Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“Your man is dead?”

“I never had one,” said _la Fleuriotte_ bruskly. “The poor child hasn’t any father. As the saying is, ‘to each his sorrow.’ There, your bed is made, and here are two or three potatoes which are left over from supper--it’s all I have to offer you.”

She was interrupted by a childish voice coming from a dark closet, separated from the main room by a board partition.

“Good night!” she repeated. “I must go look up the little one--she’s crying. Have a good night’s sleep!”

She took the lamp and went to the adjacent closet, leaving _la Bretonne_ in darkness.

Soon she was stretched upon her bed of heather. After having eaten, she tried to close her eyes, but sleep would not come. Through the partition she heard _la Fleuriotte_ talking softly with her baby, whom the arrival of the stranger had awakened, and who did not wish to go to sleep again. _La Fleuriotte_ petted her, she embraced her with caressing words--naïve expressions which strangely stirred _la Bretonne_.

The outburst of tenderness awakened a confused instinct of motherhood buried deep in the soul of that girl who had once been condemned for having stifled her new-born babe. _La Bretonne_ reflected that “if things had not gone badly” with her, her own child would have been just as old as this little girl. At that thought, and at the sound of the childish voice, she shuddered in her inmost soul; something tender and loving was born in that embittered heart, and she felt an overwhelming need for tears.

“Come, my pet,” said _la Fleuriotte_, “hurry off to sleep. If you are good, I’ll take you to-morrow to the fête of Saint Catherine.”

“Saint Catherine’s--that’s the fête for little girls, isn’t it, Mamma?”

“Yes, my own.”

“Is it true, then, that on this day Saint Catherine gives playthings to the children?”

“Yes--sometimes.”

“Why doesn’t she ever bring anything to our house?”

“We live too far away; and, besides, we are too poor.”

“Then, she brings them only to rich children! Why? I--I’d love to have some playthings.”

“Ah, well! Some day--if you are quite good--if you go to sleep nicely--perhaps she will bring you some.”

“All right--I’m going to sleep--so that she’ll bring me some to-morrow.”

Silence. Then regular and gentle breathing. The child had fallen asleep, and the mother too. Only _la Bretonne_ did not sleep. An emotion both poignant and tender wrung her heart, and she thought more fixedly than ever of that little one whom long ago she had stifled. This lasted until the first gleams of dawn.

At early daylight _la Fleuriotte_ and her child still slept. _La Bretonne_ furtively glided out of the house, and, walking hastily in the direction of Auberive, did not pause until she reached the first houses. Once there, she again passed slowly up the single street, scanning the signs of the shops. At last one of these seemed to fix her attention. She rapped upon the window-shutter, and by and by it was opened. It was a dry-goods shop, but they also had some children’s playthings--poor shopworn toys--paper dolls, a Noah’s ark, a sheep-fold. To the great amazement of the shopkeeper, _la Bretonne_ bought them all, paid, and went out.

She was again on the road to _la Fleuriotte’s_ hovel when a hand was laid heavily on her shoulder. Tremblingly she turned and found herself facing a corporal of _gensdarmes_. The unhappy woman had forgotten that convicts were not permitted after their release to remain in the neighborhood of the prison!

“Instead of loafing here, you should be already at Langres,” said the corporal severely. “Go along--on your way!”

She sought to explain--her pains were lost! In the twinkling of an eye a cart was requisitioned, she was put in under the escort of a _gendarme_, and the driver whipped up his horse.

The cart rumbled joltingly over the frozen road. Poor _la Bretonne_ heart-brokenly clutched the package of playthings in her chilled fingers.

At a turn of the highway she recognized the cross-path through the woods. Her heart leaped, and she pleaded with the _gendarme_ to stop--she had an errand for _la Fleuriotte_, a woman who lived there, only a couple of steps away. She pleaded with so much earnestness that the _gendarme_, a good fellow at heart, allowed himself to be persuaded. They tied the horse to the tree and went up the path.

In front of her door _la Fleuriotte_ was chopping up wood into faggots. Upon seeing her visitor back again, accompanied by a _gendarme_, she stood open-mouthed, her arms hanging.

“Chut!” said _la Bretonne_, “is the little one still asleep?”

“Yes, but----”

“Lay these playthings gently on her bed, and tell her that Saint Catherine sent them. I went back to Auberive to hunt for them, but it seems that I hadn’t the right to do so, and they are sending me to Langres.”

“Holy Mother of God!” cried _la Fleuriotte_.

“Pshaw!”

She drew near the bed. Followed always by her guard, _la Bretonne_ spread over the coverlet the dolls, the ark, and the flock of sheep. Then she kissed the bare arm of the sleeping child, and, turning toward the _gendarme_, who stood staring:

“Now,” said she, “we can go on.”

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, LOVER OF BEAUTY

While one is reading the tales of Gautier, he feels himself to be in a playhouse, confronted by a bewildering array of stage-settings, incredibly correct in detail and grouping, oppressively rich in appointment, and colorful--always colorful. At times characters are felt to be subordinated to background, yet these surroundings are so picturesque--or better, perhaps, so pictorial--that they furnish contrasts and harmonies which bring out rather than overpower the people who move amidst this very forest of accessory riches.

An examination of Gautier the man, both temperamentally and as his life was lived--if, indeed, there can be such a distinction--at once provides an explanation of this pervading love for setting: he was a passionate lover of the beautiful, and he was a persistent traveller in quest of things beautiful to look upon.

To speak of an artist, whether in pigments, marbles, or words, as a lover of the beautiful will at once suggest to the “practical” reader a deep-eyed dreamer with soulful, upturned look, devoid of humour, and affecting a Bunthorne stride. Not so Gautier. Robust of body, almost coarse of physiognomy, and bubbling with life, he could mix his colors with humor, tone his admirations with censure, charge his prodigious memory with endless detail, and train his observation to the minutest accuracy. There was something sensual as well as sensuous in his mind, and he was saved from grovelling only by the dominance of that subtle perception and admiration for the beautiful in _all_ its phases, which challenges continual comment in any consideration of the man and his work. Gautier was esthetic without being an esthete, witty yet not a wit, sentient but not sentimental, sensual though not gross.

* * * * *

A journey to the heart of Gautier leads by way of his outward life.

Tarbes, in the south of France, Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, was the place of his birth, August 31, 1811. Jean-Pierre Gautier, his father, was in the revenue service, and an ardent royalist. He hailed from the Avignon of the Popes that Alphonse Daudet has chronicled so delightfully. Our author’s mother, Adélaïde-Antoinette Cocard, was a tailor’s daughter, and a noted beauty, whose sister had married into the nobility.

When Théophile was only three years old, his parents removed to Paris, but even at that elastic age the lad retained his love for the South, and, like his father, often repined for its warmth and color. He was a precocious youngster, beginning at five to devour books--_Paul and Virginia_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ among others.

The inevitable _Lycée Louis-le-Grand_ was his academy, and by no means a happy prison it proved for the impressionable child, so poetic in temperament. Fortunately, his father soon took him home and entered him as a day-pupil elsewhere.

In his boyhood Théophile became a worshiper of that master romanticist, Victor Hugo, whom he was permitted to meet while yet a youth of nineteen, and who graciously encouraged the boy to publish his verses. Though Gautier afterward laughed delightedly and delightfully at the extremes of the earlier romantic school, and though both in his historical work on romanticism and in his papers on contemporaneous writers, his biting satire searched out its weaknesses, he never ceased to feel its influence and cherish a reverence for its anointed apostle, the creator of _Les Misérables_.

In those formative days the young man was physically slight and almost frail--remote as yet from the massive giant of flashing black eye and dark leonine mane, whose physique enabled him to sustain many a bout with the wine cup and rejoice in pleasures of table, until, his natural powers otherwise unabated, and but sixty-one years of age, he succumbed to an enlarged heart and died at Paris, October 23, 1872.

Gautier, like many another man of letters, presents some contradictions of temperament and production, but for the most part his work is infused with his own strong individuality.

Like Loti, he knew the life of many lands and wrote sympathetically of Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and the alluring East. A painter turned art critic and journalist--and so indefatigable a journalist that he himself has estimated that it would require three hundred volumes to compass his collected writings--he pursued a painter’s methods in his literary work. A poet of charm and attainment, and a dramatic critic of secure place, he informed both verse and criticism with the melodious spirit which issued from his love for music. In faithful description the precursor of the realists, he still adhered to his romanticist ideals. Word-connoisseur, and stylist of the first order, he loved perfection of literary form because such harmonies were the outward limbs of beauty.

Here was an aggressive, positive, individual man, strong in love as in loathing, tender to all animals, living, like Balzac, joyously a life of struggle against debt, and at last winning a place greater than the forbidden seat in the Academy--a place among the most distinguished romanticists that France ever gave to the world.

Gautier’s worship of beauty is not easy to formulate. M. de Sumichrast has termed it “not immoral, but unmoral.” The presence or the absence of virtue or of vice made no difference to him if only the person were beautiful. He no more demanded moral qualities in his characters than he did in the lovely lines of a hill crest. Beauty was the final flame for the adoration of this sensuous acolyte. In all life, at home and widely journeying abroad, he sought it, and when he found it, whether in human form, in relics of ancient art, in modern picture and marble, or in the unrivalled symmetry of nature, his whole being throbbed with delight.

As a youth he fell in love with the robust, fleshy women that Rubens had painted for the Louvre, and straightway pilgrimaged to Belgium to find the originals. His experiences were laughable--perhaps a trifle pathetic. The one slattern whose generous bulk met his Rubenic ideals was scrubbing. But out of this boyish episode grew that exquisite tale, “The Fleece of Gold”--a modern covering which, unlike Jason’s, was a woman’s wealth of blonde hair.

As the story runs, Tiburce, a young dilettante painter, had always found more beauty in the feminine creations of the great painters than in the most lovely flesh-and-blood women he ever met, so he spent much time in contemplating these exquisite creations of art. At length, from having studied certain Flemish pictures, he decided to go into Belgium “in search of the blonde”--he would love a Fleming.

In Brussels and in Laeken the quest of this new Jason was unsuccessful, so he went to Antwerp, where he was as diligent as before--and equally without reward. At length he saw in the Cathedral Rubens’ masterpiece, “The Descent from the Cross,” and was stricken dumb by the beauty of the Magdalen in this remarkable picture. “The sight of that face was to Tiburce a revelation from on high; scales fell from his eyes, he found himself face to face with his secret dream, with his unavowed hope; the intangible image which he had pursued with all the ardor of an amorous imagination, and of which he had been able to espy only the profile or the ravishing fold of a dress; the capricious and untamed chimera, always ready to unfold its restless wings, was there before him, fleeing no more, motionless in the splendor of its beauty.”

Then followed daily visits to the Cathedral, rapt, dazed, worshiping.

One day on the street Tiburce catches sight of a woman who bears--a striking resemblance to the Magdalen! Her--Gretchen--he eventually meets, and to her he reluctantly gives his love. Yet, though Gretchen comes to love Tiburce, she cannot evoke in him quite the same feelings he knows in the presence of Rubens’ beautiful woman--the Magdalen is still his ideal. Even when he christens the girl with the name of the Penitent, the transformation is not complete. At length Gretchen, hidden behind a pillar, overhears Tiburce sighing out his worship toward the woman of the painting: “How I would love thee to-morrow if thou wert living!”--and realizes that she is loved only vicariously.

By and by they go to Paris, where the artist feels his love for the absent Magdalen grow instead of wane, and Gretchen can bear her jealous unhappiness no longer. She breaks out into a tender eloquence of reproach: “You are ambitious to love; you are deceived concerning yourself, you will never love. You must have perfection, the ideal and poesy--all those things which do not exist. Instead of loving in a woman the love that she has for you, of being grateful to her for her devotion and for the gift of her heart, you look to see if she resembles that plaster Venus in your study.... You are not a lover, poor Tiburce, you are simply a painter.”

And so she goes on, uncovering to him his foolish delusion, ending in a passion of abandonment, of “sublime immodesty,” by appearing before him like Aphrodite rising from the sea.

Swept by all this nobility of her discerning spirit, and all the ravishing charm of her beauty, Tiburce seizes his brushes and does master work--and then begs his new-found love to name the day for the crying of their banns.

* * * * *

Perhaps it needs no word here to emphasize one phase of Gautier’s nature--he _knew_ himself to be a beauty-lover, and he knew all the limitations of character that this cult rendered inevitable.

* * * * *

A second force in Gautier’s life was his orientalism. In this he was not only conscious of the strain of eastern blood that pulsed through both body and temperament, but he was, by reason of long application, constant travel, and the varied opportunities of a critic’s life, a savant on matters oriental, particularly Pompeian and Egyptian.

Here, again, “The Romance of a Mummy,” a long tale, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” a short tale, and “The Mummy’s Foot,” which follows in translation, display the savant in his work. The movement of life in ancient Egypt in the time of the Hebrew bondage, and all that highly colored, picturesque civilization, afford him the always coveted background which he valued as much for itself as for its use as a setting.

In another of his shorter stories, “Arria Marcella,” the savant is also evident. The familiar but terrible theme of the vampire woman is set in an idealized reconstruction of Pompeian life; just as that one perfect short-story from the pen of Gautier, “The Dead Leman” (_La Morte Amoureuse_), marvellously made to live again the mediæval spirit in the poignantly pitiful mistress whose end is the heart-break of selfish passion; and “The Thousand-and-Second Night” evokes anew the indistinct, subtle, alluring odors of the Arabian Nights.

The three best-known longer tales of Gautier--technically they are not precisely novels--are _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, a prose-song to beauty--immoral, daring, and beautiful; _Captain Fracasse_, whose smash-’em-up, picaroon hero leads us through abundant adventures; and _Spirite_, a notable contrast to the materialism displayed--almost flaunted--in his other work. _Spirite_ is a story of fantasy; but it is more: with a tender delicacy and spiritual subtlety which well may surprise his public, Gautier presents the contrasting love-lure of Lavinia d’Audefini, a disembodied woman, and the very real but--here is the remarkable part--less attractive charms of Mme. d’Ymbercourt, a red-ripe woman indeed. We are indebted to Gautier for this one story as a demonstration that, while his tales are mostly as unmoral as the pigments of his literary palette, he can at will delineate the ethereal, and in so doing disclose a fine understanding of spiritual values.

THE MUMMY’S FOOT
(_LE PIED DE MOMIE_)

By Théophile Gautier

_Done into English by the Editor_

I had idly entered the shop of one of those curiosity-venders who, in that Parisian lingo which is so perfectly unintelligible to the rest of France, are called _marchands de bric-à-brac_.

You have doubtless glanced through the windows into one of those shops which have become so numerous since it is the mode to buy antique furniture, and since the pettiest stockbroker thinks he must have his “mediæval room.”

There is one thing that clings alike to the shop of the old-iron dealer, the wareroom of the tapestry-maker, the laboratory of the alchemist, and the studio of the artist: in these mysterious dens through whose window-shutters filters a furtive twilight, the thing that is the most manifestly ancient is the dust; there the spider-webs are more authentic than the gimps, and the old pear-wood furniture is younger than the mahogany which arrived yesterday from America.

The wareroom of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capernaum; all centuries and all countries seemed to have rendezvoused there: an Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet whose ebony panels were brilliantly inlaid with filaments of brass; a Louis XV half-lounge carelessly stretched its fawn-like feet under a massive table of the reign of Louis XIII, with heavy oaken spirals, and carvings of intermingled foliage and chimeras.

In one corner glittered the striped cuirass of a damascened suit of Milanese armor; bisque cupids and nymphs, grotesques from China, _céladon_ and _craquelé_ vases, Saxon and old Sèvres cups, encumbered what-nots and corners.

Upon the fluted shelves of several dressers glittered immense plates from Japan, with designs in red and blue relieved by gilt hatching, side by side with several Bernard Palissy enamels, showing frogs and lizards in relief work.

From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of Chinese silk lustrous with silver, billows of brocade, sown with luminous specks by a slanting sunbeam, while portraits of every epoch, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled out through their yellow varnish.

The dealer followed me with precaution through the tortuous passage contrived between the piles of furniture, fending off with his hand the hazardous swing of my coat-tails, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of the antiquary and the usurer.

It was a singular figure, that of the dealer: an immense cranium, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a meagre aureole of white hair that brought out all the more vividly the clear salmon tint of the skin, gave him a false air of patriarchal simplicity--contradicted, on the other hand, by the sparkling of two little yellow eyes, which trembled in their orbits like two _louis d’ors_ on a surface of quicksilver. The curve of the nose presented an aquiline silhouette which recalled the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands--thin, bony, veined, full of sinews stretched like the strings on the neck of a violin, and armed with talons resembling those which terminate the membranous wings of a bat--shook with a senile movement disquieting to see. But those feverishly nail-bitten hands became firmer than lobster-claws or steel pincers when they lifted some precious piece--an onyx carving, a Venetian cup, or a plate of Bohemian crystal. This old rascal had an aspect so profoundly rabbinical and cabalistic that three centuries ago they would have burned him merely from the evidence of his face.

“Will you not buy something from me to-day, Monsieur? Here is a Malay kris with a blade undulating like a flame: see those grooves to serve as gutters for the blood, those teeth fashioned and set inversely so as to rip out the entrails when the dagger is withdrawn. It is a fine type of ferocious weapon, and would look very well among your trophies. This two-handed sword is very beautiful--it is a José de la Hera; and this _colichemarde_ with perforated guard, what a superb piece of work!”

“No, I have plenty of arms and instruments of carnage. I want a figurine, something that would do for a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those stock bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found on any desk.”

The old gnome, foraging among his antiquities, finally arranged before me several antique bronzes--so called, at least; fragments of malachite; little Hindu or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah toys made of jade, showing the incarnation of Brahma or of Vishnu, marvellously well-suited for the sufficiently ungodlike purpose of holding papers and letters in place.

I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon all starred with warts, its jaws adorned with tusks and bristling whiskers, and a highly abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god Vitziliputzili _au naturel_, when I noticed a charming foot which I at first took for a fragment of an antique Venus.

It had those beautiful tawny and ruddy tints which give to Florentine bronze that warm and vivacious look so preferable to the grayish green tone of ordinary bronze, which might be taken for statues in putrefaction. Satiny lights frisked over its form, rounded and polished by the loving kisses of twenty centuries; for it seemed to be a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era, perhaps a casting by Lysippus!

“This foot will be the thing for me,” said I to the merchant, who regarded me with an ironical and saturnine air as he held out the desired object for me to examine at will.

I was surprised at its lightness; it was not a foot of metal, but indeed a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a foot of a mummy; on examining it still more closely one could see the grain of the skin, and the lines almost imperceptibly impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages. The toes were slender, delicate, terminated by perfect nails, pure and transparent as agates; the great toe, slightly separate, and contrasting happily with the modelling of the other toes, in the antique style, gave it an air of lightness, the grace of a bird’s foot; the sole, scarcely streaked by several almost invisible grooves, showed that it had never touched the earth, and had come in contact with only the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of panther skin.

“Ha, ha! You wish the foot of the Princess Hermonthis!” exclaimed the merchant, with a strange chuckle, fixing upon me his owlish eyes. “Ha, ha, ha!--for a paper-weight! Original idea! Artistic idea! If any one would have said to old Pharaoh that the foot of his adored daughter would serve for a paper-weight, he would have been greatly surprised, considering that he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out to hold the triple coffin, painted and gilded and all covered with hieroglyphics and beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls,” continued the singular little merchant, half aloud, and as though talking to himself.

“How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?”

“Ah, the highest price I am able, for it is a superb piece: if I had its counterpart, you could not have it for less than five hundred francs; the daughter of a Pharaoh, nothing is more rare!”

“Assuredly it is not common; but still, how much do you want? In the first place, let me tell you something, and that is, my entire treasure consists of only five louis: I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing dearer. You might search my innermost waistcoat pockets, and my most secret desk-drawers, without finding even one miserable five-franc piece more.”

“Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That is very little, very little, in truth, for an authentic foot,” muttered the merchant, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

“All right, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the bargain,” he added, wrapping it in an ancient damask rag. “Very fine: real damask, Indian damask, which has never been redyed; it is strong, it is soft,” he mumbled, passing his fingers over the frayed tissue, from the commercial habit which moved him to praise an object of so little value that he himself judged it worth only being given away.

He poured the gold pieces into a sort of mediæval alms-purse hanging at his belt, as he kept on saying:

“The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to serve as a paper-weight!”

Then, turning upon me his phosphorescent eyes, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the miauling of a cat that has swallowed a fish-bone:

“Old Pharaoh will not be pleased--he loved his daughter, that dear man!”

“You speak as if you were his contemporary; old as you are, you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered laughingly from the shop door.

I went home, well content with my acquisition.

In order to put it to use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers, scribbled over with verses, an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles just begun; letters forgotten and mailed in the table-drawer--an error which often occurs with absent-minded people. The whole effect was charming, bizarre, and romantic.

Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went down into the street with the becoming gravity and pride of one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a fragment of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.

I looked upon as sovereignly ridiculous all those who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so notoriously Egyptian; and it seemed to me that the true occupation of every man of sense was to have a mummy’s foot upon his desk.

Happily, my meeting some friends distracted me from my infatuation with the recent acquisition; I went to dinner with them, for it would have been difficult for me to dine by myself.

When I came back in the evening, my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately tickled my olfactory nerves: the heat of the room had warmed the sodium carbonate, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschites, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess; it was a perfume both sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to dissipate.

The dream of Egypt was Eternity: her odors have the solidity of granite, and endure as long.

I soon drank to fulness from the black cup of sleep: for an hour or two all remained opaque. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their sombre emptiness.

Presently my mental obscurity cleared; dreams commenced to graze me softly in their silent flight.

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber precisely as it was. I might have believed myself to be awake, but a vague perception told me that I slept and that something fantastic was about to take place.

The odor of the myrrh had intensely increased, and I felt a slight headache, which--with great reasonableness--I attributed to several glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods, and our future success.

I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which nothing actually justified; the furniture was precisely in place; the lamp burned upon its bracket, softly shaded by the milky whiteness of its dull crystal; the water-color sketches shone under their Bohemian glass; the curtains hung languidly: everything had an air slumbrous and tranquil.

Presently, however, this calm interior appeared to become troubled: the woodwork cracked furtively, the log enveloped in cinders suddenly emitted a jet of blue flame, and the circular ornaments on the frieze seemed like metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which were about to happen.

My gaze by chance fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of the Princess Hermonthis.

Instead of being immobile, as became a foot which had been embalmed for four thousand years, it moved uneasily, contracted itself and leaped over the papers like a frightened frog: one would have imagined it to be in contact with a galvanic battery. I could quite distinctly hear the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.

I became somewhat discontented with my acquisition, preferring my paper-weights to be sedentary, and thought it a little unnatural that feet should walk about without legs; indeed, I commenced to feel something which strongly resembled fear.

Suddenly I saw the folds of one of my bed-curtains stir, and I heard a bumping sound, like that of a person hopping on one foot. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a strange wind blow across my back, and that my suddenly rising hair caused my nightcap to execute a leap of several yards.

The bed-curtains parted, and I beheld coming towards me the strangest figure it is possible to imagine.

It was a young girl, of a deep _café-au-lait_ complexion, like the bayadere[1] Amani, of a perfect beauty, and recalling the purest Egyptian type. She had almond eyes with the corners raised, and brows so black that they seemed blue; her nose was delicately chiselled, almost Grecian in its fineness of outline, and indeed she might have been taken for a statue of Corinthian bronze had not the prominence of the cheekbones and the slightly African lips made it impossible not to recognize her as belonging beyond doubt to the hieroglyphic race of the banks of the Nile.

Her arms, slender and turned with the symmetry of a spindle--like those of very young girls--were encircled by a kind of metal bands and bracelets of glass beads; her hair was plaited in cords; and upon her bosom was suspended a little idol of green paste, which, from its bearing a whip with seven lashes, enabled one to recognize it as an image of Isis, conductress of spirits. A disk of gold scintillated upon her brow, and a few traces of rouge relieved the coppery tint of her cheeks.

As for her costume, it was very strange. Imagine an under-wrapping of linen strips, bedizened with black and red hieroglyphics, stiffened with bitumen, and apparently belonging to a freshly unbandaged mummy.

In one of those flights of thought so frequent in dreams, I heard the rough falsetto of the bric-à-brac dealer, which repeated like a monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with an intonation so enigmatical:

“Old Pharaoh will not be pleased--he loved his daughter, that dear man!”

Strange circumstance--and one which scarcely reassured me--the apparition had but one foot; the other was broken off at the ankle!

She approached the desk where the foot was moving and wriggling with redoubled liveliness. Once there, she supported herself upon the edge, and I saw tears form and grow pearly in her eyes.

Although she had not as yet spoken, I clearly discerned her thoughts: she looked at her foot--for it was indeed her own--with an infinitely graceful expression of coquettish sadness; but the foot leaped and coursed hither and yon, as though driven by steel springs.

Two or three times she extended her hand to seize it, but she did not succeed.

Then commenced between the Princess Hermonthis and her foot--which appeared to be endowed with a life of its own--a very fantastic dialogue in a most ancient Coptic dialect, such as might have been spoken some thirty centuries ago by voices of the land of Ser: luckily, that night I understood Coptic to perfection.

The Princess Hermonthis cried, in a voice sweet and vibrant as a crystal bell:

“Well, my dear little foot, you flee from me always, though I have taken good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a basin of alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with oil of palms; your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a hippopotamus tooth; I was careful to select sandals for you, broidered and painted and turned up at the toes, which made all the young girls in Egypt envious; you wore on your great toe rings representing the sacred Scarabæus, and you carried about the lightest body it was possible for a lazy foot to sustain.”

The foot replied, in a tone pouting and chagrined:

“You well know that I do not belong to myself any longer. I have been bought and paid for. The old merchant knew perfectly what he was doing; he always bore you a grudge for having refused to espouse him: this is an ill turn which he has done you. The Arab who robbed your royal sarcophagus in the subterranean pits of the necropolis of Thebes was sent by him: he desired to prevent you from going to the reunion of the shadowy peoples in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for my ransom?”

“Alas, no! My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver, were all stolen from me,” answered the Princess Hermonthis, with a sigh.

“Princess,” I then exclaimed, “I never retained anybody’s foot unjustly; even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me, I give it to you gladly: I should be in despair to make so amiable a person as the Princess Hermonthis lame.”

I delivered this discourse in a tone so royal and gallant that it must have astonished the beautiful Egyptian.

She turned toward me a look charged with gratitude, and her eyes shone with bluish gleams.

She took her foot--which, this time, let itself be taken--like a woman about to put on her little shoe, and adjusted it to her leg with much address.

This operation ended, she took two or three steps about the room, as if to assure herself that she really was no longer lame.

“Ah, how happy my father will be--he who was so desolated because of my mutilation, and who had, from the day of my birth, put a whole people at work to hollow out for me a tomb so deep that he would be able to preserve me intact until that supreme day when souls must be weighed in the balances of Amenthi! Come with me to my father--he will receive you well, for you have given me back my foot.”

I found this proposition natural enough. I enveloped myself in a dressing-gown of large flowered pattern, which gave me a very Pharaohesque appearance, hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers, and told the Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.

Hermonthis, before starting, took from her neck the tiny figurine of green paste and laid it on the scattered sheets of paper which covered the table.

“It is only fair,” she said smilingly, “that I should replace your paper-weight.”

She gave me her hand, which was soft and cold, like the skin of a serpent, and we departed.

For some time we spun with the rapidity of an arrow through a fluid and grayish medium, in which faintly outlined silhouettes were passing to right and left.

For an instant, we saw only sea and sky.

Some moments afterward, obelisks commenced to rise, porches and flights of steps guarded by sphinxes were outlined against the horizon.

We had arrived.

The princess conducted me toward the mountain of rosy granite, where we found an opening so narrow and low that it would have been difficult to distinguish it from the fissures in the rock, if two sculptured columns had not enabled us to recognize it.

Hermonthis lighted a torch and walked before me.

There were corridors hewn through the living rock; the walls, covered with hieroglyphic paintings and allegorical processions, might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years; these corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square chambers, in the midst of which pits had been contrived, through which we descended by means of cramp-hooks or spiral stairways; these pits conducted us into other chambers, from which other corridors opened, equally decorated with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, and those mystic symbols, the _tau_, the _pedum_, and the _bari_--prodigious works which no living eye would ever examine, endless legends in granite which only the dead have time to read throughout eternity.

At last we issued into a hall so vast, so enormous, so immeasurable, that the eye could not perceive its confines. Flooding the sight were files of monstrous columns between which twinkled livid stars of yellow flame, and these points of light revealed further incalculable depths.

The Princess Hermonthis always held me by the hand, and graciously saluted the mummies of her acquaintance.

My eyes accustomed themselves to the crepuscular light, and objects became discernible.

I beheld, seated upon their thrones, the kings of the subterranean races: they were magnificent, dry old men, withered, wrinkled, parchmented, blackened with naphtha and bitumen--all wearing golden headdresses, breast-plates, and gorgets starry with precious stones, eyes of a sphinx-like fixity, and long beards whitened by the snows of the centuries. Behind them, their embalmed people stood, in the rigid and constrained pose of Egyptian art, preserving eternally the attitude prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind these peoples, contemporary cats mewed, ibises flapped their wings, and crocodiles grinned, all rendered still more monstrous by their swathing bands.

All the Pharaohs were there--Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus, Sesostris, Amenotaph--all the dark rulers of the pyramids and the nymphs. On the yet higher thrones sat King Chronos, Xixouthros, who was contemporary with the deluge, and Tubal Cain, who preceded it.

The beard of King Xixouthros had grown so full that it already wound seven times around the granite table upon which he leaned, lost in a somnolent revery.

Further back, through a dusty cloud across the dim centuries, I beheld vaguely the seventy-two preadamite Kings, with their seventy-two peoples, forever passed away.

After allowing me to gaze upon this astounding spectacle a few moments, the Princess Hermonthis presented me to Pharaoh, her father, who vouchsafed me a majestic nod.

“I have recovered my foot again! I have recovered my foot!” cried the Princess, as she clapped her little hands one against the other with all the signs of playful joy. “Here is the gentleman who restored it to me.”

The races of Kemi, the races of Nahasi, all the black, bronze, and copper-colored nations, repeated in chorus:

“The Princess Hermonthis has recovered her foot!”

Even Xixouthros was visibly affected: he raised his dull eyelids, passed his fingers over his mustache, and bent upon me his look weighty with centuries.

“By Oms, the dog of Hell, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of Truth, there is a brave and worthy fellow!” exclaimed Pharaoh, extending toward me his sceptre, terminated with a lotus-flower. “What do you desire for recompense?”

Strong in that audacity which is inspired by dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked the hand of Hermonthis: the hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for such a good foot.

Pharaoh opened wide his eyes of glass, astonished by my pleasantry and my request.

“From what country do you come, and what is your age?”

“I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh.”

“Twenty-seven years old--and he wishes to espouse the Princess Hermonthis, who is thirty centuries old!” exclaimed at once all the thrones and all the circles of nations.

Hermonthis alone did not seem to find my request unreasonable.

“If only you were even two thousand years old,” replied the ancient King, “I would quite willingly give you the Princess; but the disproportion is too great; and, besides, we must give our daughters husbands who are durable--you no longer know how to preserve yourselves: the oldest people that you can produce are scarcely fifteen hundred years old, and they are no more than a pinch of dust. See here--my flesh is hard as basalt, my bones are bars of steel!

“I shall be present on the last day of the world with the body and the features which were mine in life; my daughter Hermonthis will endure longer than a statue of bronze.

“Then the winds will have dispersed the last particles of your dust, and Isis herself, who was able to recover the atoms of Osiris, would be embarrassed to recompose your being.

“See how vigorous I still am, and how well my hands can grip,” he said to me as he shook my hand _à l’Anglaise_, in a manner that cut my fingers with my rings.

He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found it was my friend Alfred who was shaking me by the arm to make me get up.

“Ah, you maddening sleepyhead! Must I have you carried out into the middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It’s afternoon; don’t you remember that you promised to take me with you to see M. Aguado’s Spanish pictures?”

“_Mon Dieu!_ I didn’t remember it any more!” I answered as I dressed myself. “We will go there at once; I have the permit here on my desk.”

I went forward to take it; but judge of my astonishment when instead of the mummy’s foot I had purchased the evening before, I saw the tiny figurine of green paste left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An East-Indian dancing girl.

ANATOLE FRANCE, FORMER MAN AND NEW

The biographies of some great men of letters are little different from their bibliographies. For many years this would seem to have been true in the case of Anatole France, for the man of public import--apart from his literary productions--came not into being until fifty-three years after his physical birth.

Every book-lover who goes to Paris must visit the banks of the Seine and revel among the riches of that vast exhibition of old books, art objects, rare prints, and fascinating what-not, which for generations have been the despair and the admiration of collectors. Over an old-book mart on the Quai Malaquis, Jacques Anatole Thibault--now everywhere known as Anatole France--was born April 16, 1844. From that day to this he has never left as a residence that Paris whose every paving-block he knows, as he himself says, and whose every stone he loves. Year by year he has increasingly stood as a type of Parisian literary life and thought.

His father was one of the prosperous booksellers of the Seine banks--meditative, thoughtful, and even a maker of verses. He brought with him from Anjou in western France all of the Vendéean’s passion for monarchism and clericalism. Just how this harmonizes with the assertion of one of our author’s biographers that the elder Thibault was of Jewish blood, I do not pretend to say, but the statement may pass on its face value. Certain it is that the father was concerned that Anatole should be educated under the auspices of clerical teachers, the priests of the old Collège Stanislas, and his son’s early mastery of the classics and attainments in literary style amply justified the choice. Indeed, the clerical schools of the period did more to establish French letters than has since proven to be the case under the public schools of present-day France.

Growing up in this bookish atmosphere, rich tokens of the past all about him, inheriting his father’s scholarly tastes, trained under the rigid system of classicists, and in the school that developed Paul Bourget and François Coppée, Anatole France needed only one more element to bring out in him the varied temperament his life and works exhibit--the inspiration of the refined and tender mother whose love for romantic fairy-tales charmed into being the first fancy-creations of her gifted boy.

In 1868 M. France produced his first book--a study of Alfred de Vigny. This made no great sensation, but his first volume of poems--many French literary men, like Daudet, Maupassant, and Bourget, have opened their literary careers with essays at verse--was published in 1873, _Les Poèmes dorés_.

About this time M. France became reader for the publisher Lemerre, and under his auspices brought out various of the thirty-some volumes which stand to his credit. In 1876 he became an attaché of the Senate library. Later, he was known as a regular contributor to _Le Temps_ and other Parisian journals, much of this review material being now accessible in book-form.

That part of M. France’s work which covers the first twenty years of his writing, ending with 1896, has largely fixed his place in the average opinion, for two reasons: those years witnessed his largest and most popular production, including nearly all of his novels and stories; and, in consequence, the preponderance of published critical estimates cover only those two decades.

The “first” Anatole France, then, must be considered almost as a separate being, so far as we regard his spirit; his literary style, however, changed scarcely at all with time. Classical training was reflected in a passion for the Greek magic of words, Latin harmony of phrasing, and the hedonistic philosophy; there was not even the suggestion of his later direct appeal to reason and “the rights of man.” His personal tone--for much of his writing is personal and even autobiographical--was pessimistic, though untinged with bitterness; and here again there was little to forecast his vigorous appeal for a social better day. No thought of social uplift, no ray of hope, appeared in his treatment of _Thaïs_, a study of the Egypt of the Ptolemies; _The Red Lily_, a picture of present-day Florence; _The Opinions of M. Jérome Coignard_, the modernization of sentiments exploited in Rabelais, “Wilhelm Meister,” “Gil Blas,” and Montaigne; _The Garden of Epicurus_, wherein the shades of great thinkers, from Plato to Schopenhauer, hold converse, “while an Esquimaux refutes Bossuet, a Polynesian develops his theory of the soul, and Cicero and Cousin agree in their estimate of a future life.” In a word, the M. France of those days viewed life as a spectacle, with dispassionate yet pitying irony. Convinced, with the Preacher, that all is vanity, this dilettante proposed no remedies for its ills, and was even frankly skeptical that any such saving medicine existed. This is Anatole France as most readers know him--the Anatole France who “died” fifteen years ago, leaving only the stylist and the keen observer to identify him with the decidedly living man of to-day.

Two important events in the life of our author took place respectively in 1896 and 1897. In the former year he was elected on the first ballot to a seat in the French Academy--the seat occupied by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and on the occasion of his _séance de réception_ M. France delivered a tactful and altogether admirable eulogy upon the unfortunate genius whom he succeeded.

This distinction coming after more than fifty years of life would have been enough to mark an epoch in his career, but one year later he issued _L’Orme du Mail_, a series of notable comments upon contemporary literary and social life. This may be regarded as the outgrowth of the social, political, and literary notes which he had been contributing to the newspapers, and which have been gathered in several volumes, forming probably the most brilliant commentary upon things French which is available to-day.

Doubtless this daily observation of the current trend gave birth to a new man, for now Anatole France is no longer the satirical and lightly ironical dilettante making excursions into the field of speculation, but a robust devotee of the rights of the people. His powerful arraignments of the social and political condition of the French common-people are not the only proofs of a new birth in M. France. Trenchant, witty, and apostolic as are his social sermons--for now and then a sermon may ring true to its word-origin and be _a thrust_--they were not so amazing and, happily, not so significant, as his brave championship of the cause of Captain Dreyfus when there were few who dared to lift voice against rampant militarism and a prejudiced, Jew-baiting military tribunal.

From this courageous stand it was only a single step to a propagandum to abolish the many abuses which he feels weigh heavily upon the masses--war, plutocracy, clericalism, militarism. I have said that it was only a single step, yet it represents a long journey for the son of a monarchist, a boy educated by priests, the smiling literary experimenter, the speculative pupil of Rénan, to have mounted the Socialistic rostrum and produced anti-military and anti-clerical papers of no doubtful sound. Such is M. France to-day; and though he still fails not in his literary appeal to the intellectuals, the cry that deeply stirs his being is that of the proletariat in need of intelligent, vigorous leadership. Whether or not one agrees with his propagandum, one cannot ignore its significance.

Anatole France has attained distinction in several literary forms. His early poems are not of sufficient merit to make him famous, but they consist of a piquant combination--humor, history, and philosophy. His critical introductions to delightful editions of famous books are charmingly done and sufficiently discriminating. His tractates on questions of the times are earnest, direct, and vigorous. But it is to his novels and stories that we must look to find his most characteristic writings.

To the English reader, his best-known novel is _The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard_ (1881), which was crowned by the Academy. Like all of M. France’s novels, it is practically plotless--a fictional framework for the skeptical observations and good-natured ironies of the old philosopher, whose name gives the book its title. A second novel of distinction, if novel it may be called, is _The Book of Friendship_ (_le Livre de Mon Ami_). It is made up of two parts--_The Book of Peter_ and _The Book of Suzanne_. The former owes its interest not alone to charm of style, childlikeness of recital, and subtle beauty, but also to its autobiographical character--which M. France has frankly admitted. Three other works immediately rise up for comparison when one reads this keen, sympathetic, and understanding story--Dickens’s _David Copperfield_, Daudet’s _Little What’s-His-Name_ (_le Petit Chose_), and Loti’s _The Story of a Child_; and the very fact of such inevitable comparisons may sufficiently suggest its ingenuous charm, its pseudo-naïvete, and its mingled humor and pathos. No Frenchman, except Victor Hugo, quite entered into child-life as did M. France in this notable compound of fiction and fact, and I am not forgetting either Alphonse Daudet or Gustav Droz in making this assertion.

The inheritance of his mother’s love for fantasy is beautifully illustrated in M. France’s _Abeille_, a fairy story of perhaps twenty-thousand words. The author’s name will vouch for its style; the simple outline will show the pretty framework for the fictional conception.

La Duchesse des Clarides brings up her daughter Abeille, together with Georges, the only son of la Comtesse Blanchelande, who at her death had confided him to the care of her friend.

The two children one day set out secretly to find the distant lake which they have seen from the high tower of the castle of Clarides. The lake is the home of the Ondines, and the woods surrounding it the realm of the Gnomes. Georges, seeking water and food for Abeille, is seized by the Ondines. Abeille, waiting for Georges’ return, falls asleep, to be wakened by the Gnomes, who carry her to their King Loc. They keep Abeille in order to teach her the wisdom and secrets of their race and they make her their Princess. Loc loves Abeille and offers her all the treasures of his kingdom if she will become his wife. She refuses, asking only to be sent back to her mother, whom she is allowed to see each night in a dream, as her mother also sees her. Loc finally learns that Abeille loves Georges, but that he has disappeared. The Gnome king discovers that the youth is with the Ondines, held prisoner because he wishes to leave the Ondine queen--who also loves him--in order to seek Abeille. Loc magnanimously rescues Georges and sends him to Clarides, but still cannot bring himself to free Abeille. The youth learns of the fate of Abeille from his mother and his serving man, and goes to the Gnome kingdom to rescue her.

Loc cannot keep Abeille longer because of a law allowing mortals, prisoners of the Gnomes, to return to the world after seven years, so he betroths Georges and Abeille and gives them rich gifts, among which is a magic ring having power to bring Abeille and Georges at any time to visit the Gnome realm, where they will be always welcome.

In the volumes, _Mother-of-Pearl_ (_L’Etui de Nacre_) and _St. Clara’s Well_ (_Le Puits de Sainte-Claire_), we find our author’s best short-story work.