Quand Panurge ressuscita
When Panurge Was Resurrected
Pierre Mille
SIX TALES
The Miracle
Every day, except Saturday, the little Jesus went to school. In summer, he wore only a long sleeveless hemp tunic, spun by the Virgin Mary. In winter, when the harsh winds from Lebanon blow, he put over this kind of shirt a rough woolen reddish pelisse, like those worn by the shepherds of the land of Gilead. But the Virgin Mary had bordered the hem, as well as the opening at the chest, with a broad band cut from the skin of a wildcat; for even in that ancient time, as today around Salonika or Brody, where they form great peoples, the Jews loved the pomp of furs. And Joseph rejoiced, in his naive heart, that the son of God, whom God had given him to guard, looked like a little rabbi.
The little Jesus went to school. He carried his slate, a piece of chalk, tablets of boxwood or terracotta — for both kinds were made — covered with fine wax, a small stick pointed at one end and flat like a spatula at the other, for writing and erasing on those tablets, and sometimes, to quench his thirst on summer days, an orange. One can never meditate enough on this magnificent and tender mystery — it is the inexhaustible source of a justly divine joy: all God, in his immensity, then lived in the body of a small child. Yes, in the body of a small human child, of the being in the world most beautiful, most pure, most luminous, most worthy of being loved, had descended the cause of all light and of all love!
The little Jesus went to school. This was not merely out of humility. His divine nature knew everything; but his human nature needed to learn to use human inventions: the alphabet, the calamus, numbers. To leave Joseph’s workshop, which was below street level, he had to climb two high steps of gray limestone, where fossils had left the hollowed trace of shells shaped like long screws. Jesus knew these imprints well, having marveled at looking at them — he who had created, after all, the sea, Leviathan, and all the fishes. His small round knees, marked with a dimple that almost gave them the look of having a face, and his pink feet climbed the obstacle with a slight effort that amused him; and standing under the narrow arched doorway, his mother, with her blue veil and eyes like dark flowers, watched him go. As he was infinitely studious and well-behaved, he chanted his lessons the whole way, as schoolchildren still do in the same country; and the heaven where his father was, above his head, blessed him.
But there was at the school a child utterly black in face and soul, whose name was Jerach; and he said that his father was of the race of Ham. But in truth Satan had hidden himself under the features of this little negro to tempt Jesus, knowing that he was the one who would one day soon be called Christ. The other children did not know this mystery. They only sensed, in Mary’s son, something gentle and beneficent, and they loved him without knowing why, as one unconsciously loves a beautiful day. Jerach ended by transferring onto them a portion of the hatred he bore against this fair-haired child, with his oval pale face, who had come to take the earth from him. That is why he put in their souls the same religious furies that burned in their parents’. Some declared themselves Sadducees and others Hasidim. They called each other turtle’s egg and toad, fish excrement, impious, thief, or Roman; at last they played at hating each other: it is a horrible game. From insults they came to blows, stones soon flew, and presently a dreadful cry was heard: it was Joel, son of the high priest Alkimos, who had just rolled on the ground, his head split by a sharp stone.
The combatants had not yet hardened hearts. All felt great pity. They gathered around the son of Alkimos, although this adolescent, proud and wicked by nature, inspired little affection in most. Clear blood poured in great bubbling gushes from the wound that cut through one eyebrow and exposed the skull bones. All cried:
— Joel is going to die now!
Joel, who had risen, leaned against the wall. His knees were knocking and his eyes were darkened by blood and by terror; he did not know what death was, but he feared it formidably. And Jesus, who had watched as if in a dream, without seeing, the stupidity of this battle, came to him with a very serious air, hastening his little steps. All the charity of heaven and earth flowed from him; it flooded the air; it was at once heavy and light, pressing, irresistible, delicious. Joel, who exceeded Jesus by a head and shoulders, fell to both knees; and the little Jesus, taking his forehead in his two hands still plump and as if swollen with the milk of earliest infancy, said only, in a low voice:
— O my brother… O my brother in my father!
Now, no sooner had he spoken these words than there was nothing more — no wound, no smell of wound! Even the scar, and the blood that had stained the earth, had vanished. Joel’s companions cried:
— Miracle! Miracle! Jesus has performed a miracle!
Only Joel said nothing. It had happened too quickly, and he could not believe he was healed.
The little Jesus received from his companions, in the days that followed, the marks of the greatest respect. They greeted him by putting their right hand to their chest, then to their mouth and their forehead; they prostrated themselves to the ground and called him rabbi. But he felt no vanity at this, since no praise can equal the divine power. It was as if someone had called the great Solomon “captain of a hundred men”! Jerach-Satan was disappointed on this score. But Joel gave him consolation. Having been miraculously healed, he felt great pride. “For,” he reasoned, “if divine favor has manifested itself upon me in so singular a fashion, it is because I am exceptionally worthy of it. The God of Israel did not wish the son of the high priest Alkimos to be disfigured. I am not surprised. Something, apart from my birth, has always told me I was called to superb futures, to domination; and this miracle was predestined to distinguish me among men!” Indeed, the sellers of roasted watermelon seeds, those who bake cakes of honey and sesame, and all the idlers of the market said as he passed: “Is it you, Joel, upon whom the Most High has manifested himself?” That is not all: the Canaanite women, whose cheeks are marked with three blue stars and who color their eyelids with cosmetics, murmured so that he heard: “There is Joel, for whom God performed so great a wonder! He is handsome! What a pity if that fine eye had been injured!” Thus Joel, for having been for one instant removed from the rules that govern nature, was on his way to losing his soul in self-worship and wicked pleasures.
Jerach wished to press his advantage further. He therefore suggested to his companions:
— Jesus can perform miracles, can he not?
— The Most High permitted it, Jerach, said Joel proudly. The Most High permitted it, because of me!
These words irritated the others. They found it unjust that Joel, well known for being a wicked boy who had deserved his fate, should have escaped it through supernatural intervention. The smallest ones thought that Jesus would have done much better to multiply cakes; the bigger ones — that he should have made them even bigger, very strong, very rich, much loved: kings! And the rabble, since the best could not agree, not sharing the same wishes, remained lazy, inert, and discontented; they had only the vague feeling that they were wronged, without knowing why; they wanted only equality, that is to say, nothing.
Then Jerach-Satan perfidiously whispered to one of the rabble, who was called Ahira:
— Jesus’ miracles are no good to us, if Jesus doesn’t perform them for us!
— But, replied Joel, you didn’t get a stone in your eye! You’re not sick, you’re not lame, you’re not one-armed, you’re not dying; you don’t need any miracle, you don’t need anything!
— Yes we do, replied Ahira. We need not to work!
And all cried, illuminated:
— It’s true! We need not to work! Work is the real pain! It is the curse since the beginning of the world! We know it: they teach us! We know it even better: we feel it!
Then Ahira said in a convinced voice:
— So, since Jesus performs miracles, he must perform the miracle of having our homework done!
They cried again:
— Yes, that’s it, let our homework do itself!
Jerach went to Jesus, who was praying, and said to him:
— You hear them?
— Yes, he answered sadly. But if I accede to their wish, they will learn nothing. They will become like brutes. Like the savages who live over there, farther than Egypt, to the south.
— Exactly! agreed Jerach-Satan. This miracle would be immoral. But if you don’t perform this miracle, they won’t believe in you. And they’ll belong to me.
— Alas! said Jesus.
Then he reflected that he could perform the miracle once, and then not do it again; and that besides, since he was to die, it would not be harmful for a few children to have, before his death, a few moments of innocent joy in idleness.
This too was one of Satan’s temptations, which God permitted.
— What is today’s assignment? he asked.
— It is about numbers, replied Ahira, and we understand nothing: A camel draws a hundred pots of water per hour from a water wheel, and the basin below the wheel is filled in three hours. How long would it take another camel, drawing a hundred and fifty pots in the same time, to fill the basin?
The divine nature within the Child-God saw everything: past, present, future. He said, as if distinguishing the figures on a board:
— It would take only two hours.
A long murmur of admiration was heard, and the smallest began to kiss his hemp tunic:
— Rabbi! Rabbi!
But Ahira cried in an impatient voice:
— That’s not the homework! The homework is the series of operations, to write them on our tablets. That’s what the master demands. What is the series of operations?
— I don’t know, answered Jesus, himself astonished not to know.
He could not know, because God has no need of human calculations to know a result. He arrives at the sum immediately. It is through the weakness of his nature that humanity needs efforts and reasoning. God makes no effort, God does not reason: he is the omniscient, he is reason. Those calculations and reasonings had to be performed by the human nature of Jesus. Jesus had not thought of that. But he said, in his infinite goodness, no longer as the Child-God, but as the best and most obliging of children:
— If you like, I’ll do the operations!
Jerach, Joel, Ahira, and all the others sneered.
— So it wouldn’t be a miracle anymore! Therefore, Jesus, you’re a liar, a liar: you can’t perform the real miracle! You can’t excuse us from working!
— No, said Jesus, I cannot.
That is why none of those who had been to school with Jesus ever counted later among his disciples. All turned away from him, from that hour, all but one.
— Rabbi? he said.
And Jesus was astonished, despite his modesty, that he was still given that name.
— Rabbi, murmured the child, whose skin seemed to burn like a torch, no one will believe in you… So you must be the Messiah?
And it is said that this one was called John.
The Centenarian
It was toward the end of the Second Empire a great happiness in my family, and a great scandal among the Reds, when it was established that Madame Espérandieu was regularly going to mass on Sundays. For my part, I shared the feelings of my family, principally because of the opportunities I would have to see this lady. Let no one be shocked: I was then approaching my ninth year, and she counted seventy-two. It is true that this was still nothing for her, since Madame Clémence Espérandieu-Tassart reached the extraordinary age of one hundred and three. One hundred and three long green years, which all flowed by, from her birth, in the same village near Paris, which I shall not name. It will suffice me to say that the kings of France had a castle there that was demolished shortly before the Revolution.
Nothing remained of that castle, at the time of which I speak, but two delicate little pavilions, pretty as pieces of furniture, a fragment of facade with fluted pilasters, and a sort of small oval temple, hidden amid the dark buildings of a factory. A broad avenue, planted with infinitely old elms, descending the slope of a hill, ended at a half-moon adorned with balusters and vases from which stone flowers emerged. It was behind these balusters that the king’s palace had once stood. But the avenue led nowhere any longer — nowhere but to vacant lots, divided into plots that would not sell. The last two trees, joining their crowns in an arch, formed an enormous gateway that opened onto emptiness; and it seemed to me that this was the effect of a spell, as in the Sleeping Beauty, that the castle still existed, that a fairy merely clouded people’s eyes to prevent them from seeing it — but that one day the enchantment would end.
I had the confused idea that Madame Clémence might well be that all-powerful fairy. She possessed the mystery of the past. In the countryside, it was claimed that she had seen Louis XV, which, moreover, was not possible, since she was born in 1782. But from having heard so much talk about the late king when she was very small, she had finally come to believe that she had known him herself. Such is the imagination of children that they never clearly distinguish what they have seen from what they have been told. They enter life by appropriating the memories of those who surround them.
Unfortunately, I had been forbidden to visit my fairy, because she was a philosopher, a republican, and an atheist, and had even been seen at a civil burial. They were wrong on one point: she was a Bonapartist. “In the matter of government,” she was accustomed to saying, “the best I have known is that of His Majesty the Emperor and King.” And she despised Napoleon III because he was only an emperor and a poor copy of the original. But, like most petty bourgeois raised during the Revolution, when the churches were closed and the teaching communities were “dormant” — if I may borrow from their competitors a characteristic expression — she had no religion and had never troubled to acquire one, because of the distrust she had of priests. So the good society, which had not received her before, although she was rich, felt itself profoundly flattered by her conversion, due to the exhortations of a relative and, I think, to the somewhat somber meditations to which elderly persons are rather naturally inclined.
But even this motive was deemed legitimate by her new friends. Among the Reds, who had until then venerated her as a saint of heroic times, it became, on the contrary, an article of faith that she had fallen into dotage. I was now permitted to speak with her on the promenade, and I made use of this permission as frequently as I could. This caused M. Grondart, the pharmacist, who read the Rappel, a newspaper then considered incendiary, to call us “the two babies.” When I went to his shop with my nurse to fetch potions, he would ask me “if Madame Espérandieu wasn’t a bit too young to play with me.” I took this man in abomination.
My fairy had nothing fanatical about her, however. She had taken religion only as an insurance against the hazards of the beyond. She gave to charity without ostentation, fulfilled her religious duties at the four great feasts, arrived at mass just in time for the Gospel — that suffices for the mass to count — and left after the Ite missa est, without waiting for the reading of the last Gospel of Saint John, of which she said she understood nothing at all, which proves she had no metaphysical mind. But she was very fond of most of the phrases of the “Ordinary” and repeated them to me in a tone I still have in my ears: ”… Yes, great God, we dare say it to you, there is more here than all the sacrifices of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek: the only victim worthy of your altar, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the sole object of your eternal pleasure!”
— That, she would add, my dear child, is how people spoke in my younger days, in a noble and amiable manner, and I confess that the coarse ways of speaking of those with whom I have now quarreled always offended me.
I would seize such an occasion, or similar ones, to lead her back to her memories: they returned in droves. Memories of a child, told to a child! We lived in a magnificent dream.
— … The house with pilasters, where there is a photographer today? That was the House of the Pages. They wore garments of pearl-gray silk, or black as jet, or sometimes flame-colored, insolent in manner with men, amorous with girls, and rode at the riding school on spirited horses with short arched heads, like none that exist today.
“What they call the little temple, in the factory? It was not a temple, but a summer dining room in the middle of a park. The table was set in the basement and rose as if by enchantment, by means of pulleys, with the glasses, the porcelain plates, the dishes, the crystal carafes full of wine, at a sign from the king. There were also mirrors, sofas, things I must not tell you, my child.”
“Sometimes the king went hunting in the Bois du Vert, on the other side of the Seine, and at that time there was no bridge. The king would embark with his court, his pack of hounds, his officers, his beautiful ladies, on golden gondolas, at the spot where there are still large stones, a half-ruined quay. Listen! These are things I should hide from you, but it is so beautiful! One day, in that Bois du Vert, he saw coming toward him a goddess, entirely nude, alive, carrying a quiver and a bow, who recited a compliment to him. It was Madame du Barry. That is why Louis XVI had the castle demolished: too many things had happened there, and no one dared live in it anymore.”
The years passed, the war of 1870 came, and Madame Espérandieu saw the second invasion as she had seen the first, without stirring, in the same village, rejuvenated perhaps — for old people have involuntary egotisms — by this new trampling of barbarians that reminded her of her eighteenth year. When she reached ninety, she was the same as at seventy: dry, straight, with bushy eyebrows and green eyes whose enlarged pupils had the gleam of impenetrable, cold stone. But then something unexpected and dreadful occurred:
Madame Clémence Espérandieu-Tassart returned to the impiety of her early years!
Having exceeded the ordinary limits of human life, motionless before the change of things, seeing them ceaselessly begin again, finding herself once more in a republic, after having seen kingdoms and empires crumble, and still alive — she, with the same limbs, the same body, the same straight, narrow, stubborn, tranquil mind, and almost the same flea-colored silk dress — she lost her fear of death and of the Most High.
It was a scandal, a revolution, the upheaval of everything.
— Have you heard the news? said the right-thinking folk. Madame Espérandieu no longer believes in God. She has fallen into dotage.
A great joy, on the contrary, seized the Reds. They saw in this event the triumph of Reason in a strong soul. Madame Clémence became once more their friend, their glory, the model of women, the eternal soul of the Revolution, an invincible and vigorous spirit. When she reached a hundred, they gave her a great celebration, where the brass band came and played subversive tunes. They brought in journalists. Articles were published about the centenarian; reports quoting her words proved the integrity of her intelligence, which could be denied only by disappointed clerics, furious at seeing this prey escape them. The result was that, when she finally died, a little old woman imperceptibly faded, there were speeches where good folk adorned with red immortelles heroically uttered a great deal of nonsense, while in right-thinking society, calumnies were blindly retailed. I alone did not open my mouth, because my grief was real. It is always like that.
Only, when I am in a philosophical mood, I still wonder at what point Madame Espérandieu was in her dotage.
When They Raised Russia
This happened when the revolutionaries rose in Moscow.
On December 23 of the year 1905, an almost unprecedented event disturbed the accustomed order at the prison of Schlüsselburg, the most dreadful and most dreaded in Russia. A functionary, dressed in a gray uniform, had a cell opened. He found there an old man who was sleeping, and said to him:
— You are Aphanase Ivanovitch Sozonof?
The sleeper awoke and answered in a foggy voice:
— Yes, that is my name.
— Well, continued the functionary, here is your release order. You are free. We have so many new arrivals to accommodate here: we must make room!
The old man had been in that cell for twenty-four years. The next morning, at the late dawn, when he left the fortress, his legs trembled beneath him and he closed his eyelids; for the pink glow of the sun, reflected on the snow, drove into his brain like a packet of nails.
Aphanase Ivanovitch Sozonof had been, around the year 1880, an exceedingly dangerous revolutionary. I mean that, with his friends, he spoke of the necessity of reestablishing some honesty in a corrupt administration; and he wished that the peasants be taught to read. He went so far as to find it extraordinary that a man could be arrested without being told why, and put in prison without being given judges. He considered it regrettable that a sovereign could make his subjects pay, each year, several billion rubles, without being required to explain to anyone the use he wished to make of them. But when a “Parliament like London’s” was proposed to him as an ideal, he shook his head, judging that this was asking a great deal. A vague liberal facade, covering with a decent veil the ruler’s harsh omnipotence, as in Germany, would have seemed quite sufficient to him.
He went to discuss these matters, in the suburbs and the countryside, with workers and muzhiks; and when they had understood, the police flogged them to punish them for having understood; then sent them to Sakhalin. So Aphanase Ivanovitch, by way of just reprisals, applied all his strength to blowing the heads off the cruelest of these policemen. That is why he had been locked up in the fortress of Schlüsselburg.
Jailers had beaten him there, sometimes with their bunches of keys, more often with corks, because blows struck in that way leave no marks. In winter they left him without fire, taking his blankets. He had had to eat filthy things. A perhaps equally harsh punishment: he had been deprived of books. And now he was free, in a Russia — this was what a prison employee whispered mysteriously in his ear — where the revolution, that revolution for which he had suffered, was blossoming everywhere. His heart was swollen with expectation and joy.
At the prison office, they had given him some money. He went to the railway station, asked for a ticket to Moscow, took the first train that came. Hours flowed by. He dreamed of the speeches he was going to deliver; for surely they would send him, old fighter and martyr, to carry the people’s wishes to the Constituent Assembly.
But suddenly he was thrown from his seat. The cars crashed together; most were crushed. A man beside him began to howl like a wounded wolf: a long wood splinter had penetrated his skull, putting out an eye. The revolutionaries had derailed the train.
A few hundred sazhens from the twisted rails, tall flames rose to the sky. He made his way toward them, like an insect toward a lamp. It was a large building burning, a sugar refinery, and peasants danced all around, laughing like lunatics. He asked them:
— Why did you burn this factory?
The peasants answered him:
— It doesn’t matter, and on the contrary, since it doesn’t belong to us! It belongs to some kind of imbecile who forced us to plant beets instead of wheat. You can’t eat beets! We want to eat, to eat!
— But, said Aphanase, that is very bad political economy. He paid you for those beets, the owner; he paid you to work in his factory?
The peasants looked at him as if he spoke an incomprehensible language. They cried, still laughing:
— There was far too much sugar! What can you do with so much sugar? Our wives each took twelve, fifteen loaves. No one wants any more, not even the priest’s wife, who is like an ant! So we throw the rest into the pond. It’s like a great glass of sugar water now, the pond, and it’s funny — the fish are dying. Come see!
By cartloads, by heavy crumbling wagonloads, they threw the sugar loaves into a pond. On the short waves, fish floated by the thousands, belly up; and this childish and mad people marveled that what is pleasant to the taste of men should kill the creatures of the waters.
Horses came neighing out of a burning stable. The muzhiks, catching them, severed their hocks. Children played at putting out their eyes. All thought only of destroying. They destroyed for nothing, or for pleasure, or rather because for too long they had been too miserable: like a man whom suffering drives mad, striking with his stick the stones, the grass, and the flowers. A delegate from a socialist committee came to congratulate them, encouraging them to seize the property of the nobles: they applauded. But he neglected to salute the icons and spoke of the tsar with contempt. So they opened his belly with a scythe blade reddened in the fire.
Aphanase Ivanovitch noticed that they were killing without thinking of winning, and pillaging without conquering. He was seized with great anxiety.
At last the steel rails were restored on their ties, the locomotive started up. Aphanase was able to reach Moscow. It was the moment of the great insurrection. He saw two thousand desperate men die in forty-eight hours.
He too, at first, wanted to die. In a house armored with mattresses, beside a few bloodied men armed with ineffective revolvers and now-useless bombs, a crowd of shivering women and terrified children was crushed. And these were poor women, dressed in cotton cloth in the heart of winter, with a shabby shawl over their flat hair; and children covered in rags, with a crucifix-fetish around their necks.
A hundred meters away, thirty cannons opened their maws. An insurgent took Aphanase’s hand and dragged him in his flight. Aphanase pointed to all those innocent people, condemned. But the other murmured that it was good that their husbands and brothers should have dead to avenge. They had barely reached a quay bordered with stone balustrades when the cannons fired. The shells, entering through the blinded openings, exploded in the rooms they had just left. It was as if the house blew up through the windows: such is the effect of the projectiles manufactured today. A great cry was heard from the wretches left behind, and that was all. Aphanase Ivanovitch cried, full of horror:
— I do not wish to stay with you. It is you who are the cause of these poor people’s death. I prefer… I prefer the others!
But as he made his way toward the soldiers, he saw a Cossack sever, with a single saber stroke, the arm of a small child clinging to its mother, as if it were not yet quite born. The little arm fell to the ground. On the poor mutilated hand, only the thumb remained, because the fingers too had been cut off…
In an abandoned post office, Aphanase found a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote:
“To General Dédouline, Prefect of Police.
“Excellency,
“I have the honor of requesting from your high goodness the favor of being readmitted, as a prisoner of state, to the fortress of Schlüsselburg, which I left a week ago…”
The True Story of Bellamano
I am going to tell you the authentic story of Bellamano, Corsican bandit.
Bellamano, of the village of Roccanera, showed from adolescence the rarest qualities. At sixteen, he killed his cousin the vicar; a little later, his brother-in-law the deputy mayor; around the age of twenty-two, having reached the full development of his remarkable physical and intellectual faculties, his friend the customs officer, his uncle the gendarme, and twenty-seven other gendarmes. But meanwhile his goodness extended over all of nature, for he played a great role at election time. He used this to have another of his cousins appointed parish priest; his sister’s second husband made mayor of a cantonal seat; his other brothers-in-law made post office clerks; many of his friends made ministry employees; and most of the inhabitants of Roccanera made gendarmes, or even gendarme sergeants; finally all the widows of those he had killed received tobacco shops. In this way he attracted universal sympathy. Surrounded by respect, he no longer felt the need to do anyone harm. It is true however that one day he felled with a gunshot Pietro Marghieri of Piedicroce. But this was in a perfectly legitimate fit of anger: the man had accused him of not being a good republican.
Bellamano moreover possessed very fine properties that he managed with science and virtue: a chestnut grove, three farms, a vineyard, a considerable herd. He could sit under several fig trees; he sat there like a sage and rejoiced his eyes at the sight of the pregnant ewes and the goats whose abundant milk hardened their pointed teats. It is true that his differences with the law prevented him in appearance from administering himself the goods with which heaven had favored him; but his sons, his strong, attentive, and devoted wife, all the others of his “gens” looked after his interests without cheating him of anything. He contented himself with exact surveillance, and would not allow anyone to attempt to infringe upon his rights. One day, the administration decided to run a new departmental road through his lands. Bellamano applauded at first: he was going to receive an expropriation indemnity. But he then judged that the indemnity offered was insufficient: with the dignity that never left him, he complained to the mayor of Roccanera.
— We shall litigate, he said, we shall litigate! The expropriation jury will render us justice.
— Why, the municipal magistrate replied, you speak of justice? Have you forgotten that you put to death your cousin the vicar, your brother-in-law the deputy mayor, your friend the customs officer, your uncle the gendarme, twenty-seven other gendarmes, and Pietro Marghieri of Piedicroce?
— That has absolutely no connection! replied Bellamano with indignation.
It is incontestable that the expropriation jury did not perceive the connection the mayor had believed he discovered, for it hastened to find in favor of the proprietor against the road authority. Bellamano’s family, still directed by him from the depths of the maquis, had yet other happy dealings with the courts. Thus it won several boundary disputes and successfully opposed a neighbor’s diversion of a spring. Bellamano also contributed, through his efforts, to the voyage to Guyana of a stranger who had circulated counterfeit money in his region. So the people he loved most in the world, after his children, his grandchildren, and those of his clan who recognized his authority, were the men of justice. Bellamano had confidence in the law, whose marvelous benefits he experienced at every hour. He was proud to live under the aegis of a civilized state that so well knows, in Corsica, how to let people settle their family affairs as they see fit, and to enforce on the other hand the regulations without which family life would become a miserable joke. He lived in prosperity, he lived in security, he lived in honor. When the prefect passed near Roccanera, Bellamano the bandit sent him game, and the prefect, discreetly, sent his card in return. A high official of the Second Empire made it his duty to present him with a work of art; a foreign sovereign sent him a cravat pin. He was then seventy years old, but he felt so solid that he still foresaw a long time of glory and legitimate satisfactions. “In ten years,” he thought, “they will give me the Legion of Honor.”
It was doubtless the desire not only to extend his fame but to know that France from which so many good things had come to him, and which had put him in contact with so many functionaries, all so perfect in the exercise of their duties, that one day induced him to leave Corsica and settle in Marseille. He found, on the Allées de Meilhan, a modest but comfortable lodging, in every way agreeable to his tastes. The bustle of the city pleased him, the climate seemed almost as mild as Corsica’s, and he felt passing over his head, as in his homeland, the sea air, only a little laden with the smells of a great port. He lived like a patriarch: he ate, as in his village, chestnuts, kid stews, fruits and vegetables, for which he had a passion.
But it happened that one day the fruits and vegetables ran out.
— It’s because of the dockers’ strike, they told him. The early produce comes from Algeria, and the dockers refuse to unload the ships.
— Well, said Bellamano, astonished, why doesn’t someone have the ships unloaded by other people?
— There are plenty who would ask nothing better, they told him, but the dockers beat them up.
— And why, Bellamano continued, doesn’t the government protect those people?
— The government, said his interlocutor, taken aback. What government?
— But, pursued Bellamano, the government!
— We have never heard of such a thing in France, replied this Frenchman, after having meditated.
Then Bellamano began to grow sad.
Some time later, burglars visited his apartment. They took from him a glorious carbine, daggers with chased handles — gifts from enthusiastic men of letters — the art object bestowed upon him by the official of the Second Empire, and the cravat pin from the foreign sovereign.
— I am going directly to file a complaint, said Bellamano.
— What for? they asked him.
— A fine question! he answered. To have the thieves arrested.
— Spare yourself the trouble, his adviser observed. There are already twelve thousand other complaints in Marseille that have never been followed up.
Bellamano’s health began to decline. He no longer understood anything about the organization of society. This man whose composure had always been admired became nervous. He even reached the point of being unable to bear the noise of the streetcars passing under his windows.
— Let them pass, he said. I consent. But they have put Chinese hats on their heads that they ring all the time; and there are others who blow hunting horns. I have the right to sleep, and I am going to write to the police commissioner about it.
— The police commissioner? they answered him with stupefaction. But here the police commissioner can do nothing about anything!