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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.
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