CHAPTER IV

The dog lantern-bearer--Demoustier's epitaph--My first fencing-master--"The king drinks"--The fourth tenor of my life--The tub of honey.

While all these things that we have related were happening, my mother experienced two fresh sorrows, quite as great as her first: she lost both her father and her mother.

I can scarcely recall my grandmother Labouret; neither do I remember any particulars relative to her life or her death. She was a worthy soul, who lived and died blamelessly.

But I remember my grandfather quite distinctly, with a pipe in his mouth and his solemn walk, which he had acquired when he was _maître d'hôtel._ He died of a liver complaint, in 1808.

He was a great domino-player, and was renowned for his very great skill at that game. Every evening he went to play in a café where a good portion of my infancy was spent. This café was kept, I remember, by two people of opposite sex, who were both devoted to me; one was Mademoiselle Wafflart and the other M. Camberlin.

As my grandfather spent all his evenings there I often joined him. I used to watch billiards being played, a game I was passionately attracted to, and one for which I possessed the greatest possible aptitude. Unluckily, billiards, no matter whether played by day or by night, was quite beyond my means; so I was compelled to look on at the play of others and to count the points;--but nothing further.

Every night at ten o'clock a scratch was heard at the door; it was my grandfather's dog come to fetch him home,--her jaws empty on moonlit nights, but filled by a stick bearing a lantern at each end when there was no moon. Her name was _Charmante_, and she was indeed charmingly intelligent. For eight or ten years, until her death, she performed this trick, and she was never known to have scratched at the door either ten minutes too soon or ten minutes too late, or to have taken the longest way instead of the shortest, or to have broken a single lantern.

One day my grandfather complained of violent pains in his side, took to his room and then to his bed. Finally, one evening, they sent me away from the house as they had done when my father died. They took me to the house of one of our neighbours, named Lepage, who was a glazier. There I spent the night, and on the morrow my grandfather died.

My mother inherited the famous thirty acres of land I have already spoken of, and the house for which we paid the life-annuity. But it was the obligation to pay the annuity, that she inherited really, and not the house.

Had my mother only given up all hope of obtaining a pension, and of being paid the arrears of 28,500 francs due to my father, she would have sold the thirty acres of ground for the 30,000 or 35,000 francs which it was worth, she would have waived her rights to M. Harlay's house for 5000 or 6000 francs, and, with these 40,000 francs she would have had 2000 livres income, on which with care we could have lived perfectly well.

On the contrary, however, she began borrowing on the land by mortgaging it, ever hoping to repay herself by the unlucky arrears.

It was quite out of the question to live out of the revenue from the land; it scarcely paid two per cent.

I do not know whether we had moved before or after my grandfather's death: I think, however, it must have been before.

We lived then in the rue de Lormet, quite close to the house where I was born.

Shortly after this time we lost in this house the cousin whom I used to call Mamma Zine.

So death had fallen heavily on our family circle; in four years four relatives had gone to eternity, one after the other, and were laid in the little cemetery of which I have already spoken.

But, with the exception of my father's, none of the other deaths made any lasting impression on my mind. They only meant a daily walk to the cemetery, and one more mound added to the rest, which my mother called her garden; a fresh cypress was planted near the old cypresses; new roses blossomed by the old rose; my mother shed more tears; and that was all.

Our graves were near that of Demoustier; and his epitaph was the first memorial inscription I had deciphered; it had been composed by Legouvé, and ran thus:--

"Beneath this stone rests, in the sleep of the just,

"CHARLES-ALBERT DEMOUSTIER,

"Associated Member of the National Institute, who was born at Villers-Cotterets, March 31st 1760, and whose peaceful spirit entered upon its immortal rest, on the 11th Ventôse, year IX of the Republic.

(2 March 1801)

"En ces mots l'amitié consacra son histoire; Il montra les talents, aux vertus réunis; Son esprit lui donna la gloire, Et sa belle âme des amis.

"Rest in peace, beloved one!"

And indeed if any soul should rest in peace it ought indeed to be that of the good and religious-minded Demoustier, whose memory was venerated by all Villers-Cotterets. My mother often used to tell me that a gentler, more sympathetic, more delightful man never breathed. He died at the same age as my father--forty-one--and faced his end with the gentle and pious resignation of all good souls. The day before his death, my mother sat beside his bedside and, though hopeless herself, she tried to instil hope into him. He smiled sweetly at her, and looked out upon a gleam of beautiful spring sunshine, the sunshine that comes more like nature's first smile than the sun of summer.

Demoustier laid his hand on hers and, looking at her, he said:--

"Dear Madame Dumas, we must not delude ourselves: I can no longer take broth or milk or water, so I must die."

And he died next day with a smile upon his lips.

Alas! it was my mother's ambition to erect just such a stone as was put over Demoustier's resting-place; but she could not afford to consecrate the dead at the cost of the living.

I fancy I must have acquired my partiality for cemeteries, that is to say village cemeteries, from my frequent walks with my mother to the Villers-Cotterets cemetery: nothing impresses me so much even now--their churches, their tall weeping willows, their broken-off columns, and their crosses painted black, with a simple white inscription stating the name and the age of the deceased.

Alas! if I were now to return to our cemetery how many graves of friends I should find there, besides my mother's! Nearly all whom I knew in my childhood lie there, and, with Christ in the early days of Christian Rome, I could exclaim: "I have more friends under the earth than on it."

Let those who take the trouble of studying small details study the different localties where my childhood was passed: les Fossés, Antilly, the confined room at the hôtel de _l'Epée_, the ruined castle of Villers-Cotterets, the house and the town garden of M. Deviolaine, the cloister at Saint-Remy, the château of Villers-Hellon, the grand park of François I., of Henri II. and of Henri IV., and the little cemetery of Pieux,--the name of the place where the Villers-Cotterets cemetery was situated,--and they may find the origins of many qualities in my books, of many traits in my character.

To all these my early impressions I owe my deep respect for all holy things, my deep faith in Providence and my great love of God. Never, throughout my long life, have I had one moment of despair, one minute of doubt, not even in the darkest hours of life; I dare not say I am certain of the immortality of my soul, but I can go as far as to say I hope in it. I believe that death is a forgetting of the past without being a renunciation of the future. If science succeeds in endowing spirits with memory it will have solved the great mystery, of which God has hitherto kept the key; souls will then remember, and immortality be laid bare to us.

But to conclude. In the midst of these walks and games and early schooling, I was growing up, I could play the _Marche des Samnites_ and the Overture to _Lodoïska_, upon my violin, and Hiraux, with his black cap pulled down over his ears, was confessing to my mother that he was too honest to steal from her any longer the ten francs per month which she gave him to make a musician of me.

I was very ready to give up these lessons, and I should have done so long before, had my attraction for Hiraux not surmounted my dislike of the solfeggio. I renounced them, too, the more eagerly as I had now begun taking lessons far more seductive to my mind--namely, lessons in fencing.

The Republic had turned the fine castle and ancient pleasure-house of the dukes of Orléans into barracks, and the Empire into a workhouse. Here I had discovered an old fencing master. He had been injured once when giving a lesson without a mask: the foil of one of his pupils had pierced his mouth and destroyed his uvula. This accident, by making him almost dumb, or rather by reducing him to an almost unintelligible gibberer, had made teaching almost an impossibility--this accident, I say, together with a great love for the bottle, had brought our old St. Georges to the royal dwelling-place of François I., then an auxiliary to the Workhouse of the Seine.

This man was called old Mounier, and, though I must ask pardon of my later master Grisier, I beg to state I received my first lessons in fencing from Mounier when I was ten years old.

For I was about ten years old when I began to show such disinclination towards music and such intense enthusiasm for physical exercises.

While all this was going on, and while I was dreaming of nothing but swords and sabres, pistols and guns, I remained very cowardly on one single point. Like nature, I abhorred a vacuum. So soon as I felt myself suspended a certain distance above the earth, like Antæus, my head began to whirl, and I lost all my wits. I dared not even go down steps if they were somewhat steep, and I had never ventured to climb trees after birds' nests with my young playfellows.

This cowardliness brought all kinds of tricks down upon me from my cousins Deviolaine, their brother Félix and my oldest sister. They delighted to lead me up into hay-lofts, under the pretext of playing hide-and-seek, or some other game: then, when the door was shut, the only way to descend was by a ladder. I used to beg and implore the other children, to their great amusement, to open the door for me; then, when they took no notice of my entreaties, I would at last make up my mind to come down by the ladder, and my descent was most clumsily performed before the eyes of my jeering play-fellows.

I was very nearly killed one day by stopping below while the other children had gone aloft. They had all climbed up a rick of straw at the foot of which I was sitting. My cousin Cécile was a real tomboy in her ways, and seemed to think, with the Princess Palatine, that she could change her sex if she went on leaping and jumping. She had reached the top first, and was bending over to look down at and tease me, when her foot slipped, and she rolled down the steep side of the rick alighting astride on my shoulders, nearly breaking my neck.

I displayed one proof of coolness in great danger which reinstated me in my young friends' good opinion. It was Twelfth-Day, and we had been dining with M. Deviolaine. The Twelfth-Day Bean, constituting me King of the Day, had fallen to my share, so after dinner I hastened to transfer the seat of my empire to the garden. While thrusting a paper-boat out into the pond in the middle of the lawn, I apparently leant a little too far over; I lost my balance, and head foremost I went into the icy cold water, which was four feet deep, with a tremendous plunge, to the great alarm of the spectators, who threw up their arms and began shouting at the top of their voices, "Help, help, Dumas is drowning!" ... Luckily, I did not lose my head, I caught hold of the plants which hung over the edge of the pool, and, thanks to that support, I reappeared on the surface of the water, streaming like the river Scamander. Then it only needed Victor's hand to haul me back to my own element on mother-earth.

This done, I turned towards the terrified company with a judicial and serious air, and I said to them:--

"Idiots, you should not have said, 'Dumas is drowning,' you should have said, 'The king drinks!'"

This charmed everybody; and, as I was then only seven years of age, and it was my first clever saying, I crave the indulgence of the public for mentioning it.

It did not, however, prevent my cousin Cécile from declaring, when she was performing some of her common tomboy tricks, that I neither was nor ever would be fit to be anything but a Seminarist.

We shall soon see how very nearly her prediction came to being fulfilled.

I believe I had five great frights in my life, and, happily, all came in my early childhood. I have mentioned the first three; the Amiens snake, the two adders at Saint Remy and Madame de Genlis.

We will now proceed to the fourth.

I was playing at marbles at the door of a grocer called Lebègue, who was scraping and spreading out chocolate on a marble slab with a long, flexible knife that I believe they call a spatula. I began a dispute with my companion, and we fell to pummelling one another. Please take note that when it was a question of fists I was never a coward. He was stronger than I, he pushed me roughly back and I fell over backwards into a tub of honey.

I at once saw the consequences of my accident, I uttered a cry which made the grocer look up, and he soon saw what had happened, namely, that, as I have said, I was seated in a tub of honey. I sprang up as though springs were attached to my legs, in spite of the resistance of the substance to which I was glued: and I fled incontinently.

My prudent and rapid flight was due to a view of the grocer dashing out knife in hand at the same time.

I naturally ran in the direction of my home, but it was in the centre of the rue de Lormet, and a good way off the scene of the accident. I ran with all my might, but the grocer's legs were double the length of mine; I was driven by terror, but he was moved by greed. I turned to look behind me as I ran, and saw that awful tradesman, with fiery eyes and open lips and frowning brow, knife in hand, gaining upon me every minute. At last, weltering with heat, panting, speechless, and on the point of a collapse, I flung myself on the pavement ten paces from our door, convinced that it was all over with me, and that Lebègue was pursuing me for no other purpose than to cut my throat.

Nothing of the kind happened. After a struggle, in which I resisted him tooth and nail, he laid me face down on his knees, and scraped the seat of my trousers with his spatula, set me on my feet, and returned perfectly content to his shop.

But in spite of this forbearance on the part of M. Lebègue it was more than a year before I ventured to pass by on the same side of the street as his grocer's shop.