Ten Tales Part 1

Ten Tales.

by Francois Coppee.

INTRODUCTION.

The _conte_ is a form of fiction in which the French have always delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the _jongleurs_ and the _trouveres_, past the periods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the present. The _conte_ is a tale, something more than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The _Canterbury Tales_ are _contes_, most of them, if not all; and so are some of the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_. The free-and-easy tales of Prior were written in imitation of the French _conte en vers_; and that, likewise, was the model of more than one of the lively narrative poems of Mr. Austin Dobson.

No one has succeeded more abundantly in the _conte en vers_ than M.

Coppee. Where was there ever anything better of its kind than _L'Enfant de la Balle?_--that gentle portrait of the Infant Phenomenon, framed in a chain of occasional gibes at the sordid ways of theatrical managers and at their hostility towards poetic plays. Where is there anything of a more simple pathos than _L'epave?_--that story of a sailor's son whom the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship M. Coppee loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate fidelity.) But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the streets of the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story some incident of daily occurrence made significant by his interpretation; he chooses some character common-place enough, but made firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected, the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our sensibilities. The sub-t.i.tle Mrs. Stowe gave to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's _contes_ either in prose or verse; they are nearly all pictures of _life among the lowly_. But there is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. The tone is always manly and wholesome.

_La Marchande de Journaux_ and the other little masterpieces of story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose--a true poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm--these can be Englished by taking thought and time and pains, without which a translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these tales have been rendered into English by Mr. Learned; and the ten chosen for translation are among the best of the two score and more of M. Coppee's _contes en prose_. These ten tales are fairly representative of his range and variety. Compare, for example, the pa.s.sion in "The Foster Sister," pure, burning and fatal, with the Black Forest _navete_ of "The Sabots of Little Wolff." Contrast the touching pathos of "The Subst.i.tute,"

poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds "My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties, making the coffee of his good old mother and taking her poodle out for a walk.

Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns," cutting in its sarcasm, but not bitter--from "The Captain's Vices," which suggests at once George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ and Mr. Austin Dobson's _Tale of Polypheme_, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table," a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table," "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the fact.i.tious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are p.r.o.ne to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy de Maupa.s.sant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain's sketches in black-and-white.

An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in _The Odd Number_ has protested to me that M. Coppee is not an etcher like M. de Maupa.s.sant, but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M.

Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppee's _contes_ have not the sharpness of M. de Maupa.s.sant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's--but what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either M. de Maupa.s.sant or M. Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really rivalled either by those of M. de Maupa.s.sant, who is a Norman by birth and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpa.s.sable in their felicity and in their verity.

It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a finer morality in M. Coppee's work than in M. de Maupa.s.sant's or in M. Daudet's or in that of almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is not that M. Coppee probably thinks of ethics rather than aesthetics; in this respect his att.i.tude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no sermon in his song--or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Moliere, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which always punishes the villain in the fifth act.

It is of good augury for our own letters that the best French fiction of to-day is getting itself translated in the United States, and that the liking for it is growing apace. Fiction is more consciously an art in France than anywhere else--perhaps partly because the French are now foremost in nearly all forms of artistic endeavor. In the short story especially, in the tale, in the _conte_, their supremacy is incontestable; and their skill is shown and their aesthetic instinct exemplified partly in the sense of form, in the constructive method, which underlies the best short stories, however trifling these may appear to be, and partly in the rigorous suppression of non-essentials, due in a measure, it may be, to the example of Merimee. That is an example we in America may study to advantage; and from the men who are writing fiction in France we may gain much. From the British fiction of this last quarter of the nineteenth century little can be learned by any one--less by us Americans in whom the English tradition is still dominant. When we look to France for an exemplar we may find a model of value, but when we copy an Englishman we are but echoing our own faults.

"The truth is," said Mr. Lowell in his memorable essay _On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners_--"the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism."

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

THE CAPTAIN'S VICES.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAPTAIN'S VICES]

I.

It is of no importance, the name of the little provincial city where Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns, and three wounds--installed himself when he was retired on a pension.

It was quite like all those other little villages which solicit without obtaining it a branch of the railway; just as if it were not the sole dissipation of the natives to go every day, at the same hour, to the Place de la Fontaine to see the diligence come in at full gallop, with its gay cracking of the whips and clang of bells.

It was a place of three thousand inhabitants--ambitiously denominated souls in the statistical tables--and was exceedingly proud of its t.i.tle of chief city of the canton. It had ramparts planted with trees, a pretty river with good fishing, a church of the charming epoch of the flamboyant Gothic, disgraced by a frightful station of the cross, brought directly from the quarter of Saint Sulpice. Every Monday its market was gay with great red and blue umbrellas, and countrymen filled its streets in carts and carriages. But for the rest of the week it retired with delight into that silence and solitude which made it so dear to its rustic population. Its streets were paved with cobble-stones; through the windows of the ground-floor one could see samplers and wax-flowers under gla.s.s domes, and, through the gates of the gardens, statuettes of Napoleon in sh.e.l.l-work. The princ.i.p.al inn was naturally called the Shield of France; and the town-clerk made rhymed acrostics for the ladies of society.

Captain Mercadier had chosen that place of retreat for the simple reason that he had been born there, and because, in his noisy childhood, he had pulled down the signs and plugged up the bell-b.u.t.tons. He returned there to find neither relations, nor friends, nor acquaintances; and the recollections of his youth recalled only the angry faces of shop-keepers who shook their fists at him from the shop-doors, a catechism which threatened him with h.e.l.l, a school which predicted the scaffold, and, finally, his departure for his regiment, hastened by a paternal malediction.

For the Captain was not a saintly man; the old record of his punishment was black with days in the guard-house inflicted for breaches of discipline, absences from roll-calls, and nocturnal uproars in the mess-room. He had often narrowly escaped losing his stripes as a corporal or a sergeant, and he needed all the chance, all the license of a campaigning life to gain his first epaulet. Firm and brave soldier, he had pa.s.sed almost all his life in Algiers at that time when our foot soldiers wore the high shako, white shoulder-belts and huge cartridge-boxes. He had had Lamoriciere for commander. The Due de Nemours, near whom he received his first wound, had decorated him, and when he was sergeant-major, Pere Bugrand had called him by his name and pulled his ears. He had been a prisoner of Abd-el-Kader, bearing the scar of a yataghan stroke on his neck, of one ball in his shoulder and another in his chest; and notwithstanding absinthe, duels, debts of play, and almond-eyed Jewesses, he fairly won, with the point of the bayonet and sabre, his grade of captain in the First Regiment of Sharp-shooters.

Captain Mercadier--twenty-six years of service, twenty-two campaigns, and three wounds--had just retired on his pension, not quite two thousand francs, which, joined to the two hundred and fifty francs from his cross, placed him in that estate of honorable penury which the State reserves for its old servants.

His entry into his natal city was without ostentation. He arrived one morning on the imperiale of the diligence, chewing an extinguished cigar, and already on good terms with the conductor, to whom, during his journey, he had related the pa.s.sage of the Porte de Fer; full of indulgence, moreover, for the distractions of his auditor, who often interrupted the recital by some oath or epithet addressed to the off mare. When the diligence stopped he threw on the sidewalk his old valise, covered with railway placards as numerous as the changes of garrison that its proprietor had made, and the idlers of the neighborhood were astonished to see a man with a decoration--a rare thing in the province--offer a gla.s.s of wine to the coachman at the bar of an inn near by.

He installed himself at once. In a house in the outskirts, where two captive cows lowed, and fowls and ducks pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed through the gate-way, a furnished chamber was to let. Preceded by a masculine-looking woman, the Captain climbed the stair-way with its great wooden bal.u.s.ters, perfumed by a strong odor of the stable, and reached a great tiled room, whose walls were covered with a bizarre paper representing, printed in blue on a white background and repeated infinitely, the picture of Joseph Poniatowski crossing the Elster on his horse. This monotonous decoration, recalling nevertheless our military glories, fascinated the Captain without doubt, for, without concerning himself with the uncomfortable straw chairs, the walnut furniture, or the little bed with its yellowed curtain, he took the room without hesitation. A quarter of an hour was enough to empty his trunk, hang up his clothes, put his boots in a corner, and ornament the wall with a trophy composed of three pipes, a sabre, and a pair of pistols. After a visit to the grocer's, over the way, where he bought a pound of candles and a bottle of rum, he returned, put his purchase on the mantle-shelf, and looked around him with an air of perfect satisfaction. And then, with the prompt.i.tude of the camp, he shaved without a mirror, brushed his coat, c.o.c.ked his hat over his ear, and went for a walk in the village in search of a cafe.

II.

It was an inveterate habit of the Captain to spend much of his time at a cafe. It was there that he satisfied at the same time the three vices which reigned supreme in his heart--tobacco, absinthe, and cards. It was thus that he pa.s.sed his life, and he could have drawn a plan of all the places where he had ever been stationed by their tobacco shops, cafes, and military clubs. He never felt himself so thoroughly at ease as when sitting on a worn velvet bench before a square of green cloth near a heap of beer-mugs and saucers. His cigar never seemed good unless he struck his match under the marble of the table, and he never failed, after hanging his hat and his sabre on a hat-hook and settling himself comfortably, by unloosing one or two b.u.t.tons of his coat, to breathe a profound sigh of relief, and exclaim,

"That is better!"

His first care was, therefore, to find an establishment which he could frequent, and after having gone around the village without finding anything that suited him, he stopped at last to regard with the eye of a connoisseur the Cafe Prosper, situated at the corner of the Place du Marche and the Rue de la Pavoisse.

It was not his ideal. Some of the details of the exterior were too provincial: the waiter, in his black ap.r.o.n, for example, the little stands in their green frames, the footstools, and the wooden tables covered with waxed cloth. But the interior pleased the Captain. He was delighted upon his entrance by the sound of the bell which was touched by the fair and fleshy dame du comptoir, in her light dress, with a poppy-colored ribbon in her sleek hair. He saluted her gallantly, and believed that she sustained with sufficient majesty her triumphal place between two piles of punch-bowls properly crowned by billiard-b.a.l.l.s. He ascertained that the place was cheerful, neat, and strewn evenly with yellow sand. He walked around it, looking at himself in the gla.s.ses as he pa.s.sed; approved the panels where guardsmen and amazons were drinking champagne in a landscape filled with red holly-hocks; called for his absinthe, smoked, found the divan soft and the absinthe good, and was indulgent enough not to complain of the flies who bathed themselves in his gla.s.s with true rustic familiarity.

Eight days later he had become one of the pillars of the Cafe Prosper.

They soon learned his punctual habits and antic.i.p.ated his wishes, while he, in turn, lunched with the patrons of the place--a valuable recruit for those who haunted the cafe, folks oppressed by the tedium of a country life, for whom the arrival of that new-comer, past master in all games, and an admirable raconteur of his wars and his loves, was a true stroke of good-fortune. The Captain himself was delighted to tell his stories to folks who were still ignorant of his repertoire. There were fully six months before him in which to tell of his games, his feats, his battles, the retreat of Constantine, the capture of Bou-Maza, and the officers' receptions with the concomitant intoxication of rum-punch.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Human weakness! He was by no means sorry, on his part, to be something of an oracle; he from whom the sub-lieutenants, new-comers at Saint-Cyr, fled dismayed, fearing his long stories.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

His usual auditors were the keeper of the cafe, a stupid and silent beer-cask, always in his sleeved vest, and remarkable only for his carved pipe; the bailiff, a scoffer, dressed invariably in black, scorned for his inelegant habit of carrying off what remained of his sugar; the town-clerk, the gentleman of acrostics, a person of much amiability and a feeble const.i.tution, who sent to the ill.u.s.trated journals solutions of enigmas and rebuses; and, lastly, the veterinary surgeon of the place, the only one who, from his position of atheist and democrat, was allowed to contradict the Captain. This pract.i.tioner, a man with tufted whiskers and eye-gla.s.ses, presided over the radical committee of electors, and when the cure took up a little collection among his devotees for the purpose of adorning his church with some frightful red and gilded statues, denounced, in a letter to the _Siecle_, the cupidity of the Jesuits.

The Captain having gone out one evening for some cigars after an animated political discussion, the aforesaid veterinary grumbled to himself certain phrases of heavy irritation concerning "coming to the point," and "a mere fencing-master," and "cutting a figure." But as the object of these vague menaces suddenly returned, whistling a march and beating time with his cane, the incident was without result.

In short, the group lived harmoniously together, and willingly permitted themselves to be presided over by the new-comer, whose white beard and martial bearing were quite impressive. And the small city, proud of so many things, was also proud of its retired Captain.

III.

Perfect happiness exists nowhere, and Captain Mercadier, who believed that he had found it at the Cafe Prosper, soon recovered from his illusion.

For one thing, on Mondays, the market-day, the Cafe Prosper was untenantable.

From early morning it was overrun with truck-peddlers, farmers, and poultrymen. Heavy men with coa.r.s.e voices, red necks, and great whips in their hands, wearing blue blouses and otter-skin caps, bargaining over their cups, stamping their feet, striking their fists, familiar with the servant, and bungling at billiards.

When the Captain came, at eleven o'clock, for his first gla.s.s of absinthe, he found this crowd gathered, and already half-drunk, ordering a quant.i.ty of lunches. His usual place was taken, and he was served slowly and badly. The bell was continually sounding, and the proprietor and the waiter, with napkins under their arms, were running distractedly hither and thither. In short, it was an ill-omened day, which upset his entire existence.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Now, one Monday morning, when he was resting quietly at home, being sure that the cafe would be much too full and busy, the mild radiance of the autumn sun persuaded him to go down and sit upon the stone seat by the side of the house. He was sitting there, depressed and smoking a damp cigar, when he saw coming down the end of the street--it was a badly paved lane leading out into the country--a little girl of eight or ten, driving before her a half-dozen geese.

As the Captain looked carelessly at the child he saw that she had a wooden leg.

There was nothing paternal in the heart of the soldier. It was that of a hardened bachelor. In former days, in the streets of Algiers, when the little begging Arabs pursued him with their importunate prayers, the Captain had often chased them away with blows from his whip; and on those rare occasions when he had penetrated the nomadic household of some comrade who was married and the father of a family, he had gone away cursing the crying babies and awkward children who had touched with their greasy hands the gilding on his uniform.