Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 2

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

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Honoré Balzac, or de Balzac, as he loved to call himself—though really there was no “noble” blood in his veins—was baptized under the name of Balssa. He was born on May 20, 1799, at Tours. His mother, Laure Sallambier, was a Parisian; his father, a provincial from Languedoc. After completing his studies in Paris, Honoré began the study of law at the age of seventeen, but after eighteen months’ apprenticeship to an attorney and a second year and a half’s service to a notary, his literary ambition began to turn him away from the law. Already at the age of twenty he had conceived the idea of a drama on Cromwell, but after fifteen months’ labor, he read it to a company of friends who received it coldly. In 1822, he made his first essay at the novel, under the title, The Inheritress de Birague. From this time on he labored incessantly in producing the gigantic works which have immortalized his name.

Debt was always threatening to overwhelm Balzac, for in the days of his largest income his free life and passion for luxuries kept him constantly in danger of going down in the flood. Once, in 1825, when his first novels produced but[Pg 4] little return, he felt compelled to leave his vocation of letters to become bookseller, printer, and type-founder. But after three years of disaster, resulting in one hundred thousand francs of debt, he once more took up his pen, this time to succeed most splendidly—though it required ten years of strenuous, almost frenzied, production to clear him of his obligations.

The story of his loves is closely knit with his literary career, as are also the records of his minglings with the men of his day, but no such brief monograph as this can even refer adequately to the details of his personal life. Inspiration, observation, and labor were its dominant notes throughout. Two thousand distinct characters move as in life through his forty-seven volumes of more than sixteen thousand aggregate pages, all produced in twenty-five years of actual pen-craft. What a monument for the titan who in 1850 passed away in his prime!

There are two marked tendencies of extreme displayed by the short-story: The first, and the more modern, is a fondness for over-compression; that is, the practice of skeletonizing the story, of giving little more than a bare, swift outline of the action, and only so much accessory material as may be needed to round out a body decently[Pg 5] clothed upon with flesh. The story is everything, the setting almost nothing. It scarcely need be said that this tendency comes perilously near to robbing the short-story of the literary qualities which it should rightly display. A few of Maupassant’s compact and abrupt shorter fictions may serve to illustrate this characteristic—not to mention unhappy examples all too prevalent to-day.

The second tendency is quite in the other extreme. I speak of it now because most of Balzac’s shorter stories are of this type,—which gives much space to detail, the development of setting, and the building up of a well-rounded and fully-garbed body to carry the soul of the story. If the scenario-story is likely to swing to an extreme of compression, the leisurely type is prone to over-leisureliness, as is often seen in the shorter work of Mr. James, and the later little fictions by Mr. Howells, wherein, and so far properly too, the story is not made to be everything, but wherein—not so wisely—circumstances and air are accorded even more than due value. The effect is to draw the narrative away from the unity and compression characteristic of the short-story type, and range it with those other fictional forms which, while cognate to, are really something different from the short-story.

Balzac’s short-stories—so to call them—were written from three to five years before Poe wrote “Berenice” (1835), which was his first short-story to anticipate and meet fully the requirements of the type as formulated by the author himself, in his criticism of Hawthorne’s “Tales,” in 1842. But Balzac drew more and more away from the impressionistic, unified, condensed short-story, for it was evidently not his ideal form, and took up the detailed psychological novel of manners. Even in the story given herewith in translation, we find a wealth of detail and an extent of time covered in the action which are not part and parcel of the true short-story, technically considered. But, lest these comments seem to cite these qualities in derogation of Balzac’s art be it noted that Balzac’s little fictions, with all their fullness, are greater than many technically perfect short-stories in their miraculous compression. Certainly it is only this dual element of fullness and consequent diffused final effect which prevented him from anticipating Poe as the first conscious artist of the short-story—yet with this one reservation I reserve much, for compression and unity of final impression are the very twin arteries of this fictional form. Balzac’s short-stories approached technical perfection just as closely as did the short-stories of[Pg 7] those two American forerunners of Poe—Irving and Hawthorne.

It is illuminating to observe that Balzac’s full-method of short-story art was not the reflex of the successful novelist who was sure of his public and for that reason dared the expansive treatment. The truth is that of his successful novels only The Chouans had been written in 1829 before he began, in 1830, that brilliant series of shorter stories which place him among the masters.

The fictive art of Balzac is more clearly displayed in his short-stories than in his novels. By far the greater number of his novels are filled with a vast amount of contributory detail not always germane to the plot. As stories, they often mark time. The author’s great motive was to make faithful transcripts from life, to present realities, to penetrate into the deeps of the human soul and disclose its inner life, to delineate the high and the low places of the whole social system of his era. On this giant-journey he was often allured from the highway of his story by side-paths rich in interest, and the great realistic novelist did not any more hesitate to follow out these beckoning byways than did Victor Hugo in his equally great romances. The inevitable in each case was a far from unified type of fiction.

In Balzac’s short-stories, however, we discern but very little of this tendency, fully expanded though they are, and that is why I have ventured to assert their artistic superiority to his novels. True, the genius of this greatest of French novelists can be fully appreciated only by those who make a study of his longer works with their tremendous sweep of character presentment, minuteness of setting, and depth of psychological inquiry. But for approximate singleness of effect—a great factor in the consideration of fictional merit—we must turn to his short-stories.

This contrast in method is due not merely to Balzac’s fondness for making excursions in his novels, but it is largely attributable to the nature of the nouvelle, or expanded short-story form. Any short-story, being complete in itself and not one of a series, necessarily bears a much less close relation to any other of its kind than does any one of Balzac’s novels to his other novels. Each of these is an integrated part of a great life-record which he was engaged in completing—but which, unhappily, was never consummated.

The themes of all Balzac’s short-stories are consistent with the artistic requirements of the nouvelle; that is to say, they are transcriptions of exceptional marginalia from common life, always dealing with the unusual, and occasionally[Pg 9] with the unique. Because of this quality, it seems evident that, as Brunetière has pointed out, Balzac elected to develop these incidents in short-story form rather than expand them into novels. Treated in the short-story, they stand for what they are—extraordinary happenings in common life (as distinguished from impossible “incidents” which are told in fantastic and ultra-romantic short-stories); in the novel, they would have been enlarged out of their true focus, and so have seemed to bear a more important, a more typical, relation to life as a whole than any such exceptional incidents ever do. Hence, again, Balzac has used in his short-stories less the realistic method of narration than the romantic. Pure realism as a method is suited to the novel, where life shows whole; but the short-story, which presents a section, a phase, an incident of life, and by which we do not hope to gain a picture of an age, of a whole social system, or even of an entire individual life, is almost compelled to adopt the methods of romanticism even when laying its fictional foundations, as Balzac did, deep in the ground of reality.

In attempting to get a view of his broad genius we must remember our author’s versatility, not alone of gift but of temper; and since a consideration of his novels is not pertinent to this paper, let[Pg 10] us see if the many-sided Balzac is not clearly revealed in a varied half-dozen of his greatest short-stories.

Picture this powerful worker spending endless days and nights, months on end, roaming the streets of Paris, haunting purlieu and boulevard, absorbing with the thirsty passion of a universal analyst the knowledge of what man is. But he is more than a terrifically industrious observer, he is sincere, and he codifies his observations as The Connoisseur of Life.

This first phase of our social psychologist—and as such he blazed new trails in French literature—is well illustrated in one of his greatest stories (it seems trite to aver that it must be read to be appreciated!) which is a romantic nouvelle of about ten thousand words, “The Unknown Masterpiece.” It is well to note in this connection that the typical psychological-study differs from the character-study in that the former concerns itself with workings of the inner life, while the latter notes the effect of life on character, disposition, bearing, and conduct.

Nicolas Poussin, a poor and ambitious young artist, timidly visits François Porbus, another artist of ability, in his studio. There Master Frenhofer, an eccentric, wealthy old artist, is discoursing on his theories of art (set forth brilliantly[Pg 11] and at length in the story, and illustrating the marvellous sweep of Balzac’s knowledge). Frenhofer is obsessed by the conviction that the artists of the day do not make their subjects live, and illustrates by criticising the painting, “St. Mary the Egyptian,” which Porbus has about completed. “Your saint is not badly put together, but she is not alive. Because you have copied nature, you imagine that you are painters, and that you have discovered God’s secret! Bah! To be a great poet, it is not enough to know syntax, and to avoid errors in grammar.” “The mission of art is not to copy nature, but to express it” (an illuminating passage when applied to Balzac’s own work). At length the old man seizes the brushes, and with a few strokes imparts vivacity to the figure, and makes the “Saint” stand out from the canvas.

Old Master Frenhofer himself has been laboring for ten years to perfect his painting of a woman, but despairs of adding the final touches, and determines to travel in search of a perfect model. In his enthusiasm for art, and hoping to gain Frenhofer’s secret, as well as instruction from the old painter, Nicolas asks his beautiful mistress and model, Gillette, to pose for the old man. A protracted struggle ensues between her abhorrence of the idea and her[Pg 12] wish to serve her lover. At last, however, she yields.

When Nicolas and Porbus are permitted to view Frenhofer’s completed canvas, they discover that in his long effort to perfect his work the old painter has entirely covered the original picture, and that not more than a shadowy human foot is to be seen; only the imaginative eye of the artist himself is able to see the figure!

The dénouement is a double one: As she feared would be the case, Gillette loses her love for Nicolas, who could sacrifice the sacredness of her beauty in order to advance his own career by capturing the secrets of a great master; and the old artist, after burning all his paintings, dies in despair upon discovering the truth, for he has lived all these years with his painting as the well-loved companion of his labors and his dreams.

A second phase of Balzac’s genius is that of The Impressionistic Literary Artist. In his inner life some pictures were born, others were caught on the retina from his attentive journeyings afield. To produce in the reader precisely the impression which the originator feels, is impressionism, and this transfusion of spirit, tone, and[Pg 13] feeling, Balzac now and then accomplished, though not often.

One of the most striking of these impressionistic sketches, more atmospheric, more simply pictorial, than any of his others, is “A Passion in the Desert.”

A Provençal soldier of Napoleon tells the story over a bottle to a friend, and he retells it in a letter to a lady who had just seen a wonderful example of animal-training in a menagerie.

When General Desaix was in upper Egypt “a provincial soldier, having fallen into the hands of the Maugrabins, was taken by these Arabs into the deserts that lie beyond the cataracts of the Nile.” Freeing himself, he secures a carbine, a dagger, a horse, and some provisions, and makes away. But, eager to see camp once more, he rides his horse to death and finds himself alone in the desert.

At length he seeks shelter and sleep in a grotto, but awakens to find his asylum shared by a huge lioness. He considers well the possibilities while he waits for her to wake. When she opens her eyes her pretty, coquettish movements remind him of “a dainty woman.” The soldier expects immediate conflict and draws his dagger; but the lioness stares steadily at him for a moment, then walks slowly but confidently toward him.[Pg 14] Forcing himself to smile into her face, he reaches out his hand caressingly, and she accepts these overtures with seeming pleasure, even purrs like a cat, but the sound is so loud that it is not unlike the dying notes of a church organ. Believing himself safe for the present, the man rises and leaves the grotto; she follows, rubbing against his legs and uttering a wild, peculiar cry, whereupon he again goes through the petting motions usual with domestic animals, at the same time weighing the chance of killing her with one blow of his weapon. On her side, the lioness scrutinizes him kindly, yet prudently—then she licks his shoes.

Visions of what may happen when his unwelcome companion is hungry bring a shudder to the soldier. He tries to come and go, as an experiment, but her eyes never leave him for the fraction of a minute. Near the spring he sees the remains of his horse partly consumed—and understands her forbearance thus far. He determines to try to tame her ladyship and to win her affection. In these endeavors the day wears on until she becomes responsive enough to his voice to turn to him when he calls “Mignonne.”

The Provençal is now relying on his nimble feet to take him out of danger so soon as the lioness is asleep, and when the right moment[Pg 15] comes he walks quickly in the direction of the Nile. But he has gone only a short distance when he hears her in pursuit, uttering the same wild cry. Even in this extremity the Frenchman reflects humorously, “It may be that this young lioness has never met a man before; it is flattering to possess her first love!”

He accompanies his hostess back to the grotto, and from this moment feels that the desert has become friendly, human; and he sleeps. When he awakes he sees nothing of Mignonne until, upon ascending the hill, he discovers her bounding along in his direction. Her chops are bloody; but she manifests her pleasure in his society by beginning to play like a large puppy.

Several days go by filled with warring sensations for the Frenchman. Solitude reveals her mysteries, and he feels their charm. He studies the effects of the moon on the limitless sand; the wonderful light of the Orient; the terrifying spectacle of a storm on the plain where sand rises in death-dealing clouds. In the cool nights he imagines music in the heavens above. He ponders on his past life.

The magnetic will of the Provençal seems to control brute nature, or else she has not felt the pangs of hunger, for her amiability is unbroken, and he trusts her completely. Whatever she may[Pg 16] be doing, she stops short at the word “Mignonne.” One day when he shows acute interest in a flying eagle, the lioness is evidently jealous, and the Provençal now declares that “she has a soul.”

Here the lady who received the Provençal’s letter about his adventure wants to know how it ended. He replies that “it ended as all great passions do, by a misunderstanding,” and goes on to explain that he must have unintentionally hurt the lioness’s feelings, as one day she turned and caught his thigh in her teeth. Fearing she meant to kill him, the soldier plunged his dagger into her throat, but his remorse was immediate; he felt that he had murdered a friend.

The brief outlines of two stories must suffice to illustrate a third and more characteristic phase of Balzac’s genius—his sternness as The Recorder of Tragedy. Both are romantic themes treated with relentless realism of detail.

During the Napoleonic era, a certain Spanish town, Menda, is under French government. A suspicion that the Spanish Marquis de Légañès has made an attempt to raise the country in favor of Ferdinand VII has caused a battalion of French soldiers to be placed here, the garrison[Pg 17] of occupation being in command of one Victor Marchand. On the night of the feast-day of St. James, the English capture the town, but Clara, the daughter of the old Spanish nobleman, had warned the young French Commandant, Marchand, with whom she was in love, and he had escaped. The English suspect her father of having made Marchand’s escape possible, so the entire family of the Marquis is condemned to be hanged. The old noble offers to the English general all that he has if he will spare the life of his youngest son, and allow the rest to be beheaded instead of ignominiously hanged. Both requests are granted. The Marquis then goes to his youngest son, Juanito, and commands him that for this day he shall be the executioner. After heart-breaking protests, the lad is compelled to yield. As his sister Clara places her head on the block, the young French officer, Victor, now friendly with the English, runs to her and tells her that if she will marry him her life will be saved. Her only reply is to her brother, “Now, Juanito,” and her head falls at the feet of her lover. When the day is done, the youngest son, Juanito, is alone. To save the family honor, he has been the executioner of the day.

Only a little less tragic is “The Conscript,” which is part sketch, part short-story.

Madame de Dey, aged thirty-eight, is the widow of a lieutenant-general. She is possessed of a great soul and an attractive personality. During the Reign of Terror she takes refuge in the village of Carentan. Motives of policy influence her to open her house every evening to the principal citizens, Revolutionary authorities, and the like. Her only relative in the world is her son, aged twenty, whom she adores. The Mayor, and others in authority in the town, aspire to marry her, but her heart is bound up in her boy. Suddenly her salon is closed without explanation. Two nights pass, and gossip finds all sorts of reasons—she is hiding a lover; or her son; or a priest. The third day in the morning an old merchant insists upon seeing her. She shows him a letter written by her son in prison, saying he hopes to escape within three days and will come to her house. This is the third day, and she is greatly agitated. The merchant tells her that people are suspicious, and that she must surely receive as usual that night. Then he goes out and spreads plausible tales of her recent extreme illness and marvelous cure. That night many come to see for themselves, and, notwithstanding her terrible anxiety, she keeps up until they all go—except the Public Prosecutor, who is one of her suitors. He tells her he knows she is[Pg 19] expecting her son Auguste, and that if he comes she must get him away early in the morning, as he, the Prosecutor, must come then with a “denunciation,” to search her house. While they talk, a young man arrives and is taken to the room prepared for Auguste. When she discovers him to be only a conscript sent there by the Mayor, her grief is great. After spending the night awake in her room, still listening for her boy’s arrival, she is found at daybreak dead—at the hour when, unknown to his mother, her son was shot at Morbihan.

No view of Balzac, the short-story writer, would be complete without considering him as The Social Philosopher—by far his preponderating character also as a novelist.

There are not lacking undiscerning folk who judge Balzac’s short-stories by the tone of his Contes Drolatiques. It is far from true, however, that Balzac preferred to deal with the corrupt side of life. In reality, he was a great moralist, with robust convictions of right and wrong, and a nicely balanced moral judgment. Yet this contradictory spirit did wallow in filthy imaginations all too often, committed personal follies, pictured the courtesan and the pander, marital infidelity and sordidness in countless manifestations.[Pg 20] But let it be remembered that he chose to depict a society which was not only the product of his age, but the outcome of a national life. No one could be more fearless in exposing vice, and while it may be questioned whether the world greatly profits morally by such vivid picturings, it cannot be doubted that Balzac’s social philosophy was not that of the literary pander. His soul had altitude, as one has said, as well as latitude.

Balzac was keenly sensitive to criticism of his moral influence, and himself answered the charge of being a creator of vicious feminine types:

“The author cannot end these remarks without publishing here the result of a conscientious examination which his critics have forced him to make in relation to the number of virtuous women and criminal women whom he has placed on the literary stage. As soon as his first terror left him time to reflect, his first care was to collect his corps d’armée, in order to see if the balance which ought to be found between those two elements of his written world was exact, relatively to the measure of vice and virtue which enters into the composition of our present morals. He found himself rich by thirty-odd virtuous women against twenty-two criminal women, whom he here takes the liberty of ranging in order of battle, in order[Pg 21] that the immense results already obtained may not be disputed. To this he adds that he has not counted-in a number of virtuous women whom he has left in the shade—where so many of them are in real life.” (Here followed tabulated lists of his prominent women characters, as arranged by himself).

In considering the big plot of the social study, La Grande Brétêche—not perfectly translated “The Great House”—we are interestingly reminded of the similar motifs in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” and Mrs. Wharton’s “The Duchess at Prayer”—just as our author’s “A Seashore Drama” recalls the more artistic story of fatherly execution, “Mateo Falcone,” by Mèrimèe.

In La Grande Brétêche a company of friends are spending an evening together and one is asked to tell a story—a conventional opening enough.

He describes a house which has been deserted, the large and once beautiful gardens overgrown with weeds. Neglect and decay are everywhere. The story of the house is this—told with much Balzacian preliminary circumstance:

Monsieur de Merret one night came home quite late, and as he was about to enter his wife’s apartments he heard a closet door, opening into her room, close very quietly. He thought it was[Pg 22] his wife’s maid, but just then the maid entered the room from another door. The husband sent the maid away and asked his wife who had gone into the closet. She answered him that no one was there.

He said, “I believe you. I will not open it. But see, here is your crucifix—swear before God that there is no one in there. I will believe you—I will never open that door.”

Monsieur de Merret sent away the servants—all but one trusted one. He then sent for a mason, and had the closet securely walled in. At dawn the work was completed, the mason had gone, and Monsieur, on some pretext, left the house. As soon as he was gone, Madame de Merret called her maid, and together they began to tear down the wall—hoping to replace the bricks before Monsieur returned. They had just begun the work when Monsieur entered the room. For twenty days he remained in his wife’s apartment, and when a noise was heard in the closet and she wished to intercede for the dying man, her husband would answer:

A fifth side of Balzac’s genius is sweeter to contemplate—that of The Idealistic Philosopher. Take time to read The Personal Opinions of Honoré de Balzac, edited by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, you who would know how the man interpreted himself, and you will find idealism lifting its lily crest from the field of ooze.

Doubtless “A Legend of Jesus Christ in Flanders” is Balzac’s most ethically idealistic story—a true symbolical tale of Hawthorne’s legendary type.

Night was falling. The ferry-boat that carried passengers from the island of Cadzand to Ostend was ready to depart. Just then a man appeared who wished to enter the boat. It was already full. There was no place in the stern for the stranger, for the “aristocrats” of Flanders were seated there—a baroness, a cavalier, a young lady, a bishop, a rich merchant, and a doctor. So he made his way to the bow, where the more humble folk were seated. They at once made room for him.

As soon as the boat had moved out on the water, the skipper called to his rowers to pull with all their might, for they were in the face of a storm. All the while the tempest was growing more terrifying, and all the while the men and women in the boat questioned in their hearts who might[Pg 24] the stranger be. On his face shone a light and a quiet peace they could not understand.

Finally, the boat was capsized. Then the stranger said to them, “Those who have faith shall be saved; let them follow me.” With a firm step he walked upon the waves, and those who followed him came safe to shore.

When they were all seated near the fire in a fisherman’s hut, they looked round for the man who had brought them safely out of the sea. But he was not there, having gone down to the water to rescue the skipper, who had been washed ashore. He carried him to the door of the hut, and when the door of the humble refuge was opened, the Saviour disappeared—for it was He.

And so on this spot the convent of Mercy was built, as a shelter for storm-beleaguered sailors, and it was said by humble folk that for many years the foot-prints of Jesus Christ could be seen there in the sands of Flanders.

There is little charm in Balzac’s work, much coarseness, much detail of vileness, much to cause the sensitive to shudder; but there is much, too, that causes the soul to judge itself honestly, and many a beauty-crowned peak rising nobly from the valley darkness.

In the story which here follows in full, in translation,[Pg 25] appear all of Balzac’s characteristic traits. Happily, its theme leads us above the sordid and the filthy, up to the heights which he knew and sometimes extolled.

“An Episode Under the Terror,” which Ferdinand Brunetière has pronounced to be “in its artistic brevity one of Balzac’s most tragic and finished narratives,” was written in 1830 as an introduction to the fictitious Memoirs of Sanson, who is the Stranger referred to in the story.

On the twenty-second of January, 1793, about eight o’clock in the evening, an old lady was walking down the steep hill that ends in front of the church of Saint Laurent, in the Faubourg Saint Martin in Paris. It had snowed so much throughout the day that foot-falls could scarcely be heard. The streets were deserted. The very natural dread inspired by the silence was augmented by all the terror which at that time caused France to groan; then, too, the old lady had not as yet met any one; her sight had long been feeble, so for this and for other reasons she could not discern by the lights of the lanterns the few distant passers-by, who were scattered like phantoms on the broad highway of the quarter. She went on courageously alone through that solitude, as though her age were a talisman which would preserve her from all evil.

When she had passed the rue des Morts, she thought she could distinguish the heavy and resolute steps of a man walking behind her. She[Pg 28] fancied that she had heard that sound before; she was frightened at having been followed, and tried to walk more rapidly in order to reach a brightly lighted shop, hoping to be able in the light to settle the suspicions that had seized her. As soon as she found herself within the direct rays of light which came from the shop, she quickly turned her head and glimpsed a human form in the haze; that indistinct vision sufficed. She faltered a moment under the weight of the terror which oppressed her, for she doubted no longer that she had been followed by the stranger from the first step that she had taken outside of her home, but the desire to escape from a spy lent her strength. Incapable of reasoning, she doubled her pace, as though she could escape from a man who was, necessarily, more agile than she. After running for several minutes she reached the shop of a pastry-cook, rushed in, and tumbled rather than sat down upon a chair in front of the counter.

The moment she rattled the door-latch, a young woman who was occupied in embroidering raised her eyes, recognized through the glass partition the old-fashioned mantle of violet silk in which the old lady was enveloped, and hastened to open a drawer, as though to take out something which she intended to give her. Not only did the young woman’s movement and expression indicate[Pg 29] a wish to be rid promptly of the unknown, as if she were one of those persons whom one is not glad to see, but she even allowed an expression of impatience to escape her upon finding that the drawer was empty; then, without looking at the lady, she rushed from the counter, turned toward the back shop, and called her husband, who appeared immediately.

“Now, where did you put—,” she demanded of him, with a mysterious air, and designated the old lady by a turn of the eye, without finishing her sentence.

Although the pastry-cook could see only the immense black silk bonnet, surrounded by knots of violet ribbons, which formed the head-dress of the unknown, he turned away, after having given his wife a look which seemed to say, “Did you suppose that I would leave that on your counter?” and quickly disappeared. Astounded by the old lady’s silence and immobility, the tradeswoman walked toward her, and as she examined her she was conscious of a feeling of compassion, and perhaps also of curiosity. Although the stranger’s complexion was naturally pallid, like that of a person vowed to secret austerities, it was easy to recognize that some recent emotion had given her an extraordinary pallor. Her head-dress was so disposed as to hide her hair—doubtless whitened[Pg 30] by age, since the neatness of the collar of her dress proclaimed that she did not use hair-powder. That article of adornment lent to her figure a sort of religious severity. Her features were grave and dignified. Formerly the manners and the habitudes of people of quality were so different from those of people belonging to the other classes that one easily divined a person of the nobility. So the young woman was herself persuaded that the unknown was a member of the outlawed nobility, and that she had belonged to the court.

“Madame—” she said to her, involuntarily, and with respect, forgetting that this title was proscribed.

The old lady did not respond. She held her eyes fixed upon the window of the shop, as if some terrifying object had there been descried.

“What is the matter, Citizeness?” asked the proprietor of the shop who reappeared at that moment.

The citizen pastry-cook aroused the lady from her revery by handing to her a little pasteboard box, covered with blue paper.

She raised her eyes to the pastry-cook as though to cast upon him a glance of gratitude; but upon[Pg 31] seeing him with a red bonnet upon his head, she allowed a cry to escape her:

The young woman and her husband replied by a gesture of horror which caused the Unknown to blush—perhaps for having suspicion, perhaps from pleasure.

Then, taking a louis d’or from her pocket, she presented it to the pastry-cook.

There is an indigence which the poor know how to divine. The pastry-cook and his wife looked at each other and watched the old lady, while they exchanged the same thought. That louis d’or seemed to be the last. The hands of the lady trembled in offering that piece, which she looked upon with sadness and without avarice, for she seemed to realize the full extent of the sacrifice. Fasting and misery were graven upon that face in lines quite as legible as those of fear and her habits of asceticism. There were in her garments some vestiges of magnificence: the silk was threadbare, the cloak neat though old-fashioned, the lace carefully mended—in short, the tatters of opulence! The tradespeople, placed between[Pg 32] pity and self-interest, commenced to solace their consciences by words:

“Perhaps Madame would like to take some refreshment?” asked the woman, cutting the words of her husband short.

“It’s so cold! Madame was perhaps chilled by her walk? But you may rest here and warm yourself a little.”

Won by the tone of benevolence which animated the words of the charitable shopkeepers, the lady avowed that she had been followed by a stranger, and that she was afraid to return home alone.

“It is no more than that?” replied the man with the red hat. “Wait for me, Citizeness.”

He gave the louis to his wife; then, moved by that species of restitution which glides into the conscience of a merchant when he has received an exorbitant price for merchandise of mediocre value, he went to put on his uniform of the National Guard, took his chapeau, thrust his sabre into his belt, and reappeared under arms; but his wife had had time to reflect. As in many other hearts, reflection closed the hand opened by beneficence. Disturbed, and fearing to see her[Pg 33] husband in a bad affair, the pastry-cook’s wife essayed to stop him by tugging at the skirt of his coat. But, obedient to a sentiment of charity, the brave man offered to escort the old lady at once.

“It seems that the man who frightened the Citizeness is still prowling about the shop,” said the young woman nervously.

“If he should be a spy! If it should be a conspiracy! Don’t go; and take back from her the box.”

These words, breathed into the ear of the pastry-cook by his wife, froze the impromptu courage which had possessed him.

“Eh’ I’ll just go out and say two words to him, and rid you of him quickly,” cried the pastry-cook, opening the door and rushing out.

The old lady, passive as an infant, and almost dazed, reseated herself upon the chair. The honest merchant was not slow in reappearing; his face, naturally red, and still more flushed by the heat of his oven, had suddenly become livid; such a great fright agitated him that his legs trembled and his eyes looked like those of a drunken man.

“Do you wish to have our heads cut off, miserable aristocrat?” he shrieked at her with fury. “Just show us your heels, never come back here[Pg 34] again, and don’t count any more on me to furnish you the stuff for conspiracy.”

As he ejaculated these words, the pastry-cook tried to take from the old lady the little box which she had put in one of her pockets. But scarcely had the bold hands of the pastry-cook touched her vestments than the Unknown, preferring to face the dangers of her way home without other defense than God, rather than to lose that which she had come to purchase, recovered the agility of her youth; she darted toward the door, opened it abruptly, and disappeared before the eyes of the stupefied and trembling woman and her husband.

As soon as the Unknown found herself outside, she began walking rapidly; but her strength soon failed her, for she heard the spy by whom she was pitilessly followed make the snow craunch under the pressure of his heavy steps. She was obliged to stop—he stopped. She dared neither to speak to him nor to look at him, whether on account of the fear with which she was seized or from lack of intelligence. She continued her way, walking slowly; thereupon the man slackened his steps so as to remain standing at a distance which permitted him to keep his eye upon her. He seemed to be the very shadow of that old woman. Nine o’clock was striking when the silent couple repassed in front of the church of Saint Laurent.[Pg 35] It is in the nature of all souls, even the most infirm, that a feeling of calm should succeed one of violent agitation, for if our feelings are infinite, our organs are limited. And so the Unknown, not experiencing any harm from her supposed persecutor, chose to see in him a secret friend, eager to protect her. She reconstructed all the circumstances which had accompanied the Stranger’s appearances, as if to find plausible arguments for that consoling opinion, and she then took pleasure in recognizing in him good rather than evil intentions.

Forgetting the fright which that man had inspired in the pastry-cook, she advanced with a firm step into the higher regions of the Faubourg Saint-Martin. After a half-hour of walking, she reached a house situated near the junction formed by the main street of the Faubourg and that which leads to the Barrière de Pantin. Even to-day that spot is one of the most deserted of all Paris. The north wind, passing over the Buttes Chaumont and from Bellville, whistles athwart the houses, or rather the hovels, scattered about in that almost uninhabited valley where the dividing lines are walls made of earth and bones. That desolate place seemed to be the natural asylum of misery and despair. The man who had persisted in the pursuit of the poor creature who[Pg 36] had the hardihood to traverse those silent streets at night seemed impressed by the spectacle presented to his eyes. He rested pensively, standing and in an attitude of hesitation, in the feeble light of a lantern whose uncertain rays with difficulty pierced the mist.

Fear gave eyes to the old woman, who fancied that she could perceive something sinister in the features of the Stranger. She felt her terrors reawake, and profited by the sort of uncertainty which had retarded the man’s advance to glide in the darkness toward the door of the lonely house. She pressed a spring, and disappeared like a ghost.

The Stranger, immobile, contemplated that house, which stood in some sort as the type of the miserable habitations of the quarter. That rickety hovel, built of rubble, was covered by a coat of yellow plaster, so deeply cracked that one thought to see it tumble before the least effort of the wind. The roof, of brown tiles and covered with moss, had so sunk in several places as to make it seem likely to give way under the weight of the snow. Each floor there had three windows, whose sashes, rotted by dampness and disjointed by the action of the sun, announced that the cold must penetrate into the room. That isolated house resembled an old tower which time had forgotten to destroy. A feeble light shone through[Pg 37] the windows which irregularly cleft the mansard roof by which the poor edifice was crowned, while all the rest of the house was in complete obscurity. The old woman climbed, not without difficulty, the steep and rough staircase, whose length was supplied with a rope in the guise of a baluster. She knocked mysteriously at the door of the apartment which she found in the attic, and dropped hastily upon a chair which an old man offered her.

“Hide! hide yourself!” she said to him. “Although we go out very rarely, our movements are known, our footsteps are spied upon.”

“What is there new in that?” demanded another old lady, seated beside the fire.

“The man who has been prowling around the house since yesterday followed me to-night.”

At these words the three occupants of the attic regarded one another, allowing signs of profound terror to appear on their faces. The old man was the least agitated of the three, perhaps because he was in the greatest danger. Under the weight of a great calamity, or under the yoke of persecution, a courageous man begins, so to say, by making the sacrifice of himself; he looks upon his days as just so many victories won back from destiny. The looks of the two women, fastened[Pg 38] upon this old man, made it easy to divine that he was the sole object of their intense solicitude.

“Why despair of God, my sisters?” said he in a voice low but impressive. “We sang His praises amid the cries which the assassins raised, and the groans of the dying at the Carmelite convent. If He decreed that I should be saved from that butchery, it was doubtless in order to reserve me for a destiny which I must accept without murmuring. God protects his own, He may dispose of them at His pleasure. It is of you, and not of me, that we must think.”

“No,” said one of the old ladies; “what are our lives in comparison with that of a priest?”

“When once I found myself outside of the Abbey of Chelles, I considered myself as dead,” said that one of the two nuns who had not gone out.

“Here,” replied the one who had come in, handing the priest the little box, “here are the wafers.... But,” she cried, “I hear some one mounting the stairs!”

“Do not be affrighted,” said the priest, “if some one should essay to enter. A person upon whose fidelity we can count has undoubtedly taken all needful measures to pass the frontier, and will come to seek the letters which I have[Pg 39] written to the Duc de Langeais and to the Marquis de Beauséant, asking them to consider the means of rescuing you from this terrible country, from the death or the misery which awaits you here.”

“You do not mean to go with us, then?” cried the two nuns gently, manifesting a sort of despair.

“Sister Martha,” he said, addressing the nun who had gone to get the wafers, “that messenger I speak of will reply ‘Fiat voluntas’ to the word ‘Hosanna.’”

“There is some one on the stairs!” cried the other nun, opening the door of a hiding-place under the roof.

This time they could easily hear, amid the most profound silence, the footsteps of a man resounding upon the stairs, whose treads were covered with ridges made by the hardened mud. The priest crept with difficulty into a species of cupboard, and the nun threw over him some garments.

The priest was scarcely hidden before three taps[Pg 40] on the door gave a shock to the two saintly women, who consulted each other with their eyes, without daring to pronounce a single word. They each seemed to be about sixty years old. Separated from the world for forty years, they were like plants habituated to the air of a hothouse, which wilt if they are taken from it. Accustomed to the life of a convent, they were no longer able to conceive of any other. One morning, their grating having been shattered, they shuddered to find themselves free. One can easily imagine the species of artificial imbecility which the events of the Revolution had produced in their innocent hearts. Incapable of reconciling their conventual ideas with the difficulties of life, and not even comprehending their situation, they resembled those children who have been zealously cared for hitherto, and who, abandoned by their motherly protector, pray instead of weeping. And so, in face of the danger which they apprehended at that moment, they remained mute and passive, having no conception of any other defense than Christian resignation.

The man who desired to enter interpreted that silence in his own manner. He opened the door and appeared suddenly before them. The two nuns shuddered as they recognized the man who for some time had been prowling about their house[Pg 41] and making inquiries about them. They remained stock-still, but gazed at him with anxious curiosity, after the manner of savage children, who examine strangers in silence.

The man was tall and large; but nothing in his demeanor, in his air, nor in his physiognomy indicated an evil man. He imitated the immobility of the nuns, and moved his eyes slowly about the room in which he found himself.

Two straw mats, laid upon boards, served the two nuns as beds. A single table was in the middle of the room and upon it they had placed a copper candlestick, a few plates, three knives, and a round loaf of bread. The fire on the hearth was meagre. A few sticks of wood piled in a corner attested the poverty of the two recluses. The walls, coated with an ancient layer of paint, proved the bad state of the roof, for stains like brown threads marked the infiltrations of the rainwater. A relic, rescued doubtless from the pillage of the Abbey of Chelles, adorned the chimney mantel. Three chairs, two coffers, and a wretched chest of drawers completed the furniture of the room. A door beside the chimney allowed one to conjecture the existence of a second chamber.

The inventory of the cell was speedily made by the person who had thrust himself under such alarming auspices into the midst of that group.[Pg 42] A sentiment of commiseration painted itself upon his face, and he cast a benevolent glance upon the two women, at least as embarrassed as they. The singular silence preserved by all three lasted but a short time, for the Stranger at last divined the moral simplicity and the inexperience of the two poor creatures, and he said to them in a voice which he tried to soften: “I do not come here as an enemy, Citizenesses.”

He paused, and then resumed: “My sisters, if there should come to you any misfortune, believe that I have not contributed to it.... I have a favor to ask of you.”

“If I seem importunate, if ... I embarrass you, tell me so freely.... I will go; but understand that I am entirely devoted to you; that if there is any good office that I am able to render you, you may employ me without fear; and that I alone, perhaps, am above the law, since there is no longer a king.”

There was such an accent of truth in these words that Sister Agatha, the one of the two nuns who belonged to the family of Langeais, and whose manners seemed to say that she had formerly known the magnificence of fêtes and had breathed the air of the court, instantly pointed to one of the chairs, as if to ask their guest to be[Pg 43] seated. The Stranger manifested a sort of joy mingled with sadness as he recognized that gesture; and he waited until the two venerable women were seated, before seating himself.

“You have given shelter,” he continued, “to a venerable unsworn priest, who has miraculously escaped the massacre at the Carmelites.”

“Hosanna!” said Sister Agatha, interrupting the Stranger, and gazing at him with anxious inquiry.

“But, monsieur,” said Sister Martha hastily, “we haven’t any priest here, and——”

“In that case, you must be more careful and more prudent,” retorted the Stranger gently, reaching to the table and taking up a breviary. “I do not believe that you understand Latin, and——”

He did not continue, for the extraordinary emotion depicted on the faces of the two poor nuns made him feel that he had gone too far; they were trembling, and their eyes were filled with tears.

“Reassure yourselves,” he said to them in a cheery voice; “I know the name of your guest, and yours; and three days ago I was informed of your destination and of your devotion to the venerable Abbé of——”

“You see, my sisters, that if I had formed the horrible design of betraying you, I might already have accomplished it more than once.”

When he heard these words, the priest emerged from his prison and reappeared in the middle of the room.

“I cannot believe, monsieur,” he said to the Stranger, “that you can be one of our persecutors, and I have faith in you. What do you want of me?”

The saintlike confidence of the priest, the nobility that shone in all his features, would have disarmed assassins. The mysterious personage who had enlivened that scene of misery and resignation gazed for a moment at the group formed by these three; then he assumed a confidential tone, and addressed the priest in these words:

“Father, I have come to implore you to celebrate a mortuary mass for the repose of the soul of a—a consecrated person, whose body, however, will never repose in holy ground.”

The priest involuntarily shuddered. The two nuns, not understanding as yet of whom the Stranger was speaking, stood with necks outstretched, and faces turned towards the two speakers in an attitude of curiosity. The ecclesiastic[Pg 45] scrutinized the Stranger; unfeigned anxiety was depicted upon his face, and his eyes expressed the most ardent supplication.

“Very well,” replied the priest; “to-night, at midnight, return, and I shall be ready to celebrate the only funeral service which we can offer in expiation of the crime of which you speak.”

The Stranger started; but a satisfaction, at once gentle and solemn, seemed to triumph over some secret grief. After having respectfully saluted the priest and the two holy women, he disappeared, manifesting a sort of mute gratitude which was comprehended by those three noble hearts.

About two hours after this scene the Stranger returned, knocked discreetly at the attic door, and was admitted by Mademoiselle de Beauséant, who conducted him into the second room of that modest retreat, where everything had been prepared for the ceremony.

Between the flues of the chimney the two nuns had carried the old chest of drawers, whose decrepit outlines were concealed beneath a magnificent altar-cloth of green moiré silk. A large crucifix of ebony and ivory was fastened upon the yellow wall, which served to emphasize its nakedness, and irresistibly drew the eye. Four little fluttering wax-tapers, which the sisters had succeeded[Pg 46] in fixing upon that improvised altar by means of sealing wax, threw a light pale and sickly, which was reflected by the wall. That feeble glow scarcely illuminated the rest of the room, but by shedding its glory only over those holy things upon that unadorned altar, it seemed a ray from the torch of heaven. The floor was damp. The roof, which on two sides declined abruptly, as in a loft, had several cracks, through which passed an icy wind.

Nothing displayed less pomp, and yet perhaps nothing could have been more solemn than that sad ceremony.

A profound silence that would have permitted them to hear the faintest sound on distant thoroughfares diffused a sort of sombre majesty over that nocturnal scene. In short, the grandeur of the occasion contrasted so strongly with the poverty of the surroundings that the result was a sentiment of religious awe. On either side of the altar, the two old nuns, kneeling on the damp floor, heedless of the deadly moisture, prayed in concert with the priest, who, clad in his pontifical vestments, prepared a golden chalice ornamented with precious stones, a consecrated vessel rescued doubtless from the pillage of the Abbey of Chelles. Beside that pyx, a monument of royal magnificence, were the water and wine destined for the[Pg 47] sacrament, contained in two glasses scarcely worthy of the lowest tavern. In default of a missal, the priest had placed his breviary on a corner of the altar. A common plate was provided for the washing of those innocent hands, pure of bloodshed. All was majestic, and yet paltry; poor, but noble; profane and holy at the same time. The Stranger knelt piously between the two nuns. But suddenly, when he noticed a band of crape on the chalice and on the crucifix—for, having nothing to indicate the purpose of that mortuary mass, the priest had draped God Himself in mourning—he was assailed by such an overpowering memory that drops of sweat gathered upon his broad forehead. The four silent actors in that scene gazed at one another mysteriously; then their hearts, acting upon one another, communicated their sentiments to one another and flowed together into a single religious commiseration; it was as if their thoughts had evoked the martyr whose remains had been devoured by quicklime, and whose shade stood before them in all its royal majesty. They celebrated an obit without the body of the deceased. Beneath those disjointed tiles and laths, four Christians had come to intercede before God for a king of France, and perform his obsequies without a bier. It was the purest of all possible devotions,[Pg 48] an astounding act of fidelity, accomplished without a selfish thought. Doubtless, in the eyes of God, it was like the cup of cold water which balances the greatest virtues. The whole of monarchy was there, in the prayers of a priest and of two poor women; but perhaps also the Revolution was represented, by that man whose face betrayed too much remorse not to cause a belief that he was fulfilling the vows of an immense repentance.

In lieu of pronouncing the Latin words, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” etc., the priest, by a divine inspiration, looked at the three assistants who represented Christian France, and said to them, in order to efface the poverty of that wretched place:

At these words, uttered with an impressive unction, a holy awe seized the assistant and the two nuns. Beneath the arches of St. Peter’s at Rome God could not have appeared with more majesty than He then appeared in that asylum of poverty, before the eyes of those Christians; so true is it that between man and Him every intermediary seems useless, and that He derives His grandeur from Himself alone. The fervor of the Stranger was genuine, and so the sentiment which[Pg 49] united the prayers of those four servitors of God and the king was unanimous. The sacred words rang out like celestial music amid the silence. There was a moment when tears choked the Stranger; it was during the paternoster. The priest added to it this Latin prayer, which was evidently understood by the Stranger: “Et remitte scelus regicidis sicut Ludovicus eis remisit semetipse! (And pardon the guilt of the regicides even as Louis himself forgave them!)”

The two nuns saw two great tears leave a humid trace adown the manly cheeks of the Stranger, and fall upon the floor. The Office for the Dead was recited. The Domine salvum fac regem, chanted in a deep voice, touched the hearts of those faithful royalists, who reflected that the infant king, for whom at that moment they were supplicating the Most High, was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies. The Stranger shuddered at the thought that there might yet be committed a new crime, in which he would doubtless be forced to participate. When the funeral service was terminated, the priest made a sign to the two nuns, who retired. As soon as he found himself alone with the Stranger, he walked towards him with a mild and melancholy expression, and said to him in a paternal voice:

“My son, if you have dipped your hands in the[Pg 50] blood of the martyr king, confess yourself to me. There is no sin which, in the eyes of God, may not be effaced by repentance as touching and sincere as yours seems to be.”

At the first words pronounced by the ecclesiastic, the Stranger allowed an involuntary movement of terror to escape him; but he resumed a calm countenance, and regarded the astonished priest with assurance.

“Father,” he said to him in a perceptibly altered voice, “no one is more innocent than I of bloodshed.”

There was a pause, during which he examined his penitent more closely; then, persisting in taking him for one of those timid members of the Convention who sacrificed an inviolable and consecrated head in order to preserve their own, he continued in a solemn voice:

“Remember, my son, that it is not enough, in order to be absolved from that great crime, not to have actually taken part in it. Those who, when they might have defended the king, left their swords in the scabbard, will have a very heavy account to render before the King of the Heavens.... Ah, yes!” added the old priest, shaking his head with an expressive movement, “yes, very heavy; for, by remaining idle, they[Pg 51] became the involuntary accomplices of that hideous crime.”

“Do you think,” demanded the stupefied Stranger, “that an indirect participation will be punished?... The soldier who is ordered to join the shooting-squad, is he also culpable?”

The priest hesitated. Pleased with the dilemma in which he had placed that puritan of royalty by planting him between the dogma of passive obedience, which, according to the partisans of monarchy, dominates the military codes, and the no less important dogma which consecrates the respect due to the persons of kings, the Stranger was ready to see in the hesitation of the priest a favorable solution of the doubts by which he seemed to be tormented. Then, in order not to allow the venerable Jansenist any more time to reflect, he said to him:

“I should blush to offer you any sort of compensation for the funeral service which you have celebrated for the repose of the king’s soul and for the relief of my conscience. One cannot pay for an inestimable thing except by an offering which is also priceless. Deign, then, monsieur, to accept the gift of a blessed relic which I offer you. A day will come, perhaps, when you will understand its value.”

As he said these words, the Stranger handed the[Pg 52] ecclesiastic a small box of light weight; the priest took it involuntarily, so to speak, for the solemnity of the man’s words, the tone in which he said them, and the respect with which he handled the box, had plunged him into a profound surprise. They then returned to the room where the two nuns were awaiting them.

“You are,” said the Stranger, “in a house whose owner, Mucius Scaevola, the plasterer who occupies the first floor, is celebrated throughout the section for his patriotism; but he is secretly attached to the Bourbons. He used to be a huntsman of Monseigneur the Prince of Conti, and to him he owes his fortune. If you do not go out of his house, you are in greater safety here than in any place else in France. Stay here. Devout hearts will attend to your necessities, and you may await without danger less evil times. A year hence, on the twenty-first of January”—(in uttering these words he could not conceal an involuntary movement)—“if you continue to adopt this dismal place of asylum, I will return to celebrate with you the expiatory mass.”

He said no more. He bowed to the silent occupants of the attic, cast a last glance upon the evidences which testified of their indigence, and went away.

To the two innocent nuns, such an adventure[Pg 53] had all the interest of a romance; and so, as soon as the venerable abbé informed them of the mysterious gift so solemnly bestowed upon him by that man, the box was placed upon the table and the three faces, unquiet, dimly lighted by the candle, betrayed an indescribable curiosity. Mademoiselle de Langeais opened the box, and found therein a handkerchief of very fine linen, drenched with perspiration; and, on unfolding it, they recognized stains.

The two sisters dropped the precious relic with horror. To those two naïve souls the mystery in which the Stranger was enveloped became altogether inexplicable; and as for the priest, from that day he did not even seek an explanation.

The three prisoners were not slow in perceiving that in spite of the Terror a powerful arm was stretched over them.

In the first place, they received some wood and some provisions; then the two nuns realized that a woman must be associated with their protector, when some one sent them linen and clothing which enabled them to go out without being remarked on account of the aristocratic fashion of the garments which they had been forced to retain; and lastly,[Pg 54] Mucius Scaevola gave them two cards of citizenship. Often, advice necessary to the priest’s safety reached him by devious ways; and he found this advice so opportune that it could have been given only by one initiated in secrets of state.

Despite the famine which prevailed in Paris, the outcasts found at the door of their lodging rations of white bread which were regularly brought there by invisible hands; nevertheless, they believed that they could recognize in Mucius Scaevola the mysterious agent of that benefaction, which was always as ingenious as it was discerning. The noble occupants of the attic could not doubt that their protector was the person who had come to ask the priest to celebrate the expiatory mass on the night of the twenty-second of January, 1793; so that he became the object of a peculiar cult of worship to those three beings, who had no hope except in him, and lived only through him. They had added special prayers for him to their devotions; night and morning those pious hearts lifted their voices for his happiness, for his prosperity, for his health, and supplicated God to deliver him from all snares, to deliver him from his enemies, and to accord him a long and peaceable life. Their gratitude, renewed every day, so to speak, was necessarily accompanied by a sentiment of curiosity which became[Pg 55] more lively from day to day. The circumstances which had accompanied the appearance of the Stranger were the subject of their conversations; they formed a thousand conjectures regarding him, and the diversion afforded them by their thoughts of him was a benefaction of a new kind. They promised themselves not to allow the Stranger to evade their friendship on the evening when he should return, according to his promise, to commemorate the sad anniversary of the death of Louis XVI.

That night, so impatiently awaited, came at last. At midnight the sound of the Stranger’s heavy steps was heard on the old wooden staircase; the room had been arrayed to receive him, the altar was dressed. This time the sisters opened the door beforehand and both pressed forward to light the stairway. Mademoiselle de Langeais even went down a few steps in order to see her benefactor the sooner.

“Come,” she said to him in a tremulous and affectionate voice, “come, we are waiting for you.”

The man raised his head, cast a sombre glance upon the nun, and made no reply. She felt as if a garment of ice had fallen upon her, and she said no more; at his aspect the gratitude and curiosity expired in all their hearts. He was perhaps less cold, less taciturn, less terrible, than he appeared[Pg 56] to those hearts, the exaltation of whose feelings disposed to outpourings of friendliness. The three poor prisoners, understanding that the man desired to remain a Stranger to them, resigned themselves. The priest fancied that he detected upon the Stranger’s lips a smile that was promptly repressed the moment he saw the preparations that had been made to receive him. He heard the mass, and prayed; but he disappeared after having responded negatively to a few words of polite invitation upon the part of Mademoiselle de Langeais to partake of the little collation they had prepared.

After the ninth of Thermidor, the nuns and the Abbé de Marolles were able to go about Paris without incurring the least danger. The first errand of the old priest was to a perfumer’s shop, at the sign of La Reine des Fleurs, kept by Citizen and Citizeness Ragon, formerly perfumers to the Court, who had remained faithful to the royal family, and of whose services the Vendeans availed themselves to correspond with the princes and the royalist committee in Paris. The abbé, dressed according to the style of that epoch, was standing on the doorstep of that shop, between Saint-Roch and Rue des Frondeurs, when a crowd which filled the Rue Saint-Honoré prevented him from going out.

“It is nothing,” she replied; “just the tumbril and the executioner, going to the Place Louis XV. Ah, we saw him very often last year; but to-day, four days after the anniversary of the twenty-first of January, we can look at that horrible procession without distress.”

“Eh, it’s the execution of the accomplices of Robespierre. They defended themselves as long as they could, but they’re going now themselves where they have sent so many innocents.”

The crowd passed like a flood. Over the sea of heads, the Abbé de Marolles, yielding to an impulse of curiosity, saw standing on the tumbril the man who, three days before, had listened to his mass.

“That is the headsman,” replied Monsieur Ragon, calling the executioner of the great by his monarchical name.

“My friend, my friend,” cried Madame Ragon, “monsieur l’abbé is fainting!”

And the old woman seized a phial of salts, in order to bring the old priest to himself.

“Without doubt he gave me,” said he, “the handkerchief with which the King wiped his brow[Pg 58] when he went to his martyrdom.... Poor man! ... That steel knife had a heart, when all France had none!”

That there is a real distinction between a short-story in French and a French short-story, Ludovic Halévy’s fictional work illustrates perfectly, for in theme, tone, and treatment it is French. More specifically still, it is Parisian. As Professor Brander Matthews observes in his discerning introduction to Parisian Points of View, a collection of our author’s stories, “Cardinal Newman once said that while Livy and Tacitus and Terence and Seneca wrote Latin, Cicero wrote Roman; so while M. Zola on the one side, and M. Georges Ohnet on the other, may write French, M. Halévy writes Parisian.” His was indeed the Parisian point of view, his the sympathetic understanding of the pursuits, the temperament, the ideals, of the dwellers in the Capital of Europe.

One service above others Halévy rendered to his Paris: while so many writers have given an unfortunate though piquant character to the French short-story by depicting chiefly the roué and the woman of easy manners, the vulgar money-king and the broken-down noble, the complacent pander and the sordid tradesman of Paris, this writer mostly chose to depict other[Pg 60] types. He knew the gay city as few other writers of his day knew it, yet nearly all of his little fictions may be read aloud in a mixed company. The explanation of this wholesome spirit is simple—unlike the others, Halévy had not come up from the provinces with eyes ready to pop out at the city sights. From boyhood he knew all sides of Parisian life, and saw things in correct perspective, so he did not interpret light-heartedness to be lightness, nor gayety to be abandon. All sorts and conditions of men move in his stories, but the vicious, the sensual, the mean, are no more prominent in the Paris he paints than they are in the real Paris—and that means that they exist in much the same numerical proportion as in any other metropolis.

Halévy’s life does not lend itself to anecdote, for it lacked stirring events, yet his every large step marked a specific advance in his work.

On the first day of January, 1834, he was born in Paris, of Hebrew parents. His father, Léon Halévy, had attained to some distinction as a poet, and his uncle, Fromental Halévy, was not only director of singing at the Opera, but a celebrated composer as well. Upon completing his formal education at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, the youth entered the civil service in the Ministry of State, in six years rose to be chef de bureau at the[Pg 61] Colonial Office, and finally became editor of the publications of the Legislative Corps. In these public offices he gained that inside view of official life which is apparent in his works.

Very early Halévy began to know the theatre, for through his uncle’s influence he was as a youngster of fourteen on the free-list of the principal theatres of Paris. Scarcely was he a man before he began the writing of numberless books for operas, burlesques, and dramas, the materials for which he had been gathering while meeting theatrical people of all grades. By and by some of these were published, some were acted, and at length he enjoyed a vogue. In collaboration with Henri Meilhac he wrote a number of opera books, notably La Belle Hélène, Blue-Beard, The Grand-Duchess of Gerolstein, The Brigands (all with music by Offenbach), Carmen (founded on Mérimée’s story), with music by Bizet, and The Little Duke, with music by Lecocq. These bright operettas and operas are typical of that mocking and practical spirit of the Second Empire which laughed away the old ideals with a zest worthy of a nobler occupation. His heavier play, Frou-Frou, though well known about a generation ago, is not so meritorious as his dramatic skits and sketches.

But Halévy’s work for the stage bore heavily[Pg 62] upon his later success, for when he left the dramatic field to give almost exclusive service to the novel and shorter fiction, he by no means forgot the training of the earlier period. Always his understanding of the people of the stage is apparent. In many a tale these folk appear, and never is the hand that leads them forward ungentle, even when the words of the introducer are tinged with irony.

As for form, it is not especially in his plot-structure that we see traces of Halévy’s training in the drama, for he seldom emphasizes plot at all. But when he does depart from his favorite sketch form to attempt the short-story, he still writes simply; and so inevitably do the incidents succeed one another that there scarcely seems to be even a plot. Halévy’s early apprenticeship to the drama is most clearly seen, however, in his precision of outline, clear characterization, sense of dramatic values, unerring climax, and suppression of needless details.

Halévy took an active part in the Franco-Prussian War, vivid impressions of which he has given us in Notes and Memories and The Invasion—volumes which are half chronicle, half story-telling, and wholly delightful. After the catastrophe of Sedan, his fictional work dealing with theatrical folk began to appear. Madame Cardinal[Pg 63] (1870), Monsieur Cardinal (1871), The Little Cardinals (1880), and Criquette (1883), are not really novels, but connected stories and sketches, giving a panorama of people and affairs theatrical—naturally, not of the loftiest tone. Halévy has drawn no more vivid characters than the Cardinals, father and mother, with their comedy anxiety as to the immoralities of their young ballet-dancing daughters, Pauline and Virginie, whose love affairs are portrayed with gayety and comical reality. The little Criquette is an actress who makes her début at the Theatre Porte-Saint-Martin. About this interesting central figure flit a score of perfect types of player-folk—clown, provincial manager, ardent young actor, the demi-mondaine actress, authors, chorus girls, and all the rest. Criquette is Halévy’s longest tale, and shows the sketch-artist and raconteur at his best.

But American readers doubtless know Ludovic Halévy most affectionately by his “Abbé Constantin,” which has gone through more than one hundred and fifty editions in France, besides numberless printings in other lands. In its first year of issue, 1882, at least thirty-five editions were required to meet the demand. It is a novelette in length, and a simple story in plot. Charming, ingenuous, idyllic, popular with all classes,[Pg 64] it is a refreshing breath from rural France. The large estate of Longueval, comprising the castle and its dependencies, two fine farms and a forest, is announced for sale at auction. The Abbé Constantin, a warm-hearted, genial, self-sacrificing priest, quite the typical Abbé of romance—“a Curé, neither young, nor gloomy, nor stern; a Curé with white hair, and looking kind and gentle”—has been for three decades the village priest. He is disconsolate at the thought that all his associations must be broken up, and is all the more distressed when he hears that an American millionaire has bought the property. Lieutenant Jean Renaud, his godson, the orphaned son of the Abbé’s old friend, the village doctor, is about to sit down at meat with the old priest when two ladies arrive—the wife of the millionaire purchaser of Longueval, Mrs. Scott, and her sister, Miss Bettina Percival. How these bright and fascinating women win the heart of the benevolent priest, and adapt themselves to their new surroundings, and how Lieutenant Jean and Miss Bettina find their happiness, furnish the incidents for this crystal little romance.

“A Marriage for Love” (1881) is the most popular of Halévy’s longer short-stories. A young French officer marries a well-bred and ingenuous girl. Soon each discovers that the[Pg 65] other has kept a diary from childhood. Thinking that the declarations of love which she sees written in her husband’s journal refer to some other woman, the young wife cries out, but is consoled by his protests, and it is agreed that they shall read aloud passages from their own diaries, turn about. With all the naïveté which it seems the special province of English eighteenth-century and French nineteenth-century writers to depict, these young people disclose in this fashion the birth and growth of their mutual love. A simple story enough, yet refreshing in the midst of so many Gallic records of marital infidelity.

Of Halévy’s shorter stories several stand out in particular. “Princess” tells with admirable directness how “the bourgeois heroine ... contrives to escape the lawyers ... and marry a real prince.” “A Grand Marriage” is the equally uncomplicated narrative of how the betrothal of an alert young Parisienne is arranged by her parents, with the clever and worldly-wise assistance of the prospective bride.

“The Most Beautiful Woman in Paris” is more a study than a story, yet the firmly wrought, breezy narrative style of the author is here at its best. The story runs that a social connoisseur, Prince Agénor, upon seeing at the Opera the wife[Pg 66] of a lawyer, pronounces her to be the most beautiful woman in Paris. Then ensue flattering newspaper notices, the inflamed ambition of the advertised beauty, costly gowns, a new coupé—all that madame may appear fittingly at a social function at which it is announced that she is to appear, as well as the Prince. Madame does appear, but she is neglected because the Prince forgets to come to make her acquaintance—he has already found another “most beautiful woman in Paris.” The author’s narration is lively, as always, and his social observation confident and minute, while his characteristic, playful irony is second only to that of another unique story, “The Chinese Ambassador.”

In this we have as a motif the unsettled political conditions existing at the close of the Franco-Prussian War. The story is told with delightful humor, in diary form, by a Chinese Ambassador Extraordinary who has been sent to France and England with rich presents to placate the French and English governments, and also to arrange official reparation, for the massacre of some foreign residents in China. Then follow a series of confusions. There is no longer an Emperor in France, there are three rival French Republics, and another coup d’état seems imminent. So the Ambassador, not knowing whom to approach, keeps the[Pg 67] presents, and waits. Soon he goes to England, where he meets the Queen. She accepts the apologies as well as the presents, but in conversation with some French women at a social function in London he finds that there are three claimants to the French throne, Napoleon III, the Duke of Orleans, and the Count of Paris—all in exile—to say nothing of the three rival presidents, Gambetta, Thiers, and Favre. He is again much in doubt as to which to approach with his mission, as he receives such contrary advice from all quarters. Upon his return to Paris, however, he finds the government has again changed its capitol, and that a seventh government is in the ascendancy—the Commune. When he learns that Paris is burning, he concludes that it is “a dead, destroyed, and annihilated city.” In two weeks, however, order is restored, and the Ambassador decides that it is still the most beautiful city in Europe, and the most brilliant, for the Republic of M. Thiers is now undisputed. To him he delivers his mission.

“The Story of a Ball Dress” is couched in an old form—the ball dress tells its own story; but we have a kaleidoscopic picture of the change of affairs before, during, and after the war—that war which plays so large a part in the writings of both Daudet and Halévy.

“The Insurgent,” first published in 1872, follows, in translation. It is without doubt Ludovic Halévy’s most intense and dramatic short narrative, yet none is more simply told. In this expanded anecdote the writer actually becomes the Insurgent, and so vigorous, so sympathetic, is the portraiture that every word comes sincerely and naturally from the soul of the speaker. Halévy does not speak as such a one would—he is the Insurgent—life, breath, and word. It is a miracle of compression—not the compression of conscious literary art, but the tense, naïve, open brevity of one who has no embroideries for his words, no masks for his sentiment, no apologies for his acts, but goes, as with the cleavage of an axe, straight to the heart of what he means. Yet with all of this brusk, speedy simplicity, abrupt, halting and rudely frank in style, there is a note of poignant pathos at the close that leaves the eye misty and the heart warm.

In no one of Halévy’s stories do we see so clearly the application of his robust, sincere literary creed as confessed in his own words:

“We must not write simply for the refined, the blasé, and the squeamish. We must write for that man who goes there on the street with his nose in his newspaper and his umbrella under his arm.[Pg 69] We must write for that fat, breathless woman whom I see from my window, as she climbs painfully into the Odéon omnibus. We must write courageously for the bourgeois, if it were only to try to refine them, to make them less bourgeois. And if I dared, I should say that we must write even for fools.”

“Prisoner,” said the president of the court-martial, “have you anything to add in your defense?”

“Yes, my colonel,” responded the accused; “you have given me a little advocate who has defended me according to his idea. I want to defend myself according to my own.

“My name is Martin—Louis Joseph; I am fifty-five years old. My father was a locksmith. He had a little shop in the upper part of the Faubourg Saint-Martin and did a small business. We just about lived. I learned to read in Le National, which was, I believe, the paper of Monsieur Thiers.

“The 27th of July, 1830, my father went out early in the morning. That evening at ten o’clock they brought him back to us dying on a litter. He had received a bullet in the chest. By his side upon the litter was his musket.

“‘Take it,’ he said to me; ‘I give it to you, and every time there is to be an insurrection, be[Pg 72] against the government—always! always! always!’

“An hour afterward he was dead. I went out in the night. At the first barricade I stopped and offered myself. A man examined me by the light of a lantern. ‘A child!’ he cried. I was not yet fifteen. I was very small, quite undersized. I answered: ‘A child, that’s possible; but my father was killed about two hours ago. He gave me his musket. Teach me how to use it.’

“Starting with that moment, I became what I have been always, for forty years: an insurgent! If I fought during the Commune, it was neither from compulsion nor for the thirty sous, it was from taste, from pleasure, from habit, from routine.

“In 1830, I bore myself rather bravely at the attack on the Louvre. That gamin who—the first—climbed the iron fence under the bullets of the Swiss—that was I. I received the medal of July; but the bourgeoisie gave us a king. Everything had to be done over again. I joined a secret society, I learned to mould bullets, to make powder. In short, I completed my education—and I waited.

“I had to wait nearly two years. The 5th of June, 1832, at midday, before the Madeleine, I began by unhitching one of the horses from the[Pg 73] hearse of General Lamarque. I passed the day shouting, ‘Vive Lafayette!’ and the night in making barricades. The next morning we were attacked by the soldiers. That afternoon towards four o’clock we were pocketed, cannonaded, fired upon with grape-shot, crushed, in the Church of St. Méry. I had a bullet and three bayonet thrusts in my body when I was picked up by the soldiers on the flag-stones of a little chapel on the right—the chapel of St. John. I used often to return to that little chapel—not to pray, I was not brought up in those ideas—but to see the trace of my blood which is still marked upon the stones.

“Because of my youth, I got only ten years in prison. I was sent to Mont-Saint-Michel. That was why I didn’t take any part in the uprisings of 1834. If I had been free, I should have been fighting in the Rue Transnonian as I had fought in the Rue St. Méry. Against the government—always!—always!—always! That was the last word of my father, that was my gospel, my religion! I called that my catechism in six words. I got out of prison in 1842 and again I began to wait.

“The revolution of ’48 made itself—without help. The bourgeoisie were stupid and cowardly. They were neither for us nor against us. The[Pg 74] City Guards alone defended themselves. We had a little trouble in capturing the post of the Château-d’Eau. The evening of the 24th of February I stayed three or four hours on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. The members of the Provisional Government one after another made speeches to us, said to us that we were ‘heroes,’ ‘noble citizens,’ ‘the first people of the world;’ that we had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. After having regaled us with these fine words, they gave us a republic which wasn’t any better than the monarchy which we had tumbled to the ground.

“In June I took up my musket again—but that time things were not successful. I was arrested, condemned, sent to Cayenne. It seems that out there I behaved myself well. One day I saved a captain of marines who was drowning. They thought that very fine. Notice that I would very cheerfully have shot at that captain—if he had been on one side of a barricade and I on the other; but a man who is drowning, who is dying——. In short, I received my pardon. I got back to France in 1852, after the Coup d’État. I had missed the insurrection of 1851.

“At Cayenne I had made a friend, a tailor named Bernard. Six months after my departure for France, Bernard died. I went to see his[Pg 75] widow. She was in destitution. I married her. We had a son in 1854. You will understand all in good time why I speak of my wife and of my son. Only, you ought already to suspect that an insurgent who marries the widow of an insurgent does not have royalist children.

“Under the Empire, nothing was going on. The police held a firm grip. We were dispersed, disarmed. I worked, I brought up my son in the ideas that my father had given me. The wait was long—Rochefort, Gambetta, public reunions; all those things put us in motion again.

“On the first serious occasion I showed myself. I was of that little band that assaulted the barracks of the firemen of Villette. Only, there a stupid thing was done. They killed a fireman unnecessarily. I was taken, thrown into prison; but the government of the Fourth of September set us free—from which I concluded that we had done quite right in attacking that barracks and in killing that fireman, even unnecessarily.

“The siege commenced. At once I was against the government, and for the Commune. I marched against the Hôtel-de-Ville on the 31st of October and the 22d of January. I loved revolt for the sake of revolt. An insurgent, I told you at the start, I am an insurgent. I cannot see a club without joining it, an insurrection without[Pg 76] running after it, a barricade without bringing my paving-stone to it. That goes with my blood.

“And then, besides, I wasn’t altogether ignorant, and I said to myself: ‘We only need to succeed some day, clear to the foundations, and then in our turn we shall be the government and things will go a little better than with all these lawyers who get behind us during the battle, and who pass ahead of us after the victory.’

“The 18th of March came, and naturally I was in it. I cried ‘Hurrah for the military!’ I fraternized with the soldiers. I went to the Hôtel-de-Ville. I found there a government at work—absolutely as on the 24th of February.

“Now you tell me that that insurrection was not legitimate. That’s possible, but I don’t quite see why. I begin to be muddled, I do, between these insurrections which are a duty and those insurrections which are a crime! I do not clearly see the difference.

“I fired on the Versailles troops in 1871, as I fired on the Royal Guards in 1830, and on the City Guards in 1848. After 1830 I received the medal of July. After 1848, the compliments of Monsieur Lamartine. This time, I’m going to have transportation or death.

“There are some insurrections that please you. You raise columns to them, you give their names[Pg 77] to streets, you distribute among yourselves the offices, the promotions, the big salaries; and we others, who made the revolution, you call us—noble citizens, heroes, a nation of brave men, etc., etc. It is with such money that we are paid.

“And then, there are some other insurrections that displease you. As a result of those, you distribute to us exile, transportation, death. Well, see here: if you hadn’t paid us so many compliments after the first, perhaps we would not have done the last. If you had not raised the Column of July at the entrance to our quarter, perhaps we should not have gone to demolish the Vendôme Column in your quarter. Those two penny-trumpets were not in harmony. The one had to discord with the other, and that is what came about.

“Now, I am going to tell you why I threw away my captain’s uniform at the street corner on the 26th of May, why I was in a blouse when I was arrested. When I learned that these gentlemen of the Commune, instead of coming to fire with us upon the barricades, were distributing thousand-franc notes to themselves at the Hôtel-de-Ville, shaving their beards, dyeing their hair, and going to hide themselves in caves, I didn’t wish to keep the shoulder-straps they had given me.

“Besides, they embarrassed me, those shoulder[Pg 78] straps. ‘Captain Martin,’ that was silly. ‘Insurgent Martin,’ quite as it should be. I wanted to end as I had begun, to die as my father had died, an insurrectionist in an insurrection, a barricader in a barricade.

“I couldn’t get myself killed. I got taken. I belong to you. Only, I wish you would do me one favor. I have a son, a child of seventeen, he is at Cherbourg, on the hulks. He has fought, it is true, and he will not deny it; but it was I who put the musket in his hand, it was I who told him that his duty was there. He listened to me. He obeyed me. That alone is his crime. Do not condemn him too harshly.

“As for me, you have hold of me—do not let me go; that’s the advice I give you. I’m too old to mend, and, besides, what would you have? Nothing can change what is: I was born on the wrong side of the barricade.”

André Theuriet was evidently in sympathy with the doctrine that those lands and their dwellers are most happy which have the least history. Singular as the statement may seem when made of a contemporary French man of letters who had defeated Zola in a contest for election to the Academy, it is nevertheless true that the tone of Theuriet’s work is repose. “The short and simple annals of the poor” he penned with simplicity and charm, and rarely did the hurly-burly tempt him to fare among scenes either boisterous or sordid. Yet, he was never squeamish, but wrote of a real life in a real world. What Alphonse Daudet became when he occasionally left fevered Paris to lie on the turf at Montauban and feel in fancy the gentle fanning of the old windmill, that André Theuriet was by temperament. The bucolic, the gentle, the peaceful—all met response in his nature and were mirrored in the placid pool of his fiction.

Theuriet was born at Marly-le-Roi, September, 1833, and spent his childhood in that lovely province. He got his education at Bar-le-duc, and at Paris, where he took up the study of law, receiving the degree of Licencée en Droit at the age[Pg 80] of twenty-four. Instead of practising, however, he entered the Ministry of Finance the same year, and began the routine of public life—as the intensely private career of the bureaucrat is called.

At once he began to publish verse, winning a place, the very year of his appointment to the Ministry of Finance, in the pages of that distinguished exponent of letters, the Revue des Deux Mondes. In Memoriam was the title of his first success—a romance in verse, quickly appraised by critics at a value which it still maintains, and displaying the qualities for which the author’s writings are appreciated to-day.

We never tire of debating as to whether distinguished men are more the product of their times, than their era is moulded by its men. Doubtless something of both views is the ultimate truth. Theuriet, however, left no profound influence upon his age. During the ten years which succeeded the publication of In Memoriam—1857 to 1867—his work continued, unaffected by the French revolt, if that is not too strong a term, against romanticism. This is shown in his first volume of poems, The Forest Path (Le Chemin du Bois), published in 1867, and awarded the Vitel prize by the Academy. Another ten years, and he received the coveted place among the Immortals, but the tone of his writings never[Pg 81] changed—his was always a quiet romanticism clothed upon with the beauty of idealism.

Theuriet’s selection of themes is a happy index to his nature. The one and the other are clean, uncomplicated by intrigue, and in the main agreeable. Are there many to-day who will be attracted to this man when his fiction is called restful and gentle? I do not know, since we are all so busy and turbulent and—disillusioned. But we ought to be, if we are not, drawn by thoughts of a melodious rhythm of words portraying honest emotions, of country life that exhales the “perfume of new hay and of ripe wheat,” of woodsy ways and forest folk—in a word, thoughts of a world where, as in La Bretonne, the lowliest respond to human need, and even crime cannot stamp out the image of the beautiful, a world full of goodness rising out of the ooze of evil.

And so it was country-life—country-life in Lorraine, enriched and made beautiful by the Loire—that inspired not only his early poems, but also the numerous novels, plays, sketches, and short-stories which stand to his credit—and I use the word designedly.

After a notable if not brilliant career as author and journalist, Theuriet died in Paris, 1897.

Relatively little of Theuriet’s work is known to[Pg 82] readers who know not French, but of this little probably the long short-story, “The Abbé Daniel,” is the most familiar. It is in the style of Ludovic Halévy’s “Abbé Constantin,” and of about the same length—a little classic of “polite rusticity,” of pastoral love, sorrow, loss, and happiness, limpid in style and artistically balanced in structure.

The plot is simple: Young Daniel loves his beautiful cousin Denise, but she marries Beauvais, the rough, hearty, typical bourgeois landed proprietor. A daughter is born—a second Denise—but the mother does not long survive. Young Daniel has entered the church and become “The Abbé Daniel.” His simple goodness leads him to adopt an orphaned lad, whom he cherishes as he would his own. One day the Abbé finds little Daniel, as he is called, feeding a threshing machine. In terror for the child’s danger, the Abbé shows his friends what the lad was doing, and the loss of his own arm is the penalty. He now resigns his parish and goes to live with the widowed father of the little Denise and assumes charge of her education, lavishing upon the child the affection he was forbidden to give to her mother. The children learn to love each other, but young Daniel goes away to the Crimean War and seems to forget. Meanwhile, Beauvais plans[Pg 83] to marry his daughter Denise to a worthy young nobody of means, but the loving Abbé sends for his protégé, who promptly returns on leave, and the end is not difficult to surmise.

All this brief narration is but sketching the frame and omitting the picture, for who can feel the charm of the simple but never insipid story when it is bereft of the witchery of Theuriet’s style! It is worth while knowing at first hand a real French home, with the farmer-father, the daughter, the young soldier, and the Abbé Daniel.

That there are not many “intense thrills for jaded readers” in Theuriet’s straightforward work will be further illustrated by a reading of his novels—Mademoiselle Guignon, Aunt Aurelia, Claudette, The Maugars, Angela’s Fortune, and others—with which we have not here to deal; but it will also be quite evident in the simplicity of his shorter fiction, which must now be considered.

“An Easter Story” tells of Juanito, an orphan boy of fifteen. Like a weed on the pavement of Triana, he had grown up. Gipsy blood flowed in his veins and, like the gipsies, he loved his independence, vagrancy, and bull-fights. He earned a poor enough living by selling programmes at the doors of the theatres, but during Holy Week the theatres were closed, and now Good Friday finds him unhappy—for he has no[Pg 84] money to go to the bull-fight on Easter Sunday! However, he follows the crowd until, tired and hungry, he lies down in a corner and sleeps. Two lovers pass. They put into the hand of the pretty youth a piece of silver, and so when he awakes his problem is solved. But as he starts down the street he sees a girl crying. He goes to her. It is Chata, whom he has known since childhood. Her mother is sick, she says, and the apothecary will not give her medicine because she has no money. Juanito looks into the girl’s eyes, hesitates a moment, then quickly puts into her hand the piece of silver. So Juanito did not see the bull-fight.

On Sunday Chata goes out to find her friend, and they go for a walk. Coming to a secluded corner, the girl looks into the young man’s eyes to thank him. But suddenly, moved by the sweetness of his deed, she throws her arms about his neck and cries, “I love you!”

Human interest—tenderness rather than strength—marks all Theuriet’s short fictions. “Little Gab” is quite without plot, which means that its delicacy defies condensed narration. It is a sympathetic sketch of a small hunchback whose parents are too hard-pressed in their struggle with poverty to look after the boy. The physician tells Little Gab’s sister that only the[Pg 85] sea air and the baths at Berck can save her brother’s life. Through the unceasing labors and savings of the sister, this is at last accomplished, and both are on the heights of joy. The change is magical, and the lad returns with some prospect of recovery; but the dense air of the city is too much for Little Gab, and he dies still thinking of the beautiful sea.

Less tragic, but quite as simple in scheme, is “The Peaches,” which narrates how Herbelot is teased out of the service of the Ministry of Finance by being detected carrying home for his wife two peaches concealed in his hat.

Though its tone is not entirely typical of Theuriet, La Bretonne—which follows, in translation—is probably his most dramatic story, revealing, as it does, the good that lives in the worst of us.

One evening in November, the Eve of Saint Catherine, the iron gate of the Central Prison of Auberive turned on its hinges and allowed a woman of about thirty years to pass out. She was clad in a faded woollen gown, and her head was surmounted by a bonnet of linen that in an odd fashion framed her face—pallid and puffed by that grayish fat which is born of prison fare.

She was a prisoner whom they had just liberated. Her fellow-convicts called her La Bretonne. Condemned for infanticide, it was just six years since the prison van had brought her to la Centrale. At length, after having donned again her street clothes, and drawing from the registry the stock of money which had been saved for her, she found herself once more free, with her road-pass viséed for Langres.

The post-cart for Langres had left; so, cowed and awkward, she directed her way stumblingly toward the principal inn of the place, and in scarcely a confident voice asked a lodging for the night. The inn was full, and the landlady, who[Pg 88] did not care to harbor “one of those jail-birds,” advised her to push on as far as the little public-house situated at the other end of the village.

La Bretonne, more awkward and frightened than ever, went on her way, and knocked at the door of the public-house, which, to speak precisely, was only a drinking place for laborers. This proprietress also cast over her a distrustful eye, doubtless scenting a woman from la Centrale, and finally turned her away on the pretense that she did not keep lodgers. La Bretonne dared not insist, she merely moved away with her head down, while from the depths of her soul arose a sullen hate against this world which so repulsed her.

In late November night comes quickly. Soon she found herself enveloped in darkness, on the gray road which stretched between the edges of the woods, and where the north wind whistled rudely as it drove the heaps of dead leaves hither and yon.

After six years of sedentary life as a recluse, she no longer knew how to walk; and the joints of her knees were rickety; her feet, accustomed to sabots, were tortured in her new shoes. After about a league they were blistered, and she herself[Pg 89] was exhausted. She sat down on a milestone, shivering and asking herself if she must die of cold and hunger in this black night, under that icy wind which so chilled her.

Suddenly, in the solitude of the road, over the squalls of wind she seemed to hear the trailing sounds of a voice in song. She strained her ears and distinguished the cadence of one of those caressing and monotonous chants with which one lulls children to sleep. Thereupon, rising again to her feet, she pressed on in the direction of the voice, and at the turn of a cross-road she saw a light which reddened through the branches.

Five minutes later she reached a mud hovel, whose roof, covered with clods of earth, leaned against the rock, and whose single window had sent forth that luminous ray. With anxious heart she decided to knock. The song ceased and a peasant opened the door—a woman of the same age as la Bretonne, but already faded and aged by work. Her bodice, torn in places, showed a rough and swarthy skin; her red hair escaped dishevelled from under a little cloth cap; her gray eyes regarded with amazement this stranger whose figure revealed something of loneliness.

“Well, good evening,” said she, raising higher the lamp which she held in her hand. “What do you want?”

“I can go no further,” murmured la Bretonne in a voice broken by a sob. “The town is far, and if you will lodge me for this night, you’ll render me a service. I have some money, and will pay you for your trouble.”

“Come in!” replied the other, after a moment of hesitation; then she continued in a tone more of curiosity than of suspicion, “Why didn’t you sleep at Auberive?”

“They were not willing to lodge me”—and, lowering her blue eyes, la Bretonne, seized with a scruple, added—“because, you see, I come from the Central Prison, and that does not give folks confidence.”

“Ah! Come in all the same. I, who never knew anything but poverty—I fear nothing! I have a conscience against turning a Christian from the door on a night like this. I’ll go make you a bed by strewing some heather.”

She proceeded to take from under a shed several bundles of dry sweet-heather and spread them in a corner before the chimney.

“Yes, with my youngster, who is nearly seven years old. I earn our living by working in the woods.”

“I never had one,” said la Fleuriotte bruskly. “The poor child hasn’t any father. As the saying is, ‘to each his sorrow.’ There, your bed is made, and here are two or three potatoes which are left over from supper—it’s all I have to offer you.”

She was interrupted by a childish voice coming from a dark closet, separated from the main room by a board partition.

“Good night!” she repeated. “I must go look up the little one—she’s crying. Have a good night’s sleep!”

She took the lamp and went to the adjacent closet, leaving la Bretonne in darkness.

Soon she was stretched upon her bed of heather. After having eaten, she tried to close her eyes, but sleep would not come. Through the partition she heard la Fleuriotte talking softly with her baby, whom the arrival of the stranger had awakened, and who did not wish to go to sleep again. La Fleuriotte petted her, she embraced her with caressing words—naïve expressions which strangely stirred la Bretonne.

The outburst of tenderness awakened a confused instinct of motherhood buried deep in the soul of that girl who had once been condemned for having stifled her new-born babe. La Bretonne reflected that “if things had not gone badly” with her, her own child would have been just as[Pg 92] old as this little girl. At that thought, and at the sound of the childish voice, she shuddered in her inmost soul; something tender and loving was born in that embittered heart, and she felt an overwhelming need for tears.

“Come, my pet,” said la Fleuriotte, “hurry off to sleep. If you are good, I’ll take you to-morrow to the fête of Saint Catherine.”

“Saint Catherine’s—that’s the fête for little girls, isn’t it, Mamma?”

“Is it true, then, that on this day Saint Catherine gives playthings to the children?”

“Then, she brings them only to rich children! Why? I—I’d love to have some playthings.”

“Ah, well! Some day—if you are quite good—if you go to sleep nicely—perhaps she will bring you some.”

“All right—I’m going to sleep—so that she’ll bring me some to-morrow.”

Silence. Then regular and gentle breathing. The child had fallen asleep, and the mother too. Only la Bretonne did not sleep. An emotion both[Pg 93] poignant and tender wrung her heart, and she thought more fixedly than ever of that little one whom long ago she had stifled. This lasted until the first gleams of dawn.

At early daylight la Fleuriotte and her child still slept. La Bretonne furtively glided out of the house, and, walking hastily in the direction of Auberive, did not pause until she reached the first houses. Once there, she again passed slowly up the single street, scanning the signs of the shops. At last one of these seemed to fix her attention. She rapped upon the window-shutter, and by and by it was opened. It was a dry-goods shop, but they also had some children’s playthings—poor shopworn toys—paper dolls, a Noah’s ark, a sheep-fold. To the great amazement of the shopkeeper, la Bretonne bought them all, paid, and went out.

She was again on the road to la Fleuriotte’s hovel when a hand was laid heavily on her shoulder. Tremblingly she turned and found herself facing a corporal of gensdarmes. The unhappy woman had forgotten that convicts were not permitted after their release to remain in the neighborhood of the prison!

“Instead of loafing here, you should be already at Langres,” said the corporal severely. “Go along—on your way!”

She sought to explain—her pains were lost! In the twinkling of an eye a cart was requisitioned, she was put in under the escort of a gendarme, and the driver whipped up his horse.

The cart rumbled joltingly over the frozen road. Poor la Bretonne heart-brokenly clutched the package of playthings in her chilled fingers.

At a turn of the highway she recognized the cross-path through the woods. Her heart leaped, and she pleaded with the gendarme to stop—she had an errand for la Fleuriotte, a woman who lived there, only a couple of steps away. She pleaded with so much earnestness that the gendarme, a good fellow at heart, allowed himself to be persuaded. They tied the horse to the tree and went up the path.

In front of her door la Fleuriotte was chopping up wood into faggots. Upon seeing her visitor back again, accompanied by a gendarme, she stood open-mouthed, her arms hanging.

“Lay these playthings gently on her bed, and tell her that Saint Catherine sent them. I went back to Auberive to hunt for them, but it seems that I hadn’t the right to do so, and they are sending me to Langres.”

She drew near the bed. Followed always by her guard, la Bretonne spread over the coverlet the dolls, the ark, and the flock of sheep. Then she kissed the bare arm of the sleeping child, and, turning toward the gendarme, who stood staring:

While one is reading the tales of Gautier, he feels himself to be in a playhouse, confronted by a bewildering array of stage-settings, incredibly correct in detail and grouping, oppressively rich in appointment, and colorful—always colorful. At times characters are felt to be subordinated to background, yet these surroundings are so picturesque—or better, perhaps, so pictorial—that they furnish contrasts and harmonies which bring out rather than overpower the people who move amidst this very forest of accessory riches.

An examination of Gautier the man, both temperamentally and as his life was lived—if, indeed, there can be such a distinction—at once provides an explanation of this pervading love for setting: he was a passionate lover of the beautiful, and he was a persistent traveller in quest of things beautiful to look upon.

To speak of an artist, whether in pigments, marbles, or words, as a lover of the beautiful will at once suggest to the “practical” reader a deep-eyed dreamer with soulful, upturned look, devoid of humour, and affecting a Bunthorne stride.[Pg 98] Not so Gautier. Robust of body, almost coarse of physiognomy, and bubbling with life, he could mix his colors with humor, tone his admirations with censure, charge his prodigious memory with endless detail, and train his observation to the minutest accuracy. There was something sensual as well as sensuous in his mind, and he was saved from grovelling only by the dominance of that subtle perception and admiration for the beautiful in all its phases, which challenges continual comment in any consideration of the man and his work. Gautier was esthetic without being an esthete, witty yet not a wit, sentient but not sentimental, sensual though not gross.

Tarbes, in the south of France, Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, was the place of his birth, August 31, 1811. Jean-Pierre Gautier, his father, was in the revenue service, and an ardent royalist. He hailed from the Avignon of the Popes that Alphonse Daudet has chronicled so delightfully. Our author’s mother, Adélaïde-Antoinette Cocard, was a tailor’s daughter, and a noted beauty, whose sister had married into the nobility.

When Théophile was only three years old, his[Pg 99] parents removed to Paris, but even at that elastic age the lad retained his love for the South, and, like his father, often repined for its warmth and color. He was a precocious youngster, beginning at five to devour books—Paul and Virginia and Robinson Crusoe among others.

The inevitable Lycée Louis-le-Grand was his academy, and by no means a happy prison it proved for the impressionable child, so poetic in temperament. Fortunately, his father soon took him home and entered him as a day-pupil elsewhere.

In his boyhood Théophile became a worshiper of that master romanticist, Victor Hugo, whom he was permitted to meet while yet a youth of nineteen, and who graciously encouraged the boy to publish his verses. Though Gautier afterward laughed delightedly and delightfully at the extremes of the earlier romantic school, and though both in his historical work on romanticism and in his papers on contemporaneous writers, his biting satire searched out its weaknesses, he never ceased to feel its influence and cherish a reverence for its anointed apostle, the creator of Les Misérables.

In those formative days the young man was physically slight and almost frail—remote as yet from the massive giant of flashing black eye and dark leonine mane, whose physique enabled him[Pg 100] to sustain many a bout with the wine cup and rejoice in pleasures of table, until, his natural powers otherwise unabated, and but sixty-one years of age, he succumbed to an enlarged heart and died at Paris, October 23, 1872.

Gautier, like many another man of letters, presents some contradictions of temperament and production, but for the most part his work is infused with his own strong individuality.

Like Loti, he knew the life of many lands and wrote sympathetically of Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and the alluring East. A painter turned art critic and journalist—and so indefatigable a journalist that he himself has estimated that it would require three hundred volumes to compass his collected writings—he pursued a painter’s methods in his literary work. A poet of charm and attainment, and a dramatic critic of secure place, he informed both verse and criticism with the melodious spirit which issued from his love for music. In faithful description the precursor of the realists, he still adhered to his romanticist ideals. Word-connoisseur, and stylist of the first order, he loved perfection of literary form because such harmonies were the outward limbs of beauty.

Here was an aggressive, positive, individual man, strong in love as in loathing, tender to all[Pg 101] animals, living, like Balzac, joyously a life of struggle against debt, and at last winning a place greater than the forbidden seat in the Academy—a place among the most distinguished romanticists that France ever gave to the world.

Gautier’s worship of beauty is not easy to formulate. M. de Sumichrast has termed it “not immoral, but unmoral.” The presence or the absence of virtue or of vice made no difference to him if only the person were beautiful. He no more demanded moral qualities in his characters than he did in the lovely lines of a hill crest. Beauty was the final flame for the adoration of this sensuous acolyte. In all life, at home and widely journeying abroad, he sought it, and when he found it, whether in human form, in relics of ancient art, in modern picture and marble, or in the unrivalled symmetry of nature, his whole being throbbed with delight.

As a youth he fell in love with the robust, fleshy women that Rubens had painted for the Louvre, and straightway pilgrimaged to Belgium to find the originals. His experiences were laughable—perhaps a trifle pathetic. The one slattern whose generous bulk met his Rubenic ideals was scrubbing. But out of this boyish episode grew that exquisite tale, “The Fleece of Gold”—a[Pg 102] modern covering which, unlike Jason’s, was a woman’s wealth of blonde hair.

As the story runs, Tiburce, a young dilettante painter, had always found more beauty in the feminine creations of the great painters than in the most lovely flesh-and-blood women he ever met, so he spent much time in contemplating these exquisite creations of art. At length, from having studied certain Flemish pictures, he decided to go into Belgium “in search of the blonde”—he would love a Fleming.

In Brussels and in Laeken the quest of this new Jason was unsuccessful, so he went to Antwerp, where he was as diligent as before—and equally without reward. At length he saw in the Cathedral Rubens’ masterpiece, “The Descent from the Cross,” and was stricken dumb by the beauty of the Magdalen in this remarkable picture. “The sight of that face was to Tiburce a revelation from on high; scales fell from his eyes, he found himself face to face with his secret dream, with his unavowed hope; the intangible image which he had pursued with all the ardor of an amorous imagination, and of which he had been able to espy only the profile or the ravishing fold of a dress; the capricious and untamed chimera, always ready to unfold its restless wings, was[Pg 103] there before him, fleeing no more, motionless in the splendor of its beauty.”

One day on the street Tiburce catches sight of a woman who bears—a striking resemblance to the Magdalen! Her—Gretchen—he eventually meets, and to her he reluctantly gives his love. Yet, though Gretchen comes to love Tiburce, she cannot evoke in him quite the same feelings he knows in the presence of Rubens’ beautiful woman—the Magdalen is still his ideal. Even when he christens the girl with the name of the Penitent, the transformation is not complete. At length Gretchen, hidden behind a pillar, overhears Tiburce sighing out his worship toward the woman of the painting: “How I would love thee to-morrow if thou wert living!”—and realizes that she is loved only vicariously.

By and by they go to Paris, where the artist feels his love for the absent Magdalen grow instead of wane, and Gretchen can bear her jealous unhappiness no longer. She breaks out into a tender eloquence of reproach: “You are ambitious to love; you are deceived concerning yourself, you will never love. You must have perfection, the ideal and poesy—all those things which do not exist. Instead of loving in a woman[Pg 104] the love that she has for you, of being grateful to her for her devotion and for the gift of her heart, you look to see if she resembles that plaster Venus in your study.... You are not a lover, poor Tiburce, you are simply a painter.”

And so she goes on, uncovering to him his foolish delusion, ending in a passion of abandonment, of “sublime immodesty,” by appearing before him like Aphrodite rising from the sea.

Swept by all this nobility of her discerning spirit, and all the ravishing charm of her beauty, Tiburce seizes his brushes and does master work—and then begs his new-found love to name the day for the crying of their banns.

Perhaps it needs no word here to emphasize one phase of Gautier’s nature—he knew himself to be a beauty-lover, and he knew all the limitations of character that this cult rendered inevitable.

A second force in Gautier’s life was his orientalism. In this he was not only conscious of the strain of eastern blood that pulsed through both body and temperament, but he was, by reason of long application, constant travel, and the varied opportunities of a critic’s life, a savant on matters oriental, particularly Pompeian and Egyptian.

Here, again, “The Romance of a Mummy,” a long tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” a short tale, and “The Mummy’s Foot,” which follows in translation, display the savant in his work. The movement of life in ancient Egypt in the time of the Hebrew bondage, and all that highly colored, picturesque civilization, afford him the always coveted background which he valued as much for itself as for its use as a setting.

In another of his shorter stories, “Arria Marcella,” the savant is also evident. The familiar but terrible theme of the vampire woman is set in an idealized reconstruction of Pompeian life; just as that one perfect short-story from the pen of Gautier, “The Dead Leman” (La Morte Amoureuse), marvellously made to live again the mediæval spirit in the poignantly pitiful mistress whose end is the heart-break of selfish passion; and “The Thousand-and-Second Night” evokes anew the indistinct, subtle, alluring odors of the Arabian Nights.

The three best-known longer tales of Gautier—technically they are not precisely novels—are Mademoiselle de Maupin, a prose-song to beauty—immoral, daring, and beautiful; Captain Fracasse, whose smash-’em-up, picaroon hero leads us through abundant adventures; and Spirite, a notable contrast to the materialism[Pg 106] displayed—almost flaunted—in his other work. Spirite is a story of fantasy; but it is more: with a tender delicacy and spiritual subtlety which well may surprise his public, Gautier presents the contrasting love-lure of Lavinia d’Audefini, a disembodied woman, and the very real but—here is the remarkable part—less attractive charms of Mme. d’Ymbercourt, a red-ripe woman indeed. We are indebted to Gautier for this one story as a demonstration that, while his tales are mostly as unmoral as the pigments of his literary palette, he can at will delineate the ethereal, and in so doing disclose a fine understanding of spiritual values.

I had idly entered the shop of one of those curiosity-venders who, in that Parisian lingo which is so perfectly unintelligible to the rest of France, are called marchands de bric-à-brac.

You have doubtless glanced through the windows into one of those shops which have become so numerous since it is the mode to buy antique furniture, and since the pettiest stockbroker thinks he must have his “mediæval room.”

There is one thing that clings alike to the shop of the old-iron dealer, the wareroom of the tapestry-maker, the laboratory of the alchemist, and the studio of the artist: in these mysterious dens through whose window-shutters filters a furtive twilight, the thing that is the most manifestly ancient is the dust; there the spider-webs are more authentic than the gimps, and the old pear-wood furniture is younger than the mahogany which arrived yesterday from America.

The wareroom of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capernaum; all centuries and all[Pg 108] countries seemed to have rendezvoused there: an Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet whose ebony panels were brilliantly inlaid with filaments of brass; a Louis XV half-lounge carelessly stretched its fawn-like feet under a massive table of the reign of Louis XIII, with heavy oaken spirals, and carvings of intermingled foliage and chimeras.

In one corner glittered the striped cuirass of a damascened suit of Milanese armor; bisque cupids and nymphs, grotesques from China, céladon and craquelé vases, Saxon and old Sèvres cups, encumbered what-nots and corners.

Upon the fluted shelves of several dressers glittered immense plates from Japan, with designs in red and blue relieved by gilt hatching, side by side with several Bernard Palissy enamels, showing frogs and lizards in relief work.

From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of Chinese silk lustrous with silver, billows of brocade, sown with luminous specks by a slanting sunbeam, while portraits of every epoch, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled out through their yellow varnish.

The dealer followed me with precaution through the tortuous passage contrived between the piles of furniture, fending off with his hand the hazardous swing of my coat-tails, watching my elbows[Pg 109] with the uneasy attention of the antiquary and the usurer.

It was a singular figure, that of the dealer: an immense cranium, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a meagre aureole of white hair that brought out all the more vividly the clear salmon tint of the skin, gave him a false air of patriarchal simplicity—contradicted, on the other hand, by the sparkling of two little yellow eyes, which trembled in their orbits like two louis d’ors on a surface of quicksilver. The curve of the nose presented an aquiline silhouette which recalled the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, bony, veined, full of sinews stretched like the strings on the neck of a violin, and armed with talons resembling those which terminate the membranous wings of a bat—shook with a senile movement disquieting to see. But those feverishly nail-bitten hands became firmer than lobster-claws or steel pincers when they lifted some precious piece—an onyx carving, a Venetian cup, or a plate of Bohemian crystal. This old rascal had an aspect so profoundly rabbinical and cabalistic that three centuries ago they would have burned him merely from the evidence of his face.

“Will you not buy something from me to-day, Monsieur? Here is a Malay kris with a blade undulating like a flame: see those grooves to[Pg 110] serve as gutters for the blood, those teeth fashioned and set inversely so as to rip out the entrails when the dagger is withdrawn. It is a fine type of ferocious weapon, and would look very well among your trophies. This two-handed sword is very beautiful—it is a José de la Hera; and this colichemarde with perforated guard, what a superb piece of work!”

“No, I have plenty of arms and instruments of carnage. I want a figurine, something that would do for a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those stock bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found on any desk.”

The old gnome, foraging among his antiquities, finally arranged before me several antique bronzes—so called, at least; fragments of malachite; little Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah toys made of jade, showing the incarnation of Brahma or of Vishnu, marvellously well-suited for the sufficiently ungodlike purpose of holding papers and letters in place.

I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon all starred with warts, its jaws adorned with tusks and bristling whiskers, and a highly abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god Vitziliputzili au naturel, when I noticed a charming foot which I at first took for a fragment of an antique Venus.

It had those beautiful tawny and ruddy tints which give to Florentine bronze that warm and vivacious look so preferable to the grayish green tone of ordinary bronze, which might be taken for statues in putrefaction. Satiny lights frisked over its form, rounded and polished by the loving kisses of twenty centuries; for it seemed to be a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era, perhaps a casting by Lysippus!

“This foot will be the thing for me,” said I to the merchant, who regarded me with an ironical and saturnine air as he held out the desired object for me to examine at will.

I was surprised at its lightness; it was not a foot of metal, but indeed a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a foot of a mummy; on examining it still more closely one could see the grain of the skin, and the lines almost imperceptibly impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages. The toes were slender, delicate, terminated by perfect nails, pure and transparent as agates; the great toe, slightly separate, and contrasting happily with the modelling of the other toes, in the antique style, gave it an air of lightness, the grace of a bird’s foot; the sole, scarcely streaked by several almost invisible grooves, showed that it had never touched the earth, and had come in contact with only the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of panther skin.

“Ha, ha! You wish the foot of the Princess Hermonthis!” exclaimed the merchant, with a strange chuckle, fixing upon me his owlish eyes. “Ha, ha, ha!—for a paper-weight! Original idea! Artistic idea! If any one would have said to old Pharaoh that the foot of his adored daughter would serve for a paper-weight, he would have been greatly surprised, considering that he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out to hold the triple coffin, painted and gilded and all covered with hieroglyphics and beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls,” continued the singular little merchant, half aloud, and as though talking to himself.

“Ah, the highest price I am able, for it is a superb piece: if I had its counterpart, you could not have it for less than five hundred francs; the daughter of a Pharaoh, nothing is more rare!”

“Assuredly it is not common; but still, how much do you want? In the first place, let me tell you something, and that is, my entire treasure consists of only five louis: I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing dearer. You might search my innermost waistcoat pockets, and my most secret desk-drawers, without finding even one miserable five-franc piece more.”

“Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That is very little, very little, in truth, for an authentic foot,” muttered the merchant, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

“All right, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the bargain,” he added, wrapping it in an ancient damask rag. “Very fine: real damask, Indian damask, which has never been redyed; it is strong, it is soft,” he mumbled, passing his fingers over the frayed tissue, from the commercial habit which moved him to praise an object of so little value that he himself judged it worth only being given away.

He poured the gold pieces into a sort of mediæval alms-purse hanging at his belt, as he kept on saying:

Then, turning upon me his phosphorescent eyes, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the miauling of a cat that has swallowed a fish-bone:

“You speak as if you were his contemporary; old as you are, you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered laughingly from the shop door.

In order to put it to use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers, scribbled over with verses, an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles just begun; letters forgotten and mailed in the table-drawer—an error which often occurs with absent-minded people. The whole effect was charming, bizarre, and romantic.

Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went down into the street with the becoming gravity and pride of one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a fragment of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.

I looked upon as sovereignly ridiculous all those who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so notoriously Egyptian; and it seemed to me that the true occupation of every man of sense was to have a mummy’s foot upon his desk.

Happily, my meeting some friends distracted me from my infatuation with the recent acquisition; I went to dinner with them, for it would have been difficult for me to dine by myself.

When I came back in the evening, my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately tickled my olfactory nerves: the heat of the room had warmed the sodium carbonate, bitumen, and[Pg 115] myrrh in which the paraschites, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess; it was a perfume both sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to dissipate.

The dream of Egypt was Eternity: her odors have the solidity of granite, and endure as long.

I soon drank to fulness from the black cup of sleep: for an hour or two all remained opaque. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their sombre emptiness.

Presently my mental obscurity cleared; dreams commenced to graze me softly in their silent flight.

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber precisely as it was. I might have believed myself to be awake, but a vague perception told me that I slept and that something fantastic was about to take place.

The odor of the myrrh had intensely increased, and I felt a slight headache, which—with great reasonableness—I attributed to several glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods, and our future success.

I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which nothing actually justified; the furniture was precisely in place; the lamp burned upon its bracket, softly shaded by the milky[Pg 116] whiteness of its dull crystal; the water-color sketches shone under their Bohemian glass; the curtains hung languidly: everything had an air slumbrous and tranquil.

Presently, however, this calm interior appeared to become troubled: the woodwork cracked furtively, the log enveloped in cinders suddenly emitted a jet of blue flame, and the circular ornaments on the frieze seemed like metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which were about to happen.

My gaze by chance fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of the Princess Hermonthis.

Instead of being immobile, as became a foot which had been embalmed for four thousand years, it moved uneasily, contracted itself and leaped over the papers like a frightened frog: one would have imagined it to be in contact with a galvanic battery. I could quite distinctly hear the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.

I became somewhat discontented with my acquisition, preferring my paper-weights to be sedentary, and thought it a little unnatural that feet should walk about without legs; indeed, I commenced to feel something which strongly resembled fear.

Suddenly I saw the folds of one of my bed-curtains[Pg 117] stir, and I heard a bumping sound, like that of a person hopping on one foot. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a strange wind blow across my back, and that my suddenly rising hair caused my nightcap to execute a leap of several yards.

The bed-curtains parted, and I beheld coming towards me the strangest figure it is possible to imagine.

It was a young girl, of a deep café-au-lait complexion, like the bayadere[1] Amani, of a perfect beauty, and recalling the purest Egyptian type. She had almond eyes with the corners raised, and brows so black that they seemed blue; her nose was delicately chiselled, almost Grecian in its fineness of outline, and indeed she might have been taken for a statue of Corinthian bronze had not the prominence of the cheekbones and the slightly African lips made it impossible not to recognize her as belonging beyond doubt to the hieroglyphic race of the banks of the Nile.

Her arms, slender and turned with the symmetry of a spindle—like those of very young girls—were encircled by a kind of metal bands and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was plaited in cords; and upon her bosom was suspended a little idol of green paste, which, from its bearing [Pg 118]a whip with seven lashes, enabled one to recognize it as an image of Isis, conductress of spirits. A disk of gold scintillated upon her brow, and a few traces of rouge relieved the coppery tint of her cheeks.

As for her costume, it was very strange. Imagine an under-wrapping of linen strips, bedizened with black and red hieroglyphics, stiffened with bitumen, and apparently belonging to a freshly unbandaged mummy.

In one of those flights of thought so frequent in dreams, I heard the rough falsetto of the bric-à-brac dealer, which repeated like a monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with an intonation so enigmatical:

Strange circumstance—and one which scarcely reassured me—the apparition had but one foot; the other was broken off at the ankle!

She approached the desk where the foot was moving and wriggling with redoubled liveliness. Once there, she supported herself upon the edge, and I saw tears form and grow pearly in her eyes.

Although she had not as yet spoken, I clearly discerned her thoughts: she looked at her foot—for it was indeed her own—with an infinitely graceful expression of coquettish sadness; but[Pg 119] the foot leaped and coursed hither and yon, as though driven by steel springs.

Then commenced between the Princess Hermonthis and her foot—which appeared to be endowed with a life of its own—a very fantastic dialogue in a most ancient Coptic dialect, such as might have been spoken some thirty centuries ago by voices of the land of Ser: luckily, that night I understood Coptic to perfection.

“Well, my dear little foot, you flee from me always, though I have taken good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a basin of alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with oil of palms; your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a hippopotamus tooth; I was careful to select sandals for you, broidered and painted and turned up at the toes, which made all the young girls in Egypt envious; you wore on your great toe rings representing the sacred Scarabæus, and you carried about the lightest body it was possible for a lazy foot to sustain.”

“You well know that I do not belong to myself any longer. I have been bought and paid for. The old merchant knew perfectly what he was doing; he always bore you a grudge for having refused to espouse him: this is an ill turn which he has done you. The Arab who robbed your royal sarcophagus in the subterranean pits of the necropolis of Thebes was sent by him: he desired to prevent you from going to the reunion of the shadowy peoples in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for my ransom?”

“Alas, no! My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver, were all stolen from me,” answered the Princess Hermonthis, with a sigh.

“Princess,” I then exclaimed, “I never retained anybody’s foot unjustly; even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me, I give it to you gladly: I should be in despair to make so amiable a person as the Princess Hermonthis lame.”

I delivered this discourse in a tone so royal and gallant that it must have astonished the beautiful Egyptian.

She turned toward me a look charged with gratitude, and her eyes shone with bluish gleams.

She took her foot—which, this time, let itself be taken—like a woman about to put on her little shoe, and adjusted it to her leg with much address.

This operation ended, she took two or three steps about the room, as if to assure herself that she really was no longer lame.

“Ah, how happy my father will be—he who was so desolated because of my mutilation, and who had, from the day of my birth, put a whole people at work to hollow out for me a tomb so deep that he would be able to preserve me intact until that supreme day when souls must be weighed in the balances of Amenthi! Come with me to my father—he will receive you well, for you have given me back my foot.”

I found this proposition natural enough. I enveloped myself in a dressing-gown of large flowered pattern, which gave me a very Pharaohesque appearance, hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers, and told the Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.

Hermonthis, before starting, took from her neck the tiny figurine of green paste and laid it on the scattered sheets of paper which covered the table.

“It is only fair,” she said smilingly, “that I should replace your paper-weight.”

She gave me her hand, which was soft and cold, like the skin of a serpent, and we departed.

For some time we spun with the rapidity of an arrow through a fluid and grayish medium, in[Pg 122] which faintly outlined silhouettes were passing to right and left.

Some moments afterward, obelisks commenced to rise, porches and flights of steps guarded by sphinxes were outlined against the horizon.

The princess conducted me toward the mountain of rosy granite, where we found an opening so narrow and low that it would have been difficult to distinguish it from the fissures in the rock, if two sculptured columns had not enabled us to recognize it.

There were corridors hewn through the living rock; the walls, covered with hieroglyphic paintings and allegorical processions, might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years; these corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square chambers, in the midst of which pits had been contrived, through which we descended by means of cramp-hooks or spiral stairways; these pits conducted us into other chambers, from which other corridors opened, equally decorated with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, and those mystic symbols, the tau, the pedum, and the bari—prodigious[Pg 123] works which no living eye would ever examine, endless legends in granite which only the dead have time to read throughout eternity.

At last we issued into a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable, that the eye could not perceive its confines. Flooding the sight were files of monstrous columns between which twinkled livid stars of yellow flame, and these points of light revealed further incalculable depths.

The Princess Hermonthis always held me by the hand, and graciously saluted the mummies of her acquaintance.

My eyes accustomed themselves to the crepuscular light, and objects became discernible.

I beheld, seated upon their thrones, the kings of the subterranean races: they were magnificent, dry old men, withered, wrinkled, parchmented, blackened with naphtha and bitumen—all wearing golden headdresses, breast-plates, and gorgets starry with precious stones, eyes of a sphinx-like fixity, and long beards whitened by the snows of the centuries. Behind them, their embalmed people stood, in the rigid and constrained pose of Egyptian art, preserving eternally the attitude prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind these peoples, contemporary cats mewed, ibises flapped their wings, and crocodiles grinned, all rendered[Pg 124] still more monstrous by their swathing bands.

All the Pharaohs were there—Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus, Sesostris, Amenotaph—all the dark rulers of the pyramids and the nymphs. On the yet higher thrones sat King Chronos, Xixouthros, who was contemporary with the deluge, and Tubal Cain, who preceded it.

The beard of King Xixouthros had grown so full that it already wound seven times around the granite table upon which he leaned, lost in a somnolent revery.

Further back, through a dusty cloud across the dim centuries, I beheld vaguely the seventy-two preadamite Kings, with their seventy-two peoples, forever passed away.

After allowing me to gaze upon this astounding spectacle a few moments, the Princess Hermonthis presented me to Pharaoh, her father, who vouchsafed me a majestic nod.

“I have recovered my foot again! I have recovered my foot!” cried the Princess, as she clapped her little hands one against the other with all the signs of playful joy. “Here is the gentleman who restored it to me.”

The races of Kemi, the races of Nahasi, all the black, bronze, and copper-colored nations, repeated in chorus:

Even Xixouthros was visibly affected: he raised his dull eyelids, passed his fingers over his mustache, and bent upon me his look weighty with centuries.

“By Oms, the dog of Hell, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of Truth, there is a brave and worthy fellow!” exclaimed Pharaoh, extending toward me his sceptre, terminated with a lotus-flower. “What do you desire for recompense?”

Strong in that audacity which is inspired by dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked the hand of Hermonthis: the hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for such a good foot.

Pharaoh opened wide his eyes of glass, astonished by my pleasantry and my request.

“Twenty-seven years old—and he wishes to espouse the Princess Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old!” exclaimed at once all the thrones and all the circles of nations.

“If only you were even two thousand years old,” replied the ancient King, “I would quite willingly give you the Princess; but the disproportion is too great; and, besides, we must give our daughters husbands who are durable—you no longer know how to preserve yourselves: the oldest people that you can produce are scarcely fifteen hundred years old, and they are no more than a pinch of dust. See here—my flesh is hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel!

“I shall be present on the last day of the world with the body and the features which were mine in life; my daughter Hermonthis will endure longer than a statue of bronze.

“Then the winds will have dispersed the last particles of your dust, and Isis herself, who was able to recover the atoms of Osiris, would be embarrassed to recompose your being.

“See how vigorous I still am, and how well my hands can grip,” he said to me as he shook my hand à l’Anglaise, in a manner that cut my fingers with my rings.

He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found it was my friend Alfred who was shaking me by the arm to make me get up.

“Ah, you maddening sleepyhead! Must I have you carried out into the middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It’s afternoon;[Pg 127] don’t you remember that you promised to take me with you to see M. Aguado’s Spanish pictures?”

“Mon Dieu! I didn’t remember it any more!” I answered as I dressed myself. “We will go there at once; I have the permit here on my desk.”

I went forward to take it; but judge of my astonishment when instead of the mummy’s foot I had purchased the evening before, I saw the tiny figurine of green paste left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

The biographies of some great men of letters are little different from their bibliographies. For many years this would seem to have been true in the case of Anatole France, for the man of public import—apart from his literary productions—came not into being until fifty-three years after his physical birth.

Every book-lover who goes to Paris must visit the banks of the Seine and revel among the riches of that vast exhibition of old books, art objects, rare prints, and fascinating what-not, which for generations have been the despair and the admiration of collectors. Over an old-book mart on the Quai Malaquis, Jacques Anatole Thibault—now everywhere known as Anatole France—was born April 16, 1844. From that day to this he has never left as a residence that Paris whose every paving-block he knows, as he himself says, and whose every stone he loves. Year by year he has increasingly stood as a type of Parisian literary life and thought.

His father was one of the prosperous booksellers of the Seine banks—meditative, thoughtful, and even a maker of verses. He brought with[Pg 130] him from Anjou in western France all of the Vendéean’s passion for monarchism and clericalism. Just how this harmonizes with the assertion of one of our author’s biographers that the elder Thibault was of Jewish blood, I do not pretend to say, but the statement may pass on its face value. Certain it is that the father was concerned that Anatole should be educated under the auspices of clerical teachers, the priests of the old Collège Stanislas, and his son’s early mastery of the classics and attainments in literary style amply justified the choice. Indeed, the clerical schools of the period did more to establish French letters than has since proven to be the case under the public schools of present-day France.

Growing up in this bookish atmosphere, rich tokens of the past all about him, inheriting his father’s scholarly tastes, trained under the rigid system of classicists, and in the school that developed Paul Bourget and François Coppée, Anatole France needed only one more element to bring out in him the varied temperament his life and works exhibit—the inspiration of the refined and tender mother whose love for romantic fairy-tales charmed into being the first fancy-creations of her gifted boy.

In 1868 M. France produced his first book—a study of Alfred de Vigny. This made no great[Pg 131] sensation, but his first volume of poems—many French literary men, like Daudet, Maupassant, and Bourget, have opened their literary careers with essays at verse—was published in 1873, Les Poèmes dorés.

About this time M. France became reader for the publisher Lemerre, and under his auspices brought out various of the thirty-some volumes which stand to his credit. In 1876 he became an attaché of the Senate library. Later, he was known as a regular contributor to Le Temps and other Parisian journals, much of this review material being now accessible in book-form.

That part of M. France’s work which covers the first twenty years of his writing, ending with 1896, has largely fixed his place in the average opinion, for two reasons: those years witnessed his largest and most popular production, including nearly all of his novels and stories; and, in consequence, the preponderance of published critical estimates cover only those two decades.

The “first” Anatole France, then, must be considered almost as a separate being, so far as we regard his spirit; his literary style, however, changed scarcely at all with time. Classical training was reflected in a passion for the Greek magic of words, Latin harmony of phrasing, and the hedonistic philosophy; there was not even the[Pg 132] suggestion of his later direct appeal to reason and “the rights of man.” His personal tone—for much of his writing is personal and even autobiographical—was pessimistic, though untinged with bitterness; and here again there was little to forecast his vigorous appeal for a social better day. No thought of social uplift, no ray of hope, appeared in his treatment of Thaïs, a study of the Egypt of the Ptolemies; The Red Lily, a picture of present-day Florence; The Opinions of M. Jérome Coignard, the modernization of sentiments exploited in Rabelais, “Wilhelm Meister,” “Gil Blas,” and Montaigne; The Garden of Epicurus, wherein the shades of great thinkers, from Plato to Schopenhauer, hold converse, “while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin agree in their estimate of a future life.” In a word, the M. France of those days viewed life as a spectacle, with dispassionate yet pitying irony. Convinced, with the Preacher, that all is vanity, this dilettante proposed no remedies for its ills, and was even frankly skeptical that any such saving medicine existed. This is Anatole France as most readers know him—the Anatole France who “died” fifteen years ago, leaving only the stylist and the keen observer to identify him with the decidedly living man of to-day.

Two important events in the life of our author took place respectively in 1896 and 1897. In the former year he was elected on the first ballot to a seat in the French Academy—the seat occupied by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and on the occasion of his séance de réception M. France delivered a tactful and altogether admirable eulogy upon the unfortunate genius whom he succeeded.

This distinction coming after more than fifty years of life would have been enough to mark an epoch in his career, but one year later he issued L’Orme du Mail, a series of notable comments upon contemporary literary and social life. This may be regarded as the outgrowth of the social, political, and literary notes which he had been contributing to the newspapers, and which have been gathered in several volumes, forming probably the most brilliant commentary upon things French which is available to-day.

Doubtless this daily observation of the current trend gave birth to a new man, for now Anatole France is no longer the satirical and lightly ironical dilettante making excursions into the field of speculation, but a robust devotee of the rights of the people. His powerful arraignments of the social and political condition of the French common-people are not the only proofs of a new birth in M. France. Trenchant, witty, and[Pg 134] apostolic as are his social sermons—for now and then a sermon may ring true to its word-origin and be a thrust—they were not so amazing and, happily, not so significant, as his brave championship of the cause of Captain Dreyfus when there were few who dared to lift voice against rampant militarism and a prejudiced, Jew-baiting military tribunal.

From this courageous stand it was only a single step to a propagandum to abolish the many abuses which he feels weigh heavily upon the masses—war, plutocracy, clericalism, militarism. I have said that it was only a single step, yet it represents a long journey for the son of a monarchist, a boy educated by priests, the smiling literary experimenter, the speculative pupil of Rénan, to have mounted the Socialistic rostrum and produced anti-military and anti-clerical papers of no doubtful sound. Such is M. France to-day; and though he still fails not in his literary appeal to the intellectuals, the cry that deeply stirs his being is that of the proletariat in need of intelligent, vigorous leadership. Whether or not one agrees with his propagandum, one cannot ignore its significance.

Anatole France has attained distinction in several literary forms. His early poems are not of sufficient merit to make him famous, but they[Pg 135] consist of a piquant combination—humor, history, and philosophy. His critical introductions to delightful editions of famous books are charmingly done and sufficiently discriminating. His tractates on questions of the times are earnest, direct, and vigorous. But it is to his novels and stories that we must look to find his most characteristic writings.

To the English reader, his best-known novel is The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), which was crowned by the Academy. Like all of M. France’s novels, it is practically plotless—a fictional framework for the skeptical observations and good-natured ironies of the old philosopher, whose name gives the book its title. A second novel of distinction, if novel it may be called, is The Book of Friendship (le Livre de Mon Ami). It is made up of two parts—The Book of Peter and The Book of Suzanne. The former owes its interest not alone to charm of style, childlikeness of recital, and subtle beauty, but also to its autobiographical character—which M. France has frankly admitted. Three other works immediately rise up for comparison when one reads this keen, sympathetic, and understanding story—Dickens’s David Copperfield, Daudet’s Little What’s-His-Name (le Petit Chose), and Loti’s The Story of a Child; and the very fact of such inevitable comparisons[Pg 136] may sufficiently suggest its ingenuous charm, its pseudo-naïvete, and its mingled humor and pathos. No Frenchman, except Victor Hugo, quite entered into child-life as did M. France in this notable compound of fiction and fact, and I am not forgetting either Alphonse Daudet or Gustav Droz in making this assertion.

The inheritance of his mother’s love for fantasy is beautifully illustrated in M. France’s Abeille, a fairy story of perhaps twenty-thousand words. The author’s name will vouch for its style; the simple outline will show the pretty framework for the fictional conception.

La Duchesse des Clarides brings up her daughter Abeille, together with Georges, the only son of la Comtesse Blanchelande, who at her death had confided him to the care of her friend.

The two children one day set out secretly to find the distant lake which they have seen from the high tower of the castle of Clarides. The lake is the home of the Ondines, and the woods surrounding it the realm of the Gnomes. Georges, seeking water and food for Abeille, is seized by the Ondines. Abeille, waiting for Georges’ return, falls asleep, to be wakened by the Gnomes, who carry her to their King Loc. They keep Abeille in order to teach her the wisdom and secrets of their race and they make her their Princess. Loc[Pg 137] loves Abeille and offers her all the treasures of his kingdom if she will become his wife. She refuses, asking only to be sent back to her mother, whom she is allowed to see each night in a dream, as her mother also sees her. Loc finally learns that Abeille loves Georges, but that he has disappeared. The Gnome king discovers that the youth is with the Ondines, held prisoner because he wishes to leave the Ondine queen—who also loves him—in order to seek Abeille. Loc magnanimously rescues Georges and sends him to Clarides, but still cannot bring himself to free Abeille. The youth learns of the fate of Abeille from his mother and his serving man, and goes to the Gnome kingdom to rescue her.

Loc cannot keep Abeille longer because of a law allowing mortals, prisoners of the Gnomes, to return to the world after seven years, so he betroths Georges and Abeille and gives them rich gifts, among which is a magic ring having power to bring Abeille and Georges at any time to visit the Gnome realm, where they will be always welcome.

In the volumes, Mother-of-Pearl (L’Etui de Nacre) and St. Clara’s Well (Le Puits de Sainte-Claire), we find our author’s best short-story work.

As has been noted in previous introductory papers of this series, there is a marked tendency[Pg 138] among French writers of little fictions to affect the sketch form, and in this field they have wrought with great delicacy and spirit. It is hardly to be expected of a writer whose novels give so much play to epigram, philosophy, dialogue, and witty comment, that he should seek to tell his shorter stories with the compression of a Maupassant and the plot-structure of a Mérimée. But other qualities of the first-rate story-teller he does display—his narration is lively and witty, and his climaxes are satisfying.

Only two of his short-stories can be given attention in this limited space, both found in the first-named volume, and one of them reproduced here in translation.

“The Procurator of Judea” tells in the author’s leisurely, pellucid style how L. Ælius Lamia, after eighteen years of exile by Tiberius Cæsar, returns to Rome. During his years of sojourn in Asia, here and there, he has met Pontius Pilate. Now they meet again, and the physical bulk of the story is taken up by their reminiscences. Just when that seems to be all, they fall to discussing the charms of Judæan women, when Lamia recalls with especial warmth a dancing girl.

“‘Some months after,’” he goes on, “‘I lost sight of her. I learned by chance that she had attached herself to a small company of men and[Pg 139] women who were followers of a young Galilean thaumaturgist. His name was Jesus; he came from Nazareth, and he was crucified for some crime, I don’t know what. Pontius, do you remember anything about the man?’

“Pontius Pilate contracted his brows, and his hand rose to his forehead in the attitude of one who probes the deeps of memory. Then after a silence of some seconds—

“‘Jesus?’ he murmured. ‘Jesus of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.’”

This dramatic episode, which exists only for its climax, is no more poignant than the pathos of that simple-hearted juggler-monk who imitated the Widow, in that he gave all that he had.

In the time of King Louis, there lived in France a poor juggler, native of Compiègne, named Barnabas, who went among the villages doing feats of strength and skill. On market days he would spread out on the public square an old carpet very much worn, and, after having attracted the children and the gazing bumpkins by some suitable pleasantries which he had adopted from an old juggler and which he never changed at all, he would assume grotesque attitudes and balance a plate on his nose.

The crowd at first looked at him with indifference. But when, standing on his hands with his head downward, he tossed in the air six copper balls which glittered in the sun, and caught them again with his feet; or when, by bending backward until his neck touched his heels, he gave his body the form of a perfect wheel, and in that posture juggled with twelve knives, a murmur of[Pg 142] admiration rose from the onlookers, and pieces of money rained upon the carpet.

However, like the majority of those who live by their talents, Barnabas of Compiègne had much difficulty in living. Earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, he bore more than his part of the miseries connected with the fall of Adam, our father. Moreover, he was unable to work as much as he would have wished. In order to show off his fine accomplishment, he needed the warmth of the sun and the light of day, just as do the trees in order to produce their blossoms and fruits.

In winter he was nothing more than a tree despoiled of its foliage and to appearance dead. The frozen earth was hard for the juggler. And, like the grasshopper of which Marie of France tells, he suffered from cold and from hunger in the bad season. But, since he possessed a simple heart, he bore his ills in patience.

He had never reflected upon the origin of riches, nor upon the inequality of human conditions. He believed firmly that, if this world is evil, the other cannot fail to be good, and this hope sustained him. He did not imitate the thieving mountebanks and miscreants who have sold their souls to the devil. He never blasphemed the name of God; he lived honestly, and, although he had no wife, he did not covet his[Pg 143] neighbor’s, for woman is the enemy of strong men, as appears from the history of Samson, which is reported in the Scriptures.

In truth, he had not a spirit which turned to carnal desires, and it would have cost him more to renounce the jugs than the women. For, although without failing in sobriety, he loved to drink when it was warm. He was a good man, fearing God and very devout toward the Holy Virgin. He never failed, when he entered a church, to kneel before the image of the Mother of God and address to her this prayer:

“Madame, take care of my life until it may please God that I die, and when I am dead, cause me to have the joys of paradise.”

II.

Well, then, on a certain evening after a day of rain, while he was walking, sad and bent, carrying under his arm his balls and knives wrapped up in his old carpet, and seeking for some barn in which he might lie down supperless, he saw on the road a monk who was travelling the same way, and saluted him decorously. As they were walking at an equal pace, they began to exchange remarks.

“Comrade,” said the monk, “how comes it that you are habited all in green? Is it not for the[Pg 144] purpose of taking the character of a fool in some mystery-play?”

“Not for that purpose, father,” responded Barnabas. “Such as you see me, I am named Barnabas, and I am by calling a juggler. It would be the most beautiful occupation in the world if one could eat every day.”

“Friend Barnabas,” replied the monk, “take care what you say. There is no more beautiful calling than the monastic state. Therein one celebrates the praises of God, the Virgin, and the saints, and the life of a monk is a perpetual canticle to the Lord.”

“Father, I confess that I have spoken like an ignoramus. Your calling may not be compared with mine, and, although there is some merit in dancing while holding on the tip of the nose a coin balanced on a stick, this merit does not approach yours. I should like very well to sing every day, as you do, Father, the office of the most Holy Virgin, to whom I have vowed a particular devotion. I would right willingly renounce my calling, in which I am known from Soissons to Beauvais, in more than six hundred towns and villages, in order to embrace the monastic life.”

The monk was touched by the simplicity of the juggler, and, as he did not lack discernment, he[Pg 145] recognized in Barnabas one of those men of good purpose whereof our Lord said: “Let peace abide with them on earth!” This is why he replied to him:

“Friend Barnabas, come with me, and I will enable you to enter the monastery of which I am the prior. He who conducted Mary the Egyptian through the desert has placed me on your path to lead you in the way of salvation.”

In the monastery where he was received, the brethren emulously solemnized the cult of the Holy Virgin, and each one employed in her service all the knowledge and all the ability which God had given him.

The prior, for his part, composed books which, according to the rules of scholasticism, treated of the virtues of the Mother of God.

Friar Maurice with a learned hand copied these dissertations on leaves of vellum.

Friar Alexander painted fine miniatures, wherein one could see the Queen of Heaven seated upon the throne of Solomon, at the foot of which four lions kept vigil. Around her haloed head fluttered seven doves, which are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: gifts of fear, piety, science, might, counsel, intelligence, and wisdom. She had for companions six golden-haired Virgins:[Pg 146] Humility, Prudence, Retirement, Respect, Virginity, and Obedience. At her feet two small figures, nude and quite white, were standing in a suppliant attitude. They were souls who implored her all-powerful intercession for their salvation—and certainly not in vain.

On another page Friar Alexander represented Eve gazing upon Mary, so that thus one might see at the same time the sin and the redemption, the woman humiliated and the Virgin exalted. Furthermore, in this book one might admire the Well of Living Waters, the Fountain, the Lily, the Moon, the Sun, and the closed Garden which is spoken of in the Canticle, the Gate of Heaven and the Seat of God, and there were also several images of the Virgin.

Friar Marbode was, similarly, one of the most affectionate children of Mary. He carved images in stone without ceasing, so that his beard, his eyebrows, and his hair were white with dust, and his eyes were perpetually swollen and tearful; but he was full of strength and joy in his advanced age, and, visibly, the Queen of Paradise protected the old age of her child. Marbode represented her seated on a bishop’s throne, her brow encircled by a nimbus whose orb was of pearls, and he took pains that the folds of her robe should cover the feet of one of[Pg 147] whom the prophet said: “My beloved is like a closed garden.”

At times, also, he gave her the features of a child full of grace, and she seemed to say: “Lord, thou art my Lord!”—“Dixi de ventre matris meæ: Deus meus es tu.” (Psalm 21, 11.)

They had also in the monastery several poets, who composed, in Latin, both prose and hymns in honor of the most happy Virgin Mary, and there was even found one Picardian who set forth the miracles of Our-Lady in ordinary language and in rhymed verses.

III.

Seeing such a concourse of praises and such a beautiful in-gathering of works, Barnabas lamented to himself his ignorance and his simplicity.

“Alas!” he sighed as he walked along in the little garden of the convent, “I am very unfortunate not to be able, like my brothers, to praise worthily the Holy Mother of God to whom I have pledged the tenderness of my heart. Alas! Alas! I am a rude and artless man, and I have for your service, Madam the Virgin, neither edifying sermons, nor tracts properly divided according to the rules, nor fine paintings, nor statues exactly [Pg 148] sculptured, nor verses counted by feet and marching in measure. I have nothing, alas!”

One night that the monks were recreating by conversing, he heard one of them relate the history of a religious who did not know how to recite anything but the Ave Maria. This monk was disdained for his ignorance; but, having died, there came forth from his lips five roses in honor of the five letters in the name of Maria, and his sanctity was thus manifested.

While listening to this recital Barnabas admired once again the bounty of the Virgin; but he was not consoled by the example of that happy death, for his heart was full of zeal, and he desired to serve the glory of his Lady who was in Heaven. He sought the means without being able to find them, and every day he grieved the more.

One morning, however, having awakened full of joy, he ran to the chapel and stayed there alone for more than an hour. He returned there after dinner. And beginning from that moment he went every day into the chapel at the hour when it was deserted, and there he passed a large part of the time which the other monks consecrated to the liberal and the mechanical arts. No more was he sad and no longer did he complain.

A conduct so singular aroused the curiosity of the monks. They asked themselves in the community why Friar Barnabas made his retreats so frequent.

The Prior, whose duty it is to ignore nothing in the conduct of his monks, resolved to observe Barnabas during his solitudes. One day that he was closeted in the chapel as his custom was, Dom Prior went, accompanied by two elders of the monastery, to observe through the windows of the door what was going on in the interior.

They saw Barnabas, who—before the altar of the Holy Virgin, head downward, feet in air—was juggling with six brass balls and twelve knives. He was doing in honor of the Holy Mother of God the feats which had brought to him the most applause. Not comprehending that this simple man was thus placing his talent and his knowledge at the service of the Holy Virgin, the two elders cried out at the sacrilege.

The Prior understood that Barnabas had an innocent heart; but he thought that he had fallen into dementia. All three were preparing to drag him vigorously from the chapel when they saw the Holy Virgin descend the steps of the altar in order to wipe with a fold of her blue mantle the sweat which burst from the brow of her juggler.

Then the Prior, prostrating his face against the marble slabs, recited these words:

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	Page

The Many-Sided Balzac	3
Story: An Episode Under the Terror	27

Ludovic Halévy, Parisian	59
Story: The Insurgent	71

André Theuriet, Humanist	79
Story: La Bretonne	87

Théophile Gautier, Lover of Beauty	97
Story: The Mummy’s Foot	107

Anatole France, Former Man and New	129
Story: Juggler to Our Lady	141

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Short-story masterpieces, Vol. 2

SHORT-STORY MASTERPIECES

THE MANY-SIDED BALZAC

AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR

LUDOVIC HALÉVY, PARISIAN

THE INSURGENT

ANDRÉ THEURIET, HUMANIST

LA BRETONNE

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, LOVER OF BEAUTY

THE MUMMY’S FOOT

ANATOLE FRANCE, FORMER MAN AND NEW

JUGGLER TO OUR-LADY

I.

II.

III.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE