By death assuage the fervent wrath of God?’
(Est-ce qu’en holocauste aujourd’hui présente,
Je dois, comme autrefois la fille de Jephté,
Du Seigneur par un mort apaiser la colère?)
“At this time Jehovah bears the closest resemblance to His rival Chamos; he was a savage being, compact of cruelty and injustice. This was what he said: ‘You may know that I am the Lord by the corpses laid out along your path.’ Don’t make any mistake about this, Monsieur de Terremondre — in passing down from Judaism to Christianity, He still retains His savagery, and about Him there still lingers a taste for blood. I don’t go so far as to say that in the present century, at the close of the age, He has not become somewhat softened. We are all, nowadays, gliding downwards on an inclined plane of tolerance and indifference, and Jehovah along with us. At any rate, He has ceased to pour out a perpetual flood of threats and curses, and at the present moment He only proclaims His vengeance through the mouth of Mademoiselle Deniseau, and no one listens to her. But His principles are the same as of old, and there has been no essential change in His moral system.
“You are a great enemy to our religion,” said M. de Terremondre.
“Not at all,” said M. Bergeret. “It is true that I find in it what I will call moral and intellectual stumbling-blocks. I even find cruelty in it. But this cruelty is now an ancient thing, polished by the centuries, rolled smooth like a pebble with all its points blunted. It has become almost harmless. I should be much more afraid of a new religion, framed with scrupulous exactitude. Such a religion, even if it were based on the most beautiful and kindly morality, would act at first with inconvenient austerity and painful accuracy. I prefer intolerance rubbed smooth, to charity with a fresh edge to it. Taking one thing with another, it is Abbé Lantaigne who is in the wrong, it is I who am wrong, and it is you, Monsieur de Terremondre, who are right. Over this ancient Judaic-Christian religion so many centuries of human passions, of human hatreds and earthly adorations, so many civilisations — barbaric or refined, austere or selfindulgent, pitiless or tolerant, humble or proud, agricultural, pastoral, warlike, mercantile, industrial, oligarchical, aristocratic, democratic — have passed, that all is now rolled smooth. Religions have practically no effect on systems of morality and they merely become what morality makes them....—”
XVI
MADAME Bergeret had a horror of silence and solitude, and now that M. Bergeret never spoke to her and lived apart from her, her room was as terrifying as a tomb to her mind. She never entered it without turning white. Her daughters would, at least, have supplied the noise and movement needed if she were to remain sane; but when an epidemic of typhus broke out in the autumn she sent them to visit their aunt, Mademoiselle Zoé Bergeret, at Arcachon. There they had spent the winter, and there their father meant to leave them, in the present state of his affairs. Madame Bergeret was a domesticated woman, with a housewifely mind. To her, adultery had been nothing more than a mere extension of wedded life, a gleam from her hearth-fire. She had been driven to it by a matronly pride in her position far more than by the wanton promptings of the flesh. She had always intended that her slight lapse with young M. Roux should remain a secret, homely habit, just a taste of adultery that would merely involve, imply, and confirm that state of matrimony which is held in honour by the world, as well as sanctified by the Church, and which secures a woman in a position of personal safety and social dignity. Madame Bergeret was a Christian wife and knew that marriage is a sacrament whose lofty and lasting results cannot be effaced by any fault such as she had committed, for serious though it might be, it was yet a pardonable and excusable lapse. Without being in a position to estimate her offence with great moral perspicuity, she felt instinctively that it was trifling and simple, being neither malicious, nor inspired by that deep passion which alone can dignify error with the splendour of crime and hurl the guilty woman into the abyss. She not only felt that she was no great criminal, but also that she had never had the chance of being one. Yet now she had to stand watching the entirely unforeseen results of such a trifling episode, as to her terror they slowly and gloomily unfolded themselves before her. She suffered cruel pangs at finding herself alone and fallen within her own house, at having lost the sovereignty of her home, and at having been despoiled, as it were, of her cares of kitchen and store-cupboard. Suffering was not good for her and brought no purification in its train; it merely awoke in her paltry mind, at one moment the instinct of revolt, and at another, a passion for self-humiliation. Every day, about three o’clock in the afternoon, she went out and paid visits at her friends’ houses. On these expeditions she walked with great strides, a grim, stiff figure with bright eyes, flaming cheeks and gaudy dress. She called on all the lower-middle-class ladies of the town, on Madame Torquet, the dean’s wife; on Madame Leterrier, the rector’s wife; on Madame Ossian Colot, the wife of the prison governor, and on Madame Surcouf, the recorder’s wife. She was not received by the society ladies, nor by the wives of the great capitalists. Wherever she went, she poured out a flood of complaints against M. Bergeret, and charged her husband with every variety of fantastic crime that occurred to her feeble imagination, focussed on the one point only. Her usual accusations were that he had separated her from her daughters, had left her penniless, and finally had deserted his home to run about in cafés and, most probably, in less reputable resorts. Wherever she went, she gained sympathy and became an object of the tenderest interest. The pity she aroused grew, spread, and rose in volume. Even Madame Dellion, the ironmaster’s wife, although she was prevented from asking her to call, because they belonged to different sets, yet sent a message to her that she pitied her with all her heart, and felt the deepest disgust at M. Bergeret’s shameful behaviour. In this way Madame Bergeret went about the town every day, fortifying her hungry soul with the social respect and fair reputation that it craved. But as she mounted her own staircase in the evening, her heart sank within her. Her weak knees would hardly sustain her and she forgot her pride, her longing for vengeance, forgot even the abuse and frivolous scandal that she had spread through the town. To escape from loneliness she longed sincerely to be on good terms with M. Bergeret once more. In such a shallow soul as hers this desire was absolutely sincere and arose quite naturally. Yet it was a vain and useless thought, for M. Bergeret went on ignoring the existence of his wife.
This particular evening Madame Bergeret said as she went into the kitchen:
“Go and ask your master, Euphémie, how he would like his eggs to be cooked.”
It was quite a new departure on her side to submit the bill of fare to the master of the house. For of old, in the days of her lofty innocence, she had habitually forced him to partake of dishes which he disliked and which upset the delicate digestion of the sedentary student. Euphémie’s mind was not of wide range, but it was impartial and unwavering, and she protested to Madame Bergeret, as she had done several times before on similar occasions, that it was absolutely useless for her mistress to ask Monsieur anything. He never answered a word, because he was in a “contrairy” mood. But Madame, turning her face away and dropping her eyelids as a sign of determination, repeated the order she had just given.
“Euphémie,” she said, “do as I tell you. Go and ask your master how he would like the eggs cooked, and don’t forget to tell him that they are new-laid and come from Trécul’s.”
M. Bergeret was sitting in his study at work on the Virgilius nauticus, which a publisher had commissioned him to prepare as an extra embellishment of a learned edition of the Æneid, at which three generations of philologists had been working for more than thirty years, and the first sheets of which were already through the press And now, slip by slip, the professor sat compiling this special lexicon for it. He conceived a sort of veneration for himself as he worked at it, and congratulated himself in these words:
“Here am I, a land-lubber who has never sailed on anything more important than the Sunday steamboat which carri
es the townsfolk up the river to drink sparkling wine on the slopes of Tuillières in summer time; here am I; a good Frenchman, who has never seen the sea except at Villers; here am I, Lucien Bergeret, acting as the interpreter of Virgil, the seaman. Here I sit in my study explaining the nautical terms used by a poet who is accurate, learned and exact, in spite of all his rhetoric, who is a mathematician, a mechanician, a geometrician, a well-informed Italian, who was trained in seafaring matters by the sailors who basked in the sun on the sea-shores of Naples and Misenum, who had, maybe, his own galley, and under the clear stars of Helen’s twin-brothers, ploughed the blue furrows of the sea between Naples and Athens. Thanks to the excellence of my philological methods I am able to reach this point of perfection, but my pupil, M. Goubin, would be as fully equipped for the task as I.”
M. Bergeret took the greatest pleasure in this work, for it kept his mind occupied without any accompanying sense of anxiety or excitement. It filled him with real satisfaction to trace on thin sheets of pasteboard his delicate, regular letters, types and symbols as they were of the mental accuracy demanded in the study of philology. All his senses joined and shared in this spiritual satisfaction, so true is it that the pleasures which man can enjoy are more varied than is commonly supposed. Just now M. Bergeret was revelling in the peaceful joy of writing thus:
Servius believes that Virgil wrote Attolli malos (for the masts to be raised) in mistake for Attolli vela, (for the sails to be raised) and the reason which he gives for this rendering is that cum navigarent, non est dubium quod olli erexerant arbores.(when they were at sea, there is no doubt that the masts were already up) Ascencius takes the same side as Servius, being either forgetful or ignorant of the fact that, on certain occasions, ships at sea are dismasted. When the state of the sea was such that the masts..?
M. Bergeret had reached this point in his work when Euphémie opened the study door with the noise that always accompanied her slightest movement, and repeated the considerate message sent by Madame Bergeret to her husband:
“Madame wants to know how you would like your eggs cooked?”
M. Bergeret’s only reply was a gentle request to Euphémie to withdraw. He went on writing:
“ran the risk of breaking, it was customary to lower them, by lifting them out of the well in which their heels were inserted...
Euphémie stood fixed against the door, while M. Bergeret finished his slip.
“The masts were then stored abaft either on a crossbar or a bridge.”
“Sir, Madame told me to say that the eggs come from Trécul’s.”
“Una omnes fecere pedem.” (then with one accord they veered out the sheet)
Filled with a sense of sadness M. Bergeret laid down his pen, for he was suddenly overwhelmed with a perception of the uselessness of his work. Unfortunately for his own happiness, he was intelligent enough to recognise his own mediocrity, and, at times, it would actually appear to him in visible shape, like a thin, little, clumsy figure dancing about on his table between the inkstand and the file. He knew it well and hated it, for he would fain have seen his personality come to him under the guise of a lissom nymph. Yet it always appeared to him in its true form, as a lanky, unlovely figure. — It shocked him to see it, for he had delicate perceptions and a taste for dainty conceits.
“Monsieur Bergeret,” he said to himself, “you are a professor of some distinction, an intelligent provincial, a university man with a tendency to the florid, an average scholar shackled by the barren quests of philology, a stranger to the true science of language, which can be plumbed only by men of broad, unbiassed and trenchant views. Monsieur Bergeret, you are not a scholar, for you are incapable of grasping or classifying the facts of language. Michel Bréal will never mention your poor, little, humble name. You will die without fame, and your ears will never know the sweet accents of men’s praise.”
“Sir... Sir,” put in Euphémie in urgent tones, “do answer me. I have no time to hang about. I have my work to do. Madame wants to know how you’d like your eggs done. I got them at Trécul’s and they were laid this morning.”
Without so much as turning his head, M. Bergeret answered the girl in a tone of relentless gentleness:
“I want you to go and never again to enter my study — at any rate, not until I call you.”
Then the professor returned to his day-dream: “How happy is Torquet, our dean! How happy is Leterrier, our rector! No distrust of themselves, no rash misgivings to interrupt the smooth course of their equable lives! They are like that old fellow Mesange, who was so beloved by the immortal goddesses that he survived three generations and attained to the Collège de France and the Institute without having learnt anything new since the holy days of his innocent childhood. He carried with him to his grave the same amount of Greek as he had at the age of fifteen. He died at the close of this century, still revolving in his little head the mythological fancies that the poets of the First Empire had turned into verse beside his cradle.
But I — how comes it that I have such a cruel sense of my own inadequacy and of the laughable folly of all I undertake? For I have a mind as weak as that Greek scholar’s, who had a bird’s brain as well as a bird’s name; I am fully as incapable as Torquet the dean, and Leterrier, the rector, of either system or initiative. I am, in fact, but a foolish, melancholy juggler with words. May it not be a sign of mental supereminence and a mark of my superiority in the realm of abstract thought? This Virgilius nauticus, which I use as the touchstone of my powers, is it really my own work and the fruit of my mind? No, it is a task foisted on my poverty by a grasping bookseller in league with a pack of pseudo-scholars who, on the pretext of freeing French scholarship from German tutelage, are bringing back the trivial methods of former times, and forcing me to take part in the philological pastimes of 1820. May the responsibility for it rest on them and not on me! It was no zeal for knowledge, but the thirst for gain, that induced me to undertake this Virgilius nauticus, at which I have now been working for three years and which will bring me in five hundred francs: to wit, two hundred and fifty francs on delivery of the manuscript, and two hundred and fifty francs on the day of publication of the volume containing this article. I determined to slake my horrible thirst for gold! I have failed, not in brain power, but in force of character. That’s a very different matter!”
In this way did M. Bergeret marshal the flock of his wandering thoughts. All this time Euphémie had not moved, but at last, for the third time, she spoke to her master:
“Sir.... Sir....”
But at this attempt her voice stuck in her throat, strangled by sobs.
When M. Bergeret at last glanced at her, he could see the tears rolling down her round, red, shining cheeks.
She tried to speak, but nothing came from her throat save hoarse croaks, like the call that the shepherds of her native village sound on their goat-horns of an evening. Then she crossed her two arms, bare to the elbow, over her face, showing the fat, white flesh furrowed with long red scratches, and wiped her eyes with the back of her brown hands. Sobs tore her narrow chest and shook her stomach, abnormally enlarged by the tabes from which she had suffered in her seventh year and which had left her deformed. Then she dropped her arms to her side, hid her hands under her apron, stifled her sobs, and exclaimed peevishly, as soon as she could get the words out:
“I cannot live any longer in this house. I cannot any more. Besides, it isn’t a life at all. I would rather go away than see what I do.”
There was as much rage as misery in her voice, and she looked at M, Bergeret with inflamed eyes.
She was really very indignant at her master’s behaviour, and this not at all because she had always been attached to her mistress. For till quite recently, in the days of her pride and prosperity, Madame Bergeret had overwhelmed her with insult and humiliation and kept her half starved. Neither was it because she knew nothing of her mistress’s lapse from virtue, and believed, with Madame Dellion and the other ladies, that Madame Bergeret was
innocent. She knew every detail of her mistress’s liaison with M. Roux, as did the concierge, the bread-woman, and M. Raynaud’s maid. She had discovered the truth long before M. Bergeret knew it. Neither, on the other hand, was it because she approved of the affair; for she strongly censured both M. Roux and Madame Bergeret. For a girl who was mistress of her own person to have a lover seemed a small thing to her, not worth troubling about, when one knows how easily these things happen. She had had a narrow escape herself one night after the fair, when she was close pressed by a lad who wanted to play pranks at the edge of a ditch. She knew that an accident might happen all in a moment. But in a middle-aged married woman with children such conduct was disgusting. She confessed to the bread-woman one morning that really mistress turned her sick. Personally, she had no hankering after this kind of thing, and if there were no one but her to supply the babies, why then, the world might come to an end for all she cared. But if her mistress felt differently, there, was always a husband for her to turn to. Euphémie considered that Madame Bergeret had committed a horribly wicked sin, but she could not bring herself to feel that any sin, however serious, should never be forgiven and should always remain unpardoned. During her childhood, before she hired herself out to service, she used to work with her parents in the fields and vineyards. There she had seen the sun scorch up the vine-flowers, the hail beat down all the corn in the fields in a few minutes; yet, the very next year, her father, mother and elder brothers would be out in the fields, training the vine and sowing the furrow. There, amid the eternal patience of nature, she had learnt the lesson that in this world, alternately scorching and freezing, good and bad, there is nothing that is irreparable, and that, as one pardons the earth itself, so one must pardon man and woman.
It was according to this principle that the people at home acted, and after all, they were very likely quite as good as townsfolk. When Robertet’s wife, the buxom Léocadie, gave a pair of braces to her footman to induce him to do what she wanted, she was not so clever that Robertet did not find out the trick. He caught the lovers just in the nick of time, and chastised his wife so thoroughly with a horsewhip that she lost all desire to sin again for ever and ever. Since then Léocadie has been one of the best women in the country: her husband hasn’t that to find fault with her for. M. Robertet is a man of sense and knows how to drive men as well as cattle: why don’t people just do as he did?
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 142