(Member of the Académie des Sciences)
A CHRISTMAS STORY
At Christmas time, about three years ago, I found myself detained by chance in a small prison in Yorkshire, awaiting trial on charges of theft, swindling and blackmail. (Thereby hangs a long and shameful story, which I would rather not go into as it brings back painful memories.) It wasn’t so much being in prison that upset me; it was being there at that particular season, because I have always loved Christmas. Ah, Christmas! The time for all children to gather round the fireplace and enjoy themselves! The time for all grown-ups to gather under the mistletoe and ditto!
But Christmas in England is a very private affair, and nowhere more so than in Yorkshire, where things are very far removed from our own social junketings in Paris. At least, it felt very far to me.
Where privacy was concerned, I had no cause for complaint. My cell was private enough, perhaps even too private. The gaoler had….
Ah, I had forgotten all about my gaoler. What a curious fellow he was! An old soldier, an ex-Horse Guard who had lost a leg in the Ashanti War. And as he had only joined the Horse Guards to wear the grand uniform in the first place, he had gone on wearing it through thick and thin, even after he had lost his leg and changed his job. I could never help smiling at the sight of him, with one leg made of wood and the other spurred, booted and trousered. It was funny, yet it was touching too.
Meanwhile, Christmas was coming closer and closer.
And there I was, I who had been invited to spend the Christmas holiday in the Faroe Isles, with a missionary and his family!
All my readers must know what it is like to be in prison, but how many of you have ever been in prison in snowy weather? I know nothing worse. All sound vanishes utterly; sweet sound, the only thing that keeps you in touch with the outside world. When snow falls you can no longer see or hear anything.
It fell relentlessly that year, hard, thick, slanting, until my poor little cell was completely muffled and deadened. And there was one noise which I missed more than any other, out of all those I had come to know and cherish in my captivity: the sound of my gaoler walking across the main prison yard. First the dull clunk of the wooden leg on the paving stones, then the triumphant smack of his boot with the jingling of his spur. Clunk, smack, clunk, smack, and so on alternately. All gone, all gone.
Did it mean that the old Horse Guard no longer ventured out into the prison yard? Or was he still walking across, but in complete silence? I worried about it endlessly, as prisoners are wont to when they have absolutely nothing else to do.
Then Christmas Eve arrived. It became dark, but I could not bring myself to go to bed. I could hear the bells ringing, first in the town, then in all the little surrounding villages. The village church bells were all muffled by the snow, muted by the distance and so evocative that I felt my eyes brimming with tears. I always feel like crying when I hear the far-off sound of bells in the countryside.
‘Come in!’ I said, startled out of my reverie.
Somebody had knocked at the door.
It opened, and in came a pink and white maiden of about fifteen, carrying a little basket in one hand and a large spray of mistletoe in the other.
‘Good evening, sir,’ she said.
‘Good evening, miss,’ I replied, also in English.
She went on:
‘Well, do you remember the last time you met me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘In one of Kate Greenaway’s books, wasn’t it?’
‘No, never.’
‘Oh. In a drawing by Robert Caldecott, then?’
‘No, wrong again.’
I fell silent.
‘Have you really forgotten?’ she said crossly. ‘It was in London last year. Don’t you remember? You saved me from certain death. I was walking across Trafalgar Square when suddenly one of the bronze lions charged furiously at me, roaring loudly. I ran away as fast as I could. You were sitting on the top deck of a passing omnibus. You leant down and with one powerful arm snatched me from the clutches of the predatory beast. Cheated of his prey, the lion slunk back to his normal place and struck once again the artistic pose the sculptor had designed for him.’
I racked my brain, but could recall nothing remotely like that which had ever happened to me. She was quite firm, though.
‘You must remember! It was the Bull and Gate bus. You were on your way to see your friend Lombardi at the Villa Chiavenna.’
Faced with such a wealth of circumstantial detail, I had to give in and agree.
So she took a large plum pudding out of her basket, together with several bottles of English ale, and we proceeded to make merry.
When dawn came, she slipped away, taking with her my heart and the empties.
Ever since then, I have often tried to remember taking part in that curious episode in Trafalgar Square.
I have always failed.
Nor, to tell the truth, can I remember ever having been in prison in Yorkshire with a wooden-legged gaoler, his pink and white daughter, a plum pudding and several bottles of ale.
Is it not curious how, in this life, we forget so much?
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
If a man goes abroad to do some travelling and then returns after, say, a couple of hundred years, he won’t be surprised to find that all the local landmarks have meanwhile fallen into ruin and become shadows of their former selves. These things do happen.
But I was surprised when exactly the opposite happened to me very recently. I had only been away five or six months from the stretch of coast which I call home, so I was staggered to find on my return that it is now dominated by an imposing medieval mansion which, I swear, was not there when I left and had certainly not been there during the Middle Ages. Like any good amateur detective, I immediately deduced that it was a forgery, and a recent one at that.
I don’t mean that there is anything criminal about the place, of course. Ludicrous is a better word. It smells of fake antique all over, with its battered battlements, tottering towers, missing machicolations and its ogival windows protected by bars so thick they would defeat any barometer. It is, in short, a piece of lunacy.
As soon as I got home I asked about this weird addition to the landscape and was quickly brought up to date on the history of the neo-ancient monstrosity, as well as the history of its owner, who turns out to be none other than the ex-chiropodist of the Queen of Roumania. His name is Baron Lagourde (though he’s about as much a baron as I am Father Superior of a Greek monastery) and he has made vast amounts of money deploying his delicate skills on the crowned feet of Europe. The only other thing worth telling you about the Baron (I’ll stick to his title as it is the kind of thing that seems to please him) is that he is fat and common and ugly and appears to keep his brains in his feet.
And he has a wife, who comes from western Bulgaria. A small, dark woman, somewhat on the unkempt side, but I’ll say this for her: she does have the gift of arousing thoughts of adultery in the opposite sex. To be quite frank, this female Bulgar de l’Ouest – or what in Paris we call a Bulgar St. Lazare – had not been in Normandy long before she started deceiving her husband with a constant stream of road menders. Road menders? Why road menders, I hear you ask? Why not rural postmen or diplomatic attachés? Ah, shall we ever know the mysteries of the female heart! Let me simply record that the baroness finds road menders particularly irresistible, and that she never manages to refuse their advances. Which is why, this last summer, the road from Trouville to Honfleur received so little love and attention. Unlike the road menders.
Anyway, it seems that the Baron Lagourde settled in this part of the country early this year and bought a superbly situated property with a spectacular view – the estuary of the Seine to his right, the promontory of Le Havre opposite and the open sea over to the west. And having secured such a prime estate, the royal expedicure proceeded to stamp on it his own peculiar idea of aesthetics in general and of feudal interior decor in particular. Before you could say ‘Jacques Robinson�
�, a manor house had arisen, ready crumbled. He hired specialist workmen to give it that whiff of decay without which no modern stately home can ever seriously hope to be truly medieval. He left nothing to chance – he even ordered real skeletons, loaded with chains, to be cast into the lowest dungeons.
And the Baron might have been very happy in his pseudo-Middle Ages if it had not been for the stubbornness of old man Fabrice. But, sad to say, the more the Baron tried to make him see reason, the more old man Fabrice dug his heels in. The trouble was, you see, that old man Fabrice owned the next door field, a long though not very wide meadow which ran right across the top of the Baron’s feudal domain and commanded an even more splendid view than he had. It wouldn’t have fetched more than about 600 francs on the open market. Lagourde kindly offered him 1,000 francs for it. Then, after a while, 1,100 francs. Finally, at the end of a lot of haggling, a last offer of 2,000 francs.
‘Ah, no, Baron,’ said the sly old farmer, shaking his head. ‘I reckon it be worth a good deal more than that. I reckon it do be worth a great deal more.’
But the Baron had no intention of going higher than 2,000 francs and that, so far as he was concerned, was that.
Well, one day not so long ago (so I was told) the noble chiropodist was lolling atop one of his towers, idly scanning the horizon through a magnificent pair of field glasses (made by Flammarion Ltd., advt.) when he happened to focus on a yacht quite near the coast and was amazed to observe the yacht’s entire company of lady and gentlemen guests assembled on the bridge, staring through binoculars in his direction.
The thing that amazed him was that they were all doubled up with laughter. Every now and again they swapped binoculars and fell about laughing all over again. It was enough to make the Baron feel vaguely offended. Could it, by any chance, be his superb château they were laughing at?
That might not have been so bad were it not for the fact that the same yacht reappeared the very next day and went through the same performance, this time accompanied by two pleasure boats whose passengers were unaccountably subject to the same fits of uncontrollable laughter. And what made it even worse was that every succeeding day after that more and more boats joined in. They all slowed down as soon as they drew level with the château. And they all had passengers on board who seemed equally prone to this terrible laughing disease. Even the ordinary fishing boats from Trouville, Villerville and Honfleur all seemed to contain fishermen in the grip of some strange, manic laughing fit. In brief, it soon became impossible for anyone to navigate past that particular stretch of coastline without going under with laughing sickness.
The Baron went through progressive stages of anxiety, distress and finally palpable anguish until one morning he decided it was time to find out for himself what exactly was causing this unseemly mirth on the high seas. So he went down to the harbour, hired a boat and sped under full sail towards the spot where everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves so much. Not fifteen minutes later his majestic manor house came into view, absolutely feudal in every detail and not in the least funny to look at. There was nothing amiss at all. What on earth could those idiots possibly have found to laugh at?
Then ……. horror of horrors! The Baron could not believe his eyes! Anyone watching him closely would have seen such strenuous emotions as indignation, fury, outrage and many others closely related chasing across his face, leaving it a nasty crimson colour. There, before his very eyes ……. but was it possible?
High above his manor house, plain for all to see, old man Fabrice’s meadow lay in the sun like a vast green banner, but a banner with a strange device. For on it there was written a horrifyingly legible message in bright yellow, namely:
THE BARON’S WIFE IS A WHORE!
The explanation was quite simple. The nasty old man had sown in his meadow a great quantity of those flowers known commonly as buttercups, and sown them according to this outrageous but unmistakable pattern. Old man Fabrice had said it with flowers on a vast scale.
The Baron stood rooted to the deck, stunned with horror and shame by the scandalous message picked out so prettily in light yellow against the dark green background of the field.
‘The Baron’s wife is a whore …. the Baron’s wife is a whore …..’ he repeated to himself, in a complete daze. It was only when he heard the crew laughing behind his back that he came out of his dream.
‘Take me straight back to land!’ he ordered, in the most feudal tone of voice he could muster in the circumstances.
When he had disembarked, he went to see the mayor at once.
‘Mr. Mayor,’ he said, ‘I have been most grossly libelled in your district. It is your duty to uphold my honour. You must take immediate action.’
‘Libel? What kind of libel, Baron?’
‘Old man Fabrice has gone too far. He has written on his field that my wife …. my wife is a whore.’
‘Written it …. on his field? I don’t quite ….’
‘Yes, written – with yellow flowers!’
Luckily, the mayor had known about Fabrice’s ingenious idea for some time, or he might have been slightly puzzled by the Baron’s complaint. So together they went off to see the author of the offending message, who only reacted with injured innocence to the charge.
‘Me, Baron? Me write that your wife do be a whore? Now, how could you think me capable of such a thing? I don’t know as when I’ve been so terrible offended.’
‘Well, we’d better go and have a look,’ sighed the mayor.
When they got to the field they could see that the buttercups did form some sort of pattern all right, but from where they stood it was quite impossible to make any sense out of it. They were far too close. (Exactly the same phenomenon has been observed in those flies who live in libraries and spend most of their life walking across printed pages, yet remain quite unable to decipher a single word.)
‘I’m sure the Baron realises,’ said old man Fabrice, ‘that wild flowers grow much where they want to and don’t ask nobody’s permission. If we was held responsible for the way they grew ….!’
‘Well, Mr. Mayor,’ growled the Baron, ‘who are you going to believe?’
‘I assure you, Baron, I am only too happy to take your word for it that you have been libelled, but if the libellous message can’t be read in my area of jurisdiction, then it’s not really up to me to deal with it. You said you had been insulted while out at sea; you should complain to the Admiralty!’
The Baron could foresee that complaining to the Admiralty about a libel case on land might be a complicated affair. He thought of a better way out.
‘Well, you old bastard,’ he said to Fabrice, ‘how much do you want for your damned field?’
‘Ah, now, Baron, you know right well I don’t want to sell the field, but seeing as how you seem so set on it, well, I’ll do you a favour and let you have it for a mere 10,000 francs. A fair old bargain it is, too. Not many fields you find with flowers that can spell all by themselves!’
And that very evening old man Fabrice’s flowery prose vanished beneath the implacable scythe of the Baron’s gardener, since when everything has been back to normal. I have one piece of advice for the Baron, though. If he is thinking of playing the same trick on Fabrice next year, he might as well forget the idea now. Old man Fabrice doesn’t care a damn what anyone says about him.
ANYTHING THEY CAN DO ….
Little Madeleine Bastye might have been the most fascinating and desirable woman of the entire nineteenth century but for one small, annoying fault. She was incapable of taking a lover without immediately being unfaithful to him. For most people broad-mindedness means taking one thing with another; for her it meant only taking one man with another.
When our story starts, her lover was a fine upstanding young man called Jean Passe (of the firm, Jean Passe et Desmeilleurs).
Not only was Jean Passe a decent sort, he was also a credit to the Paris business world. So of course he was determined to do the honourable thing by Madeleine
.
Not so Madeleine. She was unfaithful to him at the first opportunity.
Jean was heartbroken.
‘But what has he got that I haven’t got?’ he asked.
‘He’s so handsome!’ sighed Madeleine.
‘We’ll see about that,’ muttered Jean.
Love is strong! The will is all-powerful! When Jean came home that evening he had been transformed into the most handsome man in the world, beside whom the Archangel Gabriel would have looked as ugly as sin.
*
The second time Madeleine was unfaithful to Jean, Jean asked Madeleine:
‘And what has he got that I haven’t got?’
‘Money!’ said Madeleine.
‘Right,’ gritted Jean.
And that very day he invented a cheap, simple, non-labour-intensive process for converting horse dung into the most exquisite plush velvet.
American manufacturers fought among themselves in an attempt to pour millions of dollars into his pockets ….
*
The third time Madeleine was unfaithful to Jean, Jean asked Madeleine:
‘And what has he got that I haven’t got?’
‘He’s got a sense of humour, that’s what,’ said Madeleine.
‘Right,’ grunted Jean.
And he headed straight for the Flammarion bookshop to buy Pas de Bile, the latest collection of pieces by famed author Alphonse Allais. He read it from cover to cover, and back again, till he was so impregnated with the spirit of this unique book that Madeleine could hardly get to sleep at night for laughing.
*
The fourth time Madeleine was unfaithful to Jean, Jean asked Madeleine:
‘And what has he got that I haven’t got?’
‘Well …..’ said Madeleine.
She could not put it into words, but her blazing eyes said it for her. Jean understood.
‘Right!’ he cried.
*
The World of Alphonse Allais Page 3