FullReads

“It is the hour for the regatta–noon–the sun just overhead. The boats draw up in line on the sparkling river, before a tent gaudy with streamers. On the bank the mayor with his staff of office, gendarmes in yellow shoulder-belts, and a swarm of summer dresses, open parasols, and straw hats. Bang! the signal-gun is fired. The Marsouin shoots ahead of all her competitors and easily gains the prize–and no fatigue! We go around Marne, and, returning, dine at Creteil. How cool the evening in the dusky arbor, where pipes glow through the darkness, and moths singe their wings in the flame of the omelette au kirsch. At the end of a dessert, served on decorated plates, we hear from the ball-room the call of the cornet–‘Take places for the quadrille!’ But already a rival crew, beaten that same morning, has monopolized the prettiest girls. A fight!–teeth broken, eyes blackened, ugly falls, and whacks below the belt; in a word, a poem of physical enthusiasm, of noisy hilarity, of animal spirits, without speaking of the return at midnight, through crowded stations, with girls whom we lift into the cars, friends separated calling from one end of the train to the other, and fellows playing a horn upon the roof.”

And the evenings of my astonishing companion were not less full of adventure than his Sundays. Collar-and-elbow wrestling in a tent, under the red light of torches, between him–simple amateur–and Du Bois, the iron man, in person; rat-chases near the mouths of sewers, with dogs as fierce as tigers; sanguinary encounters at night, in the most dangerous quarters, with ruffians and nose-eaters, were the most insignificant episodes of his nightly career. Nor do I dare relate other adventures of a more intimate character, from which, as the writers of an earlier day would say in noble style, a pen the least timorous would recoil with horror.

However painful it may be to confess an unworthy sentiment, I am obliged to say that my admiration for Meurtrier was not unmixed with regret and bitterness. Perhaps there was mingled with it something of envy. But the recitation of his most marvellous exploits had never awakened in me the least feeling of incredulity, and Achille Meurtrier easily took his place in my mind among heroes and demigods, between Roland and Pirithous.

II.

At this time I was a great wanderer in the suburbs, and I occupied the leisure of my summer evenings by solitary walks in those distant regions, as unknown to the Parisians of the boulevards as the country of the Caribbees, and of whose sombre charm I endeavored later to tell in verse.

One evening in July, hot and dusty, at the hour when the first gas-lights were beginning to twinkle in the misty twilight, I was walking slowly from Vaugirard through one of those long and depressing suburban streets lined on each side by houses of unequal height, whose porters and porteresses, in shirt sleeves and in calico, sat on the steps and imagined that they were taking the fresh air. Hardly any one passing in the whole street; perhaps, from end to end, a mason, white with plaster, a sergeant-de-ville, a child carrying home a four-pound loaf larger than himself, or a young girl hurrying on in hat and cloak, with a leather bag on her arm; and every quarter-hour the half-empty omnibus coming back to its place of departure with the heavy trot of its tired horses.

Stumbling now and then on the pavement–for asphalt is an unknown luxury in these places–I went down the street, tasting all the delights of a stroller. Sometimes I stopped before a vacant lot to watch, through the broken boards of the fence, the fading glories of the setting sun and the black silhouettes of the chimneys thrown against a greenish sky. Sometimes, through an open window on the ground-floor, I caught sight of an interior, picturesque and familiar: here a jolly-looking laundress holding her flat-iron to her cheek; there workmen sitting at tables and smoking in the basement of a cabaret, while an old Bohemian with long gray hair, standing before them, sang something about “Liberty,” accompanying himself on a guitar about the color of bouillon–the scenes of Chardin and Van Ostade.