Kabanata Kabanata 232 · APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF
Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.
While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be
called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places without light, where
the happy can be heard walking overhead, M. Mabeuf was descending on
his side.
The _Flora of Cauteretz_ no longer sold at all. The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz,
which had a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only a few
plants which love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did not become
discouraged. He had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a
good exposure, to make his trials with indigo “at his own expense.” For
this purpose he had pawned his copperplates of the _Flora_. He had
reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old
servant, to whom he had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. And
often his breakfast was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his
infantile smile, he had grown morose and no longer received visitors.
Marius did well not to dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour
when M. Mabeuf was on his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man
and the young man passed each other on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. They
did not speak, and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A
heart-breaking thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses
bonds! Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.
Royol the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books, his
garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for his
living. He said to himself: “When I shall have made my balls of
blueing, I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the
pawn-shop, I will put my _Flora_ in vogue again with trickery, plenty
of money and advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy, I know
well where, a copy of Pierre de Médine’s _Art de Naviguer_, with
wood-cuts, edition of 1655.” In the meantime, he toiled all day over
his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home to water his garden,
and to read his books. At that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years
of age.
One evening he had a singular apparition.
He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother
Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined
on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he
had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned
stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.
Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a
sort of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a
rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There
was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in the
fruit-closet,—the remains of the winter’s provision.
M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of
his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,
a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity
rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain
degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President
Delancre, _De l’Inconstance des Démons_; the other was a quarto by
Mutor de la Rubaudière, _Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de
la Bièvre_. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,
because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in
former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to
blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held
in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a
magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days
of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks
were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed
water, the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of
those persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all
day over his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose,
laid his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with
tottering footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he
could not even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round
and cast a glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded
with stars.
The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised
to be as arid as the day had been.
“Stars everywhere!” thought the old man; “not the tiniest cloud! Not a
drop of water!”
And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his
breast.
He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:—
“A tear of dew! A little pity!”
He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.
At that moment, he heard a voice saying:—
“Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?”
At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible in
the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall,
slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at
him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had
just blossomed forth from the twilight.
Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we have
said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable, this
being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness,
had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled
the watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had
bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds
distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the
leaves filled Father Mabeuf’s soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that
the rhododendron was happy now.
The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She
watered the whole garden.
There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where
her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with
her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.
When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his
eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.
“God will bless you,” said he, “you are an angel since you take care of
the flowers.”
“No,” she replied. “I am the devil, but that’s all the same to me.”
The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her
response:—
“What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do
nothing for you!”
“You can do something,” said she.
“What?”
“Tell me where M. Marius lives.”
The old man did not understand. “What Monsieur Marius?”
He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had
vanished.
“A young man who used to come here.”
In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.
“Ah! yes—” he exclaimed. “I know what you mean. Wait! Monsieur
Marius—the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,—or rather, he no
longer lives,—ah well, I don’t know.”
As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he
continued:—
“Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes
in the direction of the Glacière, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the
Lark. Go there. It is not hard to meet him.”
When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one
there; the girl had disappeared.
He was decidedly terrified.
“Really,” he thought, “if my garden had not been watered, I should
think that she was a spirit.”
An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell
asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird
which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by
little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he
said to himself in a bewildered way:—
“In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudière narrates of the
goblins. Could it have been a goblin?”