Nearly two years ago Durtal had ceased to associate with men of letters.
They were represented in books and in the book-chat columns of magazines
as forming an aristocracy which had a monopoly on intelligence. Their
conversation, if one believed what one read, sparkled with effervescent
and stimulating wit. Durtal had difficulty accounting to himself for the
persistence of this illusion. His sad experience led him to believe that
every literary man belonged to one of two classes, the thoroughly
commercial or the utterly impossible.
The first consisted of writers spoiled by the public, and drained dry in
consequence, but "successful." Ravenous for notice they aped the ways of
the world of big business, delighted in gala dinners, gave formal
evening parties, spoke of copyrights, sales, and long run plays, and
made great display of wealth.
The second consisted of café loafers, "bohemians." Rolling on the
benches, gorged with beer they feigned an exaggerated modesty and at the
same time cried their wares, aired their genius, and abused their
betters.
There was now no place where one could meet a few artists and privately,
intimately, discuss ideas at ease. One was at the mercy of the café
crowd or the drawing-room company. One's interlocutor was listening
avidly to steal one's ideas, and behind one's back one was being
vituperated. And the women were always intruding.
In this indiscriminate world there was no illuminating criticism,
nothing but small talk, elegant or inelegant.
Then Durtal learned, also by experience, that one cannot associate with
thieves without becoming either a thief or a dupe, and finally he broke
off relations with his confrères.
He not only had no sympathy but no common topic of conversation with
them. Formerly when he accepted naturalism--airtight and unsatisfactory
as it was--he had been able to argue esthetics with them, but now!
"The point is," Des Hermies was always telling him, "that there is a
basic difference between you and the other realists, and no patched-up
alliance could possibly be of long duration. You execrate the age and
they worship it. There is the whole matter. You were fated some day to
get away from this Americanized art and attempt to create something less
vulgar, less miserably commonplace, and infuse a little spirituality
into it.
"In all your books you have fallen on our _fin de siècle_--our _queue du
siècle_--tooth and nail. But, Lord! a man soon gets tired of whacking
something that doesn't fight back but merely goes its own way repeating
its offences. You needed to escape into another epoch and get your
bearings while waiting for a congenial subject to present itself. That
explains your spiritual disarray of the last few months and your
immediate recovery as soon as you stumbled onto Giles de Rais."
Des Hermies had diagnosed him accurately. The day on which Durtal had
plunged into the frightful and delightful latter mediæval age had been
the dawn of a new existence. The flouting of his actual surroundings
brought peace to Durtal's soul, and he had completely reorganized his
life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furore of contemporary
letters, in the château de Tiffauges with the monster Bluebeard, with
whom he lived in perfect accord, even in mischievous amity.
Thus history had for Durtal supplanted the novel, whose forced banality,
conventionality, and tidy structure of plot simply griped him. Yet
history, too, was only a peg for a man of talent to hang style and
ideas on, for events could not fail to be coloured by the temperament
and distorted by the bias of the historian.
As for the documents and sources! Well attested as they might be, they
were all subject to revision, even to contradiction by others exhumed
later which were no less authentic than the first and which also but
waited their turn to be refuted by newer discoveries.
In the present rage for grubbing around in dusty archives writing of
history served as an outlet for the pedantry of the moles who reworked
their mouldy findings and were duly rewarded by the Institute with
medals and diplomas.
For Durtal history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most
infantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with a
sphinx's head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets
which babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out when
they took a tumble.
Of course exactitude was impossible. Why should he dream of getting at
the whole truth about the Middle Ages when nobody had been able to give
a full account of the Revolution, of the Commune for that matter? The
best he could do was to imagine himself in the midst of creatures of
that other epoch, wearing their antique garb, thinking their thoughts,
and then, having saturated himself with their spirit, to convey his
illusion by means of adroitly selected details.
That is practically what Michelet did, and though the garrulous old
gossip drivelled endlessly about matters of supreme unimportance and
ecstasized in his mild way over trivial anecdotes which he expanded
beyond all proportion, and though his sentimentality and chauvinism
sometimes discredited his quite plausible conjectures, he was
nevertheless the only French historian who had overcome the limitation
of time and made another age live anew before our eyes.
Hysterical, garrulous, manneristic as he was, there was yet a truly epic
sweep in certain passages of his History of France. The personages were
raised from the oblivion into which the dry-as-dust professors had sunk
them, and became live human beings. What matter, then, if Michelet was
the least trustworthy of historians since he was the most personal and
the most evocative?
As for the others, they simply ferreted around among the old state
papers, clipped them, and, following M. Taine's example, arranged,
ticketed, and mounted their sensational gleanings in logical sequence,
rejecting, of course, everything that did not advance the case they were
trying to make. They denied themselves imagination and enthusiasm and
claimed that they did not invent. True enough, but they did none the
less distort history by the selection they employed. And how simply and
summarily they disposed of things! It was discovered that such and such
an event occurred in France in several communities, and straightway it
was decided that the whole country lived, acted, and thought in a
certain manner at a certain hour, on a certain day, in a certain year.
No less than Michelet they were doughty falsifiers, but they lacked his
vision. They dealt in knickknacks, and their trivialities were as far
from creating a unified impression as were the pointillistic puzzles of
modern painters and the word hashes cooked up by the decadent poets.
And worst of all, thought Durtal, the biographers. The depilators!
taking all the hair off a real man's chest. They wrote ponderous tomes
to prove that Jan Steen was a teetotaler. Somebody had deloused Villon
and shown that the Grosse Margot of the ballade was not a woman but an
inn sign. Pretty soon they would be representing the poet as a
priggishly honest and judicious man. One would say that in writing their
monographs these historians feared to dishonour themselves by treating
of artists who had tasted somewhat fully and passionately of life. Hence
the expurgation of masterpieces that an artist might appear as
commonplace a bourgeois as his commentator.
This rehabilitation school, today all-powerful, exasperated Durtal. In
writing his study of Gilles de Rais he was not going to fall into the
error of these bigoted sustainers of middle-class morality. With his
ideas of history he could not claim to give an exact likeness of
Bluebeard, but he was not going to concede to the public taste for
mediocrity in well- and evil-doing by whitewashing the man.
Durtal's material for this study consisted of: a copy of the memorial
addressed by the heirs of Gilles de Rais to the king, notes taken from
the several true copies at Paris of the proceedings in the criminal
trial at Nantes, extracts from Vallet de Viriville's history of Charles
VII, finally the _Notice_ by Armand Guéraut and the biography of the
abbé Bossard. These sufficed to bring before Durtal's eyes the
formidable figure of that Satanic fifteenth century character who was
the most artistically, exquisitely cruel, and the most scoundrelly of
men.
No one knew of the projected study but Des Hermies, whom Durtal saw
nearly every day.
They had met in the strangest of homes, that of Chantelouve, the
Catholic historian, who boasted of receiving all classes of people. And
every week in the social season that drawing-room in the rue de Bagneux
was the scene of a heterogeneous gathering of under sacristans, café
poets, journalists, actresses, partisans of the cause of Naundorff,[1]
and dabblers in equivocal sciences.
[Footnote 1: A watchmaker who at the time of the July monarchy attempted
to pass himself off for Louis XVII.]
This salon was on the edge of the clerical world, and many religious
came here at the risk of their reputations. The dinners were
discriminately, if unconventionally, ordered. Chantelouve, rotund,
jovial, bade everyone make himself at home. Now and then through his
smoked spectacles there stole an ambiguous look which might have given
an analyst pause, but the man's bonhomie, quite ecclesiastical, was
instantly disarming. Madame was no beauty, but possessed a certain
bizarre charm and was always surrounded. She, however, remained silent
and did nothing to encourage her voluble admirers. As void of prudery as
her husband, she listened impassively, absently, with her thoughts
evidently afar, to the boldest of conversational imprudences.
At one of these evening parties, while La Rousseil, recently converted,
howled a hymn, Durtal, sitting in a corner having a quiet smoke, had
been struck by the physiognomy and bearing of Des Hermies, who stood out
sharply from the motley throng of defrocked priests and grubby poets
packed into Chantelouve's library and drawing-room.
Among these smirking and carefully composed faces, Des Hermies,
evidently a man of forceful individuality, seemed, and probably felt,
singularly out of place. He was tall, slender, somewhat pale. His eyes,
narrowed in a frown, had the cold blue gleam of sapphires. The nose was
short and sharp, the cheeks smooth shaven. With his flaxen hair and
Vandyke he might have been a Norwegian or an Englishman in not very good
health. His garments were of London make, and the long, tight,
wasp-waisted coat, buttoned clear up to the neck, seemed to enclose him
like a box. Very careful of his person, he had a manner all his own of
drawing off his gloves, rolling them up with an almost inaudible
crackling, then seating himself, crossing his long, thin legs, and
leaning over to the right, reaching into the patch pocket on his left
side and bringing forth the embossed Japanese pouch which contained his
tobacco and cigarette papers.
He was methodic, guarded, and very cold in the presence of strangers.
His superior and somewhat bored attitude, not exactly relieved by his
curt, dry laugh, awakened, at a first meeting, a serious antipathy which
he sometimes justified by venomous words, by meaningless silences, by
unspoken innuendoes. He was respected and feared at Chantelouve's, but
when one came to know him one found, beneath his defensive shell, great
warmth of heart and a capacity for true friendship of the kind that is
not expansive but is capable of sacrifice and can always be relied upon.
How did he live? Was he rich or just comfortable? No one knew, and he,
tight lipped, never spoke of his affairs. He was doctor of the Faculty
of Paris--Durtal had chanced to see his diploma--but he spoke of
medicine with great disdain. He said he had become convinced of the
futility of all he had been taught, and had thrown it over for
homeopathy, which in turn he had thrown over for a Bolognese system, and
this last he was now excoriating.
There were times when Durtal could not doubt that his friend was an
author, for Des Hermies spoke understandingly of tricks of the trade
which one learns only after long experience, and his literary judgment
was not that of a layman. When, one day, Durtal reproached him for
concealing his productions, he replied with a certain melancholy, "No, I
caught myself in time to choke down a base instinct, the desire of
resaying what has been said. I could have plagiarized Flaubert as well
as, if not better than, the poll parrots who are doing it, but I decided
not to. I would rather phrase abstruse medicaments of rare application;
perhaps it is not very necessary, but at least it isn't cheap."
What surprised Durtal was his friend's prodigious erudition. Des Hermies
had the run of the most out-of-the-way book shops, he was an authority
on antique customs and, at the same time, on the latest scientific
discoveries. He hobnobbed with all the freaks in Paris, and from them he
became deeply learned in the most diverse and hostile sciences. He, so
cold and correct, was almost never to be found save in the company of
astrologers, cabbalists, demonologists, alchemists, theologians, or
inventors.
Weary of the advances and the facile intimacies of artists, Durtal had
been attracted by this man's fastidious reserve. It was perfectly
natural that Durtal, surfeited with skin-deep friendships, should feel
drawn to Des Hermies, but it was difficult to imagine why Des Hermies,
with his taste for strange associations, should take a liking to
Durtal, who was the soberest, steadiest, most normal of men. Perhaps Des
Hermies felt the need of talking with a sane human being now and then as
a relief. And, too, the literary discussions which he loved were out of
the question with these addlepates who monologued indefatigably on the
subject of their monomania and their ego.
At odds, like Durtal, with his confrères, Des Hermies could expect
nothing from the physicians, whom he avoided, nor from the specialists
with whom he consorted.
As a matter of fact there had been a juncture of two beings whose
situation was almost identical. At first restrained and on the
defensive, they had come finally to _tu-toi_ each other and establish a
relation which had been a great advantage to Durtal. His family were
dead, the friends of his youth married and scattered, and since his
withdrawal from the world of letters he had been reduced to complete
solitude. Des Hermies kept him from going stale and then, finding that
Durtal had not lost all interest in mankind, promised to introduce him
to a really lovable old character. Of this man Des Hermies spoke much,
and one day he said, "You really ought to know him. He likes the books
of yours which I have lent him, and he wants to meet you. You think I am
interested only in obscure and twisted natures. Well, you will find
Carhaix really unique. He is the one Catholic with intelligence and
without sanctimoniousness; the one poor man with envy and hatred for
none."