IV The Café of the Navigators
Where did grandfather go after bringing me back to the house? To the café, and one day he took me there.
I did not know precisely what a café was, and I was secretly afraid of it. Father used to speak of cafés in a tone of contempt which admitted no contradiction, no favourable reservation. When he said of any one, “he spends his time at the café,” or “he is a pillar of the café,” that some one was judged and condemned: he wasn’t worth the rope to hang him. I could not have imagined my father entering one. Such audacity on the part of grandfather surprised me the less, since I had already noticed that in everything he took the opposite view from my father.
We went to the café instead of going to walk, one very warm morning; this seemed to me a sort of outrage, as we were doubly failing in the course marked out for us. Its name appeared in letters of gold, Café of the Navigators; the inscription being framed in with billiard cues. Pleasantly situated on the shore of the lake, it was composed of a long arbour whence one could see the port, and a great room whence one could see nothing. We chose the room; to me it seemed most luxurious because of its mirrors and white marble tables. Two or three groups were conversing, smoking, drinking, and I was at once nearly choked by a pungent odour of tobacco mingled with the perfume of anisette. Yet such was the attraction of the place that after having coughed I found the combination pleasant. We joined the least noisy group, who greeted grandfather with transports of delight, calling him familiarly Father Rambert:
Father Rambert here!—Father Rambert there!
They installed him on the sofa, in the middle seat, and began by asking news of Mathieu de la Drôme. Grandfather replied that he was at “set fair” with a tendency to rise, and that favourable winds would probably keep him so; at which every one rejoiced, on account of the vines; the wine would be famous if Mathieu continued to behave well. Presently I perceived that the barometer was in question, and that grandfather was consulted as to the weather because of its prophecies. These gentlemen used among themselves a conventional language to which it was important to have the key, and which complicated the conversation so far as I was concerned. No one paid any attention to me, and I was still standing, vexed at this neglect, when I was suddenly addressed.
“Well, youngster, what will you take?”
The appellative and the familiar tone completed my displeasure. I drew myself up, and put on a stern expression, but I remained “the youngster” to every one present. Grandfather with a detached air replied with majesty:
“A green.”
“With white wine?” somebody asked.
“I am not a wine sack like you,” retorted grandfather.
The reply was received with enthusiasm. At The House every one was particularly polite to a guest, but these gentlemen here laid aside all ceremony in their mutual relations. Meanwhile, the maid set before grandfather a number of things which she took one by one from a tray: a tall, deep glass, a little iron spade pierced with holes; a sugar bowl, a caraffe of water, and finally a bottle, the contents of which I could not guess. There was a deep silence and I received an impression of being present at a solemn rite, which no one might disturb. Decidedly their ways were all topsy-turvy: they treated one another without courtesy, but they venerated the drink.
Grandfather, his calm not in the least embarrassed by all the eyes fixed upon him, poured a quarter of a glass of liquid from the mysterious bottle, then placed the perforated spade across the glass and upon it two pieces of sugar in perfect equilibrium, moistened them drop by drop until they dissolved, after which he suddenly inclined the caraffe. A pleasant odour of anise caressed my nostrils. The mixture grew more clouded as the water fell, like those beautiful opaque clouds that lie along the horizon before the rain, and finally took on a pale green tint which I had never met in our walks. Immediately the talking began again: the operation was completed.
At my new guardian’s order they brought “the youngster” a grenadine with a bottle of seltzer water. The rite observed in this case was shorter and not of sufficient importance to overcome the general indifference. The rival “green” enjoyed a particular celebrity. One discharge from the seltzer bottle into the syrup which was languishing in the bottom of the glass and my mixture rose up, frothy, boiling, tossing, first light rose colour, then, after the gases had been dissipated, a golden rose. What touched me most wets the straw that was given me for imbibing it from a distance: one had only to bend the head over and breathe it in.
Merely by that breath I was initiated into a higher form of existence. Perfectly happy, I felt a great desire to tell my neighbours so. They were sucking up divers concoctions. Most of them had kindly, rubicund faces, and eyes somewhat bleared. They too were all perfectly happy. Why had grandfather taught me that people in towns were not happy? To become so, all they had to do was to go to the café.
Among the heads which I was examining at leisure and with entire sympathy was one which I thought I knew. It belonged to grandfather’s left-hand neighbour, the very one whom he had qualified as a wine-sack. The face was sprinkled with red spots, which, however, were hardly to be distinguished from his blood-shot skin. Hair, beard and skin were all of the same red colour which overspread his entire head, even threatening the nose, which, the central point of the spectacle, shone resplendent. In spite of myself I thought of the picture in my Bible where the prophet Elijah is being carried by a chariot of fire into the glory of the setting sun; but I repelled the comparison as unseemly. Where could I have seen that incandescent head? By degrees my memories cleared themselves up. It had happened at our house: a man had come out from the consulting room, not proud and flaming like him of the café, but abashed, pitiful, discomfited. Yet it must have been the same: that hairy skin, those red blotches. I could not be mistaken. Father was escorting him out, and trying to encourage him, saying, as he tapped him on the shoulder:
“Keep your money, friend. You are in a sense a part of the house. Your parents and mine said thou to one another. But you must quit drinking at any cost. Promise me never again to set your foot in a café.”
“I swear to you I won’t, doctor.”
“Don’t swear, but hold out.”
“Yes, yes. I swear to you. Never in my life shall I be seen in a wineshop.”
And yet here he was, drinking and laughing, and as healthy as possible. Father was certainly too severe. Forgetting that he had cured me, I inwardly blamed him for frightening people, finding in him a certain hardness of heart. Why should he wish to deprive this good fellow of his pleasure?
My rubicund friend answered to the name of Casenave, but he was generally called by a symbolical nickname—nothing other than “Pour-the-drink,” which might serve a double purpose. “Pour-the-drink” at once won my heart by the surprising adventures through which he had passed: stories of which he most unaffectedly poured forth. He might have figured in the narratives of the “Three Old Mariners,” in which case his weight would assuredly have assured Jeremy’s descent into the jaws of the tiger. Having in his youth learned through the newspapers of the idleness and good cheer which inhered in the monkish estate, he resolved to adopt it, and presented himself at the door of a Capuchin monastery, where he soon learned to moderate his hopes. To be routed out in the night by a barbarous brother to take part in singing the service, to be fed on vegetables half cooked by a brother suffering from incurable catarrh, made him grow thin and waste away. His ingenuity alone saved him from a still greater disaster. When the monks, placed in a circle, were invited to inflict the discipline upon one another, piously reciting the penitential psalms the while, he managed to get his rope so entangled in that of his nearest fellow-sufferer that while they were deliberately disentangling them “the ‘miserere’ ran along.”
But the prior declined to keep him, and generously restored him to civil life. He there formed the most brilliant relations, which he proved to the admiring listeners by telling of the beautiful women who came every evening to visit him in his modest abode. They used to come down through the ceiling, in which, however, no aperture was afterward visible. One moment he was alone, the next, there they were in silk gowns and hoop skirts, for they still adhered to the fashions of the Second Empire. Far from remaining inactive, they would put into his hands a bowl of reasonable dimensions, into which, bending their arms, they would empty—fz-z-z-z!—several bottles of champagne. This fz-z-z-z, which expressed the flowing of the wine into the bowl, took upon his lips a caressing, musical sound. One could almost hear the pop of the cork and the bubbling out of the froth.
He imparted to us still more astounding biographical details. One night, mistaking the gas light in the street for his candle, he had sprung out of the window to blow it out, and had been picked up in his nightshirt somewhat bruised but safe and sound. And had he not a double who walked out with him? Only the evening before he had had a long and most interesting conversation with his double, who never left him till they had returned to the outskirts of the town, when he bade him good-bye till next time.
Every one listened without interrupting him, except by signs of approval or requests to go on. Why should I not believe all those marvellous things, when no one around me showed the slightest sign of incredulity?
I did not know the nature of Casenave’s business, for he could converse upon all subjects with great competence, and might be supposed to have practised the most diverse industries. Whereas I very soon discovered that two other members of the company—Gallus and Merinos—were distinguished artists. Gallus, the musician, directed his remarks especially to grandfather, as if only they two, in the midst of the general imbecility, could understand one another and fraternise in matters musical. The pair affected to hold themselves apart, though in their asides they appeared to utter only a few brief cabalistic words: understanding thus established, they would roll the whites of their eyes when one or the other alluded to the allegro of the symphony in C minor, the andante of the fourteenth sonata, or the scherzo in B flat of the seventh trio, over which they would clasp one another’s hands as if in mutual congratulation, calling it the Archduke Rodolpho’s divine trio. No one interrupted them in the state of exultation to which a mere numeral was enough to lift them; at such times indeed every one gazed upon them with respect. From time to time some one would inquire of Gallus, somewhat diffidently, as if fearful of being pitied for not having used the proper terms:
“How about your lyrical drama on the Death of Olympus?”
“It’s getting on,” the composer would reply imperturbably.
“How far along are you?”
“Still in the prelude. There is no hurry. A lifetime is hardly long enough for the completion of such a work and I have only been at it some ten years.”
It must be a prodigious opera that demanded such efforts! For that matter, one could see, merely by looking at Gallus, that he was breaking down under the weight of so vast an undertaking. His frame was puny, stunted, sickly, like a pear tree that my father had ordered rooted up from the court. A lock of hair fell across his stormy brow, and when he passed his hand through his disorderly locks a shower of scurf would fall upon his shoulders. Though the season was warm he wore a black velvet coat, and around his neck an enormous blue scarf such as women wear, the spots upon which were innumerable. All my aunt’s benzine would not have sufficed to clean them. But I told myself that artists could not be expected to dress like other folk,—for if they did they might not be known to be artists. This dirty little man, who looked peaceable enough, would sometimes fall into a fury, and figuratively drag through mud and dirt by the napes of their necks certain abominable criminals such as Ambroise Thomas, and Gounod, who were guilty of having fraudulently robbed him of public admiration, and irremediably corrupted the public taste. He also brought accusations against the bourgeois of our town, whose plots and treacheries he enumerated at length. I observed that the designation bourgeois was by itself alone a disgrace, and I trembled at the thought that I was one, and my father also. Only grandfather, stout against being classified, might perhaps be spared. I afterward learned that Gallus was by profession an examiner of weights and measures. In its turn society in general came in for severe condemnation; but that it deserved this I had already learned in the course of my walks with grandfather. And thus I came to know that my new friends of the café, whom I had imagined to be even more fortunate than the peasants with their white cheeses and their fresh cream, were in reality persecuted martyrs.
How could I have the slightest doubt of this in face of the injustice which had befallen the second artist, Merinos? Whether this was his name or a nickname I never knew. If a nickname, it miraculously fitted his mutton face, at once long and full, rosy as the cheeks of a nursing baby, and crowned with curly hair. He vaguely resembled Mariette, our cook, though without her martial aspect. But these somewhat prepossessing features were liable to misconstruction. Merinos was a ravaged soul,> and I caught allusions to the extraordinary passions which he had experienced. Up to this time I had supposed that passion showed itself by a lugubrious face and tearful eyes, but he was shining and jovial, with not a trace of tears in his protruding orbits, though they were plain to see in those of Casenave, Gallus and nearly all the others. Thus my childish imagination found itself nonplussed.
Both Merinos and Gallus had lived long in Paris, in the mysterious Montmartre quarter, of which both spoke as of the promised land. Merinos was a portrait painter, but he had given up painting, a fact for which he gave convincing reasons.
“You understand: now-a-days people make such ridiculous demands. They insist upon a likeness. As if the likeness ever mattered to an artist!”
“That’s sure enough,” the chorus assented.
My mind at once reverted to the collection of ancestors that covered the walls of the drawing room and that were bad paintings. Assuredly they must be likenesses.
Thus defrauded of glory by the stupidity of the bourgeois, Merinos none the less continued to give evidence of genius. He always carried about with him a piece of coloured paper and a stick of charcoal. While talking and smoking he would carelessly rub his charcoal on the paper, and draw a few lines below the spots thus obtained. It was curious, but when one studied these masterpieces patiently and with good will, one could get a notion of distorted faces, barely indicated, but which the admiring group recognised as faces in torment, ill disposed folk, disturbers of society. Certain art-lovers in the town—there were some all the same, it seemed—would buy these at a high price, declaring them to be wonderful; and there was an enthusiastic and slender witted lady, who, as every one knew, used regularly to visit Merinos’s studio, which, it appeared, was a perfect dog-hole, humbly to gather up his slightest sketches, even going down upon her knees on the floor to hunt them under the furniture. I too admired him, on trust.
One day when grandfather at our house was praising this underrated genius, he brought upon himself this remark from my father:
“Yes, that’s the great fad—unfinished works! For my part, I care neither for scaffoldings nor for ruins.”
What did he mean by that? I concluded simply that he was incapable of appreciating, as we did, the art of the Café des Navigateurs.
It was the proper thing to maintain a certain distance between these two misunderstood beings and Galurin, who was only a decayed photographer. The latter was no more a stranger to me than Casenave had been. People used to employ him in their houses for this and that supplementary duty, and especially as an extra man at table. As he was once deploring this sort of servitude in our presence grandfather reminded him that Jean-Jacques had endured the same. The example of Jean-Jacques appeared to soothe his recalcitrant pride. Who in the world was this Jean-Jacques, I wondered.
At our house they had given up taking advantage of Galurin’s services after a great dinner at which he was put in charge of the wines, with instructions to name them as he served them. He triumphantly opened the dining-room door, waving the bottle in the air and crying in stentorian tones, “I announce the Moulin-à-vent”—an effort which was received with a burst of laughter that wounded him, for he was very sensitive. He abandoned the napkin and became process-server, which coercive though somewhat obscure title seemed to be one of honour. To add to his income he vouchsafed to carry around wedding or funeral invitations when such occasions occurred. One evening, before an important funeral, he forgot himself at the Café of the Navigators, and left the entire parcel of mourning invitations upon the sofa. When he found them it was too late to make his rounds. At once adopting the radical measures which circumstances demanded, he hastened to plunge the compromising parcel in the lake. As the result of this immersion the defunct was obliged to take possession of his last abode in almost complete solitude. Never had such forlorn obsequies been witnessed, and many coolnesses arose among relatives and friends who had not received invitations, and who were not slow to assume that they had been purposely and maliciously neglected.
Galurin used to heap anathemas upon the social system which constrained him to adopt such base industries, the duties of which he performed but capriciously and intermittently. Furthermore, he advocated the partition of all property, for he had nothing of his own.
But the one who cast all others into the shade when he took the floor, who excelled in transposing the incoherent lamentations of Gallus and Merinos and the scatter-brained diatribes of Galurin into the rounded forms of oratorical periods, was Martinod. Martinod, the youngest of all, had a marvellous gift of gravity. Solemn by nature, he wore a long beard and never laughed. One could easily imagine him upon a mausoleum proclaiming the last judgment through a conch-shell. The melancholy that emanated from his entire person enveloped him in all the prestige of a grand funeral, the serious character of which is not to be denied. In the beginning I did not like Martinod. He never looked nice in the face and I suspected him of dark designs. But like all the others I fell under the spell of his utterances. He would begin in a melancholy tone, which would move one to tears. One might suppose him to have but just escaped from a terrible catastrophe. What a beggar he would have made, and how many half-francs he would have extracted from the most tightly closed fists! Then his voice would grow deeper, opening hearts and minds, and from his inexhaustible lips would flow the most resonant harmonies. He would discant upon the future, a golden age when equality would be the rule in every sphere,—equality of fortune, equality of happiness. Nothing would belong to any one, everything would belong to all. I felt a degree of shame at not understanding very well, because every one else in our group understood and approved. And even at the other tables people would stop drinking and playing cards to listen. The picture which he drew was admirably simple: men in their best clothes praising nature and embracing one another like brothers. Rapt in admiration, I would compare him to my music box, the notes of which made a dancer pirouette upon the cover.
At other times Martinod would be gloomy, bitter and vindictive, heaping threats and sarcasms upon the social fabric of the day, unless it were immediately made over after his ideas. In the name of liberty he would give all Europe over to fire and sword. I would listen in terror, but on the way home grandfather would reassure me.
“He was out of humour to-day. To-morrow the world will go better.”
Thus the new and varied society with which I was mingling appeared very different from that in which until then I had been living at home or in school. When we reached the house my cheeks would be full of colour—they thought it was the good country air. Grandfather had no need to counsel me to say nothing about our visits to the Café of the Navigators. An infallible instinct warned me to say nothing about them at our house. It was a secret between him and me. We were accomplices.