Essays from 'The Guardian' Part 5

All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angelique left me for the churchyard, never to come back.' He paused to my great relief. For every one of those phrases he modulated under the fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint overset me--was like death."

[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way! The actual scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher valleys of the Cevennes abound. In fact, the boys witness the accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Leba.s.set. The latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--

"He had a long steady look towards the fruit-trees, and then whistled, on a note at once extremely clear and extremely soft. He paused, watched awhile, recommenced. The note became more rapid, more sonorous. What an astounding man he was, this Justin Leba.s.set!

Upright, his red beard forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes on the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his hands on his haunches, in an att.i.tude of repose, easy, superb, he was like some youthful pagan G.o.d, gilded with red gold, on his way across the country--like Pan, if he chose to amuse himself by charming birds. You should have seen the enthusiastic glances with which Norine watched him. Upright--she too, slim, at full height, inclining from [130] time to time towards Justin with a movement of irresistible fascination, she followed the notes of her mate; and sometimes, her, lips half opening, added thereto a sigh--something of a sigh, an aspiration, a prayer, towards the goldfinch, withdrawn into the shadows.

"The leaves were shaken in the clear, burning green; and, on a sudden, a mult.i.tude of goldfinches, the heads red in the wind, the wings half spread, were fluttering from branch to branch. I could have fancied, amid the quivering of the great bunches of fruit, that they were cherries on the wing. Justin suffered his pipe to die away: the birds were come at his invitation, and performed their prelude."

It is forty years afterwards that the narrator, now a man of letters in Paris, writes to his old friend, with tidings of Justin and Norine:--

"In 1842 (he observes) you were close on fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In my eyes your age made you my superior. And then, you were so strong, so tender, so amiteux, to use a word from up there--a charming word.

And so G.o.d, Who had His designs for you, whereas I, in spite of my pious childhood, wandered on [131] my way as chance bade me, led you by the hand, attached, ended by keeping you for Himself. He did well truly when He chose you and rejected me!"

His finding the pair in the wilds of Paris is an adventure, in which, in fact, a goldfinch again takes an important part--a goldfinch who is found to understand the Cevenol dialect:--

"The goldfinch (escaped from its cage somewhere, into the dreary court of the Inst.i.tute) has seen me: is looking at me. If he chose to make his way into my apartment, he would be very welcome. I feel a strong impulse to try him with that unique patois word, which, whistled after a peculiar manner, when I was a boy never failed to succeed in the mountains of Orb--Beni! Beni! Viens! Viens! I dare not! He might take fright and fly away altogether."

In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, introduces Norine, his rightful owner, whose husband Justin is slowly dying. Towards the end of a hard life, faithful to their mountain ideal, they have not lost their dignity, though in a comparatively sordid medium: [132]

"As for me, my dear Arribas, I remained in deep agitation, an attentive spectator of the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set both alike in the winepress of sorrow, le pressoir de la douleur, as your good books express it, murmured to each other their broken consoling words, I saw them again, in thought, young, handsome, in the full flower of life, under the cherry-trees, the swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthelemy Jalaguier. Ah me! It was thus that, five-and-forty years after, in this dark street of Paris, that festive day was finis.h.i.+ng, blessed, in the plenitude of nature, by that august old man, celebrated by the alternate song of all the birds of Rocaillet."

Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains, if it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning on which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.

l'Archeveque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of Montparna.s.se:--

Theodore calls me. I saw him distinctly to-night. He gave me a sign.

After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133] for you it were well to be released from it....'

"I have seen Justin Leba.s.set die, dear Arribas, and was touched, edified, to the bottom of my soul. G.o.d grant, when my hour comes, I may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life. Not a complaint! not a sigh! Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful, heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one word, 'Theodore!' Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave the world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with a kiss for the earth that nourished it.' Well! the peasant of Rocaillet had the beautiful, n.o.ble, simple death of the fruit of the earth, going to the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no sense that he was torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quotation from Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted the Christians. I give it with the same respect with which you would quote some holy writer. Ah! my dear Arribas! not all the saints have received canonization."

It is to the priestly character, in truth, that M. Fabre always comes back for tranquillizing [134] effect; and if his peasants have something akin to Wordsworth's, his priests may remind one of those solemn ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings and etchings of M. Alphonse Legros. The reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more of those s.p.a.cious sacristies, introduced to which for the inspection of some more than usually recherche work of art, one is presently dominated by their reverend quiet: simple people coming and going there, devout, or at least on devout business, with half-pitched voices, not without touches of kindly humour, in what seems to express like a picture the most genial side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we seem to visit under the magic of M. Fabre's well-trained pen. He has a real power of taking one from Paris, or from London, to places and people certainly very different from either, to the satisfaction of those who seek in fiction an escape.

12th June 1889

IX. THE "CONTES" OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON

TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ["CONTES DU CENTENAIRE." PAR AUGUSTIN FILON. PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE. ]

[137] IT was a happy thought of M. Filon to put into the mouth of an imaginary centenarian a series of delightfully picturesque studies which aim at the minute presentment of life in France under the old regime, and end for the most part with the Revolution. A genial centenarian, whose years have told happily on him, he appreciates not only those humanities of feeling and habit which were peculiar to the last century and pa.s.sed away with it, but also that permanent humanity which has but undergone a change of surface in the new world of our own, wholly different though it may look. With a sympathetic sense of life as it is always, [138] M. Filon has transplanted the creations of his fancy into an age certainly at a greater distance from ourselves than can be estimated by mere lapse of time, and where a fully detailed antiquarian knowledge, used with admirable tact and economy, is indeed serviceable in giving reality of effect to scene and character. In truth, M. Filon's very lively antiquarianism carries with it a genuine air of personal memory. With him, as happens so rarely, an intimate knowledge of historic detail is the secret of life, of the impression of life; puts his own imagination on the wing; secures the imaginative cooperation of the reader. A stately age--to us, perhaps, in the company of the historic muse, seeming even more stately than it actually was--it is pleasant to find it, as we do now and again on these pages, in graceful deshabille. With perfect lightness of touch, M. Filon seems to have a complete command of all the physiognomic details of old France, of old Paris and its people--how they made a holiday; how they got at the news; the fas.h.i.+ons. Did the English reader ever hear before of the beautifully dressed doll which came once a month [139] from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant world of fas.h.i.+on how to dress itself? Old Paris! For young lovers at their windows; for every one fortunate enough to have seen it: "Qu'il est joli ce paysage du Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans!" We think we shall best do justice to an unusually pretty book by taking one of M. Filon's stories (not because we are quite sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view to the more definite ill.u.s.tration of his method, therein.

Christopher Marteau was a warden of the corporation of Luthiers. He dealt in musical instruments, as his father and grandfather had done before him, at the sign of Saint Cecilia. With his wife, his only child Phlipote, and Claude his apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote, he occupied a good house of his own. Of course the disposition of the young people, bred together from their childhood, does not at first entirely concur with the parental arrangements. But the story tells, rea.s.suringly, how--to some extent how sadly--they came heartily to do so. M. Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper. The various distinguished people who had fingered his clavecins, and turned over the [140] folios of music, for half a century past, had left their memories behind them; M. de Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed the head of Phlipote with an aged, skeleton hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable impression on the child, though her father delighted to recall the incident, being himself a demi-philosophe. He went to church, that is to say, only twice a year, on the Feast of St. Cecilia and on the Sunday when the Luthiers offered the pain benit. It was his opinion that everything in the State needed reform except the Corporations.

The relations of the husband to his affectionate, satiric, pleasure-seeking wife, who knew so well all the eighteen theatres which then existed in Paris, are treated with much quiet humour. On Sundays the four set forth together for a country holiday. At such times Phlipote would walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her father and mother, side by side with her intended. But they never talked to each other: the hands, the eyes, never met. Of what was Phlipote dreaming?

and what was in the thoughts of Claude?

It happened one day that, like sister and brother, the lovers exchanged confidences. "It [141] is not always," observes Phlipote, whom every one excepting Claude on those occasions sought with admiring eyes--

"'It is not always one loves those one is told to love.'

"'What, have you, too, a secret, my little Phlipote?'

"'I too, Claude! Then what may be yours?'

"'Listen, Phlipote!' he answered. 'We don't wish to be husband and wife, but we can be friends--good and faithful friends, helping each other to change the decision of our parents.'

"'Were I but sure you would not betray me--'

"'Would you like me to confess first? The woman I love--Ah! but you will laugh at my folly!'

"'No, Claude! I shall not laugh. I know too well what one suffers.'

"'Especially when love is hopeless.'

"'Hopeless?'

"'Alas! I have never spoken to her. Perhaps never shall!'

[142] "'Well! as for me, I don't even know the name of him to whom my heart is given!'

"'Ah! poor Phlipote!'

"'Poor Claude!'

"They had approached each other. The young man took the tiny hand of his friend, pressing it in his own.

"'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle Guimard!'

"'What! Guimard of the Opera?--the fiancee of Despreaux?'"

Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, who was trembling now, and almost on fire at the story of this ambitious love. In return she reveals her own. It was Good Friday. She had come with her mother to the Sainte Chapelle to hear Mademoiselle Coupain play the organ and witness the extraordinary spectacle of the convulsionnaires, brought thither to be touched by the relic of the True Cross. In the press of the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote faints, or nearly faints, when a young man comes kindly to their aid. "She is so young!" he explains to the mother, "she seems so delicate!" "He looked at me,"

she tells Claude--"he looked at [143] me, through his half-closed eyelids; and his words were like a caress."--

"'And have you seen him no More?' asks Claude, full of sympathy.

"'Yes! once again. He pretended to be looking at the window of the Little Dunkirk, over the way, but with cautious glances towards our house. Only, as he did not know what storey we live on, he failed to discover me behind my curtain, where I was but half visible.'

"'You should have shown yourself.'

"'Oh, Claude!' she cried, with a delicious gesture of timidity, of shame.

"So they prattled for a long time; he talking of the great Guimard, she of her unknown lover, scarce listening to, but completely understanding each other.

"'Holloa!'cries the loud voice of Christopher Marteau. 'What are you doing out there?'

"The young people arose. Phlipote linked her arm gaily in that of Claude. 'How contented I feel!' she says; 'how good it is to have a friend--to have you whom I used to detest, because I thought you were in love with me. Now, when I know you can't bear me, I [144] shall be nicely in love with you.' The soft warmth of her arm seemed to pa.s.s through Claude, and gave him strange sensations. He resumed navely, 'Yes! and how odd it is after all that I am not in love with you. You are so pretty!' Phlipote raised her finger coquettishly, 'No compliments, monsieur. Since we are not to marry each other, it is forbidden to pay court to me!'"