Dieudonat

by Edmond Haraucourt

Then, as everyone was still laughing, he turned back to hide his face and his pain in the rough hair of the canine shoulder.

  In the course of the day, Noiraud acquired a grave gaze and red spectacles; sometimes, he lowered his head with an expression of astonishment and examined his belly; not perceiving anything unusual, he gave the impression of reflecting on something incomprehensible. A little later, he started licking his skin, which he rasped with persistence, slowly, always in the same place, in the pit of the stomach, and by turns, he tried to lie down, to get up and to sit down; feeble groans swelled his oblique cheeks.

  “Friend…poor friend...”

  Onuphre was no longer working; the bell and the repeated calls, the gibes and the reprimands all failed to reach him; immobile before a parcel of suffering, he forgot everything else and repeated: “Friend…poor friend...”

  The dog drew closer to that pity and responded by eye: “Don’t be upset; it will pass. I’m ill, but I love you.” Then, with a stroke of the tongue over the invisible wound: “There’s the place. But no one’s thrown a stone at me. I don’t understand it at all.”

  Dieudonat caressed the belly and Noiraud licked his hand. The dog’s nose became dry and hot; pink saliva appeared at the edges of the chops.

  “He’s going to die! Poor fried, who is so poorly...”

  It was much worse in the evening, when the animal squatted on his hind feet and stuck up his tail with an evident intention of expelling the interior torturer; he had hesitated a long time over that act of courage and he was still delaying under the pretext of finding a good place, the best place; finally resolved, he bent his legs and chose in the distance a point at which it was necessary to stare during the pain; then his furry mask was immobilized energetically, like that of a mariner at the helm looking out for the leaps of a storm, and the work of stoicism commenced.

  Without even perceiving it, Dieudonat had crouched down opposite, his hands on his abdomen, and he positively felt claws of glass carving his entrails; he uttered sighs: “Oh la la…! Oh la la…!”

  From the height of the scaffolding the masons launched gibes at the grotesque face-to-face. Crimson drops fell from the dog; the earth became sticky with blood.

  “Friend...don’t strive…you’ll do yourself more harm.”

  In order to remain brave, Noiraud refused to hear him, and no longer saw him; sudden spasms made his yellow fur undulate like a crops in a squall.

  At that moment, the companions having finished their day’s work, descended from the wall; they formed a circle.

  “Oh, good people, it’s the shard of glass laboring him!”

  “Bah!” sad Polygene. “Let’s go, crybaby. To the soup!”

  The dog stood up in order to follow, but was no longer able to put one paw in front of another.

  “I can stay with him, can’t I?” said Dieudonat. “You’ll permit me to stay with him?”

  Then he perceived the Joker, who was holding his sides.

  “Wretch! It amuses you, then, to see everyone suffering? It’s you who gave him his pain.”

  “So what?”

  “What if I passed it back to you, to teach you a lesson?”

  “What do you want to teach me, you?”

  “Justice! Yes…justice! And it would be one, to put the broken glass in your body, since you put it in his!”

  So saying he stood up, shaking with menace, and ready to make use of his magic power; for three seconds, he had the appearance of a statue; but his irrational words only obtained the result of raising a few shoulders and dispersing the audience. Polygene, as he turned his back, pronounced: “A dog isn’t a man.”

  The Joker mocked: “Justice.”

  Then the entire band disappeared, before the sorcerer had made his decision, and dusk fell upon the abandoned pair.

  Triangles of shadow were already settling between the cubes of stone. Onuphre’s indignation was obstinate in repeating: “Yes, justice!” And he started marching back and forth, with the stride of a warrior.

  The general disapproval had disconcerted him a little, however, and in the twilight he became less and less sure of himself.

  “Justice? Perhaps they’re right. To return evil for evil is to recommence doing evil, and that can’t be called justice; at the very most, it would be vengeance. I was about to do something stupid again. By taking glass out of one belly to put it in another I’d be displacing the pain but I wouldn’t be suppressing it, and that’s what’s necessary. Justice! It’s easy for me to talk. A man, a dog, I see them as equal, but what if I’m wrong? Now, for having pronounced that treble word ‘Justice’ I no longer know anything at all, but...”

  For want of anything better, he started scratching the top of the head that Noiraud held out to him.

  “In truth, Calame’s words were golden on the day he said: ‘To be good is very easy, but to be just—that’s difficult!’”

  XXXIII. He experiments with gratitude

  Onuphre had already been lodging with Polygene for three months. He was considered as one of the family, and to prove it to him, he was given the job of scouring the cooking-pot and rinsing the spoons after the evening soup. When he had finished his chore, the five little girls climbed up his legs or on to his back in order to play at biting his ear. The game recommenced every day, without becoming monotonous; he laughed at it, but not as much as the old grandmother, whose hilarity turned to spasms when the little teeth hooked on to the living flesh and made it bleed. If the pain sometimes extracted a cry from him, the mother snapped: “Don’t hurt the children, eh?”

  He was careful not to do that. They loved him. On Sunday, he sat outside the door and took them between his knees, one after another, in order to search for lice, as noble damsels do for their knight when he returns from the war.

  But all is not play in life. At the work-yard, Onuphre only earned a sol a week. He brought it faithfully, in its entirety, to Dame Melanie, who never failed to weigh it in the palm of her hand.

  “You eat more than that!”

  By reproaching him for his nourishment, at every plausible opportunity, she hoped that the sorcerer might finally take it into his head to introduce into the house the plates of victuals that he had the power to create by magic. But the candid fellow did not understand the hints.

  She soon became indignant.

  “He’s too stupid! Too selfish as well!”

  Suddenly, in the middle of a night when she was sleeping badly, the housewife had a brainwave.

  “What if we set up a rotisserie, or an eatery, where I sold cooked meat? It would be a masterstroke; the meat wouldn’t cost me anything and him hardly anything. We’d make a huge profit!”

  Right away, she woke up her man, who admired the project, but, scratching the nape of his neck, gave birth to objections: “Sure, that would be a windfall, although…it isn’t in our bargain.”

  “Capon! I’ll talk to him myself.”

  Until morning she dreamed about the hostelry where she was enthroned before a file of servants, victuals and clients; she meditated on it throughout the next day, and organized minutely the future enterprise that ought to enrich her; then, that evening, after supper, she spoke, her fits on her hips, standing in front of the sorcerer.

  He admitted his recent vow no longer to ask for foodstuffs; Melanie’s dreams, the inn, the stews and the bags of gold, collapsed noisily.

  “Oh, the stupid wretch! He must be stupid and malevolent to make such a wish. Now he’s a burden on the needy instead of coming to their aid! He can say that he’s put one over on you, my poor Ygene, and you’re his dupe!”

  She grumbled on that theme for an hour. Finally, she slapped the children to make herself feel better and put them to bed. The kids wailed. The deaf old woman, divining the racket by the movement of mouths, took the opportunity to complain about it, and her furious daughter-in-law reproached her for her infirmities, her years and her odor; in order to bring peace between the women, the head of the family threw a jug at
his wife. Crestfallen, Onuphre remained on his end of the bench.

  “It’s all his fault!”

  He sensed it only too keenly. After that, every time Melanie talked about people who lived at the expense of others, he was able to divine without effort to whom the criticism was addressed. In vain he tried to think of a means of repairing his wrongs, so he was glad when one evening, after washing the utensils, under the pretext that it was raining, he was sent to the ditch to throw the refuse into it. He went back the next day, although the rain had stopped, and, the habit having been acquired, he went back every evening while the others went to bed. Shortly afterwards, he received the early morning mission of going to draw water from the river while the others got up; he was glad about that too, but people continued to declare nevertheless that he was living at the expense of poor people. That obsession ended up installing itself under the cranium of the housewife, who started to suffer from it; the notion of being exploited by an idler caused her heart to lurch with an anger that came back every twenty-eight days, like the moon.

  It was even worse one day, when he suffered a grand mal seizure.

  “That was all it lacked! Now he’s possessed too! And then, you were my man!”

  The epileptic foamed at the mouth, writhed in a semicircle, had contortions and broke everything.

  “And that, Ygene, was that agreed on the bargain?”

  “Did I do the same myself?”

  “Exactly the same.”

  “Not astonishing, then, that I was exhausted the next day.”

  His pity did not go much further. As soon as Onuphre recovered consciousness, he was shown in detail the damage he had caused. His host deigned to console him.

  “Don’t worry, comrade; I promised you hospitality; you have it. If I’ve made a fool’s bargain, too bad for me.”

  A better consolation was due to the saintly man; he had it twenty-four hours later; still exhausted, he was taking the air outside the door when he saw the tall thin body of Calame passing along the road. He called to him and embraced him.

  “Is it really you, my lad? And not entirely dead? Explain this prodigy to me.”

  Dieudonat, stammering, recounted as best he could the exit from the hospice, but carefully neglected to mention that he had then taken on Polygene’s malady. He narrated his life at the work-yard and among the good people, not forgetting the dog Noiraud. He concluded by affirming that he was very happy.”

  “You only give the impression partially. You’re having great difficulty finding your substantive nouns and the means of articulating them; your tongue is furred, your ideas are stumbling and you’re lying. Yes, you’re lying, and it’s quite futile, for I can see lies in the middle of faces as clearly as holes in noses. Dramas have happened that you’re hiding from me; come on, cough it up!”

  Dieudonat ended up admitting how he had rid Polygene of his epileptic fits.

  The Calamitous protested: “Are you mad? I only recognize one sole philosopher on earth capable of such an aberration, the so-called Dieudonat, celebrated for his altruism and his misdeeds.”

  The other lowered his head and stammered, in an apologetic one: “That’s me.”

  “You? Dieudonat! You’re…you’re…Prince Dieudonat!”

  “Unfortunately, yes, I have been.”

  “Is it possible that I have the inestimable good fortune of talking to Prince Dieudonat? There are so many legends running around about you, and I’d be so glad to hear them narrated by the hero of such a poem!”

  The convalescent could no longer contain himself; he had so much need to unburden himself to a slightly fraternal soul. He related as well as he could an abridged count of his adventures. The poet listened standing up in an attitude of respect.

  “Rest, Milord,” he said, “you’re tiring yourself out.”

  A tear appeared in Dieudonat’s unique eye. “You’re no longer cling me tu, Calame? That’s because you no longer love me because you know my crimes...”

  “I no longer love you! On the contrary, I adore you! And if I abstain from addressing you as tu, it’s because I’m a fool, unworthy of the honor that has fallen to me, a man, my friend, a man in spite of myself, a man—which is to say, a being much more dazzled by the favor of conversing with a prince than the good fortune of encountering a saint. But you’re only giving me crumbs! Go on.”

  Dieudonat resumed his story; he concluded it by confessing that, since the roofer’s cure, he no longer enjoyed his full intelligence, but he hastened to add that the loss was mediocre.

  “I see: you’re an idiot instead of the other, and the other’s using it to the point of abusing you. You do the hard work here, of course? You double up: savior and servant.”

  “It pleases me to make myself useful.”

  “And their recognition smacks of ingratitude.”

  “They don’t suspect what I’ve done for them, the worthy people.”

  “Sublime cretin! Simpleton of genius! He devotes himself to the point of giving away his flesh—the height of absurdity!—and at the same instant—the height of sagacity!—he avoids rancor against his debtors by taking refuge in their indifference!”

  “I haven’t thought so far.”

  “You’re all the finer for it. But what you haven’t said, it’s me who’ll say it!”

  “I beg you…”

  “I’m the administrator of justice! The Kings your ancestors bore the hand of Justice? I bear the feet. Look at these two, mine. They’ve come to earth precisely to be put into things. It’s their mortal mission, and I’m proud of it.”

  Calame seemed strong in wrath. Hoisted up on his toes, with his two arms extended, one toward the cottage and the other toward the town, he shook his fingers with agility, as if electric maledictions ought to have fallen from his papillae, and he cried: “O all my peers, big and small, carnivorous race, sons of Adam who eat your bread on the sweat of others’ brows, shrewd guests at the banquet, you plunge your hands into the dishes in order to pull out the best morsels? I shall plunge my feet in, which are not grasping, with the sole aim of splashing you with your wretched cuisine!”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “Scarcely more than the world. And look! Here’s your manual laborer returning to the manor on cue!”

  “You’re not going to reproach him…?”

  “Certainly not! I’ll do worse.”

  The roof recognized Calame with a mitigated pleasure. With a virile handshake he dislocated the troubadour’s shoulder, and then leaned toward Onuphre with the condescension of strength for weakness, and pinched the skin of his neck.

  “Well, weakling, are you feeling better?”

  At the sound of that voice, Melanie appeared, a reproach in her voice as others chew a flower stem.

  “Don’t touch him so much, you’ll catch your disease!”

  Calame advanced immediately, and the words emerged from him like a trumpet blast.

  “Your wife is right, comrade, take care! That disease is contagious, since he’s caught it from you. You’re laughing? How right you are to laugh! Can you imagine, my good people, that without knowing it, you’ve been sheltering under your roof the martyr of charity. This scantly representative fellow, such as you see him, is the son of a King.”

  “Son of a King!”

  “Even better, he works miracles!”

  “Onuphre?”

  “By means of a miracle, he put you on your feet. You believe you owe your cure to a bonesetter or a sorcerer? It came to you be the intermediary of a saint, who has taken it on in your stead. You needed a health that you lacked to nourish your children; this man has given you his. Hey presto! You have it, but he has your disease in exchange! And that’s why you honor him, why you bless him, why you kiss the ground on which he walks?”

  Calame was speaking dryly, and suddenly fell silent. The healer looked at the ground with the consternated expression of a culpable confessing. The healed man scratched the back of his neck,

  �
��That’s not stories, that?”

  “It’s quite simply your story. Does it bore you?”

  The silence recommenced, and as it dragged on. Polygene judged it necessary to formulate an opinion. “Well!” he said. “Well...”

  Afterwards feeling a little embarrassed he added: “Are you supping with us, Calamitous?”

  “No, certainly not; I’ll leave you in the company of your benefactor. Do you hear? Benefactor!”

  Then he went away, giving voice to an utterly satanic laugher.

  The son of the King went back into the house, hampered by his old crown and his new aureole, which deterred proximity, even though they were invisible. The meal was as dismal as could be. Everything seemed to have changed in the room, where there was nothing additional, except for the notion of a benefit. That was sufficient; one might have thought that an abnormal presence, such as that of a creditor or a judge, had dislocated the family. An atmosphere of malaise hung between the soup tureen and the beams; a constraint camped gestures; even the grandmother contained her emissions and the brats their clamors; the mother, while squinting at the spoon of the enigmatic guest, was eating as if at the holy table.

  “Mother, where is he, the Benefactor?”

  “Peace!”

  Finally, Melanie got up to go and scour the utensils herself. The saint, deprived of his work, had two hands too many, not knowing where to put them, and Polygene thought: It’s not going to be amusing, life, with a benefactor in the house...

  XXXIV. The holy man is in a mess

  The housewife sighed all night at the idea that she no longer dared ask anything of such a high-ranking person. As long as she had thought she was only giving hospitality to an invalid, something of a sorcerer and a miscreant, a future damned soul, she could abuse him and exploit him without scruple, and make his life hard in preparation for Hell; that was fine, and even pious work. But to have in one’s home a representative of Heaven, who watches everything, notes everything and will repeat everything! What might come of it?

  That Onuphre was also the son of a King she scarcely believed, and Polygene did not either; it was sufficient to look at the runt to understand that the Calamitous was telling them tales: the sons of King are not built like that. As for Saints, that was a different matter; one knows those of all appearances; Saints willingly disguise themselves; more than once in various places, people had seen the great Saint Joseph, or even the Good God in person, coming after curfew to knock on the door of a cottage to ask for something to drink, or a bed; almost always, besides, those adventures turned out badly for somebody; no more than the earls and barons down here, the great lords of Paradise are not the sort of people to hang out with poor people; it’s better not to get too close to them. Each to his own! When one wants to live tranquil, the wise thing is to bury oneself in one’s hole, among equals, with one’s family.