She was a being of moral and religious instincts, and sufficiently philosophic to grasp the absolute value of the points in a game of cards: the idea came to her then that an act in itself entirely trivial might be great in the world of ideas. She felt no remorse, because she was devoid of imagination, and having a rational conception of God, felt that she had already been sufficiently punished.
But, at the same time, since she followed the ordinary line of thought in morality and conceived that a woman’s honour could only be judged by the common criterion, since she had formed no colossal plan of overthrowing the moral scheme in order to manufacture for herself an outrageous innocence, she could feel no quietness, no satisfaction in life, nor could she enjoy any sense of the inner peace that sustains the mind in tribulation.
Her troubles were the more harassing because they were so mysterious, so indefinitely prolonged. They unwound themselves like the ball of red string that Madame Magloire, the confectioner in the Place Saint-Exupère, kept on her counter in a boxwood case, and which she used to tie up hundreds of little parcels by means of the thread that passed through a hole in the cover. It seemed to Madame Bergeret that she would never see the end of her worries; she even, under sadness and regret, began to acquire a certain look of spiritual beauty.
One morning she looked at an enlarged photograph of her father, whom she had lost during the first year of her married life, and standing in front of it, she wept, as she thought of the days of her childhood, of the little white cap worn at her first communion, of her Sunday walks when she went to drink milk at the Tuilerie with her cousins, the two Demoiselles Pouilly of the Dictionary, of her mother, still alive, but now an old lady living in her little native town, far away at the other end of France in the département du Nord. Madame Bergeret’s father, Victor Pouilly, a headmaster and the author of a popular edition of Lhomond’s grammar, had entertained a lofty notion of his social dignity in the world and of his intellectual prowess. Being overshadowed and patronised by his elder brother, the great Pouilly of the Dictionary, being also under the thumb of the University authorities, he took it out of everybody else and became prouder and prouder of his name, his Grammar, and his gout, which was severe. In his pose he expressed the Pouilly dignity, and to his daughter his portrait seemed to say: “My child, I pass over, I purposely pass over everything in your conduct which cannot be considered exactly conventional. You should recognise the fact that all your troubles come from having married beneath you. In vain I flattered myself that I had raised him to our level. This Bergeret is an uneducated man, and your original mistake, the source of all your troubles, my daughter, was your marriage.” And Madame Bergeret gave ear to this speech, while the wisdom and kindness of her father, so clearly stamped on it, sustained her drooping courage in a measure. Yet, step by step, she began to yield to fate. She ceased to pay denunciatory visits in the town, where, in fact, she had already tired out the curiosity of her friends by the monotonous tenour of her complaints. Even at the rector’s house they began to believe that the stories which were told in the town about her liaison with M. Roux were not entirely fables. She had allowed herself to be compromised, and she wearied them; they let her plainly see both facts. The only person whose sympathy she still retained was Madame Dellion, and to this lady she remained a sort of allegorical figure of injured innocence. But although Madame Dellion, being of higher rank, pitied her, respected her, admired her, she would not receive her. Madame Bergeret was humiliated and alone, childless, husbandless, homeless, penniless.
One last effort she made to resume her rightful position in the house. It was on the morning after the most miserable and wretched day that she had ever spent. After having endured the insolent demands of Mademoiselle Rose, the modiste, and of Lafolie, the butcher, after having caught Marie stealing the three francs seventy-five centimes left by the laundress on the dining-room sideboard, Madame Bergeret went to bed so full of misery and fear that she could not sleep. Her overwhelming troubles brought on an attack of romantic fancy, and in the shades of night she saw a vision of Marie pouring out a poisonous potion that M. Bergeret had prepared for her. With the dawn her fevered terrors fled, and having dressed carefully, she entered M. Bergeret’s study with an air of quiet gravity. So little had he expected her that she found the door open.
“Lucien! Lucien!” said she.
She called upon the innocent names of their three daughters. She begged and implored, while she gave a fair enough description of the wretched state of the house. She promised that for the future she would be good, faithful, economical and good-tempered. But M. Bergeret would not answer.
Kneeling at his feet, she sobbed and twisted the arms that had once been so imperious in their gestures. He deigned neither to see nor to hear her.
She showed him the spectacle of a Pouilly at his feet. But he only took up his hat and went out. Then she got up and ran after him, and with outstretched fist and lips drawn back shouted after him from the hall:
“I never loved you. Do you hear that? Never, not even when I first married you! You are hideous, you are ridiculous and everything else that’s horrid. And everyone in the town knows that you are nothing but a ninnyhammer.... yes, a ninnyhammer....”
She had never heard this word save on the lips of Pouilly of the Dictionary, who had been in his grave for more than twenty years, and now it recurred to her mind suddenly, as though by a miracle. She attached no definite meaning to it, but as it sounded excessively insulting, she shouted down the staircase after him, “Ninnyhammer, ninnyhammer!”
It was her last effort as a wife. A fortnight after this interview Madame Bergeret appeared before her husband and said, this time in quiet, resolute tones, “I cannot remain here any longer. It is your doing entirely. I am going to my mother’s; you must send me Marianne and Juliette. Pauline I will let you have...
Pauline was the eldest; she was like her father, and between them there existed a certain sympathy.
“I hope,” added Madame Bergeret, “that you will make a suitable allowance for your two daughters who will live with me. For myself I ask nothing.”
When M. Bergeret heard these words, when he saw her at the goal whither he had guided her by foresight and firmness, he tried to conceal his joy, for fear lest, if he let it be detected, Madame Bergeret might abandon an arrangement that suited him admirably.
He made no answer, but he bent his head in sign of consent.
La nymphe blanche
Qui coule à pleines hanches,
Le long du rivage arrondi
Et de l’ile où les saules grisâtres
Mettent à ses flancs la ceinture d’Ève,
En feuillages ovales,
Et qui fuit pâle.
(Que sert à vos pareils de lire incessamment?
Ils sont toujours logés à la troisième chambre,
Vêtus au mois de juin comme au mois de décembre,
Ayant pour tout laquais leur ombre seulement.)
A CHRONICLE OF OUR OWN TIMES III: THE AMETHYST RING
Translated by B. Drillien
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER I
TRUE to her word, Madame Bergeret quitted the conjugal roof and betook herself to the house of her mother, the widow Pouilly.
As the time for
her departure drew near, she had half a mind not to go, and with a little coaxing would have consented to forget the past and resume the old life with her husband, at the same time vaguely despising M. Bergeret as the injured party.
She was quite ready to forgive and forget, but the unbending esteem in which she was held by the circle in which she moved did not allow of such a course. Madame Dellion had made it clear to her that any such weakness on her part would be judged unfavourably; all the drawing-rooms in the place were unanimous upon that score. There was but one opinion among the tradespeople: — Madame Bergeret must return to her mother. In this way did they uphold the proprieties and, at the same time, rid themselves of a thoughtless, common, compromising person, whose vulgarity was apparent even to the vulgar, and who was a burden on everybody about her. They made her believe there was something heroic in her conduct.
“I have the greatest admiration for you, my child,” said old Madame Dutilleul from the depths of her easy chair, she who had survived four husbands, and was a truly terrible woman. People suspected her of everything, except of ever having loved, and in her old age she was honoured and respected by all.
Madame Bergeret was delighted at having inspired sympathy in Madame Dellion and admiration in Madame Dutilleul, and still she could not finally make up her mind to go, for she was of a homely disposition and accustomed to regular habits and quite content to live on in idleness and deceit. Having grasped this fact, M. Bergeret redoubled his efforts to ensure his deliverance. He stoutly upheld Marie, the servant, who kept every one in the house in a state of wretchedness and trepidation, was suspected of harbouring thieves and cut-throats in her kitchen, and only brought herself into prominence by the catastrophes she caused.
Four days before the time appointed for Madame Bergeret’s departure, this girl, who was drunk as usual, upset a lighted lamp in her mistress’s room and set fire to the blue chintz bed-curtains. Madame Bergeret was spending the day with her friend, Madame Lacarelle. She returned and, amid the dreadful stillness of the house, beheld on entering her room the evidences of the disaster. She called and called in vain for her stony-hearted husband and her besotted maid, then stood gazing at the smoke-blackened ceiling and the dismal ravages of the fire. This commonplace accident assumed in her eyes a mystic significance that frightened her. But presently as the candle began to flicker she lay down, tired out and very cold, upon her bed under the skeleton of the charred canopy whose black shreds fluttered like the wings of a bat. The next morning, on waking, she wept for her blue curtains, the souvenir and symbol of her youth; bare-footed, with dishevelled hair, smothered with blacks and clad only in her nightdress, she ran desperately about the rooms, crying and moaning. M. Bergeret took no notice of her; for him she had ceased to exist.
That evening, with the help of the girl Marie, she drew her bed into the middle of the dreary room. But now she realised that this room could never again be a resting-place for her, and that she must leave the room where for fifteen years she had fulfilled the duties of daily life.
Moreover, the ingenious Bergeret, having taken rooms for his daughter Pauline and himself in a little house in the Place Saint-Exupère, was busy moving out and moving in.
He went backwards and forwards ceaselessly between the two houses, keeping close to the walls, and trotting along with the agility of a mouse suddenly unearthed in a heap of debris. His heart was glad within him, but he concealed his joy, for he was a prudent man.
Having been told that, at an early date, she must hand over the keys of the house to the landlord, Madame Bergeret in like manner set about despatching her furniture to her mother, who lived in a maisonnette on the ramparts of a little northern town. She made bundles of clothes and of linen, pushed the furniture about, gave orders to the men, sneezed in the dusty atmosphere, and wrote out labels addressed to “Madame Veuve Pouilly.”
From her labours Madame Bergeret derived moral assistance, for it is good for mankind to work. It takes a man’s mind off his own life and turns him away from dreadful self-examination; it keeps him from that which makes solitude unbearable, the contemplation of that other being, his real self. It is the sovereign remedy for moral and aesthetic obsessions. Work is also excellent, in that it panders to our vanity, hides from us our impotence, and flatters us with the hope of something good to come. We imagine that it enables us to steal a march on Fate.
Failing to realise the necessary relation between individual endeavour and the mechanism of the universe, we fondly imagine that our efforts are directed to our own advantage against the rest of the machine. Work gives us illusory determination, strength and independence, and makes us as gods in our own eyes. We appear to ourselves as so many heroes, genii, demons, demiurges, gods — yes, as God Himself. And, in fact, man has always conceived of God as a worker. Thus it was that the removal restored Madame Bergeret’s natural gaiety and the joyous energy of her physical strength. She sang songs as she tied up parcels; the rapid flow of blood in her veins made her content, and she looked forward to a happy future.
She painted in glowing colours her life in the little Flemish town where she would live with her mother and her two younger daughters. There she hoped to grow young again, to be brilliant and admired, to have attention offered her, and to find sympathy. Who could say whether, once the decree nisi was granted in her favour, a second and wealthy marriage were not awaiting her in her native town? Was it not quite possible that she might marry a good-tempered, sensible man, a country gentleman, an agriculturist or a Government official, somebody quite different from M. Bergeret?
The packing-up also afforded her peculiar satisfaction, for from it she derived some solid advantages in the way of gain. Not satisfied with the appropriation of what she had brought as her marriage portion, and a large share of the common property, she heaped into her trunks things which she ought in ordinary fairness to have left to others. In this way she packed among her underclothes a silver cup which had belonged to M. Bergeret’s maternal grandmother. Again, she added to her own jewels which, be it said, were of no great value, the watch and chain of M. Bergeret’s father, a professor at the University, who, having refused in 1852 to swear fidelity to the Empire, had died in 1873, poor and forgotten.
Madame Bergeret interrupted her packing only to go and pay her farewell calls, visits both sad and triumphant. Public opinion was in her favour. Men’s judgments are diverse, and there is no place in the world where there is undivided and unanimous opinion on any single subject. Tradidit mundum disputationibus eorum. Madame Bergeret herself was the subject of polite discussion and of secret dissent. The greater number of the ladies of her acquaintance considered her irreproachable, otherwise they would not have received her at their houses. There were a few, however, who suspected that her adventure with M. Roux had not been quite blameless; some of them even went so far as to say so. One blamed her, another excused her, a third approved of her, casting all the blame upon M. Bergeret, as being a spiteful man.
That point, too, was open to doubt. Some people declared M. Bergeret to be a nice, quiet man, the only thing to dislike in him being his too subtle mind, which was at variance with public opinion.
M. de Terremondre said that M. Bergeret was a very nice sort of man; to which Madame Dellion replied that if he were really a good man he would have stood by his wife, however wicked she was.
“There would be some merit in that,” she said. “There is nothing noble in putting-up with a charming woman.”
Another opinion of Madame Dellion’s was: “M. Bergeret is doing his utmost to keep his wife, but she is leaving him, and quite right too! It serves M. Bergeret right.”
Thus did Madame Dellion express opinions which were inconsistent, for human thought has ever depended not upon force of reason but on violence of feeling.
Although the world is known to be uncertain in its judgment, Madame Bergeret would have gone from the town in possession of a good reputation, if on the very eve of her departure, when paying her fa
rewell visit to Madame Lacarelle, she had not met M. Lacarelle alone in the drawing-room.
M. Gustave Lacarelle, chief clerk at the préfecture, had a long, thick, fair moustache, which, while the chief characteristic of his countenance, was also destined to determine his character. In his student days at the Law Schools, his comrades had discovered in him a resemblance to the ancient Gauls, as depicted in the sculpture and paintings of the later romanticists. Other more careful observers, remarking that the long strands of hair were situated under the snub nose and placid eyes, gave Lacarelle the name of “The Seal.” The latter, however, did not prevail against that of “The Gaul.” Lacarelle became “The Gaul” to his companions, who consequently made up their minds that he ought to be a great drinker, a great fighter, and a devil with the women, in order that he might conform in reality to the Frenchman of immemorial tradition. At the Corps dinners he was forced to drink far more than he wanted, and he could never go into a brasserie with his friends without being pushed, up against some tray-laden waitress. When he married and returned to his native town, and, by what was a great stroke of fortune in those days, obtained a post in the Central Administration of the department from which he hailed, Gustave Lacarelle continued to be called “The Gaul” by the most important of the magistrates, lawyers, and Government officials who frequented his house. The ignorant mob, however, did not bestow this name upon him until 1895, in which year a statue to Eporedorix was erected and unveiled on the Pont National.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 145