The Aspirations of Jean Servien Part 12

To the latter's "Come outside; we can talk better there," the old man replied unconcernedly, "Oh, no, I don't think so."

He welcomed each lady who came in with a profound bow, and distributed friendly taps on the cheek among the young aristocrats around him.

Lying back in an arm-chair and displaying his famous waistcoat to the very best advantage, he enlarged on such episodes of his life as he thought most impressive:

"The fates were vanquished," he was telling Servien, "my livelihood was a.s.sured. The landlord of an inn had entrusted his books to me, and under his roof I was devoting my attention to mathematical calculations, not, like the ill.u.s.trious and ill-starred Galileo, to measure the stars, but to establish with exact.i.tude the profits and losses of a trader. After two days' performance of these honourable duties, the Commissary of Police made a descent upon the inn, arrested the landlord and landlady and carried away my account books with him. No, I had not vanquished the fates!"

Every head was turned, every eye directed in amazement towards this extraordinary personage. There was much whispering and some half-suppressed laughter. Jean, seeing himself the centre of mocking glances and looks of annoyance, drew Tudesco towards the door. But just as the Marquis was making a series of sweeping bows by way of farewell to the ladies, Jean found himself face to face with the Superintendent of Studies, who said to him:

"Oh! Monsieur Servien, will you go and take detention in Monsieur Schuver's absence?"

The Marquis pressed his young friend's hand, watched him depart to his duties, and then, turning back to the groups gathered in the parlour, he waved his hand with a gesture at once dignified and appealing to call for silence.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "I have translated into the French tongue, which Brunetto Latini declared to be the most delectable of all, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the glorious masterpiece of the divine Torquato Ta.s.so. This great work I wrote in a garret without fire, on candle wrappers, on snuff papers----"

At this point, from one corner of the parlour, a crow of childish laughter went off like a rocket.

Monsieur Tudesco stopped short and smiled, his hair flying, his eye moist, his arms thrown open as if to embrace and bless; then he resumed:

"I say it: the laugh of innocence is the ill-starred veteran's joy. I see from where I stand groups worthy of Correggio's brush, and I say: Happy the families that meet together in peace in the heart of their fatherland! Ladies and gentlemen, pardon me if I hold out to you the casque of Belisarius. I am an old tree riven by the levin-bolt."

And he went from group to group holding out his peaked felt hat, into which, amid an icy silence, fell coin by coin a dribble of small silver.

But suddenly the Superintendent of Studies seized the hat and pushed the old man outside.

"Give me back my hat," bawled Monsieur Tudesco to the Superintendent, who was doing his best to restore the coins to the donors; "give back the old man's hat, the hat of one who has grown grey in learned studies."

The Superintendent, scarlet with rage, tossed the felt into the court, shouting:

"Be off, or I will call the police."

The Marquis Tudesco took to his heels with great agility.

The same evening the new a.s.sistant was summoned to the Director's presence and received his dismissal.

"Unhappy boy! unhappy boy!" said the Abbe Bordier, beating his brow; "you have been the cause of an intolerable scandal, of a sort unheard of in this house, and that just when I had so much to do."

And as he spoke, the scattered papers fluttered like white birds on the Director's table.

Making his way through the parlour, Jean saw the _Mater dolorosa_ as before, and read again the names of Philippe-Guy Thiererche and the Countess Valentine.

"I hate them," he muttered through clenched teeth, "I hate them all."

Meantime, the good priest felt a stir of pity. Every day they had badgered him with reports against Jean Servien. This time he had given way; he had sacrificed the young usher; but he really could make nothing of this tale about a beggar. He changed his mind, ran to the door and called to the young man to corne back.

Jean turned and faced him:

"No!" he cried, "no! I can bear the life no longer; I am unhappy, I am full of misery--and hate."

"Poor lad!" sight the Director, letting his arms drop by his side.

That evening he did not write a single line of his Tragedy.

XXVII

The kind-hearted bookbinder hara.s.sed his son with no reproaches.

After dinner he went and sat at his shop-door, and looked at the first star that peeped out in the evening sky.

"My boy," said he, "I am not a man of learning like you; but I have a notion--and you must not rob me of it, because it is a comfort to me--that, when I have finished binding books, I shall go to that star. The idea occurred to me from what I have read in the paper that the stars are all worlds. What is that star called?"

"Venus, father."

"In my part of the world, they say it is the shepherd's star.

It's a beautiful star, and I think your mother is there. That is why I should like to go there."

The old man pa.s.sed his knotted fingers across his brow, murmuring:

"G.o.d forgive me, how one forgets those who are gone!"

Jean sought balm for his wounded spirit in reading poetry and in long, dreamy walks. His head was filled with visions--a welter of sublime imaginings, in which floated such figures as Ophelia and Ca.s.sandra, Gretchen, Delia, Phaedra, Manon Lescaut, and Virginia, and hovering amid these, shadows still nameless, still almost formless, and yet full of seduction! Holding bowls and daggers and trailing long veils, they came and went, faded and grew vivid with colour. And Jean could hear them calling to him; "If ever we win to life, it will be through you. And what a bliss it will be for you, Jean Servien, to have created us. How you will love us!" And Jean Servien would answer them; "Come back, come back, or rather do not leave me. But I cannot tell how to make you visible; you vanish away when I gaze at you, and I cannot net you in the meshes of beautiful verse!"

Again and again he tried to write poems, tragedies, romances; but his indolence, his lack of ideas, his fastidiousness brought him to a standstill before half a dozen lines were written, and he would toss the all but virgin page into the fire. Quickly discouraged, he turned his attention to politics. The funeral of Victor Noir, the Belleville risings, the _plebiscite_, filled his thoughts; he read the papers, joined the groups that gathered on the boulevards, followed the yelping pack of white blouses, and was one of the crowd that hooted the Commissary of Police as he read the Riot Act. Disorder and uproar intoxicated him; his heart beat as if it would burst his bosom, his enthusiasm rose to fever pitch, amid these stupid exhibitions of mob violence.

Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

There, as he strode past some aristocratic mansion and saw the scutcheon blazoned on its facade and the two lions lying white in the moonlight on guard before its closed portal, he would cast a look of hatred at the building. Presently, as he resumed his march, he would picture himself standing, musket in hand, on a barricade, in the smoke of insurrection, along with workmen and young fellows from the schools, as we see it all represented in lithographs.

One day in July, he saw a troop of white blouses moving along the boulevard and shouting: "To Berlin!" Ragam.u.f.fin street-boys ran yelping round. Respectable citizens lined the sidewalks, staring in wonder, and saying nothing; but one of them, a stout, tall, red-faced man, waved his hat and shouted:

"To Berlin! long live the Emperor!"

Jean recognized Monsieur Bargemont.

XXVIII

On top of the ramparts. Bivouac huts and stacked rifles guarded by a sentinel. National Guards are playing shove ha'-penny. The autumn suns.h.i.+ne lies clear and soft and splendid on the roofs of the beleaguered city. Outside the fortifications, the bare, grey fields; in the distance the barracks of the outlying forts, over which fleecy puffs of smoke sail upwards; on the horizon the hills whence the Prussian batteries are firing on Paris, leaving long trails of white smoke. The guns thunder. They have been thundering for a month, and no one so much as hears them now. Servien and Garneret, wearing the red-piped _kepi_ and the tunic with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, are seated side by side on sand-bags, bending over the same book.

It was a Virgil, and Jean was reading out loud the delicious episode of Silenus. Two youths have discovered the old G.o.d lying in a drunken sleep--he is always drunk and it makes men mock at him, albeit they still revere him--and have bound him in chains of flowers to force him to sing. aegle, the fairest of the Naads, has stained his cheeks scarlet with juice of the mulberry, and lo! he sings.

"He sings how from out the mighty void were drawn together the germs of earth and air and sea and of the subtle fire likewise; how of these beginnings came all the elements, and the fluid globe of the firmament grew into solid being; how presently the ground began to harden and to imprison Nereus in the ocean, and little by little to take on the shapes of things. He sings how anon continents marvelled to behold a new-emerging sun; how the clouds broke up in the welkin and the rains descended, what time the woods put forth their first green and beasts first prowled by ones and twos over the unnamed mountain-tops."

Jean broke off to observe: