A Drama on the Seashore | Page 4

finds itself restored, as it were, to the
world whence it came? Are there not hours when feelings clasp each
other and fly upward, like children taking hands and running, they
scarce know why? It was thus we went along.
At the moment when the village roofs began to show like a faint gray
line on the horizon, we met a fisherman, a poor man returning to
Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousers ragged round the bottom;
his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This abject poverty
pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmonies. We looked at each
other, grieving mutually that we had not at that moment the power to
dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a splendid lobster
and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman was dangling in his
right hand, while with the left he held his tackle and his net.
We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which
came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was one
of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place
where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments
when life sits lightly and our hearts are full. The loveliest scenery is

that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not
remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater
place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands,
sought at great cost. Beside that rock, tumultuous thoughts! There a
whole life evolved; there all fears dispersed; there the rays of hope
descended to the soul! At this moment, the sun, sympathizing with
these thoughts of love and of the future, had cast an ardent glow upon
the savage flanks of the rock; a few wild mountain flowers were visible;
the stillness and the silence magnified that rugged pile,-- really sombre,
though tinted by the dreamer, and beautiful beneath its scanty
vegetation, the warm chamomile, the Venus' tresses with their velvet
leaves. Oh, lingering festival; oh, glorious decorations; oh, happy
exaltation of human forces! Once already the lake of Brienne had
spoken to me thus. The rock of Croisic may be perhaps the last of these
my joys. If so, what will become of Pauline?
"Have you had a good catch to-day, my man?" I said to the fisherman.
"Yes, monsieur," he replied, stopping and turning toward us the
swarthy face of those who spend whole days exposed to the reflection
of the sun upon the water.
That face was an emblem of long resignation, of the patience of a
fisherman and his quiet ways. The man had a voice without harshness,
kind lips, evidently no ambition, and something frail and puny about
him. Any other sort of countenance would, at that moment, have jarred
upon us.
"Where shall you sell your fish?"
"In the town."
"How much will they pay you for that lobster?"
"Fifteen sous."
"And the crab?"
"Twenty sous."
"Why so much difference between a lobster and a crab?"
"Monsieur, the crab is much more delicate eating. Besides, it's as
malicious as a monkey, and it seldom lets you catch it."
"Will you let us buy the two for a hundred sous?" asked Pauline.
The man seemed petrified.
"You shall not have it!" I said to her, laughing. "I'll pay ten francs; we
should count the emotions in."

"Very well," she said, "then I'll pay ten francs, two sous."
"Ten francs, ten sous."
"Twelve francs."
"Fifteen francs."
"Fifteen francs, fifty centimes," she said.
"One hundred francs."
"One hundred and fifty francs."
I yielded. We were not rich enough at that moment to bid higher. Our
poor fisherman did not know whether to be angry at a hoax, or to go
mad with joy; we drew him from his quandary by giving him the name
of our landlady and telling him to take the lobster and the crab to her
house.
"Do you earn enough to live on?" I asked the man, in order to discover
the cause of his evident penury.
"With great hardships, and always poorly," he replied. "Fishing on the
coast, when one hasn't a boat or deep-sea nets, nothing but pole and
line, is a very uncertain business. You see we have to wait for the fish,
or the shell-fish; whereas a real fisherman puts out to sea for them. It is
so hard to earn a living this way that I'm the