which Tem had neglected to mow, and there I lay, face downward, I know
not how long. All the garden enveloped me in perfume, and I breathed
the garden. The house, from its open windows, looked at me across the
grass, and I wept for the house. The strength of my love for the house
had been as unknown to me as my own heart.
It was a warm, still summer afternoon, full of the hum of insects
in the sunshine. Little by little I felt myself drowned in a soft
sweetness, as a fly is drowned in honey. And little by little I
became happy in spite of my pain. Later I came to know that debasing
consolation that comes to us from the beauty of the day, when death has
passed that way.
I fell asleep at last, like a baby in its tears. When I awoke evening
had come into the garden, noiselessly, and was hiding under the trees.
I got up and ran to seek it in the chestnut grove. The dinner bell rang
and I turned back. A quantity of things that I had never noticed before
impressed themselves upon my mind: the tone of the bell, the rosy tint
of the sky between the branches, the long sprays of clematis drooping
from the balcony, the lack of symmetry in the windows, and even the
creaking of the door as I pushed it open, though it must always have
creaked just so. With fierce ardour I was discovering all that I was
about to lose.
We could never get used to seeing without indignation, on returning
from school, the ill-omened bill that dishonoured the entrance. Tem
Bossette had not returned; we learned that he was drinking himself
drunk in all the wine-shops. Mimi Pachoux was working elsewhere; the
ship was leaking at every joint and the crew was escaping. Only the
long, woe-begone face of The Hanged occasionally showed itself here and
there like a sign of distress, or an abhorrent symbol of the evil fate
which was pursuing us.
“He is faithful,” Aunt Deen would say, overshadowing him with her
protection and aiding him in his work.
More faithful than he, and keeping vigilant guard over the menaced
home, she met us at the gate one day in an unusual state of agitation.
“I was watching for you, children,” she said, “to warn you.”
What was going on now? We were not kept long in ignorance.
“A wretch has come, a wretch from Paris (that was an aggravating
circumstance, for nothing good could come out of that notorious
Babylon, corrupt as it was and fit only for the flames), who has taken
upon himself to go through every part of the house, from cellar to
garret. Your father is going with him. I can’t imagine how he can keep
from throwing him out of window. He must have a patience quite beyond
me!”
We were thunderstruck. A stranger dared to come into our house! And
our father,--The Father--consented to escort him through it! Aunt Deen
might well be terrified: the laws of the universe were turned upside
down. As we followed her dejectedly into the house, with hanging heads
and shame-flushed cheeks, we came upon this visitor descending the
stairs on his way to the kitchen. He was loudly criticising, laying his
plans, estimating the size of the rooms, with manifold gesticulations,
as if already building a house of his own on the ruins of ours.
“The stairs are too narrow. The kitchen is out of proportion to the
other rooms; I shall convert it into a drawing-room.”
My father was showing him about politely, though without alacrity,
preserving a calm and distant manner that checked the loquacity of the
other when he turned to him, the better to set forth his plans. We went
straight up to mother’s room as to our natural refuge. Our mother,
who was kneeling at her faldstool, rose when she heard us coming. Her
emotion appeared in her face.
“God will protect us,” she said.
When she uttered the name of God she was, as it were, illumined.
At that moment I understood what it is to hate the foreigner--the
invader. My father’s subordination, my mother’s tears, and our house
trodden, judged, appraised, by a stranger--those are sights that I
can never forget. Later, when I read in my History of France that the
Allies had crossed the frontiers in 1814 and 1815, and had come and
encamped in our capital, when I learned that the Prussians had torn
Alsace and Lorraine from us, like a part of our very flesh, I had no
difficulty in giving material form to those past woes; I could most
distinctly see that gentleman who went from top to bottom of our house
as if he were at home.
“Why did you bow to him?” Aunt Deen asked grandfather, who came in with
his usual deliberate indifference.
“I am polite to every one.”
“One doesn’t compound with the enemy.”
How could our father, who was not generally considered easy-going, have
endured this outrage without faltering? He was in charge of our safety,
and the exercise of power imposes obligations which irresponsible folk
are apt to neglect. His good humour amazed us also on another occasion.
One day at table he suddenly said to mamma:
“Do you know what news is going about the town?”
“I have seen no one.”
“They say we are leaving town; the house being sold, we shall
disappear. Our pride would never endure a less conspicuous
establishment. And who do you suppose has spread the report? I give you
a thousand guesses. But no, you have too much faith in human goodness.
It is my beloved colleagues. They have discovered a practical method of
sharing my practice among them. One after another my patients ask, ‘Is
it true that you are going away? Stay with us! What will become of us?’
It is very touching. But I have reassured them.”
He laughed,--the hearty laugh of a man accustomed to the fray. We
were too young to perceive all the contempt and force that resounded
in this victorious laugh, which in our indignation almost scandalised
us. Especially Bernard and Louise, hasty and impressionable, protested
vehemently against the odious implication, though indeed their opinion
had not been asked. Our mother, even she, had blushed for the harm that
had been devised against us, and which she herself would never have
imagined. As for Aunt Deen, she doubled her fist at the enemy--“they”
indeed had at last been discovered:
“Oh, the monsters! I’m not a bit surprised. It would be no more than
they deserve if they were compelled to swallow all their own medicines.”
Her aspiration moved grandfather to hilarity. Till then he had been
passive, but he was too much the enemy of doctors not to relish his
sister’s prescription for vengeance.
It was she who, a few days later, told us of our deliverance. She had
placed herself outside of the gate, like an advanced sentinel, and
made to us from afar unintelligible signs, which as we drew near we
interpreted unfavourably. Assuredly the invader had taken possession of
the fortress. The house was sold. We had no longer a roof to shelter
us. As Tem had prophesied, we were good for nothing but to be thrown to
the dogs.
When we were within hearing distance she hailed us:
“Come quick, come quick! The house is ours! The house is ours!”
We rushed wildly forward.
“The bill isn’t there,” cried Bernard, who was ahead.
Only the marks of nails remained upon the pillar.
“Aha!” continued Aunt Deen’s voice, bursting out in a triumphant
cadence. “_They_ thought they had it! But they won’t get it!”
_They_ were no longer the doctors, but the gentleman from Paris
and other purchasers, who had appeared while we were in school. With
uplifted arm she sketched the flight of the dispersed troop.
With a step that was rapid in spite of her years she led us to the
music room where the family was assembled, with the exception of
grandfather, who no doubt had made no change in his hour of walking,
and who was probably ignorant of our salvation. Mariette followed us at
a respectful distance. Her long service gave her the right to a place
in the procession.
Our mother, deeply moved, was caressing the hair of my two elder
sisters, whom joy, like grief, had moved to tears. But I attached
no importance to the tears of my sisters, which used to flow for
nothing at all. My father standing, his hand upon the back of my
mother’s chair, was smiling. I had never seen his face so radiant, and
through the window, behind the group, the sun was coming in like a
distinguished guest.
“The bill isn’t there,” repeated Bernard without the usual greeting.
“Yes,” said our father; “we shall keep the house.”
And as our enthusiasm was about to burst forth, he added:
“You owe it to your mother and also to your Aunt Bernardine.”
The latter, whose parchment cheeks would crimson for no reason but that
some one spoke of her, while she kept neither her thoughts nor her
property for herself, and daily robbed herself as a matter of course,
stoutly refused all praise.
“How you talk, Michel! For nothing but a signature! You mustn’t mislead
these children.”
Mother at once approved:
“She is right; it is your father who has saved us all.”
And lowering her voice she turned to him, murmuring--but I heard her:
“Is not all that I have, yours?”
I paid little heed, I acknowledge, to this debate. Of course the
saving of the house was due solely to our father. How could our mother
and Aunt Been have helped? It had been necessary to throw out the
gentleman from Paris and the other invaders, as Ulysses on his return
to Ithaca had thrown out the lovers. That was an exercise of strength
which belonged only to a man. My notions of life were simple: the man
governed, the woman’s sole charge was of domestic matters. That Aunt
Deen had her rights, however diminished, in the building that “they”
were trying to get away from us I could never have understood, any more
than I could understand what a dowry was, and how the consent of the
wife was necessary to enable the husband to dispose of property.
Nevertheless I recalled the incident of the dressmaker. Mother had no
doubt made some savings in the matter of clothes and turned them in.
Does not every one make his contribution to the wars? I immediately
slipped out of the room and came back bringing the savings bank in
which I had been encouraged to drop such little sous as I received. I
expected an ovation for the magnanimity of my sacrifice. Without a word
I handed it to my father.
“What do you want me to do with it?” was all his response.
Somewhat abashed, being gazed upon by all present, I said, blushing
furiously:
“It is for the house.”
This time my father drew me to him and publicly gave me the
_accolade_ with the dazzling Order of the Day.
“This child will be our joy.”
Thus the Emperor rewarded his marshals on the field of battle; nothing
in history is surprising to one who has had a childhood like mine.
Coming in while the bell was ringing, grandfather was the last one to
learn what had happened. Aunt Deen informed him in a fiery harangue.
He heard her with interest but without emotion, his serenity all
undisturbed. And when the heroic story was finished he nodded his head,
vouchsafing merely the words of faint admiration:
“Well, well! so much the better!”
Things had been arranged with no help from him.
V
THE ABDICATION
IN the days that followed I came to understand by all sorts of small
tokens, not to speak of the remarks of servants, that the house no
longer belonged to grandfather, but to my parents, and that only a
simple formality remained to be accomplished for the treaty to be
final. Grandfather no longer having the responsibility--though in truth
the responsibility had never weighed heavily upon him--had no desire to
keep the honours of headship. More than once I heard father speaking to
him to the following effect:
“I do not want anything to be changed--I want everything to be as it
has always been--I want to take from you nothing but your cares.”
“Oho!” grandfather would reply with his little laugh, “you are lucky if
you know just what you want.”
And he would run his fingers carelessly through his beard, as if
nothing were worth any trouble. Still, a plan was simmering in his
mind, of which we were speedily advised. When once he had hold of an
idea nothing, neither entreaties nor protests, would induce him to let
it go. Aunt Deen’s tumultuous reproaches, father’s brief, clear-cut,
unanswerable arguments, mother’s entreaties,--he received them all
with equal tranquillity of temper and heeded none of them. From his
amiable and detached air one would have deemed him easily amenable to
persuasion, if it had not been for his wicked little laugh which upset
everything.
One fine morning we were all informed of his decision to give up the
room with two windows which he occupied in the very heart of the
house, which was vast, comfortable and easy to keep warm, and to take
possession of what?--no one could have guessed--the tower chamber!
This room had long been unoccupied, and all the winds of heaven blew
through it. No sooner had he made known his intention than the entire
household, after fruitless attempts to make him abandon his purpose,
must needs bend every nerve to help him move without delay. Without
waiting for any of us he was already leading the way to the staircase
laden with the most precious of his possessions.
“Wait at least until we sweep, clean and dust,” urged Aunt Deen, armed
with the wolf’s head.
“It’s not worth while,” he assured her. “One can live very comfortably
with spiders and dust.”
This scandal at least was avoided. Aunt Deen was ahead of him, and
he was obliged to have a few minutes’ patience, little as he liked
it; after which he resolutely laid hold of the bannister, bearing
his barometer, violin case and pipes. Down he came again for his
spy-glass. The rest of the removal did not interest him at all. His
clothes, linen and furniture might follow him or not, as it happened.
He showed his confidence in me by requesting me to carry a treatise on
astronomy, a volume about cryptograms, the coloured illustrations of
which I already knew, showing the principal species of mushrooms, and
another work which from its title I believed to be a book of devotion:
the “Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau”--I had almost forgotten
the “Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus,” and a collection of the “True
Limping Messenger of Berne and Vevey,” an almanac famous and precious
from every point of view, but chiefly for its meteorological bulletins.
For grandfather was greatly interested in the condition of the
atmosphere. He would snuff it up, so to speak, from his window morning
and night, at whatever risk of taking cold; and he was always observing
the movements of the clouds and the shining of the stars. He loved to
cite the authority of a certain Mathew de la Drôme, with whom he was
in correspondence, and whom we children had come to believe to be a
sorcerer or a mender of weather. He himself used to make forecasts--and
if you wanted to flatter him, you would ask him to predict the weather.
He was seldom mistaken, whether it was that luck was on his side or
that he really had rightly interpreted the direction of the winds. This
trivial reputation, which he enjoyed, seemed to make him one with the
mysterious laws of nature, whose oracles he uttered.
As soon as he had moved his books and instruments thither he found
himself at home in the tower chamber and declared himself pleased with
it. It had a view of the sky and at the same time of all four quarters
of the horizon; and would capture the slightest ray of the sun, from
whatsoever direction it might come. As for the direction of the wind,
that would be easily ascertained.
A great clatter informed him that his furniture was following him
upstairs. Aunt Deen was presiding over the removal in person, not
without mutterings and grumblings. With the bedside steps under one
arm, a bolster under the other, and a candle-stick in each hand, she
preceded, with stimulating remarks, a squad which followed in Indian
file, but without much team work in their manœuvres. Tem Bossette
came first with an easy chair on his head (he had consented to a
reconciliation, sealed by a bottle of red wine). Then appeared a
wardrobe oscillating on four legs, which on reaching the top of the
stairs were revealed as half belonging to The Hanged and half (the
smaller half) to Mimi Pachoux, whom also victory had recalled to the
fold.
“Upon my word,” said Aunt Deen to her brother during the defiling
of her troops, “I’d like to know why you couldn’t stay downstairs!
Hoisting all your things up this narrow staircase!”
And as grandfather indifferently acknowledged her remark merely by a
vague gesture she resorted next to sarcasm:
“Of course, that doesn’t distress Monsieur! Monsieur would never put
himself out for a trifle like that! Comfortably seated in the easy
chair that poor Tem has drenched with sweat, Monsieur will observe the
progress of events! And meanwhile, I shall have to come up and down a
hundred times a day. And the maids likewise. But you don’t care what
trouble you make us: you’ll always find everything you need ready at
your hand.”
The attack was direct and severe. Before replying grandfather cast a
startled glance upon the seat which Tem had transported, fearful of the
reported deluge. When he perceived it to be dry and intact he recovered
his serenity and replied with the utmost calmness:
“I ask nothing of any one.”
“Because you never lack for anything; you live like a pig in clover.”
They were both right. Grandfather never made any demands, but every
one was eager to anticipate his slightest wish. Thus he uttered no
complaint against the piercing winds that besieged his tower; but the
day after his removal all the chinks around the doors and windows were
carefully stopped up.
Aunt Deen’s dissatisfaction had given voice to the general opinion.
This unexpected exodus, utterly without necessity, cast a shadow over
our father and mother, who vainly sought for its reason.
“Why must you be up so high?”
“Altitude has always agreed with me.”
I admit that on this occasion I sided with grandfather. The tower
chamber with its four views, its isolation, its special odour (it had
never been opened except when some one went for apples, which used to
ripen there all winter long) had long had an irresistible attraction
for me. Since it was henceforth to be inhabited I promised myself to
visit it frequently.
This episode was soon put into the shade by another, much more
important and of a character to make a much deeper impression upon my
imagination. Coming home from school one morning, I learned from my
usual source of information, Aunt Deen, that this time it was settled.
She imparted this news with an air of great mystery, but mystery itself
with her was noisy in its manifestation. The word settled assumed upon
her lips a formidable importance. What was settled?
“The deed is signed. Just now. I am very glad.”
What deed? I didn’t understand a word of it all.
“Well, we are to remain in our house. _They_ can never trouble us
again.”
Didn’t I already know that _they_ had been utterly routed,
dispersed, chastised, overcome, beaten, reduced to nothingness, like
the Persians in my ancient history whom a handful of Greeks had chased
into the sea? How should she think to surprise me by telling me a
secret already several days old, perhaps several weeks old, and about
which every one had been talking freely? A child does not enter the
region of preparations, delays, formalities and judicial scribblings.
But a capital event shortly illustrated Aunt Deen’s declaration.
Grandfather returned earlier than usual from his walk, and as one of
us remarked upon his abnormal punctuality he took himself off without
a word. When, after the second bell, we entered the dining-room with
empty stomachs and ravenous appetites, what was our surprise to find
him already there, sitting at table, but not in his official place,
the place of honour in the centre opposite our mother, as is fitting
for the head of the family, the reigning king. Without confiding his
intention to any one, he had changed the napkin rings and had taken
his place at the end of the table, opposite the window. It is true
that he had chosen a very good place whence he could see the trees in
the garden and even a bit of sky between their branches. To a lover
of sunshine the view was not unimportant. But all the same it was a
revolution in the family life and the entire domestic economy. Or
rather, I was not mistaken, it was an abdication.
I was well up in abdications. Had I not been obliged to study in my
history book those of the sluggard kings, whose hair they cut off
before immuring them in a cloister?--and in spite of myself I gazed
at grandfather’s slightly curling white hair. Above all I had heard
my brother Bernard reciting the story of Charles V, by which I had
been strongly impressed. That master of the world, laying aside his
grandeur, had retired to a monastery of Estramadura, where he mended
clocks, and to give himself a foretaste of death had had his funeral
celebrated while he was still alive. Historians that dote upon truth
have since then assured me that these details are fabulous. I am
sorry, for I have not forgotten them, whereas an innumerable number of
demonstrated facts have dropped out of my memory. But at that time I
believed with iron conviction in the retirement of Charles V, the false
obsequies and the clocks. Grandfather also knew how to mend clocks, and
I at once established relations between the two sovereigns.
Aunt Deen, punctual for once, and our mother, who was not far behind
us, shared our astonishment. Then all eyes were fixed upon our father,
who was just then entering the room. At a glance he took in the
situation, and with him decision was never slow to follow. He came
forward with rapid steps.
“No, no,” he said, “I will not have this. Nothing should be changed
here. Father, take your own place, I beg.”
Assuredly not one of us would have resisted an entreaty which was also
a command. But our father’s energetic regulating force had before our
very faces come in contact with another force the power of which I had
never dreamed of, that of immovability. Grandfather did not stir. He
had resolved not to stir.
Father, receiving no reply, repeated his request more gently,--I can
not say more humbly, for at all times, in spite of himself, he wore
an air of pride. He received in the face an outburst of that eternal
little laugh, with the added accompaniment of the words:
“Oho! what a fuss about nothing.”
“Father, give me this proof of your affection!”
“One place or another, what’s the odds? I am very comfortable here, and
here I stay,” he said, adding in a tone of superb disdain, “if you only
knew, my poor Michel, how little I care!”
He cared for nothing: Tem Bossette had told me so; everything was all
one to him; one seat or another, one house or another. Such words
as these, uttered before us children, were enough to exasperate our
father, but he controlled himself.
“There must be a headship in the family,” he urged.
“Bah! We live under a republic, and I believe in liberty.”
Father saw that it was perfectly useless to insist, and he merely added:
“Then you do really refuse to come back to your own place?”
“I shall not move.”
Philomena, the waitress, offered the platter. Father signed to her to
offer it to grandfather, after which there was nothing for him but to
take the seat of honour. It was a relief to us all; we all felt that
the place belonged to him by right and that he alone deserved to occupy
it. He and no one else had long been the head of the family. At the
slightest difficulty or vexation every one turned to him, every one
appealed to him. Now the disquietude which had weighed upon the house
for so long a time would be ended. Now we should be directed. No more
sluggard kings! The reins of government, as my history book expressed
it, would be held in strong hands. And it was right that the head of
the house should have all the insignia of authority. A king does not
occupy the second place, and evidently my father would not have crowned
himself of his own accord.
Thus the transferrence of power had taken place in our presence.
I should not have anticipated the change of feeling which took place
within me, almost suddenly. Grandfather’s government had always seemed
to me precarious and derisory. But as soon as he refused to exercise
it I began to admire his disinterestedness and to discover the poetry
of abdication. His sovereign disdain of material things appeared to
me full of grandeur, and I even went so far as to interpret to myself
the expression which had once seemed sacrilegious to me--“whether one
lives in one house or another.” If he had done nothing to protect our
house, perhaps it was because he cared for higher and more distant
things. From his tower chamber he was entering into communication
with the winds and the stars, predicting the future. The weather and
the universe were absorbing him; he could no longer devote himself
to common tasks. There was another mode of interpreting life, which
I vaguely felt without understanding it, and which attracted me by
its unusualness, and its enigma. The deposed king, clothed in the
mystery which was conferred upon him by an unimaginable learning, was
recovering his prestige and even assuming, all unaware to himself, a
degree of ascendancy over my spirit.
I gazed by turns at father and grandfather: father in his normal
place, thinking of each of us, diffusing peace and order about him;
the light of his marvellous aptitude at command shining from his clear
cut features and especially from his piercing eyes; grandfather, the
delicate lines of his face, almost feminine notwithstanding his long
white beard, his eyes always slightly clouded, often abstracted,
indifferent to all around him, and more interested in the trees of the
garden or the bit of sky that he saw through the window than in us. For
the first time I was astonished to find such a difference between the
two men. I had never observed it before, or had not thought about it.
Now it struck me so strongly that I almost uttered my surprise aloud.
It doubtless would have escaped me had I not felt the unseemliness of
the fact. A son ought to resemble his father--there could be no doubt
upon the subject. Or else it wasn’t worth while to be the son of some
one. And whom was I like?
BOOK II
I
THE PICTURES
ALL these events, still so fresh in my imagination, grew dim and were
temporarily lost in the current of the days which, during the long
vacation upon which we were entering, began to flow by like a beautiful
stream, full to the brim.
As a general thing our father took his vacation at the same time with
us, and made the most of it for getting nearer to us. We saw him much
less often this year, and became somewhat weaned from those stories of
heroism with which he used to enliven our walks, kindling and stirring
us up with fierce desire to fight battles and win victories. When we
heard him tell them we used to toss our heads, our eyes would sparkle,
we would walk faster, and our steps fell into cadence. But to meet the
new expenses which he had assumed he had given up his annual rest. Once
in a while he would snatch an afternoon, and make a hasty attempt to
re-establish the old nearness to us. But his patients came to seek him
at all hours of the day, or lay in wait for him as he passed along.
Everything conspired to deprive us of him.
Yet it was evident that his authority was everywhere in exercise. When
cracks had appeared in the front of the house iron supports were placed
underneath before it was repainted. The rooms were repapered--mine
with pleasant pictures of cats and dogs--and the floors were mended
where the boards had shrunken apart. Even the kitchen, where for years
Mariette had been obstinately insisting on repairs, without producing
any effect upon grandfather, who would invariably answer her with the
old proverb, “One wastes one’s suds in washing a negro’s head”--even
the kitchen was thoroughly repaired and paved with wonderful red
bricks. The entrance gate which would not close had been repaired,
and even provided with a key, a key which really turned in the lock!
The linden was trimmed, permitting the sun-dial once more to mark
the hours. The break in the wall, by which the mole-crickets used to
penetrate, by which, one memorable evening, I had seen our enemies
introducing themselves into the place, was closed by a balustrade, set
into the trunk of the chestnut tree. And now too was seen what had
never before been seen: the three labourers at their post, and--still
more marvellous sight--all three working at once!
Little by little the garden--my old garden that used to be a perfect
forest of weeds, in which there was never an end to discovering new
trees or plants--so well were they hidden--was transformed and reduced
to order. The alleys were cleaned out and sanded, the beds remade
and the rose bushes trimmed. The trees, reduced to their proper
proportions, cast a well defined shade. A useless field became an
orchard. A fountain, set in the heart of a grass plot, sent up a shaft
of water to fall in a fine musical rain into its basin. There were
flowers and fruits to gather for banquets and desserts. But we no
longer dared to feel of the pears and peaches--still less to give to
their stems that slight see-saw motion which made them fall. In the
wide newly-opened space our larceny would have been discovered. And
I vainly sought to lay low with my sword the underbrush that used to
grow thick on the edge of the chestnut grove. Tem Bossette refused to
whittle me out the smallest wooden sword, and watched over the stakes
as if he had paid for them himself.
These changes were not made all at once, and no doubt I have their
chronology mixed. We hardly noticed them during their slow and gradual
progress, and when they were all made we ceased to remember how
things were before. Indeed they were not accomplished without many
perturbations. Tem wiped his brow unceasingly and sweated out all his
wine. Mimi Pachoux stole away no longer but made a great noise to
attest the certainty of his presence; and The Hanged bent his dantesque
countenance over obscure and useful tasks. The community of their fate
had by no means brought about their reconciliation. They were always
observing, spying upon one another, but all three observed and watched
the house still more closely. What did they fear to see emerging from
it?
I discovered one day. My father, who had become their master, drew near
with rapid step. He spoke to each with kindly encouragement, but he
examined their work as one who knew.
“All the same, he knows what he is about,” Mimi admiringly confessed.
I learned from Tem that after having severely admonished them he had
raised their wages. But he insisted upon good work. In a word, he drew,
them back to himself whenever they demurred at a task, or soured upon
it. But without doubt he upset all the old habits of a region where
people love to drift along, taking life as easily as they drink its new
wine. This is why Tem Bossette, more than any of them, sighed for the
ancient reign of the Sluggard Kings, when he had lived tranquil and
forgotten among his vines.
Once he tried in my presence to move grandfather to pity for his sad
fate.
“Friend,” was the answer, “I am nobody here; go to some one else.”
Never had grandfather seemed so full of spirits as since his
abdication. No, certainly he did not regret his lost authority, but
he made a point of knowing nothing of the acts of the new régime.
Did he travel over the kingdom? He seemed never to perceive that
its very pebbles were blossoming. But one day, when he was taking
the air in the garden, I saw him combing his beard and rubbing his
eyebrows--a sure token that he was dissatisfied; he spat, as a sign of
contempt, and the little impertinent laugh accompanied words which were
incomprehensible to me.
“Oho! everything is being put to rights--what they need is a
geometrician rather than a gardener.”
What was he finding fault with? The garden beds, the trees, obedient
to the hand of man, made a richly disposed picture. My little ideas of
life had here grouped themselves and taken form with unwonted pleasure.
I was provoked with grandfather’s lack of enthusiasm.
“See,” I said to him, not knowing just what to say, “those beautiful
red cannas around the basin of the fountain.”
He took me by the arm with unexpected roughness.
“Look out, child, you’ll spoil the grass!”
I had indeed set my foot upon the grass border of the path. And I
clearly perceived that grandfather was ridiculing my admiration and the
garden both at once. Suddenly, under the influence of his sarcasm, I
recalled the old garden, the old garden as it had been, a wild mass of
foliage, when I might trample on the very borders, with their sparse
flowers growing helter-skelter, where I had known the wild joy of
liberty.
Grandfather would never have permitted himself such a criticism before
my father. My mind having been drawn to observe the dissimilarity
between them, I had noticed the constraint in their relations.
Father was always making advances; treating grandfather with extreme
deference; never failing to inquire as to his health, his walks,
and even, indulgent to his meteorological hobby, asking him as to
weather prospects. Grandfather would reply briefly, without making
the slightest attempt to continue the conversation, which soon fell
flat,--or he would bring forward his little wounding smile, as soon as
a subject was introduced on which it was not certain that they were in
agreement.
One day father asked for his account books, explaining that he needed
to verify certain memoranda of claims upon the property which had not
yet been settled and which appeared to be exorbitant. Grandfather
opened his eyes:
“My account books?”
“Yes.”
“I never kept any.”
Father hesitated for a second. “Very well,” he said simply and turned
away.
In his tower where he had settled himself, grandfather took great
comfort in wearing his famous green dressing gown and Greek cap of
black velvet with its silk tassel. With his telescope fixed upon a
pedestal, he would watch by day the boats that ploughed the waters of
the lake, and at night he would bring the stars nearer--but only those
which moved in the southern half of the sky, because from his former
room he had only had a view of this part of the heavens, and knew it
better. Much more frequently than in the old days he would come down
stairs in this astrologer’s costume, like a deposed monarch who no
longer sets store by majesty. It was with great difficulty that Aunt
Deen prevented him from going into town, or walking in the country, in
this accoutrement.
“It does no one any harm,” he would observe.
Nevertheless, after many entreaties, he would consent to replace the
cap with a broad brimmed felt hat, and the dressing gown with a frock
coat which had to be almost daily rubbed with benzine, in spite of him,
to keep it decent. He would bring home from his walks aromatic plants
of which he used to make decoctions which he would mix with brandy,
and mushrooms which awakened Aunt Deen’s misgivings. I used to look
at them, smell them, but for nothing in the world would I have tasted
them. I could not think, in those days, that anything good to eat could
be found outside a provision store, except, on a pinch, in our garden.
My father’s reign had lasted three good years, perhaps, indeed, nearer
four than three, when an event occurred of large importance in my child
life--I fell ill. The previous year I had made my first communion, with
such deep fervour that my mother had confidentially wondered to Aunt
Deen:
“Is he going to follow the example of Mélanie and Stephen? Will God
require of us a third child? His will be done!”
My adventure was almost that of _the fair child who escaped from the
arms of his mother_. In the course of a walk of our “division” I
had tumbled into a brook which we had been forbidden to approach, and
rather than be blamed had decided to say nothing about it, though I was
soaked up to the chest. Fever set in the next day or the day after. I
learned later that it was a severe attack of pneumonia, which in time
degenerated into pleurisy. My life was believed to be in danger, and my
malady became the occasion of a change in the family arrangements which
had almost altered the whole direction of my youth. In a half-slumber I
heard whisperings around me, the meaning of which I at once interpreted.
“Am I going to die?” I asked mother and Aunt Deen who were at my
bedside.
“Be quiet, naughty boy!” murmured Aunt Deen blowing her nose with a sob
and deep sighs, which she doubtless supposed herself to be suppressing.
Mother laid her hand upon my brow--its touch refreshed me as her gentle
and persuasive voice said,
“Don’t be uneasy; we are here.”
I knew very well what death was. The school porter having died, a weird
whim of our religious director had constrained us to defile, class by
class, before the bier upon which the corpse had been laid, before
the cover of the coffin was screwed down. Now this porter was a short
stout man, whose mortal remains required a cubic receptacle in which
he looked to us so comical and smirking that we burst into a laugh
that, though it scandalised us, we found it impossible to repress.
The indignant professor who was acting as marshal to this abortive
pilgrimage overwhelmed us with the severest reproaches, not hesitating
to add thereto in due time a sermon upon our final destiny. With no
circumlocution he informed us that we were all to die, and perhaps very
soon, that our parents would die, and that we should lose every one we
loved. By degrees our laughter died away. A vague fear took possession
of us, heightened by the monotonous repetition of the word death,
continually thrown at our heads. When I went back to the house that
morning, greatly moved in spite of myself by that vehement discourse,
I looked at my father and mother as I had never looked at them before.
They were coming and going as usual, without dreaming that I was
watching them. They even laughed at one of Bernard’s remarks: I heard
them laugh--a hearty laugh very like that which the unlucky porter in
his box had aroused in us. Ah, that laugh! especially our father’s
laugh, strong and sonorous, giving a splendid impression of health--how
it comforted me, and how it put to flight the terrified curiosity which
had taken possession of me.
“Aha!” I thought in my little brain, “the teacher was lying like a
dentist! They will not die--that is certain. They can’t die. To begin
with, when people laugh, that means that they don’t die.”
This evident conclusion set my heart at rest. So far as I was concerned
there was no longer any question on the subject. They were in front and
I behind them. And since there was no risk for them how could death
touch me, passing them by?
My question “Am I going to die?” was therefore simply designed to make
myself interesting. In their presence I was safe.
Mother and Aunt Deen watched me by turns, that I might see no strange
face; mother took two nights out of three, and I liked her best. She
glided into the room like a mist over the lake, without the slightest
sound. I was never aware of any of her movements. Her cares and her
caresses mingled; while Aunt Deen, the dear woman, at the cost of
tremendous effort, disturbed and irritated me.
The important part which I myself was playing was by no means irksome
to me. I seemed to myself to have become smaller than my brother James
and my sister Nicola, and that I might just as well be rocked to sleep
with lullabies. I used to ask for Venice and The Pool, because of my
own drenching, and they thought I was delirious. I distinctly see in
memory those two faces bending over me, and still more clearly that
of my father, who was continually coming to see me; the attentive,
fixed, almost severe expression with which he noted the effects of my
disease upon my body was quite strange to me. It was his professional
expression; the examination once over, his features would relax,
lightened up by fatherhood.
One day father brought in another doctor, but I clearly saw that the
little man stood in awe of him, and invariably repeated what he said to
him. With implacable logic I observed to my faithful nurses,
“What’s the use of troubling that gentleman? Father knows much more
about it than he. Father doesn’t need any one.”
I probably uttered these words or something like them in a low voice.
Aunt Deen promptly approved.
“The child is right. He speaks so sensibly that he is surely getting
well.”
She repeated my remark to father, who was still anxious, and who
smiled, as he had not done of late.
“Yes,” he said; “we shall save him.”
I had no need of any such assurance. I felt it so strongly that that
was enough. He never dreamed that this very illness, over which he was
triumphing by skill and will-power, was later to be the origin of the
home tragedy in which I wandered away from him.
My brothers and sisters were brought into my room, two by two, in
succession, guarded with all sorts of advice--not to stay long, to make
no noise, not to touch the medicine bottles. Naturally they were soon
bored and departed. Each of them took some credit for my cure, which
I owed to the prayers of Stephen and Mélanie, to Bernard’s martial
exhortations and to the comfortable gaiety of Louise. As for the two
little ones, they were prudently kept in the background after James,
no doubt repeating what he had heard among the servants, had shouted,
jumping up and down with enthusiasm,
“Fançois” (he could hardly say _r_) “will soon be dead.”
Grandfather never appeared at my bedside. Perhaps he apprehended no
danger. I think it was rather that he had an invincible horror of
illness and all that might result from it. Deeply concerned with his
own health, he kept careful account of his bodily functions, and with
that perfect courtesy from which he never departed he never failed to
inform the entire household of the state of his internal economy; when
that went ill he would lament grievously and Aunt Deen would produce
from a cupboard a venerable instrument which when rubbed up and mended
was still good for use.
“Nothing is more important,” he would say, in our presence, gazing upon
the instrument with a satisfied air.
My convalescence was a period of enchantment, not for the new zest
that it lent to life, the savour of which only he can taste who has
deemed his life put in jeopardy, but because it truly opened to me
the mysterious realm of books. I was not unfamiliar with the _Rose
Library_. I knew Canon Schmid, and Jules Verne’s romances, and even
the fairy tales of Perrault and Andersen, but I had never found in
any of them that heart thrill which keeps you awake in bed at night,
expecting, fearing some unknown delight not unmingled with danger, such
as I had found in Aunt Deen’s amazing stories, and above all in the
epic tales that father used to tell.
Not to weary me, they began by bringing me illustrated books. Bernard
let me look over the Epinal albums which he was collecting for the sake
of the military costumes, and which it cost him some self-denial to
lend. I begged for Gustave Doré’s Bible, of which once in the parlour
by special favour I had been shown the pictures without being permitted
to touch it. The two heavy volumes were propped up on the table, in
great state, and I passed long hours in turning the pages. Mother would
come and go in the room, somewhat surprised at my being so good, and
even a little disturbed by my silence. She would approach noiselessly
and look over my shoulder.
“You are not getting tired?”
“Oh, no!”
“You are not bored?”
“Oh, mamma!”
“Are they beautiful?”
“I don’t know.”
When one is a child one doesn’t know what is beautiful. The beautiful
thing is to have the heart satisfied. What a sudden uplift my entire
æsthetic nature received from them! The unframed outlines of nature
had never impressed me; now that, copied, transferred to a square of
paper, I could look at them, I saw them, not only on the motionless
page, but everywhere, and all alive. The house with its great stones,
the walled-in garden--I had often used to touch them, understand them,
possess them;--and besides, they belonged to me. But beyond our house
the universe began, and its limitlessness had repelled me, so that I
could never think of it as having definite outlines. And here those
outlines were, before my eyes; through the open Bible I discovered them.
At thirty years’ distance I find again in my memory, with no need of
verification, the pictures of Gustave Doré. The pages turn of their
own accord and my beloved phantoms reappear. Here are those visions of
dread, Leviathan upheaving the sea, the destroying Angel exterminating
Sennacherib’s army, the long train of Nicannor’s elephants between
which Judas Maccabeus has to pass, and Death in the Apocalypse on his
pale horse. They were not my favourites, and in the evening I used
even to avoid them. My favourites were those quiet, reposeful, almost
shadowy Oriental landscapes, where the summer sunlight seemed to draw
up mists, where strange plants grew most unlike our oaks and chestnuts,
where in the background were shadows of oxen and camels, far away like
boats upon the lake in time of fog.
The birth of Eve seemed lovely to me. While Adam sleeps among the
flowers of Eden, she uprises erect and unclothed, with floating hair.
One of her knees--look at it, I am sure of it!--slightly bent, is
caressed by the sunlight. Through her, by this light upon her knee,
I felt something of the pure perfection of nudity long before I even
dreamed of its desire. Abraham leads his flocks to the land of Canaan,
and the backs of the huddled sheep undulate like the waves that I had
seen from the lake shore. The cradle of Moses floats upon the Nile;
Pharaoh’s daughter has come out from the palace that stands basking in
the sun; she draws near the river; one of her waiting women takes up
the little bark. Rebecca, in a long white veil, rests her pitcher upon
the margin of the well and talks with Eliezer, a venerable old man; but
I don’t distinguish her from the Samaritan woman who takes the same
position. Ruth, kneeling, gleans the wheat ears. The great cedars of
Lebanon, cut down, lie upon the earth which their shadow overspreads;
they are waiting to be used in building the temple in Jerusalem. The
angel of the Annunciation hovers in the air, like a falling leaf upheld
by the wind. Jesus in the house of Lazarus is sitting on the window
ledge, the moonlight stealing through the palm trees. Mary crouching
at his feet is drinking in his words, Martha, standing, is busy with
household cares. Pictures through which peace flows like a limpid
stream, and which are but the transposition of every-day scenes,
almost like those which I might have seen at our house and in the
country,--pictures of obscure lives, through which God passes.
One day when I declined to be present at the return of the prodigal
son to the paternal home, my mother, who loved that parable, asked the
reason of this disdain.
“Why don’t you look at this page?”
I made a gesture of disgust. It seemed commonplace to me--a father
forgiving his son--what was there surprising in that?
Athalia wringing her hands in despair beside the temple wall, while the
soldiers come running to kill her, recalled to my mother her convent.
She had herself taken part in the chorus of that tragedy which Racine
had written for the young pupils of Saint-Cyr, and which by a happy
tradition all girls’ boarding schools used to present in those days;
the Unes came back to her with a rush:
The universe is full of His magnificence:
Let us praise God and worship Him forever.
She would recite them with that emotion which religious things always
awakened in her, and her tones touched me more directly than that
sophisticated art which was beyond my powers.
Another little book had a part in opening my mind to poetry,--it was
a book of ballads. A knight wandering in the forest, snatched away
from Titania, queen of the elves and sylphs, her cup of happiness and
carried it off to his castle on his galloping horse. A little girl
on the bank of a stream sang the romance of the swan’s nest hidden
among the reeds, and dreamed of a knight who should come upon a red
roan steed. The Lord of Burleigh married a shepherdess, who languished
in the palace to which he took her, and died of longing for her
village and her cottage. How I entered into their longings and their
melancholy! Their heartaches poured into my heart a delicious pain,
which I could not fathom. Yet I was beginning to discern that we have
within ourselves an upspringing fountain of infinitely delicate joys.
Did my father distrust these exciting readings as he did grandfather’s
music? He brought me short, simple biographies of great men. It is
never too early to make acquaintance with such. One forms a habit of
comparing himself with the heroes, and doesn’t fail to say to oneself:
“I have time before me; when I am their age I mean to have surpassed
them....” By degrees one begins to look for those whose exploits
come late in life. I do not know which of these exemplary personages
it was of whom I read that he entered the school of adversity. I
imagined that school to be at least as severe as the Polytechnic, or
Saint-Cyr, to which my brother Bernard was destined, and I burned to
present myself there for admission. I did not know that it is the only
one that requires no examination, no preliminaries, above all, no
recommendation. I confided my desire to my mother. She smiled, which
vexed me, and assured me that I should indeed present myself there for
admission, but she hoped it would be as late as possible.
These readings transported me into a glorious state of enthusiasm. I
could not have understood sarcasm. No one made use of it in our family.
There was only grandfather’s little laugh. Our parents loved gaiety,
took pleasure even in the noise that we made, but they never used
ridicule. They took life seriously, as an opportunity for well-doing,
and deemed that it deserved the greatest respect. Grandfather, running
through my books, on the first visit that he deigned to pay me after
being assured that I was recovering, let fall certain exclamations:
“Oho! the Bible! and the Famous Men! Poor child! Just wait, I’ll bring
you some books.”
And in fact he brought me “Scenes from the Public and Private Life of
Animals,” and the “Adventures of Three Old Sailors,” both adorned with
illustrations. The latter volume was in a sad condition, the stitches
loose, the leaves falling out, and the end entirely gone as well as the
cover. It must have been translated from the English and its humour
perplexed me. Those three sailors, who had escaped from shipwreck,
landed on a desert island where they were pursued by a tiger. They
climbed a tree, by way of refuge from the ferocious creature, and
the picture showed them clinging to the trunk perched one above the
other, with hair standing on end, eyes staring, toes curled up. The
wild beast was springing up toward them, it was easy to see that with
a little exertion he would have them. Then with fierce resolution
inspired by the most imperative necessity, the two uppermost bore down
with all their weight upon the lowermost one, in order to force him to
let go, hoping that this prize would suffice to satisfy the assailant’s
fury. And while bearing down with all their might they addressed to
their unhappy companion the most touching words of parting:
“Good-bye, Jeremiah” (such was his unpropitious name), “we will go and
console your poor father and your betrothed.”
But Jeremiah, like Rachel, refused to be comforted, and stiffened
himself, to cling the tighter. Accustomed as I was to tales of heroism
I was much displeased with these traitorous friends.
“Scenes in the Life of Animals” appeared to me to have more sense.
It was a motley collection such as all old-time libraries prided
themselves on containing. Grandville’s vignettes revealed to me traces
of animal characteristics in men, whom till then I had thought of only
as in the image of God. The animals in the book were dressed like
men and women and looked like them. I soon became accustomed to this
treatment, the disguises were so natural! Here were the nightingale
as a postman, the dog as a lackey, the rabbit as a petty subaltern
employe, and there were the vulture as a landed proprietor, the lion
as an old beau, the turkey as a banker, the ass as an academician.
The centipedes were playing the piano for a young lady dancing on the
tight rope, while the cricket was making a trumpet of the carolla of
the bindweed. The chameleon, as a deputy, mounted the tribune to state
that he was proud and happy to be always of everybody’s opinion. The
shark and the saw-fish had on surgeons’ blouses, and frankly declared,
“We are going to cut muscles, saw bones--in a word, heal the sick.”
The wolf, having murdered a sheep, is reading in his prison the
_Idylls_ of Mme Deshoulières, while celebrity comes to him under
the form of a complaint sold by hawkers, to be sung to the air of
_Fualdès_:
Hearken, Woodpeckers and Ducks,
Jays and Turkeys, Crows and Rooks;
The story of a frightful crime
Worthy of Harpies, in their time.
Who performed the direful act?
A wolf, indelicate, in fact.
The bear was enjoying retirement in the bosom of his family; he could
be seen warming his youngest born by holding him before the fire by the
paws; his wife was hanging linen before the fire and a young cub in
a corner was lifting up his little shirt by way of precaution before
retiring; some one is knocking at the door, but the legend explains:
“We live by ourselves; we detest visitors and bores.”
A parroquet flapping his wings without being able to fly represented
the illustrious poet Kacatogan. And the martlet with the magpie and
the crow made a trio of women of letters. I did not know what a woman
of letters could be, but the White Blackbird, who like the parroquet
was a poet, taught me in his memoirs:
_While I was composing my poems she was bedaubing reams of paper
with her scribblings. I would recite my verses to her aloud, and
she, indifferent, kept on writing while I was doing so. She produced
romances with a facility almost equal to mine, always choosing the
most dramatic subjects: parricides, kidnappings, murders, and even
pocket-picking, always taking pains to attack the government, in
passing, and to preach the emancipation of Martlets. In one word, no
effort was too great for her mind, no clap-trap for her modesty; it
never occurred to her to erase a line, nor to work out a plan before
setting to work. She was the typical lettered Martlet._
Aunt Deen also produced stories with marvellous facility; she, too,
preferred terrible subjects and was not averse to attacking the
government. I even suspected her of not knowing, when she began, how
she was going to end up, and of inventing the plots of her stories as
she went along. Then why didn’t she bedaub paper? The simplest way was
to ask her.
“Aunt Deen, are you a woman of letters?”
She asked me twice to repeat my question, as if women of letters really
belonged to the zoological kingdom, in the category of monsters. After
which she shrugged her shoulders, not even deigning to reply directly.
“The child is certainly crazy. Augustus’s books have addled his brain.”
There was some talk of taking away the “Scenes in the Life of Animals,”
the caricatures in which had amused even my father and brought a smile
to his lips. The effect of the incident was to attach me all the more
strongly to the White Blackbird, who had nearly caused the book to be
placed upon the Index. And I soon came to see what it undoubtedly was
that distinguished Aunt Deen from the Lettered Martlet. The latter,
with immaculate plumage, was in fact merely painted--covered over with
a layer of flour which gave her that appearance of having fallen from
the sky. The White Blackbird, who never suspected it, and thought he
had discovered in the Martlet a creature unique in all the world,
becoming suspicious of a mysterious pot of some white mixture, had a
disastrous experience. His poems moving him to tenderness, he shed such
profuse tears over his companion as to dissolve the plaster of paris
with which she was covered, and reveal her as the most commonplace of
blackbirds. Now I had often wept in Aunt Deen’s arms; she had bewailed
my sorrows without losing anything of her colour. She made use neither
of paste nor flour; no, decidedly, however beautiful the stories she
made up, she would never be a woman of letters.
Another bit of knowledge came to me from the White Blackbird. I learned
from him to enjoy the charm of words for their own sake, independently
of their meaning. After his conjugal mishap, he fled to the forest
to confide his woes to the Nightingale, uttering to her this plaint:
_I was co-ordinating fooleries while you were in the woods_. I
did not clearly grasp the meaning, because of the co-ordination of
fooleries, which eluded me, and yet I loved the melody of this phrase,
and repeated it over and over to myself. The reply of the Nightingale,
still more deeply charged with mystery, completely upset me. _I love
the Rose_, he sighed. _Sadi the Persian has sung of her: I wear
out my throat all night singing to her, but she sleeps, and hears
me not. Her chalice is at this moment closed; she is cherishing an
old Beetle there; and to-morrow morning, when I go back to my couch,
exhausted with suffering and weariness, then she will open her petals
that a bee may devour her heart_. I took no interest either in the
old Beetle or in Sadi the Persian; the exhausted Nightingale, and
that Rose with the devoured heart, communicated to me, by the magic
of syllables, a sort of far-off presentiment of love-pain, in which I
found a vague and ineffable sadness.
Such sadness was very quick to pass. Much sooner, however, I had
borrowed from my new friends, the animals, an art of ridiculing which
I found most delightful. I could see no one without finding his double
among the beasts. Tem Bossette with his flat face and goggle eyes
became a frog--the very frog that tried to make himself as big as the
ox; Mimi Pachoux with his furtive step and sudden disappearance I
compared to a rat, and The Hanged, who always seemed to find difficulty
in using his arms, to a kangaroo, with his very short front legs.
This turn of mind shocked and disturbed my mother. One day she
received in my presence a visit from a person of a certain age who
was superintending a work room, founding an orphan asylum, building a
school, in a word, directing more works in the parish than actually
existed. Her name was Mlle Tapinois. She was tall and dried up, with
a pointed nose, sloping shoulders and a frigid air. She cooed softly
without a moment’s interruption. When she was gone I showed mother, in
my book, an old dove in a night gown, with a candle-stick in its claw:
“Mademoiselle Tapinois,” I said triumphantly.
Mother protested against my unseemly comparison.
“She is a holy woman,” she concluded, by way of arousing my sympathy.
But though she did not admit it, I saw that she had recognised the
likeness.
Encouraged by the degree of success I had achieved with Mlle Tapinois,
I thenceforth watched our visitors to deal out to them the same
treatment, and the facility of this game amazed me. I had no difficulty
in finding a stout landed proprietor for the elephant, a woe-begone
collector of mortgages for the owl, a pianist for the centipede. An
old nobleman with a Roman nose reminded me of the falcon whom the
_Revolutions had ruined_. In a very short while my collection was
further enriched by the bear, the chameleon, and several rabbits, drawn
from the registry or the tax office. But the region at that time had no
departmental muse worthy to be catalogued among the martlets. They tell
me that there are swarms of them now-a-days.
Grandfather, to whom I confided my observations, gave them his full
approbation.
“Now you know,” he said, “that animals and men are brothers. But the
animals are better fellows than we.”
Nevertheless a secret instinct warned me not to consult my parents on
this subject.
II
THE DESIRE
FINE weather had come. Three months still lay between us and the long
vacation. Father, agreeing with the timid little colleague whom he had
again called in to support his own opinion, declared that I was not to
return to school until the end of the vacation next October.
“The child needs out-of-door air. The first thing is to build up his
health.”
I was pained by this decision, which wounded my pride. If I were not
in school during the last quarter, I could not hope for a wreath at
the distribution of prizes. For I was full of emulation, and loved to
take the first place, though this brought down upon me grandfather’s
ridicule.
“Those classifications mean nothing. First or last it’s all one.”
Father laid out for me a very simple plan of life. A country walk
morning and evening, far from the microbes of the town, where you can
breath fresh air uncontaminated by human beings. Thus I should recover
strength and appetite. But who would walk with me and be my guide? Who
would undertake a peripatetic preceptorship of this sort? Father,
already behind in his duties because of my long illness, belonged to
his absorbing profession; mother, whose presence was certainly required
by the whole family, especially the little ones, could hardly ever
leave the house except to go to church. Aunt Deen had no out-of-door
legs, a deficiency which did not prevent her going up and down
stairs, from kitchen to tower, a hundred times a day. There remained
grandfather. He always took a walk morning and evening on his own
account; what would it cost him to take me along? This would suit all
round; the plan was evidently the best possible.
I perceived, however, that it met a serious resistance, for I overheard
my parents discussing it in the calm and confident tone which they
always used when regulating, in perfect accord, all questions
concerning us.
“I would not have him turn him against the house,” said my father.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if it were wrong to admit such a thought, “he
wouldn’t do that! You don’t think that of your own father, surely! Of
course he has his whims, and his ideas are not always ours. What he
needs is God. But he is good hearted; he will be grateful to you for
your confidence. And we could not ask such a thing of a stranger.”
“I am not quite satisfied with the plan,” said father.
A little later he resumed the subject. “I will speak to him; there
seems to be no other way.”
When this proposition concerning me was broached to him, grandfather
acceded to it without either enthusiasm or hostility, with an
indifference that wounded me.
“I’d just as soon. It’s the same to me whether I take my walk alone
or with some one.” (Naturally!) “Children ought to live out of doors.
Study does no good. No more do medicines.”
Father no doubt had an interview with him at which I was not present,
and the affair was decided. How would he act toward his new companion?
He always treated my brothers and sisters and me, even the two
youngest, like reasonable persons, though a little more interesting
than others, lending to our remarks as much attention as to those of
grown persons; but we had an impression that he couldn’t always tell us
apart, and that he would cheerfully have dispensed with us all, which
seemed to us an affront.
Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the
morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the
door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot,
then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather’s
with a certain solemnity--as a reigning king might do, I thought.
“Here is my son,” he said; “I entrust him to you; he holds the future
of our house.”
Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a
slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an
every-day footing:
“Don’t worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him.”
I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father
of me?
The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly,
so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important
when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw
nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all
their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.
“Where are we going, grandfather?”
I inclined to the direction of the town, where we should find
attractions of all sorts, shops, bazars, show-windows, faces, noise and
movement.
At the outset we were stopped by the closed gate, the key of which we
had forgotten to bring.
“Run and get it, child. But why the devil should they barricade the
gate?”
It was one of Aunt Deen’s thousand precautions; the previous evening,
or the one before, she had seen from afar a gipsy waggon, and since
then she had been keeping prudent guard over the household. I ran,
somewhat scandalised by grandfather’s remark. Wasn’t it necessary to
guard the house against enemies? A kingdom has frontiers which must be
respected; was it not enough that shadows crossed them every evening in
spite of gates and bolts?
We are off at last, and grandfather at once turns his back upon the
town:
“Child, I don’t like towns.”
Good-bye to shops and people! We had not walked ten minutes when he
took it into his head to leave the highroad, along which we were
walking at our ease, quite properly, without hurry, and took a footpath
which crossed the fields haphazard.
“You’re taking the wrong road, grandfather.”
“Not at all. Child, I detest roads!”
Well, well! he was more surprising than when he used to come down
to the dining-room in his dressing gown and Greek cap. I had always
supposed that roads were made to be used, not despised. And besides,
how could one get along without them when one went out?
The hardly perceptible path which we had taken obliged us to walk
single file. I went first, in the capacity of scout. The wheat on
one side was already tall, on the other side were oats, quivering on
their slender stems. I had learned to know the various grains from our
farmer. Wheat and oats soon mingled fraternally before me.
“Grandfather, there is no more path.”
We might have expected it. Our path had vanished. Grandfather quietly
passed before me, appeared to take his bearings, snuffed the wind,
trampled down a few stalks, and reached a hedge which he overleaped
with an ease that was surprising at his age.
“My boy,” he said, helping me to scramble through it, “I abhor fences.”
Our comradeship was beginning well! No roads, no fences! We soon
entered a chestnut wood, not in the least like the four or five trees
which were the pride of our domain. Here, above us, was a great vault
supported by trunks and intermingled branches like so many colossal
columns. I saw grandfather stoop and gather from the moss a mushroom
that looked like a little white umbrella, wide open.
“This is a sort of amanita,” he said. “It is supposed to be poisonous,
whereas it is edible.” (He tasted it to prove his words.) “It isn’t the
season, yet. I will teach you to know all the cryptogams. There are
very few noxious ones. Nature is good, and never wishes us harm. It is
men who spoil her. I know a priest who lives on Satan bolets, and is
never the worse.”
He laughed to himself at the priest who could swallow the devil without
indigestion.
At last we reached an open space whence no house was to be seen, nor
even a cultivated field,--not a trace of humanity. The woods separated
us from the town and the lake, upon which a few craft were always
sailing. At our back was a rocky hill, half covered with furze and
brambles. A slender cascade fell from the summit and was transformed at
our feet into a clear, noiseless rill. We were tramping through bracken
and a coarse grass, starred with all the flowers of spring. The brook
had given a rare exuberance to all this vegetation. The monotonous
sound of the waterfall by no means disturbed the solitude of the spot,
at once wild and gentle and so secluded. One might have thought oneself
at the very end of the earth--or at its beginning. I felt at once happy
and desolate.
I had of course taken many a walk with my father. But he always took
us to heights that commanded a view; he would point out by name the
mountains on the edge of the horizon, the villages in the plain below,
the ports on both sides of the lake. He made us feel that the earth was
inhabited, and that it was interesting and beautiful because it was
inhabited. Now I suddenly discovered the charm of wild nature.
“What is its name?” I asked grandfather to reassure myself.
“The name of what?” he asked, not comprehending.
“The place where we are.”
The question surprised him, and provoked a little laugh that I did not
enjoy.
“It has no name.”
“Who owns it?”
“Nobody.”
Nobody! That was very strange. Just as the house must always have
belonged to us, I had supposed that the whole earth was divided into
properties.
“To us, if you like,” grandfather went on.
And his laugh, his terrible little laugh, began to undermine my notions
about life, my beliefs. It produced upon me the effect of the touch
of the finger that I used to give when I erected great buildings with
my blocks. The edifice grew higher, higher,--I barely touched with my
finger one of the columns at the base, and down it all came.
“Oh, to us!” I protested.
People were not to take possession of other people’s property like
that, simply because they did not know the owner’s name. Everything
that I had been taught protested.
“Why, yes, little simpleton,” he replied. “Every one takes his own in
the world. Do you like this bit of land? It is yours,--like the sun
that warms us, the air that we breath, the loveliness of these early
spring days.”
I was not convinced. Dim resistances awoke within me, shivering; I
found no words to express them, and could only bring forward the poor
objection:
“Yes, but I couldn’t take anything from it.”
“You take your pleasure from it, that’s the important thing.”
Confident of victory, he clinched it by invoking the testimony of a
third party.
“Jean-Jacques would explain to you better than I can, that nature holds
within itself the happiness of man. Jean-Jacques would have loved this
retreat.”
He uttered the name _Jean-Jacques_ with devout unction, pursing
his lips. He spoke of him as Aunt Deen spoke of the best known and most
useful saints, Saint Christopher, for example, who protects against
accidents, or Saint Antony, who helps to find lost objects. Puzzled, I
at once asked:
“Who is that--Jean-Jacques?”
“A friend; a friend whom you do not know.”
Why, I knew, or thought I knew, all grandfather’s friends. He received
few visits, mostly from other old men, who appeared older than he, who
seemed to be sad and who soon bored him. There was one who would sit
down without saying a word, and would just sit a long time, motionless
and mute. One day grandfather forgot that he was there and left the
room. On his return he found him in the same place, fast asleep.
Grandfather would complain openly about the visits of all these “old
fogies” as he called them, not one of whom, I was certain, was named
Jean-Jacques. On the other hand, he always liked to come down to the
drawing-room when he thought he might meet ladies there.
Time pressing, we returned through the chestnut grove, but went out
on another side, passing through a second hedge, this one of young
acacias. It was with manifest pleasure that I saw houses and cultivated
fields again.
“Come! here are private properties for you,” said grandfather when we
reached the cultivated grounds. His lips curled with disdain. Not at
all disconcerted I asked for landmarks.
“Where is ours?”
“I don’t know. Look over there, at the left. You’ll see it all right as
we go on. As for me, when I take a walk I go where fancy leads me. One
always gets home somehow.”
When we reached the highroad a strange and disquieting apparition
presented itself. I clung to my new preceptor:
“Grandfather, look up the road!”
It seemed to be coming toward us from over the hill, with a slow
uniform motion. In a few minutes it would be here. Grandfather shaded
his eyes with his hands, the better to concentrate his vision, and
explained the phenomenon:
“It’s the sheep that leave Provence every spring and go up to the high
pastures. They are led there by easy stages. Let us get to the side of
the road, beyond this pile of stones, and watch them go past.”
Thus instructed, I was soon able to distinguish between the almost
white road and the yellow-grey and brown flock which composed a single
moving mass,--repeated above all those regularly swaying backs by a
thin cloud of dust which spread over the fields on either side. At once
I saw again the picture in my Bible which showed Abraham travelling to
the land of Canaan.
In front of the flock marched a shepherd, wrapped in a great cape
which must have been many a time exposed to wind and rain, for it was
of the greenish colour of a thatched roof over which many winters
have passed. Notwithstanding the sun, his ample covering appeared not
to inconvenience him. No doubt our sun was not as warm as that which
he had left behind. His hat pulled down over his eyes cast a dark
shadow over the upper part of his face, only his grey beard being
distinctly visible. He was an old man, and he advanced slowly with
a slight swaying of the whole body. He might have been taken for a
beggar but for an unconscious air of majesty which covered him like his
cloak--that of a captain leading his company, that of a sower sowing
his seed. He took no one step faster than another, and the rhythm of
his regular advance seemed to communicate itself to the entire column.
It gave an impression as of the whole landscape following, obeying
in cadence a law which he fixed, the oxen tracing the furrows, the
reapers laying bare the fields, the morning and the evening obedient
to the time of returning, and even the stars at night traversing,
unhastingly, a part of the sky which I had thought I could see moving
in grandfather’s spy-glass.
He seemed to me so important that I bowed to him, but he did not return
my salutation, nor deign to detach his attention from his absorbing
task. Grandfather began a sentence:
“Tell me, shepherd ...” but deemed it useless to go on, recognising
the intense seriousness of the man.
A black dog walked almost under his feet, and behind came, in a
triangular group, three lean, hairless donkeys, laden with objects
which could not be seen since they were covered with an awning. Their
heads hung almost to the ground as if they would fain have snuffed it
up, or browsed upon it. The main body of the army followed them, the
sheep-people, crowding close to one another, eight or ten in a row
when one could manage to count them, but most of the time the rows
were indistinct, subject to flux and reflux, the great mass of wool
undulating as if it were that of a single rampant and interminable
animal, over which continual shivers passed.
I did not at first distinguish anything in this uniform and agitated
mass. Then I noticed little black spots that were ears. By degrees, as
I got used to them, certain individualities emerged from the compact,
monotonous throng. There were rams, generally taller, with long horns
rolled in a circle, and bells hanging from their necks by a wooden
horseshoe shaped collar. There were sheep with white or black coats,
better cared for than the others, walking with a certain ostentation.
There were also vagabond animals, capricious as goats, which would
gladly have escaped from the road but for the vigilance of the dogs
that operated on the flanks of the procession, long-haired grey dogs,
with eyes shining from cavernous depths under overhanging brows,
attentive and active, not to be by any means distracted from their duty
as sergeants. One of the sheep climbed upon the stones that protected
us, and was immediately imitated by several of her companions. One of
the guardians, open-mouthed, cut short the escapade, and forced them to
return to their proper place.
They passed and they passed. I thought they would never be done,
estimating their number at several thousands. Perhaps there really were
three or four hundred of them. At last the flood slackened, the ranks
grew thinner, seven or eight isolated sheep closed the procession. Last
of all came the rearguard, composed of four pack mules and a second
shepherd, less august and solemn than the first. When he had come
opposite us grandfather, grown braver, put the question to which the
other one had paid no heed:
“Well, shepherd, where are you going like that?”
He was a young man, supple, thin and muscular, wearing a short jacket,
red sash, and hat on the back of his head,--one who cared neither for
heat nor cold. His bronzed face was exposed to the full rays of the
sun. He was whistling to pass away the time, and smiling while he
whistled, as if he enjoyed his music--though perhaps it was the curve
of his lips that made him look as if he were smiling.
At grandfathers question he burst into a frank laugh; his teeth shone
between his lips--such teeth as I had seen in wolves or other wild
beasts in a menagerie to which I was once taken. He simply replied:
“To the mountain.”
How strange the resonance that certain syllables have for us! He might
have designated by its name the mountain where his flocks were to
pasture, and I should not have noticed it, but the unexpected lack of
precision communicated to me by some sorcery a longing for the heights.
It attacked me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a lightning shock. I had
not felt the charm of the wild, bare place from which I was returning
with grandfather; but now I was not only instantaneously initiated
into it,--I augmented its wildness and isolation. I felt upon my brow
a colder, sterner breath, the wind of summits which I had never seen.
Later in my life poems and symphonies have given me this imaginary
sensation, though more faintly. In each discovery that it makes the
heart, like a virgin, gives of its freshness.
Before the passing of the sheep I had managed to discover where we
were. Notwithstanding its surrounding trees, I had proudly recognised
the house below us in the edge of the town. It had always appeared very
large to me, vast as a kingdom, and now I seemed to find it small and
insignificant, simply because I had heard within me the music of three
words, “To the mountain.”
A few years later it was my lot to climb over mountains, those that are
covered with pines and larches, and those whose only vegetation is
ice, those that are carpeted with grass, soft as rosy flesh, those that
are all bone and muscle, like Michel Angelo’s figures, and again those
whose treacherous whiteness only loses its immobility under the warming
glow of the setting sun. They have taught me patience, calmness, and
perhaps also contempt, though one of the most difficult of Christian
precepts obliges us to despise no man. There I have met and tasted
by turns war and peace, struggle and serenity, the intoxication of
solitude and the glory of conquest in the blinding splendour of the
snow. They have never given me anything that was not contained in germ
in the shepherd’s reply.
On our return home, when we opened the gate, there were Tem Bossette
and his two acolytes digging, their faces bent on the ground. One of
them having perceived us, they rested with one accord, sure of our
complicity.
Aunt Deen congratulated me on my red cheeks; mother thanked grandfather
for his care of me. Father asked:
“Did you enjoy it?” and rejoiced when I answered in the affirmative.
No one suspected, I least of all, that that little boy, till then
contented, and never dreaming of anything outside of The House, had
brought desire home with him from his walk.
III
THE DISCOVERY OF THE EARTH
THAT period of my life is quite luminous in my memory: only later
it seems as if the sun must have been a little dimmed. I walked out
with grandfather morning and evening, I came into closer relations
with nature, and I had a new suit of clothes. It was the first. Up to
that time I had worn those of my elder brothers cut down to fit me. A
seamstress used to come to the house to alter and mend the garments
destined for me. She was as homely as heart could wish, and had been
recommended by Mlle Tapinois, who flattered herself that she had formed
her in her work-rooms.
I had grown rapidly during my illness. What was then my surprise when
I was informed that a tailor, a real tailor, was coming to take my
measures, mine, not Bernard’s nor Stephen’s! The tailor’s name was
Plumeau. Tall and thin as a lath, he floated in an immense frock coat.
Did he propose, like God when he created man, to make me in his own
image and after his likeness? He fabricated for me a full suit of olive
green which emphasised my leanness, to which end he had neglected
nothing. The coat, rivalling an overcoat, reached to my knees: the
cloth was of a solidity calculated to defy time. It was very evident
that I had a suit that would last till I took my baccalaureate. I
somehow had the impression that it favoured me too much, and my vanity
rebelled. The whole family had been summoned to see me in my new suit,
and ratify its acceptance. I was constrained to turn round and round
like a horse in the market, and my rebellious face became almost as
long as my coat.
“It will do,” father finally pronounced.
It would do? Yes, in two or three years, when I had grown a great deal
more. Mother was cautious about speaking too approvingly. My brothers
kept silence, but I perceived that they were smothering their laughter,
a self-denial which Louise by no means exercised. Aunt Deen saved the
situation which was becoming painful. She arrived late upon the scene,
for she had been putting to rights in the tower chamber when notified
of the arrival of M. Plumeau. We heard her on the stairs before we saw
her. Hope at once revived. Her coming was like the arrival of fresh
troops upon the field of battle--she decided the fortunes of the day.
Hardly had she perceived me, lost in my new suit, when she cried:
“It’s admirable, Francis; I won’t keep it from you; never have I seen
any one so becomingly dressed.”
Every one drew a long breath and I was comforted; so greatly, indeed,
that, unwilling to part with my fine garments, I put them on for
our next walk. Grandfather did not notice. But at the gate Aunt Deen
overtook us all out of breath.
“Naughty boy!” she exclaimed, “putting on your best clothes for a walk!”
She almost undressed me with her own hands in the street; I must needs
go back to the house under her escort, to exchange my costume for less
distinguished raiment, and the walk that day was spoiled. But those
that came afterward made it up to me.
There was the forest and there was the lake....
The forest, with certain farms and vineyards, made part of a historic
domain, the château of which, after enduring sieges and entertaining
great personages of the army or the church, was half in ruins and no
longer habitable. The whole property belonged to a retired colonel
of cavalry, son of a Baron of the Empire, whose fortune not being
sufficient to keep it up decently, he was permitting it to fall into
decay. He lived alone and spent the whole day riding about on one or
another of his old horses, without ever going beyond his estate. Though
it was entirely surrounded with a wall grandfather and I used to find
our way in by breaches which we had discovered.
He led me about among the trees, taught me to distinguish their
characteristics, and encouraged me to sit down under their shade,
on the moss and not on the treacherous benches which we perceived
sparsely scattered here and there, the woodwork of which was rotten
with damp. Grass was growing in the alleys, which under over-arching
trees guided the gaze to portals of light, that seemed on one side to
be blue, because of the lake which they framed in.
It was the month of June. A thousand tones of green were mingling,
marrying, all around us, from the pale green of the parasite mistletoe
to the almost black of the ivy which climbed the oak trunks. Spring
was singing its whole gamut around us. And under the trees there still
remained heaps of red leaves, vestiges of the former season.
I felt a vague fear at being thus alone, we two, amidst so imposing and
silent an assembly, and I tried to talk, in order to make our presence
there seem more real.
“Hush!” said grandfather; “be still and listen.”
Listen to what? And yet, little by little, I began to perceive a
multitude of soft sounds. We were no longer alone, as I had thought;
innumerable living things were all around us.
Far away two chaffinches were calling to one another at regular
intervals. The more distant one took up softly the couplet which the
other was pouring forth from a full throat. From tree to tree the
latter drew nearer. I saw him, my eye met his--so little and round! As
I did not stir, he remained. But what could be those dull, reiterated
blows? Woodpeckers, tapping the trunks with their bills.
Long bands of light glided here and there between the branches and
lay upon the ground; in their rays, which brought out the shapes of
the leaves, spiders’ webs were swinging, their finest threads plain
to see, and wasps, buzzing as they flew about. At last I could even
hear the rustling of the grass;--the secret labour of the earth under
the influence of heat. I was discovering a life of which I had never
dreamed.
“What is that call, grandfather?” I asked in a low tone.
“It must be a hare; let’s hide, and perhaps, if you are very quiet, we
shall see it before long.”
Upon this dialogue we softly dragged ourselves behind a bush. I knew
hares only from having eaten of them on rare occasions of ceremony,
though Aunt Deen deplored giving rabbit to children, because of the
soiling of napkins and faces. The cry sounded again--nearer us this
time.
“He is calling his doe,” whispered grandfather.
“His doe?”
“Yes, his wife. Be quiet.”
It was a gentle call, infinitely tender and languishing. Far away we
heard another call, like it, but hardly audible. From opposite sides of
the forest the duet went on; and I began to understand that animals,
like people, love to see and talk to one another. Suddenly, before me,
crossing the path, I saw two long ears and a little ball of a brown
body which seemed to bound over it. At the very edge the hare stopped,
hearkened to the distant, guiding voice, once again uttered his
heart-breaking cry, and disappeared in the neighbouring underbrush.
He was hastening to join his mate, but I had had time to see him quite
plainly.
Another time it was a fox. He must have scented us with his pointed
muzzle, for he fled at top speed, his tail between his legs. Being
learned in such matters through La Fontaine’s fables, and the “Scenes
in Animal Life,” I informed grandfather that this was a plot and it
would be well for us to make off.
“How stupid you are!” he exclaimed. “The fox is harmless.”
At which I was somewhat scandalised. But our walks were not always
calm to this degree. From our favourite nook we sometimes heard, like
a heavy rain, the galloping of a horse, and we would hardly manage to
hide behind the trunk of a beech, when the colonel would appear, on
horse-back. He had a short nose, a stiff moustache and hollow cheeks.
He sat upright, knees out, looking at nothing, and as he passed he
seemed to me a fearful man. Grandfather hastened to reassure me.
“He’s an old beast,” he said, “and his mount can’t trot any longer.”
I later learned that both had fought at Reichhoffen.
But on a graver occasion grandfather himself gave the signal for
retreat. I saw him cock his ear after the fashion of the hare, then
rise hastily from the grass on which we were sitting.
“Dogs,” he murmured, fearfully. “Let’s go.”
We made for the wall as fast as his old legs and my too-new ones would
permit. The dogs were already rushing upon us, barking and threatening,
when grandfather, who had pushed me before him, reached the top. The
alarm had agitated him and our safety by no means pacified him.
“Pretty proprietors!” he fulminated; “a little more and their dogs
would have devoured us!”
Their ferocity furnished him the material for a lesson; he turned
toward me:
“You see, my boy, men become wicked in towns, like apples that rot when
they are heaped together. And then they turn round and pervert animals!”
In truth I could have brought forward two opposing arguments; the
isolation of their estate and the ferocious nature of their beasts. He
granted only the second, and overturned that in the next breath:
“You have seen the chaffinch, the hare and the fox. In their natural
state they are incapable of doing harm. Tamed, all beasts sooner or
later become dangerous, perfidious, ferocious and false. Well! it’s
just the same with men! Free, they are kind and generous. Brutalised by
discipline, like that old soldier, they become terrific!”
Never had he spoken so much at length, nor, to my mind, so
enigmatically. No doubt the emotion caused by the dogs had made him
forget, in a direct way, the promise my father had exacted from him.
I was surprised at his eloquence, for which nothing had prepared me,
and I at once drew practical conclusions from it. I had been brought
up to believe in the benefits of authority; that of parents and school
teachers. And now it appeared that to be good one must obey nobody.
This adventure disgusted us with “our” forest, and we frequented less
extensive and more peaceful pieces of woods, preferably those situated
on the communal lands, all the more agreeable to grandfather because
of his hatred of private property. According to him, property was the
great obstacle to human happiness, but I hesitated to adopt his views;
I was pretty fond of owning things--for which he cared not at all.
As he had promised at the time of our first walk, he communicated to me
his knowledge of mushrooms, the round-stemmed fleshy bolet, its dome
the colour of a not quite ripe chestnut, the laseras, most beautiful
of mushrooms, like an egg of which the shell has just been broken,
the yellow, flower-shaped chanterelle were his favourites. I saw him
bite, like the priest whose story he had told me, one of those Satan
bolets, which turns blue when it is cut, the gash at once taking on
the appearance of a frightful wound. Taught by Aunt Deen’s contagious
fears, I was persuaded that his lips also would soon turn blue. I gazed
at him all terror and curiosity, seeking for the symptoms of danger.
But he digested his poison with marvellous ease.
“You see,” he observed in triumph, “the worthy priest for once was
right. Nature is a mother to us.”
Emboldened by this experiment, I gathered from the bushes some red
berries that were very pleasing to the eye, but which gave me a sharp
colic. Grandfather must be a bit of a sorcerer.
If ever we brought home from our hunt a handkerchief full of
cryptogams, Aunt Deen, suspicious, would not fail to cry out:
“Those horrors again!”
She would look them over most carefully, keeping only those that were
notoriously good to eat; she excelled in cooking them in butter, or
preparing them as an hors-d’œuvre, with a sauce of wine, salt, pepper
and herbs, and a dash of vinegar. Thus prepared the little balls,
fresh, white and crisp, melted in the mouth. Now that I gathered them
I, too, began to eat them.
I avenged myself of my hurtful berries by the strawberries and
whortleberries that I found among the moss. I loved to fill my hand
with them and then lick them up as goats do salt when it is given them.
It is true that indigestible things had been forbidden me; the notion
of duty was beginning to change in me, and I preferred to trust to that
mother nature so much praised by grandfather, and whom he only had to
invoke to be fed to heart’s content. Grandfather was constantly lauding
her, offering to her litanies of eulogiums. And yet he ridiculed the
chaplet that Aunt Deen and mother used to recite! And he took every
opportunity to instil into me an aversion to towns and love for the
delights of the fields. Cities, he said, were full of ferocious, greedy
folk, who would murder you for a piece of money, whereas in a village
men lived peaceful and happy, and loved one another with brotherly love.
One day a peasant invited us into his half ruined arbour to eat one of
those white cheeses over which they pour sweet cream. A bowl of wood
strawberries accompanied this frugal and innocent repast. They made so
delicious a mixture that I was inclined to believe blindly in universal
happiness, provided, indeed, that every one would consent to leave the
plague and leprosy infected city. In the country every one was kind,
obliging and free into the bargain. We would have no more enemies. Aunt
Deen’s they existed only in her old-woman’s imagination. Her ideas were
narrow, she did not, like grandfather, rise above petty, every-day
cares. I was peaceful, devout, disarmed. And now I knew the flower of
rural pleasure, of which I have never lost the flavour.
“Stuff yourselves,” said our host genially; “the doctor cured me of
chills and fever.”
We owed his kindliness to my father, but we preferred to suppose it
the usual thing by way of verification of our theories. Having stuffed
myself only too well, in fact, I suffered from indigestion on the way
home, aggravated by grandfather’s unkindly humour.
“You will not boast of this,” he observed, when I was relieved.
I understood the significance of his advice, and resolved to preserve
a prudent silence which would shield us in any whim we might indulge
in future excursions. We reached home late: the want of punctuality
seemed to me an elegant indifference. Why dine at one hour rather than
at another? One could even do without dinner entirely, if one’s stomach
was full of white cheese and cream. Grandfather explained where we had
been and extolled peasant hospitality in choice terms.
“Ah, yes,” cried father, “you happened upon that rascal Barbeau. I
think I did save him from death. He lives mostly by poaching and
smuggling and owes me his bill yet. I am just as willing he should not
pay it. The colour of his money is not clean.”
I considered that he was too severe upon so polite and generous a man.
We went again to visit Barbeau, and were received by his wife. She was
an aged, grey, gnarled, blear-eyed woman, who found nothing better to
offer us than a miserable crust of gruyère cheese, which greatly vexed
us. She said nothing as to her husband’s occupation but pursed up her
lips to confide to us the fine places that her sons enjoyed. The eldest
was postman in town, the second an employe at the railway station, and
as for the third, oho! he was earning thousands and hundreds.
“Waiter in a hotel in Paris, Monsieur Rambert, waiter in a furnished
hotel. He sends us money.”
“Bad trade,” observed grandfather.
“There is no bad trade,” insisted the old woman. “The one thing is to
get money.”
“And you have none left?”
“Surely not,--there is none left. There is nobody any more who eats
chestnuts and drinks cider, Monsieur Rambert. As for the land, see! I
spit upon it!”
And the old hag did in fact spit upon the growing grain, now a pale
green about to change to gold, which grew close around her hovel. One
would have said that she was banning all the country-side.
It did not occur to me that this grain was the flour which at our house
was blessed before being kneaded into dough, the bread which my father
never cut before tracing upon the loaf the sign of the cross. All I
saw was a disgusting act and involuntarily I laid down my share of the
cheese which I had been eating without pleasure.
“Let’s go,” said grandfather abruptly.
Mother Barbeau’s remarks vexed him. At least I had no attack of nausea
this time.
After this conversation he abandoned agricultural life for a time and
decided to take me to the lake which we had not yet explored. He led me
thither with no enthusiasm.
“It is a closed-in water,” he said contemptuously.
Were there open waters then? Of course--there was the sea. Until now
the word had not impressed me and I attributed no meaning to it. When
the mist hid the opposite shore the lake used to seem endless, and
I had heard people around me say, “it’s like the sea.” I had paid
no attention. Grandfather’s disdainful description brought to my
imagination by contrast a free immensity. Later, when at last I saw the
sea--it was at Dieppe, from the top of the cliff--I felt no surprise.
It was simply an open water.
“Would you like a row?” grandfather asked one day.
Would I! I desired it all the more because such an expedition
represented to me in some sort a substitution of the individual life
for the family life. My parents had forbidden me to go out in a boat,
after the fall into the water which had brought on my pleurisy. They
were afraid both of the dampness and of my awkwardness. Once again,
then, _I was the fair child who had escaped from his mother’s
arms_. The _maiden with golden wings_ who enticed me was my own
good pleasure.
We took a canoe and rowed out of the port. Grandfather, who used the
oars irregularly (which by no means reassured me), soon laid them down
and left us to float.
“Where are we going?” I asked, somewhat uneasily.
“I don’t know.”
Uncertainty increased the mystery of the water. I amused myself with
leaning over the gunwale, and dipping my hands in the water. The cold
caress it gave me and the small danger we were encountering, or which
I thought we were encountering, gave me a mingled but very exciting
sensation.
What was the meaning of these brief flashes of silver which were
lighted on the surface and at once went out? Around their dying spark
a circle appeared, which grew ever larger and finally was lost. It was
made by fish which came up to breathe. One of them, quite near, showed
his little mouth and the shining scales on his head. I had come into
contact with a new world--the submarine world.
When the wind began to blow grandfather would make me sit in the bottom
of the boat, upon the boards, which would be pretty wet. From thence,
being still not tall, I could perceive nothing but the sky. I could the
better discern its dome and on fine days the continuous vibration of
the ether. While grandfather was dreaming I would sit there motionless
and happy. I formed the habit of being excessively happy without
knowing why, as if existence had no limits and no purpose.
Grandfather made friends also with the fishermen who were setting their
nets.
“They are good fellows,” he would say; “the lake is like the country.
As man leaves the city he approaches the happy state of nature.”
We came to know the manners of the trout, the perch, the voracious pike
and the char, the flesh of which is as savoury as the pink flesh of the
salmon.
“Aha!” said one of these artless fishermen joyfully, “all my char is
engaged by the Bellevue Hotel. We rake it in night and day. They are
the customers for my money.”
Thus was I initiated into the life of the land and the water.
Grandfather began to be interested in my progress in the friendship
of nature. He had a disciple whom he had not sought. I was the first
now to turn my back upon the town, leap over walls, cross the fields
without the slightest care for the crops. He treated me as an heir,
or a child worthy of being one of those sluggard kings who possess
the world. And one hot day in July, after we had painfully climbed a
hillock whence one could overlook the plain, the forest and the lake,
he began to laugh at a notion that had occurred to him.
“You know, my boy, they think I have nothing, that I am just one of
those clatter-clogs that shuffle along the road with a tramp’s bundle
on his back. What a joke! There is no landed proprietor richer than
I--do you hear?”
His words did not surprise me. I had lost that notion of _mine_
and _thine_ that divides riches from poverty.
“This water, these woods, these fields,” he went on, “all these are
mine. I never take any care of them, and they are mine all the same.”
And like an act of investiture he laid his hand upon my head, saying:
“They are mine; I give them to you.”
It was a playful, unceremonious presentation. Both of us amused
ourselves with the idea. And yet, in spite of our laughter, I had a
very clear impression that the world did in fact belong to me. I would
no longer consent to have a small, narrow place in the world.
As we were going down from our hilltop we met upon the road a young
woman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood. She wore a white
gown which left her forearms and neck bare, and on her head was a hat
decorated with red cherries. Her parasol, a little behind her, made an
aureola or background for a face which was as clear cut and delicate
as one of those magnolia flowers in the garden that I loved for their
colour, odour and form as of white birds with outspread wings. Still I
should not have noticed her if grandfather had not stopped, riveted to
the spot with admiration, and exclaimed aloud, “How lovely she is!”
The fair face crimsoned. But the young woman smiled at the too
direct homage. I looked at her then, and so fixedly that I have
never forgotten that vision, not even the cherries. But I made my
reservations. To me she seemed already old, perhaps thirty. That is
an advanced age in the pitiless eyes of a child. Her flower-like
complexion made me think of that avowal of the nightingale from which
one day when I was reading the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I had drawn a
fitful melancholy: _I am in love with the Rose--I strain my throat
all the night long for her, but she sleeps, and hears me not_. And
for the first time, and not without a secret anticipation, I associated
an unknown woman with a yet more unknown love.
After this incident grandfather led me to a wooded slope where we had
never been, and which he had represented to me as without interest when
I proposed it as the object of a walk. We had to cross a little brook
before reaching its foot. On the way he was self-absorbed and said not
a word. At the top he turned to the east and led the way directly to a
pavilion near a farm house but half-hidden in a clearing.
“There it is,” he said.
I understood that he was not speaking to me. This pavilion, one story
above the ground floor, appeared to be in a miserable condition. The
roof lacked slates, a surrounding gallery was rotting away. It must
have been long since abandoned. Grandfather delighted in its ruinous
and uninhabitable condition,--a thing which would have surprised me
more if I had not grown accustomed to his whims.
“So much the better,” he murmured; “there is no one there.”
Returning to the farmhouse he perceived an old man who was warming
himself upon a bench in the sun and dipping soup from a pot with
a wooden spoon. With this old man he entered upon an interminable
conversation which bored me, but which ended in some questions as to
the pavilion.
“It is good for nothing but firewood,” said the peasant.
“There were people in it formerly,” insinuated grandfather.
“Formerly--a good many years ago.”
Grandfather appeared to hesitate as to continuing the conversation, but
then resumed:
“Yes--a good many years ago. But you and I were not born to-day. Tell
me, don’t you remember a lady?”
I at once thought of the lady in white with the cherries in her hat,
and I summed up her figure in that clearing, at the door of the
pavilion. My imagination was already at work upon this new theme.
“Oh,” said the old man, before swallowing the spoonful that he held in
his hand--“as for women, I despise them.”
A gleam of rage shot across grandfather’s eyes, and I thought he was
going to overset the old man and his pot. He at once cut short the
conversation without another word. But as he turned away he took me to
witness the beauty of the place.
“All the same, it’s sweet and wild here. The trees have hardly changed.
They are all that is left.”