The original title page
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
I
Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet, with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste.
Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed, which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened that confined her to her bed.
There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish whisper bits of her favourite ditty:
The fisherman, when dawn is nigh,
Peers forth to greet the kindling sky….
Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little Jean’s lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar in her fond hopes.
A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp and the vague tales of concierges, footmen, and cooks, she pictured her boy at twenty more beautiful than an archangel, his breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing-room full of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable ladies with manners every whit as genteel as had the actresses at the Gymnase:
But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest.
Presently the vision changed; now her boy was standing up gowned in Court, by his eloquence saving the life and honour of some illustrious client:
But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest.
Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a brilliant uniform, on a prancing charger, victorious in battle, like the great Generals whose portraits she had seen one Sunday at Versailles:
But for the nonce, on mother’s breast, Sweet wee general, take thy rest.
But when night was creeping into the room, a new picture would dazzle her eyes, a picture this of other and incomparably greater glories.
Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at heart, she was gazing from the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping in the poisoned air of a back-shop:
But for the nonce, on mother’s breast,
My sweet boy-bishop, take thy rest.
One evening, as her husband handed her a cooling drink, she said to him in a tone of regret:
“Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy Virgin among flowers and precious stones and lights. It was so beautiful! so beautiful!”
She said she was no longer in pain, that she wished her Jean to learn Latin. And she passed away.
II
The widower, who from the Beauce country, sent his son to his native village in the Eure-et-Loir to be brought up by kinsfolk there. As for himself, he was a strong man, and soon learned to be resigned; he was of a saving habit by instinct in both business and family matters, and never put off the green serge apron from week’s end to week’s end save for a Sunday visit to the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on the arm of the black cross, and, if it was a hot day, take a chair on the way back along the boulevard outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he sat slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the mothers and their youngsters going by on the sidewalk.
These young wives, as he watched them approach and pass on, were so many passing reminders of his Clotilde and made him feel sad without his quite understanding why, for he was not much given to thinking.
Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife grew to be a tender, vague memory in the bookbinder’s mind. One night he tried in vain to recall Clotilde’s features; after this experience, he told himself that perhaps he might be able to discover the mother’s lineaments in the child’s face, and he was seized with a great longing to see this relic of the lost one once more, to have the child home again.
In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, Mademoiselle Servien, begging her to come and take up her abode with the little one in the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs. The sister, who had lived for many years in Paris at her brother’s expense, for indolence was her ruling passion, agreed to resume her life in a city where, she used to say, folks are free and need not depend on their neighbours.
One autumn evening she arrived at the Gare de l’Ouest with Jean and her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed figure, all ready to defend the child against all sorts of imaginary perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his satisfaction in two words.
Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, and bidding him hold on tight to his father’s hair, carried him off proudly to the house.
Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to a settled routine. At midday the old dame would don her shawl and set off with the child in the direction of Grenelle.
The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that ran between shabby walls and red-fronted drinking-shops. Generally speaking, a sky of a dappled grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past, invested the quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. Establishing herself on a bench, while the child played under a tree, she would knit her stocking and chat with an old soldier and tell him her troubles — what a hard life it was in other people’s houses.
One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted on the ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in the fine wet sand. That faculty of “pretending,” by which children are able to make their lives one unending miracle, transformed a handful of soil and a few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and fairy castles to the lad’s imagination; he clapped his hands and leapt for joy. Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in something soft and scented. It was a lady’s gown; he saw nothing except that she smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked on. He ran to tell his aunt:
“How good she smells, that lady!”
Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no better than others, and that she thought more of herself with her merino skirt than all those set-up minxes in their flounces and finery, adding:
“Better a good name than a gilt girdle.”
But this talk was beyond little Jean’s comprehension. The perfumed silk that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a memory as of a gentle, ghostly caress.
III
One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying the fresh air before his door when a big man with a red nose, past middle age and wearing a scarlet waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared, bowing politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song voice in which
even Monsieur Servien could detect an Italian accent:
“Sir, I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, the immortal masterpiece of Torquato Tasso” — and a bulging packet of manuscript under his arm confirmed the statement.
“Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this glorious and ungrateful task. Without family or fatherland, I have written my translation in dark, ice-cold garrets, on chandlers’ wrappers, snuff papers, the backs of playing cards! Such has been the exile’s task! You, sir, you live in your own land, in the bosom of a happy family — at least I hope so.”
This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence and its strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of the dead woman he had loved, and he saw her in his mind’s eye coiling her beautiful hair as in the early days of their married life.
The big man proceeded:
“Man is like a plant which perishes when the storms uproot it.
“Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you” — and laying his hand on Jean’s head, who clung to his father’s coat-tails in wonder at the red waistcoat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.
“That noble language,” he added, “whose inimitable monuments have often made me forget my misfortunes.
“Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal.”
As he said the words, a look of sadness over-spread his shining red face, and dropping his voice:
“Forgive me, sir, if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius. I am the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice. When I have received from the bookseller the price of my labour, I will not forget that you succoured me with a small coin in the time of my sharpest trial.”
The bookbinder, case-hardened as he was against beggars, who on winter evenings drifted into his shop with the east wind, nevertheless experienced a certain sympathy and respect for the Marquis Tudesco. He slipped a franc-piece into his hand.
Thereupon the old Italian, like a man inspired, exclaimed:
“One Nation there is that is unhappy — Italy, one generous
People — France; and one bond that unites the twain — humanity.
Ah! chiefest of the virtues, humanity, humanity!”
Meantime the bookbinder was pondering his wife’s last words: “I wish my Jean to learn Latin.” He hesitated, till seeing Monsieur Tudesco bowing and smiling to go:
“Sir,” he said, “if you are ready, two or three times a week, to give the boy lessons in French and Latin, we might come to terms.”
The Marquis Tudesco expressed no surprise. He smiled and said:
“Certainly, sir, as you wish it, I shall find it a delightful task to initiate your son in the mysteries of the Latin rudiments.
“We will make a man of him and a good citizen, and God knows what heights my pupil will scale in this noble land of freedom and generosity. He may one day be ambassador, my dear sir. I say it: knowledge is power.”
“You will know the shop again,” said the bookbinder; “there is my name on the signboard.”
The Marquis Tudesco, after tweaking the son’s ear amicably and bowing to the father with a dignified familiarity, walked away with a step that was still jaunty.
IV
The Marquis Tudesco returned in due course, smiled at Mademoiselle Servien, who darted poisonous looks at him, greeted the bookbinder with a discreet air of patronage, and had a supply of grammars and dictionaries bought.
At first he gave his lessons with exemplary regularity. He had taken a liking to these repetitions of nouns and verbs, which he listened to with a dignified, condescending air, slowly unrolling his screw of snuff the while; he only interrupted to interject little playful remarks with a geniality just touched with a trace of ferocity, that bespoke his real nature as an unctuous, cringing bully. He was jocular and pompous at the same time, and always made a pretence of being a long time in seeing the glass of wine put on the table for his refreshment.
The bookbinder, regarding him as a clever man of ill-regulated life, always treated him with great consideration, for faults of behaviour almost cease to shock us except among neighbours, or at most fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean found a fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of high-priest and buffoon. He was great at telling a story, and though his tales were beyond the child’s intelligence, they did not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness, irony, and cynicism. Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed her attitude of uncompromising dislike and disdain. She said nothing against him, but her face was a rigid mask of disapproval, her eyes two flames of fire, in answer to the courteous greeting the tutor never failed to offer her with a special roll of his little grey eyes.
One day the Marquis Tudesco walked into the shop with a staggering gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried, gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus.
Lessons that day were fitful and haphazard. Jean was repeating in a drawling voice: moneo, mones, monet … monebam, monebas, monebat… Suddenly Monsieur Tudesco sprang forward, dragging his chair along the floor with a horrid screech, and clapping his hand on his pupil’s shoulder:
“Child,” he said, “to-day I am going to give you a more profitable lesson than all the pitiful teaching I have confined myself to up to now.
“It is a lesson of transcendental philosophy. Hearken carefully, child. If one day you rise above your station and come to know yourself and the world about you, you will discover this, that men act only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows — and per Bacco! they are consummate fools for their pains. They dread other folks’ blame and crave their approval.
“The idiots fail to see that the world does not care a straw for them, and that their dearest friends will see them glorified or disgraced without missing one mouthful of their dinner. This is my lesson, caro figliuolo, that the world’s opinion is not worth the sacrifice of a single one of our desires. If you get this into your pate, you will be a strong man and can boast you were once the pupil of the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice, the exile who has translated in a freezing garret, on scraps of refuse paper, the immortal poem of Torquato Tasso. What a task!”
The child listened to the tipsy philosopher without understanding one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet than anybody he had ever seen before.
The professor warmed to his subject:
“Ah!” he cried, springing from his seat, “and what profit did the immortal and ill-starred Torquato Tasso win from all his genius? A few stolen kisses on the steps of a palace. And he died of famine in a madhouse. I say it: the world’s opinion, that empress of humankind, I will tear from her her crown and sceptre. Opinion tyrannizes over unhappy Italy, as over all the earth. Italy! what flaming sword will one day come to break her fetters, as now I break this chair?”
In fact, he had seized his chair by the back and was pounding it fiercely on the floor.
But suddenly he stopped, gave a knowing smile, and said in a low voice:
“No, no, Marquis Tudesco, let be, let Venice be a prey to Teuton savagery. The fetters of the fatherland are daily bread to the exiled patriot.”
His chin buried in his cravat, he stood chuckling to himself, and his red waistcoat rose and fell in jerks.
Mademoiselle Servien, who sat by at the lesson knitting a stocking and for some moments had been watching the tutor, her spectacles pushed half-way up her forehead, with a look of amazement and suspicion, exclaimed, as if talking to herself:
“If it isn’t abominable to come to people’s houses in drink!”
Monsi
eur Tudesco did not seem to hear her. His manner was quiet and jocular again.
“Child,” he ordered, “write down the theme for an essay. Write down: ‘The worst thing… yes, the worst thing of all,’ write it down… ‘is an old woman with a spiteful temper.’”
And rising with the gracious dignity of a Prince of the Church, he bowed low to the aunt, gave the nephew’s cheek a friendly tap, and marched out of the room.
However, beginning with the very next lesson, he lavished every mark of respect on the old lady, and treated her to all his choicest airs and graces, rounding his elbows, pursing his lips, strutting and swaggering. She would not relax a muscle, and sat there as silent and sulky as an owl.
But one day when she was hunting for her spectacles, as she was always doing, Monsieur Tudesco offered her his and persuaded her to try them; she found they suited her sight and felt a trifle less unamiable towards him. The Italian, pursuing his advantage, got into talk with her, and artfully turned the conversation upon the vices of the rich. The old lady approved his sentiments, and an exchange of petty confidences ensued. Tudesco knew a sovereign remedy for catarrh, and this too was well received. He redoubled his attentions, and the concierge, who saw him smiling to himself on the doorstep, told Aunt Servien: “The man’s in love with you.” Of course she declared: “At my time of life a woman doesn’t want lovers,” but her vanity was tickled all the same. Monsieur Tudesco got what he wanted — to have his glass filled to the brim every lesson. Out of politeness they would even leave him the pint jug only half empty, which he was indiscreet enough to drain dry.
One day he asked for a taste of cheese— “just enough to make a mouse’s dinner,” was his expression. “Mice are like me, they love the dark and a quiet life and books; and like me they live on crumbs.”
This pose of the wise man fallen on evil days made a bad impression, and the old lady became silent and sombre as before.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 22