The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

by William John Locke

So Roulard, when the hour of rehearsal drew nigh, conducted Aristide to the murky recesses of a dirty little theatre in the Batignolles, where Aristide performed such prodigies of repercussion that he was forthwith engaged to play the drum, the kettle-drum, the triangle, the cymbals, the castagnettes and the tambourine, in the orchestra of the Tournée Gulland at the dazzling salary of thirty francs a week.

To tell how Aristide drummed and cymballed the progress of Les Huguenots, Carmen, La Juive, La Fille de Madame Angot and L’Arlésienne through France would mean the rewriting of a “Capitaine Fracasse.” To hear the creature talk about it makes my mouth as a brick kiln and my flesh as that of a goose. He was the Adonis, the Apollo, the Don Juan, the Irresistible of the Tournée. Fled truculent bass and haughty tenor before him; from diva to moustachioed contralto in the chorus, all the ladies breathlessly watched for the fall of his handkerchief; he was recognized, in fact, as a devil of a fellow. But in spite of these triumphs, the manipulation of the drum, kettle-drum, triangle, cymbals, castagnettes and tambourine, which at first had given him intense and childish delight, at last became invested with a mechanical monotony that almost drove him mad. All day long the thought of the ill-lit corner, on the extreme right of the orchestra, garnished with the accursed instruments of noise to which duty would compel him at eight o’clock in the evening hung over him like a hideous doom. Sweet singers of the female sex were powerless to console. He passed them by, and haughty tenor and swaggering basso again took heart of grace.

“Mais, mon Dieu, c’est le métier!” expostulated Roulard.

“Sale métier!” cried Aristide, who was as much fitted for the merciless routine of a theatre orchestra as a quagga for the shafts of an omnibus. “A beast of a trade! One is no longer a man. One is just an automatic system of fog-signals!”

In this depraved state of mind he arrived at Perpignan, where that befell him which I am about to relate.

Now, Perpignan is the last town of France on the Gulf of Lions, a few miles from the Spanish border. From it you can see the great white monster of Le Canigou, the pride of the Eastern Pyrenees, far, far away, blocking up the valley of the Tet, which flows sluggishly past the little town. The Quai Sadi-Carnot (is there a provincial town in France which has not a something Sadi-Carnot in it?) is on the left bank of the Tet; at one end is the modern Place Arago, at the other Le Castillet, a round, castellated red-brick fortress with curiously long and deep machicolations of the 14th century with some modern additions of Louis XI, who also built the adjoining Porte Notre Dame which gives access to the city. Between the Castillet and the Place Arago, the Quai Sadi-Carnot is the site of the Prefecture, the Grand Hôtel, various villas and other resorts of the aristocracy. Any little street off it will lead you into the seething centre of Perpignan life—the Place de la Loge, which is a great block of old buildings surrounded on its four sides by narrow streets of shops, cafés, private houses, all with balconies and jalousies, all cramped, crumbling, Spanish, picturesque. The oldest of this conglomerate block is a corner building, the Loge de Mer, a thirteenth century palace, the cloth exchange in the glorious days when Perpignan was a seaport and its merchant princes traded with Sultans and Doges and such-like magnificoes of the Mediterranean. But nowadays its glory has departed. Below the great gothic windows spreads the awning of a café, which takes up all the ground floor. Hugging it tight is the Mairie, and hugging that, the Hôtel de Ville. Hither does every soul in the place, at some hour or other of the day, inevitably gravitate. Lawyers and clients, doctors and patients, merchants, lovers, soldiers, market-women, loafers, horses, dogs, wagons, all crowd in a noisy medley the narrow cobble-paved streets around the Loge. Of course there are other streets, tortuous, odorous and cool, intersecting the old town, and there are various open spaces, one of which is the broad market square on one side flanked by the Théâtre Municipal.

From the theatre Aristide Pujol issued one morning after rehearsal, and, leaving his colleagues, including the ever-thirsty Roulard, to refresh themselves at a humble café hard by, went forth in search of distraction. He idled about the Place de la Loge, passed the time of day with a café waiter until the latter, with a disconcerting “Voilà! Voilà!” darted off to attend to a customer, and then strolled through the Porte Notre Dame onto the Quai Sadi-Carnot. There a familiar sound met his ears—the roll of a drum followed by an incantation in a quavering, high-pitched voice. It was the Town Crier, with whom, as with a brother artist, he had picked acquaintance the day before.

They met by the parapet of the Quai, just as Père Bracasse had come to the end of his incantation. The old man, grizzled, tanned and seamed, leant weakly against the parapet.

“How goes it, Père Bracasse?”

“Alas, mon bon Monsieur, it goes from bad to worse,” sighed the old man. “I am at the end of my strength. My voice has gone and the accursed rheumatism in my shoulder gives me atrocious pain whenever I beat the drum.”