II
A DESCENDANT OF TIMON
Timon of Athens hated all men because he had once too greatly loved them. To whom shall the fault be ascribed, to mankind, or to Timon of Athens? The long-standing open question does not yet appear to have been answered. The human race continues to lay the blame on its detractors, and the descendants of Timon, who was above all a disappointed lover of his kind, have not ceased to find good reasons for their censure.
The special descendant of Timon who trotted me on his knee when I was a child was an old navy doctor retired from service after a severe wound received at Navarino. If I close my eyes, the better to call up my memories, there arises before me a long, gaunt silhouette surmounted by a bald head, the entire figure running to length, which is, they say, the mark of an immoderate idealism. I remember his small, mocking green eyes, sunk behind the brush of his formidable eyebrows. The long, white side-whiskers, the carefully shaven lips that would stretch to his ears in a grin like Voltaire's, accompanied by a dry chuckle, have remained alive in my memory, as have also his wide, incoördinate gestures, his dry, harsh voice, and his biting, wrathful utterances.
I should find it impossible at this distance to trace the life history of Doctor Jean du Pouët, known over the entire Plain, from Sainte Hermine to Fontenay-le-Comte, under the familiar yet respectful title of "The Doctor." All I can say is that the Doctor, hailing originally from L'Aiguillon, a little port of the Vendée at the mouth of the Lay, had sailed every sea, landed on every island, visited every coast of every continent, and made his studies of all nations on earth from life, which enabled him to criticise his neighbours at every turn by comparing them, disastrously for them, with heaven knows what abominable savages, in which comparison the latter were always found far superior, with regard to the point under discussion, to the men of the Vendée, from the Plain, the Woodland, and the Marsh, all put together.
It was in the very heart of the Plain, in the village of Ecoulandres, that the "Doctor" had come to settle, brought there by an inheritance from a cousin, who had left him lord and master of an old middle-class dwelling with large tile-paved rooms in which hung panoplies of tomahawks, javelins, bucklers, boomerangs, in warlike wreaths around monstrous idols, whose barbaric names, impressively enumerated by the traveller, aroused a holy terror in the soul of the peaceable tillers of the soil.
A little wood of elms, a great curiosity in a region where not a tree is to be seen, surrounded the domain. It was a thin copse, the layer of soil making but a shallow covering to the underlying limestone. This did not prevent our stern censor from taking a certain pride in his "grove," without its like to the furthermost boundary of the horizon. I must even confess that the doctor, like any other true son of the Vendée, had a very well-developed sense of landed proprietorship. Money ran through his fingers, and no outstretched palm ever sought his help in vain. But the possessive pronoun rose readily to his lips when talk turned upon the land. "My dung," "my stones," "my nettles," he was wont to say. He adored his Plain—"Green in springtime, in summer gold," where fleecy crops rippled under the great blue canopy,—pierced along the horizon by steeples suggestive of distant shipping. Flights of plovers in January and ducks in September engaged the doctor's attention. He watched for them from a murderous shooting shelter, and invented incredible ruses to allure them nearer. The rest of his time was spent scouring the countryside in a jolting rural trap, hastening to the bedside of the sick, who sent for him on any and all occasions, but did not greatly value his visits, as he never required payment, or administered to his patients that accompanying dose of legitimate charlatanism which forms the chief factor in so many cures.
For the doctor was above all things outspoken. I am unaware whether some great disappointment had driven him to misanthropy, or whether he had merely given way to the natural bent of his character. Whatever may have been his soul's history, it is certain that he at every opportunity exercised his fine capacity for indignation against mankind in general, and with particular delight against the specimens of it who happened to be present. Never any coarse rudeness, however, and absolutely never any active ill will. He was not to be taken at his word, his pleasure consisting merely in satanic thoughts, the cruel expression of which sufficed for the satisfaction of his ferocity.
You should have heard him on the subject of love, of friendship, of gratitude. It was his joy to demonstrate that every form of courtesy concealed a lie, by which he was no more deceived than was the person favouring him with it. It was no pleasure trip, coming to thank him for having saved a sick man's life. The patient and his friends heard startling things concerning the self-interest at bottom of their thoughts.
"Are you so glad, then, not to get your inheritance?" he would say to a son who came to tell him of his old father's complete return to health.