The Wicker Work Woman: A Chronicle of Our Own Times

by Anatole France

In his study M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, was preparing his lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid to the shrill mechanical accompaniment of the piano, on which, close by, his daughters were practising a difficult exercise. M. Bergeret’s room possessed only one window, but this was a large one, and filled up one whole side. It admitted, however, more draught than light, for the sashes were ill-fitting and the panes darkened by a high contiguous wall. M. Bergeret’s table, pushed close against this window, caught the dismal rays of niggard daylight that filtered through. As a matter of fact this study, where the professor polished and repolished his fine, scholarly phrases, was nothing more than a shapeless cranny, or rather a double recess, behind the framework of the main staircase which, spreading out most inconsiderately in a great curve towards the window, left only room on either side for two useless, churlish corners. Trammelled by this monstrous, green-papered paunch of masonry, M. Bergeret had with difficulty discovered in his cantankerous study—a geometrical abortion as well as an æsthetic abomination—a scanty flat surface where he could stack his books along the deal shelves, upon which yellow rows of Teubner classics were plunged in never-lifted gloom. M. Bergeret himself used to sit squeezed close up against the window, writing in a cold, chilly style that owed much to the bleakness of the atmosphere in which he worked. Whenever he found his papers neither torn nor topsy-turvy and his pens not gaping cross-nibbed, he considered himself a lucky man! For such was the usual result of a visit to the study from Madame Bergeret or her daughters, where they came to write up the laundry list or the household accounts. Here, too, stood the dressmaker’s dummy, on which Madame Bergeret used to drape the skirts she cut out at home. There, bolt upright, over against the learned editions of Catullus and Petronius, stood, like a symbol of the wedded state, this wicker-work woman.

M. Bergeret was preparing his lesson on the eighth book of the Æneid, and he ought to have been devoting himself exclusively to the fascinating details of metre and language. In this task he would have found, if not joy, at any rate mental peace and the priceless balm of spiritual tranquillity. Instead, he had turned his thoughts in another direction: he was musing on the soul, the genius, the outward features of that classic world whose books he spent his life in studying. He had given himself up to the longing to behold with his own eyes those golden shores, that azure sea, those rose-hued mountains, those lovely meadows through which the poet leads his heroes. He was bemoaning himself bitterly that it had never been his lot to visit the shores where once Troy stood, to gaze on the landscape of Virgil, to breathe the air of Italy, of Greece and holy Asia, as Gaston Boissier and Gaston Deschamps had done. The melancholy aspect of his study overwhelmed him and great waves of misery submerged his mind. His sadness was, of course, the fruit of his own folly, for all our real sorrows come from within and are self-caused. We mistakenly believe that they come from outside, but we create them within ourselves from our own personality.

So sat M. Bergeret beneath the huge plaster cylinder, manufacturing his own sadness and weariness as he reflected on his narrow, cramped, and dismal life: his wife was a vulgar creature, who had by now lost all her good looks; his daughters, even, had no love for him, and finally the battles of Æneas and Turnus were dull and boring. At last he was aroused from this melancholy train of thought by the arrival of his pupil, M. Roux, who made his appearance in red trousers and a blue coat, for he was still going through his year of military service.

“Ha!” said M. Bergeret, “so I see they’ve turned my best Latin scholar into a hero.”

And when M. Roux denied the heroic impeachment, the professor persisted: “I know what I’m talking about. I call a man who wears a sabre a hero, and I’m quite right in so doing. And if you only wore a busby, I should call you a great hero. The least one can decently do is to bestow a little flattery on the people one sends out to get shot. One couldn’t possibly pay them for their services at a cheaper rate. But may you never be immortalised by any act of heroism, and may you only earn the praises of mankind by your attainments in Latin verse! It is my patriotism, and nothing else, that moves me to this sincere wish. For I am persuaded by the study of history that heroism is mainly to be found among the routed and vanquished. Even the Romans, a people by no means so eager for war as is commonly supposed, a people, too, who were often beaten, even the Romans only produced a Decius in a moment of defeat. At Marathon, too, the heroism of Kynegeirus was shown precisely at the moment of disaster for the Athenians, who, if they did succeed in arresting the march of the barbarian army, could not prevent them from embarking with all the Persian cavalry which had just been recuperating on the plains. Besides, it is not at all clear that the Persians made any special effort in this battle.”

M. Roux deposited his sabre in a corner of the study and sat down in a chair offered him by the professor.

“It is now four months,” said he, “since I have heard a single intelligent word. During these four months I have been concentrating all the powers of my mind on the task of conciliating my corporal and my sergeant-major by carefully calculated tips. So far, that is the only side of the art of warfare that I can really say I have mastered. It is, however, the most important side. Yet I have in the process lost all power of grasping a general idea or of following a subtle thought. And here you are, my dear sir, telling me that the Greeks were conquered at Marathon and that the Romans were not warlike. My head whirls.”

M. Bergeret calmly replied:

“I merely said that Miltiades did not succeed in breaking through the forces of the barbarians. As for the Romans, they were not essentially a military people, since they made profitable and lasting conquests, in contradistinction to the true military nations, such as the French, for instance, who seize all, but retain nothing.

“It is also to be noted that in Rome, in the time of the kings, aliens were not allowed to serve as soldiers. But in the reign of the good king Servius Tullius the citizens, being by no means anxious to reserve to themselves alone the honour of fatigue and perils, admitted aliens resident in the city to military service. There are such things as heroes, but there are no nations of heroes, nor are there armies of heroes. Soldiers have never marched save under penalty of death. Military service was hateful even to those Latin herdsmen who gained for Rome the sovereignty of the world and the glorious name of goddess among the nations. The wearing of the soldier’s belt was to them such a hardship that the very name of this belt, ærumna, eventually expressed for them the ideas of dejection, weariness of body and mind, wretchedness, misfortune and disaster. When well led they made, not heroes, but good soldiers and good navvies; little by little they conquered the world and covered it with roads and highways. The Romans never sought glory: they had no imagination. They only waged absolutely necessary wars in defence of their own interests. Their triumph was the triumph of patience and good sense.