Under the supervision of Mademoiselle Zoe, the professor’s furniture
was packed and taken to the railway station.
During the days of the removal Riquet roamed sadly through the
devastated rooms. He regarded Zoe and Pauline with suspicion, as
their arrival had been closely followed by the complete upheaval of
his formerly peaceful home. The tears of old Angélique, who wept all
day long in her kitchen, increased his depression. His most cherished
habits were set at naught; the strange, ill-clad, fierce and insulting
men troubled his repose; they even went so far as to enter the kitchen
and kick away his plate of food and bowl of fresh water. Chairs were
taken from him as soon as he lay upon them, and carpets were abruptly
dragged from beneath his persecuted body, so that in his own home he no
longer knew where to lay his head.
To his honour be it said that at first he had sought to resist. When
the water-tank was removed he had barked furiously at the enemy, but
no one heeded the alarm. No one gave him any encouragement; nay, he
was, indeed, actually opposed. “Be quiet,” rapped out Mademoiselle Zoe,
and Pauline had added, “Riquet, you are perfectly absurd!”
Thenceforth he decided not to waste his time in giving warnings that
fell on deaf ears or to labour unaided for the common good, and he
grieved silently over the ruined house, and wandered from room to
room vainly seeking a little peace. When the pantechnicon men entered
the room in which he had taken refuge he would prudently hide beneath
some table or sideboard which had not yet been taken away. But this
precaution was more harmful than helpful to him, for presently the
piece of furniture tottered above him, rose, and fell again, creaking
ominously and threatening to crush him. With bristling coat and haggard
features he took to his heels only to seek another place of refuge as
precarious as the last.
But these material inconveniences, nay, these perils, were trifling
matters in comparison with the pain that filled his heart. It was his
_moral_, so to speak, that was most affected.
To him the articles of furniture were not inanimate objects but living
and kindly beings, favourable _genii_ whose departure was a presage of
dire misfortune. Dishes and frying-pans, saucepans and sugar-basins,
all the divinities of the kitchen; arm-chairs, carpets, cushions, all
the fetishes of the fireside, his Lares and his household gods, had
disappeared. He did not believe that so great a disaster could ever be
made good, and his little soul grieved over it to the very limit of its
capacity. Happily, like the human soul, it was easily distracted and
quick to forget its woes. During the lengthy absences of the thirsty
removers, when old Angélique’s broom stirred up the ancient dust upon
the floor, Riquet scented the smell of mice, or watched a scurrying
spider, and his fickle fancy was diverted awhile; but he soon relapsed
into melancholy.
On the day of departure, seeing that matters were growing worse from
hour to hour, he was utterly miserable. It seemed to him a peculiarly
ominous thing that they should thrust the linen into dismal-looking
chests. Pauline was packing her own boxes with joyful eagerness. He
turned from her as though she were doing an evil thing, and huddled
against the wall. “The worst has come,” he thought. “This is the end of
all things!”
Whether he believed that things ceased to exist when he saw them no
longer, or whether he was only anxious to avoid a painful spectacle,
he was careful not to look in Pauline’s direction. As she went to and
fro she chanced to notice Riquet’s attitude, and its melancholy struck
her as comical. Laughing, she called him: “Here, Riquet, here!” But he
would neither stir from his corner nor turn his head. He hadn’t at that
moment the heart to caress his young mistress, and a secret instinct, a
kind of foreboding, warned him not to go too near to the gaping trunk.
Pauline called him several times, and as he did not respond she went
over to him and picked him up in her arms.
“How miserable we are!” she said. “How much to be pitied!”
Her tone was ironical; Riquet did not understand irony. He lay
motionless and dejected in her arms, feigning to see nothing, to hear
nothing.
“Look at me, Riquet!” she demanded. Three times she bade him look at
her, but in vain. Then, simulating violent anger, she threw him into
the trunk, crying, “In you go, stupid!” and banged the lid on him. At
that moment her aunt called her, and she went out of the room, leaving
Riquet in the trunk.
He felt exceedingly uneasy, for it never entered his head that Pauline
had put him there for fun, and merely to tease him. Judging that his
position was quite bad enough already, he endeavoured not to aggravate
it by thoughtless behaviour. For some moments, therefore, he remained
motionless without even drawing a breath. Then, feeling that no fresh
disaster threatened him, he thought he had better explore his gloomy
prison. He pawed the petticoats and chemises upon which he had been so
cruelly precipitated, seeking some outlet by which he might escape. He
had been busy for two or three minutes when Monsieur Bergeret, who was
getting ready to go out, called him:
“Riquet! Riquet! Here! we’re going to the bookshop to say good-bye to
Paillot! Here! Where are you?”
Monsieur Bergeret’s voice comforted Riquet greatly. He replied to it by
a desperate scratching at the wicker sides of the trunk.
“Where is the dog?” inquired Monsieur Bergeret of Pauline, who at that
moment returned, carrying a pile of linen.
“In my trunk, papa.”
“Why in the trunk?”
“Because I put him there.”
Monsieur Bergeret went up to the trunk, and remarked:
“It was thus that the child Comatas, who played upon the flute as he
kept his master’s goats, was imprisoned in a chest, where he was fed
on honey by the bees of the Muses. But not so with you, Riquet; you
would have died of hunger in this trunk, for you are not dear to the
immortal Muses.”
Having spoken, Monsieur Bergeret freed his little friend, who with
wagging tail followed him as far as the hall. Then a thought appeared
to strike him. He returned to Pauline’s room, ran to her and jumped up
against her skirt, and only when he had riotously embraced her as a
sign of his adoration did he rejoin his master on the stairs. He would
have felt that he was lacking in wisdom and piety had he failed to
bestow these tokens of affection on a being whose power had plunged him
into the depths of a trunk.
Monsieur Bergeret thought Paillot’s shop a dismal, ugly place. Paillot
and his assistant were busy “calling over” the list of goods supplied
to the Communal School. This task prevented him from prolonging his
farewell to the professor. He had never had very much to say for
himself and as he grew older he was gradually losing the habit of
speech. He was weary of selling books; he saw that it was all over with
the trade and was longing for the time to come when he could give up
his business and retire to his place in the country, where he always
spent his Sundays.
As was his wont, Monsieur Bergeret made for the corner where the
old books were kept and took down volume XXXVIII of _The World’s
Explorers_. The book opened as usual at pages 212 and 213, and once
more he perused these uninspiring lines:
“... towards a northerly passage. ‘It was owing to this check,’
said he, ‘that we were able to revisit the Sandwich Islands
and enrich our voyage by a discovery which, although the last,
seems in many respects to be the most important which has yet
been made by Europeans in the whole extent of the Pacific
Ocean.’ The happy anticipations which these words appeared to
announce were, unhappily, not realized....”
These lines, which he was reading for the hundredth time, and which
reminded him of so many hours of his commonplace and laborious
existence, which was embellished, nevertheless, by the fruitful labours
of the mind; these lines, for whose meaning he had never sought,
filled him, on this occasion, with melancholy and discouragement, as
though they contained a symbol of the emptiness of all human hopes,
an expression of the universal void. He closed the book, which he had
opened so often and was never to open again, and dejectedly left the
shop.
In the Place Saint-Exupère he cast a last glance at the house of Queen
Marguerite. The rays of the setting sun gleamed upon its historic
beams, and in the violent contrast of light and shade the escutcheon
of Philippe Tricouillard proudly displayed the outlines of its gorgeous
coat of arms, placed there as an eloquent example and a reproach to the
barren city.
Having re-entered the empty house, Riquet pawed his master’s legs,
looking up at him with his beautiful sorrowing eyes, that said: “You,
formerly so rich and powerful, have you, O master, become poor? Have
you grown powerless? You suffer men clad in filthy rags to invade your
study, your bedroom and your dining-room, to fall upon your furniture
and drag it out of doors. They drag your deep arm-chair down the
stairs, your chair and mine, in which we sat to rest every evening,
and often in the morning, side by side. In the clutch of these ragged
men I heard it groan, that chair which is so great a fetish and so
benevolent a spirit. And you never resisted these invaders. If you have
lost all the _genii_ that used to fill your house, even to the little
divinities, that you used to put on your feet every morning when you
got out of bed, those slippers which I used to worry in my play, if you
are poor and miserable, O my master, what will become of me?”
“Lucien, we have no time to lose,” said Zoe. “The train goes at eight
and we have had no dinner. Let us go and dine at the station.”
“To-morrow you will be in Paris,” said Monsieur Bergeret to Riquet.
“Paris is a famous and a generous city. To be honest, however, I must
point out that this generosity is not vouchsafed alike to all its
inhabitants. On the contrary, it is confined to a very small number of
its citizens. But a whole city, a whole nation resides in the few who
think more forcefully and more justly than the rest. The others do not
count. What we call the spirit of a race attains consciousness only
in imperceptible minorities. Minds which are sufficiently free to rid
themselves of vulgar terrors and discover for themselves the veiled
truths are rare in any place!”