第6章

My uncle put on his frogged coat, took his bell shaped hat, and we descended to the street, which seemed to me singularly changed.It looked to me as if I had not been in it before for ever so long a time.Nevertheless, when we came to the Rue de Seine, the idea of my doll suddenly returned to my mind and excited me in an extraordinary way.My head was on fire.I resolved upon a desperate expedient.We were passing before the window.She was there, behind the glass--with her red checks, and her flowered petticoat, and her long legs.

"Uncle," I said, with a great effort, "will you buy that doll for me?"And I waited.

"Buy a doll for a boy--sacrebleu!" cried my uncle, in a voice of thunder."Do you wish to dishonour yourself? And it is that old Mag there that you want! Well, I must compliment you, my young fellow! If you grow up with such tastes as that, you will never have any pleasure in life; and your comrades will call you a precious ninny.If you asked me for a sword or a gun, my boy, I would buy them for you with the last silver crown of my pension.But to buy a doll for you--by all that's holy!--to disgrace you! Never in the world! Why, if I were ever to see you playing with a puppet rigged out like that, Monsieur, my sister's son, I would disown you for my nephew!"On hearing these words, I felt my heart so wrung that nothing but pride--a diabolical pride--kept me from crying.

My uncle, suddenly calming down, returned to his ideas about the Bourbons; but I, still smarting under the weight of his indignation, felt an unspeakable shame.My resolve was quickly made.I promised myself never to disgrace myself--I firmly and for ever renounced that red-cheeked doll.

I felt that day, for the first time, the austere sweetness of sacrifice.

Captain, though it be true that all your life you swore like a pagan, smoked like a beadle, and drank like a bell-ringer, be your memory nevertheless honoured--not merely because you were a brave soldier, but also because you revealed to your little nephew in petticoats the sentiment of heroism! Pride and laziness had made you almost insupportable, Uncle Victor!--but a great heart used to beat under those frogs upon your coat.You always used to wear, I now remember, a rose in your button-hole.That rose which you offered so readily to the shop-girls--that large, open-hearted flower, scattering its petals to all the winds, was the symbol of your glorious youth.

You despised neither wine nor tobacco; but you despised life.

Neither delicacy nor common sense could have been learned from you, Captain; but you taught me, even at an age when my nurse had to wipe my nose, a lesson of honour and self-abrogation that I shall never forget.

You have now been sleeping for many years in the Cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, under a plain slab bearing the epitaph:

CI-GIT

ARISTIDE VICTOR MALDENT, Capitaine d'Infanterie, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.

But such, Captain, was not the inscription devised by yourself to be placed above those old bones of yours--knocked about so long on fields of battle and in haunts of pleasure.Among your papers was found this proud and bitter epitaph, which, despite your last will none could have ventured to put upon your tomb:

CI-GIT

UN BRIGAND DE LA LOIRE

"Therese, we will get a wreath of immortelles to-morrow, and lay them on the tomb of the Brigand of the Loire."...

But Therese is not here.And how, indeed, could she be near me, seeing that I am at the rondpoint of the Champs-Elysees? There, at the termination of the avenue, the Arc de Triomphe, which bears under its vaults the names of Uncle Victor's companions-in-arms, opens its giant gate against the sky.The trees of the avenue are unfolding to the sun of spring their first leaves, still all pale and chilly.Beside me the carriages keep rolling by to the Bois de Boulogne.Unconsciously I have wandered into this fashionable avenue on my promenade, and halted, quite stupidly, in front of a booth stocked with gingerbread and decanters of liquorice-water, each topped by a lemon.A miserable little boy, covered with rags, which expose his chapped skin, stares with widely opened eyes at those sumptuous sweets which are not for such as he.With the shamelessness of innocence he betrays his longing.His round, fixed eyes contemplate a certain gingerbread man of lofty stature.It is a general, and it looks a little like Uncle Victor.I take it, I pay for it, and present it to the little pauper, who dares not extend his hand to receive it--for, by reason of precocious experience, he cannot believe in luck; he looks at me, in the same way that certain big dogs do, with the air of one saying, "You are cruel to make fun of me like that!""Come, little stupid," I say to him, in that rough tone I am accustomed to use, "take it--take it, and eat it; for you, happier than I was at your age, you can satisfy your tastes without disgracing yourself."...And you, Uncle Victor--you, whose manly figure has been recalled to me by that gingerbread general, come, glorious Shadow, help me to forget my new doll.We remain for ever children, and are always running after new toys.

Same day.

In the oddest way that Coccoz family has become associated in my mind with the Clerk Alexander.