Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  “I hate them,” he muttered through clenched teeth, “I hate them all.”

  Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity. Every day they had badgered him with reports against Jean Servien. This time he had given way; he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really could make nothing of this tale about a beggar. He changed his mind, ran to the door and called to the young man to corne back.

  Jean turned and faced him:

  “No!” he cried, “no! I can bear the life no longer; I am unhappy,

  I am full of misery — and hate.”

  “Poor lad!” sight the Director, letting his arms drop by his side.

  That evening he did not write a single line of his Tragedy.

  XXVII

  The kind-hearted bookbinder harassed his son with no reproaches.

  After dinner he went and sat at his shop-door, and looked at the first star that peeped out in the evening sky.

  “My boy,” said he, “I am not a man of learning like you; but I have a notion — and you must not rob me of it, because it is a comfort to me — that, when I have finished binding books, I shall go to that star. The idea occurred to me from what I have read in the paper that the stars are all worlds. What is that star called?”

  “Venus, father.”

  “In my part of the world, they say it is the shepherd’s star. It’s a beautiful star, and I think your mother is there. That is why I should like to go there.”

  The old man passed his knotted fingers across his brow, murmuring:

  “God forgive me, how one forgets those who are gone!”

  Jean sought balm for his wounded spirit in reading poetry and in long, dreamy walks. His head was filled with visions — a welter of sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phædra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia, and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; “If ever we win to life, it will be through you. And what a bliss it will be for you, Jean Servien, to have created us. How you will love us!” And Jean Servien would answer them; “Come back, come back, or rather do not leave me. But I cannot tell how to make you visible; you vanish away when I gaze at you, and I cannot net you in the meshes of beautiful verse!”

  Again and again he tried to write poems, tragedies, romances; but his indolence, his lack of ideas, his fastidiousness brought him to a standstill before half a dozen lines were written, and he would toss the all but virgin page into the fire. Quickly discouraged, he turned his attention to politics. The funeral of Victor Noir, the Belleville risings, the plébiscite, filled his thoughts; he read the papers, joined the groups that gathered on the boulevards, followed the yelping pack of white blouses, and was one of the crowd that hooted the Commissary of Police as he read the Riot Act. Disorder and uproar intoxicated him; his heart beat as if it would burst his bosom, his enthusiasm rose to fever pitch, amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence. Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain. There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the scutcheon blazoned on its façade and the two lions lying white in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, he would cast a look of hatred at the building. Presently, as he resumed his march, he would picture himself standing, musket in hand, on a barricade, in the smoke of insurrection, along with workmen and young fellows from the schools, as we see it all represented in lithographs.

  One day in July, he saw a troop of white blouses moving along the boulevard and shouting: “To Berlin!” Ragamuffin street-boys ran yelping round. Respectable citizens lined the sidewalks, staring in wonder, and saying nothing; but one of them, a stout, tall, red-faced man, waved his hat and shouted:

  “To Berlin! long live the Emperor!”

  Jean recognized Monsieur Bargemont.

  XXVIII

  On top of the ramparts. Bivouac huts and stacked rifles guarded by a sentinel. National Guards are playing shove ha’-penny. The autumn sunshine lies clear and soft and splendid on the roofs of the beleaguered city. Outside the fortifications, the bare, grey fields; in the distance the barracks of the outlying forts, over which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the horizon the hills whence the Prussian batteries are firing on Paris, leaving long trails of white smoke. The guns thunder. They have been thundering for a month, and no one so much as hears them now. Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped képi and the tunic with brass buttons, are seated side by side on sand-bags, bending over the same book.

  It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud the delicious episode of Silenus. Two youths have discovered the old god lying in a drunken sleep — he is always drunk and it makes men mock at him, albeit they still revere him — and have bound him in chains of flowers to force him to sing. Æglé, the fairest of the Naïads, has stained his cheeks scarlet with juice of the mulberry, and lo! he sings.

  “He sings how from out the mighty void were drawn together the germs of earth and air and sea and of the subtle fire likewise; how of these beginnings came all the elements, and the fluid globe of the firmament grew into solid being; how presently the ground began to harden and to imprison Nereus in the ocean, and little by little to take on the shapes of things. He sings how anon continents marvelled to behold a new-emerging sun; how the clouds broke up in the welkin and the rains descended, what time the woods put forth their first green and beasts first prowled by ones and twos over the unnamed mountain-tops.”

  Jean broke off to observe:

  “How admirably it all brings out Virgil’s spirit, so serious and tender! The poet has put a cosmogony in an idyll. Antiquity called him the Virgin. The name well befits his Muse, and we should picture her as a Mnemosyne pondering over the works of men and the causes of things!”

  Meanwhile Garneret, with a more concentrated attention and his finger on the lines, was marshalling his ideas. The players were still at their game, and the little copper discs they used for throwing kept rolling close to his feet, and the canteen-woman passed backwards and forwards with her little barrel.

  “See this, Servien,” he said presently; “in these lines Virgil, or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model, has anticipated Laplace’s great hypothesis and Charles Lyell’s theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the plastic rind of the globe consolidating; then the formation of islands and continents; then the rains ceasing and first appearance of the sun, heretofore veiled by opaque clouds; then vegetable life manifesting itself before animal, because the latter cannot maintain itself and endure save by absorbing the elements of the former — —”

  At that moment a stir was apparent along the ramparts. The players broke off their game and the two friends lifted their heads. It was a train of wounded going by. Under the curtains of the lumbering ambulance-waggons marked with the Geneva red cross could be seen livid faces tied up in bloodstained bandages. Linesmen and mobiles tramped behind, their arms hanging in slings. The Nationals proffered them handfuls of tobacco and asked for news. But the wounded men only shook their heads and trudged stolidly on their way.

  “Aren’t we to have some fighting soon as well as other fellows?” cried Garneret.

  To which Servien growled back:

  “We must first put down the traitors and incapables who govern us, proclaim the Commune and march all together against the Prussians.”

  XXIX

  Hatred of the Empire which had left him to rot in a back-shop and a school class-room, love of the Republic that was to bring every blessing in its train had, since the proclamation of September 4, raised Jean Servien’s warlike enthusiasm to fever heat. But he soon wearied o
f the long drills in the Luxembourg gardens and the hours of futile sentry-go behind the fortifications. The sight of tipsy shopkeepers in a frenzy of foolish ardour, half drink, half patriotism, sickened him, and this playing at soldiers, tramping through the mud on an empty stomach, struck him as after all an odious, ugly business.

  Luckily Garneret was his comrade in the ranks, and Servien felt the salutary effect of that well-stored, well-ordered mind, the servant of duty and stern reality. Only this saved him from a passion, as futile in the past as it was hopeless in the future, which was assuming the dangerous character of a mental disease.

  He had not seen Gabrielle again for a long time. The theatres were shut; all he knew, from the newspapers, was that she was nursing the wounded in the theatre ambulance. He had no wish now to meet her.

  When he was not on duty, he used to lie in bed and read (it was a hard winter and wood was scarce), or else scour the boulevards and mix with the throng of idlers in search of news. One evening, early in January, as he was passing the corner of the Rue Drouot, his attention was attracted by the clamour of voices, and he saw Monsieur Bargemont being roughly handled by an ill-looking gang of National Guards.

  “I am a better Republican than any of you,” the big man was vociferating; “I have always protested against the infamies of the Empire. But when you shout: Vive Blanqui!… excuse me… I have a right to shout: Vive Jules Favre! excuse me, I have a perfect right — —” But his voice was drowned in a chorus of yells. Men in képis shook their fists at him, shouting: “Traitor! no surrender! down with Badinguet!” His broad face, distraught with terror, still bore traces of its erstwhile look of smug effrontery. A girl in the crowd shrieked: “Throw him in the river!” and a hundred voices took up the cry. But just at that moment the crowd swayed back violently and Monsieur Bargemont darted into the forecourt of the Mairie. A squad of police officers received him in their ranks and closed in round him. He was saved!

  Little by little the crowd melted away, and Jean heard a dozen different versions of the incident as it travelled with ever-increasing exaggeration from mouth to mouth. The last comers learned the startling news that they had just arrested a German general officer, who had sneaked into Paris as a spy to betray the city to the enemy with the connivance of the Bonapartists.

  The streets being once more passable, Jean saw Monsieur Bargemont come out of the Mairie. He was very red and a sleeve of his overcoat was torn away.

  Jean made up his mind to follow him.

  Along the boulevards he kept him in view at a distance, and not much caring whether he lost track of him or no; but when the Functionary turned up a cross street, the young man closed in on his quarry. He had no particular suspicion even now; a mere instinct urged him to dog the man’s heels. Monsieur Bargemont wheeled to the right, into a fairly broad street, empty and badly lighted by petroleum flares that supplied the place of the gas lamps. It was the one street Jean knew better than another. He had been there so often and often! The shape of the doors, the colour of the shop-fronts, the lettering on the sign-boards, everything about it was familiar; not a thing in it, down to the night-bell at the chemist’s and druggist’s, but called up memories, associations, to touch him. The footsteps of the two men echoed in the silence. Monsieur Bargemont looked round, advanced a few paces more and rang at a door. Jean Servien had now come up with him and stood beside him under the archway. It was the same door he had kissed one night of desperation, Gabrielle’s door. It opened; Jean took a step forward and Monsieur Bargemont, going in first, left it open, thinking the National Guard there was a tenant going home to his lodging. Jean slipped in and climbed two flights of the dark staircase. Monsieur Bargemont ascended to the third floor and rang at a door on the landing, which was opened. Jean could hear Gabrielle’s voice saying:

  “How late you are coming home, dear; I have sent Rosalie to bed;

  I was waiting up for you, you see.”

  The man replied, still puffing and panting with his exertions:

  “Just fancy, they wanted to pitch me into the river, those scoundrels! But never you mind, I’ve brought you something mighty rare and precious — a pot of butter.”

  “Like Little Red Ridinghood,” laughed Gabrielle’s voice. “Come in and you shall tell me all about it…. Hark! do you hear?”

  “What, the guns? Oh! that never stops.”

  “No, the noise of a fall on the stairs.”

  “You’re dreaming!”

  “Give me the candle, I’m going to look.”

  Monsieur Bargemont went down two or three steps and saw Jean stretched motionless on the landing.

  “A drunkard,” he said; “there’s so many of them! They were drunkards, those chaps who wanted to drown me.”

  He was holding his light to Jean’s ashy face, while Gabrielle, leaning over the rail, looked on:

  “It’s not a drunken man,” she said; “he is too white. Perhaps it is a poor young fellow dying of hunger. When you’re brought down to rations of bread and horseflesh — —”

  Then she looked more carefully under frowning brows, and muttered:

  “It’s very queer, it’s really very queer!”

  “Do you know him?” asked Bargemont.

  “I am trying to remember — —”

  But there was no need to try; already she had recalled it all — how her hand had been kissed at the gate of the little house at Bellevue.

  Running to her rooms, she returned with water and a bottle of ether, knelt beside the fainting man, and slipping her arm, which was encircled by the white band of a nursing sister, under his shoulders, raised Jean’s head. He opened his eyes, saw her, heaved the deepest sigh of love ever expelled from a human breast and felt his lids fall softly to again. He remembered nothing; only she was bending over him; and her breath had caressed his cheek. Now she was bathing his temples, and he felt a delicious sense of returning life. Monsieur Bargemont with the candle leant over Jean Servien, who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the man’s coarse red cheek within an inch of the actress’s delicate ear. He gave a great cry and a convulsive spasm shook his body.

  “Perhaps it is an epileptic fit,” said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing; he was catching cold standing on the staircase.

  She protested:

  “We cannot leave a sick man without doing something for him. Go and wake Rosalie.”

  He remounted the stairs, grumbling. Meantime Jean had got to his feet and was standing with averted head.

  She said to him in a low tone:

  “So you love me still?”

  He looked at her with an indescribable sadness:

  “No, I don’t love you any longer” — and he staggered down the stairs.

  Monsieur Bargemont reappeared:

  “It’s very curious,” he said, “but I can’t make Rosalie hear.”

  The actress shrugged her shoulders.

  “Look here, go away, will you? I have a horrid headache. Go away,

  Bargemont.”

  XXX

  She was Bargemont’s mistress! The thought was torture to Jean Servien, the more atrocious from the unexpectedness of the discovery. He both hated and despised the coarse ruffian whose sham good-nature did not impose on him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted, mean-spirited bully. That pimply face, those goggle eyes, that forehead with the swollen black vein running across it, that heavy hand, that ugly, vulgar soul, could it be —— It sickened him to think of it! And disgust was the thing of all others Servien’s delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. His morality was shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined perversions, romantic crimes. But Bargemont and his pot of butter!… Never to possess the most adorable of women, never to see her more, he was quite willing for the sacrifice still, but to know her in the arms of that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered life impossible.

  Absorbed in such thoughts, he found his way back instinctively to his own quarter of the city. Shells whistled over his head an
d burst with terrific reports. Flying figures passed him, their heads enveloped in handkerchiefs and carrying mattresses on their backs. At the corner of the Rue de Rennes he tripped over a lamp-post lying across the pavement beside a half-demolished wall. In front of his father’s shop he saw a huge hole. He went to open the door; a shell had burst it in and he could see the work-bench capsized in a dark corner.

  Then he remembered that the Germans were bombarding the left bank, and he felt a sudden impulse to roam the streets under the rain of iron.

  A voice hailed him, issuing from underground:

  “Is it you, my lad? Come in quick; you’ve given me a fine fright.

  Come down here; we are settled in the cellars.”

  He followed his father and found beds arranged in the underground chambers, while the main cellar served as kitchen and sitting-room. The bookbinder had a map, and was pointing out to the concierge and tenants the position of the relieving armies. Aunt Servien sat in a dim corner, her eyes fixed in a dull stare, mumbling bits of biscuit soaked in wine. She had no notion of what was happening, but maintained an attitude of suspicion.

  The little assemblage, which had been living this subterranean life since the evening of the day before, asked what news young Servien brought. Then the bookbinder resumed the explanations which as an old soldier and a responsible man he had been asked to give the company.

  “The thing to do is,” he continued, “to join hands with the Army

  of the Loire, piercing the circle of iron that shuts us in. Admiral

  La Roncière has carried the positions at Épinay away beyond

  Longjumeau — —”

  Then turning to Jean:

  “My lad, just find me Longjumeau on the map; my eyes are not what they were at twenty, and these tallow candles give a very poor light.”

  At that moment a tremendous explosion shook the solid walls and filled the cellar with dust. The women screamed; the porter went off to make his round of inspection, tapping the walls with his heavy keys; an enormous spider scampered across the vaulted roof.