It is impossible to describe the dejection of Frantz Mathéus and his
disciple after they had left Haslach.
Coucou Peter could no longer control his anger; at every step he
flourished his stick and exclaimed—
“Rascally Anabaptist! rascally mayor! rascally Jacob Fischer! Ah, you
scamps! if I only had you here, I’d make you dance! I would not leave
a hair on your heads! To drive out so worthy a man!—a man who performs
miracles!—a man worth more than all of you to the twentieth generation!
Scamps! vagabonds! it’ll be a lucky day for you if I meet you sooner or
later!”
Thus spoke Coucou Peter, turning a backward glance from time to time, to
see that no gendarmes were following on their track.
The illustrious philosopher uttered not a word, but buried himself in his
sorrow. It was not until much later, when they had reached the village
of Tieffenbach, in one of the gorges of the mountain, that the good
man appeared to recover himself. Then, raising his broad-brimmed hat,
and wiping the perspiration from his streaming forehead, he said with
singular calmness—
“Dear disciple, we have passed through a very rude trial; let us return
thanks to the Demiourgos who, as ever, has sheltered us beneath his ægis.
In vain sophists pursue us with their insults, in vain they multiply
obstacles and ambush themselves upon our path; all that but serves the
better to exhibit the protection of the Being of Beings, who builds on us
the fairest hopes.”
“You are right, Doctor,” replied Coucou Peter; “when people can perform
miracles like us they have nothing to fear. Before six months are over,
I’ll re-enter Haslach in a bishop’s hat on a white horse; I’ll have two
chorister-boys to carry the skirt of my robe, and others to burn incense
under my nose; but, in the meanwhile, I think there will be no harm in
our learning where we are going.”
“Let not that distress you, my dear friend,” replied the illustrious
philosopher; “we shall always find room enough before us. If we have not
hitherto been successful, it is because we require a vaster theatre! You
must observe that Providence has conducted us, in some measure against
our inclinations, towards the larger towns; let us go to Saverne!”
“To Saverne!—mind what you are about! Saverne’s a town full of lawyers
and gendarmes!”
The good apostle said that because he had left his wife at Saverne, to
say nothing of numerous debts to the brewers and publicans in general
throughout the town; but the illustrious Doctor listened to none of these
objections.
“Gendarmes are made for thieves,” he said, “and not for philosophers;
let us go forward, Coucou Peter, let us go forward; every moment of our
existence belongs to human kind.”
They passed down the silent street of Tieffenbach; most of the
inhabitants were away at the fair of Haslach, and the small houses with
their closed doors, their little gardens surrounded with disjointed
palings, and their solitary moss-grown wells, had a melancholy look, very
different from holiday gaiety and animation.
Coucou Peter appeared thoughtful.
“Tell me, Maître Frantz,” he said, “can rabbis marry?”
“Undoubtedly, my friend; it is a duty even, imposed on them by Moses, for
the propagation of the species.”
“Yes; but the Chief Rabbi of the Peregrination of Souls?”
“Why not? Marriage is in the order of nature; I see nothing objectionable
in it.”
Coucou Peter immediately appeared in better spirits.
“Doctor,” he said, “we were wrong to worry ourselves. The first thing
we will do on reaching Saverne is to go to my wife; she must have saved
something during five months.”
“Your wife!”
“Eh!—yes; my wife, Gredel Baltzen, married to Coucou Peter before the
mayor and pastor of the town.”
“You never told me that.”
“Because you never asked me about it.”
“And you don’t live together?”
“No; she’s too thin—I like fat women—I can’t help it—it was born in me.”
“But then, why did you marry her?”
“I hadn’t then come to know my own taste; I was at the age of innocence,
and this girl wheedled me. At last—this is how it was; seeing her every
day growing thinner and thinner, I said to myself, Coucou Peter, you’re
not of the same race, you’ll make a bad mixture; you’ll do better to take
yourself off. So I took what there was in the cupboard and went off.
Conscience before everything; it would have been too painful to have
become the parent of skinny children; I sacrificed myself.”
This avowal surprised the illustrious philosopher; but he was touched
by the delicacy of his disciple, and more than all by his admirable
anthropo-zoological sentiments.
“My friend,” he said, “I cannot but approve the motive of your conduct.
If, however, your wife was unhappy——”
“Bah, Maître Frantz! she was only too glad to be rid of me. We could
never agree! when I said white she said black; and that sort of thing
always ended by the use of the stick. Besides, what is she in want of?
She is servant to Pastor Schweitzer, one of my old Strasbourg comrades,
of the time when I was employed at a beerhouse and he was studying
theology. How many times have I taken him into the cellar! March beer!
strong beer! foaming beer! we passed all the barrels in review. Ha! ha!
ha! I can’t help laughing when I think of it! But to return to my wife;
she has twelve francs a month, board and lodging, with nothing to do
but look after the house, mend the linen, make the soup, and read the
children a chapter out of the Bible every evening, while the pastor
smokes his pipe and takes his mug of beer at the casino. What woman
wouldn’t be happy leading such a life, especially as the pastor is a
widower, and has never got married again?”
“Certainly,” replied Mathéus, absently, “certainly; she must be very
happy.”
By this time they had reached the end of the village, and the illustrious
philosopher observed a knot of women gesticulating about some object
lying on the ground.
The miller, a little man with hanging cheeks, a grey cap on his head, and
white with flour from head to foot, was leaning on his door and speaking
with remarkable animation.
In spite of the tic-tac of the mill, and the noise of the water rushing
through the sluice, he could be heard exclaiming—
“Let them go to the devil! It’s no business of mine!”
Maître Frantz and Coucou Peter went to see what was the matter. When they
had come within a few paces the women moved away, and Mathéus saw an old
gipsy woman lying against the wall, and apparently at the point of death.
This old woman was so wrinkled and decrepid that she might have been
a hundred years old; she said nothing, but a young gipsy on his knees
beside her besought the miller to receive her into his barn.
The arrival of Mathéus had somewhat moderated this man’s rage.
“No, no,” he said, in a calmer tone; “the old woman might die, and all
the expense of burying her would fall on me.”
The illustrious doctor, grieved at such a spectacle, went up to the door,
and stooping towards the miller said gently to him—
“My friend, how can you refuse shelter to this unfortunate creature?
Reflect that she may die for want of assistance. To what reproaches would
you not subject yourself in the country around! Come, allow yourself to
be moved by the prayer of this poor child.”
“Monsieur le curé,” replied the miller, taking off his cap, “if they were
Christians, I wouldn’t refuse; but pagans—I can’t stand that!”
“What matters their philosophical opinions?” cried Maître Frantz. “Are
we not all brothers? Have we not all the same wants, the same passions,
the same origin? Believe me, my worthy man, give a truss of straw to this
unhappy creature, and you will be fulfilling your duty, and the Being of
Beings will recompense you for it.”
All the women sided with Mathéus, and the miller, for fear of provoking
scandal, opened his barn; but he did it with so many maledictions against
these vagabonds, who compelled the world to support them while they
lived, and to bury them when they died, that no credit was due to him for
his charitable action.
Coucou Peter noticed all this with his hands in his pockets and without
speaking a word; but when Mathéus bowed to the good women and rode on his
way, he suddenly asked—
“Maître Frantz, do you believe that old woman is very ill?”
“I fear so,” answered the good man, shaking his head. “I fear she will
not live through the night.”
“Yet you saw how she got up without assistance when the barn was opened
for her.”
“That is true, and I am still astonished at it,” replied Mathéus. “These
gipsies must have very tough lives! It comes of the sober and primitive
existence they lead in the midst of forests. They know nothing of the
excesses of the table, neither of drink nor of labour, so injurious to
other men. Thus lived our first parents.”
Coucou Peter could not help smiling.
“Maître Frantz,” he said, “with all due respect to you, I know enough of
the gipsies to know that they never disdain anything good to eat, and
that they drink a great deal more brandy than we do. As to working, you
are right; they like better doing nothing than making themselves useful
to humankind; not like we, who work for the future generations. Do you
know what I think of that old woman?”
“What do you think of her, my friend?”
“I think she is no more ill than you or I; that, after trying all the
doors in the town to see whether they were well fastened, this old
swindler, finding there was nothing to take, has shammed ill for the
purpose of getting into the mill. During the night she and the boy with
her will get up quietly, creep into the fowl-house, wring the necks of
the fowls, turkeys, and ducks, and to-morrow, before daylight, she’ll
have vanished! That’s my notion.”
“How can you bring yourself to think such things?” cried the illustrious
philosopher. “Oh, Coucou Peter! Coucou Peter! it’s very wrong to conceive
such ideas against an entire race of men because those men have a skin a
little yellower than our own, thicker lips, and brighter eyes!”
“No, Maître Frantz; it’s because they all without exception belong to the
family of foxes,” said Coucou Peter, gravely.
“But will—cannot will change their evil instincts?” cried Mathéus,
surprised to find himself embarrassed by his own system. “Are not all men
perfectible? Are they to be considered as brutes? Doubtless they have
animal appetites, which come to them from their original nature, but
the Great Demiourgos has given them at birth a superior faculty—moral
sense—which enables them to distinguish the just from the unjust, and to
combat instincts incompatible with the dignity of man.”
“That would be all very well,” said Coucou Peter, “if I hadn’t known this
old gipsy. It is not for nothing that her companions call her the Black
Magpie; the older she grows the more she likes other people’s property.
I’m sure that, after her death, the Being of Beings will send her back
with crooked fingers, as a reward for her good actions.”
“But if that is the case, let us return to the village and warn the
miller.”
“Bah! what is the use of our mixing ourselves up in matters that do not
concern us? Besides, in the first place, I’m not sure she may not be
ill; in the next place, this miller is not a bit better than she, for he
is the greatest stealer of flour I know. If the Black Magpie wrings the
necks of his fowls, he has crunched the bones of many others. We need not
trouble ourselves about that, Maître Frantz. I only wanted to tell you
that these gipsies are of another race than ourselves; still this justice
must be done them—that they never attack people on the road; they like to
eat and drink at the expense of others, and, good faith, in that respect,
they are not unlike some other people!”
While this conversation was proceeding, the illustrious philosopher
and his disciple advanced farther and farther into the forest. Coucou
Peter believed himself sure of the path, every moment expecting to see
the house of the gamekeeper Yorich, one of his old comrades, where he
proposed passing the night. But at the end of an hour, nothing coming in
sight, doubts crossed his mind as to the direction of the road, though
he said nothing to Mathéus on the subject. After going on for another
half-hour, the path becoming narrower and narrower, he no longer doubted
having missed his way. It was about seven o’clock; brambles and thorns
attached themselves to the clothes of Mathéus and his disciple; at length
the path disappeared entirely, and lost itself in the midst of tall
bushes.
“I say, Maître Frantz,” then said the fiddler, “are you quite sure of
this road?”
“Of this road!” cried Mathéus, stopping abruptly, “I don’t know it at
all.”
“Then we are in a nice fix!—and I’ve been letting you lead me! What’s to
be done?”
“Let us go back,” said the good man.
“But we haven’t more than half an hour’s daylight before us, and
we’ve come two leagues from Tieffenbach; on the contrary, let us push
forward—still forward; we must arrive somewhere.”
They then looked at each other in silence, in the greatest uncertainty.
The missel-thrushes called to each other from the tops of the pines; the
setting sun spread its yellow hues on the foliage; the dull roar of the
torrent in the valley was heard. They had remained for several minutes
without exchanging a word, when Coucou Peter exclaimed—
“Hark, Maître Frantz;—do you hear nothing?”
“Yes, I hear voices down there,” said the good man, pointing to the
valley.
“And I fancy I smell smoke,” replied Coucou Peter. “Sniff, Doctor.”
“I think it is so,” said the illustrious philosopher.
“I’m quite sure of it now,” cried the disciple; “we are not far from a
charcoal-burner’s. Which way does the wind come?—That way—forward!”
They had hardly gone fifty paces in the direction indicated, before they
entered a deep valley, right opposite to where a troop of gipsies were
preparing their cookery on the hillside.
“Hey!” cried Coucou Peter, “we shan’t want for supper, Maître Frantz—we
shan’t want for supper!”
They walked towards the gipsies, who were much surprised to see a man on
horseback in the depth of this solitude.