“This observation brings one to the true reason for the fact that, in all nations and at all periods, sexual rites have been performed in secret, in order that they might not produce violent and conflicting emotions in the spectators. At length it became customary to conceal everything that might suggest these rites. Thus was born Modesty, which governs all men, but particularly the more lascivious nations.”
Then M. Bergeret reflected:
“Accident has enabled me to discover the origin of this virtue which varies most of all, merely because it is the most universal, this Modesty, which the Greeks call Shame. Very absurd prejudices have become connected with this habit which arises from an attitude of mind peculiar to man and common to all men, and these prejudices have obscured its true character. But I am now in a position to formulate the true theory of Modesty. It was at a smaller cost to himself that Newton discovered the laws of gravitation under a tree.”
Thus meditated M. Bergeret from the depths of his arm-chair. But his thoughts were still so little under control that he rolled his bloodshot eyes, gnashed his teeth and clenched his fists, until he drove his nails into his palms. Painted with merciless accuracy on his inner eye was the picture of his pupil, M. Roux, in a condition which ought never to be seen by a spectator, for reasons which the professor had first accurately deduced. M. Bergeret possessed a measure of that faculty which we call visual memory. Without possessing the rich power of vision of the painter, who stores numberless vast pictures in a single fold of his brain, he could yet recall, accurately and easily enough, sights seen long ago which had caught his attention. Thus there lived in the album of his memory the outline of a beautiful tree, of a graceful woman, when once these had been impressed on the retina of his eye. But never had any mental impression appeared to him as clear, as exact, as vividly, accurately and powerfully coloured, as full, compact, solid and masterful, as there appeared to him at this moment the daring picture of his pupil, M. Roux, in the act of embracing Madame Bergeret. This accurate reproduction of reality was hateful; it was also false, inasmuch as it indefinitely prolonged an action which must necessarily be a fleeting one. The perfect illusion which it produced showed up the two characters with obstinate cynicism and unbearable permanence. Again M. Bergeret longed to kill his pupil, M. Roux. He made a movement as if to kill; the idea of murder that his brain formulated had the force of a deed and left him overwhelmed.
Then came a moment of reflection and slowly, quietly he strayed away into a labyrinth of irresolution and contradiction. His ideas flowed together and intermingled, losing their distinctive tints like specks of paint in a glass of water. Soon he even failed to grasp the actual event that had happened.
He cast miserable looks around him, examined the flowers on the wall-paper and noticed that there were badly-joined bunches, so that the halves of the red carnations never met. He looked at the books stacked on the deal shelves. He looked at the little silk and crochet pin-cushion that Madame Bergeret had made and given him some years before on his birthday. Then he softened at the thought of the destruction of their home life. He had never been deeply in love with this woman, whom he had married on the advice of friends, for he had always found a difficulty in settling his own affairs. Although he no longer loved her at all, she still made up a large part of his life. He thought of his daughters, now staying with their aunt at Arcachon, especially of his favourite Pauline, the eldest, who resembled him. At this he shed tears.
Suddenly through his tears he caught sight of the wicker-work woman on which Madame Bergeret draped her dresses and which she always kept in her husband’s study in front of the book-case, disregarding the professor’s resentment when he complained that every time he wanted to put his books on the shelves, he had to embrace the wickerwork woman and carry her off. At the best of times M. Bergeret’s teeth were set on edge by this contrivance which reminded him of the hen-coops of the cottagers, or of the idol of woven cane which he had seen as a child in one of the prints of his ancient history, and in which, it was said, the Phoenicians burnt their slaves. Above all, the thing reminded him of Madame Bergeret, and although it was headless, he always expected to hear it burst out screaming, moaning, or scolding.
This time the headless thing seemed to be none other than Madame Bergeret herself, Madame Bergeret, the hateful, the grotesque. Flinging himself upon it, he clasped the thing in his arms and made its wicker breast crack under his fingers, as though it were the gristles of ribs that broke. Overturning it, he stamped on it with his feet and carrying it off, threw it creaking and mutilated, out of window into the yard belonging to Lenfant, the cooper, where it fell among buckets and tubs. In doing this, he felt as though he were performing an act that symbolised a true fact, yet was at the same time ridiculous and absurd. On the whole, however, he felt somewhat relieved, and when Euphémie came to tell him that déjeuner was getting cold, he shrugged his shoulders, and walking resolutely across the still deserted dining-room, took up his hat in the hall and went downstairs.
In the gateway he remembered that he knew neither where to go nor what to do and that he had come to no decision at all. Once outside, he noticed that it was raining and that he had no umbrella. He was rather annoyed at the fact, though the sense of annoyance came quite as a relief. As he stood hesitating as to whether he should go out into the shower or not, he caught sight of a pencil drawing on the plaster of the wall, just below the bell and just at the height which a child’s arm would reach. It represented an old man; two dots and two lines within a circle made the face, and the body was depicted by an oval; the arms and legs were shown by single lines which radiated outwards like wheel-spokes and imparted a certain air of jollity to this scrawl, which was executed in the classic style of mural ribaldry. It must have been drawn some time ago, for it showed signs of friction and in places was already half rubbed out. But this was the first time that M. Bergeret had noticed it, doubtless because his powers of observation were just now in a peculiarly wide-awake condition.
“A graffito,” said the professor to himself.
He noticed next that two horns stuck out from the old man’s head and that the word Bergeret was written by the side, so that no mistake might be made.
“It is a matter of common talk, then,” said he, when he saw this name. “Little rascals on their way to school proclaim it on the walls and I am the talk of the town. This woman has probably been deceiving me for a long time, and with all sorts of men. This mere scrawl tells me more of the truth than I could have gained by a prolonged and searching investigation.”
And standing in the rain, with his feet in the mud, he made a closer examination of the graffito; he noticed that the letters of the inscription were badly written and that the lines of the drawing corresponded with the slope of the writing.
As he went away in the falling rain, he remembered the graffiti once traced by clumsy hands on the walls of Pompeii and now uncovered, collected and expounded by philologists. He recalled the clumsy furtive character of the Palatine graffito scratched by an idle soldier on the wall of the guard-house.
“It is now eighteen hundred years since that Roman soldier drew a caricature of his comrade Alexandros in the act of worshipping an ass’s head stuck on a cross. No monument of antiquity has been more carefully studied than this Palatine graffito: it is reproduced in numberless collections. Now, following the example of Alexandros, I, too, have a graffito of my own. If to-morrow an earthquake were to swallow up this dismal, accursed town, and preserve it intact for the scientists of the thirtieth century, and if in that far distant future my graffito were to be discovered, I wonder what these learned men would say about it. Would they understand its vulgar symbolism? Or would they even be able to spell out my name written in the letters of a lost alphabet?”
With a fine rain falling through the dreary dimness, M. Bergeret finally reached the Place Saint-
Exupère. Between the two buttresses of the church he could see the stall which bore a red boot as a sign. A
t the sight, he suddenly remembered that his shoes, being worn out by long service, were soaked with water; now, too, he remembered that henceforth he must look after his own clothes, although hitherto he had always left them to Madame Bergeret. With this thought in his mind, he went straight into the cobbler’s booth. He found the man hammering nails into the sole of a shoe.
“Good-day, Piédagnel!”
“Good-day, Monsieur Bergeret! What can I do for you, Monsieur Bergeret?”
So saying, the fellow, turning his angular face towards his customer, showed his toothless gums in a smile. His thin face, which ended in a projecting chin and was furrowed by the dark chasm of his eyes, shared the stern, poverty-stricken air, the yellow tint, the wretched aspect of the stone figures carved over the door of the ancient church under whose shadow he had been born, had lived, and would die.
“All right, Monsieur Bergeret, I have your size and I know that you like your shoes an easy fit. You are quite in the right, Monsieur Bergeret, not to try to pinch your feet.”
“But I have a rather high instep and the sole of my foot is arched,” protested M. Bergeret. “Be sure you remember that.”
M. Bergeret was by no means vain of his foot, but it had so happened one day that in his reading he came upon a passage describing how M. de Lamartine once showed his bare foot with pride, that its high curve, which rested on the ground like the arch of a bridge, might be admired. This story made M. Bergeret feel that he was quite justified in deriving pleasure from the fact that he was not flat-footed. Now, sinking into a wicker chair decorated with an old square of Aubusson carpet, he looked at the cobbler and his booth. On the wall, which was whitewashed and covered with deep cracks, a sprig of box had been placed behind the arms of a black, wooden cross. A little copper figure of Christ nailed to this cross inclined its head over the cobbler, who sat glued to his stool behind the counter, which was heaped with pieces of cut leather and with the wooden models which all bore leather shields to mark the places where the feet that the models represented were afflicted with painful excrescences. A small cast-iron stove was heated white-hot and a strong smell of leather and cookery combined was perceptible.
“I am glad,” said M. Bergeret, “to see that you have as much work as you can wish for.”
In answer to this remark, the man began to give vent to a string of vague, rambling complaints which yet had an element of truth in them. Things were not as they used to be in days gone by. Nowadays, nobody could stand out against factory competition. Customers just bought readymade shoes, in stores exactly like the Paris ones.
“My customers die, too,” added he. “I have just lost the curé, M. Rieu. There is nothing left but the re-soling business and there isn’t much profit in that.”
The sight of this ancient cobbler groaning under his own little crucifix filled M. Bergeret with sadness. He asked, rather hesitatingly:
“Your son must be quite twenty by now. What has become of him?”
“Firmin? I expect you know,” said the man, “that he left the seminary because he had no vocation. But the gentlemen there were kind enough to interest themselves in him, after they had expelled him. Abbé Lantaigne found a place for him as tutor at a Marquis’s house in Poitou. But Firmin refused it just out of spite. He is in Paris now, teaching at an institution in the Rue Saint-Jacques, but he doesn’t earn much.” And the cobbler added sadly:
“What I want...”
He stopped and then began again. “I have been a widower for twelve years. What I want is a wife, because it needs a woman to manage a house.”
Relapsing into silence, he drove three nails into the leather of the sole and added:
“Only I must have a steady woman.”
He returned to his task. Then suddenly raising his worn and sorrowful face towards the foggy sky, he muttered:
“And besides, it is so sad to be alone!”
M. Bergeret felt pleased, for he had just caught sight of Paillot standing on the threshold of his shop. He got up to leave:
“Good-day, Piédagnel!” said he. “Mind and keep the instep high enough!”
But the cobbler would not let him go, asking with an imploring glance whether he did not know of any woman who would suit him. She must be middle-aged, a good worker, and a widow who would be willing to marry a widower with a small business.
M. Bergeret stood looking in astonishment at this man who actually wanted to get married; Piédagnel went on meditating aloud:
“Of course,” said he, “there’s the woman who delivers bread on the Tintelleries. But she likes a drop. Then there’s the late curé of Sainte-Agnès’s servant, but she is too haughty, because she has saved a little.”
“Piédagnel,” said M. Bergeret, “go on re-soling the townsfolks’ shoes, remain as you are, alone and contented in the seclusion of your shop. Don’t marry again, for that would be a mistake.”
Closing the glazed door behind him, he crossed the Place Saint-Exupère and entered Paillot’s shop.
The shop was deserted, save for the bookseller himself. Paillot’s mind was a barren and illiterate one; he spoke but little and thought of nothing but his business and his country-house on Duroc Hill. Notwithstanding these facts, M. Bergeret had an inexplicable fondness both for the bookseller and for his shop. At Paillot’s he felt quite at ease and there ideas came on him in a flood.
Paillot was rich, and never had any complaints to make. Yet he invariably told M. Bergeret that one no longer made the profit on educational books that was once customary, for the practice of allowing discount left but little margin. Besides, the supplying of schools had become a veritable puzzle on account of the changes that were always being made in the curricula.
“Once,” said he, “they were much more conservative.”
“I don’t believe it,” replied M. Bergeret. “The fabric of our classical instruction is constantly in course of repair. It is an old monument which embodies in its structure the characteristics of every period. One sees in it a pediment in the Empire style on a Jesuit portico; it has rusticated galleries, colonnades like those of the Louvre, Renaissance staircases, Gothic halls, and a Roman crypt. If one were to expose the foundations, one would come upon opus spicatum (Brickwork laid in the shape of ears of corn.) and Roman cement. On each of these parts one might place an inscription commemorating its origin: ‘The Imperial University of 1808 — Rollin — The Oratorians — Port-Royal — The Jesuits — The Humanists of the Renaissance — The Schoolmen — The Latin Rhetoricians of Autun and Bordeaux.’ Every generation has made some change in this palace of wisdom, or has added something to it.”
M. Paillot rubbed the red beard that hung from his huge chin and looked stupidly at M. Bergeret. Finally he fled panic-stricken and took refuge behind his counter. But M. Bergeret followed up his argument to its logical conclusion:
“It is thanks to these successive additions that the house is still standing. It would soon crumble to pieces if nothing were ever changed in it. It is only right to repair the parts that threaten to fall in ruin and to add some halls in the new style. But I can hear some ominous cracking in the structure.”
As honest Paillot carefully refrained from making any answer to this occult and terrifying talk, M. Bergeret plunged silently into the corner where the old books stood.
To-day, as always, he took up the thirty-eighth; volume of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages. To-day, as always, the book opened of its own accord at page 212. Now on this page he saw the picture of M. Roux and Madame Bergeret embracing.... Now he re-read the passage he knew so well, without paying any heed to what he read, but merely continuing to think the thoughts that were suggested by the present state of his affairs:
“‘a passage to the North. It is to this check,’ said he (I know that this affair is by no means an unprecedented one, and that it ought not to astonish the mind of a philosopher), ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Islands again’ (It is a domestic event that turns my house upsi
de down. I have no longer a home), ‘and to enrich our voyage with a discovery (I have no home, no home any more) which, although the last (I’ am morally free though, and that is a great point), seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean....’”
M. Bergeret closed the book. He had caught a glimpse of liberty, deliverance, and a new life. It was only a glimmer in the darkness, but bright and steady before him. How was he to escape from this dark tunnel? That he could not tell, but at any rate he perceived at the end of it a tiny white point of light. And if he still carried about with him a vision of Madame Bergeret embraced by M. Roux, it was to him but an indecorous sight which aroused in him neither anger nor disgust — just a vignette, the Belgian frontispiece of some lewd book. He drew out his watch and saw that it was now two o’clock. It had taken him exactly ninety minutes to arrive at this wise conclusion.
VII
AFTER M. Bergeret had taken the University Bulletin from the table and gone out of the room without saying a word, M. Roux and Madame Bergeret together emitted a long sigh of relief.
“He saw nothing,” whispered M. Roux, trying to make light of the affair.
But Madame Bergeret shook her head with an expression of anxious doubt. For her part, what she wanted was to throw on her partner’s shoulders the whole responsibility for any consequences that might ensue. She felt uneasy and, above all, thwarted. She was also a prey to a certain feeling of shame at having allowed herself, like a fool, to be surprised by a creature who was so easily hoodwinked as M. Bergeret, whom she despised for his credulity. Finally, she was in that state of anxiety into which a new and unprecedented situation always throws one.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 134