She was certainly not intended for an artist's wife, above all for
such an artist as this outrageous fellow, impassioned, uproarious and
exuberant, who, with his nose in the air and bristling moustaches,
rushed through life defiantly flaunting the eccentric and whirlwind-like
name of Heurtebise,* like a challenge thrown down to all the absurd
conventionalities and prejudices of the _bourgeois_ class. How, and by
what strange charm had the little woman, brought up in a jeweller's
shop, behind rows of watch chains and strings of rings, found the means
of captivating this poet?
* Hit the blast (literally).
Picture to yourself the affected graces of a shopwoman with
insignificant features, cold and ever-smiling eyes, complacent and
placid physiognomy, devoid of real elegance, but having a certain love
for glitter and tinsel, no doubt caught at her father's shopwindow,
making her take pleasure in many-coloured satin bows, sashes and
buckles; and her hair glossy with cosmetic, stiffly arranged by the
hairdresser over a small, obstinate, narrow forehead, where the total
absence of wrinkles told less of youth than of complete lack of thought.
Such as she was, however, Heurtebise loved and wooed her, and as he
happened to possess a small income, found no difficulty in winning her.
What pleased her in this marriage was the idea of wedding an author,
a well-known man, who would take her to the theatre as often as she
wished. As for him, I verily believe that her sham elegance born of the
shop, her pretentious manners, pursed up mouth, and affectedly uplifted
little finger, fascinated him and appeared to him the height, of
Parisian refinement; for he was born a peasant and in spite of his
intelligence remained one to the end of his days.
[Illustration: p025-036]
Tempted by a quiet happiness and the family life of which he had been so
long deprived, Heurtebise spent two years far from his friends, buried
in the country, or in out-of-way suburban nooks, within easy distance
of that great city Paris, which overexcited him even while he yet sought
its attenuated atmosphere, just like those invalids who are recommended
sea air, but who, too delicate to bear it in all its strength, are
compelled to inhale it from a distance of some miles. From time to time,
his name appeared in a newspaper or magazine at the end of an article;
but already the freshness of style, the bursts of eloquence, were
lacking by which he had been formerly known. We thought: "He is too
happy! his happiness has spoilt him."
However, one day he returned amongst us, and we immediately saw that he
was not happy. His pallid countenance, drawn features contracted by a
perpetual irritability, the violent manners degenerated into a nervous
rage, the hollow sound of his once fine ringing laugh, all showed that
he was an altered man. Too proud to admit that he had made a mistake,
he would, not complain, but the old friends who gathered round him
were soon convinced that he had made a most foolish marriage, and that
henceforth his life must prove a failure. On the other hand, Madame
Heurtebise appeared to us, after two years of married life, exactly the
same as we had beheld her in the vestry on her wedding day. She wore
the same calm and simpering smile, she had as much as ever the air of
a shopwoman in her Sunday clothes, only she had gained self-possession.
She talked now. In the midst of artistic discussions into which
Heurtebise passionately threw himself, with arbitrary assertions, brutal
contempt, or blind enthusiasm, the false and honeyed voice of his
wife would suddenly make irruption, forcing him to listen to some idle
reasoning or foolish observation invariably outside of the subject
of discussion. Embarrassed and worried, he would cast us an imploring
glance, and strive to resume the interrupted conversation. Then at last,
wearied out by her familiar and constant contradiction, by the silliness
of her birdlike brain, inflated and empty as any cracknel, he held his
tongue, and silently resigned himself to let her go on to the bitter
end. But this determined silence exasperated Madame, seemed to her
more insulting, more disdainful than anything. Her sharp voice became
discordant, and growing higher and shriller, stung and buzzed, like
the ceaseless teasing of a fly, till at last her enraged husband in his
turn, burst out brutal and terrific.
She emerged from these incessant quarrels, which always ended in tears,
rested and refreshed, as a lawn after a watering, but he remained
broken, fevered, incapable of work, Little by little his very violence
was worn out One evening when I was present at one of these odious
scenes, as Madame Heurtebise triumphantly left the table, I saw on her
husband's face bent downwards during the quarrel and now upraised, an
expression of scorn and anger that no words could any longer express.
The little woman went off shutting the door with a sharp snap, and he,
flushed, with his eyes full of tears, and his mouth distorted by an
ironical and despairing smile, made like any school-boy behind his
master's back, an atrocious gesture of mingled rage and pain. After a
few moments, I heard him murmur, in a voice strangled by emotion: "Ah,
if it were not for the child, how I would be off at once!"
For they had a child, a poor little fellow, handsome and dirty, who
crawled all over the place, played with dogs bigger than himself, with
the spiders in the garden, and made mud-pies. His mother only noticed
him to declare him "disgusting" and that she had not put him out to
nurse.
[Illustration: p029-040]
She clung in fact to all the little shopkeeper traditions of her youth,
and the untidy home in which she went about from early morn in elaborate
costumes and astonishingly dressed hair, recalled the back-shops so dear
to her heart, rooms black with filth and want of air, where in the
short intervals of rest from commercial life, badly cooked meals were
hurriedly eaten, at a bare wooden table, listening all the while for the
tinkle of the shop-bell. With this class, nothing has importance but
the street, the street with its passing purchasers and idlers, and its
overflowing holiday crowd, that on Sundays throng the side walks and
pavements. And how bored she was, wretched creature, in the country, how
she regretted the Paris life! Heurtebise, on the contrary, required
the country for his mental health. Paris still bewildered him like some
countrified boor on his first visit. His wife could not understand it,
and bitterly complained of her exile. By way of diversion she invited
her old acquaintances, and when her husband was absent they amused
themselves by turning over his papers, his memoranda, and the work he
was engaged upon.
"Do look, my dear, how funny it is. He shuts himself up to write this.
He paces up and down, talking to himself. As for me, I understand
nothing of what he does."
And then came endless regrets, and recollections of her past life.
"Ah! if I had known. When I think that I might have married Aubertot and
Fajon, the linen-drapers." She always spoke of the two partners at the
same time, as though she would have married the firm. Neither did she
restrain her feelings in her husband's presence.
[Illustration: p031-042]
She disturbed him, prevented all work, settling down with her friends in
the very room he was writing in, and filling it with the silly
chatter of idle women, who talked loud, full of disdain for a literary
profession which brought in so little, and whose most laborious hours
always resemble a capricious idleness. From time to time Heurtebise
strove to escape from the life which he felt was daily becoming more
dismal. He rushed off to Paris, hired a small room at an hotel, tried to
fancy he was a bachelor; but suddenly he thought of his son, and with a
desperate longing to embrace him hurried back the same evening into the
country.
[Illustration: p032-043]
On these occasions, in order to avoid the inevitable scene on his
return, he took a friend back with him and kept him there as long as he
could. As soon as he was no longer alone face to face with his wife,
his fine intellect awoke and his interrupted schemes of work little by
little and one after the other came back to him. But what anguish it was
when his friends left! He would have kept his guests for ever, clinging
to them by all the strength of his _ennui_. With what sadness would he
accompany us to the stand of the little suburban omnibus which bore us
back to Paris! and when we left, how slowly he turned homewards over the
dusty road, with rounded shoulders and listless arms, listening to the
vanishing wheels.
In truth their _tête-à-tête_ life had become unbearable, and to avoid
it, he tried always to keep his house full. With his easy goodnature,
his weariness and indifference, he was soon surrounded by a lot of
literary starvelings. A set of scribblers, lazy, cracked day-dreamers,
settled down upon him and became more at home than himself; and as his
wife was but a fool, incapable of judging, because they talked more
loudly, she found them charming and very superior to her husband. The
days were spent in idle discussions. There was a clash of empty words,
a firing of smallest shot, and poor Heurtebise, motionless and silent
in the midst of the tumult, merely smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Sometimes, however, towards the end of an interminable repast, when all
his guests, elbows on table, began around the brandy flasks one of
those lengthy maundering conversations, benumbing like clouds of tobacco
smoke, an immense feeling of disgust would seize hold of him, and not
having the courage to turn out all these poor wretches, he would himself
disappear and remain absent for a week.
[Illustration: p034-045]
"My house is full of imbeciles," he said one day to me. "I dare not
return." With this kind of existence, he no longer wrote. His name was
never seen, and his fortune, squandered in a perpetual craving to have
people in his house, disappeared in the outstretched hands around him.
[Illustration: p035-046]
It was a long time since we had met when I received one morning a line
of his dear little handwriting, formerly so firm, now trembling and
uncertain. "We are in Paris. Come and see me. I am so dull." I found him
with his wife, his child and his dogs, in a lugubrious little apartment
in the Batignolles. The disorder which in this narrow space could not be
spread about, seemed more hideous even than in the country. While the
child and dogs rolled about in rooms the size of a chessboard
compartment, Heurtebise; who was ill, lay with his face to the wall, in
a state of utter prostration. His wife, dressed out as usual, and ever
placid, hardly looked at him. "I don't know what is the matter with
him," she said to me with a gesture of indifference. On seeing me he had
for a moment a return of gaiety, and a minute of his old hearty laugh,
but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburban
habits, there appeared at the breakfast hour, in the midst of this
household disorganized by poverty and illness, a parasite, a seedy
looking little bald man, cranky and peevish, of whom they always spoke
as "the man who has read Proudhon." It was thus that Heurtebise, who
probably had never known his name, introduced him to everybody. When he
was asked "Who is that?" he unhesitatingly replied, "Oh! a very clever
fellow, who has thoroughly studied Proudhon." His knowledge was
certainly not very apparent, for this deep thinker rarely made himself
heard except to complain at table of an ill-cooked roast or a spoilt
sauce. On this occasion, the man who had read Proudhon declared that the
breakfast was detestable, which however did not prevent his devouring
the larger half of it himself.
How long and lugubrious this meal by the bedside of my sick friend
appeared to me! The wife gossiped as usual, with a tap now and then to
the child, a bone to the dogs, and a smile to the philosopher. Not once
did Heurtebise turn towards us, and yet he was not asleep. I hardly know
whether he thought. Dear, valiant fellow! In those paltry and ceaseless
struggles, the mainspring of his strong nature had broken, and he was
already beginning to die. The silent death agony, which however was
rather an abandonment of life, lasted several months; and then Madame
Heurtebise found herself a widow. Then, as no tears had dimmed her clear
eyes, as she always bestowed the same care on her glossy locks, and as
Aubertot and Fajon were still available, she married Aubertot and Fajon.
Perhaps it was Aubertot, perhaps it was Fajon, perhaps even both of
them. In any case, she was able to resume the life she was fitted for,
and the voluble gossip and eternal smile of the shopwoman.
[Illustration: p038-049]
[Illustration: p041-052]