“I couldn’t get myself killed. I got taken. I belong to you. Only, I wish you would do me one favor. I have a son, a child of seventeen, he is at Cherbourg, on the hulks. He has fought, it is true, and he will not deny it; but it was I who put the musket in his hand, it was I who told him that his duty was there. He listened to me. He obeyed me. That alone is his crime. Do not condemn him too harshly.
“As for me, you have hold of me—do not let me go; that’s the advice I give you. I’m too old to mend, and, besides, what would you have? Nothing can change what is: I was born on the wrong side of the barricade.”
ANDRÉ THEURIET, HUMANIST
André Theuriet was evidently in sympathy with the doctrine that those lands and their dwellers are most happy which have the least history. Singular as the statement may seem when made of a contemporary French man of letters who had defeated Zola in a contest for election to the Academy, it is nevertheless true that the tone of Theuriet’s work is repose. “The short and simple annals of the poor” he penned with simplicity and charm, and rarely did the hurly-burly tempt him to fare among scenes either boisterous or sordid. Yet, he was never squeamish, but wrote of a real life in a real world. What Alphonse Daudet became when he occasionally left fevered Paris to lie on the turf at Montauban and feel in fancy the gentle fanning of the old windmill, that André Theuriet was by temperament. The bucolic, the gentle, the peaceful—all met response in his nature and were mirrored in the placid pool of his fiction.
Theuriet was born at Marly-le-Roi, September, 1833, and spent his childhood in that lovely province. He got his education at Bar-le-duc, and at Paris, where he took up the study of law, receiving the degree of Licencée en Droit at the age of twenty-four. Instead of practising, however, he entered the Ministry of Finance the same year, and began the routine of public life—as the intensely private career of the bureaucrat is called.
At once he began to publish verse, winning a place, the very year of his appointment to the Ministry of Finance, in the pages of that distinguished exponent of letters, the Revue des Deux Mondes. In Memoriam was the title of his first success—a romance in verse, quickly appraised by critics at a value which it still maintains, and displaying the qualities for which the author’s writings are appreciated to-day.
We never tire of debating as to whether distinguished men are more the product of their times, than their era is moulded by its men. Doubtless something of both views is the ultimate truth. Theuriet, however, left no profound influence upon his age. During the ten years which succeeded the publication of In Memoriam—1857 to 1867—his work continued, unaffected by the French revolt, if that is not too strong a term, against romanticism. This is shown in his first volume of poems, The Forest Path (Le Chemin du Bois), published in 1867, and awarded the Vitel prize by the Academy. Another ten years, and he received the coveted place among the Immortals, but the tone of his writings never changed—his was always a quiet romanticism clothed upon with the beauty of idealism.
Theuriet’s selection of themes is a happy index to his nature. The one and the other are clean, uncomplicated by intrigue, and in the main agreeable. Are there many to-day who will be attracted to this man when his fiction is called restful and gentle? I do not know, since we are all so busy and turbulent and—disillusioned. But we ought to be, if we are not, drawn by thoughts of a melodious rhythm of words portraying honest emotions, of country life that exhales the “perfume of new hay and of ripe wheat,” of woodsy ways and forest folk—in a word, thoughts of a world where, as in La Bretonne, the lowliest respond to human need, and even crime cannot stamp out the image of the beautiful, a world full of goodness rising out of the ooze of evil.
And so it was country-life—country-life in Lorraine, enriched and made beautiful by the Loire—that inspired not only his early poems, but also the numerous novels, plays, sketches, and short-stories which stand to his credit—and I use the word designedly.
After a notable if not brilliant career as author and journalist, Theuriet died in Paris, 1897.