Suddenly, Mariette saw him, and stopped dead.
“What’s the matter,” hiccupped Nini Nichon. “Move! You can see that they’re taking the piss out of us!”
“Charlot! My old man!” she murmured.
“Come on!” snapped her companion. “We’re going to get pinched.”
“Charlot!” Mariette tried to protest. “I want to talk to him, I want to apologize, I want him to come with me. Charlot!”
“Come on! What did I tell you—you’re making the bumpkins laugh. Look at all those turnip-heads! One would think it were a game of Aunt Sally!”
“Charlot! Where’s Charlot? She’s asking for Charlot!” cried mocking voices from all directions.
“There he is,” replied the drunken woman, pointing at the unfortunate. “I want him to come.”
“Triple malediction!” murmured Charles Balin. He quit the chain and, beside himself, ran toward the tenacious drunkard.
“Go away, you wretched woman! Go away, you’re preventing me from earning my crust.”
“I want you to come!” proclaimed Mariette, between two hiccups.
“A domestic scene!” the voices clamored.
“Go!”
“Don’t go!”
“Go!”
“Get going!”
“She needs someone in her bed!”
“She’s had a drop too much!”
“She’ll take you home.”
People were beginning to form a circle. He took her by the arm brutally and dragged her behind a truck.”
“Go away, save yourself.”
“I want you to come,” the drunken women persisted, cling on to him. He pushed her away so brutally that she collapsed several yards away.
The prostitute, partly sobered, got to her feet as best she could. Fortunately for her, the crowd was amusing itself around Nini Nichon, who, rendered furious, was pouring out her interminable repertoire.
Ashamed of his unconscious violence, he watched her come back, humble tearful, head bowed, like a beaten dog. She was weeping!
“I’ve said I’m sorry! Why can’t you come?” she sobbed.
Before that persistence, a tremor of rage suddenly took hold of him.
“Wretch,” he replied, in a dull voice. “Can’t you see, can’t you sense, that I’ve run out of resignation, and that after the insult you’ve offered me, if I went with you, I’d be capable of killing you! Go away!”
His gaze was so piercing and his voice so imperious that Mariette, returned to reason, hastened to flee.
Chapter XIV
The effort he had just made, the energy he had expended, seemed, like a flash of lightning, to tear through the darkness that enveloped him momentarily: he had an exact consciousness of the situation.
Is it possible, he thought, as he paced back and forth outside the copyist’s door, that a man of my worth and my intelligence, by the sole fact of being unexpectedly deprived of money and a domicile, can be reduced at a stroke to dying of hunger? Is it possible that a being, until then of exemplary morality, by virtue of a logical and fatal series of adventures, has consented to play the role that I have played?
Is it possible, again, that after so much misery and emotion, I’m not ill or mad?
The half-hour chimed on the clock of Saint-Eustache. He climbed up four floors and stopped in front of a door on which he read, in impeccable longhand: Aristide Lampe, copies in all genres. Enter without knocking.
He opened the door and found himself in a large room where tables of blackened wood, with piles of Bottins and papers, porcelain inkwells and various accessories, were lined up methodically in two rows. A voice emerged from a large desk situated in a well-illuminated corner.
“Who’s there?”
“The person sent by Monsieur Raphael.”
“Ah! Good, come in.” A little old man, thin and hyperbolically bearded, his head ornamented by a Greek bonnet and his sleeves covered in lustrine, considered him from head to toe in a cavalier fashion.
“What can you do?” he asked, in a bantering tone.
“Anything you wish to confide to me in the manner of handwriting.”
“Anything I wish! That might be saying a lot.”
“Would you care to try me, Monsieur?”
“I should think so. Many who pretend to know everything know nothing. You have some suspicion of what an address is? I don’t demand perfection, but have you even the slightest idea, the slightest suspicion?”
“I think so,”
“You think so! We’ll see. Most people who have sent letters to their parents or girls of their acquaintance imagine that they know how to write a subscription, the cretins! If you put them to the test they present you with something formless, devoid of order, clarity, elegance and style. Well, me, purely by the organization of an envelope I can appreciate and judge the true value of a man. I’m not a graphologist, mind—graphology is a fraud, since it’s sufficient to have the vaguest notions to make a mockery all the experts, and I, Lampe, a mere entrepreneur of copies, guarantee that I can imitate any handwriting and cover all their assertions with ridicule.”
He writhed in his armchair with shrill laughter, as if he had just carried out his threat and was enjoying his triumph.
“Certainly, I’m no graphologist,” he suddenly went on, with a kind of anger, as if to reject an imaginary accusation, and added sententiously: “but show me how you write a address and I’ll tell you who you are, what you’ve been worth, what you’re worth now and what you’ll be worth in future.”
He changed his tone. “Take an envelope and prepare to write.” The patient did as he was ordered. “Here you are: Monsieur Aristide Lampe, entrepreneur of copies in all genres, 122 Rue des Petits-Carreaux, Paris, Seine, France.” The pretentious gnome added: “Everyone knows that Paris is in the département of the Seine and that the Seine is a département of France. If I’m dictating superfluous things, unnecessary in practice, it’s because I need it in order to judge you on a complete address. You’ve finished?”
Charles Balin passed him the envelope.
“Has ha! Ha ha!” coughed the exclamatory minuscule individual. “Not bad: there’s order, firmness, correction; no general conception, of course, no flight, no artistic sense; the good little writing of a modest man, with no energy, down to earth, incapable of a brilliant or audacious action; the downstrokes of a heavy, materialistic mind, a sybarite; a hint of eccentricity but no imagination; apart from that, qualities, usage, above all, enormous usage. You’ve written a great deal in your lifetime. Wait, don’t enlighten me, I’m not asking you anything—I want to have the merit of the discovery.”
Père Lampe picked p the envelope again, looked several times at his future employee, absorbed himself in a profound meditation, and then suddenly slapped is forehead.
“Eureka!” he cried, like Archimedes. “You’re either a former clerk in the customs service, or a former employee of the State. Ha!”
Charles Balin in a state of legitimate defense against human stupidity, simulated a comical astonishment. “How the devil did you divine that?” he murmured.
“I’m never mistaken,” declared Monsieur Lampe, radiantly. “So you are?”
“A former customs clerk.”
“So you have a retirement pension that permits you to live.”
“Oh, very little, Monsieur.”
“Yes, I understand that you need little supplementary resources, to found a few pleasures. You’re a bachelor, are you not?” He winked and hummed a popular tune: Que c’est gentil les p’tites femmes.
“Don’t contradict him in anything,” the young man had advised. The petitioner sketched a smile of approval.
“So you want to work for me. Well, these are my conditions: you’ll write addresses for prospectuses at a rate of seventy-five centimes a thousand for Paris, a franc for the provinces, one franc twenty-five for other countries. I pay on Saturday.”
“I will, however, need a small advance at the end o
f the day, if only a few sous.”
“We’ll see about that. But come a little closer, and bend down.”
The entrepreneur of copies raised himself up in his armchair, sniffed him like a dog and uttered an exclamation of disgust. “You reek of alcohol, you know. Take this as read: I don’t tolerate drunkenness in the studio; at the first sign of intoxicated handwriting, I’ll sack you.”
“You can see, Monsieur, you who have just proven your astonishing perspicacity, that I don’t have the appearance of a drunkard. In any case, look: no sign of an alcoholic tremor.” He held out his two hands.
“Why are you doing that?” asked the old ape.
“Because if I had the habit of drinking, my hands would start to tremble.”
“You think so? Let’s see.” He tried to do the same; his hands were agitated characteristically. He withdrew them rapidly. “All that’s nonsense that physicians say,” he growled. “Let’s pass on to serious matters. If you accept my conditions, here’s your place.”
He sat down. Eight o’clock chimed. Three other employees, including the young man from the previous evening, came into the studio and came to occupy their desks after a silent salutation. Père Lampe distributed the work, gave a few instructions, and soon, nothing could any longer be heard but the scratching of pens and the rustle of paper.
No one said a word. Maître Lampe walked back and forth, looking over the shoulders of his scribes like a schoolmaster.
“Above all, Messieurs,” he suddenly exclaimed, “I recommend you to silence.” He went on, in a slow and monotonous voice, as if dictating an imposition: “A copyist, if one speaks to him aside, is likely to commit errors, to mistake one word for another, to neglect his work. It’s time and paper that one wastes, it’s a loss that he inflicts on his employer and himself.”
The newcomer, momentarily distracted by the attention he ought to pay to those words, swiftly resumed work.
The door slowly opened, and a frightfully pale man, a lamentable apparition of an emaciated Christ, appeared on the threshold, timidly.
“Ah, there you are, Monsieur Benoit!” cried the employer. “Very sorry, my dear Monsieur; you haven’t come for five days, and as you can see, your place is taken!”
The poor devil, with tears in his eyes, considered the occupied place sadly.
“I sent word that I was ill, Monsieur,” he sighed.
“It’s precisely for that reason that I’ve replaced you. Is it my fault if you’re ill? Ought my work to suffer? You’re ill, my friend, go take care of yourself. When you’re completely cured, come back. I’ll give you work...if I have any to give you.”
The unfortunate bowed and disappeared, closing the door discreetly. Charles Balin felt his heart gripped. So he had taken the place of that poor fellow! The struggle for existence, pitilessly cruel, required that the bread he was going to eat should be snatched from some other mouth!
Behind that man who had just appeared to him there might perhaps be a wife and children who no longer had anything to eat.
Raphael, his neighbor facing, passed him a piece of paper with a few words written in haste: If it hadn’t been you, he read, it would have been someone else. Charles Balin thanked him with a nod of the head.
“Above all, Messieurs, I recommend you to silence,” Maître Lampe repeated.
A smile from the young man seemed to say to him: Pay no attention; it’s a mania.
“Silence,” the entrepreneur of copies continued, “is indispensable in a place where one is writing. The slightest distraction might have the most unfortunate consequences. One has seen wills broken, lawsuits engaged, fortunes lost for a misplaced comma.”
He had stopped behind one of his pen-pushers, a middle-aged man who looked like an old soldier.
“Ah!” Explain to me, I beg you, why the devil you persist in underlining the word Paris in your addresses?”
“But yesterday, Monsieur, you instructed me to do it.”
“Yesterday, yes, because the prospectuses you were doing were to be distributed by post and it was, in consequence, necessary to call the attention of that administration’s employees to the proper name and the city. But today, haven’t I told you that these addresses are to be distributed to domiciles by a porter?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“And you have not divined that it is, in consequence, unnecessary to waste your time and my ink underlining the word Paris. Have you not understood that it would be much simpler and quicker to put the initials E.V., which signify En Ville? You therefore never show a little initiative? It’s necessary to tell you everything, explain everything?”
The bewildered employee kept quiet.
“Above all, Messieurs, I recommend you to silence,” the maniac added, by way of conclusion.
After several hours of work in which the accomplice of Guilleri18 never ceased chattering, knocking over piles of books, thumping chairs and shifting tables in order to make sure that they were stable, a curt tap on the desk announced the lunch break.
“Have you the habit of frequenting a restaurant?” Raphael asked him, as they went downstairs. On his negative response, the young man proposed an advantageous creamery in the vicinity.
“I only have eight sous,” he confessed.”
“For that you can have a set meal. Anyway, don’t worry about that—I’ll be able to get you credit.”
“That’s all the more obliging as you scarcely know me.”
“I know you well enough to know that I’m not risking anything by doing it.”
He thanked him cordially.
“Do you think,” he added, “that the little man will give me something on account this evening?”
“Yes, if you ask him for it in order to buy lustrine sleeves. I’ll lend you a pair tomorrow.”
“You’re my good angel.”
“Père Lampe,” Raphael continued, “only allows himself to be softened by one pretext—lustrine sleeves—and only tolerates one weakness, “little women.” When I say little, it’s a manner of speaking, for the women he decorates with that dainty qualification are always veritable monuments.”
“The law of contrasts.”
“He only understands lust in a massive form; it’s not rare to encounter him, around midnight, in the process of gravitating in the orbit of some Callipygian Venus. If you ever happen to arrive at the studio late, for whatever reason, allow him to believe that you were delayed in some alcove in a furnished house.”
While they took their meager repast, the amiable your man brought him up to date with the eccentricities and caprices to which he would be obliged to submit.
“You passed the examination?” he asked, laughing. “You didn’t deny the divination, at least?”
“Thanks to your recommendation, I carefully refrained.”
“And you did well; he would have held it against you. Anyway, you must have pleased him—he hasn’t covered you with the sarcasms that he hardly ever spares newcomers. Now, if you’re armed with patience and you intend to stay with him for a few months while waiting for something better, don’t forget what I’m about to tell you: he only admits that one earns two or three francs a day, so never do more than three thousand addresses. He always dismisses those that surpass that number on some pretext or other; his standard reason is that work too rapidly done is always poorly done. It’s thanks to that observation that I’ve been able to keep the job.”
“I note, and have already noted several times, that you have a veritable gift for observation.”
“Since my earliest childhood, Monsieur, I’ve been obliged to earn my living—one quickly acquires experience in that game.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“Worse than that, alas—I’m a poor bastard.”
“Many people who were the honor of their nation have been in the same situation. Anyway, we no longer have the same prejudices today as of old.”
“Do you think there were as many prejudices as that, in olden days? Then, as now
, poverty was much more culpable than vice; the bastards of great houses never had any cause for complaint.”
“You’re educated, I can see.”
“Not as much as I’d like; I have so little time. By day I copy addresses; by night I perform minor roles at the Théâtre du Châtelet.”
“You act at the Châtelet? How much do you get for that?”
“Two francs a night. Would you like to follow my example?”
“It’s an anonymous situation I’d accept without reluctance.”
“With a small lie it should be easy. You have one of those faces before which one remains indecisive as to whether it’s the face of a physician, a priest or an actor. Be a former actor—you’ve come back from abroad, you’re in difficulty; I’ll answer for the rest.”
“You’re a veritable providence for me!”
“Something great and mysterious that envelops you draws me to you: you must be good, you must be indulgent.”
“Raphael,” proclaimed Charles Balin, greatly impressed by that divination, “you ought to have been born in an epoch and a land where seers were honored.”
“That’s true,” murmured Raphael. “I sometimes have the fatal gift of reading the thoughts of others; I must be near death.”
“I know that you’re ill!” exclaimed Charles Balin, forcefully. “I was once a renowned healer; I shall care for you, and save you!”
“No, let me die. It’s necessary that I die. Only death can wash away the stain.”
He did not reflect then upon the infinite sadness with which his young companion pronounce those words, or perhaps put them down to his disreputable origin.
The very next day, thanks to his new friend, the apprentice copyist made his debut in a non-speaking part in La Princesse au coeur de verre, a spectacular fantasy play, which, defying the dog days, attracted the provinces to the Châtelet. He was thus, by turns, a guard, a genie, a statue, a big head, a eunuch in a seraglio, a melon in the realm of the vegetables, a great lord of the court, a village peasant, a scullion in a hostelry, a vase in the realm of porcelain, a ferocious beast in the depths of a wood, a dragon at the entrance of a cavern, an ophicleide in the Temple of Harmony, a demon in Hell and a marine monster in Neptune’s court. The lie that Raphael had told also brought him an unexpected windfall; in his capacity as a former actor a few lines were confided to him, which he delivered marvelously.
The Second Life of Doctor Albin Page 15