A SOUTHERN AUNT--REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD.
The Portal mansion in which the great man dwells when he is in
Provence is one of the show-places of Aps. It is mentioned by the
Joanne guide-book in the same category as the temple of Juno, the
amphitheatre, the old theatre and the tower of the Antonines, relics
of the old Roman days of which the town is very proud and always keeps
well furbished up. But it is not the heavy ancient arched gate of the
old provincial residence itself, embossed with immense nails, nor the
high windows, bristling with iron bars, spikes and pike-heads of a
threatening sort, that they point out to the stranger who comes to see
the town. It is only a little balcony with its black iron props on the
first floor, corbelled out above the porch. For it is here that Numa
shows himself to the crowd when he arrives and it is from here that he
speaks. The whole town is witness that the iron balcony, which was once
as straight as a rule, has been hammered into such an original shape,
into such capricious curves, by the blows showered upon it by the
powerful fist of the orator.
“_Té, vé!_ our Numa has molded the iron!”
This they will say with bulging eyes and so much earnestness as to
leave no room for doubt--say it with that imposing rolling of the “r”
thus: _pétrrri le ferrr!_
They are a proud race, these good people of Aps, and kindly withal, but
vivid in their impressions and most exaggerated in their language, of
which Aunt Portal, a true type of the local citizenry, gave a very fair
idea.
Immensely fat, apoplectic, her blood rushing to her pendulous cheeks
purple like the lees of wine in fine contrast with her pale complexion,
the skin of a former blonde. So far as one saw it the throat was very
white, and her neat handsome iron-gray curls showed from beneath a
cap decorated with lilac ribbon. Her bodice was hooked awry, but
she was imposing nevertheless, having a majestic air and a pleasant
smile and manner. It was thus that she appeared in the half-light of
her drawing-room, always kept hermetically sealed after the Southern
custom. You would say she looked like an old family portrait, or one
of Mirabeau’s old marquises, and very appropriate to her old house,
built a hundred years ago by Gonzague Portal, chief councillor of the
Parliament of Aix.
It is not uncommon to find people and houses in Provence that seem as
if they belong to olden times, as if the last century, while passing
out through those high panelled doors, had let a bit of her gown full
of furbelows stick in the crack of the door.
But if in conversing with Aunt Portal you should be so unlucky as to
hint that Protestants are as good as Catholics, or that Henry V may not
ascend the throne at any moment, the old portrait will spring headlong
out of its frame, and with the veins on its neck swelling and the hands
tearing at the neatly hanging curls, will fly into an ungovernable
passion, swear, threaten and curse! These outbursts have passed into
tradition in the town and many wonderful tales are told upon the
subject. At an evening party in her house a servant let fall a tray of
wineglasses; Aunt Portal fell into one of her fits of rage, shouting
and exciting herself with cries, reproaches and lamentations; finally
her voice failed, and almost choking in her frenzy, unable to beat the
unlucky servant, who had promptly fled, she raised the skirt of her
dress and wrapped it about her head and face to conceal her groans
and her visage disfigured by rage, quite regardless of the voluminous
display of a portly, white-fleshed lady to which she was treating her
guests.
In any other part of the country she would have been considered
mad, but in Aps, the land of hot brains and explosive natures, they
were satisfied to say that she “rode a high horse.” It is true that
passers-by on the quiet square before her doors on restful afternoons,
when the cloistral stillness of the town is only broken by the chirping
of the locusts or a few notes on a piano, are wont to hear such words
as “monster,” “thief,” “assassin,” “stealers of priests’ property,”
“I’ll cut your arm off,” “I’ll rip the skin off your stomach!”
Then doors would slam and stairways tremble beneath the vaults of
whitewashed stone; windows would open noisily, as though the mutilated
bodies of the unhappy servants were to be thrown from them! But nothing
happens; the servants placidly continue their work, accustomed to these
tempests, knowing perfectly that they are mere habits of speech.
An excellent person, all things considered, ardent, generous, with a
great desire to please and to sacrifice herself--a noble trait in these
impulsive people, and one by which Numa had profited. Since he had been
chosen deputy the house on the Place Cavalerie belonged to him, his
aunt only reserving the right to remain there the rest of her life. And
then, what a delight it was to her when the party from Paris arrived,
with the receptions, the visits, the morning music and the serenades
which the presence of the great man brought into that lonely life of
hers, eager for excitement! Besides, she adored her niece Rosalie,
partly because they were so entirely the opposite of each other and
also because of the respect she felt for the daughter of the chief
magistrate of France.
It really needed a world of patience on Rosalie’s part and all the love
of family inculcated in her by her parents to endure for two whole
months the whims and tiresome caprices of this disordered imagination,
always over-excited and as restless in mind as she was indolent in
her big body. Seated in the large vestibule, as cool as a Moorish
court, but yet close and musty from the exclusion of air and sunshine,
Rosalie, holding a bit of embroidery in her hands--for like a true
Parisian she never could be idle--was obliged to listen for hours at
a time to her surprising confidences. The enormous lady sat before
her in an arm-chair, with her hands free in order to gesticulate,
and recapitulated breathlessly the chronicles of the whole town.
She sometimes depicted her maid-servants and coachman as monsters,
sometimes as angels, according to the caprice of the moment. She would
select some one against whom she apparently had some grudge, and cover
the detested one with the foulest, bloodiest, most venomous abuse,
relating stories like those in the _Annals of the Propagation of the
Faith_. Rosalie, who had lived with Numa, had luckily become accustomed
to these frantic objurgations. She listened abstractedly; for the most
part they passed in at one ear and out at the other; hardly did she
stop to wonder how it came about that she, so reserved and discreet,
could ever have entered such a family of theatrical persons who draped
themselves with phrases and overflowed with gestures. It had to be a
very strong bit of gossip to make her hold up Aunt Portal with an “Oh,
my dear aunt!” thrown out with a far-away air.
“Perhaps you are right, my dear, perhaps I do exaggerate a little.”
But Aunt Portal’s tumultuous imagination was soon off again, recounting
some comic or tragic tale with so much mimicry and dramatic effect
that she gave one the impression of wearing alternately the two masks
borne by ancient actors of tragedy and of comedy. She only calmed down
when she described her one visit to Paris and related the wonders of
the arrival in the “Passage Somon,” where she had stopped at a small
hotel patronized by all the travelling salesmen of her native province,
where they “took the air” in a glass-covered passage as stuffy and hot
as a melon-frame. Of all her remarkable stories of Paris this place
was the central point from which everything else evolved--it was the
elegant, fashionable spot beyond all others.
These tiresome, empty tirades had at least the spice of being uttered
in the strangest and most amusing kind of language, in which an
old-school stilted French, the French of books of rhetoric, was mixed
with the oddest provincialisms. Aunt Portal detested the Provençal
tongue, that dialect so admirable in color and sonorousness, which only
the peasants and people talk, which contains an echo of Latin vibrating
across the deep blue sea. She belonged to the burgher class of Provence
who translate _pécaïré_ by _péchère_ (sinner) and fancy they talk
correctly.
When her coachman Ménicle (Dominick) in his frank way said to her in
Provençal:
“_Voù baia de civado au chivaou_” (I am going to give the horses
oats)--she would assume an austere air and say:
“I do not understand you--speak French, my good fellow!”
Then Ménicle, like a docile schoolboy, would say:
“_Je vais bayer dé civade au chivau._”
“That is right, now I understand you!”--and he would go away thinking
that he had been speaking the language. It is a fact that most of the
people in the South below Valence only know this hybrid kind of French.
But besides all this Aunt Portal played upon her words by no means
according to her fancy but in accordance with the rules of some local
grammar. Thus she said _déligence_ for _diligence_, _achéter_ for
_acheter_, _anédote_ for _anecdote_, _régitre_ for _régistre_. She
called a pillow-slip (_taie d’oreiller_) a _coussinière_, an umbrella
was an _ombrette_, the foot-warmer which she used at all seasons of
the year was a _banquette_. She did not cry, she “fell to tears;” and
though very “overweighted” she never took more than “half hour” for
her round of the city. All this twaddle was larded with those little
words and expressions without precise meaning which Provençals scatter
through their speech, those verbal snips which they stuff between
sentences to lessen their stress or increase their strength, or keep up
the multifold character of the accent, such as
“_Aie, ouie, avai, açavai, au moins, pas moins, différemment, allons!_”
This contempt of Mme. Portal for the language of her province extended
to its usages and its traditions and even to its costume. Just as she
did not permit her coachman to lapse into Provençal, in the same way
she never would have allowed a servant to enter her house wearing the
head-dress and neck-kerchief of Arles.
“My house is neither a _mas_ (farm) nor a weaver’s loft,” said she.
Nor would she let them wear a _chapo_ either. To wear a bonnet is
the distinctive hieratic sign of the ascendancy of the citizen in
the provinces. The title of “madame” is one of its attributes, a
title refused to any of the baser sort. It is amusing to see the
condescension of the wife of a retired officer or municipal employee
who earns eight hundred francs a year, doing her own marketing in an
enormous bonnet, when she speaks to the wife of an immensely rich
farmer from the Crau, in her picturesque headgear trimmed with real old
thread lace. In the Portal mansion the ladies had worn bonnets for over
a century. This made Mme. Portal very arrogant toward poor people and
was the cause of a terrible scene between her and Roumestan a few days
after the festival in the amphitheatre.
It was a Friday morning at breakfast, a regular Provençal breakfast,
pretty and attractive to the eye although strictly a fast-day meal,
for Aunt Portal was very keen about her orders. On the white cloth
in picturesque array were big green peppers, alternating with
blood-red figs, almonds and carved water-melons, that looked like big
rose-colored magnolias, anchovy patties and little white rolls such as
are to be found nowhere else--all very light dishes set among decanters
of fresh water and bottles of light home-made wine. Outside in the sun
the locusts and rays were chirping and glittering, and a broad band of
golden light slid through a crevice into the great dining-room, vaulted
and resounding like the refectory of a convent.
In the middle of the table on a chafing dish were two large cutlets
designed for Numa. Notwithstanding that his name was uttered in all the
prayers, perhaps because of it, the great man of Aps, alone of all the
family, had obtained a dispensation from fasting from the cardinal. So
there he sat feasting and carving his juicy cutlets, while his aunt and
his wife and sister-in-law breakfasted on figs and watermelon.
Rosalie was used to it. The two days’ fast every week was but a part
of her yearly burden, as much a matter of course as the sunshine, the
dust, the hot mistral wind, the mosquitoes, her aunt’s gossip and
the Sunday services at the church of St. Perpétue. But the youthful
appetite of Hortense revolted against this continual fasting and
it took all the gentle authority of the elder sister to prevent an
outburst from the spoiled child, which would have shocked all Aunt
Portal’s ideas of the conduct becoming to a young person of refinement
and education. So Hortense had to content herself with her husks,
revenging herself by making the most awful grimaces, rolling up her
eyes, snuffing up the smell of the cutlets and murmuring under her
breath for Rosalie’s benefit alone:
“It always happens so. I took a long ride this morning. I am as hungry
as a tramp!”
She still wore her habit, which was as becoming to her tall, slim
figure as was the straight, high collar to her irregular saucy little
face, still flushed by her exercise in the open air. Her ride had given
her an idea.
“Oh Numa, how about Valmajour? When are we going to see him?”
“Who is Valmajour?” answered Numa, whose fickle brain had already
discarded all memory of the taborist. “_Té_, that’s a fact, Valmajour!
I had forgotten all about him. What a genius he is!”
It all came back to him--the arches of the amphitheatre echoing to the
farandole with the dull vibration of the tabor; it fired his memory and
so excited him that he called out decisively:
“Aunt Portal, do lend us the landau; we will set off directly after
breakfast.”
His aunt’s brow darkened above her big eyes, flaming like those of a
Japanese idol.
“The landau? _Avai!_ What for? At least you’re not going to take your
wife and sister to see that player of the _tutu-panpan!_”
This word “tutu-panpan” so perfectly mimicked the sound of the fife
and tabor that Roumestan burst out laughing, but Hortense took up the
defence of the old Provençal tabor with much earnestness. Nothing that
she had seen in the South had impressed her so much. Besides, it would
not be honest to break one’s word to the nice boy.
“He is a great artist! Numa, you said so yourself.”
“Yes, yes, little sister, you are right; we must certainly go.”
Aunt Portal in a towering rage said that she could not understand
how a man like her nephew, a deputy, could put himself out for
peasants, farmers, whose people from father to son had made music for
the villages. Then, in her usual spirit of mimicry, she stuck out a
disdainful lip and played with the fingers of one hand on an imaginary
fife, while with the other she beat upon the table to represent the
tabor, taking off the tabor-player’s gestures.
“Nice people to take ladies to see! No one but Numa would dream of
doing such a thing. Calling on the Valmajours! Holy mother of angels!”
And becoming more and more excited, she accused them of crimes enough
to make them out a brood of monsters as bloody and dreadful as the
Trestaillon family, when suddenly across the table she caught the eye
of her butler Ménicle, who came from the same village as the Valmajours
and was listening to her lies, every feature strained in astonishment.
At once she shouted to him in a terrible voice to “go and change
himself quickly” and have the landau at the door at “two o’clock a
quarter off.” All the rages of Aunt Portal ended in this fashion.
Hortense threw down her napkin and ran and kissed the old lady
rapturously on her fat cheeks. She was in a tumult of gayety and
bounded for joy:
“Come, Rosalie, let us hurry!”
Aunt Portal looked at her niece:
“Well, I hope, Rosalie, that you are not going to vagabondize with
these feather-heads!”
“No, no, aunt, I will stay with you” answered Rosalie, amused at
the character of elderly relative that her unvarying amiability and
resignation had created for her in that house.
At the right moment the carriage came promptly to the door, but they
sent it on ahead, telling Ménicle to wait for them at the amphitheatre
square, and Roumestan set out on foot with his little sister on his
arm, full of curiosity and pride at seeing Aps in his company, to visit
the house in which he was born and to retrace with him the streets
through which he had so often walked when a child.
It was the hour of the midday rest. The whole town slept, silent
and deserted, rocked by the south wind blowing in great fanlike
gusts, cooling and freshening the fierce Provençal summer heat, but
making walking difficult, especially along the Corso, which offered
no resistance to it, where it roared round the little city with the
bellowings of a loosened bull. Hortense, with her head down, her
hands tightly clasped about her brother’s arm, out of breath and
bewildered, enjoyed the sensation of being raised and borne along by
the gusts which were like resistless waves, noisy and complaining,
white with foamlike dust. Sometimes they had to stop and cling to the
ropes stretched along the ramparts for use on windy days. Owing to
the whirlwinds in which bits of bark and plane-tree seeds spun round,
and owing to its solitude the Corso had an air of distress in its
wide desolation, still soiled as it was with the remains of the recent
market, strewn with melon-rinds, straw litters, empty casks, as if the
mistral alone had charge of the street cleaning.
Roumestan was anxious to reach the carriage as soon as possible, but
Hortense enjoyed this battle with the hurricane and insisted on walking
farther, panting and overborne by the gust that curled her blue veil
three times around her hat and molded her short walking skirt against
her figure as she walked. She was saying:
“It is queer how different people are! Rosalie, now, hates the wind.
She says it blows away all her ideas, keeps her from thinking. Now me
the wind excites, intoxicates!”
“So it does me!” said Numa, clinging on to his hat, his eyes full of
water, and then suddenly, as they turned a corner:
“Ah, here is my street--I was born here.”
The wind was going down, at least they felt it less; it was blowing
farther away with a sound as of billows breaking on a beach, as
one hears them from the quiet inner bay. The street was a largish
one, paved with pointed stones, without sidewalks, and the house an
insignificant little gray structure standing between an Ursuline
convent shaded with big plane-trees and a fine old seignorial mansion
on which was carved a coat of arms and the inscription “Hôtel de
Rochemaure.” Opposite stood a very old and characterless building
with broken columns, defaced statues and grave-stones with Roman
inscriptions carved on them; it had the word “Academy” in faded gilt
letters over a green door.
In that little gray house the great orator first saw the light on the
15th of July, 1832; it was easy to draw more than one parallel between
his narrow, classical talent and his education as a Catholic and a
Legitimist, and that little house of needy citizens with a convent on
one side and a seignorial residence on the other, and a provincial
academy in front of it.
Roumestan was filled with emotion, as he always was over anything
concerning himself. He had not visited this spot for perhaps thirty
years; it needed the whim of this young girl to bring him here. He was
much struck with the immutability of things. He recognized in the wall
a shutter-catch that his childish hand had turned and played with every
morning as he passed on his way up the street. The columns and precious
torsos of the academy threw their shadows on the same spot as of old.
The rose-laurel bushes had the same spicy odor and he showed Hortense
the narrow window where his mother had sat and signed to him to hurry
when he came from the friars’ school:
“Come up quickly, father has come in!” His father did not like to be
kept waiting.
“Tell me, Numa, is it really true? were you really educated by the
friars?”
“Yes, little sister, until I was twelve years old, and then Aunt Portal
sent me to the Assumption, the most fashionable boarding-school in the
town; but it was the Ignorantins over there in that big barrack with
yellow shutters who taught me to read.”
As he called to mind the pail of brine under the Brother’s chair in
which were soaked the straps with which they beat the boys, to make the
pain greater, he shuddered; he remembered the large paved class-room
where they were made to say their lessons on their knees and had to
crawl up holding out their hands to be punished on the slightest
pretext; he recalled how the Brother in his shabby black gown stood
stiff and rigid, with his habit rolled up beneath his arm, the better
to strike his pitiless blows--Brother Crust-to-cook, as he was called,
because he was the cook. He remembered how the dear Brother cried “ha!”
and how his little inky fingers tingled with the pain as if ants were
biting them. As Hortense cried aloud in dismay at the brutality of such
punishments, he related others still more dreadful; for example, they
were obliged to clean the freshly watered pavements with their tongues,
the dust and water making a muddy substance that injured the tender
palates of the naughty children.
“It is shameful! and you defend such people and speak in their favor in
the Chamber?”
“Ah, my dear, that is politics!” said Roumestan calmly.
As they talked they were threading a labyrinth of small, dingy streets,
almost oriental in their character, where old women lay asleep on their
doorsteps, and other streets, though not so sombre, where long pieces
of printed calicoes fluttered in explanation of signboards on which
were painted: “Haberdashery,” “Shoes,” “Silks.”
Thence they came out on what was called in Aps the “Little Square,”
with its asphalt melting in the hot sun and surrounded by shops, at
this hour closed and silent, in the narrow shadow of whose walls
boot-blacks slept peacefully, their heads resting on their boxes, their
limbs stretched out like those of drowned people, wrecks of the tempest
that has just swept over the town. An unfinished monument occupied
the centre of the little square. Hortense wished to know what was
ultimately to be the statue placed upon it and Roumestan smiled in an
embarrassed way.
“It is a long story!” he answered, hurrying on.
The town of Aps had voted a statue to Numa, but the Liberals of the
“Vanguard” had strongly disapproved of this apotheosis of a living man
and so his friends had not dared to go on with it. The statue was all
ready, but now probably they would wait for his death before raising
it. Surely it’s a glorious thought that after your funeral you will
have civic recognition and that you die only to rise again in bronze or
marble; but this empty pedestal shining in the sun seemed to Roumestan,
whenever he passed it, as gloomy as a majestic family vault; it was
not until they had reached the amphitheatre that he could dispel his
funereal thoughts.
The old structure, divested of its Sunday cheerfulness and returned to
its solemnity of a great and useless ruin, seemed damp and cheerless
as it loomed darkly against the rays of the setting sun, with its dark
corridors and floors caved in here and there and stones crumbling
beneath the footsteps of the centuries.
“How dreadfully sad it is!” said Hortense, regretting the music of
Valmajour’s fife; but to Numa it did not seem sad. His happiest days
had been passed there--his childish days with all their pleasures and
longings. Oh, the Sundays at the bull-fights, prowling around the
gates with other poor children who lacked ten sous to pay for their
tickets! In the hot afternoon sun they crawled into some corner where
a glimpse of the arena could be obtained. What pleasures of forbidden
fruits!--the red-stockinged legs of the bull-fighters, the wrathful
hoofs of the bull, the dust of the combat rising from the arena amid
the cries of “Bravo!” and the bellowings and the roar of the multitude!
The yearning to get inside was not to be resisted. While the sentinel’s
back was turned the bravest of them would wriggle through the iron bars
with a little effort.
“I always got through!” said Roumestan in ecstasy. The history of
his whole life was expressed in those few words. By chance or by
cleverness--no matter how close were the bars--the Southerner always
wriggled through.
“I was thinner in those days, all the same,” he said with a sigh and he
looked with comic regret at the narrow bars of the grille and then at
his big white waistcoat, within which lay the solid sign of his forty
years.
Behind the enormous amphitheatre they found the carriage, safely
harbored from wind and sun. They had to wake up Ménicle, who was
sleeping peacefully on the box between two large baskets of provisions,
wrapped in his heavy cloak of royal blue. But before getting in Numa
pointed out to Hortense an old inn at a distance whose sign read: “To
the Little St. John, coach and express office,” the whitewashed front
and large open sheds of which took up one whole corner of the square.
In these sheds were ancient stage-coaches and rural chaises long
unused, covered with dust, their shafts raised high in air from beneath
their gray covers.
“Look there, little sister,” he cried with emotion. “It was from this
spot that I set out for Paris one-and-twenty years ago. There was no
railway then; we went by coach as far as Montélimar, then up the Rhône.
Heavens, how happy I was! and how your big Paris frightened me! It was
evening--I remember it so well....”
He spoke quickly, reminiscences crowding each other in his mind.
“The evening, ten o’clock, in November, beautiful moonlight. The
guard’s name was Fouque, a great person! While he was harnessing we
walked about with Bompard--yes, Bompard--you know we were already
great friends. He was, or thought he was, studying for a druggist and
meant to join me in Paris. We made many plans for living together and
helping each other along in the world to get ahead quicker--in the
meantime he encouraged me, gave me good advice--he was older than I. My
great bugbear was the fear of being ridiculous--Aunt Portal had ordered
for me a travelling wrap called a Raglan; I was a little dubious about
that Raglan, so Bompard made me put it on and walk before him in it.
_Té!_ I can see yet my shadow beside me as I walked, and gravely, with
that knowing air he has, he said: ‘That is all right, old boy; you
don’t look ridiculous.’--Ah, youth, youth!”
Hortense, who was beginning to fear that they should never get away
from this town where every stone was eloquent of reminiscences for the
great man, led the way gently towards the carriage.
“Let us get in, Numa. We can talk just as well as we drive along.”