“‘Next year, then, your brother will not be dead any longer?’” (The day after All Saints’ Day — (Le lendemain de la Toussaint) in the Revue Alsacienne, May 1878.)
How this question, in its simple directness and sublime ignorance, pierces to our very marrow! At Bellevue there is a little creature, appropriately nicknamed the Elephant, since no longer ago than last year she could have been hidden with ease in her godmother’s muff, whose childish prattle is interspersed with utterances of as profound significance as this that you have so skilfully put on record.
A simple tale about a child has come to my ears which it would have gratified me to dedicate to you. But, alas, well as I am instructed as to its minutest details it will never be written by me. It would recall in more than one feature the delightful scenes at the Rookery at Blunderstone, and my characters, truthful as they might be, would grow pale and dwindle to vain shadows beside the ever charming inmates of Dickens’ cottage. After all, since I am only talking to you just now, I can very well tell you this story that will never be written. Here it is.
The tale is about the charming widow of a clever young surgeon, sprung from the peasantry, and her little boy, André. The child, as he grows, loses flesh and colour, so his mother resolves for his sake to pay a visit to his grandparents in their humble little farmhouse, and mother and child are received with open arms, the child in particular making a complete conquest of the old folks. The best bedroom was allotted to the Parisian visitors, a room which the grandparents had never occupied since their bridal night.
At this point in the reprinted story the author has, for some reason, struck out the following paragraph: —
The two old people slept as they were accustomed to do in the downstairs room behind the curtain that hung from the beam of the staircase. Madame Trévière’s nurse made her way timorously up a steep ladder into the attic, where she slept surrounded by onions.
The advent of the lovely young mother flutters the heart of a wealthy manufacturer, a patron of Millet and the Barbizon school, Philippe Lassalle, and he pays assiduous court to her. Little Andre instinctively recognises the menace of the interloper and exerts all his potent influence against the success of Lassalle. One night, when the child is being put to bed, he says, “Mamma, I’m afraid.” At this point again the author has cut out a few words, for in the earlier version André continues: —
“I like being afraid. It’s nice. It’s like swimming” — swimming being in his customary talk his most forcible description of a pleasant sensation.
This adoption of an expression for which he made a meaning of his own is so eminently childlike a touch that it seems a thousand pities to have cut out the passage.
The widow sits by the child’s cot and muses over a letter in which Lassalle has asked her to marry him, when the child stirs in his sleep and inquires whether his dead father can come back again. Being told no, he declares that he is glad because he loves his mother so much that he has no love left over for his father if he should come back.
The mother soothes him, saying, “Sleep on; he will not come back.”
And then, perhaps desirous that the tale should not too closely resemble the chronicle of the early troubles of David Copperfield, Monsieur France closed his story thus: —
He will not come back. Monsieur Lassalle no longer nurses any hope. His appeal has met with a rebuff. Of an evening in his room hung with landscapes and bits of still-life, with his feet on the bars, as he fills his pipe and mixes his grog, he reflects that winter evenings are sufficiently gloomy when one sits alone. He has not seen the widow since; but when his friends ask him what has become of her, he answers bravely in a cheerful tone that disguises his profound disappointment, “She is still the beautiful Madame Trévière: more so than ever.”
In fitting the tale into Le Livre de mon Ami, however, the author found a way to remove the widow’s scruples without hinting at any Murdstone-like proclivities on the part of Monsieur Lassalle. In the later version the story ends thus: —
Nevertheless, when two months were over, he did come back, and he came back with the broad, sun-burnt features of Monsieur Lassalle, the new master of the house. And little André began to grow sallow and thin and listless.
He is cured again now. He loves his nurse with the love he used to bestow on his mother; but he doesn’t know his nurse has got a young man.
The letter to Monsieur Edmond is then resumed as follows: —
There, in a few strokes, is the tale I shall never write. It is true. Accept, in default of better, the tales I have written, I hardly know how, or why. The narrator is like that inamorata of the old poet Mellin de Sainct-Gelais who had more moons in her head (Avoir la lune dans la tete = To be a little mad. — LITTRE. The use of a corresponding idiom is rendered impracticable by the author’s subsequent play upon the word lune.) than there are gondolas at Venice. I most certainly had a red moon (Lune rousse — The April moon, which gardeners assert turns young leaves and buds red: the effects it is said to produce are attributable to a nocturnal fall in the temperature. — LITTRE.) in my brain when I recast from unimpeachable materials the narrative which owes its title, Jocaste, to a circumstance as simple as it is singular. As for the moon that “governed” the Chat Maigre, it was the one that rises ruddily over the roofs of Paris. About this last there is nothing either mysterious or terrible. I beg you to accept these two tales as a feeble testimony of my gratitude and affection. — A. F.
JOCASTA
CHAPTER I
WHAT! Monsieur Longuemare, you put live frogs into your pocket? How disgusting!”
“When I get back to my room Mademoiselle, I shall nail one of them on a small board and lay bare his mesentery, having first excited it with a pair of delicate pincers.”
“But the poor frog will endure tortures.”
“That depends. It would suffer more, for instance, in the summer than in the winter. And if its mesentery should be inflamed, perhaps, because of some anterior lesion, the pain would be so intense that its heart would cease to beat.”
“What good can it do you to hurt an animal like that?”
“It helps me to construct my experimental theory of pain. I shall prove that the Stoics did not know what they were talking about, and that Zeno was an idiot. You don’t know who Zeno was? Well, don’t seek to make his acquaintance. He denied the reality of sensation, whereas I maintain that sensation is everything. You will possess an exact and sufficient notion of the Stoics when I tell you they were dull maniacs, who affectedly pretended to despise suffering. If I had one of the barbarians under my tweezers in the place of my frog, he would quickly find out if one can suppress suffering by an effort of the will. Besides, it is a good thing for living beings to be endowed with the faculty for suffering.”
“You must be joking. In what way can it be good to be able to suffer?”
“It is a necessary safeguard. If, for example, the flames did not scorch us intolerably when we go too near the fire, we should be roasted to the bone without knowing it.”
He gazed at her.
“And,” he added, after a moment, “pain is beautiful. Richet says, ‘There is such a strong affinity between intelligence and suffering, that the most intelligent beings are the most susceptible to pain.’”
“So naturally you think you are more capable of suffering than any one else. I would ask you to describe your sufferings to me, if I were not afraid of being indiscreet.”
“I have already told you, Mademoiselle, that Zeno was a fool. If I were in great pain I should scream. As for you, you have a most delicate organisation — your nerves are like sensitive strings; you present pain with a sonorous instrument, an eight octave keyboard on which it could play, if it chose, the most elaborate and complicated variations.”
“Which in plain language means I am to be very unhappy. You are insupportable; one never knows if you are speaking seriously or not. And your ideas are so extraordinary that the little I understand of them make
s me giddy. Will you answer me properly and sensibly, if you can, for once in your life? Is it true that you are leaving us and going very far away?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle, it is true. I have bidden an eternal farewell to Val de Grâce. (The military hospital in Paris.) I shall prescribe no more cooling draughts for the patients there. It is by my own request that I have been removed from the hospital staff and appointed assistant doctor in Cochin-China. I made up my mind on this point, as I do on all others, after most mature reflexion — you smile, you think I am frivolous. I will tell you my reasons for leaving France. First and foremost, I shall escape the tyranny of concierges, charwomen, landladies, waiters, old-clothes men, and all such inveterate enemies of domestic happiness. I shall no longer have to bear with the smile of the café waiter — by-the-bye, have you noticed that waiters always have magnificently shaped heads? This is a very acute observation, but it would be useless to develop to you the theories it suggests. I am going far from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, but I shall find at Shanghai osteological monuments which will enable me to finish my treatise on the dentition of the yellow races. I shall lose that bright colour, which according to you is the proof of insolent good health, and take on the more interesting appearance of a lemon whose days are numbered. I shall develop complicated disorders of the liver, and study them with lively curiosity. You must own that all this is worth the voyage?”
Thus spoke René Longuemare, assistant surgeon of the First Division, standing in a suburban garden that surrounded a small chalet. Before him was a lawn, a fountain with an artificial grotto, a Judas-tree, and holly bushes growing against the railings; beyond the garden, in the distance, lay the beautiful valley, with the Seine winding on the left between pale green banks, crossed on the right by the white line of an aqueduct, and disappearing into that immensity of roofs, steeples, and domes which is Paris. In the hazy distance the gilded rotunda of the Invalides flung back the rays of sunlight. It was a warm, blue day in July; a few little white clouds hung motionless in the sky.
The girl to whom René Longuemare was speaking sat in an iron garden-chair. She raised her great clear eyes to the young surgeon’s face, but remained silent — a somewhat sad, uncertain expression on her lips.
Her eyes, of an indefinite colour, were timid, but at the same time so languorous that the whole face they illuminated acquired a singular expression of sensuousness, though her nose was straight and her cheeks slightly hollow.
She was so uniformly pale that other women in speaking of her were wont to say, “The girl has no complexion.” Her mouth was too large and somewhat flaccid, but showed facility and benevolent instincts.
René Longuemare, with a visible effort, recommenced his detestable joking.
“No,” he said; “I must own up, Mademoiselle; in leaving France I am running away from my bootmaker. I can’t stand his German accent any longer.” She asked him again if he was really going. He ceased smiling abruptly, and said:
“I am taking the train to-morrow morning, at seven fifty-five, and on the twenty-sixth I go aboard the steamship Magenta at Toulon.”
He could hear the sound of the ivory billiard balls clicking against each other on the table, and from the chalet came a voice, with a strong southern intonation, proclaiming emphatically:
“Seven, fourteen.”
He flung a hurried look through the glass doors at the players, frowned, and with a somewhat brusque farewell to the young girl, turned swiftly away, his face distorted and his eyes brimming with tears. The girl saw him thus for a moment in profile above the holly hedge, behind the iron lances of the railings. She rose and ran to the gate, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth as though to stifle a cry; then resolutely she stretched out her arms and called in a strangled voice:
“René!”
Her arms dropped to her side; it was too late, he did not hear.
She leaned her head against an iron bar. Her drawn features, the abandonment of her whole being, showed irreparable defeat. The southern voice called from the chalet:
“Hélène! the madeira.”
It was Monsieur Fellaire de Sisac calling to his daughter. He was standing, his little figure drawn up to its full height before the board on which the billiard players marked their score by means of wooden rings strung on wires. With a wide, magnifient gesture he rubbed the end of his cue with chalk, his eyes sparkled beneath their thick bushy brows. He looked capable and well satisfied, although he had just been badly beaten at the game.
“Mr. Haviland,” he said to his guest, “I am particularly anxious that my daughter herself should do us the honours of my madeira. I am like that, you see, patriarchal and biblical. Being an islander, I think you are especially qualified to appreciate good wine in general, and madeira in particular. Taste this, I beg you.”
Mr. Haviland turned his dull eyes on Hélène and silently took the glass she offered him on a lacquered tray. He was a long personage, with long teeth and long feet — carroty, bald, and dressed in checked clothes. He wore a racing glass slung from his shoulder by a strap.
Hélène disappeared. She had looked at her father uneasily. She had appeared disturbed at hearing him pour forth his voluble politenesses. She sent word to say she was not feeling well, and wished to be excused appearing at dinner.
Monsieur Fellaire de Sisac filled the dining-room, which was painted like a boulevard café, with his noisy presence, fussily carving, passing dishes, pouring out wine, calling in loud tones for the fish-slice when it was just under his eyes, trying the edge of the knife with the gravity of a charlatan at a fair, and tucking his serviette high up in his waistcoat. He boasted of his wines, and talked for ten minutes about a certain dry Syracuse before uncorking it.
The gardener, a type of the suburban peasant hired by the year, waited at table. He was a sly, malicious-looking creature, who answered back when his master spoke to him, although the latter pretended not to notice his impertinence.
Mr. Haviland, a high-coloured, florid man, ate a great deal, became very red in the face, but did not change his melancholy expression, and hardly spoke.
Fellaire de Sisac, after declaring that he did not intend to talk about business, proceeded to expatiate on his principal operations. He was a commission agent, and found his clients mostly among landlords and shopkeepers whose property had been expropriated. The new streets and boulevards which were being so rapidly opened up by Monsieur Haussmann gave him plenty to do.
He must, as a matter of fact, have made a good deal of money in a short time (although he did not say so). For many years he was to be seen daily, with a portfolio under his arm, dragging his down-at-heel boots about the neighbourhood of the Rue Rambuteau. There in a dingy office at the end of a courtyard he held consultations with sundry pork-butchers in distress.
It was in this unhealthy place that he developed the pale, puffy cheeks which thenceforth hung down on either side of his face.
On the brass plate affixed to his door his name appeared first as “Fellaire,” followed by the words “de Sisac” in parenthesis, as indicating his birthplace: —
“Fellaire (de Sisac).”
On a new plate above the threshold of a new domicile, the parenthesis was replaced by a comma after the first name: —
“Fellaire, de Sisac.”
On a third plate, put up after a third removal, the comma was suppressed, and there was nothing to indicate its having once existed: —
“Fellaire de Sisac.”
Now there was no plate on the commission agent’s door. He occupied, when in town, an apartment ornamented with much looking-glass, on the first floor of a house in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs; besides which he built for himself, as a country residence, the chalet at Meudon.
Monsieur Fellaire was a native of Sisac, near Saint-Mamet-Ja-Salvétat, in the department of Cantal, where his brother, the miller, still lived.
When Fellaire de Sisac learnt that a portion of that part of Paris, known as the Butte-des-Moulins or Windmi
ll Hill, had to come down, so as to open up the approach to the Théâtre Français, he sent out cards, prospectuses, and circulars, and made visits to the owners and principal tradespeople of the condemned houses. On one of what he spoke of as his “rounds” he called on Mr. Haviland, who lived at the Hôtel Meurice, and was the proprietor of a large house situated at the foot of the Butte, near the theatre. This house had belonged to the Haviland family for nearly two centuries.
John Haviland, the banker, established offices there in 1789. He had placed considerable sums of money at the disposition of the Duke of Orleans, who would, he considered, surely succeed Louis XVI. if the French were, as he thought, tending towards a constitutional monarchy. But the plans of the ambitious banker were not furthered either by the violent march of events or by the naturally wavering duke, who went back to the royal cause and favoured the counter-revolution.
Haviland then put himself in communication with the queen through the intervention of the beautiful Mrs. Elliot, but on the tenth of August, after the definite fall of royalty, he was obliged to fly to England, though he remained in communication with the Duke of Brunswick and the princes. His cashier, David Ewart, a man then eighty-one years of age, insisted on remaining in Paris to look after the threatened interests of the bank. Not having been able to obtain a certificate of citizenship, and so looked on as “suspect,” he was arrested and taken to the Conciergerie, where for over four months he seemed to be forgotten. Finally, on the 1st Thermidor 1794, he was haled before the revolutionary tribunal, which condemned him to capital punishment as a conspirator, and he was guillotined the same day at the Barrière du Trône, then called the Barrière Renversée.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 285