Potage Crécy
Artichauts
Gigot de Mouton
Purée de Pommes
Gâteau de Semoule
Compote de Pruneaux
All the same, one couldn’t spend one’s nights in the dread of meeting an ichthyosaurus or of being wakened out of a sound sleep by the volcano erupting. Hebdomeros would have preferred to put up with the opposite: to live in anxiety during the day but once night had come, once the bolt had been fastened, the curtains pulled and the doors locked, to be able to repose in safety and tranquility. He considered sleep as something very sacred and sweet, and he would not allow his calm to be disturbed by anyone or anything. He professed the same cult for the sons of sleep, dreams, which is why he had had carved on the foot of his bed a picture of Mercury oneiropomp, that is, the guide of dreams, for, as everyone knows, Mercury was entrusted by Jupiter not only with exercising the profession of psychopomp, that is, of guiding and leading the souls of the dead into the other world, but also that of guiding dreams into the sleep of the living. Over his bed, Hebdomeros had hung a very curious picture which had been painted by one of his friends, an artist of great talent who had unfortunately died very young. He was an intrepid swimmer and once, wishing to swim across a flooded river, he had been swept away by the current, and despite the efforts of those who had tried to rescue him, he was dragged away by the current and disappeared in the eddies. The picture he had painted showed Mercury as a shepherd holding a crook instead of the caduceus; he was driving a flock of dreams before him into the night of sleep. The picture was very well composed; for, in the distance, behind Mercury and his flock, a sunlit land could be seen: cities, harbors, men going about their business, peasants working their fields; life, in a word; while around Mercury and his strange flock all was darkness and solitude as though they had entered an immense tunnel. Still on account of dreams, Hebdomeros abstained from eating beans at the evening meal; he was in agreement on that score with Pythagoras, who claims that beans produce obscurity and confusion in dreams. Hebdomeros sincerely regretted the young painter’s death; he owned a photograph of him taken a few days before the rash attempt that was to cost him his life; this photograph showed the painter in full face, with a black beard that contrasted with the almost childish expression of his features. “It was his passion, that beard,” Hebdomeros used to say when his friends would ask him for details of the life of the young painter. “He loved something of the past, of that not too distant past we find in the portraits of our parents when they were young. All the same he used to shave, but to have his picture taken he had let his beard grow, as film actors sometimes do so as to appear more convincing in roles where that ornament of the virile visage is indispensable; but they are wrong, they are gravely mistaken, for a false beard is always more real on the screen than a real beard, just as a wooden and cardboard set is always more real than a natural setting. But try telling that to your film directors, avid for beautiful locations and picturesque views; they won’t know what you are talking about, alas!” And Hebdomeros fell silent, gazing thoughtfully at the tender arabesques in the oriental rug he had just bought. Sometimes, in the midst of his reveries, he would pass his hand across his forehead as though to push away sad thoughts and troublesome images, and raising his head, he would say: “Let’s speak about him again, let’s speak some more of that young artist, victim of his temerity. Certainly if he had been fully conscious of his own worth he would never have exposed his life that way, out of bravado, for an athletic stunt which others better trained and more resistant than he would have surely carried off; he would have worked quietly and prudently warded off dangers and risks. In the matter of perfumes, he cared only for eau de Lubin, sometimes for eau de Cologne as well; but he maintained that eau de Lubin, from certain points of view, is more evocative.” Just at the moment that Hebdomeros finished pronouncing these last words a cannon resounded in the harbor; at once a number of pigeons, frightened by the detonation, rushed past the window like a whirlwind; instinctively everyone reached for his watch thinking it was noon, but Hebdomeros stopped them with a wave of his hand: “No, my friends,” he said, “we have not yet reached the middle of our day; that cannon shot you just heard by no means signifies that the sun in space, that the hands on clocks and the shadows on sundials have attained that fatal point which, according to certain people, indicates the hour of phantoms far more interesting and singular than those that ordinarily appear at the stroke of midnight in abandoned cemeteries or beneath the wan light of a moon breaking through storm clouds, amid the solitary ruins of an accursed castle, phantoms which all of you, and myself as well, are familiar with for having always seen them from earliest childhood. The cannon shot you have just heard, my friends, merely announced the arrival in our port of the steamship Argolide; this event would not be of the slightest interest did I not know from neighborhood gossip that it is precisely on this steamship that young Lecourt is returning to his natal city; yes, Thomas Lecourt, who five years ago left the paternal roof to roam the world and live his life, and whom every country in the world now calls the prodigal son. You know his father, that aged man with the stern profile who recently underwent a liver operation; you know too that he lives not far from here, in a villa hidden among eucalyptuses; from our balcony we can see the park of the villa. This old man, long a widower, hardly ever goes out; he attributes great importance to butter and has made long studies of its making throughout the ages; his friends sometimes jokingly call him the butterologist but he never loses his temper, in fact he scarcely ever loses his temper at all and always smiles sadly behind his white mustache; often he gazes in front of him into space, yet there are moments when his features contract, his hands clench the arms of his chair, and then in a trembling voice he utters these three words: ‘Ah! The scoundrel!’ His gaze has fallen on the portrait of Clotilde, of his daughter Clotilde, Clotilde the hunchback, abandoned when pregnant a few months after their marriage by her husband, a handsome man with a blond mustache. But to return to the point: The Lecourt boy is coming home to the paternal roof; if at this moment we go out on the balcony we shall not have long to wait before he appears; nothing is more moving, my dear friends, than such a return, especially without the stage business of the fatted calf that is killed and the old man with a white beard stretching out his pardoning arms.” On Hebdomeros’s invitation his friends stepped out on the balcony, others leaned on their elbows at the windows, and all looked at the white road which went down to the harbor; soon at the end of that road appeared a man who advanced with weary steps, his back heavily laden with a sack and a rolled-up coat tied with strings. The sky was covered with a thin layer of clouds, a slight and very gentle wind blew imperceptibly in the dry weeds and the telegraph wires; a great calm reigned everywhere; one felt however that this would not last and it was Hebdomeros’s friends who first gave the signal; no sooner did they catch sight of the stranger than they shouted in unison: “Long live he who returns to us! Long live the returning one! Long live the prodigal son! Long live the return of the prodigal son!” Their cries and acclamations spread from house to house, arousing the entire countryside, and soon flags appeared at the windows, men left their work to come and see what was happening, bands of urchins began to march in front of the escorting soldiers, copying their parade step and making all kinds of unavowable noises with their mouths to imitate the rolling of the drum. The swallows in long black lines clove the air, uttering piercing cries. At the end of the eucalyptus park the father’s house withdrew into the muteness of its closed shutters. It remained silent, the father’s house, and soon everything began little by little to fall silent with it. The noise died away; the wind held its breath, the curtains which had billowed romantically at the open windows fell back like flags that the wind no longer lifts. Men in shirtsleeves, who had been playing billiards, suddenly stopped playing as though a great weariness had overtaken them, a weariness for their past life, for their present life, and for the years that still a
waited them, with their procession of sad or smiling hours, or simply neutral ones, neither sad nor smiling, just hours, in a word! Silence and meditation were everywhere. A crier, caring little about mystery and hardly aware of metaphysical refinements, began to announce at the top of his lungs the next steamship sailings and which ones among them accepted, in addition to merchandise, passengers as well. He was careful to precede each announcement with a violent roll of his drum. A gendarme emerging from a dim, narrow alley put an end to this sacrilege by pouncing on the crier and dragging him back from where he had come, as a lion reenters a thicket with the antelope whom he has surprised at the moment she was slaking her thirst at the edge of a pond. It was the moment that Hebdomeros cherished above all others; immediately he developed an appetite and thought with joy of the midday meal; not that he was a glutton, far from that, but he was something of a gourmand, only with tact and intelligence; he loved the taste of bread; of grilled lamb fat; of fresh, limpid water; and of strong tobacco. He also loved the Jews and everything connected with them; in the company of Jews he abandoned himself to a sweet and strange torpor which was like the emotion that traveling produces, for when he was traveling he always had a slight sensation of dreaming; when he was with the sons of Israel he also left on a journey, a journey to the depths of the dark night of time and of races.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 21
