Books: Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, v3
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Gustave Droz >> Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, v3
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It is on the day which the child becomes a mirror in which you recognize
your features, that the heart is moved and awakens. Existence becomes
duplicated, you are no longer one, but one and a half; you feel your
importance increase, and, in the future of the little creature who
belongs to you, you reconstruct your own past; you resuscitate, and are
born again in him. You say to yourself: "I will spare him such and such
a vexation which I had to suffer, I will clear from his path such and
such a stone over which I stumbled, I will make him happy, and he shall
owe all to me; he shall be, thanks to me, full of talents and
attractions." You give him, in advance, all that you did not get
yourself, and in his future arrange laurels for a little crown for your
own brows.
Human weakness, no doubt; but what matter, provided the sentiment that
gives birth to this weakness is the strongest and purest of all? What
matter if a limpid stream springs up between two paving stones? Are we
to be blamed for being generous out of egotism, and for devoting
ourselves to others for reasons of personal enjoyment?
Thus, in the father, vanity is the leading string. Say to any father:
"Good heavens! how like you he is!" The poor man may hesitate at saying
yes, but I defy him not to smile. He will say, "Perhaps . . . . Do
you think so? . . . Well, perhaps so, side face."
And do not you be mistaken; if he does so, it is that you may reply in
astonishment: "Why, the child is your very image."
He is pleased, and that is easily explained; for is not this likeness a
visible tie between him and his work? Is it not his signature, his
trade-mark, his title-deed, and, as it were, the sanction of his rights?
To this physical resemblance there soon succeeds a moral likeness,
charming in quite another way. You are moved to tears when you recognize
the first efforts of this little intelligence to grasp your ideas.
Without check or examination it accepts and feeds on them. By degrees
the child shares your tastes, your habits, your ways. He assumes a deep
voice to be like papa, asks for your braces, sighs before your boots,
and sits down with admiration on your hat. He protects his mamma when he
goes out with her, and scolds the dog, although he is very much afraid of
him; all to be like papa. Have you caught him at meals with his large
observant eyes fixed on you, studying your face with open mouth and spoon
in hand, and imitating his model with an expression of astonishment and
respect. Listen to his long gossips, wandering as his little brain; does
he not say:
"When I am big like papa I shall have a moustache and a stick like him,
and I shall not be afraid in the dark, because it is silly to be afraid
in the dark when you are big, and I shall say 'damn it,' for I shall then
be grown up."
"Baby, what did you say, sir?"
"I said just as papa does."
What would you? He is a faithful mirror. You are for him an ideal, a
model, the type of all that is great and strong, handsome and
intelligent.
Often he makes mistakes, the little dear, but his error is all the more
delicious in its sincerity, and you feel all the more unworthy of such
frank admiration. You console yourself for your own imperfections in
reflecting that he is not conscious of them.
The defects of children are almost always harrowed from their father;
they are the consequences of a too literal copy. Provide, then, against
them. Yes, no doubt, but I ask you what strength of mind is not needed
by a poor man to undeceive his baby, to destroy, with a word, his
innocent confidence, by saying to him: "My child, I am not perfect,
and I have faults to be avoided?"
This species of devotion on the part of the baby for his father reminds
me of the charming remark of one of my little friends. Crossing the
road, the little fellow caught sight of a policeman. He examined him
with respect, and then turning to me, after a moment's reflection, said,
with an air of conviction: "Papa is stronger than all the policemen,
isn't he?"
If I had answered "No," our intimacy would have been broken off short.
Was it not charming? One can truly say, "Like baby, like papa." Our
life is the threshold of his. It is with our eyes that he has first
seen.
Profit, young fathers, by the first moments of candor on the part of your
dear baby, seek to enter his heart when this little heart opens, and
establish yourself in it so thoroughly, that at the moment when the child
is able to judge you, he will love you too well to be severe or to cease
loving. Win his, affection, it is worth the trouble.
To be loved all your life by a being you love--that is the problem to be
solved, and toward the solution of which all your efforts should be
directed. To make yourself loved, is to store up treasures of happiness
for the winter. Each year will take away a scrap of your life, contract
the circle of interests and pleasures in which you live; your mind by
degrees will lose its vigor, and ask for rest, and as you live less and
less by the mind, you will live more and more by the heart. The
affection of others which was only a pleasant whet will become a
necessary food, and whatever you may have been, statesmen or artists,
soldiers or bankers, when your heads are white, you will no longer be
anything but fathers.
But filial love is not born all at once, nor is it necessary it should
be. The voice of nature is a voice rather poetical than truthful. The
affection of children is earned and deserved; it is a consequence, not a
cause, and gratitude is its commencement. At any cost, therefore, your
baby must be made grateful. Do not reckon that he will be grateful to
you for your solicitude, your dreams for his future, the cost of his
nursing, and the splendid dowry that you are amassing for him; such
gratitude would require from his little brain too complicated a
calculation, besides social ideas as yet unknown to him. He will not be
thankful to you for the extreme fondness you have for him; do not be
astonished at it, and do not cry out at his ingratitude. You must first
make him understand your affection; he must appreciate and judge it
before responding to it; he must know his notes before he can play tunes.
The little man's gratitude will at first be nothing but a simple,
egotistical and natural calculation. If you have made him laugh, if you
have amused him, he will want you to begin again, he will hold out his
little arms to you, crying: "Do it again." And the recollection of the
pleasure you have given him becoming impressed upon his mind, he will
soon say to himself: "No one amuses me so well as papa; it is he who
tosses me into the air, plays at hide-and-seek with me and tells me
tales." So, by degrees, gratitude will be born in him, as thanks spring
to the lips of him who is made happy.
Therefore, learn the art of amusing your child, imitate the crowing of
the cock, and gambol on the carpet, answer his thousand impossible
questions, which are the echo of his endless dreams, and let yourself be
pulled by the beard to imitate a horse. All this is kindness, but also
cleverness, and good King Henry IV did not belie his skilful policy by
walking on all fours on his carpet with his children on his back.
In this way, no doubt, your paternal authority will lose something of its
austere prestige, but will gain the deep and lasting influence that
affection gives. Your baby will fear you less but will love you more.
Where is the harm.
Do not be afraid of anything; become his comrade, in order to have the
right of remaining his friend. Hide your paternal superiority as the
commissary of police does his sash. Ask with kindness for that which you
might rightly insist upon having, and await everything from his heart if
you have known how to touch it. Carefully avoid such ugly words as
discipline, passive obedience and command; let his submission be gentle
to him, and his obedience resemble kindness. Renounce the stupid
pleasure of imposing your fancies upon him, and of giving orders to prove
your infallibility.
Children have a keenness of judgment, and a delicacy of impression which
would not be imagined, unless one has studied them. Justice and equity
are easily born in their minds, for they possess, above all things,
positive logic. Profit by all this. There are unjust and harsh words
which remain graven on a child's heart, and which he remembers all his
life. Reflect that, in your baby, there is a man whose affection will
cheer your old age; therefore respect him so that he may respect you; and
be sure that there is not a single seed sown in this little heart which
will not sooner or later bear fruit.
But there are, you will say, unmanageable children, rebels from the
cradle. Are you sure that the first word they heard in their lives has
not been the cause of their evil propensities? Where there has been
rebellion, there has been clumsy pressure; for I will not believe in
natural vice. Among evil instincts there is always a good one, of which
an arm can be made to combat the others. This requires, I know, extreme
kindness, perfect tact, and unlimited confidence, but the reward is
sweet. I think, therefore, in conclusion, that a father's first kiss,
his first look, his first caresses, have an immense influence on a
child's life. To love is a great deal. To know how to love is
everything.
Even were one not a father, it is impossible to pass by the dear little
ones without feeling touched, and without loving them. Muddy and ragged,
or carefully decked out; running in the roadway and rolling in the dust,
or playing at skipping rope in the gardens of the Tuileries; dabbling
among the ducklings, or building hills of sand beside well-dressed
mammas--babies are charming. In both classes there is the same grace,
the same unembarrassed movements, the same comical seriousness, the same
carelessness as to the effect created, in short, the same charm; the
charm that is called childhood, which one can not understand without
loving--which one finds just the same throughout nature, from the opening
flower and the dawning day to the child entering upon life.
A baby is not an imperfect being, an unfinished sketch--he is a man.
Watch him closely, follow every one of his movements; they will reveal to
you a logical sequence of ideas, a marvellous power of imagination, such
as will not again be found at any period of life. There is more real
poetry in the brain of these dear loves than in twenty epics. They are
surprised and unskilled, no doubt; but nothing equals the vigor of these
minds, unexperienced, fresh, simple, sensible of the slightest
impressions, which make their way through the midst of the unknown.
What immense labor is gone through by them in a few months! To notice
noises, classify them, understand that some of these sounds are words,
and that these words are thoughts; to find out of themselves alone the
meaning of everything, and distinguish the true from the false, the real
from the imaginary; to correct, by observation, the errors of their too
ardent imagination; to unravel a chaos, and during this gigantic task to
render the tongue supple and strengthen the staggering little legs, in
short, to become a man. If ever there was a curious and touching sight
it is that of this little creature setting out upon the conquest of the
world. As yet he knows neither doubt nor fear, and opens his heart
fully. There is something of Don Quixote about a baby. He is as comic
as the Knight, but he has also a sublime side.
Do not laugh too much at the hesitations, the countless gropings, the
preposterous follies of this virgin mind, which a butterfly lifts to the
clouds, to which grains of sand are mountains, which understands the
twittering of birds, ascribes thoughts to flowers, and souls to dolls,
which believes in far-off realms, where the trees are sugar, the fields
chocolate, and the rivers syrup, for which Punch and Mother Hubbard are
real and powerful individuals, a mind which peoples silence and vivifies
night. Do not laugh at his love; his life is a dream, and his mistakes
poetry.
This touching poetry which you find in the infancy of man you also find
in the infancy of nations. It is the same. In both cases there is the
same necessity of idealization, the same tendency to personify the
unknown. And it may be said that between Punch and Jupiter, Mother
Hubbard and Venus, there is only a hair's breadth.
CHAPTER XXIX
HIS FIRST BREECHES
The great desire in a child is to become a man. But the first symptom of
virility, the first serious step taken in life, is marked by the
assumption of breeches.
This first breeching is an event that papa desires and mamma dreads.
It seems to the mother that it is the beginning of her being forsaken.
She looks with tearful eyes at the petticoat laid aside for ever, and
murmurs to herself, "Infancy is over then? My part will soon become a
small one. He will have fresh tastes, new wishes; he is no longer only
myself, his personality is asserting itself; he is some ones boy."
The father, on the contrary, is delighted. He laughs in his moustache to
see the little arching calves peeping out beneath the trousers; he feels
the little body, the outline of which can be clearly made out under the
new garment, and says to himself; "How well he is put together, the
rascal. He will have broad shoulders and strong loins like myself. How
firmly his little feet tread the ground." Papa would like to see him in
jackboots; for a trifle he would buy him spurs. He begins to see himself
in this little one sprung from him; he looks at him in a fresh light,
and, for the first time, he finds a great charm in calling him "my boy."
As to the baby, he is intoxicated, proud, triumphant, although somewhat
embarrassed as to his arms and legs, and, be it said, without any wish to
offend him, greatly resembling those little poodles we see freshly shaven
on the approach of summer. What greatly disturbed the poor little fellow
is past. How many men of position are there who do not experience
similar inconvenience. He knows very well that breeches, like nobility,
render certain things incumbent on their possessor, that he must now
assume new ways, new gestures, a new tone of voice; he begins to scan out
of the corner of his eye the movements of his papa, who is by no means
ill pleased at this: he clumsily essays a masculine gesture or two; and
this struggle between his past and his present gives him for some time
the most comical air in the world. His petticoats haunt him, and really
he is angry that it is so.
Dear first pair of breeches! I love you, because you are a faithful
friend, and I encounter at every step in life you and your train of sweet
sensations. Are you not the living image of the latest illusion caressed
by our vanity? You, young officer, who still measure your moustaches in
the glass, and who have just assumed for the first time the epaulette and
the gold belt, how did you feel when you went downstairs and heard the
scabbard of your sabre go clink-clank on the steps, when with your cap on
one side and your arm akimbo you found yourself in the street, and, an
irresistible impulse urging you on, you gazed at your figure reflected in
the chemist's bottles? Will you dare to say that you did not halt before
those bottles? First pair of breeches, lieutenant.
You will find them again, these breeches, when you are promoted to be
Captain and are decorated. And later on, when, an old veteran with a
gray moustache, you take a fair companion to rejuvenate you, you will
again put them on; but this time the dear creature will help you to wear
them.
And the day when you will no longer have anything more to do with them,
alas! that day you will be very low, for one's whole life is wrapped up
in this precious garment. Existence is nothing more than putting on our
first pair of breeches, taking them off, putting them on again, and dying
with eyes fixed on them.
Is it the truth that most of our joys have no more serious origin than
those of children? Are we then so simple? Ah! yes, my dear sir, we are
simple to this degree, that we do not think we are. We never quite get
rid of our swaddling clothes; do you see, there is always a little bit
sticking out? There is a baby in every one of us, or, rather, we are
only babies grown big.
See the young barrister walking up and down the lobby of the courts.
He is freshly shaven: in the folds of his new gown he hides a pile of
documents, and on his head, in which a world of thought is stirring, is a
fine advocate's coif, which he bought yesterday, and which this morning
he coquettishly crushed in with a blow from his fist before putting it
on. This young fellow is happy; amid the general din he can distinguish
the echo of his own footsteps, and the ring of his bootheels sounds to
him like the great bell of Notre Dame. In a few minutes he will find an
excuse for descending the great staircase, and crossing the courtyard in
costume. You may be sure that he will not disrobe except to go to
dinner. What joy in these five yards of black stuff; what happiness in
this ugly bit of cloth stretched over stiff cardboard!
First pair of breeches--I think I recognize you.
And you, Madame, with what happiness do you renew each season the
enjoyment caused by new clothes? Do not say, I beg of you, that such
enjoyments are secondary ones, for their influence is positive upon your
nature and your character. Why, I ask you, did you find so much
captivating logic, so much persuasive eloquence, in the sermon of Father
Paul? Why did you weep on quitting the church, and embrace your husband
as soon as you got home? You know better than I do, Madame, that it was
because on that day you had put on for the first time that little yellow
bonnet, which is a gem, I acknowledge, and which makes you look twice as
pretty. These impressions can scarcely be explained, but they are
invincible. There may be a trifle of childishness in it all, you will
admit, but it is a childishness that can not be got rid of.
As a proof of it, the other day, going to St. Thomas's to hear Father
Nicholas, who is one of our shining lights, you experienced totally
different sentiments; a general feeling of discontent and doubt and
nervous irritability at every sentence of the preacher. Your soul did
not soar heavenward with the same unreserved confidence; you left St.
Thomas's with your head hot and your feet cold; and you so far forgot
yourself as to say, as you got into your carriage, that Father Nicholas
was a Gallican devoid of eloquence. Your coachman heard it. And,
finally, on reaching home you thought your drawing-room too small and
your husband growing too fat. Why, I again ask you, this string of
vexatious impressions? If you remember rightly, dear Madame, you wore
for the first time the day before yesterday that horrible little violet
bonnet, which is such a disgusting failure. First pair of breeches, dear
Madame.
Would you like a final example? Observe your husband. Yesterday he went
out in a bad temper--he had breakfasted badly--and lo! in the evening,
at a quarter to seven, he came home from the Chamber joyful and well-
pleased, a smile on his lips, and good-humor in his eye. He kissed you
on the forehead with a certain unconstraint, threw a number of pamphlets
and papers with an easy gesture on the sidetable, sat down to table,
found the soup delicious, and ate joyously. "What is the matter with my
husband?" you asked yourself . . . . I will explain. Your husband
spoke yesterday for the first time in the building, you know. He said--
the sitting was a noisy one, the Left were threshing out some infernal
questions--he said, during the height of the uproar, and rapping with his
paper-knife on his desk: "But we can not hear!" And as these words were
received on all sides with universal approbation and cries of "Hear,
hear!" he gave his thoughts a more parliamentary expression by adding:
"The voice of the honorable gentleman who is speaking does not reach us."
It was not much certainly, and the amendment may have been carried all
the same, but after all it was a step; a triumph, to tell the truth,
since your husband has from day to day put off the delivery of his maiden
speech. Behold a happy deputy, a deputy who has just--put on his first
pair of breeches.
What matter whether the reason be a serious or a futile one, if your
blood flows faster, if you feel happier, if you are proud of yourself?
To win a great victory or put on a new bonnet, what matters it if this
new bonnet gives you the same joy as a laurel crown?
Therefore do not laugh too much at baby if his first pair of breeches
intoxicates him, if, when he wears them, he thinks his shadow longer and
the trees less high. He is beginning his career as a man, dear child,
nothing more.
How many things have not people been proud of since the beginning of the
world? They were proud of their noses under Francis the First, of their
perukes under Louis XIV, and later on of their appetites and stoutness.
A man is proud of his wife, his idleness, his wit, his stupidity, the
beard on his chin, the cravat round his neck, the hump on his back.
CHAPTER XXX
COUNTRY CHILDREN
I love the baby that runs about under the trees of the Tuileries; I love
the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and
unmanageable crinolines. I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out
like reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical
ways. It seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of
charming faults already peeping forth. But all these miniature men and
women, exchanging postage stamps and chattering of dress, have something
of the effect of adorable monstrosities on me.
I like them as I like a bunch of grapes in February, or a dish of green
peas in December.
In the babies' kingdom, my friend, my favorite is the country baby,
running about in the dust on the highway barefoot and ragged, and
searching for black birds' and chaffinches' nests on the outskirts of the
woods. I love his great black wondering eye, which watches you fixedly
from between two locks of un combed hair, his firm flesh bronzed by the
sun, his swarthy forehead, hidden by his hair, his smudged face and his
picturesque breeches kept from falling off by the paternal braces
fastened to a metal button, the gift of a gendarme.
Ah! what fine breeches; not very long in the legs, but, then, what room
everywhere else! He could hide away entirely in this immense space which
allows a shirt-tail, escaping through a slit, to wave like a flag. These
breeches preserve a remembrance of all the garments of the family; here
is a piece of maternal petticoat, here a fragment of yellow waistcoat,
here a scrap of blue handkerchief; the whole sewn with a thread that
presents the twofold advantage of being seen from a distance, and of not
breaking.
But under these patched clothes you can make out a sturdy little figure;
and, besides, what matters the clothes? Country babies are not
coquettish; and when the coach comes down the hill with jingling bells
and they rush after it, stumbling over their neighbors, tumbling with
them in the dust, and rolling into the ditches, what would all these dear
little gamins do in silk stockings?
I love them thus because they are wild, taking alarm, and fleeing away at
your approach like the young rabbits you surprise in the morning playing
among the wild thyme. You must have recourse to a thousand subterfuges
in order to triumph over their alarm and gain their confidence. But if
at length, thanks to your prudence, you find yourself in their company,
at the outset play ceases, shouts and noise die away; the little group
remain motionless, scratching their heads, and all their uneasy eyes look
fixedly at you. This is the difficult moment.
A sharp word, a stern gesture, may cause an eternal misunderstanding with
them, just as a kind remark, a smile, a caress will soon accomplish their
conquest. And this conquest is worth the trouble, believe me.
One of my chief methods of winning them was as follows: I used to take my
watch out of my pocket and look at it attentively. Then I would see my
little people stretch their necks, open their eyes, and come a step
nearer; and it would often happen that the chickens, ducklings, and
geese, which were loitering close by in the grass, imitated their
comrades and drew near too. I then would put my watch to my ear and
smile like a man having a secret whispered to him. In presence of this
prodigy my youngsters could no longer restrain themselves, and would
exchange among themselves those keen, simple, timid, mocking looks,
which must have been seen to be understood. They advanced this time in
earnest, and if I offered to let the boldest listen, by holding out my
watch to him, he would draw back alarmed, although smiling, while the
band would break into an outburst of joy; the ducklings flapping their
wings, the white geese cackling, and the chickens going chk, chk. The
game was won.
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