Ten Tales | Page 8

a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers, roared out his furious
appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of loafers, soldiers, and
women, I regarded the abject spectacle with disgust--the last vestige of
the olympic games.
Suddenly the music ceased, and the crowd broke into roars of laughter.

The clown had just made his appearance.
[Illustration]
He wore the ordinary costume of his kind, the short vest and
many-colored stockings of the peasants of the opera comique, the three
horns turned backward, the red wig with its turned-up queue and its
butterfly on the end. He was a young man, but alas, his face, whitened
with flour, was already seamed with vice. Planting himself before the
public, and opening his mouth in a silly grin, he showed bleeding gums
almost devoid of teeth. The ringmaster kicked him violently from
behind.
"Come in," he said, tranquilly.
Then the traditional dialogue, punctuated by slaps in the face, began
between the mountebank and his clown, and the entire audience
applauded these souvenirs of the classic farce, fallen from the theatre to
the stage of the mountebank, and whose humor, coarse but pungent,
seemed a drunken echo of the laughter of Molière. The clown exerted
his low talent, throwing out at each moment some low jest, some
immodest pun, to which his master, simulating a prudish indignation,
responded by thumps on the head. But the adroit clown excelled in the
art of receiving affronts. He knew to perfection how to bend his body
like a bow under the impulse of a kick, and having received on one
cheek a full-armed blow, he stuffed his tongue at once in that cheek and
began to whine until a new blow passed the artificial swelling into the
other cheek. Blows showered on him as thick as hail, and, disappearing
under a shower of slaps, the flour on his face and the red powder of his
wig enveloped him like a cloud. At last he exhausted all his resources
of low scurrility, ridiculous contortions, grotesque grimaces, pretended
aches, falls at full length, etc., till the ringmaster, judging this
gratuitous show long enough, and that the public were sufficiently
fascinated, sent him off with a final cuff.
Then the music began again with such violence that the painted canvas
trembled. The clown, having seized the sticks of a drum fixed on one of
the beams of the scaffolding, mingled a triumphant rataplan with the

bombardment of the bass-drum, the cracked thunder of the cymbals,
and the distracted wail of the clarionet. The ringmaster, roaring again
with his heavy voice, announced that the show was about to begin, and,
as a sign of defiance, he threw two or three old fencing-gloves among
his fellow-wrestlers. The crowd rushed into the tent, and soon only a
small group of loungers remained in front of the deserted stage.
I was just going off, when I noticed by my side an old woman who
looked with strange persistence at the empty stage where the red lights
were still burning. She wore the linen bonnet and the crossed fichu of
the poorer class of women, and her whole appearance was that of
neatness and honesty. Asking myself what powerful interest could hold
her in such a place, I looked at her with more attention, and I saw that
her eyes were full of tears, and that her hands, which she had crossed
over her breast, were trembling with emotion.
"What is the matter with you?" I said, coming near to her, impelled by
an instinctive sympathy.
"The matter, good sir?" cried the old woman, bursting into tears.
"Passing by this market-place--oh, quite by chance, I tell you (I have no
heart for pleasure)--passing before that dreadful tent, I have just seen in
the wretch who has received all those blows my only son, sir, my sole
child! It is the grief of my life, do you see? I never knew what had
become of him since--oh, since my poor husband sent him away to sea
as a cabin-boy. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger, sir. He robbed
his master--he, the son of two honest people. As for me, I would have
pardoned him. You know what mothers are. But my man, when they
came and told him that his son had stolen, he was like a madman. It
was that that killed him, I am sure. I have never seen the unhappy child
again. For five years I have heard nothing from him. I sought to deceive
myself. I said experience will reform him, and there--there--just now--"
And the poor old woman sobbed in a pitiful way. A crowd had formed.
It was no longer to me that she spoke; it was not to the crowd; it was to
herself, to the bitterness of her