Chapter IX (2)

“Dear friend,” he said to her at last, “I regret the love which you have conceived for me; though I search, I cannot discover the merit that might have inspired it. Let us return, I entreat you, to more Christian feelings, let us forget the illusions which once led us astray; I cannot be yours. The continual misfortune that has dogged my enterprises proceeds, perhaps, from the state of mortal sin in which I have always lived. Even listening to the counsels of human prudence, why was I not arrested with my friends on that fatal night at Forli? Why was I not found at my post at the moment of danger? Why was it that my absence could authorize the most cruel suspicions?--Because I had another passion than the liberation of Italy.”

Vanina could not recover from the surprise that she felt at the change in Missirilli. Though he did not appear to have grown thinner, he looked like thirty. Vanina attributed this change to the bad treatment that he had suffered in prison; she burst into tears.

“Ah,” she said to him, “the jailors promised so faithfully that they would treat you kindly!”

The fact was that, at the approach of death, all the religious principles that were consistent with his passion for the liberation of Italy had revived in the young carbonaro’s heart. Little by little Vanina perceived that the astonishing change which she noticed in her lover was entirely moral, and in no wise the result of physical ill-treatment. Her grief, which she had thought at its height, was augmented by this discovery.

Missirilli ceased speaking; Vanina seemed on the point of being suffocated by her sobs. He added, with some emotion:

“If I loved anything on earth, it would be you, Vanina; but thanks to God I have only one object left me in life; I will die in prison, or in the endeavour to restore liberty to Italy.”

There was another silence; evidently Vanina was unable to speak: she tried to do so, in vain. Missirilli added:

“Duty is cruel, my friend; but, if there were no pain in accomplishing it, where would heroism be? Give me your word that you will not try to see me again.”

As well as his close-bound chain allowed him, he made a little motion with his wrist and stretched out his fingers to Vanina.

“If you will let a man who was dear to you advise you, be sensible and marry the deserving man whom your father intends for you. Do not make any awkward confidence to him; but on the other hand do not ever try to see me again; let us be strangers to each other in future. You have advanced a considerable sum for the service of your country; if ever it is delivered from its tyrants, that sum will be repaid to you in national funds.”

Vanina was overwhelmed. While he spoke to her, Pietro’s eye had never once flashed, except when he uttered the word “country.”

At last pride came to the rescue of the young princess; she had provided herself with diamonds and small files. Without a word of reply, she offered them to Missirilli. “I accept them out of duty,” he said, “for I must try to escape; but I will never see you again; I swear it in presence of your new benefits. Adieu, Vanina; promise me that you will never write to me, never try to see me; leave all of me to my country, I am dead to you: farewell.”

“No!” Vanina replied furiously, “I wish you to know what I have done, led by the love I had for you.”

With that she told him all her proceedings from the moment that Missirilli quitted the castle of San Nicolo to surrender himself to the legate. When the recital was ended, Vanina said:

“All that is nothing; I did more for love of you.”

And she told him of her treason.

“Ah, monster!” exclaimed Pietro in a rage, hurling himself upon her, and he tried to fell her with his chains.

He would have succeeded in doing so, but for the jailor, who ran forward at his first cries. He seized Missirilli.

“Here, monster! I won’t be indebted to you for anything,” said Missirilli to Vanina, flinging the files and diamonds at her as well as his chains permitted; and he hastened away.

Vanina remained utterly crushed. She returned to Rome, and the newspapers announce that she has just married Prince Don Livio Savelli.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] “_Librar l’Italia de’ barbari_,” a saying of Petrarch’s in 1350, afterwards repeated by Julius II., by Machiavelli, and by Count Alfieri.

[19] Near Rimini in Romagna. It was in this castle that the famous Cagliostro perished; it is said in the district that he was suffocated there.

[20] A Roman prelate would no doubt not be fit to command an army corps bravely, as was more than once done by a general of division who was minister of police at Paris at the time of Mallet’s attempt; but he never would have let himself be held up in his own house so easily. He would have been too much afraid of being quizzed by his colleagues. A Roman who knows that he is hated does not go about without being well armed.

The writer has not thought it necessary to justify some other little differences between the ways of doing and speaking at Paris and those at Rome. So far from toning down these differences, he has thought it right to state them boldly. The Romans whom he describes have not the honour of being Frenchmen.

THE CHILD WITH THE BREAD SHOES
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

Listen to this story which the grandmothers of Germany tell their grandchildren,--Germany, a beautiful country of legends and dreams, where the moonlight, playing on the mists of Old Rhine, creates a thousand fantastic visions.

At the end of the village a poor woman lived alone in a humble cottage: the house was very poor and contained but the barest necessities in the way of furniture.

An old bed with twisted columns whence hung serge curtains yellow with age; a bread-bin; a walnut chest, polished till it shone, but the numerous worm-eaten holes of which were stopped with wax, indicated a long period of service; an arm-chair, covered with tapestry from which the colours had faded and which had been worn thin by the shaking head of the old grandmother; a spinning-wheel polished with use: that was all.

We were about to forget a child’s cradle, quite new, very cosily padded and covered with a pretty flowered counterpane stitched by an indefatigable needle, that of a mother ornamenting the crib of her little Jesus.

All the wealth in the little house was centred there.

The child of a burgomaster or of an aulic councillor could not have been more softly couched. Sacred prodigality, sweet folly of the mother who deprives herself of everything to provide a little luxury, in the midst of her poverty, for her dear nursling!

The cradle gave a festal air to the poor hovel; nature, which is compassionate to the unfortunate, made the bareness of this white-washed cottage gay with tufts of houseleek and velvet moss. Kind plants, full of pity, although they looked like parasites, filled up the holes in the roof and made it as dazzling as a bride’s jewels, and prevented the rain from falling on the cradle; the pigeons alighted on the window and cooed until the child fell asleep.

A little bird, to which young Hans had given a crumb of bread in the winter, when the snow made the ground white, had, when spring came, let a grain fall from his beak at the foot of the wall, and thence had sprung a beautiful bindweed which, clinging to the stones with its green claws, had entered the room by a broken window-pane, and crowned the child’s cradle with its cluster, so that in the morning Hans’s blue eyes and the blue bells of the bindweed woke up at the same time, and looked at each other with an understanding air.

This home, then, was poor but not gloomy.

Hans’s mother, whose husband had died far away at the war, lived as best she could on vegetables from the garden, and the product of her spinning-wheel: very little, it is true, but Hans wanted for nothing and that was enough.

Hans’s mother was a truly pious and believing woman. She prayed, worked and practised virtue; but she had one fault: she looked upon herself with too much complacence and prided herself too much on her son.

It sometimes happens that mothers, seeing these beautiful rosy children, with dimpled hands, white skin and pink heels, think that they belong to them for ever.

But God gives nothing; he only lends, and, like a forgotten creditor, he sometimes comes to demand his own again all of a sudden.

Because this fresh bud had sprung from her stem, Hans’s mother believed that she had made him to be born: and God, who, from within his Paradise with its azure vaults starred with gold, watches everything that happens on earth, and hears from the ends of the infinite the sound that the blade of grass makes as it grows, was not pleased to see this.

He also saw that Hans was greedy and that his mother was too indulgent to this greediness; the naughty child often cried when he had, after grapes or an apple, to eat bread, object of envy to so many unfortunates, and his mother let him throw away the piece of bread he had commenced, or else finished it herself.

Now it happened that Hans fell ill: fever burned him, his breath whistled in his choking throat; he had croup, a terrible illness that has made the eyes of many mothers and fathers red.

At the sight the poor woman was filled with horrible anguish.

You have doubtless seen in some church the image of Our Lady, clothed in mourning and standing under the Cross, with her breast open and her bleeding heart, where lie plunged seven swords of silver, three on one side, four on the other. That means that there is no agony more terrible than that of a mother who sees her child dying.

And yet the Holy Virgin believed in the divinity of Jesus and knew that her son would come to life again.

Now Hans’s mother had not that hope.

During the last days of Hans’s illness his mother, even while watching him, continued to spin mechanically and the whirring of the wheel mingled with the rattle in the throat of the dying child.

If some rich people find it strange that a mother can spin by the bed-side of a dying child, it is because they do not understand what tortures poverty contains for the soul; alas! it does not only break the body, it also breaks the heart.

What she was spinning thus, was the thread for her little Hans’s shroud; she did not wish that any cloth that had been used should cover that dear body, and, as she had no money, she made her spinning-wheel hum with a mournful activity; but she did not pass the thread through her lips as was her custom: enough tears fell from her eyes to moisten it.

At the end of the sixth day, Hans expired. Whether from chance or from sympathy, the cluster of bindweed that caressed his cradle faded, dried up and let its last curled-up flower fall on the bed.

When the mother was quite convinced that the breath had for ever flown from his lips, on which the violets of death had replaced the roses of life, she covered the too dear head with the edge of the sheet, took her bundle of thread under her arm, and made her way towards the weaver’s house.

“Weaver,” she said to him, “here is some very fine thread, very regular and without knots; the spider does not spin any finer between the joists of the ceiling; let your shuttle come and go; from this thread I must have an ell of cloth as soft as the cloth of Friesland or Holland.”

The weaver took the skein, set the warp, and the busy shuttle, drawing the thread after it, began to run hither and thither.

The card strengthened the woof and the thread continued to grow evenly, and without breaking, on the loom; it was as fine as the shift of an archduchess or the linen with which the priest dries the communion-cup at the altar.

When all the thread was used, the weaver gave the cloth to the poor mother, and, as he had understood everything from the settled look of despair on the unhappy woman’s face, he said to her:

“The emperor’s son, who died last year while still an infant, was not wrapped in a finer or softer shroud in his little ebony coffin with silver nails.”

Having folded the cloth, the mother drew from her wasted finger a thin gold ring, all worn with use.

“Good weaver,” she said, “take this ring, my wedding-ring, the only gold I ever possessed.”

The kind weaver-man did not wish to take it; but she said to him:

“Where I am going I shall have no need of a ring; for I feel my Hans’s small arms pulling me into the ground.”

Then she went to the carpenter and said to him:

“Master, get me some oak from the heart of the tree, which will not rot and which the worms will not be able to eat; cut from it five boards and two little boards and make a coffin to these measurements.”

The carpenter took his saw and plane, trimmed the planks, and struck the nails as lightly as possible with his hammer, so as not to let the iron points enter farther into the poor woman’s heart than into the wood.

When the work was finished, it was so carefully and so well done that it might have been taken for a box to put jewels and laces in.

“Carpenter, as you have made so beautiful a coffin for my little Hans, I give you my house at the end of the village, and the little garden behind it, and the well with the vineyard.--You shall not wait long.”

With the shroud and the coffin, which she held under her arm, it was so small, she went through the village streets, and the children, who do not know what death is, said:

“Look at Hans’s mother taking him a beautiful box of toys from Nuremberg; it must be a town with its painted and varnished wooden houses, its steeple covered with tin-foil, its belfry and its tower with battlements, and its trees in the promenades, all curly and green; or else a beautiful violin with its sculptured pegs at the neck and its horsehair bow.--Oh, why have we not a box like it!”

And the mothers, growing pale, kissed them and told them to be quiet:

“Silly children that you are, you must not say that; do not wish for the box of toys, or the violin-case that one carries with tears under one’s arm: you will have it soon enough, poor little ones!”

When Hans’s mother got home, she took the dainty, still pretty, corpse of her son and began to make his last toilet--it must be made carefully, for it has to last for eternity.

She clothed him in his Sunday clothes, his silk dress and fur pelisse, so that he should not be cold in the damp place to which he was going. Beside him she put the doll with the enamel eyes, the doll he loved so much that he always took it to bed with him.

But, just as she was turning down the shroud on the body which she had kissed for the last time a thousand times, she saw that she had forgotten to place his pretty little red slippers on the child’s feet.

She looked for them in the room, for it hurt her to see the little feet bare that used to be so warm and pink, and were now so cold and white; but during her absence the rats had found the shoes under the bed, and for want of better food had nibbled them, gnawed at them, and cut holes in the leather.

It was a great grief to the poor mother that Hans should go away into the other world with bare feet; when the heart is all one wound, it only needs a touch to make it bleed.

She cried to see the slippers: from that inflamed, worn-out eye a tear could still gush.

How could she get shoes for Hans, when she had already given her ring and her house? That was the thought that troubled her. By dint of thinking she had an idea.

In the bread-bin there was still a whole loaf of bread, as, for a long time, the unhappy woman, kept alive by her sorrow, had been eating nothing.

She broke the loaf, remembering that, in the past, she had often made with the soft parts pigeons, geese, chickens, wooden shoes, boats, and other boys’ things to amuse Hans.

Placing the bread in the hollow of her hand, and kneading it with her thumb while she moistened it with her tears, she made a little pair of bread shoes, with which she covered the cold, bluish feet of the dead child, and, her heart consoled, she turned down the shroud and closed the coffin.--While she was kneading the bread, a poor man had come to the door and timidly asked for some bread; but she had signed to him with her hand to go away.

The grave-digger came to take away the box, and buried it in a corner of the cemetery under a clump of white rose-bushes: the air was warm, it was not raining and the ground was not wet; this was a comfort to the mother, who thought that her poor little Hans would not pass the first night in his tomb too uncomfortably.

When she returned home to her solitary house, she placed Hans’s cradle beside her bed, lay down and fell asleep.

Overtaxed nature succumbed.

As she slept, she had a dream or, at least, she believed it was a dream.

Hans appeared to her, clothed, as he was in his coffin, in his Sunday dress and his pelisse lined with swans’-down, in his hand his doll with the enamel eyes and on his feet his bread shoes.

He seemed to be sad.

He had not the halo that death ought to give to the little innocents; for, if a child is placed in the ground, it comes out an angel.

The roses of Paradise were not flourishing on his pale cheeks, coloured white by death; tears fell from his blond eyelashes, and great sighs swelled his little breast.

The vision disappeared, and the mother awoke, bathed in perspiration, delighted at having seen her child, terrified at having seen him so sad; but she reassured herself by saying, “Poor Hans! even in Paradise he cannot forget me.”

The following night, the apparition was repeated: Hans was still more sad and more pale.

His mother, stretching her arms out to him, said:

“Dear child, take comfort, and do not weary in Heaven; I shall soon rejoin you.”

The third night, Hans came again; he moaned and cried more than at the other times, and he disappeared with his little hands joined; he no longer had his doll, but he still had his bread shoes.

His mother, being uneasy, went to consult a venerable priest, who said to her:

“I will watch beside you to-night, and I will question the little ghost; he will answer me; I know what words to say to innocent or guilty spirits.”

Hans appeared at the usual hour, and the priest summoned him, in the consecrated words, to tell him what troubled him in the other world.

“It is the bread shoes which torment me, and hinder me from mounting the diamond staircase of Paradise; they are heavier on my feet than postilion’s boots and I cannot get past the first two or three steps, and that troubles me greatly, for I see above a cloud of beautiful cherubim with rosy wings who are calling to me to play with them and are showing me toys of silver and gold.”

Having said these words, he disappeared.

The good priest, to whom Hans’s mother had made her confession, said to her:

“You have committed a grave fault, you have profaned the daily bread, the sacred bread, our good God’s bread, the bread that Jesus Christ, at his last repast, chose to represent his body, and, after having refused a slice of it to the poor man who came to your door, you kneaded from it slippers for your Hans.

“You must open the coffin, take the bread shoes off the child’s feet, and burn them in the all-purifying fire.”

Accompanied by the grave-digger and the mother, the priest proceeded to the cemetery: with four blows of the spade the coffin was laid bare, and was opened.

Hans was lying inside, just as his mother had laid him there, but his face bore an expression of pain.

The holy priest gently removed the bread shoes from the dead child’s feet and burned them himself at the flames of a candle, reciting a prayer the while.

When night came, Hans appeared to his mother one last time, but he was gay, rosy and happy, and had with him two little cherubim with whom he had already made friends; he had wings of light and a fillet of diamonds.

“Oh, mother, what joy, what happiness, and oh, how beautiful are the gardens of Paradise! We play there all the time and our good God never scolds.”

Next day, the mother saw her son again, not on earth, but in heaven; for she died during the day, her brow pressed against the empty cradle.

THE REVEREND FATHER GAUCHER’S ELIXIR
ALPHONSE DAUDET

“Drink this, neighbour, and tell me what you think of it.”

And drop by drop, with the scrupulous care of a lapidary counting pearls, the _curé_ of Graveson poured me out two fingers of a golden-green liquor, warm, shimmering, exquisite.... It warmed my stomach like sunshine.

“That is Father Gaucher’s elixir, the pride and the health of our Provence,” the good man informed me triumphantly. “It is made at the Premonstratensian convent, a couple of leagues from your mill.... Isn’t it worth all their Chartreuses?... And if you only knew how amusing the story of this elixir is! Just listen....”

Thereupon quite innocently, thinking no evil, in the Presbytery dining-room so simple and quiet with its little pictures of the Stations of the Cross and its pretty white starched curtains like surplices, the abbé began to tell me a tale just a little sceptical and irreverent, after the manner of a story from Erasmus or D’Assoucy.

* * * * *

“Twenty years ago the Premonstratensians, or rather the White Fathers, as our Provençals call them, had fallen into great poverty. If you had seen their house in those days, it would have made your heart ache.

“The great wall and St. Pachomius’ tower were falling into pieces. Around the weed-grown cloisters the columns were splitting, the stone saints were crumbling in their niches. Not a window was whole, not a door held fast. In the garths and chapels the Rhone wind blew as it does in the Camargue, extinguishing the candles, breaking the lead of the windows, and driving the holy water out of the stoups. But saddest of all was the convent steeple as silent as a deserted dove-cote, and the fathers, for want of means to buy themselves a bell, forced to ring to matins with clappers of almond-wood!...

“Poor White Fathers! I can see them yet, at a Corpus Christi procession, filing sadly past in their patched mantles, pale, thin from their diet of pumpkins and melons, and behind them his lordship the abbot, who hung down his head as he went, ashamed at letting the sun see his crosier with the gilding worn off and his white woollen mitre all moth-eaten. The ladies of the confraternity wept in their ranks for pity at the sight, and the big banner-carriers grinned and whispered to each other, as they pointed at the poor monks:

“‛Starlings go thin when they go in a flock!’

“The fact is that the unfortunate White Fathers were themselves reduced to debating whether they would not be better to take their flight across the world and seek fresh pasture each one where he could.

“So then, one day when this grave question was being discussed in the chapter, a message was brought to the prior that Brother Gaucher asked to be heard before the council.... You must understand that this Brother Gaucher was the convent cowherd; that is to say, he spent his days in wandering from arch to arch of the cloisters, driving two scraggy cows, which sought for grass in the crevices of the pavement. Brought up until his twelfth year by an old half-witted woman in Les Baux, called Auntie Bégon, and then taken in by the monks, the unfortunate cowherd had never been able to learn anything except to drive his beasts and to repeat his paternoster, and even that he said in Provençal; for he had a thick skull, and his wits were about as sharp as a leaden dagger. A fervent Christian, for all that, though somewhat visionary, quite comfortable in his sackcloth, and disciplining himself with strong conviction and such arms!...

“When they saw him enter the chapter-house, simple and clownish, and salute the assembly with a scrape, prior, canons, treasurer, and every one burst out laughing. That was always the effect produced everywhere that his honest, grizzled face appeared, with its goatee and its somewhat vacuous eyes; so Brother Gaucher was not put about.

“‛Your Reverences,’ he said in a good-natured tone, twisting at his olive-stone beads, ‛it’s a true saying that empty barrels make the most sound. What do you think? By putting my poor brains to steep, though they’re soft enough already, I do believe I’ve found the way to get us all out of our difficulties.

“‛It’s this way. You know Auntie Bégon, the good woman who took care of me when I was little--God rest her soul, the old sinner! She used to sing some queer songs when she had drink--Well, what I want to tell you, my reverend fathers, is that when Auntie Bégon was alive she knew the herbs that grow in the mountains as well and better than any old hag in Corsica. And, by the same token, in her latter days she compounded an incomparable elixir by blending five or six sorts of simples, which we used to go and gather together in the Alpilles. That’s many a year ago; but I think that with the aid of Saint Augustine, and the permission of our father abbot, I might--if I search carefully--recall the composition of that mysterious elixir. Then we should only have to put it into bottles and sell it a little dear, and the community would be able to get rich at its ease, like our brethren at La Trappe and the Grande....’

“He had not time to finish. The prior got up and fell on his neck. The canons took him by the hands. The treasurer, even more deeply moved than any of the others, respectfully kissed the frayed hem of his cowl.... Then each returned to his stall to deliberate; and in solemn assembly the chapter decided to entrust the cows to Brother Thrasybulus, in order that Brother Gaucher might devote himself entirely to the preparation of his elixir.

* * * * *

“How did the good brother manage to recall Auntie Bégon’s recipe? What efforts, what vigils did it cost him? History does not relate. But this much is certain, at the end of six months the White Fathers’ elixir was very popular already. In all the Comtat, in all the Arles district not a _mas_, not a farm-house but had at the backdoor of its spence, among the bottles of wine syrup and jars of _olives picholines_, a little brown stone flagon sealed with the arms of Provence, with a monk in ecstasy on a silver label. Thanks to the vogue of its elixir the house of the Premonstratensians got rich very rapidly. St Pachomius’ tower was rebuilt. The prior got a new mitre, the church grand new painted windows; and in the fine tracery of the steeple a whole flight of bells, big and little, alighted one fine Easter morning, chiming and pealing in full swing.

“As for Brother Gaucher, the poor lay brother whose rusticities used to amuse the chapter so, he was never mentioned now in the convent. They only knew the Reverend Father Gaucher, a man of brains and ability, who lived quite isolated from the petty, multifarious occupations of the cloister, and shut himself up all day in his distillery, while thirty monks scoured the mountains in search of his fragrant herbs.... This distillery, to which no one, not even the prior, had the right of entry, was an old abandoned chapel at the bottom of the canons’ garden. The good fathers’ simplicity had made it into a very mysterious and formidable place; and any bold and inquisitive monk who managed to reach the rose-window above the door by scrambling up the climbing vines promptly tumbled down, terrified at his peep of Father Gaucher with his necromancer’s beard, stooping over his furnaces, hydrometer in hand; and all around him red stone retorts, gigantic alembics, glass worms, a regular weird litter that glowed as if enchanted in the red gleam of the windows....

“At close of day, when the last stroke of the Angelus sounded, the door of this place of mystery was opened discreetly, and his Reverence betook himself to the church for the evening office. You should have seen the reception that he got as he traversed the monastery! The brethren lined up as he passed. They said:

“‛Hush!... He has the secret!...’

“The treasurer walked behind him and spoke to him, bowing deferentially.... Amid these adulations the Father went his way, wiping his brow, his three-cornered hat with its broad brim on the back of his head like an aureole, looking complacently about him at the wide courts planted with orange-trees, the blue roofs where new vanes were turning, and in the dazzling white cloister, amid the neat flower columns, the canons all newly rigged out, walking two and two with contented faces.

“‛They owe all that to me!’ his Reverence said inwardly; and, as often as he did so, the thought made his pride rise in gusts.

“The poor man was heavily punished for it. You’ll hear how that happened....

* * * * *

“You must understand that one evening, whilst the office was being sung, he arrived at the church in an extraordinary state of agitation: red, breathless, his cowl awry, and so upset that in taking holy water he dipped his sleeves into it up to the elbows. At first they thought that it was excitement at being late; but when they saw him make profound reverences to the organ and the galleries instead of saluting the high altar, rush across the church like a whirlwind, wander about in the choir for five minutes in search of his stall, then, once he was seated, sway right and left, smiling benignly, a murmur of astonishment ran through the nave and aisles. They chuckled to one another behind their breviaries:

“‛Whatever is the matter with our Father Gaucher?... Whatever is the matter with our Father Gaucher?’

“Twice the prior impatiently let his crosier fall on the pavement to command silence.... Down at the end of the choir the psalms still went on; but the responses lacked animation....

“Suddenly, in the middle of the _Ave verum_, lo and behold, Father Gaucher flung himself back in his stall, and sang out at the top of his voice:

“‛In Paris there dwells a White Father,
Patatin, patatan, tarabin, taraban....’

“General consternation. Every one rose. There were cries of:

“‛Take him away!... He’s possessed!’

“The canons crossed themselves. His Lordship flourished his crosier.... But Father Gaucher saw nothing, heard nothing; and two sturdy monks had to drag him out by the side-door of the choir, struggling like a demoniac and going on worse than ever with his ‛patatins’ and ‛tarabans.’

* * * * *

“Next morning, at daybreak, the unfortunate man was on his knees in the prior’s oratory, owning his fault with a torrent of tears.

“‛It was the elixir, my lord; it was the elixir that overcame me,’ he said, beating on his breast.

“And seeing him so conscience-smitten, so penitent, the good prior himself was moved.

“‛Come, come, Father Gaucher, set your mind at rest; it will all pass away like dew in the sun.... After all, the scandal has not been so great as you think. To be sure, there was a song that was a little ... hem! hem!... Yet let us hope that the novices would not pick it up.... But now, let us see; tell me frankly how it all happened.... It was when you were trying the elixir, was it not? Perhaps your hand was too heavy?... Yes, yes, I understand.... It is like brother Schwartz, the inventor of gunpowder: you have been the victim of your invention. But tell me, my good friend, is it absolutely necessary for you to try this terrible elixir on yourself?’

“‛Unfortunately it is, my lord! The gauge gives me the strength and the degree of alcohol, it is true; but for the fineness, the velvetiness, I can’t very well trust anything but my tongue!...’

“‛Ah, to be sure!... But listen for another moment to what I am going to say to you.... When you are compelled to taste the elixir thus, does it seem good? Do you derive any pleasure from it?’

“‛Alas, yes, my lord!’ said the unfortunate father, blushing to the roots of his hair. ‛These last two evenings I have found such a bouquet in it, such an aroma!... Surely it must be the Devil that has played me this sorry trick.... And so I have quite decided to use nothing but the gauge in future. If the liquor is not fine enough, if it does not pearl enough, so much the worse....’

“‛For any sake don’t do that,’ the prior interrupted excitedly. ‛We must not run the risk of making our customers dissatisfied.... All you have to do, now that you are forewarned, is to be on your guard.... Let us see, how much do you require to ascertain?... Fifteen or twenty drops, eh?... Let’s say twenty drops.... The Devil will be smart indeed if he catches you with twenty drops.... In any case, to prevent accidents, I’ll dispense you from coming to church in future. You will say the evening office in the distillery.... And, meanwhile, go in peace, reverend father, and, above all things, count your drops carefully.’

“Alas, his poor reverence had much need to count his drops!... The Devil had hold of him, and never afterwards let him go.

“The distillery heard some strange offices!

* * * * *

“So long as it was day, all went well. The father was tolerably calm: he prepared his chafing-dishes and alembics, sorted his herbs carefully, all Provence herbs, fine, grey, serrated, hot with perfume and sunshine.... But in the evening, when the simples were infused and the elixir was cooling in great copper basins, the poor man’s martyrdom began.

“‛Seventeen ... eighteen ... nineteen ... twenty!...’

“The drops fell from the stirring-rod into the silver-gilt goblet. The father swallowed the twenty at a gulp, almost without pleasure. What he longed for was the twenty-first. Oh, that twenty-first drop!... Then, to escape temptation, he went and knelt down at the farthest end of the laboratory, and buried himself in his paternosters. But from the still-warm liquor there rose a faint steam charged with aromas, which came stealing about him and sent him back willy-nilly to his basins.... The liquor was a lovely golden green.... Leaning over it with open nostrils, the father stirred it gently with his stirring-rod, and in the little sparkling bubbles that the emerald wave carried round he seemed to see Auntie Bégon’s eyes laughing and twinkling as they looked at him....

“‛Here goes! Another drop!’

“And with one drop and another the unfortunate at last had his goblet full to the brim. Then, completely vanquished, he sank down in a great arm-chair, and lolling at ease, his eyes half shut, tasted his sin sip by sip, saying softly to himself with a delicious remorse:

“‘Ah! I’m damning myself ... damning myself....’

“The most terrible thing was that at the bottom of this diabolical elixir he rediscovered by some black art or other all Auntie Bégon’s naughty songs: ‛There are three little gossips, who talk of making a banquet’ ... or: ‛Master Andrew’s little shepherdess goes off to the wood by her little self,’ and always the famous one about the White Fathers: ‛Patatin, patatan.’

“Imagine his confusion next day when his cell-mates said to him slyly:

“‛Eh, eh, Father Gaucher, you had a bee in your bonnet last night, when you went to bed!’

“Then it was tears, despair and fasting, sackcloth and discipline. But nothing could avail against the demon of the elixir, and every evening at the same hour his possession began anew.

* * * * *

“All this time orders were pouring into the abbey in excess of expectation. They came from Nîmes, from Aix, from Avignon, from Marseilles.... Every day the convent became more like a factory. There were packing brothers, labelling brothers, others for the accounts, others for the carting; the service of God may have lost a few tolls of the bells now and again by it; but I can assure you that the poor folk of the district lost nothing....

“Well, then, one fine Sunday morning, whilst the treasurer was reading in full chapter his stock-sheet at the end of the year, and the good canons were listening to him with sparkling eyes and smiles on their lips, who should burst into the middle of the meeting but Father Gaucher, shouting out:

“‛That’s an end of it!... I can’t stand it any longer!... Give me my cows again!’

“‛But what is it, Father Gaucher?’ asked the prior, who had his own suspicions of what it was.

“‛What is it, my lord?... I’m on a fair way of preparing myself a fine eternity of flames and pitch-forks.... I drink, and drink, like a lost soul; that’s what it is!...’

‛But I told you to count your drops.’

‛Ah, so you did! To count my drops! But I would need to count by goblets now.... Yes, your Reverences, that’s what I’ve come to. Three bottles an evening!... You know quite well that can’t go on for ever.... So, get whom you like to make the elixir.... God’s fire burn me, if I take anything more to do with it!’

“There was no more laughing for the chapter.

“‛But, wretched man, you’ll ruin us!’ cried the treasurer, brandishing his ledger.

“‛Would you rather I damned myself?’

“Thereupon the prior stood up.

“‛Reverend sirs,’ he said, stretching out his fine white hand, on which the pastoral ring glistened, ‛it can all be arranged.... It’s at night, is it not, my dear son, that the demon assails you?...’

‛Yes, Sir Prior, regularly every evening.... When I see the night coming on, I get all in a sweat, saving your Reverence’s presence, like Capitou’s ass, when he saw them come with the pack-saddle.’

“‛Well, then, keep your mind easy.... In future, every evening, during the office, we’ll recite on your behalf the Prayer of Saint Augustine, to which plenary indulgence is attached.... With that, you are safe, whatever happens.... It is absolution at the very moment of sin.’

“‘O that is good, thank you, Sir Prior.’

“And, without asking anything more, Father Gaucher returned to his alembics as light as a lark.

“And in fact, from that moment, every evening, at the end of compline, the officiant never failed to say:

“‘Let us pray for our poor Father Gaucher, who is sacrificing his soul in the interests of the community. _Oremus, Domine_....’

“And, while the prayer ran along all those white cowls prostrated in the shadow of the naves, like a little breeze over snow, away at the other end of the convent, behind the lighted windows of the distillery, Father Gaucher might be heard chanting open-throated:

“‘In Paris there dwells a White Father,
Patatin, patatan, tarabin, taraban;
In Paris there dwells a White Father
Who sets all the little nuns dancing,
Trip, trip, trip, trip in a garden;
Who sets all the....’”

* * * * *

At this point the good _curé_ stopped short in horror. “Mercy on us! If my parishioners heard me!”

THE LEGEND OF SAINT JULIAN HOSPITATOR
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT