In Madeira Place

by Heman White Chaplin

It was plain at a glance that his present was not of a piece with his past I could not place him. His manners were easy and agreeable, and yet he was not a gentleman. He was well informed, and evidently of some mental training, and yet he was not quite an educated man. After his first visit to me, with the cook, he, too, occasionally looked in upon me, generally late in the afternoon, when I could call the day's work done and could talk French for half an hour with him, in place of taking a walk. He was strongly dramatic, like Sorel, but in a different way. Sorel was intense; Carron was théâtral. He was very fond of declamation; and seeing from the first my wish to learn French,—which Sorel would never very definitely recognize,—he often recited to me, for ear practice, and in an exceedingly effective way, passages from the Old Testament. He seemed to know the Psalms by heart. He was a good deal of an actor, and he took the part of a Hebrew prophet with great effect. But his fervor was all stage fire, and he would turn in an instant from a denunciatory Psalm to a humorous story. Even his stories were of a religious cast, like those which ministers relate when they gather socially. He told me once about a priest who was strolling along the bank of the Loire, when a drunken sailor accosted him and reviled him as a lazy good-for-nothing, a fainéant, and slapped his face. The priest only turned the other cheek to him. “Strike again,” he said; and the sailor struck. “Now, my friend,” said the priest, “the Scripture tells us that when one strikes us we are to turn the other cheek. There it ends its instruction and leaves us to follow our own judgment.” Whereupon, being a powerful man, he collared the sailor and plunged him into the water. He told me, too, with great unction, and with a roguish gleam in his eye, a story of a small child who was directed to prepare herself for confession, and, being given a manual for self-examination, found the wrong places, and appeared with this array of sins: “I have been unfaithful to my marriage vows.... I have not made the tour of my diocese.”

Carron had an Irish wife ( une Irlandaise ), much younger than he, whom he worshipped. He told me, one day, about his courtship. When he first met her, she knew not a word of French, and he not a word of English. He was greatly captivated (épris), and he had to contrive some mode of communication. They were both Catholics. He had a prayer-book with Latin and French in parallel columns; she had a similar prayer-book but in Latin and English. They would seat themselves; Carron would find in his prayer-book a sentence in French which would suit his turn, on a pinch, and through the medium of the Latin would find the corresponding passage in English in Norah's prayer-book and point it out to her. Norah, in her turn, would select and point out some passage in English which would serve as a tribute to Carron's charms, and he would discover in his prayer-book, in French, what that tribute was. Why should we deem the dead languages no longer a practical study, when Latin can gain for a Frenchman an Irish wife!

Carron, as I have said, puzzled me. He had not the pensive air of one who has seen better days. He was more than cheerful in his present life: he was full of spirits; and yet it was plain that he had been brought up for something different. I asked him once to tell me, for French lessons, the story of his life. With the most charming complaisance, he at once consented; but he proceeded in such endless detail, the first time, in an account of his early boyhood in a strict Benedictine monastery school, in the south of France, as to suggest that he was talking against time. And although his spirited and amusing picture of his childhood days only awakened my curiosity, I could never persuade him to resume the history. It was always “the next time.”

He seemed to be poor: but he never asked a favor except for others. On the contrary, he brought me some little business. A Belge had been cheated out of five hundred dollars; I recovered half of it for him. A Frenchman from le Midi had bought out a little business, and the seller had immediately set up shop next door; I succeeded in shutting up the rival. I was a prodigy.

After a time I was told something further as to Carron's life. He had been a Capuchin monk, in a monastery at or near Paris. The instant that I heard this statement, I felt in my very soul that it was true. My eye had always missed something in Carron. I now knew exactly what it was,—a shaved crown, bare feet, and a cowl.

It was the usage for the brethren of his order to go about Paris barefoot, begging. They were not permitted by the concierges to go into the great apartment hotels. But “Carron, il est très fin,” said my informant; “you know,—'e is var' smart.” Carron would learn, by careful inquiry, the name of a resident on an upper floor; then he would appear at the concierge's door, and would mention the name of this resident with such adroit, demure, and absolute confidence that he would be permitted at once to ascend. Once inside, he would go the rounds of the apartments. So he would get five times as much in a day as any of his fellows. A certain amount of the receipts he would yield up to the treasury of the monastery; the rest he kept for himself. After a while this came to be suspected, and he quietly withdrew to a new country.

There was not the slightest tangible corroboration of this story. It might have been the merest gossip or the invention of an enemy. But it fitted Carron so perfectly, that from the day I heard it I could never, somehow, question its substantial truth. If I had questioned it, I should have repeated the story to him, to give him an opportunity to answer. But something warned me not to do so.

Fidèle held on well at the custom-house, and I think that he became a general favorite. No one who took the old soldier by the hand and looked him in the eye could question his absolute honesty; and as for skill in his duties,—well, it was the custom-house.

But he was not saving much money. He was free to give and free to lend to his fellow-countrymen; and, moreover, various ways were pointed out to him by Mr. Fox, from time to time, in which an old soldier, delighting to aid his country, could serve her pecuniarily. The republic,—that is, the Republicans,—it was all one.

One afternoon, late in summer, Fidèle appeared at my office. He seldom visited me, except quarterly for his pension affidavit. As he came in now, I saw that something had happened. His grisly face wore the same kindly smile that it had always borne, but the light had gone out of it. His story was short. He had lost his place. He had been notified that his services would not be needed after Saturday. No reason had been given him; he was simply dismissed in humiliation. There must be some misunderstanding, such as occurs between the warmest friends. And was not the great government his friend? Did it not send him his pension regularly? Had it not sent a special messenger to seek him out, in his obscurity, for this position; and was he not far better suited to it now than at the outset?