Jean-Christophe In Paris — ANTOINETTE, I, part 1

I

The Jeannins were one of those old French families who have remained stationary for centuries in the same little corner of a province, and have kept themselves pure from any infusion of foreign blood.

There are more of them than one would think in France, in spite of all the changes in the social order: it would need a great upheaval to uproot them from the soil to which they are held by so many ties, the profound nature of which is unknown to them.

Reason counts for nothing in their devotion to the soil, and interest for very little: and as for sentimental historic memories, they only hold good for a few literary men.

What does bind them irresistibly is the obscure though very strong feeling, common to the dull and the intelligent alike, of having been for centuries past a parcel of the land, of living in its life, breathing the same air, hearing the heart of it beating against their own, like the heart of the beloved, feeling its slightest tremor, the changing hours and seasons and days, bright or dull, and hearing the voices and the silence of all things in Nature.

It is not always the most beautiful country, nor that which has the greatest charm of life, that most strongly grips the affections, but rather it is the region where the earth seems simplest and most humble, nearest man, speaking to him in a familiar friendly tongue.

Such was the country in the center of France where the Jeannins lived.

A flat, damp country, an old sleepy little town, wearily gazing at its reflection in the dull waters of a still canal: round about it were monotonous fields, plowed fields, meadows, little rivers, woods, and again monotonous fields....

No scenery, no monuments, no memories.

Nothing attractive.

It is all dull and oppressive.

In its drowsy torpor is a hidden force.

The soul tasting it for the first time suffers and revolts against it.

But those who have lived with it for generations cannot break free: it eats into their very bones: and the stillness of it, the harmonious dullness, the monotony, have a charm for them and a sweet savor which they cannot analyze, which they malign, love, and can never forget.

* * * * * The Jeannins had always lived there.

The family could be traced back to the sixteenth century, living in the town or its neighborhood: for of course they had a great-uncle who had devoted his life to drawing up the genealogical tree of their obscure line of humble, industrious people: peasants, farmers, artisans, then clerks, country notaries, working in the subprefecture of the district, where Augustus Jeannin, the father of the present head of the house, had successfully established himself as a banker: he was a clever man, with a peasant's cunning and obstinacy, but honest as men go, not over-scrupulous, a great worker, and a good liver: he had made himself respected and feared everywhere by his genial malice, his bluntness of speech, and his wealth.

Short, thick-set, vigorous, with little sharp eyes set in a big red face, pitted with smallpox, he had been known as a petticoat-hunter: and he had not altogether lost his taste for it.

He loved a spicy yarn and good eating.

It was a sight to see him at meals, with his son Antoine sitting opposite him, with a few old friends of their kidney: the district judge, the notary, the Archdeacon of the Cathedral:--(old Jeannin loved stuffing the priest: but also he could stuff with the priest, if the priest were good at it):--hearty old fellows built on the same Rabelaisian lines.

There was a running fire of terrific stories to the accompaniment of thumps on the table and roars of laughter, and the row they made could be heard by the servants in the kitchen and the neighbors in the street.

Then old Augustus caught a chill, which turned to pneumonia, through going down into his cellars one hot summer's day in his shirt-sleeves to bottle his wine.

In less than twenty-four hours he had departed this life for the next world, in which he hardly believed, properly equipped with all the Sacraments of the Church, having, like a good Voltairian provincial, submitted to it at the last moment in order to pacify his women, and also because it did not matter one way or the other....

And then, one never knows....

His son Antoine succeeded him in business.

He was a fat little man, rubicund and expansive, clean-shaven, except for his mutton-chop whiskers, and he spoke quickly and with a slight stutter, in a loud voice, accompanying his remarks with little quick, curt gestures.

He had not his father's grasp of finance: but he was quite a good manager.

He had only to look after the established undertakings, which went on developing day by day, by the mere fact of their existence.

He had the advantage of a business reputation in the district, although he had very little to do with the success of the firm's ventures.

He only contributed method and industry.

For the rest he was absolutely honorable, and was everywhere deservedly esteemed.

His pleasant unctuous manners, though perhaps a little too familiar for some people, a little too expansive, and just a little common, had won him a very genuine popularity in the little town and the surrounding country.

He was more lavish with his sympathy than with his money: tears came readily to his eyes: and the sight of poverty so sincerely moved him that the victim of it could not fail to be touched by it.

Like most men living in small towns, his thoughts were much occupied with politics.

He was an ardent moderate Republican, an intolerant Liberal, a patriot, and, like his father, extremely anti-clerical.

He was a member of the Municipal Council: and, like the rest of his colleagues, he delighted in playing tricks on the _curé_ of the parish, or on the Lent preacher, who roused so much enthusiasm in the ladies of the town.

It must not be forgotten that the anti-clericalism of the little towns in France is always, more or less, an episode in domestic warfare, and is a subtle form of that silent, bitter struggle between husbands and wives, which goes on in almost every house.

Antoine Jeannin had also some literary pretensions.

Like all provincials of his generation, he had been brought up on the Latin Classics, many pages of which he knew by heart, and also a mass of proverbs, and on La Fontaine and Boileau,--the Boileau of _L'Art Poétique_, and, above all, of _Lutrin_,--on the author of _La Pucelle_, and the _poetæ minores_ of the eighteenth century, in whose manner he squeezed out a certain number of poems.

He was not the only man of his acquaintance possessed by that particular mania, and his reputation gained by it.

His rhyming jests, his quatrains, couplets, acrostics, epigrams, and songs, which were sometimes rather risky, though they had a certain coarsely witty quality, were often quoted.

He was wont to sing the mysteries of digestion: the Muse of the Loire districts is fain to blow her trumpet like the famous devil of Dante: "...

_Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.

_" This sturdy, jovial, active little man had taken to wife a woman of a very different character,--the daughter of a country magistrate, Lucie de Villiers.

The De Villiers--or rather Devilliers, for their name had split in its passage through time, like a stone which cracks in two as it goes hurtling down a hillside--were magistrates from father to son; they were of that old parliamentary race of Frenchmen who had a lofty idea of the law, and duty, the social conventions, their personal, and especially their professional, dignity, which was fortified by perfect honesty, tempered with a certain conscious uprightness.

During the preceding century they had been infected by nonconformist Jansenism, which had given them a grumbling pessimistic quality, as well as a contempt for the Jesuit attitude of mind.

They did not see life as beautiful: and, rather than smooth away life's difficulties, they preferred to exaggerate them so as to have good reason to complain.

Lucie de Villiers had certain of these characteristics, which were so directly opposed to the not very refined optimism of her husband.

She was tall--taller than he by a head--slender, well made; she dressed well and elegantly, though in a rather sober fashion, which made her seem--perhaps designedly--older than she was: she was of a high moral quality: but she was hard on other people; she would countenance no fault, and hardly even a caprice: she was thought cold and disdainful.

She was very pious, and that gave rise to perpetual disputes with her husband.

For the rest, they were very fond of each other: and, in spite of their frequent disagreements, they could not have lived without each other.

They were both rather unpractical: he from want of perception--(he was always in danger of being taken in by good looks and fine words),--she from her absolute inexperience of business--(she knew nothing about it: and having always been kept outside it, she took no interest in it).

* * * * * They had two children: a girl, Antoinette, the elder by five years; and a boy, Olivier.

Antoinette was a pretty dark-haired child, with a charming, honest face of the French type, round, with sharp eyes, a round forehead, a fine chin, a little straight nose--"one of those very pretty, fine, noble noses" (as an old French portrait-painter says so charmingly) "in which there was a certain imperceptible play of expression, which animated the face, and revealed the subtlety of the workings of her mind as she talked or listened."

She had her father's gaiety and carelessness.

Olivier was a delicate fair boy, short, like his father, but very different in character.

His health had been undermined by one illness after another when he was a child: and although, as a result, he was petted by his family, his physical weakness had made him a melancholy, dreamy little boy, who was afraid of death and very poorly equipped for life.

He was shy, and preferred to be alone: he avoided the society of other children: he was ill at ease with them: he hated their games and quarrels: their brutality filled him with horror.

He let them strike him, not from want of courage, but from timidity, because he was afraid to defend himself, afraid of hurting them: they would have bullied the life out of him, but for the safeguard of his father's position.

He was tender-hearted and morbidly sensitive: a word, a sign of sympathy, a reproach, were enough to make him burst into tears.

His sister was much sturdier, and laughed at him, and called him a "little fountain."

The two children were devoted to each other: but they were too different to live together.

They went their own ways and lived in their own dreams.

As Antoinette grew up, she became prettier: people told her so, and she was well aware of it: it made her happy, and she wove romances about the future.

Olivier, in his sickly melancholy, was always rubbed up the wrong way by contact with the outer world: and he withdrew into the circle of his own absurd little brain: and he told himself stories.

He had a burning, almost feminine, longing to love and be loved: and, living alone, away from boys of his own age, he had invented two or three imaginary friends: one was called Jean, another Étienne, another François: he was always with them.

He never slept well, and he was always dreaming.

In the morning, when he was lifted out of bed, he would forget himself, and sit with his bare legs dangling down, or sometimes with two stockings on one leg.

He would go off into a dream with his hands in the basin.

He would forget himself at his desk in the middle of writing or learning a lesson: he would dream for hours on end: and then he would suddenly wake up, horrified to find that he had learned nothing.

At dinner he was abashed if any one spoke to him: he would reply two minutes after he had been spoken to: he would forget what he was going to say in the middle of a sentence.

He would doze off to the murmuring of his thoughts and the familiar sensations of the monotonous provincial days that marched so slowly by: the great half-empty house, only part of which they occupied: the vast and dreadful barns and cellars: the mysterious closed rooms, the fastened shutters, the covered furniture, veiled mirrors, and the chandeliers wrapped up: the old family portraits with their haunting smiles: the Empire engravings, with their virtuous, suave heroism: _Alcibiades and Socrates in the House of the Courtezan_, _Antiochus and Stratonice_, _The Story of Epaminondas_, _Belisarius Begging_....

Outside, the sound of the smith shoeing horses in the smithy opposite, the uneven clink of the hammers on the anvil, the snorting of the broken-winded horses, the smell of the scorched hoofs, the slapping of the pats of the washerwomen kneeling by the water, the heavy thuds of the butcher's chopper next door, the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the stones of the street, the creaking of a pump, or the drawbridge over the canal, the heavy barges laden with blocks of wood, slowly passing at the end of the garden, drawn along by a rope: the little tiled courtyard, with a square patch of earth, in which two lilac-trees grew, in the middle of a clump of geraniums and petunias: the tubs of laurel and flowering pomegranate on the terrace above the canal: sometimes the noise of a fair in the square hard by, with peasants in bright blue smocks, and grunting pigs....

And on Sunday, at church, the precentor, who sang out of tune, and the old priest, who went to sleep as he was saying Mass: the family walk along the station road, where all the time he had to take off his hat politely to other wretched beings, who were under the same impression of the necessity of going for a walk all together,--until at last they reached the sunny fields, above which larks soared invisible,--or along by the still mirror of the canal, on both sides of which were poplars rustling in line....

And then there was the great provincial Sunday dinner, when they went on and on eating and talking about food learnedly and with gusto: for everybody was a connoisseur: and, in the provinces, eating is the chief occupation, the first of all the arts.

And they would talk business, and tell spicy yarns, and every now and then discuss their neighbors' illnesses, going into endless detail....

And the little boy, sitting in his corner, would make no more noise than a little mouse, pick at his food, eat hardly anything, and listen with all his ears.

Nothing escaped him: and when he did not understand, his imagination supplied the deficiency.

He had that singular gift, which is often to be remarked in the children of old families and an old stock, on which the imprint of the ages is too strongly marked, of divining thoughts, which have never passed through their minds before, and are hardly comprehensible to them.

--Then there was the kitchen, where bloody and succulent mysteries were concocted: and the old servant who used to tell him frightful and droll stories....

At last came evening, the silent flitting of the bats, the terror of the monstrous creatures that were known to swarm in the dark depths of the old house: huge rats, enormous hairy spiders: and he would say his prayers, kneeling at the, foot of his bed, and hardly know what he was saying: the little cracked bell of the convent hard by would sound the bed-time of the nuns;--and so to bed, the Island of Dreams....

The best times of the year were those that they spent in spring and autumn at their country house some miles away from the town.

There he could dream at his ease: he saw nobody.

Like most of the children of their class, the little Jeannins were kept apart from the common children: the children of servants and farmers, who inspired them with fear and disgust.

They inherited from their mother an aristocratic--or, rather, essentially middle-class--disdain for all who worked with their hands.

Olivier would spend the day perched up in the branches of an ash reading marvelous stories: delightful folklore, the _Tales_ of Musæus, or Madame d'Aulnoy, or the _Arabian Nights_, or stories of travel.

For he had that strange longing for distant lands, "those oceanic dreams," which sometimes possess the minds of boys in the little provincial towns of France.

A thicket lay between the house and himself, and he could fancy himself very far away.

But he knew that he was really near home, and was quite happy: for he did not like straying too far alone: he felt lost with Nature.

Round him the wind whispered through the trees.

Through the leaves that hid his nest he could see the yellowing vines in the distance, and the meadows where the straked cows were at pasture, filling the silence of the sleeping country-side with their plaintive long-drawn lowing.

The strident cocks crowed to each other from farm to farm.

There came up the irregular beat of the flails in the barns.

The fevered life of myriads of creatures swelled and flowed through the peace of inanimate Nature.

Uneasily Olivier would watch the ever hurrying columns of the ants, and the bees big with their booty, buzzing like organ-pipes, and the superb and stupid wasps who know not what they want--the whole world of busy little creatures, all seemingly devoured by the desire to reach their destination....

Where is it?

They do not know.

No matter where!

Somewhere....

Olivier was fearful amid that blind and hostile world.

He would start, like a young hare, at the sound of a pine-cone falling, or the breaking of a rotten branch....

He would find his courage again when he heard the rattling of the chains of the swing at the other end of the garden, where Antoinette would be madly swinging to and fro.

She, too, would dream: but in her own fashion.

She would spend the day prowling round the garden, eating, watching, laughing, picking at the grapes on the vines like a thrush, secretly plucking a peach from the trellis, climbing a plum-tree, or giving it a little surreptitious shake as she passed to bring down a rain of the golden mirabelles which melt in the mouth like scented honey.

Or she would pick the flowers, although that was forbidden: quickly she would pluck a rose that she had been coveting all day, and run away with it to the arbor at the end of the garden.

Then she would bury her little nose in the delicious scented flower, and kiss it, and bite it, and suck it: and then she would conceal her booty, and hide it in her bosom between her little breasts, at the wonder of whose coming she would gaze in eager fondness....

And there was an exquisite forbidden joy in taking off her shoes and stockings, and walking bare-foot on the cool sand of the paths, and on the dewy turf, and on the stones, cold in the shadow, burning in the sun, and in the little stream that ran along the outskirts of the wood, and kissing with her feet, and legs, and knees, water, earth, and light.

Lying in the shadow of the pines, she would hold her hands up to the sun, and watch the light play through them, and she would press her lips upon the soft satin skin of her pretty rounded arms.

She would make herself crowns and necklets and gowns of ivy-leaves and oak-leaves: and she would deck them with the blue thistles, and barberry and little pine-branches, with their green fruit: and then she looked like a little savage Princess.

And she would dance for her own delight round and round the fountain; and, with arms outstretched, she would turn and turn until her head whirled, and she would slip down on the lawn and bury her face in the grass, and shout with laughter for minutes on end, unable to stop herself, without knowing why.

So the days slipped by for the two children, within hail of each other, though neither ever gave a thought to the other,--except when it would suddenly occur to Antoinette to play a prank on her brother, and throw a handful of pine-needles in his face, or shake the tree in which he was sitting, threatening to make him fall, or frighten him by springing suddenly out upon him and yelling: "Ooh!

Ooh!..."

Sometimes she would be seized by a desire to tease him.

She would make him come down from his tree by pretending that her mother was calling him.

Then, when he had climbed down, she would take his place and refuse to budge.

Then Olivier would whine and threaten to tell.

But there was no danger of Antoinette staying in the tree for long: she could not keep still for two minutes.

When she had done with taunting Olivier from the top of his tree, when she had thoroughly infuriated him and brought him almost to tears, then she would slip down, fling her arms round him, shake him, and laugh, and call him a "little muff," and roll him on the ground, and rub his face with handfuls of grass.

He would try to struggle: but he was not strong enough.

Then he would lie still, flat on his black, like a cockchafer, with his thin arms pinned to the ground by Antoinette's strong little hands: and he would look piteous and resigned.

Antoinette could not resist that: she would look at her vanquished prisoner, and burst out laughing and kiss him suddenly, and let him go--not without the parting attention of a little gag of fresh grass in his mouth: and that he detested most of all, because it made him sick.

And he would spit and wipe his mouth, and storm at her, while she ran away as hard as she could, pealing with laughter.

She was always laughing.

Even when she was asleep she laughed.

Olivier, lying awake in the next room, would suddenly start up in the middle of the stories he was telling himself, at the sound of the wild laughter and the muttered words which she would speak in the silence of the night.

Outside, the trees would creak with the wind, an owl would hoot, in the distant villages and the farms in the heart of the woods dogs would bark.

In the dim phosphorescence of the night Olivier would see the dark, heavy branches of the pines moving like ghosts outside his window: and Antoinette's laughter would comfort him.