The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de MaupassantЧитать онлайн книгу.
front of the church, a dense crowd was awaiting them.
Andermatt cried: “At last! at last! Come, make haste. See, this is the order: two choir-boys, two chanters in surplices, the cross, the holy water, the priest, then Christiane with Professor Cloche, Mademoiselle Louise with Professor Remusot, and Mademoiselle Charlotte with Professor Mas-Roussel. Next come the members of the Board, the medical body, then the public. This is understood. Forward!”
The ecclesiastical staff thereupon left the church, taking their places at the head of the procession. Then a tall gentleman with white hair brushed back over his ears, the typical “scientist,” in accordance with the academic form, approached Madame Andermatt, and saluted her with a low bow.
When he had straightened himself up again, with his head uncovered, in order to display his beautiful, scientific head, and his hat resting on his thigh with an imposing air as if he had learned to walk at the Comédie Française, and to show the people his rosette of officer of the Legion of Honor, too big for a modest man.
He began to talk: ‘‘Your husband, Madame, has been speaking to me about you just now, and about your condition which gives rise to some affectionate disquietude. He has told me about your doubts and your hesitations as to the probable moment of your delivery.”
She reddened to the temples, and she murmured: “Yes, I believed that I would be a mother a very long time before the event. Now I can’t tell either — I can’t tell either— “
She faltered in a state of utter confusion.
A voice from behind them said: “This station has a very great future before it. I have already obtained surprising effects.”
It was Professor Remusot addressing his companion, Louise Oriol. This gentleman was small, with yellow, unkempt hair, and a frock-coat badly cut, the dirty look of a slovenly savant.
Professor Mas-Roussel, who gave his arm to Charlotte Oriol, was a handsome physician, without beard or mustache, smiling, well-groomed, hardly turning gray as yet, a little fleshy, and, with his smooth, clean-shaven face, resembling neither a priest nor an actor, as was the case with Doctor Latonne.
Next came the members of the Board, with Andermatt at their head, and the tall hats of old Oriol and his son towering above them.
Behind them came another row of tall hats, the medical body of Enval, among whom Doctor Bonnefille was not included, his place, indeed, being taken by two new physicians, Doctor Black, a very short old man almost a dwarf, whose excessive piety had surprised the whole district since the day of his arrival; then a very good-looking young fellow, very much given to flirtation, and wearing a small hat, Doctor Mazelli, an Italian attached to the person of the Duc de Ramas — others said, to the person of the Duchesse.
And behind them could be seen the public, a flood of people — bathers, peasants, and inhabitants of the adjoining towns.
The ceremony of blessing the springs was very short. The Abbé Litre sprinkled them one after the other with holy water, which made Doctor Honorât say that he was going to give them new properties with chloride of sodium. Then all the persons specially invited entered the large reading-room, where a collation had been served.
Paul said to Gontran: “How pretty the little Oriol girls have become!”
“They are charming, my dear fellow.”
“You have not seen M. le President?” suddenly inquired the ex-jailer overseer.
“Yes, he is over there, in the corner.”
“Père Clovis is gathering a big crowd in front of the door.”
Already, while moving in the direction of the springs for the purpose of having them blessed, the entire procession had filed off in front of the old invalid, cured the year before, and now again more paralyzed than ever. He would stop the visitors on the road and the last-comers as a matter of choice, in order to tell them his story:
“These waters here, you see, are no good — they cure, ’tis true, but you relapse again afterward, and after this relapse you’re half a corpse. As for me, my legs were better before, and here I am now with my arms gone in consequence of the cure. And my legs, they’re iron, but iron that you have to cut before it bends.”
Andermatt, filled with vexation, had tried to prosecute him in a court of justice and to get him sent to jail for having depreciated the waters of Mont Oriol and having attempted extortion. But he had not succeeded in obtaining a conviction or in shutting the old fellow’s mouth.
The moment he was informed that the old vagabond was babbling before the door of the establishment, he rushed out to make Clovis keep silent.
At the side of the highroad, in the center of an excited crowd, he heard angry voices. People pressed forward to listen and to see. Some ladies asked: “What is this?” Some men replied: “’Tis an invalid, whom the waters here have finished.” Others believed that an infant had just been squashed. It was also said that a poor woman had got an attack of epilepsy.
Andermatt broke through the crowd, as he knew how to do, by violently pushing his little round stomach between the stomachs of other people. “It proves,” Gontran remarked, “the superiority of balls to points.”
Père Clovis, sitting on the ditch, whined about his pains, recounted his sufferings in a sniveling tone, while standing in front of him, and separating him from the public, the Oriols, father and son, exasperated, were hurling insults and threats at him as loudly as ever they could.
“That’s not true,” cried Colosse. “This fellow is a liar, a sham, a poacher, who runs all night through the wood.”
But the old fellow, without getting excited, kept reiterating in a high, piercing voice which was heard above the vociferations of the two Oriols: “They’ve killed me, my good monchieus, they’ve killed me with their water. They bathed me in it by force last year. And here I am at this moment — here I am!” Andermatt imposed silence on all, and stooping toward the impotent man, said to him, looking into the depths of his eyes: “If you are worse, it is your own fault, mind. If you listen to me, I undertake to cure you, I do, with fifteen or twenty baths at most. Come and look me up at the establishment in an hour, when the people have all gone away, my good father. In the meantime, hold your tongue.”
The old fellow had understood. He became silent, then, after a pause, he answered: “I’m always willing to give it a fair trial. You’ll see.”
Andermatt caught the two Oriols by the arms and quickly dragged them away; while Père Clovis remained stretched on the grass between his crutches, at the side of the road, blinking his eyes under the rays of the sun.
The puzzled crowd kept pressing round him. Some gentlemen questioned him, but he did not reply, as though he had not heard or understood; and as this curiosity, futile just now, ended by fatiguing him, he began to sing, bareheaded, in a voice as false as it was shrill, an interminable ditty in an unintelligible dialect.
The crowd ebbed away gradually. Only a few children remained standing a long time in front of him, with their fingers in their noses, contemplating him.
Christiane, exceedingly tired, had gone in to take a rest. Paul and Gontran walked about through the new park in the midst of the visitors. Suddenly they saw the company of players, who had also deserted the old Casino, to attach themselves to the growing fortunes of the new.
Mademoiselle Odelin, who had become quite fashionable, was leaning as she walked on the arm of her mother, who had assumed an air of importance. M. Petitnivelle, of the Vaudeville, appeared very attentive to these ladies, who followed M. Lapalme of the Grand Theater of Bordeaux, arguing with the musicians just as of old, the maestro Saint Landri, the pianist Javel, the flautist Noirot, and the double-bass Nicordi.
On perceiving Paul and Gontran, Saint Landri rushed toward them. He had, during the winter, got a very small musical composition performed in a very small out-of-the-way theater; but the newspapers had spoken of him with a certain favor, and he now treated