Stello: A Session with Doctor Noir 9780773594029

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STELLO

STELLO A Session with Doctor Noir by ALFRED de VIGNY

TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY

IRVING MASSEY MCGILL UNIVERSITY PRESS, MONTREAL

1963

C Copyright, Canada, 1963 by McGill University Press All rights reserved PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank Professor Maurice Shroder of Harvard University and my colleague Professor Slava Klima for their painstaking reading of my manuscript and for their numerous valuable suggestions. Margery Simpson of McGill University Press has given patiently and generously of the time, constructive criticism, and encouragement needed to urge this work through the successive stages of revision, proof-reading, and publication. The reference staff of Redpath Library and of Widener Library have been of unfailing assistance in helping me to deal with the numerous problems that defied my own best efforts. In the summer of 1959 I was awarded a grant from the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society to try to locate the manuscript of Steflo, which had been missing for a generation. I was so fortunate as to discover the whereabouts of the holograph, which is in private hands. The owners prefer to remain anonymous, but I wish to acknowledge their kindness in allowing me to study the manuscript in relation to the published text. I have made reference to several significant discrepancies between the two versions in the Introduction and Notes. Acknowledgements are also due to the Journal of the History of Medicine for permission to print in my Introduction some passages from an article of mine which appeared in 1934, " The Contribution of Neurology to the Scepticism of Alfred de Vigny." Finally, I should like to thank Mrs. Ludwig Lewisohn, who prepared the typescript of the translation during many an afternoon when she might have been more agreeably employed; Mademoiselle J. Ligonnets of Paris, for special assistance in the diplomacy of research; and Miss Magda El Shishini for her help in checking the notes. IRVING MASSEY McGill University 1962

CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION

xi

A SESSION WITH DOCTOR NOIR z. THE SYMPTOMS

3 4

g. COMPLICATIONS FROM THE 'BLUE DEVILS'

7

I. THE PATIENT'S TEMPERAMENT

THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA 4. THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA 5. A N INTERRUPTION 6. SEQUEL OF D O C T O R NOIR'S S T O R Y 7. CREDO 8. ONLY HALF MAD 9. THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA (continued) 10.A N IMPROVEMENT 11. THE C O T 12. A N INTERRUPTION 13. O N E T H O U G H T F O R A N 0 T B E R

13

16 16 18 19 24 29 31

32

34

THE STORY OF KITTY BELL 14. THE S T O R Y OF K I T T Y BELL 13. A N ENGLISH LETTER 16. WHEREIN THE ACTION IS INTERRUPTED BY ERUDITION 17. CONTINUATION OF THE S T O R Y OF K I T T Y BELL: THE BENEFACTOR 18. THE STAIRCASE 19. PITY AND SORROW

39 42 48 54 61 65

A TALE OF THE TERROR 20.

21.

B

A TALE OF Th!E T E R R O R THE KIND CANNONEER

ix

75 82

22. A SWEET OLD MAN 23. THE HIEROGLYPHS OF THE KIND CANNONEER 24. SAINT-LAZARE 25. A YOUNG MOTHER 26. THE STRAW-BOTTOMED CHAIR 27. A WOMAN IS ALWAYS A CHILD 28. THE DINING-HALL 29. THE AMMUNITION-WAGON 30. THE HOUSE OF M. de ROBESPIERRE, PARLIAMENTARY ADVOCATE 31. A LEGISLATOR 32. ON THE SUBSTITUTION OF EXPIATORY SUFFERING 33. TWO STROLLERS 34. A LITTLE AMUSEMENT 35. A SUMMER EVENING 36. ROUND AND ROUND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE 37. OF PERPETUAL OSTRACISM 38. HOMER'S HEAVEN 39. THE SOCIAL LIE 40. DOCTOR NOIR'S PRESCRIPTION 41. OUTCOME OF THE CONSULTATION 42. THE END NOTES

Page 85 90 93 96 boo 104 1o6 120

123 128 131

135 138 147 153 164 166 172

179 182 183 184

x

INTRODUCTION

Alfred de Vigny was born at Loches, in west central France, on March 27, 1797. His father was an invalided army officer of sixty; his mother, considerably the younger of the parents, was a seriousminded woman with decided views about her son's upbringing and, eventually, about his poetry as well. The family moved to Paris when Alfred was two years old. At school, Vigny was persecuted as an `aristocrat', though neither the material nor the genealogical evidence of his nobility was impressive. The family's particle, `de' Vigny, may have been justified by grafting the paternal line (Vigny d'ßmerville) upon the family tree of the Vignys de Courquetaine, but recently published documents suggest that at least on his mother's side Vigny did have aristocratic ancestors. In any case, the poet maintained his identification with the nobility throughout his life. In 1814, still in his teens, Vigny entered the army. The postNapoleonic period of French military history provided no opportunities for either glory or rapid advancement in rank; furthermore, Vigny was not well adapted to an army career, and his mother's influence with people at court was not quite strong enough to gain him preferment. The series of tales entitled Servitude et Grandeur militaires (1 834-35) is concerned with this phase of his life and with the meaning of the military experience as such. Early in the eighteen-twenties Vigny began to publish poetry, and several of his early poems made a tremendous contemporary impression by the boldness of their style and the seriousness of their content. "Moise" is one example. Moses, tired of his responsibility, and of executing God's commands, pleads to be released from the privileged role that distinguishes him from ordinary men, although xi

release means only death. The poem is governed by a ponderous metre, and a strength of tone which makes one realize that it aims at a deeper meaning. It may be read as a parable of the artist's fate, or, more aptly, as a description of the human condition itself. As Camus has written, there is only one class of men, the privileged class; and all of us, chosen people that we are, are condemned to labour for the wage of death. The prosodic massiveness of "Moise," and its philosophical seriousness, prepare one for the style of Vigny's late poems, Les Destinees; but in the eighteen-twenties Vigny's literary course was not yet determined, and he produced a good deal of conventional Romantic verse (such as "Le Cor," on the theme of Roland's horn), as well as an historical novel in the style of Walter Scott, Cinq-Mars, and translations from Shakespeare that contributed to the "new wave" in the French theatre. In the meanwhile he was married (1825) to Lydia Bunbury, who proved a disappointment in most respects; a devoted wife, she was also a lifelong invalid, of unattractive personal appearance, incapable of sharing her husband's intellectual interests, and innocent of the wealth which Vigny's rather calculating mother had assumed she would bring with her. In 1827, Vigny left the army, and settled in Paris, where he had made numerous literary acquaintances in the circles of Charles Nodier. His career as a playwright, novelist, and poet was in full swing, but success did not breed an easy cheerfulness in Vigny, as the novel Stello (1832) proves. 'We will discuss its special place in his literary development later. The most familiar moment in Vigny's biography in the early eighteen-thirties is the beginning of his relationship with Marie Dorval, the actress who later created the role of Kitty Bell in Vigny's Chatterton (1835), but too much importance has probably been attached to this liaison. Vigny's journals and correspondence reveal a long series of sexual adventures, continuing to the very end of his life, among which the Dorval affair must be accounted merely an episode. After the death of his mother in 1837 (a loss which affected him deeply), and several trips to England undertaken in the hope of recovering some of his wife's patrimony, Vigny began to spend long periods on his estate in Charente. From this retreat, where he was concerned with his vineyards and the brandy trade, he emerged from time to time on forays into the world of letters and politics. xii

In 1845, after several rebuffs, he won an Academy seat. He was less successful in politics; his candidacy for the position of Representative after 1848 failed signally. With the accession of Louis Napoleon, Vigny began to seek political recognition by means less innocent than standing for election. Apparently hoping to gain some diplomatic or bureaucratic appointment, Vigny undertook to collect information about his neighbours for the administration; anyone whom he suspected of being Radical or hostile to the Government was identified and his activities were described in these private notes. Some biographers have found this phase of Vigny's career inappropriate for an apostle of the Religion of Honour (Servitude et Grandeur militaires). Vigny's death, whether from cancer of the stomach or some other intestinal disease (the diagnosis has been much debated) was a lingering agony. The stoicism he had adopted as a philosophical attitude proved inadequate when his time came. Vigny was not granted the privilege of dying the close-lipped death he most admired; he could not refrain from proclaiming his suffering to a world that had been taught to repeat "Seul le silence est grand (Silence alone is great)," from "La Mort du Loup." Throughout his later years, Vigny had been occupied with his journal, an interesting and voluminous record of his reading and ideas. He had continued to write poetry as well, but intermittently; yet it is upon the small body of his later verse, Les Destinies or Paws philosophiques, that his reputation rests most solidly. The best of these are strictly intellectual poems, philosophical in content and rather dry in texture. They represent the essential Vigny, abstract and pessimistic, in whose thought we soon recognize the problems confronted by other serious nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Vigny's disciple Baudelaire, who also seek in the very impossibility of life a source of the ideal. It is the sup-. porting network of thought that accounts for the tenacity of Vigny's literary reputation a century after his death and long after the decline of the Romantics' fame; this, and the fact that he was not quite a Romantic. For the ambiguities we discover in Vigny's biography extend to his intellectual life. The complaining stoic, the apostle of honour serving as police informer, the sensual misogynist ("La Colere de Samson") is also the rational Romantic, the prosaic poet, and the

atheist believer. We have already mentioned that Vigny's career opened with a series of poems (Poemes antiques et modernes) some of which, such as "Le Cor," are frankly Romantic and consciously lyrical, while others, such as "Moise," are more philosophical and abstract. This uncertainty of taste and method, further reflected in the novel Cinq-Mars, allows us to see Vigny's personality seeking its natural form. His writings in both poetry and prose continue to show this indecision right up to 1831-32, the year in which he had it out with himself in Stello. Stello marks the watershed in Vigny's development as a writer, from the Romantic lyrist to the philosophical poet, from the fabricator of historical fiction to the novelist of ideas. In this book Vigny faces the necessity of defining his own character, and emerges with the full consciousness of his identity. After 1831 he gives up the quest for elusive inspiration and recognizes his mission as the spokesman for the intellect in fiction and poetry. His later prose works, Stello, Servitude et Grandeur militaires, and Daphne are philosophical novels, written, as Vigny puts it, not ad narrandum but ad probandum. Stello itself, he tells us, is "an idea in three acts." After Stello, Vigny's journal becomes steadily richer in philosophical commentary. After Stello, too, Vigny's flirtation with the Romantic lyric peters out, and his published poems become more and more intellectual and abstract. Unlike Chatterton (a dramatization of one episode from this novel), Stello was not a great contemporary success; it was attacked by the Revue de Paris and the entire left-wing press, and only half-heartedly defended by its own publishers, the Revue des deux mondes. Nevertheless, it is Vigny's most important prose work. For its author, it provided the selfanalysis he needed to help him shift his efforts from contemporary stereotypes into his own literary forms. For posterity, it is a book that has attracted increasing interest as its peculiar virtues have been recognized, and recent translations into Italian and Japanese testify to an awareness of its value. The present version is a belated first attempt in our language. These observations will be spelled out before we conclude; what I should like to emphasize now is the position of Stello in Vigny's own development. In this book the would-be idealist, the immature Vigny, comes to grips with the mature realist, Doctor xiv

Noir. Vigny's position after he emerges from this inner conflict is not yet unambiguous, but Doctor Noir has taken the upper hand. The author retains his paradoxes; for instance, it is still not clear to him nor to us whether he is primarily a poet or a philosopher, but he has at least given up pretending that he is wholly a poet. He has decided to accept himself simply as he is. After 1831, florid Romantic idealism can only be identified with the dishonest side of Vigny, whether it be an official pose for the benefit of the public, or an expression of his private moments of psychological weakness (as in the Tennysonian 'elevations'). On the other hand, Doctor Noir becomes his strength. The critical rationalist, Noir, disappeared from the published works after 1832, perhaps because of Vigny's discouragement with the reception of the work in which this character made his début, but he remained with his creator as the constant companion ofhis private journals until 1863, the year of Vigny's death; and it is thanks to Doctor Noir's astringent realism that the Parties philosophiques bear such a different stamp from the bulk of the early verse. Stello is the pivot for the change. Let us turn from Stello's position in Vigny's development to the historical background and the content of the work. The sources and analogues of Stello are easy to identify, but far too numerous to list in detail. For instance, in the first episode (on Gilbert), the dialogue between Louis XV and an imaginary mistress shows an obvious resemblance to the seduction scene in Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, as well as to an anecdote of Chamfort. Maurice Shroder has pointed out, in Icarus, the similarities between the Chatterton story and the melodramatic plots ofPixerecourt. The third section, on the French Revolution, is heavily indebted for incident, tone, characterization, and opinions to the anonymous Memoires d'un pretre regicide as well as to the Souvenirs and Mélanges of Vigny's friend Charles Nodier. Even the last part of the novel, which summarizes the plight of the eternal pariah, the artist, draws on the work of another author (Colaset du Ravel in L' Art de diner en ville) for both its ideas and its examples. In fact, what is astonishing is that Vigny was able to fuse so many borrowings in a work which impresses one as distinctive and original. The story, in outline, describes the lives of three unfortunate poets, each of whom has come to grief under a different political

and social system. The first is Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert (1751-178o), the scion of a poor provincial family, who was educated at the College de l'Arc in Dole, and, after a brief stay in Nancy, came to Paris to make his fortune in the profession of letters. Poorly received by the `philosophes,' the reigning literary party, he promptly undertook to revenge himself in a series of satirical attacks on such major figures as Voltaire, Diderot, and La Harpe. His temerity was rewarded with a literary feud which extended to posthumous libel; but practical compensations were not lacking. Almost involuntarily, Gilbert found himself defender of the faith as well as enemy of the Encyclopedists, and, bolstered with pensions, befriended by the most influential members of the `devout' party, he continued his campaign without need for further anxiety about his personal future. The bizarre circumstances of his death as recounted by La Harpe, Grimm, and Charles Nodier were adapted by Vigny to the needs of his novel. The facts of Gilbert's madness (supposedly aggravated, like Rousseau's, by the persecution of the materialist philosophers) and of his having swallowed a key just before his death are fairly well attested. His final poverty, and the indifference of the court party to his efforts on their behalf, are more difficult to prove. Vigny's information concerning Thomas Chatterton (17521770) was drawn from even less reliable historians; errors in these sources, compounded by the novelist's imagination, resulted in a biography which students of the eighteenth century may have difficulty in recognizing. For instance, in Stello, William Beckford, the coarse, bourgeois mayor of London, plays the crucial role in a scene which results in Chatterton's suicide. The historical Beckford died before the poet, who wrote an elegy upon his death! Still, Vigny's characterization of Chatterton is true enough to the spirit of the unhappy young writer to command emotional acceptance, although it is obviously idealized. Chatterton's biography accommodated itself easily to the Romantic formula of the artist rejected by society, and as such it was recalled by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, before Vigny. Chatterton was born in Bristol, ofpoor parents; discovered antiquarian inclinations during his early teens; and, while apprenticed to a Bristol attorney, composed the remarkable `Rowley' poems, which he attempted to pass off as genuine antiquities. xvi

Horace Walpole's initial encouragement was quickly withdrawn when competent judges declared the poems forgeries. In 177o, Chatterton abandoned the life of a scrivener's apprentice and unsuccessful purveyor of pseudo-medieval poetry for the existence of the London political hack. This latest phase of his literary activity, with all the unsavoury topical satire in which it involved him (cf. Gilbert) Vigny overlooks; for our novelist, Chatterton is the champion of poetry, not the pamphleteer of the Wilkes faction. Whatever the causes of his suicide—whether simply a constitutional melancholy or despair that his genius remained ignored— the eighteen-year-old Chatterton was apparently not driven to take his life by mere poverty. On this point, at least, Vigny's biography is in agreement with recent scholarship. The posthumous interest in Chatterton's `Rowley' poems, of which only one was published in the poet's lifetime, was developed by the Bristol tradesman George Catcott, who succeeded in stimulating public curiosity and eventually brought about the publication of the Tyrwhitt edition in 1777. Andr6 Chenier (1762-1794), too, was driven from poetry to pamphleteering by the pressure of circumstance. He was born in Constantinople, brought to France in 1765, and sent to school in Carcassonne. His classmates came of wealthy and influential families, whereas Andre's prospects for a career were limited by his bourgeois ancestry. Not even a sub-lieutenancy in the army was available to him. After periods of travel and study, interspersed with love affairs, he was placed by his friends in a subordinate post at the London embassy. In 1791, having taken full stock of the situation in France from abroad, he returned to his own country, eager to devote his still untapped talents and energies to its needs in a time of crisis. But like many another sincere revolutionary, he was buried in the upheaval whose course he had hoped to guide; his political journalism marked him as an uncompromising constitutionalist and anti Jacobin, and in 1794 he was finally arrested. His execution took place just before the fall of Robespierre. As a poet, Chenier died virtually unpublished and unknown: yet his posthumous influence on writers such as Vigny is often held responsible for the beginnings of the Romantic school in French verse. These are the three biographies about which Stello is con-

strutted. If we go beyond the plot material to the main idea of the work, we recognize that, at a glance, to be the familiar opposition between the poet and society. Absolute monarchs fear the revolutionary implications of poetry; bourgeois governments declare the poet useless; egalitarian republics fear and resent the natural superiority of artists. The poet is the mouthpiece of immediate truth, the oracle whom no society based on fictions and conventions can tolerate. But since every society is an edifice of lies and conventions, its architects and its maintenance men (the philosophers and the politicians) will necessarily exclude poets from the building. Imagination, the organ of poetry, raises its possessor above all possible confusion with the inferior types of human being, the common man, the philosopher, or the statesman, all of whom are involved in the unclean world of action or circumscribed by the die of reason. Stello must remain in holy isolation; he must never concern himself with the application of his ideas or even with their relevance for social situations, if he is to accomplish his special mission successfully. Poetry simply does not mix with political reality. As the unadulterated expression of an ideal, it can keep no covenant with the shifting standards of social compromise. Thus far, the theme of Stello as we have described it seems entirely conventional. But such a summary is misleading. In our précis we have chosen to ignore Vigny's ambiguities, and if we ignore these ambiguities we are sure to miss the point of the book. From the outline we have given it might be concluded that Stello, the Romantic poet, is both the ideal type and the spokesman for the ideal, while the doctor is the butt of the author's satire. In fact, the opposite statement would be much nearer to the truth. Stello is the patient, sick with romantic sentiment, whose cure must be effected by the acrid Doctor Noir. The reader may be interested to know that Doctor Noir was modelled on an actual psychiatrist of Vigny's acquaintance, the famous Doctor Emile Blanche, custodian of several French Romantic poets. Indeed, the whole psychiatric atmosphere of the book is derived from a lifelong interest on Vigny's part in the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Stello, far from being the ideal incarnate, is a rather fatuous young man. He is not the portrait of the perfect poet; he is the portrait of Vigny's own weaknesses. Doctor Noir accuses him of xviii

the very sins of which the politicians themselves are guilty: the lust for power, which Louis XV, in the first anecdote, also attributes to poets; and the demand that his careless words should guide the multitude. In the latter respect Stello is little better than Saint Just, and the satire to which he is subjected (Chapters 6 and 39) is closely analogous to the Doctor's satire of that young `poet,' as Robespierre calls his coadjutor (Chapter 34). Indeed Stello is guilty of a more profound crime than any of these. He is a sentimentalist. He believes that the ideal can be achieved on earth. By making the impossible demand that political reality express the ideal, he betrays both the ideal and himself, both poetry and his own mind. Utterly confused, he has sunk into a state of morbid depression, and the cautery of cynicism is needed to extirpate the proud flesh of illusion. This is the real meaning of the political theme in Stello. The two years of Louis-Philippe's reign which had gone by before its publication in 1832 were marked by an alternation of plot and counterplot, revolution and reaction, to create an atmosphere of political tension as explosive as any that French history had known. Recent historians have revealed to us the turbulence beneath the supposedly calm surface of the July monarchy. Time and time again Vigny had had occasion to ask himself whether he would not have to devote himself to the service of a party in the event of another civil war. But there is an ontological meaning to the problem as it is presented in Stello, a significance that extends far beyond the immediate political or biographical reference. In the Premiere Consultation, political utopianism is merely a symbol of the misguided search for earthly happiness. It expresses Stello's readiness to ignore the nature of the real world and to assume that we can override its requirements. Such assumptions lead inevitably to disappointment, and whoever harbours them will fall into apathy as reality repeatedly refuses to honour his demands. Therefore, when Stello drifts from complaints about his depression into the apparently irrelevant subject of politics (Chapter 3), his associations are following a natural sequence from malady to cause. "I feel that out of sheer despair I am about to devote myself to a political ideal...." Every possible means of counteracting Stello's penchant for sentimentality is invoked. At the very beginning of the book, the claims of physiological psychology to an exhaustive description of mental functions are advanced; Stello, like Gilbert, is assaulted by xix

the demons of rationalism, and Doctor Noir is there to help them press the attack. Far from disputing the phrenological reduction of transcendental aspirations to material functions of the brain, far from seeking to prevent Doctor Gall's little demons from excavating the bumps of Ideality, Melody, Hope, and Wonder, Doctor Noir joins forces with the enemy in the onslaught upon Stello's false ideals. Stello must undergo a primary purification to prepare him for deeper understanding; he must abandon the hope for a paradise on earth before he can know the true idealism that expects no favours from this world. Living by the assumption that life harbours the possibility of perfection, Stello has fallen into apathy because his philosophy bears no relation to experience. Aimless and confused, he can know neither the external world nor himself; for the refusal to admit the refractoriness of external reality to idealistic desires is founded on an unwillingness to acknowledge the unideal elements in oneself. The assault on sentimentality is pressed by both precept and example. Time after time, in comparing the manuscript with the printed version, we find Vigny modifying the text to emphasize his ironic or his therapeutic purpose. `Plait å Dieu' (God willing) becomes `plüt aux Docteurs (if the Doctors are willing). In the third chapter of the manuscript, the doctor diagnoses Stello's malady as Blue Devils and desæuvrement (boredom); in the printed version, the mask of dilettante indifference is pierced and Stello learns that he is suffering from Blue Devils and despair. Most important; at the beginning of Chapter 7, Doctor Noir asks Stello for proof that he is a poet, and Stello offers a rather conventional Romantic Credo in support of his claim. In the manuscript, Doctor Noir is satisfied and declares, "You deserve that I continue;" in the printed text he comments wryly, "All that proves nothing but a good heart." It is not that Doctor Noir (the intellectual Vigny) rejects poetry, but that he rejects sentimentality masquerading as poetry. Himself impervious to all forms of sentiment, the Doctor stands prepared with psychiatric means to bring Stello's logos back to the realms of dispassionate understanding. By accepting such illusions as happiness and hope Stello has fallen into the contradictions that quickly make life unendurable, and he must be set back on the road to the only viable concept of existence; if he cannot become a principled pessimist like Doctor Noir,

he will certainly end by committing suicide like Chatterton. Noir's cheerful pessimism, or macabre cheerfulness, is the chief diapason of the book. The Doctor seems to enjoy hunting down Stello's illusions step by step and dispatching them. His techniques consist of an unremitting intellectual scepticism, a disconcerting readiness to satirize the most sympathetic characters in his stories, and an attitude of icy indifference toward the suffering he describes. No opportunity to insult and undermine Stello's sensibilities is overlooked, for this book is no Romantic rhapsody, but the psychoanalysis of illusion, leading to a philosophy of doubt. What we emerge with at the end of the Consultations is neither a positivistic dogma nor a doctrine of transcendence, but a grim recognition of human limitations. The two words `Why?' and `Alas !', the author finally declares, comprehend the meaning of every book. `Why?' expresses the eternal doubt which is the intellectual destiny of man; `Alas !' is the summary of life itself. The novel culminates in these two interjections. Enough has been said to clarify the theme of Stello and to correct the impression which may be created by its melodramatic devices: that the book is merely a prolonged effusion of sentiment. Of course, the same caution should be applied to the appraisal of many other works produced during what is generally called the Romantic period. The peculiar tension between emotion and reason which some hold to be more truly typical of Romanticism than mere sentimentality or melodrama alone may be studied almost as well in the writings of a Senancour, a Foscolo, or a Stendhal (all three, by the way, steeped in the same tradition of materialist psychology as Vigny). Stello is particularly original in presenting the conflict of head and heart in terms of a psychiatric interview. There had been a considerable interest in the treatment of mental illness even during the eighteenth century; and Vigny himself maintained an acquaintance with two important psychiatrists, Emile Blanche and Brierre de Boismont. An article in the Revue britannique for November, 183o, which may be a source for Stello, contains not only reports of psychiatric consultations but a description of electric-shock therapy as well. Psychiatry was sufficiently advanced in Vigny's time to let him foresee a twentieth-century phenomenon: "The Abbe has made way for the Doctor, as if this society, in turning materialist, had decided that the care of the soul would mci

have to depend henceforth on the cure of the body" (the Journal). For all this development of the new science (in fact, some of the medical components of Stello were drawn from older authors, such as Nodier and even Diderot) a long time passed before anything comparable to Stello appeared on the literary scene. It was twenty-six years later that Oliver Wendell Holmes published the first of his `psychiatric novels,' Elsie Venner. But the intent of Stello transcends medicine, although the book ends with a formal prescription. What was to be the ultimate state of mind of someone whom Doctor Noir had cured? Freed from illusion, how was he to live? What, in a word, is the moral of Stello? The only lesson we can be sure it teaches is the inferiority of the active to the contemplative life. "Epictetus understood," Vigny writes in his Journal: "independence is only in the mind. All thought and no action: that is the nature and the virtue of the philosophic genius." Within the framework of this generalization Vigny was able to construct a theory for the artist's function in society. Political authoritarian though he was, Vigny saw that the artist's relationship to society had changed in such a way that it was impossible for creative people to serve, whether voluntarily or by prescription, the purposes of any state (Stello, Chapter 39). The days of royal patronage were over; but what was much more serious, the days of social myth, when the artist could share in the mass convictions of his group, were gone. With the death of myth the artist becomes the spokesman for a private truth; to serve the state means only to peddle slogans. And that private truth, that cherished splinter of a shattered ideal, becomes more and more difficult to preserve. Once articulated, every ideal, even a fragmentary one, is at the mercy of reason; therefore we must hide it rather than proclaim it. Modern man—and Vigny is one such— "does not always possess faith, and never affirms it. What thought sustains his courage? He will not even tell." (The Journal) In Stello we are witnesses to the defeat of public idealism; we watch it take up its final position for a last-ditch fight, in the silent redoubt of the poet's heart. With official slogans the creative writer can have nothing to do. God is gone from the outside world; the poet will lose the fragment of divinity that remains by collaborating with the political machine.

But the ideal in the recesses of the individual's mind undergoes a metamorphosis. The poet who has rescued the glowing body of illusion finds himself custodian to the bony bride of Truth. And Vigny was at once under the necessity of concealing the identity of his protegee and of coming to terms with the changeling behind the closed doors of his own mind. The unpublished novel on Julian the Apostate, Daphne, which anticipates the argument of the `Grand Inquisitor' episode in The Brothers Karamazov, is the record of this awkward settlement. In the private consciousness of the isolated individual, illusion fades and turns to scepticism; and the only ideal man can still hope for is what he may discover along the pathways of uncertainty. In his doubts he must find peace, in the certitude of death his security, in his abject helplessness his self-respect. The total independence recommended to the poet in Stello is an allegory for the total independence man himself must achieve, emancipated from the hope for assurances in any form. He must learn to do without knowledge, intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic; then, in the pathos of his ignorance, he may begin to aspire to the peculiar dignity of the human being. The courage required for Stello to abandon at once his hopes for knowledge and his idealism is to be gained only at great cost; but to complete his cure, Stello must espouse the philosophy of doubt, reserving the remnant of his trust for the plumb-line of analysis. Comprehensive philosophical syntheses with claims to intellectual certainty are of the same order of unreliability as apocalyptic delusions. Because its subject throughout is uncertainty incarnate, and because its form is appropriate to its theme, Stello continues to bewilder the critics. Yet into its very epigraph is decanted the essence of its meaning. Stello offers its contemporaries the wafer of doubt as the only nourishment for its author's peculiar faith: "Analysis is a ship's lead. Sounding the depths, it brings terror and despair upon the weak; but it reassures and guides the Brave, who grasp it firmly."

A SESSION WITH DOCTOR NOIR

c

THE PATIENT'S TEMPERAMENT Analysis is a ship's lead. Sounding the depths, it brings terror and despair upon the weak; but it reassures and guides the Brave, who grasp it firmly. DOCTOR NOIR

TELLO was born in the most favourable circumstances Li imaginable, under the most auspicious star in heaven. Everything he has attempted, from his earliest childhood, has prospered. World events have always happened at just the right moment to rescue him miraculously from any personal cliff'iculties. Stello never worries when the thread of his enterprises twists and knots in the fingers of Fate; he is sure that Fate herself will take the trouble to rearrange everything, by the light of his beneficent and infallible star. His star never fails him, in even the most trivial situations: it stoops to influence the weather in his behalf. The sun and clouds present themselves to order for him. There are some people like that. Still, there are certain days in the year when Stello is overcome by a sort of vexing depression, which the slightest emotional distress can precipitate; he can sense its approach several days in advance. At such times he becomes twice as active and lively as usual in order to prepare for the storm, as all living things do when they sense danger. At these moments he has the highest opinion of everybody and greets everybody effusively; he bears no grudges, on any account. You do him a positive service by bothering him in some way, by slandering him, by bullying him; and if he should happen to notice the injury, he will still display the same indulgent, compassionate smile. The fact is, he is happy in the way blind people are happy when somebody talks to them. The deaf always appear morose because they are deprived of human conversation; the blind always seem happy and smiling because we see them only while they share the comfort of a human voice. It is in this way that Stello is happy; when one of his attacks of dreary melan3

choly is coming on, he finds violent activity, with all its tensions and its worries, with all the damage to which it exposes both body and soul, better than isolation, for when he is alone the slightest vexation may bring on one of his disastrous attacks. Solitude is poisonous to him, like the atmosphere of the Roman Campagna. He knows it to be so, yet he must surrender to it, though well aware that he will find in it a sort of monotonous despair, a total absence of hope. May the unknown woman he loves not abandon him in these moments of anguish. Yesterday morning Stello seemed as much changed in one hour as if he had been sick three weeks: his eyes staring, his lips blanched, and his head sunk on his chest under the weight of his relentless depression. In this condition, a prelude to nervous torments which your hale and ruddy man in the street can never imagine, he lay fully dressed on his couch. By a stroke of great good luck, the door of his room opened, and in walked Doctor Noir.

Chapter Two THE SYMPTOMS "AH! thank God !" cried Steno as he looked up, "here is a living being. And what's more, it's you, a doctor of the soul, not one of those who are hardly even doctors of the body; you, who see to the bottom of everything, where other men see only superficial forms !—You're not a figment of my imagination, my dear Doctor; you're very real indeed, a man created to live by boredom and, one day, to die of boredom. That's it, by Jove, that's what I like about you: you're as gloomy with other people as I am when I'm alone.—Is that why they call you 'Noir' in our fine section of Paris, or is it because of the black coat and vest you wear? I don't know. But I do want to tell you about my sufferings, and I want you to talk to me about them too. It's always a pleasure for an invalid to discuss himself and to get other people to talk about him: that achieved, he is already half cured. "Now I'd better tell you frankly; since this morning I have been 4

suffering from a fit of spleen, and such a fit of spleen that everything I look at since I have been alone disgusts me. I hate the sun and I detest the rain. That pompous sun looks like an ostentatious upstart to the tired eyes of an invalid; and the rain! oh! of all the scourges that fall from heaven, I think it's the worst. I believe I'll blame the rain today for my ills. What symbolic form can I ever find to represent this unbelievable suffering of mine? Ah ! I think I see a possibility, thanks to a scientist I used to know. All honour to Doctor Gall (the good old brain !) He numbered all the forms of the human head so well that we can recognize ourselves on his chart, just as we locate our position on a map of the provinces. We can't get a knock on the head any more without knowing precisely which one of our faculties is in danger. "Well, my friend, let me tell you that just now, tormented as I am by a private worry, I feel all the devils of migraine in my hair, hard at work splitting my skull. They're doing what Hannibal did to the Alps. You can't see them; oh, ye Doctors, I wish I could say the same for myself. There's one imp there, the size of a midge, black and delicate, who is working an enormously long saw; half of it is already buried in my forehead. He is following an oblique line from Bump No. 19, `Idealism,' to No. 32 over the left eye, `Music'; and over there, at the corner of the eyebrow near the bump of `Order,' five little devils are squatting, piled on top of each other like leeches, and hanging on to the end of the saw to force it deeper into my head; two of them have been set to work pouring boiling oil into the delicate furrow made by their blade; the stuff bums like punch, and it doesn't feel exactly blissful. I can feel another mad little demon who would make me shriek, if it weren't for that everlasting habit of politeness you know I suffer from. This fellow has set up house as absolute monarch on the huge bump of `Kindliness,' right on top of my skull; he's sitting down, because he knows that he has a lot of work ahead of him; he has a gimlet in his little arms, and he's whirling it with such amazing speed that you'll soon see it coming out of my chin. Two of the mites are too small for any eyes to see, even through a microscope held by a gnome; they are my most implacable, my fiercest enemies; they have set up an iron wedge in the dead centre of the hill known as `the Marvellous'; one of them is holding the wedge upright, and driving it in with his shoulders, his arms, 5

his head; the other one, armed with an enormous hammer, is striking it like an anvil, with a full sweep of the arms, straining his back, his legs spread wide apart; he flings himself back with a guffaw after every blow on the pitiless wedge; each of these strokes resounds in my brain with the noise of a battery of five hundred and ninety-four cannons discharging at once against five hundred and ninety-four thousand troops charging to the sound of rifles, drums, and gongs. At each blow my eyes close, my ears tremble, the soles of my feet quake.—My God, my God, why have You permitted these little monsters to attack the bump of the Marvellous? It was the biggest on my whole head, the one that was responsible for the few poems I wrote that raised my soul towards the unfathomable skies, as well as for all my most cherished and secret extravagances. If they destroy it, what will I have left in the gloom of this shadowy world? That divine mound provided me with ineffable consolations. It was like a little dome beneath which my soul took shelter to contemplate and take stock of itself, to sigh and to pray, to dazzle itself internally with images as pure as those of Raphael of the angelic name, as richly coloured as those of Rubens of the ruddy name (miraculous coincidence !) It was there that my soul, at peace, found a thousand poetic illusions which I put down on paper as well as I could from memory; but now this sanctuary, too, has been attacked by these infernal, invisible forces ! You fearsome spawn of sorrow, what harm have I done you?— Leave me alone, you gelid, nimble Demons, who freeze each of my nerves as you run across it, and slither along the cords, like skilful dancers ! Oh, my friend, if you were able to see these pitiless goblins on my head, you would scarcely be able to understand how I continue living. There you have it; now they are all crowded, heaped, swarming on the bump of Hope. How long have they been mining and undermining that mountain, flinging to the winds whatever they tear up ! Alas ! my friend, they've dug a pit where it used to be, a pit deep enough to lodge your whole hand in." As he spoke these last words, Stello buried his face in his hands. He said nothing more, but groaned aloud. The Doctor remained as cold as the statue of the Czar at Saint Petersburg in winter. "You have Les Diables Bleus," he said; "It's a disease known in English as `Blue Devils.' 6

Chapter Three

COMPLICATIONS FROM THE "BLUE DEVILS" STELLO resumed in a low voice: "You must give me some serious advice, you cold-blooded Doctor. I am consulting you as I would have consulted my own head last night, when I was still in possession of it; but, since it is no longer in my control, there is nothing left to secure me against the impetuosity of my heart; my heart is mortified and afflicted, and I feel that out of sheer despair it is on the point of devoting itself to a political ideal, and it prompts me to undertake certain writings on behalf of a sublime form of government which I am now going to expound to you in full detail ..." "Ye Gods !" exclaimed Doctor Noir, rising abruptly to his feet; "so this is the kind of madness to which a poet can be driven by Blue Devils and despair !" Then he sat down again, replaced his cane very solemnly between his legs, and proceeded to follow the lines of the flooring with it, as though he were measuring squares and diamonds by geometrical calculation. He was not really concerned with the floor, but was expecting Stello to continue. After waiting five minutes, he realized that his patient had fallen into a fit of total distraction, and recalled his attention by saying, "I want to tell you ..." Stello started from his couch. "The sound of your voice frightened me," he said; "I thought I was alone." "I want to tell you," the Doctor went on, "three little anecdotes that will serve as an excellent cure for the temptation of devoting your pen to the notions of a party." "Alas !" sighed Stello, "what would you gain by suppressing this noble impulse? Couldn't it help to get me out of my miserable state of mind?" "It would sink you into it deeper than ever." "It could only save me," said Stello; "I sometimes fear that I will choke with disgust one fine morning." 7

"Be disgusted, if you will, but don't choke yet," resumed the impassive Doctor; "if the homoeopathic principle is valid, as it takes poison to counteract poison, I shall cure you by making your disillusion more extreme. Now listen." "Just a minute !" cried Stello; "let's first come to terms about the subject you will treat and the form you intend to choose. "In the first place I must tell you that I am tired of hearing about the eternal war between Wealth and Talent. Wealth, like Terminus, with his feet sunk in his pedestal, watches Talent with a compassionate air, while Talent, who wears wings on his head and his feet, flutters around Wealth at the end of a string, perpetually slapping at his cold, proud rival. What philosopher can tell me which of the two is the more futile? As for me, I swear that each is as stupid as the other. See how gracefully our society balances between two mortal sins: Pride, father of all the aristocracies, and Envy, mother of all possible Democracies ! "So please don't talk to me about these things; and as for style, oh, Lord, please make your style as unobtrusive as possible, because I'm tired of literary airs. For God's sake choose some simple form, and tell me (if your tales are your universal cure), tell me some mild, innocuous story, something neither hot nor cold: some modest, lukewarm, insipid story, my friend, something like the Temple de Gnide! some tableau in pinks and greys, with wreaths, in very bad taste; wreaths above all, oh, yes, I entreat you, a profusion of wreaths ! and a quantity of nymphs, I beg you! nymphs with plump arms, clipping the wings of Cupids flying out of a little cage !—cages ! cages ! bows, quivers, pretty little quivers! Be lavish with love-knots, burning hearts, temples with scented columns !—And some musk, too, if possible; plenty of musk from the good old days. The good old days ! please get me some; pour me fifteen minutes' worth in an hour-glass; ten minutes' worth; five minutes' worth, if that's the best you can do for me! If ever there was such a thing as the good old days, let me see a few grains of it, for, as you know, I am mortally tired of all they tell me nowadays, of all they write to me, of all they do to me, and of everything I say and write and do, and above all tired of Rabelaisian inventories such as the one I am making up at this very moment." "That can all be arranged without changing what I have to tell 8

you," said Doctor Noir, inspecting the ceiling as though following the wanderings of a fly. "Alas !" said Stello, "I know only too well that you submit cheerfully to the boredom you inflict on others." And he turned his face to the wall. This remark and Stello's attitude notwithstanding, the Doctor began, with admirable self-confidence.

9

THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA

Chapter Four

THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA

T

HE scene was the Trianon; Mademoiselle de Coulanges was lying down after dinner on a brocaded sofa, her head toward the fireplace and her feet to the window; King Louis XV was lying on another sofa facing hers, with his feet to the fireplace and his back to the window. Both of them were in full dress, he with his red heels and silk stockings, she in high-heeled shoes and stockings worked with gold; he in a sky-blue velvet costume, she in a hooped petticoat under a pink damask dress; he powdered and curled, she curled and powdered; he with a book in his hand, asleep, she with a book in her hand, yawning. (At this point Stello felt ashamed to be lying down and sat up on his couch.) The sunlight poured into the room from all sides, since it was only three o'clock in the afternoon, and the broad beams assumed the blue of the silk curtains through which they passed. There were four very high windows and four very long shafts of light; each of these shafts was like a Jacob's ladder in which golden dustmotes swirled like myriads of celestial sprites rising and falling with infinite speed, though not the faintest draught could be felt in this, the most thoroughly padded and upholstered room that ever was known. The top of each ladder of blue light was propped upon the fringes of the curtain, while its ample base spread out over the fireplace. The hearth was filled with a lively fire, built upon heavy gilt copper andirons that represented Pygmalion and Ganymede; and Ganymede, Pygmalion, the large andirons, and the fire itself blazed and glittered with a deep red flame in the celestial blue atmosphere. Mademoiselle de Coulanges was the prettiest, the most melting, 13

the most delicate, and the least publicized of the king's feminine intimates. She was a delectable little body, was Mademoiselle de Coulanges. I can't vouch for her ever having had a soul, for I never saw anything about her which would give me the right to say she did; and it was for this very reason that her master liked her.— Pray tell: of what possible use was a soul at the Trianon?—To produce harangues on repentance, principles of moral training, religion, self-sacrifice, homesickness, fears for one's future state, disdain of the world, indifference to oneself, etc., etc.? These litanies of the saintly ladies who frequented the splendid Deer-Park were known beforehand to the happy prince, and he could read the responses in advance at any point. They always began in the same way, and he was tired of them, knowing that they always ended in the same way. What a wearisome parley: "Oh! Sire, do you think God will ever forgive me?" "Ah ! my pretty, no question of it; He is so obliging !" "And I, how am I to forgive myself?" "We'll manage that somehow, my child, you're so obliging !" "Is this the upshot of my upbringing at Saint-Cyr?" "All your girl-friends made good matches, my dear !" "Oh! my poor mother will die from this !" "She wants to be a Marquise, I'll make her a Duchess, with the privilege of the Footstool." "Ah, Sire, how generous !—But what of Heaven!" "We haven't had such a fine morning since June first." All of this would have been unendurable. But with Mademoiselle de Coulanges there was nothing of the sort: absolute docility ... she was the most naive and innocent of sinners; she possessed an unparalleled calm, an imperturbable sang-froid in the midst of her happiness, which seemed to her simply the greatest in the world. Not once a day did it occur to her to think of yesterday or of tomorrow; she never inquired about the mistresses who had preceded her, showed not a trace of jealousy or of melancholy, received the king, when he visited her, and, the rest of the time, had herself powdered, curled, and pinned, in a straight braid, frizzled, or in ringlets; looked at herself, pomaded herself, made faces in the mirror, stuck out her tongue, smiled at herself, bit her lip, pricked the fingers of her waiting-woman, scorched her with the curling-iron, put rouge on her nose and beauty-patches on her eyes; she ran round her room, whirled in a pirouette until her skirt swelled like a balloon, and sat down in the midst of it, con14

vulsed with laughter. Sometimes (on her studious days) she would practise dancing the minuet with a hoop skirt and a long train, without once turning her back to the king's armchair; but this represented her most serious effort and the profoundest calculation of her life; and then in sheer impatience she would tear with her hands the long dress of watered silk which she had had so much trouble steering around the room. In compensation for this labour she would have herself drawn in pastels, in a blue or pink silk dress, with pompons at each knot of the corset, wings on her back, a quiver on her shoulder and a butterfly drowned in the powder of her hair; they called it "Psyche" or "Diana the Huntress," and it was the height of fashion. In moments of rest or of languor, Mademoiselle de Coulanges' eyes were of an incomparable softness. Each was as beautiful as the other, whatever M. 1'Abbe de Voisenon may have had to say of them in the unpublished Memoirs which I happen to have seen: His Reverence was not ashamed to maintain that the right eye was a little higher than the left, and he composed two extremely malicious madrigals on the subject, which were sharply challenged, to be sure, by his Worship the Lord Chief Justice. But it is high time, in this century of fair play and good faith, that the truth be proclaimed in all its purity, in order to rectify the harm done by base jealously. Yes, indeed, Mademoiselle de Coulanges had two eyes of perfectly equal sweetness; they were almond-shaped, with very long, blond eyelashes; the lashes cast small shadows on her cheeks; her cheeks were pink without benefit of rouge; her lips were rosy without coral; her neck was white with blue shadows, without white paint or blue shadow; her wasp-waist could have been encircled by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl, and her steelribbed corset was scarcely tightened, since there was room there for the stem of a large bouquet, which stood perfectly upright. Goodness ! How white and dimpled were her hands ! Heavens ! How plump were her forearms ! Her little elbows were surrounded with hanging lace, and her shoulders tightly encased in closefitting sleeves. What an enchanting spectacle! Nevertheless, the king slept on. The lovely eyes were both open; but then they gradually shut over the book, and remained shut for a long while (it was Marmontel's Mariages Samnites, a work which has been translated into Is

every language, as the author confidentially informs us). So the lovely eyes remained closed for a very long time, then opened languidly, probing the soft blue light of the chamber; the eyelids were slightly swollen, and even more slightly tinted with pink, whether from sleepiness, or from the strain of reading three whole pages at one sitting; for, as far as tears are concerned, it is well known that Mademoiselle de Coulanges shed only one in her life, and that was when her cat Zulme was kicked by that brute M. Dorat de Cubieres, a regular dragoon if ever there was one, a man so martial that he never even put beauty-patches on his cheeks, and bumped into all the furniture with his steel sword, instead of wearing a whalebone `dummy.' Chapter Five AN INTERRUPTION "GOOD grief!" cried Stello dolefully, "where did you ever get that style, my dear Doctor? You hitch yourself up from the last word of one sentence to the beginning of the next like a cripple climbing the stairs on two wooden legs." "In the first place, the vapid character of the Louis Quinze period has an enervating effect on my style; then, too, I've taken a notion to try my hand at fine writing, in order to get into the spirit of some of your own friends." "Oh ! Don't rely on them," said Stello, "for one of them, by no means the dullest of the lot, once remarked, `I don't always agree with myself.' So please speak simply, gloomy Doctor, and perhaps I won't be quite so bored." The doctor continued as follows: Chapter Six SEQUEL OF DOCTOR NOIR'S STORY SUDDENLY the mouth of Mademoiselle de Coulanges opened, i6

and from her charming bosom there issued a piercing, fluty scream which effectively roused Louis XV, the Well-Beloved. "Oh, my darling! What happened?" cried he, extending both beruffled hands towards her. The two pretty feet of the most perfect of mistresses dropped from the sofa and sprinted to the far side of the room, with a speed which was quite astonishing when one considers the heels with which they were encumbered. The monarch rose with dignity, placed his hand on the damascened hilt of his sword, half drawing it with the same motion, and sought the enemy about him. The pretty head of Mademoiselle de Coulanges was thrown back on the prince's ruffles, and her blond hair spread out in a light cloud of scented powder. "I thought I saw," said her sweet voice .. . "Oh ! I know, I know, my dear ..." said the king, with tears in his eyes, smiling with affection, and playing with the curls of the languid perfumed head; "I know what you mean, you little silly." "No; really," she said; "your doctor knows very well that some of them do go mad." "We'll send for him," said the king; "but what ifit is so? Come, come, you ... baby !" he added, patting her on the cheek as though she were a little girl; "What of it? Do you think their jaws are big enough to bite you?" "Yes, yes, that's just what I do think, and I can't bear the thought!" breathed the rosy lips of Mademoiselle de Coulanges. Her lovely eyes showed signs of turning towards heaven, and dropped two tears. One fell to either side: the right one flowed quickly from the corner of the eye whence it had sprung, like Venus emerging from the bright blue sea; this pretty tear travelled down to the chin and came to rest there of its own accord in a little dimple, the better to be seen; and there it stayed, like a pearl in a rosy mollusc. The adorable tear on the left took an entirely different course; tiny, and slightly elongated, it made its appearance timidly; then it grew visibly larger, and lodged in the finest, the longest, the silkiest eyelashes that ever were seen. The WellBeloved devoured them both. Despite this consolation, Mademoiselle de Coulanges' breast filled with sighs till it seemed about to burst, and she gasped out: D

'7

"I caught one ... I caught one the day before yesterday; I'm sure it was mad; it's been such a hot summer!" "Calm yourself, calm yourself; my queen! I'll dismiss my whole staff and all my ministers, rather than suffer you to discover one more such monster in the royal apartments." Suddenly the beatific checks of Mademoiselle de Coulanges blanched, her beauteous forehead contracted horribly, her plump fingers fastened on something brown the size of a pin head, and her ruby lips (at that moment they were blue) cried out: "Look! what do you call that if it isn't a flea?" "0 perfect joy!" exclaimed the prince, with the faintest possible hint of irony: "a crumb of tobacco! Is it mad? May the gods forfend!" The white arms of Mademoiselle de Coulanges threw themselves about the neck of the king. His Majesty, exhausted by this violent interlude, lay down again upon his sofa. She stretched out on hers like a housecat, and said: "Sire, I beg of you, do get me the Doctor, your Majesty's physician." So they sent for me.

Chapter Seven CREDO "WHERE were you?" asked Stello, turning his head with an effort; but a moment later he let it fall heavily again. "At the bedside of a dying poet," answered Doctor Noir with terrifying composure. "But before I go any further, I want to ask you one question. Are you a poet? Examine yourself well, and tell me whether you feel within yourself that you are a poet." Stello heaved a deep sigh, and after musing for a moment, replied, in the monotonous cadence of the evening prayer, his forehead resting on a pillow as if he would have liked to bury his whole head in it: "I have faith in myself because I feel at the bottom of my heart a secret power, something indefinable and invisible, which is at Iö

once a presentiment of the future and an insight into the past, where lie the mysterious germs of the present. I have faith in myself because there exists in creation nothing beautiful, nothing grand, nothing harmonious which does not send a prophetic quiver through me, which does not make itself felt in my very bowels, and fill my eyes with divine and mysterious tears. I believe firmly that I have been called to a transcendental vocation; the proof is the boundless pity which all men, my companions in misfortune, inspire in me, and my constant desire to reach out to them and sustain them with words of sympathy and love. Like a flame that sinks and gutters when the oil that feeds it fails the wick, but soars in splendour and lights the temple to the very roof when the lamp is filled, so I too feel the light of thought and inspiration grow dim when Love, that indefinable force that sustains my life, leaves me forsaken of its ardent strength; but while it lives in me, my whole soul lights up, and I understand at once Eternity, Infinity, the whole Creation, together with its creatures and its Fate; and then it is that the golden phoenix of Illusion settles on my lips, and sings. "But I believe that once the gift of fortifying the weak begins to wither in the poet, then his life will also wither; for if he is not of use to everyone, he is of no use at all. "I believe in the eternal struggle of our inner life, which warms and fructifies, against the external life, which withers and repels, and I invoke from above the thoughts that kindle and concentrate the poetic forces of my life: Devotion and Pity." "All that proves nothing but a good heart," said Doctor Noir; nevertheless you may be a poet, so I'll continue." " And he did.

Chapter Eight ONLY HALF MAD YES, I was with a very unusual young man. The archbishop of Paris, M. de Beaumont, had asked me to come to his palace, because this unknown person had appeared there all alone, in 19

nothing but his shirt and frock-coat, and gravely asked him for the sacrament. I hurried to the archbishop's residence, where I did in fact find a man of some twenty-two years of age, with a serious, gentle face, attired in this excessively light costume. He was sitting in a big velvet armchair where the good old man had put him. Monsignor of Paris was in full ecclesiastical regalia, with violet socks, for on that very day he had to officiate at the festival of Saint Louis; but he had been kind enough to leave all his affairs until the very moment of the service itself, in order not to abandon this curious visitor, who appeared to arouse his strongest interest. When I entered the archbishop's bedroom, he was sitting near the poor young man, clasping his hand in his own wrinkled and trembling hands. He was watching him with a sort of terror, in despair because the invalid (for that he surely was) refused to touch the savoury little lunch the two servants had set out for him. The moment M. de Beaumont caught sight of me he said in a voice which betrayed his emotion: "Oh! come here immediately, my good Doctor! Here is a poor child who has thrown himself into my arms, Venite ad me! He came like a bird that has escaped from its cage, a bird caught by the chill on the rooftops, that flies into the first open window. Poor boy ! I've ordered clothes for him. He has the right principles, at any rate, for he came here to ask me for the sacrament; but I must have his confession first. You know that, Doctor; but he won't talk. He has put me in a very awkward position. I can't tell a thing about the state of his soul. His poor mind is very weak. Just a little while ago he cried a great deal, the dear child. My hands are still wet with his tears. Look !" Indeed, the old man's hands were still damp, like yellow parchment on which water will not dry. An old servant, who looked rather like a priest himself, brought in a seminarist's robe which he put on the invalid while the archbishop's domestics lifted him up, and then we were left alone. The new arrival had offered no resistance to being dressed. His eyes, although they were open, were clouded, and overshadowed by his blond eyebrows; the extreme redness of his eyelids, the fixity of his pupils, seemed very bad symptoms to me. I felt his pulse, and couldn't help shaking my head sadly. At that gesture, M. de Beaumont said: 20

"Give me a glass of water: I'm eighty, you know; it hurts." "Oh, it's nothing at all, Monsignor," said I. "Only, there's something about that pulse that means neither health nor fever; it's insanity," I added quietly. I spoke to the sick man: "What's your name?" No answer. His eyes remained fixed and dull. "Don't torment him, Doctor," said M. de Beaumont; "he's already told me three times that his name is Nicholas-JosephLaurent." "But those are only Christian names," said I. "What does that matter !" said the good archbishop impatiently. "That's good enough for my purposes; Christian names are the soul's names. It's by our Christian names that the saints know us. This child is a good Christian." I have frequently observed that there is such a direct and immediate connection between thought and vision that each controls the other. A thought, it is true, may arrest one's glance; but the glance, in turn, may also divert one's thoughts. I have often tested this principle with the insane. I passed my hands over the young man's staring eyes and closed them. He returned to his senses immediately, and began to speak. "Ah, monsignor !" said he; "let me have the sacrament. But quickly, please, before my eyes open on the light again; only the sacrament will deliver me from my enemy, the enemy by which I am possessed; my enemy is an idea, an idea that will soon come back !" "I used the right technique," I commented with a smile. But he went on. "Ah, monsignor, God is in that wafer, without a shadow of a doubt ... I never knew that a thought could become like a red-hot poker in one's brain ... God is sure to be in the host; and if you let me have the host, monsignor, the host will drive out that idea, and God will chase away the Philosophers ..." "You see that he thinks clearly enough," the archbishop murmured to me. "Let him go on." The poor fellow continued: "If there is anything that can conquer reason, it's faith; plain, absolute faith; and if anything can give one faith, it's the sacrament. 2I

Oh, do give me the host, if it was the host that helped Pascal! I can be cured if you give me the host while my eyes are closed; please hurry, give me the host." "Do you know your Confiteor?" asked the archbishop. But he didn't hear him. "Who can explain to me the doctrine of the Submission of the Reason?" he went on, shouting out the last words. "Saint Augustine has said: `The Reason would never submit if it didn't judge that it ought to submit. Consequently it is proper for it to submit, since it judges that it should.' But I, Nicholas-Joseph-Laurent, born at Fontenoy-le-Chateau, of a poor family, I tell you that if it submits to its own judgment it is submitting to itself, so that it isn't submitting at all, but is still the ruler. It's a vicious circle ! Saintly sophistry! School philosophy, fit to drive the Devil crazy. Oh, d'Alembert, you dear old pedant, will you stop tormenting me!" As he said this, he began to scratch his shoulder. I believe that was the result of my having left one of his eyes uncovered. I closed it with my left hand. "Alas !", said he, "monsignor, help me to call out like Pascal, Joy! Conviction, Knowledge, felt and true; Joy, joy, joy, and tears of joy, 0 God of Christ ... oblivion in you.

"He had been with the Christian God that day, from ten-thirty to twelve-thirty on the evening of Monday the twenty-fifth of November, 1654; consequently he was settled and sure of himself. He was lucky, that fellow! Oh, oh ! Now La Harpe is tugging at my feet! What do you want of me? I thought they threw La Harpe into the prompter's box together with Les Barniccides.You're dead!" At that moment I removed my hand, and he opened his eyes. "A rat!" he cried. "A rabbit! I swear by the Bible it's a rabbit. It's Voltaire ! it's Vault-air ! What a pretty pun ! Isn't my pun clever, my dear sir? There isn't a bookseller who would pay me a sou ... I didn't eat yesterday, or the day before, but I don't care, because I'm never hungry. My father is a ploughman, and I don't like to shake his hand, because it's bulky, and hard as wood. 22

Besides, he can't even talk French, the big peasant in the smock! It makes me blush when someone passes by. Where can I take him for a glass of wine? Do you think I would go to the pot-house with him? What would M. de Buffon, with his cuffs and his frills, have to say? ... A cat! ... That's a cat there under your foot, your Reverence...." Despite his extreme kindliness, M. de Beaumont had been unable to prevent himself from smiling occasionally, with tears in his eyes. But at this point he recoiled, rolling his armchair back with him, and seemed a little frightened. I took the young man's head in my hands and rocked it gently, as one shakes the bag in a lotto game, leaving my fingers over his lowered eyelids. The numbers which came out were all different. He sighed deeply, and spoke in a tone as calm as it had been agitated: "Thrice cursed is the fool who dares to say what he thinks before he's feathered his nest ! Hypocrisy, you are Right Reason! Thanks to you one need offend no one, and a poor man needs everybody's help. Holy pretence ! you are the supreme social law of every man born without an inheritance. Anyone who owns a field or has a lining to his pocket is his master, his lord, his protector. Why did the instinct for goodness and justice ever take root in my heart? My breast swelled beyond measure; torrents of anger flowed from it, and forced their way out like lava. The wicked were frightened; they made an outcry; they all rose up against me. How could I fight them all, I who am alone, I who am nobody, I who own nothing in the world but my poor pen and sometimes lack ink for that?" The worthy archbishop could endure no more. From time to time he had been extending his trembling hands towards the young man; now he raised himself heavily and went to embrace him. I had been holding my fingers over his eyes with strict determination, but I was finally forced to remove them, for I felt something pushing them away, as though the eyelids were swelling. As soon as I released the pressure, copious tears emerged between my fingers and poured over his pale cheeks. Sobs shook his chest, the veins of his neck showed swollen and blue, and he uttered little cries like a child in its mother's arms. "Plague on it, sir, you had better leave him alone," said I; 23

"it's going badly. First he turns red all of a sudden, and now he's white, and the pulse is vanishing ... He's fainted ... Fine! now he's unconscious ... Good night!" The kind prelate was in despair, and gave me a great deal of trouble by trying to help. I used every device to bring the sick man back to consciousness, and I was beginning to succeed when word was brought that a post-chaise from Versailles was waiting to take me to the King. I wrote down what remained to be done, and left. "Damme!" said I; "I surely will mention that young man." "You would do me the greatest service, dear Doctor, for our charity fund is empty. Go quickly now," said M. de Beaumont; "I'll keep my foundling here." And I saw that he blessed him, with tears and trembling. I mounted the post-chaise. Chapter Nine THE TALE OF THE MAD FLEA (continued) WHEN I left for Versailles, night had fallen. I was travelling at what they call the King's pace, with the postilion galloping and the trace-horse running at full speed. In two hours I was at the Trianon. The avenues were lit up, and lines of carriages were passing back and forth. I thought I would find the entire court in the private suites; but these were people who had been turned away and were travelling back to Paris. The crowd was all outside, and in the King's chamber there was nobody but Mademoiselle de Coulanges. "Ah! here he is at last!" said she, giving me her hand to kiss. The King, that delightful man, was walking up and down his room drinking coffee from a little blue porcelain cup. As soon as he saw me he began to laugh heartily. "By God, Doctor, you're no longer needed," said he. "The alarm was serious, but the danger is past. Milady here got by with nothing but a scare. You know our little mania," he added, leaning on my shoulder and whispering loudly in my ear; "we're afraid 24

of rabies; we think it's all over the place. Oh, wouldn't it be just fine to have a dog in this house ! I don't know whether I'll be allowed to go hunting from now on." "Well," said I, approaching the fire, which was lit although it was summer (a good practice in the country, by the way) ; "well," said I, "what can I do for your Highness?" "Madame maintains," said he, rocking from one of his red heels to the other, "that there are certain beasts, I swear, no bigger than that," as he flipped a grain of tobacco from the lace of his cuff, "that there are certain beasts—Oh, come on, now! Tell him yourself, Madame!" Mademoiselle de Coulanges had settled on the sofa like a cat, and was hiding her forehead under one of those silk doilies that they used to put on the backs of chairs to protect them from hair powder. She peeped out like a child who has stolen a goody and is pleased to have it known. She was as pretty as all of Boucher's Cupids and all of Greuze's heads in one. "Oh, but Sire !" she said, very faintly, "you speak so well!" "But Madame, you realize, I can't really divine your medical opinions. "Oh, but Sire, you talk so well about anything!" "Please, Doctor, help her unburden herself! You see that she'll never come out with it by herself." Truth to tell, I too was rather embarrassed, since I didn't know what he was driving at, and I wasn't to find out till much later, in the nineties. "Well, well, now; come, come !" said I, moving closer to the little favourite: "well, now; what does all this mean now, Madame? Now, now ! did something happen to us? ... we have some little fears, some little notion or other? ... Women's fancies? Ha, ha! Young women's fancies, Sire ! ... We know all about that! .. . Now what's the trouble? What do you call these creatures? Come now, Madame ! We're not going to feel poorly, are we? .. . In a word, all the agreeable and friendly things one usually says to the young women. All of a sudden Mademoiselle de Coulanges looked at the King and me; I looked at the King and her; the King looked at her and me; and the three of us burst into the longest fit of laughter I've heard in my lifetime. She was really choking, pointing her 25

finger at me; as for the King, he spilled the coffee on his gilt vest. When he had stopped laughing, he drew me aside and made me sit down on his sofa. "Now," he said, "let's talk sense for a while, and let that little scatter-brain laugh at us in comfort. We're just as foolish as she is. Tell me, Doctor, how has life in Paris been this past week?" As he seemed to be in a good mood, I said: "I'd rather tell your Highness how death has been. Dying in Paris has been a rather uncomfortable business of late; at least, for someone who happens to be a poet." "A poet !" said the King, drawing back with a frown, and crossing his legs in irritation. "A poet!" said Mademoiselle de Coulanges; and I observed her lower lip assume the shape of a cloven cherry, like the lips of all the female portraits of Louis XIV's time. "Of course !" said I to myself; "I knew it. All a man needs is that title to seem either ridiculous or detestable." "But who in the devil can he mean?" the King resumed. "Is La Harpe dead? or is he sick?" "Not he, Sire; on the contrary," said I, "it's another one, an unimportant little poet, and he's in a bad way; I have my doubts about being able to save him, because every time he improves, a fit of indignation brings on a relapse." I stopped talking and waited, but neither one of them asked me, "What's wrong with him?" So I began again, with my usual sang-froid. "You know, indignation creates a terrible overflow in the blood and the bile; it can produce a fearful inner flood in a decent man." Dead silence. Neither one showed any sign of consternation. "And if the King," I went on, "has such a kind interest in even the least of authors, perhaps he also knows the one I've just come from?" The silence was prolonged. No one asked, "What's his name?" That was unfortunate, for I did happen to know his name, that name of melancholy memory, a synonym for bitter satire and despair.... Don't ask me yet. Listen. I continued in a careless tone in order not to sound like a suppliant: "If it wouldn't be imposing on your Majesty's kindness, I would go so far as to ask for some subvention ... some trifling benefaction...." 26

"Buried! buried! We are just buried, sir," said Louis XV, "by requests of this kind for scoundrels who use the charity we give them to attack us." Then he drew closer to me. "You know," said he, "I'm really surprised that for all your familiarity with society, you still don't know that when somebody doesn't answer a question, he means that he doesn't want to answer. You've forced me into a corner; very well, I'll tell you what I think of your Poets: I see no reason why I should support these fellows so that they can have a good time the next day at our expense. The minute they have a few pennies they start to dictate to us, and then they do their best to get thrown into the Bastille. That makes me look a bit like Richelieu, doesn't it? The highbrows like that; but I think they're asses. Damn me, but I'm tired of being a laughing stock for those fellows. They'll manage to do plenty of damage without my help. ... I'm not so young any longer, but I've contrived to keep my head above water so far; I don't know whether my successor will do as well. Anyway, that's his business. Do you happen to know, Doctor, that for all my careless air, I'm no fool? I see quite clearly where were being led." At this point the King got up and began to walk rapidly around the room, shaking his frill. You can guess that I didn't feel very comfortable. I got up, too. "Do you think my dear brother the King of Prussia benefited from the kind reception he gave your poetical friends? He thought he was playing me a trick by taking in Voltaire: but I was immensely pleased to be rid of him, and all the King got for his pains was some insolence that obliged him to have the little man thrashed—Really, now ! they think that because they can dress up some philosophical approximations and some political generalizations in rhetorical frippery, they have a right to read us sermons from the pulpit before they're out of school !" Here he stopped and continued more merrily: "There is nothing worse than a sermon, Doctor, and I listen to as few as possible outside my chapel. What do you want me to do for your protégé? Do you want me to give him a pension? Look: this is what would happen. "Tomorrow he would call me Mars, on the strength of the battle of Fontenoy, and this dear little Mademoiselle de Coulanges, 27

who has no pretensions to such a title, would become Minerva." (I thought she would get angry. She was playing with her fan; she didn't even wince.) "Two days later he would want to play the statesman, and start lecturing on the English system of government in order to get an influential job; they wouldn't give it to him, and they would be wise not to. In four days' time he would start to make a laughingstock of my father, my grandfather, and the rest of my ancestors back to, and including, Saint Louis. He would call the King of Prussia Socrates, with all his page-boys, and dub me Sardanapalus, on account of these ladies who come to visit me at Trianon. We would send him a lettre de cachet; he would be overjoyed: now he can be a martyr for his philosophy." "One moment, Sire," I interposed; "this one is being martyred by the philosophers." "It's all the same," said the King; "Jean Jacques was no greater friend of mine for being an enemy of theirs. All they care about is making a name for themselves, at any price. They're birds of a feather; each one of them, just to aggrandize himself, wants to nibble off a piece of the cake of monarchy with his little teeth; and since I've let them have their way, they're winning hands down. Those intellectuals are our natural enemies; the only kind who are worth anything are the musicians and the dancers: they don't insult anybody with their performances, and they neither sing nor dance politics. So I like them; but don't let me hear a word about the rest." As I opened my mouth to answer, he took me gently by the arm, half seriously and half in jest, and began to lounge with his usual rocking gait towards the door of the suite. There was nothing much I could do but follow. "So you like poetry, Doctor !—You know, I can recite poetry as well as those who write it: Three rascals whole, though wits but half, Assume that once they're bound in calf They ought to figure large in State; Their pens decide a sceptre's fate; A hint of notoriety And pensions to their arms should fly; z8

On them alone the heavens gaze; Their names in distant cities blaze; In science they've prodigious lore Of everything we knew before; `For thirty years we've thought and paced!' (Ten thousand eves of utter waste); Well daubed with Latin and with Greek Their muddy booty to bespeak— Of ancient tomes discarded trash; With slender knowledge always brash; Inept for work, and void of sense, Their rant is all their excellence; Of folly full, and swagger, fit Both wisdom to disgrace, and wit. "You see that after all, `At Court not all are fools,' " he added as we came to the end of the room; "you see that your dear poets are even greater simpletons than we are, since they themselves furnish us with rods to whip them." At that the King opened the door; I passed through with a bow. He dropped my arm, turned back, and shut himself in. ... I heard a burst of laughter from Mademoiselle de Coulanges. I have never been quite certain whether that could be called `being shown the door.'

Chapter Ten AN IMPROVEMENT STELLO raised his head from the cushion. He got up, stretched out his arms, coloured suddenly, and cried out in anger: "Look here ! who gave you the right to go begging for him like that? Did he ask you to? Hadn't he suffered quietly enough until madness began to rattle its bells in his poor head? If he did maintain the dignity of his character throughout his youth, if he did pretend for twenty years to possess luxury and wealth, out of pride and in order to avoid asking for favours; you could have 29

destroyed the glory of his entire life in that one moment. That's a bad thing to do, Doctor; I wouldn't want to have such an action on my conscience for whatever years I still have to endure. I count it among the worst of those crimes (and there are a great many of them) which the law doesn't punish. It is like selling or burning the memoirs of some great man after promising him on his dying bed to preserve them, when his last glance has caressed them and his last breath has been devoted to their consecration.—You betrayed that young man when you went begging charity for him from a callous king.—Poor boy! when he had some glimmering of reason (that is, when his eyes were shut, according to your experiment), he could still, though he felt himself dying, congratulate himself on his decency in his distress, and feel proud that he had left no man the right to say, 'He went a-begging.' And at that very time you undertook to prostitute the dignity of his soul? No, that was really a foul action!" Doctor Noir smiled with utter tranquillity. "Sit down," he said; "you're already improving; you're no longer so concerned about your sickness. A shameful habit that many people have.... It gives their disease a double dominion. Why should you be surprised that I myself once fell victim to that common distemper, the philanthropic mania? But let's get back to my exit from the Trianon. "I was so disconcerted by my reception there that I didn't set foot in the archbishop's house again, and tried to put the young invalid whom I had seen in it entirely out of my mind. Within a few minutes I had succeeded in dismissing all thought of him, by bringing into play my highly developed capacity for conquering my sensibilities." "Noble achievement!" groaned Stello. "I thought I was rid of that lunatic, when one fine night I was sent for to see somebody in an attic where a deaf old caretaker showed me in. " `What do you expect me to do for him?' I asked as I entered. `He's a dead man.' "She didn't answer; she simply left me alone with him. I had difficulty in recognizing who it was."

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Chapter Eleven THE COT HE was half-lying on a trestle bed that stood in the middle of the empty room. The place was entirely dark but for a candle stuck in an inkwell, set up high on a stone chimney-piece. He was sitting up in the cot, on the thin and sunken mattress, a ragged woollen blanket over his legs, bareheaded, his hair in disorder, his body stiff and straight, his bare chest labouring in the convulsions of the death agony. Since there was no chair, I also sat down on the folding bed, and put my feet on a little black leather box on which I had set a glass and two vials. Nothing could save him any longer, but it might be possible to relieve his suffering. His features were noble, and very handsome; he was staring fixedly at me, and just above his cheeks, between the nose and the eyes, there was a nervous contraction that no convulsion can duplicate, that is caused by no malady, that says to the doctor: "Be off with you!"; that Death plants on its conquests as a flag of victory. In one hand he clutched his pen, his very last pen, well stained with ink, half bare and half bristling; in the other hand a piece of bread. His legs knocked and shook so hard that the unsteady bed creaked again. I was listening closely to his difficult breathing, and I could hear the cavernous hoarseness of the death-rattle: I knew the presence of death at this sound, as the experienced sailor knows the coming storm by the fine whistling of the wind which precedes it. "Must you always reappear in the same form to all those you meet?" said I to Death, low enough so that my lips would produce only an indistinct buzz in the ears of the dying man. "I recognize you everywhere by the hollow voice you lend to young and old alike. Ah, how well I know you, you with all your terrors, no terrors now to me; I sense the dust of your wings in the air; I can smell their dull fetor on your approach, and I alone see the fine ash that boils up at their beating.—So here you are, Inevitable One; it's you indeed !—You've come to rescue this man from his agony; pick him up like a child, and take him away. Save him; he is yours; 31

save him from the gnawing torment of which we cannot be freed on this earth before we rest in you, compassionate friend!" I wasn't mistaken; it was she. The sick man's anguish was suspended in that sudden moment of divine relief that precedes the body's eternal immobility. His eyes widened in surprise, his mouth relaxed and smiled; he passed his tongue over it twice, as though to taste once more from some invisible goblet a last drop of life's savour, and said in the hoarse voice of the dying, which comes from the bowels and seems to come from deeper still: "At life's glad feast disconsolate reveller ..." "It was Gilbert !" cried Stello, clapping his hands. "It was no longer Gilbert," said Doctor Noir, with a half-grin. "That was all he had to say. His chin fell on his chest, and his hands crushed both the crust and the poet's pen. For a long time his right arm lay in my hand, as I sought his pulse in vain. I took the pen and rested it on his mouth; it fluttered with a light breath, like a kiss from the departing soul. Then nothing more moved in the down of the pen, nor did any faint vapour darken it. I closed the dead man's eyes and took my hat."

Chapter Twelve AN INTERRUPTION "WHAT an awful ending," said Stello, raising his head from the pillow, and looking at the Doctor with troubled eyes. "Where were his relatives?" "Oh, they were off ploughing their fields, and I was more than glad!" "What do you mean?" said Stello. "When a sickness lasts a little too long, the relatives begin to play the most disagreeable role. For the first week, when they feel death approaching, they weep and wring their hands; the following week, they become accustomed to the thought of the invalid's dying, calculate the consequences, and speculate on them; the week 32

after that they begin to whisper to each other: `This staying up is killing me'; `They're prolonging his sufferings'; `It would be better for everyone if it were over.' And if he hangs on for a few more days, they begin to look at me askance. My word, I almost prefer the nurses; they do feel the quality of the sheets on the sly, but at least they don't say anything." "0, you black Doctor, you with your ineluctable truths !" sighed Stello. "Besides, Gilbert had cursed his father and mother, with justification; first, for having brought him into this world; second, for having taught him to read." "Alas," said Stello, "you're right; it was he who wrote: Accursed creatures who begot me! Father, mother, purblind beasts! Beggars, that for all estate Bequeathed me abject indigence; Nor left me, in sweet ignorance, My humble plot to cultivate .. . To restless thought you furnished fuel .

ff

"Sensible lines," said Doctor Noir. "Bad rhymes," said the other, from habit. "He was right to complain of having been taught to read, for as soon as he learned to read he turned poet, and from that time on he belonged to the tribe which the earthly powers execrate... . As for myself, as I had the honour to tell you, I took my hat, and I was on my way out when I encountered the proprietors of the cot, lamenting the loss of a key. I knew where it was." "Oh, how you torture me, merciless creature," said Stello. "Please don't finish the story. I know the rest." "As you please," said the Doctor modestly. "I won't insist on giving a surgical description; that's not the sort of thing by which I expect to cure you. I was simply saying that I went back into the poor fellow's room; I opened him up; I took the key out of the oesophagus, and I returned it to the owners."

E

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Chapter Thirteen ONE THOUGHT FOR ANOTHER STELLO, overcome, remained silent for a long time after the dismal doctor had finished his story. Like everyone else, he knew of Gilbert's calamitous end, but he also found himself possessed by that sort of terror which the account of an eye-witness inspires in most people. He was looking at and had touched the hand which had touched, the eyes which had seen. And the more impervious the frigid story-teller showed himself to the emotions of his tale, the more overwhelmed by them Stello felt himself to be. He could already sense the influence of the harsh soul-doctor, who with his gradual insinuations and his inexorable reasoning always forced him to the inevitable conclusion. Stello's thoughts were seething in his head, but they could not escape from the charmed circle within which Doctor Noir had bound them like a magician. The story of such callous treatment of poetic talent aroused his indignation, but he hesitated to let his resentment overflow, feeling himself restrained beforehand by his friend's iron logic. The tears swelled his eyelids, but he held them back by frowning. A fraternal pity filled his breast. Consequently, he did what people in such circumstances all too often do: he changed the subject. "What makes you think that I had an absolute hereditary monarchy in mind, or that I would make any sacrifices for such a system? Besides, why select this example of a forgotten man? How many authors you could have found during that same period who were encouraged, loaded with favours, caressed and pampered !" "On condition that they were willing to sell their minds," said the doctor; "I told you about Gilbert's case because it gave me the opportunity to reveal to you the private opinion of monarchy about the poetic tribe; it's understood that by poets we mean all those who serve the Muse, or the Arts, as you prefer. I discovered this secret opinion at the source, as I have just told you, and I have entered it faithfully in the record. If you wish, I can add to it the story of Kitty Bell, in the event that your political devotion is reserved for the triple machine of `representative monarchy.' I was 34

a witness to this anecdote in 177o, that is, precisely ten years before Gilbert's death." "Good grief!" said Stello; "were you born without bowels? Are you not possessed by unquenchable sorrow when you consider the fact that every year in France ten thousand men, goaded by their education, leave their fathers' tables to come and beg at some more elevated board for bread they will not get?" "What? do you take me for an infant? I've spent my whole life looking for a carpenter clever enough to make a table that would have room for everybody. But while I was looking, I had the opportunity to observe what sorts of crumbs fall from the monarchic feast; you've just had a taste of them. I've also seen the ones that drop from constitutional tables, and I intend to tell you about those too. Don't assume that in what I shall say there will be the slightest element of drama, nor any of those entanglements of characters tying their interests into a skein that the final chapter or the fifth act undoes very neatly: you people can do that sort of thing without my help. I intend to tell you the simple story of my simple Englishwoman, Kitty Bell. Here it is, just as it transpired beneath my own eyes." He turned over in his fingers a bulky snuff-box containing a lock of hair braided in a diamond-shaped pattern, and began as follows:

35

THE STORY OF KITTY BELL

Chapter Fourteen

THE STORY OF KITTY BELL

K

ITTY BELL was one of those young women of whom one finds so many in England, even among the common people. She had a sweet, pale, longish face, and was tall and slender, with rather large feet and something gauche and shy about her that I found charming. Judging by her elegant and distinguished air, by her aquiline nose, by her big, blue eyes, you would have taken her for one of those mistresses of Louis XIV whose portraits on enamel you are so fond of, rather than for what she was: namely, a cake-vendor. Her little shop was near Parliament, and sometimes members of both Houses would dismount at her door and come in to eat buns and mince-pies while continuing their discussion of the latest Bill. This had become a sort of habit through which the shop grew year by year, prospering under the care of Kitty's two children. They were eight and ten years old respectively, with fresh, pink faces, blond hair, bare shoulders, and big white aprons before and behind, hanging on them like chasubles. Kitty's husband, Master Bell, was one of London's best saddlers, and so engrossed in his profession, in the manufacture and improvement of his bridles and his stirrups, that he hardly ever set foot in his wife's shop during the day. She was sober and virtuous; he knew it, he relied on her, and I felt sure that he was not deceived. To look at Kitty, you would have said she was the statue of Peace itself. She radiated order and tranquillity, and each of her attitudes confirmed her equanimity. She would lean on her counter and incline her head in a mild pose, watching her two pretty children with unalterable patience. She would wait for customers to come in, stand up respectfully to serve them, answer appropriately, saying only what was essential, give directions to 39

her children, fold the change modestly in a piece of paper; and that, to all intents and purposes, was what her days consisted of. I had always been struck by the beauty and the length of her blond hair, all the more so because in 1770 Englishwomen no longer put anything on their heads but a light dusting of powder; besides, back in 1770 I was rather prone to admire beautiful hair, bound in a broad chignon on the neck, and hanging in long ringlets at the sides. I had a host of agreeable comparisons handy to apply to this lovely and modest dame. My English was rather ridiculous, as is usually the case with Frenchmen, but I would establish myself in front of the counter, eating her cakes and making my comparisons. I would compare her to Pamela, then to Clarissa, one moment to Ophelia, a bit later to Miranda. She had soda water poured for me and would always smile at me with a pleasant and attentive air, as if expecting some particularly amusing sally from `the Frenchman'; she even laughed when I laughed. This would go on for an hour or two, and then she would humbly beg my pardon and confess that she didn't understand German. Nevertheless, I would go there again; it did me good to see her face. I would continue to speak to her with the same confidence and she invariably listened with the same deference. Besides, her children liked me for my walking-stick a la Tronchin, which they would carve up with their knives; it was a good piece of cane! It sometimes happened that I would be reading my newspaper in a corner of her shop, my presence completely forgotten by her and by all the customers, talkers, disputants, eaters, and drinkers in the place; at those times I would ply my favourite trade of observer. And this was one of the things that I observed. Every day, at the hour when the fog was thick enough to hide that sort of dark-lantern that the English call the sun, a sun which is no more than the caricature of ours (as ours is no more than a parody of the Egyptian sun); as I was saying, every day about two o'clock in the afternoon, when dusk is approaching and the city hovers between daylight and torch-light, a shadow would pass on the sidewalk before the windows of the bakery shop; Kitty Bell would instantly get up from her counter, the older child would open the door, and she would give him something with which he would run outside; the shadow would vanish, and the mother would go back inside. 40

"Ah, Kitty, Kitty !" said I to myself; "that shadow is the shadow of some young man, the shadow of an adolescent ! What have you done, Kitty Bell ! Kitty Bell, what will you do? That shadow is a slender shadow with a lively step ! The black cloak that envelops it does not conceal the fineness of its form. Under the corner of the cocked hat pulled down over its eyes one can see two flames, two flames such as Prometheus must have scooped from the sun !" The first time I witnessed this little by-play, I left the shop with a bitter feeling because I found that it spoiled the image of a serene and virtuous Kitty that my fancy had enjoyed; besides, you know that no man can be the calm spectator of any other man's success with a woman. Even if he has no intention of pressing any claims himself he will find the lucky man insufferable. The second time, I left with a gratified smile, complimenting myself on my astuteness in having perceived what all the stout Lords and lanky Ladies who patronized the shop would leave without knowing. The third time I found myself so anxious to learn all about this pretty little secret that I would have willingly become a party to all the crimes of the Pelopidae if Kitty Bell had whispered to me, "Yes, Monsieur, you've guessed it." But Kitty Bell didn't whisper to me at all. Always as placid as though she had just come out of church, she wouldn't even condescend to look at me with embarrassment, as if to say: "I'm sure that you are much too well-bred and well-mannered to say anything; I would have preferred that you had not noticed; it's not very nice of you to stay so late every day on purpose." Nor did she look askance at me, with a resentful but domineering air, as if to signify: "Keep reading; this is none of your business." An impatient Frenchwoman, you may be sure, would have disposed of me soon enough; but she was too proud, or too self-confident, or too contemptuous of me; she sat at her counter with a smile that breathed such purity, such calm, and such piety that one would have sworn nothing whatever had happened. I did my best to attract her attention. I pursed my lips; I darted cunning glances at her; I coughed with grave authority, like an abb6 pondering the confession of an eighteen-year-old girl, or a judge who has just been cross-examining a counterfeiter; but it did me no good to snigger craftily, rubbing my hands as I paced rapidly up and down, 41

like a sly dog who recalls his own little pranks and hugs himself to see a familiar trick well played; nor did it help to stop suddenly before her, raise my eyes to heaven, and let my arms drop in despair, like someone who watches a young woman jump off a bridge in broad daylight; with equal futility did I abruptly fling down my newspaper and tear it to tatters, like some desperate idealist abandoning his dream of ushering mankind into an earthly paradise; and it was utterly useless for me to pass before her with a grand air and lowered eyes, leaning backward as I walked, like an emperor who is offended by the liberties which a page and a maid of honour have taken in his presence. With no better result did I run to the glass door the moment after the shadow had disappeared, and stop there like a Parisian tourist at the brink of a waterfall, arranging his scanty hair to make it look dishevelled by the zephyrs, and holding forth on his ineffable emotions while thinking of his cash dividends; and I had no greater success when I would decide to take the bull by the horns and march up to her like a coward playing the hero, who stops abruptly when he comes within range, at a loss what to think, do, or say next.—All my grimaces expressive of meditation, insight, confusion, contrition, compunction, renunciation, abnegation, prostration, resolution, authority, and explanation; in a word, my entire pantomime collapsed beneath this marble gaze, whose unvarying smile and ingenuous expression precluded my dropping even a cautious hint. I would still be at it (for I was determined not to be the loser, and I've always been devilish stubborn) ; yes, Sir, I would still be there. I'll swear by your whole Pantheon, if you like, twice decanonized by the canons, from which Ste. Genevieve was twice thrown out into the street (0 gentle Attila, what say you to that?) I swear I would still be there, if something hadn't happened to clear up the mystery of the amorous Will-o'-the-wisp, as I hope it will clear away the political Wills-o'-the-wisp you have been pursuing. Chapter Fifteen AN ENGLISH LETTER NEVER had the venerable city of London more graciously 42

displayed the splendour of its natural and artificial nebulae, nor been so lavish with yellow and grey fog mingled with the black smoke of coal; never had the sky shown so dead and dull a sun as on the particular day when I appeared earlier than usual at Kitty's little shop. The two pretty children were out in front of the copper door of the building. They weren't playing, but were walking gravely back and forth with a charmingly serious air, their hands behind their backs, in imitation of their father. One could almost smell the milk on their clean pink cheeks; I watched them for a while before going in. But when my gaze fell on their mother, I recoiled. The face was the same; the features were the same regular, calm features; but they were no longer Kitty Bell's. They belonged to a statue which resembled the original very closely. Never was marble statue paler than this one; there wasn't a solitary drop of blood under the white skin of the face. The lips were almost as white as the rest; the flame of life still showed only at the brink of the great eyes. Two lamps struggled with the murky, dying daylight to light the room. The lamps, on either side of her drooping head, created an unmistakably funereal impression. I sat down silently before the counter. She smiled. Whatever opinion you may have conceived of me as a result of my hard-headed reasoning and the harshness of my analytic method, I assure you that I have a very kind heart; I just don't let the world know about it. In I770 I still allowed it to be seen, which was a mistake that I've corrected since. So I approached the counter and reached a friendly hand to her. She pressed mine warmly, and then I felt a soft, crumpled sheet of note-paper between our hands. Abruptly, she showed me the letter, with a gesture as though she were pointing to a child of hers lying dead at her feet. She asked me whether I would understand. "I can read English," I said, taking her letter by one corner, but not daring to draw it towards me or glance at it without her permission. She understood my hesitation, and thanked me with a smile of both inexpressible sweetness and deadly sorrow, signifying, "Read on, friend; you have my permission; it can't make much difference.„ In our day, doctors play much the same role that priests did in the Middle Ages. To them are confided the secrets of conjugal 43

discord, of households convulsed by domestic vices and passions. The Abbe has made way for the Doctor, as if this society, on becoming materialist, had decided that the care of the soul would have to depend henceforth on the cure of the body. Since I had treated the children's gums and finger-nails, I had an automatic right to know their mother's secret sorrows. This certainty gave me confidence, and I read the letter. I have it with me; it will be the best possible medicine for your lamentable propensities. Listen. The doctor withdrew from his case an extremely yellow letter, the angles and folds of which opened like those of an old map, and began reading in English, as though determined not to spare the invalid a single word: "My Dear Madam: I will only confide to you ..." "0 God," cried Stello; "your English is terrible! Please translate the letter into our mother tongue, but try not to let your translator's mumblings, fumblings, and stumblings become too obtrusive; they make me feel that I'm chasing a hare over a ploughed field, with ten pounds of mud on each boot." "I'll try to see to it that the emotion isn't entirely lost en route," said Doctor Noir, looking blacker than ever; "and if you really feel that the risk is becoming excessive, shout, or ring the bell, or stamp on the floor to warn me." He continued as follows: "My dear lady: "In you alone will I confide, in you, my lady, in you, Kitty, in you, my reserved and tranquil beauty, the only soul to grant me the ineffable boon of pity. I have decided to leave your home forever, and I have found the means to repay my obligations to you. But I must lodge with you the secret of my ordeal, of my sorrows, of my silence, and of my frequent absence. I am too sombre a guest for your house; it is time for my stay to end. Please follow closely what I will tell you. "Today I am eighteen years old. If, as I believe, the soul does not begin to develop, and cannot stretch its wings, before our eyes have seen the sun of fourteen seasons; if, as I have found, the memory does not open its tablets before fourteen years to follow its 44

perennially nn finished records; then I may say that my soul has had only four years in which to know itself, to begin to act, to begin to soar. But from the very first time when it met the air with forehead and with wing, it has not once sunk back to earth; if it should fall, it will only fall to die. My thoughts have never stopped in night's repose; though wandering in the blind fumblings of a dream, their wings were always spread, their throats outstretched, their eyes ablaze in the night, always bound for the goal that drew their dim desire. Today my soul is exhausted, and like those of whom the Scripture says: `The afflicted souls will cry aloud to heaven.' "Why was I created as I am? I did what was right, and men rejected me as an enemy. If there be no place for me amid the crowd, I shall go away. "Now this is what I have to tell you: "In my room, at the head of my bed, will be found a pile of papers and parchments. They look old, but they are new: the dust on them is spurious; I am the Poet of these poems; I myself am the monk Rowley. I breathed upon his ashes; I restored his skeleton; I clothed him in flesh, I resurrected him, I gave him his monk's cowl; then he folded his hands, and sang. "He spoke with a voice like Ossian's: he told of `The Battle of Hastings', the tragedy of 'Aella', the ballad of `Charitie', with which you rocked your children to sleep; `William Canynge', which you liked so much; the tragedy of `Goddwyn', the `Tournament', and the old `Eclogues' of the time of Henry II. "The four years' work it took me to learn to talk that fifteenthcentury tongue would have occupied the imaginary Rowley all the eighty years of his life. This was the language he was supposed to have used to translate the tenth-century poems of the monk Turgot. I turned my room into a cloister cell; I dedicated my life and thought; I confined my gaze, and banished from my eyes the enlightenment of our age; with chastened, simple heart, I bathed in the fount of the Catholic faith; I learned the childish talk of olden times; I wrote, like King Harold to Duke William, half in Saxon and half in French; and I consecrated my pious Muse within her shrine. "Of those who visited her, some few prayed briefly and passed on; others laughed outright; many more insulted her; but one and 45

all, they trampled me under foot. I thought that the illusion of this fictitious name would be a veil for me; it has become my shroud. "My sweet friend, kind and beautiful hospitaller, you who offered me asylum; will you believe it? I was unable to overthrow that phantom, Rowley, whom I had created with my own hands ! His stony image fell back on me and crushed me; do you want to learn how? "0 sweet and simple Kitty Bell ! you must know that there exists a tribe of men with wizened hearts and piercing eyes, armed with pincers and claws; the whole ant-heap of them march out when the most insignificant book appears, fling themselves on it, swarm over it, gnaw it, tear it, bore their way into it, riddle it through and through faster and more thoroughly than any species of bookworm. No emotion has ever been known to touch any member of this family, no inspiration exalts them, no light can rejoice or warm them; this indestructible race of executioners, with the blood of the viper or the toad in their veins, sees the spots on the sun clearly enough, but has never noticed its light; they make straight for every weakness; pullulate endlessly in the very wounds they have inflicted, in the blood and tears which they have caused; for ever biting and never bitten, sheltered from every blow by their insignificance, their baseness, their shifty tricks and their perfidious machinations; whatever they attack feels stricken to the heart, as though the innumerable green insects of the Asiatic plague had fallen across its path; whatever they have wounded begins to rot from within, dries up, and, when exposed to the air, crumbles at the first touch or breath. "Dismayed at the interest shown in the documents I had spent my nights concocting, and seeing that certain men of good taste were circulating my parchments among themselves; that my monk Rowley seemed as great as Homer to Lord Chatham, to Lord North, to Sir William Draper, to Judge Blackstone, to some other famous men—they hastened to confirm the reality of my fictitious Poet. At first I thought it would be easy for me to gain recognition. In a morning's time I manufactured new antiquities, more antique than any I had made before. Their authenticity was denied, but the previous ones were still not acknowledged to be mine. Then there was a general repudiation: everything together, old poems and new, live poet and dead poet, all were rejected by the hard46

headed men whose nod determines Britain's fate. The rest no longer dared to read. But it will all be recalled when I am gone, and that time is not far off; I have completed my task: Othello's occupation's gone. They said that they found in me both patience and imagination; but they thought they could blow out one torch without extinguishing the other.— Ynne Heav'n Godd's mercie synge! say I with Rowley. May God forgive them their sins ! they would have destroyed everything at once. I tried to do what they told me, for I had no bread, and I needed money to send to my mother in Bristol; she is very old; she will not survive me for long. I attempted their mechanical tasks, but I was unable to perform them; I was like a man who comes from the light of day into a pitch-dark cave: every step I took was too big, and I kept stumbling. Hence they deduced that I didn't know how to walk. They proclaimed me incapable of useful work. I said: You are right, and I withdrew. "Today I've left my house (I should rather say your house) earlier than usual; I had intended to wait at home for Mr. Beckford, who had notified me that he plans to visit me; he is said to be a kind person, but I haven't the courage at present to look a patron in the face. If I can muster enough confidence, I will come back. This morning I spent wandering along the bank of the Thames. It is November: the month of the great mists. Today's fog hangs over the windows like a heavy sheet. I passed your door a dozen times; I saw you, although you did not see me; I pressed my forehead to the window-panes like a beggar. I felt the cold mist envelop me and penetrate my limbs; I hoped that death would come and take me where I stood, as I have seen it take many another pauper; but my feeble body is endowed with too much vitality. I studied you carefully, for the last time; but I didn't dare speak, for fear that a tear in your kind eyes might weaken my resolve. "I am leaving all my books to you, all my parchments, and all my papers; in return, I ask you to support my mother for the short time that she has left. "This is the first page I have ever written with my mind at rest. We do not realize what inner peace is felt by those who have determined to withdraw from life. It is as if one could know eternity in advance, like one of those wonderful Eastern lands 47

whose fragrant ambience can be breathed long before the ship has come to port." Chapter Sixteen WHEREIN THE ACTION IS INTERRUPTED BY ERUDITION "WHEN I had finished reading this long letter, which had exhausted both my eyesight and my comprehension through its fine script and the number of silent e's and y's with which Chatterton had larded it (accustomed as he was to writing old English), I handed it back to its grave proprietor. Kitty had remained leaning on the counter; her long, supple neck allowed her head to droop towards her shoulder, and her elbows, together with the whole charming bust, were reflected in the white marble. She resembled a little engraving of Sophia Western, Tom Jones's patient mistress, in a print I once saw at Dover, at ..." "Aha! I see that you're going to make another comparison!" Stello interrupted; "I don't need a detailed miniature of each and every one of your characters ! A sketch is ample for anyone with a bit of imagination. One significant stroke means more to me than all your details. If I let you go on in this way, Doctor, you will end up by telling me what kind of silk her shoelaces were made of. This is a pernicious habit in literature, which is making terrifying progress nowadays." "Come, come !" cried Doctor Noir, with as much indignation as he could force his impassive face to show; "the moment I become the least bit sentimental you pull me up short; very well, then, let's go ! long live Democritus ! As a rule I prefer that people should neither laugh nor cry, and that life should be considered as coldly as a game of chess; but if we must choose between Heraclitus and Democritus for terms in which to talk to people about themselves, I prefer the latter as the more disdainful. One really puts too high a value on life by shedding tears about it; the whimperers and the haters both take it much too seriously. This is what you do, and it annoys me no end. The monotonous spectacle of 48

the human race, which is incapable of either good or evil, should not upset you so much. So let nie proceed in my own way." "You are indeed proceeding—to destroy me;" Stello gave a victimized sigh. But the Doctor continued very comfortably. "Kitty Bell took the letter, turned languidly towards the street, shook her head twice, and said: 'He is gone!' "Enough ! enough! the poor girl !" cried Stello. "Please stop ! Don't add another word. I can see her whole being in that little phrase, 'He is gone !' Ah, silent Englishwoman, so that was all you had to say! Yes, I understand; you had sheltered him, you never let him feel that he was in a stranger's home; you read his poems respectfully, and never allowed yourself a presumptuous compliment; you conveyed to him that they were beautiful only by teaching them to your children together with their prayers. Perhaps you ventured to put a faint pencil-mark in the margin of Bertha's adieu to her friend; a cross, almost imperceptible, and easily erased, above the verse on King Harold's tomb, and if one of your tears washed away a single letter of the precious manuscript, you sincerely felt that it had left a stain, which you would try to hide. And then he left! Poor Kitty! The ingrate: `He is gone!' " "Good! very good!" said the Doctor; "all I have to do is give you your head. You spare me a lot of wasted words, and your guesses are very accurate. But why did I have to include all that useless information about Chatterton? You know his work as well as I do." "Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best," replied Stello nonchalantly. "I like to see if they are understood in the same way as I understand them; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing." "You're right," said the Doctor; "and, if you would do more with this idea, instead of letting it evaporate like liquid from an open flask, you would observe that the little knowledge each man's brain contains is of a curious kind. One mind holds the foot of a discipline without ever having seen its body; another has its amputated hand; a third cherishes it, adores it, ruminates over it, exhibits it and demonstrates it in the condition of the famous Torso, headless, armless, and legless, so that his poor subject, admirable as it may be, can neither walk nor stand; but the majority have the skin alone, or rather, the surface of the skin, the F 49

epidermis, the thinnest possible film, and are thought to have the whole thing very solidly in their grasp. These are the most arrogant. But if you ever meet anyone who knows everything he talks about, both inside and out, in general and in detail, and has it all equally available for immediate use as a worker has his tools, you will do me a great service by sending me his card, so that I may pay him my humblest respects. During all my travels, I have never encountered the species I have just described, among the intellectual lights of any country. "I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance. "And so, my dear sir, we were discussing Chatterton. I was fully intending to read you a technical lecture on old English, with its mixture of Saxon and Norman, on its silent e's, its y's, and the richness of its rhymes in aie and ynge. I was planning to give vent to profound sighs, swollen with science, on the irreparable loss of such naive and expressive locutions as emburled for armed, deslavatie for unfaithfulness, acrool for faintly; and such harmonious words as myndbruche for firmness of mind, mysterk for mystic, ystorven for dead. Undoubtedly, with such a facility in translating the English of 1499 into the English of 1832, I would have graced any ink-stained sprucewood chair in France. Even from my present armchair, despite its lack of stains, I could still have thrown you into one of those agreeable states of amazement in which one says to oneself; `The man knows everything.' It was fortunate that I discovered, just in the nick of time, that you too know your Chatterton—a degree of erudition that one doesn't often find in London, although, I am told, there are a good many Englishmen there. At any rate, I am now under the distressful necessity of chatting instead of lecturing, and I may even have to listen now and then. Yes, listen ! what a disagreeable and unusual role for a doctor!" Stello smiled, for the first time in a very long time. "I'm not hard to listen to," he said slowly; "I get tired of talking too soon for that." "What a poor habit for a Parisian !" said the other; "here anyone So

who can settle down before the fire or on the platform for an hour and a half and pour out the high-sounding syllables is honoured for his eloquence—provided that he says nothing original." "Yes," said Stello, his eyes fastened on the ceiling, like someone who is gradually reminded of something, and whose recollection grows sharper and clearer by the moment; "yes, I am stirred by the memory of these simple and powerful works created by the original, unrecognized genius of Chatterton, who perished at eighteen! The whole expression is so uncommon, strange, and great that it should form a single name, something like Charlemagne. "0 doleful, dour, deep Doctor ! if you were capable of emotion, would it not be the memory of the simple, old-fashioned opening of `The Battle of Hastings' that would move you? The genius to strip off the modern man ! To transform himself by sheer will into a tenth-century monk! a fanatical barbarian monk, an old Saxon, rebellious under the Norman yoke, acknowledging only two forces in the world, Christ and the Sea. It is to them that he speaks, that he cries out: O Chryste, it is a grief for me to telle, How manie a nobil erle and valrous knyghte In fyghtynge for Kynge Harrold noblie fell, Al sleyn in Hastyngs feeld in bloudie fyghte. O sea! our teeming donore, han thy floude Han anie fructuous entendement, Thou wouldst have rose and sank with tydes of bloude, Before Duke Wyllam's knyghts han hither went;" "That Duke William certainly made an impression over there !" interrupted the Doctor. "Saint-Valery is a pretty little seaport, full of dirt and mud; I've seen some lovely green groves there, worthy of the shepherds of the Lignon; I've seen little white houses too; but nowhere have I seen a stone inscribed with the words, `From this place William took sail for Hastings.' " "Duke William," continued Stello, declaiming pompously, Whose Cowart arrows manie ertes sleyne, And brued the feeld wyth bloude, as season rayne. "It's certainly a bit Homeric," grumbled the Doctor: lloAds 51

StØBiµous tivxag "Ai& lrpotaikev. Otherwise: `The souls of many chiefs untimely slain." "How beautiful the young Harold appears in his rude might," continued Stello in his fit of enthusiasm. " `Kynge Harolde hie in ayre majestic raysd,' etc. William sees him, and advances, singing the Song of Roland ..." "Quite accurate! historically exact!" the scientific Doctor murmured mechanically; "Malmesbury declares positively that William began the engagement with the Song of Roland: " 'Tune cantilena Rolandi inchoata, ut martium viri exemplum pugnatores accenderet.' "And Warton, in his `Dissertations,' says that the Huns charged to the cry of Him! Hiu! That was the barbarian custom. "And doesn't master Robert of Wace, also called Gace, Gape, Eustache and Wistace, speak of the Norman Taillefer: Taillefer, qui moult bien chantout, Sorr un cheval qui tost allout, Devant le duc allout chantant, De Karlemagne et de Rollant, Et d'Olivier et des vassals Qui morurent en Rouncevals." "The two races match their strength," Stello interjected excitedly, while the Doctor was still savouring his quotation; "the Norman shafts batter the Saxon mail. The Sire de Chåtillon attacks Earl Aldhelm; the Sire de Torcy slays Hengist. France overwhelms the ancient Saxon isle; its face is changed, its language is transformed; only in a few old convents there remain a few old monks, like Turgot, and, later, Rowley, to lament and pray by the stony statues of the saintly Saxon kings, each bearing a tiny church within his hand." "And what scholarship !" cried the Doctor. "He had to combine voluminous French readings with Saxon chronicles. How many historians to be studied, from Hue de Longueville to the Sire de Saint-Valery! The Vidame de Patay, the Seigneur de Picquigny, Guillaume des Moulins (whom Stowe calls Moulinous), and the supposed Rowley, du Mouline; and the good Sire de Sanceaulx, and the valiant Seneschal de Torcy, and the Sire de Tancarville,

sa

and all our versifiers of ill-rhymed ballads, chronicles, and histories ! It's the world of Ivanhoe all over again." "Ah," sighed Stello, "how strange that so simple and impressive a piece of work as `The Battle of Hastings' should have been written by the same author as the elegiac poems which follow it; what other English poet has ever written anything like the ballad so naively entitled `An excelente balade of Charitie'? Something like honest Francisco de Leefdael printing The Famous Comedy of Lope de Vega Carpio. What so natural as the dialogue between the Abbot of Saint Godwyn and the poor man? How simple and beautiful the opening scene ! I have always loved that tempest that seizes upon the quiet sea. What clear, precise colouring ! What a broad canvas, unsurpassed by any subsequent work in the galleries of English poetry ! "And don't you love to fill your ears with the wild harmony of the old verse? The sun was glemeing in the midde of daie, Deadde still the afire, and eke the welken blue, When from the sea arist in drear arraie A hepe of cloudes of sable sullen hue, The which full fast unto the woodlande drewe Hiltring attenes the sunnis fetyve face, And the blacke tempeste swolne and gatherd up apace." The Doctor wasn't listening. "I have a strong suspicion," said he, "that that abbot of Saint-Godwyn was none other than Sir Ralph de Bellomont, a great supporter of the House of Lancaster; it's clear that Rowley was a Yorkist." "Damned commentator !" cried Stello; "well, you've succeeded in waking me up !"—and he emerged from his sweet poetic visions. "That was my intention," said Doctor Noir; "I had to get on from the book to the man; let's leave the tale of his works for the tale of his life; simple as it was, it is still worth completing." "Well then, complete it," said Stello angrily. He put both hands over his eyes, as though resolved to turn his mind to other things; but as anyone will see who suffers through the next chapter, he did not maintain his resolution. 53

Chapter Seventeen CONTINUATION OF THE STORY OF KITTY BELL: THE BENEFACTOR AS I was saying (the implacable doctor began again), Kitty had given me a languishing look. This painful glance communicated the condition of her soul so fully that I had to content myself with her heavenly expression as the explanation of all I wished to know about the mysterious situation I had tried so hard to penetrate. The evidence became still clearer a moment later, for as I worked the muscles of my face, labouring to produce that appearance of sympathy which each one of us likes to see in his fellow-creature ... ("Now he thinks the lovely Kitty is his fellow-creature !" murmured Stello.) While I was putting on a sympathetic expression, a heavy, gilded coach rolled noisily up to the glass-fronted shop where Kitty was perpetually shut in, like a rare fruit in a hothouse. The lackeys before and behind the carriage were carrying torches—an essential precaution, for it was two in the afternoon by the clock of St. Paul's. "The Lord Mayor ! The Lord Mayor !" Kitty suddenly cried out, clapping her hands with such joy that her cheeks began to burn and her eyes shot sweet fire; and by some inexplicable instinct, she ran to kiss her children, although it was a lover's joy she felt. Women's impulses are inspired by God knows what. The coach did, in fact, belong to the Lord Mayor, the most honourable Mr. Beckford, King of London, elected by the seventytwo merchants' and artisans' guilds of the city; these are headed by the twelve corporations of the goldsmiths, the fishmongers, the tanners, etc., whose supreme chief he is. You know that in former times the Lord Mayor was so powerful that he could terrify the kings of England, and was the ringleader in every revolution, as Froissart says, speaking of the Londoners or London mob. Mr. Beckford gave no sign of being a revolutionary in 1770, to be sure; he didn't cause the King any anxiety; he was a worthy gentleman, exercising his jurisdiction with gravity and decorum, with his palace and his grand dinners at which the King occasionally 54

appeared, and at which the Lord Mayor drank prodigiously without for a moment losing his admirable sang-froid. Every evening, after dinner, he rose first from table, about eight o'clock, went himself to open the great door of the dining-room for the ladies, and returned to drink until midnight. Every wine of the globe circulated about this table, passing from hand to hand, and filling in turn glasses of every size, which Mr. Beckford was the first to empty, with equal indifference. He discussed public affairs with Lord Chatham, with the Duke of Grafton, with Count Mansfield, just as comfortably after the thirtieth bottle as before the first; his strict, clear, dry, heavy-handed intellect knew no alteration. He defended himself with good sense and moderation against the satirical accusations of Junius, that redoubtable unknown who had the courage, or perhaps the weakness, to leave in anonymity one of the tartest books in the English language, as the second Gospel was left, the Imitation ofJesus Christ. "What do I care for the syllables of a name?" sighed Stello. "The Laocoön and the Venus de Milo are anonymous, and their sculptors believed their names would be immortalized as they tapped their blocks with their little hammers. The name of Homer, that demigod's name, has just been struck out of existence by another Greek. Glory, shadow of a dream ! as Pindar said, if there ever was a Pindar; we can no longer be sure of anything." "But I am sure of Mr. Beckford," said the Doctor; "I really saw his stout, ruddy self on that memorable day. He was a tall personage, with a big red nose descending on a big red chin. He did exist; let there be no doubt of that! no one ever existed more certainly than he ! He had an idle, portly gourmand's paunch, with a gold brocade jacket swathing its entire length; proud, self-satisfied, opulent, paternal cheeks, falling in broad folds across his cravat; solid, monumental, gouty legs, which bore him nobly with a prudent, but firm and honourable step; and a powdered pigtail, enclosed in a large bag that covered his full shoulders, worthy of carrying, like a whole world, the responsibilities of a Lord Mayor. The entire man climbed slowly and painfully out of the coach. While he was getting out, Kitty Bell informed me, in eight 55

English words, that Mr. Chatterton would not have been so desperate were it not for the fact that this man, his last hope, had not come, despite his promise. "All that in eight words !" said Stello; "What a language !" "She added in four words (not one word more !)" continued the Doctor, "that she was certain Mr. Chatterton would be coming in with the Lord Mayor." And to be sure, while two of the lackeys held their thick, resinous torches on either side of the carriage step, contributing a black and mephitic smoke to the charms of the fog; while Mr. Beckford was making his entrance into the shop, the shadow which I had seen every day—the pale shadow with the dark eyes— slid along the windows and entered behind him. I beheld, with eager gaze, Thomas Chatterton. Yes, eighteen years old—at the very most eighteen ! Unpowdered brown hair falling over the temples, the profile of a young Spartan, a high, broad forehead, very large, hollow, dark eyes, with a fixed and penetrating expression, the chin raised in relief beneath heavy lips to which any smile seemed foreign. He approached with a steady step, his hat beneath his arm, and fastened his burning eyes on Kitty's face; she hid her lovely head between her hands. Chatterton was dressed in black from head to foot; his coat, drawn tight and buttoned to the collar, gave him an air at once ecclesiastical and military. He was slender and well built. The children ran to him and hung upon him, as if accustomed to his kindness. He bowed gravely to Mr. Beckford, who took his hand and shook it hard enough to tear off the arm together with the shoulder-blade. They looked each other up and down in astonishment. From behind her counter Kitty Bell whispered timidly to Chatterton that she had not expected to see him again. He didn't answer, either because he hadn't heard her, or because he didn't want to hear. A few people had come into the shop and were chattering casually over their tables. But before long they started to gather in a circle, as Mr. Beckford began to speak, in the loud tones of a stout, choleric man, and with the overbearing manner of a patron. The voices were gradually hushed and, as you poets would say, 56

the elements seemed to hearken. Light flared upon the walls from the lamps which Kitty Bell had lit, in her joy at seeing this influential man offer his hand to Chatterton. The only noise which could still be heard was an occasional click from the teeth of a couple of heavily-wrapped little Englishwomen who timidly produced their fingers from their muffs to pick up a cracker or a macaroon from the counter. This was, in so many words, what Mr. Beckford had to say: "I'm not Lord Mayor to no purpose, my child; I am well acquainted with you poor young people's problems. You brought me your poems yesterday, and I'm returning them now, my son: here they are. I attend to business promptly, don't I? And now I've come myself to see how you're put up here, and to bring you a little offer that you should find gratifying. But first take these things away." The honourable Mr. Beckford relieved one of his lackeys of a pile of Chatterton's manuscripts, returned them to their owner, sat down ponderously, and stretched himself abroad. Chatterton took his parchments and his papers with dignity and put them beneath his arm, all the while keeping his fiery eyes fixed upon the stout Lord Mayor. "There isn't one person," continued the generous Mr. Beckford, "who hasn't done some scribbling in his youth, as you have been doing. Yes, yes ! the pretty young girls like it. Surely, it's one of the weaknesses of youth, my fine boy.—The young Ladies like it. Isn't that right, my dear?" And he stretched his arm across the counter to chuck Kitty Bell under the chin. Kitty recoiled into the farthest corner of her armchair and cast a horrified glance at Chatterton, as if she were expecting an explosion of fury from him; for, you know, it has been said of this young man's character that "He was violent and impetuous to a strange degree." "When I was a gay blade I did just what you are doing," the stout Beckford announced proudly, "and never did Lyttleton, Swift, or Wilkes write more gallant banter for the pretty girls. But even when I was your age my mind was sufficiently mature to prevent me from throwing away any more than my idle time on the Muses; and before my summer had arrived, I was entirely devoted to business: my autumn saw my affairs ripen in my hands, and today my winter is reaping the savoury fruits of business!" 57

At this point the fashionable Mr. Beckford couldn't resist looking around at his audience to read in their eyes the pleasure that the fluency of his rhetoric and the freshness of his imagery had produced. The business ripening in the autumn of his life seemed to have as deep an effect on two ministers who happened to be there, one a black Quaker and the other a scarlet Lord, as the speeches of our good old generals del signor Buonaparte produce on our platforms in the year 1832, when they demand, in `classical curriculum' phrases, that our children and grandchildren be mustered into great armies. They want to show us that after spending seventeen years at book-keeping in the wine trade a man may still know how to lose his battles, as he used to do in the absence of the grand master. Good Mr. Beckford, having thus won over his audience with his bluff but dignified humour, continued in a graver tone: "I have mentioned your name in certain quarters, my friend, and I do want to help you out of your predicament. For the past year no one has asked the Lord Mayor of London for help in vain. I know that you don't know how to do anything but scribble those damned verses in that incomprehensible gibberish of yours. Even assuming that someone might be able to understand them, they aren't much good any way. I'm frank with you, you see; I talk to you as if I were your father. But even if they were fine poetry, very beautiful, and all that, what would they be good for? I ask you that: what is it all good for?" Chatterton showed no more sign of movement than a statue. The seven or eight bystanders preserved a profound and discreet silence: but one could see in their glances their hearty approval of the Lord Mayor's conclusion, and the smiles they exchanged repeated: "What is it all good for?" The benevolent visitor continued: "A good Englishman, who wants to do something for his country, should enter a career in which he can make honest profits. Come now, my boy; answer me this question: what do you conceive to be your appointed task?" He leaned back with condescension. But then I heard Chatterton's voice giving him his answer, in a strangely gentle, hollow tone; jerkily, with a pause after every sentence: 58

"England is a ship; that is our island's shape. With its prow turned to the north, it rides at anchor amid the sea, overlooking the Continent. Other vessels made in its own image are continually departing from its sides, bearing its message to all the shores of the world. Our own work lies aboard the flagship. The King, the Lords, and the Commons are at the masthead, at the rudder, at the compass; the rest of us must all lend a hand with the rigging, climb the masts, tend the sails, and load the cannon; all of us are members of the crew, and no one of us is without his appointed task in the navigation of this glorious ship." There was a sensation. Everyone crowded forward, though without having fully understood; and, as is usual among the vulgar, without being sure whether to mock or to applaud. "Good, very good!" cried big Mr. Beckford; "well said, my boy ! You have described our happy fatherland in a noble image ! Rule, Britannia!" he sang, humming a snatch of the national air. "But there, my good fellow! You stand condemned by your own confession. Of what possible use can a poet be in the business of navigating a ship?" Chatterton continued in absolute immobility: his was the dead calm of someone so preoccupied with an inner labour that he sees shadows on his path. But he raised his eyes to the ceiling as he answered: "The Poet seeks in the stars the course traced by the finger of God." I got up and, despite myself, ran to shake his hand. I felt a great deal of sympathy for this excitable, exalted young mind, always in ecstasies, like your own. The Beckford fellow was annoyed. "Fantasies !" said he. " `Fantasy ! God's verities', you should have answered," said Stello. "I know my Polyeucte as well as you do," the Doctor replied. "But I certainly wasn't thinking of it at the moment." "Fantasies !" said Beckford. "Always these fantasies, instead of good sense and sound judgment! In order to be the sort of lyric, somnambulistic poet that you want to be, you ought to be living 59

under an Attic sky, walking around bare-legged, in a cloak and sandals, and getting the stones to dance to your harp. But with your dirty boots, a three-cornered hat, a coat and a vest, you can hardly expect the pebbles to follow you, much less think that you should exert some dictatorial domination or even the least guidance over your fellow-citizens. "To our mind, poetry is a rather interesting stylistic discipline which is sometimes practised by clever people; but who ever takes it seriously? Only fools ! Furthermore, I have this from Ben Jonson, and you can take it from him: the loveliest Muse in the world does not feed her owner; these girls make fine mistresses, but terrible wives. You've tried everything that yours will do for you; leave her alone, my boy; take my advice, little man. We have also tried you out in financial and administrative work, where you have shown yourself to be worthless. Read this; accept the offer; you will be well off, and in good company. Read it, and think it over carefully; it will be worth your while." And so, handing the young scapegrace a little slip of paper, the Lord Mayor rose majestically. "You see," he said, as he withdrew amid greetings and reverences, "You see, it's a matter of a hundred pounds sterling per year. Kitty Bell got up, and curtsied as if she would have been ready to kiss his hands on bended knees. All the onlookers followed the dignitary to the door, while he smiled and turned about, making his exit with the benignant air of a bishop about to confirm a group of little girls. He expected Chatterton to follow him, but he only caught a glimpse of his protégé's violent reaction.—Chatterton cast a glance at the note; he seized his manuscripts, flung them into the coal fire, which was burning like a furnace at knee height in the grate, and vanished from the room. Mr. Beckford smiled with satisfaction, and waving from the door of his carriage, cried out: "I'm glad to see I've cured him of his Poetry." The horses started. "It's life that you've cured him of," said I to myself.—Suddenly I felt my hand gripped with an unnatural force. It was Kitty Bell, who with lowered eyes, simply appearing to pass by me, was dragging me towards the little glass door at the back of the shop through which Chatterton had left. 6o

Everyone was talking noisily about the Lord Mayor's generosity; people were coming and going. No one noticed her; I followed.

Chapter Eighteen THE STAIRCASE "SAINT SOCRATES, pray for us!" the scholar Erasmus used to say. Many a time have I repeated that prayer (continued the Doctor) but never, believe me, so fervently as that time, finding myself alone with a young woman whose language I scarcely understood, who knew still less of mine, and whose situation was no clearer to my eyes than her words were to my ears. She closed the little door quickly. It opened at the foot of a long staircase. There she stopped short, as though her limbs would not serve for the climb. For a moment she clung to the banister, but then let herself drop on the steps. Abandoning the hand with which I tried to support her, she waved me on. "Vite! vite! allez!" she said to me in French, to my great surprise; evidently the fear of expressing herself poorly had prevented her from speaking sooner. She was frozen with terror; the veins of her forehead stood out, her eyes were unnaturally dilated; she was shivering, and tried in vain to get up; her knees knocked together. Her fear revealed another woman to me. She raised her beautiful head in an effort to hear what was happening upstairs, but she seemed riveted by some secret horror to the spot where she had fallen. The sight made me shudder; but I left her there, and without knowing clearly where I was going I rushed up the stairs, as if I had been thrown like a ball. "Alas !" thought I, as I careened up the narrow stairway, "when will enlightenment descend from heaven to teach the sages of earth the real feelings of a woman for her secret lover? One can tell easily enough what power it is that weighs upon her soul, but who can judge to what degree she is possessed? Who would dare to interpret her actions boldly and judge at first glance what cure 61

her sufferings require? Dearest Kitty," said I to myself (for at that moment I was experiencing for her the same kind of love that Phedre's nurse felt when her breast shuddered with the devouring passions of her nurseling) ; "dearest Kitty !" thought I, "why didn't you tell me in the first place that he was your lover? I could have become friends with him, I could have tried to smooth things out, I might have learned the hidden sorrows of his heart; I could have ... But don't I know that sophisms and reasoning are useless where the eyes of the beloved have failed? But what sort of love does he have for her? Is she more his than he hers? Or is it the opposite? Where does it all lead to? And, by the way, where are these stairs taking me to?" I had reached the last landing of the indifferently-lit staircase, and I didn't know which way to turn, when a door near me flew open. I found myself looking into a little room whose floor was covered with myriad scraps of paper. I confess that the quantity was so immense, the scraps were so small, the whole thing bespoke the destruction of such enormous labours, that I remained staring at it for a long time before turning to Chatterton: for it was he who had opened the door. When I did turn to look at him, I seized him by the waist; and it was high time, for he was on the point of falling, swaying like a mast cut through at the base. I leaned him against his door, supporting him as one would hold an embalmed body upright in its coffin. You would have been horrified to see his face. The gentle forms of sleep lay peacefully upon his features; but it was the sleep of the millennia, the dreamless sleep through which the heart no longer beats, the sleep imposed by too great suffering. The eyes were still half-open, but drifting and without focus; the mouth agape, the breathing slow and even, the chest heaving as in a nightmare. He shook his head, and smiled fleetingly, as if to tell me it was useless to bother with him.—Since I was still holding him up firmly by the shoulders, he kicked the little vial with his foot. It rolled down the stairs, evidently coming to rest near the bottom steps where Kitty had been sitting, for I heard a cry, and shaky footsteps began to ascend the staircase. He guessed who it was, and signed to me to get him out of the way. He fell asleep upright on my shoulder, like a drunken man. 62

Without letting him go, I leaned over the stairs. I was in the grip of such horror that the hair began to rise on my head. I must have looked like an assassin. I could see the young woman holding on to the banister in an effort to drag herself up from one stair to the other, as if the only strength with which she could hope to reach us lay in her hands. Fortunately, she still had two flights to climb before she would have to see him. I started to move with my terrible burden towards the room. Chatterton half woke again—he must have been prodigiously strong, for he had drunk sixty grains of opium—and, would you believe it? Would you believe it, I ask you?—He used his last living breath to say this to me: "Monsieur ... vous ... doctor ... buy my body, and pay my debts." I pressed his hand to signify agreement. He moved once more, but for the last time. Wrenching himself from my arms, he fell to his knees at the head of the stairs, stretched his arms out towards Kitty, uttered a long cry, and dropped forward, dead. I raised his head. "Nothing more to be done for him," thought I. "Now for the other one." I was in time to stop poor Kitty; but she had already seen. I took her arm, and forced her to sit down on the steps. She obeyed me, but remained hunched up like a madwoman, her eyes wide, trembling all over. I do not know whether you, sir, have the art of saying the right thing at such moments; as for myself; I spend my life watching people die, and I keep quiet. As she stared before her, dry-eyed, I picked up the vial which she had been bringing up with her; her sidelong glance seemed to say, like Juliet's: 0 churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop To help me after? We remained sitting side by side, like twin statues; one of us motionless with horror, the other wounded to the death; neither of us willing, or able, to open his mouth. Suddenly a loud, sounding voice was heard calling from below: "Come, mistress Bell!" 63

Kitty rose at the call as if set in motion by a spring; it was her husband's voice. A thunderbolt bursting upon her would not have produced a more violent effect. The blood rushed to her cheeks; she lowered her eyes, and remained standing a moment to collect her strength. "Come, mistress Bell!" the terrible voice came again. As the first shout had brought her to her feet, so the second blow set her in motion. She started walking down the stairs, slowly, deliberately, erect and docile, with the insensible, deaf, and sightless air of a shadow. I supported her as far as the foot of the stairs; she went back into the shop, sat down with lowered eyes behind the counter, drew out a little Bible from her pocket, opened it, looked at the page, and remained sitting there, totally unconscious. Her husband began to scold, women surrounded her, the children were crying, the dogs barking. ("So what did you do?" asked Stello, rising with concern.) I gave Mr. Bell three guineas, which he accepted very calmly and, truth to tell, with great satisfaction; he counted the money carefully. "This is the rent for Mr. Chatterton's room," I said. "He's dead." "Oh!" he said, looking pleased. "I'm the owner of the body," said I; "I'll have it sent for." "Oh !" he said, apparently in assent. The body really did belong to me, for that astonishing Chatterton had had the coolness to leave on his table a note to this effect: "I hereby sell my body to Doctor (the name had been left blank) in return for the payment of six months' rent for my room to Mr. Bell; the sum amounting to three guineas. I beg that no complaint be made to his children about the cakes which they brought me every day and which have been my only sustenance for the past month." At this the Doctor let himself sink down in his easy-chair until he was lying on his back and elbows. "There !" said he, with an air of satisfaction and relief, to mark the conclusion of his story. "But Kitty Bell? What became of Kitty?" asked Stello, trying to read the answer in the cold eyes of Doctor Noir. 64

"My word," said he; "if it wasn't grief that did it, then the calomel of those English doctors must have done her a lot of harm. Not having been sent for, I returned of my own accord a few days later to try her pastries again. The children were there, playing and singing as usual, but they were wearing black. I suppose I nearly broke the shop door when I left." "What about the poet's body?" "Don't worry. It had nothing more to endure than the shroud and the coffin." "And his poems?" "It took eighteen months of patient work to collect, glue together, and translate the pieces of manuscript that he had torn up in his frenzy. As for the ones burnt up in the coal-grate, those were the concluding portions of the `Battle of Hastings,' of which only two cantos remain." "You have crushed me with your story," said Stello, as he dropped back to a sitting position. They sat there, facing each other, for three hours and forty minutes, sad and silent as Job with his friends. After that time Stello cried out, as if simply continuing the conversation: "But what did Beckford offer him in that note?" "Oh ! to be sure," said Doctor Noir, as if waking up with a start. "It was the job of chief valet in his household."

Chapter Nineteen PITY AND SORROW DURING the long speeches and the longer silences of Doctor Noir, night had fallen. A tall lamp illuminated a part of Stello's chamber; for the room was so large that the light could not reach either the corners or the high roof. Long, heavy drapes, antique furnishings, arms scattered among the books, an enormous table covered with a cloth that hung to the floor on all sides, and on the table two cups of tea: the whole scene in darkness, or fitfully illuminated by the ruddy flame of the large fire; at other moments 65 G

half-seen, half-guessed at, by the yellowish rays of the lamp. The light fell perpendicularly on the impassive face of Doctor Noir, as well as on Stello's broad brow, which shone like polished ivory. The Doctor's unblinking eyes were riveted on the forehead in front of him. He seemed to be following in silence the battle between his ideas and the thoughts of the man whose cure he had undertaken; like a general watching his army from a height as it storms the breach, comes to grips with the garrison, and struggles to subdue the half-conquered fortress. Stello got up abruptly and began to walk with large paces from one end of the room to the other and back again. He had passed his right hand under his coat, as if either to calm or to clench his heart. All that could be heard was the muffled thud of his steps on the carpet, and the monotonous whistling of a silver kettle on the table, an inexhaustible source of hot tea and delight for the two midnight conversationalists. In the midst of his rapid pacing, Stello would from time to time drop some bitter exclamation, some painful interjection, some stifled curse or violent oath—violent, that is, to the extent to which such expressions of feeling are possible in someone whose social habits have made restraint second nature. Suddenly he stopped and covered both the Doctor's hands with his own. "So you have seen him too?" he cried. "You have seen and held in your arms the unhappy young man who said to himself `Despair and die,' as you have so often heard me cry out in the night ! But I would be ashamed that I had ever sighed, I would blush to say that I had ever suffered, if the tortures inflicted by the passions were not as great as those that physical misfortunes can cause.—Yes, that's how it must have happened; yes, I see men like that Beckford every day; they are miraculously reincarnated in every age under the sallow skin of the `defenders of the public weal', that race of ceremonious complimenters and tortuous paraphrasers of sententious banalities ! They are the light-hearted forgers of that oppressive chain pompously known as the Civil Code, whose forty thousand links they have meshed and intertwined without rhyme or reason. The links are as uneven as the beads of a rosary, but they never lead back to the golden ring of a religious principle. 0 you rachitic members of the body politic, or rather impolitic! Flabby sinews of the Assemblies, whose limp, 66

vacillating, ambiguous, misguided, corrupt, bewildered, limping, choleric, sluggish, vapid, cheerful, but always and eternally common and vulgar ideas are inferior in coherence to the simple and serious opinion handed down to his family by a desert Fellah, giving the judgment of his heart. Isn't it enough for you to be gloriously employed in piling your whole weight on top of the load of that poor ass who calls his master his enemy, in so many words? Must you show that you have inherited all the arrogance of the monarchic order, minus its hereditary grace and plus your newly elected vulgarity? Yes, Doctor, you are right, with your bleak truths: things really are that way. `A poet needs nothing but three hundred francs and an attic!' says one of them. `Starvation is their inspiration,' chimes in another. `Bravo !' `Keep your courage up!' 'A nightingale has a sweet voice: if you put out its eyes it will sing still better! it's been tried, it works.' That's right, by God! "Heavenly trinity ! what have these Poets done to you, these Poets, who were created first among men, that the lowest among mankind should reject them and trample upon them like that?" In this vein did Stello hold forth while pacing to and fro. The Doctor meanwhile twirled the knob of his cane under his chin and smiled. "Where have your Blue Devils gone to?" he said. The sick man stopped short. He closed his eyes and also smiled, but did not answer, as though he did not want to give the Doctor the satisfaction of hearing him admit that his illness had been conquered. Paris was buried in the silence of sleep; nothing could be heard outside but the rusty voice of a clock striking the third quarter of an hour which was already long past midnight. Stello stopped suddenly in the middle of the room, listening to the sound of the hammer, which seemed to please him; he passed his fingers through his hair, as if to cast some soothing spell upon himself. On looking closely one might have guessed that he was taking hold of the reins of his soul again, and that his will was growing strong enough to curb his desperate feelings.—His eyes opened, turned to the eyes of the Doctor, and remained fixed there. He began to speak, sadly, but deliberately. 67

"The hours of the night as they strike sound to me like the soft voices of tender mistresses calling to me, one after another: `Why are you so sad?' "As often as I have listened to them from the hard chair in which you are now sitting, I have never heard them with indifference. These are the hours of the genii, the airy spirits who sustain our thoughts on their transparent wings, and lend them a stronger shimmer. During the hours that they tell over I feel that I carry my life more lightly; they assure me that everything I love is sleeping, that I need not worry lest harm befall anyone I care for. Then it seems to me that I alone have been left on watch, and that I have the right to take from my life as many as I wish of the hours of sleep.—That part I am surely entitled to; I relish it, and I owe no accounting for that time to any pair of closed eyes.—These hours have helped me. Rarely have my dear companions failed to bring me the gift of some celestial thought or mood. Perhaps time itself, invisible as air, but gauged and measured like it, also carries with it invisible influences. There are certain fatal hours; such, for me, is the damp dawn, so prized by poets, but it brings me nothing but misery and boredom when it wakes the shouting crowd for the livelong day, the day whose end I always despair of seeing. At this moment, if you discern a spark of life returning to my eyes, it is only through tears that it has been restored. But life it is, at last, and it is the sacred calm of the hours of darkness that has brought it back to me. "In my soul I feel an unquenchable pity for those poor but glorious men whose latest pangs you witnessed, an undying sympathy for the beloved dead. "Alas ! there are other unfortunates who react to their bitter destiny in different ways. In some, their sorrow turns to gross buffoonery; these are the saddest, to my way of thinking. In others, despair turns their hearts, and they become wicked. But even then, how great is their guilt? "In truth, man himself is rarely to blame, the social order always is.—Whoever is treated like a Gilbert or a Chatterton, let him strike, let him lay about him !—Even if he were to attack me, I would still feel for him the sympathy of a mother whose child in the cradle is unjustly afflicted with some fatal disease. " `Hit me, my son,' she says; `bite, poor innocent! you have 68

done nothing to deserve such suffering ! Bite my breast, you will feel easier ! Bite, my child, it will help you!' " In deadly calm, the Doctor smiled; but his eyes were growing darker and sterner by the moment. Finally, stony and grim, he answered: "What do I care to discover (since you wear your heart on your sleeve) that you feel such mercy and indulgence for everyone? Your mind, the accomplice of your heart, is ready to squander as much interest on any criminal as Godwin did on the murderer Falkland.—What do I care for this angelic tenderness to which you abandon yourself at every moment? Do you take me for a woman, in whom feelings take the place of thoughts?—Take yourself in hand, young man; tears blur the sight." Stello came back and sat down abruptly; he kept his eyes lowered, but stole a sidelong glance at his enemy. "Now," the Doctor began again: "let us trace the course of the idea which has led us to this point; it must be followed as one follows a winding stream. You will soon see that we have not covered the ground yet. So far, we have found on our way a monarchy and a representative government, each with its historic example of a Poet abused and disdainfully abandoned to starvation and death. I was aware of your hope, as you were being introduced to the second form of Power, that you would find its temporal leaders more intelligent, and more appreciative of the great men of the spirit. You were disappointed, but not decisively enough to prevent you from conceiving in the same moment some vague hope that a still more popular form of Power would naturally, through its own examples, avoid the errors of the other two. I can see in your eyes the entire history of Republicanism filing by, accompanied by the appropriate fanfare of schoolboy slogans. But I beg you, spare me your quotations. For one thing, the entire ancient world is disqualified as a source of examples, because of its dependence on slavery. Since, contrary to my usual custom, I'm the one who is doing the talking today, let me tell you one third and final adventure that has lain heavy on my heart ever since the day when I played a part in it. Don't sigh so heavily, as if you were trying to repel from your lungs the very air on which my voice has fallen. You know very well that you can't escape my voice. Are you not yet resigned to it? You should know that God has placed 69

the head above the heart as a sign that the head must rule.' Stello bowed his head with the look of a condemned man hearing his sentence read. "Am I to endure all of this just because one day when I was suffering from the Blue Devils I had the unhappy idea of talking politics with you? As if this thought, cast out at random along with a thousand other anguished phrases born of disease, warranted such a vindictive attack ! as if it were anything more than a fleeting thought, the glance of desperation which the sailor casts on every inch of shore, or which ..." "Poetry ! mere poetry ! it didn't happen that way at all !" the Doctor interrupted him, bringing his cane down on the floor with the force and weight of a hammer. "You're fooling yourself. That idea didn't just occur to you by accident; that idea has preoccupied you for a long time; you have been cherishing it; you love it, you fondle and caress it with secret devotion. Without your awareness it has become deeply embedded in you, so that you no longer feel its roots any more than one feels the roots of a tooth. Pride and the ambition of getting a grand role for yourself have made it sprout and grow tall in you, as it has done in many another whom I haven't cured. Only you didn't dare admit its presence to yourself, and you wanted to try out the idea on me; you pretended to let it slip out unawares, casually, as though you didn't put great stock in it. "It is a tragic temptation which we are all subject to, the impulse to break out of our natural walks and to flout the conditions of our being !—Where does it come from? It comes from every child's desire to try out the other's game, never doubting his own limitless ability. It comes from the difficulty which even the most independent souls experience in detaching themselves completely from the desires of the common herd.—It begins in that moment of weakness when the spirit tires of studying itself, of living upon its own essence, and being fully and gloriously nourished thereby in its solitude. The soul succumbs to the attraction of external things; it abandons itself; ceases to feel, and surrenders to the coarse embrace of common circumstance. "I can only extricate you from this depressed state gradually, by obliging you to follow the tiresome, miry road of real public life, on which we have been forced to set our feet tonight." This time Stello shouted his reply with the sombre resolve of a 70

man who has gathered all his courage and is prepared to stab himself: "Proceed, Sir !" And Doctor Noir spoke as follows, in the darkness of the cold night:

71

A TALE OF THE TERROR

Chapter Twenty

A TALE OF THE TERROR

N

INETY-FOUR had struck on the clock of the eighteenth century; Ninety-four, whose every minute was blood and flame. The Terrible Year was striking slowly and horribly to the rhythm of heaven and earth, which listened in silence. One would have thought that some elusive phantom was passing and repassing among men; so pale was their mien, so wild were their eyes, so withdrawn were their heads beneath hunched-up shoulders, as if to conceal or defend themselves.—At the same rime, a certain grandeur, a sombre gravity, was stamped upon all these imperilled faces, even on the features of the children; it was like that sublime mask that death invests us with. During that time men either avoided each other, or approached each other abruptly like combatants. Their greetings were an assault, their good day was an insult, their smile a convulsion; they went dressed in beggarly tatters, and their hats were rags dipped in blood; their gatherings were like riots, their families like dens of vicious and suspicious animals, their oratory like the shouting of the market-place, their loves like gipsy orgies, their public ceremonies like ill-staged old Roman tragedies on provincial tour; their wars like the migrations of barbarian nations, the names of the time like burlesque parodies. But all of this had greatness, for in the republican tumult, though each man was playing for power, at least he staked his own head in the game. For this reason only, I shall speak of these men in a more serious manner than I did of the others. If the style of my first story was as showy and affected as the ballroom sword and powdered hair, if my second manner was as pedantic and long-drawn-out as the pigtail of an alderman, I feel that now my speech must be as sharp 75

and brief as the blow of the axe that rises smoking from a severed head. At the time of which I speak, Democracy was queen. The Decemvirs, the first of whom was Robespierre, were coming to the end of their three months' reign. They had mown down about them every idea that conflicted with the idea of the Terror. On the scaffold of the Girondins they had felled the idea of pure love of liberty; on the Hebertists' scaffold, the idea of the cult of reason together with the `republican obscenity' and the `obscenity of the Mountain'; on Danton's scaffold they had demolished the last idea of moderation. There remained the Terror; it bequeathed its name to the period. The Committee of Public Safety was proceeding boldly along the open road, clearing its way with the guillotine. Robespierre and Saint Just were the carters; one dragged the machine along in the role of high priest, the other pushed it in the capacity of apocalyptic prophet. As Death, Satan's daughter, can terrify the Devil himself, so their daughter, The Terror, had turned against them and was letting them feel its goad. And it was their nightly fears that instigated their daily fury. In a little while, Sir, I shall take your hand and lead you down into the darkness of their hearts; I shall hold up before your eyes the torch whose light the weak detest, the inexorable Machiavellian light; then you will be able to see distinctly the foul impulses stirring and sinking in those turbid hearts; impulses arising, not so much from the blind perversity that remains forever fastened to their names, as from their circumstances, and from the weakness of their defective constitutions. (At this remark Stello stared at Doctor Noir in astonishment.) I have a private theory, Sir, that there are no heroes and no monsters in this world. Only children should be allowed to use these words. You are surprised to find me agreeing with you in this case; but I arrrived at my opinion through lucid reasoning, whereas you depend on blind feeling. There is only this difference between us; your heart makes you respond to these creatures whom men call `monsters' with pity; my intelligence permits me nothing but contempt for them, a frigid contempt like that of the passer-by who crushes a slug under foot. Although the only monsters are the ones in the anatomical museums, still, there do exist 76

such miserable creatures, so totally and so brutishly abandoned to their dark and degraded instincts, so susceptible to the winds of every folly, so drunk, dizzy, and stupefied with the false conviction of their own worth and of their unfounded prerogatives, that I do not feel moved either to weep for them or to laugh at them: I am left with nothing but the disgust inspired by some freak of nature. The Terrorists were among those creatures who made me look the other way; but today I am forcing myself, for your sake, to look back at them again, with a patient and intent scrutiny that will leave no bone of their skeletons unstudied. At no time before 1832 have so many theories about these men been hatched in an entire year as are now propounded in a single day, for never before have so many people nourished the hope and cherished the possibility of resembling and imitating them. And indeed, a revolutionary period is ideally suited to mediocrities. When bawling voices drown out the expression of serious thought, when physical stature means more than loftiness of mind, when the street-corner harangue silences the eloquence of orators, when the invectives of the daily sheet temporarily obscure the permanent wisdom of volumes; when ambitious centenarians pretend to hang upon the doctrine of beardless boys, their dupes; when children hoist themselves on tiptoe to exhort grown men; when a common scandal can yield a man a bit of glory and a reputation; when the great names are shaken up pell-mell in muddy sacks, and drawn out in the popular lottery by the hand of pamphleteers; when deeds which were the shame of families are invoked as a sort of claim to fame (a legacy dear to many a selfmade man) ; when bloodstains turn into haloes, I say, those are the times to live in ! Not one little fellow need fear that he will be forbidden to pluck his shining grape from the cluster of political Power, that fruit reputed to be so full of wealth and glory. Can't every gang become a dub? and every club an assembly? an assembly, a convention? a convention, a senate? and isn't a senate meant to rule? And what senate ever ruled without a man to rule it? And what did it all require?—Daring !—Aha! Well said !—What ! is that all it takes? —Yes, all ! The ones who have arrived say so.—Then courage, numskulls, give tongue and run for it !—That's how it's done. They acquired the habit of theorizing when they were still 77

school children. They have theories for everything, they will harness a sonnet to a theory. When they want to make use of the dead, they promptly lend them their systems; everybody makes one up, good, bad, or indifferent; it's a saddle that's good for every horse, and it has to fit. Do you want to ride the Committee of Public Safety? All you have to do is make it wear your saddle! It has been claimed that the members of this fearful committee were deeply devoted to the interests of the people, and prepared to sacrifice everything for the progress of humanity; everything, including their natural sympathies, as well as their reputations, which they deliberately committed to perpetual execration.— That's this year's theory, made up for this year's needs. On the other hand, they have also been described in such a way as to make one think that they had rabies; as if they had decided to sweep from the face of the earth every head whose eyes had ever seen the monarchy; as if they ruled for the sheer joy of slaughter. —That's the superannuated alarmists' theory. We have also set up for them an edifying project for a continuous mitigation of their own tyranny, ascribing to them an unshakeable faith in the triumph of virtue, as well as in the moral justification of their crimes.—These are the theories of wellmeaning children who see everything in black or white, dream of nothing but angels or demons, and have no idea of the incredible number of hypocritical masks of every colour and shape and size which men use to conceal their features when they have passed the age of devotion to ideals and have abandoned themselves unrestrainedly to their egotistic desires. There are others, more courageous still, who do these men the honour of ascribing a religious doctrine to them. They say: "If they were atheists and materialists, what did it all matter to them? a murder (according to their doctrine) simply immobilized a moving object. "If they were Pantheists, they had little reason to care, for according to their faith they were merely producing a metamorphosis in the external forms of life." There remains the doubtful possibility of their having been sincere Christians; in that case, only they would be damned, but indulgence and salvation would be reserved for their victims. On such terms, one could begin to speak of self-sacrifice and of kind78

ness to one's enemies. 0 Paradoxes ! how I love to watch you jump through the hoop! "And you, what do you think? interrupted Stello, deeply interested. "I myself? I am merely trying to reconstruct step by step the development of public opinion about these men." Death is the most engrossing spectacle for man because it is the most terrifying of mysteries. Now, just as a bloody ending is enough to establish the fame of some mediocre play, so that its faults are overlooked and its slightest felicities applauded, similarly, the career of a public figure becomes illustrious in the eyes of the common people through the violent measures he has carried out and the number of deaths he has caused, until a certain cowardly respect for him develops. Henceforth, every atrocity which he perpetrates is attributed to some supernatural characteristic. The fact that he has frightened so many people presupposes, for those who are not aware how often he did it out of cowardice, some kind of courage in the man. Once his name has become a synonym for Ogre, they are grateful for any little trait about him which would be out of character in a hangman. If it is discovered that he once grinned at a baby, if his biography records the fact that he used to wear silk stockings, the conclusion is drawn that he was kindly and refined. In general, we are attracted to paradoxes. They contradict received opinion, and nothing draws attention more readily to a speaker or a writer. That is why such paradoxical apologies for the great executioners exist. Fear, the eternal queen of the masses, having enlarged these figures in everyone's eyes, makes their most insignificant actions stand out so obtrusively, that it would be a pity not to perceive a gleam of something tolerable amidst it all. In one of them it is some hypocritical harangue, in another, some jejune draught of a system, both producing a false air of eloquence and statesmanship; futile efforts whose manner betrays the arid struggle that spawned them, but apes the terse and trenchant style of genius. These men, gorged with power and drunk with blood, in their incredible political orgy, were mediocre and narrow in their ideas, mediocre and ineffectual in their works, mediocre and base in their actions.—They obtained their few 79

moments of notoriety only through a sort of feverish energy, a nervous fury induced by their tight-rope walkers' terrors, and especially by that emotion which in some sense had actually replaced their souls: the continuous thrill of murder. This emotion, my good sir (continued the Doctor, crossing his legs and taking a pinch of snuff in greater comfort), the excitement derived from murder, partakes of anger, of fear, and of spleen all at once. Once a suicide has failed to take his own life, if you do not tie him hand and foot, he will immediately try twice as hard again, as any doctor knows. It's the same with an assassin; he thinks he is getting rid of a potential avenger of his first murder by another murder; of the avenger of his second murder by a third murder; and so on for the rest of his life, if he remains in power; in Power —that state blest and holy in his feeble eyes. Then he sets to work on a nation as if it were a gangrenous body; he cuts, he carves, he hacks away. He is pursuing a dark spot, and that spot is his own shadow, composed of the scorn and hatred everyone feels for him: he finds it everywhere. In his fretful grief and fury, he exhausts himself in an effort to fill with blood a cask that leaks below; and so he finds his own damnation. Such was the disease from which those poor people I mentioned were suffering; otherwise, they were decent enough folk. I think I knew them pretty well, as you will gather from what I will tell you, and I didn't avoid intercourse with them; their talk was odd, they said some interesting things, and above all they said some curious things. A man has to see a little of everything to know life thoroughly by the end of his own span—much use though his knowledge will be to him when he is on the way out. In any case, the fact is that I saw them often enough and examined them carefully enough; and they didn't have cloven hooves, nor did they have the faces of tigers, wolves, or hyenas, as certain famous authors have assured us; they brushed their hair, they shaved, they dressed, they had their breakfast. There were some of them of whom the women said: `A good-looking fellow!' There were still more of whom nothing at all would have been said if they had been nothing; and the ugliest of them did not compare in ferocity of expression with some of our most respectable philologians and blandest diplomats, of whom we say: `How charmingly ugly !'—All notions ! Random notions ! literary 8o

twaddle, all of those supposed affinities to beasts ! Men everywhere have always been the same weak and simple creatures, more or less knocked about and distorted by their destiny. Only the strongest or the best of them rebel against it and mould it to their taste, instead of letting themselves be kneaded by its capricious hand. The Terrorists simply let themselves be carried away by the illogical instinct of cruelty and the disgusting necessities of their situation. All this happened to them as a result of their mediocrity, as I said before. Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel. The poor Triumvirs of whom we were speaking were profoundly aware of their moral disq»nlification. Each of them had failed in a better calling, and each of them was a failure in his own way; the first, a dull and unsuccessful lawyer; the second, a half-educated doctor; one, a would-be philosopher; another, a cripple, jealous of every sound and upright man. Bewildered minds, with aborted capacities of both body and soul, each of them knew that he was an object of public contempt; so these shameful kings, terrified of every glance, flashed the axeblade to dazzle all eyes and force them to turn away. Until the very day when they established their triumviral and decemviral authority, their entire work had been nothing but one continual slander, a hypocritical and unvaryingly ferocious criticism of the previous authorities. Informers, accusers, tireless devastators, they had tumbled the Mountain over the Plain, the Dantons on the Heberts, the Desmoulins on the Vergniauds, by keeping the Medusa of conspiracy always before the eyes of the reigning Multitude. That is a sight which drives all Multitudes wild with terror, for they know it to be hidden in their own veins and blood. In this fashion, the rulers had succeeded in drawing from the body politic an abundant perspiration, as they put it; a bloody sweat, to be precise; but when it came to setting that same body on its feet and getting it to walk, they were not equal to the task. Feeble organizers, bewildered, petrified at finding themselves suddenly in a position of responsibility, all they could think of doing was to start their fighting all over again within their little flock of leaders. H

öI

Still panting from the battle, they tried their hands at scribbling some fag-ends of a system whose possible application they did not even attempt to envisage; then they returned to the simpler task of the monstrous blood-letting. The three months of their sovereign power were like a sick man's delirium. They didn't have the strength to stop to think amidst it all. In any case, Thought, as I understand it, that calm, hallowed, strong and penetrating faculty, is something of which they were no longer capable. It does not descend into a soul that abhors itself. What thoughts they did have left over to employ in conversation you shall shortly hear, as I myself had the opportunity to do. I am concerned not so much with their lives as a whole, nor with the opinions held about them, as with the original subject of our conversation, their attitude towards the Poets and other artists of their time. They will provide my final instance; and since, after all, they are the most recent representatives of the Republican-. Democratic type of Power, they will make an excellent example. I cannot help groaning, along with the sincere Republicans, over the wrong done by these men to that fine Latin phrase, res publica; I can understand their hatred for these unfortunates (souls that did not know a moment's peace) who sullied their favourite form of government in the eyes of all nations. Now why can't they find another name for republicanism while preserving its content? Language is flexible. I am terribly sorry, to be sure, but I was not in the least responsible for what happened. I wash my hands of it; let them wash their names.

Chapter Twenty-one THE KIND CANNONEER I REMEMBER distinctly now, on the fifth of Thermidor, Year II of the Republic, or, if you prefer, 1794 (I hold no brief for either), I was seated alone at my window, looking out over Revolution Square. In my hands was the same snuffbox that you see here; it was about eight in the morning, when my doorbell rang violently. 82

My servant at the time was a tall, gaunt fellow with a mild, kindly disposition, who had been a terrible cannoneer for ten years, but had been put out of the running by a wound in the foot. Since I hadn't heard the door open, I got up and looked into the antechamber to see what my soldier was doing. He was asleep, with his feet on the stove. The unreasonable length of his lanky limbs had never struck me so forcibly before. I knew that he was at least five feet nine when he stood up; but it was only to his general stature that I had attributed his height, not to his prodigiously long legs, which at this moment were unfurled in their entire length between the tile of the stove and the wicker chair, whence the rest of his body and his long, lean head arose, falling hooplike over his folded arms.—I forgot the doorbell entirely as I stood watching this innocent and happy being in his accustomed attitude; yes, this was his habitual attitude; and never, as long as valets have been sleeping in anterooms (which is ever since valets and anterooms were invented), never, I say, has any man dropped off to sleep more tranquilly, nor slumbered with more freedom from dreams and nightmares, nor remained more good-humoured when awakened. Blaireau had always seemed a marvel to me, and the noble character of his sleep was a perpetual source of wonder and speculation. The good man had been sleeping in all sorts of places for ten years, but not once had he found one bed better or worse than any other. Only occasionally, during the summer, when he found his room too warm, he would go down into the courtyard, put a paving-stone under his head, and go to sleep there. He never caught cold, and rain didn't wake him up. When he stood up, he looked like a poplartree on the point of falling. His long body was hollow and arched, and his ribs seemed to meet his backbone. His face was yellow and his skin shone like parchment. No changes of expression could be observed in his features, except for a fleeting peasant's smile, silly, cunning, but agreeable at the same time. He must have burnt a lot of powder during his ten years amid the goings-on in Paris, but he had never been greatly concerned about the destination of his cannon-balls. He served his piece like an accomplished artist. In spite of the changes in government, which he scarcely understood, he had retained a saying of the oldsters in his regiment, and he was constantly repeating: "When I've served my cannon well, the 83

King himself is not my master." He was an excellent gun-layer, and had become the head of a crew several months before, when he was retired because of a large gash in the foot which he had received in an accidental explosion at the Champ de Mars. He was deeply grieved by his discharge, and his comrades-in-arms, who were very fond of him and frequently needed his help, always made use of his services in Paris and consulted him on important occasions. His ordnance work did not conflict with the work he did for me; for, since I was rarely home, I rarely needed his services, and at that, even when I did need him, I frequently served myself for fear of waking him. Accordingly, during the two previous years, Citizen Blaireau had fallen into the habit of stepping out without asking my permission, although he never missed what he called the evening roll-call; that is the time of my return, about midnight or two A.M. I invariably found him at home, asleep before the fire. Sometimes he acted as my protector, when there was a review or a battle, or a revolution within the Revolution. In my capacity of curious spectator, I used to go about the streets on foot, dressed in black as you see me now, with cane in hand. I would be on the look-out for the artillerymen (you always need a few in a Revolution), and when I caught sight of them, I could count on seeing above their hats with the pompons, the long face of my peaceful Blaireau, back in uniform, watching for me with his sleepy eyes. He would smile on recognizing me, and tell everyone to let his citizen-friend through. Then he would take me by the arm, show me around, tell me the names of all who had won the prizes in the lottery of Saint Guillotine, as they put it, and in the evenings we didn't go back to the subject: there was a tacit agreement between us on that score. He took his wages from me at the end of each month, and refused his stipend as a Parisian cannoneer. He served me for his pleasure, and his country for his honour. He took up arms only like some great nobleman: that was the way he liked to have it, and I was perfectly content. While I stood contemplating my servant (I must interrupt myself to explain that I say `servant' only for your benefit; in the Year II the word was `coadjutor'); while I stood watching him sleep, the bell was ringing continuously, hammering at the ceiling with unaccustomed violence. Blaireau slept all the more 84

soundly. In view of this fact, I decided to open the door myself. "Maybe you're really a good man at heart," said Stello. "One is always a good master when one isn't the master," answered Doctor Noir. "I opened my door."

Chapter Twenty-two A SWEET OLD MAN BEFORE me I beheld two very different messengers: an old man and a child. The old man was neatly powdered, and wearing a livery on which one could still see the places where the lace had been sewn. He took off his hat very respectfully, but at the same time he cast his eyes suspiciously about, looked past me to see whether anyone was behind me, and held back, as though to let the boy who had arrived with him, and who was still hanging on to the bell-pull, go in before him. The urchin was ringing to the rhythm of the Marsellaise, while whistling the tune (you probably know the song, now that it's 1832); he continued to whistle while staring at me brazenly, and rang away to the very last bar. I waited patiently, then I gave him twopence and said to him: "Good ! let's have that one again, boy !" He began again, not in the least bit fazed; he understood the irony of my gift, but he was bent on showing that he could defy me. He had a very pretty face, with a brand-new red cap over his ear; but the rest of his clothing consisted of rags that would make your stomach turn; bare-armed, bare-legged, he answered perfectly to the description of `Sans-Culotte.' "Citizen Robespierre is unwell," he announced to me in a clear and imperious tone of voice, his pale little eyebrows frowning. "You will visit him at two." And with that he flung my twopenny piece with all his might through one of the panes on my landing, so that the glass flew in all directions, and went hopping down the stairs on one foot, whistling `Ca ira!' "What do you want?" I turned to the old servant. Seeing that 85

this visitor was in need of reassurance, I took him by the elbow and guided him into the anteroom. The old fellow closed the door of the landing very cautiously, looked around once more, sidled forward along the wall, and said in a whisper: "It's ... Sir, it's Milady, the Duchess; she's feeling very poorly today ..." "Which one do you mean?" said I; "Come now, be quick and talk louder. I've never seen you before." The poor man seemed to be frightened by my brusqueness; he had been disconcerted by the manner of the little boy, but he was completely overwhelmed by mine; his pale old cheeks showed red about the cheekbones; he was forced to sit down, and I could see that his knees were trembling. "Madame de Saint-Aignan," he answered timidly, in the lowest voice possible. "Very well then, take courage," said I; "she's been my patient before. I'll stop in to see her this morning at Saint-Lazare: be calm, my friend. Is she being treated any better?" "Always the same," he said with a sigh: "there is someone there who does encourage her a bit, but I have reason to fear for the welfare of that person; and if anything were to happen—in that case Madame would unquestionably succumb. Yes, as I know her, she would undoubtedly succumb, she would never recover." "Come, come, my good man, women who are easily overcome are easily resuscitated. I know how to talk to them. I'll go and see her this morning." The old fellow would have kept on talking, but I took him by the hand and said to him, "Now, my friend, wake my servant for me if you can, and tell him that I need my hat to go out." I was about to leave him in the anteroom, and, paying no further attention to him, opened the door of my study, when I realized that he was following me. As he came in with me, his eyes were fixed in a terrified stare on Blaireau, who had no intention of waking up. "What now?" said I. "Are you crazy?" "No, Sir: I am under suspicion," he answered. "Oh !" said I; "that's another matter. It's a rather unhappy position to be in, but respectable enough. I should have guessed 86

what you were from your delight in dressing like a servant. All of you do it. It's a monomania. Very well, Sir, there is a large empty closet, if it would please you to get in?" I opened the leaves of the cabinet, and bowed as one does when doing a friend the honours of one's bedroom. "I fear that you may not find it comfortable," I added; "still, I have put up six people in it, one after the other." My word, I was only telling the truth. The fellow changed his manner completely when he saw that he was alone with me. He grew taller, and relaxed; there stood before me a fine-looking old man, less bent, more dignified, but still pale. On my assuring him that he was running no risk and could speak up, he ventured to sit down and appeared to breathe more freely. "My dear Sir," he said, lowering his eyes in order to restore his composure and to help himself resume the dignity of his rank, "I must inform you immediately of the purpose of my visit and of my identity. I am Monsieur de Chenier. I have two sons, who have unfortunately turned out rather badly: both of them have become involved in the Revolution. One of them, the worse of the two, is a Representative, and I'll have reason to mourn the fact for the rest of my life. The other, the better one, is in prison. He has sobered up a bit by now, but neither he nor I have any idea of the reasons why they jailed him, the poor boy; for he did some very revolutionary writing in his time, that must have pleased those blood-suckers no end ..." "Sir," said I, "allow me to remind you that one of those bloodsuckers is expecting nie for lunch." "I know, Sir, but I thought that was only in your medical capacity, a function for which I have the highest regard; for after the doctors of the soul, that is, the priests, and, in general, all ecclesiastics, barring none of the monastic orders, certainly the doctors of the body ..." "Must get there in time to save him," I interrupted again, shaking him by the arm in order to rouse him from the senile drivel that was beginning to put him to sleep: "I know these gentlemen, your sons. "To be brief, Sir, my one consolation is that the older one, the prisoner, the officer, is not a poet like the author of Charles IX, so 87

that when I have rescued him, as I hope to do with your help, he will at least not attract publicity through his literary reputation." "Well judged," said I, resigning myself to the necessity of listening. "Isn't that right, Sir?" continued the good man. "Still, Andre is a clever fellow; it was he who drew up Louis XVI's letter to the Convention. I disguised myself out ofconsideration for you, in order not to compromise you, since you have dealings with those rogues." "A detached and independent character can never be compromised," said I carelessly; "go ahead." "Zounds, Sir !" he began again, with a sort of antiquated military fervour; "you know, it would be terrible to compromise a man of honour like yourself, especially when one comes to ask a favour of you." "I have already had the pleasure of offering ... " said I, pointing out the closet with a gallant gesture. "No, that's not what I need," he replied; "I'm not trying to hide; on the contrary, I want to show myself more than ever. We are living in times when a man has to bestir himself; no matter what his age, a man has to bestir himself, and I have no fears for my old body. I'm worried about my poor Andre, Sir; I can't bear that he should remain in that horrible Saint-Lazare place." "He had better stay in prison," I said harshly; "that's the safest thing for him to do." "I'll go ..." "Don't go." "I'll speak ..." "Don't speak." The poor man was suddenly silent; then he clasped his hands between his knees with a gesture of hopeless sadness that would have melted the hardest heart. He looked at me with the expression of a criminal beseeching his judge from the rack, in the good old days of some Organic Period. His naked old forehead suddenly broke into lines, as a peaceful sea into wavelets, travelling upward in astonishment, then down again in despair. "I see that Madame de Saint-Aignan was mistaken," he said. "I don't hold anything against you, for in these times each man watches out for himself; I only ask you not to report my visit and I won't bother you again—Citizen." 88

The last word touched me more deeply than all the rest, because of the effort the old man had to exert to bring it across his lips. His mouth worked as though he were trying to curse, and the `Citizen' that emerged from it had never sounded that way since the word was first invented. The initial syllable hung suspended in a long-drawn whistle, then the other two followed in a rapid murmur, like the croaking of frogs in a swamp. There was such stifled contempt, such suffocating torment, such absolute despair in that citoyen, that you would have shuddered, especially as the old man started to get up painfully, his blue-veined hands grasping his knees in the attempt to raise himself out of his chair. I stopped him as he was on the verge of achieving an upright position, and lowered him gently on to the cushion again. "Madame de Saint-Aignan wasn't in the least mistaken," I said to him; "I can be trusted. I have never betrayed anyone's lamentations, and I've been hearing a lot of them, especially final lamentations, of late ..." My callousness made him quiver. "I know the situation of the prisoners better than you do; and I know in particular the situation of the one who owes his life to you. If you continue to bestir yourself, as you put it, you may well deprive him of that life. Remember, my good sir, during an earthquake one must stay absolutely still." His only answer was a slight bow indicative of resignation and polite reserve; it was evident that I had lost his confidence by my harshness. As I continued with my recommendations of utter silence and complete retirement, his eyes remained lowered: almost shut. I was trying to explain to him, as politely as possible, that every age has its own giddiness, that every passion may lead to imprudent action, and that even fatherly affection may become a danger. I went on to say that he should have understood that I would not have said so much, if I had not been sure of the peril of making the slightest move; that I couldn't give him my reasons, but that he should believe what I said; that no one was deeper in the confidence of the chiefs of state than I; that I had often taken advantage of favourable moments in my intimacy with them to snatch a few human heads from their clutches; but that in this matter, one that interested me in the extreme, involving as it did his older son, the 89

intimate friend of a lady whose birth I had attended and whom I regarded as my own child, I was obliged to warn him explicitly that the only thing to do was to stay silent and to let Destiny take her course, as a pilot without stars or compass lets the wind prevail.—Useless. There will always be such characters, so polished, worn, enervated and debilitated by civilization, that they close up like a sensitive plant when a harsh word brushes them. I'll admit that I have a rough touch. At any rate, now I could go on talking as long as I wanted; he consented to everything I suggested, he agreed with everything I said; but I felt that his politeness was superficial and a rock lay beneath the surface. It was sheer senile stubbornness, that wretched remnant of blind will that floats to the surface in us when all our other faculties have been swallowed up by time, like a rotten mast that marks a sunken ship.

Chapter Twenty-three THE HIEROGLYPHS OF THE KIND CANNONEER MY mind passes from one thought to another with the speed of the eye passing from light to shadow. As soon as I saw that my discourse was futile, I stopped talking. M. de Chenier got up, and I led him back in silence to the stairway door. It was only there that, unable to contain my feelings any longer, I took his hand and pressed it warmly. Poor old man! He was touched. He turned around and said gendy (but your mild obstinacy is the worst obstinacy of all): "Forgive me for troubling you!" "I am sorry," said I, "to see that you refuse to understand me, and that you interpret my good advice as a rebuff. I hope you'll think it over." He bowed deeply and went out. Shrugging my shoulders, I turned back to prepare to leave. A large form barred the doorway to my study: it was my gunner Blaireau, as much awake as it was in his nature to be. Perhaps you think that he wanted to do something for me? to open the door for me, perhaps?—Not at all. To apologize, then?—still less so. He had rolled up a sleeve of his Parisian cannoneer's costume, and he was absorbed in finishing, 90

with a needle held in his right hand, a symbolic drawing on his left forearm. He pricked himself till the blood came, sprinkled gunpowder in the scratches, set fire to it, and there he was !indelibly tattooed. It's an old custom among soldiers, as you know better than I. I took his arm. He was not at all disturbed, surrendering it to me willingly, and even with suppressed satisfaction. He stood contemplating the arm with affection and some vanity. "Well, my boy !" I exclaimed; "your arm is both a court almanac and a republican calendar." He rubbed his chin with a cunning smile: that was his favourite gesture; then he spat to a great distance, holding his hand to his mouth as a sign of politeness. This served in lieu of all futile conversation for Blaireau: it served to express assent and embarrassment, thoughtfulness or distress; it was a guardsman's habit, a regimental mannerism. Meanwhile I was examining this heroic, sentimental arm, undisturbed. The latest inscription showed a Phrygian cap over a heart, circumscribed with the words Unity or Death.

"I see that you're not a federalist like the Girondins," said I. He scratched his head. "No, no," he said; "neither is Citizen Rosie." And he pointed, with his sly air, to a small, carefully drawn rose beside the heart, under the cap. "Aha! now I see why you've been lame for such a long time," I said; "but I won't tell your captain !" "Well, you know, being a cannoneer doesn't mean a man has to be made of iron; Rose is the daughter of a lady who takes in knitting, and her father is a jailor at Lazare.—That's a great job !" he added proudly. I pretended that I hadn't heard this bit of information, but pocketed it nevertheless; he too seemed to have passed it on to me inadvertently. In this tacit fashion we understood each other perfectly. I continued to examine his barracks hieroglyphics with the attention of a miniature-painter. Directly above the loving republican heart stood a long blue sabre, grasped by a little badger standing upright, or, as it would have been described in heraldic terms, a badger rampant, and above it, in large characters: Bow to Blaireau, the Butcher of Bullies! 91

I raised my head quickly, as one does when comparing a portrait with the original to see whether a likeness has been captured. "That's you, isn't it? And this isn't a matter of politics, but of glory, I take it." A fleeting smile wrinkled the long, sallow face of my cannoneer, and he answered calmly: "Yes, yes, that's me. The Bullies were the six fencing-masters I did for." "You mean killed, don't you?" "That's the way we say it," he answered with the same innocent air. And in fact this primitive character, unaware of his own talent, had in the manner of the heroes of Tahiti engraved upon his yellowed arm, at the end of the badger's sabre, six reversed foils in an attitude of adoration. I wanted to proceed beyond the elbow, but I saw that he was somewhat disinclined to roll up his sleeve. "That was when I was just a recruit," he said; "it doesn't count now. I understood the cause of his modesty when I glimpsed a colossal fleur-de-lis, with this inscription above it: Long live the Bourbons and the Sainte-Barbe! Madeleine forever! "Keep your sleeves rolled down if you want to keep your head, my boy," I admonished him. "And be sure to receive your citizen Rose with open but well-covered arms." "Oh, well," he said, with an assumed air of stupidity; "as long as her father draws the bolts for me once in a while, between visiting-hours, that's time enough for me to ..." I stopped him, in order not to be obliged to ask him any questions. "Good," I said; "you're a discreet young fellow, you've done no harm since I hired you; you aren't likely to begin now. Come along with me this morning: I may be needing you. Follow me at a distance, and don't go in unless you feel like it. But at least be there when I come out!" He dressed, yawning two or three times more, rubbed his eyes, and let me go ahead of him. He was now ready to follow, with his three-cornered hat over his ear, and a white rod as long as himself in his hand. 92

Chapter Twenty-four SAI NT-LAZARE SAINT-LAZARE is an old, mud-coloured building. It used to be a priory. I think I wouldn't be far wrong if I said it wasn't completed until 1465, in the place of the old monastery of Saint Lawrence that Gregory of Tours talks about, as you know, in the ninth chapter of the sixth book of his History. The Kings of France used to stop there twice: when they arrived in Paris they would halt there to rest, and when they were leaving permanently they would be set down there on the way to Saint-Denis. Across from the Priory there used to be a little house of which not a stone has been left standing. It served for these occasions, and was called the King's Chambers. The Priory became a barrack, a state prison, a house of correction for monks, soldiers, conspirators, prostitutes; the filthy building was by turns heightened, expanded, barricaded and bolted; everything about it had a dingy, glum, unhealthy look. It took me a while to get from Revolution Place to the street of the Faubourg-Saint-Denis, where the prison is located. I recognized it at a distance by a rain-soaked blue and red rag, tied to a big black stick above the door. On a black marble slab, in tall white letters, was marked the universal inscription which served for every public building, the inscription which seemed to me the nation's epitaph: UNITY, INDIVISIBILITY OF THE REPUBLIC EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, OR DEATH

Before the door of the foul guard-house a group of SansCulottes were lounging on the oaken benches, sharpening their pikes in the gutter, playing cards, and singing the Carmagnole. Seeing a man being dragged down from the upper quarter by a mob of fishwives howling "Ca ira!" they began to pull the lantern from a lamp-post with the intention of hoisting the victim into its place. I was known there; they needed me, and they let me in. I knocked at a heavy door, on the right beneath the vault. The door opened halfway, as if of its own accord, and as I hesitated, waiting for it to open farther, the jailer's voice called to me: "Come on, 93

there ! come in, come in!" The moment I had set foot inside, I felt the door swish past my heels, and heard it slam heavily, as if forever, with the entire weight of its massive timbers, its ponderous spikes, its iron fittings and its array of bolts. The jailer was cackling through the stumps of his three remaining teeth. The old scoundrel was hunched up in a big black armchair, of the kind known as a pot-hook chair, because its back is supported on either side by iron crotchets that control the angle at which it reclines when dropped. There the immovable doorkeeper kept his vigil or slept, never bothering to stand up. His wrinkled, yellow, ironic face projected beyond his knees, supported by his chin. This time his legs were propped up on the arms of the chair, to provide him with a change from his usual posture; in his right hand he held his keys, in the left, the lock of the massive door. He opened and shut it as if it were operated by a spring, and with no sign of fatigue.—Behind his armchair I saw a girl standing, with her hands in the pockets of her little apron. She was chubby and fresh-looking, with a little turned-up nose, childish lips, ample hips, white arms, and a cleanliness rare in that building. Her red stuff dress was tucked up in her pockets, and her white cap was decorated with a big tricolour cockade. I had noticed her previously, but had never paid her any attention. But this time, primed as I was with the half-secrets of my cannoneer Blaireau, I recognized his good little friend Rose, with that inner conviction that enables one to say infallibly of a stranger whom one has been hoping to meet: "That's the man." The girl combined an air of mildness with a queenly manner that doubled the gloom of the place by contrast; it was a setting in which she simply did not belong. Her whole fresh being breathed the open air, fields, villages, thyme and serpolet; she must have torn a sigh from every prisoner who passed her, forcibly reminding him of the country, of wheat-fields and of open plains. "Sheer cruelty," I said aloud, and stopped before her; "it's sheer cruelty to let the prisoners see that girl." She understood me no more than if I had been talking Greek; not that I was trying to make myself understood. She stared at me in amazement; her mouth opened like a carnation-bud pressed with a finger, and without even smiling, showed the most beautiful set of teeth. 94

The father growled. But he was afflicted with gout, and didn't reply. I lost myself in the corridors, tapping the flagstones before me with my cane, for in those days the long, wide, damp halls were dark even in broad daylight, being poorly lit by fetid lamps of an angry red. Now that everything has become polite and respectable, if you should go to visit Saint-Lazare, you would see a beautiful infirmary, newly built cells, neatly arranged, whitewashed walls, scrubbed floors, light, air, and order everywhere. The jailers, the wicketkeepers, the turnkeys, are nowadays called directors, conductors, correctors, supervisors; they wear blue uniforms with silver buttons, speak softly, and know of their former `ridiculous' titles only by hearsay. But in I794 that sombre Lazar-House resembled a great cage of wild beasts. There was only the old grey building which is still to be seen, an enormous square block. Four storeys of prisoners groaned and howled one above the other. From the outside, the grillwork on the windows drew attention, with its links across and its enormous iron spikes running vertically, the chains and bars so closely interwoven that scarcely any air passed through. Inside, three poorly lit corridors divided each storey, and were themselves broken up by some forty kennel-doors fit for stalling wolves; through some of the doors came the odour of the wild beasts' den within. At the end of each corridor stood a heavy grating of black massive iron, and in each cell door was a little square opening, also barred, and known as the `wicket'; this could be opened by the jailer from the outside, to spy on the prisoners and keep watch over their activities. On coming in I crossed the big, empty courtyard where the fearful tumbrils used for carting away the victims were usually arrayed. I climbed the half-ruined stairs by which the inmates came down for their final ride. After that, I passed through an atrocious area, dark and sinister, worn by the rubbing of feet, with scarred and battered walls, as though a battle took place there every day. A sort of trough of fetid water was its only furnishing. I don't know what the place was for, but to this day it is known as `the bludgeon.' Then I entered the prison yard, a wide, ugly court framed in high walls; the sun cast some of its saddest rays there, over the 95

rooftops. In its centre stands an enormous stone pool, with four rows of trees about. At the end, the very end, is a great white Christ on a red cross, a cross red as blood. There were two women at the feet of the tall Christ; one was very young, the other very old. The younger one was on her knees praying, her hands raised, her head lowered, weeping copiously; she resembled the beautiful Princess of Lamballe so closely that I turned my head aside. The recollection was odious to me. The older woman was watering two vines that had begun to grow at the foot of the cross. The vines are still there. How many drops and how many tears have watered its clusters, red and white themselves as blood and tears ! A turnkey was singing as he washed his clothes in the fountain. I stepped into a corridor, and stopped before the twelfth cell on the ground floor. A warder came along, looked me up and down, recognized me, put his shapeless hand on the shapely handle of the bolt, and opened the door.—I was now at the residence of the Duchess of Saint-Aignan.

Chapter Twenty-five A YOUNG MOTHER AS the turnkey jerked open the door I heard a slight cry, and I understood that Madame de Saint-Aignan had been taken by surprise in an embarrassing moment. I had always marvelled at her perfect grace and the nobility of her demeanour, her calm, her quiet resignation, her angelic patience and her dignified timidity. She exacted obedience with lowered eyes, by a kind of domination which she alone could exert. This time, she was disconcerted by our entrance; but she regained her composure, as you will see. Her cell was small and stiffing, its window facing to the south; and I assure you that Thermidor was just as hot as July would have been in its place. The only protection that Madame de SaintAignan had against the sun, which shone directly into her little room, was a large shawl which she had hung over the window— the only shawl, I presume, that had been left her. Her simple dress 96

was extremely low-cut, and her arms were bare, much as if she had been wearing a ballroom gown. This was a trifle for me, but much too much for her. She rose to her feet, exclaimed, "Oh! Lord !" and crossed her arms over her breast as if she had been caught at her bath. She blushed from forehead to fingertips, and her eyes moistened momentarily. But this was a fleeting confusion. She recovered quickly on seeing that I was alone, and throwing a sort of white wrapper over her shoulders, she sat down on the edge of her bed in order to offer me the wicker chair which was the only piece of furniture in her prison.—Then I realized that one of her feet was bare, and that she was holding a little black silk open-work stocking in her hand. "Good Lord!" said I; "you should have given me a hint ..." "The poor Queen did the same !" she said with spirit, then smiled with charming dignity and self-assurance, raising her great eyes to mine; but very soon her mouth resumed its serious air, and I observed in her noble features a profound and curious change, superimposed on her accustomed melancholy. "Sit down ! Do sit down !" she said to me, speaking quickly and jerkily, in an unusual tone. "Since my pregnancy was announced, thanks to you, and I owe you ..." "Yes, yes, to be sure," I said, interrupting her in turn, as I didn't want to hear any encomia. "I have a reprieve," she continued; "but they say that the carts are coming here today, and they aren't going to roll away empty to the tribunal !" Her eyes turned to the window and remained fixed there, her look a trifle wild. "Those carts ! Those dreadful carts ! Their wheels make every wall in Saint-Lazare quiver. Their noise shatters my nerves. How lightly they roll in through the arch, but how slow and cumbersome is their departure !—Alas ! from what I hear, they are coming here to be loaded again today. It was Rose who told me so as she sang beneath my window. Good little Rose has a sweet voice and makes all the prisoners happy. Poor girl !" She relaxed slightly, was briefly silent, passed her hand over her eyes, and began again with a noble and courageous air: "This is what I wanted to ask you," she said to me, resting her fingertips lightly on the sleeve of my black coat; "what can I do I 97

to preserve the child I carry in my womb from the influence of my sufferings? I am afraid for him ..." She blushed; but conquering her shyness, she went on, growing more animated as she spoke. "You men—no, not even you, doctor though you are—none of you know what hopes and what dread a woman in my condition feels. I'll admit that I haven't seen any other woman carry her fears as far as I do." She raised her eyes. "Lord ! what divine anxiety ! what perpetual astonishment ! The feeling that another heart beats within my heart, another soul moves within my own troubled soul, living there a mysterious life known only to myself who share it ! To think that each of my worries n-ray cause this living, unknown being to suffer, that my fears may be its pain, my pain its anguish, my anguish—its death! When I think of that, I don't dare move or breathe. I am afraid of my own thoughts, I reproach myself for loving as much as for hating, lest I become perturbed. I venerate myself, I stand in awe before myself as though I were a saint !—That's my condition." As she spoke she looked like an angel incarnate, her arms crossed over her waist. She had scarcely begun to show. "Give me a thought that will always remain firm in my mind," she continued, keeping her eyes fixed on me; "something that will keep me from hurting my son." Like every other young mother I've known, she said "my son," through some instinctive preference or inexplicable impulse. I was forced to smile, despite myself. "You're pitying me," she said; "I can tell; all right ! That's because you know that nothing can arm our poor hearts against all our emotions. Our bodies will always react and leave the stamp of our least desires upon our children. "Nevertheless," she went on, letting her beautiful head loll upon her bosom, "it is my duty to carry my child to the day of his birth, though that day be the eve of my death.—I have been left on earth for that purpose alone, that is all I am good for, I am nothing but the frail envelope that protects him, to be destroyed after his birth. That is all I am ! All that I am, Sir ! Do you think ...", she took my hand, "do you think they'll leave me at least a few hours to look at him after he is born? They won't kill me right away, will 98

they? That would be too cruel ! You know, if only they allow me enough time to hear him cry, if they let me hold him in my arms for one day, I think I could forgive them; that's all that I ask for !" What could I do but press her hands; I kissed them with religious respect, but in silence, for fear of interrupting her. She now began to smile, with all the charm of a pretty young woman of twenty-four, and for a moment she seemed cheerful despite her tears. "I always have the feeling that you know everything. It seems to me that I only have to ask why?—and you will have the answer. Why then, tell me, is a woman more of a mother than she is anything else? More mother than friend, than daughter, even than wife; more mother than delicate lady, than vain coquette, and perhaps more mother than rational being? Why should a child which is nothing be everything? Why should the living be less important than he is? It's unjust, but that's how it is. Why should it be so? I reproach myself for it." "Calm yourself now," I said; "you're a little feverish, you have been talking too much and too loudly. Calm yourself." "No, Lord!" she cried; "that child, it won't be I who will nurse him !" As she said these words, she turned away from me and dropped her head upon the little bed, weeping uncontrollably. She could contain herself no longer. I watched her frank suffering, which she did not seek to conceal in any way; and I admired her total forgetfulness of the loss of her wealth, her rank, the more delicate aspects oflife. Once more I saw, in her, what I often had occasion to observe in those days; those who have lost the most complain the least. Being accustomed to society and ease raises the mind above the luxuries by which one is surrounded, and it is scarcely a privation to give them up. An aristocratic upbringing develops a disdain for physical suffering, teaches one to accept with a smile of pity the little, miserable cares of life; to take seriously only the sufferings of the soul, and to face without surprise a fall measured in advance by one's readings, by religious meditation, even by conversations in the home or the drawing-room; and above all to rise above the power of circumstance by the awareness of one's own worth. I assure you that Madame de Saint-Aignan seemed as dignified 99

with her head buried in the woollen coverlet of her folding-bed as she had looked when leaning her forehead on her silken upholstery. With time, the quality of dignity passes into the blood, and thence into every gesture or motion. It would not have occurred to anyone to find ridiculous what I saw more clearly than ever at this moment—the pretty little bare foot I have mentioned, crossed over the other in its black silk stocking. The reason why it occurs to me just now is that there are certain details that I identify with each of the scenes of my life, details that are never erased from my memory. I see her in that pose despite myself. I could paint her in that attitude. As a rule people don't go on crying for a whole day, so I looked at my timepieces; one said ten thirty, the other eleven o'clock. I took the average, and concluded that it was ten forty-five. I had plenty of leisure, so I began to study the room, and my strawbottomed chair in particular.

Chapter Twenty-six THE STRAW-BOTTOMED CHAIR SINCE I was sitting sideways on the chair, with the spine under my left arm, I couldn't help looking at it. The broad back had grown dark and shiny, not from varnishing or waxing, but from the grip of the many hands that had rubbed against it in the contortions of their despair; from the abundant tears that had coursed down the wood, and even from the clenched teeth that had ground upon it. The chair-back was scarred, gouged, pitted, marked with the print of nails. Names, crosses, signs of every kind had been carved upon it, with knives, penknives, broken glass, watchsprings, needles, pins. I had grown so absorbed in the inspection of these marks that I had almost forgotten my poor prisoner. She was still crying; there was nothing I could say to her, except, perhaps, "You have good reason to cry;" for it would have been impossible for me to convince her of the contrary, and in order to show sympathy with her I00

I would have had to cry even harder than she. No, that was not for me. So I let her go on crying, and continued studying the back of my chair. There were names; some of them charming, some very odd; few of them were commonplace names, and all of them were accompanied by some thought or sentiment. Of all those who had left their mark on that chair, not one still carried his head on his shoulders. What an album that board had become ! Every one of the travellers who had written on it was now in the only port that we are all sure of reaching, and all of them spoke of the crossing with contempt, and with few regrets; nor did they express any hope of a better life, or for that matter of any other life in which one knows that one is living. Neither faith nor atheism in their inscriptions; but a few expressions of passion, some vague hints of secret emotions, messages from the prisoner of the moment to some future prisoner: a bequest of the dead to the dying. When faith has perished in the heart of an ageing nation, its graveyards (and this was one) assume the look of pagan exhibits. Your Pere-Lachaise cemetery is a good example. Bring a Calcutta Hindu there, and ask him: "What folk is this, whose dead bear above their dust these gardens full of little urns, lined with Doric and Corinthian columns, fancy little arcades that might have been made up for a chimney-piece, like some curious clock; all whitewashed, marbled, gilded, prettified and glazed; with sentimental half-French lines å la Riccoboni engraved on the stone, sentiments extracted from novels that have been wringing tears from all the porters' wives and making the seamstresses waste away?" The Hindu will be embarrassed; he will see neither pagodas, nor Brahma, nor statues of the three-headed Vishnu, sitting crosslegged, with his seven arms; he will look for the Lingam, but he will not find it, he will look for the turban of Mahomet in vain; he will seek the Juno of the dead, but she will not be there; he will look for the Cross, and either will not find it, or, distinguishing it with difficulty at some corner of a lane, slink in the bushes and shamefaced as a violet, he will understand that there are very few Christians among this great nation; he will scratch his head in perplexity, spinning his ear-rings with his fingertip, like a juggler. And when he sees bourgeois merrymakers run laughing through IoI

the sanded paths, dancing under and over the flowers of the dead, when he notices the urns that stand above the graves, but few inscriptions such as `Pray for his soul', he will answer: "Doubtless these people burn their dead, and keep their ashes in these urns. They believe that after the dissolution of the body it is all up with a man. This nation rejoices at the death of its elders, and laughs over their corpses; either because it has inherited their wealth, or because it is glad that they have at last been delivered from their suffering. "May Siva of the golden locks and azure throat, worshipped by all readers of the Vedas, preserve me from living among these people; like the dou-roy flower, they show two faces, and both are false !" Yes: the back of the chair which I was studying, and am still referring to, was exactly like our cemeteries. One religious thought amid a thousand frivolous ones; one cross for a thousand urns. This is what I saw: Death?—Sleep. ROUGEOT DE MONTCRIP,

Regiment of Guards "He has half an idea of Hamlet's there," I thought. "That's better than none at all." Frailty, thy name is woman !

J.-F.

GAUTHIER

"What woman could this one have been thinking of?" I wondered. "A fine time to complain of women's frailty ! But then, why not?" said I to myself, seeing next to his name, in the list of prisoners on the wall, the description: Twenty-six years old; ex page of the tyrant. —"Poor young page ! Some jealousy in love followed him all the way to Saint-Lazare ! Maybe he was the happiest of the prisoners. He didn't think about himself. What a wonderful age, when one dreams of love beneath the axe !" Farther down, surrounded by wreaths and love-knots, some idiot had written: Here languished in his fetters the unfortunate Agricola-Adorable Franconville, of the section Brutus; a good patriot, enemy IO2

of the Shopkeepers, former bailiff, friend of the Sans-Culottes; he goes to meet Death with his Republicanism unsullied. I turned my head slightly, to see whether my dear prisoner had begun to recover from her distress; but as I could still hear her sobbing, I decided not to look at her or question her, for fear lest her weeping grow still more violent; she seemed to have forgotten my presence, so I went on reading. In a small, fine, feminine hand there was written, God save King Louis XVII and my poor parents. MARIE DE SAINT-CHAMANS,

fifteen years of age. Poor child! I ran across her name again yesterday; I'll show you the list where it appears, with Robespierre's note in the margin: "Violently fanatical and hostile to liberty, though very young." `Though very young !' He felt a twinge of shame that time, the gallant gentleman ! Still thinking about the last inscription, I turned around. But Madame de Saint-Aignan, totally given over to her sorrow, continued crying. To be sure, it hadn't taken me more than three minutes to finish reading carefully what it has taken me so much longer to remember and describe. Nevertheless, I felt that there was a sort of stubbornness or perhaps timidity in her insisting on remaining in that position for such a long time. Sometimes one can't find one's way out of a burst of sorrow, especially if one happens to be with someone of a strong and reserved character—someone of the kind who is usually called `cold,' because he harbours thoughts and feelings of an uncommon order, unsuitable for casual intercourse. Then again, one may not want to relinquish one's sorrow, except at the price of some sympathetic inquiry. That sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. So I turned away again, as though to continue the story of my chair and of all those who had watched, wept, cursed, prayed, or slept in it.

103

Chapter Twenty-seven A WOMAN IS ALWAYS A CHILD I STILL had time to read these lines, which will surely make your heart beat faster: Souffre, ö cceur gros de haine, aflame de justice. Toi, Vertu, pleure si je meurs. No signature to that; but, farther down, J'ai vu sur d'autres yeux, qu'Amour faisait sourire, Ses doux regards s'attendrir et pleurer, Et du miel le plus doux que sa bouche respire Un autre s'enivrer. As I stooped to look closely at the writing, I felt a hand upon my shoulder; it was anything but heavy. I turned around; there was my gracious prisoner, her face still damp, her cheeks moist, her lips wet, but crying no longer. She had approached me, and somehow or other I realized that she was trying to bring from her heart something difficult to say, something that I hadn't wanted to take from her. In her look, in her lowered head, there was an appeal: "Please ask !" "Well, what is it?" I said aloud, turning only my head. "Don't scratch that handwriting," she said in a soft, almost melodious voice, leaning full on my shoulder. "He used to be in this cell; they moved him to another room, in the other court. M. de Chenier is a close friend of ours; I am glad to have this souvenir of him during the time I have left." I turned around, and saw a smile flit across the serious mouth. "What can those lines mean?" she continued. "Really, one can't tell what sort of jealousy they express." "Weren't they written before you were separated from the Duc de Saint-Aignan?" I remarked carelessly. (Her husband had been transferred a month earlier to the farthest wing of the building.) She smiled unblushingly. "Or perhaps," I went on indifferently, "perhaps they were written for Mademoiselle de Coigny?" 104

This time she flushed without smiling, and removed her arms from my shoulders in vexation. Then she took a few steps around the room. "Who could have given you such notions?" she snapped. "True, the girl is a bit of a flirt; but, after all, she's only a child. Besides," she continued with a proud air, "I can't imagine how an intelligent man like M. de Chr nier could be that much interested in her." "Aha, my girl," thought I, as I listened to her; "now I see what you want to hear me say; but I can wait. You'll have to bend a bit more. Seeing my cold air, she assumed a dignified bearing and advanced upon me like a queen. "I have a very high opinion of you, my dear sir," she said, and I am going to prove it by entrusting this box to you; it contains a valuable locket. I have heard that they are thinking of searching the prisons again: and searching means robbing. Until the danger is over, would you be so kind as to keep this for me? I'll let you know when I want it back, when I feel secure about everything, except, of course, my life, which there is no point in mentioning." "No point at all," said I. "At least you're frank," she said, laughing, though I had seen her wince. "But you've chosen the right woman to be frank with; I'm glad you know that I am brave enough to hear my own death discussed." She took a little box of violet morocco from under her pillow; its open spring allowed me a glimpse of a painting inside. I took the box, and, pressing my thumb down on it, deliberately snapped it shut. I lowered my eyes, pursed my lips, moved my head about sedately; in a word, I assumed the judicious and detached air of someone who through courtesy refuses to notice the content of what he has been entrusted with.—And there I awaited her next move. "What's the matter?" she said; "Why don't you open the box? You have my permission !" "Oh ! My dear duchess !" I replied; "do not think for a moment that the nature of my trust can affect my discretion. I have no desire to know what this box contains." She tried another tone: curt, sharp, decided. "Well, I don't want you to get the notion that there is any IOs

mystery here; it's all as simple as can be. You know that M. de Saint-Aignan, who is twenty-seven, is about the same age as M. de Chenier. You have probably noticed that they are very fond of each other. M. de Chenier had his portrait painted here: he made us promise to save this souvenir if we survived him. It's one chance in a thousand, but at any rate we promised; and I wanted to keep the picture myself. It would certainly be treasured as the portrait of a great man, if anyone knew the things he's read me." "What's that?" said I, with an astonished air. She was very pleased by my surprise, and in her turn took on an air of reserve, drawing back slightly. "He confides in no one, absolutely no one but myself," she said. "and I gave my word not to divulge any of his ideas, not even to you. These are matters of a superior order. It is his pleasure to discuss them with me." "What other woman would understand him?" said I, after the manner of a true courtier; for I had long since been shown fragments of his work by another woman, and by M. de Pange. She offered me her hand; that was all she had been waiting to hear. I kissed the slender white fingertips, but as I did so I could not refrain from whispering: "Alas, my dear lady, do not scorn Mademoiselle de Coigny; a woman is always a child."

Chapter Twenty-eight

THE DINING-HALL AS usual, they had locked me in with the gracious prisoner; while I was still holding her hand, the bolts were drawn, and a turnkey cried: "Berenger, wife of Aignan !—Hey ! come on! it's mealtime ! Ho, there !" "There they are," she said in a sweet voice, with a witty smile; "my staff, announcing that dinner is served." I offered her my arm, and we entered a long hall on the ground floor, lowering our heads to pass through the doorways and the gates. A broad, long table, bare of linen, loaded with leaden covers, io6

pewter glasses, stone jugs, blue crockery plates; oak benches, blackened, shiny, worn, hard, and smelling of tar; round breads piled in baskets; rough-hewn pillars standing splay-footed on the cracked paving-stones, holding up the smoke-stained ceiling on shapeless capitals; all about the hall, soot-coloured walls bristling with ill-mounted pikes and rusty muskets. The scene was illuminated by four large lamps on posts, continuously discharging a black smoke into the damp cellar air and bringing a cough to the lips as one stepped through the door. I closed my eyes for a moment in order to see better on opening them. My fellow-prisoner followed suit. On looking again, we could distinguish a small group of people who were conversing apart. Their soft voices and polite, controlled speech betrayed their breeding. They greeted me from where they sat, but rose on catching sight of the Duchess of Saint-Aignan. We proceeded. At the other end of the table was a more numerous group, younger, livelier, noisy and full of laughter, much like an informal matinee at the Court, after a ball. There were the same girls to the left and right of their great-aunt; young men whispering in each other's ear, pointing each other out in jealousy or sarcasm; stifled laughter, snatches of song, dance tunes, glissades, steps, fingers snapping in lieu of castanets and triangles; a circle had formed, and they were watching something in the middle. This activity, whatever it was, seemed to produce a moment's suspense and silence, then a noisy burst of condemnation or approval, applause or discontented murmuring, such as one would expect following a good or bad scene in a play. Suddenly a head would appear, and as suddenly vanish from sight again. "Some innocent game," I said as I approached, following the broad rectangular table. Madame de Saint-Aignan stopped, leaned on the board, and dropped my arm to press her hand upon her waist, in a familiar gesture. "Oh, Lord, let's not go any closer ! it's that horrible game of theirs again," she said; "I begged them so hard not to play it any more ! I just can't understand them ! They're so callous ! You can go and look; I'll stay here !" I left her sitting on the bench, and went over to see what it was. It didn't displease me as much as it had distressed her. On the I 07

contrary, I found this game in the jail admirable; it could be compared with the Roman gladiators' exercises. Yes, my friend, without doing things as pompously as the ancients, France can sometimes boast of just as much philosophy. We have always been Latinists, by heredity, from childhood on, and we never fail to stop and pray before the same altars and the same images as our ancestors. All of us have exclaimed at school over that miracle of `dying gracefully' to which the Roman slaves trained themselves. Well, I saw the same thing done here, unpretentiously, without fanfare, amidst wit and jollity, with a thousand jests for the slaves of the sovereign mob. "Your turn, Madame de Perigord," called a young man dressed in blue silk with a white stripe, "let's see how you'll go." "And how much you'll show," said another. "Penalty ! penalty !" was the outcry. "Indecent ! Bad taste !" "Bad taste as much as you like," said the accused; "but I thought the whole point of the game was to see which one of the ladies will go up with the greatest decorum." "What childishness !" said a very handsome woman of about thirty; "I won't try it at all if the chair isn't better placed than that." "Oh, what a shame, Madame de Perigord!" another woman interjected; "the name of Sabine Veriville appears on the list before yours: let's see you go up like a Sabine !" "Fortunately, I'm not suitably dressed. But where shall I set my foot?" the young woman asked in embarrassment. There was general laughter. One after another the onlookers approached, bent down, pointed something out, entered into descriptions: "There's a board here." "No, there." "Three feet high." "No, only two." "No higher than the chair." "Lower." "You're mistaken." "Well, live and learn." "You mean die and learn!" More laughter. "You're spoiling the game," said a sedate-looking man, quite upset; he was staring at the young woman's feet. "Very well. Let's just make the conditions clear," Madame de Perigord spoke again in the middle of the circle. "The idea is to get up on the machine...." "On the stage," another woman broke in. "Anyway, whatever you want to call it," she went on, "without Ioö

lifting your skirt more than two inches above the ankle.—Here I am." And indeed she had flown right up on the chair; there she stood, perfectly erect. There was much applause. "What comes next?" she asked gaily. "You won't have to worry about what comes next," someone said. "What comes next? The see-saw will fall !" a stout turnkey offered, with a laugh. "What comes next? Whatever you do, don't go haranguing the crowd," said an eighty-year-old canoness; "that would be in the worst of taste." "And useless in the bargain," said I. M. de Loiserolles offered her a hand to help her down from the chair; the Marquis d'Usson, M. de Micault, justice in the court of Dijon, the two young Trudaines, the gentle M. de Vergennes, seventy-six years old, all approached to help her down. But she reached her hand to nobody, and dropped from the chair as gracefully as if she had been stepping down from her carriage. "Aha! this will really be something to watch !" was now the cry on all sides. An extremely young woman was advancing, with the grace of an Athenian virgin, towards the centre of the circle. She was dancing while she walked, as children do, then realizing what she was doing, she made an effort to control her gait, and proceeded to walk while she danced, rising on her toes at each step like a bird about to take flight. Her black hair, parted in front, massed like a crown at the back of her head, and braided with a golden chain, gave her the look of the youngest Muse; this was the Greek style that was beginning to replace powdered hair. Many another woman's bracelet, I declare, could have served her as a girdle. Her head was small, and gracefully inclined, as the head of an antelope, or a swan; her delicate bosom and slightly stooped shoulders, such as one sees in growing girls, her long, thin arms, contributed to an impression both appealing and elegant. Her regular profile, serious mouth, very black eyes, with eyebrows severe and arched like a Circassian's, expressed a determination and an originality that surprised and charmed one instantly. This was Mademoiselle de Coigny; it was she whom I had seen praying in the courtyard. 109

She appeared to be thinking with enjoyment of everything she was doing, but was oblivious to her audience. She advanced with a sparkle of pleasure in her eyes. That's what I like to see, when they are sixteen or seventeen; it's the loveliest possible innocence. This natural joy electrified the exhausted features of the prisoners. It was she, the `Jeune Captive' who does not want to die. Her manner expressed the very things the poet phrased for her: My greeting to the sun brings light to every eye, and Stubborn illusion cradles in my breast. She was about to step up: "No ! not you! not you !" cried a young man dressed in grey, whom I hadn't noticed before, stepping out from the crowd. "Don't do it, I beg you, don't !" She stopped, raised her shoulders slightly, like a sulky child, and put her fingers to her mouth in embarrassment. She obviously wanted her chair, and kept stealing sidelong glances at it. At that moment, someone said: "There is Madame de SaintAignan." Instantly, with great presence of mind and tact the bystanders removed the chair, the circle dissolved, and they all formed a little quadrille, in order to conceal this singular rehearsal for the drama of Revolution Square. The women went forward to greet her, and surrounded her in order to disguise the proceedings; it was known that she detested the game, and that it might cause her serious harm. The attentions, the consideration she received were such as would have been shown her at Versailles. Good manners are not easily forgotten. With one's eyes closed, one would have thought nothing changed; it was a salon again. Among these groups I noticed the pale face of the young man, sad, worn, and passionate, as he moved silently through the crowd, his head sunk over his folded arms. He had left Mademoiselle de Coigny immediately, and was striding through the hall, prowling around the pillars and glancing like an imprisoned lion at the walls and bars. There was something of the officer's appearance in his attire, in the grey suit cut in the military fashion, in the black collar and the double-breasted vest. Clothing and features alike, smooth black hair, black eyes—there was a marked resemblance. This was IIO

the original of the portrait I was carrying: it was Andre de Chenier. I had never seen him before. Madame de Saint-Aignan introduced us. She called him over, he came and sat down with her, quickly took her hand, kissed it without speaking, and began to look around in an agitated manner. From that moment she, too, no longer spoke to us, but followed his eyes uneasily. We formed a little group in the shadow, in the midst of a crowd that was talking, walking back and forth, rustling quietly. Little by little they drew farther away, and I observed that Mademoiselle de Coigny was avoiding us. All three of us were sitting on the oak bench, leaning our backs against the table. Madame de SaintAignan, who was between us, leaned farther back as if to let us speak, since she didn't want to be the first to do so. Andre de Chenier, who was no more eager than she to gossip about trivialities, moved closer to me, in front of her. I saw that I would do him a favour by opening the conversation. "This gathering in the dining-hall must be a relief for the prisoners," said I. "As you see, it gives everyone pleasure except myself," he answered sadly; "I am suspicious of it, it contains some menace; it reminds me of the last meal of the martyrs." I. lowered my head. I thought as he did, but I didn't want to seem to agree. "Now, now, don't frighten me," said Madame de Saint-Aignan; "I have enough cause for concern: don't let me hear you talk like that again." And leaning closer to me, she whispered in my ear: "The place is full of spies; please, don't let him compromise himself; I can't prevent him; I tremble for him, because of these violent moods of his." Andre Chenier (since that is how his name has been re-fashioned in the hands of the public, and what the public does cannot be rescinded) looked at me, and turned his head aside in sorrow and compassion. I understood the gesture, and he saw that I understood. Among sensitive people, there is nothing less necessary than words. I'm sure that he would have subscribed to the silent translation that I made of his sign: "Poor girl!" it meant; "she thinks that I am still in danger of being compromised !" III

In order not to break off the conversation abruptly, which would have been a great error in the presence of someone as observant as Madame de Saint-Aignan, I enlarged the scope of the discussion, without dropping it entirely. "I have always been of the opinion," I remarked to Andre Chenier, "that poets have insight into the future." There was a flash of enthusiastic agreement in his eyes, but it quickly changed to suspicion. "Do you mean it?" he asked; "I never know whether people are in earnest or not; that perpetual banter is the bane of French society." "I'm not just a mondain," said I; "and I always mean what I say. "Well, then," he proceeded, "I will admit, quite frankly, that I too believe what you say. I have rarely been deceived by my intuitions." "So," interrupted Madame de Saint-Aignan, forcing a smile, "so that was how you knew that Mademoiselle de Coigny would hurt her little foot if she jumped up on the chair like the others !" Even I was astonished at the rapidity of her feminine insight, that can pierce stone walls when fired by a little jealousy. A salon had formed in this prison, a salon with all its rivalries, its coteries, its poetry readings, its futilities, its pretensions, its graces and its vices, its nobility and its pettiness, its loves and its hates, as an islet of flowers forms upon the stagnant, greenish waters of a swamp, certain to founder at the slightest wind. Andre Chenier alone seemed to realize the full implications of their situation, which the other prisoners ignored. Most people become accustomed to living in danger, and adjust to it like the settlers on Vesuvius in their lava huts. These sufferers at first attempted to conceal from themselves the fate of their companions who were being carried off one by one. Perhaps they had been released ! Perhaps they were better off at the Conciergerie ! Then they had begun to joke about dying; at first through bravado, but eventually by habit; then, no longer preoccupied with it, they had begun to think of other things, and to live again their usual elegant life, with its special mode of discourse and all its special virtues and vices. "Oh! I had hoped," said Andre Chenier gravely, taking one of II2

Madame de Saint-Aignan's hands in both of his, "I had hoped that that cruel game would be concealed from you. I feared lest it be continued in your presence; that was my concern. As for that pretty child—" "Child, if you please!" said the Duchess, snatching her hand away; "she means more to you than you admit; she makes you talk imprudently with her giddy ways, and she coquettes in a manner that would frighten her poor mother out of her wits, if she were here to see. Look at her with all those men !" And indeed there was Mademoiselle de Coigny, right in front of us, sauntering gaily by with a man on each arm and a crowd of others around her, some following, others walking backwards before her. As she walked she glided along the floor, watching her feet, sliding forward with rhythmic movements as though preparing to dance, and in passing she remarked to M. de Trudaine: "Since only women nowadays know how to slay before being slain, it seems to me quite right that men should die meekly, as all of you will have to do one of these days...." Andre Chenier went right on talking; but he blushed and bit his lip. It was obvious that he had heard, and that the girlish prisoner was capable of taking a sharp revenge for an unauthorized tete-a-tete. Nevertheless, with womanly delicacy, Madame de Saint-Aignan sustained the conversation, speaking rather loudly, for fear lest he take the reproach for himself, for fear lest he feel himself insulted and be stung to a harsh retort. Several ugly faces that had been prowling behind the pillars could be seen approaching. I wanted to put a stop to all this petty intrigue, which was beginning to annoy me; I had come in from the outside, and could see their situation as a whole. "I met your father this morning," I said abruptly to Chenier. He started in amazement. "But sir," he said, "I also saw him, at ten o'clock." "He must have just come from my house," I cried; "what did he tell you?" "What!" said Andre Chenier, rising; "are you, Sir, the one who...?" The rest was whispered to his pretty neighbour. I surmised what an unfavourable account of me the poor man must have given his son. g 113

But now Andre was erect, pacing back and forth; suddenly he stopped with folded arms before me, and spoke in a loud and violent voice: "Since you are so intimate with the wretches who destroy us, Citizen, you can go and repeat to them everything I've been saying, what made them arrest me and drag me here, everything I said in the Journal de Paris, and everything I screamed in the ears of the filthy catchpolls who came to arrest my friend. You can tell them what I've written here. Look !" "For God's sake, stop !" cried the young woman, trying to hold his arm. But in spite of her he dragged a piece of paper out of his pocket, and thrust it in my face. "They are nothing but butchers, scribbling laws; since the blade cannot gleam in my grasp, I can still avenge myself with my one remaining weapon, my pen; if I have but one day left to live, it will be used to spit upon their names, to hail their approaching torture, to urge on the triple lash that looms above their triumvirate; this I can tell you, from the midst of this herd of sheep like myself, who, hung from the bloody hooks of the people's larder, will soon be served up at the table of the sovereign mob !" Hearing his voice ring out, the prisoners had gathered round him, like the sheep of his own metaphor gathering around the ram of their unhappy herd. An unbelievable change had come over him. He seemed to have grown suddenly taller; his anger magnified him and gave a new power to his look; he was magnificent. I turned towards M. de Lagarde, an officer of the Guard. "The blood runs too hot in the veins of that family," I said; "I can't prevent it from flowing." I rose, shrugged my shoulders, and walked a few steps away. My phrase must have struck him, for he fell silent and bit his lip; then he leaned against a pillar. Madame de Saint-Aignan didn't take her eyes from him for a moment; she might have been watching an eruption of Mount Etna, with equally little thought of commenting or of trying to interfere with the upheaval. One of his friends, M. de Roquelaure, who had been a colonel in the regiment of Beauce, came up to him and clapped him on the shoulder. "Still so furious against the reigning rabble?" he asked. "You would be using your energies to much better purpose if you I 14

just kept booing their unsuccessful histrionics until the curtain— for us first, but then for them, too." And with that he turned a pirouette and sat down to table, humming, "Our life is a winter's journey." A loud rattling bell proclaimed that lunch was served. A sort of fishwife whom they called, I think, Mistress Seme, settled herself at the middle of the table to do the honours: this was the female of the species known as jailers, the mate of the one I had seen crouching at the entrance. The prisoners of this part of the building sat down to table: there were about fifty of them. Saint-Lazare housed seven hundred. As soon as they were seated, their manner changed. They began to exchange uneasy glances, and their expressions grew sad. Their faces, lit by the red and smoking flames of the four big lamps, cast sombre gleams like the faces of miners in their tunnels, or of the damned in their dark caverns. Ruddy cheeks seemed black, pallor showed livid, a bright, fresh face glowed blue, eyes flamed. The talking was no longer general, but confined to individual whispers and mutterings. Behind the banqueters, a row of observers had established themselves: gate-keepers, turnkeys, policemen, and dilettante SansCulottes, come to enjoy the spectacle. A few ladies of the marketplace, carrying or dragging their children, had been granted the privilege of attending this happy demonstration, in perfect democratic taste. I was apprised of their arrival by a stench of fish that spread throughout the hall, and prevented some of the women at table from continuing their meal under the eyes of these queens of the gutter and the sewers. The gracious members of the audience looked both uncouth and uneasy; they appeared to have expected something quite different from the quiet conversation, the polite asides characteristic of mealtime manners among well-bred people everywhere. Since no one shook a fist at them, they didn't know how to act. There they remained in idiot silence; some even hid on recognizing at table people in whose kitchens they had recently been serving and pilfering. Mademoiselle de Coigny had gathered about her a rampart of five or six young men as protection against the effluvium of the herring-vendors, and taking her bouillon where she stood, as she IIs

might have done at a ball, she was poking fun at the gallery with her usual careless air. Madame de Saint-Aignan wasn't eating; she was lecturing Andre Chenier, and pointing to me repeatedly, no doubt informing him that he had made an inappropriate attack on an ally. He frowned, and bowed his head in token of assent. She motioned to me to approach; I returned to the group. "Look," she said to me; "M. de Chenier here tells me that the sweet reasonableness of that gang of Jacobins is a bad sign. Please prevent him from going off into another of his fits of fury." Her eyes pleaded with me; she was obviously anxious for a reconciliation. Chenier helped by volunteering a playful remark. "You have been to England, Sir; if you happen to be there again, and if you meet Edmund Burke, please tell him that I apologize for having criticized him; he was perfectly right when he predicted the reign of the teamsters. I hope this will be a more agreeable message for you to carry than the other.—You know how it is. Jail doesn't improve the temper." He offered me his hand, and understood from the reciprocal pressure that he was dealing with a friend. At that very moment a loud, hoarse, rumbling noise made the plates and glasses shake, the windows shake, the women shake. There was dead silence in the hall. The tumbrils were rolling. The sound was unmistakable, as the sound of thunder is unmistakable. It was not the sound of an ordinary wheeled conveyance. There was something of the grating of rusted fetters and the thudding of the final shovelful of earth on coffins in that sound. It hurt the soles of my feet. "Hey there ! get on with the meal, Citizens !" Mistress Seme hailed them, in her rough voice. No movement, no reply. Our arms were frozen in the position in which the fatal rumbling had caught them. We looked like those asphyxiated families of Pompeii and Herculaneum who have been found again in the very postures in which death overtook them. It was in vain that the Seme woman plied the plates, the forks and knives; not a hand stirred amid the general amazement at this exhibition of cruelty. The prisoners had been given an opportunity to meet at table, to embrace and ease their hearts with one another IIü

for a few hours, they had been allowed to forget the sorrow and privations of their solitude, to taste of trust and friendship, wit, and even a touch of love—all in order to present them collectively with the spectacle of their individual deaths. It was beyond all belief; a game fit only for rabid Jacobins or ravening hyenas. The wide doors of the dining-hall flew open with a loud noise and vomited three commissaries in long, dirty coats, top-boots, and red sashes, followed by a new troop of red-capped bandits armed with long pikes. They came running in with cries of joy, clapping their hands, as if at the opening of a circus. What they saw stopped them short; once again the slaughterers were discountenanced by the victims. The prisoners' surprise had lasted only a moment, and their swelling contempt surged back in them to give them all a new-found strength. They felt themselves so far above their enemies that they could almost enjoy the situation, and all eyes greeted the commissary who advanced, a sheet of paper in hand, firmly and even with curiosity. The sheet was a list of names, which he began to read forthwith. As soon as a name was announced, two men came forward and led away the prisoner designated. He was turned over to the mounted gendarmes outside, and loaded on one of the carts. The charge was conspiracy against the people while in prison, and plotting the assassination of the Representatives and the Committee of Public Safety. The first person so accused was a women eighty years of age, the abbess of Montmartre, Madame de Montmorency: she got up with difficulty, but, once erect, greeted her companions with a quiet smile. Those closest to her kissed her hand. No one wept, for during that time the sight of blood left all eyes dry. She departed saying, "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do." A dumb silence reigned in the hall. Outside, ferocious whoops announced her appearance before the crowd, and stones began to strike the walls and windows. In the midst of the uproar, I was even able to distinguish the report of a firearm. Sometimes the police had to use force to save the prisoner for another twenty-four hours. The roll-call continued. The second name was that of a young man of twenty-three, M. de Coatarel, as I remember, who was accused of having an emigrant son bearing arms against his country. The accused was not even married. He burst into laughter I17

when the charge was read, shook hands with his friends, and left.— The cries outside rose again. Silence prevailed around the table, from which the members of the group were being torn one by one; they waited at their post like soldiers expecting a fusillade. Each time a prisoner left, his cover was removed, and those who remained drew closer to their new neighbours, with a bitter smile. Andre Chenier had remained standing near Madame de SaintAignan, and I was close by. As on a boat in danger of shipwreck the crew crowds spontaneously around the man who is known for firmness and resourcefulness, the prisoners had gathered of their own accord around this young man. His arms were folded, his eyes looked upwards, as if to ask whether heaven could permit such an outrage, unless perhaps heaven were empty. Mademoiselle de Coigny saw one of her guards depart at every call, and little by little she was left almost alone at the far end of the hall. Then she approached us, following the table, which was almost deserted; and supporting herself on the edge, she came up to us and sat down nearby in our shelter, like the poor abandoned child that she was. Her noble face had retained its look of pride, but nature was yielding in her, and her weak limbs were trembling. The good-hearted Madame de Saint-Aignan reached out her hand to her. She threw herself into the older woman's arms, and burst into uncontrollable tears. The harsh, pitiless voice of the commissary continued the rollcall. He would prolong the torment of each one by pronouncing the Christian names as slowly as possible, drawing out and lingering over every syllable; then he would let the surname fall suddenly, like an axe athwart the neck. Each time a prisoner passed him he would accompany him with a curse, which was the signal for prolonged hooting. He was red with wine, and seemed unsteady on his feet. While this man was reading, I noticed the face of a woman approaching on his right through the crowd; she stopped almost beneath his arm. High above his head was the long face of a man, who was reading easily from behind. The first one was Rose, the other my cannoneer Blaireau. Rose appeared curious and pleased like the other gossips of the market who went arm-in-arm with her. I detested her bitterly. Blaireau wore his usual sleepy look; his I18

cannoneer's uniform seemed to give him great prestige among the men with pikes and caps who surrounded him. The list which the commissary had in his hands was made up of a number of scribbled sheets, which he could read no better than its authors could write. Blaireau approached as if anxious to help him, and relieved him of his hat, which was in his way. I thought I saw Rose at that moment pick up something from the floor, but the movement was so rapid, and the shadow at that end of the hall was so deep, that I could not be sure of what I had seen. The reading continued. Men, women, even children, arose and passed on like shadows. The table was almost empty: it began to appear enormous and sinister for lack of company. Thirty-five had left; the fifteen who remained, scattered singly or in pairs, with eight or ten spaces among them, gave the same impression as trees overlooked during the levelling of a forest. Suddenly the commissary stopped. He had come to the end of his list; one could breathe again. I sighed with relief. Andre Chenier spoke: "Go ahead; I'm here!" The commissary looked at him in bewilderment. He peered into his hat, felt in his pockets, then in his belt, and finding nothing, sent for the bailiff of the revolutionary tribunal. The bailiff came; we remained in suspense. He was a pale, dismal looking character, like the coachman of a hearse. "I'll count them up," he said to the commissary; "if you don't have the whole batch, so much the worse for you." "Ah!" said the commissary, looking worried; "here's another one: Beauvilliers Saint-Aignan, ex-duke, twenty-seven .. ." He would have gone through the whole description, but the bailiff interrupted him to inform him that he was reading the list of another building and that he was a drunken sot to boot. He had, indeed, confused two different buildings in this roll-call of the ghosts; the young woman had been separated from her husband during the previous month. The two officials left anon, the one cursing, the other reeling. The gang followed in an uproar. Outside, the joyous cries broke out once more, exploding in a shower of stones and cudgel-blows. When the doors had closed again, I looked about the deserted hall, and saw that Madame de Saint-Aignan had remained in the same position she had held during the reading; with her arms on I19

the table, and her head upon her arms.—Mademoiselle de Coigny raised her eyes and opened them, moist as those of a nymph just emerging from the water. Andre Chenier said quietly to me, indicating the young Duchess: "I hope she didn't hear her husband's name read; don't talk to her; let her cry." "You see," said I, "that your brother, who is accused of being indifferent to your fate, does well not to make any move on your behalf. You were arrested without a warrant; he knows that, and he keeps quiet; he's wise; your name isn't on any list. If your name were once mentioned, it would be inscribed immediately. It's just a matter of playing for time, and your brother knows that." "Oh ! my brother !" he said. He dropped his chin, and for a long time kept shaking his head, with a pained and saddened expression. For the first time I saw a tear roll into his eyelashes. But he recovered quickly. "At least my father isn't so prudent," he remarked ironically. "He doesn't mind taking chances. He went himself to Robespierre this morning to ask for my freedom." "Good God !" I cried, clapping my hands together; `just as I feared!" I reached for my hat. He seized my arm. "Wait !" he exclaimed. "She's fainted!" Madame de Saint-Aignan had, indeed, lost consciousness. Mademoiselle de Coigny hastened to help. Two women who remained joined her. Even the jailer's wife took a hand, in return for a Louis that I slipped her. She began to come to. There was no time to be lost. I left without saying good-bye, and everyone was thoroughly dissatisfied with me, as always happens. The last word I heard was from Mademoiselle de Coigny, remarking with an air of forced and somewhat malicious pity to the little baroness de Soyecourt: "That poor M. de Chenier ! how I pity him for being attached to a married woman who is so completely devoted to her husband and her duties !" Chapter Twenty-nine THE AMMUNITION-WAGON I WALKED, I ran down the street of the Faubourg-Saint-Denis, I20

carried away by the fear of arriving too late, not to mention the slope of the street. All the while I was reviewing the scenes I had just witnessed. I concentrated my attention on them, I summarized them, I set them up in perspective. I had already begun that labour of philosophical optics to which I subject all my experiences. I was going fast, head and cane well forward. My general idea embraced all the things I had just seen, and I arranged all of them within it, in strict order. I was in the process of constructing an admirable systematic treatise on the workings of Providence, that had saved a poet for better days, and arranged matters so that his mission on earth would be accomplished; that his heart should not be broken by the execution of one or the other of those poor young women, both of them drunk with his poetry, basking in his brilliance, animated by his breath, stirred by his voice, dominated by his look, one of them already beloved, the other perhaps still to be loved. I felt that it was a great thing to have gained a day in this time of murder, and I gauged the possibilities that the Triumvirate and the Committee of Public Safety might be overthrown in time. I gave them only a few more days to live, and I had great hopes of making my three beloved prisoners last longer than that crew of authorities. What had to be done? Simply to make them forget. It was already the fifth of Thermidor. I could surely give my second patient, Robespierre, something else to think about, even if I had to convince him that he was desperately ill. But in order to put any of this into effect I had to get there in time. I kept looking in vain for a carriage. There weren't many of them to be seen in the streets during that year. Woe unto him who dared let himself be rolled over the burning pavements of the Year II of the Republic ! None the less, I could hear the sound of two horses and four wheels behind me. They came to a stop. I looked around, and there, high above my head, floated the benign countenance of Blaireau. "0 sleepy face, long face, simple face, slouching face, idle, sallow face ! What do you want of me?" I exclaimed. "Excuse me," he answered with a grin, "but I have a bit of paper here for you. Citizen Rose found it, just like that, under foot." As he spoke, he scraped with his big shoe in the gutter. I took the paper with some annoyance, but read with joy, and at the same time with horror at the danger so narrowly escaped: I2I

"continued: C.-L.-S. Soyecourt, thirty years of age, born in Paris, ex-baroness, widow of Inisdal, Petit-Vaugirard Street. "F.-C.-L. Maille, seventeen years of age, son of the ex-viscount. "Andre Chenier, thirty-one years ofage, born at Constantinople, author, Clery Street. "Crequy de Montmorency, sixty years of age, born at Chitzlembert, Germany, ex-nobleman. "M. Berenger, twenty-four years of age, wife of Beauvilliers Saint-Aignan, Grenelle-Saint-Germain Street. "L. J. Dervilly, forty-three, grocer, Mouffetard Street. "F. Coigny, sixteen years eight months, daughter of the exnobleman of the same name, University Street. "C. J. Dorival, ex-anchorite." And another score of names. I shall not continue: it was the rest of the list, it was the lost list, the list that the imbecile commissary had been looking for in his drunkard's hat. I ripped it, I crushed it, I tore it to a thousand tatters with my fmgers and chewed up the bits. Then, looking at my big cannoneer, I pressed his hand with—yes, indeed, I did, I can say it, with real affection. ("Bah!" said Stello, rubbing his eyes.) "Yes, with affection. But he, he just scratched his head like the lazy lout he was, and said, as if he had just been awakened: "Funny thing ! it seems the bailiff, the tall pale one, got mad at the commissary, the fat red one, and stuck him in the cart to make up for the missing prisoners. Funny !" "A consolation prize for Death! fair enough !" said I. "Now where are you going?" "Oh, I'm taking that ammunition-wagon over to the Champ de Mars." "Would you give me a ride as far as the rue Saint-Honore?" "Oh ! why not ! climb on! why should I care? today the King himself can't tell me...." It was his usual expression; but he didn't finish, and pursed his lips. The soldier convoying the wagon was waiting for his comrade. Comrade Blaireau limped back to the caisson, wiped the dust off with his coat-sleeve, climbed up, settled himself astride, handed me up, sat me down behind him, and off we went at a gallop. I22

In ten minutes I was at the rue Saint-Honorer, at Robespierre's house; but I still don't know how I held together that long.

Chapter Thirty THE HOUSE OF M. de ROBESPIERRE, PARLIAMENTARY ADVOCATE IN that grey house I was about to enter, the home of a carpenter by the name of Duplay, a building, as far as my memory serves me, of very simple appearance, in which the ex-advocate had been living for a long time (it is still standing, I believe), nothing betrayed the domicile of the master of France, unless it were the very abandon in which it seemed to have been left. All the shutters were closed from top to bottom. The gates were closed, every blind was drawn. No voices could be heard coming from it. It seemed both blind and dumb. Groups of women, gathered in conversation before their doors, as they always are in Paris during times of trouble, pointed out the house to one another from a distance, whispering. From time to time, the door would open to let out a policeman, a Sans-Culotte, or a spy (often female). Then the groups dispersed and the gossips vanished into their respective houses. All conveyances gave the house a wide berth, describing a half-circle as they passed it. Straw had been scattered on the pavement. One would have thought the plague was there. The moment I put my hand to the knocker, the door opened and the porter rushed up, in terror lest the knob fall too heavily. I asked him on the spot whether an old man of such and such appearance had not been there, and I did my best to give him a description of M. de Ch6nier. The porter fell into a marmoreal stare with an actor's promptness. He shook his head in denial. "Saw nothing of the kind," he said. I insisted. I said: "Think carefully of everybody who was here this morning." I pressed him, I questioned him, I tried him from every angle. "Saw nothing." 123

That was all I could get from him. There was a ragged little boy hiding behind him, who kept shying pebbles at my silk stockings. I recognized him by his nasty look as the one they had sent to my house. I proceeded to the chambers of `the great Incorruptible' by a rather dark staircase. The keys were in all the doors; one went from room to room without seeing a soul. At last, in the fourth room, sat two negroes and two secretaries writing eternally, without raising their heads. I glanced at their tables in passing. There were a terrible lot of lists of names on them. The sight made the soles of my feet hurt, like the sight of blood, or the sound of tumbrils. I was introduced in silence, after having walked in silence over a silent but well-worn carpet. The room was illumined by a sad and sallow daylight. The windows opened on the court, and large, dark green curtains dimmed the light still further, dulling the atmosphere and making the walls seem thicker. The reflected light from the courtyard wall, on which the sun fell, supplied the entire illumination for this large room. In a green leather armchair, before a large mahogany desk, sat my second invalid of the day, with an English newspaper in one hand, and in the other a small silver spoon with which he was stirring the sugar in a cup of camomile tea. You can easily picture Robespierre; there are many office executives who resemble him, and no striking feature inspired emotion in his presence. He was a man of thirty-five, with a face squeezed in between his forehead and his chin, as though a pair of hands had tried to bring the two together by main force just above the nose. The face was paper-pale, of a dead white, like stage paint; it was deeply pitted by small-pox. Neither blood nor bile circulated in it. The dull, cheerless little eyes never looked one in the face, and a perpetual, unpleasant blinking made them seem still smaller, whenever by chance they were not completely concealed by their green glasses. His mouth was convulsively contracted in a sort of grin or grimace, pinched and furrowed, that made Mirabeau compare him to a cat that has drunk vinegar. His hairdo was stylish and pretentious. His fmgers, his shoulders, his neck, were continually and involuntarily tensed, shaken, and twisted by little irritable nervous convulsions. He dressed early in the morning, and I had never caught him en deshabille. On that day, a yellow silk 124

coat with a white stripe, a flowered waistcoat, a frill, white silk stockings, and buckled shoes combined to give him a most debonair appearance. He rose with his customary politeness and took two steps toward me, taking off his green glasses and laying them gravely on the table. He greeted me in a gentlemanly style, sat down again, and offered me his hand. I took it, as that not of a friend but of a patient, and, lifting his cuff, I felt the pulse. "Fever," said I. "Quite possibly," he answered, compressing his lips. He got up abruptly; took two turns in the room with a firm and lively step, rubbing his hands together; then he said, "Bah !" and sat down. "Sit right there, Citizen," he said; "sit down and listen to this. Isn't it strange?" At every word he looked at me over his green eyeglasses. "Isn't it strange? What do you make of it? That whippersnapper of a Duke of York has me insulted in the newspapers !" He struck the long columns of the English paper with his hand. "Pretended anger," thought I; "On guard." "The tyrants," he went on in a high, strident voice, "the tyrants can't believe in liberty anywhere. It's humiliating for humanity. See this expression; it's repeated on every page. What affectation !" And he threw down the newspaper in front of me. "Look," he continued, pointing the word out to me with his finger: "Robespierre's army. Robespierre's troops. As though I had any armies ! As though I were a king ! As though France were simply Robespierre ! As though everything issued from me and returned to me ! Robespierre's troops. How unjust ! Pure calumny ! What do you think of that !" Then, taking up his cup of camomile tea, and raising his green eyeglasses to observe me from beneath them: "I hope these incredible expressions are never used here! You have never heard them, have you? Are such things said in the streets? No ! It's Pitt himself who disseminates these ideas about me !—Who tries to give me the name of dictator in France? The counter-revolutionaries, the former Dantonists and Hebertists who are still there in the Convention; rogues like L'Hermina, whom I intend to denounce publicly; the valets of George of England, conspirators who want the people to hate me, because they know I25

the purity of my civic spirit, while I denounce their vices every day; Varros, Catilines like Desmoulins, Ronsin and Chaumette, who have never stopped attacking the Republican government. Those filthy animals called kings are insolent enough to try to put a crown on my head too ! Is that so that my head may fall like theirs? It's a hard thing to know that they have false republicans here under their orders, thieves who transform my virtues into crimes. I've been sick for six weeks, as you know, and I haven't been appearing at the meetings of the Committee of Public Safety. Where then lies my dictatorship? Never mind! The league that persecutes me sees it everywhere; I am too inconvenient and too incorruptible an observer. That coalition was formed in the same moment that the government was born. It has recruited all the scoundrels and all the rogues. It dared to announce in the street that I had been arrested. Killed? Yes! But arrested? Not I! The coalition published all sorts of absurdities; that Saint Just wanted to save the aristocracy, because he was of noble birth. What does his birth matter if he lives and dies with the right principles? Was it not he who proposed and carried in the Convention the decree banishing the ex-nobles, by declaring them irreconcilable enemies of the Revolution? The coalition tried to ridicule the Feast of the Supreme Being and the story of Catherine Th6os; the coalition, scheming against me alone, makes me responsible for every death, revives all the stratagems of the Brissotins; nevertheless, my speech at the Festival was better than all the doctrines of Chaumette and of Fouche, wasn't it?" I made a motion with my head; he continued: "I want the impious maxim that death is a sleep removed from all tombstones, and replaced by the inscription: Death is the beginning of immortality." I saw in these sentences the prelude to a coming speech. He was trying out the chords on me during the conversation, like many another speech-maker of my acquaintance. He smiled with satisfaction and drained his cup. Then he set it back on his desk with the air of an orator on the platform; and as I hadn't responded to his idea, he came back to it by another route, since admiration and flattery were an absolute necessity for him. "I know that you are of my opinion, Citizen, although much of the manner of the old society still clings about you. But you are I26

pure, and that is a great thing. At least I am perfectly sure that you would not have any more taste than I for a military despotism; and if I'm not listened to, you will see that that is what we'll get: it will take over the reins of the Revolution if I let them go, and overthrow the debased representative government." "That seems to be very true, Citizen," I replied. And, indeed, it wasn't such a bad observation, besides being prophetic. He produced another cat-grin. "You would still prefer my Despotism, wouldn't you?" I answered, also with a grimace : "Oh ! ... ho ! ..." with all the vagueness which such interjections permit. "It would be," he continued, "that of a Citizen, of a man who is your equal, who has reached it by the high road of virtue, and who has known only one fear, that of being soiled by the impure proximity of the perverts who infiltrate the ranks of the sincere friends of humanity." He caressed this pretty little sentence with his tongue and lips, as if it were so much honey. "You haven't," said I, "you haven't nearly so many in proximity to you nowadays, do you? You aren't being precisely crowded or jostled, are you?" He bit his lip and set his glasses straight before his eyes to hide his look. "I've been living in retirement for some time ..." he said. "Besides, I am constantly being slandered." While speaking, he took a pencil and scribbled something on a sheet of paper. Five days later I learned that the paper was a list of names for the guillotine, and the something was my name. He smiled and leaned back. "Alas ! I am slandered," he continued; "for, to speak the truth, I love nothing but equality, as you know, and you should know it all the better after seeing the indignation that these papers from the arsenal of tyranny have aroused in me." He rustled and crumpled the big English newspapers with a tragic air; but it was easy to see that he took good care not to tear them. "Ah, Maximilien," thought I, "you will re-read them many a time when you are alone and you will cover with ardent kisses those grateful, magic words: Robespierre's troops!" After this little act he rose and began to pace up and down the I27

room, his fingers, his shoulders, and his neck jerking convulsively. I got up and paced with him. "I want to give you this to read before we go on to discuss my health," said he. "And I would like to talk it over with you. You know my affection for the author. It's a project of Saint-Just's. You'll see. I am expecting him this morning; we'll talk about it together. He should be in Paris by now," he added, taking out his watch; "I'll find out. Sit down and read. I'll be back." He gave me a big notebook covered with writing in a bold and hurried hand, and left abruptly, as though he were running away. I held the notebook, but I watched the door through which he had left, and thought about him. I had known him for a long time. That day he seemed strangely uneasy. Either he was planning some coup, or he feared someone else's plan. I glimpsed, in the room to which he had gone, the faces of secret agents whom I had often seen on my trail, and I could hear the sound of footsteps, as though there had been people going in and out ceaselessly since my arrival. The voices were very low. I tried to hear, but in vain, and I gave up listening. I will admit that I was closer to fear than to courage. I wanted to get out, by the room from which I had entered; but either through oversight or precaution the door had been locked behind me; I was shut in. When something is settled, I don't waste time worrying about it. I sat down, and ran through the notes with which Robespierre had left me en rite å rite.

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Chapter Thirty-one A LEGISLATOR IT was no less than a set of immutable and eternal Institutes to be issued to the French nation, my dear sir, and they had been smartly written up by Citizen Saint Just, twenty-six years of age. At first I read absent-mindedly; than I realized what I had before me, and I was stupefied. "0 innocent murderer ! Sweet executioner !" I exclaimed involuntarily; "What a charming child you are ! Where do you hail I28

from, my handsome shepherd boy? Could it be from Arcadia? From what crags do your goats descend, Alexis?" As I spoke I was reading the following: "Children shall be left to Nature. "Children are dressed in linen in all seasons. "They eat in common, nothing but fruits, vegetables, roots, and dairy foods. "Men who have lived virtuous lives wear a white sash at the age of sixty. "The man and woman who love each other are husband and wife. If they have no children, they may keep their connection secret. "Every man of twenty-one is obliged to declare in the temple who his friends are. "Friends will wear mourning for each other. "Friends dig each other's graves. "Friends fight side by side in battle. "He who declares that he does not believe in friendship, or who has no friends, is banished. "A man convicted of ingratitude is banished." ("What a migration !" said I.) "If a man commits a crime, his friends are banished. "Murderers wear black all their lives, and must be executed if they change their costume." "Sweet, innocent soul!" I cried; "what ingrates we are, to attack you! Your mind is as pure as a drop of dew on a rose petal, and we complain about a few cartloads of people that you send to the knife every day, at a given time. But you don't even see those people, much less hurt them, you dear young man! You simply write their names down on paper !—less than that: you read a list, and you sign it!—still less: you don't even read, you simply sign!" At that I laughed long and joyously, with the laugh you may know, as I continued to skim these so-called Republican Institutes; you can read them whenever you please. This cruel saint wanted to subdue our age of bronze to the laws of the Golden Age by force; he hoped to fit our full-grown, ancient nation into a child's smock. In order to stuff it in, he just had to cut off the head and the arms. L

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Read it; you'll be able to do so more comfortably than I could in Robespierre's chambers; and if you conclude, with your habitual sympathy, that this young man was to be pitied, you will for once find me in agreement with you, for madness is the greatest misfortune that can happen to a man. Alas ! There are grave and sombre madnesses that do not make a person talk at random, that scarcely change his tone from that of ordinary conversation, that leave his vision clear, free, and accurate, in all but what concerns one grim and fatal point. These are the cold, self-possessed and calculated madnesses. They ape common sense with a deceptive similarity, they convince through fear, they are not easily discovered, their mask is heavy, but madnesses they are. And what is needed to produce them? A trifle, a mere unexpected displacement in the career of a precocious dreamer. Take, at random, from the benches of any high school, a tall young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, stuffed full of his Spartans and his Romans and all the old phrases, stiff with Ancient Law and Modern Law; knowing nothing of the world he lives in and its habits but his companions and their habits; irritated by the passing of coaches in which he may not ride; contemptuous of women in general because he knows only the vilest of them, and confusing the tender susceptibilities of courtly love with the lewdness of the gutter; judging an entire body by a limb, a whole sex by one of its members, and trying desperately to construct in his head some universal synthesis which will make him a mighty sage for life; catch him at that moment and give him a little guillotine as a gift, and say to him: "My little friend, here is an instrument with which you can make the whole nation obey you; all you have to do is pull here and press there. It's simple." After having thought for a little while, he will take his highschool essay in one hand and the toy in the other; and seeing that people are really scared, he'll pull here and press there, and keep pulling and pressing until he is crushed together with his mechanical toy. And one can scarcely say that he is bad. No; strictly speaking, one would even have to call him a virtuous man. But the trouble is, that having read so often in those fine books: 'just severity; 130

salutary massacre; proud murderers of your beloved kin; let the universe perish rather than a principle!' and, above all, `the expiatory virtue of bloodshed'—that monstrous notion, born of fear— having read these things so often, upon my word, he begins to have confidence in himself; and encouraging himself with the quotation, just and tenacious of his word (Justum et tenacem propositi virum), he reaches the point where he becomes indifferent to the sufferings of others, he takes this indifference for greatness and courage, and ... he executes. The whole trouble lies in the turn of Fortune's wheel that has set him up on top and given him prematurely that most dangerous of all things: Power. Chapter Thirty-two ON THE SUBSTITUTION OF EXPIATORY SUFFERING AT this point Doctor Noir interrupted his account, and began again after a moment of trancelike reflection. One of the words I just used made me stop, and obliges me to face in consternation the collision of two extreme ideas. At the very time of which I speak, the time of the virtuous Saint Just (for he was said to be without vices, if not without crimes), there lived and wrote another virtuous man, an implacable enemy of the Revolution. This other dark mind, this distorting intellect—I would not call him an impostor, for he had an awareness of truth; this obstinate, pitiless, audacious and subtle spirit, armed like the Sphinx to the very teeth and fingertips with enigmatic metaphysical sophistry, armoured in iron dogma, adorned with nebulous plumes of fulminating prophecies; this other Spirit growled like a threatening tempest around the borders of France. His name: Joseph de Maistre. Now, among his many volumes on the future of France, foretold step by step, on the temporal government of Providence, on the principle that generates constitutions, on the Pope, on the 131

delays of divine justice and on the Inquisition, desiring to demonstrate, to plumb, to reveal to the eyes of men the sinister foundations which he ascribed to authority, he wrote in substance as follows: "The flesh is guilty, accursed, the enemy of God.—Blood is the vital fluid. Heaven can be appeased by blood alone. The innocent Ø pay for the guilty. The ancients believed that the gods came to any altar where blood flowed; the first Christian doctors believed that the angels came wherever the blood of the true victim flowed. The effusion of blood is an expiation. These are innate truths—the Cross testifies to Salvation by Blood. "Since then, Origen said truly that there were two Redemptions : that of Christ, which redeemed the Universe, and the minor Redemptions, which purchase with blood the salvation of the nations. This bloody sacrifice of a few men for many will continue until the end of the world. The nations will continue to buy their salvation forever by the substitution of expiatory suffering." And so it was that a man endowed with one of the boldest and most misleading philosophical imaginations that ever fascinated Europe succeeded in tying to the foot of the Cross itself the first link of a terrible endless chain of ambitious and impious sophisms, to which he seemed to have vowed a solemn cult, having probably come to believe in his inmost heart that they were rays of sacred inspiration. No doubt it was on bended knees, beating his breast, that he cried out: "The earth, perpetually drenched with blood, is nothing but an immense altar whereon all that lives must be sacrificed eternally, until evil itself is extinct ! The hangman is the cornerstone of society; his function is sacred. The Inquisition is the kind and gentle saviour of social life. "The Bull In Coena Domini (at God's banquet) is divinely inspired; that is the one that excommunicates the heretics and all those who may appeal from the Pope to future councils. But why, great God, are councils needed when the pillory is handy? "The feeling of terror before an angered Deity has always been with us. "War is divine; it must reign forever in order to purge the world. The savage races are consecrated to destruction and under anathema. I do not know their crime, 0 Lord, but, since they are 132

unhappy and ignorant, they must be criminals, justly punished for some transgression of their kings of yore. The Europeans, in Columbus's century, were right to exclude them from the human race. "The Earth is an altar that must be forever soaked with blood." 0 Impious Pietist! What hast thou done? Before the advent of this distorting mind, the idea of the redemption of the guilty had stopped at Calvary. There, God Himself, sacrificed by God, had cried: All is fulfilled. Was not God's blood enough to save man's body? No. Men in their pride will always be tormented by the desire to establish an incontestable basis for absolute temporal power, and it has been decreed that there will always be a cloud of sophists milling around this problem and singeing their wings on it. Let all of them be absolved, except those who dare to tamper with life, the sacred flame that God alone has the right to extinguish. Terrible authority of that sinister penalty, I contest it even in the hands of Justice ! No. That pitiless sophist had to breathe like a patient alchemist on the embers of the first Doctors, on the dust of Indian pyres and cannibal feasts, to awaken the incendiary spark of his fatal idea. He had to rediscover and write large the words of Origen, that voluntary Abelard: his was the first sacrifice and the first sophism, the principle of which he also thought he had found in the Gospel; that obscure and paradoxical Origen, Doctor in the year of our Lord i9o, whose half-Platonic Principles were praised after his death by six saints (among them Athanasius and Chrysostom) and condemned by three saints, one emperor, and one pope (among them St. Jerome and Justinian). The mind of one of the latest of the Catholics had to dig deep in the skull of one of the first Christians to extract this fatal theory of reversibility and of salvation through blood. And all in order to patch up the dismantled edifice of the Roman church and the dismembered medieval order ! While the uselessness of bloodshed for the founding of systems and of powers was being demonstrated daily in the public squares of Paris ! While at the same time, armed with the same axioms, "a few scoundrels", as he wrote himself, "were upsetting a few other scoundrels" to the same tune of: "God, Virtue, Terror !" Arm these two Authorities with equally sharp knives, and let me 133

know which of the two will soak his `altar' with the bigger watering-pot. And did he foresee, this orthodox prophet, that in his own time the monstrous family of his sophisms would grow and multiply endlessly, and that among the young of this tiger brood would be some whose cry would be: "If the doctrine of the substitution of expiatory sufferings be true, then the few voluntary self-immolations and substitutions which occur will not suffice for the salvation of the nations. The innocent, sacrificed for the guilty, is the salvation of his people; therefore it is right and good that such sacrifices be made." Do you hear the cry of the carnivorous animal behind the human voice? Do you see by what devious routes, starting from opposite points, these pure ideologists have arrived from above and below at the same point, the scaffold? Do you see how they cherish Murder? Murder is so beautiful, Murder is so good, so easy, so convenient, provided that it be properly interpreted ! How sweet Murder can become, in well-shaped mouths provided with a few daring phrases and a few philosophical subtleties ! Do you think Murder is more in place on those tongues that actually lick blood than on these tongues daubed with words? I'm not sure. Ask the massacrers of all the ages (if they will answer your invocation). Let them come from East, from West; in rags, in robes, in armour; come, you murderers of one man and slaughterers of a hundred thousand; from Saint Bartholomew's Eve to the September Days, from Jacques Clement and Ravaillac to Louvel, from Des Adrets and Montluc to Marat and Schneider; come, you will find your friends waiting for you here; but I will not be among them ! (At this point Doctor Noir stopped, and laughed for a long time; then he sighed, collected himself, and went on.) Yes, my dear sir; it is at this point that one must do as you do, and have recourse to pity. In their anxiety to connect everything, at all costs, to a cause, a theory, a Synthesis from which everything can be derived and by which everything will be explained, I perceive a perennial weakness in men; like children walking in the dark, they are seized with terror because they cannot see the bottom of the abyss which neither God the Creator nor God the Saviour wanted us to see. 134

Therefore it seems to me that the very men who think themselves the most secure, because they construct the vastest systems, are the weakest, and the most terrified of Analysis, the sight of which they cannot bear, because it rests content with positive consequences, and observes only through the shadowy haze in which Heaven has chosen to enfold it, the Cause—the eternally undefinable Cause. Now, I can tell you that it is only in Analysis that the precise minds, the only ones worthy of esteem, have found or ever will find durable ideas, the ideas that strike one with the feeling of satisfaction that is experienced in the rare, pure presence of the truth. Analysis is the whole destiny of the eternally ignorant human soul. Analysis is a plumb-line. Cast deep in the ocean, it terrifies and disheartens the weak, but it reassures and guides the brave who grasp it firmly. (Then Doctor Noir, passing his hand over his forehead and his eyes, as if to forget, erase, or suspend his meditations, took up the thread of his narrative.)

Chapter Thirty-three T IVO STROLLERS I GRADUALLY became so amused with Saint-Just's Institutes that I forgot completely where I was. I allow myself to sink with delight into such oblivion, having long since renounced all involvement in a life which has never seemed happy. Suddenly the door by which I had come in opened. A man of about thirty, handsome, tall, of a proud military bearing, entered without much ceremony. His riding-boots, his spurs, his crop, his wide open white vest, his loose black tie, suggested a young general. "Ah ! So you don't know whether he's free?" he said, continuing to address the negro who had opened the door for him. "Tell him the author of Carus Gracchus and Timoleon is here." The negro went out without answering, and shut him in with me. The former dragoon officer, left to his blustering, advanced 135

into the room as far as the chimney-piece, clapping his heels on the floor. "Have you been waiting long, Citizen?" said he. "I hope that Citizen Robespierre will receive me promptly, since I'm a Representative, and will attend to my business before the rest. I've only a word to say to him." He turned around and arranged his hair before the mirror. "I haven't come to ask for any favours.—I always say what I think; I've never been in the habit of making a secret of my opinions, either under the regime of the Bourbon tyrants or now." I put my papers down on the table, and looked at him with an air of surprise that rather surprised him in turn. "I wouldn't have believed," said I, without turning a hair, "that anyone would come here simply for his pleasure." He abandoned his matador manner abruptly and dropped into an armchair beside me. "I say," he whispered; "did you get called in just like that, for no good reason, like myself?" I noticed on this occasion something that used to happen often in those days: the familiar form of address was a sort of playlanguage that was employed in acting a certain role, and abandoned for serious conversation. "Yes," said I, "I was sent for, but simply as doctors often are sent for: that doesn't worry me, at least not so far as I myself am concerned," I added, emphasizing the last remark. "Ah ! yourself," he said, flicking the dust from his boots with his riding-whip. Then he got up and walked through the room, coughing, with evident ill humour. He came back. "Do you know if he's busy?" he asked. "I suppose so," I replied: "Citizen Chenier." He took my hand impetuously. "Man," he said, "you don't look like a spy to me. What do they want of me here? If you have any idea, tell me." I was on tenterhooks; I felt that someone would come in, that perhaps we were being watched, that our conversation was certainly being overheard. The Terror was in the air, everywhere, and particularly in this room. I got up and began to walk, so that at least there would be long silences, and the conversation would appear to be discontinuous. He understood me and walked in the 136

opposite direction. We were pacing with measured strides, like two soldiers meeting on sentry duty; each of us appeared to be deep in his own thoughts, and we said only a word to each other in passing; the reply came the next time we approached. I rubbed my hands. "It's possible," said I quietly, without letting on, as I walked toward the fireplace, "that they've brought us together on purpose." Then, very loud: "Handsome chambers, these." He came back from the fireplace to the door and, meeting me in the middle of the room, said, "I think so too." Then, raising his head: "The windows open on the court." I passed him. "I saw your father and your brother this morning," said I. Then I shouted: "What magnificent weather." He passed me again. "I know; my father and I no longer meet, but I hope Andre won't be there much longer.—Marvellous sky!" I passed him once more. "Tallien," said I, "Courtois, Barras, Clauzel are good citizens;" and added enthusiastically, "a fine theme, Timoleon." He passed me on the way back. "Also Barras, Collot D'Herbois, Loiseau, Bourdon, Barrere, Boissy d'Anglas—I liked my Fenelon still better." I hastened my steps. "It may go on another few days.—Said to be fine poetry." He approached with big steps and jostled me. "The Triumvirs won't last more than four clays. —I read it at the house of Citizen Vestris." This time I pressed his hand in passing. "Take care not to mention your brother's name; nobody is thinking about him.—They say the dénouement is beautifully done." At our last crossing, he pressed my hand warmly in turn. "He isn't on any list; I won't mention him. We have to play dead. On the ninth, I'll go and free him with my own hands.— I'm afraid it's too obviously prepared." That was our last meeting. The door opened; we were at opposite ends of the room.

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Chapter Thirty-four A LITTLE AMUSEMENT ROBESPIERRE came in, holding by the hand Saint Just, who had just arrived in Paris, in a dusty frock-coat, pale and dishevelled. Robespierre gave the two of us a rapid glance under his eyeglasses, and I thought he seemed pleased by the distance between us; he smiled with tight lips. "Citizens, here is a traveller of your acquaintance," he said. The three of us greeted one another, Joseph Ch6nier knitting his brows, Saint Just with a brusque and haughty motion of the head, and I very gravely, like a monk. Saint Just sat down beside Robespierre, who ensconced himself in his leather armchair before his desk, facing us. There was a long silence. I looked at the three characters one by one. Ch6nier leaned back and rocked with a proud air, though slightly constrained, as though dreaming of a thousand entirely different matters. SaintJust, perfectly calm, inclined his fine, melancholy head toward his shoulder, his well-shaped, gentle head, covered with floating chestnut ringlets; his large eyes were lifted to Heaven, and he sighed. He had the look of a young saint—persecutors often take on the appearance of their victims. Robespierre looked at us as a cat might look at three mice. "Here is our friend Saint Just," said Robespierre in festive tones, "just returned from the army. He crushed the traitors there, and he'll do the same here. This is quite a surprise; he wasn't expected, was he, Ch6nier?" And he looked at him sideways, as though to enjoy his embarrassment. "You sent for me, Citizen?" said Marie Joseph Ch6nier with annoyance; "if it's about business, let's hurry up; they're waiting for me at the Convention." "I wanted," said Robespierre in a formal manner, pointing to me, "I wanted you to meet this worthy man who takes such an interest in your family." I was caught. Marie-Joseph and I exchanged one glance in which all our fears were concentrated. I tried a quick feint. "Well, you know," I said, "I do have an interest in literature, and F6nelon ..." 138

"Oh ! By the way," interrupted Robespierre, "I must congratulate you, Chenier, on the success of your Timoleon in the aristocratic salons where you've been reading it.—You haven't heard?" he asked Saint Just, with irony. The latter smiled scornfully, and began to sweep the dust from his boots with the skirt of his long coat, not deigning to reply. "Bah !" said Joseph Chenier, looking at me, "it's too trivial for him." He meant to say it with indifference, but the author's blood in him rose to his cheeks. Saint Just, maintaining his unchanging calm, raised his eyes to Chenier and contemplated him with something approaching admiration. "A member of the Convention who amuses himself with that sort of thing in the Year II of the Republic is a phenomenon," he said. "Well, when one doesn't have the high hand in politics," said Joseph Chenier, "it's still the best thing one can do for the Nation." Saint Just shrugged his shoulders. Robespierre drew out his watch, as though he were expecting something, and said in a pedantic manner: "You know my opinion of writers, Citizen Chenier. I make an exception of you, because I know your republican virtues, but in general I consider writers the most dangerous enemies of our country. We must have a single will. That is the point we've reached. That will must be republican, and for this purpose we must have only republican authors; the rest corrupt the People. They, the People, must be rallied to conquer the bourgeoisie, who are the root of our internal dangers. The People must ally themselves with the Convention, and it with them; the Sans-Culottes must be paid, they must be kept angry, and they must be held in the cities. Who opposes my views? The scribblers, the versifiers, who turn up their noses in rhyme and cry: `My soul, my soul, let us fly to the wilderness;' they are the sort who discourage the People. The Convention must treat all who are not useful to the Republic as counter-revolution„ aries." "That's rather harsh," said Marie-Joseph, somewhat scared but even more irritated. "Oh, I don't mean you," Robespierre went on, in mild, sugary tones; "you have been a soldier, you are a legislator, and when you have nothing better to do, you are a poet." 139

"Not at all! Not at all!" said Joseph, thoroughly annoyed; "on the contrary! I was born a poet and I've been wasting my time in the army and at the Convention." I must admit that despite the gravity of the situation I could not help smiling at his vexation. His brother might have spoken like that; but Joseph, in my opinion, was flattering himself; and the Incorruptible, who was at bottom of the same opinion, went on tormenting him. "Come, come!" he said, with false, stale gallantry: "Come, come! You're much too modest; you are refusing two laurel wreaths for one crown of pompons!" "But I have the impression that you used to be fond of those flowers yourself, Citizen !" said Chenier; "I once read some delightful couplets of yours about a beaker and a feast. They went like this: O God! What have we here? A scandalous crime. O tragic mishap! Alas and alack! I dare not reveal— Such blushes you'll feel! Who can help but repine?— My beaker lacks wine. "Then there was a certain madrigal that went like this: Your modesty must ne'er disarm; Before the power of your charm Remain forever in alarm; To greater loves you will give birth If you believe you're little worth. "That was fun! And then we also have the two discourses on the death penalty, one against it, the other for it; and there is the eulogy of Gresset where you wrote that unforgettable sentence: Oh! read Vert-Vert, all ye who aspire to the polite arts of banter and graceful style; read it, ye who seek only amusement, and you will become acquainted with new fountains of joy. Yes, as long as French survives, so long will Vert-Vert find its admirers. Thanks to the power of genius, the adventures of a 140

parrot will continue forever to hold the interest of posterity. Crowds of heroes have remained plunged in eternal oblivion, because they never found a pen worthy of celebrating their exploits; but you, happy Vert-Vert, your glory will be communicated to our most distant descendants ! 0 Gresset ! You were the greatest of poets ! Let us shower flowers, etc. etc. etc. "It was lots of fun. I still have it at home, printed over the name of M. de Robespierre, Advocate in Parliament." He wasn't the pleasantest man to tease. His cat face suddenly became a tiger face. He crooked his nails. Saint Just, bored, took him by the arm to interrupt him. "What time are they expecting you at the Jacobins'?" "Later," said Robespierre angrily; "leave me alone. I'm just having some fun." The laugh with which he accompanied this remark made his teeth chatter. "I'm waiting for somebody," he added. "But what about you, Saint Just; what would you do with the poets?" "I read you that part," said Saint Just; "it's in the tenth chapter of my Institutes." "Well? What do you have them do?" Saint Just made a grimace expressive of contempt and looked about his feet, as though searching for a pin on the carpet. "Oh," he said, "they're ordered to produce hymns on the first of the month, in honour of the Eternal, and of good citizens, just like in Plato. On the first of Germinal, they'll celebrate Nature and the People; in Floreal, love and marriage; in Prairial, victory; in Messidor, adoption; in Thermidor, youth; in Fructidor, joy; in Vendemiaire, old age; in Brumaire, the immortal soul; in Frimaire, wisdom; in Nivöse, the fatherland; in Pluviöse, labour, and in Ventöse, friendship." Robespierre applauded. "You have it planned perfectly," he said. "Furthermore, it will be Inspiration or Death!" Joseph Chenier laughed. Saint Just rose gravely to his feet. "Well ! Why not?" he said; "if their patriotic virtues do not inspire them.... There are only two principles: Virtue or Terror." He lowered his head and remained leaning against the chimneypiece in silence, as though all had been said; conscientiously con'4'

vinced that he knew all that there was to know. His calm was perfect, his voice invariably level, and his countenance smooth, innocent, and ecstatic. "There's the man I would call a Poet," said Robespierre, pointing to him; "he sees things on a grand scale; he doesn't trifle with the niceties of style; he casts his words like lightning-flashes into the darkness of the future, and he feels that the destiny of the secondary people who concern themselves with the details of thought is to put our ideas into practice; that there is no species more dangerous for liberty, more inimical to equality, than those aesthetic aristocrats whose isolated reputations exert an invidious influence, destructive of the Unity which must reign everywhere." His sentence finished, he looked at us. We glanced at one another, in stupefaction. Saint Just made a gesture of approbation. He cherished these jealous and domineering notions which Power gained by action and effort always develops, in its attempt to control those other mysterious, independent Powers that grow only from meditation, and from admiring the fruits of meditation. The parvenus, the favourites of Fortune, will forever be irritated, like Haman, by those stern Mordecais, who sit down covered with ashes on the steps of their palace, and alone refuse to bow to them; at times, indeed, force Haman to get off his horse and hold the bridle for them. Joseph Chenier was unable to recover from his astonishment for some time. Then the passionate character of his family took the upper hand. "Yes," said he; "in my time I've known many poets who lacked only one thing to make them what they called themselves: that was the ability to write poetry." Robespierre snapped a pen between his fingers and picked up a newspaper, as though he hadn't heard. Saint Just, who was at bottom thoroughly naive and literalminded, like a schoolboy, took his reply seriously, and began to talk of himself with immense satisfaction and with an innocence that made me blush for him. "Citizen Chenier is right," said he, staring fixedly at the wall before him and seeing nothing but his own thoughts; "I must surely have been a poet when I said: "Great men do not die in bed.—Circumstance presents difficulties only to those who recoil before the tomb.—I despise the dust 142

of which I am composed, the dust that speaks to you.—Society is not man's achievement.—And, the Good itself is often an instrument of intrigue; let us be ungrateful if we wish to save our country." "These," said I, "are very fine maxims and paradoxes, more or less Spartan and more or less hackneyed, but they aren't poetry." Saint Just turned his back abruptly. The four of us remained silent. The conversation had reached the point at which every word added would have had to be a blow, and Chenier and I were not in a position to deal out blows. We were rescued from our embarrassment in an unexpected fashion, for suddenly Robespierre took a little bell from his desk and rang it vigorously. A negro entered and introduced an elderly man who, the moment he had been left in the room, seemed gripped by a spasm of terror and amazement. "Here is someone else of your acquaintance," said Robespierre; "I arranged this little interview for all of you." It was M. de Chenier, confronted with his son. I was trembling all over. The father drew back; the son dropped his eyes, then looked at me. Robespierre was laughing, and Saint Just watched him to see what was going on. The old man was the first to break the silence. Everything depended on him, and no one could stop him now or tell him what to say. We waited, as one waits for the axe to fall. He advanced with dignity toward his son. "It's a long time since I've seen you, Sir," said he; "I do you the honour of assuming that you have come here for the same reason as myself." The tall, haughty, brave, and powerful Marie Joseph Chenier was bent double with anxiety and anguish. "Father !" he said slowly, emphasizing each syllable; "Father! Have you considered carefully what you are going to say?" The father opened his mouth to answer, but his son began to speak loudly in order to drown out his voice. "Oh, I understand, I can guess, I see ... !" And turning with a smile to Robespierre: "An insignificant matter, not worth mentioning, in fact...." Then to his father: "I know just the problem you want to discuss. But it seems to me that you could have left it in my hands. I'm a Representative, and I know...." 143

"I know what you are, Sir," said M. de Chenier. "No, no," said Joseph, coming closer to him; "you know nothing, absolutely nothing. It's so long since he's been willing to see me, my poor old father ! He doesn't know what's going on in the Republic. I'm sure he doesn't even know what he just said to you. And he stepped on his father's toe. But the old man backed away. "It's your duty that I've come to fulfil myself, Sir, since you will not perform it." "My God !" cried Marie Joseph, in torment. "Aren't they a curious couple?" said Robespierre to Saint Just in a strident voice, with horrible satisfaction. "What's the matter with them? Why do they shout so much?" "There is despair in my heart," said the old father, turning to Robespierre, "when I see ..." I got up and took his arm. "Citizen," said Joseph Chenier to Robespierre, "allow me to talk to you privately, or let me take my father out for a moment. I think he is ill, and very much distraught." "Ingrate," said the old man, "do you want to show yourself as bad a son as you are a...?" "Sir," I interrupted, "it was pointless for you to consult me this morning. "No, no !" said Robespierre, with his piercing voice and his incredible sang-froid; "no, by God ! I don't want your father to leave, Chenier ! I have granted him an interview; I must hear him out.—Besides, why do you want him to leave? What are you afraid he'll tell me? Don't I know just about everything that goes on, including the advice you gave him this morning, Doctor !" "It's all over," I said, overwhelmed; and fell back into my chair. Marie Joseph, with a desperate effort, advanced boldly, and forced himself between his father and Robespierre. "After all," he addressed the latter, "we are equals, brothers, aren't we? So I can say things to you, Citizen, that no one but a Representative in the National Convention would have the right to say, can't I? —Well, let me tell you, then; my father here, my good old father, who detests me now because I am a Representative, wants to tell you some family anecdote which is entirely beneath your attenIØ

tion, Citizen Robespierre. You have bigger fish to fry! You have important things to worry about! You are alone, you walk alone; all these personal things, these petty quarrels, you know nothing of them, fortunately! Why should you bother with them?" He took him by both hands. "No; I absolutely don't want you to listen to him; I simply don't want it, you see." Trying to laugh: "All you would get from him is some silly twaddle." He tried to keep up the chatter a little longer. "Some complaint about my past behaviour; old, dated monarchist notions of his. I don't know what—mere stuff and nonsense ! Listen, my friend, our great Citizen, our master—yes, to be honest with you, that's what I think you are, our master—go, go to your affairs of state, to the Assembly, where you're listened to ! Or rather, simply send us away.—Yes, that's it, just throw us out; we aren't needed here. We're in the way! Gentlemen, we are intruding; let us leave." He picked up his hat; he was pale, trembling, covered with sweat. "Come, Doctor; come, Father, I must speak with you. We're intruding—and here is Saint Just, who has come so far especially to see him ! All the way from the army of the North ! Isn't that right, Saint Just?" Back and forth, hither and thither he rushed, seizing Robespierre by the arm, his father by the shoulder, like one possessed. Robespierre rose, and with perfidious kindness offered his hand to the old man in front of his son. The father thought all was saved; we knew that all was lost. M. de Chenier was affected by the gesture as weak old men are prone to be. "Oh, how kind you are!" he cried. "All this is just a trick, isn't it? It's a plan to make people think you're bad. Give me back my eldest son, M. de Robespierre ! Give him back to me, I beg of you; he is in Saint-Lazare. He is certainly the better of the two, you may be sure; but you don't know him! He admires you deeply, and he admires all these gentlemen; he often talks to me about them. He isn't at all violent, no matter what they may say about him. This one is afraid to compromise himself, so he hasn't broached the subject; but I, I am a father, Sir, and an old man; I am not afraid. Besides, you're a proper gentleman; one can see that in a moment by your looks and your manners; one can always reach an understanding with somebody like you." Ø

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Then to his son: "Stop making signs to me ! Don't interrupt me! You annoy me! Let this gentleman act as his heart dictates: I should think that he knows a little more about government than you do! You were always jealous of Andre, ever since you were a child. Leave me alone! Don't talk to me!" The poor brother ! In any case, he wouldn't have had anything to say. Like myself, he was mute with grief. "Oh!" said Robespierre, sitting down and removing his spectacles with relaxation and relief; "so that's all it is! Say, Saint Just ! Can you imagine, they actually thought I didn't know that little brother of theirs was in jail! These men must really think I'm crazy. It's true, I wasn't planning to do anything about his case for a while; well, all right," he added, taking up his pen and scribbling; "we'll have you son's case called up." "There you have it!" I cried, choking. "What? Called up?" said the father, dumbfounded. "Yes, Citizen," said Saint Just, explaining coldly; "called up before the revolutionary tribunal, where he can defend himself." "And what about Andr6?" said M. de Chenier. "He?" answered Saint Just; "he'll go to the Conciergerie." "But there was no warrant for Andr6's arrest!" said his father. "Very well, he'll tell that to the tribunal," answered Robespierre; "so much the better for him." He was writing continuously as he spoke. "But what's the point of sending him there?" said the poor old man. "To justify himself," Robespierre answered with the same coldness, still writing. "But will they listen to him?" said Marie Joseph. Robespierre put on his glasses and stared fixedly at him; his eyes shone like an owl's through the green lenses. "Do you question the integrity of the revolutionary tribunal?" he asked. Marie Joseph lowered his head, and said "No"; with a groan. Saint Just interposed, gravely: "The tribunal sometimes acquits." "Sometimes !" said the father, trembling where he stood. "Say, Saint Just," Robespierre resumed, beginning to write again; "did you know that that fellow is also a poet? While we talk about them, they talk about us too; look, here are some of his 146

kind remarks. It's the latest thing, isn't it, Doctor? You know, Saint Just, he calls us butchers scribbling laws." "Is that all !" said Saint Just, taking from Robespierre a sheet that I recognized only too well; it had been picked up by his marvellous spies. Suddenly Robespierre took out his watch, stood up abruptly, and said: "Two o'clock!" He bowed, and ran to the entrance by which he had come in with Saint Just. He opened the door and went halfway into the next room, where I could make out some men standing. Then, keeping his hand on the key, as though in fear and ready to shut the door in our faces, he exclaimed in a high-pitched, loud, artificial voice: "This was arranged just to show you that I know everything that happens, on the spot!" Then turning toward Saint Just, who was following him mildly, with a smile of ineffable sweetness: "Say, Saint Just, don't you think I'm just as good as the Poets at composing family scenes?" "Just wait, Maximilien !" cried Marie Joseph, showing his fist as he left by the opposite door, which opened of its own accord this time; "I'm off for the Convention, with Tallien!" "And I, for the Jacobins !" said Robespierre, with virulent pride. "With Saint-Just !" added Saint Just, in a terrible voice. As I followed Marie Joseph out of the den, I said to the father: "Take back your second son; you've just killed your first." And we left without daring to turn round to look at him.

Chapter Thirty-five A SUMMER EVENING THE first thing I did was to hide Joseph Chenier. No one in those days, despite the Terror, refused shelter to anyone whose life was in danger. A score of houses were available. He let himself be led to one of them, crying like a child. Hiding by day, he ran around by night to all his friends among the Representatives. He was brokenhearted; all he spoke of was the overthrow of Robespierre, SaintJust, and Couthon. He lived only for that hope. I shared his hope, 147

and like him I stayed in hiding. I was everywhere except at home. When Joseph Chenier went to the Convention, he entered and left surrounded by friends and Representatives whom no one dared to touch. Once he was outside, he was spirited away, and not even Robespierre's troop of spies, the most insidious swarm of locusts that ever scabbed the face of Paris, could find his tracks. The life of Andre Chenier hung by a thread of time. What remained to be seen was which would ripen first; Robespierre's anger, or the conspirators'. On the very first night following that unhappy scene, between the fifth and the sixth of Thermidor, we began to visit all the men who later came to be known as the `Thermidoreans,' all of them, from Tallien to Barras, from Lecointre to Vadier. We were uniting their purpose without gathering their persons. Each one individually was ready, but all together were not. I was saddened by what I saw; this was the gist of it. The Republic was mined and countermined. Robespierre's mine was set to go off at the Hotel de Ville; Tallien's countermine at the Tuileries. The day when the miners would meet would be the day of the explosion. But there was unity on Robespierre's side, disunity in the Convention, which was waiting for him to attack. Our attempts to urge it to take the initiative, on that night and the following (the sixth to the seventh), led to nothing but timid and restricted conferences. The Jacobins had long been ready. The Convention was waiting for the first blow to be struck. That was the point that had been reached at daybreak on the morning of the seventh. Paris felt the earth stirring beneath it. As usual, one could sense what was coming at the street corners. The squares were filled with speechmakers; the doors were agape, the windows interrogated the streets. We could get no information about Saint-Lazare. I had gone there once. The door had been slammed viciously in my face, and I had very nearly been arrested. The day had been wasted in vain inquiries. About six o'clock in the evening, groups began to run through the public squares. Agitated men tossed a word of news into the gatherings and ran off again. Rumours flew: "The Sections are taking up arms. They are conspiring at the Convention. —The Jacobins are conspiring.—The Commune has counter148

manded the decrees of the Convention.—The cannoneers have just gone by." There were shouts: "Grand petition of the Jacobins at the Convention in favour of the People." Sometimes an entire street full of people would take to its heels and run for dear life, with no apparent reason, as though swept away by the wind. Then children would start falling, women screaming, shop-shutters slamming shut, and silence would reign for a while, until a fresh disturbance renewed the tumult. The sun was veiled as by an approaching storm. The heat was stifling. I prowled about my house in Revolution Square and, deciding that after two nights this was the place where I was least likely to be sought, I passed through the archway and went in. All the doors were open; the doorkeepers were out in the streets. I went up the stairs, and entered alone; I found everything as I had left it: my books scattered and a little dusty, my windows open. I rested a moment at the window which opened on the square. As I stood there meditating, I looked down over the Tuileries, reigning in eternal sadness, with their green chestnut trees and the long building over the long terrace of the Feuillants; the trees of the Champs-Elysées, white with dust; the square, black with the heads of the crowd, and, in the middle, facing one another, two structures of painted wood: the statue of Liberty, and the Guillotine. It was an oppressive evening. The farther the sun sank behind the trees into the heavy blue clouds, the more strongly its slanting, truncated rays blazed on the scarlet caps and the jet-black hats; the sombre glow gave the surging crowd the appearance of a dark sea flecked with blood. The confused voices reached the level of my windows, just under the roof, like the sound of ocean waves, and the distant roll of thunder strengthened the grim illusion. Suddenly the murmurs swelled tremendously, and I saw every head and shoulder turn toward the boulevards, which were beyond my sight. Something coming from that direction was calling forth shouts and jeers, struggle and commotion. I leaned out of my window in vain; nothing could be seen, and the cries did not abate. An invincible desire to be a witness to what was happening made me forget my situation; I wanted to go out, but I heard a quarrel on the staircase that made me close my door hurriedly. There were men outside who wanted to come up, and the porter, con149

vinced that I was away, was proving to them by showing them his double keys that I no longer lived there. Two new voices entered the dispute and affirmed that the report was true; that everything had been searched from top to bottom just an hour before. I had come in the nick of time. The men went down the stairs regretfully. By their curses I could tell where they had come from. I had no choice now but to return sadly to my window, a prisoner in my own house. The uproar was increasing by the minute, but a greater noise was approaching the square, like the sound of cannon in the midst of a fusillade. A vast flood of men with pikes burst upon the great sea of people in the square, and I finally saw the cause of the ominous tumult. It was a wagon, a wagon painted red and loaded with eighty living beings. They were all standing, pressed close against one another. Every size and every age was bound up in that sheaf. All were bareheaded, and one could see white heads, hairless heads, little blonde heads at waist height; white dresses, peasant clothing, officers', priests', bourgeois' attire; I could even make out two women who carried their children at the breast, nursing them to the very end, as though to bequeath their sons their milk, their blood, their very lives. I've told you: this is what they used to call a load.' This load was so heavy that three horses were barely able to drag it. Besides (and this was the cause of the uproar), at every step the wagon was stopped amid the shouts of the crowd; the horses backed into one another, and the cart stood still as if besieged. Then the condemned prisoners would reach their arms out towards their friends over the heads of the guards. One might have thought it an overloaded bark about to be wrecked, that the people on shore were trying desperately to save. At every effort of the gendarmes and the Sans-Culottes to advance, the people uttered an immense cry and joined to push the convoy back with chests and shoulders; and obtruding their belated but terrible veto against the sentence, they shouted with a loud, confused, but swelling voice, which seemed to come at the same time from the Seine, from the bridges, the quais, the avenues, the trees, the curbs and the pavements: "No ! No ! No !" At each of these great waves of men, the cart swayed on its 'so

wheels like a vessel at anchor, and was almost lifted from the ground with all its load. I kept hoping it would overturn. My heart was beating violently. I was hanging half out of my window, drunk and dizzy with the grandeur of the scene. I was not breathing: my whole soul, my life itself was in my eyes. Carried away by this great spectacle, I began to feel that heaven and earth themselves were actors on the stage. From time to time a flicker of lightning would issue from the cloud, like a signal. The black front of the Tuileries would turn a bloody red, and the two great clumps of trees recoil as though in horror. A moan would arise from the crowd; and close behind their mighty voice, the voices of the clouds would join in and prolong it in a long-drawn mournful roll. The shadow was beginning to spread, the storm before the night. Dry dust began to fly above the mass of heads, sometimes veiling the whole scene from my eyes. But I couldn't tear my gaze from the tossing cart. I stretched my arms to it from above, I shouted, though I could not be heard; I called upon the people; I begged the cart to have courage; and I watched Heaven in the hope that it would intercede. "Three more days !" I cried. "Three more days ! Providence, Destiny, Powers inscrutable ! God, Spirits, our Masters, Eternal Ones, if you can hear, make them wait just three more days !" The wagon was still advancing, step by step; slowly, josded, halted, but alas ! still moving forward. The troops were gathering about it. Between the Guillotine and the statue of Liberty gleamed a mass of bayonets. It seemed that there lay the port where the bark was expected. The People, surfeited with blood, the People, sullen and growling, were making more noise than ever, but did not seem as violent as before. I was trembling; my teeth were chattering. I had been able to embrace the whole scene with my eyes; I now took my spy-glass to try to distinguish the details. The wagon was already far away from me, a long distance ahead. Nevertheless I recognized a man dressed in grey, his hands behind his back. I don't know whether they were tied. There was no doubt that it was Andre Chenier. The cart stopped again. There was fighting. I saw a man in a red cap climb up on the platform of the Guillotine and arrange a basket. I5I

My sight was growing dim: I set down my glass to wipe my eyes as well as the lens. The general appearance of the square kept changing as the battle moved on. Every step that the horses advanced seemed to be felt as a defeat by the crowd. The cries were less furious and more pained. Nevertheless the mob was growing, preventing the progress of the vehicle more by the weight of its numbers than by active resistance. I picked up my telescope and saw the unhappy passengers once more. They stood out completely above the heads of the multitude; I could have counted them individually at that moment. The women were unfamiliar to me. I could distinguish some poor peasants, but not those women whom I feared to see. The men were known to me from Saint-Lazare. Andre was talking as he watched the setting sun. My soul joined his, and while my eyes watched the movement of his distant lips, my voice repeated his last lines, aloud: Comme un dernier rayon, comme un dernier zephire Anime la fin d'un beau jour, Au pied de l'echafaud j'essaie encor ma lyre. Peut-&re est-ce bientöt mon tour. All of a sudden he made a violent gesture, so that I dropped my glass to look at the whole square, from which the cries no longer arose. The flow of the multitude had reversed its direction abruptly. The quais, just now crowded with masses of people, were emptying. The crowds broke up into groups, the groups thinned into families, the families dispersed, leaving only individuals. At the far ends of the square, people were racing to escape, raising a cloud of dust. The women covered their heads or their children's heads with their skirts. All anger had vanished.... It was raining. Only someone who knows Paris will understand. I have seen it happen repeatedly in times of crisis. There now succeeded, to the tumultuous cries, the curses, the long vociferation, a plaintive murmur which seemed an inauspicious farewell, with a few sparse, prolonged cries in a low, falling cadence, expressing the abandonment of all resistance and lamenting the final surrender. The Nation, humiliated, bent its head and filed off in herds between a false statue on the one hand, a Liberty I52

that was the image of an image, and an all-too-real Scaffold, stained with its finest blood. Those who still milled about were either trying to get a better view or trying to run away. No one had any desire to interfere. The executioners seized the moment. The sea was calm, and their hideous craft reached its destination in safety. The Guillotine raised her arm. At that moment there was not a noise, not a movement over the entire expanse of the square. The clear, monotonous sound of the heavy rainfall was all that could be heard, like the pouring of an immense watering-pot. The broad streaks of rain stretched before my eyes, furrowing the air. My limbs were trembling: I was forced to sink to my knees. From that position I watched and listened, with bated breath. The rain was still transparent enough to let me distinguish through my glass the colour of the clothing that showed between the posts. I could also see a white space between the blade and the block, and when a shadow filled this aperture, I closed my eyes. A great shout from the spectators let me know when to open them. Thirty-two times I lowered my head, with a desperate prayer, that no human ear will ever hear, and that no one but I could have conceived. After the thirty-third cry, I saw the grey coat stand up. This time I resolved to honour the courage of his genius by being brave enough to watch his death with open eyes: I rose to my feet. The head fell, and what he had there flowed off with the blood.

Chapter Thirty-six ROUND AND ROUND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE DOCTOR NOIR seemed unable to continue for some time. Then he got up abruptly and paced rapidly through the room. At that point a fantastic rage seized me. I threw the door open and shouted down the staircase: "Murderers ! Wretches ! Take me 153

if you want me, come and get me! Here I am !" And in my frenzy I craned my neck, as if offering it to the knife. But then, what was I trying to accomplish?—All I found on the staircase were two little children, the porter's children. Their innocent presence arrested me. They held each other by the hand, and terrified by the sight of me, pressed close to the wall to let me pass, like the lunatic that I was. I stopped and asked myself where I was going, and why this particular death should so disturb me, when I had seen death so often.—I recovered my self-control instantly; and regretting profoundly that I had been so senseless as to hope, for even one moment in my life, I became once more the impassive spectator that I had always been. I questioned the children about my cannoneer; he had come every morning at eight ever since the fifth of Thermidor; he had brushed my clothes and slept near the stove. Then, seeing that I didn't come back, he had left without asking any questions. I asked the children where their father was. He had gone out to the square to watch the ceremony. I had seen it only too well, from my own window. I went downstairs with less precipitation, in order to satisfy one violent desire which I still felt, namely, to see whether Destiny would have the impudence to add a general triumph to the partial success of Robespierre that I had just witnessed. I should not have been surprised. The crowd was still so large, and so preoccupied with what had been happening on the square, that I went out without being seen, through the main door, which stood open and unattended. Once outside I began to walk with lowered head, not feeling the rain. Night soon fell. I kept on walking, occupied with my thoughts. On all sides I could hear outcries, the echoing roll of the storm, the steady sweep of the rain. On all sides I imagined that I saw the Statue and the Scaffold, confronting each other gloomily over living heads and fallen heads. I was feverish. Time and time again I was stopped in the streets by passing troops, by crowds of running men. I stopped, I let them pass, and my lowered eyes saw nothing but the gleaming pavement, slippery and scoured with rain. I watched my feet walking, without having any idea where they were leading me. I reflected wisely, I reasoned logically, I saw clearly, but I was completely out of my mind. The air had grown cooler, the rain had dried in the streets and 154

on me without my having noticed anything. I followed the quais; I crossed the bridges, I recrossed them, trying to find somewhere to walk where I would not be jostled, but there was no such place. There were people beside me, people before me, people behind me, people in my head, people everywhere: it was unendurable. They crossed in front of me, they bumped into me, they crowded me. I would stop and sit down on a curb-stone or a gate; but I would keep on thinking. Every stroke of the picture returned, more vividly than before, to my eyes; I kept seeing the glare on the Tuileries, the black, turbulent sea of the square, the heavy cloud, and the giant Statue confronting the towering Guillotine. Then I would dart off again; the crowds picked me up once more, enveloping me and rolling me forward. I ran from them mechanically, but not because I felt harassed; on the contrary, crowds can lull one to the point of drowsiness. I wished they would pay some attention to me, so that I might be relieved of what was going on within me by some external stimulus. Half the night went by in this mad vagrancy. Finally, when I had sat down on the parapet of one of the quais, but still found myself pushed about, I raised my eyes and looked at my surroundings. I was in front of the Hotel de Ville; I recognized it by that luminous dial, which was later extinguished, and which has been recently relit; at that time it was red, and from that distance looked like a great moon of blood on which the magic hours were marked. The dial said twenty minutes after midnight; I thought I was dreaming. What astonished me more than anything else was that there really were crowds of people about me. On the Greve, on the quais, everywhere, people were wandering about without destination. They were gathered in a particularly dense crowd before the Hotel de Ville, watching a big, brightly lit window. It was the window belonging to the Council of the Commune. On the steps of the old palace was ranged a dense battalion of men in red caps, armed with pikes, and singing the Marseillaise. Everyone else seemed dazed and spoke only in low voices. I took the grim resolve of going to see Joseph Chimer. It did not take me long to reach the narrow street on the Ile Saint-Louis where he had taken refuge. An old woman, our confidante, who opened the door after having made me wait a long time, informed me that he was asleep; that he had been very pleased with his day's 155

work; that he had received ten Representatives without daring to go out; that on the following day they were going to attack Robespierre, and that he was planning to go with me to free Andr6 on the ninth; that he was husbanding his strength. Should I wake him to tell him, "Your brother is dead; you will arrive too late. You will call, `My brother', and there will be no answer. You will say that you wanted to save him, and no one will ever believe you, either during your lifetime or after your death! And every day they will call to you: `Cain, Cain, where is thy brother?' Wake him, to tell him that? No ! "Yes, let him husband his strength," said I; "he will need it tomorrow." And I resumed my nocturnal march through the streets, resolved not to go home before the event had come to pass. I spent the night prowling from the Hotel de Ville to the Palais-National, from the Tuileries to the Hotel de Ville. All Paris seemed to be camping out that night. The eighth of Thermidor dawned before long, a brilliant day, and destined to be a very full one. From the outside, I watched the inner struggle in the great body of the Republic. At the PalaisNational, contrary to the usual order of things, silence reigned in the square, while noise prevailed in the Chateau. Again the people waited for the verdict the whole day long, but in vain. The factions were preparing. The Commune was enrolling whole sections of the national guard. The Jacobins were delivering fiery declamations among their groups. The men were under arms; one could tell, by certain explosions, that weapons were being tested. The night returned, and all one could discover was that Robespierre was stronger than ever, and had struck a heavy blow against his enemies in the Convention with a powerful speech. What? He would not fall ! What? He would live on, kill on, reign on! Who could have thought, on the following night, of seeking a roof, a bed, or sleep? No one about me did, and as for myself, I didn't even leave the square. I took root there. It came at last, the second day, the day of crisis; and weary as I was, I was ready beforehand to greet it. The ravening discord still howled on, all that day, making the Palace that confined it tremble. When a single shout, a word, flew out, all Paris turned topsy156

turvy; everything changed colour. The dice were on the carpet, and so were the heads. Once in a while one of the pale gamblers would come to a window to wipe his forehead; then the crowd would ask him anxiously who was winning in this game where his own life was at stake. Suddenly it was made known, towards the end of the day, at the close of the session, that a certain strange, unforeseen, unheard-of cry had been heard: Down with the tyrant! and that Robespierre was in prison. The war began immediately. Each man ran to his post. Drums rolled, arms glittered, the cries grew louder. The Hotel de Ville's tocsin wailed, as if calling for its master. The Tuileries were bristling with steel, Robespierre, restored, reigned anew in his palace, the Assembly in theirs. All night long the Convention and the Commune appealed for help, proclaiming mutual excommunication. The people hung suspended between the two forces. The citizenry wandered about the streets, calling to one another, questioning each other, in confusion and in fear of destroying both themselves and the nation; others remained stock still: striking the pavement with the butt of their guns, they leaned their chins upon the barrels and stood waiting for daylight and the truth. It was midnight. I was in the Place du Carrousel when ten pieces of ordnance arrived. By the light of the burning fusees and the few torches, I saw that the officers were stationing their pieces carelessly in the square as if they were in an artillery yard, some aiming at the Louvre, others towards the river. No definite intention was apparent in the orders that they gave. When they had come to a stop they dismounted, having no idea at whose disposal they had come to place themselves. The cannoneers lay down on the ground. As I approached, I noticed one of them, possibly the sleepiest, but certainly the tallest, who had settled himself comfortably on his gun-carriage and had already begun to snore. I shook him by the arm; it was none other than my peaceful cannoneer Blaireau. He scratched his head for a moment, slightly embarrassed; stared at me; then, recognizing me, raised himself lazily to his full height. His comrades, accustomed to honour him as the captain of the crew, came up to help him execute some manoeuvre. He stretched his arms and legs to take the stiffness out of them, and said: 157

"Oh, stay where you are; it's nothing; just this citizen who's come over to have a drop with me." When his comrades had lain down or were far enough away, I said: "Well, Blaireau, my elevated friend, what's going on today?" He picked up the fuse of his cannon and amused himself by lighting his pipe with it. "Oh, nothing much !" he said. "Devil !" said I. He drew noisily on his pipe and set it going. "Oh, Lord, no ! It's nothing to make a fuss about!" He turned his head back over his lofty shoulders to look with a scornful air at the national palace of the Tuileries, all its windows blazing with light. "It's just a pack of lawyers at each other's throats. That's all !" "Oh ! Is that all it means to you?" said I, in a cavalier tone, with a futile attempt to slap him on the shoulder. "Not a thing more," Blaireau replied, with a air of indisputable superiority. I sat down on his gun-carriage and reflected. I was ashamed how little philosophy I could muster, when compared with him. Nevertheless it was hard for me to ignore what was happening before my eyes. Carrousel Square was filling up with battalions gathered in a close mass before the Tuileries; they exchanged passwords cautiously. There were the section of the Mountain, the William Tell section, the French Guards, and the Fontaine-Grenelle section, all ranging themselves around the Convention. Was it in order to besiege it, or to defend it? As I was asking myself this question, a few mounted men galloped up. The horses struck fire from the pavement with their hooves. They came straight for the Øoneers. A stout man, whom I had difficulty in making out by the light of the torches, advanced before the rest, bellowing strangely. He was brandishing a great curved sabre, and while still at a distance, he began to shout: "Citizen cannoneers ! Man your guns ! I am General Henriot. Shout with me: Long live Robespierre! The traitors are there, boys ! Let's singe their moustaches for them ! Now we'll see if they can push us fellows around ! We'll show them ! I'm with you now ! —You know me, boys; don't you know me?" There was not a word of reply. He reeled in the saddle and, i58

throwing himself back, supported the entire weight of his heavy body on the reins, so that the poor exhausted beast reared in the air. "Well, then, by God ! Where are your officers?" he went on. "Long live our country ! God's blood ! And Robespierre too ! My friends ! We're all Sans-Culottes and good fellows; we're too leery to be caught napping, we're a pretty foxy crowd, we are !—You know me, I'm your friend! I'm no yellow-livered coward! Turn your guns on that old barn; all the skunks and sneaks of the Convention are in there." An officer approached him. "Hallo, there!" he said. "Be off! We mind our own business. Mum's the word. What's more, you get on my nerves." A second officer spoke to the first: "I say, you can't really tell. Maybe the old soak is a general, after all." "Bah ! Why should I give a damn?" said the first; and he sat down again. Henriot was foaming at the mouth. "By God, I'll split your skull like a pumpkin if you don't do what I tell you!" "Come on, enough of that, Lizzie !" said the officer, showing him the handle of a gun-mop. "Cool off, there; that's the boy." The aides-de-camp, or whatever they were, who had followed Henriot did their best to convince the officers; but they were listened to even less than their fat drunkard of a general. Wine, blood, and fury were choking the ignoble Henriot. He shouted, he cursed, he fumed, he howled; he pounded his chest; he threw himself off his horse and rolled on the ground; he remounted, without his plumed hat. He raced to left and right, his horse's feet getting tangled among the gun-carriages. The cannoneers watched him unpertubed and laughed. The armed citizenry came up to look at him with candles and torches, and laughed. Henriot was loaded with insults, and responded with the curses of a drunken barkeeper. "Look at the big boar ! A boar without tusks. What does the feathered pig want of us?" Henriot kept screaming: "Rally to my sides, all you SansCulottes ! Forward, my babies ! Let's wipe out that crazy mob of Tallien's ! We'll slit Boissy d'Anglas' throat ! Let's tear the guts out ofCollot d'Herbois; let's get Merlin-Thionville; let's slice his whistle for him ! let's make Convention-hash of Billaud-Varennes, boys !" 159

"Come on, now!" said the adjutant-major of the cannoneers; "Let's have a right about turn, old idiot. Enough of this ! Stop making an ass of yourself. You're not getting through this way." At the same time he brought down the hilt of his sabre on the nose of Henriot's horse. The poor animal started to run around Carrousel Square, carrying its corpulent master off with it, his hat and his sabre dragging on the ground; and knocking over soldiers whose backs were turned, women who had come along with the Sections, and poor little boys who had run up just to see what was going on, like everybody else. The drunkard returned to the assault; but this time he addressed another officer, and with somewhat better sense (the cold air on his head and the gallop had sobered him slightly) : "Think carefully, Citizen; the order I bring, to fire on the Convention, was issued by the Commune, at the command of Robespierre, Saint Just, and Couthon. I have been appointed commander of the entire garrison. Do you follow me, Citizen?" The officer removed his hat, but then he answered with perfect coolness: "Show me an order in writing, Citizen. Do you think I'm fool enough to fire without a signed order? Not bad, not bad! Do you think I joined up yesterday, in order to get myself guillotined tomorrow? Show me a written order and I'll burn up the Palais-National and the Convention like a pack of matches." Thereupon he gave his moustache a twirl and turned his back on Henriot. "Or if you prefer," he added, "you can order the artillerymen to shoot; I won't breathe a word." Henriot took him at his word. He came straight up to Blaireau. "Cannoneer," he said, "I know you." Blaireau opened his eyes wide, with a look of amazement. "Fancy that !" he said. "He knows me!" "I order you to turn your cannon against that wall over there, and fire." Blaireau yawned. Then he set to work, and in one moment the piece was in position. He bent his great knees, and, like the experienced gunlayer that he was, adjusted the cannon so that the two sights were in line with the largest illuminated window of the chateau. Henriot was jubilant. Blaireau stood up again to his full height and said to his four 16o

comrades, who had taken up their positions two on each side: "It isn't quite right yet, fellows. Just one more little push on that wheel." As for me, I stood watching the cannon-wheel roll ahead, and then slide back again; and I thought I saw before my eyes the mythical Wheel of Fortune. Yes, this was it: the very one, large as life. On this wheel hung our world's destiny. If it moved forward and brought the gun to bear on the Convention, Robespierre was the victor. At that very moment the members had heard of Henriot's arrival; at that very moment they were taking their places in their curule chairs to die. The spectators in the galleries had fled and were now spreading the news all around us. If the cannon were fired, the Assembly would divide and the whole Guard would pass under the control of the Commune. The Terror would be intensified, then mitigated, then there would come—there would come a Richard III, or a Cromwell, or, after an Octavian, .. . who knows? I wasn't breathing, I was just watching. I couldn't bring myself to interfere. Had I whispered a word to Blaireau, had I put the least grain of sand, the shadow of a gesture in the way of his wheel, it would have fallen back. But I didn't dare do it; I had to see what Destiny herself would beget. There was a worn bit of pavement in front of the cannon; the four assistants couldn't get the wheels to stand evenly on it; they kept slipping back. Blaireau stood away from the cannon and crossed his arms in the attitude of a discontented and discouraged artist, pouting. He turned towards an artillery officer: "Lieutenant ! This outfit is too young ! The men don't know how to handle a gun. As long as you keep giving me this kind of crew to work with I won't be able to get anywhere. There's no fun in the game, this way !" The lieutenant replied angrily: "I didn't order you to shoot ! I didn't say a word !" "Oh, well, that's another story," said Blaireau, yawning. "In that case I don't have to play either. Good night." At that he kicked the cannon so that it rolled aslant, and stretched himself out on it. Henriot drew the sabre that somebody had picked up for him. "Are you going to fire?" he said. N

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Blaireau was smoking, and holding an extinguished fuse in his hand, he replied: "The candle's gone out. Go to sleep !" Henriot, choking with rage, levelled a sabre-stroke at him, fit to cleave a wall; but it was a drunkard's blow, so poorly aimed that it merely skimmed the sleeve, scarcely touching the skin. That was enough to decide the issue against Henriot. The infuriated cannoneers directed a hail of punches, kicks, and mopswipes against his horse; and the unlucky general, covered with mud and tossed about by his steed like a sack of grain on a donkey's back, was borne off towards the Louvre, ending up, as you know, at the Hotel de Ville, where Cofhnhal the Jacobin threw him out of the window into a manure pile, his natural habitat. At that very moment the commissaries of the Convention arrived, shouting from afar that Robespierre, Saint Just, Couthon, and Henriot had been declared beyond the pale of the law. The Sections responded to these magic words with cries of joy. Carrousel Square suddenly grew bright; every gun-barrel bore a torch. "Long live Liberty ! Long live the Convention ! Down with the tyrants !" cried the armed crowd. The march went towards the Hotel de Ville; and the whole people submitted and dispersed to the magic cry, the Republican interdict: "beyond the law!" The besieged Convention made its sortie and came from the Tuileries to invest the Commune, at the Hotel de Ville. I didn't follow them; I had no doubt of their victory. I didn't witness Robespierre smash his jaw instead of his head, and endure insults as he would have accepted homage, in haughty silence. He had waited for the submission of Paris, instead of going out and conquering it like the Convention. He had been afraid. It was all up with him. I didn't see his brother throw himself down on the bayonets from the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, Lebas blow his brains out, or Saint-Just go to the guillotine as calmly as he had sent others there, with folded arms, his eyes and mind toward heaven, like the Grand Inquisitor of Liberty. They were defeated: what else mattered? I stayed just where I was, and seizing the long and ignorant hands of my naive cannoneer, I made him the following little speech: "Blaireau! Thy name is not destined to fill the smallest niche in history; but little dost thou care, provided thou mayest sleep both night and day, not too far away from thy beloved Rose. 162

Thou art much too modest a man; for I swear to thee, that of all those men called great by the historians, few have done things as great as thou hast done. Thou hast abridged the era of Democracy; pushed the Revolution back a step, wounded the Republic unto death. See, therefore, what thou hast done, 0 mighty Blaireau! Others will govern, and be congratulated for thy works, whom thy breath could have dispersed like a wisp of smoke puffed from thy solemn pipe. Much will be written, till the end of time, about the ninth of Thermidor; but no one will think of granting thee the praise and homage which are thy due; thy due, surely as much as they are the due of all those other men of action, who know and think no more than thou about how what they do has come about; but who share none of thy modesty and thy philosophic simplicity. Let it not be said that none has done thee homage; thou, 0 Blaireau! art the true Man of Destiny." Having completed my speech, I bowed with real respect, in deep humility; for I had just been gazing into the very depths, at the well head of one of the great political events in the world's history. Blaireau thought—I can't imagine why—that I was making fun of him. He withdrew his hands from mine, very gently, out of respect, and scratched his head: "If you want to do me a favour," said this great man, "you would have a look at my left arm, just to get an idea...." "Right," said I. He drew up his sleeve, and I picked up a torch. "You should be grateful to Henriot, my son," I said. "He has destroyed the most dangerous of your hieroglyphs. The fleurs-delis, the Bourbons, and Madeleine are gone, together with the epidermis, and the day after tomorrow you can be healed and married to boot, if you are so inclined." I bound up his arm with my handkerchief, took him home with me, and for the rest—he suited the action to the word. For a long time afterwards I was unable to sleep; for though the serpent was crushed, it had devoured the nightingale of France. You know society too well for me to convince you that Mademoiselle de Coigny took poison and that Madame de Saint-Aignan stabbed herself. If sorrow did poison them, it acted slowly. The 163

ninth of Thermidor released them from prison. Mademoiselle de Coigny took refuge in marriage, but many things have led me to believe that she was not very happy in that retreat. As for Madame de Saint-Aignan, a soft and tender if somewhat unsociable melancholy, together with the raising of three fine children, filled her entire life and her widowhood in the solitude of the Chateau de Saint-Aignan. About a year after her imprisonment, a woman came on her behalf to ask for a certain portrait. She had waited until the period of mourning for her husband was over before recalling her treasure. She didn't want to see me. —I surrendered the precious box of red morocco, and I have not seen it again. —It was all very fine, very purely and delicately done. —I respected her wishes, and I shall always respect her charming memory, for she is no more. I have been told that no matter where she travelled, she would not leave this portrait behind; she would never consent to having it copied; perhaps she destroyed it on her death-bed, perhaps it has remained in the drawer of some secretary in the old chateau, where the grandchildren of the lovely duchess have always taken it to be a likeness of some great-uncle of theirs; for such is the destiny of portraits. They make only one heart beat faster, and when that one heart no longer beats, they should be destroyed.

Chapter Thirty-seven OF PERPETUAL OSTRACISM THE last words of Doctor Noir were still resounding in Stello's spacious chamber, when the patient cried out, throwing up his arms: "Yes, that is surely how it must have been!" "My stories," the satiric narrator said harshly, "like all man's utterances, are only half true." "Yes, it must have happened that way," Stello went on. "I can vouch for that, by the way I suffered as I listened. As we sense the resemblance in the portrait of a stranger or of someone who is no longer living, so I can sense the faithfulness of your portraits. Yes, their passions and their desires made them talk that way. And so, 164

of the three forms of Power, the first is afraid of us, the second scorns us as useless, the third one hates us and tries to pull us down, as if we were the aristocrats. Are we, then, the eternal Pariahs of society?" "Be you Pariahs or Gods," said the Doctor, "the Multitude, while carrying you in its arms, looks askance on you as it does on all its children, and from time to time it will throw you on the ground and trample you under foot. The crowd makes a bad mother. "Eternal glory to that Athenian.... Oh! Why is his name not known? Why did the great anonymous sculptor who created the Venus de Milo not reserve part of his marble block for him? Why was it not written in letters of gold, that name (vulgar though it must have been), at the head of Plutarch's Illustrious Men? Glory to that Athenian! I shall never cease admiring him; I consider him the eternal type, the perfect representative of the People in all countries and all times. I shall not forget him, whenever I sec men assembled for judgement, or even gathered to discuss a famous deed or work; or so much as pronouncing a great man's name, as the Multitude usually pronounces such names, in an indefinably pinched, stiff, jealous, hostile tone. The name seems to burst from the lips in spite of the speaker, forced out by some charm, a secret power that urges out the disagreeable sounds. While they are passing through, the mouth grimaces, the lips floating vaguely between a scornful smile and the contraction of intense and strained concentration. It's a stroke of good luck if, in this struggle, the name is not mutilated or followed by a harsh, insulting epithet. It is as though, having tasted a bitter fluid in order to be obliging, the lips had spewed it out, and, as usually happens, the action had been followed by an expulsion of breath and an expression of disgust. "0 Multitude ! 0 nameless Multitude ! You are the born enemy of names ! Consider what you do when you gather in the theatre. At the bottom of your heart lies the secret hope that the play may fail, and the fear lest it be a success. You come as if in spite of yourselves; you would prefer not to be charmed. The poet has to tame you through his interpreter, the actor. Then you submit, but not without a murmur, nor without a long series of obstinate complaints. For to proclaim a success, to honour a name, 165

means for each one of you that this name will be placed above your own, that its superiority will be acknowledged, offensive to all who must admit it. But I declare that you would never accept it, proud Multitude, did you not feel that in doing so (great relief!) you were performing an act of patronage. Your position of judge, the judge who pours out gold in handfuls, supports you a little in the cruel effort you must make to sign with your applause the confession of someone else's superiority. But whenever this secret recompense is withheld, you have no sooner made a reputation than you resent it, and undermine it secretly; you chop away at it until it falls back to your level. "Your sole passion is equality, 0 Multitude! And as long as you exist, you will be driven by an urge for the permanent ostracism of all Names. "Glory to that Athenian—Good Lord! must I never know his name?—who, with an immortal naiveté, expressed your inborn thought: " `Why do you want to banish him?' " `I'm tired of hearing his name,' was the reply."

Chapter Thirty-eight HOMER'S HEAVEN "UNTOUCHABLES or Gods," Doctor Noir repeated, "do you happen to remember someone by the name of Plato who called the poets `imitators of phantoms' and drove them out of his Republic? But he also said they were `divine.' Plato would have done well to worship them, while keeping them out of practical affairs: but the difficulty he has in reaching any conclusion, and in reconciling the worship with the banishment, reveals to what sorry devices a strict logician is reduced when he tries to subordinate everything to a universal rule. Plato demands that each man be useful to everybody else; but then he encounters on his path the sublime uselessness of a Homer, and he doesn't know what to do with it. Every kind of artist makes him uncomfortable; he puts his set-square to all of them but cannot measure them: this upsets 166

him dreadfully. He assigns them all, Poets, Painters, Sculptors, Musicians, to the category of imitators; declares that all art is child's play, that the arts address themselves to the feeblest part of the soul, the part which is susceptible to illusions, the cowardly part that weeps over human misery; that the arts are senseless, timid, fearful, contrary to reason: that in order to please the confused Multitude, Poets concentrate on passionate characters, whose vivid characteristics easily arouse a response; that they would corrupt the most virtuous minds if they were not controlled; that they prefer to have pleasure and pain reign in the State, rather than law and reason. He says further that Homer, had he been competent to instruct and perfect mankind, instead of being simply a useless minstrel (not even capable, he adds, of deterring his friend Creophilus from being a glutton—O Antique stupidity !) he would not have had to wander barefoot, but would have been esteemed, honoured, and served as were Protagoras of Abdera and Prodicus of Keos, the worthy philosophers, who were borne in triumph everywhere." "Almighty God!" cried Stello: "What do we now care for Protagoras and Prodicus?—while old and young alike adore and weep over the divine Homer." "Ah ! Ah !" the Doctor recommenced, his eyes brightening with a despairing triumph; "so you see there is no more pity for Poets among philosophers than among men of Power. They both join hands to trample on the arts." "Yes, I feel that is so," said Stello, pale and uneasy; "but what can be the everlasting cause of it all?" "Their motive is envy," said the inflexible Doctor, "and their pretext (indestructible excuse !) is the uselessness of the arts for the social order. "The general pantomime used in dealing with the Poet is a patronizing and disdainful smile; but they all feel something else at the bottom of their hearts, something like the presence of a superior Deity. "And in this respect they are still far above the common people who, sensing this superiority only dimly, experience in the presence of the Poet nothing but the uneasiness that the proximity of some great passion, incomprehensible to them, creates. They feel the discomfort of a fatuous, cold-blooded observer suddenly transported to the side of Paul at the moment of Virginie's departure; 167

of Werther when he is about to take up his pistols; of Romeo when he has just drunk the poison; of Des Grieux following barefoot behind the prostitutes' cart. This indifferent bystander will surely consider them mad, but he will nevertheless feel something great, something that demands respect in these men dedicated to deep emotion, and he will withdraw in silence, deeming himself their superior because he has remained unmoved." "True! true! alas !" murmured Stello in his bosom, as he sank further and further into his armchair as if to escape from the strong, harsh voice that pursued him. "To get back to Plato; there was also some rivalry about divinity between him and Homer. A jealous character worked in this great man, justly immortalized; but he had a matter-of-fact mind, like all those who derive their intellectual strength only from Judgement, and reject Imagination. "His convictions were deep, because he drew them from the experience of his own capacities and characteristics, by which all people try to measure others. Plato's was an exact, geometrical and rational mind, like that of Pascal, and both of them condemned Poetry, because they had no feeling for it. But I am dealing only with Plato, because he belongs within the scheme of our conversation, since he had gigantic pretensions as a legislator and a statesman. "I seem to remember that he says something to this effect: `The faculty which judges everything according to measurement and calculation is the most valuable property of the soul; hence, the other faculty, which is opposed to it, is one of the most futile things with which we are endowed.' "And the honest fellow, from this point of departure, goes on to give Homer a thorough dressing-down; he calls him to order, and lectures him in a superior tone, somewhere around Book Six of the Republic: " `My dear Homer, if it be denied that you are an artisan three stages removed from truth, incapable of producing anything but the phantoms of virtue' (he dotes on those phantoms); `if you are a worker of the second order, capable of knowing what will improve or harm either states or individuals, tell us what city owes to you the reform of its government, as Lacedaemonia is indebted to Lycurgus, Italy and Sicily to Charondas, Athens to Solon? 168

What war did you conduct or counsel in? What useful discovery, what invention furthering industry or serving man's needs is identified with your name?' "And going on in this vein with his puppet Glaucon, who keeps interjecting: `Well said! How true ! Just so !' in much the same tone as a young seminarist responding to his Abbe during a lecture, our fine-feathered philosopher fmally pitches the divine beggar clean out of his Republic (an imaginary one, fortunately for mankind). "To this familiar discourse the goodly Homer answers not at all, for the simple reason that he is asleep, not with that light sleep (dormitat) that someone else who also tried his hand at concocting rules dared reproach him with, but with the sleep that lies heavy tonight on the eyes of Gilbert, Chatterton, and Andre Chenier." Stello breathed a deep sigh and hid his face in his hands. Doctor Noir continued: "Let us, however, assume that we have the divine Plato before us now. Could we not lead him straight into the museum of Charles X (pardon the liberty, but I know no other name for it), to the sublime ceiling that represents the reign, or rather the Heaven, of Homer? We would show him the poor old man, sitting on a golden throne with his blind beggar's staff like a sceptre between his tired, bruised, and dusty feet, but with his daughters, twin goddesses, the Iliad and the Odyssey, before him. A crowd of crowned heads observes him in devotion, but standing upright, as becomes homage to genius. These men are the greatest whose names have been preserved, the Poets, and had I said the most unhappy, the names would be the same. From his time to our own they form an unbroken chain of glorious exiles, brave victims of persecution, intellects maddened by poverty, soldiers inspired in the midst of battle, sailors rescuing their lyre from the ocean if not from the dungeon; men overflowing with love, standing close about the first and unhappiest of them all, as if to ask him for a reckoning of all the hatred they have known; such hatred, that it seems to have frozen them with astonishment. "Let us expand this sublime ceiling in our mind, let us heighten and enlarge the cupola, until it can contain all the unfortunates whom poetry or imagination has subjected to universal disdain. 169

The very firmament, on a fine August day, would not suffice ! No, the firmament of gold and azure that one sees from Cairo, pure of even the lightest diaphanous vapours, would not be a canvas broad enough for us to draw the portraits of them all. "Raise your eyes to that ceiling, and imagine that you see those melancholy phantoms rise: Torquato Tasso, his eyes scorched with tears, dressed in rags, scorned even by Montaigne (0 philosophers, what have you done again?) and reduced to blindness, not through loss of sight, but—ah! I shall not say it in our language; let the Italian bear the stain of his cry of misery: Non avendo candella per escrivere i suoi versi The blind Milton, throwing his Paradise Lost to the bookseller for ten pounds sterling; Camoens receiving charity at the hospital from the hands of that glorious slave who went begging for him and would not desert him; Cervantes stretching his hands from his miserable death-bed; the white-haired Lesage, followed by his wife and daughters, going to beg the poor canon, his son, for shelter and a place to die; Corneille, who lacked everything, even soup, as Racine informed the King, the Grand Monarch !—Dryden at seventy, dying in poverty and seeking in astrology a vain consolation for human injustice; Spenser wandering on foot through Ireland, a country less poor and less desolate than himself, and dying with the Faerie Queene in his head, Rosalind in his heart, and not a bite of bread between his lips.—How I wish that that were all ! "Vondel, the old Shakespeare of Holland, perishing of hunger at ninety; his corpse borne by fourteen miserable, barefoot poets; Samuel Boyer, who was found dead of cold in an attic; Butler, the author of Hudibras, who died of poverty; Floyer Sydenham and Rushworth, loaded with chains like galley-slaves; J.J. Rousseau, who destroyed himself rather than live on charity; Malfilåtre, whom `hunger drove into the grave,' said Gilbert, when he was at the hospital .. . "And all the rest of those whose names stand inscribed in the heaven of every nation, and in the records of its lazarettes. Let us assume that Plato advances and takes his stand among them, in order to read to this divine family the page from his Republic that I've just quoted. Do you not think that Homer would find words with which to answer him? 170

" `My dear Plato, it is perfectly true that this poor Homer, and all these unfortunate mortals who surround him, are merely imitators of Nature; it is true that they are not certified carpenters because they can give you the description of a bed, nor doctors because they describe a cure; it is true that with their tissue of words and figurative expressions, sustained by rhythm, by numbers, and by harmony, they only simulate the science they describe; it is quite true that in so doing they present to mortals only a mirror of life, and deceiving men's eyes, address themselves only to that part of the soul which is susceptible to illusion. But, 0 divine Plato ! You betray a great weakness yourself if you deem that part of our soul that is capable of emotion and exaltation to be weaker and less vital than the faculty that weighs and measures. The Imagination, in its company of the Elect, is as far superior to Judgement, with no one to show but its orators, as the Olympian gods are above the demi-gods. The most precious gift of heaven is also the rarest one.—Do you not see that a century may give birth to three Poets, as compared with a whole crowd of very clever and able logicians and sophists? Imagination contains in itself both Judgement and Memory, and without them it could not exist. What moves men, if not emotion? What creates emotion, if not art? And who teaches men art, if not God Himself? For the Poet has no master, and all disciplines can be learned except his.—You ask me what institutions, what laws, what doctrines I have bequeathed to any state? None to any single nation, but an eternal one for the entire world. I belong not to a city but to the Universe. Your doctrines, your laws, your institutions, were good for a people and for an age, and they died with them; whereas the sublime works of Art stand forever as they rise, and all of them direct unhappy mankind towards the imperishable law of Love and Pity.' " Stello folded his hands with an involuntary gesture, as if in prayer. The Doctor was silent for a moment, but soon went on:

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Chapter Thirty-nine THE SOCIAL LIE "AND that calm dignity of our ancient Homer, who is the symbol of the Poet's destiny, is nothing but the constant sense of his mission that every man who feels the Muse at the bottom of his heart must own.—The Muse has not come for nothing; it knows what it is about, but the Poet cannot tell its purposes beforehand. It is only in the moment of his inspiration that he finds out.—His mission is to produce, and to produce only when he hears the secret voice. He must wait for it. Let no foreign influence dictate his words, lest they become perishable. Let him not worry that his work may be useless; if it be beautiful, it will be useful by virtue of that fact alone, since it will unite men in a common reverence and contemplation of itself, and of the idea for which it stands. "The indignant reaction I aroused in you, Sir, was so strong that you must have felt keenly the antipathy between the man of Power and the man of Art; but besides the fact of envy and the pretext of utility, does there not remain some other secret cause to be unveiled? Do you not perceive it, in the perpetual anxiety of every man who wields authority that he may lose this precious power which has replaced his soul?" "Alas ! I am beginning to get a glimpse of what you mean now," said Stello; "can it be simply the fear of truth?" "There we have it!" replied the Doctor, joyfully. "Since Power is based on the conventions of the times, and since every social order is founded on a more or less ridiculous falsehood, while on the contrary the beauty of Art can only derive from the most intimate cast of truth, you will understand that Power, of whatever sort it may be, finds perpetual opposition in every work created in this way. Hence its constant effort to suppress or to seduce the arts." "Alas !" said Stello; "to what a painful resistance the Powers condemn the Poet! But cannot Power also adjust itself to truth?" "No, it cannot, I tell you!" the Doctor cried violently, striking the floor with his cane. "My three political examples were not meant to prove that the Powers were wrong to act as they did, I72

but simply that the essence of Power is irreconcilable with your poetic essence, and that one cannot expect it to do anything but try to destroy what conflicts with it." "But," said Stello, with a keen look (trying to fall back on some support, like a sharpshooter with a whole squadron charging down on him), "but if we could manage to create a system of Power that would not be a fiction, wouldn't we all be in agreement?" "Surely; but has it ever been created, and can it ever be created by the only two systems which we have to work with, those founded on either Heredity or Talent, which you like so little, but would have to return to in the end? If your favourite Power is to rule by Heredity and Property, please begin by finding me an answer to this familiar argument against Property: `That is my place in the sun !'—Here you have the model for all the usurpers of the world. "As for Heredity, refute this if you can: `You don't choose the most aristocratic traveller to steer a ship in a storm.' "If it happens to be Talent that attracts you, be so good as to find me a good, solid answer to this question: `who likes to surrender his place to the next man? I'm as good as he is. And who is to decide between us?' "You'll find those answers easily; I'll give you plenty of time— a hundred years, if you like." "No," said Stello, very much upset; "two hundred wouldn't do." "Oh, I forgot," Doctor Noir continued; "then you'll have just one other trifle left to attend to; that is, to extirpate from the heart of every man born of woman this instinctive conviction: `The master is our enemy.' "I myself, for instance, can't spontaneously put up with any kind of authority." "Devil," said Stello, carried away by the truth, "neither can I! Not even with the innocent authority of a gamekeeper...." "And why should we be unhappy if every social order is bad and must always remain so? It is clear that God didn't want it to be otherwise. All He would have had to do was indicate, in a few words, what a perfect form of government would be, during the time that He deigned to spend among us. You will have to admit that the human race missed a really good opportunity that time !" "What dismal laughter!" said Stello. 173

"And we'll never have another chance," the Doctor continued. "We may as well resign ourselves, despite the fine declarations that all the lawmakers repeat in chorus; as soon as they've made up a Constitution and written it out in ink, they shout: `This one will last forever !' "Now, since you aren't one of those innumerable people for whom politics is nothing but a cipher, one can talk to you; speak up," the Doctor added, lying back in his armchair in his usual fashion; "with what paradox are you infatuated now, if you please?" Stello did not answer. "In your position, I should choose to love some creature of the Lord's rather than an argument, no matter how attractive." Stello dropped his eyes. "To which necessary Social Lie do you want to devote yourself? Since we have admitted that there has to be one if there is to be a society.—Which one? Let's see ! Will it at least be absurd? Which one is it?'' "I really don't know," replied the victim of logic. "When may I ask you," continued the imperturbable inquisitor, "the question I feel rising to my lips every time I meet someone caparisoned with Power: `How is your Social Lie doing this morning? Is it holding up? ' " "But can't one support a Power without sharing in it; and must one not make a choice in the midst of a civil war?" "Well ! Who has said anything to the contrary?" the Doctor interrupted him with displeasure. "Is that the point now? I was speaking of your thoughts and your work; it is only by virtue of them that you exist for me. Of what concern to me are your actions? "What does it matter if in times of upheaval you are burned in your house, or buried at a crossroads, or `thrice killed, thrice buried, and thrice revived,' as the Norman Captain Francois Sevile wrote in the time of Charles IX? "Play the game as you please. If you like, put Heredity in the coach and Capacity on the seat, to see if they will get along ..." "Maybe," said Stello. "Until the coachman tried to overturn the coach or to get inside, it wouldn't do too badly," continued the Doctor. 174

"Oh! No doubt, it's just as well to take sides in time of struggle, rather than to let oneself be tossed around like a number in the bag of a big lotto game. But your intelligence can count for very little in the choice. As you have seen, you can arrive only at a negative result by the very reasoning involved in the selection of a Power to impose on yourself—that is, if you are entirely honest. But in the circumstances of which you speak, follow your heart or your instincts. Be (excuse the expression) as stupid as a flag-staff." "Blasphemer !" cried Stello. "Why so?" said the Doctor; "the only real blasphemer is Time; it has worn all your flags down to the bare wood. "When the white flag of the Vendee advanced in the wind against the tricolour of the Convention, both were the loyal expression of an idea; one meant quite clearly Monarchy, Heredity, Catholicism; the other, Republicanism, Equality, Human Reason; their silken folds flapped in the air over the swords, as the enthusiastic singing of male voices rose above the cannon-fire, issuing from hearts full of conviction. `Henri Quatre' collided with the `Marseillaise' in mid air like the scythes and the bayonets below. Those were real flags ! "0 time of pale revulsions, not one of those is left ! Formerly the white meant Charter, now the tricolour means Charter. The white had begun to show a little pink and blue, the tricolour has now whitened distinctly. Their exact shade is indefinable. Three little clauses constitute the whole difference between them; so let us remove the flag, and carry those clauses at the end of a pole. "In our own century, I tell you, the uniform will one day be as ridiculous as war itself is now outmoded. The soldier will be exposed as the doctor was exposed by Moliere, and perhaps it will be just as well. Everyone will be classed in the category of the black suits, all like mine. Not even the revolutionaries will have a flag. Ask the city of Lyon, in this eighteen hundred and thirtysecond year of our Lord ! "In the meanwhile, do as you please; I care very little about your actions. Follow your tastes, your habits, act according to your social situation, your background ... What can I say?—Make your decision to match a ribbon that a woman gives you, and support the little Social Lie that will gratify her. Then recite to her those verses of a great poet: 175

When an empire falls 'twixt factions two Each cleaves at random to false or true; Yet none may change the choice they rue. "At random! He was of my opinion; he doesn't speak of `the wiser choice.' In your view, who was right, the Guelf or the Ghibeline party? Wasn't it The Divine Comedy? "So occupy your emotions, your arms, your body with this game of accidents. Neither I, nor philosophy, nor good sense can have anything to do with it. It's a matter of pure sentiment, interests, events, and contingencies. "I hope for your sake, as I wish you well, that you are not born into that caste of Pariahs, formerly Brahmins, who were called the Nobility, and who have been blasted with other names; a class always devoted to France, a class that has given France its greatest glories, buying the right to defend her with its purest blood, and divesting itself piecemeal of its possessions from one generation to the next; that great family of dupes, deceived and undermined by its greatest kings, the issue of its own blood; cut to pieces by some of them while serving them indefatigably, while counselling them openly and frankly; hunted, exiled, more than decimated, and always devoted, now to the Prince who ruins them or repudiates them, or deserts them, now to the People which misjudges them and massacres them; between this hammer and that anvil, ever pure and always beaten, like iron reddened in the fire; between this axe and that log, always bleeding, but smiling, like true martyrs; a race now stricken from the book of life and regarded only askance, like the Jews. May you be spared the fate of being one of them. "But what do I say? Whoever you may be, there is no need for you to enrol yourself in a party. Parties see to it that a man is enrolled despite himself, according to his birth, his position, his antecedents, so positively that there is nothing he can do about it, though he may shout from the housetops and sign with his blood a declaration that he does not believe everything his companions believe, everything that is assumed of him and assigned to him. —Therefore, in case of civil commotions, I except absolutely the parties of our consultation, and abandon you to the whim of the wind as far as your choice is concerned." 176

Stello rose to his feet, as someone does who wishes to display himself from head to foot, with secret self-satisfaction; he even cast a glance in the mirror, where his reflection could be seen. "But do you know me thoroughly?" he said with confidence: "Do you know (and who could know except myself?) in what thoughts my nights are spent? "Why, if it is to be treated in that way, why not discard Poetry altogether and throw it on the ground like a worn-out cloak? "Who tells you that I have not studied every part of man's moral organization as you have studied the physical—pulsation by pulsation, vein by vein, nerve by nerve? that I have not weighed in the iron scales of Machiavelli all the passions of natural man and the self-interest of civilized man, their senseless vanity, their egotistic pleasures, their hollow hopes, their studied hypocrisy, their disguised ill-will, their shameful jealousies, their open greed, their pantomime of love, their hate in friendship? "0 human desires, 0 human fears ! Eternal waves tossing on the surface of the unchanging Ocean ! Rarely are you constrained by the courageous currents that sweep through you, by the violent winds that drive you on, by the deep-rooted rocks on which you break!" "And," said the Doctor with a smile, "you would like to think that you are the current, the wind, or the rock?" "And you think ...?" "That you should commit nothing but your works to that Sea. "It takes more genius to concentrate all one knows of life in a work of art than to sow one's seed in the ever-laboured earth of political events. It is harder to organize a small book than a great government. Power has long lost both its force and its grace. Its days of grandeur and its feasts are over. We are looking for better things. To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and these circumstances and these idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame. But to whom does the Poet owe his, other than to himself? The height, the depth, and the breadth of his work and of his future renown correspond exactly to the three dimensions of his brain. He exists by his own achievement; he is what he is, and his work is himself. "The first among mankind will always be those who make 177 O

something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds. "Ah ! If the day ever comes when you no longer feel the stirring of the greatest and the rarest of the faculties—Imagination; when sorrow or exhaustion dry it up in your head like the kernel in a nut; when nothing remains in you but Judgement and Memory; when you feel the courage to contradict your public words by your public deeds a hundred times a year, or your deeds by your words, or each of your deeds by every other, or your words by your words, like all the other men of politics; then do as many others have done who deserve our deepest pity: desert the heaven of Homer; you who come from above will still have more than enough strength left for po itics and action. But until that time, allow the Imagination which may inhabit you its free and independent flight.—Immortal works are created to steal a march on Death, to enable our thoughts to survive our bodies. Write them if you can, and rest assured that if any idea or even a single word useful for the progress of civilization is to be found among them, even something dropped like a feather from your wing, there will be more than enough men to pick it up, exploit it, and put it into action. The application of thoughts to things is a waste of time for those who beget ideas." Stello was still standing, deliberating, as he looked at Doctor Noir; but at last he smiled, and offered his hand to his stern friend: "I give in," he said, "let me have your prescription." The Doctor took a piece of paper. "A common-sense prescription," he said while scribbling, "is rarely followed." "I shall follow yours as an immutable law," said Stello, not without stifling a sigh; and he sat down, letting his head drop upon his chest, with a feeling ofsheer despair and the conviction that new abysses were opening beneath his feet; but as he listened to the prescription, he felt a dense fog clear away before his eyes, and his infallible star seemed once more to be pointing out the only road for him to follow. This was what Doctor Noir was writing, while justifying each point in his prescription—an uncommon but praiseworthy procedure.

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Chapter Forty DOCTOR NOIR'S PRESCRIPTION SEPARATE THE POETIC LIFE FROM THE POLITICAL LIFE

AND in order to achieve this separation: I. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; that is, the right to be scorned in the streets and betrayed in the palace, every hour of the day; secretly opposed, gradually undermined, rapidly defeated and violently overthrown. To attack him or to flatter him with the triple power of the arts would be to degrade one's work and to stamp it with all that is frail and fleeting in the issues of the day. This task should be left to the morning's critics whose work is dead by night, or to the evening's critics whose work is dead by dawn.—Surrender the public square to the Caesars, let them play their röle, and pass by, as long as they do not trouble either the labour of your nights or the quiet of your days.—Pity them from the bottom of your heart, if they have been forced to assume the Caesarean crown, that has lost its leaves, and lacerates the brow. Pity them still, though they may have sought it themselves; their awakening will be all the more cruel after their sweet dream. Pity them if they have been perverted by Power; for there is nothing that this ancient, perhaps necessary Falsehood, this source of so many evils, cannot pollute.—See their flame go out, and remain on watch; be happy if your vigil can help humanity unite about some purer light. II. Alone and Free, Accomplish your Mission. Follow the conditions of your being, free from the influence of all Associations, no matter how attractive. For Solitude is the only source of inspiration. Solitude is holy. All Associations suffer from the vices of the convent. They tend to regiment and to direct intelligence, and bit by bit they lay the foundations of a tyrannical authority that deprives the mind of liberty and individuality (without which it is nothing), and seeks to stifle genius itself under the weight of collective jealousy. In the Assemblies, the Corporations, the Companies, the Schools. 179

the Academies, and all that resembles them, the intriguing mediocrities gradually occupy the dominant positions by their crude busyness, and by that kind of chicanery to which great and generous spirits cannot stoop. The Imagination lives only by virtue of spontaneous emotions peculiar to the temperament and the idiosyncrasies of an individual. The Republic of letters is the only one whose citizens are truly free, for it is composed of isolated thinkers, often unknown even to each other. The Poets and the Artists are alone among men in the pleasure of being able to accomplish their mission in solitude. Let them enjoy the happiness of not being confounded with the crowds that gather around the least celebrity, appropriate him, enclose him, embrace him, encyst him, and finally address him as "We." Yes, the imagination of the Poet is as inconstant as that of a fifteen-year-old experiencing the first impressions of love. The Poet's imagination cannot be directed, because it has not been taught to him. Remove its wings and it will die. The mission of the Poet or the Artist is to produce his works, and all he produces is useful if it be found beautiful. A Poet gives his own measure in his work; the man who is attached to Power can give his measure only in the functions he performs. Fortunate is the former, unhappy the latter; tor it progress occur in their minds, the Poet can leap forward in his work; the other must wait for the slow series of opportunities that life may provide in the gradual evolution of his career. Alone and Free, Accomplish Your Mission. III. Avoid the unhealthy, changeful dream that distracts the spirit, and employ all the power of your will to turn aside your eyes from the facile opportunities of active life: for a man who is discouraged will often, through laziness of spirit, fall into the temptation of action and involvement in the common interest, when he sees how far beneath him it is and how easy it is to take a superior role in such activity. By so doing he abandons his own path, and if he leave it often, he will lose it forever. The solitary thinker observes an armed neutrality that mobilizes at need. It is he who puts his finger on the scale and decides the balance, now urging on, now restraining the spirit of nations; he inspires i8o

public actions or protests against them, in accordance with what his foresight reveals to him. What matter if his own head be endangered in the sudden advance or retreat? He says the word that must be said, and all grows clear. He says the word from afar, and while it reverberates he returns to his silent labours without another thought for what he has done. W. Keep ever present before your mind these portraits, representing a thousand others: the portraits of Gilbert, Chatterton, and Andre Chenier. For with these three young shades always before you, you will constantly have one standing in your way on each of the political roads where you may go astray. One of the three holy phantoms will show you his key, the second his vial of poison, and the third the guillotine. They will exhort you: `The Poet bears a curse upon his life and a blessing on his name. The Poet, apostle of the ever-youthful truth, is a source of perpertual umbrage to the man of Power, apostle of an obsolete fiction; for the one is inspired, the other has at best some power of concentration or some ingenuity of mind. The Poet leaves behind him a book in which the judgement of both public actors and their actions will be read; and at the very moment when these actors disappear forever in death, the author begins his lasting life. Follow your vocation. Your kingdom is not of this world on which you open your eyes, but of that which remains after your eyes are closed. `HOPE IS THE GREATEST MADNESS.

`What can we expect of a world that we enter with the assurance of seeing our fathers and mothers die? `A world where, if two beings love each other and give their lives to each other, both can be sure that one will watch the other perish?' Then these mournful phantoms will stop talking, and will unite their voices in chorus as in a sacred hymn; for Reason speaks, but Love sings. And you will hear this song: The Swallows Consider the swallows, birds of passage like ourselves. They say to mankind: `Shelter us, but never touch us.' I8I

And men hold them, as men hold us, in superstitious veneration. The Swallows make their home where they will, in the marble palace or in the thatch of a hut; but neither the man of the palace nor the man of the hut would dare to touch their nest, lest he lose forever the bird that brings good luck to his dwelling, as we bring good luck to the lands of those who reverence us. The Swallows touch the ground for only an instant; they swim in the heavens throughout their lives, as the dolphins swim in the sea. And if they observe the earth at all, it is from far up in the sky that they look upon it, and trees and mountains, cities and edifices seem no higher to their eyes than plains and brooks; as, to the eye of the Poet, all that is earthly merges in a single globe caught in one ray of Heaven's light. Listen to them; and, if you are inspired, create a book. But do not hope that a great work will be pondered over, or that any book will be read as it was conceived. If your book was written in solitude, in study and in meditation, it should be read in that way too; but it is far more likely to be read during a stroll, at the caf6, in a caleche, among conversations, arguments, glasses, games, and bursts of laughter, if at all. And if it be original, may God preserve it from the bloodless imitators, that pale troop of clumsy, destructive apes who defile whatever they touch. And after all that, you will have brought into the world some volume that, like every other work of man, comes to nothing more than a question and a sigh, and can infallibly be summed up in the two words that will always express our destiny of doubt and pain: WHY? and, ALAS!

Chapter Forty-one OUTCOME OF THE CONSULTATION STELL 0 thought for a moment that he heard the voice of Wisdom itself.—What madness he had been through !—But now it I8z

seemed to him that the nightmare had fled; he ran involuntarily to the window to see whether his star was still looking down on him, the star he trusted. He cried out. Day had broken. The pale, damp dawn had driven all the beautiful stars from the sky; there was only one left, and it was fading on the horizon. With the waning of their sacred light, Stello felt his own thoughts ebbing. The odious noises of day were already making themselves heard. He followed with his eyes the last of the lovely eyes of night, and, when it was completely shut, Stello turned pale and fell. Doctor Noir left him plunged in a heavy, painful sleep.

Chapter Forty-two THE END SUCH was the first consultation with Doctor Noir. Will Stello follow the prescription? I cannot say. Who is this Stello? Who is this Doctor Noir? I myself hardly know. Doesn't Stello seem something like feeling? And Doctor Noir like reason? What I do believe is that if my heart and my head had been disputing the same question, they would not have spoken differently. Paris, January 1832.

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NOTES

page 4 ... and in walked Doctor Noir In French, le Docteur-Noir' (literally, 'Doctor-Black'), a single phrase implying something supra-personal rather than the name of an individual. This doctor is more than a doctor; he is ironical, sinister, Mephistophelian. Throughout this translation, I have attempted to preserve the spirit rather than the letter of the original; in this case, however, where the name of a major character was involved, I thought it best to retain the French word rather than to use some approximate equivalent.

page 7 Couldn't it help .. . This sentence, missing from the standard French edition, is restored from the manuscript.

page 8 `Temple de Guide' The Temple de Guide (1725) is an allegorical prose poem by Montesquieu (16891755), in the famous jurist's lighter vein.

page 13 Mademoiselle de Coulanges There is no historical evidence that a Mademoiselle de Coulanges was or ever could have been a mistress of Louis XV. The only lady of this time who was known to have been terrified of mad fleas was the elderly Madame d'Esclignac.

page 15 M. l'Abbe de Voisenon The Abbe de Voiscnon (1708-75) was the author of surreptitiously published licentious works.

page 1 5 `Mariages samnites' This story by Marmontel (1723-99) was set to music by Gretry, and performed at the Opera in 5767. 184

page r6 M. Dorat de Cubieres Perhaps the poetaster Michel de Cubieres (1752-182o), disciple of Claude-Joseph Dorat, and, like him, an author of licentious verse.

page 22 Oh, d'Alembert, you dear old pedant Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-83). Famous mathematician and philosopher; one of the leaders of the Encyclopedist group. In addition to his hostility on principle to all philosophes, Gilbert may have borne d'Alembert a special grudge for the cool reception which the scientist gave him on his first arrival in Paris.

page 22 like Pascal These lines are quoted from the famous memorandum which was found sewn into the lining of Pascal's doublet after his death. The note commemorates a specific mystic experience of Pascal's with the "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the savants." page 22

La Harpe and `Les Barmccides' Les Barmecides (1778) is a play about a famous Persian family by Jean-Francois de La Harpe (1739-1803). La Harpe was one of the philosophes whom Gilbert detested; later, he turned Catholic and monarchist. Teacher and historian of literature, unsuccessful dramatist, La Harpe was unmercifully derided by Gilbert. La Harpe took his revenge in various posthumous comments on Gilbert which may be found in his Lycfe and Correspondance Littfraire.

page 28 `Three rascals whole, .. .' Moliere, Fernmes savantes, IV, iii. Clitandre, disputing with Trissotin, `bel esprit', says of the Court that "au fond, elle n'est pas si bete Que vous autres, messieurs" ("At bottom, it isn't as stupid as you are, gentlemen"), and goes on to deliver the set speech against authors translated above. The object of Moliere's satire in this case is not poetry but science; still, the quotation is apt.

page 30 ... devoted to their consecration Possibly a reference to the memoirs of Byron, sold by Thomas Moore to John Murray and burned at the instigation of Lady Byron, John Cam Hobhouse, and others.

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page 32 `At life's glad feast .. .' From Gilbert's "Ode invite de plusicurs psaumes," actually written on his deathbed. page 40 `å la Tronchin.' Theodore Tronchin (1709-81), famous Swiss physician. 'Tronchiner' meant to take a morning constitutional. page 42 Pantheon ... twice decanonized The Paris Pantheon, originally the Church of St. Genevieve, became a symbolic bone of contention between orthodox and revolutionary factions, being repeatedly converted from a church to a mausoleum for the modem heroes of France, and as often restored to its original function. page 42 Gentle Attila Perhaps Vigny was thinking of Alaric, who spared the churches during the sack of Rome in A.D. 410. page 52 `Tune cantilena Rolandi .. .' "Then the Song of Roland was begun, so that the warlike example of the hero might inspire the soldiers." page 52

` Taillefer, qui moult bien chantout, . "Taillefer, the excellent singer, rode before the Duke upon a fleet horse, singing of Charlemagne and Roland, of Oliver, and of the vassals who died at Roncevaux." page 53 by another Greek Constantin Koliades, pseudonym of Jean Baptiste Lechevalier, whose UlysseHomere, ou Du veritable auteur de 1'Iliade et de l'Odyssee appeared in 5829. page 59 Fantasy! God's verities. Corneille, Polyeucte, N, iii. Polyeucte is attempting to persuade Pauline to follow his example and embrace Christianity, so that she too may gain Heaven. Pauline replies, "Imaginations !" Polyeucte counters, "Celestes Writes !"

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page 69 the murderer Falkland Falkland is the villain-hero in William Godwin's psychological novel Caleb Williams (r794). Godwin (1756-1836) is better known as the author of Political Justice (1793).

page 82 fifth of Thermidor Eleventh month of the Republican calendar, running from mid July to midAugust.

page 83 The unreasonable length of his lanky limbs .. . The average stature of Frenchmen about 1830 is given in anthropological surveys as 5 ft. 6 in., a surprisingly high figure. Vigny himself is described at the same date as a frail and slight young man of middle height.

page 85 Sans-Culotte Literally, `without trousers'; title proudly borne by the Revolutionaries.

page 85 'Ca ira!' "We'll get there!" Beginning of a popular Revolutionary song, usually rendered to the refrain "Les aristocrates a la lanterne !/ Les aristocrates on les pendra!" (Up the lamp-post with the aristocrats! We'll hang the aristocrats!)

page 87 the author of `Charles IX' Charles IX was a tragedy with strong revolutionary implications, written by Marie Joseph Chenier (1764-1811), brother of Andre Chenier. It was subtitled ''L'Ecole des Rois" ("School for Kings"). First performed in 1789, it was temporarily suppressed, and resumed performance in 1790.

page 88 some Organic Period The "Cours d'histoire de M. Lacretelle" in the 5835 Globe distinguishes between the 'époques critiques' and 'époques organiques' of history, the first dominated by scepticism, the second by faith. This conception of history is shared, in part, by Benjamin Constant.

page 91 badger standing upright `Blaireau' means `badger'.

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page 92 the `Sainte-Barbe' Patron saint of cannoneers. Also, powder magazine (nautical). page 93 the `Cartnagnole' Another popular Revolutionary song, attacking Marie-Antoinette (`Madame Veto') with particular virulence. page ioi å la Riccoboni Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-92), author of sentimental romances. page 104 `Souffre, ö cceur ...' "Suffer, heart great with hate, heart starved for justice. Thou, Virtue, weep if I die." (Andre Chenier, "Iambes.") page 104 vu stir d'autres yeux, ...' "I have seen her soft eyes grow sad and weep for the eyes of another, whom Love rejoiced; I have seen another grow drunk with the sweetest honey of her breath." (Andre Chenier, "Odes.") page 106 M. de Pange Probably Marie-Francois-Denis Thomas de Pange (1764-96), friend of both Cheniers, political author and publicist. Several of Andre Chenier's poems are addressed to him page no `My greeting to the sun .. .' These lines are from Andre Chenier's "Ode: La Jeune Captive" (Saint-Lazare, 1794). page 112 at the Conciergerie Jail to which the prisoners were transferred before their execution. Robespierre himself was eventually imprisoned there. page 114 the sovereign mob This paragraph is largely composed of phrases from Andre Chenier's "Iambes." 188

page 11s `Our life is a winter's journey.' Swiss Guards' song. page 126 the Feast of the Supreme Being and Catherine Theos Catherine Theos (really,'Theot,' 1725-94) was a demented visionary; she declared Robespierre to be the Messiah whose coming she had predicted. During the Revolution there was an attempt to substitute a universal religious cult for Catholicism while reaffirming a positive faith in the divinity. The festival of Reason was held at the end of 1793; in June 1794, the Feast of the Supreme Being was celebrated throughout the Republic, with much pomp and ceremony. page 131 Joseph de Maistre Joseph de Maistre, 1753-1821. Diplomat and philosophical exponent of the annen regime. His early ultra-conservative writings date from the 1790's, but his bestknown work, the Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, appeared in 1821. page 135 it is only in Analysis .. . Almost all editions of Stello have a serious misprint at this point: "it is not in analysis"; the correction has been made from the manuscript. page 135 the author of 'Cåtus Gracchus' and Timoleon' Both plays were by Marie-Joseph Chenier. Caius Gracchus was acted in 1792. The line "Des lois et non du sang" ("Give us laws, not blood") provoked a reaction from the extremists in the theatre. Timoleon (1794) was banned by the Comite de Salut Public, and all the manuscripts but one were seized and burned. A single copy was saved by Madame Vestris. page 136 for no good reason, like myself? In the sentence spoken by Doctor Noir the unnaturally familiar form `tu' (`thou') had been dropped, and replaced by the polite 'vows'. The official, 'fraternal' revolutionary form was `tu'. (`Comrade' might be considered a modern analogue.) page 139 they are the sort who discourage the People. Robespierre's whole statement of policy on authors and the press is quoted from Papiers inedits trouves chez Robespierre, Saint Just, Payan, etc. (Paris, 1828), vol. II. 189

page 140 the eulogy of Gresset Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (1709-77), teacher, author, and Academician, wrote the mildly amusing verse talc Vert-Vert (1734), concerning the adventures of a parrot.

page 152 `Comme un dernier rayon, . From Andre Chenier's "Iambes." "As a last ray, as a last breeze revives the close of a fine day, at the foot of the scaffold I try my lyre again. Perhaps it will soon be my turn." Chenier's style, at once conventional and original, is peculiarly difficult to translate. The following version does not pretend to capture the exact tone of the French, but may serve better than the prose translation:

As the last low rays, as the last faint breeze Revive soft days at dark, Before my turn at the knife's cold knees I'll prove once more my harp. page 153 ... what he `had there' H. de Latouche, in his introduction to Andre Chenier's CEuvres completes (Paris, 1819), quotes Chenicr on the scaffold as saying, while striking his forehead, "Still, I had something there!"

page 167 Virginie's departure A reference to the novel Paul et Virginie (1787), by Bemardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814). Virginie is recalled to France from Mauritius (Ile de France) and is obliged to abandon her lover, Paul.

page 168 ... about to take up his pistols Werther is the hero of Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He commits suicide because of his unhappy love for Lotte.

page 168 ... behind the prostitutes' cart Des Grieux is the hero of the novel Manon Lescaut by L'Abbe Prevost. When Manon is deported to Louisiana together with a group of common prostitutes, Des Grieux follows at the heel of the cart which takes them to Le Havre.

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page 169 the museum of Charles X Charles X carried out extensive alterations and improvements in the Louvre, and the museum came to be known during his reign as the Museum of Charles X. Later, his name remained associated with the first floor of the south wing, where Ingres had painted the ceiling 'Home re deifie'.

page 17o `Non avendo candella .. .' "Without a candle by which to write his verses."

page 174 ... it wouldn't do too badly The French edition contained a serious misprint here: "Ce qui ne serait pas mal" (which wouldn't be so bad). The correction has been made from the manuscript.

page 1 75 ... now the tricolour means 'Charter' The two charters were Louis XVIII's divine-right charter of 1814 and LouisPhilippe's somewhat liberalized version of the same document (183o).

page 1 75 Ask the city of Lyon .. . Probably a reference to the black flag of the Lyon silk-workers who revolted in November, 1831, under the slogan "Live working or die fighting." The revolt was suppressed, but broke out again in 1834, and spread to a number of other French cities.

page 183 in a heavy, painful sleep This terminates the first consultation with Doctor Noir. The ending is left somewhat inconclusive because a sequel is meant to follow, in which Stello's `sentimental education' is continued. Daphne, the second consultation, teaches Stello that the attempt to impose pure idealism in the domain of popular religion leads to even more disastrous consequences than does the impulse to mingle poetry with politics.

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