The Aspirations of Jean Servien | Page 2

hot day, take a chair on the way back
along the boulevard outside the door of a wine-shop. There, as he sat
slowly emptying his glass, his eye would rest on the mothers and their
youngsters going by on the sidewalk.
These young wives, as he watched them approach and pass on, were so
many passing reminders of his Clotilde and made him feel sad without
his quite understanding why, for he was not much given to thinking.
Time slipped by, and little by little his dead wife grew to be a tender,
vague memory in the bookbinder's mind. One night he tried in vain to
recall Clotilde's features; after this experience, he told himself that
perhaps he might be able to discover the mother's lineaments in the
child's face, and he was seized with a great longing to see this relic of
the lost one once more, to have the child home again.
In the morning he wrote a letter to his old sister, Mademoiselle Servien,
begging her to come and take up her abode with the little one in the
Rue Notre-Dame des Champs. The sister, who had lived for many years
in Paris at her brother's expense, for indolence was her ruling passion,
agreed to resume her life in a city where, she used to say, folks are free
and need not depend on their neighbours.
One autumn evening she arrived at the Gare de l'Ouest with Jean and
her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed figure, all
ready to defend the child against all sorts of imaginary perils. The
bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his satisfaction in two words.
Then he lifted him pickaback on his shoulders, and bidding him hold
on tight to his father's hair, carried him off proudly to the house.

Jean was seven. Soon existence settled down to a settled routine. At
midday the old dame would don her shawl and set off with the child in
the direction of Grenelle.
The pair followed the broad thoroughfares that ran between shabby
walls and red-fronted drinking-shops. Generally speaking, a sky of a
dappled grey like the great cart-horses that plodded past, invested the
quiet suburb with a gentle melancholy. Establishing herself on a bench,
while the child played under a tree, she would knit her stocking and
chat with an old soldier and tell him her troubles--what a hard life it
was in other people's houses.
One day, one of the last fine days of the season, Jean, squatted on the
ground, was busy sticking up bits of plane-tree bark in the fine wet
sand. That faculty of "pretending," by which children are able to make
their lives one unending miracle, transformed a handful of soil and a
few bits of wood into wondrous galleries and fairy castles to the lad's
imagination; he clapped his hands and leapt for joy. Then suddenly he
felt himself wrapped in something soft and scented. It was a lady's
gown; he saw nothing except that she smiled as she put him gently out
of her way and walked on. He ran to tell his aunt:
"How good she smells, that lady!"
Mademoiselle Servien only muttered that great ladies were no better
than others, and that she thought more of herself with her merino skirt
than all those set-up minxes in their flounces and finery, adding:
"Better a good name than a gilt girdle."
But this talk was beyond little Jean's comprehension. The perfumed silk
that had swept his face left behind a vague sweetness, a memory as of a
gentle, ghostly caress.

III
One evening in summer the bookbinder was enjoying the fresh air

before his door when a big man with a red nose, past middle age and
wearing a scarlet waistcoat stained with grease-spots, appeared, bowing
politely and confidentially, and addressed him in a sing-song voice in
which even Monsieur Servien could detect an Italian accent:
"Sir, I have translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, the immortal
masterpiece of Torquato Tasso"--and a bulging packet of manuscript
under his arm confirmed the statement.
"Yes, sir, I have devoted sleepless nights to this glorious and ungrateful
task. Without family or fatherland, I have written my translation in dark,
ice-cold garrets, on chandlers' wrappers, snuff papers, the backs of
playing cards! Such has been the exile's task! You, sir, you live in your
own land, in the bosom of a happy family--at least I hope so."
This speech, which impressed him by its magniloquence and its
strangeness, set the bookbinder dreaming of the dead woman he had
loved, and he saw her in his mind's eye coiling her beautiful hair as in
the early days of their married life.
The big man proceeded:
"Man is like a plant which perishes when the storms uproot it.
"Here is your son,