“At the sixth lesson, while he was explaining the mechanism of Homer’s epic, he pinched Mademoiselle Fédora’s waist so furiously that she fled uttering shrill cries. He waited, ready to make reparation for his misdeed — he would have married his noble pupil, if necessary; but he was flung out of the door. I found him in my studio that evening. ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘it is all the fault of Saint Preux. Oh, Julie! oh, Jean-Jacques!’ So you see Rousseau wrote his magnificent and passionate novel and created his:
“‘Julie, amante faible et tombée avec gloire,’
just to lead my poor friend Branchut the moralist to make a fool of himself.”
Monsieur Alidor Sainte-Lucie suppressed a yawn. His son, his head resting on his two hands, listened as though he were at the theatre. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse, with a burning eye and a heaving chest, was preparing a crushing rejoinder; but Labanne rose, went to a side-table and picked up a newspaper. While he was tearing off a bit to light his pipe, his eye followed the printed lines with the instinct of the born reader.
“I say, Sainte-Lucie,” he asked, “is it possible that you believe in democracy?”
At these words Godet-Laterrasse drew himself together with a little, dry, cracking noise, like that of a pistol being loaded. But the former Minister only replied by an enigmatical smile.
Labanne stated his opinions. He liked aristocracies; he would have them strong, extravagant, violent. Art only flourished under an aristocracy, he said. He regretted the cruel, elegant morals of a military nobility.
“What a mean epoch we live in!” he said. “In depriving politics of their two necessary attributes — poison and the dagger — you have made them innocent, stupid, dull, chattering and bourgeois. Society is dying for want of a Borgia. In a democracy you will have neither impressive statues, nor marble palaces, nor eloquent and great-hearted courtesans, nor chiselled sonnets, nor concerts in gardens, nor golden goblets, nor exquisite crimes, nor perils, nor adventures. You will be happy in a flat, foolish, and deadly way. So be it.”
For some minutes Godet-Laterrasse had been making jerky movements, like a man who restrains himself with difficulty.
“Marvellous! marvellous!” he cried. “You are brilliantly witty, Monsieur Labanne; but remember, there are certain pleasantries which are blasphemous.”
He took his hat, shook his pupil’s hand, and told Monsieur Alidor he wished to say a few words to him in the hall.
Labanne heard the chinking of money, and when Monsieur Alidor re-appeared:
“What an innocent creature!” said Labanne; “but there is no harm in him.”
“Hush,” said Sainte-Lucie, and whispered something in Labanne’s ear.
“I wish I had known you wanted a tutor. I would have sent you my friend Branchut the moralist. Well, I am going back to the Quartier. Good-bye.”
This was how he spoke of what was to him the Quartier far excellence — the Quartier Latin.
Sainte-Lucie begged the sculptor to tell Remi, who did not know Paris, of a decent hotel near the Luxembourg.
Labanne, stroking his flaming beard, and Remi moving with the supple swing characteristic of his race, were descending the gilded staircase of the hotel side by side, when Sainte-Lucie, leaning over the banister, called out to his son:
“I warn you at once, in case I should forget, that I shall most probably not go to see General Télémaque; but I should be glad if you would pay him a visit, and it would please your mother. He lives at Courbevoie, near the barracks. Good-bye, good-bye.”
CHAPTER III
REMI could only recall vaguely the house where he was born at Port-au-Prince — the lordly mansion, in the Louis XVI. style, full of mutilated statues and half-effaced emblems; the dilapidated, crumbling inner court, planted with banana-trees; the heavy mahogany arm-chairs, ornamented with sphinxes’ heads, in which he slept in the shade in the heavy noon-day silence; the luminous gaudy town, amusing as a big bazaar; and his godmother, Olivette’s shop. How often, hidden behind the big cases, he had stolen the negress’s bananas and sapotillas.
He could remember his mother; her burning eyes, imperious nose, greedy mouth and magnificent bronze chest, showing through a white muslin corsage, had imprinted their image on the child’s memory. How often he had seen her, saturated with strong scents, her head flung back and her eyes flooded with tears, exasperating Monsieur Alidor by her brief and disdainful replies. One day he had thrown himself on her, grinding his teeth with fury, and had brought his stick down on the most beautiful shoulders in the Antilles.
But Remi had seen many things besides these. He had seen the bombardment and burning of Port-au-Prince, the pillaging, the massacres, the executions, and then more massacres and more executions. He had seen his godmother, Olivette, lying murdered in the midst of her staved-in barrels, and her assassins dead drunk with her whisky.
It was about this time that they made a long sea voyage, and landed one evening in a splendidly lighted city. France pleased him from the first. He was sent to a school in the Rue du Chateau at Nantes, on the benches of which he dragged out a monotonous and dreary existence, never ceasing to shiver. During the long lesson hours, he sucked sweets and drew caricatures. Every Thursday and every Sunday throughout the year the pupils, two and two in a long file, went for a walk under the old elms on the fortifications by the side of the fair, wide Loire.
He hated these promenades in the wind and the rain. He would pretend to be ill to be dispensed from them, and to be admitted to the infirmary, where he could huddle under the blankets, like a boa-constrictor in a glass case.
But he had muscles of steel when it came to jumping over the schoolhouse wall, and running to the other end of the town to buy a bottle of rum to make punch with, in the dormitory at night. He took his studies very easily, drew the portraits of all his masters in his copybooks, passed into the rhetoric class, learnt nothing, forgot everything, was sent to Paris and confided to the care of Godet-Laterrasse.
Monsieur Sainte-Lucie had been at sea for three weeks, and the tutor had already begun the exercise of his functions by promenading his pupil on the outside of omnibuses from the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Buttes Montmartre, and from the Madeleine to the Bastille.
Then he disappeared for a week. Remi, advised by Labanne, was living up under the tiles in a very good hotel in the Rue des Feuillantines; he got up at noon, went out to breakfast, walked about in the sunshine, contemplating with something of a savage’s delight the imitation jewellery and other attractive rubbish in the shop windows, till at five o’clock it was time to sip his sweetened vermouth. Not having heard of his tutor for eight days, he had almost forgotten him, when, on the morning of the ninth, he received a telegram, making an appointment to meet him at two o’clock on the Pont des Saints Pères.
It was freezing, and a biting wind was blowing over the Seine. Remi took shelter, side by side with a policeman, against the cast-iron pedestal of one of the four plaster figures adorning the bridge; he stood with his shoulders hunched, and every now and then, to relieve the monotony of waiting, would stretch out his neck and watch a cargo of bullocks’ horns being unloaded on the Pont Saint Nicolas. He had been there half-an-hour, and had just decided to make for the nearest café, when Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse emerged from the Louvre gateway, carrying a portfolio under his arm.
“I asked you to meet me to-day,” he said, “so that we might buy the most necessary books. I am not going to bother about Virgil and Cicero; if you should need them you can find them easily enough at any of the second-hand stalls in the Rue Cujas. I am only going to see about the important ones, which will form your conscience as a man and as a citizen.”
By-and-by they came to the Quai Voltaire, where they went into a bookseller’s.
“Have you the works of Proudhon, Quinet, Cabet, and Esquiros?” asked Godet-Laterrasse.
The bookseller had these works, and he made a packet of them under the eyes of the buyers — a packet which Remi saw, with stupefaction, mount up
like a tower.
“Sir,” he said, simply, to the shopman, just as he was tying the string, “please add to the packet two or three novels by Paul de Kock. I began one at Nantes which amused me very much, but my class-master took it from me.”
The bookseller replied in a dignified tone that he did not “keep” novels, and he was beginning again to tie the string when Godet-Laterrasse stopped him. He had been thinking, and the result of his reflection was, that he borrowed from his pupil the two first volumes of Michelet’s “History of France”; he wanted to look up something, he said.
They shook hands outside, and Laterrasse called out, as he scrambled on to his omnibus:
“Dig into Quinet this evening — hard.”
For a moment his black silhouette stood out clearly on the top of the ‘bus, then it sank, and was lost among the outlines of the ordinary people seated on the double row of benches.
When evening came, Remi was but little disposed to return to his room, where the fundamental books awaited him. He took the way to the Boulevard Saint-Michel instead, and walked towards Bullier’s.
On reaching the Moorish door of the public ballroom, under which a crowd of students, shopmen, and girls were pouring in through a semicircle of gaping workmen and women, he caught sight of Labanne’s golden beard. The sculptor was standing on the opposite pavement by a lamp-post, and in spite of the frost which powdered the trees, and the wind whipping the gas flame, he was reading a newspaper.
Sainte-Lucie went up to him.
“Excuse me for interrupting you,” he said. “What you are reading must be very interesting.”
“Not at all,” replied Labanne, putting the paper in his pocket. “I was reading mechanically something very stupid. Will you come with me to ‘The Famished Cat’?”
They stopped at the narrowest, the greasiest, the blackest, the smokiest, and the nastiest part of the Rue Saint-Jacques, and went into a shop full of little tables, at the end of which was a glass partition hung with white curtains. There were paintings on the walls, on the partition, on the ceiling even. For the most part they were bold, violent sketches, whose brilliant colour under the flickering of the two gas-jets was dazzling, in spite of the thick smoky atmosphere. Sainte-Lucie, who was very fond of pictures, at once singled out the most arresting canvases — a raven in the snow, and the nude body of an old woman hanging head down; a raw sirloin of beef wrapped in a piece of paper; and above all, a gutter-cat on a roof among the chimney-pots, outlining against an enormous ruddy moon its lean black back arched like a mediaeval bridge. This work, by a young master of the impressionist school, served as a sign for the establishment. Several young fellows were smoking and drinking round the tables.
A fat little woman with carefully dressed hair, the bib of whose white apron swelled like a sail, looked at Labanne with tender vivacity. Grains of gunpowder seemed to sparkle in her eyes. She asked the sculptor for the terra-cotta cat he had promised her to put in the window between the dishes of sauer-kraut and salad bowls of stewed prunes.
“I have not forgotten your tabby — oh, full-handed Virginie,” replied Labanne; “but I don’t see him lean enough and famished enough as yet. Furthermore, I have only read five or six volumes on cats.”
Virginie, who was content to wait, told Labanne that it was most amiable of him to bring a new friend, that Monsieur Mercier and Monsieur Dion were already there, and then disappeared behind the partition — to the immediate neighbourhood of a water-tap, no doubt, for she could be heard rinsing glasses.
The new-comers sat down at a table, at which were already, seated two guests, to whom Sainte-Lucie was presented. The creole soon learnt that Dion, very young, thin, and fair, was a lyric poet, and that Mercier, small and dark, with glasses on his nose, was something very vague and very important. It was hot in the tavern, and Sainte-Lucie, feeling quite at his ease, smiled so that his big mouth gaped; while Virginie, observing him closely through the partition, concluded that he was handsome and distinguished looking. She admired his smooth, clear cheeks, so like the metal of the saucepans she polished.
The poet Dion asked Labanne, in a voice at once gentle and bitter, what had become of Bishop Gozlin.
For some time past there had been much talk at “The Famished Cat” about a statue of Bishop Gozlin, the order for which had been given, it was said, to Labanne, and which was destined to fill one of the niches of the new town-hall; this Labanne admitted, but produced no proof. He said he could not see Bishop Gozlin standing up in a niche; he could only see him seated in his episcopal chair.
Sainte-Lucie drank a glass of beer.
“You know,” said young Dion, “that we are starting a Review. Mercier has promised me an article; haven’t you, Mercier? You, Labanne, will do the fine arts. Monsieur Sainte-Lucie, I hope you will also give us something. We look to you to deal with the colonial question.”
Sainte-Lucie had seen so much that nothing could surprise him. He was drinking — he was warm — he was happy. “I am very sorry not to be able to render you such a slight service,” he replied, “but I have just come from Nantes, where I was at school, and I don’t know anything about the colonial question. Besides, I am not a writer.”
Dion was stupefied. He could not understand any one not being a writer; but he remembered that creoles are rather strange people.
“Well,” he said, “I shall publish my ‘Wild Love’ in the first number. You know my ‘Wild Love’?
“Very old and bowed down, worn by ancient despair,
I would wander for aye in the night of thy hair.”
(“Très vieux, ployé, flétri par d’anciennes détresses,
Je veux errer sans fin dans la nuit de tes tresses.”)
“Did you write that?” cried Sainte-Lucie with sincere enthusiasm. “Why, it is beautiful.”
And he emptied his glass; he was delighted.
“Have you any funds for your Review?” asked the sceptic Labanne.
“Certainly,” replied the poet. “My grandmother has given me three hundred francs.”
Labanne was reduced to silence. He turned over the pages of some pamphlets he had bought on the Quais that afternoon.
“This is a very curious volume,” he said, looking at a little book with red edges. “It is a treatise by Saumaise (Salmasius) on usury (de usuris). I shall give it to Branchut.”
Then they recollected that Branchut had not come to “The Famished Cat” that evening.
“How is poor old Branchut-du-Tic?” asked the poet Dion. “Is he still falling at the feet of Russian princesses? He must give us an article for the Review.”
Sainte-Lucie asked Labanne if this Monsieur Branchut-du-Tic was the professor of literature he had heard him speak of one day at the Grand Hotel.”
“The same, young man,” said Labanne. “You will see him. But I must tell you that his name is simply Claude Branchut. His nose, which is very long, is agitated by nervous shivers, and afflicted with a strange undulating movement; hence the nickname we have bestowed on him. For the matter of that, Cato of Utica (Caton d’Utique) and Branchut-du-Tic are both Stoics.”
“Monsieur Sainte-Lucie,” said the poet, “I will read my verses to you, so that you can make your criticisms before they are published.”
“No, no,” cried Mercier, his little round face contracting under his spectacles; “you can read your verses to him when you are alone.”
Then the conversation turned on aesthetics. Dion considered that poetry was the natural and primeval language.
Mercier replied sourly.
“It was cries, not verses, which were the primitive and natural language. The first men did not exclaim:
“Yea, to his temple I come the Eternal to worship.”
They said, “hoo hoo hoo! ba ba ba! quack!” But are you a mathematician? No? Then it is no use arguing with you. I only argue with an adversary who knows the mathematical method.”
Labanne asserted that poetry was a sublime monstrosity, a magnificent dise
ase. For him, a fine poem was a fine crime, and nothing else.
“Allow me,” said Mercier, adjusting his spectacles. “How far have you gone in mathematical analysis? I shall know by your answers if I can argue with you or not.”
Sainte-Lucie, emptying a fresh glass, said to himself: “My new friends are very peculiar, but very agreeable.”
Finally, as he understood literally nothing of the discussion, which became heated, he gave up trying to follow the tangled thread of discourse, and let his naïf bold eyes wander round the room. They encountered the amorous eyes of the fat Virginie, who, leaning against the glass door of the partition, was watching him as she wiped her red hands.
“She is a very agreeable woman,” he thought. Having drunk another bock, he became more confirmed in this opinion.
The tavern had emptied little by little. The founders of the Review alone remained round the saucers piled up on the table, like two porcelain towers in a Chinese village.
Virginie was about to pull down the iron shutters in front, when the door opened and a long pale person came in, dressed in a very short summer-jacket, with the collar turned up. Two enormous, flat, and abominably shod feet protruded in front of him.
“It is Branchut,” cried the Committee. “How do you do, Branchut?”
But Branchut was in a sombre mood.
“Labanne,” he said, “you took away, by mistake I sincerely hope, the key of your studio, and if I had not met you here, I should inevitably have had to pass the night out of doors.”
Branchut spoke with Ciceronian elegance. His eyes rolled terribly, and his nose twitched nervously from the root to the nostrils, but his mouth emitted only the purest and most dulcet sounds.
Labanne handed over his key, with an apology. Branchut would drink neither beer, coffee, cognac, nor chartreuse. He would not drink anything. Dion asked him for an article for his Review, but the moralist required a deal of coaxing.
“Take his commentary on the Phædo,” said Labanne, “which is written in charcoal all along the wall of my studio. You can have it copied, unless you prefer to take the wall to the printer.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 295