Filled with a sense of sadness M. Bergeret laid down his pen, for he was suddenly overwhelmed with a perception of the uselessness of his work. Unfortunately for his own happiness, he was intelligent enough to recognise his own mediocrity, and, at times, it would actually appear to him in visible shape, like a thin, little, clumsy figure dancing about on his table between the inkstand and the file. He knew it well and hated it, for he would fain have seen his personality come to him under the guise of a lissom nymph. Yet it always appeared to him in its true form, as a lanky, unlovely figure. It shocked him to see it, for he had delicate perceptions and a taste for dainty conceits.
“Monsieur Bergeret,” he said to himself, “you are a professor of some distinction, an intelligent provincial, a university man with a tendency to the florid, an average scholar shackled by the barren quests of philology, a stranger to the true science of language, which can be plumbed only by men of broad, unbiassed and trenchant views. Monsieur Bergeret, you are not a scholar, for you are incapable of grasping or classifying the facts of language. Michel Bréal will never mention your poor, little, humble name. You will die without fame, and your ears will never know the sweet accents of men’s praise.”
“Sir ... Sir,” put in Euphémie in urgent tones, “do answer me. I have no time to hang about. I have my work to do. Madame wants to know how you’d like your eggs done. I got them at Trécul’s and they were laid this morning.”
Without so much as turning his head, M. Bergeret answered the girl in a tone of relentless gentleness:
“I want you to go and never again to enter my study—at any rate, not until I call you.”
Then the professor returned to his day-dream: “How happy is Torquet, our dean! How happy is Leterrier, our rector! No distrust of themselves, no rash misgivings to interrupt the smooth course of their equable lives! They are like that old fellow Mesange, who was so beloved by the immortal goddesses that he survived three generations and attained to the Collège de France and the Institute without having learnt anything new since the holy days of his innocent childhood. He carried with him to his grave the same amount of Greek as he had at the age of fifteen. He died at the close of this century, still revolving in his little head the mythological fancies that the poets of the First Empire had turned into verse beside his cradle. But I—how comes it that I have such a cruel sense of my own inadequacy and of the laughable folly of all I undertake? For I have a mind as weak as that Greek scholar’s, who had a bird’s brain as well as a bird’s name; I am fully as incapable as Torquet the dean, and Leterrier, the rector, of either system or initiative. I am, in fact, but a foolish, melancholy juggler with words. May it not be a sign of mental supereminence and a mark of my superiority in the realm of abstract thought? This Virgilius nauticus, which I use as the touchstone of my powers, is it really my own work and the fruit of my mind? No, it is a task foisted on my poverty by a grasping bookseller in league with a pack of pseudo-scholars who, on the pretext of freeing French scholarship from German tutelage, are bringing back the trivial methods of former times, and forcing me to take part in the philological pastimes of 1820. May the responsibility for it rest on them and not on me! It was no zeal for knowledge, but the thirst for gain, that induced me to undertake this Virgilius nauticus, at which I have now been working for three years and which will bring me in five hundred francs: to wit, two hundred and fifty francs on delivery of the manuscript, and two hundred and fifty francs on the day of publication of the volume containing this article. I determined to slake my horrible thirst for gold! I have failed, not in brain power, but in force of character. That’s a very different matter!”
In this way did M. Bergeret marshal the flock of his wandering thoughts. All this time Euphémie had not moved, but at last, for the third time, she spoke to her master:
“Sir.... Sir....”
But at this attempt her voice stuck in her throat, strangled by sobs.
When M. Bergeret at last glanced at her, he could see the tears rolling down her round, red, shining cheeks.