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Title: Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 1
        French

Editor: J. Berg Esenwein

Release date: May 13, 2024 [eBook #73621]

Language: English

Original publication: Massachusetts: The Home correspondence school

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES, VOL. 1 ***



                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

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and words in bold are represented as in =bold=.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
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                   *       *       *       *       *

                 [Illustration: =Guy de Maupassant=]




                              SHORT-STORY
                             MASTERPIECES

                           VOLUME I--FRENCH

                         DONE INTO ENGLISH AND
                         WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

                           J. BERG ESENWEIN
                   _EDITOR OF LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE_


                    THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL
                      Springfield, Massachusetts
                                 1912


           Copyright 1911 and 1912--J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
            Copyright 1912--THE HOME CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




                               CONTENTS
                               VOLUME I

                                                               PAGE

            General Introduction: The French Short-Story         3

            François Coppée and His Work                        21

            Story: The Substitute                               33

            Guy de Maupassant, Realist                          53

            Story: Moonlight                                    61

            Alphonse Daudet, Man and Artist                     71

            Story: The Pope’s Mule                              85

            Prosper Mérimée, Impersonal Analyst                101

            Story: The Taking of the Redoubt                   113

            Pierre Loti, Colorist                              123

            Story: The Marriage to the Sea                     137




                        THE FRENCH SHORT-STORY

In zest, movement, and airy charm, in glittering style, precise
characterization, and compressed vividness, the French short-story
is unsurpassed. German writers have excelled in the fantastic and
legendary tale; Russians, in both mysticism and in unrestrained
naturalism; British, in those subtle moral distinctions which reveal
character under crucial stress; Americans, more or less in all these
phases; but no nation has ever developed a school of story-tellers who
say so much in so few words, and, withal, say it so artistically and
pungently as do the French.

There is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a
French short-story. The latter implies a national genre, and indeed
this implication is sustained by an examination of French shorter
fiction.

We are justified in asserting the existence of a national type of
short-story in France, or in any other land, when its special literary
product reflects in theme the typical spirit of the nation, when its
attitude toward life is characteristic, when its literary style is
decidedly marked by national idioms, and when local color--by which
I mean an individual flavor of characters and locality--is marked
enough to be recognized as a literary trait. Tested by each of these
four standards--which I have ventured to set up rather arbitrarily--the
short-story in France is the French short-story.

A single example may serve to illustrate the application of these
tests. Here, let us imagine, are two short-stories written in French
and by Frenchmen. The one deals with a baseball game, played in Hawaii.
Its argot is that of the “diamond,” and its attitude is that of the
frenzied “fan.” The tone and the Hawaiian background will furnish
local-color enough. The second story has for its theme a tragic family
schism caused by the struggle over clericalism in France. The attitude
of the characters is typical of the contesting parties, the language is
richly idiomatic, and the local-color convincing. Of course it would
require no wisdom to determine which was the French short-story and
which merely the short-story in French.

Now, when the great mass of short-stories written in France meet two
or more of these tests, we have a national type of short-story, and
I believe that the ten stories grouped in these two little books
sufficiently illustrate the French national spirit to warrant our
accepting them as types.

At first thought it might appear that the same might be asserted of any
nation where short-stories are produced--Italy, for example. But the
facts would not bear out any such statement. True, some Italian writers
are sufficiently imbued with their language and nationality, and yet
sufficiently modern, to produce little fictions which are typically
Italian and typically short-stories, but they are too few to constitute
a school. The novel, poetry and the drama have thus far claimed the
best efforts of Italian literary folk.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In these pages the word short-story is used somewhat broadly, yet with
an eye to the technical distinctions between it and similar forms of
short narrative.

Since the earliest story-writing of which we have record in the tales
of the Egyptian papyri (4000 B. C.?), there have been short fictional
narratives in many lands, some of which meet almost every requirement
of the short-story form as we now know it. But that every such
approach to the short-story was sporadic rather than from intention
to conform to a recognized standard is certain because in each case
there was shown no progress toward a repetition of the form, but,
instead, a reversion to the types common to all short fiction--the
straightforward, unplotted chain of incidents which we call the
_tale_; the light delineation of some mood, character, or fixed
situation, likewise without real plot, which we name the _sketch_;
the condensed outline of what might well be expanded into a long story,
which we term the _scenario_; and the brief recital of some
incident with a point, known as the _anecdote_.

With occasional accidental exceptions, as just noted, all the Egyptian
tales, Greek and Roman stories, sacred narratives, mediæval tales,
legends, and wonder-stories, and modern short fictions down to the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, were of these four types.

The short-story as a conscious genre was developed in America and in
France about the same time, with the weight of opinion favoring Poe as
its “inventor.”

In 1830 Balzac began a brilliant series of novelettes, almost
short-stories, which lack only compression and unity of impression to
stamp him and not Poe as the first consistent and conscious producer
of the new form. As it is, these remarkable stories are so near to
technical perfection (as short-stories, for there can be little adverse
criticism upon them as fiction), that he must share with two Americans
the distinction of producing little stories which must have helped Poe
materially to see the new form in clear constructive vision--I mean
Irving and Hawthorne. Prior to 1835--the date of “Berenice,” Poe’s
first technically perfect short-story--both Irving and Hawthorne had
produced short fictions incomparably in advance of any consistently
frequent short narrative work theretofore. Irving’s style was kin to
Addison’s essay-stories in the _Spectator_, and even in those
altogether admirable tale-short-stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the influence of the essay form is quite
evident. Hawthorne’s stories were chiefly symbolical tales, up to
1835,[1] or expanded anecdotes done to create a single effect upon
the mind. In this they rival the singularly potent unity of Poe’s
best work. But shortly Hawthorne turned more and more aside from the
short-story to the long symbolical romance, in which he stands without
a peer in any land.

Then arose in France--for other countries require no further comment
here--a series of notable story-writers, of supreme distinction in
all that goes to make the short-story the most popular literary
type: compressed delineation of a single crucial situation, highly
centralized leading character, swift characterization, deft handling
of crisis, climax, and dénouement, and, throughout, masterful work in
local color.

The short-story nomenclature among the French is not clearly
translatable, for three reasons--we have no precise English
equivalents, critics do not entirely agree upon what equivalents are
nearest to the French terms, and, best reason of all, the French
short-stories have this in common with all others: their forms often
overlap, and so bear marks of touching more than one type. And when
I have said this I have said nothing to their discredit; only the
Procrustean purist first builds a bed and then stretches or cuts every
story-guest to fit! I cannot say this in voice loud enough: to set up a
standard of what is a true short-story is no more to decry those short
fictive narratives which do not meet the form than it would be to brand
the lyric as imperfect because it does not fulfill the requirements of
the epic.

But, to be specific, the three terms which we constantly meet in
French fiction are _roman_, _nouvelle_, and _conte_. The _roman_ may
be dismissed as a general term standing largely for what we in English
variously denominate the (long) romance, the novel, and the (long)
tale. The _nouvelle_ most nearly approaches our English short-story,
but it also stands for the novelette, or very short novel, or even
the expanded short-story. The _conte_ is really a generic word for a
short fictional narrative or any story that is short, like the tale,
the anecdote, and the fictional sketch, without meaning specifically
the short-story to whose characteristics of compression, unity of
impression, and crisis, climax and dénouement of plot, I have just
referred.

So I repeat: in these studies the term short-story must be given some
latitude of interpretation.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The French short-story of the last eighty years is not only typically
Gallic but characteristic of the period. Just as there are four tests
of nationality in fiction so there are four forces which contribute
to its periodicity: The influence of the soil, the heritage of the
preceding period, the special characteristics of the period itself, and
the influence of surrounding nations. All these result in what may be
called the Spirit of the Period, concerning which a word must be said
presently.

The primacy of the French as _conteurs_ is doubtless due quite
as much to the rich and colorful provincial life which surrounds the
capital as to their priority as tellers of short tales. It has been
said that Paris is France. Nothing could be less true. Here is a nation
which presents the unique paradox of being at once and supremely
homogeneous and heterogeneous. The life of each province is part of
its soil, colored by the soil--or by the ever-present sea. Yet France
has a spirit of nationality equalled by no other nation. While what is
now the German Empire was still an unrelated number of minor peoples
or an integral part of some vaster state, France was a unified or at
least a closely federated kingdom. While Britain was changing under its
successive tides of invasion, what was essentially France was sending
out its national culture world-wide--it over-climbed the Pyrenees,
it spread into the Low Countries, in the west it conquered the Swiss
tongue, it permeated the Rhenish provinces, it implanted Norman life in
Britain. Thus grew the French national spirit.

Yet the provinces held tenaciously to their own picturesque types,
spoke their more than a hundred _patois_, wore their folk
costumes, sang their native songs, danced their own dances--unchanging
through the centuries. And nowhere more than in the French short-story
may we see depicted the peculiar French provincial traits. The
folk of Champagne and Picardy are shrewd, subtle, ardent, and born
_conteurs_--witness the stories of Juliette Lamber. Those of
Berry are stolid and solid, as pictured by Madame Nahant. The Gascons
are vivacious, daring, and cunning, as set forth by Emil Pouvillon. The
people of Languedoc are simple, strong and violent, as described by
Georges Baume. The happy, excitable sun-children of Provence, reveling
among their olive groves and vineyards, have been portrayed by Alphonse
Daudet; the picturesque Provençal sailors and fisherfolk live again in
the stories of Auguste Marin; while Paul Arène has done loving service
not only for Provence but for Maine as well. Maupassant has given us
notable portraits of the Norman--bold, tricky, ambitious, economical,
and of superb physique as befits the sons of sturdy men-at-arms. Loti’s
stories are redolent of the salty spume of rough, melancholy, religious
Brittany. And so, in the same recognition of rich material, Theuriet
paints Lorraine, Erckmann and Chatrian the Rhine province of Alsace,
Fabre the Cévennes, Anatole le Braz the Breton coast, Mérimée Corsica,
Maupassant Auverne, and Balzac Touraine. What a wonderful color box has
the French story-painter always open to his brush! Truly the soil and
the sea have marked this period of the short-story as well as the novel.

The inheritance of the preceding period--that of the Revolution, the
First Empire, and the First Restoration--was rich in war pictures,
dramatic episodes of intrigue, and a never-so-remarkable display
of contrasts in human passion and changing conditions. The French
short-story is therefore full of these national conditions.

The period itself, 1830-1912, witnessed kaleidoscopic social and
governmental changes--the Second Restoration, the Bourgeois Monarchy,
the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the
Commune, and the Third Republic, to say nothing of numberless minor
attempts at change. All these filled the story-teller’s pack with
rich national materials. Especially are the problems of socialism,
militarism and clericalism in evidence.

Finally, the influence of surrounding peoples has been felt not only in
the content but in the form of the French short-story.

All these forces, and others less ponderable, have fused into what
I may term the nineteenth century French spirit, as illustrated and
measurably interpreted by the French short-story.

Three sub-tones of this French symphony, to use a trope, are emotional
nature, passion for military glory, and religious sentiment. Emotional
endowment the French, in common with other Latin races, possess--a
fact which calls for no comment. The military spirit, chastened by
the experiences of the Franco-Prussian War, has been decreasingly
in evidence during the last four decades, yet indications are not
wanting that the fire burns none the less vitally because smothered by
practicalities. The war-theme constantly recurs in the short-story, and
“glory” is still dear to every Frenchman. As for the third element,
religion, the evidence is more contradictory. France has always felt
a deep undercurrent of religious feeling. Her public worship has
perpetuated this ideal in churches many and noble, as well as in a
pomp of ceremonial peculiarly suited to an artistic Latin people. But
I should seek for the surest proof of the religious spirit not so much
in these signs as in the life of the provinces, the influence of the
church there, and their constant manifestations of religious faith.
The clerical crisis was not confined to the great cities, so that the
last twenty years has shown marked changes in public sentiment, but
there are potent signs of a reaction toward free religious life, for
France will be church-loving. The typical abbé lives in her fiction as
beautifully as does the soldier.

And so I have ventured to name emotion, war, and religion as three
significant sub-tones of French life. But there are five other phases
of the French spirit which show out in the short-story, though they do
not seem to me so fundamental. Of these now a few words.

We find, first, volatile sentiment, as shown in quick changes of
attitude, sudden concentrations, extremes of gayety and depression,
lively speech, and a general habit of regarding a tempest in a teapot
as a serious crisis, with now and then a surprising way of smiling away
a real tragedy. There is much of the child-nature here, and therefore
the loving, the lovable, and the sweet.

Love of hearth is another French characteristic, the mistresses and
assignations, true and fictive, to the contrary notwithstanding. The
typical homes of any nation are found less in its cities than in its
smaller centers; and so it is in France, for the bulk of high-grade
fiction is pretty certain to be a safe index of public feeling.

A third characteristic is the unique attitude of the French toward
womanhood. The mother, in France, is honored above belief; the wife
somewhat less so; the young girl knows nothing, and is therefore merely
amusing; the woman of easy morals occupies a large place because she
must be reckoned with as a _recognized_ factor. The whole attitude
of France toward its womanhood is compounded of sentiment, lightness,
and cynicism. Less independent than the American woman, less free than
the English, less domestic than the German, the French woman is more a
being to charm man than a companion for him. And so runs the current of
the short-story, side by side with the sweep of life.

A fourth trait in the French short-story is a minute, detached
observation, tinged with cynicism--the inevitable result of realism.
It is for this reason that so many French short-stories seem
unsympathetic. Scientific observation--really, a German trait--is
likely to be cold when applied to tumults of the soul! And the writer
who as a moral vivisectionist relentlessly applies the scalpel runs the
risk of becoming blasé, not to say cruel. He is more concerned with the
truth _of_ facts than with extracting the truth _from_ facts.

A final characteristic is artistry. To do a short-story with fineness,
deftness, perfection of detail, and beauty of finish; to cut an
intaglio, so to say, to paint a miniature, to inlay a jewel--that is
the Frenchman’s conception of the artistic in brief fiction, and in
that he is unsurpassed.

Here, then, are some qualities of the French spirit as evidenced in
the short-story of the period--qualities fundamental and in the phase,
but patent, as it seems to me, in a large proportion of the entire
short-story product.

Viewing the subject generally, as one must in attempting a survey
of so varied a field as the last eighty years in French fiction,
there are several periods fairly well-defined in the movement of the
short-story. As a differentiated type the short-story appeared at a
time when classical ideals of form had broken down and moral ideals
also had quite fallen. For three decades, precise, logical prose had
been as cheerfully scouted as were old-fashioned swaddling-clothes of
personal virtue. For a period equally long, “Freedom” had been the
sweet word every one uttered with unction. Rousseau had laid his blade
to the root of the existing order; Chateaubriand had broken loose from
the fetters of old literary forms; Madame de Staël had coined the word
“romanticism” with a new image and a superscription enchanting to
the mind agitated by the sudden opening of the unknown; the success
of French arms abroad had let in a flood of new ideas--the reign of
romance was undisputed. Color, movement, dreams, enthusiasm--all
these prose began to borrow from poetry. Charles Emmaniel Nodier--a
classicist in form, but a romanticist in spirit--began his florid
tales, while Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Musset applied their
poetic skill to the telling of prose stories.

But the romantic movement began to wane in the early forties, not,
however, before reaching a brilliant high-tide in the work of the elder
Dumas. Even Gautier would sometimes scoff in his supremely clever
style at the extravagances of the period. But the chief force in this
breakdown of the romantic school was Honoré de Balzac, whose brilliant
short-story work, chiefly done from 1830 to 1832, laid the foundations
of a new school of shorter fiction in France, as the de Goncourts and
Stendhal had already done for longer fiction--for Balzac was less an
originator than a developer of the psychological novel. However, in
fiction long and short, his moderate realism stands to-day as the most
important example of his school. Prosper Mérimée became a realist only
after having begun as a romanticist; Alphonse Daudet never fully came
under the sway of realistic principles; and Ludovic Halévy generally
chose a romantic theme even when treating it realistically, so that we
must turn to Balzac as the representative of his class.

In Gustave Flaubert, a stylist of the most finished order, but latterly
a severe classicist, we find an example of the slight classical
reaction which followed the reign of realism. A similar romantic
reaction is seen in the short tales of the collaborators, Émile
Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrain, as well as of François Coppée. Here
the joint influence of the German Hoffmann and the American Poe is
plainly evident.

But these reactionary movements were neither powerful nor for long.
The disillusionment and cynicism of French life was bound to find
expression in its fiction, and the more sincere and fearless the
writer the more direct would be his methods. Naturalism became the
final expression of realism, for naturalism is realism plus pessimism.
Naturalism proposes not only to see things as they are and report
things as they are seen, but it is a pessimist who sees and reports.
Result--gloom, mire, and jagged stories, unkissed by a single star of
hope! Émile Zola is the chief-priest, and Eugene Sue the industrious
acolyte at the altar of this despairing cult.

No people, however, could long enjoy an orgy of depression, and
signs of moderation soon appeared. Guy de Maupassant, with all his
abnormality, and Paul Bourget with all his pessimism, now and then
touched the joyous side, and by and by a braver, more wholesome tone
sounded in the French short-story--a tone of eclecticism, both of
method and of philosophy. Surrounded by a social order emancipated from
many past ills and having the promise of greater equity, quieted by the
more or less permanent settlement of at least two of its most vexed
questions, the France of to-day is encouraging a group of brilliant
writers--Pierre Loti, Anatole France, Gustave Droz, Jules Lemaître,
Jules Claretie, Renè Bazin, Jean Richepin, Marcel Prévost, and Paul
Margueritte--who, though mostly no longer young, represent a youthful
France in that they are emancipated from school and type and write as
the story makes its call to their own natures. Sometimes one method,
sometimes another, rises to dominance, but _the choice of the most
available_ is after all the current practice.

Of the future no man may tell, but backed by the rich traditions
of literary France, the air of artistry all about, the growth of a
more unselfish socialized life, and the promise of stable national
conditions, we may well look for the most satisfying results in the
French short-story of tomorrow.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[1] An inquiry into the development of the short-story in Russia at
about this period has been reserved for the third volume of the series,
which is devoted to short fiction of that land.


                       SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES




                     FRANÇOIS COPPÉE AND HIS WORK


There never has been a satisfactory definition of poetry, though all
ambitious literary appraisers, from Aristotle down to Bernard Shaw,
have essayed the task. But if to be able to institute apt and beautiful
comparisons; to phrase in musical language thoughts of power, beauty,
and feeling; to discern the ideal clothed in the real; to interpret the
inner meanings of life--if this ability marks the poetic gift, then
François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a poet--a poet in prose as well as
in verse.

Very early in life the young Parisian--he was born in Paris, January
12, 1842--began to write verses which showed marks of distinction,
and he was only twenty-four when _Le Reliquaire_, his first
poetic volume, appeared. Two years later, _Poèmes Modernes_ and
_La Grève des Forgerons_ were issued, establishing his place
among modern poets of his land. And when, in 1869, at the age of
twenty-seven, he produced _Le Passant_, a group of exquisite
comedies in verse, he became a celebrity.

It was inevitable that a literary dweller in the French capital, reared
among the traditions of a stage whose productions are classic, and a
poet who by both nature and environment breathed in the air of art,
should turn to the drama after having won to the forefront in lyric and
narrative expression. Successively he produced _Deux Douleurs_,
_Fais ce que dois_, _Les Bijoux de la Délivrance_, _Madame
de Maintenon_, and _Le Luthier de Crémorne_--the last-named
an especially pleasing drama, full of that human feeling which marks
Coppée in all his writings. Four volumes contain his dramatic work, all
of it good, much of it brilliant.

As a novelist, Coppée left no mark upon his times--he was so easily
surpassed in this field by his contemporaries. But as a writer of
little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant
group which includes those immortals of the short-story--Maupassant,
Daudet, Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier, Loti, Halévy, Theuriet, and France.

From the work of all these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished.
The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and by
that same token an infinitely harder one. Daudet, child of Provence
though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire.
Balzac chose his “cases” from classes high and low, but rarely failed
to uncover with his sharp scalpel some malignant social growth. Gautier
was rougher, coarser, and less sympathetic, though at times we may
discern in him the sudden swelling tear and tremulous lip which now
and again reveal the tenderness latent in brusk men. Halévy was more
idyllic and pastoral. Mérimée of all this wonderful company--to whose
society other notables also come with insistent and well-sustained
claims for admission--was the nearest to Coppée in the type of his
work. Both knew intimately and with tender feeling the life of lowly
folk--Coppée finding ever in his Paris the themes, the scenes, the
types for his stories, while Mérimée’s pen was never so magic as when
the romantic Corsican airs breathed about his brow. Both these master
craftsmen produced a prose infused with the imagery, grace, and charm
of poesy; both were masters of a style nervous, firm, condensed, and
vivid.

In 1878, after having been for some years employed in the Senate
Library, Coppée was appointed Guardian of the Archives of the Comédie
Française. It was then that he began to produce that remarkable series
of some fifty short fictions by which he is best known to us. One year
after the publication of his first volume of stories, _Contes en
Prose_ (1882), he was distinguished by election to the Academy, and
in 1885 he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

His other collections of stories are _Vingt Contes Nouveaux_
(1883), _Contes et Recits en Prose_ (1885), _Contes Rapides_
(1888), _Contes Tout Simples_ (1894), and _Contes pour les Jours
de Fête_ (1903).

In considering Coppée’s fictional work, it seems worth while to point
out its varied types, and at the same time note the meaning of several
short fictional forms which will be referred to frequently in this
volume and in succeeding volumes of the series.

His favorite type seems to have been the tale--which is not the plotted
short-story, nor yet the sketch, but rather a straightforward narration
with little or no plot, and usually depending for its interest upon
a longer or shorter chain of incidents. The French word _conte_
sufficiently describes the tale, because _conte_ means really
just _story_, and thus the generic term includes all the shorter
fictional forms. To most English readers, the term short-story means
merely a story that is short, but modern usage limits the word--the
compound word, to be precise--to a somewhat specialized type.

The typical short-story eludes precise definition, because it is
an elastic, living thing--often the more interesting for its very
disregard of an exact technical form. Certain things, however, the
real short-story does possess: a single central dominant incident, a
single preëminent character or pair of characters, a complication (not
necessarily at all involved) the resolution or untying or dénouement
of that complication, and a treatment so compressed and unified as to
produce a singleness of impression. Here, naturally, is much latitude,
but above all the short-story must focus a white light upon one spot,
upon a crucial instance, to use Mrs. Wharton’s admirable expression,
and must not diffuse that light over a whole life, a series of loosely
related happenings, or a general condition of affairs.

But the fictional sketch presents nothing of the organization seen in
the typical short-story. It is a fragment, a detached though perhaps a
complete impression, a bit of character caught in passing, a rapidly
outlined picture, but not depending upon a complication and its
unfolding for its interest.

Like the sketch, the tale is more easily defined than the short-story.
Whether long or short, the tale--as I have just pointed out--is always
the simple narration of an incident, or a succession of incidents,
without regard to plot-complication and its consequent dénouement.
The story of a thrilling lion-hunt, the recovery of a lost child, the
adventures of a hero under strange skies, or the patient loyalty of an
old servitor, might any one of them be its theme--that and nothing
more.

                   *       *       *       *       *

How much a fictional masterpiece suffers in translation none knows so
well as he who enjoys its beauties in the original. How much more then
must it lose when one attempts to rehearse its story in brief synopsis.
Yet we may come to some understanding of Coppée’s typical variety
by such an examination of three of his short pieces, besides “The
Substitute,” which is given in full in translation.

“At Table” is one of the author’s characteristic sketches. It is about
twenty-five hundred words long. Fourteen are at table, the guests
of “_madame la comtesse_”--“four young women in full toilette,
and ten men belonging to the aristocracy of blood or of merit.” With
that pictorial gift which is the literary sketch-artist’s first
possession, we are shown the whole scene--“jewels, decorations of honor
or of nobility, the atmosphere of good living in the high hall,” the
glittering table, the noiseless service, the expanding social spirit as
the collation advances, the “snapping of bright words,” and everything
that made the dinner “charming as well as sumptuous.”

“Now, at that same table, at the lower end, in the most modest place, a
man still young ... a man of reverie and imagination ... sat silent.”
“He was plunged in a bath of optimism; it seemed good to him that there
should be, sometimes and somewhere in the weary world, beings almost
happy.” “But when the Dreamer had before him on his plate a portion
of the monstrous turbot, the light odor of the sea evoked in his mind
a picture of the Breton fisher folk, by grace of whose dangers this
delectation came to the feasters.”

Thus his fancy wanders on, vividly rebuilding the varied scenes peopled
by those whose labors, painful often and ill-requited, made possible
the revelry that night. The contrast stands out, white against black,
and leads at last to this mixed conclusion: Softly and stubbornly he
repeats to himself as he looks once again at the guests as, replete,
they arise from table:

“Yes; they are within their rights. But do they know, do they
comprehend, that their luxury is made from many miseries? Do they think
of it sometimes? Do they think of it as often as they should? Do they
think of it?”

Rarely does Coppée approach so closely to making a preachment; but
we need only to follow his gentle reflections--so far removed from
haranguing, from bitterness--to feel the utter sincerity of this heart
that so passionately loved “the people.”

“Two Clowns” is a sketch of a different type--less aggressively
moral, its conclusion more subtly enforced, and possessing more of
the narrative quality of the tale. It is a dual sketch--a sketch of
contrasts.

We are standing before the tent of some strolling acrobats. To lure the
bystanders to the performance a clown receives the rain of pretended
buffets from the hands of the ring-master--quite in the manner we all
know. Now an aged crone among the onlookers is seen to be weeping. On
being questioned she wails out the story that she has recognized in
this wretched clown her only son. Having robbed his master, he had
been sent away to sea, the father had died, and now after having heard
nothing of the scapegrace for years she discovers in the buffeted clown
her only child. But suddenly the old woman realizes that she is telling
the intimate sorrows of her heart to the gaping crowd, and with gesture
abrupt and imperious she pushes aside her listeners and disappears in
the night.

The second scene is in the Chamber of Deputies, at a sensational
sitting. An orator mounts the tribune to denounce some proposed
spoliation of the people. With all the arts of the
demagogue--wonderfully delineated--he begins his string of ready-made
phrases. He postures, he mouths, he prophesies, he looses the dogs of
war, “he even risks a bit of poetry, flourishes old metaphors which
were worn-out in the time of Cicero,” and amidst mingled bravos and
grumbles “soars like a goose,” and ends.

As we leave the Chamber we see an elderly woman of the
_bourgeoisie_. It is the mother of the political mountebank--she
is radiant and content.

“The Sabots of Little Wolff” is a typical tale, done in the manner of
a legend. Never was the spirit of childhood--human and divine--more
exquisitely set forth than in this wonderfully wrought story. How
_can_ it be told in other, or fewer, words than those simple and
eloquent sentences of François Coppée!

“Once upon a time--it was so long ago that the whole world has
forgotten the date--in a city in the north of Europe--whose name is so
difficult to pronounce that no one remembers it--once upon a time there
was a little boy of seven, named Wolff. He was an orphan in charge of
an old aunt who was hard and avaricious, who embraced him only on New
Year’s Day, and who breathed a sigh of regret every time she gave him a
porringer of soup.

“But the poor little fellow was naturally so good that he loved the old
woman all the same, though she frightened him greatly, and he could
never without trembling see the huge wart, ornamented with four gray
hairs, which she had on the end of her nose.”

On Christmas eve the schoolmaster took all his pupils to the midnight
mass. The winter was cold, so the lads came warmly wrapped and
shod--all except little Wolff, who shivered in thin garments, and heavy
wooden shoes, or sabots. “His thoughtless comrades made a thousand
jests over his sad looks and his peasant’s dress,” and boasted of the
wonderful times in store for them on Christmas Day. Little Wolff knew
very well that his miserly aunt would send him supperless to bed, yet
he innocently hoped that the Christ-child would not forget him on the
morrow.

On the way out little Wolff noticed sitting in a niche under the porch
a sleeping child--not a beggar child, for he was covered by a robe of
white linen. But notwithstanding the cold his feet were bare--and near
him lay the tools of a carpenter’s apprentice. None of the well-clad
scholars heeded the child, “but little Wolff, coming last out of
church, stopped, full of compassion, before the beautiful sleeping
infant,” took off his right shoe, and laid it beside the child, “so the
Christ-child could put something therein to comfort him in his misery.”

At home his aunt scolded him well for having given away his shoe, and
scornfully she placed the other sabot in the chimney, predicting that
he would find in it next morning only a rod for a whipping. And with a
couple of slaps the wicked woman drove the child to bed.

But on Christmas morning little Wolff beheld in artless ecstasy both
his little sabots overflowing with countless good things, so that the
whole chimney was full of them. But the outcries on the street outside
told them that the other children of the school had each gotten only a
rod!

Finally, in “The Substitute” we have the typical short-story. Though
the plot is simple, it is well balanced and marches forward with never
a digression nor a false step. The characters live, the setting is
adequate, and the treatment is without artificiality. The rise of
Leturc from the purlieus of Paris to the moral grandeur which leads
him to his final imprisonment is simple, unaffected and natural. There
is not a trace of the theatric in the whole story, not a suggestion of
false sentiment, not anything that mars its beauty, its symmetry, and
its power.

In the midst of so much that is sordid and gross in modern fiction,
how refreshing it is to read the pages of a master who could be
truthful without wallowing, moral without sermonizing, humorous
without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a
sympathetic lover of mankind!




                            THE SUBSTITUTE
                           (_LE REMPLAÇANT_)

                          By François Coppée

                   _Done into English by the Editor_


He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.

Thus he spoke to the judges:

“I am called Jean François Leturc, and for six months now I’ve been
with the man who sings between two lanterns on the Place de la
Bastille, while he scrapes on a string of catgut. I repeat the chorus
with him, and then I cry out, 'Get the collection of new songs, ten
centimes, two sous!’ He was always drunk and beat me; that’s why the
police found me the other night, in the tumble-down buildings. Before
that, I used to be with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a
laundress; she called herself Adèle. At one time a gentleman had given
her an establishment, on the ground-floor, at Montmartre. She was a
good worker and loved me well. She made money because she had the
clientele of the café waiters, and those people use lots of linen.
Sundays, she would put me to bed early to go to the ball; but week
days, she sent me to the Brothers’ school, where I learned to read.
Well, at last the _sergent-de-ville_ whose beat was up our street
began always stopping before her window to talk to her--a fine fellow,
with the Crimean medal. They got married, and all went wrong. He didn’t
take to me, and set mamma against me. Every one boxed my ears; and it
was then that, to get away from home, I spent whole days on the Place
Clichy, where I got to know the mountebanks. My step-father lost his
place, mamma her customers; she went to the wash-house to support her
man. It was there she got consumption--from the steam of the lye. She
died at Lariboisière. She was a good woman. Since that time I’ve lived
with the brush-seller and the catgut-scraper. Are you going to put me
in prison?”

He talked this way openly, cynically, like a man. He was a ragged
little rascal, as tall as a boot, with his forehead hidden under a
strange mop of yellow hair.

Nobody claimed him, so they sent him to the Reform School.

Not very intelligent, lazy, above all maladroit with his hands, he was
able to learn there only a poor trade--the reseating of chairs. Yet he
was obedient, of a nature passive and taciturn, and he did not seem
to have been too profoundly corrupted in that school of vice. But
when, having come to his seventeenth year, he was set free again on
the streets of Paris, he found there, for his misfortune, his prison
comrades, all dreadful rascals exercising their low callings. Some were
trainers of dogs for catching rats in the sewers; some shined shoes on
ball nights in the Passage de l’Opéra; some were amateur wrestlers,
who let themselves be thrown by the Hercules of the side-shows; some
fished from rafts out in the river, in the full sunlight. He tried all
these things a little, and a few months after he had left the house
of correction he was arrested anew for a petty theft: a pair of old
shoes lifted from out an open shop-window. Result: a year of prison at
Sainte-Pélagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.

He lived, astonished, among this group of prisoners, all very young and
negligently clad, who talked in loud voices and carried their heads
in such a solemn way. They used to meet in the cell of the eldest of
them, a fellow of some thirty years, already locked up for a long
time and apparently settled at Sainte-Pélagie: a large cell it was,
papered with colored caricatures, and from whose windows one could see
all Paris--its roofs, its clock-towers, and its domes, and, far off,
the distant line of the hills, blue and vague against the sky. There
were upon the walls several shelves filled with books, and all the
old apparatus of a _salle d’armes_--broken masks, rusty foils,
leather jackets, and gloves that were losing their stuffing. It was
there that the “politicians” dined together, adding to the inevitable
“soup and beef” some fruit, cheese, and half-pints of wine that Jean
François went out to buy in a can--tumultuous repasts, interrupted
by violent disputes, where they sang in chorus at the dessert the
_Carmangole_ and _Ça ira_.[2] They took on, however, an
air of dignity on days when they made place for a newcomer, who was
at first gravely treated as “citizen,” but who was the next day
_tutoyed_,[3] and called by his nickname. They used big words
there--Corporation, Solidarity, and phrases all quite unintelligible to
Jean François, such as this, for example, which he once heard uttered
imperiously by a frightful little hunchback who scribbled on paper all
night long:

“It is settled. The cabinet is to be thus composed: Raymond in the
Department of Education, Martial in the Interior, and I in Foreign
Affairs.”

Having served his time, he wandered again about Paris, under the
surveillance of the police, in the fashion of beetles that cruel
children keep flying at the end of a string. He had become one of
those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry,
arrests and releases, turn and turn about, a little like those platonic
fishermen who, so as not to empty the pond, throw back into the water
the fish just out of the net. Without his suspecting that so much honor
was done to his wretched personality, he had a special docket in the
mysterious archives of _la rue de Jérusalem_,[4] his name and
surnames were written in a large back-hand on the gray paper of the
cover, and the notes and reports, carefully classified, gave him these
graded appellations: “the man named Leturc,” “the prisoner Leturc,” and
at last “the convicted Leturc.”

He stayed two years out of prison, dining _à la Californie_,[5]
sleeping in lodging-houses, and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking
part with his fellows in endless games of pitch-penny on the boulevards
near the city gates. He wore a greasy cap on the back of his head,
carpet slippers, and a short white blouse. When he had five sous, he
had his hair curled. He danced at Constant’s at Montparnasse; bought
for two sous the jack-of-hearts or the ace-of-spades, which were used
as return checks, to resell them for four sous at the door of Bobino;
opened carriage-doors as occasion offered; led about sorry nags at the
horse-market. Of all the bad luck--in the conscription he drew a good
number.[6] Who knows whether the atmosphere of honor which is breathed
in a regiment, whether military discipline, might not have saved him?
Caught in a haul of the police-net with the young vagabonds who used to
rob the drunkards asleep in the streets, he denied very energetically
having taken part in their expeditions. It was perhaps true. But his
antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent up for
three years to Poissy. There he had to make rough toys, had himself
tattooed on the chest, and learned thieves’ slang and the penal code.
A new liberation, a new plunge into the Parisian sewer, but very short
this time, for at the end of hardly six weeks he was again compromised
in a theft by night, aggravated by violent entry,[7] a doubtful case
in which he played an obscure rôle, half dupe and half fence.[8] On
the whole, his complicity seemed evident, and he was condemned to five
years’ hard labor. His sorrow in this adventure was, chiefly, to be
separated from an old dog which he had picked up on a heap of rubbish
and cured of the mange. This beast loved him.

Toulon, the ball on his ankle, the work in the harbor, the blows from
the staves, the wooden shoes without straw,[9] the soup of black beans
dating from Trafalgar, no money for tobacco, and the horrible sleep on
the filthy camp-bed of the galley slave, that is what he knew for five
torrid summers and five winters blown upon by the _Mistral_.[10]
He came out from there stunned, and was sent under surveillance
to Vernon, where he worked for some time on the river; then, an
incorrigible vagabond, he broke exile and returned again to Paris.

He had his savings, fifty-six francs--that is to say, time enough to
reflect. During his long absence, his old and horrible comrades had
been dispersed. He was well hidden, and slept in a loft at an old
woman’s, to whom he had represented himself as a sailor weary of the
sea, having lost his papers in a recent shipwreck, and who wished
to essay another trade. His tanned face, his calloused hands, and a
few nautical terms he let fall one time or another, made this story
sufficiently probable.

One day when he had risked a saunter along the streets, and when
the chance of his walk had brought him to Montmartre, where he had
been born, an unexpected memory arrested him before the door of
the Brothers’ school in which he had learned to read. Since it was
very warm, the door was open, and with a single glance the passing
incorrigible could recognize the peaceful school-room. Nothing was
changed: neither the bright light shining in through the large windows,
nor the crucifix over the desk, nor the rows of seats furnished with
leaden inkstands, nor the table of weights and measures, nor the map on
which pins stuck in still pointed out the operations of some ancient
war. Heedlessly and without reflecting, Jean François read on the
blackboard these words of the Gospel, which a well-trained hand had
traced as an example of penmanship:

    Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more
    than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.

It was doubtless the hour for recreation, for the Brother professor had
left his chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he seemed to be
telling a story to all the _gamins_ who surrounded him, attentive
and raising their eyes. What an innocent and gay countenance was that
of the beardless young man, in long black robe, with white necktie,
with coarse, ugly shoes, and with badly cut brown hair pushed up at the
back. All those pallid faces of children of the populace which were
looking at him seemed less childlike than his, above all when, charmed
with a candid, priestly pleasantry he had made, he broke out with a
good and frank peal of laughter, which showed his teeth sound and
regular--laughter so contagious that all the scholars broke out noisily
in their turn. And it was simple and sweet, this group in the joyous
sunlight that made their clear eyes and their blonde hair shine.

Jean François looked at the scene some time in silence, and, for the
first time, in that savage nature all instinct and appetite, there
awoke a mysterious and tender emotion. His heart, that rude, hardened
heart, which neither the cudgel of the galley master nor the weight
of the watchman’s heavy whip falling on his shoulders was able to
stir, beat almost to bursting. Before this spectacle, in which he saw
again his childhood, his eyes closed sadly, and, restraining a violent
gesture, a prey to the torture of regret, he walked away with great
strides.

The words written on the blackboard came back to him.

“If it were not too late, after all?” he murmured. “If I could once
more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out my
sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to
recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out
now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap,
and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell
of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to
climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all
around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,--I have
never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”

He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it, and
three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom he
labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on the
scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and
straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man
below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his
soup at the cheap eating-house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands
burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster, but content
with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his
handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him
unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance
of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and
sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.

                   *       *       *       *       *

At last--supreme recompense!--he had a friend.

It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant
from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his stick
over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from
the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved
him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he
himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound reserved,
disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien,
himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course,
satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror
of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room,
fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take
into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre
and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages
enough to buy some land in his own province.

Jean François and Savinien scarcely left each other. On days of rest
they took long walks in the environs of Paris and dined in the open air
in one of those little country inns where there are plenty of mushrooms
in the sauces and innocent enigmas on the bottoms of the plates. There
Jean François made his friend tell him all those things of which those
born in the cities are ignorant. He learned the names of the trees,
the flowers, the plants; the seasons for the different harvests; he
listened avidly to the thousand details of a farmer’s labors: the
autumn’s sowing, the winter’s work, the splendid _fêtes_ of
harvest-home and vintage, and the flails beating the ground, and the
noise of the mills by the borders of the streams, and the tired horses
led to the trough, and the morning hunting in the mists, and, above
all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-branches, shortened
by tales of wonder. He discovered in himself a spring of imagination
hitherto unsuspected, finding a singular delight in the mere recital of
these things, so gentle, calm, and monotonous.

One anxiety troubled him, however, that Savinien should not come to
know his past. Sometimes there escaped him a shady word of thieves’
slang, an ignoble gesture, vestiges of his horrible former existence;
and then he felt the pain of a man whose old wounds reopen, more
especially as he thought he saw then in Savinien the awakening of
an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the
pleasures which Paris offers even to the poorest, questioned him about
the mysteries of the great city, Jean François feigned ignorance and
turned the conversation; but he had now conceived a vague inquietude
for the future of his friend.

This was not without foundation, and Savinien could not long remain
the naïve rustic he had been on his arrival in Paris. If the gross
and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always were repugnant to him,
he was profoundly troubled by other desires full of danger for the
inexperience of his twenty years. When the spring came, he began to
seek solitude, and at first he wandered before the gayly lighted
entrances to the dancing-halls, through which he saw the girls going
in couples, without bonnets--and with their arms around each other’s
waists, whispering low. Then, one evening, when the lilacs shed their
perfume, and when the appeal of the quadrille was more entrancing, he
crossed the threshold, and after that Jean François saw him change
little by little in manners and in visage. Savinien became more
frivolous, more extravagant; often he borrowed from his friend his
miserable savings, which he forgot to repay. Jean François, feeling
himself abandoned, was both indulgent and jealous; he suffered and
kept silent. He did not think he had the right to reproach; but his
penetrating friendship had cruel and insurmountable presentiments.

One evening when he was climbing the stairs of his lodging, absorbed
in his preoccupations, he heard in the room he was about to enter a
dialogue of irritated voices, and he recognized one as that of the old
man from Auvergne, who lodged with him and Savinien. An old habit of
suspicion made him pause on the landing, and he listened to learn the
cause of the trouble.

“Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one
has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden
in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one
of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant.
This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house,
and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open
up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place
only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find
it, no one can accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful
gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a
little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that
had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old
fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with
side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not
me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my
vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or
I will call the police. Make haste!”

“All right,” said the voice of the householder; “we’ll search with
Maria. So much the worse if you find nothing, and if the masons get
angry. It is you who have forced me to it.”

Jean François felt his heart fill with fear. He recalled the poverty
and the petty borrowings of Savinien, the sombre manner he had borne
the last few days. Yet he could not believe in any theft. He heard the
panting of the man from Auvergne in the ardor of his search, and he
clenched his fists against his breast as if to repress the beatings of
his heart.

“There they are!” suddenly screamed the victorious miser. “There they
are, my louis, my dear treasure! And in the Sunday waistcoat of that
little hypocrite from Limoges. Look, landlord! they are just as I told
you. There’s the Napoleon, and the man with the queue, and the Philippe
I had dented with my teeth. Look at the mark. Ah, the little rascal
with his saintly look! I should more likely have suspected the other.
Ah, the villain! He will have to go to the galleys!”

At this moment Jean François heard the well-known step of Savinien, who
was slowly mounting the stairs.

“He is going to his betrayal,” thought he. “Three flights. I have time!”

And, pushing open the door, he entered, pale as death, into the room
where he saw the landlord and the stupefied servant in a corner,
and the man from Auvergne on his knees amid the disordered clothes,
lovingly kissing his gold pieces.

“Enough of this,” he said in a thick voice. “It is I who have taken
the money and who have put it in my comrade’s trunk. But that is too
disgusting. I am a thief and not a Judas. Go hunt for the police. I’ll
not try to save myself. Only, I must say a word in private to Savinien,
who is here.”

The little man from Limoges had, in fact, just arrived, and, seeing his
crime discovered, and believing himself lost, he stood still, his eyes
fixed, his arms drooping.

Jean François seized him violently about the neck as though to embrace
him; he pressed his mouth to Savinien’s ear and said to him in a voice
low and supplicating:

“Be quiet!”

Then, turning to the others:

“Leave me alone with him. I shall not go away, I tell you. Shut us up,
if you wish, but leave us alone.”

And, with a gesture of command, he showed them the door. They went out.

Savinien, broken with anguish, had seated himself on a bed, and dropped
his eyes without comprehending.

“Listen,” said Jean François, who approached to take his hands. “I
understand you have stolen three gold pieces to buy some trifle for a
girl. That would have cost six months of prison for you. But one does
not get out of that except to go back again, and you would have become
a pillar of the police tribunals and the courts of assizes. I know all
about them. I have done seven years in the Reform School, one year
at Sainte-Pélagie, three years at Poissy, and five years at Toulon.
Now, have no fear. All is arranged. I have taken this affair on my
shoulders.”

“Unhappy fellow!” cried Savinien; but hope was already coming back to
his cowardly heart.

“When the elder brother is serving under the colors, the younger does
not go,” Jean François went on. “I’m your substitute, that’s all. You
love me a little, do you not? I am paid. Do not be a baby. Do not
refuse. They would have caught me one of these days, for I have broken
my exile. And then, you see, that life out there will be less hard for
me than for you; I know it, and shall not complain if I do not render
you this service in vain and if you swear to me that you will not do it
again. Savinien, I have loved you well, and your friendship has made
me very happy, for it is thanks to my knowing you that I have kept
honest and straight, as I might always have been, perhaps, if I had
had, like you, a father to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach
me my prayers. My only regret was that I was useless to you and that I
was deceiving you about my past. To-day I lay aside the mask in saving
you. It is all right. Come, good-by! Do not weep; and embrace me, for
already I hear the big boots on the stairs. They are returning with the
police; and we must not seem to know each other so well before these
fellows.”

He pressed Savinien hurriedly to his breast, and then he pushed him
away as the door opened wide.

It was the landlord and the man from Auvergne, who were bringing the
police. Jean François started forward to the landing and held out his
hands for the handcuffs and said, laughing:

“Forward, bad lot!”

To-day he is at Cayenne, condemned for life, as an incorrigible.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[2] Revolutionary songs of '93.

[3] _Tu_--Thou--used only in familiar address.

[4] Police headquarters.

[5] “The California” is a cheap eating-house in Paris.

[6] In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give
exemption.

[7] Literally, climbing and breaking in.

[8] A receiver of stolen goods.

[9] Stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.

[10] A northwest wind on the Mediterranean.




                      GUY DE MAUPASSANT, REALIST


The inflexible realist in fiction can be faithful only to what he sees;
and what he sees is inevitably colored by the lens of his real self.
For the literary observer of life there is no way of falsifying the
reports which his senses, physical and moral, make to his own brain. If
he wishes, he may make alterations in transcribing for his readers, but
in so doing he confesses to himself a departure from truth as he sees
it.

Pure realism, then, demands of its apostle both a faithful observation
of life and a faithful statement of what he sees. True, the realist
uses his artist’s privilege of selecting those facts of life which
seem best suited to picturing his characters in their natures, their
persons, and their careers, for he knows that many irrelevant,
confusing, and contradictory things happen in the everyday lives
of everyday men. So in point of practice his realism is not so
uncompromising as his theories sound when baldly stated.

How near any great artist’s transcriptions of life approach to absolute
truth will always be a question, both because we none of us know what
is final truth, and because realists, each seeing life through his
own nature, will disagree among themselves just as widely as their
temperaments, their predispositions, and their experiences vary. Thus
we are left to the common sense for our standards, and to this common
sense we may with some confidence appeal for a judgment.

Guy de Maupassant was a realist. “The writer’s eye,” he says in
_Sur l’Eau_, “is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything;
like a pickpocket’s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He
is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures,
intentions, everything that goes on in his presence--the slightest
look, the least act, the merest trifle.”

But Maupassant was more than a realist--he was an artist, a realistic
artist, frank and wise enough to conform his theories to his own
efficient literary practice. He saw as a realist, selected as an
artist, and then was uncompromising in his literary presentation.

Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a
literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder
and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three
always summed up five--his temperament would not allow for the unseen,
imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the
spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny
the superstitious solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this
pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his
critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However,
Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon
scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been.

Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes,
and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once
the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true
in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures
of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was
incomplete, morbid, and unnatural.

Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just
quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of
animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of
the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I
love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love,
with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all
that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,--days, nights,
rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of
woman; for all these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my
eyes and my heart.”

But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his
contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly
barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and
growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic
philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character
by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have
already intimated that he was biased--as similarly we all are
biased--by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice;
rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view
the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal,
the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the
spiritual--for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.

Persistently refusing to give to the public any record of his life, he
dwelt, as it were, behind closed doors. No soul, he held, could enter
into the life of another soul, so he had no real intimates, and those
who called him friend and knew the frank charm of his manner discussed
with him mainly impersonal themes. Thus in spite of importunities he
gave no encouragement to that impertinent curiosity which avidly seizes
upon the details of an author’s private life and flaunts it to a
gaping public. We, then, are concerned with Maupassant’s temperament
and personal career only in so far as they color his work.

Born in Normandy in 1850, he passed his youth in that charming section
where he has laid the scenes of many of his provincial narratives.
The picturesque Norman characters, the narrow-browed country life,
the colorful phases of town, market, and church, appear with intaglio
clearness in a thousand wonderfully-wrought settings. The sordid and
ungracious bourgeoisie with whom he came most in contact predominate in
these stories, just as his strenuous days as an oarsman live again in
his aquatic tales, and his life as a minor clerk in the government and
his experiences as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War are used
for material in other stories. It was his later life in the Capital
that gave him his knowledge of society life, and of the underworld
peopled by courtesan and roué.

The gifted Flaubert, as everyone knows, left a profound impress
upon his young nephew, Maupassant, who served under him a literary
apprenticeship at once rigid and productive. It was Flaubert who taught
the man of thirty to seek for the one inevitably fitting word, made
him tear up early poems, plays, and stories, taught him to suppress
relentlessly all his unformed work, until, full panoplied, he sprang
into being as a brilliant maker of artistic fictions.

His later years--he died by his own hand in 1893 at the age of
forty-three--were darkened by the approaching madness which he so
terribly pictures in “The Horla.” In _Bel Ami_ he writes:

“There comes a day, you know, when no matter what you are looking at,
you see Death lurking behind it.... As for me, for the last fifteen
years I have felt the torment of it, as if I were carrying a gnawing
beast. I have felt it dragging me down, little by little, month by
month, hour by hour, like a house that is crumbling away.... Each step
I take brings me nearer to it, every moment that passes, every breath
I draw, hurries on its odious work.... Breathing, sleeping, eating,
drinking, working, dreaming,--everything we do is simply dying by
inches.... Now I see it so near that I often stretch out my arm to
thrust it back!”

But under the shadow of this terrible phantasm as he was, latterly his
cold, unsympathetic scrutiny of men and things had warmed somewhat,
and his latest writings--his productive period covers only about ten
intensely active years--show more gentleness, more sympathy with
struggling humanity. But never did he really depart from the morbid and
cynical view of life, and the horror of death as the final breakdown of
all things desirable, which showed so plainly in most of his fictions.

If we see but little of Guy de Maupassant’s life in his writings,
it is to them we must turn to discover his temperament and his
philosophy--glimpses of which we have already had.

Absolutely French, almost a typical Latin, Maupassant was not
unemotional; he merely refused to allow _his_ emotions to
color the characters he delineated. He was himself a passionate
pleasure-seeker, determined to extract the last drop of satisfaction
from life, but he erred in thinking that one may at the same time drain
the cup of mental joys and that of physical pleasures. What wonder that
this vampire, in love with the blood of life, should suck final poison
whence he had thought to draw only pulsing bliss. His very repressions
supplied power for each fresh explosion of private excess--yet always
the cold precision of his artistry grew, until the perfection of his
chiselling left critics wordless. The deft maker of word-masterpieces
never lost the artist in the man.

According to this warped genius, life was intended to amuse, to gratify
self. Inner beauty he scouted--the beauty of the seen he adored. For
such a nature the ideal existed only as a foolish figment. Even ideal
love he scouted, depicting with relentless fidelity the sins of a
mother as discovered by her loving children, the universal laxity of
the Norman peasants as condoned by complacent priests, the ravishing of
every illusion, the degradation of every virtue. What other conclusion
was there for so sad, so hopeless, so pitiless, so materialistic, a
philosophy, than _What’s the use!_

But if there was little of apparent beauty in our author’s character,
it is impossible not to admire his industry, his will, his passionate
devotion to a perfect art, his relentless literary fidelity to truth as
he saw it, his magic mastery of diction and of dialogue, his incisive
though unmoral analysis of character and life, his constant advance in
craftsmanship to the end. To turn out something beautiful in form was
to him worth a lifetime of effort. How great would he have grown had
his eyes been opened to the inner light!

I have chosen his _Clair de Lune_ for presentation here because it
more nearly approaches spiritual beauty than any other of his stories.
It needs no commentary--it speaks its own beauties in tones subtly
delicate yet silver clear.




                               MOONLIGHT
                           (_CLAIR DE LUNE_)

                         By Guy de Maupassant

                   _Done into English by the Editor_


The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He
was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of
spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was
settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that
he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His
will, His purposes.

As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little
country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind:
“Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God,
he searched obstinately for the answer--and nearly always found it.
It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious
humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say
to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for
what He does, or if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”

To him, all nature seemed created with a logic as absolute as it
was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded
perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the
crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and
the night darkened for sleep.

The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and to the
priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs, and that,
on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same inexorable
laws of period, climate, and matter.

But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct
held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman,
what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think
that God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of
his hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean
of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the
first man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation--she was a
feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more
than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.

He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even
though he knew himself to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to
recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their
hearts.

In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to test
him. She should never be even approached without those defensive
measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor,
when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her
lips open and arms extended towards man.

Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were rendered
harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the same,
because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humbled hearts,
he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly surged up
toward him, priest though he was.

Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more limpid
with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual
exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love
toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really
woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was
conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their
voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their
submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.

So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and stride
off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.

Now the Abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house
near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.

She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at her, she
laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him vehemently,
pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively seek to
disengage himself from this embrace--which, all the same, gave him a
thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that feeling of
fatherhood which slumbers in every man.

Often as they walked together along the footpaths through the fields,
he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely heard him,
for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy
of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away to
catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my
uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to
kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the
priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which
blooms perennial in the heart of woman.

And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s
housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!

He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all
over his face, for he was shaving.

When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not
true. You are lying, Mélanie!”

But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord judge
me if I am lying, _monsieur le curé_. I tell you she goes out to
him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other
down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and
midnight to see for yourself.”

He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as was
his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try to
finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.

All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with indignation
and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love was now added
the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of the guardian of
souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with by a mere child.
He felt that egotistical suffocation which parents experience when
their daughter tells them that she has selected a husband without their
advice and in defiance of their wishes.

After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not--he grew more
and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his cane, a
formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went out at night
to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge cudgel, gripped
it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it menacingly in the
air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought it down upon a
chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.

He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold, surprised
by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.

And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the
Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he
became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of
the pale-faced night.

In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his
fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their
slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant
honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed
breath--the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear
night.

He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink
their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost
forgotten.

When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep
of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in
that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs
sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added
to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams
without thought--that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with
kisses.

The Abbé moved on again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as
though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted--he longed to sit down, to
linger there, to glorify God for all His works.

A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved
a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping
the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light transparent
down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and
transmuted by them into gleaming silver.

The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a
growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.

And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the
birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.

Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber,
for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why
should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset?
And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so
like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to
irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb--why was
it come to illuminate all the shades?

Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like
the others, instead of singing in the unquiet dark?

Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the
heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?

Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For
whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of
poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?

And the Abbé did not understand it at all.

But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees
wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.

The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck;
and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. Suddenly they
animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a
divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like
a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent
night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to
his question, they moved toward the priest.

Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as
though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves
of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those
majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the
Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body--all the glowing
romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing
itself into his mind.

And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order
to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”

He withdrew before this pair who went ever arm in arm. True, it was
his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge
of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he
visibly encompass it with glory such as this?

And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a
temple wherein he had no right to enter.




                    ALPHONSE DAUDET, MAN AND ARTIST


When the gods parceled out their gifts, to Alphonse Daudet fell a rich
endowment: a poet’s imaginative nature, yet withal a clear vision for
realities which is often denied the disciple of poesy; a sure dramatic
instinct, too, with a contrasting power of repression which checked
his slightest tendency toward the florid and the melodramatic; and,
coloring all, a native sense of humor so tenderly sympathetic that it
prevented his satire from biting with that acid sharpness of which his
wit was capable. An all-round, well-poised literary genius was he,
efficient in many fields, and preëminent in more than one.

There is one word of all the happy many which, in the opinion of all
his critics, fitly characterizes Daudet--he possessed charm, charm of
manner personally and charm of literary style. I wish his portrait were
before us here, that we might trace in that striking countenance the
record of those fascinating qualities of mind and heart which are so
patent in his life and work.

As for his person, from boyhood his hair grew in that untamed profusion
which we so often associate with strong individuality, and even in
later life he wore his locks long and full. His beard was silky, and
unrestrained rather than unkempt. Near-sighted eyes, peering from
behind the inevitable black-rimmed _pince nez_, or at times a
monocle, seemed curious and inquiring, typifying perfectly the spirit
of naïve interest with which he looked out on life to observe its
myriad moods and forms. In this look there was something reflective,
too, as though he had just noticed a matter of unusual interest, and
was inwardly speculating upon its further meanings. The nose was
pleasure-loving, though robust, dignified, and individual--counteracted
upon by the satirical mouth, whose sarcasm, in turn, was gently toned
by twinkling furrows that flanked his eyes. In later days the sharpness
of Daudet’s expression of mouth had been almost lost, and a gentle
detachment, betokening a just but sympathetic critical spirit, marked
his countenance and made it less keen than lovable. Yet it was in those
later years that his cherished hatred for the French Academy led to the
bitter satirical outburst against that institution in his novel, _The
Immortal_ (1888). But that was only one phase temporarily dominant
in the man whom everyone loved and who himself loved all.

Alphonse Daudet was--especially in youth--the exponent of the south,
the south as typified by his native Provence. His was the rich,
effusive, impressionable southland nature--abundantly moved upon by
all the southern charm and vivacity and naïveté and life, as well as
richly gifted in the ability to reproduce those impressions in the
pages of his writings. Then what more natural than that he should both
personally and in his fiction embody the vivid life of the carefree
land? When, in 1869, his first important volume of collected stories
appeared, it was seen that into _Letters from My Mill_--which
included “The Pope’s Mule”--Daudet had poured not only the young
unspoiled richness of his own buoyancy, but also the fulness of his
feeling for local landscapes, traditions, and characters of town and
country. And again and again, even in his later work, Daudet reverts
to the scenes of his boyhood life, and gives us pictures--now jocund
as the wine of the country, now sad as a poet’s wail--whose tone and
spirit are of the Provençal life, all delicately set in the atmosphere
of that sunny clime.

In the _History of My Books_, which forms an integral part of the
author’s _Thirty Years in Paris_, he takes us by the hand in his
dear, intimate way and shows us the great white house, the ancient and
unique manor of Montauban. Near by, its shattered wings swaying in
the wind on the summit of a little pine-clad mountain, stands _Mon
Moulin_--the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had
gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that
its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to
distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the
province.

“Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I
repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature,
to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of
our little Provençal hills.”

The greetings of old friends at an end, he would whistle to Miracle, a
venerable spaniel some fisherman had once found on a bit of wreckage at
sea, and climb up to his mill, there to browse and dream and wander in
fancy whithersoever the spirits of the place should beckon.

“The mill was a ruin,” he says; “a crumbling mass of stone, iron, and
ancient boards which had not turned in the wind for many years, and
which lay, with broken limbs, as useless as a poet, while all around
on the hillside the miller’s trade prospered and ground and ground
with all its wings. Strange affinities subsist between ourselves and
inanimate objects. From the first day, that cast-off structure was
dear to my heart; I loved it for its desolation, its road overgrown
with weeds, those little grayish, fragrant mountain weeds with which
Père Gaucher compounded his elixir; for its little worn platform where
it was so pleasant to loiter, sheltered from the wind, while a rabbit
hurried by, or a long snake, rustling among the leaves with crafty
detours, hunted the field mice with which the ruin swarmed. With the
creaking of the old building shaken by the north wind, the flapping of
its wings like the rigging of a ship at sea, the mill stirred in my
poor, restless, nomadic brain memories of journeys by sea, of landings
at lighthouses and far-off islands; and the shivering swell all about
completed the illusion. I know not whence I derived this taste for wild
and desert places which has characterized me from my childhood, and
which seems so inconsistent with the exuberance of my nature, unless
it be at the same time the physical need of repairing by a fast from
words, by abstinence from outcries and gestures, the terrible waste
which the southerner makes of his whole being. Be that as it may, I
owe a great deal to those places of refuge for the mind; and no one of
them has been more salutary in its effect upon me than that old mill in
Provence.”

Here, both in boyhood and in young manhood’s revisitations, Daudet
found the “grasshopper’s library,” and in its secret alcoves discovered
such delightful stories as “The Elixir of the Reverend Father
Gaucher,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Goat of Monsieur Seguin,”
“Master Cornille’s Secret,” and “The Old Folks,” all abounding in naïve
character and told with his own delicate charm. Here, too, he learned
to take a delight in his craft which waned not with the years; and to
find joy in pleasing “the people,” who were ever the subjects of his
finest delineations.

Born at Nîmes in 1840, and as a mere lad leaving home for the city
of Lyons, Daudet’s public career began with his journey to Paris in
November, 1857. The boy of seventeen and a half came possessed of a
slender collection of poems which, though the product of so youthful
a rhymester, met with no little favor. In manner common to those who
must win their way along the precarious paths of letters, he pressed
on, until in 1859--he being not yet twenty--Daudet published his first
volume of poems, _Les Amoureuses_, which won high praise from
the critics, but is now sought chiefly by collectors. Thus he began
to gain confidence, and others of his works followed almost yearly.
The pages of _Le Figaro_ were now freely opened to him, and that
public by whom he never ceased to be loved began to scan its columns
for his fantastic chronicles of Provençal life. In that same journal
he began in 1866 to publish his _Letters from My Mill_, which
were collected in volume form in 1869, and constituted his first real
popular triumph.

The third period in our author’s life is marked by the sad experiences
of the Siege of Paris, in 1870. Just as his life in the south inspired
the _Letters_, so did the grave impressions made by those terrible
days in the French capital during the Franco-Prussian War move him to
write the little masterpieces which, in part, appeared in the volume
entitled _Monday Tales_, published in 1873. Who that has read them
can forget the “piercing pathos” of “The Last Class” and “The Siege of
Berlin”? Not only are these human episodes of singularly tender appeal,
but they are masterpieces of form, unsurpassed among short-stories of
any language. As Daudet’s best work, they deserve further notice here.

At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace and Lorraine were ceded
to Germany by France. One of the edicts issued by the conquerors, with
a view to nationalizing the acquired territory, was that the French
language should no longer be taught in their public schools. And this
furnishes the _motif_ for Daudet’s “The Last Class.”

The story is simply told in the first person by Frantz, a little
Alsatian. Frantz recalls that historic day when he set off for school
a little late. Hoping that he might perhaps escape the teacher’s
ferrule, he cuts across the public square without even stopping to find
out the meaning of the knot of perturbed villagers who are discussing
an announcement upon the bulletin board in front of the mayor’s
office. As he slips into his seat, hoping to escape observation, he
is impressed by the unnatural quiet in the school-room, and also by
the presence of a number of the town notables, all solemnly garbed in
holiday dress.

The lad marvels that he is not even chided for his lateness, and is
more than ever mystified as the schoolmaster proceeds with one lesson
and another, all under stress of deep emotion.

By and by the schoolmaster tells his pupils of the cruel edict, and
Frantz begins to realize that the worthy master will no longer rule
in his accustomed place. He becomes conscious of neglected work, and
a whole tide of better resolutions surges in his breast. Finally the
master has heard the last class and arising seeks utterance for his
farewells. At first he is able to give his pupils some sound advice,
but at length no words will come, and with such quiverings of lip
as even Daudet tries not to depict, he chokes, swiftly turns to the
blackboard, takes a piece of chalk, and, bearing with all his might,
dashes off his final expression of patriotic protest and personal
sorrow:

    VIVE LA FRANCE!

“Then he stood there, with his head resting against the wall, and
without speaking, he motioned to us with his hand:

“'That is all; go.’”

On rereading “The Last Class” for the dozenth time, I find that it
is surrounded with an emotional atmosphere which, textually, the
story does not contain. I think this must be the aura emanating from
the spirit of the story; for a great work of fiction is not only the
product of emotion, but it kindles emotion, because it is a creation,
an entity, a living being. Doubtless the contention could not be
demonstrated that, when properly received, a great work of fictional
art will arouse the same emotions in the reader as were first enkindled
in the breast of its author when the story was born. None the less, I
believe it to be true. What feelings, then, must Daudet have known when
he gave forth this little master-story! It must be these that I myself
feel, for I do not, by analysis, find them all present in the text,
even by suggestion. Happy artist, who can so project the creations of
his soul that they henceforth live and expand and communicate their
messages to multitudes to him unknown! So all great fiction is alive;
so lives the work of Alphonse Daudet.

The emotion in “The Siege of Berlin” is of a different type. It, too,
finds its _motif_ in the Franco-Prussian War; this time in the
Siege of Paris itself.

An invalided old cuirassier of the First Empire, Colonel Jouve, lies in
his room in the Champs-Élysées, fronting the Arc de Triomphe. Day by
day his grand-daughter brings to him news of the progress of the war.
So fully is his life wrapped up in the success of the French armies
that, in order to brighten his closing days, they tell him fictitious
stories of his compatriots’ success. But one day, when the enemy’s
lines have drawn close about the beleaguered capital and the end is
at hand, it becomes difficult to deceive the old soldier any longer.
Still, fresh victories are always supplied by the news-bureau of love,
and the old man can scarcely wait for the homecoming of the victorious
battalions. So when one day the sound of bugle and drum is heard, and
the tramp of marching feet beneath the windows of the upper room, you
can picture the delight of this old veteran. With a superhuman effort
he leaves his bed and looks out of the window--only to see the Prussian
troops instead of the cheering cohorts of his countrymen! And in this
last pang of disappointment, the old man dies.

Both of these stories end with the note of disappointment and
consequent sorrow. Poe has declared that the tone of beauty is sadness,
and surely there is a penetrating beauty as well as a thrill of
sublimity in the sadness of these wonderfully-wrought episodes. Here
may be seen the beginnings of the realistic method which Daudet later
adopted. Yet, as these stories both indicate, he still carried with
him the romanticism of his earlier inspirations, untouched by either
the too painful naturalism or the sentimentality of some of his later
stories.

In still greater contrast than either of these to the other is the
story of our present translation, “The Pope’s Mule.” Here are all
the joyous satire, the rollicking fun-making, and the picturesque
description, of this unexcelled interpreter of southern life. Daudet’s
wit and humor, characterization and description, local color,
kaleidoscopic pageantry, are at their best, with never a thought of
enforcing a moral or of sounding any emotion deeper than that of boyish
amusement. It is the creator of Tartarin who now writes, and not the
later master of the novelist’s art.

Notwithstanding the success of the fecund and versatile author of
_Sapho_, as a playwright, and his much wider vogue as a novelist,
I wonder if after all he did not love best his short-stories and prose
fantasies. In his greatest real novels, _Froment, Jr., and Risler,
Sr._; _Jack_; _The Nabob_; _Kings in Exile_; and _Numa Roumestan_,
the episode often occurs, of which literary form some
further words will be said in the treatment of Loti.

Such a temperament as Daudet’s, both introspective and finely sensitive
to the impressions of his surroundings, would naturally make much
of his fiction biographical, and even autobiographical. Indeed, a
close study of his works, read in the light of his life, shows how
he has woven into his stories many personal facts. In that exquisite
child-document _Little What’s-His-Name_, we have a rather full
record of his boyhood and entrance into Paris. _Jack_, also, is
full of his own early sorrows, while one character after another may
be traced to folk whom he knew. His mind, and his heart too, were
note-books on which he was always transcribing his impressions of life,
and--here is the vital thing, after all--recreating them for use in his
own inimitable way.

So Daudet was not an extreme realist--scarcely a typical realist
at all--for while he used the realistic method for observation and
faithful record, he no more got beyond sympathizing with his characters
than did Dickens, to whom more than to any other English-writing
novelist he must be compared. Daudet “belonged” to no school, expounded
no theories, stood for no reforms. He was just a kindly, humorous,
sympathetic, patiently exact maker of fascinating fictions, and as such
we shall love him quite in the proportion that we know him. Life, as he
saw it, was full of sadness, but that did not make him conclude it to
be not worth the living. Happily married, he knew the solaces of home
life. Unlike Maupassant, “What’s the use!” was far from being the heart
of his philosophy. Disenchanted with life he never was. A disheartening
view of sordidness, vice, and misery left him still with open eyes,
for he would not close them against truth; but it never prevented his
turning his gaze upon the beautiful, the humorous, and the good--a
lovable trio ever!--and finding in them some healing for his hurt.




                            THE POPE’S MULE
                          (_LA MULE DU PAPE_)

                          By Alphonse Daudet

                   _Done into English by the Editor_


Of all the pretty sayings, proverbs, or adages with which our Provence
peasants embroider their discourse, I know none more picturesque or
singular than this: within fifteen leagues around about my mill,
whenever a person speaks of a spiteful, vindictive man, he says, “That
man there--look out for him! He is like the Pope’s mule, who kept her
kick in waiting for seven years.”

I hunted diligently for a long time to find out whence that proverb
could have come, what was that papal mule, and that kick reserved
throughout seven years. No one here has been able to inform me on this
subject, not even Francet Mamaï, my fife player, though he has all the
Provençal legends at his fingers’ ends. Francet thinks with me that it
must be founded upon some old tradition of Provence; yet he has never
heard it referred to except in this proverb.

“You will not find that anywhere but in the Library of the
Grasshoppers,” said the old fifer to me, with a laugh.

The idea struck me as a good one, and since the Library of the
Grasshoppers is at my door, I went and shut myself up there for a week.

It is a marvellous library, admirably equipped, open to poets day and
night, and attended by little librarians who constantly make music for
you with cymbals. There I passed some delicious days, and, after a
week of research--on my back--I ended by discovering what I wished to
know, that is to say, the history of my mule and of that famous kick
saved up for seven years. The story is a pretty one, although a trifle
naïve, and I am going to try to tell it you just as I read it yesterday
morning in a sky-colored manuscript, which smelled delightfully of dry
lavender, and had long gossamer threads for binding threads.

He who has never seen the Avignon of the time of the Popes, has seen
nothing. For gayety, for life, for animation, for a succession of
fêtes, there never was a city its equal. From morning till night there
were processions and pilgrimages; streets strewn with flowers and
hung with rich tapestries; cardinals arriving by the Rhône, banners
flying, galleys bedecked with flags; papal soldiers chanting in Latin
on the public squares; begging friars with their alms-rattles; then,
in addition, from roof to cellar of the houses which swarmed humming
around the great papal palace like bees about their hive, there were
heard the _tic-tac_ of the lace-makers’ looms, the flying of the
shuttles weaving cloth-of-gold for vestments, the little hammers of
the vase-sculptors, the keyboards being attuned at the lute-makers’,
the songs of the warpers; and, overhead, the booming of the bells was
heard, and always below sounded the tinkle of the tambourines on the
river bank by the bridge. For with us, when the people are happy they
must be dancing, dancing ever; and since in those days the streets
in the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifers and tambourine
players took up their post upon the Avignon Bridge, in the cool breezes
of the Rhône, and day and night they danced and danced.... Ah! happy
time, happy city, when halberds did not wound, and state prisons were
used only for cooling wine! No famine; no wars! That shows the way the
Popes of the Comtat[11] knew how to govern their people; that is why
their people regretted them so deeply!

There was one Pope especially, a good old gentleman whom they called
Boniface. Ah! how many tears were shed for him in Avignon when he died!
He was such an amiable, affable prince! He would smile down at you so
genially from his mule! And when you passed him--whether you were a
poor little digger of madder or the grand provost of the city--he would
give you his benediction so courteously! A genuine Pope of Yvetot was
he, but of an Yvetot in Provence, with something sly in his laughter,
a sprig of sweet marjoram in his cap--and not the semblance of a
Jeanneton. The only Jeanneton the good Father had ever been known to
have was his vineyard--a little vineyard which he had planted himself,
three leagues from Avignon, among the myrtles of Château-Neuf.

Every Sunday, on going out from vespers, the worthy man went to pay
his court to it, and when he was seated in the grateful sun, his mule
close beside him, his cardinals stretched at the foot of the vine
stocks all about, then he would order a flagon of wine of his own
bottling--that exquisite, ruby-colored wine, which has been called ever
since Château-Neuf of the Popes--and he would drink it appreciatively
in little sips, and regard his vineyard with a tender air. Then--the
flagon empty, the day closed--he would return joyously to the city,
followed by all his chapter; and, after crossing the Bridge of Avignon,
in the midst of drum-beats and farandoles, his mule, stirred by the
music, took up a little skipping amble, while he himself marked the
time of the dance with his cap--a thing which greatly scandalized his
cardinals, but caused all the people to say, “Ah! that good prince! Ah!
that fine old Pope!”

Next to his vineyard at Château-Neuf, the thing that the Pope loved
best in the world was his mule. The good old man doted on that beast.
Every evening before going to bed he went to see if her stable was well
shut, if nothing was lacking in the manger; and he never rose from
the table without having had prepared under his very eyes a huge bowl
of wine _à la Française_, with plenty of sugar and spice, which
he himself carried to the mule, despite the remarks of his cardinals.
It must be admitted, however, that the animal was worth the trouble.
She was a beautiful mule, black and dappled with red, glossy of coat,
sure of foot, large and full of back, and carrying proudly her neat
little head, all decked out with pompons, rosettes, silver bells, and
bows of ribbon--all this with the mildness of an angel, a naïve eye,
and two long ears, always in motion, which gave her the air of an
amiable child. All Avignon respected her, and when she went through the
streets there was no attention which she did not receive; for everyone
knew that this was the best way to be in favor at court, and that,
for all her innocent air, the Pope’s mule had led more than one to
fortune--witness Tistet Védène and his prodigious adventure.

This Tistet Védène was, from the very first, an audacious young rascal
whom his father, Guy Védène, the gold-carver, had been obliged to
drive from home because he would not do anything, and demoralized
the apprentices. For six months he could be seen trailing his jacket
through all the gutters of Avignon, but especially around the papal
palace, for this rascal had long had his eye fixed on the Pope’s
mule, and you will see what a villainous scheme it was. One day when
his Holiness was taking a walk all alone beneath the shadows of the
ramparts with his steed, behold my Tistet approached and, clasping his
hands with an air of admiration, said to him:

“Ah! _mon Dieu!_ what a splendid mule you have there, Holy Father!
Permit me to look at her a moment. Ah, my Pope, the emperor of Germany
has not her equal!”

And he caressed her and spoke softly to her, as to a damsel.

“Come here, my jewel, my treasure, my fine pearl....”

And the good Pope, deeply moved, said to himself:

“What a good little fellow! How gentle he is with my mule!”

And do you know what happened the next day? Tistet Védène exchanged his
old yellow jacket for a beautiful vestment of lace, a violet silk hood,
and buckled shoes; and he entered the household of the Pope, where
never before had any been received but sons of nobles and nephews of
cardinals. There is an intrigue for you! But Tistet did not stop there.

Once in the service of the Pope, the rascal continued the game which
had succeeded so well. Insolent with everyone else, he had nothing but
attention, nothing but provident care for the mule; and one was always
meeting him about the palace court with a handful of oats or a bunch of
clover, whose rosy clusters he shook gently and glanced at the balcony
of Saint Peter as if to say: “Ha! for whom is this?” And so it went on
until the good Pope, who felt that he was growing old, ended by leaving
it to him to watch over the stable and to carry to the mule her bowl
of wine _à la Française_--which was no laughing matter for the
cardinals.

No more was it for the mule--it did not make her laugh. Now, at the
hour for her wine, she always saw coming to her stable five or six
little clerks of the household, who hastily buried themselves in
the straw with their hoods and their laces; then, after a moment, a
delicious warm odor of caramel and spices filled the stable, and
Tistet Védène appeared carefully carrying the bowl of wine _à la
Française_. Then the martyrdom of the poor beast began.

That perfumed wine which she loved so well, which kept her warm, which
gave her wings, they had the cruelty to place before her, there in her
manger, and let her sniff it; then, when she had her nostrils full
of it, it was gone--that lovely rose-flamed liquor all went down the
gullets of those good-for-nothings. And yet if they had only stopped at
taking her wine; but they were like devils, all these little clerks,
when they had drunken. One pulled her ears, another her tail; Quinquet
mounted himself upon her back, Béluguet tried his cap on her, and not
one of those little scamps reflected that with a single good kick that
excellent beast could have sent them all into the polar star, and even
farther. But no! It is no vain thing to be the Pope’s mule, the mule
of benedictions and indulgences. The children went blithely on, she
did not get angry; and it was only against Tistet Védène that she bore
malice. But that fellow, for instance, when she felt him behind her,
her hoof itched, and truly she had excellent reason. That ne’er-do-well
of a Tistet played her such villainous tricks! He had such cruel
fancies after drinking!

One day he took it into his head to make her climb up with him into
the clock tower, all the way up to the very top of the palace! And it
is no myth that I am telling you--two hundred thousand Provençals saw
it. Imagine for yourself the terror of that unhappy mule when, after
having for a whole hour twisted like a snail blindly up the staircase,
and having clambered up I know not how many steps, she found herself
all at once on a platform dazzling with light, and saw, a thousand feet
beneath her, a fantastic Avignon: the market booths no larger than
walnuts, the papal soldiers before their barracks like red ants, and
farther down, over a silver thread, a microscopically little bridge on
which the people danced and danced. Ah! poor beast! What panic! At the
bray she uttered all the windows of the palace trembled.

“What’s the matter? What are they doing to her?” cried the good Pope,
and rushed out upon the balcony.

Tistet Védène was already in the courtyard, pretending to weep and tear
out his hair.

“Ah! Holy Father, what is the matter? There is your mule.... _Mon
Dieu!_ what will happen to us! Your mule has gone up into the
belfry!”

“All by herself?”

“Yes, Holy Father, all by herself. Stay! Look there, up high. Don’t
you see her ears waving? They look like two swallows.”

“Mercy on us!” cried the poor Pope on raising his eyes. “But she must
have gone mad! Why, she will kill herself. Will you come down, you
unhappy creature!”

_Pécaïre!_ She could have asked nothing better than to come down;
but how? The stairs--they were not to be thought of: one could mount
those things, but as to coming down, one could break one’s legs a
hundred times. And the poor mule was disconsolate; but as she roamed
about the platform with her great eyes filled with vertigo she thought
of Tistet Védène.

“Ah, bandit, if I escape--what a kick tomorrow morning!”

That idea of a kick restored a little courage to her heart; except for
that she could not have held out. At last they succeeded in getting her
down, but it was not an easy affair. They had to lower her in a litter,
with ropes and windlass, and you may imagine what a humiliation it must
have been for a Pope’s mule to see herself hanging at that height,
afloat with her legs in the air like a beetle at the end of a string.
And all Avignon looking on!

The unhappy beast did not sleep that night. It seemed to her as though
she were forever turning upon that accursed platform, with the
laughter of the city below. Then she thought of that infamous Tistet
Védène, and of the delightful kick that she proposed to turn loose the
next morning. Ah, my friends, what a kick! They could see the smoke at
Pampérigouste.

But, while this pretty reception was being prepared for him at the
stable, do you know what Tistet Védène was doing? He was going singing
down the Rhône on one of the papal galleys, on his way to the Court of
Naples with a company of young nobles whom the city sent every year
to Queen Joanna for exercise in diplomacy and in manners. Tistet was
not of noble birth; but the Pope desired to recompense him for what
he had done for his mule, and above all for the activity he had shown
throughout the day of the rescue.

It was the mule who was disappointed the next day!

“Ah, the bandit! He suspected something!” she thought as she shook her
bells in fury. “But it’s all the same; go, scoundrel! You will find it
waiting for you on your return, that kick--I’ll save it for you!”

And she did save it.

After the departure of Tistet, the Pope’s mule once more found her
course of tranquil life and her former habits. Neither Quinquet nor
Béluguet came again to her stable. The delightful days of wine _à la
Française_ had returned, and with them good-humor, the long siestas,
and the little prancing step when she crossed the Avignon bridge.
However, since her adventure she was always shown a slight coldness in
the city. Folks whispered together as she passed; the old people shook
their heads, the children laughed as they pointed to the belfry. Even
the good Pope had no longer quite the same confidence in his friend,
and whenever he permitted himself to take a little nap on her back on
Sundays on returning from his vineyard, this thought always came to
him: “What if I should awake 'way up there on the platform!” The mule
discerned this and suffered, without saying a word; only, when any one
near her mentioned the name of Tistet Védène, her long ears quivered,
and with a little laugh she would sharpen the iron of her shoes on the
paving.

Seven years passed thus; then at the end of those seven years Tistet
Védène returned from the Court of Naples. His time there was not at an
end; but he had learned that the Pope’s chief mustard-bearer had died
suddenly at Avignon, and, since the post suited him well, he had come
in great haste in order to apply for it.

When that intriguer of a Védène entered into the great hall of the
palace, the Holy Father had difficulty in recognizing him, so tall had
he grown, and stout of body. It must be said, too, that the worthy Pope
had grown old and could no longer see well without spectacles.

Tistet was not frightened.

“What, Holy Father, you do not remember me any more? It is I, Tistet
Védène!”

“Védène?”

“Why, yes, you know very well--the one who used to carry the wine _à
la Française_ to your mule.”

“Oh--yes--yes--I remember. A good little fellow, that Tistet Védène!
And now, what is it that he wants of us?”

“Oh, a very little thing, Holy Father. I came to ask you--by the way,
do you still have your mule? And is she well? Ah, so much the better! I
came to ask of you the post of the chief mustard-bearer, who has just
died.”

“First mustard-bearer, you! Why, you are too young. How old are you,
then?”

“Twenty years two months, illustrious Pontiff, just five years older
than your mule. Ah! that excellent creature! If you only knew how I
loved that mule! How I languished for her in Italy! Are you not going
to let me see her?”

“Yes, my child, you shall see her,” said the good Pope, deeply moved.
“And since you loved her so much, that excellent animal, I do not wish
you to live apart from her. From this day, I attach you to my person as
chief mustard-bearer. My cardinals will raise an outcry, but so much
the worse! I am used to it. Come to meet us tomorrow as we return from
vespers, we will deliver to you the insignia of your office in the
presence of our chapter, and then--I will take you to see the mule, and
you shall come to the vineyard with us two--ha! ha! Go along, now!”

If Tistet Védène was content upon leaving the grand hall, I need not
tell you with what impatience he awaited the ceremony of the next day.
Meanwhile, they had some one in the palace who was still more happy
and more impatient than he: it was the mule. From the time of Védène’s
return, until vespers on the following day, the terrible creature did
not cease cramming herself with oats and kicking at the wall with her
hind feet. She too was preparing herself for the ceremony.

Accordingly, on the morrow, when vespers had been said, Tistet Védène
made his entrance into the courtyard of the papal palace. All the high
clergy were there--the cardinals in red robes, the advocate of the
devil in black velvet, the convent abbés with their little mitres, the
church-wardens of the Saint-Agrico, the violet hoods of the members
of the household, the lesser clergy also, the papal soldiers in full
uniform, the three brotherhoods of penitents, the hermits from Mount
Ventoux with their ferocious eyes and the little clerk who walks behind
them carrying the bell, the Flagellant Brothers, naked to the waist,
the blond sacristans in robes like judges--all, all, down to those who
pass the holy water, and he who lights and he who extinguishes the
candles--not one was missing. Ah! That was a beautiful installation,
with bells, fireworks, sunlight, music, and, as always, those mad
tambourine players who led the dance down by the Avignon Bridge.

When Védène appeared in the midst of the assemblage, his imposing
deportment and fine appearance called forth a murmur of approbation. He
was a magnificent Provençal of the blond type, with long hair curled
at the ends and a small unruly beard which resembled the shavings of
fine metal from the graving tool of his father, the carver of gold. The
report was current that the fingers of Queen Joanna had now and then
toyed with that blond beard; and the Sire de Védène had in truth the
haughty air and the absent look of those whom queens have loved. That
day, to do honor to his nation, he had replaced his Neapolitan garb by
a jacket bordered with color-of-rose, in the Provençal fashion, and in
his hood trembled a great plume of the Camargue ibis.

As soon as he had entered, the first mustard-bearer bowed with a
gallant air, and directed his steps toward the grand dais, where the
Pope awaited him in order to deliver to him the insignia of his office:
the yellow wooden spoon and the saffron-colored coat. The mule was at
the foot of the staircase, all caparisoned and ready to depart for the
vineyard. When he passed her, Tistet Védène had a pleasant smile and
paused to give her two or three friendly pats upon the back, looking
out of the corner of his eye to see if the Pope noticed him. The
situation was admirable. The mule let fly:

“There! You are trapped, bandit! For seven years I have saved that for
you!”

And she let loose a kick so terrible, so terrible that at Pampérigouste
itself one could see the smoke: a cloud of blond smoke in which
fluttered an ibis plume--all that was left of the ill-fated Tistet
Védène.

Mules’ kicks are not ordinarily so appalling; but then this was a papal
mule; and besides, think of it! she had saved it up for seven years.
There is no finer example of an ecclesiastical grudge.


                              FOOTNOTES:

[11] The County of Avignon.




                  PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, IMPERSONAL ANALYST


Among French masters of the short-story, Prosper Mérimée easily holds
rank in the first group. Both personality and genius are his, and both
well repay scrutiny.

Stendhal has given us a picture of Mérimée as a “young man in a gray
frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man had
something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes, small
and without expression, had always the same look, and this look was
ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my present
friends.”

An examination of at least eight several portraits of Mérimée indicates
that Stendhal’s picture is far from flattering, yet no one ever charged
Mérimée with being pretty.

Our author was born in Paris, September 28, 1803. His father, Jean
François, was a cultivated artist and a writer of some ability. While
professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, the elder Mérimée married Anne
Moreau, a pupil. She was a successful painter of children, and often
kept them in quiet pose by telling them stories. Her grandmother,
Madame de Beaumont, had long before endeared herself to children of
all time by writing “Beauty and the Beast.” The Mérimée home naturally
attracted the artists and celebrities of many lands, so that Prosper
was reared in an air of refinement and inspiration.

Versatile from childhood, Mérimée took to drawing like a fine-arts
pupil, passed through college, was successful in his law examinations,
and at an early age took up literature as a vocation.

His career was seconded by many journeys abroad, where he served his
country particularly as man of letters, art critic, and archæologist.
At home he received important public recognition, notably membership in
the French Academy and appointment as a Senator of France. This latter
honor evidenced the warm personal esteem of the Empress Eugénie, whom
he had known as a girl in Spain, and at whose court--in the reign of
Napoleon III--he was received as an intimate rather than as a courtier.
Notwithstanding his reticence, everywhere his friends were many and
distinguished, for scarcely any other Frenchman ever labored so
brilliantly in capacities collateral with literature and yet attained
to such a pinnacle of many-sided authorship. He died at Cannes,
September 23, 1870, lacking five days of rounding out his sixty-seventh
year.

Those who would know somewhat of Mérimée’s spirit must read his
_Letters to an Unknown Woman_--letters covering thirty-nine years
of his life. For the first nine years the correspondents never met,
but when at length they did, it was to love; and though during the
succeeding thirty years the affection cooled, there never failed a
solid attachment, and the last letter to his _Inconnue_ was penned
but two hours before his death. True, in these epistles the author is
always the literary artist expressing the moods of a man and a lover,
and so is never to be taken quite unawares, yet all his traits are
disclosed with sufficient openness to show the real man.

And this real man, who was he? An alert student of history, who yet
was so fascinated by its anecdotal phases that he cared not at all
for the large philosophy of events in sequence; a linguist who early
delved into Greek and Latin, knew English well enough to memorize long
passages from the poets, spoke Castilian Spanish as well as several
dialects, and translated Russian--Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenieff--with
rare ability; an epicure in travel, keen for the curious and the
novel; a connoisseur in art and archæology of sufficient distinction
to warrant his appointment as the national “Inspector of Monuments;” a
prejudiced scorner of priests and religion, yet bitterly distrustful
of his own inner light; an orderly man, systematic even in his
indulgences; a pagan in refined sensualism, which he always checked
before its claims impinged too largely upon other domains; an aloof
spirit, ironical and cold, yet capable of the warm friendship that made
Stendhal happy for two days by receiving one of Mérimée’s letters,
constant enough to pour out his best at the feet of his Unknown for
more than half a lifetime, and so gentle as to crave with the tender
heart of a father the love of little children.

The sum of all this is Enigma. We are not sure which is the real man;
but this we know: his was a tender, susceptible heart beating under
an outer garment of ironical coldness. To love deeply was to endure
pain, to follow impulse was to court trouble, to cherish enthusiasms
was to delude the mind--so he schooled himself to appear impassive and
blasé. How much of this frosty withdrawal was genuine and how much a
protective mask, no man can say.

Mérimée’s literary methods reflected his singularly composite
personality, yet the author is not apparent in his work. He delighted
to tell his tales in the impersonal, matter-of-fact manner of the
casual traveller who had picked up a good story and passed it on just
as it was told to him.

“They contain,” writes Professor Van Steenderen, “no lengthy
descriptions. There are no reflections, dissertations, or explanations
in them. They bring out in relief only the permanent features of a
given situation, features interesting and intelligible to men of other
ages and climes. They are lucid and well constructed. Their plots turn
about a simple action with unique effect. Their style is alert, urbane,
discreet, and rich, seeking its effect only through concrete and simple
means. They deal but very slightly with lyrical emotion, they deal with
passions and the will.”

Mérimée’s literary career began at the age of twenty-two, when he
published a collection of eight of his short plays purporting to be
translated from the Spanish. His portrait, disguised as a Spanish
actress, serves as a frontispiece. He perpetuated a similar hoax
two years later when he issued a volume of pseudo-Illyrian poems,
“translated into French.” These brilliant jokes gulled the literary
world as completely as did Chatterton.

His historical fiction, pure history, dramas, criticisms, essays, and
works on art and archæology, we must pass. His shorter fiction claims
attention now.

“Colomba”--a novelette in length, but a long short-story in
structure--is the story of a Corsican vendetta, followed to the end by
the heroine (from whom the story takes its title) with a wild ferocity
tempered with a queer sort of piety. Mérimée’s fatalism underlies the
whole--circumstances control the will, chance decides the brigand or
the benefactor, virtue and crime are mere accidents.

When Mérimée published “Colomba,” in 1840, he was at the height of his
genius, and notwithstanding the enervating philosophy in which the
romance is steeped, it remains one of the most powerfully dramatic
stories ever written--both terrible and sweet.

Of his twenty-some briefer fictions--mostly tales in form--eight at
least are brilliant examples of the story-teller’s art, and all show
marks of distinction. Six were published in one fruitful year--1829:
“Mateo Falcone,” “The Vision of Charles XI,” “The Taking of the
Redoubt,” “Tamango,” “Federigo,” and “The Pearl of Toledo.”

“Tamango” is a fine specimen of Mérimée’s artistic irony, yet
underneath are compassion, and hatred of injustice. As does most of the
author’s work, this tale reveals his tendency to tragedy, even his love
for picturing the gruesome. There is in all literature no more terrible
picture of the slave-trade and its revolting consequent evils.

“Mateo Falcone” is a technically perfect short-story. Mateo is a
well-to-do sheep-raiser living in the plateau country of Corsica, whose
thickets were often the resort of fugitives from justice. One day Mateo
and his wife set out early to visit one of their flocks, leaving the
little son, Fortunato, at home. Several hours later a bandit, limping
painfully from a wound received from the pursuing soldiery, claims
sanctuary as a Corsican and protection because of his friendship for
Mateo. Fortunato hesitates, but at sight of a five-franc piece hides
the man under a haystack. Soon the soldiers come, but threats cannot
make the boy betray the bandit. A silver watch, however, proves an
effective bribe. Just as the wounded bandit is dragged from the
haystack, Mateo returns and learns the truth. When the soldiers have
gone, bearing their contemptuous prisoner on a litter, the father takes
out little Fortunato and, after giving him time to say a final prayer,
shoots him as the first traitor in the family.

This, says Walter Pater, is “perhaps the cruellest story in the world.”
But it is not all cruelty. So skilfully, so sincerely, does the
narrator make us feel the whole spirit of the scene, the people, the
crisis, that we are prepared to witness the awful penalty for violating
the Corsican code of sanctuary. But oh, the hopelessness of that
mother, as she stoically, yet with breaking heart, sees the inevitable
tragedy closing in upon those whom she loves!

“The Venus of Ille” the author thought to be his best story. It is
notable--as all of Mérimeé’s stories are--for its perfect local color,
as well as for its subtle air of the weird. It is one of the classic
“ghost” stories of the world--a tale of supreme distinction. It is
also, structurally, the author’s most perfect short-story.

M. de Peyrehorade unearths a bronze statue of a woman, which is
thereafter known as The Venus of Ille. From the beginning this statue
is feared by the peasantry, for when it was dug up it fell upon and
broke the leg of a workman. Peyrehorade’s son Alphonse is betrothed
to a wealthy girl. On their wedding day, while playing tennis, he
removes from his hand the bride’s diamond ring and places it on the
finger of the statue. On arriving at the home of the bride-to-be,
he discovers the absence of the ring, but replaces it with another,
without mentioning the incident. After the wedding he returns with his
bride to his father’s home and tries to remove the ring from the hand
of the Venus; but her fingers are now bent and he cannot. That night
the terrified bride hears the Venus enter their bed-chamber and lie
down beside her. Thinking it to be her husband, she makes no comment.
But presently the husband does come in and lies down upon the bed.
Whereupon the bronze Venus crushes him to death in her embrace and then
moves away as she came.

In “Arsene Guillot” (1844), Mérimée’s masterpiece of pathos, he has
given freer rein to his sympathies, and the result is a tenderly moving
tale illustrating the virtue of tolerance.

In early manhood Mérimée spent long stretches in Spain, there absorbing
rich material for his stories. “Carmen”--the story on which Bizet
founded his opera--is the greatest of these. It was published in 1845,
and in length is almost a novelette.

Don José Lizzarrabengoa, Navarrese, and corporal in a cavalry regiment,
meets at Seville the gypsy, Carmen. While taking her to prison for a
murderous assault on another woman, he is induced to connive at her
escape, and is punished by being reduced to the ranks. Through jealous
infatuation for her, he kills his lieutenant, and joins a band of
smugglers of which Carmen is the leading spirit. In a duel with Garcia,
her _rom_, or husband, Don José kills Garcia, and becomes in his
turn the _rom_ of the fascinating gypsy. Jealous of every man
who sees her, Don José offers to forget everything if she will go
with him to America. She refuses--for the sake of another lover, as he
believes--and he threatens to kill her if she persists. She answers
that it is so written, and that she has long known it, but that “free
Carmen has been, and free she will always be.” Don José does kill
her, buries her in the woods, and rides to Cordova, where he delivers
himself to the authorities.

But it is now time to look particularly at one of Mérimée’s earlier
tales--written when he was but twenty-six--“The Taking of the Redoubt.”

Technically it is a tale, with the picture-phrases of the sketch. It is
a marvellous brief story rather than a marvellous short-story, which,
as I have before remarked, must exhibit more plot, more complication,
with its consequent dénouement, than is found in either the tale or
the sketch. As a work of art, it ranks with the author’s most vivid
stories. In the memorable phrase of Walter Pater, “Seldom or never has
the mere pen of a writer taken us so close to the cannon’s mouth.”

Before reading the story itself in translation, some explanatory words
may be helpful. It is interesting to note the device which Mérimée
uses to add reality to his narrative--he tells us that the story, the
characters, the place, the fight, are real. Even those who stand in the
wings, flitting across the stage but once as if to say, “I am flesh
and blood, and not a mere stuffed figure like the doll whose only pains
were in her sawdust”--even they have names and personalities dimly
veiled under the initial and the dash.

Mérimée’s friend, the “military man” from whom he got the story, is
Henri Marie Beyle--who called himself de Stendhal. Stendhal was a
somewhat prolific author, but it was _La Chartreuse de Parme_
(1839) that brought him fame. As a romantic tragi-comedy, dealing with
Italy in the Napoleonic era, it is worth a reading, but particularly
because the so-called _Épisode de Waterloo_ (in chapters 3 and 4)
reveals the measurable debt which Mérimée owed to his friend.

Stendhal was indeed “a military man.” He first smelled powder in the
Marengo campaign (1800), and served long in Napoleon’s armies. But he
was actually present in 1812 at the assault upon Cheverino, in the
Moscow campaign, and doubtless he afterward poured its dramatic story
red-hot into the soul of Mérimée.

In another detail also Mérimée departs from fact--Stendhal died in
Paris in 1842 of apoplexy, and not of “a fever in Greece;” but surely
that is a mild variation for a fictionist. “The 4th September” is also
true to the actual, since the battle of Borodino took place on the
7th, and the arrival at Moscow on the 14th, 1812. “General B----” is
General Berthier, chief-of-staff for Napoleon in the Moscow campaign.
“Madame de B----” has been identified as Madame de Boigne, the intimate
of Madame Récamier, and a resident of the rue de Provence. In her
salon Mérimée read aloud many of his stories before publication.
Other critics suggest that “Madame B----” is Madame (la comtesse) de
Beaulaincourt, and support this contention by referring to a collection
of eleven letters addressed to this noble dame by Mérimée, and later
published. Finally, “General C----” is that famous Napoleonic soldier,
Jean Dominique Compans, who actually commanded the 57th and the 61st
regiments at Cheverino.

But a volume might be written on the art of this master story-teller,
on the life-experiences from which he drew his plots, and on the
glowing praises which his work has called forth for three-quarters of
a century. Doubtless, however, his own work will now serve better than
further pages of introduction.




                       THE TAKING OF THE REDOUBT
                    (_L’ENLÈVEMENT DE LA REDOUTE_)

                          By Prosper Mérimée

                   _Done into English by the Editor_


A friend of mine, a military man, who died of a fever some years ago
in Greece, described for me one day the first engagement in which he
had taken part. His recital so struck me that I wrote it from memory as
soon as I had the leisure. Here it is:

I joined the regiment the 4th September at evening. I found the colonel
in the camp. He received me rather bruskly; but after having read the
letter of recommendation from General B---- he changed his manner and
spoke to me a few courteous words.

I was presented by him to my captain, who had returned at that instant
from a reconnoissance. This captain, with whom I had had scarcely time
to become acquainted, was a tall, dark man, of hard, repellent visage.
He had been a private, and had won his epaulets and his cross upon the
field of battle. His voice, which was hoarse and feeble, contrasted
singularly with his almost gigantic stature. They told me he owed that
strange voice to a ball which had pierced him through and through at
the battle of Jena.

On learning that I had just left the school at Fontainebleau, he made a
grimace and said:

“My lieutenant died yesterday.”

I understood that he meant to say, “It is you who must take his place,
and you are not capable of it.” A sharp retort leaped to my lips, but I
contained myself.

The moon was rising behind the redoubt of Cheverino, which was situated
two cannon-shots from our bivouac. She was large and red, as usual at
her rising. But, on this evening, she seemed to be of extraordinary
grandeur. For one instant the redoubt stood out sharply in black
against the glittering disk of the moon. It resembled the cone of a
volcano at the moment of eruption.

An old soldier, beside whom I found myself, remarked upon the color of
the moon.

“She is very red,” said he; “it’s a sign that it will cost us dear to
take that famous redoubt!”

I have always been superstitious, and that augury, above all at that
moment, affected me. I sought my couch, but I was not able to sleep. I
arose, and for some time I walked, watching the immense line of fires
which covered the heights above the village of Cheverino.

When I believed that the fresh and sharp air of the night had
sufficiently cooled my blood, I returned to the fire; I enveloped
myself carefully in my mantle, and I closed my eyes, hoping not to open
them before day. But slumber refused to come. Insensibly my thoughts
took on a doleful hue. I told myself that I had not one friend among
the hundred thousand men who covered that plain. If I were wounded, I
should be in a hospital, treated without regard by ignorant surgeons.
All that I had heard said of surgical operations recurred to my memory.
My heart thumped with violence, and mechanically I arranged like a
kind of cuirass the handkerchief and the portfolio I had in my bosom.
Weariness overwhelmed me, I nodded every instant, and every instant
some sinister idea reproduced itself with renewed force and startled me
out of my sleep.

However, fatigue carried the day, and when they beat the reveille,
I was sound asleep. We were drawn up in battle array, the roll was
called, then we stacked arms, and everything indicated that we should
pass a tranquil day.

About three o’clock, an aide-de-camp arrived, bringing an order. We
were ordered to take up arms again; our skirmishers spread themselves
over the plain; we followed slowly, and in about twenty minutes we saw
all the Russian advance-posts fall back and reënter the redoubt.

One battery of artillery was established on our right, another at
our left, but both well in advance of us. They opened a very lively
fire upon the enemy, who replied vigorously, and soon the redoubt of
Cheverino disappeared under the dense clouds of smoke.

Our regiment was almost covered from the Russian fire by a rise of
ground. Their bullets, rarely aimed at us (for they preferred to fire
at our gunners), passed over our heads, or at worst showered us with
earth and little stones.

As soon as we had received the order to march forward, my captain
looked at me with an attention which obliged me to pass my hand two or
three times over my youthful mustache with an air as unconcerned as
was possible to me. In truth, I was not frightened, and the sole fear
that I experienced was lest he should imagine that I was afraid. The
harmless bullets contributed still more to maintain me in my heroic
calm. My self-esteem told me that I was going into real danger, since
at last I was under battery fire. I was enchanted to be so at my ease,
and I dreamed with pleasure of telling in the salon of Madame B----,
rue de Provence, how the redoubt of Cheverino was taken.

The colonel passed before our company; he said to me: “Well, you are
going to have hot work for your début.”

I smiled with a perfectly martial air as I brushed the sleeve of my
coat, on which a bullet that had struck the earth thirty yards away had
cast a little dust.

It appeared that the Russians had observed the ill success of their
cannon-balls; for they replaced them with shells, which could more
easily reach us in the hollow where we were posted. One rather big
explosion knocked off my shako, and killed a man near me.

“My compliments,” said the captain, as I picked up my shako. “You are
safe now for the day.” I knew that military superstition which believes
that the axiom, _non his in idem_[12], finds its application on a
field of battle as in a court of justice. I jauntily replaced my shako.

“That is making a man salute, without ceremony,” I said, as gaily as I
could. That bad joke, in the circumstances, seemed excellent.

“I felicitate you,” responded the captain. “You will get nothing
worse, and to-night you will command a company; for well I know that
the oven is being heated for me. Every time that I have been wounded
the officer nearest me[13] has been touched by a spent ball, and,” he
added, in a lower tone, and almost as though ashamed, “their names
always commenced with a P.”

I pretended to feel brave; many persons would have done as I did; many
persons too would have been as deeply impressed by those prophetic
words. Conscript as I was, I realized that I could not confide my
sentiments to any one, and that I must always appear coolly intrepid.

After about a half-hour, the Russian fire diminished perceptibly;
whereupon we sallied from our cover to march upon the redoubt.

Our regiment was composed of three battalions. The second was ordered
to turn the redoubt on the side of the entrance; the two others were to
make the assault. I was in the third battalion.

In coming out from behind the species of ridge which had protected us,
we were received by several discharges of musketry which did but little
damage in our ranks. The whistling of the balls surprised me: often I
turned my head, and so drew upon myself divers pleasantries on the part
of my comrades who were more familiar with that sound.

“Take it all in all,” I said to myself, “a battle is not such a
terrible matter.”

We advanced in double-time, preceded by skirmishers: all at once the
Russians gave three hurrahs--three distinct hurrahs--then remained
silent, and without firing.

“I don’t like this silence,” said my captain. “It bodes no good for us.”

I thought that our men were a trifle too noisy, and I could not help
mentally comparing their tumultuous clamor with the imposing silence of
the enemy.

We quickly attained the foot of the redoubt; the palisades had been
shattered, and the earth ploughed up by our balls. The soldiers rushed
upon these new ruins with cries of “_Vive l’Empereur!_” with more
vigor than one would have expected to hear from men who had already
cheered so much.

I raised my eyes, and never shall I forget the spectacle that I saw.
Most of the smoke had lifted and remained suspended like a canopy about
twenty feet above the redoubt. Through a bluish vapor, behind their
half-ruined parapet, one could descry the Russian grenadiers, firearms
raised, immobile as statues. I think I can see each soldier yet, the
left eye fastened upon us, the right hidden behind his levelled musket.
In an embrasure, a few feet from us, a man holding a lighted fuse stood
beside a cannon.

I shuddered, and I believed that my last hour had come.

“The dance is about to commence,” cried out my captain. “Good-night!”

These were the last words that I heard him utter.

A roll of drums resounded within the redoubt. I saw every musket
lowered. I closed my eyes, and I heard an appalling crash, followed
by cries and groans. I opened my eyes, surprised to find myself still
living. The redoubt was anew enveloped in smoke. I was surrounded with
the bleeding and the dead. My captain was stretched out at my feet: his
head had been crushed by a bullet, and I was covered with his brains
and his blood. Of all my company none remained but six men and me.

To this carnage succeeded a moment of stupor. The colonel, putting his
hat on the point of his sword, was the first to scale the parapet,
crying: “_Vive l’Empereur!_” He was followed instantly by all the
survivors. I do not remember clearly just what followed. We entered
within the redoubt, how I do not know. We fought body to body amid
a smoke so dense that we could not see one another. I believe that
I smote, for I found my sabre was all bloody. At last I heard the
cry, “Victory!” and, the smoke diminishing, I saw blood and dead
bodies completely covering the earthworks of the redoubt. The cannons
especially were buried beneath piles of corpses. About two hundred men,
in the French uniform, were grouped without order, some loading their
muskets, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven hundred Russian prisoners
were with them.

The colonel was lying all covered with blood upon a broken caisson
near the entrance. Several soldiers bestirred themselves around him: I
approached.

“Where is the senior captain?” he inquired of a sergeant.

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders in a manner most expressive.

“And the senior lieutenant?”

“This gentleman here, who arrived yesterday,” said the sergeant, in a
perfectly calm tone.

The colonel smiled bitterly.

“Come, sir,” he said to me, “you are now in chief command; promptly
fortify the entrance of the redoubt with these wagons, for the enemy is
in force; but General C---- will see that you are sustained.”

“Colonel,” I said to him, “you are severely wounded?”

“Pish, my dear fellow, but the redoubt is taken!”


                              FOOTNOTES:

[12] Latin: not twice in the same (place).

[13] In rank.




                         PIERRE LOTI, COLORIST


Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a
Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with
him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy
soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world,
not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and
minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of
to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a
poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist,
writing at a time when realism was most potent in France.

The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien
Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that
gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented
derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore
was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea
enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer
visited the island in 1872.

The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight
in his autobiographic _Le Roman d’un enfant_ not only inbreathed
his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly
of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were
stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters
of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen
we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and
lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery--as his Cross of the
Legion of Honor testifies--in the Tonquin campaign, when France must
needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia.

M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the
Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as
might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by
year.

In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership
in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and
Scribe.

Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard,
tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite
substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below
medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily
exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our
author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like
muscles to spectacular account!

So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just
presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the
task gave pause even to Loti himself.

He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had
at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human
hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering
variety. A composite is Loti--almost a chameleon, not only entering
into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn,
but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of
this somewhat more in due order.

Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is
autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author
himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or
frankly named in _propria persona_. So while we are at no time at
a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is
both embarrassingly rich and--contradictory. Still, no one can mistake
the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct.

Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He moved in the upper
layers of feeling--feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for
woman--and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover.
His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found
him fresh, tender, elemental--and as sincere as the temporary lover can
be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his
fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of
two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed
sea he felt a vast concern.

Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be
constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test
of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little;
at last his faith was doubt.

Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor
of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms.
Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit--these
excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose
style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he
painted with supernal beauty.

In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long
and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us
unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into
accepting his pictures as ever new.

In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will
you find aught to excel this passage from _Mon frère Yves_?

    “Even the nights were luminous. When all was slumbering in
    heavy immobility, in dead silence, the stars shone out above,
    more dazzling than in any other region of earth, and the sea
    also was illumined from beneath. There was a sort of immense
    gleam diffused over the waters; the lightest motion, such as
    the slow gliding of the boat, or a shark darting after it,
    brought out upon the warm eddies flashes like the color of a
    fire-fly. Then, over the great phosphorescent mirror of the
    deep, there were millions of wild flames--they were like little
    lamps lighting themselves everywhere, burning mysteriously for
    a second or two, then dying out. These nights were swooning
    with heat, full of phosphorescence; and in all this dim
    immensity light was brooding, and all these seas held latent
    life, in a rudimentary state, as did formerly the gloomy waters
    of the primeval world.”

As in the foregoing, so in the following, see how this necromancer
of words accomplishes the impossible--“the planks of the ship” are
the only solid, palpable substances in this atmospheric delicacy from
_Pecheur d’Islande_ (An Iceland Fisherman):

    “Outside it was daylight, perpetual daylight. But it was
    a pale, pale light, resembling nothing else; it threw dim
    reflections over everything, as of a dead sun, and beyond
    these, all was an immense void without color; everything
    outside the planks of the ship seeming diaphanous, impalpable,
    unreal.

    “The eye could scarcely distinguish the sea. First it took
    on the aspect of a sort of trembling mirror, with no image
    reflected in it; as it spread further it seemed to become a
    vaporous plain, and beyond this there was nothing--no outline
    nor horizon.

    “The damp freshness of the air was more intense, more
    penetrating, than actual cold; and in breathing it one was
    conscious of a taste of brine. All was calm, and it was no
    longer raining; above, formless, colorless clouds seemed to
    hold that latent, unexplained light; one could see plainly,
    while conscious all the time that it was night, and all these
    pallors were of no shade that can be named.”

This is not description--it is miracle; it is, in the fine phrase of M.
Doumic, “evocation;” it is music, color, subtlety, spirit, all thrown
upon the soul’s retina and sensed in some magic manner that refuses to
be classified. No one but a pantheist, sensitive to all the moods of
nature--and especially those of that abysmal enigma, the sea--could
have evoked such visions, such realities, where other eyes see--water.

In form our author’s books are varied, following rarely any
preconceived plan, we may well suppose--only this, that the literary
wanderer with his new book every year takes us by the hand and shows us
the intimacies of his own life-experiences, discloses the little-known
beauties and sadnesses he has uncovered everywhere, and turns into
simple yet exquisitely wrought fictions the poignant truths that have
entered his own heart. Not one novel, technically considered, did he
write, but sketches strung like pearls upon a thread: vivid impressions
of home and foreign life, longer or shorter stories of simple folk
whose days dawned to labor and were twilit with weariness, colorful
pictures of men and women living under eastern skies--and beneath and
about all, the many-spirited sea.

It would require a volume to deal adequately with Loti’s many books;
but one point invites mention: each new annual volume for a score of
years discloses his life in some new land, or in the Brittany of his
affection.

His first volume, _Aziyadé_ (1879), is the record of his love for
a beautiful Circassian slave while he sojourned in Turkey--the record,
too, of how she died of grief after his departure. _Rarahu_--later
issued as _Le Mariage de Loti_--recounts his loves in Tahiti,
and much of charm and beauty besides. _Le Roman d’un Spahi_
transports us to the Sahara and Senegal, _Fleurs d’ennui_ to
Montenegro, _Madame Chrysanthème_ to Japan, _Au Maroc_ to
Fez and Tangier, and _Le désert_, and _Jérusalem_, and _La
Galilée_, to Palestine.

I name these volumes not to attempt a catalogue of Loti’s works, but to
show how world-broad were the scenes he chose for his impressionistic
brush. Naturally, all of the foregoing works are more or less oriental
in tone, and the moral code revealed is not that of “the most approved
families.” But three masterpieces there are which breathe a more
wholesome air--though heavy, each one, with the tragedy of life.

_Mon frère Yves_ is the plotless account of “a splendid
Breton sailor and the author, his officer.” They enjoy “a sort
of companionship which finds its analogy--in a way--in the
friendly relations formerly [held] between young master and slave
in our Southern States.” No picture of the robust rollicking
sailor--superstitious, drink-loving, adventurous, warm-hearted--could
be more real, none more pathetic, and none more rich in fragments of
narrative.

In _Le livre de la pitié et de la mort_ eleven stories are brought
together to harmonize with the saddening title--“The Book of Pity
and of Death!” One of these, “The Sorrow of an Old Convict” is an
impressionistic tale of an old highwayman who is being shipped away to
exile. His only solace is a caged bird with a broken wing, and when
one day the door is opened the little bird falls into the sea. That is
all--but to read it is to feel with Yves the heart-break of that bereft
old man.

“The Wall Opposite” is a study of human tendencies. A mother, a
daughter, and an aged aunt are compelled by reverses to let out those
rooms of their apartments that faced out upon the street, but their own
little back suite had a cozy and intimate air. Its windows overlooked a
court whose walls were covered with honeysuckle and roses. One day they
were told that in the court a high wall was to be built which would
steal away the air and hide the sun. They had no money wherewith to buy
off the project, so in one short month a grayish-white wall--almost
like a twilight sky of November--shut them in.

Long they had looked for an inheritance which would some day come to
them. Then they would buy the house and tear down that wall--and always
the old aunt used to pray that she might live to see that day. But the
bequest was long in coming.

One day a young man came, introduced by friends, and for a while he sat
at the table of these “three ladies without fortune.” He was handsome
and high-spirited, and the young girl loved him, but she was poor, and
for lack of sunlight the color had begun to fade from her cheeks. So he
went away and never returned.

Twenty years passed--the aunt had died, the mother had grown gray, and
the daughter was now past forty. Then at last the inheritance came.
They sent away their lodgers, but somehow the two women remained in the
little back _salon_. They had come to love it. At last the wall
which for twenty years they had endured would be torn down. At twilight
of the second day the wall was razed, but the mother and daughter
sitting at their table were bewildered at seeing so clearly. The wall
was gone--they had the light, the roses and vines! For twenty years
they had hoped for this happiness, yet now--they were uneasy, something
seemed to have gone wrong. A sort of melancholy had come over them.

The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes, saw tears. “It can be
built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not,
to make it the same again?”

“I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you
see? _It would never be the same!_”

And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was
the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture--the face
of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time.

This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His
sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections
differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his
writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes--as to
which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the
final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, _Pecheur d’Islande_.

Fortunately for the spontaneity of the novel, many authors are more
concerned for the vividness of their narration than for mere technical
form. Hence they feel free to introduce incidents which are related
more or less loosely to the plot, and serve rather as auxiliaries
than as vital parts of the action. The purpose may be to develop a
tone, suggest an atmosphere, illustrate certain traits of character,
or, it may be, to amplify an organic part of the plot. This narrative
by-path, this illuminating side-light, we technically call an episode.
It was most in vogue among the early English novelists; Defoe,
Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith followed it so habitually
that all of their novels are episodic in form. But even in the more
highly organized French romances of plot--_Les Miserables_ and
_Les Mystères de Paris_, for example--we find frequent episodes.
This tendency is naturally more marked in the tale and in the prolonged
sketch than in the closely plotted novel. Indeed, it is only in the
very _long_ plot-novel that the episode can find room, since the
prosperity of the short plot-novel lies largely in the close and rapid
sequence of its incidents.

Even though “The Marriage to the Sea”--as I have ventured to entitle
this climacteric close of _An Iceland Fisherman_--is an essential
plot incident, and therefore an organic part of the whole, still,
considered solely for its own sake, it is easily detachable. So we
may regard it as _almost_ a typical specimen of the episode;
that is to say, we need only have some slight prior knowledge of the
setting and the relation of the characters to invest it with the
completeness and unity of a perfect short-story. True, the crisis
has occurred--unknown to the fisherman’s wife--before this episode
begins, but that could scarcely have been arranged more artistically,
with regard to suspense, had Loti purposed to use the episode as a
separate story. Here we have the carefully laid groundwork of tone,
environment, and characters. Here, too, are the breathless expectancy,
the increasing suspense (which constitutes the complication), two false
anticipations of a happy dénouement, and then the actual dénouement,
with the artistic close.

_An Iceland Fisherman_ is Pierre Loti’s most perfect work, and
it is gratifying to note that it is also his most popular, as witness
some three hundred and fifty French editions, and an unknown number
of translations. In form, it is less a typical novel than a brilliant
impressionistic tale. A major episode is the story of Sylvestre,
which, woven closely in its earlier part with the life of Yann and his
sweetheart Gaud, at length diverges, when the fisherboy passes into
the navy, fights a good fight in Cochin-China, and dies amid pathetic
circumstances in far-off Singapore.

The plot is very simple. It is laid in Paimpol, in Brittany, whose
dwellers rely solely upon the Iceland fisheries. Every year these hardy
Vikings of Northern France fare away to the Iceland waters and return
only after a long season there. The chief characters are Yann Gaos, a
great splendid young fisherman with handsome brown curls, and Gaud,
the daughter of “the great man” of the town. The two are in love, and
Yann ventures some hesitating advances; but her father’s wealth deters
the fisherman from making a full avowal. However, when Gaud’s father
dies she is found to be penniless; still Yann unaccountably holds back,
much to Gaud’s secret sorrow. Homeless, she goes to live with Granny
Moan, the grandmother of the ill-fated young Sylvestre, who had been
betrothed to Yann’s sister. At length, in the little hut where Gaud
lives as the bereft old woman’s foster-grandchild, she and Yann are
married.

Only a few days after their wedding, the bridegroom sails away on the
fine new _Léopoldine_ for the Iceland fisheries. When autumn comes
the boat does not return with the others. All that is heard of her is
from the crew of the _Marie-Jeanne_, who report a mystic meeting
with the _Léopoldine_ in a dense fog, when each vessel loomed up
to the other out of the mist and then passed spectre-like away, with
time for only a few quick cries of recognition from fellow-townsmen.
The final scene opens with all the town awaiting the return of the
fishers. One vessel has already come in, and then opens this closing
episode.




                        THE MARRIAGE TO THE SEA
                AN EPISODE FROM “AN ICELAND FISHERMAN”

                         (_PECHEUR D’ISLANDE_)

                            By Pierre Loti

                   _Done into English by the Editor_


The Iceland ships were returning--two the second day, four the next,
and twelve during the week following. And throughout the country joy
returned with them--there was happiness for the wives and mothers;
happiness too in the taverns where the pretty Paimpol girls served
drink to the fishermen.

The _Léopoldine_ was in the group of belated ones; there were
still ten missing. They could not be long now, and Gaud, in the
thought that Yann would be there within a week--an extreme of delay
which she allowed for so as not to be disappointed--was in a delicious
intoxication of expectancy, keeping the home well in order--very clean
and very neat--to receive him.

Everything being in readiness, there was nothing more for her to do;
besides, in her impatience her head could hold only the one thought.

Three more of the tardy ships now arrived, and then five. Only two
were wanting from the muster.

“Come!” they said to her laughingly, “this year it is either the
_Léopoldine_ or the _Marie-Jeanne_ that will have to stay
behind 'to sweep up.’”

And Gaud laughed--even she--more animated and more beautiful in her joy
of anticipation.

Meanwhile the days passed by.

She continued to dress every day, to put on a gay air, to go to the
harbor a-gossiping with the others. She said that it was all quite
natural, this delay. Didn’t they see the same thing every year? Oh, as
to their coming back at all--with such good sailors, and two such good
boats!

Afterwards, when she was back home at night, the old shiver of anxiety,
of anguish, would come over her.

Could it be really possible that she began to fear--already? Was there
any cause for fear? And she trembled, for having so soon been afraid.

The tenth of September! How the days flew by!

One morning when there was a cold mist over the earth, a true autumn
morning, the rising sun found her early seated under the porch of the
chapel of the shipwrecked mariners, at the place where the widows go
to pray--seated, she was, with eyes fixed and temples tense as though
held in a band of iron.

Two days ago these melancholy mists of dawn had begun, and on this
particular morning Gaud had awakened with a more poignant inquietude,
caused by this impression of winter. Why was it so this day, this hour,
this moment, more than the preceding? She knew well enough that boats
were often two weeks late--even a month.

But there was something different about this particular morning,
without doubt, for she had come to-day for the first time to sit under
the chapel porch and reread the names of the young men who had died.

    IN MEMORY OF
    GAOS, YVON,
    LOST AT SEA
    NEAR THE NORDEN-FJORD.

Like a great shudder, a gust of wind was heard rising from the sea, and
at the same time something fell like rain upon the roof: it was the
dead leaves. A whole host of them were blown in at the porch; the old
wind-tossed trees of the graveyard were losing their foliage, stripped
by this gale from the sea. Winter was coming.

    LOST AT SEA,
    NEAR THE NORDEN-FJORD,
    IN THE STORM OF THE 4TH AND 5TH OF AUGUST, 1880.

She read mechanically, and through the arch of the doorway her eyes
sought to pierce the distance over the sea: that morning it was very
vague, under the gray mist, and a suspended cloud-drapery trailed over
the horizon like a great mourning-veil.

Another gust of wind, and other dead leaves came dancing in. A stronger
squall, as if the west wind that had strewn these dead over the sea
wished to torment even the inscriptions which recalled their names to
the living.

Gaud looked with involuntary persistence at an empty space upon the
wall which seemed to wait with terrible expectancy; she was pursued by
the thought of a fresh slab that might perhaps soon be placed there,
with another name which even in spirit she did not dare repeat in such
a place.

She felt cold, but remained seated on the granite bench, her head
thrown back against the stone wall.

    ... LOST NEAR THE NORDEN-FJORD,
    IN THE STORM OF THE 4TH AND 5TH OF AUGUST,
    AT THE AGE OF 23 YEARS,
    MAY HE REST IN PEACE!

Iceland appeared to her, with its little cemetery--Iceland far, far
away, lighted from below the sea-line by the midnight sun ... and
suddenly--still in the same empty space on the wall which seemed to
be waiting--she saw with horrifying clearness the vision of that new
slab she had imagined: a fresh tablet, a death’s-head and cross-bones,
and in the centre, within a flame, a name--the adored name of _Yann
Gaos_! Then she drew herself up straight and stiff, with a hoarse,
wild cry in her throat like a mad creature.

Without, the gray dawn-mist still hung over the earth, and the dead
leaves continued to come dancing into the porch.

Steps on the foot-path!--Was somebody coming?--Then she arose
quickly, with a swift movement readjusting her coif, and composed her
countenance. The footsteps came nearer, as though they would enter. At
once she assumed the air of being there by chance. Not for anything in
the world would she as yet seem like the widow of a shipwrecked mariner.

It was only Fante Floury, the wife of the mate on the
_Léopoldine_. She understood at once what Gaud was doing there; it
was useless to dissemble with her. And at first they stood mute, the
one before the other, these two women; all the more alarmed and angry
at being entrapped while in the same mood of fear, they almost hated
each other.

“All those from Tréguier and from Saint-Brieuc have been back for
a week,” said Fante at last, pitilessly, in a voice low and almost
irritated. She carried a taper, meaning to make a votive offering.

Ah! Yes! a votive offering--Gaud had not wished to think as yet of that
last resort of the desolate. But she entered the chapel behind Fante,
without saying anything more, and they knelt side by side, like two
sisters.

To the Virgin, Star of the Sea, they said their passionate prayers with
all their hearts. But only the sound of sobs was heard, and their rapid
tears began to fall upon the floor.

They arose together, more tender, more confident. Fante aided the
tottering Gaud, and, taking her in her arms, she kissed her.

After wiping away their tears, arranging their hair, and brushing the
saltpetre and dust of the flagstones from their skirts at the knees,
they went away without saying anything more, by different paths.

                   *       *       *       *       *

This September’s close was like another summer, only it was somewhat
melancholy. The weather was really so beautiful this year that had
it not been for the dead leaves that fell in a mournful shower along
the roadways one might have said that it was the gay month of June.
Husbands, fiancés, sweethearts, had all returned, and everywhere was
the joy of a second spring-time of love.

At last one day one of the delayed ships from Iceland was signalled in
the offing. Which one?

On the cliff, groups of mute and anxious women quickly formed. Gaud was
there, trembling and pale, by the side of the father of her Yann.

“I firmly believe,” said the old fisher--“I firmly believe it’s them! A
red sail, a topsail that clews up--that’s jolly well like them anyhow.
What do you say, Gaud, my girl?

“And yet--it isn’t,” he went on, with sudden discouragement; “no, we’ve
made a mistake again, the boom isn’t the same, and they have a flying
jib. Well, well, it isn’t them this time, it’s the _Marie-Jeanne_.
Oh! but very surely, my girl, they’ll not be long now.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

And day followed day, and each night came at its appointed hour, with
inexorable tranquillity.

Gaud continued to dress every day, somewhat like a mad woman, always in
fear of seeming to be the widow of a shipwrecked sailor, exasperated
when others glanced at her compassionately and furtively, and looking
aside so that she might not meet those glances that froze her very
blood.

Now she had fallen into the habit of going of mornings right to the
end of the headland on the high cliffs of Pors-Even, passing behind
Yann’s paternal home so as not to be seen by his mother or his little
sisters. She went all alone to the extreme point of the Ploubazlanec
land, which is outlined in the shape of a reindeer’s horn against the
gray Channel, and sat there all day long at the foot of a lonely cross,
which rises above the immense expanse of waters.

There are many of these granite crosses hereabout, set up on the
uttermost cliffs of this land of mariners, as though to implore
mercy,--as though to appease that restless, mysterious thing that
lures men away and never gives them back, and by preference keeps the
bravest, the noblest.

Around this cross of Pors-Even stretched evergreen moors, carpeted
with short rushes; and at this great height the sea air was very pure,
having scarcely any of the briny smell of the seaweed, but perfumed
with the delicious ripeness of September.

Outlined in the far distance could be seen, one after another, all the
indentations of the coast, the land of Brittany terminating in ragged
edges which stretched far out into the tranquil void of the waters.
Near at hand the reefs riddled the sea, but out beyond nothing troubled
its polished mirror. There sounded over all a soft, caressing murmur,
light and infinite, arising from the deeps of its every bay. And the
distance seemed so calm, and the depths so soft! The great blue void,
the tomb of the Gaos family, guarded its inscrutable mystery while the
breezes, faint as human sighs, wafted here and there the perfume of the
gorse, which had bloomed again in the latest autumn sun.

At certain hours regularly the sea retreated, and shallow places grew
larger everywhere, as if the Channel were slowly emptying itself; then,
with the same lazy slowness, the waters rose again, and continued their
eternal going and coming without any heed of the dead.

And Gaud, seated at the foot of the cross, remained there, in the midst
of these tranquil scenes, gazing ever before her, until the night fell,
until she could see no more.

                   *       *       *       *       *

September had passed. Gaud could no longer take any nourishment, she
could no longer sleep.

She remained at home now, and sat crouching with her hands between her
knees, her head thrown back and leaning against the wall behind. What
was the good of getting up, what was the good of going to bed? When
she was too much exhausted she threw herself dressed upon her bed.
Otherwise she always remained seated, benumbed; her teeth chattered
with cold, in her stony quiet; always she had that sense of a band of
iron round her brows; her cheeks felt drawn, her mouth was dry, with
a feverish taste, and at times a raucous groan rose from her breast,
spasmodically repeated again and again, while she beat her head against
the granite wall.

Or else she called Yann by his name, very tenderly, in a low voice, as
if he were quite close, and whispered to him words of love.

Sometimes she would think of other things besides him--of many little,
insignificant things; she would amuse herself, for example, by watching
the shadow of the china Virgin and the holy-water basin lengthen slowly
over the high woodwork of her bed as the sun went down. And then the
thoughts of anguish returned with more horror, and her cry broke forth
again while she beat the wall with her head.

And so all the hours of the day passed, one after the other, and all
the hours of the evening, and all those of the night, and all those of
the morning. When she had reckoned how long it was since he ought to
have been back, a still greater terror laid hold upon her; she wished
to forget all about the dates and even the names of the days.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Usually there are some indications concerning the wrecks off Iceland:
those who return have seen the tragedy from afar; or else they have
found some wreckage, or a dead body, or have some sign from which to
divine the facts. But no, of the _Léopoldine_ nothing had been
seen, nothing was known. The men of the _Marie-Jeanne_, the last
to have seen her on the 2d of August, said that she was to have gone
on fishing farther towards the north, and beyond that the mystery was
unfathomable.

Waiting, always waiting, without knowing anything. When would the
moment come when she truly need wait no longer? She did not even know
that; and now she almost wished that it might be soon.

Oh! if he was dead, let them at least have pity enough to tell her!

Oh! to see him as he was at this very moment--him, or even what
remained of him! If only the Virgin, prayed to so often, or some other
such power, would grant her the blessing of showing him to her, by
some sort of second-sight--her Yann--him--living, struggling to return
to her--or else his body surrendered by the sea, so that she might at
least be sure, that she might know.

Sometimes she would suddenly have the feeling that a sail was appearing
on the rim of the horizon: the _Léopoldine_ approaching,
hastening home! Then she would make the first involuntary movement to
rise, and rush to look out at the ocean, to see whether it were true.

She would fall back. Alas! where was the _Léopoldine_ now? Where
could it be? Out afar, doubtless, at that awful distance of Iceland,
abandoned, crushed, lost!

And this ended in that never-fading vision, always the same: a wreck,
gaping and empty, rocked upon the silent sea of gray and rose--rocked
slowly, slowly, without sound--with an extreme of gentleness quite
ironical--in the midst of the vast calm of the dead waters.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Two o’clock in the morning.

It was at night especially that she held herself attentive to all the
steps that approached; at the least stir, at the slightest unaccustomed
sound, her temples vibrated; from being overstrained that they might
sense things from without, they had become terribly sensitive.

Two o’clock in the morning. This night as on others, hands clasped and
eyes open in the dark, she listened to the wind making its well-nigh
eternal moan over the earth.

Suddenly the steps of a man--rapid steps on the path! At such an hour,
who could be passing? She drew herself up, stirred to the deeps of her
soul, her heart ceasing to beat.

Some one stopped before the door; some one mounted the small stone
steps.

He! Oh! joy of heaven, he! Some one had knocked, could it be any other!
She was up, barefooted; she, so feeble for so many days, had sprung up
nimbly as a cat, her arms outstretched to wind round her well-beloved.
Without doubt the _Léopoldine_ had come in at night, and anchored
opposite Pors-Even Bay; and he--he had rushed home; she arranged all
this in her mind with the swiftness of lightning. And now she tore her
fingers upon the spikes of the door--in her fury to draw the bolt it
had stuck.

Ah!... And now she slowly moved back, crushed, her head fallen upon
her breast. Her sweet mad dream was over. It was no one but Fantec,
their neighbor. She could just comprehend that it was not he, her Yann,
that no part of his being had passed through the air; she felt herself
plunged again into her old abyss, to the uttermost depths of her same
awful despair.

He apologized, poor Fantec: his wife, as Gaud knew, was very ill, and
now their baby was suffocating in its cradle, seized with a malignant
sore throat; so he had come to beg for help, while he ran to hunt up
the doctor at Paimpol.

What did all this matter to her? She had gone mad in her grief, she had
nothing left to offer to others in distress. Huddled on a bench, she
sat before him with eyes glazed, as one dead, not answering him, not
hearing him, not even looking at him. What were these things to her
that the man was saying!

He understood it all; he divined why the door had been opened to him so
quickly, and he had pity for the pain he had brought about.

He stammered out an apology: Just so; he ought never to have disturbed
her--her especially.

“I!” replied Gaud quickly, “and why not I, Fantec?”

Life had returned to her suddenly, for still she did not want to appear
despairing before the eyes of others--for that she was quite unwilling.
And besides, in her turn she pitied him; she dressed to accompany him
and found strength to go see his little child.

                   *       *       *       *       *

When she returned to throw herself upon her bed, at four o’clock, sleep
laid hold upon her in a moment, for she was utterly fatigued. But that
moment of immense joy had left upon her mind an impression which, in
spite of all, was persistent; she awoke soon with a shudder, rising a
little, as remembering something.... She had some news concerning her
Yann.... In the midst of this confusion of ideas which came back to
her, rapidly she searched and searched her mind for what it could have
been.

Ah! nothing, alas, nothing but Fantec!

And a second time she fell back to the depths of the old abyss. No, in
reality, nothing was changed in her morbid, hopeless waiting.

Still, to have felt Yann there so close was as if some emanation from
him had come floating back to her; it was what they call in Breton land
a token; and she listened still more attentively for footsteps outside,
divining that some one would perhaps come who would talk to her of him.

And indeed, when the day broke, Yann’s father entered. He took off his
cap, pushed back his beautiful white locks, which were in curls like
those of his son, and sat down beside Gaud’s bed.

His heart too was in agony, for his Yann, his splendid Yann, was his
first-born, his favorite, his glory. But he did not despair, not
really, he did not despair yet. He began to reassure Gaud in a very
gentle way: to begin with, the latest ones to return from Iceland
had all spoken of the extremely dense fogs which might easily have
delayed the vessel; and then too an idea had come to him: a stop-over
at the Faroes, which are islands situated on their route, at a great
distance; and when they sent letters from there, they took a long time
to come; the same thing had happened to himself forty years ago, and
his poor dead mother had already had a mass said for his soul.... And
such a good boat, was the _Léopoldine_, and all those aboard were
such able mariners.

Old Granny Moan walked around them, shaking her head; the distress of
her foster grand-daughter had almost given her back her own strength
and reason; she tidied up the place, glancing from time to time at the
little faded portrait of her Sylvestre, which hung upon the granite
wall with its anchor emblems and mourning-wreath of black beadwork; no,
since following the sea had robbed her of her grandson, she believed no
longer in the safe return of sailors; she now prayed to the Virgin only
from fear, with the outside of her poor old lips, cherishing in the
bottom of her heart a grudge against her.

But Gaud listened eagerly to these consoling reasonings, her large
sunken eyes looking with deep tenderness upon this old sire who so
much resembled her well-beloved; just to have him near her was like a
hostage against death, and she felt more reassured, nearer to her Yann.
Her tears fell silently and more gently, and she repeated again her
passionate prayers to the Virgin, Star of the Sea.

A stop-over, 'way out at those islands, to repair damages, was a likely
event. She rose, brushed her hair, and made some sort of toilet, as if
he might possibly return. Doubtless all was not lost if his own father
did not yet despair. And for a few days she again took up her waiting.

It was full autumn now, late autumn--with the nightfalls gloomy,
and all things growing dark early in the old cottage, and all the
Breton land looking sombre, too. The very days seemed but twilight;
immeasurable clouds, slowly passing, would suddenly bring darkness
at broad noon. The wind moaned constantly--it was like the sound of
a great cathedral organ at a distance, but playing profane airs, or
despairing dirges; at other times it would come close to the door, and
lift up a howl like wild beasts.

She had grown pale, pale, and became ever more dejected, as if old
age had already touched her with its featherless wing. Very often she
would finger the belongings of her Yann, his fine wedding clothes,
folding and unfolding them like some maniac--especially one of his blue
woolen jerseys, which still retained the form of his body; when thrown
gently on the table, it disclosed from long usage the outlines of his
shoulders and chest; but at last she placed it by itself on a shelf of
their wardrobe, never to remove it, so that it might long preserve that
impress.

Every evening cold mists rose from the ground; then through her little
window she would gaze over the melancholy land, where little patches
of white smoke began to rise here and there from other chimneys: the
rest of the men had returned, migratory birds driven home by the cold.
And before many of these fires the evenings would be sweet; for the
spring-time of love had begun with winter, in all this country of
“Icelanders”.

Still clinging to the thought of those islands where he might perhaps
have put in, buoyed up by a kind of hope, she had again begun to expect
him.

                   *       *       *       *       *

He never returned.

One night in August, far away in the waters of gloomy Iceland, amid a
great fury of storm, he had consummated his Marriage to the Sea--to the
Sea which had been his nurse: it was she who had cradled him, who had
made him a big and strong youth, and afterward, in his superb manhood,
had taken him back again for herself alone.

A profound mystery had surrounded the unhallowed nuptials. All the
while, dark veils trembled overhead, moving and twisting curtains
were spread so as to conceal the ceremony; and the bride gave voice,
ever seeking with louder and more awful roars to stifle his cries....
He, thinking of Gaud, his mortal wife, had battled with giant strength
against this spouse of the tomb--until the moment when he at last
surrendered, with a great cry, deep as the roar of a dying bull, his
mouth already filled with water, his arms open, extended, and stiffened
forever.

And at his wedding were all those whom he had at one time invited.
All except Sylvestre, who himself had gone to sleep in the enchanted
gardens, far, far at the other side of the earth.





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