As soon as they left off asking him, he promised to write something. “It shall be,” he said, “a study in a particular style on the philosophers.”
He coughed, an oratorical cough, picked up an empty glass, placed it in front of him and proceeded leisurely.
“This is my point of view. There are two sorts of philosophers: those who place themselves behind the glass, like Hegel, and those who place themselves between the glass and myself, like Kant. Do you understand the point of view?”
Dion understood the point of view, so Branchut was able to continue.
“When,” he said, “a philosopher is behind my glass, do you know what I do — ?”
Here, having put out one of the lights and turned down the other, Virginie warned the gentlemen that it was half-past twelve, and they must go. Branchut, Mercier, and Labanne went out one after the other, stooping under the half-lowered shutter.
Sainte-Lucie, left alone in the dark shop, seized Virginie round the waist and gave her three or four kisses, wherever he could snatch them, on her neck or on her ear. Virginie resisted a moment, then she burst into sobs, and melted into the mulatto’s arms.
Branchut, meanwhile, standing on the pavement, was saying to Labanne: “Do you think I would take my glass and put it behind the philosopher?
No! Or take the philosopher and — ?”
“Aren’t you coming, Sainte-Lucie?” cried the poet Dion, who was counting on reciting his verses to the creole all the way home.
But Sainte-Lucie did not answer.
CHAPTER IV
IT was snowing that morning; the muffled sound of the passing carriages came heavily through the windows of “The Famished Cat.” A livid light threw up the pictures on the wall harshly, and made the painted figures look like corpses. Remi was seated at a little table in the deserted shop, devouring a beefsteak and potatoes, while Virginie stood motionless in front of him, her hands folded on her apron, her eyes contemplating him with the expression of a saint.
“It is tender, isn’t it?” she said effusively. “Have you enough? There is a fine cut of cold roast beef in the kitchen; will you have some? You don’t drink anything.”
He was eating and drinking as hard as he could, while she eyed him devoutly. She said:
“I have given you some Gruyère cheese, which is so good it is creeping. Monsieur Potrel was very fond of Gruyère, especially when it crept.”
Remi went on eating.
Then Virginie gave him fruit and jam in addition.
She remained absorbed for a long time in her mystic meditation, then sighed and said:
“Perhaps I am wrong in doing as I do. You will be like all the others, Monsieur Sainte-Lucie. All men are alike. But I am not like the average woman. When I attach myself to some one it is for life. I have told you how Potrel behaved to me. Now, frankly, was that the way to act? A man for whom I did everything. I mended his linen; I would have gone to the stake for him. He was clever, talented, everything, but he was ungrateful.”
And the afflicted eyes of the lady turned to the picture of “The Famished Cat,” as though to bid it bear witness to the ingratitude of Potrel.
Her ample chest heaved, her three chins trembled, as she added in a stifled voice:
“And to think that I am not sure that I don’t still love him! If you were to abandon me I don’t know what I should do. Are you coming this evening, darling? — What can I offer you, gentlemen?”
This last phrase, accompanied by a smile, was addressed to two customers who came in just then.
Sainte-Lucie was happy; he had been plucked gloriously by the examiners, but he warmed himself at every friendly stove, laughed his big sensual laugh, and amused himself with everything he saw and heard, without troubling about anything further. The very slightly dissimulated favour with which Virginie regarded him had won him the respect of the guests at “The Famished Cat.” Women mark with a distinctive sign the men they favour.
He found Labanne’s studio even more attractive than Virginie’s room. But the stove was never lighted. This made Remi angry; he was already a good draughtsman, and was beginning to paint. Labanne said:
“That fellow draws by instinct. He has no ideas, but he has the touch. I really believe that one must be as stupid as Potrel to model as well as he does.”
Godet-Laterrasse had tried several times to recapture his pupil. He would come down sometimes towards mid-day, outside an omnibus from the heights of Montmartre, would burst breathlessly into Remi’s room and cry out:
“Dig into Tacitus. Cheer up!”
He would say emphatically: Nox eadem Britannici necem alque rogum conjunxit. (A single night witnessed the death and the obsequies of Britannicus) Then he would get muddled over certain grammatical difficulties from which he would extricate himself by wandering remarks about the great writer, who, he said, had branded the foreheads of tyrants with a red-hot iron.
The lesson over, he would get up, and with a lordly gesture lay hold of two or three volumes of Prudhon or Ouinet, which slumbered unopened on the chest of drawers, and saying that he wished to refer to them, would put them under his arm. Remi never saw them again. In a few months’ time there was nothing but a few odd books left of the enormous packet, and these he took one day and sold to a bookseller in the Rue Soufflot. There was no longer any talk about the fundamental works.
CHAPTER V
TIME went by. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse came now and then, to give his pupil a lesson. “The Famished Cat” did not occupy all of Remi’s mind; he would stay in his room, munching exotic dainties, which he bought at the creole grocery in the Rue Tronchet.
Every day, now the weather was fine, he would open his window and look out into the street. He liked to see the horses go by; they seemed to him thin in the collar, long in the body, and big in the crupper. Of the women who passed below across the front of the hotel, he could only see the tops of their hats, their hair, their skirts puffed out behind, and occasionally a chin and a bust under it. He noticed the graceful swing or the comical waddle of all these creatures, going on their easy or difficult way. Such fugitive aspects of life amused him, and he did not spoil the spectacle by reflection. For no deep thought had as yet germinated under his thick hair.
What interested him most was the house opposite, which reared in front of his hotel its façade of new stone, with five windows to each storey. Through the half-open windows he could see bits of the wall papers, the woodwork of the dining-room, ends of gilded picture frames, and corners of furniture. All these things, diminished by distance (for the street was wide), appeared to him of the size and importance of a toy. The people who moved about in the rooms looked like marvellously finished dolls. If some startled head suddenly popped up among the tiles, through a skylight, and showed in the sunshine a bald cranium or a pair of winking eyes, the creole would go off in a long fit of laughter, and be inspired with dozens of sketches, which he afterwards tore up. In a few days he was familiar with all the people who moved about in the great stone hive across the way.
On the balcony of the fifth floor a half-pay captain (such he most surely was) sowed flower seeds in a box. On the intermediate storeys servants were to be seen beating fur rugs at the windows. Sometimes Remi would see a broom moving in front of the furniture, somnolent under its shroud-like coverings against the white panels. On the ground floor a house agent’s clerk stood at a high desk and wrote throughout the day.
But Remi’s eyes turned most frequently to the rooms on the fourth floor. There was never anything strange or mysterious there, nothing voluptuous, nothing which could call the blood to the young man’s cheeks. The only remarkable thing about the windows was a cage full of canaries and a very small pot of flowers. The apartment lighted by these windows was occupied by a middle-aged lady, slow but active and calm in her movements: her placid face, which appeared first at one window and then at another, was crowned by beautiful hair, which was nevertheless getting a little wide in the parting. Her daughter, who
was still a child in short frocks, had inherited her mother’s hair, but it was fairer and more luminous in quality, abundant and rich; she wore it separated in two masses by a fine line. She moved about like a boy, and did not know what to do with her arms and legs.
Remi entered, unseen, into the intimacy of these two people; he knew all the little monotonous events of their existence, the time for meals and for lessons, the time to go for a walk, and to bring in the bird-cage, the time when, armed with note-paper and books, to go off to classes. He knew that the ladies went out at eleven o’clock every Sunday, with prayer-books in their hands. At ten o’clock every morning during the week, the young girl sat down to the piano, whose brass handle shone near the window in the gilded drawing-room. Remi could see two little red hands, child’s hands, running up and down the notes, playing scales he could not hear.
But she did not stay very long seated on the music-stool before the piano. She came to the window, and, if it was shut, lifted up the white curtain and looked into the street with frank audacity, and pressed the end of a small nose against the glass so that it became flat and white: then she would disappear as she had come, as a bird takes flight, without any appreciable reason. Both mother and daughter had large limpid eyes, childish eyes, emotionless eyes, which seemed to say, “Nothing has ever troubled, or ever will trouble, our affectionate peacefulness.” The mother, who had no doubt been a widow for many years, was the quieter of the two. The kindly nature of the plump woman was visible in all her gestures, affectionate without being caressing, vigilant without being tiresome. Mademoiselle was more brusque. One day she even opened the window and leaned out on the balcony and made signs to two of her companions at church or school who were passing in the street below.
She did not show the slightest confusion when her mother fetched her in, and sent the maid, as Remi supposed, to ask the young ladies upstairs: they came up and evidently had very funny things to say to each other, for all three laughed merrily.
And their laughter reached Remi’s ears, across the wide roadway, like the scarcely perceptible sound of scattering pearls.
Every day Remi walked by the Luxembourg Gardens, through the railings in the light morning mist he could see the undulating lawns and the groups of exotic plants. He would go on to the Rue Carnot and into the studio, the key of which was always left for him under the mat.
Labanne’s studio was so full of books that it might have been taken for a second-hand shop. Books were piled round abandoned studies, shrinking under their dry cloths. The floor was entirely covered with piled up books. One walked over leather bindings. Calf-skin backs, with gilded lines and corners, red edges, speckled edges, yellow, blue and red backs, many of them half torn off, lay about in heaps. Big dog-eared folios yawned in every corner, and the boards dropped to pieces beneath the shrivelling leather. A thick layer of dust slowly buried this mass of literature and science.
The walls had once been whitewashed. Bare, so far as the upper half was concerned, they were scribbled over to the height of a man’s head, in small text hand, half in Greek half in French. It was the commentary on the Phædo, which Branchut had been inspired to write one sleepless night. The door was covered with inscriptions, traced by various people.
The topmost one, cut with a knife in capital letters, said:
“Woman is more bitter than death.”
The second, in round hand, in crayon, ran:
“Academicians are all bourgeois, Cabanel is a hairdresser’s assistant.”
The third in pencil, in a cursive hand, said:
“Laud we the womanly form, which still, as of old, uplifts
Chants hieratic, in praise of the greatest of beauty’s gifts.”
(“Gloire aux corps féminins qui, sur le mode antique,
Chantent l’hymne sacré de la beauté plastique.”)
PAUL DION.
The fourth, written in chalk, in an illiterate hand, said:
“I have brought back the clean linen. Monday I will call for the dirty at the porter’s lodge.”
The fifth in charcoal, by Labanne himself, said:
“Athens, ever venerable city, if thou hadst not existed, the world would not yet know the meaning of beauty.”
The sixth, inscribed with a hair-pin, which had faintly scratched the paint, declared:
“Labanne is a rat. I don’t care a damn for him. — MARIA.”
And there were many others on the door.
In a corner near the stove a horse-blanket was flung on a pile of books and papers. These papers, these books, and this horse-blanket formed the bed of the moralist Branchut.
One day when he was sitting on his horse-blanket dreaming about Demosthenes, German professors, and the Princess Fédora, Remi was copying a watering-pot and putting his tongue out in the excess of his preoccupation. Wanting to change a line in his drawing, he asked the philosopher if he had any stale bread-crumb in his pocket, and inadvertently addressed him as Monsieur Branchut-du-Tic. Branchut, whom misfortune had made irascible, looked at him with eyes goggling like a lobster, a formidable shiver ran down his nose, and he left the studio in a rage.
The poet Dion, whom he found at the tavern, and Labanne, whom he discovered in front of a box of old books on the quay, took the matter in hand. The poet Dion declared that blood alone could wipe out the insult, but the sceptic Labanne was more humane, and brought about a sort of reconciliation. Remi bore no malice.
The moralist and the creole lived in peace for a month or two; till Branchut, whose fate it was to suffer through women, had the misfortune to look tenderly at the hostess of “The Famished Cat.” Now Branchut’s face, when he wished to express tenderness, was terribly like the face of an epileptic.
He ogled Virginie with bloodshot eyes starting from their orbits; she was terrified, and made a great fuss about her fright. She took every occasion to show the philosopher that he inspired her with virtuous horror; and as at the same time she cast languishing looks at Remi, Branchut suffered all the pangs of jealousy. He was unhappy, and became spiteful.
First of all he found fault with the gentle Labanne, who had doubly wronged him, inasmuch as he was possessed of a small private income, and had rendered the philosopher many services.
Solemnly every morning Branchut would return him the key of the studio, and every morning the sculptor quietly put it under the mat, where every evening Branchut would come and find it.
During the months of July and August Branchut became bitter, sceptical, and strong-minded. He posed as the superior man. He despised women, and said they were inferior beings. He affected not to look at Virginie, when he haughtily demanded bottles of beer from her, for which Labanne paid.
He put forth transcendental theories on art.
“I saw recently in a museum,” he said, “the figure of a mammoth traced with a bit of pointed flint on a piece of fossil ivory. This figure dates from a prehistoric period — it predates the oldest of civilisations. It is the work of a stupid savage. But it reveals an artistic sentiment far superior to the most beautiful conceptions of Michael Angelo: it is at once ideal and true. And our best modern artists sacrifice truth to the ideal, or the ideal to truth.”
Here he looked maliciously at Labanne, but the latter was quite happy; he approved and even enlarged on his philosopher friend’s idea.
“Art,” he said, “declines in proportion as thought develops. There were no sculptors left in Greece at the time of Aristotle. Artists are inferior creatures; they are like pregnant women — they bring forth they know not how. Praxiteles produced his Venus as the mother of Aspasia produced Aspasia — quite naturally and quite foolishly. The sculptors of Athens and Rome had not read the Abbé Winckelmann. They knew nothing of aesthetics, yet they made the Theseus of the Parthenon and the Augustus of the Louvre. A clever man produces nothing beautiful or great.”
Branchut asked sourly:
“Then in that case why are you a sculptor — you who think you are a clever man? It is true that I
have never seen anything of yours which resembled the least bit in the world a statue, a bust, or a bas-relief. You haven’t even a clay model or a sketch to show, and it is certainly five years since you touched a chisel. If you keep your studio simply as a refuge for me, I owe it to you and I owe it to myself to tell you that I should not have the slightest trouble in finding another lodging. I have not given you, that I know of, the right to crush me with your charity.”
But in spite of the greatness of his soul the philosopher could not remain long on these heights; he became weak once more. He forgot the mammoth in the museum, and could see none but Virginie. He fell into a deadly depression; yet he had a brief, bright hour in his life. He met Virginie one morning coming back from market, a basket on each arm, sweating, puffing, coughing, and choking with incipient asthma. He followed her, rather reluctantly, and she allowed him to carry the basket of meat. He was delighted, but his joy was the cause of his downfall. He hoped and dared everything. One evening he slipped into the kitchen and seized her in his arms as she was washing the dishes. She dropped a plate and emitted heartrending cries; the Princess Fédora did not shriek so shrilly. This raised a great scandal. The poet Dion was pleased; Mercier’s eyes twinkled behind his glasses; Labanne shrugged his shoulders. Remi was a little vexed, but he smiled to himself when he hit on a scheme for revenge.
It was the vengeance of a schoolboy and a savage, and he licked his lips at the thought of it. He let it sleep in his greedy lazy heart, like a pot of jam in a good housekeeper’s store-closet.
The poet Dion was again talking about starting a review. The attempt of the previous year had failed because his grandmother’s three hundred francs had to be wasted in domestic expenses; but he had received another present of the same sum.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 296