I
The little town of P.... is built on a hill. At the foot of the old
ramparts runs a deep brook, the Chanteclair, doubtless so named from the
crystalline sound of its limpid waters. When one arrives by the
Versailles road, one crosses the Chanteclair at the south gate of the
city, over a stone bridge with a single arch, of which the broad
parapets, low and rounded, serve as benches for all the old people of
the suburbs. Opposite, rises Beau-Soleil Street, at the end of which is
a silent square, Quatre-Femmes, paved with huge cobbles and invaded by a
thickset weed which makes it green as a meadow. The houses sleep. Every
half hour, the dragging step of a passer-by starts a dog barking behind
a stable-door, and the one excitement in the square is the regular
appearance, twice a day, of officers who go to their table d'hôte in
Beau-Soleil Street.
In the house of a gardener, to the left, lived Julien Michon. The
gardener had rented him a large room, on the first floor; and, as the
landlord occupied the other side of the house, facing his garden, Julien
was left to himself. Having his own private entrance and stairway, he
already lived, although only twenty-five years of age, like a retired
bourgeois of small means.
The young man had lost his father and his mother while very young. An
uncle had sent the child to a boarding-school. Then, the uncle died, and
Julien had been filling a position as clerk in the post-office for the
past five years. His salary was fifteen hundred francs, without any hope
of ever getting more. But he could economize on that, and he did not
imagine a larger or a happier life than his.
Tall, strong, bony, Julien had large hands that seemed in his way.
He felt himself to be ugly, with his square head left in a sketchy state
as if roughly modeled by an indifferent sculptor. And that made him
timid, especially in the presence of young women. His awkwardness
engendered a startled attitude of mind, and a morbid desire for
mediocrity and seclusion. He seemed resigned to grow old thus, without a
comrade, without a love affair, with his tastes of a cloistered monk.
And that life did not weigh heavily upon his broad shoulders. Julien was
very happy. He had a calm, transparent soul. His daily existence, with
its fixed rules, was serenity itself. In the morning, he went to his
office, peacefully took up the work left off the preceding day; then
lunched on a small loaf, and continued his work. Afterwards, he dined,
he went to bed and slept. The next day, the sun brought with it the same
routine.
On holidays, he would go off on a tramp all alone, happily reeling off
the miles, and returning broken with fatigue.
He had never been seen in the company of a petticoat, in the evenings on
the ramparts. The working girls of P...., sharp-tongued wantons, had
ended by leaving him alone, after seeing him, on several occasions,
stand before them almost suffocated from embarrassment, and taking their
laughs of encouragement for mockery.
Julien's paradise, the one place where he breathed freely, was his room.
There only, he felt sheltered from the world. There, he straightened up;
he laughed to himself; and, when he caught sight of himself in the
mirror, he was surprised to find himself so young.
His room was vast. He had furnished it with a large canopy bed, a round
table, two chairs and an armchair. But there still remained plenty of
room for walking about. The bed was lost in the depths of an immense
alcove; a small chest of drawers, between the two windows, looked like a
child's plaything. He walked about, stretched himself, and never seemed
bored. He never wrote away from the bureau, and reading tired him. His
only passion was music. He would spend entire evenings playing the
flute. That was, above everything, his greatest recreation.
Julien had learned by himself to play the flute. For a long time, an old
yellow flute at a bric-à-brac merchant's on the market square had
aroused his covetousness. He had the money, but he did not dare enter
and buy it, for fear of exciting ridicule. At last, one evening, he grew
bold enough to get the flute and carry it away on the run, hidden under
his coat. Then, doors and windows closed, he had studied for two years
out of an old method that he had picked up at a bookseller's.
During the last six months only, he risked playing with the windows
open. He knew nothing but ancient airs, slow and simple, romances of the
last century, which acquired an infinite tenderness as he stumbled over
them with the awkwardness of a pupil filled with emotion. In the warm
evenings, when the quarter was asleep, and this light song floated from
the large room lighted by a single candle it seemed like a voice of love
confiding to the solitude of the night what it never would have uttered
in broad daylight.
Julien feared that they might complain of him in the neighborhood, but
they sleep soundly in the country towns. Besides, Quatre-Femmes Square
was inhabited only by a notary, M. Savournin, and a retired gendarme,
Captain Pidoux, very convenient neighbors who went to bed and to sleep
at nine o'clock. Julien was more anxious in regard to the inmates of a
noble mansion, the Marsanne residence, which reared itself on the other
side of the square, directly in front of his windows. It had a sad, gray
facade, of the severity of a monastery. A flight of five steps, invaded
by weeds, led up to a round door that was studded with enormous nails.
The only story had ten windows in a row, the shutters of which were
opened and closed always at the same hours, without allowing a view of
the rooms behind their heavy drawn curtains. To the left, the large
chestnut trees of the garden made a green mass that spread in a widening
wave to the ramparts.
Throughout the countryside, the mansion was celebrated, and it was said
that strangers came long distances to visit it. There were also legends
afloat concerning the wealth of the Marsannes. But Julien, during all
the hours that he had sat at his windows seeking to penetrate the
mysteries of that enormous fortune, had never seen anything but the gray
facade and the dark mass of the chestnut trees. Never had anyone mounted
the steps, never had the moss-grown door opened. The Marsannes had
ceased to use that door; they went in and out through an iron gate on
Saint-Anne Street. There was, besides, at the end of a lane near the
ramparts, a little gate opening into the garden, that Julien could not
see. For him, the house remained dead, like a palace in a fairy story
peopled by invisible inhabitants.
One Sunday, in the square before the church, one of the post-office
employees pointed out to Julien a tall old man and an old lady, telling
him that they were the Marquis and Marquise de Marsanne. Then his
companion informed him that they had a daughter still in the convent,
Mademoiselle Therese de Marsanne; and that little Colombel, M.
Savournin's clerk, was her foster-brother. As the old couple were about
to turn into Saint-Anne Street, little Colombel approached, and the
marquis held out his hand,--an honor he had not accorded anyone else.
Julien suffered from that handshake; for this Colombel, a youth of
twenty years, with sharp eyes and a mean mouth, had long been his enemy.
He made fun of Julien's timidity; he had stirred up the laundry-girls of
Beau-Soleil Street against him; and one evening, the two youths had come
to blows on the ramparts, with the result that the notary's clerk
retired with two black eyes.
Julien had lived five years on Quatre-Femmes Square when, one July
evening, an event upset his existence. The night was very warm. He was
playing his flute without a light, but absent-mindedly, when, all of a
sudden, opposite him, a window in the Marsanne mansion opened, showing a
brilliant light in the somber facade. A young girl leaned upon the
window-railing and she raised her head as if listening. Julien,
trembling, had stopped playing. He could not distinguish the face of the
young girl, he could only see the waving mass of her loosened hair. And
a light voice reached him in the midst of the silence.
"Didst thou not hear, Françoise? It sounded like music."
"A nightingale, miss," answered a coarse voice from the room. "Close the
blinds; look out for night-insects."
When the facade had grown dark again, Julien could not leave his
armchair. An hour later, he began to play again very softly. He smiled
at the thought that the young girl probably imagined that there was a
nightingale in the chestnut trees.