第32章

Memories throng back upon me.I feel myself like some old gnarled and mossy oak which awakens a nestling world of birds by shaking its branches.Unfortunately the song my birds sing is old as the world, and can amuse no one but myself.""Tell me your souvenirs," said Madame de Gabry."I cannot read your books, because they are written only for scholars; but I like very much to have you talk to me, because you know how to give interest to the most ordinary things in life.And talk to me just as you would talk to an old woman.This morning I found three grey threads in my hair.""Let them come without regret, Madame," I replied."Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.And when in some years more you will have a silvery fringe under your black fillet, you will be reclothed with a new beauty, less vivid but more touching than the first; and you will find your husband admiring your grey tresses as much as he did that black curl which you gave him when about to be married, and which he preserves in a locket as a thing sacred....These boulevards are broad and very quiet.We can talk at our ease as we walk along.I will tell you, to begin with, how I first made the acquaintance of Clementine's father.But you must not expect anything extraordinary, or anything even remarkable; you would be greatly deceived.

"Monsieur de Lessay used to live in the second storey of an old house in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, having a stuccoed front, ornamented with antique busts, and a large unkept garden attached to it.That facade and that garden were the first images my child-eyes perceived;and they will be the last, no doubt, which I still see through my closed eyelids when the Inevitable Day comes.For it was in that house that I was born; it was in that garden I first learned, while playing, to feel and know some particles of this old universe.

Magical hours!--sacred hours!--when the soul, all fresh from the making, first discoveries the world, which for its sake seems to assume such caressing brightness, such mysterious charm! And that, Madame, is indeed because the universe itself is only the reflection of our soul.

"My mother was being very happily constituted.She rose with the sun, like the birds; and she herself resembled the birds by her domestic industry, by her maternal instinct, by her perpetual desire to sing, and by a sort of brusque grace, which I could feel the of very well even as a child.She was the soul of the house, which she filled with her systematic and joyous activity.My father was just as slow as she was brisk.I can recall very well that placid face of his, over which at times an ironical smile used to flit.

He was fatigued with active life; and he loved his fatigue.Seated beside the fire in his big arm-chair, he used to read from morning till night; and it is from him that I inherit my love of books.Ihave in my library a Mably and a Raynal, which he annotated with his own hand from beginning to end.But it was utterly useless attempting to interest him in anything practical whatever.When my mother would try, by all kinds of gracious little ruses, to lure him out of his retirement, he would simply shake his head with that inexorable gentleness which is the force of weak characters.He used in this way greatly to worry the poor woman, who could not enter at all into his own sphere of meditative wisdom, and could understand nothing of life except its daily duties and the merry labour of each hour.She thought him sick, and feared he was going to become still more so.But his apathy had a different cause.

"My father, entering the Naval office under Monsieur Decres, in 1801, gave early proof of high administrative talent.There was a great deal of activity in the marine department in those times; and in 1805 my father was appointed chief of the Second Administrative Division.That same year, the Emperor, whose attention had been called to him by the Minister, ordered him to make a report upon the organisation of the English navy.This work, which reflected a profoundly liberal and philosophic spirit, of which the editor himself was unconscious, was only finished in 1807--about eighteen months after the defeat of Admiral Villeneuve at Trafalgar.Napoleon, who, from that disastrous day, never wanted to hear the word ship mentioned in his presence, angrily glanced over a few pages of the memoir, and then threw it in the fire, vociferating, 'Words!--words!

I said once before that I hated ideologists.' My father was told afterwards that the Emperor's anger was so intense at the moment that he stamped the manuscript down into the fire with his boot-heels.At all events, it was his habit, when very much irritated, to poke down the fire with his boot-soles.My father never fully recovered from this disgrace; and the fruitlessness of all his efforts towards reform was certainly the cause of the apathy which came upon him at a later day.Nevertheless, Napoleon, after his return from Elba, sent for him, and ordered him to prepare some liberal and patriotic bulletins and proclamations for the fleet.

After Waterloo, my father, whom the event had rather saddened than surprised, retired into private life, and was not interfered with--except that it was generally averred of him that he was a Jacobin, a buveur-de-sang--one of those men with whom no one could afford to be on intimate terms.My mother's eldest brother, Victor Maldent, and infantry captain--retired on half-pay in 1814, and disbanded in 1815--aggravated by his bad attitude the situation in which the fall of the Empire had placed my father.Captain Victor used to shout in the cafes and the public balls that the Bourbons had sold France to the Cossacks.He used to show everybody a tricoloured cockade hidden in the lining of his hat; and carried with much ostentation a walking-stick, the handle of which had been so carved that the shadow thrown by it made the silhouette of the Emperor.