Monsieur Bergeret in Paris. Anatole France
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dejected in her arms, feigning to see nothing, to hear nothing.
“Look at me, Riquet!” she demanded. Three times she bade him look at her, but in vain. Then, simulating violent anger, she threw him into the trunk, crying, “In you go, stupid!” and banged the lid on him. At that moment her aunt called her, and she went out of the room, leaving Riquet in the trunk.
He felt exceedingly uneasy, for it never entered his head that Pauline had put him there for fun, and merely to tease him. Judging that his position was quite bad enough already, he endeavoured not to aggravate it by thoughtless behaviour. For some moments, therefore, he remained motionless without even drawing a breath. Then, feeling that no fresh disaster threatened him, he thought he had better explore his gloomy prison. He pawed the petticoats and chemises upon which he had been so cruelly precipitated, seeking some outlet by which he might escape. He had been busy for two or three minutes when Monsieur Bergeret, who was getting ready to go out, called him:
“Riquet! Riquet! Here! we’re going to the bookshop to say good-bye to Paillot! Here! Where are you?”
Monsieur Bergeret’s voice comforted Riquet greatly. He replied to it by a desperate scratching at the wicker sides of the trunk.
“Where is the dog?” inquired Monsieur Bergeret of Pauline, who at that moment returned, carrying a pile of linen.
“In my trunk, papa.”
“Why in the trunk?”
“Because I put him there.”
Monsieur Bergeret went up to the trunk, and remarked:
“It was thus that the child Comatas, who played upon the flute as he kept his master’s goats, was imprisoned in a chest, where he was fed on honey by the bees of the Muses. But not so with you, Riquet; you would have died of hunger in this trunk, for you are not dear to the immortal Muses.”
Having spoken, Monsieur Bergeret freed his little friend, who with wagging tail followed him as far as the hall. Then a thought appeared to strike him. He returned to Pauline’s room, ran to her and jumped up against her skirt, and only when he had riotously embraced her as a sign of his adoration did he rejoin his master on the stairs. He would have felt that he was lacking in wisdom and piety had he failed to bestow these tokens of affection on a being whose power had plunged him into the depths of a trunk.
Monsieur Bergeret thought Paillot’s shop a dismal, ugly place. Paillot and his assistant were busy “calling over” the list of goods supplied to the Communal School. This task prevented him from prolonging his farewell to the professor. He had never had very much to say for himself and as he grew older he was gradually losing the habit of speech. He was weary of selling books; he saw that it was all over with the trade and was longing for the time to come when he could give up his business and retire to his place in the country, where he always spent his Sundays.
As was his wont, Monsieur Bergeret made for the corner where the old books were kept and took down volume XXXVIII of The World’s Explorers. The book opened as usual at pages 212 and 213, and once more he perused these uninspiring lines:
“… towards a northerly passage. ‘It was owing to this check,’ said he, ‘that we were able to revisit the Sandwich Islands and enrich our voyage by a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important which has yet been made by Europeans in the whole extent of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy anticipations which these words appeared to announce were, unhappily, not realized. …”
These lines, which he was reading for the hundredth time, and which reminded him of so many hours of his commonplace and laborious existence, which was embellished, nevertheless, by the fruitful labours of the mind; these lines, for whose meaning he had never sought, filled him, on this occasion, with melancholy and discouragement, as though they contained a symbol of the emptiness of all human hopes, an expression of the universal void. He closed the book, which he had opened so often and was never to open again, and dejectedly left the shop.
In the Place Saint-Exupère he cast a last glance at the house of Queen Marguerite. The rays of the setting sun gleamed upon its historic beams, and in the violent contrast of light and shade the escutcheon of Philippe Tricouillard proudly displayed the outlines of its gorgeous coat of arms, placed there as an eloquent example and a reproach to the barren city.
Having re-entered the empty house, Riquet pawed his master’s legs, looking up at him with his beautiful sorrowing eyes, that said: “You, formerly so rich and powerful, have you, O master, become poor? Have you grown powerless? You suffer men clad in filthy rags to invade your study, your bedroom and your dining-room, to fall upon your furniture and drag it out of doors. They drag your deep arm-chair down the stairs, your chair and mine, in which we sat to rest every evening, and often in the morning, side by side. In the clutch of these ragged men I heard it groan, that chair which is so great a fetish and so benevolent a spirit. And you never resisted these invaders. If you have lost all the genii that used to fill your house, even to the little divinities, that you used to put on your feet every morning when you got out of bed, those slippers which I used to worry in my play, if you are poor and miserable, O my master, what will become of me?”
“Lucien, we have no time to lose,” said Zoe. “The train goes at eight and we have had no dinner. Let us go and dine at the station.”
“To-morrow you will be in Paris,” said Monsieur Bergeret to Riquet. “Paris is a famous and a generous city. To be honest, however, I must point out that this generosity is not vouchsafed alike to all its inhabitants. On the contrary, it is confined to a very small number of its citizens. But a whole city, a whole nation resides in the few who think more forcefully and more justly than the rest. The others do not count. What we call the spirit of a race attains consciousness only in imperceptible minorities. Minds which are sufficiently free to rid themselves of vulgar terrors and discover for themselves the veiled truths are rare in any place!”
CHAPTER III
Upon Monsieur Bergeret’s arrival in Paris, with his daughter Pauline and his sister Zoe, he had lodged in a house which was soon to be pulled down, and which he began to like as soon as he knew that he could not remain in it. He was unaware of the fact that in any case he would have left it at the same time. Mademoiselle Bergeret had made up her mind as to that. She had taken these rooms only to give herself time to find better, and was opposed to the spending of any money upon the place.
It was a house in the Rue de Seine, a hundred years old at least. Never beautiful, it had grown uglier with age. The porte cochère opened humbly on a damp courtyard between a shoemaker’s shop and a carrier’s office. Monsieur Bergeret’s rooms were on the second floor, and on the same floor lived a picture-restorer through whose open door glimpses could be caught of little unframed canvases set about an earthenware stove, landscapes, old portraits, and an amber-skinned woman asleep in a dark wood under a green sky. The staircase was fairly well lighted. Cobwebs hung in the corners, and at the turns the wooden stairs were embellished with tiles. Stray lettuce-leaves, dropped from some housewife’s string bag, were to be found there of a morning.
Such things had no charm for Monsieur Bergeret, but he could not help feeling sad at the thought that he would become oblivious of these things as he had of so many others which, though they were not of any value, had made up the course of his life.
Every day, when his work was done, he went house-hunting. He thought of living for preference on the left bank of the Seine, where his father had dwelt before him, where it seemed to him one breathed an atmosphere of quiet life and peaceful study. What made his search more difficult was the state of the roads, broken with deep trenches and covered with mounds of earth. There were also the impassable and eternally disfigured quays.
It will, of course, be remembered that, in the year 1899, the surface of Paris underwent a complete upheaval, either because