Events followed their due course. Monsieur Bergeret continued to look
for a flat; it was his sister who found one. Thus the positive mind
has the advantage over the speculative mind. It must be admitted that
Mademoiselle Bergeret made an excellent choice. She was lacking neither
in experience of life nor in common sense. Having been a governess, she
had lived in Russia, and had travelled about Europe. She had observed
the manners and customs of the different nations. She knew the world,
and that helped her to know Paris.
“That’s it,” she said to her brother, stopping before a new house
overlooking the Luxembourg garden.
“The stairs look decent enough,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “but it’s
rather a stiff climb.”
“Nonsense, Lucien. You are quite young enough to go up five short
flights of stairs without getting exhausted.”
“Do you really think so?” said Lucien, flattered.
She was careful to point out that the stair-carpet ran right to the
top of the house, and he smilingly accused her of being susceptible to
trifling vanities.
“But it is possible,” he added, “that I myself should feel slightly
offended were the carpet to stop short at the floor below ours. We
profess to be wise, but we still have our weak points. That reminds
me of what I noticed yesterday, after lunch, as I was passing a
church. The outer steps were covered with a red carpet which had been
trodden, after the ceremony, by the guests at some great wedding. A
working-class couple with their party were waiting for the last of the
wealthy company to leave so that they might enter the church. They
were laughing at the idea of climbing the steps upon this unexpected
splendour. The little bride’s white feet were already on the edge of
the carpet when the beadle waved her away. The men in charge of the
trappings of the wealthy wedding slowly rolled up the carpet of honour,
and only when it formed a huge cylinder did they allow the humble
wedding party to mount the bare steps. I stood for a moment and watched
the worthy folk, who seemed greatly amused by the incident. Humble
folk surrender with admirable equanimity to social inequality, and
Lamennais was quite right to say ‘that the whole social order rests on
the resignation of the poor.’”
“Here we are,” said Mademoiselle Bergeret.
“I’m out of breath,” remarked Monsieur Bergeret.
“Because you would talk,” replied Mademoiselle Bergeret. “You shouldn’t
tell anecdotes while you are going upstairs.”
“After all,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “it is the common destiny of men
of learning to live close under the roof. Science and meditation are
often hidden away in garrets, and when we come to think of it, no
marble hall is worth an attic filled with beautiful thoughts.”
“This room,” replied Mademoiselle Bergeret, “is not a garret. It is
lighted by a big window and is to be your study.”
On hearing this, Monsieur Bergeret looked at the four walls in alarm,
like a man on the brink of a precipice.
“What is the matter?” asked his sister uneasily.
But he did not reply. The little square room, hung with light paper,
seemed to him dark with the unknown future. He entered with a slow and
fearful step as though he were entering upon a hidden destiny. Then,
measuring on the floor the position of his work-table, he said:
“I shall sit there. It is a mistake to be too sentimental over the past
and the future. They are nothing but abstract ideas, which were not
originally possessed by primitive man; he acquired them only after long
effort, to his great misfortune. The thought of the past in itself is
sufficiently painful. I do not think anyone would be willing to begin
life again if he had to go over precisely the same ground. That there
are delightful hours and exquisite moments I do not deny, but they
are pearls and precious stones sparsely sprinkled on the harsh and
dismal web of life. The course of the years is, for all its brevity,
of tedious slowness, and if it be sometimes sweet to remember it is
because we are able to make our minds dwell upon certain moments. And
even then the sweetness is pale and melancholy. As for the future, we
dare not look it in the face, so threatening is its gloomy countenance.
And when you told me a moment since, Zoe, that this was to be my study,
I saw myself in the future, and I could not bear the sight. I am not
without courage, I think, but I am given to reflection, and reflection
and fearlessness are not the best of friends.”
“The most difficult thing of all,” put in Zoe, “was to find three
bedrooms.”
“It is certain,” rejoined Monsieur Bergeret, “that humanity, in its
youth, did not conceive of the future and the past as we do. Now
these ideas that devour us have no reality outside ourselves. We
know nothing of life, and the theory of its development through time
is pure illusion. It is by some infirmity of our senses that we do
not see to-morrow realized as we see yesterday. We can very well
conceive of beings so organized as to be capable of the simultaneous
perception of phenomena which to us appear to be separated from one
another by an appreciable interval of time. We ourselves do not
perceive light and sound in the order of time. We ourselves take in at
a single glance, when we raise our eyes to the sky, aspects which are
by no means contemporaneous. The beams of light from the stars seem
indistinguishable to our eyes, yet they mingle in them, in a fraction
of a second, centuries and thousands of centuries. With instruments
other than those we now possess we might see ourselves lying dead in
the very midst of our own life. For, as time does not in reality exist,
and as the succession of facts is only an appearance, all facts are
realized simultaneously and there is no such thing as the future. The
future has already been; we merely discover it. Now, perhaps, you have
some idea, Zoe, why I stopped short at the door of the room where I am
to live. Time is a pure idea, and space is no more real than time.”
“That may be,” remarked Zoe, “but it is very expensive in Paris at any
rate. You must have noticed that while you were house-hunting. I don’t
expect you care to see my room; come, Pauline’s will interest you more.”
“Let us go and see them both,” said Monsieur Bergeret, as he obediently
promenaded his animal mechanism through the little square rooms hung
with flowered paper, pursuing the course of his reflections the while.
“The savages,” he said, “make no distinction between past, present and
future. Languages, which are undoubtedly the oldest monuments of the
human race, permit us to go back to the days when our ancestors had not
yet accomplished this metaphysical operation. Monsieur Michel Bréal,
who has just published an admirable essay on the subject, shows that
the verb, so rich to-day in its resources for marking the priority of
an action, had originally no means of expressing the past, and in order
to perform this function forms were employed which implied a double
affirmation of the present.”
As he spoke, he returned to the room which was to be his study, which
had at first sight seemed, in its emptiness, to be filled with the
shadows of the ineffable future.
Mademoiselle Bergeret opened the window.
“Look, Lucien.”
And, seeing the bare tops of the trees, Monsieur Bergeret smiled.
“These black boughs,” he said, “will assume, in the timid April
sunlight, the purple hue of their buds; then they will break forth
into soft green foliage. That will be delightful. It will, indeed, be
charming. Zoe, you are full of wisdom and kindness, a worthy steward
and a most endearing sister. Let me kiss you.”
Monsieur Bergeret kissed his sister, repeating:
“You are a good creature, Zoe.”
And Mademoiselle Bergeret’s reply was:
“Our father and mother were both good.”
Monsieur Bergeret would have embraced her a second time, but she
protested:
“You’ll make my hair untidy, Lucien, and that I can’t bear.”
Monsieur Bergeret stretched out his hand as he stood by the open window.
“Look, Zoe, to the right. On the site of those ugly buildings used to
be the Pépinière. There, our elders have told me, was a maze of paths
bordered by green trelliswork windows among the shrubs. Our father used
to walk there when he was a young man. He used to read the philosophy
of Kant and the novels of George Sand, seated on a bench behind the
statue of Velléda. A dreaming Velléda, with hands folded over her
mystic sickle, and crossed legs, who was the object of much generous
and youthful adoration. The students used to sit at her feet discussing
love, justice and liberty. They did not enlist in those days in the
party of untruth, injustice and tyranny.
“The Empire destroyed the Pépinière. It was an evil deed, for there
is a soul even in inanimate things. The noble ideas of many young men
perished with the gardens. How many beautiful dreams and stupendous
hopes have taken shape under the shadow of Maindron’s romantic Velléda!
To-day our students have palaces with a bust of the President of the
Republic over the mantelpiece in the principal room. Who will restore
to them the winding alleys of the Pépinière, where they were wont
to discuss the establishment of peace and happiness and the liberty
of the world? Who will give back to them the garden where, amid the
joyous songs of the birds, they repeated the generous sayings of their
masters, Quinet and Michelet?”
“No doubt they were enthusiastic enough,” said Mademoiselle Bergeret,
“but in the end they became doctors and lawyers in their own provinces.
One must resign oneself to the mediocrity of life. You know well
enough, it is very difficult to live, and one must not expect too much
of one’s fellow-creatures. Anyhow, do you like the rooms?”
“Yes, and I’m sure Pauline will be delighted. She has a charming room.”
“She has, but young girls are never delighted with anything.”
“Pauline is not unhappy with us.”
“No, indeed. She is very happy, but she does not realize it.”
“I am going to the Rue Saint-Jacques,” announced Monsieur Bergeret, “to
ask Roupart to put up some shelves in my study.”