I
Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the _Rue Notre-Dame
des Champs_. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the
Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother
nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet,
with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing
the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression
for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her
foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste.
Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held
clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a
severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no
very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed,
which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened
that confined her to her bed.
There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little
one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish
whisper bits of her favourite ditty:
The fisherman, when dawn is nigh,
Peers forth to greet the kindling sky....
Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of
each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little
Jean's lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn
and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar
in her fond hopes.
A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of
fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp
and the vague tales of _concierges_, footmen, and cooks, she
pictured her boy at twenty more beautiful than an archangel,
his breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing-room full
of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable ladies with manners every
whit as genteel as had the actresses at the _Gymnase_:
_But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest._
Presently the vision changed; now her boy was standing up gowned
in Court, by his eloquence saving the life and honour of some
illustrious client:
_But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest._
Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a brilliant
uniform, on a prancing charger, victorious in battle, like the
great Generals whose portraits she had seen one Sunday at Versailles:
_But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
Sweet wee general, take thy rest._
But when night was creeping into the room, a new picture would
dazzle her eyes, a picture this of other and incomparably greater
glories.
Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at heart, she was gazing
from the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad
in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted
choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she
would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this
poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping
in the poisoned air of a back-shop:
_But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
My sweet boy-bishop, take thy rest._
One evening, as her husband handed her a cooling drink, she said
to him in a tone of regret:
"Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy Virgin among flowers
and precious stones and lights. It was so beautiful! so beautiful!"
She said she was no longer in pain, that she wished her Jean to
learn Latin. And she passed away.