Chương Chương 186 · M. MABEUF

On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: “Certainly I approve of

political opinions,” he expressed the real state of his mind. All

political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved

them all, without distinction, provided they left him in peace, as the

Greeks called the Furies “the beautiful, the good, the charming,” the

Eumenides. M. Mabeuf’s political opinion consisted in a passionate love

for plants, and, above all, for books. Like all the rest of the world,

he possessed the termination in _ist_, without which no one could exist

at that time, but he was neither a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist,

an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist; he was a _bouquinist_, a collector of

old books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with

hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy,

legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world

all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking

at, and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over.

He took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent

his reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener.

When he made Pontmercy’s acquaintance, this sympathy had existed

between the colonel and himself—that what the colonel did for flowers,

he did for fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears

as savory as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his

combinations, apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated

and no less perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He

went to mass rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he

loved the faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled

and silent only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the

State, he had chosen the career of warden. However, he had never

succeeded in loving any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as

much as an Elzevir. He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one

asked him: “Have you never been married?” “I have forgotten,” said he.

When it sometimes happened to him—and to whom does it not happen?—to

say: “Oh! if I were only rich!” it was not when ogling a pretty girl,

as was the case with Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old

book. He lived alone with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty,

and when he was asleep, his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism,

lay crooked up in the folds of his sheets. He had composed and

published a _Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz_, with colored plates,

a work which enjoyed a tolerable measure of esteem and which sold well.

People rang his bell, in the Rue Mésières, two or three times a day, to

ask for it. He drew as much as two thousand francs a year from it; this

constituted nearly the whole of his fortune. Although poor, he had had

the talent to form for himself, by dint of patience, privations, and

time, a precious collection of rare copies of every sort. He never went

out without a book under his arm, and he often returned with two. The

sole decoration of the four rooms on the ground floor, which composed

his lodgings, consisted of framed herbariums, and engravings of the old

masters. The sight of a sword or a gun chilled his blood. He had never

approached a cannon in his life, even at the Invalides. He had a

passable stomach, a brother who was a curé, perfectly white hair, no

teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a trembling in every limb, a

Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of an old sheep, and he was

easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no other friendship, no

other acquaintance among the living, than an old bookseller of the

Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to naturalize indigo in

France.

His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a

spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri’s miserere in

the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity

of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded

as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat.

Like him, she had a moustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which

were always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in

counting over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed

the dresses in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She

knew how to read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.

M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and

gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined

with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without

wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,

with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles

in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the

sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his

hero from the point of view of flowers.

His brother the curé died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when

the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A

notary’s failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which

was all that he possessed in his brother’s right and his own. The

Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of

embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a _Flora. The

Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz_ stopped short. Weeks passed by

without a single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound of

the bell. “Monsieur,” said Mother Plutarque sadly, “it is the

water-carrier.” In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mésières,

abdicated the functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a

part of his books, but of his prints,—that to which he was the least

attached,—and installed himself in a little house on the Rue

Montparnasse, where, however, he remained but one quarter for two

reasons: in the first place, the ground floor and the garden cost three

hundred francs, and he dared not spend more than two hundred francs on

his rent; in the second, being near Faton’s shooting-gallery, he could

hear the pistol-shots; which was intolerable to him.

He carried off his _Flora_, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his

portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the

Salpêtrière, in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of

Austerlitz, where, for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a

garden enclosed by a hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of

this removal to sell off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his

entrance into his new quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on

which his engravings and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands,

dug in his garden the rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that

Mother Plutarque had a melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he

tapped her on the shoulder and said to her with a smile: “We have the

indigo!”

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and

Marius, were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a

brawling name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to

him.

However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some

bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are

but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny

is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a

passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble

philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,

and yet is hardly conscious of it one’s self. It always ends, it is

true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it

seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on

between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we

look on at the game with indifference.

It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his

hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather

puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular

swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very

long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not

stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive

and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother

Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was

reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud

is to assure one’s self of what one is reading. There are people who

read very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their

word of honor as to what they are perusing.

It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the

romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to

her.

In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It

was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:—

“—The beauty pouted, and the dragoon—”

Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.

“Bouddha and the Dragon,” struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. “Yes, it

is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,

spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars

had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the

claws of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting

the dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.

There is no more beautiful legend in existence.”

And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie.