[Illustration: TWO CLOWNS]
The night was clear and glittering with stars, and there was a crowd
upon the market-place. They crowded in gaping delight around the tent of
some strolling acrobats, where red and smoking lanterns lighted the
performance which was just beginning. Rolling their muscular limbs in
dirty wraps, and decorated from head to foot with tawdry ruffles of fur,
the athletes--four boyish ruffians with vulgar heads--were ranged in
line before the painted canvas which represented their exploits; they
stood there with their heads down, their legs apart, and their muscular
arms crossed upon their chests. Near them the marshal of the
establishment, an old sub-officer, with the drooping mustache of a
brandy-drinker, belted in at the waist, a heart of red cloth on his
leather breastplate, leaned on a pair of foils. The feminine attraction,
a rose in her hair, with a man's overcoat protecting her against the
freshness of the evening air over her ballet-dancer's dress, played at
the same time the cymbals and the big bass-drum a desperate
accompaniment to three measures of a polka, always the same, which were
murdered by a blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, a sort of
Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers,
roared out his furious appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of
loafers, soldiers, and women, I regarded the abject spectacle with
disgust--the last vestige of the olympic games.
Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd broke into roars of laughter.
The clown had just made his appearance.
[Illustration]
He wore the ordinary costume of his kind, the short vest and
many-colored stockings of the peasants of the opera comique, the three
horns turned backward, the red wig with its turned-up queue and its
butterfly on the end. He was a young man, but alas, his face, whitened
with flour, was already seamed with vice. Planting himself before the
public, and opening his mouth in a silly grin, he showed bleeding gums
almost devoid of teeth. The ringmaster kicked him violently from behind.
"Come in," he said, tranquilly.
Then the traditional dialogue, punctuated by slaps in the face, began
between the mountebank and his clown, and the entire audience applauded
these souvenirs of the classic farce, fallen from the theatre to the
stage of the mountebank, and whose humor, coarse but pungent, seemed a
drunken echo of the laughter of Molière. The clown exerted his low
talent, throwing out at each moment some low jest, some immodest pun, to
which his master, simulating a prudish indignation, responded by thumps
on the head. But the adroit clown excelled in the art of receiving
affronts. He knew to perfection how to bend his body like a bow under
the impulse of a kick, and having received on one cheek a full-armed
blow, he stuffed his tongue at once in that cheek and began to whine
until a new blow passed the artificial swelling into the other cheek.
Blows showered on him as thick as hail, and, disappearing under a shower
of slaps, the flour on his face and the red powder of his wig enveloped
him like a cloud. At last he exhausted all his resources of low
scurrility, ridiculous contortions, grotesque grimaces, pretended aches,
falls at full length, etc., till the ringmaster, judging this gratuitous
show long enough, and that the public were sufficiently fascinated, sent
him off with a final cuff.
Then the music began again with such violence that the painted canvas
trembled. The clown, having seized the sticks of a drum fixed on one of
the beams of the scaffolding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with the
bombardment of the bass-drum, the cracked thunder of the cymbals, and
the distracted wail of the clarionet. The ringmaster, roaring again with
his heavy voice, announced that the show was about to begin, and, as a
sign of defiance, he threw two or three old fencing-gloves among his
fellow-wrestlers. The crowd rushed into the tent, and soon only a small
group of loungers remained in front of the deserted stage.
I was just going off, when I noticed by my side an old woman who looked
with strange persistence at the empty stage where the red lights were
still burning. She wore the linen bonnet and the crossed fichu of the
poorer class of women, and her whole appearance was that of neatness and
honesty. Asking myself what powerful interest could hold her in such a
place, I looked at her with more attention, and I saw that her eyes were
full of tears, and that her hands, which she had crossed over her
breast, were trembling with emotion.
"What is the matter with you?" I said, coming near to her, impelled by
an instinctive sympathy.
"The matter, good sir?" cried the old woman, bursting into tears.
"Passing by this market-place--oh, quite by chance, I tell you (I have
no heart for pleasure)--passing before that dreadful tent, I have just
seen in the wretch who has received all those blows my only son, sir, my
sole child! It is the grief of my life, do you see? I never knew what
had become of him since--oh, since my poor husband sent him away to sea
as a cabin-boy. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger, sir. He robbed his
master--he, the son of two honest people. As for me, I would have
pardoned him. You know what mothers are. But my man, when they came and
told him that his son had stolen, he was like a madman. It was that that
killed him, I am sure. I have never seen the unhappy child again. For
five years I have heard nothing from him. I sought to deceive myself. I
said experience will reform him, and there--there--just now--"
And the poor old woman sobbed in a pitiful way. A crowd had formed. It
was no longer to me that she spoke; it was not to the crowd; it was to
herself, to the bitterness of her own heart.
"He, my Adrien, the child that I nourished at my own breast, a
mountebank in a travelling theatre! struck and insulted before the whole
world! He, whom I saved at four when he was so ill, a clown in a tent!
He, the beautiful baby of whom I was so proud, whom I made the neighbors
admire when he was so small that he rolled naked on my knee, holding his
little foot in his hand!"
Suddenly at this point in her heart-breaking monologue the old woman
perceived the crowd listening to her. She looked on the spectators in
astonishment, as one who starts from sleep. She recognized me who had
questioned her, and became frightfully pale.
"What have I said?" she stammered. "Let me pass." And brusquely putting
us aside with an imperious gesture, she went off with a rapid step, and
disappeared in the night.
The adventure made a lively impression on me. I thought often of it, and
after that, when I saw before my eyes some wretched and degraded
creature, some woman of the street, trailing her light silk skirts in
the flare of a gas-jet, some drunken idler leaning on the bar of a café
and bending his bloated face over his glass of absinthe, I have thought,
"Is it possible that that being can ever have been a little child?"
Now, some little time after that _rencontre_--let us be careful not to
indicate the date--I was taken into a gallery of the Chamber of Deputies
to be present at a sensational sitting. The law that they were
discussing on that day is of no importance, but it was the old and
tedious story: a Ministerial candidate, formerly in the Opposition,
proposed to strike a blow at some liberty--I don't know what--which he
had formerly demanded with virulence and force. And, more than that, the
man in power was going to forfeit his word to the tribune. In good
French that is called "to betray," but in parliamentary language they
employ the phrase, "accomplish a change of base." Opinion was divided,
the majority uncertain; and upon his speech would depend the political
future of the speaker. Therefore, on that day, the legislators were in
their places, and the Chamber did not resemble, as usual, a class of
noisy boys presided over by a master without authority. The
lunch-counter was deserted, and the deputies of the Centre themselves
were not absorbed in their personal correspondence.
The orator mounted the tribune. He had the commonplace figure of a
verbose orator: bold eye, protruding lips, as enlarged by the abuse of
words. He began by fingering his notes with an important air, tasting
the glass of sweetened water, and settling himself in his place; then he
started a babble of words without sense, with the nauseous facility of
the bar; misusing vague ideas, abstract terms, and words in _ly_ and
_ion_, stereotyped words, and ready-made phrases. A flattering murmur
greeted the end of his exordium; for the French people in general, and
the political world in particular, manifest a depraved taste for that
sort of eloquence. Encouraged, the fine speaker entered the heart of his
subject, and cynically sang his recantation. He abjured none of his
opinions, he repudiated none of his acts; he would always remain liberal
(a blow on his chest), but that which was good yesterday might be
dangerous to-day; truth on the other side of the Alps, error on this
side. The forbearance of the Government was abused. And he threatened
the assembly; became prophet; let loose the dogs of war. He even risked
a bit of poetry, flourished old metaphors, which were worn out in the
time of Cicero, and compared by turn, in the same phrase, his political
career to a pilot, a steed, and a torch. So much poetry could only
accentuate his success. There was a salvo of bravos, and the Opposition
grumbled, foreseeing their defeat. Violent interruptions broke forth:
furious voices recalled the orator's past life, and threw as insults his
former professions in his face. He was unmoved, and stood with a
disdainful air, which was very effective. Then the bravos redoubled, and
he smiled vaguely, thinking, no doubt, of the proof-sheets of the
_Officiel_, where he could by-and-by insert in the margin, without too
much exaggeration, "profound sensation" and "prolonged applause." Then,
when quiet was re-established, sure of his success, he affected a serene
majesty. He took up again his discourse, soaring like a goose, launching
out with high doctrine, citing Royer-Collard.
[Illustration]
But I heard no more. The scandalous spectacle of that political
mountebank, who sacrificed eternal principles to the interests of the
day, recalled to my memory the tent of the acrobats. The cold rhetoric
of that harangue, vibrating with neither truth nor emotion, recalled to
me the patter, learned by heart, of the powdered clown on the stage. The
superb air which the orator assumed under the rain of reproaches and
insults singularly resembled the indifference of the clown to the loud
slaps on his face. Those sonorous phrases, whose echoes had just died
away, sounded as false as a strolling band. The word "liberty" rolled
like the bass-drum, "public interests" and "welfare of the State"
clanged discordantly like the cymbals, and when the comedian spoke of
his "patriotism" I almost heard the _couac_ of a clarionet.
A long uproar woke me from my revery. The speech was finished, and the
orator, having descended from the rostrum, was receiving
congratulations. They were about to vote: the urns were being passed
around, but the result was certain, and the crowd of tribunes was
already dispersing.
As I went across the vestibule I saw an elderly lady dressed in black.
She was dressed like a wealthy bourgeoise and appeared radiant. I
stopped one of the well-groomed little chaps whom one sees trotting
around in the Ministerial corridors. I knew him slightly, and I asked
him who that lady was.
"The mother of the orator," he replied, with official emotion. "She must
be very proud."
Very proud! The old mother who wept so bitterly in the market-place was
not that; and if the mother of his future Excellency had reflected, she
would have regretted--she too--the time when her boy was very small, and
rolled naked on her knee, holding his little foot in his hand.
But, bah! everything is relative, even shame.
[Illustration]