Delphi complete works of.., p.425
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 425
Being an old Camarguais, my dear fellow, you must have heard of Arlatan’s Treasure. Little Zia died because she longed to look at it while I, on the contrary, hope that I have found in it a cure and renewed life. I shall know in a few weeks. I was warned, however, by these words of the herder:
“I have in my treasure the herb that cures and the herb that kills.”
Does not this Treasure of Arlatan’s resemble our composite and diversified imagination, which it is so dangerous to explore to its lowest depths? Of such exploration one may die or live.
Farewell for a short time, old Tim; I embrace you with a heavy heart.
HENRI DANJOU.
La Fedor (1897)
PAGES FROM LIFE.
Anonymous translation, 1899
Original French Title: ‘La Fédor’
CONTENTS
NOTE
LA FÉDOR.
AT FORT MONTROUGE.
AT LA SALPÊTRIÈRE.
MEMORIES OF A CHIEF CLERK.
THE LESSON IN HISTORY.
LES SANGUINAIRES.
THE BRISE-CAILLOUX.
THE FÊTE OF THE ROOFS.
THE THREE LOW MASSES.
NOTE
OF THE EIGHT stories now collected under the general title of La Fédor, Pages from Life, and printed in this volume, the first (La Fédor) had been previously published (in 1896) as The Burial of a Star, and three others, At Fort Montrouge, At La Salpêtrière, and The Lesson in History, in one volume (also in 1896), under the title of Three Memories.
Les Sanguinaires is, like the Lighthouse of the Sanguinaires, and like some episodes in the Nabob, an echo of the trip to Corsica by order of his physician in 1863. There are minor points of resemblance between the first-named two, notably the reference to the library of the lighthouse, consisting only of the volume of Plutarch.
LA FÉDOR.
I.
“FRANÇOIS, HERE IS Monsieur Veillon!”
At that hasty summons from the slender young woman who made her appearance between the boxes of flowers on the front stoop, François du Bréau stood erect on the lawn where he was playing with his little daughter and came forward to meet his visitor, with one hand extended, the other holding the child on his shoulder, where she laughed merrily and tossed her little pink-shod feet about in the sunshine.
“Ah! it’s Monsieur Veillon — very well, Monsieur Veillon shall be admitted. But what a shameful thing! three months without coming to Château-Fraye, without once letting us hear—”
He stopped at the foot of the steps, struck by the embarrassed, distressed expression, the look of confusion, of longing to be somewhere else, which the necessity of lying imparted to the round, kindly, moustachioed face of the oldest and best friend of his youth.
“Have you something to say to me?”
“Yes — not before your wife.”
The words were exchanged, whispered as they nervously shook hands; but not until the breakfast hour were the two friends left alone for a moment. When the nurse had carried away “Mademoiselle,” all her charms having been exhibited to Monsieur, he must inspect the estate, which had been greatly changed, greatly improved in the last few months. This Château-Fraye, which gave its name to Madame du Bréau’s family, was a domain of great antiquity, half donjon, half refinery, flanked by a massive tower and by a park with trees dating from feudal times, where a mammoth chimney poured forth its smoke over endless plains of wheat, barley and beets; except for the reddish glow which Paris kindled every evening on the horizon, one might have fancied oneself in the heart of Artois or Sologne. There, ever since their marriage two years before, the Marquis du Bréau and his young wife, his “little Château-Fraye,” as he called her, had lived in a solitude as exclusive as their love.
As they were about to take their places at the table, the nurse appeared once more; she came to call Madame to the child.
“This nounou [Nurse.] represents a type,” said the young mother unconcernedly, “she is the peasant woman with scruples — one is never free from her. Finish your breakfast, messieurs, I beg, don’t wait for me.” As she left the table she smiled prettily in the security of happiness. As the door closed behind her, the husband instantly asked:
“What’s the matter?”
“Louise is dead,” his friend replied gravely.
The other did not understand at first.
“Why, Loulou, you know — La Fédor.’’
François seized his friend’s hand nervously under the table.
“Dead! are you sure?”
And when his friend answered affirmatively with an emphatic nod, Du Bréau uttered not a sigh, but a cry, a bray of relief:
“At last!”
That outburst of joy in the face of death was so pitilessly selfish — especially with regard to a woman like La Fédor, the famous actress, admired and coveted of all men, whom he had held against his heart for six years — that he felt ashamed and embarrassed, tried to excuse himself:
“It’s horrible, isn’t it? but if you knew how unhappy she made me at the time of our separation, with her frantic letters, her threats, her constant waiting in front of my door. Six months before my wedding and ten months, yes, fifteen months after, I lived in a constant state of terror and dread, dreaming of nothing but murder, suicide, vitriol and revolvers. She had sworn that she would die, but would kill everybody first — the man, the wife, even the child, if I had one. And to any one who knew her well, there was nothing extravagant about her threats. I could not take my poor wife anywhere, nor go out on foot with her, without a dread of some ridiculous or tragic scene. And why should it be? What claim had she on my life? I owed her nothing, at all events no more than others, than so many others. I had been too attentive, that was all. And then I was young, I did not belong to her world of authors and strolling players. She expected something more from me — marriage, perhaps, and my name. Such things have been known. Ah! poor Loulou, I bear her no grudge for it now, but how she did pester me! My friends were astonished at this interminable wedding-journey; they can understand it now, and why, instead of returning to Paris, I came and shut myself up here, seized with a sudden passion for scientific farming. Even here I was not always free from anxiety, and when the bell at the main gateway on the road rang very loud or at unusual hours, my heart would leap in my breast and I would say to myself: ‘There she is!’”
Veillon, who, while eating with a healthy appetite, listened attentively to these confidences interrupted by the going and coming of the servants, replied in a reproachful tone:
“Well, you can sleep in peace now — she died day before yesterday at Wissous, at her sister’s, who took her in four months ago when her disease took a turn for the worse.”
Du Bréau felt a thrill of remorse. Ill, and so near to him, only a few leagues away, and he had known nothing of it.
“How did you learn that she was there?”
“She wrote me to come and see her. I found her in the most bourgeois surroundings, most contrary to her nature, living with Marie Fédor, who once won the prize in tragedy, now Madame Restouble, wife of the notary of Wissous.”
“But they detested each other.”
“Oh! Loulou was very unjust. She bore her sister a grudge for turning her back on the stage to marry her student of the good old days at the Conservatoire.”
Du Bréau began to laugh.
“Her student? Which one? She had more than twenty.”
“She married only one, however, Maître Restouble, whose escutcheon has shone resplendent on the prettiest little house in Wissous for I don’t know how many generations. That is where I found your former flame.”
“Why didn’t you tell me of it?”
“Because you are married, because you love your wife — that past life of yours had no interest for you. But to-day—” Veillon hesitated a second, then, still very coldly, but with a visible quivering of his heavy brown moustache:
“The funeral is to be at three o’clock. I promised that you should be there.”
François du Bréau had no time to reply; his wife entered the room, less radiant than a moment before, with an anxious expression in her pretty eyes. For once the nurse was right; the child’s eyelids were burning hot and so were her little hands.
“Oh! it will not amount to anything,” added the mother hastily, misunderstanding the embarrassment and alarm which she divined around the table.
“That is not what disturbs us,” said her husband; “but I have just learned of a death — some one whom I knew very intimately.”
“Who is it, pray?”
Veillon came to his friend’s rescue. It was one of their old school-fellows at Louis-le-Grand, Georges Hofer, at whose house they used sometimes to breakfast on Sunday, in their younger days. His parents, who were brewers on a large scale, had their brewery on the other side of the Seine, in the vast plains which extend to Montlhéry. He had died there and was to be buried that day.
Madame du Bréau looked at her husband.
“You never mentioned this Georges Hofer to me.”
“It’s a long time since I saw him,” he replied.
“Never mind,” interposed Veillon, very seriously, “you will do well to come.”
And his wife said, even more seriously:
“You must go, my dear.”
The sweet, compassionate tone in which she said it touched them both. They spoke of it an hour later in the Grande-Ceinture train which took them to Juvisy, where the plains of Wissous begin.
“Do you suppose she suspected anything?” queried Veillon.
Du Bréau thought not.
“She would have told me. She is a transparent, earnest creature, incapable of concealing anything. La Fédor used to say sometimes: ‘I am a good fellow, you can trust me.’ — A good fellow, I grant you, but a cursed woman all the same, who, as she was born in the gutter and never had anything to guide her but her instincts as a prostitute and actress, imagined that all women were like her, only more foolish and more wicked, and tried to make me believe it. If I had not had the good fortune to meet my little Château-Fraye and to go mad over her at once, on my word, I might have ended by marrying her.”
“You wouldn’t have had very much of her, however,” murmured Veillon with a heart-rending smile. “Poor Louise was doomed.”
“Why, what did she die of? I left her in the best of health and as vigorous as possible.”
His friend, leaning on the window-sill and looking out, muttered a few words under his moustache: exhaustion, bronchitis not properly treated — no one knew just what it was. There was a moment’s silence; then, when the station of Juvisy was announced, Veillon said:
“We must get out here; we will walk the rest of the way.”
Beneath a July sky, white hot, a sky of molten sunshine, the king’s pavement, as it is still called, stretched away interminably, lined with stunted elms and monumental milestones. At intervals, beside the ditch-banks covered with closely-cropped scorched grass, a commemorative stone post or iron cross marked the spot where such and such a person, market-gardener of this or that town in Seine-et-Oise, returning home from the market at Paris, was crushed to death by the wheels of his wagon.
“Fatigue or drink, sometimes both,” murmured Veillon.
And Du Bréau rejoined in an indifferent tone:
“Talking of drink, what about Louise’s musician, do you hear anything of him? You know whom I mean, that Desvarennes, the orchestra leader who consoled her at last in her widowhood? It seems that they used to fight and get tipsy on absinthe every night.”
Veillon turned on him sharply: —
“Who told you that? Who saw her? And even suppose it were true? La Fédor was an artist of great talent none the less, a beautiful girl and a good girl, who loved you as well as she knew how, and that is certainly worth the two or three hours you are giving her to-day.”
Having reached the end of the king’s pavement, the two friends took one of the innumerable country roads, burning hot and thick with dust, which run hither and thither as far as the eye can see among the fields of rye and wheat, dazzling and quivering with heat in the bright sun. The air was scorching. Here and there a church steeple, the white glare of a rough-cast wall interrupted the unbroken line of the horizon; but the road they were following never went in the direction of the steeple or the wall.
“You are not going to lose your way, are you?” said Du Bréau to his companion, who had halted in front of a sign-post at the junction of two roads.
Veillon reassured him; he knew the road from Wissous to Château-Fraye very well, having recently driven over it with Louise.
“For, just imagine, my dear fellow, the poor girl had but one object, one hope in taking refuge with her sister, whom she detested, whom she believed to be her most deadly enemy, and that was to see you again. On my first visit she broached the subject to me: ‘You see, my little Veillon,’ she said, with the artless grace which suffering had restored to her, ‘it wasn’t possible for him to come and see me when I was leading a vicious life, living in Bohemia; but here, with people who are married, in a magistrate’s house — great God! my sister tells me often enough that her husband’s a magistrate — there is nothing to keep him away, is there?’ — Ah! the unhappy girl — what a hard time I had convincing her that she was dreaming of something that was impossible, that a man of honor like you could not do that, certainly would not do it, — and, after all, I failed to convince her.” Du Bréau, who had stopped to light a cigarette, murmured after a moment’s pause: —
“But why should we meet? What could we have said to each other?”
“Oh! I know well enough what she would have said to you, and why she was so bent upon seeing you before she died.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to ask you to forgive her. Yes, to forgive her letters, her threats, all the insane freaks with which she persecuted you. I confess that, in the face of her distress and remorse, I lied abominably to poor Loulou, making her believe that everything was forgiven and forgotten. But don’t imagine that I got out of the difficulty with that!
When she fully understood that you would not come to Wissous, that you could not come, then she sang another song. Your life at Château-Fraye, your household, did you have music in the evening, did the little girl look like you — there was no end to her questions. As soon as I arrived it was impossible to talk to her about anything else. And one day she informed us that she wanted to see your house, just the walls, just the tops of the trees. It was then that I realized how entirely mistaken she was about her sister. Prostrated and ill as she was, she could not be taken on the train; she must make the whole journey in a carriage, stretched out on the cushions. I can fairly say that Marie Fédor was wonderfully patient and gentle, and that, except for her, Louise would never have been able to gratify her whim. A genuine journey it was, long and tiresome. But it all seemed magically beautiful to her; that first breath of spring, eager and joyous, the new grass appearing in all the fields, everything combined to intoxicate her. We stopped at the Bois-Margot, left the carriage there and took a cross-road overgrown with brambles, what the road-menders call a dead road. It skirts the park of Château-Fraye, and we all three crept along close to the walls, which were hot with the sun. I was afraid of being seen by one of your farmers or by some workman from the refinery; they all know me. Luckily it was in working hours. She was excited at the idea that that enormous flock in the pasture, that shepherd, those great dogs, were yours. ‘How I am enjoying myself! How glad I am!’ she said to me, clapping her hands like a child. When we drew near the avenue, her excitement became even more intense. You know that at intervals in the wall there is a high iron gate which affords a glimpse of the double avenue of lindens separated by a broad lawn. We stood at one of them looking through the bars, inhaling the fragrance of all that new spring vegetation luxuriating in the sunshine, when I recognized your wife’s voice in the distance, and saw her coming toward us with the nurse and the child. I had barely time to step aside, leaving Louise in her sister’s arms motionless behind the gate. I did not remove my eyes from her. When your wife passed, walking backwards with tiny steps before the child, she made no sign, not a feature stirred. But it was a ghastly sight, those thin, haggard cheeks, that death mask gazing through the impassable iron bars at the most beautiful spectacle on earth, at all that could cause her envy and regret, happy motherhood and infancy. But when she saw the little one trotting by in her long frock, how that poor incurable invalid’s face brightened up! She laughed, she wept, and said in a low tone to her sister as she wiped her eyes:
‘Oh! do look at her, the darling! she has hair of the same shade as her father’s, and it curls like his. Oh! the darling, the darling!’ — Her emotion was so keen, she trembled so from head to foot, holding out her hands, that we had to tear her away, to lead her back to the carriage, where she fell on the seat utterly exhausted. She did not utter a single word during the whole drive home; she lay back with her eyes closed, breathing a bouquet of yellow flowers from the tall ebony-tree that overhangs the refinery wall. On the following Sunday when I arrived — I had fallen into the habit of going to see her every Sunday — I found her as always in the garden, stretched out in a great easy-chair upholstered in pale green, in which her hollow face, her thin arms, her long hands gave her a lamentable appearance of prostration. It seemed to me as if I were looking at her in that last act of La Dame, in which Desclée alone could be compared with her. ‘I shall not try it again,’ she said, referring to her visit to Château-Fraye. ‘I suffered too much, I am completely done up.’ — Lowering her voice because of the gardener, who was raking close by, she added: ‘My sister knew very well what she was about when she suggested that journey to me — she turned the knife in my heart, and the blade has remained there.’ — Was there ever such injustice! That poor Marie Fédor, devoted to her every hour in the day, should be suspected of such scheming, such complicated perfidy! — However, you will see Madame Restouble, you will see for yourself what a dear, delightful creature she is, as little like the monster Louise described to us as the pretty house before us is like the prison in which the poor girl pretended that she had shut herself up for love of you.”
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