"Ah!" Jacques smiled.
"My friends, " Quinsonnas resumed, "there is still one great unknown artist who alone epitomized the genius of all music. This piece dates from 1947, and it is the last sigh of expiring art. "
"And it's by... ?" Michel asked.
"It's by your father, who was my beloved master. "
"My father!" the young man exclaimed, nearly in tears.
"Yes. Listen. " And Quinsonnas, reproducing melodies which Beethoven or Weber would have been proud to sign, rose to the sublime heights of interpretation.
"My father!" Michel repeated.
"Yes!" Quinsonnas replied, closing his piano with contained fury. "After him, nothing! Who would understand his music now? Enough, my sons—enough of this return to the past! Let us remember the present, our present, when industrialism has come into its own, its empire, its triumph!" And with these words he touched the instrument, whereupon the keyboard folded up and in its place revealed a bed entirely made up, with a well-stocked night table attached to one side. "Now this, " he said, "is what our epoch was worthy of inventing! A piano-bed-dresser-commode!"
"And night table as well, " Jacques added.
"Just as you say, my dear fellow. That puts the lid on it!"
Chapter IX: A Visit to Uncle Huguenin
Since that memorable evening, the three young men had become close friends; they constituted a little world of their own in the vast capital of France.
Michel spent his days on the Ledger, apparently resigned to his work, though his happiness was spoiled by not having time to visit Uncle Huguenin, with whom he would have felt in the bosom of a veritable family, having his uncle for father and his two friends for elder brothers. He wrote frequently to the old librarian, who replied almost as often.
Four months passed in this fashion; Michel evidently gave satisfaction in the offices; his cousin treated him a little less scornfully; Quinsonnas praised him to the skies. The young man had apparently found his way—he was born to dictate.
Winter passed, stoves and gas heaters mustered to combat it with success. And spring arrived. Michel obtained a whole day's freedom, a Sunday, and resolved to spend it with Uncle Huguenin. At eight in the morning he gaily left the bank building, delighted to breathe more oxygen away from the central business district. The weather was splendid. April was awakening and preparing its new flowers, with which the florists waged advantageous combat; Michel felt very much alive.
His uncle lived far away, having had to transport his Penates where it did not cost too much to shelter them. Young Dufrénoy proceeded to the Madeleine station, took his ticket, and hoisted himself onto an upper-level seat; the signal for departure sounded, and the train moved up the Boulevard Malesherbes, soon leaving on its right the heavily ornamented church of Saint-Augustin and on its left the Parc Monceau, surrounded by splendid edifices; it crossed the two Metropolitan rings and stopped at the Porte d'Asniéres station, near the old fortifications. The first part of the journey was over: Michel leaped down and followed the Rue d'Asniéres as far as the Rue de la Révolte, turned left, passing under the Versailles Railway, and finally reached the corner of the Rue du Caillou. Here stood an apartment house of modest appearance, high and densely inhabited; he asked the concierge for Monsieur Huguenin.
"Ninth floor, first door to your right, " responded this important personage, a government employee directly appointed to this confidential position. Michel thanked him, took his place in the elevator, and in a few seconds was standing on the ninth-floor landing. He rang. Monsieur Huguenin himself came to the door.
"Uncle!" exclaimed Michel.
"My dear boy!" the old man replied, throwing wide his arms. "Here you are at last. "
"Yes, Uncle, and my first free day is for you!"
"Thank you, my boy, " replied Monsieur Huguenin, leading the young man into his apartment. "What a pleasure to see you! But sit down, let me have your hat, make yourself comfortable—you'll stay awhile, won't you?"
"All day, Uncle, if it's no trouble for you. "
"Trouble! My dear boy, I've been waiting for you all this time!"
"Waiting! But I really haven't had time to let you know in advance—I'd have got here before my letter. "
"I expected you each Sunday, Michel, and your place has always been set at the table, as it is now. "
"Can this be possible?"
"I knew perfectly well you'd be coming to see your uncle one day or another. Till now, it's always been another. "
"I wasn't free, Uncle. "
"I know you weren't, my boy, and I'm not in the least put out about that; far from it. "
"How happy you must be, living here, " said Michel, glancing enviously around him.
"You're looking at these old friends of mine, my books! All in good time, but let's begin with some lunch; we'll talk about all this later, though I promised myself I wouldn't discuss literature with you. "
"Oh, Uncle, please!" Michel pleaded.
"We'll see! There are other things to discuss! Tell me what you're doing, how you're getting on in that bank! Are your ideas... ?"
"Still the same, Uncle. "
"The devil you say! Let's sit down, then! But it seems to me you haven't yet given me a hug. "
"Not yet, Uncle, not yet!"
"Now let's begin all over again, Nephew! It can't do me any harm, I haven't eaten yet; in fact, it will give me an appetite. "
Michel embraced his uncle with all his heart, and the two took their places at the table. Yet the young man kept staring around him, for there was every reason to appeal to his poet's curiosity. The little salon which, along with a bedroom, formed the whole apartment was lined with books; the walls were quite invisible behind the shelves; old bindings attracted Michel's gaze, their warm colors embrowned by time. And books had even invaded the next room, ranked over doors and inside the window bays; there were books on all the furniture, around the fireplace, even on the floors of the gaping cupboards; these precious volumes bore little resemblance to the opulent but useless libraries of the rich; they seemed instead to be at home, masters of the place, and quite at ease, though often in towering piles; moreover, there was not a speck of dust anywhere, not a corner of a page was turned down, no stain marred the fine covers; it was apparent that a friendly hand had prepared their ablutions each morning.
Two old armchairs and a table dating back to the days of the Empire with gilded sphinxes and Roman fasces constituted the salon's furnishings.
Though the room enjoyed a southern exposure, a courtyard's high walls kept the sun from penetrating very far—only once a year, at the summer solstice on June 21, if the weather was fine, the highest sunbeam brushed the neighboring roof and slid through the window, coming to rest like a bird on the corner of a shelf or the back of a book, shimmered there a moment, its luminous projection tingeing the tiny atoms of dust; then, after a moment, it resumed its flight and vanished until the following year.
Uncle Huguenin knew this shelf, always the same one, quite well; he watched it, heart pounding, with an astronomer's attention; he bathed in its beneficent light, set his old clock according to its passage, and thanked the sun for not having forgotten him. This was his own version of the Palais-Royal cannon, except that it went off only once a year, and not always then! Uncle Huguenin did not forget to invite Michel to make a solemn visit on June 21, and Michel promised to be there for the celebration.
Lunch was on the table, modest but enthusiastically served. "This is my gala day, " the uncle remarked, "today is my treat. By the way, do you know with whom you're dining this evening?"
"No, Uncle. "
"With your old Professor Richelot and his granddaughter, Mademoiselle Lucy. "
"My word, Uncle! What a pleasure it will be for me to see that good man. "
"And Mademoiselle Lucy?"
"I don't know her. "
"Well, Nephew, you'll make her acquaintance, and I can tell you she's a charming creature, and no mistake! So there's no
need to tell her as much, " Uncle Huguenin added with a laugh.
"I'll be careful not to."
"After dinner, if you like, the four of us can go for a stroll. "
"Just what I'd like, Uncle! That way, our day will be complete!"
"You're not eating any more, Michel. Won't you have something more to drink?"
"Certainly, Uncle, " replied Michel, who was feeling full. "To your health. "
"And to your next visit, my boy; for when you leave here, it still seems like a long journey to me! Now tell me something about yourself—how is life treating you these days? You see, this is the moment for confidences. "
"I'm glad it is, Uncle. "
Michel described at some length all the details of his existence, his problems, his poor performance with regard to the calculating machine, without omitting the episode of the self-defending safe, and finally the better days spent on the heights of the Ledger. "It was up there that I met my first friend. "
"Ah, you have friends, " Uncle Huguenin remarked with a frown.
"I have two. "
"That's a good many, if they deceive you, " the old fellow remarked sententiously, "and enough, if they love you. "
"Oh, Uncle, " Michel exclaimed with animation. "They're artists!"
"Yes, " Uncle Huguenin replied, tossing his head, "that's a guarantee of a sort: the statistics of prisons and reformatories include priests, lawyers, brokers, and bankers, and not a single artist! But—"
"You'll meet them, Uncle, and you'll see what splendid fellows they are!"
"I look forward to it, " Uncle Huguenin answered. "I love youth, provided it's young! These premature old men of ours have always struck me as hypocrites. "
"Oh, I can answer for these two. "
"Then judging from your associations, Michel, I should guess your ideas haven't changed?"
"Quite the contrary, Uncle. "
"You've become a hardened sinner!"
"Yes, Uncle, I have. "
"All right then, wretch, confess your latest trespasses. "
"Gladly, Uncle!" And in an enthusiastic tone the young man recited some fine verses of his own composition, carefully thought out, nicely spoken, and filled with a true spirit of poetry.
"Bravo!" exclaimed Uncle Huguenin, transported. "Bravo, my boy! So such things are still being written. You speak the language of the good old days! O my boy,
how much pleasure you give me, along with how much pain!" The old man and the young one remained silent for a few moments. "Enough of that!" said Uncle Huguenin. "Let's clear this table, which is getting in our way!" Michel helped the old man, and the dining room swiftly became a library once more.
"Now, Uncle?" inquired Michel.
Chapter X Grand Review of French Authors Conducted by Uncle Huguenin, Sunday, April 15, 1961
"This will be our dessert, " said Uncle Huguenin, gesturing toward the crowded shelves.
"It gives me an appetite all over again, " Michel replied. "Let's dig in. "
Uncle and nephew, each as young as the other, began rummaging among the shelves, in twenty places at once, though Monsieur Huguenin lost no time in restoring some order to this pillage.
"Come over here, " he said to Michel, "and let's begin at the beginning; we're not going to read today, we'll just look and talk. This is a review, rather than a battle. Think of yourself as Napoleon in the Tuileries courtyard, and not on the field of Austerlitz. Put your hands behind your back. We're going to pass through the ranks. "
"I'm following you, Uncle. "
"My boy, remember that the finest army in the world is about to parade before your eyes; there is no other nation which can offer such a sight, and which has won such brilliant victories over barbarism. "
"The Grand Army of Letters. "
"There on that first shelf, uniformed in their fine morocco bindings, stand our old sixteenth-century veterans, Amyot[30], Ronsard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Mathurin Régnier[31]; they're staunch at their positions, and you can still detect their original influence in the fine French language they established. But it must be admitted that they fought harder for ideas than for form. Here's a general close by who fought with great valor, though he mainly perfected the weapons of his day. "
"Malherbe!"
"Himself. As he says somewhere, the picklocks of Port-au-Foin were his masters; he gleaned their metaphors, their eminently Gallic expressions, he cleaned them, polished them, and out of them made that splendid language spoken so handsomely in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. "
"Ah!" said Michel, pointing to a single volume proudly and simply bound, "now there's a great captain. "
"Yes, my boy, like Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon: indeed Bonaparte would have made Corneille a prince!
The old warrior has astonishingly multiplied, for his classical editions are countless; this is the fifty-first and last of his complete works, dating from 1873; since then, Corneille has never been reprinted. "
"You must have gone to a great deal of trouble, Uncle, to have obtained all these works!"
"On the contrary—everyone was getting rid of them! Look, here's the forty-ninth edition of the complete works of Racine, the hundred fiftieth of Moliére, the fortieth of Pascal, the two hundred third of La Fontaine, the last actually, and they date from over a hundred years ago and already constitute the delight of bibliophiles! These geniuses have served their time, and now they're relegated to the rank of archaeological specimens. "
"And in fact, " replied the young man, "they speak a language no longer understood in this day and age. "
"That's quite true, my boy! The fine French tongue has been lost; the language illustrious foreigners like Leibniz, Frederick the Great, Ancillon[32], Humboldt, and Heine chose as the interpreter of their ideas—that wonderful language Goethe regretted never having written, that elegant idiom which nearly became Greek or Latin in the fifteenth century, Italian with Catherine de Médicis, and Gascon under Henri IV—is now a horrible argot. Each specialist, forgetting that a language is finer in its action than in its accumulation, has created his own word to name his own thing. Botanists, natural historians, physicists, chemists, mathematicians have coined dreadful hybrids, inventors have ransacked the English vocabulary for their most disagreeable appellations; horse traders for their horses, jockeys for their races, carriage dealers for their vehicles, philosophers for their philosophy—all of them have found the French language too poor and have resorted to foreigners! Well, let them! Let them forget all about it! French is even lovelier in its poverty and hasn't tried to grow rich by prostituting herself! Our own language, my boy, the language of Malherbe, and Moliére, of Bossuet and Voltaire, of Nodier[33] and Victor Hugo, is a well-brought-up young lady, and you need have no fear when you fall in love with her, for the barbarians of the twentieth century have failed to turn her into a courtesan!"
"How eloquent you are, Uncle—now I understand the delightful mania of old Professor Richelot, whose scorn for modern slang made him speak nothing but a sort of Frenchified Latin! People make fun of him, but he's quite right.... All the same, Uncle, hasn't French become the language of diplomacy?"
"Yes! as a punishment! At the Congress of Nijmegen in 1678! Its virtues of directness and clarity caused it to be chosen by diplomacy, which is the science of duplicity, of equivocation and of mendacity, so that our honest language has gradually been diluted and lost! You'll see—people will have to change it someday. "
"Poor French!" Michel sighed. "I see Bossuet over there, and Fénelon, and Saint-Simon, who wouldn't recognize it now!"
"Yes, their child has turned out poorly! That's what comes of frequenting scientists, industrialists, diplomats, and other bad company. Dissipation! Debauchery! A 1960 dictionary that wants to include all terms in use is twice the size of an 1800 dictionary! As for what is to be found there, I leave that to your imagination. But let's return to our review—soldiers shouldn't be kept under arms too long. "
"I see a long row of
fine volumes over there. "
"Fine and sometimes good, " Uncle Huguenin answered. "That's the four hundred twenty-eighth edition of the individual works of Voltaire: a universal mind, second in every genre, according to Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme. In 1978, according to Stendhal, Voltaire will be Voiture[34], and the dimwits will be making him their god. Fortunately Stendhal put too much faith in the future. Dimwits? There are no wits at all nowadays, and Voltaire is worshiped no more than any other... god. To continue our metaphor, Voltaire, as
I see him, was only an armchair general! He gave battle orders in his study, and didn't really see how the land lay. His wit, actually not so dangerous a weapon, occasionally misfired, and the people he killed often outlived him."
"But, Uncle, wasn't he a great writer?"
"Certainly, Nephew—he was the French language incarnate, and wielded it with elegance and spirit—the way those regimental instructors used to aim at the wall during fencing instruction: when it came to actual duels, the first clumsy conscript who lunged past his guard managed to kill the fencing master. In short— and this is really surprising for a man who wrote French so well—Voltaire was not really a brave man. "
"I guess not, " said Michel.
"Let's move on to others, " said Uncle Huguenin, heading for a dark and severe line of soldiers.
"There are your authors of the late eighteenth century, " the young man observed.
"Yes, Rousseau, who said the finest things about the Gospels, just as Robespierre wrote the most remarkable things about the immortality of the soul! A veritable General of the Republic, Jean-Jacques[35], in sabots, without epaulets or gold-embroidered uniforms! Which didn't keep him from winning some proud victories! Look, there's Beaumarchais next to him, an avant-garde sniper judiciously engaged in that great battle of '89, which civilization won over barbarism! Unfortunately, that victory has been somewhat abused subsequently, and the devil of Progress has brought us where we are today. "