QUATREMAINS-QUATREPATTES.
“Mademoiselle, what do you weave?”
She sat at the entrance to her sleeping-place--a hole under the
radiated roots of an ancient oak-tree. We had happened upon the
shelter in our league-long flight. It was one of those burrows--those
_logettes_ into which past generations of the hunted and proscribed
had sunk like moles. Many of our forests are honeycombed with them.
Over the opening to this, once concealed by a cunning mat of weeds and
branches, the roots had contrived a more enduring cover. Within, to
walls and floor, yet clung the remnants of brushwood with which long
ago the den had been lined.
Carinne was deftly busy over a queer contrivance--a sort of fencing
mask that she plaited from thin tendrils of a binding-weed.
“Monsieur on his high perch at night will suffer from the mosquitoes?”
“Has mademoiselle reason to think so?”
“As I think I can tell when a little ape carries a nut in his pouch.”
“Alas! but how cynical of romance are the tiny blood-suckers! They fly
on a chromatic scale, mademoiselle. Often I try to comfort myself with
the fancy that I am listening to the very distant humming of church
bells; and then comes a tiny prick, and something seems to rise from
my heart to my face, and to blossom thereon. No doubt it is the
flowers of fancy budding. And is the weed-bonnet for me?”
“I shall not want it in my burrow.”
This gave me exquisite gratification, which survived the many
inconveniences to which I was put by the bonnet falling off at night,
and my having to descend to recover it. But it soon appeared that the
least whim of this fascinating child was to be my law.
And yet what a dear lawless existence! I do not know what termination
to it we foresaw. Sooner or later the cold must drive me from my
nightly cradle; sooner or later the good fruits of the earth must
wither. In the meantime we were _grillon_ and _cigale_,--we stored
not, neither did we labour; but we chatted, and we wandered, and we
drew the marrow of every tender berry, and gnawed the rind of every
tough, without making faces.
And we quarrelled--_mon Dieu!_ but how we quarrelled! Scarce a day
passed without dispute, and this in the end it was that resolved the
situation for us. For truly my comrade was as full of moods and
whimsies as the wind--one moment a curious sweet woman; the next, and
on the prick of confidence, a pillar of salt. Yet, even as such, she
herself was ever the savour to the insults she made me swallow.
By then I was a little awakening, I think, to a consciousness that was
half fright, half ecstasy. Let me not misrepresent my meaning. I held
the honour of Mademoiselle de Lâge in high reverence; yet (and
_therefore_, also, _bien entendu_) I could not but acknowledge to
myself that in the depth of my heart was sprouting a desire for a more
particular understanding between us. This very self-confession at last
was like a terrifying surrender of independence--of
irresponsibility--of all that sweet store of philosophy I had made it
my practice to hive against the winter of old age. I saw my
tranquillity yielded to a disturbing sense of duty. I felt my feet and
my body stung by a thousand thorns as I turned into the narrow road of
self-abnegation. No more for me should gleam the rosy garland and the
wine-cup exhaling joy; but rather the olive from the branch should
stimulate my palate to caudle, and the priest sanctify my salt of life
out of all flavour.
_Aïe, Aïe!_ and what then? Why, I was forgetting that as a lady puts
the deduction before the argument, and cultivates her intuitive
perceptions by reading the _dénoûment_ of a romance after the first
chapter, so she will have decided upon the direction of that last gift
of herself while pinning her favours upon the coats of a dozen
successive hopefuls. I might humour or tease my fancy over the
presumptive flavour of that draught of matrimony, while all the time
Mademoiselle de Lâge of Pierrettes held my person and my citizenship
in frank contempt. Decidedly I was eating my chicken in the egg.
Still, the very fearless susceptibility of the child, her beauty and
her wilfulness, were so many flames to feed that fire of passion that
the strange nature of our comradeship had first kindled in my breast.
And so always before my mind’s eye I kept, or tried to keep, the
picture of the Chevalier Bayard and the Spanish ladies of Brescia.
* * * * * * *
One day, in our wanderings, we came out suddenly upon a track of
highroad that, sweeping from us round a foreshore of desolate hills,
seemed, like a coast-current, to set some gaunt pines at a little
distance swaying as if they were the masts of ships. By then, as I
gather, we must have travelled as far north as Chalus, and were come
into regions that, by reason of their elevation, were somewhat colder
and moister than the sunny slopes we had quitted. Perhaps it was this
change of atmosphere that chilled our odd but never too ardent
relations one with the other; perhaps it was that Carinne, as I, was
at length taking alarm over the ambiguity of our position. In any case
we fell out and apart, and so followed some harsh experiences to the
pair of us.
Now we backed from the public way in fright, and, concealing ourselves
once more amongst the trees, sat down, and were for a long space
silent. The interval was a pregnant one to me, inasmuch as I was
labouring with a resolve that had been forming for days in my breast.
And at last I spoke--
“Carinne, we have been much at cross-purposes of late.”
“Have we, M. Thibaut? But perhaps it is in the order of things.”
“And that is to say that the plebeian Thibaut and the patrician De
Lâge cannot meet on a common plane?”
“You must not put words in my mouth.”
“Ah, if I might!”
“What then? It will soothe my _ennui_ to hear.”
“Not for the moment. Tell me, mademoiselle, would you renew this
comradeship were we to escape, and meet in the after-time under better
conditions of security?”
“Oh, monsieur! and would you have me wander hand in hand with you
through the gardens of the Thuilleries? or invite you to sleep upon
the tester of my bed? or open my mouth like a young bird at the
fruit-stalls, that you might pop in raspberries?”
“Unkind! I would have you meet me by chance; I would see your eyes
open to a light of pleasure; I would have you come gladly to me and
take my fingers in yours and say: ‘This is he that was my good friend
when I needed one.’”
“I will remember. And then all will clap their hands and cry ‘Bravo!’
will they not? and I shall feel a little excitement. ‘_Qu’y a-t-il_,
Jacko!’ I shall say. ‘Show the company some of the pretty tricks you
played in the woods.’”
I was silent.
“And are those the words you would put in my mouth, monsieur?” said
Carinne.
“I referred to the present,” I answered coldly; “and, as you take it
so, I will speak in your person as I would have you speak.
‘Jean-Louis,’ you say, ‘I am, like all sweet women, an agglomerate of
truths and inconsistencies; yet I am not, in the midst of my
wilfulness, insensible to the suffering my caprice of misunderstanding
puts you to; and, in face of the equivocal character of our
intercourse, I will forego the blindness that is a privilege of my
sex. Speak boldly, then, what lies in your heart.’”
As I spoke in some trepidation, Carinne’s face grew enigmatical with
hardness and a little pallor, and she looked steadily away from me.
“I thank you,” she said softly, “for that word ‘equivocal.’ But please
to remember, monsieur, that this ‘_intercourse_’ is none of my
seeking.”
“You choose to misapprehend me.”
“Oh! it is not possible,” she cried, turning sharply upon me. “You
take advantage of my condescension and of the wicked licence of the
times. Have you sought, by this elaborate process, to entrap me into a
confession of dependence upon you? Why” (she measured me scornfully
with her eyes), “I think I look over and beyond you, monsieur.”
“Now,” I said, stung beyond endurance by her words, “I pronounce you,
mademoiselle, the most soulless, as you are the most beautiful, woman
I have ever encountered. I thought I loved you with that reverence
that would subscribe to the very conditions that Laban imposed upon
Jacob. I see I was mistaken, and that I would have bartered my gold
for a baser metal. And now, also, I see, mademoiselle, that the
callousness you displayed in presence of the murdered Lepelletier,
which I had fain fancied was a paralysis of nerve, was due in effect
to nothing less vulgar than an unfeeling heart!”
She stared at me in amazement, it seemed. I was for the moment carried
quite beyond myself.
“I will leave you,” I cried, “to your better reflections--or, at
least, to your better judgment. This Thibaut will walk off the high
fever of his presumption, and return presently, your faithful and
obedient servant.”
I turned, fuming, upon my heel, and strode off amongst the trees. I
had not gone a dozen paces when her voice stayed me. I twisted myself
about.
“Do not lift your head so high, monsieur,” she said, “or you will run
it against a mushroom and hurt yourself.”
* * * * * * *
Insolent--cruel--fascinating! For what had I indulged this mood of
quixotry--for what permitted this intolerable child to gall my sides
with her disdain? Would it have been thus had I condescended to drive
her coquetry to bay with that toothless dog of my rank? Ah! I believe
so; and that only made the sting of her contempt the more poisonous.
It was my person that could not suffice; and truly there is no bribe
to a woman’s favour like an extra inch of weediness. She is the
escapement of the heart; but the reason she will never move till she
acquire a sense of proportion. She was designed but to put man out of
conceit with himself, and I think she was not formed of his rib but of
his spleen. Therefore the tap-root of her nature is grievance, from
which her every leaf and flower and knot and canker takes its
sustenance of misconstruction. She may bloom very fair and sweet; but
then so does the dulcamara, and to taste either is dangerous.
Thinking these thoughts, I postponed my return to the little glade
where I had left Carinne. She should believe me gone for good and all,
I vowed, and so should she suffer the first pangs of desertion. Then,
though she wished to make me feel small, no giant should figure so
great in her eyes as the moderate Thibaut.
At last, in the early glow of evening, the unquenchable yearning in my
heart would brook no longer delay. Half-shamefaced, half-stubborn, I
retraced my steps to the glen that held my all of aggravation and of
desire.
She was not there. She never came to it more. For long I would not
realise the truth. I waited, and hoped, and often circumambulated the
spot where she had rested, hurrying over a greater or less
circumference according to my distance from the centre. I called--I
entreated--perhaps in the darkness of night I wept. It was all of no
avail. She had vanished without leaving a trace, wilfully and
resentfully, and had thus decided to reward my long service of
devotion.
When--after lingering about the spot for two nights and two days,
drugging a dying hope with the philtre of its own brewing--I at length
knew myself convicted of despair, a great bitterness awoke in my
breast that I should have thus permitted myself to be used and fooled
and rejected.
“She is not worthy of this vast of concern!” I cried. “I will forget
her, and resume myself, and be again the irresponsible maggot
contributing to the decay of a worm-eaten system. To taste
disenchantment! After all, that is not to drink the sea!”
But it was to eat of its fruit of ashes; and I was to carry a burden
with me that I might not forego. This in my subsequent wanderings made
my steps drag heavily, as if always I bore in the breast of my coat
the leaden image of an angel. But, nevertheless, I could muster a
pride to my aid in moments of a very desperate lassitude of the soul.
* * * * * * *
With the opening of October I was still a solitary “rogue,” ostracised
from my herded kind. I had wandered so far north as that I saw Paris
(the ultimate goal, I felt, of my weary feet) to swim distinguishable
in the misty ken of my mind. Therefrom always seemed to emanate a
deadly but dulcet atmosphere, the attraction of which must sooner or
later overpower me. Sometimes in the night I could have thought I
heard the city’s swarming voices jangling to me down the steeper roads
of wind; sometimes the keystone of the Conciergerie would figure to me
as the lodestone to all shattered barques tossing helplessly on a
shoreless waste. For I was sick to the heart of loneliness; sick of
the brute evasion of my race; sick of my perilous immunity from all
the burning processes of that frantic drama of my times. And so I
trudged ever with my face set to the north, and the hum of the
witches’ cauldron, whose broth was compound of all heroism and all
savagery, singing phantomly in my ears.
And to this direction yet another consideration induced me. With the
approach of chillier weather the wild wood-life of the wilder
provinces asserted itself, and assumed a more menacing aspect. The
abolition of the game laws had brought about, indeed, an amazing
increase in the number of wolves and foxes; and what with these on one
side and sans-culottism on the other, I had often latterly felt myself
walking between the devil and the deep sea. Then, once upon a time, I
was joined by an odd roguish way-fellow, the obliquity of whose moral
vision I overlooked for the sake of his company; and through him was
my burden of self-dependence a little lightened.
I had sunk asleep one afternoon in a copse neighbouring on the royal
village of Cléry. Autumn is all a siesta in that mild and beautiful
district. Waking, I felt the sunlight on my eyes like a damp warm
sponge; and so with my lids gratefully closed I fell a-musing.
“To think,” I murmured, “that the twang of a beetle’s bowstring at my
ear on the old bridge outside Coutras should have been the key-note to
all this devil’s dance of mine!”
I thought I heard a faint rustle somewhere at hand--a squirrel or
coney. I paid no attention to it, but indulged my mood of
introspection. By-and-by a step came towards me, advancing boldly
amongst the trees from a distance. It approached, reached, stopped
over against me. I opened my eyes as I lay, my arms under my head, and
placidly surveyed the new-comer. He stood looking down upon me, his
fingers heaped upon the black crutch of his _bâton_, and when he saw
me awake he nodded his head in a lively manner.
“The occasion is opportune,” he said, in a quick, biting voice.
His lower jaw projected, showing a straight row of little even
teeth--like palings to keep his speech within bounds. The brightness
of his half-seen eyes belied the indolence of their lids. He wore a
jacket of sheepskin, wool outwards; and a leathern bag, stuffed with
printed broadsides, hung from his shoulder by a length of scarlet
tape. On his head was a three-cornered hat, fantastically caught up
with ribbons, and his legs and feet were encased respectively in fine
black hose and the neat pumps with buckles known as _pantoufles de
Palais_.
“_Comment?_” said I, without moving.
“The citizen has slept?”
“Most tranquilly.”
“The citizen has dreamt?”
“Without doubt. And he is awake.”
He made a comprehensive gesture with his stick and his hands.
“But I interpret dreams,” said he--“and at one price. I will unravel
you the visions of a politician or expound himself to Jack Hodge for
the common charge of fifty centimes.”
He bent his head towards me with an affectation of scrutiny.
“I perceive the citizen does not credit me,” he said.
“And so his eyes rebuke his scepticism, interpreter of dreams,” said
I; “for thou hast rightly construed their meaning.”
“Ah!” he murmured, raising himself and drawing in his breath. “But I
find it simple to convince the most incredulous.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” he cried, clapping his chest; “for know that thou speak’st with
Quatremains-Quatrepattes himself!”
He dwelt on the pause that followed; collapsed from it; regarded me,
it seemed, in astonishment.
“Thou hast not heard of me?”
“Again the interpreter of dreams justifies himself.”
He looked away from me, in a high manner of abstraction.
“And this is for the sunshine of fame to throw one’s shadow over half
the world!” said he.
“Maybe thy fame is at its meridian, citizen, and thy shadow
consequently a little fat blot at thy feet?”
He turned to me again.
“Oh yes,” he cried sarcastically. “I am Quatremains-Quatrepattes, and
some outside the beaten track know my name, perhaps. But possibly the
citizen has never heard even of Jean Cazotte?”
“On the contrary; I have seen and spoken with him.”
“_Par exemple!_ The man was a charlatan. He could foretell everything
but his own guillotining last year. And yet thou art ignorant--well,
well!”
He threw up his hands in deprecation; then came and sat down on the
grass beside me.
“_Cela m’est égal_, M. Quatremains-Quatrepattes,” said I.
“Ah!” he said; “but I will convince thee at once. Describe to me thy
dream.”
“I dreamt I wrestled with an angel and was overthrown.”
“Thy mistress has quarrelled with and rejected thee.”
“An obvious deduction. Yet I will assure you she is no angel.”
“Canst thou say so? But we are all of the seed of Lucifer. Proceed.”
“I dreamt how a great march grew out of a single accident of sound.”
Here I was watchful of him, and I saw some relish twitch his lips. He
assumed an air of tense introspection, groping with his soul, like a
fakir, amongst the reflex images thrown upon the backs of his
eyeballs.
“I hear a note,” he said presently, as if speaking to himself--“one
vibrant accent like the clipt song of a bullet. Is it struck from an
instrument or from any resounding vessel? It comes down the wind--it
clangs--it passes. Nay--it signifies only that some winged insect has
fled by the ear of a solitary traveller resting on an ancient bridge;
yet from that little bugle-sound shall the traveller learn to date the
processes of a long and fruitless journey.”
I broke into a great laugh.
“Most excellent!” I cried. “Thou hast an ingenuity of adaptation that
should make thy fortune--even at the very low rate of fifty centimes
the job.”
His eyebrows lifted at me.
“Why, M. Quatremains-Quatrepattes--M. Jacquemart,” said I,--“I knew
thee listening to me just now; and I heard thee steal away and come
again. It is easy to construe with the key in one’s hand.”
He was no whit abashed.
“_Cela m’est égal_,” he said serenely, echoing my words. “But I can
foretell one’s future, nevertheless, very exactly.”
“Why, so can I, if I am not to be called upon to verify my
statements.”
He looked suddenly in my face.
“Thou art a disguised aristocrat.”
“Better and better. But are we not all such to ourselves? The soul is
excessively exclusive.”
“You will not consider I have earned my fee?” said he.
“Fifty times over, my friend. Will you take it in a promissory note?”
“Ah!” he cried pleasantly. “I perceive I have sown in barren soil.”
“Again you justify yourself. Yet should I be a very thicket were all
the berries I have swallowed of late to germinate in me.”
“Is that so?” said he. “But I have been a scapegoat myself----” and
thereat this extraordinary person pressed upon me some food he had
with him with an ample and courtly grace.
“This shall yield a better crop than my prophesying,” he said,
watching me as I munched.
“Of a surety,” I answered; “the full harvest of my gratitude.”
He pondered at me.
“I wish I could convince thee,” he said.
“Wherefore? Is not the evil sufficient for the day in this distracted
land? Why should one want to probe the future?”
“Because forewarned is forearmed.”
“Oh, little Quatremains-Quatrepattes! Dost thou not perceive the
paradox? How can destiny be altered by foreknowledge? If you interpret
that I am to be guillotined, and I profit by the statement to evade
such a catastrophe, how is not your prophecy stultified?”
“Why, I have no creed of predestination. The lords of life and death
are not inexorable. Sometimes, like M. St Meard, one may buy his
reprieve of them with a jest. Above all, they hate the sour fatalist
whose subscription to his own faith is a gloomy affectation.”
“Well; I think I love thee a little.”
He looked at me with a smile.
“Come with me, then. I long to give thee proof. Dost thou need a
safeguard? Thou shalt run under my wing--_ça et là_--to Paris if
thou wilt. I am popular with all. If necessity drives, thou shalt
figure as my Jack-pudding. What! thou mayst even play up to the part.
Thou hast slept in the mire; but ‘many a ragged colt makes a good
horse.’”
I laughed.
“Why not?” I said. “For I have played the tragic to empty houses till
I am tired.”
* * * * * * *
Quatremains-Quatrepattes and his merry-andrew gambolled through a
score of villages on their road to Paris. I found the rascal hugely
popular, as he had boasted he was, and a most excellent convoy to my
humble craft, so perilously sailing under false colours. He was
subtle, shrewd, seasonable,--of the species whose opportunity is
accident; and perhaps no greater tribute could be paid to his deftness
than this--that he never once exposed himself to detection by me in a
question of moral fraud. “_Ton génie a la main crochue_,” I would say
to him, chuckling; but he would only respond with a rebuking silence.
Early he handed over the bag of broadsides--the revolutionary songs
and ballads (some, it must be confessed, abominably coarse)--to my
care, that so he himself might assume a lofty indifference to the
meaner processes of his business. This delighted me. It was like a new
rattling game to me to hawk my commodities amongst the crowd; to jest
and laugh with my fellows once more under cover of the droll I
represented. Shortly, I think, I became as popular as Quatremains
himself; and over this, though he loved me as a valuable auxiliary, he
began to look a little sober by-and-by, as if he dreaded I should joke
the weightier part of his commerce out of all respect.
_His_ popularity was chiefly with the village wenches. They would
gather about him at the fountains, and pay their sous open-eyed to be
expounded; or singly they would withdraw him into nooks or private
places if the case was serious.
“Citizen seër,” says Margot, “I dreamed I fell and was wounded.”
“That is good, little minette. Thou wilt pay me five sous for a fond
lover.”
“Citizen seër, I dreamed I was eating of a great egg.”
“And thou shalt shortly beget a male child that shall bring thee
honour.”
“How now, old Jackalent!”
There rises a shrill cackle of laughter.
“_Fi donc_, Margot! _On te le rendra de bonne heure!_”
To submit the commerce of love to the test of a little dream-manual he
carried about with him, that was Quatremains’ system. This key (it was
in manuscript) interpreted on a couple of hundred, or more, words,
from _Abel_ to _Wounds_; but affairs of the heart predominated through
the whole alphabet of nonsense. He would coach himself continually
from it in secret; but indeed a small wit and a trifle of invention
were all that was needed. Now and again I would rally him on this
petty taxing of credulity.
“How now!” he would answer. “Art thou not yet convinced?”
“By what, thou most surprising Quatremains-Quatrepattes?”
“For example, did I not foretell that Mère Grignon, whose husband was
guillotined, would be brought to bed of a child with the mark of the
_lunette_ on its throat; and were not my words verified the same
night?”
“But who knows that some one may not have bribed the nurse to score
the neck of the new-born with whipcord?”
“_Tête-bleu!_ Should I hold good my reputation and pay this nurse,
think’st thou, out of five sous?”
But the rascal had other strings to his bow, all twanging to the same
tune _de folles amours_--charms, fortune-telling, palmistry: so many
lines under the thumb, so many children; a shorter first joint to the
little than to its neighbour finger, the wife to rule the roast; a
mole on the nose, success in intrigues; a mole on the breast,
sincerity of affection. Then, too, he would tell nativities, cast
horoscopes, quarter the planets for you like an orange or like the
fruit of his imagination. There is a late picture of him often before
me as he sat in the market-place of Essonnes, a little village that
lies almost within view of the towers of Paris. A half-dozen blooming
daughters of the Revolution stood about him, their hands under their
aprons for warmth,--for it was pretty late in November, and in fact
the eve of St Catherine’s feast.
“Now,” said Quatremains, “there are seven of ye, and that is the sure
number,--for there must not be more than seven nor fewer than three;
and be certain ye are quick to my directions.” (He jingled softly in
his fists the copper harvest of his gathering.) “Are all of ye
virgins?” he cried. “If the charm fails, she who is not will be
accountable to the others.” (He scanned their hot faces like a very
Torquemada of the true faith.) “To-morrow, then,” he said, “let each
wear inside her bosom all day a sprig of myrtle. At night, assemble
together privately in a room, and, as the clock strikes eleven, take
ye each your twig and fold it in tissue-paper, having first kindled
charcoal in a chafing-dish. Thereonto throw nine hairs from the head,
and a little moon-paring of every toe- and finger-nail, as also some
frankincense, with the fragrant vapour arising from which ye shall
fumigate each her packet. Now, go to your beds, and with the stroke of
midnight compose yourselves to slumber, the envelope under the head,
and, so ye have not failed to keep silence from first to last, each
shall assuredly be made conversant in dream with her future husband.”
Oh, wonderful nature of woman, thus, in a starving France, to throw
sous into a pool for the sport of vanity!
* * * * * * *
Quatremains smuggled me into Paris, and there, for we had no further
use of one another, our connection ceased. Thenceforwards I must live
on my wits--other than those he had taxed--and on the little pieces of
money that remained to me for feast-days. The struggle was a short
one. I had not been a fortnight in the city when the blow that I had
so long foreseen fell upon me. One day I was arrested and carried to
La Force. That, perhaps, was as well; for my personal estate was
dwindled to a few livres, and I knew no rag-picker that would be
likely to extend to me his patronage and protection.
Yet before this came about, I had one other strange little experience
that shall be related.