Delphi complete works of.., p.362
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 362
He became excited and talked very loud. The deputies who were hovering about the Minister drew near with hesitating smiles, in anticipation of sport. Marc Javel glanced about with an indulgent yet severe expression.
“You are always talking about knaves, Monsieur Izoard, but where do you see so many of them?”
“One would have to tear his eyes out in order not to see them, Monsieur le Ministre.”
And the Marseillais declaimed with an emphatic gesture, and with the lyric intonation of Frédérick Lemaître, one of the glories of his time:
“They did not all die, but all were stricken down.”
Then, pointing to a stout personage, with a sallow clean-shaven face, who came forward with his head thrown back and his frock-coat open and flapping, between two rows of fluttering salutations, he continued in his natural voice:
“There is your colleague Vourey, beside whom you sat this morning in the Council of Ministers, — shall we say that he is an honest man? When that ex-schoolmaster took the department of Mails and Telegraphs, he was as poor and thin as a nail. Now just look at the fat hog — and he is rich in proportion. He will become richer, if the Chamber adopts his proposed law for the substitution of aluminum for all the old kinds of telegraph wires. Jacques Walter makes no secret of the fact that he has millions in reserve for the perquisites of the committee.” There was a murmur of disapproval among the groups, which encouraged the Minister to lash his adversary with a sharp:
“You go too far, my master.”
“Too far! Just ask young Eudeline here, whose sister is employed at the Mails and Telegraphs to tell you how Vourey goes to work to make the state pay the rent of Casati, the pretty dancer at the Folies-Bergères. At the central office on Rue de Grenelle, every one knows about the bargain concerning the rent, the splendid apartment leased at an absurd price, provided that the Minister agrees to hire for the Government—”
Marc Javel shrugged his shoulders.
“What a child this Izoard is! He has remained a mere child! And so near the time of his retirement, too!”
Without observing the pallor which suddenly dispelled the energy of the Marseillais at that word retirement, he turned to Raymond:
“Come, young man, time presses, the session is about to begin; what have you to ask of me?”
Was it the majesty of the place, that Palace of the Parliament, with its great arches bathed in light, the paintings on the ceiling, the ice-cold marble walls, or was it Marc Javel’s new title and the arrogance of his greeting, the pedestal in short, the growth of the pedestal? Whatever it may have been, Raymond had never felt such emotion, such awe before his patron. He tried to speak of Antonin, of the approaching conscription, when the poor boy would have to take his chances, of the cruel responsibilities which the father had bequeathed to the older son; but none of his thoughts found becoming expression, and words failed him, he stammered like his brother. At last, Pierre Izoard, recovering from his own confusion, took pity on the poor fellow.
“Let me speak, my boy; otherwise you will never say what you want to. In the first place, there are some things in your father’s life which you do not know about, which he confided to us when he died, and which only your mother, Monsieur Marc Javel, and myself know.”
The Minister distorted his features in a sigh of condolence.
“Indeed, I do remember the melancholy episode to which you allude. Poor Victor Eudeline! there was a man who was not cut out for business!”
“Still, he knew how to die to save his children from misery and dishonor; that comes pretty near being cut out for business!”
No sooner had he uttered this retort than Pierre Izoard regretted it, and, assuming a very humble air, asked the Minister if he could not procure for the younger Eudeline some of the favors which the elder had obtained so easily, that is to say, one year of service instead of five, and all the facilities for continuing to supply the family with bread. For it must be agreed that, with an equal supply of energy and earnest desire, as between Raymond, the former winner of the prize for philosophy in the general competition, doctor in law and licentiate in letters, and Tonin, his younger brother, a poor electrical mechanic, the mechanic alone had kept all his family alive up to the present time, and performed the duties of the real support of the family. He should enjoy the privileges of the part, having borne all its burdens.
Ah! the visionary old dotard, how could he be made to hold his peace? Every word he spoke was a blow at the pride of the older brother, furious now at having tried this expedient, and much more so when the Minister had said his last word, cunningly devised for the benefit of the deputies who stood about.
“For an hour past, my dear master” — Marc Javel drew himself up, self-satisfied and pompous, his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat— “for an hour past you have been walking this young man through the corridors of the Chamber, to convince him that they are crowded with knaves. Very good! For my part I propose that he shall carry away from here the conviction and proof that they who make the laws know how to respect them and to demand that they be respected by others. As the older son of a widow and the support of a family, Raymond Eudeline had privileges and prerogatives to which his brother can lay no claim. Therefore expect nothing from me, not the shadow of a favor or a recommendation. It would be an injustice of which I feel that I am absolutely incapable. And now, messieurs, I see that Monsieur le Président is coming; permit me to go and pay my respects to him before he takes his seat.”
He dismissed them hastily, with the end of his fingers, and followed the crowd which surged toward the end of the corridor, where military orders rang out with the rhythmical crash of the butts of muskets on the flagstones.
“Now it is all over; I know this Marc Javel,” said Pierre Izoard taking the arm of the stupefied Raymond. “I understand why he joined the Valfon Ministry; he is as rascally as the rest. But he has a flexibility which they lack and a self-assurance which will carry him farther than any of them. As for relying upon him henceforth, your mother must give it up.”
The two friends, mingling with the deputies and reporters, had drawn near the main hall, which had been thrown open a moment before. Two lines of bayonets and red trousers extended from the door of that hall to the gallery leading to the private rooms of the President of the Chamber. It was by that gallery that he arrived, accompanied by two soldiers marching at his sides with drawn swords. A typical president of the Assembly, he had the solemn gait, the body longer than the legs, and curly grizzled hair surmounted by the broad flat rim of a silk hat. When he appeared, all heads were uncovered. A voice shouted, “Carry arms!” and under the echoing arches, the drums beat loudly.
X. BETWEEN PARIS AND LONDON.
TO ANTONIN EUDELINE, London.
By the letters which you receive from your relatives, my dear Antonin, and the newspapers which come to you from France, you have learned ere this why your friend Sophia has allowed months to pass without replying to you. As for my adventure, here it is, in as few words as possible, so that it may not bore you.
When you left for England, I established myself on the left bank, opposite Bercy, in what was left of an old Louis XV mansion, with a carved pediment, lost in the midst of smoke-begrimed factories and shabby workmen’s houses skirting an immense quay all black with heaps of old iron and coal. I expected to remain there until the affair of Boulevard Beaumarchais should be forgotten and filed away, and my great savage of a Lupniak could safely leave Paris. For the moment it was necessary for the poor boy to keep quiet. On the day after his exploit he had buried himself in a garret on Rue Pascal, near the Observatory, in the midst of Little Russia. I did not consider that he was safe there, feeling sure that the police would begin their investigations in that neighborhood. Luckily, on the quay where I boarded, within a few steps of my ancient and seigniorial little mansion, there was a wood-yard belonging to an old Auvergnate with the manners of a great lady, whose granddaughter, afflicted with an almost incurable case of amaurosis, I was attending; for I must tell you, my friend, that, pending my departure for Calcutta, I had opened in my rooms a dispensary where the most varied assortment of children’s diseases passed through my hands every day. Without telling my neighbor who Lupniak was, I persuaded her to hire him as night watchman in her wood-yard, his principal duty being to prevent cinders and sparks from the engines setting fire to the piles of wood, when trains passed over the bridge of the Circuit Railway.
You cannot imagine an existence more absolutely happy than that led by that fanatic, at once a dreamer and a man of action, wandering about at night through that vast wood-yard with its avenues of timber arranged as symmetrically as a French garden, with thickets and open spaces, and with great patches of sky studded with stars appearing beyond the dark rigid corners of the piles. In the day-time he did not leave his movable cabin, a sort of dog-kennel or shepherd’s hut, lighted by two port-holes, and furnished with a rack for his clothes, a shelf for his books — astronomy and metaphysics — and a narrow cot-bed upon which he read and mused much more than he slept. I went often to see him, and we passed many hours sitting on the edge of his cot, talking and arguing about this right of murder, this right of executing the law, which the revolutionists arrogate to themselves, and which seems to me monstrous beyond words. He would not tolerate objections. With features swollen with anger, he would shout at me, protruding his scrofulous lips:
“Dejarine was a villain, a brute! I killed him but once. He had snatched life from more than a hundred human beings.” And if I ventured to argue, he would tear about in a way to overturn the cabin.
The unfortunate part of it was that he was not satisfied with my visits, but insisted on coming to my rooms, and watching the procession, before my consulting chair, of the lower classes of Paris, who have such a vivid and picturesque way of expressing their misery. Disguised by a wig and a pair of spectacles, which gave him the appearance of one of the profession, he would sit in a corner of my office, most frequently on the days when Monsieur Alcide, your delightful Communard, brought his little boy to me. By the way, do you know that I am going to put that poor little fellow on his feet again; his disease is no longer mysterious to me. He is the child of a broken spirit, born of that moral anaemia, of that nervous fear brought back by the father from his ten years of New Caledonia, which makes him turn pale before the helmet of a policeman. The little one had something like the same fear, the same shame of existence. But he will live; I have put steel and fire into that unfortunate, deformed little body. I have given him some of my blood and my strength. “You shall walk, you little rascal, or you shall tell me why.” — Meanwhile, Lupniak would ask Père Alcide to tell him about his hunting the Canaques in the jungle, with Commandant Riviere, and about the no less savage hunt of those villainous soldiers after him and several others, among the tombs in Père-Lachaise, lighted by lanterns here and there, on that May night, the last of the Commune, when the trills of the nightingale in the cypresses of the cemetery alternated with the volleys of musketry and the crackling of the machine-guns. The little cripple also adored these heroic adventures, to which his father, an amusing and excellent actor, gave extraordinary vividness by imitating the whistling of the bullets with his lips, the fire of the platoons by snapping his fingers, and the fluttering of the wings of the shell when it drops, like a wounded bird, short of breath. Sometimes the story was not finished in the office; they would go out together to the bank of the river, the little one in his carriage, with gleaming eyes, and his head resting on his elbow, and finish it there. It was in that way that my poor Lupniak fell into the hands of the police one evening; and I knew nothing of it until two days later, when the dealer in wood came to me in great distress to find out about her night watchman, who no longer came to the yard. I was about to set out in search of him, when suddenly there came, in the guise of a harmless circular, a summons to appear that very day at the Palais de Justice, in the office of the examining magistrate. I found there a man, still young, although he tried to make himself appear old with an old-fashioned velvet cap and a cunning leer which distorted and wrinkled the most insipid and expressionless face you can imagine. As I refused to admit my complicity with Lupniak, or that he had ever spoken to me of his projects of revenge and murder, the magistrate tried to make me say and sign abominable things about that man, of whom I am fond, whom I know to be brave-hearted and kind, having never in his life fired upon any but wild beasts, or destroyed any but noxious creatures. You can judge with what an outburst of disgust I received the suggestions, and whether I was at all backward in asserting what a savage executioner, unworthy of pity, that man Dejarine, the Russian Minister of Police, really was. The magistrate pursed up his lips in face of my indignation; he made a sign to his clerk, and said to me, pointing to the gigantic police officer who had entered the room: “I am very sorry, Mademoiselle, but I am obliged to detain you at the disposition of the law.” I remained several weeks in absolutely secret confinement, in a cell at the Conciergerie, where no one came to see me, and where my meals were passed to me through a wicket, as in a leper’s hospital. My only anxiety during those long days was for my little patients, whose sorrowful faces and feeble gestures haunted me and crowded about my bed as soon as the curfew rang.
You see, my little Tonin, you cannot imagine what these children are in my life. I was born to be a mamma, a Mère Gigogne. Why, in order to have children, I would have stolen them. You will tell me that it would have been a simpler way to marry; but I am so ugly — who would have married me? This has been the disappointment of my life; not a woman’s disappointment, mere wounded vanity, but simply this thought: I shall never have children! And so, unable to be a mother like other women, I said to myself that I would be more of a mother than all women, that I would have hundreds of little ones whom I would nurse and pet and rock in my arms for hours at a time, with their little toothless mouthslike cupping-glasses against my cheeks, poor suffering little creatures whom I would love passionately; for there is nothing so touching, so appealing as a tiny mortal who suffers and cannot tell what the matter is. I had just finished my course in medicine. As I had become reconciled with my father, I had money, enough money to found my hospital for sick children; and after that my sorrows and anxieties were at an end. I have not felt unhappy since, except at the Conciergerie, deprived of my whole little family of patients. How many times at night have I fancied that I heard that little imploring voice: “Say, Papa Alcide, tell me about the battle of Père-Lachaise.” And the old Communard imitating the volleys of the musketry by slapping the palm of his hand on his curly head! At last the door of my cell was opened one afternoon; some one said “Come,” and led me through interminable passages and stairways to the office where I had been questioned. The man in the velvet cap asked me, but this time neither sternly nor arrogantly, if solitude had not refreshed my memory. I made an evasive gesture. The judge did not insist, but simply said to me: “The examining magistrate is powerless with you, mademoiselle; you have too powerful acquaintances.” He looked at me with a languishing air, with such eyes as poor ugly creatures like myself do not often meet. I thought that the ambitious fellow was about to ask my hand because of my powerful acquaintances. But what was the source of this mysterious good fortune? I dared not ask any questions, and as in a dream I saw him sign the order for my release.
What joy to breathe the free air once more, and, having returned to my rooms, to resume my consultations with my whole little ambulatory hospital! My dealer in wood was the only one who ceased to bring her child to me. She was too angry with me on account of that watchman, that species of astrologer whose cabin was filled with books of magic which the gentlemen from the Prefecture had seized. But who had notified them? That is what I would have liked to know, for I thought that I had guarded and sheltered him so securely, even going so far as to break off relations with our Little Russians of the Panthéon and the Observatory! Even with Genevieve Izoard too, whom I no longer saw, not from mistrust of that brave, sweet creature, but I knew that a sentiment of extreme violence had taken possession of her, and that she no longer belonged to herself.
Ah! my little Tonin, God preserve us from love! it is the most dangerous of all the wines that intoxicate. And if it is true, as I have heard people declare, that the young men of your age, of your “boat,” no longer think of women, so much the better! You will go straighter and more quickly to the goal you have in mind.
Speaking of women, I had a strange visitor two days ago. My consultation had just ended; I had opened my windows to let out the smell of sickness and poverty which my depressing patients bring me, and was smoking a Russian cigarette, allowing my thoughts to follow the boats which descended the Seine in the red glow of the setting sun. Enters a fine lady, red haired, buxom and richly dressed, with the build of a powerful singer; and despite her affected manner and the paint around her eyes and on her cheeks, her face as a whole wore a natural and kindly expression. She spoke to me of my hospital, of the assistants I should be inclined to take, and on what terms. She inquired, she said, in behalf of a friend of hers, a victim of society, exhausted and shattered by dint of doing nothing, ashamed of the selfishness and barrenness of her existence — a dead woman who wished to live again. Was she really acting for that friend or for herself? One could feel in her words a disgust, a sort of nausea at the thought of all the pleasure, of all the worldly luxuries she had known, which gave me a strange idea of Parisian society and left me feeling very sad. As she withdrew she told me that her friend would come very soon to see me; and handed me her own card.
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