political difference with his family, who were all staunch
Bonapartists, while he stood by the republic, and flung his hat into
the air whenever they played the _Marseillaise_. With no desire to
parade this difference, and being a shy and sensitive man, despite his
republican sympathies, he chose evasion by the road of retreat. He
left Beaufort, where his family were an influence, and bought the old
house on the island. Here few were likely to disturb him, and political
temptation could not be expected to pursue him.
His ostensible excuse was the possession of scholarly tastes and
indifference to the present. The death of his wife upon the birth of
a second girl, Adèle, was seemingly a further inducement to seek the
soothing shade of solitude. So the widower, accompanied by his wife’s
confidential servant, Joséphine, and an old gardener, Marcel, drove out
of Beaufort, with his children, his books, and his cats. In a little
while he was settled and hard at work among the ancients, and the
current world of republicans and Bonapartists alike forgot him.
There was a difference of five years between the children, and soon,
too soon, little Henriette was established upon the semi-maternal,
wholly self-sacrificing pedestal of _la grande sœur_. All she had known
of spontaneous childhood was before her mother’s death. Henceforth
she was ‘mother’ herself, with Adèle for an adored and adorable small
tyrant. While still in short frocks, her father, too, had got to rely
on her, and cling to her as to a grown-up woman. He would gravely
debate with her upon matters it was but humane to suppose she could
understand nothing of. This may be an excellent school for training
in abnegation and patient endurance, but it is a hard one. Henriette
slipped into maturity without any of the sunshine of childhood across
her backward path. She was an uncomplaining, studious little girl, and
it is not surprising that Monsieur Lenormant should have gone to the
grave without the remotest suspicion of the wrong he had done her.
Did she not love her father devotedly? Did she not worship the pretty
Adèle? And what more can any sane and reasonable young woman demand of
life than ample opportunities for the practice of self-abnegation and
the worshipping of others?
When Henriette was a slip of a girl and Adèle a child of ten, young
Dr. Vermont, the only son of Monsieur Lenormant’s comrade of youth,
came down to Beaufort from Paris, in the full blaze of university
honours, and not without promise of future scientific renown, backed
by a substantial income and solid provincial influence. This young man
looked surprisingly well upon horseback, and found it good exercise
to ride frequently from the town to the house of his father’s old
friend upon the island. Arrived there, it amused him to notice Adèle,
who was free of anything like bashfulness, and in return, thought him
the nicest person she had ever seen. Meanwhile, a grave, tall girl,
too thin for her ungraceful age, looked on with very different eyes.
To her Dr. Vermont was the traditional Phœbus Apollo of girlhood. She
knew nothing of romance, or novels, or poetry, but she felt the dawn of
womanhood upon sight of him, and blushed in divine self-consciousness.
She was a plain girl then--unfinished, unformed, and painfully
reserved; and it was not to be expected that such an elegant article of
semi-Parisian make, as Dr. Vermont, should have an eye for material so
crude and undeveloped. Had Dr. Vermont been thirty instead of twenty,
he might have thought differently, but we all know how grandly exacting
and dramatic twenty is. Whereas his conquest was not in the least
astonishing. He was a fine-looking lad, with plenty of pluck and grace
and worldly wisdom. He carried himself with a noble self-consciousness,
was sufficiently attentive to his moustache to convince mankind of
its supreme importance, and already his handsome dark eyes wore that
look of mild scrutiny that never left them. Altogether a youth with
justifiable pretensions and fascinations of an intellectual and bodily
nature, and one by no means likely to learn to abate them by experience.
As the years went by, and the little women of the dark house by the
river grew with them, the wealth of Monsieur Lenormant declined, and
when Dr. Vermont, now a distinctive _somebody_ in his profession, came
down one summer, and rode out from Beaufort to see him, matters were so
bad that he found it his duty to come every day during the rest of his
vacation. Adèle was now sixteen, a lovely flower opening in the sun of
romantic dreams. Can we wonder if Dr. Vermont’s glance rested on her in
amazed admiration? Dr. Vermont said nothing, but he looked. He looked
constantly, and his glances were not without eloquence for the maiden
blushing vividly beneath them. All this Henriette saw, and loved her
sister none the less, wished not the less heartily both her dear ones
happiness and success, though her own misery came of it. Only Monsieur
Lenormant understood nothing of the situation. His dream always had
been to marry his favourite Henriette to his young friend Vermont, but
death overtook him before he could accomplish it.
One evening, as Dr. Vermont sat beside him with his hand upon his
pulse, the poor gentleman looked up at him anxiously.
‘I have written for a relative, a lady, to come and look after my
girls, but you, François, I expect to be their real protector. I like
to think of you as my daughter’s husband. She is a good girl, François,
an excellent girl. She has been a devoted daughter, and an adoring
sister. She will make the best of wives.’
‘I am sure of it,’ said Dr. Vermont musingly, as he glanced down to
where the two girls were silently embroidering in the deep recess of
a window above the river. He knew perfectly well which daughter he
was expected to marry and which he intended to marry, but he kept his
counsel, and gazed in soft approbation upon the charming profile of
Adèle.
When he came next day, Monsieur Lenormant had departed from this
world of marriage and giving in marriage, and the lady relative had
arrived. A formal engagement with Adèle was speedily entered upon, and
the Doctor took the train for Paris, a happy prospective bridegroom,
with the advantage of being in no hurry to jump into domestic
responsibilities. His betrothed was somewhat young, and meanwhile he
would have leisure to pursue pleasure elsewhere, and nourish her placid
love upon the most expensive boxes of sweets direct from Boissier,
and instalments of light and elegant literature to teach her what to
respect of life and from mankind.
The bride was eighteen and the groom twenty-eight, when they were
married one spring morning in the Mairie and in the Cathedral of
Beaufort. That marriage still brought tears to Joséphine’s old eyes,
and tempted her to unhabitual eloquence. How lovely the bride had
looked!--too lovely, too delicate for health and long life. Eyes
limpid like an angel’s, so sweetly blue and soft, a face upon which
the tenderest breath would bring a stain of deepened colour, form slim
and curved and dainty in every detail. The groom was proud, radiantly
proud, perhaps not tender enough and unapprehensive of the rough winds
of life for a creature so fragile and for bloom so evanescent. But he
looked distinguished, well-bred, and eminently Parisian; and what more
could provincial spectators desire?
A more interesting figure far was the grave, sad young lady, who smiled
upon her happy sister through her tears, and could find words above
the pain of a breaking heart to remind the groom that Adèle had always
been petted and spoiled and cared, and fervently implore him to do the
same by her, and treat her more like a child than a wife. The scene was
clear before me. Mademoiselle, as she must have been at twenty-three,
not pretty, but captivating enough for eyes not blinded by mere animal
beauty, as the Doctor’s were. And he, fatuous, sure of himself, at
heart indifferent to others, and intoxicated with foolish marital
satisfaction. Did he know that tragedy brushed his happiness that
moment--softly, benignantly, with blessing instead of prayer, with gaze
of hope instead of reproach?
Joséphine could tell me nothing, and it pleased me to believe that he
understood, and some day might remember.
After some months in Paris, the little bride was brought back to the
dark house by the river by an anxious husband, there to linger in the
warmth of two loves, two devotions, waited upon, worshipped in vain.
The opening of her baby’s eyes was the signal for the closing of her
own. Not then, not then could Dr. Vermont be expected to understand. As
far as I could gather from Joséphine’s account, he passionately loved
his young wife. Her death crushed him for a while, and he walked the
earth like one blind to the changes of seasons, blind to surrounding
faces, and fronting a future that would remain for ever a blank.
Mademoiselle came, and gently touched his hand to remind him that he
was not alone in his sorrow. He neither felt the fraternity nor the
unspoken tenderness. The paleness of her cheek held no eloquence of
suffering for him; the sadness of her eyes left his heart untouched. As
for the child, far from feeling a thrill of paternity upon sight of it,
he desired never to behold it more. He would regard it henceforth as
the cause of his moral ruin, the beginning of a broken and joyless life.
In this hard and sullen mood he returned to Paris, and Gabrielle
grew up with Mademoiselle, without any knowledge of her father, who
apparently had forgotten the existence of both.
AN INTERLUDE
A DECISION FIN DE SIÈCLE AT THE CAFÉ LANDER
IN the middle of the rue Taitbout, there is a little café, which was
not so well known twenty years ago as it is now, at the end of the
nineteenth century. Then it was only beginning to emerge from the
inferior position of crémerie. Came one day, from the unconventional
region of the Latin Quarter, somewhere in the seventies, an
enterprising proprietor; and in his wake followed a train of noble
youths, enthusiastic in the praises of Lander, wishful for the further
enjoyments of his hospitalities, and with kindly memory of his
generosity in the matter of credit.
Lander brought the pleasant ways of the _Quarter_ across the town
with him, and the band of noble youths stood by him, encouraged and
sustained him. In consequence, the Café Lander flourished exceedingly,
and its circle of clients daily increased, until it was known, far
and wide, as the resort of embryo genius. For all the boisterous and
good-tempered young fellows who crowded round its tables, and emptied
bocks and consumed coffee (fifty centimes a cup with _fine champagne_),
were coming great men. They were the future lights in literature, art,
philosophy, and politics. The real living great man they professed to
regard with respectful admiration, but they wanted none of him in their
midst. In the slang of the day, he had made his pile, and reposed on
velvet and laurels among the Immortals. When he would have become a
part of the past, and the future was their present, they could afford
to be on more intimate terms with him. But for the present, they
belonged exclusively to the future.
These young fools had their place a while, and expectation dwelt
indulgently upon them. They chatted loudly of isms and ologies and
oxies, with refreshing crudeness: upheld the realistic, the romantic,
the psychological, and Heaven knows what other schools of literature.
They prated of form, and matter, and art, and style, as only Frenchmen,
bitten by love of these things, can prate. And then, one by one, they
dropped out of the ranks of embryo genius, having accomplished nothing,
with the great epic unwritten, unwritten the drama, the psychological
novel that was to teach M. Bourget something new about women; unwritten
the important _History of the Franks_, that was to throw into relief
hitherto unrevealed aspects of the character of their conquerors;
unsolved the problems of metaphysics under discussion, undiscovered the
great political panacea of the age, unpainted the grand masterpiece.
With the first stone of their reputation still to be laid, they went,
and the café saw them no more.
Some of them became commonplace advocates, and made uninteresting
citizens and fairly reputable fathers of families: or sordid notaries,
or humdrum bourgeois. Romance shook its bridle rein with a regretful
backward glance: ‘Farewell for evermore,’ and the converted fool turned
upon his heel to enter into the ignoble strife with his fellows in
quest of daily bread. Others there were who had a troublesome way of
right-about-facing upon fond expectation. They jilted the muse for
historical research, or discarded art for literature, or drifted
from sonnets to the stage. One youth of philosophic tastes was known,
with inexcusable fickleness, to shake off the secular garb, and array
himself in the white of the cloister. He was the only one who made
a serious reputation; he became a fashionable preacher, and wrote a
_History of the Church_ which brought upon him the wrath of Rome.
But if they were mostly crude, ineffectual youths, they had bright
faces, and eager glances, and hearts full of hope and enthusiasm. They
were each confident of his own powers, inapprehensive of defeat or
failure, bound upon a fiery race for experience and new sensations,
contemptuous of the past, and looked gaily toward a future of glorious
achievement. Not a city but furnishes the type, and in no other city
is it so persistent as in Paris. Paint one such, and you paint all her
young men, nourished upon vivid imagination, upon inexhaustible hope
and unconquerable self-faith.
Into this circle of frank and amiable egotists, Dr. Vermont dropped
accidentally some ten years ago. Being of an experimental turn of
mind, and apt to fall upon mild curiosity in his casual scrutiny
of impetuous youth, he stayed. It is a mistake to assume that an
interest in youth, and a tolerance of its nonsense, is an indication of
lingering kindness of heart Dr. Vermont liked youth as a vivisectionist
likes animals. It taught him much that he desired to know, and where
it did not teach him precisely, it helped him along the path of
observation. Men are grown-up children; boys are rude philosophers,
artists, poets, what you will.
A cold, passionless man was Dr. Vermont, the one feeble flame of human
feeling he had thrilled to having faded out of memory almost upon the
death of his just buried young wife. She, too, had interested him, only
differently, being of a less calculable and possibly less shallow order
of being than the embryo great men of Lander’s. Widowhood had sundered
him sharply from all personal ties, and left him all the freer to
indulge his passion for experimental psychology.
As he sat evening after evening, and drank his coffee and little glass,
and smoked a meditative cigar, it amused him to encourage the vivacious
contentment around him, and lead the unborn reputations to reveal
their bent. His influence upon young men was a thing to make older and
saner persons gape. It was, perhaps, all the stronger and more subtle
because it was unrecognised. He was feared, and yet admired, to an
incredible degree. His mild, sarcastic face, with its finished features
and wholly effaced humanity of expression, put a point upon emulation
and goaded to rash display. But none were made to feel the rashness
of their flights, or the absurdity of their theories. Dr. Vermont was
too clever a man to scare expansion, or cow ambition. This was how he
kept his hold upon the fresh-moustached lads around him. This was how
they spoke of him among themselves as a good fellow--_un bon garçon,
malgré_--well, in spite of a great many things.
Thus he sat, and smoked, and listened, while the years passed, and
out of the circle familiar faces went and new ones came. It must be
admitted there was not much variety in the entertainment. Always the
same questions of form and expression, of style and matter; always the
same comparison of international literatures and the relative virtues
of different forms of government; above and beyond all, sex and its
unexplained and stinging problems. They never tired, and each batch
came up, fresh and eager for the old discussions. Names may vary,
fashions may alter, but the rough, broad facts of life are there,
immutable like nature, ever recurrent like the ebb and flow of the tide.
A sense of weariness was upon Dr. Vermont the December night I write
of, as he walked toward the Café Lander. Most of the lads were
dispersed by the Christmas vacation. But he knew precisely those
who were expecting him. Anatole Buzeval, his favourite, a charming
young fellow, with healthy Norman blood in his veins, and in spite of
the disastrous environment of Paris _fin de siècle_, with something
throbbing under his coat that suspiciously resembled a boy’s free
heart. He came from a Norman fishing town, near the beat of the
channel, washed by a friendly old river and wooded by still friendlier
trees. In boyhood, he had walked in the woods, he had fished in the
river, he had known the delights of amateur seafaring, and rode, and
shot live things, and was first awakened by love to the melody of
the birds, and to heroism by the genial spirit of endurance of the
fishermen. These influences kept him partially sheltered from the
century-worn cynicism and exhausted emotions prevailing. It accounted
for the ring of sincerity in his laughter, for the zest of his
ephemeral enthusiasms and the courageous freedom of his blue eyes. But
he was nevertheless bitten by the disease of the hour, and his speech
was tainted with the cheap _fin de siècle_ indifference and dejection.
He was the youngest of the party, the most intelligent and the
brightest. Beside him sat Gaston Favre, a youth who would have been an
artist if the death-throes of the century left him any room to believe
in art. Nothing any longer interested him, but he was still capable of
remarking upon sight of a bad picture--
‘Now, if it were worth the trouble, or really mattered, there is food
for indignation in that picture.’
Whereupon he would survey it in the spirit of ostentatious tolerance,
without a wince or a critical flash of eye.
The third, Julien Renaud, was a little older than these two, and
professed a dead interest in politics. Time was when Lander’s echoed
with the noble flow of his eloquence. Time was when it was confidently
believed that he was destined, not only in his own imagination, to
reach the tribune, and thunder effectively against the abuses of
government. But that was in M. Constans’ hour, and M. Constans was
notoriously Julien’s pet aversion. In those remote days, he was
antagonistic toward what he called ‘the whole shop of the Elysian
Fields,’ and relished M. Carnot as little as he had ever relished
‘old Father Grévy.’ But these were now half-forgotten ebullitions of
youth, and like his beloved France, he was battered and bruised by the
defeats of life into complete indifference. Nothing mattered. In reply
to everything, he had but one response, a quiet shrug, a weariedly
lifted eyebrow, and a murmured _cui bono_ upon a long-drawn sigh.
On this evening the chosen drink was punch, which resulted in more
boisterous converse, and showed Anatole in almost a lyric mood. The
first mention of the insipidly recurrent phrase of the hour--‘end of
the century’--inspired him to fall upon mirthful reminiscences, just as
Dr. Vermont entered the café.
‘M. le docteur désire?’ said the waiter, helping him off with his
overcoat.
The doctor named his drink as he took a seat, and blandly scrutinised
each flushed and smiling face.
‘We were talking, Doctor,’ Anatole cried, ‘of ways of ending the
year. Do you remember, two years ago, when I first joined you, coming
straight from Barbizon, where I chummed with a queer and amusing Scotch
artist? how I taught you all to sing what I conceived to be a Scotch
melody--_Les Temps Jadis_--and we drank at midnight an execrable
decoction called in Scotland a tod-dy, standing, and gave an English
shake-hands all round, which I am told is the way in Scotland of
toasting the departing year?’
The Doctor paused in the act of lifting his glass, and nodded, as
he threw out a couple of absent names in signification of his keen
remembrance of the evening.
Followed good-natured and regretful words for each absent face. _Les
temps jadis_ were not such bad times after all, though the melancholy
Scotch might chant them with more melody than the vivacious sons of
Gaul. Jean this was an excellent heart; Henri that, a capital good
fellow, the pity was he stuttered so. Frédéric, poor fool, had settled
down, and married a _dot_ and a squint, and the squint, alas! was so
marked, that the dowry was a totally inadequate compensation. Upon
which, Julien made cynical mention of the greater security of marital
rights when backed by aid so powerful as a squint.
‘But, since women are only happy in virtue of their lovers and not in
virtue of their husbands,’ shouted Anatole, with a charming look of
_rouerie_, ‘what a dismal future for Frédéric’s wife! I declare I could
find it in my heart to rush off and console her. I should be so blinded
by my own burning eloquence, as I flung myself at her feet, that I
would have no eyes left for the squint.’
‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’
sneered Julien Renaud.
‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch
tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, _Les Temps Jadis_?’ asked
Dr. Vermont.
‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of
self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel,
and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done
towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the
remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you?
Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’
‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said
Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a
hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming
century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have
under discussion.’
‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force
of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition.
The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve
unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is
anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new
school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last
discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the
counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous
impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing
particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every
trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen,
and divides his time between laying and cackling.’
‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should
reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his
play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by
means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’
‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up
France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the
best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest
Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest
Master.’