The Aspirations of Jean Servien

Aspirations of Jean Servien, by
Anatole France

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Title: The Aspirations of Jean Servien
Author: Anatole France
Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11060]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN ***

Produced by Robert J. Hall

THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN
BY ANATOLE FRANCE
A TRANSLATION BY ALFRED ALLINSON

I
Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the Rue Notre-Dame des
Champs. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the Religious
Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother nursed him at
her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet, with the curved
needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing the shop, humming a
song, in the words of which she found expression for the vague,
splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her foot slipped on the
boards, which were moist with paste.
Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held clasped
to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a severe blow against
the corner of the iron press. She felt no very acute pain at the time, but
later on an abscess formed, which got well, but presently reopened, and
a low fever supervened that confined her to her bed.
There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little one in her
one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish whisper bits of her
favourite ditty:
The fisherman, when dawn is nigh, Peers forth to greet the kindling
sky....
Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of each verse
with only the change of a word. It was her little Jean's lullaby, who
became, at the caprice of the words, turn and turn about, General,
Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar in her fond hopes.
A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of
fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp and the
vague tales of concierges, footmen, and cooks, she pictured her boy at
twenty more beautiful than an archangel, his breast glittering with
decorations, in a drawing-room full of flowers, amid a bevy of
fashionable ladies with manners every whit as genteel as had the
actresses at the Gymnase:

But for the nonce, on mother's breast, Sweet wee gallant, take thy rest.
Presently the vision changed; now her boy was standing up gowned in
Court, by his eloquence saving the life and honour of some illustrious
client:
But for the nonce, on mother's breast, Sweet wee pleader, take thy rest.
Presently again he was an officer under fire, in a brilliant uniform, on a
prancing charger, victorious in battle, like the great Generals whose
portraits she had seen one Sunday at Versailles:
But for the nonce, on mother's breast, Sweet wee general, take thy rest.
But when night was creeping into the room, a new picture would dazzle
her eyes, a picture this of other and incomparably greater glories.
Proud in her motherhood, yet humble too at heart, she was gazing from
the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad in sacerdotal
vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted choir censed by the
beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she would tremble
awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this poor sick
work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping in the
poisoned air of a back-shop:
But for the nonce, on mother's breast, My sweet boy-bishop, take thy
rest.
One evening, as her husband handed her a cooling drink, she said to
him in a tone of regret:
"Why did you disturb me? I could see the Holy Virgin among flowers
and precious stones and lights. It was so beautiful! so beautiful!"
She said she was no longer in pain, that she wished her Jean to learn
Latin. And she passed away.

II
The widower, who from the Beauce country, sent his son to his native
village in the Eure-et-Loir to be brought up by kinsfolk there. As for
himself, he was a strong man, and soon learned to be resigned; he was
of a saving habit by instinct in both business and family matters, and
never put off the green serge apron from week's end to week's end save
for a Sunday visit to the cemetery. He would hang a wreath on the arm
of the black cross, and, if it was a