Dieudonat

by Edmond Haraucourt

  However, the day ended without encumbrance. As soon as night fell, Calame communicated his fears to the sorcerer in a low voice, while Polygene was snoring.

  “We need to escape from here, and without delay; the place isn’t safe. Can your leg carry you? Yes? Let’s go into the woods, the mountains, the caves; you have the wherewithal to eat anywhere.

  “In truth, no, I don’t have it any longer.”

  “Since when?”

  “On seeing you so low, you and the other, I made a wish never again to ask for nourishment for myself or anyone else.”

  “A plague on the idiot! Impulsive soul that you are, couldn’t you consult reasonable people before making a wish that concerns them? No matter; I’m habituated to living without roasts and I’m not at all certain of living if I’m roasted myself. But it’s going to be necessary for us to take this dimwit with us, who’ll pay for the three of us. Let’s shake him. Tickle his feet.”

  The man with the thick beard, woken up with a start, did not want to hear any of it.

  “I’m not going as long as they haven’t cured me. I’m certainly not abandoning my kids.”

  “Your kids and your wife will join you where you are.”

  “We’re used to being here. I have my old man’s cottage. I’ll die here and not elsewhere.”

  Without admitting it, Dieudonat thought that well said, and that Polygene was not so stupid. He almost admired him. Timidly, he ventured: “I don’t want to abandon this fellow, if you say that he’ll pay for me. I have to stay with him.”

  “You’re right and I’m right. Goodnight. I’m evaporating. Goodbye, my lad. You’re a fine little fellow; it’s been a pleasure to know you. I won’t live much longer myself, and perhaps we’ll meet again in the common grave. I’ve promised you your epitaph; I’ll bring it to you. Think of me one Sunday, if the Office gives you the time.”

  The Calamitous grabbed a few clothes and dressed himself as best he could. After a brief embrace, he slipped away into the night, stealthily. Dieudonat wept on seeing him leave, already swallowed by the darkness, and Polygene stretched himself with delight, thinking that they would only be two in the bed henceforth.

  The affair had consequences quite different from those the intelligent man had imagined. The Inquisitors did not appear to be concerned, or they employed clemency; timid voices recounted that the judge, in his goodness, had deigned to cover up the scandal. However, Dieudonat and Polygene, incriminated with making a din, were gently expelled; they were deposited on the edge of a stinking gutter and the doors of the hospice closed behind them.

  The roofer protested. When he thought he had hammered on the iron reinforcements of the door sufficiently with his fists, imploring his cure, he sat down on a boundary-marker and started to moan.

  “What will become of the little ones and the wife if I can’t work any longer? You had to make me eat quail!”

  Dieudonat contemplated that despair.

  “I’ve made a fine mess! How am I going to repair this? I can’t even send them bread now.”

  He twiddled his thumbs and, planted straight in front of the gross beard, from which futile words were emerging, he appeared to be on the lookout for the word that would give him a good idea—but the good idea had already occurred to him.

  “I’m not a roofer; I’m not at risking anything falling down with seizures; in any case, I’m alone; I have no wife to nourish, no children; those I might have fathered in King Gaifer’s house, I’ve abandoned in a cowardly fashion to the care of others. Here’s a compensation offered; by placing this father in my path the good God has wanted to indicate my duty.”

  He leaned toward Polygene. “The physicians haven’t taken away your illness, but perhaps I can do it. You can begin climbing on to roofs again, earning bread for your daughters. Your lady will be content.”

  “You won’t make me pay too dear?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  The fellow was suspicious; a cure that costs nothing cannot be worth very much; and when a merchant offers his merchandise gratis, it is because he has a hidden means of charging dearly. The fellow eyed the sorcerer. “Fair exchange; I want to know your price in advance.”

  “I don’t need anything.”

  With that boastful pronouncement, all his needs became apparent. What am I saying? I’m bragging. Don’t need anything? The persistence of his worthy man is evidently another advice from Providence. I’ve been a prince, a monk, a scholar, an anchorite; I’ve had palaces, treasures books, women; I’ve known everything. Except the good life of good people. What if I were to ask…?

  He hesitated, breathed, and spoke: “Since it’s absolutely necessary to ask you for something in exchange, well, in truth…what if we were to be friends, like two brothers; we could live together, in your house; I could enroll at your workplace. I haven’t been taught a trade, but I can do the simple work, mason’s assistant, mortar layer, whatever’s wanted; since the convent I’ve always wanted to be a builder. I’d bring my pay back to your household, and I wouldn’t take up much room in the lodgings; a corner and a straw mattress would be sufficient for me.”

  “Do you eat a lot?”

  “Not much.”

  Polygene thought: There might also be a roast quail occasionally, or even a goose. Shrewdly, he kept that codicil to himself, and said aloud: “Put it there! It’s done: but I won’t take a traitor; if your remedy doesn’t work, you’ll be thrown out. Cure me, and let’s go home.”

  Dieudonat extended his hand, but as he was about to proffer the sacramental words he saw once again the ugly grimace that the roofer made when his demons ran wild; the idea of introducing devils into his entrails made him nauseous; perhaps also, the fact of concluding a bargain, for the first time in his life, was sufficient to take the edge off his ordinary altruism...

  “Well,” said Polygene. “I’m waiting.”

  The Prince made the sign of the cross in order to regain courage; with pursed lips he murmured the prayer.

  The worker immediately got up. “It’s true that I feel better!”

  No more was required to put Dieudonat’s mind at rest. His soul was content, but his body was gripped by a strange lassitude. He sat down on the boundary marker that the other had just quit.

  The roofer cried to him gaily: “Let’s go!” And without further ado he started striding through the cobblestoned streets. The Prince had difficulty keeping up with him, and his head was vague.

  “I’m exhausted all of a sudden.”

  “Trot; it’ll pass.”

  In that hope, he trotted in rear, but the route was long, through the outlying districts; Polygene’s cottage was outside the town. The fellow went forth toward the horizon, singing at the top of his voice; the false notes emerged from the bushy mouth and bounded over the road, forward, ever onward. Sometimes, the villain deigned to turn round.

  “Hey, slowcoach, you’re not walking?” He laughed vigorously, and Dieudonat, comforted by so much good humor, put his best foot forward, repeating, in order to give himself courage: I’m going to know good people, the good, simple and laborious life. That’s what poor Calame needed, to give him back a little aplomb. I’m going to know good people...

  XXXII. The Prince finally knows good people,

  and the sweetness of amity

  Finally, they arrived; they recognized the spouse long before seeing her, by the cries she was uttering, which could be heard from outside.

  “Ah! It’s her! She often raises her voice against the brats; don’t worry about it, and thump her if she annoys you. I warn you that she’s a strapping woman, and her name is Melanie.”

  She wore than name worthily, black of skin, hair and gaze. With a bark of joy she threw her arms around her man’s neck, and then looked the intruder up and down, who collapsed on the bench.

  “Who’s this?”

  “A worthy fellow; he’s cured me.”

  “He’d do well to cure himself too; he’s breathing and staring the way you
did when your devils were about to come.”

  “He’s a friend all the same; we’ve made a bargain together; he’s going to live with us. He’ll be our cousin.”

  “Where’s he going to sleep? What about food?”

  “He has his bread. In fact, you’ve found a loaf and meat in the pot while I was in the hospital?”

  “Yes! An angel I never saw brought me that, every morning. I’ve thanked Our Lady, who had mercy on us.”

  With masculine scorn, the peasant listened to feminine ignorance until the end. “It was him who sent you the food.”

  “A sorcerer! Holy Virgin, a sorcerer!” Melanie made the sign of the cross rapidly, recoiling all the way to the wall. “I don’t want a sorcerer in our house to attract misfortune! Outside, man, outside!”

  “I tell you that we’ve made a bargain.”

  “Make him go away! I don’t want him!”

  Polygene marched toward her. “Repeat again what you don’t want!”

  “I don’t...”

  A sonorous slap cut off her speech and her breath; the wife remained open-mouthed with admiration, scratching her head at the place where it had just slammed into the wall.

  “Oh!” she said. “I can certainly see that you’re cured!” Then she rubbed her cheek and looked at her palm to see whether her nose was bleeding. “It’s a long time, Ygene, since you’ve given me one like that. It’s better then, for good? And it’s him who cured you?”

  “Give him a kiss for his trouble! I don’t admit that my actions by judged. Call the kids and let’s thank my bonesetter.”

  Dieudonat no longer recognized the moaning Polygene, to whom an abrupt health had rendered so much vigor. He stood up, confused, to receive the welcoming kiss that the wife and the daughters had brought him. In the meantime under the mantle of the fireplace, the worker hugged an old woman in rags and shouted in her ear: “Mama! He’s cured me! I can go back up on the roofs! It’s going to be good to live, Mama!”

  The good friend of the beautiful Aude approached in order to kiss the old woman, but he hurried slightly, for she exhaled a bitter odor of boiled urine from her entire person. The politeness complete, he stood there, arms dangling, and Melanie examined him.

  “He isn’t pretty to look at,” she said. “Truly, he doesn’t look like a sorcerer. What’s his name?”

  “Onuphre.”

  In order to give himself countenance, cousin Onuphre was looking at the grandmother, and he suddenly saw the two old shoulders jump spasmodically in a little bony laugh; the eye, lively amid its gumminess, designated the staircase in the corner of the room. Polygene had gone up there, and from the height of the grain-loft he summoned his other half in order to make a sixth child with her up there, on the straw, in honor of his return and his cure.

  They supped politely on leftover broth. Onuphre was radiant. He repeated: Here I am in the home of good people...

  Then everyone went to bed. Dame Melanie had installed her guest in a redoubt under the staircase; a straw mattress thrown on the beaten earth, with a bale of oats for a pillow, and a blanket with large holes, composed the whole of his bedding. The damp in there was so cold that he had to lie down there fully dressed.

  Everything is simple among these good people...

  But the hours passed without him being able to go to sleep, in spite of his fatigue; a new agitation labored his nerves; in his insomnia he experienced a strange difficulty in following the thread of his ideas; the thread broke continually, in order to curl up and become entangled with other filaments of thought, emerged from who knows where, and which floated in an incessant draught.

  For sure, it’s the roofer’s malady that’s causing this restlessness; he could no longer sleep, poor fellow; he must be very glad to be rid of it.

  At daybreak, he was beginning to get drowsy when a loud voice woke him up. “Get up, idler!”

  They swallowed warm soup and went to the work-yard.

  “I can’t keep up; I feel very ill.”

  “Me, it’s marvelous how well I am!”

  “My knee hurts so much when I walk…”

  “No, no: necessary not to listen.”

  Polygene’s return was greeted with acclamations.

  “It’s me! A bonesetter has taken away my evils by blowing on them. Here I am, ready to climb all the way to the cocks on the steeples!”

  “Hurrah for Polygene!”

  The new arrival obtained no less success, but as a comical individual: red-haired, one-eyed and lame, his skin imbibed with poison by Gertrude and bile by Galeas, bewildered by the roofer’s epilepsy. and timid into the bargain, he immediately became an object of amusement for the time of the snack break; the people lack sympathy with regard to malingerers, and it is their fashion of being Spartan in all lands.

  “A fine recruit you’ve brought!”

  “Pay no attention; I picked him up at the hospice: a sufferer who needs to earn his living…”

  He was enrolled, and while agonizing people, out there beyond the frontier, were desolate at being unable to put the royal crown on his head, he put on a crown of straw in order to be able to carry slabs of stone on his head.

  He was as proud of that as a king, with the conviction of finally devoting himself to useful work. Everything came back to him in that place: people and things; everything seemed to him to belong and to be put in its place; in the midst of workers covered in white dust, and similar to them, he felt at ease; he found their faces open, open through the eyes, through the mouth, which could be entered without any obstacle, much better than the faces in the Court, where all the bays were closed, padlocked with lies or mistrust. When it was necessary for him to buckle under an amicable blow of a fist, he straightened up again laughing, even though, in sum, he would have preferred not to receive that sledgehammer of flesh and bone.

  In the world, it’s always necessary to put up with something bad, isn’t it? A bruise doesn’t last long.

  His passivity soon wearied a few hearty fellows, who left him in peace, but it encouraged the imbeciles, who delighted in having, ready to hand, a victim more stupid than them; in order to amuse themselves with him they invented jokes like taking away the stool when he was about to sit down, tripping him up when he was carrying a basket of plaster, or replacing the cup of wine from which he was about to drink with another from which they had already drunk.

  Approving that, and the rest, he liked his companions indistinctly, save for a preference for the most fraternal of all; that friend was a dog, a poor dog without a master, somewhat eaten away by mites, but with such an honest face. He had large maroon eyes and yellow fur; his name was Noiraud. He hung around the work-yard regularly, guarded it by night, and in the morning wished the arriving workers welcome; he knew everything, understood everything, watched, observed, frowned, wrinkled his nose, wagged his tail and ran around relentlessly, attentive to his perpetual duty of cheering up the men and encouraging the horses by barking; he announced the hours five minutes before the monastery bells; he witnessed the masons’ meals, sitting on his meager backside or running from one to another, sometimes catching a blow and sometimes a morsel, receiving the former with indulgence, the latter with joy, and everything philosophically.

  In the roundness of his frank eyes one read the memory of kind treatment and the forgetfulness of offenses; all that he was able to retain in his memory of ill-treatment was limited to a prudence devoid of rancor, but sufficient to keep at a distance people who hit him; he liked nothing better than to abolish that distance, and the slightest amenity of word or gesture immediately brought him back to the knees of someone who had beaten him. Onuphre considered him to be sage and good; he would not have hesitated to recognize him as a beautiful soul if he had not known that the soul is immortal by definition and that dogs are deprived of them. He regretted that, for, in sum, could find nothing to hold against the creature but an absolute lack of modesty and religiosity, while for everything else he showed himself frankly superior to t
he average of human beings.

  The fallen prince and the dog had divined one another from the start; immediately, Noiraud, with the penetrating psychology of his race had recognized a brother and acted in accordance; at moments of rest he came to place his warm neck and heavy jaw on the thigh of the immortal brother, and from below, he contemplated him from the depths of his circular eyes, ready to weep with admiration and bliss. Every evening it escorted his friend to Polygene’s house and installed himself on the threshold, fixed until Melanie came out with a stick; he learned by that gesture that the day was finished; all the quotidian rites were accomplished, and he retired tranquilly, walking at first and then trotting back to his work-yard.

  Onuphre would have been surprised if anyone had told him that one of his worst woes would come to him from that friendship. Nevertheless, it was thus, and the thing happened in the time that it takes to count to twenty. One day, at the midday break, Blaise the Joker broke his wine-bottle on a stone; as he liked to laugh and even more to make others laugh, he decided to hide his embarrassment by showing good humor; to do that he picked up a sharp shard of glass, wrapped it in a piece of bread, started rubbing the ball against his lard and squinting at Noiraud, who was already drooling hopefully. Everyone had understood the joke and was enlivened by it.

  “For pity’s sake,” said Onuphre, “don’t give him...”

  He did not have time to finish; the bolide described its curve and disappeared into the dog’s maw.

  “Spit!”

  Good dogs cannot spit, and that is another difference from us. Onuphre saw a bump descending along the poor neck, and he recognized the death that was entering into his friend. He burst into sobs, threw himself to his knees, took the neck in his two arms and inundated it with his tears; behind him, a loud hilarity formed a chorus to his grief; he turned round, his face scarlet and wet, with the grimace of a little child cutting his teeth, and he murmured, in a soft but broken voice: “Wret-ches…wret-ches...”