CHAPTER IV.A SOUTHERN AUNT—REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD.
The Portal mansion in which the great man dwells when he is in Provence is one of the show-places of Aps. It is mentioned by the Joanne guide-book in the same category as the temple of Juno, the amphitheatre, the old theatre and the tower of the Antonines, relics of the old Roman days of which the town is very proud and always keeps well furbished up. But it is not the heavy ancient arched gate of the old provincial residence itself, embossed with immense nails, nor the high windows, bristling with iron bars, spikes and pike-heads of a threatening sort, that they point out to the stranger who comes to see the town. It is only a little balcony with its black iron props on the first floor, corbelled out above the porch. For it is here that Numa shows himself to the crowd when he arrives and it is from here that he speaks. The whole town is witness that the iron balcony, which was once as straight as a rule, has been hammered into such an original shape, into such capricious curves, by the blows showered upon it by the powerful fist of the orator.
“Té, vé!our Numa has molded the iron!”
This they will say with bulging eyes and so much earnestness as to leave no room for doubt—say it with that imposing rolling of the “r” thus:pétrrri le ferrr!
They are a proud race, these good people of Aps, and kindly withal, but vivid in their impressions and most exaggerated in their language, of which Aunt Portal, a true type of the local citizenry, gave a very fair idea.
Immensely fat, apoplectic, her blood rushing to her pendulous cheeks purple like the lees of wine in fine contrast with her pale complexion, the skin of a former blonde. So far as one saw it the throat was very white, and her neat handsome iron-gray curls showed from beneath a cap decorated with lilac ribbon. Her bodice was hooked awry, but she was imposing nevertheless, having a majestic air and a pleasant smile and manner. It was thus that she appeared in the half-light of her drawing-room, always kept hermetically sealed after the Southern custom. You would say she looked like an old family portrait, or one of Mirabeau’s old marquises, and very appropriate to her old house, built a hundred years ago by Gonzague Portal, chief councillor of the Parliament of Aix.
It is not uncommon to find people and houses in Provence that seem as if they belong to olden times, as if the last century, while passing out through those high panelled doors, had let a bit of her gown full of furbelows stick in the crack of the door.
But if in conversing with Aunt Portal you should be so unlucky as to hint that Protestants are as good as Catholics, or that Henry V may not ascend the throne at any moment, the old portrait will spring headlong out of its frame, and with the veins on its neck swelling and the hands tearing at the neatly hanging curls, will fly into an ungovernable passion, swear, threaten and curse! These outbursts have passed into tradition in the town and many wonderful tales are told upon the subject. At an evening party in her house a servant let fall a tray of wineglasses; Aunt Portal fell into one of her fits of rage, shouting and exciting herself with cries, reproaches and lamentations; finally her voice failed, and almost choking in her frenzy, unable to beat the unlucky servant, who had promptly fled, she raised the skirt of her dress and wrapped it about her head and face to conceal her groans and her visage disfigured by rage, quite regardless of the voluminous display of a portly, white-fleshed lady to which she was treating her guests.
In any other part of the country she would have been considered mad, but in Aps, the land of hot brains and explosive natures, they were satisfied to say that she “rode a high horse.” It is true that passers-by on the quiet square before her doors on restful afternoons, when the cloistral stillness of the town is only broken by the chirping of the locusts or a few notes on a piano, are wont to hear such words as “monster,” “thief,” “assassin,” “stealers of priests’ property,” “I’llcut your arm off,” “I’ll rip the skin off your stomach!” Then doors would slam and stairways tremble beneath the vaults of whitewashed stone; windows would open noisily, as though the mutilated bodies of the unhappy servants were to be thrown from them! But nothing happens; the servants placidly continue their work, accustomed to these tempests, knowing perfectly that they are mere habits of speech.
An excellent person, all things considered, ardent, generous, with a great desire to please and to sacrifice herself—a noble trait in these impulsive people, and one by which Numa had profited. Since he had been chosen deputy the house on the Place Cavalerie belonged to him, his aunt only reserving the right to remain there the rest of her life. And then, what a delight it was to her when the party from Paris arrived, with the receptions, the visits, the morning music and the serenades which the presence of the great man brought into that lonely life of hers, eager for excitement! Besides, she adored her niece Rosalie, partly because they were so entirely the opposite of each other and also because of the respect she felt for the daughter of the chief magistrate of France.
It really needed a world of patience on Rosalie’s part and all the love of family inculcated in her by her parents to endure for two whole months the whims and tiresome caprices of this disordered imagination, always over-excited and as restless in mind as she was indolent in her big body. Seatedin the large vestibule, as cool as a Moorish court, but yet close and musty from the exclusion of air and sunshine, Rosalie, holding a bit of embroidery in her hands—for like a true Parisian she never could be idle—was obliged to listen for hours at a time to her surprising confidences. The enormous lady sat before her in an arm-chair, with her hands free in order to gesticulate, and recapitulated breathlessly the chronicles of the whole town. She sometimes depicted her maid-servants and coachman as monsters, sometimes as angels, according to the caprice of the moment. She would select some one against whom she apparently had some grudge, and cover the detested one with the foulest, bloodiest, most venomous abuse, relating stories like those in theAnnals of the Propagation of the Faith. Rosalie, who had lived with Numa, had luckily become accustomed to these frantic objurgations. She listened abstractedly; for the most part they passed in at one ear and out at the other; hardly did she stop to wonder how it came about that she, so reserved and discreet, could ever have entered such a family of theatrical persons who draped themselves with phrases and overflowed with gestures. It had to be a very strong bit of gossip to make her hold up Aunt Portal with an “Oh, my dear aunt!” thrown out with a far-away air.
“Perhaps you are right, my dear, perhaps I do exaggerate a little.”
But Aunt Portal’s tumultuous imagination was soon off again, recounting some comic or tragic tale with so much mimicry and dramatic effectthat she gave one the impression of wearing alternately the two masks borne by ancient actors of tragedy and of comedy. She only calmed down when she described her one visit to Paris and related the wonders of the arrival in the “Passage Somon,” where she had stopped at a small hotel patronized by all the travelling salesmen of her native province, where they “took the air” in a glass-covered passage as stuffy and hot as a melon-frame. Of all her remarkable stories of Paris this place was the central point from which everything else evolved—it was the elegant, fashionable spot beyond all others.
These tiresome, empty tirades had at least the spice of being uttered in the strangest and most amusing kind of language, in which an old-school stilted French, the French of books of rhetoric, was mixed with the oddest provincialisms. Aunt Portal detested the Provençal tongue, that dialect so admirable in color and sonorousness, which only the peasants and people talk, which contains an echo of Latin vibrating across the deep blue sea. She belonged to the burgher class of Provence who translatepécaïrébypéchère(sinner) and fancy they talk correctly.
When her coachman Ménicle (Dominick) in his frank way said to her in Provençal:
“Voù baia de civado au chivaou” (I am going to give the horses oats)—she would assume an austere air and say:
“I do not understand you—speak French, my good fellow!”
Then Ménicle, like a docile schoolboy, would say:
“Je vais bayer dé civade au chivau.”
“That is right, now I understand you!”—and he would go away thinking that he had been speaking the language. It is a fact that most of the people in the South below Valence only know this hybrid kind of French.
But besides all this Aunt Portal played upon her words by no means according to her fancy but in accordance with the rules of some local grammar. Thus she saiddéligencefordiligence,achéterforacheter,anédoteforanecdote,régitreforrégistre. She called a pillow-slip (taie d’oreiller) acoussinière, an umbrella was anombrette, the foot-warmer which she used at all seasons of the year was abanquette. She did not cry, she “fell to tears;” and though very “overweighted” she never took more than “half hour” for her round of the city. All this twaddle was larded with those little words and expressions without precise meaning which Provençals scatter through their speech, those verbal snips which they stuff between sentences to lessen their stress or increase their strength, or keep up the multifold character of the accent, such as
“Aie, ouie, avai, açavai, au moins, pas moins, différemment, allons!”
This contempt of Mme. Portal for the language of her province extended to its usages and its traditions and even to its costume. Just as she did not permit her coachman to lapse into Provençal,in the same way she never would have allowed a servant to enter her house wearing the head-dress and neck-kerchief of Arles.
“My house is neither amas(farm) nor a weaver’s loft,” said she. Nor would she let them wear achapoeither. To wear a bonnet is the distinctive hieratic sign of the ascendancy of the citizen in the provinces. The title of “madame” is one of its attributes, a title refused to any of the baser sort. It is amusing to see the condescension of the wife of a retired officer or municipal employee who earns eight hundred francs a year, doing her own marketing in an enormous bonnet, when she speaks to the wife of an immensely rich farmer from the Crau, in her picturesque headgear trimmed with real old thread lace. In the Portal mansion the ladies had worn bonnets for over a century. This made Mme. Portal very arrogant toward poor people and was the cause of a terrible scene between her and Roumestan a few days after the festival in the amphitheatre.
It was a Friday morning at breakfast, a regular Provençal breakfast, pretty and attractive to the eye although strictly a fast-day meal, for Aunt Portal was very keen about her orders. On the white cloth in picturesque array were big green peppers, alternating with blood-red figs, almonds and carved water-melons, that looked like big rose-colored magnolias, anchovy patties and little white rolls such as are to be found nowhere else—all very light dishes set among decanters of fresh water and bottles of light home-made wine. Outsidein the sun the locusts and rays were chirping and glittering, and a broad band of golden light slid through a crevice into the great dining-room, vaulted and resounding like the refectory of a convent.
In the middle of the table on a chafing dish were two large cutlets designed for Numa. Notwithstanding that his name was uttered in all the prayers, perhaps because of it, the great man of Aps, alone of all the family, had obtained a dispensation from fasting from the cardinal. So there he sat feasting and carving his juicy cutlets, while his aunt and his wife and sister-in-law breakfasted on figs and watermelon.
Rosalie was used to it. The two days’ fast every week was but a part of her yearly burden, as much a matter of course as the sunshine, the dust, the hot mistral wind, the mosquitoes, her aunt’s gossip and the Sunday services at the church of St. Perpétue. But the youthful appetite of Hortense revolted against this continual fasting and it took all the gentle authority of the elder sister to prevent an outburst from the spoiled child, which would have shocked all Aunt Portal’s ideas of the conduct becoming to a young person of refinement and education. So Hortense had to content herself with her husks, revenging herself by making the most awful grimaces, rolling up her eyes, snuffing up the smell of the cutlets and murmuring under her breath for Rosalie’s benefit alone:
“It always happens so. I took a long ride this morning. I am as hungry as a tramp!”
She still wore her habit, which was as becoming to her tall, slim figure as was the straight, high collar to her irregular saucy little face, still flushed by her exercise in the open air. Her ride had given her an idea.
“Oh Numa, how about Valmajour? When are we going to see him?”
“Who is Valmajour?” answered Numa, whose fickle brain had already discarded all memory of the taborist. “Té, that’s a fact, Valmajour! I had forgotten all about him. What a genius he is!”
It all came back to him—the arches of the amphitheatre echoing to the farandole with the dull vibration of the tabor; it fired his memory and so excited him that he called out decisively:
“Aunt Portal, do lend us the landau; we will set off directly after breakfast.”
His aunt’s brow darkened above her big eyes, flaming like those of a Japanese idol.
“The landau?Avai!What for? At least you’re not going to take your wife and sister to see that player of thetutu-panpan!”
This word “tutu-panpan” so perfectly mimicked the sound of the fife and tabor that Roumestan burst out laughing, but Hortense took up the defence of the old Provençal tabor with much earnestness. Nothing that she had seen in the South had impressed her so much. Besides, it would not be honest to break one’s word to the nice boy.
“He is a great artist! Numa, you said so yourself.”
“Yes, yes, little sister, you are right; we must certainly go.”
Aunt Portal in a towering rage said that she could not understand how a man like her nephew, a deputy, could put himself out for peasants, farmers, whose people from father to son had made music for the villages. Then, in her usual spirit of mimicry, she stuck out a disdainful lip and played with the fingers of one hand on an imaginary fife, while with the other she beat upon the table to represent the tabor, taking off the tabor-player’s gestures.
“Nice people to take ladies to see! No one but Numa would dream of doing such a thing. Calling on the Valmajours! Holy mother of angels!” And becoming more and more excited, she accused them of crimes enough to make them out a brood of monsters as bloody and dreadful as the Trestaillon family, when suddenly across the table she caught the eye of her butler Ménicle, who came from the same village as the Valmajours and was listening to her lies, every feature strained in astonishment. At once she shouted to him in a terrible voice to “go and change himself quickly” and have the landau at the door at “two o’clock a quarter off.” All the rages of Aunt Portal ended in this fashion.
Hortense threw down her napkin and ran and kissed the old lady rapturously on her fat cheeks. She was in a tumult of gayety and bounded for joy:
“Come, Rosalie, let us hurry!”
Aunt Portal looked at her niece:
“Well, I hope, Rosalie, that you are not going to vagabondize with these feather-heads!”
“No, no, aunt, I will stay with you” answered Rosalie, amused at the character of elderly relative that her unvarying amiability and resignation had created for her in that house.
At the right moment the carriage came promptly to the door, but they sent it on ahead, telling Ménicle to wait for them at the amphitheatre square, and Roumestan set out on foot with his little sister on his arm, full of curiosity and pride at seeing Aps in his company, to visit the house in which he was born and to retrace with him the streets through which he had so often walked when a child.
It was the hour of the midday rest. The whole town slept, silent and deserted, rocked by the south wind blowing in great fanlike gusts, cooling and freshening the fierce Provençal summer heat, but making walking difficult, especially along the Corso, which offered no resistance to it, where it roared round the little city with the bellowings of a loosened bull. Hortense, with her head down, her hands tightly clasped about her brother’s arm, out of breath and bewildered, enjoyed the sensation of being raised and borne along by the gusts which were like resistless waves, noisy and complaining, white with foamlike dust. Sometimes they had to stop and cling to the ropes stretched along the ramparts for use on windy days. Owing to the whirlwinds in which bits of bark and plane-tree seeds spun round, and owing to its solitudethe Corso had an air of distress in its wide desolation, still soiled as it was with the remains of the recent market, strewn with melon-rinds, straw litters, empty casks, as if the mistral alone had charge of the street cleaning.
Roumestan was anxious to reach the carriage as soon as possible, but Hortense enjoyed this battle with the hurricane and insisted on walking farther, panting and overborne by the gust that curled her blue veil three times around her hat and molded her short walking skirt against her figure as she walked. She was saying:
“It is queer how different people are! Rosalie, now, hates the wind. She says it blows away all her ideas, keeps her from thinking. Now me the wind excites, intoxicates!”
“So it does me!” said Numa, clinging on to his hat, his eyes full of water, and then suddenly, as they turned a corner:
“Ah, here is my street—I was born here.”
The wind was going down, at least they felt it less; it was blowing farther away with a sound as of billows breaking on a beach, as one hears them from the quiet inner bay. The street was a largish one, paved with pointed stones, without sidewalks, and the house an insignificant little gray structure standing between an Ursuline convent shaded with big plane-trees and a fine old seignorial mansion on which was carved a coat of arms and the inscription “Hôtel de Rochemaure.” Opposite stood a very old and characterless building with broken columns, defaced statues and grave-stones withRoman inscriptions carved on them; it had the word “Academy” in faded gilt letters over a green door.
In that little gray house the great orator first saw the light on the 15th of July, 1832; it was easy to draw more than one parallel between his narrow, classical talent and his education as a Catholic and a Legitimist, and that little house of needy citizens with a convent on one side and a seignorial residence on the other, and a provincial academy in front of it.
Roumestan was filled with emotion, as he always was over anything concerning himself. He had not visited this spot for perhaps thirty years; it needed the whim of this young girl to bring him here. He was much struck with the immutability of things. He recognized in the wall a shutter-catch that his childish hand had turned and played with every morning as he passed on his way up the street. The columns and precious torsos of the academy threw their shadows on the same spot as of old. The rose-laurel bushes had the same spicy odor and he showed Hortense the narrow window where his mother had sat and signed to him to hurry when he came from the friars’ school:
“Come up quickly, father has come in!” His father did not like to be kept waiting.
“Tell me, Numa, is it really true? were you really educated by the friars?”
“Yes, little sister, until I was twelve years old, and then Aunt Portal sent me to the Assumption,the most fashionable boarding-school in the town; but it was the Ignorantins over there in that big barrack with yellow shutters who taught me to read.”
As he called to mind the pail of brine under the Brother’s chair in which were soaked the straps with which they beat the boys, to make the pain greater, he shuddered; he remembered the large paved class-room where they were made to say their lessons on their knees and had to crawl up holding out their hands to be punished on the slightest pretext; he recalled how the Brother in his shabby black gown stood stiff and rigid, with his habit rolled up beneath his arm, the better to strike his pitiless blows—Brother Crust-to-cook, as he was called, because he was the cook. He remembered how the dear Brother cried “ha!” and how his little inky fingers tingled with the pain as if ants were biting them. As Hortense cried aloud in dismay at the brutality of such punishments, he related others still more dreadful; for example, they were obliged to clean the freshly watered pavements with their tongues, the dust and water making a muddy substance that injured the tender palates of the naughty children.
“It is shameful! and you defend such people and speak in their favor in the Chamber?”
“Ah, my dear, that is politics!” said Roumestan calmly.
As they talked they were threading a labyrinth of small, dingy streets, almost oriental in their character, where old women lay asleep on their doorsteps,and other streets, though not so sombre, where long pieces of printed calicoes fluttered in explanation of signboards on which were painted: “Haberdashery,” “Shoes,” “Silks.”
Thence they came out on what was called in Aps the “Little Square,” with its asphalt melting in the hot sun and surrounded by shops, at this hour closed and silent, in the narrow shadow of whose walls boot-blacks slept peacefully, their heads resting on their boxes, their limbs stretched out like those of drowned people, wrecks of the tempest that has just swept over the town. An unfinished monument occupied the centre of the little square. Hortense wished to know what was ultimately to be the statue placed upon it and Roumestan smiled in an embarrassed way.
“It is a long story!” he answered, hurrying on.
The town of Aps had voted a statue to Numa, but the Liberals of the “Vanguard” had strongly disapproved of this apotheosis of a living man and so his friends had not dared to go on with it. The statue was all ready, but now probably they would wait for his death before raising it. Surely it’s a glorious thought that after your funeral you will have civic recognition and that you die only to rise again in bronze or marble; but this empty pedestal shining in the sun seemed to Roumestan, whenever he passed it, as gloomy as a majestic family vault; it was not until they had reached the amphitheatre that he could dispel his funereal thoughts.
The old structure, divested of its Sunday cheerfulnessand returned to its solemnity of a great and useless ruin, seemed damp and cheerless as it loomed darkly against the rays of the setting sun, with its dark corridors and floors caved in here and there and stones crumbling beneath the footsteps of the centuries.
“How dreadfully sad it is!” said Hortense, regretting the music of Valmajour’s fife; but to Numa it did not seem sad. His happiest days had been passed there—his childish days with all their pleasures and longings. Oh, the Sundays at the bull-fights, prowling around the gates with other poor children who lacked ten sous to pay for their tickets! In the hot afternoon sun they crawled into some corner where a glimpse of the arena could be obtained. What pleasures of forbidden fruits!—the red-stockinged legs of the bull-fighters, the wrathful hoofs of the bull, the dust of the combat rising from the arena amid the cries of “Bravo!” and the bellowings and the roar of the multitude! The yearning to get inside was not to be resisted. While the sentinel’s back was turned the bravest of them would wriggle through the iron bars with a little effort.
“I always got through!” said Roumestan in ecstasy. The history of his whole life was expressed in those few words. By chance or by cleverness—no matter how close were the bars—the Southerner always wriggled through.
“I was thinner in those days, all the same,” he said with a sigh and he looked with comic regret at the narrow bars of the grille and then at his bigwhite waistcoat, within which lay the solid sign of his forty years.
Behind the enormous amphitheatre they found the carriage, safely harbored from wind and sun. They had to wake up Ménicle, who was sleeping peacefully on the box between two large baskets of provisions, wrapped in his heavy cloak of royal blue. But before getting in Numa pointed out to Hortense an old inn at a distance whose sign read: “To the Little St. John, coach and express office,” the whitewashed front and large open sheds of which took up one whole corner of the square. In these sheds were ancient stage-coaches and rural chaises long unused, covered with dust, their shafts raised high in air from beneath their gray covers.
“Look there, little sister,” he cried with emotion. “It was from this spot that I set out for Paris one-and-twenty years ago. There was no railway then; we went by coach as far as Montélimar, then up the Rhône. Heavens, how happy I was! and how your big Paris frightened me! It was evening—I remember it so well....”
He spoke quickly, reminiscences crowding each other in his mind.
“The evening, ten o’clock, in November, beautiful moonlight. The guard’s name was Fouque, a great person! While he was harnessing we walked about with Bompard—yes, Bompard—you know we were already great friends. He was, or thought he was, studying for a druggist and meant to join me in Paris. We made many plans for livingtogether and helping each other along in the world to get ahead quicker—in the meantime he encouraged me, gave me good advice—he was older than I. My great bugbear was the fear of being ridiculous—Aunt Portal had ordered for me a travelling wrap called a Raglan; I was a little dubious about that Raglan, so Bompard made me put it on and walk before him in it.Té!I can see yet my shadow beside me as I walked, and gravely, with that knowing air he has, he said: ‘That is all right, old boy; you don’t look ridiculous.’—Ah, youth, youth!”
Hortense, who was beginning to fear that they should never get away from this town where every stone was eloquent of reminiscences for the great man, led the way gently towards the carriage.
“Let us get in, Numa. We can talk just as well as we drive along.”