Raw Material

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I think he was sorry for me, for any one tempted to step into human and prosaic life. He stood at the door of his ordered, settled, established life, and called to me to construct one like it, to do as he had done, to turn away from the sordid comedy of personality, and step into the blessed country of impersonal intellectual activity. Many things turned me toward his path: the great weight of his mature personality (he was over seventy then and I was twenty), my immense admiration for his learning, my interest in his subject, my intuitive dread of the guessed-at strain of human emotions. You must not think that his world was austere or rarefied. He had found there, with no penalties to pay, all the amusement, the drama, the struggle, the rewards, the entertainment, which men find in the human world, and pay for so dearly. He never knew a bored or listless moment in his life, nor did any one in his company.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, after that two-hour lecture to the seminarists, there was a half hour intermission before the next class—eight or ten advanced students—met in his oak-paneled, half-basement office, rich with precious books, to discuss with him a curious Old-French manuscript which he had discovered in the library at Cassel.

I have never in my life known anything more sparkling and stimulating than those half-hour intermissions. The old man always clapped on his hat, talking incessantly as usual, and, stretching his long legs to a stride which kept me trotting like a little dog at his side, started up the Boulevard St. Michel towards the Odéon, to the pastry-shop which calls itself “of the Medicis.” As soon as his tall form showed in the distance, and the inimitable, high, never-to-be-forgotten squeak of his voice could be heard, one of the elegant young-lady waitresses bestirred herself—for the pastry-shop was proud of its famous patron. She always had babas au rhum waiting for us, as this was the only pastry Professor Meyer considered worth eating. I do not like babas au rhum myself, but who was I to set up my insignificant opinion against so great a man? So I ate the wet sop docilely, considering it a small price to pay for the stories that went with it, stories that blew the walls away from around us, and spread there the rich darkness of the Middle Ages. There were stories out of medieval manuscripts as yet unattributed and unedited, heaped in the upper rooms of the Ambrosiana at Milan, of the untold riches, unclassified and unarranged of the Bodleian, which Paul Meyer described with apostolic fervor; of priceless scripts discovered in impossible places, by incredible coincidences; of years of fruitless work on an obscure passage in the Grail-cycle, suddenly cleared up because a Greek priest in Siberia had discovered a manuscript bound in with an old Bible.

Or if he were in a playful mood, the mood the waitresses adored and hoped for, he would begin juggling with the names of things about us, the trim shoes on their feet, the brooches at their throats, the ribbon in their well-kept hair; and with a pyrotechnic display of laughing erudition, would hunt those words around and around through all the languages where they had tarried for a time, back through history—the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Late Latin, the Empire—till they ended in the long-drawn sonorous Sanscrit chant of an early Aryan dialect, which Professor Meyer rendered with a total disregard of onlookers.

After one of these flights, we came to ourselves with a start, looking around with astonishment at our everyday dress and surroundings and bodies.

Or perhaps it was a story out of his life, his long, long life, of which not a day had been lost from his work. My favorites, I remember, were the Tarascon stories. Ages and ages ago, when Paul Meyer was a very young man, one of the brilliant pioneers in the study of Old French, the municipal authorities of Tarascon employed him to come and decipher the Town records, faithfully kept from the beginning of time, but in their strange medieval scripts, with the abbreviations, conventional signs, and handwritings of the past centuries, wholly unintelligible to the modern Tarasconians. The young savant spent a whole winter there, studying and copying out these manuscripts, a first experience of the intense, bright pleasure such work was to give him all his life long. The quick-hearted southerners in the town, loving change and novelty, delighted to see the young, new face among them, welcomed him with meridional hospitality, and filled his leisure hours with the noisy, boisterous fun of Provence. He made friends there whom he never forgot, and every year after that he made the long trip to Tarascon to have a reunion with those comrades of his youth. But he lived long, much longer than the quickly-consumed southerners, and one by one, the friends of Tarascon were absent from the annual reunion. They were fewer and fewer, older and older, those men used up by the fever of living, and they fell away from the side of the vigorous man who had chosen for his own the unchanging world of the intellect. “And finally, last year,” said Professor Meyer on one occasion, “when I went back, they were all gone. Every one! I had to go to the cemetery to have a visit with them.”

As I gazed at him, astounded by the unbroken matter-of-factness of his tone, no self-pity in it, he went on, his voice brightening into enthusiasm, “So I went and had another look at the town records. Such a glorious collection of scripts. Not one known style missing!”

He regretted deeply the death of the much-loved Gaston Paris, his great colleague at the Collège de France, whose name was always linked with his in the glory of the renaissance of Old-French studies, but his lamentations were over the work unfinished, the priceless manuscripts yet unedited. When the news came of the tragic family disgrace of one of the greatest of German editors of Old-French texts, Paul Meyer was moved almost to tears. They were not of sympathy with the sorrow of the other scholar, but of exasperation that any man, especially one filled with irreplaceable knowledge of his subject, could let so ephemeral a thing as human relations distract him from the rich fields to be tilled in the kingdom of words.

During the second trial of Dreyfus, Paul Meyer was called to testify as a handwriting expert and gave his testimony in favor of Dreyfus, the evidence, he said, being unmistakable. It was at the height of the Dreyfus re-trial, when all France was throbbing with hate and suspicion like an ulcer throbbing with fever. Professor Meyer was abominably treated by the opposition, attacked in the streets, insulted, boycotted, his classes filled with jeering young men who yelled him down when he tried to speak. His bearing through this trial is one of the momentous impressions of my life. He did not resent it, he made no effort to resist it, he struck no melodramatic attitude, as did many of the fine men then fighting for justice in France. He smothered the flame out, down to the last spark by his total disregard of it. What did he care for howling fanatics in one camp or another? Nothing! He had been asked to pass judgment on a piece of handwriting and he had done it. There was nothing more to be said.