Numa Roumestan

by Alphonse Daudet

While awaiting a more complete settling than was possible before the arrival of their furniture, which was coming by slow freight, the Valmajours had taken rooms temporarily at the famous Passage du Saumon, where from time immemorial teachers from Aps and its district have stopped, and of which Aunt Portal still retained such astonishing recollections. There, up under the roof, they had two small rooms, one of which was without light or air, a kind of wood-closet which was occupied by the men; the other was not much larger but seemed to them fine in comparison, with its worm-pierced black walnut furniture, its moth-eaten ragged carpet on the worn wooden floor and the dormer windows that let in only a bit of a sky as lowering and yellow as the long donkey-backed skylight over the Passage.

In these poor quarters they kept up the memory of home with a strong smell of garlic and fried onions, which foreign food they cooked for themselves on a little stove. Old Valmajour, who loved good eating and was also fond of company, would have liked to dine at the hotel table, where the white linen and plated salt-cellars and service seemed very handsome to him, and also to have joined in the noisy conversations and mingled with shouts of laughter of the commercial gentlemen who at meal times filled the house to the very top floor with their noise and jollity. But Audiberte opposed this flatly.

Amazed not to find at once on their arrival the promises of Numa fulfilled and the two hundred francs an evening which had filled her little head with piles of money ever since the visit of the Parisians; horrified at the high price of everything, from the first day she had been seized with the craze that the Parisians call “fear of wanting.” For herself she could get along with anchovies and olives as in Lent—té, pardi! but her men were perfect wolves, worse than in their own country because it is colder in Paris, and she was obliged to be constantly opening her saquette, a large calico pocket made by her own hands, in which she carried the three thousand francs that they had received for their farm and chattels.

Each coin that she spent was a struggle, a pang, as if she were handing over the stones of her farmhouse or the last vines of her vineyard. Her peasant greed and her suspiciousness, that fear of being cheated by a tenant which caused her to sell her farm instead of letting it, were redoubled in this gloomy, unknown Paris, this city which from her garret she heard roaring with a sound that did not cease day or night at this noisy corner of the city market, causing the glasses near the hotel water-bottle on the table to rattle at every hour.

No traveller lost in a wood of sinister repute ever clung more convulsively to his baggage than did Audiberte to her saquette as she walked through the streets in her green skirt and her Arles head-dress, which the passers-by turned to stare at. When she entered a shop with her countrywoman’s gait, the way she had of calling things by a lot of outlandish names, saying api for celery, mérinjanes for aubergines, made her, a woman from the south of France, as much a stranger in her country’s capital as if she had been a Russian from Nijni Novgorod or a Swede from Stockholm.

Sweet and humble of manner at first, if she detected a smile on the face of a clerk or received a rough answer on account of her mania for bargaining, she would suddenly fly into a gust of rage; her pretty virginal brown face twitching with frantic gesticulations she would pour forth a torrent of noisy, vainglorious words. Then she would tell about the expected legacy from Cousin Puyfourcat, the two hundred francs a night to be earned by her brother, the friendship that Roumestan had for them—sometimes calling him Numa, sometimes the Menister—all this with an emphasis more grotesque than her familiarity. Everything was jumbled together in a flood of gibberish composed of the langue d’oil tinged with French.

Then her habitual caution would return to her; she would fear that she had talked imprudently, and, seized by a superstitious terror at her own gossip, she would stop, suddenly mute, and close her lips as tightly as the strings of her saquette.

At the end of a week she had become a legendary character in the quarter of the Rue Montmartre, a street of shops where, at their ever-open doors, the vendors of meats, green-groceries and colonial wares discussed the affairs and secrets of all the inhabitants of the neighborhood. The constant teasing of these people, the saucy questions with which they plied her as she made her frugal purchases each morning—as to why her brother’s appearance was delayed and when the legacy was coming from the Arab—all these insults to her self-respect, more than the fear of poverty staring them in the face, exasperated Audiberte against Numa, against those promises which at first she had suspected, true child of the South that she was, knowing well that the promises of her country-people down South vanish easier than those of other folks—all because of the lightness of the air.

“Oh, if we had only made him sign a paper!”

This idea became a fixture in her mind and she felt daily in her brother’s pockets for the stamped document when Valmajour set out for the Ministry, in order to be sure it was there.