The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  The incessant inevitable contacts that everyone suffers and no one can avoid were aided by the homeopathic remedy of mundane duties—visits, balls, meetings held on the pretext of propagandistic or charitable efforts and all the other servitudes that relieve human beings, however careless of their reputation, of the most fugitive particle of corporeal and moral liberty.

  In salons, unified by the fashions of the day, conversations manifested their habitual scorn for subjects demanding some attention and were consecrated to the thousand trivia that fill, to the point of obstruction, the butterfly minds of chattering ladies whose husbands resemble dull and colorless fowlers.

  While the masters were killing time and exchanging the most malevolent remarks with regard to one another, the domestics devoted themselves lazily to their duties, full of satisfaction when, in the evenings, they had hermetically closed the shutters behind which one could forget the volcanoes, whose flames were no longer visible.

  Although the governor had reduced the rations, the food-supplies were running low. All the horses had been eaten, with the exception of those ensuring military or administrative function. The authorities had already foreseen their imminent diminution. A committee examined the entitlements of each one; some owed a temporary salvation to the protectors they had the honor of pulling or carrying. As the exigencies were becoming more pressing, the judges became more pitilessly rigorous, and soon, there were no horses left in Miellune but the governor’s. The whole town was familiar with them: covered with cloths embroidered with Miellune’s coat-of-arms they wandered along the boulevards, led on the bridle by pikemen; thin and hungry, while all heads were bared as they passed by, they extended avid lips toward the low branches of the trees, which were beginning to come into bud.

  Forty days had passed since the terrible night; they had thus arrived in the month of March. The certainty of an imminent end to present misery caused the privations to be supported without overmuch complaint. Fine words and the threat of a few hours in prison sufficed to calm irritated individuals capable of disturbing public order.

  One morning, a rumor ran around Miellune, which posters immediately confirmed and specified. The authorities informed the population that enough food remained for another forty-five days, and in consequence, the last distribution would be carried out at midday on the thirtieth of April.

  Hope is like those birds that cross seas. Their flight is so forceful that, to them, it seems that the air is aiding their effort. Suddenly, in the calm of the clouds, the bird stops falls like an inert mass into the waves. It is because fatigue has gradually overtake it. Every wing-beat has used up a little energy, and in the air, one point of resistance similar to all the rest has sufficed to vanquish the exhausted organism.

  Thus human beings go, supported by the dreams that animate their thoughts, careless of the obstacles whose debris interrupts the monotony of the route, abridging the difficulty and the tedium. Their brisk stride, certain of the promised end, suddenly buckles; the travelers roll in the dust, inert. Reality, with a slow and painless bite, has eaten away the hope, and it has died, charging frail shoulders with an excessively heavy weight.

  The government’s laconic warning, even though people were prepared for it and in spite of the forty-five day respite it contained, toppled the edifice built by the interest of living, and massively reinforced by hypotheses and deductions.

  While some protested against the brutality of the communication, others criticized administrative negligence. What was Miellune if not a town besieged? Why had no one attempted to get through the ring of fire? Glorious sieges were recalled in which heroes had traversed enemy lines surely more perilous than that of the volcanoes.

  Fathers of families called upon the devotion of bachelors whose right to exist was doubtless less undeniable than their own, the fact of not being officially recorded with a wife and children being a social crime.

  The love of sacrifice flourishes in a soul without it being possible to identify its seed, and it is not the thirst for glory and appetite for recompense that drive individuals to action whose glamour increases with their temerity. Scorn for life seems to be a normal reaction to the fear of dying. In an atmosphere paled by cowardice, reckless courage is born like a star in the night.

  Appeals to sentiments of pride and vanity, the promises of enormous sums and extraordinary distinctions, the engagements of priests reserved places of honor in the other world for those who would risk their lives for common salvation, did not find the slightest echo.

  The people demanded the official designation by the drawing of lots of one of the soldiers whose blood belong to the fatherland by contract. The governor acquiesced.

  The reluctant hero was a hussar, who immediately advanced his quality as a cavalier to decline any pedestrian mission. The military code being formal on that point, there could be no thought, according to the most authorized jurists, of violating one of its most essential articles. The hussar was, therefore, entirely assured as to his fate when a councilor with an ingenious mind found the legal solution to the quandary.

  “Since he’s a cavalier, let’s give him a horse!”

  The palace stables only had four remaining. The others had been slaughtered in order to be eaten a few hours before the maladies caused by the progressive starvation to which they had been subjected had consummated their natural death.

  The governor had more than affection for the survivors; being part of the dignity of his responsibility, they were a large fraction of himself. He could not, however, withhold them from the patriotic objective that was about to be pursued by the hussar, perhaps fatally.

  According to humans, animals do not enjoy free will; their destiny can only be determined by blind chance. In consequence, a committee was formed to elect the most qualified charger. After several laborious sessions, the question of the coat was declared to be the most important of all, and without discussion, the committee-members voted for a burnt chestnut on which the reflection of the flames had the most beautiful effect.

  In accordance with the calendar officially adopted, which counted down the time remaining until the thirtieth of April, it was on day thirty-three that the first sortie was attempted.

  The hussar had put on his dress uniform. Before climbing into the saddle he received, along with the governor’s accolade, the rarest and most envied insignia of decoration. His colonel embraced him as if he were his own son, after having, moved by a very paternal solicitude, emptied the regulation cartridges, the contents of which risked explosion on contact with the fire.

  The twelve strokes of midday were sounding as the cortege, composed of all the functionaries and citizens of note, moved off, to the vibrant and disorderly strains of multiple bands, to leave the town. The entire population, in a compact double hedge, acclaimed the imminent hero, whose vague eyes gazed ten paces ahead, in conformity with the theory of his armaments.

  A young woman, struck by a thunderbolt, ran forward, braving the reactions of the horse, and, seizing one of the rider’s legs—which nearly tipped him out of the saddle—pressed it frantically to her heart, crying that no other man would be her husband.

  Close by, a couple was weeping tenderly; they were the sudden fiancée’s father and mother. They counted among Miellune’s wealthiest; they had amassed an enormous fortune in the transformation of the mortal envelopes of rabbits and other furred and feathered animals into hats, muffs and sumptuary objects as useless as they were varied.

  Several years before, Philémon Sphéroboul had abandoned the effective management of Sphéroboul & Co., in which he nevertheless conserved major interests. The time that was left to him by his concern with the fine fare that had made him the arbiter of all culinary difficulties, and the satisfaction of his penchant for the fine wines and varied liqueurs that he consumed on a daily basis to the point of the least discreet inebriation, he devoted to imagining extravagant fashions that he attempted to launch, to the undissimulated joy of his fellow citizens.
r />   Naturally, he enjoyed an incomparable popularity, but the solemnity of the moment prevented anyone from paying any attention to him.

  A captain disengaged the hussar’s leg as gallantly as he could, whereupon the young woman went to join her tears to those of her authors.

  Slowly, they marched toward the furnace, whose radiation increased to the pint of not permitting another forward step.

  The governor addressed a few words to the hussar, whose head was turning back continually toward Miellune.

  The Bishop also spoke to him, on behalf of omnipotent God, and made him bend down to kiss the amethyst in his ring.

  Trumpets sounded the charge. The horse emitted a long whinny; the neck-cloth extended over its bristling mane, its eyes bloodshot and its nostrils flared, it launched forward with an abrupt surge on its hamstrings, and it set off at a furious gallop, further exasperated by its rider’s spurs as is legs instinctively tightened about the animal’s flanks.

  Time has the value one gives it. At that speed, the time required to reach the furnace could not have surpassed fifty seconds, but it was centuries that detailed their duration for the spectators of that patriotic enterprise.

  Instead of shrinking in accordance with the laws of perspective, the man and the horse were magnified as they drew away.

  Suddenly, the giant group came to a stop. The animal, whose ardent cost was streaming with a hectic glare, bucked several times, projecting a fantastic silhouette on the fiery sky. Arms widespread, the rider fell to the ground; his mount, relieved of all servitude, disappeared into the flames with a mighty leap.

  The hussar got up, spun around several times, tottering, and, as fast as his legs could carry him, stiffened as they were by tight leather trousers, started running toward the crowd, whose amazement as such that it opened to let him pass.

  He was waving his arms in front of his face as if to ward off danger. His moustache and hair had been singed; his garments were smoking. In a hoarse voice he cried: “Where is she? I want to see her! Where is she?”

  The poor devil was remembering the young woman who, a few moments before, had spontaneously offered him her heart. She had probably forgotten him already. His haggard eyes perceived her and, without anyone thinking of stopping him, he threw himself upon her and hugged her in his arms.

  The parents intervened. Impotent to extract the young woman from that wild embrace, they tried to arouse the crowd against the hussar, denouncing the indignity of his conduct, accusing him of desertion, of having voluntarily separated himself from his horse in order to bring trouble and dishonor into the best family in Miellune.

  Philémon Sphéroboul displayed, beneath the turned up brim of the octagonal top hat that he was about to make fashionable, a broad moon-shaped face crimson with irritation—all that remained approximately human in his person—along with an implausibly developed belly, behind which, buckled by effort, short legs were splayed to describe a polygon of insufficient support. The neck had disappeared; the arms could not move away from the trunk save for the elbows and the hands, with stout red fingers, emerging with difficulty from sleeves sealed by large shiny cufflinks.

  From his body, coated with an obscene and triumphant lard, a nasal voice emerged: “I am Philémon Sphéroboul, the guide and servant of the world of fashion...”

  Booing greeted these words, and cries of “Down with Sphéroboul!”

  One member of the audience, with a gesture of defiance directed at the howling crowd, placed a hand on Sphéroboul’s shoulder, in order to show solidarity with him. He was tall, thin and twisted, as if he had passed through a fantastic rolling-mill. His face was sad and pale, dotted with a few yellow hairs. In imitation of his future father-in-law, he wore an octagonal top hat, which a blow from a cane knocked to the ground, exposing a dull, wrinkled cranium afflicted by a sickly baldness, edged by a thin demi-crown of hairs separated from one another as if by a repulsive force. The individual’s ugliness tended to the prodigious.

  His name was Percepointe. The dead languages he taught seemed to have caused all the usual appearances of life to flee from his person. Bleakly, he inclined his angular silhouette over Sphéroboul like a giant heron looming over an enormous pumpkin.

  Folantin Percepointe had been engaged to Jenny Sphéroboul for several years. The marriage had not taken place, delayed by multiple mournings, as can occur in families as numerous as those of the Percepointes and Sphérobouls. In any case, unlike most young women, Jenny was in no hurry to savor the joys of marriage, and whenever Folantin, at the moment he judged propitious during the two hours of his implacably quotidian courtship, indulged himself in a gesture translating his sentiments, he received a magisterial slap in the face, for which the mother of the bourgeois Amazon apologized with heartbreaking tears.

  The physician of the two families had declared in vain that the nature of the Sphérobouls, predisposed to plumpness, would be very fortunately corrected by the gaunt temperament of the Percepointes; Jenny, with all the piquancy of the brunette grace of her twenty years, dreamed of a husband less ingrately edified and more expert at amorous talk in the Miellunese language, the only living one so far as she was concerned.

  The cavalier, corseted in azure and helmet in gold, going forth on a magnificent horse the color of fire to the heroic adventure of deliverance, had dazzled the heiress of the Sphérobouls. In order to protect Folantin Percepointe, her parents, had been careful not to take Jenny’s inflamed gesture seriously—according to them, it was merely further evidence of an adorable heart ready for sacrifice.

  Now the soldier had come back, after a fall that had dragged the best of Miellune’s hops down with it—and it was that man, incapable of staying on a horse, who had the impudence to embrace the daughter of Philémon Sphéroboul, the former head of the house of Sphéroboul, the foremost in the city! Was there no longer any justice, then?

  The lame lady in question arrived under the auspices of a captain leading a squad of gendarmes. The hussar was apprehended, tied up and taken before the governor, who gave the order to lock him up in anticipation of a court martial.

  Philémon Sphéroboul had recaptured his daughter. She administered two slaps to Folantin Percepointe, whose cheeks happened to be in the vicinity of her hand.

  That family tragicomedy had not advanced public affairs. The people were demanding violently, for a new attempt, the three horses that remained in the palace stables. After much argument, the governor ordered that they should be brought. An hour later, the palfreys were presented, bridled and saddled. The governor was about to proceed with a triple drawing of lots when a very moving scene occurred.

  Abandoning the tails of his frock-coat to the Sphérobouls, who were trying to hold him back, Folantin Percepointe demanded the honor of mounting one of the horses. He did so with nobility ad simplicity, his eyes turned toward his fiancée.

  Doubting the equestrian talents of the professor of dead languages, the governor refused his offer, but the crowd, transported by that gesture of abnegation, offered Folantin Percepointe a long ovation, before the significance of which it was prudent to bow.

  Two young men, electrified by Percepointe’s example, ran forward to complete the trio of heroes to whom Miellune was about to confide its last three horses.

  It was decided not to sacrifice them simultaneously. In spite of his pleas, Folantin Percepointe was kept for the supreme effort, if that one still remained necessary.

  The first two failed. One after the other, the riders were unsaddled when they reached the line of fire. Unluckier than the hussar, however, they were unable to get up; their bodies agitated briefly, crackling like hot parchment, then stiffened and no longer moved.

  The frightened horses, their flanks beaten by the stirrups, had continued their course.

  Folantin Percepointe’s role assumed a dramatic capital importance. Fully conscious of his responsibility and intent on pleasing his fiancée, he had put on a hussar’s uniform. The undershoes of his overly short trous
ers extended over his ankles; his dolman floated around his body, and his helmet rested on his ears, maintained by a short chin-strap whose blackness cut through the saffron-speckled collar of his beard.

  Sincere eyes do not stop at external appearances. No one saw the grotesque aspects of that caricaturish figure. The whole crowd doffed their hats to Folantin Percepointe.

  After having embraced his present and future parents, transformed into fountains of tears, and making a supreme bow to offer his life to Jenny—who, with a finger in her mouth, was too absorbed by distant thoughts to notice his gesture—he climbed on to his mount, evoking an image of instantaneously-growing ivy.

  The piebald horse seemed to suspect what was expected of it. It departed at a stolen pace, progressively elongating its stride to a trot, reserving the gallop until the last hundred meters.

  Contemptuous of all esthetics, Percepointe had let go of the reins in order to attach both hands to the pommel of the saddle. His upper body oscillated in acrobatic disequilibrium. His trousers, the undershoes having snapped, left his wading-bird legs bare above the feet adorned with brilliant spurs.

  But an equestrian miracle was about to burst forth; man and horse disappeared, making a breach in the flamboyant wall that immediately closed up again.

  They had got out of Miellune!

  A cry of joy resounded; they would come back with news of the outside world! Communications had been reestablished. Miellune had vanquished its isolation.

  The idea did not occur to anyone that Percepointe and his mount might have perished in the flames.

  It was, therefore, only necessary to await their return.

  Night fell, rendering the volcanoes their terrifying aspect. The governor suggested that the population return to Miellune. He set the example, leaving two men on guard with orders to send word as soon as Percepointe appeared.