“Be quiet, Léonard,” said my mother, “Madame d’Anquetil’s behaviour is not known to you, and I must have spoken well enough to the lady, for she replied:
“‘Be at peace, Madame Menétrier, I will act for your son as for my own; count on my zeal.’ And you know, Léonard, that before two months had elapsed we received the assurance that our Jacquot could return to Paris without any anxiety.”
We supped with good appetite. My father asked me whether I counted on remaining in Monsieur d’Astarac’s service. I replied that after the ever-to-be-regretted death of my good master I had no wish to find myself with that cruel Mosaïde and with a gentleman who paid his servants only in fine speeches. My father obligingly invited me to turn his spit as before.
“Latterly I have given the employment to brother Ange, Jacquot,” he told me, but he acquitted himself less well than Miraut and even than you. Will you not take your place on the stool again in the chimney-corner, my son?”
My mother who, simple as she was, did not lack judgment, shrugged her shoulders and said:
“Monsieur Blaizot, who is a bookseller at the sign of St. Catherine, has need of an assistant. That employment, my son, would fit you like a glove. You have gentle ways and good manners. That is what is suitable for the selling of Bibles.” I went at once and offered myself to Monsieur Blaizot, who took me into his service.
My misfortunes had rendered me wise. I was not discouraged by the humbleness of my task, and I fulfilled it with exactitude, handling the featherbrush and the broom to my patron’s satisfaction.
My duty was to pay a call on Monsieur d’Astarac. I presented myself at the great alchemist’s the last Sunday in November after the mid-day dinner. The distance is great from the rue St. Jacques to the Cross of Les Sablons, and the almanack does not lie when it tells us that the days are short in November. When I arrived at La Roule night had fallen, and a dark fog covered the deserted road. I meditated sadly in the gloom.
“Alas!” I said to myself, “it will soon be a year since for the first time I took the same road in the snow in the company of my good master, who rests now on a vine-covered hill in a village of Burgundy. He fell asleep in the hope of eternal life. And that is a hope it befits us to share with so learned and wise a man. God keep me from ever doubting the immortality of the soul. But one must own to one’s self that all that belongs to a future existence and to another world appertains to those imperceptible truths which one believes without being affected by them, and which have neither taste nor savour, in such wise that one swallows them without being aware of them. For my part, I am not consoled by the thought of one day meeting Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard once more in Paradise. Surely he would not be recognisable, and his speeches would not have the charm they borrowed from circumstances.”
While making these reflections I saw before me a great light spreading over half the sky; the fog was reddened with it right over my head, and the light palpitated at its source. A heavy smoke mingled with the vapours of the air. I feared at once that it was the château d’Astarac on fire. I hastened my steps, and I soon saw that my fears were but too well-founded. I perceived the Calvary of Les Sablons opaquely black against a torrent of flame and I saw, nearly at the same time, the château whose windows all blazed as if for a sinister revel. The little green door was burst open. Shadows moved in the park and whispered in horror. They were the inhabitants of the town of Neuilly who had hastened thither out of curiosity and to bring help. Some were throwing jets of water from a pump, which fell like glittering rain in the blazing furnace. A thick column of smoke rose above the château. A rain of sparks and cinders fell around me, and I soon perceived that my clothes and hands were blackened with them. I thought with despair that this dust which filled the air was the remains of so many beautiful books and precious manuscripts which had been my master’s joy, the remains perhaps of Zozimus the Panipolitan, at which we had worked together during the noblest hours of my life.
I had seen Monsieur l’Abbé Coignard die. This time it was his very soul, his shining and gentle soul, that I thought I saw reduced to powder with the queen of libraries. I felt that a part of myself was destroyed at the same time. The wind which was rising added strength to the fire, and the flames roared like hungry throats. Seeing a man from Neuilly, blacker than I was myself, and wearing but his waistcoat, I asked him if they had saved Monsieur d’Astarac and his people.
“No one,” said he, “has come out of the château except an old Jew, who was seen to escape with some bundles towards the marshes. He lived in the keeper’s cottage on the river, and was hated for his origin and for the crimes of which he was suspected. Some children pursued him, and in flying he fell into the Seine. He was fished out dead, holding to his heart a grammary and six gold cups. You can see him on the bank in his yellow robe. He is awful, with open eyes.”
“Ah,” I replied, “his end was due to his crimes. But his death will not give me back the best of masters, whom he assassinated. Tell me again, has no one seen Monsieur d’Astarac?”
At the moment when I asked this question I heard one of the restless shadows near me give a terror-stricken cry:
“The roof is going to fall in.”
Then I recognised with horror the tall black form of Monsieur d’Astarac running along the gutter. The alchemist cried in a ringing voice:
“I rise on the wings of the flame into the abode of divine life.”
He spoke: all at once the roof gave way with a horrible crash, and flames high as mountains enveloped the friend of the Salamanders.
XXIV
THERE is no love can outlast absence. The memory of Jael, cruel at first, softened little by little, and there remained to me but a vague restlessness of which she was not even the unique object.
Monsieur Blaizot waxed old. He withdrew to Montrouge, to his little house in the fields, and sold me his stock-in-trade in consideration of an allowance for life. Becoming, in his place, sworn bookseller at the sign of the Image de Sainte Catherine, I made my father and mother retire there, for their cook-shop had not smoked for some time past. I had a liking for my modest shop and I was solicitous to deck it. I nailed old Venetian maps on the doors, and these ornamented with allegorical engravings, which make an odd and old-world ornamentation no doubt, but pleasant to friends of the classics. My knowledge, on the condition that I took care to hide it, did me no harm in my business. It would have stood more in my light had I been, like Marc-Michel Rey, bookseller and publisher, and obliged as he was to earn my living at the expense of public stupidity.
I stock, as they say, the classic authors, and it is a commodity which has its price in this learned rue St. Jacques, whose antiquities and illustrious occupants it would give me pleasure one day to write of. The first Parisian printer set up his venerable presses here. The Cramoisys, whom Guy Patin calls the kings of the rue St. Jacques, sent forth from here the collected works of our historians. Before the College of France rose up, the king’s readers Pierre Danès, François Votable, and Ramus, gave their lessons in a shed where resounded the quarrels of porters and washerwomen. And how can we forget Jean de Meung, who, in a little house in this street, composed the Romaunt of the Rose?
I have the run of all the house, which is old, and dates at least from the Gothic period, as appears in the beams of wood which cross on the narrow façade, in the two projecting storeys, and in the overhanging roof laden with moss-grown tiles. It has but one window on each floor. The one on the first floor is full of flowers in all seasons and furnished with strings on which convolvulus and nasturtium climb in the spring-time. My good mother plants and waters them.
It is the window of her room. One can see her from the street, reading her prayers from a book printed in large type, above the sign of Sainte Catherine. Years, devotion, and maternal pride have given her an air of dignity, and to see her waxen face under the high white coif one would swear it was that of a rich bourgeoise.
My father, with advancing years, has also acqui
red a certain dignity. As he likes fresh air and movement I occupy him in carrying the books to town. At first I had employed brother Ange, but he asked for alms of my clients, made them kiss relics, stole their wine, caressed their maid-servants, and left half my books in all the gutters of the neighbourhood, I withdrew his appointment as soon as possible. But my good mother, whom he makes believe he possesses secrets wherewith to gain heaven, gives him soup and wine. He is not a bad man and he has ended by inspiring me with a sort of attachment.
Many savants and some of our wits frequent my shop. And it is the great advantage of my position to be put in daily intercourse with people of worth. Among those who come oftenest to turn over the leaves of the new books and converse familiarly with one another, are historians as learned as Tillemont, ecclesiastical orators who equal Bossuet and even Bourdaloue in eloquence; poets, comic and tragic; theologians in whom pureness of morals is joined to solidity of doctrine; esteemed authors of Spanish romances; geometricians and philosophers capable, like Monsieur Descartes, of measuring and weighing universes. I admire them, I relish their lightest words. But none, to my thinking, equals in genius the good master I had the misfortune to lose on the Lyons road; none recalls that incomparable elegance of thought, the sweet sublimity, that amazing richness of a soul always overflowing and pouring forth like the urns of those personified rivers one sees in marble in the gardens; none offers me that inexhaustible wellspring of knowledge and morals where I had the happiness to slake the thirst of my youth; none gives me even the shadow of that grace, that wisdom, that vigour of thought which shone in Monsieur Jérôme Coignard. Him I hold for the kindliest soul that ever blossomed on this earth.
THE OPINIONS OF JEROME COIGNARD
Translated by Mrs. Wilfred Jackson
The Opinions of Jerome Coignard was first published in 1893 in France and two decades later it was translated and released in Britain. The work is a companion piece to France’s novel At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque, consisting of a series of fictionalised essays attributed to the controversial priest Jerome Coignard. Jacques Tournebroche (Menetrier) returns as a prominent figure in this novel, which details philosophical discussions often held at an old bookstore near where they both reside. Coignard is an intriguing figure, representing a combination of philosophical positions, while also managing to appear cohesive as a character and a great thinker. While often employing irony, he is shown to be incredibly harsh in debunking notions he believes to be illusions. He launches satirical attacks on the problems with the government and Church, while somehow being able to also reaffirm aspects of faith.
The essays address a plethora of issues and topics, including the priest’s dismal view on the nature of humankind and its inability to evolve or progress. One intriguing discussion is focused on the notion of justice: a concept and ideal which has plagued philosophers since Plato’s The Republic. France explores how morality becomes established, the inadequate form that justice takes in society, and the faulty means through which this justice is supposedly enacted.
CONTENTS
I. MINISTERS OF STATE
II. SAINT ABRAHAM
III. MINISTERS OF STATE (concluded)
IV. THE AFFAIR OF THE MISSISSIPPI
V. EASTER EGGS
VI . THE NEW MINISTRY
VII. THE NEW MINISTRY (concluded)
VIII. THE CITY MAGISTRATES
IX. SCIENCE
X. THE ARMY
XI. THE ARMY (continued)
XII. THE ARMY (concluded)
XIII. ACADEMIES
XIV. SEDITION-MONGERS
XV. REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES
XVI. HISTORY
XVII. MONSIEUR NICODEME
XVIII. JUSTICE
XIX. THE BEADLE’S STORY
XX. JUSTICE (continued)
XXI. JUSTICE (continued)
XXII. JUSTICE (concluded)
TO OCTAVE MIRBEAU
THERE is no need for me to tell over again here the life of Monsieur l’Abbé Jérôme Coignard, professor of oratory at the college of Beauvais, librarian to Monseigneur de Séez, Sagiensis episcopi bibliothecarius solertissimus, as his epitaph has it, later on secretary at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, and finally curator of that queen of libraries (the Astaracian), whose loss is for ever to be deplored. He perished, assassinated, on the Lyons road, by a Jew cabalist of the name of Mosaïde (Judæa manu nefandissima), leaving several incomplete works, and the memory of his admirable familiar conversation. All the circumstances of his odd existence and tragic end have been reported by his disciple Jacques Menétrier, called Tournebroche, or Turnspit because he was the son of a cook in the Rue St. Jacques. This Tournebroche professed for him whom it was his habit to speak of as his good master, a lively and tender admiration. “His was the kindliest soul,” said he, “that ever blossomed on this earth.” Modestly and faithfully he edited the memoirs of the Abbé, who lives again in the work as Socrates does in the Memorabilia of Xenophon.
Observant, exact, and charitable, he drew a portrait full of life and instinct with a loving faithfulness. It is a work that makes one think of those portraits of Erasmus by Holbein that one sees in the Louvre, at Bâle, or at Hampton Court, the delicacy of which never wearies the sense of appreciation. In short, he left us a masterpiece. It will cause surprise no doubt, that he was not careful to have it printed. Moreover, he could have published it himself, for he set up as a bookseller in the Rue St. Jacques at the sign of the Image de Sainte Catherine, where he succeeded Blaizot.
Perhaps, living as he did among books, he feared to add, if it were but a few leaves, to the horrible hoard of blackened paper that mildews unseen on the book-stalls. We may share his disgust when we pass the twopenny box on the quays, where the sun and the rain slowly consume pages written for immortality. Like those pathetic death’s-heads that Bossuet sent to the Abbot of la Trappe to divert his solitude, here are subjects for reflection fitted to make the man of letters conceive the vanity of writing. I may say, for my part, that between the Pont Royal and the Pont Neuf, I have felt that vanity to the full. I should incline to believe that Abbé Coignard’s pupil never printed his work because, formed by so good a master, he judged sanely of literary glory, and esteemed it at its worth, and that is exactly nothing. He knew it for uncertain, capricious, subject to every vicissitude, and dependent on circumstances themselves petty and wretched. Seeing his contemporaries, ignorant, abusive, and mediocre, he saw no reason to hope that their posterity would suddenly become learned, balanced, and reliable. He merely divined that the Future, a stranger to our quarrels, would accord indifference in default of justice. We are well-nigh assured that, great and small, the Future will unite us in oblivion and cover us in a peaceful uniformity of silence. But if, by some extraordinary chance, that hope deceives us, if future generations keep some memory of our name and writings, we can foresee that they will only make acquaintance with our thoughts by the ingenious labour of gloss and super-gloss which alone perpetuates works of genius through the ages. The long life of a masterpiece is assured only at the price of quite pitiable intellectual hazards, in which the gabble of pedants reinforces the ingenious word-twisting of aesthetic souls. I am not afraid to say that, at the present day, we do not understand a single line of the Iliad, of the Divine Comedy, in the sense primitively attaching to it. To live is to change, and the posthumous life of our written-down thoughts is not free from the rule: they only continue to exist on condition that they become more and more different from what they were when they issued from our minds. Whatsoever in future may be admired in us, will have become altogether alien from us.
Possibly Jacques Tournebroche, whose simplicity we know, did not put himself all these questions in reference to the little book under his hand. It would be an insult to think that he had an exaggerated opinion of himself. —
I think I know him. I have meditated over his book. Everything he says, and everything he doesn’t say, betrays an exquisite modesty of soul. — If, however, he was no
t without knowledge of his talent, he knew also that it is precisely talent that is least pardonable. In people of note we tolerate easily bareness of soul and falseheartedness. We are quite content that they should be bad or cowardly, and their good-luck even does not raise over much envy so long as it is not merited. Mediocrities are at once raised up, and carried along, by the surrounding nobodies who are honoured in them. The success of a commonplace person disturbs nobody. Rather, it secretly flatters the mob. But there is an insolence of talent which is expiated by dumb hatred, and calumnies not loud but deep. If Jacques Tournebroche consciously renounced the painful honour of irritating the foolish and the wicked by eloquent writing, one can only admire his good sense, and hold him the worthy scholar of a master who knew mankind. However it may be, the manuscript of Jacques Tournebroche, being left unpublished, was lost for more than a century.
I had the extraordinary good luck to find it again at a general broker’s on the Boulevard Montparnasse, who spreads behind the dirtied panes of his shop, croix du Lis, médailles de Sainte-Hélène, and decorations de Juillet, without a suspicion that he is furnishing the generations a melancholy lesson on peacemaking. This manuscript was published under my care in 1893, under the title: La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque. I refer the reader to it. He will find there more novelties than he looks for ordinarily in an old book. But it is not with that book that we have to do here.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 76