"What are you doing around here, you errand simp you? Who gave you permission to leave the ranks, you dirty, snotty-nosed trash? Come on, face about double step, march!... Ta ra ta ta ra, ta ta ra!..."
Then he gave the command. In a few minutes the chairs, the tables, the buffet, the bed were dashed to pieces. The kindly man raised himself with some effort, went into the farthest corner of the room; and while the fire was being made, while the sergeant, whose cloak and trousers were steaming, was warming himself laughingly in front of the crackling fire, the old man was watching the burning of his last piece of furniture with eyes of a stoic, and never stopped repeating obstinately:
"I ain't got no wood."
I went back to the station. The general had come out of the telegraph office more excited and flushed and angry than ever. He jabbered out something and presently brought about a great commotion. The clang of sabres was heard, voices called out and answered one another, officers were running in all directions. The bugle sounded. Without the least understanding of this counter order, we had to put our knapsacks on our backs and the guns on our shoulders.
Forward! March!...
With bodies rendered rigid by immobility and with dizzy heads, we pushed and jostled one another and resumed our breathless journey in the rain, in the mud, through the night!... To the right and the left of us there were long stretches of fields swallowed up in the shadows from which rose the crowns of apple trees which appeared to be twisted in the skies. From time to time the barking of a dog was heard from afar.... There were deep forests, sombre thickets which rose like walls on each side of the road. Then came villages asleep, where our steps resounded even more mournfully, or where at a window quickly opened and quickly closed again, there appeared the vague outline of a human white form ... terrified.... Then again fields and woods and villages.... Not a single song, not a single word, only an immense silence, accentuated by the rhythm of the tramping feet. The leather straps of the knapsack cut into my flesh, the rifle felt like a red hot iron bar placed upon my shoulder. For a moment I thought myself harnessed to a huge wagon, loaded with broad stone and stuck in the mud and felt that the carters were breaking my legs with the lashes of whips. With my feet planted in the ground, my spine bent in two, with outstretched neck, strangled by the bit, my lungs emitting a rattling sound, I was pulling and pulling.... Pretty soon I reached a state where I was no longer conscious of anything. I was marching in a state of torpor, like an automaton, as if in a trance.... Strange hallucinations flitted before my eyes. I saw a glowing road receding into space, lined with palatial mansions and brilliant lights.... Strange scarlet flowers swayed their corollæ in the air on the top of flexible stems, and a crowd of gay people were singing at tables laden with refreshments and delicious fruit.... Women with fluttering gauze skirts were dancing on illumined lawns, to the music of numerous orchestras hidden in the grove strewn with falling leaves, adorned with jasmines, sprinkled with water.
"Halt!" commanded the sergeant.
I stopped, and in order not to sink down to the ground I had to hold on to the arm of a comrade. I awoke from my trance.... Darkness was all around me. We had come to the entrance of a forest, near a small town where the general and most of the officers went to find quarters. Having pitched my tent, I occupied myself with rubbing my feet, the skin of which was peeling off, with a candle which I had hidden in my knapsack, and like an emaciated dog, stretched myself out on the wet ground and immediately fell asleep. During the night, fellow-soldiers who, exhausted with fatigue, had dropped out of the ranks on the road, kept on coming into camp. Of these, five men were never heard from. It was ever so at each difficult march. Some of the men, weak or sick, fell into the ditches and died there; others deserted....
The next morning reveille was sounded at dawn. The night had been extremely cold, it never stopped raining and we could not get any straw litter or hay to sleep on. It was very difficult for me to get out of the tent; for a while I was obliged to crawl on my knees on all fours, my legs refusing to carry me. My limbs were frozen stiff like bars of iron, I could not move my head on my paralyzed neck, and my eyes which felt as if they had been pricked by numerous tiny needles, kept shedding tears in ceaseless streams.... At the same time I felt an acute, lancinating, unbearable pain in my back and shoulders. I noticed that my comrades fared no better. With drawn faces of ghostly pallor they were advancing, some limping piteously, others bent down and staggering over clumps of underbrush—all lame, mournful and covered with mud. I saw several men who, seized with the colic, writhed and twisted their mouths, holding their hands to their bellies. Some of them were shivering with fever, and their teeth chattered with cold. All around us one could hear dry coughs rending human breasts, groans, short and raucous breathing. A hare ventured out of its cover and fled wildly, with its ears flapping, but no one thought of pursuing the animal as we used sometimes to do. After the roll call, foodstuffs were distributed, as the commissary regained our regiment. We made some soup which we ate as greedily as half-starved dogs.
I was still suffering. After the soup I had an attack of dizziness followed by vomiting, and I shook with fever. Everything around me was in a whirl—the tents, the forest, the fields, the small town way yonder, whose chimneys were smoking in the mist, and the sky where huge clouds were floating, bleak and low. I asked the sergeant for permission to see a doctor.
Our tents were arranged in two rows, backed against the forest on each side of the road of Senonches which led into the open country through a magnificent grove of oak trees, crossed the Chartre road three hundred meters away and still further the town of Belhomert and extended farther toward Loupe. At the crossing of these two roads there was a small dilapidated building covered with thatch, a sort of abandoned shed which provided shelter for the laborers on the road during rain. It was here that the surgeon had established a sort of improvised field hospital recognizable by a Red Cross flag put up in a crack in the wall and adorning it.
In front of the house a crowd was waiting. A long line of human beings, wan and worn out, some standing with fixed looks, others sitting on the ground, sad with stooped and pointed shoulders, their heads buried in their hands. Death had already laid its terrible hand upon these emaciated countenances, these scraggy frames, these members which hung loose, devoid of blood and marrow. And confronted with this heartbreaking sight, I forgot my own suffering, and my heart was touched with pity. Three months were sufficient to break down these robust bodies, inured to labor and fatigue!... Three months! And these young men who loved life, these children of the soil who grew up as dreamers in the freedom of the fields, trusting in the goodness of nature, these youths were done for!... To the marine who dies is given the sea as a burying place; he descends into eternal darkness to the rhythm of its murmuring waves. But these!... A few more days of grace perhaps, and then these tatterdemallions will suddenly tumble down into the mud of a ditch, their corpses delivered, up to the fangs of prowling dogs and to the beaks of nightbirds.
I was swept by a feeling of such brotherly and sorrowful pity for them that I wished I could press all these unhappy men to my breast, in a single embrace, and I wished, oh, how ardently I wished it!—I had a hundred female breasts, like Isis, swollen with milk, that I might offer to all these bloodless lips.... They were entering the house one by one and were leaving it as quickly, pursued by growling and swearing sounds. For the rest, the surgeon did not bother with them at all. Very angry, he was demanding of his orderly his medicine chest which was missing from the luggage.
"My medicine chest, for God's sake!" he shouted. "Where is my medicine chest? And my instrument case?... What did you do with my instrument case? Ah! for God's sake!..."
A little soldier of the reserves who suffered from an abscess on his knee came back hopping on one foot, crying, pulling his hair in despair. They did not want to attend to him. When it was my turn to go in I was all atremble. Inside the place which was dark, four patients, lying flat in the straw, were emitting rattling sounds like the cock of a musket; a fifth one was gesticulating, muttering incoherent words in delirium; still another, half-reclining, with head drooped on his chest, was moaning and asking for a drink in a feeble voice, the voice of an infant. Squatted in front of the fire place, an attendant was holding over the flame, on the end of a stick, a piece of stale pudding whose stench of burned grease filled the room. The adjutant did not even look at me. He shouted:
"Well, what's the matter now?... A bunch of lazy buggers. A good ten league run at a stretch will fix you up, you straggler.... Face about!... March!"
On the threshold I met a peasant woman who asked me:
"Is this the place where you can see the doctor."
"Women now!" growled the adjutant. "What do you want now?"
"Beg pardon, excuse me, Doctor," rejoined the peasant woman, who came up very timidly. "I came for my son who is a soldier."
"Tell me now, old woman, am I here to keep track of your son, or what?"
With her hands crossed on the handle of her umbrella, timorous, she examined the place about her.
"It seems like he is very sick, my son is, very, very sick.... And so I came to see if he was not around here, Doctor."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Riboulleau."
"Riboulleau.... Riboulleau!... That may be ... look in that pile there."
The attendant who was broiling his pudding turned his head.
"Riboulleau," he said, "why he has been dead three days already...."
"What is that you are saying?" cried the peasant woman whose sunburned face suddenly became pallid. "Where did he die?... Why did he die, my little darling boy."
The adjutant intervened, and rudely pushing the old woman toward the door, shouted:
"Go on, go on, no scenes around here! Well, he is dead—and that is all there is to it."
"My little darling boy! My little darling boy!" wailed the old woman in a heart-breaking manner.
I walked away with a heavy heart and felt so discouraged that I was asking myself whether it was not better to put an end to it all at once by hanging myself on the branch of a tree or by blowing my brains out with the gun. While I was going to my tent, stumbling on the way, I was hardly paying any attention to the little soldier who, having stopped at the foot of a pine tree, had opened his abscess with his knife himself, and, pale, with sweat drops rolling all over his forehead, was bandaging his bleeding wound.
In the morning I felt a great deal better than I thought I would. I was relieved of all work, and after having greased my rifle which became rusted in the rain, I enjoyed a few hours of rest. Stretched out on my blanket, with my body torpid in delicious half slumber where I distinctly heard all the noises of the camp—the sounding of the bugle, the neighing of the horses as if coming from afar—I was thinking of the people and the things I had left behind me. A thousand images and a thousand scenes of the past rapidly filed before my eyes. I saw again the Priory, my dead mother and my father, with his large straw hat and the short beggar with his flaxen hair and Felix squatted in the lettuce patches, lying in wait for a mole. I saw again my study room, my school mates and, topping the noise of the Bal Bullier, Nini, her hair loose and brown, with her ruddy neck and her pink stockings showing like some lascivious flower from under the skirt raised in dancing. Then the image of an unknown woman in a yellow dress, whom I noticed in the shadow of a box in a theatre one evening, came back to me—an insistent and sweet vision.
During this time the strongest among us had gone out to roam in the fields and on the farms. They came back merrily carrying bundles of straw, chickens, turkeys and ducks. One of them was driving before him with a switch, a big, grunting pig; another was balancing a sheep on his shoulder. At the end of a halter the latter was also dragging a calf which, tangled up in the rope, resisted comically and shook its snout, bellowing all the time. The peasants came up running to the camp to complain that they had been robbed; they were hooted and driven out.
The general, very stiff and with round eyes, came to review us in the afternoon, accompanied by our lieutenant who walked at his right. His shiny look, his flushed cheeks, his mealy voice bore witness to the fact that he had had a plentiful breakfast. He was munching the end of an extinguished cigar; he spat, sniffed, swore. One could not tell at whom or what, for he did not address himself to any one in particular. When standing in front of our company, he looked at our lieutenant-colonel severely, and I heard him say:
"Your men are dirty slops!"
Then he walked away, his body weighed down by his belly, dragging his feet, dressed in yellow boots above which red breeches swelled and folded like a skirt.
The rest of the day was devoted to loitering in the taverns of Belhomert. There was such crowding and such noise everywhere, and besides I knew so well these fights in the cabarets, these violent outbursts as a result of drunkenness which often degenerated into general scuffles, that I preferred to go out on the road, far from all these brawls, in the company of a few peaceable comrades.
Just then the weather grew better, dim sunlight came from the sky freed from clouds. We seated ourselves on the side of a sloping hill, bending our backs under the warm sun rays as does a cat under the hand that caresses it. Vehicles kept passing by, heavy carts, dung carts, small carriages with awning hoods, rubbish carts drawn by small mules. Those were the peasants of Chartres valley who were fleeing from the Prussians.... Excited by rumors, spread from village to village, of burnings, robberies, murders and all kinds of atrocities committed by the Germans in the invaded territories, they were carrying away in haste their most precious possessions, abandoning their homes and their fields and, utterly bewildered, were proceeding straight ahead, without knowing where they were going. In the evening they would stop at some chance road, near a town, sometimes in the open fields. The horses, unharnessed and fettered, browsed on the river banks, the people ate and slept at God's mercy, guarded by dogs, in storm and rain, in the cold of foggy nights. Then in the morning they would start out again. Droves of animals, and throngs of men succeeded one another alternately. They were passing by us, and upon the yellow main road one could see the black and mournful procession of the refugees as far as the hill closing the horizon: one might think it was an exodus of a whole people. I questioned an old man who led a donkey pulling a cart, at the bottom of which in the midst of bundles, tied with kerchiefs, and carrots and heads of cabbage, on a pile of straw there shifted about a peasant woman with a flat nose, two pink-colored pigs and a few domestic fouls tied by their feet in twos.
"Eh, the robbers!" the old man replied. "Don't speak to me about them!... They came one morning, a whole gang of them with plumed hats.... They raised such a racket!... Eh, Holy Jesus! And then they took everything away.... Well I thought they were the Prussians.... I have found out since that they were the 'franc-tireurs'...."
"How about the Prussians?"
"The Prussians!... Of them that are Prussians I have seen very few to be sure.... They are supposed to be up at our place right now!... Jacqueline thinks she saw one behind the hedge the other day!... He was tall, very tall and he was as red as the devil.... Is he really one of these fellows, those savages that came?... Now tell me truly who are they?"
"Those are Germans, old man, just as we are French."
"Germans?... So I hear.... But what do they want, those damned Germans, will you please tell me, mister soldier?... Well, I have saved two pigs, our girl and all our poultry just the same!... By Jove!"
And the peasant continued on his way, repeating:
"The Germans! the Germans!... What do these damned Germans want?"
That evening fires were made along the entire line of the camp, and the attractive looking pots full of fresh meat were hissing joyously upon the improvised stoves of earth and stone. For us that was a time of exquisite respite and delicious forgetfulness. Peace seemed to have descended from heaven, all blue with the moon and aglitter with stars; the fields, unrolling themselves with soft and misty undulations, had in them a kind of tender sweetness which penetrated into our souls and set new blood, less acrid and endowed with new vigor, circulating in our members. Little by little, memories of our hardships, our discouragements and privations, however near, effaced themselves, and simultaneously with the awakening of our sense of duty, a desire for action seized us. Unusual animation reigned at our camp. Every one offered voluntarily to do some kind of work; some, torch in hand, were running about to light again the fires which went out, others were blowing at the ashes in order to kindle them into flame again, still others were sorting vegetables and slicing meat. Some comrades, forming a circle around the debris of burned timber, struck up a tune "Have you seen Bismark?" in a jeering chorus. Revolt—the child of hunger—had its inception in the hissing of saucepans, in the clatter of platters.
The next day, when the last of us answered "Present" at the roll call, the little lieutenant gave the command: "Form a circle, march!"
And in a faltering voice, jumbling the words and skipping phrases, the quartermaster read a pompous order of the day, issued by the general. In that piece of military literature it was said that a Prussian army corps, starving, ill-clad and without arms, after having occupied Chartres, was advancing on us at double marching time. Our task was to block its way, to throw it back as far as the walls of Paris, where the valiant Ducrot was only waiting for our arrival to sally out and clean the land of all invaders at one sweep. The general recalled the victories of the Revolution, the Egypt expedition, Austerlitz, Borodino. He expressed the faith that we would show ourselves worthy of our glorious ancestors of Sambre-et-Meuse. In view of that he gave precise strategic instructions for the defense of the country, namely: to establish an impregnable barrier to the eastern entrance to the town and another still more impregnable barrier upon the road of Chartres, to fortify the walls of the cemetery at the crossroad, to fell as many trees as possible in the nearby forest so that the enemy cavalry and even infantry should be unable to turn our flank from Senonches under the cover of the woods, to be on the lookout for spies, and finally to keep our eyes open.... The country was counting on us.... Long live the Republic!
The cheer was not responded to. The little lieutenant who was walking around, his arms crossed on his back, his eyes obstinately fixed on the point of his boot, did not raise his head. We looked at one another perplexed, with a sort of anguish in our hearts, which came as a result of our knowledge that the Prussians were very near, that war was going to begin for us in earnest the very next day, today perhaps. And I had a sudden vision of Death, red Death standing on a chariot, drawn by rearing horses, which was sweeping down on us, brandishing his scythe. As long as the actual fighting was only a remote possibility we wanted to be in it, first for reasons of patriotism, enthusiasm, then out of mere braggadocio, later because we were nervously exhausted and wearisome and saw in it a way out of our misery. Now when the opportunity offered itself, we were afraid; we shuddered at the mere mention of it. Instinctively my eyes turned toward the horizon, in the direction of Chartres. And the fields seemed to me to conceal a secret, unknown terror, a fearful uncertainty, which lent to things a new aspect of relentlessness. Over yonder, above the blue line of trees, I expected to see helmets spring up suddenly, bayonets flash, the thundering mouths of cannons spurt fire. A harvest field, all red under the sun, appeared to me like a pond of blood. Hedges strung themselves out into armies, joined ranks, crossed one another like regiments, bristling with arms and standards and going through various evolutions before the battle. The apple trees looked frightened like cavalry men thrown into disorder.
"Break the circle—march!" shouted the lieutenant.
Stupefied, with swinging arms, we were standing on one place for a long time, a prey to some vague misgiving, trying to pierce in thought this terrible line on the horizon, behind which was now being realized the mystery of our fate. In this disquieting silence, in this sinister immobility, only carts and herds were passing by, more numerous, more hurried and pressed than ever. A flock of ravens, which came from yonder like a black vanguard, spotted the skies, thickened, distended and, stringing itself out into a line, turned aside, floating above us like a funeral cloak, then disappeared among the oak trees.
"At last we are going to see them, these famous Prussians!" said, in a faltering voice, a big fellow who was very pale and who, in order to give himself the air of a fearless daredevil, was beating his ears with his kepi.
No one replied to this remark and several walked away. Our corporal, however, shrugged his shoulders. He was a very impudent little man, with a pock-eaten face, full of pimples.
"Oh! I!" he said.
He clarified his thought by a cynical gesture, sat down on the heath, puffed at his pipe slowly, till fire appeared.
"Oh, piffle!" he concluded, emitting a cloud of smoke which vanished in the air.
While one company of chasseurs was detailed to the crossroads to establish an "impregnable barrier" there, my company went in the woods to "fell as many trees as possible." All the axes, bill-hooks and hatchets of the village were speedily requisitioned. Almost everything was used as a tool. For a whole day the blows of the axes were resounding and trees were falling. To spur us on to greater efforts, the general himself wanted to assist us in the vandalism.
"Come on, you scamps!" he would cry out at every occasion, clapping his hands. "Come on boys, let's get this one!..."
He himself pointed out the most stalwart among the trees, those which grew up straight and spread out like the columns of a temple. It was an orgy of destruction, criminal and foolish; a shout of brutal joy went up every time a tree fell on top of another with a great noise. The old trees became less dense, one could say they were mowed down by some gigantic and supernatural scythe. Two men were killed by the fall of an oak tree.
And the few trees which remained standing, austere in the midst of ruined trunks lying on the ground, and the twisted branches which rose up towards them like arms outstretched in supplication, were showing open wounds, deep and red gashes from which the sap was oozing, weeping as it were.
The supervisor of the forest section, warned by a guard, came running from Senonches, and with a broken heart witnessed this useless devastation. I was near the general when the forester approached him respectfully, kepi in hand.
"Beg pardon, general," said he. "I can understand the felling of trees on the edge of the road, the barricading of lines of approach.... But your destruction of the heart of the old forest seems to me a little...."
But the general interrupted:
"Eh? What? It seems to you what?...What are you butting in here for?... I do as I please.... Who is commander here, you or I?..."
"But...." stammered the forester.
"There are no buts about it, Monsieur.... You make me tired, that's one thing sure!... You had better hurry back to Senonches or I'll have you strung up on a tree.... Come on, boys!..."
The general turned his back on the stupefied agent and walked away knocking some dead leaves and sprigs before him with the end of his cane.
While we were thus desecrating the forest, the chasseurs were not idle either, and the barricade rose, huge and formidable, cutting off the road at the crossroad. It was accomplished not without difficulty and above all not without gayety. Suddenly halted by a trench which barred their flight, the peasants protested. Their carts and herds became congested on the road, very narrow at this point; there was, therefore, an indescribable uproar. They were complaining, the women were moaning, the cattle were lowing, the soldiers were laughing at the frightened looks of men and beasts, and the captain who was in command of the troops did not know what action to take. Several times the soldiers pretended to drive the peasants back at the point of the bayonet, but the latter were stubborn and determined to pass and invoked their rights as Frenchmen. Having made his round in the forest, the general went to see the progress of the work on the barricade. He demanded to know what "these dirty civilians" wanted. He was told about it.
"All right," he cried. "Seize all their carts and throw them into the barricade.... Come on, get a move on you, boys!..."
The soldiers, rejoicing in the opportunity, hurled themselves on the first carts which stood abandoned with everything in them, and smashed them with a few blows of the pick-axe. A wild panic broke out among the peasants. The congestion became so great that it was impossible for them either to advance or to turn back. Lashing their horses with all their might and trying to extricate their impeded wagons, they were shouting, jostling and bruising one another without making a step backward. Those last arrived had turned back and were going at full speed of their horses excited by the tumult; others, despairing of a chance to save their carts and provisions, climbed over the barrier and, dispersing across the field, uttered cries of indignation, pursued by oaths and curses flung at them by the soldiers. Then, they piled up the smashed vehicles one on top of the other, filled the gaps with sacks of oats, matresses, bundles of clothes and stones. On top of the barricade, upon a coach pole, which rose vertically upward like a flagstaff, a little chasseur planted a bouquet of wedding flowers found among other booty.
Towards the evening, groups of reserves arriving from Chartres in great disorder, scattered all over Belhomert and the camp. They brought horrible tales. The Prussians were more than a hundred thousand strong, all in one army. They, the reserves, hardly had time to fall back.... Chartres was in flames, the villages in the vicinity were burning, the farms were destroyed. The greater part of the French detachments which bore the brunt of covering the retreat, could not hold out much longer. The fugitives were questioned; they were asked whether they saw the Prussians, what insignia they wore and were particularly quizzed about all the details of the enemy uniforms.
Every fifteen minutes new reserves would show up in groups of two or three, pale, exhausted with fatigue. Most of them had no kits, some had no guns, and they were telling stories, each more terrible than the other. None of them was wounded. It was decided to quarter them in the church, to the great indignation of the curé who, lifting his arms to heaven, exclaimed:
"Holy Virgin!... In my church!... Ah! Ah! Soldiers in my church!..."
Up to this time the general who was preoccupied solely with his plans of destruction, had no time to provide for the guarding of the camp, except by establishing a small outpost in a tavern, frequented by carterers within a mile from Belhomert upon the Chartres road. This outpost, commanded by a sergeant, had not received any definite instructions, and the man did nothing except loaf, drink and sleep. Still the sentinel who was nonchalantly pacing to and fro in front of the tavern, gun on shoulder, at one time arrested a country doctor as a German spy because of his blond beard and blue spectacles. As for the sergeant, an old professional poacher who sneered at everything and everybody, he amused himself by setting traps for rabbits in the hedges nearby.
The arrival of the reserves, the menace of the Prussians had thrown us into confusion. Messengers came up every minute, carrying sealed envelopes containing orders and counter-orders. The officers were running about with a preoccupied look, not knowing what to do, and completely lost their heads. Three times we were ordered to break up camp and three times we were told to pitch our tents anew. All night trumpets and bugles were sounding, and big log fires were burning, around which, in the growing tumult, were passing back and forth shadows strangely agitated, silhouettes of demoniacal appearances. Patrols were scouring the fields, riding out on the crossroads, searching the outskirts of the forest. Artillery stationed on this side of the town was ordered to move up forward upon the heights, but it ran into the barricade. To clear the way for the cannons, it was found necessary to demolish it piece-meal and to fill up the ditch.
At daybreak my company was sent to do main guard duty. We met mobilized soldiers, dispirited franc-tireurs who were dragging their feet piteously. A little further away, the general, accompanied by his staff, was watching the manoeuvres of the artillery. He held a map of the general staff, unfolded on the neck of his horse, and was vainly trying to locate the Saussaie mill. Bending over the map which the horse shifted out of place with every movement of its head, he shouted:
"Where is that damned mill?... Pontgouin.... Couville.... Courville.... Do they think I know all their damned mills around here?"
The general commanded us to halt and asked:
"Is there anyone here who is familiar with this country?... Is there anyone here who knows where the Saussaie mill is?"
Nobody answered.
"No?... Well alright. To hell with it!"
And he threw the map to his aide who began folding it up carefully. We resumed our march.
The company was stationed on a farm and I was put on guard duty near the road, at the entrance to a grove, beyond which I could look on an open plain, immense and smooth like the sea. Here and there small woods emerged from the ocean of land like islands; the belfries of the villages, the farms, blurred by the fog, assumed the aspect of a distant veil. In this enormous expanse a great silence reigned, a solitude wherein the least noise, the least thing stirring in the skies, had something mysterious about it which put anguish into one's heart. Up above, black dots spotted the skies—those were the ravens; down below, upon the earth, small black specks moved forward, growing larger, disappearing—those were the fleeing soldiers of the reserves; and now and then the distant barking of dogs, answered by similar barking all along the line from east to west, from north to south, sounded like the plaint of the deserted fields. Our guard was supposed to be relieved every four hours, but hours upon hours passed, slow and endless, and no one came to take my place.
No doubt they had forgotten all about me. With a heavy heart I was searching the horizon on the Prussian side, the French side; I saw nothing, nothing but this hard, relentless line, which encircled the huge grey sky around me. It was a long time since the ravens had ceased flying and the reserve soldiers fleeing. For a moment I saw a truck coming toward the woods where I was, but it turned off on one of the roads and soon was no longer distinguishable from the grey terrain.... Why did they leave me thus?... I was hungry and I was cold, my bowels rumbled, my fingers became numb. I ventured out on the road a little; having walked a few steps I shouted.... Not a being answered my call, not a thing stirred.... I was alone, utterly alone, alone in this deserted, empty field.... A shudder passed through my frame, and tears came into my eyes.... I shouted again.... No answer.... Then I went back into the woods and sat down at the foot of an oak tree, with my rifle across my lap, keeping a sharp lookout and waiting.... Alas! The day was waning little by little, the sky grew yellow, then purple by degrees and finally vanished in deadly silence. And night, moonless and starless, fell upon the fields, and at the same time a chilling fog arose from the shadows.
Worn out with fatigue, always occupied with something or other and never alone, I had no time to reflect on anything from the moment we started out. But still confronted by the strange and cruel sights constantly before my eyes, I felt within me the awakening of the idea of human life which until now had lain slumbering in the sluggishness of my childhood and the torpor of my youth. Yes ... the idea awoke confusedly, as if emerging from a long and painful nightmare. And reality appeared to me more frightful than the nightmare. Transposing the instincts, the desires and passions which agitated us from the small group of errant men that we were to society as a whole, recalling the impressions so fleeting and wholly external which I had received in Paris, the rude crowds, the pushing and jostling of pedestrians, I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
What was this country, in whose name so many crimes were being committed, which had torn us—formerly so full of love—from the motherly bosom of nature, which had thrown us, now so full of hatred, famished and naked, upon this cruel land?... What was this country, personified to us by this rabid and pillaging general who gave vent to his madness on old people and trees, and by this surgeon who kicked the sick with his feet and maltreated poor old mothers bereaved of their sons?... What was this country every step on whose soil was marked by a grave, which had but to look at the tranquil waters of its streams to change them into blood, which was always frittering away its man power, digging here and there deep charnel vaults where the best children of men were rotting?... And I was astounded, when for the first time it dawned upon me that only those were the most glorious, the most acclaimed heroes of mankind who had pillaged the most, killed the most, burned the most.
They condemn to death the stealthy murderer who kills the passerby with a knife, on the corner of the street at night, and they throw his beheaded body into a grave of infamy. But the conqueror who has burned cities and decimated human beings, all the folly and human cowardice unite in raising to the throne of the most marvelous; in his honor triumphal arches are built, giddy columns of bronze are erected, and in the cathedrals multitudes reverently kneel before his tomb of hallowed marble guarded by saints and angels under the delighted gaze of God!... With what remorse did I repent of the fact that until now I had remained blind and deaf to this life so full of inexplicable riddles! Never had I opposed this mysterious book, never had I stopped even for a single moment to consider the question marks which are represented by things and beings; I did not know anything. And now, suddenly, a desire to know, a yearning to wrest from life some of its enigmas tormented me; I wanted to know the human reason for creeds which stupefy, for governments which oppress, for society which kills; I longed to be through with this war so that I might consecrate myself to some ardent cause, to some magnificent and absurd apostleship.
My thought traveled toward impossible philosophies of love, toward utopias of undying brotherhood.... I saw all men bent down beneath some crushing heels; they all resembled the little soldier of the reserves at Saint-Michel, whose eyes were running, who was coughing and spitting blood, and as I knew nothing of the necessity of higher laws of nature, a feeling of compassion rose within me, clogging my throat with suppressed sobs. I have noticed that a man has no real compassion for anyone except when he himself is unhappy. Was this not, after all, but a form of self-pity? And if on this cold night, close to the enemy who would perhaps come out of the fogs of the morrow, I loved humanity so much—was it not myself only that I loved, myself only that I wanted to save from suffering? These regrets of the past, these plans for the future, this sudden passion for study, this ardor which I employed in picturing myself in the future in my room on the Rue Oudinot, in the midst of books and papers, my eyes burning with the fever of work—was this not after all only a means to ward off the perils of the present, to dispel other horrible visions, visions of death which, blurred and blunted, incessantly followed one another in the terror of darkness?
Night, impenetrable night continued. Under the sky which brooded over them, sinister and greedy, the fields stretched like a vast sea of Shadow. At long intervals, out of the dead whiteness, long curtains of fog were floating up above, grazing the invisible ground where clumps of trees here and there appeared still darker in the surrounding darkness. I never stirred from the place where I sat down, and the cold numbed my members and chapped my lips. With difficulty I raised myself and walked on the outskirt of the woods. The sound of my own steps on the ground frightened me, it always seemed to me that someone was walking behind me. I was walking carefully, on tiptoe, as if afraid to wake the sleeping earth, and listened, trying to penetrate the darkness, for in spite of everything, I had not yet given up the hope that some one would come to relieve me. Not a stir, not a breath, not a glimmer of light in this blind and mute night. Twice, however, I distinctly heard the sound of steps, and my heart thumped violently.... But the noise moved away, grew fainter by degrees, ceased altogether and silence set in again, more oppressive, more terrible, more disheartening than ever.
A branch brushed against my face; I recoiled, seized with terror. Further away, a rise in the ground appeared to me like a man who with crooked back seemed to be crawling toward me; I loaded my rifle.... At the sight of an abandoned plough with its arms turned upward toward the sky, like the menacing horns of some monster, my breath left me and I almost fell on my back.... I was afraid of the shadow, of the silence, of the least object that extended beyond the line of the horizon and which my deranged imagination endowed with a soul of sinister life.... Despite the cold, perspiration in large drops was streaming upon my face.... I had a notion to quit my post, to return to camp, persuading myself by all sorts of ingenious and cowardly arguments that my comrades had forgotten all about me and that they would be glad to see me back with them. Obviously, since I had not been relieved by anyone from my company, and saw none of the officers make his round of inspection, they must have left.... But supposing I were mistaken about it, what excuse could I offer, and how would I be received at the camp?... To go back to the farm where my company was quartered this morning and ask for instructions?... I was thinking of doing it.... But in my plight I had lost all sense of direction, and if I attempted to do that I would surely get lost in this plain that was so endless and so black.
Then an abominable thought flashed through my mind.... Yes, why not discharge a bullet into my arm and run back, bleeding and wounded, and tell them that I had been attacked by the Prussians?... I had to make a strong effort to regain my reason which was leaving me; I had to gather all the moral forces that were left in me in order to get away from this cowardly and odious impulse, from this wretched ecstasy of fear, and I desperately strove to recall the memories of former times, to conjure up gentle and silent visions, sweet-scented and white-winged.... They came to me as in a painful dream, distorted, mutilated, under the spell of hallucination, and fear immediately threw them into confusion.... The Virgin of Saint-Michel, with a body of pink, in a blue mantle, adorned with golden stars, I saw in a lewd attitude, prostituting herself on a bed, in some miserable shack, with drunken soldiers. My favorite spots in the Tourouvre forest, so peaceful, where I used to stay for entire days, stretched out on the mossy ground, were turning topsy-turvy, tangled up, brandishing their gigantic trees over me; then a few howitzer shells crossed one another in the air, resembling familiar faces which sniggered; one of these projectiles suddenly spread out wide wings, flame-colored, which swung around me and enveloped me.... I cried out.... My God, am I going crazy? I felt my breast, my chest, my back, my legs.... I must have been as pale as a corpse, and I felt a shiver passing through me from heart to brain, like a steel bore....
"Let's see now," I said aloud to myself to make sure that I was awake, that I was alive.... In two gulps I swallowed the remainder of the whiskey in my flask, and I started to walk very fast, tramping with rage upon the clods under my feet, whistling the air of a soldier song which we used to sing in chorus to relieve the tedium of the march. Somewhat calmed, I came back to the oak tree and kicked its trunk with the sole of my boots; for I was in need of this noise and this physical motion.... And now I thought of my father so lonely at the Priory. It was more than three weeks since I had received a letter from him. Oh! How sad and heart-rending his last letter was!... It did not complain of anything, but one felt in it a deep despair, a wearisomeness of being alone in that large empty house, and anxiety about me who, he knew, was wandering, knapsack on back, amidst the dangers of battle.... Poor father! He had not been happy with my mother—who was ill, always fretful, who did not love him and could not stand his presence.... And never a sign of reproach, not even when meeting with the most painful rebuff and unkindness!... He used to bend his back like a dog, and walk out....
Ah! how I repented of the fact that I did not love him enough. Perhaps he had not brought me up in the manner he should have done. But what difference did it make? He did everything he could!... He was himself without experience in life, defenseless against evil, of a kindly but timid nature. And in the measure that the features of my father stood out clearly before me even to their smallest details, the face of my mother was obliterating itself, and I was no longer able to recall its endearing outline. At this moment all the affection that I had for my mother I transferred to my father. I recalled with tenderness how on the day my mother died he took me on his lap and said, "Perhaps it's for the best." And now I understood how much sorrow accumulated in the past and terror in facing the future there was summed up in that phrase. It was for her sake that he said that, and also for the sake of one who resembled my mother so much, and not for his own consolation, unhappy man that he was, who had resigned himself to suffering all.... During the last three years he had aged very much; his tall frame was worn out, his face, formerly so red with the color of health, grew yellow and wrinkled, his hair became almost white. He no longer lay in wait for the birds in the park, he let the cats rove among the lianas and lick the water from the basin; he took little interest in his practice, the direction of which he left to his chief clerk, a trusted man who was stealing from him; he no longer occupied himself with the small but honorable affairs of his locality. He never went out, he would not even stir from his rocking-chair with small pillows which he ordered moved into the kitchen, not wishing to stay alone—without Marie who would bring him his cane and his hat.
"Well, Monsieur, you must take a little walk. You are getting all 'rusty' in your corner there...."
"All right, Marie. I am going to take the air.... I'll walk along the bank of the river, if you want me to."
"No, Monsieur, you must take a walk in the woods.... The air there will do you good."
"All right, Marie, I am going to take a walk in the woods."
At times, seeing him inactive, slumbering, she would tap him on the shoulder:
"Why don't you get your rifle, Monsieur? There are a lot of finches in the park."
And looking at her with an air of reproach, my father would mutter:
"Finches?... The poor things!..."
Why did my father not write to me? Did my letters reach him at all? I reproached myself with having been too dry in my letters until now, and I promised myself to write to him the next day—the first opportunity I got—a long affectionate letter, in which I was going to pour out my heart to him.
The sky was gradually clearing way yonder on the horizon whose outline stood out clear against a darker blue. It was still night, the fields remained dark, but one could feel the approaching dawn. The cold was more piercing than ever, the earth cracked harder under the feet, moisture crystallized into drops on the branches of the trees. And little by little the sky was brightened by a faint glimmer of pale-gold color which was growing in distinctness. Gradually, outlines emerged from the shadow, indefinite and confused as yet, the opaque blackness of the plain changed into a dull violet, here and there rent by light.... Suddenly I heard a noise, weak at first, like the distant roll of a drum.... I listened, my heart beating violently. Presently the noise stopped and the cocks crowed.... About ten minutes later the noise started again, more distinct, coming nearer!... Pa-ta-ra! Pa-ta-ra! It was the gallop of a horse on the Chartres road.... Instinctively I buckled up my knapsack on my back and made sure that my rifle was loaded.... I was very excited, the veins in my temples dilated.... Pa-ta-ra! Pa-ta-ra!...
Hardly had I time enough to squat down behind the oak tree, when on the road, at a distance of twenty paces in front of me, there suddenly appeared a large shadow, surprisingly immobile, like an equestrian statue of bronze, and this enormous shadow which obtruded itself almost entirely upon the brightness of the eastern sky was terrible to behold.... The man appeared to me superhuman, inordinately large against the sky!...He wore the flat cap of the Prussians, a long black cloak, under which the chest was bulging out greatly. Was he an officer or a plain soldier? I did not know, for I could not distinguish any insignia of rank on the dark uniform.... His features, at first indistinct, became more accentuated. He had clear eyes, very limpid, a broad beard, his bearing bespoke youthful strength; his face breathed power and kindness along with something noble, audacious and sad which struck me. Holding his hand flat on his thigh, he studied the country before him, and his horse scraped the ground with its hoofs and puffed long streams of vapor in the air through its quivering nostrils.... Evidently this Prussian was reconnoitering, he came to observe our position, the nature of the ground; undoubtedly a whole army was swarming behind him, waiting for a signal from this man to throw themselves on the plain!...
Well hidden in my woods, with rifle ready, I was watching him.... He was handsome indeed, life flowed abundantly in this robust body.... What a pity! He kept on studying the country, and it seemed to me as though he were studying it more like a poet than a soldier.... I detected a sort of emotion in his eyes.... Perhaps he forgot why he had come here and allowed himself to be fascinated by the beauty of this virginal and triumphant dawn. The sky became all red, it blazed up gloriously, the awakened fields unrolled themselves in the distance, emerging one after another from their veil of mist, rose-colored and blue, which floated like long scarves ruffled by invisible hands. The trees were dripping dew, the hovels separated themselves from the pink and blue background, the dove-cot of a large farm whose new tile roofs began to glitter, projected its whitish cone into the purple glare of the east.... Yes, this Prussian who started out with the notion to kill, was arrested, dazzled and reverently stirred by the splendor of a new-born day, and his soul for a few minutes was the captive of love.
"Perhaps it's a poet," I said to myself, "an artist; he must be kind, since he is capable of tenderness."
And upon his face I could see all the emotion of a brave man which agitated him, all the tremors, all the delicate and flitting reactions of his heart, moved and fascinated.... I feared him no longer. On the contrary, a sort of infatuation drew me towards him, and I had to hold on to the tree to keep myself from going to this man. I would have liked to speak to him, to tell him that it was well that he contemplated the heaven thus, and that I liked him because of his receptiveness to beauty.... But his face grew sombre, a sadness stole into his eyes.... Ah, the horizon over which they swept was so far, so far away! And beyond that horizon there was another and further on, still another! One had to conquer all that!... When was he to be relieved of his duty ever to spur his horse on through this nostalgic territory, always to cut a way through ruins and through death, always to kill, always to be cursed!...
And then, undoubtedly, he was thinking of the things he had left behind; of his home resounding with the laughter of his children, of his wife, who was waiting for him and praying to God while doing so.... Will he ever see her again?... I was sure that at this very moment he was recalling the most fugitive details, the most childish habits of his life at home ... a rose plucked one evening, after dinner, with which he adorned the hair of his wife, the dress which she wore when he was leaving, a blue bow on the hat of his little daughter, a wooden horse, a tree, a river view, a paper knife!... All the memories of his joys came back to him, and with that keenness of vision which exiled persons possess, he encompassed in a single mental glance of despondency all those things by means of which he had been happy until now....
The sun rose higher, rendering the plain larger, extending the distant horizon still farther.... I felt a compassion for this man and I loved him ... yes I swear I loved him!... Well, then, how did that happen?... A detonation was suddenly heard, and at that very moment I caught sight of a boot in the air, of a torn piece of a military cloak, of a mane flying about wildly on the road ... and then nothing, I heard the noise of a blow with a sabre, the heavy fall of a body, furious beats of a gallop ... then nothing.... My rifle was warm, and smoke was coming out of it.... I let it fall to the ground.... Was I the victim of hallucination?... Clearly not. Of the large shadow which rose skyward at the middle of the road like an equestrian statue of bronze there was left but a small corpse all black, stretched out face downward, with crossed arms.... I recalled the poor cat that my father had killed, when with fascinated eyes she had been following the flight of a butterfly....
Stupidly, unconsciously, I had killed a man whom I loved, a man with whom my soul had just identified itself, a man who in the dazzling splendor of the rising sun was retracing the purest dreams of his life!... Perhaps I had killed him at the very moment that that man had said to himself: "And when I shall see her again at home...." Why? For what reason? Since I loved him, since, if soldiers had menaced him, I would have defended him! Why of all men was it he I assassinated? In two bounds I was beside this man; I called him ... he did not move. My bullet had pierced his neck under the ear, and blood was gushing from an opened vein with a gurgling sound, collecting into a red pool and sticking to his beard.... With trembling hands I raised him slowly, his head swung from side to side, fell back, inert and heavy.... I felt his chest where the heart was: it beat no longer.... Then I raised him again, supporting his head with my knees, and suddenly I saw his eyes, his two clear eyes which looked at me sadly, without hatred, without reproach, his two eyes which seemed to be alive!... I thought I was going to faint, but gathering all my strength in a supreme effort, I clasped the dead body of the Prussian, placed it right in front of me and pressing my lips against this bleeding face from which long, purple threads of congealed slaver were hanging, I desperately kissed it!...
From this moment on I don't remember anything.... I see again smoky fields covered with snow, and ruins burning incessantly, ever recurring dismal flights, delirious marches during the night, confusion at the crossroads congested with ammunition wagons, where the dragoons with drawn swords were driving their horses right into our midst and trying to cut a way through the wagons; I see again funeral carriages, followed by dead bodies of young men which we buried in the frozen ground, saying to ourselves that tomorrow would be our turn; I see again, near the cannon carriages, large carcasses of horses dismembered by howitzer shells, stiff, cut up, over which we used to quarrel in the evening, from which we used to carry away, into our tents, bleeding portions which we devoured growling, showing our teeth like wolves!...And I see again the surgeon, with sleeves of his white coat rolled up, pipe in mouth, amputating on a table, in a farmhouse, by the smoky light of a tallow candle, the foot of a little soldier still wearing his coarse shoes!... But above all I see again the Priory, when worn out and broken in body and spirit by these sufferings, rendered apathetic by the disaster of defeat I re-entered it one nice and sunny day.... The windows of the large house were closed, the window blinds were down in every room.... Felix, more bent than ever, was cleaning the walk and Marie, seated near the kitchen door, was knitting a pair of stockings, wagging her head.
"Well! Well!" I shouted, "is that the way you receive me!"
As soon as the two noticed me, Felix went away as if frightened and Marie growing pale, uttered a cry.
"What's the matter?" I asked with a heavy heart. "How about father?"
The old woman looked at me fixedly.
"Why, don't you know?... Haven't you received anything?... Ah, my poor Monsieur Jean! My poor Monsieur Jean!"
And with eyes filled with tears, she stretched out her arms in the direction of the cemetery.
"Yes! Yes! There is where he is now, with Madame," she said in a dull voice.
Toc, toc, toc.
And at the same time a small drawn otter skin bonnet appeared in the slight opening of the door, followed by two smiling eyes under a veil, then a long fur cape which outlined the slender body of a young woman.
"I am not disturbing you?... May I come in?"
Lirat, the painter, raised his head.
"Ah! it's you, Madame!" he said in a curt tone, almost irritated, while shaking his hands soiled with pastel. "Why, yes, certainly.... Come right in!"
He left his easel and offered a seat.
"How is Charles?" he asked.
"He is all right, thank you."
She sat down, smiling, and her smile was really charming as well as sad. Although covered with a veil, her clear eyes of pinkish blue, her very large eyes which illuminated her whole figure, seemed to be radiating infinite kindness.... She was dressed very elegantly, without striving to be pretentious. A little over-perfumed, however.... There was a moment of silence.
The studio of the painter Lirat, situated in a peaceful section of the Faubourg Saint Honoré, on Rodrigues Square, was a vast, bare place with grey walls, with rough carpentry work and without furniture. Lirat called it familiarly "his hangar." A hangar it was, indeed, where the north winds blew and the rain entered the room through the small crevices in the roof. Two long tables of plain wood supported boxes of paint, scrap books, blocks, handles of fans, Japanese albums, casts, a mess of odd and useless things. Near a book case filled with old magazines in a corner there was a pile of pasteboard, canvas, torn sketches with the stretchers sticking through. A shattered sofa creaking with a sound like that of a piano out of tune, whenever one tried to sit on it, two rickety arm chairs, a looking glass without a frame—constituted the only luxury of the studio illumined by trembling sunlight. In the winter, on days when Lirat had a model posing for him in the studio, he used to light his little cast iron stove whose chimney, crooked into several large bends, supported by iron wire and covered with rust, rose in a serpentine fashion in the middle of the room, before losing itself in the roof through an opening, all too large. On other days, even during the coldest nights, he substituted for the heat of the stove an old coat of astracan fur, worn out, bald and scabby, which he put on with real pleasure.
Lirat took a childish pride in this dilapidated studio, and he boasted of its bareness as other painters do of their embroidered plush and tapestries, invariably historical in origin. Nay, he even wanted it to be still less attractive, he wanted its floor to be the bare ground. "It is in my studio that I learn who my best friends are," he would often say, "they always come again, the others stay away. That's very convenient." Very few came more than once.
The young woman was attractively seated in her chair, her bust slightly bent forward, her hands buried in her muff; from time to time she would take out an embroidered handkerchief and bring it slowly to her mouth which I could not see because of the thick border of the veil which hid it, but which I surmised was very beautiful, very red and exquisitely shaped. In her whole figure, elegant and refined, about which, in spite of the smile which rendered it so alluring, there was an air of modesty and even haughtiness, I could distinguish only these beautiful eyes which rested on objects like the rays of some heavenly star, and I followed her gaze which passed from the floor to the frame work, so vibrant with luminosity and caresses. The embarrassing silence continued. I thought I alone was the cause of this embarrassment and I was getting ready to leave, when Lirat exclaimed:
"Ah! Pardon! ... I have forgotten.... Dear Madame, allow me to introduce to you my friend Jean Mintié."
She greeted me with a gracious and at the same time coaxing nod of her head and in a very sweet voice, which thrilled me deliciously, she said:
"I am delighted to meet you, Monsieur, but I know you well."
While very much flushed, I was stammering out a few confused and silly words, Lirat broke in mockingly:
"I hope you are not going to make him believe that you have read his book?"
"I beg your pardon, Monsieur Lirat.... I have read it.... It is very good."
"Yes, like my studio and my painting, isn't that right?"
"Oh, no! what a comparison!"
She said it frankly, with a laugh, which rolled through the room like the chirping of a bird.
I did not like this laughter. Although it had a hard, sonorous quality, it nevertheless rang false. It seemed to me out of harmony with the expression of her face, so delicately sad, and then, in my admiration for Lirat's genius it hurt me almost like an insult. I do not know why, but it would have been more pleasing to me if she had expressed her admiration for this great unrecognized artist, if she had shown at this moment a loftier judgment, if she had evinced a sentiment superior to those of other women. On the other hand the contemptuous manner of Lirat, his tone of bitter hostility, shocked me deeply! I had a grudge against him for this affected rudeness, for this attitude of boyish insolence which lowered him in my esteem, I thought. I was displeased and very much embarrassed. I tried to speak of indifferent things, but not a single object of conversation came to my mind.
The young woman got up. She walked a few steps in the studio, stopped before the sketches lying in a heap, examined one or two of them with an air of disgust.
"My God! Monsieur Lirat," she said, "why do you persist in painting such ugly women, so comically shaped?"
"If I should tell you," Lirat replied, "you would not understand it."
"Thanks!... And when will you paint my portrait?"
"You should ask Monsieur Jacket or, better still, a photographer about that."
"Monsieur Lirat?"
"Madame!"
"Do you know why I came?"
"To oblige me with your kindness, I suppose."
"That's in the first place!... And then?"
"We seem to be playing an innocent little game? That's very nice."
"To ask you to come to dine with me on Friday? Do you care to?"
"You are very kind, dear Madame, but on Friday that is just when it will be utterly impossible. That's my day at the Institute."
"Well, of all things!... Charles will be hurt by your refusal."
"You will express my regrets to him, will you not?"
"Well, good bye, Monsieur Lirat! A person can freeze to death here."
And walking over to me, she gave me her hand.
"Monsieur Mintié. I am home every day, from five to seven!... I shall be delighted to see you ... delighted...."
I bowed and thanked her, and she went out leaving in my ears some of the music of her voice, in my eyes some of the kindliness of her look and in the studio the strong perfume of her hair, of her cape, of her muff, of her small handkerchief.
Lirat resumed his work without saying a word; I was turning over the pages of a book which I was not reading at all, and upon the moving pages there was flitting incessantly back and forth the image of the young visitor. I certainly was not asking myself what kind of an impression I had retained of her, nor whether I had retained any impression at all; but although she went out, she was not gone entirely. There was left with me an indefinite something of this short-lived apparition, something like a haze which assumed her form in which I could make out the shape of her head, the turn of the back of her neck, the movement of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her waistline, and that something haunted me.... I still beheld her in that chair which she had just left, unfathomable and more charming than ever, with her tender and luminous smile which radiated from her and created a halo of love about her.
"Who is that woman?" I suddenly asked, in a tone which I forced myself to render indifferent.
"What woman?" said Lirat.
"Why, the one that has just left."
"Ah! Yes ...my God! A woman just like others."
"I should think so.... This does not tell me her name, however, nor who she is."
Lirat was rummaging in his paint box. He answered carelessly:
"And so you want to know the name of that woman.... Strange curiosity!... Her name is Juliette Roux.... As for biographical information, the police can furnish you all you want, I imagine.... I presume that Juliette Roux gets up late, that she has her fortune told by cards, that she is deceiving and ruining as well as she can that poor Charles Malterre, an excellent chap whom you met here sometime ago, and whose mistress she is, for the time being.... Lastly, she is like other women, only with this difference, which makes her case worse: she is more beautiful than most of them and consequently more foolish and more malicious.... That sofa there, that you are sitting on ... it was Charles who broke it by lying and crying on it for entire days, while telling me his troubles, you understand? One day he caught her with a croupier of a gambling club, on another day with a buffoon at the Bouffes theatre.
"There was also an affair with the wrestler of Neuilly, to whom she gave twenty francs and Charles' old trousers. As you see, it's full of idylls.... I like Malterre very much ... because he is good-natured and his lack of sense evokes my pity.... He really has my sympathy.... But what can one say to such men, to whom love is the greatest thing in life and who can't see a woman's back without tacking on to it wings of dreams and sending it flying to the stars.... Nothing, isn't that true?... So much so that the unfortunate fellow, in the midst of his rage and sobs, could brag about the fact that Juliette had received a good education. He used to take pride in the fact that she came from the womb of a physician's wife and not from that of the wife of a janitor, and he would show me her letters, emphasizing the correct spelling and the elegant turn of phrases!... He seemed to say: 'How I suffer, but how well written this is!'... What a pity!"
"Ah! You, too, love the woman!" I exclaimed, when he finished his tirade.
And foolishly, I added:
"They say you have suffered much."
Lirat shrugged his shoulders and smiled:
"You talk like Delauney, of the Comédie-Française. No, no, my kind friend, I have not suffered; I have seen others suffer, and that was enough for me ... do you understand?"
Suddenly his voice became shrill, an almost cruel light shone in his eyes. He resumed:
"Ordinary people, poor devils like Charles Malterre, when stepped upon, are crushed, they disappear in the blood, in the mire, in the atrocious filth stirred up by woman's hands ... that's unfortunate of course.... Humanity, however, does not claim them back; for nothing has been stolen from it.... But artists, men of our calibre with big hearts and big brains,—when these are lost, strangled, killed!... You understand?"
His hand trembled, he crushed his crayon on the canvas.
"I have known three of them, three wonderful, divine ones; two died by hanging themselves; the third one, my teacher, is in a padded dark room at Bicêtre!... Of this pure genius there has been left only a lump of wan flesh, a sort of raving beast who grimaces and hurls himself at you with froth at his mouth!... And in this crowd of cast-offs, how many young hopes have perished in the grasp of the beast of prey! Count them up, all these lamentable, bewildered, maimed people; those who had wings and who are now crawling on all fours; those who scrape the earth with their nails and feed on their own excrements! Why, you yourself ... a minute ago looked at Juliette with ecstasy ... you were ready to do anything for a kiss from her.... Don't deny it, I saw you.... Oh! well, let's go out; that's enough, I can't work any more."
He arose and paced across the studio in agitation. Gesticulating and angry, he upset the chairs and paste-boards, ripped some of his sketches with a kick. I thought he was going mad. His bloodshot eyes rolled wildly; he was pale, and the words were coming out of his drawn-up mouth in a violent jumble.
"For men to be born of woman ... men!... How irrational! For men to be conceived in an impure womb!... For men to gorge themselves with woman's vices, with her imbecile, ferocious appetites, to have sucked the sap of life from her nefarious breasts! Mother!... Ah! yes, mother!... Divinized mother, eh? Mother who creates us, sick and wasted race that we are, who stifles the man in the child and hurls us nailless and toothless, stupid and tamed, upon the bedstead of a mistress and the nuptial bed!..."
Lirat stopped for a moment; he was choking. Then, bringing his hands together and knotting his crisp fingers in the air, as if gripping an imaginary neck, he shouted madly, terribly:
"This is what should be done with them, all of them, all of them!...Do you understand? ... eh ... tell me?... All of them!..."
And he began pacing back and forth again, swearing, stamping his feet. But the last shout of anger had evidently relieved him.
"Come now, my dear Lirat, calm yourself," I said to him. "What's the use of getting excited, and over what, I ask you? Come now, you are not a woman."
"That's true, too, but you provoked me with this Juliette.... How does this Juliette concern you anyway?"
"Was it not natural on my part to want to know the name of the person to whom you had introduced me?... And then, frankly, pending the invention of some other machine than woman for breeding children ..."
"Pending that... I am a brute," interrupted Lirat, who again seated himself before his easel, a little ashamed of himself, and in a quiet voice asked:
"Dear little Mintié, would you mind sitting for me a little. That won't bore you, will it? For only ten minutes."
Joseph Lirat was forty-two years old. I made his acquaintance casually one evening; I no longer remember where it was, and though he had the reputation of being a misanthrope, unsociable and spiteful, I instantly took a fancy to him. Is it not painful to think that our deepest friendships, which ought to be the result of a long process of selection, that the gravest events in our life which should be brought about by a logical chain of causes, are for the most part, the instant result of chance?... You are at home in your study, tranquilly absorbed in a book. Outside the sky is grey, the air is cold: it is raining, the wind is blowing, the street is gloomy and dirty, therefore you have every good reason in the world not to stir from your chair.... Yet you go out, driven by weariness, by idleness, by something you yourself don't know—by nothing, ... and then at the end of a hundred steps, you meet the man, the woman, the carriage, the stone, the orange peel, the mud puddle which upsets your whole existence from top to bottom.
In the midst of the most sorrowful of my experiences I used to think of these things, and often I would say to myself—with what bitter regrets!—"If on the evening when I met Lirat, in the forgotten place where I certainly had nothing to do, I had but stayed at home and worked or dreamed or slept, I would have been today the happiest man on earth and there would have happened to me none of the things which did happen to me." And that moment of trivial hesitancy, the moment when I was asking myself: "Shall I go out or shall I not?," that moment embraced the most important act in my life; my whole destiny was determined in the brief space of time which in my memory left no more trace than a gust of wind, which blows down a house or uproots an oak tree, leaves upon the skies! I recall the most insignificant details of my life. For example, I remember the blue velvet suit, laced in front, which I wore on Sunday, when I was very little. I can swear, yes I can swear, that I could count the grease spots on the habit of curé Blanchetière or even the number of tobacco grains he used to drop while snuffing up his pinch of snuff.
It seems a senseless and yet disquieting thing: very often when I cry, or look at the sea or even watch the sunset upon an enchanted field—I can still see by that odious freak of irony which is at the bottom of our ideals, our dreams and our sufferings—I can still see upon the nose of an old guard we had, father Lejars, a big tumor, grumous and funny with its four hair filaments which proved an excellent attraction for flies.... Whereas the moment which decided my life, which cost me my peace, my honor, and reduced me to the position of a scabby dog; this moment which I passionately wish to reconstruct, to bring back again to memory with the aid of physical reminders and mental associations—this moment I cannot recall. Thus it is that in the course of my life there happened a tremendous, a singular event, since all the subsequent occurrences flow from it, and yet the recollection of it escapes me entirely!... I remember neither the occasion, nor the place, nor the circumstances, nor the immediate cause of that event.... What do I know then about myself?... What do people in general know about themselves, when they are hopelessly unable to trace the sources of their actions? Nothing, nothing, nothing! And must one explain the enigmas which our mental phenomena and the manifestation of our so-called will represent, by the promptings of this blind mysterious force, the fatality of human nature?... That is not speaking to the point, however.
I said that I had met Lirat one evening by accident, in a place I don't remember and that instantly I took a fancy to him.... He was the most original of men.... With his forbidding appearance, his machine-like and magisterial stiffness and his air of a petty official, he at first made the impression of a typical functionary, of some orleanist puppet such as are manufactured in the politicians' clubs and drawing rooms for the punch and judy show of parliaments and academies. From a distance, he positively looked like one who is in the habit of distributing decorations, excize offices and prizes for valor! This impression, however, quickly disappeared; for this it was sufficient to listen, if only for five minutes, to his conversation, lucid, colorful, bristling with original ideas, and above all to feel the power of his glance, his extraordinary glance, exhilarated and cold at the same time, a glance to which all things seemed familiar, which went through you like a gimlet against your will.