VI
Aunt Aline had, in fact, been more fortunate than the Sphex and the Cerceris, working, as Fabre says somewhere, “for the future children that their compound eyes will never see.” For a long time, as for them, according to another expression regarding insects by Balzac “the ultimate goal of her work” had remained “occult.” If she had been obliged to cease to live only ten years before, she would have died like them, like so many other beings in the chain of generations, without having knowing the meaning of her seemingly-absurd enigmatic labor. But today, thanks to her divinatory gift, which was one of her automatically-acquired virtues, and thanks also to her great longevity, which had given her reference-points in the past with which to triangulate the future, she had a very clear notion of having done for Geneviève alone all that she had done for such a long time without knowing why, and the perception, still vague but already stirring, of something great that Geneviève would soon do.
Who could have told poor simple Aunt Aline that, long ago when she had hired herself out as a little “overdoer” in the old Gasguin household, to the great discontent of Père and Mère Hescheboix, who were making such good use of her in begging by the roadside? Who could have told her that she had entered into that household to work there mysteriously for the birth of Geneviève’s genius? And was it not the same when she had subsequently worked so hard negotiating Idalie’s marriage to François Gasguin? And also when, after the birth of the elder son, Denis, she had installed herself beside the young mother who had become pregnant again almost immediately with Thibaud, and fallen ill? Why, in spite of the devotion that she professed for her idol, Idalie, had she then thought so often and so forcefully about the imminent and certain death of the poor beauty, adored so much, as “necessary”? Why, if not because it was necessary that Idalie should die in order that she should pass entirely into her younger son: into the Thibaud destined to be the obscure transmitter of the torch that would finally burn resplendently in Geneviève?
But for that, she would have been horrified by Thibaud, her Idalie’s murderer. On the contrary, she had cherished him, cared for him, pampered him, doted on him, as no prince had ever been doted on. And she had stood guard over him, preventing François Gasguin from marrying again, so that, she thought—for she had no fixed plan then—Denis’ and Thibaud’s inheritance would be assured. How had she been able to put so many spokes in the wheels—breaking all the wheels—of all the marriage plans aimed determinedly at the widower, still young and “fertile”? She did not know how she had been able to do it, but she must have done it well, since François had, in fact, never remarried.
It is true that, in preventing that remarriage, she did not attain the envisaged goal of protecting her Thibaud’s inheritance; but another goal, and the only important one, had thus been achieved, as we shall see—and in order that the bull’s-eye of the other target might be hit, it was first necessary that the Gasguin fortune be squandered. That was the hidden purpose of the marriage and the subsequent widowhood, as we shall be able to judge.
Already, after the two brief years that Idalie had lived, expenditure had made considerable inroads at the farm, which had become a meeting-place for hunting and revelry, as if in perpetual festivity. In spite of old Mère Gasguin reprimanding her coquettish “embarrassment” of a daughter-in-law, and going so far as to box the ears of her big booby of a son for his captive amorous weakness and always giving in to the beauty’s caprices, and whatever the doughty old bird had done in trying to manage the farm as her worthy late husband had done, the farm had rapidly come into jeopardy. The work was left undone, the profits disappeared and the land suffered, far from the master’s eyes. And the mother, dying of despair and rage, joined Père Gasguin in the cemetery, where the solid plow-pushers of old were sleeping.
With François a widower and an orphan, the flight of the wealth not only continued but accelerated. After the two years of spendthrift honeymoon, things might yet have been put back on to a sound footing, with energetic effort. Aline had plenty to do maintaining the house, more or less, and bringing up the two sons as best she could, paying particular attention to pampering her angelic Thibaud, and above all to making sure that no one marriageable succeeded Idalie; with her energy devoted to these various tasks, she had none to spare to look after the fortune itself, of the management of which she knew nothing. Her father, the old mountebank, having convinced her that he was an expert, she introduced him to François as an adviser—and straight away, after lavish hunting lunches and fine revelry, there was dirty and crapulous debauchery, heavy drinking, gluttony, womanizing and interminable card games: a dance in which everyone joined.
A dance at Gasguin’s expense, moreover, with no profit for Père Hescheboix, now also a widower, and brought his filthy retinue of drunks, guzzlers, card-sharps and prostitutes, who stole from him to begin with, and then assisted him to strip bare more rapidly, and especially to ruin physically, the handsome and sanguine young fellow that Francis Gasguin had once been, soon turning him into a fat, rubicund—almost purple-faced—stupid wreck in danger of a stroke. Ruined financially too, the unfortunate farmer died before the age of forty-five, leaving his affairs in disarray, with lawsuits in progress and others in prospect, and large debts—and, to face up to the men of law and the creditors, the simple Aunt Aline, flanked by her two sons, Denis and Thibaud, seminarians.
About that fortune, however, so keenly coveted for Thibaud when he was very small, and now lost when he might really have needed it, Aline did not care. No remorse troubled her then with regard to that ruination, for which she might have judged herself slightly culpable. She was not even visited by regret. Her obscure awareness of things and her sense of the future had revealed to her, doubtless in confidence, that this poverty was henceforth necessary in order that Thibaud’s destiny should work itself out fully—which destiny was not for him to remain a seminarian, to become a rich curé, on the way to climbing up to the episcopate and dying plump without posterity.
The true and fateful destiny of Idalie’s son—Aline had not known it then, but she knew it now—was that, being too poor to continue to be a future ecclesiastic, he would renounce the priesthood, while Denis alone entered holy orders, and that he should turn to a new vocation, leading him to marriage, in order that Geneviève should come into the world and eventually do what she had to do there.
VII
Although he was the son of Idalie the merligodgière, and was to serve as Geneviève’s channel for the blood of the Hescheboix, so richly mineralized with strange and powerful atavisms, Thibaud Gasguin was primarily, very strongly and almost essentially marked with the seal of the Gasguins.
Established since time immemorial in the northern corner of Thiérache, of the old autochthonous race, prehistoric in origin, their stereotype was both serious and refined, tenacious by nature, positive in mind and inclined toward serious things. Cultivators for the most part, for many generations, they hardly ever departed from that profession, in general, except to become priests, notaries or schoolmasters, François Gasguin had followed a family tradition in sending his two sons to the seminary at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse,18 the elder to have a good bourgeois education before returning to take over the paternal farm and the younger to retain the soutane and raise himself, eventually, to some good position in the church.
Now, it had happened that the elder, Denis, had conceived a particular taste for theology, classical culture and letters, and even developed therein a sort of intellectual elegance uncommon in a Gasguin. By contrast, Thibaud proved resistant, not only to a veritable priestly vocation but to the humanities in general. By way of compensation, he got his teeth into the sciences, education in which was neither in much favor nor much provided for in the seminary’s courses, only extending to what was strictly necessary for the paltry scientific component of the baccalaureate in letters.
Thibaud got his teeth so firmly into what had previously been regarded as a refuge of dunces that he suddenly mani
fested first-rate aptitudes therein, which astonished his professor, Abbé Dujars, the only X-head in the seminary—a former Polytechnique man19, no less! In announcing the fact to the director, the latter could not help making a humorous remark.
“One imagines that all the positivist and serious members of the Gasguin ancestry will finally be able to celebrate this enthusiasm of their descendant for geometry, algebra, physics and chemistry!”
The director smiled at the remark, and, as he was a Jesuit with a flexible mind, knowing how to take advantage of the most unexpected circumstances, he immediately, and most ingeniously, addressed the question of the fate of the two brothers. The news was then quite fresh of the definitive ruination affecting the sons of the late François Gasguin. If Thibaud had been a rich heir, the debility of his ecclesiastical vocation could easily have been passed over and his preparation as a potential bishop continued, without renouncing the probability that Denis, no less rich an heir, would quite naturally become one of the most distinguished and useful members of the Company. In the present state of things, the director very wisely judged it preferable to “invert the order of priorities”—as he said to himself privately, no less humorously, on this occasion, than Abbé Dujars, but without letting it show—and he decided that Denis Gasguin would henceforth be allowed to follow, simply as a humble priest, his comfortable path to some rural parish, while Thibaud would be directed into a career as a scientist—in which, priest or not, having been raised by and for the Company, he would later bring it profit and honor.
Here, once again, the occult work of the Sphex that Aunt Aline was pursuing by instinct to prepare for the advent of the larva intervened. Without that, in fact, none of what had to come to pass would have done so, even after all that she had already done in that obscure hope. Happy to remain at the seminary as the favorite, unique pupil of Abbé Dujars, Thibaud had thousand and three chances, against the thousandth part of one, of letting himself be confined there, and finally taking the soutane anyway, while satisfying his frenetic passion for the sciences. And it seemed that in that regard, loving him as much as she did, Aunt Aline should have encouraged him.
It was the opposite that she had done, scornful of all reason and all prudence, even to the apparent detriment of the immediate and distant interests of her dear Thibaud.
For two and a half years, without saying a word, she had at first tolerated the fact that he was living away from her, indoctrinated by his brother Denis, flattered by the director and seduced by Abbé Dujars, who was opening all the Eldorados of science to him. Thus, she gave the appearance of accepting that her Thibaud had escaped her. Certainly, no one suspected the extent of her grim determination to get him back. Neither the brother, nor the professor, nor the director himself, had the slightest suspicion of it. The entire seminary, including the stones in its walls and the desks in its classrooms, would have protested in indignation if anyone had said, or even thought, that Notre-Dame-de-Liesse would not have, as the supreme ornament in its diadem, the glory of the future Abbé Thibaud Gasguin.
And such was, in fact, the prospect imagined in honor of Gasguin by his best friend, his comrade in all their classes, the “brilliant” Blaise Yvernaux, the person who had, until then, been nicknamed at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, exactly as Bossuet had been at the Collège de Navarre “the Angel of the School.” Abdicating his title to the embellishment of the former dunce of letters, who had so rapidly become the Pico della Mirandola of the science, The famous Yvernaux had composed to that end, in praise of his friend and conqueror, an admirable epistle in hexameters parodying Horace’s centos, the delight of the good Fathers, who had inserted a copy of it in the book of honor, in Gothic calligraphy, with initial indented letters illuminated in blue, red and gold.
Now, it was precisely by the intermediary of this Yvernaux, however far removed from her he was in his glory as a latinum elegantiarum magister,20 that Aunt Aline had contrived the repossession of her Thibaud, necessary to the mysterious germination from which the supreme flower of the Hescheboix was to emerge.
Blaie Yvernaux too did not feel an ecclesiastic vocation, but in his case, it was by virtue of infatuation with his triumphs in rhetoric and philosophy, and because he felt that, although poor, he was called to play a role in life different from that of, as he put it, a “fieldmouse of a curé” or a “schoolmaster force-feeding geese to fatten them on Latin cuisine.” And bang!—a joyful bang—one fine day, as he was mourning not having a foot in the stirrup of some career appropriate to his stature, he received, out of the blue, it seemed, a request to serve as tutor to the family of the Walloon Vicomte Pyckelsberghe de Lumay. In consequence of which he resolved, having first accepted it provisionally, to take advantage of it to “throw his soutane into the nettles” in due course—a gesture that the mere contagion of the dream soon suggested to Gasguin that he should do the same.
For that request had not come out of the blue, as had seemed to be the case; it had been contrived over time by the manipulations—ever tenacious and without any fixed plan—of Aunt Aline, who was then living, or rather vegetating, separated from her favorite, as an exile in Belgium, placed in the capacity of a nurse in the presence the old Comtesse de Pyckelsberghe. Placed there how and by whom? At a distance of forty years, Aline could hardly remember that. But placed there why? After having not known for more than thirty years, today she knew. Placed there, of course, in order that she might unshackle Thibaud’s fate, which threatened to settle at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, interring Geneviève’s there.
On Yvernaux’s advice, solicited thanks to Aunt Aline, Thibaud too had been summoned, to share the work of tuition. The director of the seminar had willingly let him go—for a year, he told himself—in the expectation that the two pupils of Liesse, especially Thibaud Gasguin, so grateful, so submissive, would not be wasting too much time out there, except perhaps on their own account, certainly not that of the company, in gaining a voice and a foothold in the opulent and powerful Lumay family, one of the fortresses of the Belgian clerical party,
But once Thibaud was under her influence, all the more pervasive because it was more covert, Aunt Aline had had him to herself, as when he was very young. She said nothing too him, still being taciturn and so simple—but his friend Yvernaux spoke for her, doubtless inspired by her, without he or she ever getting wind of it. He spoke about the great joy, the fine and legitimate pride that there would be, since the ecclesiastical vocation had refused them, in finding a niche elsewhere, in the lay world, honestly, by virtue of their talent. What a fine future they saw opening before them, one as a philosopher, a professor of letters, perhaps a writer, certainly an orator, the other at the École Polytechnique, to begin with, or the École Normale, also a professor, an engineer perhaps an inventor, certainly a scientist!
Aunt Aline gave her assent, nodding her mourning-bonnet—but not in mourning for her hopes, for she only unsealed the purse, already tight, of her lips over her gums to allow golden prophetic phrases to spring forth, such as these:
“Yvernaux’s right, far-sighted and clear-sighted.”
“You were born with a caul—a lucky sign!”
“Messieurs the priests know your worth.
“The younger sons of Cattelinettes are magicians.”21
“Two and three make five and you make six.”
“If you want your future, open your hands.”
“On the eve of your birth, your mother dreamed about an eagle.”
“Poor Idalie! She’s waiting to live again.”
“One only has oneself—so much the worse for me, where you’re concerned.”
In little formulae of this sort, sometimes more singular still, she unburdened her heart from time to time, half-stifling them between her teeth, amid sobs that were also stifle-not sobs of grief but of impatience, at not being better able to make herself understood, and, at the end of the day, not wishing to do so. Thus, at least was the interpretation of Yvernaux, a lover of more verbose rhetoric, more lavish
ly spiced with metaphors.
Gasguin allowed himself to be touched more fully, often deeply penetrated, by these “sayings” reminiscent of childhood memories, proverbs, riddles or mottoes, which gripped him and made his fibers resonate. He resented being so sensitive to words denuded of sense—he affirmed—and to ancient and troubled things trailing in the old cafourniaux22 of his memory. Nevertheless, he was prey to them without admitting it, and it was by virtue of them, even more that Yvernaux’s impetuous declamations, that he was definitively extracted from the seminary, and conquered his liberty.
That did not prevent him from denigrating those lyrical declamations. They alone still gave him something like the frisson of the mysterious chains by means of which the clock of destiny works. And to translate entirely the period in which Gasguin’s liberty emerged, necessary to Geneviève’s birth, nothing is better, in sum, than a prose poem that Yvernaux composed at a later date.
In the starch of the heavy solidity that had made all his Gasguin peasant ancestors before and including him into notaries, curés and schoolmasters, and the dough that the eloquence of Yvernaux was now rolling repeatedly, kneading and baking, those little sibylline phrases uttered by Aunt Aline were pellets of yeast that were about to make the bread rise. And that bread—Aunt Aline did not know why, but the blood of the Hescheboix knew it on her behalf—had first to be cooked, in order that the surplus of flour could be made into a disk of unleavened bread, of holy bread, of synthetic and symbolic bread: the host by means of which an entire race would express itself and offer itself to the adoration of the world, in the sublime and resplendent monstrance of genius.
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