Chapter II: Part 2

“Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant. This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house, and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find it, no one can accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or I will call the police. Make haste!”

“All right,” said the voice of the householder; “we’ll search with Maria. So much the worse if you find nothing, and if the masons get angry. It is you who have forced me to it.”

Jean François felt his heart fill with fear. He recalled the poverty and the petty borrowings of Savinien, the sombre manner he had borne the last few days. Yet he could not believe in any theft. He heard the panting of the man from Auvergne in the ardor of his search, and he clenched his fists against his breast as if to repress the beatings of his heart.

“There they are!” suddenly screamed the victorious miser. “There they are, my louis, my dear treasure! And in the Sunday waistcoat of that little hypocrite from Limoges. Look, landlord! they are just as I told you. There’s the Napoleon, and the man with the queue, and the Philippe I had dented with my teeth. Look at the mark. Ah, the little rascal with his saintly look! I should more likely have suspected the other. Ah, the villain! He will have to go to the galleys!”

At this moment Jean François heard the well-known step of Savinien, who was slowly mounting the stairs.

“He is going to his betrayal,” thought he. “Three flights. I have time!”

And, pushing open the door, he entered, pale as death, into the room where he saw the landlord and the stupefied servant in a corner, and the man from Auvergne on his knees amid the disordered clothes, lovingly kissing his gold pieces.

“Enough of this,” he said in a thick voice. “It is I who have taken the money and who have put it in my comrade’s trunk. But that is too disgusting. I am a thief and not a Judas. Go hunt for the police. I’ll not try to save myself. Only, I must say a word in private to Savinien, who is here.”

The little man from Limoges had, in fact, just arrived, and, seeing his crime discovered, and believing himself lost, he stood still, his eyes fixed, his arms drooping.

Jean François seized him violently about the neck as though to embrace him; he pressed his mouth to Savinien’s ear and said to him in a voice low and supplicating:

“Be quiet!”

Then, turning to the others:

“Leave me alone with him. I shall not go away, I tell you. Shut us up, if you wish, but leave us alone.”

And, with a gesture of command, he showed them the door. They went out.

Savinien, broken with anguish, had seated himself on a bed, and dropped his eyes without comprehending.

“Listen,” said Jean François, who approached to take his hands. “I understand you have stolen three gold pieces to buy some trifle for a girl. That would have cost six months of prison for you. But one does not get out of that except to go back again, and you would have become a pillar of the police tribunals and the courts of assizes. I know all about them. I have done seven years in the Reform School, one year at Sainte-Pélagie, three years at Poissy, and five years at Toulon. Now, have no fear. All is arranged. I have taken this affair on my shoulders.”

“Unhappy fellow!” cried Savinien; but hope was already coming back to his cowardly heart.

“When the elder brother is serving under the colors, the younger does not go,” Jean François went on. “I’m your substitute, that’s all. You love me a little, do you not? I am paid. Do not be a baby. Do not refuse. They would have caught me one of these days, for I have broken my exile. And then, you see, that life out there will be less hard for me than for you; I know it, and shall not complain if I do not render you this service in vain and if you swear to me that you will not do it again. Savinien, I have loved you well, and your friendship has made me very happy, for it is thanks to my knowing you that I have kept honest and straight, as I might always have been, perhaps, if I had had, like you, a father to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach me my prayers. My only regret was that I was useless to you and that I was deceiving you about my past. To-day I lay aside the mask in saving you. It is all right. Come, good-by! Do not weep; and embrace me, for already I hear the big boots on the stairs. They are returning with the police; and we must not seem to know each other so well before these fellows.”

He pressed Savinien hurriedly to his breast, and then he pushed him away as the door opened wide.

It was the landlord and the man from Auvergne, who were bringing the police. Jean François started forward to the landing and held out his hands for the handcuffs and said, laughing:

“Forward, bad lot!”

To-day he is at Cayenne, condemned for life, as an incorrigible.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Revolutionary songs of '93.

[3] _Tu_--Thou--used only in familiar address.

[4] Police headquarters.

[5] “The California” is a cheap eating-house in Paris.

[6] In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give exemption.

[7] Literally, climbing and breaking in.

[8] A receiver of stolen goods.

[9] Stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.

[10] A northwest wind on the Mediterranean.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT, REALIST

The inflexible realist in fiction can be faithful only to what he sees; and what he sees is inevitably colored by the lens of his real self. For the literary observer of life there is no way of falsifying the reports which his senses, physical and moral, make to his own brain. If he wishes, he may make alterations in transcribing for his readers, but in so doing he confesses to himself a departure from truth as he sees it.

Pure realism, then, demands of its apostle both a faithful observation of life and a faithful statement of what he sees. True, the realist uses his artist’s privilege of selecting those facts of life which seem best suited to picturing his characters in their natures, their persons, and their careers, for he knows that many irrelevant, confusing, and contradictory things happen in the everyday lives of everyday men. So in point of practice his realism is not so uncompromising as his theories sound when baldly stated.

How near any great artist’s transcriptions of life approach to absolute truth will always be a question, both because we none of us know what is final truth, and because realists, each seeing life through his own nature, will disagree among themselves just as widely as their temperaments, their predispositions, and their experiences vary. Thus we are left to the common sense for our standards, and to this common sense we may with some confidence appeal for a judgment.

Guy de Maupassant was a realist. “The writer’s eye,” he says in _Sur l’Eau_, “is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything; like a pickpocket’s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures, intentions, everything that goes on in his presence--the slightest look, the least act, the merest trifle.”

But Maupassant was more than a realist--he was an artist, a realistic artist, frank and wise enough to conform his theories to his own efficient literary practice. He saw as a realist, selected as an artist, and then was uncompromising in his literary presentation.

Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three always summed up five--his temperament would not allow for the unseen, imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny the superstitious solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However, Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been.

Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes, and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was incomplete, morbid, and unnatural.

Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love, with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,--days, nights, rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of woman; for all these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my eyes and my heart.”

But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have already intimated that he was biased--as similarly we all are biased--by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice; rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal, the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the spiritual--for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.

Persistently refusing to give to the public any record of his life, he dwelt, as it were, behind closed doors. No soul, he held, could enter into the life of another soul, so he had no real intimates, and those who called him friend and knew the frank charm of his manner discussed with him mainly impersonal themes. Thus in spite of importunities he gave no encouragement to that impertinent curiosity which avidly seizes upon the details of an author’s private life and flaunts it to a gaping public. We, then, are concerned with Maupassant’s temperament and personal career only in so far as they color his work.

Born in Normandy in 1850, he passed his youth in that charming section where he has laid the scenes of many of his provincial narratives. The picturesque Norman characters, the narrow-browed country life, the colorful phases of town, market, and church, appear with intaglio clearness in a thousand wonderfully-wrought settings. The sordid and ungracious bourgeoisie with whom he came most in contact predominate in these stories, just as his strenuous days as an oarsman live again in his aquatic tales, and his life as a minor clerk in the government and his experiences as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War are used for material in other stories. It was his later life in the Capital that gave him his knowledge of society life, and of the underworld peopled by courtesan and roué.

The gifted Flaubert, as everyone knows, left a profound impress upon his young nephew, Maupassant, who served under him a literary apprenticeship at once rigid and productive. It was Flaubert who taught the man of thirty to seek for the one inevitably fitting word, made him tear up early poems, plays, and stories, taught him to suppress relentlessly all his unformed work, until, full panoplied, he sprang into being as a brilliant maker of artistic fictions.

His later years--he died by his own hand in 1893 at the age of forty-three--were darkened by the approaching madness which he so terribly pictures in “The Horla.” In _Bel Ami_ he writes:

“There comes a day, you know, when no matter what you are looking at, you see Death lurking behind it.... As for me, for the last fifteen years I have felt the torment of it, as if I were carrying a gnawing beast. I have felt it dragging me down, little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house that is crumbling away.... Each step I take brings me nearer to it, every moment that passes, every breath I draw, hurries on its odious work.... Breathing, sleeping, eating, drinking, working, dreaming,--everything we do is simply dying by inches.... Now I see it so near that I often stretch out my arm to thrust it back!”

But under the shadow of this terrible phantasm as he was, latterly his cold, unsympathetic scrutiny of men and things had warmed somewhat, and his latest writings--his productive period covers only about ten intensely active years--show more gentleness, more sympathy with struggling humanity. But never did he really depart from the morbid and cynical view of life, and the horror of death as the final breakdown of all things desirable, which showed so plainly in most of his fictions.

If we see but little of Guy de Maupassant’s life in his writings, it is to them we must turn to discover his temperament and his philosophy--glimpses of which we have already had.

Absolutely French, almost a typical Latin, Maupassant was not unemotional; he merely refused to allow _his_ emotions to color the characters he delineated. He was himself a passionate pleasure-seeker, determined to extract the last drop of satisfaction from life, but he erred in thinking that one may at the same time drain the cup of mental joys and that of physical pleasures. What wonder that this vampire, in love with the blood of life, should suck final poison whence he had thought to draw only pulsing bliss. His very repressions supplied power for each fresh explosion of private excess--yet always the cold precision of his artistry grew, until the perfection of his chiselling left critics wordless. The deft maker of word-masterpieces never lost the artist in the man.

According to this warped genius, life was intended to amuse, to gratify self. Inner beauty he scouted--the beauty of the seen he adored. For such a nature the ideal existed only as a foolish figment. Even ideal love he scouted, depicting with relentless fidelity the sins of a mother as discovered by her loving children, the universal laxity of the Norman peasants as condoned by complacent priests, the ravishing of every illusion, the degradation of every virtue. What other conclusion was there for so sad, so hopeless, so pitiless, so materialistic, a philosophy, than _What’s the use!_

But if there was little of apparent beauty in our author’s character, it is impossible not to admire his industry, his will, his passionate devotion to a perfect art, his relentless literary fidelity to truth as he saw it, his magic mastery of diction and of dialogue, his incisive though unmoral analysis of character and life, his constant advance in craftsmanship to the end. To turn out something beautiful in form was to him worth a lifetime of effort. How great would he have grown had his eyes been opened to the inner light!

I have chosen his _Clair de Lune_ for presentation here because it more nearly approaches spiritual beauty than any other of his stories. It needs no commentary--it speaks its own beauties in tones subtly delicate yet silver clear.

MOONLIGHT
(_CLAIR DE LUNE_)

By Guy de Maupassant

_Done into English by the Editor_

The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His will, His purposes.

As with long strides he promenaded the garden walk of his little country presbytery, sometimes a question would arise in his mind: “Why did God create that?” And, mentally taking the place of God, he searched obstinately for the answer--and nearly always found it. It would not have been like him to murmur, in an outburst of pious humility: “O Lord, thy designs are impenetrable!” Rather might he say to himself: “I am the servant of God; I ought to know the reasons for what He does, or if I know them not, I ought to divine them.”

To him, all nature seemed created with a logic as absolute as it was admirable. The “wherefore” and the “because” always corresponded perfectly. Dawn was made to gladden our waking, the day to ripen the crops, the rain to water them, the evening to prepare for slumber, and the night darkened for sleep.

The four seasons met perfectly all the needs of agriculture; and to the priest it was quite inconceivable that nature had no designs, and that, on the contrary, all living things were subjects of the same inexorable laws of period, climate, and matter.

But he did hate woman! He hated her unconscionably, and by instinct held her in contempt. Often did he repeat the words of Christ, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” And he would add, “One might think that God Himself did not feel quite content with this one work of his hands!” To him, indeed, woman was the child twelve times unclean of whom the poet speaks. She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who constantly kept up her work of damnation--she was a feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous creature. And even more than her accursed body did he hate her loving spirit.

He had often felt that women were regarding him tenderly, and even though he knew himself to be invulnerable, it exasperated him to recognize that need for loving which fluttered ever-present in their hearts.

In his opinion, God had created woman only to tempt man and to test him. She should never be even approached without those defensive measures which one would take, and those fears which one would harbor, when nearing a trap. In fact, she was precisely like a trap, with her lips open and arms extended towards man.

Only toward nuns did he exercise any indulgence, for they were rendered harmless by their vow. But he treated them harshly just the same, because, ever-living in the depths of their pent-up and humbled hearts, he discerned that everlasting tenderness which constantly surged up toward him, priest though he was.

Of all this he was conscious in their upturned glances, more limpid with pious feeling than the looks of monks; in the spiritual exaltations in which their sex indulged; in their ecstasies of love toward Christ, which made the priest indignant because it was really woman’s love, carnal love. Of this detestable tenderness he was conscious, too, in their very docility, in the gentleness of their voices when they addressed him, in their downcast eyes, and in their submissive tears when he rudely rebuked them.

So he would shake his cassock when he left the convent door, and stride off, stretching his legs as if fleeing before some danger.

Now the Abbé had a niece who lived with her mother in a little house near by. He was determined to make of her a sister of charity.

She was pretty, giddy, and a born tease. When he preached at her, she laughed; and when he became angry with her, she kissed him vehemently, pressing him to her bosom, while he would instinctively seek to disengage himself from this embrace--which, all the same, gave him a thrill of exquisite joy, awaking deep within his soul that feeling of fatherhood which slumbers in every man.

Often as they walked together along the footpaths through the fields, he would talk with her of God, of his God; but she scarcely heard him, for she was looking at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy of life which beamed from her eyes. Sometimes she would dart away to catch some flying creature, crying as she brought it back: “See, my uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And that passion to kiss insects, or lilac flowers, disturbed, irritated, and repelled the priest, who recognized even in that longing the ineradicable love which blooms perennial in the heart of woman.

And now one day the sacristan’s wife, who was the Abbé Marignan’s housekeeper, cautiously told him that his niece had a lover!

He was dreadfully shocked, and stood gasping for breath, lather all over his face, for he was shaving.

When at length he was able to think and speak, he cried: “It is not true. You are lying, Mélanie!”

But the peasant woman laid her hand over her heart: “May our Lord judge me if I am lying, _monsieur le curé_. I tell you she goes out to him every night as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other down by the river. You need only go there between ten o’clock and midnight to see for yourself.”

He stopped rubbing his chin and began pacing the room violently, as was his custom in times of serious thought. When at length he did try to finish his shaving he cut himself three times, from nose to ear.

All day long he was silent, though almost exploding with indignation and wrath. To his priestly rage against the power of love was now added the indignation of a spiritual father, of a teacher, of the guardian of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, and trifled with by a mere child. He felt that egotistical suffocation which parents experience when their daughter tells them that she has selected a husband without their advice and in defiance of their wishes.

After dinner he tried to read a little, but he could not--he grew more and more exasperated. When the clock struck ten, he grasped his cane, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he went out at night to visit the sick. With a smile he examined this huge cudgel, gripped it in his solid, countryman’s fist, and flourished it menacingly in the air. Then, suddenly, with grinding teeth, he brought it down upon a chair-back, which fell splintered to the floor.

He opened his door to go out; but paused upon the threshold, surprised by such a glory of moonlight as one rarely sees.

And as he was endowed with an exalted soul of such a sort as the Fathers of the Church, those poetic seers, must have possessed, he became suddenly entranced, moved by the grand and tranquil beauty of the pale-faced night.

In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed breath--the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear night.

He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost forgotten.

When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams without thought--that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with kisses.

The Abbé moved on again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted--he longed to sit down, to linger there, to glorify God for all His works.

A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light transparent down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and transmuted by them into gleaming silver.

The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.

And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.

Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset? And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb--why was it come to illuminate all the shades?

Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like the others, instead of singing in the unquiet dark?

Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?

Why this show of charms, never seen by men because they are asleep? For whose eyes was all this sublime spectacle designed, all this wealth of poetic loveliness diffused from heaven over the earth?

And the Abbé did not understand it at all.

But there below, at the very edge of the field, under the arching trees wet with luminous mist, two shadows appeared, walking side by side.

The man was the taller, and had his arm about his sweetheart’s neck; and from time to time he bent to kiss her forehead. Suddenly they animated the lifeless landscape, which enveloped their figures like a divine frame fashioned expressly for them. They seemed, those two, like a single being, the being for whom was created this tranquil, silent night. Like a living answer, the answer which his Master had sent to his question, they moved toward the priest.

Overwhelmed, his heart throbbing, he stood still, and it seemed as though there spread before him some Biblical scene, like the loves of Ruth and Boaz, the working out of the Lord’s will in one of those majestic dramas set forth in the lives of the saints. The verses of the Song of Songs, the ardent cries, the call of the body--all the glowing romance of that poem so aflame with tenderness and love, began to sing itself into his mind.

And he said to himself: “Perhaps God made nights such as this in order to cast the veil of the ideal over the loves of men.”

He withdrew before this pair who went ever arm in arm. True, it was his niece; but now he asked himself if he had not been upon the verge of disobeying God. And, indeed, if God did not permit love, why did he visibly encompass it with glory such as this?

And he fled, bewildered, almost ashamed, as if he had penetrated into a temple wherein he had no right to enter.

ALPHONSE DAUDET, MAN AND ARTIST

When the gods parceled out their gifts, to Alphonse Daudet fell a rich endowment: a poet’s imaginative nature, yet withal a clear vision for realities which is often denied the disciple of poesy; a sure dramatic instinct, too, with a contrasting power of repression which checked his slightest tendency toward the florid and the melodramatic; and, coloring all, a native sense of humor so tenderly sympathetic that it prevented his satire from biting with that acid sharpness of which his wit was capable. An all-round, well-poised literary genius was he, efficient in many fields, and preëminent in more than one.

There is one word of all the happy many which, in the opinion of all his critics, fitly characterizes Daudet--he possessed charm, charm of manner personally and charm of literary style. I wish his portrait were before us here, that we might trace in that striking countenance the record of those fascinating qualities of mind and heart which are so patent in his life and work.

As for his person, from boyhood his hair grew in that untamed profusion which we so often associate with strong individuality, and even in later life he wore his locks long and full. His beard was silky, and unrestrained rather than unkempt. Near-sighted eyes, peering from behind the inevitable black-rimmed _pince nez_, or at times a monocle, seemed curious and inquiring, typifying perfectly the spirit of naïve interest with which he looked out on life to observe its myriad moods and forms. In this look there was something reflective, too, as though he had just noticed a matter of unusual interest, and was inwardly speculating upon its further meanings. The nose was pleasure-loving, though robust, dignified, and individual--counteracted upon by the satirical mouth, whose sarcasm, in turn, was gently toned by twinkling furrows that flanked his eyes. In later days the sharpness of Daudet’s expression of mouth had been almost lost, and a gentle detachment, betokening a just but sympathetic critical spirit, marked his countenance and made it less keen than lovable. Yet it was in those later years that his cherished hatred for the French Academy led to the bitter satirical outburst against that institution in his novel, _The Immortal_ (1888). But that was only one phase temporarily dominant in the man whom everyone loved and who himself loved all.

Alphonse Daudet was--especially in youth--the exponent of the south, the south as typified by his native Provence. His was the rich, effusive, impressionable southland nature--abundantly moved upon by all the southern charm and vivacity and naïveté and life, as well as richly gifted in the ability to reproduce those impressions in the pages of his writings. Then what more natural than that he should both personally and in his fiction embody the vivid life of the carefree land? When, in 1869, his first important volume of collected stories appeared, it was seen that into _Letters from My Mill_--which included “The Pope’s Mule”--Daudet had poured not only the young unspoiled richness of his own buoyancy, but also the fulness of his feeling for local landscapes, traditions, and characters of town and country. And again and again, even in his later work, Daudet reverts to the scenes of his boyhood life, and gives us pictures--now jocund as the wine of the country, now sad as a poet’s wail--whose tone and spirit are of the Provençal life, all delicately set in the atmosphere of that sunny clime.

In the _History of My Books_, which forms an integral part of the author’s _Thirty Years in Paris_, he takes us by the hand in his dear, intimate way and shows us the great white house, the ancient and unique manor of Montauban. Near by, its shattered wings swaying in the wind on the summit of a little pine-clad mountain, stands _Mon Moulin_--the windmill about whose dusty portals for centuries had gathered the quaint characters of the district, and where, now that its traffic was forever departed, the young Alphonse first began to distinguish man from man in the stories told him by the ancients of the province.

“Excellent people, blessed house!” he writes. “How often have I repaired thither in the winter to recuperate in the embrace of nature, to heal myself of Paris and its fevers in the wholesome emanations of our little Provençal hills.”

The greetings of old friends at an end, he would whistle to Miracle, a venerable spaniel some fisherman had once found on a bit of wreckage at sea, and climb up to his mill, there to browse and dream and wander in fancy whithersoever the spirits of the place should beckon.

“The mill was a ruin,” he says; “a crumbling mass of stone, iron, and ancient boards which had not turned in the wind for many years, and which lay, with broken limbs, as useless as a poet, while all around on the hillside the miller’s trade prospered and ground and ground with all its wings. Strange affinities subsist between ourselves and inanimate objects. From the first day, that cast-off structure was dear to my heart; I loved it for its desolation, its road overgrown with weeds, those little grayish, fragrant mountain weeds with which Père Gaucher compounded his elixir; for its little worn platform where it was so pleasant to loiter, sheltered from the wind, while a rabbit hurried by, or a long snake, rustling among the leaves with crafty detours, hunted the field mice with which the ruin swarmed. With the creaking of the old building shaken by the north wind, the flapping of its wings like the rigging of a ship at sea, the mill stirred in my poor, restless, nomadic brain memories of journeys by sea, of landings at lighthouses and far-off islands; and the shivering swell all about completed the illusion. I know not whence I derived this taste for wild and desert places which has characterized me from my childhood, and which seems so inconsistent with the exuberance of my nature, unless it be at the same time the physical need of repairing by a fast from words, by abstinence from outcries and gestures, the terrible waste which the southerner makes of his whole being. Be that as it may, I owe a great deal to those places of refuge for the mind; and no one of them has been more salutary in its effect upon me than that old mill in Provence.”

Here, both in boyhood and in young manhood’s revisitations, Daudet found the “grasshopper’s library,” and in its secret alcoves discovered such delightful stories as “The Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The Goat of Monsieur Seguin,” “Master Cornille’s Secret,” and “The Old Folks,” all abounding in naïve character and told with his own delicate charm. Here, too, he learned to take a delight in his craft which waned not with the years; and to find joy in pleasing “the people,” who were ever the subjects of his finest delineations.

Born at Nîmes in 1840, and as a mere lad leaving home for the city of Lyons, Daudet’s public career began with his journey to Paris in November, 1857. The boy of seventeen and a half came possessed of a slender collection of poems which, though the product of so youthful a rhymester, met with no little favor. In manner common to those who must win their way along the precarious paths of letters, he pressed on, until in 1859--he being not yet twenty--Daudet published his first volume of poems, _Les Amoureuses_, which won high praise from the critics, but is now sought chiefly by collectors. Thus he began to gain confidence, and others of his works followed almost yearly. The pages of _Le Figaro_ were now freely opened to him, and that public by whom he never ceased to be loved began to scan its columns for his fantastic chronicles of Provençal life. In that same journal he began in 1866 to publish his _Letters from My Mill_, which were collected in volume form in 1869, and constituted his first real popular triumph.

The third period in our author’s life is marked by the sad experiences of the Siege of Paris, in 1870. Just as his life in the south inspired the _Letters_, so did the grave impressions made by those terrible days in the French capital during the Franco-Prussian War move him to write the little masterpieces which, in part, appeared in the volume entitled _Monday Tales_, published in 1873. Who that has read them can forget the “piercing pathos” of “The Last Class” and “The Siege of Berlin”? Not only are these human episodes of singularly tender appeal, but they are masterpieces of form, unsurpassed among short-stories of any language. As Daudet’s best work, they deserve further notice here.

At the close of the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace and Lorraine were ceded to Germany by France. One of the edicts issued by the conquerors, with a view to nationalizing the acquired territory, was that the French language should no longer be taught in their public schools. And this furnishes the _motif_ for Daudet’s “The Last Class.”

The story is simply told in the first person by Frantz, a little Alsatian. Frantz recalls that historic day when he set off for school a little late. Hoping that he might perhaps escape the teacher’s ferrule, he cuts across the public square without even stopping to find out the meaning of the knot of perturbed villagers who are discussing an announcement upon the bulletin board in front of the mayor’s office. As he slips into his seat, hoping to escape observation, he is impressed by the unnatural quiet in the school-room, and also by the presence of a number of the town notables, all solemnly garbed in holiday dress.

The lad marvels that he is not even chided for his lateness, and is more than ever mystified as the schoolmaster proceeds with one lesson and another, all under stress of deep emotion.

By and by the schoolmaster tells his pupils of the cruel edict, and Frantz begins to realize that the worthy master will no longer rule in his accustomed place. He becomes conscious of neglected work, and a whole tide of better resolutions surges in his breast. Finally the master has heard the last class and arising seeks utterance for his farewells. At first he is able to give his pupils some sound advice, but at length no words will come, and with such quiverings of lip as even Daudet tries not to depict, he chokes, swiftly turns to the blackboard, takes a piece of chalk, and, bearing with all his might, dashes off his final expression of patriotic protest and personal sorrow:

VIVE LA FRANCE!

“Then he stood there, with his head resting against the wall, and without speaking, he motioned to us with his hand:

“'That is all; go.’”

On rereading “The Last Class” for the dozenth time, I find that it is surrounded with an emotional atmosphere which, textually, the story does not contain. I think this must be the aura emanating from the spirit of the story; for a great work of fiction is not only the product of emotion, but it kindles emotion, because it is a creation, an entity, a living being. Doubtless the contention could not be demonstrated that, when properly received, a great work of fictional art will arouse the same emotions in the reader as were first enkindled in the breast of its author when the story was born. None the less, I believe it to be true. What feelings, then, must Daudet have known when he gave forth this little master-story! It must be these that I myself feel, for I do not, by analysis, find them all present in the text, even by suggestion. Happy artist, who can so project the creations of his soul that they henceforth live and expand and communicate their messages to multitudes to him unknown! So all great fiction is alive; so lives the work of Alphonse Daudet.

The emotion in “The Siege of Berlin” is of a different type. It, too, finds its _motif_ in the Franco-Prussian War; this time in the Siege of Paris itself.

An invalided old cuirassier of the First Empire, Colonel Jouve, lies in his room in the Champs-Élysées, fronting the Arc de Triomphe. Day by day his grand-daughter brings to him news of the progress of the war. So fully is his life wrapped up in the success of the French armies that, in order to brighten his closing days, they tell him fictitious stories of his compatriots’ success. But one day, when the enemy’s lines have drawn close about the beleaguered capital and the end is at hand, it becomes difficult to deceive the old soldier any longer. Still, fresh victories are always supplied by the news-bureau of love, and the old man can scarcely wait for the homecoming of the victorious battalions. So when one day the sound of bugle and drum is heard, and the tramp of marching feet beneath the windows of the upper room, you can picture the delight of this old veteran. With a superhuman effort he leaves his bed and looks out of the window--only to see the Prussian troops instead of the cheering cohorts of his countrymen! And in this last pang of disappointment, the old man dies.

Both of these stories end with the note of disappointment and consequent sorrow. Poe has declared that the tone of beauty is sadness, and surely there is a penetrating beauty as well as a thrill of sublimity in the sadness of these wonderfully-wrought episodes. Here may be seen the beginnings of the realistic method which Daudet later adopted. Yet, as these stories both indicate, he still carried with him the romanticism of his earlier inspirations, untouched by either the too painful naturalism or the sentimentality of some of his later stories.

In still greater contrast than either of these to the other is the story of our present translation, “The Pope’s Mule.” Here are all the joyous satire, the rollicking fun-making, and the picturesque description, of this unexcelled interpreter of southern life. Daudet’s wit and humor, characterization and description, local color, kaleidoscopic pageantry, are at their best, with never a thought of enforcing a moral or of sounding any emotion deeper than that of boyish amusement. It is the creator of Tartarin who now writes, and not the later master of the novelist’s art.

Notwithstanding the success of the fecund and versatile author of _Sapho_, as a playwright, and his much wider vogue as a novelist, I wonder if after all he did not love best his short-stories and prose fantasies. In his greatest real novels, _Froment, Jr., and Risler, Sr._; _Jack_; _The Nabob_; _Kings in Exile_; and _Numa Roumestan_, the episode often occurs, of which literary form some further words will be said in the treatment of Loti.

Such a temperament as Daudet’s, both introspective and finely sensitive to the impressions of his surroundings, would naturally make much of his fiction biographical, and even autobiographical. Indeed, a close study of his works, read in the light of his life, shows how he has woven into his stories many personal facts. In that exquisite child-document _Little What’s-His-Name_, we have a rather full record of his boyhood and entrance into Paris. _Jack_, also, is full of his own early sorrows, while one character after another may be traced to folk whom he knew. His mind, and his heart too, were note-books on which he was always transcribing his impressions of life, and--here is the vital thing, after all--recreating them for use in his own inimitable way.

So Daudet was not an extreme realist--scarcely a typical realist at all--for while he used the realistic method for observation and faithful record, he no more got beyond sympathizing with his characters than did Dickens, to whom more than to any other English-writing novelist he must be compared. Daudet “belonged” to no school, expounded no theories, stood for no reforms. He was just a kindly, humorous, sympathetic, patiently exact maker of fascinating fictions, and as such we shall love him quite in the proportion that we know him. Life, as he saw it, was full of sadness, but that did not make him conclude it to be not worth the living. Happily married, he knew the solaces of home life. Unlike Maupassant, “What’s the use!” was far from being the heart of his philosophy. Disenchanted with life he never was. A disheartening view of sordidness, vice, and misery left him still with open eyes, for he would not close them against truth; but it never prevented his turning his gaze upon the beautiful, the humorous, and the good--a lovable trio ever!--and finding in them some healing for his hurt.

THE POPE’S MULE
(_LA MULE DU PAPE_)

By Alphonse Daudet

_Done into English by the Editor_

Of all the pretty sayings, proverbs, or adages with which our Provence peasants embroider their discourse, I know none more picturesque or singular than this: within fifteen leagues around about my mill, whenever a person speaks of a spiteful, vindictive man, he says, “That man there--look out for him! He is like the Pope’s mule, who kept her kick in waiting for seven years.”

I hunted diligently for a long time to find out whence that proverb could have come, what was that papal mule, and that kick reserved throughout seven years. No one here has been able to inform me on this subject, not even Francet Mamaï, my fife player, though he has all the Provençal legends at his fingers’ ends. Francet thinks with me that it must be founded upon some old tradition of Provence; yet he has never heard it referred to except in this proverb.

“You will not find that anywhere but in the Library of the Grasshoppers,” said the old fifer to me, with a laugh.

The idea struck me as a good one, and since the Library of the Grasshoppers is at my door, I went and shut myself up there for a week.

It is a marvellous library, admirably equipped, open to poets day and night, and attended by little librarians who constantly make music for you with cymbals. There I passed some delicious days, and, after a week of research--on my back--I ended by discovering what I wished to know, that is to say, the history of my mule and of that famous kick saved up for seven years. The story is a pretty one, although a trifle naïve, and I am going to try to tell it you just as I read it yesterday morning in a sky-colored manuscript, which smelled delightfully of dry lavender, and had long gossamer threads for binding threads.

He who has never seen the Avignon of the time of the Popes, has seen nothing. For gayety, for life, for animation, for a succession of fêtes, there never was a city its equal. From morning till night there were processions and pilgrimages; streets strewn with flowers and hung with rich tapestries; cardinals arriving by the Rhône, banners flying, galleys bedecked with flags; papal soldiers chanting in Latin on the public squares; begging friars with their alms-rattles; then, in addition, from roof to cellar of the houses which swarmed humming around the great papal palace like bees about their hive, there were heard the _tic-tac_ of the lace-makers’ looms, the flying of the shuttles weaving cloth-of-gold for vestments, the little hammers of the vase-sculptors, the keyboards being attuned at the lute-makers’, the songs of the warpers; and, overhead, the booming of the bells was heard, and always below sounded the tinkle of the tambourines on the river bank by the bridge. For with us, when the people are happy they must be dancing, dancing ever; and since in those days the streets in the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifers and tambourine players took up their post upon the Avignon Bridge, in the cool breezes of the Rhône, and day and night they danced and danced.... Ah! happy time, happy city, when halberds did not wound, and state prisons were used only for cooling wine! No famine; no wars! That shows the way the Popes of the Comtat[11] knew how to govern their people; that is why their people regretted them so deeply!

There was one Pope especially, a good old gentleman whom they called Boniface. Ah! how many tears were shed for him in Avignon when he died! He was such an amiable, affable prince! He would smile down at you so genially from his mule! And when you passed him--whether you were a poor little digger of madder or the grand provost of the city--he would give you his benediction so courteously! A genuine Pope of Yvetot was he, but of an Yvetot in Provence, with something sly in his laughter, a sprig of sweet marjoram in his cap--and not the semblance of a Jeanneton. The only Jeanneton the good Father had ever been known to have was his vineyard--a little vineyard which he had planted himself, three leagues from Avignon, among the myrtles of Château-Neuf.

Every Sunday, on going out from vespers, the worthy man went to pay his court to it, and when he was seated in the grateful sun, his mule close beside him, his cardinals stretched at the foot of the vine stocks all about, then he would order a flagon of wine of his own bottling--that exquisite, ruby-colored wine, which has been called ever since Château-Neuf of the Popes--and he would drink it appreciatively in little sips, and regard his vineyard with a tender air. Then--the flagon empty, the day closed--he would return joyously to the city, followed by all his chapter; and, after crossing the Bridge of Avignon, in the midst of drum-beats and farandoles, his mule, stirred by the music, took up a little skipping amble, while he himself marked the time of the dance with his cap--a thing which greatly scandalized his cardinals, but caused all the people to say, “Ah! that good prince! Ah! that fine old Pope!”

Next to his vineyard at Château-Neuf, the thing that the Pope loved best in the world was his mule. The good old man doted on that beast. Every evening before going to bed he went to see if her stable was well shut, if nothing was lacking in the manger; and he never rose from the table without having had prepared under his very eyes a huge bowl of wine _à la Française_, with plenty of sugar and spice, which he himself carried to the mule, despite the remarks of his cardinals. It must be admitted, however, that the animal was worth the trouble. She was a beautiful mule, black and dappled with red, glossy of coat, sure of foot, large and full of back, and carrying proudly her neat little head, all decked out with pompons, rosettes, silver bells, and bows of ribbon--all this with the mildness of an angel, a naïve eye, and two long ears, always in motion, which gave her the air of an amiable child. All Avignon respected her, and when she went through the streets there was no attention which she did not receive; for everyone knew that this was the best way to be in favor at court, and that, for all her innocent air, the Pope’s mule had led more than one to fortune--witness Tistet Védène and his prodigious adventure.

This Tistet Védène was, from the very first, an audacious young rascal whom his father, Guy Védène, the gold-carver, had been obliged to drive from home because he would not do anything, and demoralized the apprentices. For six months he could be seen trailing his jacket through all the gutters of Avignon, but especially around the papal palace, for this rascal had long had his eye fixed on the Pope’s mule, and you will see what a villainous scheme it was. One day when his Holiness was taking a walk all alone beneath the shadows of the ramparts with his steed, behold my Tistet approached and, clasping his hands with an air of admiration, said to him:

“Ah! _mon Dieu!_ what a splendid mule you have there, Holy Father! Permit me to look at her a moment. Ah, my Pope, the emperor of Germany has not her equal!”

And he caressed her and spoke softly to her, as to a damsel.

“Come here, my jewel, my treasure, my fine pearl....”

And the good Pope, deeply moved, said to himself:

“What a good little fellow! How gentle he is with my mule!”