“Your son,” the Abbe Marguerite told him,
“will read for his Master’s degree in
the intervals of his duties, and the title of Licencie-es-Lettres
will open the door to the higher walks of teaching.
We have known assistants rise to high positions in
the University and even occupy Monsieur de Fontanes’
chair.”
These considerations had clenched the bookbinder’s
resolution, and this was now the third day of Jean’s
ushership.
Three months had dragged by. It was a Friday;
a hot, nauseating smell of fried fish filled the refectory;
a strong drought blew cold about feet encased in wet
boots; the walls dripped with moisture, and outside
the barred windows a fine rain was falling from a
grey sky. The boys, seated at marble-topped tables,
were making a hideous rattle with their forks and
tin cups, while one of their schoolfellows, seated
at the desk in the middle of the great room, was reading
aloud, as the regulations direct, a passage from Rollin’s
Ancient History.
Jean, at the head of a table, his nose in his ill-washed
earthenware plate, had cold feet and a sore heart.
Something resembling rotten wood formed a deposit
at the bottom of his glass, while the servers were
handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing
in the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle
of plates, the rasping voice of the reader, a lad
of seventeen, reached the usher’s ears.
He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of
sentences: “She was about to appear
before Antony at an age when women unite with the
flower of their beauty every charm of wit and intellect...
her person more compelling than any magnificence of
adornment.... Her galley entered the Cydnus...
the poop of the vessel shone resplendent with gold,
the sails were of Tyrian purple, the oars of silver.”
Then the seductive names of Nereids, flutes, perfumes.
The hot blood flooded his cheeks. The woman who
for him was the sole and only incarnation of the whole
race of womankind throughout the ages rose before
his mental sight with a surprising clearness; every
hair of his body stood on end in an agonizing spasm
of desire, and he dug his nails into the palms of
his hands. The vision caused him an unspeakable
yet delicious pain—Gabrielle in a loose
peignoir at a small, daintily ordered table
gay with flowers and glasses. He saw it all quite
clearly; his gaze searched every fold of the soft
material that covered her bosom and rose and fell
at each breath she drew. Face and neck and lively
hands had a surprisingly brilliant yet so natural a
sheen that they exhaled amorous invitation as if they
had been verily of flesh and blood. The superb
moulding of the lips, pouting like a ripe mulberry,
and the exquisite grain of the skin were manifest—treasures
such as men risk death and crime to win. It was
the actress, in fine, seen by the two eyes which of
all eyes in the whole world had learned to see her
best. She was not alone; a man was looking at
her with a penetrating intensity as he filled her
glass. They were straining one towards the other.
Jean could not restrain his sobs. Suddenly he
seemed to be falling from the top of a high tower.
The Superintendent of Studies was standing in front
of him and saying:
