“In brief, he’s run away?”
“If he’s done that, after the trouble we’ve gone to for him and what we’ve endured because of his magic, he’s an ingrate.”
Calame ran to the prison door.
“Have you seen him, Gertrude?”
“Yes. He came yesterday at nightfall, very plaintive and crestfallen, with his dog; he told me that he was going far away, in order to disencumber the good people, who have difficulty living; he hid it from them, because they would have retained him, so he said. He came to kiss me before leaving forever, and he told me to give you a big kiss, but that he has to hide from you as from the other, because he does wrong to everyone.”
“Truly?”
“You should have heard him when he said: ‘Far away! I’m going far away!’ It wasn’t his ordinary tone; with all his little strength, he shouted: ‘I wish it!’ He even added: ‘So be it.’ And then he left.”
“But how will he live?
“Oh, I foresaw that, in a way; I was suspicious. He has his means: dog-clipper-and-cat-cutter, like me. I showed him the implements and how to make use of them.”
“What about tools?”
“Mine, of course. My big scissors, my new knife, and a nice box to put them in, lined with leather, with big brass nails. It’s pretty, though! It opens, it shuts. He admired it enough, turning it every which way. Since the preacher, I’ve been nailing it expressly for him, for fear of what might happen, but I didn’t have time to finish it, as evidenced by the fact that here are the rest of my nails. They’re shiny, eh?”
“Magnificent.”
“They cost a lot. I’ve saved, on food. I said to myself: ‘It’ll be for my little Onuphre.’ And every time, I laughed, and my soup tasted better, for not having any butter or lard. Do you believe me?”
“Yes indeed: you deprived yourself. And to give, truly to give, it’s necessary to deprive oneself, undoubtedly.”
“For sure. When one isn’t depriving oneself, one isn’t giving, eh?”
“One is rendering, isn’t one?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve always thought that too: giving something of which one has too much is only rendering.”
“Exactly! And there’s no pleasure in it, don’t you find?”
“In that case, good Gertrude, offer yourself the pleasure of giving me the nails you still have.”
“I’ll wager that you want to go finish my box? You want to catch up with him?”
“Perhaps… one day...”
“Right away, then! It’s necessary. He’s all alone, and he’s so good! You’ll catch him up quickly, at the pace he can go.”
“Which way did he go?”
“Through the East Gate and straight ahead, following the King’s highway. I’ll put you on the road.” She ballasted him with a soup and guided him outside the town, to make sure that he left.
Calame set forth; he too went straight ahead, eastwards, and followed the King’s highway while chewing over the lines of his poem and throwing rhymes at the landscapes of spring.
“Bizarre, how I miss him, that stump of a man, a trunk without legs and almost without a head; it’s as if we completed one another, him the heart and me the brain.”
The trail was easy to follow; in traversing the hamlets he asked about a legless man escorted by a yellow dog.
“Yes,” replied a peasant, “we’ve seen him. He cut our little cat and he said to him, softly. ‘Let me do it, puss, it’s for your own good; in this base world, the less one has, the better; the less one is, the happier one is.’”
“He said that, did he?”
“We had a good laugh, and he got himself scratched. We gave him a chunk of bread for his trouble.”
Calame resumed his route. “Is it possible that the boy talked like that? Has he deciphered the key to life?”
People always affirmed to him that they had seen the legless man and the yellow dog.
He continued to advance along the King’s highway, but he hastened in vain; the days succeeded one another, and Calame never caught up with Dieudonat.
“He the heart and me the brain...”
He searched with his eyes along the thin thread of the King’s highway and the edges of the horizons.
“Is it possible that he could walk so quickly?”
Sometimes, he thought he perceived him in silhouette on the skyline.
“Is it possible that he climbed so high?”
He climbed the hill and did not find anyone.
“Devil of a little man who rolls like a giant. I can’t do any more!”
As he exhausted himself in his vain pursuit, the inaccessible Dieudonat grew in his thought, until he took on the appearance of a symbol: colossal and transfigured, the image of the disappeared smiled blissfully, and the poet contemplated it in the depths of his memory, believing that he recognized half of himself, and that he no longer had more within himself than the other half.
Finally, one morning, he discovered the imprint of four castors in a rut; it was dry and already old.
“The heart is going on, the heart is going faster. Will I ever catch up with it…?”
On the evening of that day, having reached the crest of a hill, he saw down below, in the violet mist of large towns, roofs without number and the bell-towers of an immense city, astride a red river, and he recognized King Gaifer’s capital.
XXXVII. In which Dieudonat loses the little confidence that he still had
After a few weeks of searching, Calame found his prince again one morning, under the porch of the cathedral, wedged against a pillar near the right-hand door, at the feet of the second apostle. To his right, Noiraud was holding himself severely seated; to his left a box covered with leather was ornamented with nails that shone like fine gold. Whether by fatigue, malady or meditation, the group seemed petrified, and the figures of painted stone, in their niches, coated with azure and silver stars, were scarcely more motionless.
“Oh,” said the amputee, “You’ve come to join me, Calame? You’ve made that long journey!”
They embraced; Noiraud wagged his tail, rubbed his nose against the poet’s cheek, and passed politely to the blind side, in order to leave the better place to the new arrival.
“You’re very thin, Calame. We live well. In the morning, we stay here; people give to us; people are charitable, and give more than you’d think, especially the poor. With the result that we often have enough to offer a nice morsel to the more wretched, don’t we, Noiraud? Not to mention that one doesn’t get bored on the parvis; there are celebrations of every sort, marriages, burials, baptisms, Te deums; one sees everything, the great and small of the earth, because everyone comes to the house of the good God, don’t they, Noiraud? There’s also the master of the chapel, who likes us, and who never fails to stop, and talks to us politely; he’s a little hard of hearing, and doesn’t hear what I reply to him, but he tell me stories about the city. That prevents thought. You used to tell me stories too, didn’t you, Calame? When the hour of the offices is past, I go in my vehicle to the river bank, against the abutment of the bridge; there I clip dogs and cut cats—for I have a trade, you see? And a pretty box! It was Gertrude again who gave me all that! When clients come to us, and a little dog wants to move too much, or a little cat isn’t content, Noiraud plants himself in front of them, and you ought to see him making wide eyes at them, telling them to remain tranquil! He’s a big help to me, the good Noiraud. And then, in the city, we have other friends, other stray dogs; we say hello. Don’t we, Noiraud? I’m happy. I believe that I’ve never been as happy...”
He was exaggerating. With an infantile cunning, he had hastened to affirm his material good fortune, in order not to be interrogated about his mental state, which was not as good. Since his precipitate adieux to the Polygene household, dull and mute sadness had inhabited the depths of his inner being, a lassitude, a discouragement that he did not want to admit to anyone, not even to Noiraud, much less to himself.
/> It was like a bad fog in which one can only see things vaguely, which move, without one knowing why they are here rather than there: uncertain ghosts, the ghosts of people, the ghosts of ideas, good, evil, unknown beings that are the present and are already blurring, known beings that are the past, which one can scarcely discern any better. From that swarming fog, an insipid odor was exhaled, perhaps the odor of death; and when it rose in gusts, Dieudonat turned away with an abrupt torsion of the neck, as if the poison had veritably been in his heart.
He was no longer exempt from the miseries that immediate contingencies procure; they came to him every day, at a mixed hour, from a friend who detested him. Opposite him, under the same porch, was an old blind man, who carved little deformed animals in white wood, sold very few, and attributed the decline in his industry to the competition of the amputee.
“I can no longer earn my living since you’ve been there.”
When the exit from mass had been poor, he blamed Dieudonat for it, hurling, from one pillar to the other, names that the sanctity of the location ought not to have permitted. In vain the Prince responded with conciliating words; in order to gain indulgence he admired loudly the wooden rabbits or sheep, and signaled their beauty to Noiraud; often, too, be profited from his adversary’s blindness to throw a coin into his wooden bowl; the blind man, alerted by the keenness of his hearing, was never duped, but affected to thank an imaginary passer-by, in order to retain his entitlement to rancor intact, a right all the more precious because every recrimination had the result of procuring a donation. Noiraud, sniffing a vile soul, growled continually at the artist, who pretended to be afraid, and Dieudonat took great pains to restore peace between the two enemies.
Calame’s arrival brought the carver of images a new opportunity to complain.
“Are you going to draw all the beggars in the city here? Is it a place for repairing old shoes? You haven’t finished planting nails?”
The first concern of the Calamitous was, in fact, to finish Gertrude’s box. Dieudonat and Noiraud were very interested in that decorative work, which lasted all day, and gradually, they saw a coat of arms appear on the leather of the anterior panel
“Look,” said the Prince. “My father’s arms. I’d very much like to know what had become of my father...”
Calame went to obtain news, and the following day, he said: “Hardouin died some time ago. Gaifer had him deposed by the Emperor and decapitated by the executioner, in order better to ensure the annexation of the kingdom.”
Dieudonat said a prayer for the repose of the paternal soul, but his orison was insufficient to calm his mind. He accused himself of parricide, and from then on the idea haunted him; twenty times a day he beat his breast while praying for his father. Facing him, without respite, a voice sang: “My work... Have pity on a poor blind man...”
“All the same,” said Calame, “you’re a King now, the legitimate King, for your people persist in searching for you, in hoping for you; they ask for you, refusing to believe in your death. What do you think about going to reconquer your scepter? With two or three wishes, one could see the farce through. You could appoint me prime minister.”
In order to complete the decoration of the box, the clerk disposed three copper nails in the form of a royal crown above the escutcheon.
But he was only amusing himself. Dieudonat became increasingly bleak; by virtue of contagion, Noiraud became more severe; the Calamitous could not succeed in making either one of them laugh.
His own life was not cheerful either. To kill time, he recommenced frequenting the mountain of the University; without pleasure, he listened to the lessons of the masters in the public squares, and without success, he climbed on to the boundary markers of the crossroads himself to recite his verses; he had composed superb ones in the Alexandrine mode, recently invented by the clerk Alexander,20 but his poems were veritably too superior to the mind of the century, with the result that few alms flowed into his wallet. He rarely supped; his hours of gastronomy were spent outside the shop-fronts of rotisseries, where the odor of goose substituted momentarily for the smoke of metaphysics; after that ideal repast, he drew away with a sigh and, if he did not die of hunger, at least he lived in it.
His most reliable bread came from clipping dogs, which earned more. In exchange for some meager meat he brought to the common meal his contribution of intellectual fodder, relating anecdotes about the capital. Unfortunately they saddened his audience more often than they cheered him up.
“This morning, they took to the plain a man named Anoure; his story is comical. Can you imagine that the clown passed himself off as a eunuch and took advantage of the general confidence to lure into his lair prey of a very young age, who were never seen again; in truth, he was abusing it. He was hanged...”
“Alas!”
The lack of success of his tales did not discourage the storyteller.
“Today, you’ll laugh, I hope, for the adventure is joyful. I encountered, with his escort of squires and pages, a rich imbecile who was once my comrade at school, Gontran the Rogue. Do you remember him? You met him in the brigands’ cavern, with Ruprecht the Pug-nosed, and I told you that in our youth, the three of us were inseparable: Ruprecht, the adventurous brute, Gontran the adventurous fool, and me, the man of genius. Gontran seemed to us to be the least well-equipped, but he had more than us, since he’s the only one who has prospered; he’s known as the Vicomte d’Avatar. He married the only daughter of a Lombard, successively rendered her an orphan and a mother, and conducted her to the grave; sumptuous henceforth on the heritage of his own child, he struts in the face of the universe. From him I learned that Ruprecht got himself captured last year and quartered. The vicomte told me the details in person, In spite of my rags, or because of them, for he felt visibly magnified by our failure almost as much as by his own fortune, and he showed himself to be candidly proud of the contrast that his cleverness had been able to put between his destiny and ours. He pushed the demonstration as far as to give me a handful of coins, not to mention that he’s promised me more. You can see that it’s a good day!”
“No, Calame, and your story is vile; that money wouldn’t be worth anything to us.”
“You’re never content: one offers you the picture of a man who succeeds...”
“Alas!”
The voice of the blind man opposite yelped its request to the passers-by.
“Share your coins with that fellow, will you? And tell us another story quickly, so that we can forget that one.”
“Do you prefer politics? Grave news. The old Emperor has decided to die; he’s just entered into death-throes, it’s said, for which the Archduke has been waiting for fifteen years, with an impatient patience.”
“Then little Aude is going to be Empress?”
“Little Aude? But she’s dead. He was very jealous, she was very futile: one day, he dragged her so rudely by the hair that the brain came away with the scalp. It’s claimed that she’d married him for love.”
“Alas! My pretty nostrils...”
“In fact, there was an entire drama at the Court. That Galeas, whom people continued to call the One-Eyed, was a seductive fellow; Queen Gaude was smitten with him.”
“Alas! My resemblance...”
“As the Emperor was taking a long time to die, the two lovers made a plan to dethrone Gaifer in order to offer themselves a kingdom while awaiting the empire...”
“I knew of a similar plot...”
“But what you doubtless don’t know is that this one was discovered by a stupefying young lad whose gaze nothing escaped: a fellow named Epagomene, then still a page of the King and now his private secretary. He emerged from no one knows where. His age is unknown.”
“He must have reached sixteen.”
“He has the figure of an adolescent and the face of an old man. Endowed with omniscience and devoid of illusions, he has read everything, he weighs everything, and sees everything in depth; instead of looking at the effects, like
a man, he only looks at the causes; he understands everything, so that he gives the impression of understanding nothing by dint of remaining impassive; he’s so shrewd that he doesn’t even take pleasure in the honors he’s awarded; by virtue of the favor of his master he possesses everything, and by virtue of the excess of his intelligence, he doesn’t enjoy anything. He has never been seen to laugh; he has never be seen to get angry; in spite of his age, he isn’t known to have had any amour, and although he lives surrounded by hatreds, he isn’t known to have had any rancor. Either he doesn’t deign to, or he can’t.”
“Alas...”
“A jolly gift to give a child! Anyway, Galeas has gone away; his betrayer Epagomene will probably perish under the dagger of vengeance.”
“When did the Archduke leave?”
“This morning So long as he stayed here the King didn’t dare to do anything against the Queen, but the future Emperor no longer cares about her, and Gaifer is already talking about imprisoning his adulterous wife in a convent, not without obliging her to make honorable amends on the parvis of the cathedral: a Royal spectacle that Your Majesty will be able to watch delightedly from here.”
“I’d rather not see that. And please, cousin, don’t tell me any more stories; I’ve had my fill of them.”
Dieudonat became even sadder; his had inclined toward his breast, and his eyelid lowered over his unique eye. He fell into long silences, during which he evoked his actions of old, for the sake of penitence. The present slid around him without provoking anything in him but a voluntarily vain and totally desolate commiseration, for the notion of real things no longer permitted any hope of remedying the evil of imminent things. All his strength had ebbed away.
Every day, on arriving under the porch, Calame found him similar; standing before him, he contemplated him without daring to say anything to him, and every day, on seeing the dwarf motionless, he remembered the saying of Paracelsus: “All those who have surpassed the measure, no matter in what way, fall into despair.”
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