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+Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Aspirations of Jean Servien
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11060]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert J. Hall
+
+
+
+
+THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN
+
+
+BY ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+A TRANSLATION BY ALFRED ALLINSON
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the _Rue Notre-Dame
+des Champs_. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the
+Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother
+nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet,
+with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing
+the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression
+for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her
+foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste.
+
+Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held
+clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a
+severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no
+very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed,
+which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened
+that confined her to her bed.
+
+There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little
+one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish
+whisper bits of her favourite ditty:
+
+  The fisherman, when dawn is nigh,
+  Peers forth to greet the kindling sky....
+
+Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of
+each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little
+Jean's lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn
+and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar
+in her fond hopes.
+
+A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of
+fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp
+and the vague tales of _concierges_, footmen, and cooks, she
+pictured her boy at twenty more beautiful than an archangel,
+his breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing-room full
+of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable ladies with manners every
+whit as genteel as had the actresses at the _Gymnase_:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest._
+
+Presently the vision changed; now her boy was standing up gowned
+in Court, by his eloquence saving the life and honour of some
+illustrious client:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest._
+
+Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a brilliant
+uniform, on a prancing charger, victorious in battle, like the
+great Generals whose portraits she had seen one Sunday at Versailles:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee general, take thy rest._
+
+But when night was creeping into the room, a new picture would
+dazzle her eyes, a picture this of other and incomparably greater
+glories.
+
+Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at heart, she was gazing
+from the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad
+in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted
+choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she
+would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this
+poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping
+in the poisoned air of a back-shop:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  My sweet boy-bishop, take thy rest._
+
+One evening, as her husband handed her a cooling drink, she said
+to him in a tone of regret:
+
+"Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy Virgin among flowers
+and precious stones and lights. It was so beautiful! so beautiful!"
+
+She said she was no longer in pain, that she wished her Jean to
+learn Latin. And she passed away.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The widower, who from the Beauce country, sent his son to his
+native village in the Eure-et-Loir to be brought up by kinsfolk
+there. As for himself, he was a strong man, and soon learned
+to be resigned; he was of a saving habit by instinct in both
+business and family matters, and never put off the green serge
+apron from week's end to week's end save for a Sunday visit to
+the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on the arm of the black
+cross, and, if it was a hot day, take a chair on the way back
+along the boulevard outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he
+sat slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the mothers
+and their youngsters going by on the sidewalk.
+
+These young wives, as he watched them approach and pass on, were
+so many passing reminders of his Clotilde and made him feel sad
+without his quite understanding why, for he was not much given
+to thinking.
+
+Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife grew to be a
+tender, vague memory in the bookbinder's mind. One night he tried
+in vain to recall Clotilde's features; after this experience,
+he told himself that perhaps he might be able to discover the
+mother's lineaments in the child's face, and he was seized with
+a great longing to see this relic of the lost one once more,
+to have the child home again.
+
+In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, Mademoiselle
+Servien, begging her to come and take up her abode with the little
+one in the _Rue Notre-Dame des Champs_. The sister, who had lived
+for many years in Paris at her brother's expense, for indolence
+was her ruling passion, agreed to resume her life in a city where,
+she used to say, folks are free and need not depend on their
+neighbours.
+
+One autumn evening she arrived at the _Gare de l'Ouest_ with Jean
+and her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed
+figure, all ready to defend the child against all sorts of
+imaginary perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his
+satisfaction in two words.
+
+Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, and bidding him
+hold on tight to his father's hair, carried him off proudly to
+the house.
+
+Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to a settled routine.
+At midday the old dame would don her shawl and set off with the
+child in the direction of Grenelle.
+
+The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that ran between shabby
+walls and red-fronted drinking-shops. Generally speaking, a sky
+of a dappled grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past,
+invested the quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. Establishing
+herself on a bench, while the child played under a tree, she would
+knit her stocking and chat with an old soldier and tell him her
+troubles--what a hard life it was in other people's houses.
+
+One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted
+on the ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in
+the fine wet sand. That faculty of "pretending," by which children
+are able to make their lives one unending miracle, transformed a
+handful of soil and a few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and
+fairy castles to the lad's imagination; he clapped his hands and
+leapt for joy. Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in something
+soft and scented. It was a lady's gown; he saw nothing except
+that she smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked
+on. He ran to tell his aunt:
+
+"How good she smells, that lady!"
+
+Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no
+better than others, and that she thought more of herself with
+her merino skirt than all those set-up minxes in their flounces
+and finery, adding:
+
+"Better a good name than a gilt girdle."
+
+But this talk was beyond little Jean's comprehension. The perfumed
+silk that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a
+memory as of a gentle, ghostly caress.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying the fresh air
+before his door when a big man with a red nose, past middle age and
+wearing a scarlet waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared,
+bowing politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song
+voice in which even Monsieur Servien could detect an Italian
+accent:
+
+"Sir, I have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the immortal
+masterpiece of Torquato Tasso"--and a bulging packet of manuscript
+under his arm confirmed the statement.
+
+"Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this glorious and
+ungrateful task. Without family or fatherland, I have written my
+translation in dark, ice-cold garrets, on chandlers' wrappers,
+snuff papers, the backs of playing cards! Such has been the exile's
+task! You, sir, you live in your own land, in the bosom of a
+happy family--at least I hope so."
+
+This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence and its
+strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of the dead woman he
+had loved, and he saw her in his mind's eye coiling her beautiful
+hair as in the early days of their married life.
+
+The big man proceeded:
+
+"Man is like a plant which perishes when the storms uproot it.
+
+"Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you"--and laying
+his hand on Jean's head, who clung to his father's coat-tails
+in wonder at the red waistcoat and the sing-song voice, he asked
+if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to
+be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.
+
+"That noble language," he added, "whose inimitable monuments have
+often made me forget my misfortunes.
+
+"Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped
+on a satire of Juvenal."
+
+As he said the words, a look of sadness over-spread his shining
+red face, and dropping his voice:
+
+"Forgive me, sir, if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius.
+I am the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice. When I have received from
+the bookseller the price of my labour, I will not forget that
+you succoured me with a small coin in the time of my sharpest
+trial."
+
+The bookbinder, case-hardened as he was against beggars, who
+on winter evenings drifted into his shop with the east wind,
+nevertheless experienced a certain sympathy and respect for the
+Marquis Tudesco. He slipped a franc-piece into his hand.
+
+Thereupon the old Italian, like a man inspired, exclaimed:
+
+"One Nation there is that is unhappy--Italy, one generous
+People--France; and one bond that unites the twain--humanity.
+Ah! chiefest of the virtues, humanity, humanity!"
+
+Meantime the bookbinder was pondering his wife's last words: "I
+wish my Jean to learn Latin." He hesitated, till seeing Monsieur
+Tudesco bowing and smiling to go:
+
+"Sir," he said, "if you are ready, two or three times a week,
+to give the boy lessons in French and Latin, we might come to
+terms."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco expressed no surprise. He smiled and said:
+
+"Certainly, sir, as you wish it, I shall find it a delightful
+task to initiate your son in the mysteries of the Latin rudiments.
+
+"We will make a man of him and a good citizen, and God knows
+what heights my pupil will scale in this noble land of freedom
+and generosity. He may one day be ambassador, my dear sir. I
+say it: knowledge is power."
+
+"You will know the shop again," said the bookbinder; "there is
+my name on the signboard."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco, after tweaking the son's ear amicably and
+bowing to the father with a dignified familiarity, walked away
+with a step that was still jaunty.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Marquis Tudesco returned in due course, smiled at Mademoiselle
+Servien, who darted poisonous looks at him, greeted the bookbinder
+with a discreet air of patronage, and had a supply of grammars
+and dictionaries bought.
+
+At first he gave his lessons with exemplary regularity. He had
+taken a liking to these repetitions of nouns and verbs, which he
+listened to with a dignified, condescending air, slowly unrolling
+his screw of snuff the while; he only interrupted to interject
+little playful remarks with a geniality just touched with a trace
+of ferocity, that bespoke his real nature as an unctuous, cringing
+bully. He was jocular and pompous at the same time, and always
+made a pretence of being a long time in seeing the glass of wine
+put on the table for his refreshment.
+
+The bookbinder, regarding him as a clever man of ill-regulated
+life, always treated him with great consideration, for faults
+of behaviour almost cease to shock us except among neighbours,
+or at most fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean found a
+fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old
+teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of
+high-priest and buffoon. He was great at telling a story, and
+though his tales were beyond the child's intelligence, they did
+not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness,
+irony, and cynicism. Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed her
+attitude of uncompromising dislike and disdain. She said nothing
+against him, but her face was a rigid mask of disapproval, her
+eyes two flames of fire, in answer to the courteous greeting
+the tutor never failed to offer her with a special roll of his
+little grey eyes.
+
+One day the Marquis Tudesco walked into the shop with a staggering
+gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation
+of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink
+cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried,
+gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to
+a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus.
+
+Lessons that day were fitful and haphazard. Jean was repeating
+in a drawling voice: _moneo, mones, monet ... monebam, monebas,
+monebat..._ Suddenly Monsieur Tudesco sprang forward, dragging
+his chair along the floor with a horrid screech, and clapping
+his hand on his pupil's shoulder:
+
+"Child," he said, "to-day I am going to give you a more profitable
+lesson than all the pitiful teaching I have confined myself to
+up to now.
+
+"It is a lesson of transcendental philosophy. Hearken carefully,
+child. If one day you rise above your station and come to know
+yourself and the world about you, you will discover this, that
+men act only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows--and
+_per Bacco!_ they are consummate fools for their pains. They
+dread other folks' blame and crave their approval.
+
+"The idiots fail to see that the world does not care a straw
+for them, and that their dearest friends will see them glorified
+or disgraced without missing one mouthful of their dinner. This
+is my lesson, _caro figliuolo_, that the world's opinion is not
+worth the sacrifice of a single one of our desires. If you get
+this into your pate, you will be a strong man and can boast you
+were once the pupil of the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice, the exile
+who has translated in a freezing garret, on scraps of refuse
+paper, the immortal poem of Torquato Tasso. What a task!"
+
+The child listened to the tipsy philosopher without understanding
+one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as
+a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet
+than anybody he had ever seen before.
+
+The professor warmed to his subject:
+
+"Ah!" he cried, springing from his seat, "and what profit did
+the immortal and ill-starred Torquato Tasso win from all his
+genius? A few stolen kisses on the steps of a palace. And he
+died of famine in a madhouse. I say it: the world's opinion,
+that empress of humankind, I will tear from her her crown and
+sceptre. Opinion tyrannizes over unhappy Italy, as over all the
+earth. Italy! what flaming sword will one day come to break her
+fetters, as now I break this chair?"
+
+In fact, he had seized his chair by the back and was pounding
+it fiercely on the floor.
+
+But suddenly he stopped, gave a knowing smile, and said in a low
+voice:
+
+"No, no, Marquis Tudesco, let be, let Venice be a prey to Teuton
+savagery. The fetters of the fatherland are daily bread to the
+exiled patriot."
+
+His chin buried in his cravat, he stood chuckling to himself,
+and his red waistcoat rose and fell in jerks.
+
+Mademoiselle Servien, who sat by at the lesson knitting a stocking
+and for some moments had been watching the tutor, her spectacles
+pushed half-way up her forehead, with a look of amazement and
+suspicion, exclaimed, as if talking to herself:
+
+"If it isn't abominable to come to people's houses in drink!"
+
+Monsieur Tudesco did not seem to hear her. His manner was quiet
+and jocular again.
+
+"Child," he ordered, "write down the theme for an essay. Write
+down: 'The worst thing... yes, the worst thing of all,' write
+it down... 'is an old woman with a spiteful temper.'"
+
+And rising with the gracious dignity of a Prince of the Church,
+he bowed low to the aunt, gave the nephew's cheek a friendly
+tap, and marched out of the room.
+
+However, beginning with the very next lesson, he lavished every
+mark of respect on the old lady, and treated her to all his choicest
+airs and graces, rounding his elbows, pursing his lips, strutting
+and swaggering. She would not relax a muscle, and sat there as
+silent and sulky as an owl.
+
+But one day when she was hunting for her spectacles, as she was
+always doing, Monsieur Tudesco offered her his and persuaded her
+to try them; she found they suited her sight and felt a trifle
+less unamiable towards him. The Italian, pursuing his advantage,
+got into talk with her, and artfully turned the conversation upon
+the vices of the rich. The old lady approved his sentiments, and
+an exchange of petty confidences ensued. Tudesco knew a sovereign
+remedy for catarrh, and this too was well received. He redoubled
+his attentions, and the _concierge_, who saw him smiling to himself
+on the doorstep, told Aunt Servien: "The man's in love with you."
+Of course she declared: "At my time of life a woman doesn't want
+lovers," but her vanity was tickled all the same. Monsieur Tudesco
+got what he wanted--to have his glass filled to the brim every
+lesson. Out of politeness they would even leave him the pint jug
+only half empty, which he was indiscreet enough to drain dry.
+
+One day he asked for a taste of cheese--"just enough to make
+a mouse's dinner," was his expression. "Mice are like me, they
+love the dark and a quiet life and books; and like me they live
+on crumbs."
+
+This pose of the wise man fallen on evil days made a bad impression,
+and the old lady became silent and sombre as before.
+
+When springtime came Monsieur Tudesco vanished.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The bookbinder, for all his scanty earnings, was resolved to
+enter Jean at a school where the boy could enjoy a regular and
+complete course of instruction. He selected a day-school not
+far from the Luxembourg, because he could see the top branches
+of an acacia overtopping the wall, and the house had a cheerful
+look.
+
+Jean, as a little new boy (he was now eleven), was some weeks
+before he shook off the shyness with which his schoolfellows'
+loud voices and rough ways and his masters' ponderous gravity
+had at first overwhelmed him. Little by little he grew used to
+the work, and learned some of the tricks by means of which
+punishments were avoided; his schoolfellows found him so inoffensive
+they left off stealing his cap and initiated him in the game of
+marbles. But he had little love for school-life, and when five
+o'clock came, prayers were over and his satchel strapped, it
+was with unfeigned delight he dashed out into the street basking
+in the golden rays of the setting sun. In the intoxication of
+freedom, he danced and leapt, seeing everything, men and horses,
+carriages and shops, in a charmed light, and out of sheer joy of
+life mumbling at his Aunt Servien's hand and arm, as she walked
+home with him carrying the satchel and lunch-basket.
+
+The evening was a peaceful time. Jean would sit drawing pictures
+or dreaming over his copy-books at one end of the table where
+Mademoiselle Servien had just cleared away the meal. His father
+would be busy with a book. As age advanced he had acquired a
+taste for reading, his favourites being La Fontaine's _Fables_,
+Anquetil's _History of France_, and Voltaire's _Dictionnaire
+Philosophique_, "to get the hang of things," as he put it.
+His sister made fruitless efforts to distract his attention with
+some stinging criticism of the neighbours or a question about
+"our fat friend who had not come back," for she made a point
+of never remembering the Marquis Tudesco's name.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Before long Jean's whole mind was given over to the catechizings
+and sermons and hymns preparatory to the First Communion.
+Intoxication with the music of chants and organ, drowned in the
+scent of incense and flowers, hung about with scapularies, rosaries,
+consecrated medals, and holy images, he, like his companions, assumed
+a certain air of self-importance and wore a smug, sanctified look.
+He was cold and unbending towards his aunt, who spoke with far
+too much unconcern about the "great day." Though she had long
+been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday,
+she was not "pious." Most likely she confounded in one common
+detestation the luxury of the rich and the pomps of the Church
+service. She had more than once been overheard informing one
+of the cronies she used to meet on the boulevards that she was
+a religious woman, _but_ she could not abide priests, that she
+said her prayers at home, and these were every bit as good as
+the fine ladies' who flaunted their crinolines in church. His
+father was more in sympathy with the lad's new-found zeal; he
+was interested and even a little impressed. He undertook to bind
+a missal with his own hands against the ceremony.
+
+When the days arrived for retreats and general confessions, Jean
+swelled with pride and vague aspirations. He looked for something
+out of the ordinary to happen. Coming out at evening from
+Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, he would
+feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; some divine interposition
+_must_ be forthcoming. The lads used to tell each other strange
+stories, pious legends they had read in one of their little books
+of devotion. Now it was a phantom monk who had stepped out of the
+grave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced
+side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church
+pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins. Jean
+had _his_ favourite tale. Shuddering, he would relate how St.
+Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely
+beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest
+in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured
+the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the
+unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman's
+beauty in the dark gulf of death. And as he told the tale, he could
+hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in
+the plane trees of the Luxembourg.
+
+The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony
+with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.
+
+He was most favourably impressed by the _curé's_ homily, in which
+a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger
+that plunges over precipices. The simile struck his fancy, and
+he would quote it years after with approbation. He made up his
+mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, "to get the
+hang of things."
+
+Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just
+the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again
+to recover the first fervent rapture.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+The holidays were near. An noon of a blazing hot day Jean was
+seated in the shade on the dwarf-wall that bounded the school
+count towards the headmaster's garden, He was playing languidly
+at shovel-board with a schoolfellow, a lad as pretty as a girl
+with his curls and his jacket of white duck.
+
+"Ewans," said Jean, as he pushed a pebble along one of the lines
+drawn in charcoal on the stone coping, "Ewans, you must find
+it tiresome to be a boarder?"
+
+"Mother cannot have me with her at home," replied the boy.
+
+Servien asked why.
+
+"Oh! Because----" stammered Ewans.
+
+He stared a long time at the white pebble he held in his hand
+ready to play, before he added:
+
+"My mother goes travelling."
+
+"And your father?"
+
+"He is in America. I have never seen him. You've lost. Let's begin
+again."
+
+Servien, who felt interested in Madame Ewans because of the superb
+boxes of chocolates she used to bring to school for her boy,
+put another question:
+
+"You love her very much, your mother I mean?"
+
+"Of course I do!" cried the other, adding presently:
+
+"You must come and see me one day in the holidays at home. You'll
+find our house is very pretty, there's sofas and cushions no end.
+But you must not put off, for we shall be off to the seaside
+soon."
+
+At this moment a servant, a tall, thin man, appeared in the
+playground and called out something which the shrill cries of
+their companions at play prevented the two seated on the wall
+from hearing. A fat boy, standing by himself with his face to
+the wall with the unconcern born of long familiarity with this
+form of punishment, clapped his two hands to his mouth trumpetwise
+and shrieked:
+
+"Ewans, you're wanted in the parlour."
+
+The usher marched up:
+
+"Garneret," he ordered, "you will stand half an hour this evening
+at preparation speaking when you were forbidden to. Ewans, go
+to the parlour."
+
+The latter clapped his hands and danced for joy, telling his friend:
+
+"It's my mother! I'll tell her you are coming to our house."
+
+Servien reddened with pleasure, and stammered out that he would
+ask his father's leave. But Ewans had already scampered across
+the yard, leaving a dusty furrow behind him.
+
+Leave was readily granted by Monsieur Servien, who was fully
+persuaded that all boys admitted to so expensive a school born of
+well-to-do parents, whose society could not but prove advantageous
+to his son's manners and morals and to his future success in
+life.
+
+Such information as Jean could give him about Madame Ewans was
+extremely vague, but the bookbinder was well used to contemplating
+the ways of rich folks through a veil of impenetrable mystery.
+
+Aunt Servien indulged in sundry observations on the occasion of
+a very general kind touching people who ride in carriages. Then
+she repeated a story about a great lady who, just like Madame
+Ewans, had put her son to boarding-school, and who was mixed up
+in a case of illicit commissions, in the time of Louis-Philippe.
+
+She added, to clinch the matter, that the cowl does not make
+the monk, that she thought herself, for all she did not wear
+flowers in her hat, a more honest woman than your society ladies,
+false jades everyone, concluding with her pet proverb: Better
+a good name than a gilt girdle!
+
+Jean had never seen a gilt girdle, but he thought in a vague way
+he would very much like to have one.
+
+The holidays came, and one Thursday after breakfast his aunt
+produced a white waistcoat from the wardrobe, and Jean, dressed
+in his Sunday best, climbed on an omnibus which took him to the
+Rue de Rivoli. He mounted four flights of a staircase, the carpet
+and polished brass stair-rods of which filled him with surprise
+and admiration.
+
+On reaching the landing, he could hear the tinkling of a piano.
+He rang the bell, blushed hotly and was sorry he had rung. He
+would have given worlds to run away. A maid-servant opened the
+door, and behind her stood Edgar Ewans, wearing a brown holland
+suit, in which he looked entirely at his ease.
+
+"Come along," he cried, and dragged him into a drawing-room, into
+which the half-drawn curtains admitted shafts of sunlight that
+were flashed back in countless broken reflections from mirrors
+and gilt cornices. A sweet, stimulating perfume hung about the
+room, which was crowded with a superabundance of padded chairs
+and couches and piles of cushions.
+
+In the half-light jean beheld a lady so different from all he had
+ever set eyes on till that moment that he could form no notion of
+what she was, no idea of her beauty or her age. Never had he seen
+eyes that flashed so vividly in a face of such pale fairness, or
+lips so red, smiling with such an unvarying almost tired-looking
+smile. She was sitting at a piano, idly strumming on the keys
+without playing any definite tune. What drew Jean's eyes above
+all was her hair, arranged in some fashion that struck him with
+a sense of mystery and beauty.
+
+She looked round, and smoothing the lace of her _peignoir_ with
+one hand:
+
+"You are Edgar's friend?" she asked, in a cordial tone, though
+her voice struck Jean as harsh in this beautiful room that was
+perfumed like a church.
+
+"Yes, Madame."
+
+"You like being at school?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"The masters are not too strict?"
+
+"No, Madame."
+
+"You have no mother?"
+
+As she put the question Madame Evans' voice softened.
+
+"No, Madame."
+
+"What is your father?"
+
+"A bookbinder, Madame"--and the bookbinder's son blushed as he
+gave the answer. At that moment he would gladly have consented
+never to see his father more, his father whom he loved, if by
+the sacrifice he could have passed for the son of a Captain in
+the Navy or a Secretary of Embassy. He suddenly remembered that
+one of his fellow-pupils was the son of a celebrated physician
+whose portrait was displayed in the stationers' windows.
+
+If only he had had a father like that to tell Madame Ewans of!
+But that was out of the question--and how cruelly unjust it was!
+He felt ashamed of himself, as if he had said something shocking.
+
+But his friend's mother seemed quite unaffected by the dreadful
+avowal. She was still moving her hands at random up and down
+the keyboard. Then presently:
+
+"You must enjoy yourself finely to-day, boys," she cried. "We
+will all go out. Shall I take you to the fair at Saint-Cloud?"
+
+Yes, Edgar was all for going, because of the roundabouts.
+
+Madame Ewans rose from the piano, patted her pale flaxen hair
+in place with a pretty gesture, and gave a sidelong look in the
+mirror as she passed.
+
+"I'm going to dress," she told them; "I shall not be long."
+
+While she was dressing, Edgar sat at the piano trying to pick
+out a tune from an opera bouffe, and Jean, perched uncomfortably
+on the edge of his chair, stared about the room at a host of
+strange and sumptuous objects that seemed in some mysterious
+way to be part and parcel of their beautiful owner, and affected
+him almost as strangely as she herself had done.
+
+Preceded by a faint waft of scent and a rustle of silk, she
+reappeared, tying the strings of the hat that made a dainty diadem
+above her smiling eyes.
+
+Edgar looked at her curiously:
+
+"Why, mother, there's something... I don't know what. . . something
+that alters you."
+
+She glanced in the mirror, examining her hair, which showed pale
+violet shadows amid the flaxen plaits.
+
+"Oh! it's nothing," she said; "only I have put some powder in
+my hair. Like the Empress," she added, and broke into another
+smile.
+
+As she was drawing on her gloves, a ring was heard, and the maid
+came in to tell her mistress that Monsieur Delbèque was waiting
+to see her.
+
+Madame Ewans pouted and declared she could not receive him, whereupon
+the maid spoke a few words in a very peremptory whisper. Madame
+Ewans shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Stay where you are!" she told the boys, and passed into the
+dining-room, whence the murmur of two voices could presently be
+heard.
+
+Jean asked Edgar, under his breath, who the gentleman was.
+
+"Monsieur Delbèque," Edgar informed him. "He keeps horses and a
+carriage. He deals in pigs. One evening he took us to the theatre,
+mother and me."
+
+Jean was surprised and rather shocked to find Monsieur Delbèque
+dealt in pigs. But he hid his surprise and asked if he was a
+relation.
+
+"Oh! no," said Edgar, "he's one of our friends. It's a long time...
+at least a year we have known him."
+
+Jean, harking back to his first idea, put the question:
+
+"Have you ever seen him selling his pigs?"
+
+"How stupid you are!" retorted Edgar; "he deals in them wholesale.
+Mother says it's a famous trade. He has a cigar-holder with an
+amber mouthpiece and a woman all naked carved in meerschaum.
+Just think, the other day he came and told mother his wife was
+making him atrocious scenes."
+
+Madame Ewans put in her head at the half-open door:
+
+"Come along," she said, and they set out. No sooner were they
+in the street than a man, who was smoking, greeted Madame with
+a friendly wave of his gloved hand. She muttered between her
+teeth:
+
+"Shall we never be done with them?"
+
+The man began in a guttural voice:
+
+"I was just going to your place, my dear, to offer you a box of
+Turkish cigarettes. But I see you are taking a boarding-school
+out for a walk--a regular boarding-school, 'pon my word! You
+take pupils, eh? I congratulate you. Make men of 'em, my dear,
+make men of 'em."
+
+Madame Ewans frowned and replied with a curl of the lips:
+
+"I am with my son and one of my son's friends."
+
+The gentleman threw a careless look at one of the lads--Jean Servien
+as it happened.
+
+"Capital, capital!" he exclaimed. "Is that one your son?"
+
+"Not he, indeed!" she cried hotly.
+
+Jean felt he was looked down upon, and as she laid her hand on
+her son's shoulder with a proud gesture, he could not help noticing
+his schoolfellow's easy air and elegant costume, at the same time
+casting a glance of disgust at his own jacket, which had been
+cut down for him by his aunt out of an overcoat of his father's.
+
+"Shall we be honoured by your presence to-night at the _Bouffes_?"
+asked the gentleman.
+
+"No!" replied Madame Ewans, and pushed the two children forward
+with the tip of her sunshade.
+
+Stepping out gaily, they soon arrive under the chestnuts of the
+Tuileries, cross the bridge, then down the river-bank, over the
+shaky gangway, and so on to the steamer pontoon.
+
+Now they are aboard the boat, which exhales a strong, healthy
+smell of tar under the hot sun. The long grey walls of the
+embankments slip by, to be succeeded presently by wooded slopes.
+
+Saint-Cloud! The moment the ropes are made fast, Madame Ewans
+springs on to the landing-stage and makes straight for the shrilling
+of the clarinettes and thunder of the big drums, steering her
+little charges through the press with the handle of her sunshade.
+
+Jean was mightily surprised when Madame Ewans made him "try his
+luck" in a lottery. He had before now gone with his aunt to sundry
+suburban fairs, but she had always dissuaded him so peremptorily
+from spending anything that he was firmly persuaded revolving-tables
+and shooting-galleries were amusements only permitted to a class
+of people to which he did not belong. Madame Ewans showed the
+greatest interest in her son's success, urging him to give the
+handle a good vigorous turn.
+
+She was very superstitious about luck, "invoking" the big prizes,
+clapping her hands in ecstasy whenever Edgar won a halfpenny
+egg-cup, falling into the depths of despair at every bad shot.
+Perhaps she saw an omen in his failure; perhaps she was just
+blindly eager to have her darling succeed. After he had lost two
+or three times, she pulled the boy away and gave the wooden disk
+such a violent push round as set its cargo of crockery-ware and
+glass rattling, and proceeded to play on her own account--once,
+twice, twenty times, thirty times, with frantic eagerness. Then
+followed quite a business about exchanging the small prizes for
+one big one, as is commonly done. Finally, she decided for a
+set of beer jugs and glasses, half of which she gave to each of
+the two friends to carry.
+
+But this was only a beginning. She halted the children before
+every stall. She made them play for macaroons at _rouge et
+noir_. She had them try their skill at every sort of
+shooting-game, with crossbows loaded with little clay pellets,
+with pistols and carbines, old-fashioned weapons with caps and
+leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at all kinds of
+targets--plaster images, revolving pipes, dolls, balls bobbing
+up and down on top of a jet of water.
+
+Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy or done so many
+different things in so short a space of time.
+
+His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and startling colours, his
+throat parched with dust, elbowed, crushed, mauled, hustled by
+the crowd, he was intoxicated with this debauch of diversions.
+
+He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening her little purse of
+Russia leather, and a new power was revealed to him. Nor was
+this all. There was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden
+horses of the merry-go-round to be mounted; they had to dash
+down the great chute and take a turn in the Venetian gondolas,
+to be weighed in the machine and touch the arm of the "human
+torpedo."
+
+But Madame Ewans could not help returning again and again to
+stand before the booth of a hypnotist from Paris, a clairvoyante
+boasting a certificate signed by the Minster of Agriculture and
+Commerce and by three Doctors of the Faculty. She gazed enviously
+at the servant-girls as they trooped up blushing into the van
+meagrely furnished with a bed and a couple of chairs; but she
+could not pluck up courage to follow their example.
+
+She recalled to mind how a hypnotist had once helped a friend
+of hers to recover some stolen forks and spoons. She had even
+gone so far as to consult a fortune-teller shortly before Edgar's
+birth, and the cards had foretold a boy.
+
+All three were tired out and overloaded with crockery, glass,
+reed-pipes, sticks of sugar-candy, cakes of ginger-bread and
+macaroons. For all that, they paid a visit to the wax-works,
+where they saw Monseigneur Sibour's body lying in state at the
+Archbishop's Palace, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, models
+of people's legs and arms disfigured by various hideous diseases,
+and a Circassian maiden stepping out of the bath--"the purest
+type of female beauty," as a placard duly informed the public.
+Madame Ewans examined this last exhibit with a curiosity that
+very soon became critical.
+
+"People may say what they please," she muttered; "if you offered
+me the whole world, _I_ wouldn't have such big feet and such
+a thick waist. And then, your regular features aren't one bit
+attractive. Men like a face that says something."
+
+When they left the tent, the sun was low and the dust hovered in
+golden clouds over the throng of women, working-men, and soldiers.
+
+It was time for dinner; but as they passed the monkey-cage, Madame
+Ewans noticed such a crush of eager spectators squeezing in between
+the baize curtains on the platform in front that she could not
+resist the temptation to follow suit. Besides which, she was
+drawn by a motive of curiosity, having been told that monkeys
+were not insensible to female charms. But the performance diverted
+her thoughts in another direction. She saw an unhappy poodle in
+red breeches shot as a deserter in spite of his honest looks.
+Tears rose to her eyes, she was so sensitive, so susceptible
+to the glamour of the stage!
+
+"Yes, it's quite true," she sobbed; "yes, poor soldiers have
+been shot before now just for going off without leave to stand
+by their mother's death-bed or for smacking a bullying officer's
+face."
+
+Some old refrain of Béranger she had heard working folks sing
+in her plebeian childhood rose to her memory and intensified
+her emotion. She told the children the lamentable tale of the
+canine deserter's pitiful doom, and made them feel quite sad.
+
+No sooner were they outside the place, however, than an itinerant
+toy-seller with a paper helmet on his head set them splitting
+with laughter.
+
+Dinner must be thought of. She knew of a tavern by the river-side
+where you could eat a fry of fish in the arbour, and thither
+they betook themselves.
+
+The lady from Paris and the landlady of the inn greeted each
+other with a wink of the eye. It was a long time since she had
+seen Madame; she had no idea who the two young gentlemen were,
+but anyway they were dear little angels. Madame Ewans ordered the
+meal like a connoisseur, with a knowing air and all the proper
+restaurant tricks of phrase. All three sat silent, agreeably
+tired and enjoying the sensation, she with her bonnet-strings
+flying loose, the boys leaning back against the trellis. They
+could see the river and its grassy banks through an archway of
+wild vine. Their thoughts flowed softly on like the current before
+their eyes, while the dusk and cool of the evening wrapped them
+in a soft caress. For the first time Jean Servien, as he gazed
+at Madame Ewans, felt the thrill of a woman's sweet proximity.
+
+Presently, warmed by a trifle of wine and water he had drunk,
+he became wholly lost in his dreams--visions of all sorts of
+elegant, preposterous, chivalrous things. His head was still
+full of these fancies when he was dragged back to the fair-ground
+by Madame Ewans, who could never have enough of sight-seeing
+and noise. Illuminated arches spanned at regular intervals the
+broad-walk, lined on either side by stalls and trestle-tables,
+but the lateral avenues gloomed dark and deserted under the tall
+black trees. Loving couples paced them slowly, while the music
+from the shows sounded muffled by the distance. They were still
+there when a band of fifes, trombones, and trumpets struck up
+close by, playing a popular polka tune. The very first bar put
+Madame Ewans on her mettle. She drew Jean to her, settled his
+hands in hers and lifting him off the ground with a jerk of the
+hip, began dancing with him. She swung and swayed to the lilt
+of the music; but the boy was awkward and embarrassed, and only
+hindered his partner, dragging back and bumping against her.
+She threw him off roughly and impatiently, saying sharply:
+
+"You don't know how to dance, eh? You come here, Edgar."
+
+She danced a while with him in the semi-darkness. Then, rosy and
+smiling:
+
+"Bravo!" she laughed; "we'll stop now."
+
+Servien stood by in gloomy silence, conscious of his own
+inefficiency. His heart swelled with a sullen anger. He was hurt,
+and longed for somebody or something to vent his hate upon.
+
+The drive home was a silent one. Jean nearly gave himself cramp
+in his determined efforts not to touch with his own the knees
+of Madame Ewans' who dozed on the back seat of the conveyance.
+She hardly awoke enough to bid him good-bye when he alighted
+at his father's door.
+
+As he entered, he was struck for the first time by a smell of
+paste that seemed past bearing. The room where he had slept for
+years, happy in himself and loved by others, seemed a wretched
+hole. He sat down on his bed and looked round gloomily and morosely
+at the holy-water stoup of gilt porcelain, the print commemorating
+his First Communion, the toilet basin on the chest of drawers,
+and stacked in the corners piles of pasteboard and ornamental
+paper for binding.
+
+Everything about him seemed animated by a hostile, malevolent,
+unjust spirit. In the next room he could hear his father moving.
+He pictured him at his work-bench, with his serge apron, calm
+and content. What a humiliation! and for the second time in a
+dozen hours he blushed for his parentage.
+
+His slumbers were broken and uneasy; he dreamed he was turning,
+turning unendingly in complicated figures, and it was impossible
+always to avoid touching Madame Evans' knee, though all the time
+he was horribly afraid of doing it. Then there was a great field
+full of thousands and thousands of marble pigs stuck up on stone
+pedestals, among which he could see Monsieur Delbèque promenading
+slowly up and down.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning he awoke feeling sour-tempered and low-spirited.
+
+"Well, my boy," his father asked him, blowing noisily at each
+spoonful of soup he absorbed, "well, did you enjoy yourself
+yesterday?"
+
+He answered curtly and crossly. Everything stirred his gorge.
+His aunt's print gown filled him with a sort of rage.
+
+His father propounded a hundred minute inquiries; he would fain
+have pictured the whole expedition to himself as he consumed his
+bowl of soup. He had seen Saint-Cloud in his soldiering days;
+but he had never been there since. He had a bright idea; they
+would go to Versailles, the three of them; his sister would see
+to having a bit of veal cooked overnight, and they could take
+it with them. They would have a look at the pictures, eat their
+snack on the great lawn, and have a fine time generally.
+
+Jean, who was horrified at the whole project, opened his
+exercise-books and buried his head in his lessons, to avoid the
+necessity of hearing any more and answering questions. He did not
+as a rule show such alacrity about setting to work. His father
+remarked on the fact, commending him for his zeal.
+
+"We should play," he announced, "when it is play-time, and work
+when it is the time to work," and _he_ set to work flattening
+a piece of shagreen.
+
+Jean fell into a brown study. He had caught a glimpse of a world
+he knew to be for ever closed against him, but towards which
+all the forces of his young heart drew him irresistibly. He did
+not dream Madame Ewans could ever be different from what he had
+seen her. He could not imagine her otherwise dressed or amid any
+other surroundings. He knew nothing whatever of women; this one
+had seemed motherly to him, and it was a mother such as Madame
+Ewans he would have liked to have. But how his heart beat and
+his brow burned as he pictured this imaginary mother a reality!
+
+Dating from the day at Saint-Cloud, Jean thought himself unhappy,
+and unhappy he became in fact. He was wilfully, deliberately
+insubordinate, proud of breaking rules and defying punishments.
+
+He and his school-mates attended the classes of a _Lycée_ in
+the _Quartier Latin_. Directly he had taken his place on the
+remotest bench in the well-warmed lecture-room, he would become
+absorbed in some sentimental novel concealed under piles of
+Latin and Greek authors. Sometimes the master, short-sighted as
+he was, would catch the culprit in the act.
+
+Still, Jean had his hours of triumph. His translations were
+remarkable, not for accuracy, but at any rate for elegance. So,
+too, his compositions sometimes contained happy phrases that
+earned him high praise. On the theme, "The maiden Theano defending
+Alcibiades against the incensed Athenians," he wrote a Latin
+oration that was warmly commended by Monsieur Duruy, the then
+Inspector of Public Instruction, and gained the young author
+some weeks of scholastic fame.
+
+On holidays he would roam the boulevards and gaze with greedy
+eyes at the jewels, the silks and satins, the bronzes, the
+photographs of women, displayed in the shop-windows--the thousand
+and one gewgaws and frivolities of fashion that seemed to him
+to sum up the necessary conditions of happiness.
+
+His entry into the philosophy class was a red-letter day; he
+sported his first tall hat and smoked his first non-surreptitious
+cigarettes. He possessed a certain brilliancy of mind and a keen
+wit that amused his companions, whose superior he was in gifts
+of imagination.
+
+His last vacation was passed in tolerable content. His father,
+thinking him looking pale, sent him on a visit to relatives living
+in a village near Chartres. Jean, the tedious farm dinner ended,
+would go and sit under a tree and bury himself in a novel.
+Occasionally he would ride to the city in the miller's cart.
+Often he would be drenched all the way by the rain that fell
+drearily at nightfall. Then he would enjoy the fun of drying
+himself before the huge fireplace of some inn on the outskirts
+of the town, beside the savoury roast on the turning spit. He
+even had a day's shooting with an old flint-lock fowling-piece
+under the auspices of his cousin the miller. In short, he could
+boast on his return of having had a country holiday.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+At eighteen he took his bachelor's degree. The evening after the
+examination Monsieur Servien uncorked a bottle with a special
+seal, which he had hoarded for years in anticipation of this
+domestic solemnity, and the contents of which had turned from
+red to pink as they slowly fined.
+
+"A young man who carries his diploma in his pocket can enter
+every door," Monsieur Servien observed, as he imbibed the wine
+with fitting respect; it had been good stuff once, but was past
+its prime.
+
+Jean polished off the family repast rapidly and hurried away to
+the theatre. His only ideas as yet of what a play was like were
+derived from the posters he had seen. He selected for tonight
+one of the big theatres where a tragedy was on the bill. He took
+his ticket for the pit with a vague idea it would be the talisman
+admitting him to a new wonder-world of passion and emotion. Every
+trifle is disconcerting to a troubled spirit, and on his entrance
+he was surprised and sobered to see how few spectators there were
+in the stalls and boxes. But at the first scraping of the violins
+as the orchestra tuned up, he glued his eyes to the curtain,
+which rose at last.
+
+Then, then he saw, in a Roman palace, leaning on the back of a
+chair of antique shape, a woman who wore over her robe of white
+woollen the saffron-hued _palla_. Amid the trampling of feet, the
+rustle of dresses and the shifting of stools, she was reciting
+a long soliloquy, accompanied by slow, deliberate gestures. He
+felt, as he gazed, a strange, unknown pleasure, that grew more
+and more acute till it was almost pain. As scene followed scene,
+there entered a confidante, then a hero, then a crowd of supers.
+But he saw nothing but the apparition that had first fascinated
+him. His eyes fastened greedily on her beauty, caressing the two
+bare arms, encircled with rings of metal, gliding along the curve
+of the hips below the high girdle, plunging amid the brown locks
+that waved above the brow and were tied back with three white
+fillets; they clung to the moving lips and the white, moist teeth
+that ever and anon flashed in the glare of the footlights. He
+longed to feel, to seize, to hold this lovely, living thing that
+moved before his eyes; in imagination he enfolded and embraced
+the beautiful vision.
+
+The wait between the acts (for the tragedy involved a change of
+scenery) was intolerably tedious. His neighbours were talking
+politics and passing one another quarters of orange across him;
+the newspaper boy and the man who hired out opera-glasses deafened
+him with their bawling. He was in terror of some sudden catastrophe
+that might interrupt the play.
+
+The curtain rose once more, on a succession of scenes of political
+intrigue à la Corneille which had no meaning for Servien. To
+his joy the lovely being in the white robe came on again. But
+he had strained his sight too hard; he could see nothing; by
+dint of riveting his gaze on the long gold pendants that hung
+from the actress's ears, he was dazzled; his eyes swam and closed
+involuntarily, and he could hear no sound but the beating of
+the blood in his temples.
+
+By a supreme effort, in the last scene, he saw and heard her again
+clearly and distinctly, yet not as with his ordinary senses, for
+she wore for him the elemental guise of a supernatural vision.
+When the prompter's bell tinkled and the curtain descended for the
+last time, he had a feeling as though the universe had collapsed
+in irretrievable ruin.
+
+_Tartuffe_ was the after-piece; but neither the spirit and perfection
+of the acting, nor the pretty face and plump shoulders of Elmire,
+nor the _soubrette_'s dimpled arms, nor the _ingénue_'s innocent
+eyes, nor the noble, witty lines that filled the theatre and
+roused the audience to fresh attention, could stir his spirit
+that hung entranced on the lips of a tragic heroine.
+
+As he stepped out into the street, the first breath of the cool
+night air on his face blew away his intoxication. His senses came
+back to him and he could think again; but his thoughts never left
+the object of his infatuation, and her image was the only thing
+he saw distinctly. He was entranced, possessed; but the feeling
+was delicious, and he roamed far and wide in the dark streets,
+making long detours by the river-side quays to lengthen out his
+reveries, his heart full, overfull of passionate, voluptuous
+imaginings. He was content because he was weary; his soul lay
+drowned in a delicious languor that no pang of desire troubled;
+to look and long was more than sufficient as yet to still the
+cravings of his virgin appetites.
+
+He threw himself half dressed on his bed, overjoyed to cherish
+the picture of her beauty in his heart. All he wanted was to
+lose himself in the enchanted sleep that weighed down his boyish
+lids.
+
+On waking, he gazed about him for something--he knew not what.
+Was he in love? He could not tell, but there was a void somewhere.
+Still, he felt no overmastering impulse, except to read the verses
+he had heard the actress declaim. He took down from his shelves
+a volume of Corneille and read through Émilie's part. Every line
+enchanted him, one as much as another, for did they not all evoke
+the same memory for him?
+
+His father and his aunt, with whom he passed his days, had grown
+to be only vague, meaningless shapes to him. Their broadest
+pleasantries failed to raise a smile, and the coarse realities of
+a narrow, penurious existence had no power to disturb his happy
+serenity. All day long, in the back-shop where the penetrating
+smell of paste mingled with the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he
+lived a life of his own, a life of incomparable splendours. His
+little Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at every
+couplet of Émilie's, was all he needed to foster the fairest
+of illusions. A face and the tones of a voice were his world.
+
+In a few days he knew the whole tragedy by heart. He would declaim
+the lines in a slow, pompous voice, and his aunt would remark
+after each speech, as she shredded the vegetables for dinner:
+
+"So you're for being a _curé_, are you, that you preach like they
+do in church?"
+
+But in the main she approved of these exercises, and when Monsieur
+Servien scratched his head doubtfully and complained that his
+son would not make up his mind to any way of earning a living,
+she always took up the cudgels for the "little lad" and silenced
+the bookbinder by telling him roundly he knew nothing about it--or
+about anything else.
+
+So the worthy man went back to his calf-skins. All the same,
+albeit he could form no very clear idea of what was in his son's
+head, for the latter having become a "gentleman" was beyond his
+purview, he felt some disquietude to see a holiday, legitimate
+enough no doubt after a successful examination, dragging out to
+such a length. He was anxious to see his son earning money in
+some department of administration or other. He had heard speak
+of the _Hôtel de Ville_ and the Government Offices, and he
+racked his brains to think of someone among his customers who
+might interest himself in his son's future. But he was not the
+man to act precipitately.
+
+One day, when Jean Servien was out on one of the long walks he had
+got into the habit of taking, he read on a poster that his Émilie,
+Mademoiselle Gabrielle T----, was appearing in that evening's
+piece. This time, ignoring his aunt's disapproval, he donned his
+Sunday clothes, had his hair frizzed and curled, and took his
+seat in the orchestra stalls.
+
+He saw her again! For the first few moments she did not seem
+so beautiful as he had pictured her. So long had he laboured
+and lain awake over the first image he had carried away of her
+that the impression had become blurred, and the type that had
+originally imprinted it on his heart no longer corresponded with
+the result created by his mind's unconscious working. Then he
+was disconcerted to see neither the white _stola_ and saffron
+mantle nor the bracelets and fillets that had seemed to him part
+and parcel of the beauty they adorned. Now she wore the turban
+of Roxana and the wide muslin trousers caught in at the ankle.
+It was only by degrees he could grow reconciled to the change.
+He realized that her arms were a trifle thin, and that a tooth
+stood back behind the rest in the row of pearls. But in the end
+her very defects pleased him, because they were hers, and he loved
+her the better for them. This time, by the law of change which is
+of the very essence of life, and by virtue of the imperfection
+that characterizes all living creatures, she made a physical
+appeal to his senses and called up the idea of a human being of
+flesh and blood, a creature you could cling to and make one with
+yourself. His admiration was lost in a flood of tenderness and
+infinite sadness--and he burst into tears.
+
+The next day he conceived a great desire to see her as she was
+in everyday life, dressed for the streets. It would be a sort of
+intimacy merely to pass her on the pavement. One evening, when she
+was playing, he watched for her at the stage-door, through which
+emerged one after the other scene-shifters, actors, constables,
+firemen, dressers, and actresses. At last she appeared, muffled
+in her fur cloak, a bouquet in her hand, tall and pale--so pale
+in the dusk her face seemed to him as if illumined by an inward
+light. She stood waiting on the doorstep till a carriage was
+called.
+
+He clasped both hands on his breast and thought he was going to
+die.
+
+When he found himself alone on the deserted _Quai_, he plucked
+a leaf from the overhanging bough of a plane tree. Then, setting
+his elbows on the parapet of the bridge, he tossed the leaf into
+the river and watched it borne away by the current of the stream
+that lay silvery in the moonlight, spangled with quivering lights.
+He watched it till he could see it no longer. Was it not the
+emblem of himself? He, too, was abandoning himself to the waters
+of a passion that shone bright and which he thought profound.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+That year the _Champs de Mars_ was occupied by one of the
+series of _Expositions Universelles_. Under the trees, in
+the heat and dust, crowds were swarming towards the entrance.
+Jean passed the turnstiles and entered the palace of glass and
+iron. He was still pursuing his passion, for he associated the
+being he loved with all manifestations of art and luxury. He
+made for the park and went straight to the Egyptian pavilion.
+Egypt had filled his dreams from the day when all his thoughts
+had been centred on one woman. In the avenue of sphinxes and
+before the painted temple he fell under the glamour that women
+of olden days and strange lands exercise on the senses,--on those
+of lovers with especial force. The sanctuary was venerable in
+his eyes, despite the vulgar use it was put to as part of the
+Exhibition. Looking at the jewels of Queen Aahotep, who lived
+and was lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered sadly
+over all that had been in the world and was no more. He pictured
+in fancy the black locks that had scented this diadem with the
+sphinx's head, the slim brown arms these, beads of gold and lapis
+lazuli had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vulture's
+wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and gorgets had confined,
+the breast that had once communicated its warmth to yonder gold
+scarabæus with the blue wing-cases, the little royal hand that
+once held that poniard by the hilt wrought over with flowers
+and women's faces. He could not conceive how what was a dream to
+him had been a reality for other men. Vainly he tried to follow
+the lapse of ages. He told himself that another living shape
+would vanish in its turn, and it would be for nothing then that
+it had been so passionately desired. The thought saddened and
+calmed him. He thought, as he stood before these gewgaws from
+the tomb, of all these men who, in the abyss of bygone time,
+had in turn loved, coveted, enjoyed, suffered, whom death had
+taken, hungry or satiated, and made an end of the appetites of
+all alike. A placid melancholy swept over him and held him
+motionless, his face buried in his hands.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+It was at breakfast the next morning that Jean noticed, for the
+first time, the venerable, kindly look of his father's face. In
+truth, advancing years had invested the bookbinder's appearance
+with a sort of beauty. The smooth forehead under the curling
+white locks betokened a habit of peaceful and honest thoughts.
+Old age, while rendering the play of the muscles less active,
+veiled the distortion of the limbs due to long hours of labour
+at the bench under the more affecting disfigurements which life
+and _its_ long-drawn labours impress on all men alike. The old
+man had read, thought, striven honestly to do his best, and won
+the saving grace a simple faith bestows on the humble of heart;
+for he had become a religious man and a regular attendant at
+the church of his parish. Jean told himself it would be an easy
+and a grateful task to cherish such a father, and he resolved to
+inaugurate a life of toil and sacrifice. But he had no employment
+and no notion what to do.
+
+Shut up in his room, he was filled with a great pity for himself
+and longed to recover the peace of mind, the calm of the senses, the
+happy life that had vanished along with the leaf he had abandoned
+that evening to the drifting current. He opened a novel, but at
+the first mention of love he pitched the volume down, and fell
+to reading a book of travel, following the steps of an English
+explorer into the reed palace of the King of Uganda. He ascended
+the Upper Nile to Urondogami; hippopotamuses snorted in the swamps,
+waders and guinea-fowl rose in flight, while a herd of antelopes
+sped flying through the tall grasses. He was recalled from far,
+far away by his aunt shouting up the stairs:
+
+"Jean! Jean! come down into the shop; your father wants you."
+
+A stout, red-faced man, with the bent shoulders that come of
+much stooping over the desk, sat beside the counter. Monsieur
+Servien's eyes rested on his face with a deprecating air.
+
+When the boy appeared, the stranger asked if this was the young
+man in question, adding in a scolding voice:
+
+"You are all the same. You work and sweat and wear yourselves
+out to make your sons bachelors of arts, and you think the day
+after the examination the fine fellows will be posted Ambassadors.
+For God's sake! no more graduates, if you please! We can't tell
+what to do with 'em.... Graduates indeed! Why, they block the
+road; they are cab-drivers, they distribute handbills in the
+streets. You have 'em dying in hospital, rotting in the hulks!
+Why didn't you teach your son your own trade? Why didn't you
+make a bookbinder of him? ... Oh! I know why; you needn't tell
+me,--out of ambition! Well, then! some day your son will die of
+starvation, blushing for your folly--and a good job too! The State!
+you say, the State! it's the only word you can put your tongues
+to. But it's cluttered up, the State is! Take the Treasury; you
+send us graduates who can't spell; what d'ye expect us to do
+with all these loafers?"
+
+He drew his hand across his hot forehead. Then pointing a finger
+to show he was addressing Jane:
+
+"At any rate, you write a good hand?"
+
+Monsieur Servien answered for his son, saying it was legible.
+
+"Legible! Legible!" repeated the great man--throwing his fat
+hands about. "A copying clerk must write an even hand. Young man,
+do you write an even hand?"
+
+Jean said he did not know, his handwriting might have been spoilt,
+he had never thought very much about it. His questioner frowned:
+
+"That's very wrong," he blustered; "and I dare swear you young
+fellows make a silly affectation of not writing decently.... I
+may have a bit of influence at the Ministry, but you mustn't
+ask me to do impossibilities."
+
+The bookbinder shrunk back with a scared glance. _He_ certainly
+did not look the man to ask impossibilities.
+
+The other got up:
+
+"You will take lessons," he said, turning to Jean, "in writing
+and ciphering. You have eight months before you. Eight months
+from now the Minister will hold an examination. I will put your
+name down. Do you set to work without losing a minute!"
+
+So saying, he pulled out his watch, as though to see if his protégé
+was actually going to waste a single minute before beginning his
+studies. He directed Monsieur Servien to get to work without
+delay on the books he was giving him to bind, and walked out of
+the shop. After the bookbinder had seen him to his carriage:
+
+"Jean, my boy," said he, "that is Monsieur Bargemont; I have
+spoken to him about you and you have heard what he had to say;
+he is going to help you to get into the Treasury Office, where
+he holds a high post. You understand what he told you about the
+examinations; you know more about such things, praise God! than
+I do. I am only an ignoramus, my lad, but I am your father. Now
+listen; I want to have a word of explanation with you, so that
+from this day on till I go to where your dear mother is we can
+look each other calmly in the face and understand one another
+at the first glance. Your mother loved you right well, Jean.
+There's not a gold mine in the world could give a notion of the
+wealth of affection that woman possessed. From the first moment
+you saw the light, she lived, so to say, more in you than in
+herself. Her love was stronger than she could bear. Well, well,
+she is dead. It was nobody's fault."
+
+The old man turned his eyes involuntarily towards the darkest
+corner of the shop, and Jean, looking in the same direction,
+caught sight of the sharp angles of the hand-press in the gloom.
+
+Monsieur Servien went on:
+
+"On her death-bed your mother asked me to make an educated man
+of you, for well she knew that education is the key that opens
+every door.
+
+"I have done what she wished. She was no longer with us, Jean,
+and when a voice comes back to you from the grave and bids you do
+a thing 'that a blessing may come,' why, one must needs obey. I
+did my best; and no doubt God was with me, for I have succeeded.
+You have your education; so far so good, but we must not have
+a blessing turn into a curse. And idleness is a curse. I have
+worked like a packhorse, and given many a hard pull at the collar,
+in harness from morning to night. I remember in particular one
+lot of cloth covers for the firm of Pigoreau that kept me on
+the job for thirty-six hours running. And then there was the
+year when your examination fees had to be paid and I accepted
+an order in the English style; it was a terrible bit of work,
+for it's not in my way at all, and at my time of life a man is
+not good at new methods. They wanted a light sort of binding,
+with flexible boards as flimsy as paper almost. I shed tears
+over it, but I learned the trick! Ah! it is a famous tool, is a
+workman's hand! But an educated man's brain is a far more wonderful
+thing still, and that tool you have, thanks to God in the first
+place, and to your mother in the second. It was she had the notion
+of educating you, I only followed her lead. Your work will be
+lighter than mine, but you must do it. I am a poor man, as you
+know; but, were I rich, I would not give you the means to lead
+an idle life, because that would be tempting you to vices and
+shaming you. Ah! if I thought your education had given you a
+taste for idleness, I should be sorry not to have made you a
+working man like myself. But then, I know you have a good heart;
+you have not got into your stride yet, that's all! The first
+steps will be uphill work; Monsieur Bargemont said so. The State
+services are overcrowded; there are over many graduates--though
+it is well enough to be one. Besides, I shall be at your back;
+I will help you, I will work for you; I have a pair of stout
+arms still. You shall have pocket-money, never fear; you will
+want it among the folks you will live with. We will save and
+pinch. But you must help yourself, lad; never be afraid of hard
+work, hit out from the shoulder and strike home. Good work never
+spoiled play yet. Your job done, laugh and sing and amuse yourself
+to your heart's content; you won't find me interfere. And, when
+you are a great man, if I am still in this world, don't you be
+afraid; I shall not get in your way. I am not a fellow to make
+a noise. We will hide away in some quiet hole, your aunt and
+I, and nobody will hear one word said of the old father."
+
+Aunt Servien, who had slipped into the shop and been listening
+for the last few moments, broke into sobs; she was quite ready
+to follow her brother and hide away in a corner; but when her
+nephew had risen to greatness, she would insist on going every day
+to keep things straight in his grand house. She was not going to
+leave "the little lad" to be a prey to housekeepers--housekeepers,
+indeed, she called them housebreakers!
+
+"The creatures keep great hampers," she declared, "that swallow
+up bottles of wine, cold chickens, and other titbits, fine linen,
+old clothes, oil, sugar, and candles--the best pickings from a
+rich man's house. No, I'll not let my little Jean be sucked to
+death by such vampires. _I_ mean to keep your house in order. No
+one will ever know I am your aunt. And if they did know, there's
+nobody, I should hope, could object. I don't know why anyone
+should be ashamed of me. They can lay my whole life bare, I have
+nothing to blush for. And there's many a Duchess can't say as
+much. As for forsaking the lad for fear of doing him a hurt,
+well, the notion is just what I expected of you, Servien; you've
+always been a bit simple-minded. _I_ mean to stay all my life
+with Jean. No, little lad, you'll never drive your old aunt out
+of your house, will you? And who could ever make your bed the
+way I can, my lamb?"
+
+Jean promised his father faithfully, oh! most faithfully, he
+would lead a hardworking life. Then he shut himself up in his
+room and pictured the future to himself--long years of austere
+and methodical labour.
+
+He mapped out his days systematically. In the morning he wrote
+copies to improve his handwriting, seated at a corner of the
+workbench. After breakfast he did sums in his bedroom. Every
+evening he went to the _Rue Soufflot_ by way of the Luxembourg
+gardens to a private tutor's, and the old man would set him
+dictations and explain the rules of simple interest. On reaching
+the gate adjoining the _Fontaine Médicis_ the boy always turned
+round for a look at the statues of women he could discern
+standing like white ghosts along the terrace. He had left behind
+on the path of life another fascinating vision.
+
+He never read a theatrical poster now, and deliberately forgot
+his favorite poets for fear of renewing his pain.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+This new life pleased him; it slipped by with a soothing monotony,
+and he found it healthful and to his taste. One evening, as he
+was coming downstairs at his old tutor's, a stout man offered
+him, with a sweep of the arm, the bill of fare advertising a
+neighbouring cook-shop; he carried a huge bundle of them under
+his left arm. Then stopping abruptly:
+
+"_Per Bacco!_" cried the fellow; "it is my old pupil. Tall and
+straight as a young poplar, here stands Monsieur Jean Servien!"
+
+It was no other than the Marquis Tudesco. His red waistcoat was
+gone; instead he wore a sort of sleeved vest of coarse ticking,
+but his shining face, with the little round eyes and hooked nose,
+still wore the same look of merry, mischievous alertness that
+was so like an old parrot's.
+
+Jean was surprised to see him, and not ill-pleased after all.
+He greeted him affectionately and asked what he was doing now.
+
+"Behold!" replied the Marquis, "my business is to distribute
+in the streets these advertisements of a local poisoner, and
+thereby to earn a place at the assassin's table to spread the
+fame of which I labour. Camoens held out his hand for charity
+in the streets of Lisbon. Tudesco stretches forth his in the
+byways of the modern Babylon, but it is to give and not to
+receive--lunches at 1 fr. 25, dinners at 1 fr. 75," and he offered
+one of his bills to a passer-by, who strode on, hands in pockets,
+without taking it.
+
+Thereupon the Marquis Tudesco heaved a sigh and exclaimed:
+
+"And yet I have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
+masterpiece of the immortal Torquato Tasso! But the brutal-minded
+booksellers scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean
+the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the humiliation
+inflicted on her nursling."
+
+"And what has become of you all the time since we last saw you?"
+asked the young man frankly.
+
+"God only knows, and 'pon my word! I think He has forgotten."
+
+Such was the Marquis Tudesco's oracular answer.
+
+He tied up his bundle of papers in a cloth, and taking his pupil by
+the arm, urged him in the direction of the _Rue Saint-Jacques_.
+
+"See, my young friend," he said, "the dome of the Panthéon is
+half hidden by the fog. The School of Salerno teaches that the
+damp air of evening is inimical to the human stomach. There is
+near by a decent establishment where we can converse as two
+philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to
+conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated
+you in the Latin rudiments."
+
+They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of
+kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away. The room was
+long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with
+copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was
+lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under
+the gas-jets. At little tables of painted deal a number of men
+were drinking; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats,
+broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the rain, they sat and
+smoked in silence. Before the door of the stove several pairs
+of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of
+steam curled up from the toes of the owners' boots. A heavy torpor
+seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, impassive
+faces.
+
+While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old
+acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about
+him that filled him with a despairing melancholy--school ushers
+railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering
+contentedly to one another, enchanted at the profundity of their
+own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians
+arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes
+of love and women--and amongst it all this sentence:
+
+"The harmony of the spheres fills the spaces of infinity, and
+if we hear it not, it is because, as Plato says, our ears are
+stopped with earth."
+
+Monsieur Tudesco consumed brandy-cherries in a very elegant way.
+Then the waiter served two dantzigs in little glass cups. Jean
+admired the translucent liquor dotted with golden sparkles, and
+Monsieur Tudesco demanded two more. Then, raising his cup on
+high:
+
+"I drink to the health of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father,"
+he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least
+I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile
+condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of
+letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with
+the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere
+virtue. I conjecture you are wishing to order another dantzig,
+my young friend."
+
+Jean looked about him. The dram-shop was transfigured; the casks
+looked enormous with their taps splendidly glittering, and seemed
+to stretch into infinity in a quivering, golden mist. But one
+object was more monstrously magnified than all the rest, and
+that was the Marquis Tudesco; the old man positively towered
+as huge as the giant of a fairy-tale, and Jean looked for him
+to do wonders.
+
+Tudesco was smiling.
+
+"You do not drink, my young friend," he resumed. "I conjecture
+you are in love. Ah! love! love is at once the sweetest and the
+bitterest thing on earth. I too have felt my heart beat for a
+woman. But it is long years ago since I outlived that passion. I
+am now an old man crushed under adverse fortune; but in happier
+days there was at Rome a _diva_ of a beauty so magnificent and
+a genius so enthralling that cardinals fought to the death at
+the door of her box; well, sir, that sublime creature I have
+pressed to my bosom, and I have been informed since that with her
+last sigh she breathed my name. I am like an old ruined temple,
+degraded by the passage of time and the violence of men's hands,
+yet sanctified for ever by the goddess."
+
+This tale, whether it recalled in exaggerated terms some commonplace
+intrigue of his young days in Italy, or more likely was a pure
+fiction based on romantic episodes he had read in novels, was
+accepted by Jean as authentic and vastly impressive. The effect
+was startling, amazing. In an instant he beheld, with all the
+miraculous clearness of a vision, there, standing between the
+tables, the queen of tragedy he adored; he saw the locks braided
+in antique fashion, the long gold pendants drooping from either
+ear, the bare arms and the white face with scarlet lips. And
+he cried aloud:
+
+"I too love an actress."
+
+He was drinking, never heeding what the liquor was; but lo! it
+was a philtre he swallowed that revivified his passion. Then a
+torrent of words rose flooding to his lips. The plays he had
+seen, _Cinna, Bajazet_, the stern beauty of Émilie, the
+sweet ferocity of Roxana, the sight of the actress cloaked in
+velvet, her face shining so pale and clear in the darkness, his
+longings, his hopes, his undying love, he recounted everything
+with cries and tears.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco heard him out, lapping up a glass of Chartreuse
+drop by drop the while, and taking snuff from a screw of paper.
+At times he would nod his head in approval and go on listening
+with the air of a man watching and waiting his opportunity. When
+he judged that at last, after tedious repetitions and numberless
+fresh starts, the other's confidences were exhausted, he assumed
+a look of gravity, and laying his fine hand with a gesture as
+of priestly benediction on the young man's shoulder:
+
+"Ah! my young friend," he said, "if I thought that what you feel
+were true love... but I do not," and he shook his head and let
+his hand drop.
+
+Jean protested. To suffer so, and not to be really in love?
+
+Monsieur Tudesco repeated:
+
+"If I thought that this were true love... but I do not, so far."
+
+Jean answered with great vehemence; he talked of death and plunging
+a dagger in his heart.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco reiterated for the third time:
+
+"I do not believe it is true love."
+
+Then Jean fell into a fury and began to rumple and tear at his
+waistcoat as if he would bare his heart for inspection. Monsieur
+Tudesco took his hands and addressed him soothingly:
+
+"Well, well, my young friend, since it _is_ true love you feel,
+I will help you. I am a great tactician, and if King Carlo Alberto
+had read a certain memorial I sent him on military matters he
+would have won the battle of Novara. He did not read my memorial,
+and the battle was lost, but it was a glorious defeat. How happy
+the sons of Italy who died for their mother in that thrice holy
+battle! The hymns of poets and the tears of women made enviable
+their obsequies. I say it: what a noble, what a heroic thing
+is youth! What flames divine escape from young bosoms to rise
+to the Creator! I admire above everything young folk who throw
+themselves into ventures of war and sentiment with the impetuosity
+natural to their age."
+
+Tasso, Novara, and the _diva_ so beloved of cardinals mingled
+confusedly in Jean Servien's heated brain, and in a burst of
+sublime if fuddled enthusiasm he wrung the old villain's hand.
+Everything had grown indistinct; he seemed to be swimming in
+an element of molten metal.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, who at the moment was imbibing a glass of kümmel,
+pointed to his waistcoat of ticking.
+
+"The misfortune is," he observed, "that I am garbed like a
+philosopher. How show myself in such a costume among elegant
+females? 'Tis a sad pity! for it would be an easy matter for
+me to pay my respects to an actress at an important theatre. I
+have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, that masterpiece
+of Torquato Tasso's. I could propose to the great actress whom
+you love and who is worthy of your love, at least I hope so, a
+French adaptation of the _Myrrha_ of the celebrated Alfieri.
+What eloquence, what fire in that tragedy! The part of Myrrha
+is sublime and terrible; she will be eager to play it. Meantime,
+you translate _Myrrha_ into French verse; then I introduce you
+with your manuscript into the sanctuary of Melpomene, when you
+bring with you a double gift--fame and love! What a dream, oh!
+fortunate young man!... But alas! 'tis but a dream, for how should
+I enter a lady's boudoir in this rude and sordid guise?"
+
+But the tavern was closing and they had to leave. Jean felt so
+giddy in the open air he could not tell how he had come to lose
+Monsieur Tudesco, after emptying the contents of his purse into
+the latter's hand.
+
+He wandered about all night in the rain, stumbling through the
+puddles which splashed up the mud in his face. His brains buzzed
+with the maddest schemes, that took shape, jostled one another,
+and tumbled to pieces in his head. Sometimes he would stop to
+wipe the sweat from his forehead, then start off again on his
+wild way. Fatigue calmed his nerves, and a clear purpose emerged.
+He went straight to the house where the actress lived, and from
+the street gazed up at her dark, shuttered windows; then, stepping
+up to the _porte-cochère_, he kissed the great doors.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Dating from that night Jean Servien spent his days in translating
+_Myrrha_ bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having
+taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which
+he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of
+blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise.
+Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman
+that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had
+kissed in a night of frenzy.
+
+Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his son had grown
+heedless, absent-minded, and hollow-eyed, coming back late at
+night, and hardly up before noon. Before the mute reproach in
+his father's eyes the boy hung his head. But his home-life was
+nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, hovering around
+the unknown, in regions he pictured as resplendent with poetry,
+wealth and pleasure.
+
+Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet the Marquis Tudesco
+again. He had found it impossible to replace his waistcoat of
+ticking. Moreover, he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to
+shop-girls.
+
+When the summer came, the theatrical posters announced in quick
+succession _Mithridate, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Rodogune, les
+Enfants d'Edouard, la Fiammina_. Jean, having secured the money
+to pay for a seat by hook or by crook, by some bit of trickery or
+falsehood, by cajoling his aunt or by a surreptitious raid on
+the cash-box, would watch from an orchestra stall the startling
+metamorphoses of the woman he loved. He saw her now girt with
+the white fillet of the virgins of Hellas, like those figures
+carved with such an exquisite purity in the marble of the Greek
+bas-reliefs that they seem clad in inviolate innocence, now in a
+flowered gown, with powdered ringlets sweeping her naked shoulders,
+that had an inexpressible charm in their spare outlines suggestive
+of the bitter-sweet taste of an unripe fruit. She reminded him
+in this attire of some old-time pastel of gallant ladies such
+as the bookbinder's son had pored over in the dealers' shops
+on the _Quai Voltaire_. Anon she would be crowned with a
+hawk's crest, girdled with plaques of gold on which were traced
+magic symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour
+of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black
+hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a
+Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics
+in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in
+this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman,
+clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat
+set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in
+these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians,
+Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire's verses on the death of Adrienne
+Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him
+as elegant or fraught with passion. But in all these creations
+it was one image, and one only, that he saw.
+
+Going one evening to the dram-shop with the Marquis Tudesco,
+who had given up all idea of discarding his checked waistcoat,
+he made the acquaintance of an old man whose white hair lay in
+ringlets on his shoulders and who still had the blue eyes of a
+child. He was an architect fallen to ruin along with the little
+Gothic erections he had raised at great expense in the Paris
+suburbs about 1840. His name was Théroulde, and the old fellow,
+whose smiling face belied his wretched condition, overflowed
+with anecdotes of artists and pretty women.
+
+In his prosperous days he had built country villas for actresses
+and attended many a joyous house-warming, the fun and frolic of
+which were still fresh in the light-hearted veteran's memory. He
+had long ceased to care who heard him, and primed with maraschino,
+he would unfold his reminiscences like some sumptuous tapestry
+gone to tatters. The bookseller's son, meeting an artist for the
+first time, listened to the old Bohemian with rapt enthusiasm.
+All these forgotten celebrities, or half-celebrities, all these
+old young beauties of whom Théroulde spoke, came to life again
+for him, fascinated him with an unexpected charm and a piquant
+sense of familiarity. Servien pictured them as he had seen them
+represented in the old foxed lithographs that litter the second-hand
+bookstalls along the _Quais_, wearing the hair in flat bandeaux
+with a jewel on a gold chain in the middle of the forehead, or
+else in heavy ringlets _à l'Anglaise_ brushing the cheeks. Obsessed
+by his one idea, he endeavoured to recall one who seemed so well
+acquainted with ladies of the stage to the present day. He spoke
+of tragedy, but Théroulde said he thought that sort of plays
+ridiculous, and repeated a number of parodies. Jean mentioned
+Gabrielle T----.
+
+"T----," exclaimed the artist-architect; "I knew her mother well."
+
+Never in all his life had Jean heard a sentence that interested
+him so profoundly.
+
+"I knew her in 1842," Théroulde went on, "at Nantes, where she
+created fourteen rôles in six weeks. And folks imagine actresses
+have nothing to do! A fine thing, the stage! But the mischief is,
+there's not a single architect capable of building a playhouse
+with any sense. As to scenery, it is simply puerile, even at the
+Opera--so childish it might make a South Sea Islander blush.
+I have thought out a system of rollers in the flies so as to
+get rid of those long top-cloths that represent the sky without
+a pretence at deceiving anyone. I have likewise invented an
+arrangement of lamps and reflectors so placed as to light the
+characters on the stage from above downwards, as the sun does,
+which is the rational way, and not from below upwards, as the
+footlights do, which is absurd."
+
+"Of course it is," agreed Servien. "But you were speaking of
+Gabrielle T----'s mother."
+
+"She was a fine woman," replied the architect; "tall, dark, with
+a little moustache that became her to perfection.... You see the
+effect of my roller contrivance--a vast sky shedding an equal
+illumination over the actors and giving every object its natural
+shadows. _La Muette_ is being played, we will say; the famous
+_cavatina_, the slumber-song, is heard beneath a transparent
+sky, vaulted like the real thing and giving the impression of
+boundless space. The effect of the music is doubled! Fenella
+wakes, crosses the boards with cadenced tread; her shadow, which
+follows her on the floor, is cadenced like her steps; it is nature
+and art both together. That is my invention! As for putting it
+in execution, why, the means are childishly simple."
+
+Thereupon he entered upon endless explanations, using technical
+terms and illustrating his meaning with everything he could lay
+hands on--glasses, saucers, matches. His frayed sleeves, as they
+swept to and fro, wiped the marble top of the table and set the
+glasses rattling. Disturbed by the noise, the Marquis Tudesco,
+who was asleep, half opened his eyes mechanically.
+
+Servien kept nodding his approval and repeating that he quite
+understood, to stop the old man's babble. Then he advised the
+architect to try and put his invention in practice; but he only
+shrugged his shoulders--it was years since he had left off trying
+anything. After all, what did it matter to him whether his system
+was applied or no? He was an inventor!
+
+Recalled for the third time by his young listener to Gabrielle
+T----'s mother:
+
+"She never had any great success on the stage," he declared;
+"but she was a careful woman and saved money. She was near on
+fifty when I came upon her again in Paris living with Adolphe, a
+very handsome young fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six, nephew
+of a stockbroker. It was the most loving couple, the merriest,
+happiest household in the world. Never once did I breakfast at their
+little flat, fifth floor of a house in the _Rue Taitbout_,
+without being melted to tears. 'Eat, my kitten,' 'Drink, my lamb!'
+and such looks and endearments, and each so pleased with the
+other! One day he said to her: 'My kitten, your money does not
+bring you in what it ought; give me your scrip and in forty-eight
+hours I shall have doubled your capital.' She went softly to her
+cupboard and opening the glass doors, handed him her securities
+one by one with hands that trembled a little.
+
+"He took them unconcernedly and brought her a receipt the same
+evening bearing his uncle's signature. Three months after she
+was pocketing a very handsome income. The sixth month Adolphe
+disappeared. The old girl goes straight to the uncle with her
+screed of paper. 'I never signed that,' says the stockbroker, 'and
+my nephew never deposited any securities with me.' She flies like
+a mad-woman to the Commissary of Police, to learn that Adolphe,
+hammered at the Bourse, is off to Belgium, carrying with him
+a hundred and twenty thousand francs he had done another old
+woman out of. She never got over the blow; but we must say this
+of her, she brought up her daughter mighty strictly, and showed
+herself a very dragon of virtue. Poor Gabrielle must feel her
+cheeks burn to this day only to think of her years at the
+Conservatoire; for in those days her mother used to smack them
+soundly for her, morning and evening. Gabrielle, why I can see
+her now, in her sky-blue frock, running to lessons nibbling
+coffee-berries between her teeth. She was a good girl, that."
+
+"You knew her!" cried Jean, for whom these confidences formed
+the most exciting love adventure he had ever known.
+
+The old man assured him:
+
+"We used to have fine rides with her and a lot of artists in old
+days on horseback and donkey-back in the woods of Ville d'Avray;
+she used to dress as a man, and I remember one day..." He finished
+his story in a whisper,--it was just as well. He went on to say
+he hardly ever saw her now that she was with Monsieur Didier,
+of the Crédit Bourguignon. The financier had sent the artists
+to the right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fellow,
+a dull, tiresome prig.
+
+Jean was neither surprised nor excessively shocked to hear that
+she had a lover, because having studied the ways of the ladies
+of the theatre in the proverbs in verse of Alfred de Musset, he
+pictured the life of Parisian actresses without exception as
+one continual feast of wit and gallantry. He loved her; with or
+without Didier, he loved her. She might have had three hundred
+lovers, like Lesbia,--he would have loved her just as much. Is
+it not always so with men's passions? They are in love because
+they are in love, and in spite of everything.
+
+As for feeling jealousy of Monsieur Didier, he never so much
+as thought of it. The infatuation of the lad! He was jealous
+of the men and women who saw her pass to and fro in the street,
+of the scene-shifters and workmen whom the business of the stage
+brought into contact with her. For the present these were his only
+rivals. For the rest, he trusted to the future, the ineffable
+future big whether with bliss or torment. Indeed, the literature
+of romance had inspired him with no small esteem of courtesans,
+if only their attitude was as it should be--leaning pensively
+on the balcony-rail of their marble palace.
+
+What did shock him in the rapscallion architect's stories, what
+wounded his love without weakening it, was all the rather squalid
+elements these narratives implied in the actress's young days.
+Of all things in the world he thought anything sordid the most
+repugnant.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, feeling sure his brandy-cherries would be paid
+for, did not trouble himself to talk, and the conversation was
+languishing when the architect remarked casually:
+
+"By-the-by! As I was going to Bellevue yesterday on business
+of my own, I came upon that actress of yours, young man, at her
+gate... oh! a rubbishy little villa, run up to last through a
+love affair, standing in six square yards of garden, meant to
+give a stock-broker some sort of notion what the country's like.
+She invited me in--but what was the use?"...
+
+She was at Bellevue! Jean forgot all the humiliating details
+the old man had told him, retaining the one fact only, that she
+was at Bellevue and it was possible to see her there in the sweet
+intimacy of the country.
+
+He got up to go. Monsieur Tudesco caught him by the skirt of his
+jacket to detain him:
+
+"My young friend, you have my admiration; for I see you rise
+on daring pinions above the hindrances of a lowly station to
+the realms of beauty, fame and wealth. You will yet cull the
+splendid blossom that fascinates you, at least I hope so. But how
+much better had you loved a simple work-girl, whose affections
+you could have beguiled by offering her a penn'orth of fried
+potatoes and a seat among the gods to see a melodrama. I fear you
+are a dupe of men's opinion, for one woman is not very different
+from another, and it is opinion, that mistress of the world, and
+nothing else, which sets a high price on some and a low one on
+others. Do you profit, my young and very dear friend, by the
+experience afforded me by the vicissitudes of fortune, which
+are such that I am obliged at this present moment to borrow of
+you the modest sum of two and a half francs."
+
+So spake the Marquis Tudesco.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Jean had trudged afoot up the hill of Bellevue. Evening was falling.
+The village street ran upwards between low walls, brambles and
+thistles lining the roadway on either side. In front the woods
+melted into a far-off blue haze; below him stretched the city,
+with its river, its roofs, its towers and domes, the vast, smoky
+town which had kindled Servien's aspirations at the flaring lights
+of its theatres and nurtured his feverish longings in the dust
+of its streets. In the west a broad streak of purple lay between
+heaven and earth. A sweet sense of peace descended on the landscape
+as the first stars twinkled faintly in the sky. But it was not
+peace Jean Servien had come to find.
+
+A few more paces on the stony high road and there stood the gate
+festooned with the tendrils of a wild vine, just as it had been
+described to him.
+
+He gazed long, in a trance of adoration. Peering through the
+bars, between the sombre boughs of a Judas tree, he saw a pretty
+little white house with a flight of stone steps before the front
+door, flanked by two blue vases. Everything was still, nobody
+at the windows, nobody stirring on the gravel of the drive; not
+a voice, not a whisper, not a footfall. And yet, after a long,
+long look, he turned away almost happy, his heart filled with
+satisfaction.
+
+He waited under the old walnut trees of the avenue till the windows
+lighted up one by one in the darkness, and then retraced his
+steps. As he passed the railway station, to which people were
+hurrying to catch an incoming train, he saw amid the confusion
+a tall woman in a mantilla kiss a young girl who was taking her
+leave. The pale face under the mantilla, the long, delicate hands,
+that seemed ungloved out of a voluptuous caprice, how well he
+knew them! How he saw the woman from head to foot in a flash!
+His knees bent under him. He felt an exquisite languor, as if
+he would die there and then! No, he never believed she was so
+beautiful, so beyond price! And he had thought to forget her!
+He had imagined he could live without her, as if she did not
+sum up in herself the world and life and everything!
+
+She turned into the lane leading to her house, walking at a smart
+pace, with her dress trailing and catching on the brambles, from
+which with a backward sweep of the hand and a rough pull she
+would twitch it clear.
+
+Jean followed her, pushing his way deliberately through the same
+bramble bushes and exulting to feel the thorns scratch and tear
+his flesh.
+
+She stopped at the gate, and Jean saw her profile, in its purity
+and dignity, clearly defined in the pale moonlight. She was a
+long time in turning the key, and Jean could watch her face, the
+more enthralling to the senses for the absence of any tokens of
+disturbing intellectual effort. He groaned in grief and rage to
+think how in another second the iron bars would be close between
+her and him.
+
+No, he would not have it so; he darted forward, seized her by
+the hand, which he pressed in his own and kissed.
+
+She gave a loud cry of terror, the cry of a frightened animal.
+Jean was on his knees on the stone step, chafing the hand he
+held against his teeth, forcing the rings into the flesh of his
+lips.
+
+A servant, a lady's maid, came running up, holding a candle that
+had blown out.
+
+"What is all this?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+Jean released the hand, which bore the mark of his violence in
+a drop of blood, and got to his feet.
+
+Gabrielle, panting and holding the wounded hand against her bosom,
+leant against the gate for support.
+
+"I want to speak to you; I must," cried Jean.
+
+"Here's pretty manners!" shrilled the maid-servant. "Go your
+ways," and she pointed with her candlestick first to one end,
+then to the other of the street.
+
+The actress's face was still convulsed with the shock of her
+terror. Her lips were trembling and drawn back so as to show
+the teeth glittering. But she realized that she had nothing to
+fear.
+
+"What do you want with me?" she demanded.
+
+He had lost his temerity since he had dropped her hand. It was
+in a very gentle voice he said:
+
+"Madame, I beg and beseech you, let me say one word to you alone."
+
+"Rosalie," she ordered, after a moment's hesitation, "take a
+turn or two in the garden. Now speak, sir," and she remained
+standing on the step, leaving the gate half-way open, as it had
+been at the moment he had kissed her hand.
+
+He spoke in all the sincerity of his inmost heart:
+
+"All I have to say to you, Madame, is that you must not, you
+ought not, to repulse me, for I love you too well to live without
+you."
+
+She appeared to be searching in her memory.
+
+"Was it not you," she asked, "who sent me some verses?"
+
+He said it was, and she resumed:
+
+"You followed me one evening. It is not right, sir, not the right
+thing, to follow ladies in the street."
+
+"I only followed _you_, and that was because I could not help
+it."
+
+"You are very young."
+
+"Yes, but it was long ago I began to love you."
+
+"It came upon you all in a moment, did it not?"
+
+"Yes, when I saw you."
+
+"That is what I thought. You are inflammable, so it seems."
+
+"I do not know, Madame. I love you and I am very unhappy. I have
+lost the heart to live, and I cannot bear to die, for then I
+should not see you any more. Let me be near you sometimes. It
+must be so heavenly!"
+
+"But, sir, I know nothing about you."
+
+"That is my misfortune. But how _can_ I be a stranger for you?
+You are no stranger, no stranger in my eyes. I do not know any
+woman, for me there is no other woman in the world but you."
+
+And again he took her hand, which she let him kiss. Then:
+
+"It is all very pretty," she said, "but it is not an occupation,
+being in love. What are you? What do you do?"
+
+He answered frankly enough:
+
+"My father is in trade; he is looking out for a post for me."
+
+The actress understood the truth; here was a little bourgeois,
+living contentedly on next to nothing, reared in habits of
+penuriousness, a hidebound, mean creature, like the petty tradesmen
+who used to come to her whining for their bills, and whom she
+encountered of a Sunday in smart new coats in the Meudon woods.
+She could feel no interest in him, such as he might have inspired,
+whether as a rich man with bouquets and jewels to offer her,
+or a poor wretch so hungry and miserable as to bring tears to
+her eyes. Dazzle her eyes or stir her compassion, it must be
+one or the other! Then she was used to young fellows of a more
+enterprising mettle. She thought of a young violinist at the
+Conservatoire who, one evening, when she was entertaining company,
+had pretended to leave with the rest and concealed himself in her
+dressing-room; as she was undressing, thinking herself alone, he
+burst from his hiding-place, a bottle of champagne in either hand
+and laughing like a mad-man. The new lover was less diverting.
+However, she asked him his name.
+
+"Jean Servien."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Jean Servien, I am sorry, very sorry, to have
+made you unhappy, as you say you are."
+
+At the bottom of her heart she was more flattered than grieved
+at the mischief she had done, so she repeated several times over
+how very sorry she was.
+
+She added:
+
+"I cannot bear to hurt people. Every time a young man is unhappy
+because of me, I am so distressed; but, honour bright, what do
+you want me to do for you? Take yourself off, and be sensible.
+It's no use your coming back to see me. Besides, it would be
+ridiculous. I have a life of my own to live, quite private, and
+it is out of the question for me to receive strange visitors."
+
+He assured her between his sobs:
+
+"Oh! how I wish you were poor and forsaken. I would come to you
+then and we should be happy."
+
+She was a good deal surprised he did not take her by the waist
+or think of dragging her into the garden under the clump of trees
+where there was a bench. She was a trifle disappointed and in a
+way embarrassed not to have to defend her virtue. Finding the
+conclusion of the interview did not match the beginning and the
+young man was getting tedious, she slammed the gate in his face
+and slipped back into the garden, where he saw her vanish in
+the darkness.
+
+She bore on her hand, beside a sapphire on her ring finger, a
+drop of blood. In her chamber, as she emptied a jug of water over
+her hands to wash away the stain, she could not help reflecting
+how every drop of blood in this young man's veins would be shed
+for her whenever she should give the word. And the thought made
+her smile. At that moment, if he had been there, in that room,
+at her side, it may be she would not have sent him away.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Jean hurried down the lane and started off across country in
+such a state of high exaltation as robbed him of all senses of
+realities and banished all consciousness whether of joy or pain.
+He had no remembrance of what he had been before the moment when
+he kissed the actress's hand; he seemed a stranger to himself.
+On his lips lingered a taste that stirred voluptuous fancies,
+and grew stronger as he pressed them one against the other.
+
+Next morning his intoxication was dissipated and he relapsed
+into profound depression. He told himself that his last chance
+was gone. He realized that the gate overhung with wild vine and
+ivy was shut against him by that careless, capricious hand more
+firmly and more inexorably than ever it could have been by the
+bolts and bars of the most prudish virtue. He felt instinctively
+that his kiss had stirred no promptings of desire, that he had
+been powerless to win any hold on his mistress's senses.
+
+He had forgotten what he said, but he knew that he had spoken
+out in all the frank sincerity of his heart. He had exposed his
+ignorance of the world, his contemptible candour. The mischief
+was irreparable. Could anyone be more unfortunate? He had lost
+even the one advantage he possessed, of being unknown to her.
+
+Though he entertained no very high opinion of himself, he certainly
+held fate responsible for his natural deficiencies. He was poor,
+he reasoned, and therefore had no right to fall in love. Ah!
+if only he were wealthy and familiar with all the things idle,
+prosperous people know, how entirely the splendour of his material
+surroundings would be in harmony with the splendour of his passion!
+What blundering, ferocious god of cruelty had immured in the dungeon
+of poverty this soul of his that so overflowed with desires?
+
+He opened his window and caught sight of his father's apprentice
+on his way back to the workshop. The lad stood there on the pavement
+talking with naive effrontery to a little book-stitcher of his
+acquaintance. He was kissing the girl, without a thought of the
+passers-by, and whistling a tune between his teeth. The pretty,
+sickly-looking slattern carried her rags with an air, and wore
+a pair of smart, well-made boots; she was pretending to push
+her admirer away, while really doing just the opposite, for the
+slim yet broad-shouldered stripling in his blue blouse had a
+certain townified elegance and the "conquering hero" air of the
+suburban dancing-saloons. When he left her, she looked back
+repeatedly; but he was examining the saveloys in a pork-butcher's
+window, never giving another thought to the girl.
+
+Jean, as he looked on at the little scene, found himself envying
+his father's apprentice.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+He read the same morning on the posters that _she_ was playing
+that evening. He watched for her after the performance and saw her
+distributing hand-shakes to sundry acquaintances before driving
+off. He was suddenly struck with something hard and cruel in
+her, which he had not observed in the interview of the night
+before. Then he discovered that he hated her, abominated her
+with all the force of his mind and muscles and nerves. He longed
+to tear her to pieces, to rend and crush her. It made him furious
+to think she was moving, talking, laughing,--in a word, that she
+was alive. At least it was only fair she should suffer, that
+life should wound her and make her heart bleed. He was rejoiced
+at the thought that she must die one day, and then nothing of
+her would be left, of her rounded shape and the warmth of her
+flesh; none would ever again see the superb play of light in
+her hair and eyes, the reflections, now pale, now pearly, of
+her dead-white skin. But her body, that filled him with such
+rage, would be young and warm and supple for long years yet,
+and lover after lover would feel it quiver and awake to passion.
+She would exist for other men, but not for him. Was that to be
+borne? Ah! the deliciousness of plunging a dagger in that warm,
+living bosom! Ah! the bliss, the voluptuousness of holding her
+pinned beneath one knee and demanding between two stabs:
+
+"Am I ridiculous now?"
+
+He was still muttering suchlike maledictions when he felt a hand
+laid on his shoulder. Wheeling round, he saw a quaint figure--a
+huge nose like a pothook, high, massive shoulders, enormous,
+well-shaped hands, a general impression of uncouthness combined
+with vigour and geniality. He thought for a moment where this
+strange monster could have come from; then he shouted: "Garneret!"
+
+Instantly his memory flew back to the court-yard and class-rooms
+of the school in the _Rue d'Assas_, and he saw a heavily built
+lad, for ever under punishment, standing out face to the wall
+during playtime, getting and giving mighty fisticuffs, a terrible
+fellow for plain speaking and hard hitting, industrious, yet a
+thorn in the side of masters, always in ill-luck, yet ever and
+anon electrifying the class with some stroke of genius.
+
+He was glad enough to see his old school-fellow again, who struck
+him as looking almost old with his puckered lids and heavy features.
+They set off arm in arm along the deserted _Quai_, and to the
+accompaniment of the faint lapping of the water against the retaining
+walls, told each other the history of their past--which was succinct
+enough, their present ideas, and their hopes for the future--which
+were boundless.
+
+The same ill-luck still pursued Garneret; from morn to eve he
+was engaged on prodigiously laborious hack-work for a map-maker,
+who paid him the wages of one of his office boys; but his big
+head was crammed with projects. He was working at philosophy
+and getting up before the sun to make experiments on the
+susceptibility to light of the invertebrates; by way of studying
+English and politics at the same time, he was translating Mr.
+Disraeli's speeches; then every Sunday he accompanied Monsieur
+Hébert's pupils on their geological excursions in the environs of
+Paris, while at night he gave lectures to working men on Italian
+painting and political economy. There was never a week passed
+but he was bowled over for twenty-four or forty-eight hours with
+an agonizing sick-headache. He spent long hours too with his
+fiancée, a girl with no dowry and no looks, but of a loving,
+sensitive temper, whom he adored and fully intended to marry the
+moment he had five hundred francs to call his own.
+
+Servien could make nothing of the other's temperament, one that
+looks upon the world as an immense factory where the good workman
+labours, coat off and sleeves rolled up, the sweat pouring from his
+brow and a song on his lips. He found it harder still to conceive
+a love with which the glamour of the stage or the splendours of
+luxurious living had nothing to do. Yet he felt there was something
+strong and sensible and true about it all, and craving sympathy
+he made Garneret the confidant of his passion, telling the tale
+in accents of despair and bitterness, though secretly proud to
+be the tortured victim of such fine emotions.
+
+But Garneret expressed no admiration.
+
+"My dear fellow," said he, "you have got all these romantic notions
+out of trashy novels. How can you love the woman when you don't
+know her?"
+
+How, indeed? Jean Servien did not know; but his nights and days,
+the throbbings of his heart, the thoughts that possessed his
+mind to the exclusion of all else, everything convinced him that
+it was so. He defended himself, talking of mystic influences,
+natural affinities, emanations, a divine unity of essence.
+
+Garneret only buried his face between his hands. It was above
+his comprehension.
+
+"But come," he said, "the woman is no differently constituted
+from other women!"
+
+Obvious as it was, this consideration filled Jean Servien with
+amazement. It shocked him so much that, rather than admit its
+truth, he racked his brains in desperation to find arguments
+to controvert the blasphemy.
+
+Garneret gave his views on women. He had a judicial mind, had
+Garneret, and could account for everything in the relations of
+the sexes; _but_ he could not tell Jean why one face glimpsed
+among a thousand gives joy and grief more than life itself seemed
+able to contain. Still, he tried to explain the problem, for he
+was of an eminently ratiocinative temper.
+
+"The thing is quite simple," he declared. "There are a dozen
+violins for sale at a dealer's. I pass that way, common scraper
+of catgut that I am, I tune them and try them, and play over
+on each of them in turn, with false notes galore, some catchy
+tune--_Au clair de la lune_ or _J'ai du bon tabac dans ma
+tabatière_--stuff fit to kill the old cow. Then Paganini
+comes along; with one sweep of the bow he explores the deepest
+depths of the vibrating instruments. The first is flat, the second
+sharp, the third almost dumb, the fourth is hoarse, five others
+have neither power nor truth of tone; but lo! the twelfth gives
+forth under the master's hand a mighty music of sweet, deep-voiced
+harmonies. It is a Stradivarius; Paganini knows it, takes it home
+with him, guards it as the apple of his eye; from an instrument
+that for me would never have been more than a resonant wooden box
+he draws chords that make men weep, and love, and fall into a
+very ecstasy; he directs in his will that they bury this violin
+with him in his coffin. Well, Paganini is the lover, the instrument
+with its strings and tuning-pegs is the woman. The instrument
+must be beautifully made and come from the workshop of a right
+skilful maker; more than that, it must fall into the hands of
+an accomplished player. But, my poor lad, granting your actress
+is a divine instrument of amorous music, I don't believe you
+capable of drawing from it one single note of passion's fugue....
+Just consider. I don't spend my nights supping with ladies of
+the theatre; but we all know what an actress is. It is an animal
+generally agreeable to see and hear, always badly brought up,
+spoilt first by poverty and afterwards by luxury. Very busy into
+the bargain, which makes her as unromantic as anybody can well
+be. Something like a _concierge_ turned princess, and combining
+the petty spite of the porter's lodge with the caprices of the
+boudoir and the fagged nerves of the student.
+
+"You can hardly expect to dazzle T---- with the munificence and
+tastefulness of your presents. Your father gives you a hundred
+sous a week to spend; a great deal for a bookbinder, but very
+little for a woman whose gowns cost from five hundred to three
+thousand francs apiece. And, as you are neither a Manager to
+sign agreements, nor a Dramatic Author to apportion rôles, nor
+a Journalist to write notices, nor a young man from the draper's
+to take advantage of a moment's caprice as opportunity offers
+when delivering a new frock, I don't see in the least how you
+are to make her favour you, and I think your tragedy queen did
+quite right to slam her gate in your face."
+
+"Ah, well!" sighed Jean Servien, "I told you just now I loved
+her. It is not true. I hate her! I hate her for all the torments
+she has made me suffer, I hate her because she is adorable and
+men love her. And I hate all women, because they all love someone,
+and that someone is not I!"
+
+Garneret burst out laughing.
+
+"Candidly," he grinned, "they are not so far wrong. Your love
+has no spark of anything affectionate, kindly, useful in it.
+Since the day you fell in love with Mademoiselle T----, have
+you once thought of sparing her pain? Have you once dreamed of
+making a sacrifice for her sake? Has any touch of human kindness
+ever entered into your passion? Can it show one mark of manliness
+or goodness? Not it. Well, being the poor devils we are, with
+our own way to push in life and nothing to help us on, we must
+be brave and good. It is half-past one, and I have to get up
+at five. Good night. Cultivate a quiet mind, and come and see
+me."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Jean had only three days left to prepare for his examination for
+admission to the Ministry of Finance. These he spent at home,
+where the faces of father, aunt, and apprentice seemed strange and
+unfamiliar, so completely had they disappeared from his thoughts.
+Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid
+as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches. His aunt
+overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection;
+at night she would creep into his room to see if he was sound
+asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of her
+petty grievances and dislikes.
+
+Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacred
+spectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had left
+a kind of religious horror in her mind.
+
+"That boy is capable of anything," she used to say. One of the
+boy's pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady's back a
+war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.
+Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair,
+and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he
+would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by
+little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually
+gave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutiny
+showed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could not
+help laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it
+was. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the little
+farce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her head
+sharply, she had found reason to suspect something disrespectful
+was going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because of
+his lowly origin. The only folks she really hated were the rich.
+She was furious because the butcher's wife had gone to a wedding
+in a silk dress.
+
+At the upper end of the _Rue de Rennes_, beside a plot of waste
+and, was a stall where an old woman sold dusty ginger-bread and
+sticks of stale barley-sugar. She had a face the colour of brick
+dust under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale,
+steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple of
+francs, and on windy days the white dust from houses building
+in the neighbourhood covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nurses
+and mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones who were
+casting sheep's eyes at the sweetstuff:
+
+"Dirty!" they would say dissuasively; "dirty!"
+
+But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was past feeling
+anything. She did not beg. Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her
+good-day in passing, address her by name and fall into talk with
+her before the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a
+time. The staple of conversation with them both was the neighbours,
+accidents that had occurred in the public thoroughfares, cases
+of coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and trials of
+life and the ways of Providence, "which are not always just."
+
+Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies. He was
+a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the
+poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless
+resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant,
+as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces
+and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and
+empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man
+learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught
+at school. His thoughts flew from this woman to that other, who
+was so beautiful and whom he loved, and he saw life before him
+as a whole--a melancholy panorama. He told himself they must
+die both of them, and a hideous old woman, squatted before a
+few sodden sweetmeats, gave him the same impression of solemn
+serenity he had experienced at sight of the jewels from the Queen
+of Egypt's sepulchre.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+After sitting all day over little problems in arithmetic, he
+set off in the evening in working clothes for the _Avenue de
+l'Observatoire_. There, between two tallow candles, in front
+of a hoarding covered with ballads in illustrated covers, a fellow
+was singing in a cracked voice to the accompaniment of a guitar.
+A number of workmen and work-girls stood round listening to the
+music. Jean slipped into the circle, urged by the instinct that
+draws a stroller with nothing to do to the neighbourhood of light
+and noise and that love of a crowd which is characteristic of
+your Parisian. More isolated in the press, more alone than ever,
+he stood dreaming of the splendour and passion of some noble
+tragedy of Euripides or Shakespeare. It was some time before he
+noticed something soft touching and pressing against him from
+behind. He turned round and saw a work-girl in a little black
+hat with blue ribbons. She was young and pretty enough, but his
+mind was fixed on the awe-inspiring and superhuman graces of
+an Electra or a Lady Macbeth. She went on nuzzling against his
+back till he looked round again.
+
+"Monsieur," she said then; "will you just let me slip in front
+of you? I am so little; I shan't stop your seeing."
+
+She had a nice voice. The poise of her head, lifted and thrown
+back on a plump neck, showed a pair of bright eyes and good teeth
+between pouting lips. She glided, merry and alert, into the place
+Jean made for her without a word.
+
+The man with the guitar sang a ballad about caged birds and blossoms
+in flower-pots.
+
+"_Mine_," observed the work-girl to Jean, "are carnations, and
+I have birds too--canaries they are."
+
+At the moment he was thinking of some fair-faced châtelaine roaming
+under the battlements of a donjon.
+
+The work-girl went on:
+
+"I have a pair,--you understand, to keep each other company. Two
+is a nice number, don't you think so?"
+
+He marched off with his visions under the old trees of the Avenue.
+After a turn or two up and down, he espied the little work-girl
+hanging on the arm of a handsome young fellow, fashionably dressed,
+wearing a heavy gold watch-chain. Her admirer was catching her
+by the waist in the dusk of the trees, and she was laughing.
+
+Then Jean Servien felt sorry he had scorned her advances.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Jean was called up for examination, but with his insufficient
+preparation he got hopelessly fogged in the intricacies of a
+difficult, tricky piece of dictation and sums that were too long
+to be worked in the time allowed the candidates. He came home in
+despair. His father tried in his good-nature to reassure him.
+But a fortnight after came an unstamped letter summoning him to
+the Ministry, and after a three hours' wait he was shown into
+Monsieur Bargemont's private room. He recognized his own dictation
+in the big man's hand.
+
+"I am sorry," the functionary began, "to inform you that you
+have entirely failed to pass the tests set you. You do not know
+the language of your own country, sir; you write _Maisons-Lafitte_
+without an 's' to _Maisons_. You cannot spell! and what is more,
+you do not cross your 't's.' You _must_ know at your age that
+a 't' ought to be crossed. It's past understanding, sir!"
+
+And striking fiercely at the sheet of foolscap on which the mistakes
+were marked in red ink, he kept muttering: "It's past understanding,
+past understanding!" His face grew purple, and a swollen vein
+stood out on his forehead. A queer look in Jean's face gave him
+pause:
+
+"Young man," he resumed in a calmer voice, "whatever I can do
+for you, I will do, be sure of that; but you must not ask me to
+do impossibilities. We cannot enlist in the service of the State
+young men who spell so badly they write _Maisons-Lafitte_ without
+an 's' to the _Maisons_. It is in a way a patriotic duty for a
+Frenchman to know his own language. A year hence, the Ministry
+will hold another examination, and I will enter your name. You have
+a year before you; work hard, sir, and learn your mother-tongue."
+
+Jean stood there scarlet with rage, hate in his heart, his eyes
+aflame, his throat dry, his teeth clenched, unable to articulate
+a word; then he swung round like an automaton and darted from
+the room, banging the door after him with a noise of thunder;
+piles of books and papers rolled on to the floor of the Chief's
+office at the shock.
+
+Monsieur Bargemont was left alone to digest his stupefaction; even
+so his first thought was to save the honour of his Department.
+He reopened the door and shouted, "Leave the room!" after Jean,
+who, mastered once more by his natural timidity, was flying like
+a thief down the corridors.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+In the court, which was enlivened by a parterre of roses, Jean,
+carrying a letter in his hand, was trying to find his bearings
+according to the directions given him in a low voice, as if it
+were a secret, by the lay-brother who acted as doorkeeper. He
+was wandering uncertainly from door to door along the walls of
+the old silent buildings when a little boy noticed his plight
+and accosted him:
+
+"Do you want to see the Director? He is in his study with mamma.
+Go and wait in the parlour."
+
+This was a large hall with bare walls, a noble enough apartment
+in its unadorned simplicity, in spite of the mean horsehair chairs
+that stood round it. Above the fire-place, instead of a mirror,
+was a _Mater dolorosa_ that caught the eye by its dazzling
+whiteness. Big marble tears stood arrested in mid-career down
+the cheeks, while the features expressed the pious absorption
+of the Divine Mother's grief. Jean Servien read the inscription
+cut in red letters on the pedestal, which ran thus:
+
+  PRESENTED TO THE REVEREND ABBE BORDIER,
+               IN MEMORY OF
+        PHILIPPE-GUY DE THIERERCHE,
+             WHO DIED AT PAU,
+   NOVEMBER 11, 1867, IN THE SEVENTEENTH
+             YEAR OF HIS AGE,
+  BY THE COUNTESS VALENTINE DE THIERERCHE,
+       NÉE DE BRUILLE DE SAINT-AMAND.
+         _LAUDATE PUERI DOMINUM_
+
+Then he forgot his anxieties, forgot he was there to beg for
+employment, shook off the instinctive dread that had seized him
+on the threshold of the great silent house. He forgot his fears
+and hopes--hopes of being promoted usher! He was absorbed by
+this cruel domestic drama revealed to him in the inscription.
+A scion of one of the greatest families of France, a pupil of
+the Abbé Bordier, attacked by phthisis in the midst of his now
+profitless studies and leaving school, not to enjoy life and
+taste the glorious pleasures only those contemn who have drained
+them to the dregs, but to die at a southern town in the arms of
+his mother whose overwhelming, but still self-conscious grief
+was symbolized by this pompous memorial of her sorrow. He could
+feel, he could see it all. The three Latin words that represent
+the stricken mother saying: "Children, praise ye the Lord who
+hath taken away my child," astonished him by their austere piety,
+while at the same time he admired the aristocratic bearing that
+was preserved even in the presence of death.
+
+He was still lost in these day-dreams when an old priest beckoned
+him to walk into an inner room. The worthy man took the letter
+of recommendation which Jean handed him, set on his big nose a
+pair of spectacles with round glasses for all the world like
+the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, and proceeded to
+read the letter, holding it out at the full stretch of his arm.
+The windows giving on the garden stood open, and a tendril of
+wild vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a crucifix of
+old ivory, while a light breeze set the papers on it fluttering
+like white wings.
+
+The Abbé Bordier, his reading concluded, turned to the young man,
+showing a deeply lined countenance and a forehead beautifully
+polished by age. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
+Then the worn eyelids lifted slowly and discovered a pair of grey
+eyes of a shade that somehow reminded you of an autumn morning.
+He lay back in his armchair, his legs stretched out in front of
+him, displaying his silver-buckled shoes and black stockings.
+
+"It seems then, my dear boy," he began, "you wish, so my venerable
+friend the Abbé Marguerite informs me, to devote yourself to
+teaching; and your idea would be to prepare for your degree while
+at the same time performing the duties of an assistant master
+to supervise the boys at their work. It is a humble office; but
+it will depend entirely on yourself, my dear young friend, to
+dignify it by a heartfelt zeal and a determination to succeed.
+I shall entrust the studies of the _Remove_ to your care. Our
+bursar will inform you of the conditions attaching to the post."
+
+Jean bowed and made to leave the room; but suddenly the Abbé Bordier
+beckoned him to stop and asked abruptly:
+
+"You understand the rules of verse?"
+
+"Latin verse?" queried Jean.
+
+"No, no! French verse. Now, would you rhyme _trône_ with _couronne_?
+The rhyme is not, it must be allowed, quite satisfactory to the
+ear, yet the usage of the great writers authorizes it."
+
+So saying, the old fellow laid hold of a bulky manuscript book.
+
+"Listen," he cried, "listen. It is St. Fabricius addressing the
+Proconsul Flavius:
+
+  _Achève, fais dresser l'appareil souhaité
+  De ma mort, ou plutôt de ma félicité.
+  Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son céleste trône,
+  Déjà me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne._
+
+"Do you think it would be better if he said:
+
+  _Achève, fais dresser l'appareil souhaité
+  De ma mort, ou plutôt de ma félicité.
+  Je vois le Roi des Rois me tendre la couronne,
+  Quel n'en est le prix quand c'est Dieu qui la donne!_
+
+"Doubtless these latter lines are more correct than the others,
+but they are less vigorous, and a poet should never sacrifice
+meaning to metre.
+
+  _Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son céleste trône,
+  Déjà me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne."_
+
+This time, as he declaimed the verses, he went through the
+corresponding gestures of tendering a gift and plaiting a garland.
+
+"It is better so," he added, "better so!"
+
+Jean, in some surprise, said yes, it was certainly better.
+
+"Certainly better, yes," cried the old poet, smiling with the
+happy innocence of a little child.
+
+Then he confided in Jean that it was a very difficult thing indeed
+to write poetry. You must get the cæsura in the right place,
+bring in the rhyme naturally, make your rhythm run in divers
+cadences, now strong, now sweet, sometimes onomatopoetic, use
+only words either elevated in themselves or dignified by the
+circumstances.
+
+He read one passage of his Tragedy because he had his doubts
+about the number of feet in the line, another because he thought
+it contained some bold strokes happily conceived, then a third
+to elucidate the two first, eventually the whole five acts from
+start to finish. He acted the words as he read, modulating his
+voice to suit the various characters, stamping and storming,
+and to adjust his black skullcap--it _would_ tumble off at the
+pathetic parts--dealing himself a succession of sounding slaps
+on the crown of his head.
+
+This sacred drama, in which no woman appeared, was to be played
+by the pupils of the Institution at a forthcoming function. The
+previous year he had staged his first tragedy, _le Baptême
+de Clovis_, in the same approved style. A regular, Monsieur
+Schuver, had arranged garlands of paper roses to represent the
+battlefield of Tolbiac and the basilica at Rheims. To give a
+wild, barbaric look to the boys who represented Clovis' henchmen,
+the sister superintendent of the wardrobe had tacked up their
+white trousers to the knee. But the Abbé Bordier hoped greater
+things still for his new piece.
+
+Jean applauded and improved upon these ambitious projects. His
+suggestions for scenery and costumes were admirable. He would
+have the ruthless Flavius seated on a curule chair of ivory,
+draped with purple, erected before a portico painted on the back
+cloth. The costumes of the Roman soldiers, he insisted, must
+be copied from those on Trajan's Column.
+
+His words opened superb vistas before the old priest's eyes;
+he was enchanted, ravished, yet full of doubts and fears. Alas!
+Monsieur Schuver was quite helpless if it came to designing anything
+more ambitious than his paper roses. Then Jean must needs take
+a look round in the shed where the properties were stored, and
+the two discussed together how the stage must be set and the
+side-scenes worked. Jean took measurements, drew up a plan, worked
+out an estimate. He manifested a passionate eagerness that was
+surprising, albeit the old priest took it all as a matter of
+course. A batten would come here, a practicable door there. The
+actor would enter there...
+
+But the worthy priest checked him:
+
+"Say the reciter, my dear boy; _actor_ is not a word for
+self-respecting people."
+
+Barring this trifling misunderstanding, they were in perfect
+accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbé Bordier's
+shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor
+of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse
+that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien
+was smiling at the vision only _his_ eyes could see of Gabrielle,
+the inspirer of all his enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+It was nearly the end of the long evening preparation and absolute
+quiet reigned in the schoolroom. The broad lamp-shades concentrated
+the light on the tangled heads of the boys, who were working at
+their lessons or sitting in a brown study with their noses on
+the desks. The only sounds were the crackling of paper, the lads'
+breathing and the scratch, scratch of steel pens. The youngest
+there, his cheeks still browned by the sea-breezes, was dreaming
+over his half-finished exercise of a beach on the Normandy coast
+and the sand-castles he and his friends used to build, to see
+them swept away presently by the waves of the rising tide.
+
+At the top of the great room, at the high desk where the
+Superintendent of Studies had solemnly installed him underneath
+the great ebony crucifix, Jean Servien, his head between his
+two hands, was reading a Latin poet.
+
+He felt utterly sad and lonely; but he had not realized yet that
+his new life was an actual fact, and from moment to moment he
+expected the schoolroom would suddenly vanish and the desks with
+their litter of dictionaries and grammars and the young heads
+gilded by the lamp-light melt into thin air.
+
+Suddenly a paper pellet, shot from the far end of the hall, struck
+him on the cheek. He turned pale and cried in a voice shaking
+with anger:
+
+"Monsieur de Grizolles, leave the room!"
+
+There was some whispering and stifled laughter, then peace was
+restored. The scratching of pens began again, and exercises were
+passed surreptitiously from hand to hand for cribbing purposes.
+
+He was an usher.
+
+His father had come to this decision by the advice of Monsieur
+Marguerite, the _vicaire_ of his parish and a friend of the Abbé
+Bordier. The bookbinder, having a high respect for knowledge,
+entertained a correspondingly high idea of the status of all its
+ministers. Assistant master struck him as an imposing title, and
+he was delighted to have his son connected with an aristocratic
+and religious foundation.
+
+"Your son," the Abbé Marguerite told him, "will read for his
+Master's degree in the intervals of his duties, and the title
+of Licencié-ès-Lettres will open the door to the higher walks
+of teaching. We have known assistants rise to high positions
+in the University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes' chair."
+
+These considerations had clenched the bookbinder's resolution,
+and this was now the third day of Jean's ushership.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Three months had dragged by. It was a Friday; a hot, nauseating
+smell of fried fish filled the refectory; a strong drought blew
+cold about feet encased in wet boots; the walls dripped with
+moisture, and outside the barred windows a fine rain was falling
+from a grey sky. The boys, seated at marble-topped tables, were
+making a hideous rattle with their forks and tin cups, while
+one of their schoolfellows, seated at the desk in the middle of
+the great room, was reading aloud, as the regulations direct,
+a passage from Rollin's _Ancient History_.
+
+Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill-washed earthenware
+plate, had cold feet and a sore heart. Something resembling rotten
+wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the servers
+were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in
+the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping
+voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher's ears.
+He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of sentences:
+"_She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women
+unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and
+intellect... her person more compelling than any magnificence
+of adornment.... Her galley entered the Cydnus... the poop of
+the vessel shone resplendent with gold, the sails were of Tyrian
+purple, the oars of silver._"
+
+Then the seductive names of _Nereids, flutes, perfumes_. The
+hot blood flooded his cheeks. The woman who for him was the sole
+and only incarnation of the whole race of womankind throughout the
+ages rose before his mental sight with a surprising clearness;
+every hair of his body stood on end in an agonizing spasm of
+desire, and he dug his nails into the palms of his hands. The
+vision caused him an unspeakable yet delicious pain--Gabrielle
+in a loose _peignoir_ at a small, daintily ordered table gay
+with flowers and glasses. He saw it all quite clearly; his gaze
+searched every fold of the soft material that covered her bosom
+and rose and fell at each breath she drew. Face and neck and
+lively hands had a surprisingly brilliant yet so natural a sheen
+that they exhaled amorous invitation as if they had been verily
+of flesh and blood. The superb moulding of the lips, pouting
+like a ripe mulberry, and the exquisite grain of the skin were
+manifest--treasures such as men risk death and crime to win.
+It was the actress, in fine, seen by the two eyes which of all
+eyes in the whole world had learned to see her best. She was not
+alone; a man was looking at her with a penetrating intensity as
+he filled her glass. They were straining one towards the other.
+Jean could not restrain his sobs. Suddenly he seemed to be falling
+from the top of a high tower. The Superintendent of Studies was
+standing in front of him and saying:
+
+"Monsieur Servien, will you see about punishing that boy Laboriette,
+who is emptying his leavings in his neighbour's pocket?"
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Superintendent, with his large, flat face and the sly ways
+of a peasant turned monk, was a constant thorn in Jean's side.
+"_Be firm, be firm, sir_," was his parable every day, and
+he never missed an opportunity of doing the usher an ill turn
+with the Director.
+
+The early days of Jean's servitude had slipped by in an enervating
+monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly
+aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while
+the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one
+exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud
+of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled in big letters on
+his light trousers, and overjoyed at the chance of hurting an
+inferior's feelings, had from the very first day declared war
+against the poor usher. He used to empty ink-bottles into his
+desk, stick cobbler's wax on his chair, and let off crackers
+in the middle of school.
+
+Hearing the disturbance, the Superintendent would march in with
+the airs of a Police Inspector and bid Jean: "_Be firm, sir!
+be firm!_"
+
+Far from taking his advice, Jean affected an excessive easiness of
+temper. One day he caught a boy in the act of drawing a caricature
+of himself; he picked it up and glanced at it, then handed it
+back to the artist with a shrug of the shoulders.
+
+Such mildness was misconstrued and only weakened his authority.
+The usher's miseries grew acute, and he lost the patience that
+alleviated his sufferings. He could not put up with the lads'
+restlessness, their happy laughter and light-hearted enjoyment
+of life. He showed temper, venting his spite on mere acts of
+thoughtlessness or simple ebullitions of high spirits. Then he would
+fall into a sort of torpor. He had long fits of absentmindedness,
+during which he was deaf to every noise. It became the fashion
+to keep birds, plait nets, shoot arrows, and crow like a cock
+in Monsieur Jean Servien's class-room. Even the boys from other
+divisions would slip out of their own classrooms to peep in at
+the windows of this one, about which such amazing stories were
+told, and the ceiling of which was decorated with little figures
+swinging at the end of a string stuck to the plaster with chewed
+paper.
+
+De Grizolles had installed a regular Roman catapult for shooting
+kidney-beans at the usher's head.
+
+Jean would drive the young gentleman out of the room. The
+Superintendent of Studies would reinstate him, only to be turned
+out again. And each time meant a fresh report to the Director.
+The Abbé Bordier, who never found patience to hear the worthy
+Superintendent out to the end, could only throw up his hands to
+heaven and declare they would be the death of him between them.
+But the impression became fixed in his mind that the Assistant
+in charge of the _Remove_ was a source of trouble.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Sunday was a day of cheerful indolence, devoted to attending
+the services in the Chapel, which was filled with the scent of
+incense all day long. At Vespers, while the clear, boyish voices
+intoned the long-drawn canticles, Jean would be gazing at some
+woman's face half seen in the dusk of the galleries where the
+pupils' mothers and sisters knelt during the office, their haughty
+air contradicting the humble attitude. At the sound of the _Ave
+maris stella_, the lowly bookbinder's son would lift his eyes
+to these ladies of high degree, the plainest of whom feels herself
+a jewel of price and cherishes a natural and unaffected pride of
+birth. The chants and incense, the flowers and sacred images,
+whatever troubles the imagination and stimulates to prayer, all
+these things united to enervate his spirit and deliver him a
+trembling victim to the glamour of these patrician dames.
+
+But it was Gabrielle he worshipped in them, Gabrielle to whom
+he offered up his prayers, his supplications. All that element
+in religion which gives to love the fascination of forbidden
+fruit appealed powerfully to his imagination. Unbeliever though
+he was, he loved the Magdalen's God and savoured the creed that
+has bestowed on lovers one amorous bliss the more--the bliss
+of losing their immortal souls.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Little by little the boys wearied of this insubordination, their
+imaginations proving unequal to the invention of any new forms
+of mischief. Even de Grizolles himself left off shooting beans.
+Instead, he conceived the notion of brewing chocolate inside
+his desk with a spirit-lamp and a silver patty-pan. Jean left
+him in peace and reopened his Sophocles with a sigh of relief.
+But the Superintendent, going by in the court, caught a smell of
+cooking, searched the desks and unearthed the patty-pan, which he
+offered, still warm, for the Reverend the Director's inspection,
+with the words: "There! that's what goes on in Monsieur Servien's
+class-room." The Director slapped his forehead, declared they
+would be the death of him and ordered the patty-pan to be restored
+to its owner. Then he sent for the Assistant in charge and
+administered a severe reprimand, because he believed it to be
+his bounden duty to do so.
+
+The next day was a whole holiday, and Jean went to spend the
+day at his father's. The latter asked him if he was ready for
+his professorial examination.
+
+"My lad," he adjured him, "be quick and find a good post if you
+want me to see you in it. One of these days your aunt and I will
+be going out at yonder door feet foremost. The old lady had a
+fit of dizziness last week on the stairs. _I_ am not ill, but
+I can feel I am worn out. I have done a hard life's work in the
+world."
+
+He looked at his tools, and walked away, a bent old man!
+
+Then Jean gathered up in both hands the old work-worn tools, all
+polished with use, scissors, punches, knives, folders, scrapers,
+and kissed them, the tears running down his cheeks.
+
+At that moment his aunt came in, looking for her spectacles.
+Furtively, in a whisper, she asked him for a little money. In
+old days she used to save the halfpence to slip them into the
+"little lad's " hand; now, grown feebler than the child, she
+trembled at the idea of destitution; she hoarded, and asked charity
+of the priests. The fact is, her wits were weakening. Very often
+she would inform her brother that she did not mean to let the
+week pass without going to see the Brideaus. Now the Brideaus,
+jobbing tailors at Montrouge in their lifetime, had been dead,
+both husband and wife, for the last two years. Jean gave her a
+louis, which she took with a delight so ugly to see that the
+poor lad took refuge out of doors.
+
+Presently, without quite knowing how, he found himself on the
+_Quai_ near the _Pont d'Iéna_. It was a bright day, but the
+gloomy walls of the houses and the grey look of the river banks
+seemed to proclaim that life is hard and cruel. Out in the
+stream a dredger, all drab with marl, was discharging one after
+the other its bucket-fuls of miry gravel. By the waterside a
+stout oaken crane was unloading millstones, wheeling backwards
+and forwards on its axis. Under the parapet, near the bridge,
+an old dame with a copper-red face sat knitting stockings as
+she waited for customers to buy her apple-puffs.
+
+Jean Servien thought of his childhood; many a time had his aunt
+taken him to the same spot, many a time had they watched together
+the dredger hauling aboard, bucketful by bucketful, the muddy
+dregs of the river. Very often his aunt had stopped to exchange
+ideas with the old stallkeeper, while he examined the counter
+which was spread with a napkin, the carafe of liquorice-water
+that stood on it, and the lemon that served as stopper. Nothing
+was changed, neither the dredger, nor the rafts of timber, nor
+the old woman, nor the four ponderous stallions at either end
+of the _Pont d'Iéna_.
+
+Yes, Jean Servien could hear the trees along the _Quai_, the
+waters of the river, the very stones of the parapet calling to
+him:
+
+"We know you; you are the little boy his aunt, in a peasant's
+cap, used to bring here to see us in former days. But we shall
+never see your aunt again, nor her print shawl, nor her umbrella
+which she opened against the sun; for she is old now and does
+not take her nephew walks any more, for he is a grown man now.
+Yes, the child is grown into a man and has been hurt by life,
+while he was running after shadows."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+One day, in the midday interval, he was informed that a visitor
+was asking for him in the parlour; the news filled him with delight,
+for he was very young and still counted on the possibilities of
+the unknown. In the parlour he found Monsieur Tudesco, wearing
+his waistcoat of ticking and holding a peaked hat in one hand.
+
+"My young friend," began the Italian, "I learned from your respected
+father's apprentice that you were confined in this sanctuary of
+studious learning. I venture to say your fortune is overcast
+with clouds, at least I fear it is. The lowliness of your estate
+is not gilded like that of the Latin poet, and you are struggling
+with a valiant heart against adverse fortune. That is why I am
+come to offer you the hand of friendship, and I venture to say
+you will regard as a mark of my amity and my esteem the request
+I proffer for a crown-piece, which I find needful to sustain
+an existence consecrated to learned studies."
+
+The parlour was filling with pupils and their friends and relations.
+Mothers and sons were exchanging sounding kisses, followed by
+exclamations of "How hot you are, dear!" and prolonged whisperings.
+Girls in light summer frocks were making sheep's eyes on the sly
+at their brothers' friends, while fathers were pulling cakes
+of chocolate out of their pockets.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, entirely at his ease among these fine people, did
+not seem at all aware of the young usher's hideous embarrassment.
+To the latter's "Come outside; we can talk better there," the
+old man replied unconcernedly, "Oh, no, I don't think so."
+
+He welcomed each lady who came in with a profound bow, and
+distributed friendly taps on the cheek among the young aristocrats
+around him.
+
+Lying back in an arm-chair and displaying his famous waistcoat
+to the very best advantage, he enlarged on such episodes of his
+life as he thought most impressive:
+
+"The fates were vanquished," he was telling Servien, "my livelihood
+was assured. The landlord of an inn had entrusted his books to me,
+and under his roof I was devoting my attention to mathematical
+calculations, not, like the illustrious and ill-starred Galileo,
+to measure the stars, but to establish with exactitude the profits
+and losses of a trader. After two days' performance of these
+honourable duties, the Commissary of Police made a descent upon
+the inn, arrested the landlord and landlady and carried away my
+account books with him. No, I had not vanquished the fates!"
+
+Every head was turned, every eye directed in amazement towards
+this extraordinary personage. There was much whispering and some
+half-suppressed laughter. Jean, seeing himself the centre of
+mocking glances and looks of annoyance, drew Tudesco towards the
+door. But just as the Marquis was making a series of sweeping
+bows by way of farewell to the ladies, Jean found himself face
+to face with the Superintendent of Studies, who said to him:
+
+"Oh! Monsieur Servien, will you go and take detention in Monsieur
+Schuver's absence?"
+
+The Marquis pressed his young friend's hand, watched him depart
+to his duties, and then, turning back to the groups gathered in
+the parlour, he waved his hand with a gesture at once dignified
+and appealing to call for silence.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "I have translated into the
+French tongue, which Brunetto Latini declared to be the most
+delectable of all, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the glorious
+masterpiece of the divine Torquato Tasso. This great work I wrote
+in a garret without fire, on candle wrappers, on snuff papers----"
+
+At this point, from one corner of the parlour, a crow of childish
+laughter went off like a rocket.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco stopped short and smiled, his hair flying, his
+eye moist, his arms thrown open as if to embrace and bless; then
+he resumed:
+
+"I say it: the laugh of innocence is the ill-starred veteran's
+joy. I see from where I stand groups worthy of Correggio's brush,
+and I say: Happy the families that meet together in peace in
+the heart of their fatherland! Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me
+if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius. I am an old tree
+riven by the levin-bolt."
+
+And he went from group to group holding out his peaked felt hat,
+into which, amid an icy silence, fell coin by coin a dribble
+of small silver.
+
+But suddenly the Superintendent of Studies seized the hat and
+pushed the old man outside.
+
+"Give me back my hat," bawled Monsieur Tudesco to the Superintendent,
+who was doing his best to restore the coins to the donors; "give
+back the old man's hat, the hat of one who has grown grey in
+learned studies."
+
+The Superintendent, scarlet with rage, tossed the felt into the
+court, shouting:
+
+"Be off, or I will call the police."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco took to his heels with great agility.
+
+The same evening the new Assistant was summoned to the Director's
+presence and received his dismissal.
+
+"Unhappy boy! unhappy boy!" said the Abbé Bordier, beating his
+brow; "you have been the cause of an intolerable scandal, of a
+sort unheard of in this house, and that just when I had so much
+to do."
+
+And as he spoke, the scattered papers fluttered like white birds
+on the Director's table.
+
+Making his way through the parlour, Jean saw the _Mater dolorosa_
+as before, and read again the names of Philippe-Guy Thiererche
+and the Countess Valentine.
+
+"I hate them," he muttered through clenched teeth, "I hate them
+all."
+
+Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity. Every day they
+had badgered him with reports against Jean Servien. This time he
+had given way; he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really
+could make nothing of this tale about a beggar. He changed his
+mind, ran to the door and called to the young man to corne back.
+
+Jean turned and faced him:
+
+"No!" he cried, "no! I can bear the life no longer; I am unhappy,
+I am full of misery--and hate."
+
+"Poor lad!" sight the Director, letting his arms drop by his side.
+
+That evening he did not write a single line of his Tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The kind-hearted bookbinder harassed his son with no reproaches.
+
+After dinner he went and sat at his shop-door, and looked at the
+first star that peeped out in the evening sky.
+
+"My boy," said he, "I am not a man of learning like you; but
+I have a notion--and you must not rob me of it, because it is
+a comfort to me--that, when I have finished binding books, I
+shall go to that star. The idea occurred to me from what I have
+read in the paper that the stars are all worlds. What is that
+star called?"
+
+"Venus, father."
+
+"In my part of the world, they say it is the shepherd's star.
+It's a beautiful star, and I think your mother is there. That
+is why I should like to go there."
+
+The old man passed his knotted fingers across his brow, murmuring:
+
+"God forgive me, how one forgets those who are gone!"
+
+
+Jean sought balm for his wounded spirit in reading poetry and in
+long, dreamy walks. His head was filled with visions--a welter of
+sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and
+Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phædra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia,
+and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost
+formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers
+and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid
+with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; "If ever
+we win to life, it will be through you. And what a bliss it will
+be for you, Jean Servien, to have created us. How you will love
+us!" And Jean Servien would answer them; "Come back, come back,
+or rather do not leave me. But I cannot tell how to make you
+visible; you vanish away when I gaze at you, and I cannot net
+you in the meshes of beautiful verse!"
+
+Again and again he tried to write poems, tragedies, romances;
+but his indolence, his lack of ideas, his fastidiousness brought
+him to a standstill before half a dozen lines were written, and
+he would toss the all but virgin page into the fire. Quickly
+discouraged, he turned his attention to politics. The funeral
+of Victor Noir, the Belleville risings, the _plébiscite_, filled
+his thoughts; he read the papers, joined the groups that gathered
+on the boulevards, followed the yelping pack of white blouses,
+and was one of the crowd that hooted the Commissary of Police as
+he read the Riot Act. Disorder and uproar intoxicated him; his
+heart beat as if it would burst his bosom, his enthusiasm rose
+to fever pitch, amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence.
+Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers
+till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs
+and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and
+loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
+There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the
+scutcheon blazoned on its façade and the two lions lying white
+in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, he would
+cast a look of hatred at the building. Presently, as he resumed
+his march, he would picture himself standing, musket in hand, on
+a barricade, in the smoke of insurrection, along with workmen
+and young fellows from the schools, as we see it all represented
+in lithographs.
+
+One day in July, he saw a troop of white blouses moving along
+the boulevard and shouting: "To Berlin!" Ragamuffin street-boys
+ran yelping round. Respectable citizens lined the sidewalks,
+staring in wonder, and saying nothing; but one of them, a stout,
+tall, red-faced man, waved his hat and shouted:
+
+"To Berlin! long live the Emperor!"
+
+Jean recognized Monsieur Bargemont.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+On top of the ramparts. Bivouac huts and stacked rifles guarded
+by a sentinel. National Guards are playing shove ha'-penny. The
+autumn sunshine lies clear and soft and splendid on the roofs
+of the beleaguered city. Outside the fortifications, the bare,
+grey fields; in the distance the barracks of the outlying forts,
+over which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the horizon
+the hills whence the Prussian batteries are firing on Paris,
+leaving long trails of white smoke. The guns thunder. They have
+been thundering for a month, and no one so much as hears them
+now. Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped _képi_ and the
+tunic with brass buttons, are seated side by side on sand-bags,
+bending over the same book.
+
+It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud the delicious
+episode of Silenus. Two youths have discovered the old god lying
+in a drunken sleep--he is always drunk and it makes men mock at
+him, albeit they still revere him--and have bound him in chains
+of flowers to force him to sing. Æglé, the fairest of the Naïads,
+has stained his cheeks scarlet with juice of the mulberry, and
+lo! he sings.
+
+"He sings how from out the mighty void were drawn together the
+germs of earth and air and sea and of the subtle fire likewise;
+how of these beginnings came all the elements, and the fluid
+globe of the firmament grew into solid being; how presently the
+ground began to harden and to imprison Nereus in the ocean, and
+little by little to take on the shapes of things. He sings how
+anon continents marvelled to behold a new-emerging sun; how the
+clouds broke up in the welkin and the rains descended, what time
+the woods put forth their first green and beasts first prowled
+by ones and twos over the unnamed mountain-tops."
+
+Jean broke off to observe:
+
+"How admirably it all brings out Virgil's spirit, so serious
+and tender! The poet has put a cosmogony in an idyll. Antiquity
+called him the Virgin. The name well befits his Muse, and we
+should picture her as a Mnemosyne pondering over the works of
+men and the causes of things!"
+
+Meanwhile Garneret, with a more concentrated attention and his
+finger on the lines, was marshalling his ideas. The players were
+still at their game, and the little copper discs they used for
+throwing kept rolling close to his feet, and the canteen-woman
+passed backwards and forwards with her little barrel.
+
+"See this, Servien," he said presently; "in these lines Virgil,
+or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model,
+has anticipated Laplace's great hypothesis and Charles Lyell's
+theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from
+which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the plastic
+rind of the globe consolidating; then the formation of islands
+and continents; then the rains ceasing and first appearance of
+the sun, heretofore veiled by opaque clouds; then vegetable life
+manifesting itself before animal, because the latter cannot maintain
+itself and endure save by absorbing the elements of the former----"
+
+At that moment a stir was apparent along the ramparts. The players
+broke off their game and the two friends lifted their heads.
+It was a train of wounded going by. Under the curtains of the
+lumbering ambulance-waggons marked with the Geneva red cross could
+be seen livid faces tied up in bloodstained bandages. Linesmen
+and _mobiles_ tramped behind, their arms hanging in slings. The
+Nationals proffered them handfuls of tobacco and asked for news.
+But the wounded men only shook their heads and trudged stolidly
+on their way.
+
+"Aren't _we_ to have some fighting soon as well as other fellows?"
+cried Garneret.
+
+To which Servien growled back:
+
+"We must first put down the traitors and incapables who govern
+us, proclaim the Commune and march all together against the
+Prussians."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+Hatred of the Empire which had left him to rot in a back-shop
+and a school class-room, love of the Republic that was to bring
+every blessing in its train had, since the proclamation of September
+4, raised Jean Servien's warlike enthusiasm to fever heat. But
+he soon wearied of the long drills in the Luxembourg gardens
+and the hours of futile sentry-go behind the fortifications.
+The sight of tipsy shopkeepers in a frenzy of foolish ardour,
+half drink, half patriotism, sickened him, and this playing at
+soldiers, tramping through the mud on an empty stomach, struck
+him as after all an odious, ugly business.
+
+Luckily Garneret was his comrade in the ranks, and Servien felt
+the salutary effect of that well-stored, well-ordered mind, the
+servant of duty and stern reality. Only this saved him from a
+passion, as futile in the past as it was hopeless in the future,
+which was assuming the dangerous character of a mental disease.
+
+He had not seen Gabrielle again for a long time. The theatres
+were shut; all he knew, from the newspapers, was that she was
+nursing the wounded in the theatre ambulance. He had no wish
+now to meet her.
+
+When he was not on duty, he used to lie in bed and read (it was a
+hard winter and wood was scarce), or else scour the boulevards and
+mix with the throng of idlers in search of news. One evening, early
+in January, as he was passing the corner of the _Rue Drouot_, his
+attention was attracted by the clamour of voices, and he saw
+Monsieur Bargemont being roughly handled by an ill-looking gang
+of National Guards.
+
+"I am a better Republican than any of you," the big man was
+vociferating; "I have always protested against the infamies of
+the Empire. But when you shout: Vive Blanqui!... excuse me...
+I have a right to shout: Vive Jules Favre! excuse me, I have a
+perfect right----" But his voice was drowned in a chorus of yells.
+Men in _képis_ shook their fists at him, shouting: "Traitor! no
+surrender! down with Badinguet!" His broad face, distraught with
+terror, still bore traces of its erstwhile look of smug effrontery.
+A girl in the crowd shrieked: "Throw him in the river!" and a
+hundred voices took up the cry. But just at that moment the crowd
+swayed back violently and Monsieur Bargemont darted into the
+forecourt of the _Mairie_. A squad of police officers received
+him in their ranks and closed in round him. He was saved!
+
+Little by little the crowd melted away, and Jean heard a dozen
+different versions of the incident as it travelled with
+ever-increasing exaggeration from mouth to mouth. The last comers
+learned the startling news that they had just arrested a German
+general officer, who had sneaked into Paris as a spy to betray
+the city to the enemy with the connivance of the Bonapartists.
+
+The streets being once more passable, Jean saw Monsieur Bargemont
+come out of the _Mairie_. He was very red and a sleeve of his
+overcoat was torn away.
+
+Jean made up his mind to follow him.
+
+Along the boulevards he kept him in view at a distance, and not
+much caring whether he lost track of him or no; but when the
+Functionary turned up a cross street, the young man closed in
+on his quarry. He had no particular suspicion even now; a mere
+instinct urged him to dog the man's heels. Monsieur Bargemont
+wheeled to the right, into a fairly broad street, empty and badly
+lighted by petroleum flares that supplied the place of the gas
+lamps. It was the one street Jean knew better than another. He
+had been there so often and often! The shape of the doors, the
+colour of the shop-fronts, the lettering on the sign-boards,
+everything about it was familiar; not a thing in it, down to
+the night-bell at the chemist's and druggist's, but called up
+memories, associations, to touch him. The footsteps of the two men
+echoed in the silence. Monsieur Bargemont looked round, advanced
+a few paces more and rang at a door. Jean Servien had now come up
+with him and stood beside him under the archway. It was the same
+door he had kissed one night of desperation, Gabrielle's door. It
+opened; Jean took a step forward and Monsieur Bargemont, going
+in first, left it open, thinking the National Guard there was
+a tenant going home to his lodging. Jean slipped in and climbed
+two flights of the dark staircase. Monsieur Bargemont ascended
+to the third floor and rang at a door on the landing, which was
+opened. Jean could hear Gabrielle's voice saying:
+
+"How late you are coming home, dear; I have sent Rosalie to bed;
+I was waiting up for you, you see."
+
+The man replied, still puffing and panting with his exertions:
+
+"Just fancy, they wanted to pitch me into the river, those
+scoundrels! But never you mind, I've brought you something mighty
+rare and precious--a pot of butter."
+
+"Like Little Red Ridinghood," laughed Gabrielle's voice. "Come
+in and you shall tell me all about it.... Hark! do you hear?"
+
+"What, the guns? Oh! that never stops."
+
+"No, the noise of a fall on the stairs."
+
+"You're dreaming!"
+
+"Give me the candle, I'm going to look."
+
+Monsieur Bargemont went down two or three steps and saw Jean
+stretched motionless on the landing.
+
+"A drunkard," he said; "there's so many of them! They were drunkards,
+those chaps who wanted to drown me."
+
+He was holding his light to Jean's ashy face, while Gabrielle,
+leaning over the rail, looked on:
+
+"It's not a drunken man," she said; "he is too white. Perhaps
+it is a poor young fellow dying of hunger. When you're brought
+down to rations of bread and horseflesh----"
+
+Then she looked more carefully under frowning brows, and muttered:
+
+"It's very queer, it's really very queer!"
+
+"Do you know him?" asked Bargemont.
+
+"I am trying to remember----"
+
+But there was no need to try; already she had recalled it all--how
+her hand had been kissed at the gate of the little house at Bellevue.
+
+Running to her rooms, she returned with water and a bottle of
+ether, knelt beside the fainting man, and slipping her arm, which
+was encircled by the white band of a nursing sister, under his
+shoulders, raised Jean's head. He opened his eyes, saw her, heaved
+the deepest sigh of love ever expelled from a human breast and
+felt his lids fall softly to again. He remembered nothing; only
+she was bending over him; and her breath had caressed his cheek.
+Now she was bathing his temples, and he felt a delicious sense
+of returning life. Monsieur Bargemont with the candle leant over
+Jean Servien, who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the
+man's coarse red cheek within an inch of the actress's delicate
+ear. He gave a great cry and a convulsive spasm shook his body.
+
+"Perhaps it is an epileptic fit," said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing;
+he was catching cold standing on the staircase.
+
+She protested:
+
+"We cannot leave a sick man without doing something for him. Go
+and wake Rosalie."
+
+He remounted the stairs, grumbling. Meantime Jean had got to his
+feet and was standing with averted head.
+
+She said to him in a low tone:
+
+"So you love me still?"
+
+He looked at her with an indescribable sadness:
+
+"No, I don't love you any longer"--and he staggered down the stairs.
+
+Monsieur Bargemont reappeared:
+
+"It's very curious," he said, "but I can't make Rosalie hear."
+
+The actress shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Look here, go away, will you? I have a horrid headache. Go away,
+Bargemont."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+She was Bargemont's mistress! The thought was torture to Jean
+Servien, the more atrocious from the unexpectedness of the discovery.
+He both hated and despised the coarse ruffian whose sham good-nature
+did not impose on him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted,
+mean-spirited bully. That pimply face, those goggle eyes, that
+forehead with the swollen black vein running across it, that heavy
+hand, that ugly, vulgar soul, could it be---- It sickened him to
+think of it! And disgust was the thing of all others Servien's
+delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. His morality was
+shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined
+perversions, romantic crimes. But Bargemont and his pot of butter!...
+Never to possess the most adorable of women, never to see her more,
+he was quite willing for the sacrifice still, but to know her in
+the arms of that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered
+life impossible.
+
+Absorbed in such thoughts, he found his way back instinctively
+to his own quarter of the city. Shells whistled over his head
+and burst with terrific reports. Flying figures passed him, their
+heads enveloped in handkerchiefs and carrying mattresses on their
+backs. At the corner of the _Rue de Rennes_ he tripped over a
+lamp-post lying across the pavement beside a half-demolished
+wall. In front of his father's shop he saw a huge hole. He went
+to open the door; a shell had burst it in and he could see the
+work-bench capsized in a dark corner.
+
+Then he remembered that the Germans were bombarding the left
+bank, and he felt a sudden impulse to roam the streets under the
+rain of iron.
+
+A voice hailed him, issuing from underground:
+
+"Is it you, my lad? Come in quick; you've given me a fine fright.
+Come down here; we are settled in the cellars."
+
+He followed his father and found beds arranged in the underground
+chambers, while the main cellar served as kitchen and sitting-room.
+The bookbinder had a map, and was pointing out to the _concierge_
+and tenants the position of the relieving armies. Aunt Servien
+sat in a dim corner, her eyes fixed in a dull stare, mumbling
+bits of biscuit soaked in wine. She had no notion of what was
+happening, but maintained an attitude of suspicion.
+
+The little assemblage, which had been living this subterranean
+life since the evening of the day before, asked what news young
+Servien brought. Then the bookbinder resumed the explanations
+which as an old soldier and a responsible man he had been asked
+to give the company.
+
+"The thing to do is," he continued, "to join hands with the Army
+of the Loire, piercing the circle of iron that shuts us in. Admiral
+La Roncière has carried the positions at Épinay away beyond
+Longjumeau----"
+
+Then turning to Jean:
+
+"My lad, just find me Longjumeau on the map; my eyes are not
+what they were at twenty, and these tallow candles give a very
+poor light."
+
+At that moment a tremendous explosion shook the solid walls and
+filled the cellar with dust. The women screamed; the porter went
+off to make his round of inspection, tapping the walls with his
+heavy keys; an enormous spider scampered across the vaulted roof.
+
+Then the conversation was resumed as if nothing had happened,
+and two of the lodgers started a game of cards on an upturned
+cask.
+
+Jean was dog-tired and fell asleep on the floor--a nightmare sleep.
+
+"Has the little lad come home?" asked Aunt Servien, still sucking
+at her biscuit.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+Old Servien, in his working jacket, stepped up to the bed; then,
+creeping away again on tip-toe:
+
+"He is asleep, Monsieur Garneret, he is asleep. The doctor tells
+us he is saved. He is a very good doctor! _You_ know that yourself,
+for he is your friend, and it was you brought him here. You have
+been our saviour, Monsieur Garneret."
+
+And the bookbinder turned his head away to wipe his eyes, walked
+across to the window, lifted the curtain and looked out into
+the sunlit street.
+
+"The fine weather will quite set him up again. But we have had
+six terrible weeks. I never lost heart; it is not in the nature
+of things that a father should despair of his son's life; still,
+you know, Monsieur Garneret, he has been very ill.
+
+"The neighbours have been very good to us; but it was a hard job
+nursing him in this cursed cellar. Just think, Monsieur Garneret,
+for twenty days we had to keep his head in ice."
+
+"You know that is the treatment for meningitis."
+
+The bookbinder came up confidentially to Garneret. He scratched his
+ear, rubbed his forehead, stroked his chin in great embarrassment.
+
+"My poor lad," he got started at last, "is in love, passionately
+in love. I have found it out from the things he said when he
+was delirious. It is not my way to interfere with what does not
+concern me; but as I see the matter is serious, I am going to
+ask you, for his own good, to tell me who it is, if you know
+her."
+
+Garneret shrugged his shoulders:
+
+"An actress! a tragedy actress! pooh!"
+
+The bookbinder pondered a moment; then:
+
+"Look you, Monsieur Garneret, I acted for the best in my poor boy's
+interest, but I blame myself. I tell myself this, the education I
+gave him has disqualified him for hard work and practical life....
+An actress, you say, a tragedy actress? Tastes of that sort must
+be acquired in the schools. Those times he was attending his
+classes, I used to get hold of his exercise books after he had
+gone to bed and read whatever there was in French. It was my
+way of checking his work; because, ignoramus as he may be, a
+man can see, with a little common sense, what is done properly
+and what is scamped. Well, Monsieur Garneret, I was terrified to
+find in his themes so many high-flown ideas; some of them were
+very fine, no doubt, and I copied out on a paper those that struck
+me most. But I used to tell myself: All these grand speeches,
+all these histories, taken from the books of the ancient Romans,
+are going to put my lad's head in a fever, and he will never know
+the truth of things. I was right, my dear Monsieur Garneret;
+it is school learning, look you, has made him fall in love with
+a tragedy actress----"
+
+Jean Servien raised himself up in bed.
+
+"Is that you, Garneret? I am very glad to see you."
+
+Then, after listening a moment:
+
+"Why, what is that noise?" he asked.
+
+Garneret told him it was Mont Valérien firing on the fortifications.
+The Commune was in full swing.
+
+"Vive la Commune!" cried Jean Servien, and he dropped his head
+back on the pillow with a smile.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+He was recovered and, with a book in his hand, was talking a
+quiet walk in the Luxembourg gardens. He had that feeling of
+harmless selfishness, that self-pity that comes with convalescence.
+Of his previous life, all he cared to remember was a charming
+face bending over him and a voice sweeter than the loveliest
+music murmuring: "So you love me still?" Oh! never fear, he would
+not answer now as he did on that dreadful staircase: "I don't
+love you any longer." No, he would answer with eyes and lips and
+open arms: "I shall love you always!" Still the odious spectre of
+his rival would cross his memory at times and cause him agonies.
+Suddenly his eyes were caught by an extraordinary sight.
+
+Two yards away from him in the garden, in front of the orange-house,
+was Monsieur Tudesco, burly and full-blown as usual, but how
+metamorphosed in costume! He wore a National Guard's tunic, covered
+with glittering _aiguillettes_; from his red sash peeped the
+butts of a brace of pistols. On his head was perched a _képi_
+with five gold bands. The central figure of a group of women
+and children, he was gazing at the heavens with as much tender
+emotion as his little green eyes were capable of expressing.
+His whole person breathed a sense of power and kindly patronage.
+His right hand rested at arm's length on a little boy's head,
+and he was addressing him in a set speech:
+
+"Young citizen, pride of your mother's heart, ornament of the
+public parks, hope of the Commune, hear the words of the proscribed
+exile. I say it: Young citizen, the 18th of March is a great day;
+it witnessed the foundation of the Commune, it rescued you from
+slavery. Grave on your heart's core that never-to-be-forgotten
+date. I say it: We have suffered and fought for you. Son of the
+disinherited and despairing, you shall be a free man!"
+
+He ended, and restoring the child to its mother, smiled upon
+his listeners of the fair sex, who were lost in admiration of
+his eloquence, his red sash, his gold lace and his green old
+age.
+
+Albeit it was three o'clock in the afternoon, he had not drunk
+more than he could carry, and he trod the sandy walks with a
+mien of masterful assurance amid the plaudits of the people.
+
+Jean advanced to meet him; he had a soft place in his heart for
+the old man. Monsieur Tudesco grasped his hand with a fatherly
+affection and declaimed:
+
+"I am overjoyed to see my dear disciple, the child of my intellect.
+Monsieur Servien, look yonder and never forget the sight; it is
+the spectacle of a free people."
+
+The fact is, a throng of citizens of both sexes was tramping over
+the lawns, picking the flowers in the beds and breaking branches
+from the trees.
+
+The two friends tried to find seats on a bench; but these were
+all occupied by _fédérés_ of all ranks huddled up on them and
+snoring in chorus. For this reason Monsieur Tudesco opined it
+was better to adjourn to a café.
+
+They came upon one in the _Place de l'Odéon_, where Monsieur
+Tudesco could display his striking uniform to his own satisfaction.
+
+"I am an engineer," he announced, when he was seated with his
+bitter before him, "an engineer in the service of the Commune,
+with the rank of Colonel."
+
+Jean thought it mighty strange all the same. No doubt he had heard
+his old tutor's tales about his confabulations at the dram-shop
+with the leaders of the Commune, but it struck him as extraordinary
+that the Monsieur Tudesco he knew should have blossomed into an
+engineer and Colonel under any circumstances. But there was the
+fact. Monsieur Tudesco manifested no surprise, not he!
+
+"Science!" he boasted, "science is everything! It's study does
+it! Knowledge is power! To vanquish the myrmidons of despotism,
+we must have science. That is why I am an engineer with the rank
+of Colonel."
+
+And Monsieur Tudesco went on to relate how he was charged with
+very special duties--to discover the underground passages which
+the instruments of tyranny had dug beneath the capital, tunnelling
+under the two branches of the Seine, for the transport of munitions
+of war. At the head of a gang of navvies, he inspected the palaces,
+hospitals, barracks and religious houses, breaking up cellars
+and staving in drain-pipes. Science! science is everything! He
+also inspected the crypts of churches, to unearth traces of the
+priests' lubricity. Knowledge is power!
+
+After the bitter came absinthe, and Colonel Tudesco proposed
+for Servien's consideration a lucrative post at the Delegacy for
+Foreign Affairs.
+
+But Jean shook his head. He felt tired and had lost all heart.
+
+"I see what it is," cried the Colonel, patting him on the shoulder;
+"you are young and in love. There are two spirits breathe their
+inspiration alternately in the ear of mankind--Love and Ambition.
+Love speaks the first; and you are still hearkening to his voice,
+my young friend."
+
+Jean, who had drunk _his_ share of absinthe, confessed that he
+was deeper in love than ever and that he was jealous. He related
+the episode of the staircase and inveighed bitterly against Monsieur
+Bargemont. Nor did he fail to identify his case with the good of
+the Commune, by making out Gabrielle's lover to be a Bonapartist
+and an enemy of the people.
+
+Colonel Tudesco drew a note-book from his pocket, inscribed
+Bargemont's name and address in it, and cried:
+
+"If the man has not fled like a poltroon, we will make a hostage
+of him! I am the friend of the Citizen Delegate in charge of
+the Prefecture of Police, and I say it: you shall be avenged
+on the infamous Bargemont! Have you read the decree concerning
+hostages? No? Read it then; it is an inimitable monument of the
+wisdom of the people.
+
+"I tear myself regretfully from your company, my young friend.
+But I must be gone to discover an underground passage the Sisters
+of Marie-Joseph, in their contumacy, have driven right from the
+Prison of Saint-Lazare to the Mother Convent in the village of
+Argenteuil. It is a long tunnel by which they communicate with
+the traitors at Versailles. Come and see me in my quarters at
+the General Staff, in the _Place Vendôme_. Farewell and
+fraternal greeting!"
+
+Jean paid the Colonel's score and set out for home. The walls
+were all plastered over with posters and proclamations. He read
+one that was half hidden under bulletins of victories:
+
+"Article IV. _All persons detained in custody by the verdict
+of the jury of accusation shall be hostages of the people of
+Paris._
+
+"Article V. _Every execution of a prisoner of war or a partisan
+of the government of the Commune of Paris shall be followed by
+the instant execution of thrice the number of hostages detained
+in virtue of Article IV, the same being chosen by lot._"
+
+He frowned dubiously and asked himself:
+
+"Can it be I have denounced a man as hostage?"
+
+But his fears were soon allayed; Colonel Tudesco was only a wind-bag,
+and could not really arrest people. Besides, was it credible
+that Bargemont, head of a Ministerial Department, was still in
+Paris? And after all, if he did come to harm, well, so much the
+worse for him!
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+Two days after a cab with a musket barrel protruding from either
+window stopped before the bookbinder's shop. The two National
+Guards who stumbled out of it demanded to see the citizen Jean
+Servien, handed him a sealed packet and signed to him to open
+the door wide and wait for them. Next minute they reappeared
+carrying a full-length portrait.
+
+It represented a woman of forty or thereabouts, with a yellow
+face, very long and disproportionately large for the frail, sickly
+body it surmounted, and dressed in an unpretending black gown.
+She wore a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a contrite
+and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous and the loose chin
+almost touched the bosom. Jean scrutinized the poor, pitiful
+face, but could recall no memory in connection with it. He opened
+the letter and read:
+
+  "_Commune of Paris--General Staff_.
+
+  "Order to deliver to the citizen Jean Servien
+  the portrait of Madame Bargemont.
+
+  "Tudesco.
+
+  "Colonel commanding the Subterranean
+  Ways of the Commune."
+
+Jean wanted to ask the National Guards what it all meant, but
+already the cab was driving off, bayonets protruding from both
+windows. The passers-by, who had long ceased to be surprised at
+anything, cast a momentary glance after the retreating vehicle.
+
+Jean, left alone with Madame Bargemont's portrait before him,
+began to ask himself why his disconcerting friend Tudesco had
+sent it to him.
+
+"The wretch," he told himself, "must have arrested Bargemont and
+sacked his apartments."
+
+Meantime Madame Bargemont was gazing at him with a martyr's haunting
+eyes. She looked so unhappy that Jean was filled with pity.
+
+"Poor woman!" he ejaculated, and turning the canvas face to the
+wall, he left the house.
+
+Presently the bookbinder returned to his work and, though anything
+but an inquisitive man, was tempted to look at this big picture
+that blocked up his shop. He scratched his head, wondering if
+this could be the actress his son was in love with. He opined she
+must be mightily taken with the young man to send him so large
+a portrait in so handsome a frame. He could not see anything to
+capture a lover's fancy.
+
+"At any rate," he thought, "she does not look like a bad woman."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+Jean stepped over the bodies of two or three drunked National
+Guards and found himself in the room occupied by Colonel Tudesco
+and in that worthy's presence. The Colonel lay snoring on a satin
+sofa, a cold chicken on the table at his elbow. He wore his spurs.
+Jean shook him roughly by the shoulder and asked him where the
+portrait came from, declaring that he, Jean, had not the smallest
+wish to keep it. The Colonel woke, but his speech was thick and
+his memory confused. His mind was full of his underground passages.
+He was commander of them all and could not find one. There was
+something in this fact that offended his sense of justice. The
+Lady Superior of the Nuns of Marie-Joseph had refused to betray
+the secret of the famous Saint-Lazare tunnel.
+
+"She has refused," declared the old Italian, "out of contumacy--and
+also, perhaps, because there is no tunnel. And, since truth must
+out, I'm bound to say, if I was not Commandant of the subterranean
+passages of the capital, I should really think there were none."
+
+His wits came back little by little.
+
+"Young man, you have seen the soldier reposing from his labours.
+What question have you come to ask the veteran champion of freedom?"
+
+"About Bargemont? About that portrait?"
+
+"I know, I know. I proceeded with a dozen men to his domicile
+to arrest him, but he had taken to flight, the coward! I carried
+out a perquisition in his rooms. In the _salon_ I saw Madame
+Bargemont's portrait and I said: 'That lady looks as sad as Monsieur
+Jean Servien. They are both victims of the infamous Bargemont;
+I will bring them together and they shall console each other.'
+Monsieur Servien, oblige me by tasting that cognac; it comes
+from the cellar of your odious rival."
+
+He poured the brandy into two big glasses and hiccuped with a
+laugh:
+
+"The cognac of an enemy tastes well."
+
+Then he fell back on the sofa, muttering:
+
+"The soldier reposing----"
+
+His face was crimson. Jean shrugged his shoulders and left the
+room. He had hardly opened the door when the old man began howling
+in his sleep: "Help! help! they're murdering me."
+
+In an instant the _fédérés_ on guard hurled themselves upon Jean;
+he could feel the cold muzzles of revolvers at his temples and
+hear rifles banging off at random in the ante-room.
+
+The Colonel was raving in the frenzy of alcoholic delirium, writhing
+in horrible convulsions and yelling: "He has killed me! he has
+murdered me!"
+
+"He has murdered the Colonel," the _fédérés_ took up the cry.
+"He has poisoned him. Take him before the court martial."
+
+"Shoot him right away. He's an assassin; the Versaillais have
+sent him."
+
+"Off with him to the lock-up!"
+
+Servien's denials and struggles were in vain. Again and again
+he protested:
+
+"You can see for yourselves he's drunk and asleep!"
+
+"Listen to him--he is insulting the sovereign people."
+
+"Pitch him in the river!"
+
+"Swing him on a lamp-post."
+
+"Shoot him!"
+
+Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him in the back
+to help him along, Jean was haled before an officer, who there
+and then signed an order of arrest.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+He had been in solitary confinement in a cell at the _depôt_
+for sixteen days now--or was it fifteen?--he was not sure. The
+hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony and tediousness.
+
+At the start he had demanded justice and loudly protested his
+innocence. But he had come to realize at last that justice had
+no concern with his case or that of the priests and gendarmes
+confined within the same walls. He had given up all thought of
+persuading the savage frenzy of the Commune to listen to reason,
+and deemed it the wisest thing to hold his tongue and the best
+to be forgotten. He trembled to think how easily it might end
+in tragedy, and his anguish seemed to choke him.
+
+Sometimes, as he sat dreaming, he could see a tree against a patch
+of blue sky, and great tears would rise to his eyes.
+
+It was there, in his prison cell, Jean learned to know the shadowy
+joys of memory.
+
+He thought of his good old father sitting at his work-bench or
+tightening the screw of the press; he thought of the shop packed
+with bound volumes and bindings, of his little room where of
+evenings he read books of travel--of all the familiar things of
+home. And every time he reviewed in spirit the poor thin romance
+of his unpretending life, he felt his cheeks burn to think how
+it was all dominated, almost every episode controlled, by this
+drunken parasite of a Tudesco! It was true nevertheless! Paramount
+over his studies, his loves, his dangers, over all his existence,
+loomed the rubicund face of the old villain! The shame of it!
+He had lived very ill! but what a meagre life it had been too.
+How cruel it was, how unjust! and there was more of self-pity
+in the poor, sore heart than of anger.
+
+Every day, every hour he thought of Gabrielle; but how changed
+the complexion of his love for her! Now it was a tender, tranquil
+sentiment, a disinterested affection, a sweet, soothing reverie.
+It was a vision of a wondrous delicacy, such as loneliness and
+unhappiness alone can form in the souls they shield from the
+rude shocks of the common life--the dream of a holy life, a life
+dim and overshadowed, vowed wholly and completely, without reward
+or recompense, to the woman worshipped from afar, as that of the
+good country _curé_ is vowed to the God who never steps down
+from the tabernacle of the altar.
+
+His gaoler was a good-natured _sous-officier_ who, amazed and
+horrified at what was going forward, clung to discipline as a
+sheet-anchor in the general shipwreck. He felt a rough, uncouth
+pity for his prisoners, but this never interfered with the strict
+performance of his duties, and Jean, who had no experience of
+soldiers' ways, never guessed the man's true character. However,
+he grew less and less unbending and taciturn the nearer the army
+of order approached the city.
+
+Finally, one day he had told his prisoner, with a wink of the
+eye:
+
+"Courage, lad! something's going to turn up soon."
+
+The same afternoon Jean heard a distant sound of musketry; then,
+all in a moment, the door of his cell opened and he saw an avalanche
+of prisoners roll from one end of the corridor to the other. The
+gaoler had unlocked all the cells and shouted the words, "Every
+man for himself; run for it!" Jean himself was carried along,
+down stairs and passages, out into the prison courtyard, and
+pitched head foremost against the wall. By the time he recovered
+from the shock of his fall, the prisoners had vanished, and he
+stood alone before the open wicket.
+
+Outside in the street he heard the crackle of musketry and saw
+the Seine running grey under the lowering smoke-cloud of burning
+Paris. Red uniforms appeared on the _Quai de l'École_. The
+_Pont-au-Change_ was thick with _fédérés_. Not knowing where
+to fly, he was for going back into the prison; but a body of
+_Vengeurs de Lutèce_, in full flight, drove him before their
+bayonets towards the _Pont-au-Change_. A woman, a _cantinière_,
+kept shouting: "Don't let him go, give him his gruel. He's a
+Versaillais." The squad halted on the _Quai-aux-Fleurs_, and Jean
+was pushed against the wall of the _Hôtel-Dieu_, the _cantinière_
+dancing and gesticulating in front of him. Her hair flying loose
+under her gold-laced _képi_, with her ample bosom and her elastic
+figure poised gallantly on the strong, well-shaped limbs, she had
+the fierce beauty of some magnificent wild animal. Her little
+round mouth was wide open, yelling menaces and obscenities, as she
+brandished a revolver. The _Vengeurs de Lutèce_, hard-pressed
+and dispirited, looked stolidly at their white-faced prisoner
+against the wall, and then looked in each other's faces. Her
+fury redoubled; threatening them collectively, addressing each
+man by some vile nickname, pacing in front of them with a bold
+swing of the powerful hips, the woman dominated them, intoxicated
+them with her puissant influence.
+
+They formed up in platoon.
+
+"Fire!" cried the _cantinière_.
+
+Jean threw out his arms before him.
+
+Two or three shots went off. He could hear the balls flatten against
+the wall, but he was not hit.
+
+"Fire! fire!" The woman repeated the cry in the voice of an angry,
+self-willed child.
+
+She had been through the fighting, this girl, she had drunk her
+fill from staved-in wine-casks and slept on the bare ground,
+pell-mell with the men, out in the public square reddened with
+the glare of conflagration. They were killing all round her,
+and nobody had been killed yet _for her_. She was resolved they
+should shoot her someone, before the end! Stamping with fury,
+she reiterated her cry:
+
+"Fire! Fire! Fire!"
+
+Again the guns were cocked and the barrels levelled. But the
+_Vengeurs de Lutèce_ had not much heart left; their leader had
+vanished; they were disorganized, they were running away;
+sobered and stupefied, they knew the game was up. They were quite
+willing all the same to shoot the bourgeois there at the wall,
+before bolting for covert, each to hide in his own hole.
+
+Jean tried to say: "Don't make me suffer more than need be!" but
+his voice stuck in his throat.
+
+One of the _Vengeurs_ cast a look in the direction of the
+_Pont-au-Change_ and saw that the _fédérés_ were losing ground.
+Shouldering his musket, he said:
+
+"Let's clear out of the bl--y place, by God!"
+
+The men hesitated; some began to slink away.
+
+At this the _cantinière_ shrieked:
+
+"Bl--sted hounds! Then _I'll_ have to do his business for him!"
+
+She threw herself on Jean Servien and spat in his face; she abandoned
+herself to a frantic orgy of obscenity in word and gesture and
+clapped the muzzle of her revolver to his temple.
+
+Then he felt all was over and waited.
+
+A thousand things flashed in a second before his eyes; he saw
+the avenues under the old trees where his aunt used to take him
+walking in old days; he saw himself a little child, happy and
+wondering; he remembered the castles he used to build with strips
+of plane-tree bark... The trigger was pulled. Jean beat the air
+with his arms and fell forward face to the ground. The men finished
+him with their bayonets; then the woman danced on the corpse
+with yells of joy.
+
+The fighting was coming closer. A well-sustained fire swept the
+_Quai_. The woman was the last to go. Jean Servien's body lay
+stretched in the empty roadway. His face wore a strange look of
+peacefulness; in the temple was a little hole, barely visible;
+blood and mire fouled the pretty hair a mother had kissed with
+such transports of fondness.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Aspirations of Jean Servien
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11060]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert J. Hall
+
+
+
+
+THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN
+
+
+BY ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+A TRANSLATION BY ALFRED ALLINSON
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the _Rue Notre-Dame
+des Champs_. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the
+Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother
+nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet,
+with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing
+the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression
+for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her
+foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste.
+
+Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held
+clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a
+severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no
+very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed,
+which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened
+that confined her to her bed.
+
+There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little
+one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish
+whisper bits of her favourite ditty:
+
+  The fisherman, when dawn is nigh,
+  Peers forth to greet the kindling sky....
+
+Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of
+each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little
+Jean's lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn
+and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar
+in her fond hopes.
+
+A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of
+fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp
+and the vague tales of _concierges_, footmen, and cooks, she
+pictured her boy at twenty more beautiful than an archangel,
+his breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing-room full
+of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable ladies with manners every
+whit as genteel as had the actresses at the _Gymnase_:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest._
+
+Presently the vision changed; now her boy was standing up gowned
+in Court, by his eloquence saving the life and honour of some
+illustrious client:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest._
+
+Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a brilliant
+uniform, on a prancing charger, victorious in battle, like the
+great Generals whose portraits she had seen one Sunday at Versailles:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  Sweet wee general, take thy rest._
+
+But when night was creeping into the room, a new picture would
+dazzle her eyes, a picture this of other and incomparably greater
+glories.
+
+Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at heart, she was gazing
+from the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad
+in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted
+choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she
+would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this
+poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping
+in the poisoned air of a back-shop:
+
+  _But for the nonce, on mother's breast,
+  My sweet boy-bishop, take thy rest._
+
+One evening, as her husband handed her a cooling drink, she said
+to him in a tone of regret:
+
+"Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy Virgin among flowers
+and precious stones and lights. It was so beautiful! so beautiful!"
+
+She said she was no longer in pain, that she wished her Jean to
+learn Latin. And she passed away.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The widower, who from the Beauce country, sent his son to his
+native village in the Eure-et-Loir to be brought up by kinsfolk
+there. As for himself, he was a strong man, and soon learned
+to be resigned; he was of a saving habit by instinct in both
+business and family matters, and never put off the green serge
+apron from week's end to week's end save for a Sunday visit to
+the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on the arm of the black
+cross, and, if it was a hot day, take a chair on the way back
+along the boulevard outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he
+sat slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the mothers
+and their youngsters going by on the sidewalk.
+
+These young wives, as he watched them approach and pass on, were
+so many passing reminders of his Clotilde and made him feel sad
+without his quite understanding why, for he was not much given
+to thinking.
+
+Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife grew to be a
+tender, vague memory in the bookbinder's mind. One night he tried
+in vain to recall Clotilde's features; after this experience,
+he told himself that perhaps he might be able to discover the
+mother's lineaments in the child's face, and he was seized with
+a great longing to see this relic of the lost one once more,
+to have the child home again.
+
+In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, Mademoiselle
+Servien, begging her to come and take up her abode with the little
+one in the _Rue Notre-Dame des Champs_. The sister, who had lived
+for many years in Paris at her brother's expense, for indolence
+was her ruling passion, agreed to resume her life in a city where,
+she used to say, folks are free and need not depend on their
+neighbours.
+
+One autumn evening she arrived at the _Gare de l'Ouest_ with Jean
+and her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed
+figure, all ready to defend the child against all sorts of
+imaginary perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his
+satisfaction in two words.
+
+Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, and bidding him
+hold on tight to his father's hair, carried him off proudly to
+the house.
+
+Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to a settled routine.
+At midday the old dame would don her shawl and set off with the
+child in the direction of Grenelle.
+
+The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that ran between shabby
+walls and red-fronted drinking-shops. Generally speaking, a sky
+of a dappled grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past,
+invested the quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. Establishing
+herself on a bench, while the child played under a tree, she would
+knit her stocking and chat with an old soldier and tell him her
+troubles--what a hard life it was in other people's houses.
+
+One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted
+on the ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in
+the fine wet sand. That faculty of "pretending," by which children
+are able to make their lives one unending miracle, transformed a
+handful of soil and a few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and
+fairy castles to the lad's imagination; he clapped his hands and
+leapt for joy. Then suddenly he felt himself wrapped in something
+soft and scented. It was a lady's gown; he saw nothing except
+that she smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked
+on. He ran to tell his aunt:
+
+"How good she smells, that lady!"
+
+Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no
+better than others, and that she thought more of herself with
+her merino skirt than all those set-up minxes in their flounces
+and finery, adding:
+
+"Better a good name than a gilt girdle."
+
+But this talk was beyond little Jean's comprehension. The perfumed
+silk that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a
+memory as of a gentle, ghostly caress.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying the fresh air
+before his door when a big man with a red nose, past middle age and
+wearing a scarlet waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared,
+bowing politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song
+voice in which even Monsieur Servien could detect an Italian
+accent:
+
+"Sir, I have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the immortal
+masterpiece of Torquato Tasso"--and a bulging packet of manuscript
+under his arm confirmed the statement.
+
+"Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this glorious and
+ungrateful task. Without family or fatherland, I have written my
+translation in dark, ice-cold garrets, on chandlers' wrappers,
+snuff papers, the backs of playing cards! Such has been the exile's
+task! You, sir, you live in your own land, in the bosom of a
+happy family--at least I hope so."
+
+This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence and its
+strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of the dead woman he
+had loved, and he saw her in his mind's eye coiling her beautiful
+hair as in the early days of their married life.
+
+The big man proceeded:
+
+"Man is like a plant which perishes when the storms uproot it.
+
+"Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you"--and laying
+his hand on Jean's head, who clung to his father's coat-tails
+in wonder at the red waistcoat and the sing-song voice, he asked
+if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to
+be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.
+
+"That noble language," he added, "whose inimitable monuments have
+often made me forget my misfortunes.
+
+"Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped
+on a satire of Juvenal."
+
+As he said the words, a look of sadness over-spread his shining
+red face, and dropping his voice:
+
+"Forgive me, sir, if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius.
+I am the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice. When I have received from
+the bookseller the price of my labour, I will not forget that
+you succoured me with a small coin in the time of my sharpest
+trial."
+
+The bookbinder, case-hardened as he was against beggars, who
+on winter evenings drifted into his shop with the east wind,
+nevertheless experienced a certain sympathy and respect for the
+Marquis Tudesco. He slipped a franc-piece into his hand.
+
+Thereupon the old Italian, like a man inspired, exclaimed:
+
+"One Nation there is that is unhappy--Italy, one generous
+People--France; and one bond that unites the twain--humanity.
+Ah! chiefest of the virtues, humanity, humanity!"
+
+Meantime the bookbinder was pondering his wife's last words: "I
+wish my Jean to learn Latin." He hesitated, till seeing Monsieur
+Tudesco bowing and smiling to go:
+
+"Sir," he said, "if you are ready, two or three times a week,
+to give the boy lessons in French and Latin, we might come to
+terms."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco expressed no surprise. He smiled and said:
+
+"Certainly, sir, as you wish it, I shall find it a delightful
+task to initiate your son in the mysteries of the Latin rudiments.
+
+"We will make a man of him and a good citizen, and God knows
+what heights my pupil will scale in this noble land of freedom
+and generosity. He may one day be ambassador, my dear sir. I
+say it: knowledge is power."
+
+"You will know the shop again," said the bookbinder; "there is
+my name on the signboard."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco, after tweaking the son's ear amicably and
+bowing to the father with a dignified familiarity, walked away
+with a step that was still jaunty.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Marquis Tudesco returned in due course, smiled at Mademoiselle
+Servien, who darted poisonous looks at him, greeted the bookbinder
+with a discreet air of patronage, and had a supply of grammars
+and dictionaries bought.
+
+At first he gave his lessons with exemplary regularity. He had
+taken a liking to these repetitions of nouns and verbs, which he
+listened to with a dignified, condescending air, slowly unrolling
+his screw of snuff the while; he only interrupted to interject
+little playful remarks with a geniality just touched with a trace
+of ferocity, that bespoke his real nature as an unctuous, cringing
+bully. He was jocular and pompous at the same time, and always
+made a pretence of being a long time in seeing the glass of wine
+put on the table for his refreshment.
+
+The bookbinder, regarding him as a clever man of ill-regulated
+life, always treated him with great consideration, for faults
+of behaviour almost cease to shock us except among neighbours,
+or at most fellow-countrymen. Without knowing it, Jean found a
+fund of amusement in the witticisms and harangues of his old
+teacher, who united in himself the contradictory attributes of
+high-priest and buffoon. He was great at telling a story, and
+though his tales were beyond the child's intelligence, they did
+not fail to leave behind a confused impression of recklessness,
+irony, and cynicism. Mademoiselle Servien alone never relaxed her
+attitude of uncompromising dislike and disdain. She said nothing
+against him, but her face was a rigid mask of disapproval, her
+eyes two flames of fire, in answer to the courteous greeting
+the tutor never failed to offer her with a special roll of his
+little grey eyes.
+
+One day the Marquis Tudesco walked into the shop with a staggering
+gait; his eyes glittered and his mouth hung half open in anticipation
+of racy talk and self-indulgence, while his great nose, his pink
+cheeks, his fat, loose hands and his big belly, gallantly carried,
+gave him, beneath his jacket and felt hat, a perfect likeness to
+a little rustic god his ancestors worshipped, the old Silenus.
+
+Lessons that day were fitful and haphazard. Jean was repeating
+in a drawling voice: _moneo, mones, monet ... monebam, monebas,
+monebat..._ Suddenly Monsieur Tudesco sprang forward, dragging
+his chair along the floor with a horrid screech, and clapping
+his hand on his pupil's shoulder:
+
+"Child," he said, "to-day I am going to give you a more profitable
+lesson than all the pitiful teaching I have confined myself to
+up to now.
+
+"It is a lesson of transcendental philosophy. Hearken carefully,
+child. If one day you rise above your station and come to know
+yourself and the world about you, you will discover this, that
+men act only out of regard for the opinion of their fellows--and
+_per Bacco!_ they are consummate fools for their pains. They
+dread other folks' blame and crave their approval.
+
+"The idiots fail to see that the world does not care a straw
+for them, and that their dearest friends will see them glorified
+or disgraced without missing one mouthful of their dinner. This
+is my lesson, _caro figliuolo_, that the world's opinion is not
+worth the sacrifice of a single one of our desires. If you get
+this into your pate, you will be a strong man and can boast you
+were once the pupil of the Marquis Tudesco, of Venice, the exile
+who has translated in a freezing garret, on scraps of refuse
+paper, the immortal poem of Torquato Tasso. What a task!"
+
+The child listened to the tipsy philosopher without understanding
+one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as
+a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet
+than anybody he had ever seen before.
+
+The professor warmed to his subject:
+
+"Ah!" he cried, springing from his seat, "and what profit did
+the immortal and ill-starred Torquato Tasso win from all his
+genius? A few stolen kisses on the steps of a palace. And he
+died of famine in a madhouse. I say it: the world's opinion,
+that empress of humankind, I will tear from her her crown and
+sceptre. Opinion tyrannizes over unhappy Italy, as over all the
+earth. Italy! what flaming sword will one day come to break her
+fetters, as now I break this chair?"
+
+In fact, he had seized his chair by the back and was pounding
+it fiercely on the floor.
+
+But suddenly he stopped, gave a knowing smile, and said in a low
+voice:
+
+"No, no, Marquis Tudesco, let be, let Venice be a prey to Teuton
+savagery. The fetters of the fatherland are daily bread to the
+exiled patriot."
+
+His chin buried in his cravat, he stood chuckling to himself,
+and his red waistcoat rose and fell in jerks.
+
+Mademoiselle Servien, who sat by at the lesson knitting a stocking
+and for some moments had been watching the tutor, her spectacles
+pushed half-way up her forehead, with a look of amazement and
+suspicion, exclaimed, as if talking to herself:
+
+"If it isn't abominable to come to people's houses in drink!"
+
+Monsieur Tudesco did not seem to hear her. His manner was quiet
+and jocular again.
+
+"Child," he ordered, "write down the theme for an essay. Write
+down: 'The worst thing... yes, the worst thing of all,' write
+it down... 'is an old woman with a spiteful temper.'"
+
+And rising with the gracious dignity of a Prince of the Church,
+he bowed low to the aunt, gave the nephew's cheek a friendly
+tap, and marched out of the room.
+
+However, beginning with the very next lesson, he lavished every
+mark of respect on the old lady, and treated her to all his choicest
+airs and graces, rounding his elbows, pursing his lips, strutting
+and swaggering. She would not relax a muscle, and sat there as
+silent and sulky as an owl.
+
+But one day when she was hunting for her spectacles, as she was
+always doing, Monsieur Tudesco offered her his and persuaded her
+to try them; she found they suited her sight and felt a trifle
+less unamiable towards him. The Italian, pursuing his advantage,
+got into talk with her, and artfully turned the conversation upon
+the vices of the rich. The old lady approved his sentiments, and
+an exchange of petty confidences ensued. Tudesco knew a sovereign
+remedy for catarrh, and this too was well received. He redoubled
+his attentions, and the _concierge_, who saw him smiling to himself
+on the doorstep, told Aunt Servien: "The man's in love with you."
+Of course she declared: "At my time of life a woman doesn't want
+lovers," but her vanity was tickled all the same. Monsieur Tudesco
+got what he wanted--to have his glass filled to the brim every
+lesson. Out of politeness they would even leave him the pint jug
+only half empty, which he was indiscreet enough to drain dry.
+
+One day he asked for a taste of cheese--"just enough to make
+a mouse's dinner," was his expression. "Mice are like me, they
+love the dark and a quiet life and books; and like me they live
+on crumbs."
+
+This pose of the wise man fallen on evil days made a bad impression,
+and the old lady became silent and sombre as before.
+
+When springtime came Monsieur Tudesco vanished.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The bookbinder, for all his scanty earnings, was resolved to
+enter Jean at a school where the boy could enjoy a regular and
+complete course of instruction. He selected a day-school not
+far from the Luxembourg, because he could see the top branches
+of an acacia overtopping the wall, and the house had a cheerful
+look.
+
+Jean, as a little new boy (he was now eleven), was some weeks
+before he shook off the shyness with which his schoolfellows'
+loud voices and rough ways and his masters' ponderous gravity
+had at first overwhelmed him. Little by little he grew used to
+the work, and learned some of the tricks by means of which
+punishments were avoided; his schoolfellows found him so inoffensive
+they left off stealing his cap and initiated him in the game of
+marbles. But he had little love for school-life, and when five
+o'clock came, prayers were over and his satchel strapped, it
+was with unfeigned delight he dashed out into the street basking
+in the golden rays of the setting sun. In the intoxication of
+freedom, he danced and leapt, seeing everything, men and horses,
+carriages and shops, in a charmed light, and out of sheer joy of
+life mumbling at his Aunt Servien's hand and arm, as she walked
+home with him carrying the satchel and lunch-basket.
+
+The evening was a peaceful time. Jean would sit drawing pictures
+or dreaming over his copy-books at one end of the table where
+Mademoiselle Servien had just cleared away the meal. His father
+would be busy with a book. As age advanced he had acquired a
+taste for reading, his favourites being La Fontaine's _Fables_,
+Anquetil's _History of France_, and Voltaire's _Dictionnaire
+Philosophique_, "to get the hang of things," as he put it.
+His sister made fruitless efforts to distract his attention with
+some stinging criticism of the neighbours or a question about
+"our fat friend who had not come back," for she made a point
+of never remembering the Marquis Tudesco's name.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Before long Jean's whole mind was given over to the catechizings
+and sermons and hymns preparatory to the First Communion.
+Intoxication with the music of chants and organ, drowned in the
+scent of incense and flowers, hung about with scapularies, rosaries,
+consecrated medals, and holy images, he, like his companions, assumed
+a certain air of self-importance and wore a smug, sanctified look.
+He was cold and unbending towards his aunt, who spoke with far
+too much unconcern about the "great day." Though she had long
+been in the habit of taking her nephew to Mass every Sunday,
+she was not "pious." Most likely she confounded in one common
+detestation the luxury of the rich and the pomps of the Church
+service. She had more than once been overheard informing one
+of the cronies she used to meet on the boulevards that she was
+a religious woman, _but_ she could not abide priests, that she
+said her prayers at home, and these were every bit as good as
+the fine ladies' who flaunted their crinolines in church. His
+father was more in sympathy with the lad's new-found zeal; he
+was interested and even a little impressed. He undertook to bind
+a missal with his own hands against the ceremony.
+
+When the days arrived for retreats and general confessions, Jean
+swelled with pride and vague aspirations. He looked for something
+out of the ordinary to happen. Coming out at evening from
+Saint-Sulpice with two or three of his schoolfellows, he would
+feel an atmosphere of miracle about him; some divine interposition
+_must_ be forthcoming. The lads used to tell each other strange
+stories, pious legends they had read in one of their little books
+of devotion. Now it was a phantom monk who had stepped out of the
+grave, showing the stigmata on hands and feet and the pierced
+side; now a nun, beautiful as the veiled figures in the Church
+pictures, expiating in the fires of hell mysterious sins. Jean
+had _his_ favourite tale. Shuddering, he would relate how St.
+Francis Borgia, after the death of Queen Isabella, who was lovely
+beyond compare, must have the coffin opened wherein she lay at rest
+in her robe embroidered with pearls; in imagination he pictured
+the dead Queen, invested her form with all the magic hues of the
+unknown, traced in her lineaments the enchantments of a woman's
+beauty in the dark gulf of death. And as he told the tale, he could
+hear, in the twilight gloom, a murmur of soft voices sighing in
+the plane trees of the Luxembourg.
+
+The great day arrived. The bookbinder, who attended the ceremony
+with his sister, thought of his wife and wept.
+
+He was most favourably impressed by the _cure's_ homily, in which
+a young man without faith was compared to an unbridled charger
+that plunges over precipices. The simile struck his fancy, and
+he would quote it years after with approbation. He made up his
+mind to read the Bible, as he had read Voltaire, "to get the
+hang of things."
+
+Jean withdrew from the houselling cloth, wondering to be just
+the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again
+to recover the first fervent rapture.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+The holidays were near. An noon of a blazing hot day Jean was
+seated in the shade on the dwarf-wall that bounded the school
+count towards the headmaster's garden, He was playing languidly
+at shovel-board with a schoolfellow, a lad as pretty as a girl
+with his curls and his jacket of white duck.
+
+"Ewans," said Jean, as he pushed a pebble along one of the lines
+drawn in charcoal on the stone coping, "Ewans, you must find
+it tiresome to be a boarder?"
+
+"Mother cannot have me with her at home," replied the boy.
+
+Servien asked why.
+
+"Oh! Because----" stammered Ewans.
+
+He stared a long time at the white pebble he held in his hand
+ready to play, before he added:
+
+"My mother goes travelling."
+
+"And your father?"
+
+"He is in America. I have never seen him. You've lost. Let's begin
+again."
+
+Servien, who felt interested in Madame Ewans because of the superb
+boxes of chocolates she used to bring to school for her boy,
+put another question:
+
+"You love her very much, your mother I mean?"
+
+"Of course I do!" cried the other, adding presently:
+
+"You must come and see me one day in the holidays at home. You'll
+find our house is very pretty, there's sofas and cushions no end.
+But you must not put off, for we shall be off to the seaside
+soon."
+
+At this moment a servant, a tall, thin man, appeared in the
+playground and called out something which the shrill cries of
+their companions at play prevented the two seated on the wall
+from hearing. A fat boy, standing by himself with his face to
+the wall with the unconcern born of long familiarity with this
+form of punishment, clapped his two hands to his mouth trumpetwise
+and shrieked:
+
+"Ewans, you're wanted in the parlour."
+
+The usher marched up:
+
+"Garneret," he ordered, "you will stand half an hour this evening
+at preparation speaking when you were forbidden to. Ewans, go
+to the parlour."
+
+The latter clapped his hands and danced for joy, telling his friend:
+
+"It's my mother! I'll tell her you are coming to our house."
+
+Servien reddened with pleasure, and stammered out that he would
+ask his father's leave. But Ewans had already scampered across
+the yard, leaving a dusty furrow behind him.
+
+Leave was readily granted by Monsieur Servien, who was fully
+persuaded that all boys admitted to so expensive a school born of
+well-to-do parents, whose society could not but prove advantageous
+to his son's manners and morals and to his future success in
+life.
+
+Such information as Jean could give him about Madame Ewans was
+extremely vague, but the bookbinder was well used to contemplating
+the ways of rich folks through a veil of impenetrable mystery.
+
+Aunt Servien indulged in sundry observations on the occasion of
+a very general kind touching people who ride in carriages. Then
+she repeated a story about a great lady who, just like Madame
+Ewans, had put her son to boarding-school, and who was mixed up
+in a case of illicit commissions, in the time of Louis-Philippe.
+
+She added, to clinch the matter, that the cowl does not make
+the monk, that she thought herself, for all she did not wear
+flowers in her hat, a more honest woman than your society ladies,
+false jades everyone, concluding with her pet proverb: Better
+a good name than a gilt girdle!
+
+Jean had never seen a gilt girdle, but he thought in a vague way
+he would very much like to have one.
+
+The holidays came, and one Thursday after breakfast his aunt
+produced a white waistcoat from the wardrobe, and Jean, dressed
+in his Sunday best, climbed on an omnibus which took him to the
+Rue de Rivoli. He mounted four flights of a staircase, the carpet
+and polished brass stair-rods of which filled him with surprise
+and admiration.
+
+On reaching the landing, he could hear the tinkling of a piano.
+He rang the bell, blushed hotly and was sorry he had rung. He
+would have given worlds to run away. A maid-servant opened the
+door, and behind her stood Edgar Ewans, wearing a brown holland
+suit, in which he looked entirely at his ease.
+
+"Come along," he cried, and dragged him into a drawing-room, into
+which the half-drawn curtains admitted shafts of sunlight that
+were flashed back in countless broken reflections from mirrors
+and gilt cornices. A sweet, stimulating perfume hung about the
+room, which was crowded with a superabundance of padded chairs
+and couches and piles of cushions.
+
+In the half-light jean beheld a lady so different from all he had
+ever set eyes on till that moment that he could form no notion of
+what she was, no idea of her beauty or her age. Never had he seen
+eyes that flashed so vividly in a face of such pale fairness, or
+lips so red, smiling with such an unvarying almost tired-looking
+smile. She was sitting at a piano, idly strumming on the keys
+without playing any definite tune. What drew Jean's eyes above
+all was her hair, arranged in some fashion that struck him with
+a sense of mystery and beauty.
+
+She looked round, and smoothing the lace of her _peignoir_ with
+one hand:
+
+"You are Edgar's friend?" she asked, in a cordial tone, though
+her voice struck Jean as harsh in this beautiful room that was
+perfumed like a church.
+
+"Yes, Madame."
+
+"You like being at school?"
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"The masters are not too strict?"
+
+"No, Madame."
+
+"You have no mother?"
+
+As she put the question Madame Evans' voice softened.
+
+"No, Madame."
+
+"What is your father?"
+
+"A bookbinder, Madame"--and the bookbinder's son blushed as he
+gave the answer. At that moment he would gladly have consented
+never to see his father more, his father whom he loved, if by
+the sacrifice he could have passed for the son of a Captain in
+the Navy or a Secretary of Embassy. He suddenly remembered that
+one of his fellow-pupils was the son of a celebrated physician
+whose portrait was displayed in the stationers' windows.
+
+If only he had had a father like that to tell Madame Ewans of!
+But that was out of the question--and how cruelly unjust it was!
+He felt ashamed of himself, as if he had said something shocking.
+
+But his friend's mother seemed quite unaffected by the dreadful
+avowal. She was still moving her hands at random up and down
+the keyboard. Then presently:
+
+"You must enjoy yourself finely to-day, boys," she cried. "We
+will all go out. Shall I take you to the fair at Saint-Cloud?"
+
+Yes, Edgar was all for going, because of the roundabouts.
+
+Madame Ewans rose from the piano, patted her pale flaxen hair
+in place with a pretty gesture, and gave a sidelong look in the
+mirror as she passed.
+
+"I'm going to dress," she told them; "I shall not be long."
+
+While she was dressing, Edgar sat at the piano trying to pick
+out a tune from an opera bouffe, and Jean, perched uncomfortably
+on the edge of his chair, stared about the room at a host of
+strange and sumptuous objects that seemed in some mysterious
+way to be part and parcel of their beautiful owner, and affected
+him almost as strangely as she herself had done.
+
+Preceded by a faint waft of scent and a rustle of silk, she
+reappeared, tying the strings of the hat that made a dainty diadem
+above her smiling eyes.
+
+Edgar looked at her curiously:
+
+"Why, mother, there's something... I don't know what. . . something
+that alters you."
+
+She glanced in the mirror, examining her hair, which showed pale
+violet shadows amid the flaxen plaits.
+
+"Oh! it's nothing," she said; "only I have put some powder in
+my hair. Like the Empress," she added, and broke into another
+smile.
+
+As she was drawing on her gloves, a ring was heard, and the maid
+came in to tell her mistress that Monsieur Delbeque was waiting
+to see her.
+
+Madame Ewans pouted and declared she could not receive him, whereupon
+the maid spoke a few words in a very peremptory whisper. Madame
+Ewans shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Stay where you are!" she told the boys, and passed into the
+dining-room, whence the murmur of two voices could presently be
+heard.
+
+Jean asked Edgar, under his breath, who the gentleman was.
+
+"Monsieur Delbeque," Edgar informed him. "He keeps horses and a
+carriage. He deals in pigs. One evening he took us to the theatre,
+mother and me."
+
+Jean was surprised and rather shocked to find Monsieur Delbeque
+dealt in pigs. But he hid his surprise and asked if he was a
+relation.
+
+"Oh! no," said Edgar, "he's one of our friends. It's a long time...
+at least a year we have known him."
+
+Jean, harking back to his first idea, put the question:
+
+"Have you ever seen him selling his pigs?"
+
+"How stupid you are!" retorted Edgar; "he deals in them wholesale.
+Mother says it's a famous trade. He has a cigar-holder with an
+amber mouthpiece and a woman all naked carved in meerschaum.
+Just think, the other day he came and told mother his wife was
+making him atrocious scenes."
+
+Madame Ewans put in her head at the half-open door:
+
+"Come along," she said, and they set out. No sooner were they
+in the street than a man, who was smoking, greeted Madame with
+a friendly wave of his gloved hand. She muttered between her
+teeth:
+
+"Shall we never be done with them?"
+
+The man began in a guttural voice:
+
+"I was just going to your place, my dear, to offer you a box of
+Turkish cigarettes. But I see you are taking a boarding-school
+out for a walk--a regular boarding-school, 'pon my word! You
+take pupils, eh? I congratulate you. Make men of 'em, my dear,
+make men of 'em."
+
+Madame Ewans frowned and replied with a curl of the lips:
+
+"I am with my son and one of my son's friends."
+
+The gentleman threw a careless look at one of the lads--Jean Servien
+as it happened.
+
+"Capital, capital!" he exclaimed. "Is that one your son?"
+
+"Not he, indeed!" she cried hotly.
+
+Jean felt he was looked down upon, and as she laid her hand on
+her son's shoulder with a proud gesture, he could not help noticing
+his schoolfellow's easy air and elegant costume, at the same time
+casting a glance of disgust at his own jacket, which had been
+cut down for him by his aunt out of an overcoat of his father's.
+
+"Shall we be honoured by your presence to-night at the _Bouffes_?"
+asked the gentleman.
+
+"No!" replied Madame Ewans, and pushed the two children forward
+with the tip of her sunshade.
+
+Stepping out gaily, they soon arrive under the chestnuts of the
+Tuileries, cross the bridge, then down the river-bank, over the
+shaky gangway, and so on to the steamer pontoon.
+
+Now they are aboard the boat, which exhales a strong, healthy
+smell of tar under the hot sun. The long grey walls of the
+embankments slip by, to be succeeded presently by wooded slopes.
+
+Saint-Cloud! The moment the ropes are made fast, Madame Ewans
+springs on to the landing-stage and makes straight for the shrilling
+of the clarinettes and thunder of the big drums, steering her
+little charges through the press with the handle of her sunshade.
+
+Jean was mightily surprised when Madame Ewans made him "try his
+luck" in a lottery. He had before now gone with his aunt to sundry
+suburban fairs, but she had always dissuaded him so peremptorily
+from spending anything that he was firmly persuaded revolving-tables
+and shooting-galleries were amusements only permitted to a class
+of people to which he did not belong. Madame Ewans showed the
+greatest interest in her son's success, urging him to give the
+handle a good vigorous turn.
+
+She was very superstitious about luck, "invoking" the big prizes,
+clapping her hands in ecstasy whenever Edgar won a halfpenny
+egg-cup, falling into the depths of despair at every bad shot.
+Perhaps she saw an omen in his failure; perhaps she was just
+blindly eager to have her darling succeed. After he had lost two
+or three times, she pulled the boy away and gave the wooden disk
+such a violent push round as set its cargo of crockery-ware and
+glass rattling, and proceeded to play on her own account--once,
+twice, twenty times, thirty times, with frantic eagerness. Then
+followed quite a business about exchanging the small prizes for
+one big one, as is commonly done. Finally, she decided for a
+set of beer jugs and glasses, half of which she gave to each of
+the two friends to carry.
+
+But this was only a beginning. She halted the children before
+every stall. She made them play for macaroons at _rouge et
+noir_. She had them try their skill at every sort of
+shooting-game, with crossbows loaded with little clay pellets,
+with pistols and carbines, old-fashioned weapons with caps and
+leaden bullets, at all sorts of distances, and at all kinds of
+targets--plaster images, revolving pipes, dolls, balls bobbing
+up and down on top of a jet of water.
+
+Never in his life had Jean Servien been so busy or done so many
+different things in so short a space of time.
+
+His eyes dazzled with uncouth shapes and startling colours, his
+throat parched with dust, elbowed, crushed, mauled, hustled by
+the crowd, he was intoxicated with this debauch of diversions.
+
+He watched Madame Ewans for ever opening her little purse of
+Russia leather, and a new power was revealed to him. Nor was
+this all. There was the Dutch top to be set twirling, the wooden
+horses of the merry-go-round to be mounted; they had to dash
+down the great chute and take a turn in the Venetian gondolas,
+to be weighed in the machine and touch the arm of the "human
+torpedo."
+
+But Madame Ewans could not help returning again and again to
+stand before the booth of a hypnotist from Paris, a clairvoyante
+boasting a certificate signed by the Minster of Agriculture and
+Commerce and by three Doctors of the Faculty. She gazed enviously
+at the servant-girls as they trooped up blushing into the van
+meagrely furnished with a bed and a couple of chairs; but she
+could not pluck up courage to follow their example.
+
+She recalled to mind how a hypnotist had once helped a friend
+of hers to recover some stolen forks and spoons. She had even
+gone so far as to consult a fortune-teller shortly before Edgar's
+birth, and the cards had foretold a boy.
+
+All three were tired out and overloaded with crockery, glass,
+reed-pipes, sticks of sugar-candy, cakes of ginger-bread and
+macaroons. For all that, they paid a visit to the wax-works,
+where they saw Monseigneur Sibour's body lying in state at the
+Archbishop's Palace, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, models
+of people's legs and arms disfigured by various hideous diseases,
+and a Circassian maiden stepping out of the bath--"the purest
+type of female beauty," as a placard duly informed the public.
+Madame Ewans examined this last exhibit with a curiosity that
+very soon became critical.
+
+"People may say what they please," she muttered; "if you offered
+me the whole world, _I_ wouldn't have such big feet and such
+a thick waist. And then, your regular features aren't one bit
+attractive. Men like a face that says something."
+
+When they left the tent, the sun was low and the dust hovered in
+golden clouds over the throng of women, working-men, and soldiers.
+
+It was time for dinner; but as they passed the monkey-cage, Madame
+Ewans noticed such a crush of eager spectators squeezing in between
+the baize curtains on the platform in front that she could not
+resist the temptation to follow suit. Besides which, she was
+drawn by a motive of curiosity, having been told that monkeys
+were not insensible to female charms. But the performance diverted
+her thoughts in another direction. She saw an unhappy poodle in
+red breeches shot as a deserter in spite of his honest looks.
+Tears rose to her eyes, she was so sensitive, so susceptible
+to the glamour of the stage!
+
+"Yes, it's quite true," she sobbed; "yes, poor soldiers have
+been shot before now just for going off without leave to stand
+by their mother's death-bed or for smacking a bullying officer's
+face."
+
+Some old refrain of Beranger she had heard working folks sing
+in her plebeian childhood rose to her memory and intensified
+her emotion. She told the children the lamentable tale of the
+canine deserter's pitiful doom, and made them feel quite sad.
+
+No sooner were they outside the place, however, than an itinerant
+toy-seller with a paper helmet on his head set them splitting
+with laughter.
+
+Dinner must be thought of. She knew of a tavern by the river-side
+where you could eat a fry of fish in the arbour, and thither
+they betook themselves.
+
+The lady from Paris and the landlady of the inn greeted each
+other with a wink of the eye. It was a long time since she had
+seen Madame; she had no idea who the two young gentlemen were,
+but anyway they were dear little angels. Madame Ewans ordered the
+meal like a connoisseur, with a knowing air and all the proper
+restaurant tricks of phrase. All three sat silent, agreeably
+tired and enjoying the sensation, she with her bonnet-strings
+flying loose, the boys leaning back against the trellis. They
+could see the river and its grassy banks through an archway of
+wild vine. Their thoughts flowed softly on like the current before
+their eyes, while the dusk and cool of the evening wrapped them
+in a soft caress. For the first time Jean Servien, as he gazed
+at Madame Ewans, felt the thrill of a woman's sweet proximity.
+
+Presently, warmed by a trifle of wine and water he had drunk,
+he became wholly lost in his dreams--visions of all sorts of
+elegant, preposterous, chivalrous things. His head was still
+full of these fancies when he was dragged back to the fair-ground
+by Madame Ewans, who could never have enough of sight-seeing
+and noise. Illuminated arches spanned at regular intervals the
+broad-walk, lined on either side by stalls and trestle-tables,
+but the lateral avenues gloomed dark and deserted under the tall
+black trees. Loving couples paced them slowly, while the music
+from the shows sounded muffled by the distance. They were still
+there when a band of fifes, trombones, and trumpets struck up
+close by, playing a popular polka tune. The very first bar put
+Madame Ewans on her mettle. She drew Jean to her, settled his
+hands in hers and lifting him off the ground with a jerk of the
+hip, began dancing with him. She swung and swayed to the lilt
+of the music; but the boy was awkward and embarrassed, and only
+hindered his partner, dragging back and bumping against her.
+She threw him off roughly and impatiently, saying sharply:
+
+"You don't know how to dance, eh? You come here, Edgar."
+
+She danced a while with him in the semi-darkness. Then, rosy and
+smiling:
+
+"Bravo!" she laughed; "we'll stop now."
+
+Servien stood by in gloomy silence, conscious of his own
+inefficiency. His heart swelled with a sullen anger. He was hurt,
+and longed for somebody or something to vent his hate upon.
+
+The drive home was a silent one. Jean nearly gave himself cramp
+in his determined efforts not to touch with his own the knees
+of Madame Ewans' who dozed on the back seat of the conveyance.
+She hardly awoke enough to bid him good-bye when he alighted
+at his father's door.
+
+As he entered, he was struck for the first time by a smell of
+paste that seemed past bearing. The room where he had slept for
+years, happy in himself and loved by others, seemed a wretched
+hole. He sat down on his bed and looked round gloomily and morosely
+at the holy-water stoup of gilt porcelain, the print commemorating
+his First Communion, the toilet basin on the chest of drawers,
+and stacked in the corners piles of pasteboard and ornamental
+paper for binding.
+
+Everything about him seemed animated by a hostile, malevolent,
+unjust spirit. In the next room he could hear his father moving.
+He pictured him at his work-bench, with his serge apron, calm
+and content. What a humiliation! and for the second time in a
+dozen hours he blushed for his parentage.
+
+His slumbers were broken and uneasy; he dreamed he was turning,
+turning unendingly in complicated figures, and it was impossible
+always to avoid touching Madame Evans' knee, though all the time
+he was horribly afraid of doing it. Then there was a great field
+full of thousands and thousands of marble pigs stuck up on stone
+pedestals, among which he could see Monsieur Delbeque promenading
+slowly up and down.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Next morning he awoke feeling sour-tempered and low-spirited.
+
+"Well, my boy," his father asked him, blowing noisily at each
+spoonful of soup he absorbed, "well, did you enjoy yourself
+yesterday?"
+
+He answered curtly and crossly. Everything stirred his gorge.
+His aunt's print gown filled him with a sort of rage.
+
+His father propounded a hundred minute inquiries; he would fain
+have pictured the whole expedition to himself as he consumed his
+bowl of soup. He had seen Saint-Cloud in his soldiering days;
+but he had never been there since. He had a bright idea; they
+would go to Versailles, the three of them; his sister would see
+to having a bit of veal cooked overnight, and they could take
+it with them. They would have a look at the pictures, eat their
+snack on the great lawn, and have a fine time generally.
+
+Jean, who was horrified at the whole project, opened his
+exercise-books and buried his head in his lessons, to avoid the
+necessity of hearing any more and answering questions. He did not
+as a rule show such alacrity about setting to work. His father
+remarked on the fact, commending him for his zeal.
+
+"We should play," he announced, "when it is play-time, and work
+when it is the time to work," and _he_ set to work flattening
+a piece of shagreen.
+
+Jean fell into a brown study. He had caught a glimpse of a world
+he knew to be for ever closed against him, but towards which
+all the forces of his young heart drew him irresistibly. He did
+not dream Madame Ewans could ever be different from what he had
+seen her. He could not imagine her otherwise dressed or amid any
+other surroundings. He knew nothing whatever of women; this one
+had seemed motherly to him, and it was a mother such as Madame
+Ewans he would have liked to have. But how his heart beat and
+his brow burned as he pictured this imaginary mother a reality!
+
+Dating from the day at Saint-Cloud, Jean thought himself unhappy,
+and unhappy he became in fact. He was wilfully, deliberately
+insubordinate, proud of breaking rules and defying punishments.
+
+He and his school-mates attended the classes of a _Lycee_ in
+the _Quartier Latin_. Directly he had taken his place on the
+remotest bench in the well-warmed lecture-room, he would become
+absorbed in some sentimental novel concealed under piles of
+Latin and Greek authors. Sometimes the master, short-sighted as
+he was, would catch the culprit in the act.
+
+Still, Jean had his hours of triumph. His translations were
+remarkable, not for accuracy, but at any rate for elegance. So,
+too, his compositions sometimes contained happy phrases that
+earned him high praise. On the theme, "The maiden Theano defending
+Alcibiades against the incensed Athenians," he wrote a Latin
+oration that was warmly commended by Monsieur Duruy, the then
+Inspector of Public Instruction, and gained the young author
+some weeks of scholastic fame.
+
+On holidays he would roam the boulevards and gaze with greedy
+eyes at the jewels, the silks and satins, the bronzes, the
+photographs of women, displayed in the shop-windows--the thousand
+and one gewgaws and frivolities of fashion that seemed to him
+to sum up the necessary conditions of happiness.
+
+His entry into the philosophy class was a red-letter day; he
+sported his first tall hat and smoked his first non-surreptitious
+cigarettes. He possessed a certain brilliancy of mind and a keen
+wit that amused his companions, whose superior he was in gifts
+of imagination.
+
+His last vacation was passed in tolerable content. His father,
+thinking him looking pale, sent him on a visit to relatives living
+in a village near Chartres. Jean, the tedious farm dinner ended,
+would go and sit under a tree and bury himself in a novel.
+Occasionally he would ride to the city in the miller's cart.
+Often he would be drenched all the way by the rain that fell
+drearily at nightfall. Then he would enjoy the fun of drying
+himself before the huge fireplace of some inn on the outskirts
+of the town, beside the savoury roast on the turning spit. He
+even had a day's shooting with an old flint-lock fowling-piece
+under the auspices of his cousin the miller. In short, he could
+boast on his return of having had a country holiday.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+At eighteen he took his bachelor's degree. The evening after the
+examination Monsieur Servien uncorked a bottle with a special
+seal, which he had hoarded for years in anticipation of this
+domestic solemnity, and the contents of which had turned from
+red to pink as they slowly fined.
+
+"A young man who carries his diploma in his pocket can enter
+every door," Monsieur Servien observed, as he imbibed the wine
+with fitting respect; it had been good stuff once, but was past
+its prime.
+
+Jean polished off the family repast rapidly and hurried away to
+the theatre. His only ideas as yet of what a play was like were
+derived from the posters he had seen. He selected for tonight
+one of the big theatres where a tragedy was on the bill. He took
+his ticket for the pit with a vague idea it would be the talisman
+admitting him to a new wonder-world of passion and emotion. Every
+trifle is disconcerting to a troubled spirit, and on his entrance
+he was surprised and sobered to see how few spectators there were
+in the stalls and boxes. But at the first scraping of the violins
+as the orchestra tuned up, he glued his eyes to the curtain,
+which rose at last.
+
+Then, then he saw, in a Roman palace, leaning on the back of a
+chair of antique shape, a woman who wore over her robe of white
+woollen the saffron-hued _palla_. Amid the trampling of feet, the
+rustle of dresses and the shifting of stools, she was reciting
+a long soliloquy, accompanied by slow, deliberate gestures. He
+felt, as he gazed, a strange, unknown pleasure, that grew more
+and more acute till it was almost pain. As scene followed scene,
+there entered a confidante, then a hero, then a crowd of supers.
+But he saw nothing but the apparition that had first fascinated
+him. His eyes fastened greedily on her beauty, caressing the two
+bare arms, encircled with rings of metal, gliding along the curve
+of the hips below the high girdle, plunging amid the brown locks
+that waved above the brow and were tied back with three white
+fillets; they clung to the moving lips and the white, moist teeth
+that ever and anon flashed in the glare of the footlights. He
+longed to feel, to seize, to hold this lovely, living thing that
+moved before his eyes; in imagination he enfolded and embraced
+the beautiful vision.
+
+The wait between the acts (for the tragedy involved a change of
+scenery) was intolerably tedious. His neighbours were talking
+politics and passing one another quarters of orange across him;
+the newspaper boy and the man who hired out opera-glasses deafened
+him with their bawling. He was in terror of some sudden catastrophe
+that might interrupt the play.
+
+The curtain rose once more, on a succession of scenes of political
+intrigue a la Corneille which had no meaning for Servien. To
+his joy the lovely being in the white robe came on again. But
+he had strained his sight too hard; he could see nothing; by
+dint of riveting his gaze on the long gold pendants that hung
+from the actress's ears, he was dazzled; his eyes swam and closed
+involuntarily, and he could hear no sound but the beating of
+the blood in his temples.
+
+By a supreme effort, in the last scene, he saw and heard her again
+clearly and distinctly, yet not as with his ordinary senses, for
+she wore for him the elemental guise of a supernatural vision.
+When the prompter's bell tinkled and the curtain descended for the
+last time, he had a feeling as though the universe had collapsed
+in irretrievable ruin.
+
+_Tartuffe_ was the after-piece; but neither the spirit and perfection
+of the acting, nor the pretty face and plump shoulders of Elmire,
+nor the _soubrette_'s dimpled arms, nor the _ingenue_'s innocent
+eyes, nor the noble, witty lines that filled the theatre and
+roused the audience to fresh attention, could stir his spirit
+that hung entranced on the lips of a tragic heroine.
+
+As he stepped out into the street, the first breath of the cool
+night air on his face blew away his intoxication. His senses came
+back to him and he could think again; but his thoughts never left
+the object of his infatuation, and her image was the only thing
+he saw distinctly. He was entranced, possessed; but the feeling
+was delicious, and he roamed far and wide in the dark streets,
+making long detours by the river-side quays to lengthen out his
+reveries, his heart full, overfull of passionate, voluptuous
+imaginings. He was content because he was weary; his soul lay
+drowned in a delicious languor that no pang of desire troubled;
+to look and long was more than sufficient as yet to still the
+cravings of his virgin appetites.
+
+He threw himself half dressed on his bed, overjoyed to cherish
+the picture of her beauty in his heart. All he wanted was to
+lose himself in the enchanted sleep that weighed down his boyish
+lids.
+
+On waking, he gazed about him for something--he knew not what.
+Was he in love? He could not tell, but there was a void somewhere.
+Still, he felt no overmastering impulse, except to read the verses
+he had heard the actress declaim. He took down from his shelves
+a volume of Corneille and read through Emilie's part. Every line
+enchanted him, one as much as another, for did they not all evoke
+the same memory for him?
+
+His father and his aunt, with whom he passed his days, had grown
+to be only vague, meaningless shapes to him. Their broadest
+pleasantries failed to raise a smile, and the coarse realities of
+a narrow, penurious existence had no power to disturb his happy
+serenity. All day long, in the back-shop where the penetrating
+smell of paste mingled with the fumes of the cabbage-soup, he
+lived a life of his own, a life of incomparable splendours. His
+little Corneille, scored thickly with thumb-nail marks at every
+couplet of Emilie's, was all he needed to foster the fairest
+of illusions. A face and the tones of a voice were his world.
+
+In a few days he knew the whole tragedy by heart. He would declaim
+the lines in a slow, pompous voice, and his aunt would remark
+after each speech, as she shredded the vegetables for dinner:
+
+"So you're for being a _cure_, are you, that you preach like they
+do in church?"
+
+But in the main she approved of these exercises, and when Monsieur
+Servien scratched his head doubtfully and complained that his
+son would not make up his mind to any way of earning a living,
+she always took up the cudgels for the "little lad" and silenced
+the bookbinder by telling him roundly he knew nothing about it--or
+about anything else.
+
+So the worthy man went back to his calf-skins. All the same,
+albeit he could form no very clear idea of what was in his son's
+head, for the latter having become a "gentleman" was beyond his
+purview, he felt some disquietude to see a holiday, legitimate
+enough no doubt after a successful examination, dragging out to
+such a length. He was anxious to see his son earning money in
+some department of administration or other. He had heard speak
+of the _Hotel de Ville_ and the Government Offices, and he
+racked his brains to think of someone among his customers who
+might interest himself in his son's future. But he was not the
+man to act precipitately.
+
+One day, when Jean Servien was out on one of the long walks he had
+got into the habit of taking, he read on a poster that his Emilie,
+Mademoiselle Gabrielle T----, was appearing in that evening's
+piece. This time, ignoring his aunt's disapproval, he donned his
+Sunday clothes, had his hair frizzed and curled, and took his
+seat in the orchestra stalls.
+
+He saw her again! For the first few moments she did not seem
+so beautiful as he had pictured her. So long had he laboured
+and lain awake over the first image he had carried away of her
+that the impression had become blurred, and the type that had
+originally imprinted it on his heart no longer corresponded with
+the result created by his mind's unconscious working. Then he
+was disconcerted to see neither the white _stola_ and saffron
+mantle nor the bracelets and fillets that had seemed to him part
+and parcel of the beauty they adorned. Now she wore the turban
+of Roxana and the wide muslin trousers caught in at the ankle.
+It was only by degrees he could grow reconciled to the change.
+He realized that her arms were a trifle thin, and that a tooth
+stood back behind the rest in the row of pearls. But in the end
+her very defects pleased him, because they were hers, and he loved
+her the better for them. This time, by the law of change which is
+of the very essence of life, and by virtue of the imperfection
+that characterizes all living creatures, she made a physical
+appeal to his senses and called up the idea of a human being of
+flesh and blood, a creature you could cling to and make one with
+yourself. His admiration was lost in a flood of tenderness and
+infinite sadness--and he burst into tears.
+
+The next day he conceived a great desire to see her as she was
+in everyday life, dressed for the streets. It would be a sort of
+intimacy merely to pass her on the pavement. One evening, when she
+was playing, he watched for her at the stage-door, through which
+emerged one after the other scene-shifters, actors, constables,
+firemen, dressers, and actresses. At last she appeared, muffled
+in her fur cloak, a bouquet in her hand, tall and pale--so pale
+in the dusk her face seemed to him as if illumined by an inward
+light. She stood waiting on the doorstep till a carriage was
+called.
+
+He clasped both hands on his breast and thought he was going to
+die.
+
+When he found himself alone on the deserted _Quai_, he plucked
+a leaf from the overhanging bough of a plane tree. Then, setting
+his elbows on the parapet of the bridge, he tossed the leaf into
+the river and watched it borne away by the current of the stream
+that lay silvery in the moonlight, spangled with quivering lights.
+He watched it till he could see it no longer. Was it not the
+emblem of himself? He, too, was abandoning himself to the waters
+of a passion that shone bright and which he thought profound.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+That year the _Champs de Mars_ was occupied by one of the
+series of _Expositions Universelles_. Under the trees, in
+the heat and dust, crowds were swarming towards the entrance.
+Jean passed the turnstiles and entered the palace of glass and
+iron. He was still pursuing his passion, for he associated the
+being he loved with all manifestations of art and luxury. He
+made for the park and went straight to the Egyptian pavilion.
+Egypt had filled his dreams from the day when all his thoughts
+had been centred on one woman. In the avenue of sphinxes and
+before the painted temple he fell under the glamour that women
+of olden days and strange lands exercise on the senses,--on those
+of lovers with especial force. The sanctuary was venerable in
+his eyes, despite the vulgar use it was put to as part of the
+Exhibition. Looking at the jewels of Queen Aahotep, who lived
+and was lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered sadly
+over all that had been in the world and was no more. He pictured
+in fancy the black locks that had scented this diadem with the
+sphinx's head, the slim brown arms these, beads of gold and lapis
+lazuli had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vulture's
+wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and gorgets had confined,
+the breast that had once communicated its warmth to yonder gold
+scarabaeus with the blue wing-cases, the little royal hand that
+once held that poniard by the hilt wrought over with flowers
+and women's faces. He could not conceive how what was a dream to
+him had been a reality for other men. Vainly he tried to follow
+the lapse of ages. He told himself that another living shape
+would vanish in its turn, and it would be for nothing then that
+it had been so passionately desired. The thought saddened and
+calmed him. He thought, as he stood before these gewgaws from
+the tomb, of all these men who, in the abyss of bygone time,
+had in turn loved, coveted, enjoyed, suffered, whom death had
+taken, hungry or satiated, and made an end of the appetites of
+all alike. A placid melancholy swept over him and held him
+motionless, his face buried in his hands.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+It was at breakfast the next morning that Jean noticed, for the
+first time, the venerable, kindly look of his father's face. In
+truth, advancing years had invested the bookbinder's appearance
+with a sort of beauty. The smooth forehead under the curling
+white locks betokened a habit of peaceful and honest thoughts.
+Old age, while rendering the play of the muscles less active,
+veiled the distortion of the limbs due to long hours of labour
+at the bench under the more affecting disfigurements which life
+and _its_ long-drawn labours impress on all men alike. The old
+man had read, thought, striven honestly to do his best, and won
+the saving grace a simple faith bestows on the humble of heart;
+for he had become a religious man and a regular attendant at
+the church of his parish. Jean told himself it would be an easy
+and a grateful task to cherish such a father, and he resolved to
+inaugurate a life of toil and sacrifice. But he had no employment
+and no notion what to do.
+
+Shut up in his room, he was filled with a great pity for himself
+and longed to recover the peace of mind, the calm of the senses, the
+happy life that had vanished along with the leaf he had abandoned
+that evening to the drifting current. He opened a novel, but at
+the first mention of love he pitched the volume down, and fell
+to reading a book of travel, following the steps of an English
+explorer into the reed palace of the King of Uganda. He ascended
+the Upper Nile to Urondogami; hippopotamuses snorted in the swamps,
+waders and guinea-fowl rose in flight, while a herd of antelopes
+sped flying through the tall grasses. He was recalled from far,
+far away by his aunt shouting up the stairs:
+
+"Jean! Jean! come down into the shop; your father wants you."
+
+A stout, red-faced man, with the bent shoulders that come of
+much stooping over the desk, sat beside the counter. Monsieur
+Servien's eyes rested on his face with a deprecating air.
+
+When the boy appeared, the stranger asked if this was the young
+man in question, adding in a scolding voice:
+
+"You are all the same. You work and sweat and wear yourselves
+out to make your sons bachelors of arts, and you think the day
+after the examination the fine fellows will be posted Ambassadors.
+For God's sake! no more graduates, if you please! We can't tell
+what to do with 'em.... Graduates indeed! Why, they block the
+road; they are cab-drivers, they distribute handbills in the
+streets. You have 'em dying in hospital, rotting in the hulks!
+Why didn't you teach your son your own trade? Why didn't you
+make a bookbinder of him? ... Oh! I know why; you needn't tell
+me,--out of ambition! Well, then! some day your son will die of
+starvation, blushing for your folly--and a good job too! The State!
+you say, the State! it's the only word you can put your tongues
+to. But it's cluttered up, the State is! Take the Treasury; you
+send us graduates who can't spell; what d'ye expect us to do
+with all these loafers?"
+
+He drew his hand across his hot forehead. Then pointing a finger
+to show he was addressing Jane:
+
+"At any rate, you write a good hand?"
+
+Monsieur Servien answered for his son, saying it was legible.
+
+"Legible! Legible!" repeated the great man--throwing his fat
+hands about. "A copying clerk must write an even hand. Young man,
+do you write an even hand?"
+
+Jean said he did not know, his handwriting might have been spoilt,
+he had never thought very much about it. His questioner frowned:
+
+"That's very wrong," he blustered; "and I dare swear you young
+fellows make a silly affectation of not writing decently.... I
+may have a bit of influence at the Ministry, but you mustn't
+ask me to do impossibilities."
+
+The bookbinder shrunk back with a scared glance. _He_ certainly
+did not look the man to ask impossibilities.
+
+The other got up:
+
+"You will take lessons," he said, turning to Jean, "in writing
+and ciphering. You have eight months before you. Eight months
+from now the Minister will hold an examination. I will put your
+name down. Do you set to work without losing a minute!"
+
+So saying, he pulled out his watch, as though to see if his protege
+was actually going to waste a single minute before beginning his
+studies. He directed Monsieur Servien to get to work without
+delay on the books he was giving him to bind, and walked out of
+the shop. After the bookbinder had seen him to his carriage:
+
+"Jean, my boy," said he, "that is Monsieur Bargemont; I have
+spoken to him about you and you have heard what he had to say;
+he is going to help you to get into the Treasury Office, where
+he holds a high post. You understand what he told you about the
+examinations; you know more about such things, praise God! than
+I do. I am only an ignoramus, my lad, but I am your father. Now
+listen; I want to have a word of explanation with you, so that
+from this day on till I go to where your dear mother is we can
+look each other calmly in the face and understand one another
+at the first glance. Your mother loved you right well, Jean.
+There's not a gold mine in the world could give a notion of the
+wealth of affection that woman possessed. From the first moment
+you saw the light, she lived, so to say, more in you than in
+herself. Her love was stronger than she could bear. Well, well,
+she is dead. It was nobody's fault."
+
+The old man turned his eyes involuntarily towards the darkest
+corner of the shop, and Jean, looking in the same direction,
+caught sight of the sharp angles of the hand-press in the gloom.
+
+Monsieur Servien went on:
+
+"On her death-bed your mother asked me to make an educated man
+of you, for well she knew that education is the key that opens
+every door.
+
+"I have done what she wished. She was no longer with us, Jean,
+and when a voice comes back to you from the grave and bids you do
+a thing 'that a blessing may come,' why, one must needs obey. I
+did my best; and no doubt God was with me, for I have succeeded.
+You have your education; so far so good, but we must not have
+a blessing turn into a curse. And idleness is a curse. I have
+worked like a packhorse, and given many a hard pull at the collar,
+in harness from morning to night. I remember in particular one
+lot of cloth covers for the firm of Pigoreau that kept me on
+the job for thirty-six hours running. And then there was the
+year when your examination fees had to be paid and I accepted
+an order in the English style; it was a terrible bit of work,
+for it's not in my way at all, and at my time of life a man is
+not good at new methods. They wanted a light sort of binding,
+with flexible boards as flimsy as paper almost. I shed tears
+over it, but I learned the trick! Ah! it is a famous tool, is a
+workman's hand! But an educated man's brain is a far more wonderful
+thing still, and that tool you have, thanks to God in the first
+place, and to your mother in the second. It was she had the notion
+of educating you, I only followed her lead. Your work will be
+lighter than mine, but you must do it. I am a poor man, as you
+know; but, were I rich, I would not give you the means to lead
+an idle life, because that would be tempting you to vices and
+shaming you. Ah! if I thought your education had given you a
+taste for idleness, I should be sorry not to have made you a
+working man like myself. But then, I know you have a good heart;
+you have not got into your stride yet, that's all! The first
+steps will be uphill work; Monsieur Bargemont said so. The State
+services are overcrowded; there are over many graduates--though
+it is well enough to be one. Besides, I shall be at your back;
+I will help you, I will work for you; I have a pair of stout
+arms still. You shall have pocket-money, never fear; you will
+want it among the folks you will live with. We will save and
+pinch. But you must help yourself, lad; never be afraid of hard
+work, hit out from the shoulder and strike home. Good work never
+spoiled play yet. Your job done, laugh and sing and amuse yourself
+to your heart's content; you won't find me interfere. And, when
+you are a great man, if I am still in this world, don't you be
+afraid; I shall not get in your way. I am not a fellow to make
+a noise. We will hide away in some quiet hole, your aunt and
+I, and nobody will hear one word said of the old father."
+
+Aunt Servien, who had slipped into the shop and been listening
+for the last few moments, broke into sobs; she was quite ready
+to follow her brother and hide away in a corner; but when her
+nephew had risen to greatness, she would insist on going every day
+to keep things straight in his grand house. She was not going to
+leave "the little lad" to be a prey to housekeepers--housekeepers,
+indeed, she called them housebreakers!
+
+"The creatures keep great hampers," she declared, "that swallow
+up bottles of wine, cold chickens, and other titbits, fine linen,
+old clothes, oil, sugar, and candles--the best pickings from a
+rich man's house. No, I'll not let my little Jean be sucked to
+death by such vampires. _I_ mean to keep your house in order. No
+one will ever know I am your aunt. And if they did know, there's
+nobody, I should hope, could object. I don't know why anyone
+should be ashamed of me. They can lay my whole life bare, I have
+nothing to blush for. And there's many a Duchess can't say as
+much. As for forsaking the lad for fear of doing him a hurt,
+well, the notion is just what I expected of you, Servien; you've
+always been a bit simple-minded. _I_ mean to stay all my life
+with Jean. No, little lad, you'll never drive your old aunt out
+of your house, will you? And who could ever make your bed the
+way I can, my lamb?"
+
+Jean promised his father faithfully, oh! most faithfully, he
+would lead a hardworking life. Then he shut himself up in his
+room and pictured the future to himself--long years of austere
+and methodical labour.
+
+He mapped out his days systematically. In the morning he wrote
+copies to improve his handwriting, seated at a corner of the
+workbench. After breakfast he did sums in his bedroom. Every
+evening he went to the _Rue Soufflot_ by way of the Luxembourg
+gardens to a private tutor's, and the old man would set him
+dictations and explain the rules of simple interest. On reaching
+the gate adjoining the _Fontaine Medicis_ the boy always turned
+round for a look at the statues of women he could discern
+standing like white ghosts along the terrace. He had left behind
+on the path of life another fascinating vision.
+
+He never read a theatrical poster now, and deliberately forgot
+his favorite poets for fear of renewing his pain.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+This new life pleased him; it slipped by with a soothing monotony,
+and he found it healthful and to his taste. One evening, as he
+was coming downstairs at his old tutor's, a stout man offered
+him, with a sweep of the arm, the bill of fare advertising a
+neighbouring cook-shop; he carried a huge bundle of them under
+his left arm. Then stopping abruptly:
+
+"_Per Bacco!_" cried the fellow; "it is my old pupil. Tall and
+straight as a young poplar, here stands Monsieur Jean Servien!"
+
+It was no other than the Marquis Tudesco. His red waistcoat was
+gone; instead he wore a sort of sleeved vest of coarse ticking,
+but his shining face, with the little round eyes and hooked nose,
+still wore the same look of merry, mischievous alertness that
+was so like an old parrot's.
+
+Jean was surprised to see him, and not ill-pleased after all.
+He greeted him affectionately and asked what he was doing now.
+
+"Behold!" replied the Marquis, "my business is to distribute
+in the streets these advertisements of a local poisoner, and
+thereby to earn a place at the assassin's table to spread the
+fame of which I labour. Camoens held out his hand for charity
+in the streets of Lisbon. Tudesco stretches forth his in the
+byways of the modern Babylon, but it is to give and not to
+receive--lunches at 1 fr. 25, dinners at 1 fr. 75," and he offered
+one of his bills to a passer-by, who strode on, hands in pockets,
+without taking it.
+
+Thereupon the Marquis Tudesco heaved a sigh and exclaimed:
+
+"And yet I have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
+masterpiece of the immortal Torquato Tasso! But the brutal-minded
+booksellers scorn the fruit of my vigils, and in the empyrean
+the Muse veils her face so as not to witness the humiliation
+inflicted on her nursling."
+
+"And what has become of you all the time since we last saw you?"
+asked the young man frankly.
+
+"God only knows, and 'pon my word! I think He has forgotten."
+
+Such was the Marquis Tudesco's oracular answer.
+
+He tied up his bundle of papers in a cloth, and taking his pupil by
+the arm, urged him in the direction of the _Rue Saint-Jacques_.
+
+"See, my young friend," he said, "the dome of the Pantheon is
+half hidden by the fog. The School of Salerno teaches that the
+damp air of evening is inimical to the human stomach. There is
+near by a decent establishment where we can converse as two
+philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to
+conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated
+you in the Latin rudiments."
+
+They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of
+kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away. The room was
+long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with
+copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was
+lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under
+the gas-jets. At little tables of painted deal a number of men
+were drinking; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats,
+broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the rain, they sat and
+smoked in silence. Before the door of the stove several pairs
+of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of
+steam curled up from the toes of the owners' boots. A heavy torpor
+seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, impassive
+faces.
+
+While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old
+acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about
+him that filled him with a despairing melancholy--school ushers
+railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering
+contentedly to one another, enchanted at the profundity of their
+own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians
+arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes
+of love and women--and amongst it all this sentence:
+
+"The harmony of the spheres fills the spaces of infinity, and
+if we hear it not, it is because, as Plato says, our ears are
+stopped with earth."
+
+Monsieur Tudesco consumed brandy-cherries in a very elegant way.
+Then the waiter served two dantzigs in little glass cups. Jean
+admired the translucent liquor dotted with golden sparkles, and
+Monsieur Tudesco demanded two more. Then, raising his cup on
+high:
+
+"I drink to the health of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father,"
+he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least
+I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile
+condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of
+letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with
+the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere
+virtue. I conjecture you are wishing to order another dantzig,
+my young friend."
+
+Jean looked about him. The dram-shop was transfigured; the casks
+looked enormous with their taps splendidly glittering, and seemed
+to stretch into infinity in a quivering, golden mist. But one
+object was more monstrously magnified than all the rest, and
+that was the Marquis Tudesco; the old man positively towered
+as huge as the giant of a fairy-tale, and Jean looked for him
+to do wonders.
+
+Tudesco was smiling.
+
+"You do not drink, my young friend," he resumed. "I conjecture
+you are in love. Ah! love! love is at once the sweetest and the
+bitterest thing on earth. I too have felt my heart beat for a
+woman. But it is long years ago since I outlived that passion. I
+am now an old man crushed under adverse fortune; but in happier
+days there was at Rome a _diva_ of a beauty so magnificent and
+a genius so enthralling that cardinals fought to the death at
+the door of her box; well, sir, that sublime creature I have
+pressed to my bosom, and I have been informed since that with her
+last sigh she breathed my name. I am like an old ruined temple,
+degraded by the passage of time and the violence of men's hands,
+yet sanctified for ever by the goddess."
+
+This tale, whether it recalled in exaggerated terms some commonplace
+intrigue of his young days in Italy, or more likely was a pure
+fiction based on romantic episodes he had read in novels, was
+accepted by Jean as authentic and vastly impressive. The effect
+was startling, amazing. In an instant he beheld, with all the
+miraculous clearness of a vision, there, standing between the
+tables, the queen of tragedy he adored; he saw the locks braided
+in antique fashion, the long gold pendants drooping from either
+ear, the bare arms and the white face with scarlet lips. And
+he cried aloud:
+
+"I too love an actress."
+
+He was drinking, never heeding what the liquor was; but lo! it
+was a philtre he swallowed that revivified his passion. Then a
+torrent of words rose flooding to his lips. The plays he had
+seen, _Cinna, Bajazet_, the stern beauty of Emilie, the
+sweet ferocity of Roxana, the sight of the actress cloaked in
+velvet, her face shining so pale and clear in the darkness, his
+longings, his hopes, his undying love, he recounted everything
+with cries and tears.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco heard him out, lapping up a glass of Chartreuse
+drop by drop the while, and taking snuff from a screw of paper.
+At times he would nod his head in approval and go on listening
+with the air of a man watching and waiting his opportunity. When
+he judged that at last, after tedious repetitions and numberless
+fresh starts, the other's confidences were exhausted, he assumed
+a look of gravity, and laying his fine hand with a gesture as
+of priestly benediction on the young man's shoulder:
+
+"Ah! my young friend," he said, "if I thought that what you feel
+were true love... but I do not," and he shook his head and let
+his hand drop.
+
+Jean protested. To suffer so, and not to be really in love?
+
+Monsieur Tudesco repeated:
+
+"If I thought that this were true love... but I do not, so far."
+
+Jean answered with great vehemence; he talked of death and plunging
+a dagger in his heart.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco reiterated for the third time:
+
+"I do not believe it is true love."
+
+Then Jean fell into a fury and began to rumple and tear at his
+waistcoat as if he would bare his heart for inspection. Monsieur
+Tudesco took his hands and addressed him soothingly:
+
+"Well, well, my young friend, since it _is_ true love you feel,
+I will help you. I am a great tactician, and if King Carlo Alberto
+had read a certain memorial I sent him on military matters he
+would have won the battle of Novara. He did not read my memorial,
+and the battle was lost, but it was a glorious defeat. How happy
+the sons of Italy who died for their mother in that thrice holy
+battle! The hymns of poets and the tears of women made enviable
+their obsequies. I say it: what a noble, what a heroic thing
+is youth! What flames divine escape from young bosoms to rise
+to the Creator! I admire above everything young folk who throw
+themselves into ventures of war and sentiment with the impetuosity
+natural to their age."
+
+Tasso, Novara, and the _diva_ so beloved of cardinals mingled
+confusedly in Jean Servien's heated brain, and in a burst of
+sublime if fuddled enthusiasm he wrung the old villain's hand.
+Everything had grown indistinct; he seemed to be swimming in
+an element of molten metal.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, who at the moment was imbibing a glass of kuemmel,
+pointed to his waistcoat of ticking.
+
+"The misfortune is," he observed, "that I am garbed like a
+philosopher. How show myself in such a costume among elegant
+females? 'Tis a sad pity! for it would be an easy matter for
+me to pay my respects to an actress at an important theatre. I
+have translated the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, that masterpiece
+of Torquato Tasso's. I could propose to the great actress whom
+you love and who is worthy of your love, at least I hope so, a
+French adaptation of the _Myrrha_ of the celebrated Alfieri.
+What eloquence, what fire in that tragedy! The part of Myrrha
+is sublime and terrible; she will be eager to play it. Meantime,
+you translate _Myrrha_ into French verse; then I introduce you
+with your manuscript into the sanctuary of Melpomene, when you
+bring with you a double gift--fame and love! What a dream, oh!
+fortunate young man!... But alas! 'tis but a dream, for how should
+I enter a lady's boudoir in this rude and sordid guise?"
+
+But the tavern was closing and they had to leave. Jean felt so
+giddy in the open air he could not tell how he had come to lose
+Monsieur Tudesco, after emptying the contents of his purse into
+the latter's hand.
+
+He wandered about all night in the rain, stumbling through the
+puddles which splashed up the mud in his face. His brains buzzed
+with the maddest schemes, that took shape, jostled one another,
+and tumbled to pieces in his head. Sometimes he would stop to
+wipe the sweat from his forehead, then start off again on his
+wild way. Fatigue calmed his nerves, and a clear purpose emerged.
+He went straight to the house where the actress lived, and from
+the street gazed up at her dark, shuttered windows; then, stepping
+up to the _porte-cochere_, he kissed the great doors.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+Dating from that night Jean Servien spent his days in translating
+_Myrrha_ bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having
+taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which
+he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of
+blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise.
+Still, he did get something said of the fair vision of a woman
+that hovered for ever before his eyes, and of the door he had
+kissed in a night of frenzy.
+
+Monsieur Servien was disturbed to note how his son had grown
+heedless, absent-minded, and hollow-eyed, coming back late at
+night, and hardly up before noon. Before the mute reproach in
+his father's eyes the boy hung his head. But his home-life was
+nothing now; his whole thoughts were abroad, hovering around
+the unknown, in regions he pictured as resplendent with poetry,
+wealth and pleasure.
+
+Occasionally, at a street corner, he would meet the Marquis Tudesco
+again. He had found it impossible to replace his waistcoat of
+ticking. Moreover, he now advised Jean to pay his addresses to
+shop-girls.
+
+When the summer came, the theatrical posters announced in quick
+succession _Mithridate, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Rodogune, les
+Enfants d'Edouard, la Fiammina_. Jean, having secured the money
+to pay for a seat by hook or by crook, by some bit of trickery or
+falsehood, by cajoling his aunt or by a surreptitious raid on
+the cash-box, would watch from an orchestra stall the startling
+metamorphoses of the woman he loved. He saw her now girt with
+the white fillet of the virgins of Hellas, like those figures
+carved with such an exquisite purity in the marble of the Greek
+bas-reliefs that they seem clad in inviolate innocence, now in a
+flowered gown, with powdered ringlets sweeping her naked shoulders,
+that had an inexpressible charm in their spare outlines suggestive
+of the bitter-sweet taste of an unripe fruit. She reminded him
+in this attire of some old-time pastel of gallant ladies such
+as the bookbinder's son had pored over in the dealers' shops
+on the _Quai Voltaire_. Anon she would be crowned with a
+hawk's crest, girdled with plaques of gold on which were traced
+magic symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour
+of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black
+hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a
+Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics
+in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in
+this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman,
+clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat
+set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in
+these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians,
+Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire's verses on the death of Adrienne
+Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him
+as elegant or fraught with passion. But in all these creations
+it was one image, and one only, that he saw.
+
+Going one evening to the dram-shop with the Marquis Tudesco,
+who had given up all idea of discarding his checked waistcoat,
+he made the acquaintance of an old man whose white hair lay in
+ringlets on his shoulders and who still had the blue eyes of a
+child. He was an architect fallen to ruin along with the little
+Gothic erections he had raised at great expense in the Paris
+suburbs about 1840. His name was Theroulde, and the old fellow,
+whose smiling face belied his wretched condition, overflowed
+with anecdotes of artists and pretty women.
+
+In his prosperous days he had built country villas for actresses
+and attended many a joyous house-warming, the fun and frolic of
+which were still fresh in the light-hearted veteran's memory. He
+had long ceased to care who heard him, and primed with maraschino,
+he would unfold his reminiscences like some sumptuous tapestry
+gone to tatters. The bookseller's son, meeting an artist for the
+first time, listened to the old Bohemian with rapt enthusiasm.
+All these forgotten celebrities, or half-celebrities, all these
+old young beauties of whom Theroulde spoke, came to life again
+for him, fascinated him with an unexpected charm and a piquant
+sense of familiarity. Servien pictured them as he had seen them
+represented in the old foxed lithographs that litter the second-hand
+bookstalls along the _Quais_, wearing the hair in flat bandeaux
+with a jewel on a gold chain in the middle of the forehead, or
+else in heavy ringlets _a l'Anglaise_ brushing the cheeks. Obsessed
+by his one idea, he endeavoured to recall one who seemed so well
+acquainted with ladies of the stage to the present day. He spoke
+of tragedy, but Theroulde said he thought that sort of plays
+ridiculous, and repeated a number of parodies. Jean mentioned
+Gabrielle T----.
+
+"T----," exclaimed the artist-architect; "I knew her mother well."
+
+Never in all his life had Jean heard a sentence that interested
+him so profoundly.
+
+"I knew her in 1842," Theroulde went on, "at Nantes, where she
+created fourteen roles in six weeks. And folks imagine actresses
+have nothing to do! A fine thing, the stage! But the mischief is,
+there's not a single architect capable of building a playhouse
+with any sense. As to scenery, it is simply puerile, even at the
+Opera--so childish it might make a South Sea Islander blush.
+I have thought out a system of rollers in the flies so as to
+get rid of those long top-cloths that represent the sky without
+a pretence at deceiving anyone. I have likewise invented an
+arrangement of lamps and reflectors so placed as to light the
+characters on the stage from above downwards, as the sun does,
+which is the rational way, and not from below upwards, as the
+footlights do, which is absurd."
+
+"Of course it is," agreed Servien. "But you were speaking of
+Gabrielle T----'s mother."
+
+"She was a fine woman," replied the architect; "tall, dark, with
+a little moustache that became her to perfection.... You see the
+effect of my roller contrivance--a vast sky shedding an equal
+illumination over the actors and giving every object its natural
+shadows. _La Muette_ is being played, we will say; the famous
+_cavatina_, the slumber-song, is heard beneath a transparent
+sky, vaulted like the real thing and giving the impression of
+boundless space. The effect of the music is doubled! Fenella
+wakes, crosses the boards with cadenced tread; her shadow, which
+follows her on the floor, is cadenced like her steps; it is nature
+and art both together. That is my invention! As for putting it
+in execution, why, the means are childishly simple."
+
+Thereupon he entered upon endless explanations, using technical
+terms and illustrating his meaning with everything he could lay
+hands on--glasses, saucers, matches. His frayed sleeves, as they
+swept to and fro, wiped the marble top of the table and set the
+glasses rattling. Disturbed by the noise, the Marquis Tudesco,
+who was asleep, half opened his eyes mechanically.
+
+Servien kept nodding his approval and repeating that he quite
+understood, to stop the old man's babble. Then he advised the
+architect to try and put his invention in practice; but he only
+shrugged his shoulders--it was years since he had left off trying
+anything. After all, what did it matter to him whether his system
+was applied or no? He was an inventor!
+
+Recalled for the third time by his young listener to Gabrielle
+T----'s mother:
+
+"She never had any great success on the stage," he declared;
+"but she was a careful woman and saved money. She was near on
+fifty when I came upon her again in Paris living with Adolphe, a
+very handsome young fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six, nephew
+of a stockbroker. It was the most loving couple, the merriest,
+happiest household in the world. Never once did I breakfast at their
+little flat, fifth floor of a house in the _Rue Taitbout_,
+without being melted to tears. 'Eat, my kitten,' 'Drink, my lamb!'
+and such looks and endearments, and each so pleased with the
+other! One day he said to her: 'My kitten, your money does not
+bring you in what it ought; give me your scrip and in forty-eight
+hours I shall have doubled your capital.' She went softly to her
+cupboard and opening the glass doors, handed him her securities
+one by one with hands that trembled a little.
+
+"He took them unconcernedly and brought her a receipt the same
+evening bearing his uncle's signature. Three months after she
+was pocketing a very handsome income. The sixth month Adolphe
+disappeared. The old girl goes straight to the uncle with her
+screed of paper. 'I never signed that,' says the stockbroker, 'and
+my nephew never deposited any securities with me.' She flies like
+a mad-woman to the Commissary of Police, to learn that Adolphe,
+hammered at the Bourse, is off to Belgium, carrying with him
+a hundred and twenty thousand francs he had done another old
+woman out of. She never got over the blow; but we must say this
+of her, she brought up her daughter mighty strictly, and showed
+herself a very dragon of virtue. Poor Gabrielle must feel her
+cheeks burn to this day only to think of her years at the
+Conservatoire; for in those days her mother used to smack them
+soundly for her, morning and evening. Gabrielle, why I can see
+her now, in her sky-blue frock, running to lessons nibbling
+coffee-berries between her teeth. She was a good girl, that."
+
+"You knew her!" cried Jean, for whom these confidences formed
+the most exciting love adventure he had ever known.
+
+The old man assured him:
+
+"We used to have fine rides with her and a lot of artists in old
+days on horseback and donkey-back in the woods of Ville d'Avray;
+she used to dress as a man, and I remember one day..." He finished
+his story in a whisper,--it was just as well. He went on to say
+he hardly ever saw her now that she was with Monsieur Didier,
+of the Credit Bourguignon. The financier had sent the artists
+to the right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fellow,
+a dull, tiresome prig.
+
+Jean was neither surprised nor excessively shocked to hear that
+she had a lover, because having studied the ways of the ladies
+of the theatre in the proverbs in verse of Alfred de Musset, he
+pictured the life of Parisian actresses without exception as
+one continual feast of wit and gallantry. He loved her; with or
+without Didier, he loved her. She might have had three hundred
+lovers, like Lesbia,--he would have loved her just as much. Is
+it not always so with men's passions? They are in love because
+they are in love, and in spite of everything.
+
+As for feeling jealousy of Monsieur Didier, he never so much
+as thought of it. The infatuation of the lad! He was jealous
+of the men and women who saw her pass to and fro in the street,
+of the scene-shifters and workmen whom the business of the stage
+brought into contact with her. For the present these were his only
+rivals. For the rest, he trusted to the future, the ineffable
+future big whether with bliss or torment. Indeed, the literature
+of romance had inspired him with no small esteem of courtesans,
+if only their attitude was as it should be--leaning pensively
+on the balcony-rail of their marble palace.
+
+What did shock him in the rapscallion architect's stories, what
+wounded his love without weakening it, was all the rather squalid
+elements these narratives implied in the actress's young days.
+Of all things in the world he thought anything sordid the most
+repugnant.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, feeling sure his brandy-cherries would be paid
+for, did not trouble himself to talk, and the conversation was
+languishing when the architect remarked casually:
+
+"By-the-by! As I was going to Bellevue yesterday on business
+of my own, I came upon that actress of yours, young man, at her
+gate... oh! a rubbishy little villa, run up to last through a
+love affair, standing in six square yards of garden, meant to
+give a stock-broker some sort of notion what the country's like.
+She invited me in--but what was the use?"...
+
+She was at Bellevue! Jean forgot all the humiliating details
+the old man had told him, retaining the one fact only, that she
+was at Bellevue and it was possible to see her there in the sweet
+intimacy of the country.
+
+He got up to go. Monsieur Tudesco caught him by the skirt of his
+jacket to detain him:
+
+"My young friend, you have my admiration; for I see you rise
+on daring pinions above the hindrances of a lowly station to
+the realms of beauty, fame and wealth. You will yet cull the
+splendid blossom that fascinates you, at least I hope so. But how
+much better had you loved a simple work-girl, whose affections
+you could have beguiled by offering her a penn'orth of fried
+potatoes and a seat among the gods to see a melodrama. I fear you
+are a dupe of men's opinion, for one woman is not very different
+from another, and it is opinion, that mistress of the world, and
+nothing else, which sets a high price on some and a low one on
+others. Do you profit, my young and very dear friend, by the
+experience afforded me by the vicissitudes of fortune, which
+are such that I am obliged at this present moment to borrow of
+you the modest sum of two and a half francs."
+
+So spake the Marquis Tudesco.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+Jean had trudged afoot up the hill of Bellevue. Evening was falling.
+The village street ran upwards between low walls, brambles and
+thistles lining the roadway on either side. In front the woods
+melted into a far-off blue haze; below him stretched the city,
+with its river, its roofs, its towers and domes, the vast, smoky
+town which had kindled Servien's aspirations at the flaring lights
+of its theatres and nurtured his feverish longings in the dust
+of its streets. In the west a broad streak of purple lay between
+heaven and earth. A sweet sense of peace descended on the landscape
+as the first stars twinkled faintly in the sky. But it was not
+peace Jean Servien had come to find.
+
+A few more paces on the stony high road and there stood the gate
+festooned with the tendrils of a wild vine, just as it had been
+described to him.
+
+He gazed long, in a trance of adoration. Peering through the
+bars, between the sombre boughs of a Judas tree, he saw a pretty
+little white house with a flight of stone steps before the front
+door, flanked by two blue vases. Everything was still, nobody
+at the windows, nobody stirring on the gravel of the drive; not
+a voice, not a whisper, not a footfall. And yet, after a long,
+long look, he turned away almost happy, his heart filled with
+satisfaction.
+
+He waited under the old walnut trees of the avenue till the windows
+lighted up one by one in the darkness, and then retraced his
+steps. As he passed the railway station, to which people were
+hurrying to catch an incoming train, he saw amid the confusion
+a tall woman in a mantilla kiss a young girl who was taking her
+leave. The pale face under the mantilla, the long, delicate hands,
+that seemed ungloved out of a voluptuous caprice, how well he
+knew them! How he saw the woman from head to foot in a flash!
+His knees bent under him. He felt an exquisite languor, as if
+he would die there and then! No, he never believed she was so
+beautiful, so beyond price! And he had thought to forget her!
+He had imagined he could live without her, as if she did not
+sum up in herself the world and life and everything!
+
+She turned into the lane leading to her house, walking at a smart
+pace, with her dress trailing and catching on the brambles, from
+which with a backward sweep of the hand and a rough pull she
+would twitch it clear.
+
+Jean followed her, pushing his way deliberately through the same
+bramble bushes and exulting to feel the thorns scratch and tear
+his flesh.
+
+She stopped at the gate, and Jean saw her profile, in its purity
+and dignity, clearly defined in the pale moonlight. She was a
+long time in turning the key, and Jean could watch her face, the
+more enthralling to the senses for the absence of any tokens of
+disturbing intellectual effort. He groaned in grief and rage to
+think how in another second the iron bars would be close between
+her and him.
+
+No, he would not have it so; he darted forward, seized her by
+the hand, which he pressed in his own and kissed.
+
+She gave a loud cry of terror, the cry of a frightened animal.
+Jean was on his knees on the stone step, chafing the hand he
+held against his teeth, forcing the rings into the flesh of his
+lips.
+
+A servant, a lady's maid, came running up, holding a candle that
+had blown out.
+
+"What is all this?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+Jean released the hand, which bore the mark of his violence in
+a drop of blood, and got to his feet.
+
+Gabrielle, panting and holding the wounded hand against her bosom,
+leant against the gate for support.
+
+"I want to speak to you; I must," cried Jean.
+
+"Here's pretty manners!" shrilled the maid-servant. "Go your
+ways," and she pointed with her candlestick first to one end,
+then to the other of the street.
+
+The actress's face was still convulsed with the shock of her
+terror. Her lips were trembling and drawn back so as to show
+the teeth glittering. But she realized that she had nothing to
+fear.
+
+"What do you want with me?" she demanded.
+
+He had lost his temerity since he had dropped her hand. It was
+in a very gentle voice he said:
+
+"Madame, I beg and beseech you, let me say one word to you alone."
+
+"Rosalie," she ordered, after a moment's hesitation, "take a
+turn or two in the garden. Now speak, sir," and she remained
+standing on the step, leaving the gate half-way open, as it had
+been at the moment he had kissed her hand.
+
+He spoke in all the sincerity of his inmost heart:
+
+"All I have to say to you, Madame, is that you must not, you
+ought not, to repulse me, for I love you too well to live without
+you."
+
+She appeared to be searching in her memory.
+
+"Was it not you," she asked, "who sent me some verses?"
+
+He said it was, and she resumed:
+
+"You followed me one evening. It is not right, sir, not the right
+thing, to follow ladies in the street."
+
+"I only followed _you_, and that was because I could not help
+it."
+
+"You are very young."
+
+"Yes, but it was long ago I began to love you."
+
+"It came upon you all in a moment, did it not?"
+
+"Yes, when I saw you."
+
+"That is what I thought. You are inflammable, so it seems."
+
+"I do not know, Madame. I love you and I am very unhappy. I have
+lost the heart to live, and I cannot bear to die, for then I
+should not see you any more. Let me be near you sometimes. It
+must be so heavenly!"
+
+"But, sir, I know nothing about you."
+
+"That is my misfortune. But how _can_ I be a stranger for you?
+You are no stranger, no stranger in my eyes. I do not know any
+woman, for me there is no other woman in the world but you."
+
+And again he took her hand, which she let him kiss. Then:
+
+"It is all very pretty," she said, "but it is not an occupation,
+being in love. What are you? What do you do?"
+
+He answered frankly enough:
+
+"My father is in trade; he is looking out for a post for me."
+
+The actress understood the truth; here was a little bourgeois,
+living contentedly on next to nothing, reared in habits of
+penuriousness, a hidebound, mean creature, like the petty tradesmen
+who used to come to her whining for their bills, and whom she
+encountered of a Sunday in smart new coats in the Meudon woods.
+She could feel no interest in him, such as he might have inspired,
+whether as a rich man with bouquets and jewels to offer her,
+or a poor wretch so hungry and miserable as to bring tears to
+her eyes. Dazzle her eyes or stir her compassion, it must be
+one or the other! Then she was used to young fellows of a more
+enterprising mettle. She thought of a young violinist at the
+Conservatoire who, one evening, when she was entertaining company,
+had pretended to leave with the rest and concealed himself in her
+dressing-room; as she was undressing, thinking herself alone, he
+burst from his hiding-place, a bottle of champagne in either hand
+and laughing like a mad-man. The new lover was less diverting.
+However, she asked him his name.
+
+"Jean Servien."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Jean Servien, I am sorry, very sorry, to have
+made you unhappy, as you say you are."
+
+At the bottom of her heart she was more flattered than grieved
+at the mischief she had done, so she repeated several times over
+how very sorry she was.
+
+She added:
+
+"I cannot bear to hurt people. Every time a young man is unhappy
+because of me, I am so distressed; but, honour bright, what do
+you want me to do for you? Take yourself off, and be sensible.
+It's no use your coming back to see me. Besides, it would be
+ridiculous. I have a life of my own to live, quite private, and
+it is out of the question for me to receive strange visitors."
+
+He assured her between his sobs:
+
+"Oh! how I wish you were poor and forsaken. I would come to you
+then and we should be happy."
+
+She was a good deal surprised he did not take her by the waist
+or think of dragging her into the garden under the clump of trees
+where there was a bench. She was a trifle disappointed and in a
+way embarrassed not to have to defend her virtue. Finding the
+conclusion of the interview did not match the beginning and the
+young man was getting tedious, she slammed the gate in his face
+and slipped back into the garden, where he saw her vanish in
+the darkness.
+
+She bore on her hand, beside a sapphire on her ring finger, a
+drop of blood. In her chamber, as she emptied a jug of water over
+her hands to wash away the stain, she could not help reflecting
+how every drop of blood in this young man's veins would be shed
+for her whenever she should give the word. And the thought made
+her smile. At that moment, if he had been there, in that room,
+at her side, it may be she would not have sent him away.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Jean hurried down the lane and started off across country in
+such a state of high exaltation as robbed him of all senses of
+realities and banished all consciousness whether of joy or pain.
+He had no remembrance of what he had been before the moment when
+he kissed the actress's hand; he seemed a stranger to himself.
+On his lips lingered a taste that stirred voluptuous fancies,
+and grew stronger as he pressed them one against the other.
+
+Next morning his intoxication was dissipated and he relapsed
+into profound depression. He told himself that his last chance
+was gone. He realized that the gate overhung with wild vine and
+ivy was shut against him by that careless, capricious hand more
+firmly and more inexorably than ever it could have been by the
+bolts and bars of the most prudish virtue. He felt instinctively
+that his kiss had stirred no promptings of desire, that he had
+been powerless to win any hold on his mistress's senses.
+
+He had forgotten what he said, but he knew that he had spoken
+out in all the frank sincerity of his heart. He had exposed his
+ignorance of the world, his contemptible candour. The mischief
+was irreparable. Could anyone be more unfortunate? He had lost
+even the one advantage he possessed, of being unknown to her.
+
+Though he entertained no very high opinion of himself, he certainly
+held fate responsible for his natural deficiencies. He was poor,
+he reasoned, and therefore had no right to fall in love. Ah!
+if only he were wealthy and familiar with all the things idle,
+prosperous people know, how entirely the splendour of his material
+surroundings would be in harmony with the splendour of his passion!
+What blundering, ferocious god of cruelty had immured in the dungeon
+of poverty this soul of his that so overflowed with desires?
+
+He opened his window and caught sight of his father's apprentice
+on his way back to the workshop. The lad stood there on the pavement
+talking with naive effrontery to a little book-stitcher of his
+acquaintance. He was kissing the girl, without a thought of the
+passers-by, and whistling a tune between his teeth. The pretty,
+sickly-looking slattern carried her rags with an air, and wore
+a pair of smart, well-made boots; she was pretending to push
+her admirer away, while really doing just the opposite, for the
+slim yet broad-shouldered stripling in his blue blouse had a
+certain townified elegance and the "conquering hero" air of the
+suburban dancing-saloons. When he left her, she looked back
+repeatedly; but he was examining the saveloys in a pork-butcher's
+window, never giving another thought to the girl.
+
+Jean, as he looked on at the little scene, found himself envying
+his father's apprentice.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+He read the same morning on the posters that _she_ was playing
+that evening. He watched for her after the performance and saw her
+distributing hand-shakes to sundry acquaintances before driving
+off. He was suddenly struck with something hard and cruel in
+her, which he had not observed in the interview of the night
+before. Then he discovered that he hated her, abominated her
+with all the force of his mind and muscles and nerves. He longed
+to tear her to pieces, to rend and crush her. It made him furious
+to think she was moving, talking, laughing,--in a word, that she
+was alive. At least it was only fair she should suffer, that
+life should wound her and make her heart bleed. He was rejoiced
+at the thought that she must die one day, and then nothing of
+her would be left, of her rounded shape and the warmth of her
+flesh; none would ever again see the superb play of light in
+her hair and eyes, the reflections, now pale, now pearly, of
+her dead-white skin. But her body, that filled him with such
+rage, would be young and warm and supple for long years yet,
+and lover after lover would feel it quiver and awake to passion.
+She would exist for other men, but not for him. Was that to be
+borne? Ah! the deliciousness of plunging a dagger in that warm,
+living bosom! Ah! the bliss, the voluptuousness of holding her
+pinned beneath one knee and demanding between two stabs:
+
+"Am I ridiculous now?"
+
+He was still muttering suchlike maledictions when he felt a hand
+laid on his shoulder. Wheeling round, he saw a quaint figure--a
+huge nose like a pothook, high, massive shoulders, enormous,
+well-shaped hands, a general impression of uncouthness combined
+with vigour and geniality. He thought for a moment where this
+strange monster could have come from; then he shouted: "Garneret!"
+
+Instantly his memory flew back to the court-yard and class-rooms
+of the school in the _Rue d'Assas_, and he saw a heavily built
+lad, for ever under punishment, standing out face to the wall
+during playtime, getting and giving mighty fisticuffs, a terrible
+fellow for plain speaking and hard hitting, industrious, yet a
+thorn in the side of masters, always in ill-luck, yet ever and
+anon electrifying the class with some stroke of genius.
+
+He was glad enough to see his old school-fellow again, who struck
+him as looking almost old with his puckered lids and heavy features.
+They set off arm in arm along the deserted _Quai_, and to the
+accompaniment of the faint lapping of the water against the retaining
+walls, told each other the history of their past--which was succinct
+enough, their present ideas, and their hopes for the future--which
+were boundless.
+
+The same ill-luck still pursued Garneret; from morn to eve he
+was engaged on prodigiously laborious hack-work for a map-maker,
+who paid him the wages of one of his office boys; but his big
+head was crammed with projects. He was working at philosophy
+and getting up before the sun to make experiments on the
+susceptibility to light of the invertebrates; by way of studying
+English and politics at the same time, he was translating Mr.
+Disraeli's speeches; then every Sunday he accompanied Monsieur
+Hebert's pupils on their geological excursions in the environs of
+Paris, while at night he gave lectures to working men on Italian
+painting and political economy. There was never a week passed
+but he was bowled over for twenty-four or forty-eight hours with
+an agonizing sick-headache. He spent long hours too with his
+fiancee, a girl with no dowry and no looks, but of a loving,
+sensitive temper, whom he adored and fully intended to marry the
+moment he had five hundred francs to call his own.
+
+Servien could make nothing of the other's temperament, one that
+looks upon the world as an immense factory where the good workman
+labours, coat off and sleeves rolled up, the sweat pouring from his
+brow and a song on his lips. He found it harder still to conceive
+a love with which the glamour of the stage or the splendours of
+luxurious living had nothing to do. Yet he felt there was something
+strong and sensible and true about it all, and craving sympathy
+he made Garneret the confidant of his passion, telling the tale
+in accents of despair and bitterness, though secretly proud to
+be the tortured victim of such fine emotions.
+
+But Garneret expressed no admiration.
+
+"My dear fellow," said he, "you have got all these romantic notions
+out of trashy novels. How can you love the woman when you don't
+know her?"
+
+How, indeed? Jean Servien did not know; but his nights and days,
+the throbbings of his heart, the thoughts that possessed his
+mind to the exclusion of all else, everything convinced him that
+it was so. He defended himself, talking of mystic influences,
+natural affinities, emanations, a divine unity of essence.
+
+Garneret only buried his face between his hands. It was above
+his comprehension.
+
+"But come," he said, "the woman is no differently constituted
+from other women!"
+
+Obvious as it was, this consideration filled Jean Servien with
+amazement. It shocked him so much that, rather than admit its
+truth, he racked his brains in desperation to find arguments
+to controvert the blasphemy.
+
+Garneret gave his views on women. He had a judicial mind, had
+Garneret, and could account for everything in the relations of
+the sexes; _but_ he could not tell Jean why one face glimpsed
+among a thousand gives joy and grief more than life itself seemed
+able to contain. Still, he tried to explain the problem, for he
+was of an eminently ratiocinative temper.
+
+"The thing is quite simple," he declared. "There are a dozen
+violins for sale at a dealer's. I pass that way, common scraper
+of catgut that I am, I tune them and try them, and play over
+on each of them in turn, with false notes galore, some catchy
+tune--_Au clair de la lune_ or _J'ai du bon tabac dans ma
+tabatiere_--stuff fit to kill the old cow. Then Paganini
+comes along; with one sweep of the bow he explores the deepest
+depths of the vibrating instruments. The first is flat, the second
+sharp, the third almost dumb, the fourth is hoarse, five others
+have neither power nor truth of tone; but lo! the twelfth gives
+forth under the master's hand a mighty music of sweet, deep-voiced
+harmonies. It is a Stradivarius; Paganini knows it, takes it home
+with him, guards it as the apple of his eye; from an instrument
+that for me would never have been more than a resonant wooden box
+he draws chords that make men weep, and love, and fall into a
+very ecstasy; he directs in his will that they bury this violin
+with him in his coffin. Well, Paganini is the lover, the instrument
+with its strings and tuning-pegs is the woman. The instrument
+must be beautifully made and come from the workshop of a right
+skilful maker; more than that, it must fall into the hands of
+an accomplished player. But, my poor lad, granting your actress
+is a divine instrument of amorous music, I don't believe you
+capable of drawing from it one single note of passion's fugue....
+Just consider. I don't spend my nights supping with ladies of
+the theatre; but we all know what an actress is. It is an animal
+generally agreeable to see and hear, always badly brought up,
+spoilt first by poverty and afterwards by luxury. Very busy into
+the bargain, which makes her as unromantic as anybody can well
+be. Something like a _concierge_ turned princess, and combining
+the petty spite of the porter's lodge with the caprices of the
+boudoir and the fagged nerves of the student.
+
+"You can hardly expect to dazzle T---- with the munificence and
+tastefulness of your presents. Your father gives you a hundred
+sous a week to spend; a great deal for a bookbinder, but very
+little for a woman whose gowns cost from five hundred to three
+thousand francs apiece. And, as you are neither a Manager to
+sign agreements, nor a Dramatic Author to apportion roles, nor
+a Journalist to write notices, nor a young man from the draper's
+to take advantage of a moment's caprice as opportunity offers
+when delivering a new frock, I don't see in the least how you
+are to make her favour you, and I think your tragedy queen did
+quite right to slam her gate in your face."
+
+"Ah, well!" sighed Jean Servien, "I told you just now I loved
+her. It is not true. I hate her! I hate her for all the torments
+she has made me suffer, I hate her because she is adorable and
+men love her. And I hate all women, because they all love someone,
+and that someone is not I!"
+
+Garneret burst out laughing.
+
+"Candidly," he grinned, "they are not so far wrong. Your love
+has no spark of anything affectionate, kindly, useful in it.
+Since the day you fell in love with Mademoiselle T----, have
+you once thought of sparing her pain? Have you once dreamed of
+making a sacrifice for her sake? Has any touch of human kindness
+ever entered into your passion? Can it show one mark of manliness
+or goodness? Not it. Well, being the poor devils we are, with
+our own way to push in life and nothing to help us on, we must
+be brave and good. It is half-past one, and I have to get up
+at five. Good night. Cultivate a quiet mind, and come and see
+me."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Jean had only three days left to prepare for his examination for
+admission to the Ministry of Finance. These he spent at home,
+where the faces of father, aunt, and apprentice seemed strange and
+unfamiliar, so completely had they disappeared from his thoughts.
+Monsieur Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid
+as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches. His aunt
+overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions of doting affection;
+at night she would creep into his room to see if he was sound
+asleep, while all day long she wearied him with the tale of her
+petty grievances and dislikes.
+
+Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles, her sacred
+spectacles, perched on his nose, and the profanation had left
+a kind of religious horror in her mind.
+
+"That boy is capable of anything," she used to say. One of the
+boy's pet diversions was to execute behind the old lady's back a
+war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once at a theatre.
+Sticking feathers he had plucked from a feather-broom in his hair,
+and holding a big knife without a handle between his teeth, he
+would creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing by
+little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces which gradually
+gave place to a look of disappointed appetite, as a closer scrutiny
+showed how tough and leathery his victim was. Jean could not
+help laughing at this buffoonery, trivial and ill-bred as it
+was. His aunt had never got clearly to the bottom of the little
+farce that dogged her heels, but more than once, turning her head
+sharply, she had found reason to suspect something disrespectful
+was going on. Nevertheless, she put up with the lad because of
+his lowly origin. The only folks she really hated were the rich.
+She was furious because the butcher's wife had gone to a wedding
+in a silk dress.
+
+At the upper end of the _Rue de Rennes_, beside a plot of waste
+and, was a stall where an old woman sold dusty ginger-bread and
+sticks of stale barley-sugar. She had a face the colour of brick
+dust under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale,
+steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple of
+francs, and on windy days the white dust from houses building
+in the neighbourhood covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nurses
+and mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones who were
+casting sheep's eyes at the sweetstuff:
+
+"Dirty!" they would say dissuasively; "dirty!"
+
+But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was past feeling
+anything. She did not beg. Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her
+good-day in passing, address her by name and fall into talk with
+her before the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a
+time. The staple of conversation with them both was the neighbours,
+accidents that had occurred in the public thoroughfares, cases
+of coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and trials of
+life and the ways of Providence, "which are not always just."
+
+Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies. He was
+a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the
+poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless
+resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant,
+as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces
+and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and
+empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man
+learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught
+at school. His thoughts flew from this woman to that other, who
+was so beautiful and whom he loved, and he saw life before him
+as a whole--a melancholy panorama. He told himself they must
+die both of them, and a hideous old woman, squatted before a
+few sodden sweetmeats, gave him the same impression of solemn
+serenity he had experienced at sight of the jewels from the Queen
+of Egypt's sepulchre.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+After sitting all day over little problems in arithmetic, he
+set off in the evening in working clothes for the _Avenue de
+l'Observatoire_. There, between two tallow candles, in front
+of a hoarding covered with ballads in illustrated covers, a fellow
+was singing in a cracked voice to the accompaniment of a guitar.
+A number of workmen and work-girls stood round listening to the
+music. Jean slipped into the circle, urged by the instinct that
+draws a stroller with nothing to do to the neighbourhood of light
+and noise and that love of a crowd which is characteristic of
+your Parisian. More isolated in the press, more alone than ever,
+he stood dreaming of the splendour and passion of some noble
+tragedy of Euripides or Shakespeare. It was some time before he
+noticed something soft touching and pressing against him from
+behind. He turned round and saw a work-girl in a little black
+hat with blue ribbons. She was young and pretty enough, but his
+mind was fixed on the awe-inspiring and superhuman graces of
+an Electra or a Lady Macbeth. She went on nuzzling against his
+back till he looked round again.
+
+"Monsieur," she said then; "will you just let me slip in front
+of you? I am so little; I shan't stop your seeing."
+
+She had a nice voice. The poise of her head, lifted and thrown
+back on a plump neck, showed a pair of bright eyes and good teeth
+between pouting lips. She glided, merry and alert, into the place
+Jean made for her without a word.
+
+The man with the guitar sang a ballad about caged birds and blossoms
+in flower-pots.
+
+"_Mine_," observed the work-girl to Jean, "are carnations, and
+I have birds too--canaries they are."
+
+At the moment he was thinking of some fair-faced chatelaine roaming
+under the battlements of a donjon.
+
+The work-girl went on:
+
+"I have a pair,--you understand, to keep each other company. Two
+is a nice number, don't you think so?"
+
+He marched off with his visions under the old trees of the Avenue.
+After a turn or two up and down, he espied the little work-girl
+hanging on the arm of a handsome young fellow, fashionably dressed,
+wearing a heavy gold watch-chain. Her admirer was catching her
+by the waist in the dusk of the trees, and she was laughing.
+
+Then Jean Servien felt sorry he had scorned her advances.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Jean was called up for examination, but with his insufficient
+preparation he got hopelessly fogged in the intricacies of a
+difficult, tricky piece of dictation and sums that were too long
+to be worked in the time allowed the candidates. He came home in
+despair. His father tried in his good-nature to reassure him.
+But a fortnight after came an unstamped letter summoning him to
+the Ministry, and after a three hours' wait he was shown into
+Monsieur Bargemont's private room. He recognized his own dictation
+in the big man's hand.
+
+"I am sorry," the functionary began, "to inform you that you
+have entirely failed to pass the tests set you. You do not know
+the language of your own country, sir; you write _Maisons-Lafitte_
+without an 's' to _Maisons_. You cannot spell! and what is more,
+you do not cross your 't's.' You _must_ know at your age that
+a 't' ought to be crossed. It's past understanding, sir!"
+
+And striking fiercely at the sheet of foolscap on which the mistakes
+were marked in red ink, he kept muttering: "It's past understanding,
+past understanding!" His face grew purple, and a swollen vein
+stood out on his forehead. A queer look in Jean's face gave him
+pause:
+
+"Young man," he resumed in a calmer voice, "whatever I can do
+for you, I will do, be sure of that; but you must not ask me to
+do impossibilities. We cannot enlist in the service of the State
+young men who spell so badly they write _Maisons-Lafitte_ without
+an 's' to the _Maisons_. It is in a way a patriotic duty for a
+Frenchman to know his own language. A year hence, the Ministry
+will hold another examination, and I will enter your name. You have
+a year before you; work hard, sir, and learn your mother-tongue."
+
+Jean stood there scarlet with rage, hate in his heart, his eyes
+aflame, his throat dry, his teeth clenched, unable to articulate
+a word; then he swung round like an automaton and darted from
+the room, banging the door after him with a noise of thunder;
+piles of books and papers rolled on to the floor of the Chief's
+office at the shock.
+
+Monsieur Bargemont was left alone to digest his stupefaction; even
+so his first thought was to save the honour of his Department.
+He reopened the door and shouted, "Leave the room!" after Jean,
+who, mastered once more by his natural timidity, was flying like
+a thief down the corridors.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+In the court, which was enlivened by a parterre of roses, Jean,
+carrying a letter in his hand, was trying to find his bearings
+according to the directions given him in a low voice, as if it
+were a secret, by the lay-brother who acted as doorkeeper. He
+was wandering uncertainly from door to door along the walls of
+the old silent buildings when a little boy noticed his plight
+and accosted him:
+
+"Do you want to see the Director? He is in his study with mamma.
+Go and wait in the parlour."
+
+This was a large hall with bare walls, a noble enough apartment
+in its unadorned simplicity, in spite of the mean horsehair chairs
+that stood round it. Above the fire-place, instead of a mirror,
+was a _Mater dolorosa_ that caught the eye by its dazzling
+whiteness. Big marble tears stood arrested in mid-career down
+the cheeks, while the features expressed the pious absorption
+of the Divine Mother's grief. Jean Servien read the inscription
+cut in red letters on the pedestal, which ran thus:
+
+  PRESENTED TO THE REVEREND ABBE BORDIER,
+               IN MEMORY OF
+        PHILIPPE-GUY DE THIERERCHE,
+             WHO DIED AT PAU,
+   NOVEMBER 11, 1867, IN THE SEVENTEENTH
+             YEAR OF HIS AGE,
+  BY THE COUNTESS VALENTINE DE THIERERCHE,
+       NEE DE BRUILLE DE SAINT-AMAND.
+         _LAUDATE PUERI DOMINUM_
+
+Then he forgot his anxieties, forgot he was there to beg for
+employment, shook off the instinctive dread that had seized him
+on the threshold of the great silent house. He forgot his fears
+and hopes--hopes of being promoted usher! He was absorbed by
+this cruel domestic drama revealed to him in the inscription.
+A scion of one of the greatest families of France, a pupil of
+the Abbe Bordier, attacked by phthisis in the midst of his now
+profitless studies and leaving school, not to enjoy life and
+taste the glorious pleasures only those contemn who have drained
+them to the dregs, but to die at a southern town in the arms of
+his mother whose overwhelming, but still self-conscious grief
+was symbolized by this pompous memorial of her sorrow. He could
+feel, he could see it all. The three Latin words that represent
+the stricken mother saying: "Children, praise ye the Lord who
+hath taken away my child," astonished him by their austere piety,
+while at the same time he admired the aristocratic bearing that
+was preserved even in the presence of death.
+
+He was still lost in these day-dreams when an old priest beckoned
+him to walk into an inner room. The worthy man took the letter
+of recommendation which Jean handed him, set on his big nose a
+pair of spectacles with round glasses for all the world like
+the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, and proceeded to
+read the letter, holding it out at the full stretch of his arm.
+The windows giving on the garden stood open, and a tendril of
+wild vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a crucifix of
+old ivory, while a light breeze set the papers on it fluttering
+like white wings.
+
+The Abbe Bordier, his reading concluded, turned to the young man,
+showing a deeply lined countenance and a forehead beautifully
+polished by age. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
+Then the worn eyelids lifted slowly and discovered a pair of grey
+eyes of a shade that somehow reminded you of an autumn morning.
+He lay back in his armchair, his legs stretched out in front of
+him, displaying his silver-buckled shoes and black stockings.
+
+"It seems then, my dear boy," he began, "you wish, so my venerable
+friend the Abbe Marguerite informs me, to devote yourself to
+teaching; and your idea would be to prepare for your degree while
+at the same time performing the duties of an assistant master
+to supervise the boys at their work. It is a humble office; but
+it will depend entirely on yourself, my dear young friend, to
+dignify it by a heartfelt zeal and a determination to succeed.
+I shall entrust the studies of the _Remove_ to your care. Our
+bursar will inform you of the conditions attaching to the post."
+
+Jean bowed and made to leave the room; but suddenly the Abbe Bordier
+beckoned him to stop and asked abruptly:
+
+"You understand the rules of verse?"
+
+"Latin verse?" queried Jean.
+
+"No, no! French verse. Now, would you rhyme _trone_ with _couronne_?
+The rhyme is not, it must be allowed, quite satisfactory to the
+ear, yet the usage of the great writers authorizes it."
+
+So saying, the old fellow laid hold of a bulky manuscript book.
+
+"Listen," he cried, "listen. It is St. Fabricius addressing the
+Proconsul Flavius:
+
+  _Acheve, fais dresser l'appareil souhaite
+  De ma mort, ou plutot de ma felicite.
+  Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son celeste trone,
+  Deja me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne._
+
+"Do you think it would be better if he said:
+
+  _Acheve, fais dresser l'appareil souhaite
+  De ma mort, ou plutot de ma felicite.
+  Je vois le Roi des Rois me tendre la couronne,
+  Quel n'en est le prix quand c'est Dieu qui la donne!_
+
+"Doubtless these latter lines are more correct than the others,
+but they are less vigorous, and a poet should never sacrifice
+meaning to metre.
+
+  _Le Roi des Rois, du haut de son celeste trone,
+  Deja me tend la palme et tresse ma couronne."_
+
+This time, as he declaimed the verses, he went through the
+corresponding gestures of tendering a gift and plaiting a garland.
+
+"It is better so," he added, "better so!"
+
+Jean, in some surprise, said yes, it was certainly better.
+
+"Certainly better, yes," cried the old poet, smiling with the
+happy innocence of a little child.
+
+Then he confided in Jean that it was a very difficult thing indeed
+to write poetry. You must get the caesura in the right place,
+bring in the rhyme naturally, make your rhythm run in divers
+cadences, now strong, now sweet, sometimes onomatopoetic, use
+only words either elevated in themselves or dignified by the
+circumstances.
+
+He read one passage of his Tragedy because he had his doubts
+about the number of feet in the line, another because he thought
+it contained some bold strokes happily conceived, then a third
+to elucidate the two first, eventually the whole five acts from
+start to finish. He acted the words as he read, modulating his
+voice to suit the various characters, stamping and storming,
+and to adjust his black skullcap--it _would_ tumble off at the
+pathetic parts--dealing himself a succession of sounding slaps
+on the crown of his head.
+
+This sacred drama, in which no woman appeared, was to be played
+by the pupils of the Institution at a forthcoming function. The
+previous year he had staged his first tragedy, _le Bapteme
+de Clovis_, in the same approved style. A regular, Monsieur
+Schuver, had arranged garlands of paper roses to represent the
+battlefield of Tolbiac and the basilica at Rheims. To give a
+wild, barbaric look to the boys who represented Clovis' henchmen,
+the sister superintendent of the wardrobe had tacked up their
+white trousers to the knee. But the Abbe Bordier hoped greater
+things still for his new piece.
+
+Jean applauded and improved upon these ambitious projects. His
+suggestions for scenery and costumes were admirable. He would
+have the ruthless Flavius seated on a curule chair of ivory,
+draped with purple, erected before a portico painted on the back
+cloth. The costumes of the Roman soldiers, he insisted, must
+be copied from those on Trajan's Column.
+
+His words opened superb vistas before the old priest's eyes;
+he was enchanted, ravished, yet full of doubts and fears. Alas!
+Monsieur Schuver was quite helpless if it came to designing anything
+more ambitious than his paper roses. Then Jean must needs take
+a look round in the shed where the properties were stored, and
+the two discussed together how the stage must be set and the
+side-scenes worked. Jean took measurements, drew up a plan, worked
+out an estimate. He manifested a passionate eagerness that was
+surprising, albeit the old priest took it all as a matter of
+course. A batten would come here, a practicable door there. The
+actor would enter there...
+
+But the worthy priest checked him:
+
+"Say the reciter, my dear boy; _actor_ is not a word for
+self-respecting people."
+
+Barring this trifling misunderstanding, they were in perfect
+accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbe Bordier's
+shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor
+of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse
+that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien
+was smiling at the vision only _his_ eyes could see of Gabrielle,
+the inspirer of all his enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+It was nearly the end of the long evening preparation and absolute
+quiet reigned in the schoolroom. The broad lamp-shades concentrated
+the light on the tangled heads of the boys, who were working at
+their lessons or sitting in a brown study with their noses on
+the desks. The only sounds were the crackling of paper, the lads'
+breathing and the scratch, scratch of steel pens. The youngest
+there, his cheeks still browned by the sea-breezes, was dreaming
+over his half-finished exercise of a beach on the Normandy coast
+and the sand-castles he and his friends used to build, to see
+them swept away presently by the waves of the rising tide.
+
+At the top of the great room, at the high desk where the
+Superintendent of Studies had solemnly installed him underneath
+the great ebony crucifix, Jean Servien, his head between his
+two hands, was reading a Latin poet.
+
+He felt utterly sad and lonely; but he had not realized yet that
+his new life was an actual fact, and from moment to moment he
+expected the schoolroom would suddenly vanish and the desks with
+their litter of dictionaries and grammars and the young heads
+gilded by the lamp-light melt into thin air.
+
+Suddenly a paper pellet, shot from the far end of the hall, struck
+him on the cheek. He turned pale and cried in a voice shaking
+with anger:
+
+"Monsieur de Grizolles, leave the room!"
+
+There was some whispering and stifled laughter, then peace was
+restored. The scratching of pens began again, and exercises were
+passed surreptitiously from hand to hand for cribbing purposes.
+
+He was an usher.
+
+His father had come to this decision by the advice of Monsieur
+Marguerite, the _vicaire_ of his parish and a friend of the Abbe
+Bordier. The bookbinder, having a high respect for knowledge,
+entertained a correspondingly high idea of the status of all its
+ministers. Assistant master struck him as an imposing title, and
+he was delighted to have his son connected with an aristocratic
+and religious foundation.
+
+"Your son," the Abbe Marguerite told him, "will read for his
+Master's degree in the intervals of his duties, and the title
+of Licencie-es-Lettres will open the door to the higher walks
+of teaching. We have known assistants rise to high positions
+in the University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes' chair."
+
+These considerations had clenched the bookbinder's resolution,
+and this was now the third day of Jean's ushership.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+Three months had dragged by. It was a Friday; a hot, nauseating
+smell of fried fish filled the refectory; a strong drought blew
+cold about feet encased in wet boots; the walls dripped with
+moisture, and outside the barred windows a fine rain was falling
+from a grey sky. The boys, seated at marble-topped tables, were
+making a hideous rattle with their forks and tin cups, while
+one of their schoolfellows, seated at the desk in the middle of
+the great room, was reading aloud, as the regulations direct,
+a passage from Rollin's _Ancient History_.
+
+Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill-washed earthenware
+plate, had cold feet and a sore heart. Something resembling rotten
+wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the servers
+were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in
+the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping
+voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher's ears.
+He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of sentences:
+"_She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women
+unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and
+intellect... her person more compelling than any magnificence
+of adornment.... Her galley entered the Cydnus... the poop of
+the vessel shone resplendent with gold, the sails were of Tyrian
+purple, the oars of silver._"
+
+Then the seductive names of _Nereids, flutes, perfumes_. The
+hot blood flooded his cheeks. The woman who for him was the sole
+and only incarnation of the whole race of womankind throughout the
+ages rose before his mental sight with a surprising clearness;
+every hair of his body stood on end in an agonizing spasm of
+desire, and he dug his nails into the palms of his hands. The
+vision caused him an unspeakable yet delicious pain--Gabrielle
+in a loose _peignoir_ at a small, daintily ordered table gay
+with flowers and glasses. He saw it all quite clearly; his gaze
+searched every fold of the soft material that covered her bosom
+and rose and fell at each breath she drew. Face and neck and
+lively hands had a surprisingly brilliant yet so natural a sheen
+that they exhaled amorous invitation as if they had been verily
+of flesh and blood. The superb moulding of the lips, pouting
+like a ripe mulberry, and the exquisite grain of the skin were
+manifest--treasures such as men risk death and crime to win.
+It was the actress, in fine, seen by the two eyes which of all
+eyes in the whole world had learned to see her best. She was not
+alone; a man was looking at her with a penetrating intensity as
+he filled her glass. They were straining one towards the other.
+Jean could not restrain his sobs. Suddenly he seemed to be falling
+from the top of a high tower. The Superintendent of Studies was
+standing in front of him and saying:
+
+"Monsieur Servien, will you see about punishing that boy Laboriette,
+who is emptying his leavings in his neighbour's pocket?"
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+The Superintendent, with his large, flat face and the sly ways
+of a peasant turned monk, was a constant thorn in Jean's side.
+"_Be firm, be firm, sir_," was his parable every day, and
+he never missed an opportunity of doing the usher an ill turn
+with the Director.
+
+The early days of Jean's servitude had slipped by in an enervating
+monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly
+aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while
+the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one
+exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud
+of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled in big letters on
+his light trousers, and overjoyed at the chance of hurting an
+inferior's feelings, had from the very first day declared war
+against the poor usher. He used to empty ink-bottles into his
+desk, stick cobbler's wax on his chair, and let off crackers
+in the middle of school.
+
+Hearing the disturbance, the Superintendent would march in with
+the airs of a Police Inspector and bid Jean: "_Be firm, sir!
+be firm!_"
+
+Far from taking his advice, Jean affected an excessive easiness of
+temper. One day he caught a boy in the act of drawing a caricature
+of himself; he picked it up and glanced at it, then handed it
+back to the artist with a shrug of the shoulders.
+
+Such mildness was misconstrued and only weakened his authority.
+The usher's miseries grew acute, and he lost the patience that
+alleviated his sufferings. He could not put up with the lads'
+restlessness, their happy laughter and light-hearted enjoyment
+of life. He showed temper, venting his spite on mere acts of
+thoughtlessness or simple ebullitions of high spirits. Then he would
+fall into a sort of torpor. He had long fits of absentmindedness,
+during which he was deaf to every noise. It became the fashion
+to keep birds, plait nets, shoot arrows, and crow like a cock
+in Monsieur Jean Servien's class-room. Even the boys from other
+divisions would slip out of their own classrooms to peep in at
+the windows of this one, about which such amazing stories were
+told, and the ceiling of which was decorated with little figures
+swinging at the end of a string stuck to the plaster with chewed
+paper.
+
+De Grizolles had installed a regular Roman catapult for shooting
+kidney-beans at the usher's head.
+
+Jean would drive the young gentleman out of the room. The
+Superintendent of Studies would reinstate him, only to be turned
+out again. And each time meant a fresh report to the Director.
+The Abbe Bordier, who never found patience to hear the worthy
+Superintendent out to the end, could only throw up his hands to
+heaven and declare they would be the death of him between them.
+But the impression became fixed in his mind that the Assistant
+in charge of the _Remove_ was a source of trouble.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Sunday was a day of cheerful indolence, devoted to attending
+the services in the Chapel, which was filled with the scent of
+incense all day long. At Vespers, while the clear, boyish voices
+intoned the long-drawn canticles, Jean would be gazing at some
+woman's face half seen in the dusk of the galleries where the
+pupils' mothers and sisters knelt during the office, their haughty
+air contradicting the humble attitude. At the sound of the _Ave
+maris stella_, the lowly bookbinder's son would lift his eyes
+to these ladies of high degree, the plainest of whom feels herself
+a jewel of price and cherishes a natural and unaffected pride of
+birth. The chants and incense, the flowers and sacred images,
+whatever troubles the imagination and stimulates to prayer, all
+these things united to enervate his spirit and deliver him a
+trembling victim to the glamour of these patrician dames.
+
+But it was Gabrielle he worshipped in them, Gabrielle to whom
+he offered up his prayers, his supplications. All that element
+in religion which gives to love the fascination of forbidden
+fruit appealed powerfully to his imagination. Unbeliever though
+he was, he loved the Magdalen's God and savoured the creed that
+has bestowed on lovers one amorous bliss the more--the bliss
+of losing their immortal souls.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Little by little the boys wearied of this insubordination, their
+imaginations proving unequal to the invention of any new forms
+of mischief. Even de Grizolles himself left off shooting beans.
+Instead, he conceived the notion of brewing chocolate inside
+his desk with a spirit-lamp and a silver patty-pan. Jean left
+him in peace and reopened his Sophocles with a sigh of relief.
+But the Superintendent, going by in the court, caught a smell of
+cooking, searched the desks and unearthed the patty-pan, which he
+offered, still warm, for the Reverend the Director's inspection,
+with the words: "There! that's what goes on in Monsieur Servien's
+class-room." The Director slapped his forehead, declared they
+would be the death of him and ordered the patty-pan to be restored
+to its owner. Then he sent for the Assistant in charge and
+administered a severe reprimand, because he believed it to be
+his bounden duty to do so.
+
+The next day was a whole holiday, and Jean went to spend the
+day at his father's. The latter asked him if he was ready for
+his professorial examination.
+
+"My lad," he adjured him, "be quick and find a good post if you
+want me to see you in it. One of these days your aunt and I will
+be going out at yonder door feet foremost. The old lady had a
+fit of dizziness last week on the stairs. _I_ am not ill, but
+I can feel I am worn out. I have done a hard life's work in the
+world."
+
+He looked at his tools, and walked away, a bent old man!
+
+Then Jean gathered up in both hands the old work-worn tools, all
+polished with use, scissors, punches, knives, folders, scrapers,
+and kissed them, the tears running down his cheeks.
+
+At that moment his aunt came in, looking for her spectacles.
+Furtively, in a whisper, she asked him for a little money. In
+old days she used to save the halfpence to slip them into the
+"little lad's " hand; now, grown feebler than the child, she
+trembled at the idea of destitution; she hoarded, and asked charity
+of the priests. The fact is, her wits were weakening. Very often
+she would inform her brother that she did not mean to let the
+week pass without going to see the Brideaus. Now the Brideaus,
+jobbing tailors at Montrouge in their lifetime, had been dead,
+both husband and wife, for the last two years. Jean gave her a
+louis, which she took with a delight so ugly to see that the
+poor lad took refuge out of doors.
+
+Presently, without quite knowing how, he found himself on the
+_Quai_ near the _Pont d'Iena_. It was a bright day, but the
+gloomy walls of the houses and the grey look of the river banks
+seemed to proclaim that life is hard and cruel. Out in the
+stream a dredger, all drab with marl, was discharging one after
+the other its bucket-fuls of miry gravel. By the waterside a
+stout oaken crane was unloading millstones, wheeling backwards
+and forwards on its axis. Under the parapet, near the bridge,
+an old dame with a copper-red face sat knitting stockings as
+she waited for customers to buy her apple-puffs.
+
+Jean Servien thought of his childhood; many a time had his aunt
+taken him to the same spot, many a time had they watched together
+the dredger hauling aboard, bucketful by bucketful, the muddy
+dregs of the river. Very often his aunt had stopped to exchange
+ideas with the old stallkeeper, while he examined the counter
+which was spread with a napkin, the carafe of liquorice-water
+that stood on it, and the lemon that served as stopper. Nothing
+was changed, neither the dredger, nor the rafts of timber, nor
+the old woman, nor the four ponderous stallions at either end
+of the _Pont d'Iena_.
+
+Yes, Jean Servien could hear the trees along the _Quai_, the
+waters of the river, the very stones of the parapet calling to
+him:
+
+"We know you; you are the little boy his aunt, in a peasant's
+cap, used to bring here to see us in former days. But we shall
+never see your aunt again, nor her print shawl, nor her umbrella
+which she opened against the sun; for she is old now and does
+not take her nephew walks any more, for he is a grown man now.
+Yes, the child is grown into a man and has been hurt by life,
+while he was running after shadows."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+One day, in the midday interval, he was informed that a visitor
+was asking for him in the parlour; the news filled him with delight,
+for he was very young and still counted on the possibilities of
+the unknown. In the parlour he found Monsieur Tudesco, wearing
+his waistcoat of ticking and holding a peaked hat in one hand.
+
+"My young friend," began the Italian, "I learned from your respected
+father's apprentice that you were confined in this sanctuary of
+studious learning. I venture to say your fortune is overcast
+with clouds, at least I fear it is. The lowliness of your estate
+is not gilded like that of the Latin poet, and you are struggling
+with a valiant heart against adverse fortune. That is why I am
+come to offer you the hand of friendship, and I venture to say
+you will regard as a mark of my amity and my esteem the request
+I proffer for a crown-piece, which I find needful to sustain
+an existence consecrated to learned studies."
+
+The parlour was filling with pupils and their friends and relations.
+Mothers and sons were exchanging sounding kisses, followed by
+exclamations of "How hot you are, dear!" and prolonged whisperings.
+Girls in light summer frocks were making sheep's eyes on the sly
+at their brothers' friends, while fathers were pulling cakes
+of chocolate out of their pockets.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco, entirely at his ease among these fine people, did
+not seem at all aware of the young usher's hideous embarrassment.
+To the latter's "Come outside; we can talk better there," the
+old man replied unconcernedly, "Oh, no, I don't think so."
+
+He welcomed each lady who came in with a profound bow, and
+distributed friendly taps on the cheek among the young aristocrats
+around him.
+
+Lying back in an arm-chair and displaying his famous waistcoat
+to the very best advantage, he enlarged on such episodes of his
+life as he thought most impressive:
+
+"The fates were vanquished," he was telling Servien, "my livelihood
+was assured. The landlord of an inn had entrusted his books to me,
+and under his roof I was devoting my attention to mathematical
+calculations, not, like the illustrious and ill-starred Galileo,
+to measure the stars, but to establish with exactitude the profits
+and losses of a trader. After two days' performance of these
+honourable duties, the Commissary of Police made a descent upon
+the inn, arrested the landlord and landlady and carried away my
+account books with him. No, I had not vanquished the fates!"
+
+Every head was turned, every eye directed in amazement towards
+this extraordinary personage. There was much whispering and some
+half-suppressed laughter. Jean, seeing himself the centre of
+mocking glances and looks of annoyance, drew Tudesco towards the
+door. But just as the Marquis was making a series of sweeping
+bows by way of farewell to the ladies, Jean found himself face
+to face with the Superintendent of Studies, who said to him:
+
+"Oh! Monsieur Servien, will you go and take detention in Monsieur
+Schuver's absence?"
+
+The Marquis pressed his young friend's hand, watched him depart
+to his duties, and then, turning back to the groups gathered in
+the parlour, he waved his hand with a gesture at once dignified
+and appealing to call for silence.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "I have translated into the
+French tongue, which Brunetto Latini declared to be the most
+delectable of all, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the glorious
+masterpiece of the divine Torquato Tasso. This great work I wrote
+in a garret without fire, on candle wrappers, on snuff papers----"
+
+At this point, from one corner of the parlour, a crow of childish
+laughter went off like a rocket.
+
+Monsieur Tudesco stopped short and smiled, his hair flying, his
+eye moist, his arms thrown open as if to embrace and bless; then
+he resumed:
+
+"I say it: the laugh of innocence is the ill-starred veteran's
+joy. I see from where I stand groups worthy of Correggio's brush,
+and I say: Happy the families that meet together in peace in
+the heart of their fatherland! Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me
+if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius. I am an old tree
+riven by the levin-bolt."
+
+And he went from group to group holding out his peaked felt hat,
+into which, amid an icy silence, fell coin by coin a dribble
+of small silver.
+
+But suddenly the Superintendent of Studies seized the hat and
+pushed the old man outside.
+
+"Give me back my hat," bawled Monsieur Tudesco to the Superintendent,
+who was doing his best to restore the coins to the donors; "give
+back the old man's hat, the hat of one who has grown grey in
+learned studies."
+
+The Superintendent, scarlet with rage, tossed the felt into the
+court, shouting:
+
+"Be off, or I will call the police."
+
+The Marquis Tudesco took to his heels with great agility.
+
+The same evening the new Assistant was summoned to the Director's
+presence and received his dismissal.
+
+"Unhappy boy! unhappy boy!" said the Abbe Bordier, beating his
+brow; "you have been the cause of an intolerable scandal, of a
+sort unheard of in this house, and that just when I had so much
+to do."
+
+And as he spoke, the scattered papers fluttered like white birds
+on the Director's table.
+
+Making his way through the parlour, Jean saw the _Mater dolorosa_
+as before, and read again the names of Philippe-Guy Thiererche
+and the Countess Valentine.
+
+"I hate them," he muttered through clenched teeth, "I hate them
+all."
+
+Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity. Every day they
+had badgered him with reports against Jean Servien. This time he
+had given way; he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really
+could make nothing of this tale about a beggar. He changed his
+mind, ran to the door and called to the young man to corne back.
+
+Jean turned and faced him:
+
+"No!" he cried, "no! I can bear the life no longer; I am unhappy,
+I am full of misery--and hate."
+
+"Poor lad!" sight the Director, letting his arms drop by his side.
+
+That evening he did not write a single line of his Tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+The kind-hearted bookbinder harassed his son with no reproaches.
+
+After dinner he went and sat at his shop-door, and looked at the
+first star that peeped out in the evening sky.
+
+"My boy," said he, "I am not a man of learning like you; but
+I have a notion--and you must not rob me of it, because it is
+a comfort to me--that, when I have finished binding books, I
+shall go to that star. The idea occurred to me from what I have
+read in the paper that the stars are all worlds. What is that
+star called?"
+
+"Venus, father."
+
+"In my part of the world, they say it is the shepherd's star.
+It's a beautiful star, and I think your mother is there. That
+is why I should like to go there."
+
+The old man passed his knotted fingers across his brow, murmuring:
+
+"God forgive me, how one forgets those who are gone!"
+
+
+Jean sought balm for his wounded spirit in reading poetry and in
+long, dreamy walks. His head was filled with visions--a welter of
+sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and
+Cassandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phaedra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia,
+and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost
+formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers
+and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid
+with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; "If ever
+we win to life, it will be through you. And what a bliss it will
+be for you, Jean Servien, to have created us. How you will love
+us!" And Jean Servien would answer them; "Come back, come back,
+or rather do not leave me. But I cannot tell how to make you
+visible; you vanish away when I gaze at you, and I cannot net
+you in the meshes of beautiful verse!"
+
+Again and again he tried to write poems, tragedies, romances;
+but his indolence, his lack of ideas, his fastidiousness brought
+him to a standstill before half a dozen lines were written, and
+he would toss the all but virgin page into the fire. Quickly
+discouraged, he turned his attention to politics. The funeral
+of Victor Noir, the Belleville risings, the _plebiscite_, filled
+his thoughts; he read the papers, joined the groups that gathered
+on the boulevards, followed the yelping pack of white blouses,
+and was one of the crowd that hooted the Commissary of Police as
+he read the Riot Act. Disorder and uproar intoxicated him; his
+heart beat as if it would burst his bosom, his enthusiasm rose
+to fever pitch, amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence.
+Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers
+till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs
+and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and
+loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
+There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the
+scutcheon blazoned on its facade and the two lions lying white
+in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, he would
+cast a look of hatred at the building. Presently, as he resumed
+his march, he would picture himself standing, musket in hand, on
+a barricade, in the smoke of insurrection, along with workmen
+and young fellows from the schools, as we see it all represented
+in lithographs.
+
+One day in July, he saw a troop of white blouses moving along
+the boulevard and shouting: "To Berlin!" Ragamuffin street-boys
+ran yelping round. Respectable citizens lined the sidewalks,
+staring in wonder, and saying nothing; but one of them, a stout,
+tall, red-faced man, waved his hat and shouted:
+
+"To Berlin! long live the Emperor!"
+
+Jean recognized Monsieur Bargemont.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+On top of the ramparts. Bivouac huts and stacked rifles guarded
+by a sentinel. National Guards are playing shove ha'-penny. The
+autumn sunshine lies clear and soft and splendid on the roofs
+of the beleaguered city. Outside the fortifications, the bare,
+grey fields; in the distance the barracks of the outlying forts,
+over which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the horizon
+the hills whence the Prussian batteries are firing on Paris,
+leaving long trails of white smoke. The guns thunder. They have
+been thundering for a month, and no one so much as hears them
+now. Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped _kepi_ and the
+tunic with brass buttons, are seated side by side on sand-bags,
+bending over the same book.
+
+It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud the delicious
+episode of Silenus. Two youths have discovered the old god lying
+in a drunken sleep--he is always drunk and it makes men mock at
+him, albeit they still revere him--and have bound him in chains
+of flowers to force him to sing. AEgle, the fairest of the Naiads,
+has stained his cheeks scarlet with juice of the mulberry, and
+lo! he sings.
+
+"He sings how from out the mighty void were drawn together the
+germs of earth and air and sea and of the subtle fire likewise;
+how of these beginnings came all the elements, and the fluid
+globe of the firmament grew into solid being; how presently the
+ground began to harden and to imprison Nereus in the ocean, and
+little by little to take on the shapes of things. He sings how
+anon continents marvelled to behold a new-emerging sun; how the
+clouds broke up in the welkin and the rains descended, what time
+the woods put forth their first green and beasts first prowled
+by ones and twos over the unnamed mountain-tops."
+
+Jean broke off to observe:
+
+"How admirably it all brings out Virgil's spirit, so serious
+and tender! The poet has put a cosmogony in an idyll. Antiquity
+called him the Virgin. The name well befits his Muse, and we
+should picture her as a Mnemosyne pondering over the works of
+men and the causes of things!"
+
+Meanwhile Garneret, with a more concentrated attention and his
+finger on the lines, was marshalling his ideas. The players were
+still at their game, and the little copper discs they used for
+throwing kept rolling close to his feet, and the canteen-woman
+passed backwards and forwards with her little barrel.
+
+"See this, Servien," he said presently; "in these lines Virgil,
+or rather the poet of the Alexandrine age who was his model,
+has anticipated Laplace's great hypothesis and Charles Lyell's
+theories. He shows cosmic matter, that negative something from
+which everything must come, condensing to make worlds, the plastic
+rind of the globe consolidating; then the formation of islands
+and continents; then the rains ceasing and first appearance of
+the sun, heretofore veiled by opaque clouds; then vegetable life
+manifesting itself before animal, because the latter cannot maintain
+itself and endure save by absorbing the elements of the former----"
+
+At that moment a stir was apparent along the ramparts. The players
+broke off their game and the two friends lifted their heads.
+It was a train of wounded going by. Under the curtains of the
+lumbering ambulance-waggons marked with the Geneva red cross could
+be seen livid faces tied up in bloodstained bandages. Linesmen
+and _mobiles_ tramped behind, their arms hanging in slings. The
+Nationals proffered them handfuls of tobacco and asked for news.
+But the wounded men only shook their heads and trudged stolidly
+on their way.
+
+"Aren't _we_ to have some fighting soon as well as other fellows?"
+cried Garneret.
+
+To which Servien growled back:
+
+"We must first put down the traitors and incapables who govern
+us, proclaim the Commune and march all together against the
+Prussians."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+Hatred of the Empire which had left him to rot in a back-shop
+and a school class-room, love of the Republic that was to bring
+every blessing in its train had, since the proclamation of September
+4, raised Jean Servien's warlike enthusiasm to fever heat. But
+he soon wearied of the long drills in the Luxembourg gardens
+and the hours of futile sentry-go behind the fortifications.
+The sight of tipsy shopkeepers in a frenzy of foolish ardour,
+half drink, half patriotism, sickened him, and this playing at
+soldiers, tramping through the mud on an empty stomach, struck
+him as after all an odious, ugly business.
+
+Luckily Garneret was his comrade in the ranks, and Servien felt
+the salutary effect of that well-stored, well-ordered mind, the
+servant of duty and stern reality. Only this saved him from a
+passion, as futile in the past as it was hopeless in the future,
+which was assuming the dangerous character of a mental disease.
+
+He had not seen Gabrielle again for a long time. The theatres
+were shut; all he knew, from the newspapers, was that she was
+nursing the wounded in the theatre ambulance. He had no wish
+now to meet her.
+
+When he was not on duty, he used to lie in bed and read (it was a
+hard winter and wood was scarce), or else scour the boulevards and
+mix with the throng of idlers in search of news. One evening, early
+in January, as he was passing the corner of the _Rue Drouot_, his
+attention was attracted by the clamour of voices, and he saw
+Monsieur Bargemont being roughly handled by an ill-looking gang
+of National Guards.
+
+"I am a better Republican than any of you," the big man was
+vociferating; "I have always protested against the infamies of
+the Empire. But when you shout: Vive Blanqui!... excuse me...
+I have a right to shout: Vive Jules Favre! excuse me, I have a
+perfect right----" But his voice was drowned in a chorus of yells.
+Men in _kepis_ shook their fists at him, shouting: "Traitor! no
+surrender! down with Badinguet!" His broad face, distraught with
+terror, still bore traces of its erstwhile look of smug effrontery.
+A girl in the crowd shrieked: "Throw him in the river!" and a
+hundred voices took up the cry. But just at that moment the crowd
+swayed back violently and Monsieur Bargemont darted into the
+forecourt of the _Mairie_. A squad of police officers received
+him in their ranks and closed in round him. He was saved!
+
+Little by little the crowd melted away, and Jean heard a dozen
+different versions of the incident as it travelled with
+ever-increasing exaggeration from mouth to mouth. The last comers
+learned the startling news that they had just arrested a German
+general officer, who had sneaked into Paris as a spy to betray
+the city to the enemy with the connivance of the Bonapartists.
+
+The streets being once more passable, Jean saw Monsieur Bargemont
+come out of the _Mairie_. He was very red and a sleeve of his
+overcoat was torn away.
+
+Jean made up his mind to follow him.
+
+Along the boulevards he kept him in view at a distance, and not
+much caring whether he lost track of him or no; but when the
+Functionary turned up a cross street, the young man closed in
+on his quarry. He had no particular suspicion even now; a mere
+instinct urged him to dog the man's heels. Monsieur Bargemont
+wheeled to the right, into a fairly broad street, empty and badly
+lighted by petroleum flares that supplied the place of the gas
+lamps. It was the one street Jean knew better than another. He
+had been there so often and often! The shape of the doors, the
+colour of the shop-fronts, the lettering on the sign-boards,
+everything about it was familiar; not a thing in it, down to
+the night-bell at the chemist's and druggist's, but called up
+memories, associations, to touch him. The footsteps of the two men
+echoed in the silence. Monsieur Bargemont looked round, advanced
+a few paces more and rang at a door. Jean Servien had now come up
+with him and stood beside him under the archway. It was the same
+door he had kissed one night of desperation, Gabrielle's door. It
+opened; Jean took a step forward and Monsieur Bargemont, going
+in first, left it open, thinking the National Guard there was
+a tenant going home to his lodging. Jean slipped in and climbed
+two flights of the dark staircase. Monsieur Bargemont ascended
+to the third floor and rang at a door on the landing, which was
+opened. Jean could hear Gabrielle's voice saying:
+
+"How late you are coming home, dear; I have sent Rosalie to bed;
+I was waiting up for you, you see."
+
+The man replied, still puffing and panting with his exertions:
+
+"Just fancy, they wanted to pitch me into the river, those
+scoundrels! But never you mind, I've brought you something mighty
+rare and precious--a pot of butter."
+
+"Like Little Red Ridinghood," laughed Gabrielle's voice. "Come
+in and you shall tell me all about it.... Hark! do you hear?"
+
+"What, the guns? Oh! that never stops."
+
+"No, the noise of a fall on the stairs."
+
+"You're dreaming!"
+
+"Give me the candle, I'm going to look."
+
+Monsieur Bargemont went down two or three steps and saw Jean
+stretched motionless on the landing.
+
+"A drunkard," he said; "there's so many of them! They were drunkards,
+those chaps who wanted to drown me."
+
+He was holding his light to Jean's ashy face, while Gabrielle,
+leaning over the rail, looked on:
+
+"It's not a drunken man," she said; "he is too white. Perhaps
+it is a poor young fellow dying of hunger. When you're brought
+down to rations of bread and horseflesh----"
+
+Then she looked more carefully under frowning brows, and muttered:
+
+"It's very queer, it's really very queer!"
+
+"Do you know him?" asked Bargemont.
+
+"I am trying to remember----"
+
+But there was no need to try; already she had recalled it all--how
+her hand had been kissed at the gate of the little house at Bellevue.
+
+Running to her rooms, she returned with water and a bottle of
+ether, knelt beside the fainting man, and slipping her arm, which
+was encircled by the white band of a nursing sister, under his
+shoulders, raised Jean's head. He opened his eyes, saw her, heaved
+the deepest sigh of love ever expelled from a human breast and
+felt his lids fall softly to again. He remembered nothing; only
+she was bending over him; and her breath had caressed his cheek.
+Now she was bathing his temples, and he felt a delicious sense
+of returning life. Monsieur Bargemont with the candle leant over
+Jean Servien, who, opening his eyes for the second time, saw the
+man's coarse red cheek within an inch of the actress's delicate
+ear. He gave a great cry and a convulsive spasm shook his body.
+
+"Perhaps it is an epileptic fit," said Monsieur Bargemont, coughing;
+he was catching cold standing on the staircase.
+
+She protested:
+
+"We cannot leave a sick man without doing something for him. Go
+and wake Rosalie."
+
+He remounted the stairs, grumbling. Meantime Jean had got to his
+feet and was standing with averted head.
+
+She said to him in a low tone:
+
+"So you love me still?"
+
+He looked at her with an indescribable sadness:
+
+"No, I don't love you any longer"--and he staggered down the stairs.
+
+Monsieur Bargemont reappeared:
+
+"It's very curious," he said, "but I can't make Rosalie hear."
+
+The actress shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Look here, go away, will you? I have a horrid headache. Go away,
+Bargemont."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+She was Bargemont's mistress! The thought was torture to Jean
+Servien, the more atrocious from the unexpectedness of the discovery.
+He both hated and despised the coarse ruffian whose sham good-nature
+did not impose on him, and whom he knew for a brutal, dull-witted,
+mean-spirited bully. That pimply face, those goggle eyes, that
+forehead with the swollen black vein running across it, that heavy
+hand, that ugly, vulgar soul, could it be---- It sickened him to
+think of it! And disgust was the thing of all others Servien's
+delicately balanced nature felt most keenly. His morality was
+shaky, and he could have found excuse for elegant vices, refined
+perversions, romantic crimes. But Bargemont and his pot of butter!...
+Never to possess the most adorable of women, never to see her more,
+he was quite willing for the sacrifice still, but to know her in
+the arms of that coarse brute staggered the mind and rendered
+life impossible.
+
+Absorbed in such thoughts, he found his way back instinctively
+to his own quarter of the city. Shells whistled over his head
+and burst with terrific reports. Flying figures passed him, their
+heads enveloped in handkerchiefs and carrying mattresses on their
+backs. At the corner of the _Rue de Rennes_ he tripped over a
+lamp-post lying across the pavement beside a half-demolished
+wall. In front of his father's shop he saw a huge hole. He went
+to open the door; a shell had burst it in and he could see the
+work-bench capsized in a dark corner.
+
+Then he remembered that the Germans were bombarding the left
+bank, and he felt a sudden impulse to roam the streets under the
+rain of iron.
+
+A voice hailed him, issuing from underground:
+
+"Is it you, my lad? Come in quick; you've given me a fine fright.
+Come down here; we are settled in the cellars."
+
+He followed his father and found beds arranged in the underground
+chambers, while the main cellar served as kitchen and sitting-room.
+The bookbinder had a map, and was pointing out to the _concierge_
+and tenants the position of the relieving armies. Aunt Servien
+sat in a dim corner, her eyes fixed in a dull stare, mumbling
+bits of biscuit soaked in wine. She had no notion of what was
+happening, but maintained an attitude of suspicion.
+
+The little assemblage, which had been living this subterranean
+life since the evening of the day before, asked what news young
+Servien brought. Then the bookbinder resumed the explanations
+which as an old soldier and a responsible man he had been asked
+to give the company.
+
+"The thing to do is," he continued, "to join hands with the Army
+of the Loire, piercing the circle of iron that shuts us in. Admiral
+La Ronciere has carried the positions at Epinay away beyond
+Longjumeau----"
+
+Then turning to Jean:
+
+"My lad, just find me Longjumeau on the map; my eyes are not
+what they were at twenty, and these tallow candles give a very
+poor light."
+
+At that moment a tremendous explosion shook the solid walls and
+filled the cellar with dust. The women screamed; the porter went
+off to make his round of inspection, tapping the walls with his
+heavy keys; an enormous spider scampered across the vaulted roof.
+
+Then the conversation was resumed as if nothing had happened,
+and two of the lodgers started a game of cards on an upturned
+cask.
+
+Jean was dog-tired and fell asleep on the floor--a nightmare sleep.
+
+"Has the little lad come home?" asked Aunt Servien, still sucking
+at her biscuit.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+Old Servien, in his working jacket, stepped up to the bed; then,
+creeping away again on tip-toe:
+
+"He is asleep, Monsieur Garneret, he is asleep. The doctor tells
+us he is saved. He is a very good doctor! _You_ know that yourself,
+for he is your friend, and it was you brought him here. You have
+been our saviour, Monsieur Garneret."
+
+And the bookbinder turned his head away to wipe his eyes, walked
+across to the window, lifted the curtain and looked out into
+the sunlit street.
+
+"The fine weather will quite set him up again. But we have had
+six terrible weeks. I never lost heart; it is not in the nature
+of things that a father should despair of his son's life; still,
+you know, Monsieur Garneret, he has been very ill.
+
+"The neighbours have been very good to us; but it was a hard job
+nursing him in this cursed cellar. Just think, Monsieur Garneret,
+for twenty days we had to keep his head in ice."
+
+"You know that is the treatment for meningitis."
+
+The bookbinder came up confidentially to Garneret. He scratched his
+ear, rubbed his forehead, stroked his chin in great embarrassment.
+
+"My poor lad," he got started at last, "is in love, passionately
+in love. I have found it out from the things he said when he
+was delirious. It is not my way to interfere with what does not
+concern me; but as I see the matter is serious, I am going to
+ask you, for his own good, to tell me who it is, if you know
+her."
+
+Garneret shrugged his shoulders:
+
+"An actress! a tragedy actress! pooh!"
+
+The bookbinder pondered a moment; then:
+
+"Look you, Monsieur Garneret, I acted for the best in my poor boy's
+interest, but I blame myself. I tell myself this, the education I
+gave him has disqualified him for hard work and practical life....
+An actress, you say, a tragedy actress? Tastes of that sort must
+be acquired in the schools. Those times he was attending his
+classes, I used to get hold of his exercise books after he had
+gone to bed and read whatever there was in French. It was my
+way of checking his work; because, ignoramus as he may be, a
+man can see, with a little common sense, what is done properly
+and what is scamped. Well, Monsieur Garneret, I was terrified to
+find in his themes so many high-flown ideas; some of them were
+very fine, no doubt, and I copied out on a paper those that struck
+me most. But I used to tell myself: All these grand speeches,
+all these histories, taken from the books of the ancient Romans,
+are going to put my lad's head in a fever, and he will never know
+the truth of things. I was right, my dear Monsieur Garneret;
+it is school learning, look you, has made him fall in love with
+a tragedy actress----"
+
+Jean Servien raised himself up in bed.
+
+"Is that you, Garneret? I am very glad to see you."
+
+Then, after listening a moment:
+
+"Why, what is that noise?" he asked.
+
+Garneret told him it was Mont Valerien firing on the fortifications.
+The Commune was in full swing.
+
+"Vive la Commune!" cried Jean Servien, and he dropped his head
+back on the pillow with a smile.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+He was recovered and, with a book in his hand, was talking a
+quiet walk in the Luxembourg gardens. He had that feeling of
+harmless selfishness, that self-pity that comes with convalescence.
+Of his previous life, all he cared to remember was a charming
+face bending over him and a voice sweeter than the loveliest
+music murmuring: "So you love me still?" Oh! never fear, he would
+not answer now as he did on that dreadful staircase: "I don't
+love you any longer." No, he would answer with eyes and lips and
+open arms: "I shall love you always!" Still the odious spectre of
+his rival would cross his memory at times and cause him agonies.
+Suddenly his eyes were caught by an extraordinary sight.
+
+Two yards away from him in the garden, in front of the orange-house,
+was Monsieur Tudesco, burly and full-blown as usual, but how
+metamorphosed in costume! He wore a National Guard's tunic, covered
+with glittering _aiguillettes_; from his red sash peeped the
+butts of a brace of pistols. On his head was perched a _kepi_
+with five gold bands. The central figure of a group of women
+and children, he was gazing at the heavens with as much tender
+emotion as his little green eyes were capable of expressing.
+His whole person breathed a sense of power and kindly patronage.
+His right hand rested at arm's length on a little boy's head,
+and he was addressing him in a set speech:
+
+"Young citizen, pride of your mother's heart, ornament of the
+public parks, hope of the Commune, hear the words of the proscribed
+exile. I say it: Young citizen, the 18th of March is a great day;
+it witnessed the foundation of the Commune, it rescued you from
+slavery. Grave on your heart's core that never-to-be-forgotten
+date. I say it: We have suffered and fought for you. Son of the
+disinherited and despairing, you shall be a free man!"
+
+He ended, and restoring the child to its mother, smiled upon
+his listeners of the fair sex, who were lost in admiration of
+his eloquence, his red sash, his gold lace and his green old
+age.
+
+Albeit it was three o'clock in the afternoon, he had not drunk
+more than he could carry, and he trod the sandy walks with a
+mien of masterful assurance amid the plaudits of the people.
+
+Jean advanced to meet him; he had a soft place in his heart for
+the old man. Monsieur Tudesco grasped his hand with a fatherly
+affection and declaimed:
+
+"I am overjoyed to see my dear disciple, the child of my intellect.
+Monsieur Servien, look yonder and never forget the sight; it is
+the spectacle of a free people."
+
+The fact is, a throng of citizens of both sexes was tramping over
+the lawns, picking the flowers in the beds and breaking branches
+from the trees.
+
+The two friends tried to find seats on a bench; but these were
+all occupied by _federes_ of all ranks huddled up on them and
+snoring in chorus. For this reason Monsieur Tudesco opined it
+was better to adjourn to a cafe.
+
+They came upon one in the _Place de l'Odeon_, where Monsieur
+Tudesco could display his striking uniform to his own satisfaction.
+
+"I am an engineer," he announced, when he was seated with his
+bitter before him, "an engineer in the service of the Commune,
+with the rank of Colonel."
+
+Jean thought it mighty strange all the same. No doubt he had heard
+his old tutor's tales about his confabulations at the dram-shop
+with the leaders of the Commune, but it struck him as extraordinary
+that the Monsieur Tudesco he knew should have blossomed into an
+engineer and Colonel under any circumstances. But there was the
+fact. Monsieur Tudesco manifested no surprise, not he!
+
+"Science!" he boasted, "science is everything! It's study does
+it! Knowledge is power! To vanquish the myrmidons of despotism,
+we must have science. That is why I am an engineer with the rank
+of Colonel."
+
+And Monsieur Tudesco went on to relate how he was charged with
+very special duties--to discover the underground passages which
+the instruments of tyranny had dug beneath the capital, tunnelling
+under the two branches of the Seine, for the transport of munitions
+of war. At the head of a gang of navvies, he inspected the palaces,
+hospitals, barracks and religious houses, breaking up cellars
+and staving in drain-pipes. Science! science is everything! He
+also inspected the crypts of churches, to unearth traces of the
+priests' lubricity. Knowledge is power!
+
+After the bitter came absinthe, and Colonel Tudesco proposed
+for Servien's consideration a lucrative post at the Delegacy for
+Foreign Affairs.
+
+But Jean shook his head. He felt tired and had lost all heart.
+
+"I see what it is," cried the Colonel, patting him on the shoulder;
+"you are young and in love. There are two spirits breathe their
+inspiration alternately in the ear of mankind--Love and Ambition.
+Love speaks the first; and you are still hearkening to his voice,
+my young friend."
+
+Jean, who had drunk _his_ share of absinthe, confessed that he
+was deeper in love than ever and that he was jealous. He related
+the episode of the staircase and inveighed bitterly against Monsieur
+Bargemont. Nor did he fail to identify his case with the good of
+the Commune, by making out Gabrielle's lover to be a Bonapartist
+and an enemy of the people.
+
+Colonel Tudesco drew a note-book from his pocket, inscribed
+Bargemont's name and address in it, and cried:
+
+"If the man has not fled like a poltroon, we will make a hostage
+of him! I am the friend of the Citizen Delegate in charge of
+the Prefecture of Police, and I say it: you shall be avenged
+on the infamous Bargemont! Have you read the decree concerning
+hostages? No? Read it then; it is an inimitable monument of the
+wisdom of the people.
+
+"I tear myself regretfully from your company, my young friend.
+But I must be gone to discover an underground passage the Sisters
+of Marie-Joseph, in their contumacy, have driven right from the
+Prison of Saint-Lazare to the Mother Convent in the village of
+Argenteuil. It is a long tunnel by which they communicate with
+the traitors at Versailles. Come and see me in my quarters at
+the General Staff, in the _Place Vendome_. Farewell and
+fraternal greeting!"
+
+Jean paid the Colonel's score and set out for home. The walls
+were all plastered over with posters and proclamations. He read
+one that was half hidden under bulletins of victories:
+
+"Article IV. _All persons detained in custody by the verdict
+of the jury of accusation shall be hostages of the people of
+Paris._
+
+"Article V. _Every execution of a prisoner of war or a partisan
+of the government of the Commune of Paris shall be followed by
+the instant execution of thrice the number of hostages detained
+in virtue of Article IV, the same being chosen by lot._"
+
+He frowned dubiously and asked himself:
+
+"Can it be I have denounced a man as hostage?"
+
+But his fears were soon allayed; Colonel Tudesco was only a wind-bag,
+and could not really arrest people. Besides, was it credible
+that Bargemont, head of a Ministerial Department, was still in
+Paris? And after all, if he did come to harm, well, so much the
+worse for him!
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+Two days after a cab with a musket barrel protruding from either
+window stopped before the bookbinder's shop. The two National
+Guards who stumbled out of it demanded to see the citizen Jean
+Servien, handed him a sealed packet and signed to him to open
+the door wide and wait for them. Next minute they reappeared
+carrying a full-length portrait.
+
+It represented a woman of forty or thereabouts, with a yellow
+face, very long and disproportionately large for the frail, sickly
+body it surmounted, and dressed in an unpretending black gown.
+She wore a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a contrite
+and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous and the loose chin
+almost touched the bosom. Jean scrutinized the poor, pitiful
+face, but could recall no memory in connection with it. He opened
+the letter and read:
+
+  "_Commune of Paris--General Staff_.
+
+  "Order to deliver to the citizen Jean Servien
+  the portrait of Madame Bargemont.
+
+  "Tudesco.
+
+  "Colonel commanding the Subterranean
+  Ways of the Commune."
+
+Jean wanted to ask the National Guards what it all meant, but
+already the cab was driving off, bayonets protruding from both
+windows. The passers-by, who had long ceased to be surprised at
+anything, cast a momentary glance after the retreating vehicle.
+
+Jean, left alone with Madame Bargemont's portrait before him,
+began to ask himself why his disconcerting friend Tudesco had
+sent it to him.
+
+"The wretch," he told himself, "must have arrested Bargemont and
+sacked his apartments."
+
+Meantime Madame Bargemont was gazing at him with a martyr's haunting
+eyes. She looked so unhappy that Jean was filled with pity.
+
+"Poor woman!" he ejaculated, and turning the canvas face to the
+wall, he left the house.
+
+Presently the bookbinder returned to his work and, though anything
+but an inquisitive man, was tempted to look at this big picture
+that blocked up his shop. He scratched his head, wondering if
+this could be the actress his son was in love with. He opined she
+must be mightily taken with the young man to send him so large
+a portrait in so handsome a frame. He could not see anything to
+capture a lover's fancy.
+
+"At any rate," he thought, "she does not look like a bad woman."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+Jean stepped over the bodies of two or three drunked National
+Guards and found himself in the room occupied by Colonel Tudesco
+and in that worthy's presence. The Colonel lay snoring on a satin
+sofa, a cold chicken on the table at his elbow. He wore his spurs.
+Jean shook him roughly by the shoulder and asked him where the
+portrait came from, declaring that he, Jean, had not the smallest
+wish to keep it. The Colonel woke, but his speech was thick and
+his memory confused. His mind was full of his underground passages.
+He was commander of them all and could not find one. There was
+something in this fact that offended his sense of justice. The
+Lady Superior of the Nuns of Marie-Joseph had refused to betray
+the secret of the famous Saint-Lazare tunnel.
+
+"She has refused," declared the old Italian, "out of contumacy--and
+also, perhaps, because there is no tunnel. And, since truth must
+out, I'm bound to say, if I was not Commandant of the subterranean
+passages of the capital, I should really think there were none."
+
+His wits came back little by little.
+
+"Young man, you have seen the soldier reposing from his labours.
+What question have you come to ask the veteran champion of freedom?"
+
+"About Bargemont? About that portrait?"
+
+"I know, I know. I proceeded with a dozen men to his domicile
+to arrest him, but he had taken to flight, the coward! I carried
+out a perquisition in his rooms. In the _salon_ I saw Madame
+Bargemont's portrait and I said: 'That lady looks as sad as Monsieur
+Jean Servien. They are both victims of the infamous Bargemont;
+I will bring them together and they shall console each other.'
+Monsieur Servien, oblige me by tasting that cognac; it comes
+from the cellar of your odious rival."
+
+He poured the brandy into two big glasses and hiccuped with a
+laugh:
+
+"The cognac of an enemy tastes well."
+
+Then he fell back on the sofa, muttering:
+
+"The soldier reposing----"
+
+His face was crimson. Jean shrugged his shoulders and left the
+room. He had hardly opened the door when the old man began howling
+in his sleep: "Help! help! they're murdering me."
+
+In an instant the _federes_ on guard hurled themselves upon Jean;
+he could feel the cold muzzles of revolvers at his temples and
+hear rifles banging off at random in the ante-room.
+
+The Colonel was raving in the frenzy of alcoholic delirium, writhing
+in horrible convulsions and yelling: "He has killed me! he has
+murdered me!"
+
+"He has murdered the Colonel," the _federes_ took up the cry.
+"He has poisoned him. Take him before the court martial."
+
+"Shoot him right away. He's an assassin; the Versaillais have
+sent him."
+
+"Off with him to the lock-up!"
+
+Servien's denials and struggles were in vain. Again and again
+he protested:
+
+"You can see for yourselves he's drunk and asleep!"
+
+"Listen to him--he is insulting the sovereign people."
+
+"Pitch him in the river!"
+
+"Swing him on a lamp-post."
+
+"Shoot him!"
+
+Bundled down the stairs, rifle-butts prodding him in the back
+to help him along, Jean was haled before an officer, who there
+and then signed an order of arrest.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+He had been in solitary confinement in a cell at the _depot_
+for sixteen days now--or was it fifteen?--he was not sure. The
+hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony and tediousness.
+
+At the start he had demanded justice and loudly protested his
+innocence. But he had come to realize at last that justice had
+no concern with his case or that of the priests and gendarmes
+confined within the same walls. He had given up all thought of
+persuading the savage frenzy of the Commune to listen to reason,
+and deemed it the wisest thing to hold his tongue and the best
+to be forgotten. He trembled to think how easily it might end
+in tragedy, and his anguish seemed to choke him.
+
+Sometimes, as he sat dreaming, he could see a tree against a patch
+of blue sky, and great tears would rise to his eyes.
+
+It was there, in his prison cell, Jean learned to know the shadowy
+joys of memory.
+
+He thought of his good old father sitting at his work-bench or
+tightening the screw of the press; he thought of the shop packed
+with bound volumes and bindings, of his little room where of
+evenings he read books of travel--of all the familiar things of
+home. And every time he reviewed in spirit the poor thin romance
+of his unpretending life, he felt his cheeks burn to think how
+it was all dominated, almost every episode controlled, by this
+drunken parasite of a Tudesco! It was true nevertheless! Paramount
+over his studies, his loves, his dangers, over all his existence,
+loomed the rubicund face of the old villain! The shame of it!
+He had lived very ill! but what a meagre life it had been too.
+How cruel it was, how unjust! and there was more of self-pity
+in the poor, sore heart than of anger.
+
+Every day, every hour he thought of Gabrielle; but how changed
+the complexion of his love for her! Now it was a tender, tranquil
+sentiment, a disinterested affection, a sweet, soothing reverie.
+It was a vision of a wondrous delicacy, such as loneliness and
+unhappiness alone can form in the souls they shield from the
+rude shocks of the common life--the dream of a holy life, a life
+dim and overshadowed, vowed wholly and completely, without reward
+or recompense, to the woman worshipped from afar, as that of the
+good country _cure_ is vowed to the God who never steps down
+from the tabernacle of the altar.
+
+His gaoler was a good-natured _sous-officier_ who, amazed and
+horrified at what was going forward, clung to discipline as a
+sheet-anchor in the general shipwreck. He felt a rough, uncouth
+pity for his prisoners, but this never interfered with the strict
+performance of his duties, and Jean, who had no experience of
+soldiers' ways, never guessed the man's true character. However,
+he grew less and less unbending and taciturn the nearer the army
+of order approached the city.
+
+Finally, one day he had told his prisoner, with a wink of the
+eye:
+
+"Courage, lad! something's going to turn up soon."
+
+The same afternoon Jean heard a distant sound of musketry; then,
+all in a moment, the door of his cell opened and he saw an avalanche
+of prisoners roll from one end of the corridor to the other. The
+gaoler had unlocked all the cells and shouted the words, "Every
+man for himself; run for it!" Jean himself was carried along,
+down stairs and passages, out into the prison courtyard, and
+pitched head foremost against the wall. By the time he recovered
+from the shock of his fall, the prisoners had vanished, and he
+stood alone before the open wicket.
+
+Outside in the street he heard the crackle of musketry and saw
+the Seine running grey under the lowering smoke-cloud of burning
+Paris. Red uniforms appeared on the _Quai de l'Ecole_. The
+_Pont-au-Change_ was thick with _federes_. Not knowing where
+to fly, he was for going back into the prison; but a body of
+_Vengeurs de Lutece_, in full flight, drove him before their
+bayonets towards the _Pont-au-Change_. A woman, a _cantiniere_,
+kept shouting: "Don't let him go, give him his gruel. He's a
+Versaillais." The squad halted on the _Quai-aux-Fleurs_, and Jean
+was pushed against the wall of the _Hotel-Dieu_, the _cantiniere_
+dancing and gesticulating in front of him. Her hair flying loose
+under her gold-laced _kepi_, with her ample bosom and her elastic
+figure poised gallantly on the strong, well-shaped limbs, she had
+the fierce beauty of some magnificent wild animal. Her little
+round mouth was wide open, yelling menaces and obscenities, as she
+brandished a revolver. The _Vengeurs de Lutece_, hard-pressed
+and dispirited, looked stolidly at their white-faced prisoner
+against the wall, and then looked in each other's faces. Her
+fury redoubled; threatening them collectively, addressing each
+man by some vile nickname, pacing in front of them with a bold
+swing of the powerful hips, the woman dominated them, intoxicated
+them with her puissant influence.
+
+They formed up in platoon.
+
+"Fire!" cried the _cantiniere_.
+
+Jean threw out his arms before him.
+
+Two or three shots went off. He could hear the balls flatten against
+the wall, but he was not hit.
+
+"Fire! fire!" The woman repeated the cry in the voice of an angry,
+self-willed child.
+
+She had been through the fighting, this girl, she had drunk her
+fill from staved-in wine-casks and slept on the bare ground,
+pell-mell with the men, out in the public square reddened with
+the glare of conflagration. They were killing all round her,
+and nobody had been killed yet _for her_. She was resolved they
+should shoot her someone, before the end! Stamping with fury,
+she reiterated her cry:
+
+"Fire! Fire! Fire!"
+
+Again the guns were cocked and the barrels levelled. But the
+_Vengeurs de Lutece_ had not much heart left; their leader had
+vanished; they were disorganized, they were running away;
+sobered and stupefied, they knew the game was up. They were quite
+willing all the same to shoot the bourgeois there at the wall,
+before bolting for covert, each to hide in his own hole.
+
+Jean tried to say: "Don't make me suffer more than need be!" but
+his voice stuck in his throat.
+
+One of the _Vengeurs_ cast a look in the direction of the
+_Pont-au-Change_ and saw that the _federes_ were losing ground.
+Shouldering his musket, he said:
+
+"Let's clear out of the bl--y place, by God!"
+
+The men hesitated; some began to slink away.
+
+At this the _cantiniere_ shrieked:
+
+"Bl--sted hounds! Then _I'll_ have to do his business for him!"
+
+She threw herself on Jean Servien and spat in his face; she abandoned
+herself to a frantic orgy of obscenity in word and gesture and
+clapped the muzzle of her revolver to his temple.
+
+Then he felt all was over and waited.
+
+A thousand things flashed in a second before his eyes; he saw
+the avenues under the old trees where his aunt used to take him
+walking in old days; he saw himself a little child, happy and
+wondering; he remembered the castles he used to build with strips
+of plane-tree bark... The trigger was pulled. Jean beat the air
+with his arms and fell forward face to the ground. The men finished
+him with their bayonets; then the woman danced on the corpse
+with yells of joy.
+
+The fighting was coming closer. A well-sustained fire swept the
+_Quai_. The woman was the last to go. Jean Servien's body lay
+stretched in the empty roadway. His face wore a strange look of
+peacefulness; in the temple was a little hole, barely visible;
+blood and mire fouled the pretty hair a mother had kissed with
+such transports of fondness.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France
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