Delphi complete works of.., p.206
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 206
“Mamma, if I am no longer a king, will you love me all the same?”
“Oh, my treasure!..”
Passionately she presses the little hand put out to meet hers... Yes, the sacrifice is made. Warmed, comforted by that clasp, Frederica is a mother only; and when the Tuileries, their ashes gilded by a departing ray, rise up before her to recall the past, she gazes at them without emotion, without memory, as though she looked upon some ancient ruin of Assyria or of Egypt, the witness of manners and of morals and of peoples vanished; a grand old dead past — gone.
THE END
Numa Roumestan (1880)
OR, JOY ABROAD AND GRIEF AT HOME
Anonymous translation, 1884
Original French Title: ‘Numa Roumestan. Mœurs parisiennes’
During the late 1870’s, Daudet began to experience fatigue and symptoms of ailments that he initially dismissed as simply a result of joint pain. However, by the start of the 1880’s, it was clear that the author was suffering from a far more severe illness. When he was seventeen, Daudet had contracted syphilis and had been treated with mercury. The disease had then remained dormant for many years before it flared up again in the 1870’s. Daudet was sexually promiscuous throughout his life and syphilis was a famously rampant disease amongst French writers of the period, as Flaubert, Baudelaire and Maupassant were all ravaged by it. One major consequence of the disease was that the author spent the last fifteen years of his life in an increasing state of agony, which was only managed by frequent self-administered injections of morphine.
Numa Roumestan was first published by Georges Charpentier in 1881 and was considered to be one of the author’s best novels by his contemporaries. The novel is a humorous study of the contrasts and differences in manners and character between the North and South of France. The eponymous Numa Roumestan is a politician and statesman from Provence, who has been elected by the men of Apt to The Chambers of Deputies in Paris. Roumestan is very prone to deception; he is a man that revels in the adoration of his constituents and he makes sure to promise everything to everyone as a matter of course. He defends his outlandish lies by claiming that his fellow Southerners will know that it is all just rhetoric. The divide between North and South is portrayed on a personal level by the protagonist’s marriage to a Parisian woman, whose temperament and manners are shown to be significantly different from those typical of Southern women.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
Daudet, photographed by Nadar, close to the time of publication
INTRODUCTION.
IN THIS NOVEL Alphonse Daudet has expressed some of his most cherished opinions regarding his own country people. To perfect it he exerted himself to the highest pitch of industry. As one of his studies in Parisian manners and customs, it will remain a document from which a period in French history can be reconstructed hereafter. Comedy and broad farce, tragedy and pathos, alternate in its chapters, while its dramatic possibilities have been exploited for the stage.
Over “Numa Roumestan” the genius of Alphonse Daudet plays as clearly as over any of his novels. Its construction is simpler than “Jack” and it moves with greater ease; its characters are racier and more varied than those of “Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné.” It affords the quintessence of Daudet’s best, of his naturalness and descriptive powers, and shows an unrivalled use of materials carefully collected in Paris and Provence. The southern parts of France, the landscape and inhabitants, are described with a master hand, but its finest effects of contrast are reserved for those expatriated Southrons who have Paris for a background — whether they are law students who herd together at the Café Malmus, or worthy shopkeepers from Nîmes who sell the products of the South to their fellow-Southerners under such cloudy canopies as hang above the Seine and the Oise.
The conflict of political ideas and social forms between the North and South was brought to a head during and after the struggle between Germany and France. The novel moves within the period 1870 to 1876. The situation was suggested by the hard feeling engendered of the lukewarmness of the South in coming to the aid of the country when invaded by Moltke’s armies. But Daudet does not encumber the movement of his story with politics; never once does he refer directly to the war or the siege of Paris; he merely uses the situation in order better to depict the opposites in southern and northern character. And it must be conceded that, much as he relishes the outsides of men and things in Provence, he attacks the southern character, as only one who is born to a knowledge of its failings can. Bompard is Tartarin de Tarascon viewed through another facet. Aunt Portal, however, who is drawn from a relative of the Daudets, and the keeper of the Café Malmus; Baron de Lappara and the Bachellery girl; but first and foremost Roumestan himself, seem characters in whom a great bitterness of the author toward his old home comes to expression. Nevertheless this bitterness had its origin in affection; it is the scolding, if one may use so light a word, of a person who feels responsible for his own fellow-countrymen and exaggerates their faults in order to read them a lesson.
How admirable a creation Numa Roumestan is may be measured by the fact that his character fits American politicians, allowance being made for certain superficial traits that do not belong to men of our race. It is not merely in France that one can put the label “Numa” on a shifty but eloquent phrasemonger, ever ready to attempt the highest offices of State by the aid of promises and empty, booby-catching rhetoric. We also have great men like Numa, who confessed, with more frankness than we find in our own windy examples, that he could only think after he had begun to speak — men of note “upon whom time and reflection have the same effect as humidity upon phosphorus.”
Numa is not an ordinary villain but a kindly soul, not without occasional gleams of humor and the ability to see the faults of his own temperament, but he includes a strain of Oriental paganism which makes it impossible for him to be faithful, especially in love. While Rosalie is no blue-stocking and not really cold, yet she has self-respect, is intellectual, reserved and proud. Apart from the theme of North and South discussed in this couple we have the wider theme, applicable to all mankind, of the active, fleshly temperament attracted by, yet inevitably at war with, the passive intellectual partner in life. Numa would have been more at ease, perhaps happier, had he taken a Provençal wife who would have lain in wait for his infidelities and made his life miserable at the slightest sign of disaffection. He needed a partner as childlike if not as vulgar as himself. Rosalie was too fine for his nature.
Much light is thrown indirectly on “Numa Roumestan” by the memoir of M. Léon Daudet on his father recently translated for this series. There we find Alphonse Daudet talking about his compatriots in this fashion: “A morality as loose as one’s belt. Streams of faults, talk as facile as their impulse and their promises, yes, as their mendacity!... Alas, for the lofty comedies! What breasts smitten by the hand, what low, moved voices, hoarse but captivating, what easy tears are theirs! what adjurations and calls upon patriotism and lofty sentiments!” And speaking of the sobriety of the Southern French in the matter of stimulants he says in “Numa Roumestan” that the South needs no wine, for it feels itself intoxicated from birth— “drunk without drinking.” Again he remarked to his son: “The sun transformed into heat and movement, furious and irresistible, glides into the veins of the Southerners. Though it may intoxicate and turn their heads, it never attacks their intelligence, which on the contrary it renders stronger, deeper and more lucid.” And again, singing the praise of heat: “Heat brings our temperaments to flowering, fruit and burgeoning. It gives to the human being his own particular perfume and to sentiments their vehemence. When accumulated in an individual and in a race, it acts like a subtle kind of alcohol or like some delicate opium; it transfigures and renders divine.”
Such remarks bring back to the translator similar statements that Alphonse Daudet once made to him in Paris regarding a mysterious influence exerted upon his nerves to the detriment of his health by this same sun of the South. The conversation took place many years before that illness was developed which carried him off. Perhaps the following, reported by his son, may bear upon this fancy of his:
“These sensations have to be paid for later. We, the transplanted ones, are seized upon by this homicidal North with its mists and rheumatism, its mournful rains and sleet. Wet outside, we are burning within, and are the prey of a twofold nature. Then our impressions become more tender. The North is difficult on the question of the choice of words, their value and their place in the sentence, much more so than the lazy, voluptuous South.”
“Numa Roumestan” is in so far forth a Tendenz-Novelle, as it is to a great extent occupied with the vice of mendacity in the South; Numa is the typical liar. The sun breeds lively nerves and proneness to make promises and exaggerate; the result of kindliness, imaginativeness and laziness is untruthfulness. His son tells us: “A subject for discussion that never ran dry was the problem of lying. ‘Is it fair to treat a man as a liar,’ argued Daudet, ‘who becomes drunk with his own speech, and, without any low purpose, without the instinct of deceiving or getting the better of his neighbor, or of profit, endeavors to embellish his own life and that of others with stories which he knows are untrue but which he would like to have true, or at any rate probable? Is Don Quixote a liar? And all those poets who wish to take us away from the actual and compass the globe in their wandering flights — are they liars?’”
Daudet makes this defence for his fellow-countrymen; but a more striking if less natural specimen of a liar of this sort than Numa Roumestan is Bompard, while M. Rostand has added another to the list in his Gascon hero Cyrano de Bergerac.
The consistency of the plot of “Numa Roumestan” is notable in this point: Numa comes within an ace of losing his wife and Ministry through the vengeance of a girl, the sister of the tabor-player, the musician he has lured to Paris through his mania for making promises which he does not dream of fulfilling. Enraged at his failure to provide a place for her brother, she sends the anonymous letter that brings on the catastrophe. It is like the mouse that means disaster to the elephant; it is like the reasoning of the primitive peoples who, as we are beginning to discover, recognizing just such petty origins for wide calamities, worshipped and raised temples to the grasshopper, and to noxious insects still more minute, under the names of Beelzebub or Herakles the queller of the Vine-fly.
A word as to the translation. Owing to his desire for actuality and liveliness of style, Alphonse Daudet uses many expressions that are slang or hover near the border of slang, yet are used by people of the best education in colloquial discourse, but are not permitted in serious literature. In addition to these terms there is the host of dialectic words that give the local color of the South. Translated into English or American slang, or expressions that are supposed to be unuttered in polite society, these words come with an unpleasant coarseness. But without them the reader would fail to realize the original, for slang is as common among all but priggish French people as with us — perhaps among Parisians commoner. Again, Daudet’s style is often condensed; he often swings off into descriptive passages where strict ideas as to grammar and the proportion of sentences are lost and the purists and grammarians are offended. These intentional violations of strict rules cannot be ignored, nor can they be pedantically corrected by the translator, for therein is reflected the nervous concentration of the author; these passages are redolent of Daudet’s peculiar individuality. It may be remembered that at first he found little favor with the Institute and that later, when the Institute no longer had anything to offer him, Daudet refused to take the necessary steps toward an election which in all probability was within his grasp: the author of “L’Immortel” was not elected to the Immortals.
Daudet followed Flaubert and the Goncourts in repeating the idioms and slang of the people as they talk when at their ease; therein he followed his own beliefs in regard to naturalism, as may be read in his own words in the memoir by his son.
CHAPTER I.
TO THE ARENA!
THAT SUNDAY — it was a scorching hot Sunday in July at the time of the yearly competitions for the department — there was a great open-air festival held in the ancient amphitheatre of Aps in Provence. All the town was there — the weavers from the New Road, the aristocrats of the Calade quarter, and some people even came all the way from Beaucaire.
“Fifty thousand persons at the lowest estimate,” said the Forum in its account the next day; but then we must allow for Provençal puffing.
The truth was that an enormous crowd was crushed together upon the sun-baked stone benches of the old amphitheatre, just as in the palmy days of the Antonines, and it was evident that the meet of the Society of Agriculture was far from being the main attraction to this overflow of the folk. Something more than the Landes horse-races was needed, or the prize-fights for men and “half men,” the athletic games of “strangle the cat” and “jump the swineskin,” or the contests for fifers and tabor-players, as old a story to the townspeople as the ancient red stones of the Arena; something more was needed to keep this multitude standing for two hours under that blinding, murderous sun, upon those burning flags, breathing in an atmosphere of flame and dust flavored with gunpowder, risking blindness, sunstroke, fevers and all the other dangers and tortures attendant on what is called down there in Provence an open-air festival.
The grand attraction of the annual competitions was Numa Roumestan.
Ah, well; the proverb “No man is a prophet” etc. is certainly true when applied to painters and poets, whose fellow-countrymen in fact are always the last to acknowledge their claims to superiority for whatever is ideal and lacking in tangible results; but it does not apply to statesmen, to political or industrial celebrities, those mighty advertised fames whose currency consists of favors and influence, fames that reflect their glory on city and townsmen in the form of benefits of every sort and kind.
For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence; for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and gesticulatory caresses.
When he comes each summer during the vacation of the Chamber of Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station! There are the Orphéons swelling out their embroidered banners as they intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting, seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step farther.
From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against the white walls.
The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then delegations arrive from the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held high under their Arlesian caps.
The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the “Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals of a voice that belongs to the popular god.
Not a prophet in his own country. ’Twas only necessary to look at the Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below, and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over an “i.”
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