Chapter 2
It was a long time since we had met when I received one morning a line of his dear little handwriting, formerly so firm, now trembling and uncertain. "We are in Paris. Come and see me. I am so dull." I found him with his wife, his child and his dogs, in a lugubrious little apartment in the Batignolles. The disorder which in this narrow space could not be spread about, seemed more hideous even than in the country. While the child and dogs rolled about in rooms the size of a chessboard compartment, Heurtebise; who was ill, lay with his face to the wall, in a state of utter prostration. His wife, dressed out as usual, and ever placid, hardly looked at him. "I don't know what is the matter with him," she said to me with a gesture of indifference. On seeing me he had for a moment a return of gaiety, and a minute of his old hearty laugh, but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburban habits, there appeared at the breakfast hour, in the midst of this household disorganized by poverty and illness, a parasite, a seedy looking little bald man, cranky and peevish, of whom they always spoke as "the man who has read Proudhon." It was thus that Heurtebise, who probably had never known his name, introduced him to everybody. When he was asked "Who is that?" he unhesitatingly replied, "Oh! a very clever fellow, who has thoroughly studied Proudhon." His knowledge was certainly not very apparent, for this deep thinker rarely made himself heard except to complain at table of an ill-cooked roast or a spoilt sauce. On this occasion, the man who had read Proudhon declared that the breakfast was detestable, which however did not prevent his devouring the larger half of it himself.
How long and lugubrious this meal by the bedside of my sick friend appeared to me! The wife gossiped as usual, with a tap now and then to the child, a bone to the dogs, and a smile to the philosopher. Not once did Heurtebise turn towards us, and yet he was not asleep. I hardly know whether he thought. Dear, valiant fellow! In those paltry and ceaseless struggles, the mainspring of his strong nature had broken, and he was already beginning to die. The silent death agony, which however was rather an abandonment of life, lasted several months; and then Madame Heurtebise found herself a widow. Then, as no tears had dimmed her clear eyes, as she always bestowed the same care on her glossy locks, and as Aubertot and Fajon were still available, she married Aubertot and Fajon. Perhaps it was Aubertot, perhaps it was Fajon, perhaps even both of them. In any case, she was able to resume the life she was fitted for, and the voluble gossip and eternal smile of the shopwoman.
THE CREDO OF LOVE.
To be the wife of a poet! that had been the dream of her life! but ruthless fate, instead of the romantic and fevered existence she sighed for, had doomed her to a peaceful, humdrum happiness, and married her to a rich man at Auteuil, gentle and amiable, perhaps indeed a trifle old for her, possessed of but one passion,--perfectly inoffensive and unexciting--that of horticulture. This excellent man spent his days pruning, scissors in hand, tending and trimming a magnificent collection of rose trees, heating a greenhouse, watering flower beds; and really it must be admitted that, for a poor little heart hungering after an ideal, this was hardly sufficient food. Nevertheless for ten years her life remained straightforward and uniform, like the smooth sanded paths in her husband's garden, and she pursued it with measured steps, listening with resigned weariness to the dry and irritating sound of the ever-moving scissors, or to the monotonous and endless showers that fell from the watering pots on to the leafy shrubs. The rabid horticulturist bestowed on his wife the same scrupulous attention he gave to his flowers. He carefully regulated the temperature of the drawing-room, overcrowded with nosegays, fearing for her the April frosts or March sun; and like the plants in pots that are put out and taken in at stated times, he made her live methodically, ever watchful of a change of barometer or phase of the moon.
She remained like this for a long time, closed in by the four walls of the conjugal garden, innocent as a clematis, full however of wild aspirations towards other gardens, less staid, less humdrum, where the rose trees would fling out their branches untrained, and the wild growth of weed and briar be taller than the trees, and blossom with unknown and fantastic flowers, luxuriantly coloured by a warmer sun. Such gardens are rarely found save in the books of poets, and so she read many verses, all unknown to the nurseryman, who knew no other poetry than a few almanac distichs such as:
Quand il pleut à la Saint-Médard, Il pleut quarante jours plus tard.*
* When it rains on Saint Medard's day, It rains on for forty more days.
At haphazard, the unfortunate creature ravenously devoured the paltriest rhymes, satisfied if she found in them lines ending in "love" and "passion"; then closing the book, she would spend hours dreaming and sighing: "That would have been the husband for me!"
It is probable that all this would have remained in a state of vague aspiration, if at the terrible age of thirty, which seems to be the decisive critical moment for woman's virtue, as twelve o'clock is for the day's beauty, the irresistible Amaury had not chanced to cross her path. Amaury was a drawing-room poet, one of those fanatics in dress coat and grey kid gloves, who between ten o'clock and midnight, go and recite to the world their ecstasies of love, their raptures, their despair, leaning mournfully against the mantel-piece, in the blaze of the lights, while seated around him women, in full evening dress, listen entranced behind their fans.
This one might pose as the very ideal of his kind; with his vulgar but irresistible countenance, sunken eye, pallid complexion, hair cut short and moustaches stiffly plastered with cosmetic. A desperate man such as women love, hopeless of life but irreproachably dressed, a lyric enthusiast, chilled and disheartened, in whom the madness of inspiration can be divined only in the loose and neglected tie of his cravat. But also what success awaits him, when he delivers in a strident voice a tirade from his poem, the _Credo of Love_, more especially the one ending in this extraordinary line:
Moi, je crois à l'amour comme je crois en Dieu! *
* I believe in love as I believe in God.
Mark you, I strongly suspect the rascal cares as little for God, as for the rest; but women do not look so closely. They are easily caught by a birdlime of words, and every time Amaury recites his _Credo of Love_, you are certain to see all round the drawing-room rows upon rows of little rosy mouths, eagerly opening, ready to swallow the taking bait of mawkish sentimentality. Just fancy! A poet who has such beautiful moustaches and who believes in love as he believes in God.
For the nurseryman's wife this proved indeed irresistible. In three sittings she was conquered. Only, as at the bottom of this elegiac nature there was some honesty and pride, she would not stoop to any paltry fault. Moreover the poet himself declared in his _Credo_, that he only understood one way of erring: that which was openly declared and ready to defy both law and society. Taking therefore the _Credo of Love_ for her guide, the young woman one fine day escaped from the garden at Auteuil and went off to throw herself into her poet's arms.--"I can no longer live with that man! Take me away!"
In such cases the husband is always _that man_, even when he is a horticulturist.
For a moment Amaury was staggered. How on earth could he have imagined that an ordinary little housewife of thirty would have taken in earnest a love poem, and followed it out literally? However he put the best face he could on his over-good fortune, and as the lady had, thanks to her little Auteuil garden, remained fresh and pretty, he carried her off without a murmur. The first days, all was delightful. They feared lest the husband should track them. They thought it advisable to hide under fictitious names, change hotels, inhabit the most remote quarters of the town, the suburbs of Paris, the outlying districts.
In the evening they stealthily sallied forth and took sentimental walks along the fortifications. Oh the wonderful power of romance! The more she was alarmed, the more precautions, window blinds and lowered veils, were necessary, the greater did her poet seem. At night, they opened the little window of their room and gazing at the stars rising on high above the signal lights of the neighbouring railway, she made him repeat again and again his wonderful verses:
Moi, je crois à l'amour comme je crois en Dieu.
And it was delightful!
Unfortunately it did not last. The husband left them too much undisturbed. The fact is, _that man_ was a philosopher. His wife gone, he had closed the green door of his oasis and quietly set about trimming his roses again, happy in the thought that these at least, attached to the soil by long roots, would not be able to run away from him. Our reassured lovers returned to Paris and then suddenly the young woman felt that some change had come over her poet. Their flight, fear of detection, and constant alarms,--all these things which had fed her passion existing no longer, she began to understand and see the situation clearly.
Moreover, at every moment, in the settling of their little household, in the thousand paltry details of every day life, the man she was living with showed himself more thoroughly.
The few and scarce generous, heroic or delicate feelings he possessed were spun out in his verses, and he kept none for his personal use. He was mean, selfish, above all very niggardly, a fault love seldom forgives. Then he had cut off his moustaches, and was disfigured by the loss. How different from that fine gloomy fellow with his carefully curled locks, as he appeared one evening declaiming his _Credo_, in the blaze of two chandeliers! Now, in the enforced retreat he was undergoing on her account, he gave way to all his crotchets, the greatest of which was fancying himself always ill. Indeed, from constantly playing at consumption, one ends by believing in it. The poet Amaury was fond of decoctions, wrapped himself up in plaisters, and covered his chimney piece with phials and powders. For some time the little woman took up quite seriously her part of a nursing sister. Her devotion seemed to excuse her fault and give an object to her life. But she soon tired of it. In spite of herself, in the stuffy room where the poet sat wrapped in flannel, she could not help thinking of her little garden so sweetly scented, and the kind nurseryman seen from afar in the midst of his shrubs and flowerbeds, appeared to her as simple, touching and disinterested, as this other one was exacting and egotistical.
At the end of a month, she loved her husband, really loved him, not with the affection induced by habit, but with a real and true love. One day she wrote him a long letter full of passion and repentance. He did not vouchsafe a reply. Perhaps he thought she was not yet sufficiently punished. Then she despatched letter after letter, humbled herself, begged him to allow her to return, saying she would die rather than continue to live with that man. It was now the lover's turn to be called "that man." Strange to say, she hid herself from him to write; for she believed him still in love, and while imploring her husband's forgiveness, she feared the exaltation of her lover.
"He will never allow me to leave," she said to herself. Accordingly, when by dint of supplications she obtained forgiveness and the nurseryman--I have already mentioned that he was a philosopher,--consented to take her back, the return to her own home bore all the mysterious and dramatic aspect of flight. She literally eloped with her husband. It was her last culpable pleasure. One evening as the poet, tired of their dual existence, and proud of his regrown moustaches, had gone to an evening party to recite his _Credo of Love_, she jumped into a cab that was awaiting her at the end of the street and returned with her old husband to the little garden at Auteuil, for ever cured of her ambition to be the wife of a poet. It is true that this fellow was not much of a poet!
THE TRANSTEVERINA.
The play was just over, and while the crowd, with its many varied impressions, hurried away and poured out under the glare of the principal portico of the theatre, a few friends, of whom I was one, awaited the poet at the artists' entrance in order to congratulate him. His production had not, indeed, been very successful. Too powerful to suit the timid and trivial imagination of the public of our day, it was quite beyond the range of the stage, limited as that is by conventionalities and tolerated traditions. Pedantic criticism declared: "It is not fit for the stage!" and the scoffers of the boulevards revenged themselves for the emotion these magnificent verses had given them by repeating: "It won't pay!" As for us, we were proud of the friend who had dared to roll forth in a ringing peal, his splendid golden rhymes, flashing the best product of his genius beneath the artificial and murderous light of the lustres, and presenting his personages in life-like size, heedless of the optical illusion of the modern stage, of the dimness of opera-glass and defective vision.
Amid a motley crowd of scene shifters, firemen, and _figurants_ muffled up in comforters, the poet approached us, his tall figure bent double, his coat collar chillily turned up over his thin beard and long grizzled hair. He seemed depressed. The scant applause of the hired claque and literary friends confined to a corner of the house foretold a limited number of representations, choice and rare spectators, and posters rapidly replaced without giving his name a chance of being known. When one has worked twenty of talent and life, this obstinate refusal of the public to comprehend is wearying and disheartening, and one ends by thinking: "Perhaps after all they are right." Fear paralyses and words fail. Our acclamations and enthusiastic greetings somewhat cheered him. "Really do you think so? Is it well done? 'Tis true I have given all I knew." And his feverish hands anxiously clutched ours, his eyes full of tears sought a sincere and reassuring glance. It was the imploring anguish of the sick person, asking the doctor: "It is not true, I'm not going to die?" No! poet, you will not die. The operettas and fairy pieces that have had hundreds of representations and thousands of spectators will be long since forgotten, scattered to the winds with their last playbills, while your work will ever remain fresh and living.
As we stood on the now deserted pavement, exhorting and cheering him, a loud contralto voice vulgarised by an Italian accent burst upon us.
"Hullo, artist! enough _pouégie_. Let's go and eat the _estoufato!_"
At the same moment a stout woman wrapped up in a hooded cape and a red tartan shawl linked her arm in that of our friend, in a manner so brutal and despotic that his countenance and attitude became at once embarrassed.
"My wife," he said, then turning towards her with a hesitating smile:
"Suppose we take them home and show them how you make an _estoufato?_"
Flattered in the conceit of her culinary accomplishments, the Italian graciously consented to receive us, and five or six of us started off for the heights of Montmartre where they dwelt, to share their stewed beef.
I confess I took a certain interest in the artist's home life. Since his marriage our friend had led a very secluded existence, almost always in the country; but what I knew of his life whetted my curiosity. Fifteen years before, when in all the freshness of a romantic imagination, he had met in the suburbs of Rome a magnificent creature with whom he immediately fell desperately in love. Maria Assunta, her father, and a brood of brothers and sisters inhabited one of those little houses of the Transtevera with walls uprising from the waters of the Tiber, and an old fishing boat rocking level with the door. One day he caught sight of the handsome Italian girl, with bare feet in the sand, red skirt tightly pleated around her, and unbleached linen sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, catching eels out of a large gleaming wet net. The silvery scales glistening through the meshes full of water, the golden river and scarlet petticoat, the beautiful black eyes deep and pensive, which seemed darkened in their musing by the surrounding sunlight struck the artist, perhaps even rather trivially, like some coloured print on the titlepage of a song in a music-seller's window.
It so chanced that the girl was heart-whole, having till now bestowed her affections on a big tom-cat, yellow and sly, also a great fisher of eels, who bristled up all over when anyone approached his mistress.
Beasts and men, our lover managed to tame all these folk, was married at Santa-Maria of the Transtevera and brought back to France the beautiful Assunta and her _cato_.
Ah! poor fellow, he ought also to have brought away at the same time some of the sunlight of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing nets of the _Ponte Rotto_; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when, having settled in a modest flat on the fourth storey, on the heights of Montmartre, he saw his handsome Transteverina decked out in a crinoline, a flounced dress, and a Parisian bonnet, which, constantly out of balance on the top of her heavy braids, assumed the most independent attitudes. Under the clear cold light of Parisian skies, the unfortunate man soon perceived that his wife was a fool, an irretrievable fool. Not a single idea even lurked in the velvety depths of those beautiful black eyes, lost in infinite contemplation. They glittered like an animal's in the calm of digestion, or in a chance gleam of light, nothing more. Withal the lady was common, vulgar, accustomed to govern by a slap all the little world of her native hut, and the least opposition threw her into uncontrollable rages.
Who would have guessed that the fine mouth, straitened by silence into the purest shape of an antique face, would suddenly open to let flow torrents of vulgar abuse? Without respect for herself or for him, out loud, in the street, at the theatre, she would pick a quarrel with him, and indulge in scenes of fearful jealousy. To crown all, devoid of any artistic feeling, she was completely ignorant of her husband's profession and language, of manners, in fact of everything. The little French she could be taught, only made her forget Italian, and the result was that she composed a kind of half and half jargon which had the most comical effect. In short this love story, begun like one of Lamartine's poems, was ending like a novel of Champfleury's. After having for a long time struggled to civilise this wild woman, the poet saw he must abandon the task. Too honourable to leave her, probably still too much in love, he made up his mind to shut himself up, see no one, and work hard. The few intimate friends he admitted to his house, saw that they embarrassed him and ceased to come.
Hence it was that for the last fifteen years he had been living boxed up in his household like in a leper's cell.
As I pondered over this wretched existence, I watched the strange couple walking before me. He, slender, tall and round-shouldered.
She, squarely built, heavy, shaking her shawl by an impatient shrug of her shoulders, with a free gait like a man's. She was tolerably cheerful, her speech was loud, and from time to time she turned round to see if we followed, familiarly shouting and calling by name those of us she happened to know, accentuating her words by much gesticulation as she would have hailed a fishing boat on the Tiber. When we reached their house, the _concierge_, furious at seeing so noisy a crew at such an unearthly hour, tried to prevent our entry. The Italian and he had a fearful row on the staircase. We were all dotted about on the winding stairs dimly lighted by the dying gas, ill at ease, uncomfortable, hardly knowing if we ought not to come down again.
"Come, quick, let us go up," said the poet in a low tone, and we followed him silently, while, leaning over the banisters that shook under her weight and anger, the Italian let fly a volley of abuse in which Roman imprecations alternated with the vocabulary of the back slums. What a return home for the poet who had just roused the admiration of artistic Paris, and still retained in his fevered eyes the dazzling intoxication of his first performance! What a humiliating recall to every-day life!
It was only by the fireside in his little sitting room that the icy chill caused by this silly adventure was dispelled, and we should soon have completely forgotten it, had it not been for the piercing voice and bursts of laughter of the signora whom we heard in the kitchen telling her maid how soundly she had rated that _choulato!_ When the table was laid and supper ready, she came and seated herself amongst us, having taken off her shawl, bonnet and veil, and I was able to examine her at my leisure. She was no longer handsome. The square face, the broad heavy jaw, the coarse hair turning grey, and above all the vulgar expression of the mouth, contrasted singularly with the eternal and meaningless reverie of the dreamy gaze. Resting her elbows on the table, familiar and shapeless, she joined in the conversation without for an instant losing sight of her plate. Just over her head, proud amid all the melancholy rubbish of the drawing-room, a large portrait signed by an illustrious name, stood out of the surrounding shade,--it was Maria Assunta at twenty. The purple costume, the milky white of the pleated wimple, the bright gold of the over-abundant imitation jewelry, set off magnificently the brilliancy of a sunny complexion, the velvety shades of the thick hair growing low on the forehead, which seemed to be united by an almost imperceptible down to the superb and straight line of the eyebrows. How could such an exuberance of life and beauty have deteriorated and become such a mass of vulgarity? And curiously while the Transteverina talked, I interrogated her lovely eyes, so deep and soft on the canvas.
The excitement of the meal had put her in a good humour. To cheer up the poet, to whom his mingled failure and glory were doubly painful, she thumped him on the back, laughed with her mouth full, saying in her hideous jargon, that it was not worth while for such a trifle to fling oneself head downwards from the _campanile del Duomo_.
"Isn't it true, _il cato?_" she added turning to the old tom-cat crippled by rheumatism, snoring in front of the fire. Then suddenly, in the middle of an interesting discussion, she screamed out to her husband in a voice senseless and brutal as the crack of a rifle:
"Hey! artist! _la lampo qui filo!_"
The poor fellow immediately interrupted his conversation to wind up the lamp, humble, submissive, anxious to avoid the scene he dreaded, and which in spite of all, he did not escape.