Ten Tales Part 4

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They were all there: the stars, the comedians, the lovers, the traitors; n.o.body was lacking: soubrettes, duennas, coquettes, first walking ladies. Wearing a sack-coat and a felt hat on his long gray hair, the superb adventurer of all the cloak and sword dramas leaned against the shutter of a shop in his familiar att.i.tude, and crossed his arms to show his handsome hands; while a little old fellow with the wrinkled face of a clown spoke to him briskly in the broad, harsh voice which had so often made us explode with laughter. By the side of the aged first young man, who, pinched in his scanty frock-coat, and with trousers trailing under foot, twirled in his gloved hands his locks of over-black hair, stood a great handsome fellow, beautiful as a model, who had not been able to renounce even for that day his eccentricities of costume, and strutted in a black velvet cape and the boots of an equerry. Oh, how sad, tired, and old they seemed in the gray light of that winter morning, all those pathetic heads, graceful or laughable, which we were only in the habit of seeing when transfigured by the prestige of the stage. Chins had become blue-black under too frequent shaving; hair thin and dry under the hot iron of the hair-dresser; skins rough under the injurious action of unguents and vinegar; eyes dull, burned by the glare of foot-lights--blinded, almost fixed, like those of an owl in the sunlight.

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The women were especially to be pitied. Obliged by the occasion to rise at a very early hour, and not having had the time for a careful and minute toilet, they gathered in groups of four or five, chilled and s.h.i.+vering in their fur mantles, m.u.f.fs, and triple black veils.

Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and powder of the morning, they were unrecognizable, and it required an effort of imagination to find in them a memory of that sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres, exposed every evening to the desires of several thousand men. On all of these charming types appeared the mark of weariness and age. Some ossified into faded skeletons, others grew dull with an unhealthy weight of fat; wrinkles crossed the foreheads and starred the temples; lips were livid and eyes circled with dark rings; the complexions were particularly frightful--that uniform tint, morbid and sickly, the work of rouge and grease-paints. That heavy woman, with the head and neck of a farmer's wife (one almost sees a basket on her shoulder), is the terrible and fatal queen of grand, romantic dramas; and that small blonde and pale creature, so faded under her laces, and who would have completely filled a music-teacher's carrying roll, was the artless young woman whom all the vaudevillists married at the denouement of their pieces. There were the dying glances of the lorette in the hospital, the pose of the old copyist of the Louvre, and the theatrical sneer.

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Soon the cabs drove up with the functionaries connected with the administration of the theatre, in black hats and coats, with an official air of sadness; young reporters, the outflow of journalism, staring at everybody and taking notes; dramatic authors, Monday feuilletonists--in short, all of those nocturnal beings, tired and worn-out, who are properly called the actives of Paris.

The groups became more compact, and talked animatedly. Old friends found each other; they shook hands, and, in view of the circ.u.mstances, smiled cordially, while the women saluted each other through their veils.

In pa.s.sing, we could catch fragments of conversation like this:

"When will the affair begin?"

"Were you at the opening of the Varietes yesterday?"

Theatrical terms were heard--"My talents," "My charms," "My physique."

Some business, even, was done. A new manager was quite surrounded; an old actress organized her benefit.

Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd. The undertaker's men had just placed the coffin in the hea.r.s.e, and the young girls of the Sisterhood of the Virgin, to which the dead girl had belonged, arranged themselves in two lines, in their white veils, at the sides of the funeral-car. Preceded by the master of ceremonies, in silk stockings and a wand of office in his hand, the poor father appeared on the pavement in full mourning, with a white cravat, broken down by grief and sustained by his friends.

The procession set out and came to the parish church, fortunately near.

There was a grand ma.s.s, with music which was not finished. It was too warm in the church stuffed with people, and the inattention was general.

Men who recognized each other saluted with a light movement of the head; conversation was exchanged in a low voice; some young actors struck att.i.tudes for the benefit of the women, and the pious responded to Dominus Vobisc.u.m droned by the priest. At the elevation, from behind the altar, rang out a magnificent Pie Jesu, sung by a celebrated baritone, who had never put in his voice so much amorous languor. Outside the church-yard the small boys of the quarter stood on tiptoe, and, hanging on to the railings, pointed out the celebrities with their fingers.

The office finished, the long defile commenced; and every one went to the entrance of the church to sprinkle some drops of holy-water on the bier, and press the hand of the old actor, who, broken by grief, and having hardly strength to hold his hat, leaned against a pillar.

That was the most horrible moment.

Carried away by the habit of playing up to the situation, all these theatrical people put into the token of sympathy which they gave to their friend the character of their employment. The star advanced gravely, and with a three-quarter inclination of his head flashed out the "Look of Fate." The old tragedian with a gray beard a.s.sumed a stoical expression, and did not forget to "vibrate" in p.r.o.nouncing a masculine "Courage!" The clown approached with a short, trotting step, and shaking his head until his cheeks trembled, he murmured, "My poor old fellow." And the fairy queen, with the sensibility of a sensitive female, threw herself impulsively on the neck of the unhappy father, who, with swollen face, bloodshot eyes, and hanging lip, blackened his face and his gloved hands with the dye of his mustache, diluted by tears.

And all the time, a few steps from this grotesque and sinister scene, we could see--last word of this ant.i.thesis--the white figures of the young girls of the sisterhood, kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of their companion, and who undoubtedly were beseeching G.o.d, in their nave and original prayers, to grant her the paradise of their dreams: a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical style, all in carved and gilded wood, and many-colored marble, where one could see at the end a tableau in a transparent light; the Virgin crowned with stars, with a serpent under her feet, while little cherubs suspended in mid-air over her head an azure streamer flaming with these words: "_Ecce Regina Angelorum._"

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THE SUBSt.i.tUTE.

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He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.

He spoke thus to the judge:

"I am called Jean Francois Leturc, and for six months I was with the man who sings and plays upon a cord of catgut between the lanterns at the Place de la Bastille. I sang the refrain with him, and after that I called, 'Here's all the new songs, ten centimes, two sous!' He was always drunk, and used to beat me. That is why the police picked me up the other night. Before that I was with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a laundress; her name was Adele. At one time she lived with a man on the ground-floor at Montmartre. She was a good work-woman and liked me. She made money because she had for customers waiters in the cafes, and they use a good deal of linen. On Sundays she used to put me to bed early so that she could go to the ball. On week-days she sent me to Les Freres, where I learned to read. Well, the sergeant-de-ville whose beat was in our street used always to stop before our windows to talk with her--a good-looking chap, with a medal from the Crimea. They were married, and after that everything went wrong. He didn't take to me, and turned mother against me. Every one had a blow for me, and so, to get out of the house, I spent whole days in the Place Clichy, where I knew the mountebanks. My father-in-law lost his place, and my mother her work. She used to go out was.h.i.+ng to take care of him; this gave her a cough--the steam.... She is dead at Lamboisiere. She was a good woman.

Since that I have lived with the seller of brushes and the catgut sc.r.a.per. Are you going to send me to prison?"

He said this openly, cynically, like a man. He was a little ragged street-arab, as tall as a boot, his forehead hidden under a queer mop of yellow hair.

n.o.body claimed him, and they sent him to the Reform School.

Not very intelligent, idle, clumsy with his hands, the only trade he could learn there was not a good one--that of reseating straw chairs.

However, he was obedient, naturally quiet and silent, and he did not seem to be profoundly corrupted by that school of vice. But when, in his seventeenth year, he was thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he unhappily found there his prison comrades, all great scamps, exercising their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers, and blacking shoes on ball nights in the pa.s.sage of the Opera--amateur wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the booths--or fis.h.i.+ng at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft--a pair of old shoes prigged from a shop-window. Result: a year in the prison of Sainte Pelagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.

He lived in much surprise among this group of prisoners, all very young, negligent in dress, who talked in loud voices, and carried their heads in a very solemn fas.h.i.+on. They used to meet in the cell of one of the oldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already a long time in prison and quite a fixture at Sainte Pelagie--a large cell, the walls covered with colored caricatures, and from the window of which one could see all Paris--its roofs, its spires, and its domes--and far away the distant line of hills, blue and indistinct upon the sky. There were upon the walls some shelves filled with volumes and all the old paraphernalia of a fencing-room: broken masks, rusty foils, breast-plates, and gloves that were losing their tow. It was there that the "politicians" used to dine together, adding to the everlasting "soup and beef," fruit, cheese, and pints of wine which Jean Francois went out and got by the can--a tumultuous repast interrupted by violent disputes, and where, during the dessert, the "Carmagnole" and "Ca Ira" were sung in full chorus. They a.s.sumed, however, an air of great dignity on those days when a newcomer was brought in among them, at first entertaining him gravely as a citizen, but on the morrow using him with affectionate familiarity, and calling him by his nickname. Great words were used there: Corporation, Responsibility, and phrases quite unintelligible to Jean Francois--such as this, for example, which he once heard imperiously put forth by a frightful little hunchback who blotted some writing-paper every night:

"It is done. This is the composition of the Cabinet: Raymond, the Bureau of Public Instruction; Martial, the Interior; and for Foreign Affairs, myself."

His time done, he wandered again around Paris, watched afar by the police, after the fas.h.i.+on of c.o.c.kchafers, made by cruel children to fly at the end of a string. He became one of those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, arrests and releases by turn--something like those platonic fishers who, in order that they may not exhaust their fish-pond, throw immediately back in the water the fish which has just come out of the net. Without a suspicion on his part that so much honor had been done to so sorry a subject, he had a special bundle of memoranda in the mysterious portfolios of the Rue de Jerusalem. His name was written in round hand on the gray paper of the cover, and the notes and reports, carefully cla.s.sified, gave him his successive appellations: "Name, Leturc;" "the prisoner Leturc," and, at last, "the criminal Leturc."

He was two years out of prison, dining where he could, sleeping in night lodging-houses and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking part with his fellows in interminable games of pitch-penny on the boulevards near the barriers: He wore a greasy cap on the back of his head, carpet slippers, and a short white blouse. When he had five sous he had his hair curled.

He danced at Constant's at Montparna.s.se; bought for two sous to sell for four at the door of Bobino, the jack of hearts or the ace of clubs serving as a countermark; sometimes opened the door of a carriage; led horses to the horse-market. From the lottery of all sorts of miserable employments he drew a goodly number. Who can say if the atmosphere of honor which one breathes as a soldier, if military discipline might not have saved him. Taken, in a cast of the net, with some young loafers who robbed drunkards sleeping on the streets, he denied very earnestly having taken part in their expeditions. Perhaps he told the truth, but his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent for three years to Poissy. There he made coa.r.s.e playthings for children, was tattooed on the chest, learned thieves' slang and the penal-code. A new liberation, and a new plunge into the sink of Paris; but very short this time, for at the end of six months at the most he was again compromised in a night robbery, aggravated by climbing and breaking--a serious affair, in which he played an obscure role, half dupe and half fence. On the whole his complicity was evident, and he was sent for five years at hard labor. His grief in this adventure was above all in being separated from an old dog which he had found on a dung-heap, and cured of the mange. The beast loved him.

Toulon, the ball and chain, the work in the harbor, the blows from a stick, wooden shoes on bare feet, soup of black beans dating from Trafalgar, no tobacco money, and the terrible sleep in a camp swarming with convicts; that was what he experienced for five broiling summers and five winters raw with the Mediterranean wind. He came out from there stunned, was sent under surveillance to Vernon, where he worked some time on the river. Then, an incorrigible vagabond, he broke his exile and came again to Paris. He had his savings, fifty-six francs, that is to say, time enough for reflection. During his absence his former wretched companions had dispersed. He was well hidden, and slept in a loft at an old woman's, to whom he represented himself as a sailor, tired of the sea, who had lost his papers in a recent s.h.i.+pwreck, and who wanted to try his hand at something else. His tanned face and his calloused hands, together with some sea phrases which he dropped from time to time, made his tale seem probable enough.

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One day when he risked a saunter in the streets, and when chance had led him as far as Montmartre, where he was born, an unexpected memory stopped him before the door of Les Freres, where he had learned to read. As it was very warm the door was open, and by a single glance the pa.s.sing outcast was able to recognize the peaceable school-room. Nothing was changed: neither the bright light s.h.i.+ning in at the great windows, nor the crucifix over the desk, nor the rows of benches with the tables furnished with ink-stands and pencils, nor the table of weights and measures, nor the map where pins stuck in still indicated the operations of some ancient war. Heedlessly and without thinking, Jean Francois read on the blackboard the words of the Evangelist which had been set there as a copy:

"Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."

It was undoubtedly the hour for recreation, for the Brother Professor had left his chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he was telling a story to the boys who surrounded him with eager and attentive eyes.

What a bright and innocent face he had, that beardless young man, in his long black gown, and white necktie, and great ugly shoes, and his badly cut brown hair streaming out behind! All the simple figures of the children of the people who were watching him seemed scarcely less childlike than his; above all when, delighted with some of his own simple and priestly pleasantries, he broke out in an open and frank peal of laughter which showed his white and regular teeth, a peal so contagious that all the scholars laughed loudly in their turn. It was such a sweet, simple group in the bright sunlight, which lighted their dear eyes and their blond curls.

Jean Francois looked at them for some time in silence, and for the first time in that savage nature, all instinct and appet.i.te, there awoke a mysterious, a tender emotion. His heart, that seared and hardened heart, unmoved when the convict's cudgel or the heavy whip of the watchman fell on his shoulders, beat oppressively. In that sight he saw again his infancy; and closing his eyes sadly, the prey to torturing regret, he walked quickly away.

Then the words written on the blackboard came back to his mind.

"If it wasn't too late, after all!" he murmured; "if I could again, like others, eat honestly my brown bread, and sleep my fill without nightmare! The spy must be sharp who recognizes me. My beard, which I shaved off down there, has grown out thick and strong. One can burrow somewhere in the great ant-hill, and work can be found. Whoever is not worked to death in the h.e.l.l of the galleys comes out agile and robust, and I learned there to climb ropes with loads upon my back. Building is going on everywhere here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day! I never earned so much. Let me be forgotten, and that is all I ask."

He followed his courageous resolution; he was faithful to it, and after three months he was another man. The master for whom he worked called him his best workman. After a long day upon the scaffolding, in the hot sun and the dust, constantly bending and raising his back to take the hod from the man at his feet and pa.s.s it to the man over his head, he went for his soup to the cook-shop, tired out, his legs aching, his hands burning, his eyelids stuck with plaster, but content with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in a knot in his handkerchief. He went out now without fear, since he could not be recognized in his white mask, and since he had noticed that the suspicious glances of the policeman were seldom turned on the tired workman. He was quiet and sober. He slept the sound sleep of fatigue. He was free!

At last--oh, supreme recompense!--he had a friend!

He was a fellow-workman like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant with red lips who had come to Paris with his stick over his shoulder and a bundle on the end of it, fleeing from the wine-shops and going to ma.s.s every Sunday. Jean Francois loved him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a pa.s.sion, profound and unrestrained, which transformed him by fatherly cares and attentions. Savinien, himself of a weak and egotistical nature, let things take their course, satisfied only in finding a companion who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a fairly comfortable lodging, but their resources were very limited. They were obliged to take into their room a third companion, an old Auvergnat, gloomy and rapacious, who found it possible out of his meagre salary to save something with which to buy a place in his own country. Jean Francois and Savinien were always together. On holidays they together took long walks in the environs of Paris, and dined under an arbor in one of those small country inns where there are a great many mushrooms in the sauces and innocent rebusses on the napkins. There Jean Francois learned from his friend all that lore of which they who are born in the city are ignorant: learned the names of the trees, the flowers, and the plants; the various seasons for harvesting; he heard eagerly the thousand details of a laborious country life--the autumn sowing, the winter ch.o.r.es, the splendid celebrations of harvest and vintage days, the sound of the mills at the water-side, and the flails striking the ground, the tired horses led to water, and the hunting in the morning mist; and, above all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-shoots, that were shortened by some marvellous stories.

He discovered in himself a source of imagination before unknown, and found a singular delight in the recital of events so placid, so calm, so monotonous.

One thing troubled him, however: it was the fear lest Savinien might learn something of his past. Sometimes there escaped from him some low word of thieves' slang, a vulgar gesture--vestiges of his former horrible existence--and he felt the pain one feels when old wounds re-open; the more because he fancied that he sometimes saw in Savinien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the pleasures which Paris offers to the poorest, asked him about the mysteries of the great city, Jean Francois feigned ignorance and turned the subject; but he felt a vague inquietude for the future of his friend.

His uneasiness was not without foundation. Savinien could not long remain the simple rustic that he was on his arrival in Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always repelled him, he was profoundly troubled by other temptations, full of danger for the inexperience of his twenty years. When spring came he began to go off alone, and at first he wandered about the brilliant entrance of some dancing-hall, watching the young girls who went in with their arms around each others' waists, talking in low tones. Then, one evening, when lilacs perfumed the air and the call to quadrilles was most captivating, he crossed the threshold, and from that time Jean Francois observed a change, little by little, in his manners and his visage. He became more frivolous, more extravagant. He often borrowed from his friend his scanty savings, and he forgot to repay. Jean Francois, feeling that he was abandoned, jealous and forgiving at the same time, suffered and was silent. He felt that he had no right to reproach him, but with the foresight of affection he indulged in cruel and inevitable presentiments.