“We must find a title,” he said.
For two hours they discussed any number of possible and impossible appellations.
The next day Dion saluted the assembly at “The Famished Cat” with a triumphant cry:
“I’ve got it: The Idea. The Idea: A new Review.”
And with his head on one side, his Apollo-like locks thrown back, his face illuminated by a smile, he turned over the pages of an imaginary magazine and read out, as it were in capital letters: “The Idea: A new Review. Paul Dion, editor.”
“What idea?” asked Labanne, stroking his yellow beard.
“The idea of the mathematical basis, of course,” replied Mercier.
“The idea of the superiority of poetry and ideality over prose and reality,” replied Dion.
“And also, perhaps,” insinuated the moralist Branchut in bitter-sweet tones, rubbing his flexible nose, “and also, perhaps, the idea of the new morality of which I propose to expound the theory, that is of course if it is agreeable to you.”
Labanne remarked that the thing had better be called The Ideas, and not The Idea, as each one seemed to have his own.
But the first title was adhered to, and Dion wrote out on a sheet of notepaper, with the pen Virginie used for her accounts, a summary of the first number, which was to contain:
1. “An Address to the Reader,” by Paul Dion.
2. “An article, as yet vague, on philosophy,” by Claude Branchut.
3. “An article, still more vague, on the fine arts,” by Emile Labanne.
4. “The Mistress who brings Death — a Poem,” by Paul Dion.
5. “Something very vague on science,” by Guillaume Mercier.
As to theatrical and literary criticisms, the editor would look after them.
The matter thus decided on, Dion discovered, in a badly-paved street near Saint-André des Arts, a printer in distress, who with dull indifference consented to print the magazine. He was a little, pale, bald man, whose melting-away aspect made one think of a candle-end burning in a draught. His affairs were in a pitiful condition. He was a hopeless printer, but he was a printer. He printed. He sent proofs which Dion befouled on all the tables in the café. But they were obliged to admit that copy was lacking, in spite of sundry poems sent from divers parts of Europe to the editor in chief of The Idea.
The first number seemed likely to be the more slender, since Branchut lost the pages of his article on philosophy in the various doorways as fast as he wrote them, and Labanne could not compose the first lines of his studies on art until he had read fifteen hundred volumes. Mercier’s article did really exist; but the author, who was as cramped in his writing, in his style, and in his ideas, as he was in his clothes, could easily have put the whole thing on the two glasses of his spectacles. As for “The Mistress who brings Death,” she was already in her third proof.
It was at this moment that Sainte-Lucie, appointed Secretary to the Staff, proposed to introduce Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse to the poet; he could not help but give them an article, he said.
It was a great occasion the night on which Godet-Laterrasse climbed down from the outside of an omnibus and entered Virginie’s establishment. He turned the door-handle with the air of a man who knows himself in demand, and while his entrance was received with a flattering murmur, he crossed the shop with African majesty, tempered by creole languor. When he heard himself hailed as “dear master” by the poet Dion, he showed every tooth in his head, and smiled like an idol. But all of a sudden his face assumed an expression of haughty dislike. He had met Labanne’s indifferent glance through the tobacco smoke. He had heard that Labanne had declared that he was going to represent him in an heroic attitude, with the dial of a clock in his waistcoat. Since then he considered him to be the most corrupt of sceptics. Filled with this thought, he turned his horizontal face towards Dion and Mercier, and said:
“Young men, beware of scepticism; it is a poisonous breath which dries up the soul in its flower.”
He promised to contribute to the magazine an unpublished chapter of his great work on the regeneration of humanity by the black races.
He explained his theory. The black races were untouched by the Christian leprosy, which for eighteen centuries had devoured the white peoples.
He told how, when he was but eleven years old, he was walking alone by the sea, and, looking at its immensity, he said to himself: “Priests can say what they like; I will never believe that Christianity has done anything for the abolition of slavery.”
When he left, they escorted him to the omnibus. As it approached Sainte-Lucie hailed it. Godet-Laterrasse, having shaken hands all round, took his pupil affectionately by the shoulders, and, drawing him a little to one side, said:
“I have forgotten my purse; it is most careless of me! Lend me a few sous.”
Then, having adroitly picked up a franc from the handful of change held out to him, he climbed on to the vehicle and called out:
“Go ahead, Remi! Dig into Tacitus!”
CHAPTER VI
IT was quite natural that Remi should be plucked when he went up for his examination the second time. His prospects of a degree were becoming more and more misty and effaced. When Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse commented on his failures, which were certainly not surprising, he managed to make them appear mysterious and questionable.
“It is not you who have been plucked,” he said; “it is I. They were aiming at me when they hit you, you may be sure. Ah! these gentlemen of the Sorbonne won’t forgive me my last article.”
When Remi heard remarks of this kind, he felt so completely knocked over that he did not exactly know if the baccalaureate was a literary examination or a secret society.
He passed the winter in a voluptuous torpor, and when the timid April sun shone on the walls it only half-awakened him.
The sparrows were twittering on the roofs. The half-pay captain was sowing seeds in his green boxes.
Windows, which had been closed for so long, their panes obscured by thick steam, now opened to the pale daylight and the first warm breath of spring. Remi, who had since the summer lost sight and recollection of his friends on the fourth storey, was pleased to see the cage full of canaries and the brass handle of the piano again.
When he caught sight, for the first time, of the mother and daughter in the gilt salon, he almost bowed in a friendly way to them.
A little old man was sitting on the sofa holding his hat and his umbrella between his knees; he seemed to be talking to them in an intimate fashion. He raised his arm, and Remi imagined that he was saying:
“How you have grown, Marie (or Jeanne, or Louise)! Why, you are quite a young lady!”
Remi felt a little cross at seeing a stranger seated in this fashion on his friend’s sofa — not that the little old man was unpleasant looking; on the contrary, he had the air of a good fellow. But Remi did not know him, and the thought that the ladies had secrets from him made him unhappy. One cannot foresee everything. He shut his window, and sulked till the next day. He opened it in the morning just to see if the canaries’ cage was in its usual place, and saw the young girl, in a round hat, chewing the top of her umbrella and prancing with the impatience of a young horse — a habit of hers when she was ready to go out, and had to wait while her mother loitered, tying her bonnet-strings in front of the glass. But one must admit that a woman of forty-five can’t dress as a little girl can in two or three birdlike darts.
The mother that day, as every day, inspected her daughter’s toilet minutely. But there must have been something seriously wrong with the grey frock, for she said something which was received with all sorts of little impatient pouting movements with stamping and marks of despair. Finally, Mademoiselle undid the buttons of her corsage and pushed-to the window, which in a few seconds opened again of its own accord, so that Remi caught a glimpse of the mother standing up with the grey frock in her hand; she was putting a stitch in it, while Mademoiselle, clad in her stays and a short white petticoat, s
tood waiting.
She turned her head, and saw the student looking at her; then, with the pretty gesture of a child who is being bathed and is chilly, she covered her chest with her two arms. Her lips pronounced some words very rapidly, which were surely:
“Mamma — mamma.”
The mother shrugged her shoulders, and seemed to answer quite calmly:
“Good Lord, my dear! What does it matter?” Then she closed the window nonchalantly.
From that day Remi refrained, though he could not have said why, from observing his opposite neighbours too closely; but he thought they might go away, and he would never see them again, and the thought made him sad. He decided that the degree, as understood by Godet-Laterasse, was not a very important matter, and he resolved to be a painter. To paint seemed to him at once fine and simple. Then suddenly he remembered General Télémaque.
“I must go and see him,” he said.
CHAPTER VII
AFTER his second failure, Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse, who was much taken up with public affairs, neglected his pupil considerably. Remi consoled himself for the absence of his tutor by drawing in Labanne’s studio. The incomparable sculptor had recently discovered the works of the poet Colardeau in a box on the parapet of the Quai Malaquais, and was carried away with admiration for them.
“Colardeau is the greatest of all French poets,” he said.
A heavy heat hung over the city of stone and asphalt, but the moralist Branchut was clothed in a thick overcoat of cloth with a long pile, which, one of his friends said, made him look like a scythe covered with goat’s skin. His thoughts dwelt perpetually on woman, and he had never been in such a ferocious humour. He no longer had the appetite with which he had formerly eaten a ha’penny roll every day, but an inextinguishable thirst burnt him under his thick fleece. One day when Remi, under Labanne’s direction, was copying for the hundredth time the water-jar, which stood in the winter on the studio stove, the moralist Branchut seized the model vase and went off to fill it at the pump. When he returned, with a wet nose and a dripping beard, the young creole cast a sidelong glance, full of meaning, at him. Branchut called for lightning from heaven, and longed for the deluge. He wrote obscure and terrible sentiments on leaves which he tore from Labanne’s most valuable books. A storm freshened the atmosphere of the city and relieved the moralist’s over-strained nerves.
Time went by, the passing seasons brought kites in the windy September skies, fogs on the October horizon, hot chestnuts at the doors of the wine shops, oranges on the barrows, the magic-lantern on the Savoyard’s back; and when the roofs were covered with snow, the savoury smell of roasted goose in warm dining-rooms, on feast days, such as Christmas, New Year, and Twelfth Night. But time did not change Branchut’s heart.
Towards four o’clock on the afternoon of Twelfth Night, Remi was crossing the Place Saint-Sulpice with the poet Dion; he looked at the icicles which hung from the four stone bishops and half hid them, and at the frozen water in the fountain under their feet. He rubbed his hands together, and laughed aloud.
“It won’t be very warm on this Place at midnight,” he said.
Then they began to discuss — Remi with childish joy, and Dion with more refined satisfaction — a letter they had just sent off by a commissionaire, the opening phrases of which they repeated to one another untiringly:
“You are dark and I am fair. You are strong and I am weak. I understand you, and I love you.”
They had evidently concocted some detestable practical joke, with which they felt pleased and proud.
That evening Branchut dined at “The Famished Cat” with Mercier, who was beginning to look old, and whose shrunken face was almost hidden by his spectacles, with Labanne, who had been much taken up for a week past with a seventeenth-century book on etiquette, the poet Dion, and Sainte-Lucie. Virginie gave them a cabbage soup of powerful bouquet. Branchut pushed away the smoking plateful Labanne offered him. Such heavy food choked him, he said. Labanne had not the slightest idea how to feed one of the élite.
A commissionaire came in, asked for Monsieur Branchut, and handed him a violet-scented letter in a pearl-grey envelope with a blue monogram. As the philosopher read it, his sensitive nose twitched violently. At last he put it in his pocket (he was wearing a dress-coat Labanne had given him), and looked around mysteriously. All his thin and acrid blood rushed to his pimpled face; he was transfigured. His nose seemed illuminated by an interior flame. Dion was examining the hem of his table-napkin; Remi, with his knife in the salt-cellar, was making hills and valleys with the salt, and seemed entirely lost in the contemplation of the little polar landscapes he was creating, and destroying with the all-powerful capriciousness of a Lapland Jehovah.
The conversation which the commissionaire had interrupted was quietly resumed, Labanne alone talking with any energy. Much interested in the etiquette of polite manners in the seventeenth century, he was regretting the days of Louis XIV., and said:
“The Great King was certainly not to be compared with Cæsar Borgia, but anyway he was better than the rights of man and immortal principles!”
Every now and then Branchut slipped his hand into the pocket of his coat and pressed something to his heart. He was lost in a profound reverie, and from his swollen and cracked lips there escaped at intervals suave words alluding to the possible regeneration of mankind by love. At eleven o’clock he rose to go out; first brushing his waistcoat with his cuff, which showed for him extraordinary refinement and unwonted attention to his personal appearance.
“See you to-morrow?” asked Labanne. The philosopher muttered mysteriously something about the probability of his total disappearance, and departed as quietly and swiftly as if he had wings. Shortly after, Dion and Labanne left “The Famished Cat.”
At midnight the moralist, in his dress-coat, was still walking round and round the fountain with its four bishops. The few belated passers-by went quickly across the square. The water which had overflowed from the basin of the fountain froze on the asphalt, and Branchut slipped at every step. A bitter wind blew through the tails of his coat; but like a blind horse turning a mill-wheel, he turned and turned about the stone fountain indefatigably. The town-hall clock struck one and still the moralist revolved; the silence of the night was broken only by the monotonous tread of two policemen on their beat. At half-past one he drew out the scented note and read it over by the light of a street lamp.
“You are dark and I am fair. You are strong and I am weak. I understand you, and I love you. Come to-night at twelve o’clock to the fountain on the Place Saint-Sulpice.”
There could be no mistaking that, so the philosopher returned to his post. The hoar-frost covered him with a glittering powder; the tails of his coat hung heavy with moisture. The square was deserted. Still he waited. Deceived, disappointed, overcome, he dropped on to a bench and sat there motionless, his head in his hands. When at last he looked up, he thought he caught sight of Dion and Sainte-Lucie disappearing swiftly in the obscurity of the Rue Honoré-Chevalier. A sudden light burst in upon him; his nose trembled with indignation.
He swore to Labanne next day, as he lay draped in his horse-blanket, that he would kill Sainte-Lucie.
“I don’t care much for my life,” he said, “but I care still less for his.”
Labanne tried in vain to pacify him.
At the same time Remi was quietly and obliviously enjoying the warmth of his eider-down quilt, thinking to himself the while:
“I really must go and see General Télémaque one of these days.”
CHAPTER VIII
TÉLÉMAQUE, a linen cap on his head, a white apron round his waist, stood smiling on the threshold of his shop. The dusty avenue, with its meagre plane trees, was inundated by the bright morning sunshine. To the right the view extended as far as the barracks, from whence came a sound of trumpets; to the left, to the round, open space where the Emperor’s statue should have been, but where there was only an empty pedestal. On either side of the wide ave
nue were low houses and bits of waste ground, with washerwomen’s clothes-poles in rows. The wine shops at the street corners overlooking these bare patches were painted a brown-red, to attract the eye, and provoke the thirst of soldiers and workmen, even from a distance. All the rest, walls and waste ground alike, were a uniform grey. The two houses opposite to that occupied by Télémaque had plaster façades and were three storeys high. They were ornamented with balustrades, semicircular bow-windows, and niches containing busts — all cracking, peeling, mouldy, their broken windows patched with paper and hung with rags. Groups of children and dogs played in confused heaps in the dust, soldiers were walking slowly towards the river-bank, and straight-petticoated women came and went, carrying pails and baskets.
Télémaque’s shop was painted red; in the window were to be seen a sirloin of beef and some steaks laid out on plates. Télémaque was swinging a dead rabbit by the ears and smiling. The lustrous enamel of his eyes subdued yet at the same time set off by his plump cheeks, illuminated his ebony face, with its flat nose and thick lips. His wool was still black and curly, but his forehead, which had yielded to a rectilinear baldness, rose as it receded, disclosing a portion of the skull of which the summit formed a sort of crest.
Miragoane, sitting on her haunches, looked with equal interest at men, animals, and things. Free from disturbing passions, her mind at ease, she warmed herself quietly in the sun. Sometimes she would stretch up her intelligent head and with curled-up tongue lick a little of the coagulated blood on the muzzle of the rabbit as it hung from Télémaque’s hands; then, satisfied with this delicate piece of sensuality, she would look down the avenue again, and softly stir her tail.
Télémaque turned the skin of the rabbit inside out as easily as one turns a glove, then putting the skinless animal, glowing with the most brilliant hues, upon a small table, he adroitly cut it up and put the pieces in a dish. Then he went into the shop, the outer door of which opened on to a little garden in which were several arbours. Having prepared his stew in the cleanest way, he sat down and dreamily watched the copper saucepan singing on the stove. His eyes, which were like the freshly-painted eyes on a new doll, stared vacantly; but no doubt they saw more than the tiled stove, the pewter counter, and the tables covered with American cloth, for he was murmuring to himself a strange, low chant, and talking to invisible beings. Then, having taken another look at the stew, which, as the cooks say, had started on a slow fire:
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