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Calvary: A Novel

by Octave Mirbeau · English · Gutenberg #48773 · 464,869 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Calvary: A Novel

Author: Octave Mirbeau

Translator: Louis Rich


        
Release date: April 24, 2015 [eBook #48773]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALVARY: A NOVEL ***
CALVARY

(A NOVEL)

BY

OCTAVE MIRBEAU

Member of the Goncourt Academy


TRANSLATED BY LOUIS RICH

(From the original French "Le Calvaire")


NEW YORK

LIEBER & LEWIS

MCMXXII




CHAPTER I


I was born one evening in October at Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres, a small
town in the department of Orne, and I was immediately christened by the
name of Jean-François-Marie-Mintié. To celebrate in a fitting manner
my coming into this world, my godfather, who was my uncle, distributed
a lot of dainties, threw many coppers and other small coins to a crowd
of country boys gathered on the church steps. One of them, while
struggling with his comrades, fell so awkwardly on the sharp edge of
a stone that he broke his neck and died the following day. As for my
uncle, when he returned home he contracted typhoid fever and passed
away a few weeks later. My governess, old Marie, often related these
incidents to me with pride and admiration.

Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres is situated on the outskirts of a great
national forest, the Tourouvre forest. Although it counts fifteen
hundred inhabitants, it makes no more noise than is made in the fields
on a calm day by the trees, the grass, the corn. A grove of giant beech
trees, which turn purple in autumn, shields it from the northern winds,
and the houses with pentile roofs, descending the declivity of the
hill, extend far out until they meet the great valley, broad and always
green, where one can see straying herds of oxen. The Huisne River,
glittering under the sun, winds and loses itself in the meadows which
are separated by rows of tall poplars. Dilapidated tanneries, small
windmills scale its course, clearly visible among clumps of alders. On
the other side of the valley are cultivated fields with straight lines
of fences and apple trees scattered here and there. The horizon is
enlivened by small pink farms, by hamlets one can see here and there
in the midst of the verdure which appears almost black. Because of the
proximity of the woods, the sky is alive with crows and yellow-beaked
jackdaws coming and going at all seasons.

Our family lived on the outskirts of the town, opposite a church,
very old and tottering, an ancient and curious structure which was
called the Priory--an annex of an Abbey which was destroyed during the
Revolution and of which were left not more than two or three faces
of a crumbled wall covered with ivy. I recall clearly but without
tenderness the smallest details of the places where my childhood was
spent. I recall the iron gate in a neglected condition which opened
with a creaking sound into a large court adorned by a scurfy grass
plot, two shabby looking sorbs visited by blackbirds, some chestnut
trees, very old and with such large trunks that the arms of four men
could not reach around them--my father used to tell this with pride
to every visitor. I recall the house with its brick walls, grim and
crusty; its semi-circular steps beautified by geraniums; its irregular
windows which looked like holes; its roof, very steep, ending in a
weather-cock, which in a breeze made a sound like an owl. Behind the
house, I remember, was a basin where muddy wake-robins were bathing or
small carps with white scales were playing. I recall the sombre curtain
of fir trees which hid the commons from view, the back yard, the study
which my father built on the edge of the road skirting the property in
such a manner that the coming and going of clients and clerks did not
disturb the quiet of the household. I recall the park, its enormous
trees, strangely twisted, eaten up by polypes and moss, joined together
by tangled lianas, and the alleys never raked, where worn-out stone
benches rose up here and there like ancient tombs. And I also remember
myself, a sickly child, in a smock frock of lustring, running across
this gloom of forsaken things, lacerating myself in the blackberry
bush, torturing the animals in the backyard or for entire days sitting
in the kitchen and watching Felix who served as our gardener, valet,
and coachman.

Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead.
Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has
been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy
gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick
belfry laughs gaily into the blue; in place of the old house there now
rises an elaborate Swiss cottage built by the new proprietor who, in
the enclosure, has increased the number of colored glass balls, small
cascades and plaster statues of Love, soiled by rain. But things and
people are engraved so profoundly upon my memory that time could not
apply a burnisher hard enough to erase them.

I want, from now on, to speak of my parents not as I knew them when
I was a child, but such as they would appear to me now, completed by
memory, humanized, so to speak, by intimacy and revelation, in all
the crudity of life, in all the immediacy of impression which the
inexorable experiences of life lend to persons too unhesitatingly loved
and too closely known.

My father was a notary public. Since time immemorial it had been so
with the Mintié family. It would have appeared monstrous, almost
revolutionary, if a member of the Mintié family had dared to break
this family tradition and had renounced the scutcheons of gilt wood
which were transmitted religiously from one generation to another like
some title of nobility. At Saint-Michel-les-Hêtres and the surrounding
country, my father occupied a position which ancestral pride, his
dignified manners of a country gentleman, and, above all, his income
of twenty thousand francs rendered very important, almost unshakeable.
Mayor of Saint-Michel, member of the general council, acting justice
of the peace, vice president of the agricultural commission, member
of numerous agronomic and forestry societies, he did not overlook
any of the petty or ambitious honors which carry with them a sort
of prestige and influence. He was an excellent man, very honest and
very gentle,--with a mania for killing. He could not see a bird, a
cat, an insect--anything at all that was alive--without being seized
with a strange desire to kill it. He waged a relentless trapper's
war on blackbirds, goldfinches, chaffinches and bullfinches. Felix
was instructed to let my father know as soon as a bird appeared in
our garden, and my father would leave everything--clients, business,
his meal--to kill the bird. He would often lie in wait for hours,
motionless, behind a tree on which the gardener had pointed out a
little blueheaded titmouse. During his walks, every time he noticed a
bird on a branch and did not have his rifle with him, he would throw
his cane at it, never failing to say, "Oh, hang it! He was there this
morning!" or "Hang it! I must have missed him for sure, it's too far."
These were the only thoughts which birds ever inspired in him.

He was also greatly engrossed with cats. Whenever he recognized the
trail of a cat he could not rest until he discovered and killed it.
Sometimes on a moonlight night he would get up, go out with his gun and
stay outside till dawn. You should have seen him, musket on shoulder,
holding by the tail the cadaver of a cat, bleeding and motionless!
Never have I admired anything so heroic; and David on killing Goliath
must have had no more intoxicated an air of triumph! With a majestic
gesture he threw the cat at the feet of the cook who said, "Oh! the
nasty beast!" and thereupon started to cut it up, saving the meat for
the beggars, leaving the skin to dry on the end of a stick, later to
be sold at Auvergnats. If I dwell so much on details of a seemingly
unimportant character, it is because during all my life I was obsessed
with and haunted by these feline episodes of my childhood. There is
one among them which has left such an impression on my spirit that to
this very day, in spite of all the years that have gone by and all the
sorrows that I have experienced, not a day passes without my thinking
of it sadly.

One afternoon father and I were walking in the garden. My father
carried a long stick ending in an iron skewer, by means of which he
unearthed snails and limaxes that were eating up the plants. Suddenly
on the edge of the basin we noticed a little kitten drinking. We hid
behind a thick shrub.

"Child," my father said in a low voice, "go quickly, fetch my musket
and come back. Be careful the cat does not see you."

And squatting down, he moved apart the twigs of the shrub so that
he might observe every movement of the kitten which, resting on its
forelegs, its neck drawn out and wagging its tail, was lapping the
water in the basin and turning its head from time to time to lick its
mouth and scratch its neck.

"Come on," repeated my father, "be off!" I pitied the little kitten. It
was so pretty with its tawny fur striped with silky black, its supple
and graceful movements and its tongue, like the petal of a rose, which
pumped water! I would have liked to disobey my father, I even thought
of making a noise, I wanted to cough, to brush the twigs apart rudely
in order to warn the poor animal of the danger ahead. But my father
looked at me with eyes so severe that I walked away in the direction
of the house. Pretty soon I came back with the musket. The kitten was
still there, confident and gay. It had finished drinking. Sitting on
its back, its ears pricked up and eyes shining, it was following the
flight of a butterfly in the air. Oh, what a moment of unspeakable
anguish that was for me! My heart was beating so powerfully that I
feared I was going to faint.

"Papa! Papa!" I shouted. At the same time a sharp report was heard,
which sounded like the crack of a whip.

"Damned rascal!" my father swore.

He aimed again. I saw his finger pull the trigger; quickly I shut my
eyes and stopped my ears. Bang!! .... and I heard a mewing, at first
plaintive and then sorrowful, oh, so sorrowful that one might have said
it was the cry of a child. And the little kitten jumped, writhed, pawed
the grass and did not stir any more.

Of an absolutely mediocre mind, tender hearted, though he seemed
indifferent to everything which did not appeal to his vanity or did
not affect his professional interests, lavish of counsel, ready to
render aid, conservative, of graceful carriage and gay, my father
justly enjoyed the respect of everybody. My mother, a young woman of
the nobility, had brought no fortune with her as a dowry; instead, she
had brought with her powerful connections, a closer alliance with the
petty aristocracy of the country, which was considered just as useful
as an increment in cash or an acquisition of land. Although his powers
of observation were very limited and he did not boast of any ability
to read souls as well as he could read a marriage contract or explain
the legal points of a testament, my father very soon realized the
difference of birth, education and temperament which separated him
from his wife.

Whether or not in the beginning he felt hurt on that score, I do not
know; at any rate he never showed it. He resigned himself to it.
Between him, who was rather awkward, ignorant and indifferent,--and
her, who was educated, refined and emotional, there was a chasm which
he never for a moment tried to bridge, having neither the desire nor
the ability to do so. This moral situation of two beings united for all
time, whom no community of thought and aspiration ever brought in close
contact with each other, did not in the least trouble my father who
considered himself satisfied if he found the house well managed, the
meals well regulated, his habits and idiosyncrasies well respected. To
my mother, on the other hand, this condition was very painful and made
her heart heavy.

My mother was not beautiful, not even good looking, but there was so
much simple dignity in her carriage, so much natural gracefulness
in her movements, an expression of such broad kindness on her lips,
somewhat pale, and in her eyes which by turns changed their color like
the skies in April and shone like a sapphire, a smile so caressing, so
sad, so humble, that one overlooked her forehead which was a little
too high, swelling out under spots of hair irregularly planted, her
nose all too large and her skin which was ash-colored and metal-like
in appearance and which at times had an eruption of pimples on it.
In her presence, as one of her old friends often told me, and as
since then I sorrowfully realized myself, one felt at first slightly
affected, then gradually carried away and finally violently possessed
by a strange feeling of sympathy in which there was mingled a sort of
affectionate respect, a vague desire, pity, and a longing to offer
oneself as a sacrifice for her. Despite her physical imperfections or
rather because of these very imperfections, she possessed the sad and
irresistible charm which is given to certain creatures privileged by
misfortune, and around whom there floats an atmosphere of something
irreparable. Her childhood and her early youth were periods of illness
and were marked by some disquieting nervous fits. But it was hoped
that marriage, in modifying the conditions of her existence, would
restore her health which the physicians believed was suffering only
from an excessive sensitiveness. It was not so at all. Marriage, on the
contrary, only developed the morbid tendencies that were in her, and
her sensitiveness was heightened to such a degree that, among other
alarming symptoms, my poor mother could not stand the slightest odor,
without being thrown into a fit, which always ended in a swoon. Of
what did she suffer? Why these melancholic fits, these prostrations,
which left her huddled up on the lounge for entire days, motionless
and sullen like an old paralytic? Why these tears which would suddenly
choke her throat to suffocation and for hours roll from her eyes in
burning streams? Why this disgust with everything, which nothing could
overcome: neither distractions nor prayers? She could not tell, for she
herself did not know... Of the causes of her physical ailments, her
mental tortures, her hallucinations which filled her heart and brains
with a passionate desire to die, she knew nothing. She knew not why one
evening as she sat in front of the glowing fireplace, she was suddenly
seized with a horrible temptation to roll on the fire grate, to deliver
her body over to the kisses of the flame which called her, fascinated
her, sang to her hymns of unknown love. Nor did she know why on another
day, while taking a stroll in the country and noticing a man walking in
a half-mowed meadow with his scythe on the shoulder, she ran towards
him with outstretched arms, shouting "Death, O blessed death, take me,
carry me away!" No, she knew not the cause or reason for all that. What
she did know was that at such moments the image of her mother, her
dead mother, was always before her, the image of her mother whom she
herself, one Sunday morning, had found hanging from the chandelier in
the parlor. And she again beheld the dead body which oscillated slowly
in the air, she saw the face all black, the eyes all white and without
pupils, she saw everything up to the sunbeam which, penetrating through
the closed shutters, illuminated with a tragic light the tongue, stuck
out, and the swollen lips. This anguish, these frenzies, this yearning
for death, her mother had no doubt transmitted to her when she gave
life to her; it is from her mother's side that she drew, it is from her
mother's breast that she drank the poison, this poison which now filled
her veins, with which her flesh was permeated, which fuddled her brain,
which gnawed at her soul. During the intervals of calm which grew less
frequent as the days, months and years passed by, she often thought
of these things; and brooding over her life, recalling its remotest
incidents and comparing the physical resemblances between the mother
who died voluntarily and the daughter who wished to die, she felt more
and more upon her the crushing weight of this lugubrious inheritance.
She exalted in and completely abandoned herself to the idea that it was
impossible for her to resist the fate of her ancestors who appeared to
her as a long chain of suicides emerging from the depth of night, far
in the past, and extending over ages to terminate ... where? At this
question her eyes became troubled, her temples grew moist with a cold
sweat and her hands gripped her throat as if striving to grasp the
imaginary cord, the loop of which she felt was bruising her neck and
choking her. Every object seemed to her an instrument of fatal death;
everything reminded her of the image of death, decomposed and bleeding;
the branches of the trees appeared to her as so many sinister gibbets,
and in the green water of the fish pond, among the reeds and water
lilies, in the river shaded by tall herbage, she distinguished the
floating form covered with slime.

In the meantime my father, squatted behind some thick shrub, musket in
hand, was watching a cat or bombarding some vocalizing warbler hidden
in the branches. In the evening, by way of consolation he would gently
say to mother, "Well, dearie, your health is not always good. You
see, what you need is some bitters, take some bitters. A glass in the
morning, a glass in the evening.... That's all that's needed." He did
not complain of anything, he never got excited over anything. Seating
himself at his desk, he would go over the papers which were brought to
him by the city clerk during the day and sign them rapidly with an air
of disdain. "Here!" he would exclaim, "it is just like this corrupt
administration; it would do a whole lot better if it occupied itself
with the farmer instead of pestering us with these small matters....
Here is some more silly stuff!"... Then he would go to bed, repeating
in a calm voice: "Bitters, take some bitters."

This resignation hurt my mother like a reproach. Although my father's
education was rather limited and though she did not find in him any
trace of that masculine tenderness or fanciful romanticism of which
she had dreamed, she nevertheless could not deny his physical energy
and a sort of moral vigor which she envied in him, despising as she
did its application to things which she considered petty and sordid.
She felt guilty toward herself, guilty toward life so uselessly
wasted in tears. Not only did she not meddle in the affairs of her
husband, but little by little she lost her interest even in household
duties, leaving them to the whims of the servants. She took so little
care of herself that her chambermaid, good old Marie, who was present
at her birth, often had to nurse and feed her, while scolding her
affectionately, as one does a little infant in the cradle. In her
desire for isolation she came to a point where she could no longer
stand the presence of her parents, of her friends who, discomfited
and repelled by her countenance more and more morose, by this mouth
whence no word ever came, by this forced smile which was immediately
shrivelled by an involuntary trembling of her lips,--called, less and
less frequently and ended by forgetting altogether the path leading to
the Priory. Religion, like everything else, became a burden to her. She
no longer put in an appearance in the church, did not pray any more,
and two Easters passed without anyone seeing her approach the holy
table.

Then my mother began to lock herself up in her room, the shutters
of which she closed, and drew the curtains together, deepening the
darkness about her. She used to spend entire days there, sometimes
stretched out on a lounge, sometimes kneeling in a corner, her head
touching the wall. And she was annoyed by the least noise from outside;
the slamming of the door, the creaking of old shoes along the corridor,
the neighing of a horse in the court came to disturb her novitiate of
non-existence. Alas! What could be done about it! For a long time she
had struggled against an unknown disease, and the disease, stronger
than she was, had felled her to the ground. Now her will-power was
paralyzed. She was no longer free to rise or act. Some mysterious force
held her in chains, rendering her arms inert, her brain muddled, her
heart vacillating like a little smoky flame beaten by the wind; and far
from resisting, she looked for added opportunities to plunge deeper
into suffering, relishing with a sort of perverted exultation the
frightful delights of her self-annihilation.

Dissatisfied with the management of his domestic affairs, my father
at length decided to take an interest in the progress of my mother's
illness, which passed his understanding. He had the hardest time in the
world to make mother accept the idea of going to Paris to consult the
"princes of science" as he put it. It was a sorry trip. Of the three
celebrated physicians to whom he took her, the first declared that
my mother was anæmic and prescribed a strengthening diet; the second
diagnosed that she was affected with nervous rheumatism and prescribed
a debilitating regimen; the third one found that "it was nothing" and
recommended mental tranquility.

No one saw clearly into her soul. She herself did not know it. Obsessed
with the cruel memory to which she attributed all her misfortunes, she
could not unravel with clearness all that stirred obscurely in the
innermost depths of her being, nor understand the vague passions, the
imprisoned aspirations, the captive dreams which had accumulated in her
since childhood. She was like a nestling bird that, without realizing
the obscure and nostalgic forces which drew it toward heaven of which
it has no knowledge, crushes its head and maims its wings against the
cage bars. Instead of craving death as she thought she was, her soul
within her, just like that bird that hungered for the unknown skies,
hungered for life radiant with tenderness, filled with love; and just
like that bird, was dying from this unassuaged hunger. As a child, she
gave herself entirely, with all the exaggerations of her fervid nature,
to the love for material things and animals; as a young girl she was
given to love of dreams of the impossible, but material objects never
brought her peace, nor did her dreams assume a precise and soothing
form. She had no one to guide her, no one to set right this youthful
mind already shaken by internal shocks, no one to open the door of this
heart to wholesome reality, a door already guarded by chimeric shadows
in her vacant state; no one to whom she could pour out the exuberance
of her thoughts, her tenderness, her desires, which finding no outlet
for expansion, accumulated, boiled within her, ready to burst the
fragile mould poorly protected by nerves too jaded.

Her mother, always ill, singularly absorbed in that hypochondria
which was soon to kill her, was incapable of intelligent and firm
direction in the matter of her daughter's education. Her father, all
but ruined, put to his last shift, struggled hard to save for his
family its ancestral home which was threatened; and among the young
people about her--shiftless noblemen, vainglorious burghers, greedy
peasants, none bore upon his brow the magic star which could lead her
to her God. Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in
disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her,
the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies
deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her
fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and
left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture
of unfulfilled desires. And later her marriage which had been more
than a sacrifice--a business transaction, a compromise to improve the
straitened circumstances of her father!... And her disgust, her revolt
at feeling herself a piece of dishonored flesh, a prey, an instrument
of man's pleasure! To have soared so high and to fall so low! To have
dreamed of celestial kisses, of mystic caresses and divine possessions
and then ... the end of it!... Instead of wide expanses, ablaze with
light, where her imagination felt at home among the soaring flights
of angels in a trance of joy and affrighted doves--there came night,
thick, sinister and haunted by the spectre of her mother, stumbling
over tombs and crosses with a piece of cord on her neck.

The Priory soon grew silent. On the gravel of its alleys one no
longer heard the trundle of carts and carriages bringing friends of
the neighborhood to the front entrance decorated with geraniums. The
front gate was bolted in order to make the carnages go through the
back yard. In the kitchen the servants talked among themselves in low
voices, moving about on tiptoe as is done in a house where some one
has died. The gardener, by order of my mother who could not stand the
noise of wheelbarrows and the scraping of rakes on the ground, allowed
the wild stock to suck up the sap of the rose bushes turned yellow,
allowed the weeds to choke the flowers in the baskets and to cover up
the walks. And the house with its dark curtain of fir trees resembling
a funeral canopy which sheltered it from the west, with its windows
always closed, with its living corpse which it guarded buried behind
its square walls of old brick looked like a burial vault. The country
folk who on Sunday used to take a stroll in the woods, no longer passed
by the Priory without some sort of superstitious terror, as if that
dwelling were an evil place haunted by ghosts. Pretty soon a legend
grew about the place: a wood cutter told how one night, going back from
work, he saw Madame Mintié all in white, her hair disheveled, crossing
the sky high above and beating her chest with the crucifix.

My father locked himself up in his study more than ever, avoiding as
much as possible staying in the house where he was hardly seen at times
other than meal hours. He also took to making distant trips, increased
the number of committees and societies over which he presided, found
means to create for himself new distractions and business affairs far
away from home. The Council General, the Agricultural Commission,
the jury of the Court of Assizes were of great help to him for that
purpose. When some one spoke to him of his wife he answered, shaking
his head:

"Ah, I am very uneasy, very much wrought up over it. How will it end? I
must confess I fear she may become insane...."

And when some one expressed his unbelief:

"No, no, I am not joking.... You know well that it runs in her family,
their heads don't seem to be very strong!"

Nevertheless reproach never came from his lips, although he realized
the embarrassing condition in which this situation placed his business
affairs and which he ascribed to nothing but the irritating obduracy of
my mother in not wanting to try anything that might cure her.

It was in these sad surroundings that I grew up. I came to this world
a tiny, sickly child. What cares, what fierce tenderness, what deadly
anguishes I brought with me! In the presence of the puny creature that
I was, sustained by a breath of life so feeble that it could be guessed
at only by a rattling sound in my throat, my mother forgot her own
sorrows. Maternity revived her worn-out energy, awakened her conscience
to new duties, to new sacred responsibilities which now devolved
upon her. What ardent nights, what feverish days she spent bent over
the cradle where lay something born of her own flesh and soul, and
palpitating!... Ah! yes!... I belonged to her, to her only; it was not
at all of this conjugal submission that I was born; I was not the fatal
consequence of the original sin as other children of men are; no! she
had always carried me in her womb, and like Christ I was conceived in a
long cry for love. All her troubles, her terrors, her past sufferings
she understood now; it was because a great mystery of creation was
being enacted in her being.

She had great difficulty in bringing me up, and if I outlived all that
had threatened me one might say it was accomplished by a miracle of
love. More than twenty times my mother snatched me from the clutches
of death.... And then what a joy and what a recompense it was to
her to see the little wrinkled body fill itself with the sap of
health, the rumpled face take on the color of shiny pink, the little
eyes open gaily into a smile, the lips, greedy and searching, move
and gluttonously pump the life-giving liquid from her nourishing
breast! My mother now tasted a few moments of complete and wholesome
happiness. A desire to act, to be good and useful, to occupy her
hands, heart and spirit, to live at last took hold of her, and even
in the most commonplace duties of her household she found a new, a
passionate interest which was doubled by a feeling of profound peace.
Her gayety came back to her, a natural and gentle gayety without
violent outbursts. She made plans, pictured the future to herself with
confidence, and many a time she was astonished to discover that she no
longer thought of her past--that evil dream which vanished.

I grew. "One can see him getting bigger every day," the nurse used to
say. And with rapturous emotions my mother watched the hidden labor
of nature which polished the rough places of flesh, giving it more
pliant form, more definite features, better regulated movements and
poured into the dimness of the brain just emerged from nothingness
the primitive glimmer of instinct. Oh, how everything seemed to her
now clothed in bright and entrancing colors! It was music of welcome
itself, the benediction of love, and even the trees, formerly so full
of dread and menace, were stretching out their branches above like so
many protecting arms. One was led to hope that the mother had saved the
woman. Alas! That hope was of short duration.

One day she noticed in me a certain predisposition to nervous fits,
to a diseased contraction of muscles, and she became alarmed. When I
was about one year old I had convulsions which came short of finishing
me. The fits were so violent that my mouth, even long after the attack
was over, remained twisted into an ugly grimace as if paralyzed. My
mother would not admit that at periods of rapid growth the majority of
children were subject to such fits. She saw in that something which
she thought was characteristic of her and her ancestors, she saw in
that the first symptoms of a hereditary illness, of a terrible disease
which she thought was going to continue in her son. She battled hard,
however, against these thoughts which came in hives; she used every bit
of energy and vigor she could command to dissipate them, taking refuge
in me as if in an inviolable asylum for protection against phantoms and
evil spirits. She held me pressed against her bosom, covering me with
kisses and saying:

"My little Jean, it is not true, is it? You will live and be happy,
won't you?... Answer me!... Alas! You can't talk, my poor little
angel.... Oh, don't cry, never cry, Jean, my Jean, my dear little
Jean!..."

But question as she might, feel as she might my heart beating against
her own, my awkward hands gripping her breasts, my legs dangling from
under the loosed swaddling cloth--her confidence was gone, doubts
gained the upper hand. An incident which was related to me time and
again with a sort of religious terror served to bring consternation
into my mother's soul.

One day she was taking a bath. In the hall of the bathroom laid out
with black and white square slabs, Marie, bent over me, was watching my
first uncertain steps. Suddenly, fixing my gaze on a black square, I
appeared to be very much frightened. I uttered a cry and, trembling all
over as if I had seen something terrible, I hid my head in my nurse's
apron.

"What's the matter?" my mother anxiously asked.

"I don't know," answered old Marie. It seemed as though Master Jean had
been frightened by a paving block.

She brought me to the spot where my countenance so suddenly changed its
expression. But at the sight of the paving slab, I cried out again. My
whole body shuddered.

"There must be something!" cried my mother. "Marie, quick, quick, my
underwear!... My God!--What did he see?"

Having come out of the bathroom, she did not want to wait to be wiped,
and scarcely covered by her peignoir she stooped over the stone and
examined it.

"That's strange," she murmured. "And yet he saw something....but
what?... There isn't anything...."

She took me in her arms, swayed me. I smiled now, uttering inarticulate
sounds and playing with the ribbons of her peignoir. She put me down on
the floor. Moving with short, unsteady steps, both arms outstretched,
I purred like a kitten. None of the blocks before which I stopped
frightened me in the least. Arrived at the fatal block, my face again
assumed the expression of horror, and frightened and crying I returned
quickly to my mother.

"I tell you there must be something!" she cried. "Call Felix. Let him
come with tools ... a hammer, quick, quick! Tell Monsieur also!"

"It seems strange all the same," assented Marie who, with gaping mouth
and eyes wide open, was looking at the mysterious slab. "He must be a
sorcerer then!"

Felix lifted one stone, examined it carefully, dug into the mortar
below.

"Dig up another one!" my mother commanded. "And that one also ...
another one ... all of them ... dig them all up! I want to find out....
And Monsieur is not coming!"

In the excitement of her gestures, forgetting that there was a man
around, she uncovered herself and revealed her nude body. Kneeling on
the blocks, Felix continued digging them up. He took each one out with
his brawny hands and shook his head.

"If Madame wants me to tell her.... For the rest, Monsieur is way out
in the park, busy sharpening the pick-axe.... And besides, there is
nothing to it ... the stone blocks are like stone blocks, seemingly of
the pavement. That's all!... Madame may be sure.... Only it might be
that that was only in Master Jean's imagination.... Madame knows that
children are like grown-up folks and that they see things! But as to
these slabs, they are just slabs, neither more nor less."

My mother became pale, haggard.

"Shut up!" she ordered, "and get out of here, all of you!"

And without waiting for the execution of her order she carried me
out of the room. Her cries, interrupted by the slamming of the door,
resounded on the stairway and in the hall.

She never thought, however, poor dear creature that she was, of
giving to the bathroom incident a natural explanation. One could
have demonstrated to her that what had frightened me so badly might
have been a moving reflection of a towel upon the humid surface of
the floor, or perhaps the shadow of a leaf projected from outside
across the window, which of course she would not have admitted as
likely to have taken place. Her spirit, fed on dreams, tormented by
lurid exaggerations and instinctively drawn to the mysterious and the
fantastic, accepted with dangerous credulity the vaguest explanation
and yielded to the most troubling suggestions. She imagined that her
caresses, her kisses, her lulling me to sleep communicated to me
the germs of her disease, that the nervous fits which almost caused
my death, the hallucinations which shone in my eyes with the sombre
radiance of madness, were to her a divine warning, and as soon as she
conceived that, the last hope died in her heart.

Marie found her mistress half naked, stretched out on the bed.

"My God! My God!" she moaned, "that's the end of it.... My poor little
Jean!... You, too, they will take away from me!... Oh, God, have pity
on him!... Could that be possible!... So little, so weak!..."

And while Marie was putting back her clothes which slipped to the
ground, trying to quiet her:

"My good Marie," she stammered, "listen to me. Promise me, yes promise
me to do as I tell you.... You have seen it just now, you have seen it,
haven't you?... Well, take Jean, and bring him up because I--you see
... he must not.... I'll kill him.... Here, you'll stay in this room
with him, right near me.... You shall take good care of him and tell
me all about him.... I'll feel his presence there, I'll hear him....
But you understand, he must not see me.... It is I who make him that
way!..."

Marie held me in her arms.

"Madame, there is no sense in that at all," she said, "and you really
deserve a good scolding as a lesson. ... Why just look at your little
Jean!... He is just like a little quail. Now tell her, tell her,
my little Jean, that you are well and brave!... Look, look at him
laughing, the little creature.... Put your arms around him, Madame."

"No, no!" my mother cried out wildly. "I must not.... Later.... Take
him away!..."

It was impossible to make her abandon this idea. Marie well understood
that if her mistress had any chance at all to come back to normal life,
to cure herself of her "black moods," it was not in being separated
from her child. In the sad state in which my mother found herself, she
had but one means of recovery and now she rejected it, impelled to
do so by some new and unknown fit of madness. All that a little baby
brings of joy, uneasiness, activity, anxiety, forgetfulness of self to
the heart of a mother was exactly what she needed and yet she said:

"No, no.... I must not.... Later.... Take him away!..."

In her own language, familiar and rude, to which her long devotions
entitled her, the old servant maid brought forward all the reasoning
and arguments dictated by her common sense and by her simple peasant
heart. She even reproached my mother for neglecting her duties, she
spoke of her selfishness and declared that a good mother who had any
religion at all or even a savage beast wouldn't act as she did.

"Yes," she ended, "that is bad! ... you have already been so unkind to
your husband, poor fellow. Must you now make your child unhappy?"

But mother, always sobbing, could but repeat:

"No, no.... I must not.... Later.... Take him away!..."

What was my childhood? A long torpor. Separated from my mother whom I
saw but rarely, avoiding my father whom I did not love at all, living
almost in seclusion, a miserable orphan between old Marie and Felix
in this grand lugubrious house, the silence and neglect of which
weighed down upon me like a night of death--I was bored. Yes, I was
that rare and wretched specimen of a child who is bored. Always sad
and grave, hardly speaking at all, I had none of the inquisitiveness
and mischievousness of my age, one might have said that my intellect
had been slumbering forever in the numbness of maternal gestation. I
am trying to recall, I am trying to bring to life again my feelings of
childhood; verily I believe I had none. I was dragging on, all wasted
and stultified, without knowing what to do with my legs, my arms, my
eyes, my poor little body which annoyed me like a tiresome companion
whom one wishes to get rid of. There is not one recollection, not one
single impression that has been retained by me even in part. I always
wished to be where I was not, and the toys exhaling the wholesome odor
of fir trees were lying in heaps around me, without inducing me even to
think of touching them. Never did I dream about a knife or wooden horse
or picture book. Today, when I see little children running, jumping,
chasing one another on the garden lawns, the sandy beaches, I recall
with sadness the first mournful years of my life, and while listening
to the clear laughter which sounds like the ringing of the angelus of
human dawn, I say to myself that all my misfortunes have come from this
childhood, lonely and lifeless, unbroken by a single bright event.

I was not quite twelve years old when my mother died. The day on which
this misfortune happened the good curé Blanchetière, who liked us very
much, pressed me to his breast, then he looked at me for some time and
with eyes full of tears murmured several times: "Poor little devil!"
I burst into uncontrollable tears when I saw the good curé cry, for I
did not want to reconcile myself to the thought that my mother was dead
and never again would come back. During her illness I was forbidden to
go into her room, and now she was gone without having let me embrace
her!... Could she have really deserted me that way?... When I was about
seven years old and was well she had agreed to re-admit me into her
life. It was from this time on that I understood that I had a mother
and that I adored her. My sorrowing mother was represented to me by her
two eyes, her two large round eyes, fixed, with rings of red around
them, which always shed tears without moving the eyelids, which shed
tears as does a rain cloud or a fountain. All at once I felt a keen
sorrow at the grief of my mother, and it is through this grief that I
awoke to life. I did not know what she suffered from, but I knew that
her malady must have been horrible; I knew that from the way she used
to embrace me. She had fits of tenderness which used to frighten me and
which inspire me with fear even now. As she clasped my head, squeezed
my neck and moved her lips over my forehead, my cheeks, my mouth, her
frenzied kisses often passed into bites, similar to the caresses of a
beast; into her embraces she put all the true passion of a lover, as if
I had been the adored chimerical being of her dreams, the being that
never came, the being whom her soul and her body so ardently desired.
Was it possible then that she was dead?

Every evening, before going to bed, I fervently entreated the beautiful
image of the Virgin to whom I addressed my prayers: "Holy Virgin,
please grant my dear mother good health and a long life." But one
morning my father, silent and pale, accompanied the physician to the
gate, and the countenances of both were so grave that it was easy to
surmise that something irreparable had happened. Then the servants were
crying. What else could they have cried about, if not the loss of their
mistress?... And then did not the curé come up to me and say "poor
little devil!" in a tone of irremediable pity? I remember the smallest
details of that frightful day as if it were yesterday. From the room
where I was shut in with old Marie I could hear the coming and going of
people and other strange noises, and with my forehead pressed against
the window pane, I could see through the window blinds women beggars
squatted on the lawn, waxpaper in hand, muttering prayers. I saw people
enter the courtyard, the men in black, the women with long black veils.
"Ah! here is Monsieur Bacoup!..." "Why, that's Madame Provost!" I
noticed that all of them looked sad, while at the gate which was wide
open the children of the choir, the choristers uncomfortable in their
black vestments, the Brothers of Charity with their red tunics, one of
whom carried a banner and another a heavy silver cross, were laughing
aloud and amusing themselves by pushing and jostling one another. The
beadle, tinkling his bell, was driving back inquisitive mendicants, and
a wagon loaded with hay which had come up on the road was compelled
to stop and wait. In vain did I look for the eyes of little Sorieul,
a crippled child of my age whom I used to give a small loaf of bread
every Saturday; I could not find him anywhere, and that made me feel
uneasy. Then suddenly the bells on the church belfry began to toll.
Ding! Ding! Dong! The sky was of deep blue, the sun was ablaze. Slowly
the funeral procession started out, first the Brothers of Charity and
the choristers, the cross which glittered, the banner which fluttered
in the air, the curé in a white surplice, shielding his head with the
psalm-book, then something heavy and long covered with flowers and
wreaths which some men carried shaking at their knees, then the crowd,
a crawling crowd which filled the courtyard, wound itself out on the
road, a crowd in which I could distinguish no one except my cousin
Merel who was mopping his head with a checkered handkerchief. Ding!
Dong! Dong! The church bell tolled for a long, long time; ah! the sad
knell! Ding! Dong! Dong! And while the bells were tolling, tolling,
three white pigeons continuously fluttered about, pursuing one another
around the church right opposite me which projected its warped roof and
its slate steeple out of plumb above a clump of acacia and chestnut
trees.

The ceremony ended, my father entered my room. He walked back and forth
for some time without speaking, his arms crossed on his back.

"Ah! my poor Monsieur," lamented old Marie, "what a terrible
misfortune!"

"Yes; yes," replied my father, "it is a great, a terrible misfortune!"

He sank into an armchair, heaving a sigh. I can see him right now with
his swollen eyelids, his dejected look, his hanging arms. He had a
handkerchief in his hand, and from time to time brought it to his eyes,
red from tears.

"Perhaps I did not take good care of her, Marie.... She did not like to
have me around.... Yet I did what I could, everything I could.... How
frightful she looked, all rigid on the bed!... Ah, God! I shall always
see her that way. The day after tomorrow she would be thirty-one, would
she not?"

My father drew me toward him and seated me on his knees.

"You love me all the same, don't you, my little Jean?" he asked,
rocking me. "Tell me, do you love me? I have no one but you!..."

Speaking to himself he said:

"Perhaps it is better that it is so. Who knows what the outcome would
be later on!... Yes, perhaps it is better this way.... Ah! poor little
one, look at me straight!..."

And as if at that very moment he had divined in my eyes which resembled
the eyes of my mother a whole destiny of suffering, he pressed me close
to his breast and burst into tears.

"My little Jean!--Ah! my poor little Jean!"

Worn out by the emotion and fatigue of the night before, he fell
asleep, holding me in his arms. And I, seized suddenly with a feeling
of great pity, listened to this unknown heart which for the first time
was beating close to mine.

It had been decided a few months previous to this that I should not
be sent to college, but that I should have a private tutor. My father
did not approve of this method of education. But he had met with such
opposition that he thought best not to interfere, and just as he had
sacrificed his domination of husband over wife, he also gave up his
right of a father over me. Now I was to have a tutor, for my father
wanted to remain faithful to the wishes of my mother even when she was
dead.

One fine morning I saw him arrive, a very grave-looking gentleman, very
blond, very close shaven, who wore blue spectacles. Monsieur Jules
Rigard had very obsolete ideas on education, he carried himself with
the stiffness of a servant, and bore a sacerdotal air which, far from
encouraging me to learn, made all study disgusting to me. He had been
told without a doubt that my mentality was slow and sluggish and, as
I understood nothing from his first lesson, he took that judgment
for granted and treated me like an idiot. It never occurred to him to
penetrate into my young mind, to hold converse with my heart; never did
he ask himself whether under this sad mask of a lonesome child there
were not hidden ardent aspirations quite beyond my age, an all too
passionate and restless nature eager to know, which introspectively and
morbidly unfolded itself in the silence of secret thoughts and mute
ecstasies.

Monsieur Rigard stupefied me with Greek and Latin, and that was all.
Ah! how many children understood and guided properly, might have become
great if they had not been permanently deformed by this frightful
crushing of their brains by an imbecile father or an ignorant teacher.
Is it all, then, to have lustfully begotten you on an evening of
passion, and must not one continue the work of one's life forces by
giving you intellectual nourishment as well, in order that it may
strengthen your life and provide you with weapons to defend it. The
truth was that my soul felt even lonelier with my father than with my
teacher! Yet he did everything he could to please me. He consciously,
though stupidly, strove to show his love for me. But when I was with
him, he could never find anything to tell me outside of foolish,
idle tales, bogey man stories, terrifying legends of the revolution
of 1848 which had left in him an invincible fear, or else a tale of
the brigandage of one Lebecq, a great republican who scandalized the
country by his passionate opposition to the curé and his obduracy in
refusing to hang red bunting on the walls on national holidays.

Often he would take me along in his cabriolet, on his business trips
in the country and, when perplexed as I was by the mystery of nature
which every day unfolded itself around me, I asked him questions, he
would not know how or what to answer and would dodge the answer thus:
"You are too young to be told that! Wait till you grow up." And feeling
miserable by the side of the large body of my father which swayed
with the jolts of the road, I huddled up inside the cabriolet, while
my father was killing with the stick of his whip the gad flies which
swarmed on our mare's croup. Every now and then he would say: "I have
never seen such pestering things; we'll have storm, that's sure."

In the church of Saint-Michel, inside a small chapel, illumined by
the red glimmer of a window, upon an altar ornamented with embroidery
and vases full of flowers, stood a statue of the Virgin. She had a
pink body, a blue cloak bespangled with silver stars, a lilac-colored
robe whose folds fell modestly upon gilt sandals.... In her arms she
held a child, rosy and nude with a golden halo around its head, and
the eyes of the mother rested rapturously upon the child. For several
months this plaster Virgin was my sole friend, and the entire time
which I could steal from my lessons I used to spend before this image,
contemplating its tender colors. She appeared to me so beautiful, so
kind and sweet that no human creature could rival in beauty, kindness
and sweetness this painted piece of statuary which spoke to me in
an unknown and delightful language and from which there came to me
something like the intoxicating odor of incense and myrrh. When near
her I was in truth a different child; I felt how rosier my cheeks were
getting, how my blood was flowing more vigorously in my veins, how my
thoughts disentangled themselves more easily and quickly; it seemed to
me that the black veil which hung over my mentality was gradually being
lifted, revealing new lights to me.

Marie was made an accomplice in my stealthy flights to the church; she
often led me to the chapel where I remained for hours conversing with
the Virgin, while the old nurse fervently recited her Rosary, kneeling
before the altar. She had to get me out of my state of ecstasy by
force, because otherwise, absorbed as I had been in the dreams which
transported me to heaven, I would never have thought of returning home.
My passion for this Virgin became so strong that away from her I was
miserable and wished I had never left her at all. "Monsieur Jean will
surely become a priest," old Marie used to say. It was like a yearning
for possession, like a violent desire to take her, to entwine her, to
cover her with kisses.

I took a notion to make a sketch of her: with what love, it would be
impossible for you to imagine. When the statue had taken on a semblance
of crude form on the paper, it gave me joy without end. All the energy
in me that I could put forward I employed in this work, which I
thought admirable and superhuman. More than twenty times I started the
drawing over again, incensed with the crayon for not conforming to the
delicacy of the lines, incensed with the paper upon which the image
would not appear as live and real as I should have liked to see it. I
was rabid on this point. My will was bent upon this unique goal. At
length I succeeded in giving more or less exact substance to my idea
of the plaster Virgin--but how naïve an idea it was. And immediately
thereafter I stopped thinking of it. An inner voice had told me that
nature was more beautiful, more moving, more splendid, and I began to
notice the sun which caressed the trees, which played upon the pentiles
of the roof, covered the grass with gold, illumined the rivers; and
I began to listen to all the palpitations of life, whose puffed up
creatures scourge the earth like a body of flesh.

The years rolled by, wearisome and void. I remained gloomy, wild,
always shut up within myself, fond of running about in the fields,
penetrating into the very heart of the forest. It seemed to me that at
least there, lulled by the grand voices of things, I was less alone and
I felt more alive. Without being endowed with that terrible gift which
certain natures have of analyzing themselves, questioning themselves,
searching without end for the reason of their actions, I often asked
myself who I was and what I wanted. Alas! I was nobody and did not want
anything.

My childhood had been spent in darkness, my adolescence was passed
in a void; not having been a child I could no more be a young man. I
lived in a sort of fog. A thousand thoughts were agitating me, but they
were so confused that I could not seize upon their form; none of them
detached itself clearly from this depth of opaque mist. I had some
aspirations; some exalted notions, but it would have been impossible
for me to formulate them, to explain their cause or reason. It would
have been impossible for me to say into which world of reality or dream
they transplanted me; I had fits of infinite tenderness, in which my
whole being would lose itself, but for whom or for what this feeling
was intended, I did not know. Sometimes, all of a sudden, I would
abandon myself to tears, but the reason for these tears? In truth, I
knew not. What was certain was that nothing was to my liking, that I
did not see any purpose in living, that I felt myself incapable of any
effort.

Children usually say: "I'll be a general, priest, physician,
innkeeper." I never said anything of the kind, never; never did I
tear myself loose from the present; never did I venture a glimpse
into the future. Man appeared to me like a tree which spread out its
foliage and stretched out its limbs into the stormy skies, without
knowing which flower would bloom at its foot, which birds would sing
at its top, or which thunderbolt would fell it to the ground. And
notwithstanding that, the feeling of moral solitude in which I found
myself oppressed and frightened me. I could not open my heart to my
father, to my teacher or to anybody else. I had no friend, not a living
soul who could understand, guide or love me. My father and preceptor
were disheartened by my waywardness, and in the country I passed for a
feebleminded maniac. In spite of everything, however, I was permitted
to take my college entrance examinations, and though neither my father
nor myself had any idea as to what I should take up, I went to Paris to
study law. "Law will get you anywhere," my father used to say.

Paris amazed me. It struck me like a place of tempestuous uproar and
raving madness. Individuals and throngs were passing by, strange,
incoherent, hurrying to work which I imagined terrible and monstrous.
Knocked down by horses, jostled by men, deafened by the roar of the
city always in motion like some colossal and hellish factory, blinded
by the glare of lights to which I was not accustomed, I roamed about
the city in the strange dream of a demented one. I was very much
surprised to find trees there. How could they grow there, in that soil
of pavements, how could they shoot upwards in the forest of stone,
amidst the rumbling noise of men, their branches lashed by evil winds?

It took me a long time to get used to this life which seemed to me
the reverse of nature; and from the depths of this boiling hell my
thoughts would often wander back to the peaceful fields way yonder
which brought to my nostrils the delicious odor of dug up and fertile
soil; back to the green retreats of the woods, where I heard only the
light rustling of the leaves, and from time to time in the resonant
depths, the dull blows of the ax and the almost human groans of the old
oak trees. Nevertheless, curiosity often drove me out of my small room
which I occupied on Rue Oudinot, and I sauntered along the streets,
the boulevards, the river banks impelled by a feverish desire for
walking, my fingers twitching from nervousness, my brains squashed, as
it were, by the gigantic and intense activity of Paris, my senses in
some way thrown out of balance by all these colors, odors, sounds, by
the perversion and strangeness of the contact so new to me. The more
I mingled with the crowds, the more intoxicated I became with this
uproar, the more I saw multitudes of human lives pass by, brushing
one another, indifferent to one another, without apparent attachment,
and saw others surge forward, disappear and emerge again and so
on forever--the more I felt the overwhelming sense of inexorable
loneliness.

At Saint-Michel, although I was lonely, I at least knew some human
beings and objects. Everywhere I had points of reference by which my
spirit was guided; the back of a peasant bent over his glebe, the ruins
of a building at the turn of the road, a ditch, a dog, a clay pit,
a charming face--everything there was familiar to me, if not dear.
At Paris everything was strange and unknown to me. In this frightful
haste with which all seemed to be moving about, in the profound
selfishness, in this giddy obliviousness to one another into which they
were all precipitated, how could one retain even for a single moment
the attention of these people, these phantoms; I don't speak of the
attention of tenderness or pity, but of that of simple notice!... One
day I saw a man who killed another: he was admired and his name was
soon on everybody's lips; the next morning I saw a woman who lifted
her skirt going through obscene motions: the crowd followed her.

Being awkward, ignorant of the ways of the world, very timid, I found
it hard to make friends. I never even set foot in the homes where I was
recommended, for fear of appearing ridiculous. I had been invited for
dinner to the home of a cousin of my mother's who was rich and kept a
large retinue. The sight of the mansion, the footmen in the vestibule,
the lights, the carpets, the heavy perfume of smothered flowers--all
this frightened me and I fled, knocking down on the stairway a woman in
a red cloak who got up and started to laugh at my bewildered look.

The noisy gayety of the young men, my school comrades, whom I had met
at the lectures, at the restaurants, in the cafés, was not to my liking
either. The coarseness of their pleasures hurt me, and the women,
with their eyes colored with bistre, their overpainted lips, their
cynicism and shameless speech and behavior did not tempt me at all. One
evening, however, when my nerves were all wrought up, and I was driven
by a sudden rutting of the flesh, I went into a house of ill-fame and
left it burning with shame, despising myself, remorseful and with
the sensation of filth on my skin. What! Was it from this slimy and
loathsome act that men were born! From this time on I looked at women
more frequently, but my look was no longer chaste, and fixed upon them
as upon some impure images, it was searching for sex and stripping them
under the folds of their clothes. I came to know their secret vices,
which rendered me still more dejected, restless and out of sorts.

A kind of crapulous torpor settled down upon me. I used to stay in
bed several days at a stretch, sunk in the brutishness of obscene
dreams, awakened now and then by sudden nightmares, by painful attacks
of heartache which caused my skin to perspire. In my room, behind
drawn curtains, I was thus living like a corpse which was conscious
of its death and which from the depth of its grave in the frightful
night could hear the stamping of many feet and the rumble of the city
about it. Sometimes, tearing myself loose from this dejection, I went
out. But what was I going to do? Where could I go? I was indifferent
to everything, and I had not a single desire or curiosity. With fixed
gaze, with heavy drooping head and listless, I used to walk straight
ahead, without purpose, and I would end by flinging myself on a bench
in the Luxembourg, senilely shrunk into myself, lying motionless for
many hours, without seeing anything, without hearing anything, without
asking myself why there were children about me, why there were birds
singing, why young couples passed.... Naturally I was not working and
did not think of anything....

Then war came, then defeat.... Despite the opposition of my father,
despite the entreaties of old Marie, I enlisted.




CHAPTER II


Our regiment was what is called a march regiment, that is, one formed
while on the march. It had been made up at Mans, after much trouble,
of all the remains of a corps of dissimilar fighting units which
encumbered the city. Zuaves, mobilized soldiers, of franc-tireurs,
forestry guards, dismounted cavalrymen, including gendarmes, Spaniards
and Wallachians--there were troops of every kind and description, and
they were all under the command of an old captain quickly promoted for
the occasion to the rank of lieutenant colonel. At that time, such
promotions were not infrequent. The gaps of human flesh wrought in the
ranks of the French by the cannons of Wissembourg and Sedan had to be
filled. Several companies lacked officers.

At the head of mine was a little lieutenant of the reserves, a young
man of twenty, frail and pallid and so weak that after marching a few
kilometers he was out of breath, dragged his feet and usually reached
his destination in an ambulance wagon. The poor little devil! It was
enough to look at him to make him blush, and never did he allow himself
to issue orders for fear of appearing ridiculous. We jeered at him
because of his timidity and weakness, and no doubt because he was kind
and would sometimes distribute cigars and meat supplies to the men.
I quickly inured myself to this new life, carried away by examples
and overexcited by the fever about me. And reading the heartbreaking
reports of our lost battles, I felt myself transported by enthusiasm
which, however, was not mingled with any thought of my threatened
fatherland. We remained a month in Mans for training, to get our full
equipment and to frequent cabarets and houses of ill-fame. At last,
October 3, we started out.

Composed of stray units, of detachments without officers, of
straggling volunteers poorly equipped, poorly fed and more often not
fed at all,--without cohesion, without discipline, everyone thinking
of himself only, and driven by a unique feeling of ferociousness,
implacable selfishness; some wearing police caps, others having silk
handkerchiefs wrapped round their heads; still others wearing artillery
pants and vests of batmen--we were marching along the highways, ragged,
harassed and in an ugly mood.

For twelve days since we had been incorporated into a brigade of recent
formation, we were tramping across the fields like madmen and to no
purpose, as it were. Today marching to the right, tomorrow to the left,
one day covering a stretch of forty kilometers, the next day going back
an equal distance, we were moving in the same circle; like a scattered
herd of cattle which has lost its shepherd. Our enthusiasm diminished
appreciably. Three weeks of suffering were enough for that. Before we
could ever hear the roar of cannon and the whiz of bullets, our forward
march resembled a retreat of a conquered army, cut to pieces by cavalry
charges and precipitated into wild confusion. It was like a panicky
flight in which each one was allowed to shift for himself. How often
did I see soldiers getting rid of their cartridges by scattering them
along the roads?

"What good will they do me?" one of them said. "I don't need them at
all except one to crack the jaw of our captain, the first chance we get
to fight."

In the evening, in camp, squatted around the porridge pot or stretched
out on the cold furze, with heads resting on their knapsacks, they were
thinking of the homes from which they had been taken by force. All
the young men, strong and healthy, had come from the villages. Many
of them were already sleeping in the ground way yonder, disembowelled
by shells; others with shattered backs, like shadows, were straggling
in the fields and in the woods awaiting death. In the small country
places, left to sorrow, there were only old men, more stooped than
ever, and women who wept. The barn-floors where they thrashed corn were
mute and closed, in the deserted fields where weeds sprouted, one no
longer saw against the purple background of the sunset the silhouette
of the laborer returning home, keeping step with his tired horses.
And men with long sabres would come and in the name of the law take
away the horses one day and empty the cowshed the next; for it was not
enough that war should glut itself with human flesh, it was necessary
that it should also devour beasts, the earth itself, everything that
lived in the calm and peace of labor and love.... And at the bottom of
the hearts of all these miserable soldiers whose emaciated frames and
flagged limbs were lit up by the sinister glare of camp fires--there
was one hope, the hope of the coming battle, that is to say, the hope
of flight, of butt turned upwards, and of the German fortress.

Nevertheless we were preparing for the defence of the country which
we traversed and which was no longer threatened. To accomplish that
we thought it would be best to fell trees and scatter them on the
roads; we blew up bridges and desecrated cemeteries at the entrance to
villages under the pretext of barricading them, and we compelled the
inhabitants at the point of the bayonet to help us in the destruction
of their property. Then we would depart, leaving behind us nothing but
ruin and hatred. I remember one time we had to raze a very beautiful
park to the last staddling, in order to build barracks which we never
used at all. Our manner of doing things was not at all such as to
reassure the people. And so at our approach the houses were shut, the
peasants hid their provisions; everywhere we were met by hostile faces,
surly mouths and empty hands. There were bloody scuffles over some
potted pork discovered in a cupboard, and the general ordered an old
and kindly man shot for hiding a few kilograms of salted pork under a
heap of manure.

The first of November we marched all day and about three o'clock we
arrived at the railroad station of Loupe. There was great disorder and
unspeakable confusion at first. Many, leaving the ranks, scattered in
the direction of the city, ten kilometers away, and disappeared in the
neighboring cabarets. For more than an hour the bugles sounded a rally.
Mounted men were sent to the city to bring back the runaways, but they
themselves lingered there to get a drink. There was a rumor afloat that
a train made up at Nogent-le-Rotrou was supposed to take us to Chartres
menaced by the Prussians who were said to have sacked Maintenon and
were camping at Jouy. A workman questioned by our sergeant said that
he did not know anything about it, nor did he hear anything ever said
about it. The general, rather old, short, stout and gesticulating, who
could hardly sit up in his saddle, galloped hither and thither, shaking
and swaying like a drunkard on his saddle horse and with purple face,
bristled moustach, repeated without end:

"Ah! scoundrel!... Ah! scoundrel of scoundrels!..."

He dismounted, assisted by his orderly; his legs got tangled up in
the leather strap of his sabre which dragged on the ground, and
having called over the station master, entered into a most animated
conversation with the latter whose countenance showed perplexity.

"How about the mayor?" shouted the general. "Where is that scoundrel?
Get me that fellow!... Are they trying to make a fool out of me here or
what!"

He was out of breath, sputtered out unintelligible words, stamped his
feet and scolded the station master. Finally both of them, one with a
mien of humility, the other gesticulating furiously, disappeared into
the telegraph office from which there came to us the clicking of the
apparatus, frenzied, excited, interrupted from time to time by the
outbursts of the general. At last it was decided to draw us up on the
quay in company formation, and we were left there standing, knapsack on
the ground, in front of the formed arm racks.... Night came, rain fell,
drizzling and cold, penetrating through our uniforms already drenched
by showers. Here and there the road was lit up by small dim lights,
rendering more sombre than ever the storehouses and the mass of wagons
which men were pushing into a shed. And the derrick crane standing
upright on the turning platform projected its long neck against the sky
like a bewildered giraffe.

Apart from coffee which we gulped down hurriedly in the morning, we
did not eat anything all day, and although fatigue had worn out our
bodies and hunger clutched our stomachs, we anticipated with horror
that we would have to go without supper today. Our gourd-bottles were
empty, our supplies of biscuits and bacon exhausted, and the wagons
of the commissary department which had gone astray had not yet joined
our columns. Several among us grumbled, made threats and voiced their
rebellious feelings aloud, but the no less dejected officers who were
promenading in front of the arm racks, did not seem to take notice of
it. I consoled myself with the thought that the general had perhaps
requisitioned food in the city. It was a vain hope. The time passed,
the rain kept steadily drumming on the hollow mess plates and the
general continued swearing at the station master who in turn went on
avenging himself verbally on the telegraph, the click of which became
more and more violent and erratic. From time to time trains came up
over-crowded with troops. Soldiers of the reserve, light infantry
units, bare-breasted, bare-headed, with loose cravats, some of them
drunk and wearing their kepis wrong side up, deserted the wagons where
they were parked, invaded the taverns and even relieved themselves in
public impudently. From this swarm of human heads, from this stamping
on the floor of the cars by multitudes there emanated oaths, sounds
of the Marseillaise, obscene songs which mingled with shouts of the
gangs of workmen, with the tinkling of bells, with the panting of
machines.... I recognized a little boy from Saint-Michel whose swollen
eyelids oozed, who coughed and spat blood. I asked him where they were
going. He did not know. Having left Mans, they were held up at Connerre
for twelve hours without food because of congestion on the road,--too
crowded to lie down and sleep. He hardly had strength enough to speak.
He went into a tavern to rinse his eyes with warm water. I shook hands
with him, and he said he sincerely hoped that in the first battle the
Germans would make a prisoner of him.... And the train pulled out,
disappeared in the night, carrying all these wan faces, all these
bodies already vanquished----toward what useless and bloody slaughters?

I shivered with cold. Under the icy rain which drenched me to the very
marrow, I felt a terrible cold penetrating me. It seemed as if my
members were getting numb. I took advantage of the confusion caused by
the arrival of a train to reach the open gate and run out on the road
in search of a house or cover where I could warm myself, find a piece
of bread or something. The inns and public places near the station
were guarded by sentries who had orders not to let anyone in.... Three
hundred yards away I noticed a few windows which shone gently in the
night. These lights looked to me like two kindly eyes, two eyes filled
with pity which called me, smiled to me, caressed me.... It was a small
house isolated a few strides away from the road. I ran toward it.... A
sergeant accompanied by four men was there, shouting and swearing. Near
the fireplace without a fire, I saw an old man seated on a very low
wicker chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his face buried in his
hands. A candle burning in an iron candlestick lit up half of his face
hollowed and furrowed by deep wrinkles.

"Will you give us some wood, I am asking you for the last time?"
shouted the sergeant.

"I ain't got no wood," answered the old man.... "It's been eight days
since the troops passed here, I tell you.... They took everything away."

He huddled himself up on the chair and in a feeble voice muttered:

"I ain't got ... nothing... Nothing!..."

"Don't act the rogue, you old rascal.... Ah, you are hiding your wood
to warm the Prussians.... Well I am going to knock those Prussians out
of your head."

The old man shook his head:

"But if I ain't got no wood...."

With angry gestures the sergeant commanded the soldiers to search the
house. They examined everything, looked everywhere from cellar to
garret. They found nothing, nothing but evidence of plunder and some
broken furniture. In the cellar, damp with spilled cider, the casks
were broken open and over the whole there spread a hideously offensive
stench. That exasperated the sergeant who struck the flat end of the
butt of his musket.

"Come on," he shouted, "come on, you old sloven, tell us where your
wood is," and he rudely shook the old man who tottered and almost
struck his head against the andiron of the fireplace.

"I ain't got no wood," the poor man simply repeated.

"Ah! you are getting stubborn!... You have no wood you say! Well, look
here, you have chairs, a buffet, a table, a bed ... if you don't tell
me where your wood is I'll burn it all up."

The old man did not protest. Shaking his aged white head he again
repeated:

"I ain't got no wood."

I wanted to intercede and muttered a few words; but the sergeant did
not let me finish. He took me in from head to foot with a look of
contempt.

"What are you doing around here, you errand simp you? Who gave you
permission to leave the ranks, you dirty, snotty-nosed trash? Come on,
face about double step, march!... Ta ra ta ta ra, ta ta ra!..."

Then he gave the command. In a few minutes the chairs, the tables, the
buffet, the bed were dashed to pieces. The kindly man raised himself
with some effort, went into the farthest corner of the room; and while
the fire was being made, while the sergeant, whose cloak and trousers
were steaming, was warming himself laughingly in front of the crackling
fire, the old man was watching the burning of his last piece of
furniture with eyes of a stoic, and never stopped repeating obstinately:

"I ain't got no wood."

I went back to the station. The general had come out of the telegraph
office more excited and flushed and angry than ever. He jabbered out
something and presently brought about a great commotion. The clang of
sabres was heard, voices called out and answered one another, officers
were running in all directions. The bugle sounded. Without the least
understanding of this counter order, we had to put our knapsacks on our
backs and the guns on our shoulders.

Forward! March!...

With bodies rendered rigid by immobility and with dizzy heads, we
pushed and jostled one another and resumed our breathless journey in
the rain, in the mud, through the night!... To the right and the left
of us there were long stretches of fields swallowed up in the shadows
from which rose the crowns of apple trees which appeared to be twisted
in the skies. From time to time the barking of a dog was heard from
afar.... There were deep forests, sombre thickets which rose like walls
on each side of the road. Then came villages asleep, where our steps
resounded even more mournfully, or where at a window quickly opened and
quickly closed again, there appeared the vague outline of a human white
form ... terrified.... Then again fields and woods and villages.... Not
a single song, not a single word, only an immense silence, accentuated
by the rhythm of the tramping feet. The leather straps of the knapsack
cut into my flesh, the rifle felt like a red hot iron bar placed
upon my shoulder. For a moment I thought myself harnessed to a huge
wagon, loaded with broad stone and stuck in the mud and felt that the
carters were breaking my legs with the lashes of whips. With my feet
planted in the ground, my spine bent in two, with outstretched neck,
strangled by the bit, my lungs emitting a rattling sound, I was pulling
and pulling.... Pretty soon I reached a state where I was no longer
conscious of anything. I was marching in a state of torpor, like an
automaton, as if in a trance.... Strange hallucinations flitted before
my eyes. I saw a glowing road receding into space, lined with palatial
mansions and brilliant lights.... Strange scarlet flowers swayed their
corollæ in the air on the top of flexible stems, and a crowd of gay
people were singing at tables laden with refreshments and delicious
fruit.... Women with fluttering gauze skirts were dancing on illumined
lawns, to the music of numerous orchestras hidden in the grove strewn
with falling leaves, adorned with jasmines, sprinkled with water.

"Halt!" commanded the sergeant.

I stopped, and in order not to sink down to the ground I had to hold
on to the arm of a comrade. I awoke from my trance.... Darkness was
all around me. We had come to the entrance of a forest, near a small
town where the general and most of the officers went to find quarters.
Having pitched my tent, I occupied myself with rubbing my feet, the
skin of which was peeling off, with a candle which I had hidden in my
knapsack, and like an emaciated dog, stretched myself out on the wet
ground and immediately fell asleep. During the night, fellow-soldiers
who, exhausted with fatigue, had dropped out of the ranks on the road,
kept on coming into camp. Of these, five men were never heard from. It
was ever so at each difficult march. Some of the men, weak or sick,
fell into the ditches and died there; others deserted....

The next morning reveille was sounded at dawn. The night had been
extremely cold, it never stopped raining and we could not get any straw
litter or hay to sleep on. It was very difficult for me to get out of
the tent; for a while I was obliged to crawl on my knees on all fours,
my legs refusing to carry me. My limbs were frozen stiff like bars
of iron, I could not move my head on my paralyzed neck, and my eyes
which felt as if they had been pricked by numerous tiny needles, kept
shedding tears in ceaseless streams.... At the same time I felt an
acute, lancinating, unbearable pain in my back and shoulders. I noticed
that my comrades fared no better. With drawn faces of ghostly pallor
they were advancing, some limping piteously, others bent down and
staggering over clumps of underbrush--all lame, mournful and covered
with mud. I saw several men who, seized with the colic, writhed and
twisted their mouths, holding their hands to their bellies. Some of
them were shivering with fever, and their teeth chattered with cold.
All around us one could hear dry coughs rending human breasts, groans,
short and raucous breathing. A hare ventured out of its cover and fled
wildly, with its ears flapping, but no one thought of pursuing the
animal as we used sometimes to do. After the roll call, foodstuffs were
distributed, as the commissary regained our regiment. We made some soup
which we ate as greedily as half-starved dogs.

I was still suffering. After the soup I had an attack of dizziness
followed by vomiting, and I shook with fever. Everything around me
was in a whirl--the tents, the forest, the fields, the small town way
yonder, whose chimneys were smoking in the mist, and the sky where
huge clouds were floating, bleak and low. I asked the sergeant for
permission to see a doctor.

Our tents were arranged in two rows, backed against the forest on each
side of the road of Senonches which led into the open country through a
magnificent grove of oak trees, crossed the Chartre road three hundred
meters away and still further the town of Belhomert and extended
farther toward Loupe. At the crossing of these two roads there was a
small dilapidated building covered with thatch, a sort of abandoned
shed which provided shelter for the laborers on the road during rain.
It was here that the surgeon had established a sort of improvised field
hospital recognizable by a Red Cross flag put up in a crack in the wall
and adorning it.

In front of the house a crowd was waiting. A long line of human beings,
wan and worn out, some standing with fixed looks, others sitting
on the ground, sad with stooped and pointed shoulders, their heads
buried in their hands. Death had already laid its terrible hand upon
these emaciated countenances, these scraggy frames, these members
which hung loose, devoid of blood and marrow. And confronted with
this heartbreaking sight, I forgot my own suffering, and my heart was
touched with pity. Three months were sufficient to break down these
robust bodies, inured to labor and fatigue!... Three months! And these
young men who loved life, these children of the soil who grew up as
dreamers in the freedom of the fields, trusting in the goodness of
nature, these youths were done for!... To the marine who dies is given
the sea as a burying place; he descends into eternal darkness to the
rhythm of its murmuring waves. But these!... A few more days of grace
perhaps, and then these tatterdemallions will suddenly tumble down
into the mud of a ditch, their corpses delivered, up to the fangs of
prowling dogs and to the beaks of nightbirds.

I was swept by a feeling of such brotherly and sorrowful pity for them
that I wished I could press all these unhappy men to my breast, in a
single embrace, and I wished, oh, how ardently I wished it!--I had a
hundred female breasts, like Isis, swollen with milk, that I might
offer to all these bloodless lips.... They were entering the house one
by one and were leaving it as quickly, pursued by growling and swearing
sounds. For the rest, the surgeon did not bother with them at all.
Very angry, he was demanding of his orderly his medicine chest which
was missing from the luggage.

"My medicine chest, for God's sake!" he shouted. "Where is my medicine
chest? And my instrument case?... What did you do with my instrument
case? Ah! for God's sake!..."

A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on
his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in
despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go
in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients,
lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock
of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words
in delirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his
chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice
of an infant. Squatted in front of the fire place, an attendant was
holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding
whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not
even look at me. He shouted:

"Well, what's the matter now?... A bunch of lazy buggers. A good
ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler.... Face
about!... March!"

On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me:

"Is this the place where you can see the doctor."

"Women now!" growled the adjutant. "What do you want now?"

"Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor," rejoined the peasant woman, who came
up very timidly. "I came for my son who is a soldier."

"Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?"

With her hands crossed on the handle of her umbrella, timorous, she
examined the place about her.

"It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very, very sick.... And so I
came to see if he was not around here, Doctor."

"What's your name?"

"My name is Riboulleau."

"Riboulleau.... Riboulleau!... That may be ... look in that pile there."

The attendant who was broiling his pudding turned his head.

"Riboulleau," he said, "why he has been dead three days already...."

"What is that you are saying?" cried the peasant woman whose sunburned
face suddenly became pallid. "Where did he die?... Why did he die, my
little darling boy."

The adjutant intervened, and rudely pushing the old woman toward the
door, shouted:

"Go on, go on, no scenes around here! Well, he is dead--and that is all
there is to it."

"My little darling boy! My little darling boy!" wailed the old woman in
a heart-breaking manner.

I walked away with a heavy heart and felt so discouraged that I was
asking myself whether it was not better to put an end to it all at once
by hanging myself on the branch of a tree or by blowing my brains out
with the gun. While I was going to my tent, stumbling on the way, I was
hardly paying any attention to the little soldier who, having stopped
at the foot of a pine tree, had opened his abscess with his knife
himself, and, pale, with sweat drops rolling all over his forehead, was
bandaging his bleeding wound.

In the morning I felt a great deal better than I thought I would. I was
relieved of all work, and after having greased my rifle which became
rusted in the rain, I enjoyed a few hours of rest. Stretched out on
my blanket, with my body torpid in delicious half slumber where I
distinctly heard all the noises of the camp--the sounding of the bugle,
the neighing of the horses as if coming from afar--I was thinking of
the people and the things I had left behind me. A thousand images and a
thousand scenes of the past rapidly filed before my eyes. I saw again
the Priory, my dead mother and my father, with his large straw hat and
the short beggar with his flaxen hair and Felix squatted in the lettuce
patches, lying in wait for a mole. I saw again my study room, my school
mates and, topping the noise of the Bal Bullier, Nini, her hair loose
and brown, with her ruddy neck and her pink stockings showing like
some lascivious flower from under the skirt raised in dancing. Then
the image of an unknown woman in a yellow dress, whom I noticed in the
shadow of a box in a theatre one evening, came back to me--an insistent
and sweet vision.

During this time the strongest among us had gone out to roam in the
fields and on the farms. They came back merrily carrying bundles of
straw, chickens, turkeys and ducks. One of them was driving before him
with a switch, a big, grunting pig; another was balancing a sheep on
his shoulder. At the end of a halter the latter was also dragging a
calf which, tangled up in the rope, resisted comically and shook its
snout, bellowing all the time. The peasants came up running to the camp
to complain that they had been robbed; they were hooted and driven out.

The general, very stiff and with round eyes, came to review us in the
afternoon, accompanied by our lieutenant who walked at his right.
His shiny look, his flushed cheeks, his mealy voice bore witness to
the fact that he had had a plentiful breakfast. He was munching the
end of an extinguished cigar; he spat, sniffed, swore. One could not
tell at whom or what, for he did not address himself to any one in
particular. When standing in front of our company, he looked at our
lieutenant-colonel severely, and I heard him say:

"Your men are dirty slops!"

Then he walked away, his body weighed down by his belly, dragging his
feet, dressed in yellow boots above which red breeches swelled and
folded like a skirt.

The rest of the day was devoted to loitering in the taverns of
Belhomert. There was such crowding and such noise everywhere, and
besides I knew so well these fights in the cabarets, these violent
outbursts as a result of drunkenness which often degenerated into
general scuffles, that I preferred to go out on the road, far from all
these brawls, in the company of a few peaceable comrades.

Just then the weather grew better, dim sunlight came from the sky
freed from clouds. We seated ourselves on the side of a sloping hill,
bending our backs under the warm sun rays as does a cat under the hand
that caresses it. Vehicles kept passing by, heavy carts, dung carts,
small carriages with awning hoods, rubbish carts drawn by small mules.
Those were the peasants of Chartres valley who were fleeing from the
Prussians.... Excited by rumors, spread from village to village, of
burnings, robberies, murders and all kinds of atrocities committed by
the Germans in the invaded territories, they were carrying away in
haste their most precious possessions, abandoning their homes and their
fields and, utterly bewildered, were proceeding straight ahead, without
knowing where they were going. In the evening they would stop at some
chance road, near a town, sometimes in the open fields. The horses,
unharnessed and fettered, browsed on the river banks, the people ate
and slept at God's mercy, guarded by dogs, in storm and rain, in
the cold of foggy nights. Then in the morning they would start out
again. Droves of animals, and throngs of men succeeded one another
alternately. They were passing by us, and upon the yellow main road
one could see the black and mournful procession of the refugees as far
as the hill closing the horizon: one might think it was an exodus of a
whole people. I questioned an old man who led a donkey pulling a cart,
at the bottom of which in the midst of bundles, tied with kerchiefs,
and carrots and heads of cabbage, on a pile of straw there shifted
about a peasant woman with a flat nose, two pink-colored pigs and a few
domestic fouls tied by their feet in twos.

"Eh, the robbers!" the old man replied. "Don't speak to me about
them!... They came one morning, a whole gang of them with plumed
hats.... They raised such a racket!... Eh, Holy Jesus! And then they
took everything away.... Well I thought they were the Prussians.... I
have found out since that they were the 'franc-tireurs'...."

"How about the Prussians?"

"The Prussians!... Of them that are Prussians I have seen very few
to be sure.... They are supposed to be up at our place right now!...
Jacqueline thinks she saw one behind the hedge the other day!... He was
tall, very tall and he was as red as the devil.... Is he really one of
these fellows, those savages that came?... Now tell me truly who are
they?"

"Those are Germans, old man, just as we are French."

"Germans?... So I hear.... But what do they want, those damned Germans,
will you please tell me, mister soldier?... Well, I have saved two
pigs, our girl and all our poultry just the same!... By Jove!"

And the peasant continued on his way, repeating:

"The Germans! the Germans!... What do these damned Germans want?"

That evening fires were made along the entire line of the camp, and
the attractive looking pots full of fresh meat were hissing joyously
upon the improvised stoves of earth and stone. For us that was a time
of exquisite respite and delicious forgetfulness. Peace seemed to have
descended from heaven, all blue with the moon and aglitter with stars;
the fields, unrolling themselves with soft and misty undulations, had
in them a kind of tender sweetness which penetrated into our souls
and set new blood, less acrid and endowed with new vigor, circulating
in our members. Little by little, memories of our hardships, our
discouragements and privations, however near, effaced themselves, and
simultaneously with the awakening of our sense of duty, a desire for
action seized us. Unusual animation reigned at our camp. Every one
offered voluntarily to do some kind of work; some, torch in hand, were
running about to light again the fires which went out, others were
blowing at the ashes in order to kindle them into flame again, still
others were sorting vegetables and slicing meat. Some comrades, forming
a circle around the debris of burned timber, struck up a tune "Have you
seen Bismark?" in a jeering chorus. Revolt--the child of hunger--had
its inception in the hissing of saucepans, in the clatter of platters.

The next day, when the last of us answered "Present" at the roll call,
the little lieutenant gave the command: "Form a circle, march!"

And in a faltering voice, jumbling the words and skipping phrases, the
quartermaster read a pompous order of the day, issued by the general.
In that piece of military literature it was said that a Prussian army
corps, starving, ill-clad and without arms, after having occupied
Chartres, was advancing on us at double marching time. Our task was to
block its way, to throw it back as far as the walls of Paris, where
the valiant Ducrot was only waiting for our arrival to sally out and
clean the land of all invaders at one sweep. The general recalled
the victories of the Revolution, the Egypt expedition, Austerlitz,
Borodino. He expressed the faith that we would show ourselves worthy
of our glorious ancestors of Sambre-et-Meuse. In view of that he gave
precise strategic instructions for the defense of the country, namely:
to establish an impregnable barrier to the eastern entrance to the town
and another still more impregnable barrier upon the road of Chartres,
to fortify the walls of the cemetery at the crossroad, to fell as many
trees as possible in the nearby forest so that the enemy cavalry and
even infantry should be unable to turn our flank from Senonches under
the cover of the woods, to be on the lookout for spies, and finally to
keep our eyes open.... The country was counting on us.... Long live the
Republic!

The cheer was not responded to. The little lieutenant who was walking
around, his arms crossed on his back, his eyes obstinately fixed on the
point of his boot, did not raise his head. We looked at one another
perplexed, with a sort of anguish in our hearts, which came as a result
of our knowledge that the Prussians were very near, that war was going
to begin for us in earnest the very next day, today perhaps. And I
had a sudden vision of Death, red Death standing on a chariot, drawn
by rearing horses, which was sweeping down on us, brandishing his
scythe. As long as the actual fighting was only a remote possibility
we wanted to be in it, first for reasons of patriotism, enthusiasm,
then out of mere braggadocio, later because we were nervously exhausted
and wearisome and saw in it a way out of our misery. Now when the
opportunity offered itself, we were afraid; we shuddered at the mere
mention of it. Instinctively my eyes turned toward the horizon, in the
direction of Chartres. And the fields seemed to me to conceal a secret,
unknown terror, a fearful uncertainty, which lent to things a new
aspect of relentlessness. Over yonder, above the blue line of trees,
I expected to see helmets spring up suddenly, bayonets flash, the
thundering mouths of cannons spurt fire. A harvest field, all red under
the sun, appeared to me like a pond of blood. Hedges strung themselves
out into armies, joined ranks, crossed one another like regiments,
bristling with arms and standards and going through various evolutions
before the battle. The apple trees looked frightened like cavalry men
thrown into disorder.

"Break the circle--march!" shouted the lieutenant.

Stupefied, with swinging arms, we were standing on one place for a
long time, a prey to some vague misgiving, trying to pierce in thought
this terrible line on the horizon, behind which was now being realized
the mystery of our fate. In this disquieting silence, in this sinister
immobility, only carts and herds were passing by, more numerous, more
hurried and pressed than ever. A flock of ravens, which came from
yonder like a black vanguard, spotted the skies, thickened, distended
and, stringing itself out into a line, turned aside, floating above us
like a funeral cloak, then disappeared among the oak trees.

"At last we are going to see them, these famous Prussians!" said, in a
faltering voice, a big fellow who was very pale and who, in order to
give himself the air of a fearless daredevil, was beating his ears with
his kepi.

No one replied to this remark and several walked away. Our corporal,
however, shrugged his shoulders. He was a very impudent little man,
with a pock-eaten face, full of pimples.

"Oh! I!" he said.

He clarified his thought by a cynical gesture, sat down on the heath,
puffed at his pipe slowly, till fire appeared.

"Oh, piffle!" he concluded, emitting a cloud of smoke which vanished in
the air.

While one company of chasseurs was detailed to the crossroads to
establish an "impregnable barrier" there, my company went in the woods
to "fell as many trees as possible." All the axes, bill-hooks and
hatchets of the village were speedily requisitioned. Almost everything
was used as a tool. For a whole day the blows of the axes were
resounding and trees were falling. To spur us on to greater efforts,
the general himself wanted to assist us in the vandalism.

"Come on, you scamps!" he would cry out at every occasion, clapping his
hands. "Come on boys, let's get this one!..."

He himself pointed out the most stalwart among the trees, those which
grew up straight and spread out like the columns of a temple. It was an
orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish; a shout of brutal joy went
up every time a tree fell on top of another with a great noise. The old
trees became less dense, one could say they were mowed down by some
gigantic and supernatural scythe. Two men were killed by the fall of an
oak tree.

And the few trees which remained standing, austere in the midst of
ruined trunks lying on the ground, and the twisted branches which rose
up towards them like arms outstretched in supplication, were showing
open wounds, deep and red gashes from which the sap was oozing, weeping
as it were.

The supervisor of the forest section, warned by a guard, came running
from Senonches, and with a broken heart witnessed this useless
devastation. I was near the general when the forester approached him
respectfully, kepi in hand.

"Beg pardon, general," said he. "I can understand the felling of trees
on the edge of the road, the barricading of lines of approach....
But your destruction of the heart of the old forest seems to me a
little...."

But the general interrupted:

"Eh? What? It seems to you what?...What are you butting in here for?...
I do as I please.... Who is commander here, you or I?..."

"But...." stammered the forester.

"There are no buts about it, Monsieur.... You make me tired, that's one
thing sure!... You had better hurry back to Senonches or I'll have you
strung up on a tree.... Come on, boys!..."

The general turned his back on the stupefied agent and walked away
knocking some dead leaves and sprigs before him with the end of his
cane.

While we were thus desecrating the forest, the chasseurs were not idle
either, and the barricade rose, huge and formidable, cutting off the
road at the crossroad. It was accomplished not without difficulty and
above all not without gayety. Suddenly halted by a trench which barred
their flight, the peasants protested. Their carts and herds became
congested on the road, very narrow at this point; there was, therefore,
an indescribable uproar. They were complaining, the women were moaning,
the cattle were lowing, the soldiers were laughing at the frightened
looks of men and beasts, and the captain who was in command of the
troops did not know what action to take. Several times the soldiers
pretended to drive the peasants back at the point of the bayonet, but
the latter were stubborn and determined to pass and invoked their
rights as Frenchmen. Having made his round in the forest, the general
went to see the progress of the work on the barricade. He demanded to
know what "these dirty civilians" wanted. He was told about it.

"All right," he cried. "Seize all their carts and throw them into the
barricade.... Come on, get a move on you, boys!..."

The soldiers, rejoicing in the opportunity, hurled themselves on the
first carts which stood abandoned with everything in them, and smashed
them with a few blows of the pick-axe. A wild panic broke out among
the peasants. The congestion became so great that it was impossible
for them either to advance or to turn back. Lashing their horses with
all their might and trying to extricate their impeded wagons, they
were shouting, jostling and bruising one another without making a step
backward. Those last arrived had turned back and were going at full
speed of their horses excited by the tumult; others, despairing of a
chance to save their carts and provisions, climbed over the barrier
and, dispersing across the field, uttered cries of indignation, pursued
by oaths and curses flung at them by the soldiers. Then, they piled
up the smashed vehicles one on top of the other, filled the gaps with
sacks of oats, matresses, bundles of clothes and stones. On top of
the barricade, upon a coach pole, which rose vertically upward like a
flagstaff, a little chasseur planted a bouquet of wedding flowers found
among other booty.

Towards the evening, groups of reserves arriving from Chartres in great
disorder, scattered all over Belhomert and the camp. They brought
horrible tales. The Prussians were more than a hundred thousand strong,
all in one army. They, the reserves, hardly had time to fall back....
Chartres was in flames, the villages in the vicinity were burning, the
farms were destroyed. The greater part of the French detachments which
bore the brunt of covering the retreat, could not hold out much longer.
The fugitives were questioned; they were asked whether they saw the
Prussians, what insignia they wore and were particularly quizzed about
all the details of the enemy uniforms.

Every fifteen minutes new reserves would show up in groups of two or
three, pale, exhausted with fatigue. Most of them had no kits, some had
no guns, and they were telling stories, each more terrible than the
other. None of them was wounded. It was decided to quarter them in the
church, to the great indignation of the curé who, lifting his arms to
heaven, exclaimed:

"Holy Virgin!... In my church!... Ah! Ah! Soldiers in my church!..."

Up to this time the general who was preoccupied solely with his
plans of destruction, had no time to provide for the guarding of the
camp, except by establishing a small outpost in a tavern, frequented
by carterers within a mile from Belhomert upon the Chartres road.
This outpost, commanded by a sergeant, had not received any definite
instructions, and the man did nothing except loaf, drink and sleep.
Still the sentinel who was nonchalantly pacing to and fro in front of
the tavern, gun on shoulder, at one time arrested a country doctor as a
German spy because of his blond beard and blue spectacles. As for the
sergeant, an old professional poacher who sneered at everything and
everybody, he amused himself by setting traps for rabbits in the hedges
nearby.

The arrival of the reserves, the menace of the Prussians had thrown
us into confusion. Messengers came up every minute, carrying sealed
envelopes containing orders and counter-orders. The officers were
running about with a preoccupied look, not knowing what to do, and
completely lost their heads. Three times we were ordered to break up
camp and three times we were told to pitch our tents anew. All night
trumpets and bugles were sounding, and big log fires were burning,
around which, in the growing tumult, were passing back and forth
shadows strangely agitated, silhouettes of demoniacal appearances.
Patrols were scouring the fields, riding out on the crossroads,
searching the outskirts of the forest. Artillery stationed on this side
of the town was ordered to move up forward upon the heights, but it
ran into the barricade. To clear the way for the cannons, it was found
necessary to demolish it piece-meal and to fill up the ditch.

At daybreak my company was sent to do main guard duty. We met mobilized
soldiers, dispirited franc-tireurs who were dragging their feet
piteously. A little further away, the general, accompanied by his
staff, was watching the manoeuvres of the artillery. He held a map of
the general staff, unfolded on the neck of his horse, and was vainly
trying to locate the Saussaie mill. Bending over the map which the
horse shifted out of place with every movement of its head, he shouted:

"Where is that damned mill?... Pontgouin.... Couville.... Courville....
Do they think I know all their damned mills around here?"

The general commanded us to halt and asked:

"Is there anyone here who is familiar with this country?... Is there
anyone here who knows where the Saussaie mill is?"

Nobody answered.

"No?... Well alright. To hell with it!"

And he threw the map to his aide who began folding it up carefully. We
resumed our march.

The company was stationed on a farm and I was put on guard duty near
the road, at the entrance to a grove, beyond which I could look on
an open plain, immense and smooth like the sea. Here and there small
woods emerged from the ocean of land like islands; the belfries of
the villages, the farms, blurred by the fog, assumed the aspect of
a distant veil. In this enormous expanse a great silence reigned, a
solitude wherein the least noise, the least thing stirring in the
skies, had something mysterious about it which put anguish into one's
heart. Up above, black dots spotted the skies--those were the ravens;
down below, upon the earth, small black specks moved forward, growing
larger, disappearing--those were the fleeing soldiers of the reserves;
and now and then the distant barking of dogs, answered by similar
barking all along the line from east to west, from north to south,
sounded like the plaint of the deserted fields. Our guard was supposed
to be relieved every four hours, but hours upon hours passed, slow and
endless, and no one came to take my place.

No doubt they had forgotten all about me. With a heavy heart I was
searching the horizon on the Prussian side, the French side; I saw
nothing, nothing but this hard, relentless line, which encircled the
huge grey sky around me. It was a long time since the ravens had ceased
flying and the reserve soldiers fleeing. For a moment I saw a truck
coming toward the woods where I was, but it turned off on one of the
roads and soon was no longer distinguishable from the grey terrain....
Why did they leave me thus?... I was hungry and I was cold, my bowels
rumbled, my fingers became numb. I ventured out on the road a little;
having walked a few steps I shouted.... Not a being answered my call,
not a thing stirred.... I was alone, utterly alone, alone in this
deserted, empty field.... A shudder passed through my frame, and tears
came into my eyes.... I shouted again.... No answer.... Then I went
back into the woods and sat down at the foot of an oak tree, with my
rifle across my lap, keeping a sharp lookout and waiting.... Alas! The
day was waning little by little, the sky grew yellow, then purple by
degrees and finally vanished in deadly silence. And night, moonless and
starless, fell upon the fields, and at the same time a chilling fog
arose from the shadows.

Worn out with fatigue, always occupied with something or other and
never alone, I had no time to reflect on anything from the moment we
started out. But still confronted by the strange and cruel sights
constantly before my eyes, I felt within me the awakening of the idea
of human life which until now had lain slumbering in the sluggishness
of my childhood and the torpor of my youth. Yes ... the idea awoke
confusedly, as if emerging from a long and painful nightmare. And
reality appeared to me more frightful than the nightmare. Transposing
the instincts, the desires and passions which agitated us from the
small group of errant men that we were to society as a whole, recalling
the impressions so fleeting and wholly external which I had received
in Paris, the rude crowds, the pushing and jostling of pedestrians,
I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable,
murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation
but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the
same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of
honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so
full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep,
through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the
kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the
more foully.

What was this country, in whose name so many crimes were being
committed, which had torn us--formerly so full of love--from the
motherly bosom of nature, which had thrown us, now so full of hatred,
famished and naked, upon this cruel land?... What was this country,
personified to us by this rabid and pillaging general who gave vent to
his madness on old people and trees, and by this surgeon who kicked the
sick with his feet and maltreated poor old mothers bereaved of their
sons?... What was this country every step on whose soil was marked by a
grave, which had but to look at the tranquil waters of its streams to
change them into blood, which was always frittering away its man power,
digging here and there deep charnel vaults where the best children
of men were rotting?... And I was astounded, when for the first time
it dawned upon me that only those were the most glorious, the most
acclaimed heroes of mankind who had pillaged the most, killed the most,
burned the most.

They condemn to death the stealthy murderer who kills the passerby
with a knife, on the corner of the street at night, and they throw his
beheaded body into a grave of infamy. But the conqueror who has burned
cities and decimated human beings, all the folly and human cowardice
unite in raising to the throne of the most marvelous; in his honor
triumphal arches are built, giddy columns of bronze are erected, and in
the cathedrals multitudes reverently kneel before his tomb of hallowed
marble guarded by saints and angels under the delighted gaze of God!...
With what remorse did I repent of the fact that until now I had
remained blind and deaf to this life so full of inexplicable riddles!
Never had I opposed this mysterious book, never had I stopped even for
a single moment to consider the question marks which are represented by
things and beings; I did not know anything. And now, suddenly, a desire
to know, a yearning to wrest from life some of its enigmas tormented
me; I wanted to know the human reason for creeds which stupefy, for
governments which oppress, for society which kills; I longed to be
through with this war so that I might consecrate myself to some ardent
cause, to some magnificent and absurd apostleship.

My thought traveled toward impossible philosophies of love, toward
utopias of undying brotherhood.... I saw all men bent down beneath
some crushing heels; they all resembled the little soldier of the
reserves at Saint-Michel, whose eyes were running, who was coughing and
spitting blood, and as I knew nothing of the necessity of higher laws
of nature, a feeling of compassion rose within me, clogging my throat
with suppressed sobs. I have noticed that a man has no real compassion
for anyone except when he himself is unhappy. Was this not, after all,
but a form of self-pity? And if on this cold night, close to the enemy
who would perhaps come out of the fogs of the morrow, I loved humanity
so much--was it not myself only that I loved, myself only that I wanted
to save from suffering? These regrets of the past, these plans for the
future, this sudden passion for study, this ardor which I employed in
picturing myself in the future in my room on the Rue Oudinot, in the
midst of books and papers, my eyes burning with the fever of work--was
this not after all only a means to ward off the perils of the present,
to dispel other horrible visions, visions of death which, blurred and
blunted, incessantly followed one another in the terror of darkness?

Night, impenetrable night continued. Under the sky which brooded over
them, sinister and greedy, the fields stretched like a vast sea of
Shadow. At long intervals, out of the dead whiteness, long curtains
of fog were floating up above, grazing the invisible ground where
clumps of trees here and there appeared still darker in the surrounding
darkness. I never stirred from the place where I sat down, and the cold
numbed my members and chapped my lips. With difficulty I raised myself
and walked on the outskirt of the woods. The sound of my own steps
on the ground frightened me, it always seemed to me that someone was
walking behind me. I was walking carefully, on tiptoe, as if afraid
to wake the sleeping earth, and listened, trying to penetrate the
darkness, for in spite of everything, I had not yet given up the hope
that some one would come to relieve me. Not a stir, not a breath, not
a glimmer of light in this blind and mute night. Twice, however, I
distinctly heard the sound of steps, and my heart thumped violently....
But the noise moved away, grew fainter by degrees, ceased altogether
and silence set in again, more oppressive, more terrible, more
disheartening than ever.

A branch brushed against my face; I recoiled, seized with terror.
Further away, a rise in the ground appeared to me like a man who with
crooked back seemed to be crawling toward me; I loaded my rifle.... At
the sight of an abandoned plough with its arms turned upward toward the
sky, like the menacing horns of some monster, my breath left me and I
almost fell on my back.... I was afraid of the shadow, of the silence,
of the least object that extended beyond the line of the horizon
and which my deranged imagination endowed with a soul of sinister
life.... Despite the cold, perspiration in large drops was streaming
upon my face.... I had a notion to quit my post, to return to camp,
persuading myself by all sorts of ingenious and cowardly arguments that
my comrades had forgotten all about me and that they would be glad to
see me back with them. Obviously, since I had not been relieved by
anyone from my company, and saw none of the officers make his round
of inspection, they must have left.... But supposing I were mistaken
about it, what excuse could I offer, and how would I be received at the
camp?... To go back to the farm where my company was quartered this
morning and ask for instructions?... I was thinking of doing it.... But
in my plight I had lost all sense of direction, and if I attempted to
do that I would surely get lost in this plain that was so endless and
so black.

Then an abominable thought flashed through my mind.... Yes, why not
discharge a bullet into my arm and run back, bleeding and wounded,
and tell them that I had been attacked by the Prussians?... I had
to make a strong effort to regain my reason which was leaving me; I
had to gather all the moral forces that were left in me in order to
get away from this cowardly and odious impulse, from this wretched
ecstasy of fear, and I desperately strove to recall the memories of
former times, to conjure up gentle and silent visions, sweet-scented
and white-winged.... They came to me as in a painful dream, distorted,
mutilated, under the spell of hallucination, and fear immediately
threw them into confusion.... The Virgin of Saint-Michel, with a body
of pink, in a blue mantle, adorned with golden stars, I saw in a lewd
attitude, prostituting herself on a bed, in some miserable shack,
with drunken soldiers. My favorite spots in the Tourouvre forest, so
peaceful, where I used to stay for entire days, stretched out on the
mossy ground, were turning topsy-turvy, tangled up, brandishing their
gigantic trees over me; then a few howitzer shells crossed one another
in the air, resembling familiar faces which sniggered; one of these
projectiles suddenly spread out wide wings, flame-colored, which swung
around me and enveloped me.... I cried out.... My God, am I going
crazy? I felt my breast, my chest, my back, my legs.... I must have
been as pale as a corpse, and I felt a shiver passing through me from
heart to brain, like a steel bore....

"Let's see now," I said aloud to myself to make sure that I was awake,
that I was alive.... In two gulps I swallowed the remainder of the
whiskey in my flask, and I started to walk very fast, tramping with
rage upon the clods under my feet, whistling the air of a soldier song
which we used to sing in chorus to relieve the tedium of the march.
Somewhat calmed, I came back to the oak tree and kicked its trunk with
the sole of my boots; for I was in need of this noise and this physical
motion.... And now I thought of my father so lonely at the Priory. It
was more than three weeks since I had received a letter from him. Oh!
How sad and heart-rending his last letter was!... It did not complain
of anything, but one felt in it a deep despair, a wearisomeness of
being alone in that large empty house, and anxiety about me who, he
knew, was wandering, knapsack on back, amidst the dangers of battle....
Poor father! He had not been happy with my mother--who was ill, always
fretful, who did not love him and could not stand his presence.... And
never a sign of reproach, not even when meeting with the most painful
rebuff and unkindness!... He used to bend his back like a dog, and walk
out....

Ah! how I repented of the fact that I did not love him enough. Perhaps
he had not brought me up in the manner he should have done. But what
difference did it make? He did everything he could!... He was himself
without experience in life, defenseless against evil, of a kindly but
timid nature. And in the measure that the features of my father stood
out clearly before me even to their smallest details, the face of my
mother was obliterating itself, and I was no longer able to recall its
endearing outline. At this moment all the affection that I had for my
mother I transferred to my father. I recalled with tenderness how on
the day my mother died he took me on his lap and said, "Perhaps it's
for the best." And now I understood how much sorrow accumulated in
the past and terror in facing the future there was summed up in that
phrase. It was for her sake that he said that, and also for the sake of
one who resembled my mother so much, and not for his own consolation,
unhappy man that he was, who had resigned himself to suffering all....
During the last three years he had aged very much; his tall frame was
worn out, his face, formerly so red with the color of health, grew
yellow and wrinkled, his hair became almost white. He no longer lay in
wait for the birds in the park, he let the cats rove among the lianas
and lick the water from the basin; he took little interest in his
practice, the direction of which he left to his chief clerk, a trusted
man who was stealing from him; he no longer occupied himself with the
small but honorable affairs of his locality. He never went out, he
would not even stir from his rocking-chair with small pillows which
he ordered moved into the kitchen, not wishing to stay alone--without
Marie who would bring him his cane and his hat.

"Well, Monsieur, you must take a little walk. You are getting all
'rusty' in your corner there...."

"All right, Marie. I am going to take the air.... I'll walk along the
bank of the river, if you want me to."

"No, Monsieur, you must take a walk in the woods.... The air there will
do you good."

"All right, Marie, I am going to take a walk in the woods."

At times, seeing him inactive, slumbering, she would tap him on the
shoulder:

"Why don't you get your rifle, Monsieur? There are a lot of finches in
the park."

And looking at her with an air of reproach, my father would mutter:

"Finches?... The poor things!..."

Why did my father not write to me? Did my letters reach him at all? I
reproached myself with having been too dry in my letters until now, and
I promised myself to write to him the next day--the first opportunity
I got--a long affectionate letter, in which I was going to pour out my
heart to him.

The sky was gradually clearing way yonder on the horizon whose outline
stood out clear against a darker blue. It was still night, the fields
remained dark, but one could feel the approaching dawn. The cold was
more piercing than ever, the earth cracked harder under the feet,
moisture crystallized into drops on the branches of the trees. And
little by little the sky was brightened by a faint glimmer of pale-gold
color which was growing in distinctness. Gradually, outlines emerged
from the shadow, indefinite and confused as yet, the opaque blackness
of the plain changed into a dull violet, here and there rent by
light.... Suddenly I heard a noise, weak at first, like the distant
roll of a drum.... I listened, my heart beating violently. Presently
the noise stopped and the cocks crowed.... About ten minutes later
the noise started again, more distinct, coming nearer!... Pa-ta-ra!
Pa-ta-ra! It was the gallop of a horse on the Chartres road....
Instinctively I buckled up my knapsack on my back and made sure that
my rifle was loaded.... I was very excited, the veins in my temples
dilated.... Pa-ta-ra! Pa-ta-ra!...

Hardly had I time enough to squat down behind the oak tree, when on
the road, at a distance of twenty paces in front of me, there suddenly
appeared a large shadow, surprisingly immobile, like an equestrian
statue of bronze, and this enormous shadow which obtruded itself
almost entirely upon the brightness of the eastern sky was terrible
to behold.... The man appeared to me superhuman, inordinately large
against the sky!...He wore the flat cap of the Prussians, a long
black cloak, under which the chest was bulging out greatly. Was he an
officer or a plain soldier? I did not know, for I could not distinguish
any insignia of rank on the dark uniform.... His features, at first
indistinct, became more accentuated. He had clear eyes, very limpid, a
broad beard, his bearing bespoke youthful strength; his face breathed
power and kindness along with something noble, audacious and sad which
struck me. Holding his hand flat on his thigh, he studied the country
before him, and his horse scraped the ground with its hoofs and puffed
long streams of vapor in the air through its quivering nostrils....
Evidently this Prussian was reconnoitering, he came to observe our
position, the nature of the ground; undoubtedly a whole army was
swarming behind him, waiting for a signal from this man to throw
themselves on the plain!...

Well hidden in my woods, with rifle ready, I was watching him.... He
was handsome indeed, life flowed abundantly in this robust body....
What a pity! He kept on studying the country, and it seemed to me
as though he were studying it more like a poet than a soldier.... I
detected a sort of emotion in his eyes.... Perhaps he forgot why he
had come here and allowed himself to be fascinated by the beauty of
this virginal and triumphant dawn. The sky became all red, it blazed up
gloriously, the awakened fields unrolled themselves in the distance,
emerging one after another from their veil of mist, rose-colored and
blue, which floated like long scarves ruffled by invisible hands. The
trees were dripping dew, the hovels separated themselves from the pink
and blue background, the dove-cot of a large farm whose new tile roofs
began to glitter, projected its whitish cone into the purple glare of
the east.... Yes, this Prussian who started out with the notion to
kill, was arrested, dazzled and reverently stirred by the splendor of a
new-born day, and his soul for a few minutes was the captive of love.

"Perhaps it's a poet," I said to myself, "an artist; he must be kind,
since he is capable of tenderness."

And upon his face I could see all the emotion of a brave man which
agitated him, all the tremors, all the delicate and flitting reactions
of his heart, moved and fascinated.... I feared him no longer. On the
contrary, a sort of infatuation drew me towards him, and I had to
hold on to the tree to keep myself from going to this man. I would
have liked to speak to him, to tell him that it was well that he
contemplated the heaven thus, and that I liked him because of his
receptiveness to beauty.... But his face grew sombre, a sadness stole
into his eyes.... Ah, the horizon over which they swept was so far,
so far away! And beyond that horizon there was another and further
on, still another! One had to conquer all that!... When was he to be
relieved of his duty ever to spur his horse on through this nostalgic
territory, always to cut a way through ruins and through death, always
to kill, always to be cursed!...

And then, undoubtedly, he was thinking of the things he had left
behind; of his home resounding with the laughter of his children, of
his wife, who was waiting for him and praying to God while doing so....
Will he ever see her again?... I was sure that at this very moment
he was recalling the most fugitive details, the most childish habits
of his life at home ... a rose plucked one evening, after dinner,
with which he adorned the hair of his wife, the dress which she wore
when he was leaving, a blue bow on the hat of his little daughter, a
wooden horse, a tree, a river view, a paper knife!... All the memories
of his joys came back to him, and with that keenness of vision which
exiled persons possess, he encompassed in a single mental glance of
despondency all those things by means of which he had been happy until
now....

The sun rose higher, rendering the plain larger, extending the distant
horizon still farther.... I felt a compassion for this man and I loved
him ... yes I swear I loved him!... Well, then, how did that happen?...
A detonation was suddenly heard, and at that very moment I caught sight
of a boot in the air, of a torn piece of a military cloak, of a mane
flying about wildly on the road ... and then nothing, I heard the noise
of a blow with a sabre, the heavy fall of a body, furious beats of a
gallop ... then nothing.... My rifle was warm, and smoke was coming
out of it.... I let it fall to the ground.... Was I the victim of
hallucination?... Clearly not. Of the large shadow which rose skyward
at the middle of the road like an equestrian statue of bronze there was
left but a small corpse all black, stretched out face downward, with
crossed arms.... I recalled the poor cat that my father had killed,
when with fascinated eyes she had been following the flight of a
butterfly....

Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with
whom my soul had just identified itself, a man who in the dazzling
splendor of the rising sun was retracing the purest dreams of his
life!... Perhaps I had killed him at the very moment that that man had
said to himself: "And when I shall see her again at home...." Why? For
what reason? Since I loved him, since, if soldiers had menaced him, I
would have defended him! Why of all men was it he I assassinated? In
two bounds I was beside this man; I called him ... he did not move. My
bullet had pierced his neck under the ear, and blood was gushing from
an opened vein with a gurgling sound, collecting into a red pool and
sticking to his beard.... With trembling hands I raised him slowly, his
head swung from side to side, fell back, inert and heavy.... I felt
his chest where the heart was: it beat no longer.... Then I raised him
again, supporting his head with my knees, and suddenly I saw his eyes,
his two clear eyes which looked at me sadly, without hatred, without
reproach, his two eyes which seemed to be alive!... I thought I was
going to faint, but gathering all my strength in a supreme effort, I
clasped the dead body of the Prussian, placed it right in front of me
and pressing my lips against this bleeding face from which long, purple
threads of congealed slaver were hanging, I desperately kissed it!...

From this moment on I don't remember anything.... I see again smoky
fields covered with snow, and ruins burning incessantly, ever recurring
dismal flights, delirious marches during the night, confusion at the
crossroads congested with ammunition wagons, where the dragoons with
drawn swords were driving their horses right into our midst and trying
to cut a way through the wagons; I see again funeral carriages,
followed by dead bodies of young men which we buried in the frozen
ground, saying to ourselves that tomorrow would be our turn; I see
again, near the cannon carriages, large carcasses of horses dismembered
by howitzer shells, stiff, cut up, over which we used to quarrel
in the evening, from which we used to carry away, into our tents,
bleeding portions which we devoured growling, showing our teeth like
wolves!...And I see again the surgeon, with sleeves of his white coat
rolled up, pipe in mouth, amputating on a table, in a farmhouse, by
the smoky light of a tallow candle, the foot of a little soldier still
wearing his coarse shoes!... But above all I see again the Priory, when
worn out and broken in body and spirit by these sufferings, rendered
apathetic by the disaster of defeat I re-entered it one nice and sunny
day.... The windows of the large house were closed, the window blinds
were down in every room.... Felix, more bent than ever, was cleaning
the walk and Marie, seated near the kitchen door, was knitting a pair
of stockings, wagging her head.

"Well! Well!" I shouted, "is that the way you receive me!"

As soon as the two noticed me, Felix went away as if frightened and
Marie growing pale, uttered a cry.

"What's the matter?" I asked with a heavy heart. "How about father?"

The old woman looked at me fixedly.

"Why, don't you know?... Haven't you received anything?... Ah, my poor
Monsieur Jean! My poor Monsieur Jean!"

And with eyes filled with tears, she stretched out her arms in the
direction of the cemetery.

"Yes! Yes! There is where he is now, with Madame," she said in a dull
voice.




CHAPTER III

Toc, toc, toc.

And at the same time a small drawn otter skin bonnet appeared in the
slight opening of the door, followed by two smiling eyes under a veil,
then a long fur cape which outlined the slender body of a young woman.

"I am not disturbing you?... May I come in?"

Lirat, the painter, raised his head.

"Ah! it's you, Madame!" he said in a curt tone, almost irritated, while
shaking his hands soiled with pastel. "Why, yes, certainly.... Come
right in!"

He left his easel and offered a seat.

"How is Charles?" he asked.

"He is all right, thank you."

She sat down, smiling, and her smile was really charming as well as
sad. Although covered with a veil, her clear eyes of pinkish blue,
her very large eyes which illuminated her whole figure, seemed to be
radiating infinite kindness.... She was dressed very elegantly, without
striving to be pretentious. A little over-perfumed, however.... There
was a moment of silence.

The studio of the painter Lirat, situated in a peaceful section of the
Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Rodrigues Square, was a vast, bare place with
grey walls, with rough carpentry work and without furniture. Lirat
called it familiarly "his hangar." A hangar it was, indeed, where
the north winds blew and the rain entered the room through the small
crevices in the roof. Two long tables of plain wood supported boxes
of paint, scrap books, blocks, handles of fans, Japanese albums,
casts, a mess of odd and useless things. Near a book case filled with
old magazines in a corner there was a pile of pasteboard, canvas,
torn sketches with the stretchers sticking through. A shattered sofa
creaking with a sound like that of a piano out of tune, whenever one
tried to sit on it, two rickety arm chairs, a looking glass without a
frame--constituted the only luxury of the studio illumined by trembling
sunlight. In the winter, on days when Lirat had a model posing for
him in the studio, he used to light his little cast iron stove whose
chimney, crooked into several large bends, supported by iron wire and
covered with rust, rose in a serpentine fashion in the middle of the
room, before losing itself in the roof through an opening, all too
large. On other days, even during the coldest nights, he substituted
for the heat of the stove an old coat of astracan fur, worn out, bald
and scabby, which he put on with real pleasure.

Lirat took a childish pride in this dilapidated studio, and he boasted
of its bareness as other painters do of their embroidered plush and
tapestries, invariably historical in origin. Nay, he even wanted it to
be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground.
"It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are," he would
often say, "they always come again, the others stay away. That's very
convenient." Very few came more than once.

The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly
bent forward, her hands buried in her muff; from time to time she
would take out an embroidered handkerchief and bring it slowly to her
mouth which I could not see because of the thick border of the veil
which hid it, but which I surmised was very beautiful, very red and
exquisitely shaped. In her whole figure, elegant and refined, about
which, in spite of the smile which rendered it so alluring, there was
an air of modesty and even haughtiness, I could distinguish only these
beautiful eyes which rested on objects like the rays of some heavenly
star, and I followed her gaze which passed from the floor to the frame
work, so vibrant with luminosity and caresses. The embarrassing silence
continued. I thought I alone was the cause of this embarrassment and I
was getting ready to leave, when Lirat exclaimed:

"Ah! Pardon! ... I have forgotten.... Dear Madame, allow me to
introduce to you my friend Jean Mintié."

She greeted me with a gracious and at the same time coaxing nod of her
head and in a very sweet voice, which thrilled me deliciously, she said:

"I am delighted to meet you, Monsieur, but I know you well."

While very much flushed, I was stammering out a few confused and silly
words, Lirat broke in mockingly:

"I hope you are not going to make him believe that you have read his
book?"

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur Lirat.... I have read it.... It is very
good."

"Yes, like my studio and my painting, isn't that right?"

"Oh, no! what a comparison!"

She said it frankly, with a laugh, which rolled through the room like
the chirping of a bird.

I did not like this laughter. Although it had a hard, sonorous quality,
it nevertheless rang false. It seemed to me out of harmony with the
expression of her face, so delicately sad, and then, in my admiration
for Lirat's genius it hurt me almost like an insult. I do not know why,
but it would have been more pleasing to me if she had expressed her
admiration for this great unrecognized artist, if she had shown at
this moment a loftier judgment, if she had evinced a sentiment superior
to those of other women. On the other hand the contemptuous manner of
Lirat, his tone of bitter hostility, shocked me deeply! I had a grudge
against him for this affected rudeness, for this attitude of boyish
insolence which lowered him in my esteem, I thought. I was displeased
and very much embarrassed. I tried to speak of indifferent things, but
not a single object of conversation came to my mind.

The young woman got up. She walked a few steps in the studio, stopped
before the sketches lying in a heap, examined one or two of them with
an air of disgust.

"My God! Monsieur Lirat," she said, "why do you persist in painting
such ugly women, so comically shaped?"

"If I should tell you," Lirat replied, "you would not understand it."

"Thanks!... And when will you paint my portrait?"

"You should ask Monsieur Jacket or, better still, a photographer about
that."

"Monsieur Lirat?"

"Madame!"

"Do you know why I came?"

"To oblige me with your kindness, I suppose."

"That's in the first place!... And then?"

"We seem to be playing an innocent little game? That's very nice."

"To ask you to come to dine with me on Friday? Do you care to?"

"You are very kind, dear Madame, but on Friday that is just when it
will be utterly impossible. That's my day at the Institute."

"Well, of all things!... Charles will be hurt by your refusal."

"You will express my regrets to him, will you not?"

"Well, good bye, Monsieur Lirat! A person can freeze to death here."

And walking over to me, she gave me her hand.

"Monsieur Mintié. I am home every day, from five to seven!... I shall
be delighted to see you ... delighted...."

I bowed and thanked her, and she went out leaving in my ears some of
the music of her voice, in my eyes some of the kindliness of her look
and in the studio the strong perfume of her hair, of her cape, of her
muff, of her small handkerchief.

Lirat resumed his work without saying a word; I was turning over
the pages of a book which I was not reading at all, and upon the
moving pages there was flitting incessantly back and forth the image
of the young visitor. I certainly was not asking myself what kind
of an impression I had retained of her, nor whether I had retained
any impression at all; but although she went out, she was not gone
entirely. There was left with me an indefinite something of this
short-lived apparition, something like a haze which assumed her form
in which I could make out the shape of her head, the turn of the back
of her neck, the movement of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her
waistline, and that something haunted me.... I still beheld her in that
chair which she had just left, unfathomable and more charming than
ever, with her tender and luminous smile which radiated from her and
created a halo of love about her.

"Who is that woman?" I suddenly asked, in a tone which I forced myself
to render indifferent.

"What woman?" said Lirat.

"Why, the one that has just left."

"Ah! Yes ...my God! A woman just like others."

"I should think so.... This does not tell me her name, however, nor who
she is."

Lirat was rummaging in his paint box. He answered carelessly:

"And so you want to know the name of that woman.... Strange
curiosity!... Her name is Juliette Roux.... As for biographical
information, the police can furnish you all you want, I imagine.... I
presume that Juliette Roux gets up late, that she has her fortune told
by cards, that she is deceiving and ruining as well as she can that
poor Charles Malterre, an excellent chap whom you met here sometime
ago, and whose mistress she is, for the time being.... Lastly, she
is like other women, only with this difference, which makes her case
worse: she is more beautiful than most of them and consequently more
foolish and more malicious.... That sofa there, that you are sitting on
... it was Charles who broke it by lying and crying on it for entire
days, while telling me his troubles, you understand? One day he caught
her with a croupier of a gambling club, on another day with a buffoon
at the Bouffes theatre.

"There was also an affair with the wrestler of Neuilly, to whom she
gave twenty francs and Charles' old trousers. As you see, it's full of
idylls.... I like Malterre very much ... because he is good-natured and
his lack of sense evokes my pity.... He really has my sympathy.... But
what can one say to such men, to whom love is the greatest thing in
life and who can't see a woman's back without tacking on to it wings
of dreams and sending it flying to the stars.... Nothing, isn't that
true?... So much so that the unfortunate fellow, in the midst of his
rage and sobs, could brag about the fact that Juliette had received
a good education. He used to take pride in the fact that she came
from the womb of a physician's wife and not from that of the wife of
a janitor, and he would show me her letters, emphasizing the correct
spelling and the elegant turn of phrases!... He seemed to say: 'How I
suffer, but how well written this is!'... What a pity!"

"Ah! You, too, love the woman!" I exclaimed, when he finished his
tirade.

And foolishly, I added:

"They say you have suffered much."

Lirat shrugged his shoulders and smiled:

"You talk like Delauney, of the Comédie-Française. No, no, my kind
friend, I have not suffered; I have seen others suffer, and that was
enough for me ... do you understand?"

Suddenly his voice became shrill, an almost cruel light shone in his
eyes. He resumed:

"Ordinary people, poor devils like Charles Malterre, when stepped upon,
are crushed, they disappear in the blood, in the mire, in the atrocious
filth stirred up by woman's hands ... that's unfortunate of course....
Humanity, however, does not claim them back; for nothing has been
stolen from it.... But artists, men of our calibre with big hearts and
big brains,--when these are lost, strangled, killed!... You understand?"

His hand trembled, he crushed his crayon on the canvas.

"I have known three of them, three wonderful, divine ones; two died by
hanging themselves; the third one, my teacher, is in a padded dark room
at Bicêtre!... Of this pure genius there has been left only a lump of
wan flesh, a sort of raving beast who grimaces and hurls himself at you
with froth at his mouth!... And in this crowd of cast-offs, how many
young hopes have perished in the grasp of the beast of prey! Count
them up, all these lamentable, bewildered, maimed people; those who had
wings and who are now crawling on all fours; those who scrape the earth
with their nails and feed on their own excrements! Why, you yourself
... a minute ago looked at Juliette with ecstasy ... you were ready to
do anything for a kiss from her.... Don't deny it, I saw you.... Oh!
well, let's go out; that's enough, I can't work any more."

He arose and paced across the studio in agitation. Gesticulating
and angry, he upset the chairs and paste-boards, ripped some of his
sketches with a kick. I thought he was going mad. His bloodshot eyes
rolled wildly; he was pale, and the words were coming out of his
drawn-up mouth in a violent jumble.

"For men to be born of woman ... men!... How irrational! For men
to be conceived in an impure womb!... For men to gorge themselves
with woman's vices, with her imbecile, ferocious appetites, to have
sucked the sap of life from her nefarious breasts! Mother!... Ah!
yes, mother!... Divinized mother, eh? Mother who creates us, sick and
wasted race that we are, who stifles the man in the child and hurls
us nailless and toothless, stupid and tamed, upon the bedstead of a
mistress and the nuptial bed!..."

Lirat stopped for a moment; he was choking. Then, bringing his hands
together and knotting his crisp fingers in the air, as if gripping an
imaginary neck, he shouted madly, terribly:

"This is what should be done with them, all of them, all of them!...Do
you understand? ... eh ... tell me?... All of them!..."

And he began pacing back and forth again, swearing, stamping his feet.
But the last shout of anger had evidently relieved him.

"Come now, my dear Lirat, calm yourself," I said to him. "What's the
use of getting excited, and over what, I ask you? Come now, you are not
a woman."

"That's true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette.... How does
this Juliette concern you anyway?"

"Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person
to whom you had introduced me?... And then, frankly, pending the
invention of some other machine than woman for breeding children ..."

"Pending that... I am a brute," interrupted Lirat, who again seated
himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet
voice asked:

"Dear little Mintié, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won't
bore you, will it? For only ten minutes."

Joseph Lirat was forty-two years old. I made his acquaintance casually
one evening; I no longer remember where it was, and though he had
the reputation of being a misanthrope, unsociable and spiteful, I
instantly took a fancy to him. Is it not painful to think that our
deepest friendships, which ought to be the result of a long process of
selection, that the gravest events in our life which should be brought
about by a logical chain of causes, are for the most part, the instant
result of chance?... You are at home in your study, tranquilly absorbed
in a book. Outside the sky is grey, the air is cold: it is raining, the
wind is blowing, the street is gloomy and dirty, therefore you have
every good reason in the world not to stir from your chair.... Yet you
go out, driven by weariness, by idleness, by something you yourself
don't know--by nothing, ... and then at the end of a hundred steps, you
meet the man, the woman, the carriage, the stone, the orange peel, the
mud puddle which upsets your whole existence from top to bottom.

In the midst of the most sorrowful of my experiences I used to think
of these things, and often I would say to myself--with what bitter
regrets!--"If on the evening when I met Lirat, in the forgotten place
where I certainly had nothing to do, I had but stayed at home and
worked or dreamed or slept, I would have been today the happiest man
on earth and there would have happened to me none of the things which
did happen to me." And that moment of trivial hesitancy, the moment
when I was asking myself: "Shall I go out or shall I not?," that moment
embraced the most important act in my life; my whole destiny was
determined in the brief space of time which in my memory left no more
trace than a gust of wind, which blows down a house or uproots an oak
tree, leaves upon the skies! I recall the most insignificant details
of my life. For example, I remember the blue velvet suit, laced in
front, which I wore on Sunday, when I was very little. I can swear, yes
I can swear, that I could count the grease spots on the habit of curé
Blanchetière or even the number of tobacco grains he used to drop while
snuffing up his pinch of snuff.

It seems a senseless and yet disquieting thing: very often when I cry,
or look at the sea or even watch the sunset upon an enchanted field--I
can still see by that odious freak of irony which is at the bottom of
our ideals, our dreams and our sufferings--I can still see upon the
nose of an old guard we had, father Lejars, a big tumor, grumous and
funny with its four hair filaments which proved an excellent attraction
for flies.... Whereas the moment which decided my life, which cost
me my peace, my honor, and reduced me to the position of a scabby
dog; this moment which I passionately wish to reconstruct, to bring
back again to memory with the aid of physical reminders and mental
associations--this moment I cannot recall. Thus it is that in the
course of my life there happened a tremendous, a singular event, since
all the subsequent occurrences flow from it, and yet the recollection
of it escapes me entirely!... I remember neither the occasion, nor the
place, nor the circumstances, nor the immediate cause of that event....
What do I know then about myself?... What do people in general know
about themselves, when they are hopelessly unable to trace the sources
of their actions? Nothing, nothing, nothing! And must one explain
the enigmas which our mental phenomena and the manifestation of our
so-called will represent, by the promptings of this blind mysterious
force, the fatality of human nature?... That is not speaking to the
point, however.

I said that I had met Lirat one evening by accident, in a place I don't
remember and that instantly I took a fancy to him.... He was the most
original of men.... With his forbidding appearance, his machine-like
and magisterial stiffness and his air of a petty official, he at
first made the impression of a typical functionary, of some orleanist
puppet such as are manufactured in the politicians' clubs and drawing
rooms for the punch and judy show of parliaments and academies. From
a distance, he positively looked like one who is in the habit of
distributing decorations, excize offices and prizes for valor! This
impression, however, quickly disappeared; for this it was sufficient to
listen, if only for five minutes, to his conversation, lucid, colorful,
bristling with original ideas, and above all to feel the power of his
glance, his extraordinary glance, exhilarated and cold at the same
time, a glance to which all things seemed familiar, which went through
you like a gimlet against your will.

I liked him very much, only in my liking for him there was lacking the
element of tenderness, of kindliness; I liked him with a sort of fear
and uneasiness, with a painful feeling that in his presence I did not
amount to much and that I was eclipsed, so to speak, by the grandeur of
his genius.... I liked him as one likes the sea, the tempest, as one
likes some immense force of nature. Lirat inspired me with fear, his
presence paralyzed what little intellectual powers there were in me,
for I was always afraid that I might say something foolish at which
he would jeer. He was so severe, so relentless to everybody; he knew
so well how to discover, to reveal the ridiculous side in artists,
in writers whom I considered superior to myself, and to characterize
them by some apt remark unforgettable and fierce, that in his presence
I found myself in a state of constant mistrust, of ever present
disquietude. I always asked myself: "What does he think of me? What
scornful thoughts do I inspire in him?"

I had that feminine curiosity which obsessed me to know what opinion
he had of me. By means of distant allusions, absurd affections or
hypocritical circumlocutions, I would sometimes try to surprise or
provoke him into frankness, and I suffered even more when he deigned to
pay me a curt compliment, as one who throws a few pennies to a pauper
whom one wishes to be rid of; at least, that is what I imagined. In a
word, I liked him very much, I assure you; I was very much devoted to
him, but in this affection and in this devotion there was an element
of uncertainty, which destroyed the charm of those feelings; there was
also a certain grudge which rendered those feelings almost painful, a
grudge caused by the sense of my inferiority. Never, not even when I
was most intimate with him, was I able to conquer that feeling of base
and timid pride, never could I enjoy a friendship which I prized very
highly. Lirat, on the other hand, was simple in his relations with me,
often affectionate, sometimes "fatherly" in his attentions, and of all
his friends, who were very few in number, I was the only one whose
companionship he sought.

Like all those who hold tradition in contempt, like all who rebel
against the prejudices of conventional education, against the idiotic
formulae of the School, Lirat was very much discussed; spoken of
with contempt--I should rather say. It must be stated also that his
conception of free and lofty art conflicted with all the professed
conventions and accepted ideas, and that by their forceful synthesis
and prodigious knowledge of life which obscured his craftsmanship, his
works of art disconcerted the lovers of prettiness and grace and of the
frigid correctness of academic unity. The return of modern painting to
the great gothic art--this they could never forgive him.

He fashioned the man of today in his craving for enjoyment, a
frightfully tortured soul with a body sapped by neurosis, with flesh
tormented by lust, which quivers under the influence of passion that
lures man on and sinks its claws into his skin. In his representations
of the human body wrought in avenging postures, with monstrous
apophyses guessed at under the garments, there was such human emphasis,
such grief over infernal voluptuousness, such tragic power, that a
shudder passed through one's frame when looking at them. It was no
longer curly headed, pomaded love, adorned with ribbons and fainting
with yearning, rose in mouth, by the light of the moon, or strumming
on a guitar under the balcony; it was Love besmirched with blood,
drunk with the filth of vice, Love with its onanistic furies, wretched
Love which fastens upon man its mouth like a cupping glass and drains
his veins, sucks the marrow of his bones and emaciates his frame. And
in order to give these representations a still greater intensity of
horror, to weigh them down with the burden of even greater affliction,
he cast them in the midst of peaceful, smiling surroundings of
surpassing clearness, among pink and blue landscapes with softened
vistas, amidst glorious sunshine, with the radiant sea in the
background. All around them nature was resplendent with all the magic
of her delicate and changing colors.

When for the first time he consented to place his works on a free
exhibit, together with a group of friends, the critics and the mob,
which influences the critics, shouted with indignation. But the anger
did not last very long--for there is a sort of nobility, or generosity
in anger--and they merely contented themselves with laughing. Then
the humbug which is always represented by mediocre opinion with its
foul spittle, this humbug came to replace the menace of raised fists.
And viewing the superb artistry of Lirat, they were convulsed with
laughter, holding their sides with both hands. Clever, merry-making
people deposited pennies on the edge of the frames as one does for
a Jack-in-the-box, and this was considered excellent sport--for it
actually became a sport for people of the better sort, with purses.

In the magazines, in the studios, in the salons, in the clubs and
the cafés the name of Lirat served as a term of comparison, as an
indispensable standard whenever one wanted to designate something
devoid of sense or some sort of obscenity; it even seemed as if
women--and girls too--could not pronounce that reprobate name without
blushing. The year-end reviews dragged it into their revolting
lampoons, people sang it at the cabarets. Then from these "centres of
Parisian culture" it spread to the street--where one saw it blossom
forth again into a vulgar bud, upon the sloppy lips of drivers, in the
shriveled mouths of street boys, "It's a go, eh! Lirat!" For a few
years poor Lirat really enjoyed an uproarious popularity.... But one
gets tired of everything, even of abusing a person. Paris abandons
its puppets which it raises to the throne as quickly as it does its
martyrs whom it hoists on the gibbet; in its perpetual hunger for new
playthings, it never gets itself excited overly much before the statues
of its heroes or at the sight of the blood of its victims.

Now there was only silence for Lirat's portion. It was very seldom
indeed that in some of the magazines there was again heard an echo of
the past, in the form of some annoying anecdote. Besides, he decided
not to exhibit any more, saying:

"Leave me alone in peace!... Is painting done to be seen ... tell me
... painting ... do you understand?... One works for himself, for two
or three living friends and for others whom one has never known and who
are dead ... Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoiewsky, Shakespeare.... Shakespeare!
... do you understand?.... And the rest?... The rest don't amount to
anything."

Having reduced his needs to a minimum, he lived on little with
admirable and touching dignity. Provided he earned enough with which
to buy his brushes, paints, canvas, pay his models and his landlord,
make a studying trip each year, he did not wish for more. Money did
not tempt him at all, and I am sure that he never sought success. But
if success had come to him, I am also sure that Lirat would not have
resisted the joy, so human, of relishing factitious delights. Though
he did not want to admit it, though he affected to defy injustice
gayly, he felt it more keenly than anyone else, and at heart suffered
from it cruelly. He suffered from the present neglect shown to him as
much as he had suffered from the former insults. Only once did a young
critic publish an enthusiastic and high-sounding article about him in
a magazine. The article was well-meant but full of banalities and
errors; one could see that its author was not sufficiently familiar
with art and that he did not understand anything about the talent of
the great artist.

"Have you read it?" Lirat shouted, "have you read it, eh, tell me?...
What idiots these critics are!... If they keep on talking about me,
they will finally force me to paint in a cave, understand?... What do
they take me for anyway--a vulgarizer?... And then what business is it
of this fellow here--whether I make paintings, boots or slippers?...
That's my private affair!"

Nevertheless he had put it away in a drawer as a thing of great value,
and several times I surprised him reading it. It was very well for him
to say with supreme detachment, when we were inveighing against the
stupidity of the public: "Well, what would you want them to do?...
Do you expect the people to start a revolution because I paint my
canvases plainly?" But in reality this contempt for notoriety, this
apparent resignation concealed deep but secret sentiment. Deep in
his very sensitive and very generous soul there accumulated profound
aversions, which were vented with terrible and malignant fervor on the
whole world. If, on the one hand, his talent had gained in strength and
ruggedness on account of this, his character, on the other hand, had
lost something of its inherent nobility, and his critical spirit had
been deprived of some of its penetrating quality and brilliance.

He ended by giving himself over entirely to decrying everybody and
everything, the excess of which threatened to render him odious; at
times it bore evidence of nothing but a childishness which made him
ridiculous. Great souls nearly always have petty weaknesses--that is
a mysterious law of nature, and Lirat did not escape the effects of
this law. Above everything else, he held fast to his well-established
reputation of an ill-natured man. He bore very well with the opinion
which denied him talent, but what he could not tolerate was that they
called in question the propriety of his insulting humanity with his
sarcastic jibes.

To avenge the scouring words with which he characterized them, some of
the enemies of Lirat attributed to him unnatural vices; others simply
called him an epileptic, and these coarse and cowardly calumnies,
strengthened every day by ingenious comments, based on "certain"
stories which made the rounds of the studios--these calumnies found
ready listeners willing, some owing to his actual malice, others
prompted solely by the intemperance of the painter's tongue, to receive
and spread them.

"You know Lirat?... He had another attack yesterday, this time on the
street."

And names of important personages were mentioned who had assisted in
the scene and who had seen him rolling in the mud, lying, with foam at
his mouth.

I must confess that I myself at the beginning of our friendship was
greatly troubled by these stories. I could not think of Lirat without
at the same time picturing to myself horrible fits in which, I was
told, he was writhing. Victim of a delusion born of an obsession with
this idea, I seemed to discover in him symptoms of horrible diseases;
I often imagined that he suddenly became livid, that his mouth was
distorted, that his body was convulsed in horrible spasms, that his
eyes, wild and streaked with red, were shunning the light and seeking
the shadow of deep vacuous space, like the eyes of trapped beasts that
are about to die. And I regretted that I did not see him fall, shriek,
writhe here in his studio filled with his genius, under my avid glance
that watched him and hoped for the worst!... Poor Lirat!... And still I
loved him!...

The day was drawing to a close. All over Rodrigues place one heard the
slamming of doors; the noise of steps upon the street was rapidly dying
away, and in the shops voices were heard rising in song at the end of
the day's work. Lirat had not uttered a word since resuming his work,
except to fix my posture, which I did not keep just the way he wanted.

"The leg a little this way!... A little more now!... Your chest not
quite so drawn in!... You'll excuse me, my dear Mintié, but you pose
like a pig!"

He worked now feverishly, now haltingly, mumbling in his mustache,
swearing from time to time. His crayon snapped at the canvas with a
sort of uneasy haste of angry nervousness.

"Ah, shucks!" he cried out, pushing away the easel with a kick.... "I
can do nothing but botch-work today!... The devil take me, one might
think I was competing for a prize."

Moving back his chair he examined his sketch with a frigid air and
muttered:

"Whenever women come here it's the same old story.... When they go away
the women leave you the soul of a Boulanger in the pretty claws of a
Henner.... Henner, do you understand?... Let's go out."

When we were at the end of the street:

"Are you coming to dine with me, Lirat?" I asked him.

"No," he replied in a dry tone, reaching out his hand.

And he walked away, stiff, formal, solemn, with the business air of a
deputy who has just discussed the budget.

That evening I did not go out and remained at home to muse in solitude.
Stretched on a sofa, with half-closed eyes, and body made torpid by the
heat, almost slumbering, I liked to go back to my past, to bring to
life things dead and to recall memories which escaped me. Five years
had passed since the war--the war in which I began my apprenticeship
in life by entering the tormenting profession of a man-killer....
Five years already!...Still it seemed like yesterday ... the smoke,
the fields covered with snow, stained with blood and ruins, these
fields where, like ghosts, we wandered about piteously, worn out with
fatigue.... Only five years!... And when I came back to the Priory,
the house was empty, my father dead!... My letters had come to him
only rarely, at long intervals and they had always been short, dry,
written in haste on the back of my knapsack. Only once, after a night
of terrible anguish had I become tender, affectionate; only once had I
poured out my heart to him, and this letter which should have brought
him sweetness, hope and consolation he had not received!... Every
morning, Marie told me, he used to come out to the gate an hour before
the arrival of the mailman and watch the turn of the road, a prey to
mortal fear. Old wood cutters would pass on their way to the woods; my
father used to question them:

"Hey there, uncle Ribot, you have not seen the mailman, by any chance?"

"Why no, Monsieur Mintié--it's a little early yet."

"Oh, no, uncle Ribot, he is rather late."

"That might be, Monsieur Mintié, that might be."

When he noticed the kepi and red collar of the mailman he became pale,
trembling with the fear of bad news. As the mailman approached, the
heart of my father beat furiously, almost bursting.

"Nothing but magazines today, Monsieur Mintié."

"How is that!... No letters at all! You must be mistaken, my boy. Look
... look again...."

He made the mailman search in his letter bag, untie the bundles and go
through them again....

"Nothing!... Why it's impossible!"

And he would return to the kitchen, seat himself in the rocking chair
heaving a sigh:

"Just think of it," he would say to Marie who gave him a bowl of milk,
"just think of it, Marie, if his poor mother had been alive!"

During the day, when in town, he used to visit people who had sons in
the army; the conversation was always the same.

"Well, have you heard from your boys."

"Why, no, M'sieur Mintié. How about you, have you heard anything from
Jean?"

"I haven't either."

"That's very strange. How is it possible?... Can you explain it?..."

That they themselves did not get any letters only half surprised them,
but that Mintié, the mayor, had not received any either, surprised
them very much. Most unusual conjectures were made; they turned to the
confusing statements of the papers, they questioned old soldiers who
told them their war experiences with the most extravagant and lavish
details; at the end of a couple of hours, they would part with lighter
hearts.

"Don't worry M'sieur Mayor. You'll see him back a colonel, sure."

"Colonel, colonel!" my father would say, shaking his head.... "I don't
ask that much.... Just so he comes back!..."

One day--nobody knew how that happened--Saint-Michel found itself full
of Prussian soldiers. The Priory was occupied. Long sabres were found
in our old house. From this moment, my father became more ill than
ever, he took fever and was confined to his bed, and in his delirium
he repeated without end: "Put the horses to, Felix, put the horses to,
for I want to go to Alençon to get some news of Jean!" He imagined
himself starting out on the road. "Gid up, gid up, Bichette, gid up,
come on!... We are going to have some news of Jean this evening.... Gid
up, gid up, come on!... And my poor father gently breathed his last in
the arms of the curé Blanchetière, surrounded by Felix and Marie who
were sobbing!... After a six months' stay at the Priory, now sadder
than ever, I was weary to death... Old Marie, accustomed to manage the
house according to her own notions, was unbearable to me; in spite of
her devotion, her whims exasperated me, and there always were long
altercations in which I never had the last word. For my only company I
had the good curé to whom nothing appealed as much as the profession of
a notary. From morning till night he used to lecture to me thus:

"Your grandfather was a notary, so was your father, your uncles, your
cousins, in fact your whole family.... You owe it to yourself, my dear
child, not to desert your post. You shall be Mayor of Saint-Michel,
you may even hope to replace your poor father at the general council,
in a few years.... Why man alive, that's something! And then--take my
word for it--times are going to be pretty hard for decent people who
love the good Lord.... You see that rascal Lebecq, he is municipal
counsellor. All he thinks of is how to rob and kill people, that
brigand there.... We need at the head of our country a right-minded
man to uphold religion and defend the principles of righteousness....
Paris, Paris!... Oh! these silly heads, those youngsters!... But will
you please tell me what good you have accomplished at Paris?...Why,
the very air there is infected! Look at big Mange, he comes from a good
family, but that did not prevent him from coming back from Paris with a
red cap on. Isn't that a pretty affair?"

And he would continue in this vein for hours, taking his snuff, evoking
the vision of the red cap of big Mange which appeared to him more
abominable than the horns of the devil.

What was there to do at Saint-Michel? There was no one to whom I could
communicate my thoughts, my dreams; there was no outlet for the ardor
of life where I could expend that intellectual energy, that passion
for knowledge and for creative work which the war, in developing my
muscles, in strengthening my body, had awakened in me, and which
omnivorous reading overstimulated in me more and more every day. I
realized that Paris alone, which formerly had frightened me so much,
that Paris alone could furnish nourishment for ambitions, as yet
indefinite, which spurred me on, and with the estate settled, and the
library sold I left suddenly, leaving the Priory to the care of Felix
and Marie.... And here I am back in Paris!...

What have I accomplished during these five years, to use the words
of the curé?... Carried away by vague ardors, by confused enthusiasm
which blended together some sort of a chimeric ideal with a kind of
impracticable apostleship, how far did I get?... I am no longer the
timid child whom the footmen, in the vestibule flooded with light, used
to put to flight. If I have not acquired much self-assurance, I at
least know how to behave in society without appearing too ridiculous.
I pass pretty much unnoticed, a condition which is the best that could
be wished for a man of my calibre who possesses none of the graces and
qualities which are necessary to shine there.

Very often I ask myself: what am I doing here in this society to which
I do not belong, where they respect only success however fraudulently
obtained, only money, no matter from what filthy place it comes; where
every spoken word acts as a wound inflicted on everything I love best
and everything I admire most?... Besides, is not man with all his
differences of education which are betrayed only in his gestures,
in his manner of greeting, in his more or less graceful bearing,
pretty much the same no matter where he is?... What! were these the
high-spirited artists, the much admired writers whose glory is sung,
whose genius is acclaimed ... these petty, vulgar, frightfully pedantic
beings, slavishly aping the manners of the society they rail at,
ludicrously vain, fiercely jealous, lying prostrate before wealth, and
kneeling in the dust, worshipping publicity--that old blackguard, which
they carry about on velvet cushions.... Oh, how much better I love
the herdsmen and their oxen, the pig drivers and their pigs, yes the
pigs, round and pink, digging the earth with their snouts and whose fat
smooth backs reflect the clouds that float above!

I read excessively, without discrimination, without system, and from
this faulty reading there was left in my mind nothing but a chaos of
disjointed facts and incomplete ideas, from the tangle of which I did
not know how to extricate myself.... I tried to acquire knowledge in
every way, but I realized that I was just as ignorant today as I had
been in the past.... I had had mistresses whom I loved for a week,
sentimental and romantic blondes, fierce brunettes, impatient to be
caressed, and love showed me only the frightful emptiness of the human
heart, the deceptiveness of affection, the lie of the ideal, the
nothingness of pleasure....

Believing myself converted to the formulæ of descriptive art by means
of which I was going to harness my ambition and fix my shifting and
thrilling dreams upon the pinion of words, I had published a book which
was praised and which proved to be "a best seller." Of course, I was
flattered by this little success; I, too, spoke of myself with pride as
of a rare talent; I, too, gave myself superior airs in order to deceive
others all the better. And wishing to deceive myself as well, I often
looked upon myself in the mirror with the complacency of a comedian, in
order that I might discover certain marks of genius in my eyes, on my
forehead, in the majestic bearing of my head.

Alas! Success rendered yet more painful the inner knowledge of my
impotence. My book did not amount to much; its style was forced, its
conception infantile: a passionate harangue, an absurd phraseology
took the place of ideas in it. At times I would read over the passages
praised by the critics, and in those passages discover something
of everybody: Herbert Spencer and Scribe, Jean Jacques Rousseau
and Commerson, Victor Hugo, Poe and Eugene Chavette. Of my own
contribution, I, whose name was displayed on the title page, on the
yellow cover of the volume, found nothing. Following the caprices of
my memories, aroused by the intermittent light of my recollections,
I expressed the thoughts of one and used the style of another; none
of the ideas or style belonged to me. And important looking persons
whose tastes are infallible and whose judgment is law praised my
personality, my originality, the unexpected nature and subtleness of my
impressions!...

How sad it was!... Whither was I going? I knew no more about it today
than I did yesterday. I had the conviction that I could not be a
writer, because all the effort of which I was capable had been spent
in writing that miserable and incoherent book. Had I had a more humble
and compromising ambition, were I only prompted by desires less noble,
by those which never cause remorse--such as love of money, official
titles, dissoluteness!... But, no! Only one thing which I could never
attain lured me, and that was talent.... To be able to say to myself,
yes ... to say to myself: "This book, this sonnet, this phrase is
yours, you wrung it from your brains swollen with passion; it is your
thought that quivers here; it is pieces of your flesh and drops of
your blood, that it scatters over the sorrowful pages; it is your
nerves that vibrate in it like the strings of a violin under the bow
of a divine musician. What you have accomplished here is beautiful and
grand!" For this moment of supreme joy I would be willing to sacrifice
my future, my wealth, my life; I would be willing even to kill!...

And never, never will I be able to say that to myself!... Ah how I
envied the eternal self-contentment of the mediocre!... Now I again
felt a passionate desire to return to Saint-Michel. I wished I could
drive the plough in the brown furrow, roll in the fields of yellow
clover, smell the wholesome odor of the stables, and, above all, lose
myself in the thick of the coppice wood, penetrating into it farther
and farther....

The light went out and my lamp was smoking. A cold like a gentle caress
filled my legs and sent a current of pleasurable chills through my
back. Outside not a sound was heard; the street grew silent. It had
been long since I heard the dull trundle of the omnibus rolling on
the causeway. The clock struck six. But a sort of laziness kept me
glued to my sofa: while thus stretched out I felt a physical pleasure
amidst a great mental depression. I had to make a strenuous effort
to free myself from this languor and to go into my bedroom. I found
it impossible to fall asleep. No sooner did I close my eyes than it
seemed to me that I had been thrown into a black and very deep pit, and
suddenly I awoke, panting and perspiring. I again lit my lamp, tried
to read.... I could not concentrate my mind on the lines of the text
which seemed to swerve, to cross one another, to abandon themselves to
a fantastic dance under my very eyes.

What a stupid life mine is!... Why am I so different, preyed upon by
obnoxious chimeras? Who has poured into my soul this deadly poison of
weariness and discouragement? Before others there stretches a vast
horizon illumined by the sun! But I am walking in the darkness, stopped
on every side by walls which obstruct my way and against which I vainly
beat my head and knees.... Perhaps it is because they possess love!
Love, ah yes! If I could only love!

And again I saw the beautiful virgin of Saint-Michel, the radiant
virgin of plaster of paris with its robe adorned with stars and
its golden nimbus descending from heaven. All around her suns were
revolving, inclining themselves like celestial flowers, and doves in
the exaltation of prayers were flying about, brushing her with their
wings.... I recalled the ecstasies, the fits of mystic adoration which
she evoked in me; all the sweet joys which I had experienced came back
to me at the mere contemplation of her. Did she not also speak to me,
then, at the chapel? And those unuttered words which poured into my
childish soul such ineffable tenderness, this language more harmonious
than angels' voices and the music of golden harps, this language more
fragrant than the perfume of roses,--was it not the divine language of
love?

As I listened with all my senses to this language which was music to
me, I was lifted into a world unknown and wondrous; a new enchanted
life sprouted, burst into bud and flourished all around me. The horizon
receded into mysterious infinity: space shone bright like the interior
of the sun, and I felt myself growing so tall and strong that in one
embrace I was pressing to my breast all the beings, all the flowers,
all the swarms of creatures born of the glance of love exchanged
between the Holy Virgin of plaster and a little child.

"Holy Virgin, kindly Virgin!" I cried. "Speak to me, speak to me
again,--as you used to in the past, in the chapel.... And give me love
once more, for love is life and I am dying because I am no longer able
to love."

But the Virgin was not listening to me any longer. She glided into the
chamber and curtsying, mounted the chairs, pried into the furniture
pieces, singing strange airs all the time. A drawn bonnet of otter skin
now replaced her nimbus of gold, her eyes became like those of Juliette
Roux, very large, very sweet, which smiled at me from a plaster face
under a veil of very fine gauze. From time to time she approached my
bed, waving above me her embroidered handkerchief which exhaled a
violent perfume.

"Monsieur Mintié," she said, "I am at home every day from five to
seven. And I shall be delighted to see you, delighted!"

"Virgin, kindly Virgin!" I implored again. "Speak to me, please. Speak
to me as you did formerly in the chapel."

"Tu, tu, tu, tu!" hummed the Virgin who, causing her lilac robe to
swell out and removing her cloak, adorned with golden stars with the
tips of her long, thin fingers, began to turn around slowly as if
dancing a waltz, her head swaying from one side to the other.

"Good Virgin!" I repeated in a rather irritated voice, "why don't you
speak to me!"

She stopped, posted herself in front of me, stripped off her plaster
garments one after another, and entirely nude, lustful and magnificent,
her bosom shook with clear, sonorous, precipitous laughter:

"Monsieur Mintié," she said, "I am at home every day from five to
seven. And I'll give you Charles' old trousers." And she threw her
otter skin bonnet at me.

I sat up on my bed.... With a stupid gaze and breathing with
difficulty, I looked about me. But the room was quiet, the lamp
continued to burn sadly and my open book was lying on the carpet.

The next morning I got up late, having slept badly, pursued by the
thought of Juliette in my sleep disturbed by nightmares. During the
remainder of that troubled, feverish night she did not leave me for an
instant, assuming the most extravagant forms, abandoning herself to the
most wretched pranks, and lo! I again beheld her in the morning, and
this time she was the same as when I met her before at Lirat's, with
her air of modesty, her discreet and charming manners.

I felt a kind of sadness--not exactly sadness, but regret, the regret
one feels at the sight of a rose-bush whose roses have wilted and whose
petals are scattered over the muddy ground. For I could not think of
Juliette without thinking at the same time of Lirat's malignant words:
"There was also an affair with a wrestler of Neuilly whom she gave
twenty francs." What a pity!... When she entered the studio I could
swear that she was the most virtuous of women.... Her very manner of
walking, greeting, smiling, seating herself bespoke good breeding,
a peaceful, happy life without hasty acts of indiscretion, without
degrading remorse. Her hat, her cloak, her dress, her whole appearance
was of a refined and charming elegance, meant for the enjoyment of just
one, for the cheerfulness of a secluded house, closed to the seekers
of unclean spoils.... And her eyes, radiating a perfectly legitimate
tenderness, her eyes from which shone such candor, so much sincerity,
which seemed to have no knowledge of lies, her eyes more beautiful than
the lakes haunted by the moon!...

"Is Charles all right?" Lirat had asked.

Charles?... Her husband, to be sure!... And naïvely I pictured to
myself a respectable interior of a room, with jolly children playing on
the carpet, a family lamp, grouping kind and simple beings around its
gentle shimmer; a chaste bed, protected by a crucifix and a hallowed
branch of boxtree!... Then suddenly, crashing into this peace, the
bullhead from the Bouffes, the croupier of the gambling club, and
Charles Malterre who broke Lirat's lounge by rolling on it, while
crying in rage!... I conjured the image of the comedian--a pallid face,
wrinkled, glabrous, with impudent bloodshot eyes, with sensual lips,
wearing an open collar, a pink cravat, a low-plaited short jacket!

I was unnerved and irritated.... What did it matter to me, after all?
Did the life of this woman concern me, was it related to me in any
way?... Was it my business to interest myself in the fate of women
whom chance threw in my path?... I don't care what she is, this Mlle.
Juliette Roux!... She is neither my sister nor my fiançée, nor my
friend; there is not a single bond of kinship between us.... If I had
seen her yesterday walking on the street, like one of the thousands of
persons whom one brushes against every day and who pass on and vanish,
she would have already been drawn into the vortex of oblivion and never
again would I be likely to see her.

"Maybe Lirat is mistaken?" I repeated, while breakfasting. I knew his
exaggerations, his passion for ridicule, his horror of and contempt for
woman. What he said of Juliette he was saying of all other women. Who
knows,--perhaps this comedian, this croupier, all the details of this
ignominious affair in the exposure of which his spiteful spirit found
gratification, existed only in his imagination? And Charles Malterre?

Undoubtedly I should have preferred to see her married. I should have
been pleased to see her leaning openly on the arm of a man, respected,
envied by the most honest! But she loved this Malterre, she lived
decently with him, she was devoted to him: "Charles will be sorry to
learn of your refusal." The almost entreating voice in which she said
those words was still in my ears. This means that she was mindful of
the things that might or might not please Malterre.

And at the thought that Lirat, in making improper use of a false
situation, was calumniating her in an odious manner, my heart grew
heavy, a feeling of great pity swept over me and I caught myself saying
aloud: "Poor girl!" Still this Malterre had been writhing on the
lounge, he had cried, he had laid bare his heart to Lirat, had shown
him her letters. Well, what of it? What have I to do with this woman?
Let her have all the singers, all the croupiers, all the wrestlers she
wants! To hell with her! And I went out humming a gay air, with the
free bearing of a gentleman whose spirit is not in the least troubled
by anything. And why should it be, I ask you?...

I went down the boulevards, stopping in front of the booths, strolling
in spite of the sun, which was like a niggardly and pallid smile of
December still permeated with fog; the air was cold and piercing. On
the sidewalk women were passing, shivering with cold, wrapped in long
cloaks of otter skin, some of them dressed in small drawn bonnets of
fur like Juliette's, and every time these cloaks and bonnets attracted
my attention I observed them with genuine pleasure. I liked to follow
them with my glance until they were lost in the crowd. At the corner of
the Rue Taitbout, I remember, I came upon a tall slender woman, pretty
and resembling Juliette so closely that I brought my hand to my hat
ready to greet her. I was excited--oh, it was not the violent beating
of the heart which halts your breathing, weakens the flow of blood in
your veins and stuns you; it was a light touch, a caress, something
very sweet, which brings a smile upon the lips and a cheerful surprise
to the eyes.

But this woman was not Juliette. I felt somewhat peeved and avenged
myself by thinking her very ugly. Two o'clock already!... Shall I go to
see Lirat? Why? To make him talk about Juliette, to compel him to admit
that he had lied to me, to make him tell me of her traits of character,
sublime and poignant, tell me some touching stories of her devotion,
sacrifice--that tempted me. I thought the matter over, however, knowing
that Lirat would be angry, that he would mock at me, at her, and I had
a horror of his sarcasms; I already heard sinister words, abominable
phrases coming out of a twisted corner of his mouth with a hissing
sound.

At the Champs-Elysées, I called a hackney-coach and proceeded toward
the Bois. Why dissemble? There I hoped to meet Juliette. Yes, certainly
I hoped it, but at the same time I feared it. Not to see her at all, I
felt, would prove a disappointment to me. On the other hand, were she
in the habit of exhibiting herself in this market place of gallantry
regularly like the other ladies, I should again feel hurt, and in the
end I did not know what it was that stirred me more: the hope of seeing
her or the fear of meeting her.

There were few people in the Bois. On the grand lake drive, carriages
were passing slowly at a considerable distance from one another, the
drivers perched high upon their seats. Sometimes a brougham would leave
the strung-out line, turn and disappear to the trot of its horses,
carrying away God knows where the profile of a woman, or some white
and pallid faces, or the end of a ruffled dress seen for a moment
through the window of the coach door.... My heart and the blood in my
temples were beating faster, impatience caused the tips of my fingers
to twitch; my neck was tired from turning in the same direction in an
effort to penetrate the shadow of the carriages and began to hurt;
anxiously I was chewing the end of a cigar which I could not make up
my mind to light, for fear of missing her carriage in the act. Once I
thought I saw her inside a brougham, which was going in the opposite
direction.

"Turn, turn," I shouted to the driver, "and follow that brougham."

I did not at all reflect whether or not I was acting properly towards a
woman to whom I had been introduced only the day before, and casually
at that, one whose reputation I wanted to see rehabilitated at all
costs. Half leaning against the lowered window of the coach door, I
never lost sight of the brougham. And I was saying to myself: "Perhaps
she recognized me! Perhaps she is going to stop, get out of the
carriage, appear in the street." Indeed, I was saying this to myself
without the slightest notion of attempting a gallant conquest. I
was saying that as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in
the world. The brougham rolled on speedily, lightly, bounding on its
springs, and my hackney coach followed it with difficulty.

"Faster!" I gave the order, "faster, and get ahead of it!"

The driver lashed his horse, which started into a gallop, and in a
few seconds the wheels of the two carriages touched each other. Then
a woman's head, with dishevelled hair under a very large hat, with a
nose comically turned up, with lips cracked from the excessive use of
paint and crimson like a living flesh wound, appeared in the frame of
the coach door. With a scornful glance, she took in the driver, the
cab, the horse and myself, put out her tongue and then withdrew into a
corner of her carriage. It was not Juliette! I did not come home until
night, very much disappointed and yet delighted with my useless drive!

I had no plans for the evening. Still I spent more than the usual time
in dressing myself. I did it with the greatest care, and, for the first
time, the knot of my cravat seemed to me a matter of great importance,
and I was very much absorbed in the process of tying it carefully. This
unexpected discovery brought in its train others equally important.
For example, I noticed that my shirt was ill cut, that the shirt front
wrinkled disgracefully at the opening of the vest; that my dress coat
looked very old and curiously out of style. In a word, I thought I
looked very ridiculous and promised myself to change all that in the
future. Without making elegant appearance an exacting and tyrannical
law of my life, it was quite permissible, I thought, to look like
the rest of the people. Simply because one dressed well, one was not
necessarily a fool.

These preoccupations consumed my time till the dinner hour. Usually I
ate at home, but this evening my apartment appeared to me so small, so
dismal; it suffocated me, and I felt the need of space, of noise, of
merriment.

At the restaurant I took an interest in everything: the coming and
going of people, the gilding on the ceiling, the large mirrors which
multiplied to infinity the parlors, waiters, electric globes, the
flowers on ladies hats, the counters on which were spread dressed
meats of all kinds, where pyramids of fruit, red and gold colored,
rose amid salads and sparkling glassware. I watched the women above
all, I studied their somewhat airy manner of eating, the joy in their
eyes, the movement of their ungloved arms encircled by heavy bracelets
of glittering gold, the exposed lines of their necks so delicate and
tender, which gradually receded into the bosom, under the roseate lace
napkin. This fascinated me, it affected me like something altogether
new, like a landscape of some distant country suddenly glimpsed. I was
wonder-struck, like a boy.

Ordinarily, impelled by the brooding disposition of my nature, I would
fasten my attention on the intimate moral life of a human being, that
is to say, I would point out its ugliness or suffering; at this moment,
on the contrary, I abandoned myself to the joy of solely perceiving
its physical charm: I was delighted to observe the magic spell cast
by the women; even in the ugliest one I found some little detail such
as a curve in the back of a neck, a languor in eyes, a suppleness of
hands--always something or other--which made me happy, and I reproached
myself for having until now arranged my life so badly, for having
isolated myself like a barbarian in a dark melancholy chamber, for not
having lived, while all this time Paris was offering me, at every
step, joys so easily attained and so sweet to relish.

"Is Monsieur perhaps waiting for someone?" the waiter asked me.

Some one? Why no, I was not waiting for anyone. The door of the
restaurant opened and I quickly turned around. Then I understood why
the waiter had asked that question. Each time the door opened I would
hastily turn around as I did just now and would stare anxiously at the
people entering as if I knew that someone was about to enter, someone I
was waiting for.... Some one! Well, for whom could I be waiting?

I very seldom went to the theatre; to force me there, a special
occasion or obligation or inducement was required. I quite believe that
of my own accord I would never think of going there. I even affected
a supreme contempt for the kind of literary stuff offered for sale in
these pushcart markets of mediocrity. Conceiving, as I did, the theatre
as a place not of idle distraction but of serious art, it was repugnant
to me to see human passion warbling one and the same sentimental
tune amidst the mechanism of always identical scenes, to see gaiety,
bedecked with tinsel, tumbling into the same pit of tomfoolery. A
manufacturer of such plays, be they ever so applauded, seemed to me
an artist gone astray; he bore the same relation to the poet that an
unfrocked clergyman bears to a priest, or a deserter does to a soldier!

And I always remembered Lirat's remark, so powerfully concise, so
profoundly discerning. We had been attending the funeral of the painter
M----. The celebrated dramatist D---- was the chief mourner. At the
cemetery he delivered an address. This did not surprise anyone, for did
not H---- and D---- enjoy a reputation of equal greatness? At the end of
the ceremony Lirat took my arm and we walked back to Paris very sad.
Lirat, who seemed lost in painful meditation, was silent. Suddenly he
stopped, crossed his arms and, swaying his head with an irresistibly
comical air because it was intended to be grave, exclaimed: "But why
did that fellow D---- interfere, tell me?" And he was right. Why did he
interfere, really? Did they come from the same stock and were they
headed for the same glory--the one an ardent artist with grandiose
thoughts and immortal works, and the other, whose sole ideal was to
entertain with silly nonsense an assembly of wealthy and reputable
bourgeois each evening. Yes, really, why did he interfere?

How removed I was from such morose sentiments when, after dinner,
having sauntered along the boulevards, enjoying the feeling of
physical well-being which gave to my movement a special lightness
and elasticity, I seated myself in a chair at the Varieté, where a
successful musical comedy was being played! With my face deliciously
freshened by the cold air outside, my heart entirely won over to a sort
of universal forebearance, I was really enjoying myself. With what?
I did not know and little cared to know, not being in the mood for
psychological self-analysis.

As was proper, I arrived during the intermission, when the crowd, very
elegant in appearance, was filling the lobbies. After having left
my overcoat at the check room, I passed through the parterre boxes
with that same sweet impatience, that same delicious anguish, which I
had already experienced at the Bois; on reaching the first balcony I
continued the same careful inspection of the loges. "Why is she not
here?" I asked myself. Each time I failed to distinguish clearly a
woman's face, whether it was because the face was slightly bent, in
shadow, or cut off from view by a fan, I would say to myself: "That's
Juliette!" And each time it was not Juliette at all. The play amused
me; I laughed heartily at the flat jokes which constituted the essence
of the piece: I enjoyed all this perverse ineptitude, this vulgar
coarseness and really found in it a quality of irony which did not
lack literary merit. At the love scenes I grew sentimental. During the
last intermission I met a young man whom I scarcely knew. Glad of the
opportunity to pour out the banalities which had accumulated in me and
were pressing for an outlet, I clung to him.

"An amazing thing, isn't it?" he said to me. "It is stunning, eh?"

"Yes, it isn't bad!"

"Not bad! Not bad!... Why that is a masterpiece, an astounding
masterpiece! What I especially like is the second act. There is a
situation for you, not that ... a tense situation! Why it is high
comedy, you know! And the gowns! And that Judic, ah! that Judic!..."

He struck his thigh and clicked his tongue:

"It got me all excited, my dear! It's astonishing!"

We thus discussed the merits of the various acts, scenes and actors.

When we were parting:

"Tell me," I asked him, "do you happen to know a certain Juliette Roux?"

"Wait now! Oh, perfectly well! A little brunette, very 'chic'? No, I
got mixed up. Wait now! Juliette Roux! Don't know her."

An hour later I was seated at a table with a glass of soda water in
front of me, in the café de la Paix where, after the theatre, used to
assemble the most beautiful representatives of the fashionable world. A
great many women came in and out, insolent, loud-mouthed, their faces
covered with fresh layers of rice powder, their lips newly painted with
rouge! At the adjoining table a little blonde lady, already aged but
very animated, was speaking in a nasal voice; a brunette, farther away,
was simpering with a turkey's ludicrous majesty, and with the same hand
which had raked manure on the farm she held a fan, while her escort,
leaning against his chair, his hat pushed back, his legs spread apart,
was obdurately sucking his cane's head.

An uncontrollable feeling of disgust rose within me; I was ashamed of
being here, and I compared the ridiculous and noisy manners of these
women with the reserved deportment of the gentle Juliette at Lirat's
studio. These raucous and piercing voices rendered even more suave the
freshness of her voice, the voice which I still heard saying to me:
"Delighted, Monsieur! But I know you well." I arose.

"What a scoundrel this Lirat is, all the same," I exclaimed while
getting into bed, furious at the fact that he had so treated a young
woman whom I had met neither on the street, at the Bois, in the
restaurant, at the theatre, nor at the night cabaret.




CHAPTER IV


"Madame Juliette Roux, if you please?"

"Will Monsieur please come in?" the maid asked.

Without demanding my name or waiting for my answer, she made me cross a
small, dark antechamber, and led me into a room where at first I could
only distinguish a lamp covered by a large lamp-shade, which burned low
in a corner. The maid raised the flame of the lamp and carried out an
otter skin cape which had been thrown on the sofa.

"I will go tell madame," she said.

And she disappeared, leaving me alone in the room.

So I was at her house! For eight days the thought of this visit
had tortured me. I had no special business, I simply wanted to see
Juliette; some kind of keen curiosity, which I did not stop to analyze,
drew me to her. Several times I had gone to the Rue Saint Petersbourg
with the firm intention of calling on her, but at the last moment my
nerve failed me, and I left without mustering sufficient courage to
cross her threshold. And now I was the most embarrassed being in the
world, and I regretted my foolish step, for obviously it was a foolish
step. How would she receive me? What should I say? What caused me the
greatest uneasiness was that after I had made a thorough search in my
brain I found not a single phrase, not a single word with which to
begin our conversation when Juliette entered. What if words should fail
me and I should be left standing here with gaping mouth! How ridiculous
that would be!

I examined the room into which Juliette was presently to come. It
was a dressing room which also served as a parlor. It made a rather
unfavorable impression on me. The toilet table, ostentatiously
displayed with its two wash basins of cracked, pink cut glass, shocked
me. The walls and ceiling, hung with loud red satin, the furniture,
bordered with elaborate plush hangings, the knick-knacks, costly and
ugly, placed here and there on the furniture, the queer tables serving
no apparent purpose, consols weighed down with heavy ornaments--all
this bespoke a vulgar taste. I noticed in the center of the
mantlepiece, between two massive vases of onyx, a terra cotta statuette
of Cupid, smiling with a sort of grimace and offering a flower held
at the tips of his outspread fingers. Every detail revealed, on the
one hand, a love of expensive and unrefined luxury, and on the other a
regrettable predilection for romance and puerile affection. It was at
once distressing and sentimental. Nevertheless, and that was a relief
to me, I saw here no evidence of that incongruity, that transitory air,
that severity of aspect so characteristic of ladies' boarding houses,
those apartments where one is made aware of a haggard existence, where
by the number of knick-knacks one can count the number of lovers who
have passed there, lovers for an hour, a night, a year; where every
chair tells of the lack of decency, the unfaithfulness; where on the
glass one can see the tragedy of fortune's fickleness; on the marble,
traces of a tear still warm; on the candlestick, blood drops still
moist. The door opened and Juliette appeared wearing a white, long
flowing dress. I trembled, color came to my face; but she recognized
me and, smiling that smile of hers which at last I found again, she
stretched out her hand.

"Ah! Monsieur Mintié!" she said, "how nice of you not to have
forgotten me! Has it been long since you saw that eccentric Lirat?"

"Why, yes, Madame, I have not seen him since the day I had the honor of
meeting you at his place."

"Ah, my God, I thought you two never separated at all."

"It is true," I replied, "that I see him

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