The “cursed gewgaw” was no other than the sun, just then filling the studio with blinding light.
Potrel had a huge appetite which he satisfied in cabmen’s restaurants. When Remi spoke to him of “The Famished Cat,” he would simply smile. One day, however, he asked if Virginie had kept her fine figure. After many vain attempts Remi succeeded in enticing him one evening to the establishment in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Virginie, red as a peony, brought him a large slice of ham.
“Eat it, Monsieur Potrel,” she said. “It is very good, very delicate. See how white the fat is. You are not drinking anything. Try this beer; I bottled it last month. You used to be fond of beer.”
And Potrel ate and drank, while Virginie, standing behind his chair, her face illuminated with a seraphic smile, gasped ecstatically at every mouthful the silent and robust man swallowed.
The hostess did not even notice when Remi left the tavern, and he gave a sigh of relief, like a man who has been eased from an oppressive weight.
On his way home he met the concierge of the house where the two ladies lived going into the wine shop, and a little farther on he saw the man’s wife gossiping with the greengrocer. Then an idea suddenly occurred to him. He walked into the deserted lodge, and looked about to see if he could discover the name of the ladies on the fourth storey. Above one of the little pigeon-holes were the words “Madame Lourmel, rentière.”
Next day he saw from the window Mademoiselle Lourmel giving her birds water in a small china cup. He watched her involuntarily with a warm and lively sympathy. She saw him, but it was only slowly that she turned aside her frank ingenuous gaze. He noticed that she was no longer a child, and that she was very pretty.
He went at this period several times a week to Courbevoie, and the portrait of Télémaque emerged little by little from the canvas. It was a very bad portrait, but Télémaque was enchanted with it. When the shop was shut at night, he would prop the painting up on a table between two lighted candles, and dance the Calenda before it, or else sing to it in a soft nasal voice:
“Canga-do-ki-la,
Canga-li.”
Miragoane, seated on her haunches, gravely took part in the ceremonies. One day she affectionately licked the nose of the portrait: the paint was wet, but the damage done was easily repaired.
Télémaque had moments of regret that Olivette was not on the canvas beside him, dressed in her red shawl. It did not deeply distress him, however, and he continued to dance the Calenda.
CHAPTER X
REMI got up one morning with the pleasant thought in his mind, that he had finished the negro’s portrait, and that it was in its way a remarkable work. He could see, framed in the window opposite his, two little hands tapping on the keys of a piano; they were no longer red, and did not tap so hard. He also noticed that the chandelier was imprisoned in a muslin bag, and that there was a great deal of bustling about in the ordinarily calm apartment.
The little hands shut down the piano-lid and disappeared, to reappear carrying leather bags and hat-boxes. Remi, who felt that something of importance was happening, stuck to his post of observation, and kept his eye on the approaches to the house. After two hours’ watching he saw the porter come down carrying a pyramid of trunks and boxes; a cab stopped at the door, and he saw Madame Lourmel’s servant pile still more travelling bags and boxes in it. Remi seized his paint-box, emptied all the money he had in his secretary into his pocket, and rushed bare-headed, in a jersey and his slippers, downstairs and into the street. He hailed the astonished driver of a passing cab and hurried him in pursuit of the vehicle which had just moved off under its tottering pyramid of luggage, and into which he had seen the skirts of a dress disappearing.
The two cabs crossed Paris, one behind the other, and drew up in the courtyard of the St. Lazare railway station. Remi followed the two ladies, and, still in his unconventional attire, climbed the stairs. Mademoiselle Lourmel turned her head to see this strange traveller, whom she recognised perfectly well. Her look showed a surprise which included amusement, and something of admiration. As he stood by Madame Lourmel at the ticket-office and heard her ask for two tickets for Avranches, he breathed a sigh of relief and also took a ticket for Avranches. Madame Lourmel went off with her daughter to register the luggage, and Remi, who had no formality of that kind to fulfil, decided to do a little useful shopping. He ran to a ready-made clothes-store in the Rue de la Pépinière, bought two or three suits without looking at them, and paid the shopkeeper, who had half a mind to have his extraordinary customer arrested. Suddenly Remi gave a cry of despair:
“Shoes!” he said; “shoes!”
The shopkeeper, a handsome Jew with a goat-like head, an amiable mouth and pitiless eyes, replied coldly that “he didn’t keep the article.”
“Give me yours, then,” said the desperate creole.
But the Israelite, who was becoming more and more uneasy, looked so forbidding that Remi went off in his slippers, putting on some of the new clothes as he went along through the bustle of the garish street. He stopped to snatch a hat hanging outside a shop, and flung down the money for it. It was twenty-seven minutes past four already. Remi tore along towards the station, and by thirty-two minutes past he was in the waiting-room, which had probably never before been entered by a traveller in slippers. A pair of violet eyes welcomed him as he entered and seemed to say:
“We were waiting for you. You are very extraordinary with your brown skin, your new clothes put on all awry, and your bedroom slippers. But we are not in the least afraid of you or annoyed at you; you don’t look at all ill-tempered, and you have a bold air which is rather pleasing. This is all we have to say to you. If you want to know anything more you must ask mamma.”
If the daughter’s eyes talked after this fashion, Madame de Lourmel’s glance betrayed that sort of uneasiness noticeable in a hen when one coaxes her chickens from her with bread crumbs.
Remi left mother and daughter discreetly alone in their carriage, and settled himself at the other end of the train. Having taken his seat, the first question he asked himself was when, where, and how could he get some shoes; then, on counting his money, he found he had twenty-one francs thirty-five centimes left, and felt quite reassured. His second question was, if by any chance he was in love with Mademoiselle Lourmel.
CHAPTER XI
ABOUT a week after Remi’s departure, Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse was seized with an ardent desire to see him. With a volume of Tacitus in his pocket, he went off to the Rue des Feuillantines, where he learnt that his pupil had disappeared.
A cloud crossed his noble brow, that brow which, if it had been a mirror, would only have reflected the sky, the gulls of the Pacific, and the constellations of the two hemispheres. People with superior minds are more given to presentiment than ordinary beings. Godet-Laterrasse had a presentiment. That is why, laying aside their old enmity, he went to see Labanne in his studio.
The sculptor, who had no idea of time or space, could tell him nothing. He took him to interview the opulent Virginie, who attributed Remi’s flight to a secret sorrow, the nature of which she left unexplained; but she insinuated that she had not failed to anticipate this eventuality. If, as she feared, it was love which had driven Monsieur Sainte-Lucie to despair, she was truly grieved, but one could not please everybody, unless one was the sort of woman which is unfortunately too numerous in these days. She had done nothing to make Monsieur Remi jealous of Monsieur Potrel; she was an honest woman and had nothing to reproach herself with. She appealed to the picture of “The Famished Cat” to bear witness to her innocence, and returned to the dark corner, where she spent most of her time washing glasses.
With a mind full of care, Godet-Laterrasse returned to the heights of Montmartre. He came down again next day on the top of an omnibus and revisited the studio, which he had chosen as his centre of operations. There he found Branchut, who, in his horse-blanket, was occupied in writing a treatise on love. Full of his subject, Branchut proceeded to expound it.
“Love,” he said, “can only be absolute between two beings who have never seen each other. Eternal absence is necessary for two souls to be in perfect harmony. Solitude is the condition necessary to the growth of a definite passion.”
Godet-Laterrasse resisted the temptations to an oratorical duel on these sublime heights, and asked the moralist if he had seen Sainte-Lucie.
Branchut was totally ignorant of the creole’s disappearance, but a sudden intuition enabled him to explain it. In the twinkling of an eye many things were revealed to him. According to him, this disappearance had a not remote connection with the death of the Princess Vranga. Sainte-Lucie’s gloomy behaviour, in the circumstances that preceded and accompanied the lamentable and poetic end of the Princess Vranga, was due, in the moralist’s eyes, to an eternal remorse that had taken possession of the soul of this young man, frivolous in appearance, but Machiavellian in reality.
“Princess Vranga had to die,” said the philosopher serenely. “It was needful for her to die, so that the love she felt for me might be realised in the absolute. Sainte-Lucie’s crime has probably led him to suicide; he intercepted, over and over again, the letters the Princess had written to me, the text of which I have reconstructed from intuition! and with Satanic irony he gave me only the last one.”
So said Branchut, whose nose twitched in his livid face touched with spots of colour, and whose eyes were haggard and bloodshot. Labanne arrived just in time to drag the unfortunate tutor out into the street, wildly shaking his umbrella above his head.
“My poor moralist!” said he, “he has never had finer ideas than he has now. A grain of phosphorus in the brain makes a man of genius; unhappily he has two grains, that’s the misfortune!”
Labanne remembered having heard Sainte-Lucie speak enthusiastically of a black general who kept a restaurant at Courbevoie; the sculptor thought he might know something. Any way, he would like to see the negro himself.
They got on top of a tram, which took them to the Place de l’Etoile, where Labanne instinctively stopped at the first café, and, having ordered sundry bottles of beer, lost himself in interminable chatter. Monsieur Godet-Laterrasse answered him at great length, and though Labanne did not listen to him, he continued to talk. Many fine theories were aired. All of a sudden the sculptor made a gesture in the air with his thumb, and said:
“It would be quite possible to make that thing bearable to the eye.”
“That thing” was the Arc de Triomphe.
“It would be simple, but you’ll see no one will think of it. One need only establish a sufficient number of stalls at the foot of the edifice, and let them to cobblers, public letter-writers, and fried-potato sellers, especially the latter, because of the smoke. These stalls ought to be sordid, with incorrect, vulgarly-painted signs. The builders might be allowed to take stone from the monument itself, particularly at the corners; this would soften down the harsh outline. It would be desirable to fill up the holes resulting from these various depredations with a few spadefuls of earth, and plant beech-nuts and acorns. The beeches and oaks would spread out their green branches at different heights, and so break the monotony of the grey surface; their roots, pushing down into the masonry, would cause most picturesque cracks. There would have to be a lot of ivy, but that tenacious plant would not fail us; it thrives on stonework. The wind and the birds would sow seeds of gilli-flowers, which love old walls, and a thousand other things in the dusty orifices. Saxifrage, eager for moisture, blackberries, and Virginia creeper would spring up and multiply at random. The top of the edifice would be honeycombed with pigeons’ nests; the swallows would plaster theirs under the vaulting; troops of crows, attracted by the dead dormice and field mice, would swoop down at nightfall. Thus, the Arc de Triomphe, if kept up with some sort of intelligent care, would be looked at by poets, copied by painters, and considered as a work of art. Waiter, another bock.”
Night was falling. The artist and the thinker decided that they would not go any further, so they took the tram back to Montparnasse.
CHAPTER XII
MADAME LOURMEL and her daughter settled themselves in a little stone house with a thatched roof at a small unfrequented seaside place, a few miles from Avranches.
Remi, happy and intoxicated with the salt air, went off with his paint-box to a neighbouring fair. He had only fourteen francs seventy centimes left, but he had a pair of shoes.
Lines of carts were drawn up on the outskirts of the market-place. Under the trees there was a great assembly of red faces, fringed with fair beards, the rumps of calves plastered with dung, horned cattle, pink muzzles, shining haunches, and white caps. The squealing of pigs being taken out of carts was heard above every other sound of man or beast. Women, with cotton fichus and gold chains round their necks, stood stolidly in their straight skirts by the waggons, keenly watching over them, while the men, in full-plaited blue blouses, did business over a pot of cider in some cabaret full of flies.
Remi passed under the holly branch above the door, and sat down at one of the tables with his pencil and paper. He made a sketch of a peasant, then another and another, then one of a group of peasants who were watching him. He said he would do the portrait of any one of them for a franc; but this offer did not loosen their pursestrings. “Go and get your sweethearts,” he said; “I will draw them.”
There was a murmur in the crowd, and three or four particularly jovial fellows pushed a bouncing girl in front of Remi. She was purple, almost violet, and she was laughing from ear to ear. Remi made a sketch of her, in which she could be recognised by her cap and her cross.
One of the jovial fellows pulled a franc out of a woollen stocking and handed it to the painter, then, neatly folding the picture in four, he tucked it under his smock.
The general opinion was that the Parisian could make a good likeness, and Remi went back with several pieces of silver in his pocket. He slept in the most rustic inn in the village, where Madame Lourmel had taken up her quarters, and appeared next day on the dazzling beach, where the striped bathing machines were drawn up in line.
The sea, blue on the horizon, was coming in slowly, breaking on the sand in oily green waves edged with foam. A soft damp sky, one of those treacherous skies which both caress and scorch the tender skins of city dwellers, arched in the round horizon. Skinny women in bathing costumes, their hair in water-proof caps, were scurrying before the incoming waves. He saw Mademoiselle Lourmel; she was wearing a fluttering violet veil.
He wanted to throw his arms round her neck; but he caught sight of Monsieur Sarriette, with the same white whiskers and the same umbrella, coming down a little path to the shore.
“Good morning, Monsieur Sarriette,” he said to the astonished old man.
At the end of a quarter of an hour they were great friends.
“I am very fond of old monuments,” said Monsieur Sarriette, “and, believe me or not, I spent three weeks measuring all the walls of the Abbey on Saint-Michael’s Mount. I have a way of my own of taking measurements — I use my umbrella. The average height of the Abbey ramparts is seventy-two umbrellas, and in the church the pillars of the nave measure no less than thirty-seven umbrellas, three handles, and two ferrules.”
Monsieur Sarriette was delighted to hear that Remi was a painter. They arranged to explore the whole countryside together; Remi was to make sketches and Monsieur Sarriette was to measure the historical buildings.
THE FAMISHED CAT
“Present me to Madame Lourmel,” said Remi.
“Monsieur Remi Sainte-Lucie, son of Monsieur Sainte-Lucie, a former Minister of Haïti,” said the good man at this request.
Remi bowed low first to Madame Lourmel, who was dumb with astonishment, then to the girl, who opened her violet eyes widely and smiled with her flower-like mouth.
That evening Madame Lourmel and her daughter leaned at their window breathing the salt air and watching the moon rise over the sparkling sea.
“But, my dear child,” said Madame L
ourmel, “we know nothing about his family, or his fortune, or his mode of life.”
“But, mamma, I love him,” answered the girl, with the audacity of innocence.
“What do you mean, Jeanne? You know nothing about him,” said the mother.
And Jeanne, whose beautiful eyes were shining with a slightly rebellious tenderness, answered:
“Perhaps I don’t know him, but I know him again.”
CHAPTER XIII
MONSIEUR ALIDOR SAINTE - LUCIE had been twelve hours in Paris and had not yet seen his son. He had looked for him at the railway station and waited in vain for him at the hotel. Remi’s absence irritated him, his nerves were shaken by his long voyage, and in the peaceful bed at the hotel he could still feel the rolling of the ship and the oscillation of the express train. He awoke in a bad humour; the vague uneasiness of his limbs spread to his brain.
Lying back in a cab, jolted by the rough paving of the streets leading up to Montmartre, he thought with dissatisfaction of his son’s education. Godet-Laterrasse did not appear to have troubled himself much about it. Four years had gone by and Remi had not taken his bachelor’s degree. It was for such a result as this that he had chosen a poor but superior man as tutor. He had expected better things of Godet-Laterrasse, who spoke so eloquently and so austerely in political cafés.
The letters the man wrote him annoyed him; they were so indefinite and so hollow. He was furthermore furious with Remi for not coming to the station to embrace him as he should have done. The smell of fried fish rose to his nostrils exasperatingly. The cab went slowly, drawn by a lean horse which, with a hanging head and a long tongue, offered its crupper to the whip. At last the cabman stopped without saying a word, and the hundred and sixty steps of the Passage Cotin rose steeply before the cab door. Monsieur Alidor, having alighted, handed the man a five-franc piece. The latter, pimply faced, huge and covered with dust, put it between his teeth without a word of explanation. Then followed a long mute comedy; the cabman turned his colossal body slowly on the seat, while he dived into one of his pockets from which he drew a bag. Then he stopped to survey his horse which shook convulsively, explored another pocket, urged his horse several paces forward to get out of the way of a waggon, from which there was not the slightest danger. Finally, he produced seven sous from the depths of his red waistcoat, and proffered them to his exasperated fare. It was all the change he had. Monsieur Alidor turned his back on him in a raging temper, and he drove away, grumbling and plying his whip.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 299