A Drama on the Seashore | Page 5

only man in these parts
who fishes along-shore. I spend whole days without getting anything.
To catch a crab, it must go to sleep, as this one did, and a lobster must
be silly enough to stay among the rocks. Sometimes after a high tide
the mussels come in and I grab them."
"Well, taking one day with another, how much do you earn?"
"Oh, eleven or twelve sous. I could do with that if I were alone; but I
have got my old father to keep, and he can't do anything, the good man,
because he's blind."
At these words, said simply, Pauline and I looked at each other without
a word; then I asked,--
"Haven't you a wife, or some good friend?"
He cast upon us one of the most lamentable glances that I ever saw as
he answered,--
"If I had a wife I must abandon my father; I could not feed him and a
wife and children too."
"Well, my poor lad, why don't you try to earn more at the salt marshes,
or by carrying the salt to the harbor?"
"Ah, monsieur, I couldn't do that work three months. I am not strong

enough, and if I died my father would have to beg. I am forced to take a
business which only needs a little knack and a great deal of patience."
"But how can two persons live on twelve sous a day?"
"Oh, monsieur, we eat cakes made of buckwheat, and barnacles which I
get off the rocks."
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-seven."
"Did you ever leave Croisic?"
"I went once to Guerande to draw for the conscription; and I went to
Savenay to the messieurs who measure for the army. If I had been half
an inch taller they'd have made me a soldier. I should have died of my
first march, and my poor father would to-day be begging his bread."
I had thought out many dramas; Pauline was accustomed to great
emotions beside a man so suffering as myself; well, never had either of
us listened to words so moving as these. We walked on in silence,
measuring, each of us, the silent depths of that obscure life, admiring
the nobility of a devotion which was ignorant of itself. The strength of
that feebleness amazed us; the man's unconscious generosity belittled
us. I saw that poor being of instinct chained to that rock like a
galley-slave to his ball; watching through twenty years for shell-fish to
earn a living, and sustained in his patience by a single sentiment. How
many hours wasted on a lonely shore! How many hopes defeated by a
change of weather! He was hanging there to a granite rock, his arm
extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his father, sitting in their
hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a meal of the coarsest bread
and shell-fish, if the sea permitted.
"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked.
"Three or four times a year," he replied.
"Well, you shall drink it to-day,--you and your father; and we will send
you some white bread."
"You are very kind, monsieur."
"We will give you your dinner if you will show us the way along the
shore to Batz, where we wish to see the tower which overlooks the bay
between Batz and Croisic."
"With pleasure," he said. "Go straight before you, along the path you
are now on, and I will follow you when I have put away my tackle."
We nodded consent, and he ran off joyfully toward the town. This

meeting maintained us in our previous mental condition; but it lessened
our gay lightheartedness.
"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which removes from the
compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we
not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"
"Nothing is so cruelly painful as to have powerless desires," I answered.
"Those two poor creatures, the father and son, will never know how
keen our sympathy for them is, any more than the world will know how
beautiful are their lives; they are laying up their treasures in heaven."
"Oh, how poor this country is!" she said, pointing to a field enclosed by
a dry stone wall, which was covered with droppings of cow's dung
applied symmetrically. "I asked a peasant-woman who was busy
sticking them on, why it was done; she answered that she was making
fuel. Could you have imagined that when those patches of dung have
dried, human beings would collect them, store them, and use them for
fuel? During the winter, they are even sold as peat is sold. And what do
you suppose the best dressmaker in the place can earn?--five sous a
day!" adding, after a pause, "and her food."