The house

by Henry Bordeaux

BOOK II

I
THE PICTURES

ALL these events, still so fresh in my imagination, grew dim and were temporarily lost in the current of the days which, during the long vacation upon which we were entering, began to flow by like a beautiful stream, full to the brim.

As a general thing our father took his vacation at the same time with us, and made the most of it for getting nearer to us. We saw him much less often this year, and became somewhat weaned from those stories of heroism with which he used to enliven our walks, kindling and stirring us up with fierce desire to fight battles and win victories. When we heard him tell them we used to toss our heads, our eyes would sparkle, we would walk faster, and our steps fell into cadence. But to meet the new expenses which he had assumed he had given up his annual rest. Once in a while he would snatch an afternoon, and make a hasty attempt to re-establish the old nearness to us. But his patients came to seek him at all hours of the day, or lay in wait for him as he passed along. Everything conspired to deprive us of him.

Yet it was evident that his authority was everywhere in exercise. When cracks had appeared in the front of the house iron supports were placed underneath before it was repainted. The rooms were repapered—mine with pleasant pictures of cats and dogs—and the floors were mended where the boards had shrunken apart. Even the kitchen, where for years Mariette had been obstinately insisting on repairs, without producing any effect upon grandfather, who would invariably answer her with the old proverb, “One wastes one’s suds in washing a negro’s head”—even the kitchen was thoroughly repaired and paved with wonderful red bricks. The entrance gate which would not close had been repaired, and even provided with a key, a key which really turned in the lock! The linden was trimmed, permitting the sun-dial once more to mark the hours. The break in the wall, by which the mole-crickets used to penetrate, by which, one memorable evening, I had seen our enemies introducing themselves into the place, was closed by a balustrade, set into the trunk of the chestnut tree. And now too was seen what had never before been seen: the three labourers at their post, and—still more marvellous sight—all three working at once!

Little by little the garden—my old garden that used to be a perfect forest of weeds, in which there was never an end to discovering new trees or plants—so well were they hidden—was transformed and reduced to order. The alleys were cleaned out and sanded, the beds remade and the rose bushes trimmed. The trees, reduced to their proper proportions, cast a well defined shade. A useless field became an orchard. A fountain, set in the heart of a grass plot, sent up a shaft of water to fall in a fine musical rain into its basin. There were flowers and fruits to gather for banquets and desserts. But we no longer dared to feel of the pears and peaches—still less to give to their stems that slight see-saw motion which made them fall. In the wide newly-opened space our larceny would have been discovered. And I vainly sought to lay low with my sword the underbrush that used to grow thick on the edge of the chestnut grove. Tem Bossette refused to whittle me out the smallest wooden sword, and watched over the stakes as if he had paid for them himself.

These changes were not made all at once, and no doubt I have their chronology mixed. We hardly noticed them during their slow and gradual progress, and when they were all made we ceased to remember how things were before. Indeed they were not accomplished without many perturbations. Tem wiped his brow unceasingly and sweated out all his wine. Mimi Pachoux stole away no longer but made a great noise to attest the certainty of his presence; and The Hanged bent his dantesque countenance over obscure and useful tasks. The community of their fate had by no means brought about their reconciliation. They were always observing, spying upon one another, but all three observed and watched the house still more closely. What did they fear to see emerging from it?

I discovered one day. My father, who had become their master, drew near with rapid step. He spoke to each with kindly encouragement, but he examined their work as one who knew.

“All the same, he knows what he is about,” Mimi admiringly confessed.

I learned from Tem that after having severely admonished them he had raised their wages. But he insisted upon good work. In a word, he drew, them back to himself whenever they demurred at a task, or soured upon it. But without doubt he upset all the old habits of a region where people love to drift along, taking life as easily as they drink its new wine. This is why Tem Bossette, more than any of them, sighed for the ancient reign of the Sluggard Kings, when he had lived tranquil and forgotten among his vines.

Once he tried in my presence to move grandfather to pity for his sad fate.

“Friend,” was the answer, “I am nobody here; go to some one else.”

Never had grandfather seemed so full of spirits as since his abdication. No, certainly he did not regret his lost authority, but he made a point of knowing nothing of the acts of the new régime. Did he travel over the kingdom? He seemed never to perceive that its very pebbles were blossoming. But one day, when he was taking the air in the garden, I saw him combing his beard and rubbing his eyebrows—a sure token that he was dissatisfied; he spat, as a sign of contempt, and the little impertinent laugh accompanied words which were incomprehensible to me.

“Oho! everything is being put to rights—what they need is a geometrician rather than a gardener.”

What was he finding fault with? The garden beds, the trees, obedient to the hand of man, made a richly disposed picture. My little ideas of life had here grouped themselves and taken form with unwonted pleasure. I was provoked with grandfather’s lack of enthusiasm.

“See,” I said to him, not knowing just what to say, “those beautiful red cannas around the basin of the fountain.”

He took me by the arm with unexpected roughness.

“Look out, child, you’ll spoil the grass!”

I had indeed set my foot upon the grass border of the path. And I clearly perceived that grandfather was ridiculing my admiration and the garden both at once. Suddenly, under the influence of his sarcasm, I recalled the old garden, the old garden as it had been, a wild mass of foliage, when I might trample on the very borders, with their sparse flowers growing helter-skelter, where I had known the wild joy of liberty.

Grandfather would never have permitted himself such a criticism before my father. My mind having been drawn to observe the dissimilarity between them, I had noticed the constraint in their relations. Father was always making advances; treating grandfather with extreme deference; never failing to inquire as to his health, his walks, and even, indulgent to his meteorological hobby, asking him as to weather prospects. Grandfather would reply briefly, without making the slightest attempt to continue the conversation, which soon fell flat,—or he would bring forward his little wounding smile, as soon as a subject was introduced on which it was not certain that they were in agreement.

One day father asked for his account books, explaining that he needed to verify certain memoranda of claims upon the property which had not yet been settled and which appeared to be exorbitant. Grandfather opened his eyes:

“My account books?”

“Yes.”

“I never kept any.”

Father hesitated for a second. “Very well,” he said simply and turned away.

In his tower where he had settled himself, grandfather took great comfort in wearing his famous green dressing gown and Greek cap of black velvet with its silk tassel. With his telescope fixed upon a pedestal, he would watch by day the boats that ploughed the waters of the lake, and at night he would bring the stars nearer—but only those which moved in the southern half of the sky, because from his former room he had only had a view of this part of the heavens, and knew it better. Much more frequently than in the old days he would come down stairs in this astrologer’s costume, like a deposed monarch who no longer sets store by majesty. It was with great difficulty that Aunt Deen prevented him from going into town, or walking in the country, in this accoutrement.

“It does no one any harm,” he would observe.

Nevertheless, after many entreaties, he would consent to replace the cap with a broad brimmed felt hat, and the dressing gown with a frock coat which had to be almost daily rubbed with benzine, in spite of him, to keep it decent. He would bring home from his walks aromatic plants of which he used to make decoctions which he would mix with brandy, and mushrooms which awakened Aunt Deen’s misgivings. I used to look at them, smell them, but for nothing in the world would I have tasted them. I could not think, in those days, that anything good to eat could be found outside a provision store, except, on a pinch, in our garden.

My father’s reign had lasted three good years, perhaps, indeed, nearer four than three, when an event occurred of large importance in my child life—I fell ill. The previous year I had made my first communion, with such deep fervour that my mother had confidentially wondered to Aunt Deen:

“Is he going to follow the example of Mélanie and Stephen? Will God require of us a third child? His will be done!”

My adventure was almost that of the fair child who escaped from the arms of his mother. In the course of a walk of our “division” I had tumbled into a brook which we had been forbidden to approach, and rather than be blamed had decided to say nothing about it, though I was soaked up to the chest. Fever set in the next day or the day after. I learned later that it was a severe attack of pneumonia, which in time degenerated into pleurisy. My life was believed to be in danger, and my malady became the occasion of a change in the family arrangements which had almost altered the whole direction of my youth. In a half-slumber I heard whisperings around me, the meaning of which I at once interpreted.

“Am I going to die?” I asked mother and Aunt Deen who were at my bedside.

“Be quiet, naughty boy!” murmured Aunt Deen blowing her nose with a sob and deep sighs, which she doubtless supposed herself to be suppressing.

Mother laid her hand upon my brow—its touch refreshed me as her gentle and persuasive voice said,

“Don’t be uneasy; we are here.”

I knew very well what death was. The school porter having died, a weird whim of our religious director had constrained us to defile, class by class, before the bier upon which the corpse had been laid, before the cover of the coffin was screwed down. Now this porter was a short stout man, whose mortal remains required a cubic receptacle in which he looked to us so comical and smirking that we burst into a laugh that, though it scandalised us, we found it impossible to repress. The indignant professor who was acting as marshal to this abortive pilgrimage overwhelmed us with the severest reproaches, not hesitating to add thereto in due time a sermon upon our final destiny. With no circumlocution he informed us that we were all to die, and perhaps very soon, that our parents would die, and that we should lose every one we loved. By degrees our laughter died away. A vague fear took possession of us, heightened by the monotonous repetition of the word death, continually thrown at our heads. When I went back to the house that morning, greatly moved in spite of myself by that vehement discourse, I looked at my father and mother as I had never looked at them before. They were coming and going as usual, without dreaming that I was watching them. They even laughed at one of Bernard’s remarks: I heard them laugh—a hearty laugh very like that which the unlucky porter in his box had aroused in us. Ah, that laugh! especially our father’s laugh, strong and sonorous, giving a splendid impression of health—how it comforted me, and how it put to flight the terrified curiosity which had taken possession of me.

“Aha!” I thought in my little brain, “the teacher was lying like a dentist! They will not die—that is certain. They can’t die. To begin with, when people laugh, that means that they don’t die.”

This evident conclusion set my heart at rest. So far as I was concerned there was no longer any question on the subject. They were in front and I behind them. And since there was no risk for them how could death touch me, passing them by?

My question “Am I going to die?” was therefore simply designed to make myself interesting. In their presence I was safe.

Mother and Aunt Deen watched me by turns, that I might see no strange face; mother took two nights out of three, and I liked her best. She glided into the room like a mist over the lake, without the slightest sound. I was never aware of any of her movements. Her cares and her caresses mingled; while Aunt Deen, the dear woman, at the cost of tremendous effort, disturbed and irritated me.

The important part which I myself was playing was by no means irksome to me. I seemed to myself to have become smaller than my brother James and my sister Nicola, and that I might just as well be rocked to sleep with lullabies. I used to ask for Venice and The Pool, because of my own drenching, and they thought I was delirious. I distinctly see in memory those two faces bending over me, and still more clearly that of my father, who was continually coming to see me; the attentive, fixed, almost severe expression with which he noted the effects of my disease upon my body was quite strange to me. It was his professional expression; the examination once over, his features would relax, lightened up by fatherhood.

One day father brought in another doctor, but I clearly saw that the little man stood in awe of him, and invariably repeated what he said to him. With implacable logic I observed to my faithful nurses,

“What’s the use of troubling that gentleman? Father knows much more about it than he. Father doesn’t need any one.”

I probably uttered these words or something like them in a low voice. Aunt Deen promptly approved.

“The child is right. He speaks so sensibly that he is surely getting well.”

She repeated my remark to father, who was still anxious, and who smiled, as he had not done of late.

“Yes,” he said; “we shall save him.”

I had no need of any such assurance. I felt it so strongly that that was enough. He never dreamed that this very illness, over which he was triumphing by skill and will-power, was later to be the origin of the home tragedy in which I wandered away from him.

My brothers and sisters were brought into my room, two by two, in succession, guarded with all sorts of advice—not to stay long, to make no noise, not to touch the medicine bottles. Naturally they were soon bored and departed. Each of them took some credit for my cure, which I owed to the prayers of Stephen and Mélanie, to Bernard’s martial exhortations and to the comfortable gaiety of Louise. As for the two little ones, they were prudently kept in the background after James, no doubt repeating what he had heard among the servants, had shouted, jumping up and down with enthusiasm,

“Fançois” (he could hardly say r) “will soon be dead.”

Grandfather never appeared at my bedside. Perhaps he apprehended no danger. I think it was rather that he had an invincible horror of illness and all that might result from it. Deeply concerned with his own health, he kept careful account of his bodily functions, and with that perfect courtesy from which he never departed he never failed to inform the entire household of the state of his internal economy; when that went ill he would lament grievously and Aunt Deen would produce from a cupboard a venerable instrument which when rubbed up and mended was still good for use.

“Nothing is more important,” he would say, in our presence, gazing upon the instrument with a satisfied air.

My convalescence was a period of enchantment, not for the new zest that it lent to life, the savour of which only he can taste who has deemed his life put in jeopardy, but because it truly opened to me the mysterious realm of books. I was not unfamiliar with the Rose Library. I knew Canon Schmid, and Jules Verne’s romances, and even the fairy tales of Perrault and Andersen, but I had never found in any of them that heart thrill which keeps you awake in bed at night, expecting, fearing some unknown delight not unmingled with danger, such as I had found in Aunt Deen’s amazing stories, and above all in the epic tales that father used to tell.

Not to weary me, they began by bringing me illustrated books. Bernard let me look over the Epinal albums which he was collecting for the sake of the military costumes, and which it cost him some self-denial to lend. I begged for Gustave Doré’s Bible, of which once in the parlour by special favour I had been shown the pictures without being permitted to touch it. The two heavy volumes were propped up on the table, in great state, and I passed long hours in turning the pages. Mother would come and go in the room, somewhat surprised at my being so good, and even a little disturbed by my silence. She would approach noiselessly and look over my shoulder.

“You are not getting tired?”

“Oh, no!”

“You are not bored?”

“Oh, mamma!”

“Are they beautiful?”

“I don’t know.”

When one is a child one doesn’t know what is beautiful. The beautiful thing is to have the heart satisfied. What a sudden uplift my entire æsthetic nature received from them! The unframed outlines of nature had never impressed me; now that, copied, transferred to a square of paper, I could look at them, I saw them, not only on the motionless page, but everywhere, and all alive. The house with its great stones, the walled-in garden—I had often used to touch them, understand them, possess them;—and besides, they belonged to me. But beyond our house the universe began, and its limitlessness had repelled me, so that I could never think of it as having definite outlines. And here those outlines were, before my eyes; through the open Bible I discovered them.

At thirty years’ distance I find again in my memory, with no need of verification, the pictures of Gustave Doré. The pages turn of their own accord and my beloved phantoms reappear. Here are those visions of dread, Leviathan upheaving the sea, the destroying Angel exterminating Sennacherib’s army, the long train of Nicannor’s elephants between which Judas Maccabeus has to pass, and Death in the Apocalypse on his pale horse. They were not my favourites, and in the evening I used even to avoid them. My favourites were those quiet, reposeful, almost shadowy Oriental landscapes, where the summer sunlight seemed to draw up mists, where strange plants grew most unlike our oaks and chestnuts, where in the background were shadows of oxen and camels, far away like boats upon the lake in time of fog.

The birth of Eve seemed lovely to me. While Adam sleeps among the flowers of Eden, she uprises erect and unclothed, with floating hair. One of her knees—look at it, I am sure of it!—slightly bent, is caressed by the sunlight. Through her, by this light upon her knee, I felt something of the pure perfection of nudity long before I even dreamed of its desire. Abraham leads his flocks to the land of Canaan, and the backs of the huddled sheep undulate like the waves that I had seen from the lake shore. The cradle of Moses floats upon the Nile; Pharaoh’s daughter has come out from the palace that stands basking in the sun; she draws near the river; one of her waiting women takes up the little bark. Rebecca, in a long white veil, rests her pitcher upon the margin of the well and talks with Eliezer, a venerable old man; but I don’t distinguish her from the Samaritan woman who takes the same position. Ruth, kneeling, gleans the wheat ears. The great cedars of Lebanon, cut down, lie upon the earth which their shadow overspreads; they are waiting to be used in building the temple in Jerusalem. The angel of the Annunciation hovers in the air, like a falling leaf upheld by the wind. Jesus in the house of Lazarus is sitting on the window ledge, the moonlight stealing through the palm trees. Mary crouching at his feet is drinking in his words, Martha, standing, is busy with household cares. Pictures through which peace flows like a limpid stream, and which are but the transposition of every-day scenes, almost like those which I might have seen at our house and in the country,—pictures of obscure lives, through which God passes.

One day when I declined to be present at the return of the prodigal son to the paternal home, my mother, who loved that parable, asked the reason of this disdain.

“Why don’t you look at this page?”

I made a gesture of disgust. It seemed commonplace to me—a father forgiving his son—what was there surprising in that?

Athalia wringing her hands in despair beside the temple wall, while the soldiers come running to kill her, recalled to my mother her convent. She had herself taken part in the chorus of that tragedy which Racine had written for the young pupils of Saint-Cyr, and which by a happy tradition all girls’ boarding schools used to present in those days; the Unes came back to her with a rush:

The universe is full of His magnificence:

Let us praise God and worship Him forever.

She would recite them with that emotion which religious things always awakened in her, and her tones touched me more directly than that sophisticated art which was beyond my powers.

Another little book had a part in opening my mind to poetry,—it was a book of ballads. A knight wandering in the forest, snatched away from Titania, queen of the elves and sylphs, her cup of happiness and carried it off to his castle on his galloping horse. A little girl on the bank of a stream sang the romance of the swan’s nest hidden among the reeds, and dreamed of a knight who should come upon a red roan steed. The Lord of Burleigh married a shepherdess, who languished in the palace to which he took her, and died of longing for her village and her cottage. How I entered into their longings and their melancholy! Their heartaches poured into my heart a delicious pain, which I could not fathom. Yet I was beginning to discern that we have within ourselves an upspringing fountain of infinitely delicate joys.

Did my father distrust these exciting readings as he did grandfather’s music? He brought me short, simple biographies of great men. It is never too early to make acquaintance with such. One forms a habit of comparing himself with the heroes, and doesn’t fail to say to oneself: “I have time before me; when I am their age I mean to have surpassed them....” By degrees one begins to look for those whose exploits come late in life. I do not know which of these exemplary personages it was of whom I read that he entered the school of adversity. I imagined that school to be at least as severe as the Polytechnic, or Saint-Cyr, to which my brother Bernard was destined, and I burned to present myself there for admission. I did not know that it is the only one that requires no examination, no preliminaries, above all, no recommendation. I confided my desire to my mother. She smiled, which vexed me, and assured me that I should indeed present myself there for admission, but she hoped it would be as late as possible.

These readings transported me into a glorious state of enthusiasm. I could not have understood sarcasm. No one made use of it in our family. There was only grandfather’s little laugh. Our parents loved gaiety, took pleasure even in the noise that we made, but they never used ridicule. They took life seriously, as an opportunity for well-doing, and deemed that it deserved the greatest respect. Grandfather, running through my books, on the first visit that he deigned to pay me after being assured that I was recovering, let fall certain exclamations:

“Oho! the Bible! and the Famous Men! Poor child! Just wait, I’ll bring you some books.”

And in fact he brought me “Scenes from the Public and Private Life of Animals,” and the “Adventures of Three Old Sailors,” both adorned with illustrations. The latter volume was in a sad condition, the stitches loose, the leaves falling out, and the end entirely gone as well as the cover. It must have been translated from the English and its humour perplexed me. Those three sailors, who had escaped from shipwreck, landed on a desert island where they were pursued by a tiger. They climbed a tree, by way of refuge from the ferocious creature, and the picture showed them clinging to the trunk perched one above the other, with hair standing on end, eyes staring, toes curled up. The wild beast was springing up toward them, it was easy to see that with a little exertion he would have them. Then with fierce resolution inspired by the most imperative necessity, the two uppermost bore down with all their weight upon the lowermost one, in order to force him to let go, hoping that this prize would suffice to satisfy the assailant’s fury. And while bearing down with all their might they addressed to their unhappy companion the most touching words of parting:

“Good-bye, Jeremiah” (such was his unpropitious name), “we will go and console your poor father and your betrothed.”

But Jeremiah, like Rachel, refused to be comforted, and stiffened himself, to cling the tighter. Accustomed as I was to tales of heroism I was much displeased with these traitorous friends.

“Scenes in the Life of Animals” appeared to me to have more sense. It was a motley collection such as all old-time libraries prided themselves on containing. Grandville’s vignettes revealed to me traces of animal characteristics in men, whom till then I had thought of only as in the image of God. The animals in the book were dressed like men and women and looked like them. I soon became accustomed to this treatment, the disguises were so natural! Here were the nightingale as a postman, the dog as a lackey, the rabbit as a petty subaltern employe, and there were the vulture as a landed proprietor, the lion as an old beau, the turkey as a banker, the ass as an academician. The centipedes were playing the piano for a young lady dancing on the tight rope, while the cricket was making a trumpet of the carolla of the bindweed. The chameleon, as a deputy, mounted the tribune to state that he was proud and happy to be always of everybody’s opinion. The shark and the saw-fish had on surgeons’ blouses, and frankly declared, “We are going to cut muscles, saw bones—in a word, heal the sick.” The wolf, having murdered a sheep, is reading in his prison the Idylls of Mme Deshoulières, while celebrity comes to him under the form of a complaint sold by hawkers, to be sung to the air of Fualdès:

Hearken, Woodpeckers and Ducks,

Jays and Turkeys, Crows and Rooks;

The story of a frightful crime

Worthy of Harpies, in their time.

Who performed the direful act?

A wolf, indelicate, in fact.

The bear was enjoying retirement in the bosom of his family; he could be seen warming his youngest born by holding him before the fire by the paws; his wife was hanging linen before the fire and a young cub in a corner was lifting up his little shirt by way of precaution before retiring; some one is knocking at the door, but the legend explains:

“We live by ourselves; we detest visitors and bores.”

A parroquet flapping his wings without being able to fly represented the illustrious poet Kacatogan. And the martlet with the magpie and the crow made a trio of women of letters. I did not know what a woman of letters could be, but the White Blackbird, who like the parroquet was a poet, taught me in his memoirs:

While I was composing my poems she was bedaubing reams of paper with her scribblings. I would recite my verses to her aloud, and she, indifferent, kept on writing while I was doing so. She produced romances with a facility almost equal to mine, always choosing the most dramatic subjects: parricides, kidnappings, murders, and even pocket-picking, always taking pains to attack the government, in passing, and to preach the emancipation of Martlets. In one word, no effort was too great for her mind, no clap-trap for her modesty; it never occurred to her to erase a line, nor to work out a plan before setting to work. She was the typical lettered Martlet.

Aunt Deen also produced stories with marvellous facility; she, too, preferred terrible subjects and was not averse to attacking the government. I even suspected her of not knowing, when she began, how she was going to end up, and of inventing the plots of her stories as she went along. Then why didn’t she bedaub paper? The simplest way was to ask her.

“Aunt Deen, are you a woman of letters?”

She asked me twice to repeat my question, as if women of letters really belonged to the zoological kingdom, in the category of monsters. After which she shrugged her shoulders, not even deigning to reply directly.

“The child is certainly crazy. Augustus’s books have addled his brain.”

There was some talk of taking away the “Scenes in the Life of Animals,” the caricatures in which had amused even my father and brought a smile to his lips. The effect of the incident was to attach me all the more strongly to the White Blackbird, who had nearly caused the book to be placed upon the Index. And I soon came to see what it undoubtedly was that distinguished Aunt Deen from the Lettered Martlet. The latter, with immaculate plumage, was in fact merely painted—covered over with a layer of flour which gave her that appearance of having fallen from the sky. The White Blackbird, who never suspected it, and thought he had discovered in the Martlet a creature unique in all the world, becoming suspicious of a mysterious pot of some white mixture, had a disastrous experience. His poems moving him to tenderness, he shed such profuse tears over his companion as to dissolve the plaster of paris with which she was covered, and reveal her as the most commonplace of blackbirds. Now I had often wept in Aunt Deen’s arms; she had bewailed my sorrows without losing anything of her colour. She made use neither of paste nor flour; no, decidedly, however beautiful the stories she made up, she would never be a woman of letters.

Another bit of knowledge came to me from the White Blackbird. I learned from him to enjoy the charm of words for their own sake, independently of their meaning. After his conjugal mishap, he fled to the forest to confide his woes to the Nightingale, uttering to her this plaint: I was co-ordinating fooleries while you were in the woods. I did not clearly grasp the meaning, because of the co-ordination of fooleries, which eluded me, and yet I loved the melody of this phrase, and repeated it over and over to myself. The reply of the Nightingale, still more deeply charged with mystery, completely upset me. I love the Rose, he sighed. Sadi the Persian has sung of her: I wear out my throat all night singing to her, but she sleeps, and hears me not. Her chalice is at this moment closed; she is cherishing an old Beetle there; and to-morrow morning, when I go back to my couch, exhausted with suffering and weariness, then she will open her petals that a bee may devour her heart. I took no interest either in the old Beetle or in Sadi the Persian; the exhausted Nightingale, and that Rose with the devoured heart, communicated to me, by the magic of syllables, a sort of far-off presentiment of love-pain, in which I found a vague and ineffable sadness.

Such sadness was very quick to pass. Much sooner, however, I had borrowed from my new friends, the animals, an art of ridiculing which I found most delightful. I could see no one without finding his double among the beasts. Tem Bossette with his flat face and goggle eyes became a frog—the very frog that tried to make himself as big as the ox; Mimi Pachoux with his furtive step and sudden disappearance I compared to a rat, and The Hanged, who always seemed to find difficulty in using his arms, to a kangaroo, with his very short front legs.

This turn of mind shocked and disturbed my mother. One day she received in my presence a visit from a person of a certain age who was superintending a work room, founding an orphan asylum, building a school, in a word, directing more works in the parish than actually existed. Her name was Mlle Tapinois. She was tall and dried up, with a pointed nose, sloping shoulders and a frigid air. She cooed softly without a moment’s interruption. When she was gone I showed mother, in my book, an old dove in a night gown, with a candle-stick in its claw:

“Mademoiselle Tapinois,” I said triumphantly.

Mother protested against my unseemly comparison.

“She is a holy woman,” she concluded, by way of arousing my sympathy.

But though she did not admit it, I saw that she had recognised the likeness.

Encouraged by the degree of success I had achieved with Mlle Tapinois, I thenceforth watched our visitors to deal out to them the same treatment, and the facility of this game amazed me. I had no difficulty in finding a stout landed proprietor for the elephant, a woe-begone collector of mortgages for the owl, a pianist for the centipede. An old nobleman with a Roman nose reminded me of the falcon whom the Revolutions had ruined. In a very short while my collection was further enriched by the bear, the chameleon, and several rabbits, drawn from the registry or the tax office. But the region at that time had no departmental muse worthy to be catalogued among the martlets. They tell me that there are swarms of them now-a-days.

Grandfather, to whom I confided my observations, gave them his full approbation.

“Now you know,” he said, “that animals and men are brothers. But the animals are better fellows than we.”

Nevertheless a secret instinct warned me not to consult my parents on this subject.

II
THE DESIRE

FINE weather had come. Three months still lay between us and the long vacation. Father, agreeing with the timid little colleague whom he had again called in to support his own opinion, declared that I was not to return to school until the end of the vacation next October.

“The child needs out-of-door air. The first thing is to build up his health.”

I was pained by this decision, which wounded my pride. If I were not in school during the last quarter, I could not hope for a wreath at the distribution of prizes. For I was full of emulation, and loved to take the first place, though this brought down upon me grandfather’s ridicule.

“Those classifications mean nothing. First or last it’s all one.”

Father laid out for me a very simple plan of life. A country walk morning and evening, far from the microbes of the town, where you can breath fresh air uncontaminated by human beings. Thus I should recover strength and appetite. But who would walk with me and be my guide? Who would undertake a peripatetic preceptorship of this sort? Father, already behind in his duties because of my long illness, belonged to his absorbing profession; mother, whose presence was certainly required by the whole family, especially the little ones, could hardly ever leave the house except to go to church. Aunt Deen had no out-of-door legs, a deficiency which did not prevent her going up and down stairs, from kitchen to tower, a hundred times a day. There remained grandfather. He always took a walk morning and evening on his own account; what would it cost him to take me along? This would suit all round; the plan was evidently the best possible.

I perceived, however, that it met a serious resistance, for I overheard my parents discussing it in the calm and confident tone which they always used when regulating, in perfect accord, all questions concerning us.

“I would not have him turn him against the house,” said my father.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if it were wrong to admit such a thought, “he wouldn’t do that! You don’t think that of your own father, surely! Of course he has his whims, and his ideas are not always ours. What he needs is God. But he is good hearted; he will be grateful to you for your confidence. And we could not ask such a thing of a stranger.”

“I am not quite satisfied with the plan,” said father.

A little later he resumed the subject. “I will speak to him; there seems to be no other way.”

When this proposition concerning me was broached to him, grandfather acceded to it without either enthusiasm or hostility, with an indifference that wounded me.

“I’d just as soon. It’s the same to me whether I take my walk alone or with some one.” (Naturally!) “Children ought to live out of doors. Study does no good. No more do medicines.”

Father no doubt had an interview with him at which I was not present, and the affair was decided. How would he act toward his new companion? He always treated my brothers and sisters and me, even the two youngest, like reasonable persons, though a little more interesting than others, lending to our remarks as much attention as to those of grown persons; but we had an impression that he couldn’t always tell us apart, and that he would cheerfully have dispensed with us all, which seemed to us an affront.

Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot, then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather’s with a certain solemnity—as a reigning king might do, I thought.

“Here is my son,” he said; “I entrust him to you; he holds the future of our house.”

Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an every-day footing:

“Don’t worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him.”

I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father of me?

The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.

“Where are we going, grandfather?”

I inclined to the direction of the town, where we should find attractions of all sorts, shops, bazars, show-windows, faces, noise and movement.

At the outset we were stopped by the closed gate, the key of which we had forgotten to bring.

“Run and get it, child. But why the devil should they barricade the gate?”

It was one of Aunt Deen’s thousand precautions; the previous evening, or the one before, she had seen from afar a gipsy waggon, and since then she had been keeping prudent guard over the household. I ran, somewhat scandalised by grandfather’s remark. Wasn’t it necessary to guard the house against enemies? A kingdom has frontiers which must be respected; was it not enough that shadows crossed them every evening in spite of gates and bolts?

We are off at last, and grandfather at once turns his back upon the town:

“Child, I don’t like towns.”

Good-bye to shops and people! We had not walked ten minutes when he took it into his head to leave the highroad, along which we were walking at our ease, quite properly, without hurry, and took a footpath which crossed the fields haphazard.

“You’re taking the wrong road, grandfather.”

“Not at all. Child, I detest roads!”

Well, well! he was more surprising than when he used to come down to the dining-room in his dressing gown and Greek cap. I had always supposed that roads were made to be used, not despised. And besides, how could one get along without them when one went out?

The hardly perceptible path which we had taken obliged us to walk single file. I went first, in the capacity of scout. The wheat on one side was already tall, on the other side were oats, quivering on their slender stems. I had learned to know the various grains from our farmer. Wheat and oats soon mingled fraternally before me.

“Grandfather, there is no more path.”

We might have expected it. Our path had vanished. Grandfather quietly passed before me, appeared to take his bearings, snuffed the wind, trampled down a few stalks, and reached a hedge which he overleaped with an ease that was surprising at his age.

“My boy,” he said, helping me to scramble through it, “I abhor fences.”

Our comradeship was beginning well! No roads, no fences! We soon entered a chestnut wood, not in the least like the four or five trees which were the pride of our domain. Here, above us, was a great vault supported by trunks and intermingled branches like so many colossal columns. I saw grandfather stoop and gather from the moss a mushroom that looked like a little white umbrella, wide open.

“This is a sort of amanita,” he said. “It is supposed to be poisonous, whereas it is edible.” (He tasted it to prove his words.) “It isn’t the season, yet. I will teach you to know all the cryptogams. There are very few noxious ones. Nature is good, and never wishes us harm. It is men who spoil her. I know a priest who lives on Satan bolets, and is never the worse.”

He laughed to himself at the priest who could swallow the devil without indigestion.

At last we reached an open space whence no house was to be seen, nor even a cultivated field,—not a trace of humanity. The woods separated us from the town and the lake, upon which a few craft were always sailing. At our back was a rocky hill, half covered with furze and brambles. A slender cascade fell from the summit and was transformed at our feet into a clear, noiseless rill. We were tramping through bracken and a coarse grass, starred with all the flowers of spring. The brook had given a rare exuberance to all this vegetation. The monotonous sound of the waterfall by no means disturbed the solitude of the spot, at once wild and gentle and so secluded. One might have thought oneself at the very end of the earth—or at its beginning. I felt at once happy and desolate.

I had of course taken many a walk with my father. But he always took us to heights that commanded a view; he would point out by name the mountains on the edge of the horizon, the villages in the plain below, the ports on both sides of the lake. He made us feel that the earth was inhabited, and that it was interesting and beautiful because it was inhabited. Now I suddenly discovered the charm of wild nature.

“What is its name?” I asked grandfather to reassure myself.

“The name of what?” he asked, not comprehending.

“The place where we are.”

The question surprised him, and provoked a little laugh that I did not enjoy.

“It has no name.”

“Who owns it?”

“Nobody.”

Nobody! That was very strange. Just as the house must always have belonged to us, I had supposed that the whole earth was divided into properties.

“To us, if you like,” grandfather went on.

And his laugh, his terrible little laugh, began to undermine my notions about life, my beliefs. It produced upon me the effect of the touch of the finger that I used to give when I erected great buildings with my blocks. The edifice grew higher, higher,—I barely touched with my finger one of the columns at the base, and down it all came.

“Oh, to us!” I protested.

People were not to take possession of other people’s property like that, simply because they did not know the owner’s name. Everything that I had been taught protested.

“Why, yes, little simpleton,” he replied. “Every one takes his own in the world. Do you like this bit of land? It is yours,—like the sun that warms us, the air that we breath, the loveliness of these early spring days.”

I was not convinced. Dim resistances awoke within me, shivering; I found no words to express them, and could only bring forward the poor objection:

“Yes, but I couldn’t take anything from it.”

“You take your pleasure from it, that’s the important thing.”

Confident of victory, he clinched it by invoking the testimony of a third party.

“Jean-Jacques would explain to you better than I can, that nature holds within itself the happiness of man. Jean-Jacques would have loved this retreat.”

He uttered the name Jean-Jacques with devout unction, pursing his lips. He spoke of him as Aunt Deen spoke of the best known and most useful saints, Saint Christopher, for example, who protects against accidents, or Saint Antony, who helps to find lost objects. Puzzled, I at once asked:

“Who is that—Jean-Jacques?”

“A friend; a friend whom you do not know.”

Why, I knew, or thought I knew, all grandfather’s friends. He received few visits, mostly from other old men, who appeared older than he, who seemed to be sad and who soon bored him. There was one who would sit down without saying a word, and would just sit a long time, motionless and mute. One day grandfather forgot that he was there and left the room. On his return he found him in the same place, fast asleep. Grandfather would complain openly about the visits of all these “old fogies” as he called them, not one of whom, I was certain, was named Jean-Jacques. On the other hand, he always liked to come down to the drawing-room when he thought he might meet ladies there.

Time pressing, we returned through the chestnut grove, but went out on another side, passing through a second hedge, this one of young acacias. It was with manifest pleasure that I saw houses and cultivated fields again.

“Come! here are private properties for you,” said grandfather when we reached the cultivated grounds. His lips curled with disdain. Not at all disconcerted I asked for landmarks.

“Where is ours?”

“I don’t know. Look over there, at the left. You’ll see it all right as we go on. As for me, when I take a walk I go where fancy leads me. One always gets home somehow.”

When we reached the highroad a strange and disquieting apparition presented itself. I clung to my new preceptor:

“Grandfather, look up the road!”

It seemed to be coming toward us from over the hill, with a slow uniform motion. In a few minutes it would be here. Grandfather shaded his eyes with his hands, the better to concentrate his vision, and explained the phenomenon:

“It’s the sheep that leave Provence every spring and go up to the high pastures. They are led there by easy stages. Let us get to the side of the road, beyond this pile of stones, and watch them go past.”

Thus instructed, I was soon able to distinguish between the almost white road and the yellow-grey and brown flock which composed a single moving mass,—repeated above all those regularly swaying backs by a thin cloud of dust which spread over the fields on either side. At once I saw again the picture in my Bible which showed Abraham travelling to the land of Canaan.

In front of the flock marched a shepherd, wrapped in a great cape which must have been many a time exposed to wind and rain, for it was of the greenish colour of a thatched roof over which many winters have passed. Notwithstanding the sun, his ample covering appeared not to inconvenience him. No doubt our sun was not as warm as that which he had left behind. His hat pulled down over his eyes cast a dark shadow over the upper part of his face, only his grey beard being distinctly visible. He was an old man, and he advanced slowly with a slight swaying of the whole body. He might have been taken for a beggar but for an unconscious air of majesty which covered him like his cloak—that of a captain leading his company, that of a sower sowing his seed. He took no one step faster than another, and the rhythm of his regular advance seemed to communicate itself to the entire column. It gave an impression as of the whole landscape following, obeying in cadence a law which he fixed, the oxen tracing the furrows, the reapers laying bare the fields, the morning and the evening obedient to the time of returning, and even the stars at night traversing, unhastingly, a part of the sky which I had thought I could see moving in grandfather’s spy-glass.

He seemed to me so important that I bowed to him, but he did not return my salutation, nor deign to detach his attention from his absorbing task. Grandfather began a sentence:

“Tell me, shepherd ...” but deemed it useless to go on, recognising the intense seriousness of the man.

A black dog walked almost under his feet, and behind came, in a triangular group, three lean, hairless donkeys, laden with objects which could not be seen since they were covered with an awning. Their heads hung almost to the ground as if they would fain have snuffed it up, or browsed upon it. The main body of the army followed them, the sheep-people, crowding close to one another, eight or ten in a row when one could manage to count them, but most of the time the rows were indistinct, subject to flux and reflux, the great mass of wool undulating as if it were that of a single rampant and interminable animal, over which continual shivers passed.

I did not at first distinguish anything in this uniform and agitated mass. Then I noticed little black spots that were ears. By degrees, as I got used to them, certain individualities emerged from the compact, monotonous throng. There were rams, generally taller, with long horns rolled in a circle, and bells hanging from their necks by a wooden horseshoe shaped collar. There were sheep with white or black coats, better cared for than the others, walking with a certain ostentation. There were also vagabond animals, capricious as goats, which would gladly have escaped from the road but for the vigilance of the dogs that operated on the flanks of the procession, long-haired grey dogs, with eyes shining from cavernous depths under overhanging brows, attentive and active, not to be by any means distracted from their duty as sergeants. One of the sheep climbed upon the stones that protected us, and was immediately imitated by several of her companions. One of the guardians, open-mouthed, cut short the escapade, and forced them to return to their proper place.

They passed and they passed. I thought they would never be done, estimating their number at several thousands. Perhaps there really were three or four hundred of them. At last the flood slackened, the ranks grew thinner, seven or eight isolated sheep closed the procession. Last of all came the rearguard, composed of four pack mules and a second shepherd, less august and solemn than the first. When he had come opposite us grandfather, grown braver, put the question to which the other one had paid no heed:

“Well, shepherd, where are you going like that?”

He was a young man, supple, thin and muscular, wearing a short jacket, red sash, and hat on the back of his head,—one who cared neither for heat nor cold. His bronzed face was exposed to the full rays of the sun. He was whistling to pass away the time, and smiling while he whistled, as if he enjoyed his music—though perhaps it was the curve of his lips that made him look as if he were smiling.

At grandfathers question he burst into a frank laugh; his teeth shone between his lips—such teeth as I had seen in wolves or other wild beasts in a menagerie to which I was once taken. He simply replied:

“To the mountain.”

How strange the resonance that certain syllables have for us! He might have designated by its name the mountain where his flocks were to pasture, and I should not have noticed it, but the unexpected lack of precision communicated to me by some sorcery a longing for the heights. It attacked me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a lightning shock. I had not felt the charm of the wild, bare place from which I was returning with grandfather; but now I was not only instantaneously initiated into it,—I augmented its wildness and isolation. I felt upon my brow a colder, sterner breath, the wind of summits which I had never seen. Later in my life poems and symphonies have given me this imaginary sensation, though more faintly. In each discovery that it makes the heart, like a virgin, gives of its freshness.

Before the passing of the sheep I had managed to discover where we were. Notwithstanding its surrounding trees, I had proudly recognised the house below us in the edge of the town. It had always appeared very large to me, vast as a kingdom, and now I seemed to find it small and insignificant, simply because I had heard within me the music of three words, “To the mountain.”

A few years later it was my lot to climb over mountains, those that are covered with pines and larches, and those whose only vegetation is ice, those that are carpeted with grass, soft as rosy flesh, those that are all bone and muscle, like Michel Angelo’s figures, and again those whose treacherous whiteness only loses its immobility under the warming glow of the setting sun. They have taught me patience, calmness, and perhaps also contempt, though one of the most difficult of Christian precepts obliges us to despise no man. There I have met and tasted by turns war and peace, struggle and serenity, the intoxication of solitude and the glory of conquest in the blinding splendour of the snow. They have never given me anything that was not contained in germ in the shepherd’s reply.

On our return home, when we opened the gate, there were Tem Bossette and his two acolytes digging, their faces bent on the ground. One of them having perceived us, they rested with one accord, sure of our complicity.

Aunt Deen congratulated me on my red cheeks; mother thanked grandfather for his care of me. Father asked:

“Did you enjoy it?” and rejoiced when I answered in the affirmative. No one suspected, I least of all, that that little boy, till then contented, and never dreaming of anything outside of The House, had brought desire home with him from his walk.

III
THE DISCOVERY OF THE EARTH

THAT period of my life is quite luminous in my memory: only later it seems as if the sun must have been a little dimmed. I walked out with grandfather morning and evening, I came into closer relations with nature, and I had a new suit of clothes. It was the first. Up to that time I had worn those of my elder brothers cut down to fit me. A seamstress used to come to the house to alter and mend the garments destined for me. She was as homely as heart could wish, and had been recommended by Mlle Tapinois, who flattered herself that she had formed her in her work-rooms.

I had grown rapidly during my illness. What was then my surprise when I was informed that a tailor, a real tailor, was coming to take my measures, mine, not Bernard’s nor Stephen’s! The tailor’s name was Plumeau. Tall and thin as a lath, he floated in an immense frock coat. Did he propose, like God when he created man, to make me in his own image and after his likeness? He fabricated for me a full suit of olive green which emphasised my leanness, to which end he had neglected nothing. The coat, rivalling an overcoat, reached to my knees: the cloth was of a solidity calculated to defy time. It was very evident that I had a suit that would last till I took my baccalaureate. I somehow had the impression that it favoured me too much, and my vanity rebelled. The whole family had been summoned to see me in my new suit, and ratify its acceptance. I was constrained to turn round and round like a horse in the market, and my rebellious face became almost as long as my coat.

“It will do,” father finally pronounced.

It would do? Yes, in two or three years, when I had grown a great deal more. Mother was cautious about speaking too approvingly. My brothers kept silence, but I perceived that they were smothering their laughter, a self-denial which Louise by no means exercised. Aunt Deen saved the situation which was becoming painful. She arrived late upon the scene, for she had been putting to rights in the tower chamber when notified of the arrival of M. Plumeau. We heard her on the stairs before we saw her. Hope at once revived. Her coming was like the arrival of fresh troops upon the field of battle—she decided the fortunes of the day.

Hardly had she perceived me, lost in my new suit, when she cried:

“It’s admirable, Francis; I won’t keep it from you; never have I seen any one so becomingly dressed.”

Every one drew a long breath and I was comforted; so greatly, indeed, that, unwilling to part with my fine garments, I put them on for our next walk. Grandfather did not notice. But at the gate Aunt Deen overtook us all out of breath.

“Naughty boy!” she exclaimed, “putting on your best clothes for a walk!”

She almost undressed me with her own hands in the street; I must needs go back to the house under her escort, to exchange my costume for less distinguished raiment, and the walk that day was spoiled. But those that came afterward made it up to me.

There was the forest and there was the lake....

The forest, with certain farms and vineyards, made part of a historic domain, the château of which, after enduring sieges and entertaining great personages of the army or the church, was half in ruins and no longer habitable. The whole property belonged to a retired colonel of cavalry, son of a Baron of the Empire, whose fortune not being sufficient to keep it up decently, he was permitting it to fall into decay. He lived alone and spent the whole day riding about on one or another of his old horses, without ever going beyond his estate. Though it was entirely surrounded with a wall grandfather and I used to find our way in by breaches which we had discovered.

He led me about among the trees, taught me to distinguish their characteristics, and encouraged me to sit down under their shade, on the moss and not on the treacherous benches which we perceived sparsely scattered here and there, the woodwork of which was rotten with damp. Grass was growing in the alleys, which under over-arching trees guided the gaze to portals of light, that seemed on one side to be blue, because of the lake which they framed in.

It was the month of June. A thousand tones of green were mingling, marrying, all around us, from the pale green of the parasite mistletoe to the almost black of the ivy which climbed the oak trunks. Spring was singing its whole gamut around us. And under the trees there still remained heaps of red leaves, vestiges of the former season.

I felt a vague fear at being thus alone, we two, amidst so imposing and silent an assembly, and I tried to talk, in order to make our presence there seem more real.

“Hush!” said grandfather; “be still and listen.”

Listen to what? And yet, little by little, I began to perceive a multitude of soft sounds. We were no longer alone, as I had thought; innumerable living things were all around us.

Far away two chaffinches were calling to one another at regular intervals. The more distant one took up softly the couplet which the other was pouring forth from a full throat. From tree to tree the latter drew nearer. I saw him, my eye met his—so little and round! As I did not stir, he remained. But what could be those dull, reiterated blows? Woodpeckers, tapping the trunks with their bills.

Long bands of light glided here and there between the branches and lay upon the ground; in their rays, which brought out the shapes of the leaves, spiders’ webs were swinging, their finest threads plain to see, and wasps, buzzing as they flew about. At last I could even hear the rustling of the grass;—the secret labour of the earth under the influence of heat. I was discovering a life of which I had never dreamed.

“What is that call, grandfather?” I asked in a low tone.

“It must be a hare; let’s hide, and perhaps, if you are very quiet, we shall see it before long.”

Upon this dialogue we softly dragged ourselves behind a bush. I knew hares only from having eaten of them on rare occasions of ceremony, though Aunt Deen deplored giving rabbit to children, because of the soiling of napkins and faces. The cry sounded again—nearer us this time.

“He is calling his doe,” whispered grandfather.

“His doe?”

“Yes, his wife. Be quiet.”

It was a gentle call, infinitely tender and languishing. Far away we heard another call, like it, but hardly audible. From opposite sides of the forest the duet went on; and I began to understand that animals, like people, love to see and talk to one another. Suddenly, before me, crossing the path, I saw two long ears and a little ball of a brown body which seemed to bound over it. At the very edge the hare stopped, hearkened to the distant, guiding voice, once again uttered his heart-breaking cry, and disappeared in the neighbouring underbrush. He was hastening to join his mate, but I had had time to see him quite plainly.

Another time it was a fox. He must have scented us with his pointed muzzle, for he fled at top speed, his tail between his legs. Being learned in such matters through La Fontaine’s fables, and the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I informed grandfather that this was a plot and it would be well for us to make off.

“How stupid you are!” he exclaimed. “The fox is harmless.”

At which I was somewhat scandalised. But our walks were not always calm to this degree. From our favourite nook we sometimes heard, like a heavy rain, the galloping of a horse, and we would hardly manage to hide behind the trunk of a beech, when the colonel would appear, on horse-back. He had a short nose, a stiff moustache and hollow cheeks. He sat upright, knees out, looking at nothing, and as he passed he seemed to me a fearful man. Grandfather hastened to reassure me.

“He’s an old beast,” he said, “and his mount can’t trot any longer.”

I later learned that both had fought at Reichhoffen.

But on a graver occasion grandfather himself gave the signal for retreat. I saw him cock his ear after the fashion of the hare, then rise hastily from the grass on which we were sitting.

“Dogs,” he murmured, fearfully. “Let’s go.”

We made for the wall as fast as his old legs and my too-new ones would permit. The dogs were already rushing upon us, barking and threatening, when grandfather, who had pushed me before him, reached the top. The alarm had agitated him and our safety by no means pacified him.

“Pretty proprietors!” he fulminated; “a little more and their dogs would have devoured us!”

Their ferocity furnished him the material for a lesson; he turned toward me:

“You see, my boy, men become wicked in towns, like apples that rot when they are heaped together. And then they turn round and pervert animals!”

In truth I could have brought forward two opposing arguments; the isolation of their estate and the ferocious nature of their beasts. He granted only the second, and overturned that in the next breath:

“You have seen the chaffinch, the hare and the fox. In their natural state they are incapable of doing harm. Tamed, all beasts sooner or later become dangerous, perfidious, ferocious and false. Well! it’s just the same with men! Free, they are kind and generous. Brutalised by discipline, like that old soldier, they become terrific!”

Never had he spoken so much at length, nor, to my mind, so enigmatically. No doubt the emotion caused by the dogs had made him forget, in a direct way, the promise my father had exacted from him. I was surprised at his eloquence, for which nothing had prepared me, and I at once drew practical conclusions from it. I had been brought up to believe in the benefits of authority; that of parents and school teachers. And now it appeared that to be good one must obey nobody.

This adventure disgusted us with “our” forest, and we frequented less extensive and more peaceful pieces of woods, preferably those situated on the communal lands, all the more agreeable to grandfather because of his hatred of private property. According to him, property was the great obstacle to human happiness, but I hesitated to adopt his views; I was pretty fond of owning things—for which he cared not at all.

As he had promised at the time of our first walk, he communicated to me his knowledge of mushrooms, the round-stemmed fleshy bolet, its dome the colour of a not quite ripe chestnut, the laseras, most beautiful of mushrooms, like an egg of which the shell has just been broken, the yellow, flower-shaped chanterelle were his favourites. I saw him bite, like the priest whose story he had told me, one of those Satan bolets, which turns blue when it is cut, the gash at once taking on the appearance of a frightful wound. Taught by Aunt Deen’s contagious fears, I was persuaded that his lips also would soon turn blue. I gazed at him all terror and curiosity, seeking for the symptoms of danger. But he digested his poison with marvellous ease.

“You see,” he observed in triumph, “the worthy priest for once was right. Nature is a mother to us.”

Emboldened by this experiment, I gathered from the bushes some red berries that were very pleasing to the eye, but which gave me a sharp colic. Grandfather must be a bit of a sorcerer.

If ever we brought home from our hunt a handkerchief full of cryptogams, Aunt Deen, suspicious, would not fail to cry out:

“Those horrors again!”

She would look them over most carefully, keeping only those that were notoriously good to eat; she excelled in cooking them in butter, or preparing them as an hors-d’œuvre, with a sauce of wine, salt, pepper and herbs, and a dash of vinegar. Thus prepared the little balls, fresh, white and crisp, melted in the mouth. Now that I gathered them I, too, began to eat them.

I avenged myself of my hurtful berries by the strawberries and whortleberries that I found among the moss. I loved to fill my hand with them and then lick them up as goats do salt when it is given them. It is true that indigestible things had been forbidden me; the notion of duty was beginning to change in me, and I preferred to trust to that mother nature so much praised by grandfather, and whom he only had to invoke to be fed to heart’s content. Grandfather was constantly lauding her, offering to her litanies of eulogiums. And yet he ridiculed the chaplet that Aunt Deen and mother used to recite! And he took every opportunity to instil into me an aversion to towns and love for the delights of the fields. Cities, he said, were full of ferocious, greedy folk, who would murder you for a piece of money, whereas in a village men lived peaceful and happy, and loved one another with brotherly love.

One day a peasant invited us into his half ruined arbour to eat one of those white cheeses over which they pour sweet cream. A bowl of wood strawberries accompanied this frugal and innocent repast. They made so delicious a mixture that I was inclined to believe blindly in universal happiness, provided, indeed, that every one would consent to leave the plague and leprosy infected city. In the country every one was kind, obliging and free into the bargain. We would have no more enemies. Aunt Deen’s they existed only in her old-woman’s imagination. Her ideas were narrow, she did not, like grandfather, rise above petty, every-day cares. I was peaceful, devout, disarmed. And now I knew the flower of rural pleasure, of which I have never lost the flavour.

“Stuff yourselves,” said our host genially; “the doctor cured me of chills and fever.”

We owed his kindliness to my father, but we preferred to suppose it the usual thing by way of verification of our theories. Having stuffed myself only too well, in fact, I suffered from indigestion on the way home, aggravated by grandfather’s unkindly humour.

“You will not boast of this,” he observed, when I was relieved.

I understood the significance of his advice, and resolved to preserve a prudent silence which would shield us in any whim we might indulge in future excursions. We reached home late: the want of punctuality seemed to me an elegant indifference. Why dine at one hour rather than at another? One could even do without dinner entirely, if one’s stomach was full of white cheese and cream. Grandfather explained where we had been and extolled peasant hospitality in choice terms.

“Ah, yes,” cried father, “you happened upon that rascal Barbeau. I think I did save him from death. He lives mostly by poaching and smuggling and owes me his bill yet. I am just as willing he should not pay it. The colour of his money is not clean.”

I considered that he was too severe upon so polite and generous a man. We went again to visit Barbeau, and were received by his wife. She was an aged, grey, gnarled, blear-eyed woman, who found nothing better to offer us than a miserable crust of gruyère cheese, which greatly vexed us. She said nothing as to her husband’s occupation but pursed up her lips to confide to us the fine places that her sons enjoyed. The eldest was postman in town, the second an employe at the railway station, and as for the third, oho! he was earning thousands and hundreds.

“Waiter in a hotel in Paris, Monsieur Rambert, waiter in a furnished hotel. He sends us money.”

“Bad trade,” observed grandfather.

“There is no bad trade,” insisted the old woman. “The one thing is to get money.”

“And you have none left?”

“Surely not,—there is none left. There is nobody any more who eats chestnuts and drinks cider, Monsieur Rambert. As for the land, see! I spit upon it!”

And the old hag did in fact spit upon the growing grain, now a pale green about to change to gold, which grew close around her hovel. One would have said that she was banning all the country-side.

It did not occur to me that this grain was the flour which at our house was blessed before being kneaded into dough, the bread which my father never cut before tracing upon the loaf the sign of the cross. All I saw was a disgusting act and involuntarily I laid down my share of the cheese which I had been eating without pleasure.

“Let’s go,” said grandfather abruptly.

Mother Barbeau’s remarks vexed him. At least I had no attack of nausea this time.

After this conversation he abandoned agricultural life for a time and decided to take me to the lake which we had not yet explored. He led me thither with no enthusiasm.

“It is a closed-in water,” he said contemptuously.

Were there open waters then? Of course—there was the sea. Until now the word had not impressed me and I attributed no meaning to it. When the mist hid the opposite shore the lake used to seem endless, and I had heard people around me say, “it’s like the sea.” I had paid no attention. Grandfather’s disdainful description brought to my imagination by contrast a free immensity. Later, when at last I saw the sea—it was at Dieppe, from the top of the cliff—I felt no surprise. It was simply an open water.

“Would you like a row?” grandfather asked one day.

Would I! I desired it all the more because such an expedition represented to me in some sort a substitution of the individual life for the family life. My parents had forbidden me to go out in a boat, after the fall into the water which had brought on my pleurisy. They were afraid both of the dampness and of my awkwardness. Once again, then, I was the fair child who had escaped from his mother’s arms. The maiden with golden wings who enticed me was my own good pleasure.

We took a canoe and rowed out of the port. Grandfather, who used the oars irregularly (which by no means reassured me), soon laid them down and left us to float.

“Where are we going?” I asked, somewhat uneasily.

“I don’t know.”

Uncertainty increased the mystery of the water. I amused myself with leaning over the gunwale, and dipping my hands in the water. The cold caress it gave me and the small danger we were encountering, or which I thought we were encountering, gave me a mingled but very exciting sensation.

What was the meaning of these brief flashes of silver which were lighted on the surface and at once went out? Around their dying spark a circle appeared, which grew ever larger and finally was lost. It was made by fish which came up to breathe. One of them, quite near, showed his little mouth and the shining scales on his head. I had come into contact with a new world—the submarine world.

When the wind began to blow grandfather would make me sit in the bottom of the boat, upon the boards, which would be pretty wet. From thence, being still not tall, I could perceive nothing but the sky. I could the better discern its dome and on fine days the continuous vibration of the ether. While grandfather was dreaming I would sit there motionless and happy. I formed the habit of being excessively happy without knowing why, as if existence had no limits and no purpose.

Grandfather made friends also with the fishermen who were setting their nets.

“They are good fellows,” he would say; “the lake is like the country. As man leaves the city he approaches the happy state of nature.”

We came to know the manners of the trout, the perch, the voracious pike and the char, the flesh of which is as savoury as the pink flesh of the salmon.

“Aha!” said one of these artless fishermen joyfully, “all my char is engaged by the Bellevue Hotel. We rake it in night and day. They are the customers for my money.”

Thus was I initiated into the life of the land and the water. Grandfather began to be interested in my progress in the friendship of nature. He had a disciple whom he had not sought. I was the first now to turn my back upon the town, leap over walls, cross the fields without the slightest care for the crops. He treated me as an heir, or a child worthy of being one of those sluggard kings who possess the world. And one hot day in July, after we had painfully climbed a hillock whence one could overlook the plain, the forest and the lake, he began to laugh at a notion that had occurred to him.

“You know, my boy, they think I have nothing, that I am just one of those clatter-clogs that shuffle along the road with a tramp’s bundle on his back. What a joke! There is no landed proprietor richer than I—do you hear?”

His words did not surprise me. I had lost that notion of mine and thine that divides riches from poverty.

“This water, these woods, these fields,” he went on, “all these are mine. I never take any care of them, and they are mine all the same.” And like an act of investiture he laid his hand upon my head, saying:

“They are mine; I give them to you.”

It was a playful, unceremonious presentation. Both of us amused ourselves with the idea. And yet, in spite of our laughter, I had a very clear impression that the world did in fact belong to me. I would no longer consent to have a small, narrow place in the world.

As we were going down from our hilltop we met upon the road a young woman who lived in a villa in the neighbourhood. She wore a white gown which left her forearms and neck bare, and on her head was a hat decorated with red cherries. Her parasol, a little behind her, made an aureola or background for a face which was as clear cut and delicate as one of those magnolia flowers in the garden that I loved for their colour, odour and form as of white birds with outspread wings. Still I should not have noticed her if grandfather had not stopped, riveted to the spot with admiration, and exclaimed aloud, “How lovely she is!”

The fair face crimsoned. But the young woman smiled at the too direct homage. I looked at her then, and so fixedly that I have never forgotten that vision, not even the cherries. But I made my reservations. To me she seemed already old, perhaps thirty. That is an advanced age in the pitiless eyes of a child. Her flower-like complexion made me think of that avowal of the nightingale from which one day when I was reading the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I had drawn a fitful melancholy: I am in love with the Rose—I strain my throat all the night long for her, but she sleeps, and hears me not. And for the first time, and not without a secret anticipation, I associated an unknown woman with a yet more unknown love.

After this incident grandfather led me to a wooded slope where we had never been, and which he had represented to me as without interest when I proposed it as the object of a walk. We had to cross a little brook before reaching its foot. On the way he was self-absorbed and said not a word. At the top he turned to the east and led the way directly to a pavilion near a farm house but half-hidden in a clearing.

“There it is,” he said.

I understood that he was not speaking to me. This pavilion, one story above the ground floor, appeared to be in a miserable condition. The roof lacked slates, a surrounding gallery was rotting away. It must have been long since abandoned. Grandfather delighted in its ruinous and uninhabitable condition,—a thing which would have surprised me more if I had not grown accustomed to his whims.

“So much the better,” he murmured; “there is no one there.”

Returning to the farmhouse he perceived an old man who was warming himself upon a bench in the sun and dipping soup from a pot with a wooden spoon. With this old man he entered upon an interminable conversation which bored me, but which ended in some questions as to the pavilion.

“It is good for nothing but firewood,” said the peasant.

“There were people in it formerly,” insinuated grandfather.

“Formerly—a good many years ago.”

Grandfather appeared to hesitate as to continuing the conversation, but then resumed:

“Yes—a good many years ago. But you and I were not born to-day. Tell me, don’t you remember a lady?”

I at once thought of the lady in white with the cherries in her hat, and I summed up her figure in that clearing, at the door of the pavilion. My imagination was already at work upon this new theme.

“Oh,” said the old man, before swallowing the spoonful that he held in his hand—“as for women, I despise them.”

A gleam of rage shot across grandfather’s eyes, and I thought he was going to overset the old man and his pot. He at once cut short the conversation without another word. But as he turned away he took me to witness the beauty of the place.

“All the same, it’s sweet and wild here. The trees have hardly changed. They are all that is left.”

I never learned the adventure of the pavilion. But one day when we were passing the colonel’s tottering château another memory, less direct no doubt, awoke in his mind and without preparation he began:

“They called her the beautiful Alixe.”

“Who, grandfather?”

“She lived there. It was under the Empire.”

“You saw her, grandfather?”

“Oh, I; no! That’s too long ago. I am speaking of the first Emperor. Those who had seen her were old when I was young. Those who had seen her were bursting with pride merely at mentioning her name.”

These brief evocations of the past threw for me a lovely veil of romance over our walks, which had “happened” like history.

He never said more about either, as I expected him to do. He never supposed that I was watching his slightest words, and exaggerating their importance. Save the white lady with the cherries in her hat, who perhaps resembled, who doubtless resembled, some far-away picture of his past, he greeted women the most frankly in the world and never made any remark about them. When, several years later, one evening at school, I read the famous passage of the Iliad about the old men of Troy being disposed to forgive Helen because of her beauty, like that of the immortal goddesses, while my comrades were dozing over their Homer, I was seeing myself once more at my grandfather’s side on the road by which the lady in white came to us. And ever since I have called that unknown one Helen.

Grandfather, who began to enjoy our friendship, consented to receive me in the tower chamber. He took no notice of my presence, however, now enveloping me with the smoke of his pipe, and again playing upon his violin, the notes of which mingled in my mind with the forest, the lake and all our secret retreats. That room was to me a continuation of my free out-of-door life. On stormy days, very rare in the course of that bright summer predicted by Mathieu de la Drôme, I used to watch the falling rain and the changing skies, lulled and softened by this spectacle of the uselessness of things. When the west was clear I could see the sun shooting into the waters of the lake a pillar of fire, which by degrees was changed into a sword and finally was reduced to a golden point, the reflection of the star resting upon the shoulder of the mountain, which was what the sun became for one second before it disappeared. In the evenings, after dinner, I used to obtain the favour of looking at the constellations through the telescope. As his former room had faced the south, grandfather, as I have said, was acquainted with only half the heavens, and refused to puzzle out the other half. Therefore I knew only Altair and Vega, Arcturus and the Virgin’s sheaf, which may be seen in the south in July. I was obliged to lean out to distinguish Antares on the edge of the roof. The other months all is confused to my eyes, and the same if I look toward the north.

The household was pleased with my new regimen. More than once father asked of grandfather:

“Truly, the boy doesn’t inconvenience you?”

“Oh, not at all,” grandfather would invariably reply.

And father would express his gratitude for my recovered health, Aunt Deen would declare that I no longer had my papier-mâché face, and would rub my cheeks to make them redder. My mother saw in grandfather’s affection a guarantee of peace and reconciliation. As for me, life had been insensibly changed. School, lessons, emulation, regular hours, work—all that no longer existed. I had only to turn my back upon the town and give myself up to lovely nature. I felt that, though I cannot explain it, at once clearly and confusedly: confusedly in my mind and clearly as a matter of practice.

And yet, on our return from our walks, grandfather would pretty often simply bring me back as far as the gate, and slip away in the direction of the accursed city.

IV
THE CAFÉ OF THE NAVIGATORS

WHERE did grandfather go after bringing me back to the house? To the café, and one day he took me there.

I did not know precisely what a café was, and I was secretly afraid of it. Father used to speak of cafés in a tone of contempt which admitted no contradiction, no favourable reservation. When he said of any one, “he spends his time at the café,” or “he is a pillar of the café,” that some one was judged and condemned: he wasn’t worth the rope to hang him. I could not have imagined my father entering one. Such audacity on the part of grandfather surprised me the less, since I had already noticed that in everything he took the opposite view from my father.

We went to the café instead of going to walk, one very warm morning; this seemed to me a sort of outrage, as we were doubly failing in the course marked out for us. Its name appeared in letters of gold, Café of the Navigators; the inscription being framed in with billiard cues. Pleasantly situated on the shore of the lake, it was composed of a long arbour whence one could see the port, and a great room whence one could see nothing. We chose the room; to me it seemed most luxurious because of its mirrors and white marble tables. Two or three groups were conversing, smoking, drinking, and I was at once nearly choked by a pungent odour of tobacco mingled with the perfume of anisette. Yet such was the attraction of the place that after having coughed I found the combination pleasant. We joined the least noisy group, who greeted grandfather with transports of delight, calling him familiarly Father Rambert:

Father Rambert here!—Father Rambert there!

They installed him on the sofa, in the middle seat, and began by asking news of Mathieu de la Drôme. Grandfather replied that he was at “set fair” with a tendency to rise, and that favourable winds would probably keep him so; at which every one rejoiced, on account of the vines; the wine would be famous if Mathieu continued to behave well. Presently I perceived that the barometer was in question, and that grandfather was consulted as to the weather because of its prophecies. These gentlemen used among themselves a conventional language to which it was important to have the key, and which complicated the conversation so far as I was concerned. No one paid any attention to me, and I was still standing, vexed at this neglect, when I was suddenly addressed.

“Well, youngster, what will you take?”

The appellative and the familiar tone completed my displeasure. I drew myself up, and put on a stern expression, but I remained “the youngster” to every one present. Grandfather with a detached air replied with majesty:

“A green.”

“With white wine?” somebody asked.

“I am not a wine sack like you,” retorted grandfather.

The reply was received with enthusiasm. At The House every one was particularly polite to a guest, but these gentlemen here laid aside all ceremony in their mutual relations. Meanwhile, the maid set before grandfather a number of things which she took one by one from a tray: a tall, deep glass, a little iron spade pierced with holes; a sugar bowl, a caraffe of water, and finally a bottle, the contents of which I could not guess. There was a deep silence and I received an impression of being present at a solemn rite, which no one might disturb. Decidedly their ways were all topsy-turvy: they treated one another without courtesy, but they venerated the drink.

Grandfather, his calm not in the least embarrassed by all the eyes fixed upon him, poured a quarter of a glass of liquid from the mysterious bottle, then placed the perforated spade across the glass and upon it two pieces of sugar in perfect equilibrium, moistened them drop by drop until they dissolved, after which he suddenly inclined the caraffe. A pleasant odour of anise caressed my nostrils. The mixture grew more clouded as the water fell, like those beautiful opaque clouds that lie along the horizon before the rain, and finally took on a pale green tint which I had never met in our walks. Immediately the talking began again: the operation was completed.

At my new guardian’s order they brought “the youngster” a grenadine with a bottle of seltzer water. The rite observed in this case was shorter and not of sufficient importance to overcome the general indifference. The rival “green” enjoyed a particular celebrity. One discharge from the seltzer bottle into the syrup which was languishing in the bottom of the glass and my mixture rose up, frothy, boiling, tossing, first light rose colour, then, after the gases had been dissipated, a golden rose. What touched me most wets the straw that was given me for imbibing it from a distance: one had only to bend the head over and breathe it in.

Merely by that breath I was initiated into a higher form of existence. Perfectly happy, I felt a great desire to tell my neighbours so. They were sucking up divers concoctions. Most of them had kindly, rubicund faces, and eyes somewhat bleared. They too were all perfectly happy. Why had grandfather taught me that people in towns were not happy? To become so, all they had to do was to go to the café.

Among the heads which I was examining at leisure and with entire sympathy was one which I thought I knew. It belonged to grandfather’s left-hand neighbour, the very one whom he had qualified as a wine-sack. The face was sprinkled with red spots, which, however, were hardly to be distinguished from his blood-shot skin. Hair, beard and skin were all of the same red colour which overspread his entire head, even threatening the nose, which, the central point of the spectacle, shone resplendent. In spite of myself I thought of the picture in my Bible where the prophet Elijah is being carried by a chariot of fire into the glory of the setting sun; but I repelled the comparison as unseemly. Where could I have seen that incandescent head? By degrees my memories cleared themselves up. It had happened at our house: a man had come out from the consulting room, not proud and flaming like him of the café, but abashed, pitiful, discomfited. Yet it must have been the same: that hairy skin, those red blotches. I could not be mistaken. Father was escorting him out, and trying to encourage him, saying, as he tapped him on the shoulder:

“Keep your money, friend. You are in a sense a part of the house. Your parents and mine said thou to one another. But you must quit drinking at any cost. Promise me never again to set your foot in a café.”

“I swear to you I won’t, doctor.”

“Don’t swear, but hold out.”

“Yes, yes. I swear to you. Never in my life shall I be seen in a wineshop.”

And yet here he was, drinking and laughing, and as healthy as possible. Father was certainly too severe. Forgetting that he had cured me, I inwardly blamed him for frightening people, finding in him a certain hardness of heart. Why should he wish to deprive this good fellow of his pleasure?

My rubicund friend answered to the name of Casenave, but he was generally called by a symbolical nickname—nothing other than “Pour-the-drink,” which might serve a double purpose. “Pour-the-drink” at once won my heart by the surprising adventures through which he had passed: stories of which he most unaffectedly poured forth. He might have figured in the narratives of the “Three Old Mariners,” in which case his weight would assuredly have assured Jeremy’s descent into the jaws of the tiger. Having in his youth learned through the newspapers of the idleness and good cheer which inhered in the monkish estate, he resolved to adopt it, and presented himself at the door of a Capuchin monastery, where he soon learned to moderate his hopes. To be routed out in the night by a barbarous brother to take part in singing the service, to be fed on vegetables half cooked by a brother suffering from incurable catarrh, made him grow thin and waste away. His ingenuity alone saved him from a still greater disaster. When the monks, placed in a circle, were invited to inflict the discipline upon one another, piously reciting the penitential psalms the while, he managed to get his rope so entangled in that of his nearest fellow-sufferer that while they were deliberately disentangling them “the ‘miserere’ ran along.”

But the prior declined to keep him, and generously restored him to civil life. He there formed the most brilliant relations, which he proved to the admiring listeners by telling of the beautiful women who came every evening to visit him in his modest abode. They used to come down through the ceiling, in which, however, no aperture was afterward visible. One moment he was alone, the next, there they were in silk gowns and hoop skirts, for they still adhered to the fashions of the Second Empire. Far from remaining inactive, they would put into his hands a bowl of reasonable dimensions, into which, bending their arms, they would empty—fz-z-z-z!—several bottles of champagne. This fz-z-z-z, which expressed the flowing of the wine into the bowl, took upon his lips a caressing, musical sound. One could almost hear the pop of the cork and the bubbling out of the froth.

He imparted to us still more astounding biographical details. One night, mistaking the gas light in the street for his candle, he had sprung out of the window to blow it out, and had been picked up in his nightshirt somewhat bruised but safe and sound. And had he not a double who walked out with him? Only the evening before he had had a long and most interesting conversation with his double, who never left him till they had returned to the outskirts of the town, when he bade him good-bye till next time.

Every one listened without interrupting him, except by signs of approval or requests to go on. Why should I not believe all those marvellous things, when no one around me showed the slightest sign of incredulity?

I did not know the nature of Casenave’s business, for he could converse upon all subjects with great competence, and might be supposed to have practised the most diverse industries. Whereas I very soon discovered that two other members of the company—Gallus and Merinos—were distinguished artists. Gallus, the musician, directed his remarks especially to grandfather, as if only they two, in the midst of the general imbecility, could understand one another and fraternise in matters musical. The pair affected to hold themselves apart, though in their asides they appeared to utter only a few brief cabalistic words: understanding thus established, they would roll the whites of their eyes when one or the other alluded to the allegro of the symphony in C minor, the andante of the fourteenth sonata, or the scherzo in B flat of the seventh trio, over which they would clasp one another’s hands as if in mutual congratulation, calling it the Archduke Rodolpho’s divine trio. No one interrupted them in the state of exultation to which a mere numeral was enough to lift them; at such times indeed every one gazed upon them with respect. From time to time some one would inquire of Gallus, somewhat diffidently, as if fearful of being pitied for not having used the proper terms:

“How about your lyrical drama on the Death of Olympus?”

“It’s getting on,” the composer would reply imperturbably.

“How far along are you?”

“Still in the prelude. There is no hurry. A lifetime is hardly long enough for the completion of such a work and I have only been at it some ten years.”

It must be a prodigious opera that demanded such efforts! For that matter, one could see, merely by looking at Gallus, that he was breaking down under the weight of so vast an undertaking. His frame was puny, stunted, sickly, like a pear tree that my father had ordered rooted up from the court. A lock of hair fell across his stormy brow, and when he passed his hand through his disorderly locks a shower of scurf would fall upon his shoulders. Though the season was warm he wore a black velvet coat, and around his neck an enormous blue scarf such as women wear, the spots upon which were innumerable. All my aunt’s benzine would not have sufficed to clean them. But I told myself that artists could not be expected to dress like other folk,—for if they did they might not be known to be artists. This dirty little man, who looked peaceable enough, would sometimes fall into a fury, and figuratively drag through mud and dirt by the napes of their necks certain abominable criminals such as Ambroise Thomas, and Gounod, who were guilty of having fraudulently robbed him of public admiration, and irremediably corrupted the public taste. He also brought accusations against the bourgeois of our town, whose plots and treacheries he enumerated at length. I observed that the designation bourgeois was by itself alone a disgrace, and I trembled at the thought that I was one, and my father also. Only grandfather, stout against being classified, might perhaps be spared. I afterward learned that Gallus was by profession an examiner of weights and measures. In its turn society in general came in for severe condemnation; but that it deserved this I had already learned in the course of my walks with grandfather. And thus I came to know that my new friends of the café, whom I had imagined to be even more fortunate than the peasants with their white cheeses and their fresh cream, were in reality persecuted martyrs.

How could I have the slightest doubt of this in face of the injustice which had befallen the second artist, Merinos? Whether this was his name or a nickname I never knew. If a nickname, it miraculously fitted his mutton face, at once long and full, rosy as the cheeks of a nursing baby, and crowned with curly hair. He vaguely resembled Mariette, our cook, though without her martial aspect. But these somewhat prepossessing features were liable to misconstruction. Merinos was a ravaged soul,> and I caught allusions to the extraordinary passions which he had experienced. Up to this time I had supposed that passion showed itself by a lugubrious face and tearful eyes, but he was shining and jovial, with not a trace of tears in his protruding orbits, though they were plain to see in those of Casenave, Gallus and nearly all the others. Thus my childish imagination found itself nonplussed.

Both Merinos and Gallus had lived long in Paris, in the mysterious Montmartre quarter, of which both spoke as of the promised land. Merinos was a portrait painter, but he had given up painting, a fact for which he gave convincing reasons.

“You understand: now-a-days people make such ridiculous demands. They insist upon a likeness. As if the likeness ever mattered to an artist!”

“That’s sure enough,” the chorus assented.

My mind at once reverted to the collection of ancestors that covered the walls of the drawing room and that were bad paintings. Assuredly they must be likenesses.

Thus defrauded of glory by the stupidity of the bourgeois, Merinos none the less continued to give evidence of genius. He always carried about with him a piece of coloured paper and a stick of charcoal. While talking and smoking he would carelessly rub his charcoal on the paper, and draw a few lines below the spots thus obtained. It was curious, but when one studied these masterpieces patiently and with good will, one could get a notion of distorted faces, barely indicated, but which the admiring group recognised as faces in torment, ill disposed folk, disturbers of society. Certain art-lovers in the town—there were some all the same, it seemed—would buy these at a high price, declaring them to be wonderful; and there was an enthusiastic and slender witted lady, who, as every one knew, used regularly to visit Merinos’s studio, which, it appeared, was a perfect dog-hole, humbly to gather up his slightest sketches, even going down upon her knees on the floor to hunt them under the furniture. I too admired him, on trust.

One day when grandfather at our house was praising this underrated genius, he brought upon himself this remark from my father:

“Yes, that’s the great fad—unfinished works! For my part, I care neither for scaffoldings nor for ruins.”

What did he mean by that? I concluded simply that he was incapable of appreciating, as we did, the art of the Café des Navigateurs.

It was the proper thing to maintain a certain distance between these two misunderstood beings and Galurin, who was only a decayed photographer. The latter was no more a stranger to me than Casenave had been. People used to employ him in their houses for this and that supplementary duty, and especially as an extra man at table. As he was once deploring this sort of servitude in our presence grandfather reminded him that Jean-Jacques had endured the same. The example of Jean-Jacques appeared to soothe his recalcitrant pride. Who in the world was this Jean-Jacques, I wondered.

At our house they had given up taking advantage of Galurin’s services after a great dinner at which he was put in charge of the wines, with instructions to name them as he served them. He triumphantly opened the dining-room door, waving the bottle in the air and crying in stentorian tones, “I announce the Moulin-à-vent”—an effort which was received with a burst of laughter that wounded him, for he was very sensitive. He abandoned the napkin and became process-server, which coercive though somewhat obscure title seemed to be one of honour. To add to his income he vouchsafed to carry around wedding or funeral invitations when such occasions occurred. One evening, before an important funeral, he forgot himself at the Café of the Navigators, and left the entire parcel of mourning invitations upon the sofa. When he found them it was too late to make his rounds. At once adopting the radical measures which circumstances demanded, he hastened to plunge the compromising parcel in the lake. As the result of this immersion the defunct was obliged to take possession of his last abode in almost complete solitude. Never had such forlorn obsequies been witnessed, and many coolnesses arose among relatives and friends who had not received invitations, and who were not slow to assume that they had been purposely and maliciously neglected.

Galurin used to heap anathemas upon the social system which constrained him to adopt such base industries, the duties of which he performed but capriciously and intermittently. Furthermore, he advocated the partition of all property, for he had nothing of his own.

But the one who cast all others into the shade when he took the floor, who excelled in transposing the incoherent lamentations of Gallus and Merinos and the scatter-brained diatribes of Galurin into the rounded forms of oratorical periods, was Martinod. Martinod, the youngest of all, had a marvellous gift of gravity. Solemn by nature, he wore a long beard and never laughed. One could easily imagine him upon a mausoleum proclaiming the last judgment through a conch-shell. The melancholy that emanated from his entire person enveloped him in all the prestige of a grand funeral, the serious character of which is not to be denied. In the beginning I did not like Martinod. He never looked nice in the face and I suspected him of dark designs. But like all the others I fell under the spell of his utterances. He would begin in a melancholy tone, which would move one to tears. One might suppose him to have but just escaped from a terrible catastrophe. What a beggar he would have made, and how many half-francs he would have extracted from the most tightly closed fists! Then his voice would grow deeper, opening hearts and minds, and from his inexhaustible lips would flow the most resonant harmonies. He would discant upon the future, a golden age when equality would be the rule in every sphere,—equality of fortune, equality of happiness. Nothing would belong to any one, everything would belong to all. I felt a degree of shame at not understanding very well, because every one else in our group understood and approved. And even at the other tables people would stop drinking and playing cards to listen. The picture which he drew was admirably simple: men in their best clothes praising nature and embracing one another like brothers. Rapt in admiration, I would compare him to my music box, the notes of which made a dancer pirouette upon the cover.

At other times Martinod would be gloomy, bitter and vindictive, heaping threats and sarcasms upon the social fabric of the day, unless it were immediately made over after his ideas. In the name of liberty he would give all Europe over to fire and sword. I would listen in terror, but on the way home grandfather would reassure me.

“He was out of humour to-day. To-morrow the world will go better.”

Thus the new and varied society with which I was mingling appeared very different from that in which until then I had been living at home or in school. When we reached the house my cheeks would be full of colour—they thought it was the good country air. Grandfather had no need to counsel me to say nothing about our visits to the Café of the Navigators. An infallible instinct warned me to say nothing about them at our house. It was a secret between him and me. We were accomplices.

V
THE RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

“YOU are in luck,” my brothers would say to me as they prepared to face the dreaded examinations for the baccalaureate, bending from morning till night over their books through all the trying July heat; “no school, no examinations, no possible failures for you.”

“And no piano,” Louise would add, for having given evidence of an aptitude for music she had been set to work at never-ending five-finger exercises.

Even little James, rebellious under his first lessons in reading and writing, confided to his inseparable Nicola that when he was big he would do like François.

“What does Francis do?” she would ask.

“Nothing.”

The month of August drew on without awaking that impatience which its approach had never failed to arouse in me until this year; I even felt a selfish regret as it came nearer. Vacation would rob me of that superiority which convalescence had conferred upon me, and would put me back into my place, the common life. Or rather, I supposed it would do so, being incompetent to measure the chasm that had opened between the little boy that I had been yesterday, and what I had now become. Some one had measured it before me.

I had become much absorbed between my walks and my visits to the Café of the Navigators, whither grandfather, who was no longer happy without my companionship, was taking me regularly. Though I was rather unobservant of the acts and doings of the family, I again became aware of an atmosphere of anxiety at our house, and of secret conferences that recalled to me the days when the destiny of our property had been at stake.

Father’s voice was penetrating, even when he moderated it and believed himself to be speaking softly.

“We shall have no fortune to leave them,” he was saying. “We must neglect nothing in their education. They must be armed for life.”

We, armed? Why should we be armed? Nothing was easier than life. I had outgrown wooden swords, heroic biographies, epic stories. All I should need would be a few tools for working in the ground, which furnishes men abundantly with all they need. One would harvest so much as was necessary, one would live on white cheese, sweet cream and wild strawberries, and listen to Martinod, preaching universal peace and proclaiming the arrival of the golden age. How simple the programme! What need was there of arms?

Mother was answering father.

“You are right. We must neglect nothing. Their faith and their union will be their only fortune.”

Far from being touched by this declaration of principles, I was imagining the little laugh with which grandfather would meet it, and one morning while combing my hair I practised my face in assuming a satirical expression.

In conversations which I accidentally overheard, the names of Parisian schools or lycées would recur, those especially that prepared boys for the great schools, Stanislas on Post-office Street, Louis-le-grand or Saint-Louis. My parents would have preferred a religious institution, and in this Aunt Deen emphatically acquiesced.

“No godless school,” she would exclaim. “All the rascals come out of the lycées.”

“Oho!” grandfather would protest, greatly amused at her vehemence. “I was educated in a lycée.”

He received his bouquet without a moment’s delay.

“And you are not worth so very much!”

It is true that to soften the severity of her retort, she went on,

“I must confess that you have become good for something, now that you take the boy out walking.”

Father, who seemed always to be glad of anything which might bring him and grandfather together, heightened the reluctant admission into praise.

“Yes, François owes his health to you. And all these lovely walks that you are giving him will attach him the more firmly to the region in which he is to live, and which he will know the better because of them.”

As a matter of fact I felt myself entirely aloof from the region and even from our house. What I loved was the earth, the vast unnamed earth, and not this place or that; most of all I loved the uncultivated places, the wild places in the woods, the copses, the secret nooks, and in less degree the pasture lands, any untilled, unsowed: bit of earth. In the matter of people, I had accepted grandfather’s new gospel which catalogued them as peasants and towns people. The nice people were in the country, whereas towns were inhabited by wicked individuals and notably by bourgeois, who persecute men of genius like my friends of the café. And in the towns were the schools where you were reduced to a state of slavery.

While I was giving myself up to these reflections my mother’s gaze had fallen upon me; it seemed to me that she was reading my thoughts, and I blushed—a proof that I was not unaware of my inward insubordination.

“He has grown quite robust,” she said. “Could he not begin gradually to take up his lessons? We could arrange him a place in the garden, where he would be in the out-door air, and yet not be entirely idle. Idleness is never good.”

I was astounded to hear my mother uttering so direful a proposition—my mother, so careful to spare me all fatigue, so expert in nursing me, so minute in her watchfulness! Decidedly, they had changed parts; father had appeared suspicious of my walks with grandfather, and now he was not only authorising, he was encouraging them.

“No, no,” he exclaimed, “pleurisy is too grave a matter. He would still risk losing strength and colour. See how well he looks now!” adding aside to mother, “Father is so happy in his little companion! Since he has had charge of him he has quite changed and grown younger. Haven’t you noticed it?”

Mother, who always agreed with him, did not express her opinion. I divined that she was uneasy about me, but why? Had she not rejoiced in my good spirits and my round, rosy cheeks? Grandfather never attempted to monopolise me; he took me on his walks, and helped in that way, and in addition, he taught me a thousand things about trees, mushrooms, botany: the things he knew were much more interesting than the history, geography and catechism that my teachers used to teach me.

Now that my attention had been attracted to mother’s uneasiness I continually noticed that she was always following me like a shadow. At the bottom of my heart I was pleased. Even a child loves to inspire fear in those who love him; it puts him at a sort of vantage point, gives him a feeling as of being a man, and understanding life better than a weak woman can do.

One day mother was talking in her room with Aunt Deen. I heard only the reply of the latter, who never could conceal anything.

“Come, come! my poor Valentine; don’t you go to troubling your head about that good-for-nothing boy. In the first place, I know perfectly what those two talk to one another about—country things, the pleasures of the fields, the peace of the earth, the goodness of the animals; all humbug, to be sure, but what of that? It’s just like poultices,—it can’t do any harm.”

I had not the slightest doubt that they were talking of me, and I was not at all displeased at having my share in the family interest, for in these days there was a great deal of discussion about my brothers, who, having graduated from school, would start for Paris in the autumn, Bernard for the military school at Saint-Cyr, and Stephen, who was not yet sixteen, to complete his studies in mathematics, unless indeed he persisted in wishing to enter the Seminary. Aunt Deen was greatly distressed over the exorbitant cost of board and outfit, and was continually discanting with emotion upon the merits of our parents, who shrank from no financial sacrifice to complete our education.

“Aha!” sneered grandfather. “These great religious institutions don’t take in a pupil for nothing. They bleed their patrons at all four veins for the love of God.”

Furthermore, it was arranged that Louise was to go for two or three years to the convent school of the Ladies of the Retreat at Lyons. She would sober down there, and when she came home she would be an accomplished young lady, like Mélanie, who at that time was in the very flower of her youth—Mélanie, who long ago had invited me to sing vespers before a wardrobe, or to run after Yes-Yes, the drunkard, with a glass of water, and whose persistent piety foreshadowed a vocation which she had professed as a child, but concerning which she was now silent, unless, perhaps, to our mother.

Altogether the future of the family now demanded much reflection and many decisions. Grandfather and I remained quite apart from it all. Once beyond the gate we never looked back, except when my companion, laughing derisively, would say:

“And as to you, boy; what is being cooked up for you? Are you still inclined to enter the school of adversity?”

There had been much pleasantry over that incident, and I found it by no means amusing. I had given up all my fine plans, and had no thought of commanding some brilliant situation like my brothers. I was content with the sort of property which one enjoys without ever taking trouble, after grandfather’s fashion,—the lake, the forest, the mountain; not to speak of the stars and those fine July nights. I am not even sure that I did not prefer to them all the red benches of the Café of the Navigators, when I had the feeling of being a man, admitted to hear utterances concerning painting, music and politics.

Yet I never ceased to feel my mother’s gaze resting upon me. By way of not acknowledging it I began to put on airs of independence. Like the “Scenes in Animal Life,” I would work up offensive resemblances for all the people with whom we were familiar; turning men and things to ridicule and even affecting when with my brothers and sisters an incurious air, as if I had formed my views of life and had nothing more to learn. By a singular phenomenon, as I now see clearly, the more deeply I was initiated into the simplicity of rural life and the benevolence of nature the more complicated I became. And always, through all my newly assumed ways, that gaze followed me, as if it were seeking my heart.

Grandfather and I had a fright one day when we came upon my mother in the street. She was going to church for benediction and we to the café for our pleasure. She so rarely left the house that we had never thought of meeting her. Noses in air, already inhaling the special odour of tobacco and anise which awaited us, we paid no attention to the woman who was approaching, so modest, so grave that no one thought of looking at her, and we were much surprised when she accosted us, asking,

“Where are you going?”

What would grandfather say? I wondered. We had so loudly proclaimed our disdain of the town which we were now lightheartedly crossing. Would he betray the secret which I had kept so well? Without the least embarrassment in the world he replied:

“To buy a paper, daughter.”

Then he would not own up about our visits to the Café of the Navigators, either. Mother let us go on our way. When she had turned to the left, in the direction of the church, grandfather chuckled over the fine trick he had played her, but she had not wished to appear to doubt the truth of his reply: it had not deceived her. I knew it, for I had seen her blush at our falsehood.

Another circumstance directly revealed her penetration and her anxiety. One Sunday morning as I was going out of the door of the house with grandfather, she admonished us to come back in time for Mass. She would go with me herself, she said, although she had already heard mass at daybreak, as was her habit. All would have been well if grandfather and I, on our way home, had not met Gallus and Merinos, amiable and thirsty pair, who urged us, in spite of ourselves, to take a morning draught. We need only stay two or three minutes, at most, and we were really early. But at the Café was Martinod, perorating in full vein. All the tables were listening to him, drinking to him, applauding him, surrounding him with an atmosphere of admiration, the smoke of the pipes rising like incense around him. He was describing with picturesque and highly coloured details the approaching era of Nature and Reason, so that every one seemed to be already living, by anticipation, in that glorious time. What festival it would be!—a generous humanity renouncing all divisions of caste, class or race, all frontiers and wars, fraternally sharing all riches of earth! The transfigured orator tore away the evil from the future, and showed the sun of that day like the golden monstrance in a religious procession. It was all so beautiful that we quite forgot about Mass, and when, sated with eloquence, we turned our steps homeward, the hour was long past.

At the gate, grandfather, descending from his exalted mood, began to show some anxiety. As for me, I felt not the slightest remorse, being under the shelter of an older responsibility. Still, when I saw, behind the half-closed blind, that shadow that was so easily disquieted about the absent one, I too felt my pride droop, and became conscious that I had done wrong. Mother came down to meet us. We found her on the doorstep, so pale that we could no longer mistake the importance of our defection. Her voice betrayed her anxiety as she asked:

“What can have happened?”

“Why, nothing at all,” replied grandfather.

“Then why did you let the child miss Mass?”

“Oh, we forgot how time was passing.”

This time grandfather rubbed his nose and excused himself as if he had done wrong. A shadow passed over mother’s eyes. A moment before they had been limpid, and now the light that shone through their humidity pierced my heart. Softened as it was by the mist of tears it can not have been very formidable, there was nothing in it by itself so to affect me, but I have never forgotten its power. It must have been with eyes like these that Confessors of the faith looked upon their torturers. I know that I, too, have seen that divine flame.

Young as I was I understood that my mother was shaken by filial respect: yet a more imperious obligation constrained her to speak, and she spoke:

“We did not entrust this child to you, father, to withdraw him from his religious duties. You should not have forgotten this, for the sake both of his soul and of us.”

She spoke with mingled firmness and gentleness, and her face, already pale when we arrived, became so white from the effort she was making, as to seem absolutely bloodless.

... Long, very long after this, when I was a young man, I was getting ready to go out to meet a woman. The woman whom I loved—for how long?—had promised to betray her husband for my pleasure, but I was thinking only of her beauty. My mother came into my room. She had not the courage to say a word; as so long ago she was trembling, this time with that other sort of respect which is respect for oneself. I did not know why she had come, and I felt uneasy at being detained. She laid her hand on my shoulder:

“Francis,” she said, “listen; one must never take what belongs to another.”

I protested my innocent intentions, and as I went my way I shook off the importunate words, which however met me again on the road and went with me. By what clairvoyance of love had my mother divined where I was going? She had looked at me with those same eyes, faintly shadowed by mist. Grief, rather than years, had already made her almost an old woman. And I distinctly saw the evil of the light love to which I was hastening with a song upon my lips....

Grandfather made no attempt to defend himself. He did not call to his aid the little dry laugh which usually served him so conveniently in shaking off his opponent without argument. He only murmured, somewhat weakly, “Oh! goodness, what a fuss about nothing,” and hastened toward the staircase, to go up to his tower where, at least, he would be sheltered from reproach. But my father, who was coming down, seemed to close the way. A conflict appeared to be imminent. And by the natural inclination of my childish logic I suddenly recalled that return from the procession which had first revealed to me this same antagonism:—my parents all a-thrill from the ceremony which grandfather compared to the festival of the sun, and my suddenly chilled enthusiasm. But I was in a mood to take this recollection lightly; without knowing it, I had changed sides.

Grandfather appeared to me all the more embarrassed on hearing steps upon the stairs. He could not avoid the meeting. But as a matter of fact it passed off the most quietly in the world. A few words were exchanged about the weather, the crops, our walk. Generosity, deference, the desire to avoid a domestic dispute, or to spare my father an anxiety, kept my mother silent as to our late return.

But after this she never saw me going out with grandfather without fixing upon me that look, the anxiety of which I still feel. By some ingenious artifice she used to add Louise to our party, or even little Nicola, who would trot behind us, her seven year old legs finding some difficulty in keeping up with us. The whole troop would set forth, grandfather clearly showing his displeasure over the new recruits.

“I don’t propose to drag the whole camp after me,” he would mutter. “I am not a child’s nurse.”

“Come, come!” Aunt Deen would reply, “such pretty children! You are only too proud to show yourself in their company.”

None the less I agreed with him that the presence of my sisters spoiled our walks. One can never talk about anything with women along. They don’t understand out-of-door things, and they get cross as soon as one touches upon religion. I was not very far—I who had shown such fervour at my first communion—from thinking that mother exaggerated the importance of our having missed that service. I thought myself free, because I had closed my mind against all teaching except what came to me from grandfather. Being free, one could do as he pleased. We were not hindering the others from going to church, and even to the communion, and vespers into the bargain.

Vacation came and completely interrupted our walks by ourselves. After vacation school would begin, and I should resume my place among the little school boys of my own age, without so much as knowing that the previous three months had quite changed my heart.