Having re-entered the empty house, Riquet pawed his master’s legs, looking up at him with his beautiful sorrowing eyes, that said: “You, formerly so rich and powerful, have you, O master, become poor? Have you grown powerless? You suffer men clad in filthy rags to invade your study, your bedroom and your dining-room, to fall upon your furniture and drag it out of doors. They drag your deep arm-chair down the stairs, your chair and mine, in which we sat to rest every evening, and often in the morning, side by side. In the clutch of these ragged men I heard it groan, that chair which is so great a fetish and so benevolent a spirit. And you never resisted these invaders. If you have lost all the genii that used to fill your house, even to the little divinities, that you used to put on your feet every morning when you got out of bed, those slippers which I used to worry in my play, if you are poor and miserable, O my master, what will become of me?”
“Lucien, we have no time to lose,” said Zoe. “The train goes at eight and we have had no dinner. Let us go and dine at the station.”
“To-morrow you will be in Paris,” said Monsieur Bergeret to Riquet. “Paris is a famous and a generous city. To be honest, however, I must point out that this generosity is not vouchsafed alike to all its inhabitants. On the contrary, it is confined to a very small number of its citizens. But a whole city, a whole nation resides in the few who think more forcefully and more justly than the rest. The others do not count. What we call the spirit of a race attains consciousness only in imperceptible minorities. Minds which are sufficiently free to rid themselves of vulgar terrors and discover for themselves the veiled truths are rare in any place!”
CHAPTER III
Upon Monsieur Bergeret’s arrival in Paris, with his daughter Pauline and his sister Zoe, he had lodged in a house which was soon to be pulled down, and which he began to like as soon as he knew that he could not remain in it. He was unaware of the fact that in any case he would have left it at the same time. Mademoiselle Bergeret had made up her mind as to that. She had taken these rooms only to give herself time to find better, and was opposed to the spending of any money upon the place.
It was a house in the Rue de Seine, a hundred years old at least. Never beautiful, it had grown uglier with age. The porte cochère opened humbly on a damp courtyard between a shoemaker’s shop and a carrier’s office. Monsieur Bergeret’s rooms were on the second floor, and on the same floor lived a picture-restorer through whose open door glimpses could be caught of little unframed canvases set about an earthenware stove, landscapes, old portraits, and an amber-skinned woman asleep in a dark wood under a green sky. The staircase was fairly well lighted. Cobwebs hung in the corners, and at the turns the wooden stairs were embellished with tiles. Stray lettuce-leaves, dropped from some housewife’s string bag, were to be found there of a morning.
Such things had no charm for Monsieur Bergeret, but he could not help feeling sad at the thought that he would become oblivious of these things as he had of so many others which, though they were not of any value, had made up the course of his life.
Every day, when his work was done, he went house-hunting. He thought of living for preference on the left bank of the Seine, where his father had dwelt before him, where it seemed to him one breathed an atmosphere of quiet life and peaceful study. What made his search more difficult was the state of the roads, broken with deep trenches and covered with mounds of earth. There were also the impassable and eternally disfigured quays.