CHAPTER EIGHT
MONSIEUR L'ABBÉ PICOT OF THE BRAVE OUTLANDISH HEART
Monsieur l'Abbé Picot, in whose heart there dwelt a queer mixture out of which to make a priest, was talking with a letter, written in a strange foreign hand, as it lay upon his knee. The entire morning had been spent at the beloved task of writing a sonnet. The afternoon, in the most miserable part of Paris, he might have been found visiting the homes of his sick and his poor, to whose ills, of body and of spirit, he deemed himself physician. In the evening for an hour he saw that happy laughing première danseuse, Mademoiselle Andree, at the gay little theater near the corner, pirouetting care from the heavy souls of men. In the early night he had but recently ceased to read the book which still lay open on the floor at his side, and for uncounted joyous moments had fancied himself strutting the streets in the company of the brave D'Artagnan, their swords clanking in their scabbards, their eyes fierce for adventure.
It was thus, upon a day, that his warm love of life would come calling him for the army. At the very thought of men-at-arms his slender nostrils would widen and his imagination sniff the pungent odor of burning powder. There was no doubt in his mind that among his ancestors there had been some great warrior whose passion for fighting was but tempered by his patriotism. And his heroes, were they not Porthos, La Fayette, D'Artagnan, Washington, and Napoleon? Could he have been born to please his own choice of time, other than to have been the captain of the Guards during the reign of Louis XIV—the Louis of his own Dumas, the magnificent—he would have chosen to have fought under the Emperor. Then those escapades of student life at Harcourt! He scarcely dared to dream of such old brave days, now the well-beloved secrets hidden beneath a cassock and a cowl. They were stored in a memory made all the more sacred by the thought that such adventurous hours dare never be lived again. Then he feared for his impulsive nature. His mind, cooled and brought to the level of every day's simple duty, knew what was his actual and true work in the world. But O, the mischief of his wandering fingers, of his heart when the virile passion of life played riot in his veins. So it was, at times he seemed to know that to lead the battle, to cry for France, to spill one's blood for kings, that, indeed, was to be a man.
Yet when the wild airs of the early springtime came caressing the winter's fields and forcing from their barren and frosty breasts the first of the gladsome flowers, the passion in his veins turned merciful. The snows he did not love; for beneath the beauty and the softness of the drifting flakes he saw the treachery of the cold—the cold that brought but misery to his poor and made them almost forget that ever again God would bring the summer-time days. But when the earth lived again and became a mother with a thousand wombs, giving birth each beautiful moment to every green and blossoming thing; when he turned his eyes, made world-weary by looking on the suffering his people needs must bear, unto the blue of the warm skies, where it seemed that the very heavens were renewing, with some mysterious pigments, their blue and the white clouds afloat therein; and women went about with a strange new faith on their brows, while their men grew strong again with hope and courage, it was then that the thoughts of the Abbé Picot wandered to the gentler play of happy children, while his fingers, made kind through a mood quickened by nature, wrought new dreams into song. A poet! Ah, he told himself, was there anything better than to be a maker of dreams? Was the good God ever more gracious than when he gave to one's mind to see and appreciate everything beautiful in a world within which there was so much of ugliness? Aye, on occasions even to find the very hideousness of things containing some inner, secret loveliness for the souls of men? Then, withal, to bless the hand with the art of expressing the things seen of his heart so others, reading in passing, might know His wonders too, was of a surety to be markedly favored of destiny. Thus it was that our good Abbé made sonnets and madrigals with his master Pierre Ronsard, ballades after the manner of that charming rogue François Villon, and songs quite as exquisite as those of the amorous troubadour, Bernard de Ventadour, whom he admired more for the structure of his verses than the sentiment expressed therein.
Probably most of all the Abbé Picot loved the earlier night hours, when, in fancy, his priestly robes laid aside, he seemed to forget his chivalry, his strength of arm, and the tenderness of his hands and live merely to absorb himself in the superficial lives of the men and women passing in the streets. The garish lights of theaters, cafés, and the great salons, the thoroughfares congested with carriages, and bewildered people hastened by fear and the threatening gendarme; the hurried, half-confused movements of belated shoppers, the roaming groups of pleasure-seekers, all found him thinking himself as Pierrot with his Pierrett, the gayest of the revelers. Frequently he would take his stand within an unused doorway and look with curious kindly interest into every face that passed. The pretty chattering grisettes; the swaggering soldier with his impudent leer; the wealthy, from quarters distinguished for their aristocratic dwellers, out to dabble in questionable joys; the vagabond stopping, meanwhile munching his miserable crust, to gaze into the richness of a shop-window at the clothing he might never hope to wear; the gamin, happy, ignorant, old at ten years, and appallingly wise in the ways of crime and despairing poverty; a thief with furtive look, shifting eyes, and hands whose searching fingers curved like the claws of a bird of prey; a courtesan irresponsibly, artificially gay in her rented finery; a priest hurrying to shrive some woful dying player on the boards of existence; a palsied old man tottering on the very edge of his finished days; a gladsome pink-cheeked youth, buoyed by the hope and courage born of inexperience, with his years all unfulfilled; a sick child crying in its mother's impotent arms; birth, death, and all that passes between found a very human interest in the mind, with a prayer in the heart of Monsieur l'Abbé, who now deemed it his particular business in life to be a maker of joys. He knew that none of them were all bad. The most of them were peculiarly generous and often good. His heart told him that a knowledge of life was a far, far better equipment for the soul's physician than a course in theology. To help his men and women, he argued, he must know them, not only in their more potent wrongs and uglier misdeeds, but in their pleasing sins, their follies, the gaiety belonging to the idle, lighter part of their being. And because there was in his own nature a subdued impulse which, uncontrolled, would have led him into many of their venial intemperances, he had a confidence in them wrought of an understanding mind and a sympathetic heart. So this watcher by the side of the road loved the night and all of her mysterious, alluring children. In his fancy he followed in and out of their varied lives until his soul became a part of those to whom he deemed it the biggest thing in the world to bring joy.
After such a night, again in his home with the day's work and play ended, kneeling beside his lonely little bed beneath the crucifix, the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the misery caused by all of life seemed to surge through his veins like a tempestuous sea overwhelming all before it. Quickly crossing himself, sighing while gently shaking his head, he would once again become the good Abbé Jacques Picot. He was, so to speak, a religious free-lance; a priest without benefice, whose relations with the authority of the Church were scarcely evident—a condition somewhat prevalent in France. Yet, unlike many of his brother clerics, he believed his parish to consist of humanity at large.
"Wherever a heart is broken, a soul is sick, or a body suffering," he is known to have said, "it is there I have a work to do. Patria est ubicumque est bene. So my task is wherever joy may be made."
Yet withal, at heart and in temperament he was a loyal Parisian.
Just how long the Abbé's meditations had been going on from the moment he had ceased to read until the concièrge, after knocking upon the door, slipped in and laid a letter upon his lap, it would be difficult to calculate. Whatever that may have been, for much longer did he read, reread, and study the missive before him. Finally he raised his good gray eyes, filled with a sort of an amazing despair, and cried aloud:
"Jacques, Jacques, thou art indeed sore beset. To be one man is of course to be none at all; to be two is the average lot of the more fortunate; but to be no less than five, by all the saints in paradise, is to be worse off than that angel whose right wing was born of heaven and the left of hell!"
"What is it, my brother?" one of the men within him seemed quietly to ask. In fact, the wee, small voice appeared so actual that the good Abbé was startled.
By way of reply, for the hundredth time he read the letter.... It was from a Doctor Felix Longstreet of Oldmeadow, Kentucky, United States of America, announcing an inheritance—that is, with conditions. To him it meant wealth.
"Shall you go?" now inquired the quiet man uneasily.
"It is a green, grassy old name for a town," was the rather irrelevant reply.
"Do you wish to go?" again came the inquiry from the same anxious source.
"Kentucky!" he pronounced with not unbeautiful accents. "Kentucky sounds like poetry for 'out of doors.'"
"What will you do?" insisted several of the little men within at once.
"Things will be different there," argued the Abbé. "It is an old Protestant community. So said the letter.... You will not be in unconventional Rue St. Jacques. You cannot have liberties." He advanced a hundred objections, yet scarcely believing in any of them.
"But I may study," he continued. "I scarcely have an opportunity here. And my beloved philosophy shall have more time. I might even write my memoirs.... You know," in a tone of apology to the quiet one, "every Frenchman who can hold a pen wants to write memoirs.... Besides, cannot I make the people good Catholics?" This he said for conscience's sake.
"That, you know when you say it, would be next to impossible," came the prompt objection.
"I can try very hard, very gently."
"Certainly! It will ease your conscience for accepting quiet, well-ordered years of ease away from the problems of life."
"O, thou tender friend, you are brutally frank.... You help me make up my mind.... I shall go to this land of Kentucky."
"Do.... 'Au revoir, my happy, sunny France,' you shall say, but many's the time your poor heart shall break for her freedom, the merry, care-free streets of Paris, and the road to Amiens we have traveled so often together."
"Very likely.... I think I shall go," came from the Abbé.
"Are you certain?" again insisted the quiet one, with a note of suspicious eagerness illy suppressed.
The Abbé looked about him, before replying, as if sensing something wrong. "I am absolutely sure!" he said a trifle vehemently.
"I am glad," chuckled the quiet one good humoredly. "I wanted to go myself."
It was thus, after much debating with himself, that Monsieur l'Abbé Jacques Picot came to live in the old-fashioned home of the many pillars.