He went away, begging his bread through the world.
He held out his hand to horsemen on the highways, approached the
harvesters with genuflexions, or remained motionless before the
barriers of courts; and his visage was so sad that they never refused
him alms.
In his humility he told his story; thereupon all fled from him,
crossing themselves. In the villages where he had already passed, as
soon as he was recognized, they shut the doors, shouted threats at
him, threw stones at him. The more charitable set a dish on their
window-sill, then closed the shutter so as not to see him.
Repulsed everywhere, he avoided men; and nourished himself with roots,
plants, wild fruits, and shell-fish which he sought along the shores.
Sometimes on turning a hill he would see below him a confusion of
crowded roofs, with stone spires, bridges, towers, black streets
crossing one another, whence a continual hum rose up to his ears.
The need of mingling with the existence of others would force him
to descend to the town. But the brutish air of the faces, the din
of occupations, the indifference of their talk, froze his heart. On
feast-days, when the great bell of some cathedral filled the whole
people with joy from break of day, he watched the inhabitants issuing
from their houses, then the dances in the squares, the fountains
running ale at the crossings, the damask hangings outside the lodgings
of princes, and at evening, through the panes of the ground-floors, the
long family tables, where grandparents held little children on their
knees; sobs choked him and he turned back to the country.
He contemplated with transports of love the foals in the pastures, the
birds in their nests, the insects on the flowers; at his approach all
fled farther away, hid themselves in alarm, flew off as fast as they
could.
He sought the solitudes again. But the wind brought what seemed groans
of death-agony to his ear; the tears of the dew falling to earth
recalled other drops of heavier weight to his mind. The sun showed like
blood in the clouds every evening; and every night, in a dream, his
parricide began anew.
He made himself a haircloth shirt with iron points. He climbed on his
two knees up every hill that had a chapel on its summit. But pitiless
thought obscured the splendours of the sanctuaries, and tortured him
amid the macerations of his penance.
He did not revolt against God who had inflicted this deed upon him, and
yet he was in despair to think that he could have wrought it.
His own person caused him such horror that he adventured himself in
perils in the hope of delivering himself from it. He saved paralytics
from fires, children from the bottom of gulfs. The abyss rejected him,
the flames spared him.
Time did not ease his sufferings. They became intolerable. He resolved
to die.
And one day that he found himself at the edge of a fountain, as he
stooped over it to judge the depth of the water, he saw facing him an
old man, all fleshless, with white beard and so lamentable an aspect
that he could not restrain his tears. The other wept also. Without
recognizing his own reflection, Julian had a confused remembrance of a
face that resembled it. He uttered a cry; it was his father; and he had
no more thought of killing himself.
So bearing about the burden of his memory he covered many countries;
and he arrived beside a river the crossing of which was dangerous
because of its violence, and because there was a great stretch of mud
on its banks. No one had dared to cross it for a long time.
An old boat, sunk by the stern, reared its prow among the reeds. On
examining it, Julian discovered a pair of oars; and the thought struck
him to employ his existence in the service of others.
He began by establishing a sort of causeway on the bank, which would
permit of descending to the channel; and he broke his nails dislodging
enormous stones, thrust his stomach against them to move them, slid in
the mud, sunk in it, all but perished several times.
Then he repaired the boat with some wreckage, and built himself a cabin
with clay and tree-trunks.
When the ferry became known, travellers presented themselves. They
summoned him from the other bank by waving flags; Julian quickly sprang
into his boat. It was very heavy; and they overloaded it with all sort
of baggage and bundles, not to speak of the beasts of burden, which,
plunging with terror, increased the encumbrance. He asked nothing for
his trouble; some gave him scraps of victuals that they took from
their wallets, or worn-out clothes that they no longer wanted. Rough
characters vociferated blasphemies. Julian reproached them gently, and
they retorted with insults. He contented himself with blessing them.
A little table, a stool, a bed of dead leaves and three earthenware
cups, that was all his furniture. Two holes in the wall served for
windows. On one side, as far as the eye could reach, extended sterile
plains with pale meres on their surface here and there; and in front
of him the great river rolled its greenish waves. In spring the humid
earth had an odour of rottenness. Then a wanton wind would raise the
dust in clouds. It came in everywhere, muddied the water, crunched
under his teeth. A little later, there were clouds of mosquitoes,
whose trumpeting and stinging never ceased day or night. Next came
cruel frosts, which gave things the rigidity of stone and caused a mad
longing to eat flesh.
Months passed without Julian seeing any person. Often he closed his
eyes, trying by way of memory to return to his youth;--and a castle
yard appeared with greyhounds in a porch, serving-men in the hall, and
beneath an arbour of vines a fair-haired youth between an old man in
furs and a lady with a great head-dress; all at once the two corpses
were there. He threw himself flat on his face upon his bed and weeping
repeated:
“Ah, poor father! poor mother! poor mother!” and fell into a swoon in
which the doleful visions continued.
* * * * *
One night as he slept he thought he heard some one calling him. He
listened intently and could make out nothing but the roaring of the
waves. But the same voice repeated:
“Julian!”
It came from the other side, which seemed extraordinary, considering
the breadth of the river.
A third time the call came:
“Julian!”
And the loud voice had the tone of a church-bell.
Lighting his lantern he went out of his cabin. A furious hurricane
filled the night. The darkness was profound, rent here and there by the
whiteness of leaping waves.
After a moment’s hesitation, Julian unfastened the moorings. The water
immediately became calm, the boat glided upon it and touched the other
bank, where a man was waiting.
He was wrapped in a tattered sheet, his face like a plaster mask, and
his two eyes redder than coals. On holding his lantern to him, Julian
saw that he was covered with a hideous leprosy; yet he had in his
bearing a sort of kingly majesty.
As soon as he entered the boat, it sank prodigiously, crushed under his
weight; a shock sent it up again, and Julian began to row.
At each stroke of the oar the surge of the waves heaved up the bow.
The water, blacker than ink, rushed furiously past either side of the
planking. It scooped out abysses, it made mountains, and the skiff now
leaped up, now sank back into depths where it spun round, tossed about
by the wind.
Julian bent his back, stretched his arms, and taking a purchase with
his feet, came back, bending from his waist, in order to get more
power. The hail lashed his hands, the rain ran down his back, the
violence of the wind choked him, he halted. Then the boat was carried
away by the current. But, comprehending that some great thing was
afoot, some order which he durst not disobey, he took to his oars
again; and the creaking of the tholes broke on the clamour of the
tempest.
The little lantern burned in front of him. Birds flying past hid it at
intervals. But he saw always the eyes of the Leper, who sat up in the
stern immobile as a column.
And this lasted long, very long!
When they arrived in the cabin, Julian shut the door; and he saw him
sitting on the stool. The sort of shroud that covered him had fallen
to his haunches; and his shoulders, his chest, his meagre arms, were
hidden under patches of scaly pustules. Enormous wrinkles furrowed his
brow. Like a skeleton, he had a hole in place of a nose; and his bluish
lips gave out a breath as thick as a fog and nauseating.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
Julian gave him what he had, an old piece of bacon and the crusts of a
black loaf.
When he had devoured them, the table, the dish, and the haft of the
knife all bore the same marks as were to be seen on his body.
Next he said, “I’m thirsty!”
Julian went to get his pitcher; and as he took it an aroma came from it
which made his heart swell and his nostrils dilate, it was wine; what
a find! But the Leper put out his arm and emptied the whole pitcher at
one draught.
Then he said, “I’m cold!”
With his candle Julian set light to a bundle of fern in the middle of
the hut.
The Leper went to it to warm himself; and, squatted on his heels, he
trembled in every limb, became weaker; his eyes no longer shone, his
sores ran, and in a voice almost inaudible he murmured:
“Your bed!”
Julian aided him gently to drag himself to it, and even spread over
him, to cover him, the sail of his boat.
The Leper groaned. The corners of his mouth exposed his teeth, a
quicker rattle shook his breast, and at each breath his belly sank in
to his backbone.
Then he closed his eyelids.
“My bones are like ice! Come beside me!”
And Julian, lifting up the canvas, lay down on the dead leaves, beside
him.
The Leper turned his head.
“Undress yourself, so that I can have the warmth of your body!”
Julian stripped off his garments, then, naked as at the day of his
birth, got into bed again, and against his thigh he felt the Leper’s
skin, colder than a serpent and rough as a file.
He tried to cheer him, and the other answered panting:
“Ah, I am dying!... Come close to me, warm me! No, not with your hands!
No, with your whole body!”
Julian stretched himself full length upon him, mouth against mouth and
breast against breast.
Then the Leper caught him in his embrace, and his eyes all at once
assumed the brightness of stars; his hair lengthened out like sunbeams,
the breath of his nostrils had the sweetness of roses; a cloud of
incense rose from the hearth; the waves sang. There at a fulness of
delight, a joy more than human, descended like a flood upon Julian’s
fainting soul; and he whose arms clasped him grew greater and greater;
till he touched either wall of the hut with his head and feet. The
roof flew off, the firmament opened wide,--and Julian mounted up to
the azure spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who bore him away
into Heaven.
* * * * *
Such is the story of Saint Julian Hospitator, almost exactly as it is
to be seen in a church-window in my native province.
THE GATE-KEEPER
FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
Her Majesty the Queen of Bohemia--for story-tellers there will always
be a kingdom of Bohemia--is travelling in the strictest and most
modest incognito, under the name of the Comtesse des Sept-Châteaux and
accompanied only by the old Baroness de Georgenthal, her reader, and
General Horschowitz, her gentleman in waiting.
In spite of their hot-water pans and furs, it has been cold all the
time in their reserved compartment, and when the Queen, tired of her
English novel, or fidgetted by the general’s knitting--for the general
knits--wished to look out at the landscape white with snow, she was
forced to rub a moment with her handkerchief on the carriage-window,
which the frost covered with sparkling crystals and delicate ferns of
ice. It is a singular caprice indeed that her Majesty has had, and well
worthy of a twenty-year-old head, to set out for Paris in mid-winter,
there to meet her mother, the Queen of Moravia, though she had arranged
to see her at Prague next spring. In spite of that, she must needs
start on her journey in ten degrees below zero, the baroness has had
to shake up her old rheumatic bones, the general, in despair, has
left a magnificent bedspread behind him that he was busy knitting for
his daughter-in-law, taking nothing with him to beguile the tedium of
the journey but material for a modest pair of worsted stockings. The
journey has been bad; all Europe is covered with snow, and they have
come half-way across, with many delays and difficulties, on railways
where the service is disorganized by the severity of the season. At
last the end is coming near; this evening, at nine o’clock, they have
dined in the refreshment room at Mâcon, and now, though to-night the
foot-warmers are once more barely lukewarm, and outside the great
flakes whirl in the darkness, the baroness and the general, slumbering
under their furred mantles and their rugs, dream in their corners of
their arrival and their stay in Paris, where the good lady will be
able to fulfil a special little piece of devotion, and where the old
campaigner will betake himself without delay to a certain wool-shop in
the Rue Saint-Honoré, the only one where he can match his green skeins
to his satisfaction.
As for the Queen, she is not sleeping.
Feverish and shivering in her great blue-fox pelisse, her elbow in the
padded rest, and her hand clenched amid the disorder of her magnificent
straw-coloured hair which escapes from her smart travelling toque,
she is reflecting, her great eyes open in the half-shadow, listening
mechanically to the vague and distant music that the tired ears of
travellers fancy they hear in the iron gallop of an express. She
reviews in memory all her existence, poor young Queen, and she reflects
that she is very unhappy.
* * * * *
First she sees herself again as the little princess with red hands
and a flat waist, beside her twin sister, the one who is married far
away in the North, her sister whom she loved so, and who resembled
her so closely that when they were dressed alike they had to have
different-coloured bows put in their hair to distinguish them. That was
before the rising had overthrown her parents’ throne; and she loved the
calm, sleepy atmosphere of the little court of Olmutz, where etiquette
was tempered with homeliness; that was the time when her father, the
good King Louis V., who has since died in exile of a broken heart,
used to take her for a walk across the park, without laying aside
his court-suit and his stars, to drink coffee with her sister at
four o’clock in the afternoon, in a Chinese pavilion overrun with
convolvulus and virgin’s bower, from which the course of the river was
seen and the distant amphitheatre of the hills reddened by the autumn.
Then there was her marriage and the grand state-ball, on that lovely
night in July, when they heard through the open windows the murmur
ascending from the crowd that thronged the illuminated gardens. How
she trembled when she had been left alone for an instant in the
conservatory with the young King! Yet she loved him already, she had
always loved him from her first glimpse of him, when he had advanced,
the white aigrette in his busby, so elegant and supple in his blue
uniform all over diamonds, at each step jingling the curved gold spurs
on his little grey boots with a thousand folds. After the first waltz
Ottokar had taken her arm, and, caressing his long black moustache all
the time, had led her to the conservatory, had made her sit down under
a great palm, then, placing himself beside her and taking her hand
with the most noble ease, had said to her, looking her in the eyes,
“Princess, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” Then she had
blushed, bowed her head, and replied, repressing with one hand the mad
beating of her heart, “Yes, Sire!” while the furious violins of the
Hungarians attacked all together the first notes of the Czech March,
that sublime song of enthusiasm and triumph!
Alas, how quickly that happiness had taken wings! Six months of error
and illusion, barely six months, and then, one day, when soon to become
a mother, a brutal chance had informed her that she had been deceived,
that the King did not love her, never had loved her, that the very
day after his marriage he had supped with La Gazella, the _première
danseuse_ at the Prague Theatre, a common strumpet. And that was not
all! She had then learned what every one knew but herself, Ottokar’s
old liaison with the Comtesse de Pzibrann, by whom he had three
children, whom he had never quitted amid a hundred passing fancies, and
whom he had had the audacity to make first lady in waiting to his wife.
At one blow the Queen’s love was killed, that frail and timid love
which she had never dared to avow to her husband, and which she now
compared to the pet bird that she had smothered when she was a little
girl through closing her hand suddenly at the noise of a Chinese vase
broken by a housemaid.
Her son! To be sure she had a son, and she loved him; but, dreadful
thought, very often, when seated beside the gilded cradle adorned
with the royal crown in which her little Ladislas was sleeping, the
Queen had felt an icy pang shoot through her heart as she looked at
the child, begotten by a man who had cruelly, cynically outraged her.
Besides, she never had him to herself, at least to herself alone.
Things were not as they had been at home with her good parents, whom--a
fresh grief--a revolution had lately driven far away, and everything in
this old-fashioned and pompous court of Bohemia was done according to
the laws of the most rigid ceremonial. A whole swarm of duennas and dry
nurses, ancient ladies with grand airs and imposing head-gear, bustled
about the royal cradle, and, when the Queen went to look at her son and
embrace him, they would say to her solemnly, “His Highness was coughing
a little during the night.... His Highness’s teeth are troubling
him....” And she felt as if the icy breaths of those women blew on her
mother’s heart to freeze it and extinguish it.
Ah, she was indeed helpless, poor Queen, and life was too cruel!
So sometimes, giving way to vexation and weariness, she obtained
permission from the King to go and see the Queen of Moravia, a refugee
in France; she escaped away, she stole out as if from a prison--alone,
for tradition forbade the Heir Apparent to travel without his
father--and she hastened to pour out all her tears, with her arms round
the neck of her grey-haired mother.
This time she had left suddenly, without asking permission, and after
a hasty kiss on the brow of the sleeping Ladislas; for she was almost
mad with disgust and shame. The King’s debauchery was becoming more
notorious every day; he now had establishments and families in all the
towns of Bohemia, at all his hunting-resorts. It was food for derision
everywhere, and satirical verses were sung in the streets of Prague,
asking what was to become of this illegitimate race, and if Ottokar,
like Augustus the Strong in his day, would not form a squadron of Life
Guards from his bastards. To meet the expense of such a warren, the
King was turning everything into money, was exhausting and burdening
the state. The trade in decorations was particularly scandalous, and a
case was quoted of a tailor in Vienna who had made a fortune by selling
connoisseurs of foreign crosses, for five hundred florins, black coats,
in the pocket and button-hole of which the purchaser found the diploma
and ribbon of Bohemia’s most illustrious order, a military order that
dates back to the Thirty Years’ War.
* * * * *
But what is the matter? For the last minute the train has been slowing
down; it stops. What is the meaning of this halt in the open country,
at dead of night? The general and the baroness have waked up, much
alarmed; and the gentleman in waiting, having let down the window,
leans out into the darkness, and, see, the guard’s lamp, who was
running alongside the carriages in the snow, stops, is raised, and all
at once illumines the general’s long, white, bristling moustache and
his otter cap.
“What’s the matter? What’s the reason of this stoppage?” asks old
Horschowitz.
“The matter is, sir, that we are held up for an hour at least.... Two
feet of snow! No way of getting further!... The Parisians will have to
do without their coffee to-morrow.”
“What? An hour to wait here, in this weather!... You know that the
foot-warmers are cold....”
“What can we do, sir?... They have just telegraphed to Tonnerre for a
gang to clear the line.... But, I repeat, we’re here for an hour at
least.”
And the man goes off with his lamp toward the engine.
“But this is abominable! Your Majesty will catch cold!” chirps the
baroness.
“Yes, I do feel cold,” says the Queen, with a shiver.
The general divines that now is the moment to be heroic; he jumps down
to the rails, sinks knee-deep in the snow and overtakes the man with
the lamp. He says something to him in an undertone.
“I don’t care though it was the Grand Mogul, I couldn’t do anything,”
answers the railwayman. “However, we are opposite a gate-keeper’s
house, there should be a fire there.... And if the lady cares to get
down.... Hey, Sabatier!...”
A second lamp comes up.
“Just go and see if there is a fire in the gate-keeper’s house.”
By great good-fortune there is. The general is happier than if he
had won a battle or finished the last strip of his famous knitted
bedspread. He returns to the Queen’s compartment, announces the result
of his exertions, and, an instant afterwards, the three travellers,
with much stamping of feet to shake off the snow that has gathered
under their shoes, are in the low room of the tiny house, where the
gate-keeper, who has just let them in and has kept on his goatskin,
kneels in front of the fire and puts dead wood on the fire-dogs.
The Queen, seated in front of the cheerful blaze, has thrown her
pelisse over the back of her straw-bottomed chair; she has taken off
her long suède gloves to warm her hands, and is looking about her.
It is a peasant’s room. The floor is hard and uneven underfoot; bunches
of onions hang from the smoky beams; there is an old poacher’s gun on
two nails over the fire-place, and some flowered dishes on the dresser.
The general has just made a wry face on catching sight of two Épinal
pictures fastened to the wall with pins: the portrait of M. de Thiers,
decorated with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, and that of
Garibaldi in a red shirt. But what attracts the young Queen’s attention
is, beside the great bed, and half hidden by the curtains of striped
calico, a wicker cradle, from which the whimpering of a waking child
has just sounded.
In a moment the gate-keeper has left his fire and has gone to the
cradle, and there he is rocking it gently.
“Go bye-bye, my biddie, go bye-bye! It’s nothing, it’s friends of papa.”
He looks a good father, the man in the goatskin, with his bald Saint
Peter’s pate, his fierce old soldier’s moustache, and the two great,
sad wrinkles in his cheeks.
“Is that your little girl?” the Queen asks him, interested.
“Yes, ma’am, she’s my Cecily.... She’ll be three years old next month.”
“But ... her mother?” Her Majesty asks with some hesitation, and, as
the man shakes his head, “you are a widower?”
But he makes another sign of negation. At that the Queen, greatly
moved, rises, goes to the cradle, and looks at Cecily, who has fallen
asleep again, tenderly clasping to her heart a little pasteboard poodle.
“Poor child!” she murmurs.
“Don’t you think, ma’am,” the gate-keeper thereupon says in a hoarse
voice, “don’t you think that a mother must be very heartless to leave
her daughter at that age? As for her leaving me, after all, that is
partly my fault.... I was wrong to marry a wife too young for me, wrong
to let her go to town, where she made undesirable acquaintances. But to
leave this darling!... Is it not a scandal?... Well, well, I’ll have to
rear her all by myself, poor little brat!... It’s difficult, I can tell
you, because of my duties.... At night I have often to leave her there
screaming and crying, when I hear the train whistle.... But in the
day-time, you see, I carry her about with me, and she is quite used to
it already, the darling, she’s not afraid of the railway now.... Why,
yesterday I held her in my left arm, while I held out my flag with my
right. Well, she did not even tremble when the express passed.... What
bothers me most, you know, is sewing her dresses and bonnets. It’s a
good thing that I’ve been a corporal in the Zouaves in my day, and know
a little about needles and thread.”
“But, my poor man,” replies the Queen, “that is a very difficult
task.... See here, I should like to help you.... There must be a
village in the neighbourhood, and in that village some respectable
people who would undertake to look after your little girl.... If it’s
only a question of money....”
But the gate-keeper shook his head again.
“No, ma’am, no, thank you kindly. I am not proud, and I would
cheerfully accept any offer of help for my little Cecily ... but I will
never part from her ... never, not even for an hour!”
“But why?”
“Why?” the man answered in a sad tone. “Because I will trust no one but
myself to make the child what her mother has not been ... a good woman!
But excuse me, would you be so kind as rock Cecily for a little?... I’m
wanted on the line.”
Will it ever be known what the young Queen of Bohemia thought about
that winter night when she nursed a poor gate-keeper’s child for a
whole hour, while the general and the baroness, whose help she had
refused, sat mightily offended by the fire? When the guard opened the
door and called, “Come, ladies and gentlemen, the express is about
to start again ... all aboard!” the Queen laid her purse well filled
with gold, and the bunch of violets from her waist, on little Cecily’s
cradle, then she climbed back into the carriage.
But her Majesty spent only two days in Paris; she went back at once
to Prague, from which she is scarcely ever absent now, and where she
devotes herself entirely to her son’s education. The governesses with
thirty quarterings who used to cast the shadow of their funereal
head-gear over the infancy of the Heir Apparent have only sinecures
now. If there are still kings in Europe when little Ladislas has grown
up, he will be what his father has not been, a good king. At five years
of age he is already very popular, and when he travels with his mother
on those dear Bohemian railways that crawl like four-wheelers, and when
he sees from the window of the saloon-carriage a gate-keeper carrying
a baby on one arm and presenting his little flag with the other, the
royal child, to whom his mother has made a sign, always throws him a
kiss.
MADEMOISELLE PERLE
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
I
What a strange notion indeed of mine to choose Mademoiselle Perle for
queen this evening.
Every year I go to my old friend Chantal’s for Twelfth-night. My
father, whose most intimate friend he was, used to take me there when a
child. I have kept up the custom, and no doubt will continue to keep it
up as long as I live, and as long as there is a Chantal in this world.
The Chantals, I ought to say, lead a singular existence: they live at
Paris as if they were at Grasse, Yvetot, or Pont-à-Mousson.
They have a house with a small garden near the Observatory. There they
live their own life as if they were in the country. Of Paris, the real
Paris, they have no knowledge and no suspicion: they are so far, far
away from it! Sometimes, however, they take a journey, a long journey,
there. Madame Chantal goes to lay in supplies, as they say in the
family. This is how they lay in supplies.
Mademoiselle Perle, who keeps the keys of the pantry-presses (for the
linen-presses are administered by the mistress of the house herself),
Mademoiselle Perle notices that the sugar is running down, that the
preserves are exhausted, that there is not much more left at the bottom
of the coffee-sack.
Thus warned against famine, Madame Chantal inspects the remains, and
takes notes in a note-book. Then, when she has written a great many
figures, she plunges first into long calculations, then into long
discussions with Mademoiselle Perle. The upshot of it is, however,
that they come to an agreement and settle upon the quantities of each
article that they will provide for a quarter, sugar, rice, prunes,
coffee, preserves, tins of green peas, of haricot beans, of lobster,
salt and smoked fish, and so on, and so on.
This done, they fix the day for their shopping, and set out in a cab, a
cab with a rail, to a biggish grocer, whose shop is across the bridges,
in the new districts.
Madame Chantal and Mademoiselle Perle make this expedition in company,
mysteriously, and come home at dinner-time quite exhausted, though
still excited, and shaken up in the cab, the top of which is covered
with parcels and bags, like a removal van.
For the Chantals all Paris on the other side of the Seine is the new
districts, districts inhabited by a strange population, noisy, not too
honest, that passes its days in dissipation, its nights in feasting,
and makes ducks and drakes of its money. Nevertheless the young ladies
are now and again taken to the theatre, the Opéra-Comique or the
Théâtre Français, when the piece is approved by the newspaper that M.
Chantal reads.
The young ladies are now nineteen and seventeen years old; they are two
pretty girls, tall and fresh, very well brought up, too well brought
up, so well brought up that they pass unnoticed like two pretty dolls.
It would never enter my head to pay attentions or to pay court to
Mesdemoiselles Chantal: one scarcely dares to speak of them, they seem
so immaculate, and as for bowing to them, one almost fears he is taking
a liberty.
As for their father, he is a charming man, very well informed, very
frank, very cordial, but whose one desire is repose and peace and
quietness, and who is largely responsible for thus mummifying his
family in order to live as he desires in stagnant immobility. He reads
a great deal, is fond of conversation, is easily touched. The absence
of all contact, elbowing and collisions has made him very sensitive and
thin-skinned. The least thing excites him, agitates him, and hurts him.
Yet the Chantals do have some acquaintances, but restricted
acquaintances, carefully selected in their neighbourhood. They also
exchange two or three annual visits with some relatives who live at a
distance.
As for me, I dine with them on the 15th of August and on Twelfth-night.
The latter is part of my duty, like a Catholic’s Easter communion.
On the 15th of August some friends are invited, but on Twelfth-night I
am the only guest.