Delphi complete works of.., p.445
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 445
For the truth of this I call to witness the innumerable friends and literary comrades and strangers who came to make the author a visit; without exception they found him ready with counsel and help, ready with those precious words which elicit confidences and calm and heal the soul.
No one understood as he did the path to hearts. He himself had had hardships in the beginning and his extraordinary sensitiveness, which I shall presently attempt to analyze, caused him to place vividly before his own mind all the difficulties and rebuffs and shames others might have met, and with unexampled sharpness and vigor in particulars. When a man stood before him with his face in a strong light he divined him and summed him up with a precision which was like magic; but he was chary of words and only used his eyes, so soft, veiled and yet so penetrating!— “The look out of his eyes warmed one” — that was the phrase which I caught from so many lips during those days of mourning; and I admired the justice of the expression. Moreover, confession — that balm for souls which indignation or disdain has closely imprisoned, that consolation of the afflicted, of the abandoned and those in revolt — confession came true and sincere from the hearts of the rudest people; yes, the ears of my beloved father have had to hear strange avowals!
I believe also that in him people divined a veritable ferment of indulgence; his love of pardon and of sacrifice belonged to his Catholic blood. He believed that every crime could be forgiven and that nothing was absolutely irreparable when confronted by a sincere repentance. So many luckless ones are captives of the evil which they themselves have caused and only begin their crimes over again through distress! My father had a final argument; he pointed out to them how he himself had been struck by illness in his mid career, and how, by the force of his will, he could offer himself now as an example. His strength of argument was such that very few resisted him.
And then, what an intimate eloquence was his! His words and his very intonations remain in my memory quite intact. The tone was not the same when he was telling some story in lively, splendid and precise words, as when he took my sufferings in hand. In the latter case he employed words which were vague enough at first and rather murmured than spoken, accompanied by gestures gently persuasive. By little and little, and with infinite precaution and delicacy, this speech became more definite and connected; it wove about one’s being a thousand little tangible and intangible bonds, a fine and delicate cobweb for the heart, in which the heart very soon was beating warm. That is the way he employed strategy; but what I cannot express in words was the spontaneity and irresistible grace of his manoeuvres, half methodical, half inexplicable, the net result of which was the solace of unhappiness.
He expected silence to do a great deal; in this silence the last words he had uttered vibrated and thus grew in grandeur. I can still see certain people standing erect before his table with moist eyes and trembling hands. I can see others seated, turning toward him with a movement of thanks, astonished by so much wisdom as his. I can see the frightened ones and the stutterers, to whom he knew how to give confidence by means of a smile. Or else, while waiting for the result of his counsel, he would pretend to look up a piece of paper or his pen, his pipe or his eye-glass, somewhere about his always cluttered table.
A depositary of so many confidences and secrets, my father kept them to himself; he has carried them with him into his tomb; very often I guessed at certain things, but when I put him questions, he gently evaded me and teased me for my curiosity.
Far, far back, at the very beginning of my youngest childhood, I can perceive the kindness of my father. That kindness shows itself in caresses, he draws me close to him, he tells me wonderful stories, we walk together through the streets of Paris and everything seems to have the appearance of a festival. I perceive the warmth of the sun and then another warmth, softer and nearer to me, which is transmitted by the dear, strong hand. In my narrow little breast I feel something tangible and exquisite, for the sake of which my breathing is quicker, something which I have already learned to call happiness, and as I walk along I repeat to myself I am very happy to-day. My father talks to me; for me he has neither features nor face; he is not a marvellous man, but just simply my father. I often call him Papa, Papa, just for the simple pleasure which that word gives me, because attached to it seem all the germs of brilliant and noteworthy ideas. I ask him questions about everything around us, in order to hear the sound of his voice, which appears to me like the most beautiful music and seems to sound in exact accord with the happiness and brilliancy of all my hopes.
We pass through squares full of people and enter grand mansions; those who greet us are jovial and Papa always makes them laugh. I am wonderfully quick to perceive that there is something in him which is greater than that which exists in others. They turn toward him, they address themselves to him.
We are in the working-room, he, my mother, and I; at that time we inhabited the old Hôtel Lamoignon, 24 Pavée Street in the Marais; this time there is sunshine, too, in the shape of a big yellow streak which lengthens the designs of the carpet, a streak which I insist upon trying to polish by rubbing it with my hand. My mother is seated and writes; my father also writes, but standing up, using a little plank screwed to the wall. Now and then he stops, turns about and puts a question to my mother. From the way in which they look at each other I divine that they are very happy. Now and then he quits his place, strolls up and down with long steps, repeating in a low tone phrases which I know are his “work.”
These conversations of my father with himself when he “plunges into work,” form part of my childhood’s atmosphere. This expression of plunging into work often makes me pensive, but the most violent labor does not prevent him from raising me in his arms when he passes near me, or of kissing me, or of standing me upright on an armchair or on a table, — a dangerous but delightful exercise, during which I feel perfect confidence as to his strength.
Of all my comrades he it is who knows how to play the best. In a corner we have a great mass of paper balls, in order to have a snowball fight; we have a corner of the drawing-room where two armchairs placed together form an actual cabin, in which we do not fear the attacks of savages and where all the fruits of the Fortunate Isles grow in abundance. When winter’s cold groups us about the fire, Robinson Crusoe’s shelter is between the thin knees of my father; as to the roof of the cabin, that is his inevitable laprug which has been known to take on the strangest forms and reach the most unexpected destinations. The situation in my mind is twofold; I know perfectly well that my father draws on his fancy and holds the thread of the plot; nevertheless I believe in my own rôle and I inhabit with him a lonely country which a very terrifying conflagration ever lights up.
Here is a painful matter: later, very much later, it must be a year and a half ago, when I had that typhoid fever and my father watched me every night; my vague and floating brain revived those distant remembrances. As in the case of a weakened convalescent, my memory went back to pluck these flowers of my extreme youth. I trod again the pathway of the heaped-up years and with an inexpressible tenderness looked upon the handsome face of my beloved, turned toward me under the rays of the lamp; he did not seem to be changed at all.
Often, as he recalled it to me later, were our walks in the fields of Champrosay, roads given over to filial love, roads of my heart! At that time I was hardly four years old and my father held me by the hand. I had an idea that I was leading him and constantly called out “Look out, Papa, beware of the little stones!”
Since that time, O Destiny, he has had need of my grown man’s arm! We passed again over the same paths, becoming gently melancholy the while. We called back again those fragile hours in the meadows and autumnal plains, the splendor of which he would celebrate in familiar brief phrases, and once more in the footpaths among the broom and common herbs the past touched the present. Our silence was filled with regret, for we had formed the most beautiful dreams of trips together, travels on foot yielding all the emotions and all the surprises which my friend knew how to extract from the slightest episodes; but his malady made all these things impossible!
“Do you know, Léon, under what guise the roads appear to me? As escapes from my pain! O, to flee away and disappear behind a bend of the road! How beautiful they are, those long pink turnpikes of France which I would have so liked to tread with you and your brother!” He raised his black eyes with a great sigh, and I felt my love for him augmented by an immense pity.
At the end of my childhood my father stands before me proud and valiant and ready for his growing fame. I know that he writes fine books, for his friends compliment him about them, his big friends whom I call the giants, who come to dine in the house — M. Flaubert, M. de Goncourt! I am very fond of M. Flaubert; he kisses me with a loud laugh. He speaks in a very high voice and a very strong one, while he beats with his fists upon the table.
When they are gone we talk about them with admiration.
Then my education begins; my father and mother undertake it all; I shall talk about this later. At present simply a few recollections:
We are in the country in Provence at the house of a friend. On a delightful morning filled with fragrances and the hum of bees my companion takes his copy of Virgil, his lap-rug and his short pipe. We settle down on the brink of a river; the horizon, where lines of gold and rose are trembling, is of a divine purity and is heightened by the slender dark cypresses. My father explains the Georgics to me. Thus does poetry show itself to me! All of a sudden, at a single stroke, the beauty of the verses and the rhythm of the singing voice and the harmony of the landscape — penetrate my heart. An immense beatitude invades me, I feel myself ready to weep, and as he knows what is passing within me, he draws me to his breast, increases the charm and shares in my enthusiasm; I am fairly drunk with beauty.
This time it is the evening. I come back from college after several courses in philosophy: with incomparable power Burdeau, our master, has just been analyzing Schopenhauer for us. Gloomy images have torn my soul; positively, in that lecture I have eaten of the fruit of death and pain. Through what disproportion of things have the words of that sombre thinker completely conquered me and won such an actual power in my impressionable brain? My father understands my terror; I hardly say a word to him, but he sees something has been born within my look which is too hard for a growing boy. Then he goes about it as before. He approaches me tenderly and he who is already filled with sombre presages about himself celebrates for my sake the glory of life in unforgettable terms.
He talks of labor that ennobles everything; of goodness radiating happiness; of the sense of pity which provides an asylum for the sad; finally of love, the only consoler for death, love, which I only knew by name, but which was soon to be revealed to me and was to overwhelm me with happiness. How strong and pressing are his words! He makes a radiant picture of that life on which I am embarking. Before his eloquence the arguments of the philosopher fall one by one; he repulses triumphantly this first and decided attack of metaphysics.
Do not smile, ye who read me; to-day I understand the importance of that little family drama. Since that unforgettable evening I have gorged myself with metaphysics and I know that in that way a subtle poison has slipped into my brain as into those of my contemporaries. It is not through its pessimism that this philosophy is perilous, but because it carries people aside from life and overwhelms humanity in us. Bitterly do I regret that I did not jot down the lecture my father gave; it would have been in many ways a great comfort.
Thus I reach the final years, only stopping at the brighter points of that life of filial piety on which my whole being depends. If I speak of myself, still it is always he round whom the matter runs, because I was his field of trial — a field, alas, very often ungrateful and without a harvest.
My father would have liked me to have entered the literary career in the line of instruction. It seemed to him that the finest of all duties was the education of young minds to the point of understanding ideas, following them step by step, forming in them a character and developing in them the power of feeling. He admired all those in our epoch who have, as he was wont to say “taken charge of souls,” and he showed a sympathy and respect to my masters at Louis le Grand College which most of them unquestionably will recall. By what way and wherefore did destiny at first drag me toward medicine? That is something of which I shall speak in another place. His own maladies and the visits of celebrated doctors unquestionably had a good deal to do with it, so impressionable is youth!
But the very day on which that career repulsed me, the day I grew disgusted with the charnel house, its examinations and its competitions, he respected my evolution. My first literary essays, which I read to him at the Baths of Lamalou, were resolutely encouraged by him; and from that very moment, entering into the estate on which he planted and caused to grow such magnificent trees, I profited every day by his counsel and experience.
In the rare old copy of Montaigne that never left him, which carries on its yellow and green pages the traces of visits to many a noted thermal bath — in this book wherein he found every kind of instruction and every sort of comfort, I find that famous chapter on The Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers marked and annotated with special care. Unquestionably, he had realized for several years past that there had been roused in me, and almost without my knowledge, that strange literary demon from whom it is not possible to escape.
When I confessed to him this new zeal which had filled me, he gave me a fine lecture which I remember perfectly. It took place in a vulgar and bare hotel room; by some unusual chance my mother had been forced to stay in Paris with my brother Lucien and my sister Edmée who was then very young. He spoke to me with a gravity full of emotion, coming after his usual manner very near to my heart and my intelligence. He represented to me the troubles of the profession of a man-of-letters, in which no one has a right to be an artist in the highest sense, because one remains always responsible for those who, reading one’s books, might be troubled in mind thereby. He did not conceal from me the many and varied difficulties which I would meet upon my way — even admitting that success would favor me, “which is very rare!” To this he added some very simple rules, but so true! — rules for sincerity and effect in style, the part played by observation and imagination, the building up of a work, its method, and the relief to be given therein to the actors and their temperaments.
I listened in a religious spirit. Well I understood that he was pouring forth to me, there, the accumulated result of his hard work and the finest crystallization of his mind. At about that time we were in the habit of reading Pascal of an evening in a loud voice from chamber to chamber and from bed to bed. He presented this sublime master of style to me along with his beloved Montaigne, not as if he were too lofty an example, but like a constant stimulus. He also spoke to me of his own sufferings, but in a manner almost like that of a philosopher in order not to make me sad; and he insinuated that, for a number of souls who have not expressed themselves, literature was a solace and relief, such persons finding in it a mirror and a guide. He showed me the nearest examples in Flaubert and the de Goncourt brothers. He closed with a eulogy upon life in all its forms, even the most painful.
The light was failing, but still lit up his proud and delicate face. Filled with a sort of holy confidence, I traced his words back to their original meaning, back to those deep motives concerning which he was silent. Between us two there was some happiness but a great deal of anxiety. As I evoke them, I make them live again, decisive hours that they were!
From that day onward till his last hour he never ceased to counsel and instruct and guide me; we got in the habit of such a way of talk that I was able to translate his silences, so that a single word from him was equivalent to long phrases. From that time forth, without a variation or truce, he was my impartial and tender critic.
During his last years the fear of losing him grew upon me, but owing to that sorrowful privilege of mine it made me attentive to his slightest word. That has made it possible for me to write this book. I lived as it were in a cave where shone a perpetual flame; our garden at Champrosay and his working room are crammed with the memories of conversations in which I limited myself to questions concerning all the great problems of humanity. I shall try to give some idea of his curt, elliptical and picturesque language, which really approached a human look, owing to its intensity, rapidity and the crowding of images. Of a surety the novelist was a power and the future will show him to have been one still more; but the man behind the novelist had not his equal for’ the treasures of experience and truth, which, like minted money, he poured forth from dawn to night.
His friends knew his power of divination well; he analyzed the most distant and varied events with an almost infallible acuteness. His rare mistakes became for him so many causes for new observations of himself. His pitying, charitable nature was lightened by playful and ironical phrases in which tears seemed to mix with smiles. At our family table in the presence of my grandmother, whom he adored, his wife, whom he loved more than anything else, his baby daughter and two sons — at our delightful table which his departure has left so empty and silent, he took as much trouble in conversation as he would at a reunion of his friends.
There indeed it was that death came to seize him on the 16th of December, 1897. It was during dinner. I had come in somewhat late and found our little family met together as was usual in his working-room. I gave him my arm into the diningroom and seated him in his big armchair. Whilst taking his soup, he began to converse; neither in his movements nor his way of acting was there anything to announce such a disaster; when, all of a sudden, during a short and terrible silence, I heard that frightful noise which one never forgets — a veiled rattle in the throat followed by another rattle. As my mother cried out we rushed toward him.
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