Delphi complete works of.., p.378
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 378
Then he sent his dear constituents to the devil, and the Muse of agricultural comitias was forced to veil her face.
Veil thy face, O Muse of agricultural comitias! When at the end of an hour the servants of the sub-prefecture, uneasy about their master, entered the little wood, they saw a sight that caused them to recoil with horror. The sub-prefect was lying on his stomach in the grass, his clothes loose, his coat off, as disorderly as a bohemian, and — all the while chewing violets — he, the sub-prefect, was writing poetry!
BIXIOU’S PORTFOLIO.
ONE MORNING IN the month of October, a few days before leaving Paris, a man entered my room while I was at breakfast, an old man in a shabby, muddy coat, his spine bent, and trembling on his long legs like an unfledged heron. This was Bixiou. Yes, Parisians, your Bixiou, the malicious, fascinating Bixiou, — that frantic jester, who delighted you for fifteen years with his pamphlets and his caricatures. Ah! the poor fellow, what distress! Were it not for a grimace he made as he entered the room I should never have recognized him.
With his head bent sideways to his shoulder, a cane at his teeth like a flute, the illustrious and lugubrious jester advanced to the middle of the room, striking against my table, and saying in a doleful voice: —
“Have pity on a poor blind man!”
The mimicry was so good that I could not help laughing. But he, very coldly: —
“You think I am joking — look!”
And he turned to me a pair of white eyes, sightless.
“I am blind, my dear fellow, blind for life. That is what comes of writing with vitriol. I have burned out my eyes at that pretty trade; yes, burned them to the socket — to the bobèches!” he added, showing me his calcined eyelids, in which not the vestige of a lash remained.
I was so moved that I could not speak to him. My silence made him uneasy.
“Are you at work?”
“No, Bixiou, I am at breakfast. Will you have some?”
He did not answer, but by the quivering of his nostrils I saw his desire to accept. I took him by the hand and seated him beside me.
While they served him, the poor devil breathed in, as it were, the food with a laugh.
“It smells good, all that. I shall feast well; it is so long since I gave up breakfasting. A two-sous loaf every morning while I haunt the ministries, — for you know I haunt the ministries now-a-days; that’s my only profession. I am trying to hook a tobacco license. You are shocked, but what am I to do? They must have food at home. I can’t design any longer; I can’t write. Dictate? But what? I have nothing in my head now; I can’t invent. My business was to see the grimaces of Paris and show them up, and I can’t do that any longer. So I bethought me of a tobacco license — not on the boulevards, you understand. I have no claim to that favour, not being the mother of a danseuse, nor the widow of an officer. No, simply some little provincial tobacco office, far away, in a corner of the Vosges. There I shall set up a big porcelain pipe and call myself Hans or Zébédé, as in Erckmann-Chatrian, and I shall console myself for not writing any longer by making cornucopias for snuff out of the works of my contemporaries.
“That is all I ask for. Not much, is it? Well, it is the devil and all to get it. And yet I ought not to be without influence. Think how I used to be in the thick of everything! I dined with the marshal, and the prince, and the ministers; all those people wanted me because I amused them, or else because they were afraid of me. Now, I can’t make any one afraid. Oh, my eyes! my poor eyes! No one invites me now. It is too dismal to have a blind head at table. Pass me the bread, if you please. Ah! those bandits; they are making me pay dear for that wretched tobacco license. For six months I have lobbied the ministries with my petition. I get there every morning when the servants are lighting the fires and exercising their Excellencies’ horses in the courtyards, and I don’t leave till night, when the lamps are brought in and the kitchens begin to smell good. My whole life is spent on the wooden chests of antechambers. The ushers know me well, I can tell you! At the Interior they call me ‘That kind monsieur!’ because, to get their good word, I make puns or sketch them some of the big-wigs on a corner of their tablets, which makes them laugh. That’s what I’ve come to after twenty years of rollicking successes! that’s the end of an artist’s life. And to think that there are forty thousand young rascals in France whose very mouths water to take up that profession! To think that every day in the provinces a locomotive gets up steam to bring batches of imbeciles hungry for literature and printed rubbish to Paris! Ah! deluded provinces, if Bixiou’s miserable fate could only teach you a lesson!”
So saying, he dropped his nose into his plate and began to eat with avidity, without another word. It was piteous to see him. Every second he lost his bread, his fork, and felt about for his glass. Poor man! he had not yet got the habit of blindness.
After a while, he resumed: —
“Do you know what is most horrible of all to me? It is that I can no longer read the papers. You have to belong to, the newspaper business to understand that. Sometimes, in the evening when I go home I buy one, only to smell that odour of damp paper and fresh news. It is so good! but there’s no one to read it to me. My wife might, but she won’t; she pretends that in the ‘diverse facts’ there is so much that is improper. Ha! those former mistresses! once married, there are none more prudish than they. Ever since I made her Madame Bixiou she thinks herself bound to be a bigot — and to such a point! Didn’t she want to have me wash my eyes with water from the Salette? and then, holy bread, and holy water, and collections, and Foundlings and Chinese orphans and I don’t know what all. We are in good works up to our chin. I think it would be a good work to read me my newspaper, but no, she won’t. If my daughter were at home she would read it to me, but after I became blind I sent her to Notre-Dame-des-Arts, to have one less mouth to feed. She’s another who gives me comfort! not nine years in the world, and she has had every known disease! And sad! and ugly! uglier than I, if that’s possible — a fright! Well, I never could make anything but caricatures, and she is one of them — Ah ça! I’m a fine fellow to be telling you my family histories. What are they to you? Come, give me a little more of that brandy. I must brace myself up; I am going from here to the ministry of Public Instruction, and the ushers there are not so easy as some to amuse — they are all retired professors.”
I poured him out his brandy. He began to drink it with little sips and a gentler air. Presently I don’t know what fancy took him, but he rose, glass in hand, turned on all sides that head of a blind adder, with the cajoling smile of a man about to speak, and said, in a strident voice, as if haranguing a banquet of two hundred guests: —
“To Art! To Letters! To the Press!”
And thereupon he launched into a ten minutes’ speech, the craziest, most marvellous improvisation which ever issued from that satirical brain.
Imagine a review of events at the end of a year, entitled, “The Bohemia of Letters in 18—” — our so called literary meetings, our disquisitions, our quarrels, all the absurdities of an eccentric society, a sewer of ink, hell without grandeur, where the denizens throttle, and gut, and rob one another, and talk interest and sous (far more than they do among the bourgeois), which does not hinder many from dying of hunger — in short, an epitome of all our meanness, all our paltriness; old Baron T... of the Tombola going about saying “gna, gna, gna” in the Tuileries gardens with his wooden bowl and his bottle-blue coat; together with the deaths of the year, the burials pro tem., the funeral orations, always the same “dear and regretted” over a poor devil whose grave no one will pay for; and the suicides, and those who have gone mad — imagine all that related, detailed, gesticulated, by a humourist of genius, and you will have an idea of Bixiou’s improvisation.
His speech ended and the brandy drunk, he asked me what time it was and went away without bidding me good-bye. I don’t know what the ushers of M. Duruy thought of his visit that morning, but I know that never in all my life did I feel more sad or so ill at ease for the work of the day as I did that morning after the departure of my terrible visitor. My inkstand sickened me, my pen was a horror to me. I wanted to rush away, afar, to see trees, to smell something good. What hatred, great God! what gall! what a need to slaver all things! to soil all things! Ah! the miserable man!
I paced up and down my room in a fury, fancying I still heard the sneer of disgust with which he had spoken of his daughter.
Suddenly, near the chair where the blind man had been sitting, I felt something touch my foot. Stooping I saw his portfolio, a big, shiny wallet with broken edges, which never left him, and which he called in jest his “venom pocket.” That pocket was as renowned among us as the famous boxes of M. de Girardin. It was said there were terrible things within it. The opportunity now offered itself to ascertain if this were so. In falling, the old portfolio, stuffed too full, had burst, and the papers lay scattered on the carpet. I was forced to pick them up, one by one; and so doing I saw: —
A number of letters, written on flowered paper, all beginning: “My dear papa,” and signed Céline Bixiou of the Children of Marie.
Old prescriptions for children’s ailments; croup, convulsions, scarlatina, measles; the poor little thing had not been spared a single one.
Finally, from a large sealed envelope, a few strands of yellow curly hair were escaping, and on the paper was written, in big, straggling writing, the writing of a blind man: —
“Céline’s hair, cut off May 13th; the day she entered over there.”
That is what there was in Bixiou’s portfolio.
Ah, Parisians, you are all alike. Disgust, sarcasm, infernal laughter, ferocious jeers, and then — Céline’s hair, cut off May 13th.
THE LEGEND OF THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN BRAIN.
TO THE LADY WHO ASKS FOR GAY STORIES.
ON READING YOUR letter, madame, I felt something like remorse. I blamed myself for the halfmourning colour of my tales, and I resolved to offer you to-day something joyous, even wildly joyous.
Why should I be sad, after all? I am living a thousand leagues from Parisian fogs, on a luminous hill, in a land of tambourines and muscat wine. Around me is nought but sun and music; I have orchestras of finches, choral societies of torn-tits; in the morning, curlews are saying: Coureli! coureli! at midday come the cicadas; and then the shepherds playing their fifes, and the pretty young brunettes laughing among the vines. In truth, this place is ill-chosen to rub-in black. I ought rather to send to a lady rose-coloured poems and tales of gallantry.
But, no! I am still too near Paris. Every day that city sends me, even among my pines, spatterings of her sadness. At the moment when I write these lines, the news reaches me of poor Charles Barbara’s miserable death, and my mill is a place of mourning. Adieu, curlews and cicadas! I have no heart now for gayety. This is why, madame, instead of the lively, jesting story that I meant to write for you, you must accept to-day one more melancholy legend.
There was once a man with a golden brain; yes, madame, a brain all golden. When he came into the world the doctors thought that the babe could not live, so heavy was his head and his cranium so developed. He did live, however, and he grew in the sun like a beautiful olive-tree. But his big head dragged him about, and it was pitiable to see how he knocked against the furniture as he went along. He often fell. Once he rolled from the top of a portico and struck his forehead on the marble steps, and his skull rang like an ingot of metal. They thought him dead; but, on picking him up, only a slight wound was found, out of which two or three tiny drops of gold oozed into his hair. This was how his parents first knew that his brain was gold.
The thing was kept secret. The poor little fellow himself did not know it. Now and then he would ask why they no longer let him run out to play with the children in the street.
“They would steal you, my dear treasure,” replied his mother.
That gave the little one a great fear of being stolen. He played alone, and said no more; staggering heavily from one room to another.
When he was eighteen years of age his parents first revealed to him the abnormal gift he had received from fate; and as they had brought him up and fed him until that day, they asked him, in return, for a little of his gold. The lad did not hesitate. Instantly — how, or by what means, the legend does not say — he tore from his brain a morsel of massive gold, a piece as big as a nut, and proudly flung it on his mother’s lap. Then, quite dazzled by the thought of the riches he carried in his brain, mad with desires, drunk with his power, he quitted his father’s house and went out into the world, squandering his treasure.
At the pace he led his life, in royal fashion, sowing gold without counting it, one would have thought that his brain was inexhaustible. It did exhaust itself, however, and by degrees his eyes grew dim, his cheeks hollow. At last, one morning after a wild debauch, the unfortunate fellow, left alone amid the fragments of the feast and the lamps that were paling, was horrified at the enormous breach he had made in his ingots. It was time to stop.
Henceforth, a new existence. The man with the golden brain went away, to live apart, by the work of his hands; suspicious and timid as a miser, fleeing from temptation, striving to forget, himself, the fatal riches which he desired never to touch again. Unfortunately, a friend followed him into his solitude; and that friend knew his secret.
One night the poor man was awakened by a pain in his head, a dreadful pain; he sprang up terrified, and saw, in a moon ray, his friend hastily departing and hiding something beneath his cloak.
A piece of his brain which was stolen from him! Some time later, the man with the golden brain fell in love. This time all was over with him. He loved with the best of his soul a fair-haired little woman, who loved him in return, but nevertheless preferred bow-knots and feathers and pretty bronze tassels to her boots.
Between the fingers of this dainty creature, half bird, half doll, the gold slipped gayly away. She had all the caprices; he never could say her nay; for fear of troubling her, he never told her to the last about the melancholy source of his fortune.
“We must be very rich,” she would say.
And the poor fellow answered: —
“Oh, yes! very rich indeed!”
And so saying he smiled with love at the little fairy bird that was eating his brain out innocently. Sometimes, however, fears took possession of him; he longed to become a miser; but then the little woman would come to him, skipping, and say:
“My husband, you are so rich, buy me something that is very costly.”
And he bought her something that was very costly.
This lasted two years; then, one morning, the little woman died, no one knew why, like a bird. The gold was almost at an end, and with what remained of it the widower gave his dear lost love a fine interment. Bells all ringing, mourning coaches draped with black, horses caparisoned, silver tears upon the velvet, and great black plumes upon their heads. Nothing seemed to him too magnificent. What was his gold to him now? He gave it to the church, to the bearers, to those who sold the immortelles; he gave it to every one, without a question. So, on leaving the cemetery, almost nothing remained to him of that marvellous brain, except a few atoms in the corners of the cranium.
Then he was seen to go away through the streets, with a wild look, his hands held out before him, stumbling along like a drunken man. At night, when the arcades were brilliant, he stopped before a large show-window in which a mass of stuffs and adornments glittered under the gaslight, and fixing his eyes on two pairs of blue satin slippers lined with swan’s-down, “I wonder which she would like best,” he said to himself, smiling. Then, forgetting already that the little wife was dead, he entered to buy them.
At the farther end of the shop the owner heard a loud cry; rushing forward she recoiled with fear on seeing a tall man leaning on the counter and gazing at her stupefied. In one hand he was holding a pair of blue slippers lined with swan’s-down; the other he held out to her, all cut and bleeding, with fragments of gold at the tips of the nails.
That, madame, is the legend of the man with the golden brain.
In spite of its fantastic air, this legend is true from beginning to end. There are in this world poor fellows who are compelled to live by their brains, and to pay in the fine gold of their marrow and substance for the smallest things of life. It is their daily martyrdom; and when they are weary of suffering —
THE POET MISTRAL.
LAST SUNDAY, ON rising, I fancied I had waked in the rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. It rained, the sky was gray, the mill melancholy. I was afraid to spend that cold, rainy day at home, and suddenly a desire came to me to go and warm myself up beside Frédéric Mistral, that great poet, who lives three leagues away from my pines in his little village of Maillane.
No sooner thought than gone; a myrtle-wood stick, my Montaigne, a wrap, and I am off!
No one in the fields. Our noble Catholic Provence leaves the earth to rest on Sundays. The farmhouses are closed, the dogs are alone in the yards. Now and then I meet the waggon of a carrier with its streaming hood, or an old woman wrapped in her mantle, colour of dead leaves, or mules in their gala trappings, saddle-cloths of blue and white matweed, scarlet pompons and silver bells, drawing at a trot a carriole of the farm hands going to mass; and away over there, through the fog, I see a boat on the pond and a fisherman standing to cast his net.
No possibility of reading on the way. The rain is falling in torrents and the tramontana is dashing it in bucketfuls on my face. I do the way at a rush; and after a walk of three hours I see before me the little cypress wood in the middle of which Maillane shelters itself in dread of the wind.
Not a cat in the village streets; everybody is at high-mass. As I pass before the church the trombones are snorting and I see the lighted candles through the panes of coloured glass.
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