Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (437 page)

I fear, however, that in her heart of hearts, madame kindly despised and pitied the boy.  She had no admiration for his class of virtues; she liked a smart, polite, forward, roguish sort of boy, cap in hand, light of foot, meeting the eye; she liked volubility, charm, a little vice — the promise of a second Doctor Desprez.  And it was her indefeasible belief that Jean-Marie was dull.  ‘Poor dear boy,’ she had said once, ‘how sad it is that he should be so stupid!’  She had never repeated that remark, for the Doctor had raged like a wild bull, denouncing the brutal bluntness of her mind, bemoaning his own fate to be so unequally mated with an ass, and, what touched Anastasie more nearly, menacing the table china by the fury of his gesticulations.  But she adhered silently to her opinion; and when Jean-Marie was sitting, stolid, blank, but not unhappy, over his unfinished tasks, she would snatch her opportunity in the Doctor’s absence, go over to him, put her arms about his neck, lay her cheek to his, and communicate her sympathy with his distress.  ‘Do not mind,’ she would say; ‘I, too, am not at all clever, and I can assure you that it makes no difference in life.’

The Doctor’s view was naturally different.  That gentleman never wearied of the sound of his own voice, which was, to say the truth, agreeable enough to hear.  He now had a listener, who was not so cynically indifferent as Anastasie, and who sometimes put him on his mettle by the most relevant objections.  Besides, was he not educating the boy?  And education, philosophers are agreed, is the most philosophical of duties.  What can be more heavenly to poor mankind than to have one’s hobby grow into a duty to the State?  Then, indeed, do the ways of life become ways of pleasantness.  Never had the Doctor seen reason to be more content with his endowments.  Philosophy flowed smoothly from his lips.  He was so agile a dialectician that he could trace his nonsense, when challenged, back to some root in sense, and prove it to be a sort of flower upon his system.  He slipped out of antinomies like a fish, and left his disciple marvelling at the rabbi’s depth.

Moreover, deep down in his heart the Doctor was disappointed with the ill-success of his more formal education.  A boy, chosen by so acute an observer for his aptitude, and guided along the path of learning by so philosophic an instructor, was bound, by the nature of the universe, to make a more obvious and lasting advance.  Now Jean-Marie was slow in all things, impenetrable in others; and his power of forgetting was fully on a level with his power to learn.  Therefore the Doctor cherished his peripatetic lectures, to which the boy attended, which he generally appeared to enjoy, and by which he often profited.

Many and many were the talks they had together; and health and moderation proved the subject of the Doctor’s divagations.  To these he lovingly returned.

‘I lead you,’ he would say, ‘by the green pastures.  My system, my beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one phrase — to avoid excess.  Blessed nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates excess.  Human law, in this matter, imitates at a great distance her provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law.  Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for ourselves and for our neighbours — lex armata — armed, emphatic, tyrannous law.  If you see a crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box!  The judge, though in a way an admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or the priest.  Above all the doctor — the doctor and the purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia!  Pure air — from the neighbourhood of a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine — unadulterated wine, and the reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works of nature — these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best religious comforts.  Devote yourself to these.  Hark! there are the bells of Bourron (the wind is in the north, it will be fair).  How clear and airy is the sound!  The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind attuned to silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the heart!  Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these sensations; and yet you yourself perceive they are a part of health. — Did you remember your cinchona this morning?  Good.  Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather for ourselves if we lived in the locality. — What a world is this!  Though a professed atheist, I delight to bear my testimony to the world.  Look at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround our path!  The river runs by the garden end, our bath, our fishpond, our natural system of drainage.  There is a well in the court which sends up sparkling water from the earth’s very heart, clean, cool, and, with a little wine, most wholesome.  The district is notorious for its salubrity; rheumatism is the only prevalent complaint, and I myself have never had a touch of it.  I tell you — and my opinion is based upon the coldest, clearest processes of reason — if I, if you, desired to leave this home of pleasures, it would be the duty, it would be the privilege, of our best friend to prevent us with a pistol bullet.’

One beautiful June day they sat upon the hill outside the village.  The river, as blue as heaven, shone here and there among the foliage.  The indefatigable birds turned and flickered about Gretz church tower.  A healthy wind blew from over the forest, and the sound of innumerable thousands of tree-tops and innumerable millions on millions of green leaves was abroad in the air, and filled the ear with something between whispered speech and singing.  It seemed as if every blade of grass must hide a cigale; and the fields rang merrily with their music, jingling far and near as with the sleigh-bells of the fairy queen.  From their station on the slope the eye embraced a large space of poplar’d plain upon the one hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the other, and Gretz itself in the middle, a handful of roofs.  Under the bestriding arch of the blue heavens, the place seemed dwindled to a toy.  It seemed incredible that people dwelt, and could find room to turn or air to breathe, in such a corner of the world.  The thought came home to the boy, perhaps for the first time, and he gave it words.

‘How small it looks!’ he sighed.

‘Ay,’ replied the Doctor, ‘small enough now.  Yet it was once a walled city; thriving, full of furred burgesses and men in armour, humming with affairs; — with tall spires, for aught that I know, and portly towers along the battlements.  A thousand chimneys ceased smoking at the curfew bell.  There were gibbets at the gate as thick as scarecrows.  In time of war, the assault swarmed against it with ladders, the arrows fell like leaves, the defenders sallied hotly over the drawbridge, each side uttered its cry as they plied their weapons.  Do you know that the walls extended as far as the Commanderie?  Tradition so reports.  Alas, what a long way off is all this confusion — nothing left of it but my quiet words spoken in your ear — and the town itself shrunk to the hamlet underneath us!  By-and-by came the English wars — you shall hear more of the English, a stupid people, who sometimes blundered into good — and Gretz was taken, sacked, and burned.  It is the history of many towns; but Gretz never rose again; it was never rebuilt; its ruins were a quarry to serve the growth of rivals; and the stones of Gretz are now erect along the streets of Nemours.  It gratifies me that our old house was the first to rise after the calamity; when the town had come to an end, it inaugurated the hamlet.’

‘I, too, am glad of that,’ said Jean-Marie.

‘It should be the temple of the humbler virtues,’ responded the Doctor with a savoury gusto.  ‘Perhaps one of the reasons why I love my little hamlet as I do, is that we have a similar history, she and I.  Have I told you that I was once rich?’

‘I do not think so,’ answered Jean-Marie.  ‘I do not think I should have forgotten.  I am sorry you should have lost your fortune.’

‘Sorry?’ cried the Doctor.  ‘Why, I find I have scarce begun your education after all.  Listen to me!  Would you rather live in the old Gretz or in the new, free from the alarms of war, with the green country at the door, without noise, passports, the exactions of the soldiery, or the jangle of the curfew-bell to send us off to bed by sundown?’

‘I suppose I should prefer the new,’ replied the boy.

‘Precisely,’ returned the Doctor; ‘so do I.  And, in the same way, I prefer my present moderate fortune to my former wealth.  Golden mediocrity! cried the adorable ancients; and I subscribe to their enthusiasm.  Have I not good wine, good food, good air, the fields and the forest for my walk, a house, an admirable wife, a boy whom I protest I cherish like a son?  Now, if I were still rich, I should indubitably make my residence in Paris — you know Paris — Paris and Paradise are not convertible terms.  This pleasant noise of the wind streaming among leaves changed into the grinding Babel of the street, the stupid glare of plaster substituted for this quiet pattern of greens and greys, the nerves shattered, the digestion falsified — picture the fall!  Already you perceive the consequences; the mind is stimulated, the heart steps to a different measure, and the man is himself no longer.  I have passionately studied myself — the true business of philosophy.  I know my character as the musician knows the ventages of his flute.  Should I return to Paris, I should ruin myself gambling; nay, I go further — I should break the heart of my Anastasie with infidelities.’

This was too much for Jean-Marie.  That a place should so transform the most excellent of men transcended his belief.  Paris, he protested, was even an agreeable place of residence.  ‘Nor when I lived in that city did I feel much difference,’ he pleaded.

‘What!’ cried the Doctor.  ‘Did you not steal when you were there?’

But the boy could never be brought to see that he had done anything wrong when he stole.  Nor, indeed, did the Doctor think he had; but that gentleman was never very scrupulous when in want of a retort.

‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘do you begin to understand?  My only friends were those who ruined me.  Gretz has been my academy, my sanatorium, my heaven of innocent pleasures.  If millions are offered me, I wave them back:
Retro
,
Sathanas
! — Evil one, begone!  Fix your mind on my example; despise riches, avoid the debasing influence of cities.  Hygiene — hygiene and mediocrity of fortune — these be your watchwords during life!’

The Doctor’s system of hygiene strikingly coincided with his tastes; and his picture of the perfect life was a faithful description of the one he was leading at the time.  But it is easy to convince a boy, whom you supply with all the facts for the discussion.  And besides, there was one thing admirable in the philosophy, and that was the enthusiasm of the philosopher.  There was never any one more vigorously determined to be pleased; and if he was not a great logician, and so had no right to convince the intellect, he was certainly something of a poet, and had a fascination to seduce the heart.  What he could not achieve in his customary humour of a radiant admiration of himself and his circumstances, he sometimes effected in his fits of gloom.

‘Boy,’ he would say, ‘avoid me to-day.  If I were superstitious, I should even beg for an interest in your prayers.  I am in the black fit; the evil spirit of King Saul, the hag of the merchant Abudah, the personal devil of the mediæval monk, is with me — is in me,’ tapping on his breast.  ‘The vices of my nature are now uppermost; innocent pleasures woo me in vain; I long for Paris, for my wallowing in the mire.  See,’ he would continue, producing a handful of silver, ‘I denude myself, I am not to be trusted with the price of a fare.  Take it, keep it for me, squander it on deleterious candy, throw it in the deepest of the river — I will homologate your action.  Save me from that part of myself which I disown.  If you see me falter, do not hesitate; if necessary, wreck the train!  I speak, of course, by a parable.  Any extremity were better than for me to reach Paris alive.’

Doubtless the Doctor enjoyed these little scenes, as a variation in his part; they represented the Byronic element in the somewhat artificial poetry of his existence; but to the boy, though he was dimly aware of their theatricality, they represented more.  The Doctor made perhaps too little, the boy possibly too much, of the reality and gravity of these temptations.

One day a great light shone for Jean-Marie.  ‘Could not riches be used well?’ he asked.

‘In theory, yes,’ replied the Doctor.  ‘But it is found in experience that no one does so.  All the world imagine they will be exceptional when they grow wealthy; but possession is debasing, new desires spring up; and the silly taste for ostentation eats out the heart of pleasure.’

‘Then you might be better if you had less,’ said the boy.

‘Certainly not,’ replied the Doctor; but his voice quavered as he spoke.

‘Why?’ demanded pitiless innocence.

Doctor Desprez saw all the colours of the rainbow in a moment; the stable universe appeared to be about capsizing with him.  ‘Because,’ said he — affecting deliberation after an obvious pause — ’because I have formed my life for my present income.  It is not good for men of my years to be violently dissevered from their habits.’

That was a sharp brush.  The Doctor breathed hard, and fell into taciturnity for the afternoon.  As for the boy, he was delighted with the resolution of his doubts; even wondered that he had not foreseen the obvious and conclusive answer.  His faith in the Doctor was a stout piece of goods.  Desprez was inclined to be a sheet in the wind’s eye after dinner, especially after Rhone wine, his favourite weakness.  He would then remark on the warmth of his feeling for Anastasie, and with inflamed cheeks and a loose, flustered smile, debate upon all sorts of topics, and be feebly and indiscreetly witty.  But the adopted stable-boy would not permit himself to entertain a doubt that savoured of ingratitude.  It is quite true that a man may be a second father to you, and yet take too much to drink; but the best natures are ever slow to accept such truths.

The Doctor thoroughly possessed his heart, but perhaps he exaggerated his influence over his mind.  Certainly Jean-Marie adopted some of his master’s opinions, but I have yet to learn that he ever surrendered one of his own.  Convictions existed in him by divine right; they were virgin, unwrought, the brute metal of decision.  He could add others indeed, but he could not put away; neither did he care if they were perfectly agreed among themselves; and his spiritual pleasures had nothing to do with turning them over or justifying them in words.  Words were with him a mere accomplishment, like dancing.  When he was by himself, his pleasures were almost vegetable.  He would slip into the woods towards Acheres, and sit in the mouth of a cave among grey birches.  His soul stared straight out of his eyes; he did not move or think; sunlight, thin shadows moving in the wind, the edge of firs against the sky, occupied and bound his faculties.  He was pure unity, a spirit wholly abstracted.  A single mood filled him, to which all the objects of sense contributed, as the colours of the spectrum merge and disappear in white light.