Books: The Red Lily, v1
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Anatole France >> The Red Lily, v1
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"A truly great lady," he added, "who does not show her magnificence in
gowns and hats. She wears her chemises for six weeks, and sometimes
longer. The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white
stockings, which fell around her heels. The virtues of the great queens
of Spain are revived in her. Oh, those soiled stockings, what real glory
there is in them!"
He took the letter and put it back in his book. Then, arming himself
with a horn-handled knife, he began, with its point, to finish a figure
sketched in the handle of his stick. He complimented himself on it:
"I am skilful in all the arts of beggars and vagabonds. I know how to
open locks with a nail, and how to carve wood with a bad knife."
The head began to appear. It was the head of a thin woman, weeping.
Choulette wished to express in it human misery, not simple and touching,
such as men of other times may have felt it in a world of mingled
harshness and kindness; but hideous, and reflecting the state of ugliness
created by the free-thinking bourgeois and the military patriots of the
French Revolution. According to him the present regime embodied only
hypocrisy and brutality.
"Their barracks are a hideous invention of modern times. They date from
the seventeenth century. Before that time there were only guard-houses
where the soldiers played cards and told tales. Louis XIV was a
precursor of Bonaparte. But the evil has attained its plenitude since
the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment. The shame of
emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men to
kill. In the ages called barbarous, cities and princes entrusted their
defence to mercenaries, who fought prudently. In a great battle only
five or six men were killed. And when knights went to the wars, at least
they were not forced to do it; they died for their pleasure. They were
good for nothing else. Nobody in the time of Saint Louis would have
thought of sending to battle a man of learning. And the laborer was not
torn from the soil to be killed. Nowadays it is a duty for a poor
peasant to be a soldier. He is exiled from his house, the roof of which
smokes in the silence of night; from the fat prairies where the oxen
graze; from the fields and the paternal woods. He is taught how to kill
men; he is threatened, insulted, put in prison and told that it is an
honor; and, if he does not care for that sort of honor, he is fusilladed.
He obeys because he is terrorized, and is of all domestic animals the
gentlest and most docile. We are warlike in France, and we are citizens.
Another reason to be proud, this being a citizen! For the poor it
consists in sustaining and preserving the wealthy in their power and
their laziness. The poor must work for this, in presence of the majestic
quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from
sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from
stealing bread. That is one of the good effects of the Revolution.
As this Revolution was made by fools and idiots for the benefit of those
who acquired national lands, and resulted in nothing but making the
fortune of crafty peasants and financiering bourgeois, the Revolution
only made stronger, under the pretence of making all men equal, the
empire of wealth. It has betrayed France into the hands of the men of
wealth. They are masters and lords. The apparent government, composed
of poor devils, is in the pay of the financiers. For one hundred years,
in this poisoned country, whoever has loved the poor has been considered
a traitor to society. A man is called dangerous when he says that there
are wretched people. There are laws against indignation and pity, and
what I say here could not go into print."
Choulette became excited and waved his knife, while under the wintry
sunlight passed fields of brown earth, trees despoiled by winter, and
curtains of poplars beside silvery rivers.
He looked with tenderness at the figure carved on his stick.
"Here you are," he said, "poor humanity, thin and weeping, stupid with
shame and misery, as you were made by your masters--soldiers and men of
wealth."
The good Madame Marmet, whose nephew was a captain in the artillery, was
shocked at the violence with which Choulette attacked the army. Madame
Martin saw in this only an amusing fantasy. Choulette's ideas did not
frighten her. She was afraid of nothing. But she thought they were a
little absurd. She did not think that the past had ever been better than
the present.
"I believe, Monsieur Choulette, that men were always as they are to-day,
selfish, avaricious, and pitiless. I believe that laws and manners were
always harsh and cruel to the unfortunate."
Between La Roche and Dijon they took breakfast in the dining-car, and
left Choulette in it, alone with his pipe, his glass of benedictine, and
his irritation.
In the carriage, Madame Marmet talked with peaceful tenderness of the
husband she had lost. He had married her for love; he had written
admirable verses to her, which she had kept, and never shown to any one.
He was lively and very gay. One would not have thought it who had seen
him later, tired by work and weakened by illness. He studied until the
last moment. Two hours before he died he was trying to read again. He
was affectionate and kind. Even in suffering he retained all his
sweetness. Madame Martin said to her:
"You have had long years of happiness; you have kept the reminiscence of
them; that is a share of happiness in this world."
But good Madame Marmet sighed; a cloud passed over her quiet brow.
"Yes," she said, "Louis was the best of men and the best of husbands.
Yet he made me very miserable. He had only one fault, but I suffered
from it cruelly. He was jealous. Good, kind, tender, and generous as
he was, this horrible passion made him unjust, ironical, and violent.
I can assure you that my behavior gave not the least cause for suspicion.
I was not a coquette. But I was young, fresh; I passed for beautiful.
That was enough. He would not let me go out alone, and would not let me
receive calls in his absence. Whenever we went to a reception, I
trembled in advance with the fear of the scene which he would make later
in the carriage."
And the good Madame Marmet added, with a sigh:
"It is true that I liked to dance. But I had to renounce going to balls;
it made him suffer too much."
Countess Martin expressed astonishment. She had always imagined Marmet
as an old man, timid, and absorbed by his thoughts; a little ridiculous,
between his wife, plump, white, and amiable, and the skeleton wearing a
helmet of bronze and gold. But the excellent widow confided to her that,
at fifty-five years of age, when she was fifty-three, Louis was just as
jealous as on the first day of their marriage.
And Therese thought that Robert had never tormented her with jealousy.
Was it on his part a proof of tact and good taste, a mark of confidence,
or was it that he did not love her enough to make her suffer? She did
not know, and she did not have the heart to try to know. She would have
to look through recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open.
She murmured carelessly:
"We long to be loved, and when we are loved we are tormented or worried."
The day was finished in reading and thinking. Choulette did not
reappear. Night covered little by little with its gray clouds the
mulberry-trees of the Dauphine. Madame Marmet went to sleep peacefully,
resting on herself as on a mass of pillows. Therese looked at her and
thought:
"She is happy, since she likes to remember."
The sadness of night penetrated her heart. And when the moon rose on the
fields of olive-trees, seeing the soft lines of plains and of hills pass,
Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and
oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the Seine, the Arc de
Triomphe with its radiating avenues, and the alleys of the park where,
at least, the trees and the stones knew her.
Suddenly Choulette threw himself into the carriage. Armed with his
knotty stick, his face and head enveloped in red wool and a fur cap, he
almost frightened her. It was what he wished to do. His violent
attitudes and his savage dress were studied. Always seeking to produce
effects, it pleased him to seem frightful.
He was a coward himself, and was glad to inspire the fears he often felt.
A moment before, as he was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while seeing
the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of those childish frights that
tormented his light mind. He had come near the Countess to be reassured.
"Arles," he said. "Do you know Arles? It is a place of pure beauty.
I have seen, in the cloister, doves resting on the shoulders of statues,
and I have seen the little gray lizards warming themselves in the sun on
the tombs. The tombs are now in two rows on the road that leads to the
church. They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at
night. One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman
who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had died on
her wedding-day. We said goodnight to her. She replied: 'May God hear-
you! but fate wills that this tomb should open on the side of the
northwest wind. If only it were open on the other side, I should be
lying as comfortably as Queen Jeanne.'"
Therese made no answer. She was dozing. And Choulette shivered in the
cold of the night, in the fear of death.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LADY OF THE BELLS
In her English cart, which she drove herself, Miss Bell had brought over
the hills, from the railway station at Florence, the Countess Martin-
Belleme and Madame Marmet to her pink-tinted house at Fiesole, which,
crowned with a long balustrade, overlooked the incomparable city. The
maid followed with the luggage. Choulette, lodged, by Miss Bell's
attention, in the house of a sacristan's widow, in the shadow of the
cathedral of Fiesole, was not expected until dinner. Plain and gentle,
wearing short hair, a waistcoat, a man's shirt on a chest like a boy's,
almost graceful, with small hips, the poetess was doing for her French
friends the honors of the house, which reflected the ardent delicacy of
her taste. On the walls of the drawing-room were pale Virgins, with long
hands, reigning peacefully among angels, patriarchs, and saints in
beautiful gilded frames. On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only
with her hair, frightful with thinness and old age, some beggar of the
road to Pistoia, burned by the suns and the snows, whom some unknown
precursor of Donatello had moulded. And everywhere were Miss Bell's
chosen arms-bells and cymbals. The largest lifted their bronze clappers
at the angles of the room; others formed a chain at the foot of the
walls. Smaller ones ran along the cornices. There were bells over the
hearth, on the cabinets, and on the chairs. The shelves were full of
silver and golden bells. There were big bronze bells marked with the
Florentine lily; bells of the Renaissance, representing a lady wearing a
white gown; bells of the dead, decorated with tears and bones; bells
covered with symbolical animals and leaves, which had rung in the
churches in the time of St. Louis; table-bells of the seventeenth
century, having a statuette for a handle; the flat, clear cow-bells of
the Ruth Valley; Hindu bells; Chinese bells formed like cylinders--they
had come from all countries and all times, at the magic call of little
Miss Bell.
"You look at my speaking arms," she said to Madame Martin. "I think that
all these Misses Bell are pleased to be here, and I should not be
astonished if some day they all began to sing together. But you must not
admire them all equally. Reserve your purest and most fervent praise for
this one."
And striking with her finger a dark, bare bell which gave a faint sound:
"This one," she said, "is a holy village-bell of the fifth century.
She is a spiritual daughter of Saint Paulin de Nole, who was the first to
make the sky sing over our heads. The metal is rare. Soon I will show
to you a gentle Florentine, the queen of bells. She is coming. But I
bore you, darling, with my babble. And I bore, too, the good Madame
Marmet. It is wrong."
She escorted them to their rooms.
An hour later, Madame Martin, rested, fresh, in a gown of foulard and
lace, went on the terrace where Miss Bell was waiting for her. The humid
air, warmed by the sun, exhaled the restless sweetness of spring.
Therese, resting on the balustrade, bathed her eyes in the light. At her
feet, the cypress-trees raised their black distaffs, and the olive-trees
looked like sheep on the hills. In the valley, Florence extended its
domes, its towers, and the multitudes of its red roofs, through which the
Arno showed its undulating line. Beyond were the soft blue hills.
She tried to recognize the Boboli Gardens, where she had walked at her
first visit; the Cascine, which she did not like; the Pitti Palace. Then
the charming infinity of the sky attracted her. She looked at the forms
in the clouds.
After a long silence, Vivian Bell extended her hand toward the horizon.
"Darling, I do not know how to say what I wish. But look, darling, look
again. What you see there is unique in the world. Nature is nowhere
else so subtle, elegant, and fine. The god who made the hills of
Florence was an artist. Oh, he was a jeweller, an engraver, a sculptor,
a bronze-founder, and a painter; he was a Florentine. He did nothing
else in the world, darling. The rest was made by a hand less delicate,
whose work was less perfect. How can you think that that violet hill of
San Miniato, so firm and so pure in relief, was made by the author of
Mont Blanc? It is not possible. This landscape has the beauty of an
antique medal and of a precious painting. It is a perfect and measured
work of art. And here is another thing that I do not know how to say,
that I can not even understand, but which is a real thing. In this
country I feel--and you will feel as I do, darling--half alive and half
dead; in a condition which is sad, noble, and very sweet. Look, look
again; you will realize the melancholy of those hills that surround
Florence, and see a delicious sadness ascend from the land of the dead."
The sun was low over the horizon. The bright points of the mountain-
peaks faded one by one, while the clouds inflamed the sky. Madame Marmet
sneezed.
Miss Bell sent for some shawls, and warned the French women that the
evenings were fresh and that the night-air was dangerous.
Then suddenly she said:
"Darling, you know Monsieur Jacques Dechartre? Well, he wrote to me that
he would be at Florence next week. I am glad Monsieur Jacques Dechartre
is to meet you in our city. He will accompany us to the churches and to
the museums, and he will be a good guide. He understands beautiful
things, because he loves them. And he has an exquisite talent as a
sculptor. His figures in medallions are admired more in England than in
France. Oh, I am so glad Monsieur Jacques Dechartre and you are to meet
at Florence, darling!"
CHAPTER IX
CHOULETTE FINDS A NEW FRIEND
She next day, as they were traversing the square where are planted, in
imitation of antique amphitheatres, two marble pillars, Madame Marmet
said to the Countess Martin:
"I think I see Monsieur Choulette."
Seated in a shoemaker's shop, his pipe in his hand, Choulette was making
rhythmic gestures, and appeared to be reciting verses. The Florentine
cobbler listened with a kind smile. He was a little, bald man, and
represented one of the types familiar to Flemish painters. On a table,
among wooden lasts, nails, leather, and wax, a basilic plant displayed
its round green head. A sparrow, lacking a leg, which had been replaced
by a match, hopped on the old man's shoulder and head.
Madame Martin, amused by this spectacle, called Choulette from the
threshold. He was softly humming a tune, and she asked him why he had
not gone with her to visit the Spanish chapel.
He arose and replied:
"Madame, you are preoccupied by vain images; but I live in life and in
truth."
He shook the cobbler's hand and followed the two ladies.
"While going to church," he said, "I saw this old man, who, bending over
his work, and pressing a last between his knees as in a vise, was sewing
coarse shoes. I felt that he was simple and kind. I said to him, in
Italian: 'My father, will you drink with me a glass of Chianti?' He
consented. He went for a flagon and some glasses, and I kept the shop."
And Choulette pointed to two glasses and a flagon placed on a stove.
"When he came back we drank together; I said vague but kind things to
him, and I charmed him by the sweetness of sounds. I will go again to
his shop; I will learn from him how to make shoes, and how to live
without desire. After which, I shall not be sad again. For desire and
idleness alone make us sad."
The Countess Martin smiled.
"Monsieur Choulette, I desire nothing, and, nevertheless, I am not
joyful. Must I make shoes, too?"
Choulette replied, gravely:
"It is not yet time for that."
When they reached the gardens of the Oricellari, Madame Marmet sank
on a bench. She had examined at Santa Maria-Novella the frescoes of
Ghirlandajo, the stalls of the choir, the Virgin of Cimabue, the
paintings in the cloister. She had done this carefully, in memory of her
husband, who had greatly liked Italian art. She was tired. Choulette
sat by her and said:
"Madame, could you tell me whether it is true that the Pope's gowns are
made by Worth?"
Madame Marmet thought not. Nevertheless, Choulette had heard people say
this in cafes. Madame Marmet was astonished that Choulette, a Catholic
and a socialist, should speak so disrespectfully of a pope friendly to
the republic. But he did not like Leo XIII.
"The wisdom of princes is shortsighted," he said; "the salvation of the
Church must come from the Italian republic, as Leo XIII believes and
wishes; but the Church will not be saved in the manner which this pious
Machiavelli thinks. The revolution will make the Pope lose his last sou,
with the rest of his patrimony. And it will be salvation. The Pope,
destitute and poor, will then become powerful. He will agitate the
world. We shall see again Peter, Lin, Clet, Anaclet, and Clement; the
humble, the ignorant; men like the early saints will change the face of
the earth. If to-morrow, in the chair of Peter, came to sit a real
bishop, a real Christian, I would go to him, and say: 'Do not be an old
man buried alive in a golden tomb; quit your noble guards and your
cardinals; quit your court and its similacrums of power. Take my arm and
come with me to beg for your bread among the nations. Covered with rags,
poor, ill, dying, go on the highways, showing in yourself the image of
Jesus. Say, "I am begging my bread for the condemnation of the wealthy."
Go into the cities, and shout from door to door, with a sublime
stupidity, "Be humble, be gentle, be poor!" Announce peace and charity
to the cities, to the dens, and to the barracks. You will be disdained;
the mob will throw stones at you. Policemen will drag you into prison.
You shall be for the humble as for the powerful, for the poor as for the
rich, a subject of laughter, an object of disgust and of pity. Your
priests will dethrone you, and elevate against you an anti-pope, or will
say that you are crazy. And it is necessary that they should tell the
truth; it is necessary that you should be crazy; the lunatics have saved
the world. Men will give to you the crown of thorns and the reed
sceptre, and they will spit in your face, and it is by that sign that you
will appear as Christ and true king; and it is by such means that you
will establish Christian socialism, which is the kingdom of God on
earth.'"
Having spoken in this way, Choulette lighted one of those long and
tortuous Italian cigars, which are pierced with a straw. He drew from it
several puffs of infectious vapor, then he continued, tranquilly:
"And it would be practical. You may refuse to acknowledge any quality in
me except my clear view of situations. Ah, Madame Marmet, you will never
know how true it is that the great works of this world were always
achieved by madmen. Do you think, Madame Martin, that if Saint Francis
of Assisi had been reasonable, he would have poured upon the earth, for
the refreshment of peoples, the living water of charity and all the
perfumes of love?"
"I do not know," replied Madame Martin; "but reasonable people have
always seemed to me to be bores. I can say this to you, Monsieur
Choulette."
They returned to Fiesole by the steam tramway which goes up the hill.
The rain fell. Madame Marmet went to sleep and Choulette complained.
All his ills came to attack him at once: the humidity in the air gave him
a pain in the knee, and he could not bend his leg; his carpet-bag, lost
the day before in the trip from the station to Fiesole, had not been
found, and it was an irreparable disaster; a Paris review had just
published one of his poems, with typographical errors as glaring as
Aphrodite's shell.
He accused men and things of being hostile to him. He became puerile,
absurd, odious. Madame Martin, whom Choulette and the rain saddened,
thought the trip would never end. When she reached the house she found
Miss Bell in the drawing-room, copying with gold ink on a leaf of
parchment, in a handwriting formed after the Aldine italics, verses which
she had composed in the night. At her friend's coming she raised her
little face, plain but illuminated by splendid eyes.
"Darling, permit me to introduce to you the Prince Albertinelli."
The Prince possessed a certain youthful, godlike beauty, that his black
beard intensified. He bowed.
"Madame, you would make one love France, if that sentiment were not
already in our hearts."
The Countess and Choulette asked Miss Bell to read to them the verses she
was writing. She excused herself from reciting her uncertain cadence to
the French poet, whom she liked best after Francois Villon. Then she
recited in her pretty, hissing, birdlike voice.
"That is very pretty," said Choulette, "and bears the mark of Italy
softly veiled by the mists of Thule."
"Yes," said the Countess Martin, "that is pretty. But why, dear Vivian,
did your two beautiful innocents wish to die?"
"Oh, darling, because they felt as happy as possible, and desired nothing
more. It was discouraging, darling, discouraging. How is it that you do
not understand that?"
"And do you think that if we live the reason is that we hope?"
"Oh, yes. We live in the hope of what to-morrow, tomorrow, king of the
land of fairies, will bring in his black mantle studded with stars,
flowers, and tears. Oh, bright king, To-morrow!"
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A hero must be human. Napoleon was human
Anti-Semitism is making fearful progress everywhere
Brilliancy of a fortune too new
Curious to know her face of that day
Do you think that people have not talked about us?
Each had regained freedom, but he did not like to be alone
Fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city
Gave value to her affability by not squandering it
He could not imagine that often words are the same as actions
He does not bear ill-will to those whom he persecutes
He is not intelligent enough to doubt
He studied until the last moment
Her husband had become quite bearable
His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth
I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness
I gave myself to him because he loved me
I haven't a taste, I have tastes
It was too late: she did not wish to win
Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope
Laughing in every wrinkle of his face
Learn to live without desire
Life as a whole is too vast and too remote
Life is made up of just such trifles
Life is not a great thing
Love was only a brief intoxication
Made life give all it could yield
Miserable beings who contribute to the grandeur of the past
None but fools resisted the current
Not everything is known, but everything is said
One would think that the wind would put them out: the stars
Picturesquely ugly
Recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open
Relatives whom she did not know and who irritated her
She is happy, since she likes to remember
She pleased society by appearing to find pleasure in it
Should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one
So well satisfied with his reply that he repeated it twice
That if we live the reason is that we hope
That sort of cold charity which is called altruism
The discouragement which the irreparable gives
The most radical breviary of scepticism since Montaigne
The violent pleasure of losing
Umbrellas, like black turtles under the watery skies
Was I not warned enough of the sadness of everything?
Whether they know or do not know, they talk
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