"You like that?" asked Mme. Carhaix. "For a change I served the broth
yesterday and kept the beef for tonight. So we'll have vermicelli soup,
a salad of cold meat with pickled herring and celery, some nice mashed
potatoes _au gratin_, and a dessert. And then you shall taste the new
cider we just got."
"Oh!" and "Ah!" exclaimed Des Hermies and Durtal, who, while waiting for
dinner, were sipping the elixir of life. "Do you know, Mme. Carhaix,
your cooking tempts us to the sin of gluttony--If you keep on you will
make perfect pigs of us."
"Oh, you are joking. I wonder what is keeping Louis."
"Somebody is coming upstairs," said Durtal, hearing the creaking of
shoes in the tower.
"No, it isn't his step," and she went and opened the door. "It's
Monsieur Gévingey."
And indeed, clad in his blue cape, with his soft black hat on his head,
the astrologer entered, made a bow, like an actor taking a curtain call,
nibbed his great knuckles against his massive rings, and asked where the
bell-ringer was.
"He is at the carpenter's. The oak beams holding up the big bell are
cracked and Louis is afraid they will break down."
"Any news of the election?" and Gévingey took out his pipe and filled
it.
"No. In this quarter we shan't know the results until nearly ten
o'clock. There's no doubt about the outcome, though, because Paris is
strong for this democratic stuff. General Boulanger will win hands
down."
"This certainly is the age of universal imbecility."
Carhaix entered and apologized for being so late. While his wife brought
in the soup he took off his goloshes and said, in answer to his friends'
questions, "Yes; the dampness had rusted the frets and warped the beams.
It was time for the carpenter to intervene. He finally promised that he
would be here tomorrow and bring his men without fail. Well, I am mighty
glad to get back. In the streets everything whirls in front of my eyes.
I am dizzy. I don't know what to do. The only places where I am at home
are the belfry and this room. Here, wife, let me do that," and he pushed
her aside and began to stir the salad.
"How good it smells!" said Durtal, drinking in the incisive tang of the
herring. "Do you know what this perfume suggests? A basket funnelled
fireplace, twigs of juniper snapping in it, in a ground-floor room
opening on to a great harbour. It seems to me there is a sort of salt
water halo around these little rings of gold and rusted
iron.--Exquisite," he said as he tasted the salad.
"We'll make it again for you, Monsieur Durtal," said Mme. Carhaix, "you
are not hard to please."
"Alas!" said her husband, "his palate isn't, but his soul is. When I
think of his despairing aphorisms of the other night! However, we are
praying God to enlighten him. I'll tell you," he said to his wife, "we
will invoke Saint Nolasque and Saint Theodulus, who are always
represented with bells. They sort of belong to the family, and they will
certainly be glad to intercede for people who revere them and their
emblems."
"It would take a stunning miracle to convince Durtal," said Des Hermies.
"Bells have been known to perform them," said the astrologer. "I
remember to have read, though I forget where, that angels tolled the
knell when Saint Isidro of Madrid was dying."
"And there are many other cases," said Carhaix. "Of their own accord
the bells chimed when Saint Sigisbert chanted the De Profundis over the
corpse of the martyr Placidus, and when the body of Saint Ennemond,
Bishop of Lyons, was thrown by his murderers into a boat without oars or
sails, the bells rang out, though nobody set them in motion, as the boat
passed down the Saône."
"Do you know what I think?" asked Des Hermies, looking at Carhaix. "I
think you ought to prepare a compendium of hagiography or a really
informative work on heraldry."
"What makes you think that?"
"Well, you are, thank God, remote from this epoch and fond of things
which it knows nothing about or execrates, and a work of that kind would
take you still further away. My good friend, you are the man forever
unintelligible to the coming generations. To ring bells because you love
them, to give yourself over to the abandoned study of feudal art or
monasticism would make you complete--take you clear out of Paris, out of
the world, back into the Middle Ages."
"Alas," said Carhaix, "I am only a poor ignorant man. But the type you
speak of does exist. In Switzerland, I believe, a bell-ringer has for
years been collecting material for a heraldic memorial. I should think,"
he continued, laughing, "that his avocation would interfere with his
vocation."
"And do you think," said Gévingey bitterly, "that the profession of
astrologer is less decried, less neglected?"
"How do you like our cider?" asked the bell-ringer's wife. "Do you find
it a bit raw?"
"No, it's tart if you sip it, but sweet if you take a good mouthful,"
answered Durtal.
"Wife, serve the potatoes. Don't wait for me. I delayed so long getting
my business done that it's time for the angelus. Don't bother about me.
Go on eating. I shall catch up with you when I get back."
And as her husband lighted his lantern and left the room the woman
brought in on a plate what looked to be a cake covered with golden brown
caramel icing.
"Mashed potatoes, I thought you said!"
"_Au gratin_. Browned in the oven. Taste it. I put in everything that
ought to make it very good."
All exclaimed over it.
Then it became impossible to hear oneself. Tonight the bell boomed out
with unusual clarity and power. Durtal tried to analyze the sound which
seemed to rock the room. There was a sort of flux and reflux of sound.
First, the formidable shock of the clapper against the vase, then a sort
of crushing and scattering of the sounds as if ground fine with the
pestle, then a rounding of the reverberation; then the recoil of the
clapper, adding, in the bronze mortar, other sonorous vibrations which
it ground up and cast out and dispersed through the sounding shutters.
Then the bell strokes came further apart. Now there was only the
whirring as of a spinning wheel; a few crumbs were slow about falling.
And now Carhaix returned.
"It's a two-sided age," said Gévingey, pensive. "People believe nothing,
yet gobble everything. Every day a new science is invented. Nobody reads
that admirable Paracelsus who rediscovered all that had ever been found
and created everything that had not. Say now to your congress of
scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the
essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet
and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of
the divine sphere. Tell them--and this, experience attests--that every
man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn
and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to
superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and varices, hemorrhoids and
leprosies; that it is, alas! the great purveyor to hospital and
prison--and the scientists will shrug their shoulders and laugh at you.
The glorified pedants and homiletic asses!"
"Paracelsus," said Des Hermies, "was one of the most extraordinary
practitioners of occult medicine. He knew the now forgotten mysteries of
the blood, the still unknown medical effects of light. Professing--as
did also the cabalists, for that matter--that the human being is
composed of three parts, a material body, a soul, and a perispirit
called also an astral body, he attended this last especially and
produced reactions on the carnal envelope by procedures which are either
incomprehensible or fallen into disuse. He cared for wounds by treating
not the tissues, but the blood which came out of them. However, we are
assured that he healed certain ailments."
"Thanks to his profound knowledge of astrology," said Gévingey.
"But if the study of the sidereal influence is so important," said
Durtal, "why don't you take pupils?"
"I can't get them. Where will you unearth people willing to study twenty
years without glory or profit? Because, to be able to establish a
horoscope one must be an astronomer of the first order, know mathematics
from top to bottom, and one must have put in long hours tussling with
the obscure Latin of the old masters. Besides, you must have the
vocation and the faith, and they are lost."
"Just the way it is with bell ringing," said Carhaix.
"No, you see, messieurs," Gévingey went on, "the day when the grand
sciences of the Middle Ages fell foul of the systematic and hostile
indifference of an impious people was the death-day of the soul in
France. All we can do now is fold our arms and listen to the wild
vagaries of society, which by turns shrieks with farcical joy and bitter
grief."
"We must not despair. A better time is coming," said Mme. Carhaix in a
conciliating tone, and before she retired she shook hands with all her
guests.
"The people," said Des Hermies, pouring the water into the coffee-pot,
"instead of being ameliorated with time, grow, from century to century,
more avaricious, abject, and stupid. Remember the Siege, the Commune;
the unreasonable infatuations, the tumultuous hatreds, all the dementia
of a deteriorated, malnourished people in arms. They certainly cannot
compare with the naïf and tender-hearted plebes of the Middle Ages. Tell
us, Durtal, how the people acted when Gilles de Rais was conducted to
the stake."
"Yes, tell us," said Carhaix, his great eyes made watery by the smoke of
his pipe.
"Well, you know, as a consequence of unheard-of crimes, the Marshal de
Rais was condemned to be hanged and burned alive. After the sentence was
passed, when he was brought back to his dungeon, he addressed a last
appeal to the Bishop, Jean de Malestroit, beseeching the Bishop to
intercede for him with the fathers and mothers of the children Gilles
had so ferociously violated and put to death, to be present when he
suffered.
"The people whose hearts he had lacerated wept with pity. They now saw
in this demoniac noble only a poor man who lamented his crimes and was
about to confront the Divine Wrath. The day of execution, by nine
o'clock they were marching through the city in processional. They
chanted psalms in the streets and took vows in the churches to fast
three days in order to help assure the repose of the Marshal's soul."
"Pretty far, as you see, from American lynch law," said Des Hermies.
"Then," resumed Durtal, "at eleven they went to the prison to get Gilles
de Rais and accompanied him to the prairie of Las Biesse, where tall
stakes stood, surmounted by gibbets.
"The Marshal supported his accomplices, embraced them, adjured them to
have 'great displeasure and contrition of their ill deeds' and, beating
his breast, he supplicated the Virgin to spare them, while the clergy,
the peasants, and the people joined in the psalmody, intoning the
sinister and imploring strophes of the chant for the departed:
"'Nos timemus diem judicii
Quia mali et nobis conscii.
Sed tu, Mater summi concilii,
Para nobis locum refugii,
O Maria.
"'Tunc iratus Judex--'"
"Hurrah for Boulanger!"
The noise as of a stormy sea mounted from the Place Saint Sulpice, and a
hubbub of cries floated up to the tower room. "Boulange--Lange--" Then
an enormous, raucous voice, the voice of an oyster woman, a push-cart
peddler, rose, dominating all others, howling, "Hurrah for Boulanger!"
"The people are cheering the election returns in front of the city
hall," said Carhaix disdainfully.
They looked at each other.
"The people of today!" exclaimed Des Hermies.
"Ah," grumbled Gévingey, "they wouldn't acclaim a sage, an artist, that
way, even--if such were conceivable now--a saint."
"And they did in the Middle Ages."
"Well, they were more naïf and not so stupid then," said Des Hermies.
"And as Gévingey says, where now are the saints who directed them? You
cannot too often repeat it, the spiritual councillors of today have
tainted hearts, dysenteric souls, and slovenly minds. Or they are worse.
They corrupt their flock. They are of the Docre order and Satanize."
"To think that a century of positivism and atheism has been able to
overthrow everything but Satanism, and it cannot make Satanism yield an
inch."
"Easily explained!" cried Carhaix. "Satan is forgotten by the great
majority. Now it was Father Ravignan, I believe, who proved that the
wiliest thing the Devil can do is to get people to deny his existence."
"Oh, God!" murmured Durtal forlornly, "what whirlwinds of ordure I see
on the horizon!"
"No," said Carhaix, "don't say that. On earth all is dead and
decomposed. But in heaven! Ah, I admit that the Paraclete is keeping us
waiting. But the texts announcing his coming are inspired. The future is
certain. There will be light," and with bowed head he prayed fervently.
Des Hermies rose and paced the room. "All that is very well," he
groaned, "but this century laughs the glorified Christ to scorn. It
contaminates the supernatural and vomits on the Beyond. Well, how can we
hope that in the future the offspring of the fetid tradesmen of today
will be decent? Brought up as they are, what will they do in Life?"
"They will do," replied Durtal, "as their fathers and mothers do now.
They will stuff their guts and crowd out their souls through their
alimentary canals."
FINIS