Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  Monsieur Bergeret had just reached this stage in his reflections when Riquet got up from his, cushion and ran barking to the door.

  This action was remarkable because it was unusual. Riquet never left his cushion until his master rose from table. He had been barking for some moments when old Angélique, putting a bewildered face in at the door, announced that “those young ladies” had arrived.

  Monsieur Bergeret understood her to allude to his sister Zoe and his daughter Pauline, whom he had not expected so soon. He knew that his sister Zoe was brusque and sudden in her actions. He rose from the table; but Riquet, at the sound of footsteps, which were now heard in the passage outside, uttered terrible cries of warning; his aboriginal caution, unconquered by a liberal education, leading him to believe that every stranger must of necessity be an enemy. He scented a great danger, a hideous invasion of the diningroom, with the menace of ruin and desolation.

  Pauline flung her arms around her father’s neck. Napkin in hand, he kissed her, and then stood back to gaze at this young girl, a mysterious being, like all young girls, whom, after a year’s absence, he hardly recognized. She was at once very near and almost a stranger to him. She was his by virtue of the obscure sources of life, but she eluded him in the dazzling energy of youth.

  “How do you do, papa?”

  Her very voice had changed; it was lower and less uneven.

  “How you have grown, my child!”

  He thought her pretty, with her dainty nose, intelligent eyes and quizzical mouth. But this feeling was at once marred by the reflection that there is little peace in this world of ours, and that young people, seeking for happiness, are entering upon a difficult and uncertain enterprise.

  He gave Zoe a hasty kiss upon either cheek.

  “You have not altered, Zoe, my dear. I did not expect you to-day, but I am very glad to see you both again.”

  Riquet could not understand why his master gave so warm a welcome to strange folk. Had he violently driven them forth, he could have understood. However, he was used to not understanding all the ways of men. Suffering Monsieur Bergeret to do as he would, he continued to perform his duty, barking furiously to scare the evildoers. Then, from the depths of his throat, he drew growls of hatred and anger; and a frightful contraction of his lips uncovered his white teeth. Backing away from his enemies, he hurled threats at them.

  “Is that your dog, papa?”

  “You were to have come on Saturday,” remarked Monsieur Bergeret.

  “Didn’t you get my letter?” inquired Zoe.

  “Yes,” replied Monsieur Bergeret.

  “No, I mean the other one.”

  “I received only one.”

  “One cannot hear oneself speak here!”

  It is true that Riquet was barking at the top of his voice.

  “Your sideboard is dusty,” remarked Zoe, putting her muff on it. “Doesn’t your servant ever do any dusting?”

  Riquet could not bear any one to lay hold of the sideboard like that. Either he had conceived a special aversion for Mademoiselle Zoe or he judged her the more important of the two, for it was to her that he addressed his loudest barks and growls. When he saw her place a hand upon the receptacle in which the human nutriment was stored he barked so shrilly that the glasses upon the table rang again. Mademoiselle Zoe, turning upon him suddenly, inquired ironically:

  “Are you going to eat me up?”

  Riquet fled in terror.

  “Is your dog vicious, papa?”

  “No, he is intelligent; he isn’t vicious.”

  “I don’t think he’s particularly intelligent,” said Zoe.

  “Yes, he is,” said Monsieur Bergeret. “He does not understand all our ideas; but we don’t understand all his. No one can enter into the mind of another.”

  “You, Lucien, are no judge of persons,” said Zoe.

  Monsieur Bergeret turned to Pauline.

  “Come, let me have a look at you. I can hardly recognise you.”

  A bright idea struck Riquet. He made up his mind to go to the kitchen, to the kindly Angélique, and to warn her, if possible, of the disturbance taking place in the dining-room. She was his last hope for the restoration of order and the expulsion of the intruders.

  “What have you done with Father’s portrait?” inquired Mademoiselle Zoe.

  “Sit down and have something to eat,” said Monsieur Bergeret. “There is some chicken and various other things.”

  “Papa, is it really true that we are going to live in Paris?”

  “Next month, my child. Are you glad?”

  “Yes, but I should be just as happy in the country if I could have a garden.”

  She stopped eating her chicken and said:

  “I do admire you, papa. I’m proud of you. You are a great man.”

  “That is what my little dog Riquet thinks too,” replied Monsieur Bergeret.

  CHAPTER II

  UNDER the supervision of Mademoiselle Zoe, the professor’s furniture was packed and taken to the railway station.

  During the days of the removal Riquet roamed sadly through the devastated rooms. He regarded Zoe and Pauline with suspicion, as their arrival had been closely followed by the complete upheaval of his formerly peaceful home. The tears of old Angélique, who wept all day long in her kitchen, increased his depression. His most cherished habits were set at naught; the strange, ill-clad, fierce and insulting men troubled his repose; they even went so far as to enter the kitchen and kick away his plate of food and bowl of fresh water. Chairs were taken from him as soon as he lay upon them, and carpets were abruptly dragged from beneath his persecuted body, so that in his own home he no longer knew where to lay his head.

  To his honour be it said that at first he had sought to resist. When the water-tank was removed he had barked furiously at the enemy, but no one heeded the alarm. No one gave him any encouragement; nay, he was, indeed, actually opposed. “Be quiet,” rapped out Mademoiselle Zoe, and Pauline had added, “Riquet, you are perfectly absurd!”

  Thenceforth he decided not to waste his time in giving warnings that fell on deaf ears or to labour unaided for the common good, and he grieved silently over the ruined house, and wandered from room to room vainly seeking a little peace. When the pantechnicon men entered the room in which he had taken refuge he would prudently hide beneath some table or sideboard which had not yet been taken away. But this precaution was more harmful than helpful to him, for presently the piece of furniture tottered above him, rose, and fell again, creaking ominously and threatening to crush him. With bristling coat and haggard features he took to his heels only to seek another place of refuge as precarious as the last.

  But these material inconveniences, nay, these perils, were trifling matters in comparison with the pain that filled his heart. It was his moral, so to speak, that was most affected.

  To him the articles of furniture were not inanimate objects but living and kindly beings, favourable genii whose departure was a presage of dire misfortune. Dishes and frying-pans, saucepans and sugar-basins, all the divinities of the kitchen; arm-chairs, carpets, cushions, all the fetishes of the fireside, his Lares and his household gods, had disappeared. He did not believe that so great a disaster could ever be made good, and his little soul grieved over it to the very limit of its capacity. Happily, like the human soul, it was easily distracted and quick to forget its woes. During the lengthy absences of the thirsty removers, when old Angélique’s broom stirred up the ancient dust upon the floor, Riquet scented the smell of mice, or watched a scurrying spider, and his fickle fancy was diverted awhile; but he soon relapsed into melancholy.

  On the day of departure, seeing that matters were growing worse from hour to hour, he was utterly miserable. It seemed to him a peculiarly ominous thing that they should thrust the linen into dismal-looking chests. Pauline was packing her own boxes with joyful eagerness. He turned from her as though she were doing an evil thing, and huddled against the wall. “The worst has come,” he thought. “
This is the end of all things!”

  Whether he believed that things ceased to exist when he saw them no longer, or whether he was only anxious to avoid a painful spectacle, he was careful not to look in Pauline’s direction. As she went to and fro she chanced to notice Riquet’s attitude, and its melancholy struck her as comical. Laughing, she called him: “Here, Riquet, here!” But he would neither stir from his corner nor turn his head. He hadn’t at that moment the heart to caress his young mistress, and a secret instinct, a kind of foreboding, warned him not to go too near to the gaping trunk. Pauline called him several times, and as he did not respond she went over to him and picked him up in her arms.

  “How miserable we are!” she said. “How much to be pitied!”

  Her tone was ironical; Riquet did not understand irony. He lay motionless and dejected in her arms, feigning to see nothing, to hear nothing.

  “Look at me, Riquet!” she demanded. Three times she bade him look at her, but in vain. Then, simulating violent anger, she threw him into the trunk, crying, “In you go, stupid!” and banged the lid on him. At that moment her aunt called her, and she went out of the room, leaving Riquet in the trunk.

  He felt exceedingly uneasy, for it never entered his head that Pauline had put him there for fun, and merely to tease him. Judging that his position was quite bad enough already, he endeavoured not to aggravate it by thoughtless behaviour. For some moments, therefore, he remained motionless without even drawing a breath. Then, feeling that no fresh disaster threatened him, he thought he had better explore his gloomy prison. He pawed the petticoats and chemises upon which he had been so cruelly precipitated, seeking some outlet by which he might escape. He had been busy for two or three minutes when Monsieur Bergeret, who was getting ready to go out, called him:

  “Riquet! Riquet! Here! we’re going to the bookshop to say good-bye to Paillot! Here! Where are you?”

  Monsieur Bergeret’s voice comforted Riquet greatly. He replied to it by a desperate scratching at the wicker sides of the trunk.

  “Where is the dog?” inquired Monsieur Bergeret of Pauline, who at that moment returned, carrying a pile of linen.

  “In my trunk, papa.”

  ‘Why in the trunk?”

  “Because I put him there.”

  Monsieur Bergeret went up to the trunk, and remarked:

  “It was thus that the child Comatas, who played upon the flute as he kept his master’s goats, was imprisoned in a chest, where he was fed on honey by the bees of the Muses. — But not so with you, Riquet; you would have died of hunger in this trunk, for you are not dear to the immortal Muses.”

  Having spoken, Monsieur Bergeret freed his little friend, who with wagging tail followed him as far as the hall. Then a thought appeared to strike him. He returned to Pauline’s room, ran to her and jumped up against her skirt, and only when he had riotously embraced her as a sign of his adoration did he rejoin his master on the stairs. He would have felt that he was lacking in wisdom and piety had he failed to bestow these tokens of affection on a being whose power had plunged him into the depths of a trunk.

  Monsieur Bergeret thought Paillot’s shop a dismal, ugly place. Paillot and his assistant were busy “calling over” the list of goods supplied to the Communal School. This task prevented him from prolonging his farewell to the professor. He had never had very much to say for himself and as he grew older he was gradually losing the habit of speech. He was weary of selling books; he saw that it was all over with the trade and was longing for the time to come when he could give up his business and retire to his place in the country, where he always spent his Sundays.

  As was his wont, Monsieur Bergeret made for the corner where the old books were kept and took down volume XXXVIII of The World’s Explorers. The book opened as usual at pages 212 and 213, and once more he perused these uninspiring lines:

  “... towards a northerly passage. ‘It was owing to this check,’ said he, ‘that we were able to revisit the Sandwich Islands and enrich our voyage by a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important which has yet been made by Europeans in the whole extent of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy anticipations which these words appeared to announce were, unhappily, not realized....”

  These lines, which he was reading for the hundredth time, and which reminded him of so many hours of his commonplace and laborious existence which was embellished, nevertheless, by the fruitful labours of the mind; these lines, for whose meaning he had never sought, filled him, on this occasion, with melancholy and discouragement, as though they contained a symbol of the emptiness of all human hopes, an expression of the universal void. He closed the book, which he had opened so often and was never to open again, and dejectedly left the shop.

  In the Place Saint-Exupère he cast a last glance at the house of Queen Marguerite. The rays of the setting sun gleamed upon its historic beams, and in the violent contrast of light and shade the escutcheon of Philippe Tricouillard proudly displayed the outlines of its gorgeous coat of arms, placed there as an eloquent example and a reproach to the barren city.

  Having re-entered the empty house, Riquet pawed his master’s legs, looking up at him with his beautiful sorrowing eyes, that said: “You, formerly so rich and powerful, have you, O master, become poor? Have you grown powerless? You suffer men clad in filthy rags to invade your study, your bedroom and your dining-room, to fall upon your furniture and drag it out of doors. They drag your deep arm-chair down the stairs, your chair and mine, in which we sat to rest every evening, and often in the morning, side by side. In the clutch of these ragged men I heard it groan, that chair which is so great a fetish and so benevolent a spirit. And you never resisted these invaders. If you have lost all the genii that used to fill your house, even to the little divinities, that you used to put on your feet every morning when you got out of bed, those slippers which I used to worry in my play, if you are poor and miserable, O my master, what will become of me?”

  “Lucien, we have no time to lose,” said Zoe. “The train goes at eight and we have had no dinner. Let us go and dine at the station.”

  “To-morrow you will be in Paris,” said Monsieur Bergeret to Riquet. “Paris is a famous and a generous city. To be honest, however, I must point out that this generosity is not vouchsafed alike to all its inhabitants. On the contrary, it is confined to a very small number of its citizens. But a whole city, a whole nation resides in the few who think more forcefully and more justly than the rest. The others do not count. What we call the spirit of a race attains consciousness only in imperceptible minorities. Minds which are sufficiently free to rid themselves of vulgar terrors and discover for themselves the veiled truths are rare in any place!”

  CHAPTER III

  UPON Monsieur Bergeret’s arrival in Paris, with his daughter Pauline and his sister Zoe, he had lodged in a house which was soon to be pulled down, and which he began to like as soon as he knew that he could not remain in it. He was unaware of the fact that in any case he would have left it at the same time. Mademoiselle Bergeret had made up her mind as to that. She had taken these rooms only to give herself time to find better, and was opposed to the spending of any money upon the place.

  It was a house in the Rue de Seine, a hundred years old at least. Never beautiful, it had grown uglier with age. The porte cochère opened humbly on a damp courtyard between a shoemaker’s shop and a carrier’s office. Monsieur Bergeret’s rooms were on the second floor, and on the same floor lived a picture-restorer through whose open door glimpses could be caught of little unframed canvases set about an earthenware stove, landscapes, old portraits, and an amber-skinned woman asleep in a dark wood under a green sky. The staircase was fairly well lighted. Cobwebs hung in the corners, and at the turns the wooden stairs were embellished with tiles. Stray lettuce-leaves, dropped from some housewife’s string bag, were to be found there of a morning.

  Such things had no charm for Monsieur Bergeret, but he could not help feeling sad at the thought that
he would become oblivious of these things as he had of so many others which, though they were not of any value, had made up the course of his life. —

  Every day, when his work was done, he went house-hunting. He thought of living for preference on the left bank of the Seine, where his father had dwelt before him, where it seemed to him one breathed an atmosphere of quiet life and peaceful study. What made his search more difficult was the state of the roads, broken with deep trenches and covered with mounds of earth. There were also the impassable and eternally disfigured quays.

  It will, of course, be remembered that, in the year 1899, the surface of Paris underwent a complete upheaval, either because the new conditions of life necessitated the execution of a great number of municipal undertakings, or because the approach of a huge international exhibition gave rise on every side to an exaggerated activity and a sudden ardour of enterprise. Monsieur Bergeret was grieved to see the town upset, for he did not sufficiently understand the necessity of such a proceeding, but, as he was a wise man, he endeavoured to console himself, to reassure himself by meditation. When he passed along his beautiful Quai Malaquais, so cruelly ravaged by merciless engineers, he pitied the uprooted trees and the banished keepers of bookstalls, and he reflected, not without a certain depth of feeling:

  “I have lost my friends, and now all that gave me delight in this city, her peace, her grace and her beauty, her old-time elegance and her noble historical vistas, is being violently swept away. It is always right and fitting, however, that reason should prevail over sentiment. We must not dally with vain regrets for the past, nor commiserate with ourselves over the changes that thrust themselves upon us, since change is the very condition of life. Perhaps these upheavals are necessary; it is needful that this city should lose some of her traditional beauty, so that the lives of the greater number of her inhabitants may become less painful and less hard.”