Delphi complete works of.., p.299
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 299
His books, indeed! Did he suppose that they had got him into the Académie? Why, it was to his wife alone that he owed his green coat! She had spent her life in plotting and manoeuvring to break open one door after another; sacrificed all her youth to such intrigues, and such intriguers, as made her sick with disgust. ‘Why, my dear, I had to! The Académie is attained by talent, of which you have none, or a great name, or a high position. You had none of these things. So I came to the rescue.’ And that there might be no mistake about it, that he might not attribute what she said only to the exasperation of a woman wounded and humiliated in her wifely pride and her blind maternal devotion, she recalled the details of his election, and reminded him of his famous remark about Madame Astier’s veils that smelt of tobacco, though he never smoked, ‘a remark, my dear, that has done more to make you notorious than your books.’
He gave a low deep groan, the stifled cry of a man who stays with both hands the life escaping from a mortal rent The sharp little voice went on unaltered. ‘Ah well, pack your trunk, do, once for all! Let the world hear no more of you. Fortunately your son is rich and will give you your daily bread. For you need not be told that now you will find no publisher or magazine to take your rubbish, and it will be due to Paul’s supposed infamy that you escape starvation.’
‘This is more than I can bear,’ muttered the poor man as he fled away, away from the lashing fury. And as he felt his way along the walls, and passed through the passage, down the stairs, across the echoing court, he muttered almost in tears, ‘More than I can bear, more than I can bear.’
Whither is he going? Straight before him, as if in a dream. He crosses the square and is half over the bridge, before the fresh air revives him. He sits down on a bench, takes off his hat and pulls up his coat sleeves to still the beating of his pulses; and the regular lapping of the water makes him calmer. He comes to himself again, but consciousness brings only memory and pain. What a woman! what a monster! And to think that he has lived five-and-thirty years with her and not known her! A shudder of disgust runs over him at the recollection of all the horrors he has just heard. She has spared nothing and left within him nothing alive, not even the pride which still kept him erect, his faith in his work and his belief in the Académie. At the thought of the Académie he instinctively turned round. Beyond the deserted bridge, beyond the wider avenue which leads to the foot of the building, the pile of the Palais Mazarin, massed together in the darkness, up-reared its portico and its dome, as on the cover of the Didot books, so often gazed upon in his young days and in the ambitious aspirations of his whole life. That dome, that block of stone, had been the delusive object of his hopes, and the cause of all his misery.
It was there he sought his wife, feeling neither love nor delight, but for the hope of the Institute. And he has had the coveted seat, and he knows the price!
Just then there was a sound of steps and laughter on the bridge; it came nearer. Some students with their mistresses were coming back to their rooms. Afraid of being recognised, he rose and leant over the parapet; and while the party passed close to him without seeing him, he reflected with bitterness that he had never amused himself, never allowed himself such a fine night’s holiday of song beneath the starlight. His ambition had always been fixed unbendingly on the approach to yonder dome, the dome, as it were, of a temple, whose beliefs and whose ritual he had respected in anticipation.
And what had yonder dome given him in return? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Even on the day of his admission, when the speeches were over and the double-edged compliments at an end, he had felt the sensation of emptiness and deluded hope. He had said to himself as he drove home to change his green coat, ‘Have I really got in? Why, it can’t be like this.’ Since then, by dint of constant lying to himself and echoing, with his colleagues, that it was delightful, delicious, he had ended by believing so. But now the veil had fallen away, and he saw the truth; and he would have liked to proclaim with a thousand tongues to the youth of France, ‘The Académie is a snare and a delusion. Go your way and do your work. Sacrifice nothing to the Académie, for it has nothing to offer you, neither gift, nor glory, nor the best thing of all, self-contentment. It is neither a retreat nor a refuge; it is a hollow idol, a religion that offers no consolations. The great troubles of life come upon you there as elsewhere; under that dome men have killed themselves, men have gone mad there! Those who in their agony have turned to the Académie, and weary of loving, or weary of cursing, have stretched forth their arms to her, have clasped but a shadow.’
The old schoolmaster was speaking aloud, bareheaded, grasping the parapet with both hands as in old days he used to hold the edge of his desk at lessons. The river rolled on below, tinged with hues of night, between its rows of winking lamps. An uncanny thing is the speechless life of light, moving, and looking, and never saying what it means. On the quay the song of a drunken man died quavering away in the distance, ‘When Cupid... in the morn... awakes.’ The accent showed that the merry singer was an Auvergnat making his way back to his coal-barge. It reminded him of Teyssèdre, the polisher, and his glass of good wine. He saw him wiping his mouth on his shirt-sleeve. ‘It’s the only real good in life.’ Even a humble natural joy like that he had never known; he must needs envy even Teyssèdre. Absolutely alone, with no refuge, no breast on which to weep, he realised that ‘that woman’ was right, and ‘the trunk had better be packed for good and all, Léonard.’
In the morning some policemen found on a bench on the Pont des Arts a wide-brimmed hat, one of those hats which preserve something of the expression of their owner. Inside was a large gold watch and a visiting card— ‘Léonard Astier-Réhu, Permanent Secretary of the Académie Française.’ Right across the line of print had been written in pencil the words, ‘I die here of my own will.’ Of his own will indeed it was! Even better than the little phrase in the large, firm handwriting did the expression of his features — the set teeth, the projection of the lower jaw — declare his fixed determination to die, when after a morning’s search the dredgers found the body caught in the wide meshes of an iron net surrounding some baths for women, quite close to the bridge.
It was taken first to the emergency-station, where Picheral came to identify it, a strange sight himself, as he fluttered along the wide bank, with bare bald head and in a frock coat. It was not the first time that a Permanent Secretary had been taken out of the Seine; the same thing had occurred in the time of Picheral’s father, under very similar circumstances. And Picheral the son did not seem much affected, only annoyed that he could not wait till the evening to carry Astier-Réhu home. But it was necessary to take advantage of the absence of Madame Astier (who was breakfasting with her son) so as to spare her too great a shock.
The clock of the Palais Mazarin was striking one, when with the heavy tramp of the bearers the stretcher from the station was brought under the archway, marking its road with ominous splashes of water. At the foot of Staircase B there was a halt to take breath. Over the dazzling court was a great sharp-lined square of blue sky. The covering of the stretcher had been raised, and the features of Léonard Astier-Réhu were visible for the last time to his colleagues on the Dictionary Committee, who had just broken up their meeting in sign of mourning. They stood round, with their hats off, not a little shocked. Other people also stopped to see what it was, workmen, clerks, and apprentices, for the Institute serves as a passage from the Rue Mazarin to the quay. Among them was kind-hearted Freydet, who, as he wiped his eyes, thought in his heart, and was ashamed to think it, that here was another vacancy. Old Jean Réhu was just coming downstairs for his daily constitutional.
He had heard nothing, seemed surprised to see the crowd beneath him as he stood on one of the lower steps, and came nearer to look, in spite of the scared gestures of those who tried to keep him back. Did he understand? Did he recognise the corpse? His face remained calm, so did his eyes, as expressionless as those of the bust of Minerva under her helmet of bronze. And after a long look, as they turned the striped canvas down over the poor dead face, he went on, upright and proud, with his tall shadow stalking beside him, a ‘deity’ deathless indeed, while a half-mad senile shake of the head seemed to say: ‘That’s another of the things I have seen.’
Rose and Ninette (1892)
Anonymous translation, 1892
Original French Title: ‘Rose et Ninette’
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
The first edition’s title page
ROSE AND NINETTE.
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF OUR DAY.
“After clearly perceiving that study of books and striving after nicety of language merely lead us into paradoxes, I have resolved never to make any sacrifice save in favor of conviction and truth, in order that a complete and profound sincerity shall dominate my works and lend them that consecrated character which the divine presence of the truth ought to give, that character which makes tears come to our eyes when a child bears witness to what it has seen.”
ALFRED DE VIGNY.
(Journal d’un Poetel)
CHAPTER I.
ONLY FIFTEEN DAYS after the divorce had been granted to him, and still intoxicated with the happiness of his release from bondage, Régis de Fagan stood one morning at the open window of his new bachelor apartments, watching for the appearance of his two little daughters, who were allowed by the Court to spend two Sundays in the month with him. This was their first Sunday, 2nd in all the pile of letters from women showered for the last twenty years upon the table of the popular playwright very few had caused him such emotion as the simple little note that had come the evening before:
“MY DEAR FATHER — We shall be at Passy to-morrow by the ten o’clock train. Mademoiselle will leave us in front of 37 Boulevard Beauséjour and come for us at nine o’clock in the evening punctually.
“Your respectful and most affectionate daughter,
“ROSE DE FAGAN.”
Underneath, in a large and still somewhat unformed hand, the younger sister had placed her signature “Ninette.”
And now, made nervous by the length of time he had to wait, he was asking himself if they would really come, if at the last moment their mother, that wily and unscrupulous one, or the redoubtable mademoiselle, might not have found some pretext to detain them. Not that he doubted the affection of his daughters, but they were so young — Rose barely sixteen, Nina not yet twelve — both powerless to resist a hostile influence; the more so that, since the divorce and their return from the convent, they had lived entirely with their mother and their governess.
His lawyer had said to him:
“The game is not a square one, my poor Régis; you will have only two days a month in which to gain their hearts.”
Never mind, with those two days well employed the father felt strong enough to retain the love of his darlings, but he required the whole of these two days actually, without any tricks or foolish excuses. Becoming more and more anxious as the hour approached, more agitated by the anticipation of this interview than he had ever been by any other in his life, whether of a tender or of a business nature, Fagan became violently impatient, thrust his long body out of the window and looked up and down the green and peaceful surburban street, with the railroad on one side of it screened by a trellis and a hedge, and on the other a row of handsome residences with broad steps, many flowers and well kept lawns.
“Good morning, papa; here we are!”
“You! Why, how did you get here — how did you get in?”
He had been so busy calculating the time, watching the trains and scanning the passers-by, that he had missed them, and they rushed in upon him now out of the little antechamber. There they were before him, grown much larger, it seemed to him, and more womanlike during the two or three months since he had seen them. His hands shook as he helped them to remove their close-fitting jackets and their round hats laden with feathers.
The children themselves felt somewhat embarrassed at the novelty of the situation. Of course their father was still their father — the jolly, amiable father, who had played with them and danced them so gayly on his knee when they were little; but he was no longer the husband of their mother, and this made a wonderful change which they felt but could not have explained, which expressed itself by the simple wonder in their eyes.
This awkwardness soon vanished, however, as they inspected the apartment, bright in the cheerful May sunshine, some of the rooms looking out on the boulevard and others upon the garden of the house, the large shade-trees making it seem larger than it really was. Almost all the furniture was new, but in the study the children recognized a bookcase and the large writing-table, the sharp corners of which paternal caution had caused to be rounded off, as dangerous to two little heads that formerly often played hide-and-seek under it. What memories were associated with every corner of those massive pieces of furniture with twisted brasses on the drawers!
“Do you remember, Ninette, that time when mamma” —
But Ninette, younger but quicker-witted and keener than the other sister, cut the anecdote short.
The fact was, before sending her daughters to visit their father the late Madame de Fagan, now called by her maiden name of Ravaut, had warned her daughters that they were not to talk about her and give no information as to her present way of living or her plans for the future, as she wished no spying on her affairs; and knowing big Rose to be thoughtless and light-minded, had particularly impressed her injunctions on Ninette, whose little face was amusing with its tightly closed, secretive mouth and its eyes as full of shrewdness and sharpness as those of a mouse. Could it be possible that Mme. Ravaut should so soon have forgotten the nature of the proud man whose wife she had been for nearly twenty years as to think that he would use the children as spies upon their mother?
Truly it is not easy to become indifferent suddenly to the existence of one whose life has been your life, whose excitements and reactions, joys and sorrows have been echoed daily in your own heart; but Régis de Fagan threw his whole will into forgetting; he never even mentioned his wife’s name; and as the children were also preoccupied by the same effort, the gay little trip through the new rooms was often broken by sudden silences and pauses and what in theatrical parlance are called “gaps.”
In the bedroom, for instance, Rose and Ninette could not repress a cry of surprise at sight of the little iron bed — a simple student’s bed without curtains or hangings. The two children looked at one another and both thought of the Christmas and New-Year mornings, when they had come running, their feet entangled in their long nightgowns and their eyes still heavy with sleep, to climb into the big bed and exchange kisses and gifts with papa and mamma.
The eyes of Rose and Ninette expressed still more when they observed, hanging at the head of the bed, several pictures that used to hang in their parents’ chamber in the Rue Laffitte which their father had carried away with him.
First there was the big pastel by Besnard in which they were represented hand in hand at the age of six and ten, dressed in a Greenaway costume with big muslin sun-bonnets and enormous sleeves; then the portrait of their father’s mother, a pastel under glass in an oval frame — they had never known their grandmother, but their mother had always said that she was a very, very severe person.
What strange reflections were passing through these young minds, what a confusion of all their ideas of persons and things, once united and now scattered, as on the day after a fire or a shipwreck! And how perplexing it must seem, how alarming, in that absence of reasoning power which characterizes and signifies extreme youth! Luckily they came next to the cheerful diningroom, where the sun was pouring in through the open windows and the air was sweet with odors from the garden.
The table was laid daintily, appetizingly, a bouquet at the plate of each of the girls. This last attention had been paid by Mme. Hulin.
“Mme. Hulin?” asked Ninette, her little round eyes shining with sudden curiosity.
“My landlady; she lives on the ground floor and lets this one in order not to feel so lonely in the house; for she is a widow with one little boy and an ancient governess.”
“Some one for papa to flirt with,” said Rose recklessly as she stood arranging her curls with the aid of a hand-glass. De Fagan glanced at her sadly; his wife had so often made just such foolish speeches; and yet of the two Rose was the one who physically resembled Mme. Ravaut less. She was tall and slight and stooped a little; with her dark Creole complexion and a grave and sentimental expression she repeated the type of her father. In a tone of gentle reproach he answered:
“I have little heart for that, my dear child, and I fancy poor Mme. Hulin thinks as little about flirting as I do; but she is a very devoted mother, and knowing that my daughters were to come this morning, she picked these flowers for them.”
The servant brought in the first course, which was eggs flavored with morel, the favorite dish of Ninette, and was received with cries of delight: “Ah, here is Anthyme! How are you, Anthyme?” He had been in the service of the De Fagans for several years, and reddening, embarrassed by the peculiarity of the situation, he stammered:
“A very good day to you, young ladies!”
He was a peasant from Bauce, quite untaught, with straight hair covering an almost imperceptible forehead; it seemed as if some one had shaved off the top of his head, taking his intellect with it. Madame had hated him on account of his utter stupidity, and Régis had kept him after his divorce perhaps because Anthyme was still friendly with the other servants and in this way he could get daily news from the Rue Laffitte.
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