Henry Bordeaux

“ As I had been successively born into a mysterious longing by a word of the shepherd who was leading his sheep to the mountain, into the knowledge of liberty by a walk with grandfather in the wild forest, into the sense of beauty by having met the lady in white, into the disquietude of love because Nazzarena had told me with a laugh that I was her little lover, so now I was born into a knowledge of human wickedness, to which all my childhood had been a stranger. ”

“ Eden. “They” were coming into our house as into a mill. “They” were dividing our treasures among themselves as the Greeks divided the spoils of the Trojans. “They?” Who? Aunt Deen’s “they”; I knew no more than that. And in this catastrophe one remark kept coming back to me, incomprehensible, terrifying, and yet not to be put away: What’s the difference whether one lives in one house or in another?
These words of my grandfather, revolting and at the same time stupefying, almost mesmerized me by their audacity, almost made me giddy. ”

“ The picture which he drew was admirably simple: men in their best clothes praising nature and embracing one another like brothers. Rapt in admiration, I would compare him to my music box, the notes of which made a dancer pirouette upon the cover.
At other times Martinod would be gloomy, bitter and vindictive, heaping threats and sarcasms upon the social fabric of the day, unless it were immediately made over after his ideas. In the name of liberty he would give all Europe over to fire and sword. I would listen in terror, but on the way home grandfather would reassure me. ”

“ The Count de Chambord had always seemed to me a legendary personage, as far away and illusory as the chevaliers in the ballads which had thrilled me during my convalescence. To be sure he had not filched the cup of happiness from Titania, the fair queen of the elves, he had not come on a red roan steed to see the young girl of the romance of the Swan’s Nest; but I knew that he was living in exile, endued with the martyr’s aureola, and that he was expected. Aunt Deen never spoke of him except as “our prince,” and raised her head proudly whenever he was mentioned, as if he belonged to her. ”

“ Before my convalescence I should have disagreed with grandfather. The transformation of our garden since our father took the reins of government, the arrangement of the grass-plots, the form of the groves, the harmonious order of the whole, had given me great satisfaction. But our wanderings in the country had by degrees opened my eyes to the beauty of wilder things. A clump of ferns and reeds, a tangle of vines and bushes, rocks crowned with ruddy bracken, and hidden nooks had won my preference, so that I unhesitatingly accepted his view. ”

“ And I used to blush for Tem Bossette’s wooden sabres and the laths that I bestrode. I understood that my feats of horsemanship in the garden were not serious, were not real. Those two redoubtable portraits sometimes puffed me up with pride and again overwhelmed me with their importance. One day when I was gazing upon them with some uneasiness grandfather came by, and with his little dry smile and his most impertinent pursing of the lips, let fall the words,
“Pooh! They are only bad paintings.”
It is dangerous to teach too much esthetics to a child. ”

“ Alone by myself I resumed the walks which a few years before I had taken with grandfather. His friend Jean-Jacques was with me in his stead. These were not the same places, but in natural aspects there was small difference between them. They had the same glamour of wildness, that flutter of vegetation stirred by the slightest breath, the sparkle of waters; and the greater altitude even added a more exhilarating air, farther distances, less accessible to the works of man, a new exaltation. ”

“ Little by little I relinquished all religious practices, building up for myself a sort of mysticism in which I formed a habit of taking refuge. Imagination substituted for my walks in the forest and other wild retreats, and even for my meetings with Nazzarena, a sort of abstract notion of nature and of love in which I found intense joy. I invented elusive landscapes and ideal passions. I was at the age in which one most easily lives in metaphysical chimeras, when ideas are mistaken for affections, and the sensibilities have no need of the spring-board of reality to leap into action. ”

“ How could grandfather rob my father of me?
The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.
“Where are we going, grandfather?”
I inclined to the direction of the town, where we should find attractions of all sorts, shops, bazars, show-windows, faces, noise and movement. ”

“ I knew hares only from having eaten of them on rare occasions of ceremony, though Aunt Deen deplored giving rabbit to children, because of the soiling of napkins and faces. The cry sounded again—nearer us this time.
“He is calling his doe,” whispered grandfather.
“His doe?”
“Yes, his wife. Be quiet.”
It was a gentle call, infinitely tender and languishing. Far away we heard another call, like it, but hardly audible. From opposite sides of the forest the duet went on; and I began to understand that animals, like people, love to see and talk to one another. ”

“ Don’t distress yourself about my health, Valentine. I have never felt myself more robust nor better able to endure fatigue. And I can not help thinking of the useful part which is offered me,—for to be mayor to-day is to be deputy to-morrow: to denounce to the country the gang that is cheating it and fattening upon it, to prepare the public mind for the return of the king—so necessary if we are to recover from defeat. All these plain folk who rely upon me touch my heart, and shake my resolution to hold myself aloof from public life. ”

“ And I ceased to deny the existence of those who surrounded us, “they,” and knew that calamity was impending over us.
A little later in the evening, just before the dinner hour, as the bell rang I went myself to the door, thinking that it might be my brother Stephen, arriving from Rome, whence he had been recalled the previous evening. I saw before me in the shadow, for the vestibule lamp but feebly lighted the doorstep, one of our poor people, old Yes-Yes, with his ever-nodding head. I knew that he was still alive, though Zeeze Million had carried her dreams of fortune with her to the grave. ”

“ Grandfather exclaimed, “Oh! oh!”—and went on in his turn:
“I should like to know what you are blaming me for. I took the boy to walk when he needed it, and instilled into him the love of nature.”
“And not the love of his home.”
“Is it my fault that he prefers my society? I never try to teach, for my part—I don’t go about preaching at all times and seasons subordination, tradition, the principles of religion. I simply have respect for life, for liberty if you prefer the word.”
“But liberty is not life. It destroys everything that should be preserved.” ”

“ Grandfather had not been afraid to condemn his father in my presence. It was the most effective lesson in independence that I had yet received, and this discovery, far from gratifying me, inspired me with fear, and aroused again the feeling of sacrilege which I had felt with respect to the dead man. Irreverence was not liberty. One might scorn and at the same time obey, still, one really had a right to be free, not to accept his father’s ideas, not obey his orders. ”

“ I gave the order to cut down the witness of my first love sorrow. I leaned over the hole which its torn-up roots left in the earth, and was not surprised that it occupied so much room. Now the newly-built wall has closed up the breach, and I feel myself more than ever shut up within my property. As one advances in life, it seems that the surrounding walls draw in.
Nature changes before we do. Nature dies before we do. Little by little we lose all that gave the past its character. Nothing is left to bear witness to the truth of our memories. ”

“ Who would recognise you to-day? Raked, reduced to order, pruned, watered, your alleys sanded, your turf cut close around the flower urns, never flatter yourself that you can dazzle me with your beauty!
When I walk in my garden I still go as I please, trampling down the borders, treading underfoot the grass plots, endangering the flowers, until the new gardener—who by himself alone only too ably replaces Tem Bossette, Mimi Pachoux, and the Hanged—cries out in a voice of consternation:
“Do take care, sir!” ”

“ I did not utter the word in the sense of filial piety, but because his ascendency subjugated me, overawed me. Yes, in this dimly lighted chamber, heavy with the odour of medicines, suffering and fever, that complex odour which is as it were the advance herald of death, I mechanically came back into subordination, as a soldier about to desert returns to his place in the ranks under the eye of his chief. I was aware of this change in myself. That mysticism in which I had so revelled and which isolated me from all the universe, melted away like clouds before the first rays of dawn. ”

“ Every one was on the alert for something to happen, perhaps a bulletin of victory or of disaster, such as comes to a country where the armies are on the frontier.
Alone among these secret parleyings, these evident anxieties, grandfather maintained the most complete indifference. Evidently the approaching event was no affair of his. He played the violin, smoked his pipe, consulted his barometer, inspected the sky, predicted the weather, as if nothing could be more important, and he went regularly for his walk. Nothing was changing, nothing could change for him except the clouds across the sun. ”

“ As at evening one sees the village lights come out, one by one, along the slopes, so I could see the lights of our house shining out even beyond our own horizon, to the ends of the world, and even beyond the world. They were shining for the absent as well as for the present, for Mélanie at the bedside of the poor, for Stephen at Rome, and for Bernard, soldier of the outposts in his far distant colony. ”

“ Yet I was beginning to discern that we have within ourselves an upspringing fountain of infinitely delicate joys.
Did my father distrust these exciting readings as he did grandfather’s music? He brought me short, simple biographies of great men. It is never too early to make acquaintance with such. One forms a habit of comparing himself with the heroes, and doesn’t fail to say to oneself: “I have time before me; when I am their age I mean to have surpassed them....” ”

“ What I loved was the earth, the vast unnamed earth, and not this place or that; most of all I loved the uncultivated places, the wild places in the woods, the copses, the secret nooks, and in less degree the pasture lands, any untilled, unsowed: bit of earth. In the matter of people, I had accepted grandfather’s new gospel which catalogued them as peasants and towns people. The nice people were in the country, whereas towns were inhabited by wicked individuals and notably by bourgeois, who persecute men of genius like my friends of the café. ”

“ In that ill-lighted circus, to the sound of that strange, exciting orchestra, I came to feel the charm of the danger that serves no purpose.
But clowns, rope dancer and even the Marinetti brothers were eclipsed in my imagination as by enchantment, when into the ring there dashed a little horsewoman standing erect upon a black horse whose saddle was large and flat like a table. I had been looking down during the interval, that is why I noticed the horse, for otherwise I should surely have seen only the rider. She wore a robe of gold. ”

“ Our father, at table or in other conversations with us, had never failed to instil into our minds respect and love for the long line of kings who had ruled France, and whom nearly all the bad paintings in the drawing-room, save the grenadier and the latest portraits, had served. He used to talk as often of the power of nations as grandfather of their happiness. Napoleon the Great, whose epic story all school boys know by heart, had ruined the country, but all the same he was the greatest genius of modern times. ”

“ Grandfather having struck up an acquaintance with the circus folk, whom he supplied with tobacco, I found myself again in Nazzarena’s presence. The desire to give her something tortured me, the more so because Fernand de Montraut, an acknowledged judge, had assured me that one always gave presents to ladies. The only embarrassment was the choice of gift. Now I had in a drawer a collection of cornelian marbles which I treasured as if they had been jewels. There were spotted red ones, and black ones with white circles. Nothing that I possessed was more precious to me. ”

“ How strange the resonance that certain syllables have for us! He might have designated by its name the mountain where his flocks were to pasture, and I should not have noticed it, but the unexpected lack of precision communicated to me by some sorcery a longing for the heights. It attacked me as suddenly and unexpectedly as a lightning shock. I had not felt the charm of the wild, bare place from which I was returning with grandfather; but now I was not only instantaneously initiated into it,—I augmented its wildness and isolation. ”

“ In my dreams I was my own master, until such time as life should make me independent. I had discovered the independence of the brain, and that it can supply all that is lacking. And to crown all, I threw myself into music as into an element which takes one’s own shape; plastic and so to say liquid, it lent itself to all my longings with a docility which filled me with wonder. I had come upon the Freischütz and Euryanthe, that forest where the alleys reach beyond sight. ”