Chapter V: Book II: I (1)

THE PICTURES

ALL these events, still so fresh in my imagination, grew dim and were temporarily lost in the current of the days which, during the long vacation upon which we were entering, began to flow by like a beautiful stream, full to the brim.

As a general thing our father took his vacation at the same time with us, and made the most of it for getting nearer to us. We saw him much less often this year, and became somewhat weaned from those stories of heroism with which he used to enliven our walks, kindling and stirring us up with fierce desire to fight battles and win victories. When we heard him tell them we used to toss our heads, our eyes would sparkle, we would walk faster, and our steps fell into cadence. But to meet the new expenses which he had assumed he had given up his annual rest. Once in a while he would snatch an afternoon, and make a hasty attempt to re-establish the old nearness to us. But his patients came to seek him at all hours of the day, or lay in wait for him as he passed along. Everything conspired to deprive us of him.

Yet it was evident that his authority was everywhere in exercise. When cracks had appeared in the front of the house iron supports were placed underneath before it was repainted. The rooms were repapered--mine with pleasant pictures of cats and dogs--and the floors were mended where the boards had shrunken apart. Even the kitchen, where for years Mariette had been obstinately insisting on repairs, without producing any effect upon grandfather, who would invariably answer her with the old proverb, “One wastes one’s suds in washing a negro’s head”--even the kitchen was thoroughly repaired and paved with wonderful red bricks. The entrance gate which would not close had been repaired, and even provided with a key, a key which really turned in the lock! The linden was trimmed, permitting the sun-dial once more to mark the hours. The break in the wall, by which the mole-crickets used to penetrate, by which, one memorable evening, I had seen our enemies introducing themselves into the place, was closed by a balustrade, set into the trunk of the chestnut tree. And now too was seen what had never before been seen: the three labourers at their post, and--still more marvellous sight--all three working at once!

Little by little the garden--my old garden that used to be a perfect forest of weeds, in which there was never an end to discovering new trees or plants--so well were they hidden--was transformed and reduced to order. The alleys were cleaned out and sanded, the beds remade and the rose bushes trimmed. The trees, reduced to their proper proportions, cast a well defined shade. A useless field became an orchard. A fountain, set in the heart of a grass plot, sent up a shaft of water to fall in a fine musical rain into its basin. There were flowers and fruits to gather for banquets and desserts. But we no longer dared to feel of the pears and peaches--still less to give to their stems that slight see-saw motion which made them fall. In the wide newly-opened space our larceny would have been discovered. And I vainly sought to lay low with my sword the underbrush that used to grow thick on the edge of the chestnut grove. Tem Bossette refused to whittle me out the smallest wooden sword, and watched over the stakes as if he had paid for them himself.

These changes were not made all at once, and no doubt I have their chronology mixed. We hardly noticed them during their slow and gradual progress, and when they were all made we ceased to remember how things were before. Indeed they were not accomplished without many perturbations. Tem wiped his brow unceasingly and sweated out all his wine. Mimi Pachoux stole away no longer but made a great noise to attest the certainty of his presence; and The Hanged bent his dantesque countenance over obscure and useful tasks. The community of their fate had by no means brought about their reconciliation. They were always observing, spying upon one another, but all three observed and watched the house still more closely. What did they fear to see emerging from it?

I discovered one day. My father, who had become their master, drew near with rapid step. He spoke to each with kindly encouragement, but he examined their work as one who knew.

“All the same, he knows what he is about,” Mimi admiringly confessed.

I learned from Tem that after having severely admonished them he had raised their wages. But he insisted upon good work. In a word, he drew, them back to himself whenever they demurred at a task, or soured upon it. But without doubt he upset all the old habits of a region where people love to drift along, taking life as easily as they drink its new wine. This is why Tem Bossette, more than any of them, sighed for the ancient reign of the Sluggard Kings, when he had lived tranquil and forgotten among his vines.

Once he tried in my presence to move grandfather to pity for his sad fate.

“Friend,” was the answer, “I am nobody here; go to some one else.”

Never had grandfather seemed so full of spirits as since his abdication. No, certainly he did not regret his lost authority, but he made a point of knowing nothing of the acts of the new régime. Did he travel over the kingdom? He seemed never to perceive that its very pebbles were blossoming. But one day, when he was taking the air in the garden, I saw him combing his beard and rubbing his eyebrows--a sure token that he was dissatisfied; he spat, as a sign of contempt, and the little impertinent laugh accompanied words which were incomprehensible to me.

“Oho! everything is being put to rights--what they need is a geometrician rather than a gardener.”

What was he finding fault with? The garden beds, the trees, obedient to the hand of man, made a richly disposed picture. My little ideas of life had here grouped themselves and taken form with unwonted pleasure. I was provoked with grandfather’s lack of enthusiasm.

“See,” I said to him, not knowing just what to say, “those beautiful red cannas around the basin of the fountain.”

He took me by the arm with unexpected roughness.

“Look out, child, you’ll spoil the grass!”

I had indeed set my foot upon the grass border of the path. And I clearly perceived that grandfather was ridiculing my admiration and the garden both at once. Suddenly, under the influence of his sarcasm, I recalled the old garden, the old garden as it had been, a wild mass of foliage, when I might trample on the very borders, with their sparse flowers growing helter-skelter, where I had known the wild joy of liberty.

Grandfather would never have permitted himself such a criticism before my father. My mind having been drawn to observe the dissimilarity between them, I had noticed the constraint in their relations. Father was always making advances; treating grandfather with extreme deference; never failing to inquire as to his health, his walks, and even, indulgent to his meteorological hobby, asking him as to weather prospects. Grandfather would reply briefly, without making the slightest attempt to continue the conversation, which soon fell flat,--or he would bring forward his little wounding smile, as soon as a subject was introduced on which it was not certain that they were in agreement.

One day father asked for his account books, explaining that he needed to verify certain memoranda of claims upon the property which had not yet been settled and which appeared to be exorbitant. Grandfather opened his eyes:

“My account books?”

“Yes.”

“I never kept any.”

Father hesitated for a second. “Very well,” he said simply and turned away.

In his tower where he had settled himself, grandfather took great comfort in wearing his famous green dressing gown and Greek cap of black velvet with its silk tassel. With his telescope fixed upon a pedestal, he would watch by day the boats that ploughed the waters of the lake, and at night he would bring the stars nearer--but only those which moved in the southern half of the sky, because from his former room he had only had a view of this part of the heavens, and knew it better. Much more frequently than in the old days he would come down stairs in this astrologer’s costume, like a deposed monarch who no longer sets store by majesty. It was with great difficulty that Aunt Deen prevented him from going into town, or walking in the country, in this accoutrement.

“It does no one any harm,” he would observe.

Nevertheless, after many entreaties, he would consent to replace the cap with a broad brimmed felt hat, and the dressing gown with a frock coat which had to be almost daily rubbed with benzine, in spite of him, to keep it decent. He would bring home from his walks aromatic plants of which he used to make decoctions which he would mix with brandy, and mushrooms which awakened Aunt Deen’s misgivings. I used to look at them, smell them, but for nothing in the world would I have tasted them. I could not think, in those days, that anything good to eat could be found outside a provision store, except, on a pinch, in our garden.

My father’s reign had lasted three good years, perhaps, indeed, nearer four than three, when an event occurred of large importance in my child life--I fell ill. The previous year I had made my first communion, with such deep fervour that my mother had confidentially wondered to Aunt Deen:

“Is he going to follow the example of Mélanie and Stephen? Will God require of us a third child? His will be done!”

My adventure was almost that of _the fair child who escaped from the arms of his mother_. In the course of a walk of our “division” I had tumbled into a brook which we had been forbidden to approach, and rather than be blamed had decided to say nothing about it, though I was soaked up to the chest. Fever set in the next day or the day after. I learned later that it was a severe attack of pneumonia, which in time degenerated into pleurisy. My life was believed to be in danger, and my malady became the occasion of a change in the family arrangements which had almost altered the whole direction of my youth. In a half-slumber I heard whisperings around me, the meaning of which I at once interpreted.

“Am I going to die?” I asked mother and Aunt Deen who were at my bedside.

“Be quiet, naughty boy!” murmured Aunt Deen blowing her nose with a sob and deep sighs, which she doubtless supposed herself to be suppressing.

Mother laid her hand upon my brow--its touch refreshed me as her gentle and persuasive voice said,

“Don’t be uneasy; we are here.”

I knew very well what death was. The school porter having died, a weird whim of our religious director had constrained us to defile, class by class, before the bier upon which the corpse had been laid, before the cover of the coffin was screwed down. Now this porter was a short stout man, whose mortal remains required a cubic receptacle in which he looked to us so comical and smirking that we burst into a laugh that, though it scandalised us, we found it impossible to repress. The indignant professor who was acting as marshal to this abortive pilgrimage overwhelmed us with the severest reproaches, not hesitating to add thereto in due time a sermon upon our final destiny. With no circumlocution he informed us that we were all to die, and perhaps very soon, that our parents would die, and that we should lose every one we loved. By degrees our laughter died away. A vague fear took possession of us, heightened by the monotonous repetition of the word death, continually thrown at our heads. When I went back to the house that morning, greatly moved in spite of myself by that vehement discourse, I looked at my father and mother as I had never looked at them before. They were coming and going as usual, without dreaming that I was watching them. They even laughed at one of Bernard’s remarks: I heard them laugh--a hearty laugh very like that which the unlucky porter in his box had aroused in us. Ah, that laugh! especially our father’s laugh, strong and sonorous, giving a splendid impression of health--how it comforted me, and how it put to flight the terrified curiosity which had taken possession of me.

“Aha!” I thought in my little brain, “the teacher was lying like a dentist! They will not die--that is certain. They can’t die. To begin with, when people laugh, that means that they don’t die.”

This evident conclusion set my heart at rest. So far as I was concerned there was no longer any question on the subject. They were in front and I behind them. And since there was no risk for them how could death touch me, passing them by?

My question “Am I going to die?” was therefore simply designed to make myself interesting. In their presence I was safe.

Mother and Aunt Deen watched me by turns, that I might see no strange face; mother took two nights out of three, and I liked her best. She glided into the room like a mist over the lake, without the slightest sound. I was never aware of any of her movements. Her cares and her caresses mingled; while Aunt Deen, the dear woman, at the cost of tremendous effort, disturbed and irritated me.

The important part which I myself was playing was by no means irksome to me. I seemed to myself to have become smaller than my brother James and my sister Nicola, and that I might just as well be rocked to sleep with lullabies. I used to ask for Venice and The Pool, because of my own drenching, and they thought I was delirious. I distinctly see in memory those two faces bending over me, and still more clearly that of my father, who was continually coming to see me; the attentive, fixed, almost severe expression with which he noted the effects of my disease upon my body was quite strange to me. It was his professional expression; the examination once over, his features would relax, lightened up by fatherhood.

One day father brought in another doctor, but I clearly saw that the little man stood in awe of him, and invariably repeated what he said to him. With implacable logic I observed to my faithful nurses,

“What’s the use of troubling that gentleman? Father knows much more about it than he. Father doesn’t need any one.”

I probably uttered these words or something like them in a low voice. Aunt Deen promptly approved.

“The child is right. He speaks so sensibly that he is surely getting well.”

She repeated my remark to father, who was still anxious, and who smiled, as he had not done of late.

“Yes,” he said; “we shall save him.”

I had no need of any such assurance. I felt it so strongly that that was enough. He never dreamed that this very illness, over which he was triumphing by skill and will-power, was later to be the origin of the home tragedy in which I wandered away from him.

My brothers and sisters were brought into my room, two by two, in succession, guarded with all sorts of advice--not to stay long, to make no noise, not to touch the medicine bottles. Naturally they were soon bored and departed. Each of them took some credit for my cure, which I owed to the prayers of Stephen and Mélanie, to Bernard’s martial exhortations and to the comfortable gaiety of Louise. As for the two little ones, they were prudently kept in the background after James, no doubt repeating what he had heard among the servants, had shouted, jumping up and down with enthusiasm,

“Fançois” (he could hardly say _r_) “will soon be dead.”

Grandfather never appeared at my bedside. Perhaps he apprehended no danger. I think it was rather that he had an invincible horror of illness and all that might result from it. Deeply concerned with his own health, he kept careful account of his bodily functions, and with that perfect courtesy from which he never departed he never failed to inform the entire household of the state of his internal economy; when that went ill he would lament grievously and Aunt Deen would produce from a cupboard a venerable instrument which when rubbed up and mended was still good for use.

“Nothing is more important,” he would say, in our presence, gazing upon the instrument with a satisfied air.

My convalescence was a period of enchantment, not for the new zest that it lent to life, the savour of which only he can taste who has deemed his life put in jeopardy, but because it truly opened to me the mysterious realm of books. I was not unfamiliar with the _Rose Library_. I knew Canon Schmid, and Jules Verne’s romances, and even the fairy tales of Perrault and Andersen, but I had never found in any of them that heart thrill which keeps you awake in bed at night, expecting, fearing some unknown delight not unmingled with danger, such as I had found in Aunt Deen’s amazing stories, and above all in the epic tales that father used to tell.

Not to weary me, they began by bringing me illustrated books. Bernard let me look over the Epinal albums which he was collecting for the sake of the military costumes, and which it cost him some self-denial to lend. I begged for Gustave Doré’s Bible, of which once in the parlour by special favour I had been shown the pictures without being permitted to touch it. The two heavy volumes were propped up on the table, in great state, and I passed long hours in turning the pages. Mother would come and go in the room, somewhat surprised at my being so good, and even a little disturbed by my silence. She would approach noiselessly and look over my shoulder.

“You are not getting tired?”

“Oh, no!”

“You are not bored?”

“Oh, mamma!”

“Are they beautiful?”

“I don’t know.”

When one is a child one doesn’t know what is beautiful. The beautiful thing is to have the heart satisfied. What a sudden uplift my entire æsthetic nature received from them! The unframed outlines of nature had never impressed me; now that, copied, transferred to a square of paper, I could look at them, I saw them, not only on the motionless page, but everywhere, and all alive. The house with its great stones, the walled-in garden--I had often used to touch them, understand them, possess them;--and besides, they belonged to me. But beyond our house the universe began, and its limitlessness had repelled me, so that I could never think of it as having definite outlines. And here those outlines were, before my eyes; through the open Bible I discovered them.

At thirty years’ distance I find again in my memory, with no need of verification, the pictures of Gustave Doré. The pages turn of their own accord and my beloved phantoms reappear. Here are those visions of dread, Leviathan upheaving the sea, the destroying Angel exterminating Sennacherib’s army, the long train of Nicannor’s elephants between which Judas Maccabeus has to pass, and Death in the Apocalypse on his pale horse. They were not my favourites, and in the evening I used even to avoid them. My favourites were those quiet, reposeful, almost shadowy Oriental landscapes, where the summer sunlight seemed to draw up mists, where strange plants grew most unlike our oaks and chestnuts, where in the background were shadows of oxen and camels, far away like boats upon the lake in time of fog.

The birth of Eve seemed lovely to me. While Adam sleeps among the flowers of Eden, she uprises erect and unclothed, with floating hair. One of her knees--look at it, I am sure of it!--slightly bent, is caressed by the sunlight. Through her, by this light upon her knee, I felt something of the pure perfection of nudity long before I even dreamed of its desire. Abraham leads his flocks to the land of Canaan, and the backs of the huddled sheep undulate like the waves that I had seen from the lake shore. The cradle of Moses floats upon the Nile; Pharaoh’s daughter has come out from the palace that stands basking in the sun; she draws near the river; one of her waiting women takes up the little bark. Rebecca, in a long white veil, rests her pitcher upon the margin of the well and talks with Eliezer, a venerable old man; but I don’t distinguish her from the Samaritan woman who takes the same position. Ruth, kneeling, gleans the wheat ears. The great cedars of Lebanon, cut down, lie upon the earth which their shadow overspreads; they are waiting to be used in building the temple in Jerusalem. The angel of the Annunciation hovers in the air, like a falling leaf upheld by the wind. Jesus in the house of Lazarus is sitting on the window ledge, the moonlight stealing through the palm trees. Mary crouching at his feet is drinking in his words, Martha, standing, is busy with household cares. Pictures through which peace flows like a limpid stream, and which are but the transposition of every-day scenes, almost like those which I might have seen at our house and in the country,--pictures of obscure lives, through which God passes.

One day when I declined to be present at the return of the prodigal son to the paternal home, my mother, who loved that parable, asked the reason of this disdain.

“Why don’t you look at this page?”

I made a gesture of disgust. It seemed commonplace to me--a father forgiving his son--what was there surprising in that?

Athalia wringing her hands in despair beside the temple wall, while the soldiers come running to kill her, recalled to my mother her convent. She had herself taken part in the chorus of that tragedy which Racine had written for the young pupils of Saint-Cyr, and which by a happy tradition all girls’ boarding schools used to present in those days; the Unes came back to her with a rush:

The universe is full of His magnificence:
Let us praise God and worship Him forever.

She would recite them with that emotion which religious things always awakened in her, and her tones touched me more directly than that sophisticated art which was beyond my powers.

Another little book had a part in opening my mind to poetry,--it was a book of ballads. A knight wandering in the forest, snatched away from Titania, queen of the elves and sylphs, her cup of happiness and carried it off to his castle on his galloping horse. A little girl on the bank of a stream sang the romance of the swan’s nest hidden among the reeds, and dreamed of a knight who should come upon a red roan steed. The Lord of Burleigh married a shepherdess, who languished in the palace to which he took her, and died of longing for her village and her cottage. How I entered into their longings and their melancholy! Their heartaches poured into my heart a delicious pain, which I could not fathom. Yet I was beginning to discern that we have within ourselves an upspringing fountain of infinitely delicate joys.

Did my father distrust these exciting readings as he did grandfather’s music? He brought me short, simple biographies of great men. It is never too early to make acquaintance with such. One forms a habit of comparing himself with the heroes, and doesn’t fail to say to oneself: “I have time before me; when I am their age I mean to have surpassed them....” By degrees one begins to look for those whose exploits come late in life. I do not know which of these exemplary personages it was of whom I read that he entered the school of adversity. I imagined that school to be at least as severe as the Polytechnic, or Saint-Cyr, to which my brother Bernard was destined, and I burned to present myself there for admission. I did not know that it is the only one that requires no examination, no preliminaries, above all, no recommendation. I confided my desire to my mother. She smiled, which vexed me, and assured me that I should indeed present myself there for admission, but she hoped it would be as late as possible.

These readings transported me into a glorious state of enthusiasm. I could not have understood sarcasm. No one made use of it in our family. There was only grandfather’s little laugh. Our parents loved gaiety, took pleasure even in the noise that we made, but they never used ridicule. They took life seriously, as an opportunity for well-doing, and deemed that it deserved the greatest respect. Grandfather, running through my books, on the first visit that he deigned to pay me after being assured that I was recovering, let fall certain exclamations:

“Oho! the Bible! and the Famous Men! Poor child! Just wait, I’ll bring you some books.”

And in fact he brought me “Scenes from the Public and Private Life of Animals,” and the “Adventures of Three Old Sailors,” both adorned with illustrations. The latter volume was in a sad condition, the stitches loose, the leaves falling out, and the end entirely gone as well as the cover. It must have been translated from the English and its humour perplexed me. Those three sailors, who had escaped from shipwreck, landed on a desert island where they were pursued by a tiger. They climbed a tree, by way of refuge from the ferocious creature, and the picture showed them clinging to the trunk perched one above the other, with hair standing on end, eyes staring, toes curled up. The wild beast was springing up toward them, it was easy to see that with a little exertion he would have them. Then with fierce resolution inspired by the most imperative necessity, the two uppermost bore down with all their weight upon the lowermost one, in order to force him to let go, hoping that this prize would suffice to satisfy the assailant’s fury. And while bearing down with all their might they addressed to their unhappy companion the most touching words of parting:

“Good-bye, Jeremiah” (such was his unpropitious name), “we will go and console your poor father and your betrothed.”

But Jeremiah, like Rachel, refused to be comforted, and stiffened himself, to cling the tighter. Accustomed as I was to tales of heroism I was much displeased with these traitorous friends.

“Scenes in the Life of Animals” appeared to me to have more sense. It was a motley collection such as all old-time libraries prided themselves on containing. Grandville’s vignettes revealed to me traces of animal characteristics in men, whom till then I had thought of only as in the image of God. The animals in the book were dressed like men and women and looked like them. I soon became accustomed to this treatment, the disguises were so natural! Here were the nightingale as a postman, the dog as a lackey, the rabbit as a petty subaltern employe, and there were the vulture as a landed proprietor, the lion as an old beau, the turkey as a banker, the ass as an academician. The centipedes were playing the piano for a young lady dancing on the tight rope, while the cricket was making a trumpet of the carolla of the bindweed. The chameleon, as a deputy, mounted the tribune to state that he was proud and happy to be always of everybody’s opinion. The shark and the saw-fish had on surgeons’ blouses, and frankly declared, “We are going to cut muscles, saw bones--in a word, heal the sick.” The wolf, having murdered a sheep, is reading in his prison the _Idylls_ of Mme Deshoulières, while celebrity comes to him under the form of a complaint sold by hawkers, to be sung to the air of _Fualdès_:

Hearken, Woodpeckers and Ducks,
Jays and Turkeys, Crows and Rooks;
The story of a frightful crime
Worthy of Harpies, in their time.
Who performed the direful act?
A wolf, indelicate, in fact.

The bear was enjoying retirement in the bosom of his family; he could be seen warming his youngest born by holding him before the fire by the paws; his wife was hanging linen before the fire and a young cub in a corner was lifting up his little shirt by way of precaution before retiring; some one is knocking at the door, but the legend explains:

“We live by ourselves; we detest visitors and bores.”

A parroquet flapping his wings without being able to fly represented the illustrious poet Kacatogan. And the martlet with the magpie and the crow made a trio of women of letters. I did not know what a woman of letters could be, but the White Blackbird, who like the parroquet was a poet, taught me in his memoirs:

_While I was composing my poems she was bedaubing reams of paper with her scribblings. I would recite my verses to her aloud, and she, indifferent, kept on writing while I was doing so. She produced romances with a facility almost equal to mine, always choosing the most dramatic subjects: parricides, kidnappings, murders, and even pocket-picking, always taking pains to attack the government, in passing, and to preach the emancipation of Martlets. In one word, no effort was too great for her mind, no clap-trap for her modesty; it never occurred to her to erase a line, nor to work out a plan before setting to work. She was the typical lettered Martlet._

Aunt Deen also produced stories with marvellous facility; she, too, preferred terrible subjects and was not averse to attacking the government. I even suspected her of not knowing, when she began, how she was going to end up, and of inventing the plots of her stories as she went along. Then why didn’t she bedaub paper? The simplest way was to ask her.

“Aunt Deen, are you a woman of letters?”

She asked me twice to repeat my question, as if women of letters really belonged to the zoological kingdom, in the category of monsters. After which she shrugged her shoulders, not even deigning to reply directly.

“The child is certainly crazy. Augustus’s books have addled his brain.”

There was some talk of taking away the “Scenes in the Life of Animals,” the caricatures in which had amused even my father and brought a smile to his lips. The effect of the incident was to attach me all the more strongly to the White Blackbird, who had nearly caused the book to be placed upon the Index. And I soon came to see what it undoubtedly was that distinguished Aunt Deen from the Lettered Martlet. The latter, with immaculate plumage, was in fact merely painted--covered over with a layer of flour which gave her that appearance of having fallen from the sky. The White Blackbird, who never suspected it, and thought he had discovered in the Martlet a creature unique in all the world, becoming suspicious of a mysterious pot of some white mixture, had a disastrous experience. His poems moving him to tenderness, he shed such profuse tears over his companion as to dissolve the plaster of paris with which she was covered, and reveal her as the most commonplace of blackbirds. Now I had often wept in Aunt Deen’s arms; she had bewailed my sorrows without losing anything of her colour. She made use neither of paste nor flour; no, decidedly, however beautiful the stories she made up, she would never be a woman of letters.

Another bit of knowledge came to me from the White Blackbird. I learned from him to enjoy the charm of words for their own sake, independently of their meaning. After his conjugal mishap, he fled to the forest to confide his woes to the Nightingale, uttering to her this plaint: _I was co-ordinating fooleries while you were in the woods_. I did not clearly grasp the meaning, because of the co-ordination of fooleries, which eluded me, and yet I loved the melody of this phrase, and repeated it over and over to myself. The reply of the Nightingale, still more deeply charged with mystery, completely upset me. _I love the Rose_, he sighed. _Sadi the Persian has sung of her: I wear out my throat all night singing to her, but she sleeps, and hears me not. Her chalice is at this moment closed; she is cherishing an old Beetle there; and to-morrow morning, when I go back to my couch, exhausted with suffering and weariness, then she will open her petals that a bee may devour her heart_. I took no interest either in the old Beetle or in Sadi the Persian; the exhausted Nightingale, and that Rose with the devoured heart, communicated to me, by the magic of syllables, a sort of far-off presentiment of love-pain, in which I found a vague and ineffable sadness.

Such sadness was very quick to pass. Much sooner, however, I had borrowed from my new friends, the animals, an art of ridiculing which I found most delightful. I could see no one without finding his double among the beasts. Tem Bossette with his flat face and goggle eyes became a frog--the very frog that tried to make himself as big as the ox; Mimi Pachoux with his furtive step and sudden disappearance I compared to a rat, and The Hanged, who always seemed to find difficulty in using his arms, to a kangaroo, with his very short front legs.

This turn of mind shocked and disturbed my mother. One day she received in my presence a visit from a person of a certain age who was superintending a work room, founding an orphan asylum, building a school, in a word, directing more works in the parish than actually existed. Her name was Mlle Tapinois. She was tall and dried up, with a pointed nose, sloping shoulders and a frigid air. She cooed softly without a moment’s interruption. When she was gone I showed mother, in my book, an old dove in a night gown, with a candle-stick in its claw:

“Mademoiselle Tapinois,” I said triumphantly.

Mother protested against my unseemly comparison.

“She is a holy woman,” she concluded, by way of arousing my sympathy.

But though she did not admit it, I saw that she had recognised the likeness.

Encouraged by the degree of success I had achieved with Mlle Tapinois, I thenceforth watched our visitors to deal out to them the same treatment, and the facility of this game amazed me. I had no difficulty in finding a stout landed proprietor for the elephant, a woe-begone collector of mortgages for the owl, a pianist for the centipede. An old nobleman with a Roman nose reminded me of the falcon whom the _Revolutions had ruined_. In a very short while my collection was further enriched by the bear, the chameleon, and several rabbits, drawn from the registry or the tax office. But the region at that time had no departmental muse worthy to be catalogued among the martlets. They tell me that there are swarms of them now-a-days.

Grandfather, to whom I confided my observations, gave them his full approbation.

“Now you know,” he said, “that animals and men are brothers. But the animals are better fellows than we.”

Nevertheless a secret instinct warned me not to consult my parents on this subject.

II

THE DESIRE

FINE weather had come. Three months still lay between us and the long vacation. Father, agreeing with the timid little colleague whom he had again called in to support his own opinion, declared that I was not to return to school until the end of the vacation next October.

“The child needs out-of-door air. The first thing is to build up his health.”

I was pained by this decision, which wounded my pride. If I were not in school during the last quarter, I could not hope for a wreath at the distribution of prizes. For I was full of emulation, and loved to take the first place, though this brought down upon me grandfather’s ridicule.

“Those classifications mean nothing. First or last it’s all one.”

Father laid out for me a very simple plan of life. A country walk morning and evening, far from the microbes of the town, where you can breath fresh air uncontaminated by human beings. Thus I should recover strength and appetite. But who would walk with me and be my guide? Who would undertake a peripatetic preceptorship of this sort? Father, already behind in his duties because of my long illness, belonged to his absorbing profession; mother, whose presence was certainly required by the whole family, especially the little ones, could hardly ever leave the house except to go to church. Aunt Deen had no out-of-door legs, a deficiency which did not prevent her going up and down stairs, from kitchen to tower, a hundred times a day. There remained grandfather. He always took a walk morning and evening on his own account; what would it cost him to take me along? This would suit all round; the plan was evidently the best possible.

I perceived, however, that it met a serious resistance, for I overheard my parents discussing it in the calm and confident tone which they always used when regulating, in perfect accord, all questions concerning us.

“I would not have him turn him against the house,” said my father.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if it were wrong to admit such a thought, “he wouldn’t do that! You don’t think that of your own father, surely! Of course he has his whims, and his ideas are not always ours. What he needs is God. But he is good hearted; he will be grateful to you for your confidence. And we could not ask such a thing of a stranger.”

“I am not quite satisfied with the plan,” said father.

A little later he resumed the subject. “I will speak to him; there seems to be no other way.”

When this proposition concerning me was broached to him, grandfather acceded to it without either enthusiasm or hostility, with an indifference that wounded me.

“I’d just as soon. It’s the same to me whether I take my walk alone or with some one.” (Naturally!) “Children ought to live out of doors. Study does no good. No more do medicines.”

Father no doubt had an interview with him at which I was not present, and the affair was decided. How would he act toward his new companion? He always treated my brothers and sisters and me, even the two youngest, like reasonable persons, though a little more interesting than others, lending to our remarks as much attention as to those of grown persons; but we had an impression that he couldn’t always tell us apart, and that he would cheerfully have dispensed with us all, which seemed to us an affront.

Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot, then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather’s with a certain solemnity--as a reigning king might do, I thought.

“Here is my son,” he said; “I entrust him to you; he holds the future of our house.”

Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an every-day footing:

“Don’t worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him.”

I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father of me?

The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.

“Where are we going, grandfather?”

I inclined to the direction of the town, where we should find attractions of all sorts, shops, bazars, show-windows, faces, noise and movement.

At the outset we were stopped by the closed gate, the key of which we had forgotten to bring.

“Run and get it, child. But why the devil should they barricade the gate?”

It was one of Aunt Deen’s thousand precautions; the previous evening, or the one before, she had seen from afar a gipsy waggon, and since then she had been keeping prudent guard over the household. I ran, somewhat scandalised by grandfather’s remark. Wasn’t it necessary to guard the house against enemies? A kingdom has frontiers which must be respected; was it not enough that shadows crossed them every evening in spite of gates and bolts?

We are off at last, and grandfather at once turns his back upon the town:

“Child, I don’t like towns.”

Good-bye to shops and people! We had not walked ten minutes when he took it into his head to leave the highroad, along which we were walking at our ease, quite properly, without hurry, and took a footpath which crossed the fields haphazard.

“You’re taking the wrong road, grandfather.”

“Not at all. Child, I detest roads!”

Well, well! he was more surprising than when he used to come down to the dining-room in his dressing gown and Greek cap. I had always supposed that roads were made to be used, not despised. And besides, how could one get along without them when one went out?

The hardly perceptible path which we had taken obliged us to walk single file. I went first, in the capacity of scout. The wheat on one side was already tall, on the other side were oats, quivering on their slender stems. I had learned to know the various grains from our farmer. Wheat and oats soon mingled fraternally before me.

“Grandfather, there is no more path.”

We might have expected it. Our path had vanished. Grandfather quietly passed before me, appeared to take his bearings, snuffed the wind, trampled down a few stalks, and reached a hedge which he overleaped with an ease that was surprising at his age.

“My boy,” he said, helping me to scramble through it, “I abhor fences.”

Our comradeship was beginning well! No roads, no fences! We soon entered a chestnut wood, not in the least like the four or five trees which were the pride of our domain. Here, above us, was a great vault supported by trunks and intermingled branches like so many colossal columns. I saw grandfather stoop and gather from the moss a mushroom that looked like a little white umbrella, wide open.

“This is a sort of amanita,” he said. “It is supposed to be poisonous, whereas it is edible.” (He tasted it to prove his words.) “It isn’t the season, yet. I will teach you to know all the cryptogams. There are very few noxious ones. Nature is good, and never wishes us harm. It is men who spoil her. I know a priest who lives on Satan bolets, and is never the worse.”

He laughed to himself at the priest who could swallow the devil without indigestion.

At last we reached an open space whence no house was to be seen, nor even a cultivated field,--not a trace of humanity. The woods separated us from the town and the lake, upon which a few craft were always sailing. At our back was a rocky hill, half covered with furze and brambles. A slender cascade fell from the summit and was transformed at our feet into a clear, noiseless rill. We were tramping through bracken and a coarse grass, starred with all the flowers of spring. The brook had given a rare exuberance to all this vegetation. The monotonous sound of the waterfall by no means disturbed the solitude of the spot, at once wild and gentle and so secluded. One might have thought oneself at the very end of the earth--or at its beginning. I felt at once happy and desolate.

I had of course taken many a walk with my father. But he always took us to heights that commanded a view; he would point out by name the mountains on the edge of the horizon, the villages in the plain below, the ports on both sides of the lake. He made us feel that the earth was inhabited, and that it was interesting and beautiful because it was inhabited. Now I suddenly discovered the charm of wild nature.

“What is its name?” I asked grandfather to reassure myself.

“The name of what?” he asked, not comprehending.

“The place where we are.”

The question surprised him, and provoked a little laugh that I did not enjoy.

“It has no name.”

“Who owns it?”

“Nobody.”

Nobody! That was very strange. Just as the house must always have belonged to us, I had supposed that the whole earth was divided into properties.

“To us, if you like,” grandfather went on.

And his laugh, his terrible little laugh, began to undermine my notions about life, my beliefs. It produced upon me the effect of the touch of the finger that I used to give when I erected great buildings with my blocks. The edifice grew higher, higher,--I barely touched with my finger one of the columns at the base, and down it all came.

“Oh, to us!” I protested.

People were not to take possession of other people’s property like that, simply because they did not know the owner’s name. Everything that I had been taught protested.

“Why, yes, little simpleton,” he replied. “Every one takes his own in the world. Do you like this bit of land? It is yours,--like the sun that warms us, the air that we breath, the loveliness of these early spring days.”

I was not convinced. Dim resistances awoke within me, shivering; I found no words to express them, and could only bring forward the poor objection:

“Yes, but I couldn’t take anything from it.”

“You take your pleasure from it, that’s the important thing.”

Confident of victory, he clinched it by invoking the testimony of a third party.

“Jean-Jacques would explain to you better than I can, that nature holds within itself the happiness of man. Jean-Jacques would have loved this retreat.”

He uttered the name _Jean-Jacques_ with devout unction, pursing his lips. He spoke of him as Aunt Deen spoke of the best known and most useful saints, Saint Christopher, for example, who protects against accidents, or Saint Antony, who helps to find lost objects. Puzzled, I at once asked:

“Who is that--Jean-Jacques?”

“A friend; a friend whom you do not know.”

Why, I knew, or thought I knew, all grandfather’s friends. He received few visits, mostly from other old men, who appeared older than he, who seemed to be sad and who soon bored him. There was one who would sit down without saying a word, and would just sit a long time, motionless and mute. One day grandfather forgot that he was there and left the room. On his return he found him in the same place, fast asleep. Grandfather would complain openly about the visits of all these “old fogies” as he called them, not one of whom, I was certain, was named Jean-Jacques. On the other hand, he always liked to come down to the drawing-room when he thought he might meet ladies there.

Time pressing, we returned through the chestnut grove, but went out on another side, passing through a second hedge, this one of young acacias. It was with manifest pleasure that I saw houses and cultivated fields again.

“Come! here are private properties for you,” said grandfather when we reached the cultivated grounds. His lips curled with disdain. Not at all disconcerted I asked for landmarks.

“Where is ours?”

“I don’t know. Look over there, at the left. You’ll see it all right as we go on. As for me, when I take a walk I go where fancy leads me. One always gets home somehow.”

When we reached the highroad a strange and disquieting apparition presented itself. I clung to my new preceptor:

“Grandfather, look up the road!”

It seemed to be coming toward us from over the hill, with a slow uniform motion. In a few minutes it would be here. Grandfather shaded his eyes with his hands, the better to concentrate his vision, and explained the phenomenon:

“It’s the sheep that leave Provence every spring and go up to the high pastures. They are led there by easy stages. Let us get to the side of the road, beyond this pile of stones, and watch them go past.”

Thus instructed, I was soon able to distinguish between the almost white road and the yellow-grey and brown flock which composed a single moving mass,--repeated above all those regularly swaying backs by a thin cloud of dust which spread over the fields on either side. At once I saw again the picture in my Bible which showed Abraham travelling to the land of Canaan.

In front of the flock marched a shepherd, wrapped in a great cape which must have been many a time exposed to wind and rain, for it was of the greenish colour of a thatched roof over which many winters have passed. Notwithstanding the sun, his ample covering appeared not to inconvenience him. No doubt our sun was not as warm as that which he had left behind. His hat pulled down over his eyes cast a dark shadow over the upper part of his face, only his grey beard being distinctly visible. He was an old man, and he advanced slowly with a slight swaying of the whole body. He might have been taken for a beggar but for an unconscious air of majesty which covered him like his cloak--that of a captain leading his company, that of a sower sowing his seed. He took no one step faster than another, and the rhythm of his regular advance seemed to communicate itself to the entire column. It gave an impression as of the whole landscape following, obeying in cadence a law which he fixed, the oxen tracing the furrows, the reapers laying bare the fields, the morning and the evening obedient to the time of returning, and even the stars at night traversing, unhastingly, a part of the sky which I had thought I could see moving in grandfather’s spy-glass.

He seemed to me so important that I bowed to him, but he did not return my salutation, nor deign to detach his attention from his absorbing task. Grandfather began a sentence:

“Tell me, shepherd ...” but deemed it useless to go on, recognising the intense seriousness of the man.

A black dog walked almost under his feet, and behind came, in a triangular group, three lean, hairless donkeys, laden with objects which could not be seen since they were covered with an awning. Their heads hung almost to the ground as if they would fain have snuffed it up, or browsed upon it. The main body of the army followed them, the sheep-people, crowding close to one another, eight or ten in a row when one could manage to count them, but most of the time the rows were indistinct, subject to flux and reflux, the great mass of wool undulating as if it were that of a single rampant and interminable animal, over which continual shivers passed.

I did not at first distinguish anything in this uniform and agitated mass. Then I noticed little black spots that were ears. By degrees, as I got used to them, certain individualities emerged from the compact, monotonous throng. There were rams, generally taller, with long horns rolled in a circle, and bells hanging from their necks by a wooden horseshoe shaped collar. There were sheep with white or black coats, better cared for than the others, walking with a certain ostentation. There were also vagabond animals, capricious as goats, which would gladly have escaped from the road but for the vigilance of the dogs that operated on the flanks of the procession, long-haired grey dogs, with eyes shining from cavernous depths under overhanging brows, attentive and active, not to be by any means distracted from their duty as sergeants. One of the sheep climbed upon the stones that protected us, and was immediately imitated by several of her companions. One of the guardians, open-mouthed, cut short the escapade, and forced them to return to their proper place.