On est broyé, ou on broie les autres. There is no middle path for those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy and joined the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame.
But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the perfection of human triumph.
'What all who are not artists underrate,' he said to Damaris, as they passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, 'is the artist's joy in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to suppose that it is the ignis fatuus of celebrity which allures the young poet, the young musician, the young painter; that is very secondary with him. What overmasters him is the longing for the opportunity of expression; the besoin de se faire sentir, which is as powerful and imperious as the besoin d'aimer. I first played in a barn to villagers; I had a grand part, Robert Macaire; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on played at the Français to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swimming, as the heron feels in slowly sailing through the air: the ecstasy in the expansion of natural powers. But the majority of men know nothing of that. The custom-house officer would not believe that Berlioz was composing music as he sat on a rock above the sea. They laughed in his face and said: "Where is your piano?" This is as far as the world goes; it understands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.'
He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been the great 'abbey of the fields:' the fields were there unchanged, it was only the great thinkers whose brains were dust.
'I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your island of orange groves,' he continued. 'I was born in a little dusky, close, noisome shop in a back street of Vierzon, that dreary town of our dreary district of the Sologne. My grandfather had been born in that shop before me. Everything in it was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar, sordid; and vulgarity is so much worse than any ugliness, and sordid small aims and hopes are so much worse than any poverty! Of course no one need be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow. I suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that little stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the ironworkers and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged on me and noble visions haunted me, as they did you in your sea-girt orange thickets, and I used to sit in my hideous attic and recite verse to the one star which was all I could see through a chink in the wall, as you did, you tell me, to the whole of the southern skies glowing above your balcony. It was not fame that I wanted; I never thought of it; I longed to hear my own voice in the glory of the words; I longed to leap up and shout to all the sleeping town; I longed to cry out to the Immortals, wherever they were, "I have understood you, I am not unworthy!" Ah, those beautiful impersonal enthusiasms of youth! Fame! It is of nothing so narrow or so selfish that we think!'
The tears rose to his eyes: half a century and more had rolled away from him; he was a boy again, dreaming his dreams as he wandered over the sandy wastes of the Sologne.
'Ah, my dear,' he said with a sigh, 'how miserable I thought I was in that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal water slipping past its walls, and the black-faced iron puddlers quarrelling over my father's short weight! It stifled me; it cramped me; it killed me! so I thought. But I got away from it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape of a towing-horse, which carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a new life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling player; a jack at a pinch, a Jean-qui-rit or a Jean-qui-pleure, as it was wanted; and then I had more than thrice over the seven fat years, and all that men call success. I have had all the best things that there are in life, and I do not think I should have had as many of them if I had remained in the dingy little shop all my days, as my father wished me to do. Poor old father! he came to see me once in Paris—once, when I was thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs; and he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand, but he found out that my servants charged me four times too much a pound for candles. "Un grand homme toi!" he said, with a sneer at me, "et tu n' sais pas le prix d'une bougie!" The world admired me: he never did. I was always to him a fool who burned wax instead of tallow. There is always something to be said for the bourgeois point of view; but it is narrow—narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus are better than the worry over a lost centime in the back parlour. I have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have been a very indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring myself to care for that lost centime—though I have lost many!'
He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand gaspillage of his generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, perhaps, but it had been delightful; and, after all, he had as much as he wanted now in his little river-side house, his good wall fruits, and his first editions of Molière and of Marivaux. He would not have been a whit happier had he been a millionaire.
As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the air, and the shadow of the doves' tower lengthened behind them on the grass, the notes of a horn in the fanfare which is called La Brisée, blew loud and full over the fields to their ears.
'What is that?' cried Damaris, startled at the sound which she had never heard before.