My brother's letters, written close on very fine paper, continued to reach us from time to time; he could only send them to us by sailing vessels bound in our direction which lay-to in that part of the world where he was stationed. Some of them were written particularly for me, and these were long, and filled with never-to-be-forgotten descriptions. I already knew several words of the sweet and liquid language of Oceanica, and often in my dreams I saw the exquisite island he described and roamed over it; it haunted my imagination as does a chimerical realm, ardently desired, but as inaccessible as if situated upon another planet.
During my visit to my cousins my father forwarded me a letter from my brother addressed to me. I went up to the garret roof, on the side where the plums were drying, to read it. He wrote of a place called Fataua which was situated in a deep valley and surrounded by steep mountains. “A perpetual twilight,” he wrote, “reigns here under the great exotic trees, and the spray of the cascade keeps the carpet of rare ferns fresh.” Yes; I could picture that scene to myself very well, now that I had about me mountains and moist glens luxuriant with ferns. . . . He described everything fully and vividly: my brother could not know that his letters exercised a dangerous spell over the child who, at his departure, appeared to be so tranquil and so attached to the home fireside.
“The only pity,” he wrote at the end, “is that this delightful island has not a door opening into the home-yard, into the beautiful arbor overgrown with honeysuckle, for instance, that lies behind the grottoes and the little pond.”
This idea of a door in the wall at the foot of our garden, and especially the association between the little lake constructed by my brother and distant Oceanica, struck me as very singular, and the following night I had this dream:
I went into the yard and found it enveloped in a sort of deadly twilight that gave me the impression that the sun had been extinguished forever. Every where there seemed to be an inexpressible desolation that is known only in dreams, and which it is almost impossible to conceive of in the waking state. When I arrived at the bottom of the garden near the beloved little lake, I felt myself rising from the ground like a bird about to take flight. At first I floated aimlessly as thistledown, then I passed over the wall and took a south-west direction, the direction of Oceanica; I had no trace of wings, and I lay on my back in an agony of dizziness and nausea as I travelled with frightful rapidity, with the swiftness of a stone shot from a sling. The stars whirled madly in space; beneath me oceans and seas faded into the pallid and indistinguishable distance, and as I journeyed I was ever enwrapped in that twilight bespeaking a dead world. . . . After a few minutes I suddenly found myself encompassed by the darkness of the noble trees in the valley of Fataua.
There in the valley my dream continued, for I ceased to believe in it,—the utter impossibility of really being there impressed itself upon my mind,—for very often I had been duped by such illusions which always vanished when I awoke. My main concern was lest I should wake wholly, for the vision, incomplete as it was, enchanted me. At least the carpet of rare ferns was really there. As I groped in the night air and plucked them I said to myself: “Surely these plants are real, for I can touch them and I have them in my hand; surely they will not disappear when the dream vanishes.” And I grasped them with all my strength to be sure of keeping them.
I awoke. A beautiful summer day had dawned, and in the village was heard the noise of recommencing life. The continual clucking of the hens as they roamed about in the streets, and the click-clack of the weaver's loom caused me to realize where I was. My empty hand was still shut tight, and the nails were pressed almost into the flesh, the better to guard that imaginary bouquet of Fataua, composed of the impalpable stuff of dreams.
I had very quickly attached myself to my grown cousins, and I felt as well acquainted with them as if I had always known them. I believe it is necessary that there should be the bond of blood for the creation of those intimate relations between people, who but the day before were almost ignorant of each other's existence. I also loved my uncle and aunt; my aunt especially, who spoiled me a little, and who was so good and still so beautiful in spite of her sixty years, her gray hair and her grandmotherly way of dressing herself. In these levelling days, wherein one person is so like another, people of my aunt's type no longer exist. Born in the neighborhood, of a very ancient family, she had never been away from this province of France, and her manners, her hospitality, and her exquisite courtesy had a local stamp, every detail of which pleased me greatly.
In direct contrast to my sheltered home life, here I lived almost entirely out of doors. I roamed about in the streets and highways, and often I went beyond the gates of the town. The narrow streets paved with black pebbles like those in the Orient, and bordered with gothic dwellings of the time of Louis XIII, had a singular charm for me. I already knew all the nooks and corners, public highways and the byways of the village, and I was well acquainted with many of the kind country people who lived about us.
The women, peasant women with goitres, who passed my uncle's house on their way to and from the surrounding fields and vineyards, carried baskets of fruit on their heads, and they always paused to offer me luscious grapes and delicious peaches. I was delighted with the southern dialect, and with the songs of the mountaineers; and, best of all, my unfamiliar surroundings ever reminded me that I was in a strange country.
And now when I see any of the little things that I brought from there for my museum, or when I look over the brief letters that I wrote to my mother every day, I suddenly feel the warm sunshine, I experience again the strange newness, I smell the fragrance of ripe southern fruits, and I feel the keen freshness of the mountain air; and at such times I realize that in spite of the long descriptions in these dead pages they inadequately express all I felt.
The little St. Hermangardes, of whom every one spoke so often, arrived about the middle of September. Their castle was situated in the north upon the bank of the Carreze, but they came every year to pass the autumn in their very old and dilapidated mansion near my uncle's house.
Two boys, both a little older than I, came this time, and contrary to my expectation I took a fancy to them immediately. As they were in the habit of spending a part of each year at their country place they had guns and powder and often went hunting. Thus they brought an entirely new element into our games. Their estate of Bories became one of the centres of our operations. Everything there was at our disposal, the servants and all the animals in the stables. One of our favorite amusements was the construction of enormous balloons, nine or ten feet high, and these we inflated by burning under them sheaves of hay; we then watched them rise and sail away and away, until they were lost to our sight high above the distant fields and woods.
The little St. Hermangardes were unlike other children; they had had all their instruction from a tutor, and their ideas were different from those one imbibes at boarding schools. When there was any disagreement between us in regard to our games they always courteously gave in to me, and therefore my contact with them did not help me to meet the painful experiences of the future.
One day they came over and with much grace made me a present of a very rare butterfly. It was of a pale yellow color, almost merging into light green, the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly, but its front wings were a shaded and exquisite pink, similar to the delicate rosy tints sometimes seen at daybreak. They had captured it, they said, in the late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories,—they had caught hold of it so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon its brilliant coloring. When, at about noontime, I received it from them I was in the vestibule of my uncle's house, a place always kept tightly closed during the hours of intense heat. From the wing of the house I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a mountaineer; he often sang in that manner, and when he did so his voice always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness of the late September noons. He sang over and over the same old refrain: “Ah! Ah! The good, good story. . . .” Here he always broke off and recommenced. And from that moment Bories, the pinkish-yellow butterfly, and the sad little refrain of the “good, good story” were inseparably associated in my memory.
But I fear that I have said too much about the incoherent impressions and images which came to me so frequently in days gone by; this is the last time that I will speak at length of them. But it will be seen, because of what follows, how important it is for me to note the association existing between the dissimilar things mentioned above.
We left the mountains at the beginning of October, but my home-coming was marked by a very painful circumstance—I was sent to school! I went, of course, only as a day scholar; and it goes without saying that I was never allowed to go and come alone lest I should get into bad company. The four years that I spent at the university, as a day scholar, were as strange and as full of odd experiences as any of my life. But, notwithstanding, from that fatal day my history becomes much less interesting as a narrative.
I was taken to school for the first time, at two o'clock in the afternoon, upon one of those glorious October days, so sunny and peaceful, that is like a reluctant and sad leave-taking of the summer-time. Ah! how beautiful it had been in the mountains, in the leafless forests and among the autumn-tinted vines!
With a crowd of children, all talking at the same time, I entered the torture chamber. My first impression was one of astonished disgust because of the hideousness of the ink-stained walls, and of the old benches of shiny wood defaced by the penknife carvings of countless school-boys who had been so inexpressibly miserable in this place. Although I was a stranger to my new companions they treated me with the greatest familiarity (they used thee and thou in addressing me) and gave themselves patronizing airs that were almost impertinent. Although I observed my school-mates timidly and furtively I thought them, for the most part, exceedingly ill-mannered and untidy.
As I was twelve and a half I entered the third class; my tutor considered me advanced enough to keep up with it if I chose to do so, although I myself felt that I was scarcely equal to the task. The first day, for the purpose of qualifying, we had to write Latin exercises, and I remember that my father awaited, with some anxiety, the outcome of the examination. When I told him I was second among fifteen I was surprised that he attached so much importance to a matter of so little interest to me. It was all one to me! Broken hearted as I felt, how could I be affected by such a trifle?
Later, indeed, at no time, did I feel the impetus that the desire to excel brings with it. To be at the foot of the class always seemed to me the least of the ills that a school-boy is called upon to endure.
The weeks following my entrance were extremely painful to me. I felt my intellect cramping rather than expanding under the multiplicity of the lessons and the tasks imposed; even the realm of my young dreams seemed closing against me little by little. The first dismal, foggy weather, and the first gray days added a greater desolation and sadness to my already overwrought feelings. The uncouth chimney-sweeps had returned, and their yearly autumn cry was again heard in the streets. Theirs was a cry that in my earlier years wrung my heart and caused my tears to flow. When one is a child the approach of winter, with its killing gloom and cold, seems to awake in him inexplicable forebodings bespeaking the end of all bright and beautiful things; time goes so slowly in childhood that we appear not to be able to anticipate the inevitable reawakening that comes in the spring to all things.
No, it is only when we are older, and would seem, therefore, to be more impressionable to the changes of the seasons, that we regard winter merely as an incident having its rightful place among the other incidents of life.
I had a calendar and I marked off upon it the slowly passing days. At the commencement of my first year of college life I was oppressed by the thought of the months of study stretching before me, and by the prospect of the interminable months that must come and go before we reached the Easter vacation that was to give us a respite of eight or ten days from the dreadful schoolroom grind and ennui; I seemed to lose all my courage, and at times I was almost overwhelmed with despair at the prospect of the long and dreary days that went so slowly.
In the meantime cold weather, really cold weather set in and aggravated my sorrows. Oh! the daily journey to school upon those frigid December mornings, where for two deadly hours the only warmth we obtained came from the inadequate coal fire, and before me the torture of returning to my home in the face of the icy winter wind! The other children frolicked and ran and pushed each other, and they slid upon the ice when it chanced that the water in the gutters was frozen over. As for me I did not know how to slide, and, besides, sports such as the other boys indulged in, I considered highly undignified. I was always escorted to and from school very sedately, and I felt the humiliation of being conducted. I was sometimes laughed at by my school-mates with whom I was not at all popular; and I had a disdain for those who, like myself, were in bondage. I had scarcely an idea in common with them.
Even Thursdays I had to give to the preparation of lessons that took the entire day. The written tasks, absurd exercises, I scrawled off in the most careless and illegible handwriting.
And my disgust for life was so great that I no longer took the least bit of pains with myself; often now I was scolded for looking so unkempt, and for having dirty, ink-stained hands. . . . But if I continue in this strain I will succeed in making my recital as tedious as were the school-days of my youth.
Cakes! Cakes! My good hot cakes! The old cake woman had resumed her nightly tour, and again we heard her rapid footsteps and her shrill refrain. Always at the same hour, with the regularity of an automaton, she went by our house. And the long winter recommenced in the same manner as had the preceding ones, and as were similarly to begin the following two or three years.
Our neighbors, the D——-s, accompanied by Lucette, always came at eight o'clock Sunday evenings, and another neighbor visited us also upon this same evening. These latter brought with them their little daughter Marguerite, who gradually insinuated herself into my affections.
That year Marguerite and I brought the Sunday winter evenings, over which the thought of the tasks of the morrow brooded sadly, to a close with an entirely new amusement. After the tea, when I felt that the party was about to break up, I would hurry little Marguerite into the dining-room, and there we rushed madly about the round table and tried to catch or tag each other,—we played furiously. It goes without saying that she was usually caught immediately and tagged very often, and I scarcely ever; it therefore fell out that it was almost always her turn to chase me, and she did it desperately. We struck the table with our bodies, and yelled, and carried on our play with the greatest imaginable uproar. We succeeded in turning up the rugs, in disarranging the chairs, and in making havoc of everything. We soon tired of our play, however,—the truth is I was too old to care greatly for such frolics. I had scarcely any feeling save one of melancholy in spite of the wild sport I indulged in, for over me hovered the chilling thought that in the morning the usual round of dry and laborious lessons would begin. My furious revel was simply a way of prolonging that day of truce, of making it count to its very last moment; it was an attempt to divert my thoughts by making plenty of noise. It was also my way of hurling a defiance at those tasks that I had left undone. My negligence troubled my conscience and disturbed my sleep, and caused me finally to look over, hastily and feverishly, by the feeble light of a candle, or by the cold gray light of early dawn, the neglected lessons, before the coming of the despised hour in which I betook myself to school.
There was always a little consternation in the parlor when the sounds of our merriment reached those gathered there; it must have been particularly distressing to our parents to hear that we were amusing ourselves otherwise than with our duet sonatas, and to find that we preferred noise and discord to the “Pretty Shepherdess.”
And for at least two winters, at about half-past ten every Sunday evening, we indulged in that romp around the dining-table. My school was of little value to me, and the tasks imposed of even less benefit; I always went to work reluctantly and in the wrong spirit, and that lessened and extinguished my power and stupefied me. I had the same unfortunate experience when I came in contact with school-mates of my own age, my equals; their roughness disgusted me, and I repulsed all the efforts they made to be friendly. . . . I never saw them except in class, under the master's rod as it were; I had already become a little being too peculiar and set in my ways to be modified greatly by contact with them, and I therefore held aloof, and my eccentricities accentuated themselves.
Almost all of them were older and more developed than I; they also were more crafty and more sophisticated; in consequence there sprung up amongst them a feeling of contempt and enmity for me that I repaid with disdain, for I felt sure that they were incapable of comprehending or following the flights of my imagination.
With the very youthful peasants in the mountains, and the fishermen's children on the Island, I had never been haughty; we had understood each other after the fashion of children who are primitive and therefore fond of childish play; and upon such occasions I had associated with them as if they were my equals. But I was arrogant in my behavior to the boys at school, and they had good reason to consider me whimsical and priggish. It took me many years to conquer that arrogance, to act simply and like other people in the world; and especially it was difficult for me to realize that one is not necessarily superior to his fellows because he is (to his own misfortune often) prince and conjurer in the realm of fancy.
The theatre wherein was enacted the “Donkey's Skin,” very much amplified and more elaborate, had now a permanent place in my aunt Claire's room. Little Jeanne, more interested in it since the additions to the scenery and the text, came over oftener; she painted backgrounds under my direction, and the moments I enjoyed most were those in which I impressed her with my great superiority. We had now a box full of characters, each with a name and a role; and the fantastic processions were made up of regiments of monsters, beasts and gnomes made out of plaster and painted with water colors.
I recall our delight and enthusiasm when we tried for the first time the effect of a scenic background which we had made to represent the “void of heaven.” Delicate rosy clouds, bespeaking the dawn, floated over the blue expanse that was softened and paled by the gauze hanging in front of it. And the chariot of a silken-haired fairy, drawn by two butterflies and suspended on invisible threads, advanced towards the centre of the scene.
But in spite of our efforts our work was never finished, for we took no account of limitations; every day we had new ideas and ever more and more wonderful projects, and the great comprehensive representation was deferred from day to day, was postponed to a future that never came.
Every undertaking of my life will be, or has already been, left unfinished and incomplete as was that little play of the “Donkey's Skin.”
Among those professors who seemed, during my school-days, so severe, and indeed almost cruel to me, the most terrible without any exception were the “Bull of Apis” and the “Big Black Ape” (I had nicknames for all of them). I hope should they read this they will understand that I am writing from the child's view-point. Should I meet them to-day I would, in all probability, humbly tender them my hand and ask their pardon for having been such an unmanageable pupil.
Oh! the Big Ape especially, how I hated him! When from the height of his desk these words fell upon my ear: “You will do a hundred lines; I mean you, you little sap-head!” I could have flown at his face like an enraged cat. He was the first to arouse in me those sudden and violent outbursts of rage that characterized me as a man, outbreaks which could scarcely have been foreseen in a child of my sweet and patient disposition.
I would be doing myself a great injustice in saying that I was altogether a bad scholar, I was, rather, an unequal and erratic one; one day at the head of my class, the next day at the foot; but on the whole I maintained a fair average, and at the end of the year I received the prize for translation—I won no others however. It surprised me that every one in the class did not receive the prize that I had won without great effort, for translation was extraordinarily easy for me. On the other hand I found composition very difficult, and narration still more so.
Little by little I deserted my own work-desk, and in my aunt Claire's room, near the china bon-bon bear, I underwent with as much resignation as possible, the torture that the preparing of my tasks imposed. On the wainscoting of the wall, in a hidden recess of the room, there is still visible, among the other fantastical sketches, a pen-portrait of the “Big Ape”; the ink has faded to a light yellow, but the drawing has endured, and when I look at it I again feel a sort of deadly weariness, and a sensation of suffocation chills me through and through—in short I once more live over those dread school-days.
Aunt Claire was more than ever my resource during those hard times; she always looked up words for me in the dictionary, and often she took upon herself the task of writing for me, in an assumed hand, the exercises exacted by the “Big Ape.”
Bring me, please, dear, the second . . . no, the third drawer of my chiffonier.
It is mamma who is speaking; she is busying herself with the drawers of the chiffonier which every day, for many years, she had asked me to bring to her,—sometimes she pretends to need them merely for the purpose of pleasing me by requiring my services. It was one of the things that I was able to do for her when I was very little: to carry to her one or another of those tiny drawers. It was an honored custom in our household for a long time.
At the time of my life of which I am now writing it was in the evening, at dusk, after my return from school, that I busied myself carrying the little chiffonier drawers. I usually found mamma seated in her accustomed place near the window chatting or embroidering, her work basket was before her, and the bureau, whose different compartments she required from time to time, was situated some distance away, in an anteroom.
The Louis XVth chiffonier was very much revered, for it had belonged to great-grandmothers. In it there were some very old and very tiny painted boxes which had doubtless been handled every day by one or another of our ancestresses. It goes without saying that I knew all the secrets of these compartments that were kept in such exquisite order; there was a special place for silks that was classified by being put into ribbon bags; one for needles, another for braid, and still another for little hooks. And these things were still arranged, I have no doubt, as they had been in our grandmother's days, whose saintly activity my mother imitated.
To bring the drawers of the chiffonier to mamma was the joy and pride of my childhood, and there has been no change in my feelings for those little compartments since that time. They have always inspired me with the most tender respect; they are blended with the image of my mother and they recall to me her beautiful, skillful hands, ever busy manufacturing some pretty, useful article,—even to her last piece of embroidery which was a handkerchief for me.
In my seventeenth year, when we met great reverses—at that troubled time of which I will not speak here, but only mention because I have already, in preceding chapters, touched upon the matter—we had to face, for several months, the dreadful possibility of being obliged to part with our old home and all the precious things that it contained. At that time when I passed in review all the beloved memories and habits and mementoes that I would need to break with, one of my most agonizing thoughts was: “Never more will I be able to come and go in the ante-chamber where the chiffonier stands, nor never again be able to carry its precious little drawers to mamma.”
And her very old-fashioned work-basket that I had begged her not to discard, although it was much worn, with its little articles, needle books, receptacles for thimbles and screws for holding the embroidery frames! The thought that a time must surely come when the well-beloved hands that daily touch these things will touch them no more, fills me with so much sorrow that I am bereft of all courage and I struggle in vain against invading sad emotions. Let me hope that as long as I live it may remain as it is, that for so long it will be guarded with the sacredness of a relic; but to whom can I bequeath this heirloom with the assurance that it will be cherished? What will become of those poor little trifles that are so precious to me?
That work-basket belonging to my mother, and the little drawers of the old chiffonier are, I doubt not, the things that I will part with most regretfully when the time comes for me to go into the world.
Truly all of this is very puerile and childish, and I am ashamed of it;—and yet I am almost weeping as I write it.
Because of the haste and confusion brought about by conflicting school tasks, I had not for many months found time to read my Bible; indeed I scarcely had time for a morning prayer.
I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother.
It was at church, however, that my faith continued to receive its most damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and meaningless term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human reasoning and dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and the Gospels, and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite poetry. For a peculiar nature like mine it was very difficult to have any one touch upon holy subjects (in such a way as did the minister) without in some measure, in my opinion, desecrating them. The family worship, held every evening, awakened in me the only religious meditation that I now knew, for the voice that read or prayed was exceedingly dear to me, and that changed everything.
My untiring contemplation of nature, and the reflections that I indulged in in the presence of the fossils I had brought from the mountains and cliffs, and placed in my museum, indicated that there had been bred in me a vague and unconscious pantheism.
In short my deeply rooted and still-living faith was covered over with encumbering earth. At times it threw out a green shoot, but for the most part it lay like an entirely dead thing in the cold ground. Moreover, I was too much troubled to pray; my conscience, still restive and timid, gave me no rest during the time that I was on my knees,—I always felt remorse gnaw at me then because of the slovenly and half-done tasks, and because of the feelings of hate I had for the “Big Ape” and the “Bull of Apis,” emotions that I was obliged to hide and disguise until I shuddered at the falsehoods I spoke and acted. These things gave me poignant remorse and excruciating moral distress, and to escape from these emotions I indulged in noisy sports and foolish laughter; and when my conscience troubled me most, and I dared not, therefore, appear before my parents, I took refuge with the servants, played tennis, jumped the rope, or make a great racket.
For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for I now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I knew still less what to reply.
However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in mathematics and a certain precision of nature, certainly anomalies in one of my temperament, that it might be well for me to study engineering. And when they consulted me and I replied apathetically: “Very well, it is agreeable enough to me,” the matter seemed satisfactorily settled.
I would need to spend a little more than a year at a polytechnic school in order to prepare myself. To be there or elsewhere, what difference did it make to me? . . . When I contemplated the men of a certain age who surrounded me, those occupying the most honorable positions, who had every claim to respect and consideration, I would say to myself: “It will some day be necessary for me to live a useful, sedate life in a given place and fixed sphere as they do, and to grow old as they are—and that is all!” And a bitter hopelessness overwhelmed me as I brooded on the thought; I yearned for the impossible; I longed most of all to remain a child forever, and the reflection that the years were fleeing, and that, whether I would or would not, I must become a man, was anguish to me.
Twice a week, in the history classes, I came in contact with the naval students. To give themselves a sailor-like appearance they wore red sashes, and they constantly drew ships and anchors on their copy-books.
I never dreamed of that career for myself; scarcely oftener than once or twice had such a thought passed through my mind and then it had disquieted me: it was, however, the only life in which I could indulge my taste for travel and adventure. It terrified me, this naval career, more than any other because of the long exiles it imposed, exiles that faith could no longer make seem endurable, as in the days when I had expressed a desire to become a missionary.
To go far away as my brother had done; to be separated from my mother and other beloved ones for years and years; not to see during that time the little yard reclothe itself in green at the coming of the spring, nor to see the roses bloom upon the old wall, no, I had not the courage to undertake it.
Because it was assumed, doubtless because of my peculiar education, that such a rough life was wholly unsuited to me. And I knew very well, from some words that had been spoken in my hearing, that should so wild an idea gain a lodgment with me my parents would withhold their consent and thwart me in every way.
On my Thursday holidays during the winter, after having finished my duties and accomplished all my school tasks, I felt the greatest homesickness when I mounted to my museum. It was always a little late when I finished my lessons, and the light was usually fading when I looked down at the great meadows that appeared inexpressibly melancholy as they stretched before me enwrapped in a grayish-pink mist. I was homesick for the summer, homesick for the sun and the south, all of which were suggested by the butterflies from my uncle's garden that I had arranged and pinned under glass, and by the mountain fossils that the little Peyrals and I had collected in the summer time.
It was a foretaste of that longing for somewhere else which later, after my return from long voyages to tropical countries, spoiled my visits to my home.
Oh! there was in particular the pinkish-yellow butterfly! There were times when I experienced a bitter pleasure in seeking to understand the great sadness that it caused me. It was in the glass case at the far end of the room; its two colors so fresh and unusual, like a Chinese painting, or a fairy's robe, were exquisite foils for each other; the butterfly formed a luminous whole that shone out brightly in the gray twilight, and it caused the other butterflies surrounding it to look as dull as dun-colored little bats.
As soon as my eyes rested upon it I seemed to hear drawled out lazily, in a mountaineer's treble, the refrain: “Ah! ah! the good, good story!” And again I saw the white porch of Bories in the midst of the silence and the hot sunshine of a summer noon. A deep regret for past and gone vacations took possession of me; I felt saddened when I tried to recreate days belonging to a dead past, and tried to imagine vacations still to come; but mingled in with sentiments that I can name, there were those other inexpressible ones that well up from the unfathomable deeps of one's being.
This association between the butterfly, the song and Bories caused me for a long time an extreme sadness that, try as hard as I may, I cannot explain satisfactorily; and the feeling continued until stormy and tempestuous winds swept over my life and carried away with them the small concerns belonging to my childhood.
Sometimes, upon gray winters evenings, when I looked at the butterfly I would sing to myself the little refrain of the “good, good story;” to accomplish this I had to make my voice very flute-like; and as I sang, the porch of Bories appeared to me more vividly than ever, as it stood, sunny but desolate, under the dazzling light of the September noon. This association was a little like the one that later established itself for me between the sad falsetto of the Arab songs, the snowy splendor of their mosques and the winding-sheet whiteness of their lime-washed porticos.
That butterfly in all the freshness and radiance of its two strange colors, mummified, it is true, but as brilliant looking as ever under its glass, retains for me a sort of old-time charm which I cherish. The little St. Hermangardes, whom I have not seen for many years, and who are now attached to an embassy somewhere in the Orient, would doubtless, should they read this, be much astonished to learn what value circumstances has given to their little present.
The chief event of these winters, so poisoned by my college life, was the gift-giving festival that we had at New Year.
At about the end of November it was our custom, my sister's, Lucette's and mine, to make out a list of the things we desired most. Everybody in the two families prepared surprises for us, and the mystery surrounding these gifts was our most exquisite pleasure during the last days of the year. Between parents, grandmother and aunts there occurred, to excite my curiosity still further, conversations full of mysterious hints, and whisperings that were hastily discontinued as soon as I appeared.
Between Lucette and me it became a real guessing game. As in the play of “Words with a double meaning,” we had the right to ask certain pointed questions,—for example we asked the most ridiculous ones, such as: “Has it hair like an animal?”
And the answers went something after this fashion:
What your father is to give you (a dressing-case made of leather) had hair, but it has none now, except on some portion of its interior (brushes), and that is false. Your mamma's present (a fur muff) still has some hair. What your aunt is to give you (a lamp) will help you to see the hair on the others better; but, let me see, yes, I am sure that that has none.
In the December twilights, in that hour between daylight and darkness, we would sit upon our low stools before the wood-fire, and continue our series of questions from day to day. We grew ever more eager and excited until the 31st, and in the evening of that momentous day the mysteries were revealed.
That day the presents for the two families, wrapped, tied and labeled, were piled upon tables in a room closed against Lucette and me. At eight o'clock the doors were thrown open and we filed in, the elders going first, and each one of us sought for his own gift among the heap of white parcels. For me the moment of entry was an exceedingly joyous one, and until I was twelve or thirteen years of age, I could not refrain from jumping and leaping like a kid long before it came time for us to cross the threshold.
We had supper at eleven, and when the clock in the dining room struck the midnight hour, tranquilly, in harmony with the sound of its calm stroke, we separated in the first moments of those New Years that are now buried under the ashes of many succeeding ones. And on those evenings I fell asleep with all my gifts in my room near me. I even kept the favorite ones upon my bed. The following morning I always waked earlier than usual so that I might re-examine them; they cast a spell of enchantment over that winter morning, the first one of a new year.
Once there was, among my presents, a large illustrated book treating of the antediluvian world.
Through the study of fossils I had already been initiated into the mysteries of prehistoric creations. I knew something about those terrible creatures that in geologic times shook the primitive forests with their heavy tread; for a long time the thought of them disquieted me. I found them all in my book pictured in their proper habitat, surrounded by great brakes, and standing under a leaden sky.
The antediluvian world already haunted my imagination and became the constant subject of my dreams; often I concentrated my whole mind upon it, and endeavored to picture to myself one of its gigantic landscapes that seemed ever enveloped in a sinister and gloomy twilight with a background filled in with great moving shadows. Then when the vision thus created took on a seeming reality I felt an inexpressible sadness that was like an exhalation of the soul,—as soon as the emotion passed the dream-structure vanished.
Soon after this I sketched a new scene for the “Donkey's Skin;” it was one representing the liassic period. I painted a dismal swamp overshadowed by lowering clouds, where, in the shave-grass and the gigantic ferns, strange extinct beasts wandered slowly.
The play of the “Donkey's Skin” seemed no longer the same Donkey's Skin. I discarded one by one the little stage people who now offended me by their uncompromising doll-like stiffness; they were relegated to their card-board box, the poor little things, where they slept the sleep eternal, and without doubt they will never be exhumed.
My new scenes had nothing in common with the old fairy spectacle: in the depths of virgin forests, in exotic gardens, and oriental palaces formed of pearls and gold I tried to realize, with the small means at my command, all my dreams, while waiting for that improbable better time that ever lies in the future.
That hard winter passed under the ferule of the “Bull of Apis” and the “Great Ape,” finally came to an end and spring returned; it was always a troublous time for us, the scholars, for the first mild days gave us a great longing to be out, and we could scarcely hide our restlessness. The roses budded everywhere upon our old walls; my beloved little garden, bright and warm under the March sunshine, tempted me, and I would tarry there a long time to watch the insects wake up, and to see the early butterflies and bees fly away. Even the revised “Donkey's Skin” was neglected.
I was no longer escorted to and from school, for I had persuaded my family to discontinue a custom that made me ridiculous in the eyes of my companions. Often, before returning home, I would take a long and roundabout way and pass by the peaceful ramparts from where I had glimpses of other provinces, and a sight of the distant country.
I worked with even less zeal than usual that spring, for the beautiful weather that tempted me out of doors turned my head and made study almost impossible.
Assuredly one of the things for which I had the least aptitude was French composition; I generally composed a mere rough draught without a particle of embellishment to redeem it. In the class there was a boy who was a very eagle, and he always read his lucubrations aloud. Oh! with what unction he read out his pretty creations! (He is now settled in a manufacturing town, and has become the most prosaic of petty bailiffs.) One day the subject given out was: “A Shipwreck.” To me the words had a lyrical sound! But, nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind to elaborate the subjects given to us by the “Great Ape”; a sort of instinctive good taste kept me from writing trite commonplaces, and as for putting down things of my own imagining, the knowledge that they would be read and picked to pieces by the old bogey made it impossible for me to compose anything.
I loved, however, even at this time, to write for myself, but I did it with the greatest secrecy. Not in the desk in my room that was profaned by lessons and copy-books, but in the little old-fashioned one that was part of the furniture of my museum, there was hidden away a unique thing that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red ink,—and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events and reflections. A year later, however, because of the labor involved in transcribing the cryptographic characters I had chosen I discarded them and used the ordinary letters; but I continued my work with the greatest secrecy, and I kept my manuscript under lock and key as if it were an interdicted book. I inscribed there, not so much the events of my almost colorless existence, as my incoherent impressions, the melancholy that I felt at twilight, my regret for past summers, and my dreams of distant countries. . . . I already had a longing to give my fugitive emotions a determinative quality, I needed to wrestle against my own weaknesses and frailties and to banish, if possible, the dream-like element that I seemed to discover in all the things about me, and for that reason I continued my journal until a few years ago. . . . But at that time the mere idea that a day might come when someone would have a peep at it was insupportable to me; so much so indeed that if I left home and went to the Island or elsewhere for a few days, I always took care to seal up my journal, and with the greatest solemnity I wrote upon the packet: “It is my last wish that this book be burned without being read.”
God knows, I have changed since then. But it would be going too far beyond the limits of this story of my childhood to recount here through what changes in my life's view-point it chances that I now sing aloud of my woes, and cry out to the passers-by, for the purpose of drawing to myself the sympathy of distant unknown ones; and I call out with the greater anguish in proportion as I feel myself approaching nearer and nearer to the final dust. . . . And who knows? perhaps as I grow older I may write of those still more sacred things which at present cannot be forced from me,—and by that means try to prolong beyond the bounds of my individual life, memory of my being, of my sorrows, and joys, and love.