Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (75 page)

“Already!” she exclaimed; “at a quarter-past I must go.”

She sat down again, but she kept looking at the clock, and he paced the room, puffing at his cigarette. Neither of them could think of anything further to say to the other. There is a moment at the hour of parting when the person that we love is already with us no longer.

At last, when the hands of the clock passed the twenty-five minute mark, she slowly took up her bonnet, holding it by the strings.

“Good-bye, my friend—my dear friend! I shall never see you again! This is the closing page in my life as a woman. My soul shall remain with you even when you see me no more. May all the blessings of Heaven be yours!”

And she kissed him on the forehead, like a mother.

But she appeared to be looking for something, and then she asked him for a pair of scissors.

She unfastened her comb, and all her white hair fell down.

With an abrupt movement of the scissors, she cut off a long lock from the roots.

“Keep it! Good-bye!”

When she was gone, Frédéric rushed to the window and threw it open. There on the sidewalk he saw Madame Arnoux beckoning towards a passing cab. She stepped into it. The vehicle disappeared.

And that was all.

A
bout the beginning of this winter, Frédéric and Deslauriers were chatting by the fireside, destined by nature, to always reunite and become friends again.

Frédéric briefly explained his quarrel with Madame Dambreuse, who had married again, her second husband being an Englishman.

Deslauriers, without telling how he had come to marry Mademoiselle Roque, related to his friend how his wife had one day eloped with a singer. In order to wipe away to some extent the ridicule that this brought upon him, he had compromised himself by an excess of zeal for the government in his functions as prefect. He had been dismissed. After that, he had been an agent for colonisation in Algeria, secretary to a pasha, editor of a newspaper, and an advertising agent, his latest employment being the office of legal counsil for a manufacturing company.

As for Frédéric, having squandered two thirds of his fortune, he was now living a middle-class life.

Then they brought each other up-to-date on their friends.

Martinon was now a member of the Senate.

Hussonnet occupied a high position, in which he was fortunate enough to have control of all the theatres and the entire press.

Cisy, deeply religious, and the father of eight children, was living in the chateau of his ancestors.

Pellerin, after turning his hand to Fourrièrism, homœpathy, table-turning, Gothic art, and humanitarian painting, had become a photographer; and he was to be seen on every wall in Paris, where he was represented in a black coat with a very small body and a big head.

“And what about your chum Sénécal?” asked Frédéric.

“Disappeared—I can’t tell you where! And yourself—what about the woman you were so passionately attached to, Madame Arnoux?”

“She must be in Rome with her son, a cavalry lieutenant.”

“And her husband?”

“He died a year ago.”

“You don’t say,” exclaimed the lawyer. Then, striking his forehead:

“Now that I think of it, the other day in a shop I met that dear old Maréchale, holding by the hand a little boy whom she has adopted. She is the widow of a certain M. Oudry, and is now enormously stout. What a change for the worse!—she who formerly had such a slender waist!”

Deslauriers did not deny that he had taken advantage of her despair to find this out for himself.

“After all you gave me permission.”

This admission was a compensation for the silence he had maintained with reference to his attempt to seduce Madame Arnoux.

Frédéric would have forgiven him, inasmuch as he had not succeeded in the attempt.

Although a little annoyed at the discovery, he pretended to laugh at it; and the allusion to the Maréchale brought back Vatnaz to his recollection.

Deslauriers had never seen her, any more than the others who used to come to the Arnoux’s house; but he remembered Regimbart perfectly.

“Is he still living?”

“He is barely alive. Every evening regularly he drags himself from the Rue de Grammont to the Rue Montmartre, to the cafés, weak, bent in two, emaciated, a ghost of a man!”

“Well, and what about Compain?”

Frédéric uttered a cry of joy, and begged the ex-delegate of the provisional government to explain to him the mystery of the calf’s head.

“It’s an idea imported from England. In order to parody the ceremony which the Royalists celebrated on the thirtieth of January, some Independents threw on annual banquet, at which they ate calves’ heads, and drank red wine out of calves’ skulls while toasting the extermination of the Stuarts. After Thermidor, some Terrorists organized a brotherhood of a similar description, which proves how contagious stupidity is.”

“You seem to have lost you passion for politics?”

“Effect of age,” said the lawyer.

And then they each proceeded to summarise their lives.

They had both failed in their plans—the one who dreamed only of love, and the other of power.

What was the reason for this?

“ ’Tis perhaps from not having kept to a steady course,” said Frédéric.

“In your case that may be so. I, on the contrary, have sinned through excess rigidity, without taking into account a thousand secondary things more important than any other. I had too much logic, and you too much sentiment.”

Then they blamed bad luck, circumstances, the times in which they were born.

Frédéric went on:

“We have never done what we thought of doing long ago at Sens, when you wished to write a critical history of Philosophy and I a great mediaeval romance about Nogent, the subject of which I had found in Froissart:
^dh
‘How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Bishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache d’Ambrecicourt.’ Do you remember?”

And, exhuming their youth with every sentence, they said to each other:

“Do you remember?”

They saw once more the school playground, the chapel, the parlour, the fencing room at the bottom of the staircase, the faces of the school monitors and of the pupils—one named, Angelmarre, from Versailles, who used to make himself trousers-straps from old boots, M. Mirbal and his red whiskers, the two professors of geometric and artistic drawing, who were always wrangling, and the Pole, the fellow-countryman of Copernicus, with his planetary system on cardboard, an itinerant astronomer whose lecture had been paid for by a free dinner in the refectory, then a drunken escapade while they were out on a walking excursion, the first pipes they had smoked, the distribution of prizes, and the delightful sensation of going home for the holidays.

It was during the vacation of 1837 that they had called at the house of the Turkish woman.

This was the phrase used to designate a woman whose real name was Zoraide Turc; and many people believed her to be a Muslim, a Turk, which added to the poetic charm of her establishment, situated at the water’s edge behind the ramparts. Even in the middle of summer there was shade around her house, which could be recognised by a glass bowl of goldfish near a pot of mignonette on the windowsill. Young ladies in white nightdresses, with painted cheeks and long earrings, used to tap at the panes as the students passed; and as it grew dark, their custom was to hum softly in their husky voices standing on the doorstep.

This den of iniquity spread its fantastic notoriety over all the arrondissement. Allusions were made to it indirectly: “The place you know—a certain street—below the Bridges.” It made the farmers’ wives of the district tremble for their husbands, and the bourgeois ladies grow apprehensive about their servants’ virtue, because the sub-prefect’s cook had been caught there; and, it was, of course, the secret obsession of every adolescent.

One Sunday, when everyone was at Vespers, Frédéric and Deslauriers, having previously curled their hair, gathered some flowers in Madame Moreau’s garden, then made their way out through the gate leading into the fields, and, after taking a long detour through the vineyards, came back through the Fishery, and stole into the Turkish woman’s house with their big bouquets still in their hands.

Frédéric presented his as a lover does to his betrothed. But the great heat, the fear of the unknown, and even the very pleasure of seeing at one glance so many women placed at his disposal, affected him so strangely that he turned exceedingly pale, and remained there without taking a single step or uttering a single word. All the girls burst out laughing, amused at his embarrasment. Thinking that they were making fun of him, he ran away; and, as Frédéric had the money, Deslauriers was obliged to follow him.

They were seen leaving the house; and the episode furnished material for a bit of local gossip which was still remembered three years later.

They related the story to each other at great length, each completing the narrative where the other’s memory failed; and, when they had finished:

“That was the best we ever got!” said Frédéric.

“Yes, perhaps so, indeed! It was the best time we ever had,” said Deslauriers.

1
(p. 5)
15th of September,
1840: We are in the middle of the reign of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, brought to power by the revolution of 1830.

2
(p. 5)
Quai St. Bernard:
This wharf is in the center of Paris, on the left bank. The boat
Ville
de
Montereau
will steam up the Seine to the town of Montereau.

3
(p. 5)
receiving an inheritance:
Frédéric Moreau has made an excursion to Le Havre, at the estuary of the Seine on the English Channel; after a halt in Paris, he is returning to his native town of Nogent-sur-Seine.

4
(p. 15)
Madame Lafarge:
Accused of poisoning her husband, Madame Lafarge had just been condemned to forced labor but never ceased to claim her innocence.

5
(p. 16)
an army recruiter at Troyes:
Every twenty-year-old Frenchman could be drafted by lottery for a seven-year stint of military service; those with a called-up number and sufficient means could “buy” a substitute. People like M. Deslauriers acted as middlemen in these transactions.

6
(p. 17)
Jouffroy, Cousin, Laromiguière, Malebranche, and the Scotch metaphysicians:
Théodore Jouffroy, Victor Cousin, and Pierre Laromiguiere were eclectic nineteenth-century French philosophers. Around 1680 Nicolas Malebranche attempted to reconcile Cartesianism and Christianity. And in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, Scots Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart founded their metaphysics on the certainty of common sense.

7
(p. 17)
the Walter Scott of France:
Scott, the prolific author of
Waverley
(1814) and
Ivanhoe
(1819), was extraordinarily popular in France during the Romantic period, a fact that explains the durable success of the historical novel.

8
(p. 22)
Rastignac in the
Comédie Humaine: The young protagonist
of Le Père Goriot
(1835;
Father Goriot),
by Honoré de Balzac, starts as a poor provincial student in Paris and finds success in later novels largely through his connections with rich women.

9
(p. 26)
But he left off studying the Civil Code ... and he gave up the Institutes at the
Summa Divisio Personarum: The French Civil Code (the Napoleonic Code) was established under Napoleon I in 1804 and is still in use today. The Institutes is one of four books comprising the Justinian code composed under the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D.

10
(p. 32) he perceived a large gathering around the Panthéon:
A temple to France’s illustrious men, in the Latin Quarter, the Panthéon went back to its initial function as a church under the Second Empire.

11
(p. 32)
some other events:
The Reform asked for was that of the electoral system, which allowed only citizens paying a certain level of taxes to vote. The National Guard was a civic militia created by the French Revolution to maintain public order; it was abolished in 1871. The census of finance minister Jean-Georges Humann, falsely perceived as an instrument to increase taxes, raised a lot of protest.

12
(p. 33)
like Frédéric Lemaitre
in Robert Macaire: Frédéric Lemaitre was a well-known Romantic actor in the mid-nineteenth century; Robert Macaire was a thief in a melodrama of the same name.

13
(p. 34)
“Down with Guizot!” “Down with Pritchard!”:
The influence of George Pritchard, an English Protestant missionary in Tahiti, a French protectorate since 1843, created tensions between France and Great Britain. Pritchard, a British consul, had argued that Tahiti should become a British protectorate. The conservative government minister François Guizot (see the introduction) placated him with a large monetary compensation, which was a very unpopular measure.

14
(p. 35)
the “Marseillaise”... to Béranger’s house ... Laffitte’s house ... Chateaubriand’s house... “To Voltaire’s house!” yelled the young man with the fair moustache:
Under the restored kings, the “Marseillaise” was not the national hymn but a revolutionary song. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857), a popular poet and chansonnier, Jacques Laffitte (1767-1844), a rich banker, and even François de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), a Legitimist and well-known writer, all had liberal tendencies. The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) was dead by this time.

15
(p.
39)
noticing ... a volume of Hugo and another of Lamartine ... criticisms of the romantic school:
Although far from revolutionary in their poetic practices, Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), Victor Hugo (1802-1885), and the other Romantics were accused by the Classicists of distorting the French language. Lamartine and Hugo were both “engagés” writers of leftist leaning.