LOWN by the north wind over the hard, white ground along with a whirl of dead leaves, M. Bergeret crossed the Mall between the leafless elms and began to climb Duroc Hill. His footsteps echoed on the uneven pavements as he walked towards the louring, smoky sky which painted a barrier of violet across the horizon; to the right he left the farrier’s forge and the front of a dairy decorated with a picture of two red cows, to the left stretched the long, low walls of market-gardens. He had that morning prepared his tenth and last lesson on the eighth book of the ?neid, and now he was mechanically turning over in his mind the points in metre and grammar which had particularly caught his notice. Guiding the rhythm of his thoughts by the beat of his footsteps, at regular intervals he repeated to himself the rhythmic words: Patrio vocat agmina sistro.... But every now and then his keen, versatile mind flitted away to critical appreciation of a wider range.48 The martial rhetoric of this eighth book annoyed him, and it seemed to him absurd that Venus should give ?neas a shield embossed with pictures of the scenes of Roman history up to the battle of Actium and the flight of Cleopatra. Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Having reached the cross-roads at the Bergères, which give toward Duroc Hill, he paused for a moment before the wine-coloured front of Maillard’s tavern, now damp, deserted and shuttered. Here the thought occurred to him that these Romans, although he had devoted his whole life to the study of them, were, after all, but terrors of pomposity and mediocrity. As he grew older and his taste became more mellowed, there was scarcely one of them that he prized, save Catullus and Petronius. But, after all, it was his business to make the best of the lot to which fate had called him. Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Would Virgil and Propertius try to make one believe, said he to himself, that the timbrel, whose shrill sound accompanied the frenzied religious dances of the priests, was also the instrument of the Egyptian soldiers and sailors? It was really incredible.
As he descended the street of the Bergères, on the side opposite Duroc Hill, he suddenly noticed the mildness of the air. Just here the road winds downward between walls of limestone, where the49 roots of tiny oak-trees find a difficult foothold. Here M. Bergeret was sheltered from the wind, and in the eye of the December sun which filtered down on him in a half-hearted, rayless fashion, he still murmured, but more softly: Patrio vocat agmina sistro. Doubtless Cleopatra had fled from Actium to Egypt, but still it was through the fleet of Octavius and Agrippa which tried to stop her passage.
Allured by the sweetness of air and sun, M. Bergeret sat down by the side of the road, on one of the blocks which had been quarried out of the mountain years ago, and which were now covered with a coating of black moss. Through the delicate tracery of the branches overhead he noticed the lilac hue of the sky, streaked here and there with smoke trails. Thus to plunge in lonely reverie filled his soul with peaceful sadness.
In attacking Agrippa’s galleys which blocked their way, he reflected, Antony and Cleopatra had but one object, and that was to clear a passage. It was this precise feat that Cleopatra, who raised the blockade of her sixty ships, succeeded in accomplishing. Seated in the cutting, M. Bergeret enjoyed the harmless elation of settling the fate of the world on the far-famed waves of Acarnania. Then, as he happened to throw a glance three paces in front of him, he caught sight of an old man50 who was sitting on a heap of dead leaves on the other side of the road and leaning against the grey wall. It was scarcely possible to distinguish between this wild figure and its surroundings, for his face, his beard and his rags were exactly the colour of the stones and the leaves. He was slowly scraping a piece of wood with an old knife-blade ground thin on the millstone of the years.
“Good-day to you, sir,” said the old fellow. “The sun is pretty. And I’ll tell you what’s more—it isn’t going to rain.”
M. Bergeret recognised the man: it was Pied d’Alouette, the tramp whom M. Roquincourt, the magistrate, had wrongly implicated in the murder that took place in Queen Marguerite’s house and whom he had imprisoned for six months in the vague hope that unforeseen charges would be laid at his door. This he did, either because he thought that the longer the imprisonment continued the more justifiable it would seem, or merely through spite against a simpleton who had misled the officers of the law. M. Bergeret, who always had a fellow-feeling for the oppressed, answered Pied d’Alouette in a kindly style that reflected the old fellow’s good-will.
“Good-day, friend,” said he. “I see that you know all the pleasant nooks. This hillside is warm and well sheltered.”
51 There was a moment’s silence, and then Pied d’Alouette answered:
“I know better spots than this. But they are far away from here. One mustn’t be afraid of a walk. Feet are all right. Shoes aren’t. I can’t wear good shoes because they’re strange to my feet. I only rip them up, when they give me sound ones.”
And raising his foot from the cushion of dead leaves, he pointed to his big toe sticking out, wrapped in wads of linen, through the slits in the leather of his boot.
Relapsing into silence once more, he began to polish the piece of hard wood.
M. Bergeret soon returned to his own thoughts.
Pallentem morte futura. Agrippa’s galleys could not bar the way to Antony’s purple-sailed trireme. This time, at least, the dove escaped the vulture.
But hereupon Pied d’Alouette began again:
“They have taken away my knife!”
“Who have?”
Lifting his arm, the tramp waved it in the direction of the town and gave no other answer. Yet he was following the course of his own slow thought, for presently he said:
“They never gave it back to me.”
He sat on in solemn silence, powerless to express the ideas that revolved in his darkened52 mind. His knife and his pipe were the only possessions he had in the world. It was with his knife that he cut the lump of hard bread and the bacon rind they gave him at farm-house doors, food which his toothless gums would not bite; it was with his knife that he chopped up cigar-ends to stuff them into his pipe; it was with his knife that he scraped out the rotten bits in fruit and with it he managed to drag out from the dung-heaps things good to eat. It was with his knife that he shaped his walking-sticks and cut down branches to make a bed of leaves for himself in the woods at night. With his knife he carved boats out of oak-bark for the little boys, and dolls out of deal for the little girls. His knife was the tool with which he practised all the arts of life, the most skilled, as well as the most homely, everyday ones. Always famished and often full of ingenuity, he not only supplied his own wants, but also made dainty reed fountains which were much admired in the town.
For, although the man would not work, he was yet a jack of all trades. When he came out of prison nothing would induce them to restore his knife to him; they kept it in the record office. And so he went on tramp once more, but now weaponless, stripped, weaker than a child, wretched wherever he went. He wept over his loss: tiny53 tear-drops came, that scorched his bloodshot eyes without overflowing. Then, as he went out of the town, his courage returned, for in the corner of a milestone he came upon an old knife-blade. Now he had cut a strong beechen handle for it in the woods of the Bergères, and was fitting it on with skilful hands.
The idea of his knife suggested his pipe to him. He said:
“They let me keep my pipe.”
Drawing from the woollen bag which he wore against his breast, a kind of black, sticky thimble, he showed the bowl of a pipe without the fragment of a stem.
“My poor fellow,” said M. Bergeret, “you don’t look at all like a great criminal. How do you manage to get put in gaol so often?”
Pied d’Alouette had not acquired the dialogue habit and he had no notion of how to carry on a conversation. Although he had a kind of deep intelligence, it took him some time to grasp the sense of the words addressed to him. It was practice that he lacked and at first, therefore, he made no attempt to answer M. Bergeret, who sat tracing lines with the point of his stick in the white dust of the road. But at last Pied d’Alouette said:
“I don’t do any wrong things. Then I am punished for other things.”
54 At length he seemed able to talk connectedly, with but few breaks.
“Do you mean to say that they put you in prison for doing nothing wrong?”
“I know the people who do the wrong things, but I should do myself harm if I blabbed.”
“You herd, then, with vagabonds and evil-doers?”
“You are trying to make me peach. Do you know Judge Roquincourt?”
“I know him a little. He’s rather stern, isn’t he?”
“Judge Roquincourt, he is a good talker. I never heard anyone speak so well and so quickly. A body hasn’t time to understand him. A body can’t answer. There isn’t anybody who speaks one half as well.”
“He kept you in solitary confinement for long months and yet you bear him no grudge. What a humble example of mercy and long-suffering.”
Pied d’Alouette resumed the polishing of his knife-handle. As the work progressed, he became quieter and seemed to recover his peace of mind. Suddenly he demanded:
“Do you know a man called Corbon?”
“Who is he, this Corbon?”
It was too difficult to explain. Pied d’Alouette waved his arm in a vague semicircle that covered55 a quarter of the horizon. Yet his mind was busy with the man he had just mentioned, for again he repeated:
“Corbon.”
“Pied d’Alouette,” said M. Bergeret, “they say you are a queer sort of vagabond and that, even when you are in absolute want, you never steal anything. Yet you live with evil-doers and you are the friend of murderers.”
Pied d’Alouette answered:
“There are some who think one thing and others who think another. But if I myself thought of doing wrong, I should dig a hole under a tree on Duroc Hill and bury my knife at the bottom of the hole. Then I should pound down the earth on top of it with my feet. For when people have the notion of doing wrong, it’s the knife that leads them on. It’s also pride which leads them on. As for me, I lost my pride when I was a lad, for men, women and children in my own parts all made fun of me.”
“And have you never had wicked, violent thoughts?”
“Sometimes, when I came upon women alone on the roads, for the fancy I had for them. But that’s all over now.”
“And that fancy never comes back to you?”
“Time and again it does.”
56 “Pied d’Alouette, you love liberty and you are free. You live without toil. I call you a happy man.”
“There are some happy folks. But not me.”
“Where are these happy folks, then?”
“At the farms.”
M. Bergeret rose and slipping a ten-sou piece into Pied d’Alouette’s hand, said:
“So you fancy, Pied d’Alouette, that happiness is to be found under a roof, by the chimney-corner, or on a feather-bed. I thought you had more sense.”