Complete Works of Anatole France

by Anatole France

  Like all the anti-revolutionaries, he had a great respect for the authorities established by the Republic, and ever since he had been denounced for fraud in connection with his supplies for the army, the Revolutionary Tribunal had inspired him with a wholesome dread. He felt himself to be a person too much in the public eye and mixed up in too many transactions to enjoy perfect security; so the citoyen Gamelin struck him as a friend worth cultivating. When all was said, one was a good citizen and on the side of justice.

  He gave the painter magistrate his hand, declaring himself his true friend and a true patriot, a well-wisher of the arts and of liberty. Gamelin forgot his injuries and pressed the hand so generously offered.

  “Citoyen Évariste Gamelin,” said Jean Blaise, “I appeal to you as a friend and as a man of talent. I am going to take you to-morrow for two days’ jaunt in the country; you can do some drawing and we can enjoy a talk.”

  Several times every year the print-dealer was in the habit of making a two or three days’ expedition of this sort in the company of artists who made drawings, according to his suggestions, of landscapes and ruins. He was quick to see what would please the public and these little journeys always resulted in some picturesque bits which were then finished at home and cleverly engraved; prints in red or colours were struck off from these, and brought in a good profit to the citoyen Blaise. From the same sketches he had over-doors and panels executed, which sold as well or better than the decorative works of Hubert Robert.

  On this occasion he had invited the citoyen Gamelin to accompany him to sketch buildings after nature, so much had the juror’s office increased the painter’s importance in his eyes. Two other artists were of the party, the engraver Desmahis, who drew well, and an almost unknown man, Philippe Dubois, an excellent designer in the style of Robert. According to custom, the citoyenne Élodie with her friend the citoyenne Hasard accompanied the artists. Jean Blaise, an adept at combining pleasure with profit, had also extended an invitation to the citoyenne Thévenin, an actress at the Vaudeville, who was reputed to be on the best of terms with him.

  X

  On Saturday at seven in the morning the citoyen Blaise, in a black cocked-hat, scarlet waistcoat, doe-skin breeches, and boots with yellow tops, rapped with the handle of his riding-whip at the studio door. The citoyenne Gamelin was in the room in polite conversation with the citoyen Brotteaux, while Évariste stood before a bit of looking-glass knotting his high white cravat.

  “A pleasant journey, Monsieur Blaise!” the citoyenne greeted him. “But, as you are going to paint landscapes, why don’t you take Monsieur Brotteaux, who is a painter?”

  “Well, well,” said Jean Blaise, “will you come with us, citoyen Brotteaux?”

  On being assured he would not be intruding, Brotteaux, a man of a sociable temper and fond of all amusements, accepted the invitation.

  The citoyenne Élodie had climbed the four storeys to embrace the widow Gamelin, whom she called her good mother. She was in white from head to foot, and smelt of lavender.

  An old two-horsed travelling berline stood waiting in the Place, with the hood down. Rose Thévenin occupied the back seat with Julienne Hasard. Élodie made the actress sit on the right, took the left-hand place herself and put the slim Julienne between the two of them. Brotteaux settled himself, back to the horses, facing the citoyenne Thévenin; Philippe Dubois, opposite the citoyenne Hasard; Évariste opposite Élodie. As for Philippe Desmahis, he planted his athletic figure on the box, on the coachman’s left, and proceeded to amaze that worthy with a traveller’s tale about a country in America where the trees bore chitterlings and saveloys by way of fruit.

  The citoyen Blaise, who was a capital rider, took the road on horseback, going on in front to escape the dust from the berline.

  As the wheels rattled merrily over the suburban roads the travellers began to forget their cares, and at sight of the green fields and trees and sky, their minds turned to gay and pleasant thoughts. Élodie dreamed she was surely born to rear poultry with Évariste, a country justice, to help her, in some village on a river bank beside a wood. The roadside elms whirled by as they sped along. Outside the villages the peasants’ mastiffs dashed out to intercept the carriage and barked at the horses, while a fat spaniel, lying in the roadway, struggled reluctantly to its feet; the fowls scattered and fled; the geese in a close-packed band waddled slowly out of the way. The children, with their fresh morning faces, watched the company go by. It was a hot day and a cloudless sky. The parched earth was thirsting for rain. They alighted just outside Villejuif. On their way through the little town, Desmahis went into a fruiterer’s to buy cherries for the overheated citoyennes. The shop-keeper was a pretty woman, and Desmahis showed no signs of reappearing. Philippe Dubois shouted to him, using the nickname his friends constantly gave him:

  “Ho there! Barbaroux!... Barbaroux!”

  At this hated name the passers-by pricked up their ears and faces appeared at every window. Then, when they saw a young and handsome man emerge from the shop, his jacket thrown open, his neckerchief flying loose over a muscular chest, and carrying over his shoulder a basket of cherries and his coat at the end of a stick, taking him for the proscribed girondist, a posse of sansculottes laid violent hands on him. Regardless of his indignant protests, they would have haled him to the town-hall, had not old Brotteaux, Gamelin, and the three young women borne testimony that the citoyen was named Philippe Desmahis, a copper-plate engraver and a good Jacobin. Even then the suspect had to show his carte de civisme, which he had in his pocket by great good luck, for he was very heedless in such matters. At this price he escaped from the hands of these patriotic villagers without worse loss than one of his lace ruffles, which had been torn off; but this was a trifle after all. He even received the apologies of the National Guards who had hustled him the most savagely and who now spoke of carrying him in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville.

  A free man again and with the citoyennes Élodie, Rose, and Julienne crowding round him, Desmahis looked at Philippe Dubois — he did not like the man and suspected him of having played him a practical joke — with a wry smile, and towering above him by a whole head:

  “Dubois,” he told him, “if you call me Barbaroux again, I shall call you Brissot; he is a little fat man with a silly face, greasy hair, an oily skin and damp hands. They’ll be perfectly sure you are the infamous Brissot, the people’s enemy; and the good Republicans, filled with horror and loathing at sight of you, will hang you from the nearest lamp-post. You hear me?”

  The citoyen Blaise, who had been watering his horse, announced that he had arranged the affair, though it was quite plain to everybody that it had been arranged without him.

  The company got in again, and as they drove on, Desmahis informed the coachman that in this same plain of Longjumeau several inhabitants of the Moon had once come down, in shape and colour much like frogs, only very much bigger. Philippe Dubois and Gamelin talked about their art. Dubois, a pupil of Regnault, had been to Rome, where he had seen Raphael’s tapestries, which he set above all the masterpieces of the world. He admired Correggio’s colouring, Annibale Caracci’s invention, Domenichino’s drawing, but thought nothing comparable in point of style with the pictures of Pompeio Battoni. He had been in touch at Rome with Monsieur Ménageot and Madame Lebrun, who had both pronounced against the Revolution; so the less said of them the better. But he spoke highly of Angelica Kauffmann, who had a pure taste and a fine knowledge of the Antique.

  Gamelin deplored that the apogee of French painting, belated as it was, for it only dated from Lesueur, Claude and Poussin and corresponded with the decadence of the Italian and Flemish schools, had been succeeded by so rapid and profound a decline. This he attributed to the degraded state of manners and to the Academy, which was the expression of that state. But the Academy had been happily abolished, and under the influence of new canons, David and his school were creating an art worthy of a free people. Among the young painters, Gamelin, without a trace of envy,
gave the first place to Hennequin and Topino-Lebrun. Philippe Dubois preferred his own master Regnault to David, and founded his hopes for the future of painting on that rising artist Gérard.

  Meantime Élodie complimented the citoyenne Thévenin on her red velvet toque and white gown. The actress repaid the compliment by congratulating her two companions on their toilets and advising them how to do better still; the thing, she said, was to be more sparing in ornaments and trimmings.

  “A woman can never be dressed too simply,” was her dictum. “We see this on the stage, where the costume should allow every pose to be appreciated. That is its true beauty and it needs no other.”

  “You are right, my dear,” replied Élodie. “Only there is nothing more expensive in dress than simplicity. It is not always out of bad taste we add frills and furbelows; sometimes it is to save our pockets.”

  They discussed eagerly the autumn fashions, — frocks entirely plain and short-waisted.

  “So many women disfigure themselves through following the fashion!” declared Rose Thévenin. “In dressing every woman should study her own figure.”

  “There is nothing beautiful save draperies that follow the lines of the figure and fall in folds,” put in Gamelin. “Everything that is cut out and sewn is hideous.”

  These sentiments, more appropriate in a treatise of Winckelmann’s than in the mouth of a man talking to Parisiennes, met with the scorn they deserved, being entirely disregarded.

  “For the winter,” observed Élodie, “they are making quilted gowns in Lapland style of taffeta and muslin, and coats à la Zulime, round-waisted and opening over a stomacher à la Turque.”

  “Nasty cheap things,” declared the actress, “you can buy them ready made. Now I have a little seamstress who works like an angel and is not dear; I’ll send her to see you, my dear.”

  So they prattled on trippingly, eagerly discussing and appraising different fine fabrics — striped taffeta, self-coloured china silk, muslin, gauze, nankeen.

  And old Brotteaux, as he listened to them, thought with a pensive pleasure of these veils that hide women’s charms and change incessantly, — how they last for a few years to be renewed eternally like the flowers of the field. And his eyes, as they wandered from the three pretty women to the cornflowers and the poppies in the wheat, were wet with smiling tears.

  They reached Orangis about nine o’clock and stopped before the inn, the Auberge de la Cloche, where the Poitrines, husband and wife, offered accommodation for man and beast. The citoyen Blaise, who had repaired any disorder in his dress, helped the citoyennes to alight. After ordering dinner for midday, they all set off, preceded by their paintboxes, drawing-boards, easels, and parasols, which were carried by a village lad, for the meadows near the confluence of the Orge and the Yvette, a charming bit of country giving a view over the verdant plain of Longjumeau and bounded by the Seine and the woods of Sainte-Geneviève.

  Jean Blaise, the leader of the troop of artists, was bandying funny stories with the ci-devant financier, tales that brought in without rhyme or reason Verboquet the Open-handed, Catherine Cuissot the pedlar, the demoiselles Chaudron, the fortune-teller Galichet, as well as characters of a later time like Cadet-Rousselle and Madame Angot.

  Évariste, inspired with a sudden love of nature, as he saw a troop of harvesters binding their sheaves, felt the tears rise to his eyes, while visions of concord and affection filled his heart. For his part, Desmahis was blowing the light down of the seeding dandelions into the citoyennes’ hair. All three loved posies, as town-bred girls always do, and were busy in the meadows plucking the mullein, whose blossoms grow in spikes close round the stem, the campanula, with its little blue-bells hanging in rows one above another, the slender twigs of the scented vervain, wallwort, mint, dyer’s weed, milfoil — all the wild flowers of late summer. Jean-Jacques had made botany the fashion among townswomen, so all three knew the name and symbolism of every flower. As the delicate petals, drooping for want of moisture, wilted in her hands and fell in a shower about her feet, the citoyenne Élodie sighed:

  “They are dying already, the poor flowers!”

  All set to work and strove to express nature as they saw her; but each saw her through the eyes of a master. In a short time Philippe Dubois had knocked off in the style of Hubert Robert a deserted farm, a clump of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Évariste Gamelin found a landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating the Flemings, was drawing a cow with infinite care. Élodie was sketching a peasant’s hut, while her friend Julienne, who was a colourman’s daughter, set her palette. A swarm of children pressed about her, watching her paint, whom she would scold out of her light at intervals, calling them pestering gnats and giving them lollipops. The citoyenne Thévenin, picking out the pretty ones, would wash their faces, kiss them and put flowers in their hair. She fondled them with a gentle air of melancholy, because she had missed the joy of motherhood, — as well as to heighten her fascinations by a show of tender sentiment and to practise herself in the art of pose and grouping.

  She was the only member of the party neither drawing nor painting. She devoted her attention to learning a part and still more to charming her companions, flitting from one to another, book in hand, a bright, entrancing creature.

  “No complexion, no figure, no voice, no nothing,” declared the women, — and she filled the earth with movement, colour and harmony. Faded, pretty, tired, indefatigable, she was the joy of the expedition. A woman of ever-varying moods, but always gay, sensitive, quick-tempered and yet easy-going and accommodating, a sharp tongue with the most polished utterance, vain, modest, true, false, delightful; if Rose Thévenin enjoyed no triumphant success, if she was not worshipped as a goddess, it was because the times were out of joint and Paris had no more incense, no more altars for the Graces. The citoyenne Blaise herself, who made a face when she spoke of her and used to call her “my step-mother,” could not see her and not be subjugated by such an array of charms.

  They were rehearsing Les Visitandines at the Théâtre Feydeau, and Rose was full of self-congratulation at having a part full of “naturalness.” It was this quality she strove after, this she sought and this she found.

  “Then we shall not see ‘Paméla’?” asked Desmahis.

  The Théâtre de la Nation was closed and the actors packed off to the Madelonnettes and to Pélagie.

  “Do you call that liberty?” cried Rose Thévenin, raising her beautiful eyes to heaven in indignant protest.

  “The players of the Théâtre de la Nation are aristocrats, and the citoyen François’ piece tends to make men regret the privileges of the noblesse.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Rose Thévenin, “have you patience to listen only to those who flatter you?”

  As midday approached everybody began to feel pangs of hunger and the little band marched back to the inn.

  Évariste walked beside Élodie, smilingly recalling memories of their first meetings:

  “Two young birds had fallen out of their nests on the roof on to the sill of your window. You brought the little creatures up by hand; one of them lived and in due time flew away. The other died in the nest of cotton-wool you had made him. ‘It was the one I loved best,’ I remember you said. That day, Élodie, you were wearing a red bow in your hair.”

  Philippe Dubois and Brotteaux, a little behind the rest, were talking of Rome, where they had both been, the latter in ‘72, the other towards the last days of the Academy. Brotteaux indeed had never forgotten the Princess Mondragone, to whom he would most certainly have poured out his plaints but for the Count Altieri, who always followed her like her shadow. Nor did Philippe Dubois fail to mention that he had been invited to dine with Cardinal de Bernis and that he was the most obliging host in the world.

  “I knew him,” said Brotteaux, “and I may add without boasting that I was fo
r some while one of his most intimate friends; he had a taste for low society. He was an amiable man, and for all his affectation of telling fairy tales, there was more sound philosophy in his little finger than in the heads of all you Jacobins, who are for making us virtuous and God-fearing by Act of Parliament. Upon my word I prefer our simple-minded theophagists who know not what they say nor yet what they do, to these mad law-menders, who make it their business to guillotine us in order to render us wise and virtuous and adorers of the Supreme Being who has created them in His likeness. In former days I used to have Mass said in the Chapel at Les Ilettes by a poor devil of a Curé who used to say in his cups: ‘Don’t let’s speak ill of sinners; we live by ‘em, we priests, unworthy as we are!’ You must agree, sir, this prayer-monger held sound maxims of government. We should adopt his principles, and govern men as being what they are and not what we should like them to be.”

  Rose Thévenin had meantime drawn closer to the old man. She knew he had lived on a grand scale, and the thought of this gilded the ci-devant financier’s present poverty, which she deemed less humiliating as being due to general causes, the result of the public bankruptcy. She saw in him, with curiosity not unmixed with respect, the survival of one of those open-handed millionaires of whom her elder comrades of the stage spoke with sighs of unfeigned regret. Besides, the old fellow in his plum-coloured coat, so threadbare and so well brushed, pleased her by his agreeable address.

  “Monsieur Brotteaux,” she said to him, “we know how once upon a time, in a noble park, on moonlight nights, you would slip into the shade of myrtle groves with actresses and dancing-girls to the far-off shrilling of flutes and fiddles.... Alas! they were more lovely, were they not, your goddesses of the Opera and the Comédie-Française, than we of to-day, we poor little National actresses?”