"It gives you a good fire in which to warm yourselves, for nothing, and the smell of my stew into the bargain."
As for his money, he spent in drink with the trollop, and afterwards, what was left of it, with the other eighteen.
"You see," he used to say, "I am just, and more than just. I give her up to you, because it is your right."
The consequence was that they all liked Daddy La Bretagne, so that he gloried in it, and said proudly:
"What a pity that we are living under the Republic! These fellows would think nothing of making me king."
And one day, when he said this, his trollop replied: "The king is here, old fellow!" And at the same time she presented a new comrade to them, who was no less ragged or wretched looking than the eighteen, but quite young by the size of him. He was a tall, thin fellow of about forty, and without a white streak in his long hair. He was dressed only in a pair of trousers and a shirt, which he wore outside them, like a blouse, and the trollop said:
"Here, Daddy La Bretagne, you have two knitted vests on, so just give him one."
"Why should I?" the hauler asked.
"Because I choose you to," the woman replied. "I have been living with you set of old men for a long time, so now I want to have a young one; there he is, so you must give him a vest, and keep him here, or I shall throw you up. You may take it or leave it, as you like. Do you understand me?"
The eighteen looked at each other open-mouthed, and good Daddy La Bretagne scratched his head, and then said:
"What she asks is quite right, and we must give way," he replied.
Then they explained themselves, and came to an understanding. The poor devil did not come like a conqueror, for he was a wretched clown who had just been released from prison, where he had undergone three years" hard labor for an attempted outrage on a girl, but, with one exception, the best fellow in the world, so the people declared.
"And something nice for me," the trollop added, "for I can a.s.sure you that I mean him to reward me for anything I may do for him."
From that time the household of eighteen persons consisted of nineteen, and at first all went well. The clown was very humble, and tried not to be burdensome to them. Fed, clothed and supplied with tobacco, he tried not to be too exacting in the other matter, and if needful, he would have hauled like the others, but the woman would not allow it.
"You shall not fatigue yourself, my little man," she said. "You must reserve yourself entirely for me."
And he did as she wished.
And soon, the eighteen, who had never been jealous of each other, grew jealous of the favored lover. Some tried to pick a quarrel with him. He resisted. The best fellow in the world, no doubt, but he was not going to be taken for a mussel shut up in its sh.e.l.l, for all that. Let them call him as lazy as a priest if they liked; he did not mind that, but when they put hairs into his coffee, armsful of rushes among his wreckage, and filth into his soup, they had better look out!
"None of that, all the lot of you, or you will see what I can do," he used to say.
They repeated the practical jokes, however, and he thrashed them. He did not try to find out who the culprits were, but attacked the first one he met, so much the worse for him. With a kick from his wooden clog (it was his specialty) he smashed their noses into a pulp, and having thus acquired the knowledge of his strength, and urged on by his trollop, he soon became a tyrant. The eighteen felt that they were slaves, and their former paradise where concord and perfect equality had reigned, became a h.e.l.l, and that state of things could not last.
"Ah!" Daddy La Bretagne growled, "if only I were twenty years younger I would nearly kill him! I have my Breton"s hot head still, but my confounded legs are no good any longer."
And he boldly challenged the clown to a duel, in which the latter was to have his legs tied, and then both of them were to sit on the ground and hack at each other with knives.
"Such a duel would be perfectly fair!" he replied, kicking him in the side with one of his clogs, and the woman burst out laughing, and said:
"At any rate, you cannot compete with him on equal terms as regards myself, so do not worry yourself about it."
Daddy La Bretagne was lying in his corner and spitting blood, and none of the rest spoke. What could the others do, when he, the bl.u.s.tering of them all, had been served so? The jade had been right when she had brought in the intruder, and said:
"The king is here, old fellow."
Only, she ought to have remembered that, after all, she alone kept her subjects in check, and as Daddy La Bretagne said, by a right object.
With her to console them, they would no doubt have borne anything, but she was foolish enough to cut down their food, and not to fill their common dish as full as it used to be. She wanted to keep everything for her lover, and that raised the exasperation of the eighteen to its height, and so one night when she and the clown were asleep, among all these fasting men, the eighteen threw themselves upon them. They wrapped the despot"s arms and legs up in tarpaulin, and in the presence of the woman, who was firmly bound, they flogged him till he was black and blue.
"Yes," old Bretagne said to me, himself, "yes, Monsieur, that was our revenge. The king was guillotined in 1793, and so we guillotined our king also."
And he concluded with a sneer, and said: "Ah! We wished to be just, and as it was not his head that had made him our king, so, by Jove, we settled him."
BABETTE
I was not very fond of going to inspect that asylum for old, infirm men, officially, as I was obliged to go over it in company of the superintendent, who was talkative, and a statistician. But then, the grandson of the foundress accompanied us, who was evidently pleased at that minute inspection, and he was a charming man, and the owner of a large forest, where he had given me permission to shoot, and I was, of course, obliged to pretend to be interested in his grandmother"s philanthropic work. So with a smile on my lips I endured the superintendent"s interminable discourse, punctuating it here and there, as best I could, by a:
"Ah! really! ... Very strange, indeed! ... I should never have believed it! ..."
I was absolutely ignorant of the matter to which I replied thus, for my thoughts were lulled to repose by the constant humming of our loquacious guide. I was only vaguely conscious that no doubt the persons and things would have appeared worthy of attention to me if I had been there alone as an idler, for in that case, I should certainly have asked the superintendent:
"Who is this Babette, whose name appears so constantly in the complaints of so many of the inmates?"
Quite a dozen men and women had spoken to us about her, now to complain of her, now to praise her; and especially the women, as soon as they saw the superintendent, cried out:
"M"sieur, Babette has again been ..."
"There! that will do, that will do!" he interrupted them, his gentle voice suddenly becoming harsh.
At other times he would amicably question some old man with a happy countenance, and say:
"Well, my friend! I suppose you are very happy here?"
Many replied with fervent expressions of grat.i.tude, with which Babette"s name was frequently mingled, and when he heard them speak so, the superintendent put on an ecstatic air; looking up to heaven with clasped hands, he said, slowly shaking his head: "Ah! Babette is a very precious woman, very precious!"
Yes, it would certainly interest one to know who that creature was, but not under present circ.u.mstances, and so, rather than to undergo any more of this, I made up my mind to remain in ignorance of who Babette was, for I could pretty well guess what she would be like. I pictured her to myself as a flower that had sprung up in a corner of these dull courtyards, like a ray of sun shining through the sepulchral gloom of these dismal pa.s.sages.
I pictured her so clearly to myself that I did not even feel any wish to know her, but yet she was dear to me, because of the happy expression which they all put on when they spoke of her, and I was angry with the old women who spoke against her. One thing certainly puzzled me, and that was, that the superintendent was among those who went into ecstasies over her, and this made me strongly disinclined to question him about her, though I had no other reason for this feeling.
But all this pa.s.sed through my mind in rather a confused manner, and without my taking the trouble to fix or to formulate any ideas and sensations, for I continued to dream, rather than to think effectively, and it is very probable that, when my visit was over, I should not have remembered much about it, not even with regard to Babette, if I had not been suddenly awakened by the sight of her in the person, and been quite upset by the difference that there was between my fancy and the reality.
We had just crossed a small back yard, and had gone into a very dark pa.s.sage, when a door suddenly opened at the other end of it, and an unexpected apparition appeared through another door, and we could indistinctly see that it was the figure of a woman. At the same moment, the superintendent called out in a furious voice:
"Babette! Babette!"
He had mechanically quickened his pace, and almost ran, and we followed him, and he quickly opened the door through which the apparition had vanished, and which led on to a staircase, and he again called out, and a burst of stifled laughter was the only reply. I looked over the bal.u.s.ters, and saw a woman down below, who was looking at us fixedly.
She was an old woman; there could be no doubt of that, from her wrinkled face and her few straggling gray locks which appeared under her cap. But one did not think of that when one saw her eyes, which were wonderfully youthful, for then, one saw nothing but them. They were profound eyes, of a deep, almost violet blue; the eyes of a child.
Suddenly the superintendent called out to her: "You have been with _la Frieze_ again!"
The old woman did not reply, but shook with laughter, as she had done just before, and then she ran off, giving the superintendent a look, which said as plainly as words could have done: "Do you think I care a fig for you?"