CHAPTER V

My horror of great heights--The Abbé Conseil--My opening at the Seminary--My mother, much pressed, decides to enter me there--The horn inkstand--Cécile at the grocer's--My flight.

But I was now ten years old, and it was time to take my mental education seriously in hand. My physical training was proceeding fast enough. I could throw stones like David, I could draw a bow like a Balearic archer, I could ride like a Numidian; but I could not climb trees or steeples.

I have travelled much, and, whether in the Alps or in Sicily, in Calabria, or in Spain or in Africa, I have gone over difficult enough places; but I only crossed them because I was obliged to; and no one but myself will ever now know what I endured in the process. My terror is purely nervous, and therefore incurable; it is so great that, if I were given the choice, I would rather fight a duel than climb to the top of the column in the place Vendôme.

I went up to the top of the towers of Nôtre Dame once with Hugo, and I do not like to think what it cost me in perspirations and cold shivers.

But we must return to the question of my mental training, for it was high time it was begun in earnest. They had tried to get me entered free at all the colleges endowed for the education of sons of superior officers. But, in spite of the most urgent representations, they could neither obtain for me admission to the Prytanée nor a bursary in any Imperial lycée.

Had I been of sufficient age to be of any importance at that time I should have flattered myself that Bonaparte's hatred for my father was being continued towards me.

None of the applications on my behalf, then, had been successful, when one of my cousins died, of whom I have already spoken,--the Abbé Conseil.

He had been tutor to the royal pages, he had received all sorts of benefices from Louis XV. and Louis XVI., and he was accordingly wealthy. He owned a charming house in the village of Largny, within a league of Villers-Cotterets, and a most picturesque garden, both in the centre of a valley; I have not referred to all this before because our cousin Conseil showed us but scant hospitality.

He also had a house at Villers-Cotterets--number 3 or 5, I think, in the rue de Lormet, just opposite the house where Demoustier died.

I paid two visits a year to this cousin Conseil, one on New Year's Day, the other on his birthday. He would give me a kiss on one cheek and a slap on the other, and there ended his generosity.

Once he gave me half a crown. But my mother and I never went again, and he died the same year. He left an income of something like 12,000 livres behind him, to a certain Miss Ryan, before mentioned.

My mother received a legacy of 1500 francs, and to one of his relatives he bequeathed a bursary at the Seminary of Soissons.

My destiny was clear, and Cécile's prophecy was to be realised: I was to be the future Seminarist.

But the question remained how to get me there,--not an easy matter. I had an unreasoning aversion to priests, and Cécile's prediction had sown in my heart the seeds of revolt against its coming true.

My mother's mind was not made up. She, poor woman, was incapable of insisting on anything that she saw was the least distasteful to me; but she desired to give me as good an education as possible. The thought of making a priest of me had, however, never entered her head. I believe, indeed, if she had thought such a thing were likely to come of it she would have been the first to oppose the plan, which she now put before me in the most glowing colours.

Two or three months passed, I resisting and my mother begging and praying me to go.

Finally, one fine day when she had used every inducement she could think of to make me go, promising solemnly, on her word of honour, that I should always be free to come home if I did not like the rules of the Seminary, I let fall the fatal _yes_, and I consented to all her wishes.

There was a week granted me to make my preparations for departure. It was a great separation, and it cost my mother as much as it did me; but she tried to hide her tears, till I unjustly imagined she was quite pleased to get rid of me.

The day before that on which I was to travel in the coach which plied twice a week between Villers-Cotterets and Soissons, as I was collecting all my little wants for my school life, I discovered I hadn't an inkstand. I told my mother of this, and she, recognising the justice of my request, asked me what sort I would like.

I had luxurious ideas concerning that inkstand. I wished a horn inkstand with a place for pens. But, as my mother did not clearly understand my explanations, she gave me twelve sous, and told me to go and buy the inkstand myself.

Please pay great attention to this little matter; for, puerile though it may seem, it changed the whole course of my life.

I hurried off to a grocer named Devaux. I took good care not to go to Lebègue's: the reader knows why.

The grocer had not the kind of inkpot I wanted; but he promised to get me one by evening.

When evening came, I returned, and he had the inkpot ready for me; but as luck would have it I found my cousin Cécile in the shop.

She was very glad to see me, she took the opportunity to wish me all possible success in the career I had chosen and she promised that, as soon as I was ordained, she would ask me to become her spiritual director.

I cannot say whether it was that her sarcasm galled me past bearing, or whether the responsibility of the suggested office seemed too heavy, but I flung the inkpot in the grocer's face. I pocketed my twelve sous, and I rushed out of the shop crying--"Very well; I don't care. I will not go to the Seminary!"

Like Cæsar I had crossed my Rubicon: but the next step was to try and escape my mother's urgent entreaties, which I might not perhaps have been able to withstand.

I ventured on my first wilful act. I bought a loaf and a sausage with my twelve sous, food to last me two or three days, in fact, and then I went to find Boudoux.

I must explain who he was.

Boudoux was a character. Had not the disease termed _bulimia_ already received its name at that epoch it would certainly have been christened after him.

I have never seen such a voracious eater as was Boudoux.

One day he came to our house, and a calf had just been killed; he gazed at it with longing eyes, and my father said to him--

"Do you want to eat the whole of it? You can have it."

"Oh! general, you are joking!" was Boudoux's reply.

"Upon my word I am not."

"Indeed I should love it, general."

They put the whole calf in the oven, and when it was cooked Boudoux ate it all.

When he had picked the last bone, my father complimented him on his performance.

"I hope your hunger is satisfied now, Boudoux?" he said.

"Put the mother on the spit, general," replied Boudoux, "and you will see."

My father drew back, for he was fond of his cow, and Boudoux was likely to leave nothing of her but her horns.

I could cite other instances than this; but they would pale before the one I have just given.

One day at the opening of the hunting season M. Danré, of Vouty, had two dozen chickens on the spit. Boudoux looked at them as he had looked at my father's veal; and M. Danré was unwise enough to make a proposal to him similar to the one which had been made at our house.

Boudoux made twenty-four mouthfuls of the twenty-four chickens.

Later (I must not stop much longer over Boudoux's appetite), after the Restoration, when the prince de Condé came to hunt at Villers-Cotterets, he brought a pack of a hundred and twenty hounds.

Boudoux obtained the post of kennelman to the huntsmen, and it was therefore his business to distribute food to the princely Roquadors and Barbaros.

It was soon discovered that although the purchase of bread and meat was the same as always, the poor beasts grew thin and languid and unsteady on their legs.

Suspicions were aroused, and Boudoux was watched.

It was found out that he himself had eaten the portions of forty dogs--one-third, that was, of the whole food supply.

The prince ordered that Boudoux's portion of food should be served separately to him each day, and that this portion should be as much as for forty dogs.

So much, then, for Boudoux's appetite. We will next speak of his physical attainments, and lastly of his moral qualities.

Physically, Boudoux seemed as though he were of the refuse of creation; Quasimodo would have appeared almost beautiful beside him. Boudoux's face was not merely pitted, it was scarred, furrowed and almost eaten away by smallpox; his eyes, drawn out of their sockets by the hollowness of his eyelids, seemed to hang over his cheeks, watery and bloodshot; his nose was depressed instead of being raised, and flattened down on his upper lip; from his lips flowed a constant trickle of saliva blackened by the quids of tobacco he chewed; the upper lip curved like a serpent's, almost round to his ears, and gave his mouth the appearance of being able to accommodate a whole leg of mutton at once; the picture was completed by hair that Polyphemus himself might have envied; his beard was scanty, red and coarse, and only grew out of the rare spaces not covered with pox marks.

His head was supported by a body five feet nine inches in height, but that height was never realised on account of a defect in one leg, which doubled and yielded under him to such an extent; with every step he took, that the lower part of his leg and the top of his thigh looked like the two pointers of a compass opened triangle-fashion.

For all that, Boudoux had almost superhuman strength. During a house-move he was worth his weight in gold: he would carry trunks, sideboards, bedsteads, tables, on his head, and, as his limping stride measured over a yard and a half at each step he took, he could move the entire furniture of one house to another in a trice.

Furthermore, Boudoux, who could have taken up a horse by its hind hoofs and torn off its shoes like Alcidamas; or, like Samson, have taken the gates of Gaza from their hinges and carried them on his back; or like Milo of Crotona, have gone round the circus with an ox on his shoulders, and then felled it and eaten it; Boudoux, I say, with the strength of an elephant, was as gentle as a lamb.

And now as to his character.

Although ugly, repulsive, hideous to look at, everybody liked Boudoux. He lodged with his aunt, Mademoiselle Chapuis, the postmistress, but he had his meals everywhere. Three times a day he went the round of the town and, like the begging Friars of the ancient monasteries, he collected enough to feed a convent; only, as he had no monks to feed, he ate the whole supply himself.

It was not enough to satisfy him, but it just kept him going.

Boudoux had a calling, or rather two callings, for he worked _à la marette_ and _à la pipée._

We must explain to Parisians; who will probably not know what are the two trades we have referred to under the names of _marette_ and _pipée._ We will take _marette_ first.

There are very few forests, woods, or covers that do not contain some pools of water, commonly called _mares_; for instance, the _mare_ d'Auteuil, which has been noted as long as I can remember. At these pools in the woods, forests, and covers, birds are accustomed to drink at certain times of day. Here the bird-catcher drives small birch twigs coated with bird-lime into the soft, muddy soil along the edges of the pools, and when the birds come to drink they are caught on these limed twigs.

This is called snaring a _mare_, and in the clever setting of these traps consists the whole success and art of the hunter.

And as, to explain everything fully, there are more small _mares_ than large ones, and as the smaller _mares_ are better than the large, because they need less bird-lime, and consequently are less expensive, these small _mares_ are called "_marelles_," and in the language of the snarers of small birds, the phrase to work _à la marette_ indicates the nature of their calling.

_La pipée_ is worked in the same way, but with differences of detail. A tree high enough to out-top the rest of the coppice is chosen; it is stripped of its smaller branches, and these are replaced by lime-twigs fitted into notches made by a bill-hook; the bird-catchers then take their place inside a hut made of foliage constructed round the trunk of the tree, and they attract all the birds in the district by three methods.

The first is to attach an owl to the centre of the tree.

The owl, with his buff plumage and great round eyes, plays in the forest the part that Jean Jacques Rousseau played in the streets of Paris when he went forth dressed as an Armenian.

All the street arabs ran after the Genevan philosopher.

All the birds chase the owl.

But a fate awaits these poor creatures that did not overtake the hooligans: when they fly against the tree, in attacking the owl which is fastened to the tree, each bird that settles on a lime-twig is lost; he falls from bough to bough, and passes from freedom to a cage, lucky if he does not go from his cage to the spit.

The second method of attraction is to take a jay.

Out of a hare one can only make jugged hare, but in the case of a jay something else can be constructed.

It must, however, be a living jay, that is a condition _sine quâ non._

The jay has a shocking reputation in the bird world.

It is accused by la Fontaine of stealing peacock's feathers; and, like all reputations made by man, this one, perhaps, is least deserved; another accusation brought against it--and a far more serious charge in the eyes of the birds--is that it eats the eggs of its smaller and weaker brethren. So the hatred in which birds hold this glutton is in proportion to the number of eggs they lay; the titmouse, for instance, which sometimes lays as many as twenty to twenty-five tiny eggs, is the most relentless against this robber; next come _fourgons_, which lay fifteen; chaffinches, which lay five or six; and last, redbreasts and warblers, which lay three or four. So they take a live jay, stretch out his wings and pull the feathers from it.

It is not a very humane process, but it is very efficacious.

The cry of the jay is a frightful noise: as each feather is pulled out, the jay utters that cry, and at each cry flocks of chaffinches, titmice, _fourgons_, warblers, and robins come flying down to enjoy their enemy's discomfort; for they are not deceived, they recognise his cry as one of pain.

But this time they are punished for their want of forgiveness towards their enemy, and the lime-twigs execute justice on their hard hearts.

The success of the third means depends entirely on the degree of skill with which the bird-catcher has been naturally endowed, in producing sounds to imitate the songs of birds, by the aid of blades of couch-grass or a piece of glossy silk. The musician who can imitate birds' notes requires no jay or owl to help him; he retires into his hut, counterfeits cries of distress of the different birds he wants to catch, and all the birds of the same species that are in the district flock to the call.

I must say, however, that I have met few _pipurs_ (and I have known a great number) who have reached such a pitch of perfection.

But Boudoux, who spoke no dead language, and could only talk his own among living ones, and that very imperfectly, took, in the matter of birds, the first rank as a philologist, and not merely in the forest of Villers-Cotterets, but, I dare venture to assert, in any forest of the world.

There was not an ornithological language or jargon or patois that he could not talk, from the language of the crow to that of the wren.

He held those of his confrères in contempt who made use of grass and silk, for he could imitate the cry of an owl so perfectly that I have seen one come and perch on his hat as on the helmet of Minerva.

I went to find Boudoux. I unburdened my heart to him, and I asked him to hide me for two or three days in one of his huts.

Of course he granted my request.

His only condition was that, as it was autumn, I ought to take a blanket with me, as the nights were not so warm as they had been.

I returned home, slipped into my room, took a blanket off my bed, and wrote on a bit of paper:--

"Do not be anxious about me, mother dear; I have run away, because I do not want to be a priest."

Then I rejoined Boudoux, who had collected his evening food and was waiting for me at the entrance to the park.

Boudoux had two snaring pools, one on the road to Vivières, and the other on the road to Compiègne. Near the pool on the road to Compiègne he had a hut, and it was in this hut that I asked shelter from the Seminary of Soissons.

I spent three days and three nights in the forest. At night, I rolled myself in my blanket, and I must own that I slept without any feeling of remorse; by day I wandered from one _mare_ to another, collecting the snared birds. We took an incalculable number of birds during those three days; by the third day, the two _mares_ were completely _ruined_ until the next breeding season. I emphasise the word _ruined_, because that is the technical term for it.

Those three days increased my antipathy towards the Seminary, but at the same time it gave me a keen taste for _la marette._

At the end of these three days I returned, but I did not dare to go straight to the house. I went to find my good friend Madame Darcourt, and I begged her to announce to my mother the return of her prodigal son, and to smooth the way for my re-entry under the maternal roof.

Alas! the more prodigal the children, the warmer their reception! When the original prodigal son returned home to his father after three years' absence, they killed a calf; if he had not returned until after an absence of six years, they would have killed an ox.

My mother hugged me to her and called me a bad boy. She promised me that there should be no more talk between us of my going to the Seminary, delighted to think that I should not leave her. She reserved all her wrath for Boudoux, and, the first time she saw him, poor as we were, she gave him five francs.

Just think what a trivial circumstance decided the course of my life. If the grocer had had the inkstand I wanted that morning, I should not have returned to his shop in the evening; I should not have met Cécile there; she would not have made that joke which exasperated me; I should not have placed myself under Boudoux's care; and the next day I should have gone to Soissons and entered the Seminary. When at the Seminary my latent inclinations for a religious life would have developed, and I might have become a great preacher instead of what I am--namely, a poor poet. I wonder whether that would have been better or worse?

What God does is well done. This was not the only danger I escaped; we shall see later how I nearly became something much worse than a Seminarist or a priest.

We shall see that I just missed being a tax-gatherer!