Ten Tales
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7 [Illustration: FRANCOIS COPPEE.]
FROM THE FRENCH
Ten Tales
By
Francois Coppee
_Translated by WALTER LEARNED, with fifty pen-and-ink drawings
by ALBERT E. STERNER, and an introduction by BRANDER MATTHEWS_
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1891
Copyright, 1890, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
THE CAPTAIN'S VICES
TWO CLOWNS
A VOLUNTARY DEATH
A DRAMATIC FUNERAL
THE SUBSTITUTE
AT TABLE
AN ACCIDENT
THE SABOTS OF LITTLE WOLFF
THE FOSTER SISTER
MY FRIEND MEURTRIER
INTRODUCTION.
The _conte_ is a form of fiction in which the French have always
delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the
_jongleurs_ and the _trouveres_, past the periods of La Fontaine and
Voltaire, down to the present. The _conte_ is a tale, something more
than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In
verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost
to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The _Canterbury Tales_ are
_contes_, most of them, if not all; and so are some of the _Tales of a
Wayside Inn_. The free-and-easy tales of Prior were written in imitation
of the French _conte en vers_; and that, likewise, was the model of more
than one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin Dobson.
No one has succeeded more abundantly in the _conte en vers_ than M.
Coppee. Where was there ever anything better of its kind than _L'Enfant
de la Balle?_--that gentle portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed in
a chain of occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical managers
and at their hostility towards poetic plays. Where is there anything of
a more simple pathos than _L'Epave?_--that story of a sailor's son whom
the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that
killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship
M. Coppee loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of
Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate
fidelity.) But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the
streets of the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story
some incident of daily occurrence made significant by his
interpretation; he chooses some character common-place enough, but made
firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he
puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected,
the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he
tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our
sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's _contes_ either in prose or
verse; they are nearly all pictures of _life among the lowly_. But there
is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is
no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. The tone is always
manly and wholesome.
_La Marchande de Journaux_ and the other little masterpieces of
story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all
poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A
translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it
brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose--a true
poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm--these can be
Englished by taking thought and time and pains, without which a
translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these tales have been rendered
into English by Mr. Learned; and the ten chosen for translation are
among the best of the two score and more of M. Coppee's _contes en
prose_. These ten tales are fairly representative of his range and
variety. Compare, for example, the passion in "The Foster Sister," pure,
burning and fatal, with the Black Forest _naivete_ of "The Sabots of
Little Wolff." Contrast the touching pathos of "The Substitute,"
poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has
conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he
has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an
inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy
as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds
"My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has
been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties, making the
coffee of his good old mother and taking her poodle out for a walk.
Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure
of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns," cutting
in its sarcasm, but not bitter--from "The Captain's Vices," which
suggests at once George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ and Mr. Austin Dobson's
_Tale of Polypheme_, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a
sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies
the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic
Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous
reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk,
who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic
Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean
Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy
de Maupassant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain's
sketches in black-and-white.
An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in _The Odd Number_ has
protested to me that M. Coppee is not an etcher like M. de Maupassant,
but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M.
Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the
very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppee's _contes_ have not the
sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's--but
what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy,
poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by
those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppee's street views
in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the
shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely
to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the
varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really
rivalled either by those of M. de Maupassant, who is a Norman by birth
and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of
Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee
is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps
this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity
and in their verity.
It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a finer morality in M. Coppee's
work than in M. de Maupassant's or in M. Daudet's or in that of almost
any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we
breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is
not that M. Coppee probably thinks of ethics rather than aesthetics; in
this respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no
sermon in his song--or at least none for those who will not seek it for
themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I
have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in
Moliere, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais,
despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly
from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different
as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which
always punishes the villain in the fifth act.
It is of good augury for our own letters that the best French fiction of
to-day is getting itself translated in the United States, and that the
liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is more consciously an art in
France than anywhere else--perhaps partly because the French are now
foremost in nearly all forms of artistic endeavor. In the short story
especially, in the tale, in the _conte_, their supremacy is
incontestable; and their skill is shown and their aesthetic instinct
exemplified partly in the sense of form, in the constructive method,
which underlies the best short stories, however trifling these may
appear to be, and partly in the rigorous suppression of non-essentials,
due in a measure, it may be, to the example of Merimee. That is an
example we in America may study to advantage; and from the men who are
writing fiction in France we may gain much. From the British fiction of
this last quarter of the nineteenth century little can be learned by any
one--less by us Americans in whom the English tradition is still
dominant. When we look to France for an exemplar we may find a model of
value, but when we copy an Englishman we are but echoing our own faults.
"The truth is," said Mr. Lowell in his memorable essay _On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners_--"the truth is that we are worth nothing
except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism."
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
THE CAPTAIN'S VICES.
[Illustration: THE CAPTAIN'S VICES]
I.
It is of no importance, the name of the little provincial city where
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--installed himself when he was retired on a pension.
It was quite like all those other little villages which solicit without
obtaining it a branch of the railway; just as if it were not the sole
dissipation of the natives to go every day, at the same hour, to the
Place de la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at full gallop, with
its gay cracking of the whips and clang of bells.
It was a place of three thousand inhabitants--ambitiously denominated
souls in the statistical tables--and was exceedingly proud of its title
of chief city of the canton. It had ramparts planted with trees, a
pretty river with good fishing, a church of the charming epoch of the
flamboyant Gothic, disgraced by a frightful station of the cross,
brought directly from the quarter of Saint Sulpice. Every Monday its
market was gay with great red and blue umbrellas, and countrymen filled
its streets in carts and carriages. But for the rest of the week it
retired with delight into that silence and solitude which made it so
dear to its rustic population. Its streets were paved with
cobble-stones; through the windows of the ground-floor one could see
samplers and wax-flowers under glass domes, and, through the gates of
the gardens, statuettes of Napoleon in shell-work. The principal inn was
naturally called the Shield of France; and the town-clerk made rhymed
acrostics for the ladies of society.
Captain Mercadier had chosen that place of retreat for the simple reason
that he had been born there, and because, in his noisy childhood, he had
pulled down the signs and plugged up the bell-buttons. He returned there
to find neither relations, nor friends, nor acquaintances; and the
recollections of his youth recalled only the angry faces of shop-keepers
who shook their fists at him from the shop-doors, a catechism which
threatened him with hell, a school which predicted the scaffold, and,
finally, his departure for his regiment, hastened by a paternal
malediction.
For the Captain was not a saintly man; the old record of his punishment
was black with days in the guard-house inflicted for breaches of
discipline, absences from roll-calls, and nocturnal uproars in the
mess-room. He had often narrowly escaped losing his stripes as a
corporal or a sergeant, and he needed all the chance, all the license of
a campaigning life to gain his first epaulet. Firm and brave soldier, he
had passed almost all his life in Algiers at that time when our foot
soldiers wore the high shako, white shoulder-belts and huge
cartridge-boxes. He had had Lamoriciere for commander. The Due de
Nemours, near whom he received his first wound, had decorated him, and
when he was sergeant-major, Pere Bugrand had called him by his name and
pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kader, bearing the
scar of a yataghan stroke on his neck, of one ball in his shoulder and
another in his chest; and notwithstanding absinthe, duels, debts of
play, and almond-eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point of the
bayonet and sabre, his grade of captain in the First Regiment of
Sharp-shooters.
Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns,
and three wounds--had just retired on his pension, not quite two
thousand francs, which, joined to the two hundred and fifty francs from
his cross, placed him in that estate of honorable penury which the State
reserves for its old servants.
His entry into his natal city was without ostentation. He arrived one
morning on the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an extinguished
cigar, and already on good terms with the conductor, to whom, during his
journey, he had related the passage of the Porte de Fer; full of
indulgence, moreover, for the distractions of his auditor, who often
interrupted the recital by some oath or epithet addressed to the off
mare. When the diligence stopped he threw on the sidewalk his old
valise, covered with railway placards as numerous as the changes of
garrison that its proprietor had made, and the idlers of the
neighborhood were astonished to see a man with a decoration--a rare
thing in the province--offer a glass of wine to the coachman at the bar
of an inn near by.
He installed himself at once. In a house in the outskirts, where two
captive cows lowed, and fowls and ducks passed and repassed through the
gate-way, a furnished chamber was to let. Preceded by a
masculine-looking woman, the Captain climbed the stair-way with its
great wooden balusters, perfumed by a strong odor of the stable, and
reached a great tiled room, whose walls were covered with a bizarre
paper representing, printed in blue on a white background and repeated
infinitely, the picture of Joseph Poniatowski crossing the Elster on his
horse. This monotonous decoration, recalling nevertheless our military
glories, fascinated the Captain without doubt, for, without concerning
himself with the uncomfortable straw chairs, the walnut furniture, or
the little bed with its yellowed curtain, he took the room without
hesitation. A quarter of an hour was enough to empty his trunk, hang up
his clothes, put his boots in a corner, and ornament the wall with a
trophy composed of three pipes, a sabre, and a pair of pistols. After a
visit to the grocer's, over the way, where he bought a pound of candles
and a bottle of rum, he returned, put his purchase on the mantle-shelf,
and looked around him with an air of perfect satisfaction. And then,
with the promptitude of the camp, he shaved without a mirror, brushed
his coat, cocked his hat over his ear, and went for a walk in the
village in search of a cafe.
II.
It was an inveterate habit of the Captain to spend much of his time at a
cafe. It was there that he satisfied at the same time the three vices
which reigned supreme in his heart--tobacco, absinthe, and cards. It was
thus that he passed his life, and he could have drawn a plan of all the
places where he had ever been stationed by their tobacco shops, cafes,
and military clubs. He never felt himself so thoroughly at ease as when
sitting on a worn velvet bench before a square of green cloth near a
heap of beer-mugs and saucers. His cigar never seemed good unless he
struck his match under the marble of the table, and he never failed,
after hanging his hat and his sabre on a hat-hook and settling himself
comfortably, by unloosing one or two buttons of his coat, to breathe a
profound sigh of relief, and exclaim,
"That is better!"
His first care was, therefore, to find an establishment which he could
frequent, and after having gone around the village without finding
anything that suited him, he stopped at last to regard with the eye of a
connoisseur the Cafe Prosper, situated at the corner of the Place du
Marche and the Rue de la Pavoisse.
It was not his ideal. Some of the details of the exterior were too
provincial: the waiter, in his black apron, for example, the little
stands in their green frames, the footstools, and the wooden tables
covered with waxed cloth. But the interior pleased the Captain. He was
delighted upon his entrance by the sound of the bell which was touched
by the fair and fleshy dame du comptoir, in her light dress, with a
poppy-colored ribbon in her sleek hair. He saluted her gallantly, and
believed that she sustained with sufficient majesty her triumphal place
between two piles of punch-bowls properly crowned by billiard-balls. He
ascertained that the place was cheerful, neat, and strewn evenly with
yellow sand. He walked around it, looking at himself in the glasses as
he passed; approved the panels where guardsmen and amazons were drinking
champagne in a landscape filled with red holly-hocks; called for his
absinthe, smoked, found the divan soft and the absinthe good, and was
indulgent enough not to complain of the flies who bathed themselves in
his glass with true rustic familiarity.
Eight days later he had become one of the pillars of the Cafe Prosper.
They soon learned his punctual habits and anticipated his wishes, while
he, in turn, lunched with the patrons of the place--a valuable recruit
for those who haunted the cafe, folks oppressed by the tedium of a
country life, for whom the arrival of that new-comer, past master in all
games, and an admirable raconteur of his wars and his loves, was a true
stroke of good-fortune. The Captain himself was delighted to tell his
stories to folks who were still ignorant of his repertoire. There were
fully six months before him in which to tell of his games, his feats,
his battles, the retreat of Constantine, the capture of Bou-Maza, and
the officers' receptions with the concomitant intoxication of rum-punch.
[Illustration]
Human weakness! He was by no means sorry, on his part, to be something
of an oracle; he from whom the sub-lieutenants, new-comers at Saint-Cyr,
fled dismayed, fearing his long stories.
[Illustration]
His usual auditors were the keeper of the cafe, a stupid and silent
beer-cask, always in his sleeved vest, and remarkable only for his
carved pipe; the bailiff, a scoffer, dressed invariably in black,
scorned for his inelegant habit of carrying off what remained of his
sugar; the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much
amiability and a feeble constitution, who sent to the illustrated
journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary
surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and
democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain. This practitioner, a
man with tufted whiskers and eye-glasses, presided over the radical
committee of electors, and when the cure took up a little collection
among his devotees for the purpose of adorning his church with some
frightful red and gilded statues, denounced, in a letter to the
_Siecle_, the cupidity of the Jesuits.
The Captain having gone out one evening for some cigars after an
animated political discussion, the aforesaid veterinary grumbled to
himself certain phrases of heavy irritation concerning "coming to the
point," and "a mere fencing-master," and "cutting a figure." But as the
object of these vague menaces suddenly returned, whistling a march and
beating time with his cane, the incident was without result.
In short, the group lived harmoniously together, and willingly permitted
themselves to be presided over by the new-comer, whose white beard and
martial bearing were quite impressive. And the small city, proud of so
many things, was also proud of its retired Captain.
III.
Perfect happiness exists nowhere, and Captain Mercadier, who believed
that he had found it at the Cafe Prosper, soon recovered from his
illusion.
For one thing, on Mondays, the market-day, the Cafe Prosper was
untenantable.
From early morning it was overrun with truck-peddlers, farmers, and
poultrymen. Heavy men with coarse voices, red necks, and great whips in
their hands, wearing blue blouses and otter-skin caps, bargaining over
their cups, stamping their feet, striking their fists, familiar with the
servant, and bungling at billiards.
When the Captain came, at eleven o'clock, for his first glass of
absinthe, he found this crowd gathered, and already half-drunk, ordering
a quantity of lunches. His usual place was taken, and he was served
slowly and badly. The bell was continually sounding, and the proprietor
and the waiter, with napkins under their arms, were running distractedly
hither and thither. In short, it was an ill-omened day, which upset his
entire existence.
[Illustration]
Now, one Monday morning, when he was resting quietly at home, being sure
that the cafe would be much too full and busy, the mild radiance of the
autumn sun persuaded him to go down and sit upon the stone seat by the
side of the house. He was sitting there, depressed and smoking a damp
cigar, when he saw coming down the end of the street--it was a badly
paved lane leading out into the country--a little girl of eight or ten,
driving before her a half-dozen geese.
As the Captain looked carelessly at the child he saw that she had a
wooden leg.
There was nothing paternal in the heart of the soldier. It was that of a
hardened bachelor. In former days, in the streets of Algiers, when the
little begging Arabs pursued him with their importunate prayers, the
Captain had often chased them away with blows from his whip; and on
those rare occasions when he had penetrated the nomadic household of
some comrade who was married and the father of a family, he had gone
away cursing the crying babies and awkward children who had touched with
their greasy hands the gilding on his uniform.
But the sight of that particular infirmity, which recalled to him the
sad spectacle of wounds and amputations, touched, on that account, the
old soldier. He felt almost a constriction of the heart at the sight of
that sorry creature, half-clothed in her tattered petticoats and old
chemise, bravely running along behind her geese, her bare foot in the
dust, and limping on her ill-made wooden stump.
The geese, recognizing their home, turned into the poultry-yard, and the
little one was about to follow them when the Captain stopped her with
this question:
"Eh! little girl, what's your name?"
"Pierette, monsieur, at your service," she answered, looking at him with
her great black eyes, and pushing her disordered locks from her
forehead.
"You live in this house, then? I haven't seen you before."
"Yes, I know you pretty well, though, for I sleep under the stairs, and
you wake me up every evening when you come home."
"Is that so, my girl? Ah, well, I must walk on my toes in future. How
old are you?"
"Nine, monsieur, come All-Saints day."
"Is the landlady here a relative of yours?"
"No, monsieur, I am in service."
"And they give you?"
"Soup, and a bed under the stairs."
"And how came you to be lame like that, my poor little one?"
"By the kick of a cow when I was five."
"Have you a father or mother?"
The child blushed under her sunburned skin. "I came from the Foundling
Hospital," she said, briefly. Then, with an awkward courtesy, she passed
limping into the house, and the Captain heard, as she went away on the
pavement of the court, the hard sound of the little wooden leg.
Good heavens! he thought, mechanically walking towards his cafe, that's
not at all the thing. A soldier, at least, they pack off to the
Invalides, with the money from his medal to keep him in tobacco. For an
officer, they fix up a collectorship, and he marries somewhere in the
provinces. But this poor girl, with such an infirmity,--that's not at
all the thing!
Having established in these terms the injustice of fate, the Captain
reached the threshold of his dear cafe, but he saw there such a mob of
blue blouses, he heard such a din of laughter and click of
billiard-balls, that he returned home in very bad humor.
His room--it was, perhaps, the first time that he had spent in it
several hours of the day--looked rather shabby. His bed-curtains were
the color of an old pipe. The fireplace was heaped with old
cigar-stumps, and one could have written his name in the dust on the
furniture. He contemplated for some time the walls where the sublime
lancer of Leipsic rode a hundred times to a glorious death. Then, for an
occupation, he passed his wardrobe in review. It was a lamentable series
of bottomless pockets, socks full of holes, and shirts without buttons.
"I must have a servant," he said.
Then he thought of the little lame girl.
"That's what I'll do. I'll hire the next little room; winter is coming,
and the little thing will freeze under the stairs. She will look after
my clothes and my linen and keep the barracks clean. A valet, how's
that?"
But a cloud darkened the comfortable picture. The Captain remembered
that quarter-day was still a long way off, and that his account at the
Cafe Prosper was assuming alarming proportions.
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