Eugène Sue--His family, birth, godfather and godmother--His
education--Dr. Sue's wine-cellar--Choir of botanists--Committee of
chemistry--Dinner on the grass--Eugène Sue sets out for Spain--His
return--Ferdinand Langlé's room--Captain Gauthier
Twenty kilometres from Grasse there lies a small seaport called La
Calle; it is the cradle of the Sue family, celebrated both in science
and letters.
La Calle is still peopled by members of this family, which, probably,
composes half the population. It was from here that, towards the close
of the reign of Louis XIV., a young, adventurous student set up as a
doctor in Paris. Becoming successful, he sent for his nephew to come to
the capital. Both became very distinguished: Pierre Sue, as Professor
of Forensic and Librarian of the Medical School--he left behind him
works of great scientific value--Jean Sue, as Head, surgeon to the
Hospital de la Charité, Professor of the School of Medicine, Professor
of Anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, and surgeon to King Louis XVI.
This latter was succeeded by Jean-Joseph Sue, who, besides the post of
Professor to the Beaux-Arts, which he inherited from his father, became
principal doctor to the king's military household. It was Eugène Sue's
father who had the famous discussion with Cabanis about the guillotine,
the inventor making out that a person guillotined only felt a slight
chill on the neck, while Jean-Joseph Sue, on the contrary, maintained
that it was dreadfully painful, and defended his opinion by arguments
which proved his profound knowledge of anatomy; and by experiments
made by some German doctors and others. We read all the discussion in
connection with our _Mille et un Fantômes_; and we admit to having
taken a lively interest in it.
Eugène Sue was born on 1 January 1803. He was, consequently, five
months younger than I, and a few days older than Victor Hugo. His
godfather was Prince Eugène and his godmother the Empress Joséphine;
hence, his Christian name Eugène. He was suckled by a goat, and, for a
long while, preserved the queer, hopping gait of his foster-mother. He
studied, or, rather, did not study, at the Collège Bourbon:--like all
men who are destined to make for themselves an original and eminent
position in literature, he was an execrable scholar. His father, a
ladies' doctor, who gave a course of natural history lectures for the
benefit of society people, was married three times. He was wealthy,
possessing nearly two million francs, and he lived in the rue du
Chemin-du-Rempart, a street which has disappeared, but which was then
situated behind the Madeleine. The whole of this quarter was at that
time occupied by timber-yards: the ground then not being worth half
what it now is. M. Sue had a fine house there and a magnificent garden.
In the same house as M. Sue, lived his sister, the mother of Ferdinand
Langlé, who wrote upwards of fifty comic operas with Villeneuve between
1822 and 1830.
At the period at which we have arrived, 1817 to 1818, the two cousins
went together to the Collège Bourbon, that is to say, Ferdinand Langlé
went to the college, and Eugène Sue was supposed to go there. He had
a private tutor at his residence, Father Delteil, a plucky Auvergnat
five feet in height, who, in fulfilment of his tutorial duties, did not
hesitate to have hand-to-hand tussles with his pupil, when he fled into
the garden only to be pursued after the fashion of Virgil's Galatea.
When in the garden, the rebellious pupil gained an arsenal containing
arms defensive and offensive. The defensive arms were the borders of
the botanical garden, amongst which he took refuge, where his tutor
dared not follow him for fear of trampling under foot the rare plants
which the fugitive scholar crushed pitilessly without remorse under
foot; the offensive arms were the supporting stakes which bore labels
with the scientific names of the plants thereon, stakes which Eugène
Sue converted into javelins, and with which he overcame his master with
a skill that would have done honour to a pupil of Castor and Pollux,
the two cleverest javelin throwers of antiquity.
When it was demonstrated to Eugène's father that his son's vocation
was to throw javelins and not to expound Horace and Vergil, he took
him away from college, and made him enter as an assistant-surgeon at
the hospital attached to the king's household, of which he himself was
head-surgeon. It was situated in the rue Blanche. Eugène Sue there
found his cousin, Ferdinand Langlé, and the future doctor, Louis Véron.
We have said that Eugène Sue had many of his foster-mother's
characteristics: the scamp of the household, ever ready to play wicked
tricks, especially on his father, who had just remarried, and who
treated him very harshly. But he avenged himself well in respect of
this harsh treatment! Dr. Sue employed his pupils in preparing his
course of natural history lectures; the preparations were conducted in
a splendid anatomical room that had been bequeathed to the Beaux-Arts.
It contained, among other things, the brain of Mirabeau, preserved in
a glass jar. The legitimate organisers were Eugène Sue and Ferdinand
Langlé, and a friend of theirs called Delâtre, who afterwards became,
and probably still is, a doctor of medicine; the amateur assistants
were Achille Petit, and that old and clever friend James Rousseau, whom
I have often mentioned. The preparations were quite dreary enough, but
were rendered more so because close at hand were two cupboards full
of wine, to which the nectar of the gods was but as the white wine
of Limoux: these wines were presents which the Allied Sovereigns had
given to Dr. Sue after 1814. There was Tokay, given by the Emperor of
Austria; Rhenish wines, given by the King of Prussia; Johannisberg
wines, given by M. de Metternich; and, finally, a hundred bottles of
Alicante, given by Madame de Morville, which bore the most respectable
and venerable date 1750. They had tried every possible means of
opening the cupboards, which had virtuously resisted persuasion as
well as force; they despaired of ever making the acquaintance of
Madame de Morville's Alicante, M. de Metternich's Johannisberg, the
King of Prussia's "Liebfraumilch," and the Emperor of Austria's Tokay,
otherwise than by the samples which, at Dr. Sue's grand dinners, he
poured out for his guests into glasses the size of a thimble, when, one
day, while fumbling about in a skeleton, Eugène Sue found, by chance,
a bunch of keys. They were the keys of the cupboards! First, they laid
hands on a bottle of Tokay, sealed with the Imperial seal, and emptied
every drop in it; then they hid the bottle. The next day it was the
turn for the Johannisberg, and, the day after, for the "Liebfraumilch";
next followed the Alicante. They disposed of these three bottles in
the same way as the first. But James Rousseau, who was the oldest
and, consequently, possessed superior knowledge of the world to that
of his young friends, who had only just ventured their first steps
upon the slippery ground of society, judiciously pointed out that, at
the rate they were going, they would quickly make a hole which Dr.
Sue's eyes would perceive, and so find out the truth. He therefore
made the astute suggestion of drinking but a third of the contents
of each bottle, filling them up with some composition which should
look as much like wine as possible, recorking them scientifically and
putting them back in their places again. Ferdinand Langlé approved the
suggestion, and added an amendment: namely, to proceed to the great
and solemn occasion of opening the cupboard in old-fashioned style, to
the accompaniment of the singing of choruses. Both propositions were
carried unanimously. That same day they opened a cupboard to a chorus
copied from _La Leçon de botanique,_ by Dupaty. The Corypheus sang--
"Que l'amour et la botanique
N'occupent pas tous les instants;
Il faut aussi que l'on s'applique
A boire le vin des parents!
CHŒUR.
Buvons le vin des grands parents!"
Then precept was followed by example. When started, they composed a
second chorus for the work. Their work consisted especially in stuffing
the magnificent birds which they received from all four quarters of the
globe.
This is the chorus of the workers--
"Goûtons le sort que le ciel nous destine;
Reposons-nous sur le sein des oiseaux;
Mêlons le camphre à la térébenthine.
Et par le vin égayons nos travaux."
Whereupon, they took a second pull at the bottle, which was soon
half-emptied. They next had to follow James Rousseau's counsel and fill
it up. For this purpose they appointed a chemical committee, comprised
of Ferdinand Langlé, Eugène Sue and Delâtre; later, Romieu was added to
it. This chemical committee concocted a horrible mixture of treacle,
liquorice and burnt sugar, replaced the wine with the improvised
mixture, recorked the bottle as carefully as possible and put it back
in its place. When it was a white wine, they clarified the preparation
with beaten-up white of egg. But punishment occasionally falls upon the
guilty.
M. Sue gave large and splendid dinner-parties: at dessert, they
sometimes drank Madame de Morville's Alicante, sometimes His Majesty
the Emperor of Austria's Tokay, at others, M. de Metternich's
Johannisberg, or the King of Prussia's "Liebfraumilch." All went
swimmingly if they happened to fall upon an unopened bottle; but,
if they lit upon one examined and corrected by the committee of
chemistry.... Well, they had to swallow the drink! Dr. Sue tasted
his wine, made a slight grimace, and said, "It is good, but wants to
be drunk!" This was so great a truth, and the wine did indeed cry
out to be drunk, that next day they began drinking it again. Such a
performance was bound to end in a catastrophe, and this one proved no
exception. One day, when they believed Dr. Sue to be at his country
place of Bouqueval, from whence they reckoned he could not well return
in the day, they managed, by dint of various seductive overtures to
the cook and the servants, to have an excellent dinner served them on
the lawn in the garden. All the bird-stuffers, the chemical committee
included, were present, lying about on the grass, crowned by roses like
Sybarites, drinking Tokay and Johannisberg, or, rather, having drunk
it, when, suddenly, the door of the house leading out into the garden
opened, and the commander appeared--the commander being Dr. Sue. Every
one of them fled and hid; Rousseau alone took up his empty glass,
refilled a second glass, and, stumbling forward straight towards the
doctor, he said--
"Ah! dear Doctor Sue, this is the famous Tokay! Let us drink the health
of the Emperor of Austria!"
One can imagine the doctor's wrath when he found the empty Tokay bottle
on the grass, together with two bottles of Johannisberg and three
of Alicante. They had drunk the Alicante like common wine. Talk of
thievery, of procureur du roi, of police correctionnelle, rolled in the
air like thunder rolling in the clouds during a storm. Profound was
the terror of the guilty parties. Delâtre knew of a dried-up well near
Clermont and proposed to take refuge in it!
A week later, Eugène Sue set out as assistant to explore the country
of Spain (in 1823). He did this and stayed a year at Cadiz, only
returning to Paris at the beginning of 1825. The heat of the Trocadero
had made his hair and moustache grow; he was as beardless as an apple
when he left, and he returned as hairy as a king of the primitive
races and as bearded as a moujik. This capillary growth doubtless
flattered the doctor's vanity, but it did not serve to unloosen his
purse-strings, which he kept tightly shut.
Desforges who had a small private fortune, and Ferdinand Langlé whose
mother worshipped him, were the two Crœsuses of society; several
times, as did Crœsus with Cæsar, they presented not 30,000,000
sesterces, but 20, 30, 40, 50 and even 100 francs to the most
necessitous of the joyous band. Besides his purse, Ferdinand Langlé put
at the disposition of the members of the society, who were never sure
of a bed or supper, his own room in M. Sue's house, and the meal his
mother always put ready for him every night.
Ferdinand Langlé, then a tall fellow of twenty-three, author of a
dozen vaudevilles, lover of the charming girl called Fleurriet, who
died before her time, an actress at the Gymnase,[1] rarely slept at
home, but, as the servant told his mother that Ferdinand lived with the
frugality of a monk, the good mother ordered a meal to be put upon his
bedroom table every night. The servant put the supper on the table, and
the key of the little street door in an agreed spot. When a belated one
was homeless he turned his steps to the rue du Chemin-du-Rempart, put
his hand into a hole in the wall, found the key there, opened the door,
religiously put the key back in its place, drew the door to behind
him, lit the candle and, if he were the first to come, ate, drank and
slept in the bed. If a second followed the first, he found the key in
the same place, entered in the same way, ate the remains of the fowl,
drank the rest of the wine, lifted the bedclothes in his turn and dived
underneath them. If a third followed, the same game was played with
the key and door, only the visitor found no more fowl or wine and no
room in the bed, but ate the rest of the bread and drank a glass of
water and stretched himself upon the couch. And so _ad infinitum._ If
the number increased immoderately, the last-comers drew a mattress
from the bed and slept on the floor. One night, Rousseau arrived last
and counted fourteen legs. It was in this room that Henry Monnier and
Romieu met for the first time and made each other's acquaintance. Next
day they thee'd and thou'd each other, and continued to do so until
Romieu was appointed prefect and _tutoya_-ed people no more. Next
morning, they were pretty often awakened by a visitor, a brigadier
of the _Gardes,_ who, in passing by, came to look at the state of
Ferdinand Langlé's wine cellar. This brigadier, whom I knew well,
deserves particular mention. His name was Gauthier de Villiers. He was
not only one of the bravest soldiers in the army, but one of the most
active boxers in France. The word boxer applies here to his whole body.
What became of Captain Gauthier, I have no idea. I would gladly see him
once more, even at the risk of his breaking my wrist in shaking hands.
He had the courage and the good-heartedness of Porthos. Not for the
whole world would he have given a fillip to a child; but he had more
wit than M. de Pierrefonds. He had served in the Horse Grenadiers of
the Empire; he had made a special name for himself as a sabreman; when
he charged and stabbed an enemy on horseback, he would lift him from
his horse by the strength of his wrist and throw him behind him, as
though he were a truss of hay. Gauthier stopped with one hand a tilbury
that was going at full trot. He would get off his horse, put it on his
shoulders and carry it for ten, fifteen or twenty yards with almost as
much ease as his horse carried him. He would pick up a china plate and
put his finger through it with the same ease as a bullet passes through
a cardboard target. One day at the barracks, they did him an injustice
for which he wanted to have satisfaction. He waited on the bridge of
the Tuileries for King Louis XVIII., who was to come out. Just as His
Majesty's carriage passed out at a fast trot, as usual, Gauthier leaped
to the horses' heads and stopped the coach dead. Louis XVIII. put his
head out of the window and recognised his brigadier _aux_ _gardes._
"Ah! it is you," he said, in his little piping voice, "it is you,
Gauthier. Well, what do you want, my friend?"
Gauthier then came up and laid bare his request.
"I will examine into it, I will examine into it," replied Louis XVIII.
A week later justice was done Gauthier.
He had a special gift for saving life. If a man fell into the water and
was drowning, Gauthier jumped in and saved him; if any house caught
fire and some tardy inmate was in risk of being burned, Gauthier
would save the laggard. He saved old Vatteville from the Odéon
conflagration, and thirty-seven or eight others besides. Gauthier went
out in the African campaign as interpreter, and lived at Algiers. In
the expeditions made round the town, he took a little cannon of four,
instead of a rifle. When he came up to the enemy he put it in position
for firing, and discharged it. At other times, he was contented with
a rampart gun. While in the guards he had a magnificent horse which
had the following history. It had the twofold fault of throwing its
rider to the ground, and, when he was there, of bending to bite him:
they decided to kill it. But, when proceeding to the execution,
Gauthier came into the Hôtel du quai d'Orsay, and saw the whole company
assembled together, deploring the loss of such a splendid horse. He
inquired into the matter.
"Good!" he said, "I will tackle it; but on condition that, if I conquer
it, it shall be mine."
The bargain was agreed to, and they handed him a bridle. The horse
quietly allowed itself to be mounted; so Gauthier had not much trouble
in leaping on its back. When he was there, the horse began its tricks
and games, shying to right and to left, etc., but the rebellious
animal did not know with whom it had to deal. Gauthier began to press
his knees in; the horse, which was breathing hard, redoubled its
leapings: Gauthier pressed more strongly. It was a splendid struggle
to watch; the horse was vanquished, and ended by falling on its knees
and lying down. Gauthier leapt off to free himself from the animal,
then he waited. The horse was cured of his first fault, which consisted
in throwing its rider; it must also be cured of its second habit of
biting. As we have said, Gauthier remained standing ten yards from
the horse. He had subjugated it like another Alexander; it remained
to find out if he was to be devoured by it like another Diomede. In
fact, as the horse regained its breath its eye went red, its nostrils
smoked with anger; it raised itself on its fore legs, then on its hind,
looked at its enemy, neighed and rushed upon him. Gauthier waited for
it in the position of a boxer; he gave it a blow on the nose and broke
two teeth, the horse reared with pain, turned round on its hind legs,
and went into its stable. It was conquered. You, d'Arpentigny, will
remember that, you too, Leroi and Ferdinand Langlé, my old friends in
the Guards?
Well, Gauthier was one of the morning callers. He went straight to the
cellar, applied his lips to the flask of rum or brandy, and swallowed
as much as was in it. He began by feeling in his pockets; we must do
him that justice, but they were as empty as the cellar. Then, seeing
three or four waistcoats and as many trousers lying about haphazard,
he began to pass them in review. The sleepers watched him do it, one
eye half open and the other completely shut; they were quite easy,
for it was neither their waistcoats nor their trousers that Gauthier
wanted: he could hardly get into the largest--he wanted their contents,
and they contained nothing. Romieu alone manifested some disquietude;
he had 19 sous in his waistcoat pocket. Gauthier fell upon the
treasure. Romieu wanted to get up and dispute possession of his 19 sous
with Gauthier. Gauthier pinned him down on his sofa with one hand, and,
with the other, rang for the servant. When he appeared, Gauthier said
to him--
"Go and fetch 19 sous' worth of brandy."
The servant prepared to obey.
"But, _sacre bleu!_" said Romieu, "I live in the faubourg
Saint-Germain: as least leave me a son to cross the pont des Arts."
"That is quite reasonable," said Gauthier, putting back one son into
Romieu's waistcoat. "Go and fetch me 18 sous' worth of brandy," he said
to the servant.
It was upon that day and occasion that the robbed one, whom
Gauthier had deprived of his 18 sous, but not of his spirits and
quick-wittedness, made the famous chanson--
"J'nai qu'un son,
J'nai qu'un son,
La richess' n'est pas l'Pérou!
Je dîn'rai je ne sais pas où;
Mais, pour sûr, je n'ai qu'un son!"
I forget the rest of it, so ask Henri Monnier to sing it you and he
will recollect as vividly as I do the occasion upon which it was made.
[Footnote 1: I have already spoken of her in connection with my
literary beginnings with de Leuven. Castaing was accused of having
poisoned her, but she really died from the effects of a fit of anger
against Poirson, manager of the Gymnase, concerning the engagement by
that theatre of Madame Théodore. The fit of anger brought on brain
fever, which carried her off in forty-eight hours.]