Part 15

From that day, the world might have come to an end without my knowing what had happened; my eye was fastened on my fishing line, waiting for a bite. What monster am I now to draw from the deep? Ha! look at this splendid fellow, with his white belly and his coat of mail, changeable green and blue, all shining in the sun. Honestly, the best part of my life, (days, weeks, or years,--I kept no count of them,) was spent then: and God be thanked! who gave us eyes, through which the wonderful visions in books can reach our brains. Give us only those closely packed little black marks, between the borders of the white page, and from their sight the magician conjures up long-dispersed armies, ruined cities, great orators of Rome, fierce enemies, heroes and the beauties that beguile them, the winds that blow, the sparkling sea, the hot eastern sun, and the snows of winter.

Here I can see imperial Cæsar, pale and thin, reclining in his litter surrounded by his grim old soldiers; or that guzzler, Antony, with his dishes and cups, on his way to some green nook, where he and his parasites can stuff and swill to their hearts’ content; devouring eight roasted boars at one sitting. Then Pompey passes, stiff and formal, with Flora whom he loves;--Poliorcites decked with a gold mantle, embroidered with the sun, moon and stars; and Artaxerxes, like a great bull among his herd of four hundred women.

Now comes Alexander, beautiful as the god Bacchus, whose dress he wears, returning in his triumph from India. See him high in a great car drawn by eight horses and covered with rich carpets and garlands of green leaves; hear the strains of flutes and hautboys as he feasts and drinks with his generals, all of them crowned with flowers: women leaping about him in the dance, and his great army at his back. Wasn’t it marvelous? Then there was Queen Cleopatra, Lamia the flute-player, and Statira, who was so beautiful that it hurt your eyes to look at her! In spite of Antony, Alexander, and Artaxerxes, all these enchantresses are mine, now at my pleasure. I can enter their bowers, drink with Thaïs, embrace Roxana, and carry Cleopatra away in my arms wrapped in her carpet. It is possible for me even to imitate Antiochus, who was in love with his mother-in-law, although that is a singular idea to my notion.

I go out to exterminate the Gauls; I come, I see, I conquer; and the best of it all is that it does not cost me one single drop of blood! Then, too, my riches are beyond counting; each story is a caravel, laden with the treasures of the East or Barbary; bringing precious metals, old wines, strange beasts, and captured slaves of the rarest beauty:--such breasts, such ivory limbs! All this is mine, these empires rose, flourished and disappeared, only to give me pleasure. I feel as if I were at a Carnival, where in turn I can wear every man’s mask and disguise, even to putting on his skin, and with it his thoughts and passions. Thus I am at once the music, and the dancer, the book and old Plutarch, who was inspired to write it in a most fortunate hour.

How good it is to let the rhythm of words and phrases carry you off, dancing and laughing, into space, free from all trammels of the body. This mind, this thought of ours is God Himself. Praise be to His Holy Spirit!--Sometimes I pause in the midst of the story to imagine how it will turn out, and then compare my own fancy with the image which nature or art had created. In the case of art, I am so sharp that I can generally guess right; and then how I laugh at my own cleverness! But the old witch, life, is often too much for me!--her resources are beyond our feeble comprehension. There is only one part of the tale which she never troubles herself to vary; all her stories end in the same way--wit, war, love--you know what happens to them--they disappear into the darkness; and on this one point she certainly does repeat herself.

She is like a naughty child, breaking her toys when she is tired of them, till I am provoked to blame her for being so destructive, and snatch the pieces out of her hands; but it is too late; they are broken past repair; and all that I can do, is to cherish what is left, as Glodie rocks the remains of her doll in her arms.

At each revolution of the dial this Death comes nearer and nearer, like a beautiful refrain: “Strike hour! ring bells, ding dong ding.” Now, I fancy myself Cyrus, Emperor of Persia, Conqueror of Asia; hear what I say:--“Friend, envy me not the small space of earth, which covers my poor body.”--I stand beside Alexander as he reads this epitaph and trembles, for in it he seems to hear his own voice rising from the tomb.

Now that you are dead, great Cyrus and Alexander, how near you both seem to me; do I dream? or are they really there? I pinch myself to find out if I am awake, yes, there on the table by my side are two coins which I dug up in my vineyard last year, with the profiles of bearded Commodus dressed as Hercules, and Crispina Augusta, with her heavy chin and her shrewish nose.--“This is no dream,” say I; “for here is Rome between my thumb and forefinger.”

My greatest pleasure was to lose myself in reflections on moral issues; to raise once more, questions long settled by force; should I cross the Rubicon,--or not? I could never make up my mind! I fought Brutus and Cæsar in turn; changed my opinion and argued on either side with so much eloquence that I could not tell what I believed. In this way the subject takes possession of you, as you give and take, strike out and hit back, till at last you are transfixed by your own blade! Did you ever hear of such an idea? But it all comes of reading Plutarch, with his smooth tongue, and pleasant way of calling you “my friend”! He gets you first on one side and then on the other; and has as many points of view as he has stories to tell you; so that the hero I love best is always the last one that I have read about.

We are all chained to Fortune’s car; her triumphs over history are greater than Pompey’s, as her wheel turns, never resting for a moment. She has as many phases as the moon, says Menelaus, in the words Sophocles puts into his mouth; and for those who are still in her first quarter, that is a comforting reflection.

I would sometimes say to myself: “What does all this matter, Breugnon? What to you are the glories of Rome, and the crimes and follies of these old rascals? You have your own faults and troubles to think of, why go out of your way to worry over those of people who have been dead and gone for eighteen hundred years? To a sober middle-class citizen of Clamecy, Cæsar, Antony, and their light-o’-love, Cleopatra, these Persian princes who murdered their sons and married their daughters, were extremely depraved people; the most virtuous thing they ever did was to die; so peace to their ashes!--but how can a respectable man find pleasure in reading about such insanities? Think of Alexander, who spent the treasures of a nation on the burial of his beautiful favorite, Ephestion. Are you not shocked by such extravagance?--It is bad enough to murder a lot of people, for men are savage beasts; but when it comes to wasting so much good money, that these tyrants had never earned, how can you smile at such wickedness? It is really absurd to see you sitting up with your eyes wide open, as proud as if you yourself had been fool enough to scatter these millions to the wind. Surely the worst idiot of all is he who delights in the follies of others!”

After a discourse of this kind, the other side of me would make answer: “Colas, you talk like a printed book, but, none the less, I would give my right hand for these things which you call nonsense; and I find more life in the shadows of the men who died two thousand years ago, than in those who move and breathe today. I feel that I know and love them, and would consent to let Alexander kill me as he did Clytus, if afterward he would come and weep over my body. It is all real to me; my heart is in my throat when I see Cæsar in the Senate-house, his back against a pillar like a stag at bay, the conspirators’ knives searching for his life; and I am in ecstasy when Cleopatra floats by me in her gilded barge, surrounded by Nereids and young pages, naked and beautiful as the day. The perfumed breeze blows across my face, and I open my big nostrils, the better to inhale the delicious fragrance.”

When at the end Antony is drawn up to the loophole in the tower, bleeding, half dead; and his love, struggling with the heavy weight, can hardly pull him in;--I really cannot bear it, and sob like a child! What is it that moves me thus, and binds me to these men and women as if to those of my own blood? except the fact that we are truly of one family, we are Man, each and all of us.

I pity people from the bottom of my heart who know nothing of the profound pleasure of books; they are like disinherited children, but they do not know it, and boast that the present is enough for them. Blind geese! who can see no farther than the end of their noses! Not that I mean to deny the merits of the present; that would come with an ill grace from one like me, who have always kept my hands and my mouth open for anything good. No, those who find fault with the present are ignorant, or else they have a poor digestion: I understand a man who clasps all that he can reach to his heart, but there are those who reach nothing worth while:--he who contents himself with little is of small value; and I have always preferred to take the most that I could get in life.

In Adam’s time the present was all very well; there were no clothes to wear, and only one woman in the world; but life is fuller now, coming as we do at the end of a long line of ancestors, heirs to all that they have amassed, and we should be fools indeed to neglect the harvests of the past, on the pretext that we can gather others.

I often dwell on the thought of Adam. He and I are really the same person, only I am older and bigger; the same tree, but with more branches. I feel every stroke of the woodman’s axe to my remotest leaf; all the joys and sorrows of the world are mine; I laugh with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep; and this is especially true of the world of books; there, more than in my own life, I feel the bond that unites men, from prince to peasant.

Soon of us all there will remain only a few ashes, and the flame which rises, one yet infinitely multiplied, from our inmost souls towards Heaven. There with its thousand tongues it will sing forever the glory of the Omnipotent Creator.

* * * * *

So I lie dreaming in my garret, while outside the wind falls with the fading light, and the chill wings of the snow brush across the window panes. As the shadows darken my eyes can no longer distinguish the book in my hand, but with my face on the page the human scent comes to my nostrils; is it I, or the story that is dying away into the night, that comes, that is here? I am in the forest, my prey eludes me in the long vistas, as I seem to stop and listen with a beating heart to the flight and the pursuit: my eyes slowly close, but they can pierce through the darkness; I am not asleep, the planets are looking at me through the window, I can almost touch the glass, and across the black arch without flashes one shooting star, then another,--a rain of jewels this November night; and I think of Cæsar and his comet,--perhaps that is the trail of his blood up yonder!

At dawn I am still there dreaming. It is Sunday; I hear the church bells, and their sound fills the whole house from cellar to garret with its vibrations, giving new life to my vagrant fancies, which spread themselves over poor old Paillard’s book. To my ear my dim little chamber resounds to the feet of armies, the wheels of chariots, and the tramp of war-steeds. The windows shake, my ears and my heart thrill with the sound, and I open my mouth to cry: “Ave Cæsar Imperator!”--when Florimond, who has come up and is looking out of the window, says with a loud yawn: “There is not a single soul to be seen in the street this morning,--it is as dull as ditch-water!”

XIV

HEALTH TO THE KING!

St. Martin’s Day, November 11th.

The air was delightfully soft and warm when I woke this morning; it seemed like a gentle touch on my cheek, or a kitten rubbing itself against me. It flowed in a golden stream through the window; the sky had raised her cloudy eyelids, and looked at me with her pale blue eyes, while a faint ray of sunshine smiled from the opposite roof.

I felt dreamy and languid and like a boy again,--old fool that I am! But I have stopped growing old and am now retracing my steps as fast as I can; pretty soon I shall be an infant in arms once more. My heart was filled with sweet visions,--like good Roger who yearned for Alcine,--you remember? I was in such a tender humor that I could not have been persuaded to harm a fly, and any child could have played with me.

I thought I was alone, but all at once I caught sight of Martine in the corner; I had not noticed when she came in, for she had said nothing, contrary to her habit, but just sat down and took up her sewing without even looking in my direction. I felt on such good terms with all the world that I wanted to share my pleasure, so just for the sake of being amiable, I said, “Why did they ring the great bell this morning?”

“It is St. Martin’s Day, Father,” said she, surprised at the question.

To think that I should have so lost myself in dreams as to forget the god of our town and herself! Among all the new friends in Plutarch, I could see in my mind’s eye this old one, as good as any of the rest of them, dividing his long cloak with his sword, as his legend tells us. “How could I forget St. Martin?” cried I.

“I don’t know indeed,” said Martine, “except that these days you don’t seem to remember anything in earth or Heaven but that stupid book of yours.”

This made me laugh, for I had often noticed that she cast a malevolent eye on old Plutarch when she came in the morning and found him in my bed; women seldom have a real love for books; they see in them either lovers or rivals. When they themselves read they always have an uneasy sense of infidelity, and that is why they cannot bear to see us absorbed in books, which they feel to be a sort of treachery.

“It is St. Martin’s own fault,” said I, “he never comes to see me nowadays, though he has half his cloak to wear, and so I forgot all about him. Out of sight out of mind! You must keep yourself before people’s eyes, you know, my daughter, if you want to be remembered.”

“There is no need to tell me that; I don’t let folks forget me.”

“True enough, you are easy to see and hear as a general thing, but this morning you were as still as a mouse; I miss our usual quarrel, come over here and begin.”

She would not even turn her head, but answered, “I have given up, there is no use talking to you!”

I looked at her as she sat stitching away with her mouth obstinately set; she really looked sad, so I began to be sorry that I had got the better of her. “Come here, dear, and give me a kiss; I may forget Martin, but never his namesake. Come, I have a present here for you.”

“You have some trick up your sleeve.”

“No, no, on my word, come and see what I have for you.”

“I am too busy.”

“Unnatural child, you are too busy to kiss your old father?”

She came reluctantly and stood near the bed, and I held out my arms to her.

“I don’t see any present,” said she.

“You have it now, I meant myself.”

“A pretty present you would be!”

“Ugly or pretty, I am yours entirely now to do with as you please.”

“Will you sleep downstairs?”

“Anywhere you choose to put me.”

“Will you do as you are told and let me love you and scold you when you need it?”

“I am your slave from this hour!”

“You dear bad old thing!” she cried. “I am going to get even with you now, for all your obstinacy!”

Then she hugged and cuffed me, shaking me about like a doll, and, without waiting a minute, called Florimond and his white-capped assistants who carried me feet first down the narrow stair and put me down in the big bed in the bright room, and there Martine and Glodie tucked me up and fussed about me, telling me over and over again that now that they had me downstairs I should see what good care they would take of me.

Do you know I really enjoyed it? And, having given in to my daughter completely, strangely enough I find that it is I who really direct and manage the whole household.

Martine spends the greater part of the day in my room now and we have long talks about one time in particular when _I_ sat by _her_ bedside, because it was she who was laid up with a sprained foot. The naughty little cat had jumped out of the window one night to meet her sweetheart; I caught her, and in spite of the sprain, I gave her a good trouncing; she laughs at it now and says I did not hurt enough, but in those days it was impossible to keep her in order no matter what you did; she always managed to slip through my fingers, but she kept her head nevertheless and some one else lost his, we must suppose, as he is now her husband. She laughs and sighs over those old days, and says it is all over now; that there are no more jokes for her; and then we talk of Florimond. She does justice to his good qualities, like the sensible woman that she is, but admits that he does not amuse her; marriage, however, is not intended for an amusement.

“No one knows that better than you do, Father, but we must make the best of what we have. You might as well try to draw water out of a sieve as to look for love in a husband, but I am not one to cry my eyes out for what I cannot have; I am not so badly off, and contented enough on the whole; but I can’t help thinking how different things are now from what I used to expect. How far our youthful dreams are from the things we come to accept in later years! I don’t know if it is sad or ridiculous, but when I remember all the hopes and fears, vows and flames, and for what? To make some man’s pot boil. After all, it is as much as most of us deserve, but if any one had told me so, once upon a time!--Well, there is always some fun to be got out of it. Laughter is a sauce that would make anything taste good, and that has never been lacking to you and me, Daddy; we can always laugh when we have made fools of ourselves.”

Such as it was, you can be sure we did not deny ourselves that consolation, and had many a joke, too, at the expense of other people. Sometimes we would fall silent; she occupied with her work and I with my book; but we kept up a little murmur like a brook which flows underground till it can leap out again into the sunshine; an idea would come into Martine’s head which made her burst out laughing, and then our tongues would run on again faster than ever.

I should have been glad to introduce Plutarch to Martine, and make her appreciate all his beauties, and enjoy my interesting and pathetic manner of reading aloud, but I had no sort of success; she did not like Greece or Rome any more than a fish would like apples for his dinner. Sometimes she would listen for a few moments, just from politeness, but she could not keep her mind on it, or rather her thoughts were elsewhere, flying up, down and all around, so that at the most exciting part of the narrative when I was working up to my effect, with a trembling voice, she would interrupt me, calling out to Glodie, or to Florimond at the other end of the house. This vexed me, of course, but I had to give it up, and resign myself to the fact that woman rarely shares our visions with us. She is half of us, but which half? The upper, of course, but suppose it should be the other? One thing is very sure, whatever the sexes have in common, it is not their brain, for each has its own, like a case full of baubles; or rather, they are like two sprouts from the same stem with one root between them--the heart.

I have a great many visitors these days, old graybeard as I am, ruined and lame into the bargain; all the pretty young housewives of the neighborhood gather round my bed, ostensibly to bring me the news, or to ask to have something mended. It does not matter what excuse they make for coming, they forget all about it as soon as they are inside the door; it is like the market, where each one has her place; Guillemine the bright-eyed, Huguette with her straight nose, clever Jacquotte, Margueron, Alizon, and all the rest of them, and the old man in the middle, snug under his down comforter. Such gossiping and such a clack of tongues, with their gay laughter ringing out like bells--mine is the big deep one. I know a lot of good stories which hit the girls in the right spot, and they laugh sometimes till they roll on the floor, and you can hear them across the street.

Florimond was actually jealous of my popularity, and wanted me to tell him the secret of my success. I said that it was an open secret; I was young, that was all; but he said rather spitefully that he knew that it was because I had such a bad reputation, as women always like a rake.

“True enough,” said I, “you know how boys admire an old soldier, when he comes back from the field of glory, and in the same way the ladies like Colas because they understand each other; they think he has fought in the campaigns of Love, and may perhaps live to fight another day.”

“Did any one ever hear such an old wretch?” cried Martine, “to be talking of making love at his time of life!”

“Why not? Now that you have put the idea into my head, I have a great mind to marry again.”

“Much good may it do you! But, after all, boys will be boys!”

December 6th. St. Nicholas Day,

I got out of bed this morning to do honor to the anniversary, and they rolled my great armchair between the table and the window, set a foot-warmer under my feet, and placed a little desk before me, with a socket for the candle.

About ten o’clock appeared the brotherhood of sailors, boat-builders, and workmen on the river. First came their players and the banner, and then they all passed by our windows arm in arm, dancing and singing, on their way to church, perhaps to the wineshop later. They saw me and stopped to cheer, so I stood up, and my patron saint and I exchanged salutations. Then I leaned down and shook as many of their black paws as I could reach, and poured a drop or two into each of the big mouths, though it was like trying to sprinkle a field.

My four sons came at twelve o’clock to offer me the compliments of the season, for no matter on what terms one lives for the rest of the year, a father’s name-day is sacred; the whole family life revolves around it as on a pivot; it is a bond which draws us all together, and I attach a great deal of importance to it. I don’t know that the four enjoyed themselves much when they were all there together, for in fact I am the only real tie between them, as they have but little love for each other.