Part 8

He puffed, waved a good-day to Paillot with his hand, bowed with some deference to M. de Terremondre, and said:

“I am tired. … Well! Paillot, were you pleased with the show yesterday? What did Madame Paillot think of the play and the actors?”

The bookseller did not commit himself. He considered that it is wise for a tradesman to express no opinions in his shop. Besides, he went to the theatre only _en famille_, and that but seldom. But Dr. Fornerol, whose position as medical officer to the theatre procured him free passes, never missed a performance.

A travelling company had given _la Maréchale_ the night before, with Pauline Giry in the leading part.

“She is always capital, is Pauline Giry,” said the doctor.

“That’s the general opinion,” said the bookseller.

“She isn’t as young as she once was,” said M. de Terremondre, who was turning over the leaves of volume xxxviii. of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_.

“By Jove, no!” answered the doctor. “You know that Giry isn’t her real name?”

“Her real name is Girou,” answered M. de Terremondre authoritatively. “I knew her mother, Clémence Girou. Fifteen years ago Pauline Giry was dark and very pretty.”

And the three of them, in the old-book corner, set to work to reckon the actress’s age. But as they were calculating from doubtful or incorrect data, they only reached contradictory, or sometimes even absurd, conclusions, and with these they were by no means satisfied.

“I am worn out,” said the doctor. “You all went to bed after the theatre. But I was called up at midnight to go to an old farmer on Duroc hill, who was suffering from strangulated hernia. Says his man to me: ‘He has brought up everything he can. He harps on one note. He is going to die.’ I have the horse put in and I spin out to Duroc hill, over yonder, right at the end of the Faubourg de Tramayes. I find my man a-bed and howling. Corpse-like face, stercoraceous vomiting. Very good! His wife says to me: ‘It’s in his inside that it takes him.’”

“She’s forty-seven, is Pauline Giry,” said M. de Terremondre.

“It’s quite possible,” said Paillot.

“At least forty-seven,” answered the doctor. “Double hernia, and dangerous it was. Very good! I proceed to reduce it by hand-pressure. Although it is only necessary to exercise a very faint pressure with the hand, after thirty minutes of this business, one’s arms and back are broken. And it was only at the end of five hours, at the tenth repetition, that I was able to effect the reduction.”

At this point in the narrative recounted by Dr. Fornerol, Paillot the bookseller went to serve some ladies who asked for some interesting books to read in the country. And the doctor, addressing himself to M. de Terremondre alone, continued:

“I was one ache. I say to my man: ‘You must keep to your bed, and, if possible, you must remain lying on your back, until the truss-maker has made a truss for you according to my directions. Lie stretched out, or look out for strangulation. And you know whether that’s nice! Without counting that one day or another it’ll carry you off. You understand?’

“‘Yes, sir.’

“‘Very good.’

“Down I go to the yard to wash myself at the pump. You may imagine that after this business I wanted a bit of a wash. I strip myself to the waist, and I rub myself with soft soap for, maybe, a quarter of an hour. I dress myself again. I drink a glass of white wine that they bring me in the yard. I see the grey dawn break, I hear the lark sing, and I go back to the sick man’s room. There it was dark. I shout in the direction of the bed: ‘Hey? That’s understood, isn’t it? Perfect stillness whilst waiting for the new truss. The one you have is no good at all. D’you hear?’ No answer. ‘Are you asleep?’ Then I hear behind me the voice of the old nurse: ‘Doctor, our man’s no longer in the house,’ she tells me. ‘He was wearying to go out to his vines.’”

“There I recognise my peasants,” said M. de Terremondre.

He lapsed into meditation and resumed:

“Doctor, Pauline Giry is now forty-nine. She made her _début_ at the Vaudeville in 1876; she was then twenty-two. I am sure of it.”

“In that case,” said the doctor, “she would be in her forty-third year, since we are now in 1897.”

“It isn’t possible,” said M. de Terremondre, “for she is at least six years older than Rose Max, who has certainly passed her fortieth year.”

“Rose Max? I don’t say no, but she is still a fine woman,” said the doctor.

He yawned, stretched himself, and said:

“Getting back from Duroc hill, at six o’clock in the morning, I find two baker’s men in my hall, come to tell me that their mistress, the baker’s wife of the Tintelleries, has been brought to bed.”

“But,” asked M. de Terremondre, “did it require two baker’s men to tell you that?”

“They had sent them one after the other,” answered the doctor. “I ask if the characteristic symptoms have set in. They give me no answer, but a third baker’s man turns up in his master’s cart. Up I get and seat myself at his side. We take half a turn, and there I am rolling over the pavement of the Tintelleries.”

“I have it!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, who was pursuing his own thoughts. “It was in ’69 that she came out at the Vaudeville. And it was in ’76 that my cousin Courtrai knew her … and was intimate with her.”

“Are you speaking of Jacques de Courtrai, who was a captain of dragoons?”

“No, I am speaking of Agénor, who died in Brazil. … She has a son who left Saint-Cyr last year.”

Thus spoke M. de Terremondre, just as M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, entered the shop.

M. Bergeret held one of the three academic chairs of the Paillot establishment, and was the most indefatigable talker of the old-book corner. There, with a friendly hand, he used to turn over the leaves of books old and books new, and although he never bought a single volume, for fear of getting a wigging for it from his wife and three daughters, he received the heartiest welcome from Paillot, who held him in high esteem as a reservoir, an alembic, of that science and those belles-lettres on which booksellers live and flourish. The old-book corner was the only place in the town where M. Bergeret could sit in utter contentment, for at home Madame Bergeret chased him from room to room for different reasons of domestic administration; at the University, the Dean, in his hatred, forced him to give his lectures in a dark, unhealthy cellar, into which but few pupils descended, and all three classes in the town cast black looks at him for having called Jeanne d’Arc a military mascotte. Now M. Bergeret slipped into the old-book corner.

“Good-day, gentlemen! Anything new?”

“A baby to the baker’s wife in the Tintelleries,” said the doctor. “I brought it into the world just twenty minutes ago. I was going to tell M. de Terremondre about it. And I may add that it wasn’t without difficulty.”

“This child,” replied the professor, “hesitated to be born. He would never have consented to it if, being gifted with understanding and foresight, he had known the destiny of man on the earth, and more especially in our town.”

“It is a pretty little girl,” said the doctor, “a pretty little girl with a raspberry mark under the left breast.”

The conversation continued between the doctor and M. de Terremondre.

“A pretty little girl, with a raspberry mark under the left breast, doctor? It would seem that the bakeress had a longing for raspberries when she took off her corsets. The mere desire of a mother does not suffice to stamp the picture of it on the offspring she bears. It is also necessary that the longing woman should touch one particular part of her body. And the picture will be stamped on the child in the corresponding spot. Isn’t that the common belief, doctor?”

“That is what old women believe,” replied Dr. Fornerol. “And I have known men, and even doctors, who were women in this respect, and who shared in the credulity of the nurses. For my part, the experience of an already long practice, my knowledge of observations made by scientists, and especially a general view of embryology, prevent my sharing in this popular belief.”

“Then, according to your opinion, doctor, wishing-marks are just spots like others, that form on the skin without known cause.”

“Stop a bit! ‘Wishing-marks’ present a particular characteristic. They contain no blood-vessels and are not erectile, like the tumours with which you might perhaps be tempted to confuse them.”

“You declare, doctor, that they are a peculiar species. Do you make no inference from that as to their origin?”

“Absolutely none.”

“But if these spots are not really ‘wishing-marks,’ if you refuse them a … how shall I put it? … a psychic origin, I am unable to account for the accident of a belief which is found in the Bible, and which is still shared by such a great number of people. My aunt Pastré was a very intelligent and by no means superstitious woman. She died last spring, aged seventy-seven, in the full belief that the three white currants visible on the shoulder of her daughter Bertha had an illustrious origin and came from the Parc de Neuilly, where, in the autumn of 1834, during her pregnancy, she was presented to Queen Marie-Amélie, who took her to walk along a path bordered by currant-bushes.”

To this Dr. Fornerol made no reply. He was not remarkably given to contradicting the opinions of rich patients. But M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, bent his head towards his left shoulder and gave a far-away look, as he always did whenever he was going to speak. Then he said:

“Gentlemen, it is a fact that these marks, called ‘wishing-spots,’ reduce themselves to a small number of types, which may be classified, according to their colour and form, into strawberries, currants, and raspberries, or wine and coffee spots. It would, perhaps, be convenient to add to these types that of those diffused yellow spots in which folks endeavour to recognise portions of tart or mince-pie. Now, who can possibly believe that pregnant women desire nothing save to drink wine or _café au lait_, or to eat red fruits, and, possibly, forcemeat-pie? Such an idea runs counter to natural philosophy. That desire which, according to certain philosophers, has alone created the world and alone preserves it, works in them as in all living beings, only with more range and diversity. It gives them secret fevers, hidden passions, and strange frenzies. Without going into the question of the effect of their particular condition on the appetites common to all that lives, and even to plants, we recognise that this condition does not produce indifference, but that it rather perverts and inflames the deeper instincts. If the new-born child ought really to carry the visible signs of its mother’s desires, believe me, we should more frequently see imprinted on its body other symbols than these innocent strawberries and drops of coffee with which the folly of old wives diverts itself.”

“I see what you mean,” said M. de Terremondre. “Women loving jewels, many children would be born with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds on their fingers, and with gold bracelets on their wrists; necklaces of pearls, rivières of diamonds would cover their neck and breast. Still, one ought to be able to point to such children as these.”

“Just so,” replied M. Bergeret.

And, taking up from the table, where M. de Terremondre had left it, the thirty-eighth volume of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_, the professor buried his nose in the book, between pages 212 and 213, a spot which, every time that he had opened the inevitable old book during the last six years, had confronted him like a fate, to the exclusion of every other page, as an instance of the monotony with which life glides by, a symbol of the uniformity of those tasks and those days in a provincial university which precede the day of death and the travail of the body in the tomb. And this time, as he had already done so many times before, M. Bergeret read in volume xxxviii. of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_ the first lines of page 212: “a passage to the North. ‘It is to this check,’ said he, ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Isles again, and to enrich our voyage with a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy prophecy which these words seemed to denote has, unfortunately, never been fulfilled.”

And this time, as always, the reading of these lines plunged M. Bergeret into melancholy. Whilst he was immersed in it, the bookseller, M. Paillot, confronted a little soldier, who had come in to buy a sou’s worth of letter-paper, with disdain and hauteur.

“I don’t keep letter-paper,” declared M. Paillot, turning his back on the little soldier.

Then he complained of his assistant, Léon, who was always on errands, and who, once gone out, never came back. Consequently he, Paillot, was constantly being pestered by intruders. They actually asked him for letter-paper!

“I remember,” said Dr. Fornerol to him, “that one market-day a good country-woman came in and asked you for a plaster, and that you had the greatest difficulty in preventing her from tucking up her petticoats and showing you the painful spot where the paper was to be applied.”

Paillot, the bookseller, replied to this anecdotic sally by a silence which expressed offended dignity.

“Heavens!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre, the book-lover, “this learned storehouse of our Fröben, our Elzevir, our Debure, confused with the chemist’s shop of Thomas Diafoirus! What an outrage!”

“Indeed,” replied Dr. Fornerol, “the good soul meant no harm in showing Paillot the seat of her trouble. But it won’t do to judge the peasants by her. In general, they show extreme repugnance to letting themselves be seen by the doctor. My country colleagues have often remarked this to me. Country-women, attacked by serious diseases, resist examination with an energy and obstinacy which townswomen, and particularly women of the world, do not show in the same circumstances. I saw a farmer’s wife at Lucigny die of an internal tumour, which she had never allowed to be suspected.”

M. de Terremondre, who, as president of several local academies, had literary prejudices, took these remarks as a pretext for accusing Zola of having shamefully maligned the peasants in _La Terre_. At this accusation, M. Bergeret emerged from his pensive sadness and said:

“Yet the peasants are drunkards and parricides, and voluntarily incestuous, as Zola has depicted them. Their repugnance to lend themselves to clinical inspection by no means proves their chastity. It only shows the power of prejudice in minds of limited intelligence. The simpler a prejudice is, the stronger is its power. The prejudice that it is wrong to be seen naked remains powerful with them. It has been weakened amongst artists and people of intelligence by the custom of baths, douches, and massage; it has been still further weakened by æsthetic feeling and by the taste for voluptuous sensations, and it easily yields to considerations of health and hygiene. This is all that can be deduced from the doctor’s observations.”

“I have noticed,” said M. de Terremondre, “that well-made women …”

“There are hardly any,” said the doctor.

“Doctor, you remind me of my chiropodist,” replied M. de Terremondre. “He said to me one day: ‘If you were a chiropodist, sir, you would take no stock in women.’”

Paillot, the bookseller, who for some moments had been glued to the wall listening intently, said:

“I don’t know what is going on in Queen Marguerite’s house; I hear cries and the noise of furniture being overturned.”

And he was again seized with his customary misgiving.

“That old lady will set fire to her house, and the whole block of buildings will be burnt: it’s all wood.”

Nobody heeded these words, nobody attempted to soothe his ridiculous apprehensions. Dr. Fornerol rose painfully to his feet, stretched the wearied muscles of his arms with an effort, and went off on his round of visits through the town.

M. de Terremondre put on his gloves and took a step towards the door. Then, perceiving a tall withered figure which was crossing the square in stiff, abrupt strides:

“Here,” said he, “is General Cartier de Chalmot. I hope the _préfet_ won’t meet him.”

“And why not?” demanded M. Bergeret.

“Because these meetings are by no means pleasant for M. Worms-Clavelin. Last Sunday our _préfet_, while driving by in a victoria, caught sight of General Cartier de Chalmot, who was walking with his wife and daughters. Lolling back in his carriage, with his hat on his head, he saluted the gallant veteran with a little wave of his hand and a ‘Good-day, good-day, general!’ The general reddened with anger. For the unassuming are always violent in their anger. General Chalmot was beside himself. He was terrible. Before all the promenaders he imitated M. Worms-Clavelin’s familiar salute and shouted at him in a voice of thunder: ‘Good-day, good-day, _préfet_!’”

“There is perfect silence now in Queen Marguerite’s house,” said M. Paillot.

XIII

The midday sun darted its clear white rays. Not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air. The solitary orb swung across the vast repose in which everything was wrapped and urged its blazing course towards the horizon. On the deserted Mall the shadows lay still and heavy at the foot of the elms. A road-mender slept in the bottom of the ditch that bounds the ramparts. The birds were silent.

Seated at the shady end of a bench three parts steeped in sunlight, M. Bergeret forgot, under these classic trees, in the friendly solitude, his wife and his three daughters, his cramped life and his cramped home; like Æsop he revelled in the freedom of his mind, and his analytical imagination roved irresponsibly among the living and the dead.

However Abbé Lantaigne, head of the high seminary, was passing, with his breviary in his hand, down the broad walk of the Mall. M. Bergeret rose to offer his shady place on the bench to the priest. M. Lantaigne came up and sank into it composedly, with that priestly dignity which never left him and which in him was just simplicity. M. Bergeret sat near him, at the spot where the shadow fell mingled with light from the feathery end of the branches, so that his black clothing was covered with golden discs, and over his dazzled eyes his eyelids began to blink.

He congratulated Abbé Lantaigne in these words:

“It is said everywhere, monsieur l’abbé, that you will be called to the bishopric of Tourcoing.

“The sign I hail, and from it dare to hope.[J]

But this choice is too good a one not to make one doubtful. You are believed to be a royalist, and that counts against you. Are you not a republican like the Pope?”

[J] “J’en accepte l’augure et j’ose l’espérer.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “I am a republican like the Pope. That is to say, I am at peace and not at war with the government of the Republic. But peace is not love. And I do not love the Republic.”

M. BERGERET: “I guess your reasons. You condemn it for being freethinking and hostile to the clergy.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Assuredly I condemn it as irreligious and inimical to the priests. But this irreligion, these hostilities, are not inherent in it. They are the attributes of republicans, not of the Republic. They diminish or increase at every change of ministers. They are less to-day than they were yesterday. Possibly they will increase to-morrow. Perhaps a time will come when they will be non-existent, as they were non-existent under the rule of Marshal MacMahon, or at least during the delusive beginnings of that rule and under the deceptive ministry of May 16th. They are accidental, not essential. But even if it were respectful towards religion and its ministers, I should still hate the Republic.”

M. BERGERET: “Why?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Because it is diversity. In that it is essentially bad.”

M. BERGERET: “I don’t quite understand you, monsieur l’abbé.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “That comes from your not having the theological mind. At one time even laymen received some impress of it. Their college note-books, which they preserved, supplied them with the elements of philosophy. That is especially true of the men of the seventeenth century. At that time all those who were educated knew how to reason, even the poets. It is the teaching of Port-Royal that underlies the _Phèdre_ of Racine. But to-day when theology has been relegated to the seminaries, no one knows how to reason, and men of the world are almost as foolish as poets and savants. Did not M. de Terremondre, believing that he was speaking to the point, tell me yesterday, on the Mall, that Church and State ought to make mutual concessions? People no longer know, they no longer think. Empty words pass and repass in the air. We are in Babel. You, Monsieur Bergeret, are much better read in Voltaire than in Saint Thomas.”

M. BERGERET: “It is true. But did you not say, monsieur l’abbé, that the Republic is _diversity_, and that in that respect it is essentially bad? That is what I beg you to explain to me. Perhaps I might succeed in understanding you. I know more theology than you credit me with. Note-book in hand, I have read Baronius.”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Baronius is only an annalist, although the greatest of all; and I am quite sure that from him you have only been able to carry away some historic odds and ends. If you were in the slightest degree a theologian, you would be neither surprised nor disconcerted at what I have just said.

“Diversity is hateful. It is the characteristic of evil to be diverse. This characteristic manifests itself in the government of the Republic, which is more alienated than any other from unity. With its want of unity it fails in independence, permanence, and power. It fails in knowledge, and one may say of it that it knows not what it does. Although for our chastisement it continues, yet it has no continuity. For the idea of continuity implies that of identity, and the Republic of one day is never the same as that of the day before. Even its ugliness and its vices do not belong to it. And you have yourself remarked that by them it has never been discredited. Reproaches and scandals that would have ruined the mightiest empire have poured over it harmlessly. It is indestructible, for it is destruction. It is dispersion, it is discontinuity, it is diversity, it is evil.”

M. BERGERET: “Are you speaking of Republics in general, or only of our own?”

M. LANTAIGNE: “Obviously I am considering neither the Roman Republic, nor the Dutch, nor the Swiss, but only the French. For these governments have nothing in common save the name, and you will not charge me with judging them by the name by which they call themselves, nor by those points in which they seem, one and all, opposed to monarchy—an opposition which is not in itself necessarily to be condemned; but the Republic in France means nothing more than the lack of a prince and the want of a governing power. And this nation was too old at the time of the amputation for one not to fear that it would die of it.”

M. BERGERET: “Yet France has already survived the Empire by twenty-seven years, the _bourgeois_-king by forty-eight years, and the legitimate sovereign by sixty-six years.”