The house

by Henry Bordeaux

BOOK III

I
POLITICS

AFTER my long convalescence I did indeed return to school. It was an ancient institution in which kindly monks imparted antiquated instruction. It was possible to work there, when one’s schoolfellows did not positively put obstacles in the way, but it was easier to devote oneself to clandestine industries, such as training flies and cockchafers, drawing caricatures, reading forbidden books, and even carrying on explorations through the passages. The discipline was no better than the teaching. Up to this time the idea had never occurred to me to view as a prison this great building with its numerous doors and windows where one came and went as one pleased under the paternal eye of a new porter, entirely absorbed in the care of his flowers and of a tortoise whose manners he was studying. But I was now new-born to the sentiment of liberty, and consequently to that of slavery. I made every effort therefore to discover that I was unhappy.

On holidays I resumed my walks with grandfather. An involuntary complicity established itself between us. If one or another of my brothers or sisters joined us we spoke only of indifferent things. When we were alone we went into rhapsodies over the joys of the fields and the brotherhood of men, only hindered by property with all its enclosures. I learned that money was the cause of all ills, that one should despise and do away with it, and that the only necessary good things cost nothing, namely, health, the sunlight, pure air, the songs of birds and all the pleasures of the eye. My teachers, who were much more interested in Latin than in philanthropy, neglected to teach me the latter except by their example, to which I paid no attention. No more towns, no more armies (and Bernard, who was preparing at Saint-Cyr, and who had never been informed of these truths!), no more judges, no more lost lawsuits, no more houses. But here I thought that grandfather was going rather too far. No more houses! What about ours, then? Ours which had been repaired and all done over! It mattered little about the others, so long as ours was spared.

“Why no, little dunce; pastoral peoples used to sleep out of doors. It’s more hygienic.”

When Abraham journeyed to the land of Canaan he must have slept out of doors, and so must the shepherds whom we had met leading their flock to the mountains.

We made another pilgrimage to the pavilion which I had come to call Helen’s pavilion, and from time to time we put in an appearance together at the Café of the Navigators, so that I did not entirely lose contact with my friends.

I was entering my fourteenth year, I think, or it may have been a little later, when our town became the scene of great events. The mayor’s office was contested in an election, and the Marinetti Circus set up its tent and waggon-houses in the market-place. I do not know which of these two dissimilar facts seemed the more important to me.

At our house, in view of the new preoccupations as to our future, the tone of conversation became more serious. More than once I came upon our father and mother mysteriously discussing Mélanie’s approaching majority.

“The time is coming,” father would say. “I have promised and I shall keep my promise. But it will be hard.”

And mother would answer,

“God wills it. He will give us the needful strength.”

Nevertheless, she seemed less sad than father, when she spoke about my sister. What promise were they talking about, and what was it that God willed? I used often to think of the picture in the Bible representing the sacrifice of Isaac, but since the time of our missing church I was less inclined to believe that God was so very strict.

Mélanie went often to church, visited the poor, and dipped her brush in water every morning to smooth down her blond hair which curled naturally and refused to lie in straight bands. I knew these details through Aunt Deen, who was always saying:

“That child is an angel.”

It had become impossible to quarrel with Mélanie. Our parents no longer gave her orders; they spoke to her gently, as if they were consulting her. Even I, without knowing why, dared not speak roughly to her, and growing less and less inclined to be respectful, I kept aloof from her, and no longer sought her company.

The others were not to return until the long vacation. Louise, from her boarding school in Lyons, wrote loving letters which I found somewhat silly, because they often alluded to religious ceremonies and visits of the Superior, or of some passing missionary. Bernard’s letters briefly described the life at Saint-Cyr which he had just entered, and Stephen’s contained numerous obscure allusions to his plans, which seemed to harmonise with those of Mélanie. I could not condescend so far as to play with the younger children, the delicate Nicola who was always disturbing mother while she was writing to the absent ones, and the tumultuous Jamie, in whose behalf I would cheerfully have seen the establishment of the severe discipline which I did not care about for myself. I treated them as from a higher level—they could not understand me. So that my real comrade was grandfather.

Two or three times my father, displeased by my silences or my superior airs, observed in those family councils of which somehow children generally manage to catch scraps,

“That child is growing secretive.”

Mother, still somewhat uneasy about me, did not protest, but Aunt Deen, fertile in excuses, would authoritatively affirm that I would blossom out before long. Far from being grateful to this steadfast ally, I laughed in my sleeve at her fanatical loyalty, by way of proving my superior intelligence.

The circus and the elections stirred up the town at the same time. Every day as I crossed the market-place I would stop to watch the slow erection of the tent and the placing of the raised seats, necessary preliminaries of the show. At our house the conversation was more likely to turn upon the future of the country. I was not so ignorant of politics as they might have supposed, though my opinions vacillated. I knew that certain days, like the Fourth of September and the Sixteenth of May, were anniversaries variously celebrated, that all the monks except ours had been expelled, and that there was an expedition to China,—which as it happened, aroused only criticism at our house.

“Why can’t they let those folks alone!” grandfather would exclaim.

Father would shake his head:

“They are forgetting the past. A conquered people should never scatter its forces.”

I was not ignorant of his having taken part in the war—we used to speak of it simply as “the war”—and I could easily imagine him at the head of an army, whereas grandfather must always have preferred his violin and his telescope to swords, guns, pistols and other murderous engines. In vain had the Café des Navigateurs poured contempt upon all military glory: it still kept its prestige for me. Yet I could not easily understand how the French Guard and the grenadier in the drawing-room could have died, one for the King and the other for the Emperor, and yet both deserve the same praise, while the partisans of the Emperor were always exchanging opprobrious remarks with those of the King.

Father explained: “For the soldier, there is only France. There is no nobler death.”

Grandfather, being present, declared that in his opinion the noblest thing was to die for liberty. But he did not insist, and notwithstanding the silence which followed I saw that he had displeased my father.

The idea seemed to haunt him, for he returned to it on our next walk, and described, with more enthusiasm than usual, a splendid epoch which he had known, compared with which our own period was but darkness. Our own period seemed to me quite endurable, between our walks and the Café. It appeared that at that time, as under the Revolution, liberty had a second time been set free, and when liberty is set free an era of universal peace and concord begins. Citizens moved by a fraternal impulse were working together in vast national workshops, a modest remuneration, the same for all, weak and strong, robust and malingerers, giving to each that contentment which arises from being sure of one’s daily bread.

“That is what M. Martinod demands,” I said.

“Martinod is right,” replied my companion, “but will he succeed where we came to grief?”

“You came to grief, grandfather!”

“We failed in the blood of the days of June.”

We failed in the blood of the days of June. The meaning of the words might escape me, but they made music in my ears like the rolling of a drum. Long ago—three or four years perhaps—I had been excited over other mysterious words, such as the lament of the White Blackbird, I was arranging trifles while you were in the woods, and also that of the Nightingale, All night long I strain my throat for her, but she sleeps and hears me not. Now I found their melancholy somewhat insipid, and preferred this new rhythm, so war-like and full of pain. Touched to the heart I at once asked, as with Aunt Deen’s stories when I was little,

“And what happened after that?”

“A tyrant came.”

Ah, this time it was all clear! A tyrant, a hospodar, to be sure! Aunt Deen’s hospodar, the famous man all dressed in red, who gave commands with loud shouts.

“What tyrant?” I asked, by way of knowing it all.

“Badinguet. Napoleon III. For that matter all emperors and all kings are tyrants.”

No; certainly I could not understand. The glimmer of truth which I had half seen died out. Our father, at table or in other conversations with us, had never failed to instil into our minds respect and love for the long line of kings who had ruled France, and whom nearly all the bad paintings in the drawing-room, save the grenadier and the latest portraits, had served. He used to talk as often of the power of nations as grandfather of their happiness. Napoleon the Great, whose epic story all school boys know by heart, had ruined the country, but all the same he was the greatest genius of modern times. As for Napoleon the Little, it was to him we owed defeat and the loss of territory. Curiously enough these events, when they were spoken of at our house, never seemed to me to have the slightest connection with those that figured in my history book. One never recognises in the plants of a herbarium those that are growing in the fields. And when father spoke in praise of the kings grandfather had never made any objection. He had neither approved nor disapproved. And here he was declaring in peremptory tones that all kings were tyrants! Why did he keep silence at table when he was so sure of his opinion? No doubt he did not wish to oppose any one. Thenceforth I accounted to myself for his self-effacement by delicacy, and was moved to consider him right.

Once again he spoke to me of those mysterious days of June when people fought to break the chains that bound the proletariat. I had no distinct notion of what the proletariat was. Tem Bossette, Mimi Pachoux and The Hanged, for instance, were they proletaires? I pictured them to myself loaded with chains and shut up in a cellar full of empty wine casks—because if the casks had been full they would never have come out of their own accord. Grandfather had rushed to their aid. I learned from his own lips that he had taken part in the insurrection in Paris, and had carried a gun.

“Did you fire it off, grandfather?” I asked in surprise and perhaps in admiration, for I should never have thought him capable of so vigorous an act.

He modestly explained that he had never had an opportunity.

Aunt Deen had shown me, in a cupboard, the sabre which my father had worn during the war. Why had no one ever showed me that gun? Was not it too a family trophy? Grandfather concluded his somewhat vague story with the familiar reflection:

“Papa wasn’t pleased.”

He seemed so old that I should never have had an idea of thinking of his parents, who were nothing but paintings in the drawing-room. And here he was saying papa, like little Jamie, not even father like my elder brothers and me. Greatly amused I exclaimed,

“Your papa, grandfather?”

“To be sure, the man of roses and laws, the magistrate, the nurseryman.”

He spoke of him without the slightest respect, and this to me unimaginable audacity seemed a thing so prodigious that by itself it was enough to obliterate all distinctions of rank. By it he at once placed himself above all other men, of whom he could make light with impunity. I promised myself to be disrespectful, too, to show my spirit.

Grandfather proceeded to enlighten me with certain particulars concerning the displeasure of his “papa.”

“Yes, indeed! he insisted that a king is as necessary to a nation as a gardener to a garden. And all the bad paintings in the drawing-room thought the same.”

What! all the family! Grandfather was deliberately taking his stand apart from all the ancestors! He proposed to flock by himself, to walk alone, far from the road, as in our walks. What’s the use of being a grown-up person if one must still consider others, may not do as he chooses, must heed counsels and remonstrances? He had done mighty well to carry a gun, seeing it was for liberty.

His impertinent little laugh seemed to break with paternal opinion and invoke nature:

“It’s absurd! As if it was necessary to trim trees and cut plants into shape! See how they grow without any help, and if these don’t knock out all the gardens in the world!”

We had reached a grove of beeches, aspens and other trees. The tender little spring leaves were not large enough yet to hide the ramifications of the branches. Before my convalescence I should have disagreed with grandfather. The transformation of our garden since our father took the reins of government, the arrangement of the grass-plots, the form of the groves, the harmonious order of the whole, had given me great satisfaction. But our wanderings in the country had by degrees opened my eyes to the beauty of wilder things. A clump of ferns and reeds, a tangle of vines and bushes, rocks crowned with ruddy bracken, and hidden nooks had won my preference, so that I unhesitatingly accepted his view. But I was in a measure stunned by the discovery that one might be of a different mind from one’s parents and even sit in judgment upon them, like this, in all quietness of mind. Grandfather had not been afraid to condemn his father in my presence. It was the most effective lesson in independence that I had yet received, and this discovery, far from gratifying me, inspired me with fear, and aroused again the feeling of sacrilege which I had felt with respect to the dead man. Irreverence was not liberty. One might scorn and at the same time obey, still, one really had a right to be free, not to accept his father’s ideas, not obey his orders.

I dared not give form to the thoughts which were assailing me and therefore returned to politics.

“Then,” I asked, “there won’t be kings any more?”

“As fast as people become civilised, kings will disappear.”

“How about the Count de Chambord?”

“Oh, as for him, he may as well cut up his white flag into a nightshirt.”

To speak of the Count de Chambord like that! The pleasantry shocked, rather than amused me. The Count de Chambord had always seemed to me a legendary personage, as far away and illusory as the chevaliers in the ballads which had thrilled me during my convalescence. To be sure he had not filched the cup of happiness from Titania, the fair queen of the elves, he had not come on a red roan steed to see the young girl of the romance of the Swan’s Nest; but I knew that he was living in exile, endued with the martyr’s aureola, and that he was expected. Aunt Deen never spoke of him except as “our prince,” and raised her head proudly whenever he was mentioned, as if he belonged to her. From time to time conferences were held in our drawing-room for the discussion of his approaching return. And he would not come back alone; God would come with him, and he would bring back the white flag. My imagination found no difficulty in picturing him at the head of a multitude waving banners, though I could not quite determine whether it was an army or a religious procession.

Of all these conferences one of the members was Mlle Tapinois, she who resembled the old dove in my picture book; there were also M. de Hurtin, an old gentleman who looked like the falcon who had been ruined by Revolutions, and divers other personages also drawn from my “Scenes from Animal Life,” and who are now somewhat mixed in my memory. There was also a certain impetuous priest, Abbé Heurtevant, who was always scenting the battle from afar, and whose prominent round eyes could see only things at a distance, so that he was always bumping into the furniture, and always restless, carrying on war against vases and Chinese curiosities. When he upset a knickknack he never excused himself but simply remarked:

“That’s one less.”

Small frivolous objects of that sort interfered with his actions and he detested them. Aunt Deen forgave even his destructiveness for the sake of his eloquence. When he was standing his head was perched so high that I would look for it as for a mountain top. On the other hand, when he sat down he would almost disappear in an easy chair, his knees on a level with his chin, as if he had been folded in three parts of equal length. He was as emaciated as an ascetic, which was not surprising since his only food was roots. It was he, indeed, who during the mushroom season, lived upon Satan bolets. They did him no harm, but neither did they fatten him. Grandfather was greatly interested in his diet, considering him a phenomenon, and upholding his opinions because of his eccentricities. He never called him anything but Nostradamus. On the contrary, father thought comparatively little of such an ally, and indeed did not greatly care for these quasi secret meetings.

“Our good abbé,” he would say, “is always up in the air. He studies the heavens, but knows nothing of what is going on down here.”

What need had he of knowing, since he could foresee the future? In fact, he was making a collection of predictions concerning the restoration of the monarchy, and could cite from memory all the important ones. I can remember a good many of them, having heard them so often. The most celebrated of them all was that from the Abbey of Orval, which had predicted the downfall of Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons and even the reign of Louis-Philippe and the war. How then, could it have been mistaken in the apostrophe which Abbé Heurtevant would whisper in a moving tone, bringing tears from the eyes of the ladies. Come, young prince, leave the island of captivity ... unite the lion with the white flower. He had found a subtle interpretation of the island of captivity and the lion, which on the first investigation had been obscure. I was however in no haste to have the young prince obey this injunction, because of the events which were bound to follow, namely, the conversion of England and of the Jews, and to finish up with, Antichrist. Antichrist terrified me: he also, like Death in my Bible, was to ride, on a pale horse.

“The young prince, indeed,” grandfather would sneer when I related all these marvels to him, for he refused to be present at the assemblies over which Abbé Nostradamus presided, “young prince of sixty springs!”

There were also the visions of a certain Rose-Colombe, a Dominican nun, deceased upon the Italian coast. A great revolution was to burst out in Europe, the Russians and Prussians would turn their churches into stables, and peace would hot appear again until the lilies, descendants of Saint Louis, were again blossoming upon the throne of France, which would happen. Which would happen closed the paragraph, proving that it was not a mere hypothesis, as learned men might construe it, but an incontestable truth, proved by ecstatic visions.

“Yes, the lilies will bloom again,” Aunt Deen loved to repeat, for she attached especial credit to the sayings of Sister Rose Colombe.

This conviction caused her to rush up and downstairs all the more proudly, since she might suppose that her services would be needed. She had a habit of accompanying the innumerable labours to which, without respite, she gave herself, with interjections and exclamations. We could hear her psalmodies as she swept or scoured, for she turned her hand to everything.

“They will bloom again, to the salvation of religion and of France.”

The Abbé did not stop at predictions which re-established monarchs among ourselves. His solicitude extended even over unhappy Poland, and one evening he triumphantly brought in a Roman newspaper, in which was recorded the apparition of the Blessed Andrew Bobola, who informed a monk of the restoration of that kingdom, after a war which would involve all nations.

“At last Poland is saved,” he concluded in a tone of satisfaction.

“Poor Poland, it is high time!” chimed in Aunt Deen, who had compassion upon all unfortunates.

Nevertheless, in order to attain to these miraculous renascences many catastrophes must be endured. Our abbé heroically put the torch to all Europe, and consented to drench it in blood if only the lilies would bloom again at the end.

The ladies enjoyed his vaticinations. His nostrils would expand like sails under a favourable breeze, and his round eyes would bulge with so much ardour that it almost seemed as if they might fall out, all in a flame. He used also to break a lance with the party that admitted the escape of Louis XVII from the prison of the Temple and the authenticity of Naundorff. Mlle Tapinois, especially, preached Naundorffism, which won her many a stinging retort. She almost drew Aunt Deen after her, but one glance from Abbé Heurtevant sufficed to keep her firm in the good cause. Mlle Tapinois invoked Providence, of whom every one knew that she was the right arm, declaring him—it was impossible to say why—hostile to the return of the Count de Chambord. By way of eclipsing her adversary she would state that Jules Favre, the advocate of her Naundorff, had received from him as a token of gratitude the seal of the Bourbons, and happening to have no other one with him on that historic day, he had set the royal seal to the Treaty of Paris after the signature of Count Bismarck, as if he were acting simply as the delegate of his prince. This anecdote having obtained the success of curiosity, in spite of father’s remark, “No Bourbon would have signed such a treaty,” Abbé Heurtevant, broken-hearted at having been interrupted in his predictions by such fiddle-faddles, shrugged his shoulders in token of his incredulity, and from the corner where I was playing with a pack of cards, I heard him murmur,

“When Balaam’s ass spoke, the prophet kept silence.”

I knew the adventure of Balaam from a picture in my Bible. But our abbé came in also for his own, and was recompensed for his brief overthrow. Old M. Hurtin, whose bird of prey profile deceived people as to the obstinacy of his temper, shaken by the stories and asseverations of Mlle Tapinois, began on his part to bring up objections to Monseigneur, for no one failed to give him his title if only to dispute it. He went so far as to reproach him for having no children.

“One will be made for him,” M. Heurtevant declared in a moment of sudden illumination.

This remark, most forcibly uttered, raised a great outcry. The ladies manifested their indignation by various little ejaculations, and Mlle Tapinois, covering her face, protested against a man of God daring to scandalise a respectable and well-meaning company, and with children present. The abbé, blushing and quite out of countenance, being much more accustomed to reprimand others than to be reprimanded, lifted up his hands while Mlle Tapinois was haranguing, as a sign that he desired to explain. The opportunity was not immediately given, and he was forced to have patience until the excitement was calmed. He had simply meant to say that the continuity of the dynasty would be provided for, and that the royal race was not threatened with extinction. A legitimate successor would do as well as a child of a king. His explanations were received with ill grace, and Mlle Tapinois, who was seated near me, turned to M. de Hurtin, and put him through a course of questions, to certify that the prophet had found a very bad mouthpiece; thus taking her revenge on Balaam’s ass, which had not escaped her acute ear.

This incident which fastened itself on my memory though I did not very well understand it, as sometimes happens with memories, had cast a damper on these royalist meetings, when the approaching elections reanimated them.

“I do not believe in salvation by election,” father remarked, “still we must neglect nothing for the welfare of the country.”

A rumour was going round that the mayor’s chair would be contested, the actual occupant being unworthy. But who would lead the conflict? It must be a man of mettle, able and firm. Thenceforth I never passed the municipal building on my way to school without imagining it endowed with machicolations and cannons and bearing its part in a great confusion of historic sieges.

The bell at our gate was incessantly ringing, and it was not always some one for the doctor. Well dressed gentlemen who seemed to prefer to slip in at nightfall with the shadows, peasants, working men, were invading the house, and the same words were constantly repeated:

“Won’t you come forward, doctor?”

“Doctor, you must come forward.”

The old men of the suburbs would say more familiarly, “Get a move on, Monsieur Michel.”

I observed that the peasants and working men put more earnestness and conviction into their entreaties. The well-dressed gentlemen, better mannered, and more discreet, did not insist, and one of them, stout and dignified, carried his devotion so far as to propose himself.

“To be sure, we understand your scruples, your hesitations. It’s a weighty undertaking and very expensive. If it must be, I will consent to be candidate in your place—just to please you.”

“Not you,” spoke up with authority a bearded individual in a blue blouse. “You wouldn’t get four votes. Monsieur Michel is another story.”

The gentleman, thus turned down, majestically buttoned up his frock coat.

When the intruders had retired, a discussion arose between father and mother, peaceful, grave and confidential. So absorbed were they that they did not notice that we were present.

“You can not,” said mother gently, almost quoting the stout gentleman. “Think of the expenses that we are bearing. You were obliged to buy the property in order to spare your father, and I encouraged your doing so, remember. In a family, all stand or fall together. The great schools are very expensive, for we do not get scholarships, though we have seven children. You are known to be hostile to the institutions under which we are governed. Within a few years we shall need to settle Louise, even though Mélanie will need but a small dowry. And besides, think of yourself. You are already working too hard, your patients absorb all your strength. I am afraid you will overdo. We are no longer in our first youth, my dear. The family is enough for us. The family is our first duty.”

Father was silent for a moment, as if weighing the pros and cons. Then he said:

“I do not forget the family. Don’t distress yourself about my health, Valentine. I have never felt myself more robust nor better able to endure fatigue. And I can not help thinking of the useful part which is offered me,—for to be mayor to-day is to be deputy to-morrow: to denounce to the country the gang that is cheating it and fattening upon it, to prepare the public mind for the return of the king—so necessary if we are to recover from defeat. All these plain folk who rely upon me touch my heart, and shake my resolution to hold myself aloof from public life. I have no personal ambition. But even here, surely here, there is a duty to fulfil.”

They were like alternating strophes in which the family and the country by turns made their pressing appeals.

My father’s picture of a restored France did not closely resemble that of Abbé Heurtevant, who trusted to miracles. He added circumstantial details which I could not follow, but in the end, without knowing exactly how, we got the impression that the aroused provinces would march promptly and joyfully under the authority of the prince who would address himself directly to them, and who at the same time would refer all religious matters to the Pope of Rome.

Father was so well able to command that I found it quite natural that the government should be entrusted to him, since the realm of the house was not enough for him, and he desired another. And besides, in that case he would be too busy to watch over my studies and my thoughts, which I well knew he talked over anxiously with mother, in the evenings.

Things were even more changed at the Café des Navigateurs than at our house, where only a faint note of coming events reached my ear. I went thither with grandfather, one holiday, when we were not expected. Casenave, prematurely aged, apart from the others, was still drinking for pleasure, in the midst of the general inattention, the other members of the group being occupied with loftier things. They were not talking of the king, but of liberty. I learned that the hydra of reaction which had been supposed to be crushed after the Sixteenth of May, was beginning to lift up its head. Galurin was openly demanding the partition of goods, which was his hobby, Gallus and Merinos were repudiating a bourgeois Republic, desiring it to be at once Athenian and popular, one which would assure to each person a minimum wage for an indeterminate amount of work, and at the same time would be open to beauty, and a protector of the arts. They were both sketching, in the intervals of their labours, one a symphony, the other a charcoal drawing in which the new era was symbolised. But I hardly recognised Martinod. Instead of presenting to our dazzled eyes, as in former days, the marriage of the People and Reason, he left all phrase-making to the two artists. With unexpected coherence he was enumerating urgent reforms, the diminution of military service with a view to its complete suppression, the independence of syndicates, State monopoly of education, not to mention the revision of the Constitution, a matter upon which every one was agreed. The independence of syndicates especially struck me because no matter how much my neighbour explained to me in what it consisted, I could not in the least understand it, and therefore set a particularly high value upon it. Leaving his reforms, notwithstanding their urgency, Martinod, who was continually bringing in recruits and treating them, worked himself up into a great excitement upon a subject of more immediate importance, which was the next mayor.

Decidedly, I understood one thing, the battle would be carried on there and not elsewhere.

Soon the entire conversation began to turn upon proper names. Forgotten was the Athenian and popular Republic, forgotten were reforms, only individuals were spoken of, and very few of these found grace in the eyes of the company. Most of them were considered suspicious; they were not deemed pure enough,—and all sorts of fatal defects were brought up against them, notably consorting with priests, and sending their children to clerical schools. Then there were discussions in an undertone (and I clearly saw Martinod directing furtive glances, now in grandfather’s direction and now in mine, which flattered me, for in general I did not exist for so great a man), of a redoubtable leader who would be the worst adversary and not easily to be overcome.

“There is only he,” Martinod concluded. “The others are all knaves or thieves.”

“He is the only one,” repeated the chorus in approval.

Yet nobody mentioned his name. I found no difficulty, however, in picturing him to myself formidable and mysterious, leading his forces to certain victory. Grandfather was negligently listening to Casenave’s dialogue with his double. Martinod, who had been observing him for a moment or two, now secretly and again full in the face, suddenly leaned toward him, and said abruptly:

“Do you know one thing, Father Rambert? You are the one to lead us in this fight.”

“I!” exclaimed grandfather, quite taken aback. “Oho!”

And he gurgled out his little laugh. They let him laugh at his ease, after which Martinod repeated his offer.

“To be sure, you. Who deserves it better? In ’48 you came near dying for liberty.”

“Not at all. I did not come near dying.”

This proposition was not further pressed. But as we were going back to the house at the dinner hour he stood still, saying:

“That was a good thing, Martinod! I their candidate? Insane!”

He laughed again with all his heart. A little further on he repeated,

“I, their candidate!”

This time he did not laugh. I understood that all the same he was not displeased with Martinod’s suggestion.

II
THE CIRCUS

MY attention was distracted from these election concerns by the circus which had been set up in the Market Place. Its immense white tent, at last secured in place by solid pegs, bore above the entrance curtain, in letters of gold against a blue background, the inscription Marinetti’s Circus. A drummer plied his drumsticks at short intervals to attract the attention of the public, and from time to time the portière was raised and a princess in a spangled robe and rose-coloured stockings emerged like an apparition. I used to pass that way on my return from school, merely to hear that unceasing drum and to see that lady, who was sometimes old and sometimes very young. How I longed to get inside the tent! I indulged my desire for this forbidden paradise by lingering as long as possible and then speeding away at my best pace, so as not to be late at home.

Once I made the circuit of the tent and got “behind the scenes.” The waggon-houses were drawn up side by side at the back. Thick smoke was pouring from their slender chimneys—as if from green wood, and from the odour some witch’s broth must have been in course of preparation. Several raw-boned horses were wandering at liberty, as if they had not the strength to go far, under the indulgent watch of dogs whose indolence reassured me. A parroquet was fluttering from roof to roof. On the steps of one waggon a woman was sitting clothed in rags which unblushingly revealed her amber skin, combing her hair in the sun; the black mass which she drew forward cast a shadow over all her face, hiding it from me, though it alone interested me. A bronzed old fellow was smoking his pipe with a majesty like that of the old shepherd in his russet mantle, walking before his sheep with even pace toward the mountain. Some half-naked children, brown and curly-headed, crawling among the waggons, were hustling one another, exchanging thumps, when suddenly a door opened and out bounced a termagant, holding a stewpan in her left hand and with her right restoring peace by means of a few sound slaps.

This spectacle in no way cooled my curiosity. Has the wrong side of a theatre ever cooled the interest of amateurs or the zeal of actors? What was not my delight then when grandfather, returning from a walk, proposed to take me inside. I imagine he was going in on his own account and was far from suspecting my longings.

We entered. The orchestra, composed of a cornopean, two small flutes and a clavier which some one struck with two rulers—I was unfamiliar with the dulcimer—were making such a clatter as quite to drown out the faithful and monotonous drum outside. Little by little we grew used to it and through all the noise I soon became aware of a sort of call, at once indescribably sad, sweet and authoritative, and so insistent that no one could resist it. In later years the Hungarian dances gave me a better understanding of the longing which I then felt. The sound brought before me unknown, far distant lands, and all the pleasures of vague pain. I longed to extend my arms to hasten the future. It was, as it were, a new apprehension of the still more vague sensation which Aunt Deen’s cradle song had awakened in me:

Si Dieu favorise

Ma noble entreprise

J’irai-z-à Venise

Couler d’heureux jours.

And I dimly realised that The House would never fulfil my dream. We didn’t hear such music there.

Powdered clowns in parti-coloured red and yellow costumes and little pointed caps played tricks upon one another which excited the laughter of the crowd and disgusted me. I had not come to witness buffoonery, but had expected, without quite knowing what, a noble and moving spectacle. Happily a tight-rope dancer restored my serenity, for it was with difficulty that she preserved her equilibrium, seeming likely at any moment to fall to the ground.

But the sensational number was the flying trapeze of the two Marinetti brothers. More than one celebrated acrobat has doubtless begun his career in a travelling circus. The two Marinetti brothers later became celebrated; one was killed in London by a fall; the other is to-day one of the first mimics of the world. At that time they were very young fellows, hardly older than I. One might have thought that they were simply amusing themselves, with no thought of the spectators. They played into each other’s hands with touching solicitude and arranged by a slight signal for the execution of their joint turns—I had almost said their duet, for there was so much rhythm in the supple movements of their two bodies that they really seemed to sing. During their whole glorious or tragic career, did they ever do anything more daring than those flights from one trapeze to another, without the security of the net, always laid in wait for by death, for which they seemed to care no more than a sparrowhawk for a knife?

The stifled cry of a woman in the audience awoke me to the danger to which I had been as indifferent as they, but of which I became suddenly aware. I was full of admiration and envy of them, soaring thus through the air. I could conceive of nothing more heroic, and my notion of courage underwent a change. Until now, through the epic stories father had told me, I had imagined it as always serving a cause. Hector was defending his city against the Greeks and Roland his faith against the Saracens. But was it not finer to juggle thus with oneself, for no reason, for one’s own pleasure?—for the public had ceased to count. In that ill-lighted circus, to the sound of that strange, exciting orchestra, I came to feel the charm of the danger that serves no purpose.

But clowns, rope dancer and even the Marinetti brothers were eclipsed in my imagination as by enchantment, when into the ring there dashed a little horsewoman standing erect upon a black horse whose saddle was large and flat like a table. I had been looking down during the interval, that is why I noticed the horse, for otherwise I should surely have seen only the rider. She wore a robe of gold. If the lamps had emitted less smoke and more light it is probable that that frayed dress would not have given me such a vision of luxury. The girl’s arms were bare and her hair unbound. Alone among all those tawny performers she was fair like the heroines of all my ballads. Merely by her leap into the ring she gave me what no woman had ever given me before, not even she whom I had met with grandfather and whom I had called the lady of the pavilion before I named her Helen;—not the sense of beauty—to that I had already attained; but the fear of approaching her and not keeping her. Yet I search my memory in vain for her features—I can not find them. I must have seen her often, and now I wonder if I ever looked at her, if I ever really dared to look at her. I think she had golden eyes—the golden tint of a virgin in a stained glass window through which the sun is shining. How old was she? Sixteen or seventeen—not older, and perhaps not so old. The fruits of her country do not need many months for ripening. She appeared taller than she was, by reason of her slenderness. It would be unjust to call her thin; slight, yes, but her slight form was full and muscular, and I wondered at the nascent roundness of her bosom. She was leaping through hoops that were held before her, and at each spring I trembled lest the horse should get away or she should miss the large saddle. It made me happy to tremble for her. Reassured by her skill I began to watch the movement of her hair, which each time she bounded rose and fell in cadence upon her shoulders. If a lock fell over her face she would throw it back with a gesture of annoyance.

The gravity of her countenance showed that she was wholly absorbed in her work. From time to time her lips would part with the little words hop, hop, designed to warm up her horse, who was apathetically rounding the circle. Then she would seat herself on the saddle for a moment’s rest, her legs hanging, while she indifferently bowed her head in answer to the applause, her bosom, unconfined by her clinging gown, rising and falling with her quickened breath. She seemed completely isolated from all around by her gravity, her indifference. The young girls whom I knew, my sisters’ friends, used to talk, chatter, laugh, play, put their arms around each others’ waists. This one was passive as an idol.

The show ended with a pantomime, every scene of which I remember. When we went back to the house I repeated it as well as I could by mobilising my sister Nicola, and even little Jamie for a minor part, pressing two little schoolfellows into the service, and with this improvised troop I proposed to treat our parents on the festival of one or the other. Our performance was ruthlessly stopped in the very middle without the slightest respect for dramatic art. Grandfather alone was clamorously delighted with it, for which Aunt Deen reproved him. Reflecting upon the incident, I at last recognised that the plot turned upon a hoodwinked husband. The innocent Nicola had been charged with this part, and under my instructions performed it with wonderful success. But I was forbidden to return to the circus.

The little circus queen who had made a single spring from her horse’s back into my imagination was doubtless destined to remain a magnificent and remote memory for me. But grandfather loved the company of artists and unconventional folk. I can see him now at the Café des Navigateurs, taking sides with all the Martinod group against the bourgeois. One day as we were crossing the Market Place he went round the tent to where the waggons were drawn up.

“Where are we going, grandfather?” I murmured, with throbbing heart.

“I want to get a nearer view of these people.”

In fact, he stopped and talked with the men who were smoking their pipes, while the women were preparing the soup or mending clothes. He spoke to them in an unknown tongue, which must have been Italian. This language upon his lips seemed to me simply incomprehensible. He pronounced it almost like the words that we use, only dwelling upon certain syllables and gliding over those that followed. But when those bronzed men spoke their words took on a strange accent, sometimes low and sometimes sharp, like gay music.

Were these clowns or acrobats? The Marinetti brothers were absent. To see them there would have filled me with pride. The only important personage whom I seemed to recognise was the rope dancer, and she was somewhat disconcertingly crowned with grey hair, and was sadly repairing a dirty skirt of puffed gauze. I was not aware that its proper name is tulle.

Timidly my eyes sought the little horsewoman, though I should have preferred not to find her. I had looked too far away; she was at my side, peeling potatoes with a broken knife. Instead of her golden tunic, she was in an ugly striped gown. Her bare feet—that had been shod with gold—were covered with dust. But in this humiliation she seemed to me as beautiful as in her glory, on the pedestal of her large saddle, springing through hoops amid multitudinous applause. My eyes still enlightened by illusion, I found her just as beautiful, and yet my first impulse was to move away, of course from timidity—but also, I confess, because I had got from Aunt Deen, in the matter of gipsies and beggars, her fear of vermin, which she always said, are easily caught.

Let him who can explain these inconsistencies. I found a new and obscure feeling awaking within me, merely from the shame I felt at that recoil, and in my eagerness to be able to forgive myself, I could at once have shared with her even her insects.

I admired the nobility and also the dexterity with which she peeled her potatoes, never making two beginnings, but removing an entire skin with a single operation. She was condescending without impatience to this mean occupation, and I was grateful to her for her humility. As the other day in the ring, during her hippie exercises, she was serious and impassive, absorbed in her work. Yet did she not observe my fixed observation? She deigned to be the first to speak.

“Peeling is slow work,” she observed.

“Yes, indeed,” I replied, at the very summit of happiness; “peeling is slow work.”

I should have liked to help her. I ought to have helped her, but I dared not. A pharisaic scruple withheld me. Though my zeal might carry me even to the vermin which you catch without knowing it, I had not the courage to endure the obloquy of peeling potatoes in the public square, before all those roulottes.

Our mutual confidences went no further. Suddenly a guttural voice called,

“Nazzarena!”

She left her vegetables and went away without saying good-bye. I was greatly moved; at least I knew her name. I rushed back to the house at a gallop, leaving behind me grandfather, waving his arms and crying,

“Halloa! Wait!”

It was impossible for me not to run. Wings had sprouted from my shoulders, and during my wild race my whole being was surging, like our music box when the spring was released. I rushed into the garden, bumping against Tem Bossette, who had not stepped aside quickly enough, and who shouted,

“What’s the matter with you, Master Francis?”

I replied laughing, but without checking my speed:

“Why, nothing at all. Nothing is the matter with me.”

I leaped over the cannas, flew to the orchard like a run-away chicken, and threw myself, breathless, against a young apple tree. The trees were in blossom—it was springtime. The branches trembled at the shock, and a shower of rosy petals rained down upon me.

I was far from suspecting that I was also gathering the blossom of love, the love that does not ripen.

At school the Marinetti circus had become the object of all our interest and conversation. In the playground, between two games of prison-bars, the big boys discussed sometimes the flying trapeze, which had dazzled the lovers of sport, and sometimes the little horsewoman, preferred by the clan of philosophers. I would catch fragments of their remarks as I passed, and I was burning to arouse the envy of my elders with the superiority which I had achieved over them. Thus torn between my secret and my vanity, it was the latter which won out, and one day, with feigned modesty, I admitted that I had spoken to her. My object was at once attained and even exceeded: they all crowded around me, congratulating me, plying me with questions. I was forced to embroider the truth a little, in order to satisfy their curiosity.

“You are a lucky fellow,” said Fernand de Montraut, whose jealousy I divined.

Fernand de Montraut was the ornament of the rhetoric division and at the same time the lowest in the class. He passed for the most elegant fellow in school because of his cravats, and every one bowed to his superior experience in all matters of sentiment, for he boasted the friendship of several girls. Unfortunately, he added,

“Then you are in love?”

Not knowing until that moment what it was to be in love, I at once learned its meaning from his question, and gave myself up to the melancholy which I deemed the proper thing.

Grandfather having struck up an acquaintance with the circus folk, whom he supplied with tobacco, I found myself again in Nazzarena’s presence. The desire to give her something tortured me, the more so because Fernand de Montraut, an acknowledged judge, had assured me that one always gave presents to ladies. The only embarrassment was the choice of gift. Now I had in a drawer a collection of cornelian marbles which I treasured as if they had been jewels. There were spotted red ones, and black ones with white circles. Nothing that I possessed was more precious to me. For a moment I hesitated at so great a sacrifice, and thought of at least keeping back that flame-coloured agate that the light shone through and which was my favourite. But it was clear to me that if I kept back that one my offering would be worthless. In a moment of resignation rather than of enthusiasm I gathered up the whole lot and ran to my new friend, awkwardly presenting them to her without a word of explanation. She seemed somewhat surprised, but accepted them without hesitation.

“Zat’s pretty,” she said, “you ’z cute.”

She used familiar words, which I had always heard without noticing their sound, and it seemed as if she had transformed them into another language, all flowers and music. I was emboldened to speak to her in reply, urged on perhaps by a notion of justice: having sacrificed my marbles I had a right to some compensation.

“I know your name,” I said with some emphasis. “Your name is Nazzarena.”

She was greatly delighted at the extent of my knowledge.

“Aha! he knows my name. But it isn’t Nazzarena, it’s Nazzaré-na. Say it!”

I must needs learn her accent. After which she asked,

“What’s your name?”

“Francis.”

“Like the saint of Assisi. And where are you from?”

“Why, from here, of course.”

How should I be from anywhere else? One lives in his own town and his own house. Perhaps she perceived her blunder, for she asked no more questions and it was I who bashfully resumed the conversation, not without timidity.

“Where are you from?”

“I don’t know.”

What a curious answer! One always knows where one is from. Well!

“Then you have no house of your own?”

“That’s our house.”

She pointed to one of the waggons, the front of which was painted green. I could not mistake her expression of scorn. She suddenly turned away and gazed at the great buildings of cut stone which surrounded the market place on all four sides; my town is ancient and rugged, and its houses were built to last for centuries. Perhaps she was estimating the security of a stationary life, but I was picturing to myself the joys of a nomad existence when I went on:

“It must be very amusing.”

“What must?”

“To keep changing your locality.”

I used the word locality purposely, to give her a high idea of me.

“That depends,” she said. “There are places where the receipts are bad. One time we made only seven francs and a half.”

Details of that sort were of no interest, but I went on to confess to an unbounded admiration for this mode of life. At this declaration she opened her eyes wide, doubtless amazed that one could envy her when one lived in one of those great buildings, capable of enduring all sorts of bad weather.

“All the same you wouldn’t come with us.” The mere suggestion seemed to please her, but she at once put it away as an absurdity.

“Besides you can’t know much. But you’z cute.”

Again that expression which seemed offensive to my self-love. I could not remain silent under so unworthy an estimate, and I retorted proudly,

“I can ride horse-back.”

I had sometimes been hoisted upon our farmer’s blind mare, and had even experienced a disquietude akin to fear when long shivers ran through her body. My friend appeared enchanted and promised to lend me her black steed.

How does the grown-up heart differ from that of childhood? I had not the least idea of going with her. She did not suppose I was going. I had not the slightest equestrian ability. She had no authority over her horse; without mutual agreement each was conniving at luring the other on. It was a delicious foretaste of the falsehoods which lurk beneath all lovers’ conversations.

Just then, as we both sat silent, a fearful and torturing memory came to me. One phrase—just a short phrase from the book of ballads which I had read and reread during my convalescence, until they seemed to form part of the very atmosphere of my existence, suddenly detached itself from the rest—I heard it within myself as if another than myself had uttered it. It was a line in the legend of The Lord of Burleigh. The Lord of Burleigh is speaking to a peasant girl, who is the prettiest and most modest girl in the village, and what he says is,

There is no one in the world whom I love like thee.

To be sure, I should never in the world have spoken those words aloud; I should even have closed my lips tight to make sure of not uttering them. But I felt them as living things, and they thrilled through me. Now I discovered their prodigious meaning. How could one say such words to some one who was not of one’s family, and whom one hardly knew? No one in the world! What about father—and mother? I dimly perceived the sacrilegious power of love, and while I was leaning over that abyss, Nazzarena, usually so grave, was laughing and showing her teeth.

One of the bronzed men of the troop passed, and stopped before us, scrutinising us. Then suddenly he knocked our two heads together, uttering in his jargon a word or two that I did not understand.

The touch of her cheek burned me, and violently pulling myself free I felt myself reddening to the very roots of my hair. She only laughed the more.

“What did he say?” I stammered, tossed between anger and a totally new emotion.

“Oh, nothing,” said she. “That you were my little lover.”

“I!” I protested. “What an idea!”

I could not consent that it should be possible. The love that one expressed must lose all importance. And what next? That way everything would be over. Surely, for love to be love one must keep it to oneself and it must hurt....

III
THE PLOT

HOW was it that no one noticed, when I returned to the house, that I had suddenly changed and grown? I was almost scandalised at their blindness.

“Well, here you are!” observed my father, who was beginning to be uneasy about my absences.

Aunt Deen ran after me to make me put on another coat, more obviously worn. I had hastily slipped on my best, for my visit to Nazzarena. It may have been the memorable olive-green of my convalescence, at last become better adapted to my size after three or four years of growth, unless it had already been retired to a clothes press, in camphor and naphtha, until such time as James should grow to it. I commanded not the slightest respect, although the entire household ought to have been struck with my changed countenance. Instead of thinking only of my adventure, which indeed I could not quite understand, I was vexed with the familiarity with which I was treated.

We were all gathered in mother’s room because of little Nicola, who was somewhat grippy, and who, being a delicate child, needed watchful care. Notwithstanding my absorbing secret I felt that some important event was impending. The too turbulent Jamie was admonished to keep quiet in a corner. Mélanie, always somewhat in the moon—Aunt Deen insisted that she was listening to her voices, like Jeanne d’Arc—quietly undertook to amuse her sick sister, so that father was finally able to show mother the letter which he had in his hand.

“It is from Monsignor’s secretary,” he said as he opened it.

I thought he was speaking of the bishop, who always dined with us once a year. But the name of the Count de Chambord occurred in it. When he had finished reading it—I had not heard it distinctly—father added simply:

“Very well; I will present myself, since the prince desires that nothing be neglected for the welfare of the country.”

“Oh, the prince!” murmured grandfather, smothering his little laugh.

Father looked at him with that straightforward, penetrating gaze which was always hard to bear. But grandfather at once put on his most innocent air, such as I remembered him to have assumed the time we met mamma in the street — when he said, “We are going to buy a paper.”

I at once divined that father was the mysterious and terrible leader whose intervention in the assault upon the mayor’s office Martinod had so feared. It could be no one but he, and how was it possible that he should not win the battle? A look at him was enough. He bore victory about with him. My childish eyes, still loyal and clear-sighted, could see the signs of superiority radiating from his brow. How should I have guessed that superiority is a small factor in success, since all sorts of dubious weapons against it are being forged in dark places? I might indeed endeavour to escape from my father’s influence, but at least I never dreamed of underrating it.

The watchful care usually extended to me was diminished by the illness of Nicola, who was always asking for her mother. I had remarked that father was making the most of his infrequent moments of leisure to talk with Mélanie, go out with Mélanie, take walks with Mélanie. More than ever he treated her with an affection at once tender and reserved, almost respectful, and seemed to extend his strength over her, as if some one was endangering his daughter or seeking to take her from him. As for Aunt Deen, who almost worshipped her nephews and nieces, individually and collectively, she remarked between going up and down stairs that I was a model child and an exemplary son, and even placed to her brother’s credit a large part in this happy state of things.

I made the most of this relaxed vigilance, which in fact was merely comparative, to continue my visits to the circus in spite of the prohibition which had been put upon them. With a hypocrisy which had already become perspicacious, I had persuaded myself that I was not disobeying when I walked around the tent to where the waggons were stationed. The side scenes are not the theatre. Thus from argument to argument I went on until at last I actually entered the tent. Had not grandfather taken me there the first time? He was the oldest, he ought to know better than any one else what was good for me. Besides, no one would know; there was no risk of any member of the family meeting me there, unless, indeed, grandfather. And Nazzarena rode her horse for me alone, and when she bowed courteously in response to the applause it was still for me alone. With all the ease in the world I suppressed the existence of the surrounding public.

Nevertheless, as my conscience was not perfectly easy, I clung to grandfather, who in case of need could ward off suspicions or bear the burden of responsibility. I even went with him to the Café des Navigateurs, though I had exhausted its pleasures and should have preferred another society. Martinod was unusually glad to see us.

“Father Rambert! What a pleasure to see you again! Father Rambert, sit here beside me in the place of honour.”

I observed that if he had formerly excelled in passing over the bills to others, he now kept open purse not only for his own drinks but for those of others. Gallus and Merinos perceived it sooner than I did and refused themselves no indulgence. As for Casenave and Galurin, they had never troubled themselves about the score. I had already before this remarked a complete change in Martinod; he was less and less concerned with oratorical effect, and no longer sought to dazzle us with descriptions of festivals where fraternal embraces were the general order. He produced lists and figures, enumerated proper names and with a bit of pencil which he moistened at his lips industriously addressed himself to checking them up.

A newspaper man having laid the local gazette upon a table, he called the servant to bring it to him in so imperious a voice that the girl was startled and came near upsetting a dish of food which she was carrying. Hardly had he unfolded the sheet when he cried:

“There it is! I was sure of it! He presents himself.”

He had no need of being more definitely designated. Every one in the café unhesitatingly recognised him, and I as well as the others. Our group, which up to that moment had probably not felt sure that he would be a candidate, appeared to be deeply impressed and indeed quite demoralised. All wore long faces as they bent over their tumblers. Secretly scanning them one by one, as an impartial outsider, I considered their party, however numerous, quite incapable of carrying on a contest against my father.

Martinod permitted the others, and especially the neophytes who formed a sort of court around him, and for whose drinks he paid, to start up, exclaim, though without naming the enemy, while he, inattentive or meditative, fixed grandfather with his eyes. As he continued for some time in this attitude, a passage from my natural history recurred to my mind, concerning a serpent that fascinated birds, and I laughed to myself at this absurd idea. For a long time he maintained his fixed gaze; then, after ordering drinks all around, except for me, whom he had forgotten, he leaned forward and in a fawning voice spoke in his neighbour’s ear, but not so softly but that I heard.

“So, Father Rambert, you are no longer in your own house?”

“How so?” replied grandfather indifferently.

“Why, no; that fine château that you live in isn’t yours now.”

He pronounced the word château like the farmer, only omitting a few circumflex accents. Grandfather observed it, and it amused him. “Oho! the château,” he said; “why not the palace?”

“Call it what you like, for all me,” replied Martinod; “the fact remains that it is the finest residence in the country. And well situated—town and country at once. All the same, ha! ha! They have played you a trick, and you are no longer master of the house.”

Grandfather scratched his eyebrow, then pulled his beard. He never spoke to any one of his abdication, not even to me in our walks, and I had perceived that allusions to this old story, several years old now, did not interest him. I knew that he despised property and deemed it detrimental to the general good. But wasn’t that a sacred dogma at the Café of the Navigators, too?

“Well, yes,” he replied with a forced laugh. “I am no longer in my own house; there’s a discovery for you! My poor Martinod, you are behind the times! It’s many a long day since I’ve been in my own house and glad I am, as you see. No more bother, no more care. I am no longer the master, but I am my own master.”

Upon this the dialogue proceeded, more and more gaily.

“Ta, ta, ta! At your age it’s not easy to get used to camping in other folks’ houses.”

“At my age one likes peace and quiet.”

“Yes, I know. They have relegated you to the end of the table.”

“I put myself there of my own accord, and food tastes just as good there as in the middle.”

“But here, Father Rambert, you have the place of honour.”

“There is no place of honour in a café.”

“And your room?—every one knows that you have been hoisted to the garret.”

“Every one knows that I love heights.”

All of which was said banteringly. They were playing at tossing questions and answers to and fro, as we tossed balls at school. Listening to them, my mind was for a moment distracted from its absorbing sentiment, and I inwardly condemned myself for this as for a fault.

The subject soon became a theme for cheap pleasantries. Every one in the café began to talk of Father Rambert’s end of the table, Father Rambert’s garret. He would shrug his shoulders and take it all laughingly.

“Really, isn’t all that true, Father Rambert?” asked Martinod one day.

“Why, to be sure it is true in a sense. If you make a point of it, it is true. But what is it that is true?”

As if everybody didn’t know what is true and what is not true! Grandfather was rather fond of dark sayings. That same afternoon we went home together, he gay and sprightly, I downcast because I had not, even at a distance (which I preferred), seen Nazzarena. At the top of the steps we met father, who was waiting for us, and who seemed much disturbed. He had a newspaper crumpled up in his hand, and handed it without a word to grandfather, who made no motion to take it.

“Do you know who wrote that?” he asked. How contemptuously he pronounced the word that! I felt that he was controlling himself, but that something serious was going on at our house.

“How should I know?” asked grandfather. “I never read the local papers.”

“Very well, read this one.”

“No, thank you; I’m not interested.”

“Then I’ll read it to you.”

“If you insist upon it.”

I saw them go together into father’s consulting room, leaving the door open, and I had no notion of going away. Grandfather sat down resignedly in an easy chair, and father began to read at once. I felt ill rewarded for the curiosity which had kept me there, for I couldn’t understand a word of that dull, prosy and ill-worded article, which seemed to leave a bad taste in your mouth like grated cheese that melts in onion soup and turns into a sticky glue that clings to your gums. It was about the approaching elections, and a certain omnipotent and despotic personage, eager to rule the public with a rod of iron as he ruled his household. After this there was something about a garret full of rats, exposed to all the winds of heaven, yet good enough, it appeared, for the miserable old man who had been relegated to it, and who was expiating his social kindliness by being treated with contempt and forced into the meanest position in his own house. The article closed with a warm appeal to justice and sympathy. No name, no place, was mentioned. How could I have understood the illusions? It was too complicated an act of perfidy for a child to see through.

“Is that all?” asked grandfather when the indignant voice was silent.

“It seems to me that it is enough.”

“Oh, there isn’t enough there to whip a cat for—mere vague generalities.”

“Is that your opinion?” asked father. “Don’t you feel how venomous, and how dishonouring to me it all is? Have not you always been well treated here? Whose wish was it to sit at the end of the table? Who took possession of the tower chamber in spite of all we could say? Which of us has ever been lacking in respect to you? When has any one neglected to care for you most tenderly and deferentially? Of whom, of what, do you complain? Father, I entreat you,—tell me; this is a grave matter.”

Entreaty followed entreaty, hurrying one upon another, in a voice which gave them a pathetic intonation that thrilled me from head to foot. The obscure article suddenly became clear to me, and I grasped its entire significance. Some one was accusing my father of harshness to grandfather. The scene of the abdication rose up before me, and the morning in which I had borne a part by carrying the pile of Limping Messengers of Berne and Vevey.

“I am not complaining,” said grandfather; “I have never complained.”

“And of what could you have complained? This house has continued to be yours. I have taken upon myself only the duties and expenses which were a burden to you. But these calumnies have not been invented.”

“My dear Michel, all these stories bore me to death. I don’t read the newspapers, and get along very comfortably without them. I advise you to follow my example.”

“Because it is not you who are attacked. Because I shall never permit any one to attack you. This attack upon me comes from the Café of the Navigators. I am sure that you still go there, though I have informed you that it is the headquarters of our enemies. But you place in those people all the confidence that you refuse to me.”

“As for that, I go where I please and I see whom I like.”

“You are free, father, without the slightest doubt. But in a family all the members stand or fall together. Whoever aims at you strikes me. Whoever defames me insults you.”

“I have no such narrow views as to the family. I have never opposed you; do the same to me.”

At that moment father saw me through the half-open door, and a suspicion must have crossed his mind, for he cut the discussion short, and pointing to me said,

“I hope you never take that child there!”

“Where, pray?”

“To the Café of the Navigators.”

And turning to me father added in a tone which admitted of no reply, “Go away!”

So that I did not hear the reply.

I have forgotten no incident of that scene and am certain of having reconstructed it in its integrity, and if not in the same words at least in equivalent ones. As I had been successively born into a mysterious longing by a word of the shepherd who was leading his sheep to the mountain, into the knowledge of liberty by a walk with grandfather in the wild forest, into the sense of beauty by having met the lady in white, into the disquietude of love because Nazzarena had told me with a laugh that I was her little lover, so now I was born into a knowledge of human wickedness, to which all my childhood had been a stranger. Aunt Deen’s famous they, at whom I scoffed after having vainly sought them around me, did then exist, and Martinod was one of them, and the gentle and gay Casenave, whom my father had cured, and the old photographer Galurin, and the two artists!

This unexpected revelation completely upset me. People went to the café to enjoy themselves and not to hatch plots. They drank vari-coloured drinks and made jokes the while. No, it could not be possible! A doubt swept over me, both because of grandfather’s calmness, and because the “go away” which dismissed me had been somewhat brusque and aroused in me a desire to take the other side. Perhaps that scrap of paper was indeed not worth reading.

The next day I was in mother’s room when father came in with his hat on, coming straight in from outside without stopping in the vestibule. He took off his hat hastily, and we saw that his face was animated and suffused with colour. He had his grand air of a battle, and he laughed as if pleased.

“I have slapped Martinod’s face,” he said simply, as if he had said, “I have been to see such and such a patient.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” murmured my mother; “what will he invent against you now?”

I heard Aunt Deen running heavily, shaking the floor, rushing in like a whirlwind. She had heard my father’s words from a distance.

“Well done, Michel; well done!” she cried, all out of breath. “They are beaten; well done!”

There was one who didn’t haggle over the defence of the house!

I made the most of the unusual excitement to steal away. I had no objection to Martinod being slapped, so long as I profited by it in some way. I had been feeling myself more closely watched; opportunities to slip away were becoming rare. With all speed I made off to the street and rushed in the direction of the town. But as soon as I reached the Market Place I began to walk slowly, even putting on an unconcerned, indifferent manner, as of a loiterer who has no special point in view and doesn’t quite know where he is going. Thus I proceeded toward the circus, and started to walk around it, being careful to look about me carelessly, to show plainly that I was walking without a purpose. No one could be mistaken. How many times had I executed this little manœuvre and not always with success! If Nazzarena was there, occupied with some household duty, that was no reason why I should approach her, or even greet her. As a general thing I went past her without speaking, stiff as a poker. Our first conversation had exhausted my courage, and moreover I did not know what to talk about next. Sometimes she would laugh at me as she saw me pass—for when it came to playing with me or mocking at me she would lay aside her professional gravity as a horsewoman. Sometimes she would call me. I always went to her at her call, but not for worlds would I have spoken first.

That day she was leading her horse to water at the public fountain. Seen without his trappings and the blaze of torches with which the tent was lighted during performances, this steed appeared to me singularly like our farmer’s old blind mare that I had occasionally bestridden; it was a long bony beast, continually wrinkling his skin all over his body to shake off the flies. But I immediately closed my eyes to so pitiful a sight, and imagined in its place the red roan steed of the Romance of the Swan’s Nest which, in my book of ballads, bore the Knight to the young girl sitting in the grass by the river side, her bare feet in the water.

My adored one was absorbed in her work, or pretended to be, and did not deign to observe my presence. There was nothing for it but to keep on my way, since she would not turn her eyes toward me. And that horse kept on drinking, as if he were capable of drinking the fountain dry. It was enough to make one desperate! At last she turned her head. She was laughing. The naughty girl! She had seen me then! But in her most natural tone, as if she had suddenly discovered me, she bade me good morning.

Having given up hope of her speaking, I found nothing to say. My discomfited face no doubt betrayed my feelings, for she seemed not displeased with my silence, and even spoke of it:

“So, you are dumb to-day?” she asked, laughing all the more heartily as she added, “Aha! so you aren’t my little lover any more?”

I hung my head to conceal my embarrassment. Not love her any more! The foolish question! When one loved it was for always. The word always, which my lips could never have uttered, made a strange music in my heart, so sweet that nothing sweeter could ever be heard in the world.

Reassured as to my condition, and no doubt as to the effect she produced upon me, she calmly pulled the halter. Her horse had ceased to drink and from his moist nostrils drops of water were falling back into the basin.

IV
MY BETRAYAL

BECAUSE of that word always, continually singing in my heart, the days that followed were at once delicious and bitter, like the fruit that I used to gather too early in the garden. I was sure of the future and indeed of all eternity, enjoying to the full the love that as yet asks for nothing outside of itself. For the slight distress that I had felt at the contact of Nazzarena’s cheek when our heads had been jokingly bumped together had soon passed; nothing indeed was lacking to fill the cup of my happiness but never to see my beloved; my embarrassment returned whenever we met. If at least I had not been obliged to speak to her! I could not have endured to kiss her—I never so much as touched her hand. Each of us—so I think now—perhaps believed in the superiority of the other: she because my house was so solid, and I because of her horse, her golden robe, her talent as a horsewoman, her wandering life, and that indefinable something with which love endowed her. She soon perceived that the two sides were not equal: she could appear in public and be applauded; I was a mere spectator.

Conscious of her domination, she no longer shrank from laying commands upon me. She would ask little services of me,—to buy her a thimble in town, or gold thread and needles to mend her fine robe; and to ask for things used by girls and not by boys made me blush in the shop. If I Had to add some complementary explanations, I didn’t know where to turn to hide myself. She made me help her peel potatoes and delighted in my embarrassment when she saw me casting furtive glances toward the open square.

“Don’t worry, little man; no one is passing,” she would say, robbing me at a blow of all the benefit of my heroism.

Every day, either morning or evening, I would somehow manage to come home from school by way of the Market Place where she was living. What stratagems were mine to avoid suspicion! Sometimes my parents would come to walk home with me, or, the distance not being great, would merely meet me a few steps from the gate. How did I manage not to arouse their misgivings? One or another of my school fellows having discovered my manœuvres tried to make fun of me, but Fernand de Montraut’s intervention spared me the vexation of practical jokes. As the boys urged upon him that I refused to talk about the little horsewoman he pronounced my silence chivalrous; and this opinion, from so competent a judge, filled me with pride.

The same tawny young man who had knocked our heads together, finding me one day in conversation with Nazzarena, jabbered something again in their jargon, pointing his finger at me, and both burst out laughing. As for me, I could have cried.

By degrees this passion, greater than I, and too serious for my fourteen years, made a chasm between me and my family, all unawares to myself. I forgot the elections, and the newspaper article, and Martinod’s slapped face, which had brought about none of the immediate results that mother had dreaded. At the same time I would gladly have made a confidant of grandfather, because of our visits to the pavilion and also because of the lady in white, the memory of whom, until then somewhat vague, was now definitely fixed in my mind. Like a bouquet of fresh flowers I breathed in all the romance of our former walks. Their charm mysteriously affected me—was it not to them that I owed the precocious emotions of my excited sensibilities? But for them I should probably have been thinking only of playing tricks upon my teachers, or at most of enjoying these first days of spring without knowing why.

One Thursday afternoon—our holiday was Thursday—as I had with some difficulty escaped to the circus, to enjoy the performance and gaze upon my horsewoman, who that day did not deign to notice me, not knowing how to go back to the house without attracting attention, I decided to go to the Café of the Navigators, where there was some chance of meeting grandfather. The discussion between him and my father on this subject had already slipped my mind, and my only object was to get home without questionings, with no thought of Martinod and his acolytes. I half opened the door with beating heart; it was the first time that I had entered such a place alone. Grandfather was there; I was saved! So long as I went home under his protection no questions would be asked, and my absence would be justified by the very fact.

I seated myself in a corner to wait until he was ready to go. Near me Martinod was talking with the head of the establishment. I knew him, for he used to mingle familiarly with the patrons, and even in his days of prodigal humour, he would treat them all round.

“You see,” he was saying in a tearful voice, “the bill has been running several years.”

“Send it to the son,” Martinod advised.

“It is not his affair.”

“All the same, you’ll see that he will pay it. That I can guarantee. It’s a good trick to pay him against the elections. And besides, the boy has had some.”

Whom was he talking about? I had not noticed. But suddenly Martinod gazed at me, and under that gaze I at once remembered the slap he had received. I even felt a vague remorse at being in his company; but grandfather had surely kept on going with him. After all, he had received and not given the slap, and here he was, raising his arm to heaven as if some one had committed an unpardonable crime against me:

“That child has nothing to drink!”

I should never have believed him so solicitous with regard to me. Everybody had neglected me for a long time, and in fact, but for the passion which absorbed me, and inclined me to privations for the very love of suffering, I should have observed the infrequency of the glasses of syrup. The oversight was immediately repaired. The materials generally reserved for full grown men were set before me; I was solemnly offered a verte—of course an attenuated, diluted, inoffensive verte.

“I will mix it myself,” declared Martinod.

“I’ll leave it to you,” observed grandfather indifferently, interrupting himself in a heated discussion with Gallus as to the Andante of Bach’s second sonata for piano and violin. “And no practical jokes.”

“Father Rambert, don’t you worry!”

Certainly that Martinod was a good fellow, agreeable and slow to take offence. His cheek was perhaps still warm from that slap, and he was caring for me as for his own youngster!

He didn’t mix it the same way grandfather did. The superimposed lumps of sugar were melted; now he might pour the absinthe. Upon my word! He surely was treating me seriously and not like a baby gorged with milk! That brew must be extraordinary!

I tasted it and pronounced it delicious, without knowing why, the better to play my own part; and this gained me the suffrages of Casenave and Galurin.

“That’s the first,” they declared, “but it shall not be the last.”

I was almost the object of an ovation, and in gratitude I turned upon Martinod a humid eye. But why did he look at me in silence with that compassionate look? Had I a papier-mâché countenance? He finally leaned over me and whispered in my ear a few simple words that completed my disquietude:

“Poor little fellow!”

Why under the sun did he call me poor little fellow? Did I look as wretched as that? No doubt I hadn’t succeeded in seeing Nazzarena the whole day long. Yes, to be sure, I was unhappy, since everybody noticed it. Only no one ought to notice it. This was a secret, hidden in the very bottom of my heart, and no one had any right to speak to me of it. I at once assumed a repellant face, intended to discourage sympathy. But I couldn’t keep up this attitude. Ever since I emptied my glass, I felt, as it were, a veil before my eyes, and a warmth through all my body, an enervating torpor, and a sort of longing for confidence and affection. Furthermore, I had been mistaken as to Martinod’s intentions. He was not thinking of my love, he knew nothing about it, and with small respect to consistency I began now to regret that I didn’t hear him pronounce Nazzarena’s name. He was fascinating me with his gaze, as the serpent in my natural history must have fascinated the birds, and in a voice of caressing inflections, insinuating, coaxing, he gave me to understand that in my family I was misunderstood. In ambiguous words, with all sorts of circumlocutions, hesitations, reticences, he revealed to me that my father cared more for one of his older sons than for me. Which one? Stephen or Bernard? At this distance of time I do not remember which one he indicated. Was it Bernard, for his military air, his decided manner, his gaiety, his enthusiasm, and his resemblance to father? Or Stephen, for his fine and even temper, his good marks, his application, even his absence of mind? Upon my word I can not say which, now. Our parents treated us without the slightest difference, and each one was the object of special attention which he was free to consider a favour. Still, I did not hesitate to believe this stranger who did not know us, who had never set foot in our house, and who, I knew, had been chastised by my father for his perfidy.

Yes, I was misunderstood by my family. Imperceptible proofs started up from the shadows, and grew like clouds chased before the wind. My father was always talking about the absent ones, and when he received news of them he was radiant. Their letters were bulletins of victory. He wore paternal pride upon his forehead. I, I alone, was systematically kept in the background, I was of no consequence. How severely, the other week, he had cried “go away!” Did he know that I was frequenting the circus in spite of his prohibition, and that I peeled potatoes in the public square? If Bernard or Stephen had been the offender he would have come to know it, and would have scolded them, whereas he treated me with outrageous contempt; I, who was bearing the burden of so noble a love, I was treated only with humiliation and insult. Worst of all, worst of all, my father did not love me—nobody loved me. Everything conspired to make me think so, since I had not once met Nazzarena that whole day long! There was only grandfather, and grandfather was absorbed in his conversations, his music, in smoking his pipe, in his telescope and his almanacs.

I cast an imploring glance in his direction. Now he was waxing warm with Gallus over a quintette by Schumann. At such a time the world did not exist for him.

I would have consented to get along without the existence of the world, provided he would concern himself with me. I had the horrible sensation of being abandoned by every one, and that this man close at hand who insinuated his sympathy in a moved and compassionate voice had just informed me of an irreparable misfortune. I could have cried, but in the face of curious looks I kept back my tears. But on that bench, in that café, I learned to know the sadness of being misunderstood, of solitude in the midst of a crowd, of despair. Life is made up of many griefs; have I ever experienced a more intense pain than this imaginary despair?

Thus disarmed by the very tenderness that bared my sensibility to the quick, and fascinated by the serpent, I unconsciously entered into the plot which was being concocted against my father. Having accomplished his purpose—more easily than he had believed possible, for he was unaware that love was his ally—Martinod repeated in a heart-rending tone,

“Poor little fellow!”

My stifled sobs were suffocating me. He might blazen his triumph abroad, for he had succeeded even beyond his hopes; the seed of his suggestions was destined to spring up later and bear noxious fruit. But had he not found an easy prey?

I was still too unsophisticated to know that hate can flatter and smile, look pleasant, appear sympathetic or compassionate, and enwrap its object in fine phrases as bandits bind ropes about the man they would render powerless. Hatred of this sort, which with affected sympathy addresses itself to the friends and relations of the man it pursues, certain of wounding him on the rebound, can not always be denounced even later. There are few sentinels like Aunt Deen to keep guard over the sacred ark of the family.

It has been said that circumstances conspired to further Martinod’s plan. One Sunday afternoon, as I was idling at the window instead of finishing a task—I usually preferred grandfather’s tower chamber, but he was absent—I suddenly beheld a wonderful, a terrifying sight! The circus troop was invading our garden! They had come through the gate, which, notwithstanding Aunt Deen’s vigilance, had been left open because of the more frequent comings and goings of a holiday. The whole company was swarming over the grass plats and shamelessly trampling the flower borders. There were ragged women with babies in their arms, there were the two clowns whom I had in time come to identify, there was the grey-headed rope dancer and there—oh, woe! there was Nazzarena herself! Nazzarena without a hat, her hair unbound and her dress in rags. For the first time I realised that she was poor. In our garden, in the carefully tended alley, one might have taken her for a poor country girl.

Dumb with amazement, I dared neither hide nor lean out of the window. Terror at what was sure to happen paralysed me. Why had they come? What did they want? What ill wind had brought them? Our garden was not a place for wandering folk, bohemians, people whose only knowledge of land was to walk upon it. If only it had been the old-time garden, overgrown with weeds, never pruned nor watered! Or if only grandfather had been there to receive these suspicious guests! Nazzarena, Nazzarena, hasten back to your roulotte and the white tent in which you reign! I assure you that this is no place for you!

I was actually undergoing martyrdom on seeing them thus shamelessly making merry over our grass and flowers. I longed at heart to cry out, to warn them, but I could not. And in infinite agony I measured the distance which separated the house from my love.

One of the clowns was already ringing the door bell. My God! what would happen next? They had hardly begun to parley with Mariette, whose uncompromising humours I knew, when the catastrophe fell upon us. Aunt Deen came flying to the rescue and stoutly made head against the whole band. The dialogue was distinctly audible at my window:

“What do you people want?”

A chirping voice replied:

“This is Father Rambert’s house, isn’t it?”

“What do you want with Father Rambert? Go about your business. Get out!”

What abominable injustice! All the beggars of our town were always kindly treated by us; they even had their days, like society ladies, and Zeeze Million, who was crazy, and that drunkard Yes-Yes received a regular allowance at our door. Then why not give these honourable acrobats a chance to explain? Aunt Deen, always so charitable and ready to help, was turning them out with harsh words merely because they were strangers!

Thus ignominiously ordered out, they rebelled, and poured invectives upon their persecutor, who, I must admit, was not mute.

An infernal uproar arose. The rope dancer yelled, beating her sides. At last I resolved to intervene in behalf of my friends, Nazzarena’s friends. Suddenly, at the very moment when I was about to quit my post of observation to fly to the fray, my father, no doubt drawn by the uproar, appeared upon the scene. Without so much as opening his lips, with a single gesture—but how unanswerable!—he pointed to the entrance. And the whole roaring troop retreated, crowding between the two pillars that supported the gate, and fled, immediately and most astonishingly.

I was furious at so sudden and complete a rout. Since it was thus, I, by myself alone, would resist that authority which no one ever dared to brave. All my new-found enthusiasm again sweeping over me, I rushed to the stairs, flew down four steps at a time at the risk of carabossing myself, to overtake my beloved.

“Where are you going?” asked father, still at his post, and barring my way.

I was silent. My enthusiasm was already falling flat.

“Go back at once,” he went on. “I forbid you to go out.”

Unhesitatingly, but swelling with wrath, I went upstairs, gnawing my fists with rage. Was no one to resist him, then? I, too, like those others, had been immediately vanquished, overthrown, petrified, merely by having faced him. People think it is easy to revolt against the powers that be: I had just learned that that depends upon the character of the government. Again and again I went over Martinod’s insinuations. How true they were! He understood; he was a true friend!

I had only obeyed in appearance. I had hardly reached the tower when I began to listen for the sound of closing doors, and no sooner was I convinced that my father had gone back to his study than I furtively crept down and slipped out of the house. Once beyond the gate new courage inspired me: I straightened up and breathed freely. This time, I had no thought of taking a roundabout way, putting on airs of indifference, deceiving any whom I might meet, but ran by the shortest road to the Market Square. The gipsies were rolling up the tent, piling up the benches, the Sunday loiterers looking on with interest. This raising of the camp boded ill—I saw Nazzarena at last; she was gathering together the scattered household utensils. This was no time to be bashful: it called for heroic resolution. In the very face of all the spectators, most of whom doubtless knew the Rambert boy, I flew to my beloved, like one of the knights of my ballads. When she saw me she cast a heart-broken glance upon me.

“They drove us out of your garden,” she said before I had spoken a word.

How reply to this grievous statement? No doubt she included me among her persecutors.

“It wasn’t I!” I cried, hasting to separate myself from my family.

“Of course it wasn’t you,” she replied philosophically. “You are too little. We went to tell your grandfather that we are going away to-morrow. To-morrow morning.”

“To-morrow!” I repeated, as if I had not heard, or had not understood.

“Yes, to-morrow. See for yourself. They are loading the things on the waggons now. The Marinetti brothers have left us. There’ll be no matinée to-day—that’s one good haul lost.”

To my surprise, she was not angry with me for her expulsion, and even in my grief I observed an unexpected reversal of parts: she was showing an unaccustomed consideration for me, and I was taking on a little protecting air. The prestige of power was doing its work all unawares to myself. Thus she did not suggest that I should help her in her work, though the day before she would not have failed to do so.

One of the old hags stuck her long yellow face out of the nearest waggon, and upbraided her for wasting her time.

“I must go,” said Nazzarena. “Such a job to get ready for moving! Good-bye, good-bye, my little lover! I wish you another sweetheart; you’s cute; you’ll find one.”

She did not offer her hand; perhaps she dared not, because of the respect for me which the sight of the house had inspired in her. And I found no words in which to reply to her. I smiled foolishly at her strange wish for me: it seemed abominable and sacrilegious, though the affectionate way in which she uttered it was as sweet to me as a caress. Her departure floored me—seemed to cut my legs and arms and empty my brain. I stood there like a dolt. Time and place were nothing to me—she was going away!

I saw her in the distance, stumbling under the heavy trappings of her horse, and she made a little gesture of adieu as she disappeared behind one of the waggons. It seemed to me as if she was already far off, and I managed to walk away.

Where should I go? Associating the cruelty of my family with Nazzarena’s departure, I could not go back home. What consolation, what support would I have found there? Father had forbidden me to go out: I could judge of the reception which awaited me. I wandered up and down the streets among the people in their Sunday best, absent-mindedly bumping against one or another, who hurled at me the epithet of blockhead, or boor. I almost enjoyed it, so tempestuously did I long to change the character of my pain. Powerless to direct my steps, I automatically found myself at the Café des Navigateurs. Grandfather would understand me; grandfather was the embodiment of that security for which that dear Martinod was working.

The room was crowded, and I suddenly felt comforted by the atmosphere of tobacco and anise, the stir and movement. I lost the immediate sense of my grief, I was even able to perceive distinctly that something solemn and unusual was going on. A decision of capital importance had been arrived at, and from the way they were talking it seemed to me that this was one of those historic events that by and by boys would study in school. Grandfather was the object of a thousand testimonials of honour and admiration. They were crowding around him, congratulating him, shaking hands with him, though this he resisted. And champagne was being brought—highest favour! Champagne on a day like this! I began to feel deeply moved, all the more that no one offered me any.

“A goblet!” cried Martinod, that dear Martinod who certainly was good to me; “a goblet for the little fellow!”

And lifting high his own, with a grand gesture he proclaimed,

“To the election of Father Rambert! To the victory of the Republic!”

“Bravo!” exclaimed the faithful Galurin.

Callus and Merinos were overflowing with happiness: no doubt they were foreseeing that era of Beauty which they had so often anticipated in my hearing. As for Casenave, he was supporting the weight of his head with both hands, his vague eyes perhaps fixed upon some vision. The barmaid was inclining the bottle over his glass: he may have seen in her one of those beautiful ladies in empire gowns who used to come down through the ceiling of his garret to give him drinks and visit him openly.

“Ziou!” he exclaimed, sitting up.

As he gazed upon the frothing beverage, and the golden stream, he was seized with a convulsive shudder. His trembling hands failed to grasp the goblet, and he hiccoughed with impotent greed.

Grandfather alone showed no enthusiasm nor even pleasure. His ill-humour was evident. He found small enjoyment in popularity or applause. All this open-mouthed, drinking, shouting crowd got on his nerves. I am sure he would rather have been somewhere else—in the country—for instance, eating strawberries and sweet cream. Still, he was constrained to yield before the general enthusiasm.

“After all, it is perhaps well,” he conceded. “No tyrants, above all; liberty!”

No, indeed; no tyrants! In an instant the vision of my father rose before me, standing on the doorstep, his extended arm driving away those poor gipsies. And by way of protest, I emptied my goblet.

At that precise moment—so long as I live I shall never forget the sight—father entered the Café des Navigateurs. Unheard-of act! My back was turned to the door, so that I could only see him in the mirror. But it was Martinod’s face that told me of his presence. Martinod had suddenly turned pale, and the hand which held his glass trembled like that of Casenave, so that a little champagne slopped over. Father, before whom every one hastily gave way as before an important personage, or as if in fear, was already at our table. He raised his hat, saying most courteously,

“Good day, gentlemen. I have come for my son.”

No one spoke. There was utter silence, not only in our group but all through the room, every one attentive to the incident. The apparition of Nazzarena in the circus upon her black horse would not have aroused so much interest. The only sound was the exclamation, “Oh!” uttered by the proprietor, who, napkin in hand, stood motionless behind the bar.

Grandfather was the first to regain self-possession. He remarked, calmly, almost impertinently:

“Good afternoon, Michel. Will you take something with us?”

The offer was received by the bystanders with mocking little laughs and all tongues were unloosed. But the diversion was of brief duration. Father merely replied, “Thank you, I came for my son. It is nearly dinner time, and we are expecting you both.”

Thus he invited grandfather to go with us. Perceiving that his invitation was not accepted, he turned to Martinod, who was giggling, and measured him from head to foot.

“See here, Monsieur Martinod, since I have removed my hat, I beg you to remove yours.”

It is true that Martinod had kept his hat on, but I knew that it was the custom in the café. Far from complying with the order—no one could mistake that it was an order, notwithstanding the “I beg you”—he hastened to pull his hat lower on his head. Interested and enthralled, every one in the room was watching, and a wag in the corner ejaculated:

“He will. He will not.”

My father took a step forward, and to me he seemed a very giant. Alone among them all, it was he who spread terror. In that clear voice that I so well knew, the voice that moved Tem Bossette in the depths of his vines and brought the whole household together in an instant, he said:

“Do you wish me to knock off your hat with my cane, Monsieur Martinod? For my hand will never touch you again.”

This time the laughs ceased. The case was becoming tragic: one might have heard a spider spinning her web. Grandfather saved the situation.

“Come, Martinod,” he said; “one must be polite.”

“Then it’s for you, Father Rambert,” Martinod replied, suddenly uncovering. His face was bloodless, and no one could doubt of his defeat.

My father, having conquered, turned to Casenave, lost in his dreams.

“You, too, friend, would do well to go home.”

The terrified Casenave cried in a melancholy voice which broke the tension, so droll did it seem.

“I haven’t been drinking, Doctor. I swear I haven’t.”

Thereupon we went out, father and I; I behind him, and though the crowded tables were full of company, I moved between them without difficulty, so large was the place respectfully made for my guide. By way of not resembling Martinod, whose cowardice disgusted me, I forced myself to hold up my head and appear indifferent. At the bottom of my heart I was in unspeakable dread of what might happen in the street, when we were alone. Never, save perhaps in my earliest childhood, had my parents inflicted corporal punishment upon us: self-esteem was a part of our education. But now I expected it. If only he didn’t slap my face like Martinod! Martinod was an enemy of the house and I had drunk his champagne. Little did I care for the house, however; like grandfather, I proposed to be free. Hadn’t grandfather taken a gun when he had failed in the blood of the days of June, against the prohibition of his own father, the magistrate, the nurseryman, whom he held in such slight esteem? They might beat me, might abuse me, but they should get nothing out of me. I braced myself against the terror which was gripping me, until I at last came to feel a sort of insensibility, a strength of resistance which enabled one to endure anything without uttering a complaint.

I had, however, no occasion to make use of the provision of energy which I was laying in against my martyrdom. As we walked along father merely asked me, without raising his voice,

“Have you often been to that café?”

“Sometimes.”

“Never set foot in it again.”

I felt that indeed I never could set foot in it again. But would that be all my punishment? We were walking side by side, very fast. Though he gave no sign of what he was thinking, I understood,—I can not tell how—that a great tempest was inwardly agitating him. He had it in his power to crush me, to break me in two, and he kept silent. Thus we crossed the Market Place, and I seemed to myself like one of those criminals whom I had seen escorted to prison by a gendarme. If only Nazzarena did not see me! To me she represented the life of liberty, as I was slavery in person.

At last we reached the door of the house. Before opening it father turned to me, covering me from head to foot with a look, under which I hung my head in spite of myself, like one guilty.

“Poor child!” he said—it was Martinod’s very expression—“what are they trying to make of you?”

In my tense condition this sudden pity conquered my rebellion, and I was on the point of throwing myself into his arms with tears. But he had already regained his self-control, and in his tone of command he went on:

“You simply must obey. You simply must.”

I at once hardened my heart again. He was affirming his authority: and though he had certainly not abused it, there was for me only the sacred war for independence.

Mother, whose anxious shadow I had distinguished behind the window, was watching for our return, and came to the top of the steps to meet us.

“He was there,” said my father simply. “I was not mistaken.”

“Oh, my God!” she murmured, as if she could not have imagined so tragic a misfortune.

Aunt Deen, who was close behind her, lifted up her hands to heaven:

“It’s not possible! It’s not possible!”

Beyond this I was not scolded. With his will or against his will the prodigal son had been brought back. But, far from being grateful for this indulgence, which now I better understand as being due to the uncertainty of my parents as to the influences to which I had been subject, and the best way of winning me back, I tried to revive with all my recovered strength the love-pain which had been dulled by all these incidents, saying over and over to myself,

“Nazzarena is going to-morrow. Nazzarena is going to-morrow.”

V
THE DOUBLE LIFE

I HARDLY slept that night, and in my half slumber I confused the holy war for independence with my loss of Nazzarena. My love was a part of that liberty which grandfather vaunted, and for which he had carried a gun. When morning came it found me firmly resolved not to go to school, but to take my last chance of being present when the circus troop departed. The farewell of the evening before had been disappointing. Not being prepared, I had found nothing to say. Surely, things couldn’t end that way.

I complained of a headache, and found ready credence. I understood that I was supposed to be upset by the scene in the Café of the Navigators. Aunt Deen even brought me secretly a frothing and tasty mulled egg, good for headaches, and so delicious that I enjoyed it in spite of my grief—at which I was inwardly humiliated.

“You’ll stay in bed till noon,” she said, as she carried away the cup, adding—she, too!—

“Poor child!”

At which my gratitude to her immediately vanished, for I had no idea of being considered a child any longer, since I was in love.

As soon as she was gone I dressed hastily, but not without a certain care, and ran up to the tower chamber, where grandfather received me with surprise, and some signs of pleasure.

“They let you come up?” he asked.

Why should he ask? I had asked permission of no one. He merely shrugged his shoulders and became the philosopher once more—“Oh, it’s all the same to me.”

The four windows of the tower commanded all the roads. It was my plan to watch from this lookout for the train of waggons. They were loaded, they would advance slowly. I calculated that I should have time to overtake them. Which way would they go? I had no notion. I imagined that they would take the road for Italy, and I watched that one especially.

I had stationed myself before one of the windows, half hidden by a piece of furniture, when there came a knock at the door and father entered. I thought he had come for me, and I at once knew that in spite of my resolutions I should not resist. He had the same calm and irresistible air of authority that he had had the evening before; but, absorbed in his purpose, he did not so much as see me, and as he walked directly to grandfather he even turned his back to me. Unless I intervened he would not know I was there. After a brief but courteous salutation he showed the newspaper he had in his hand—a local journal.

“This paper announces that you are presenting yourself for election at the head of the list of the Left. Is that so, father?”

I could divine under the interrogative form of the simple phrase that he was inwardly boiling with restrained anger.

At the gate of the town there was a blank wall overlooking the lake, which was always swept by waves on windy or stormy days. My school fellows and I used sometimes to amuse ourselves by running across between two waves, at the risk of being wet by spray or even drenched by some larger wave. On certain days when the storm, was severe, such bravado was impossible. We used to say then that the tempest-tossed lake was smoking. I had the sensation now that my way would be barred in the same manner.

How can I have forgotten one traitor word of the conversation that followed? Grandfather, according to his habit, merely replied—at once gently and bravely (he detested scenes and usually avoided them, but Martinod’s cowardice was not his style):

“I am free, I suppose.”

“No one is free,” replied my father, with a determined evenness of voice which chilled me to the marrow. “All of us depend upon one another. And you are aware that you are presenting yourself against me.”

This time grandfather’s retort was more sharp. He would not give way, he would defend himself. At last!

“I am presenting myself against no one,” he replied. “I simply present myself—that is all. And I hinder no one from presenting himself. I say again, Michel, every one is free to act according to his good pleasure.”

With an eloquence which gradually grew warm, and which he then interrupted, as if determined not to depart from the most respectful form of speech, constantly struggling to control himself against the vehemence of his own words, father sought to convince him by a line of argument which even at this distance I believe I can recall. Why this candidacy at the last moment when grandfather had never dreamed of taking any part in politics, and when he knew that his son was the head of the conservative party? How was it that he did not see that this was a manœuvre of Martinod, who was only too happy to take revenge for the blow he had received, and to effect the disintegration of the Rambert family? Surely no one would allow himself to be taken in Martinod’s coarse trap!

“And besides,” he concluded, “we can not be candidates against one another.”

Grandfather’s little laugh accompanied his answer: “Oho! Why not? It will be something new, and for my part I see no harm in it.”

“Because a family can not be divided.”

“A family! A family! You always have that word in your mouth. Individuals are of some account, too, I suppose. And besides, why aren’t your convictions the same as mine, since you are my son?”

“You forget that my convictions are the same as those of all our family down to your father.”

“Yes, the nurseryman. You forget the soldier of the Emperor ...”

“He served France. France comes first. I do not include those who emigrated.”

“And your great uncle Philippe Rambert, the sans-culotte?”

“Don’t let us speak of him; he is our shame. Every family has its tradition. Ours, until you, was simple and fine. ‘God and the King.’”

“Well, liberty is enough for me. Once for all, I leave you your way; let me have mine.”

“But I repeat to you that the solidarity of our name and our race lays an obligation upon you. Besides, your liberty is a mere chimera. We are all in a state of dependence. Will you force me to remind you that I have accepted this dependence with all its cost? The very house which shelters us, and which I have saved, is a witness to the permanence and unity of the family under one roof.”

By degrees the conversation became a battle. Father seemed to me so big and powerful that he could have crushed grandfather with a snap of the finger, and yet grandfather held out against him, with his sharp little voice, and with a vigour such as I hardly recognised in him. To see them thus drawn up against each other frightened me and gave me horrible torment. In my new-born rebellion against authority my heart was with grandfather. I pictured to myself, under Nazzarena’s features, that liberty of which they were speaking in attack and defence. It seemed to me that I should be committing a cowardly act like that of Martinod in the Café des Navigateurs when he took off his hat in obedience to orders, showing his white, terrified face, if I did not intervene in behalf of my companion, my comrade in walks, who had transmitted to me as a brilliant inheritance—the only one he had to give—his love of simple nature, of the wandering life, of that independence which proudly refuses to submit to rule, and perhaps also that love of love which by itself alone includes all these. I did not conceal from myself the risk I was running. I foresaw the punishment which would follow, and yet I came forward like a little martyr asking for death.

“Grandfather is free!” I cried at the top of my voice.

I had thought to utter a tremendous shout, but I could hardly hear my own voice, and was astonished and vexed that I had not made more noise. Nevertheless, I perceived the immediate effect, which though quite enough to satisfy me, was far from reassuring. My father had turned suddenly, amazed at my presence and audacity. This time the road was closed, like that of the lakeside on stormy days. He gazed at us both by turns as if to discover some complicity, some understanding between us. Face to face with him we were really just nothing at all. He was strong enough to crush us both. His eyes flashed fire; his voice would roll over us like thunder; the storm that was about to overwhelm us would be terrible.

Why did he keep silent? What was he waiting for? Still he said nothing, and the silence became more distressing, more tragic. I could hear my own terror like the tick tock of a clock.

Having taken time to regain his self-control, by what must have been a superhuman effort, he turned from me that gaze that so terrified me, and spoke to grandfather:

“Very well,” he said, so calmly and gently that it disconcerted me; “I am no longer a candidate. We will not amuse the city with the sight of our divisions. But I will permit myself to give you one bit of advice. By my retirement Martinod will have secured what he wants; that was all he was after; now do not permit yourself to be any longer the tool of the man who has slandered me; do you on your side give up this candidacy, which is not at all in your line.”

If grandfather was surprised by this change of tactics, he did not show it in the least.

“Oh, it would be a great mistake for you to retire. You would perhaps have been elected, and as for me, it’s all one. My principal object is to disavow your political opinions. The family can’t command our ideas.”

Father seemed to hesitate a moment as to resuming the subject before deciding to let it go. He let it go because there was another matter even nearer to his heart.

“Let us say no more about it,” he said. “Something of far greater importance has been going on in my house, something that I can not tolerate. You have robbed me of this child whom I entrusted to you.”

The conflict was suddenly taking another form, and I had become its object. In a flash arose before me the scene when I was setting out for my first walk after my convalescence. We were all three upon the doorstep. Father was putting my hand into grandfather’s with the bewildering words, Here is my son—it is the future of the house. And grandfather answered with his little laugh, Don’t worry, Michel, no one will rob you of him. What did they mean? How could any one rob him of me?

“How absurd!” grandfather was saying. “I never robbed any one of anything. So I am accused of stealing children, am I? Why not of eating them?”

Mockery and irony were, however, too weak a weapon not to be broken in the attack that followed. Not one detail of that scene has faded from my memory. I can see them both, one strong and high-coloured, in the fulness of strength and vigour, and yet uttering such a groan as trees give forth under the woodman’s axe, the other so old, fragile and shrivelled, and yet all insolence, holding up his head and jeering, and I between the two like the stake in a game they were playing.

“Yes,” father replied; “I gave you my son to make him well, not to lead him astray. You yourself promised to do nothing which might one day put him in opposition to our household and religious traditions. Have you kept your promise? I have for some time been doubtful as to what was going on in this little head. I spoke to Valentine about it, and learned that she too was fearful of this misfortune, though in her respect for you she dreaded to make the mistake of attributing an unfortunate influence to you. I do not know how you have managed to take possession of the child’s mind. But I can not but know that you have been taking Francis to the very place where our opponents are in the habit of meeting, and where they take advantage of your weakness and your generosity.”

“I can’t permit you—” grandfather tried to interrupt.

“Of your generosity,” the voice went on more firmly, “or of mine. This morning I received a bill from that place. It is a large one. Martinod no doubt thinks it a joke to treat his heelers at my expense.”

“Who sent you the bill?”

“The proprietor of the café. To whom should he send it? He brought it himself, and by way of argument he simply said, ‘The boy had some of it.’ My son was a partaker as well as my father; I am responsible, since, for my part, I believe in the solidarity of the family. I paid for Casenave, whose body bears already the promise of a drunkard’s death; for Gallus and Merinos, poor wretches, incapable of the slightest work; for that idle Galurin and that scoundrel Martinod. Paying is of no consequence—I have been through worse than that, as you know. But what errors have you taught this child? I must know all, now, that I may uproot them from his heart like weeds from the garden. Where is he going? What will he make of his life with that utopia of liberty to which every hour of real life gives the lie—without the stern discipline of home, without our faith? Don’t you know that what maintains our race, every race, is the spirit of the family? Has not life taught you that?”

I was moved by the tone in which he spoke. Always sensitive to the melody of words, I caught them as they were uttered, and by them I can now easily rise to the ideas which they expressed but which then passed over my head.

“Have you finished?” asked grandfather, with an impertinence that moved me to admiration.

“Yes, I have finished. I beg pardon for having raised my voice in the presence of this child. He should at least know—you can bear witness to that—that I have always been a respectful son.”

“Oh, you have paid my debts. And you are still paying them.”

“Is that all? And have you not at all times had the support of my filial affection?”

“Of your protection.”

“My protection is extended only to shield you from those who desire your ruin. And can’t you understand that in withdrawing this child from my authority, disarming him for future conflicts, you are preparing the way for the ruin of us all?”

Grandfather exclaimed, “Oh! oh!”—and went on in his turn:

“I should like to know what you are blaming me for. I took the boy to walk when he needed it, and instilled into him the love of nature.”

“And not the love of his home.”

“Is it my fault that he prefers my society? I never try to teach, for my part—I don’t go about preaching at all times and seasons subordination, tradition, the principles of religion. I simply have respect for life, for liberty if you prefer the word.”

“But liberty is not life. It destroys everything that should be preserved.”

“Oh, don’t let us go over that discussion. What has happened to your son happened to mine.”

“To me?”

“Yes, to you. When you were little another influence was substituted for mine. The magistrate, the nurseryman, the lover of roses—”

“Your father.”

“Yes; he gave you a taste for trimmed trees, raked alleys, for laws, human and divine, and what more!”

“Why do you lay it up against me that I am like all our race?”

“I saw you changing under my very eyes. Do you know whether I too did not suffer to see it?”

“Oh, you were always so detached from me, and from—”

My father did not finish his sentence, and I shall not finish it now, though I am only too fearful of having discovered its meaning. The respect which he then maintained lays its command upon me, even at this distance. They had both laid bare a hidden wound, which had never quite ceased to bleed. They stood there face to face with that memory between them, terrified perhaps with what they were discovering in the past, not wishing to go farther before me, when an unexpected relief arrived.

Mother came in. She had probably heard their voices from her room and had hastened, all a-tremble, to prevent the conflict going farther. With her came the household peace.

“What is the matter?” she asked gently.

Her mere presence had parted them, and it was impressed upon me that the conversation would have no further interest for any one.

“I am here to claim my son,” said father.

“Take him, take him,” said grandfather, abandoning me to my fate. But he could not refrain from adding, defiantly:

“Take him back if you can.”

“He ought not to be parted from God,” said my mother simply, remembering the time I had failed to come to Mass. Then, feeling that this was not the place for me, she pushed me toward them, as a token of reconciliation, with the words:

“Kiss them, and go down to Aunt Deen.”

I obeyed, and after being negligently or reluctantly kissed I rushed down stairs, not caring how the peace was made, thinking only of Nazzarena who was going away. A little later I heard some one in the garden calling me, but I did not answer.

I flew to the chestnut grove on the edge of the domain, and scrambled upon the wall, near the breach that one of the trees had once made merely by the push of its roots, and which had been closed by a grating. From this point I could see the road to Italy. Only one chance was left to me—would the circus troop go that way? I waited long, but not in vain.

They are coming, they are coming! First the waggons carrying the tent, the benches, and all the accessories. What wretched horses were drawing them! I looked about for Nazzarena’s black courser, but he was not to be distinguished from the rest of the sorry jades. Then came the roulottes that the folk lived in. Smoke was rising from one or another of the slender chimneys. They were getting dinner ready for the long journey. On one of the rear balconies an old woman was combing a little girl’s hair, the well known parroquet beside them. I was looking, with all my eyes I was looking, for the blond hair of my beloved.

Ah, I saw her at last! It was she, there, bareheaded—her clear-cut face and golden tint. She was herself driving one of the waggons. A mission of importance had been entrusted to her. She held her whip upright in the air, but she loved animals too much to strike them. She was sitting very straight, holding her head proudly—how lovely were the lines of her throat! Why had I never noticed that before? I had never really seen her, so to speak—I must see her, I must see her!

When she emerged from the shadow of the chestnuts the sun made a golden nimbus through her curly hair, that seemed to blend with the light, so that one could not tell where her curls began or the light ended. Beside her on the seat sat a little boy. They were talking to one another, laughing together. I saw her white teeth, but her glance, her golden glance, would she not turn it toward me? Nazzarena, Nazzarena, don’t you feel that I am here, so close to you, perched upon the wall, this wall just above you?

She laughed, she was passing, she had passed. Now the roof of the roulotte hid her. I had not called her, she had not looked at me. Was it possible that I no longer saw her face, nor her eyes, nor her golden colour? Is it possible that so tremendous a thing lasted only a tiny little minute?

My heart was bursting in my breast, and I sat there motionless. Why did I not leap from the wall to the road? Why did I not run after her? Was I nailed to my place? Now I knew that she was lost to me; now I knew that she was always lost to me. Like the shepherd leading his flock to the mountain, whose chance word taught me to know desire, so she, only by going away, taught me the pain of love-partings.

The pain of love-partings is fixed for me in that picture, a little boy astride of the wall of his ancestral home, and a little girl who in the morning light goes away along the road, goes away without turning her head....

How fast we hold to our memories! Long after, when I had become the master, the farmer came to ask permission to cut down that tree which had covered her with its shadow that last time. “Monsieur,” he urged, “the leaves are rusty, it is all rotten inside, it bears no more fruit, it is losing value every day, and before long it won’t bring anything.” I resisted his entreaties, alleging vague reasons. How make an honest farmer understand that one would preserve a dead chestnut tree merely because a little gipsy passed under it, so many years ago that one dares not count them? If there are inexplicable things, this surely is one.

My man wouldn’t give up. “Monsieur, Monsieur, one of these fine days it will fall and break down the wall.” I opine that a wall may be replaced. “Monsieur, Monsieur, one of these fine days it will crush some one passing by.” Come, that’s more serious. A passer-by can’t be made over again. Oh, well, let’s be reasonable. If it falls, it will crush nothing but my heart.

I gave the order to cut down the witness of my first love sorrow. I leaned over the hole which its torn-up roots left in the earth, and was not surprised that it occupied so much room. Now the newly-built wall has closed up the breach, and I feel myself more than ever shut up within my property. As one advances in life, it seems that the surrounding walls draw in.

Nature changes before we do. Nature dies before we do. Little by little we lose all that gave the past its character. Nothing is left to bear witness to the truth of our memories. Little by little other shadows than those of trees descend upon us. And it is hard to believe that one has been—as perhaps every one was once—a boy astride of a wall, not knowing whether he will jump over, to the free life, to the young girl who is laughing, to love, or whether he will go back, like a good boy, to The House....

VI
A WALK WITH FATHER

DURING my long convalescence, as I was not permitted to read all the time, I had constructed, with the aid of Aunt Deen, who used patiently to put on her glasses, which she was not fond of wearing, in order to be more accurate in the use of her big scissors, which sometimes gave an unlucky slip in the cardboard—all sorts of edifices, châteaux, farmhouses, cottages, and even cathedrals. I used to set them up on a great table which had been appropriated to me. The whole represented to my mind a town which my lead soldiers were to besiege. These soldiers, some of them a legacy from my brother Bernard, who even as a small child had begun to make a collection of uniforms, others which had been brought to me some Christmas Eve by the war-like Little Jesus, were innumerable; there were whole regiments of them, large and tiny, thin and plump, infantry, cavalry and artillery. Among the cavalry some were of one piece with their horses, others were detachable, a sharp pointed appendix in their rear permitting them to be fixed at will upon the perforated backs of their horses. One evening there was a tragic assault. The detached general (he was one of those provided with an appendix) had been the first to enter the breach, after which he remounted his chestnut charger, which had been by I know not what subterfuge hoisted into the interior. In the excitement of victory I set fire to the four corners of the conquered city, and when I sought to check its ravages it was too late. In another minute the fire had consumed everything, and all those houses that had cost me so many weeks’ work, and upon which I had so prided myself, were only a heap of black ashes. I was severely reprimanded for having so nearly burned the furniture, and yet I just sat there in stupefied amazement at the rapidity of the burning, compared with the time it had taken me to build.

The abrupt end of my first love affair, that poor little minute in which it was given me to see Nazzarena in the sunlight—caused me a like amazement, a like discouragement. Day after day I had been building up within myself my love story, so vague at first and then so rich and serious, continually adding something to it—a smile, a word, a meeting, and even a bit of scoffing on her part; now it was admiration for her feats of horsewomanship—now that I had merely passed through the Market Square and seen her roulotte. She had filled a larger place in my life than I suspected, and now nothing more happened. This void, so new to me, was harder to bear than real pain. Unavailingly I tried to shake it off, for I could not as yet imagine how much of comfort one may have remembering things. How should I have known that it is possible to live outside of the present moment? All that was left to me of Nazzarena gone, Nazzarena forever lost, it was less the thought of her than an all pervading lassitude caused by her absence—a lassitude which was dear to me, in which I seemed to find her again, and which made me incapable of taking an interest in anything whatever.

This condition of mind prevented my paying much attention to the changes which were taking place at our house. I accommodated myself to them without effort and every one spoke of my yielding disposition. Since the tower scene a certain embarrassment had existed between my father and my grandfather, which only my mother’s tact rendered endurable to either. Though I had not been formally forbidden, I ceased to walk out with grandfather or even to go to his room. He would shut himself up a good part of the day to play on his violin. When we assembled at table he made no attempt to come near me,—it was as if he had entirely given up our intimacy. That seemed to me somewhat ungrateful, in view of the important part I had taken in defending him. Meal times became stupid. One held aloof, another was absorbed in thought. I understood that both of them, by a tacit understanding, had retired from the municipal campaign. No one dared to speak of the elections, which were close at hand, but the notices posted on the walls which I read on the way to school, told me how things were. Martinod’s name appeared, and even Galurin’s, but Pour-the-drink and the two artists had been left out. Aunt Deen talked to herself on the staircase of extraordinary events and horrible traitors. In the end Martinod had accomplished his purpose: the candidate whom he dreaded, the only one he dreaded, had refused to run.

I also understood that grandfather had not gone again to the Café of the Navigators, either by way of observing the truce, or to avoid entreaties to which he would doubtless have been inclined to yield. When he heard that father had been called to the bedside of Casenave, who was delirious, he seemed surprised and even moved; he had therefore not seen that old companion.

“Casenave ill!” he exclaimed. “He must have drunk too much.”

At luncheon father announced to us that Casenave was dead.

“I warned him,” he said. “He ought to have given up the bottle long ago.”

“He chose for himself,” said grandfather.

He chose for himself! That was enough to excuse and justify all actions, good or bad, and so I understood it. I saw a reply spring to my father’s lips, but he repressed it, and merely added:

“I have warned Tem Bossette. He will come to the same end, if he does not take care. It is already pretty late for him.”

“All of them drunkards,” summed up Aunt Deen, who liked to deal in generalities.

Election Sunday came at last. I knew it by the multicoloured posters which decorated the fronts of buildings and the greater affluence of those that I had to wade through on the way to the School Mass. At the house no one had made the slightest allusion to it. After the spiritless luncheon grandfather put on his hat and grasped his cane.

“Where are you going?” asked Aunt Deen.

“Into the country.”

“You have voted already?”

“Indeed I have not.”

“It’s a duty.”

“That’s all the same to me.”

“After all, so much the better,” my aunt added; “you would have been capable of voting for those scoundrels.”

She deemed it useless to designate them more definitely.

He had almost “solicited the suffrages of voters,” to quote from the posters, and he didn’t even vote. He chose for himself and I could see no reason to object. Every one had a right to do as he chose and to change as he fancied,—otherwise what would become of liberty? As he was going out he suddenly turned to me and proposed that I should go with him.

“Just let me get my cap,” I cried, starting up, as if I had totally forgotten the scene in the tower.

Father, who was observing us, checked my enthusiasm by saying:

“Thank you. To-day I will take him for a walk. I am at leisure.”

He very seldom allowed himself leisure. His patients were more and more absorbing him. His reputation must have extended far and wide, for he was sent for from great distances; his absences, his journeys multiplied.

“I am no longer my own master,” he said to mother. “And life is passing.”

“My dear,” she murmured. “I beg of you don’t overtire yourself so.”

She was always devising ways of caring for him, of finding means for him to rest. To reassure her he would laugh, drawing himself up to full height, rounding out his chest. He never needed rest. His robust shoulders might have borne up the world; and in fact did he not carry the burden of the house and of our seven futures? By a strange complication of feeling, though inwardly I was always in a state of revolt against him, I never ceased to admire him. I could not imagine him beaten, or complaining. Life was for him one perpetual victory.

I admired him only at a distance. The prospect of this walk with him appalled me, and I remained on the stairs, waiting for some unknown event to interpose an obstacle.

“Come,” he said encouragingly, “run get your cap—make haste. The days are long—we can take a good walk.”

There was no harshness in his sonorous voice, but rather that encouraging tone that always brought hope to his patients. In fact, neither when he took me home from the Café of the Navigators, nor in the tower chamber, had he treated me harshly. But his kindness had no softening effect upon me. I was not in the least grateful for it, but still considered him as a ruthless tyrant bent upon keeping me in fetters. As soon as he appeared I ceased to be free. Had he taken me to the wildest, most desolate place in the world, I should still have seen walls rising up around me. With grandfather it always seemed to me as if all enclosures disappeared, and the enfranchised earth belonged to every one—or to no one.

Why did my father impose upon me this long walk with him, the mere prospect of which chilled me? Hadn’t Martinod’s revelations showed me what his preferences were? He was proud of Bernard and Stephen, he was always thinking of Mélanie. I had sometimes seen him looking at her with a strange earnestness, as if he had never seen her before, or as if he were imprinting her upon his memory; as for me, I didn’t count. With all the power of my will I was determined to be a misunderstood son, an unhappy, unjustly neglected child. It was necessary that I should play this rôle, to keep alive the love-sadness in which I found my chief pleasure.

Therefore I set out reluctantly, and let him see that I did. He on the contrary made every effort to be gay. Perceiving that he desired to put me at my ease, I became all the more reserved, in a spirit of opposition.

We were off at last, not with the slow pace of idlers who have no particular point in view, as grandfather and I were in the habit of walking, but with a light, quick step as if to military music.

“If we walk fast,” he said, “we can do it in two or three hours.”

Desiring him to understand that I was not in the least interested in the walk, I did not inquire where we were going. It would surely not be that secluded place where the ferns grew thick, where furze clung to the rocks, where, apart from the rest of the world, far from houses and cultivated fields, I had been introduced to wild nature by the soft music of a cascade.

I remember that as we were passing through a village I gave a great kick to a fragment of an old drain tile that lay in the road. In an instant all the dogs were howling at our heels. Somewhat terrified by their wide open mouths and the great hubbub that I had aroused, I drew near to my companion.

“Let them bark,” he said reassuringly. “You will see that it is just so in life. As soon as one makes a little noise in the world all the dogs rush upon you. If you turn against them you make yourself ridiculous. The best way is to take no notice, and just let the dogs bark.”

Somehow I knew that he was thinking of Martinod and the slap he had given him. As soon as we were beyond reach of the dogs I was vexed with my father for having noticed my movement of fear.

We began to climb a hill by a good mule path. By degrees as we went up into a purer air, he recovered his fine spirits. It was a lovely day in late May or early June, warm but with a good breeze. Spring comes slowly in my country, and vegetation starts suddenly into life. It might have begun the day before, or the day before that, so bright were the leaves, so rich the grass, so gay the flowers. We crossed a grove of oaks, beeches and birches; the ruddy brown oaks formed the pillars of an immense vaulted temple, hiding the sky.

“Ah,” said father, pausing for breath, and taking off his hat, the better to feel the coolness that fell from the trees, “how good it is to be here, and what a beautiful day!”

I wondered at his raptures over so common a thing, which I had so often enjoyed, not considering how seldom he had an opportunity for such enjoyment. But he went on:

“It is terrible to be so busy! Not to have time to enjoy the sunshine and the wide spaces, nor to talk with one’s sons as often as one would wish. Do you remember the old times, Francis, when I used to tell you about the wars in the Iliad and the return to Ithaca?”

I had not forgotten, but those epic stories seemed to me to belong to a far-away and outgrown childhood. They dated from before that convalescence which had changed my heart. They dated from before my walks with grandfather, from before liberty and Nazzarena, from before love. So I cared for them no longer. Hector had fought to guard his home, and Ulysses had braved tempests to return to his, the smoke from which he had seen afar, from the sea; but I was looking forward to my individual future, when I should not be dependent upon any person or anything.

We soon made our way through the cover of the trees and reached the top of the hill. It was crowned by the ruins of an ancient fortress, which, to judge by the broken and crumbling fragments of walls, and by the height of the still upright and loop-holed towers, must have been of considerable extent. Brambles and ivy were growing among the ruins, which seemed to be standing out against the last assault, that of vegetable growth, greedy to overwhelm them.

“I do not care much for ruins,” observed my father. “They are poetic, but they weaken the desire for action. They remind us of the end of things, and the object of life is to build up. Still, they have their part to play, evoking the memory of a past of conflict and glory. This was once the fortified château of Malpas. It commanded the road to the frontier. What attacks and sieges it has endured! In 1814, when France was assailed by three armies, though it was then entirely dismantled, cannon were set upon the walls to resist the Austrians.”

I might have known that we were going there. The place is celebrated through the entire province. For what it was celebrated I only vaguely knew. Grandfather had never taken me there; he detested places that every one visited, “where,” he used to say, “whole families go on Sundays, places full of memories, great men, battles and greasy papers.”

Father grew animated when he talked of battles. Had not he too defended the house against our enemies, against Aunt Deen’s they, so fiercely bent upon its overthrow? Won to him for a moment, I had almost asked, “And where were you during the war, father?” I knew that he had entered the army and braved the snow with his company during a bitter winter. But the question did not pass my lips. To have asked it would have been to own that I was yielding to his influence, and I braced myself to resist him. I would have given all this forest of oaks, birches and beeches, all those ruins, so picturesque against the sky-line, for the chestnut tree under which Nazzarena had passed.

He led me to the edge of the terrace that had once been the court of the château, the wall of which had been thrown down. From here one dominated the whole country; there was the lake with its indented shores, its graceful little gulfs, its green promontories, the town rising in terraces above it, easy to trace by its open squares and public gardens; there were the villages of the plain, half hidden in greenery, like flocks of sheep at rest, those on the hillsides grouped around their sentry-like churches; and closing in the view, the mountains, here clothed with forests, there rocky and bare. The pure afternoon light, shimmering over all, sharpened their outlines. Here and there a slate roof reflected back its arrows of gold. The various crops could be distinguished by their different colours, by the various shades of green, and all the boundaries of the indefinitely divided properties, hedges, walls or fences, and the little white cemeteries with their square plots, near the groups of houses, stood out clear.

Father named over all the inhabited places, and then the hills and valleys. His way was not in the least like grandfather’s. Where grandfather and I would have looked for such traces of nature as we could find still surviving in its pristine simplicity between the havoc wrought by plough and axe, the changes brought about by agricultural toil, he, on the contrary, was pointing out the constant intervention of man, the results of the toil of generations. Instead of the free earth, it was the earth disciplined, constrained to serve, obey, produce,—the earth that in the past had been watered by blood, traversed by armed troops, protected by force against the foreigner, as was meet for a frontier province of France, blessed by prayer. For a very saint, a popular saint who had brought miracles into every-day life, our Saint François de Sales had knelt upon this earth and offered it to God. It was feeding the living; it was giving repose to the dead.

Glorious, fruitful, sacred earth, the eulogy of its threefold greatness fell from his lips with such lucidity that in spite of myself I was moved with him.

“And the house,” he concluded, “don’t you see the house?”

I looked for it without interest, realising that I had lost the habit of looking in that direction. It was, however, easy enough to discover, on the edge of the town, standing alone, and at its back the lovely rural domain by which it joined the country.

Like the spirals of a soaring bird, father’s words had covered the entire country, and now, drawing in its circles, had suddenly dropped down upon our roof. He went on to describe the house in detail, as one describes the features of a countenance.

It had not all been built at one time. At first there was only the ground floor.

“You have seen the date on the tablet in the kitchen chimney—1610.”

“Or 1670,” I thought to myself, almost repeating, like grandfather, whose reflection recurred to my mind: “It’s a matter of no importance.” But I dared not risk this comment openly.

A century later our ancestors, having improved their fortunes, had added a story and built the tower. Limited in one direction by the town, the property had been extended toward the plain, then covered by woods. Trees had been cut down to make room for the garden, for fields and meadows. It had been a constant and oft repeated struggle against difficulties, against mischance and against other foes. Did father, then, believe in Aunt Deen’s they? I had almost smiled, but he did not give me time. Each generation had brought its effort to the common task, and one or another—that of the garde-français, that of the grenadier,—its contribution of honour; the chain had not been broken.

I felt a strong desire to object—“How about grandfather?” What would he have said to that?

He answered without my question, with no bitterness in his voice, when he went on. Sometimes the chain had been stretched almost to the breaking point, and the house had seen bad days. He pictured it ploughing the waves like a strong ship that has an unerring pilot at the helm. His voice, which in the old days had so joyfully related the exploits of heroes, seemed now to rise, with growing exaltation, into a sort of hymn to the house. It was the poem of the land, the race, the family, it was the history of our realm, our dynasty.

Through the years that have fled since then, the memory of that day, far from weakening, has grown more full of meaning to my eyes. My father had measured the length of the road which I had followed in separating myself from him, and was endeavouring to recall me, to overtake me, to attach me to himself again. Before resorting to authority he was trying to kindle my imagination, awaken my heart, free them from chimeras and set before them an object capable of moving them. Only, hemmed in on all sides as he was by the pressure of daily duty, he had felt the need of haste, he had only this one day, a part of which was already gone, only a few fleeting hours in which to effect my transformation. He was hoping to regain his lost son by a single effort, counting upon his incomparable art of winning men, of subduing them to himself.

Now, so late, I realise that all he was saying to convince me, to awaken in me an emotion which should free me from my bonds, must have been as noble as a Homeric song. Even then I had some inward intuition of it. I do not know if ever more eloquent words were uttered than those he spoke to me upon that hilltop, while evening was slowly beginning to paint the sky and breathe peace upon the earth. I can find no other words to express it,—he was paying court to me like a lover who feels that he is not loved, who yet knows that his love alone can bestow happiness. The affection of a father descends, calls to ours to rise to it; but his, by a unique privilege which in no sense lowered its pride, rose to me, enveloped me, implored me.

Yes, I really believe that my father was imploring me, and I remained apparently unmoved while I should have interrupted him with a cry in which my whole being was outpoured. Yet I was not in fact unmoved. There was too much pathos in the tone of his voice not to thrill through my early awakened sensibility. But by a singular inconsistency, that in me which was moved by his voice was precisely the very desire, all the desires, that he was trying to eradicate from my heart. That voice was chanting the stones of the house that had been built to triumph over time, the shelter of the roof, the unity of the family, the strength of the race which maintains itself upon the soil, the peace of the dead whom God has in his keeping. And while this canticle was thus making melody I was distinctly hearing another, sung for me alone by the music of the vagabond wind, the immensity of unknown spaces, the words of the shepherd on his way to the mountain; the apple blossoms showered upon my face the first day of my love, and Nazzarena’s laugh, and the hopeless shadow of the chestnut tree under which she had passed.

For one moment my father thought that he had conquered. His piercing eyes, always studying me, discerned my emotion. An impulse of sincerity moved me to turn away without speaking, and he understood that I was far from him. His voice ceased. Surprised by the sudden silence I looked at him in my turn, and I saw sadness sweeping over him like a shadow, that heart-breaking shadow that rises from the hollows of the valleys and slowly climbs the mountains as night draws on.

... Father, now I can interpret your sadness. Alone I have once more made the pilgrimage of Malpas, and alone there, I could understand you better. You were thinking of your two elder sons, who, burning with sacrifice, would soon be far away, for the service of God and of the fatherland. You were thinking of your dear Mélanie, who, drawn by the severe serenity of the cloister, was awaiting the hour of her majority. The main branches of the tree of life that you had planted were detaching themselves from the trunk. You had been counting upon me to continue your work and I was escaping you. By yourself alone you had sustained the tottering house, and the house, overwhelming you with labours and cares, was separating your own from you. It is the penalty of material necessities,—they do not leave time enough for the guardianship of souls. But you were thinking of triumphing over time by the mere power of your virile love for me, and your eloquence. In one walk, one conversation, you had hoped to regain the ground you had lost, without violating the respect due to your father. The heart of a child of fourteen years is an obscure heart, especially when love has entered it too soon. I did feel the importance of what you were teaching me, and yet I was considering how to shake it off. The less clearly I understood the word liberty, the more it fascinated and drew me. All the music to which I was listening was the music that it made....

My father’s disappointment found expression in a gesture. Grieved at his inability to win me he suddenly seized me by the two arms as if to lift me from the ground, and prove that he possessed me.

“Oh, understand me, poor child,” he exclaimed. “You must indeed understand me. Your whole future depends upon it.”

“Father, you hurt,” was my only reply.

I lied, for his grasp had merely surprised me. He tried to make light of it.

“Oh, come, that’s not true! I didn’t hurt you in the least.”

“Yes, you did,” I insisted with temper.

He replied kindly, almost apologetically, “I did not mean to.”

Ah, I might well be proud of myself! That strength which I dreaded had entreated instead of breaking me: it had not conquered me.

He laid his hand on my head, no doubt to clear my mind of any mistaken interpretation of his former act, and though he did not lean hard upon it, I felt it heavy upon me. A few years earlier, grandfather, by the same imposition of hands, had invested me with the ownership of all nature.

“Let us go back,” said my father. “Let us go back to the house.”

He said “the house,” like me. Until then the expression had been too familiar to make an impression. This time it did impress me.

On the homeward way we heard the detonations of small cannon, fired in honour of the elections.

“So soon!” he said. “The Martinod list is elected.”

The frustration of his public hopes had followed hard upon his paternal disappointment. For a moment he bowed his head, but it was only for a moment.

The church bell of a neighbouring village rang the Angelus. Another replied, and then another, breathing over all the country-side the serenity of evening and of prayer.

My father stood still to listen, and he smiled. Through this peaceful reminder of the Annunciation God was speaking to him, and through it he regained composure.

“Let’s walk fast,” he said, “your mother may be anxious over our delay.”

I was thinking within myself: “One of these days I shall go away. One of these days I shall be my own master, like grandfather.”

VII
THE FIRST DEPARTURE

A FEW days after this disappointing walk—perhaps even the next day—I went to my mother’s room to get a forgotten school book. I was already turning the latch of the door when I heard two voices. One, my mother’s, was familiar to my ear, but its tones were almost new to me, by reason of the firmness now mingled with its habitual gentleness; when we were little she had sometimes spoken to us in that tone to require more attention and earnestness in our little duties, or our lessons. As for the other, it must have been that of a stranger, even of some one asking for alms, for it came to my ear hushed, veiled, melancholy. What visitor was this whom my mother received in her room and not in the drawing-room? I dared neither go in nor let go of the latch, lest in falling it should betray my presence. Hooted to the spot, at once by timidity and curiosity, I listened to the dialogue going on within.

“I am sure you are mistaken,” my mother was saying. “The child is going through a crisis, but he is not different from his brothers and sisters; he is not estranged from us.”

“The chasm is deeper than you think, Valentine,” replied the other voice. “I feel that I am losing him. If you had seen him at Malpas, how inflexible he was, how he resisted my exhortations, almost my entreaties.”

“He is only a child.”

“Too mature a child. I can not yet be sure what it is that estranges him from us, but I shall find out. Ah, poor dear, there is no use in trying to reassure me; three years ago my father completed his cure by keeping him out of doors, but he did not give back to us the same child that we had entrusted to him: he has changed his heart, and it is in childhood that the heart is formed. This child is no longer ours.”

This child is no longer ours. The statement lifted me up with a sort of vanity. I belonged to no one. I was free. That liberty which grandfather had not been able to command, even in the blood of the days of June, had all of a sudden become mine!

I had recognised my father’s voice, and my parents were talking of me. But why had they so interchanged their attitudes that I had not at first recognised them? I had always supposed that they could not change. Mother was always anxious about nothing at all—when the wind blew or the thunder growled, even far away, she never failed to light the blessed candle; or her shadow behind her chamber window told us that she was watching for the return of the absent ones. She was never wholly at peace, unless we were all grouped around her, except, indeed, when praying, for she lived very near to God. It sometimes happened that father would laugh at her for her endless anxieties. During my illness, and longer ago, when the house had been put up for sale, it was he, always he, who kept up her woman’s courage, who assured her of the future, reminded her of the constant protection of Providence. I had never imagined them otherwise, and now behold they had changed parts,—it was mother who was uplifting father in his discouragement.

I should have been disgusted with myself if I had listened at doors. Urged by self-esteem, mingled with a sense of honour, I should not have hesitated to enter the room but for the next words, which were uttered by my father, and which nailed me to the spot, the latch still in my hand, powerless to go in or to draw back, so greatly was I impressed and captivated.

“The same thing took place between him and me that long ago took place between me and my father—the same family tragedy.”

“Oh, Michel, what do you mean?”

“Yes, my father was right when he recalled it the day that I found Francis in his room, the day when Francis took his part against me—unhappy child! When I was little, I, too, had felt the influence of my grandfather. Only it was exercised in the other direction. He had been president of the Chamber at the Court. Returning home at the age of retirement, he amused himself with cultivating the garden. It was he who planted the rose-garden. He taught me the importance, the beauty, yes, the beauty of the order to which man may subject not only himself, but nature. Perhaps it is to him that I owe it that I have been able to direct my life, to dominate it. But my father, who was interested only in his music and his utopias, used to laugh at us. ‘He will turn that child into a geometrician,’ he used to say. It is he who has turned my child into a rebel.”

He added, bitterly, “A father, in his own house, should never yield his own authority to any one. To withdraw Francis from that influence which has gained the upper hand of mine, I should not hesitate even to send him to boarding school. It would only be anticipating by a year or two the method we adopted for the older children. And in fact our school is hardly advanced enough for him now.”

“It would be one more expense,” objected mother.

“Money is a small thing compared with education.”

Thus I learned that they were proposing to arrange my future without consulting me! Boarding school—prison—was to punish me for my independence. For the moment I was crushed,—then, in my pride I refused to admit that I was crushed. Would not that be to admit the attractions of the house? Since they were considering the possibility of sending me away I would get ahead of them, and would myself ask to go. Yes, that should be the punishment I would inflict upon my parents. Upon my parents only?

But I could not remain there at the door and be surprised—and besides, I was ashamed! I therefore finally turned the latch and went in. I went in like an important personage, steeling myself against the emotion which was getting the better of me.

“I have come for my book,” said I, by way of justifying my entrance.

Father and mother, sitting opposite one another, looked at me and then exchanged a glance. I found my book—which a careful hand had put in order upon the table, seized it hastily and turned to go.

“Francis,” said my mother.

I turned to her with an expressionless face, put on to keep back the tears.

“Listen, my child,” she said,—and when she called me “child” I drew myself up—“you must always obey your father.”

Obey! the word was odious to me. “Why, I always listen to him,” I said.

Father fixed me with his piercing eyes that hurt as if I felt the points of their rays. He seemed to hesitate; no doubt he did hesitate between his desire to explain and the sense of its uselessness. Recovering his natural—and by that very fact, authoritative—voice, he simply gave me a proof of confidence.

“We were talking of you just now,” he said.

“Yes, of you,” repeated mother, somewhat anxiously.

Then came a sort of interrogatory:

“What do you think of being when you are grown?” asked father. “You think about it sometimes, don’t you? What sort of life would you prefer? You have your own tastes and preferences. Have you chosen your vocation, like your brothers?”

My vocation! Just what I expected! Vocations were often talked about at our house, and how every one ought faithfully to fulfil his own. During my illness, and in the early days of my convalescence, before my walks with grandfather, I had often thought, and even announced, that when I was grown up I would be a doctor, too. I could not imagine a finer career. I had talked in the kitchen with the peasants who came for the doctor, their faces all drawn with pain, and on the staircase I had met the train of patients who came for consultation with dolorous faces, and went away cheered. Though I had ceased to talk about it it was understood at our house that I was to be my father’s successor.

“I don’t know,” I replied, turning away.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, in a surprised and disappointed tone. “I thought you wanted to be a doctor.”

“Oh, no!” I replied, suddenly making up my mind in a spirit of opposition.

He said nothing more of this hope which had been dear to him, but went on:

“Oh, well, you have plenty of time to choose. Lawyer, perhaps? There are noble causes to defend. Or architect? Building houses, restoring old ones, constructing schools and churches—we have no good architects about here; there is a vacancy for one.”

Thus by turns he extolled the various professions which might keep me in my native town. As he spoke the dastardly thought came to me of separating myself entirely from the house, of achieving the conquest of my own liberty. I sought about in my mind for a calling which would oblige me to leave home. In our part of the country there were no mines nor any metallurgical establishments.

“I want to be an engineer,” I said.

I had but just made the discovery, and knew but vaguely the nature of the profession. There had been some talk about it in the family for Stephen.

“Really?” said my father, without pursuing the subject. “We will talk about it another time.”

“Only,” I said, hanging my head and averting my eyes, somewhat surprised to find how one thing followed another, “only I should need another preparation than that of this school.”

“Your school isn’t sufficient?”

“Oh, the teachers are good fellows,” I replied contemptuously, “but as for lessons, they are far from brilliant.”

Father said “ah!” and was silent. Raising my eyes I saw how surprised he was, and that was as joyful to me as a victory. Perhaps there was also in his countenance another expression than one of surprise. I was giving him an opportunity to get rid of me, as I was pleased to think was his wish; why did he not make the most of it? He turned to mother, who seemed grieved.

“This requires reflection,” he said.

How could one, at such an early age, find pleasure in tormenting those who loved him? Perhaps the picture in my Bible representing the return of the Prodigal Son had taught me the inexhaustible resources of paternal love. My father seemed to me so strong that I could have no fear of hurting him. All through life it is those upon whom one most depends whom one uses and misuses without mercy, not so much as thinking that they may be weary, since they never complain. And counting on their energy and health one always persuades oneself that there will be plenty of time to make it up to them, in case of need.

And yet I had discerned my father’s sorrow as I stood at the door, and the altered tone of his voice had revealed to me its depth. I am asking myself now if that very confession of sorrow, far from touching me did not lessen him in my eyes, accustomed as I had been to consider him an invincible hero—whether it did not change for me that picture of him which he had imprinted upon me from my earliest intelligence.

The long vacation did not bring its usual gaiety and diversions, that year. Mélanie’s departure for the convent, and that of Stephen, young as he was, for the Seminary had been finally decided upon. They were merely waiting for the month of October; then father would take his daughter to Paris and at the same time would place me in the school where my two elder brothers had finished their preparatory studies—for I had gained my point—and mother would go to Lyons with Stephen. This knowledge cast over our games and our gatherings a shade of sadness, which those concerned tried in vain to clear away. Aunt Deen, who was growing a little heavier, climbed the stairs more slowly, blew her nose noisily, prayed very loud and with a certain impetuosity which must have shaken the saints in Paradise, and murmured Thy will be done in a tone that could hardly pass for one of submission. Grandfather shut himself up in his tower, playing his violin with hands that trembled, adding other notes than those of the score, went out for his walk at nightfall without a word to any one, and seemed to be living in ignorance and indifference concerning all that was going on in the family. When he met me he would simply make the remark, accompanied with his little laugh,

“Ah, there you are!” while he never spoke to either of my brothers or sisters as he passed them. But his laugh did not ring true; my ear was quick to perceive that our separation weighed upon him. I would gladly have rushed to him if he had not had an air of thinking lightly of all the vexations in the world. The shadow of my father was always between us. I had had no orders to avoid him; our alienation was by tacit consent. We had never dared to confess to any complicity. One day, however, he added:

“So, you are going to Paris?”

“Yes, grandfather, when schools open.”

“You are in luck. One feels more free in Paris than anywhere else. You will see.”

Was he jesting again? For me Paris meant boarding school, prison. And besides, had he not often told me that large cities are baneful, that real happiness was to be found only in the fields? But grandfather cared little enough for logic.

My approaching departure—that departure which I had proudly demanded, and which inspired within me a secret repulsion against which I hardened myself, made but small stir in the house—a fact that greatly irritated my self-love—being lost in that of Mélanie and my brothers, as a small boat is lost in the wake of a great vessel. Bernard, who had graduated from Saint-Cyr with a high grade that put him in the marine infantry, would go to Toulon, whence he would shortly embark for Tonkin. Now his first word, on his return home had been—I heard him say it to Aunt Deen, who had hastened, breathless, to open the door,

“You can’t imagine the pleasure with which I ring this bell.”

Then why did he ask to go to China? Mélanie and Stephen, too, exchanged mystifying confidences.

“Do you really want to go?” Stephen asked his sister. “We are so happy here. As for me, there are days when I am not sure.”

Mélanie, with illumined eyes, replied:

“I must, indeed, since God calls me,” adding, almost gaily,

“But I shall carry a lot of handkerchiefs, a dozen at least, for I feel sure that I shall cry all the tears that are in me.”

Why, oh why, then, that craze to go away when they said they were so happy at home? And I, too, why was I suffering in advance at the thought of leaving the house, since I had discovered that I was misunderstood and forlorn, and since I was determined to go?

One evening toward the end of August our friend Abbé Heurtevant came to see us, with a lenten face, so long and dolorous that we all expected to hear of some catastrophe. Mother hastily spoke for us all.

“Monsieur l’Abbé, for the love of God what has happened?”

“Ah, madame, Monseigneur is dead!”

I was the only one, except grandfather, who supposed him to be speaking of his ecclesiastical superior. But all the others understood, and bewailed the death of the Count de Chambord, who was known to have had an affection of the stomach for several days, or rather, as our abbé declared, to have been poisoned by strawberries. Aunt Deen burst out in tumultuous despair, my sisters endeavouring to console her, and father uttered a short obituary address which to me seemed lacking in heart.

“It is a misfortune for France, which he would have governed wisely. Monseigneur the Count of Paris succeeds him: the two princes had become reconciled, and that was the crown of a noble life. But what is the matter with you, Abbé?”

The abbé appeared to be even more inconsolable than Aunt Deen. Grandfather, who since the affair of the electoral lists had said less and less concerning his political opinions, could not control his tongue on this occasion:

“Why, don’t you see that his prophecies are choking him? He is thinking of the Abbey of Orval and of Sister Rose-Colombe. No hope now of hoisting his ‘young prince’ to the throne. There he is, dead from eating too much fruit. And the new Pretender isn’t much younger than the old one.”

“Father, I beg!” protested father.

The abbé, crushed and crumpled in the depths of an easy chair, suddenly started up, drew up the long lines of his body till one might have thought he had climbed upon something in order to orate, and in a thundering voice made confession of his faith:

“The King is dead. Long live the King! And the lilies will bloom again!”

“They will bloom again,” repeated Aunt Deen, with conviction.

His public life checked, father was evidently transferring his ambition to our future: he was fulfilling himself in us. I alone withdrew myself from his solicitude, my suspicions having been aroused by Martinod’s insinuations. It was not difficult for me to accumulate causes of vexation. Thus I refused to consider my departure—that departure which was my own doing—as any less important than that of Bernard for the colonies, Stephen for the Seminary, or Mélanie for the convent in the rue du Bac where the Sisters of Charity pass the time of their novitiate. Mélanie’s going away especially wronged me, because it coincided with my own. The people who came to visit my mother on account of my sister’s “holocaust” as Mlle Tapinois called it, exasperated me; they never alluded to me, no one condoled with my parents for losing me, no one noticed me, and yet I was going away, too. Even grandfather made not the slightest effort to keep me at home—nor so much as expressed any regret.

The day of separation came, a grey, rainy day, in harmony with the sadness that hung over the house. The laughing Louise followed, weeping, every step of Mélanie, who clung closely to mother. Every one said insignificant nothings—no one had any appropriate words, and the time was slipping away. We must start for the station. We had begun to think of it long before the time, and mother added to her other anxieties her fear that we should be too late.

Neither grandfather nor Aunt Deen was to be of the escorting party. The former dreaded emotional exhibitions, and Aunt Deen excused herself to Mélanie; she simply could not weep silently, and she preferred to remain in solitude where she could give way to her grief without making a disturbance; having said which she began loudly to bewail herself.

I went up to the tower chamber with my sister.

“Till we meet again, grandfather,” murmured Mélanie.

“Adieu, rather, little girl.”

“No, grandfather; till we meet again in heaven, where we are all going.”

He made a vague gesture which said only too plainly, “I won’t spoil your illusions,” adding,

“You are carrying out your own idea. You are right. Till we meet again, then, in the valley of Jehoshaphat.”

He showed himself no more moved over me.

“Well, well, my boy; may Paris be good to you!”

We went out together, last of all. Mélanie kissed old Mariette, who murmured, “Can it be possible!” and stepped across the threshold. Twice she turned again toward the house, and the second time she made the sign of the cross. We could hear Aunt Deen’s cries from her closed room.

We were too early at the station, and had to drag out the time in the waiting-room and on the platform. Father busied himself with the tickets and the baggage. A few family friends who had come to bid us good-bye joined us with doleful faces and words of sympathy. Thus we had to endure Mlle Tapinois,—whom I could never think of except in her night dress with a candle in her hand, since I had recognised her in the aged dove in “Scenes of Animal Life”—and Abbé Heurtevant, who since the death of his monarch had grown bent, and could predict nothing but misfortune. Nothing could take place in our town without the whole population mixing in. Marriage, departure or death, the public claimed its share. Mother was politely thanking all these people whose presence so distressed her—she would fain have been alone with her daughter, and I could see that she was enduring martyrdom. The last moments of our being together were flying. Louise, Nicola and James clung to Mélanie—Bernard was trying to brighten the conversation, but his pleasantries fell wide of the mark. As for Stephen, absorbed, he was doubtless thinking that it would soon be his turn, or perhaps he was praying.

When the moment came, mother wanted to be the last to say good-bye; she clasped her daughter to her breast without a word, then, relinquishing her hold she whispered low,

“My child, I bless thee.”

I was beside her, waiting for my turn to say good-bye. I used to imagine to myself a parent’s blessing as a solemn act, such as I had seen it in pictures; but here it was given in the twinkling of an eye, and without so much as the lifting of a hand.

But for the demonstrations of Mlle Tapinois, the abbé and several other persons who made a point of uttering memorable words, one might have thought that ours was just any ordinary going away. The train started. Having got in last, I was nearest the door. My father invited me to give that place to my sister. The invitation wounded me, for it sounded too much like an order. Of course I ought to have thought first of getting out of the way.

Mélanie extended her head from the window with no heed to the falling rain. She waved her arm—then as the train rounded a curve she turned back to the compartment with red eyes, but only to hasten to the other window. I knew that she was looking for the house, which was visible from that side. After that she sat down covering her face with her hands. As she remained thus, without moving, father gently took her in his arms.

“You know, my child, if it makes you too unhappy, I shall take you home again.”

She raised her head, tears raining down her cheeks, and with a heart-broken smile replied,

“Oh, father, it is truly my vacation. Only I have been so happy at home,—and never again to see our mother, nor the house—it is hard?”

“And for us?” said my father.

He turned away his head. Perhaps if I had better appreciated his grief, I should have suffered less, in my corner, from thinking myself forgotten. But as he controlled himself, I was free to torment myself to my heart’s content. My sister was going away to carry out her own idea, as grandfather had said, whereas I was being sent to prison. I quite forgot that I had myself asked to be sent. But had I not been a prisoner already, at our house? And in my rebellion, working myself up with the thought of Nazzarena on the high road, the sun shining through her hair and her teeth parted in her smile, I repeated to myself the phrase which chimed with the movement of the train,

“I want to be free! I want to be free!”