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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Alphonse Daudet's "Numa Roumestan" is a vivid exploration of ambition, social aspiration, and the complexities of human relationships set against the backdrop of post-Imperial France. This masterfully woven narrative employs Daudet's signature naturalistic style, characterized by meticulous attention to the protagonist's emotional landscape and the societal influences shaping his journey. Through the lens of a charming yet flawed hero, Numa Roumestan, Daudet delves into the intricacies of the Parisian social stratification, illustrating the palpable tension between personal desire and societal expectation in a rapidly changing world. Alphonse Daudet, a prominent figure in 19th-century French literature, was deeply influenced by his experiences in the artistic and political climate of France. The son of a successful silk manufacturer, his early life in the south of France and subsequent move to Paris exposed him to diverse societal layers, providing ample inspiration for his works. Daudet'Äôs keen observations of human behavior and intricate depictions of character dynamics are paramount in "Numa Roumestan," showcasing his ability to capture the zeitgeist of his time while exploring universal themes. This engaging narrative is highly recommended for readers interested in the intersection of personal ambition and societal dynamics. "Numa Roumestan" promises to captivate those who appreciate richly drawn characters and profound insights into the human experience, making it a must-read within the canon of French literature.
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Numa Roumestan
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.TO THE ARENA!
That Sunday—it was a scorching hot Sunday in July at the time of the yearly competitions for the department—there was a great open-air festival held in the ancient amphitheatre of Aps in Provence. All the town was there—the weavers from the New Road, the aristocrats of the Calade quarter, and some people even came all the way from Beaucaire.
“Fifty thousand persons at the lowest estimate,” said the Forum in its account the next day; but then we must allow for Provençal puffing.
The truth was that an enormous crowd was crushed together upon the sun-baked stone benches of the old amphitheatre, just as in the palmy days of the Antonines, and it was evident that the meet of the Society of Agriculture was far from being the main attraction to this overflow of the folk. Something more than the Landes horse-races was needed, or the prize-fights for men and “half men,” the athletic games of “strangle the cat” and “jump the swineskin,” or the contests for fifers and tabor-players, as old a story to the townspeople as the ancient red stones of the Arena; something more was needed to keep this multitude standing for two hours under that blinding, murderous sun, upon those burning flags, breathing in an atmosphere of flame and dust flavored with gunpowder, risking blindness, sunstroke, fevers and all the other dangers and tortures attendant on what is called down there in Provence an open-air festival.
The grand attraction of the annual competitions was Numa Roumestan.
Ah, well; the proverb “No man is a prophet” etc. is certainly true when applied to painters and poets, whose fellow-countrymen in fact are always the last to acknowledge their claims to superiority for whatever is ideal and lacking in tangible results; but it does not apply to statesmen, to political or industrial celebrities, those mighty advertised fames whose currency consists of favors and influence, fames that reflect their glory on city and townsmen in the form of benefits of every sort and kind.
For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence; for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and gesticulatory caresses.
When he comes each summer during the vacation of the Chamber of Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station! There are the Orpheons swelling out their embroidered banners as they intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting, seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step farther.
From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against the white walls.
The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then delegations arrive from the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held high under their Arlesian caps.
The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the “Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals of a voice that belongs to the popular god.
Not a prophet in his own country? ’Twas only necessary to look at the Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below, and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over an “i.”
“Diou! qu’es bèou! God! how beautiful he is!”
“He is a bit stouter than he was last year.”
“That makes him look all the more imposing.”
“Don’t push so! there is room for everybody!”
“Look at him, my son; there’s our Numa. When you are grown up you can say that you have seen him, qué!”
“His Bourbon nose is all there! and not one of his teeth missing!”
“Not a single gray hair, either!”
“Té, I should say not! he is not so very old yet. He was born in ’32—the year that Louis Philippe pulled down the mission crosses, pecaïré!”
“That scoundrel of a Philippe!”
“They scarcely show, those forty-three years of his.”
“Sure enough, they certainly don’t.... Té! here, great star—”
And with a bold gesture a big girl with burning eyes throws a kiss toward him from afar that resounds through the air like the cry of a bird.
“Take care, Zette—suppose his wife should see you.”
“The one in blue, is that his wife?”
No, the lady in blue was his sister-in-law, Mlle. Hortense, a pretty girl just out of the convent, but one, they say, who already straddled a horse just as well as a dragoon. Mme. Roumestan was more dignified, more thoroughbred in appearance, but she looked much haughtier. These Parisian ladies think so much of themselves! And so, with the picturesque impudence of their half-Latin language, the women, standing and shading their eyes with their hands, proceeded in loud voices deliberately to pick the two Parisians to pieces—their simple little travelling hats, their close-fitting dresses worn without jewelry, which were so great a contrast to the local toilettes, in which gold chains and red and green skirts puffed out by enormous bustles prevailed.
The men talked of the services rendered by Numa to the good cause, of his letter to the Emperor, and his speeches for the White Flag. Oh, if we had only a dozen men in the Chamber like him, Henry V would have been on his throne long ago!
Intoxicated by this circumambient enthusiasm and wrought up by these remarks, Numa could not remain quiet in one spot. He threw himself back in his great arm-chair, his eyes shut, his expression ecstatic, and swayed himself restlessly back and forth; then, rising, he strode up and down the platform and leaned over toward the arena to breathe in as it were all the light and cries, and then returned to his seat. Jovial and unceremonious, his necktie loose, he knelt on his chair, his back and his boot-soles turned to the crowd, and conversed with his Paris ladies seated above and behind him, trying to inoculate them with his own joy and satisfaction.
Mme. Roumestan was bored—that was evident from the expression of abstracted indifference on her face, which though beautiful in lines seemed cold and a little haughty when not enlivened by the light of two gray eyes, two eyes like pearls, true Parisian eyes, and by the dazzling effect of the smile on her slightly open mouth.
All this southern gayety, made up of turbulence and familiarity, and this wordy race all on the outside and the surface, whose nature was so much the opposite of her own, which was serious and self-contained, grated on her perhaps unconsciously, because she saw in them multiplied and vulgarized the same type as that of the man at whose side she had lived ten years, whom she had learned to know to her cost. The glaring hot blue sky, so excessively brilliant and vibrating with heat, was also not to her liking. How could these people breathe? Where did they find breath enough to shout so? She took it into her head to speak her thought aloud, how delightful a nice gray misty sky of Paris would be, and how a fresh spring shower would cool the pavements and make them glisten!
“Oh, Rosalie, how can you talk so!”
Her husband and sister were quite indignant, especially her sister, a tall young girl in the full bloom of youth and health, who, the better to see everything, was making herself as tall as possible. It was her first visit to Provence, and yet one might have thought that these shouts and gestures beneath the burning Italian sky had stirred within her some secret fibre, some dormant instinct, her southern origin, in fact, which was revealed in the heavy eyebrows meeting over her houri-like eyes, and her pale complexion, on which the fierce summer sun left not one red mark.
“Do, please, Rosalie!” pleaded Roumestan, who was determined to persuade his wife. “Get up and look at that. Did Paris ever show you anything like that?”
In the vast theatre widening into an ellipse that made a great jag in the blue sky, thousands of faces were packed together on the many rows of benches rising in terraces; bright eyes made luminous points, while bright colored and picturesque costumes spangled the whole mass with butterfly tints. Thence, as from a huge caldron, rose a chorus of joyous shouts, the ringing of voices and the blare of trumpets volatilized, as it were, by the intense light of the sun. Hardly audible on the lower stories, where dust, sand and human breath formed a floating cloud, this din grew louder as it rose and became more distinct and unveiled itself in the purer air. Above all rang out the cry of the milk-roll venders, who bore from tier to tier their baskets draped with white linen: “Li pan ou la, li pan ou la!” (Here’s your milk bread, here’s your milk bread!) The sellers of drinking-water, cleverly balancing their green glazed pitchers, made one thirsty just to hear them cry: “L’aigo es fresco! Quau voù beùre?” (The water’s fresh! Who will drink?)
Up on the highest brim of the amphitheatre, high up, groups of children playing and running noisily added a crown of sharp calls to the mass of noise below, much like a flock of martins soaring high above the other birds.
And over all of it, how wonderful was the play of light and shadow, as with the advance of day the sun turned slowly in the hollow of the vast amphitheatre as it might on the disk of a sundial, driving the crowd along, and grouping it in the zone of shade, leaving empty those parts of the vast structure exposed to a terrible heat—broad stretches of red flags fringed with dry grass where successive conflagrations have left their mark in black.
At times a stone would detach itself in the topmost tier of the ancient monument, and, rolling down from story to story, cause cries of terror and much crowding among the people below, as if the whole edifice were about to crumble; then on the tiers there was a movement like the assault of a raging sea on the dunes, for with this exuberant race the effect of a thing never has any relation to its cause, enlarged as it is by dreams and perceptions that lack all sense of proportion.
Thus peopled and thus animated once more, the ancient ruin seemed to live again, and no longer retain its appearance of a showplace for tourists. Looking thereon, it gave one the sensation of a poem by Pindar recited by a modern Greek, which means a dead language come to life again, having lost its cold scholarly look. The clear sky, the sun like silver turned to vapor, these Latin intonations still preserved in the Provençal idiom, and here and there, particularly in the cheap seats, the poses of the people in the opening of a vaulted passage—motionless attitudes made antique and almost sculptural by the vibration of the air, local types, profiles standing out like those on ancient coins, with the short aquiline nose, broad shaven cheeks and upturned chin that Numa showed; all this filled out the idea of a Roman festival—even to the lowing of the cows from the Landes which echoed through the vaults below—those vaults whence in olden days lions and elephants were wont to issue to the combat. Thus, when the great black hole of the podium, closed by a grating, stood open to the arena all empty and yellow with sand, one almost expected to see wild beasts spring out instead of the peaceful bucolic procession of men and of the animals that had received prizes in the competitions.
At the moment it was the turn of the mules led along in harness, sumptuously arrayed in rich Provençal trappings, carrying proudly their slender little heads adorned with silver bells, rosettes, ribbons and feathers, not in the least alarmed at the fierce cracking of whips clear and sharply cut, swung serpent-like or in volleys by the muleteers, each one standing up full length upon his beast. In the crowd each village recognized its champions and named each one aloud:
“There’s Cavaillon! There’s Maussane!”
The long, richly-colored file rolled its slow length around the arena to the sound of musical bells and jingling, glittering harness, and stopped before the municipal platform and saluted Numa with a serenade of whip-crackings and bells; then passed along on its circular course under the leadership of a fine-looking horseman in white tights and high top-boots, one of the gentlemen of the local club who had planned the function and quite unconsciously had struck a false note in its harmony, mixing provincialism with Provençal things and thus giving to this curious local festival a vague flavor of a procession of riders at Franconi’s circus. However, apart from a few country people, no one paid much attention to him. No one had eyes for anything but the grand stand, crowded just then with persons who wished to shake hands with Numa—friends, clients, old college chums, who were proud of their relations with the great man and wished all the world to see them conversing with him and proposed to show themselves there on the benches, well in sight.
Flood of visitors succeeded flood without a break. There were old men and young men, country gentlemen dressed all in gray from their gaiters to their little hats, managers of shops in their best clothes creased from much lying away in presses, ménagers or farmers from the district of Aps in their round jackets, a pilot from Port St. Louis twirling his big prisoner’s cap in his hands—all bearing their “South” stamped upon their faces, whether covered to the eyes with those purple-black beards which the Oriental pallor of their complexion accentuates, or closely shaven after the ancient French fashion, short-necked ruddy people sweating like terra cotta water coolers; all of them with flaming black eyes sticking well out from the face, gesticulating in a familiar way and calling each other “thee” and “thou”!
And how Roumestan did receive them, without distinction of birth or class or fortune, all with the same unquenchable effusiveness! It was: “Té, Monsieur d’Espalion! and how are you, Marquis?” “Hé bé! old Cabantous, how goes the piloting?” “Delighted to see you, President Bédarride!”
Then came shaking of hands, embraces, solid taps on the shoulder that give double value to words spoken, which are always too cold for the intense feeling of the Provençal. To be sure, the conversations were of short duration. Their “leader” gave but a divided attention, and as he chatted he waved how-d’ye-do with his hand to the new-comers. But nobody resented this unceremonious way of dismissing people with a few kind words: “Yes, yes, I won’t forget—send in your claim—I will take it with me.”
There were promises of government tobacco shops and collectors’ offices; what they did not ask for he seemed to divine; he encouraged timid ambitions and provoked them with kindly words:
“What, no medal yet, my old Cabantous, after you have saved twenty lives? Send me your papers. They adore me at the Navy Department. We must repair this injustice.”
His voice rang out warm and metallic, stamping and separating each word. One would have said that each one was a gold piece rolling out fresh from the mint. And every one went away delighted with this shining coin, leaving the platform with the beaming look of the pupil who has been awarded a prize. The most wonderful thing about this devil of a man was his prodigious suppleness in assuming the air and manner of the person to whom he was speaking, and perfectly naturally, too, apparently in the most unconscious way in the world.
With President Bédarride he was unctuous, smooth in gestures, his mouth fixed affectedly and his arm stretched forth in a magisterial fashion as if he were tossing aside his lawyer’s toga before the judge’s seat. When talking to Colonel Rochemaure he assumed a soldierly bearing, his hat slapped on one side; while with Cabantous he thrust his hands into his pockets, bowed his legs and rolled his shoulders as he walked, just like an old sea-dog. From time to time, between two embraces as it were, he turned to his Parisian guests, beaming and wiping his steaming brow.
“But, my dear Numa!” cried Hortense in a low voice with her pretty laugh, “where will you find all these tobacco shops you have been promising them?”
Roumestan bent his large head with its crop of close curling hair slightly thinned at the top and whispered: “They are promised, little sister, not given.”
And, fancying a reproach in his wife’s silence, he added:
“Do not forget that we are in Provence, where we understand each other’s language. All these good fellows understand what a promise is worth. They don’t expect to get the shops any more positively than I count on giving them. But they chatter about them—which amuses them—and their imaginations are at work: why deprive them of that pleasure? Besides, you must know that among us Southerners words have only a relative meaning. It is merely putting things in their proper focus.” The phrase seemed to please him, for he repeated several times the final words, “in their proper focus—in their proper focus—”
“I like these people,” said Hortense, who really seemed to be amusing herself immensely; but Rosalie was not to be convinced. “Still, words do signify something,” she murmured very seriously, as if communing with her own soul.
“My dear, it is a simple question of latitude.” Roumestan accompanied his paradox with a jerk of the shoulder peculiar to him, like that of a peddler putting up his pack. The great orator of the aristocracy retained several personal tricks of this kind, of which he had never been able to break himself—tricks that might have caused him in another political party to seem a representative of the common folk; but it was a proof of power and of singular originality in those aristocratic heights where he sat enthroned between the Prince of Anhalt and the Duc de la Rochetaillade. The Faubourg St. Germain went wild over this shoulder-jerk coming from the broad stalwart back that carried the hopes of the French monarchy.
If Mme. Roumestan had ever shared the illusions of the Faubourg she did so no longer, judging from her look of disenchantment and the little smile with which she listened to her husband’s words, a smile paler with melancholy than with disdain. But he left them suddenly, attracted by the sound of some peculiar music that came to them from the arena below. The crowd in great excitement was on its feet shouting “Valmajour! Valmajour!”
Having taken the musicians’ prize the day before, the famous Valmajour, the greatest taborist of Provence, had come to honor Numa with his finest airs. In truth he was a handsome youth, this same Valmajour, as he stood in the centre of the arena, his coat of yellow wool hanging from one shoulder and a scarlet belt standing out against the white linen of his shirt. Suspended from his left arm he carried his long light tabor by a strap and with his left hand held a small fife to his lips, while with his right hand and his right leg held forward he played on his tabor with a brave and gallant air. The fife, though but small, filled the whole place like a chorus of locusts; appropriate music in this limpid crystalline atmosphere in which all sounds vibrate, while the deep notes of the tabor supported this peculiar singing and its many variations.
The sound of the wild, sharp music brought back his childhood to Numa more vividly than anything else that he had seen that day; he saw himself a little Provence boy running about to country fairs, dancing under the leafy shadow of the plane-trees, on village squares, in the white dust of the highroads, or over the lavender flowers of sun-parched hillsides. A delicious emotion passed through his eyes, for, notwithstanding his forty years and the parching effects of political life, he still retained a good portion of imagination, thanks to the kindliness of nature, a surface-sensibility that is so deceptive to those who do not know the true bottom of a man’s character.
And besides, Valmajour was not an everyday taborist, one of those common minstrels who pick up music-hall catches and odds and ends of music at country fairs, degrading their instrument by trying to cater to modern taste. Son and grandson of taborists, he played only the songs of his native land, songs crooned during night watches over cradles by grandmothers; and these he did know; he never wearied of them. After playing some of Saboly’s rhythmical Christmas carols arranged as minuets and quadrilles, he started the “March of the Kings,” to the tune of which, during the grand epoch, Turenne conquered and burned the Palatinate. Along the benches where but a moment before one heard the humming of popular airs like the swarming of bees, the delighted crowd began keeping time with their arms and heads, following the splendid rhythm which surged along through the grand silences of the theatre like mistral, that mighty wind; silences only broken by the mad twittering of swallows that flew about hither and thither in the bluish green vault above, disquieted, and as it were crazy, as if trying to discover what unseen bird it was that gave forth these wonderfully high and sharp notes.
When Valmajour had finished, wild shouts of applause burst forth. Hats and handkerchiefs flew into the air. Numa called the musician up to the platform, and throwing his arms around his neck exclaimed: “You have made me weep, my boy.” And he showed his big golden-brown eyes all swimming in tears.
Very proud to find himself in such exalted company, among embroidered coats and the mother-of-pearl handles of official swords, the musician accepted these praises and embraces without any great embarrassment. He was a good-looking fellow with a well shaped head, broad forehead, beard and moustache of lustrous black against a swarthy skin, one of those proud peasants from the valley of the Rhône who have none of the artful humility of the peasants of central France.
Hortense had noticed at once how delicately formed were his hands under their covering of sunburn. She examined the tabor with its ivory-tipped drum-stick and was astonished at the lightness of the old instrument, which had been in his family for two hundred years, and whose case curiously carved in walnut wood, decked with light carvings, polished, thin and sonorous, seemed to have grown pliable under the patina time had lent it. They admired above all the little old fife, that simple rustic flute with three stops only, such as the ancient taborists used, to which Valmajour had returned out of respect for tradition and the management of which he had conquered after infinite pains and patience. Nothing more touching than to hear the little tale of his struggles and victory in an odd sort of French.
“It come to me in the night,” he said, “as I listened me to the nightingawles. Thought I in meself—look there, Valmajour, there’s a little birrd o’ God whose throat alone is equal to all the trills. Now, what he can do with one stop, can’t you accomplish with the three holes in your little flute?”
He talked quietly, with a perfectly confident tone of voice, without a suspicion of being ridiculous. No one indeed would have dared to smile in the face of Numa’s enthusiasm, for he was throwing up his arms and stamping so that he almost went through the platform. “How handsome he is! What an artist!” And after him the Mayor and President Bédarride and the General and M. Roumavage, the big brewer from Beaucaire, vice-consul of Peru, tightly buttoned into a carnival costume all over silver, echoed the sentiments of the leader, repeating in convinced tones: “What a great artist!”
Hortense agreed with them, and in her usual impulsive manner expressed her sentiments: “Oh, yes, a great artist indeed” while Mme. Roumestan murmured “You will turn his head, poor fellow.”
But there seemed to be no fear of this for Valmajour, to judge by his tranquil air; he was not even in the least excited on hearing Numa suddenly exclaim:
“Come to Paris, my boy, your fortune is assured!”
“Oh, my sister never would let me go,” he explained with a quiet smile.
His mother was dead and he lived with his father and sister on a farm that bore the family name some three leagues distant from Aps on the Cordova mountain. Numa swore he would go to see him before he returned to Paris; he would talk to his relations—he was sure to make it a go.
“And I will help you, Numa,” said a girlish voice behind him.
Valmajour bowed without speaking, turned on his heel and walked down the broad carpet of the platform, his tabor under his arm, his head held high and in his gait that light, swaying motion of the hips common to the Provençal, a lover of dancing and rhythm. Down below his comrades were waiting for him and shook him by the hand.
Suddenly a cry arose, “The farandole, the farandole,” a shout without end doubled by the echoes of the stone passages and corridors from which the shadows and freshness seemed to come which were now invading the arena and ever diminishing the zone of sunlight. In a moment the arena was crowded, crammed to suffocation with merry dancers, a regular village crowd of girls in white neckscarfs and bright dresses, velvet ribbons nodding on lace caps, and of men in braided blouses and colored waistcoats.
At the signal from the tabor that mob fell into line and filed off in bands, holding each other’s hands, their legs all eager for the steps. A prolonged trill from the fife made the whole circus undulate, and led by a man from Barbantane, a district famous for its dancers, the farandole slowly began its march, unwinding its rings, executing its figures almost on one spot, filling with its confused noise of rustling garments and heavy breathing the huge vaulted passage of the outlet in which, bit by bit, it was swallowed up.
Valmajour followed them with even steps, solemnly, managing his long tabor with his knee, while he played louder and louder upon the fife, as the closely packed crowd in the arena, already plunged in the bluish gray of the twilight, unwound itself like a bobbin filled with silk and gold thread.
“Look up there!” said Roumestan all of a sudden.
It was the head of the line of dancers pouring in through the arches of the second tier, while the musician and the last line of dancers were still stepping about in the arena. As it proceeded the farandole took up in its folds everybody whom the rhythm forced to join in the dance. What Provençal could have resisted the magic flute of Valmajour? Upborne and shot forward by the rebounding undernote of the tabor, his music seemed to be playing on every tier at the same time, passing the gratings and the open donjons, overtopping the cries of the crowd. So the farandole climbed higher and higher, and reached at last the uppermost tier, where the sun was yet glowing with a tawny light. The outlines of the long procession of dancers, bounding in their solemn dance, etched themselves against the high panelled bays of the upper tier in the hot vibration of that July afternoon, like a row of fine silhouettes or a series of bas-reliefs in antique stone on the sculptured pediment of some ruined temple.
Down below on the deserted platform—for people were beginning to leave and the lower tiers were empty—Numa said to his wife as he wrapped a lace shawl about her to protect her from the evening chill:
“Now, really, is it not beautiful?”
“Very beautiful,” answered the Parisian, moved this time to the depths of her artistic nature.
And the great man of Aps seemed prouder of this simple word of approbation than of all the noisy homage with which he had been surfeited for the last two hours.
CHAPTER II.THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN.
Numa Roumestan was twenty-two years old when he came to Paris to complete the law studies which he had begun at Aix. At that time he was a good enough kind of a fellow, light-hearted, boisterous, full-blooded, with big, handsome, prominent eyes of a golden-brown color and somewhat frog-like, and a heavy mop of naturally curling hair which grew low on his forehead like a woollen cap without a visor. There was not the shadow of an idea, not the ghost of an ambition beneath that encroaching thatch of his. He was a typical Aix student, a good billiard and card player, without a rival in his capacity for drinking champagne and “going on the cat-hunt with torches” until three o’clock in the morning through the wide streets of the old aristocratic and Parliamentary town. But he was interested in absolutely nothing. He never read a book nor even a newspaper, and was deep in the mire of that provincial folly which shrugs its shoulders at everything and hides its ignorance under a pretence of plain common-sense.
Arrived in Paris, the Quartier Latin woke him up a little, although there was small reason for it. Like all his compatriots Numa installed himself as soon as he arrived at the Café Malmus, a tall and noisy barrack of a place with three stories of tall windows, as high as those in a department shop, on the corner of the Rue Four Saint Germain. It filled the street with the noise of billiard playing and the vociferations of its clients, a regular horde of savages. The entire South of France loomed and spread itself there; every shade of it! Specimens of the southern French Gascon, the Provençal, the Bordeaux man, the Toulousian and Marseilles man, samples of the Auvergnat and Perigordian Southerner, him of Ariège, of the Ardèche and the Pyrenees, all with names ending in “as,” “us” and “ac,” resounding, sonorous and barbarous, such as Etcheverry, Terminarias, Bentaboulech, Laboulbène—names that sounded as if hurled from the mouth of a blunderbuss or exploded as from a powder mine, so fierce were the ejaculations. And what shouts and wasted breath merely to call for a cup of coffee; what resounding laughter, like the noise of a load of stones shunted from a cart; what gigantic beards, too stiff, too black, with a bluish tinge, beards that defied the razor, growing up into the eyes and joining on to the eyebrows, sprouted in little tufts in the broad equine nostrils and ears, but never able utterly to conceal the youth and innocence of these good honest faces hidden beneath such tropical growths.
When not at their lectures, which they attended conscientiously, these students passed their entire time at Malmus’s, falling naturally into groups according to their provinces or even their parishes, seated around the same old tables handed down to them by tradition, which might have retained the twang of their patois in the echoes of their marble tops, just as the desks of school-rooms retain the initials carved on them by school-boys.
Women in that company were few and far between, scarcely two or three to a story, poor girls whom their lovers brought there in a shamefaced way only to pass an evening beside them behind a glass of beer, looking over the illustrated papers, silent and feeling very out of place among these Southern youths who had been brought up to despise lou fémélan—females. Mistresses? Té! By Jove, they knew where to get them whenever they wanted them for an hour or a night; but never for long. Bullier’s ball and the “howlers” did not tempt them, nor the late suppers of the rôtisseuse. They much preferred to stay at Malmus’s, talk patois, and roll leisurely from the café to the schools and then to the table d’hôte.
If they ever crossed the Seine it was to go to the Théâtre Français to a performance of one of the old plays; for the Southerner always has the classic thing in his blood. They would go in a crowd, talking and laughing loudly in the street, though in reality feeling rather timid, and then return silent and subdued, their eyes dazed by the dust of the tragic scenes they had just witnessed, and with closed blinds and gas turned low would have another game before they went to bed.
Sometimes, on the occasion of the graduation of one of their number, an impromptu feed would make the whole house redolent of garlic stews and mountain cheeses smelling strong and rotting nicely in their blue paper wrappers. After his farewell dinner the new owner of a sheepskin would take down from the rack the pipe that bore his initials and sally forth to be notary or deputy in some far-away hole beyond the Loire, there to talk to his friends in the provinces about Paris—Paris which he thought he knew, but in which really he had never set his foot!
In this narrow local circle Numa readily assumed the eagle’s place. To begin with, he shouted louder than the others, and then his music was looked upon as a sign of superiority; at any rate there was some originality in his very lively taste for music. Two or three times a week he treated himself to a stall at the opera and when he came back he overflowed with recitatives and arias, which he sang quite agreeably in a pretty good throaty voice that rebelled against all cultivation. When he strode into the Café Malmus in a theatrical manner, singing some bit of Italian music as he passed the tables, peals of admiration welcomed him: “Hello, old artist!” the boys would shout from every gang. It was just like a club of ordinary citizens in this respect: owing to his reputation as a musical artist all the women gave him a warm look, but the men would use the term enviously and with a suggestion of irony. This artistic fame did him good service later when he came to power and entered public life. Even now the name of Roumestan figures high on the list of all artistic commissions, plans for popular operas, reforms in exhibitions of paintings proposed in the Chamber of Deputies. All that was the result of evenings spent in haunting the music-halls. He learned there self-confidence, the actor’s pose, and a certain way of taking up a position three-quarters front when talking to the lady at the cashier’s desk; then his wonder-struck comrades would exclaim: “Oh! de ce Numa, pas moins!” (Oh, that Numa! what a fellow he is!)
In his studies he had the same easy victory; he was lazy and hated study and solitude, but he managed to pass his examination with no little success through sheer audacity and Southern slyness, the slyness which made him discover the weak spot in his professor’s vanity and work it for all it was worth. Then his pleasant, frank expression and his amiability were also in his favor, and it seemed as if a lucky star lighted the pathway before him.
As soon as he obtained his lawyer’s diploma his parents sent for him to return home, because the slender pocket money which he cost them meant privations they could no longer bear. But the prospect of burying himself alive in the old dead town of Aps crumbling to dust with its ancient ruins, an existence composed of a humdrum round of visits and nothing more exciting than a few lawsuits over a parcel of party-walls, held out no inducements to that undefined ambition that the southern youth vaguely felt underlying his love for the stir and intellectual life of Paris.
With great difficulty he obtained an extension of two years more, in which to complete his studies, and just as these two years had expired and the irrevocable summons home had come, at the house of the Duchesse de San Donnino he met Sagnier during a musical function to which he had been asked on account of his pretty voice—Sagnier, the great Sagnier, the Legitimist lawyer, brother of the duchess and a musical monomaniac. Numa’s youthful enthusiasm appearing in the monotonous round of society and his craze for Mozart’s music carried Sagnier off his feet. He offered him the position of fourth secretary in his office. The salary was merely nominal, but it was being admitted into the employment of the greatest law office in Paris, having close relations with the Faubourg Saint Germain and also with the Chamber of Deputies. Unluckily old Roumestan insisted on cutting off his allowance, hoping to force him to return when hunger stared him in the face. Was he not twenty-six, a notary, and fit to earn his own bread? Then it was that landlord Malmus came to the front.
A regular type was this Malmus; a large, pale-faced, asthmatic man, who from being a mere waiter had become the proprietor of one of the largest restaurants in Paris, partly by having credit, partly by usury. It had been his custom in early days to advance money to the students when they were in need of it, and then when their ships came in, allow himself to be repaid threefold. He could hardly read and could not write at all; his accounts were kept by means of notches cut in a piece of wood, as he had seen the baker boys do in his native town of Lyon; but he was so accurate that he never made a mistake in his accounts, and, more than all, he never placed his money badly. Later, when he had become rich and the proprietor of the house in which he had been a servant for fifteen years, he established his business, and placed it entirely upon a credit basis, an unlimited credit that left the money-drawer empty at the close of the day but filled his queerly kept books with endless lines of orders for food and drink jotted down with those celebrated five-nibbed pens which are held in such sovereign honor in the world of Paris trade.
And the honest fellow’s system was simplicity itself. A student kept all his pocket money, all his allowance from home. All had full credit for meals and drinks and favorites were even allowed a room in his house. He did not ask for a penny during term time, letting the interest mount up on very high sums. But he did not do this carelessly or without circumspection. Malmus passed two months every year, his vacation, in the provinces, making secret inquiry into the health and wealth of the families of his debtors. His asthma was terrible as he mounted the peaks of the Cévennes and descended the low ranges of Languedoc. He was to be seen, gouty and mysterious, prowling about among forgotten villages, with suspicious eyes lowering under the heavy lids that are peculiar to waiters in all-night restaurants. He would remain a few days in each place, interview the notary and the sheriff, inspect secretly the farm or factory of his debtor’s father, and then nothing was heard of him more.
What he learned at Aps gave him full confidence in Numa. The latter’s father, formerly a weaver, had ruined himself with inventions and speculations and lived now in modest circumstances as an insurance agent, but his aunt, Mme. Portal, the childless widow of a rich town councillor, would doubtless leave all her property to her nephew; so, naturally, Malmus wished Numa to remain in Paris.
“Go into Sagnier’s office; I will help you.”
As a secretary of a man in Sagnier’s position he could not live in the Quartier Latin, so Malmus furnished a set of bachelor chambers for him on the Quai Voltaire, on the courts, paying the rent and giving him his allowance on credit. Thus did the future leader face his destiny, everything on the surface seemingly easy and comfortable, but in reality in the direst need; lacking pin and pocket money. The friendship of Sagnier helped him to fine acquaintances. The Faubourg welcomed him. But this social success, the invitations in Paris and to country houses in summer, where he had to arrive in perfect fashionable outfit, only added to his expense. After repeated prayers his Aunt Portal helped him a little, but with great caution and stinginess, always accompanying her gifts with long flighty stupidities and Bible denunciations against “that ruinous Paris.” The situation was untenable.
At the end of a year he looked for other employment. Besides, Sagnier required pioneers, regular navvies for hard work, and Roumestan was not that sort of man. The Provençal’s indolence was ineradicable, and above all things he had a loathing for office work or any hard and continuous labor. The faculty of attention, which is nothing if not deep, was absolutely wanting to this volatile Southerner. That was because his imagination was too vivid, his ideas too jumbled-up beneath his dark brows, his mind too fickle, as even his writing showed; it was never twice the same. He was all on the surface, all voice, gestures, like a tenor at the opera.
“When I am not speaking I cannot think,” he said naïvely, and it was true. Words with him never rushed forth propelled by the force of his thought; on the contrary, at the mechanical sound of his own words the thoughts formed themselves in advance. He was astonished and amused at chance meetings of words and ideas in his mind which had been lost in some corner of his memory, thoughts which speech would discover, pick up and marshal into arguments. Whilst he held forth he would suddenly discover emotions of which he had been unconscious; the vibrations of his own voice moved him to such a degree that there were certain intonations which touched his heart and affected him to tears. These were the qualities of an orator, to be sure, but he did not recognize them, as his duties at Sagnier’s had hardly been such as to give him a chance to practise them.
Nevertheless, the year spent with the great Legitimist lawyer had a decisive effect upon his after life. He acquired convictions and a political party, the taste for politics and a longing for fortune and glory.
Glory came to him first.
A few months after he left his master, that title of “Secretary to Sagnier,” which he clung to as an actor who has appeared once on the boards of the Comédie Française forever calls himself “of the Comédie Française,” was the means of getting him his first case, the defence of a little Legitimist newspaper called “The Ferret,” much patronized in the best society. His defence was cleverly and brilliantly made. Coming into court without the slightest preparation, his hands in his pockets, he talked for two hours with such an insolent “go” to him, and so much good-natured sarcasm, that the judges were forced to listen to him to the end. His dreadful southern accent, with its rolling “r’s,” which he had always been too indolent to correct, seemed to make his irony only bite the deeper. It had a power of its own, this eloquence with its very Southern swing, theatrical and yet familiar, but above all lucid and full of that broad light which is found in the works of people down South, as in their landscapes, limpid to their remotest parts.
Of course the paper was non-suited; Numa’s success was paid for by costs and imprisonment. So from the ashes of many a play that has ruined manager and author one actor may snatch a reputation. Old Sagnier, who had come to hear Numa plead, embraced his pupil before the assembled crowd. “Count yourself from this day on a great man, my dear Numa!” said he, and seemed surprised that he had hatched such a falcon’s egg. But the most surprised man was Numa himself, as with the echo of his own words still sounding in his ears he descended the broad railless staircase of the Palais de Justice, quite stunned, as if in a dream.
After this success and this ovation, after showers of eulogistic letters and the jaundiced smiles of his brethren, the coming lawyer naturally felt he was indeed launched upon a triumphal career. He sat patiently waiting in his office looking out on the courtyard, before his scanty little fire; but nothing came save a few more invitations to dinner, and a pretty bronze from the foundry of Barbédienne, a donation from the staff of Le Furet.
The new great man found himself still facing the same difficulties, the same uncertain future. Oh! these professions called liberal, which cannot decoy and entrap their clients, how hard are their beginnings, before serious and paying customers come to sit in rows in their little rooms furnished on credit with dilapidated furniture and the symbolical clock on the chimney-piece flanked by tottering candelabra! Numa was driven to giving lessons in law among his Catholic and Legitimist acquaintances; but he considered work like this beneath the dignity of the man whose name had been so covered with glory by the party newspapers.
What mortified him most of all and made him feel his wretched plight was to be obliged to go and dine at Malmus’s when he had no invitation elsewhere, and no money for a dinner at a fashionable restaurant. Nothing had changed at Malmus’s; the same cashier’s lady was enthroned among the punch-bowls as of old; the same pottery stove rumbled away near the old pipe-rack; the same shouts and accents, the same black beards from every section of the South prevailed; but his generation had passed, and he looked on the new generation with the disfavor which a man at maturity, but without a position, feels for the youths who make him seem old.
How could he have existed in so brainless a set? Surely the students of his day could not have been such fools! Even their admiration, their fawning round him like a lot of good-natured dogs, was insupportable to him.
While he ate, Malmus, proud of his guest, came and sat on the little red sofa which shook under his fits of asthma, and talked to him, while at a table near by a tall, thin woman took her place, the only relic of the old days left—a bony creature destitute of age known in the quarter as “everyone’s old girl.” Some kind-hearted student now married and settled far away had opened a credit for her at Malmus’s before he went. Confined for so many years to this one pasture, the poor creature knew nothing of what was going on in the outside world; she had not even heard of Numa’s triumph, and spoke to him pityingly as to one whom fortune had passed by, and in the same rank and category as herself.
“Well, poor old chum, how are things a-getting on? You know Pompon is married, and Laboulbène has passed his deputy at Caen.”
Roumestan hardly answered a word, hurried through his dinner and rushed away through the streets, noisy with many beershops and fruit stalls, feeling the bitterness of a life of failure and a general impression of bankruptcy.
Several years passed thus, during which his name became better known and more firmly established, but with little profit to himself, except for an occasional gift of a copy of some statuette in Barbédienne bronze. Then he was called upon to defend a manufacturer of Avignon, who had made seditious silk handkerchiefs. There was some sort of a deputation pictured on them standing about the Comte de Chambord, but very confusedly done in the printing, only with great imprudence he had allowed the initials “H. V.” (Henry Fifth) to be left, surrounded by a coat of arms.
Here was Numa’s chance for a good bit of comedy. He thundered against the stupidity that could see the slightest political allusion in that H. V.! Why, that meant Horace Vernet—there he was, presiding over a meeting of the French Institute!
This “tarasconade” had a great local success that did him more service than any advertisement won in Paris could; above all, it gained him the active approbation of his Aunt Portal. At first this was expressed by presents of olive oil and white melons, followed by a lot of other articles of food—figs, peppers, potted ducks from Aix, caviar from Martigues, jujubes, elderberry jam and St. John’s-bread, a lot of boyish goodies of which the old lady herself was very fond, but which her nephew threw into a cupboard to spoil.
Shortly after arrived a letter, written with a quill in a large handwriting, which displayed the brusque accents and absurd phrases customary with his aunt, and betrayed her puzzle-headed mind by its absolute freedom from punctuation and by the lively way in which she jumped from one subject to the other.
Still, Numa was able to discover the fact that the good woman desired to marry him off to the daughter of a Councillor in the Court of Appeals in Paris, one M. Le Quesnoy, whose wife, a Mlle. Soustelle from Aps, had gone to school with her at the Convent of la Calade—big fortune—the girl handsome, good morals, somewhat cool and haughty—but marriage would soon warm that up. And if the marriage took place, what would his old Aunt Portal give her Numa? One hundred thousand francs in good clinking tin—on the day of the wedding!
Under its provincialisms the letter contained a serious proposition, so serious indeed that the next day but one Numa received an invitation to dine with the Le Quesnoys. He accepted, though with some trepidation.
The Councillor, whom he had often seen at the Palais de Justice, was one of those men who had always impressed him most. Tall, slender, with a haughty face and a mortal paleness, sharp, searching eyes, a thin-lipped, tightly-closed mouth—the old magistrate, who originally came from Valenciennes, seemed like that town to be surrounded by an impregnable wall and fortified by Vauban. His cool Northern manner was most disconcerting to Numa. His high position, gained by his exhaustive study of the Penal Code, his wealth and his spotless life would have given him a yet higher position had it not been for the independence of his views and a morose withdrawal from the world and its gayeties ever since the death of his only son, a lad of twenty. All these circumstances passed before Numa’s mental vision as he mounted the broad stone steps with their carved hand-rail of the Le Quesnoy residence, one of the oldest houses on the Place Royale.
The great drawing-room into which he was shown, with its lofty ceiling reaching down to the doors to meet the delicate paintings of its piers, the straight hangings with stripes in brown and gold-colored Chinese silk framing the long windows that opened upon an antique balcony, and also on one of the rose-colored corners of brick buildings on the square—all this was not calculated to change his first impressions.
But the welcome given him by Mme. Le Quesnoy soon put him at his ease.
This fragile little woman with her sad sweet smile, wrapped in many shawls and crippled by rheumatism, from which she had suffered ever since she came to live in Paris, still preserved the accent and habits of her dear South, and she loved anything that reminded her of it. She invited Numa to sit down by her side, and looking affectionately at him in the dim light, she murmured: “The very picture of Evelina!” This pet name of his aunt, so long unheard by him, touched his quick sensibility like an echo of his childhood. It appeared that Mme. Le Quesnoy had long wished to know the nephew of her old friend, but her house had been so mournful since her son’s death, and they had been so entirely out of the world, that she had never sought him out. Now they had decided to entertain a little, not because their sorrow was less keen, but on account of their two daughters, the eldest of whom was almost twenty years old; and turning toward the balcony whence they could hear peals of girlish laughter, she called, “Rosalie, Hortense, come in—here is Monsieur Roumestan!”
Ten years after that visit Numa remembered the calm and smiling picture that appeared, framed by the long window in the tender light of the sunset, of that beautiful young girl, and the absence of all affected embarrassment as she came towards him, smoothing the bands of her hair that her little sister’s play had ruffled—her clear eyes and direct gaze.
He felt an instant confidence in and sympathy with her.
