Jules escaped from his brother’s house and returned home, wishing
to pass the night beside his wife, and see till the last moment that
celestial creature. As he walked along with an indifference to life
known only to those who have reached the last degree of wretchedness,
he thought of how, in India, the law ordained that widows should die; he
longed to die. He was not yet crushed; the fever of his grief was still
upon him. He reached his home and went up into the sacred chamber; he
saw his Clemence on the bed of death, beautiful, like a saint, her hair
smoothly laid upon her forehead, her hands joined, her body wrapped
already in its shroud. Tapers were lighted, a priest was praying,
Josephine kneeling in a corner, wept, and, near the bed, were two men.
One was Ferragus. He stood erect, motionless, gazing at his daughter
with dry eyes; his head you might have taken for bronze: he did not see
Jules.
The other man was Jacquet,--Jacquet, to whom Madame Jules had been ever
kind. Jacquet felt for her one of those respectful friendships which
rejoice the untroubled heart; a gentle passion; love without its desires
and its storms. He had come to pay his debt of tears, to bid a long
adieu to the wife of his friend, to kiss, for the first time, the icy
brow of the woman he had tacitly made his sister.
All was silence. Here death was neither terrible as in the churches, nor
pompous as it makes its way along the streets; no, it was death in the
home, a tender death; here were pomps of the heart, tears drawn from the
eyes of all. Jules sat down beside Jacquet and pressed his hand; then,
without uttering a word, all these persons remained as they were till
morning.
When daylight paled the tapers, Jacquet, foreseeing the painful scenes
which would then take place, drew Jules away into another room. At this
moment the husband looked at the father, and Ferragus looked at
Jules. The two sorrows arraigned each other, measured each other, and
comprehended each other in that look. A flash of fury shone for an
instant in the eyes of Ferragus.
“You killed her,” thought he.
“Why was I distrusted?” seemed the answer of the husband.
The scene was one that might have passed between two tigers recognizing
the futility of a struggle and, after a moment’s hesitation, turning
away, without even a roar.
“Jacquet,” said Jules, “have you attended to everything?”
“Yes, to everything,” replied his friend, “but a man had forestalled me
who had ordered and paid for all.”
“He tears his daughter from me!” cried the husband, with the violence of
despair.
Jules rushed back to his wife’s room; but the father was there no
longer. Clemence had now been placed in a leaden coffin, and workmen
were employed in soldering the cover. Jules returned, horrified by the
sight; the sound of the hammers the men were using made him mechanically
burst into tears.
“Jacquet,” he said, “out of this dreadful night one idea has come to
me, only one, but one I must make a reality at any price. I cannot let
Clemence stay in any cemetery in Paris. I wish to burn her,--to gather
her ashes and keep her with me. Say nothing of this, but manage on my
behalf to have it done. I am going to _her_ chamber, where I shall stay
until the time has come to go. You alone may come in there to tell me
what you have done. Go, and spare nothing.”
During the morning, Madame Jules, after lying in a mortuary chapel at
the door of her house, was taken to Saint-Roch. The church was hung with
black throughout. The sort of luxury thus displayed had drawn a crowd;
for in Paris all things are sights, even true grief. There are people
who stand at their windows to see how a son deplores a mother as he
follows her body; there are others who hire commodious seats to see how
a head is made to fall. No people in the world have such insatiate eyes
as the Parisians. On this occasion, inquisitive minds were particularly
surprised to see the six lateral chapels at Saint-Roch also hung in
black. Two men in mourning were listening to a mortuary mass said in
each chapel. In the chancel no other persons but Monsieur Desmarets,
the notary, and Jacquet were present; the servants of the household were
outside the screen. To church loungers there was something inexplicable
in so much pomp and so few mourners. But Jules had been determined that
no indifferent persons should be present at the ceremony.
High mass was celebrated with the sombre magnificence of funeral
services. Beside the ministers in ordinary of Saint-Roch, thirteen
priests from other parishes were present. Perhaps never did the _Dies
irae_ produce upon Christians, assembled by chance, by curiosity, and
thirsting for emotions, an effect so profound, so nervously glacial as
that now caused by this hymn when the eight voices of the precentors,
accompanied by the voices of the priests and the choir-boys, intoned it
alternately. From the six lateral chapels twelve other childish voices
rose shrilly in grief, mingling with the choir voices lamentably. From
all parts of the church this mourning issued; cries of anguish responded
to the cries of fear. That terrible music was the voice of sorrows
hidden from the world, of secret friendships weeping for the dead.
Never, in any human religion, have the terrors of the soul, violently
torn from the body and stormily shaken in presence of the fulminating
majesty of God, been rendered with such force. Before that clamor of
clamors all artists and their most passionate compositions must bow
humiliated. No, nothing can stand beside that hymn, which sums all human
passions, gives them a galvanic life beyond the coffin, and leaves them,
palpitating still, before the living and avenging God. These cries of
childhood, mingling with the tones of older voices, including thus in
the Song of Death all human life and its developments, recalling the
sufferings of the cradle, swelling to the griefs of other ages in
the stronger male voices and the quavering of the priests,--all this
strident harmony, big with lightning and thunderbolts, does it not speak
with equal force to the daring imagination, the coldest heart, nay, to
philosophers themselves? As we hear it, we think God speaks; the vaulted
arches of no church are mere material; they have a voice, they tremble,
they scatter fear by the might of their echoes. We think we see
unnumbered dead arising and holding out their hands. It is no more a
father, a wife, a child,--humanity itself is rising from its dust.
It is impossible to judge of the catholic, apostolic, and Roman faith,
unless the soul has known that deepest grief of mourning for a loved one
lying beneath the pall; unless it has felt the emotions that fill the
heart, uttered by that Hymn of Despair, by those cries that crush the
mind, by that sacred fear augmenting strophe by strophe, ascending
heavenward, which terrifies, belittles, and elevates the soul, and
leaves within our minds, as the last sound ceases, a consciousness
of immortality. We have met and struggled with the vast idea of the
Infinite. After that, all is silent in the church. No word is said;
sceptics themselves _know not what they are feeling_. Spanish genius
alone was able to bring this untold majesty to untold griefs.
When the solemn ceremony was over, twelve men came from the six chapels
and stood around the coffin to hear the song of hope which the Church
intones for the Christian soul before the human form is buried. Then,
each man entered alone a mourning-coach; Jacquet and Monsieur Desmarets
took the thirteenth; the servants followed on foot. An hour later, they
were at the summit of that cemetery popularly called Pere-Lachaise. The
unknown twelve men stood in a circle round the grave, where the coffin
had been laid in presence of a crowd of loiterers gathered from all
parts of this public garden. After a few short prayers the priest threw
a handful of earth on the remains of this woman, and the grave-diggers,
having asked for their fee, made haste to fill the grave in order to dig
another.
Here this history seems to end; but perhaps it would be incomplete if,
after giving a rapid sketch of Parisian life, and following certain of
its capricious undulations, the effects of death were omitted. Death in
Paris is unlike death in any other capital; few persons know the trials
of true grief in its struggle with civilization, and the government of
Paris. Perhaps, also, Monsieur Jules and Ferragus XXIII. may have proved
sufficiently interesting to make a few words on their after life not
entirely out of place. Besides, some persons like to be told all, and
wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to know by what
chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin’s lamp.
Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was brought
that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was necessary to
employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a man so crushed
that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was also necessary to
coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature of the request,
which was done in these words: “The petitioner respectfully asks for the
incineration of his wife.”
When the official charged with making the report to the Councillor of
State and prefect of police read that marginal note, explaining the
object of the petition, and couched, as requested, in the plainest
terms, he said:--
“This is a serious matter! my report cannot be ready under eight days.”
Jules, to whom Jacquet was obliged to speak of this delay, comprehended
the words that Ferragus had said in his hearing, “I’ll burn Paris!”
Nothing seemed to him now more natural than to annihilate that
receptacle of monstrous things.
“But,” he said to Jacquet, “you must go to the minister of the Interior,
and get your minister to speak to him.”
Jacquet went to the minister of the Interior, and asked an audience; it
was granted, but the time appointed was two weeks later. Jacquet was a
persistent man. He travelled from bureau to bureau, and finally reached
the private secretary of the minister of the Interior, to whom he had
made the private secretary of his own minister say a word. These high
protectors aiding, he obtained for the morrow a second interview, in
which, being armed with a line from the autocrat of Foreign affairs to
the pacha of the Interior, Jacquet hoped to carry the matter by assault.
He was ready with reasons, and answers to peremptory questions,--in
short, he was armed at all points; but he failed.
“This matter does not concern me,” said the minister; “it belongs to the
prefect of police. Besides, there is no law giving a husband any legal
right to the body of his wife, nor to fathers those of their children.
The matter is serious. There are questions of public utility involved
which will have to be examined. The interests of the city of Paris might
suffer. Therefore if the matter depended on me, which it does not, I
could not decide _hic et nunc_; I should require a report.”
A _report_ is to the present system of administration what limbo
or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for
“reports”; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that
bureaucratic absurdity. He knew that since the invasion into public
business of the _Report_ (an administrative revolution consummated
in 1804) there was never known a single minister who would take upon
himself to have an opinion or to decide the slightest matter, unless
that opinion or matter had been winnowed, sifted, and plucked to bits
by the paper-spoilers, quill-drivers, and splendid intellects of his
particular bureau. Jacquet--he was one of those who are worthy of
Plutarch as biographer--saw that he had made a mistake in his management
of the affair, and had, in fact, rendered it impossible by trying to
proceed legally. The thing he should have done was to have taken Madame
Jules to one of Desmaret’s estates in the country; and there, under
the good-natured authority of some village mayor to have gratified the
sorrowful longing of his friend. Law, constitutional and administrative,
begets nothing; it is a barren monster for peoples, for kings, and for
private interests. But the peoples decipher no principles but those that
are writ in blood, and the evils of legality will always be pacific; it
flattens a nation down, that is all. Jacquet, a man of modern liberty,
returned home reflecting on the benefits of arbitrary power.
When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to deceive
him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave his bed.
The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial dinner that
same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing to burn his
wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris took up the
subject, and talked for a while of the burials of antiquity. Ancient
things were just then becoming a fashion, and some persons declared that
it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for distinguished persons, the
funeral pyre. This opinion had its defenders and its detractors. Some
said that there were too many such personages, and the price of wood
would be enormously increased by such a custom; moreover, it would
be absurd to see our ancestors in their urns in the procession at
Longchamps. And if the urns were valuable, they were likely some day
to be sold at auction, full of respectable ashes, or seized by
creditors,--a race of men who respected nothing. The other side made
answer that our ancestors were much safer in urns than at Pere-Lachaise,
for before very long the city of Paris would be compelled to order a
Saint-Bartholomew against its dead, who were invading the neighboring
country, and threatening to invade the territory of Brie. It was, in
short, one of those futile but witty discussions which sometimes cause
deep and painful wounds. Happily for Jules, he knew nothing of the
conversations, the witty speeches, and arguments which his sorrow had
furnished to the tongues of Paris.
The prefect of police was indignant that Monsieur Jacquet had appealed
to a minister to avoid the wise delays of the commissioners of the
public highways; for the exhumation of Madame Jules was a question
belonging to that department. The police bureau was doing its best to
reply promptly to the petition; one appeal was quite sufficient to set
the office in motion, and once in motion matters would go far. But as
for the administration, that might take the case before the Council of
state,--a machine very difficult indeed to move.
After the second day Jacquet was obliged to tell his friend that he must
renounce his desire, because, in a city where the number of tears shed
on black draperies is tariffed, where the laws recognize seven classes
of funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is sold at its
weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the
prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra
voices in the _Dies irae_,--all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed
by the authorities for sorrow is useless and impossible.
“It would have been to me,” said Jules, “a comfort in my misery. I meant
to have died away from here, and I hoped to hold her in my arms in a
distant grave. I did not know that bureaucracy could send its claws into
our very coffins.”
He now wished to see if room had been left for him beside his wife. The
two friends went to the cemetery. When they reached it they found (as
at the doors of museums, galleries, and coach-offices) _ciceroni_, who
proposed to guide them through the labyrinth of Pere-Lachaise. Neither
Jules nor Jacquet could have found the spot where Clemence lay. Ah,
frightful anguish! They went to the lodge to consult the porter of the
cemetery. The dead have a porter, and there are hours when the dead are
“not receiving.” It is necessary to upset all the rules and regulations
of the upper and lower police to obtain permission to weep at night, in
silence and solitude, over the grave where a loved one lies. There’s a
rule for summer and a rule for winter about this.
Certainly, of all the porters in Paris, the porter of Pere-Lachaise is
the luckiest. In the first place, he has no gate-cord to pull; then,
instead of a lodge, he has a house,--an establishment which is not
quite ministerial, although a vast number of persons come under his
administration, and a good many employees. And this governor of the
dead has a salary, with emoluments, and acts under powers of which
none complain; he plays despot at his ease. His lodge is not a place of
business, though it has departments where the book-keeping of receipts,
expenses, and profits, is carried on. The man is not a _suisse_, nor a
concierge, nor actually a porter. The gate which admits the dead stands
wide open; and though there are monuments and buildings to be cared
for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an
authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,--an authority
placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all. Nevertheless,
this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,--that chimerical
creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature of reason
moving on a thousand paws which are seldom unanimous in motion.
This guardian of the cemetery may be called a concierge who has reached
the condition of a functionary, not soluble by dissolution! His place
is far from being a sinecure. He does not allow any one to be buried
without a permit; he must count his dead. He points out to you in this
vast field the six feet square of earth where you will one day put all
you love, or all you hate, a mistress, or a cousin. Yes, remember
this: all the feelings and emotions of Paris come to end here, at
this porter’s lodge, where they are administrationized. This man has
registers in which his dead are booked; they are in their graves, and
also on his records. He has under him keepers, gardeners, grave-diggers,
and their assistants. He is a personage. Mourning hearts do not speak to
him at first. He does not appear at all except in serious cases, such as
one corpse mistaken for another, a murdered body, an exhumation, a
dead man coming to life. The bust of the reigning king is in his hall;
possibly he keeps the late royal, imperial, and quasi-royal busts
in some cupboard,--a sort of little Pere-Lachaise all ready for
revolutions. In short, he is a public man, an excellent man, good
husband and good father,--epitaph apart. But so many diverse sentiments
have passed before him on biers; he has seen so many tears, true and
false; he has beheld sorrow under so many aspects and on so many faces;
he has heard such endless thousands of eternal woes,--that to him sorrow
has come to be nothing more than a stone an inch thick, four feet long,
and twenty-four inches wide. As for regrets, they are the annoyances of
his office; he neither breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off
the rain of an inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other
feelings; he will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the
“Auberge des Adrets,” the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered
by Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize
death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he _is_ sublime through
every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.
When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.
“I told you,” he was saying, “to water the flowers from the rue Massena
to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d’Angely. You paid no attention
to me! _Sac-a-papier_! suppose the relations should take it into their
heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what would they
say to me? They’d shriek as if they were burned; they’d say horrid
things of us, and calumniate us--”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, “we want to know where Madame Jules is
buried.”
“Madame Jules _who_?” he asked. “We’ve had three Madame Jules within the
last week. Ah,” he said, interrupting himself, “here comes the funeral
of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that! He has soon
followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin to go, rattle
down like a wager. Lots of bad blood in Parisians.”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, touching him on the arm, “the person I spoke
of is Madame Jules Desmarets, the wife of the broker of that name.”
“Ah, I know!” he replied, looking at Jacquet. “Wasn’t it a funeral with
thirteen mourning coaches, and only one mourner in the twelve first? It
was so droll we all noticed it--”
“Monsieur, take care, Monsieur Desmarets is with me; he might hear you,
and what you say is not seemly.”
“I beg pardon, monsieur! you are quite right. Excuse me, I took you for
heirs. Monsieur,” he continued, after consulting a plan of the cemetery,
“Madame Jules is in the rue Marechal Lefebre, alley No. 4, between
Mademoiselle Raucourt, of the Comedie-Francaise, and Monsieur
Moreau-Malvin, a butcher, for whom a handsome tomb in white marble has
been ordered, which will be one of the finest in the cemetery--”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, interrupting him, “that does not help us.”
“True,” said the official, looking round him. “Jean,” he cried, to a man
whom he saw at a little distance, “conduct these gentlemen to the
grave of Madame Jules Desmarets, the broker’s wife. You know where it
is,--near to Mademoiselle Raucourt, the tomb where there’s a bust.”
The two friends followed the guide; but they did not reach the steep
path which leads to the upper part of the cemetery without having
to pass through a score of proposals and requests, made, with honied
softness, by the touts of marble-workers, iron-founders, and monumental
sculptors.
“If monsieur would like to order _something_, we would do it on the most
reasonable terms.”
Jacquet was fortunate enough to be able to spare his friend the hearing
of these proposals so agonizing to bleeding hearts; and presently they
reached the resting-place. When Jules beheld the earth so recently dug,
into which the masons had stuck stakes to mark the place for the stone
posts required to support the iron railing, he turned, and leaned upon
Jacquet’s shoulder, raising himself now and again to cast long glances
at the clay mound where he was forced to leave the remains of the being
in and by whom he still lived.
“How miserably she lies there!” he said.
“But she is not there,” said Jacquet, “she is in your memory. Come, let
us go; let us leave this odious cemetery, where the dead are adorned
like women for a ball.”
“Suppose we take her away?”
“Can it be done?”
“All things can be done!” cried Jules. “So, I shall lie there,” he
added, after a pause. “There is room enough.”
Jacquet finally succeeded in getting him to leave the great enclosure,
divided like a chessboard by iron railings and elegant compartments, in
which were tombs decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as cold
as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their
regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black
letters, epigrams reproving the curious, _concetti_, wittily turned
farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious
biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus,
there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few
cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of
art,--Moorish, Greek, Gothic,--friezes, ovules, paintings, vases,
guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable _immortelles_, and
dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy! It is another Paris, with its
streets, its signs, its industries, and its lodgings; but a Paris seen
through the diminishing end of an opera-glass, a microscopic Paris
reduced to the littleness of shadows, spectres, dead men, a human race
which no longer has anything great about it, except its vanity. There
Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the
slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre,
the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which
the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a
constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to
the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the
gilded cupola of the Invalides:--
“She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world
which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and occupation.”
Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a
modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin the
middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a death
scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps, with no
accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches, without prayers
of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity. Here are the facts:
The body of a young girl was found early in the morning, stranded on the
river-bank in the slime and reeds of the Seine. Men employed in dredging
sand saw it as they were getting into their frail boat on their way to
their work.
“_Tiens_! fifty francs earned!” said one of them.
“True,” said the other.
They approached the body.
“A handsome girl! We had better go and make our statement.”
And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went
to the house of the village mayor, who was much embarrassed at having to
make out the legal papers necessitated by this discovery.
The news of this event spread with the telegraphic rapidity peculiar to
regions where social communications have no distractions, where gossip,
scandal, calumny, in short, the social tale which feasts the world
has no break of continuity from one boundary to another. Before
long, persons arriving at the mayor’s office released him from all
embarrassment. They were able to convert the _proces-verbal_ into a mere
certificate of death, by recognizing the body as that of the Demoiselle
Ida Gruget, corset-maker, living rue de la Corderie-du-Temple, number
14. The judiciary police of Paris arrived, and the mother, bearing her
daughter’s last letter. Amid the mother’s moans, a doctor certified
to death by asphyxia, through the injection of black blood into the
pulmonary system,--which settled the matter. The inquest over, and the
certificates signed, by six o’clock the same evening authority was given
to bury the grisette. The rector of the parish, however, refused to
receive her into the church or to pray for her. Ida Gruget was
therefore wrapped in a shroud by an old peasant-woman, put into a common
pine-coffin, and carried to the village cemetery by four men, followed
by a few inquisitive peasant-women, who talked about the death with
wonder mingled with some pity.
The widow Gruget was charitably taken in by an old lady who prevented
her from following the sad procession of her daughter’s funeral. A man
of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the
parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,--a
church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and pointed
roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner
buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery, enclosed
with a dilapidated wall,--a little field full of hillocks; no marble
monuments, no visitors, but surely in every furrow, tears and true
regrets, which were lacking to Ida Gruget. She was cast into a corner
full of tall grass and brambles. After the coffin had been laid in
this field, so poetic in its simplicity, the grave-digger found himself
alone, for night was coming on. While filling the grave, he stopped now
and then to gaze over the wall along the road. He was standing thus,
resting on his spade, and looking at the Seine, which had brought him
the body.
“Poor girl!” cried the voice of a man who suddenly appeared.
“How you made me jump, monsieur,” said the grave-digger.
“Was any service held over the body you are burying?”
“No, monsieur. Monsieur le cure wasn’t willing. This is the first person
buried here who didn’t belong to the parish. Everybody knows everybody
else in this place. Does monsieur--Why, he’s gone!”
Some days had elapsed when a man dressed in black called at the house
of Monsieur Jules Desmarets, and without asking to see him carried up to
the chamber of his wife a large porphyry vase, on which were inscribed
the words:--
INVITA LEGE
CONJUGI MOERENTI
FILIOLAE CINERES
RESTITUIT
AMICIS XII. JUVANTIBUS
MORIBUNDUS PATER.
“What a man!” cried Jules, bursting into tears.
Eight days sufficed the husband to obey all the wishes of his wife, and
to arrange his own affairs. He sold his practice to a brother of Martin
Falleix, and left Paris while the authorities were still discussing
whether it was lawful for a citizen to dispose of the body of his wife.
* * * * *
Who has not encountered on the boulevards of Paris, at the turn of a
street, or beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, or in any part of
the world where chance may offer him the sight, a being, man or woman,
at whose aspect a thousand confused thoughts spring into his mind?
At that sight we are suddenly interested, either by features of some
fantastic conformation which reveal an agitated life, or by a singular
effect of the whole person, produced by gestures, air, gait, clothes; or
by some deep, intense look; or by other inexpressible signs which seize
our minds suddenly and forcibly without our being able to explain even
to ourselves the cause of our emotion. The next day other thoughts and
other images have carried out of sight that passing dream. But if we
meet the same personage again, either passing at some fixed hour, like
the clerk of a mayor’s office, or wandering about the public promenades,
like those individuals who seem to be a sort of furniture of the streets
of Paris, and who are always to be found in public places, at first
representations or noted restaurants,--then this being fastens himself
or herself on our memory, and remains there like the first volume of a
novel the end of which is lost. We are tempted to question this unknown
person, and say, “Who are you?” “Why are you lounging here?” “By what
right do you wear that pleated ruffle, that faded waistcoat, and carry
that cane with an ivory top; why those blue spectacles; for what reason
do you cling to that cravat of a dead and gone fashion?” Among these
wandering creations some belong to the species of the Greek Hermae;
they say nothing to the soul; _they are there_, and that is all. Why? is
known to none. Such figure are a type of those used by sculptors for
the four Seasons, for Commerce, for Plenty, etc. Some others--former
lawyers, old merchants, elderly generals--move and walk, and yet seem
stationary. Like old trees that are half uprooted by the current of a
river, they seem never to take part in the torrent of Paris, with its
youthful, active crowd. It is impossible to know if their friends
have forgotten to bury them, or whether they have escaped out of their
coffins. At any rate, they have reached the condition of semi-fossils.
One of these Parisian Melmoths had come within a few days into a
neighborhood of sober, quiet people, who, when the weather is fine,
are invariably to be found in the space which lies between the
south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the
Observatoire,--a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris.
There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is
a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue,
high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be
found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that,--it is a desert.
Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital,
the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital
La Rochefoucauld, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the
Val-de-Grace; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of
Paris find their asylum there. And (that nothing may lack in this
philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes,
Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and
the Carmelites have founded a convent. The great events of life are
represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert,--for
the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that
succumbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old
man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded. And a few steps off
is the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry
funerals of the faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way. This esplanade,
which commands a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by
bowl-players; it is, in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old
gray faces, belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the
race of our ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with
those of their surroundings.
The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of this
desert region, proved an assiduous attendant at these games of bowls;
and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature of these
various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians to
the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk. The
new-comer kept sympathetic step with the _cochonnet_,--the little
bowl which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must
centre. He leaned against a tree when the _cochonnet_ stopped; then,
with the same attention that a dog gives to his master’s gestures, he
looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the
ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the
_cochonnet_. He said nothing; and the bowl-players--the most fanatic
men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith--had never
asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most observing of
them thought him deaf and dumb.
When it happened that the distances between the bowls and the
_cochonnet_ had to be measured, the cane of this silent being was used
as a measure, the players coming up and taking it from the icy hands
of the old man and returning it without a word or even a sign of
friendliness. The loan of his cane seemed a servitude to which he
had negatively consented. When a shower fell, he stayed near the
_cochonnet_, the slave of the bowls, and the guardian of the unfinished
game. Rain affected him no more than the fine weather did; he was, like
the players themselves, an intermediary species between a Parisian
who has the lowest intellect of his kind and an animal which has the
highest.
In other respects, pallid and shrunken, indifferent to his own person,
vacant in mind, he often came bareheaded, showing his sparse white
hair, and his square, yellow, bald skull, like the knee of a beggar seen
through his tattered trousers. His mouth was half-open, no ideas were
in his glance, no precise object appeared in his movements; he never
smiled; he never raised his eyes to heaven, but kept them habitually on
the ground, where he seemed to be looking for something. At four o’clock
an old woman arrived, to take him Heaven knows where; which she did by
towing him along by the arm, as a young girl drags a wilful goat which
still wants to browse by the wayside. This old man was a horrible thing
to see.
In the afternoon of the day when Jules Desmarets left Paris, his
travelling-carriage, in which he was alone, passed rapidly through the
rue de l’Est, and came out upon the esplanade of the Observatoire at the
moment when the old man, leaning against a tree, had allowed his cane
to be taken from his hand amid the noisy vociferations of the players,
pacifically irritated. Jules, thinking that he recognized that face,
felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the carriage came to a
standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some handcarts, had too much
respect for the game to call upon the players to make way for him.
“It is he!” said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus XXIII.,
chief of the Devorants. Then, after a pause, he added, “How he loved
her!--Go on, postilion.”
ADDENDUM
Note: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is
entitled The Duchesse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with
the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories
are usually combined under the title The Thirteen.
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bourignard, Gratien-Henri-Victor-Jean-Joseph
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Desmartes, Jules
Cesar Birotteau
Desmartes, Madame Jules
Cesar Birotteau
Desplein
The Atheist’s Mass
Cousin Pons
Lost Illusions
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
Gruget, Madame Etienne
The Government Clerks
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Haudry (doctor)
Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Cousin Pons
Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de
Father Goriot
The Duchesse of Langeais
Marsay, Henri de
The Duchesse of Langeais
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Maulincour, Baronne de
A Marriage Settlement
Meynardie, Madame
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
Father Goriot
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Melmoth Reconciled
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Pamiers, Vidame de
The Duchesse of Langeais
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ronquerolles, Marquis de
The Imaginary Mistress
The Duchess of Langeais
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Peasantry
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Another Study of Woman
The Member for Arcis
Serizy, Comtesse de
A Start in Life
The Duchesse of Langeais
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Another Study of Woman
The Imaginary Mistress