[CHAPTER III.]
SUMS LODGED AT LAFITTE'S.
Father Madeleine remained as simple as he had been on the first day: he had gray hair, a serious eye, the bronzed face of a workingman, and the thoughtful face of a philosopher. He habitually wore a broad-brimmed hat, and a long coat of coarse cloth buttoned up to the chin. He performed his duties as Mayor, but beyond that lived solitary; he spoke to few persons, shunned compliments, smiled to save himself from talking, and gave to save himself from smiling. The women said of him, "What a good bear!" and his great pleasure was to walk about the fields. He always took his meals with an open book before him, and he had a well-selected library. He was fond of books, for they are calm and sure friends. In proportion as leisure came with fortune, he seemed to employ it in cultivating his mind: it was noticed that with each year he spent in M—— his language became more polite, chosen, and gentle.
He was fond of taking a gun with him on his walks, but rarely fired; when he did so by accident, he had an infallible aim, which was almost terrific. He never killed an inoffensive animal or a small bird. Though he was no longer young, he was said to possess prodigious strength: he lent a hand to any one who needed it, raised a fallen horse, put his shoulder to a wheel stuck in the mud, or stopped a runaway bull by the horns. His pockets were always full of half-pence when he went out, and empty when he came home; whenever he passed through a village, the ragged children ran merrily after him, and surrounded him like a swarm of gnats. It was supposed that he must have formerly lived a rustic life, for he had all sorts of useful secrets which he taught the peasants. He showed them how to destroy blight in wheat by sprinkling the granary and pouring into the cracks of the boards a solution of common salt, and to get rid of weevils by hanging up everywhere, on the walls and roots, flowering orviot. He had recipes to extirpate from arable land tares and other parasitic plants which injure wheat, and would defend a rabbit hutch from rats by the mere smell of a little Guinea pig, which he placed in it.
One day he saw some countrymen very busy in tearing up nettles; he looked at the pile of uprooted and already withered plants and said: "They are dead, and yet they are good if you know how to use them. When nettles are young, the tops are an excellent vegetable. When they are old, they have threads and fibre like hemp and flax. When chopped up, nettles are good for fowls; when pounded, excellent for horned cattle. Nettle-seed mixed with the food renders the coats of cattle shining, and the root mixed with salt produces a fine yellow color. The nettle is also excellent hay, which can be mown twice; and what does it require? A little earth, no care, and no cultivation. The only thing is that the seed falls as it ripens, and is difficult to garner. If a little care were taken, the nettle would be useful; but, being neglected, it becomes injurious, and is then killed. How men resemble nettles!" He added after a moment's silence: "My friends, remember this,—there are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators."
The children also loved him, because he could make them pretty little toys of straw and cocoa-nut shells. When he saw a church door hung with black, he went in; he went after a funeral as other persons do after a christening. The misfortunes of others attracted him, owing to his great gentleness; he mingled with friends in mourning, and with the priests round a coffin. He seemed to be fond of hearing those mournful psalms which are full of the vision of another world. With his eye fixed on heaven, he listened, with a species of aspiration toward all the mysteries of Infinitude, to the sad voice singing on the brink of the obscure abyss of death. He did a number of good actions, while as careful to hide them as if they were bad. He would quietly at night enter houses, and furtively ascend the stairs. A poor fellow, on returning to his garret, would find that his door had been opened, at times forced, during his absence; the man would cry that a robber had been there, but when he entered, the first thing he saw was a gold coin left on the table. The robber who had been there was Father Madeleine.
He was affable and sad: people said, "There is a rich man who does not look proud: a lucky man who does not look happy." Some persons asserted that he was a mysterious character, and declared that no one ever entered his bed-room, which was a real anchorite's cell, furnished with winged hour-glasses and embellished with cross-bones and death's-heads. This was so often repeated that some elegant and spiteful ladies of M—— came to him one day, and said, "Monsieur le Maire, do show us your bed-room, for people say that it is a grotto." He smiled and led them straightway to the "grotto;" they were terribly punished for their curiosity, as it was a bed-room merely containing mahogany furniture as ugly as all furniture of that sort, and hung with a paper at twelve sous a roll. They could not notice anything but two double-branched candlesticks of an antiquated pattern, standing on the mantel-piece, and seeming to be silver, "because they were Hall-marked,"—a remark full of the wit of small towns. People did not the less continue to repeat, however, that no one ever entered this bed-room, and that it was a hermitage, a hole, a tomb. They also whispered that he had immense sums lodged with Lafitte, and with this peculiarity that things were always at his immediate disposal, "so that," they added, "M. Madeleine could go any morning to Lafitte's, sign a receipt, and carry off his two or three millions of francs in ten minutes." In reality, these "two or three millions" were reduced, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or forty thousand francs.