The Thirteen Part 15

Jacquet finally succeeded in getting him to leave the great enclosure, divided like a chessboard by iron railings and elegant compartments, in which were tombs decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as cold as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, _concetti_, wittily turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of art,--Moorish, Greek, Gothic,--friezes, ovules, paintings, vases, guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable _immortelles_, and dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy! It is another Paris, with its streets, its signs, its industries, and its lodgings; but a Paris seen through the diminishing end of an opera-gla.s.s, a microscopic Paris reduced to the littleness of shadows, spectres, dead men, a human race which no longer has anything great about it, except its vanity. There Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to the s.p.a.ce comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the gilded cupola of the Invalides:--

"She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and occupation."

Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin the middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a death scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps, with no accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches, without prayers of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity. Here are the facts: The body of a young girl was found early in the morning, stranded on the river-bank in the slime and reeds of the Seine. Men employed in dredging sand saw it as they were getting into their frail boat on their way to their work.

"_Tiens_! fifty francs earned!" said one of them.

"True," said the other.

They approached the body.

"A handsome girl! We had better go and make our statement."

And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went to the house of the village mayor, who was much embarra.s.sed at having to make out the legal papers necessitated by this discovery.

The news of this event spread with the telegraphic rapidity peculiar to regions where social communications have no distractions, where gossip, scandal, calumny, in short, the social tale which feasts the world has no break of continuity from one boundary to another. Before long, persons arriving at the mayor's office released him from all embarra.s.sment. They were able to convert the _proces-verbal_ into a mere certificate of death, by recognizing the body as that of the Demoiselle Ida Gruget, corset-maker, living rue de la Corderie-du-Temple, number 14. The judiciary police of Paris arrived, and the mother, bearing her daughter's last letter. Amid the mother's moans, a doctor certified to death by asphyxia, through the injection of black blood into the pulmonary system,--which settled the matter. The inquest over, and the certificates signed, by six o'clock the same evening authority was given to bury the grisette. The rector of the parish, however, refused to receive her into the church or to pray for her. Ida Gruget was therefore wrapped in a shroud by an old peasant-woman, put into a common pine-coffin, and carried to the village cemetery by four men, followed by a few inquisitive peasant-women, who talked about the death with wonder mingled with some pity.

The widow Gruget was charitably taken in by an old lady who prevented her from following the sad procession of her daughter's funeral. A man of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,--a church well known, a cla.s.sic church, with a square tower and pointed roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner b.u.t.tresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery, enclosed with a dilapidated wall,--a little field full of hillocks; no marble monuments, no visitors, but surely in every furrow, tears and true regrets, which were lacking to Ida Gruget. She was cast into a corner full of tall gra.s.s and brambles. After the coffin had been laid in this field, so poetic in its simplicity, the grave-digger found himself alone, for night was coming on. While filling the grave, he stopped now and then to gaze over the wall along the road. He was standing thus, resting on his spade, and looking at the Seine, which had brought him the body.

"Poor girl!" cried the voice of a man who suddenly appeared.

"How you made me jump, monsieur," said the grave-digger.

"Was any service held over the body you are burying?"

"No, monsieur. Monsieur le cure wasn't willing. This is the first person buried here who didn't belong to the parish. Everybody knows everybody else in this place. Does monsieur--Why, he's gone!"

Some days had elapsed when a man dressed in black called at the house of Monsieur Jules Desmarets, and without asking to see him carried up to the chamber of his wife a large porphyry vase, on which were inscribed the words:--

INVITA LEGE CONJUGI MOERENTI FILIOLAE CINERES RESt.i.tUIT AMICIS XII. JUVANTIBUS MORIBUNDUS PATER.

"What a man!" cried Jules, bursting into tears.

Eight days sufficed the husband to obey all the wishes of his wife, and to arrange his own affairs. He sold his practice to a brother of Martin Falleix, and left Paris while the authorities were still discussing whether it was lawful for a citizen to dispose of the body of his wife.

Who has not encountered on the boulevards of Paris, at the turn of a street, or beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, or in any part of the world where chance may offer him the sight, a being, man or woman, at whose aspect a thousand confused thoughts spring into his mind?

At that sight we are suddenly interested, either by features of some fantastic conformation which reveal an agitated life, or by a singular effect of the whole person, produced by gestures, air, gait, clothes; or by some deep, intense look; or by other inexpressible signs which seize our minds suddenly and forcibly without our being able to explain even to ourselves the cause of our emotion. The next day other thoughts and other images have carried out of sight that pa.s.sing dream. But if we meet the same personage again, either pa.s.sing at some fixed hour, like the clerk of a mayor's office, or wandering about the public promenades, like those individuals who seem to be a sort of furniture of the streets of Paris, and who are always to be found in public places, at first representations or noted restaurants,--then this being fastens himself or herself on our memory, and remains there like the first volume of a novel the end of which is lost. We are tempted to question this unknown person, and say, "Who are you?" "Why are you lounging here?" "By what right do you wear that pleated ruffle, that faded waistcoat, and carry that cane with an ivory top; why those blue spectacles; for what reason do you cling to that cravat of a dead and gone fashion?" Among these wandering creations some belong to the species of the Greek Hermae; they say nothing to the soul; _they are there_, and that is all. Why? is known to none. Such figure are a type of those used by sculptors for the four Seasons, for Commerce, for Plenty, etc. Some others--former lawyers, old merchants, elderly generals--move and walk, and yet seem stationary. Like old trees that are half uprooted by the current of a river, they seem never to take part in the torrent of Paris, with its youthful, active crowd. It is impossible to know if their friends have forgotten to bury them, or whether they have escaped out of their coffins. At any rate, they have reached the condition of semi-fossils.

One of these Parisian Melmoths had come within a few days into a neighborhood of sober, quiet people, who, when the weather is fine, are invariably to be found in the s.p.a.ce which lies between the south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the Observatoire,--a s.p.a.ce without a name, the neutral s.p.a.ce of Paris.

There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue, high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that,--it is a desert.

Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital, the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital La Rochefoucauld, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the Val-de-Grace; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of Paris find their asylum there. And (that nothing may lack in this philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes, Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and the Carmelites have founded a convent. The great events of life are represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert,--for the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that succ.u.mbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded. And a few steps off is the cemetery of Mont-Parna.s.se, where, hour after hour, the sorry funerals of the faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way. This esplanade, which commands a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by bowl-players; it is, in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old gray faces, belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the race of our ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with those of their surroundings.

The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of this desert region, proved an a.s.siduous attendant at these games of bowls; and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature of these various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians to the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk. The new-comer kept sympathetic step with the _cochonnet_,--the little bowl which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must centre. He leaned against a tree when the _cochonnet_ stopped; then, with the same attention that a dog gives to his master's gestures, he looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the _cochonnet_. He said nothing; and the bowl-players--the most fanatic men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith--had never asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most observing of them thought him deaf and dumb.

When it happened that the distances between the bowls and the _cochonnet_ had to be measured, the cane of this silent being was used as a measure, the players coming up and taking it from the icy hands of the old man and returning it without a word or even a sign of friendliness. The loan of his cane seemed a servitude to which he had negatively consented. When a shower fell, he stayed near the _cochonnet_, the slave of the bowls, and the guardian of the unfinished game. Rain affected him no more than the fine weather did; he was, like the players themselves, an intermediary species between a Parisian who has the lowest intellect of his kind and an animal which has the highest.

In other respects, pallid and shrunken, indifferent to his own person, vacant in mind, he often came bareheaded, showing his spa.r.s.e white hair, and his square, yellow, bald skull, like the knee of a beggar seen through his tattered trousers. His mouth was half-open, no ideas were in his glance, no precise object appeared in his movements; he never smiled; he never raised his eyes to heaven, but kept them habitually on the ground, where he seemed to be looking for something. At four o'clock an old woman arrived, to take him Heaven knows where; which she did by towing him along by the arm, as a young girl drags a wilful goat which still wants to browse by the wayside. This old man was a horrible thing to see.

In the afternoon of the day when Jules Desmarets left Paris, his travelling-carriage, in which he was alone, pa.s.sed rapidly through the rue de l'Est, and came out upon the esplanade of the Observatoire at the moment when the old man, leaning against a tree, had allowed his cane to be taken from his hand amid the noisy vociferations of the players, pacifically irritated. Jules, thinking that he recognized that face, felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the carriage came to a standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some handcarts, had too much respect for the game to call upon the players to make way for him.

"It is he!" said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus XXIII., chief of the Devorants. Then, after a pause, he added, "How he loved her!--Go on, postilion."

ADDENDUM

Note: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is ent.i.tled The d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories are usually combined under the t.i.tle The Thirteen.

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bourignard, Gratien-Henri-Victor-Jean-Joseph The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Desmartes, Jules Cesar Birotteau

Desmartes, Madame Jules Cesar Birotteau

Desplein The Atheist's Ma.s.s Cousin Pons Lost Illusions The Government Clerks Pierrette A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Modeste Mignon Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine

Gruget, Madame Etienne The Government Clerks A Bachelor's Establishment

Haudry (doctor) Cesar Birotteau A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Cousin Pons

Langeais, d.u.c.h.esse Antoinette de Father Goriot The d.u.c.h.esse of Langeais

Marsay, Henri de The d.u.c.h.esse of Langeais The Girl with the Golden Eyes The Unconscious Humorists Another Study of Woman The Lily of the Valley Father Goriot Jealousies of a Country Town Ursule Mirouet A Marriage Settlement Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Letters of Two Brides The Ball at Sceaux Modeste Mignon The Secrets of a Princess The Gondreville Mystery A Daughter of Eve

Maulincour, Baronne de A Marriage Settlement

Meynardie, Madame Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de Father Goriot Eugenie Grandet Cesar Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen Another Study of Woman A Daughter of Eve The Member for Arcis

Pamiers, Vidame de The d.u.c.h.esse of Langeais Jealousies of a Country Town

Ronquerolles, Marquis de The Imaginary Mistress The d.u.c.h.ess of Langeais The Girl with the Golden Eyes The Peasantry Ursule Mirouet A Woman of Thirty Another Study of Woman The Member for Arcis

Serizy, Comtesse de A Start in Life The d.u.c.h.esse of Langeais Ursule Mirouet A Woman of Thirty Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Another Study of Woman The Imaginary Mistress

II. THE d.u.c.h.eSSE OF LANGEAIS