As I left the Palais-Bourbon at five o’clock that afternoon, it rejoiced
my heart to breathe in the sunny air. The sky was bland, the river
gleamed, the foliage was fresh and green. Everything seemed to whisper
an invitation to idleness. Along the Pont de la Concorde, in the
direction of the Champs-Elysées, victorias and landaus kept rolling by.
In the shadow of the lowered carriage-hoods, women’s faces gleamed clear
and radiant and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I watched them flash by
like hopes vanishing and reappearing in endless succession. Every woman
as she passed by left me with an impression of light and perfume.
I think a man, if he is wise, will not ask much more than that of a
beautiful woman. A gleam and a perfume! Many a love-affair leaves even
less behind it. Moreover, that day, if Fortune herself had run with her
wheel a-spinning before my very nose along the pavement of the Pont
de la Concorde, I should not have so much as stretched forth an arm to
pluck her by her golden hair. I lacked nothing that day; all was mine.
It was five o’clock and I was free till dinner-time. Yes, free! Free
to saunter at will, to breathe at my ease for two hours, to look on at
things and not have to talk, to let my thoughts wander as I listed. All
was mine, I say again. My happiness was making me a selfish man. I
gazed at everything about me as though it were all a picture, a splendid
moving pageant, arranged for my own particular delectation. It seemed
to me as though the sun were shining for me alone, as though it were
pouring down its torrents of flame upon the river for my special
gratification. I somehow thought that all this motley throng was
swarming gaily around me for the sole purpose of animating, without
destroying, my solitude. And so I almost got the notion that the
people about me were quite small, that their apparent size was only an
illusion, that they were but puppets; the sort of thoughts a man has
when he has nothing to think about. But you must not be angry on that
score with a poor man who has had his head crammed chock-full for ten
years on end with politics and law making and is wearing away his life
with those trivial preoccupations men call affairs of state.
In the popular imagination, a law is something abstract, without form or
colour. For me a law is a green baize table, sealing-wax, paper, pens,
ink-stains, green-shaded candles, books bound in calf, papers yet damp
from the printer’s and all smelling of printer’s ink, conversations
in green papered offices, files, bundles of documents, a stuffy smell,
speeches, newspapers; a law, in short, is all the hundred and one
things, the hundred and one tasks you have to fulfil at all hours, the
grey and gentle hours of the morning, the white hours of middle day, the
purple hours of evening, the silent, meditative hours of night;
tasks which leave you no soul to call your own and rob you of the
consciousness of your own identity.
Yes, it is so. I have left my own _ego_ behind me there. It is scattered
up and down among all sorts of memoranda and reports. Industrious junior
clerks have put away a parcel of it in each one of their beautiful green
filing cases. And so I have had to go on living without my _ego_,
which, moreover, is how all politicians have to live. But an _ego_ is a
strangely subtle thing. And wonder of wonders! mine came back to me just
now on the Pont de la Concorde. ‘Twas he without a doubt and, would
you believe it, he had not suffered so very much from his sojourn among
those musty papers. The very moment he arrived I found myself again, I
recognized my own existence, whereof I had not been conscious these
ten years. “Ha ha!” said I to myself, “since I exist, I am just as well
pleased to know it. Behold I will set forth here and now to improve this
new acquaintance by strolling, with a lover’s thoughts in my heart, down
the Champs-Elysées.”
And this is why I am here, at this hour, beneath the sculptured
steeds of Marly, more high-spirited than those aristocratic quadrupeds
themselves; this is why I am setting foot in the avenue whose entrance
is marked by their hoofs of stone perpetually poised in air. The
carriages flow past endlessly, like a sombre scintillating stream of
lava or molten asphalt, whereon the hats of the women seem borne along
like so many flowers, and like everything else one sees in Paris, at
once extravagant and pretty. I light up a cigar and looking at nothing,
behold everything. So intense is my joy that it scares me. It is the
first cigar I have smoked for ten years. Oh yes, I grant I have begun
as many as ten a day in my room; but those I scorched, bit, chewed and
threw away; I never smoked them. This one I am really and truly smoking
and the smoke it exhales is a cloud of poesy spreading grace and charm
about it. What an interest I take in all I see. These little shops,
which display at regular intervals their motley assortment of wares,
fill me with delight. Here especially is one which I cannot forbear
stopping to look at. What I chiefly delight to contemplate there is a
decanter with lemonade in it. The decanter reflects in miniature on its
polished sides the trees around it and the women that pass by and the
skies. It has a lemon on the top of it which gives it a sort of oriental
air. However, it is not its shape nor its colour that is the attraction
in my eyes; I cannot keep my gaze from it because it reminds me of
my childhood. At the sight of it, innumerable delightful scenes come
thronging into my memory. Once again do I behold those shining hours,
those hours divine of early childhood. Ah, what would I not give to be
again the little boy of those days and to drink once more a glass of
that precious liquid!
[Illustration: 024]
In that little shop, I find once more, besides the lemonade and the
gooseberry syrup, all those divers things wherein my childhood took
delight. Here be whips, trumpets, swords, guns, cartridge-pouches,
belts, scabbards, sabretaches, all those magic toys which, from five
to nine years old, made me feel that I was fulfilling the destiny of
a Napoleon. I played that mighty rôle, in my tenpenny soldier’s kit,
I played it from start to finish, bating only Waterloo and the years of
exile. For, mark you, I was always the victor. Here, too, are coloured
prints from Épinal. It was on them that I began to spell out those signs
which to the learned reveal a few faint traces of the Mighty Riddle.
Yes, the sorriest little coloured daub that ever came out of a village
in the Vosges consists of print and pictures, and what is the sum and
substance of Science after all but just pictures and print?
From those Épinal prints I learned things far finer and more useful
than anything I ever got from the little grammar and history books my
schoolmasters gave me to pore over. Épinal prints, you see, are stories,
and stories are mirrors of destiny. Blessed is the child that is brought
up on fairy-tales. His riper years should prove rich in wisdom and
imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story _The Blue Bird_. I
know him by his outspread tail. ‘Tis he right enough. It is as much as
I can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman’s
neck and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt
I owe him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to
him. Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of
the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and
parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed in. I used to reflect
then that the human soul contained infinite desires, unimaginable
metamorphoses and hallowed sorrows, and if, under the spell of such
thoughts, I gave to the clause I chanced to be engaged upon an ampler, a
humaner sense, an added respect for the soul and its rights, and for
the universal order of things, that clause would never fail to encounter
vigorous opposition in the Chamber. The counsels of the Blue Bird seldom
prevailed in the committee stage. Howbeit some did manage to get through
Parliament.
I now perceive that I am not the only one inspecting the little stall:
a little girl has come to a halt in front of the brilliant display. I
am looking at her from behind. Her long, bright hair comes tumbling in
cascades from under her red velvet hood and spreads out on her broad
lace collar and on her dress, which is the same colour as her hood.
Impossible to say what is the colour of her hair (there is no colour so
beautiful) but one can describe the lights in it; they are bright and
pure and changing, fair as the sun’s rays, pale as a beam of starlight.
Nay, more than that, they shine, yes; but they flow also. They possess
the splendour of light, and the charm of pleasant waters. Methinks that,
were I a poet, I should write as many sonnets on those tresses as M.
José Maria de Heredia composed concerning the Conquerors of Castille
d’Or. They would not be so fine, but they would be sweeter. The child,
so far as I can judge, is between four and five years old. All I can see
of her face is the tip of her ear, daintier than the daintiest jewel,
and the innocent curve of her cheek. She does not stir; she is holding
her hoop in her left hand; her right is at her lips as though she were
biting her nails in her eager contemplation. What is it she is gazing
at so longingly? The shop contains other things besides the arms and the
gear of fighting men. Balls and skipping ropes are suspended from the
awning. On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard,
smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little
six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms,
little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them
a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has
no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips
of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He
is hitched on to one of the poles of the booth all by himself. He
dominates, he effaces everything else. Once you have beheld him, you see
naught else save him.
Bolt upright in his warm wraps, a little swansdown tucker under his
chin, he is stretching out his little chubby arms for some one to take
him. He speaks straight to the little maid’s heart. He appeals to her
by every maternal instinct she possesses. He is enchanting. His face has
three little dots, two black ones for the eyes, and one red one for the
mouth. But his eyes speak, his mouth invites you. He is alive.
Philosophers are a heedless race. They pass by dolls with never a
thought. Nevertheless the doll is more than the statue, more than the
idol. It finds its way to the heart of woman, long ere she be a woman.
It gives her the first thrill of maternity. The doll is a thing august.
Wherefore cannot one of our great sculptors be so very kind as to take
the trouble to model dolls whose lineaments, coming to life beneath his
fingers, would tell of wisdom and of beauty?
At last the little girl awakens from her silent day-dream. She turns
round and shows her violet eyes made bigger still with wonder, her nose
which makes you smile to look at it, her tiny nose, quite white, that
reminds you of a little pug dog’s black one, her solemn mouth, her
shapely but too delicate chin, her cheeks a shade too pale. I recognize
her. Oh yes! I recognize her with that instinctive certainty that is
stronger than all convictions supported by all the proofs imaginable. Oh
yes, ‘tis she, ‘tis indeed she and all that remains of the most charming
of women. I try to hasten away but I cannot leave her. That hair of
living gold, it is her mother’s hair; those violet eyes, they are her
mother’s own; Oh, child of my dreams, child of my despair! I long to
gather you to my arms, to steal you, to bear you away.
But a governess draws near, calls the child and leads her away: “Come,
Marguerite, come along, it’s time to go home.”
And Marguerite, casting a look of sad farewell at the baby with its
outstretched arms, reluctantly follows in the footsteps of a tall woman
clad in black with ostrich feathers in her hat.
[Illustration: Endpiece 033]
[Illustration: 034]