a farm-hand of Master Breton’s, the market-gardener at Ymauville,
returned the pocketbook and its contents to Master Houlbrèque, of
Manneville.
[Sidenote: Apparent resolution of the complication.]
62. This man asserted, in substance, that he had found the article on
the road; but, not being able to read, he had carried it home and given
it to his employer.
63. The news spread to the suburbs. Master Hauchecorne was informed of
it. He set himself at once to journeying about and commenced to narrate
his story as completed by the denouement. He was triumphant.
64. “Wha’ made me feel bad,” he said, “wasn’t the thing itself, you
understand, but it was the lies. There’s nothing hurts you like being
blamed for a lie.”
[Sidenote: Tone of story.]
[Sidenote: FOUNDATION FOR CLIMAX.]
65. All day long he talked of his adventure, he recounted it on the
roadways to the people who passed, at the tavern to the folks who
drank, at the dismissal of church on the following Sunday. He even
button-holed strangers to tell it to them.
[Sidenote: RESULTANT COMPLICATION.]
Now, he was tranquil, and yet something else bothered him without his
being able to tell precisely what. People did not seem to be convinced.
He felt as if they gossiped behind his back.
66. On Tuesday of the following week, he went to the Goderville market,
solely impelled by the desire to relate his story. Malandin, standing
in his doorway, began to laugh when he saw him pass. Why?
67. He accosted a farmer of Criquetot who would not let him finish,
but giving him a dig in the pit of the stomach, cried out in his face,
“G’long, you great rogue!” Then he turned on his heel.
[Sidenote: Peasant simplicity.]
68. Master Hauchecorne stood speechless, growing more and more
disturbed. Why had he called him “great rogue”?
69. When seated at table at Jourdain’s tavern, he again began to
explain the affair.
70. A Montivilliers horse-dealer called out to him:
71. “Go on, go on, you old trickster, I know you, and your piece of
string!”
72. Hauchecorne stammered, “But--they--found it, the pocketbook!”
73. But the other retorted:
[Sidenote: DENOUEMENT AS TO THE RESULTANT COMPLICATION.]
[Sidenote: FINAL COMPLICATION.]
74. “Be quiet, daddy! There’s one who finds it, and one who takes it
back. No one sees it, no one recognizes it, no one is the wiser for it.”
75. The peasant sat dumbfounded. He understood at last. They accused
him of having returned the pocketbook by a confederate, an accomplice.
76. He tried to protest. Everyone at the table began to laugh.
77. He could not finish his dinner, and left amidst their mockeries.
[Sidenote: Key.]
78. He returned home, ashamed and indignant, strangled by his anger,
by his confusion, and all the more thunderstruck because, with his
Norman cunning, he was quite capable of having done the thing of which
they had accused him, and even of boasting of it as a good trick. It
appeared to him confusedly as impossible to prove his innocence, for
his trickery was well known. And he felt struck to the heart with the
injustice of the suspicion.
[Sidenote: Tone.]
[Sidenote: Key.]
79. Again he began to tell of his adventure, every day lengthening
his recital, advancing each time new proofs, more energetic
protestations, and more solemn oaths which he conjured up in his hours
of solitude--his mind was occupied solely by the story of the piece
of string. They believed him all the less as his defense became more
complicated and his reasoning more fine-spun.
[Sidenote: Complication summarized.]
80. “Ha, they are liar’s reasons!” they said behind his back.
81. He realized it; he fretted over it; he exhausted himself in futile
efforts.
82. He visibly wasted away.
83. The wags now made him recite “The Piece of String” for their
amusement, as one persuades a soldier who has been through a
campaign, to tell the story of his battles. His mind, attacked at its
foundations, began to totter.
84. Towards the end of December he took to his bed.
85. During the first days of January he died, and, in the delirium of
his mortal agony he protested his innocence, repeating:
[Sidenote: CLIMAX.]
86. “--a li’l’ piece of string ... a li’l’ piece of string ... see,
here it is, _m’sieu le maire_.”
COPPÉE AND HIS WRITINGS
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was born in Paris, January 12, 1842. He
was educated at the _Lycée St. Louis_, and early attracted attention
by his poetic gifts. He held office as Librarian of the Senate, and
also Guardian of the Archives at the _Comédie Française_. The honors
of membership in the French Academy and that of being decorated with
the Cross of the Legion of Honor were given him in 1883 and 1888
respectively. He died May 23, 1908.
François Coppée was a poet, dramatist, and short-story writer. The
collection _Poèmes Modernes_, published at the age of twenty-seven,
contains some remarkable work which well represents his talent. The
plays _Madame de Maintenon_ and _Le Luthier de Crémone_ rank with his
best dramatic work. Among his short-story gems are “The Sabots of
Little Wolff,” “At Table,” “Two Clowns,” “The Captain’s Vices,” “My
Friend Meurtrier,” “An Accident,” and “The Substitute.”
* * * * *
As a novelist, Coppée left no permanent mark upon his times, for in
this field he was far surpassed by his contemporaries; but as a writer
of little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant
group which includes those immortals of the short-story--Maupassant,
Daudet, and Mérimée. From the work of these masters, Coppée’s is well
distinguished. The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper
pencil, and, by the same token, an infinitely harder one; Daudet,
child of Provence though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the
acid of satire; and the Parisian Mérimée, though nearer than any other
to Coppée in his manner of work, was less in sympathy with his own
characters than the warmer-hearted author of “The Sabots of Little
Wolff” and “The Substitute”--which follows in a translation by the
author of this volume. Coppée was almost an idealist--certainly he
was quick to respond to the call of the ideal in his themes. Amidst
so much that is sordid and gross in French fiction, how refreshing
it is to read a master who could be truthful without wallowing,
moral without sermonizing, compassionate without sniveling, humorous
without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a
sympathetic lover of mankind. Like Dickens, he chose the lowly for his
characters, and like Dickens, he found poetry in their simple lives.
In common with other modern French writers, with Daudet,
Maupassant, and others, Coppée excels in the writing of tales.
His prose is remarkable for the same qualities that appear in his
poetical works: sympathy, tenderness, marked predilection for the
weak, the humble, and especially a masterly treatment of subjects
essentially Parisian and modern.--ROBERT SANDERSON, _François
Coppée_, in WARNER’S _Library of the World’s Best Literature_.
Compassion is the chief quality of this little
masterpiece,--compassion and understanding of a primitive type
of character. The author shows us the good in a character not
altogether bad; and he almost makes us feel that the final
sacrifice was justifiable. He succeeds in doing this chiefly
because he shows us the other characters only as they appeared to
Jean François, thus focusing the interest of the reader on this
single character.--BRANDER MATTHEWS, _The Short-story_.
More than Daudet, Coppée deserves the title of the French Dickens.
A fellow member of the French Academy, José de Heredia, calls
him “the poet of the humble, painting with sincere emotion
his profound sympathy for the sorrows, the miseries, and the
sacrifices of the meek.” As an artist in fiction, says Heredia,
“Coppée possesses preëminently the gift of presenting concrete
fact rather than abstraction,” and a “great grasp of character,”
enabling him “to show us the human heart and intellect in full
play and activity”--both of which endowments were the supreme
characteristics of the author of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and _David
Copperfield_.--MERION M. MILLER, Introduction to _The Guilty Man_.
Contrast the touching pathos of the “Substitute,” poignant in his
magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered
his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has
fled from, that he may save from a like degradation and from an
inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all
unworthy as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the
gigantic deeds “My Friend Meurtrier” boasts about unceasingly, not
knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily
domestic duties--making the coffee of his good old mother, and
taking her poodle out for a walk.... No doubt M. Coppée’s _contes_
[stories] have not the sharpness of Maupassant’s nor the brilliancy
of M. Daudet’s. But what of it? They have qualities of their own.
They have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not
exceeded, I think, by those of either Maupassant or M. Daudet. M.
Coppée’s street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist
sketches of life under the shadow of Notre Dame, are convincingly
successful.--BRANDER MATTHEWS, _Aspects of Fiction_.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON COPPÉE
Introduction to _Ten Tales by Coppée_, Brander Matthews (1890); _Books
and Play-Books_, Brander Matthews (1895); _Literary Movement in France
during the Nineteenth Century_, Georges Pellissier (1897); _Hours with
Famous Parisians_, Stuart Henry (1897).
FOR ANALYSIS
THE SUBSTITUTE
(LE REMPLAÇANT)
BY FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
_Translation by The Editor_[27]
He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.
2. Thus he spoke to the judges:
3. I am called Jean François Leturc, and for six months now I’ve
been with the man who sings between two lanterns on the Place de la
Bastille, while he scrapes on a string of catgut. I repeat the chorus
with him, and then I cry out, ‘Get the collection of new songs, ten
centimes, two sous!’ He was always drunk and beat me; that’s why the
police found me the other night, in the tumble-down buildings. Before
that, I used to be with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a
laundress; she called herself Adèle. At one time a gentleman had given
her an establishment, on the ground-floor, at Montmartre. She was a
good worker and loved me well. She made money because she had the
clientele of the café waiters, and those people use lots of linen.
Sundays, she would put me to bed early to go to the ball; but week
days, she sent me to the Brothers’ school, where I learned to read.
Well, at last the _sergent-de-ville_ whose beat was up our street,
began always stopping before her window to talk to her--a fine fellow,
with the Crimean medal. They got married, and all went wrong. He didn’t
take to me, and set mamma against me. Every one boxed my ears; and it
was then that, to get away from home, I spent whole days on the Place
Clichy, where I got to know the mountebanks. My stepfather lost his
place, mamma her customers; she went to the wash-house to support her
man. It was there she got consumption--from the steam of the lye. She
died at Lariboisière. She was a good woman. Since that time I’ve lived
with the brush-seller and the catgut-scraper. Are you going to put me
in prison?”
4. He talked this way openly, cynically, like a man. He was a ragged
little rascal, as tall as a boot, with his forehead hidden under a
strange mop of yellow hair.
5. Nobody claimed him, so they sent him to the Reform School.
6. Not very intelligent, lazy, above all maladroit with his hands, he
was able to learn there only a poor trade--the reseating of chairs.
Yet he was obedient, of a nature passive and taciturn, and he did not
seem to have been too profoundly corrupted in that school of vice.
But when, having come to his seventeenth year, he was set free again
on the streets of Paris, he found there, for his misfortune, his
prison comrades, all dreadful rascals, exercising their low callings.
Some were trainers of dogs for catching rats in the sewers; some
shined shoes on ball nights in the Passage de l’Opéra; some were
amateur wrestlers, who let themselves be thrown by the Hercules of
the side-shows; some fished from rafts out in the river, in the full
sunlight. He tried all these things a little, and a few months after
he had left the house of correction he was arrested anew for a petty
theft: a pair of old shoes lifted from out an open shop-window. Result:
a year of prison at Sainte-Pélagie, where he served as valet to the
political prisoners.
[Sidenote: Revolutionary songs of 1793.]
[Sidenote: _Tu_--thou--used only in familiar address.]
7. He lived, astonished, among this group of prisoners, all very young
and negligently clad, who talked in loud voices and carried their heads
in such a solemn way. They used to meet in the cell of the eldest of
them, a fellow of some thirty years, already locked up for a long
time and apparently settled at Sainte-Pélagie: a large cell it was,
papered with colored caricatures, and from whose windows one could see
all Paris--its roofs, its clock-towers, and its domes, and far off,
the distant line of the hills, blue and vague against the sky. There
were upon the walls several shelves filled with books, and all the old
apparatus of a _salle d’armes_--broken masks, rusty foils, leather
jackets, and gloves that were losing their stuffing. It was there that
the “politicians” dined together, adding to the inevitable “soup and
beef” some fruit, cheese, and half-pints of wine that Jean François
went out to buy in a can--tumultuous repasts, interrupted by violent
disputes, where they sang in chorus at the dessert the _Carmagnole_
and _Ça ira_. They took on, however, an air of dignity on days when
they made place for a newcomer, who was at first gravely treated as
“_citizen_,” but who was the next day _tutoyed_, and called by his
nickname. They used big words there--Corporation, Solidarity, and
phrases all quite unintelligible to Jean François, such as this, for
example, which he once heard uttered imperiously by a frightful little
hunchback who scribbled on paper all night long:
8. “It is settled. The cabinet is to be thus composed: Raymond in the
Department of Education, Martial in the Interior, and I in Foreign
Affairs.”
[Sidenote: Police headquarters.]
9. Having served his time, he wandered again about Paris, under the
surveillance of the police, in the fashion of beetles that cruel
children keep flying at the end of a string. He had become one of
those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry,
arrests and releases, turn and turn about, a little like those platonic
fishermen who, so as not to empty the pond, throw back into the water
the fish just out of the net. Without his suspecting that so much honor
was done to his wretched personality, he had a special docket in the
mysterious archives of _la rue de Jérusalem_, his name and surnames
were written in a large back-hand on the gray paper of the cover, and
the notes and reports, carefully classified, gave him these graded
appellations: “the man named Leturc,” “the prisoner Leturc,” and at
last “the convicted Leturc.”
[Sidenote: The California, a cheap eating-house in Paris.]
[Sidenote: In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give
exemption, and this he secured by drawing “a good number.”]
[Sidenote: A receiver of stolen goods.]
10. He stayed two years out of prison, dining _à la Californie_,
sleeping in lodging-houses, and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking
part with his fellows in endless games of pitch-penny on the
boulevards near the city gates. He wore a greasy cap on the back of his
head, carpet slippers, and a short white blouse. When he had five sous,
he had his hair curled. He danced at Constant’s at Montparnasse; bought
for two sous the jack-of-hearts or the ace-of-spades, which were used
as return checks, to resell them for four sous at the door of Bobino;
opened carriage-doors as occasion offered; led about sorry nags at the
horse-market. Of all the bad luck--in the conscription he drew a good
number. Who knows whether the atmosphere of honor which is breathed
in a regiment, whether military discipline, might not have saved
him? Caught in a haul of the police-net with the younger vagabonds
who used to rob the drunkards asleep in the streets, he denied very
energetically having taken part in their expeditions. It was perhaps
true. But his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was
sent up for three years to Poissy. There he had to make rough toys,
had himself tattooed on the chest, and learned thieves’ slang and the
penal code. A new liberation, a new plunge into the Parisian sewer,
but very short this time, for at the end of hardly six weeks he was
again compromised in a theft by night, aggravated by violent entry,
a doubtful case in which he played an obscure rôle, half dupe and
half fence. On the whole, his complicity seemed evident, and he was
condemned to five years’ hard labor. His sorrow in this adventure was,
chiefly, to be separated from an old dog which he had picked up on a
heap of rubbish and cured of the mange. This beast loved him.
[Sidenote: Straw was stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.]
[Sidenote: The northwest storm-wind from the Mediterranean.]
11. Toulon, the ball on his ankle, the work in the harbor, the blows
from the staves, the wooden shoes without straw, the soup of black
beans dating from Trafalgar, no money for tobacco, and the horrible
sleep on the filthy camp-bed of the galley slave, that is what he knew
for five torrid summers and five winters blown upon by the _Mistral_.
He came out from there stunned, and was sent under surveillance
to Vernon, where he worked for some time on the river; then, an
incorrigible vagabond, he broke exile and returned again to Paris.
12. He had his savings, fifty-six francs--that is to say, time enough
to reflect. During his long absence, his old and horrible comrades
had been dispersed. He was well hidden, and slept in a loft at an old
woman’s, to whom he had represented himself as a sailor weary of the
sea, having lost his papers in a recent shipwreck, and who wished
to essay another trade. His tanned face, his calloused hands, and a
few nautical terms he let fall one time or another, made this story
sufficiently probable.
13. One day when he had risked a saunter along the streets, and
when the chance of his walk had brought him to Montmartre, where he
had been born, an unexpected memory arrested him before the door of
the Brothers’ school in which he had learned to read. Since it was
very warm, the door was open, and with a single glance the passing
incorrigible could recognize the peaceful schoolroom. Nothing was
changed: neither the bright light shining in through the large windows,
nor the crucifix over the desk, nor the rows of seats furnished with
leaden ink-stands, nor the table of weights and measures, nor the map
on which pins stuck in still pointed out the operations of some ancient
war. Heedlessly and without reflecting, Jean François read on the
blackboard these words of the Gospel, which a well-trained hand had
traced as an example of penmanship:
Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than
over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.
14. It was doubtless the hour for recreation, for the Brother professor
had left his chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he seemed to
be telling a story to all the _gamins_ who surrounded him, attentive
and raising their eyes. What an innocent and gay countenance was that
of the beardless young man, in long black robe, with white necktie,
with coarse, ugly shoes, and with badly cut brown hair pushed up at the
back. All those pallid faces of children of the populace which were
looking at him seemed less childlike than his, above all when, charmed
with a candid, priestly pleasantry he had made, he broke out with a
good and frank peal of laughter, which showed his teeth sound and
regular--laughter so contagious that all the scholars broke out noisily
in their turn. And it was simple and sweet, this group in the joyous
sunlight that made their clear eyes and their blonde hair shine.
15. Jean François looked at the scene some time in silence, and, for
the first time, in that savage nature all instinct and appetite, there
awoke a mysterious and tender emotion. His heart, that rude, hardened
heart, which neither the cudgel of the galley-master nor the weight
of the watchman’s heavy whip falling on his shoulders was able to
stir, beat almost to bursting. Before this spectacle, in which he saw
again his childhood, his eyes closed sadly, and, restraining a violent
gesture, a prey to the torture of regret, he walked away with great
strides.
16. The words written on the blackboard came back to him.
17. “If it were not too late, after all!” he murmured. “If I could
once more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out
my sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to
recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out
now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap,
and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell
of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to
climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all
around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,--I have
never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”
18. He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it,
and three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom
he labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on
the scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and
straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man
below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his
soup, at the cheap eating house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands
burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster, but content
with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his
handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him
unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance
of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and
sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.
* * * * *
19. At last--supreme recompense!--he had a friend.
20. It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little
peasant from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his
stick over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from
the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved
him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he
himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound, reserved,
disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien,
himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course,
satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror
of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room,
fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take
into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre
and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages
enough to buy some land in his own province.