s he came out of the dean’s house, m. bergeret met madame de gromance returning from mass. this gave him great pleasure, for he always considered that the sight of a pretty woman is a stroke of good luck when it comes in the way of an honest man, and in his eyes madame de gromance was a most charming woman. she alone, of all the women in the town, knew how to dress herself with the skilful art that conceals art: and he was grateful to her for this, as well as for her carriage that displayed the lissom figure and the supple hips, mere hints though they were of a beauty veiled from the sight of the humble, poverty-stricken scholar, but which could yet serve him as an apposite illustration of some line of horace, ovid or martial. his heart went out towards her for her sweetness and the amorous atmosphere that floated round her. in his mind he thanked her for that heart of hers that yielded so easily; he felt it as a personal71 favour, although he had no hope at all of ever sunning himself in the light of her smile. stranger as he was in aristocratic circles, he had never been in the lady’s house, and it was merely by a stroke of extraordinary luck that someone introduced him to her in m. de terremondre’s box, after the procession at the jeanne d’arc celebrations. moreover, being a wise man with a sense of the becoming, he did not even hope for closer acquaintance. it was enough for him to catch a chance glimpse of her fair face as he passed in the street, and to remember, whenever he saw her, the tales they told about her in paillot’s shop. thus he owed some pleasant moments to her and accordingly felt a sort of gratitude towards her.
this new year’s morning he caught sight of her in the porch of saint-exupère, as she stood lifting her petticoat with one hand so as to emphasise the pliant bending of the knee, while with the other she held a great prayer-book bound in red morocco. as he gazed, he offered up a mental hymn of thanksgiving to her for thus acting as a charming fairy-tale, a source of subtle pleasure to all the town. this idea he tried to throw into his smile as he passed.
madame de gromance’s notion of ideal womanhood was not quite the same as m. bergeret’s.72 hers was mingled with many society interests, and being of the world, she had a keen eye to worldly affairs. she was by no means ignorant of the reputation she enjoyed in the town, and hence, whenever she had no special desire to stand in anyone’s good graces, she treated him with cold hauteur. among such persons she classed m. bergeret, whose smile seemed merely impertinent. she replied to it, therefore, by a supercilious look which made him blush. as he continued his walk, he said to himself penitently:
“she has been a minx. but on my side, i have just made an ass of myself. i see that now; and now that it’s too late, i also see that my smile, which said ‘you are the joy of all the town,’ must have seemed an impertinence. this delicious being is no philosopher emancipated from common prejudices. of course, she would not understand me: it would be impossible for her to see that i consider her beauty one of the prime forces of the world, and regard the use she makes of it only as a splendid sovereignty. i have been tactless and i am ashamed of it. like all honourable people, i have sometimes transgressed a human law and yet have felt no repentance for it whatever. but certain other acts of my life, which were merely opposed to those subtle and lofty niceties that we call the conventions, have often filled me73 with sharp regret and even with a kind of remorse. at this moment i want to hide myself for very shame. henceforth i shall flee whenever i see the charming vision of this lady of the supple figure, crispum ... docta movere latus. i have, indeed, begun the year badly!”
“a happy new year to you,” said a voice that emerged from a beard beneath a straw hat.
it belonged to m. mazure, the archivist to the department. ever since the ministry had refused him academic honours on the ground that he had no claim, and since all classes in the town steadily refused to return madame mazure’s calls, because she had been both cook and mistress to the two officials previously in charge of the archives, m. mazure had been seized with a horror of all government and become disgusted with society. he lived now the life of a gloomy misanthrope.
this being a day when friendly or, at any rate, courteous visits are customary, he had put on a shabby knitted scarf, the bluish wool of which showed under his overcoat decorated with torn buttonholes: this he did to show his scorn of the human race. he had also donned a broken straw hat that his good wife, marguerite, used to stick on a cherry tree in the garden when the cherries were ripe. he cast a pitying glance at m. bergeret’s white tie.
74 “you have just bowed,” said he, “to a pretty hussy.”
it pained m. bergeret to have to listen to such harsh and unphilosophic language. but as he could forgive a good deal to a nature warped by misanthropy, it was with gentleness that he set about reproving m. mazure for the coarseness of his speech.
“my dear mazure,” said he, “i expected from your wide experience a juster estimate of a lady who harms no one.”
m. mazure answered drily that he objected to light women. from him it was by no means a sincere expression of opinion, for, strictly speaking, m. mazure had no moral code. but he persisted in his bad temper.
“come now,” said m. bergeret with a smile, “i’ll tell you what is wrong with madame de gromance. she was born just a hundred and fifty years too late. in eighteenth-century society no man of brains would have disapproved of her.”
m. mazure began to relent under this flattery. he was no sullen puritan, but he respected the civil marriage, to which the statesmen of the revolution had imparted fresh dignity. for all that, he did not deny the claim of the heart and the senses. he acknowledged that the mistress has her place in society as well as the wife.
75 “and, by the way, how is madame bergeret?” he inquired.
as the north wind whistled across the place saint-exupère m. bergeret watched m. mazure’s nose getting redder and redder under the turned-down brim of the straw hat. his own feet and knees were frozen, and he suffered his thoughts to play round the idea of madame de gromance just to get a little warmth and joy into his veins.
paillot’s shop was not open, and the two professors, thus fireless and houseless, stood looking at each other in sad sympathy.
in the depths of his friendly heart m. bergeret thought to himself:
“as soon as i leave this fellow with his limited, boorish ideas, i shall be once more alone in the desert waste of this hateful town. it will be wretched.”
and his feet remained glued to the sharp stones of the square, whilst the wind made his ears burn.
“i will walk back with you as far as your door,” said the archivist of the department.
then they walked on side by side, bowing from time to time to fellow-citizens who hurried along in their sunday clothes, carrying dolls and bags of sweets.
“this countess de gromance,” said the archivist,76 “was a chapon. there was never but one chapon heard of—her father, the most arrant skinflint in the province. but i have hunted up the record of the gromance family, who belong to the lesser nobility of the place. there was a demoiselle cécile de gromance who in 1815 gave birth to a child by a cossack father. that will make a capital subject for an article in a local paper. i am writing a regular series of them.”
m. mazure spoke the truth: every day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in his dusty garret under the roof of the prefecture, he eagerly ransacked the six hundred and thirty-seven thousand pigeonholes which were there huddled together. his gloomy hatred of his fellow-townsmen drove him to this research, merely in the hope that he would succeed in unearthing some scandalous facts about the most respected families in the neighbourhood. amid piles of ancient parchments and papers stamped by the registrars of the last two centuries with the arms of six kings, two emperors and three republics he used to sit, laughing in the midst of the clouds of dust, as he stirred up the evidences, now half eaten up by mice and worms, of bygone crimes and sins long since expiated.
as they followed the windings of the tintelleries, it was with the tale of these cruel revelations that he continued to entertain m. bergeret, a man who77 always cultivated an attitude of particular indulgence towards our forefathers’ faults, and who was inquisitive merely in the matter of their habits and customs. mazure had, or so he averred, discovered in the archives a certain terremondre who, being a terrorist and president of a local club of sans-culottes in 1793, had changed his christian names from nicolas-eustache to marat-peuplier. instantly mazure hastened to supply m. jean de terremondre, his colleague in the arch?ological society, who had gone over to the monarchical and clerical party, with full information touching this forgotten forbear of his, this marat-peuplier terremondre, who had actually written a hymn to saint guillotine. he had also unearthed a great-great-uncle of the diocesan vicar-general, a sieur de goulet, or rather, more precisely, a goulet-trocard as he signed himself, who, as an army contractor, was condemned to penal servitude in 1812 for having supplied glandered horseflesh instead of beef. the documents relating to this trial he had published in the most rabid journal in the department. m. mazure promised still more terrible revelations about the laprat family, revelations full of cases of incest; about the courtrai family, with one of its members branded for high treason in 1814; about the dellion family, whose wealth had been gained by gambling in wheat;78 about the quatrebarbe family, whose ancestors, two stokers, a man and a woman, were hanged by lynch law on a tree on duroc hill at the time of the consulate. in fact, as late as 1860, old people were still to be met who remembered having seen in their childhood the branches of an oak from which hung a human form with long, black, floating tresses that used to frighten the horses.
“she remained hanging there for three years,” exclaimed the archivist, “and she was own grandmother to hyacinthe quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect!”
“it’s very singular,” said m. bergeret, “but, of course, one ought to keep that kind of thing to oneself.”
but mazure paid no heed. he longed to publish everything, to bruit everything abroad, in direct opposition to the opinion of m. worms-clavelin, the préfet, who wisely said: “one ought most carefully to avoid giving occasion to scandal and dissension.” he had threatened, in fact, to get the archivist dismissed, if he persisted in revealing old family secrets.
“ah!” cried mazure, chuckling in his tangled forest of beard, “it shall be known that in 1815 there was a little cossack who came into the world through the exertions of a demoiselle de gromance.”
79 only a moment since m. bergeret had reached his own door, and he still held the handle of the bell.
“what does it matter, after all?” said he. “the poor lady did what she couldn’t help doing. she is dead, and the little cossack also is dead. let us leave their memory in peace, or if we recall it for a moment, let it be with a kindly thought. what zeal is it that so carries you away, dear monsieur mazure?”
“the zeal for justice.”
m. bergeret pulled the bell.
“good-bye, mazure,” said he; “don’t be just, and do be merciful. i wish you a very happy new year.”
m. bergeret looked through the dirty window of the hall to see if there were any letter or paper in the box; he still took an interest in letters from a distance or in literary reviews. but to-day there were only visiting-cards, which suggested to him nothing more interesting than personalities as shadowy and pale as the cards themselves, and a bill from mademoiselle rose, the modiste of the tintelleries. as his eyes fell on this, the thought suddenly occurred to him that madame bergeret was becoming extravagant and that the house was stuffy. he could feel the weight of it on his shoulders, and as he stood in the hall, he seemed80 to be bearing on his back the whole flooring of his flat, in addition to the drawing-room piano and that terrible wardrobe that swallowed up his little store of money and yet was always empty. thus weighted with domestic troubles, m. bergeret grasped the iron handrail with its ample curves of florid metal-work, and began, with bent head and short breath, to climb the stone steps. these were now blackened, worn, cracked, patched, and ornamented with worn bricks and squalid paving-stones, but once, in the bygone days of their early youth, they had known the tread of fine gentlemen and pretty girls, hurrying to pay rival court to pauquet, the revenue-tax farmer who had enriched himself by the spoils of a whole province. for it was in the mansion of pauquet de sainte-croix that m. bergeret lived, now fallen from its glory, despoiled of its splendour and degraded by a plaster top-storey which had taken the place of its graceful gable and majestic roof. now the building was darkened by tall houses built all round it, on ground where once there were gardens with a thousand statues, ornamental waters and a park, and even on the main courtyard where pauquet had erected an allegorical monument to his king, who was in the habit of making him disgorge his booty every five or six years, after which he was left for another term to stuff himself again with gold.
81 this courtyard, which was flanked by a splendid tuscan portico, had vanished in 1857 when the rue des tintelleries was widened. now pauquet de sainte-croix’s mansion was nothing but an ugly tenement-house badly neglected by two old caretakers, gaubert by name, who despised m. bergeret for his quietness and had no sense of his true generosity, because it was that of a man of moderate means. yet whatever m. raynaud gave they regarded with respect, although he gave little when he was well able to give much: to the gauberts, his hundred-sou piece was valuable because it came from great wealth.
m. raynaud, who owned the land near the new railway station, lived on the first storey. over the doorway of this there was a bas-relief which, as usual, caught m. bergeret’s eye as he passed. it depicted old silenus on his ass surrounded by a group of nymphs. this was all that remained of the interior decoration of the mansion which, belonging to the reign of louis xv, had been built at a period when the french style was aiming at the classic, but, lucky in missing its aim, had acquired that note of chastity, stability and noble elegance which one associates more especially with gabriel’s designs. as a matter of fact pauquet de sainte-croix’s mansion had actually been designed by a pupil of that great architect. since then it had been82 systematically disfigured. although, for economy’s sake and just to save a little trouble and expense, they had not torn down the little bas-relief of silenus and the nymphs, they had at any rate painted it, like the rest of the staircase, with a sham decoration of red granite. the tradition of the place would have it that in this silenus one might see a portrait of pauquet himself, who was reputed to have been the ugliest man of his time, as well as the most popular with women. m. bergeret, although no great connoisseur in art, made no such mistake as this, for in the grotesque, yet sublime, figure of the old god he recognised a type well known in the renaissance, and transmitted from the greeks and romans. yet, whenever he saw this silenus and his nymphs, his thoughts naturally turned to pauquet, who had enjoyed all the good things of this world in the very house where he himself lived a life that was not only toilsome, but thankless.
“this financier,” he thought as he stood on the landing, “merely sucked money from a king who in turn sucked it from him. this made them quits. it is unwise to brag about the finances of the monarchy, since, in the end, it was the financial deficit that brought about the downfall of the system. but this point is noteworthy, that the king was then the sole owner of all property, both real and83 personal, throughout the kingdom. every house belonged to the king, and in proof of this, the subject who actually enjoyed the possession of it had to place the royal arms on the slab at the back of the hearth. it was therefore as owner, and not in pursuance of his right of taxation, that louis xiv sent his subjects’ plate to the mint in order to defray the expenses of his wars. he even had the treasures of the churches melted down, and i read lately that he carried off the votive-offerings of notre-dame de liesse in picardy, among which was found the breast that the queen of poland had deposited there in gratitude for her miraculous recovery. everything then belonged to the king, that is to say, to the state. and yet neither the socialists, who to-day demand the nationalisation of private property, nor the owners who intend to hold fast their possessions, pay any heed to the fact that this nationalisation would be, in some respects, a return to the ancient custom. it gives one a philosophic pleasure to reflect that the revolution really was for the benefit of those who had acquired private ownership of national possessions and that the declaration of the rights of man has become the landlords’ charter.
“this pauquet, who used to bring here the prettiest girls from the opera, was no knight of saint-louis. to-day he would be commander of84 the legion of honour and to him the finance ministers would come for their instructions. then it was money he enjoyed; now it would be honours. for money has become honourable. it is, in fact, the only nobility we possess. we have destroyed all the others to put in their place the most oppressive, the most insolent, and the most powerful of all orders of nobility.”
m. bergeret’s reflections were distracted at this point by the sight of a group of men, women, and children coming out of m. raynaud’s flat. he saw that it was a band of poor relations who had come to wish the old man a happy new year: he fancied he could see them smelling about, under their new hats, for some profit to themselves. he went on up the stairs, for he lived on the third floor, which he delighted to call the third “room,” using the seventeenth-century phrase for it. and to explain this ancient term he loved to quote la fontaine’s lines:
where is the good of life to men of make like you,
to live and read for ever in a poor third room?
chill winter always finds you in the dress of june,
with for lackey but the shadow that is each man’s due.[6]
[6] que sert à vos pareils de lire incessamment?
ils sont toujours logés à la troisième chambre,
vêtus au mois de juin comme au mois de décembre,
ayant pour tout laquais leur ombre seulement.
85 possibly the use he made of this quotation and of this kind of talk was unwise, for it exasperated madame bergeret, who was proud of living in a flat in the middle of the town, in a house that was inhabited by people of good position.
“now for the third ‘room,’” said m. bergeret to himself. drawing out his watch, he saw that it was eleven o’clock. he had told them not to expect him before noon, as he had intended to spend an hour in paillot’s shop. but there he had found the shutters up: holidays and sundays were days of misery to him, simply because the bookseller’s was closed on those days. to-day he had a feeling of annoyance, because he had not been able to pay his usual call on paillot.
on reaching the third storey he turned his key noiselessly in the lock and entered the dining-room with his cautious footstep. it was a dismal room, concerning which m. bergeret had formed no particular opinion, although in madame bergeret’s eyes it was quite artistic, on account of the brass chandelier which hung above the table, the chairs and sideboard of carved oak with which it was furnished, the mahogany whatnot loaded with little cups, and especially on account of the painted china plates that adorned the wall. on entering this room from the dimly lit hall one had the door of the study on the left, and on the86 right the drawing-room door. whenever m. bergeret entered the flat he was in the habit of turning to the left into his study, where solitude, books and slippers awaited him. this time, however, for no particular motive or reason, without thinking what he was doing, he went to the right. he turned the handle, opened the door, took one step and found himself in the drawing-room.
he then saw on the sofa two figures linked together in a violent attitude that suggested either endearment or strife, but which was, as a matter of fact, very compromising. madame bergeret’s head was turned away and could not be seen, but her feelings were plainly expressed in the generous display of her red stockings. m. roux’s face wore that strained, solemn, set, distracted look that cannot be mistaken, although one seldom sees it; it agreed with his disordered array. then, the appearance of everything changed in less than a second, and now m. bergeret saw before him two quite different persons from those whom he had surprised; two persons who were much embarrassed and whose looks were strange and even rather comical. he would have fancied himself mistaken had not the first picture engraved itself on his sight with a strength that was only equalled by its suddenness.
