“Little brother,” said he, “what relics did you and Catherine carry on the vicaire’s donkey? It was your breeches, wasn’t it, you gave to the devotees to kiss, like the Franciscan in the tale told by Henry Estienne?”
“Ah, Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied brother Ange with the air of a martyr suffering for the truth, “it was not my breeches but a foot of St. Eustatius.”
“I would have sworn it, were swearing not a sin,” cried the Abbé waving a drumstick. “These capuchins ferret you out saints that good writers of church history know nothing of. Neither Tillemont nor Fleury mention this St. Eustatius, to whom it was exceedingly wrong to dedicate a church in Paris, when there are so many saints, acknowledged by writers worthy of belief, who still await such an honour. The life of this Eustatius is a tissue of ridiculous fables. The same may be said of that of St. Catherine, who never existed save in the imagination of some malicious Byzantine monk. I will not be too severe upon her though, for she is the patron saint of writers and serves for a sign at good Monsieur Blaizot’s shop, which is the most delectable spot in the world.”
“I had also,” went on the little brother imperturbably, “a rib of St. Mary of Egypt.”
“Oh! oh! as to her,” cried the Abbé, throwing his bone across the room, “I rate her as a great saint, for in her life she gave a beautiful example of humility! You know, Madame,” he answered, pulling my mother by the sleeve, “that St. Mary of Egypt making a pilgrimage to the tomb of our Saviour was stopped by a deep river, and not having a farthing wherewith to pay the ferry-boat, she offerred her body in payment to the boatman. What do you say to that, my good lady?”
My mother first asked whether the story was really true. When she was assured that it was printed in books and painted on a window in the church of La Jussienne, she held it for true. “I think,” said she, “that one would needs be as great a saint as she to do as much without sinning. As for me, I would not risk it.”
“For my part,” said the Abbé, “in accordance with the more subtle theologians, I approve the conduct of this saint. She is a lesson to honest women who entrench themselves too overweeningly in the height of their virtue. There is a certain sensuality when one thinks about it in putting such a very high price on the flesh, and in guarding with such exceeding care what one ought to disdain. One sees matrons who think they have in themselves a treasure to protect, and who visibly exaggerate the interest taken in their person by God and the angels. They believe themselves a sort of natural Blessed Sacrament St. Mary of Egypt knew better. Although pretty and ravishingly well-made, she judged that there would be too much pride of the flesh in stopping on her blessed pilgrimage for a thing indifferent in itself, and which, far from being a precious jewel, is but an occasion for mortification. She suffered mortification, Madame, and in this manner with admirable humility she entered on the path of penitence, where she accomplished marvellous things.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé,” said my mother, “I fail to understand you. You are too learned for me.”
“This great saint,” said brother Ange, “is painted life-size in my convent chapel, and all her body is covered, by God’s grace, with long, thick hair. Copies of it are made, and I will bring you one which has been blessed, my good lady.”
My mother, touched, passed him the soup-bowl behind the master’s back. And the good brother sitting over the ashes, dipped his beard in the savoury-smelling soup.
“Now is the time,” said my father, “to uncork one of those bottles which I hold in reserve for great feast-days such as Christmas, Twelfth Night, and the feast of St. Lawrence; nothing is more pleasing than to drink good wine when one is quietly at home, sheltered from all intruders.”
He had scarcely pronounced these words when the door opened and a big man invaded the cookshop in a squall of wind and snow. “A Salamander! a Salamander!” he cried, and without taking notice of any one, he leant over the hearth and stirred the fire with his stick, to the great annoyance of brother Ange who, swallowing cinders and smuts in his soup, coughed till he nearly gave up the ghost. And the big man stirred the fire again, crying “A Salamander! — I see a Salamander!” till the troubled flame made his shadow waver on the ceiling in the shape of some great bird of prey.
My father was surprised, nay even shocked, at the ways of this visitor. But he knew how to control himself. He got up, his napkin under his arm, and approaching the chimney-corner he bent over the hearth, his hands on his hips.
When he had sufficiently considered his fire all scattered and brother Ange covered with ash:
“If your lordship will pardon me,” he said, “I see but a sinful monk and no Salamander.”
“And after all I do not regret it,” my father added. “For from all I have heard, it is an ugly beast, hairy and horned and with great claws.”
“What a mistake!” replied the dark man. “Salamanders are like women, or rather, like Nymphs, for they are of a perfect beauty. But it was silly of me to ask if you could see this one. One must be a philosopher to see a Salamander and I should scarcely think that there are any philosophers in this kitchen.”
“Possibly you are mistaken,” said Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard. “I am a doctor of theology and master of arts; I have studied to some extent the Greek and Latin moralists, whose maxims have fortified my soul in the vicissitudes of my life, and particularly have I applied Boethius as a local application for the evils of existence. And behold by my side Jacobus Tournebroche, my pupil, who knows by heart the Aphorisms of Publius Syrus.”
The unknown turned on the Abbé his yellow eyes, which shone strangely over his eagle nose, and excused himself with more politeness than his fierce looks gave promise of, not having immediately recognised a person of his merit.
“It is extremely probable,” he added, “that this Salamander has come for you or for your pupil. I saw her very plainly from the street, when passing the shop. She would have been more apparent if the fire had been brighter. That is why one should stir the fire vigorously when one thinks there is a Salamander in the chimney.”
At the first movement that the unknown made to stir the coals, brother Ange, in his anxiety, covered his soup with a corner of his robe and shut his eyes.
“Monsieur,” pursued the Salamander-seeking gentleman, “allow your pupil to approach the hearth, and tell us if he cannot see some resemblance to a woman above the flames.”
Just then, the smoke which went up under the hood of the chimney curled into a marked grace, making curves which might have been said to simulate a sinuous body had one’s attention been on the strain. I was not altogether fibbing therefore when I said that I could, perhaps, see something.
I had scarcely said so when the unknown, raising his abnormally long arm, struck me on the shoulder so roughly with his fist that I thought he must have broken my collar-bone.
Thereon, in a very gentle voice, he said, looking in the meanwhile with a benevolent air: —
“My child, it was necessary to make this strong impression on you that you may never forget that you have seen a Salamander. ’Tis a sign that you are destined to become a learned man, perhaps a Mage.
Your face, moreover, augurs well for your intelligence,”
“Monsieur,” said my mother, “he has all the learning that he wishes, and please God he will yet be an Abbé.”
Monsieur Jérôme Coignard added that I had drawn some profit from his lessons, and my father asked the stranger if he would not have something to eat.
“I have no need to eat,” said the man, “and it is easy for me to go for a year and even more without food, with the exception of a certain elixir, whose composition is known only to the philosophers. This faculty is not peculiar to me. It is common to all the elect, and we know that the illustrious Cardan abstained from all food for several years without being inconvenienced. On the contrary, his mind gained during that time a rare sharpness. At the same time I will eat of what you may offer me solely to do you pleasure.”
And he
took a seat without ceremony at our table. At the same time brother Ange silently pushed a stool between my chair and my master’s, and slipped into position to receive his share of the pasty of partridges that my mother had just served up.
The philosopher, having thrown his cloak over the back of his chair, allowed us to remark the diamond buttons in his coat. He sat there dreamily. The shadow of his nose shaded his mouth, and his fallen cheeks sank into his jaw. His gloomy mood affected us all.
My good master himself drank in silence. The only sound one heard was the little brother chewing his pasty.
Suddenly the philosopher said:
“The more I think of it the more persuaded I am that this Salamander came for this young man.” And he pointed at me with his knife. “Monsieur,” I answered him, “if Salamanders are half such as you say, this one does me great honour, and I am much obliged to her. But truth to tell, I rather guessed at her than saw her, and this first meeting has roused my curiosity without satisfying it.”
My good master was choking with the desire to speak his mind.
“Monsieur,” he burst out all at once to the philosopher, “I am fifty-one years of age; I am bachelor of arts and doctor of theology; I have read all the Greek and Latin authors who have survived the injury done by time and the evil done by man, and I have never seen a Salamander, whence I reasonably conclude that no such thing exists.”
“Excuse me,” said brother Ange, half-choked with partridge and with fright. “Excuse me. But unhappily Salamanders do exist. And a Jesuit father, whose name I forget, has written a treatise on these apparitions. I myself saw, in a place called St. Claude, in the house of some villagers, a Salamander in a chimney-corner, right up against the stew-pot. She had a cat’s head, a frog’s body, and a fish tail. I threw a potful of holy water over the beast and she immediately vanished into thin air with a fearful frizzling noise, and in the midst of an exceedingly acrid smoke which all but burnt my eyes out. And what I tell you is so true that for at least a whole week my beard smelt of burning, which proves more than all the rest the malign nature of this beast.”
“You are making fun of us, little brother,” said the Abbé, “your frog with a cat’s head is no more real than the nymph of this gentleman here. And moreover, it is a disgusting invention.”
The philosopher began to laugh.
Brother Ange had not been allowed, said he, to see the Salamanders as known to the wise, “When the nymphs of the fire see capuchins they turn their backs on them.”
“Oh! Oh!” said my father laughing loudly, “a nymph’s back is too good for a capuchin.”
And as he was in a good temper he passed a huge slice of pasty to the little brother.
My mother placed the roast in the middle of the table and took the opportunity of asking whether the Salamanders were good Christians, which she much doubted, having never heard that those who dwelt in fire praised the Lord.
“Madame,” replied the Abbé, “many theologians of the Society of Jesus have acknowledged the existence of a whole race of incubi and succubi, who are not demons properly speaking because they do not allow themselves to be put to rout by a sprinkling of holy water, and who do not belong to the church triumphant, for spirits of glory would never have tried to seduce a baker’s wife, as happened at Pérouse. But if you want my opinion, these are rather the unclean imaginings of a canting humbug than the views of a divine. We should abhor these ridiculous bedevilments and deplore that sons of the Church, born in the light, should form a less sublime idea of the world and of God than did a Plato or a Cicero in the shades of paganism. God, I venture to say, is more present in the Thoughts of Scipio than in those dark treatises on demonology, whose authors pronounce themselves to be Christians and Catholics.”
“Monsieur l’Abbé, mind what you say,” said the philosopher. “Your Cicero spoke fluently and easily, but his was a commonplace mind, and he was not far advanced in the sacred sciences. Have you ever heard speak of Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Table?”
“Monsieur,” said the Abbé, “I found a very ancient manuscript of ‘The Emerald Table’ in the library of my Lord Bishop of Séez, and I would have deciphered it sooner or later had not the chambermaid in the steward’s household fled to Paris to seek her fortune and made me climb into the coach with her. There was no sorcery in that, Master philosopher, and the charms that worked upon her were those of nature:
Non facit hoc verbis: facie tenerisque lacertis
Devovet et flavis nostra puella comis.”
“It is one more proof,” said the philosopher, “that women are great enemies of knowledge, and so the wise man should keep himself from all dealings with them.”
“Even in lawful marriage?” asked my father.
“Above all in lawful marriage,” replied the philosopher.
“Alas, what is left for your poor wise man when he is disposed to relax a little?” asked my father.
The philosopher replied:
“The Salamanders are left to them.”
At these words brother Ange raised a terrified nose above his plate.
“Do not speak thus, my good Monsieur,” he murmured, “in the name of all the saints of my order, do not say such things! And do not lose sight of the fact that a Salamander is no other than the devil, who, as one knows, clothes himself in divers forms, sometimes pleasing, when he succeeds in disguising his natural ugliness, at other times hideous, when he lets his true nature be seen.”
“It is for you to mind what you say, brother Ange,” replied the philosopher, “and since you fear the devil, do not anger him too much nor excite him by ill-considered speeches. You know that the Old Enemy, the Spirit that denies, still holds such power in the spiritual world that even God must reckon with him. I will go further: that God, Who fears him, has made him His steward. Beware, little brother, beware! They understand one another!”
On hearing this speech, the poor capuchin thought he heard and saw the devil in person, whom the unknown precisely resembled, with his fiery eyes, his hooked nose, his dark skin, and the whole of his long thin person.
His wits, already confounded, were finally overwhelmed by pious terror. Feeling himself in the grip of the Evil One, he began to tremble in every limb, slipped into his pocket all the good scraps he could collect, got up very quietly and made for the door, moving backwards, and murmuring exorcisms.
The philosopher took no notice of him. He pulled from his coat a little dogs’ eared parchment covered book, which he held out open to my good master and me. It was an old Greek text, full of abbreviations and linked letters, which at first sight looked to me like a volume of Grammary. But Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard, once he had donned his spectacles and held out the book at a just distance, began to read easily, characters, more like skeins of thread tangled by cat’s claws, than the plain and steady lettering of my St. John Chrysostom, where I learnt the tongue of Plato and the Gospel. When he had finished his reading:
“Monsieur,” said he, “this passage is to be understood in this way:
“‘Among the Egyptians, the instructed learn first of all the letters which are called epistolographic; secondly, the hieratic, which the hierogrammats use, and lastly, the hieroglyphic.’”
Then, pulling off his spectacles and waving them with an air of triumph:
“Ha! ha! Master philosopher,” he added, “you don’t catch me tripping. This is taken from the first book of the Stromata, whose author, Clement of Alexandria, is not inscribed in the martyrology, for divers reasons, learnedly set forth by His Holiness Benedict II, the principal of which is that this father frequently erred in matters of faith. This exclusion should not trouble him much, if you consider with what philosophic detachment he regarded martyrdom during his life. He preferred exile, and took care to spare the crime to his persecutors, for he was a very good man. He wrote with elegance, had a lively talent, his morals were unimpeachable, and even austere. He had an excessive fondness for allegories and for salads.”
/> The philosopher stretched an arm, which elongating itself prodigiously, at least to me it seemed so, crossed the whole length of the table, to recover the book from the hands of my learned master.
“Enough,” said he, replacing the Stromata in his pocket. “I see that you understand Greek. You have rendered the passage well enough, at any rate, in its vulgar and literal sense. I will make your fortune and that of your pupil. I shall employ you both in my house in translating Greek texts sent to me from Egypt.”
And turning to my father:
“I imagine, mine host, that you will consent to let me have your son that I may make a learned man and a man of substance of him. If it is too much to ask of your paternal affection to give him up altogether, I will maintain at my expense a scullion to take his place in your cook-shop.”
“Since your Excellency thus arranges it,” replied my father, “I will not stand in the way of his benefiting my son.”
“On the condition,” said my mother, “that it shall not be at the cost of his soul? You must promise me, Monsieur, that you are a good Christian?”
“Barbe,” said my father, “you are a saintly and worthy woman, but you force me to make excuses to his lordship for your want of manners, which comes less, truth to tell, from your disposition, which is good enough, than from your neglected education.”
“Let the good woman speak,” said the philosopher, “and let her make her mind easy, I am a very religious man.”
“That is a good thing,” said my mother. “We must worship the holy Name of God.”
“I worship all His Names, my good woman, for He has many. He is called Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Otheos, Athanatas, and Schyros, and many others.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 57