The three best-known longer tales of Gautier—technically they are not precisely novels—are Mademoiselle de Maupin, a prose-song to beauty—immoral, daring, and beautiful; Captain Fracasse, whose smash-’em-up, picaroon hero leads us through abundant adventures; and Spirite, a notable contrast to the materialism displayed—almost flaunted—in his other work. Spirite is a story of fantasy; but it is more: with a tender delicacy and spiritual subtlety which well may surprise his public, Gautier presents the contrasting love-lure of Lavinia d’Audefini, a disembodied woman, and the very real but—here is the remarkable part—less attractive charms of Mme. d’Ymbercourt, a red-ripe woman indeed. We are indebted to Gautier for this one story as a demonstration that, while his tales are mostly as unmoral as the pigments of his literary palette, he can at will delineate the ethereal, and in so doing disclose a fine understanding of spiritual values.
THE MUMMY’S FOOT
(LE PIED DE MOMIE)
By Théophile Gautier
Done into English by the Editor
I had idly entered the shop of one of those curiosity-venders who, in that Parisian lingo which is so perfectly unintelligible to the rest of France, are called marchands de bric-à-brac.
You have doubtless glanced through the windows into one of those shops which have become so numerous since it is the mode to buy antique furniture, and since the pettiest stockbroker thinks he must have his “mediæval room.”
There is one thing that clings alike to the shop of the old-iron dealer, the wareroom of the tapestry-maker, the laboratory of the alchemist, and the studio of the artist: in these mysterious dens through whose window-shutters filters a furtive twilight, the thing that is the most manifestly ancient is the dust; there the spider-webs are more authentic than the gimps, and the old pear-wood furniture is younger than the mahogany which arrived yesterday from America.
The wareroom of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capernaum; all centuries and all countries seemed to have rendezvoused there: an Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet whose ebony panels were brilliantly inlaid with filaments of brass; a Louis XV half-lounge carelessly stretched its fawn-like feet under a massive table of the reign of Louis XIII, with heavy oaken spirals, and carvings of intermingled foliage and chimeras.
In one corner glittered the striped cuirass of a damascened suit of Milanese armor; bisque cupids and nymphs, grotesques from China, céladon and craquelé vases, Saxon and old Sèvres cups, encumbered what-nots and corners.