“‘You are irresistible,’ she said. ‘Do not think too badly of me.’
“She avowed her love in raptures inconceivable. One day she made me try on some bands and ruffles of lace, and finding they suited me to perfection, she begged me to keep them. I did not want to do so at all. But as she seemed irritated at my refusal, wherein she saw a slight to her love, I consented to take what she offered me for fear of offending her.
“My happiness lasted until I was replaced by an officer. I was filled with anger and spite, and hot for vengeance, I made it known to the governors of the college that I no longer repaired to the Bible d’Or lest I should see there sights likely to offend the modesty of a young cleric. Truth to tell, I had no need to congratulate myself on this trick. For Madame Pigoreau, hearing of my behaviour in regard to her, told every one that I had stolen from her some lace bands and ruffles. Her false accusation came to the ears of the governors, who had my box searched, and there they found the set, which was sufficiently valuable. They turned me out, and thus I learnt, after the fashion of Hippolytus and Bellerophon, the wiles and wickedness of woman. Finding myself in the street, with my clothes and oratorical text-books, I ran great risk of dying of hunger there when, abandoning my clerical collar, I offered myself to a Huguenot gentleman, who took me as secretary, and dictated to me his pamphlets against religion.”
“Ah! there you did wrong,” cried my father. “That was bad, Monsieur l’Abbé! An honest man should never lend a hand to such abominations. And for my part, ignorant as I am, and a mere workman, I cannot endure any taint of Colas’s cow.”
“You are right, mine host,” replied the Abbé.
“’Tis the worst passage in my life, and the one that I repent the most. But my man was a Calvinist; he only employed me to write against the Lutherans and the Socinians, whom he could not endure; and I assure you that he made me treat these heretics more hardly than the Sorbonne has ever done.”
“Amen!” said my father. “Lambs feed in peace while the wolves devour one another.”
The Abbé continued his recital:
“For the matter of that I did not remain long with that gentleman, who set more store on the letters of Ulrich von Hutten than on the orations of Demosthenes, and in whose house one drank but water. After that I tried various trades, none of which succeeded with me. I was successively pedlar, comedian, monk, and varlet. Then, donning my bands again, I became secretary to the bishop of Séez, and edited the catalogue of precious MSS. shut away in his library. The catalogue forms two volumes, in folio, which he has placed in his collection, gilt-edged, and bound in red morocco bearing his arms. I venture to say it is a good piece of work.
“It rested entirely with me whether I should grow old in the service of Monseigneur in study and in peace. But I loved a chambermaid in the steward’s household. Do not be too hard on me. Dark-skinned, full of life, fresh and plump, St. Pachomius himself must have loved her. One day she took coach, and went to seek her fortune in Paris. I followed her there, but I did not do as well for myself as she did. On her recommendation I entered the service of Madame de St. Ernest, a dancer at the Opera, who, knowing my particular talent, ordered me to write, under her prompting, a lampoon against Mademoiselle Davilliers, against whom she had a grudge. I was a good secretary, and well did I merit the fifty écus which had been promised me. The book was printed at Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey, with an allegorical frontispiece, and Mademoiselle Davilliers received the first copy at the very moment when she was going on the stage to sing the principal air in Armide. Rage made her voice hoarse and uncertain. She sang out of tune, and was hissed. Her part played, she ran in her powder and panniers to the stage-manager, who could refuse her nothing. She flung herself at his feet in tears, and cried for vengeance. It was soon known that the stab came from Madame de St. Ernest.
“Questioned, pressed, menaced, she denounced me, and I was thrown into the Bastille, where I lay four years. I found some consolation in reading Boethius and Cassiodorus.
“Since then I have kept a public writer’s stall at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and have put at the disposal of amorous servant-girls a pen which should rather paint the illustrious men of Rome, or annotate the writings of the Fathers. I make two liards for a love-letter, and it is a trade by which I die rather than live. But I do not forget that Epictetus was a slave and Pyrrho a gardener.
“A moment ago, by great luck, I got an ecu for an anonymous letter. It was two days since I had eaten anything. So I promptly went in search of an eating-house. I saw from the street your illuminated sign, and the fire of your hearth, which flickered joyously on the pane. I smelt a delicious odour on the threshold. I entered. My good host, you know my life.”
“I perceive it is that of an honest man,” said my father, “and excepting the matter of Colas’s cow, there is nothing much to take amiss. Your hand. We are friends. What is your name?”
“Jérôme Coignard, doctor of theology, and bachelor of arts.”
III
THE wonderful thing in human affairs is the linking together of effects and causes. Monsieur Jérôme Coignard might well say so: when we come to consider the strange succession of incident and consequence wherein our destinies clash, we are bound to recognise that God in His perfection is not wanting in wit nor fancy, nor in the comic spirit, but, on the contrary, that He excels in imbroglio as in all else, and that after having inspired Moses, David, and the Prophets, He had deigned to inspire Monsieur Le Sage and the playwrights of the booth. He could have dictated to them some very diverting harlequinades. Thus, for instance, I became a Latinist because brother Ange was taken by the guard and put in the ecclesiastical prison for having knocked down a cutler in the arbour of the Petit Bacchus. Monsieur Jérôme Coignard fulfilled his promise. He gave me lessons, and finding me docile and intelligent, he took pleasure in teaching me ancient literature. In a few years he made me a fairly good Latinist.
I cherish his memory with a gratitude which will only end with my life. The obligation he laid me under may be conceived when I say that he left nothing undone that might help to shape my affections and my soul along with my intelligence. He would repeat to me the Maxims of Epictetus, the Homilies of St. Basil, and Boethius, — his consolations. He exhibited to me, in many a fine passage, the philosophy of the Stoics; but he only displayed it in its sublimity to abase it the lower before the philosophy of the Christian. His faith remained intact above the ruins of his fondest illusions and of his most rightful hopes. His weaknesses, his mistakes, and his faults — and he did not try to conceal them nor to lend them colouring — had not shaken his trust in Divine goodness. And to understand him well you must realise that he had care of his eternal welfare on occasions when he seemed apparently to care the least for it. He inculcated in me principles of enlightened piety. He exerted himself to apprentice me to virtue — to make it, so to speak, homely and familiar to me by examples drawn from the life of Zeno.
That I might learn of the dangers of vice he drew his arguments from a source nearer to hand, confiding to me that, through having loved wine and women over much, he had had to renounce the honour of being raised to a collegiate chair, the long robe, the doctor’s cap.
To these exceptional merits he joined a constancy and an assiduity, and he gave his lessons with a punctuality that one would not have expected from a man given up, as he was, to every caprice of a wandering life, and driven about incessantly by the stresses of an existence less dignified than picaresque. This zeal was the result of his kind-heartedness, and emanated also from the liking he had for our worthy street, the Rue St. Jacques, where he found the wherewithal to satisfy at once the desires of body and mind. Having given me some profitable lesson while enjoying a succulent dinner, he would go the round of the Petit Bacchus and of the Image of St. Catherine, finding thus united in the little corner of earth, which was his Paradise, good wine and books.
He had become an assiduous visitor of Monsieur Blaizot the bookseller, who al
ways welcomed him, notwithstanding that he turned over all the books without ever buying one. And it was a wonderful sight to see my master at the back of the shop, his nose poked into some little books new come from Holland, raising his head to hold forth according to the occasion with the same smiling and overflowing knowledge, whether concerning the plans for universal monarchy attributed to the late king, or the amorous adventures of a financier and an actress. Monsieur Blaizot never tired of listening to him. This Monsieur Blaizot was a little dry old man, neat in his person, in maroon coat and breeches and grey worsted stockings. I admired him immensely, and I could think of nothing more delightful in the world than to sell books as he did at the Image of St. Catherine.
A certain memory helped to indue Monsieur Blaizot’s shop for me with a mysterious charm. It was there that when very young I saw, for the first time, a woman unclothed. I see her still. It was Eve, in a pictured Bible. She had a round stomach and rather short legs, and she was conversing with the serpent in a Dutch landscape. The possessor of this print inspired me thenceforward with a consideration which showed no falling off when, thanks to Monsieur Coignard, I acquired the taste for books.
By the time I was sixteen I knew a good deal of Latin and a little Greek. Said my good master to my father:
“Do you not think, mine host, that it is improper that a young Ciceronian should still wear the clothes of a scullion?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” answered my father.
“It is very true,” said my mother, “our son should have a dimity coat. He is pleasing in his appearance, he has good manners, and is well taught. He will do honour to his clothes.”
My father remained thoughtful for a minute, and then asked, would a dimity coat look well on a cook? But Abbé Coignard represented to him that, fostered by the Muses, I could never become a cook, and that the time was near when I should wear the clerical bands.
My father sighed when he thought that I should never, when he had gone, carry the banner of the Parisian Confraternity of Cooks.
And my mother’s eyes ran over with pride and joy at the thought of her son in the church.
The first effect of my dimity coat was to give me self-confidence and to encourage me to get a more exact notion of women than that given me once on a time by Monsieur Blaizot’s Eve. I thought, not unreasonably for the purpose, of Jeannette the violplayer, and Catherine the lace-maker, whom I saw pass the cook-shop twenty times a day, showing in wet weather a slim ankle and a little foot, whose point skipped from paving-stone to stone. Jeannette was not as pretty as Catherine, neither was she so young nor so smart in her attire. She was a Savoyard, and dressed her head en marmotte with a checked kerchief which hid her hair. But it must be said for her that she put on no airs and graces, and understood what was wanted of her even before one spoke. This quality suited my bashfulness down to the ground. One night in the porch of St. Benoît-le-Bétourné, which is furnished with stone seats, she taught me what I did not know as yet, and what she had known for long enough. But I was not as grateful for it as I ought to have been, and I only longed to bring to the service of others who were prettier the knowledge she had instilled into me. I must say, as an excuse for my ingratitude, that Jeannette the viol-player put no greater price on her lessons than I myself had paid; and she was prodigal of her favours to every scamp in the neighbourhood.
Catherine had more reserve in her ways. I was much afraid of her, and did not dare tell her how pretty I thought her. What made me doubly shy was that she made fun of me continually, and lost no occasion to tease me. She made game of me on account of my smooth chin. I blushed for it, and wished the earth would cover me. I assumed a dark and aggrieved air when I met her. I pretended to despise her, but truth to tell, she was far too pretty for any such despite.
IV
THAT night, the night of the Epiphany and the nineteenth anniversary of my birth, while the heavens shed along with the melted snow a relentless cold which pierced one to the bone, and an icy wind set the sign of the Reine Pédauque creaking, a clear fire, scented with goose-fat, blazed in the cook-shop, and the soup-bowl smoked on the cloth round which were seated Monsieur Jérôme Coignard, my father and myself. My mother, as her habit was, was standing behind the master of the house, ready to serve.
He had already filled the Abbe’s basin when, the door opening, we saw brother Ange, very pale, his nose red and his beard dripping. In his surprise my father raised his soup-ladle nearly up to the smoked beams of the ceiling.
My father’s surprise was easily explained. Brother Ange who once before had disappeared for six months after knocking down the lame cutler, had this time stayed away two whole years without anything having been heard of him. He had gone away one spring with a donkey laden with relics, and the worst of the matter was that he had taken Catherine along with him, dressed as a nun. It was not known what had become of them, but there had been rumours at the Petit Bacchus that the little brother and the little sister had come in conflict with the authorities between Tours and Orleans.
Without counting that one of the vicaires of St. Benoît declared with much outcry that this gallows-thief of a capuchin had stolen his donkey.
“What,” exclaimed my father, “isn’t this rascal in the deepest of dungeons? Then there is no longer justice in the kingdom.” But brother Ange repeated the Benedicite and made the sign of the Cross over the bowl of soup.
“Hello there!” my father went on. “A truce to your grimaces, my fine monk! And now confess that you have spent in prison at least one of the two years that haven’t seen your Beelzebub’s face in the parish. The Rue St. Jacques was the honester for it, and the whole quarter more respectable. Look at him, the shameless fellow, who leads astray his neighbour’s donkey and every man’s hack!”
“Perhaps,” replied brother Ange, his eyes downcast and his hands in his sleeves, “perhaps, Maître Léonard, you wish to refer to Catherine, whom I had the happiness to convert and to turn to a better life. So much so that she ardently longed to follow me along with the relics that I bore, and to accompany me on blessed pilgrimages to the Black Virgin of Chartres? I agreed on condition that she should don a religious habit. Which she did without a murmur.”
“Hold your tongue,” said my father, “you are a deboshed rogue. You have no respect for your cloth. Go back whence you came, and go and look if you like, out in the street, whether the Reine Pédauque has any chilblains.”
But my mother signed to the brother to sit down in the chimney corner, which he quietly did.
“We must forgive much to capuchins, for they sin without malice,” said the Abbé.
My father begged Monsieur Coignard to talk no more of the brood, for their very name sent the blood to his head.
“Maître Léonard,” said the Abbé, “philosophy is conducive to clemency. For my part I freely absolve ragamuffins, rogues and all wretched people. And I bear no ill-will even to the wealthy, though in their case there is much frowardness. And if you had mixed as I have done with people of repute, Maître Léonard, you would know they are worth no more than others, and that they are often less agreeable to meet. When I was with the bishop of Séez I sat at the third table, and two attendants clad in black stood at my elbow: Constraint and Ennui.”
“It must be owned,” said my mother, “that Monseigneur’s valets bore tiresome names. Why didn’t they call them Champagne, Olive, or Frontin, according to custom?”
The Abbé continued:
“It is true that certain people easily accommodate themselves to the drawbacks of living among the great. At the second table of the bishop of Séez sat a certain Canon, a very polite man, who remained on a formal footing until the day of his death. Learning that he was extremely ill Monseigneur went to see him in his extremity. ‘Alas,’ said the Canon, ‘I ask pardon of your lordship for unavoidably dying in your presence.’
‘Go on, go on, do not mind me,’ replied Monseigneur kindly.”
At this moment my mother brought in t
he roast, which she placed on the table with a gesture so imbued with homely gravity that my father was quite moved, and cried out brusquely, his mouth full: “Barbe, you are a saintly and worthy woman.”
“Madame,” said my good master, “is indeed comparable to the virtuous woman of Holy Writ. She is a spouse such as God loves.”
“Thanks be to God,” replied my mother, “I have never failed in the fidelity I swore to my husband Léonard Menétrier and now that the worst is over assuredly I reckon on not failing in it until the hour of my death. I only wish that he had been as faithful to me as I to him.”
“Madame, I knew at first sight that you were a good woman,” the Abbé ran on, “for I feel in your presence a peace which is more of Heaven than earth.”
My mother, who was simple but not foolish, well understood what he meant, and answered that had he but known her twenty years before he would have found her very different from what she had become in this cook-shop where her good looks had been lost under the fiery heat of the spit and the steam from the smoking bowls. And now, being roused, she related how the baker at Auneau found her sufficiently to his taste to offer her cakes every time she passed his bakehouse. She added, with spirit, that for the matter of that there is neither maid nor woman so ugly but that she can do wrong if the fancy take her.
“The good woman is right,” said my father; “I remember when I was apprenticed at the cook-shop of the Oie Royale, near the gate of St. Denis, my master, who was in those days banner-bearer to the confraternity, as I am now, saying to me: ‘I shall never be cuckold, my wife is too ugly.’ This speech gave me the notion of doing what he thought impossible. I succeeded at the first attempt, one morning when he was at La Vallée. He spoke truth: his wife was very plain, but not without wit, and she was not without gratitude.”
At this anecdote my mother lost her temper altogether, saying that that was not the kind of talk a father of a family should indulge in with his wife and son should he wish to keep their respect. Monsieur Jérôme Coignard seeing her quite red with anger, turned the conversation with adroit kindliness, suddenly questioning brother Ange who, his hands in his sleeves, was sitting humbly in the kitchen corner:
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