[XXXIX]
Philippe Villard came from the small, independent merchant class.
His father, a printer in a little town, active, bustling, bold, had at once the energy and the freedom from scruple that are necessary for success on a vaster scene; but he did not succeed, because for success there is a line of audacity that one must be able to reach and not go beyond, and he had always gone beyond it. Managing a local newspaper that swam on the troubled waters of politics, a Gambettist republican, a tireless anti-clerical, a great hand at elections, he once exceeded the limits of libel and blackmailing that are authorized by the law (no, by custom!) and was condemned and dropped by those whom he had served. Ill in addition, he saw that he was ruined; his plant was sold and all the local hatreds were unmuzzled, now that he no longer had the means to make himself useful or feared. He fought furiously, like a wolf, against illness, poverty and misfortune. The exasperation made his condition worse, and he died, expressing with his last breath his implacable bitterness against the treason of his old companions. The son was ten years old; and none of these imprecations was lost on him.
His mother, a proud peasant woman from the slopes of the Jura mountains, accustomed to struggling with an ungrateful soil that was bitten by a harsh wind, went out by the day as a washerwoman in the canal and undertook the roughest work. She was as strong as a Percheron mare, attacking her work with her four limbs and her iron frame, greedy for gain, but painstaking, honest, hard on herself and close-fisted; she was feared and sought after; she had a redoubtable tongue, which she restrained, and people knew that, through her husband's death, she was the mistress of many family secrets. She made no use of these, but she possessed them, and it was more prudent to pay for her services than to do without them. She had no intellectual scruples and was rigorously active, rather sombre (for in this race Spain has left its blood), with a limitless passion of energy which, mingled with Gallic disillusionment, believes in nothing and yet acts as if salvation or damnation were awaiting it. She loved nothing but her son. She was ferocious in her love. She did not conceal from him any of the things about which she held her tongue with other people; she treated him as a partner. Ambitious for him alone, she sacrificed herself, and he was going to sacrifice himself—for whom? For her revenge. (Hers? Yes, her own, that of the son, that of the mother—all the same thing!) No tenderness, no indulgence—above all, no whimpering. "Go without things! You will gloat over it later." When he came home from school—heaven knew by what efforts of work and diplomacy she obtained for him a scholarship in the town grammar-school, then at the lycée in the county-town!—when he came home, thrashed and humiliated by the little bourgeois boys, the fool-hardy heirs of the hidden spite of their fathers, she said to him, "You will be stronger than they are later. They will kiss your feet. Rely on yourself! Don't rely on anyone else!"
He did not rely on anyone else, and he soon made it clear that they would have to reckon with him. She succeeded in clinging to life until her son's studies were brilliantly finished and he had taken his first term in medicine in Paris. He was in the midst of an examination when she had to take to her bed with an inflammation of the chest. She did not want to disturb him before he had finished. She died without him. In her rude handwriting, twisted like the claws of the vine in spring, with all the dots and accents well marked and in their places, she wrote to him on a blank sheet carefully cut from a letter from her son, who was reckless with his paper, "I am going. My boy, keep strong. Do not give way."
He had not given way. Returning to the country to bury his mother, he found a small sum of money, collected from day to day, which enabled him to pay his way for another year. Then, thrown upon himself, he spent half his days and sometimes his nights earning what the other half demanded for his subsistence. No task was too much for him. He worked at natural history for a taxidermist, he served as a sculptor's model, as an extra boy on Sundays in suburban cafés, or on Saturday nights at wedding-parties in restaurants. In winter, when he was hungry one morning, he even took a job under the sewerage commission in a gang of snow-sweepers. He did not hesitate to have recourse to bold-faced begging, to charity societies, to accepting humiliating loans which he could not pay back and which gave mean souls the right to treat him without consideration for a five-franc piece. . . . (The blackguards! They didn't try it again after the look he gave them! But then, since they could not repay themselves with scorn, they did so with hatred, prudently behind his back: they slandered him.) During a few months of desperate labor, he went so far as to accept the money that a girl of the neighborhood offered him. He did not blush at this, for it was not for himself (he was killing himself with privations), it was for his success. Of course he had needs! He wanted to take everything, but he repressed his desire. Later on! He must conquer first. And to conquer he must live. Live by every means. Victory cleanses everything. And it was his due. He felt he was a genius.
He attracted the attention of his masters, his comrades. He was given work to do that was signed by men at the top after they had made a pretence of touching it up a little. He allowed himself to be exploited so as to acquire a hold over those who barred the gates to new-comers. They were in no great hurry to let him in. They respected him, and respect is a kind of money that enables one to dispense with other kinds. They appreciated him, oh, yes. But he did not grow fat on this. In spite of his native strength, the strength of his mother's Jura mountains, he was on the point of going under from fatigue and malnutrition when Solange happened upon him. It was at one of those many charities which she patronized with a sincere though intermittent generosity, with her heart and her money; a children's clinic. Solange saw Philippe there, devoting himself with a rage—that rage he felt to conquer, whenever there was the least chance of it—at the beds of the little patients who were apparently doomed. He spent nights there and came away from these battles looking worn and debilitated, but with eyes flaming with fever and genius. When he had conquered he was almost handsome and seemed more than good as he sat by the little sufferer whom he had just saved. Did he love him? It was possible, not certain. But he had got the best of the disease.
Solange, when she saw Philippe's situation, passed through one of those periodical crises of "patheticness" in which her whole horizon was filled by a single object. Whoever wished to profit by this had to lose no time. Philippe did not lose it. This drowning man grasped the hand that was held out to him. He even took the arm with it, and he would have taken the rest if he had not perceived that Solange, in her infatuation, had no thought of an amorous relation. She loved to feel exalted, but this in no way disturbed her tranquillity. Philippe had never seen a woman who was interested in him without being in pursuit of some interest of her own. The good Solange found her pleasure in herself. All she asked of others was that they should not gainsay the image she had formed of them. At heart she did not really want to know them. She took pains not to see anything in the other person that might displease her, saying to herself that this was not his "real nature"; and she accepted as real only what resembled herself. Thus she succeeded in creating in her own mind a whole universe composed of good, comfortable souls after her own pattern. Philippe let her go her own way with a little contempt and a little respect. He did not like stupid people; and he regarded as such those who did not see the world as it was; but a goodness that does the good of which it speaks was for him no everyday spectacle. Whatever their value might be, moral or immoral, the essential thing was that such people counted. Solange's goodness was not fictitious. Since she had become aware of Philippe's destitution and toil, she gave him a pension till he finished his years of study; she provided him with leisure so that he might work in peace. She did more: she made use of her extensive relations to interest one of the influential masters of the Faculty in him, or rather, since this cautious man had not failed to observe the restless power of the hungry young wolf, to so arrange things that his interest should not remain confined intus et in cute, but should show itself in the open. In the end she brought him into touch with an American oil-king who wanted to immortalize himself vicariously and opened for him a rapid path to fame. He laid the foundation of this across the ocean by his audacious feats of surgery in a palatial hospital founded by this Pharaoh.
During the course of these trying years, however, Solange would sometimes totally forget her protégé for months, and as a result of her carelessness the promised pension would cease to come. With all their good will, the rich cannot understand that some people have to think of money all the time. Money is a constant anxiety with the poor. Solange would send Philippe tickets to concerts. Philippe had to swallow all his pride to remind this charming woman, in her box at the theatre, of the unpaid pension. He swallowed it. It was sometimes the only nutriment he had taken during the day. On these occasions Solange would open her big, surprised eyes: "What's that. . . . Ah, my dear friend, how astonished I am! The moment I get home . . ."
She would promise, forget it again for a day or two and finally send it, excusing herself as gracefully as possible. Philippe, maddened by the delay and the humiliation, would swear that the next time he would die rather than ask for it again. But dying is not good for people who feel the necessity of living! And he felt this necessity. . . . He would ask for it again as often as he was obliged to do so. . . . Solange was never put out with him. If she often forgot—she had "so much to think of!"—when he reminded her of it she always took the same pleasure in giving.