The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  VIII

  Ah! That faith, that exaltation of pride, so lyrically expressed, later, by Blaise Yvernaux, how far away they were from it, forty years before, when the sad reckoning was made of the first battle fought against Paris and so completely lost! Only Aunt Aline was not disappointed, doubtless not understanding very well, the poor ignorant woman—in the estimation of Thibaud, and even Blaise—the total lack of success. But the two superb peacocks, who had set off displaying their tails in a fan flourishing with all their illusions—what lamentable, pitiful jackdaws they were when stripped of their hopes, with their self-confidence in tatters!23

  In the beginning, things had gone well for some time, in spite of the bad omens that marked their debut. The tutorship having ended abruptly in a dismissal due to their exasperated and exasperating vanity, they had put a fury of stubborn self-respect in refusing an apology, if not to Pyckelsberghe, at least to the newly-appointed director of Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, who had no reason to cherish and protect those “favorites” of the old regime. Abbé Dujars, also having changed residence, was no longer there either to intervene on behalf of the disciple who had done him honor. Egged on by Yvernaux, and even, mutedly, by Aunt Aline, Thibaud had argued with his elder brother, who had advised him to submit and solicit his reintegration into the seminary. That had led to his falling out with Denis. In spite of everything, the two escapees were not without resources for throwing themselves into the water, and that is why they had, in the beginning, been relatively cheerful.

  To begin with, the matter of his inheritance having been settled, Thibaud had 12,000 francs to come, to which was added about 2000 francs saved from the salaries of their tutorship, which they had pooled. Basic but inexpensive accommodation organized by Aunt Aline permitted them to live without too much anxiety, while working on the preparation of their prodigious future, before which they had to pass their examinations—for they had wisely resolved to “go through the necessary channels” to reach the desired honors. That was according to the formal desire of Thibaud, who was only half Thiérachian—and “not a Gasguin for nothing,” as Aunt Aline observed. And Yvernaux had conceded—a trifle regretfully, being more of a fantastic, but congratulating himself almost immediately, since their two baccalaureates had been obtained with ease, Blaise’s in letters and Thibaud’s in sciences and both with white balls, the expenses of the examination reimbursed.

  Nevertheless, disillusionment had set in as soon the preparation for the bachot had been replaced by that for entrance to the great Écoles, Normale or Polytechnique. Latinarum elegantiarum magister as he had been at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, Yvernaux was incapable of competing victoriously with the candidates aimed at the Rue d’Ulm by the Lycées de Louis-le-Grand and Charlemagne, strengthened by the expertise of their ancient institutions. And Abbé Dujars had scarcely guided his “prodigy disciple” Gasguin—a prodigy primarily from the viewpoint of the seminary, where the Jardin des racines grecques24 was cultivated rather than the less flowery one of square roots—to the threshold of “special mathematics.” The result was that the local Pico della Mirandola now found himself an average pupil of “elementary mathematics” and no more—which is to say, in need of at least two years’ “swotting” to be able to compete with the “solid candidates,” accomplished veterans aspiring to the honor of choosing between the “leather crown” of Normalian sciences and the “tangent” of the Poly.

  Each of them having failed twice to obtain privileged entrance, it was necessary to renounce the vanity of being there, and fall back on the humble and not very comfortable diploma, which only requires a patient labor of assimilation, and which thus offers near-certain admission, albeit without the conceit of competition, and to resign themselves to marking time, shining “gregariously,” as Yvernaux put it.

  They had, indeed, marked time, the overly brilliant Yvernaux for longer than Gasguin of the solid bovine effort. The latter at his first attempt and the former only at his third—because of his intemperate lyricism and frightening the Sorbonnards, he said—had got their hands on the donkey-skin that permits beating the retreat from special lessons at to enlist in the famished regiment of liberal education.

  In the meantime, their war-chest was exhausted, in spite of the savant parsimony of Aunt Aline in eking out their provisions. Merely the expenses of enrollments, books to be bought, and clothes to be bought, in order to be properly presentable on the premises of private tutors, along with a few follies and petty fantasies risked by Yvernaux, had quickly put an end to the 12,000 francs. By the third year of their sojourn in Paris the dolorous farce had been played out, and the mad ambitions were vanishing into thin air—fizzling out, Blaise said, trying to meet ill-luck with a brave heart.

  But both of them did, indeed, have stout hearts, and it was then that the fundamentally-modest Thibaud had had the cruel remembrance of his humanities, and of the jackdaw ornamented with a peacock’s plumage. Upon which, brave and tenacious, braced rather than depressed by the bitterness of his disappointment, and revealing himself more Thiérachian—which is to say cautious—than ever, he had said to Yvernaux: “Since the University doesn’t want me through its main door, I’ll get in by the back one, but I will get in.”

  And he had applied for a way-station, a position as a teacher of general science at a wretched college in a distant province, where he might, by force of solitary and harshly assiduous “slogging,” prepare for the second diploma—that of physics after that of mathematics—and later for his doctorate. Still encouraged by Aunt Aline—who had mumbled a furtive and heartening “To Gasguins, patience brings profit”—he did not despair.

  They had not even discussed—neither him not Aunt Aline—the cruel choice that had been made for them of a wild and remote corner in Basse-Bretagne, of a town of which they had not even known the name a week before.

  Yvernaux had tried to put them off in advance, but in vain. They had, moreover, separated from him a trifle coldly, without too many regrets, especially on Aunt Aline’s part. She had always judged him rather scatterbrained, but for some time, she thought, he had gone too far. Certainly, he had had his usefulness, when needed, with regard to Gasguin, and perhaps he would again someday. For the time being, however, he risked becoming harmful to him with his ideas of taking things in his stride, saying a great deal but doing nothing, with his vanity of thinking no end of himself without knowing whether there was anything to be admired, with his spendthrift tendencies in general and, most of all, with his new inclination, already very marked, to feel more often than was reasonable that his “tongue was dried by the salt of too much talk” and his “throat was in need of washing.”

  It is certain that, about this time, Yvernaux took certain side-roads that risked leading him where Aunt Aline would have been scared to see Gasguin go, and where Gasguin himself would have been horrified to set foot. Sometimes a junior teacher in “bachot ovens” of equivocal reputation, sometimes a tutor of young foreigners procured for him by shady agencies, one day a plagiarist in the service of some bankrupt Encyclopedia, the next secretary to a defrocked monk exploiting a sort of Buddhism for mature ladies, Blaise Yvernaux, the ex-angel of the school at Notre-Dame-de-Liesse became bogged down in Bohemia, rolling from one low dive to the next, and heading straight for a renown in the Latin Quarter that scarcely resembled the one formerly imagined for him by the good Jesuit Fathers, lovers of his intimate epistles parodying Horace’s centos.

  Undoubtedly, he clung to the pretension of soon passing his doctorate in letters, and also his doctorate in philosophy, but his habit of preparing for them by holding forth at tables over aperitifs and nocturnal drinking dens—without ever obtaining any advantage—was not to the liking of the bourgeois that Gasguin remained and always would remain or Aunt Aline, who had never been a Hescheboix in that regard.

  “All right! All right!” Yvernaux had declared, not without scorn. “Go to the provinces to recover the snail’s life for which you were born and brought up, and show me the
horns as you go. Me, I’ll stay in Paris, where glory awaits me. I have it already in the Quarter. Tomorrow, or the day after, I’ll have it on the great boulevards as well as on the Boul’Mich. And I’ll see you in thirty years, perhaps in twenty—or even before, who can tell?—when you’ll be my old Thibaud, a petty functionary of the University, sucking the sour milk of your approaching retirement from the meager breast of the Alma mater, while I...”

  For once, by an extraordinary exception, Aunt Aline had had no need for a half-strangled phrase be wrenched from her gums; she had interrupted of her own accord, aloud, no longer as a quasi-mute reluctant to speak but, on the contrary, almost as a chatterbox delighting in being loquacious.

  “Shut up, shut up, fake ferlampier!” she had screeched, forcefully. “If you ever become a doctor and falsifier”—that was how she pronounced philosopher—“you’ll be a doctor of stupidity and a falsifier of silly ditties. Unlike the son of Idalie Hecheboix, who will be someone and something, since she will flourish again in him—yes, yes, I tell you, me who is saying this, since I see it, I see it, I see it!”

  Never had she expressed herself at such length in one breath.

  Yvernaux had fled, thinking that she had gone mad, after cocking a snook at her as he ran away. And once outside, he really thought that he had left them forever. He did not hold anything against them—even Aunt Aline—retaining good and curious memories, among the sweetest and dearest in the depths of his heart, of Thibaud, his childhood friend. He had pitied him, saying to himself: Poor fellow! Perhaps he does have something in his noggin! If he’d continued living with me, it would have borne seed in the sunlight of my words!

  Aunt Aline sensed that thought from afar, telepathically. And, mutely—having fallen back into her habitual silence—while packing the meager trunks for the departure into exile, she ruminated as if by way of reply, less in articulate sentences than in troubled and ambiguous sibylline terms of which Thibaud understood nothing, although he grasped fragments in passing: the only distinct phrases amid obscure mutterings, like—as Yvernaux would have said if he had heard them—nuggets in a matrix of crumbling flint.

  “No, no, not by you, that seed...”

  “The other seed, the true, yes, a little...”

  “But first, the fine Breton sun...”

  “When Idalie’s blood has been filtered...”

  “In the sand, the sand, the sand...”

  “We’ll meet again, anyway, we’ll see...”

  “Almost an entire week and a half of years without seeing one another...”

  “We’ll meet again, I tell you: we’ll see one another...”

  Thibaud, who had long since given up paying any heed to her absurd outbursts of oracular gibberish—which were widely spaced in any case—had not been able to prevent himself, this time, as on certain past occasions, being impressed, shaken by the frisson of mystery. To defend himself against it, he had taken her firmly by the wrists and said: “Indeed! I think Yvernaux wasn’t entirely wrong just now, slamming the door in your face as on a madwoman, Aunt Aline! Your head’s a little upside-down today, eh? What’s that you’re muttering? Is there any rhyme or reason to it? What are you thinking about? Of whom?”

  Suddenly, she had calmed down, and had replied softly, in a childish voice “Nothing, nothing, my son. I wasn’t thinking about anything or anyone.”

  And a dialogue was established between them, abrupt on his part, vague in her mouth.

  “But what do you see, then, looking into God knows where, with a fixed and seemingly interior gaze? What do you see?”

  “Things, things.”

  “What things?”

  “The one that are out there.”

  “Where, out there?”

  “Out there and in me.”

  “Explain yourself better.”

  “I don’t see them anymore, now.”

  After which, with a slight foam at the corners of her lips, her face very pale, her eyes dull, the purse of her speech sealed over her gums and determined not to open again, Aunt Aline resumed packing the trunks. Absorbed by her meticulous work and concentrating all her voluntary self therein, she had become once again what she had always been, and what she would continue to be for the 25 years of their provincial existence, and what was, in sum, in the ordinary state of her nature, outside of her rare divinatory crises—which is to say, the worthy little woman, neat and mousy, in the black uniform, with the appearance and humor of a shiny scarab beetle, active, grim and silent.

  Thibaud, in spite of the kind of fit that he had just witnessed, found her once again to be as he defined her, so exactly, in the everyday routine: his housekeeping organ, no more. It would have required what he had never had—a strange delicacy of telepathic touch—to perceive that the pretended housekeeping organ, of vulgar utility, was also, and especially, an organ of magnetization, directing his entire life toward an unknown pole, which only that humble insect could detect.

  IX

  During his first ten years of provincial teaching, the story of Gasguin, flanked by Aunt Aline, was that of happy people who have no story. Their monotonous happiness had been woven on a weft without snags, but also devoid of embroideries, or nearly so. Very conscientiously, Aunt Aline had looked after Gasguin’s modest home, while he, also very conscientiously, had looked after his classes—which had not prevented him from preparing privately, still very conscientiously, for his second diploma, in physical sciences, and for his future but distant doctorate, henceforth the supreme goal of his university ambitions.

  They were both able to count the major events of those ten years, the rare embroideries embellishing the bleak desert of their day-to-day uniformity with bouquets of flowers, and they took pleasure in them, in fact, like misers adding up their treasure.

  First and foremost, there was a journey to Rennes, the seat of the academy to which Gasguin had gone to pass his famous diploma and from which he returned with a further diploma, which gave him three more than the principal of his colleague, a mere baccalaureate-holder. Now in possession of four parchments, the teacher of general sciences could hope for advancement, and he had obtained it, in spite of the malevolent envy of his superior. Distinguished by a scrupulous inspector, Gasguin had been promoted to a less miserable position—and that had given him and Aunt Aline their second notable joy.

  That change of residence, soon followed by another—the excellent and highly-qualified master rose quite quickly—caused them scant excitement, however. The pay was slightly better, it’s true, but one small town in Brittany is very similar to another, even if one is in Basse-Bretagne and the other in Haute-Bretagne, so Gasguin and Aunt Aline scarcely noticed any difference.

  Also, they never made any friends anywhere; the teacher never had any horizon other than his classes and the doctoral program to come, not amusing himself even in a few special lessons of which he had no need, thanks to Aunt Aline’s skillful economies. The augmentation of salary had permitted him to indulge himself in the only distractions he appreciated, since they consisted of the acquisition of books and journals, all instruments of labor—not to mention the actual instruments that gradually made up a small laboratory of sorts.

  And that too—more than anything else—had embellished and colored his grey existence, and that of Aunt Aline in parallel. When he rubbed his hands after some successful experiment in the vacant cupboard pompously designated as his “physics laboratory,” Aunt Alice was gladdened by seeing him content, and doubled that contentment with some remark such as: “You’ll get there, I tell you, you’ll get there”—unless she limited herself to clicking her tongue and imparting a: “Well! You’ve found the bird on its nest, then?” She had no idea at all what Gasguin had done or what had happened, or what bird and what nest were involved; his delighted expression was sufficient proof of how perfect their present collective felicity was, although made of so little.

  Another joy—very vivid, this one, and perhaps the richest ornament adding a protrusion
of silk and gold to the flat tapestry of their happiness—had been a complete reconciliation with the elder brother, Denis. After having been without news of him for nearly seven years, they had suddenly received a letter announcing that he was coming to visit Saint-Brieuc, with the express intention of making up with those he loved. And that, truly, had been a great celebration for all of them. To begin with, Denis had brought a genuine affection to the reconciliation, Then he had give them some important good news. Ordained as a priest, he had stopped off at Saint-Brieuc before leaving for the Channel Islands, where he was to spend a phase of his novitiate with the Jesuit Fathers established on an island between Herm and Sark. Thus, he too was prospering in his chosen path.

  What he did not say, being too sincerely modest to take any vanity therefrom, was how and why he had effected the conquest of this destiny, which had been temporarily refused to him. For, as you will remember, having become poor after his father’s death, Denis had been classed among the pupils destined to obscure priesthood in the minor clergy, no longer among the elect that the Company reserved for itself. And yet, by dint of gentle and smiling determination, Denis has overcome that obstacle. His very rare distinction, his real, natural and ever-increasing mental elegance, the flexibility of his character, and also the seriousness of his religious vocation, which had nothing crude or sad about it—quite the contrary!—had finally reckoned with the limitations imposed on the former director by the total ruin of the Gasguins. The new and more refined director, doing justice to Denis, had finally declared: “As a spiritual resource, no fortune is worth as much as the seductiveness of that young abbé.”

  Aunt Aline, of course, had not heard that pronouncement, and Abbé Denis was unaware of it himself—but Aunt Aline made an occult allusion to it even so, when she congratulated the elder brother on his success and said to him, more chattily than usual: “You owe it your mother, you know, Monsieur l’Abbé. It’s a renewal of her charm, and a second crop of her seductiveness.”