Part 3

“If it were not too late, after all?” he murmured. “If I could once more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out my sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap, and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,--I have never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”

He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it, and three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom he labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on the scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his soup at the cheap eating-house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster, but content with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.

* * * * *

At last--supreme recompense!--he had a friend.

It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his stick over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound reserved, disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien, himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course, satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room, fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages enough to buy some land in his own province.

Jean François and Savinien scarcely left each other. On days of rest they took long walks in the environs of Paris and dined in the open air in one of those little country inns where there are plenty of mushrooms in the sauces and innocent enigmas on the bottoms of the plates. There Jean François made his friend tell him all those things of which those born in the cities are ignorant. He learned the names of the trees, the flowers, the plants; the seasons for the different harvests; he listened avidly to the thousand details of a farmer’s labors: the autumn’s sowing, the winter’s work, the splendid _fêtes_ of harvest-home and vintage, and the flails beating the ground, and the noise of the mills by the borders of the streams, and the tired horses led to the trough, and the morning hunting in the mists, and, above all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-branches, shortened by tales of wonder. He discovered in himself a spring of imagination hitherto unsuspected, finding a singular delight in the mere recital of these things, so gentle, calm, and monotonous.

One anxiety troubled him, however, that Savinien should not come to know his past. Sometimes there escaped him a shady word of thieves’ slang, an ignoble gesture, vestiges of his horrible former existence; and then he felt the pain of a man whose old wounds reopen, more especially as he thought he saw then in Savinien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the pleasures which Paris offers even to the poorest, questioned him about the mysteries of the great city, Jean François feigned ignorance and turned the conversation; but he had now conceived a vague inquietude for the future of his friend.

This was not without foundation, and Savinien could not long remain the naïve rustic he had been on his arrival in Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always were repugnant to him, he was profoundly troubled by other desires full of danger for the inexperience of his twenty years. When the spring came, he began to seek solitude, and at first he wandered before the gayly lighted entrances to the dancing-halls, through which he saw the girls going in couples, without bonnets--and with their arms around each other’s waists, whispering low. Then, one evening, when the lilacs shed their perfume, and when the appeal of the quadrille was more entrancing, he crossed the threshold, and after that Jean François saw him change little by little in manners and in visage. Savinien became more frivolous, more extravagant; often he borrowed from his friend his miserable savings, which he forgot to repay. Jean François, feeling himself abandoned, was both indulgent and jealous; he suffered and kept silent. He did not think he had the right to reproach; but his penetrating friendship had cruel and insurmountable presentiments.

One evening when he was climbing the stairs of his lodging, absorbed in his preoccupations, he heard in the room he was about to enter a dialogue of irritated voices, and he recognized one as that of the old man from Auvergne, who lodged with him and Savinien. An old habit of suspicion made him pause on the landing, and he listened to learn the cause of the trouble.

“Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant. This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house, and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find it, no one can accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or I will call the police. Make haste!”

“All right,” said the voice of the householder; “we’ll search with Maria. So much the worse if you find nothing, and if the masons get angry. It is you who have forced me to it.”

Jean François felt his heart fill with fear. He recalled the poverty and the petty borrowings of Savinien, the sombre manner he had borne the last few days. Yet he could not believe in any theft. He heard the panting of the man from Auvergne in the ardor of his search, and he clenched his fists against his breast as if to repress the beatings of his heart.

“There they are!” suddenly screamed the victorious miser. “There they are, my louis, my dear treasure! And in the Sunday waistcoat of that little hypocrite from Limoges. Look, landlord! they are just as I told you. There’s the Napoleon, and the man with the queue, and the Philippe I had dented with my teeth. Look at the mark. Ah, the little rascal with his saintly look! I should more likely have suspected the other. Ah, the villain! He will have to go to the galleys!”

At this moment Jean François heard the well-known step of Savinien, who was slowly mounting the stairs.

“He is going to his betrayal,” thought he. “Three flights. I have time!”

And, pushing open the door, he entered, pale as death, into the room where he saw the landlord and the stupefied servant in a corner, and the man from Auvergne on his knees amid the disordered clothes, lovingly kissing his gold pieces.

“Enough of this,” he said in a thick voice. “It is I who have taken the money and who have put it in my comrade’s trunk. But that is too disgusting. I am a thief and not a Judas. Go hunt for the police. I’ll not try to save myself. Only, I must say a word in private to Savinien, who is here.”

The little man from Limoges had, in fact, just arrived, and, seeing his crime discovered, and believing himself lost, he stood still, his eyes fixed, his arms drooping.

Jean François seized him violently about the neck as though to embrace him; he pressed his mouth to Savinien’s ear and said to him in a voice low and supplicating:

“Be quiet!”

Then, turning to the others:

“Leave me alone with him. I shall not go away, I tell you. Shut us up, if you wish, but leave us alone.”

And, with a gesture of command, he showed them the door. They went out.

Savinien, broken with anguish, had seated himself on a bed, and dropped his eyes without comprehending.

“Listen,” said Jean François, who approached to take his hands. “I understand you have stolen three gold pieces to buy some trifle for a girl. That would have cost six months of prison for you. But one does not get out of that except to go back again, and you would have become a pillar of the police tribunals and the courts of assizes. I know all about them. I have done seven years in the Reform School, one year at Sainte-Pélagie, three years at Poissy, and five years at Toulon. Now, have no fear. All is arranged. I have taken this affair on my shoulders.”

“Unhappy fellow!” cried Savinien; but hope was already coming back to his cowardly heart.

“When the elder brother is serving under the colors, the younger does not go,” Jean François went on. “I’m your substitute, that’s all. You love me a little, do you not? I am paid. Do not be a baby. Do not refuse. They would have caught me one of these days, for I have broken my exile. And then, you see, that life out there will be less hard for me than for you; I know it, and shall not complain if I do not render you this service in vain and if you swear to me that you will not do it again. Savinien, I have loved you well, and your friendship has made me very happy, for it is thanks to my knowing you that I have kept honest and straight, as I might always have been, perhaps, if I had had, like you, a father to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach me my prayers. My only regret was that I was useless to you and that I was deceiving you about my past. To-day I lay aside the mask in saving you. It is all right. Come, good-by! Do not weep; and embrace me, for already I hear the big boots on the stairs. They are returning with the police; and we must not seem to know each other so well before these fellows.”

He pressed Savinien hurriedly to his breast, and then he pushed him away as the door opened wide.

It was the landlord and the man from Auvergne, who were bringing the police. Jean François started forward to the landing and held out his hands for the handcuffs and said, laughing:

“Forward, bad lot!”

To-day he is at Cayenne, condemned for life, as an incorrigible.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Revolutionary songs of '93.

[3] _Tu_--Thou--used only in familiar address.

[4] Police headquarters.

[5] “The California” is a cheap eating-house in Paris.

[6] In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give exemption.

[7] Literally, climbing and breaking in.

[8] A receiver of stolen goods.

[9] Stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.

[10] A northwest wind on the Mediterranean.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT, REALIST

The inflexible realist in fiction can be faithful only to what he sees; and what he sees is inevitably colored by the lens of his real self. For the literary observer of life there is no way of falsifying the reports which his senses, physical and moral, make to his own brain. If he wishes, he may make alterations in transcribing for his readers, but in so doing he confesses to himself a departure from truth as he sees it.

Pure realism, then, demands of its apostle both a faithful observation of life and a faithful statement of what he sees. True, the realist uses his artist’s privilege of selecting those facts of life which seem best suited to picturing his characters in their natures, their persons, and their careers, for he knows that many irrelevant, confusing, and contradictory things happen in the everyday lives of everyday men. So in point of practice his realism is not so uncompromising as his theories sound when baldly stated.

How near any great artist’s transcriptions of life approach to absolute truth will always be a question, both because we none of us know what is final truth, and because realists, each seeing life through his own nature, will disagree among themselves just as widely as their temperaments, their predispositions, and their experiences vary. Thus we are left to the common sense for our standards, and to this common sense we may with some confidence appeal for a judgment.

Guy de Maupassant was a realist. “The writer’s eye,” he says in _Sur l’Eau_, “is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything; like a pickpocket’s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures, intentions, everything that goes on in his presence--the slightest look, the least act, the merest trifle.”

But Maupassant was more than a realist--he was an artist, a realistic artist, frank and wise enough to conform his theories to his own efficient literary practice. He saw as a realist, selected as an artist, and then was uncompromising in his literary presentation.

Here at the outstart another word is needed: Maupassant was also a literalist, and this native trait served to render his realism colder and more unsympathetic. By this I mean that to him two and three always summed up five--his temperament would not allow for the unseen, imponderable force of spiritual things; and even when he mentions the spiritual, it is with a sort of tolerant unbelief which scorns to deny the superstitious solace of women, weaklings, and zealots. It was this pervading quality in both character and method which has caused his critics to class him is a disciple of naturalism in fiction. However, Maupassant’s pessimism was not so great that he could not dwell upon scenes of joy; but a preacher of hope he never was, nor could have been.

Maupassant led so individual a life, was so unnormal in his tastes, and ended his career so unusually, that common sense decides at once the validity of this one contention: his realism was marvellously true in details, but less trustworthy in its general results. His pictures of incidents were miracles of accuracy; his philosophy of life was incomplete, morbid, and unnatural.

Think how unnormal must be a spirit who could write, in the work just quoted: “I feel vibrating through me something akin to every form of animal life; I thrill with all the instincts and confused desires of the lower creatures. Like them I love the earth, not men, as you do. I love it without admiring it, without poetizing or exalting it; I love, with a profound and bestial love, at once contemptible and sacred, all that lives, all that thinks, all that we see about us,--days, nights, rivers, seas, and forests, the dawn, the rosy flesh and beaming eye of woman; for all these things, while they leave my mind calm, trouble my eyes and my heart.”

But this author’s life may not be read in his works, for, unlike his contemporary, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant’s writings are singularly barren of personal detail. True to his naturalistic school, and growing out of his method as well as by reason of his individualistic philosophy, he avoided all attempt at interpreting life and character by the lights and leadings of his own personality. And yet I have already intimated that he was biased--as similarly we all are biased--by his own nature; but it was not an artistic prejudice; rather was it the temperamental bias of a cynical eye trained to view the minute rather than the large, the sordid rather than the ideal, the pessimistic rather than the hopeful, the physical rather than the spiritual--for this was the sort of life he lived, first and last.

Persistently refusing to give to the public any record of his life, he dwelt, as it were, behind closed doors. No soul, he held, could enter into the life of another soul, so he had no real intimates, and those who called him friend and knew the frank charm of his manner discussed with him mainly impersonal themes. Thus in spite of importunities he gave no encouragement to that impertinent curiosity which avidly seizes upon the details of an author’s private life and flaunts it to a gaping public. We, then, are concerned with Maupassant’s temperament and personal career only in so far as they color his work.

Born in Normandy in 1850, he passed his youth in that charming section where he has laid the scenes of many of his provincial narratives. The picturesque Norman characters, the narrow-browed country life, the colorful phases of town, market, and church, appear with intaglio clearness in a thousand wonderfully-wrought settings. The sordid and ungracious bourgeoisie with whom he came most in contact predominate in these stories, just as his strenuous days as an oarsman live again in his aquatic tales, and his life as a minor clerk in the government and his experiences as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War are used for material in other stories. It was his later life in the Capital that gave him his knowledge of society life, and of the underworld peopled by courtesan and roué.

The gifted Flaubert, as everyone knows, left a profound impress upon his young nephew, Maupassant, who served under him a literary apprenticeship at once rigid and productive. It was Flaubert who taught the man of thirty to seek for the one inevitably fitting word, made him tear up early poems, plays, and stories, taught him to suppress relentlessly all his unformed work, until, full panoplied, he sprang into being as a brilliant maker of artistic fictions.

His later years--he died by his own hand in 1893 at the age of forty-three--were darkened by the approaching madness which he so terribly pictures in “The Horla.” In _Bel Ami_ he writes:

“There comes a day, you know, when no matter what you are looking at, you see Death lurking behind it.... As for me, for the last fifteen years I have felt the torment of it, as if I were carrying a gnawing beast. I have felt it dragging me down, little by little, month by month, hour by hour, like a house that is crumbling away.... Each step I take brings me nearer to it, every moment that passes, every breath I draw, hurries on its odious work.... Breathing, sleeping, eating, drinking, working, dreaming,--everything we do is simply dying by inches.... Now I see it so near that I often stretch out my arm to thrust it back!”

But under the shadow of this terrible phantasm as he was, latterly his cold, unsympathetic scrutiny of men and things had warmed somewhat, and his latest writings--his productive period covers only about ten intensely active years--show more gentleness, more sympathy with struggling humanity. But never did he really depart from the morbid and cynical view of life, and the horror of death as the final breakdown of all things desirable, which showed so plainly in most of his fictions.

If we see but little of Guy de Maupassant’s life in his writings, it is to them we must turn to discover his temperament and his philosophy--glimpses of which we have already had.

Absolutely French, almost a typical Latin, Maupassant was not unemotional; he merely refused to allow _his_ emotions to color the characters he delineated. He was himself a passionate pleasure-seeker, determined to extract the last drop of satisfaction from life, but he erred in thinking that one may at the same time drain the cup of mental joys and that of physical pleasures. What wonder that this vampire, in love with the blood of life, should suck final poison whence he had thought to draw only pulsing bliss. His very repressions supplied power for each fresh explosion of private excess--yet always the cold precision of his artistry grew, until the perfection of his chiselling left critics wordless. The deft maker of word-masterpieces never lost the artist in the man.

According to this warped genius, life was intended to amuse, to gratify self. Inner beauty he scouted--the beauty of the seen he adored. For such a nature the ideal existed only as a foolish figment. Even ideal love he scouted, depicting with relentless fidelity the sins of a mother as discovered by her loving children, the universal laxity of the Norman peasants as condoned by complacent priests, the ravishing of every illusion, the degradation of every virtue. What other conclusion was there for so sad, so hopeless, so pitiless, so materialistic, a philosophy, than _What’s the use!_

But if there was little of apparent beauty in our author’s character, it is impossible not to admire his industry, his will, his passionate devotion to a perfect art, his relentless literary fidelity to truth as he saw it, his magic mastery of diction and of dialogue, his incisive though unmoral analysis of character and life, his constant advance in craftsmanship to the end. To turn out something beautiful in form was to him worth a lifetime of effort. How great would he have grown had his eyes been opened to the inner light!

I have chosen his _Clair de Lune_ for presentation here because it more nearly approaches spiritual beauty than any other of his stories. It needs no commentary--it speaks its own beauties in tones subtly delicate yet silver clear.

MOONLIGHT (_CLAIR DE LUNE_)

By Guy de Maupassant

_Done into English by the Editor_

The Abbé Marignan bore well his title of Soldier of the Church. He was a tall priest, and spare; fanatical, perpetually in a state of spiritual exaltation, but upright of soul. His every belief was settled, without even a thought of wavering. He imagined sincerely that he understood his God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His will, His purposes.