Books: The Red Lily, v1
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Anatole France >> The Red Lily, v1
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"Oh, my books! One never says in a book what one wishes to say. It is
impossible to express one's self. I know how to talk with my pen as well
as any other person; but, after all, to talk or to write, what futile
occupations! How wretchedly inadequate are the little signs which form
syllables, words, and phrases. What becomes of the idea, the beautiful
idea, which these miserable hieroglyphics hide? What does the reader
make of my writing? A series of false sense, of counter sense, and of
nonsense. To read, to hear, is to translate. There are beautiful
translations, perhaps. There are no faithful translations. Why should I
care for the admiration which they give to my books, since it is what
they themselves see in them that they admire? Every reader substitutes
his visions in the place of ours. We furnish him with the means to
quicken his imagination. It is a horrible thing to be a cause of such
exercises. It is an infamous profession."
"You are jesting," said M. Martin-Belleme.
"I do not think so," said Therese. "He recognizes that one mind is
impenetrable to another mind, and he suffers from this. He feels that he
is alone when he is thinking, alone when he is writing. Whatever one may
do, one is always alone in the world. That is what he wishes to say.
He is right. You may always explain: you never are understood."
"There are signs--" said Paul Vence.
"Don't you think, Monsieur Vence, that signs also are a form of
hieroglyphics? Give me news of Monsieur Choulette. I do not see him any
more."
Vence replied that Choulette was very busy in forming the Third Order of
Saint Francis.
"The idea, Madame, came to him in a marvellous fashion one day when he
had gone to call on his Maria in the street where she lives, behind the
public hospital--a street always damp, the houses on which are tottering.
You must know that he considers Maria the saint and martyr who is
responsible for the sins of the people.
"He pulled the bell-rope, made greasy by two centuries of visitors.
Either because the martyr was at the wine-shop, where she is familiarly
known, or because she was busy in her room, she did not open the door.
Choulette rang for a long time, and so violently that the bellrope
remained in his hand. Skilful at understanding symbols and the hidden
meaning of things, he understood at once that this rope had not been
detached without the permission of spiritual powers. He made of it a
belt, and realized that he had been chosen to lead back into its
primitive purity the Third Order of Saint Francis. He renounced the
beauty of women, the delights of poetry, the brightness of glory, and
studied the life and the doctrine of Saint Francis. However, he has sold
to his editor a book entitled 'Les Blandices', which contains, he says,
the description of all sorts of loves. He flatters himself that in it he
has shown himself a criminal with some elegance. But far from harming
his mystic undertakings, this book favors them in this sense, that,
corrected by his later work, he will become honest and exemplary; and the
gold that he has received in payment, which would not have been paid to
him for a more chaste volume, will serve for a pilgrimage to Assisi."
Madame Martin asked how much of this story was really true. Vence
replied that she must not try to learn.
He confessed that he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the
adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal
and Judaic sense.
He affirmed that at least Choulette was publishing Les Blandices, and
desired to visit the cell and the grave of St. Francis.
"Then," exclaimed Madame Martin, "I will take him to Italy with me.
Find him, Monsieur Vence, and bring him to me. I am going next week."
M. Martin then excused himself, not being able to remain longer. He had
to finish a report which was to be laid before the Chamber the next day.
Madame Martin said that nobody interested her so much as Choulette.
Paul Vence said that he was a singular specimen of humanity.
"He is not very different from the saints of whose extraordinary lives
we read. He is as sincere as they. He has an exquisite delicacy of
sentiment and a terrible violence of mind. If he shocks one by many of
his acts, the reason is that he is weaker, less supported, or perhaps
less closely observed. And then there are unworthy saints, just as there
are bad angels: Choulette is a worldly saint, that is all. But his poems
are true poems, and much finer than those written by the bishops of the
seventeenth century."
She interrupted him:
"While I think of it, I wish to congratulate you on your friend
Dechartre. He has a charming mind."
She added:
"Perhaps he is a little too timid."
Vence reminded her that he had told her she would find Dechartre
interesting.
"I know him by heart; he has been my friend since our childhood."
"You knew his parents?"
"Yes. He is the only son of Philippe Dechartre."
"The architect?"
"The architect who, under Napoleon III, restored so many castles and
churches in Touraine and the Orleanais. He had taste and knowledge.
Solitary and quiet in his life, he had the imprudence to attack Viollet-
le-Duc, then all-powerful. He reproached him with trying to reestablish
buildings in their primitive plan, as they had been, or as they might
have been, at the beginning. Philippe Dechartre, on the contrary, wished
that everything which the lapse of centuries had added to a church, an
abbey, or a castle should be respected. To abolish anachronisms and
restore a building to its primitive unity, seemed to him to be a
scientific barbarity as culpable as that of ignorance. He said: 'It is a
crime to efface the successive imprints made in stone by the hands of our
ancestors. New stones cut in old style are false witnesses.' He wished
to limit the task of the archaeologic architect to that of supporting and
consolidating walls. He was right. Everybody said that he was wrong.
He achieved his ruin by dying young, while his rival triumphed. He
bequeathed an honest fortune to his widow and his son. Jacques Dechartre
was brought up by his mother, who adored him. I do not think that
maternal tenderness ever was more impetuous. Jacques is a charming
fellow; but he is a spoiled child."
"Yet he appears so indifferent, so easy to understand, so distant from
everything."
"Do not rely on this. He has a tormented and tormenting imagination."
"Does he like women?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Oh, it isn't with any idea of match-making."
"Yes, he likes them. I told you that he was an egoist. Only selfish men
really love women. After the death of his mother, he had a long liaison
with a well-known actress, Jeanne Tancrede."
Madame Martin remembered Jeanne Tancrede; not very pretty, but graceful
with a certain slowness of action in playing romantic roles.
"They lived almost together in a little house at Auteuil," Paul Vence
continued. "I often called on them. I found him lost in his dreams,
forgetting to model a figure drying under its cloths, alone with himself,
pursuing his idea, absolutely incapable of listening to anybody; she,
studying her roles, her complexion burned by rouge, her eyes tender,
pretty because of her intelligence and her activity. She complained to
me that he was inattentive, cross, and unreasonable. She loved him and
deceived him only to obtain roles. And when she deceived him, it was
done on the spur of the moment. Afterward she never thought of it.
A typical woman! But she was imprudent; she smiled upon Joseph Springer
in the hope that he would make her a member of the Comedie Francaise.
Dechartre left her. Now she finds it more practical to live with her
managers, and Jacques finds it more agreeable to travel."
"Does he regret her?"
"How can one know the things that agitate a mind anxious and mobile,
selfish and passionate, desirous to surrender itself, prompt in
disengaging itself, liking itself most of all among the beautiful things
that it finds in the world?"
Brusquely she changed the subject.
"And your novel, Monsieur Vence?"
"I have reached the last chapter, Madame. My little workingman has been
guillotined. He died with that indifference of virgins without desire,
who never have felt on their lips the warm taste of life. The journals
and the public approve the act of justice which has just been
accomplished. But in another garret, another workingman, sober, sad, and
a chemist, swears to himself that he will commit an expiatory murder."
He rose and said good-night.
She called him back.
"Monsieur Vence, you know that I was serious. Bring Choulette to me."
When she went up to her room, her husband was waiting for her, in his
red-brown plush robe, with a sort of doge's cap framing his pale and
hollow face. He had an air of gravity. Behind him, by the open door of
his workroom, appeared under the lamp a mass of documents bound in blue,
a collection of the annual budgets. Before she could reach her room he
motioned that he wished to speak to her.
"My dear, I can not understand you. You are very inconsequential. It
does you a great deal of harm. You intend to leave your home without any
reason, without even a pretext. And you wish to run through Europe with
whom? With a Bohemian, a drunkard--that man Choulette."
She replied that she should travel with Madame Marmet, in which there
could be nothing objectionable.
"But you announce your going to everybody, yet you do not even know
whether Madame Marmet can accompany you."
"Oh, Madame Marmet will soon pack her boxes. Nothing keeps her in Paris
except her dog. She will leave it to you; you may take care of it."
"Does your father know of your project?"
It was his last resource to invoke the authority of Montessuy. He knew
that his wife feared to displease her father. He insisted:
"Your father is full of sense and tact. I have been happy to find him
agreeing with me several times in the advices which I have permitted
myself to give you. He thinks as I do, that Madame Meillan's house is
not a fit place for you to visit. The company that meets there is mixed,
and the mistress of the house favors intrigue. You are wrong, I must
say, not to take account of what people think. I am mistaken if your
father does not think it singular that you should go away with so much
frivolity, and the absence will be the more remarked, my dear, since
circumstances have made me eminent in the course of this legislature.
My merit has nothing to do with the case, surely. But if you had
consented to listen to me at dinner I should have demonstrated to you
that the group of politicians to which I belong has almost reached power.
In such a moment you should not renounce your duties as mistress of the
house. You must understand this yourself."
She replied "You annoy me." And, turning her back to him, she shut the
door of her room between them. That night in her bed she opened a book,
as she always did before going to sleep. It was a novel. She was
turning the leaves with indifference, when her eyes fell on these lines:
"Love is like devotion: it comes late. A woman is hardly in love or
devout at twenty, unless she has a special disposition to be either, a
sort of native sanctity. Women who are predestined to love, themselves
struggle a long time against that grace of love which is more terrible
than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest
yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten
her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane
asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as
rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women
do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love. They know that
nothing is less common than sacrifice among them. And consider how much
a worldly woman must sacrifice when she is in love--liberty, quietness,
the charming play of a free mind, coquetry, amusement, pleasure--she
loses everything.
"Coquetry is permissible. One may conciliate that with all the
exigencies of fashionable life. Not so love. Love is the least mundane
of passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous.
So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of
manners. In one sense the world is right. A woman in love betrays her
nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like
a work of art. A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man's
industry ever has produced. A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the
concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal. She is
the work of everybody, she belongs to the world."
Therese closed the book and thought that these ideas were only the dreams
of novelists who did not know life. She knew very well that there was in
reality neither a Carmel of passion nor a chain of love, nor a beautiful
and terrible vocation against which the predestined one resisted in vain;
she knew very well that love was only a brief intoxication from which one
recovered a little sadder. And yet, perhaps, she did not know
everything; perhaps there were loves in which one was deliciously lost.
She put out her lamp. The dreams of her first youth came back to her.
CHAPTER VI
A DISTINGUISHED RELICT
It was raining. Madame Martin-Belleme saw confusedly through the glass
of her coupe the multitude of passing umbrellas, like black turtles under
the watery skies. She was thinking. Her thoughts were gray and
indistinct, like the aspect of the streets and the squares.
She no longer knew why the idea had come to her to spend a month with
Miss Bell. Truly, she never had known. The idea had been like a spring,
at first hidden by leaves, and now forming the current of a deep and
rapid stream. She remembered that Tuesday night at dinner she had said
suddenly that she wished to go, but she could not remember the first
flush of that desire. It was not the wish to act toward Robert Le Menil
as he was acting toward her. Doubtless she thought it excellent to go
travelling in Italy while he went fox-hunting. This seemed to her a fair
arrangement. Robert, who was always pleased to see her when he came
back, would not find her on his return. She thought this would be right.
She had not thought of it at first. And since then she had thought
little of it, and really she was not going for the pleasure of making him
grieve. She had against him a thought less piquant, and more harsh.
She did not wish to see him soon. He had become to her almost a
stranger. He seemed to her a man like others--better than most others--
good-looking, estimable, and who did not displease her; but he did not
preoccupy her. Suddenly he had gone out of her life. She could not
remember how he had become mingled with it. The idea of belonging to him
shocked her. The thought that they might meet again in the small
apartment of the Rue Spontini was so painful to her that she discarded it
at once. She preferred to think that an unforeseen event would prevent
their meeting again--the end of the world, for example. M. Lagrange,
member of the Academie des Sciences, had told her the day before of a
comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming
hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die
in a frenzy of laughter. She expected that this, or something else,
would happen next month. It was not inexplicable that she wished to go.
But that her desire to go should contain a vague joy, that she should
feel the charm of what she was to find, was inexplicable to her.
Her carriage left her at the corner of a street.
There, under the roof of a tall house, behind five windows, in a small,
neat apartment, Madame Marmet had lived since the death of her husband.
Countess Martin found her in her modest drawing-room, opposite
M. Lagrange, half asleep in a deep armchair. This worldly old savant had
remained ever faithful to her. He it was who, the day after M. Marmet's
funeral, had conveyed to the unfortunate widow the poisoned speech
delivered by Schmoll. She had fainted in his arms. Madame Marmet
thought that he lacked judgment, but he was her best friend. They
dined together often with rich friends.
Madame Martin, slender and erect in her zibeline corsage opening on a
flood of lace, awakened with the charming brightness of her gray eyes the
good man, who was susceptible to the graces of women. He had told her
the day before how the world would come to an end. He asked her whether
she had not been frightened at night by pictures of the earth devoured by
flames or frozen to a mass of ice. While he talked to her with affected
gallantry, she looked at the mahogany bookcase. There were not many
books in it, but on one of the shelves was a skeleton in armor. It
amazed one to see in this good lady's house that Etruscan warrior wearing
a green bronze helmet and a cuirass. He slept among boxes of bonbons,
vases of gilded porcelain, and carved images of the Virgin, picked up at
Lucerne and on the Righi. Madame Marmet, in her widowhood, had sold the
books which her husband had left. Of all the ancient objects collected
by the archaeologist, she had retained nothing except the Etruscan. Many
persons had tried to sell it for her. Paul Vence had obtained from the
administration a promise to buy it for the Louvre, but the good widow
would not part with it. It seemed to her that if she lost that warrior
with his green bronze helmet she would lose the name that she wore
worthily, and would cease to be the widow of Louis Marmet of the Academie
des Inscriptions.
"Do not be afraid, Madame; a comet will not soon strike the earth. Such
a phenomenon is very improbable."
Madame Martin replied that she knew no serious reason why the earth and
humanity should not be annihilated at once.
Old Lagrange exclaimed with profound sincerity that he hoped the
cataclysm would come as late as possible.
She looked at him. His bald head could boast only a few hairs dyed
black. His eyelids fell like rags over eyes still smiling; his cheeks
hung in loose folds, and one divined that his body was equally withered.
She thought, "And even he likes life!"
Madame Marmet hoped, too, that the end of the world was not near at hand.
"Monsieur Lagrange," said Madame Martin, "you live, do you not, in a
pretty little house, the windows of which overlook the Botanical Gardens?
It seems to me it must be a joy to live in that garden, which makes me
think of the Noah's Ark of my infancy, and of the terrestrial paradises
in the old Bibles."
But he was not at all charmed with his house. It was small, unimproved,
infested with rats.
She acknowledged that one seldom felt at home anywhere, and that rats
were found everywhere, either real or symbolical, legions of pests that
torment us. Yet she liked the Botanical Gardens; she had always wished
to go there, yet never had gone. There was also the museum, which she
was curious to visit.
Smiling, happy, he offered to escort her there. He considered it his
house. He would show her rare specimens, some of which were superb.
She did not know what a bolide was. She recalled that some one had said
to her that at the museum were bones carved by primitive men, and plaques
of ivory on which were engraved pictures of animals, which were long ago
extinct. She asked whether that were true. Lagrange ceased to smile.
He replied indifferently that such objects concerned one of his
colleagues.
"Ah!" said Madame Martin, "then they are not in your showcase."
She observed that learned men were not curious, and that it is indiscreet
to question them on things that are not in their own showcases. It is
true that Lagrange had made a scientific fortune in studying meteors.
This had led him to study comets. But he was wise. For twenty years he
had been preoccupied by nothing except dining out.
When he had left, Countess Martin told Madame Marmet what she expected of
her.
"I am going next week to Fiesole, to visit Miss Bell, and you are coming
with me."
The good Madame Marmet, with placid brow yet searching eyes, was silent
for a moment; then she refused gently, but finally consented.
CHAPTER VII
MADAME HAS HER WAY
The Marseilles express was ready on the quay, where the postmen ran, and
the carriages rolled amid smoke and noise, under the light that fell from
the windows. Through the open doors travellers in long cloaks came and
went. At the end of the station, blinding with soot and dust, a small
rainbow could be discerned, not larger than one's hand. Countess Martin
and the good Madame Marniet were already in their carriage, under the
rack loaded with bags, among newspapers thrown on the cushions.
Choulette had not appeared, and Madame Martin expected him no longer.
Yet he had promised to be at the station. He had made his arrangements
to go, and had received from his publisher the price of Les Blandices.
Paul Vence had brought him one evening to Madame Martin's house. He had
been sweet, polished, full of witty gayety and naive joy. She had
promised herself much pleasure in travelling with a man of genius,
original, picturesquely ugly, with an amusing simplicity; like a child
prematurely old and abandoned, full of vices, yet with a certain degree
of innocence. The doors closed. She expected him no longer. She should
not have counted on his impulsive and vagabondish mind. At the moment
when the engine began to breathe hoarsely, Madame Marmet, who was looking
out of the window, said, quietly:
"I think that Monsieur Choulette is coming."
He was walking along the quay, limping, with his hat on the back of his
head, his beard unkempt, and dragging an old carpet-bag. He was almost
repulsive; yet, in spite of his fifty years of age, he looked young, so
clear and lustrous were his eyes, so much ingenuous audacity had been
retained in his yellow, hollow face, so vividly did this old man express
the eternal adolescence of the poet and artist. When she saw him,
Therese regretted having invited so strange a companion. He walked
along, throwing a hasty glance into every carriage--a glance which,
little by little, became sullen and distrustful. But when he recognized
Madame Martin, he smiled so sweetly and said good-morning to her in so
caressing a voice that nothing was left of the ferocious old vagabond
walking on the quay, nothing except the old carpet-bag, the handles of
which were half broken.
He placed it in the rack with great care, among the elegant bags
enveloped with gray cloth, beside which it looked conspicuously sordid.
It was studded with yellow flowers on a blood-colored background.
He was soon perfectly at ease, and complimented Madame Martin on the
elegance of her travelling attire.
"Excuse me, ladies," he added, "I was afraid I should be late. I went to
six o'clock mass at Saint Severin, my parish, in the Virgin Chapel, under
those pretty, but absurd columns that point toward heaven though frail as
reeds-like us, poor sinners that we are."
"Ah," said Madame Martin, "you are pious to-day."
And she asked him whether he wore the cordon of the order which he was
founding. He assumed a grave and penitent air.
"I am afraid, Madame, that Monsieur Paul Vence has told you many absurd
stories about me. I have heard that he goes about circulating rumors
that my ribbon is a bell-rope--and of what a bell! I should be pained if
anybody believed so wretched a story. My ribbon, Madame, is a symbolical
ribbon. It is represented by a simple thread, which one wears under
one's clothes after a pauper has touched it, as a sign that poverty is
holy, and that it will save the world. There is nothing good except in
poverty; and since I have received the price of Les Blandices, I feel
that I am unjust and harsh. It is a good thing that I have placed in my
bag several of these mystic ribbons."
And, pointing to the horrible carpet-bag:
"I have also placed in it a host which a bad priest gave to me, the works
of Monsieur de Maistre, shirts, and several other things:"
Madame Martin lifted her eyebrows, a little ill at ease. But the good
Madame Marmet retained her habitual placidity.
As the train rolled through the homely scenes of the outskirts, that
black fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city, Choulette took
from his pocket an old book which he began to fumble. The writer, hidden
under the vagabond, revealed himself. Choulette, without wishing to
appear to be careful of his papers, was very orderly about them. He
assured himself that he had not lost the pieces of paper on which he
noted at the coffeehouse his ideas for poems, nor the dozen of flattering
letters which, soiled and spotted, he carried with him continually, to
read them to his newly-made companions at night. After assuring himself
that nothing was missing, he took from the book a letter folded in an
open envelope. He waved it for a while, with an air of mysterious
impudence, then handed it to the Countess Martin. It was a letter of
introduction from the Marquise de Rieu to a princess of the House of
France, a near relative of the Comte de Chambord, who, old and a widow,
lived in retirement near the gates of Florence. Having enjoyed the
effect which he expected to produce, he said that he should perhaps visit
the Princess; that she was a good person, and pious.
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