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THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN

THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN

THE WICKER
WORK WOMAN

A CHRONICLE OF OUR OWN TIMES

BY ANATOLE FRANCE

A TRANSLATION BY
M. P. WILLCOCKS

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMX

WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN

THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN

I

In his study M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, was preparing his lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid to the shrill mechanical accompaniment of the piano, on which, close by, his daughters were practising a difficult exercise. M. Bergeret’s room possessed only one window, but this was a large one, and filled up one whole side. It admitted, however, more draught than light, for the sashes were ill-fitting and the panes darkened by a high contiguous wall. M. Bergeret’s table, pushed close against this window, caught the dismal rays of niggard daylight that filtered through. As a matter of fact this study, where the professor polished and repolished his fine, scholarly phrases, was nothing more than a shapeless cranny, or rather a double recess, behind the framework of the main staircase which, spreading out most inconsiderately in a great curve towards the window, left only room on either side for two useless, churlish corners. Trammelled by this monstrous, green-papered paunch of masonry, M. Bergeret had with difficulty discovered in his cantankerous study—a geometrical abortion as well as an æsthetic abomination—a scanty flat surface where he could stack his books along the deal shelves, upon which yellow rows of Teubner classics were plunged in never-lifted gloom. M. Bergeret himself used to sit squeezed close up against the window, writing in a cold, chilly style that owed much to the bleakness of the atmosphere in which he worked. Whenever he found his papers neither torn nor topsy-turvy and his pens not gaping cross-nibbed, he considered himself a lucky man! For such was the usual result of a visit to the study from Madame Bergeret or her daughters, where they came to write up the laundry list or the household accounts. Here, too, stood the dressmaker’s dummy, on which Madame Bergeret used to drape the skirts she cut out at home. There, bolt upright, over against the learned editions of Catullus and Petronius, stood, like a symbol of the wedded state, this wicker-work woman.

M. Bergeret was preparing his lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid, and he ought to have been devoting himself exclusively to the fascinating details of metre and language. In this task he would have found, if not joy, at any rate mental peace and the priceless balm of spiritual tranquillity. Instead, he had turned his thoughts in another direction: he was musing on the soul, the genius, the outward features of that classic world whose books he spent his life in studying. He had given himself up to the longing to behold with his own eyes those golden shores, that azure sea, those rose-hued mountains, those lovely meadows through which the poet leads his heroes. He was bemoaning himself bitterly that it had never been his lot to visit the shores where once Troy stood, to gaze on the landscape of Virgil, to breathe the air of Italy, of Greece and holy Asia, as Gaston Boissier and Gaston Deschamps had done. The melancholy aspect of his study overwhelmed him and great waves of misery submerged his mind. His sadness was, of course, the fruit of his own folly, for all our real sorrows come from within and are self-caused. We mistakenly believe that they come from outside, but we create them within ourselves from our own personality.

So sat M. Bergeret beneath the huge plaster cylinder, manufacturing his own sadness and weariness as he reflected on his narrow, cramped, and dismal life: his wife was a vulgar creature, who had by now lost all her good looks; his daughters, even, had no love for him, and finally the battles of Æneas and Turnus were dull and boring. At last he was aroused from this melancholy train of thought by the arrival of his pupil, M. Roux, who made his appearance in red trousers and a blue coat, for he was still going through his year of military service.

“Ha!” said M. Bergeret, “so I see they’ve turned my best Latin scholar into a hero.”

And when M. Roux denied the heroic impeachment, the professor persisted: “I know what I’m talking about. I call a man who wears a sabre a hero, and I’m quite right in so doing. And if you only wore a busby, I should call you a great hero. The least one can decently do is to bestow a little flattery on the people one sends out to get shot. One couldn’t possibly pay them for their services at a cheaper rate. But may you never be immortalised by any act of heroism, and may you only earn the praises of mankind by your attainments in Latin verse! It is my patriotism, and nothing else, that moves me to this sincere wish. For I am persuaded by the study of history that heroism is mainly to be found among the routed and vanquished. Even the Romans, a people by no means so eager for war as is commonly supposed, a people, too, who were often beaten, even the Romans only produced a Decius in a moment of defeat. At Marathon, too, the heroism of Kynegeirus was shown precisely at the moment of disaster for the Athenians, who, if they did succeed in arresting the march of the barbarian army, could not prevent them from embarking with all the Persian cavalry which had just been recuperating on the plains. Besides, it is not at all clear that the Persians made any special effort in this battle.”

M. Roux deposited his sabre in a corner of the study and sat down in a chair offered him by the professor.

“It is now four months,” said he, “since I have heard a single intelligent word. During these four months I have been concentrating all the powers of my mind on the task of conciliating my corporal and my sergeant-major by carefully calculated tips. So far, that is the only side of the art of warfare that I can really say I have mastered. It is, however, the most important side. Yet I have in the process lost all power of grasping a general idea or of following a subtle thought. And here you are, my dear sir, telling me that the Greeks were conquered at Marathon and that the Romans were not warlike. My head whirls.”

M. Bergeret calmly replied:

“I merely said that Miltiades did not succeed in breaking through the forces of the barbarians. As for the Romans, they were not essentially a military people, since they made profitable and lasting conquests, in contradistinction to the true military nations, such as the French, for instance, who seize all, but retain nothing.

“It is also to be noted that in Rome, in the time of the kings, aliens were not allowed to serve as soldiers. But in the reign of the good king Servius Tullius the citizens, being by no means anxious to reserve to themselves alone the honour of fatigue and perils, admitted aliens resident in the city to military service. There are such things as heroes, but there are no nations of heroes, nor are there armies of heroes. Soldiers have never marched save under penalty of death. Military service was hateful even to those Latin herdsmen who gained for Rome the sovereignty of the world and the glorious name of goddess among the nations. The wearing of the soldier’s belt was to them such a hardship that the very name of this belt, ærumna, eventually expressed for them the ideas of dejection, weariness of body and mind, wretchedness, misfortune and disaster. When well led they made, not heroes, but good soldiers and good navvies; little by little they conquered the world and covered it with roads and highways. The Romans never sought glory: they had no imagination. They only waged absolutely necessary wars in defence of their own interests. Their triumph was the triumph of patience and good sense.

“The make of a man is shown by his ruling passion. With soldiers, as with all crowds, the ruling passion, the predominant thought, is fear. They go to meet the enemy as the foe from whom the least danger is to be feared. Troops in line are so drawn up on both sides that flight is impossible. In that lies all the art of battle. The armies of the Republic were victorious because the discipline of the olden times was maintained in them with the utmost severity, while it was relaxed in the camp of the Allied Armies. Our generals of the second year after the Revolution were none other than sergeants like that la Ramée who used to have half a dozen conscripts shot every day in order to encourage the others, as Voltaire put it, and to arouse them with the trumpet-note of patriotism.”

“That’s very plausible,” said M. Roux. “But there is another point. There is such a thing as the innate joy of firing a musket-shot. As you know, my dear sir, I am by no means a destructive animal. I have no taste for military life. I have even very advanced humanitarian ideas, and I believe that the brotherhood of the nations will be brought about by the triumph of socialism. In a word, I am filled with the love of humanity. But as soon as they put a musket in my hand I want to fire at everyone. It’s in the blood....”

M. Roux was a fine hearty fellow who had quickly shaken down in his regiment. Violent exercise suited his robust temperament, and being in addition very adaptable, although he had acquired no special taste for the profession, he found life in barracks quite bearable, and so remained both healthy and happy.

“You have left the power of suggestion out of your calculations, sir,” said he. “Only give a man a bayonet at the end of a musket and he will instantly be ready to plunge it into the body of the first comer and so make himself a hero, as you call it.”

The rich southern tones of M. Roux were still echoing through the room when Madame Bergeret came in. As a rule she seldom entered the study when her husband was there. To-day M. Bergeret noticed that she wore her fine pink and white peignoir.

Expressing great surprise at finding M. Roux in the study, she explained that she had just come in to ask her husband for a volume of poems with which she might while away an hour or two.

She was suddenly a charming, good-tempered woman: the professor noticed the fact, as a fact, though he felt no special interest in it.

Removing Freund’s Dictionary from an old leather arm-chair, M. Roux cleared a seat for Madame Bergeret, while her husband’s thoughts strayed, first to the quartos stacked against the wall and then to his wife who had taken their place in the arm-chair. These two masses of matter, the dictionary and the lady, thought he, were once but gases floating in the primitive nebulosity. Though now they are strangely different from one another in look, in nature and in function, they were once for long ages exactly similar.

“For,” thought he to himself, “Madame Bergeret once swam in the vasty abyss of the ages, shapeless, unconscious, scattered in light gleams of oxygen and carbon. At the same time, the molecules that were one day to make up this Latin dictionary were whirling in this same vapour, which was destined at last to give birth to monstrous forms, to minute insects and to a slender thread of thought. These imperfect and often harassing creations, these monuments of my weary life, my wife and my dictionary, needed the travail of eternity to produce them. Yet Amélie is just a paltry mind in a coarsened body, and my dictionary is full of mistakes. We can see from this example alone that there is very little hope that even new æons of time would ever give us perfect knowledge and beauty. As it is, we live but for a moment, yet by living for ever we should gain nothing. The faults we see in nature, and how faulty she is we know, are produced neither by time nor space!”

And in the restless perturbation of his thoughts M. Bergeret continued:

“But what is time itself, save just the movements of nature, and how can I judge whether these are long or short? Granted that nature is cruel in her cast-iron laws, how comes it that I recognise the fact? And how do I manage to place myself outside her, so that I can weigh her deeds in my scales? Had I but another standpoint in it, perchance the universe might even seem to me a happier place.”

M. Bergeret hereupon suddenly emerged from his day-dream, and leant forward to push the tottering pile of quartos close against the wall.

“You are somewhat sunburnt, Monsieur Roux,” said Madame Bergeret, “and rather thinner, I fancy. But it suits you well enough.”

“The first few months are trying,” answered M. Roux. “Drill, of course, in the barrack-yard at six o’clock in the morning and with eight degrees of frost is rather a painful process, and just at first one finds it difficult to look on the mess as appetising. But weariness is, after all, a great blessing, stupefaction a priceless remedy and the stupor in which one lives is as soporific as a feather-bed. And because at night one only sleeps in snatches, by day one is never wide awake. And this state of automatic lethargy in which we all live is admirably conducive to discipline, it suits the tone of military life and produces physical and moral efficiency in the ranks.”

In short, M. Roux had nothing to complain of, but one of his friends, a certain Deval, a student of Malay at the school of Oriental languages, was plunged in the depths of misery and despair. Deval, an intelligent, well-educated, intrepid man, was cursed with a sort of rigidity of mind and body that made him tactless and awkward. In addition to this he was harassed by a painfully exact sense of justice which gave him peculiar views of his rights and duties. This unfortunate turn of mind landed him in all sorts of troubles, and he had not been more than twenty-four hours in barracks before Sergeant Lebrec demanded, in terms which must needs be softened for Madame Bergeret’s sake, what ill-conducted being had given birth to such a clumsy cub as Number Five. It took Deval a long time to make sure that he, and none other, was actually Number Five. He had, in fact, to be put under arrest before he was convinced on the subject. Even then he could not see why the honour of Madame Deval, his mother, should be called in question because he himself was not exactly in line. His sense of justice was outraged by his mother’s being unexpectedly declared responsible in this matter, and at the end of four months he was still a prey to melancholy amazement at the idea.

“Your friend Deval,” answered M. Bergeret, “put a wrong construction on a warlike speech that I should be inclined to count among those which exalt men’s moral tone. Such speeches, in fact, arouse the spirit of emulation by exciting a desire to earn the good-conduct stripes, which confer on their wearers the right to make similar speeches in their turn, speeches which obviously stamp the speaker of them as head and shoulders above those humble beings to whom they are addressed. The authority of officers in the army should never be weakened, as was done in a recent circular issued by a War Minister, which laid down the law that officers and non-commissioned officers were to avoid the practice of addressing the men with the contemptuous ‘thou.’ The minister, himself a well-bred, courteous, urbane and honourable man, was full of the idea of the dignified position of the citizen soldier and failed, therefore, to perceive that the power of scorning an inferior is the guiding principle in emulation and the foundation-stone of all governance. Sergeant Lebrec spoke like a hero who is schooling heroes, for, being a philologist, I am able to reconstruct the original form his speech took. This being the case, I have no hesitation in declaring that, in my opinion, Sergeant Lebrec rose to sublimity when he associated the good fame of a family with the port of a conscript, when he thus linked the life of Number Five, even before he saw the light, with the regiment and the flag. For, in truth, does not the issue of all warfare rest on the discipline of the recruit?

“After this, you will probably tell me that I am indulging in the weakness common to all commentators and reading into the text of my author meanings which he never intended. I grant you that there is a certain element of unconsciousness in Sergeant Lebrec’s memorable speech. But therein lies the genius of it. Unaware of his own range, he hurls his bolts broadcast.”

M. Roux answered with a smile that there certainly was an unconscious element in Sergeant Lebrec’s inspiration. He quite agreed with M. Bergeret there. But Madame Bergeret interposed drily:

“I don’t understand you at all, Lucien. You always laugh when there is nothing funny, and really one never knows whether you are joking or serious. It’s positively impossible to talk rationally to you.”

“My wife reasons after the dean’s fashion,” said M. Bergeret, “and the only thing to do with either is to give in.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Madame Bergeret, “you do well to talk about the dean! You have always set yourself to annoy him and now you are paying for your folly. You have also managed to fall out with the rector. I met him on Sunday when I was out with the girls and he hardly so much as bowed.” And turning towards the young soldier, she continued:

“I know that my husband is very much attached to you, Monsieur Roux. You are his favourite pupil and he foretells a brilliant future for you.”

M. Roux’s swarthy face, with its mat of frizzy hair, flashed into a bold smile that showed the brilliant whiteness of his teeth.

“Do try, Monsieur Roux, to get my husband to use a little tact with people who may be useful to him. His conduct is making life a howling wilderness for us all.”

“Surely not, Madame,” murmured M. Roux, turning the conversation.

“The peasants,” said he, “drag out a wretched three years of service. They suffer horribly, but no one ever guesses it, for they are quite inarticulate when it comes to expressing subtleties. Loving the land as they do with all the intensity of animal passion, when they are separated from it their existence is full of deep, silent, monotonous melancholy, with nothing whatever to distract them from their sense of exile and imprisonment, save fear of their officers and weariness of their occupation. Everything around them is strange and incomprehensible. In my company, for instance, there are two Bretons who have not learnt the colonel’s name after six months’ training. Every morning we are drawn up before the sergeant to repeat this name with them, for every one in the regiment receives exactly the same instruction. Our colonel’s name is Dupont. It’s the same in all our exercises: quick, clever men are kept back for ever to wait for the dolts.”

M. Bergeret inquired whether, like Sergeant Lebrec, the officers also cultivated the art of martial eloquence.

“Not at all,” said M. Roux. “My captain—quite a young man he is, too—is the very pink of courtesy. He is an æsthete, a Rosicrucian, and he paints pictures of angels and pallid virgins, against a background of pink and green skies. I devise the legends for his pictures, and whilst Deval is on fatigue-duty in the barrack-square, I am on duty with the captain, who employs me to produce verses for him. He really is a charming fellow. His name is Marcel de Lagère; he exhibits at L’Œuvre under the pseudonym of Cyne.”

“Is he a hero too?” asked M. Bergeret.

“Say rather a Saint George,” answered M. Roux. “He has conceived a mystic ideal of the military profession and declares that it is the perfect way of life. We are marching, unawares, to an unknown goal. Piously, solemnly, chastely, we advance towards the altar of mystic, fated sacrifice. He is exquisite. I am teaching him to write vers libre and prose poems and he is beginning to compose prose sketches of military life. He is happy, placid and gentle, and the only sorrow he has is the flag. He considers its red, white and blue an intolerably violent colour scheme and yearns for one of rose-pink or lilac. His dreams are of the banner of Heaven. ‘If even,’ he says sadly, ‘the three colours rose from a flower-stalk, like the three flames of the oriflamme, it would be bearable. But when they are perpendicular, they cut the floating folds painfully and ridiculously.’ He suffers, but he bears his suffering bravely and patiently. As I said before, he is a true Saint George.”

“From your description,” said Madame Bergeret, “I feel keenly for the poor young man.” So speaking, she threw a severe glance in M. Bergeret’s direction.

“But aren’t the other officers amazed at him?” asked M. Bergeret.

“Not at all,” answered M. Roux. “For at mess, or in society, he says nothing about his opinions and he looks just like any other officer.”

“And what do the men think of him?”

“The men never come in contact with their officers in quarters.”

“You will dine with us, won’t you, Monsieur Roux?” said Madame Bergeret. “It will give us great pleasure if you will stay.”

Her words instantly suggested to M. Bergeret’s mind the vision of a pie, for whenever Madame Bergeret had informally invited anyone to dinner she always ordered a pie from Magloire, the pastry-cook, and usually a pie without meat, as being more dainty. By a purely mental impetus that had no connection with greed, M. Bergeret now called up a picture of an egg or fish pie, smoking in a blue-patterned dish on a damask napkin. Homely and prophetic vision! But if Madame Bergeret invited M. Roux to dinner, she must think a great deal of him, for it was most unusual for Amélie to offer the pleasures of her humble table to a stranger. She dreaded the expense and fuss of doing so, and justly, for the days when she had a guest to dinner were made hideous by the noise of broken dishes, by yells of alarm and tears of rage from the young maid, Euphémie, by an acrid smoke-reek that filled the whole flat and by a smell of cooking which found its way to the study and disturbed M. Bergeret among the shades of Æneas, Turnus, and the bashful Lavinia. However, the professor was delighted at the idea that his pupil, M. Roux, would feed to-night at his table. For there was nothing he liked better than men’s talk, and a long discussion filled him with joy.

Madame Bergeret continued:

“You know, Monsieur Roux, it will be just pot-luck.”

Then she departed to give Euphémie her orders.

“My dear sir,” said M. Bergeret to his pupil, “are you still asserting the pre-eminence of vers libre? Of course, I am aware that poetic forms vary according to time and place. Nor am I ignorant of the fact that, in the course of ages, French verse has undergone incessant alterations, and, hidden behind my books of notes on metre, I can smile discreetly at the pious prejudices of the poets who refuse to allow anyone to lay an unhallowed finger on the instrument consecrated by their genius. I have noticed that they give no reasons for the rules they follow, and I am inclined to think that one must not search for these reasons in the verse itself, but rather in the music which in primitive times accompanied it. It is the scientific spirit which I acknowledge as my guide, and as that is naturally far less conservative than the artistic spirit, I am therefore ready to welcome innovations. But I must, nevertheless, confess that vers libre baffles me and I cannot even grasp the definition of it. The vagueness of the limits to which it must conform is a worry to me and ...”

At that moment a visitor came into the study. It was a well-built man in the prime of life, with handsome sunburnt features. Captain Aspertini of Naples was a student of philology and agriculture and a member of the Italian Parliament who for the last ten years had been carrying on a learned correspondence with M. Bergeret, after the style of the great scholars of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, and whenever he visited France he made it his practice to come and see his correspondent. Savants the world over held a high opinion of Carlo Aspertini for having deciphered a complete treatise by Epicurus on one of the charred scrolls from Pompeii. Although his energies were now absorbed in agriculture, politics and business, he was still passionately devoted to the art of numismatics and his sensitive hands still itched to have the fingering of medals. Indeed, there were two attractions which drew him to * * *—the pleasure of seeing M. Bergeret and the delight of looking once more at the priceless collection of ancient coins bequeathed to the town library by Boucher de La Salle. He also came to collate the letters of Muratori which were preserved there. The two men greeted each other with great pleasure, for a common love of knowledge had made them fellow-citizens. Then, when the Neapolitan perceived that they had a soldier with them in the study, M. Bergeret hastened to inform him that this Gallic warrior was a budding philologist, inspired by enthusiasm for the Latin tongue.

“This year, however,” said M. Bergeret, “he is learning in a barrack-square to put one foot before the other, and in him you see what our witty commandant, General Cartier de Chalmot, calls the primary tool of tactics, commonly known as a soldier. My pupil, M. Roux, is a warrior, and having a high-bred soul, he feels the honour of the position. Truth to tell, it is an honour which he shares at this identical moment with all the young men of haughty Europe. Your Neapolitans, too, rejoice in it, since they became part of a great nation.”

“Without wishing in any way to show disloyalty to the house of Savoy, to which I am genuinely attached,” said the captain, “I feel that military service and taxation weigh so heavily on the Neapolitans as to make them sometimes regret the happy days of King Bomba and the pleasure of living ingloriously under an easy-going government. Neither tax nor conscription is popular with the Neapolitan. What is wanted is that statesmen should really open their eyes to the necessities of national life. But, as you know, I have always been an opponent of megalomaniac politics and have always deplored those great armaments which hinder all progress in Europe, whether it be intellectual, moral, or material. It is a great, a ruinous folly which can only culminate in farce.”

“I foresee no end to it at all,” replied M. Bergeret. “No one wishes it to end save certain thinkers who have no means of making their ideas known. The rulers of states cannot desire disarmament, for such a movement would render their position difficult and precarious and would take an admirable tool of empire out of their hands. For armed nations meekly submit to government. Military discipline shapes them to obedience, and in a nation so disciplined, neither insurrections, nor riots, nor tumults of any kind need be feared. When military service is obligatory upon all, when all the citizens either are, or have been, soldiers, then all the forces of social life are so calculated as to support power, or even the lack of it. This fact the history of France can prove.”

Just as M. Bergeret reached this point in his political reflections, from the kitchen close by there burst out the noise of grease pouring over on the fire; from this the professor inferred that the youthful Euphémie, according to her usual practice on gala days, had upset her saucepan on the stove, after rashly balancing it on a pyramid of coal. He had learnt by now that such an event must recur again and again with the inexorable certainty of the laws that govern the universe. A shocking smell of burnt meat filled the study, while M. Bergeret traced the course of his ideas as follows:

“Had not Europe,” said he, “been turned into a barrack, we should have seen insurrections bursting out in France, Germany, or Italy, as they did in former times. But nowadays those obscure forces which from time to time uplift the very pavements of our city find regular vent in the fatigue duty of barrack-yards, in the grooming of horses and the sentiment of patriotism.

“The rank of corporal supplies an admirable outlet for the energies of young heroes who, had they been left in freedom, would have been building barricades to keep their arms lissom. I have only this moment been told of the sublime speeches made by a certain Sergeant Lebrec. Were he dressed in the peasant’s blouse this hero would be thirsting for liberty, but clad in a uniform, it is tyranny for which he yearns, and to help in the maintenance of order the thing for which he craves. In armed nations it is easy enough to preserve internal peace, and you will notice that, although in the course of the last twenty-five years, Paris has been a little agitated on one occasion, it was only when the commotion was the work of a War Minister. That is, a general was able to do what a demagogue could not have done. And the moment this general lost his hold on the army, he also lost it on the nation, and his power was gone. Therefore, whether the State be a monarchy, an empire, or a republic, its rulers have an interest in keeping up obligatory military service for all, in order that they may command an army, instead of governing a nation.

“And, while the rulers have no desire for disarmament, the people have lost all wish for it, too. The masses endure military service quite willingly, for, without being exactly pleasurable, it gives an outlet to the rough, crude instincts of the majority and presents itself as the simplest, roughest and strongest expression of their sense of duty. It overawes them by the gorgeous splendour of its outward paraphernalia and by the amount of metal used in it. In short, it exalts them through the only ideals of power, of grandeur and of glory, which they are capable of conceiving. Often they rush into it with a song; if not, they are perforce driven to it. For these reasons I foresee no termination to this honourable calling which is brutalising and impoverishing Europe.”

“There are,” said Captain Aspertini, “two ways out of it: war and bankruptcy.”

“War!” exclaimed M. Bergeret. “It is patent that great armaments only hinder that by aggravating the horrors of it and rendering it of doubtful issue for both combatants. As for bankruptcy, I foretold it the other day to Abbé Lantaigne, the principal of our high seminary, as we sat on a bench on the Mall. But you need not pin your faith on me. You have studied the history of the Lower Empire too deeply, my dear Aspertini, not to be perfectly aware that, in questions of national finance, there are mysterious resources which escape the scrutiny of political economists. A ruined nation may exist for five hundred years on robbery and extortion, and how is one to guess what a great people, out of its poverty, will manage to supply to its defenders in the way of cannon, muskets, bad bread, bad shoes, straw and oats?”

“This argument sounds plausible enough,” answered Aspertini. “Yet, with all due deference to your opinion, I believe I can already discern the dawn of universal peace.”

Then, in a sing-song voice, the kindly Neapolitan began to describe his hopes and dreams for the future, to the accompaniment of the heavy thumping of the chopper with which the youthful Euphémie was preparing a mince for M. Roux on the kitchen table just the other side of the wall.

“Do you remember, Monsieur Bergeret,” said Captain Aspertini, “the place in Don Quixote where Sancho complains of being obliged to endure a never-ending series of misfortunes and the ready-witted knight tells him that this protracted wretchedness is merely a sign that happiness is at hand? ‘For,’ says he, ‘fortune is a fickle jade and our troubles have already lasted so long that they must soon give place to good-luck.’ The law of change alone....”

The rest of these optimistic utterances was lost in the boiling over of the kettle of water, followed by the unearthly yells of Euphémie, as she fled in terror from her stove.

Then M. Bergeret’s mind, saddened by the sordid ugliness of his cramped life, fell to dreaming of a villa where, on white terraces overlooking the blue waters of a lake, he might hold peaceful converse with M. Roux and Captain Aspertini, amid the scent of myrtles, when the amorous moon rides high in a sky as clear as the glance of a god and as sweet as the breath of a goddess.

But he soon emerged from this dream and began once more to take part in the discussion.

“The results of war,” said he, “are quite incalculable. My good friend William Harrison writes to me that French scholarship has been despised in England since 1871, and that at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin it is the fashion to ignore Maurice Raynouard’s text-book of archæology, though it would be more helpful to their students than any other similar work. But they refuse to learn from the vanquished. And in order that they may feel confidence in a professor when he speaks on the characteristics of the art of Ægina or on the origins of Greek pottery, it is considered necessary that he should belong to a nation which excels in the casting of cannon. Because Marshal Mac-Mahon was beaten in 1870 at Sedan and General Chanzy lost his army at the Maine in the same year, my colleague Maurice Raynouard is banished from Oxford in 1897. Such are the results of military inferiority, slow-moving and illogical, yet sure in their effects. And it is, alas, only too true that the fate of the Muses is settled by a sword-thrust.”

“My dear sir,” said Aspertini, “I am going to answer you with all the frankness permissible in a friend. Let us first grant that French thought circulates freely through the world, as it has always done. And although the archæological manual of your learned countryman Maurice Raynouard may not have found a place on the desks of the English Universities, yet your plays are acted in all the theatres of the world; the novels of Alphonse Daudet and of Émile Zola are translated into every language; the canvases of your painters adorn the galleries of two worlds; the achievements of your scientists win renown in every quarter of the globe. And if your soul no longer thrills the soul of the nations, if your voice no longer quickens the heart-beats of mankind, it is because you no longer choose to play the part of apostles of brotherhood and justice, it is because you no longer utter the holy words that bring strength and consolation; it is because France is no longer the lover of the human race, the comrade of the nations; it is because she no longer opens her hands to fling broadcast those seeds of liberty which once she scattered in such generous and sovereign fashion that for long years it seemed that every beautiful human idea was a French idea; it is because she is no longer the France of the philosophers and of the Revolution: in the garrets round the Panthéon and the Luxembourg there are no longer to be found young leaders, writing on deal tables night after night, with all the fire of youth, those pages which make the nations tremble and the despots grow pale with fear. Do not then complain that the glory which you cannot view without misgivings has passed away.

“Especially, do not say that your defeats are the sources of your misfortunes: say, rather, that they are the outcome of your faults. A nation suffers no more injury from a battle lost than a robust man suffers from a sword-scratch received in a duel. It is an injury that only produces a transient illness in the system, a perfectly curable weakness. To cure it, all that is needed is a little courage, skill and political good sense. The first act of policy, the most necessary and certainly the easiest, is to make the defeat yield all the military glory it is capable of producing. For in the true view of things, the glory of the vanquished equals that of the conquerors, and it is, in addition, the more moving spectacle. In order to make the best of a disaster it is desirable to fête the general and the army which has sustained it, and to blazon abroad all the beautiful incidents which prove the moral superiority of misfortune. Such incidents are to be found even in the most headlong retreats. From the very first moment, then, the defeated side ought to decorate, to embellish, to gild their defeat, and to distinguish it with unmistakably grand and beautiful symbols. In Livy it may be read how the Romans never failed to do this, and how they hung palms and wreaths on the swords broken at the battles of the Trebbia, of Trasimene and of Cannæ. Even the disastrous inaction of Fabius has been so extolled by them that, after the lapse of twenty-two centuries, we still stand amazed at the wisdom of the Cunctator, the Lingerer, as he was nicknamed. Yet, after all, he was nothing but an old fool. In this lies the great art of defeat.”

“It is by no means a lost art,” said M. Bergeret. “In our own days Italy showed that she knew how to practise it after Novara, after Lissa, after Adowa.”

“My dear sir,” said Captain Aspertini, “whenever an Italian army capitulates, we rightly reckon this capitulation glorious. A government which succeeds in throwing a glamour of poetry over a defeat rouses the spirit of patriotism within the country and at the same time makes itself interesting in the eyes of foreigners. And to bring about these two results is a fairly considerable achievement. In the year 1870 it rested entirely with you Frenchmen to produce them for yourselves. After Sedan, had the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and all the State officials publicly and unanimously congratulated the Emperor Napoleon and Marshal Mac-Mahon on not having despaired of the salvation of their country when they gave battle to the enemy, do you not think that France would have gained a radiant halo of glory from the defeat of its army? At the same time it would have given forcible expression of its will to conquer. And pray believe, dear Monsieur Bergeret, that I am not impertinent enough to be trying to give your country lessons in patriotism. In doing that, I should be putting myself in a wrong position. I am merely presenting you with some of the marginal notes that will be found, after my death, pencilled in my copy of Livy.”

“It is not the first time,” said M. Bergeret, “that the commentary on the Decades has been worth more than the text. But go on.”

With a smile Captain Aspertini once more took up the thread of his argument.

“The wisest thing for the country to do is to cast huge handfuls of lilies over the wounds of war. Then, skilfully and silently, with a swift glance, she will examine the wound. If the blow has been a knock-down one, and if the strength of the country is seriously impaired, she will instantly start negotiating. In treating with the victorious side, it will be found that the earliest moment is the most propitious. In the first surprise of triumph, the enemy welcomes with joy any proposal which tends to turn a favourable beginning into a definite advantage. He has not yet had time for repeated successes to go to his head, nor for long-continued resistance to drive him to rage. He will not demand huge damages for an injury that is still trifling, nor, as yet, have his budding aspirations had time to grow. It is possible that even under these circumstances he may not grant you peace on easy terms. But you are sure to have to pay dearer for it, if you delay in applying for it. The wisest policy is to open negotiations before one has revealed all one’s weakness. It is possible then to obtain easy terms, which are usually rendered easier still by the intervention of neutral powers. As for seeking safety in despair and only making peace after a victory, these ideas are doubtless fine enough as maxims, but very difficult to carry out at a time when, for one thing, the industrial and commercial needs of modern life, and for another, the immense size of the armies which have to be equipped and fed, do not permit an indefinite continuance of warfare, and consequently do not leave the weaker side enough time to straighten out its affairs. France in 1870 was inspired by the noblest of sentiments, but if she had acted in accordance with reason, she would have started negotiations immediately after her first reverses, honourable as they were. She had a government which could have undertaken the task, and which ought to have done so, a government which was, indeed, in a better position for bringing it to a successful issue than any that might follow. The sensible thing to have done would have been to exact this last service from it before getting rid of it altogether. Instead, they acted the wrong way about. After having maintained that government for twenty years, France conceived the ill-considered notion of overturning it just at the very moment when it ought to have been useful to her, and of substituting another government for it. This administration, not being jointly liable with the former one, had to begin the war over again, without, however, bringing any new strength to its prosecution. After that a third government tried to establish itself.

“If it had succeeded, the war would have begun again a third time, because the first two unfortunate attempts did not count. Honour, say you, must be satisfied. But you had given satisfaction with your blood to two honours: the honour of the Empire, as well as of the Republic; you were also ready to satisfy a third, the honour of the Commune. Yet it seems to me that even the proudest nation in the world has but one honour to satisfy. You were thrown by this excess of generosity into a state of great weakness from which you are now happily recovering....”

“In fact,” said M. Bergeret, “if Italy had been beaten at Weissenburg and at Reichshoffen, these defeats would have been as valuable to her as the whole of Belgium. But we are a people of heroes, who always fancy that we have been betrayed. That sums up our history. Take note also of the fact that we are a democracy; and that is the state in which negotiations present most difficulties. Nobody can, however, deny that we made a long and courageous stand. Moreover, we have a reputation for magnanimity, and I believe we deserve it. Anyhow, the feats of the human race have always been but melancholy farces, and the historians who pretend to discover any sequence in the flow of events are merely great rhetoricians. Bossuet...”

Just as M. Bergeret was uttering this name the study door opened with such a crash that the wicker-work woman was upheaved by it and fell at the feet of the astonished young soldier. Then there appeared in the doorway a ruddy, squint-eyed wench, with no forehead worth mentioning. Her sturdy ugliness shone with the glow of youth and health. Her round cheeks and bare arms were a fine military red. Planting herself in front of M. Bergeret, she brandished the coal-shovel and shouted:

“I’m off!”

Euphémie, having quarrelled with Madame Bergeret, was now giving notice. She repeated:

“I’m going off home!”

Said M. Bergeret:

“Then go quietly, my child.”

Again and again she shouted:

“I’m off! Madame wants to turn me into a regular beast of burden.”

Then, lowering her shovel, she added in lower tones:

“Besides, things are always happening here that I would rather not see.”

Without attempting to unravel the mystery of these words, M. Bergeret merely remarked that he would not delay her, and that she could go.

“Well, then, give me my wages.”

“Leave the room,” answered M. Bergeret. “Don’t you see that I have something to do besides settling with you? Go and wait elsewhere.”

But Euphémie, once more waving the dull, heavy shovel, yelled:

“Give me my money! My wages! I want my wages!”

II

At six o’clock in the evening Abbé Guitrel got out of the train in Paris and called a cab in the station-yard. Then, driving in the dusk through the murky, rain-swept streets, dotted with lights, he made for Number 5, Rue des Boulangers. There, in a narrow, rugged, hilly street, above the coopers and the cork-dealers, and amidst a smell of casks, lived his old friend Abbé Le Génil, chaplain to the Convent of the Seven Wounds, who was a popular Lenten preacher in one of the most fashionable parishes in Paris. Here Abbé Guitrel was in the habit of putting up, whenever he visited Paris in the hope of expediting the progress of his tardy fortunes. All day long the soles of his buckled shoes tapped discreetly upon the pavements, staircases and floors of all sorts of different houses. In the evening he supped with M. Le Génil. The two old comrades from the seminary spun each other merry yarns, chatted over the rates charged for mass and sermon, and played their game of manille. At ten o’clock Nanette, the maid, rolled into the dining-room an iron bedstead for M. Guitrel, who always gave her when he left the same tip—a brand-new twenty-sou piece.

On this occasion, as in the past, M. Le Génil, who was a tall, stout man, smacked his great hand down on Guitrel’s flinching shoulder, and rumbling out a good-day in his deep organ note, instantly challenged him in his usual jolly style:

“Well, old miser, have you brought me twelve dozen masses at a crown each, or are you, as usual, going to keep to yourself the gold that your pious provincials swamp you with?”

Being a poor man, and knowing that Guitrel was as poor as himself, he regarded this sort of talk as a good jest.

Guitrel went so far as to understand a joke, though, being of a gloomy temperament, he never jested himself. He had, he explained, been obliged to come to Paris to carry out several commissions with which he had been charged, more especially the purchase of books. Would his friend, then, put him up for a day or two, three at the most?

“Now do tell the truth for once in your life!” answered M. Le Génil. “You have just come up to smell out a mitre, you old fox! To-morrow morning you will be showing yourself to the nuncio with a sanctimonious expression. Guitrel, you are going to be a bishop!”

Hereupon the chaplain of the Convent of the Seven Wounds, the preacher at the church of Sainte-Louise, made a bow to the future bishop. Mingled with his ironic courtesy there was, perhaps, a certain strain of instinctive deference. Then once more his face fell into the harsh lines that revealed the temperament of a second Olivier Maillard.[1]

[1] An eccentric priest of the fifteenth century. His sermons were full of denunciations against his enemies. He once attacked Louis XI, who threatened to throw him into the Seine. Maillard replied: “The King is master, but tell him that I shall get to heaven by water sooner than he will by his post-horses.”

“Come in, then! Will you take some refreshment?”

M. Guitrel was a reserved man, whose compressed lips showed his determination not to be pumped. As a matter of fact, it was quite true that he had come up to enlist powerful influence in support of his candidature, but he had no wish to explain all his wily courses to this naturally frank friend of his. For M. Le Génil made, not only a virtue of his natural frankness, but even a policy.

M. Guitrel stammered:

“Don’t imagine ... dismiss this notion that ...”

M. Le Génil shrugged his shoulders, exclaiming, “You old mystery-monger!”

Then, conducting his friend to his bedroom, he sat down once more beneath the light of his lamp and resumed his interrupted task, which was that of mending his breeches.

M. Le Génil, popular preacher as he was both in Paris and Versailles, did his own mending, partly to save his old servant the trouble and partly because he was fond of handling a needle, a taste he had acquired during the years of grinding poverty that he had endured when he first entered the Church. And now this giant with lungs of brass, who fulminated against atheists from the elevation of a pulpit, was meekly sitting on a rush-bottomed chair, occupied in drawing a needle in and out with his huge red hands. In the midst of his task he raised his head and glancing shyly towards Guitrel with his big, kindly eyes, exclaimed:

“We’ll have a game of manille to-night, you old trickster.”

But Guitrel, hesitating, yet firm, stammered out that he would be obliged to go out after dinner. He was full of plans, and after pushing on the preparations for a meal, he gobbled down his food, to the great disgust of his host, who was not only a great eater, but a great talker. He refused to wait for dessert, but, retiring to another room, shut himself in, drew a layman’s suit from his portmanteau and put it on.

When he appeared again, his friend saw that he was dressed in a long, severe, black frock-coat, which seemed to have the drollery of a disguise. With his head crowned by a rusty opera-hat of prodigious height, he hastily gulped down his coffee, mumbled a grace and slipped out. Leaning over the stair-rail, Abbé Le Génil shouted to him:

“Don’t ring when you come in, or you’ll wake Nanette. You’ll find the key under the mat. One moment, Guitrel, I know where you’re going. You old Quintilian, you, you’re just going to take an elocution lesson.”

Through the damp fog, Abbé Guitrel followed the quays along by the river, passed the bridge of Saint-Pères, crossed the Place du Carrousel, unnoticed by the indifferent passers-by, who scarcely took the trouble even to glance at his huge hat. Finally he halted under the Tuscan porch of the Comédie-Française. He carefully read the playbill in order to make sure that the arrangements had not been changed, and that Andromaque and the Malade Imaginaire would be presented. Then he asked at the second pay-box for a pit ticket.

The narrow seats behind the empty stalls were already almost filled when he sat down and opened an old newspaper, not to read, but to keep himself in countenance, while he listened to the talk going on around him. He had a quick ear, and it was always by the ear that he observed, just as M. Worms-Clavelin listened with his mouth. His neighbours were shop-hands and artists’ assistants who had obtained seats through friendship with a scene-shifter or a dresser. It is a little world of simple-minded folk, keenly bent on sight-seeing, very well satisfied with themselves, and busied with bets and bicycles. The younger members are peaceful enough in reality, although they assume a jaunty military air, being automatically democratic and republican, but conservative in their jokes about the President of the Republic. As Abbé Guitrel caught the words that flew hither and thither all round him, words which revealed this frame of mind, he thought of the fancies cherished by Abbé Lantaigne, who still dreamt, in his hermit-like seclusion, of bringing such a class as this back to obedience to monarchy and priestcraft. Behind his paper Abbé Guitrel chuckled at the idea.

“These Parisians,” thought he, “are the most adaptable people in the world. To the provincial mind they are quite incomprehensible, but would to God that the republicans and freethinkers of the diocese of Tourcoing were cut out on the same model! But the spirit of Northern France is as bitter as the wild hops of its plains. And in my diocese I shall find myself placed with violent Socialists on one side and fervid Catholics on the other.”

He foresaw the trials that awaited him in the see once held by the blessed Loup, and so far was he from shrinking at the contemplation of them, that he invoked them on himself, with an accompaniment of such loud sighs that his neighbour looked at him to see if he were ill. Thus Abbé Guitrel’s head seethed with fancies of his bishopric amid the murmur of frivolous chatter, the banging of doors and the restless movements of the work-girls.

But when at the signal the curtain slowly rose, he instantly became absorbed in the play. It was the delivery and the gestures of the actors on which his attention was riveted. He studied the notes of their voices, their gait, the play of their features, with all the intent interest of an experienced preacher who would fain learn the secret of noble gesture and pathetic intonation. Whenever a long speech echoed through the theatre, he redoubled his attention and only longed to be listening to Corneille, whose speeches are longer, who is more fond of oratorical effects and more skilful in emphasising the separate points of a speech.

At the moment when the actor who played Orestes was reciting the great classic harangue “Avant que tous les Grecs ...” the professor of sacred elocution set himself to store up in his mind every attitude and intonation. Abbé Le Génil knew his old friend well; he was perfectly aware that the crafty preacher was in the habit of going to the theatre to learn the tricks of oratory.

To the actresses M. Guitrel paid far less attention. He held women in contempt, which fact by no means implies that his thoughts had always been chaste. Priest as he was, he had in his time known the promptings of the flesh. Heaven only knows how often he had dodged, evaded or transgressed the seventh commandment! And one had better ask no questions as to the kind of women who also knew this about him. Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine, Domine quis sustinebit? But he was a priest, and had the priestly horror of the woman’s body. Even the perfume of long hair was abhorrent to him, and when his neighbour, a young shop-assistant, began to extol the beautiful arms of a famous actress, he replied by a contemptuous sneer that was by no means hypocritical.

However, he remained full of interest right up to the final fall of the curtain, as he saw himself in fancy transferring the passion of Orestes, as rendered by an expert interpreter, into some sermon on the torments of the damned or the miserable end of the sinner. He was troubled by a provincial accent which spoilt his delivery, and between the acts he sat busily trying to correct it in his mind, modelling his correction on what he had just heard. “The voice of a bishop of Tourcoing,” thought he, “ought not to savour of the roughness of the cheap wines of our hills of the Midlands.”

He was immensely tickled by the play of Molière with which the performance concluded. Incapable of seeing the humorous side of things for himself, he was very pleased when anyone else pointed them out to him. An absurd physical mishap filled him with infinite joy and he laughed heartily at the grosser scenes.

In the middle of the last act he drew a roll of bread from his pocket and swallowed it morsel by morsel, keeping his hand over his mouth as he ate, and watching carefully lest he should be caught in this light repast by the stroke of midnight; for next morning he was to say Mass in the chapel of the Convent of the Seven Wounds.

He returned home after the play by way of the deserted quays, which he crossed with his short, tapping steps. The hollow moan of the river alone filled the silence, as M. Guitrel walked along through the midst of a reddish fog which doubled the size of everything and made his hat look an absurd height in the dimness. As he stole by, close to the dripping walls of the ancient Hôtel-Dieu, a bare-headed woman came limping forward to meet him. She was a fat, ugly creature, no longer young, and her white chemise barely covered her bosom. Coming abreast of him, she seized the tail of his coat and made proposals to him. Then suddenly, even before he had time to free himself, she rushed away, crying:

“A priest! What ill luck! Plague take it! What misfortune is coming to me?”

M. Guitrel was aware that some ignorant women still cherish the superstition that it is unlucky to meet a priest; but he was surprised that this woman should have recognised his profession even in the dress of a layman.

“That’s the penalty of the unfrocked,” thought he. “The priest, which still lives in him, will always peep out. Tu es sacerdos in æternum, Guitrel.”

III

Blown by the north wind over the hard, white ground along with a whirl of dead leaves, M. Bergeret crossed the Mall between the leafless elms and began to climb Duroc Hill. His footsteps echoed on the uneven pavements as he walked towards the louring, smoky sky which painted a barrier of violet across the horizon; to the right he left the farrier’s forge and the front of a dairy decorated with a picture of two red cows, to the left stretched the long, low walls of market-gardens. He had that morning prepared his tenth and last lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid, and now he was mechanically turning over in his mind the points in metre and grammar which had particularly caught his notice. Guiding the rhythm of his thoughts by the beat of his footsteps, at regular intervals he repeated to himself the rhythmic words: Patrio vocat agmina sistro.... But every now and then his keen, versatile mind flitted away to critical appreciation of a wider range. The martial rhetoric of this eighth book annoyed him, and it seemed to him absurd that Venus should give Æneas a shield embossed with pictures of the scenes of Roman history up to the battle of Actium and the flight of Cleopatra. Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Having reached the cross-roads at the Bergères, which give toward Duroc Hill, he paused for a moment before the wine-coloured front of Maillard’s tavern, now damp, deserted and shuttered. Here the thought occurred to him that these Romans, although he had devoted his whole life to the study of them, were, after all, but terrors of pomposity and mediocrity. As he grew older and his taste became more mellowed, there was scarcely one of them that he prized, save Catullus and Petronius. But, after all, it was his business to make the best of the lot to which fate had called him. Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Would Virgil and Propertius try to make one believe, said he to himself, that the timbrel, whose shrill sound accompanied the frenzied religious dances of the priests, was also the instrument of the Egyptian soldiers and sailors? It was really incredible.

As he descended the street of the Bergères, on the side opposite Duroc Hill, he suddenly noticed the mildness of the air. Just here the road winds downward between walls of limestone, where the roots of tiny oak-trees find a difficult foothold. Here M. Bergeret was sheltered from the wind, and in the eye of the December sun which filtered down on him in a half-hearted, rayless fashion, he still murmured, but more softly: Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Doubtless Cleopatra had fled from Actium to Egypt, but still it was through the fleet of Octavius and Agrippa which tried to stop her passage.

Allured by the sweetness of air and sun, M. Bergeret sat down by the side of the road, on one of the blocks which had been quarried out of the mountain years ago, and which were now covered with a coating of black moss. Through the delicate tracery of the branches overhead he noticed the lilac hue of the sky, streaked here and there with smoke trails. Thus to plunge in lonely reverie filled his soul with peaceful sadness.

In attacking Agrippa’s galleys which blocked their way, he reflected, Antony and Cleopatra had but one object, and that was to clear a passage. It was this precise feat that Cleopatra, who raised the blockade of her sixty ships, succeeded in accomplishing. Seated in the cutting, M. Bergeret enjoyed the harmless elation of settling the fate of the world on the far-famed waves of Acarnania. Then, as he happened to throw a glance three paces in front of him, he caught sight of an old man who was sitting on a heap of dead leaves on the other side of the road and leaning against the grey wall. It was scarcely possible to distinguish between this wild figure and its surroundings, for his face, his beard and his rags were exactly the colour of the stones and the leaves. He was slowly scraping a piece of wood with an old knife-blade ground thin on the millstone of the years.

“Good-day to you, sir,” said the old fellow. “The sun is pretty. And I’ll tell you what’s more—it isn’t going to rain.”

M. Bergeret recognised the man: it was Pied d’Alouette, the tramp whom M. Roquincourt, the magistrate, had wrongly implicated in the murder that took place in Queen Marguerite’s house and whom he had imprisoned for six months in the vague hope that unforeseen charges would be laid at his door. This he did, either because he thought that the longer the imprisonment continued the more justifiable it would seem, or merely through spite against a simpleton who had misled the officers of the law. M. Bergeret, who always had a fellow-feeling for the oppressed, answered Pied d’Alouette in a kindly style that reflected the old fellow’s good-will.

“Good-day, friend,” said he. “I see that you know all the pleasant nooks. This hillside is warm and well sheltered.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Pied d’Alouette answered:

“I know better spots than this. But they are far away from here. One mustn’t be afraid of a walk. Feet are all right. Shoes aren’t. I can’t wear good shoes because they’re strange to my feet. I only rip them up, when they give me sound ones.”

And raising his foot from the cushion of dead leaves, he pointed to his big toe sticking out, wrapped in wads of linen, through the slits in the leather of his boot.

Relapsing into silence once more, he began to polish the piece of hard wood.

M. Bergeret soon returned to his own thoughts.

Pallentem morte futura. Agrippa’s galleys could not bar the way to Antony’s purple-sailed trireme. This time, at least, the dove escaped the vulture.

But hereupon Pied d’Alouette began again:

“They have taken away my knife!”

“Who have?”

Lifting his arm, the tramp waved it in the direction of the town and gave no other answer. Yet he was following the course of his own slow thought, for presently he said:

“They never gave it back to me.”

He sat on in solemn silence, powerless to express the ideas that revolved in his darkened mind. His knife and his pipe were the only possessions he had in the world. It was with his knife that he cut the lump of hard bread and the bacon rind they gave him at farm-house doors, food which his toothless gums would not bite; it was with his knife that he chopped up cigar-ends to stuff them into his pipe; it was with his knife that he scraped out the rotten bits in fruit and with it he managed to drag out from the dung-heaps things good to eat. It was with his knife that he shaped his walking-sticks and cut down branches to make a bed of leaves for himself in the woods at night. With his knife he carved boats out of oak-bark for the little boys, and dolls out of deal for the little girls. His knife was the tool with which he practised all the arts of life, the most skilled, as well as the most homely, everyday ones. Always famished and often full of ingenuity, he not only supplied his own wants, but also made dainty reed fountains which were much admired in the town.

For, although the man would not work, he was yet a jack of all trades. When he came out of prison nothing would induce them to restore his knife to him; they kept it in the record office. And so he went on tramp once more, but now weaponless, stripped, weaker than a child, wretched wherever he went. He wept over his loss: tiny tear-drops came, that scorched his bloodshot eyes without overflowing. Then, as he went out of the town, his courage returned, for in the corner of a milestone he came upon an old knife-blade. Now he had cut a strong beechen handle for it in the woods of the Bergères, and was fitting it on with skilful hands.

The idea of his knife suggested his pipe to him. He said:

“They let me keep my pipe.”

Drawing from the woollen bag which he wore against his breast, a kind of black, sticky thimble, he showed the bowl of a pipe without the fragment of a stem.

“My poor fellow,” said M. Bergeret, “you don’t look at all like a great criminal. How do you manage to get put in gaol so often?”

Pied d’Alouette had not acquired the dialogue habit and he had no notion of how to carry on a conversation. Although he had a kind of deep intelligence, it took him some time to grasp the sense of the words addressed to him. It was practice that he lacked and at first, therefore, he made no attempt to answer M. Bergeret, who sat tracing lines with the point of his stick in the white dust of the road. But at last Pied d’Alouette said:

“I don’t do any wrong things. Then I am punished for other things.”

At length he seemed able to talk connectedly, with but few breaks.

“Do you mean to say that they put you in prison for doing nothing wrong?”

“I know the people who do the wrong things, but I should do myself harm if I blabbed.”

“You herd, then, with vagabonds and evil-doers?”

“You are trying to make me peach. Do you know Judge Roquincourt?”

“I know him a little. He’s rather stern, isn’t he?”

“Judge Roquincourt, he is a good talker. I never heard anyone speak so well and so quickly. A body hasn’t time to understand him. A body can’t answer. There isn’t anybody who speaks one half as well.”

“He kept you in solitary confinement for long months and yet you bear him no grudge. What a humble example of mercy and long-suffering.”

Pied d’Alouette resumed the polishing of his knife-handle. As the work progressed, he became quieter and seemed to recover his peace of mind. Suddenly he demanded:

“Do you know a man called Corbon?”

“Who is he, this Corbon?”

It was too difficult to explain. Pied d’Alouette waved his arm in a vague semicircle that covered a quarter of the horizon. Yet his mind was busy with the man he had just mentioned, for again he repeated:

“Corbon.”

“Pied d’Alouette,” said M. Bergeret, “they say you are a queer sort of vagabond and that, even when you are in absolute want, you never steal anything. Yet you live with evil-doers and you are the friend of murderers.”

Pied d’Alouette answered:

“There are some who think one thing and others who think another. But if I myself thought of doing wrong, I should dig a hole under a tree on Duroc Hill and bury my knife at the bottom of the hole. Then I should pound down the earth on top of it with my feet. For when people have the notion of doing wrong, it’s the knife that leads them on. It’s also pride which leads them on. As for me, I lost my pride when I was a lad, for men, women and children in my own parts all made fun of me.”

“And have you never had wicked, violent thoughts?”

“Sometimes, when I came upon women alone on the roads, for the fancy I had for them. But that’s all over now.”

“And that fancy never comes back to you?”

“Time and again it does.”

“Pied d’Alouette, you love liberty and you are free. You live without toil. I call you a happy man.”

“There are some happy folks. But not me.”

“Where are these happy folks, then?”

“At the farms.”

M. Bergeret rose and slipping a ten-sou piece into Pied d’Alouette’s hand, said:

“So you fancy, Pied d’Alouette, that happiness is to be found under a roof, by the chimney-corner, or on a feather-bed. I thought you had more sense.”

IV

On New Year’s Day M. Bergeret was always in the habit of dressing himself in his black suit the first thing in the morning. Nowadays, it had lost all its gloss and the grey wintry light made it look ashen-colour. The gold medal that hung from M. Bergeret’s buttonhole by a violet riband, although it gave him a false air of splendour, testified clearly to the fact that he was no Knight of the Legion of Honour. In fact, in this dress he always felt strangely thin and poverty-stricken. Even his white tie seemed to his fancy a wretchedly paltry affair, for to tell the truth, it was not even a fresh one. At length, after vainly crumpling the front of his shirt, he recognised the fact that it is impossible to make mother-of-pearl buttons stay in buttonholes that have been stretched by long wear: at the thought he became utterly disconsolate, for he recognised the fact sorrowfully that he was no man of the world. And sitting down on a chair, he fell into a reverie:

“But, after all, does there in truth exist a world populated by men of the world? For it seems to me, indeed, that what is commonly called the world is but a cloud of gold and silver hung in the blue of heaven. To the man who has actually entered it, it seems but a mist. In fact, social distinctions are matters of much confusion. Men are drawn together in flocks by their common prejudices or their common tastes. But tastes often war against prejudices, and chance sets everything at variance. All the same, a large income and the leisure given by it tend to produce a certain style of life and special habits. This fact is the bond which links society people, and this kinship produces a certain standard which rules manners, physique and sport. Hence we derive the ‘tone’ of society. This ‘tone’ is purely superficial and for that very reason fairly perceptible. There are such things as society manners and appearances, but there is no such thing as society human nature, for what truly decides our character is passion, thought and feeling. Within us is a tribunal with which the world has no concern.”

Still, the wretched look of his shirt and tie continued to harass him, till at last he went to look at himself in the sitting-room mirror. Somehow his face assumed a far-off appearance in the glass, quite obscured as it was by an immense basket of heather festooned with ribands of red satin. The basket was of wicker, in the shape of a chariot with gilded wheels, and stood on the piano between two bags of marrons glacés. To its gilded shaft was affixed M. Roux’s card, for the basket was a present from him to Madame Bergeret.

The professor made no attempt to push aside the beribboned tufts of heather; he was satisfied with catching a glimpse of his left eye in the glass behind the flowers, and he continued to gaze at it benevolently for some little time. M. Bergeret, firmly convinced as he was that no one loved him, either in this world or in any other, sometimes treated himself to a little sympathy and pity. For he always behaved with the greatest consideration to all unhappy people, himself included. Now, dropping further consideration of his shirt and tie, he murmured to himself:

“You interpret the bosses on the shield of Æneas and yet your own tie is crumpled. You are ridiculous on both counts. You are no man of the world. You should teach yourself, then, at least, how to live the inner life and should cultivate within yourself a wealthy kingdom.”

On New Year’s Day he had always grounds for bewailing his destiny, before he set out to pay his respects to two vulgar, offensive fellows, for such were the rector and the dean. The rector, M. Leterrier, could not bear him. This feeling was a natural antipathy that grew as regularly as a plant and brought forth fruit every year. M. Leterrier, a professor of philosophy and the author of a text-book which summed up all systems of thought, had the blind dogmatic instincts of the official teacher. No doubt whatever remained in his mind touching the questions of the good, the beautiful and the true, the characteristics of which he had summarised in one chapter of his work (pages 216 to 262). Now he regarded M. Bergeret as a dangerous and misguided man, and M. Bergeret, in his turn, fully appreciated the perfect sincerity of the dislike he aroused in M. Leterrier. Nor, in fact, did he make any complaint against it; sometimes he even treated it with an indulgent smile. On the other hand, he felt abjectly miserable whenever he met the dean, M. Torquet, who never had an idea in his head, and who, although he was crammed with learning, still retained the brain of a positive ignoramus. He was a fat man with a low forehead and no cranium to speak of, who did nothing all day but count the knobs of sugar in his house and the pears in his garden, and who would go on hanging bells, even when one of his professional colleagues paid him a visit. In doing mischief he showed an activity and a something approaching intelligence which filled M. Bergeret with amazement. Such thoughts as these were in the professor’s mind, as he put on his overcoat to go and wish M. Torquet a happy New Year.

Yet he took a certain pleasure in being out of doors, for in the street he could enjoy that most priceless blessing, the liberty of the mind. In front of the Two Satyrs at the corner of the Tintelleries, he paused for a moment to give a friendly glance at the little acacia which stretched its bare branches over the wall of Lafolie’s garden.

“Trees in winter,” thought he, “take on an aspect of homely beauty that they never show in all the pomp of foliage and flowers. It is in winter that they reveal their delicate structure, that they show their charming framework of black coral: these are no skeletons, but a multitude of pretty little limbs in which life slumbers. If I were a landscape-painter....”

As he stood wrapt in these reflections, a portly man called him by name, seized his arm and walked on with him. This was M. Compagnon, the most popular of all the professors, the idolised master who gave his mathematical lectures in the great amphitheatre.

“Hullo! my dear Bergeret, happy New Year. I bet you’re going to call on the dean. So am I. We’ll walk on together.”

“Gladly,” answered M. Bergeret, “since in that way I shall travel pleasantly towards a painful goal. For I must confess it is no pleasure to me to see M. Torquet.”

On hearing this uncalled-for confidence, M. Compagnon, whether instinctively or inadvertently it was hard to say, withdrew the hand which he had slipped under his colleague’s arm.

“Yes, yes, I know! You and the dean don’t get on very well. Yet in general he isn’t a man who is difficult to get on with.”

“In speaking to you as I have done,” answered M. Bergeret, “I was not even thinking of the hostility which, according to report, the dean persists in keeping up towards me. But it chills me to the very marrow whenever I come in contact with a man who is totally lacking in imagination of any kind. What really saddens is not the idea of injustice and hatred, nor is it the sight of human misery. Quite the contrary, in fact, for we find the misfortunes of our fellows quite laughable, if only they are shown to us from a humorous standpoint. But those gloomy souls on whom the outer world seems to make no impression, those beings who have the faculty of ignoring the entire universe—the very sight of them reduces me to distress and desperation. My intercourse with M. Torquet is really one of the most painful misfortunes of my life.”

“Just so!” said M. Compagnon. “Our college is one of the most splendid in France, on account of the high attainments of the lecturers and the convenience of the buildings. It is only the laboratories that still leave something to be desired. But let us hope that this regrettable defect will soon be remedied, thanks to the combined efforts of our devoted rector and of so influential a senator as M. Laprat-Teulet.”

“It is also desirable,” said M. Bergeret, “that the Latin lectures should cease to be given in a dark, unwholesome cellar.”

As they crossed the Place Saint-Exupère, M. Compagnon pointed to Deniseau’s house.

“We no longer,” said he, “hear any chatter about the prophetess who held communion with Saint Radegonde and several other saints from Paradise. Did you go to see her, Bergeret? I was taken to see her by Lacarelle, the préfet’s chief secretary, just at the time when she was at the height of her popularity. She was sitting with her eyes shut in an arm-chair, while a dozen of the faithful plied her with questions. They asked her if the Pope’s health was satisfactory, what would be the result of the Franco-Russian alliance, whether the income-tax bill would pass, and whether a remedy for consumption would soon be found. She answered every question poetically and with a certain ease. When my turn came, I asked her this simple question:

“‘What is the logarithm of 9’? Well, Bergeret, do you imagine that she said 0,954?”

“No, I don’t,” said M. Bergeret.

“She never answered a word,” continued M. Compagnon; “never a word. She remained quite silent. Then I said: ‘How is it that Saint Radegonde doesn’t know the logarithm of 9? It is incredible!’ There were present at the meeting a few retired colonels, some priests, old ladies and a few Russian doctors. They seemed thunderstruck and Lacarelle’s face grew as long as a fiddle. I took to my heels amid a torrent of reproaches.”

As M. Compagnon and M. Bergeret were crossing the square chatting in this way, they came upon M. Roux, who was going through the town scattering visiting-cards right and left, for he went into society a good deal.

“Here is my best pupil,” said M. Bergeret.

“He looks a sturdy fellow,” said M. Compagnon, who thought a great deal of physical strength. “Why the deuce does he take Latin?”

M. Bergeret was much piqued by this question and inquired whether the mathematical professor was of opinion that the study of the classics ought to be confined exclusively to the lame, the halt, the maimed and the blind.

But already M. Roux was bowing to the two professors with a flashing smile that showed his strong, white teeth. He was in capital spirits, for his happy temperament, which had enabled him to master the secret of the soldier’s life, had just brought him a fresh stroke of good luck. Only that morning M. Roux had been granted a fortnight’s leave that he might recover from a slight injury to the knee that was practically painless.

“Happy man!” cried M. Bergeret. “He needn’t even tell a lie to reap all the benefits of deceit.” Then, turning towards M. Compagnon, he remarked: “In my pupil, M. Roux, lie all the hopes of Latin verse. But, by a strange anomaly, although this young scholar scans the lines of Horace and Catullus with the utmost severity, he himself composes French verses that he never troubles to scan, verses whose irregular metre I must confess I cannot grasp. In a word, M. Roux writes vers libres.”

“Really,” said M. Compagnon politely.

M. Bergeret, who loved acquiring information and looked indulgently on new ideas, begged M. Roux to recite his last poem, The Metamorphosis of the Nymph, which had not yet been given to the world.

“One moment,” said M. Compagnon. “I will walk on your left, Monsieur Roux, so that I may have my best ear towards you.”

It was settled that M. Roux should recite his poem while he walked with the two professors as far as the dean’s house on the Tournelles, for on such a gentle slope as that he would not lose his breath.

Then M. Roux began to declaim The Metamorphosis of the Nymph in a slow, drawling, sing-song voice. In lines punctuated here and there by the rumbling of cart-wheels he recited:

The snow-white nymph,

Who glides with rounded hips

Along the winding shore,

And the isle where willows grey

Girdle her waist with the belt of Eve,

In leafage of oval shape,

And palely disappears.[2]

[2] La nymphe blanche

Qui coule à pleines hanches,

Le long du rivage arrondi

Et de l’île où les saules grisâtres

Mettent à ses flancs la ceinture d’Ève,

En feuillages ovales,

Et qui fuit pâle.

Then he painted a shifting kaleidoscope of:

Green banks shelving down,

With the hostel of the town

And the frying of gudgeons within.[3]

[3] De vertes berges,

Avec l’auberge

Et les fritures de goujons.

Restless, unquiet, the nymph takes to flight.

She draws near the town and there the metamorphosis takes place.

Fretted are her hips by the rough stone of the quay,

Her breast is a thicket of rugged hair

And black with the coal, which mingled with sweat,

Has turned the nymph to a stevedore wet.

And below is the dock

For the coke.[4]

[4] La pierre du quai dur lui rabote les hanches,

Sa poitrine est hérissée d’un poil rude,

Et noire de charbons, que délaye la sueur,

La nymphe est devenue un débardeur.

Et là-bas est le dock

Pour le coke.

Next the poet sang of the river flowing through the city:

And the river, from henceforth municipal and historic,

And worthy of archives, of annals and records,

Worthy of glory.

Deriving something solemn and even stern

From the grey stone walls,

Flows under the heavy shadow of the basilica

Where linger still the shades of Eudes, of Adalberts,

In the golden fringes of the past,

Bishops who bless not the nameless dead,

The nameless dead,

No longer bodies, but leather bottèls,

Who will to go hence,

Along the isles in the form of boats

With, for masts, but the chimney-tops.

For the drownèd will out beyond.

But pause you on the erudite parapets

Where, in boxes, lies many a fable strange,

And the red-edged conjuring book whereon the plane-tree

Sheds its leaves,

Perchance there you’ll discover potent words:

“For you’re no stranger to the value of runes

Nor to the true power of signs traced on the sheets.”[5]

[5] Et le fleuve, d’ores en avant municipal et historique,

Et dignement d’archives, d’annales, de fastes,

De gloire.

Prenant du sérieux et même du morose