Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  “Is Queen Marguerite still in the land of the living?”

  And M. Paillot replied that assuredly one morning she would be found dead in her bed, living shut up alone at her age. Meanwhile, he dreaded her setting his house on fire. This was her neighbour’s constant fear. He lived in terror lest the old lady should burn down her wooden house and his along with it.

  Madame Houssieu interested M. de Terremondre greatly. He was inquisitive about all that Queen Marguerite, as he called her, said and did. At the last visit which he had paid to her, she had shown him a bad Restoration engraving representing the Duchess of Angoulême pressing to her heart the portraits of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette enclosed in a medallion. This engraving, set in a black frame, hung in the ground-floor sitting-room. Showing it to him, Madame Houssieu said:

  “That’s the portrait of Queen Marguerite, who long ago lived in this house.”

  And M. de Terremondre asked himself how a portrait of Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France had, even by the dullest of minds, been taken for a portrait of Margaret of Scotland. He meditated on it for a month.

  Then one day he exclaimed, as he entered Paillot’s shop:

  “I’ve got it!”

  And he explained to his friend the bookseller the very plausible reasons for this extraordinary confusion.

  “Listen to me, Paillot! Margaret of Scotland, mistaken for Marguerite Larrivée, is confused with Marguerite of Valois, Duchess of Angouleme, and this princess is, in her turn, confused with the Duchess of Angouleme, daughter of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette, Marguerite Larrivée — Margaret of Scotland — Marguerite, Duchess of Angouleme — the Duchess of Angouleme.

  “I am rather proud of having found that out, Paillot. Tradition should always be taken into account. But when we own Queen Marguerite’s house, we will furbish up the memory of that good Philippe Tricouillard a little.”

  Hard upon this declaration Dr. Fornerol entered the shop with the wonted impetuosity of that indefatigable visitor of the sick, who brought with him hope and comfort. Gustave Fornerol was a fat, moustachioed man. Possessed in his wife’s right of a small country estate, he affected the fashions of a country proprietor and paid his visits in a soft hat, a hunting waistcoat and leather leggings. Although his practice was exclusively among the lower middle class and the rural population of the suburbs, he was considered the most skilful practitioner in the town.

  Friendly with Paillot, as with all his fellow-townsmen, he was not in the habit of paying useless visits to him, nor of wasting his time gossiping in the shop. This time, however, he sank down on one of the three rush-bottomed chairs which, set in the old-book corner, had gained for Paillot’s shop the reputation for a hospitality at once literary, learned, cultured, and academic.

  He puffed, waved a good-day to Paillot with his hand, bowed with some deference to M. de Terremondre, and said:

  “I am tired.... Well! Paillot, were you pleased with the show yesterday? What did Madame Paillot think of the play and the actors?”

  The bookseller did not commit himself. He considered that it is wise for a tradesman to express no opinions in his shop. Besides, he went to the theatre»only en famille, and that but seldom. But Dr. Fornerol, whose position as medical officer to the theatre procured him free passes, never missed a performance.

  A travelling company had given la Maréchale the night before, with Pauline Giry in the leading part.

  “She is always capital, is Pauline Giry,” said the doctor.

  “That’s the general opinion,” said the bookseller.

  “She isn’t as young as she once was,” said M. de Terremondre, who was turning over the leaves of volume xxxviii of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages.

  “By Jove, no!” answered the doctor. “You know that Giry isn’t her real name?”

  “Her real name is Girou,” answered M. de Terremondre authoritatively. “I knew her mother, Clémence Girou. Fifteen years ago Pauline Giry was dark and very pretty.”

  And the three of them, in the old-book corner, set to work to reckon the actress’s age. But as they were calculating from doubtful or incorrect data, they only reached contradictory, or sometimes even absurd, conclusions, and with these they were by no means satisfied.

  “I am worn out,” said the doctor. “You all went to bed after the theatre. But I was called up at midnight to go to an old farmer on Duroc hill, who was suffering from strangulated hernia. Says his man to me:— ‘He has brought up everything he can. He harps on one note. He is going to die.’ I have the horse put in and I spin out to Duroc hill, over yonder, right at the end of the Faubourg de Tramayes. I find my man a-bed and howling. Corpse-like face, stercoraceous vomiting. Very good! His wife says to me:— ‘It’s in his inside that it takes him.’”

  “She’s forty-seven, is Pauline Giry,” said M. de Terremondre.

  “It’s quite possible,” said Paillot.

  “At least forty-seven,” answered the doctor. “Double hernia, and dangerous it was. Very good! I proceed to reduce it by hand-pressure. Although it is only necessary to exercise a very faint pressure with the hand, after thirty minutes of this business, one’s arms and back are broken. And it was only at the end of five hours, at the tenth repetition, that I was able to effect the reduction.”

  At this point in the narrative recounted by Dr. Fornerol, Paillot the bookseller went to serve some ladies who asked for some interesting books to read in the country. And the doctor, addressing himself to M. de Terremondre alone, continued:

  “I was one ache. I say to my man:— ‘You must keep to your bed, and, if possible, you must remain lying on your back, until the truss-maker has made a truss for you according to my directions. Lie stretched out, or look out for strangulation. And you know whether that’s nice! Without counting that one day or another it’ll carry you off. You understand?’

  “‘Yes, sir.’

  “‘Very good.’

  “Down I go to the yard to wash myself at the pump. You may imagine that after this business I wanted a bit of a wash. I strip myself to the waist, and I rub myself with soft soap, for, maybe, a quarter of an hour. I dress myself again. I drink a glass of white wine that they bring me in the yard. I see the grey dawn break, I hear the lark sing, and I go back to the sick man’s room. There it was dark. I shout in the direction of the bed:— ‘Hey?

  That’s understood, isn’t it? Perfect stillness whilst waiting for the new truss. The one you have is no good at all. D’you hear?’ No answer. ‘Are you asleep?’ Then I hear behind me the voice of the old nurse:— ‘Doctor, our man’s no longer in the house,’ she tells me. ‘He was wearying to go out to his vines.’”

  “There I recognise my peasants,” said M. de Terremondre.

  He lapsed into meditation and resumed: “Doctor, Pauline Giry is now forty-nine. She made her début at the Vaudeville in 1876; she was then twenty-two. I am sure of it.”

  “In that case,” said the doctor, “she would be in her forty-third year, since we are now in 1897.”

  “It isn’t possible,” said M. de Terremondre, “for she is at least six years older than Rose Max, who has certainly passed her fortieth year.”

  “Rose Max? I don’t say no, but she is still a fine woman,” said the doctor.

  He yawned, stretched himself, and said:

  “Getting back from Duroc hill, at six o’clock in the morning, I find two baker’s men in my hall, come to tell me that their mistress, the baker’s wife of the Tintelleries, has been brought to bed.”

  “But,” asked M. de Terremondre, “did it require two baker’s men to tell you that?”

  “They had sent them one after the other,” answered the doctor. “I ask if the characteristic symptoms have set in. They give me no answer, but a third baker’s man turns up in his master’s cart. Up I get and seat myself at his side. We take half a turn, and there I am rolling over the pavement of the Tintelleries.”

  “I have it!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, who was pursuing his own th
oughts. “It was in’69 that she came out at the Vaudeville. And it was in’76 that my cousin Courtrai knew her... and was intimate with her.”

  “Are you speaking of Jacques de Courtrai, who was a captain of dragoons?”

  “No, I am speaking of Agénor, who died in Brazil.... She has a son who left Saint-Cyr last year.”

  Thus spoke M. de Terremondre, just as M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, entered the shop.

  M. Bergeret held one of the three academic chairs of the Paillot establishment, and was the most indefatigable talker of the old-book corner. There, with a friendly hand, he used to turn over the leaves of books old and books new, and although he never bought a single volume, for fear of getting a wigging for it from his wife and three daughters, he received the heartiest welcome from Paillot, who held him in high esteem as a reservoir, an alembic, of that science and those belles-lettres on which booksellers live and flourish. The old-book corner was the only place in the town where M. Bergeret could sit in utter contentment, for at home Madame Bergeret chased him from room to room for different reasons of domestic administration; at the University, the Dean, in his hatred, forced him to give his lectures in a dark, unhealthy cellar, into which but few pupils descended, and all three classes in the town cast black looks at him for having called Jeanne d’Arc a military mascotte. Now M. Bergeret slipped into the old-book corner.

  “Good-day, gentlemen! Anything new?”

  “A baby to the baker’s wife in the Tintelleries,” said the doctor. “I brought it into the world just twenty minutes ago. I was going to tell M. de Terremondre about it. And I may add that it wasn’t without difficulty.”

  “This child,” replied the professor, “hesitated to be born. He would never have consented to it if, being gifted with understanding and foresight, he had known the destiny of man on the earth, and more especially in our town.”

  “It is a pretty little girl,” said the doctor, “a pretty little girl with a raspberry mark under the left breast.”

  The conversation continued between the doctor and M. de Terremondre.

  “A pretty little girl, with a raspberry mark under the left breast, doctor? It would seem that the bakeress had a longing for raspberries when she took off her corsets. The mere desire of a mother does not suffice to stamp the picture of it on the offspring she bears. It is also necessary that the longing woman should touch one particular part of her body. And the picture will be stamped on the child in the corresponding spot. Isn’t that the common belief, doctor?”

  “That is what old women believe,” replied Dr. Fornerol. “And I have known men, and even doctors, who were women in this respect, and who shared in the credulity of the nurses. For my part, the experience of an already long practice, my knowledge of observations made by scientists, and especially a general view of embryology, prevent my sharing in this popular belief.”

  “Then, according to your opinion, doctor, wishing-marks are just spots like others, that form on the skin without known cause.”

  “Stop a bit! ‘Wishing-marks’ present a particular characteristic. They contain no bloodvessels and are not erectile, like the tumours with which you might perhaps be tempted to confuse them.”

  “You declare, doctor, that they are a peculiar species. Do you make no inference from that as to their origin?”

  “Absolutely none.”

  “But if these spots are not really ‘wishing-marks,’ if you refuse them a... how shall I put it?... a psychic origin, I am unable to account for the accident of a belief which is found in the Bible, and which is still shared by such a great number of people. My aunt Pastré was a very intelligent and by no means superstitious woman. She died last spring, aged seventy-seven, in the full belief that the three white currants visible on the shoulder of her daughter Bertha had an illustrious origin and came from the Parc de Neuilly, where, in the autumn of 1834, during her pregnancy, she was presented to Queen Marie-Amélie, who took her to walk along a path bordered by currant-bushes.”

  To this Dr. Fornerol made no reply. He was not remarkably given to contradicting the opinions of rich patients. But M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, bent his head towards his left shoulder and gave a far-away look, as he always did whenever he was going to speak. Then he said:

  “Gentlemen, it is a fact that these marks, called ‘wishing-spots,’ reduce themselves to a small number of types, which may be classified, according to their colour and form, into strawberries, currants, and raspberries, or wine and coffee spots. It would, perhaps, be convenient to add to these types that of those diffused yellow spots in which folks endeavour to recognise portions of tart or mincepie. Now, who can possibly believe that pregnant women desire nothing save to drink wine or café au lait, or to eat red fruits, and, possibly, forcemeatpie? Such an idea runs counter to natural philosophy. That desire which, according to certain philosophers, has alone created the world and alone preserves it, works in them as in all living beings, only with more range and diversity. It gives them secret fevers, hidden passions, and strange frenzies. Without going into the question of the effect of their particular condition on the appetites common to all that lives, and even to plants, we recognise that this condition does not produce indifference, but that it rather perverts and inflames the deeper instincts. If the new-born child ought really to carry the visible signs of its mother’s desires, believe me, we should more frequently see imprinted on its body other symbols than these innocent strawberries and drops of coffee with which the folly of old wives diverts itself.”

  “I see what you mean,” said M. de Terremondre. “Women loving jewels, many children would be born with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds on their fingers, and with gold bracelets on their wrists; necklaces of pearls, rivières of diamonds would cover their neck and breast. Still, one ought to be able to point to such children as these.”

  “Just so,” replied M. Bergeret.

  And, taking up from the table, where M. de Terremondre had left it, the thirty-eighth volume of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages, the professor buried his nose in the book, between pages 212 and 213, a spot which, every time that he had opened the inevitable old book during the last six years, had confronted him like a fate, to the exclusion of every other page, as an instance of the monotony with which life glides by, a symbol of the uniformity of those tasks and those days in a provincial university which precede the day of death and the travail of the body in the tomb. And this time, as he had already done so many times before, M. Bergeret read in volume xxxviii of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages the first lines of page 212: “a passage to the North. ‘It is to this check,’ said he, ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Isles again, and to enrich our voyage with a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy prophecy which these words seemed to denote has, unfortunately, never been fulfilled.”

  And this time, as always, the reading of these lines plunged M. Bergeret into melancholy. Whilst he was immersed in it, the bookseller, M. Paillot, confronted a little soldier, who had come in to buy a sou’s worth of letter-paper, with disdain and hauteur.

  “I don’t keep letter-paper,” declared M. Paillot, turning his back on the little soldier.

  Then he complained of his assistant, Léon, who was always on errands, and who, once gone out, never came back. Consequently he, Paillot, was constantly being pestered by intruders. They actually asked him for letter-paper!.

  “I remember,” said Dr. Fornerol to him, “that one market-day a good country-woman came in and asked you for a plaster, and that you had the greatest difficulty in preventing her from tucking up her petticoats and showing you the painful spot where the paper was to be applied.”

  Paillot, the bookseller, replied to this anecdotic sally by a silence which expressed offended dignity.

  “Heavens!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, the
book-lover, “this learned storehouse of our Frôben, our Elzevir, our Debure, confused with the chemist’s shop of Thomas Diafoirus! What an outrage!”

  “Indeed,” replied Dr. Fornerol, “the good soul meant no harm in showing Paillot the seat of her trouble. But it won’t do to judge the peasants by her. In general, they show extreme repugnance to letting themselves be seen by the doctor. My country colleagues have often remarked this to me. Country-women, attacked by serious diseases, resist examination with an energy and obstinacy which townswomen, and particularly women of the world, do not show in the same circumstances. I saw a farmer’s wife at Lucigny die of an internal tumour, which she had never allowed to be suspected.” M. de Terremondre, who, as president of several local academies, had literary prejudices, took these remarks as a pretext for accusing Zola of having shamefully maligned the peasants in La Terre. At this accusation, M. Bergeret emerged from his pensive sadness and said:

  “Yet the peasants are drunkards and parricides, and voluntarily incestuous, as Zola has depicted them. Their repugnance to lend themselves to clinical inspection by no means proves their chastity. It only shows the power of prejudice in minds of limited intelligence. The simpler a prejudice is, the stronger is its power. The prejudice that it is wrong to be seen naked remains powerful with them. It has been weakened among artists and people of intelligence by the custom of baths, douches, and massage; it has been still further weakened by aesthetic feeling and by the taste for voluptuous sensations, and it easily yields to considerations of health and hygiene. This is all that can be deduced from the doctor’s observations.”

  “I have noticed,” said M. de Terremondre, “that well-made women...”

  “There are hardly any,” said the doctor. “Doctor, you remind me of my chiropodist,” replied M. de Terremondre. “He said to me one day:— ‘If you were a chiropodist, sir, you would take no stock in women.’”