A late October sun of unusual splendour lit up the windows of M.
Paillot’s bookshop, at the corner of the Place Saint-Exupère and the
Rue des Tintelleries. But it was sombre in the back region of the shop
where the second-hand book shelves were and M. Mazure, the departmental
archivist, adjusted his spectacles to read his copy of _Le Phare_, with
one eye on the newspaper and the other on M. Paillot and his customers.
For M. Mazure wished not so much to read as to be seen reading, in order
that he might be asked what the leading article was and reply, “Oh, a
little thing of my own.” But the question was not asked, for the only
other _habitué_ present was the Lecturer in Latin at the Faculty of
Letters, who was sad and silent. M. Bergeret was turning over the new
books and the old with a friendly hand, and though he never bought a
book for fear of the outcries of his wife and three daughters he was on
the best of terms with M. Paillot, who held him in high esteem as the
reservoir and alembic of those humaner letters that are the livelihood
and profit of booksellers. He took up Vol. XXXVIII. of “L’Histoire
Générale des Voyages,” which always opened at the same place, p. 212,
and he read:—
“ver un passage au nord. ‘C’est à cet échec, dit-il, que nous
devons n’avoir pu visiter les îles Sandwich et enrichir notre
voyage d’une découverte qui....’”
For six years past the same page had presented itself to M. Bergeret,
as an example of the monotony of life, as a symbol of the uniformity of
daily tasks, and it saddened him.
At that moment M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture
and Archæology, entered the shop and greeted his friends with the slight
air of superiority of a traveller over stay-at-homes. “I’ve just got back
from England,” he said, “and here, if either of you have enough English
to read it, is to-day’s _Times_.”
M. Mazure hastily thrust _Le Phare_ into his pocket and looked askance at
the voluminous foreign journal, wherein he could claim no little thing of
his own. M. Bergeret accepted it and applied himself as conscientiously
to construing the text as though it were one of those books of the Æneid
from which he was compiling his “Virgilius Nauticus.” “The manners of
our neighbours,” he presently said, “are as usual more interesting to
a student of human nature than their politics. I read that they are
seriously concerned about the ethical teaching of their kinematography,
and they have appointed a film censor, the deputy T. P. O’Connor.”
“I think I have heard speak of him over there,” interrupted M. de
Terremondre; “they call him, familiarly, Tépé.”
“A mysterious name,” said M. Bergeret, “but manifestly not abusive, and
that of itself is a high honour. History records few nicknames that
do not revile. And if the deputy O’Connor, or Tépé, can successfully
acquit himself of his present functions he will be indeed an ornament
to history, a saint of the Positivist Calendar, which is no doubt less
glorious than the Roman, but more exclusive.”
“Talking of Roman saints,” broke in M. Mazure, “the Abbé Lantaigne has
been spreading it abroad that you called Joan of Arc a mascot.”
“By way of argument merely,” said M. Bergeret, “not of epigram. The Abbé
and I were discussing theology, about which I never permit myself to be
facetious.”
“But what of Tépé and his censorial functions?” asked M. de Terremondre.
“They are extremely delicate,” replied M. Bergeret, “and offer pitfalls
to a censor with a velleity for nice distinctions. Thus I read that
this one has already distinguished, and distinguished _con allegrezza_,
between romantic crime and realistic crime, between murder in Mexico
and murder in Mile End (which I take to be a suburb of London). He has
distinguished between ‘guilty love’ and ‘the pursuit of lust.’ He has
distinguished between a lightly-clad lady swimming and the same lady at
rest. Surely a man gifted with so exquisite a discrimination is wasted
in rude practical life. He should have been a metaphysician.”
“Well, I,” confessed M. de Terremondre, “am no metaphysician, and it
seems to me murder is murder all the world over.”
“Pardon me,” said M. Bergeret, “but there, I think, your Tépé is quite
right. Murder is murder all the world over if you are on the spot. But
if you are at a sufficient distance from it in space or time, it may
present itself as a thrilling adventure. Thus the Mexican film censor
will be right in prohibiting films of murder in Mexico, and not wrong in
admitting those of murder in Mile End. Where would tragedy be without
murder? We enjoy the murders of Julius Cæsar or of Duncan because
they are remote; they gratify the primeval passion for blood in us
without a sense of risk. But we could not tolerate a play or a picture
of yesterday’s murder next door, because we think it might happen to
ourselves. Remember that murder was long esteemed in our human societies
as an energetic action, and in our manners and in our institutions there
still subsist traces of this antique esteem. And that is why I approve
the English film censor for treating with a wise indulgence one of the
most venerable of our human admirations. He gratifies it under conditions
of remoteness that deprive bloodshed of its reality while conserving its
artistic verisimilitude.”
“But, bless my soul,” said M. de Terremondre “how does the man
distinguish between guilty love and lust?”
“It is a fine point,” said M. Bergeret. “The Fathers of the Church, the
schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Descartes and Locke, Kant, Hegel,
and Schopenhauer, have all failed to make the distinction, and some of
them have even confounded with the two what men to-day agree in calling
innocent love. But is love ever innocent—unless it be that love Professor
Bellac in Pailleron’s play described as _l’amour psychique_, the love
that Petrarch bore to Laura?”
“If I remember aright,” interposed M. Mazure, “someone else in the play
remarked that Laura had eleven children.”
Just then Mme. de Gromance passed across the Place. The conversation was
suspended while all three men watched her into the patissier’s opposite,
elegantly hovering over the plates of cakes, and finally settling on a
_baba au rhum_.
“Sapristi!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, “she’s the prettiest woman in
the whole place.”
M. Bergeret mentally went over several passages in Æneid, Book IV.,
looked ruefully at his frayed shirt cuffs, and regretted the narrow life
of a provincial university lecturer that reduced him to insignificance in
the eyes of the prettiest woman in the place.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh, “it is a very fine point. I wonder how on
earth Tépé manages to settle it?”