One October morning, a few days before I left Paris, a man in shabby
clothes turned up at my home--while I was having lunch.
He was bent over, muddied, and stooped and shivered on his long legs
like a plucked wading bird. It was Bixiou. Yes, Parisians, your very
own Bixiou, the ferociously charming Bixiou, the fanatical satirist who
has so delighted you for fifteen years with his writings and
caricatures.... Oh, poor man, and how painful to see him like that.
Without the familiar grimace when he came in, I would not have
recognised him.
His head was bent over to one side, and his cane was pushed into his
mouth like a clarinet. The illustrious and gloomy jester then moved to
the centre of the room and staggered against my table as he said
despondently: "Have pity on a blind man!..."
It was such a good take-off that I couldn't stop myself laughing. The
Arctic-cold response came immediately: "If you think I'm joking ...
just look into my eyes."
He then turned two large, white, sightless eyes towards me: "I've gone
blind, my dear, blind for life.... That's what comes from writing with
vitriol. I have burned out the candle of my eyes out doing the damned
job ... to the stub!" he added showing me his desiccated eyelids with
no trace of an eyelash.
I was so overcome, I couldn't find anything to say. My silence troubled
him:
"Are you working?"
“--No, Bixiou, I'm having lunch. Would you like to join me?"
He didn't reply, but I could see clearly from his quivering nostrils
that he was dying to say yes. I took his hand and sat him down beside
me.
While I served him, the poor devil sniffed at the food and chuckled:
"Oh, it smells good, this. I'm really going to enjoy it; and it will be
an age before I eat again! A sou's worth of bread every morning, as I
traipse through the ministries, is all I get.... I tell you, I'm really
badgering the ministries now--it's the only work I do--I am trying to
get permission to run a tobacconist's shop.... What else can I do; I've
got to eat. I can't draw; I can't write... Dictation?... But dictate
what?... I haven't a clue, me; I can't think of a thing to write. My
trade was to look at the lunacies of Paris and hold a mirror up to
them; but I haven't got what it takes now.... Then I thought about a
tobacconist's shop; not in the boulevards of course, I can't expect
those kind of favours, being neither a show girl's mother, nor a field
officer's widow. No. I'm just looking for a small shop in the
provinces, somewhere far away, say a spot in the Vosges. I will sell a
hell of a clay pipe, and console myself by wrapping tobacco in my
contemporaries' writings.
"That's all I want. Not too much to ask, is it? But, do you know what,
its hell on earth to get it... Yet, I shouldn't be short of patronage.
I have soared high in my time. I used to dine with the Marshal, the
prince, and ministers, all those people wanted me then because I amused
them--or frightened them. Now, no one does. Oh, my eyes! my poor, poor
eyes! I'm not welcome anywhere, now. It's unbearable being blind at
meal times.... Do pass me the bread, please.... Oh, those thieves! They
will make me pay through the nose for this damned tobacconist's shop.
I've been wandering through all the ministries clutching my petition,
for the last six months. I go in the morning at the time they light the
stoves and take His Excellence's horse around the sanded courtyard, and
I don't leave until night when they bring in the big lights and the
kitchens begin to smell really good....
"All my life is spent sitting on the wooden chests in the antechambers.
The ushers know who I am, as well--enough said. Inside the court they
call me _That kind man!_ So, to get them on my side, to amuse them, I
practise my wit, or, in a corner of their blotters, I draw rough
caricatures without taking the pen off the page.... See what I've come
to after twenty years of outstanding success; look at just what an
artist's life amounts to!... And to think there are forty thousand
rascals in France who slobber over our work! To think that throughout
Paris, every day, locomotives make steam to bring us loads of idiots
thirsting for waffle and printed gossip!... Oh, what a world of
fantasists. If only Bixiou's suffering could teach them a lesson."
With that, and without another word, he pushed his face towards the
plate and began to scoff the food.... It was pitiful to look at. He was
losing his bread, and his fork, and groping for his glass all the
time.... Poor soul! He just hadn't had the time to get used to it all
yet.
* * * * *
After a short time, he spoke again:
"Do you know what's even worse? It's not being able to read the damned
newspapers. You have to be in the trade to understand that....
Sometimes at night, when I am coming home, I buy one just for the smell
of the fresh, moist paper, and newsprint.... It's so good! But there's
not a soul willing to read it to me! My wife could, but she doesn't
want to. She makes out that there are indecent things in the news
items. Ah-ha! these old mistresses, once they marry you, there's no one
more prudish. That Madame Bixiou has turned herself into a right little
bigot--but only as far as it suits her!... It was she who wanted to me
rub my eyes in Salette water. And then there was the blessed bread, the
pilgrimages, the Holy Child, the Chinese herbal remedies, and God knows
what else.... We're up to our necks in good works. And yet, it would be
a real kindness to read the papers to me.... But there you are, there's
no chance, she simply doesn't want to.... If my daughter was still at
home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the
Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed....
"Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on
earth and already she's had every imaginable illness... And miserable!
And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible ... a real monster!...
What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my
responsibilities....
"Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family
business. And what's it all got to do with you?... Come on, give me a
bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the
public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense
of humour. They're all retired teachers."
I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by
something.... Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, glass in hand,
and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable
smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice,
as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,
"To the arts! To literature! To the press!"
And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the
most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain
could devise.
"Imagine a year's-end revue entitled _Collection of Letters of 186*_;
about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an
eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, hell in miniature, where you cut
your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the
bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve
to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old
baron T... of la Tombola going away with a _tut-tut_ to the Tuileries
with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's
deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of
the delegate: the _Dearly missed! Poor dear!_ over some unlucky soul
who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone
insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator
of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's
improvisation was about."
* * * * *
The toast over, his glass empty, he asked me what the time was, and
left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye.... I don't know
how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning;
but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never
felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life.
The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to
distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel
something good, real.... Good God! The hatred, the venom, the
unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That
wretched man....
Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the
giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt
something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting.
Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split
corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his
pocket of venom.
This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de Girardin's
cartoons. Rumour has it that there are some awful things in it.... I
was soon to discover the truth of it. The old over-stuffed wallet had
burst open as it fell and the papers inside fell onto the carpet; I had
to collect them one by one....
There was a package of letters written on decorated paper, all
beginning, _My dear Daddy,_ and signed, _Céline Bixiou at the Children
of Mary hospital_.
There were old prescriptions for childhood ailments: croup,
convulsions, scarlet fever and measles.... (the poor little girl hadn't
missed out on a single one of them!)
Finally, there was a hidden envelope from which came a two or three
curly, blond hairs, which might have come from the girl's bonnet. There
was some writing on it in a large, unsteady hand; the handwriting of a
blind man:
_Céline's hair, cut the 13th May, the day she went to that hell_.
That's all there was in Bixiou's wallet.
Let's face it, Parisians, you're all the same; disgust, irony, evil
laughter at vicious jokes. And what does it all amount to?...
_Céline's hair, cut on the 13th May_.