Chapter XVII: Epilogue (1)

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,

Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;

But, like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.

Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,

I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand.

POEMS IN PROSE

Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

DEDICATION

To

ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail; since all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what convenience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to me and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my musing, you your consideration, and the reader his perusal--for I do not hold the latter's restive will by the interminable thread of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy rejoin painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will see that each part can exist by itself. In the hope that some of these segments will be lively enough to please and to amuse you, I venture to dedicate to you the entire serpent.

I have a little confession to make. It was while glancing, for at least the twentieth time, through the famous _Gaspard de la Nuit_, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me, and to a few of our friends, has it not the highest right to be called famous?), that the idea came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather of a life modern and more abstract, the process which he applied in the depicting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque.

Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts of the conscience?

It is particularly in frequenting great cities, it is from the flux of their innumerable streams of intercourse, that this importunate ideal is born. Have not you yourself, my dear friend, tried to convey in a chanson the strident cry of the glazier, and to express in a lyric prose all the grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the house-tops, through the heaviest mists of the street? But, to speak truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me good fortune. As soon as I had begun the work, I saw that not only was I laboring far, far, from my mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reaching an accomplishment (if it can be called _an accomplishment_) peculiarly different--accident of which all others would doubtless be proud, but which can but profoundly humiliate a mind which considers it the highest honor of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.

Devotedly yours,

C. B.

A JESTER

It was the outburst of the New Year: chaos of mud and snow, crossed by a thousand coaches, sparkling with baubles and gewgaws, swarming with desires and with despairs, official folly of a great city made to weaken the fortitude of the firmest eremite.

In the midst of this hubbub and tumult, a donkey was trotting along, tormented by a lout with a horsewhip.

As the donkey was about to turn a corner, a fine fellow, gloved, polished, with a merciless cravat, and imprisoned in impeccable garments, bowed ceremoniously before the beast; said to it, removing his hat: "I greet thee, good and happy one"; and turned towards some companions with a fatuous air, as though requesting them to add their approbation to his content.

The donkey did not see the clever jester, and continued steadily where its duty called.

As for me, I was overcome by an inordinate rage against the sublime idiot, who seemed to me to concentrate in himself the wit of France.

THE DOG AND THE VIAL

"My pretty dog, my good dog, my doggy dear, come and smell this excellent perfume bought at the best scent-shop in the city."

And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the poor creature's substitute for a laugh or a smile, approached and curiously placed its damp nose to the opened vial; then, recoiling with sudden fright, it growled at me in reproach.

"Ah! wretched dog, if I had offered you a mass of excrement, you would have smelled it with delight, and probably have devoured it. So even you, unworthy companion of my unhappy life, resemble the public, to whom one must never offer delicate perfumes, which exasperate, but carefully raked-up mire."

THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE

"Really, my dear, you tire me immeasurably and unpityingly; one would say, to hear you sigh, that you suffered more than the sexagenarian gleaners or the old beggar hags who pick up crusts at the doors of restaurants.

"If at least your sighs expressed remorse, they would do you some honor; but they convey merely the surfeit of well-being and the languor of repose. And, too, you will not stop your constant flow of needless words: 'Love me well! I have so much need! Comfort me thus, caress me so!'

"Come! I shall try to cure you; perhaps we shall find a means, for two cents, in the midst of a fair, not far away.

"Take a good look, I pray you, at this strong iron cage, within which moves, howling like a damned soul, shaking the bars like an ourang-outang enraged by exile, imitating to perfection, now the circular bounds of the tiger, now the clumsy waddling of the polar bear, that hairy monster whose form vaguely resembles your own.

"That monster is one of those beasts one usually calls 'my angel'--that is, a woman. The other monster, he who bawls at the top of his voice, club in his hand, is a husband. He has chained his lawful wife like a beast, and he exhibits her in the suburbs on fair days--with the magistrates' permission, of course.

"Pay close attention. See with what voracity (perhaps not feigned) she tears apart the living rabbits and the cackling fowl her keeper throws her. 'Come,' he says, 'one must not eat one's whole store in a day'; and, with that wise word, he cruelly snatches the prey, the winding entrails of which remain a moment caught on the teeth of the ferocious beast--I mean, the woman.

"Come! A good blow to calm her! for she darts terrible glances of lust at the stolen food. Good God! The club is not a jester's slap stick! Did you hear the flesh resound, right through the artificial hair? Her eyes leap from her head now; she howls _more naturally_. In her rage she sparkles all over, like smitten iron.

"Such are the conjugal customs of these two children of Adam and Eve, these works of Thy hands, O my God! This woman is doubtless miserable, though after all, perhaps, the titillating joys of glory are not unknown to her. There are misfortunes less remediable, and with no compensation. But in the world to which she has been thrown, she has never been able to think that woman might deserve a different destiny.

"Now, as for us two, my fine lady! Seeing the hells of which the world is made, what would you have me think of your pretty hell, you who rest only on stuffs as soft as your own skin, who eat only cooked viands, for whom a skilled domestic takes care to cut the bites?

"And what can mean to me all these soft signs which heave your perfumed breast, my lusty coquette? And all those affectations learned from books, and that everlasting melancholy, intended to arouse an emotion far other than pity? Indeed, I sometimes feel like teaching you what true misfortune means.

"Seeing you so, my beautiful dainty one, your feet in the mire and your moist eyes turned to the sky, as though to demand a king, one would say indeed: a young frog invoking the ideal. If you scorn the log (which I am now, you know), beware the stork which will kill, swallow, devour you at its caprice.

"Poet as I am, I am not such a fool as you may think, and if you tire me too often with your whining affectations, I shall treat you as a wild woman, or throw you through the window as an empty flask."

THE OLD MOUNTEBANK

Everywhere the holiday crowd was parading, spread out, merry making. It was one of those festivals on which mountebanks, tricksters, animal trainers and itinerant merchants had long been relying, to compensate for the dull seasons of the year.

On such days it seems to me the people forget all, sadness and work; they become children. For the little ones, it is a day of leave, the horror of the school put off twenty-four hours. For the grown-ups, it is an armistice, concluded with the malevolent forces of life, a respite in the universal contention and struggle.

The man of the world himself, and even he who is occupied with spiritual tasks, with difficulty escape the influence of this popular jubilee. They absorb, without volition, their part of the atmosphere of devil-may-care. As for me, I never fail, like a true Parisian, to inspect all the booths that flaunt themselves in these solemn epochæ.

They made, in truth, a formidable gathering: they bawled, bellowed, howled. It was a mingling of cries, of blaring of brass and bursting of rockets. The clowns and the simpletons convulsed the features of their swarthy faces, hardened by wind, rain, and sun; they hurled forth, with the assurance of comedians certain of their wares, witticisms and pleasantries of a humor solid and heavy as that of Molière. The Hercules, proud of the enormousness of their limbs, without forehead, without cranium, stalked majestically about under fleshings fresh washed for the occasion. The dancers, pretty as fairies or as princesses, leapt and cavorted under the flare of lanterns which filled their skirts with sparkles.

All was light, dust, shouting, joy, tumult; some spent, others gained, the one and the other equally joyful. Children clung to their mothers' skirts to obtain a sugar-stick, or climbed upon their fathers' shoulders the better to see a conjurer dazzling as a god. And spread over all, dominating every odor, was a smell of frying, which was the incense of the festival.

At the end, at the extreme end of the row of booths, as if, ashamed, he had exiled himself from all these splendors, I saw an old mountebank, stooped, decrepit, emaciated, a ruin of a man, leaning against one of the pillars of his hut, more wretched than that of the most besotted barbarian, the distress of which two candle ends, guttering and smoking, lighted up only too well.

Everywhere was joy, gain, revelry; everywhere certainty of the morrow's bread; everywhere the frenetic outbursts of vitality. Here, absolute misery, misery bedecked, to crown the horror, in comic tatters, where necessity, rather than art, produced the contrast. He was not laughing, the wretched one! He was not weeping, he was not dancing, he was not gesticulating, he was not crying. He was singing no song, gay or grievous, he was imploring no one. He was mute and immobile. He had renounced, he had withdrawn. His destiny was accomplished.

But what a deep, unforgettable look he cast over the crowd and the lights, the moving stream of which was stemmed a few yards from his repulsive wretchedness! I felt my throat clutched by the terrible hand of hysteria, and it seemed as though glances were clouded by rebellious tears that would not fall.

What was to be done? What good was there in asking the unfortunate what curiosity, what marvel had he to show within those barefaced shades, behind that threadbare curtain? In truth, I dared not; and, although the reason for my timidity will make you laugh, I confess that I was afraid of humiliating him. At length, I had resolved to drop a coin while passing his boards, in the hope that he would divine my purpose, when a great backwash of people, produced by I know not what disturbance, carried me far away.

And leaving, obsessed by the sight, I sought to analyze my sudden sadness, and I said: "I have just seen the image of the aged man of letters, who has survived the generation of which he was the brilliant entertainer; of the old poet, friendless, without family, without child, degraded by his misery and by public ingratitude, into whose booth a forgetful world no longer wants to go!"

THE CLOCK

The Chinese tell the time in the eyes of cats. One day a missionary, walking in the suburbs of Nanking, noticed that he had forgotten his watch, and asked a little boy what time it was.

The youngster of the heavenly Empire hesitated at first; then, carried away by his thought he answered: "I'll tell you." A few moments later he reappeared, bearing in his arms an immense cat, and looking, as they say, into the whites of its eyes, he announced without hesitation: "It's not quite noon." Which was the fact.

As for me, if I turn toward the fair feline, to her so aptly named, who is at once the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart and the fragrance of my mind, be it by night or by day, in the full light or in the opaque shadows, in the depths of her adorable eyes I always tell the time distinctly, always the same, a vast, a solemn hour, large as space, without division of minutes or of seconds,--an immovable hour which is not marked on the clocks, yet is slight as a sigh, is rapid as the lifting of a lash.

And if some intruder comes to disturb me while my glance rests upon that charming dial, if some rude and intolerant genie, some demon of the evil hour, comes to ask: "What are you looking at so carefully? What are you hunting for in the eyes of that being? Do you see the time there, mortal squanderer and do-nothing?" I shall answer, unhesitant: "Yes, I see the time, it is Eternity!"

Is not this, madame, a really worth-while madrigal, just as affected as yourself? Indeed, I have had so much pleasure in embroidering this pretentious gallantry, that I shall ask you for nothing in exchange.

A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS

Let me breathe, long, long, of the odor of your hair, let me plunge my whole face in its depth, as a thirsty man in the waters of a spring, let me flutter it with my hand as a perfumed kerchief, to shake off memories into the air.

If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all that I understand in your hair! My soul journeys on perfumes as the souls of other men on music.

Your hair meshes a full dream, crowded with sails and masts; it holds great seas on which monsoons bear me toward charming climes, where the skies are bluer and deeper, where the atmosphere is perfumed with fruits, with leaves, and with the human skin.

In the ocean of your hair I behold a port humming with melancholy chants, with strong men of all nations and with ships of every form carving their delicate, intricate architecture on an enormous sky where lolls eternal heat.

In the caresses of your hair, I find again the languor of long hours on a divan, in the cabin of a goodly ship, cradled by the unnoticed undulation of the port, between pots of flowers and refreshing water-jugs.

At the glowing hearth-stone of your hair, I breathe the odor of tobacco mixed with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair, I see shine forth the infinite of the tropic sky; on the downy bank-sides of your hair, I grow drunk with the mingled odors of tar and musk, and oil of cocoanut.

Let me bite, long, your thick black hair. When I nibble your springy, rebellious hair, it seems that I am eating memories.

THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR

I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones!

When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill your pockets with little penny contrivances--such as the straight merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail--and, along the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit you have given them, having learned to distrust man.

On a road, behind the rail of a great garden at the foot of which appeared the glitter of a beautiful mansion struck by the sun, stood a pretty, fresh child, clad in those country garments so full of affectation.

Luxury, freedom from care, and the habitual spectacle of wealth, make these children so pretty that one would think them formed of other paste than the sons of mediocrity or of poverty.

Beside him on the grass lay a splendid toy, fresh as its master, varnished, gilt, clad in a purple robe, covered with plumes and beads of glass. But the child was not occupied with his favored plaything, and this is what he was watching:

On the other side of the rail, on the road, among the thistles and the thorns, was another child, puny, dirty, fuliginous, one of those pariah-brats the beauty of which an impartial eye might discover if, as the eye of the connoisseur divines an ideal painting beneath the varnish of the coach-maker, it cleansed him of the repugnant patina of misery.

Across the symbolic bars which separate two worlds, the highway and the mansion, the poor child was showing the rich child his own toy, which the latter examined eagerly, as a rare and unknown object. Now, this toy, which the ragamuffin was provoking, tormenting, tossing in a grilled box, was a live rat! His parents, doubtless for economy, had taken the toy from life itself.

And the two children were laughing together fraternally, with teeth of equal _whiteness_!

THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES

It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed with the repartition of gifts among the new-born who had arrived at life within the last twenty-four hours.

All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny, all these bizarre mothers of sadness and of joy, were most diversified: some had a somber, crabbed air; others were wanton, mischievous; some, young, who had always been young; others old, who had always been old.

All the fathers who believed in fairies had come, each bearing his new-born in his arms.

Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circumstances, were gathered at the side of the tribunal, as prizes on the platform for distribution. What was peculiar here was that the gifts were not the reward of an effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him who had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine his destiny and become as well the source of his misfortune as of his good.

The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd of solicitors was great, and the intermediate world, placed between man and God, is subject, like man, to the terrible law of Time and his endless offspring, Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.

In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an audience day, or as guards at the Mont-de-Piété when a national holiday authorizes gratuitous liberations. I really think that from time to time they looked at the hands of the clock with as much impatience as human judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot help dreaming of dinner, of the family, and of their cherished slippers. If, in supernatural justice, there is a little of haste and of luck, we should not be surprised sometimes to find the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that case, would be unjust judges.

So some shams were enacted that day which might be thought bizarre, if prudence, rather than caprice, were the distinctive, eternal characteristic of the fairies.

For instance, the power of magnetically attracting fortune was awarded the sole heir of a very wealthy family, who, endowed with no feeling of charity, no more than with lust for the most visible goods of life, must later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his millions.

Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were given to the son of a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by trade, who could in no way develop the faculties or satisfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.

All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through; for there remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that human fry, when one fine fellow, a poor little tradesman, I think, rose, and grasping by her robe of multi-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:

"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still my little one! I don't want to have come for nothing!" The fairy could have been embarrassed, for there no longer was a thing. However, she recalled in time a law, well known, though rarely applied, in the supernatural world, inhabited by those impalpable deities, friends, of man and often constrained to mold themselves to his passions, such as Fairies, Gnomes, Salamanders, Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and Undines--I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case similar to this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the prizes, power to give one more, supplementary and exceptional, provided always that she has sufficient imagination to create it at once.

Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-possession worthy of her rank: "I give to your son.... I give him ... _the gift of pleasing!_"

"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked the little shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those logicians so commonly met, incapable of rising to the logic of the Absurd.

"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy, turning her back on him; and, rejoining the train of her companions, she said to them: "What do you think of this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to know everything, and who, having secured for his son the best of gifts, dares still to question and to dispute the indisputable?"

SOLITUDE

A philanthropic journalist once said to me that solitude is harmful to man, and, to support his thesis, he cited--as do all unbelievers--words of the Christian Fathers.

I know that the Demon gladly frequents parched places, and that the spirit of murder and lechery is marvellously inflamed in solitude. But it is possible that solitude is dangerous only to the idle, rambling soul, who peoples it with his passions and his chimeras.

It is certain that a babbler, whose supreme pleasure consists in speaking from a pulpit or a rostrum, would be taking great chances of going stark mad on the island of Crusoe. I do not demand of my journalist the courageous virtues of Robinson, but I ask that he do not summon in accusation lovers of solitude and mystery.

There are in our chattering races individuals who would accept the supreme agony with less reluctance, if they were permitted to deliver a copious harangue from the height of the scaffold, without fear that the drums of Santerre[1] would unseasonably cut short their oration.

I do not pity them, for I guess that their oratorical effusions bring them delights equal to those which others draw from silence and seclusion; but I despise them.

I desire above all that my accursed journalist leave me to amuse myself as I will. "Then you never feel," he says in a very apostolic nasal tone, "the need of sharing your joys?" Do you see the subtle jealous one! He knows that I scorn his, and he comes to insinuate himself into mine, the horrible killjoy!

"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyère says somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves.

"Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine language of my century.

[Footnote 1: Santerre is the general of the French Revolution who ordered his drummers to play, drowning the words of Louis XVI from the scaffold.]

PROJECTS

He said to himself, while strolling in the great lonely park: "How beautiful she would be in an intricate, gorgeous court costume, descending, through the air of a beauteous evening, the marble stairs of a palace, opposite shallow pools and great greenswards. For she has naturally the air of a princess."

Passing along a street somewhat later, he stopped before a print-shop, and finding in a portfolio an engraving of a tropical scene, he said: "No, it is not in a palace that I should like to be master of her beloved life. We would not feel at home. Besides, walls riddled with gold would afford no niche to hold her likeness; in those solemn galleries there is no intimate corner. Decidedly it is _there_ I must live to develop the dream of my life."

And, analyzing the details of the engraving, he continued mentally: "At the edge of the sea, a little log cabin, surrounded by those shiny, bizarre trees, the names of which I have forgotten ... in the air, an indefinable, intoxicating perfume ... in the cabin, a potent fragrance of rose and of musk ... farther off, behind our little domain, mast-tops swaying with the swell ... around us, beyond the room lighted by a roseate glow sifted through the blinds, adorned with fresh matting and intoxicating flowers, with rare benches of Portuguese rococo, of a heavy and shadowy wood (where she will rest, so calm, so gently fanned, smoking tobacco tinged with opium), beyond the timbers of the ships, the racket of the birds drunk with the light, and the chattering of little negresses ... and, at night, to serve as accompaniment to my musings,' the plaintive song of musical trees, of melancholy beef-woods! Yes, in truth, there indeed is the setting that I seek. What have I to do with palaces?"

And still farther, as he followed a great avenue, he noticed a well-kept tavern, from a window of which, enlivened by curtains of checkered prints, two laughing heads leaned forth. And at once: "My fancy," he said, "must be a great vagabond to seek so far what is so near to me. Pleasure and good fortune are in the nearest tavern, in the chance tavern, so rich in happiness. A great fire, gaudy earthenware, a tolerable meal, rough wine, and an enormous bed with cloths somewhat coarse, but fresh; what more could be desired?"

And returning home, alone, at the hour when the counsels of Wisdom are not drowned by the hum of external life, he said: "I have had to-day, in my revery, three dwellings in which I have found equal pleasure. Why constrain my body to move about, when my soul voyages so freely? And to what end carry out projects, when the project itself is a sufficing joy?"

THE LOVELY DOROTHEA

The sun pours down upon the city with its direct and terrible light; the sand is dazzling, and the sea glistens. The stupefied world sinks cowardly down and holds siesta, a siesta which is a sort of delightful death, in which the sleeper, half-awake, enjoys the voluptuousness of his annihilation.

None the less, Dorothea, strong and proud as the sun, advances along the deserted street, alone animated at that hour, under the immense blue sky, forming a startling black spot against the light.

She advances, lightly, balancing her slender trunk upon her so large hips. Her close-fitting silk dress, of a clear, roseate fashion, stands out vividly against the darkness of her skin and is exactly molded to her long figure, her rounded back and her pointed throat.

Her red parasol, sifting the light, throws over her dark face the bloody disguise of its reflection.

The weight of her enormous, blue-black hair draws back her delicate head and gives her a triumphant, indolent bearing. Heavy pendants tinkle quietly at her delicate ears.

From time to time the sea-breeze lifts the hem of her flowing skirt and reveals her shining, superb limbs; and her foot, a match for the feet of the marble goddesses whom Europe locks in its museums, faithfully imprints its form in the fine sand. For Dorothea is such a wondrous coquette, that the pleasure of being admired overcomes the pride of the enfranchised, and, although she is free, she walks without shoes.

She advances thus, harmoniously, glad to be alive, smiling an open smile; as if she saw, far off in space, a mirror reflecting her walk and her beauty.

At the hour when dogs moan with pain under the tormenting sun, what powerful motive can thus draw forth the indolent Dorothea, lovely, and cold as bronze?

Why had she left her little cabin, so coquettishly adorned, the flowers and mats of which make at so little cost a perfect boudoir; where she takes such delight in combing herself, in smoking, in being fanned, or in regarding herself in the mirror with its great fans of plumes; while the sea, which strikes the shore a hundred steps away, shapes to her formless reveries a mighty and monotonous accompaniment, and while the iron pot, in which a ragout of crabs with saffron and rice is cooking, sends after her, from the courtyard, its stimulating perfumes?

Perhaps she has a rendezvous with some young officer, who, on far distant shores, heard his comrades talk of the renowned Dorothea. Infallibly she will beg him, simple creature, to describe to her the Bal de l'Opéra, and will ask him if one can go there barefoot, as to the Sunday dances, where the old Kaffir women themselves get drunk and mad with joy; and then, too, whether the lovely ladies of Paris are all lovelier than she.

Dorothea is admired and pampered by all, and she would be perfectly happy if she were not obliged to amass piastre on piastre to buy back her little sister, who is now fully eleven, and who is already mature, and so lovely! She will doubtless succeed, the good Dorothea; the child's master is so miserly, too miserly to understand another beauty than that of gold.

THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY

As we were moving away from the tobacconist's, my companion carefully sorted his money: in the left pocket of his waistcoat he slipped little gold pieces; in the right, little silver pieces; in the left pocket of his trousers, a mass of coppers, and finally, in the right, a silver two-franc pieces that he had particularly examined.

"Singular and minute distribution!" I said to myself.

We came across a pauper who, trembling, held forth his cap.--I know nothing more disquieting than the dumb eloquence of those suppliant eyes which hold, for the sensitive man who can read within, both so great humility and so deep reproach. Something lies there which approaches that depth of complex feeling in the tearful eyes of dogs that are being flogged.

The offering of my friend was much more considerable than mine, and I said to him: "You are right; after the pleasure of being astonished, none is greater than that of creating a surprise."--"It was the counterfeit," he answered tranquilly, as though to justify his prodigality.

But in my miserable brain, always busied seeking noon at two p.m. (of such a wearying faculty has nature made me a gift!), the idea suddenly came that such conduct, on the part of my friend, was excusable only by the desire to produce an occasion in the life of the poor devil, perhaps even to know the diverse consequences, disastrous or otherwise, that a counterfeit in the hands of a mendicant can engender. Could it not multiply itself in valid pieces? Could it not also lead him to jail? A tavern-keeper, a baker, for example, might perhaps have him arrested as a forger or a spreader of counterfeits. Quite as well the counterfeit coin might be, for a poor little speculator, the germ of a several days' wealth. And so my fancy ran its course, lending wings to the spirit of my friend and drawing all possible deductions from all imaginable hypotheses.

But he abruptly burst my revery asunder by taking up my own words: "Yes, you are right: there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he expected."

I looked into the whites of his eyes, and I was frightened to see that his eyes shone with an undeniable candor. I then saw clearly that he wished to combine charity and a good stroke of business; to gain forty sous and the heart of God; to sweep into Paradise economically; in short, to entrap gratis the brevet of charitable man.

I would almost have pardoned in him the desire of the criminal joy of which I had just now thought him capable! I would have thought it curious, singular, that he found it amusing to compromise the poor; but I shall never pardon the ineptitude of his calculation. One is never to be forgiven for being wicked, but there is some merit in being conscious that one is;--the most irreparable of all evils is to do wrong through stupidity.

THE GENEROUS PLAYER

Yesterday, in the crowd of the boulevard, I felt myself grazed by a mysterious Being whom I have always wished to know, and whom I recognized at once, though I had never seen him. He doubtless had a similar wish to make my acquaintance, for he gave me a significant wink in passing which I hastened to obey. I followed him attentively, and soon I descended behind him into a resplendent subterranean abode, where sparkled a luxury that none of the better homes in Paris can nearly approach. It seemed odd to me that I could have passed by this enchanting den so often without divining the entrance. There reigned an exquisite, though heady atmosphere, which made one forget almost at once all the fastidious horrors of life; there one breathed a somber blessedness, similar to that which the lotus-eaters experienced when, disembarking on an enchanted isle, bright with the glimmerings of eternal afternoon, they felt growing within them, to the drowsy sound of melodious cascades, the desire never to see again their hearthstones, their wives, their children, and never to remount the high surges of the sea.

Strange visages of men and women were there, marked with a fatal beauty, which it seemed to me I had already seen in epochs and in lands I could not precisely recall, and which inspired me rather with a fraternal sympathy than with that fear which is usually born at sight of the unknown. If I wished to try to define in any way the singular expression of these visages, I should say that I had never seen eyes burning more feverishly with dread of ennui and with the immortal desire of feeling themselves alive.

My host and I were already, when we sat down, old and perfect friends. We ate, we drank beyond measure of all sorts of extraordinary wines, and--what was no less extraordinary--it seemed to me, after several hours, that I was no more drunken than he. Play, that superhuman pleasure, had meanwhile irregularly interrupted our frequent libations, and I must say that I staked and lost my soul, at the rubber, with heroic heedlessness and lightness. The soul is so impalpable a thing, so often useless and sometimes so annoying, that I experienced, at its loss, a little less emotion than if, on a walk, I had misplaced my visiting card. For a long time we smoked some cigars the incomparable savor and perfume of which gave the soul nostalgia for unknown lands and joys, and, intoxicated with all these delights, I dared, in an access of familiarity which seemed not to displease him, to cry, while mastering a cup full to the brim: "To your immortal health, old Buck!"

We talked, also, of the universe, of its creation and of its future destruction; of the great idea of the century, namely, progress and perfectibility; and, in general, of all forms of human infatuation. On this subject, His Highness never exhausted his fund of light and irrefutable pleasantries, and he expressed himself with an easy flow of speech and a quietness in his drollery that I have found in none of the most celebrated causeurs of humanity. He explained to me the absurdity of the different philosophies which have hitherto taken possession of the human brain, and deigned even to confide to me certain fundamental principles, the property and the benefits of which it does not suit me to share with the casual comer. He did not in any way be-moan the bad deputation which he enjoys in all parts of the world, assured me that he himself was the person most interested in the destruction of _superstition_, and confessed that he had never feared for his own power save once, on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than his colleagues, cry from the pulpit: "My dear brethren, never forget, when you hear the progress of wisdom vaunted, that the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!"

The memory of this celebrated orator led us naturally to the subject of the academies, and my strange companion stated that he did not disdain, in many cases, to inspire the pen, the word, and the conscience of pedagogs, and that he was almost always present, though invisible, at the academic sessions.

Encouraged by so many kindnesses, I asked him for news of God, and whether he had recently seen Him. He answered, with a carelessness shaded with a certain sadness: "We greet one another when we meet, but as two old gentlemen, in whom an innate politeness cannot extinguish the memory of ancient bitterness."

It is doubtful that His Highness had ever granted so long an audience to a plain mortal, and I was afraid of abusing it. Finally, as the shivering dawn whitened the panes, this famous personage, sung by so many poets and served by so many philosophers who have worked unknowingly for his glory, said to me: "I want to leave you with a pleasant memory of me, and to prove that I, of whom so much ill is said, I can sometimes be a _good devil_, to make use of one of your common phrases. In order to compensate for the irremediable loss of your soul, I shall give you the stakes you would have won had fate been with you, namely, the possibility of relieving and of conquering, all through your life, that odd affection of ennui which is the source of all your maladies and of all your wretched progress. Never shall a desire be framed by you which I will not aid you to realize; you shall reign over your vulgar fellow-men; you shall be stocked with flattery, even with adoration; silver, gold, diamonds, fairylike palaces, shall come seeking you and shall pray you to accept them, without your having made an effort to attain them; you shall change fatherland and country as often as your fancy may dictate; you shall riot in pleasures, unwearying, in charming countries where it is always warm and where the women are fragrant as the flowers--et cetera, et cetera ..." he added, rising and taking leave of me with a pleasant smile.

If I had not been afraid of humiliating myself before so vast an assemblage, I should gladly have fallen at the feet of this generous player to thank him for his unheard of munificence. But little by little, after I had left him, incurable distrust reentered my breast; I dared no longer believe in such prodigious good fortune, and, on going to bed, still saying my prayers through silly force of habit, I repeated in semi-slumber: "My God! Lord, my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his word!"

THE ROPE

To Edward Manet

Illusions, my friend told me, are perhaps as numberless as the relations of men with one another, or of men to things. And when the illusion disappears, that is, when we see the being or the fact as it exists outside of us, we undergo a strange feeling, a complex half of regret for the vanished phantom, half of agreeable surprise before the novelty, before the real fact. If one phenomenon exists that is trite, evident, always the same, concerning, the nature of which it is impossible to be deceived, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to imagine a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it not then perfectly legitimate to attribute to maternal love all the words and actions of a mother, relating to her child? None the less hear this little story, in which I was singularly mystified by the most natural illusion.

"My profession of painter drives me to regard attentively the visages, the physiognomies, which present themselves on my way, and you know what joy we derive from this faculty which renders life more vivid and significant in our eyes than for other men. In the secluded section where I live, and where great grassy spaces still separate the buildings, I often observed a child whose ardent and roguish countenance, more than all the rest, won me straightway. He posed for me more than once, and I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now into an angel, now into mythological Love. I made him bear the violin of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. At length, I took so lively a pleasure in all the drollery of the youngster, that one day I begged his parents, poor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promising to clothe him well, to give him money and not to impose on him any task beyond cleaning my brushes and running my errands. The child, with his face washed, became charming, and the life he led with me seemed a paradise, compared to that he had undergone in the parental hovel. Only I must say that the little fellow astonished me at times by singular spells of precocious sadness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste for sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when I found that, despite my numerous warnings, he had again been doing some pilfering of that sort, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I went out, and my business kept me away for quite some time.

"What was my surprise and horror when, reëntering the house, the first object that met my eyes was my little fellow, the frolicsome companion of my life, hanging from the panel of the closet! His feet almost touched the floor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent convulsively over one shoulder; his bloated face, and his eyes, quite wide open with a fearful fixity, gave at first the illusion of life. To take him down was not so easy a business as you might think. He was already quite stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance to letting him fall heavily to the floor. It was necessary to bear his whole weight on one arm, and, with the free hand, to cut the rope. But that accomplished, all was not yet done; the little monster had made use of a very slender twine which had entered deep into his flesh, and I must now, with delicate scissors, seek the cord between the two cushions of the swelling, to disengage the neck.

"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously for help; but all my neighbors refused to come to my assistance, faithful in that to the habits of civilized man, who never wishes, I know not why, to mix in the affairs of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came, who said that the child had been dead several hours. When, later, we had to disrobe him for burial, the cadaverous rigidity was such that, despairing of bending his limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to remove them."

"The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to announce the casualty, looked at me askew and said to me: 'Here's something suspicious,' moved doubtless by an inveterate desire and a professional habit of frightening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty.

"There remained a supreme task to perform, the thought of which alone gave me a terrible anguish: I had to notify the parents. My feet refused to guide me to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to my great astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed from the corner of her eye. I attributed that strangeness to the very horror she must feel, and I recalled the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible sorrows are silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself with saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive: 'After all, it is perhaps for the best; he would always have come to a bad end!'

"However, the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the mother entered my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of her son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of her grief and refuse her that supreme and somber consolation. Then she begged me to show her the place where her little one had hanged himself. 'Oh no, madam' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And as my eyes turned involuntarily toward the fatal cupboard, I perceived, with disgust mingled with horror and wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the casing, with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to snatch away the last traces of the misfortune, and as I was going to hurl them out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in an irresistible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you! I beseech you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it seemed to me, so frantic that she was now overcome with tenderness toward that which had served her son as the instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as a dear and horrible relic.--And she took possession of the nail and of the twine.

"At last! At last! all was accomplished. There remained only to set myself back at work, even more strenuously than usual, to drive out gradually the little corpse that haunted the recesses of my brain, the phantom of which wore me out with its great fixed eyes. But the next day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodgers in the house, several others from neighboring houses; one from the first floor, another from the second, another from the third, and so throughout! some in semi-humorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath an apparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others, grossly shameless and without spelling; but all tending to the same goal, namely, to securing from me a bit of the fatal and beatific rope. Among the signers were, I must say, more women than men; but not all, I assure you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the letters.

"And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and I understood why the mother was so very anxious to wrest the twine from me, and by what traffic she meant to be consoled."

CALLINGS

In a beautiful garden where the rays of the autumnal sun seemed to linger with delight, under a sky already greenish, in which golden clouds floated like voyaging continents, four fine children, four boys, doubtless tired of playing, were chatting away.

One said: "Yesterday I was taken to the theatre. In great, sad palaces, where in the background spread the sea and the sky, men and women, also serious and sad, but much more beautiful and much better dressed than any we see about, were talking with musical voices. They threatened one another, they entreated, they were disconsolate, and often they rested a hand on a dagger sunk within the sash. Ah! that is beautiful indeed! The women are much more beautiful and much greater than those that come to the house to visit us, and although with their great hollow eyes and their fiery cheeks they have a terrible look, you can not help loving them. You are afraid, you want to cry, and still you are content.... And then, what is stranger still, it all makes you want to be dressed the same, to say and to do the same things, to speak with the same voice...."

One of the four children, who for several moments had no longer been listening to his comrade's talk, and had been watching with surprising fixity some point or other in the sky, said all at once: "Look, look down there! Do you see _Him_? He is sitting on that little isolated cloud, that little fiery cloud, which is moving slowly. _He_ too, they say, He watches us."

"Who? Who?" asked the others.

"God!" he answered, with the accent of perfect conviction.--"Ah! He is already quite far away; by and by you will not be able to see Him. Doubtless He is traveling to visit every land. Look, He is going to pass in back of that line of trees near the horizon..., and now He is going down behind the steeple.... Ah! you can't see Him any longer!" And the child remained for some time turned in the same direction, fixing on the line which separates earth from the sky eyes in which burned an inexpressible glow of ecstasy and regret.

"He is a fool, that one, with his good God, whom he alone can see!" then said the third, whose whole person was marked with a singular vivacity and life. "_I_ am going to tell you how something happened to me which has never happened to you, and which is a little more interesting than your theatre and your clouds.... Several days ago my parents took me on a trip with them, and as the inn where we stopped didn't have enough beds for all of us, it was decided that I should sleep in the same bed as my nursery maid." He drew his comrades quite close and spoke in a lower tone. "That was a strange performance, now! not to sleep alone, and to be in bed with your maid, in the dark. As I couldn't sleep, I amused myself, while she was sleeping, by passing my hand over her arms, her neck, and her shoulders. She has a much thicker neck and arm than all other women, and her skin is so soft, so soft, that you might call it note-paper or silver paper. I liked it so much that I should have kept on for a long time, if I hadn't been afraid, afraid at first of waking her, and then still afraid of I don't know what. Then I buried my head in the hair which lay down her back, thick as a mane, and it smelled just as good, I assure you, as the flowers in the garden, right now. Try, when you can, to do as much, and you will see!"

The young author of this prodigious revelation, in telling his story, had his eyes wide open in a sort of stupefaction at what he still felt, and the rays of the setting sun, slipping across the sandy locks of his ruffled hair, illumined it like a sulphurous aureole of passion. It was easy to guess that this youngster would not lose his life seeking Divinity in the clouds, and that he would frequently discover it elsewhere.