CHAPTER I

Auguste Lafarge--Bird-snaring on a large scale--A wonderful catch--An epigram--I wish to write French verses--My method of translating Virgil and Tacitus--Montagnon--My political opinions.

It would seem as though in response to this outburst of my spirit towards God He rewarded my mother by giving her the only thing she had ever been able to obtain in return for her twelve years of petitioning.

To provide for this great event we had moved to the rue de Lormet, and had taken up our abode in the place de la Fontaine, in a house belonging to a coppersmith called Lafarge, who had let us the whole of his first floor, and engaged besides to let us his shop if we needed it.

The license to keep a tobacco-shop having been obtained, he kept his promise, and we established ourselves on the ground floor, facing the street, in a large room furnished with two counters: one for the retail of tobacco and the other for the sale of salt.

Our future prospects all centred in this twofold trade, which we owed to the protection of M. Collard.

Some time after we were installed, the son of the coppersmith came to see his father. He was a fine, light-complexioned young fellow, who held a post as head clerk in Paris; he was looking out for a lawyer's practice, but wanted the capital wherewith to purchase one. He had returned to his family with all the attractions of the capital about him; a box-coat with thirty-six bands to it in the latest fashion, a watch-chain with massive trinkets, tight-fitting trousers, and boots _à la hussarde._ He hoped to dazzle a wealthy heiress;--no difficult task, perhaps, to one accustomed to charm the fair ones of Paris.

Poor Auguste Lafarge was at that period a fascinating youth, with fair, pink complexion as I have said; a complexion which, under the disguise of health, hid the germs of consumption, the disease he later fell a victim to. Moreover, he had intellectual tastes, having been thrown into the literary atmosphere of the time, and he numbered Désaugiers, Béranger, and Armand Gouffé among his friends; he composed dainty songs, and, as though born wealthy, he knew how to draw a gold piece out of his pocket and fling it down carelessly in payment for the smallest article he bought.

Such a man of fashion could not, of course, sleep at the back of his father's shop; so they borrowed one of our rooms, which we willingly gave up to him, and Auguste was established in our quarters.

Greedy after novelty, I was, of course, anxious to cultivate so personable a model, and I made advances to Auguste, whom, moreover, my mother held up to me as a pattern. Auguste accepted my overtures, and offered, what he thought might please me most, to take me on a grand bird-catching expedition.

I agreed. I had hitherto recognised Auguste's superiority in everything, but I quite hoped to bear away the palm in the matter of bird-catching.

I was wrong: we country people perform our bird-catching like artists; Auguste did his as a lord of the manor.

He sent for Boudoux, and asked him which were the best bird-snaring pools in the forest?

"Those near the Compiègne and Vivières roads," promptly answered Boudoux.

"How many other pools are there within, say, a league of this neighbourhood?"

"Seven or eight."

"So then, if we block all the other pools three or four days beforehand, the birds will be obliged to go to the two pools on the Vivières and Compiègne roads?"

"Yes, poor little things, unless it rains; in which case, instead of leaving their haunts, they will, as you know, drink out of the hollows of the leaves."

"Do you think it will rain, Boudoux?"

Boudoux shook his head.

"My aunt's barometer is at set fair, M. Auguste; it will not rain till the moon changes."

"Very well! Boudoux, take these ten francs, and block all the pools round about; on Saturday evening Dumas and I will come and draw the two pools near the Compiègne and Vivières roads. We ought to have a first-class hut near one or other of these two pools, to spend the night in."

"Very good, M. Auguste," said Boudoux, "I will attend to it."

"I want, besides, two thousand lime-twigs to-night, so as to get them smeared beforehand."

"You shall have them, M. Auguste."

"All right," said Lafarge, with the gestures of an emperor.

This was my first lesson in extravagance; the readers of _Monte-Cristo_ can judge if it was lost on me!

On the Saturday night, all was ready, thanks to the ten francs Boudoux had received. When the robin's last song was ended we spread the two pools with snares. Then we wrapped ourselves up, Auguste in his greatcoat, I in my blanket, on a bed of ferns prepared by Boudoux, and we tried to sleep.

I say we tried to sleep, but, although the air around us was balmy, the forest quiet, the moonlight serene, the expectation of pleasure keeps one awake almost as much as pleasure itself. It is very rarely I sleep the night before a hunting expedition, and only when life is more seriously preoccupied do these pleasant attacks of insomnia cease.

It was then very rarely that I slept on fine nights, when excited by anticipation of a bird-snaring, or shooting, or hunting excursion. Those lonely vigils were not waste time, for I love solitude and silence and vastness, and I owe this love to those nights spent in the forest, at the foot of a tree, watching the stars through the canopy of leaves stretched between me and the sky, and listening to all the mysterious, incomprehensible sounds which are awake in the bosom of the wood while Nature sleeps.

Lafarge slept hardly more than I did. What was he dreaming of, I wonder? Probably of the face of a pretty grisette he had deserted in a Parisian garret; or, simpler explanation still, of that overweening ambition of his to become a solicitor, though only the son of a coppersmith.

At three o'clock in the morning the song of a robin, as it hopped among the bushes, announced to us that day had come, as it had announced night to us; next a blackbird fluted, then the tomtits and jays followed suit.

Each bird seemed to have his own special hour for waking and praising God. I never recollect to have taken part in or seen such a haul of birds as we took that day. We numbered jays, blackbirds, and thrushes by the dozen; redbreasts, tomtits, linnets, and warblers by the score; and we returned to the town bent down under the weight of our spoils.

Three days after, Auguste Lafarge returned to Paris. His attractions had failed; he had come to Villers-Cotterets to ask Mademoiselle Picot to marry him, and had been rejected.

The night he spent with me he was not dreaming of ambition, or of love, but of revenge: he was concocting an epigram, copies of which he gave to me and to twenty other persons when he left.

It ran as follows:--

"La fière Éléonor compte avec complaisance Les nombreux soupirants qui briguèrent sa main, Et que sa noble indifférence Paya toujours d'un froid dédain. Pourtant, à ces discours que votre esprit résiste; S'il en fut un ou deux tenté par ses ducats, Un volume in quarto contiendrait il la liste De tous ceux qui n'en voudraient pas?"

I cannot say whether the epigram is good or bad; I will leave the question to be decided by the Academy, which is learned in such matters, since it accepted M. de Sainte-Aulaire because of a quatrain. But I know very well that all the people I had seen the previous day laughing at the Lafarge family, on the morrow laughed at the Picot family.

Since the death of Demoustier there had not been an unpublished verse circulated in our little town; so Auguste's eight lines made a great sensation for eight days after.

I confess that the stir made over an absent man dazzled me. I was fired with ambition to have the glory attached to me of being talked of when away, and at the Abbé Grégoire's first lesson I begged him to teach me to make French verses, instead of insisting so tiresomely on my making Latin ones.

These lines of Auguste Lafarge were the first rays of light thrown upon my life; he kindled in me ambitions vague and nebulous until then; things which had been dreams rather than definite ideas, aspirations rather than determinations.

And it will be seen that Auguste Lafarge's influence on me was continued by Adolphe de Leuven.

I asked Abbé Grégoire to teach me to make French verses, for he was the official poet of the countryside.

I have said that since the days of Demoustier not an unpublished poem had tickled the wits of my fellow townspeople; but I am mistaken; for at every festival, at all christenings or baptisms of any importance, the Abbé Grégoire was called upon in his capacity as poet.

I have never seen more worthy verses than his were; therefore, when I made this request, which would have been tolerably presumptuous made to Hugo or Lamartine, "Teach me to make French verses," the Abbé Grégoire was not in the least taken aback, but answered simply--

"I shall be delighted; but you will be tired of it, as you are of everything else, at the end of a week."

He gave me some _boûts-rimés_ to finish, and I strove hard to compose French poetry. But the abbé was right; and at the end of a week I had had enough of it.

All my other lessons continued as usual. The Abbé Grégoire came at eleven o'clock every day to give me two hours' lessons, while the rest of the day I had pretty much to myself; and this is what happened.

My professor, to save himself trouble, had a Virgil and a Tacitus, with the translation side by side with the original. These two volumes he left behind him at our house each day, to save carrying them backwards and forwards, and he locked them up in a little cabinet, carefully taking the key away, knowing what a great temptation they would be to an idle boy like me.

Unluckily, I made the discovery that the box had hinges on the outside. With the help of a screw-driver I half opened the hinges, and extracted whatever I wanted through this half-open space, sometimes the singer of Æneas, at others the historian of the Cæsars; and, thanks to the help of the French translation, I produced versions which astonished even the professor.

As for my mother, she was charmed.

"Look at that child," she would say to all callers; "he shuts himself up, and in an hour the whole of his home lessons for the day are done."

I did indeed shut myself up, and with the utmost precautions. But, unfortunately, things did not prosper so well on composition days as on those of translation.

The exercises were dictated by the abbé, but, alas! there was no translation to their Latin locked away in any sort of cabinet; they had to be done by the help of a dictionary, and the result was that they were full of mistakes, which counterbalanced, in the mind of my teacher, the good effect of my translations, and eternally puzzled the poor man with the question as to how "The child could be so good in translation and so weak in composition." He died without finding the solution to it.

So it came about that on composition days the work took me four hours instead of two: but, even then, the two or four hours' work left me ten or twelve hours free each day. It will be seen that I had plenty of time at my own disposal.

I spent the greater part of my time at a gunsmith's who lived opposite us.

He was called Montagnon. He had a son who took lessons with me from Abbé Grégoire, and who died of nervous exhaustion. They let me see him when he was laid out, and the sight completed the cure begun by M. Tissot.

I did not give up frequenting the father's shop after the death of his son, my companion; for the firearms there were what I loved above all else.

Amongst these firearms I found the single-barrelled gun which I had taken down on the day after my father's death, with which to kill God. I was to have that gun _when I was big_;--now, this definition _when I was big_ was utterly vague, and tormented me greatly. I thought I was by now quite big enough, for I was growing taller than the gun.

The consequence of my assiduous attendance at Montagnon's shop was that I became more learned in my knowledge of a gunsmith's trade than in translation; and I could take to pieces and put together again as complicated a mechanism as the breeching of a gun as well, and almost as ingeniously, as the cleverest gunsmith.

Old Montagnon would tell me that it was my vocation, and offered to take me free of premium as an apprentice; but he was mistaken, my enthusiasm did not go to that length.

The rest of my time was spent in making weapons with Mounier, or in going bird-snaring, or decoying, with my two best friends Saulnier and Arpin.

In these leisure times it was very rarely that a day passed without my receiving a dressing down on account of my political opinions!

Everybody had an opinion about the end of 1814 and the beginning of 1815, and generally each opinion was very strongly held; only, these opinions were not divided into as many shades as the colours in a rainbow, as nowadays, but were divided into two sharply defined colours--you were either a Royalist or a Bonapartist. The Republican party had passed away and Liberals had not yet appeared; there were no such parties as Saint Simonism, Fourierism, Democracy, Socialism, Cabétism.

I do not assert that my mother and I were Bonapartists, but we had been labelled such by other people.

We Bonapartists! It was a strange idea. Bonaparte had disgraced, exiled, and ruined us; Napoleon had forgotten, disowned, and left us to starve; and they dubbed us Bonapartists!

The feelings which made me resent this appellation, on behalf of my mother and myself, were so hearty, that whenever any children called me a Bonapartist as we met in the streets, I would throw off my cap and my jacket and, considering myself insulted, instantly demand reparation.

If the offender were of a size to offer it me, satisfaction was given, sometimes too satisfactorily; but it did not matter, for if that happened I began again the next day.

The persistency with which people called us Bonapartists made my mother very uneasy on two accounts: first, because it earned me so many blows; I had never come home so often with a bleeding nose or black eye as since the Restoration; and, secondly, because she detected, underlying this accusation, a feeling of hatred, or rather of jealousy, which would cause her to lose her tobacco-shop license: they would certainly not fail to take it away from her if the charge of Bonapartism were believed.