by Paul Negri
Alas!11 As for her, she would have liked nothing better than to go down . . . but which way? The staircase wasn’t even to be thought of; those contraptions can be climbed up, at best; but going down them, you could break your legs a hundred times. . . . And the poor mule was in misery; while walking around the platform, her large eyes glazed over with dizziness, she kept thinking about Tistet Védène.
“Oh, you villain, if I get out of this . . . what a kick you’ll get tomorrow morning!”
That thought of the kick put a little heart back into her; otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to stick it out. . . . Finally they managed to get her down from there, but it was quite a job. She had to be let down with a winch, ropes, and a litter. Just imagine how humiliating it was for a Pope’s mule to see herself hanging up so high, swimming with her feet in the air like a June bug at the end of a string! And with everyone in Avignon watching her!
The unhappy animal didn’t sleep all night. She kept thinking she was still turning to and fro on that accursed platform, with the laughter of the city below her; then she thought about that vile Tistet Védène and the neat kick she was going to treat him to on the following morning. Oh, my friends, what a kick! They’d see the smoke from it all the way to Pampérigouste.12 . . . Now, while this lovely reception was being planned for him in the stable, do you know what Tistet Védène was doing? He was going down the Rhône, singing, on a papal galley, on his way to the court of Naples as one of the company of young noblemen that the city used to send annually to Queen Jeanne13 to perfect themselves in diplomacy and fine manners. Tistet wasn’t a nobleman, but the Pope desired to reward him for the attentions he had shown his animal, particularly for his active participation on the day when she was rescued.
Wasn’t the mule disappointed the next day!
“Oh, the villain! He suspected something!” she thought, shaking her jingle bells in a rage. “But it’s all the same; go on, you rat! You’ll find your kick when you get back. . . . I’ll save it for you!”
And she saved it for him.
After Tistet’s departure, the Pope’s mule regained her calm life style and her former ways. No more Quiquet, no more Béluguet in the stable. The good old days of the French-style wine had returned and, with them, her good humor, her long siestas, and her little gavotte step whenever she crossed the bridge of Avignon. And yet, ever since her adventure, people in town always showed a little coolness toward her. There were whispers when she passed by; old folks shook their heads, children laughed and pointed to the bell tower. The good Pope himself no longer had as much confidence in his friend as formerly, and when he allowed himself to take a little nap on her back on Sundays on his way back from the vineyard, he always had this thought in the back of his mind: “What if I were to wake up up there, on the platform?” The mule noticed all this, and suffered from it, but said nothing; it was only when Tistet Védène’s name was pronounced in her presence that her long ears quivered, and she sharpened the iron of her shoes on the pavement with a little laugh.
Seven years went by in that way; then, at the end of those seven years, Tistet Védène returned from the court of Naples. His appointed time there was not yet over, but he had learned that the chief purveyor of mustard to the Pope had just died suddenly in Avignon, and, since the office seemed like a good one to him, he had arrived in great haste to apply for it.
When that intriguer Védène entered the great hall of the palace, the Holy Father had trouble recognizing him, he was so much taller and had filled out so much. It must also be said that, on his part, the good Pope had grown old and didn’t see well without his spectacles.
Tistet wasn’t intimidated.
“What! Great Holy Father, you no longer recognize me? It’s I, Tistet Védène! . . .”
“Védène? . . .”
“Yes, yes, you know . . . the one who used to bring the French-style wine to your mule.”
“Oh, yes . . . yes . . . I remember. . . . A good little boy, that Tistet Védène! . . . And now, what does he ask of us?”
“Oh, not much, great Holy Father. . . . I’ve come to request of you . . . By the way, do you still have her, your mule? And is she in good health? . . . Oh, good! . . . I’ve come to request of you the office of the chief purveyor of mustard, who has just died.”
“Chief purveyor of mustard—you! But you’re too young. How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty years and two months old, illustrious Pontiff, exactly five years older than your mule. . . . Ah, by heaven, that fine animal! . . . If you only knew how I loved that mule! . . . How I missed her when I was in Italy! . . . Won’t you let me see her?”
“Yes, my child, you’ll see her,” said the good Pope, deeply touched. “And since you love that fine animal so much, I don’t want you to be separated from her any longer. From this day forward, I attach you to my person as chief purveyor of mustard. . . . My cardinals will raise the roof, but I don’t care! I’m used to it. . . . Come see us tomorrow when vespers are over, and we’ll hand over to you the insignia of your office in the presence of our chapter of canons; and then . . . I’ll take you to see the mule, and you’ll come to the vineyard with both of us. . . . Ho, ho! Go now . . .”
I have no need to tell you how happy Tistet Védène was on leaving the great hall, or how impatiently he awaited the ceremony on the following day. And yet there was someone in the palace who was even happier and more impatient than he: it was the mule. From the moment of Védène’s return until vespers on the following day, the awesome beast didn’t stop stuffing herself with oats and kicking out at the wall with her hind hooves. She, too, was getting ready for the ceremony.
And thus, the next day, after vespers had been recited, Tistet Védène made his entry into the courtyard of the papal palace. All of the high clergymen were there, the cardinals in red robes, the devil’s advocate14 in black velvet, the abbots of the monastery with their little miters, the church wardens of Saint-Agrico, the violet short capes of the choir school, as well as the minor clergymen, the Pope’s soldiers in dress uniform, the three brotherhoods of penitents, the hermits from Mont Ventoux15 with their fierce expressions, the young cleric walking behind them carrying the handbell, the flagellant monks stripped to the waist, the florid sacristans in judges’ robes, everyone, everyone, down to the people who hand out holy water, who light candles and put them out . . . there wasn’t a single one missing. . . . Oh, what a beautiful ordination it was! Bells, firecrackers, sunshine, music, and constantly those rabid drummers leading the dance over yonder on the bridge of Avignon.
When Védène made his appearance in the midst of the assembly, his noble bearing and good looks touched off a murmur of admiration. He was a magnificent Provençal, but one of the blond type, with plentiful hair curling at the tips and a little wisp of beard, which seemed to be made of the filings of fine metal that had fallen from the graving tool of his father, the goldsmith. A rumor was afloat that the fingers of Queen Jeanne had sometimes toyed with that blond beard; and, indeed “Lord” Védène had the boastful air and absentminded gaze of men whom queens have loved. . . . On that day, to honor his native land, he had exchanged his Neapolitan garments for a Provençal-style coat edged with pink, and on his headgear there waved a large ibis plume from the Camargue.16
As soon as he came in, the chief purveyor of mustard greeted the assembly gallantly and made his way to the high flight of steps where the Pope was waiting to hand over the insignia of his office: the yellow boxwood spoon and the saffron outfit. The mule was at the foot of the steps, completely harnessed and ready to leave for the vineyard. . . . When he came near her, Tistet Védène had a kind smile for her, and stopped to give her two or three little friendly taps on the back, looking out of the corner of his eye to see whether the Pope was watching. The position was a good one. . . . The mule started into motion:
“Here you are! Take this, villain! I’ve been saving it for you for seven years now!”
And she launched an awesome kick
at him, so awesome that, even as far off as Pampérigouste, they could see the smoke from it, a whirlwind of blond smoke in which an ibis feather was whirling: all that was left of the unfortunate Tistet Védène! . . .
Kicks from mules aren’t usually that overwhelming; but this mule belonged to a Pope, and besides, just imagine: she had been saving it for him for seven years. . . . There’s no finer example of an ecclesiastical grudge.
Jules Laforgue
SALOMÉ
To be born is to depart; to die is to return.
PROVERBS FROM THE KINGDOM OF ANNAM,
COLLECTED BY FATHER JOURDAIN OF FOREIGN
MISSIONS.
I
The dog days had come and gone two thousand times since an elementary rhythmic revolution of the Palace Mandarins had elevated the first Tetrarch, a minor Roman proconsul, to this throne (hereditary, henceforth, but through careful selection) of the Esoteric White Islands (henceforth, lost to history), but that unusual title of Tetrarch was retained because it had as sacred a ring to it as Monarch, and implied in addition the seven symbols of statehood clinging to the prefix “tetra” but not to “monos.”
With pylons, three blocks of them, squat and stark, inner courtyards, galleries, vaults, and the famous Hanging Park, its jungles undulating in the Atlantic breezes, and the Observatory’s one eye on the lookout six hundred feet up, near the sky, and a hundred flights of sphinxes and cynocephali: the tetrarchic palace was no more than a monolith, carved, excavated, hollowed, compartmented, and finally burnished into a mountain of black basalt streaked with white, extended by a pier of sonorous pavement, with a double row of poplars, funereal violet, in tubs, projecting far out into the shifting solitude of the sea, until it reached an eternal rock, very much like an ossified sponge, holding out a pretty comic-opera beacon toward the night-prowling junks.
Titanic hulk of gloom, streaked with pallor! Those ivory-black façades give so mysterious a reflection of today’s July sun, that sun above the sea, darkly reflected, which the owls of the Hanging Park can contemplate without eyestrain from the tops of their dusty fir trees.
At the pier’s edge the galley that had come, the day before, carrying those two unwelcome princes who claimed to be the son and nephew of a certain northern satrap, swayed in its moorings, discussed by a few languid silhouettes.
Now, while high noon stagnated on (the festival would not begin officially until three o’clock), the palace slept away the afternoon, postponed the stretch that would end its siesta.
The followers of those northern princes and the Tetrarch’s men could be heard laughing loudly, in the court where the conduits met, laughing without understanding one another, playing quoits, exchanging tobacco. A lesson was offered to these foreign colleagues on the proper grooming of white elephants. . . .
“But there are no white elephants in our country,” they tried to say.
And they saw how the grooms blessed themselves, as if warding off blasphemous ideas. And then they gaped at the peacocks strutting above the fountain, moving in circles, their tails iridescent in the sunlight ; and then they entertained themselves—they really went too far!—with the guttural echoes of their barbaric shouts.
The Tetrarch, Emerald-Archetypas, appeared on the central terrace, taking off his gloves in honor of the sun, universal Artist of the Zenith, Firefly of the Higher Sky, etc.; and that rabble rushed back inside to attend to their business.
Oh, see the Tetrarch on the terrace, see the dynastic caryatid!
Behind him the city, already humming festively (drying out its copious irrigation); and farther on, beyond those ridiculous ramparts and their enamelwork of tiny yellow flowers, how contentedly the fields were sprawling—the fine roads covered with small fragments of crushed flint, the checkered complexity of crops! Before him the sea, the sea, eternally novel and respectable, called the sea because there is no other name to give it.
And to punctuate this silence, nothing now but the joyous, clear barking of dogs down below, as the street Arabs, their bodies gleaming naked amid the mica of the scorching sand, whistled exotically and launched the animals against the foaming scrollwork at the rim of the sea, the sea on the surface of which these children had been converting their worn arrowheads into stones for skipping. And so, through the clematis of the terrace, through the cool hush of invisible streams, disjointed spirals of smoke arose, sadly and artlessly, as the Tetrarch, propped on his elbows, puffed sulkily on his midday hookah. There had been a moment, yesterday, after a messenger had put in a shady appearance and announced those northern princes, when his pregnant destiny on these pregnant islands had wavered between his immediate domestic terrors and an absolute dilettantism that could go for the highest stakes even at the moment of ruin.
For he was one of those sons of the North, those eaters of meat—he, that wretched Iokanaan, who had turned up here one fine morning, with his spectacles and his uncut red beard, hawking (in that country’s own language) some pamphlets that he was distributing gratis, but delivering his sales talk in such an inflammatory style that the people had nearly stoned him—so that now he was thinking things over in the depths of the tetrarchic palace’s only dungeon.
Would the twentieth centenary of the Emerald-Archetypas dynasty be celebrated by a war with the outside world, after so many centuries of esotericism, lost to history? Iokanaan had described his fatherland as a country stunted by want, famished for the property of others, fostering warfare as a national industry. And those two princes might very possibly have come to claim this fellow, who was a talented sort after all, and a subject of theirs—and they might build on this pretext, extend their rights of jurisdiction over the occidentals. . . .
But fortunately!—and thanks to the inexplicable intercession of his daughter Salomé—he had not yet interfered with the executioner’s traditional, honorary sinecure, nor sent him after Iokanaan armed with the sacred Kris!
However, false alarm! The two princes were merely on a voyage of circumnavigation, looking in on dubiously occupied colonies, and they had only approached the White Islands because they were passing nearby, out of curiosity. But what a surprise! Could it be in this corner of the world that their notorious Iokanaan was going to end up on the gallows? The idea had made them eager for details of the tribulations of this poor soul, who was already so little of a prophet in his own country.
And so the Tetrarch sucked on his midday hookah, with a vacant look, his mood impaired, as it always was at this climactic hour of the day—even more impaired than usual today, with those mounting noises of the national festival, firecrackers and choristers, bunting and lemonade. . . .
The next morning, over the horizon, which was so infinite in spite of everything, but beyond which—so they said—many other races existed under the same sun, those two gentlemen and their galley would vanish.
Now, leaning across the syrupy clematis on his earthenware balustrade, throwing cake crumbs down to the fish in the ponds below, Emerald-Archetypas reminded himself that now he could no longer count on even the small income that his hidden talents might bring in, since his venerable carcass definitely resisted all impulses toward art, toward meditation, toward congenial spirits, or toward industry.
To think that, on the day of his birth, a remarkable tempest had burst over the black dynastic palace, and many trustworthy persons had seen a lightning-flash calligraph “alpha” and “omega”! How many noonday hours had he killed in sighing over that mystical folderol? And nothing out of the ordinary had come to pass. Besides, a message like “alpha,” “omega”—that leaves a lot of leeway.
And so, for nearly two months now, relinquishing the interests of youth and pummeling his thighs to regain some of that old enthusiasm about resigning himself to the nothingness that had asceticzed his twentieth year, he had seriously gone about taking up a course of daily visits to the necropolis (so cool in the summer, besides) of his ancestors. Winter was on its way; the ceremonies of the Snow Cult, his grandson’s investiture
. And besides, Salomé would stay at his side—she wouldn’t hear a word about the joys of hymeneal bliss, the dear child!
Emerald-Archetypas was about to reach for a hand bell and request some more consecrated cake for those resplendent July fish, when he heard on the flagstones, behind him, the sound of the cane belonging to the Commander-of-a-Thousand-Trifles. The northern princes had returned from a visit to the city; they awaited the Tetrarch in the hall of the Palace Mandarins.
II
The aforementioned northern princes, belted, pomaded, braided, gloved, beards combed out, hair parted along the occiput (with bangs smoothed down on the temples to suggest the medallion-profile look), were waiting, one hand of each pressing his helmet against his right thigh, the other hand caressing the hilt of his saber, with the waddling gait of a stallion that smells powder everywhere, in spite of himself. They were making conversation with the aristocrats: the high Mandarin, the Lord High Supervisor of Libraries, the Arbiter of Elegance, the Preserver of Symbols, the Tutor and Selector of the Gynecium, the Pope of Snow, and the Administrator of Death, surrounded by two rows of scrawny, nervous scribes, armed with quills at their sides and inkstands tucked in their sleeves.
Their Highnesses congratulated the Tetrarch and themselves on the “fortunate wind which . . .” “on such a glorious day . . .” “upon these islands . . .” and concluded with a eulogy of the capital, especially of the White Basilica, where they had heard a “Tedium Laudamus” played on the Hand Organ of the Seven Sorrows, and of the Cemetery of Beasts and Objects—nor were these the only curiosities of such magnitude.
A snack was served. And because the princes swore that they felt compelled not to touch meat in the company of their hosts, so orthodox in their devotion to vegetarianism and ichthyophagy, the table was a picture, with its delicate arrangement, among fine crystals, of a smattering of artichokes in the shell, swimming in iron husks that stood erect and worked on hinges, asparagus served on mats of pink rushes, pearly-gray eels, date cakes, assorted fruit compotes, and several sweet wines.