“Bergeret wouldn’t gird at the universe in this way if he hadn’t some special trouble. It isn’t natural to see the seamy side of everything.”
“You’re right,” said M. de Terremondre.
XII
The elm-trees on the Mall were slowly clothing their dusky limbs with a delicate drapery of pale gauzy green. But on the slope of the hill crowned with its ancient ramparts, the flowering trees of the orchards showed their round white heads, or distaffs of rosy bloom, against a background of cloudless, sunny sky that smiled between the showers. In the distance flowed the river, swollen with spring rains, a line of bare, white water, that fretted with its rounded curves the rows of slender poplars which outlined its course. Beautiful, invincible, fruitful and eternal, flowed the river, a true goddess, as in the days when the boatmen of Roman Gaul made their offerings of copper coins to it and raised, before the temple of Venus and Augustus, a votive pillar on which they had roughly carved a boat with its oars. Everywhere in this open valley, the sweet, trembling youth of the year shivered along the surface of the ancient earth. Under the elm-trees on the Mall walked M. Bergeret with slow, irregular steps. As he wandered on, his mind glanced hither and thither; shifting it was and confused; old as the earth itself, yet young as the flowers on the apple-boughs; empty of thought, yet full of vague visions; lonely, yet full of desire; gentle, innocent, wanton, melancholy; dragging behind it a weight of weariness, yet still pursuing Hopes and Illusions whose very names, shapes and faces were unknown to him.
At last he drew near the wooden bench on which he was in the habit of sitting in summer time, at the hour when the birds are silent on the trees. Here, where he often sat resting with Abbé Lantaigne, under the beautiful elm that overheard all their grave talk, he saw that some words had been recently traced by a clumsy hand in chalk on the green back of the seat. At first he was seized with a fear lest he should find his own name written there, for it was quite familiar by now to all the blackguards of the town. But he soon saw that he need have no trouble on that score, since it was merely a lewd inscription in which Narcissus announced to the world the pleasures he had enjoyed on this very bench in the arms of his Ernestine, doubtless under cover of the kindly night. The style of the legend was simple and concise, but coarse and uncomely in its terms.
M. Bergeret was just about to sit down in his accustomed place, but he changed his mind, since it did not seem a fitting action for a decent man to lean publicly against this obscene memorial, dedicated to the Venus of cross-roads and gardens, especially as it stood on the very spot where he had expressed so many noble and ironic thoughts and had so often invoked the muse of seemly meditation. Turning away, therefore, from the bench, he said to himself:
“O vain desire for fame! We long to live in the memory of men, and unless we are consummately well-bred men of the world, we would fain publish in the market-place our loves, our joys, our sorrows and our hates. Narcissus, here, can only really believe that he has actually won his Ernestine, when all the world has heard of it. It was the same spirit that drove Phidias to trace a beloved name on the great toe of the Olympian Jove. O thirst of the soul to unburden itself, to plunge into the ocean of the not-self! ‘To-day, on this bench, Narcissus....’
“Yet,” thought M. Bergeret once more, “the first virtue of civilised man and the corner-stone of society is dissimulation. It is just as incumbent on us to hide our thoughts as it is for us to wear clothes. A man who blurts out all his thoughts, just as they arise in his mind, is as inconceivable as the spectacle of a man walking naked through a town. Talk in Paillot’s shop is free enough, yet were I, for instance, to express all the fancies that crowd my mind at this moment, all the notions which pass through my head, like a swarm of witches riding on broomsticks down a chimney, if I were to describe the manner in which I suddenly see Madame de Gromance, the incongruous attitudes in which I picture her, the vision of her which comes to me, more ludicrous, more weird, more chimerical, more quaint, more monstrous, more perverted and alien to all seemly conventions, a thousand times more waggish and indecent than that famous figure introduced in the scene of the Last Judgment on the north portal of Saint-Exupère by a masterly craftsman who had caught a glimpse of Lust himself as he leant over a vent-hole of hell; if I were accurately to reveal the strangeness of my dream, it would be concluded that I am a prey to some repulsive mania. Yet, all the same, I know that I am an honourable man, naturally inclined to purity, disciplined by life and reflection to self-control, a modest man wholly dedicated to the peaceful pleasures of the mind, a foe to all excess, and hating vice as a deformity.”