Rochefort in 1850, of an old Protestant family. He shipped
aboard the "Borda" in 1867, and made many voyages to India
and elsewhere in the East. This young naval officer was so
modest and retiring that his comrades called him "Loti," after
the name of a little flower of India which discreetly hides
itself. In 1891 he was elected to the Academy. His chief works
are "Le Marriage de Loti," 1882, "Madame Chrysanthème," 1887,
"Japoneries d'Automne," "Le Roman d'un Spahi," etc._
_Loti is an impressionist, a personal psychologist--giving
reflections of the passing show, fleeting things. "He has an
exquisite instinct for the preservation of whatever is antique
and beautiful--a Pied Piper who draws his admirers after him
whether they will or no."_
_"The Wall Opposite" is an exquisite bit of symbolism, worthy
to stand, as it does, in the same volume with the author's
"Papillon de Mite."_
[Illustration]
THE WALL OPPOSITE
BY PIERRE LOTI
Translated by R. W. Howes, 3d.
Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.
'Way at the farther end of a court they lived, in a modest little
suite, the mother, the daughter, and a maternal parent already quite
aged--their aunt and great-aunt--whom they had come to shelter.
The daughter was still very young, in the fleeting freshness of her
eighteen years, when they were compelled, after a reverse of fortune,
to withdraw there into the most secluded corner of their ancestral
mansion. The rest of the familiar home, all the bright side that
looked out on to the street, it had become necessary to let to some
profane strangers, who changed there the aspect of things ancient and
obliterated the cherished associations.
A judicial sale had stripped them of the most luxurious furniture of
other days, and they had arranged their new little salon of recluses
with objects a little incongruous: relics of ancestors, old things
brought to light from the garret, the reserves of the house. But they
fell in love with it at once, this salon so humble, which must now for
years to come, on winter evenings, reunite all three around the same
fire and around the same lamp. One found it comfortable there; it had
an air cozy and intimate. One felt a little cloistered there, it is
true, but without melancholy, for the windows, draped with simple
muslin curtains, looked out on to a sunny court, whose walls, 'way at
this farther end, were adorned with honeysuckle and roses.
And already were they forgetting the comfort, the luxury of other
times, happy in their modest salon, when one day a communication was
brought to them which left them in mournful consternation: the neighbor
was about to raise his apartment two stories; a wall was going to rise
there, in front of their windows, to steal away the air, to hide the
sun.
And no means, alas! to turn aside that misfortune, more intimately
cruel to their spirits than all the preceding disasters of fortune. To
buy that house from their neighbor, a thing that had been easy at the
time of their past affluence, was no longer to be dreamed of! Nothing
to do, in their poverty, but to bow their heads.
* * * * *
And so the stories began to mount, line upon line; with anxiety they
watched them grow; a silence of grief reigned among them, in the little
salon, the depth of their melancholy measured day by day by the height
of that obscuring object. And to think that that thing there, higher
and still higher, would soon replace the background of blue sky or
golden clouds, against which in days gone by the wall of their court
trailed off in its network of branches!
In one month the masons had achieved their work: it was a glazed
surface in freestone, which was next painted a grayish white,
resembling almost a twilight sky of November, perpetually opaque,
unchangeable and dead; and in the summers following the rose trees,
the bushes of the court, took on their green again more palely in its
shadow.
Into the salon the warm suns of June and July still penetrated, but
more laggardly in the morning, fleeing more hurriedly in the evening;
the twilights of autumn fell one hour earlier, bringing abruptly down
the dull, chill melancholy.
* * * * *
And the times, the months, the seasons, passed. Between daylight and
darkness, at the undecided hours of evening, when the three women left
off one after the other their work of embroidery or sewing before
lighting the evening lamp, the young daughter--who would soon be no
longer young--lifted her eyes ever toward the wall, set up there in
place of her sky of yesterday; often, even, in a sort of melancholy
childishness that constantly returned to her like the sick fancy of
a prisoner, she amused herself in watching from a certain place the
branches of the rose trees, the tops of the bushes detach themselves in
relief against the grayish background of the painted stones, and sought
to give herself the illusion that the background there was a sky, a sky
lower and nearer than the real one--after the manner of those who at
night hang upon the deformed visions of dreams.
* * * * *
They had in expectation a heritage of which they often spoke around
their lamp and their work-table, as of a day-dream, as of a fairy tale,
so far away it seemed.
But, as soon as they possess it, that accession from America, at no
matter what price, the house of the neighbor shall be bought in order
to pull down all that new part, to reestablish things as in times past,
and to restore to their court, to restore to their cherished rose
bushes of the high walls, the sun of other times. To throw it down,
that wall, this had become their sole earthly desire, their continual
obsession.
And the old aunt was accustomed to say at such times:
"My dear daughters, may God grant that I live long enough, even I, to
see that happy day!"
* * * * *
It tarried long in coming, that heritage.
The rains, and time, had traced on that glazed surface a sort of
blackish stripes, melancholy, melancholy to look at, formed like a V,
or like the trembling silhouette of a hovering bird. And the young girl
contemplated that wearily every day, every day.
* * * * *
Once, in a very warm springtime, which, in spite of the shadow of the
wall, made the roses more advanced than usual, and more spreading, a
young man appeared at the farther end of that court, took his place
for several evenings at the table of the three ladies without fortune.
Passing through the village, he had been recommended by some friends in
common, not without _arrière-pensée_ of marriage. He was handsome, with
a high-spirited face, browned by the great blowings of the seas.
But he judged it too chimerical, that heritage; he found her too poor,
the young girl, in whom, besides, the color began to fade for lack of
sunlight.
So he departed, without return, he who had represented there for a time
the sun, energy, and life. And she who already looked upon herself as
his fiancée received from that departure a dumb and secret feeling as
of death.
* * * * *
And the monotonous years continued their march, like the impassive
rivers; there passed five; there passed ten, fifteen, even twenty. The
freshness of the young girl without fortune finished little by little
by fading away, useless and disdained; the mother took on some gray
hairs; the old aunt became infirm, shaking her head, octogenarian in
a faded armchair, forever seated at the same place, near the darkened
window, her venerable profile cut out against the foliage of the court
below that background of glazed wall where the blackish marbling
accentuated itself in the form of a bird, traced by the sluggish
gutters.
In the presence of the wall, of the inexorable wall, they grew old all
three. And the rose bushes, the shrubs, grew old, too, with the less
ominous age of plants, with their airs of rejuvenation at each return
of spring.
"Oh! my daughters, my poor daughters," said the aunt continually in her
broken voice that no longer finished the phrase, "provided I live long
enough, even I."
And her bony hand, with a movement of menace, indicated that oppressive
thing of stone.
* * * * *
She had been dead a twelvemonth, leaving a dreadful void in that little
salon of recluses, and they had wept over her as the most cherished of
grandmothers, when at last the inheritance came, very upsetting, one
day when they had ceased longer to think of it.
The aged daughter--forty years struck now--found herself quite young in
her joy at entering into possession of the returned fortune.
They drove out the lodgers, you may be sure, they reestablished
themselves as before; but by preference they kept themselves ordinarily
in the little salon of the days of moderate means: in the first place
it was now full of souvenirs, and then besides it was again taking on a
sunny cheerfulness, since they were to throw down that imprisoning wall
which was to-day no more than a vain scarecrow, so easy to destroy by
touch of louis d'or.
* * * * *
It took place at last, that downfall of brick and mortar, longed for
during twenty gloomy years. It took place in April, at the moment of
the first balmy airs of the first long evenings. Very quickly it was
accomplished, in the midst of the noise of falling stones, of singing
workmen, in a cloud of plaster and of ancient dust.
And at twilight of the second day, when the work was finished, the
workmen gone, silence returned, they found themselves once more sitting
at their table, the mother and the daughter, bewildered at seeing so
clearly, at having need no longer of the lamp to begin their evening
meal. Like a formal visit from familiar days gone by, they contemplated
the rose bushes of their court spread out once more against the
sky. But instead of the joy they had looked forward to there was at
first an indefinable uneasiness: too much light all at once in their
little salon, a sort of melancholy splendor, and the feeling of an
unaccustomed void out of doors, of limitless change. No words there
came to them in presence of the accomplishment of their dream; rapt,
the one and the other, held by an ever-increasing melancholy, they
remained there without talking, without touching the waiting meal. And
little by little, their two hearts pressing still closer, that grew to
be a kind of grief, like one of those regrets, dull and without hope,
which the dead leave us.
When the mother, at length, perceived that the eyes of her daughter
began to grow faded with crying, divining the unexpressed thoughts
which must so perfectly resemble her own: "It can be built up again,"
she says. "It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the
same again?"
"I, too, thought of that," replied the daughter. "But no, don't you
see: _it would never be the same_!"
Mon Dieu! was it possible that such a thing could be; it was she, the
very same, who had decreed it, the annihilation of that background of
a familiar picture, below which, during one springtime, she had seen
in high relief a certain fine face of a young man, and during so many
winters the venerable profile of an old aunt dead.
And all at once, at recollection of that vague design in the form of
the shadow of a bird, traced there by patient gutters, and which she
would see again never, never, never, her heart was suddenly torn in a
manner most pitiable; she wept the most melancholy tears of her life
before the irreparable destruction of that wall.
THE ANCESTOR
BY CHARLES JOSEPH PAUL BOURGET
[Illustration]
_Paul Bourget presents the greatest possible contrast to Anatole
France. His style is involved, sentence is fitted into sentence,
clothed like Henry James, and altogether un-French. Bourget's
psychology, though penetrating, seems rather to clothe his characters
than to create them, consequently his novels are long psychological
treatises. It was a delight, therefore, to come upon this tale of
Bourget's, in which the story is as absorbing as the psychology._
_Bourget was born at Amiens in 1852, and began his literary career, as
usual, by writing verses, etc. Besides "Outre Mer," which he published
in 1891 after his visit to America, his work consists chiefly of
novels, "Mensonges," "Crime d'Amour," "Le Disciple," "Cosmopolis," etc.
He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1894._
[Illustration]
THE ANCESTOR
BY PAUL BOURGET
Translated by V. Quiroga. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.
Alfred Boyer felt very happy that afternoon over the printer's proofs
that the mail had just brought him. He could not take his eyes off the
page containing the title:
"_Mémoires du Maréchal Frédet Prince d'Augsbourg, Duc d'Ivrea, with
notes and introduction by Alfred Boyer, former student of the École de
Chartres._" The work to which he had devoted himself during the last
two years was nearing completion. His name was going to be associated
for ever with that of "Catinat of the Grande Armée," who had begun as
volunteer in 1792, and had died of a broken heart after Waterloo.
Need one recall Frédet's heroism in the wars in the North--then too,
in the first campaign in Italy, just under the walls of Ivrea, and
his brilliant services in Egypt and Germany; how after Ulm, he had
surrounded and taken prisoner ten thousand of the enemy at the gates of
Augsbourg, with a handful of hussars? Austerlitz, Iéna, Eylau, Wagram,
and Spain in turn saw this indefatigable soldier maneuvre his troops
with the skill to which the "Mémoires" bore testimony. "I sent Frédet
to Catalonia," said the Emperor, "with twenty thousand men. It was like
sending fifty thousand. He alone made up the difference."
A very severe wound prevented his joining Napoleon in Russia, he
achieved wonders at Dresden, though scarcely reestablished in health,
and at Leipzig, where he saved the retreat by checking during several
hours, the main body of the Austrian cavalry. Like Ney, and like the
Emperor himself, he was one of those who sought death at Waterloo, and
whom death would not accept, in spite of prodigies of valor, exalted
almost to madness by the despair of the defeat.
When peace was concluded, the veteran shut himself up at Combronde,
near Riom, on a small estate that he had acquired in Auvergne, where
he had been born. It was there where he commenced to write or rather
to dictate his mémoires in a haphazard fashion, following his exalted
fancy, accumulating a pile of rather incoherent notes, which had slept
in their portfolios for eighty years--from 1821, at which date the
old soldier died, until 1900 when his grandson, the present Prince
of Augsbourg, had at last decided to publish those papers, a little
influenced, it must be admitted, by his need of money. Having a scanty
fortune and a very large family--five marriageable daughters--he
had been tempted by the success of "Marbot's Mémoires." He summoned
from Paris to his little Château of Combes, where the meagreness of
his income and his misanthropy kept him prisoner the year round,
a young man who was to put in order that mass of documents mostly
without shape. That is how Alfred Boyer found himself with a task
that developed into a passion. Whatever may be the political value
accorded to the Napoleonic legend, its heroic character casts a magic
spell that few historians of that fantastic epoch have been able to
overthrow. That magic spell had acted so much the more on the young
compiler, because the moral figure of Frédet was fully in accord with
his military bearing. Among the portraits of those marshals, all
equally brilliant, but not equally attractive, his was one of the most
pure and exalted. The heroism of the Prince of Augsbourg retained to
the last that antique charm that one imagines would have adorned Desaix
had he lived long enough. It seems that Frédet never had any ambition
for these dignities which his master delighted to shower upon him. When
did he have a chance to enjoy them? Bonaparte, who knew men and their
value, never ceased for a moment to keep him employed, in peace as well
as in war. When he was not fighting, Frédet was an administrator. His
proverbial integrity, his gentleness, and--a quality extremely rare in
that army sprung from the Revolution--his religious fervor, gave to his
countenance the look of a paladin. While he lived it was impossible to
come in contact with him without loving him. He disarmed the envy of
Marmont, the sour humor of Soult, and warmed the coldness of Macdonald.
The writings of these three rivals in glory, give ample proof of it.
Dead, his rare personality had just performed a similar miracle of
seduction in his memorialist, who gazed as if hypnotized at the first
page of the mémoires, and the bulky package of proofs. At that very
minute he was living over again the two years of his arduous labor. He
saw himself once more, after his thesis had been approved, hesitating
between accepting a poorly paid post as librarian in an obscure corner
of some province, and the offer that one of his professors had made
him, to work on the mémoires of the famous marshal. It was food and
lodging assured for some time, a means of becoming known, and of laying
aside a few thousand francs with which he could support himself until
he could obtain appointment to some good post. Beyond this, Boyer did
not know anything about the soldier whose papers he had to classify.
In that old house at Combes, which had remained unchanged during
three-quarters of a century, he had commenced to give himself up to
that retrospective semi-hallucination known only to those who have a
scholarly disposition. Taine has pictured it in that eloquent page,
where he describes himself at the archives, following over the yellowed
paper the old writings of the men of the Revolution. "I was," he says,
"tempted to speak aloud to them." In that poor mansion where the old
hero had sheltered himself in his last few days, the walls were covered
with relics of his glorious adventures, brought together in confusion;
here, swords of honor hung on the wall, next to them some engravings
representing feats of arms; there, portraits of the marshal himself,
the first Consul, the Emperor, Frédet's chosen companions, among
others that of Ney, who had been one of the witnesses to his marriage.
Frédet's wife was there, frail and delicate in her rich costume of a
court lady, painted by Gérard, in an attitude identical with that of
the Duchess of Rovigo, on the edge of a park leaning on a small column
ornamented with helmets and cuirasses in high relief. She had survived
her husband forty years, and to her piety was due the preservation
of the home to which the eldest son of the family had not returned
until 1875, after having served in the army and resigned while simple
lieutenant-colonel, when another had--unjustly as he maintained--been
promoted over him. His carelessness produced at least this advantage,
that the species of family museum brought together through the sorrow
of the grandmother had remained undisturbed.
In the mean while, that is to say, under the monarchy of July and the
Second Empire, the Frédets had lived in Paris; the second Prince of
Augsbourg as a peer of France, and then as Senator; the third, the
present Prince, as an officer of the staff of Napoleon the Third.
Physically the colonel was the living image of his illustrious
grandfather. He had the leonine face, the calm and powerful mien, the
grave eyes, the serious mouth, and also the athlete's muscles, broad
shoulders and powerful neck. There the resemblance stopped. Was it lack
of education or opportunity? Did he take morally after some ancestor
on the mother's side? His father had married a girl of noble birth,
but of that country nobility with whom hunting is the sole hereditary
occupation. In his old age it was the only pleasure that seemed to
survive in this heir to an illustrious name, the first ambition of a
disappointed career.
Alfred Boyer recalled his strange impression during the first weeks of
his sojourn when he saw the Prince start out in the early morning,
with his gamekeeper and his dogs and not return until nightfall,
covered with dust or mud, sunburned or else soaked in rain, according
to the weather, his gun on his shoulder, and his game bag bulging with
the pheasants hunted during the day. To his five daughters, left at
home under the charge of an old aunt, who managed the household for
him, this taciturn hunter seemed to give no thought.
They were pretty and refined girls, and if the memorialist had not
been a poor pale-faced student, his presence in this isolation with
these five young unmarried girls might not have been without danger.
But Alfred belonged to that class of timid, intellectual men who
have no need of disenchanting experiences to put in practise the
advice the fair Venetian gave so amusingly to Rousseau: "Avoid women
and study mathematics." Being of a sickly nature, knowing himself
awkward and homely, he had early turned into intellectual channels the
feverish ardor that young men of his age usually spend in sentimental
adventures. His only pleasures were the discoveries of unpublished
texts, of ingenious hypotheses on obscure historical points, and the
patient conquest of a chair in the Institute by force of erudite
publications. The marshal's papers fell in well with this program, and
with something more--the poetry of the extraordinary imperial exploit
incarnate in one of the most magnificent workers. Thus it was that
after having engaged in the work as compiler of records, Alfred Boyer
continued as enthusiast, identifying himself with his hero in each
episode of his brilliant career, collating the smallest anecdotes
about him, claiming for him the first place in all the events in which
he had taken part, putting himself at infinite pains to make this great
man greater still; possessed by one of those retrospective idolatries
at which we can not smile, so disinterested and pathetic are they when
their object is a name sunk in misfortune and oblivion, like that of
this soldier who had died of the defeat of his master and of France.
What a work it was to decipher the piles of notes and documents he had
left, to make selection from among the texts, to complete them with
commentaries! But those "Mémoires" were at last to appear, all the
traits of that noble figure were to shine out in a brilliant light,
and the author of this posthumous justice could not gaze enough on
the printed characters that would soon shine forth in the cover of
the first volume--the complete work would be in four volumes--in the
booksellers' shop windows....
The sound of a door opening roused Boyer from his "semihypnotic"[14]
trance. He raised his head and sprang suddenly to his feet. It was
the Prince of Augsbourg who had just entered the library. Those
visits, rare at first, had become more frequent as Alfred Boyer's work
advanced. Not that the sportsman had ever ventured to give any advice
to the memorialist, who had read to him some of the pages dictated
or written by his grandfather--those, more frequently, in which the
marshal told of the departure from his paternal roof (he was the son of
a physician at Combronde), to join the army--the story of the first
battle in which he had taken part, at Hondschoote--that of his last,
and his farewell to the Emperor before the charge at Waterloo.
The manner in which he listened to those recitals, his head in his
hands, never uttering a word, revealed an intense feeling in the hero's
descendant. Evidently an almost religious cult for his ancestor burned
in this obscure and wild nature, which Alfred Boyer pitied without
quite comprehending. He could see that, overburdened by the weight
of a great name, ruined by his father, discontented with his present
circumstances, and knowing his inability to alter them, the colonel had
fallen into that lethargy of the will in which for some years he had
simply vegetated.
He had given up the society of his set, as well as his profession,
turning countryman, and since his wife's death had not paid any
attention to the small details in personal appearance that, even in
the most ordinary surroundings, reveal the man who has been used to
good company. It was evident that he loved his daughters, as proved
by the sadness with which his eyes would sometimes rest on these
pretty children, doomed by their portionless condition to some obscure
marriage in that corner of Auvergne. The remnants of his fortune
yielded an income of about thirty thousand francs a year. Was that
enough to sustain the rank of a prince?
The colonel had said to himself that decadence would be better borne
in the solitude of this house peopled with the memories of his
grandfather. Thus he had reasoned.