I should like to tell you about Bernier, too. They say he is a very
poor man because his coat is all shiny from wear and his shoes have the
weary, wretched look of things that have never been young, because the
sweat of many summers has soaked and stained the ribbon of his hat and
his baggy trousers give him the air of always kneeling.
Bernier has a poor little drooping moustache with nothing glorious
about it. You know only too well that he earns a hundred and twenty
francs a month in some government bureau and that people say of him,
“He’s a poor devil with a miserable job.”
As for me, I know that Bernier is rich, and I have seen him smile in
the hour of his wealth,--for the true wealth has its times of slumber
and its awakenings. Bernier possesses something which is quite
strange and almost inexpressible; it is a space, a white space, vast
and virgin, and it is his power to be able to trace there certain
harmonious lines which he alone knows how to trace in the right way.
Why have you never seen, why have you never been able to see Bernier
at the moment when he begins his work, when the whole sickly light of
the office seems concentrated on the beautiful white page? His face is
serene, smiling, assured. He half closes his eyes and draws back his
head; he holds, adroitly and elegantly, a certain chosen pen, flexible,
with a good point, a pen that belongs to him alone, which he has
prepared for himself and which he would throw away if some blundering
fool happened to touch it. And then he begins!
His kingdom is ranged all about him: ink pure from all dust, a brightly
lined ruler, a collection of pens with all sorts of points. He begins,
and the black line obeys him, springs up, curves in, stops, bounds
forward or falls back, prances, yields. Look at Bernier’s face: is it
really the face of that poor wretch you have just described to me? No!
No! It is the face of a masterful man, calm, sure of himself and his
wealth, who is doing something that no one can do as well as he: across
a snowy, limitless desert he directs, as if in a dream, a black line
that advances, advances, now slowly, now dizzily, like time itself.