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X
THE JBOOK OF PITY
AND' OF DEATH
V
BY
PIERRE LOTI
(of the French Academy)
SOLD BY THE
MEECAlfTILE LTBRAET,
NEW YOBK.
TRANSLATED BT
T. P. O'CONNOR, M. P.
L :5. 1.0 :{;.{'*
NEW YOKK
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
104 & 106 FOURTH AVENUE
.
.
COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY.
All rights reserved.
THE MEHBHON COMPANY
JUHWAV, N, J,
TTo /IDs JSelovefc flDotber
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK, AND WITHOUT FEAK :
FOR HER CHRISTIAN FAITH ALLOWS
HER TO READ WITH TRAN-
QUILLITY EVEN THE
MOST SOMBER
THINGS.
2217814
CONTENTS.
PAGE
A PRELIMINARY WORD FROM THE AUTHOR, . . vii
A DREAM, 1
THE SORROW OF AN OLD CONVICT, .... 13
A MANGY CAT 23
A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME, .... 33
A STORY OF Two CATS, 41
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON 119
IN THE DEAD PAST, 141
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS, 165
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES Us, 183
THE SLAUGHTER OF AN Ox AT SEA, . . . 343
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE, .... 253
A PRELIMINARY WORD FROM
THE AUTHOR.
Ah ! Insense, qui crois que tu ri*es pas moi.
VICTOR HUGO : " Les Contemplations."
THIS book is more my real self than any-
thing I have yet written. It contains one
chapter (the Ninth, which is between page
185 and page 242) that I have never al-
lowed to appear in any magazine lest it
should fall under the eyes of certain peo-
ple without my being able to give them a
forewarning. My first inclination was not
to publish this chapter at all. But I
thouo-ht of the friends I have who are
o
unknown to me ; one response from their
distant sympathy I would regard as too
much to give up. And then I have always
the feeling that in time and space I extend
a little the limits of niy own soul by ming-
viii A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR.
ling it with theirs. A few moments and I
shall have passed away ; and then, per-
haps, these brethren will preserve the life
of the images dear to me which I have
graven on their memories.
This craving to struggle against death,
besides next to the desire of doing some-
thing of which one believes one's self cap-
able is the sole spiritual reason one has
for writing at all.
Among those who profess to study the
works of their neighbors, there is a goodly
number with whom I have nothing in
common, either in my language or my
ideas. I am less than ever capable of
feeling irritation against them, so much do
I allow, before judging other men, for dif-
ferences either natural or acquired.
But this is the first time their sarcasm
has the power to wound me, if it should
ever reach me, for it would wound at the
same time things and beings that are
sacred to me. I certainly give them their
chance by publishing this book. To them,
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR. IX
then, I desire to say just here : " Do me
the favor not to read it ; it contains noth-
ing for you ; and it will bore you so much,
if you only knew."
PlERRE LOTI.
A DREAM.
SOLD BY THE
ANTHE LIBEAEY,
NEW YORK.
A DREAM.
I WOULD I knew a language apart in
which I could write the visions of my
sleep. When I try to do so with ordinary
words I only succeed in constructing a
description that is clumsy - and dull, in
which my readers can see nothing. I
am alone able to perceive behind the
cloud of accumulated words the unfathom-
able abyss.
Dreams, even those which seem to us the
longest, have, it appears, a scarcely appre-
ciable duration no more than those fugi-
tive moments in which the spirit floats be-
tween waking and sleep. But we are de-
ceived by the extraordinary rapidity with
which their mirages succeed and change;
and having seen so many things pass be-
fore us we say : " I have dreamt the whole
night through," when perhaps we have
dreamt for barely one minute.
The vision which I am about to describe
did not really last in all probability for
more than a few seconds, for even to my-
self it appeared very brief.
The first faint picture defined itself two
or three times by stages like the flame of a
lamp that is raised by slight jerks behind
something transparent.
At first there was a long, wavering light,
drawing to it the attention of my soul as it
emerged from deep sleep, from night, and
from non-existence.
The light becomes a beam of the sun,
which enters by an open window and
spreads over the floor. At the same time,
my soul growing more excited, suddenly is
disquieted ; a vague reminiscence of I
know not what, a rapid presentiment,
rushes upon me. like a flash of lightning, of
something which must move ine to the
very depths of my soul,
A DREAM. 3
Then the scene becomes more defined.
It is the ray of the evening sun that comes
from a garden into which the window
looks an exotic garden where, without
seeing them, I know there are mango
trees. In the sunlight that lies across the
floor is reflected the shadow of a plant
which is in the garden outside and
trembles gently the shadow of a banana
tree.
And now the parts, which were com-
paratively dark, become clear; in the semi-
light the different objects become distinct,
and at last I see everything with an inde-
scribable shudder.
Yet there is nothing there but the most
simple things : a small colonial room, with
walls of wood and chairs of straw: on a
console table a clock of the time of Louis
the Fifteenth, whose pendulum ticks imper-
ceptibly. But I have already seen all this,
though I am conscious of being unable to
recollect where, and I am shaken with an.
before this dark veil which is spreacl
THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
across at a certain point in my memory, im-
peding the looks I would plunge beyond
into some abyss more profound.
It is evening, and the golden light is
about to disappear, and the hands of the
Louis Fifteenth clock point to six six
o'clock, on what day forever lost in the
eternal gulf ? on what day, in what year,
now remote and dead ?
Those chairs have also an antique look.
On one of them is laid a woman's large
hat, white straw, and of a shape which was
in vogue more than a hundred years ago.
My eyes are at once attracted to it, and
then again the indescribable shudder,
stronger now than before. The light be-
comes lower and lower, and now it is
scarcely even the dim illumination of ordi-
nary dreams. I do not know, I cannot say
how it is, and yet I feel that at one time I
was familiar with everything in this house
and with the life that was led there this
life, more melancholy and more remote in
the Colonies of former days, when the dis-
A DREAM. 5
tances were greater, and the seas more un-
known.
And while I gaze at this woman's hat,
which gradually becomes dimmer and
dimmer, like everything else which is
there in the gray twilight, the reflection
comes to me, though evidently it sprung in
another brain than mine, " Oh, then She
has come in."
And, in fact, She does appear. She
stands behind me without my having heard
her enter She remains in that dark space
in the room to which the reflection of the
sun does not penetrate ; She very vague,
like a sketch, drawn in dead colors and
gray shadows.
She very young, a Creole, bare-headed,
her black curls arranged around her brow
in a manner long since out of date : eyes,
beautiful and limpid, that seemingly long to
speak to me, with a mixture in them of
sad apprehension and infantine candor:
perhaps not absolutely beautiful, still su-
premely charming .... and then, above
all things, it is She a word which in it-
self is exquisitely sweet to pronounce, a
word which, taken in the sense in which
I understand it, embraces in it every
reason for existence, expresses almost the
ineffable and the infinite. To say that I
recognized her would be an expression
miserably commonplace and miserably
weak. There was .something which made
all my being rush toward her, moved by
some profound and irresistible attraction,
as if to seize hold of her, and. this impulse
at the same time had something about it
restrained and repressed, as though it were
an impossible effort by someone to regain
his lost breath and his dead life after years
and years passed under the mound of a
grave.
Usually a very strong emotion in a
dream breaks its impalpable threads and
all is over. You awake ; the fragile web,
once broken, floats an instant, and then
vanishes the more quickly the more eagerly
A DREAM. 1
the mind strives to retain it ; disappears
like a torn veil which one pursues into
the void, and which the wind carries away
to inaccessible distances.
But no ; this time I woke not, and the
dream continued even while it was being
effaced, lasted on still while gradually fading
away.
A moment we remained one opposite
the other, stupefied, in the very ecstacy
of our remembrance, by some indefinable
and somber inertia; without voices to
speak, and almost without thought ; ex-
changing our phantom looks with astonish-
ment and a delicious anguish Then
our eyes were veiled and we became forms
still vaguer, performing insignificant and
involuntary actions. The light became
dimmer, ever dimmer, and soon we saw al-
most nothing. She went outside and I
followed her into a kind of drawing-room
with white walls, vast and scantily fur-
nished wdth simple things, as was the
custom in the dwellings of the planters.
8 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
Another woman's shadow awaited us
there, clothed in the Creole dress an
elderly woman whom I recognized almost
immediately, and who resembled her,
doubtless her mother. She arose at our
approach, and we all three went out to-
gether, without previous arrangement, as
if obeying a habit. . . . . Good Heavens!
What an accumulation of words and of
prolix phrases to explain awkwardly all
that thus passed passed without duration
and without noise, between personages
transparent as rays, moving without life in
a darkness that ever increased, ever became
more colorless, and ever dimmer than that
of night.
We all three went out together in the
twilight into a sad little street, ah ! so sad
with small, low colonial houses on each
side under large trees ; at the end, the sea,'
vaguely defined; over it all, a suggestion
of expatriation, of distant exilo, something
like what one would have felt in the last
century in the streets of Martinique or of
A DREAM. 9
La Reunion, but without the full light of
day ; everything seen in that twilight
where dwell the dead. Large birds
wheeled in the dark sky, but, in spite of
this darkness, one had the consciousness of
its being that hour, still bright, which fol-
lows the setting of the sun. Evidently
we were following an ordinary habit. In
this darkness, which ever became thicker,
though it was not the darkness of night,
we were once again taking our evening
stroll.
But the clear impressions were no longer
visible, and there remained to ine nothing
beyond a notion of two specters, light and
sweet, that walked by my side, and then,
then came nothingness to us, extinguished
in the absolute night of real sleep.
I slept for a long time after this dream
an hour, two hours, how long I know
not. When I awoke and began to think,
as soon as the first recollection of what I
had seen came back to me, I experienced
10 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
that kind of internal emotion which makes
one start and open wide one's eyes. In
my memory I caught the vision first at its
most intense moment, that in which sud-
denly I had thought of Her; that I recog-
nized her large hat thrown on that chair,
and that she had appeared from behind me.
.... Then slowly, little by little, I rec-
ollected all the rest : details, so precise, of
that room already familiar to me ; of that
older lady whom I saw in the shade ; of
that walk in the little dilapidated street.
.... Where, then, had I seen and lived
all this? I sought rapidly in my past
with a certain inquietude, with an anxious
sadness, believing it certain that I should
find it all there. .But no ; there was
nothing of the kind anywhere in my own
life; there was nothing to resemble it in
my own experiences
The human head is filled with innumer-
able memories, heaped up pell-mell, like
the threads in a tangled skein. There are
thousands and thousands of them hidden
A DREAM. 11
in obscure corners whence they will never
come forth; the mysterious hand that
moves and then puts them back seizes
sometimes those which are most minute
and most illusive, and brings them back
for a moment into the light during those
intervals of calm that precede or follow
sleep. That which I have just related will
certainly never reappear ; or, if it does re-
appear some other night, I shall probably
learn no more as to this woman and this
place of exile, because in my head there is
no more that concerns them. It is the
last fragment of a broken thread which
finished where finished my dream. The
commencement and the end existed in
other brains long since returned to dust.
Among my ancestors I had some sailors
whose lives and adventures are but im-
perfectly known to me, and there are cer-
tainly I know not where in some small
cemetery in the Colonies some old bones
which are the remains of the young
woman with the straw hat and the black
12 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
locks. The charm which her eyes exer-
cised over one of my ancestors was suffi-
ciently powerful to project a last mysteri-
ous reflection even unto me. I dreamt of
her the whole day .... and with so
strange a melancholy.
THE SOEEOW OF AN OLD
CONVICT.
THE SORROW OF AN OLD
CONVICT.
THIS is a little story which was told me
by Yves. It happened one evening when
he had gone into the Roads to carry in his
gunboat a cargo of convicts to the trans-
port vessel which was to take them to
New Caledonia.
Among them was a very old convict
(seventy at least), who carried with him
very tenderly a poor sparrow in a small
cage.
Yves, to pass the time, had entered into
conversation with this old fellow, who had
not, it appears, a bad face, but who was
tied by his chain to a young gentleman
ignoble-looking, sneering, with the glasses
of the short-sighted on a small pale nose.
An old highwayman arrested for the
15
16 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
fifth or sixth time for vagabondage and
robbery, he said he was. " How can a
man avoid stealing when he has once com-
menced, and when he has no trade what-
ever, and when people won't have any-
thing to do with him anywhere? He
must, mustn't he ? My last sentence was
for a sack of potatoes which I took in a
field with a wagoner's whip and a pump-
kin. Mightn't they have allowed me to
die in France, I ask you, instead of sending
me down there, old as I am ?".... And
then, quite happy at finding that some-
body was willing to listen to him with
sympathy, he showed to Yves his most
precious possession in the world, the little
cage and the sparrow.
The sparrow was quite tame, and knew
his voice, and for more than a year had
lived with him in his cell, perched on his
shoulder. .... Ah, it was not without
trouble he had obtained permission to take
it with him to New Caledonia, and then,
he had besides to make for it a cage which
THE SORROW OF AN OLD CONVICT. 17
would be suitable for the voyage, to pro-
cure some wood, a little old Avire, and a
little green paint to paint the whole and
make it pretty.
Here I recall the very words of Yves.
" Poor sparrow ! It had for food in its
cage a piece of that gray bread which is
given in prisons, but it had the appearance
of being quite happy, nevertheless. It
jumped about just like any other bird."
Some hours afterward, when they
reached the transport vessel and the con-
victs were about to embark for their long
voyage, Yves, who had forgotten this old
man, passed once more by chance near him.
" Here, take it, 77 said the old man, with
a voice that had altogether changed, hold-
ing out to him his little cage, " I give it to
you. You may perhaps find some use for
it ; perhaps it may give you pleasure."
" Certainly not," replied Yves. " On the
contrary, you must take it with you. It
will be your little comrade down there."
"Oh," replied the old man, "he is no
18 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
longer inside. You didn't know that ; you
didn't hear, then ! He is no longer there,"
and two tears of indescribable misery ran
down his cheeks.
Through a lurch of the vessel the door
of the cage had opened ; the sparrow took
fright, flew out, and immediately fell into
the sea because of its cut wing. Oh, what a
moment of horrible grief to see it fight and
die, swept away by the rapid current, and he
all the time helpless to rescue it. At first,
by a natural impulse, he wished to cry out
for help ; to address himself to Yves ; to im-
plore him But the impulse was im-
mediately stopped by the recollection and
the consciousness of his personal degrada-
tion. An old wretch like him ! Who
would be ready to hear the prayer of such
as he ? Could he ever imagine that the ship
would be stopped to fish up a drowning
sparrow the poor bird of a convict ? The
idea was absurd. Accordingly he re-
O /
mained silent in his place, looking at the
little gray body as it disappeared on the
THE SORROW OF AN OLD CONVICT. 19
foam of the sea, struggling to the end. He
felt terribly lonely now, and forever, and
great tears of solitary and supreme despair
dimmed Iris eyes. Meantime, the young
gentleman with the eye-glasses, his chain-
fellow, laughed to see an old man weep.
Now that the bird was no longer there,
he did not wish to preserve its cage, made
with so much solicitude for the lonely dead
bird. He offered it to this good soldier who
had condescended to listen to his story,
anxious to leave him this legacy before de-
parting for his long and last voyage.
And Yves sadly had accepted the
empty cage as a present, so that he might
not cause any more pain to this old aban-
doned wretch by appearing to disdain
this thing which had cost him so much
labor.
I feel that I have not been able to do
full justice to all the sadness that there
was in this story as it was told me.
It was evening and very late, and I was
about to go to bed. I, who had in the
20 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
course of my life seen with little emo-
tion so many loud-sounding sorrows and
dramas and deaths, perceived with aston-
ishment that the distress of this old man
tore my heart, and even threatened to dis-
turb my sleep.
" I wonder," said I, " if means could be
found of sending him another ? "
" Yes," replied Yves, " I also thought of
that. I thought of buying him a beauti-
ful bird at a bird dealer's and bringing it
back to him to-morrow with the little cage
if there were time to do so before his de-
parture. It would be a little difficult.
Moreover, you are the only person who
could go into the Roads to-morrow and go
on board the transport to find out this old
man ; and I do not even know his name.
And, then, would not people think it very
odd?"
"Ah, yes, certainly. As to its being
thought odd, there cannot be any mistake
about that." And for a moment I dwelt
with pleasure upon the idea, laughing that
THE SORROW OF AN OLD CONVICT. 21
good inner laugh which scarcely appears
upon the surface.
However, I did not follow up the pro-
ject, and the following morning when I
awoke, and with the first impression gone,
the thing appeared to me childish and
ridiculous. This disappointment was not
one of those which a mere plaything could
console. The poor old convict, all alone
in the Avorld the most beautiful bird in
Paradise would never replace for him the
humble gray little sparrow with cut wing,
reared on prison bread, who had been able
to awake once more in him a tenderness
infinitely sweet, and to draw tears from a
heart that was hardened and half-dead.
ROCHESTER, December, 1889.
A MANGY CAT.
A MANGY CAT.
AN old mangy cat, hunted out of its
abode no doubt by its owners, had estab-
lished itself in our street, on the footpath
of our house, where a little November
sun once more warmed its body. It is the
custom with certain people whose pity is a
selfish pity thus to send off, as far away as
possible, and " lose" the poor animals they
care neither to tend nor to see suffer.
All day long it would sit piteously in
the corner of a window sill, looking, oh ! so
unhappy and so humble, an object of dis-
gust to those who passed, menaced by
children and by dogs, in continual danger,
and sickening from hour to hour. It lived
on offal, picked up with great difficulty in
the streets, and there it sat all alone, drag-
ging out its existence as it could, striving to
25
26 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ward off death. Its poor head was eaten
up with disease, covered with sores, and
almost without fur, but its eyes, which re-
mained bright, seemed to reflect profoundly.
It must have felt in its frightful bitterness
the worst of all sufferings to a cat that
of not being able to make its toilet, to lick
its fur, and to comb itself with the care
cats always bestow on this operation.
To make its toilet! I believe that to
beast, as to man, this is one of the most
necessary distractions of life. The poorest,
the most diseased, and the most decrepit
animals at certain hours dress themselves
up, and, as long as they are able to find
time to do that, have not lost everything in
life. But to be no longer able to care for
their appearance because nothing can be
done before the final moldering away,
that has always appeared to me the lowest
depth of all the supreme agony. Alas for
those poor old beggars who before death
have mud and filth on their faces, their
bodies scarred with wounds that no longer
A MANGY CAT. 27
can be dressed, the poor diseased animals
for whom there is no longer even pity.
It gave me so much miseiy to look at
this forsaken cat that I first sent it some-
thing to eat in the street, and then I
approached it and spoke to it softly
(animals very soon learn to understand
kind actions and find consolation in them).
Accustomed to be hunted, it was first
frightened at seeing me stop before it. Its
first look was suspicious, filled with re-
proach and supplication. " Are you also
going to drive me away from this last
sunny corner?" And then quickly per-
ceiving that I had come from sympathy,
and astonished at so much kindness, it ad-
dressed to me very softly its poor cat's an-
swer, "Prr! PIT! Prr !" rising out of po-
liteness, and attempting to lift its back, in
spite of its weariness, and in hopes that
perhaps I would go as far as a caress.
No, my pity, even though I was the only
body in the world that felt any for it, did
not go this length. That happiness of be-
28 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ing caressed it would never know again, but
as a compensation I imagined that I might
give it death immediately, with my own
hand, and in a manner almost pleasant.
An hour afterward this was done in the
stable. Sylvester, my servant, who had
first gone and bought some chloroform,
had attracted the cat in quietly, induced it
to lie down on the hot hay at the bottom
of a wicker basket, which was to be its
mortuary chamber. Our preparations did
not disquiet it. We had rolled a carte-de-
visite in the shape of a cone, as we had
seen the surgeons do in the ambulance.
The cat looked at us with a confiding and
happy air, having thought at last it had
found a home, people who would take
compassion on it, new masters who would
heal it.
Meantime, and in spite of my dread of
its disease, I leaned down to caress it, hav-
ing already received from the hands of
Sylvester the paste-board cup all covered
with poison. While caressing it I tried to
A MANGY CAT. 29
induce it to remain quiet there, to push
little by little the end of his nose into the
narcotized cup. A little surprised at first,
sniffing with va<me terror at this unaccus-
o o
torned smell, it ended by doing as it was
asked with such submission that I almost
hesitated to continue my work. The anni-
hilation of a thinking animal, even thougli
it be not a human being, has in it some-
thing to dunifound us. When one thinks
O
of it, it is always the same revolting mys-
tery, and death besides carries with it so
much majesty, that it has the power of
giving sublimity in an unexpected, exag-
gerated form to the most infinitesimal scene
from the instant its shadow appears. At
this moment I appeared to myself like
some black magician, arrogating to myself
the right of bringing to the suffering what
I believod to be supreme peace, the right of
opening to those who had not demanded it
the gates of the great night.
Once it lifted its poor head, almost life-
less, to look at me fixedly. Our eyes met
30 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
his, questioning, expressive, asking me
with an extreme intensity, " What are you
doing to me, you to whom I confided my-
self, and whom I know so little ? What
are you doing to me ? " And I still hesi-
tated, but its neck fell ; its poor disgust-
ing head now supported itself on my hand,
which I did not withdraw. A torpor in-
vaded it in spite of itself, and I hoped it
would not look at me again.
But it did, one other last time. Cats, as
the poor people say, have their souls
pinned to their bodies. In a last spasm of
life, it looked at me again across the half
sleep of death. It seemed even to all at
once comprehend everything. " Ah, then
it was to kill me and not assist me :
I allow it to be done It is too
late I am falling asleep."
In fact, I was afraid that I had done
wrong. In this world in which we know
nothing of anything, men are not allowed
to even pity intelligently. Thus, its look,
infinitely sad, even while it descended into
A M4NGT CAT. 31
the petrifaction of death, continued to
pursue me as with a reproach. " Why did
you interfere with my destiny ? I might
have been able to drag along for a time ;
to have had still some little thoughts for
at least another week. There remained to
me sufficient strength to leap on the win-
dow sill where the dogs could no more
torment me, where I was not cold. In the
morning, when the sun came there, I had
some moments which were not unbearable,
looking at the movement of life around me,
interested in the coming and going of
other cats,' conscious at least of something :
' o "
while now, I am about to decompose and
be transformed into I know not what, that
will not remember. Soon I shall no
longer be"
I should have recollected, in fact, that
even the meanest of things love to pro-
long their life by every means, even to its
utmost limits of misery, preferring any-
thing to the terror of being nothing, of no
longer being.
32 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
When I came back in the evening to see
it again I found it stiff and cold, in the
attitude of sleep in which I had left it.
Then I told Sylvester to close the mor-
tuary basket, to carry it away far from
the city, and throw it away in the fields.
A COUNTRY WITHOUT A
NAME.
A COUNTRY WITHOUT A
NAME.
HERE is a vision which came to me one
April right while I slept in a tent in an
encampment among the Bani-Hassen in
Morocco, at about three days' march from
the holy city of Mequinez.
The curtain of the dream rose abruptly
on a remote country oh ! so remote far
more remote than the usual earthly dis-
tances, so that as soon as the scene began
to dimly unveil itself even before I could
see it well I myself had a sense of this
terrible remoteness. It was a plain, rugged,
bare desert, where it was terribly hot and
dark, under a mournful twilight sky. It
had, however, nothing unique in its ap-
pearance, as, for example, certain plains in
Central Africa which seem insignificant ui
36 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
themselves, but have a certain distinctive
character, and which nevertheless are dif-
ficult and dangerous of access. If I had
known nothing pf the place, I might have
believed myself anywhere; but I had a
knowledge of the country, a sort of immedi-
ate intuition, and therefore it oppressed me
to be there, for I felt myself annihilated by
these endless distances, by the anguish of
infinite journeys from which there was no
return.
On this plain, small stunted trees arose
whose black branches were twisted back on
each other by a series of rectangular frac-
tures, like the arms of Chinese armchairs.
They had each only three or four leaves of
a soft green, which hung as though ex-
hausted by the heat.
I had a sense that from one moment to
another sinister spirits, animals, perils,
might arise from every point on this dim
horizon, misty with stagnant clouds of
darkness. One of the imaginary compan-
ions of my journey I must have had at
A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME. 37
least two, whose presence I felt, but who
were invisible spirits, voices. One of my
companions whispered in my ear, "Ah,
now that we are here, you must beware
of the dogs with claws" " Ah, quite so," I
said, with a careless air, as though I were
' I O
quite familiar with this kind of animal and
with the danger they threatened. Clearly
I had been there already, and yet these
dogs with claws, their image suddenly re-
called to. my spirit, and accentuating still
more the notion of this remote expatriation,
made me tremble.
They appeared immediately, called forth
by the single mention of their name, and
with that astonishing facility with which
things pass in dreams. They ran more
quickly across the shadow of this dark twi-
light shot forth like arrows or bullets, so
that one had not time to see them approach
frightful black dogs, with nails like cats
claws that seemed to scratch viciously as
they pattered swiftly along and lost them-
selves in the confused distance.
38 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
There also passed little women, almost
dwarfs, giggling, mocking half-monkeys (in
real life I had met two like them in the
midst of an African desert, devoured by
the sun, under the oppression of a black
sky, and in the environs of Obock). These
women, doubtless, had claws like the dogs,
for as they passed me they clawed in the
same way. Then their breath also gave
the suggestion of a " claw " ; for, when they
breathed in nay face, it pricked like the
points of needles.
Human words cannot describe the real
heart of this vision the mystery and the
sadness of this plain which thus reap-
peared ; all that rose up in me of disquie-
tude and desolation in merely looking at
those wretched little trees, with their long
leaves withered by the heat. When I
woke up the timid dawn was just begin-
ning to penetrate through the canvas of
my tent, and the notion came back to me
gradually and slowly of real life of
Africa, of Morocco, of the Beni-Hassen, of
A COUNTRY WITHOUT A NAME. 39
our little encampment in the midst of the
widely stretching desert pasturages. Then
I regained suddenly a pleasant impression
of Tiome, of unexpected return. And, good
Heavens ! how many people are there who
will smile at my dread of these little women
with claws, who, in my place, would be
considerably alarmed by these uncertain
tribes around him, by these long journeys
from station to station, under a hot sun,
without roads over the mountains, and with-
out bridges over the streams ? As for me,
the territory of the Beni-Hassen appeared
comparable to the tamest suburb of Paris in
comparison with that country belonging to
I know not what planet, going whence I
know not, and seen during the unfathom-
able infinities of time and of space in the
inexplicable second-sight of dreams.
A STORY OF TWO CATS.
A STOEY OF TWO CATS.
(For my son Samuel, when lie has learned
to read.)
i.
I HAVE often seen, with an infinitely sad
disquietude, the soul of animals appear in
the depths of their eyes. I have seen the
soul of a cat, the soul of a dog, the soul of
a monkey reveal itself suddenly for a
moment as sad as a human soul, and search
for my soul with tenderness, supplication,
or terror ; and I have perhaps felt a deeper
pity for the souls of animals than for those
of my brothers, because they are without
speech and incapable of coming forth from
their semi night, especially when they be-
long to the humblest and most despised of
their kind.
43
44 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
II.
The two cats whose story I am about to
tell are associated in my memory with
some of the years of my life which were
comparatively happy. Ah ! they were
quite recent years if you look at them
with the dates in your hand, but they are
years which to me appear already distant,
already remote, carried past me with that
rapidity of time which becomes ever and
ever more terrible years that now being
past look as if they were colored by the last
rays of the dawn, with the final rosy tints
of morning and of the openings of life when
I put them in contrast with the gray hours
of to-day. Thus quickly do our days be-
come darker ; thus rapidly do we descend
toward everlasting night.
in.
I must be pardoned for calling them
both by the same name of " Moumoutte."
In the first place I have never had any
power of imagination for coining names for
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 45
my cats. It has always been Moumoutte,
and the kittens always Miini ; and, indeed,
for my part, I do not think there are any
names which suit better, which are more
cattish than those two adorable ones, Mimi
and Moumoutte.
I will then preserve to the poor little
heroines of these stories the names they
bore in real life for the one White Mou-
moutte, for the other Gray Moumoutte, or
Chinese Moumoutte.
IV.
By order of seniority, it is White Mou-
moutte that I must first introduce. On
her carte-de-visite, in fact, she had engraved
her title as first cat in my house :
MADAME MOUMOUTTE BLANCHE,
Premiere Ghatte
CHEZ M. PIERRE LOTI.
It is almost ten years ago that memor-
able, joyous evening on which I saw her
for the first time ! It was a winter even-
46 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
ing on one of my periodic returns to my
fireside after some campaign or other in
the East. I had just arrived home, and I
was warming myself in the large draw-
ing-room before a wood fire between
mamma and Aunt Claire, who were seated
at the two corners of the fireplace. Sud-
denly something burst with a jump into
the room like a rocket, fell, then madly
rolled itself on the ground, white as snow
on the somber red carpet.
" Ah," said Aunt Claire, " you did not
know then ? I must introduce her to you.
This is our new Moumoutte. What would
you have ? We had to have another ;
a mouse had found its way right into our
little room below."
There had been in our house a pretty
long interregnum without Moumouttes be-
cause we mourned a certain cat from Sene-
gal which had been brought home by me
after my first campaign, and, after being
adored for two years, had, one morning in
June, after a short illness, died looking at
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 4*7
me with an expression of supreme prayer ;
I myself had buried it at the foot of a
tree in our courtyard.
I caught up, to see it better, the beauti-
ful ball of fur which spread so white upon
the red carpet. I took her in both hands
of course, for this is a special precaution
which I never omit in dealing with cats,
and which seems to say to them at once,
" Here is a man who understands us ; who
knows how to touch us ; who is one of our
friends, and w r hose caresses one can con-
descend to receive with amiability."
It was very affable the little phiz of
this new Moumoutte ; its eyes bright,
almost childlike ; the end of its little nose
rosy red, and then nothing more, for the
remainder was lost in the depths of an
Angora coat, silky, clean, sweet-smelling,
while exquisite to stroke and pet. More-
over, it was marked and spotted exactly
like the dead Moumoutte from Senegal
O
which perhaps was what decided the
choice of mamma and Aunt Claire, so that
48 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
a slight confusion of the two in my some-
what volatile heart might be brought
about in the end. On her ears she had a
very large black bonnet, fixed straight,
and forming a fillet for her bright eyes.
A short black pelerine was thrown over
her shoulders, and finally she had a splen-
did black tail like a superb plume, which
was agitated with the perpetual motion of
a fan to drive away flies. The stomach
and the paws were as white as the down
of a swan, and altogether she gave you the
impression of a . large bundle of fur, so
light as to be almost without weight, and
moved by a capricious little machinery of
nerves always on the stretch.
Moumoutte after this examination ran
away from me to begin once more its play,
and in those first moments after my arrival
which were necessarily melancholy be-
cause they marked one more stage in life
the new white cat with its black spots
insisted on rny taking notice of her, jump-
ing on my knees to bid me welcome, or
A &TORY OF TWO CATS. 49
stretching herself on the ground with an
affected lassitude to make me admire the
more the whiteness of her stomach and
her silky neck. AVhile this Moumoutte
was thus gamboling, my eyes rested with
devotion on the two dear faces which
were smiling at me there, a little aged, and
framed in locks a little grayer ; on the
family portraits, which preserved the same-
ness of expression and age in their frames
on the wall ; on the objects so familiar and
in the same places ; on the thousand
things of this hereditary home that had
remained unchanged also, while I had
passed with a changed heart over the
changing world. And this was the pic-
ture, persistent and distinct, which was to
remind me of her, even after her death a
foolish little animal, white, unexpected,
gamboling on a red ground between the
mourning dress of mamma and Aunt
Claire on the evening of one of my great
home-comings.
Poor Moumoutte during the first winter
50 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
of her life was the familiar little demon,
the little household imp that brightened
the solitude of those two blessed guardians
of my fireside, mamma and Aunt Claire.
While I was wandering on distant seas,
when the house had become again large
and empty, in the sad twilight of Decem-
ber, in the long evenings without end, she
remained their faithful companion, tor-
menting them now and then, and leaving
on their irreproachable black gowns tufts
of her white fur. Entirely without discre-
tion, she used to install herself on their
knees, on their worktables, even in their
workbaskets, twisting their balls of cotton
or their skeins of silk, and then they
would say with terrible looks, but almost
laughing in spite of themselves, " Ah, that
cat ; there is no making her behave. Be
off ! Be off ! Did ever anybody see such
manners? It is too bad." There was
even a whip expressly for her which she
was occasionally allowed to see. She loved
them after her cat manner that is to say,
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 51
without obedience, but with a touching
confidence ; and if it were only for this,
her little soul, incomplete and fantastic,
deserves that I should remember her.
In the spring, when the March sun
began to warm her coat, she would ex-
perience an ever novel surprise that of
seeing her comrade and friend Sulima, the
tortoise, wake up and come out of the
earth. During the beautiful month of
May, she would generally feel an irre-
sistible desire for expansion and for liberty
enter into her soul, and then there came
nocturnal disappearances in the gardens
and on the roofs of the neighbors. In the
summer she would have the languors of a
O
Creole. During entire days she would
lie in a stupor of comfort and of heat,
crouched on the old walls among the
O
honeysuckle and the roses, or stretched on
the ground, presenting to the burning sun
her white stomach on the white stones
between the pots of blooming cactus.
Extremely careful of her person and at
52 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ordinary times sedate, correct in her be-
havior, aristocratic down to the tips of her
nails, she was nevertheless quite intractable
with other cats, and became quite rude the
moment a visitor presented itself to her.
In the courtyard, which she considered as
her domain, she would never allow a
stranger the right to appear ; if above the
wall of a neighboring garden two ears or
the nose of cat iniidl made their ap-
pearance, or even if anything stirred in the
branches of the ivy, sh would dart out
herself like a young fury, with her fur
erect down to the end of her tail, impossi-
ble to hold, and no longer her usual self ;
then came cries in the worst taste, followed
by a rough and tumble and the blows of
conflicting claws.
To sum up, she was fiercely independent,
and she was usually disobedient, but she
was affectionate in her good moments,
so caressing and so wheedling, and she
uttered such a pretty little cry of joy
when she returned among us after one of
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 53
her vagabond excursions in the gardens of
the neighborhood. She was now about
five years old, and she was in all the splen-
dor of her Angora beauty, with attitudes
of superb dignity and the airs of a queen.
I had harl time to become attached to her
by a series of absences and returns, con-
sidering her as one of the things of the
hearth, as one of the beings of the house-
hold, when there was born, three thousand
leagues from her home, in the Gulf of
Pekin, and of a family more than humble,
she who was to become her inseparable
friend the strangest little person I have
ever known Chinese Mounioutte.
v.
MADAME MOUMOUTTE CHINOISE,
Deuxidme CJiatte
CHEZ M. PIERRE LOTI.
Singular, indeed, was the destiny which
handed over to me this Moumoutte of a
54 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
yellow race, and the offspring of parents at
once poor and without any title to beauty.
It was at the end of the war there, on
one of those evenings of conflict which
O
were so frequent then. I do not know
how it was that this little animal, escaped
from some junk in the midst of disorder,
had, after jumping aboard our vessel in its
terror, sought an asylum in my room under
uiy bed. She was yellow, not yet of adult
figure, miserable-looking, emaciated, plain-
tive, having without doubt, like her
parents and her masters, lived sparingly on
the heads of fish with a little rice cooked
in water, and I took so much pity on her
that I ordered my orderly to procure for
her something to eat and drink.
With a humble and grateful air she ac-
cepted my kindness, and I can see her
still as she slowly approached toward this
unexpected repast, advancing first one foot
and then the other, her eyes all the time
fixed on mine to assure herself that she
was not deceived, and that it was really in-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 55
tended for her. Next morning, of course,
I wanted to put her out. After having had
a fairly good breakfast prepared for her, I
clapped my hands violently, stamping with
both my feet at the same time as is usual
in such cases, and saying, in a very gruff
voice, " Get out, little Moumoutte." But
no ; the Chinese young lady refused to go.
Evidently she had no dread of me, under-
standing by instinct that all this noise was
mere bluster. With an air of saying to
me, " I know well you will do me no
harm," she remained crouched in her cor-
ner, lying low upon the ground in the pose
of a suppliant, and fixing upon me her two
dilated eyes, a human look in them which
I have never seen in any cat but her.
AYhat was to be done ? I could not es-
tablish this cat as a permanent resident in
my cabin, and, besides, an animal so ugly
and so delicate, what an encumbrance she
would be for the future !
Then I took her on my shoulder, with a
thousand precautions, saying to her at the
56 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
same time, "I am very sorry, my little
Moumoutte," and then I resolutely took it
outside to the other end of the battery, in
the midst of the sailors, who, as a rule, ex-
tend a hospitable welcome to all kinds of
cats. Flattened against the timber of the
bridge, and her head turned toward me as
if to implore me with a look of prayer, she
began to run with a quaintly humble step
in the direction of my room, which she
reached before me. When I arrived there
after her, I found her crouched in a little
corner, and her eyes were so expressive
that courage failed me to drive her out
anew. This is how the Chinese cat took
me for a master.
My orderly, who had probably been won
to her side from the commencement of the
struggle, completed her installation on the
spot by placing on the ground, under my
bed, a stuffed basket for her to sleep on,
and one of my china dishes most thought-
fully filled with sand a detail that gave
me a cold shiver !
A STOUT Of TWO CATS. 57
VI.
Never going out for air, day or night, she
lived seven months in the same obscurity
amid the continual swaying of this berth,
and little by little an intimacy was estab-
lished between us, and we acquired at the
same time a power of mutual penetration
very rare between a man and an animal.
I remember the first day when our rela-
tions became really affectionate. We were
out in the open on the north of the Yellow
Sea, in mournful September weather. The
first fogs of autumn had already formed
themselves on the waters, which had sud-
denly become clouded and unquiet, and in
these climates the chills and the somber
skies come quick, bringing to us Europeans
away on the wing a melancholy that grows
greater the further we feel from home.
We were going toward the east, and there
was a heavy swell, on which we were
rocked in a monotonous manner that
caused plaintive creakings throughout the
58 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
whole of the vessel. It had become neces-
sary to close the porthole, and my berth
had only a dim light through the thick
glass, over which now and then the crest of
waves threw themselves in grand transpar-
encies, alternating with intervals of dark-
ness. I had taken up my position at the
narrow little sliding desk, which is the
same in all our berths on ships, with the
intention of writing during one of those
rather rare moments in which the service
leaves one in complete peace, and in which
one is moved to retire, as it were, into one's
cloister cell.
Chinese Moumoutte had lived under my
bed for about two weeks. She had lived
there very retired, discreet, and melancholy,
observing the proprieties and the strict
limitations of her dish filled with sand. She
showed herself little, being almost always
hidden, and overcome apparently by home-
sickness for the native laud which she was
never more to see.
Suddenly I saw her appear in the semi-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 59
darkness, stretch herself out slowly, as if to
give herself still time for reflection, then ad-
vance toward me, hesitating, stopping now
and then, sometimes even putting on all her
Chinese graces ; she held one of her paws in
the air for some seconds before deciding to
lay it down on the ground to make a step
forward.
She looked at me fixedly with a question-
ing air.
What could she desire from me ? She
was not hungry, that was plain. A little
dish to her taste was served twice every
day by my order. What was it, then ?
When she was quite near, so that she al-
most touched my leg, she sat down, moved
her tail round, and uttered a little cry, veiy
softly.
Then she continued to look at me, but to
look at me right in the eyes, which already
proved the possession in her little head of
a whole world of intelligent conceptions.
She must first have understood that I was
not a thing but a thinking being, capable of
60 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
the unexpected asylum where the short
mysterious dream of her cat's life could
finish with the most peace and the least
suffering. But I could not imagine this
delicate little Chinese, with her pauper
coat, the fellowlodger of the proud and
jealous White Mournoutte, who would
certainly maul her as soon as she saw her
appear. No, that was impossible.
On the other hand, to abandon her to
chance friends when we put in at a port
that I might have done, perhaps, if she
had been strong and beautiful ; but this
plaintive little thing with her human eyes
held me by a profound feeling of pity.
VIII.
Our intimacy, the result of our common
isolation, grew daily closer. The weeks
and the months passed in the midst of a
continual change in the external world,
while everything remained immutably the
same in this obscure corner of the ship
where the cat had fixed her home. For us
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 61
men, who sail over the seas, there are
always the fresh breezes that fan us, the
life in the open air, the night under the
stars, and the wanderings through foreign
* o o o
lands. She, on the contrary, knew noth-
ing of the immense world through which
o o
her prison moved nothing of her kind or
of the sun or of the grass or of the shade.
And without ever leaving her home she
lived there in the prison of this berth. It
was a place that was sometimes as cold as
ice when the porthole opening admitted a
great draught of wind which swept away
everything. More frequently it was a
stove, somber and suffocating, where the
Chinese perfumes burned before old idols
as in a Buddhist temple. For her com-
panions of her dreams, she had monsters of
wood and of bronze, nailed to the walls,
and laughing with a sinister laugh ; in the
midst of an accumulation of sacred things,
captured from her country in the midst of
a pillage, she blanched from want of air
between hangings of silk which she loved
62 THE BOOS: OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
to tear with her little unquiet and nervous
claws.
As soon as I entered my room she
would make her appearance, darting out
with an imperceptible cry of joy from
behind a curtain of shelves, or a box, like
some imp. If by chance I sat down to
write, Moumoutte, with much wheedling
and tenderness, in quest of protection and
caresses, would slowly take her place on
my knees and follow with her eyes the
progress of my pen, blotting out sometimes
with an entirely unexpected stroke from
her paw such lines as did not meet with
her approval.
The bumps in bad weather, the noise of
our cannon, caused her a terror that was
dangerous. In such moments she jumped
against the walls, twisted round like one
possessed, and then stopped, panting, and
went and curled herself up in her corner
looking sad and frightened.
Her cloistered youth had in it some-
thing unhealthy and strange, which in-
A STORY OF TWO CAT& 63
creased daily. Her appetite, however,
remained good, and the dishes continued
to be eaten with satisfaction. But she
was thin singularly thin ; her nose be-
came long and her ears drawn out, like
those of a bat. Her large yellow eyes
sought mine always with an expression of
timid affection or of anxious inquiry on the
unknown in life, which was as troublesome
and as unfathomable to her small intelli-
gence as to mine.
Very inquisitive as to things outside, in
spite of her inexplicable obstinacy about
never crossing the threshold of my door,
she did not neglect to examine with ex-
O
treme attention every new object which
came into our common room, bringing to
her the confused impression of the exotic
countries through which our ships had
passed. For example, I remember once to
have seen her so interested as to forget her
breakfast in a bouquet of sweet-smelling
orchids, which were very extraordinary to
her who had never known gardens or
64 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
pity and accessible to the mute prayer of a
look. Further, she must have known that
my eyes were open to her eyes that is to
say, mirrors in which her little soul could
anxiously seek to find the reflection of mine.
And, indeed, they are frightfully near to us
when you think of it the animals who
are capable of thinking two such things.
As for me, I examined with attention for
the first time the little visitor who now for
almost two weeks had shared my cabin.
She had the yellow color of a wild hare ;
was covered with spots like a tiger ; her nose
and neck were white in fact, she was
ugly, and miserably thin, or, rather, she
was bizarre rather than ugly to a man like
me, emancipated from all the commonplace
rules of beauty. In other respects she was
rather different from our French cats. She
was low upon her paws, and not unlike a
marten with a huge tail. Her ears were
large and straight, and her face by its
sharpness suggested the corner of a wall ;
but the charm was in her eyes, which were
A STOUT OF TWO CATS. 65
raised toward her temples like all eyes in
extreme Asia, of a beautiful golden yellow
in place of green, incessantly mobile, aston-
ishingly expressive, and while I looked at
her I allowed my hand to descend on her
strange little head and stroked her coat as
a first caress.
What she felt was something different
and far removed from the mere impression
of physical comfort. She had the sense of
protection, of sympathy with her in her
distress and abandonment. That is the
reason Miss Moumoutte had come forth
from her dark nest. "What she had deter-
mined to ask me, after so much hesitation,
was not food or drink. It w T as for her
little cat-soul a little companionship in this
world, a little friendship.
Where had she learned all this this
wastrel cat, never flattered by any friendly
hand, never loved by anybody unless,
perhaps, in the paternal junk by some
little Chinese child without playthings and
without caresses brought into this swarm-
66 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ing mass of yellow humanity like a super-
fluous plant, as miserable and as hungry as
herself, who also, in disappearing, would
leave as little trace behind ?
Then a little delicate paw was placed
timidly on me oh ! with what delicacy
and with what discretion ; and after having
for yet a long time studied and besought
me, Moumoutte, thinking she might rush
things, jumped at last on my knees.
She installed herself there in a lump,
but with such tact and such discretion,
making herself quite light, scarcely leaning
on me, and almost without weight; and
looking at me all the time. She remained
O
there a long time, interfering with me
certainly. But I had not the courage to
drive her away, which I certainly should
have done if she had been a pretty joyous
animal in the splendor of life. All this
time, afraid of the least of rny motions, she
did not lose sight of me; not that she
feared I would do her any harm she was
too intelligent to believe me capable of
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 67
that but with the air of saying to me,
" Am I really disturbing you ? Am I
annoying you?" Then her eyes became
more expressive and more wheedling still,
saying to me quite clearly, " In this autumn
day, so sad to the hearts of cats, since we
are here together, both isolated beings, in
this home that is being rolled about so and
lost in the midst of I know not what
danger and infinitude, suppose we give, one
to the other, a little of that kindness which
softens troubles, which resembles the im-
material that defies death, which is called
affection, and expresses itself from time to
time by a caress ? "
VII.
When the treaty of friendship was
signed between this animal and me, I felt
some disquietude as to the future. What
was to be done with her ? Was I to brine;
O
her back to France over so many thou-
sands of miles and through so many diffi-
culties ? Clearly my fireside was for her
68 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
forests, had never seen any flowers but
those that had been gathered into and had
died in my bronze vases.
In spite of her ugly and shabby coat,
which, at first sight, gave her the appear-
ance of a cat from the gutter, she had in
her face a rare distinction, and the least
movements of her paws had a patrician
grace. Thus she produced upon me the
effect of some little Princess, condemned by
the bad fairies to share my solitude under
an inferior form, and I thought of that
story of the mother of the great Tchengis
Khan, which an American priest at Con-
stantinople, my professor in the Turk-
ish language, had given me to trans-
late:
The young Princess Ulemalik-Kureklu, conse-
crated to death before her birth in case she ever
saw the light of day, was imprisoned in a dark
dungeon.
" What is this thing they call the world ? Is
there any space elsewhere ? and is this tower in
anything ? "
"No, Princess, this is not the world; it is out-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 69
side, and it is much larger. And then there
are things which are called stars and sun and
moon."
" Oh ! " replied Ulemalik, "let me die, but let
me see. "
IX.
It was at the end of winter and in the
first warm days of March when Chinese
Moumoutte made her entrance into my
house in France.
White Moumoutte, to whom my eyes had
grown unaccustomed during my campaign
in China, still bore at this epoch of the year
the royal coat of cold weather, and I never
knew her more imposing.
The contrast would be the more striking
with the other, emaciated, and with its poor
coat like that of a wild hare, and with holes
in places as though it had been eaten by
moths. Thus I was very much embar-
rassed when my servant Sylvester, returning
with her from the ship, raised with a half-
waggish aii' the lid of the basket where he
had placed her, and when this small Chinese
70 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
friend had to come forth in the midst of all
my assembled family.
The first impression was to be deplored ;
and I recall all the conviction my Aunt
Claire put into the simple phrase.
" Oh, dear, how ugly she is ! "
She was, indeed, very ugly. And how
and under what pretext and with what ex-
cuses could I introduce her to White Mou-
in6utte. Not being able to hit on any-
thing, I took her for the moment into an
isolated granary to hide them from each
other and to gain time for reflection.
x.
Their first interview was something ter-
rible.
It came about unexpectedly some days
afterward in the kitchen a spot which
has irresistible attractions, and where cats
who live in the same house are bound some
day to meet. In all haste, they came to
fetch me, and I ran. There were inhuman
cries ; a ball, a heap of fur and claws, com-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 71
posed of their two little bodies, entangled
in each other, rolled and leaped ; shivering
glasses, plates, dishes, while the white coat
and the hare-colored fur flew in little tufts
all around. It was necessary to intervene
with energy, and to separate them by
tin-owing a bottle of water over both
I was horrified.
XI.
Trembling, scratched, her heart beating
as though it would burst, Chinese Moti-
moutte, gathered up in my arms, crouched
up against me and gradually grew tranquil,
her nerves relieved, and with a look of
sweet security. Then she became grad-
ually soft and inert, like something without
life, which with cats is an expression of
supreme confidence in those who hold
them.
White Moumoutte, pensive and somber,
looked at us with wide-open eyes ; and a
line of reasoning began to dawn in her
jealous little head. She, who from one
72 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
year's end to the other mauled on the wall
the same neighbors, male and female, with-
out ever becoming accustomed to their ap-
pearance, began to understand that this
foreigner belonged to me since I took, it
thus into my embrace, and since she took to
it tenderly. Thus she must do it no
further injury, but must become resigned
and tolerant of its presence in the house.
My surprise and my admiration were
great to see them pass each other a moment
after, each disdainful of the other, but
calm, very correct. It was over; during
the rest of their lives they were never angry
with one another. .
xn.
Ah ! the springtime of that year how
well I remember it. Although very short,
as all seasons appear to be now, it was one of
the last of those that still retained for me the
charm, and even an approach to the myster-
ious enchantment, of those of my child-
hood. Moreover, it was passed amid the
A STORT OF TWO CATS. <3
same surroundings of the same flowers re-
newed in the same place on the same
antique jessamines and the same rose-trees.
After each of rny campaigns I have come
to forget in a very few days the continents
and the vast seas. Once more, as at life's
start, I limit my external world to those
old walls clad with ivy and with moss
which surrounded me when I was a little
child. The distant countries, where I have
gone so many times to live, appear to me
as unreal as in the days when, before seeing
them, I dreamed of them. The illimitable
horizons close in ; everything quietly con-
tracts, and quite naturally I reach the
point of almost forgetting that there exists
ought else than our mossy stones, our arbu-
tus trees, our vines, and our sweet white
roses.
I was building up a Buddhist pagoda at
this time in a corner of my house with the
remains of a temple destroyed la-bas.
Enormous chests were being opened every
day in my courtyard, spreading that inde-
74 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEA TH.
finable and complex odor of China. They
unpacked in the beautiful new sunshine
shafts of columns, stones of arches, ugly
altars and ancient idols. It was amusing,
and curious also, to see these things reap-
pear one by one, and then spread them-
selves on the grass and moss of the old
familiar stones all these monsters of far-
thest Asia, making the same grimaces under
our paler sun as they had made in their
own homes for years for centuries. From
time to time, mamma and Aunt Claire
came to inspect them, frightened by their
astounding ugliness. But it was Chinese
Moumoutte who assisted with most inter-
est at these unpackings. She recognized
her traveling companions ; she smelt at
everything with confused recollections of
her own country ; then, from her habit of
living in the dark, she hastened to creep
into the empty chests and, to hide herself
there where the idols had been, under this
exotic hay that smelt of musk and sandal.
It was truly a beautiful and very
A STORT OF TWO CATS. V5
bright spring, with an excess of the music
of the swallow and the martens in the air.
And Chinese Moumoutte wondered at it
exceedingly. Poor little hermit ! reared in
a stifling twilight, she was at once alarmed
and delighted by the broad daylight, the
air soft to breathe, the neighborhood of
other cats. She made at this period long
exploring excursions in the courtyard, snif-
fing at all the young blades of grass, all
the new sprouts that came forth from the
warmed earth fresh and sweet-smelling.
These forms and shades which, old as the
world, the plants reproduce unconsciously
every April, these laws of immutability
under which the first leaves unfold and
come out, were things absolutely new and
surprising to her who had never seen any
verdure or any spring. And White Mou-
moutte, formerly the sole and jealous sov-
ereign of these realms, had consented to
share them, allowing the other to wander
at her pleasure in the midst of the arbutus
trees, the flowerpots, and among the old
76 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
gray walls, under the spreading branches.
It was the shores of the miniature lake in
particular so intimately associated with
my memories of childhood that attracted
her. There in the grass, which every day
grew higher and thicker, she walked, bend-
ing down like a hunted deer, a trick in-
herited without doubt from her ancestors,
Mongolian cats with primitive manners.
She hid herself behind the Lilliputian
rocks, buried herself under the ivy like a
little tiger in a miniature virgin forest.
It was an amusement to me to watch
her goings and comings, her sudden halts,
her surprises. And she, feeling herself
watched, would turn and look at me, be-
comino; immovable all at once in an atti-
O
tude that was becoming to her an atti-
tude very graceful but affected, after the
Chinese fashion, with a paw in front of her
in the air in the manner of those persons
who, when taking hold of an object,
coquettishly lift their little finger. And
her drol\ yellow eyes w^re then extremely
A STORY OF TWO CATS. V7
expressive speaking eyes, as good people
say. " You have no objection to my con-
tinuing my walk ? " she seemed to ask.
" It doesn't put you out in any way, does
it? You see, I walk and move with such
lightness, with such discretion. And you'll
admit 'tis all very pretty here all these
extraordinary little green things which
scatter their fresh odors, and this good
air, so pure, and this vast space ! And
these other things, also, which I see around
me, which they call stars and the sun and
the moon ! How different from our old
home, and how pleasant it is to be in this
countiy where we have both arrived ! "
This place, so new to her, was to me the
oldest and the most familiar of all places
on earth the spot where the smallest de-
tails, the smallest blades of grass, were
known to me from the first uncertain and
astonished hours of my existence. To such
a degree was this the case that I was at-
tached to it with all my heart ; that I loved
in a peculiar fashion a little idolatrous
78 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEAT3.
perhaps some of the plants that are in it,
vines, jessamines, and a certain dielytra
rose, which every March shows in the same
place its buds red with young sap, displays
very quickly its early leaves, gives the
same flowers once again in April, grows
yellow in the sun of June, then burns in
the sun of August, and seems to die.
And while the little Chinese Moumoutte
allowed herself to be enticed by all these
airs of joy, of youth, of opening life, I, on
the contrary, who knew that all this passes
away, felt for the first time ascend into my
life the sense of evening, of that great and
inexorable night without a morrow, of that
last autumn which will be followed by no
springtime. And, with infinite melan-
choly, I looked in this gay courtyard,
brightened by the new sun, at the two
dear figures with white hair that walked
up and down there in their robes of
mourning, mamma and Aunt Claire. I
watched them as they stooped, as they had
done for so many a spring before, to recog-
A STORT OF TWO CATS. 79
nize wliat buds liad pushed through the
earth, and raised their heads to look at the
buds of glycine and of roses. And when
their black dresses appeared and reappeared
from the back of that green avenue which
forms the courtyard of our family mansion,
I particularly remarked that their step was
slower and more infirm. Alas, for the
early day when, perhaps, I would never
see them like this again in the green
avenue ! Must such a time ever really come ?
"When they have gone from me, I have the
illusive idea that it will not be a complete
departure so long as I shall be on this spot,
able to recall their sweet presence. I be-
lieve that in the summer evenings I shall
sometimes see their blessed shadows pass
under the old jessamines and the old vine
trees ; and that something of them will
remain dimly in the plants which they
have cared for in the falling honeysuckle,
in the old dielytra rose.
80 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
xm.
While Chinese Moumoutte lived this
open-air life, she became visibly more
beautiful eveiy day. The holes in her
hare-colored coat were replaced by a quite
new fur ; she became less thin, more smooth
and more careful of her person, and no
longer had a dissipated appearance. Once
mamma and Aunt Claire stopped to speak
to her, amused by her unique manners, by
her expressive eyes, and by her soft little
answers of " PIT ! PIT ! " which she never
failed to give when anybody addressed
her.
"Really," they said, "this young China
lady looks as if she felt happy with us;
we have never seen a cat with a happier
face."
It was the happy and grateful look which
she had for him who brought her thither.
O
And the happiness of young animals is com-
plete, perhaps, because they have no sense
of the inexorable future. She passed days
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 81
in delicious reflection, in attitudes of su-
preme comfort, stretched carelessly on the
stones and the moss, enjoying the silence
a little melancholy to me of this house
which neither the roar of cannon nor the
crash of wave ever troubled. She had ar-
rived at the port, remote and tranquil, at the
last halting-place in her life, and she rested
herself, unconscious -of the coming end.
xrv.
One fine day, without any period of tran-
sition, and by a sudden caprice, the tolera-
tion of White Mounioutte for Chinese
Moumoutte was transfomed into a tender
friendship. She approached with deliber-
ation, and then, all of a sudden, she kissed
the lips of the other one, which among cats
its the equivalent of a most affectionate
embrace.
Sylvester, who was present at the scene,
was, however, skeptical.
" Did you," said I, " see the kiss of peace
between the Moumouttes ? "
82 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
" Oh no, sir," replied lie, with that per-
fectly knowing air which he always as-
sumes when any question arises with regard
to the inner life of my cats, horses, or any
other animal. " No, sir, White Moumoutte
simply wanted to satisfy herself, by smell-
ing the muzzle of the Chinese, whether she
had not just eaten her food."
He was wrong, however. I found they
were friends from this day. You could
see them, seated in the same chair, eat their
dinners from the same dish, and every
morning run to give each other "good-
morrow " by rubbing the ends of their
comical noses, the one yellow, the other
rose-colored.
XV.
By the time we had got to saying, " The
Moumouttes have done this or that," they
were an intimate and inseparable couple,
consulting each other and imitating each
other down to the least and most trivial
actions of their life combing each other,
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 83
licking each other, making their toilet in
common with mutual tenderness.
AVhite Moumoutte continued to be the
special cat of* Aunt Claire, while the
Chinese remained my little faithful friend,
with always her same tender manner of
following me with her eyes, of answering
to the least call of my voice. Scarcely
could I seat myself when a light paw
would place itself softly upon me, as in
the old days on board ship; two yellow
eyes would interrogate me with an intense
human expression. Then, houp-la! Chi-
nese sat on my knees ; very slow in select-
ing her position, scratching with her two
paws, turning herself around in this direc-
tion and then in that, and she had just
nicely installed herself when I was ready
to go away.
\Yhat a strange mystery, what a prob-
lem of soul the constant affection of an
animal and its enduring gratitude !
84 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
XVI.
They were very much spoiled, these two
Moimiouttes. They were admitted into
the dining room at meal-hours ; they were
found seated at my side, one on the right
and the other on the left; recalling them-
selves from time to time to my memory by
a little, discreet pat of their paws on my
napkin, and enjoying the scraps which I
gave them for dinner, like a schoolboy
who knew he was at fault, and from the
end of my own fork.
In telling all this I am afraid that I
injure my reputation, which already it
appears is so stained by eccentricity and
want of decorum. I, nevertheless, am in a
position to expose a certain Academician,
who, having done me the honor of sitting
at my table, did not abstain from offering
to each of them in his own spoon a little
Chantilly cream.*
* This episode was written before the election of M. Loti
to the French Academy.
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 85
xvn.
The summer which followed was for
Chinese Mouuioutte an absolutely delicious
period in her life. With her orginality and
her air of distinction, she had become
almost pretty, and then also her fur had
been renewed. Around in the world of
cats, at the bottom of the garden and on
the roofs, the report had circulated of the
arrival of this piquant stranger, and the
admirers were numerous who came to mew
under the windows in the beautiful warm
nights perfumed with honeysuckle. To-
ward the middle of September, the two
Moumouttes knew almost at the same time
the joy of maternity. White Moumoutte
was, as may be imagined, a mother on a
large scale ; Chinese Moumoutte, on the
other hand, when the first moments of sur-
prise had passed, was seen to lick tenderly
the prized and tiny little gray kitten,
streaked like a tiger, who was her only
son.
86 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
xvm.
The reciprocal affection of these two
families was very touching; the funny
little Chinaman and the Angora, round as a
powder puff, played together, and were
cleaned, combed, and fed by either one or
the other of the two Moumouttes with an
almost equal solicitude.
XIX.
Winter is the season in -which cats be-
come especially the guests of the house-
hold, the companions at all moments at the
fireside, sharing with us the dancing flames,
the vague melancholies of twilight and our
unfathomable dreams.
It is also, as everybody knows, the epoch
of their greatest beauty, their greatest
luxury of coat and of fur. Chinese Mou-.
moutte, when the cold came first, had no
longer any holes in her coat, and White
Moumoutte had put up an imposing cravat,
a boa, of whitest snow which framed her
A STORY OF TWO CATS, 87
face like a ruff a la Medici. Their affec-
tion was increased by the pleasure that
they experienced in warming each other
near the hearth ; on cushions, on arm-
chairs, they slept whole days in each
other's arms, rolled into a single ball, in
which you could no longer distinguish
their heads or tails.
It was Chinese Mounioutte especially
which could never get near enough to the
other. If, after returning from some ex-
O
pedition in the open air, she perceived her
friend White Mounioutte asleep before the
fire, very gently, ever so gently, she ap-
proached, with strategy as careful as
though she were trying to surprise a
mouse, while the other, always capricious,
nervous, irritated at bein^ disturbed, some-
7 O '
times gave a light stroke of her paw or a
smack. Chinese Moumoutte never replied,
but, lifting only her little hand, like a men-
acing gesture in fun, she said to me from
the corner of her eye, " Isn't she a difficult
creature to deal with? But I doo't take
88 TEE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
her seriously, of course, you know." With
an increase of precautions she always suc-
ceeded in her purpose, which was that they
should sleep one with the other, her head
buried in the beautiful snowy fur and be-
fore going to sleep she said to me, still
with that half-look of an eye scarcely
opened, " That is just what I want ; I am
all right now."
xx.
Ah, those wonderful winter evenings of
ours at that time ! In the depths of the
house, silent, dark, empty, and almost too
large, in the very warm little room of the
rez-de-chaussee, which looked out on the
courtyard and on the gardens, mamma and
Aunt Claire sat under the hanging lamp
in this place familiar during so many pre-
vious and similar winters; and most fre-
quently I sat there also, in order not to
lose one moment of their presence on earth
and of my association with them. In an-
other part of the house ? far away from us,
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 89
I left my workroom my Aladdin room-
black and fireless, merely for the pleasure
of passing our evenings all together in this
little room, which was the most secret
coulisse of our family life, a place where
we were more unconstrainedly at home
than anywhere else. No other place be-
sides has ever given me so complete and so
sweet an impression of a nest, nowhere
have I been able to warm myself with
more soothing melancholy than in front of
the flames in the wide fire of this hearth.
The windows, with shutters, which in our
confident tranquillity were never closed ;
the closed door, with just a suggestion of
rusticity, looked out on the black winter
foliage and the laurel trees, on the ivy, on
the walls, sometimes illuminated by a
moonbeam. No noise reached us from the
street, which was pretty far away, and
which, besides, was very quiet, scarcely dis-
turbed from time to time by the songs of
sailors celebrating their return home. No,
O '
we heard rather the noise of the country,
90 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
whose presence we felt almost near, just
beyond the low gardens and the town ram-
parts. In the summer we heard the im-
mense concert of the grasshoppers in those
marshy plains which surrounded us, but
were joined together like steppes, and
from moment to moment the tiny note, like
the sad flute, of the owl. In the winter,
on those nights of which I speak, we heard
some cry of a seabird, and especially the
long moaning of the western wind com-
ing from the sea.
On the large table, covered with a cer-
tain flowered cloth which I* knew all my
life, Mamma and Aunt Claire spread their
precious workbaskets, where they had
things which I would call fundamental, if
I dared to employ a word which in the
present case has a meaning to me alone
all those little things which have taken
the place of relics in my eyes, which have
acquired in my memory, in my life, an im-
portance of the very first order embroi-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 1
dery scissors, handed down from ancestors,
which were lent to me when I was quite a
child, with a thousand warnings, to amuse
myself in cutting things up ; reels made of
the rare wood of the colonies, brought
from there by sailors, which in the past
had caused me so many a dream ; needle-
cases, glasses, thimbles, boxes. I knew
them all, and how much I loved them !
those poor little nothings, so precious to
me, which I remembered as -they were laid
out for so many years on the old flowered
tablecloth by the hands of mamma and
Aunt Claire. After every long voyage,
with w T hat a feeling of tenderness I found
O
them again and gave them my greeting on
arrival ! I employed just a moment ago
for them the word " fundamental " a
word whose inappropriateness I acknowl-
edge ; but here is how I explain it : if any-
body were to destroy them, if they ceased
to exist in the same eternal place, I would
have felt an impression of having made
92 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
one long step further toward tlie annihi-
lation of myself, toward dust, toward
oblivion.
And when they have both departed-
mamma and Aunt Claire it seems, to me
that these dear little objects, religiously
preserved by them, will call back again
their presence, will prolong for a little
their sojourn among us.
The Moumouttes, of course, also took
possession of this room, sleeping together
in one single warm ball on some armchair
or some stool, as near as possible to the
fire, and their unexpected awakenings,
their reflections, their curious ideas, amused
our evenings, which were somewhat taci-
turn. White Moumoutte was once seized
by a sudden desire of being no longer in
our company. She jumped upon the table,
and seated herself with gravity on the
work of Aunt Claire, turning her back
upon her, after having unexpectedly rubbed
her face with her imposing black tail.
Then she remained there, impolite and
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 93
obstinate, in contemplation before the flame
of tlie lamp.
Or sometimes, on one of those nights of
sharp frost which disturb the nerves of
cats, you heard suddenly in the neighboring
garden a discussion, and " Miaou, miaou,
rniaou ! " Then the quiet robe of fur, which
slumbered so still, became suddenly erect,
with two heads and two pairs of ears.
Once again came the sound of " Miaou,
miaou, miaou ! " It was not going to stop,
then ! White Moumoutte, rising with re-
solution, her fur erect for war, rushed from
one door to another, seeking an outlet, as
if called outside by an imperious duty of
supreme importance. "No, no, Mou-
moutte," said Aunt Claire ; " you need not
mix yourself up in this, I assure you. It
will be all right without you." The
Chinese, on the other hand, always calmer,
and not anxious for perilous adventures,
contented herself with looking at me
from the corner of her eye with an air
at once intelligent and ironical; she said
94 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
to me, "Am I not right to remain
neutral ? "
A certain part of me, quite tranquil,
restored to serenity, and almost childlike,
came back again there in the evenings in
this little room so sweetly silent, at this
table where mamma and Aunt Claire
worked ; and if now and then I remember,
with a dumb, internal emotion, that I had
had an Oriental heart, an African heart,
and a heap of other hearts besides that
I had dreamed, under different suns, dreams
and fancies without number all this now
appeared to me very remote, and forever
done with. And this past of wanderings
made me enjoy more completely the pres-
ent hour, with its repose, this entr'acte in
that strictly private and domestic side of
my life, which would astonish so many
people, and perhaps make them smile.
With a sincerity that for the minute was
complete, I said to myself that I would
never go away again, that nothing in the
world was as good as the peace of being
A STORY Off TWO CATS. $5
just there, and in finding over again some
of the emotions of one's young soul; of
feeling around one, in this nest of child-
O /
hood, the indefinable sense of protection
against nothingness and death ; of divining
through the glass of the window, athwart
the darkness of the foliage, and under the
winter moonlight, the courtyard, which in
early days was regarded as almost the
whole earth, and which has remained just
the same, with its ivy, its little rooks, and
its old walls, and which might, mo?i Dieu !
regain once more in my eyes its importance,
its vastness of the olden days, and, perhaps,
be peopled once again in the same dreams !
Above all this, I said to myself that nothing
in the great wide world was worth the sweet
joy of looking at mamma and Aunt Claire,
seated at their worktable, leaning toward the
flowered tablecloth, with their caps of black
lace and the plumes of their white locks.
Ah ! one evening I can recall there was
O
a real cat scene. Even to-day I cannot think
of it without lauorhinsr.
O O
96 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
It was a frosty iiiglit about Christmas.
In the midst of the profound silence, we had
heard passing over the roofs, across the cold
and quiet sky, a flight of wild geese which
were emigrating to other climes. It was
like the distant noise of a shooting-gallery
those sharp and multitudinous voices that
shouted aloud in the void, and then were
soon lost in the airy distance. " Do you
hear ? do you hear ? " said Aunt Claire
to me, with a little smile and an affectation
of dread, in ridicule of me ; for in my
childhood I was greatly frightened by these
nocturnal flights of birds. To hear it one
must have, indeed, a quick ear and be in
a silent place.
Calm then returned, and so completely
that one could hear the crackling moan of
the wood in the fireplace, and the regular
breathing of the two cats seated in the
corner of the hearth.
Suddenly a certain large, yellow tom-
cat, w r hom White Moumoutte detested, but
who, nevertheless, persecuted her with his
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 97
attentions, appeared behind the glass look-
ing into the courtyard, standing out in the
light from the black background of the
foliage, and looked at Moumoutte with a
O '
brazen and yet bewildered air, and with a
formidable and provoking " miaou ! " Then
Moumoutte jumped to the window, like a
tennis-ball, and there, nose to nose, on either
side of the window, there was a splendid
battle a volley of frightful insults in voices
hoarse with rage, violent raps and slaps
across the pane, which made a frightful up-
roar, but, of course, produced no effect. Oh !
the terror of mamma and Aunt Claire, jump-
ing from their seats at the first moment of
surprise ; and, then, the hearty laughter ! It
was irresistible the comic effect of all this
sudden and absurd tumult, succeeding to
a meditative silence so deep; and especially
the look of the yellow tom-cat, slapped and
discomfited, whose eyes flamed so comically
behind the glass of the window.
In those times, the putting to bed of the
cats was one of the important I had almost
98 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
said, primordial operations of the house.
They were not allowed, like so many other
cats, to pass their nights wandering about
in the foliage or the woods, in the con-
templation of the stars and the moon.
On such questions we had principles in
regard to which we allowed no com-
promise.
The operation consisted in placing them
in a granary at the bottom of the courtyard,
in a shed of a house which stood apart, was
very old, and hidden under the ivy, the
vines, and the glycines. This happened to
be in Sylvester's quarters and next his room !
Thus, eveiy evening, all three took their de-
parture together, the Moumouttes and he.
When each day days to which I paid no
heed then, for which I have often wept
since when each day closed and was lost
in the abyss of time, this servant, who had'
become almost a member of the family,
was called, and mamma said, with a half-
joking air, amused at the sacerdotal air
with which these high functions were pre-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 99
formed, " Sylvester, it is time to put your
cats to bed."
At the veiy first words of the sentence,
even though they were pronounced in a
low tone of voice, White Mouinoutte
cocked her ear anxiously. Then, when
she was convinced that she had heard
aright, she jumped down from her chair,
and, with an air at once important and
agitated, she ran by herself to the door, in
order to go in front, and to do so on foot,
never allowing herself to be carried wish-
ing to enter into her bed-chamber of her
own free-will or not at all.
The Chinese, on the contrary, schemed to
avoid, if possible, leaving this cosy room ;
jumped down very quietly, crept along the
floor very softly, and bent down so as to
appear smaller, and, looking from the cor-
ner of her eye to see if she had escaped
notice, hid herself under a piece of furni-
ture. Big Sylvester, then, who had learned
all these ways long ago, asked, with his
boyish smile ? " Where are you, Chinese 1
100 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
I know well enough you are not far away."
Immediately she answered him with a purr,
understanding that it was useless to make
any further pretenses, then allowed herself
to be taken up, and was carried out, seated
very tenderly astride the broad shoulder of
Sylvester.
The procession at last was ready to
start : in front White Moumoutte, inde-
pendent and proud ; in the rear, Sylvester,
who said, " Good-evening, sir, and ladies,"
and who, carrying in one hand his lantern
to light the courtyard, held invariably in
the other the long gray tail of the Chinese
as it lay on his chest.
As a rule, White Moumoutte went with
docility along the path that led to the gran-
ary. But sometimes, at certain phases of
the moon, the spirit of vagabondage seized
her, or she had a fancy to go to sleep at the
angle of some roof or on the top of some
solitary pear-tree, in the beautiful freshness
of December, which was in contrast to the
heat she had enjoyed all the day in a com-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 101
fortable armchair. When this happened,
Sylvester made his reappearance, with a
comic face suitable to the occasion still
with his lantern in his hand, and with the
tail of the docile Chinese, squatted against
his neck. " White Moumoutte doesn't
want again to go to bed." " What ? " Aunt
Claire would exclaim indignantly. " Ah !
we shall see." And, then, she would go
out herself to try the effect of her author-
ity, calling out " Mouinoutte ! " in her poor,
dear voice, which I feel as if I heard still,
and whose sound was taken up and pro-
longed, in the silence of the gardens and in
sonorous echoes on a winter's night. But
no, White Moumoutte would not obey.
From the top of a tree or of a wall she
would content herself with looking down at
us, cunningly seated, her fur making a white
spot in the darkness, and her eyes shin-
ing like particles of phosphorus. " Mou-
moutte, Moumoutte ! Ah, the wretched
creature ! It is a shame, miss such con-
duct is really shameful."
102 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
Then mamma went out in her turn,
afraid of the effect of the bitter cold on
Aunt Claire, and anxious to make her come
in ; then, a moment after, I followed to
bring the other two in. And then, when
we saw ourselves all gathered together in
the courtyard on a frosty night Sylvester
among the rest, holding the Chinese by
the tail and all set at defiance by this
Moumoutte perched up aloft, we could not
help laughing at our own expense; the
laugh beginning with Aunt Claire, and
communicating itself at once to all of us.
Indeed, I have always doubted that there
were in the whole world two other old
people alas ! they were very old who
had such a faculty for laughing frankly
with young people, or who understood so
well the art of being amiable, of being
thoroughly gay. So much so that I have
never had such fun with anybody as with
them, and all about such insignificant
things, an irresistibly comic side to which
they would find out in a way of their own.
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 103
This Moumoutte was certainly deter-
mined to have the last word. We all re-
entered, rather mystified, the small room,
which had been chilled by the open doors.
and went to our respective rooms by a
series of stairs and of somber passages.
And Aunt Claire, seized with a renewal of
her anger, before she entered her own
room, standing at her door exclaimed, as
she bade me good-night: "All very well,
but what have you to say for her this
cat?"
XXI.
The existence of a cat can go on for
twelve or fifteen years if no accident hap-
pen.
The two Moumouttes lived, still to-
gether, to brighten another delicious sum-
mer. They enjoyed once again their hours
of ceaseless reverie in the company of
Suleima (that eternal tortoise, whom the
long succession of years had no power to
age), between the cactus in bloom, and on
104 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
the stones of the courtyard, warmed by
the hot sun. Or they sat alone on the top
of the old wall, in the annual confusion of
the honeysuckle and the white roses.
They had several little ones, who had
been brought up with tenderness and
placed advantageously in the neighbor-
hood. Even those of the Chinese had
been easily disposed of and were much
in request, because of the originality of
their looks.
They also lived through another winter,
and were able to enjoy once again their
long sleeps at the corner of the fireplace,
their profound meditations before the
changing aspect of the braziers and the
flames.
But this was the last season of their
happiness ; and immediately after, their
sad decline began. In the following
spring some indefinable maladies began to
disorganize their two queer little persons,
although they were still of an age to
promise several years more of life.
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 105
Chinese Moumoutte, who was the first
attacked, showed, in the first instance,
symptoms of mental trouble, of black
melancholy regrets, perhaps, for her dis-
tant Mongolian home. Refusing to eat or
drink, she made prolonged retreats to the
top of the wall, remaining in the same
place for whole days without moving,
answering to our calls with piteous looks
and plaintive little " miaous."
White Moumoutte, also, in the first fine
days, had begun to languish, and in April
both were really ill.
Veterinary surgeons, who were called in
for consultation, ordered seriously impossi-
ble things. For one, pills morning and
evening, and poultices on the stomach ; to
shave them quite bare, and bathe them
twice a day in plenty of water ! Sylvester
himself, who adored them, and could make
them obey when nobody else could, de-
clared that the thing was impossible. Then
we applied for remedies to skillful old
women ; some " wise women " were called
106 THE BOOK Of PITT AND OF DEATH.
in, and their prescriptions were adopted;
but nothing came of it.
They were both going to leave us, our
Moumouttes ! We felt a deep pity for
them ; but neither the fine spring nor the
beautiful sun, when it came back again,
could drag them out of the torpor of death.
One morning when I came home after a
journey to Paris, Sylvester said to me
sadly, as he took my bag, " The Chinese is
dead, sir."
For three days she had disappeared
she who had been stf regular in her habits,
and never left the house. Without doubt,
feeling her end near, she had gone away
for good, obeying that feeling of exquisite
j,nd supreme delicacy which impels certain
animals to hide themselves in their dying
hour. " She remained, sir, the whole week
perched up there in the red jessamine, not
even coming down to eat. She always,
however, answered when we spoke to her,
but in such a weak voice ! "
Where, then, had she gone to pass her
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 107
last sad hour, poor Chinese Moumoutte?
Perhaps, in her ignorance of everything,
she had gone among strangers who would
not allow her to pass her last hour in
peace ; who perhaps hunted her, tormented
her; who perhaps threw her on to the
dunghill ! I should, indeed, have pre-
ferred to have heard that she had died in
our home ; my heart grew heavy as I
thought of that queer human look of hers
so full of appeal, so full of that desire
for affection which she had no power to
express which had sought my eyes with
those same anxious questionings that she
had never been able to put into words.
Who knows what mysterious anguish may
penetrate into the little confused souls of
animals in their dying hour ?
xxn.
As if bad luck had fallen upon our cats,
White Moumoutte also seemed to approach
her end.
By one of the caprices which possess the
108 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
dying, she had chosen as her last home my
dressing room, on a certain couch whose
rose color had doubtless pleased her. We
took her some food there a little milk,
which she barely touched. But, neverthe-
less, she gave us, when we entered, a look
that showed she was pleased, and she even
uttered a feeble purr when we stroked her
as a caress.
Then, one fine morning, she disappeared
also clandestinely, as the Chinese had
done and we thought she would never
return.
She was to reappear, however, and I
recollect how sad that reappearance was.
It was about three days after, in one of
those periods of early June, which radiate
and glow with the utter calm of the air de-
ceptive in their appearance of eternal dura-
tion, melancholy to those beings who are
destined to die. Our courtyard put forth
all its leaves, all its flowers, all its roses on
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 109
the walls, as it had done in so many Junes
in the past. The martlets and the swallows,
intoxicated by the light, wheeled with cries
of joy in the deep blue sky. There 'was
everywhere a festival of the things that
have no life and of the volatile creatures
that have no dread of death.
Aunt Claire, who was walking there,
watching the growth of the flowers, called
me suddenly, and her voice showed that
something extraordinary had happened.
" Oh ! come here and see ; our poor
Mouinoutte has returned!"
And she was, in fact, there ; come back
again, like a sad phantom, with her coat
already stained by earth, and half-dead.
Who can tell what feeling had brought her
back ? Some reflection, perhaps ; a failure
of courage at the last hour, the craving to
see us once again before she died.
With great difficulty she had crossed
over the little wall so familiar to her, which
once she had jumped over in two bounds
when she returned from her police duties
1 10 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
on the outside and had slapped some tom-
cat or corrected some tabby. Breathless
from her severe struggles to return, she
remained half-lying on the moss and the
new grass at the side of the pool, trying to
stoop down to get a mouthful of the fresh
water. And her looks implored us, called
us to her aid. " Do you not see, then, that
I am about to die ? Can you do nothing
to prolong my existence a little ? "
There were presages of death everywhere
on this beautiful June morning, under this
calm and superb sun. Aunt Claire, bent
toward the dying cat, appeared to me, all
of a sudden, so aged, weaker than ever be-
fore, ready also to soon depart.
We decided to take Moumoutte back
into my dressing room, on the same rose-
colored couch which she had chosen in the
preceding week, and which had seemed to
please her. And I promised to watch her,
so as to prevent her from running away
again at least, until her bones found a
resting-place in the ground of our court-
A STORY OF TWO CATS. Ill
yard and that she might not be thrown
on some dunghill, as happened doubtless to
that other one, my poor little companion
from China, whose anxious look still pur-
sued me. I took her into my arms, with
extreme precautions, and, contrary to her
usual custom, she allowed herself to be
carried this time, completely confiding in
me, with her drooping head supported on
my arm.
On the rose-colored couch, soiling every-
thing, she held out for some days still for
cats die hard. June continued to blaze
through the house and in the gardens
around us.
We often went to see her, and she always
tried to raise herself, so as to do the honors of
the place to us, her look grateful and moved,
her eyes telling as plainly as could human
eyes the existence inside her, and the an-
guish of what we call soul.
One morning I found her stiff, her eyes
glassy, reduced to a dead creature, some-
thing to be thrown away. Then I ordered
112 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
Sylvester to dig a hole in a bend in the
courtyard, at the foot of an arbutus tree.
Where had that light which I had seen
through the eyes of the dying cat gone
to ? What had become of that small un-
quiet flame from within ?
XXIV.
The burial of White Mourn outte in the
quiet courtyard took place under the
beautiful sky of June, in the full sunshine
of two o'clock.
At the spot indicated Sylvester digs out
the earth, then stops, looking into the
bottom of the hole, and leans down to take
out of it with his hand something which
had surprised him.
" What is this ? " he asked, shaking some
small white bones which he had just per-
ceived. " Is it a hare ? "
It was the remains of an animal, cer-
tainly those of my Senegal cat, a Mou-
moutte from the olden time, my companion
in Africa, who had also been much loved,
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 113
whom I had buried there a dozen years
ago, and then forgotten in the abyss in
which are heaped up all the things and
beings which have disappeared. And
while I looked at these little bones mingled
with earth, these little legs now mere
white sticks, this collection which still gave
an impression of the hind-quarters of an
animal seen from behind, I suddenly re-
membered, with an inclination to smile and
yet a slight oppression of the heart, a scene
which I had forgotten entirely a certain
moment when I had seen the same skele-
ton of this cat's back then provided with
agile muscles and a silky coat fly before
me comically, and scamper oft* with its tail
in the air, and frightened to death.
It was on a day when, with the obstinacy
characteristic of the race, she had got up
on a piece of furniture which had been
forbidden to her twenty times, and had
broken a vase there which I greatly valued.
I first smacked her, and then, my anger
not being yet exhausted, I had aimed at
114 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TIL
her, as I followed her, a kick which was
rather brutal. She who had been slightly
surprised by the smack, understood, from
the kick which followed, that this was a
case of a serious declaration of war. It
was then that she had scampered off so
quickly with all her limbs, her tail like a
plume floating in the wind. Then, having
taken refuge under a piece of furniture, she
'had turned round to give me a look of re-
proach and of distress, believing herself
ruined, betrayed, murdered by him whom
she loved, and into whose hands she had
confided her lot. And as my eyes still
retained their wicked expression, she had
uttered her wild howl, that unique and
sinister " miaou " of cats when they believe
themselves about to be killed. All my
anger suddenly disappeared ; I called her,
caressed her, calmed her on my knees, still
frightened and panting. Ah ! that last dis-
tressful cry of an animal, even though it be
but that of a poor cow which they have
just taken to the slaughterhouse, even
A STORY OF TWO dATS. 115
though it be but that of a poor- rat which
a bulldog holds between his teeth that
cry which no longer hopes for anything,
which is addressed to nobody which is
like a last grand remonstrance to Nature
herself, an appeal to some unconscious
spirits of pity in the air!
Two or three bones buried at the foot
of a tree that was all that remained of
those hindquarters of a Moumoutte whom
I remember in the full of life, and so
funny. And its flesh, its little person, its
attachment to me, its great fright on a
certain day, its cry of anguish and re-
proach in short, all that was around those
bones has become a little earth.
When the hole was made to the proper
depth, I went up for the Moumoutte
which lay stiff up there on my rose-colored
couch.
When I came down with the little bur-
den, I found mamma and Aunt Claire in
the courtyard, seated on a bench in the
shadow, with an affectation of having come
1 1 6 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TIL
there by accident, and of speaking of some-
thing or other. To meet expressly for
this burial of a cat would have appeared,
even to ourselves, rather ridiculous, would
have made us smile in spite of ourselves.
Never was there a more dazzling June
day, never a warmer silence, broken by
such a gay buzzing of insects. The court-
yard was all flowery, the rose trees covered
in roses. The calm of a village, of the
country, reigned in the gardens around ;
the swallows and the martins slept ; only
the everlasting tortoise Suleima, grown
livelier as the heat increased, wandered
lightly and promiscuously about on the
old sunny stones. Everything was a prey
to the melancholy of skies that were too
tranquil, of weather too fair, and to the
heaviness of the middle of the day. Amid
so much fresh verdure, joyous and dazzling
light, the two dresses of mamma and Aunt
Claire, both alike, made two spots in-
tensely black. Their heads, with their
white glossy hair, were bent, as though
A STORY OF TWO CATS. 117
they were a little tired of having seen and
reseen so often so very often, almost
eighty times the treacherous renewal of
all life. The plants, the things, seemed to
sing cruelly the triumph of their perpetual
renewal, without pity for the fragile beings
who heard them, already saddened by the
anticipation of their inevitable end.
I put Moumoutte at the bottom of the
hole, and her coat, white and black, dissap-
peared immediately under some shovelfuls
of earth. I was glad that I had succeeded
in keeping her, and in preventing her from
going to die elsewhere, as had the other
one. At least, she would turn to dust
among us, and in that courtyard where so
long she had laid down the law to the
cats of the neighborhood, where she had so
often lounged in the summer on the old
walls with their white roses ; and where in
the winter nights, at the hour when she
O '
would make her capricious choice of a bed,
her name had resounded so often in the si-
118 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
lence as it was called aloud by the aged
voice of Aunt Claire.
It seemed to me as if her death were
the beginning of the end with the dwellers
in the house. In my mind, this Mou-
moutte was linked, like a plaything that
had been a long time in use, with those
two well-beloved guardians of my fireside,
seated there on that bench where she had
so often kept them company while I was
absent far away. My regret was less for
the poor incomprehensible and faint little
soul than for the period that had come to
an end. It was as if it were ten years of
our own life which we had just buried in
the earth.
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON.
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON.
I AM astonished at myself, at my giving
my advocacy to this work, which is alto-
gether out of my line, and which at first
sight, besides, rather repelled me. I am
astonished still more that I do it with a
strong sense of conviction, with a real de-
sire to be heard, to persuade, to carry other
people away, as I have been carried away
myself.
This autumn a highly respected admiral
wrote to me and begged me to take an in-
terest in the Pen-Bron hospital, the name
of which I then heard for the first time. I
confess that if the letter had not been
signed by this excellent sailor's name I
should have thrown it into the wastepaper
basket. Good Heavens ! just think of Avhat
I was asked to do, and for what purpose !
A hospital for scrofulous children what
121
122 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
had I to do with it of all men ? Better let
them die, these poor little things, than pre-
serve them for a miserable life and, per-
haps, from children that would be a dis-
grace. "We had, alas ! quite enough al-
ready of weaklings and stragglers in our
armies in France.
Out of respect, however, for him who
had addressed himself to me, I answered
that I would do my best, and most cordi-
ally. And I wrote, with some internal
mistrust, to the founder of Pen-Bron, M.
Pallu whose name and address the ad-
miral had given me that I was at his
service.
Two or three days afterward M. Pallu
in person came from Nantes to see me.
At first his enthusiastic language did not
move me. These little unhealthy beings,
these scrofulous subjects of which he
spoke, still gave me a vague sense of terror
a certain degree of pity, mingled, how-
ever, with an unsurmountable disgust. I
listened to him with resignation. They
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 123
had brought him some of them, he told me,
from the gutter, their limbs eaten up by
horrible Avounds. Some who were almost
falling to pieces had been brought in little
boxes ; and he had sent them back, able to
walk, at the end of a few months had re-
stored their bones, given them back some
health and a certainty of life.
. At last, tired out, I interrupted him, a
little brusquely, with the remark, " It
would, perhaps, have been more humane to
have allowed them to die."
With great calmness he replied that he
was of the same opinion.
Then I began to see that here was a man
with whom I should find something in
common. This work had another side
doubtless, which he would explain to me
a loftier scope than I had yet divined.
Little by little he told me things of
which I had never heard before, things
' O
that frightened me of the progress of
this disease, the very name of which brings
disgrace ; of its more and more rapid in-
124 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
crease, in recent years especially; of the
sufferings, the physicial impoverishing, of
the children in great cities ; in fine, that at
least a third of the blood of France was
already vitiated.
Those cures which had been effected at
Pen-Bron, on little beings who were sup-
posed to be utterly lost, and who would
remain pitiably weak, had to him only a
value as experiments. They showed that
this evil, whose name I dare not even
write, was curable thoroughly curable, in
certain climates, by salt and by the sea.
And then he told me his dream of extend-
ing his work, of making it something vast
and universal, of attempting the renewal of
the entire race.
" To-day." he said, " in this hospital
which we have founded with so much
difficulty, and which can accommodate just
one hundred children, we have only the ref-
use of the other hospitals in France poor
little morbid phenomena who have lived in
beds for years, who have tired out all the
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 125
doctors, and who are brought to us in ex-
tremis, when there is no longer any hope
for them. But if, instead of a hundred
children, we could receive in Pen-Broil
thousands and thousands, in rows of large
buildings with miles of frontage all along
O O cu
this marvelous sandy peninsula, where the
air is always warm and impregnated with
salt if in place of these poor little beings
whose skin is pierced with deep holes, they
brought us all those whom the malady has
scarcely touched as yet, all those who are
merely threatened if they could send to
us every year all the little weaklings and
sickly things that grow up without air in
the factories of great cities, and who be-
come afterward scrofulous soldiers, whose
children will be still more pitiful if they
could all corne here at the age when the
constitution can be easily strengthened
and if they asked from the sea a little of
that strength which it gives to sailors and
to fisherman
And as he unfolded his idea to me, as he
226 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
enlarged it to me with burning conviction,
I saw rise into his eyes the look of an /
apostle. I understood that the work to
which he had devoted his life was noble,
French, humanitarian.
Then, almost won to his side, I promised
that, before I tried to say anything about
it (I have never been able to speak of any-
thing that I have not seen with my own
eyes), I would go myself to Pen-Bron, and
see what he had already begun to do there
on those "marvelous sands," as he
called them.
Some weeks later, at the end of Septem-
ber, we were at Croisic, in the little port
crowded with fishing boats. Before us the
sea-water had that peculiarly intense blue
which it always assumes in places where,
under the influence of certain currents, it is
partially salt and warm. And down there
just beyond the first blue shoals there
rises an old mansion with turrets which
the gales have whitened, and which stands
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 12V
alone in sands that look as if they formed
a complete island. This is Pen-Bron.
But never did a hospital look less like one.
It was, indeed, difficult to realize that this
gay building, open to all winds, could con-
tain within it so many poor smitten beings
so many terrible and rare varieties of a
horrible disease.
After a passage of a few minutes a boat
brings us to the sands which are not an
inlet, as they appear in the distance, but
are the end of a long, very long, and nar-
row peninsula of a kind of endless beach
inclosed between the ocean and some salt
lagoons fed by the sea. Pen-Bron is there,
surrounded with water like a ship. In
front of its walls there is a rudimentary
garden, which is swept by all the breezes
of the open sea, but where, nevertheless,
flowers grow in the sandy flower beds.
About sixty children are outside boys
and little girls, in two separate groups.
The little boys play, talk, sing, under the
superintendence of a good Sister in her
1 2 8 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TH.
distinctive cap ; and so do the little girls,
with the exception of some who are taller,
and who are seated on chairs and do needle
work. And this is how it is, it seems, every
day, except when it is raining heavily. Liv-
ing constantly in the open air, the boarders of
Pen-Bron move round the building, accord-
ing to the direction of the wind and sun,
looking at one time on the lagoon, at
o o /
another on the open sea always breath-
ing that breeze what leaves a taste of salt
on the lips. And really, if it were not
that one sees some crutches bearing up
poor weak little limbs, some bandages con-
cealing half the face, and, leaning against the
walls, three or four little chairs of a shape
that is disquieting, you would imagine
that you had come to an ordinary board-
ing school at the recreation hour. So much
was this the case that I felt vanish sud-
denly that kind of physical horror, of un-
reasoning distress, which contracted my
breast at the first sight of this museum of
wretchedness.
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 129
I have now but a feeling of curiosity as
I approach these little invalids. From
afar I see them playing, just like any other
children of their age. And yet they would
not be here unless they had been attacked
every one of them, without exception
to the very marrow of their bones by some
frightful disease. What kind of faces
must they have, then ?
Mon Dieu, faces just like anybody else
sometimes even, to my great surprise,
faces that are very winning round, full,
imitating health. And how they are sun-
burnt, actually scorched! They have on
their cheeks the mark of the sea, just like
fishermen. You might imagine that they
had stolen from the children of sailors that
appearance of having been tanned by the
wind and the sun which make them look so
strong. It is a complete surprise to find
them looking thus.
When one comes closer, however, there
are plenty of things to make one groan.
Under the broad small trousers of the pat-
130 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
tern common in the country you see limbs
that are odiously twisted contorted and
twisted thighs. Under the small waistcoat
are hard corsets, which sustain weakened
spines that otherwise would fall in; and
then in the flesh there are large holes which
are scarcely closed, hollow and horrible
scars, and all kinds of mysterious phenom-
ena of a very mournful order.
But laughing gay ety is there all the same
in almost every eye. You find confidence
and hope have returned to these poor
anaemic things, and they give you the impres-
sion of an unexpected return of life into
their weak limbs.
M. Pallu, who accompanies me, calls them
in turn, quite proud of being able to present
them to me with their healthy, bronzed
cheeks. And poor children ! they show
me their scars without shame and each one
tells me the story of his lamentable past.
This one had an open wound in his side for
six years, below the arm. The hole was al-
ways getting deeper, and the treatment in
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON- 131
the hospitals was doing no good. He had
been in the Pen-Bron only four or five
months, and it was all closed, all cured.
Smiling, he opened his little shirt to show me
the spot, where there then seemed nothing
but a long scar, a little red. Another, about
ten years old, had just spent four years in a
hospital bed, stretched in a kind of box, with
what is called Pott's disease, of which I had
never heard before, but the very sound of
which makes me cold. It is a disease of the
spinal cord. The rings are not perfectly at-
tached to one another, the ligatures are
Aveakened, and thus the poor little body, if
left to itself, would fall in like a Venetian
lamp, which you take down and fold up.
Well now the child who had this disease is
standing erect before me ; they have taken
off within the last two or three days the
corset which had supported his back when
first he had gone out ; he has no further
need of it, and even his chest will be scarcely
deformed.
They all have things of the same kind to
132 TUB BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
show me and to tell me, and this they do
with a gay simplicity, with an air of abso-
lute confidence in their easy and complete
recovery. The splendid salt air of Pen-
Bron cures all this sinister human de-
composition, almost as surely as the warm
winds dry up putrid sewers, the oozings
and the moldiness on walls.
We now enter the hospital, which dur-
ing the day is almost empty. It is an old
building, was formerly a salt warehouse,
and has now been transformed by M. Pallu.
To carry this out, he must have had a
strong will and tenacious purpose. The
expenses have been almost entirely covered
by subscriptions. But it was not without
trouble, without vexations of all kinds, that
one could succeed in raising one hundred
thousand francs for such a work, which is
not very inviting at first sight.
The hospital at Pen-Bron in its present
state holds about one hundred beds and
these, children's beds scarcely larger than
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 133
cradles. The halls, all white, open on two
sides to the sea. Just as if one were in a
floating house, one sees through the win-
dows nothing but broad marine expanses,
great changing horizons, with fishing boats
which sail past. And the simple chapel,
with its oak roof, also resembles a chapel
on board a vessel. The little invalids who
have recently arrived, and who are not yet
able to go out, instead of gazing on large
gray walls, as in the ordinary hospital,
amuse themselves by looking from their
places on the passing boats, and receive
even in their beds the splendid reviving air
of the open sea. In contrast with boarders
of a more ancient date, these newcomers
have a pale complexion, the transparency
of wax, and large hollow eyes.
But their stay inside the hospital is gen-
erally not very long ; as quickly as possi-
ble, and at all risks, they send them out to
breathe the salt air of the sea. They have
even special boats on which they put them
to bed a kind of floating bed on which
134 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
they carry them on the lagoon. Through
an open window they show me down be-
low their poor singular little fleet, which is
just starting out from the shore, towed by
a barge. Three of these raft beds are oc-
cupied by pale children. In the barge is
the chaplain who superintends them ; he
carries a book from which he reads to them
during the long hours during the day when
they have to lie at anchor.
Among those who cannot yet go out are
several who are certainly very emaciated,
very pale, more saddening to look upon
than dead children. But they all receive
me with a friendly smile ; doubtless they
have been instructed to do so. Before my
arrival they have been told that I was
someone devoted to their cause, and then
in their ever active imaginations they have
attributed to me, perhaps, some beneficent
powers like those of a magician, and it
seems to me that their long, kind looks
compel me to do all that I can for their
hospital. Here and there on the beds
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 135
there are playthings very simple ones, I
should add. For the girls there are^dolls,
or, rather, make-believe dolls, clothed in
dressing gowns of printed calico. Here, a
little boy of four or five years of age, who
has his two legs in splints, with weights
attached to the feet to prevent his crumb-
ling bones from shrinking up, amuses him-
self by drawing up in line little paste-
board soldiers which have been presented
to him by the good sister. And then my
eyes are arrested and charmed by the sight
of a beautiful little creature of about
twelve years of age, white and rosy, with
features of a strange refinement, who plays
at nothing, but who appears already to
dream with a profound melancholy, her
little head resting on its scrupulously clean
and white pillow. I ask what is the
matter with this little being, so very beau-
tiful ; they tell me it is that horrible Pott's
disease at its last stage, and they fear it is
too far gone to allow of its cure.
Her looks impress me strangely. They
136 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
are like an appeal, a sad supplication, a cry
of despair, which knows everything, and
which is infinite. And then, no word, no
tears appeal to me like those prayers of
anguish which at certain moments flash
O
out, mute and brief, from the eyes of the
disinherited of all classes sick children,
old men, the poor and the abandoned, or
even beaten animals that tremble and
suffer. Ah, that poor little thing ! And
just think that I am the man who had
said that it were better to allow those
children of Pen-Bron to die. It is in this
vague and general manner that you say
these things before you have seen them with
your own eyes; but as soon as it comes
home to you in the individual case, you
feel immediately that this cannot be done ;
that it would be monstrous. And then,
seeing it is possible to prevent it, by what
right would you send to the mysterious
unknown of death those little bright eyes,
with such a look of intelligence those
little eyes, wistful and suppliant, which
THE WORK A T PEN-BRON. 13V
have scarcely opened upon life ! Even
though the idea of developing this hospital
so that it may become a work of national
regeneration be an impracticable chimera,
the task of bringing back to health a few
little children such as those just seen is
worth the trouble, a hundred times over,
of continuing and increasing: the work.
O O
But the chimera is capable of realization
with money ; ah, yes, with money, with
much money. Behind the existing hospital
there is this almost interminable peninsula
of sand, which stretches out of sight like a
yellowish ruby, between the blue waters
of the sea and the still bluer waters of
the salty lagoon. It is there, in this in-
comparable situation, that M. Pallu, the
founder of Pen-Bron, dreams of extending
over miles of frontage his rows of white
beds, so that thousands of weakling chil-
dren may come and acquire the swelling
chests and the hard muscles of sailors.
Let nobody imagine for a moment that
I have lent my influence by mistake to a
138 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH
private and selfish speculation. Oh no ;
let there be no mistake on this point. He
who has founded Pen-Bron has spent his
money as well as his energy and his mind
upon it. There is a managing committee
which receives no pay a committee com-
posed of thoroughly good people, who,
when there is any deficit in the accounts,
make it up out of their own purses.
There are doctors who are not paid, and
who come there every day from Nantes,
simply out of their benevolence. There
are Sisters of Charity who are admirable.
And here is a little point which will give
you an idea of the character of the Mother
Superior : For want of money, they do
not burn the soiled linen ; they wash it, so
as to be able to use it again ; and on the
servant-women refusing to do this terrible
work, this sister said, quite simply, " I will
wash these things myself ! " and she has
washed them and she washes them every
day, during the hours she has for rest. It
THE WORK AT PEN-BRON. 139
is just an entire community of people
with good hearts, bound together by a
common faith in the work they have be-
gun, and sustained amid their terrible
difficulties by the marvelous results they
have already attained. They have built
some hopes on me, and on what I could
say to make them better known ; and I
tremble lest their hopes should be deceived,
so deeply do I feel that their admirable
work is one of those which at first sight
are not attractive. They want money not
only to undertake the great work of which
they dream the regeneration of all the
children of France but even to meet the
most pressing cases of wretchedness.
Every day, for want of room, they are
obliged to close their doors to parents who
come and beg admission for their children.
Oh, if my voice could only be heard !
If only I could get them some subscrip-
tions ; or if I could only induce those who
will not be convinced by me, to have the
140 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TIL
curiosity during their excursions to the
seaside to pay a visit to Pen-Bron ! I am
sure that when they have seen they will
be gained over to the cause, as I was ; and
will subscribe.
IN THE DEAD PAST.
IN THE DEAD PAST.
THE past all the accumulation of what
has gone before us possesses my imagina-
tion almost without cessation. And often
I have the desire the only one that can
never be realized, and that is impossible
even to God to go back, if it were only
for a furtive moment, into the abyss of the
days that have gone forever into the
auroral freshness of the more or less remote
past.
By the partial exercise of my will, the
half -illusion can come to me of such a re-
turn especially at certain special hours,
when, for instance, I penetrate into regions
that have not changed for centuries, into
dwellings that have remained intact;
where skeletons, now scattered in Heaven
knows what earth, once lived, thought,
smiled. I experience it also when I find
143
144 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
by chance things which, while in them-
selves fragile and frail, have nevertheless
preserved themselves miraculously a long
time after the beings to whom they belong
have disappeared into unrecognizable dust.
Then I see again, with sufficient clearness,
in my mind's eye, personages who have
disappeared some old, some delightfully
young. But never do I succeed in repro-
ducing them in the full light of day. The
vague twilight in which they usually re-
appear to me belongs at once to the earliest
morning and to the approaching night to
the strangely fresh hour of dawn or the ex-
piring hours of evening.
My nearest ancestors those of the be-
ginning of this century or of the end of
the last those whose faces and smiles I
have learned to know from their portraits,
whose manners and habits, some of whose
very phrases, have been repeated to me,
and who, besides, lived a life very similar
to ours, in the midst of well-known things
these I see sometimes, but always in the
IX THE DEAD PAST. 145
spring evenings, in beautiful twilights,
limpid and embalmed in jessamine.
I find infinite charm in this association
which takes place in my mind in spite of
me between the dead past and the evenings
of May with their odor of flowers. I can
explain it, besides, quite easily. First, the
jasmin is an old-fashioned plant. The
old walls in our family house in the He
d'Oleron have been carpeted with it for
t\v<> or three centuries. And, then, one
evening, at the dawn of my life, when I
returned from a walk in the twilight, in-
toxicated with the odors of the country, of
the new hay, of the beautiful verdure that
was everywhere appearing again, I found
my grandmother and my grandaunt, Bertha,
seated in the bottom of the courtyard,
breathing the fresh air of the evening, in
the twilight under the hanging branches,
in which one could distinguish confusedly
some white flowers; these were the ever-
lasting jessamines. They were just talk-
ing of their two sisters, who had died by
146 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
accident very young somewhere about
1820 and who used, it appeared, to re-
main out in this court in the spring evenings
and sing duets to the accompaniment of
their guitars. Then there came upon me a
sudden impression of the past the first
really vivid one I had ever received since
I had come into the world seizing me so
as almost to frighten me, and with a whole
volume of sensations that appeared not to
belong to me at all.
They had never before spoken in my
presence of those two dead girls, and I ap-
proached, shuddering, to listen with a hun-
gry terror to what they were saying about
them. Ah ! these duets which they sang
those voices of former days which vibrated
in this same spot, and in just such May
evenings. They are nothing but dust now
the lips, the throats, the cords that had
given out those melodies in the same fresh
tranquillity of the twilight. And how old
they were also those ancestresses of mine,
the last who remembered these girls ! I
IN THE DEAD PAST. 147
put timid questions as to their appearance.
What were their faces like ? whom did they
resemble ? Already there rose up in my
pathway the revolting mystery of the brutal
annihilation of human beings, the blind con-
tinuation of families and races. Ever since,
in the evenings of spring, under the cradle
of jessamine, I have thought persistently of
those two young girls my unknown grand-
aunts. And the association of ideas, of
which I spoke just now, was thus created
forever in my mind.
Quite recently, on an evening in last
May, I gazed from the window of my study
on the beautiful light as it faded little by
little over our quiet quarter on the houses
around, that to me are so familiar. The
swallows, the martins, after wheeling round
and round with cries of ecstatic joy, had
suddenly grown silent all together, as if at
a signal from one leader, frightened, per-
haps, by the growing shadows ; one by one
they sought their nests under the roofs, leav-
148 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEA TIL
ing the meadows of the sky void except
for scarcely visible bats. A remnant of the
rosy splendor still hovered over us, just
touching the tops of the old roofs with
light ; then it rose and rose till it was lost
in the profound depths of the sky. Real
night was approaching.
An odor of jessamine suddenly reached
me from the gardens around; and then I
began to dream of the past, but of that past
which has but lately gone ; of that whose
actors still retain their forms tinder the
devouring earth and fill our cemeteries with
their coffins almost intact ; men who wore
on their necks the cravats of many folds
which were the fashion in 1830; women
who arranged their hair in curl papers
those poor remains of grandfathers and
grandmothers tenderly wept for and now
almost forgotten. Doubtless, thanks to the
immobility of small provincial towns, this
quarter immediately under my eyes has
scarcely changed since the past days, which
IN THE DEAD PAST. 149
are filling my imagination. That house
opposite has remained the same; it was
there that one of my grandmothers formerly
lived. And, with the assistance of the
darkness, I forced myself to imagine that
the present moment had not yet been born ;
and that the date of the actual day was
sixty or eighty years ago. If the door of
this house opposite were to open, and
on its threshold were to appear that
grandmother whom I scarcely knew still
young and pretty, with leg-of-mutton
sleeves, and a coiffure unknown to this
generation ; if other fair beings also, in
the dress of the same period, were to walk
out and people the streets with their faint
shadows ; ah ! what a charm, what a melan-
choly delight it would it be to see, if it were
for but a moment, the same quarter in the
twilight of the May of 1820 or 1830 ; to see
the young ladies of that time in their out-
of-date garments and with their old-fash-
ioned airs and graces starting out for their
150 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
walk, or coming to the windows to catch
the freshness of the evening air.
It happened that, on the following night,
I saw in a dream all that I had brought
before my imagination during that reverie.
Nightfall was at hand, toward the closing
days of the first quarter in this century, in
the streets of niy native town, which were
scarcely changed, but in which there was a
somber half-light. I was taking a walk
with someone of my own generation ; I
could not tell distinctly who it was it was
an invisible being, a pure specter, as the com-
panions of my dreams usually are it was
perhaps my niece, or, rather, Leo, at all
events it was somebody who is in constant
association with my ideas, and haunted, as
I am, by visions of the past. And we
looked with all our eyes in order not to
lose anything of this moment, which we
knew to be rare, unique, fleeting, incapable
of returning a moment in a buried epoch
which had come to life by some magic
IN THE DEAD PAST. 151
artifice. There was a feeling, too, that one
could not count on the stability of any-
thing there. Sometimes the images died
out suddenly for just half a second, then
reappeared, then died out once again. It
was like some pale, shifting phantas-
magoria, which an effort of will, very diffi-
cult to keep up, had succeeded in bringing
to life to move across the dim canvas of a
shadowy past. We hurried forward with
some feverislmess to see to see the very
utmost possible before there came the
stroke of the magician's wand that would
plunge everything once more into eternal
night. We tarried before we started for our
own quarter, in the hope of being able to
recognize some member of our own family
some ancestor whom we might be able
to recognize, or perhaps even mamma or
Aunt Claire, still quite little children as
they were, being brought back from their
evening w^alk with the May flowers they
had gathered in their hands. The passers-
by also rushed in and out of the houses,
152 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
quickly closing the doors, as though they
had grown unaccustomed to wander in the
midst of streets and were a little dis-
tressed at finding themselves restored to
real life. The women wore leg-of-mutton
sleeves, combs a la girafe ; bonnets so old-
fashioned that in spite of our emotion and
of our vague terror we could not but smile.
A mournful breeze, at the corner of the
streets especially, agitated, in the confused
twilight, the petticoats, the little shawls,
the odd-looking scarves of the women who
passed by, giving them still more the ap-
pearance of phantoms. But in spite of
this breeze, and in spite of this somber
twilight, one could see that it was spring ;
the lime-trees were in flower, and on the
old walls the jessamine smelt sweet.
Quite close to us, there passed a couple,
still very young, two lovers, tenderly lean-
ing on each other's arm, and with a some-
thing I know not what in their air
which, being familiar to me, made me look
at them with particular attention. " Ah ! "
IN TEE DEAD PAST. 153
said my niece, in a tone half-tender, half-
irouical, though without malice, " it is the
old Dongas." The person at my side, who
was indistinct at the start, had definitely
resolved herself into my niece. I saw her
now quite clearly at my side, walking
very rapidly almost running.
It was, indeed, the old Dougas ; that was
the resemblance which I myself sought to
recall. And we were both deeply stirred,
not precisely because of them, but because
of the simple fact that we had succeeded
in recognizing someone in the multitude of
furtive specters. That at once gave the
charm of the most striking truth to this
dive into the dead past, and that threw
over this si<?ht of buried events a melan-
O
choly still more indescribable.
Those old Dougas the people of whom
we were thinking least of all under what
O
an unexpected aspect did they reappear to
us. Poor old grotesque beings whom we
had known formerly in our quarter who
were already infirm and decrepit while we
154 7770 BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
were still children old people of the kind
that produce on children the impression of
having always been the same. And these
were really the people who passed along so
briskly, looking like a pair of turtle-doves,
in this gentle evening breeze she posi-
tively young, with her head bent, her coal-
black hair coquettishly arranged under a
large hat of the fashion of the time ! They
were not more absurd than others, not
uglier, transfigured by the mere magic of
youth, and with the air of enjoying as much
as anybody could the fugitive hours of
spring and of love. And to see them
young and in love again thus those old
Dougas gave me a still sadder sense of
the fragility of these two things, love and
youth, the only things which are worth
living for.
Another very somber impression of the
past came to me during a recent visit to
Corsica.
At Ajaccio, where I had just arrived,
IN THE DEAD PAST. 155
and which I saw for the first time, some
friends took me to see the house in which
Napoleon the First was born. It was in
the spring it is always spring when these
things happen to me a spring warmer
than ours, heavy under a clouded sky, with
the scent of orange trees and some other
plants that might almost have been African.
I had felt but little interest beforehand in
this house, no more than I do about any
other of the scenes familiar to sightseers
and guidebooks where people generally
think themselves bound to go. It said to
me nothing, and would cause me no emo-
tion.
The spot, however, pleased me from the
very first. You felt that in the district
nothing could have changed since the
childhood of this man, who had so up-
turned the world.
Above all, the house was intact ; and
from the moment I entered, helped by the
evening hours and the silence, the past be-
gan to come forth to me out of the dark-
156 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ness, evoked as it were by the smallest de-
tails ; the track of feet on the steps of the
stairs, the faded whitewash of the walls,
the old iron scraper placed before the
threshold on which muddy eighteenth-cen-
tury boots had been rubbed. The past be-
gan to assume its spectral life in my atten-
tive brain.
First, in the courtyard that sad little
courtyard, bare of grass and surrounded by
high houses of very ancient date I saw
playing the strange child that afterward
became the emperor.
The rooms into which I entered in the
twilight were but dimly lighted through
the shutters, which were everywhere closed
as though to increase the sense of mystery.
The furniture had an air of elegance, an
odor of bon ton, in this large dwelling ; it
was clear that the owners of this house
were people of substance according to the
ideas of the time. And, then, the seal of
the past was so deeply impressed every-
where, the smell of dust, the extreme de-
IN THE DEAD PAST. 157
cay of this furniture of the days of Louis
XV., or of Louis XVI., eaten by moths
and worms, gave an impression of the abso-
lute abandonment, the long immobility of
a tomb, as if nobody had entered there
since that time, nearly a hundred years ago,
when its historic owners had passed from
its doors. In the dining room, looking on
the small and almost deserted street, there
was their table, still set, with curious
chairs of an ancient pattern ranged around ;
and little by little I succeeded in bringing
before my imagination one of their family
suppers on a spring evening fearfully
like this, with the same sounds of birds
from under the roofs and the same scents
in the air. They came to life again before
my eyes, in the semi-dark ness favorable to
the dead, faces and dresses and all ; pale
Mme. Letitia seated in the midst of her
somewhat strange-looking children, their
enigmatic future already preoccupying her
grave spirit. It is so near to us this epoch
of theirs when one thinks of it ; we are al-
158 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
ways so near each other in time's profound
depths of endless successions.
Then my thoughts wandered from this
mother of an emperor to my own ; and sud-
denly I cannot explain the origin of this
feeling I felt an extreme sadness in the
darkness, something like the dizziness one
feels on looking into an abyss, when I said
to myself that this supper of the Bona-
partes, which I had seen so clearly and so
suddenly, had all passed more than half a
century before there was any thought in
the world of my own mother of that
mother who has been always the most pre-
cious and the most stable thinsj in life to
O
me to whose side I cling with some of the
feelino- of the child's tender confidence
O
whenever dark terror seizes me of destruc-
tion and the void.
I don't know how to explain it; but I
should prefer to believe that her beginnings
of life started from a date more remote;
that her gentle faith, which still gives me a
sense of security, had its origin in a past
IN THE DEAD PAST. 159
a little more remote ; at the same time,
feeling the contradictory sentiment that
her soul should have beyond death an
existence without end ; and to think of a
time very like ours, and yet in which she
had not begun to exist, upsets me com-
pletely. I believe that it gives me a new
sensation more poignant that ever of the
nothingness of us both in the vast whirl
of beings, in the infinitude of time.
Attention is quickly tired as soon as it
has been devoted too intently to any sub-
ject. During the rest of my visit to the
house of the emperor I thought of other
things nothing of any importance, and
nothing that interested me.
I saw nevertheless his modest room his
room as a young man in which I was told
he slept for the last time on his return from
Egypt. It was quite striking in appear-
ance, with all its small details, which were
still preserved. In our old house in the Isle
of Oleron I remember a similar one which
160 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
was formerly occupied by a Huguenot great-
grandaunt, who was almost liis contem-
porary.
But for me the soul and the terror of the
place are in the room of Mine. Letitia, a
pale portrait of whom, placed in a dark
spot I did not at first see, but which
arrested me just as I was leaving with a
sudden sense of fright. In an oval that
had lost its gilt, under a moldy glass, it
stands, a discolored pastel, the head pale
against a black background. She is like
him. : she has the same imperious eyes, and
the same smooth hair with the same
smoothly lying locks. Her expression, sur-
prisingly intense, has in it something sad,
wild, suppliant. She appears a prey to the
anguish of no longer being. The face, how
I know not, has not remained in the center
of the frame ; it is as a face of a dead person
who, frightened at finding herself there in
the midst of night, has placed her face fur-
tively in an obscure corner in this oval for
IN THE DtfAD PAST. 161
the purpose of seeing through the mist of
the dim glass what the living are doing.
And what has become of all the glory of
her son ? Poor woman ! At the side of
his portrait on the worm-eaten chest-of-
dni \vers in his old room, there is under a
globe a " Crib of Bethlehem/' with the
figures in ivory, which looks like a child's
toy. It was probably her son who brought
this back to her from one of his journeys.
It would be very curious to know how they
were to each other what degree of tender-
ness they showed to each other ; he, intoxi-
cated with glory; she always anxious,
severe, sad, foreboding.
Poor woman ! she has passed into dark
night ; and even the fading splendor of the
emperor scarcely suffices to keep his name
in some men's memories. And in spite of
his efforts to immortalize himself like the
old legendary heroes, his mother in less than
a century is forgotten. To save her from
oblivion there remains but two or three
portraits, scattered and neglected like this
162 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
one, which is already half-fafled out. And
our mothers the mothers of us who are
unknown who will remember them?
Who will preserve their loved images when
we are no longer here ?
Face to face with this pastel, in the
opposite angle of this same room, another
small sad thing attracts my attention in
spite of the growing darkness : it is a simple
frame in wood, containing a yellow photo-
graph attached to the wall. It represents,
still a little child in short trousers, that
young Prince Imperial who was killed in
Africa about a dozen years ago. A curious
fancy, yet a touching one, of the ex-Empress
Eugenie to place here this souvenir of her
son, the last of the Napoleons, in the same
room where was born that other one who
shook the world !
I think of how striking and strange it
will be to our children a century or two
hence to pass in review the photographs of
their ancestors or of dead children. How-
IN THE DEAD PAST. 163
ever expressive be those portraits, whether
printed or painted, which our ancestors
have bequeathed to us, they cannot produce
on us anything like the same impression.
But photographs, which are direct reflec-
tions from ourselves, which fix even fugitive
7 O
attitudes, gestures, momentary expression,
how curious and how almost terrifying they
will be to those generations which will
come after us when we also have descended
into the dead past.
SOME FISHEKMEN'S WIDOWS.
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS.
During the recent fishing season two boats belonging to
Paimpol, the Petite-Jeanne and the Catherine, were lost
with all their crews and freight in the sea off Iceland. By
this one disaster thirty widows and eighty orphans were
added to the list on the Breton Coast. M. Pierre Loti then
made an appeal to the charity of the public. A subscrip-
tion, which was immediately opened, brought in about
thirty thousand francs, which were distributed among the
bereaved families. lathe pages that follow the account is
given of the work of distribution. Note by the Publisher.
THE scene is at Paimpol, one September
morning, in the usual Breton weather
somber and rainy. The first emotion I
experienced was poignant enough when, at
the hour agreed upon, I entered the house
of the Naval Commissary, where were
assembled the families of the sailors who
had been lost. The corridor and the
vestibule were filled with widows, a^ed
' O
mothers, women in mourning; black
gowns, white caps, from under which
167
168 Til K BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
tears were flowing. All silent and
huddled together there because of the
O
rain outside, they awaited rny appear-
ance.
In the office of the Commissary were
met, on his invitation, the Mayors of Plou-
bazlanec, of Plouezec, and of Kerity (the
three Communes Avhere the suffering was
greatest). They came to assist as wit-
nesses at the distribution, and to supply
information with regard to the character of
the widows to whom sums comparatively
large were about to be given. I had
feared that among so many there would be
some who were not quite reliable, who
might be extravagant in this country
which reeks of alcohol. But I was wrong.
Ah ! These poor women, they did not
require the good character given to them
in every case by the Mayors ; their honest
faces told their own tale. And they were
all so clean, so neat, so nicely dressed with
their humble black clothes and their caps
freshly ironed.
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 169
We began with the widows of the crew
of the Petite- Jeanne.
They answered one after the other to
their names, and came to take the money,
some with sobs, others with quiet tears,
and some finally with a little sad and
embarrassed salutation to us. When they
retired, thanking everybody, the Mayor
had the kindness to say to them, pointing
to me, "It is to him it is to Nostre Loti
(in French, Monsieur Loti) that you
should give your thanks." Then some put
out their hands to touch mine ; all gave
me an ever-to-be-remembered look of grati-
tude.
There were some among them who had
never seen a note for a thousand francs, and
who turned this little blue symbol over and
over again in their hands with an air al-
most of fright. The value of this piece of
paper was explained to them in the Breton
tongue. "You must be economical," ex-
plained the Mayor to them, " and keep that
for the children." They replied, " I will
170 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
invest it, good sir ; " or, " I will buy a piece
of a field I will buy some sheep -I will
buy a cow ? " and then they went away,
weeping.
When the sorrowful work of distribution
to the widows of the Petite- Jeanne was
finished, that of the Catherine began, with
an incident which was very touching.
This Catherine, you must know, had a
mysterious fate, like that formerly told of
the Leopoldine / nobody had ever met it in
Iceland ; it must have foundered before
ever it got there ; and, then, nobody had
seen or ever heard anything of its wreck.
But it was now six months since anything
had been heard of it, and that was suffi-
cient to allow us to assume that it was cer-
tainly lost. Nevertheless, some widows, it
appeared, still hoped against all probability.
I had no doubts myself; but on the previ-
ous evening, acting on the opinion of the
owner of the ship, the Naval Commissary
and myself had decided that, in the absence
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 171
of proofs, we should wait some weeks yet
before distributing the money to these fam-
ilies of the Catherine. The widows had
been informed that they would be called
this morning to be told only the sums that
were designed for them, and that they
would not receive them until October, and
then only in case no good news came by
that time with regard to the fate of the
vessel. But M. de Nouel, Mayor of Plou-
bazlanec,' had come to tell us during our
meeting, that some of the fishermen belong-
ing to his Commune, who had returned
from Iceland, had seen a piece of what was
undoubtedly the wreck of the Catherine;
our hesitations naturally fell to the ground ;
there was nothing further to be expected,
and we could pay immediately.
The first widows who were called two
young women, who presented themselves
together thought that they were only
going to be informed of the amount of their
money. When they saw that they were to
be paid immediately, they, like their sisters
172 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
of the Petite-Jeanne, looked at each other
with eyes that questioned; at the same
moment, a frightful look of anguish crossed
their faces, and then there came an unex-
pected outburst of sobs which was caught
up even as far as the vestibule, where the
others were. The unfortunate creatures
had not yet given way to complete despair.
They had already begun to wear mourning,
but they persisted in hoping against hope 5
and now, when the money was put in their
hands, it seemed to them that everything
was made more hopeless, more irrevocable ;
that it was the lives of their husbands
which were being paid to them. I had
without thinking, by my tactlessness, in-
flicted on them a cruel blow.
When all those of the Catherine had taken
their departure, about ten other women, in
their poor black gowns, who had been sum-
moned, still waited at the door. Here I am
compelled to confess that I went beyond my
powers. But how difficult it was not to do
SOVE FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 1V3
so ; and who will find fault with me for
it?
During the preceding evening some
women in mourning had come to the hotel
where I was staying to call on me, and
had said to me humbly, without recrimina-
tion and without jealousy, " I also have lost
my husband in Iceland this year ; he fell
into the sea" ; or, " he was carried away
from his ship by a wave ; and I also have
little children." I should have said to them,
" I am exceedingly sorry, but you do not
belong to the Petite-Jeanne or the Cathe-
rine, Now I have assistance only for them ;
I cannot recognize you."
It ended by my feeling this inequality
to be unjust and unnatural. I ask pardon
of my subscribers, but after refusing at
first, I took it upon myself to make these
poor people share in the distribution. I
decided to give a part of the subscription
a lesser part it must be said to the other
women of the district of Paimpol whose
husbands had been lost in the course of this
1Y4 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
year, arid I begged the Commissary of the
Naval Recruiting Department who ap-
proved of my decision to begin again the
complicated calculation of the amounts to
be distributed to each person.
Alas ! in this country of the Icelanders
there remain many widows still to whom I
can give no assistance ; widows from last
year, widows from two years ago, from
three years ago all in great poverty and
burdened with very young children. To
them I have been obliged to turn a deaf
ear ; one must stop somewhere draw the
line at some point.
It was painful to me not to be able to do
something for these afflictions of older date.
I have suffered still more from the thought
of my inability to console those who are
going to suffer in the coming fishing seasons,
for I can never venture to address another
appeal to my unknown friends.
After such reflections I understood better
the half-protest, so courteous in its terms,
which had been sent to me by the ship-
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 1V5
owners of Puimpol when I started the sub-
scription. They were almost frightened to
see the money so soon reach the widows of
the Petite-Jeanne when other women of the
same district, living next door to them,
having had the same losses through ship-
wreck, would have to remain in their deep
distress. They had urgently requested me
to ask the permission of the subscribers to
place the funds at the disposal of the
"Courcy Society," and I had been on the
point of doing so.
But, then, if I had done so, I should have
immediately stopped the flow of charity
which had been coming in with such spon-
taneity. We are like this : there must be
some special case of misfortune brought
under our very eyes in an especial manner
to open our hearts. Charitable associations
organized for a general purpose speak to
us but little hardly touch us at all. And
so I had to let things go, as we say in the
Navy.
At this moment and for the future I am
176 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DBA TIL
entirely devoted to the Courcy Society, the
very existence of which I did not know of
two months ago. If I can contribute to
making it a little better known I shall be
very glad.
There is a charitable man M. de
Courcy* who has devoted himself heart
and soul to the widows and little orphans
of the sea. In seven years he has gathered
and placed about eight hundred thousand
francs as a charitable fund for the families
of all shipwrecked French sailors. There
is not a fishing village where his name is
not known and blessed.
The help which the Society sends has
this advantage over those started by in-
dividual initiative, that it is always given in
the proportion in which it is needed, so as
to excite no feeling of jealousy among the
families whom misfortune has overtaken.
But this assistance is unfortunately very
* The office of the Society for the Assistance of the
Families of the Shipwrecked, founded by H. de Courcy, is
at 87, Rue de Richelieu, Paris.
SO J/A' FISHERMEN '8 WID OWS. 1 1 1
much smaller than that which I have been
sufficiently fortunate to bring to Paimpol
to-day. It is insufficient everywhere and
often; for the activity of the Society ex-
tends without distinction along all our
coast, from the Mediterranean to the Chan-
nel, and, alas ! the sailors who lose their
lives every year are numerous. M. de
Courcy then ought to have many legacies,
many donations, and I would that I could
speak of his work such touching words as
would bring him some.
Thanks to the information collected with
so much care by the Naval Commissary, we
have been able to calculate the shares of
the different claimants with tolerable equity,
taking into account the sums already given
by M. de Courcy, and taking also into
especial consideration the number of chil-
dren in each family (including the babies
that were expected, who were numer-
ous).
I have also thought it our duty to give
178 TEE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
assistance to aged parents who had lost
their breadwinner in their son.
Those who knew how to write a little
signed opposite their names on the lists
which we had prepared. For those who
could not write (they were the more
numerous) the mayors who were present
signed as witnesses.
At Pors-Even and at Ploubazlanec,
where I went in the evening at the close
of the distribution to see some fishermen
who were old friends of mine, I received
many shakes of the hand, many thanks,
many blessings. I wish I had the power
to transmit to the subscribers some of all
this it was so frank, simple, and so good.
On the Tuesday following I left this dis-
trict quietly in a coupe on the Saint-Brieuc
diligence, thinking that it was all over.
About two o'clock we were to pass
Plouezec, the most afflicted commune, that
of the sailors of the Petite- Jeanne.
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 1?9
At first I looked from afar at this village,
with its houses of granite, its chapel, and
its gray spire, thinking of all there was of
sorrow and misery within its narrow limits.
As I got closer I was surprised to see
many people stationed along the road-
crowds, as if for a fair ; but, unlike them,
silent and motionless ; the majority women
and children.
" I believe it is for you. They are wait-
ing for you," said an Iceland friend to me,
who was traveling at my side in this car-
riage.
And it turned out to be for me ; I un-
derstood that soon. They had learned the
hour at which I was going to pass, and
they wished to see me.
When the courier stopped before the
post-office the mayor advanced, raising with
his two hands a little child of six to seven
years, who had some business to transact
with me a very beautiful little child, with
large dark eyes and hair that was silky
and of the color of yellow straw. She
1 80 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TIL
had to offer me a beautiful bouquet, and to
address to me tliis compliment (over which
she got mixed a little, which made her
Aveep) : u I thank you because you have
kept the little children of Plouezec from
being hungry."
They were drawn up in a line on the two
sides of the road, these " little children of
Plouezec" ; and in the first roAV behind
them I recognized the wido\vs of yesterday,
Avhose eyes were filled with tears as they
looked at me. Behind them Avere almost
the whole population of the village, and
some strangers bathers, doubtless, or
tourists.
It was not a noisy croAvd ; there was no
ovation with outbursts of applause it Avas
much better and more than that ; it was
just a few groups of people, poor for the
most part, who, touched, grateful, motion-
less, looked at me Avithout saying anything.
The courier set out once more, and I
bowed along the whole street to the people,
striving to maintain the ordinary expression
SOME FISHERMEN'S WIDOWS. 181
of my face, for a man looks very absurd
when he weeps.
*
I have already in the name of those
widows and those orphans thanked the
subscribers who have responded to my ap-
peal. I have to thank them also for my-
self, because of this moment of sweet emo-
tion which I owe to them.
AUNT CLAIEE LEAVES US.
I AUNT CLAIEE LEAVES US.
Ah / Insense, que crois que tu n'es pas moi.
V. HUGO : " Les Contemplations."
SUNDAY, November 30, 1890. Yester-
day evening the sad boundary was passed ;
the precise moment in which one under-
stands suddenly that death has come, is
gone.
Those who have passed through the sor.
row know well that decisive conversation
with the doctor, and how one fixes on him
one's eyes, almost threatening in their ex-
citedness, while he speaks. His answers,
at first obstinately vague, and then more
and more heart-breaking as you press him,
are understood gradually, enveloping you
with successive chills which penetrate
deeper with every moment, until the
moment comes when you bow your head,
185
186 THE BOOK OF PITT AND
having finally grasped it all. One is
almost moved to cry out to him for mercy,
as if it depended on him, and at the same
time one almost hates him because he can
do nothing.
So, then, she is going to die Aunt
Claire.
And when one does know it, a certain
length of time is necessary to survey all
the aspects of what is going to happen-
even to understand why it is that there
is something so frightfully final in
death.
The first night, then, arrives of that cer-
tainty with the momentary oblivion that
comes with sleep, and then you must go
through the anguish of waking to find that
black thought seated more closely than
ever by your "side.
And so it is all over ; Aunt Claire is go-
ing to die.
MONDAY, December 1. This is a day of
severe frost. A sad winter sun shines
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 187
white in a pale-blue sky more sinister
than if gray.
This day is passed in expecting the
death of Aunt Claire. She lies on a low
bed in the middle of her room where she
had been laid just for a moment, and where
she asked to be left without moving her
again.
It is her old room of former days, where
I used to love to remain whole days long
when I was a child ; many of my first
strange little dreams of the great and un-
known universe are associated with some of
the things around with the window frames,
the ancient water colors on the walls;
above all they are entangled with the
cloudy patterns on the marble of the
chimney-piece which I used to closely
study in the winter evenings, discovering
there all kinds of shapes of animals or
things when the twilight hour brought me
close to the fire. Nothing is changed in
this chimney-piece where Aunt Claire
formerly used to place for me EOurs aux
188 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
pralines ; and I see still in the same places
the table on which she assisted me to
place my magic tricks, the large chest of
drawers which I used to burden with my
play of the Peau d'Ane, with my fantastic
decorations and with my little actors in
porcelain. All my childhood, whether
anxious or happy all the opening im-
pressions of my mind, whether disquieted
or dazzled by mirages I find again to-day
with a melancholy as from beyond the
tomb in this room where formerly I was
so much petted, consoled, spoiled by her
who is going to die there. Ah ! that is the
end of everything. Alas ! for the nothing-
ness which beckons to us all, and where
we shall all be to-morrow.
There is nothing more to be done ; and
we remain near her bed.
During those hours of dumb expectancy,
in which the spirit sometimes falls asleep
and forgets in which one sees nothing
but the poor pale face, already almost
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 189
without thought, of her who is yet Aunt
Claire the good old aunt so deeply loved
my eyes catch sight of the cushions
which hold her up. This one, with pat-
terns a little faded, was embroidered by
her formerly as a surprise, I remember, for
New Year's Day at the period when the
approach of the New Year presents trans-
ported me with such childish joy twenty-
five or thirty years ago. Ah ! what a time
is that of youth ! Oh ! that one could re-
turn there for but one hour ! Oh ! that
one might retrace one's steps across the
times that have been, or if only one could
tarry a little by the way and not rush on
so fast to death !
There is nothing to be done ; we remain
near her, and from time to time the new-
comers of the family the veiy little ones
who will grow old so soon arrive also, led
by the hand or in their nurses' arms a little
frightened without knowing how much
cause there is for terror, and with their eyes
opened anxiously. They scarcely remem-
190 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
berherwho is passing away. Without, it
is freezing bitterly under this pale hyper-
borean sky. And my beloved old mother,
sitting motionless in the same chair opposite
her dying sister, continues to watch that poor
face which is breaking up and passing to an-
nihilation, will not turn away her eyes from
that companion of all her life, who is the first
to return to earth. And I hear her whisper
quite low, with an accent of sweet and sub-
lime pity, " How long ! How long ! "
This thing, which she does not name and
which we all know, is the last agony. She
feels that it is very long for her sister and
that no suffering is spared her. But
she speaks of it as of a passage toward an
elsewhere, radiant and very assured ; she
speaks of it with that tranquil faith which
I venerate which is the one thing in the
world that gives me at certain hours an
unreasoning hope that is still somewhat
sweet.
This terrible cold weather, so unusual in
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES VS. 191
our region, continues, adding to the sadness
of the expectation of death a general sinister
impression as of a cosmic trouble as of the
freezing up of the whole earth.
Toward three in the afternoon, in the
frozen house, I was w r anderin^ about the
' O
rooms without object, merely for the pur-
pose of changing from one place to another,
without knowing what to do and my mind
absent for a little while. I had almost for-
gotten, as happens when the most sorrowful
expectation is prolonged indefinitely; and
I reached quite accidentally the linen-room
at the top of the house, whence one can see
ihe country for a long distance through the
window panes dimmed by the foggy frost
the country level and somber under the
red sun of a winter evening.
On one of the shutters outside the win-
dow my eyes caught sight of two blades of
rose-bay in a poor little broken bottle,
which hung by a string from a nail, and
suddenly I remembered it all with a pang
192 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
of grief. It was just about two months ago,
during the beautiful autumn, which was so
luminous and warm that Aunt Claire, pass-
ing accidentally at the same time as I
through this linen-room, said to me, pointing
this out to me, " Those are some cuttings
of rose-bay that I am making." I do not
know why, but at the first moment I was
rather saddened. This idea of making cut-
tings when it would have been so much
more simple to buy rose-bays all grown,
appeared to me like a bit of senile folly.
But then my thoughts went back with a
deep sense of tenderness to those past
days to that time at which we were so
poor, and ab which the energy, order, and
thrift of mamma and Aunt Claire were able
to giv^ a good appearance to our honse ; to
that time when, as ever afterward, it was
Aunt Claire who had the supreme direction
of our trees and our flowers ; for it was she
herself who made the cuttings and who
attended to the buds, to the sowing in
the spring, and always found the means,
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 193
at an infinitesimal expense, of making
our courtyard flowery and beautiful.
, To have been poor is really an exquisite
experience. I blessed that unexpected
poverty, which came to us one fine day just
at the close of my too happy infancy, and
remained with us for more than ten years.
It drew closer together the bonds between
us; it made me adore the more the two
dear guardians of my fireside. It has given
me priceless memories ; it has thrown much
charm over my life. I cannot tell all
that it has brought me and all that I owe
to it, all of which is certainly wanting to
those who have never known poverty ; to
them one of the most beautiful sides of this
world remains unknown.
These plants, which we buy nowadays at
the nurseries, are to me impersonal just
the same as any others I know them not,
when they die I care not ; but those which
were sown or grafted by Aunt Claire, ah !
how I wished that this unaccustomed cold
should not kill them, Terror suddenly
194 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
seized hold of me at the thought ; it
would be one sorrow the more. I will at
once tell the servants to take care of all
those which are in the pots, to keep them at
the right temperature ; to watch over them
with greater care than ever.
Then I look closer through the windows
at these two blades of rose-bay shaken by
the deadly north wind. They are already
frozen, and the frost has broken the bottle
in which they are suspended. Nobody
will ever plant it again or make it revive,
this poor little slip left by Aunt Claire.
It makes me cruelly miserable to look at it,
and sobs suddenly come to me the first
since I have learned that she is going to
die.
Then I open* the window ; . I take up
piously the frozen slip, the remains of the
bottle, the string to which it is attached,
and I inclose ' all in a box, writing on the
cover what it had all been, with the
mournful date. Who can tell into whose
hands will fall this absurd little relic when
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 195
I also shall have returned to earth?
Everywhere there is this eternal irony.
To love with all one's heart faces and
things which each day, each hour, helps to
destroy, to weaken, to bring to decay ;
and, after struggling with anguish to
retain some little portion of all that is
passing away, to pass away in one's turn !
In the evening Aunt Claire breathes
O
and speaks still, recognizes us, answers our
questions, but in a dull monotonous voice
without inflections ; it is not her old voice ;
she has already half descended into the
abyss.
I have to mount guard at the sailors'
barracks, and have accordingly to go back
there for the night. Leo, who has come
to take me there through the dark and icy
streets, says to me en route, during our
silent walk, only this little phrase, so sim-
ple in itself, so commonplace from its very
simplicity, and, nevertheless, expressing
pages of that kind of regret for my distant
past which I experience at this moment
196 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
words, besides, which sound the funeral
knell of all the auroral epoch in my life,
" She will no longer attend to your exer-
cises or your impositions; poor Aunt
Claire, she will no longer take part in your
performance of the Peau d'Ane."
I pass my night of guard without sleep
in these barracks. Outside there is still
the heavy frost and the persistent cold
under a clear and dry sky. At break of
day I send my orderly for news. A word
written in pencil tells me that nothing is
changed ; Aunt Claire still lives.
At the barracks, also, where I have to
remain all day, there is something else
which adds its tiny sadness to my great
grief. In consequence of an order from
the Ministry reducing our Division, they
take down some rooms where the Marines
had lodged since Louis XIV., among them
the old fencing-hall, which I loved, because
I had taken there my first lessons in arms,
and because I had there for years taught
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 197
myself all the sailor's sports. Pell-mell
are thrown on the frozen ground the
bundles of foils, the sticks and the boxing-
gloves, the old escutcheons and the old
trophies. And I feel almost that a portion
of my youth is being scattered with them
over the ground.
About four o'clock in the afternoon,
after taking a turn at work in the open air
in the courtyards, I re-enter this poor room
of the officer on guard which I have to
occupy until the following morning, and I
see on the ugly and sad yellow curtains of
the bed a poor butterfly, which flaps its
wings as if about to die a large butterfly
of the flowers of summer, a " Vanesse,"
whose existence in December, after all this
excessive cold, unusual in our countiy, has
in it something abnormal and inexplicable.
I approach and look at it. It is pierced
right to its head by a large pin, which has
been run into its poor little torn body. It
is my orderly who has done this, with the
same want of pity which is shown by chil-
198 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
dren. A flutter of painful agony agitates
its poor wings, which are still fresh. In
certain peculiar states of the mind, in
moments of anxiety and despair, very
insignificant little things are exaggerated ;
reveal their unfathomable depths, cause
you pain, and bring tears. Thus it is that
the sight of the agony of this last butterfly
of the summer on a wintry and frosty eve-
ning, under the dying hours of a wan and
rose-colored setting sun, appears to me a
thing infinitely melancholy, and is asso-
ciated in my mind in a mysterious manner
with the other agony which is close at
hand. And tears, the tears that are the
more bitter because they are shed in soli-
tude, dim my eyes.
Ah ! that beautiful past summer, of which
this butterfly is the last survivor. With
what tightening of the heartstrings I saw
it disappear ! I felt it finish little by little
in the midst of plants that grew yellow, in
the midst of our vines and roses shedding
their leaves. I had so clear a presentiment
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 199
that it was the last of those in which it
would be given to me to see once more pass
together the two dear black dresses, alike
in shape, amid the flowers of our courtyard
and in the green avenue.
There was nothing to be done for this
butterfly. It was doubly killed by the
cold and by this hole which went through
its body. I cannot do better than hasten
its end. I catch hold of it, causing it as
little pain as possible, and I throw it into
the fire, where it was instantaneously
burned, its soul passing away in impercepti-
ble smoke.
Another night on guard at the barracks,
through which I believe I hear every mo-
ment steps on the stairs somebody coming
from the house to tell me that death has
done its work.
WEDISTESDAY, December 3. This morn-
ing I finish my week of duty. There is
200 TUB BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEA TH.
still this weather of severe frost with a
wan sun.
In this room of Aunt Claire, where for
three days it seems to me one can feel
physically the approach of death, things
retain their same aspect of expectancy, and
mamma is in the same chair beside her,
looking at her as she takes her flight on
O O
this little iron bed from which she no longer
O
wishes to be moved. Very low, in full
view of everyone, and almost in the midst
of the room, Aunt Claire is lying, complains,
is agitated, and suffers. She looks like
herself less and less, growing disfigured.
The locks of her white hair, which used to
be arranged so carefully, are now all in dis-
order. Her face changes and becomes
effaced under her eyes, even before the end.
Then she scarcely recognizes, and is no
longer able to speak even with that dull
voice which had not appeared to belong to
her. All around, nevertheless, her room
has preserved its accustomed aspect, with
the same little objects in the same places
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 201
as in the days of my childhood, and when
I try to imagine that this poor remnant,
already scarcely recognizable, condemned
beyond hope, is the Aunt Claire of former
days, I have a rush of sorrow which is like
the fall of wintry night on my life, and
brings besides a disquieting feeling that I
have never been able to let her know how
much I loved her.
The doctor declares this evenino- that she
O
cannot pass through the night, and that
there is nothing more to be attempted, to
be hoped. Nevertheless a little Buffering
can be prevented by the use of morphia.
On this little chance bed she is in the grip of
annihilation ; she is about to finish that life,
without joy even in the hours of her youth,
which was always humble and self -effaced
sacrificed to us all.
In the old house, in the rooms, on the
staircase, there prevails during this night a
cold which penetrates to our bones which
grasps the mind and holds it clutched in
202 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
the single thought of death. One might
imagine that the sun was departing from
us for ever, just like life ; and those plants
which Aunt Claire cared for so many years
in our courtyard are also doubtless about
to die.
About ten o'clock, mamma, after having
kissed the poor invalid, is persuaded to
leave her, and to go and take some rest in
a distant room where she might find more
silence. She allows herself to be led away
by her faithful Melanie one of a race of
old and faithful servants who have become
almost members of the family. Before she
goes away, however, she has prepared with*
that tranquil courage, that love of order
which ruled her whole life, those white
things which are necessary for the last
toilet. I, who never saw anybody die ex-
cept in the distance, without preparations,
in ambulances, or on ships, am astonished
and chilled by these thousand little details
which are altogether unfamiliar to me.
o
A consultation is held in a low voice as
AUNT CLAIRB LEAVES US. 203
to this last night's watch. It is agreed that
for this night the servants shall be allowed
to sleep, and that the nieces shall keep the
vigil together. I go to bed close by in the
Arab room, and I am to be roused up when
the moment of the last agony comes. They
are not to knock at my door for fear that
mamma below should hear and understand
in the silence of the night. No, they are to
knock at a certain point in the wall which
is near my head, and just at that point
where Aunt Claire formerly tapped with
her cane in the early morning at the time,
marked with constant accuracy by a great
clock, when I had some little work to do
in the early morning, or some journey to
make. I used to trust much more, to her
than to my sleepy servant, and she ac-
cepted cheerfully this task; just as for-
merly she had that of dressing the nymphs
and the fairies in the Peau cPAne, or of recit-
ing to me the Iliad, or any of the other tasks
which my fertile fancy conveyed to her.
204 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TIT.
THURSDAY, December 4. On this same
night, toward two o'clock in the morning,
after some moments of that peculiar sleep
which one has when some sorrow lies in
wait, the expectancy of some misfortune or
of death, I wake up shivering with a kind
of frozen terror. They have knocked be-
hind this wall which, on this side, resem-
bles that of some distant white mosque and
makes the spirit wander, but which on the
other side looks down upon the alcove of
Aunt Claire. I understood almost before
I had heard. I understood with the same
terror as if death itself with its bony finger
had struck this little place in the alcove.
I jump up in haste, my teeth chattering
from the cold of this icy night, and run to
where I am called.
Yes ; it is the end, the somber struggle
of the final hour. It lasts but a few
seconds. Still but half awake, I see it all
as if in a painful nightmare. Then comes
the soft immobility, and supreme tran-
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 205
quillity. Oh ! the horror of that moment ;
the terror inspired by that poor head, so
venerated and so loved, which falls back on
its pillow forever !
Now the most painful things have to be
done ; the most terrible tasks accomplished.
Those who were present resolve to do
these things themselves, without waiting
for the presence of the servants, or even
their assistance. I retire until this is com-
pleted, in the, icy anteroom, penetrated by
a deadly sense of cold which is not alto-
gether physical, but which also penetrates
down to my soul's depths In this
anteroom of Aunt Claire there were those
familiar objects which I have known all my
life, but which at this moment I can no
longer look at ; they dim my eyes with
tears There is a particular little
desk of hers, some small books and a Bible
there on an old table. Above all others,
in a corner there is her own little chair as
a child, brought thither from the " Isle,"
' O 7
preserved for seventy or seventy -five years,
206 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
and in which when I was quite a child I
used to sit down near her, trying to imagine
that remote epoch, almost legendary and
miraculous in my young eyes, in which, in
this Isle of Oleron, Aunt Claire herself
had been a little girl.
When the last toilet is finished I am
called back Then we lift the poor body,
now calm and in white garments, and
raise it from the small, terrible bed of suf-
fering, which in spite of everything we
could do had assumed the look of a pallet,
and placed her on a large bed, white and
stainless.
Then we begin through the black and
frozen house a curious rushing backward
and forward, not waking the servants, and
noiseless so that mamma may hear nothing.
We take away bit by bit the bed of death,
all the somber things which have no longer
any use, carting these things down our-
selves to the farthermost point of the house,
and passing twenty times to and from the
courtyard, in which a wintry rain, colder
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES ITS. 20Y
than real snow, begins to fall. This is
about three o'clock in the morning. We
look as though we were doing something
clandestine and criminal. We perform
tasks of which we had no idea until this
night, astonished at being able to do them
without more pain and disgust, and sus-
tained by a kind of delicacy as regards the
servants by a kind of pious sentiment
which extends itself even to trifles.
Returned at last to the side of the bed
where we had laid her, we took away with
anxious fear that mournful bandage which
in the first moments is placed on the faces
of the dead, and her face reappears immo-
bile, with an expression already more peace-
ful, no longer in the least painful to look
at. *
They now begin to dress Aunt Claire, to
fix for the last time those venerable locks
of which she had been so careful during
her life. And as soon as this toilet is
finished, the white hair framing the pale
forehead, there is a transformation complete
208 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
and astonishing. The dear face, which for
so many days I have seen contracted by
physical pain, has become completely trans-
figured. Aunt Claire has assumed an ex-
pression of supreme peace, a tranquil air of
distinction, with a vague smile which is
very beautiful, an air of soaring above all
things and above us. It is soothing and
consoling to see her thus in this garment
white as snow in the majesty that has
suddenly come to her after all the horrors
of that little bed on which she had chosen
to lie, waiting for death.
Still noiseless, ascending and descending
like phantoms, we look everywhere for
whatever flowers can be found in the house
during this frosty weather ; for boumiets
of white chrysanthemums, which were
below in the drawing-room ; sweet-smelling
orange blossoms which have been brought
from Leo's garden in Provence ; then
primroses, and we cut also and throw over
the clothes the leaves of a cyca to which
we attached a special value, because, con-
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 209
traiy to the custom of annual cycas, it had
remained living for four summers in suc-
cession in the shade in our courtyard.
The face continues to grow refined, to
become more beautiful in its pallor of white
wax. Never was there a dead face more
beautiful to look on, and we thought that
all the little children in the family, even
my son Samuel, might enter in the morning
to bid her adieu.
Before descending to my mother, and in
order to gain time and to delay still longer
the moment for saying everything to her,
we make up our minds to place the whole
room in perfect order. Thus, when she
comes to see her sister once again the aspect
of everything around will have nothing in
it that is painful, and will be more in har-
mony with the infinite calmness of the face
which rests on the white pillow. This, like
everything else, we do entirely ourselves,
and in this way no trace will remain of the
struggle of the night to those who were not
present at it. Always maintaining the
210 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
same silence, stepping on tip-toe, we began
the work with a craving for activity which
is perhaps a little feverish. Here we are,
like servants, taking away plates, cups,
medicines, all the apparatus of illness and
death. Then we open the windows to the
frozen air of night ; we burn incense, and I
even remember that I myself swept the
carpets, feeling a pleasure at this moment
in doing for her even the most humble
work. Five o'clock in the morning strikes
when all is finished. When everything is
in perfect order and the flowers are arranged,
a little silver lamp placed in a certain posi-
tion throws through the shutter a rosy light
on the dead face, which completes its
radiant transfiguration. Aunt Claire has
become pretty, prettier than we have ever
seen her in her life ; an expression of su-
preme triumph and peace has fixed itself for
ever upon her as in marble. Her face at
this moment is rather an ideal representation
of hers, in which, while all the features have
been made regular, are preserved only the
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 211
charm, gentleness, and sweetness reflected
from her soul, and these green branches
placed in the shape of a cross on her breast
add to the tranquil and unexpected majesty
of her look.
Come now, there is no longer any pre-
text for further delay. We must make up
our minds to tell my mother that all is
passed and what we have done. To reach
her room I had to make a long detour by
the rez-de-chaussee because of my son, who
sleeps the light sleep of a little child, and I
find our silent journey interminable as I
pass with a lamp in my hand at this unac-
customed hour through the rooms and
stairs one after the other black and
cold.
It is horribly painful to be the bearer of
such a message. At the first knock, though
it is a gentle one, and before Melanie had
had time to get up and open, the voice of
mamma, who defines why we have come,
asks, in this silence of the night, very
212 THE BOOtf OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
quickly and with an intonation full of an-
guish, " It is all over, is it not ? "
The winter's day breaks at last, very
pale, much less cold than the preceding
days, warmed by that melted snow which
had fallen through the night.
In the forenoon the servants go hither
and thither to announce the end to our
friends. They bring bouquets and wreaths
of the sad flowers of winter, with which the
bed is gradually covered. They were still
awaiting the roses from Provence which
had been ordered by telegram. The photog-
rapher comes to take that quiet face framed
in white locks, which to-morrow will have
disappeared for ever. The image which
will be made will remain permanent for
some years still for just a few moments of
insignificant duration in the continuous in-
finitude of time. Friends go up and go
down ; the house is full of continual rust-
ling, unique, soft, with muffled feet, and
there lies Aunt Claire in the midst of her
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 213
flowers, with the same smile always of
triumphant and unalterable peace. My
little niece, only five, when she is brought
to the bed-side, thus expresses her impres-
sions to her still smaller sister, who has not
yet been brought up : " They have just
taken me to see Aunt Claire, who looks
like an angel as she is ascending to heaven."
I also remember the scene with Leo.
For nearly four years he was her neighbor
at table. They had their little secrets
even their comic little quarrels, especially
in reference to a certain pair of thin short
scissors for embroidery which are called
"monstres"; he,, inventing a thousand ex-
cuses, each more stupid than the other, for
wanting these little "monstres," would
come to ask the loan of them from Aunt
Claire, and she would refuse them always
in indignation. Only one solitary time she
had confided them to him the evening on
which he had been promoted to his cap-
taincy. On this day she had herself
quietly slipped them under his napkin in
214 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
fulfillment of an old promise. " The day
on which you get your captaincy I will
lend them to you, if you are only good up
to then." And this morning, somebody
having mentioned before him the words,
" little monstres," he bursts into sobs.
I go to the cemetery under the mid-day
sun to make the arrangements with regard
to the vault and the ceremony on the
following day. The weather is pleasant
after these terrible frosts, and there is a
deceptive sky which mocks one with the
light of summer. I. believe that somber
skies are less melancholy in December
than those half-lights which grow warm
toward the middle of the day, and after-
ward grow cold very early from the damp-
ness and the fogs. In this cemetery, bright
and almost smiling under the sun, where
thousands of artificial wreaths throw pris-
matic colors on the tombs, I allow myself
to be distracted for a few moments, my
mind going a-wandering, when suddenly
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 215
there conies back upon me the recollection
of death, and I remember that I have gone
there to prepare a place of annihilation for
my Aunt Claire.
The night is quickly returned, and we
prepare for the last vigil. I look for a
long time before I depart at the serene face
of Aunt Claire, trying to fix in my memory
this last image of her, so silent and so pretty.
All the arrangements, these flowers on
the bed, everything is just as I would have
wished it, and just as I had seen it with a
sad spirit of anticipation.
Memories of childhood return to me this
evening with a curious distinctness. They
return to me doubtless to give their farewell,
for it is certain that Aunt Claire takes away
a great part of them into the earth. When
I was eight or ten years of age I had a
bird which I loved very much. I knew
that its little existence was very uncertain,
and I had taken the singular precaution of
preparing a long time beforehand all that
2 1 6 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TH.
was necessary to bury it a little leaden
box lined with rose-colored wadding, and a
cambric handkerchief belonging to Aunt
Claire as a pall. I loved this little bird
with a strange affection, and with the
vehemence of many of my feelings then.
For a long time in advance, I represented
to myself that a day would come when I
would have to put the bird in its little
box, and when I would see the silent cage
occupied by the little coffin covered with
its white pall. One morning when they
came to take me to college, Aunt Claire,
who had watched me from a window, took
me apart to announce to me gently that
the bird had been found dead, from what
cause was unknown. I wept for it and
buried it, as I had for a long time arranged.
Then, till the day following I left in its
cage the miniature coffin covered with
the fine handkerchief, and I could not
grow tired of looking at the sad sight,
which, however, was the realization of
a tiling that had been long feared and
AUAT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 217
imagined beforehand exactly as it oc-
curred.
It was something like this on this par-
ticular evening. During all the recent
winters, seeing Aunt Claire grow weaker
and older, I had had a vision of her bed of
death, of her last toilet and her white
locks thus arranged, and with many flow-
ers thrown over her. This evening; I look
O
at the realization of a thins; which I had
O
feared and foreseen absolutely as it was to
be, with the certainty that it had reached
its inexorable fulfillment.
FRIDAY, December 5. The heavy frost
has returned under a sky low, dark,
funereal. Never since I came into the
world has there been such a winter in our
country. Once more there comes these
vague impressions of the end of every-
thing, of universal destruction before the
invading ice ; and more and more the mind
in such times is brought back again and
again and concentrated on the dominating
218 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
thought of the moment which for us
all is the thought of death.
I dreaded to think what the face of Aunt
Claire might look like in the daylight of
this day. One night more could change it
very much, and we had resolved to cover
the face if it had ceased to be pleasant to
look at.
After some hours of sleep I come anxi-
ously to look at it; but no, there is no
effacement in the pale features ; rather the
appearance has become younger, more
beautiful, more refined, and the expression
of peace and of triumph, the mysterious
sweet smile, remains always exactly the
same, as though decisive and eternal. We
should have wished to preserve her and
look at her for one day more, if everything
had not been arranged for to-day.
There are a thousand preparations to be
made which keep one from thinking. The
baskets of roses and lilies from Provence
have just arrived from the railway station,
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 219
and there is a sense almost of enchantment
in opening them. The bed from which
Aunt Claire smiles so sweetly is soon
covered with all these new flowers.
Now they bring in that ugly, common-
place and sinister thing the coffin which
I had never before seen enter the house,
having always been absent on the sea
whenever death visited us ; and the hour
has come to do the most cruel of all our
tasks, to place Aunt Claire in this coffin,
and to close the cover upon her forever.
Before this is don.e mamma goes away,
for we had begged her to leave the room in
order that she may not see this last sight.
Ah ! the sorrow of very old people, men
or women, who have no tears any longer to
shed ! This is the hardest of all things for
me to look at, except, perhaps, the tears of
little children who are deserted. And at
this moment I have to look on the sorrow
of my own mother, and the sorrow that be-
longs to her alone. I believe that nothing
has ever grieved me like her farewell kiss
220 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
to her sister, and the expression of her eyes
when she turned back on the threshold to
look once more, and for the last time, on
this companion of all her life. Never has
my revolt been more angry and more dead-
ly against all the odiousness of death.
We placed her in the coffin ourselves, not
allowing her to be touched by any strange
hand, even by those faithful servants who
were almost ourselves. It was all done
very quickly, almost mechanically.
There were many people there, porters,
workmen who had come to solder the
heavy lead, and their presence neutralizes
everything. It is all over, the face of Aunt
Claire is vanished forever, vanished into the
great night of things that are gone.
The coffin goes away ; it is brought
down into the courtyard ; it has departed
forever from this dear room, in which
during all my childhood I came to receive
those pettings from her who never tired of
giving them, and into which it seemed as
though her presence had brought something
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 221
of the charm of the old isle, something of
that former life of our ancestors la-bas.
In the courtyard, on benches covered
with grass, they place her under the shel-
ter of an awning. On the ground leaves
are strewed, and around were green arbutus
trees. I have everything taken away that
the severe month of December has de-
stroyed in our fruit trees ; have the frozen
branches cut, and all the dead leaves taken
off. On this last occasion of her being in
the courtyard, which she had cared for all
her life, in which each plant, and even each
imperceptible bit of moss ought to have
known her, I am anxious that everything
should make its toilet for her, in, spite of
the winter.
Of the ceremony of the procession, on
which there falls a shower of melted snow,
I scarcely remember anything. In public
one becomes almost unconscious, as at the
burial of somebody one does not know.
One remembers only, from amid so many
external manifestations of sympathy, a look,
222 THE BOOK Off PlT? Atiti OF t>EATH.
a shake of the hands, which have been
really meant.
Ah ! but the returning ! To see the
house once more under this black Decem-
ber sky, in this icy rain, in this funereal
twilight ; the house in disorder, trodden by
the feet of so many people, with the green
branches which were strewn around, the
odor of all the accessories to death, which
hangs vaguely on the stairs over which the
coffin has passed. Then comes the evening
meal, the first meal at which we all meet,
now tranquil, without any call to get up
or go into the chamber of the invalid;
the first meal which begins again the old
life of yesterday with one place forever
empty in the midst of us. And then the
first night which follows this day.
Lying in the Arab chamber, I am con-
stantly beset, athwart my tired, half-sleep,
by an impression, infinitely sad, of the un-
accustomed stillness which is on the other
side of the wall, and which will last for-
ever the stillness in the room of Aunt
AUNT CLAIRE LEA YES U8. 223
Claire. Ah ! for those dear voices and
those dear protecting murmurs which I
heard there for so many years through this
wall when the stillness of night had come
upon the house Aunt Claire opening the
large wardrobe, which creaked on its locks
in a peculiar manner (the wardrobe in
which was placed for ever " UOurs aux
pralines ") ; Aunt Claire calling out some
words, which I could just distinguish, to
mamma, who had gone to bed, a little
further on in a room close by, " Do you
sleep, my sister ? " And the large clock on
the wall stopped to-day which chimed
so loud ; the clock which made so rnfcch
noise when being wound up, and which
sometimes, to our great amusement, would
wind itself up before it went to sleep, at the
stroke of midnight so that it had become
a traditional joke in the house whenever
there was any nocturnal disturbance to
accuse Aunt Claire and her clock of it.
All that is over, forever over ; for Aunt
Claire has taken her departure for the
224 THE BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
cemetery, and mamma, doubtless, will pre-
fer never again to live in the room next
hers ; silence, therefore, is to reign there
forever. For many years it was my joy
and my comfort to hear them both, to re-
cognize their dear old voices through this
wall, rendered sonorous by the night. It
is all over ; never again shall I hear them.
When at last, under the influence of the
extreme fatigue and the overwork of these
last few days, I fell asleep on this night of
mourning, I had a succession of dreams
which I will attempt to describe and which
wefce all impregnated with the idea of
death.
The first dream took place at home. We
were all gathered together in the Gothic
hall, and in the evening. It must have been
just about the hour the sun was setting,
for large red rays reached us from the west
through the curtains and the embrasures of
O
the arches, and yet there was a light that
was dimmer and more somber than is usual,
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 225
even when the twilight is coming on. In
the hall there was all the desolation of ruin.
The walls were cracked, the chairs were
broken, the furniture was worni-eaten,
everything was crumbling to dust. But
we were careless of this disorder, 'twas but
the precursor of some other kind of in-
definable destruction which had become in-
evitable ; we remained stationary in our
places, resignedly awaiting the end of the
world.
And now we began to see through the
half-opened wall the heaped-up ruins of the
houses of the whole neighborhood, and be-
yond stretched the monotonous horizon of
the country as far as Martrou and Limoise :
while over the vast plains the red disk of
the setting sun lay, scattering around us its
long evening rays. The forms and faces of
the beings who waited there with me re-
O
mained indistinct, with phantom-like aspect;
on one side was my mother, whom I re-
cognized. -But who were the others?
Perhaps ancestors whom I had never seen,
226 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
from the Isle of Oleron, or some descen-
dants or heirs who had not yet come into
existence members of the same family,
but without epoch or distinct individuality.
"We were all still under the impression of
the death of Aunt Claire, but this impres-
sion lost something of its force under the
feeling that we were face to face with the
end of everything and of ourselves; the
regret of what we had lost in her was dif-
fused in the more general melancholy in-
spired by the annihilation of everything
else in the world. And as to this sun,
which set with a tranquillity that seemed
to vaunt of its limitless duration, we looked
upon it with a sort of hatred. Then one of
the half-phantoms stretched forth its hand,
and its index-finger pointed toward the
disk of the sun as though to curse it; a
voice began to utter words which seemed
to us to reveal truths that could not be
grasped, while, at the same time, they were
the expression of our universal complaint
of our universal revolt, hitherto voiceless,
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 227
against that annihilation which was so near
and so inevitable.
The words which the voice uttered, when
recalled after, in waking hours, appeared to
be incoherent and devoid of sense ; in the
hours of dreams they appeared on the con-
trary an eloquent and profound Apocalypse,
revealing sublime truths. In dreams one is
perhaps more capable of understanding the
mysterious, more capable of penetrating
into the unfathomed depths of origins and
causes.
Of all the sentences which the voice had
uttered against the sun, this last one alone
remains with definite meaning to my
awakened spirit a phrase not common-
place, and ordinary enough in all con-
science : " Thou art always the same al-
ways the same. The same that didst set
in the same place, on these same plains,
years, centuries, ten of centuries ago, in the
period before the great deluge, when thy
sole duty was to cast light on an earth pop-
ulated by the animals of that period the
228 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
mammoths and the plesiosaurus." And
this word plesiosaurus, on which the voice
died away, had vibrated strangely, had
been prolonged in the silence as though it
were an invocation and an appeal to the
monstrosities and the terrors of the begin-
nings of existence. The dimly lit plain,
with the loud expiring and melancholy echo
of this word, stretched to infinite length be-
fore us, with this same pallid sun ever in
the midst of its immense horizon. The
plain put on again its antediluvian aspect,
the primordial desolation and nudity of the
epochs that have disappeared.
And thus it came- to pass that inexpli-
cable things began to take place around us
at the bottom of the hall. In the dark
part, the door of the " museum " opened
in which formerly my childish spirit had
been initiated into the infinite diversity of
Nature's forms opened on the high gallery
on which it gave; animals began to walk
forth from it; the old animals stuffed with
straw, some of which, brought thither by
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 229
sailors of a past age, had been dried up
into dust for a long time.
Slowly, one after the other, the beasts
came forth; there was, however, neither
epoch, nor duration, nor life, nor death,
and in this grand confusion of things there
seemed no cause for wonder.
The birds, coming forth from behind
their glass cases, went one by one and
perched on the embrasures of the high
chimney-place ; and I especially recognized
among them, the oldest ones, the first that
had been given to me when I was a child.
It is a curious thin^ that at moments of
O
fatigue or sorrow, of any kind of over-ex-
citement of the nervous system, it is always
the impressions of childhood which reap-
pear and dominate everything.
The butterflies also, butterflies dead for
so many summers, had broken from the
pins and the glass cases, and flew around
us in the darkness, that grew deeper with
every succeeding moment. There was
one in particular among these butterflies
230 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
whose approach I saw with a feeling o
indefinable terror; a certain yellow, pale
butterfly, the " citron-aurore/' which is
associated to me, in my mind, with a whole
world of memories of sunshine and youth.
It began its little life again like the rest;
but its wings shivered with that same
agony which I had seen in the butterfly
I had found, four days previously, pinned
to the curtains of my barrack-room bed,
and I retreated from it, so as not to in-
terfere with its flight, surprised that the
other human forms did not do likewise ;
for this butterfly had become in my eyes
an emanation, as it were, of Aunt Claire,
something of herself perhaps her wander-
ing soul.
Next day another dream came to me,
suffused with this same feeling of the end
of all things, but with less of the sense of
revolt and horror.
I dreamed this time that after a long sea
voyage I returned to the familiar hearth,
AUNT CLAIRE IE AYES US. 231
having aged much in the meantime, and
my hair having grown gray. Athwart this
same half day of the twilight I saw once
again the things that were familiar to me.
They were in no way disarranged, but in
orderly array as in the houses of the liv-
ing ; in spite of this apprehension of
death, which continued to hang over
everything.
I arrived alone, expected by nobody,
after an absence that had lasted so long.
I saw my mother slowly ascending the
dark stairs, aged and feeble to an extent I
had never seen before ; we recognized each
other without saying anything, united in
the same silent apprehensions. Taking
her by the hand I brought her into my
own room the Arab room where I made
her sit down, and threw myself on the
ground at her feet. Then, drawn to the
door by some indefinable and disquieting
presentiment, I went to look out on the
staircase ; I went out with a certain tremu-
lous hesitation in this sinister semi-dark-
232 THE BOOK OF fITY AND OF DEATH.
ness, to try and see if there were nobody
ascending the stairs after us. The room
of Aunt Claire, which also looked out on
this vestibule, was open, and lit by a sort
of yellow as by the yellowish rays of a
setting star. I went in there to look
around. And then, turning around, I saw
her behind me ; she had reappeared
silently with her set eyes smiling, but so
sad. I felt no terror; I touched her just
to assure myself that she was as real as I
myself ; then, taking her by the hand, and
still without uttering a word, I led her
into the Arab room toward mamma, to
whom I said only as I entered, "Guess
whom I am bringing back to you."
When they were both seated, and I once
more at their feet, I took them once again
by the hands, just to hold them tight and
prevent them from vanishing before me,
having but little confidence in their reality
or their duration. And we remained a
long time thus, without motion and with-
out words, with the consciousness not only
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 233
of beinsr alone in this deserted house, but
O '
of being also the only survivors in all this
town abandoned to specters, as though
after the long lapse of time we three alone
had been spared. Moreover, we knew
that we also were going to disappear, to
be annihilated. I said to myself with a
supreme despair, I have been able to fix
something of their features in my books,
to reveal them both to thousands of un-
known brothers as distraught as I by the
prospect of death and oblivion. But they
also have passed away, everybody who
had read me, every one o^ my own genera-
tion; and now it is all over with that
factitious life which I gave them both in
the memories of men ; it is all over with
them, it is all over with me ; even the
traces of our existence are about to be
effaced and lost in the absoluteness of
annihilation, complete nothingness.
MARCH, 1891. Three months have
already passed since Aunt Claire left us.
234 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATI1.
Almost on the morrow of her death I
had abruptly rushed off, leaving the house
still in the sinister disorder and the country
under the somber cold of the severe mid-
winter. I had gone to lands of sun and
blue sea, called to a distance by my trade
of sailor.
And I came back yesterday on a vaca-
tion of a few hours in weather that had
already become spring-like, very luminous,
very soft. I was almost saddened by the
perfect restoration of order everywhere, by
the careless tranquillity of things. Time
has passed, and the image of Aunt Claire
has faded in the distance.
A warm sun, transient and unexpected,
has begun once again to brighten our court-
yard, which I had left still in the grip of
that black cold, with the green branches
that had formed part of the funeral pyre
still heaped up together in a corner under
the snow. Several of our plants are dead
some of those which Aur.t Claire had
tended herself, and which I loved because
AtTNT CLAIRE LEAVES if 8. 235
of her ; they have been replaced by others
which had been brought thither in haste
and in expectation of my arrival. Even in
this courtyard, which had been her domain,
the trace of her beneficient and sweet stay
on earth will soon have disappeared.
We all go together to the cemetery
to pay a visit to the vault where she
sleeps, now walled in with stones. A
spring sun shines on our black clothes.
The cemetery itself is shaking off the long
torpor of this long and fatal winter. The
plants, whose roots touch the dead, already
are gently putting forth their buds, and
are going to live again.
We feel as though we came to see a
tomb which had become already old and
begun to be forgotten.
On our return I go into her room ; the
windows are opened to the soft breeze of
spring, and there reigns in it a perfect order :
perfect order prevails, and with it there
236 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
would seem to be almost an air of gayety,
an unexpected return, as it were, to younger
days. In her place there is substituted a
large portrait, just recently painted, which
has caught slightly her expression and her
sweet smile, but that image framed in this
gold that looks too new now, but will by
and by fade, will not tell my son Samuel
whom it represents unless he is told all
about her. It will become, after I have
gone, just the same as those other portraits
of ancestors, a mere commonplace thing,
which nobody knows and at which one
scarcely looks.
I open her large wardrobe. There are the
little things which she used to handle every
day, which have been arranged with religi-
ous care by my mother, who has put them in
an order that is not to be interfered with ;
behind some little boxes, of a make that
has gone out of fashion, to which Aunt
Claire was much attached, I suddenly
come upon the Ours aux Pralines in a
corner. All these things will remain im-
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 237
movable on these shelves that are not to
be moved again in this room which no-
body will occupy again until that hour
of all profanation which I cannot fore-
see, which will come later when I also am
dead.
I return to my own quarters to my
study, and, with my elbow on the sill of
the open window and with an Oriental
cigarette between my lips, I look, as I have
for so many years, at the little familiar
street, at the district which does not
change.
At all times I have dreamed and medi-
tated much at this same window especially
in the evenings of June ; and I would wish
that they should not change, until my
death, the aspect of the old roofs of the
neighborhood. I feel attached to them,
although perhaps they would appear com-
monplace and ordinary to those to whom
they bring no memories. And every time
that I have stayed in my own home during
238 THE BOOR OF PITT AND Of DEATH.
all the different phases of my life which
have succeeded each other with such rapid-
ity, I have passed moments of reverie
there, moments of nostalgia and of regret
for the thousand and one scenes in the
East or elsewhere. And, conversely, when
elsewhere I have in the midst of these mi-
rages longed now and then for this window.
Little Samuel, my son, has begun to come
there also, supported on the neck of his
nurse ; more than once he has cast his little
eye, surprised and half-conscious, on the
neighborhood. After me, perhaps, he will
also love this place in his turn.
The weather is deliciously fine to-day.
The sky is blue, the breeze passes over my
head, warm as a breeze in April. Every-
where there is a feeling of spring. Already
may be heard the pipes of the goat-herds
who have just arrived from the Pyrenees.
There, too, are those three wandering musi-
cians, who every summer reappear and
play once more the same airs. There they
are, installed at their old post on the pave-
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 239
ment in front, to begin all over again the
music of the beautiful seasons that have
now for ever passed away. For the
moment I allow myself to be carried away
just a little by all this gayety, and by the
thought of all the sunny morrows which
are still ahead of me and of that life which
still lies before me.
My eyes now wander to the window
which is nearest mine, one of those in the
apartments of Aunt Claire. It is half-
closed, and I see through the opening the
small and perfumed head of a vigorous
bud of mignonette push its way through
the tiles of the window sill. (Mignonette
was the favorite flower of Aunt Claire.
I used to see it in her room almost every
season, and mamma doubtless will preserve
her traditions faithfully in this as if she
were still there.)
For the last two or three summers she
used to sit often behind her shutters, half
open, having given up a little from sheer
weakness all those tasks which had occu-
240 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
pied her for more than half a century.
We used to see her there quite close to us,
she bade us "good-day," with a smile
above her eternal mignonette flowers, at
the moment in which Leo and I left our
tasks, he his mathematical books, I the
sheets of paper on which I was striving to
fix the transient things which time carries
away. Both of us would lean out of the
window, amusing ourselves by looking
down on the passers-by, on the contem-
plative cats on the roofs, and the martins
whirling in the air.
I confess that I am attached to my
passers-by also, and the longer they are in
our neighborhood the deeper is my attach-
ment. I love not only those who now and
again lift their heads to give me the salute
of acquaintance, but also those who cast
upon me an ill-natured and foolish look,
nourishing some little secret grudge against
me. Though they do not know it, these
latter form a part of the surroundings of
AUNT CLAIRE LEAVES US. 241
my home, and, if needs were, I should
offer a bribe to Death to leave them a little
longer near me.
O
Now I look to where Aunt Claire had
her rooms, and I find that breeze melan-
choly which charmed me just a while ago.
I find suddenly the sun mournful and sad,
and this motionless serenity of the air fills
me with anguish. These half-opened
shutters from which I shall never, never
again see her cap of black lace and her
white locks of hair; this bud of mignon-
ette which is there all alone, showing me
innocently its pretty head no, I cannot
any longer look at these things, and I close
my window quickly that I may weep like
a little child.
Perhaps, mon Dieu, it is the last time
the sorrow for Aunt Claife will come to
me with this intensity and in the special
form that brings tears. For everything in
this world grows less acute; everything
242 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
becomes customary and is forgotten. For
a veil of mist, ashes, I know not what, is
thrown as though in haste and suddenly
across our memory of beings that have re-
turned into eternal nothingness.
THE SLAUGHTER OF AN OX
AT SEA.
THE SLAUGHTEK OF AN OX
AT SEA.
WE were in the midst of the Indian
Ocean on a sad evening in which the wind
is beginning to groan. Two poor oxen
remained to us of the twelve that we had
taken in at Singapore to eat on the way.
These had been spared because the voyage
was being prolonged owing to the contrary
winds of the monsoon.
Two poor oxen, wasted, thin, pitiable,
their hides already shabby and worn
through by the bones shaken by the rock-
ing of the vessel. For many days they had
sailed over this miserable sea their backs
turned to their old pasture lands far away,
where nobody would ever take them again ;
fastened tightly to each other by a rope
round their horns, and their heads lowered
245
246 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEA TH.
with resignation each time that a wave
came to inundate their bodies with a new
chilling bath. With mournful eyes they
chewed together some bad hay, wet with
the salt of the sea; animals condemned to
death, doomed from the beginning and
without hope of mercy, but destined to
suffer still for a long time before death ; to
suffer from the cold, the shock of the
vessel, from the constant wetting, from the
numbness, and from fear.
The evening of which I speak was
especially somber. At sea there are many
such evenings, when ugly -and livid fogs
spread themselves over the horizon, as the
light is fading, when the wind begins to
swell its voice, and the night announces
beforehand that it is going to be unsafe.
At such hours, feeling one's self isolated in
the midst of these infinite Avaters, one is
seized with a vague anguish which the
twilight never brings on land, even in the
most funereal places. And these two poor
oxen, children of the meadow and the
TEE SLA UGHTER OF AN OX AT SEA. 247
pasture, alone, more completely exiles than
we men, in these moving deserts, and un-
buoyed by hope as we are, must, in spite
of their rudimentary intelligence, suffer
after their fashion from the depression of
such scenes ; although they see only con-
fusedly the image of their approaching
death.
Yet with the slowness of the invalided,
their large and dim eyes remained fixed on
these sinister distances in the sea. One by
one their companions had been slaughtered
on these planks beside them. For two
weeks, then, they had lived together, drawn
toward each other by the solitude, sup-
porting each other in the rocking of the
vessel, and in their friendship rubbing their
horns together. And now the person who
is charged with the supply of provisions,
him whom on board vessels we call the
maitre-commis, came toward me on the
bridge to tell me, in the usual phrase,
"Captain, a cow is going to be killed."
The devil take him, say I, this maitre-
248 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
commis! I receive him very badly,
although assuredly he was not to blame;
but in truth I had had no luck from the
beginning of this voyage ; it was always
during my watch that the time came for
the slaughter of the oxen. Besides it takes
place immediately below the bridge on
which we walk, and it is useless to turn
away one's eyes, to think of other things,
to look abroad on the waters ; you cannot
avoid hearing the stroke of the ax between
the horns, and in the center of the poor
forehead, bound very low to a ring on the
deck. And then comes the noise of the
animal as he falls down on the deck, with
a rattling of his bones. Soon after he is
quickly cut to pieces. A horrible and
musty smell comes from his entrails when
they are opened, and, all around, the deck
of the vessel, ordinarily so clean, is soiled
by blood and unclean things.
And now it was the moment to slaughter
the ox. Some sailors formed a circle around
the- ring by which it was to be tied for ex^
THE SLA UGHTER OF AN OS AT SEA. 249
edition ; and of the two that remain they
take the more infirm, one who was already
dying, and who allowed itself to be carried
a\vay without resistance.
Then the other turned slowly its head to
follow it with melancholy eyes, and seeing
that they brought it toward the same fatal
spot where all its brothers had fallen, it
understood. A ray of light could be seen
in the poor depressed forehead of this
chewino- animal, and it uttered a low sound
O '
of distress. The cry of that ox was one of
the saddest sounds that ever made me groan,
and at the same time was one of the most
mysterious things that I had ever heard.
There was in it a dim reproach against all
men, and then a kind of resignation that
O
was deeply moving, something so restrained
and subdued, as though it felt how useless
was its groan of despair, and that its cry
would be heard by nobody. With the
consciousness of its universal abandonment,
it appeared to say, " Ah, yes, the inevitable
hour has come for him who was my last
250 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
brother, who came with me from la-bas,
from the country where we ran on the
grass and my turn will come soon, and
not another being in the world will have
pity on me any more than on him."
Ah ! yes, I did have pity on him ; I ex-
perienced a sense of pity, indeed, that was
almost quixotic, and an impulse came upon
me to go and take hold of his head and,
feeble and revolting though it was, to sup-
port it on my breast, since that is one of
the physical methods most natural to us
when we wish to soothe with the sense of
protection those who suffer or are about to
die.
But, in fact, it did not receive any help
from anybody, for even I, who had felt
the supreme distress of its cry, remained
stiff and impassive in my place, merely
turning away my eyes. Because an animal
is in despair one cannot change the direc-
tion of a ship and prevent three hundred
men from eating their rations of fresh
meat. A man who should even think of
THE SLA UGHTER OF AN OX AT SEA. 251
such a thing for a iniuute would pass for a
lunatic. .
Nevertheless a little cabin-boy, who per-
haps also was alone in the world and had
never found any pity, had heard the ap-
peal and so understood it in the depths of
his soul as I had. He approached the ox
quite gently, and softly and gently began
to rub its nose. If he had only thought he
might have been able to predict to him
thus : " All these will die also these who
are going to eat you to-morrow ; all, even
the strongest and the youngest, and per-
haps jthe terrible hour will be still more
cruel for them than for you, with suffering
more prolonged. Perhaps then they
would prefer the stroke of the ax right in
the midst of their foreheads." The animal
returned to him his caress, looking at him
with affectionate eyes, and licking his
hands. But it was all over. The ray of
light which had penetrated his low and
narrow forehead went out in the sinister
immensity in which the ship carried him,
252 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
always faster, in the cold fog, in the twi-
light announcing the bad nighl ; by the
body of his companion, who was now noth-
ing but a shapeless mass of meat hung on
hooks, he began once more to chew quietly
did this poor ox. His brief intelligence
did not go further ; he thought of nothing ;
he no longer remembered anything.
THE IDYL OF AN OLD
COUPLE.
THE IDYL OF AN OLD
COUPLE.
and Kaka-San were husband
and wife. They were old so old ; every-
body had always known them ; the oldest
people in Nagasaki did not even remember
the time when they had seen them young.
They begged in the streets. Toto-San,
who was blind, dragged after him in a sort
of small bath-chair Kaka-San, who was
paralyzed. Formerly they were known as
Hato-San and Ounie-San (Monsieur Pigeon
and Madame Prune), but the people no
longer remembered this. In the Japanese
language Toto and Kata are very soft words
which signify " father" and " mother " in
the mouths of children. Doubtless because
of their great age, everybody called them
so ; and in this land of excessive politeness
255
256 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
they added to these familiar names the word
" San," which is a word of courtesy like
monsieur and madame (Monsieur Papa and
Madame Mamari). Even the smallest of
Japanese babies do not neglect these terms
of politeness. Their method of begging
was discreet and comme ilfavt. They did
not harass the passers-by with prayers, but
held out their hands simply and without
saying anything poor hands wrinkled and
already like those of a mummy. The peo-
ple gave them rice, heads of fish, old soups.
Very small, like all Japanese women, Kaka-
San appeared reduced almost to nothing in
this chair, in which her lower limbs, almost
dead, had been dried up and huddled to-
gether for so many years. Her carriage
was badly hung ; and thus it came to be
much jolted in the course of its journeys
through the city. He did not walk very
quickly, her poor husband, and he was so
full of care and precaution. She guided
him with her voice, and he, attentive, his
ear pricked up, went on his way, like the
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 257
wafideTiner Jew, in his everlasting darkness,
O ' O /
the leather rein thrown over his shoulder and
striking the ground with a bamboo cane to
direct his steps.
They went to all the religious festivals
celebrated in the temples. Under the
great black cedars, which shade the sacred
meadows, at the foot of some old monster
in granite, they installed themselves at an
early hour before the arrival of the earliest
devotees, and so long as the pilgrimage
lasted, many of the passers-by stopped at
their side. They were young girls with the
faces of dolls, and little eyes like cats,
dragging after them their high boots of
wood ; Japanese children, veiy funny in
their long parti-colored dresses, arriving in
bands to pay their devotions and holding
each other by their hands ; beautiful sim-
pering ladies, with complicated chignons
going to the pagoda to pray and to laugh ;
peasants with long hair, Bonzes or mer-
chants, every imaginable description of these
gay little doll-people passed before Kaka-
258 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
San, who still was able to see them, and
Toto-San, who was not. They always gave
them a kind look, and sometimes somebody
would detach himself from a group to give
them some alms.* Sometimes even they
made them bows, quite as if they were peo-
ple of quality so well were they known,
and so polite is everybody in this Empire.
In those days it often happened that
they could smile at the feast when the
weather was fine and the breeze soft, when
the sorrows of old age slumbered a little in
their exhausted limbs. Kaka-San, excited
by the tumult of the laughing and light
voices, began to simper like the passing
ladies, playing with her poor fan of paper,
assuming the air of one who still had
something to say to life, and who inter-
ested herself like other people in the
amusing things of this world.
But when evening came, bringing dark-
ness and chill under the cedars, when
there was everywhere a sense of religious
horror and mystery around the temples, in
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 259
the alleys lined with monsters, the old
couple sank back on themselves. It
seemed as if the fatigues of the day had
gnawed them from within ; their wrinkles
became deeper, their skin hung more
loosely ; their faces expressed only their
frightful misery and the hideous idea of
the nearness of death.
Meantime, thousands of lamps were lit
around them in the black branches ; and
the devout held their places on the steps
of the temples. The hum of a gayety, at
once frivolous and strange, came from this
cTo\vd, filled the avenues and the holy
vaults, in sharp contrast with the sinister
grin of the immobile monsters who guard
the gods with the frightful and unknown
symbols with the vague terrors of the
night. The feast was prolonged till day-
light, and seemed an immense irony to the
spirits of heaven rather then an act of
adoration ; but an irony that had no
bitterness, that was child-like, amiable,
and, above all things, irresistibly joyous.
260 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
But this affected not the old couple.
With the setting of the sun there was
nothing which could animate any longer
those human wrecks. They became sin-
ister to look at; huddled up, apart from
everybody else, like sick pariahs or old
monkeys, worn out and done for, eating
in a corner their poor little alms-offerings.
At this moment were they disturbed by
something profound and eternal, else why
was there this expression of anguish on
their death-masks ? . Who knows what
passed in their old Japanese heads ? Per-
haps nothing at all. They struggled simply
to keep on living ; they ate with their
little chop-sticks, helping each other ten-
derly. They covered each other up so as
not to get cold and to keep the dew from
penetrating to their bones. They took
care of each other as much as they could
with the simple desire of being alive the
next day, and of recommencing their old
wandering promenade, the one rolling the
other's chair, In the little chair Kaka-San
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLK. 261
kept all their household effects, broken
dishes of blue porcelain for their rice, little
cups to drink their tea, and lanterns of red
paper which they lit at night.
Once eveiy week, Kaka-San's hair was
carefully combed and dressed by her
beloved husband. Her arras she could
not quite raise high enough to fix her
Japanese chignon, and Toto-San had
learned to do it instead. Trembling and
fumbling, he caressed the poor old head,
which allowed itself to be stroked with
coquettish abandon, and the whole thing
recalled except that it was sadder the
toilette which the humbugs help each
other to make. Her hair was thin ; and
Toto-San did not find much to comb on
her poor yellow parchment, wrinkled like
the skin of an apple in winter. He suc-
ceeded, however, in fixing up her hair in
puffs, after the Japanese fashion : and she,
deeply interested in the operation, fol-
lowed it with her eyes in a broken piece
of a mirror, with : " A little higher, Toto-
262 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
San ! " "A little more to the right ! " " A
little to the left." In the end, when he
had stuck two long pins in, which gave to
the coiffure its finishing touch, Kaka-San
seemed to regain the air of a genteel grand-
mother, a profile like that of a well-bred
woman.
They also went through their ablutions
conscientiously: for they are very clean in
Japan.
And when they had finished these ablu-
tions once more, which had been done so
often already during so many years ; when
they had completed that toilette, which
the approach of death rendered less grate-
ful from day to day did they feel them-
selves vivified by the pure and cold water ?
did they experience a little more comfort
in the freshness of the morning ?
Ah ! what a depth of wretchedness was
theirs ! After each night, to wake up
both more infirm, more depressed, more
shaky, and in spite of it all, to wish obstin-
ately to live op., to display their decrepi-
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 263
tilde to the sun, and to set out in the same
eternal promenade in their bath-chair; with
the same long pauses, the same creaks of
the wood, the same joltings, the same
fatigue ; to pass even through the streets,
into the suburbs, through the valleys, even
to the distant country where a festival was
announced in some temple in the Avoods.
It was in the fields one morning, at the
crossing of two of the Royal roads, that
death suddenly caught old Kaka-San.
It was a beautiful morning in April ; the
sun was shining brightly, and the grass
was very green. In the island of Kin-Sin
the spring is a little warmer than ours,
comes earlier, and already everything was
resplendent in the fertile fields. The two
roads crossed each other in the midst of
the fields ; all around was the rice-crop
glistening under the light breeze in innum-
erable chaages of color. The air was filled
with the music of the grasshoppers, which
in Japan are loud in their buzz. At this
spot there were about ten tombs in the
264 Tim BOOK OF PITY AND OF DEATH.
grass, under a bunch of large and isolated
cedars. Square stone pillars, or ancient
Budhas, in granite, were set up in the cups
of the lotus. Beyond the fields of rice,
you saw the woods, riot imlike our wood
of oak. But here and there were white
or rose-colored clumps, which were the
camelias in flower, and the light foliage of
the bamboos. Then farther off were the
mountains, resembling small domes with
little cupolas, forming against the sky
shapes that seemed artificial, yet very
agreeable.
It was in the midst of this region of
calm and verdure that the chair of Kaka-
San stopped, and for a halt that was to be
its last. Peasants, men and women, dressed
in their long dresses of dark blue cotton
with pagoda sleeves about twenty good
little Japanese souls hurried to the bath-
chair where the old dying woman was
convulsively twisting her old arms. She
had had a stroke quite suddenly while
being drawn along by Toto-San on a
; THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 265
pilgrimage to the temple of the goddess
Kwauon.
They, good souls, did their best, at-
tracted by sympathy as much as by curios-
ity, to help the old woman. They were
for the most part people who, like her,
were making their way to the feast of
of Kwanon, the Goddess of Beauty. Poor
Kaka-San ! They attempted to restore her
with a cordial made of rice brandy ; they
rubbed the pit of her stomach with aro-
matic herbs, and bathed the back of her
neck with the fresh water of a stream.
Toto-San touched her quite gently, caressed
her timidly, not knowing what to do, em-
barrassing the others with his awkward
blind movements, and trembling with
anguish in all his limbs.
Finally, they made her swallow, in
small pellets, pieces of paper which con-
tained efficacious prayers written on them
by the Bonzes, and which a helpful woman
had consented to take from the lining in
her own sleeves. Labor in vain ! for the
2C6 THE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
hour had struck. Death was there, invisi-
ble, laughing in the face of all these good
Japanese, and holding the old woman
tight in his secure hands.
A last painful convulsion and Kaka-San
was dead. Her mouth lay open, her body
all on one side, half fallen out of the chair,
and her arms hanging like the doll of a
poor Punch and Judy show, which is al-
lowed to rest at the close of the perform-
ance.
This little shaded cemetery, before which
the final scene had taken place, seemed to
be indicated by the Spirits themselves, and
even to have been chosen by the dead
woman herself. They made no delay.
They hired some coolies who were passing,
and very quickly they began to dig out the
earth. Everybody was in a hurry, not
wishing to miss the pilgrimage nor to leave
this poor old thing without burial the
more so as the day promised to be very hot,
and already some ugly flies were gathering
round. In half an hour the grave was
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 26 1
ready. They took the old woman from
her chair, lifting her by the shoulders, and
placed her in the earth, seated as she had
always been, her lower limbs huddled to-
gether as they had been in life like one
of those dried-up monkeys which sports-
men meet sometimes at the foot of trees in
the forest. Toto-San tried to do everything
himself, no longer in his right senses, and
hindering the coolies, who have not sensi-
tive hearts, and who hustled him about.
He groaned like a little child, and tears ran
from his eyes without exciting any atten-
tion. He tried to find out if at least her
hair was properly combed to present her-
self in the eternal dwellings, if the bows of
her hair were in order, and he wished to
replace the large pins in her head-dress be-
fore they threw 'the earth over her.
They heard a slight groaning in the
foliage; it was the spirits of Kaka-San's
ancestors who had come to receive her on
her entrance into the Country of Shadows.
268 TEE BOOK OF PITT AND OF DEATH.
Toto-San yoked himself to the bath-chair
once more ; once more started out, from the
sheer habit of walking and of dragging
something after him. But the bath-chair
was empty behind him. Separated from
her who had been his friend, adviser, his in-
telligence and his eyes, he went about with-
out thought, a mournful wreck, irrevocably
alone on earth to the very end, no longer
capable of collecting his thoughts, moving
timidly without object and without hope,
in night blacker than ever before. In the
meantime the grasshoppers sang at their
shrillest in the grass, which darkened
under the stars ; and whilst real night
gathered around the old blind man, one
heard already in the branches the same
groanings as earlier while the burial was
taking place. They were the murmurs of
the Spirits who "said : " Console thyself,
Toto-San. She-orate in a very sweet sort of
annihilation where we also are and whither
thou com'st soon. She is no longer old nor
tottering, for she is dead ; nor ugly to look
THE IDYL OF AN OLD COUPLE. 269
upon, since she is hidden in the roots
underground; nor disgusting to anybody,
since she has become the fertilizing sub-
stance of the land. Her body will be puri-
fied, permeating the earth ; Kaka-San will
live again in beautiful Japanese plants ; in
the branches of the cedar, in the beautiful
camelias in the bamboo."
EKD.
FEB221995
OCT 2 2QQ1
A 000129799 3
Unive
So
L