CHAPTER IV

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 Mesieres,
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 cure, 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 mustache. 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 cure 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 Mesieres, 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 Salpetriere, 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 revery.