On New Year’s Day M. Bergeret was always in the habit of dressing
himself in his black suit the first thing in the morning. Nowadays,
it had lost all its gloss and the grey wintry light made it look
ashen-colour. The gold medal that hung from M. Bergeret’s buttonhole
by a violet riband, although it gave him a false air of splendour,
testified clearly to the fact that he was no Knight of the Legion
of Honour. In fact, in this dress he always felt strangely thin and
poverty-stricken. Even his white tie seemed to his fancy a wretchedly
paltry affair, for to tell the truth, it was not even a fresh one. At
length, after vainly crumpling the front of his shirt, he recognised
the fact that it is impossible to make mother-of-pearl buttons stay in
buttonholes that have been stretched by long wear: at the thought he
became utterly disconsolate, for he recognised the fact sorrowfully
that he was no man of the world. And sitting down on a chair, he fell
into a reverie:
“But, after all, does there in truth exist a world populated by men of
the world? For it seems to me, indeed, that what is commonly called the
world is but a cloud of gold and silver hung in the blue of heaven.
To the man who has actually entered it, it seems but a mist. In fact,
social distinctions are matters of much confusion. Men are drawn
together in flocks by their common prejudices or their common tastes.
But tastes often war against prejudices, and chance sets everything at
variance. All the same, a large income and the leisure given by it tend
to produce a certain style of life and special habits. This fact is the
bond which links society people, and this kinship produces a certain
standard which rules manners, physique and sport. Hence we derive the
‘tone’ of society. This ‘tone’ is purely superficial and for that very
reason fairly perceptible. There are such things as society manners
and appearances, but there is no such thing as society human nature,
for what truly decides our character is passion, thought and feeling.
Within us is a tribunal with which the world has no concern.”
Still, the wretched look of his shirt and tie continued to harass
him, till at last he went to look at himself in the sitting-room
mirror. Somehow his face assumed a far-off appearance in the glass,
quite obscured as it was by an immense basket of heather festooned
with ribands of red satin. The basket was of wicker, in the shape of a
chariot with gilded wheels, and stood on the piano between two bags of
_marrons glacés_. To its gilded shaft was affixed M. Roux’s card, for
the basket was a present from him to Madame Bergeret.
The professor made no attempt to push aside the beribboned tufts
of heather; he was satisfied with catching a glimpse of his left
eye in the glass behind the flowers, and he continued to gaze at it
benevolently for some little time. M. Bergeret, firmly convinced as
he was that no one loved him, either in this world or in any other,
sometimes treated himself to a little sympathy and pity. For he always
behaved with the greatest consideration to all unhappy people, himself
included. Now, dropping further consideration of his shirt and tie, he
murmured to himself:
“You interpret the bosses on the shield of Æneas and yet your own tie
is crumpled. You are ridiculous on both counts. You are no man of the
world. You should teach yourself, then, at least, how to live the inner
life and should cultivate within yourself a wealthy kingdom.”
On New Year’s Day he had always grounds for bewailing his destiny,
before he set out to pay his respects to two vulgar, offensive fellows,
for such were the rector and the dean. The rector, M. Leterrier,
could not bear him. This feeling was a natural antipathy that grew as
regularly as a plant and brought forth fruit every year. M. Leterrier,
a professor of philosophy and the author of a text-book which summed
up all systems of thought, had the blind dogmatic instincts of the
official teacher. No doubt whatever remained in his mind touching the
questions of the good, the beautiful and the true, the characteristics
of which he had summarised in one chapter of his work (pages 216 to
262). Now he regarded M. Bergeret as a dangerous and misguided man, and
M. Bergeret, in his turn, fully appreciated the perfect sincerity of
the dislike he aroused in M. Leterrier. Nor, in fact, did he make any
complaint against it; sometimes he even treated it with an indulgent
smile. On the other hand, he felt abjectly miserable whenever he met
the dean, M. Torquet, who never had an idea in his head, and who,
although he was crammed with learning, still retained the brain of a
positive ignoramus. He was a fat man with a low forehead and no cranium
to speak of, who did nothing all day but count the knobs of sugar in
his house and the pears in his garden, and who would go on hanging
bells, even when one of his professional colleagues paid him a visit.
In doing mischief he showed an activity and a something approaching
intelligence which filled M. Bergeret with amazement. Such thoughts as
these were in the professor’s mind, as he put on his overcoat to go and
wish M. Torquet a happy New Year.
Yet he took a certain pleasure in being out of doors, for in the street
he could enjoy that most priceless blessing, the liberty of the mind.
In front of the Two Satyrs at the corner of the Tintelleries, he paused
for a moment to give a friendly glance at the little acacia which
stretched its bare branches over the wall of Lafolie’s garden.
“Trees in winter,” thought he, “take on an aspect of homely beauty
that they never show in all the pomp of foliage and flowers. It is
in winter that they reveal their delicate structure, that they show
their charming framework of black coral: these are no skeletons, but a
multitude of pretty little limbs in which life slumbers. If I were a
landscape-painter....”
As he stood wrapt in these reflections, a portly man called him by
name, seized his arm and walked on with him. This was M. Compagnon, the
most popular of all the professors, the idolised master who gave his
mathematical lectures in the great amphitheatre.
“Hullo! my dear Bergeret, happy New Year. I bet you’re going to call on
the dean. So am I. We’ll walk on together.”
“Gladly,” answered M. Bergeret, “since in that way I shall travel
pleasantly towards a painful goal. For I must confess it is no pleasure
to me to see M. Torquet.”
On hearing this uncalled-for confidence, M. Compagnon, whether
instinctively or inadvertently it was hard to say, withdrew the hand
which he had slipped under his colleague’s arm.
“Yes, yes, I know! You and the dean don’t get on very well. Yet in
general he isn’t a man who is difficult to get on with.”
“In speaking to you as I have done,” answered M. Bergeret, “I was
not even thinking of the hostility which, according to report, the
dean persists in keeping up towards me. But it chills me to the
very marrow whenever I come in contact with a man who is totally
lacking in imagination of any kind. What really saddens is not the
idea of injustice and hatred, nor is it the sight of human misery.
Quite the contrary, in fact, for we find the misfortunes of our
fellows quite laughable, if only they are shown to us from a humorous
standpoint. But those gloomy souls on whom the outer world seems to
make no impression, those beings who have the faculty of ignoring the
entire universe—the very sight of them reduces me to distress and
desperation. My intercourse with M. Torquet is really one of the most
painful misfortunes of my life.”
“Just so!” said M. Compagnon. “Our college is one of the most splendid
in France, on account of the high attainments of the lecturers and the
convenience of the buildings. It is only the laboratories that still
leave something to be desired. But let us hope that this regrettable
defect will soon be remedied, thanks to the combined efforts of our
devoted rector and of so influential a senator as M. Laprat-Teulet.”
“It is also desirable,” said M. Bergeret, “that the Latin lectures
should cease to be given in a dark, unwholesome cellar.”
As they crossed the Place Saint-Exupère, M. Compagnon pointed to
Deniseau’s house.
“We no longer,” said he, “hear any chatter about the prophetess who
held communion with Saint Radegonde and several other saints from
Paradise. Did you go to see her, Bergeret? I was taken to see her by
Lacarelle, the _préfet’s_ chief secretary, just at the time when she
was at the height of her popularity. She was sitting with her eyes
shut in an arm-chair, while a dozen of the faithful plied her with
questions. They asked her if the Pope’s health was satisfactory,
what would be the result of the Franco-Russian alliance, whether
the income-tax bill would pass, and whether a remedy for consumption
would soon be found. She answered every question poetically and with a
certain ease. When my turn came, I asked her this simple question:
“‘What is the logarithm of 9’? Well, Bergeret, do you imagine that she
said 0,954?”
“No, I don’t,” said M. Bergeret.
“She never answered a word,” continued M. Compagnon; “never a word. She
remained quite silent. Then I said: ‘How is it that Saint Radegonde
doesn’t know the logarithm of 9? It is incredible!’ There were present
at the meeting a few retired colonels, some priests, old ladies and
a few Russian doctors. They seemed thunderstruck and Lacarelle’s
face grew as long as a fiddle. I took to my heels amid a torrent of
reproaches.”
As M. Compagnon and M. Bergeret were crossing the square chatting
in this way, they came upon M. Roux, who was going through the town
scattering visiting-cards right and left, for he went into society a
good deal.
“Here is my best pupil,” said M. Bergeret.
“He looks a sturdy fellow,” said M. Compagnon, who thought a great deal
of physical strength. “Why the deuce does he take Latin?”
M. Bergeret was much piqued by this question and inquired whether the
mathematical professor was of opinion that the study of the classics
ought to be confined exclusively to the lame, the halt, the maimed and
the blind.
But already M. Roux was bowing to the two professors with a flashing
smile that showed his strong, white teeth. He was in capital spirits,
for his happy temperament, which had enabled him to master the secret
of the soldier’s life, had just brought him a fresh stroke of good
luck. Only that morning M. Roux had been granted a fortnight’s leave
that he might recover from a slight injury to the knee that was
practically painless.
“Happy man!” cried M. Bergeret. “He needn’t even tell a lie to reap
all the benefits of deceit.” Then, turning towards M. Compagnon, he
remarked: “In my pupil, M. Roux, lie all the hopes of Latin verse.
But, by a strange anomaly, although this young scholar scans the lines
of Horace and Catullus with the utmost severity, he himself composes
French verses that he never troubles to scan, verses whose irregular
metre I must confess I cannot grasp. In a word, M. Roux writes _vers
libres_.”
“Really,” said M. Compagnon politely.
M. Bergeret, who loved acquiring information and looked indulgently on
new ideas, begged M. Roux to recite his last poem, _The Metamorphosis
of the Nymph_, which had not yet been given to the world.
“One moment,” said M. Compagnon. “I will walk on your left, Monsieur
Roux, so that I may have my best ear towards you.”
It was settled that M. Roux should recite his poem while he walked with
the two professors as far as the dean’s house on the Tournelles, for on
such a gentle slope as that he would not lose his breath.
Then M. Roux began to declaim _The Metamorphosis of the Nymph_ in a
slow, drawling, sing-song voice. In lines punctuated here and there by
the rumbling of cart-wheels he recited:
The snow-white nymph,
Who glides with rounded hips
Along the winding shore,
And the isle where willows grey
Girdle her waist with the belt of Eve,
In leafage of oval shape,
And palely disappears.[2]
[2] La nymphe blanche
Qui coule à pleines hanches,
Le long du rivage arrondi
Et de l’île où les saules grisâtres
Mettent à ses flancs la ceinture d’Ève,
En feuillages ovales,
Et qui fuit pâle.
Then he painted a shifting kaleidoscope of:
Green banks shelving down,
With the hostel of the town
And the frying of gudgeons within.[3]
[3] De vertes berges,
Avec l’auberge
Et les fritures de goujons.
Restless, unquiet, the nymph takes to flight.
She draws near the town and there the metamorphosis takes place.
Fretted are her hips by the rough stone of the quay,
Her breast is a thicket of rugged hair
And black with the coal, which mingled with sweat,
Has turned the nymph to a stevedore wet.
And below is the dock
For the coke.[4]
[4] La pierre du quai dur lui rabote les hanches,
Sa poitrine est hérissée d’un poil rude,
Et noire de charbons, que délaye la sueur,
La nymphe est devenue un débardeur.
Et là-bas est le dock
Pour le coke.
Next the poet sang of the river flowing through the city:
And the river, from henceforth municipal and historic,
And worthy of archives, of annals and records,
Worthy of glory.
Deriving something solemn and even stern
From the grey stone walls,
Flows under the heavy shadow of the basilica
Where linger still the shades of Eudes, of Adalberts,
In the golden fringes of the past,
Bishops who bless not the nameless dead,
The nameless dead,
No longer bodies, but leather bottèls,
Who will to go hence,
Along the isles in the form of boats
With, for masts, but the chimney-tops.
For the drownèd will out beyond.
But pause you on the erudite parapets
Where, in boxes, lies many a fable strange,
And the red-edged conjuring book whereon the plane-tree
Sheds its leaves,
Perchance there you’ll discover potent words:
“For you’re no stranger to the value of runes
Nor to the true power of signs traced on the sheets.”[5]
[5] Et le fleuve, d’ores en avant municipal et historique,
Et dignement d’archives, d’annales, de fastes,
De gloire.
Prenant du sérieux et même du morose
De pierre grise,
Se traîne sous la lourde ombre basilicale
Que hantent encore des Eudes, des Adalberts,
Dans les orfrois passés,
Évêques qui ne bénissent pas les noyés anonymes,
Anonymes,
Non plus des corps, mais des outres,
Qui vont outre,
Le long des îles en forme de bateaux plats
Avec, pour mâtures, des tuyaux de cheminées.
Et les noyés vont outre.
Mais arrête-toi aux parapets doctes
Où, dans les boîtes, gît mainte anecdote,
Et le grimoire à tranches rouges sur lequel le platane
Fait pleuvoir ses feuilles,
Il se peut que, là, tu découvres une bonne écriture:
Car tu n’ignores pas la vertu des runes
Ni le pouvoir des signes tracés sur les lames.
For a long, long while M. Roux traced the course of this marvellous
river, nor did he finish his recital till they reached the dean’s
doorstep.
“That’s very good,” said M. Compagnon, for he had no grudge against
literature, though for want of practice he could barely distinguish
between a line of Racine and a line of Mallarmé.
But M. Bergeret said to himself:
“Perhaps, after all, this is a masterpiece?”
And, for fear of wronging beauty in disguise, he silently pressed the
poet’s hand.
V
As he came out of the dean’s house, M. Bergeret met Madame de Gromance
returning from Mass. This gave him great pleasure, for he always
considered that the sight of a pretty woman is a stroke of good luck
when it comes in the way of an honest man, and in his eyes Madame de
Gromance was a most charming woman. She alone, of all the women in the
town, knew how to dress herself with the skilful art that conceals art:
and he was grateful to her for this, as well as for her carriage that
displayed the lissom figure and the supple hips, mere hints though they
were of a beauty veiled from the sight of the humble, poverty-stricken
scholar, but which could yet serve him as an apposite illustration of
some line of Horace, Ovid or Martial. His heart went out towards her
for her sweetness and the amorous atmosphere that floated round her. In
his mind he thanked her for that heart of hers that yielded so easily;
he felt it as a personal favour, although he had no hope at all of
ever sunning himself in the light of her smile. Stranger as he was in
aristocratic circles, he had never been in the lady’s house, and it was
merely by a stroke of extraordinary luck that someone introduced him
to her in M. de Terremondre’s box, after the procession at the Jeanne
d’Arc celebrations. Moreover, being a wise man with a sense of the
becoming, he did not even hope for closer acquaintance. It was enough
for him to catch a chance glimpse of her fair face as he passed in the
street, and to remember, whenever he saw her, the tales they told about
her in Paillot’s shop. Thus he owed some pleasant moments to her and
accordingly felt a sort of gratitude towards her.
This New Year’s morning he caught sight of her in the porch of
Saint-Exupère, as she stood lifting her petticoat with one hand so as
to emphasise the pliant bending of the knee, while with the other she
held a great prayer-book bound in red morocco. As he gazed, he offered
up a mental hymn of thanksgiving to her for thus acting as a charming
fairy-tale, a source of subtle pleasure to all the town. This idea he
tried to throw into his smile as he passed.
Madame de Gromance’s notion of ideal womanhood was not quite the same
as M. Bergeret’s. Hers was mingled with many society interests, and
being of the world, she had a keen eye to worldly affairs. She was by
no means ignorant of the reputation she enjoyed in the town, and hence,
whenever she had no special desire to stand in anyone’s good graces,
she treated him with cold hauteur. Among such persons she classed M.
Bergeret, whose smile seemed merely impertinent. She replied to it,
therefore, by a supercilious look which made him blush. As he continued
his walk, he said to himself penitently:
“She has been a minx. But on my side, I have just made an ass of
myself. I see that now; and now that it’s too late, I also see that my
smile, which said ‘You are the joy of all the town,’ must have seemed
an impertinence. This delicious being is no philosopher emancipated
from common prejudices. Of course, she would not understand me: it
would be impossible for her to see that I consider her beauty one of
the prime forces of the world, and regard the use she makes of it only
as a splendid sovereignty. I have been tactless and I am ashamed of
it. Like all honourable people, I have sometimes transgressed a human
law and yet have felt no repentance for it whatever. But certain other
acts of my life, which were merely opposed to those subtle and lofty
niceties that we call the conventions, have often filled me with
sharp regret and even with a kind of remorse. At this moment I want to
hide myself for very shame. Henceforth I shall flee whenever I see the
charming vision of this lady of the supple figure, _crispum ... docta
movere latus_. I have, indeed, begun the year badly!”
“A happy New Year to you,” said a voice that emerged from a beard
beneath a straw hat.
It belonged to M. Mazure, the archivist to the department. Ever since
the Ministry had refused him academic honours on the ground that he had
no claim, and since all classes in the town steadily refused to return
Madame Mazure’s calls, because she had been both cook and mistress to
the two officials previously in charge of the archives, M. Mazure had
been seized with a horror of all government and become disgusted with
society. He lived now the life of a gloomy misanthrope.
This being a day when friendly or, at any rate, courteous visits are
customary, he had put on a shabby knitted scarf, the bluish wool of
which showed under his overcoat decorated with torn buttonholes: this
he did to show his scorn of the human race. He had also donned a broken
straw hat that his good wife, Marguerite, used to stick on a cherry
tree in the garden when the cherries were ripe. He cast a pitying
glance at M. Bergeret’s white tie.
“You have just bowed,” said he, “to a pretty hussy.”
It pained M. Bergeret to have to listen to such harsh and unphilosophic
language. But as he could forgive a good deal to a nature warped by
misanthropy, it was with gentleness that he set about reproving M.
Mazure for the coarseness of his speech.
“My dear Mazure,” said he, “I expected from your wide experience a
juster estimate of a lady who harms no one.”
M. Mazure answered drily that he objected to light women. From him
it was by no means a sincere expression of opinion, for, strictly
speaking, M. Mazure had no moral code. But he persisted in his bad
temper.
“Come now,” said M. Bergeret with a smile, “I’ll tell you what is wrong
with Madame de Gromance. She was born just a hundred and fifty years
too late. In eighteenth-century society no man of brains would have
disapproved of her.”
M. Mazure began to relent under this flattery. He was no sullen
Puritan, but he respected the civil marriage, to which the statesmen
of the Revolution had imparted fresh dignity. For all that, he did not
deny the claim of the heart and the senses. He acknowledged that the
mistress has her place in society as well as the wife.
“And, by the way, how is Madame Bergeret?” he inquired.
As the north wind whistled across the Place Saint-Exupère M. Bergeret
watched M. Mazure’s nose getting redder and redder under the
turned-down brim of the straw hat. His own feet and knees were frozen,
and he suffered his thoughts to play round the idea of Madame de
Gromance just to get a little warmth and joy into his veins.
Paillot’s shop was not open, and the two professors, thus fireless and
houseless, stood looking at each other in sad sympathy.
In the depths of his friendly heart M. Bergeret thought to himself:
“As soon as I leave this fellow with his limited, boorish ideas, I
shall be once more alone in the desert waste of this hateful town. It
will be wretched.”
And his feet remained glued to the sharp stones of the square, whilst
the wind made his ears burn.
“I will walk back with you as far as your door,” said the archivist of
the department.
Then they walked on side by side, bowing from time to time to
fellow-citizens who hurried along in their Sunday clothes, carrying
dolls and bags of sweets.
“This Countess de Gromance,” said the archivist, “was a Chapon.
There was never but one Chapon heard of—her father, the most arrant
skinflint in the province. But I have hunted up the record of the
Gromance family, who belong to the lesser nobility of the place. There
was a Demoiselle Cécile de Gromance who in 1815 gave birth to a child
by a Cossack father. That will make a capital subject for an article in
a local paper. I am writing a regular series of them.”
M. Mazure spoke the truth: every day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in
his dusty garret under the roof of the prefecture, he eagerly ransacked
the six hundred and thirty-seven thousand pigeonholes which were there
huddled together. His gloomy hatred of his fellow-townsmen drove him to
this research, merely in the hope that he would succeed in unearthing
some scandalous facts about the most respected families in the
neighbourhood. Amid piles of ancient parchments and papers stamped by
the registrars of the last two centuries with the arms of six kings,
two emperors and three republics he used to sit, laughing in the midst
of the clouds of dust, as he stirred up the evidences, now half eaten
up by mice and worms, of bygone crimes and sins long since expiated.
As they followed the windings of the Tintelleries, it was with the
tale of these cruel revelations that he continued to entertain M.
Bergeret, a man who always cultivated an attitude of particular
indulgence towards our forefathers’ faults, and who was inquisitive
merely in the matter of their habits and customs. Mazure had, or so he
averred, discovered in the archives a certain Terremondre who, being a
terrorist and president of a local club of Sans-Culottes in 1793, had
changed his Christian names from Nicolas-Eustache to Marat-Peuplier.
Instantly Mazure hastened to supply M. Jean de Terremondre, his
colleague in the Archæological Society, who had gone over to the
monarchical and clerical party, with full information touching this
forgotten forbear of his, this Marat-Peuplier Terremondre, who had
actually written a hymn to Saint Guillotine. He had also unearthed a
great-great-uncle of the diocesan Vicar-General, a Sieur de Goulet, or
rather, more precisely, a Goulet-Trocard as he signed himself, who,
as an army contractor, was condemned to penal servitude in 1812 for
having supplied glandered horseflesh instead of beef. The documents
relating to this trial he had published in the most rabid journal in
the department. M. Mazure promised still more terrible revelations
about the Laprat family, revelations full of cases of incest; about
the Courtrai family, with one of its members branded for high treason
in 1814; about the Dellion family, whose wealth had been gained by
gambling in wheat; about the Quatrebarbe family, whose ancestors, two
stokers, a man and a woman, were hanged by lynch law on a tree on Duroc
Hill at the time of the consulate. In fact, as late as 1860, old people
were still to be met who remembered having seen in their childhood
the branches of an oak from which hung a human form with long, black,
floating tresses that used to frighten the horses.
“She remained hanging there for three years,” exclaimed the archivist,
“and she was own grandmother to Hyacinthe Quatrebarbe, the diocesan
architect!”
“It’s very singular,” said M. Bergeret, “but, of course, one ought to
keep that kind of thing to oneself.”
But Mazure paid no heed. He longed to publish everything, to
bruit everything abroad, in direct opposition to the opinion of
M. Worms-Clavelin, the _préfet_, who wisely said: “One ought most
carefully to avoid giving occasion to scandal and dissension.” He had
threatened, in fact, to get the archivist dismissed, if he persisted in
revealing old family secrets.
“Ah!” cried Mazure, chuckling in his tangled forest of beard, “it shall
be known that in 1815 there was a little Cossack who came into the
world through the exertions of a Demoiselle de Gromance.”
Only a moment since M. Bergeret had reached his own door, and he still
held the handle of the bell.
“What does it matter, after all?” said he. “The poor lady did what she
couldn’t help doing. She is dead, and the little Cossack also is dead.
Let us leave their memory in peace, or if we recall it for a moment,
let it be with a kindly thought. What zeal is it that so carries you
away, dear Monsieur Mazure?”
“The zeal for justice.”