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THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
ANNE DILLON | i GIFT OF j
Mrs. Helen A. Dillon
Mirbeau. ‘This 1s wnat me suze
“He is a literary explorer. - - The rare charm of tenderness is his. . - In his novels we find strong, violent strokes, an extreme irony; but his pages are filled with an emotion which avows, as if regretfully, the nobility and lofty desires” of a soul imprisoned in the reserve of its youth.”
And another critic thus paints him:
“A masterly and vigorous writer, gifted with an extraordinary power of expression, an enthusiast, an unexampled evoker of nature, stirred by the physical sensations which human beings and inanimate things give him, equally capable of lifting us to a world of poetry Of of hurling us into abys- mal depths; always 2 man of the first water, battling against all the spectres of life; and.
me Set OES
exaggeration. In its remarkable pages, Octave
Mirbeau, who has been characterized as “the Don Juan of the Ideal,” pours the tumultuous passion of a Byronically sensitive soul. It is filled with pity, it trembles with poetry and is extraordinary by reason of its wave of sublime eloquence. Yet it is a simple story, the story of a love for a wilful woman, but the striking character which distinguishes it lies in the clear, unmatched impressions of the love.
4 (oe can be called a masterpiece without
Jean Mintie, the hero, is an analyst of the soul who cannot experience an action without dissecting it, a man of feeling who recklessly surrenders himself to his love, at once frenzied and intelligent; a man neither foolish nor an imbecile, who yet permits himself to be dragged to the depths of vice and crime for his sweet- heart. The description of Mintie’s reaction to war is masterly in its realism.
. The book has undeniable charm —a powerful, sweeping narrative. It is the record of a man crucified by his love.
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from Microsoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/calvaryanovel0Omirbiala
CALVARY
(A Novel)
By Octave Mirbeau Member of the Goncourt Academy
Translated by Louis Rich
New York Lieber & Lewis
MCMXXII
CopyricHr, 1922, By LIEBER & LEWIS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Collere CALVARY
Library
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CHAPTER I
- les-Hétres, a small town in the department of Orne, and I was immediately christened by the name of Jean-Frangois-Marie-Mintié. To celebrate in a fitting manner my coming into this world, my godfather, who was my uncle, distributed a lot of dainties, threw many coppers and other small coins to a crowd of country boys gathered on the church steps. One of them, while struggling with his comrades, fell so awkwardly on the sharp edge of a stone that he broke his neck and died the following day. As for my uncle, when he returned home he contracted typhoid fever and passed away a few weeks later. My governess, old Marie, often related these incidents to me with pride and admiration.
Saint-Michel-les-Hétres is situated on the outskirts of a great national forest, the Tourouvre forest. Al- though it counts fifteen hundred inhabitants, it makes no more noise than is made in the fields on a calm day by the trees, the grass, the corn. A grove of giant beech trees, which turn purple in autumn, shields it from the northern winds, and the houses with pentile roofs, descending the declivity of the hill, extend far out until they meet the great valley, broad and always green, where one can see straying herds of oxen. The Huisne River, glittering under the sun, winds and loses itself in the meadows which are separated by rows of tall poplars. Dilapidated tanneries, small wind- mills scale its course, clearly visible among clumps of alders. On the other side of the valley are cultivated fields with straight lines of fences and apple trees
| WAS born one evening in October at Saint-Michel-
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scattered here and there. The horizon is enlivened by small pink farms, by hamlets one can see here and there in the midst of the verdure which appears almost black. Because of the proximity of the woods, the sky is alive with crows and yellow-beaked jackdaws coming and going at all seasons.
Our family lived on the outskirts of the town, op- posite a church, very old and tottering, an ancient and curious structure which was called the Priory —an annex of an Abbey which was destroyed during the Revolution and of which were left not more than two or three faces of a crumbled wall covered with ivy. I recall clearly but without tenderness the smallest de- tails of the places where my childhood was spent. I recall the iron gate in a neglected condition which opened with a creaking sound into a large court adorned by a scurfy grass plot, two shabby looking sorbs visited by blackbirds, some chestnut trees, very old and with such large trunks that the arms of four men could not reach around them— my father used to tell this with pride to every visitor. I recall the house with its brick walls, grim and crusty; its semi- circular steps beautified by geraniums; its irregular windows which looked like holes; its roof, very steep, ending in a weather-cock, which in a breeze made a sound like an owl. Behind the house, I remember, was a basin where muddy wake-robins were bathing or small carps with white scales were playing. I recall the sombre curtain of fir trees which hid the commons from view, the back yard, the study which my father built on the edge of the road skirting the property in such a manner that the coming and going of clients and clerks did not disturb the quiet of the household. I recall the park, its enormous trees, strangely twisted, eaten up by polypes and moss, joined together by tangled lianas, and the alleys never raked, where worn-
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out stone benches rose up here and there like ancient tombs. And I also remember myself, a sickly child, in a smock frock of lustring, running across this gloom of forsaken things, lacerating myself in the blackberry bush, torturing the animals in the backyard or for entire days sitting in the kitchen and watching Felix who served as our gardener, valet, and coachman.
Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead. Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick belfry laughs gaily into the blue; in place of the old house there now rises an elaborate Swiss cottage built by the new proprietor who, in the enclosure, has increased the number of colored glass balls, small cascades and plaster statues of Love, soiled by rain. But things and people are engraved so profoundly upon my memory that time could not apply a burnisher hard enough to erase them.
I want, from now on, to speak of my parents not as I knew them when I was a child, but such as they would appear to me now, completed by memory, humanized, so to speak, by intimacy and revelation, in all the crudity of life, in all the immediacy of impres- sion which the inexorable experiences of life lend to persons too unhesitatingly loved and too closely known.
My father was a notary public. Since time imme- morial it had been so with the Mintié family. It would have appeared monstrous, almost revolutionary, if a member of the Mintié family had dared to break this family tradition and had renounced the scutcheons of gilt wood which were transmitted religiously from one generation to another like some title of nobility. At Saint-Michel-les-Hétres and the surrounding coun-
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try, my father occupied a position which ancestral pride, his dignified manners of a country gentleman, and, above all, his income of twenty thousand francs rendered very important, almost unshakeable. Mayor of Saint-Michel, member of the general council, acting justice of the peace, vice president of the agricultural commission, member of numerous agronomic and for- estry societies, he did not overlook any of the petty or ambitious honors which carry with them a sort of prestige and influence. He was an excellent man, very honest and very gentle,—with a mania for kill- ing. He could not see a bird, a cat, an insect — any- thing at all that was alive — without being seized with a strange desire to kill it. He waged a relentless trapper’s war on blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches and bullfinches. Felix was instructed to let my father know as soon as a bird appeared in our garden, and my father would leave everything — clients, business, his meal —to kill the bird. He would often lie in wait for hours, motionless, behind a tree on which the gardener had pointed out a little blueheaded titmouse. During his walks, every time he noticed a bird on a branch and did not have his rifle with him, he would throw his cane at it, never failing to say, “ Oh, hang it! He was there this morning!” or “Hang it! I must have missed him for sure, it’s too far.” These were the only thoughts which birds ever inspired in him.
-He was also greatly engrossed with cats. When- ever he recognized the trail of a cat he could not rest until he discovered and killed it. Sometimes on a moonlight night he would get up, go out with his gun and stay outside till dawn. You should have seen him, musket on shoulder, holding by the tail the ca- daver of a cat, bleeding and motionless! Never have I. admired anything so heroic; and David on killing
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Goliath must have had no more intoxicated an air of triumph! With a majestic gesture he threw the cat at the feet. of the cook who said, “Oh! the nasty beast!” and thereupon started to cut it up, saving the meat for the beggars, leaving the skin to dry on the end of a stick, later to be sold at Auvergnats. If I dwell so much on details of a seemingly unimportant character, it is because during all my life I was ob- sessed with and haunted by these feline episodes of my childhood. There is one among them which has left such an impression on my spirit that to this very day, in spite of all the years that have gone by and all the sorrows that I have experienced, not a day passes without my thinking of it sadly.
One afternoon father and I were walking in the garden. My father carried a long stick ending in an iron skewer, by means of which he unearthed snails
"and limaxes that were eating up the plants. Suddenly on the edge of the basin we noticed a little kitten drinking. We hid behind a thick shrub.
“ Child,” my father said in a low voice, “go quickly, fetch my musket and come back. Be careful the cat does not see you.”
And squatting down, he moved apart the twigs of the shrub so that he might observe every movement of the kitten which, resting on its forelegs, its neck drawn out and wagging its tail, was lapping the water in the basin and turning its head from time to time to lick its mouth and scratch its neck.
“Come on,” repeated my father, “ be off!” I pitied the little kitten. It was so pretty with its tawny fur striped with silky black, its supple and graceful move- ments and its tongue, like the petal of a rose, which pumped water! I would have liked to disobey my father, I even thought of making a noise, I wanted to cough, to brush the twigs apart rudely in order to
£
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warn the poor animal of the danger ahead. But my father looked at me with eyes so severe that I walked away in the direction of the house. Pretty soon I came back with the musket. The kitten was still there, confident and gay. It had finished drinking. Sitting on its back, its ears pricked up and eyes shin- ing, it was following the flight of a butterfly in the air. Oh, what a moment of unspeakable anguish that was for me! My heart was beating so powerfully that I feared I was going to faint.
“Papa! Papa!” I shouted. At the same time a sharp report was heard, which sounded like the crack of a whip.
“ Damned rascal!” my father swore.
He aimed again. I saw his finger pull the trigger; quickly I shut my eyes and stopped my ears. Bang!! ....and I heard a mewing, at first plaintive and then sorrowful, oh, so sorrowful that one might have said it was the cry of a child. And the little kitten jumped, writhed, pawed the grass and did not stir any more.
Of an absolutely mediocre mind, tender hearted, though he seemed indifferent to everything which did not appeal to his vanity or did not affect his profes- sional interests, lavish of counsel, ready to render aid, conservative, of graceful carriage and gay, my father justly enjoyed the respect of everybody. My mother, a young woman of the nobility, had brought no for- tune with her as a dowry; instead, she had brought with her powerful connections, a closer alliance with the petty aristocracy of the country, which was con- sidered just as useful as an increment in cash or an acquisition of land. Although his powers of observa- tion were very limited and he did not boast of any ability to read souls as well as he could read a marriage contract or explain the legal points of a testament, my father very soon realized the difference of birth, edu-
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cation and temperament which separated him from his wife.
Whether or not in the beginning he felt hurt on that score, I do not know; at any rate he never showed it. He resigned himself to it. Between him, who was rather awkward, ignorant and indifferent,— and her, who was educated, refined and emotional, there was a chasm which he never for a moment tried to bridge, having neither the desire nor the ability to do so. This moral situation of two beings united for all time, whom no community of thought and aspiration ever brought in close contact with each other, did not in the least trouble my father who considered himself satisfied if he found the house well managed, the meals well regulated, his habits and idiosyncrasies well re- spected. To my mother, on the other hand, this con- dition was very painful and made her heart heavy.
My mother was not beautiful, not even good looking, but there was so much simple dignity in her carriage, so much natural gracefulness in her movements, an expression of such broad kindness on her lips, some- what pale, and in her eyes which by turns changed their color like the skies in April and shone like a sapphire, a smile so caressing, so sad, so humble, that one overlooked her forehead which was a little too high, swelling out under spots of hair irregularly planted, her nose all too large and her skin which was ash-colored and metal-like in appearance and which at times had an eruption of pimples on it. In her presence, as one of her old friends often told me, and as since then I sorrowfully realized myself, one felt at first slightly affected, then gradually carried away and finally violently possessed by a strange feeling of sympathy in which there was mingled a sort of affec- tionate respect, a vague desire, pity, and a longing to offer oneself as a sacrifice for her. Despite her physical
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imperfections or rather because of these very imper- fections, she possessed the sad and irresistible charm which is given to certain creatures privileged by mis- fortune, and around whom there floats an atmosphere of something irreparable. Her childhood and her early youth were periods of illness and were marked by some disquieting nervous fits. But it was hoped that marriage, in modifying the conditions of her existence, would restore her health which the physicians believed was suffering only from an excessive sensitiveness. It was not so at all. Marriage, on the contrary, only developed the morbid tendencies that were in her, and her sensitiveness was heightened to such a degree that, among other alarming symptoms, my poor mother could not stand the slightest odor, without being thrown into a fit, which always ended in a swoon. Of what did she suffer? Why these melan- cholic fits, these prostrations, which left her huddled up on the lounge for entire days, motionless and sullen like an old paralytic? Why these tears which would suddenly choke her throat to suffocation and for hours roll from her eyes in burning streams? Why this dis- gust with everything, which nothing could overcome: neither distractions nor prayers? She could not tell, for she herself did not know. . . Of the causes of her phy- sical ailments, her mental tortures, her hallucinations which filled her heart and brains with a passionate de- sire to die, she knew nothing. She knew not why one evening as she sat in front of the glowing fireplace, she was suddenly seized with a horrible temptation to roll on the fire grate, to deliver her body over to the kisses of the flame which called her, fascinated her, sang to her hymns of unknown love. Nor did she know why on another day, while taking a stroll in the country and noticing a man walking in a half-mowed meadow with his scythe on the shoulder, she ran to-
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wards him with outstretched arms, shouting “ Death, O blessed death, take me, carry me away!” No, she knew not the cause or reason for all that. What she did know was that at such moments the image of her mother, her dead mother, was always before her, the image of her mother whom she herself, one Sunday morning, had found hanging from the chandelier in the parlor. And she again beheld the dead body which oscillated slowly in the air, she saw the face all black, the eyes all white and without pupils, she saw every- thing up to the sunbeam which, penetrating through the closed shutters, illuminated with a tragic light the tongue, stuck out, and the swollen lips. This anguish, these frenzies, this yearning for death, her mother had no doubt transmitted to her when she gave life to her; it is from her mother’s side that she drew, it is from her mother’s breast that she drank the poison, this poison which now filled her veins, with which her flesh was permeated, which fuddled her brain, which gnawed at her soul. During the intervals of calm which grew less frequent as the days, months and years passed by, she often thought of these things; and brooding over her life, recalling its remotest inci- dents and comparing the physical resemblances be- tween the mother who died voluntarily and the daugh- ter who wished to die, she felt more and more upon her the crushing weight of this lugubrious inheritance. She exalted in and completely abandoned herself to the idea that it was impossible for her to resist the fate of her ancestors who appeared to her as a long chain of suicides emerging from the depth of night, far in the past, and extending over ages to terminate ... Where? At this question her eyes became troubled, her temples grew moist with a cold sweat and her hands gripped her throat as if striving to grasp the imaginary cord, the loop of which she felt was bruis-
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ing her neck and choking her. Every object seemed to her an instrument of fatal death; everything re- minded her of the image of death, decomposed and bleeding ; the branches of the trees appeared to her as so many sinister gibbets, and in the green water of the fish pond, among the reeds and water lilies, in the river shaded by tall herbage, she distinguished the floating form covered with slime.
In the meantime my father, squatted behind some thick shrub, musket in hand, was watching a cat or bombarding some vocalizing warbler hidden in the branches. In the evening, by way of consolation he would gently say to mother, “ Well, dearie, your health is not always good. You see, what you need is some bitters, take some bitters. A glass in the morning, a glass in the evening.... That’s all that’s needed.” He did not complain of anything, he never got excited over anything. Seating himself at his desk, he would go over the papers which were brought to him by the city clerk during the day and sign them rapidly with an air of disdain. “ Here!” he would exclaim, “ it is just like this corrupt administration; it would do a whole lot better if it occupied itself with the farmer instead of pestering us with these small matters. . . . Here is some more silly stuff!” ... Then he would go to bed, repeating in a calm voice: “ Bitters, take some bitters.”
This resignation hurt my mother like a reproach. Although my father’s education was rather limited and though she did not find in him any trace of that masculine tenderness or fanciful romanticism of which she had dreamed, she nevertheless could not deny his physical energy and a sort of moral vigor which she envied in him, despising as she did its application to things which she considered petty and sordid. She felt guilty toward herself, guilty toward life so use-
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lessly wasted in tears. Not only did she not meddle in the affairs of her husband, but little by little she lost her interest even in household duties, leaving them to the whims of the servants. She took so little care of herself that her chambermaid, good old Marie, who was present at her birth, often had to nurse and feed her, while scolding her affectionately, as one does a little infant in the cradle. In her desire for isolation she came to a point where she could no longer stand the presence of her parents, of her friends who, dis- comfited and repelled by her countenance more and more morose, by this mouth whence no word ever came, by this forced smile which was immediately shrivelled by an involuntary trembling of her lips,— called less and less frequently and ended by forgetting altogether the path leading to the Priory. Religion, like everything else, became a burden to her. She no longer put in an appearance in the church, did not pray any more, and two Easters passed without any- one seeing her approach the holy table.
Then my mother began to lock herself up in her room, the shutters of which she closed, and drew the curtains together, deepening the darkness about her. She used to spend entire days there, sometimes stretched out on a lounge, sometimes kneeling in a corner, her head touching the wall. And she was an- noyed by the least noise from outside; the slamming of the door, the creaking of old shoes along the cor- ridor, the neighing of a horse in the court came to disturb her novitiate of non-existence. Alas! What could be done about it! For a long time she had struggled against an unknown disease, and the dis- ease, stronger than she was, had felled her to the ground. Now her will-power was paralyzed. She was no longer free to rise or act. Some mysterious force held her in chains, rendering her arms inert, her
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brain muddled, her heart vacillating like a little smoky flame beaten by the wind; and far from resisting, she looked for added opportunities to plunge deeper into suffering, relishing with a sort of perverted exultation the frightful delights of her self-annihilation.
Dissatisfied with the management of his domestic affairs, my father at length decided to take an interest in the progress of my mother’s illness, which passed his understanding. He had the hardest time in the world to make mother accept the idea of going to Paris to consult the “ princes of science” as he put it. It was a sorry trip. Of the three celebrated physicians to whom he took her, the first declared that my mother was anemic and prescribed a strengthening diet; the second diagnosed that she was affected with nervous rheumatism and prescribed a debilitating regimen; the third one found that “it was nothing” and recom- mended mental tranquility.
No one saw clearly into her soul. She herself did not know it. Obsessed with the cruel memory to which she attributed all her misfortunes, she could not unravel with clearness all that stirred obscurely in the innermost depths of her being, nor understand the vague passions, the imprisoned aspirations, the captive dreams which had accumulated in her since childhood. She was like a nestling bird that, without realizing the obscure and nostalgic forces which drew it toward heaven of which it has no knowledge, crushes its head and maims its wings against the cage bars. Instead of craving death as she thought she was, her soul within her, just like that bird that hun- gered for the unknown skies, hungered for life radiant with tenderness, filled with love; and just like that bird, was dying from this unassuaged hunger. As a child, she gave herself entirely, with all the exaggera- tions of her fervid nature, to the love for material
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things and animals; as a young girl she was given to love of dreams of the impossible, but material objects never brought her peace, nor did her dreams assume a precise and soothing form. She had no one to guide her, no one to set right this youthful mind already shaken by internal shocks, no one to open the door of this heart to wholesome reality, a door already guarded by chimeric shadows in her vacant state; no one to whom she could pour out the exuberance of her thoughts, her tenderness, her desires, which find- ing no outlet for expansion, accumulated, boiled with- in her, ready to burst the fragile mould poorly pro- tected by nerves too jaded.
Her mother, always ill, singularly absorbed in that hypochondria which was soon to kill her, was inca- pable of intelligent and firm direction in the matter of her daughter’s education. Her father, all but ruined, put to his last shift, struggled hard to save for his family its ancestral home which was threatened; and among the young people about her — shiftless noble- men, vainglorious burghers, greedy peasants, none bore upon his brow the magic star which could lead her to her God. Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires. And later her marriage which had been more than a sacrifice—a business transaction, a compromise to improve the straitened circumstances of her father! . .. And her disgust, her revolt at feeling herself a piece of dishonored flesh, a prey, an instrument of man’s pleasure! To have
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soared so high and to fall so low! To have dreamed of celestial kisses, of mystic caresses and divine pos- sessions and then... the end of it!... Instead of wide expanses, ablaze with light, where her imagination felt at home among the soaring flights of angels in a trance of joy and affrighted doves — there came night, thick, sinister and haunted by the spectre of her mother, stumbling over tombs and crosses with a piece of cord on her neck.
The Priory soon grew silent. On the gravel of its alleys one no longer heard the trundle of carts and carriages bringing friends of the neighborhood to the front entrance decorated with geraniums. The front gate was bolted in order to make the carriages go through the back yard. In the kitchen the servants talked among themselves in low voices, moving about on tiptoe as is done in a house where some one has died. The gardener, by order of my mother who could not stand the noise of wheelbarrows and the scraping of rakes on the ground, allowed the wild stock to suck up the sap of the rose bushes turned yellow, allowed the weeds to choke the flowers in the baskets and to cover up the walks. And the house with its dark curtain of fir trees resembling a funeral canopy which sheltered it from the west, with its windows always closed, with its living corpse which it guarded buried behind its square walls of old brick looked like a burial vault. The country folk who on Sunday used to take a stroll-in the woods, no longer passed by the Priory without some sort of superstitious terror, as if that dwelling were an evil place haunted by ghosts. Pretty soon a legend grew about the place: a wood cutter told how one night, going back from work, he saw Madame Mintié all in white, her hair disheveled, cross- ing the sky high above and beating her chest with the crucifix.
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My father locked himself up in his study more than ever, avoiding as much as possible staying in the house where he was hardly seen at times other than meal hours. He also took to making distant trips, increased the number of committees and societies over which he presided, found means to create for himself new dis- tractions and business affairs far away from home. The Council General, the Agricultural Commission, the jury of the Court of Assizes were of great help to him for that purpose. When some one spoke to him of his wife he answered, shaking his head:
“ Ah, lam very uneasy, very much wrought up over it. How will it end? I must confess I fear she may become insane.....
And when some one expressed his unbelief:
“ No, no, I am not joking. ... You know well that it runs in her family, their heads don’t seem to be very strong!”
Nevertheless reproach never came from his lips, although he realized the embarrassing condition in which this situation placed his business affairs and which he ascribed to nothing but the irritating ob- duracy of my mother in not wanting to try anything » that might cure her.
It was in these sad surroundings that I grew up. I came to this world a tiny, sickly child. What cares, what fierce tenderness, what deadly anguishes I brought with me! In the presence of the puny crea- ture that I was, sustained by a breath of life so feeble that it could be guessed at only by*a rattling sound in my throat, my mother forgot her own sorrows. Maternity revived her worn-out energy, awakened her conscience to new duties, to new sacred responsibili- ties which now devolved upon her. What ardent nights, what feverish days she spent bent over the cradle where lay something born of her own flesh and
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soul, and palpitating!... Ah! yes! ... I belonged to her, to her only; it was not at all of this conjugal sub- mission that I was born; I was not the fatal conse- quence of the original sin as other children of men are; no! she had always carried me in her womb, and like Christ I was conceived in a long cry for love. All her troubles, her terrors, her past sufferings she under- stood now; it was because a great mystery of creation was being enacted in her being.
She had great difficulty in bringing me up, and if I outlived all that had threatened me one might say it was accomplished by a miracle of love. More than twenty times my mother snatched me from the clutches of death. ... And then what a joy and what a recompense it was to her to see the little wrinkled body fill itself with the sap of health, the rumpled face take on the color of shiny pink, the little eyes open gaily into a smile, the lips, greedy and searching, move and gluttonously pump the life-giving liquid from her nourishing breast! My mother now tasted a few moments of complete and wholesome happiness. A desire to act, to be good and useful, to occupy her hands, heart and spirit, to live at last took hold of her, and even in the most commonplace duties of her household she found a new, a passionate interest which was doubled by a feeling of profound peace. Her gayety came back to her, a natural and gentle gayety without violent outbursts. She made plans, pictured the future to herself with confidence, and many a time she was astonished to discover that she no longer thought of her past — that evil dream which vanished.
I grew. “One can see him getting bigger every day,” the nurse used to say. And with rapturous emotions my mother watched the hidden labor of nature which polished the rough places of flesh, giving it more pliant form, more definite features, better regulated move-
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ments and poured into the dimness of the brain just emerged from nothingness the primitive glimmer of instinct. Oh, how everything seemed to her now clothed in bright and entrancing colors! It was music of welcome itself, the benediction of love, and even the trees, formerly so full of dread and menace, were stretching out their branches above like so many pro- tecting arms. One was led to hope that the mother had saved the woman. Alas! That hope was of short duration.
One day she noticed in me a certain predisposition to nervous fits, to a diseased contraction of muscles, and she became alarmed. When I was about one year old I had convulsions which came short of finishing me. The fits were so violent that my mouth, even long after the attack was over, remained twisted into an ugly grimace as if paralyzed. My mother would not admit that at periods of rapid growth the majority of children were subject to-such fits. She saw in that something which she thought was characteristic of her and her ancestors, she saw in that the first symptoms of a hereditary illness, of a terrible disease which she thought was going to continue in her son. She battled hard, however, against these thoughts which came in hives ; she used every bit of energy and vigor she could command to dissipate them, taking refuge in me as if in an inviolable asylum for protection against phan- toms and evil spirits. She held me pressed against her bosom, covering me with kisses and saying:
“ My little Jean, it is not true, is it? You will live
and be happy, won’t you?... Answer me!... Alas! You can’t talk, my poor little angel... . Oh, don’t cry, never cry, Jean, my Jean, my dear little Jean! ...”
But question as she might, feel as she might my heart beating against her own, my awkward hands gripping her breasts, my legs dangling from under
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the loosed swaddling cloth — her confidence was gone, doubts gained the upper hand. An incident which was related to me time and again with a sort of religious ter- ror served to bring consternation into my mother’s soul.
One day she was taking a bath. In the hall of the bath room laid out with black and white square slabs, Marie, bent over me, was watching my first uncertain steps. Suddenly, fixing my gaze on a black square, I appeared to be very much frightened. I uttered a cry and, trembling all over as if I had seen something ter- rible, I hid my head in my nurse’s apron.
“ What’s the matter?” my mother anxiously asked.
“JT don’t know,” answered old Marie. It seemed as though Master Jean had been frightened by a pav- ing block.
She brought me to the spot where my countenance so suddenly changed its expression. But at the sight of the paving slab, I cried out again. My whole body shuddered.
“There must be something!” cried my mother. “Marie, quick, quick, my underwear! ... My God! — What did he see?”
Having come out of the bath room, she did not want to wait to be wiped, and scarcely covered by her peig- noir she stooped over the stone and examined it.
“ That’s strange,” she murmured. “ And yet he saw something. ... but what?... There isn’t anything....”
She took me in her arms, swayed me. I smiled now, uttering inarticulate sounds and playing with the rib- bons of her peignoir. She put me down on the floor. Moving with short, unsteady steps, both arms out- stretched, I purred like a kitten. None of the blocks before which I stopped frightened me in the least. Arrived at the fatal block, my face again as- sumed the expression of horror, and frightened and crying I returned quickly to my mother.
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“T tell you there must be something!” she cried. “Call Felix. Let him come with tools ...a hammer, quick, quick! Tell Monsieur also!”
“It seems strange all the same,” assented Marie who, with gaping mouth and eyes wide open, was look- ing at the mysterious slab. “ He must be a sorcerer then!”
Felix lifted one stone, examined it carefully, dug into the mortar below.
“Dig up another one!” my mother commanded. “ And that one also... another one...all of them... dig them all up! I want to find out. ... And Monsieur is not coming!”
In the excitement of her gestures, forgetting that there was a man around, she uncovered herself and revealed her nude body. Kneeling on the blocks, Felix continued digging them up. He took each one out with his brawny hands and shook his head.
“If Madame wants me to tell her. . . . For the rest, Monsieur is way out in the park, busy sharpening the pick-axe. ... And besides, there is nothing to it .. . the stone blocks are like stone blocks, seemingly of the pavement. That’s all! ... Madame may be sure.... Only it might be that that was only in Master Jean’s imagination. ... Madame knows that children are like grown-up folks and that they see things! But as to these slabs, they are just slabs, neither more nor less.”
My mother became pale, haggard.
“Shut up!” she ordered, “and get out of here, all of you!”
And without waiting for the execution of her order she carried me out of the room. Her cries, interrupted by the slamming of the door, resounded on the stair- way and in the hall.
She never thought, however, poor dear creature that she was, of giving to the bathroom incident a natural
: 24 CALVARY
explanation. One could have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of the floor, or perhaps the shadow. of a leaf projected from outside across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by lurid exag- gerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her ca- resses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communi- cated to me the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.
Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed. .
“My God! My God!” she moaned, “ that’s the end of it... .. My poor little Jean! . . . You, too, they will take away from me!... Oh, God, have pity on him!... Could that be possible! ... So little, so weak! ...”
And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the ground, trying to quiet her:
“My good Marie,” she stammered, “listen to me. Promise me, yes promise me to do as I tell you.... You have seen it just now, you have seen it, haven’t you?... Well, take Jean, and bring him, up because I — you see... he must not.... I'll kill him. .. . Here, you'll stay in this room with him, right near me... . You shall take good care of him and tell me all about him. ... ll feel his presence there, I’ll hear him. ... But you understand, he must not see me... . It is I who make him that way! .. .”
Marie held me in her arms.
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“ Madame, there is no sense in that at all,” she said, “and you really deserve a good scolding as a lesson. ... Why just look at your little Jean! ... He is just like a little quail. Now tell her, tell her, my little Jean, that you are well and brave! . . . Look, look at him laughing, the little creature. . . . Put your arms around him, Madame.”
“No, no!” my mother cried out wildly. “I must not.... Later.... Take him away!...”
It was impossible to make her abandon this idea. Marie well understood that if her mistress had any chance at all to come back to normal life, to cure her- self of her “ black moods,” it was not in being sepa- rated from her child. In the sad state in which my mother found herself, she had but one means of recov- ery and now she rejected it, impelled to do so by some new and unknown fit of madness. All that a little baby brings of joy, uneasiness, activity, anxiety, for- getfulness of self to the heart of a mother was exactly what she needed and yet she said: ;
“No, no....I1 must not.... Later.... Take him away!...”
In her own language, familiar and rude, to which her long devotions entitled her, the old servant maid brought forward all the reasoning and arguments dic- tated by her common sense and by her simple peasant heart. She even reproached my mother for neglecting her duties, she spoke of her selfishness and declared that a good mother who had any religion at all or even a savage beast wouldn’t act as she did.
“Yes,” she ended, “that is bad! ... you have al- ready been so unkind to your husband, poor fellow. Must you now make your child unhappy?”
But mother, always sobbing, could but repeat:
“No, no....I1 must not. ... Later.... Take him away!...”
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What was my childhood? A long torpor. Sepa- rated from my mother whom I saw but rarely, avoid- ing my father whom I did not love at all, living almost in seclusion, a miserable orphan between old Marie and Felix in this grand lugubrious house, the silence and neglect of which weighed down upon me like a night of death—I was bored. Yes, I was that rare and wretched specimen of a child who is bored. Al- ways sad and grave, hardly speaking at all, I had none of the inquisitiveness and mischievousness of my age, one might have said that my intellect had been slum- bering forever in the numbness of maternal gestation. I am trying to recall, I am trying to bring to life again my feelings of childhood; verily I believe I had none. I was dragging on, all wasted and stultified, without knowing what to do with my legs, my arms, my eyes, my poor little body which annoyed me like a tiresome companion whom one wishes to get rid of. There is not one recollection, not one single impression that has been retained by me even in part. I always wished to be where I was not, and the toys exhaling the whole- some odor of fir trees were lying in heaps around me, without inducing me even to think of touching them. Never did I dream about a knife or wooden horse or picture book. Today, when I see little children run- ning, jumping, chasing one another on the garden lawns, the sandy beaches, I recall with sadness the first mournful years of my life, and while listening to the clear laughter which sounds like the ringing of the angelus of human dawn, I say to myself that all my misfortunes have come from this childhood, lonely and lifeless, unbroken by a single bright event.
I was not quite twelve years old when my mother died. The day on which this misfortune happened the good curé Blanchetiére, who liked us very much, pressed me to his breast, then he looked at me for
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some time and with eyes full of tears murmured sev- eral times: “ Poor little devil!” I burst into uncon- trollable tears when I saw the good curé cry, for I did not want to reconcile myself to the thought that my mother was dead and never again would come back. During her illness I was forbidden to go into her room, and now she was gone without having let me embrace her! . .. Could she have really deserted me that way?... When I was about seven years old and was well she had agreed to re-admit me into her life. It was from this time on that I understood that I had a mother and that I adored her. My sorrowing mother was represented to me by her two eyes, her two large round eyes, fixed, with rings of red around them, which always shed tears without moving the eye- lids, which shed tears as does a rain cloud or a foun- tain. All at once I felt a keen sorrow at the grief of my mother, and it is through this grief that I awoke to life. I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used to embrace me. She had fits of tenderness which used to frighten me and which inspire me with fear even now. As she clasped my head, squeezed my neck and moved her lips over my forehead, my cheeks, my mouth, her frenzied kisses often passed into bites, similar to the caresses of a beast; into her embraces she put all the true passion of a lover, as if I had been the adored chimerical being of her dreams, the being that never came, the being whom her soul and her body so ardently desired. Was it possible then that she was dead?
Every evening, before going to bed, I fervently entreated the beautiful image of the Virgin to whom I addressed my prayers: “ Holy Virgin, please grant my dear mother good health and a long life.” But one morning my father, silent and pale, accompanied the
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physician to the gate, and the countenances of both were so grave that it was easy to surmise that some- thing irreparable had happened. Then the servants were crying. What else could they have cried about, if not the loss of their mistress? ... And then did not the curé come up to me and say “ poor little devil!” in a tone of irremediable pity? I remember the small- est details of that frightful day as if it were yesterday. From the room where I was shut in with old Marie I could hear the coming and going of people and other strange noises, and with my forehead pressed against the window pane, I could see through the window blinds women beggars squatted on the lawn, wax- paper in hand, muttering prayers. I saw people enter the courtyard, the men in black, the women with long black veils. “Ah! here is Monsieur Bacoup!... ” “Why, that’s Madame Provost!” I noticed that all of them looked sad, while at the gate which was wide open the children of the choir, the choristers uncom- fortable in their black vestments, the Brothers of Charity with their red tunics, one of whom carried a banner and another a heavy silver cross, were laughing aloud and amusing themselves by pushing and jostling one another. The beadle, tinkling his bell, was driv- ing back inquisitive mendicants, and a wagon loaded with hay which had come up on the road was com- pelled to stop and wait. In vain did I look for the eyes of little Sorieul, a crippled child of my age whom I used to given a small loaf of bread every Saturday; I could not find him anywhere, and that made me feel uneasy. Then suddenly the bells on the church belfry began to toll. Ding! Ding! Dong! The sky was of deep blue, the sun was ablaze. Slowly the funeral pro- cession started out, first the Brothers of Charity and the choristers, the cross which glittered, the banner which fluttered in the air, the curé in a white surplice,
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shielding his head with the psalm-book, then some- thing heavy and long covered with flowers and wreaths which some men carried shaking at their knees, then the crowd, a crawling crowd which filled the court- yard, wound itself out on the road, a crowd in which I could distinguish no one except my cousin Merel who was mopping his head with a checkered handker- chief. Ding! Dong! Dong! The church bell tolled for a long, long time; ah! the sad knell! Ding! Dong! Dong! And while the bells were tolling, tolling, three white pigeons continuously fluttered about, pursuing one another around the church right opposite me which projected its warped roof and its slate steeple out of plumb above a clump of acacia and chestnut trees.
The ceremony ended, my father entered my room. He walked back and forth for some time without speaking, his arms crossed on his back.
“Ah! my poor Monsieur,” lamented old Marie, “what a terrible misfortune! ”
“Yes, yes,” replied my father, “it is a great, a ter- rible misfortune! ”
He sank into an armchair, heaving a sigh. I can see him right now with his swollen eyelids, his dejected look, his hanging arms. He had a handkerchief in his hand, and from time to time brought it to his eyes, red from tears.
“ Perhaps I did not take good care of her, Marie.... She did not like to have me around. ... Yet I did what I could, everything I could. . . . How frightful she looked, all rigid on the bed! . . . Ah, God! I shall al- ways see her that way. The day after tomorrow she would be thirty-one, would she not?”
My father drew me toward him and seated me on his knees.
“You love me all the same, don’t you, my little
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Jean?” he asked, rocking me. “Tell me, do you love me? I have no one but you!...”
Speaking to himself he said:
“ Perhaps it is better that it is so. Who knows what
the outcome would be later on! ... Yes, perhaps it is better this way... . Ah! poor little one, look at me straight! .
And as if at that very moment he had divined in my eyes which resembled the eyes of my mother a whole destiny of suffering, he pressed me close to his breast and burst into tears.
“ My little Jean! — Ah! my poor little Jean!”
Worn out by the emotion and fatigue of the night before, he fell asleep, holding me in his arms. And I, seized suddenly with a feeling of great pity, listened to this unknown heart which for the first time was beating close to mine.
It had been decided a few months previous to this that I should not be sent to college, but that I should have a private tutor. My father did not approve of this method of education. But he had met with such opposition that he thought best not to interfere, and just as he had sacrificed his domination of husband over wife, he also gave up his right of a father over me. Now I was to have a tutor, for my father wanted to remain faithful to the wishes of my mother even when she was dead.
One fine morning I saw him arrive, a very grave- looking gentleman, very blond, very close shaven, who wore blue spectacles. Monsieur Jules Rigard had very obsolete ideas on education, he carried himself with the stiffness of a servant, and bore a sacerdotal air which, far from encouraging me to learn, made all study disgusting to me. He had been told without a doubt that my mentality was slow and sluggish and, as I understood nothing from his first lesson, he took
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that judgment for granted and treated me like.an idiot. It never occurred to him to penetrate into my young mind, to hold converse with my heart; never did he ask himself whether under this sad mask of a lonesome child there were not hidden ardent aspirations quite beyond my age, an all too passionate and restless na- ture eager to know, which introspectively and mor- bidly unfolded itself in the silence of secret thoughts and mute ecstasies.
Monsieur Rigard stupefied me with Greek and Latin, and that was all. Ah! how many children un- derstood and guided properly, might have become great if they ad not been permanently deformed by this frightful crushing of their brains by an imbecile father or an ignorant teacher. Is it all, then, to have lustfully begotten you on an evening of passion, and must not one continue the work of one’s life forces by giving you intellectual nourishment as well, in order that it may strengthen your life and provide you with weapons to defend it. The truth was that my soul felt even lonelier with my father than with my teacher! Yet he did everything he could to please me. He consciously, though stupidly, strove to show his love for me. But when I was with him, he could never find anything to tell me outside of foolish, idle tales, bogey man stories, terrifying legends of the revolution of 1848 which had left in him an invincible fear, or else a tale of the brigandage of one Lebecq, a great repub- lican who. scandalized the country by his passionate opposition to the curé and his obduracy in refusing to hang red bunting on the walls on national holidays.
Often he would take me along in his cabriolet, on his business trips in the country and, when perplexed as I was by the mystery of nature which every day unfolded itself around me, I asked him questions, he would not know how or what to answer and would
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dodge the answer thus: “ You are too young to be told that! Wait till you grow up.” And feeling mis- erable by the side of the large body of my father which swayed with the jolts of the road, I huddled up inside the cabriolet, while my father was killing with the stick of his whip the gad flies which swarmed on our mare’s croup. Every now and then he would say: “I have never seen such pestering things; we'll have storm, that’s sure.”
In the church of Saint-Michel, inside a small chapel, illumined by the red glimmer of a window, upon an altar ornamented with embroidery and vases full of flowers, stood a statue of the Virgin. She had a pink body, a blue cloak bespangled with silver stars, a lilac- colored robe whose folds fell modestly upon gilt san- dals. . . . In her arms she held a child, rosy and nude with a golden halo around its head, and the eyes of the mother rested rapturously upon the child. For several months this plaster Virgin was my sole friend, and the entire time which I could steal from my les- sons I used to spend before this image, contemplating its tender colors. She appeared to me so beautiful, so kind and sweet that no human creature could rival in beauty, kindness and sweetness this painted piece of statuary which spoke to me in an unknown and de- lightful language and from which there came to me something like the intoxicating odor of incense and myrrh. When near her I was in truth a different child; I felt how rosier my cheeks were getting, how my blood was flowing more vigorously in my veins, how my thoughts disentangled themselves more easily and quickly ; it seemed to me that the black veil which hung over my mentality was gradually being lifted, revealing new lights to me.
Marie was made an accomplice in my stealthy flights to the church; she often led me to the chapel
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where I remained for hours conversing with the Vir- gin, while the old nurse fervently recited her Rosary, » kneeling before the altar. She had to get me out of my state of ecstasy by force, because otherwise, ab- sorbed as I had been in the dreams which transported me to heaven, I would never have thought of returning home. My passion for this Virgin became so strong that away from her I was miserable and wished I had never left her at all. “Monsieur Jean will surely be- come a priest,” old Marie used to say. It was like a yearning for possession, like a violent desire to take her, to entwine her, to cover her with kisses.
I took a notion to make a sketch of her: with what love, it would be impossible for you to imagine. When the statue had taken on a semblance of crude form on the paper, it gave me joy without end. All the energy in me that I could put forward I employed in this work, which I thought admirable and superhuman. More than twenty times I started the drawing over again, incensed with the crayon for not conforming to the delicacy of the lines, incensed with the paper upon which the image would not appear as live and real as I should have liked to see it. I was rabid on this point. My will was bent upon this unique goal. At length I succeeded in giving more or less exact substance to my idea of the plaster Virgin — but how naive an idea it was. And immediately thereafter I stopped thinking of it. An inner voice had told me that nature was more beautiful, more moving, more splendid, and I began to notice the sun which caressed the trees, which played upon the pentiles of the roof, covered the grass with gold, illumined the rivers; and I began to listen to all the palpitations of life, whose puffed up creatures scourge the earth like a body of flesh. |
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The years rolled by, wearisome and void. I re- mained gloomy, wild, always shut up within myself, fond of running about in the fields, penetrating into the very heart of the forest. It seemed to me that at least there, lulled by the grand voices of things, I was less alone and I felt more alive. Without being en- dowed with that terrible gift which certain natures have of analyzing themselves, questioning themselves, searching without end for the reason of their actions, I often asked myself who I was and what I wanted. Alas! I was nobody and did not want anything.
My childhood had been spent in darkness, my ado- lescence was passed in a void; not having been a child I could no more be a young man. I lived in a sort of fog. A thousand thoughts were agitating me, but they were so confused that I could not seize upon their form; none of them detached itself clearly from this depth of opaque mist. I had some aspirations; some exalted notions, but it would have been impossible for me to formulate them, to explain their cause or reason. It would have been impossible for me to say into which world of reality or dream they transplanted me; I had fits of infinite tenderness, in which my whole being would lose itself, but for whom or for what this feeling was intended, I did not know. Sometimes, all of a sudden, I would abandon myself to tears, but the reason for these tears? In truth, I knew not. What was certain was that nothing was to my liking, that I did not see any purpose in living, that I felt myself incapable of any effort.
Children usually say: “I'll be a general, priest, phy- sician, innkeeper.” I never said anything of the kind, never; never did I tear myself loose from the present; never did I venture a glimpse into the future. Man appeared to me like a tree which spread out its foliage and stretched out its limbs into the stormy skies, with-
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out knowing which flower would bloom at its foot, which birds would sing at its top, or which thunder- bolt would fell it to the ground. And notwithstanding that, the feeling of moral solitude in which I found myself oppressed and frightened me. I could not open my heart to my father, to my teacher or to anybody else. I had no friend, not a living soul who could un- derstand, guide or love me. My father and preceptor were disheartened by my waywardness, and in the country I passed for a feebleminded maniac. In spite of everything, however, I was permitted to take my college entrance examinations, and though neither my father nor myself had any idea as to what I should take up, I went to Paris to study law. “ Law will get you anywhere,” my father used to say.
Paris amazed me. It struck me like a place of tempestuous uproar and raving madness. Individuals and throngs were passing by, strange, incoherent, hurrying to work which I imagined terrible and mon- strous. Knocked down by horses, jostled by men, deafened by the roar of the city always in motion like some colossal and hellish factory, blinded by the glare of lights to which I was not accustomed, I roamed about the city in the strange dream of a demented one. I was very much surprised to find trees there. How could they grow there, in that soil of pavements, how could they shoot upwards in the forest of stone, amidst the rumbling noise of men, their branches lashed by _ evil winds?
It took me a long time to get used to this life which seemed to me the reverse of nature; and from the depths of this boiling hell my thoughts would often wander back to the peaceful fields way yonder which brought to my nostrils the delicious odor of dug up and fertile soil; back to the green retreats of the woods, where I heard only the light rustling of the leaves,
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and from time to time in the resonant depths, the dull blows of the ax and the almost human groans of the old oak trees. Nevertheless, curiosity often drove me out of my small room which I occupied on Rue Ou- dinot, and I sauntered along the streets, the boule- vards, the river banks impelled by a feverish desire for walking, my fingers twitching from nervousness, my brains squashed, as it were, by the gigantic and intense activity of Paris, my senses in some way thrown out of balance by all these colors, odors, sounds, by the perversion and strangeness of the con- tact so new to me. The more I mingled with the crowds, the more intoxicated I became with this up- roar, the more I saw multitudes of human lives pass by, brushing one another, indifferent to one another, without apparent attachment, and saw others surge forward, disappear and emerge again and so on for- ever — the more I felt the overwhelming sense of in- exorable loneliness.
At Saint-Michel, although I was lonely, I at least knew some human beings and objects. Everywhere I had points of reference by which my spirit was guided; the back of a peasant bent over his glebe, the ruins of a building at the turn of the road, a ditch, a dog, a clay pit, a charming face — everything there was fa- miliar to me, if not dear. At Paris everything was strange and unknown to me. In this frightful haste with which all seemed to be moving about, in the pro- found selfishness, in this giddy obliviousness to one another into which they were all precipitated, how could one retain even for a single moment the atten- tion of these people, these phantoms; I don’t speak of the attention of tenderness or pity, but of that of simple notice! ... One day I saw a man who killed another: he was admired and his name was soon on everybody’s lips; the next morning I saw a woman
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who lifted her skirt going through obscene motions: the crowd followed her.
Being awkward, ignorant of the ways of the world, very timid, I found it hard to make friends. I never even set foot in the homes where I was recommended, for fear of appearing ridiculous. I had been invited for dinner to the home of a cousin of my mother’s who was rich and kept a large retinue. The sight of the mansion, the footmen in the vestibule, the lights, the carpets, the heavy perfume of smothered flowers — all this frightened me and I fled, knocking down on the stairway a woman in a red cloak who got up and started to laugh at my bewildered look.
The noisy gayety of the young men, my school com- rades, whom I had met at the lectures, at the restau- rants, in the cafés, was not to my liking either. The coarseness of their pleasures hurt me, and the women, with their eyes colored with bistre, their overpainted lips, their cynicism and shameless speech and behavior did not tempt me at all. One evening, however, when my nerves were all wrought up, and I was driven by a sudden rutting of the flesh, I went into a house of ill- fame and left it burning with shame, despising myself, remorseful and with the sensation of filth on my skin. What! Was it from this slimy and loathsome act that men were born! From this time on I looked at women more frequently, but my look was no longer chaste, and fixed upon them as upon some impure images, it was searching for sex and stripping them under the folds of their clothes. I came to know their secret vices, which rendered me still more dejected, restless and out of sorts.
A kind of crapulous torpor settled down upon me. I used to stay in bed several days at a stretch, sunk in the brutishness of obscene dreams, awakened now and then by sudden nightmares, by painful attacks of heart-
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ache which caused my skin to perspire. In my room, behind drawn curtains, I was thus living like a corpse which was conscious of its death and which from the depth of its grave in the frightful night could hear the stamping of many feet and the rumble of the city about it. Sometimes, tearing myself loose from this dejec- tion, I went out. But what was I going todo? Where could I go? I was indifferent to everything, and I had not a single desire or curiosity. With fixed gaze, with heavy drooping head and listless, I used to walk straight ahead, without purpose, and I would end by flinging myself on a bench in the Luxembourg, senilely shrunk into myself, lying motionless for many hours, without seeing anything, without hearing anything, without asking myself why there were children about me, why there were birds singing, why young couples passed. ... Naturally I was not working and did not think of anything. ...
Then war came, then defeat... . Despite the oppo- sition of my father, despite the entreaties of old Marie, I enlisted.
CHAPTER II
UR regiment was what is called a march regi- ment, that is, one formed while on the march.
It had been made up at Mans, after much trouble, of all the remains of a corps of dissimilar fighting units which encumbered the city. Zuaves, mobilized soldiers, of franc-tireurs, forestry guards, dismounted cavalrymen, including gendarmes, Span- iards and Wallachians— there were troops of every kind and description, and they were all under the command of an old captain quickly promoted for the occasion to the rank of lieutenant colonel. At that time, such promotions were not infrequent. The gaps of human flesh wrought in the ranks of the French by the cannons of Wissembourg and Sedan had to be filled. Several companies lacked officers.
At the head of mine was a little lieutenant of the reserves, a young man of twenty, frail and pallid and so weak that after marching a few kilometers he was out of breath, dragged his feet and usually reached his destination in an ambulance wagon. The poor little devil! It was enough to look at him to make him blush, and never did he allow himself to issue orders for fear of appearing ridiculous. We jeered at him because of his timidity and weakness, and no doubt because he was kind and would sometimes distribute cigars and meat supplies to the men. I quickly inured myself to this new life, carried away by examples and overexcited by the fever about me. And reading the heartbreaking reports of our lost battles, I felt myself transported by enthusiasm which, however, was not mingled with any thought of my threatened father-
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land. We remained a month in Mans for training, to get our full equipment and to frequent cabarets and houses of ill-fame. At last, October 3, we started out.
Composed of stray units, of detachments without officers, of straggling volunteers poorly equipped, poorly fed and more often not fed at all,— without co- hesion, without discipline, everyone thinking of him- self only, and driven by a unique feeling of ferocious- ness, implacable selfishness ; some wearing police caps, others having silk handkerchiefs wrapped round their heads; still others wearing artillery pants and vests of batmen—we were marching along the highways, ragged, harassed and in an ugly mood.
For twelve days since we had been incorporated into a brigade of recent formation, we were tramping across the fields like madmen and to no purpose, as it were. Today marching to the right, tomorrow to the left, one day covering a stretch of forty kilometers, the next day going back an equal distance, we were mov- ing in the same circle, like a scattered herd of cattle which has lost its shepherd. Our enthusiasm dimin- ished appreciably. Three weeks of suffering were enough for that. Before we could ever hear the roar of cannon and the whiz of bullets, our forward march resembled a retreat of a conquered army, cut to pieces by cavalry charges and precipitated into wild con- fusion. It was like a panicky flight in which each one was allowed to shift for himself. How often did I see soldiers getting rid of their cartridges by scattering them along the roads?
“What good will they do me?” one of them said. “TI don’t need them at all except one to crack the jaw of our captain, the first chance we get to fight.”
In the evening, in camp, squatted around the por- ridge pot or stretched out on the cold furze, with heads resting on their knapsacks, they were thinking of the
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homes from which they had been taken by force. All the young men, strong and healthy, had come from the villages. Many of them were already sleeping in the ground way yonder, disembowelled by shells; others with shattered backs, like shadows, were strag- gling in the fields and in the woods awaiting death. In the small country places, left to sorrow, there were only old men, more stooped than ever, and women who wept. The barn-floors where they thrashed corn were mute and closed, in the deserted fields where weeds sprouted, one no longer saw against the purple back- ground of the sunset the silhouette of the laborer re- turning home, keeping step with his tired horses. And men with long sabres would come and in the name of the law take away the horses one day and empty the cowshed the next; for it was not enough that war should glut itself with human flesh, it was necessary that it should also devour beasts, the earth itself, everything that lived in the calm and peace of labor and love.... And at the bottom of the hearts of all these miserable soldiers whose emaciated frames and flagged limbs were lit up by the sinister glare of camp fires— there was one hope, the hope of the coming battle, that is to say, the hope of flight, of butt turned upwards, and of the German fortress.
Nevertheless we were preparing for the defence of the country which we traversed and which was no longer threatened. To accomplish that we thought it would be best to fell trees and scatter them on the roads; we blew up bridges and desecrated cemeteries at the entrance to villages under the pretext of barri- cading them, and we compelled the inhabitants at the point of the bayonet to help us in the destruction of their property. Then we would depart, leaving behind us nothing but ruin and hatred. I remember one time we had to raze a very beautiful park to the last stad-
42 CALVARY
dling, in order to build barracks which we never used at all. Our manner of doing things was not at all such as to reassure the people. And so at our approach the houses were shut, the peasants hid their provisions ; everywhere we were met by hostile faces, surly mouths and empty hands. There were bloody scuffles over some potted pork discovered in a cupboard, and the general ordered an old and kindly man shot for hiding a few kilograms of salted pork under a heap of manure.
The first of November we marched all day and about three o’clock we arrived at the railroad station of Loupe. There was great disorder and unspeakable confusion at first. Many, leaving the ranks, scattered in the direction of the city, ten kilometers away, and disappeared in the neighboring cabarets. For more than an hour the bugles sounded a rally. Mounted men were sent to the city to bring back the runaways, but they themselves lingered there to get a drink. There was a rumor afloat that a train made up at Nogent-le-Rotrou was supposed to take us to Chartres menaced by the Prussians who were said to have sacked Maintenon and were camping at Jouy. A workman questioned by our sergeant said that he did not know anything about it, nor did he hear anything ever said about it. The general, rather old, short, stout and gesticulating, who could hardly sit up in his saddle, galloped hither and thither, shaking and sway- ing like a drunkard on his saddle horse and with pur- ple face, bristled moustach, repeated without end:
“Ah! scoundrel!... Ah! scoundrel of scoundrels! ...”
He dismounted, assisted by his orderly; his legs got tangled up in the leather strap of his sabre which dragged on the ground, and having called over the station master, entered into a most animated conver- sation with the latter whose countenance showed per- plexity.
CALVARY 43
“How about the mayor?” shouted the general. “Where is that scoundrel? Get me that fellow!... Are they trying to make a fool out of me here or what!”
He was out of breath, sputtered out unintelligible words, stamped his feet and scolded the station mas- _ ter. Finally both of them, one with a mien of humility, © the other gesticulating furiously, disappeared into the telegraph office from which there came to us the click- ing of the apparatus, frenzied, excited, interrupted from time to time by the outbursts of the general. At last it was decided to draw us up on the quay in com- | pany formation, and we were left there standing, knap- sack on the ground, in front of the formed arm racks. ... Night came, rain fell, drizzling and cold, penetrat- ing through our uniforms already drenched by show- ers. Here and there the road was lit up by small dim lights, rendering more sombre than ever the store- houses and the mass of wagons which men were push- ing into a shed. And the derrick crane standing up- right on the turning platform projected its long neck against the sky like a bewildered giraffe.
Apart from coffee which we gulped down hurriedly in the morning, we did not eat anything all day, and although fatigue had worn out our bodies and hunger clutched our stomachs, we anticipated with horror that we would have to go without supper today. Our gourd-bottles were empty, our supplies of biscuits and bacon exhausted, and the wagons of the commissary department which had gone astray had not yet joined our columns. Several among us grumbled, made threats and voiced their rebellious feelings aloud, but’ the no less dejected officers who were promenading in front of the arm racks, did not seem to take notice of it. I consoled myself with the thought that the general had perhaps requisitioned food in the city. It was a
44 CALVARY
vain hope. The time passed, the rain kept steadily drumming on the hollow mess plates and the general continued swearing at the station master who in turn went on avenging himself verbally on the telegraph, the click of which became more and more violent and erratic. From time to time trains came up over- crowded with troops. Soldiers of the reserve, light infantry units, bare-breasted, bare-headed, with loose cravats, some of them drunk and wearing their kepis wrong side up, deserted the wagons where they were parked, invaded the taverns and even relieved them- selves in public impudently. From this swarm of hu- man heads, from this stamping on the floor of the cars by multitudes there emanated oaths, sounds of the Marseillaise, obscene songs which mingled with shouts of the gangs of workmen, with the tinkling of bells, with the panting of machines.... I recognized a little boy from Saint-Michel whose swollen eyelids oozed, who coughed and spat blood. I asked him where they were going. He did not know. Having left Mans, they were held up at Connerre for twelve hours with- out food because of congestion on the road,—too crowded to lie down and sleep. He hardly had strength enough to speak. He went into a tavern to rinse his eyes with warm water. I shook hands with him, and he said he sincerely hoped that in the first battle the Germans would make a prisoner of him... . And the train pulled out, disappeared in the night, carrying all these wan faces, all these bodies already vanquished toward what useless and _ bloody slaughters?
I shivered with cold. Under the icy rain which drenched me to the very marrow, I felt a _ ter- rible cold penetrating me. It seemed as if my mem- bers were getting numb. I took advantage of the con- fusion caused by the arrival of a train to reach the
CALVARY - 45
open gate and run out on the road in search of a house or cover where I could warm myself, find a piece of bread or something. The inns and public places near the station were guarded by sentries who had orders not to let anyone in. ... Three hundred yards away I noticed a few windows which shone gently in the night. These lights looked to me like two kindly eyes, two eyes filled with pity which called me, smiled to me, caressed me.... It was a small house isolated a few strides away from the road. I ran toward it. .
A sergeant accompanied by four men was there, shouting and swearing. Near the fireplace without a fire, I saw an old man seated on a very low wicker chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his face buried in his hands. A candle burning in an iron candlestick lit up half of his face hollowed and furrowed by deep wrinkles.
“ Will you give us some wood, I am asking you for the last time?” shouted the sergeant.
“T ain’t got no wood,” answered the old man... . “It’s been eight days since the troops passed here, I tell you.... They took everything away.’
He huddled himself up on the chair and in a feeble voice muttered:
“Tain’t got...nothing... Nothing!...”
“ Don’t act the rogue, you old rascal... . Ah, you are hiding your wood to warm the Prussians. ... Well I am going to knock those Prussians out of your head.”
The old man shook his head:
“ But if I ain’t got no wood....”
With angry gestures the sergeant commanded the soldiers to search the house. They examined every- thing, looked everywhere from cellar to garret. They found nothing, nothing but evidence of plunder and some broken furniture. In the cellar, damp with spilled cider, the casks were broken open and over the
46 - CALVARY
whole there spread a hideously offensive stench. That exasperated the sergeant who struck the flat end of the butt of his musket.
“Come on,” he shouted, “ come on, you old sloven, tell us where your wood is,” and he rudely shook the old man who tottered and almost struck his head against the andiron of the fireplace.
“T ain’t got no wood,” the poor man simply repeated.
“ Ah! you are getting stubborn! ... Yiou have no wood you say! Well, look here, you have chairs, a buffet, a table, a bed . . . if you don’t tell me where your wood is I’ll burn it all up.”
The old man did not protest. Shaking his aged white head he again repeated:
“T ain’t got no wood.”
I wanted to intercede and muttered a few words; but the sergeant did not let me finish. He took me in from head to foot with a look of contempt.
“What are you doing around here, you errand simp you? Who gave you permission to leave the ranks, you dirty, snotty-nosed trash? Come on, face about double step, march!...Tarata tara, tatara!...”
Then he gave the command. In a few minutes the chairs, the tables, the buffet, the bed were dashed to pieces. The kindly man raised himself with some ef- fort, went into the farthest corner of the room; and while the fire was being made, while the sergeant, whose cloak and trousers were steaming, was warm- ing himself laughingly in front of the crackling fire, the old man was watching the burning of his last piece of furniture with eyes of a stoic, and never stopped repeating obstinately :
“T ain’t got no wood.”
I went back to the station. The general had come out of the telegraph office more excited and flushed and angry than ever. He jabbered out something and
CALVARY. 47
presently brought about a great commotion. The clang of sabres was heard, voices called out and an- swered one another, officers were running in all direc- tions. The bugle sounded. Without the least under- standing of this counter order, we had to put our knapsacks on our backs and the guns on our shoulders.
Forward! March!...
With bodies rendered rigid by immobility and with dizzy heads, we pushed and jostled one another and resumed our breathless journey in the rain, in the mud, through the night!... To the right and the left of us there were long stretches of fields swallowed up in the shadows from which rose the crowns of apple trees which appeared to be twisted in the skies. From time to time the barking of a dog was heard from afar.... There were deep forests, sombre thickets which rose like walls on each side of the road. Then came villages asleep, where our steps resounded even more mourn- fully, or where at a window quickly opened and quickly closed again, there appeared the vague outline of a human white form... terrified.... Then again fields and woods and villages.... Nota single song, not a single word, only an immense silence, accentuated by the rhythm of the tramping feet. The leather straps of the knapsack cut into my flesh, the rifle felt like a red hot iron bar placed upon my shoulder. For a mo- ment I thought myself harnessed to a huge wagon, loaded with broad stone and stuck in the mud and felt that the carters were breaking my legs with the lashes of whips. With my feet planted in the ground, my spine bent in two, with outstretched neck, strangled by the bit, my lungs emitting a rattling sound, I was pulling and pulling. ... Pretty soon I reached a state where I was no longer conscious of anything. I was marching in a state of torpor, like an automaton, as if in a trance.... Strange hallucinations flitted before
48 CALVARY
my eyes. I saw a glowing road receding into space, lined with palatial mansions and brilliant lights... . Strange scarlet flowers swayed their corollz in the air on the top of flexible stems, and a crowd of gay people were singing at tables laden with refreshments and delicious fruit... . Women with fluttering gauze skirts were dancing on illumined lawns, to the music of nu- merous orchestras hidden in the grove strewn with falling leaves, adorned with jasmines, sprinkled with water.
“ Halt!” commanded the sergeant.
I stopped, and in order not to sink down to the ground I had to hold on to the arm of a comrade. I awoke from my trance. . . . Darkness was all around me. We had come to the entrance of a forest, near a small town where the general and most of the officers went to find quarters. Having pitched my tent, I oc- cupied myself with rubbing my feet, the skin of which was peeling off, with a candle which I had hidden in my knapsack, and like an emaciated dog, stretched myself out on the wet ground and immediately fell asleep. During the night, fellow-soldiers who, ex- hausted with fatigue, |had dropped out of the ranks on the road, kept on coming into camp. Of these, five men were never heard from. It was ever so at each difficult march. Some of the men, weak or sick, fell into the ditches and died there; others deserted. ...
The next morning reveille was sounded at dawn. The night had been extremely cold, it never stopped raining and we could not get any straw litter or hay to sleep on. It was very difficult for me to get out of the tent; for a while I was obliged to crawl on my knees on all fours, my legs refusing to carry me. My limbs were frozen stiff like bars of iron, I could not move my head on my paralyzed neck, and my eyes which felt as if they had been pricked by numerous
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tiny needles, kept shedding tears in ceaseless streams. ... At the same time I felt an acute, lancinating, un- bearable pain in my back and shoulders. I noticed that my comrades fared no better. With drawn faces of ghostly pallor they were advancing, some limping piteously, others bent down and staggering over clumps of underbrush —all lame, mournful and cov- ered with mud. I saw several men who, seized with the colic, writhed and twisted their mouths, holding their hands to their bellies. Some of them were shiv- ering with fever, and their teeth chattered with cold. All around us one could hear dry coughs rending hu- man breasts, groans, short and raucous breathing. A hare ventured out of its cover and fled wildly, with its ears flapping, but no one thought of pursuing the ani- mal as we used sometimes to do. After the roll call, foodstuffs were distributed, as the commissary re- gained our regiment. We made some soup which we ate as greedily as half-starved dogs.
I was still suffering. After the soup I had an at- tack of dizziness followed by vomiting, and I shook with fever. Everything around me was in a whirl — the tents, the forest, the fields, the small town way yonder, whose chimneys were smoking in the mist, and the sky where huge clouds were floating, bleak and low. I asked the sergeant for permission to see a doctor.
Our tents were arranged in two rows, backed against the forest on each side of the road of Senonches which led into the open country through a magnificent grove of oak trees, crossed the Chartre road three hundred meters away and still further the town of Belhomert and extended farther toward Loupe. At the crossing of these two roads there was a small dilapidated build- ing covered with thatch, a sort of abandoned shed which provided shelter for the laborers on the road
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during rain. It was here that the surgeon had estab- lished a sort of improvised field hospital recognizable by a Red Cross flag put up in a crack in the wall and adorning it.
In front of the house a crowd was waiting. A long line of human beings, wan and worn out, some stand- ing with fixed looks, others sitting on the ground, sad with stooped and pointed shoulders, their heads buried in their hands. Death had already laid its terrible hand upon these emaciated countenances, these scraggy frames, these members which hung loose, devoid of blood and marrow. And confronted with this heartbreaking sight, I forgot my own suffering, and my heart was touched with pity. Three months were sufficient to break down these robust bodies, inured to labor and fatigue! ... Three months! And these young men who loved life, these children of the soil who grew up as dreamers in the freedom of the fields, trusting in the goodness of nature, these youths were done for! ... To the marine who dies is given the sea as a burying place; he descends into eternal darkness to the rhythm of its murmuring waves. But these! ...A few more days of grace perhaps, and then these tatterdemallions will suddenly tumble down into the mud of a ditch, their corpses delivered up to the fangs of prowling dogs and to the beaks of ‘nightbirds.
I was swept by a feeling of such brotherly and sorrow- ful pity for them that I wished I could press all these unhappy men to my breast, in a single embrace, and I wished, oh, how ardently I wished it!—I had a hundred female breasts, like Isis, swollen with milk, that I might offer to all these bloodless lips. . . They were entering the house one by one and were leaving it as quickly, pursued by growling and swearing sounds. For the rest, the surgeon did not bother with them at
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all. Very angry, he was demanding of his orderly his medicine chest which was missing from the luggage.
“ My medicine chest, for God’s sake!” he shouted. “Where is my medicine chest? And my instrument case? .. What did you do with my instrument case? Ah! for God’s sake! .. .”
A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients, lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words in de- lirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice of an infant. Squatted in front of the fire place, an attendant was holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not even look at me. He shouted:
“Well, what’s the matter now? ...A bunch of lazy buggers. A good ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler.... Face about!.... March!”
On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me:
“Ts this the place where you can see the doctor.”
“Women now!” growled the adjutant. ‘“ What do you want now?”
“Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor,” rejoined the peasant woman, who came up very timidly. “I came for my son who is a soldier.”
“Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?”
With her hands crossed on the handle of her um- brella, timorous, she examined the place about her.
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“It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very, very sick. .. And so I came to see if he was not around here, Doctor.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Riboulleau.”
“Riboulleau.... Riboulleau! ... That may be.... look in that pile there.”
The attendant who was broiling his pudding turned his head.
“ Riboulleau,” he said, “why he has been dead — three days already. . .”
“What is that you are saying?” cried the peasant woman whose sunburned face suddenly became pallid. “Where did he die? ... Why did he die, my little darling boy.”
The adjutant intervened, and rudely pushing the old woman toward the door, shouted:
“Go on, go on, no scenes around here! Well, he is dead — and that is all there is to it.”
“My little darling boy! My little darling boy!” wailed the old woman in a heart-breaking manner.
I walked away with a heavy heart and felt so dis- couraged that I was asking myself whether it was not better to put an end to it all at once by hanging myself on the branch of a tree or by blowing my brains out with the gun. While I was going to my tent, stum- bling on the way, I was hardly paying any attention to the little soldier who, having stopped at the foot of a pine tree, had opened his abscess with his knife him- self, and, pale, with sweat drops rolling all over his forehead, was bandaging his bleeding wound.
In the morning I felt a great deal better than I thought I would. I was relieved of all work, and after having greased my rifle which became rusted in the rain, I enjoyed a few hours of rest. Stretched out on my blanket, with my body torpid in delicious half
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slumber where I distinctly heard all the noises of the camp —the sounding of the bugle, the neighing of the horses as if coming from afar —I was thinking of the people and the things I had left behind me. A thousand images and a thousand scenes of the past rapidly filed before my eyes. I saw again the Priory, my dead mother and my father, with his large straw hat and the short beggar with his flaxen hair and Felix squatted in the lettuce patches, lying in wait for a mole. I saw again my study room, my school mates and, topping the noise of the Bal Bullier, Nini, . her hair loose and brown, with her ruddy neck and her pink stockings showing like some lascivious flower from under the skirt raised in dancing. Then the image of an unknown woman in a yellow dress, whom I noticed in the shadow of a box in a theatre one evening, came back to me — an insistent and sweet vision.
During this time the strongest among us had gone out to roam in the fields and on the farms. They came back merrily carrying bundles of straw, chickens, tur- keys and ducks. One of them was driving before him with a switch, a big, grunting pig; another was balancing a sheep on his shoulder. At the end of a halter the latter was also dragging a calf which, tangled up in the rope, resisted comically and shook its snout, bellowing all the time. The peasants came up running to the camp to complain that they had been robbed; they were hooted and driven out.
The general, very stiff and with round eyes, came to review us in the afternoon, accompanied by our lieutenant who walked at his right. His shiny look, his flushed cheeks, his mealy voice bore witness to the fact that he had had a plentiful breakfast. He was munching the end of an extinguished cigar; he spat, sniffed, swore. One could not tell at whom or what,
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for he did not address himself to any one in particular. When standing in front of our company, he looked at our lieutenant-colonel severely, and I heard him say:
“Your men are dirty slops!”
Then he walked away, his body weighed down by his belly, dragging his feet, dressed in yellow boots above which red breeches swelled and folded like a skirt.
The rest of the day was\devoted to loitering in the taverns of Belhomert. There was such crowding and such noise everywhere, and besides I knew so well these fights in the cabarets, these violent outbursts as a result of drunkenness which often degenerated into general scuffles, that I preferred to go out on the road, far from all these brawls, in the company of a few peaceable comrades.
Just then the weather grew better, dim sunlight came from the sky freed from clouds. We seated our- selves on the side of a sloping hill, bending our backs under the warm sun rays as does a cat under the hand that caresses it. Vehicles kept passing by, heavy carts, dung carts, small carriages with awning hoods, rubbish carts drawn by small mules. Those were the peasants of Chartres valley who were fleeing from the Prussians. . . . Excited by rumors, spread from village to village, of burnings, robberies, murders and all kinds of atrocities committed by the Germans in the invaded territories, they were carrying away in haste their most precious possessions, abandoning their homes and their fields and, utterly bewildered, were proceeding straight ahead, without knowing where they were going. In the evening they would stop at some chance road, near a town, sometimes in the open fields. The horses, unharnessed and fettered, browsed on the river banks, the people ate and slept at Ged’s mercy, guarded by dogs, in storm and rain, in the cold
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of foggy nights. Then in the morning they would start out again. Droves of animals, and throngs of men succeeded one another alternately. They were passing by us, and upon the yellow main road one could see the black and mournful procession of the refugees as far as the hill closing the horizon: one might think it was an exodus of a whole people. I questioned an old man who led a donkey pulling a cart, at the bottom of which in the midst of bundles, tied with kerchiefs, and carrots and heads of cabbage, on a pile of straw there shifted about a peasant woman with a flat nose, two pink-colored pigs and a few do- mestic fouls tied by their feet in twos.
“Eh, the robbers!” the old man replied. “ Don’t speak to me about them!... They came one morning, a whole gang of them with plumed hats. ... They raised such a racket! ... Eh, Holy Jesus! And then they took everything away. ... Well I thought they were the Prussians. ... I have found out since that they were the ‘franc-tireurs’. . .”
“ How about the Prussians?”
“The Prussians! . . . Of them that are Prussians I have seen very few to be sure. ... They are supposed to be up at our place right now! ... Jacqueline thinks she saw one behind the hedge the other day!... He was tall, very tall and he was as red as the devil.... Is he really one of these fellows, those savages that came?... Now tell me truly who are they?”
“Those are Germans, old man, just as we are French.” .
“Germans? ... So I hear. ... But what do they want, those damned Germans, will you please tell me, mister soldier? ... Well, I have saved two pigs, our girl and all our poultry just the same!... By Jove!”
And the peasant continued on his way, repeating:
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“The Germans! the Germans! ... What do these damned Germans want?”
That evening fires were made along the entire line of the camp, and the attractive looking pots full of fresh meat were hissing joyously upon the improvised stoves of earth and stone. For us that was a time of exquisite respite and delicious forgetfulness. Peace seemed to have descended from heaven, all blue with the moon and aglitter with stars; the fields, unrolling themselves with soft and misty undulations, had in them a kind of tender sweetness which penetrated into our souls and set new blood, less acrid and endowed with new vigor, circulating in our members. Little by little, memories of our hardships, our discourage- ments and privations, however near, effaced them- selves, and simultaneously with the awakening of our sense of duty, a desire for action seized us. Unusual animation reigned at our camp. Every one offered voluntarily to do some kind of work; some, torch in hand, were running about to light again the fires which went out, others were blowing at the ashes in order to kindle them into flame again, still others were sort- ing vegetables and slicing meat. Some comrades, forming a circle around the débris of burned timber, struck up a tune “Have you seen Bismark?” in a jeering chorus. Revolt—the child of hunger — had its inception in the hissing of saucepans, in the clatter of platters.
The next day, when the last of us answered “ Pres- ent” at the roll call, the little lieutenant gave the command: “ Form a circle, march!”
And in a faltering voice, jumbling the words and skipping phrases, the quartermaster read a pompous order of the day, issued by the general. In that piece of military literature it was said that a Prussian army corps, starving, ill-clad and without arms, after having
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occupied Chartres, was advancing on us at double marching time. Our task was to block its way, to throw it back as far as the walls of Paris, where the valiant Ducrot was only waiting for our arrival to sally out and clean the land of all invaders at one sweep. The general recalled the victories of the Revolution, the Egypt expedition, Austerlitz, Boro- dino. He expressed the faith that we would show ourselves worthy of our glorious ancestors of Sambre- et-Meuse. In view of that he gave precise strategic instructions for the defense of the country, namely: to establish an impregnable barrier to the eastern en- trance to the town and another still more impregnable barrier upon the road of Chartres, to fortify the walls of the cemetery at the cross-road, to fell as many trees as possible in the nearby forest so that the enemy cavalry and even infantry should be unable to turn our flank from Senonches under the cover of the woods, to be on the lookout for spies, and finally to keep our eyes open. ... The country was counting on us.... Long live the Republic!
The cheer was not responded to. The little lieu- tenant who was walking around, his arms crossed on his back, his eyes obstinately fixed on the point of his boot, did not raise his head. We looked at one another ' perplexed, with a sort of anguish in our hearts, which came as a result of our knowledge that the Prussians were very near, that war was going to begin for us in earnest the very next day, today perhaps. And I had a sudden vision of Death, red Death standing on a chariot, drawn by rearing horses, which was sweeping down on us, brandishing his scythe. As long as the actual fighting was only a remote possibility we wanted to be in it, first for reasons of patriotism, enthusiasm, then out of mere braggadocio, later be- cause we were nervously exhausted and wearisome
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and saw in it a way out of our misery. Now when the opportunity offered itself, we were afraid; we shuddered at the mere mention of it. Instinctively my eyes turned toward the horizon, in the direction of Chartres. And the fields seemed to me to conceal a secret, unknown terror, a fearful uncertainty, which lent to things a new aspect of relentlessness. Over yonder, above the blue line of trees, I expected to see helmets spring up suddenly, bayonets flash, the thun- dering mouths of cannons spurt fire. A harvest field, all red under the sun, appeared to me like a pond of blood. Hedges strung themselves out into armies, joined ranks, crossed one another like regiments, brist- ling with arms and standards and going through var- ious evolutions before the battle. The apple trees looked frightened like cavalry men thrown into dis- order.
“ Break the circle — march! ” shouted the lieutenant.
Stupefied, with swinging arms, we were standing on one place for a long time, a prey to some vague misgiving, trying to pierce in thought this terrible line on the horizon, behind which was now being realized the mystery of our fate. In this disquieting silence, in this sinister immobility, only carts and herds were passing by, more numerous, more hurried and pressed than ever. A flock of ravens, which came from yonder like a black vanguard, spotted the skies, thickened, distended and, stringing itself out into a line, turned aside, floating above us like a funeral cloak, then dis- appeared among the oak trees.
“ At last we are going to see them, these famous Prussians!” said, in a faltering voice, a big fellow who was very pale and who, in order to give himself the air of a fearless daredevil, was beating his ears with his kepi.
No one replied to this remark and several walked
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away. Our corporal, however, shrugged his shoulders. He was a very impudent little man, with a pock-eaten face, full of pimples.
“Oh! I!” he said.
He clarified his thought by a cynical gesture, sat down on the heath, puffed at his pipe slowly, till fire appeared.
“Oh, piffle!” he concluded, emitting a cloud of smoke which vanished in the air.
While one company of chasseurs was detailed to the crossroads to establish an “impregnable barrier” there, my company went in the woods to “fell as many trees as possible.” All the axes, bill-hooks and hatchets of the village were speedily requisitioned. Almost everything was used as a tool. For a whole day the blows of the axes were resounding and trees were falling. To spur us on to greater efforts, the general himself wanted to assist us in the vandalism.
“Come on, you scamps!” he would cry out at every occasion, clapping his hands. “Come on boys, let’s get this one! .. .”
He himself pointed out the most stalwart among the trees, those which grew up straight and spread out like the columns of a temple. It was an orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish; a shout of brutal joy went up every time a tree fell on top of another with a great noise. The old trees became less dense, one could say they were mowed down by some gigantic and supernatural scythe. Two men were killed by the fall of an oak tree.
And the few trees which remained standing, austere in the midst of ruined trunks lying on the ground, and the twisted branches which rose up towards them like arms outstretched in supplication, were showing open wounds, deep and red gashes from which the sap was oozing, weeping as it were.
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The supervisor of the forest section, warned by a guard, came running from Senonches, and with a broken heart witnessed this useless devastation. I was near the general when the forester approached him respectfully, kepi in hand.
“ Beg pardon, general,” said he. “I can understand the felling of trees on the edge of the road, the barri- cading of lines of approach. ... But your destruction of the heart of the old forest seems to me a little. . . .”
But the general interrupted:
“Eh? What? It seems to you what? ... What are you butting in here for?... I do asI please.... Who is commander here, you or I?.. .”
“ But. . . .” stammered the forester.
“There are no buts about it, Monsieur. ... You make me tired, that’s one thing sure! ... You had better hurry back to Senonches or I’ll have you strung up on a tree.... Come on, boys!...”
The general turned his back on the stupefied agent and walked away knocking some dead leaves and sprigs before him with the end of his cane.
While we were thus desecrating the forest, the chasseurs were not idle either, and the barricade rose, huge and formidable, cutting off the road at the cross- road. It was accomplished not without difficulty and above all not without gayety. Suddenly halted by a trench which barred their flight, the peasants pro- tested. Their carts and herds became congested on the road, very narrow at this point; there was, there- fore, an indescribable uproar. They were complain- ing, the women were moaning, the cattle were lowing, the soldiers were laughing at the frightened looks of men and beasts, and the captain who was in com- mand of the troops did not know what action to take. Several times the soldiers pretended to drive the peas- ants back at the point of the bayonet, but the latter
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were stubborn and determined to pass and invoked their rights as Frenchmen. Having made his round in the forest, the general went to see the progress of the work on the barricade. He demanded to know what “these dirty civilians” wanted. He was told about it.
“All right,” he cried. “Seize all their carts and throw them into the barricade. . . . Come on, get a move on you, boys!...”
The soldiers, rejoicing in the opportunity, hurled themselves on the first carts which stood abandoned with everything in them, and smashed them with a few blows of the pick-axe. A wild panic broke out among the peasants. The congestion became so great that it was impossible for them either to advance or to turn back. Lashing their horses with all their might and trying to extricate their impeded wagons, they were shouting, jostling and bruising one another without making a step backward. Those last arrived had turned back and were going at full speed of their horses excited by the tumult; others, despairing of a chance to save their carts and provisions, climbed over the barrier and, dispersing across the field, uttered cries of indignation, pursued by oaths and curses flung at them by the soldiers. Then, they piled up the smashed vehicles one on top of the other, filled the gaps with sacks of oats, matresses, bundles of clothes and stones. On top of the barricade, upon a coach pole, which rose vertically upward like a flag- staff, a little chasseur planted a bouquet of wedding flowers found among other booty.
Towards the evening, groups of reserves arriving from Chartres in great disorder, scattered all over Belhomert and the camp. They brought horrible tales. The Prussians were more than a hundred thou- sand strong, all in one army. They, the reserves,
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hardly had time to fall back. ... Chartres was in flames, the villages in the vicinity were burning, the farms were destroyed. The greater part of the French detachments which bore the brunt of covering the retreat, could not hold out much longer. The fugi- tives were questioned; they were asked whether they saw the Prussians, what insignia they wore and were particularly quizzed about all the details of the enemy uniforms.
Every fifteen minutes new reserves would show up in groups of two or three, pale, exhausted with fatigue. Most of them had no kits, some had no guns, and they were telling stories, each more terrible than the other. None of them was wounded. It was decided to quarter them in the church, to the great indignation of the curé who, lifting his arms to heaven, exclaimed:
“Holy Virgin! ... In my church! .., Ah! Ah! Soldiers in my church!...”
Up to this time the general who was preoccupied solely with his plans of destruction, had no time to provide for the guarding of the camp, except by es-. tablishing a small outpost in a tavern, frequented by carterers within a mile from Belhomert upon the Chartres road. This outpost, commanded by a ser- geant, had not received any definite instructions, and the man did nothing except loaf, drink and sleep. Still the sentinel who was nonchalantly pacing to and fro in front of the tavern, gun on shoulder, at one time arrested a country doctor as a German spy because of his blond beard and blue spectacles. As for the sergeant, an old professional poacher who sneered at everything and everybody, he amused himself by set- ting traps for rabbits in the hedges nearby.
The arrival of the reserves, the menace of the Prus- sians had thrown us into confusion. Messengers came up every minute, carrying sealed envelopes containing
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orders and counter-orders. The officers were running about with a preoccupied look, not knowing what to do, and completely lost their heads. Three times we were ordered to break up camp and three times we were told to pitch our tents anew. All night trumpets and bugles were sounding, and big log fires were burn- ing, around which, in the growing tumult, were passing back and forth shadows strangely agitated, silhouettes of demoniacal appearances. Patrols were scouring the fields, riding out on the crossroads, searching the outskirts of the forest. Artillery sta- tioned on this side of the town was ordered to move up forward upon the heights, but it ran into the barri- cade. To clear the way for the cannons, it was found necessary to demolish it piece-meal and to fill up the ditch.
At daybreak my company was sent to do main guard duty. We met mobilized soldiers, dispirited franc-tireurs who were dragging their feet piteously. A little further away, the general, accompanied by his staff, was watching the manceuvres of the artillery. He held a map of the general staff, unfolded on the neck of his horse, and was vainly trying to locate the Saussaie mill. Bending over the map which the horse shifted out of place with every movement of its head, he shouted:
“Where is that damned mill? ... Pontgouin.... Couville. ... Courville.... Do they think I know all their damned mills around here?”
The general commanded us to halt and asked:
“Ts there anyone here who is familiar with this country?... Is there anyone here who knows where the Saussaie mill is?”
Nobody answered.
“No?... Well alright. To hell with it!”
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And he threw the map to his aide who began fold- ing it up carefully. We resumed our march.
The company was stationed on a farm and I was put on guard duty near the road, at the entrance to a grove, beyond which I could look on an open plain, immense and smooth like the sea. Here and there small woods emerged from the ocean of land like isl- ands; the belfries of the villages, the farms, blurred by the fog, assumed the aspect of a distant veil. In this enormous expanse a great silence reigned, a soli- tude wherein the least noise, the least thing stirring in the skies, had something mysterious about it which put anguish into one’s heart. Up above, black dots spotted the skies — those were the ravens; down be- low, upon the earth, small black specks moved for- ward, growing larger, disappearing — those were the fleeing soldiers of the reserves; and now and then the distant barking of dogs, answered by similar bark- ing all along the line from east to west, from north to south, sounded like the plaint of the deserted fields. Our guard was supposed to be relieved every four hours, but hours upon hours passed, slow and endless, and no one came to take my place.
No doubt they had forgotten all about me. With a heavy heart I was searching the horizon on the Prus- sian side, the French side; I saw nothing, nothing but this hard, relentless line, which encircled the huge grey sky around me. It was a long time since the ravens had ceased flying and the reserve soldiers flee- ing. For a moment I saw a truck coming toward the woods where I was, but it turned off on one of the roads and soon was no longer distinguishable from the grey terrain.... Why did they leave me thus? ...1 was hungry and I was cold, my bowels rumbled, my fingers became numb. I ventured out on the road a little; having walked a few steps I shouted.... Not
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a being answered my call, not a thing stirred.... I was alone, utterly alone, alone in this deserted, empty field. ... A shudder passed through my frame, and tears came into my eyes.... I shouted again.... No answer.... Then I went back into the woods and sat down at the foot of an oak tree, with my rifle across my lap, keeping a sharp lookout and waiting. ... Alas! The day was waning little by little, the sky grew yel- low, then purple by degrees and finally vanished in deadly silence. And night, moonless and starless, fell upon the fields, and at the same time a chilling fog arose from the shadows.
Worn out with fatigue, always occupied with some- thing or other and never alone, I had no time to reflect on anything from the moment we started out. But still confronted by the strange and cruel sights con- stantly before my eyes, I felt within me the awakening of the idea of human life which until now had lain slumbering in the sluggishness of my childhood and the torpor of my youth. Yes... the idea awoke con- fusedly, as if emerging from a long and painful night- mare. And reality appeared to me more frightful than the nightmare. Transposing the instincts, the desires and passions which agitated us from the small group of errant men that we were to society as a whole, re- calling the impressions so fleeting and wholly external which I had received in Paris, the rude crowds, the pushing and jostling of pedestrians, I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, mur- derous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which
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they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
What was this country, in whose name so many crimes were being committed, which had torn us — formerly so full of love—from the motherly bosom of nature, which had thrown us, now so full of hatred, famished and naked, upon this cruel land? . . . What was this country, personified to us by this rabid and pillaging general who gave vent to his madness on old people and trees, and by this surgeon who kicked the sick with his feet and maltreated poor old mothers bereaved of their sons? ... What was this country every step on whose soil was marked by a grave, which had but to look at the tranquil waters of its streams to change them into blood, which was always frittering away its man power, digging here and there deep charnel vaults where the best children of men were rotting? . . . And I was astounded, when for the first time it dawned upon me that only those were the most glorious, the most acclaimed heroes of mankind who had pillaged the most, killed the most, burned the most.
They condemn to death the stealthy murderer who kills the passerby with a knife, on the corner of the street at night, and they throw his beheaded body into a grave of infamy. But the conqueror who has burned cities and decimated human beings, all the folly and human cowardice unite in raising to the throne of the most marvelous; in his honor triumphal arches are built, giddy columns of bronze are erected, and in the cathedrals multitudes reverently kneel be- fore his tomb of hallowed marble guarded by saints and angels under the delighted gaze of God! ... With what remorse did I repent of the fact that until now I had remained blind and deaf to this life so full of
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inexplicable riddles! Never had I opposed this mys- terious book, never had I stopped even for a single moment to consider the question marks which are represented by things and beings; I did not know anything. And now, suddenly, a desire to know, a yearning to wrest from life some of its enigmas tor- mented me; I wanted to know the human reason for creeds which stupefy, for governments which oppress, for society which kills; I longed to be through with this war so that I might consecrate myself to some ardent cause, to some magnificent and absurd apostle- ship.
My thought traveled toward impossible philosophies of love, toward utopias of undying brotherhood.... I saw all men bent down beneath some crushing heels; they all resembled the little soldier of the reserves at Saint-Michel, whose eyes were running, who was coughing and spitting blood, and as I knew nothing of the necessity of higher laws of nature, a feeling of compassion rose within me, clogging my throat with suppressed sobs. I have noticed that a man has no- real compassion for anyone except when he himself is unhappy. Was this not, after all, but a form of self- pity? And if on this cold night, close to the enemy who would perhaps come out of the fogs of the mor- row, I loved humanity so much — was it not myself only that I loved, myself only that I wanted to save from suffering? These regrets of the past, these plans for the future, this sudden passion for study, this ardor which I employed in picturing myself in the future in my room on the Rue Oudinot, in the midst of books and papers, my eyes burning with the fever of work — was this not after all only a means to ward off the perils of the present, to dispel other horrible visions, visions of death which, blurred and blunted,
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incessantly followed one another in the terror of darkness?
Night, impenetrable night continued. Under the sky which brooded over them, sinister and greedy, the fields stretched like a vast sea of Shadow. At long intervals, out of the dead whiteness, long curtains of fog were floating up above, grazing the invisible ground where clumps of trees here and there appeared still darker in the surrounding darkness. I never stirred from the place where I sat down, and the cold numbed my members and chapped my lips. With difficulty I raised myself and walked on the outskirt of the woods. The sound of my own steps on the ground frightened me, it always seemed to me that someone was walking behind me. I was walking carefully, on tiptoe, as if afraid to wake the sleeping earth, and listened, trying to penetrate the darkness, for in spite of everything, I had not yet given up the hope that some one would come to relieve me. Nota stir, not a breath, not a glimmer of light in this blind and mute night. Twice, however, I distinctly heard the sound of steps, and my heart thumped violently. ... But the noise moved away, grew fainter by de- grees, ceased altogether and silence set in again, more oppressive, more terrible, more disheartening than ever.
A branch brushed against my face; I recoiled, seized with terror. Further away, a rise in the ground appeared to me like a man who with crooked back seemed to be crawling toward me; I loaded my rifle. ...At the sight of an abandoned plough with its arms turned upward toward the sky, like the menacing horns of some monster, my breath left me and I al- most fell on my back.... I was afraid of the shadow, of the silence, of the least object that extended beyond the line of the horizon and which my deranged imag-
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ination endowed with a soul of sinister life.... De- spite the cold, perspiration in large drops was stream- ing upon my face.... I had a notion to quit my post, to return to camp, persuading myself by all sorts of ingenious and cowardly arguments that my comrades had forgotten all about me and that they would be glad to see me back with them. Obviously, since I had not been relieved by anyone from my company, and saw none of the officers make his round of inspec- tion, they must have left.... But supposing I were mistaken about it, what excuse could I offer, and how would I be received at the camp?... To go back to the farm where my company was quartered this morn- ing and ask for instructions?... I was thinking of doing it.... But in my plight I had lost all sense of direction, and if I attempted to do that I would surely get lost in this plain that was so endless and so black.
Then an abominable thought flashed through my mind.... Yes, why not discharge a bullet into my arm and run back, bleeding and wounded, and tell them that I had been attacked by the Prussians?... I had to make a strong effort to regain my reason which was leaving me; I had to gather all the moral forces that were left in me in order to get away from this cowardly and odious impulse, from this wretched ecs- tasy of fear, and I desperately strove to recall the memories of former times, to conjure up gentle and silent visions, sweet-scented and white-winged. .. . They came to me as in a painful dream, distorted, mutilated, under the spell of hallucination, and fear immediately threw them into confusion.... The Vir- gin of Saint-Michel, with a body of pink, in a blue mantle, adorned with golden stars, I saw in a lewd attitude, prostituting herself on a bed, in some miser- able shack, with drunken soldiers. My favorite spots in the Tourouvre forest, so peaceful, where I used to
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stay for entire days, stretched out on the mossy ground, were turning topsy-turvy, tangled up, brand- ishing their gigantic trees over me; then a few how- itzer shells crossed one another in the air, resembling familiar faces which sniggered ; one of these projectiles suddenly spread out wide wings, flame-colored, which swung around me and enveloped me.... I cried out. ... My God, am I going crazy? I felt my breast, my chest, my back, my legs.... I must have been as pale as a corpse, and I felt a shiver passing through me from heart to brain, like a steel bore. ...
“Let’s see now,” I said aloud to myself to make sure that I was awake, that I was alive.... In two gulps I swallowed the remainder of the whiskey in my flask, and I started to walk very fast, tramping with rage upon the clods under my feet, whistling the air of a soldier song which we used to sing in chorus to relieve the tedium of the march. Somewhat calmed, I came back to the oak tree and kicked its trunk with the sole of my boots; for I was in need of this noise and this physical motion.... And now I thought of my father so lonely at the Priory. It was more than three weeks since I had received a letter from him. Oh! How sad and heart-rending his last letter was!
It did not complain of anything, but one felt in it a deep despair, a wearisomeness of being alone in that large empty house, and anxiety about me who, he knew, was wandering, knapsack on back, amidst the dangers of battle.... Poor father! He had not been happy with my mother— who was ill, always fretful, who did not love him and could not stand his presence.... And never a sign of reproach, not even when meeting with the most painful rebuff and un- kindness! ... He used to bend his back like a dog, and walk out....
_ Ah! how I repented of the fact that I did not love
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him enough. Perhaps he had not brought me up in the manner he should have done. But what difference did it make? He did everything he could!... He was himself without experience in life, defenseless against evil, of a kindly but timid nature. And in the measure that the features of my father stood out clearly before me even to their smallest details, the face of my mother was obliterating itself, and I was no longer able to recall its endearing outline. At this moment all the affection that I had for my mother I transferred to my father. I recalled with tenderness how on the day my mother died he took me on his lap and said, “ Perhaps it’s for the best.” And now I understood how much sorrow accumulated in the past and terror in facing the future there was summed up in that phrase. It was for her sake that he said that, and also for the sake of one who resembled my mother so much, and not for his own consolation, unhappy man that he was, who had resigned himself to suffer- ing all.... During the last three years he had aged very much; his tall frame was worn out, his. face, formerly so red with the color of health, grew yellow and wrinkled, his hair became almost white. He no longer lay in wait for the birds in the park, he let the cats rove among the lianas and lick the water from the basin; he took little interest in his practice, the direction of which he left to his chief clerk, a trusted man who was stealing from him; he no longer occu- pied himself with the small but honorable affairs of his locality. He never went out, he would not even stir from his rocking-chair with small pillows which he ordered moved into the kitchen, not wishing to stay alone— without Marie who would bring him his cane and his hat.
“ Well, Monsieur, you must take a little walk. You are getting all ‘rusty’ in your corner there,...”
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“ All right, Marie. I am going to take the air.... I’ll walk along the bank of the river, if you want me tp.”
“No, Monsieur, you must take a walk in the woods. ... The air there will do you good.”
“ All right, Marie, I am going to take a walk in the woods.”
At times, seeing him inactive, slumbering, she would tap him on the shoulder:
“Why don’t you get your rifle, Monsieur? There are a lot of finches in the park.”
And looking at her with an air of reproach, my father would mutter:
“ Finches?... The poor things!...”
Why did my father not write to me? Did my let- ters reach him at all? I reproached myself with hav- ing been too dry in my letters until now, and I prom- ised myself to write to him the next day — the first opportunity I got — a long affectionate letter, in which I was going to pour out my heart to him.
The sky was gradually clearing way yonder on the horizon whose outline stood out clear against a darker blue. It was still night, the fields remained dark, but one could feel the approaching dawn. The cold was more piercing than ever, the earth cracked harder under the feet, moisture crystallized into drops on the branches of the trees. And little by little the sky was brightened by a faint glimmer of pale-gold color which was growing in distinctness. Gradually, out- lines emerged from the shadow, indefinite and con- fused as yet, the opaque blackness of the plain changed into a dull violet, here and there rent by light. ... Suddenly I heard a noise, weak at first, like the distant roll of a drum. ... I listened, my heart beating violently. Presently the noise stopped and the cocks crowed. ... About ten minutes later
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the noise started again, more distinct, coming nearer! ... Pa-ta-ra! Pa-ta-ra! It was the gallop of a horse on the Chartres road.... Instinctively I buckled up my knapsack on my back and made sure that my rifle was loaded. ... I was very excited, the veins in my temples dilated.... Pa-ta-ra! Pa-ta-ra!...
Hardly had I time enough to squat down behind the oak tree, when on the road, at a distance of twenty paces in front of me, there suddenly appeared a large shadow, surprisingly immobile, like an equestrian statue of bronze, and this enormous shadow which obtruded itself almost entirely upon the brightness of the eastern sky was terrible to behold.... The man appeared to me superhuman, inordinately large against the sky! ... He wore the flat cap of the Prussians, a long black cloak, under which the chest was bulging out greatly. Was he an officer or a plain soldier? I did not know, for I could not distinguish any insignia of rank on the dark uniform. ... His features, at first indistinct, became more accentuated. He had clear eyes, very limpid, a broad beard, his bearing bespoke youthful strength; his face breathed power and kind- ness along with something noble, audacious and sad which struck me. Holding his hand flat on his thigh, he studied the country before him, and his horse scraped the ground with its hoofs and puffed long streams of vapor in the air through its quivering nos- trils. . . . Evidently this Prussian was reconnoitering, he came to observe our position, the nature of the ground; undoubtedly a whole army was swarming behind him, waiting for a signal from this man to throw themselves on the plain! ...
Well hidden in my woods, with rifle ready, I was watching him. ... He was handsome indeed, life flowed abundantly in this robust body. ... Whata pity! He kept on studying the country, and it seemed
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to me as though he were studying it more like a poet than a soldier. ... I detected a sort of emotion in his eyes. ... Perhaps he forgot why he had come here and allowed himself to be fascinated by the beauty of this virginal and triumphant dawn. The sky became all red, it blazed up gloriously, the awak- ened fields unrolled themselves in the distance, emerg- ing one after another from their veil of mist, rose- colored and blue, which floated like long scarves ruf- fled by invisible hands. The trees were dripping dew, the hovels separated themselves from the pink and blue background, the dove-cot of a large farm whose new tile roofs began to glitter, projected its whitish cone into the purple glare of the east.... Yes, this Prussian who started out with the notion to kill, was arrested, dazzled and reverently stirred by the splen- dor of a new-born day, and his soul for a few minutes was the captive of love.
“Perhaps it’s a poet,” I said to myself, “an artist; he must be kind, since he is capable of tenderness.”
And upon his face I could see all the emotion of a brave man which agitated him, all the tremors, all the delicate and flitting reactions of his heart, moved and fascinated.... I feared him no longer. On the con- trary, a sort of infatuation drew me towards him, and I had to hold on to the tree to keep myself from going to this man. I would have liked to speak to him, to tell him that it was well that he contemplated the heaven thus, and that I liked him because of his re- ceptiveness to beauty.... But his face grew sombre, a sadness stole into his eyes.... Ah, the horizon over which they swept was so far, so far away! And be- yond that horizon there was another and further on, still another! One had to conquer all that!... When was he to be relieved of his duty ever to spur his horse on through this nostalgic territory, always to cut a
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way through ruins and through death, always to kill, always to be cursed!...
And then, undoubtedly, he was thinking of the things he had left behind; of his home resounding with the laughter of his children, of his wife, who was waiting for him and praying to God while doing so.... Will he ever see her again? ... I was sure that at this very moment he was recalling the most fugitive details, the most childish habits of his life at home... a rose plucked one evening, after dinner, with which he adorned the hair of his wife, the dress which she wore when he was leaving, a blue bow on the hat of his little daughter, a wooden horse, a tree, a river view, a paper knife! ... All the memories of his joys came back to him, and with that keenness of vision which exiled persons possess, he encompassed in a single mental glance of despondency all those things by means of which he had been happy until now. ...
The sun rose higher, rendering the plain larger, ex- tending the distant horizon still farther.... I felt a compassion for this man and I loved him... yes I swear I loved him! ... Well, then, how did that happen? ... A detonation was suddenly heard, and at that very moment I caught sight of a boot in the air, of a torn piece of a military cloak, of a mane flying about wildly on the road ... and then nothing, I heard the noise of a blow with a sabre, the heavy fall of a body, furious beats of a gallop ... then noth- ing.... My rifle was warm, and smoke was coming out of it.... I let it fall to the ground.... Was I the victim of hallucination? ... Clearly not. Of the large shadow which rose skyward at the middle of the road like an equestrian statue of bronze there was left but a small corpse all black, stretched out face downward, with crossed arms. ... I recalled the poor cat that my father had killed, when with fasci-
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nated eyes she had been following the flight of a butterfly... .
Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with whom my soul had just identified itself, a man who in the dazzling splendor of the rising sun was retracing the purest dreams of his life! ... Perhaps I had killed him at the very moment that that man had said to himself: “And when I shall see her again at home... .” Why? For what reason? Since I loved him, since, if soldiers had menaced him, I would have defended him! Why of all men was it he I assassinated? In two bounds I was beside this man; I called him... he did not move. My bullet had pierced his neck under the ear, and blood was gushing from an opened vein with a gurgling sound, collecting into a red pool and sticking to his beard. ... With trembling hands I raised him slowly, his head swung from side to side, fell back, inert and heavy... . I felt his chest where the heart was: it beat no longer. ... Then I raised him again, supporting his head with my knees, and suddenly I saw his eyes, his two clear eyes which looked at me sadly, without hatred, with- out reproach, his two eyes which seemed to be alive! .. . I thought I was going to faint, but gathering all my strength in a supreme effort, I clasped the dead body of the Prussian, placed it right in front of me and pressing my lips against this bleeding face from which long, purple threads of congealed slaver were hanging, I desperately kissed it!...
From this moment on I don’t remember anything. ... I see again smoky fields covered with snow, and ruins burning incessantly, ever recurring dismal flights, delirious marches during the night, confusion at the crossroads congested with ammunition wagons, where the dragoons with drawn swords were driving their horses right into our midst and trying to cut a
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way through the wagons; I see again funeral carriages, followed by dead bodies of young men which we buried in the frozen ground, saying to ourselves that tomorrow would be our turn; I see again, near the cannon car- riages, large carcasses of horses dismembered by how- itzer shells, stiff, cut up, over which we used to quar- rel in the evening, from which we used to carry away, into our tents, bleeding portions which we devoured growling, showing our teeth like wolves!... And I see again the surgeon, with sleeves of his white coat rolled up, pipe in mouth, amputating on a table, in a farmhouse, by the smoky light of a tallow candle, the foot of a little soldier still wearing his coarse shoes!
. But above all I see again the Priory, when worn out and broken in body and spirit by these sufferings, rendered apathetic by the disaster of defeat I re-en- tered it one nice and sunny day.... The windows of the large house were closed, the window blinds were down in every room.... Felix, more bent than ever, was cleaning the walk and Marie, seated near the. kitchen door, was knitting a pair of stockings, wag- ging her head.
“Well! Well!” I shouted, “is that the way you receive me!”
As soon as the two noticed me, Felix went away as if frightened and Marie growing pale, uttered a cry.
““What’s the matter?” I asked with a heavy heart. “ How about father? ”
The old woman looked at me fixedly.
“Why, don’t you know?... Haven’t you received anything?... Ah, my poor Monsieur Jean! My poor Monsieur Jean!”
And with eyes filled with tears,. she stretched out her arms in the direction of the cemetery.
“Yes! Yes! There is where he is now, with Ma- dame,” she said in a dull voice.
CHAPTER III
OC, toc, toc. And at the same time a small drawn otter skin bonnet appeared in the slight opening of
the door, followed by two smiling eyes under a veil, then a long fur cape which outlined the slender body of a young woman.
“Tam not disturbing you?... May I come in?”
Lirat, the painter, raised his head.
“ Ah! it’s you, Madame!” he said in a curt tone, almost irritated, while shaking his hands soiled with pastel. ‘“ Why, yes, certainly.... Come right in!”
He left his easel and offered a seat.
“ How is Charles?” he asked.
_ “He is all right, thank you.”
She sat down, smiling, and her smile was really charming as well as sad. Although covered with a veil, her clear eyes of pinkish blue, her very large eyes which illuminated her whole figure, seemed to be ra- diating infinite kindness. ... She was dressed very elegantly, without striving to be pretentious. A little over-perfumed, however. ... There was a moment of silence.
The studio of the painter Lirat, situated in a peace- ful section of the Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Rodri- gues Square, was a vast, bare place with grey walls, with rough carpentry work and without furniture. Lirat called it familiarly “his hangar.” A hangar it was, indeed, where the north winds blew and the rain entered the room through the small crevices in the roof. Two long tables of plain wood supported boxes of paint, scrap books, blocks, handles of fans, Jap-
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anese albums, casts, a mess of odd and useless things. Near a book case filled with old magazines in a cor- ner there was a pile of pasteboard, canvas, torn sketches with the stretchers sticking through. A shat- tered sofa creaking with a sound like that of a piano out of tune, whenever one tried to sit on it, two-rickety arm chairs, a looking glass without a frame — con- stituted the only luxury of the studio illumined by trembling sunlight. In the winter, on days when Lirat had a model posing for him in the studio, he used to light his little cast iron stove whose chimney, crooked into several large bends, supported by iron wire and covered with rust, rose in a serpentine fashion in the middle of the room, before losing itself in the roof through an opening, all too large. On other days, even during the coldest nights, he substituted for the heat of the stove an old coat of astracan fur, worn out, bald and scabby, which he put on with real pleasure.
Lirat took a childish pride in this dilapidated studio, © and he boasted of its bareness as other painters do of their embroidered plush and tapestries, invariably his- torical in origin. Nay, he even wanted it to be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground. “It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are,” he would often say, “they always come again, the others stay away. That’s very con- venient.” Very few came more than once.
The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly bent forward, her hands bu- ried in her muff; from time to time she would take out an embroidered handkerchief and bring it slowly to her mouth which I could not see because of the thick border of the veil which hid it, but which I surmised was very beautiful, very red and exquisitely shaped. In her whole figure, elegant and refined, about which, in spite of the smile which rendered it so
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alluring, there was an air of modesty and even haugh- tiness, I could distinguish only these beautiful eyes which rested on objects like the rays of some heavenly star, and I followed her gaze which passed from the © floor to the frame work, so vibrant with luminosity and caresses. The embarrassing silence continued. I thought I alone was the cause of this embarrassment and I was getting ready to leave, when Lirat ex- claimed :
“Ah! Pardon!... I have forgotten.... Dear Madame, allow me to introduce to you my friend Jean Mintié.”
She greeted me with a gracious and at the same time coaxing nod of her head and in a very sweet voice, which thrilled me deliciously, she said:
“Tam delighted to meet you, Monsieur, but I know you well.”
While very much flushed, I was stammering out a few confused and silly words, Lirat broke in mock- ingly:
“T hope you are not going to make him believe that you have read his book?”
“T beg your pardon, Monsieur Lirat.... I have read it.... It is very good.”
“Yes, like my studio and my painting, isn’t that right?”
“Oh, no! what a comparison!”
She said it frankly, with a laugh, which rolled through the room like the chirping of a bird.
I did not like this laughter. Although it had a hard, sonorous quality, it nevertheless rang false. It seemed to me out of harmony with the expression of her face, so delicately sad, and then, in my admiration for Lirat’s genius it hurt me almost like an insult. I do not know why, but it would have been more pleasing to me if she had expressed her admiration for this
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great unrecognized artist, if she had shown at this moment a loftier judgment, if she had evinced a sen- timent superior to those of other women. On the other hand the contemptuous manner of Lirat, his tone of bitter hostility, shocked me deeply! I had a grudge against him for this affected rudeness, for this attitude of boyish insolence which lowered him in my esteem, I thought. I was displeased and very much embarrassed. I tried to speak of indifferent things, but not a single object of conversation came to my mind.
The young woman got up. She walked a few steps in the studio, stopped before the sketches lying in a heap, examined one or two of them with an air of disgust.
““My God! Monsieur Lirat,” she said, “ why do you persist in painting such ugly women, so comically shaped?”
“Tf I should tell you,” Lirat replied, “ you would not understand it.” |
“Thanks! ... And when will you paint my por- trait?”
“You should ask Monsieur Jacket or, better still, a photographer about that.”
“Monsieur Lirat?”
“ Madame!”
“Do you know why I came?”
“To oblige me with your kindness, I suppose.”
“That’s in the first place!... And then?”
“We seem to be playing an innocent little game? That’s very nice.”
“To ask you to come to dine with me on Friday? Do you care to?”
“You are very kind, dear Madame, but on Friday that is just when it will be utterly impossible. That’s my day at the Institute.”
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“ Well, of all things! ... Charles will be hurt by your refusal.”
“ You will express my regrets to him, will you not?”
“Well, good bye, Monsieur Lirat! A person can freeze to death here.”
And walking over to me, she gave me her hand.
“ Monsieur Mintié. I am home every day, from five to seven!... I shall be delighted to see you... delighted... .”
I bowed and thanked her, and she went out leav- ing in my ears some of the music of her voice, in my eyes some of the kindliness of her look and in the studio the strong perfume of her hair, of her cape, of her muff, of her small handkerchief.
Lirat resumed his work without saying a word; I was turning over the pages of a book which I was not reading at all, and upon the moving pages there was flitting incessantly back and forth the image of the young visitor. I certainly was not asking myself what kind of an impression I had retained of her, nor whether I had retained any impression at all; but although she went out, she was not gone entirely. There was left with me an indefinite something of this short-lived apparition, something like a haze which assumed her form in which I could make out the shape of her head, the turn of the back of her neck, the movement of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her waistline, and that something haunted me.... I still beheld her in that chair which she had just left, unfathomable and more charming than ever, with her tender and luminous smile which radiated from her and created a halo of love about her:
“ Who is that woman?” I suddenly asked, in a tone which I forced myself to render indifferent.
“What woman?” said Lirat.
“Why, the one that has just left.”
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“Ah! Yes... my God! A woman just like others.”
“JT should think so.... This does not tell me her name, however, nor who she is.”
Lirat was rummaging in his paint box. He an- swered carelessly:
“And so you want to know the name of that wom-
an.... Strange curiosity! ... Her name is Juliette Roux.... As for biographical information, the police can furnish you all you want, I imagine.... I pre-
sume that Juliette Roux gets up late, that she has her fortune told by cards, that she is deceiving and ruin- ing as well as she can that poor Charles Malterre, an excellent chap whom you met here sometime ago, and whose mistress she is, for the time being.... Lastly, she is like other women, only with this difference, which makes her case worse: she is more beautiful than most of them and consequently more foolish and more malicious. ... That sofa there, that you are sitting on ... it was Charles who broke it by lying and crying on it for entire days, while telling me his troubles, you understand? One day he caught her with a croupier of a gambling club, on another day with a buffoon at the Bouffes theatre.
“There was also an affair with the wrestler of Neuilly, to whom she gave twenty francs and Charles’ old trousers. As you see, it’s full of idylls.... I like Malterre very much. . . because he is good-natured and his lack of sense evokes my pity.... He really has my sympathy.... But what can one say to such men, to whom love is the greatest thing in life and who can’t see a woman’s back without tacking on to it wings of dreams and sending it flying to the stars... . Nothing, isn’t that true? ... So much so that the unfortunate fellow, in the midst of his rage and sobs, could brag about the fact that Juliette had received a good education. He used to take pride in the fact
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that she came from the womb of a physician’s wife and not from that of the wife of a janitor, and he would show me her letters, emphasizing the correct spelling and the elegant turn of phrases!... He seemed to say: ‘How I suffer, but how well written this is!’. . . What a pity!”
“Ah! You, too, love the woman!” I exclaimed, when he finished his tirade.
And foolishly, I added:
“They say you have suffered much.”
Lirat shrugged his shoulders and smiled:
“ You talk like Delauney, of the Comédie-Frangaise. No, no, my kind friend, I have not suffered; I have seen others suffer, and that was enough for me... do you understand?”
Suddenly his voice became shrill, an almost cruel light shone in his eyes. He resumed:
“Ordinary people, poor devils like Charles Mal- terre, when stepped upon, are crushed, they disappear in the blood, in the mire, in the atrocious filth stirred up by woman’s hands. .. that’s unfortunate of course. .. . Humanity, however, does not claim them back;
for nothing has been stolen from it.... But artists, men of our calibre with big hearts and big brains,— when these are lost, strangled, killed! ... You un- derstand?...”
His hand trembled, he crushed his crayon on the canvas.
“T have known three of them, three wonderful, di- vine ones; two died by hanging themselves; the third one, my teacher, is in a padded dark room at Bicétre! ... Of this pure genius there has been left only a lump of wan flesh, a sort of raving beast who grimaces and hurls himself at you with froth at his mouth!... And in this crowd of cast-offs, how many young hopes have perished in the grasp of the beast of prey! Count
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them up, all these lamentable, bewildered, maimed people; those who had wings and who are now crawl- ing on all fours; those who scrape the earth with their nails and feed on their own excrements! Why, you
yourself ...a minute ago looked at Juliette with ecs- tasy ... you were ready to do anything for a kiss from her.... Don’t deny it, 1 saw you.... Oh! well, let’s
go out; that’s enough, I can’t work any more.”
He arose and paced across the studio in agitation. Gesticulating and angry, he upset the chairs and paste- boards, ripped some of his sketches with a kick. I thought he was going mad. His bloodshot eyes rolled wildly ; he was pale, and the words were coming out of his drawn-up mouth in a violent jumble.
“For men to be born of woman... men!... How irrational! For men to be conceived in an impure womb!... For men to gorge themselves with wom-
an’s vices, with her imbecile, ferocious appetites, to have sucked the sap of life from her nefarious breasts! Mother!... Ah! yes, mother!... Divinized mother, eh? Mother who creates us, sick and wasted race that we are, who stifles the man in the child and hurls us nailless and toothless, stupid and tamed, upon the bedstead of a mistress and the nuptial bed!...”
Lirat stopped for a moment; he was choking. Then, bringing his hands together and knotting his crisp fingers in the air, as if gripping an imaginary neck, he shouted madly, terribly:
“This is what should be done with them, all of them, all of them!... Do you understand?...eh... tell me?... Allofthem!...”
And he began pacing back and forth again, swear- ing, stamping his feet. But the last shout of anger had evidently relieved him.
“Come now, my dear Lirat, calm yourself,” I said
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to him. ‘“ What’s the use of getting excited, and over what, I ask you? Come now, you are not a woman.”
“That’s true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette.... How does this Juliette concern you any- way?”
“Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person to whom you had introduced me?... And then, frankly, pending the invention of some other machine than woman for breeding chil- dren. 23.”
“ Pending that ... I ama brute,” interrupted Lirat, who again seated himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet voice asked:
“ Dear little Mintié, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won’t bore you, will it? For only ten minutes.”
Joseph Lirat was forty-two years old. I made his acquaintance casually one evening; I no longer re- member where it was, and though he had the reputa- tion of being a misanthrope, unsociable and spiteful, I instantly took a fancy to him. Is it not painful to think that our deepest friendships, which ought to be the result of a long process of selection, that the gravest events in our life which should be brought about by a logical chain of causes, are for the most part, the instant result of chance? ... You are at home in your study, tranquilly absorbed in a book. Outside the sky is grey, the air is cold: it is raining, the wind is blow- ing, the street is gloomy and dirty, therefore you have every good reason in the world not to stir from your
chair. ... Yet you go out, driven by weariness, by idleness, by something you yourself don’t know—by nothing, .. . and then at the end of a hundred steps,
you meet the man, the woman, the carriage, the stone, the orange peel, the mud puddle which upsets your whole existence from top to bottom.
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In the midst of the most sorrowful of my experi- ences I used to think of these things, and often I would say to myself—with what bitter regrets!—“If on the evening when I met Lirat, in the forgotten place where I certainly had nothing to do, I had but stayed at home and worked or dreamed or slept, I would have been today the happiest man on earth and there would have happened to me none of the things which did happen to me.” And that moment of trivial hesitancy, the moment when I was asking myself: “Shall I go out or shall I not?,” that moment embraced the most important act in my life; my whole destiny was de- termined in the brief space of time which in my memory left no more trace than a gust of wind, which blows down a house or uproots an oak tree, leaves upon the skies! I recall the most insignificant details of my life. For example, I remember the blue velvet suit, laced in front, which I wore on Sunday, when I was very little. I can swear, yes I can swear, that I could | count the grease spots on the habit of curé Blanche- tiére or even the number of tobacco grains he used to drop while snuffing up his pinch of snuff.
It seems a senseless and yet disquieting thing: very often when I cry, or look at the sea or even watch the sunset upon an enchanted field—I can still see by that odious freak of irony which is at the bottom of our ideals, our dreams and our sufferings—lI can still see upon the nose of an old guard we had, father Lejars, a big tumor, grumous and funny with its four hair filaments which proved an excellent attraction for flies. ... Whereas the moment which decided my life, which cost me my peace, my honor, and reduced me to the position of a scabby dog; this moment which I passionately wish to reconstruct, to bring back again to memory with the aid of physical reminders and mental associations—this moment I cannot recall.
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Thus it is that in the course of my life there happened a tremendous, a singular event, since all the subse- quent occurrences flow from it, and yet the recollec- tion of it escapes me entirely!... I remember neither the occasion, nor the place, nor the circumstances, nor the immediate cause of that event. ... What do I know then about myself? . . . What do people in gen- eral know about themselves, when they are hopelessly unable to trace the sources of their actions? Nothing, nothing, nothing! And must one explain the enigmas which our mental phenomena and the manifestation of our so-called will represent, by the promptings of this blind mysterious force, the fatality of human na- ture?... That is not speaking to the point, however.
I said that I had met Lirat one evening by accident, in a place I don’t remember and that instantly I took a fancy to him.... He was the most original of men. ... With his forbidding appearance, his machine-like and magisterial stiffness and his air of a petty official, he at first made the impression of a typical functionary, of some orleanist puppet such as are manufactured in the politicians’ clubs and drawing rooms for the punch and judy show of parliaments and academies. From a distance, he positively looked like one who is in the habit of distributing decorations, excize offices and prizes for valor! This impression, however, quickly disappeared ; for this it was sufficient to listen, if only for five minutes, to his conversation, lucid, colorful, bristling with original ideas, and above all to feel the power of his glance, his extraordinary glance, exhila- rated and cold at the same time, a glance to which all things seemed familiar, which went through you like a gimlet against your will.
I liked him very much, only in my liking for him there was lacking the element of tenderness, of kindli- ness; I liked him with a sort of fear and uneasiness,
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with a painful feeling that in his presence I did not amount to much and that I was eclipsed, so to speak, by the grandeur of his genius.... I liked him as one likes the sea, the tempest, as one likes some immense force of nature. Lirat inspired me with fear, his pres- ence paralyzed what little intellectual powers there were in me, for I was always afraid that I might say something foolish at which he would jeer. He was so severe, so relentless to everybody; he knew so well how to discover, to reveal the ridiculous side in artists, in writers whom I considered superior to myself, and to characterize them by some apt remark unforget- able and fierce, that in his presence I found myself in a state of constant mistrust, of ever present dis- quietude. I always asked myself: “‘ What does he think of me? What scornful thoughts do I inspire in him?”
I had that feminine curiosity which obsessed me to know what opinion he had of me. By means of dis- tant allusions, absurd affections or hypocritical cir- cumlocutions, I would sometimes try to surprise or provoke him into frankness, and I suffered even more when he deigned to pay me a curt compliment, as one who throws a few pennies to a pauper whom one wishes to be rid of; at least, that is what I imagined. In a word, I liked him very much, I assure you; I was very much devoted to him, but in this affection and in this devotion there was an element of uncertainty, which destroyed the charm of those feelings; there was also a certain grudge which rendered those feel- ings almost painful, a grudge caused by the sense of my inferiority. Never, not even when I was most inti- mate with him, was I able to conquer that feeling of base and timid pride, never could I enjoy a friendship which I prized very highly. Lirat, on the other hand, was simple in his relations with me, often affectionate, sometimes “fatherly ” in his attentions, and of all his
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friends, who were very few in number, I was the only one whose companionship he sought.
Like all those who hold tradition in contempt, like all who rebel against the prejudices of conventional education, against the idiotic formule of the School, Lirat was very much discussed; spoken of with con- tempt—JI should rather say. It must be stated also that his conception of free and lofty art conflicted with all the professed conventions and accepted ideas, and that by their forceful synthesis and prodigious know- ledge of life which obscured his craftsmanship, his works of art disconcerted the lovers of prettiness and grace and of the frigid correctness of academic unity. The return of modern painting to the great gothic art — this they could never forgive him.
He fashioned the man of today in his craving for enjoyment, a frightfully tortured soul with a body sapped by neurosis, with flesh tormented by lust, which quivers under the influence of passion that lures man on and sinks its claws into his skin. In his rep- resentations of the human body wrought in avenging postures, with monstrous apophyses guessed at under the garments, there was such human emphasis, such grief over infernal voluptuousness, such tragic power, that a shudder passed through one’s frame when look- ing at them. It was no longer curly headed, pomaded love, adorned with ribbons and fainting with yearning, rose in mouth, by the light of the moon, or strumming on a guitar under the balcony; it was Love besmirched with blood, drunk with the filth of vice, Love with its onanistic furies, wretched Love which fastens upon man its mouth like a cupping glass and drains his veins, sucks the marrow of his bones and emaciates his frame. And in order to give these representations a still greater intensity of horror, to weigh them down with the burden of even greater affliction, he cast them
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in the midst of peaceful, smiling surroundings of sur- passing clearness, among pink and blue landscapes with softened vistas, amidst glorious sunshine, with the radiant sea in the background. All around them nature was resplendent with all the magic of her deli- cate and changing colors.
When for the first time he consented to place his works on a free exhibit, together with a group of friends, the critics and the mob, which influences the critics, shouted with indignation. But the anger did not last very long — for there is a sort of nobility, or generosity in anger—and they merely contented them- selves with laughing. Then the humbug which is al- ways represented by mediocre opinion with its foul spittle, this humbug came to replace the menace ot raised fists. And viewing the superb artistry of Lirat, they were convulsed with laughter, holding their sides with both hands. Clever, merry-making people depos- ited pennies on the edge of the frames as one does for a Jack-in-the-box, and this was considered excellent sport —for it actually became a sport for people of the better sort, with purses.
In the magazines, in the studios, in the salons, in the clubs and the cafés the name of Lirat served as a term of comparison, as an indispensable standard whenever one wanted to designate something devoid of sense or some sort of obscenity; it even seemed as if women —and girls too—could not pronounce that reprobate name without blushing. The year-end re- views dragged it into their revolting lampoons, people sang it at the cabarets. Then from these “ centres of Parisian culture” it spread to the street — where one saw it blossom forth again into a vulgar bud, upon the sloppy lips of drivers, in the shriveled mouths of street boys, “It’s a go, eh! Lirat!” For a few years poor Lirat really enjoyed an uproarious popularity. . .
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But one gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much be- fore the statues of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.
Now there was only silence for Lirat’s portion. It was very seldom indeed that in some of the magazines there was again heard an echo of the past, in the form of some annoying anecdote. Besides, he decided not to exhibit any more, saying:
“Leave me alone in peace!.. Is painting done to _ be seen..tell me..painting..do you understand?... One works for himself, for two or three living friends and for others whom one has never known and who
are dead... Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoiewsky, Shake- speare. . . . Shakespeare! . . do you understand? ... And the rest?... The rest don’t amount to any- thing. ”
Having reduced his needs to a minimum, he lived on little with admirable and touching dignity. Pro- vided he earned enough with which to buy his brushes, paints, canyas, pay his models and his landlord, make a studying trip each year, he did not wish for more. Money did not tempt him at all, and I am sure that he never sought success. But if success had come to him, I am also sure that Lirat would not have resisted the joy, so human, of relishing factitious delights. Though he did not want to admit it, though he af- fected to defy injustice gayly, he felt it more keenly than anyone else, and at heart suffered from it cruelly. He suffered from the present neglect shown to him as much as he had suffered from the former insults. Only once did a young critic publish an enthusiastic and high-sounding article about him in a magazine.
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The article was well-meant but full of banalities and errors; one could see that its author was not suffi- ciently familiar with art and that he did not under- stand anything about the talent of the great artist.
“Have you read it?” Lirat shouted, “have you read it, eh, tell me?... What idiots these critics are! ... If they keep on talking about me, they will finally force me to paint in a cave, understand?... What do they take me for anyway—a vulgarizer?... And then what business is it of this fellow here—whether I make paintings, boots or slippers? ... That’s my private affair!”
Nevertheless he had put it away in a drawer as a thing of great value, and several times I surprised him reading it. It was very well for him to say with supreme detachment, when we were inveighing against the stupidity of the public: “ Well, what would you want them to do?... Do you expect the people to start a revolution because I paint my canvases plainly?” But in reality this contempt for notoriety, this apparent resignation concealed deep but secret sentiment. Deep in his very sensitive and very gen- erous soul there accumulated profound aversions, which were vented with terrible and malignant fer- vor on the whole world. If, on the one hand, his talent had gained in strength and ruggedness on ac- count of this, his. character, on the other hand, had lost something of its inherent nobility, and his critical spirit had been deprived of some of its penetrating quality and brilliance.
He ended by giving himself over entirely to decry- ing everybody and everything, the excess of which threatened to render him odious; at times it bore evidence of nothing but a childishness which made him ridiculous. Great souls nearly always have petty weaknesses — that is a mysterious law of nature, and
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Lirat did not escape the effects of this law. Above everything else, he held fast to his well-established reputation of an ill-natured man. He bore very well with the opinion which denied him talent, but what he could not tolerate was that they called in question the propriety of his insulting humanity with his sar- castic jibes.
To avenge the scouring words with which he characterized them, some of the enemies of Lirat attrib- uted to him unnatural vices; others simply called him an epileptic, and these coarse and cowardly calumnies, strengthened every day by ingenious comments, based on “certain” stories which made the rounds of the studios — these calumnies found ready listeners willing, some owing to his actual malice, others prompted solely by the intemperance of the painter’s tongue, to receive and spread them.
“You know Lirat?.... He had another attack yesterday, this time on the street.”
And names of important personages were mentioned who had assisted in the scene and who had seen him rolling in the mud, lying, with foam at his mouth.
I must confess that I myself at the beginning of our friendship was greatly troubled by these stories. I could not think of Lirat without at the same time pic- turing to myself horrible fits in which, I was told, he was writhing. Victim of a delusion born of an obses- sion with this idea, I seemed to discover in him symp- toms of horrible diseases; I often imagined that he suddenly became livid, that his mouth was distorted, that his body was convulsed in horrible spasms, that his eyes, wild and streaked with red, were shunning the light and seeking the shadow of deep vacuous space, like the eyes of trapped beasts that are about to die. And I regretted that I did not see him fall, shriek, writhe here in his studio filled with his genius,
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under my avid glance that watched him and hoped for the worst!... Poor Lirat!.. And still I loved him!...
The day was drawing to a close. All over Rodri- gues place one heard the slamming of doors; the noise of steps upon the street was rapidly dying away, and in the shops voices were heard rising in song at the end of the day’s work. Lirat had not uttered a word since resuming his work, except to fix my pos- ture, which I did not keep just the way he wanted.
“ The leg a little this way!... A little more now!
. Your chest not quite so drawn in!.... You'll excuse me, my dear Mintié, but you pose like a pig!”
He worked now feverishly, now haltingly, mum- bling in his mustache, swearing from time to time. His crayon snapped at the canvas with a sort of uneasy haste of angry nervousness.
“Ah, shucks!” he cried out, pushing away the easel with a kick.... I can do nothing but botch- work today!.... The devil take me, one might think I was competing for a prize.”
Moving back his chair he examined his sketch with a frigid air and muttered:
“Whenever women come here it’s the same old
story..... When they go away the women leave you the soul of a Boulanger in the pretty claws of a Henner.... Henner, do you understand?.. Let’s go out.”
When we were at the end of the street:
“Are you coming to dine with me, Lirat?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied in a dry tone, reaching out his hand.
And he walked away, stiff, formal, solemn, with the business air of a deputy who has just discussed the budget.
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That evening I did not go out and remained at home to muse in solitude. Stretched on a sofa, with half-closed eyes, and body made torpid by the heat, almost slumbering, I liked to go back to my past, to bring to life things dead and to recall memories which escaped me. Five years had passed since the war — the war in which I began my apprenticeship in life by entering the tormenting profession of a man-killer.... Five years already!... Still it seemed like yesterday ... the smoke, the fields covered with snow, stained with blood and ruins, these fields where, like ghosts, we wandered about piteously, worn out with fatigue.... Only five years!... And when I came back to the Priory, the house was empty, my father dead!... My letters had come to him only rarely, at long intervals and they had always been short, dry, written in haste on the back of my knapsack. Only once, after a night of terrible anguish had I become tender, affectionate; only once had I poured out my heart to him, and this letter which should have brought him sweetness, hope and consolation he had not received!... Every morn- ing, Marie told me, he used to come out to the gate an hour before the arrival of the mailman and watch the turn of the road, a prey to mortal fear. Old wood cutters would pass on their way to the woods; my father used to question them:
“Hey there, uncle Ribot, you have not seen the mailman, by any chance?”
“Why no, Monsieur Mintié — it’s a little early yet.”
“ Oh, no, uncle Ribot, he is rather late.”
“That might be, Monsieur Mintié, that might be.”
When he noticed the kepi and red collar of the mail- man he became pale, trembling with the fear of bad news. As the mailman approached, the heart of my father beat furiously, almost bursting.
“Nothing but magazines today, Monsieur Mintié.”
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“ How is that! ... No letters at all! You must be mistaken, my boy. Look. . . look again. .. .”
He made the mailman search in his letter bag, untie the bundles and go through them again....
“Nothing!... Why it’s impossible!
And he would return to the kitchen, seat himself in | the rocking chair heaving a sigh:
“ Just think of it,” he would say to Marie who gave him a bowl of milk, “just think of it, Marie, if his poor mother had been alive!”
During the day, when in town, he used to visit peo- ple who had sons in the army; the conversation was always the same.
“Well, have you heard from your boys.”
“Why, no, M’sieur Mintié. .How about you, have you heard anything from Jean?”
“T haven’t either.”
“That’s very strange. How is it possible?... Can you explain it? ...”
That they themselves did not get any letters only half surprised them, but that Mintié, the mayor, had not received any either, surprised them very much. Most unusual conjectures were made; they turned to the confusing statements of the papers, they ques- tioned old soldiers who told them their war experi- ences with the most extravagant and lavish details; at the end of a couple of hours, they would part with lighter hearts.
“ Don’t worry M’sieur Mayor. You’ll see him back a colonel, sure.’
“Colonel, colonel!” my father would say, shaking his head. “IT don’t ask that much... Just so he comes back! EP 4 :
One day—nobody knew how that happened—Saint- Michel found itself full of Prussian soldiers. The Priory was occupied. Long sabres were found in our
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old house. From this moment, my father became more ill than ever, he took fever and was confined to his bed, and in his delirium he repeated without end: “Put the horses to, Felix, put the horses to, for I want to go to Alengon to get some news of Jean!” He imagined himself starting out on the road. “ Gid up, gid up, Bichette, gid up, come on!... We are going to have some news of Jean this evening.... Gid up, gid up, come on!.. And my poor father gently breathed his last in the arms of the curé Blanchetiére, surrounded by Felix and Marie who were sobbing!... After a six months’ stay at the Priory, now sadder than ever, I was weary to death... Old Marie, accustomed to manage the house according to her own notions, was unbearable to me; in spite of her devotion, her whims exasperated me, and there always were long altercations in which I never had the last word. For my only company I had the good curé to whom nothing appealed as much as the pro- fession of a notary. From morning till night he used to lecture to me thus:
“Your grandfather was a notary, so was your father, your uncles, your cousins, in fact your whole family. ... You owe it to yourself, my dear child, not to desert your post. You shall be Mayor of Saint- Michel, you may even hope to replace your poor father at the general council, in a few years.... Why man alive, that’s something! And then—take my word for it—times are going to be pretty hard for decent people who love the good Lord.... You see that rascal Lebecq, he is municipal counsellor. All he thinks of is how to rob and kill people, that brigand there.... We need at the head of our country a right-minded man to uphold religion and defend the principles of righteousness.... Paris, Paris!... Oh! these silly heads, those youngsters!... But will you
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please tell me what good you have accomplished at Paris?... Why, the very air there is infected! Look at big Mange, he comes from a good family, but that did not prevent him from coming back from Paris with a red cap on. Isn’t that a pretty affair?”
And he would continue in this vein for hours, tak- ing his snuff, evoking the vision of the red cap of big Mange which appeared to him more abominable than the horns of the devil.
What was there to do at Saint-Michel? There was no one to whom I could communicate my thoughts, my dreams; there was no outlet for the ardor of life where I could expend that intellectual energy, that passion for knowledge and for creative work which the war, in developing my muscles, in strengthening my body, had awakened in me, and which omnivorous reading overstimulated in me more and more every day. I realized that Paris alone, which formerly had frightened me so much, that Paris alone could furnish nourishment for ambitions, as yet indefinite, which spurred me on, and with the estate settled, and the library sold I left suddenly, leaving the Priory to the care of Felix and Marie.... And here f am back in Paris!...
What have I accomplished during these five years, to use the words of the curé?... Carried away by vague ardors, by confused enthusiasm which blended together some sort of a chimeric ideal with a kind of impracticable apostleship, how far did I get?... I am no longer the timid child whom the footmen, in the vestibule flooded with light, used to put to flight. If I have not acquired much self-assurance, I at least know how to behave in society without appearing too ridiculous. I pass pretty much unnoticed, a condition which is the best that could be wished for a man of my
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calibre who possesses none of the graces and qualities which are necessary to shine there.
Very often I ask myself: what am I doing here in this society to which I do not belong, where they respect only success however fraudulently obtained, only money, no matter from what filthy place it comes; where every spoken word acts as a wound inflicted on everything I love best and everything I admire most? ... Besides, is not man with all his differences of education which are betrayed only in his gestures, in his manner of greeting, in his more or less graceful bearing, pretty much the same no matter where he is?... What! were these the high-spirited artists, the much admired writers whose glory is sung, whose genius is acclaimed... these petty, vulgar, frightfully pedantic beings, slavishly aping the man- ners of the society they rail at, ludicrously vain, fiercely jealous, lying prostrate before weaith, and kneeling in the dust, worshipping publicity — that old blackguard, which they carry about on velvet cush- ions. ... Oh, how much better I love the herdsmen and their oxen, the pig drivers and their pigs, yes the pigs, round and pink, digging the earth with their snouts and whose fat smooth backs reflect the clouds that float above!
I read excessively, without discrimination, without system, and from this faulty reading there was left in my mind nothing but a chaos of disjointed facts and incomplete ideas, from the tangle of which I did not know how to extricate myself.... I tried to acquire knowledge in every way, but I realized that I was just as ignorant today as I had been in the past.... I had had mistresses whom I loved for a week, sentimental and romantic blondes, fierce brunettes, impatient to be caressed, and love showed me only the frightful emptiness of the human heart, the deceptiveness of
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affection, the lie of the ideal, the nothingness of pleasure....
Believing myself converted to the formule of de- scriptive art by means of which I was going to harness my ambition and fix my shifting and thrilling dreams upon the pinion of words, I had published a book which was praised and which proved to be “a best seller.” Of course, I was flattered by this little suc- cess; I, too, spoke of myself with pride as of a rare talent; I, too, gave myself superior airs in order to deceive others all the better. And wishing to deceive myself as well, I often looked upon myself in the mirror with the complacency of a comedian, in order that I might discover certain marks of genius in my eyes, on my forehead, in the majestic bearing of my head.
Alas! Success rendered yet more painful the inner knowledge of my impotence. My book did not amount to much; its style was forced, its conception infantile: a passionate harangue, an absurd phraseology took the place of ideas in it. At times I would read over the passages praised by the. critics, and in those passages discover something of everybody: Herbert Spencer and Scribe, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Com- merson, Victor Hugo, Poe and Eugene Chavette. Of my own contribution, I, whose name was displayed on the title page, on the yellow cover of the volume, found nothing. Following the caprices of my memo- ries, aroused by the intermittent light of my recollec- tions, I expressed the thoughts of one and used the style of another; none of the ideas or style belonged to me. And important looking persons whose tastes are infallible and whose judgment is law praised my personality, my originality, the unexpected nature and subtleness of my impressions!...
How sad it was!... Whither was I going? I knew
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no more about it today than I did yesterday. I had the conviction that I could not be a writer, because all the effort of which I was capable had been spent in writing that miserable and incoherent book. Had I had a more humble and compromising ambition, were I only prompted by desires less noble, by those which never cause remorse — such as love of money,
official titles, dissoluteness!... But, no! Only one thing which I could never attain lured me, and that was talent... To be able to say to myself, yes... to
say to myself: “This book, this sonnet, this phrase is yours, you wrung it from your brains swollen with passion; it is your thought that quivers here; it is pieces of your flesh and drops of your blood, that it scatters over the sorrowful pages; it is your nerves that vibrate in it like the strings of a violin under the bow of a divine musician. What you have accom- plished here is beautiful and grand!” For this moment of supreme joy I would be willing to sacrifice my future, my wealth, my life; I would be willing even to kill!...
And never, never will I be able to say that to my- self!... Ah how I envied the eternal self-content- ment of the mediocre!... Now I again felt a passion- ate desire to return to Saint-Michel. I wished I could drive the plough in the brown furrow, roll in the fields of yellow clover, smell the wholesome odor of the stables, and, above all, lose myself in the thick of the coppice wood, penetrating into it farther and farther. ...
The light went out and my lamp was smoking. A cold like a gentle caress filled my legs and sent a current of pleasurable chills through my back. Out- side not a sound was heard; the street grew silent. It had been long since I heard the dull trundle of the omnibus rolling on the causeway. The clock struck
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six. But a sort of laziness kept me glued to my sofa: while thus stretched out I felt a physical pleasure amidst a great mental depression. I had to make a strenuous effort to free myself from this languor and to go into my bedroom. I found it impossible to fall asleep. No sooner did I close my eyes than it seemed to me that I had been thrown into a black and very deep pit, and suddenly I awoke, panting and perspir- ing. I again lit my lamp, tried to read.... I could not concentrate my mind on the lines of the text which seemed to swerve, to cross one another, to abandon themselves to a fantastic dance under my very eyes. What a stupid life mine is!... Why am I so dif- ferent, preyed upon by obnoxious chimeras? Who has poured into my soul this deadly poison of weari- ness and discouragement? Before others there stretches a vast horizon illumined by the sun! But I am walk- ing in the darkness, stopped on every side by walls which obstruct my way and against which I vainly beat my head and knees... . Perhaps it is because they possess love! Love, ah yes! If I could only love! And again I saw the beautiful virgin of Saint-Mi- chel, the radiant virgin of plaster of paris with its robe adorned with stars and its golden nimbus de- scending from heaven. All around her suns were re- volving, inclining themselves like celestial flowers, and doves in the exaltation of prayers were flying about, brushing her with their wings.... I recalled the ecstasies, the fits of mystic adoration which she evoked in me; all the sweet joys which I had experienced came back to me at the mere contemplation of her. Did she not also speak to me, then, at the chapel? And those unuttered words which poured into my childish soul such ineffable tenderness, this language more harmonious than angels’ voices and the music of golden harps, this language more fragrant than the
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perfume of roses,— was it not the divine language of love?
As I listened with all my senses to this language which was music to me, I was lifted into a world un- known and wondrous; a new enchanted life sprouted, burst into bud and flourished all around me. The horizon receded into mysterious infinity: space shone bright like the interior of the sun, and I felt myself growing so tall and strong that in one embrace I was pressing to my breast all the beings, all the flowers, all the swarms of creatures born of the glance of love exchanged between the Holy Virgin of plaster and a little child.
“Holy Virgin, kindly Virgin!” I cried. “ Speak to me, speak to me again,— as you used to in the past, in the chapel.... And give me love once more, for love is life and I am dying because I am no longer able to love.”
But the Virgin was not listening to me any longer. She glided into the chamber and curtsying, mounted the chairs, pried into the furniture pieces, singing strange airs all the time. A drawn bonnet of otter skin now replaced her nimbus of gold, her eyes became like those of Juliette Roux, very large, very sweet, which smiled at me from a plaster face under a veil of very fine gauze. From time to time she approached my bed, waving above me her embroidered handker- chief which exhaled a violent perfume.
“ Monsieur Mintié,” she said, “I am at home every day from five to seven. And I shall be delighted to see you, delighted!”
“Virgin, kindly Virgin!” I implored again. “ Speak to me, please. Speak to me as you did formerly in the chapel.”
“Tu, tu, tu, tu!” hummed the Virgin who, causing her lilac robe to swell out and removing her cloak,
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adorned with golden stars with the tips of her long, thin fingers, began to turn around slowly as if dancing a waltz, her head swaying from one side to the other.
“Good Virgin!” I repeated in a rather irritated voice, “ why don’t you speak to me!”
She stopped, posted herself in front of me, stripped off her plaster garments one after another, and entirely nude, lustful and magnificent, her bosom shook with clear, sonorous, precipitous laughter:
“ Monsieur Mintié,” she said, “I am at home every day from five to seven. And I’ll give you Charles’ old trousers.” And she threw her otter skin bonnet at me.
I sat up on my bed.... With a stupid gaze and breathing with difficulty, I looked about me. But the room was quiet, the lamp continued to burn sadly and my open book was lying on the carpet.
The next morning I got up late, having slept badly, pursued by the thought of Juliette in my sleep dis- turbed by nightmares. During the remainder of that troubled, feverish night she did not leave me for an instant, assuming the most extravagant forms, abandoning herself to the most wretched pranks, and lo! I again beheld her in the morning, and this time she was the same as when I met her before at Lirat’s, with her air of modesty, her discreet and charming manners.
I felt a kind of sadness — not exactly sadness, but regret, the regret one feels at the sight of a rose-bush whose roses have wilted and whose petals are scat- tered over the muddy ground. For I could not think of Juliette without thinking at the same time of Lirat’s malignant words: “ There was also an affair with a wrestler of Neuilly whom she gave twenty francs.” What a pity! ... When she entered the studio I could swear that she was the most virtuous of women.... Her very manner of walking, greeting,
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smiling, seating herself bespoke good breeding, a peaceful, happy life without hasty acts of indiscretion, without degrading remorse. Her hat, her cloak, her dress, her whole appearance) was of a refined and charming elegance, meant for the enjoyment of just one, for the cheerfulness of a secluded house, closed to the seekers of unclean spoils.... And her eyes, radiating a perfectly legitimate tenderness, her eyes from which shone such candor, so much sincerity, which seemed to have no knowledge of lies, her eyes more beautiful than the lakes haunted by the moon!...
“Is Charles all right?” Lirat had asked.
Charles? ... Her husband, to be sure! ... And naively I pictured to myself a respectable interior of a room, with jolly children playing on the carpet, a family lamp, grouping kind and simple beings around its gentle shimmer; a chaste bed, protected by a cru- cifix and a hallowed branch of boxtree!... Then sud- denly, crashing into this peace, the bullhead from the Bouffes, the croupier of the gambling club, and Charles Malterre who broke Lirat’s lounge by rolling on it, while crying in rage! ... I conjured the image of the comedian —a pallid face, wrinkled, glabrous, with impudent bloodshot eyes, with sensual lips, wearing an open collar, a pink cravat, a low- plaited short jacket!
I was unnerved and irritated.... What did it matter to me, after all? Did the life of this woman concern me, was it related to me in any way?... Was it my business to interest myself in the fate of women whom chance threw in my path? ... I don’t care what she is, this Mlle. Juliette Roux! ... She is neither my sister nor my fiancée, nor my friend; there is not a single bond of kinship between us. ... If I had seen her yesterday walking on the street, like one of the thousands of persons whom one brushes against
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every day and who pass on and vanish, she would have already been drawn into the vortex of oblivion and never again would I be likely to see her.
“Maybe Lirat is mistaken?” I repeated, while breakfasting. I knew his exaggerations, his passion for ridicule, his horror of and contempt for woman. What he said of Juliette he was saying of all other women. Who knows,— perhaps this comedian, this croupier, all the details of this ignominious affair in the exposure of which his spiteful spirit found grati- fication, existed only in his imagination? And Charles Malterre?
Undoubtedly I should have preferred to see her married. I should have been pleased to see her lean- ing openly on the arm of a man, respected, envied by the most honest! But she loved this Malterre, she lived decently with him, she was devoted to him: “ Charles will be sorry to learn of your refusal.” The almost entreating voice in which she said those words was still in my ears. This means that she was mind- ful of the things that might or might not please Mal- terre.
And at the thought that Lirat, in making improper use of a false situation, was calumniating her in an odious manner, my heart grew heavy, a feeling of great pity swept over me and I caught myself saying aloud: “Poor girl!” Still this Malterre had been writhing on the lounge, he had cried, he had laid bare his heart to Lirat, had shown him her letters. Well, what of it? What have I to do with this woman? Let her have all the singers, all the croupiers, all the wrestlers she wants! To hell with her! And I went out humming a gay air, with the free bearing of a gentleman whose spirit is not in the least troubled by anything. And why should it be, I ask you?...
I went down the boulevards, stopping in front of
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the booths, strolling in spite of the sun, which was like a niggardly and pallid smile of December still permeated with fog; the air was cold and piercing. On the sidewalk women were passing, shivering with cold, wrapped in long cloaks of otter skin, some of them dressed in small drawn bonnets of fur like Juli- ette’s, and every time these cloaks and bonnets at- tracted my attention I observed them with genuine pleasure. I liked to follow them with my glance until they were lost in the crowd. At the corner of the Rue Taitbout, I remember, I came upon a tall slender woman, pretty and resembling Juliette so closely that I brought my hand to my hat ready to greet her. I was excited —oh, it was not the violent beating of the heart which halts your breathing, weakens the flow of blood in your veins and stuns you; it was a light touch, a caress, something very sweet, which brings a smile upon the lips and a cheerful surprise to the eyes.
But this woman was not Juliette. I felt somewhat peeved and avenged myself by thinking her very ugly. Two o’clock already! ... Shall I go to see Lirat? Why? To make him talk about Juliette, to compel him to admit that he had lied to me, to make him tell me of her traits of character, sublime and poignant, tell me some touching stories of her devotion, sacrifice — that tempted me. I thought the matter over, how- ever, knowing that Lirat would be angry, that he would mock at me, at her, and I had a horror of his sarcasms; I already heard sinister words, abominable phrases coming out of a twisted corner of his mouth with a hissing sound.
At the Champs-Elysées, I called a hackney-coach and proceeded toward the Bois. Why dissemble? There I hoped to meet Juliette. Yes, certainly I hoped it, but at the same time I feared it. Not to see
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her at all, I felt, would prove a disappointment to me. On the other hand, were she in the habit of exhibiting herself in this market place of gallantry regularly like the other ladies, I should again feel hurt, and in the end I did not know what it was that stirred me more: the hope of seeing her or the fear of meeting her.
There were few people in the Bois. On the grand lake drive, carriages were passing slowly at a consid- erable distance from one another, the drivers perched high upon their seats. Sometimes a brougham would leave the strung-out line, turn and disappear to the trot of its horses, carrying away God knows where the profile of a woman, or some white and pallid faces, or the end of a ruffled dress seen for a moment through the window of the coach door. ... My heart and the blood in my temples were beating faster, impatience caused the tips of my fingers to twitch; my neck was tired from turning in the same direction in an effort to penetrate the shadow of the carriages and began to hurt; anxiously I was chewing the end of a cigar which I could not make up my mind to light, for fear of missing her carriage in the act. Once I thought I saw her inside a brougham, which was going in the opposite direction.
“Turn, turn,” I shouted to the driver, “and follow that brougham.”
I did not at all reflect whether or not I was acting properly towards a woman to whom I had been intro- duced only the day before, and casually at that, one whose reputation I wanted to see rehabilitated at all costs. Half leaning against the lowered window of the coach door, I never lost sight of the brougham. And I was saying to myself: “ Perhaps she recognized me! Perhaps she is going to stop, get out of the car- riage, appear in the street.” Indeed, I was saying this to myself without the slightest notion of attempting
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a gallant conquest. I was saying that as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. The brougham rolled on speedily, lightly, bounding on its springs, and my hackney coach followed it with diffi- culty.
“ Faster!” I gave the order, “faster, and get ahead of it!”
The driver lashed his horse, which started into a gallop, and in a few seconds the wheels of the two car- riages touched each other. Then a woman’s head, with dishevelled hair under a very large hat, with a nose comically turned up, with lips cracked from the excessive use of paint and crimson like a living flesh wound, appeared in the frame of the coach door. With a scornful glance, she took in the driver, the cab, the horse and myself, put out her tongue and then with- drew into a corner of her carriage. It was not Juli- ette! I did not come home until night, very much disappointed and yet delighted with my useless drive!
I had no plans for the evening. Still I spent more than the usual time in dressing myself. I did it with the greatest care, and, for the first time, the knot of my cravat seemed to me a matter of great importance, and I was very much absorbed in the process of tying it carefully. This unexpected discovery brought in its train others equally important. For example, I no- ticed that my shirt was ill cut, that the shirt front wrinkled disgracefully at the opening of the vest; that my dress coat looked very old and curiously out of style. In a word, I thought I looked very ridiculous and promised myself to change all that in the future. Without making elegant appearance an exacting and tyrannical law of my life, it was quite permissible, I thought, to look like the rest of the people. Simply because one dressed well, one was not necessarily a fool.
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These preoccupations consumed my time till the dinner hour. Usually I ate at home, but this evening my apartment appeared to me so small, so dismal; it suffocated me, and I felt the need of space, of noise, of merriment.
At the restaurant I took an interest in everything: the coming and going of people, the gilding on the ceiling, the large mirrors which multiplied to infinity the parlors, waiters, electric globes, the flowers on ladies hats, the counters on which were spread dressed meats of all kinds, where pyramids of fruit, red and gold colored, rose amid salads and sparkling glass- ware. I watched the women above all, I studied their somewhat airy manner of eating, the joy in their eyes, the movement of their ungloved arms encircled by heavy bracelets of glittering gold, the exposed lines of their necks so delicate and tender, which gradually receded into the bosom, under the roseate lace nap- kin. This fascinated me, it affected me like something altogether new, like a landscape of some distant coun- try suddenly glimpsed. I was wonder-struck, like a boy.
Ordinarily, impelled by the brooding disposition of my nature, I would fasten my attention on the inti- mate moral life of a human being, that is to say, I would point out its ugliness or suffering; at this mo- ment, on the contrary, I abandoned myself to the joy of solely perceiving its physical charm: I was de- lighted to observe the magic spell cast by the women; even in the ugliest one I found some little detail such as a curve in the back of a neck, a languor in eyes, a suppleness of hands — always something or other — which made me happy, and I reproached myself for having until now arranged my life so badly, for having isolated myself like a barbarian in a dark melancholy chamber, for not having lived, while all this time Paris
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was offering me, at every step, joys so easily attained and so sweet to relish.
. “Ts Monsieur perhaps waiting for someone?” the waiter asked me.
Some one? Why no, I was not waiting for anyone. The door of the restaurant opened and I quickly turned around. Then I understood why the waiter had asked that question. Each time the door opened I would hastily turn around as I did just now and would stare anxiously at the people entering as if I knew that someone was about to enter, someone I was waiting for.... Some one! Well, for whom could I be waiting?
I very seldom went to the theatre; to force me there, a special occasion or obligation or inducement was required. I quite believe that of my own accord I would never think of going there. I even affected a supreme contempt for the kind of literary stuff offered for sale in these pushcart markets of mediocrity. Con- ceiving, as I did, the theatre as a place not of idle distraction but of serious art, it was repugnant to me to see human passion warbling one and the same sen- timental tune amidst the mechanism of always ident- ical scenes, to see gaiety, bedecked with tinsel, tum- bling into the same pit of tomfoolery. A manufac- turer of such plays, be they ever so applauded, seemed to me an artist gone astray; he bore the same relation to the poet that an unfrocked clergyman bears to a priest, or a deserter does to a soldier!
And I always remembered Lirat’s remark, so pow- erfully concise, so profoundly discerning. We had been attending the funeral of the painter M The celebrated dramatist D was the chief mourner. At the cemetery he delivered an address. This did not surprise anyone, for did not H and D enjoy a reputation of equal greatness? At
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the end of the ceremony Lirat took my arm and we walked back to Paris very sad. Lirat, who seemed lost in painful meditation, was silent. Suddenly he stopped, crossed his arms and, swaying his head with an irresistibly comical air because it was intended to be grave, exclaimed: “But why did that fellow D interfere, tell me?” And he was right. Why did he interfere, really? Did they come from the same stock and were they headed for the same glory — the one an ardent artist with grandiose thoughts and immortal works, and the other, whose sole ideal was to entertain with silly nonsense an assembly of wealthy and reputable bourgeois each evening. Yes, really, why did he interfere?
How removed I was from such morose sentiments when, after dinner, having sauntered along the boule- vards, enjoying the feeling of physical well-béing which gave to my movement a special lightness and elasticity, I seated myself in a chair at the Varieté, where a successful musical comedy was being played! With my face deliciously freshened by the cold air outside, my heart entirely won over to a sort of uni- versal forebearance, I was really enjoying myself. With what? I did not know and little cared to know, not being in the mood for psychological self-analysis.
As was proper, I arrived during the intermission, when the crowd, very elegant in appearance, was fill- ing the lobbies. After having left my overcoat at the check room, I passed through the parterre boxes with that same sweet impatience, that same delicious an- guish, which I had already experienced at the Bois; on reaching the first balcony I continued the same careful inspection of the loges. “ Why is she not here?” I asked myself. Each time I failed to dis- tinguish clearly a woman’s face, whether it was be- cause the face was slightly bent, in shadow, or cut
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off from view by a fan, I would say to myself: “ That’s Juliette!” And each time it was not Juliette at all. The play amused me; I laughed heartily at the flat jokes which constituted the essence of the piece: I enjoyed all this perverse ineptitude, this vulgar coarse- ness and really found in it a quality of irony which did not lack literary merit. At the love scenes I grew sentimental. During the last intermission I met a young man whom I scarcely knew. Glad of the op- portunity to pour out the banalities which had accu- mulated in me and were pressing for an outlet, I clung to him.
“An amazing thing, isn’t it?” he said to me. “It is stunning, eh?”
“Yes, it isn’t bad!”
“Not bad! Not bad! ... Why that is a master- piece, an astounding masterpiece! What I especially like is the second act. There is a situation for you, not that . . . a tense situation! Why it is high com- edy, you know! And the gowns! And that Judic, ah! that Judic! ...”
He struck his thigh and clicked his tongue:
“Tt got me all excited, my dear! It’s astonishing!”
We thus discussed the merits of the various acts, scenes and actors.
When we were parting:
“Tell me,” I asked him, “do you happen to know a certain Juliette Roux?”
“Wait now! Oh, perfectly well! A little brunette, very ‘chic’? No, I got mixed up. Wait now! Juli- ette Roux! Don’t know her.”
An hour later I was seated at a table with a glass of soda water in front of me, in the café de la Paix where, after the theatre, used to assemble the most beautiful representatives of the fashionable world. A great many women came in and out, insolent, loud-mouthed, their
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faces covered with fresh layers of rice powder, their lips newly painted with rouge! At the adjoining table a little blond lady, already aged but very animated, was speaking in a nasal voice; a brunette, farther away, was simpering with a turkey’s ludicrous ma- jesty, and with the same hand which had raked man- ure on the farm she held a fan, while her escort, lean- ing against his chair, his hat pushed back, his legs spread apart, was obdurately sucking his cane’s head.
An uncontrollable feeling of disgust rose within me; I was ashamed of being here, and I compared the ridiculous and noisy manners of these women with the reserved deportment of the gentle Juliette at Li- rat’s studio. These raucous and piercing voices ren- dered even more suave the freshness of her voice, the voice which I still heard saying to me: “ Delighted, Monsieur! But I know you well.” I arose.
“ What a scoundrel this Lirat is, all the same,” I exclaimed while getting into bed, furious at the fact that he had so treated a young woman whom I had met neither on the street, at the Bois, in the restaurant, at the theatre, nor at the night cabaret.
CHAPTER IV
" ADAME JULIETTE ROUX, if you please?” “Will Monsieur please come in?” the
maid asked.
Without demanding my name or waiting for my answer, she made me cross a small, dark antechamber, and led me into a room where at first I could only distinguish a lamp covered by a large lamp-shade, which burned low in a corner. The maid raised the flame of the lamp and carried out an otter skin cape which had been thrown on the sofa.
“T will go tell madame,” she said.
And she disappeared, leaving me alone in the room.
So I was at her house! For eight days the thought of this visit had tortured me. I had no special busi- ness, I simply wanted to see Juliette; some kind of keen curiosity, which I did not stop to analyze, drew me to her. Several times I had gone to the Rue Saint Petersbourg with the firm intention of calling on her, but at the last moment my nerve failed me, and I left without mustering sufficient courage to cross her threshold. And now I was the most embarrassed be- ing