The Immortal Part 4

Dressed quietly in black, with an unbecoming bonnet, she stood in the doorway; and near her was Dalzon, very much excited, between two members of the Academie who looked judicial. He was protesting violently and with a choking voice. 'It's not true, it's a shame, I never wrote it!'

Here was a mystery; and Madame Astier, who might have enlightened me, was herself engaged in close confabulation with Lavaux and the Prince d'Athis. You must have seen the Prince d'Athis driving about Mousseaux with the d.u.c.h.ess. 'Sammy,' as he is called, is a long, thin, bald man, with stooping shoulders, a crinkled face as white as wax, and a black beard reaching half down his chest, as if his hair, falling from his head, had lodged upon his chin. He never speaks, and when he looks at you seems shocked at your daring to breathe the same air as he. He is high in the service, has a close, mysterious, English air which reminds you that he is Lord Palmerston's great-nephew, and is in high repute at the Inst.i.tute and on the Quai d'Orsay. He is said to be the only French diplomatist whom Bismarck never dared to look in the face. It is supposed that he will very shortly have one of the great Emba.s.sies. Then what will become of the d.u.c.h.ess? To leave Paris and follow him would be a serious thing for a leader of society. And then abroad the world might refuse to accept their equivocal relations, which here are looked upon almost as marriage, in consideration of the propriety of their conduct and their respect for appearances, and considering also the sad state of the Duke, half paralysed and twenty-years older than his wife, who is also his niece.

The Prince, was no doubt discussing these grave matters with Lavaux and Madame Astier when I drew near. A man just arrived in any society, no matter where, soon finds how much he is 'out of it,' He understands neither the phrases current nor the thoughts, and is a nuisance. I was just leaving when that kind Madame Astier called me back, saying, 'Will you not go up and see him? He will be so glad.' So I went up a narrow staircase in the wall to see my old master. I heard his loud voice from the end of the pa.s.sage, 'Is that you, f.a.ge?'

'No, sir,' said I.

'Why, it's Freydet! Take care; keep your head down.'

It was in fact impossible to stand upright under the sloping roof. What a different place from the Foreign Office, where I last saw him, in a lofty gallery lined with portfolios.

'A kennel, is it not?' said the worthy man with a smile; 'but if you knew what treasures I have here,'--and he waved his hand towards a large set of pigeonholes containing at least 10,000 important MS. doc.u.ments, collected by him during the last few years. 'There is history in those drawers,' he went on, growing more animated and playing with his magnifying gla.s.s; 'history new and authentic, let them say what they will.' But in spite of his words he seemed to me gloomy and uncomfortable. He has been treated very badly. First came that cruel dismissal; and now, as he has continued to publish historical works based on new doc.u.ments, people say that he has plundered from the Bourbon papers. This calumny was started in the Inst.i.tute, and is traced to Baron Huchenard, who calls his collection of MSS. 'the first in France,' and hates to be outdone by that of Astier. He tries to revenge himself by treacherous criticisms, launched, like an a.s.segai, from the bush. 'Even my letters of Charles V.,' said Astier, 'even those they want now to prove false. And on what ground if you please? For a mere trifling error, "Maitre Rabelais" instead of "Frere Rabelais." As if an emperor's pen never made a slip! It's dishonest, that's what it is!'

And, seeing that I shared his indignation, my good old master grasped me by both hands and said, 'But there! enough of these slanders. Madame Astier told you, I suppose, about your book? There is still a little too much for my taste; but I am pleased with it on the whole.' What there is 'too much' of in my poetry is what he calls 'the weed' of the fancy.

At school he was always at it, plucking it out, and rooting it up. Now, dear Germaine, attend. I give you the last part of our conversation, word for word.

_I._ Do you think, sir, that I have any chance of the Boisseau prize?

_M. A._ After such a book as that, my dear boy, it is not a prize you deserve, but a seat. Loisillon is hard hit; Ripault cannot last much longer. Don't move; leave it to me; henceforward I look upon you as a candidate.

I don't know what I said in reply. I was so confused that I feel still as if I were dreaming. Me, me, in the Academie Francaise! Take good care of yourself, dearest, and get your naughty legs well again; for you must come to Paris on the great occasion, and see your brother, with his sword at his side and his green coat embroidered with palms, take his place among all the greatest men of France! Why, it makes me dizzy now!

So I send you a kiss, and am off to bed.

Your affectionate brother,

ABEL DE FREYDET.

You may imagine that among all these doings I have quite forgotten the seeds, matting, shrubs, and all the rest of my purchases. But I will see about them soon, as I shall stay here some time. Astier-Rehu advised me to say nothing, but to go about in Academic society. To show myself and be seen is the great point.

CHAPTER IV.

'Don't trust them, my dear Freydet. I know that trick; it's the recruiting trick. The fact is, these people feel that their day is past, and that under their cupola they are beginning to get mouldy. The Academie is a taste that is going out, an ambition no longer in fashion.

Its success is only apparent. And indeed for the last few years the distinguished company has given up waiting at home for custom, and comes down into the street to tout. Everywhere, in society, in the studios, at the publishers', in the greenroom, in every literary or artistic centre, you will find the Recruiting-Academician, smiling on young budding talent. "The Academie has its eye on you, my young friend." If a man has got some reputation, and has just written his third or fourth book, like you, then the invitation takes a more direct form. "Don't forget us, my dear fellow; now's your time." Or perhaps, brusquely, with a friendly scolding, "Well, so you don't mean to be one of us." When it's a man in society who is to be caught a translator of Ariosto or a writer of amateur plays, there is a gentler and more insinuating way of playing off the trick. And if our fashionable writer protests that he is not a gun of sufficient calibre, the Recruiting-Academidan brings out the regular phrase, that "the Academie is a club." Lord bless us, how useful that phrase has been! "The Academie is a club, and its admission is not only for the work, but the worker." Meantime the Recruiting-Academician is welcomed everywhere, made much of, asked to dinner and other entertainments. He becomes a parasite, fawned upon by those whose hopes he arouses--and is careful to maintain.'

But at this point kind-hearted Freydet protested indignantly. Never would his old master lend himself to such base uses. Vedrine shrugged his shoulders: 'Why, the worst of the lot is the recruiter who is sincere and disinterested. He believes in the Academie; his whole life is centred in the Academie; and when he says to you, "If you only knew the joy of it," with a smack of the tongue like a man eating a ripe peach, he is saying what he really means, and so his bait is the more alluring and dangerous. But when once the hook has been swallowed and struck, then the Academician takes no more notice of the victim, but leaves him to struggle and dangle at the end of the line. You are an angler; well, when you have taken a fine perch or a big pike, and you drag it along behind your boat, what do you call that?'

'Drowning your fish.'

'Just so. Well, look at Moser! Does he not look like a drowned fish?

He has been carried along in tow for these ten years. And there's De Salele, and Guerineau, and I don't know how many others, who have even given up struggling.'

'But still people do get into the Academie sooner or later.'

'Not those once taken in tow. And suppose a man does succeed, where's the good? What does it bring you? Money? Not as much as your hay-crop.

Fame? Yes, a hole-and-corner fame within a s.p.a.ce no bigger than your hat. It would be something if it gave talent, but those who have talent lose it when once they get inside and are chilled by the air of the place. The Academie is a club, you know; so there is a tone that must be adopted, and things which must be left unsaid, or watered down. There's an end to originality, an end to bold neck-or-nothing strokes. The liveliest spirits never move for fear of tearing their green coats. It is like putting children into their Sunday clothes and saying "Amuse yourselves, my dears, but don't get dirty." And they do amuse themselves, I can tell you. Of course, they have the adulation of the Academical taverns, and their fair hostesses. But what a bore it is!

I speak from experience, for I have let myself be dragged there occasionally. I can say with old Rehu, "That's a thing I have seen."

Silly pretentious women have favoured me with ill-digested sc.r.a.ps from magazine articles, coming out of their little beaks like the written remarks of characters in a comic paper. I have heard fat, good natured Madame Ancelin, a woman as stupid as anything, cackle with admiration at the epigrams of Danjou, regular stage manufacture, about as natural as the curling of his wig.'

Here was a shock for Freydet: Danjou, the shepherd of Latium, had a wig!

'A half-wig, what they call a _breton_. At Madame Astier's,' he went on, 'I have gone through lectures on ethnology enough to kill a hippopotamus; and at the table of the d.u.c.h.ess, the severe and haughty d.u.c.h.ess, I have seen that old monkey Laniboire, seated in the place of honour, do and say things for which, if he had not been a "deity," he would have been turned out of the house, with a good-bye in her Grace's characteristic style. And the joke is, that it was she who got him into the Academie. She has seen that very Laniboire at her feet, begging humbly, piteously, importunately, to get himself elected, "Elect him,"

she said to my cousin Loisillon, "elect him, do; and then I shall be rid of him." And now she looks up to him as a G.o.d; he is always next her at table; and her contempt has changed into an abject admiration. It is like a savage, falling down and quaking before the idol he has carved.

I know what Academic society is, with all its foolish, ludicrous, mean little intrigues. You want to get into it! What for, I should like to know? You have the happiest life in the world. Even I, who am not set upon anything, was near envying you, when I saw you with your sister at Clos-Jallanges: a perfect house on a hill-side, airy rooms, chimney-corners big enough to get into, oakwoods, cornfields, vineyards, river; the life of a country gentleman, as it is painted in the novels of Tolstoi; fishing and shooting, a pleasant library, a neighbourhood not too dull, the peasants reasonably honest; and to prevent you from growing callous in the midst of such unbroken satisfaction, your companion, suffering and smiling, full of life and keenness, poor thing, in her arm-chair, delighted to listen, when you came in from a ride and read her a good sonnet, genuine poetry, fresh from nature, which you had pencilled on your saddle, or lying flat in the gra.s.s, as we are now--only without this horrible din of waggons and trumpets.'

Vedrine stopped perforce. Some heavy drays, loaded with iron, and shaking ground and houses as they went by, a piercing alarum from the neighbouring barracks, the harsh screech of a steam-tug's whistle, an organ, and the bells of Sainte-Clotilde, all united at the moment, as from time to time the noises of a great town will do, in a thundering _tutti_; and the outrageous babel, close to the ear, contrasted strangely with the natural field of gra.s.s and weed, overshadowed by tall trees, in which the two old cla.s.smates were enjoying their smoke and their familiar chat.

[Ill.u.s.tration: At the corner of the Quai d'Orsay 082]

It was at the corner of the Quai d'Orsay and the Rue de Bellecha.s.se, on the ruined terrace of the old Cour des Comptes, now occupied by sweet wild plants, like a clearing in the forest at the coming of spring.

Clumps of lilac past the flowering and dense thickets of plane and maple grew all along the bal.u.s.trades, which were loaded with ivy and clematis: and within this verdant screen the pigeons lighted, the bees wandered, and under a beam of yellow light might be seen the calm and handsome profile of Madame Vedrine, nursing her youngest, while the eldest threw stones at the numerous cats, grey, black, yellow, and tabby, which might be called the tigers of this Parisian jungle.

'And as we are talking of your poetry, you will wish me to speak my mind, won't you, old boy? Well, I have only just looked into your last book, but it has not that smell of bluebells and thyme that I found in the others. Your "G.o.d in Nature" has rather a flavour of the Academic bay; and I am much afraid you have made a sacrifice of your "woodnotes wild," you know, and thrown them, by way of pa.s.s-money, into the mouth of _Crocodilus_.'

This nickname 'Crocodilus,' turning up at the bottom of Vedrine's schoolboy recollections, amused them for a moment. They pictured once more Astier-Rehu at his desk, with streaming brow, his cap well on the back of his head, and a yard of red ribbon relieved against the black of his gown, emphasising with the solemn movements of his wide sleeves the well-worn joke from Racine or Moliere, or his own rounded periods in the style of Vic't-d'Azir, whose seat in the Academie he eventually filled.

Then Freydet, vexed with himself for laughing at his old master, began to praise his work as an historian. What a ma.s.s of original doc.u.ments he had brought out of their dust!

'There's nothing in that,' retorted Vedrine with unqualified contempt.

In his view, the most interesting doc.u.ments in hands of a fool had no more meaning than has the great book of humanity itself, when consulted by a stupid novelist. The gold all turns into dead leaves. 'Look here,' he went on with rising animation, 'a man is not to be called an historian because he has expanded unpublished material into great octavo volumes, which are shelved unread among the books of information, and should be labelled, "For external application only. Shake the bottle." It is only French frivolity that attaches a serious value to compilations like those. The English and Germans despise us.

"Ineptissimus vir Astier-Rehu," says Mommsen somewhere or other in a note.'

'Yes, and it was you, you heartless fellow, who made the poor man read out the note before the whole cla.s.s.'

'And a terrible jaw he gave me. It was nearly as bad as when one day I got so tired of hearing him tell us that the will was a lever, a lever with which you might lift anything anywhere, that I answered him from my place in his own voice: "Could you fly with it, sir--could you fly with it?"'

Freydet, laughing, abandoned his defence of the historian, and began to plead for Astier-Rehu as a teacher. But Vedrine went off again.

'A teacher! What is he? A poor creature who has spent his life in "weeding" hundreds of brains, or, in plain terms, destroying whatever in them was original and natural, all the living germs which it is the first duty of an educator to nourish and protect. To think how the lot of us were hoed, and stubbed, and grubbed! One or two did not take kindly to the process, but the old fellow went at it with his tools and his nails, till he made us all as neat and as flat as a schoolroom bench. And see the results of his workmanship! A few rebels, like Herscher, who, from hatred of the conventional, go for exaggeration and ugliness, or like myself, who, thanks to that old a.s.s, love roughness and contortion so much, that my sculpture, they say, is "like a bag of walnuts." And the rest of them levelled, sc.r.a.ped, and empty!'

'And pray, what of me?' said Freydet, with an affected despair.

'Oh, as for you, Nature has preserved you so far; but look out for yourself if you let Crocodilus clip you again. And to think that we have public schools to provide us with this sort of pedagogue, and that we reward him with endowments, and honours, and a place (save the mark) in the National Inst.i.tute!'

Stretched at his ease in the long gra.s.s, with his head on his arm and waving a fern, which he used as a sun-screen, Vedrine calmly uttered these strong remarks, without the slightest play of feature in his broad face, pale and puffy like that of an Indian idol. Only the tiny laughing eyes broke the general expression of dreamy indolence.

His companion was shocked at such treatment of what he was accustomed to respect 'But,' he said, 'if you are such an enemy of the father, how do you manage to be such a friend of the son?'

'I am no more one than the other. I look upon Paul Astier, with his imperturbable _sang-froid_ and his pretty-miss complexion, as a problem.

I should like to live long enough to see what becomes of him.'

'Ah, Monsieur de Freydet,' said Madame Vedrine, joining in the conversation from the place where she sat, 'if you only knew what a tool he makes of my husband! All the restorations at Mousseaux, the new gallery towards the river, the concert-room, the chapel, all were done by Vedrine. And the Rosen tomb too. He will only be paid for the statue; but the whole thing is really his--conception, arrangement, everything.'

'There, there, that will do,' said the artist quietly. 'As for Mousseaux, the young fellow would certainly have been hard put to it to rediscover a fragment of the design under the layers of rubbish that the architects have been depositing there for the last thirty years. But the neighbourhood was charming, the d.u.c.h.ess amiable and not at all tiresome, and there was friend Freydet, whom I had found out at Clos-Jallanges.

Besides, the truth is I have too many ideas, and am just tormented with them. To relieve me of a few is to do me a real service. My brain is like a railway junction, where the engines are getting up steam on all the lines at once. The young man saw that. He has not many ideas. So he purloins mine, and brings them before the public, quite certain that I shall not protest But he does not take me in. Don't I know when he is going to filch! He preserves his little indifferent air, with no expression in his eyes, until suddenly there comes a little nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. Done! Nabbed! I have no doubt he thinks to himself, "Good Lord, what a simpleton Vedrine is!" He has not the least notion that I watch him and enjoy his little game. Now,' said the sculptor as he got up, 'I will show you my Knight, and then we will go over the ruin. It is worth looking at, you will find.'

Pa.s.sing from the terrace into the building, they mounted a semicircle of steps and went through a square room, formerly the apartment of the Secretary to the Conseil d'Etat. It had no floor and no ceiling, all the upper storeys had fallen through and showed the blue sky between the huge iron girders, now twisted by the fire, which had divided the floors. In a corner, against a wall to which were attached long iron pipes overgrown with creepers, lay in three pieces a model of the Rosen tomb, buried in nettles and rubbish.

'You see,' said Vedrine, 'or rather you can't see.' And he began to describe the monument. The little Princess's conception of a tomb was not easy to come up to. Several things had been tried--reminiscences of Egyptian, a.s.syrian, and Ninevite monuments--before deciding on Vedrine's plan, which would raise an outcry among architects, but was certainly impressive. A soldier's tomb: an open tent with the canvas looped back, disclosing within, before an altar, the wide low sarcophagus, modelled on a camp bedstead, on which lay the good Knight Crusader, fallen for King and Creed; beside him his broken sword, and at his feet a great greyhound.