“Yes, it’s presumably a lottery?”
“Not entirely, because in a lottery, no one knows the number they’re going to draw, whereas, for races, there are clever people who know which horse is going to win. And me, now, I’m one of them, those clever people...”
Monsieur Pigouette winked, and tapped the newspaper.
“I know the one that’s going to win tomorrow.”
“I’ve guessed it, me too!” cried the triumphant chair-woman. “It’s the Monseigneur’s horse!”
“It’s the Monseigneur’s horse,” confirmed the beadle. “Oh, Madame Subtil, how well you merit your name! Yesterday, I met Mr. Griffith, who assured me that the horse will certainly win. And besides, listen carefully, little Sophie Poirier, the visionary of Tassigny-la-Raclée has had an apparition of the Archangel Michael, and the Archangel confirmed the thing himself. And then, the Monseigneur’s horse, you see, how can you imagine that he won’t finish first?”
“But Monsieur Pigouette, what is it necessary to do to bet on the Monseigneur’s horse?”
The beadle, seeing that he had a bite, adopted a very confidential tone.
“Listen Madame Subtil, it’s necessary not to tell anyone—not even your confessor, you understand. Tomorrow, there’s no mass. We’ll ask for leave for the day. We’ll take the train to Paris. If we met anyone we know at the station, we’ll tell them that we’re going to visit Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. Once in Paris we’ll take a cab to Longchamp. And I promise you that in the evening, your pockets will be too small to contain the hundred-sou pieces we’ll be bringing back.”
The next day, in fact, at the stroke of two o’clock, the beadle and the chair-woman passed, through one of the turnstiles giving access to Longchamp racecourse.
The chair-woman had brought her savings. The beadle had borrowed fifty francs from the proprietor of the Café du Commerce; I addition, by virtue of a thoughtlessness that he was later to regret bitterly, he had imprudently kept on his person certain funds belonging to the cash-box of the vestry that had been confided to him.
The arrival of the bizarre couple formed by Monsieur Pigouette and Madame Subtil would have caused a sensation in many public places. The beadle had brought out an implausible top hat with a shaggy nap, and his quaker coat had the very rare green streaks that one finds in the Louvre museum on certain items of Etruscan pottery.
The chair-woman had wanted to react and protest against the somber garments imposed on her by her profession. Her elegance was special and struck the impressionist mode very well; either by chance or intention, she was dressed in Monseigneur Bénin-Despalmes’ racing colors: a dress of a very bright purple, and an exceedingly red and exceedingly ridiculous hat.
Funnier things had been seen on the course, however, and the members of the crowd had other things on their mind than taking notice of the costumes and appearance of passers-by. Absorbed exclusively in the search for the winners, for their winners, they walked like somnambulists, wandering alive through their starry dream, under the emprise of the Problem, in the midst of the densest crowd, isolated in an inaccessible ivory tower.
Madame Subtil was astonished not to see the Monseigneur’s horse as soon as she arrived on the racecourse. She had imagined, naively, that Peau-de-Balle would be exhibited under a canopy with a silver fringe, or that he would be walked with great pomp along the track, to the sound of huge organs and hymns.
“Don’t be impatient,” said the beadle. “We have time to see him. He isn’t running until the fourth race.”
Fortunately, Madame Subtil found a resource to pass the time; she recognized a compatriot, a native of Caudebec-en-Caux, who was selling licorice water to the sportsmen in the crowd.
“Better than champagne! Two sous a glass! And a hot tip into the bargain. It won’t be for everyone. The winner to my clients!”
“So you know what’s going to win too?” asked Madame Subtil, astonished.
“It’s not difficult,” replied the coco-merchant. “I give all the horses to different people. That way there are always a few who come to thank me after the race.”
“Oh…!” said Madame Subtil, who had not understood.
Then, seized by the ambient contagion, bewitched by the effluvia that form the atmosphere of racecourses, she unconsciously allowed herself to give way to the need for boasting and lies that is rife on the lawns. And, instinctively, she employed expressions of which she had not had the slightest idea an hour before.
“We’ve got information of the first order, ourselves. We’ve come to bet on Monseigneur Bénin-Despalmes’ horse. The proof is that the Monseigneur himself sent us to do it. You’ll see.”
The coco-merchant opened a mouth into which one could have poured the contents of his barrel. And immediately, seized by a kind of sacred delirium, he started howling:
“To all my clients I give the winner! Look, Messieurs, I’ll tip you the wink. Come and tell me after the race whether I didn’t give it to you! It’s Peau-de-Balle in the fourth! Peau-de-Balle all alone, Messieurs.”
Suddenly, Monsieur Pigouette started and took hold of the chair-woman’s arm.
“Madame Subtil, look over there, between the two stalls...that soutane!”
“In truth, one would think that it’s Abbé Douillet…but that’s not possible. No, it can’t be him. At that distance, all priests look alike.”
The runners for the fourth race were posted. The beadle immediately disappeared, saying that he would be back in a trice and confiding the chair-woman to the coco-merchant. He was going to effect a discreet and serious punt on Peau-de-Balle; as he was not going to do so moderately, he did not want the chair-woman to see him take out a large sum of money whose origin he could not explain.
As soon as his back was turned, Madame Subtil sought information from her compatriot, who was occupied in pouring a few supplementary jugs of Seine water into his barrel.
“Tell me, Monsieur, where is it necessary to go in order to bet on the Monseigneur’s horse?”
The other interrupted the baptism of the licorice water momentarily in order to develop a broad gesture that embraced the entire group of the Mutuel huts.
“At any window, Madame.”
Madame Subtil disappeared for a moment and then came back, quite discomfited.
“Oh, Monsieur, I told the employee at the widow that I wanted to bet on the Monseigneur’s horse. Do you know what he replied? That he didn’t care and that he had a Monseigneur somewhere.93 When I observed to him that he wasn’t polite, he asked me if I was drunk. A woman of my age and attached to the cathedral!”
“You didn’t need to mention the Monseigneur,” said the coco-merchant, who was still stretching his sauce. “It was simply necessary to ask for Peau-de-Balle.”
The chair-woman made a second attempt, which was no more successful.
“The employee replied to me: ‘I don’t have to know Peau-de-Balle, ask for a number.’”
“Alas, Madame Subtil, you haven’t understood. How much do you want to put on Peau-de-Balle?”
The chair-woman displayed four hundred-sou pieces that she had just extracted from her profonde—which really was the word that suited her pocket.94
“Well, you go to the window and you ask for four on the six as you hand over you money.”
Madame Subtil, coming back from her third expedition, still had her four hundred-sou pieces; furthermore, she was furious.
“Would you believe that the Monsieur refused my coins, on the pretext that they’re not good! Coins that Abbé Tacot gave me on the first of January for my new year’s present, saying: ‘Here, my child, here are coins with the effigy of our Holy Father the Pope. Keep them; they’ll bring you good luck.”
“Oh, you’ve no chance, Madame. If they’re refusing Holy Father coins now…! Do you know what I’d do in your place? I’d present myself successively at all the windows in the row, until I finally happened upon a obliging employee who’d accept my money. Go on, have a little patience..
.”
The coco-merchant was right. After having suffered several humiliating refusals, Madame Subtil ended up obtaining a resounding success. In fact, one Mutuel clerk, who fancied himself a wit, had the idea of having some fun, and looked the lady up and down instead of checking the money she had. Giving simultaneous proof of his literary culture and his sarcastic wit, he leaned over toward his “pompier” and offered her this reminiscence:
Who sends us this duenna, a frightful companion
With a flourishing beard and a nose like an onion?95
So saying, he dropped the four papal coins in his bag. He was quite astonished to find them there that even when cashing up—which proves that one should never make fun of old ladies.
Madame Subtil returned to the coco-merchant’s stall waving her tickets triumphantly. She found Monsieur Pigouette there, who had just descended a fatal slope, pushed by the demon of gambling. Unknown to the churchwarden, the vestry funds were represented by shares in Peau-de-Balle.
“Come on, Madame Subtil,” said the bold speculator, “get a move on. We only just have time to get to the start if you want to see the Monseigneur’s horse.”
They traversed the lawns and arrived at a place where the crowd was particularly compact. Among all the backs offered to their views, there was one that attracted the beadle’s attention particularly.
“But it really is Monsieur l’Abbé Douillet!” he exclaimed.
On hearing his name pronounced, the excellent ecclesiastic turned round; he seemed very embarrassed to see the beadle and the chair-woman, who were no prouder than he was. Monsieur Pigouette greatly regretted his involuntary exclamation.
Abbé Douillet thought that it was necessary to break the silence, and sought an original topic of conversation.
“So you’ve come to stake a stroll here, to take advantage of the fine weather. Excellent idea! Excellent idea!”
Fortunately, an entirely predictable diversion occurred. The horses came to line up under the starter’s flag, and Madame Subtil was able to admire, above the spectators’ hats, the red cap of Peau-de-Balle’s jockey.
A rumor…and then a sorrowful knell. The horses had set off…but Madame Subtil could still see Gustave Louffe’s cap in the same place.
“But…the Monseigneur’s horse has stayed there on his own! The others will come back to fetch him, surely!”
“Do you think so?” said a member of the crowd, with a snigger. “The start was good. They’ll dance without him, that’s all.”
“But it won’t count, then? We’ll get our money back?”
“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” said the worthy Abbé Douillet, who was very pale. “We’ll get our money back.”
“What a bunch of idiots!” cried a furious sportsman, who also had a few Peau-de-Balle tickets in his pocket. “Give us our moolah back! You have to be as stupid as swine to believe that! It’s in the bucket, our moolah. It was bound to happen. When I next see a curé, I’ll give him poverty! He won’t be able to say his mass!”
“No one’s talking to you, lout!” put in Monsieur Pigouette, who had nothing more to lose and at least wanted to put up a good show, in view of the catastrophic future events that he could foresee.
The lout in question could not let such a good opportunity to soothe his nerves go by. He fell upon the unfortunate beadle, punching and kicking. Around them, the brawl became general; it required the intervention of four policemen to extract the inhabitants of Caudebec-en-Caux.
In the train that repatriated them, Monsieur Pigouette pretended to search his pockets anxiously.
“My God! My God! I’ve lost all the money in the riot!”
“What money?”
“The Peter’s pence money! I had inadvertently kept it on me. I shall have to confess my stupidity to the Monseigneur.”
“No, no!” said Abbé Douillet, swiftly, who had no wish for his presence on the racecourse to be revealed. “I’d rather reimburse you the money—but don’t mention the affair to anyone.”
“And my four coins with the effigy of the Holy Father?” asked the chair-woman, bitterly.
“Ask Monsieur l’Abbé Tacot to give you some more—he’s got a trunk full of them at home.”
VIII. Between Scylla and Charybdis
In that epoch, a phenomenon was produced in the physical condition of Gustave Louffe that would have delighted any other jockey. He visibly lost weight, to the point that Ely Pauwels said to him one day, ironically: “Hey, Master Louffe, I can offer you a nice little engagement as a lightweight. We’ll sign it soon, when you don’t weigh any more than forty-five kilos and you’re understood that the starter gives the signal to go when he lowers his flag.”
“It’ll also be necessary for me to learn to understand Sem Lévy’s odds, in order to drop my hands when necessary,” Gustave Louffe had retorted.
“Oh, you know those things better than I do!”
Louffe had swallowed that insult and gone away, his heart heavy.
The poor fellow was being eaten away by a worm: the remorse of having put Peau-de-Balle’s mechanism out of order, and his impotence to repair the damage.
Every evening, he struggled with his screwdriver, and imagined, after long hours of labor, that he had returned the automaton to its true form, but as soon as he found himself on the track, on the hippodrome, he had to yield to the sad evidence. Peau-de-Balle was no longer himself, in the full sense of the term.
Sometimes he remained at the post, without the galloping lever having the slightest effect on him, and Gustave Louffe had to watch the disaster passively, as in the nightmares in which the worst catastrophes descend upon you without your being able to move your arms or legs, and without you being able to react to the torture of your nerves and your brain. And the patience of the starter could evidently only serve to prolong his agony.
Sometimes Peau-de-Balle departed at the velocity of his heyday, only to stop after a few hundred meters.
Sometimes, finally, he galloped with a singular gait, his front legs following the regular rhythm, while his back legs danced in syncopation. The strange horse then seemed afflicted with locomotive ataxia, and, to Griffith’s great terror, it had been proposed to submit the case to the Académie des Sciences, which would certainly have delegated a natural scientist to examine him.
Peau-de-Balle’s eccentricities varied infinitely, according to the manner in which Gustave Louffe, on the eve of each race, had adjusted his essential organs, with the best of intentions. As the combinations of the cogwheels, gears and levers were innumerable, also innumerable were the practical jokes that the automaton permitted his faithful partisans to encounter.
For Peau-de-Balle, in spite of the painful disillusionments that he caused every day, was still a favorite on the course at the hundred sou windows; small punters have a particularly tenacious memory.
But it was no longer sympathetic acclamations that saluted Gustave Louffe when he returned pitifully to the weighing-room at a jerky walk, the only one of Peau-de-Balle’s actions that remained regular. The names of birds now alternated with the names of fish; there was also mention of household ordure and certain organs that it would have been in bad taste to mention in a drawing room.
A particularly scandalous occurrence happened one day. A drunk, having lost a hundred sous on the archiepiscopal colors, stated crying vigorously: “À bas la calotte!” which came as a surprise, because at that time anticlerical and political passions had no access to the Turf; the episcopal miter and the presidential hat were respected then.
Monseigneur Bénin-Despalmes heard about the incident, and his heart was profoundly saddened, all the more so as Le Balai did not limit itself purely and simply to reporting it, but aggravated it with venomous commentaries, in which the hand and style of the Baron de l’Échelle-Jacob was recognizable.
It is inadmissible, one read in that paper, that the government will tolerate much longer the shameful scandal of which Monsieur Bénin-Despalmes, the archbishop of Caudebec
-en-Caux, is presently providing the spectacle to the citizens who are, in sum, his paymasters. This, then, is the use made of the religious budget, alimented by the impositions that pressurize the unfortunate French taxpayers: it is used to promenade, in the gambling-den of racecourses, violet silks that cover all the shady schemes and all the fraudulent maneuvers by which the disciples of Loyola, since the Inquisition, have sought to appease their shameful and inextinguishable thirst for lucre. No one will be astonished if, one day soon, the enlightened patriots of the Parisian suburbs, seized by a legitimate fit of indignation, deliver good and prompt justice to Monsieur Bénin-Despalmes’ horse and jockey.
It continued in the same vein for three columns. Le Balai also wanted to notify its readers of the presence at the weigh-in of the reactionary lawyer Dessumeaux, and perfidiously invited the clients of the said lawyer to maintain a close surveillance on the management of any funds that might be deposited in his study. Le Balai also occupied itself with Comte Jérôme Thomas, declaring that for him, money had no odor—which was at least funny.
Le Balai’s campaign had one result. It happened that after one race—or, rather, after an unsuccessful attempt to race—a rain of stones coming from the lawns fell upon Peau-de-Balle and his jockey. Gustave Louffe was badly bruised. As for the horse, the newspapers announced that it had come back with a limp, but that, thanks to his robust constitution, there was no reason to think that it had sustained any injury.
That new proof consternated the archbishop of Caudebec-en-Caux. Only Abbé Tacot was triumphant.
Monseigneur Bénin-Despalmes was overwhelmed by the weight of a profound affliction. He could already see his case brought before the Court of Rome, and struggled, uncomprehendingly, in the midst of complicate catastrophes.
The Mirror of Present Events Page 21
