The Immortal by Alphonse Daudet (short story to read txt) 📖

/> Here was a shock for Freydet: Danjou, the shepherd of Latium, had a wig!
'A half-wig, what they call a _breton_. At Madame Astier's,' he went on, 'I have gone through lectures on ethnology enough to kill a hippopotamus; and at the table of the Duchess, the severe and haughty Duchess, I have seen that old monkey Laniboire, seated in the place of honour, do and say things for which, if he had not been a "deity," he would have been turned out of the house, with a good-bye in her Grace's characteristic style. And the joke is, that it was she who got him into the Academie. She has seen that very Laniboire at her feet, begging humbly, piteously, importunately, to get himself elected, "Elect him," she said to my cousin Loisillon, "elect him, do; and then I shall be rid of him." And now she looks up to him as a god; he is always next her at table; and her contempt has changed into an abject admiration. It is like a savage, falling down and quaking before the idol he has carved. I know what Academic society is, with all its foolish, ludicrous, mean little intrigues. You want to get into it! What for, I should like to know? You have the happiest life in the world. Even I, who am not set upon anything, was near envying you, when I saw you with your sister at Clos-Jallanges: a perfect house on a hill-side, airy rooms, chimney-corners big enough to get into, oakwoods, cornfields, vineyards, river; the life of a country gentleman, as it is painted in the novels of Tolstoi; fishing and shooting, a pleasant library, a neighbourhood not too dull, the peasants reasonably honest; and to prevent you from growing callous in the midst of such unbroken satisfaction, your companion, suffering and smiling, full of life and keenness, poor thing, in her arm-chair, delighted to listen, when you came in from a ride and read her a good sonnet, genuine poetry, fresh from nature, which you had pencilled on your saddle, or lying flat in the grass, as we are now--only without this horrible din of waggons and trumpets.'
Vedrine stopped perforce. Some heavy drays, loaded with iron, and shaking ground and houses as they went by, a piercing alarum from the neighbouring barracks, the harsh screech of a steam-tug's whistle, an organ, and the bells of Sainte-Clotilde, all united at the moment, as from time to time the noises of a great town will do, in a thundering _tutti_; and the outrageous babel, close to the ear, contrasted strangely with the natural field of grass and weed, overshadowed by tall trees, in which the two old classmates were enjoying their smoke and their familiar chat.
It was at the corner of the Quai d'Orsay and the Rue de Bellechasse, on the ruined terrace of the old Cour des Comptes, now occupied by sweet wild plants, like a clearing in the forest at the coming of spring. Clumps of lilac past the flowering and dense thickets of plane and maple grew all along the balustrades, which were loaded with ivy and clematis: and within this verdant screen the pigeons lighted, the bees wandered, and under a beam of yellow light might be seen the calm and handsome profile of Madame Vedrine, nursing her youngest, while the eldest threw stones at the numerous cats, grey, black, yellow, and tabby, which might be called the tigers of this Parisian jungle.
'And as we are talking of your poetry, you will wish me to speak my mind, won't you, old boy? Well, I have only just looked into your last book, but it has not that smell of bluebells and thyme that I found in the others. Your "God in Nature" has rather a flavour of the Academic bay; and I am much afraid you have made a sacrifice of your "woodnotes wild," you know, and thrown them, by way of pass-money, into the mouth of _Crocodilus_.'
This nickname 'Crocodilus,' turning up at the bottom of Vedrine's schoolboy recollections, amused them for a moment. They pictured once more Astier-Rehu at his desk, with streaming brow, his cap well on the back of his head, and a yard of red ribbon relieved against the black of his gown, emphasising with the solemn movements of his wide sleeves the well-worn joke from Racine or Moliere, or his own rounded periods in the style of Vic't-d'Azir, whose seat in the Academie he eventually filled. Then Freydet, vexed with himself for laughing at his old master, began to praise his work as an historian. What a mass of original documents he had brought out of their dust!
'There's nothing in that,' retorted Vedrine with unqualified contempt. In his view, the most interesting documents in hands of a fool had no more meaning than has the great book of humanity itself, when consulted by a stupid novelist. The gold all turns into dead leaves. 'Look here,' he went on with rising animation, 'a man is not to be called an historian because he has expanded unpublished material into great octavo volumes, which are shelved unread among the books of information, and should be labelled, "For external application only. Shake the bottle." It is only French frivolity that attaches a serious value to compilations like those. The English and Germans despise us. "Ineptissimus vir Astier-Rehu," says Mommsen somewhere or other in a note.'
'Yes, and it was you, you heartless fellow, who made the poor man read out the note before the whole class.'
'And a terrible jaw he gave me. It was nearly as bad as when one day I got so tired of hearing him tell us that the will was a lever, a lever with which you might lift anything anywhere, that I answered him from my place in his own voice: "Could you fly with it, sir--could you fly with it?"'
Freydet, laughing, abandoned his defence of the historian, and began to plead for Astier-Rehu as a teacher. But Vedrine went off again.
'A teacher! What is he? A poor creature who has spent his life in "weeding" hundreds of brains, or, in plain terms, destroying whatever in them was original and natural, all the living germs which it is the first duty of an educator to nourish and protect. To think how the lot of us were hoed, and stubbed, and grubbed! One or two did not take kindly to the process, but the old fellow went at it with his tools and his nails, till he made us all as neat and as flat as a schoolroom bench. And see the results of his workmanship! A few rebels, like Herscher, who, from hatred of the conventional, go for exaggeration and ugliness, or like myself, who, thanks to that old ass, love roughness and contortion so much, that my sculpture, they say, is "like a bag of walnuts." And the rest of them levelled, scraped, and empty!'
'And pray, what of me?' said Freydet, with an affected despair.
'Oh, as for you, Nature has preserved you so far; but look out for yourself if you let Crocodilus clip you again. And to think that we have public schools to provide us with this sort of pedagogue, and that we reward him with endowments, and honours, and a place (save the mark) in the National Institute!'
Stretched at his ease in the long grass, with his head on his arm and waving a fern, which he used as a sun-screen, Vedrine calmly uttered these strong remarks, without the slightest play of feature in his broad face, pale and puffy like that of an Indian idol. Only the tiny laughing eyes broke the general expression of dreamy indolence.
His companion was shocked at such treatment of what he was accustomed to respect 'But,' he said, 'if you are such an enemy of the father, how do you manage to be such a friend of the son?'
'I am no more one than the other. I look upon Paul Astier, with his imperturbable _sang-froid_ and his pretty-miss complexion, as a problem. I should like to live long enough to see what becomes of him.'
'Ah, Monsieur de Freydet,' said Madame Vedrine, joining in the conversation from the place where she sat, 'if you only knew what a tool he makes of my husband! All the restorations at Mousseaux, the new gallery towards the river, the concert-room, the chapel, all were done by Vedrine. And the Rosen tomb too. He will only be paid for the statue; but the whole thing is really his--conception, arrangement, everything.'
'There, there, that will do,' said the artist quietly. 'As for Mousseaux, the young fellow would certainly have been hard put to it to rediscover a fragment of the design under the layers of rubbish that the architects have been depositing there for the last thirty years. But the neighbourhood was charming, the Duchess amiable and not at all tiresome, and there was friend Freydet, whom I had found out at Clos-Jallanges. Besides, the truth is I have too many ideas, and am just tormented with them. To relieve me of a few is to do me a real service. My brain is like a railway junction, where the engines are getting up steam on all the lines at once. The young man saw that. He has not many ideas. So he purloins mine, and brings them before the public, quite certain that I shall not protest But he does not take me in. Don't I know when he is going to filch! He preserves his little indifferent air, with no expression in his eyes, until suddenly there comes a little nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. Done! Nabbed! I have no doubt he thinks to himself, "Good Lord, what a simpleton Vedrine is!" He has not the least notion that I watch him and enjoy his little game. Now,' said the sculptor as he got up, 'I will show you my Knight, and then we will go over the ruin. It is worth looking at, you will find.'
Passing from the terrace into the building, they mounted a semicircle of steps and went through a square room, formerly the apartment of the Secretary to the Conseil d'Etat. It had no floor and no ceiling, all the upper storeys had fallen through and showed the blue sky between the huge iron girders, now twisted by the fire, which had divided the floors. In a corner, against a wall to which were attached long iron pipes overgrown with creepers, lay in three pieces a model of the Rosen tomb, buried in nettles and rubbish.
'You see,' said Vedrine, 'or rather you can't see.' And he began to describe the monument. The little Princess's conception of a tomb was not easy to come up to. Several things had been tried--reminiscences of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Ninevite monuments--before deciding on Vedrine's plan, which would raise an outcry among architects, but was certainly impressive. A soldier's tomb: an open tent with the canvas looped back, disclosing within, before an altar, the wide low sarcophagus, modelled on a camp bedstead, on which lay the good Knight Crusader, fallen for King and Creed; beside him his broken sword, and at his feet a great greyhound.
The difficulty of the work and the hardness of the Dalmatian granite, which the Princess insisted on having, had obliged Vedrine to take mallet and chisel himself and to work like an artisan under the tarpaulin at the cemetery. Now, at last, after much time and trouble, the canopy was up, 'and that young rascal, Astier, will get some credit from it,' added the sculptor with a smile in which was no touch of bitterness. Then he lifted up an old carpet hanging over a hole in the wall, which had once been a door, and led Freydet into the huge ruined hall which served him for