When, at fourteen, Arnica lost her father, it was Madame Semène who took in the orphan. Her two sisters, who were considerably older than she was, visited her only rarely. It was in the course of one of these visits, however, that Marguerite first met the young man who was to become her husband. Julius de Baraglioul was then aged twenty-eight and was on a visit to his grandfather, who, as we have already said, had settled in the neighbourhood of Pau shortly after the annexation of the Duchy of Parma by France.
Marguerite’s brilliant marriage (as a matter of fact, the Misses Péterat were not absolutely without fortune) made her appear more distant than ever to Arnica’s dazzled eyes; she had a shrewd suspicion that no Count—no Julius—would ever stoop to breathe her perfume. She envied her sister for having at last succeeded in escaping from the ill-sounding name of Péterat. The name of Marguerite was charming. How well it went with de Baraglioul! Alas! Was there any name wedded to which Arnica would cease to seem ridiculous?
Repelled by the world of fact, her soul, in its soreness and immaturity, tried to take refuge in poetry. At sixteen, she wore two drooping ringlets on each side of her sallow face, and her dreamy blue eyes looked out their astonishment beside the blackness of her hair. Her toneless voice was not ungentle; she read verses and made strenuous efforts to write them. She considered everything that helped her to escape from life, poetical.
Two young men, who since their early childhood had been friends and partners in affection, used to frequent Madame Semène’s evening parties. One, weedy without being tall, scraggy rather than thin, with hair that was not so much fair as faded, with an aggressive nose and timid eyes, was Amédée Fleurissoire. The other was fat and stumpy, with stiff black hair growing low on his forehead, and the odd habit of holding his head on one side, his mouth open and his right hand stretched out in front of him: such is the portrait of Gaston Blafaphas. Amédée was the son of a stonecutter with a business in tombstones and funeral wreaths; Gaston’s father had an important chemist’s shop.
(However strange the name of Blafaphas may seem, it is very common in the villages of the lower slopes of the Pyrenees, though it is sometimes spelt in slightly different ways. Thus, for instance, in the single small town of Sta ..., where the writer of these lines was once called on some business connected with an examination, he saw a notary Blaphaphas, a hairdresser Blafafaz, and a pork-butcher Blaphaface, who, on being questioned, disclaimed any common origin, while each one of them expressed considerable contempt for the name of the other two and its inelegant orthography.—But these philological remarks will be of interest only to a somewhat restricted class of reader.)
What would Fleurissoire and Blafaphas have been without each other? It is hard to imagine such a thing. At school, during their recreation time they were continually together; constantly teased and tormented by the other boys, they gave each other patience, comfort and support. They were nicknamed the Blafafoires. To each of them their friendship seemed the ark of salvation—the single oasis in life’s pitiless desert. Neither of them tasted a joy that he did not immediately wish to share with the other—or, to speak more truly, there were no joys for either of them save those which could be tasted together.
Indifferent scholars—in spite of their disarming industry—and fundamentally refractory to any sort of culture, the Blafafoires would always have been at the bottom of their form if it had not been for the assistance of Eudoxe Lévichon, who, in return for a small consideration, corrected and even wrote their exercises for them. This Lévichon was the son of one of the chief jewellers of the town. (Albert Lévy, shortly after his marriage twenty years earlier with the only daughter of the jeweller Cohen, had found his business so prosperous that he had quitted the lower quarters of the town in order to establish himself not far from the Casino, and at the same time he had judged it a favourable opportunity to unite and agglutinate the two names as he had united the two businesses.)
Blafaphas had a wiry constitution, but Fleurissoire was delicate. At the approach of puberty Gaston’s superficies had turned dusky—one would have thought that the sap was going to burst forth into hair over the whole of his body; while Amédée’s more sensitive epidermis resisted, grew fiery—grew pimply, as if the hair were bashful at making its appearance. Old Monsieur Blafaphas advised the use of detergents and every Monday Gaston used to bring over in his bag a bottle of anti-scorbutic mixture, which he surreptitiously handed to his friend. They used ointments as well.
About this time Amédée caught his first cold—a cold which, notwithstanding the salubrious climate of Pau, lasted all the winter and left behind an unfortunate bronchial delicacy. This gave Gaston the opportunity for renewed attentions; he overwhelmed his friend with liquorice, with jujubes, with cough mixtures and with eucalyptus pectoral lozenges, specially prepared by Monsieur Blafaphas père from a receipt which had been given him by an old curé. Amédée became subject to constant catarrh and had to resign himself to never going out without a comforter.
The highest flight of Amédée’s ambition was to succeed to his father’s business. Gaston, however, notwithstanding his indolent appearance, was not without initiative; even at school he amused himself with devising small inventions, chiefly, it must be confessed, of a somewhat trifling nature—a fly-trap, a weighing-machine for marbles, a safety lock for his desk—which, for that matter, had no more secrets in it than his heart. Innocent as these first applications of his industry were, they nevertheless led him on to the more serious labours which afterwards engaged him, and the first result of which was the invention of a “hygienic, fumivorous [or smoke-consuming] pipe for weak-chested and other smokers,” which for a long time occupied a prominent place in the chemist’s shop window.