It was in that square, and under one of those canvases, that Javotte Goubard, Eustache’s betrothed, was awaiting his return. Most of the merchants had a stand in the plaza of the Les Halles market, a branch of their dark stores that was overseen by a family member. Javotte took her place every morning in her father’s stand, and there, actually sitting on the merchandise, she tried to draw customers in. Sometimes she would get up to call them or grab them by the arm, not releasing them until they bought something. All of which, at the same time, did not keep her from being the most timid of all the young ladies who, not having married, had reached the age when a girl is considered an old maid. Full of charm, pretty, blond, tall, and slightly slumped, as were the majority of the girls dedicated to commerce, with a slim, delicate figure. She also blushed easily at any word spoken out of turn, although she was better than anyone at the game of “fast and loose” (the business style of the period).
Eustache usually came to take her place at midday under the red canvas so that she could eat with her father at the store. And it was his intention of doing just that which made Eustache move along, fearing his lateness might make Javotte impatient. However, from a distance he could see that she seemed quite calm, with her elbow leaning on a roll of fabric and paying close attention to the animated, noisy chatter of a handsome soldier who was leaning on the same roll and who seemed to be a customer rather than anything one might imagine.
“It’s my fiancé!” said Javotte, smiling at the stranger, who turned his head without changing position to take the measure of the apprentice with that disdain soldiers have for ordinary townspeople.
“He looks like a bugler,” he observed gravely, “except that a bugler has a little more purpose in his gait. But you know, Javotte, the bugler in a company is something less than a horse and something more than a dog …”
“This is my nephew,” said Javotte to Eustache, looking at him with her big blue eyes and smiling in satisfaction. “He managed to get a leave to attend our wedding. Isn’t that wonderful? He’s a harquebusier in the cavalry. Oh! What a wonderful uniform! If you were dressed that way, Eustache!—but, you aren’t as tall, or as strong …”
“And for how long,” said the young Eustache timidly, “will you be doing us the honor of staying with us in Paris?”
“That depends,” said the soldier, standing up after delaying his answer. “They’ve sent us to Berri to exterminate the peasants, and if they keep quiet for a while, I can give you a month. But in any case, come Saint Martin’s Day we’re to be sent to Paris to replace the Humiéres regiment, and then I’ll see you every day, indefinitely.”
Eustache examined the harquebusier when he managed to evade his gaze, and found him to be physically not what he would expect in a nephew.
“Well, I said every day, and that’s not the case,” the nephew went on, “because Thursdays we take part in the grand parade. But since we have our nights free, I’ll always be able to dine that evening at your house.”
“How does he count on eating the other days?” thought Eustache.
“But, Mademoiselle Goubard, you never told me your nephew was SO …”
“So spruce? Oh yes! How he’s grown! Well, it’s been seven years since we’ve seen poor Joseph, and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.”
“And a lot of wine under his nose,” thought the apprentice, put off by the ruddy face of his future nephew. “No one’s face get’s that fiery from drinking watered-down wine. Master Goubard’s bottles are going to dance the dance of the dead before the wedding … and perhaps afterward as well.”
“Let’s eat. Papa must be getting impatient,” said Javotte, walking out of the stand. “Joseph, give me your arm! And to think that once upon a time, when I was twelve and you ten, I was the bigger one, and you called me Mama …. How proud I’ll be to be walking on the arm of a harquebusier! You’ll take me out walking, won’t you? I go out so little! And since I may not go out alone … Sunday evenings, I have to attend religion classes, because I’m in the Sisterhood of the Virgin of the Holy Innocents. I wear a ribbon of the standard.”
The young woman’s chatter, rhythmically marked by the military gait of the soldier—that light and graceful form leaping along, entwined with the heavy and rigid form of the other—faded quickly in the dull shadow of the pillars that lined rue Tonnellerie, leaving nothing in Eustache’s eyes but a shadow, and in his ears a buzz.
VII. MISERIES AND CROSSES
Up until now, we’ve been closely following this bourgeois tale without taking more time to tell it than it needed to take place. And now, despite our respect, or, better yet, despite our profound esteem for maintaining the three unities in the novel, we find ourselves forced to have one of them leap some days ahead. Eustache’s tribulations with regard to his future nephew might be sufficiently interesting to tell, but they were, in the event, less bitter than what one might have expected after all we’ve said. Eustache soon felt more at ease with regard to his fiancee. Javotte really had done nothing more than retain a too-intense impression of her childhood memories, which in an uneventful life like hers must acquire a disproportionate importance.
At first, all she’d seen in the cavalry harquebusier was the happy, noisy boy, her playmate of former times, but it did not take her long to realize that the boy had grown up, that he’d taken other paths in life, and she soon became more reserved with him.
As far as the soldier was concerned: aside from the customary familiarities, he did not seem to harbor any dishonorable intentions toward his young aunt. It might even be said that he was one of those men—there are many—whose desire is not aroused by respectable women. For the moment he, like Tabarin, could say “that the bottle was his lover.” The first three days he was in Paris, he never left Javotte for a moment, and even brought her at night to the Cours de la Reine, the two of them accompanied only by an old servant woman, all to Eustache’s disgust. But that did not last long, because he soon tired of her company and got into the habit of going out alone all day—politely, let it be said, returning at dinnertime.
The only thing bothering the future husband was seeing this relative so comfortably established in the house that was going to be his after the wedding, a guest, so it seemed, who would be difficult to dislodge because with each passing day he appeared more firmly ensconced. And he was only a nephew once removed of Javotte, being the child of Master Goubard’s deceased wife’s first marriage. But how was Eustache going to make her understand that she was exaggerating the importance of family ties, and that she had ideas that were too strict about the rights and principles of relatives—even, to put it bluntly, too antiquated and patriarchal?
Even so, it was possible that the soldier himself would realize his indiscretion, so Eustache was obliged to be patient—“like the ladies of Fontainebleau when the court is in Paris,” as the proverb goes.
However, the wedding did not change the habits of the harquebusier, who thought that thanks to the peacefulness of the peasants he would be granted permission to remain in Paris until his regiment arrived. Eustache made a few epigrammatic allusions to people who take a store for an inn, or to those who were not welcome and who seemed weak. By the same token, he did not dare to speak frankly to his wife and father-in-law lest he appear too selfish at the outset of his married life, when he really owed them everything he was.
Besides, the soldier’s company was in no way amusing. His mouth was the eternal bell ringing out his own glory: of his triumphs in individual combat which had made him the terror of the army, and of his prodigious deeds carried out against the peasants, miserable French villagers whom the soldiers of King Henri fought because they couldn’t pay their taxes, and who did not exactly seem to be enjoying their famous chicken paysanne …
This swaggering was quite common in those days, as is obvious in literary characters like Taillebras and Captain Matamoros, constantly reproduced in the comedies of the period. And this is due, in my own opinion, to the vi
ctorious irruption of the Gascon, followed by the Navarese, into Paris. But this vainglorious character grew weaker over time, and, a few years later, the figure Foeneste was merely a weak caricature, though a perfect comic type; and in the comedy Le Menteur, in 1662, it had already shrunk to almost ordinary proportions.
But what our good Eustache took most careful note of in the soldier’s habits was his constant mania to treat him, Eustache, as if he were a little boy, to emphasize his less attractive features, and, whenever he could, to make him look ridiculous in front of Javotte, something that was quite damaging in the first days, when a newly married groom must establish his respect with regard to the future. Besides, it was very easy to wound the honor of a man who only recently had been set up in business, licensed, and sworn in.
A new tribulation came swiftly along to push things over the limit. Since Eustache was going to be made a member of the guild guards, and since he did not want, like the honorable Master Goubard, to carry out that office wearing civilian clothes and with a borrowed halberd, he bought a basket-handled sword (though lacking the basket handle), a helmet, and a cuirass—all made of a red copper that looked more appropriate for pots. After spending three days cleaning and polishing the pieces, he managed to give them a shine they’d never had. But when he put it all on and marched proudly through the store asking if he had “the grace to wear armor,” the harquebusier laughed his head off and swore he seemed to be decked out in kitchenwear.
VIII. THE TWEAK
With things standing in this fashion, it happened that one afternoon—it was the twelfth or thirteenth of the month, of course a Thursday—Eustache closed the store early, a liberty he would never have taken if Master Goubard hadn’t departed the previous day to visit his property in Picardy, where he intended to move three months later, once his successor was solidly established and fully merited the confidence of the other merchants.
It happened that the harquebusier, when he returned home as usual, found the door locked and the lights out. That shocked him a great deal, as the evening watch had not passed through Châtelet; and since he always returned a bit fired-up with wine, his contrary nature translated itself into a curse that made Eustache, who had still not gone to bed, apprehensive about the boldness of his action, tremble.
“Hello there! Hey!” shouted the soldier, kicking the door. “What, is there some holiday this afternoon? Is today Saint Michael’s Day, the holiday of clothiers, thieves, and pickpockets …?”
And he pounded his fist against the shopwindow, which had no more effect than grinding water in a mortar.
“Hey! Uncle! Aunt! Do you want me to sleep out of doors, on the paving stones, at the mercy of dogs and other beasts …? Hey, hey! Come down right away, you bourgeois, I’m bringing you money! May the plague take you, churl!”
The poor nephew’s harangue did not move even slightly the wooden face of the door. His words were not heard, as when the Venerable Bede preached to a mountain of stones.
But while doors may be deaf, windows are not blind, and there is a very simple method for making them see. The soldier quickly reached that very conclusion, walked out from the somber gallery of porticos, retreated to the center of rue Tonnellerie, picked up a stone, and aimed so well that he smashed one of the small windows on the mezzanine. Eustache had not foreseen that eventuality, a formidable question mark that summarized the soldier’s monologue: “Why won’t you open the door for me?”
Eustache quickly made a decision: a coward who loses his head is like a peasant who starts to squander his money, and besides, he had decided to face up to the soldier once and for all in the presence of his wife, whose respect for her husband may have declined somewhat after seeing him play the fool for the harquebusier—the difference being that even a fool occasionally hits back. He slipped his mantle over his head, and before Javotte could stop him, ran down the narrow staircase to the street floor. He took his sword off the wall as he passed through the rear of the store, and only when he felt the cold of the copper haft in his hot hand did he stop an instant to walk with leaden feet toward the door, the key to which he was carrying in his other hand. But then a second window broke with a huge racket, and the footsteps of his wife, which he heard behind his own, restored all his energy. He quickly opened the heavy door and stood on the threshold with his sword bared, like an archangel at the gates of the earthly paradise.
“Now what does this night owl want? This worthless drunk? This lunatic looking for fights …?” he shouted in a tone of voice that would have sounded tremulous if he’d done it two notes lower. “Is this the way to behave around honorable people …? Go on, get out of here and go sleep under the tents with the other thugs, or I’ll rouse the neighbors and the night watch will come and take you away!”
“Well, well, well! Just look at how our simpleton sings! What’s gotten into you tonight? This is something new! I like seeing you speak like a character from tragedy, like Tranchemontagne. The brave are my friends! Come, let Picrochole embrace you!”
“Get out of here, you cur! Can’t you see that you’re waking the neighbors with all the noise you’re making and that they’re going to have you arrested for a swindler or a thief? Go on, then, go your way quietly, and never come back!”
But instead of leaving, the soldier came toward the door, which weakened somewhat the end of Eustache’s response.
“Very well spoken!” said the harquebusier. “The warning you’ve just given me is honest and deserves to be paid for.”
And in the twinkling of an eye, he was standing right before Eustache and tweaked his nose so hard that it turned scarlet.
“There! And you can keep the change. Farewell to you, Uncle!”
Eustache could not stand patiently by and tolerate an insult like that in the presence of his wife—something even more humiliating than a slap—and despite Javotte’s efforts to hold him back, he fell upon his adversary, who was leaving, and gave him a slash that would have honored the arm of the Roger the Crusader—if his sword had had something resembling an edge on it. But Eustache’s sword hadn’t cut anything since the religious wars, so it didn’t even cut through the soldier’s leather’straps. The harquebusier caught Eustache’s hands in his own and smartly disarmed him. Eustache then began to shout as loudly as he could and kicked the boots of his persecutor. Luckily, Javotte got between them, because even though the neighbors could see the fight from their windows, they hadn’t the slightest intention of stopping it. Eustache finally managed to extract his bluish fingers from the human vise that held them and had to rub them for a long time to make them lose the square shape they’d acquired.
“I’m not afraid of you!” he exclaimed. “And we’ll meet again! If you’ve got any dignity, you’ll be at Pré-aux-Clercs tomorrow morning! At six, you rogue, you braggart, And we’ll fight to the death!”
“A very well-chosen site, my little champion, and we’ll comport ourselves like gentlemen! Until tomorrow, then, and by Saint George, may the night seem short to you!”
The soldier pronounced those words in a considerate tone he’d never used until then. Eustache proudly returned to his wife: his challenge had caused him to increase six palms in height. He picked up his sword and noisily slammed the door.
IX. CHTEAU-GAILLARD
When the young clothier awoke, he felt completely bereft of his valor of the previous evening. It was not difficult for him to recognize that he’d made a fool of himself in challenging the harquebusier to a duel, he who could manage no other weapon than the willow wand, with which he’d often played as an apprentice in the field of the Carthusians with his friends. It took him no time at all to resolve that he would stay at home and leave his adversary strolling, showing himself off, wandering back and forth like a goose on a lead.
When the hour set for the duel had passed, he got up, opened the store, and said not a word to his wife about what had happened the previous night. For her part, she also made no references to it. They had breakfast in silence,
and then Javotte, as always, went to take her place under the red tent, leaving her husband occupied in examining, with the help of a maid, a bolt of cloth in order to find its defects. It must be said that he frequently looked toward the door, each time fearing that his terrible relative was coming to reproach him for his cowardice and for not keeping his word. And at around eight-thirty he saw the harquebusier’s uniform appear under the gallery of the porticos, like one of Rembrandt’s German soldiers, shining from the triple glow of his helmet, his cuirass, and his nose—an ill-fated apparition that rapidly became larger and clearer, and whose metallic footsteps seemed to mark each minute of the clothier’s last hour.
But the same uniform was not covering the same body, or, to say it more simply, it was a fellow soldier, a friend of the other’s, who stopped outside Eustache’s store. To Eustache, who had barely recovered from his shock, he spoke in a calm and very civilized tone.
He informed him that, in the first place, his adversary, after having waited for him for two hours in the designated place and not seeing him, had imagined that some unforeseen accident had kept Eustache from attending, and, for that reason, would return the next day at the same time and would remain there the same amount of time, and if this meeting were also not to take place, he would come instantly to the store, cut off Eustache’s ears, and put them in his pocket, as, in 1605, the celebrated Brusquet had done to a squire of the Duke de Chevreuse for the same reason. He had obtained the applause of the court, which found his action to be in very good taste.
Eustache answered that his adversary offended his valor with such a threat, that it doubled the motive for the duel. He added that the obstacle was nothing more than his not having found someone to be his second.
Fantastic Tales Page 18