One day, one of the last fine days of the season,
Jean, squatted on the ground, was busy sticking up
bits of plane-tree bark in the fine wet sand.
That faculty of “pretending,” by which
children are able to make their lives one unending
miracle, transformed a handful of soil and a few bits
of wood into wondrous galleries and fairy castles
to the lad’s imagination; he clapped his hands
and leapt for joy. Then suddenly he felt himself
wrapped in something soft and scented. It was
a lady’s gown; he saw nothing except that she
smiled as she put him gently out of her way and walked
on. He ran to tell his aunt:
“How good she smells, that lady!”
Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies
were no better than others, and that she thought more
of herself with her merino skirt than all those set-up
minxes in their flounces and finery, adding:
“Better a good name than a gilt girdle.”
But this talk was beyond little Jean’s comprehension.
The perfumed silk that had swept his face left behind
a vague sweetness, a memory as of a gentle, ghostly
caress.
One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying
the fresh air before his door when a big man with
a red nose, past middle age and wearing a scarlet
waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared, bowing
politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a
sing-song voice in which even Monsieur Servien could
detect an Italian accent:
“Sir, I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata,
the immortal masterpiece of Torquato Tasso”—and
a bulging packet of manuscript under his arm confirmed
the statement.
“Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to
this glorious and ungrateful task. Without family
or fatherland, I have written my translation in dark,
ice-cold garrets, on chandlers’ wrappers, snuff
papers, the backs of playing cards! Such has been
the exile’s task! You, sir, you live in
your own land, in the bosom of a happy family—at
least I hope so.”
This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence
and its strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of
the dead woman he had loved, and he saw her in his
mind’s eye coiling her beautiful hair as in
the early days of their married life.
The big man proceeded:
“Man is like a plant which perishes when the
storms uproot it.
“Here is your son, is it not so? He is
like you”—and laying his hand on
Jean’s head, who clung to his father’s
coat-tails in wonder at the red waistcoat and the
sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his
lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever
man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.
“That noble language,” he added, “whose
inimitable monuments have often made me forget my
misfortunes.
“Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page
of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal.”
