HE elm-trees on the Mall were slowly clothing their dusky limbs with a delicate drapery of pale gauzy green. But on the slope of the hill crowned with its ancient ramparts, the flowering trees of the orchards showed their round white heads, or distaffs of rosy bloom, against a background of cloudless, sunny sky that smiled between the showers. In the distance flowed the river, swollen with spring rains, a line of bare, white water, that fretted with its rounded curves the rows of slender poplars which outlined its course. Beautiful, invincible, fruitful and eternal, flowed the river, a true goddess, as in the days when the boatmen of Roman Gaul made their offerings of copper coins to it and raised, before the temple of Venus and Augustus, a votive pillar on which they had roughly carved a boat with its oars. Everywhere in this open valley, the sweet, trembling youth of the year shivered along the surface of the ancient earth. Under the elm-trees173 on the Mall walked M. Bergeret with slow, irregular steps. As he wandered on, his mind glanced hither and thither; shifting it was and confused; old as the earth itself, yet young as the flowers on the apple-boughs; empty of thought, yet full of vague visions; lonely, yet full of desire; gentle, innocent, wanton, melancholy; dragging behind it a weight of weariness, yet still pursuing Hopes and Illusions whose very names, shapes and faces were unknown to him.
At last he drew near the wooden bench on which he was in the habit of sitting in summer time, at the hour when the birds are silent on the trees. Here, where he often sat resting with Abbé Lantaigne, under the beautiful elm that overheard all their grave talk, he saw that some words had been recently traced by a clumsy hand in chalk on the green back of the seat. At first he was seized with a fear lest he should find his own name written there, for it was quite familiar by now to all the blackguards of the town. But he soon saw that he need have no trouble on that score, since it was merely a lewd inscription in which Narcissus announced to the world the pleasures he had enjoyed on this very bench in the arms of his Ernestine, doubtless under cover of the kindly night. The style of the legend was simple and concise, but coarse and uncomely in its terms.
174 M. Bergeret was just about to sit down in his accustomed place, but he changed his mind, since it did not seem a fitting action for a decent man to lean publicly against this obscene memorial, dedicated to the Venus of cross-roads and gardens, especially as it stood on the very spot where he had expressed so many noble and ironic thoughts and had so often invoked the muse of seemly meditation. Turning away, therefore, from the bench, he said to himself:
“O vain desire for fame! We long to live in the memory of men, and unless we are consummately well-bred men of the world, we would fain publish in the market-place our loves, our joys, our sorrows and our hates. Narcissus, here, can only really believe that he has actually won his Ernestine, when all the world has heard of it. It was the same spirit that drove Phidias to trace a beloved name on the great toe of the Olympian Jove. O thirst of the soul to unburden itself, to plunge into the ocean of the not-self! ‘To-day, on this bench, Narcissus....’
“Yet,” thought M. Bergeret once more, “the first virtue of civilised man and the corner-stone of society is dissimulation. It is just as incumbent on us to hide our thoughts as it is for us to wear clothes. A man who blurts out all his thoughts, just as they arise in his mind, is as inconceivable as175 the spectacle of a man walking naked through a town. Talk in Paillot’s shop is free enough, yet were I, for instance, to express all the fancies that crowd my mind at this moment, all the notions which pass through my head, like a swarm of witches riding on broomsticks down a chimney, if I were to describe the manner in which I suddenly see Madame de Gromance, the incongruous attitudes in which I picture her, the vision of her which comes to me, more ludicrous, more weird, more chimerical, more quaint, more monstrous, more perverted and alien to all seemly conventions, a thousand times more waggish and indecent than that famous figure introduced in the scene of the Last Judgment on the north portal of Saint-Exupère by a masterly craftsman who had caught a glimpse of Lust himself as he leant over a vent-hole of hell; if I were accurately to reveal the strangeness of my dream, it would be concluded that I am a prey to some repulsive mania. Yet, all the same, I know that I am an honourable man, naturally inclined to purity, disciplined by life and reflection to self-control, a modest man wholly dedicated to the peaceful pleasures of the mind, a foe to all excess, and hating vice as a deformity.”
As he walked on, deep in this singular train of thought, M. Bergeret caught sight, along the Mall,176 of Abbé Lantaigne, the principal of the high seminary, and Abbé Tabarit, the chaplain of the prison. The two were in close conversation and M. Tabarit was waggling his long body, with his little pointed head, while he emphasised his words by sweeping gestures of his bony arms. Abbé Lantaigne, with head erect and chest projecting, held his breviary under his arm and listened gravely with far-away gaze and lips locked tightly between stolid cheeks that were never distended by a smile.
M. Lantaigne answered M. Bergeret’s bow by a gesture and a word of greeting:
“Stop, Monsieur Bergeret,” he cried, “M. Tabarit is not afraid of infidels.”
But the prison chaplain was not to be interrupted in the full tide of his thoughts.
“Who,” said he, “could have remained unmoved at what I saw? This lad has taught every one of us a lesson by the sincerity of his repentance, by the simple, truthful expression of the most Christian sentiments. His bearing, his looks, his words, his whole being spoke plainly enough of gentleness and humility, of utter submission to the will of God. He never ceased to offer a most consoling spectacle, a most salutary example. Perfect resignation, an awakened faith too long stifled in his heart, a supreme abasement before the God who177 pardons: such were the blessed fruits of my exhortations.”
The old man was moved with the easy earnestness of the blameless, buoyant, self-absorbed nature. Real grief stirred in his great, prominent eyes and his poor, meagre red nose. After a momentary sigh, he began again, this time turning towards M. Bergeret:
“Ah, sir,” said he, “in the course of my painful ministry I have encountered many thorns. But also what fruit I find! Many times in the course of my long life have I snatched lost souls from the devil, who was on the alert to lay hold of them. But none of the poor creatures with whom I have journeyed to the gates of death presented such an edifying spectacle in their last moments as this young Lec?ur.”
“What!” cried M. Bergeret, “you surely are not speaking like this of the murderer of Madame Houssieu? Isn’t it well known that——”
He was just going on to say that, according to the unanimous account of all those who had witnessed the execution, the poor wretch had been carried to the scaffold, already half dead with fear. He stopped short, however, lest he should afflict the old man, who continued in his own way:
“It is true that he made no long speeches and indulged in no noisy demonstrations. But if you178 had only heard the sighs, the ejaculations, by which he testified to his repentance! In his melancholy journey from the prison to the place of expiation, when I reminded him of his mother and his first communion, he wept.”
“Certainly,” said M. Bergeret, “Madame Houssieu didn’t die so edifyingly.”
At these words M. Tabarit rolled his great eyes from east to west. He always sought for the solution of metaphysical problems, not within himself, but without, and whenever he fell into a day dream at table his old servant, misunderstanding his look, would inquire: “Are you looking for the cork of the bottle, sir? It’s in your hand.”
But M. Tabarit’s roving glance had fallen on a great bearded man in cyclist’s dress who was passing along the Mall. This was Eusèbe Boulet, editor in chief of the radical paper le Phare. Instantly M. Tabarit bade a hasty good-bye to the professor and the head of the seminary, and hurrying up to the journalist with great strides, wished him good-day. Then, with a face reddened by excitement, he drew some crumpled papers out of his pocket and handed them to him with a hand that trembled. These were rectifications and supplementary communications as to the last moments of young Lec?ur. For at the end of his secluded179 life and humble ministry, a passion for print, a thirst for interviews and articles, had come upon this holy man.
It was with something approaching a smile that M. Lantaigne watched the poor old fellow, with his quick, birdlike movements, handing up his scrawls to the radical editor.
“Look!” said he to M. Bergeret, “the miasma of this age has even infected a man who was marching deathwards by a path long paved with goodness and virtue. This old fellow, though he is humble and modest about everything else, is craving for notoriety. He yearns to appear in print at any cost, even though it be in the pages of an anti-clerical paper.”
Then, vexed at having betrayed one of his own people to the enemy, M. Lantaigne added with a brisk air of indifference:
“Not much harm done. It’s absurd, that’s all.”
Thereupon, relapsing into silence, he was his own gloomy self once more.
M. Lantaigne was a masterful man, and his will forced M. Bergeret towards their usual seat. Entirely indifferent to the vulgar phenomena by which the world outside themselves is manifested to the generality of men, he scorned to notice the lewd inscription of Narcissus and Ernestine, written in chalk in large running characters on the back of180 the seat. Sinking down on the bench with a placid air of mental detachment, he covered a third of this inscribed memorial with his broad back. M. Bergeret sat down by M. Lantaigne’s side, first, however, spreading out his newspaper over the back, so as to conceal that part of the text which seemed to him the most outspoken. In his estimation this was the verb—a word which, according to the grammarians, denotes the existence of an attribute to the subject. But inadvertently, he had merely substituted one inscription for another. The paper, in fact, announced in a side-note one of those episodes that have become so common in parliamentary life since the memorable triumph of democratic institutions. This spring the scandal period had come round once more with astronomical exactitude, following the change of the Seasons and the Dance of the Hours, and during the month several deputies had been prosecuted, according to custom. The sheet unfolded by M. Bergeret bore in huge letters this notice: “A Senator at Mazas. Arrest of M. Laprat-Teulet.” Although there was nothing unusual about the fact itself, which merely indicated the regular working of the parliamentary machine, it struck M. Bergeret that there was perhaps an uncalled-for display of indifference in posting up this notice on a bench on the Mall, in the very shadow of those elms under181 which the honourable M. Laprat-Teulet had so often been the recipient of the honours which democracy loves to bestow on her greatest citizens. Here on the Mall, M. Laprat-Teulet, sitting at the right hand of the President of the Republic, on a rostrum draped in ruby velvet beneath a trophy of flags, had, on different ceremonial occasions in honour of great local or national rejoicings, uttered those words which are so well calculated to exalt the blessings of government, while at the same time they recommend patience to the toiling and devoted masses. Laprat-Teulet, who had started as a republican, had now been for five-and-twenty years the powerful and highly respected leader of the opportunist party in the department. Now that his hair had grown white with age and parliamentary toil, he stood out in his native town like an oak adorned with tricoloured garlands. His enemies had been ruined and his friends enriched through his exertions and he was loaded with public honours. He was, moreover, not only august, but also affable, and every year at prize distributions, he spoke of his poverty to the little children: he could call himself poor without injuring himself in any way, for no one believed him, and everyone felt certain that he was very rich. The sources of his wealth, in fact, were well known, the thousand channels by means of which182 his labour and his astuteness had drained off the money into his own pockets. They could calculate perfectly what funds had poured into his coffers from the undertakings that were based on his political credit and from all the concessions granted on account of his parliamentary interest. For he was a deputy with famous business capacities, a capital financial orator, and his friends knew, as well as, and even better, than his enemies, what he had pocketed through the Panama affair and similar enterprises. Very far-seeing, moderate in his desires and, above all, anxious not to tempt fortune too far, this great guardian of our industrious and intelligent democracy had given up high finance for the last ten years, thus bowing before the first breath of the storm. He had even left the Palais-Bourbon and retired to the Luxembourg, to that great Council of the Commons of France where his wisdom and devotion to the Republic were duly appreciated. There he was able to pull the strings without being seen by the public. He only spoke on secret commissions. But there he still showed those brilliant qualities which for many years the princes of cosmopolitan finance had justly learnt to appraise at a high value. He remained the outspoken defender of the fiscal system introduced at the Revolution and founded, as we are all aware, on the principles of liberty183 and justice. He upheld the rights of capital with that emotion which is always so touching in an old hand at the game. Even the turn-coats themselves revered in the person of Laprat-Teulet a pacific and truly conservative mind, regarding him as the guardian angel of personal property.
“His notions are honourable enough,” said M. de Terremondre. “But the worst aspect of it is that to-day he is burdened with the weight of a difficult past.” But Laprat-Teulet had enemies who were implacable in their hatred of him. “I have earned this hatred,” said he magnanimously, “by defending the interests which were entrusted to me.”
His enemies pursue............