WHEREIN WE SEE YOUNG MAURICE BEWAILING THE LOSS OF HIS
GUARDIAN ANGEL, EVEN IN HIS MISTRESS'S ARMS, AND WHEREIN WE
HEAR THE ABBÉ PATOUILLE REJECT AS VAIN AND ILLUSORY ALL
NOTIONS OF A NEW REBELLION OF THE ANGELS
A fortnight had elapsed since the angel's apparition in the flat. For
the first time Gilberte arrived before Maurice at the rendezvous.
Maurice was gloomy, Gilberte sulky. So far as they were concerned Nature
had resumed her drab monotony. They eyed each other languidly, and kept
glancing towards the angle between the wardrobe with the mirror and the
window, where recently the pale shade of Arcade had taken shape, and
where now the blue cretonne of the hangings was the only thing visible.
Without giving him a name (it was unnecessary) Madame des Aubels asked:
"You have not seen him since?"
Slowly, sadly, Maurice turned his head from right to left, and from left
to right.
"You look as if you missed him," continued Madame des Aubels. "But come,
confess that he gave you a terrible fright, and that you were shocked at
his unconventionally."
"Certainly he was unconventional," said Maurice without any resentment.
"Tell me, Maurice, is it nothing to you now to be with me alone?... You
need an angel to inspire you. That is sad, for a young man like you!"
Maurice appeared not to hear, and asked gravely:
"Gilberte, do you feel that your guardian angel is watching over you?"
"I, not at all. I have never thought of him, and yet I am not without
religion. In the first place, people who have none are like animals. And
then one cannot go straight without religion. It is impossible."
"Exactly, that's just it," said Maurice, his eyes on the violet stripes
of his flowerless pyjamas; "when one has one's guardian angel one does
not even think about him, and when one has lost him one feels very
lonely."
"So you miss this...."
"Well, the fact is...."
"Oh, yes, yes, you miss him. Well, my dear, the loss of such a guardian
angel as that is no great matter. No, no! he is not worth much, that
Arcade of yours. On that famous day, while you were out getting him some
clothes, he was ever so long fastening my dress, and I certainly felt
his hand.... Well, at any rate, don't trust him."
Maurice dreamily lit a cigarette. They spoke of the six days' bicycle
race at the winter velodrome, and of the aviation show at the motor
exhibition at Brussels, without experiencing the slightest amusement.
Then they tried love-making as a sort of convenient pastime, and
succeeded in becoming moderately absorbed in it; but at the very moment
when she might have been expected to play a part more in accordance with
a mutual sentiment, she exclaimed with a sudden start:
"Good Heavens! Maurice, how stupid of you to tell me that my guardian
angel can see me. You cannot imagine how uncomfortable the idea makes
me."
Maurice, somewhat taken aback, recalled, a little roughly, his
mistress's wandering thoughts.
She declared that her principles forbade her to think of playing a round
game with angels.
Maurice was longing to see Arcade again and had no other thought. He
reproached himself for suffering him to depart without discovering where
he was going, and he cudgelled his brains night and day thinking how to
find him again.
On the bare chance, he put a notice in the personal column of one of the
big papers, running thus:
"Arcade. Come back to your Maurice."
Day after day went by, and Arcade did not return.
One morning, at seven o'clock, Maurice went to St. Sulpice to hear Abbé
Patouille say Mass, then, as the priest was leaving the sacristy, he
went up to him and asked to be heard for a moment.
They descended the steps of the church together and in the bright
morning light walked round the fountain of the _Quatre Évêques_. In
spite of his troubled conscience and the difficulty of presenting so
extraordinary a case with any degree of credibility, Maurice related how
the angel Arcade had appeared to him and had announced his unhappy
resolve to separate from him and to stir up a new revolt of the spirits
of glory. And young d'Esparvieu asked the worthy ecclesiastic how to
find his celestial guardian again, since he could not bear his absence,
and how to lead his angel back to the Christian faith. Abbé Patouille
replied in a tone of affectionate sorrow that his dear child had been
dreaming, that he took a morbid hallucination for reality, and that it
was not permissible to believe that good angels may revolt.
"People have a notion," he added, "that they can lead a life of
dissipation and disorder with impunity. They are wrong. The abuse of
pleasure corrupts the intelligence and impairs the understanding. The
devil takes possession of the sinner's senses, penetrating even to his
soul. He has deceived you, Maurice, by a clumsy artifice."
Maurice objected that he was not in any way a victim of hallucinations,
that he had not been dreaming, that he had seen his guardian angel with
his eyes and heard him with his ears.
"Monsieur l'Abbé," he insisted, "a lady who happened to be with me at
the time,--I need not mention her name,--also saw and heard him. And,
moreover, she felt the angel's fingers straying ... well, anyhow, she
felt them.... Believe me, Monsieur l'Abbé, nothing could be more real,
more positively certain than this apparition. The angel was fair, young,
very handsome. His clear skin seemed, in the shadow, as if bathed in
milky light. He spoke in a pure, sweet voice."
"That, alone, my child," the Abbé interrupted quickly, "proves you were
dreaming. According to all the demonologies, bad angels have a hoarse
voice, which grates like a rusty lock, and even if they did contrive to
give a certain look of beauty to their faces, they cannot succeed in
imitating the pure voice of the good spirits. This fact, attested by
numerous witnesses, is established beyond all doubt."
"But, Monsieur l'Abbé, I saw him. I saw him sit down, stark naked, in an
arm-chair on a pair of black stockings. What else do you want me to tell
you?"
The Abbé Patouille appeared in no way disturbed by this announcement.
"I say once more, my son," he replied, "that these unhappy illusions,
these dreams of a deeply troubled soul, are to be ascribed to the
deplorable state of your conscience. I believe, moreover, that I can
detect the particular circumstance that has caused your unstable mind
thus to come to grief. During the winter in company with Monsieur
Sariette and your Uncle Gaétan, you came, in an evil frame of mind, to
see the Chapel of the Holy Angels in this church, then undergoing
repair. As I observed on that occasion, it is impossible to keep artists
too closely to the rules of Christian art; they cannot be too strongly
enjoined to respect Holy Writ and its authorized interpreters. Monsieur
Eugène Delacroix did not suffer his fiery genius to be controlled by
tradition. He brooked no guidance and, here, in this chapel he has
painted pictures which in common parlance we call lurid, compositions of
a violent, terrible nature which, far from inspiring the soul with
peace, quietude, and calm, plunge it into a state of agitation. In them
the angels are depicted with wrathful countenances, their features are
sombre and uncouth. One might take them to be Lucifer and his companions
meditating their revolt. Well, my son, it was these pictures, acting
upon a mind already weakened and undermined by every kind of
dissipation, that have filled it with the trouble to which it is at
present a prey."
But Maurice would have none of it.
"Oh, no! Monsieur l'Abbé," he cried, "it is not Eugène Delacroix's
pictures that have been troubling me. I didn't so much as look at them.
I am completely indifferent to that kind of art."
"Well, then, my son, believe me: there is no truth, no reality, in any
of the story you have just related to me. Your guardian angel has
certainly not appeared to you."
"But, Abbé," replied Maurice, who had the most absolute confidence in
the evidence of the senses, "I saw him tying up a woman's shoe-laces and
putting on the trousers of a suicide."
And stamping his feet on the asphalt, Maurice called as witnesses to the
truth of his words the sky, the earth, all nature, the towers of St.
Sulpice, the walls of the great seminary, the Fountain of the _Quatre
Évêques_, the public lavatory, the cabmen's shelter, the taxis and motor
'buses' shelter, the trees, the passers-by, the dogs, the sparrows, the
flower-seller and her flowers.
The Abbé made haste to end the interview.
"All this is error, falsehood, and illusion, my child," said he. "You
are a Christian: think as a Christian,--a Christian does not allow
himself to be seduced by empty shadows. Faith protects him against the
seduction of the marvellous, he leaves credulity to freethinkers. There
are credulous people for you--freethinkers! There is no humbug they will
not swallow. But the Christian carries a weapon which dissipates
diabolical illusions,--the sign of the Cross. Reassure yourself,
Maurice,--you have not lost your guardian angel. He still watches over
you. It lies with you not to make this task too difficult nor too
painful for him. Good-bye, Maurice. The weather is going to change, for
I feel a burning in my big toe."
And Abbé Patouille went off with his breviary under his arm, hobbling
along with a dignity that seemed to foretell a mitre.
That very day, Arcade and Zita were leaning over the parapet of La
Butte, gazing down on the mist and smoke that lay floating over the vast
city.
"Is it possible," said Arcade, "for the mind to conceive all the pain
and suffering that lie pent within a great city? It is my belief that if
a man succeeded in realising it, the weight of it would crush him to the
earth."
"And yet," answered Zita, "every living being in that place of torment
is enamoured of life. It is a great enigma!
"Unhappy, ill-fated, while they live, the idea of ceasing to be is,
nevertheless, a horror to them. They look not for solace in
annihilation, it does not even bring them the promise of rest. In their
madness they even look upon nothingness with terror: they have peopled
it with phantoms. Look you at these pediments, these towers and domes
and spires that pierce the mist and rear on high their glittering
crosses. Men bow in adoration before the demiurge who has given them a
life that is worse than death, and a death that is worse than life."
Zita was for a long time lost in thought. At length she broke silence,
saying:
"There is something, Arcade, that I must confess to you. It was no
desire for a purer justice or wiser laws that hurried Ithuriel
earthward. Ambition, a taste for intrigue, the love of wealth and
honour, all these things made Heaven, with its calm, unbearable to me,
and I longed to mingle with the restless race of men. I came, and by an
art unknown to nearly all the angels, I learned how to fashion myself a
body which, since I could change it as the fancy seized me, to
whatsoever age and sex I would, has permitted me to experience the most
diverse and amazing of human destinies. A hundred times I took a
position of renown among the leaders of the day, the lords of wealth and
princes of nations. I will not reveal to you, Arcade, the famous names I
bore; know only that I was pre-eminent in learning, in the fine arts, in
power, wealth, and beauty, among all the nations of the world. At last,
it was but a few years since, as I was journeying in France, under the
outward semblance of a distinguished foreigner, I chanced to be roaming
at evening through the forest of Montmorency, when I heard a flute
unfolding all the sorrows of Heaven. The purity and sadness of its
notes rent my very soul. Never before had I hearkened to aught so
lovely. My eyes were wet with tears, my bosom full of sobs, as I drew
near and beheld, on the skirts of a glade, an old man like to a faun,
blowing on a rustic pipe. It was Nectaire. I cast myself at his feet,
imprinted kisses on his hands and on his lips divine, and fled away....
"From that day forth, conscious of the littleness of human achievements,
weary of the tumult and the vanity of earthly things, ashamed of my vast
and profitless endeavours, and deciding to seek out a loftier aim for my
ambition, I looked upwards towards my skiey home and vowed I would
return to it as a Deliverer. I rid myself of titles, name, wealth,
friends, the horde of sycophants and flatterers and, as Zita the
obscure, set to work in indigence and solitude, to bring freedom into
Heaven."
"And I," said Arcade, "I too have heard the flute of Nectaire. But who
is this old gardener who can thus woo from a rude wooden pipe notes that
are so moving and so beautiful?"
"You will soon know," answered Zita.