Ten Tales
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Francois Coppee >> Ten Tales
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I hurried to see him. He still lived at the Enclos des Ternes; but on
this sombre day of the last of November the little house seemed cold,
and looked naked among the leafless trees. It seemed to me shrunken and
diminished, like everything that we have not seen for a long time.
The dog was probably dead, for his bark no longer answered the sound of
the bell when I passed the little gate and entered the garden, all
strewn with dead leaves where the night's frost had withered the last
chrysanthemums.
It was not Madame Miraz--she was absent--it was Helen who received me,
Helen, who had grown to be a great girl of fourteen, with an awkward
manner. She opened for me the door of her father's study, and brusquely
lifting her great black eyelashes, turned on me a timid and distressed
glance.
I found Miraz huddled in an easy-chair in the corner of the fireplace,
wrapped in a sort of bed-gown, with gray locks streaking his long hair;
and by the cold, clammy hand which he reached towards me, by the pallid
face which he turned upon me, I knew that he was lost. Horrible! I found
in my unhappy comrade that worn and ruined look which used to strike us
formerly among the poor Poles of the cremerie.
[Illustration]
"Ah, well, old man, things are not going well?"
"Deucedly bad, my boy," he answered, with a heart-breaking smile. "I am
going out stupidly with consumption, as they do in the fifth act, you
know, when the venerable doctor, with a head like Beranger, feels the
first walking gentleman's pulse, and lifts his eyes towards heaven,
saying, 'The death-struggle approaches!' Only the difference is that
with me it continues; it will not conclude, the death-struggle. Smoke
away; that doesn't disturb me," he added, seeing me put my cigar one
side, his cough sounding like a death-rattle.
I tried to find encouraging words. I talked with him, holding him by the
hand and patting him affectionately on the shoulder; but my voice had in
my own ears the empty hollowness of deceit, and Miraz, looking at me,
seemed to pity my efforts.
I was silent.
"Look," said he, pointing to his table; "see my work-bench. For six
months I have not been able to write."
It was true. Nothing could be more sad than that heap of papers covered
with dust, and in an old Roman plate there was a bundle of pens, crusted
with ink, and like those trophies of rusty foils which hang on the walls
of old fencers.
I made a new attempt to revive him. Die! at his age. Nonsense! He wasn't
taking care of himself. He must pass the winter in the South, drink a
good draught of sunlight. He could. He was easy in his money matters.
But he stopped me, putting his hand on my arm.
"Listen," he said, gravely, "we have seen each other seldom, but you are
my oldest, perhaps my best, friend. You have proved me pen in hand.
Well, I am going to tell you something in confidence, for you to keep to
yourself, unless it may serve on some occasion to discourage the young
literary aspirants who bring their manuscripts to you--always a
praiseworthy action. Yes, I have been successful. Yes, I have been paid
a franc a line. Yes, I have made money, and there in that drawer are a
certain number of yellow, green, and red papers from which a bit is
clipped every six months, and which represent three or four thousand
francs of income. It is rare in our profession, and to gain that poor
hoard I have been obliged--I, a poet--to imitate the unsociable virtues
of a bourgeois, know how to deny a jewel to my wife, a dress to my
daughter. At last I have that money. And I often said to myself, if I
should die their bread is assured, and here is a little marriage portion
for Helen! And I was content--I was proud!--for I know them, the stories
of our widows and our orphans, the fourpenny help of the government, the
tobacco shops for six hundred francs in the province, and, if the
daughter is intelligent and pretty like mine, the dramatic author, an
old friend of the father, who advises her to enter the Conservatoire,
and who makes of her--mercy of God! that shall never be. But for all
that, my boy, it is necessary that I should not linger. Sickness is
expensive, and already it has been necessary to sell one or two bonds
from that drawer. To seek the sunlight, as you suggest, to bask like a
lizard at Cannes or at Menton, one more bond must go, and there would
not be enough to last to the end, if I should wait for seven or eight
years more, now that I can no longer write. Happily, there is nothing to
fear. But what I have suffered since I have been incapable of writing,
and have felt my hoard of gold shrink and diminish in my hand like the
Magic Skin of Balzac, is frightful. Now you understand me, do you not?
and you will no longer bid me take care of myself. No; if you still pray
to God, ask him to send me speedily to the undertaker's."
* * * * *
Fifteen days later some thirty of us followed the hearse which carried
Louis Miraz to the Cemetery Montmartre. It had snowed the day before,
and Doctor Arnould, the old frequenter of painters' studios, the friend
and physician of the dead man, walking behind me, called in his brusque
voice,
"Very commonplace, but always terrible the contrast: a burial in the
snow--black on white. The Funeral of the Poor, by the late Vigneron,
isn't to be ridiculed. Brr!"
At last we came to the edge of the grave. The place and the time were
sad. Under a cloudy sky the little yew-trees, swayed by the wind, threw
down their burdens of melted snow. The by-standers had formed a circle,
and were watching the grave-diggers, who were lowering the coffin by
cords. Near a cross-bearer, whose short surplice permitted the bottom of
his trousers to be seen, the priest waited with a finger in his book;
and, having grasped the rim of his hat under his left arm, the orator of
the Society of Men of Letters already held in his black-gloved hand the
funeral oration, hastily patched up by the aid of a comrade over a
couple of glasses at the corner of a cafe table.
Suddenly, as the priest began his Latin prayers, Doctor Arnould seized
me by the arm and whispered in my ear,
"You know that he killed himself?"
I looked at him with astonishment. But he pointed to the group in black,
composed of Madame Miraz and her daughter, who were sobbing under their
long veils and clasping each other in a tragic embrace, and he added,
"For them. Yes, for six months he threw all his medicines in the fire,
and designedly committed all sorts of imprudences. He confessed it to me
before his death. I had not understood it at all--I, who had expected to
prolong his life at least three years by creosote. At last the other
night, when it was freezing cold, he left his window open, as if by
forgetfulness, and was taken with bleeding at the lungs. Yes, that he
might leave bread for those two women. The cure does not dream that he
is blessing a suicide. But what of it, my good fellow? Miraz is in the
paradise of the brave. The details of such a death. Eh? It is tougher
than the passage of the Bridge of Arcole."
[Illustration]
A DRAMATIC FUNERAL.
[Illustration: A DRAMATIC FUNERAL]
For twenty-five years he had played the role of the villain at the
Boulevard du Crime,[A] and his harsh voice, his nose like an eagle's
beak, his eye with its savage glitter, had made him a good player of
such parts. For twenty-five years, dressed in the cloak and encircled by
the fawn-colored leather belt of Mordaunt, he had retreated with the
step of a wounded scorpion before the sword of D'Artagnan; draped in the
dirty Jewish gown of Rodin, he had rubbed his dry hands together,
muttering the terrible "Patience, patience!" and, curled on the chair of
the Duc d'Este, he had said to Lucretia Borgia, with a sufficiently
infernal glance, "Take care and make no mistake. The flagon of gold,
madame." When, preceded by a tremolo, he made his entry in the scene,
the third gallery trembled, and a sigh of relief greeted the moment when
the first walking gentleman at last said to him: "Between us two, now,"
and immolated him for the grand triumph of virtue.
[Footnote A: A nickname given to the Boulevard du Temple, on account of
the numerous melodramatic theatres situated there.]
[Illustration]
But this sort of success, which is only betrayed by murmurs of horror,
is not of the kind to make a dramatic career seductive; and besides the
old actor had always hidden in a corner of his heart the bucolic ideal
which is in the heart of almost all artists. He sighed for an old age of
leisure, and the comfortable dignity of a retired shopkeeper; the house
in the country, where he could live with his family, with melons, under
an arbor; cakes and wine in the winter evenings; his daughter a scholar
in a convent; his son in the uniform of the Polytechnique; and the cross
of the Legion.
Now, when we had occasion to know him, he had already nearly realized
his dreams.
After the failure of the theatre where he had been for a long time
engaged, some capitalists had thought of him to put the enterprise on
its feet again. With his systematic habits, his good sense, his thorough
and practical knowledge of the business, and a sufficiently correct
literary instinct, he became an excellent manager. He was the owner of
stocks and a villa at Montmorency; his son was a student at
Sainte-Barbe, and his daughter had just come out of Les Oiseaux; and if
the malice of small newspapers had retarded his nomination in the Legion
of Honor by recalling every year, about the first of January, his old
ranting on the stage, when he played formerly the villains' parts, he
could yet hope that it would not be long before the red ribbon would
flourish in his button-hole. He had still preserved some of the habits
of a strolling player, such as being very familiar with everybody, and
dyeing his mustaches; but as he was, on the whole, good, honest, and
serviceable, he conquered the esteem and friendship of those with whom
he came in contact.
So it was with sincere grief that the whole dramatic world learned one
day the terrible sorrow which had smitten that excellent man. His
daughter, a girl of seventeen, had died suddenly of brain-fever.
We knew how he adored the child; how he had brought her up in the
strictest principles of family and religion, far from the theatre,
something as Triboulet hid his daughter Blanche in the little house of
the cul-de-sac Bucy. We understood that all the hopes and ambitions of
the man rested on the head of that charming girl, who, near all the
corruption of the theatre, had grown up in innocence and purity, as one
sees sometimes in the scanty grass of the faubourgs a field-flower
spring up by the door of a hovel.
[Illustration]
We were among the first at the funeral, to which we had been summoned by
a black-bordered billet.
A crowd of the people of the neighborhood encumbered the street before
the house of the dead, attracted by the pomps of the first-class funeral
ordered by the old comedian, who had preserved the taste of the _mise en
scene_ even in his grief. The magnificent hearse and cumbrous
mourning-coaches were already drawn up to the sidewalk, and under the
door, and in the shade of the heavy fringed and silvered draperies, amid
the twinkling of burning candles, between two priests reading prayers in
their Prayer-books, the form of the massive coffin could be seen under
its white cloth, covered with Parma violets.
As we walked among the crowd we noticed the groups formed of those who,
like us, were waiting the departure of the cortege. There were almost
all the actors, men and women, of Paris, who had come to pay their last
respects to the daughter of their comrade. Undoubtedly nothing could be
more natural; but we experienced not the less a strange sensation on
seeing, around the coffin of that pure young girl who had breathed away
her last breath in a prayer, the gathering of all those faces marked by
the brand of the theatre.
[Illustration]
They were all there: the stars, the comedians, the lovers, the traitors;
nobody was lacking: soubrettes, duennas, coquettes, first walking
ladies. Wearing a sack-coat and a felt hat on his long gray hair, the
superb adventurer of all the cloak and sword dramas leaned against the
shutter of a shop in his familiar attitude, and crossed his arms to show
his handsome hands; while a little old fellow with the wrinkled face of
a clown spoke to him briskly in the broad, harsh voice which had so
often made us explode with laughter. By the side of the aged first young
man, who, pinched in his scanty frock-coat, and with trousers trailing
under foot, twirled in his gloved hands his locks of over-black hair,
stood a great handsome fellow, beautiful as a model, who had not been
able to renounce even for that day his eccentricities of costume, and
strutted in a black velvet cape and the boots of an equerry. Oh, how
sad, tired, and old they seemed in the gray light of that winter
morning, all those pathetic heads, graceful or laughable, which we were
only in the habit of seeing when transfigured by the prestige of the
stage. Chins had become blue-black under too frequent shaving; hair thin
and dry under the hot iron of the hair-dresser; skins rough under the
injurious action of unguents and vinegar; eyes dull, burned by the glare
of foot-lights--blinded, almost fixed, like those of an owl in the
sunlight.
[Illustration]
The women were especially to be pitied. Obliged by the occasion to rise
at a very early hour, and not having had the time for a careful and
minute toilet, they gathered in groups of four or five, chilled and
shivering in their fur mantles, muffs, and triple black veils.
Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and powder of the morning, they were
unrecognizable, and it required an effort of imagination to find in them
a memory of that sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres, exposed
every evening to the desires of several thousand men. On all of these
charming types appeared the mark of weariness and age. Some ossified
into faded skeletons, others grew dull with an unhealthy weight of fat;
wrinkles crossed the foreheads and starred the temples; lips were livid
and eyes circled with dark rings; the complexions were particularly
frightful--that uniform tint, morbid and sickly, the work of rouge and
grease-paints. That heavy woman, with the head and neck of a farmer's
wife (one almost sees a basket on her shoulder), is the terrible and
fatal queen of grand, romantic dramas; and that small blonde and pale
creature, so faded under her laces, and who would have completely filled
a music-teacher's carrying roll, was the artless young woman whom all
the vaudevillists married at the denouement of their pieces. There were
the dying glances of the lorette in the hospital, the pose of the old
copyist of the Louvre, and the theatrical sneer.
[Illustration]
Soon the cabs drove up with the functionaries connected with the
administration of the theatre, in black hats and coats, with an official
air of sadness; young reporters, the outflow of journalism, staring at
everybody and taking notes; dramatic authors, Monday feuilletonists--in
short, all of those nocturnal beings, tired and worn-out, who are
properly called the actives of Paris.
The groups became more compact, and talked animatedly. Old friends found
each other; they shook hands, and, in view of the circumstances, smiled
cordially, while the women saluted each other through their veils.
In passing, we could catch fragments of conversation like this:
"When will the affair begin?"
"Were you at the opening of the Varietes yesterday?"
Theatrical terms were heard--"My talents," "My charms," "My physique."
Some business, even, was done. A new manager was quite surrounded; an
old actress organized her benefit.
Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd. The undertaker's men had
just placed the coffin in the hearse, and the young girls of the
Sisterhood of the Virgin, to which the dead girl had belonged, arranged
themselves in two lines, in their white veils, at the sides of the
funeral-car. Preceded by the master of ceremonies, in silk stockings and
a wand of office in his hand, the poor father appeared on the pavement
in full mourning, with a white cravat, broken down by grief and
sustained by his friends.
The procession set out and came to the parish church, fortunately near.
There was a grand mass, with music which was not finished. It was too
warm in the church stuffed with people, and the inattention was general.
Men who recognized each other saluted with a light movement of the head;
conversation was exchanged in a low voice; some young actors struck
attitudes for the benefit of the women, and the pious responded to
Dominus Vobiscum droned by the priest. At the elevation, from behind the
altar, rang out a magnificent Pie Jesu, sung by a celebrated baritone,
who had never put in his voice so much amorous languor. Outside the
church-yard the small boys of the quarter stood on tiptoe, and, hanging
on to the railings, pointed out the celebrities with their fingers.
The office finished, the long defile commenced; and every one went to
the entrance of the church to sprinkle some drops of holy-water on the
bier, and press the hand of the old actor, who, broken by grief, and
having hardly strength to hold his hat, leaned against a pillar.
That was the most horrible moment.
Carried away by the habit of playing up to the situation, all these
theatrical people put into the token of sympathy which they gave to
their friend the character of their employment. The star advanced
gravely, and with a three-quarter inclination of his head flashed out
the "Look of Fate." The old tragedian with a gray beard assumed a
stoical expression, and did not forget to "vibrate" in pronouncing a
masculine "Courage!" The clown approached with a short, trotting step,
and shaking his head until his cheeks trembled, he murmured, "My poor
old fellow." And the fairy queen, with the sensibility of a sensitive
female, threw herself impulsively on the neck of the unhappy father,
who, with swollen face, bloodshot eyes, and hanging lip, blackened his
face and his gloved hands with the dye of his mustache, diluted by
tears.
And all the time, a few steps from this grotesque and sinister scene, we
could see--last word of this antithesis--the white figures of the young
girls of the sisterhood, kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of
their companion, and who undoubtedly were beseeching God, in their
naive and original prayers, to grant her the paradise of their dreams:
a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical style, all in carved and gilded
wood, and many-colored marble, where one could see at the end a tableau
in a transparent light; the Virgin crowned with stars, with a serpent
under her feet, while little cherubs suspended in mid-air over her head
an azure streamer flaming with these words: "_Ecce Regina Angelorum._"
[Illustration]
THE SUBSTITUTE.
[Illustration: THE SUBSTITUTE]
He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.
He spoke thus to the judge:
"I am called Jean Francois Leturc, and for six months I was with the
man who sings and plays upon a cord of catgut between the lanterns at
the Place de la Bastille. I sang the refrain with him, and after that I
called, 'Here's all the new songs, ten centimes, two sous!' He was
always drunk, and used to beat me. That is why the police picked me up
the other night. Before that I was with the man who sells brushes. My
mother was a laundress; her name was Adele. At one time she lived with
a man on the ground-floor at Montmartre. She was a good work-woman and
liked me. She made money because she had for customers waiters in the
cafes, and they use a good deal of linen. On Sundays she used to put me
to bed early so that she could go to the ball. On week-days she sent me
to Les Freres, where I learned to read. Well, the sergeant-de-ville
whose beat was in our street used always to stop before our windows to
talk with her--a good-looking chap, with a medal from the Crimea. They
were married, and after that everything went wrong. He didn't take to
me, and turned mother against me. Every one had a blow for me, and so,
to get out of the house, I spent whole days in the Place Clichy, where I
knew the mountebanks. My father-in-law lost his place, and my mother her
work. She used to go out washing to take care of him; this gave her a
cough--the steam.... She is dead at Lamboisiere. She was a good woman.
Since that I have lived with the seller of brushes and the catgut
scraper. Are you going to send me to prison?"
He said this openly, cynically, like a man. He was a little ragged
street-arab, as tall as a boot, his forehead hidden under a queer mop of
yellow hair.
Nobody claimed him, and they sent him to the Reform School.
Not very intelligent, idle, clumsy with his hands, the only trade he
could learn there was not a good one--that of reseating straw chairs.
However, he was obedient, naturally quiet and silent, and he did not
seem to be profoundly corrupted by that school of vice. But when, in his
seventeenth year, he was thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he
unhappily found there his prison comrades, all great scamps, exercising
their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers,
and blacking shoes on ball nights in the passage of the Opera--amateur
wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the
booths--or fishing at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he
followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house
of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft--a pair of old
shoes prigged from a shop-window. Result: a year in the prison of Sainte
Pelagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.
He lived in much surprise among this group of prisoners, all very young,
negligent in dress, who talked in loud voices, and carried their heads
in a very solemn fashion. They used to meet in the cell of one of the
oldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already a long time in
prison and quite a fixture at Sainte Pelagie--a large cell, the walls
covered with colored caricatures, and from the window of which one could
see all Paris--its roofs, its spires, and its domes--and far away the
distant line of hills, blue and indistinct upon the sky. There were upon
the walls some shelves filled with volumes and all the old paraphernalia
of a fencing-room: broken masks, rusty foils, breast-plates, and gloves
that were losing their tow. It was there that the "politicians" used to
dine together, adding to the everlasting "soup and beef," fruit, cheese,
and pints of wine which Jean Francois went out and got by the can--a
tumultuous repast interrupted by violent disputes, and where, during the
dessert, the "Carmagnole" and "Ca Ira" were sung in full chorus. They
assumed, however, an air of great dignity on those days when a newcomer
was brought in among them, at first entertaining him gravely as a
citizen, but on the morrow using him with affectionate familiarity, and
calling him by his nickname. Great words were used there: Corporation,
Responsibility, and phrases quite unintelligible to Jean Francois--such
as this, for example, which he once heard imperiously put forth by a
frightful little hunchback who blotted some writing-paper every night:
"It is done. This is the composition of the Cabinet: Raymond, the Bureau
of Public Instruction; Martial, the Interior; and for Foreign Affairs,
myself."
His time done, he wandered again around Paris, watched afar by the
police, after the fashion of cockchafers, made by cruel children to fly
at the end of a string. He became one of those fugitive and timid beings
whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, arrests and releases by
turn--something like those platonic fishers who, in order that they may
not exhaust their fish-pond, throw immediately back in the water the
fish which has just come out of the net. Without a suspicion on his part
that so much honor had been done to so sorry a subject, he had a special
bundle of memoranda in the mysterious portfolios of the Rue de
Jerusalem. His name was written in round hand on the gray paper of the
cover, and the notes and reports, carefully classified, gave him his
successive appellations: "Name, Leturc;" "the prisoner Leturc," and, at
last, "the criminal Leturc."
He was two years out of prison, dining where he could, sleeping in night
lodging-houses and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking part with his
fellows in interminable games of pitch-penny on the boulevards near the
barriers: He wore a greasy cap on the back of his head, carpet slippers,
and a short white blouse. When he had five sous he had his hair curled.
He danced at Constant's at Montparnasse; bought for two sous to sell for
four at the door of Bobino, the jack of hearts or the ace of clubs
serving as a countermark; sometimes opened the door of a carriage; led
horses to the horse-market. From the lottery of all sorts of miserable
employments he drew a goodly number. Who can say if the atmosphere of
honor which one breathes as a soldier, if military discipline might not
have saved him. Taken, in a cast of the net, with some young loafers who
robbed drunkards sleeping on the streets, he denied very earnestly
having taken part in their expeditions. Perhaps he told the truth, but
his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent for
three years to Poissy. There he made coarse playthings for children, was
tattooed on the chest, learned thieves' slang and the penal-code. A new
liberation, and a new plunge into the sink of Paris; but very short this
time, for at the end of six months at the most he was again compromised
in a night robbery, aggravated by climbing and breaking--a serious
affair, in which he played an obscure role, half dupe and half fence. On
the whole his complicity was evident, and he was sent for five years at
hard labor. His grief in this adventure was above all in being separated
from an old dog which he had found on a dung-heap, and cured of the
mange. The beast loved him.
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