2.M.5.4. 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.