NOVELS BY Paul de Kock VOLUME XVIII LE COCU

THE JEFFERSON PRESS BOSTON NEW YORK

Copyrighted, 1903-1904, by G. B. & Sons.

PREFACE BECAUSE OF THE TITLE

I have never written prefaces to my novels; I have always considered what an author says in a preface, what he therein explains beforehand to the reader, as utterly useless. The reader would be entitled to reply, as Alceste replies to Orontes: “We shall see.”

Nor have I ever supposed that the public read a novel in order to talk with its author. It matters little to my readers, I presume, whether I am young or old, short or tall, whether I write in the morning or at night; what they want is a work that pleases them, in which there is enough of truth to enable them to identify themselves with the characters; and if the author constantly talks of himself and stations himself between his heroes and his reader, it seems to me that he destroys the illusion and injures his own work.

My reason for placing a preface at the head of this book has to do with the title—that title which has caused persons to recoil in dismay who do not balk at executioners, damned, tortured, guillotined, and other pleasant conceits in which authors indulge without objection. I propose, not to justify myself, for I do not think myself guilty, but to reassure some of my readers of the gentler sex, whom my title might alarm beyond measure.

Le Cocu! What is there so indecent in the word, pray? In the first place, what does it mean? A married man who is deceived by his wife, a husband whose wife is unfaithful. Would you like me to give my book such a title as The Husband whose Wife was False to Her Vows? That would resemble a Pontoise poster. Was it not clearer and simpler to take the one word which, alone, means all that?

You might have called it the Predestined, someone may say. My answer to that is that that title would have been excellent for those who understood it, but that very many people would never have guessed that it meant cuckold; that everybody is not familiar with such conventional language, and that I write to be understood by everybody.

But, after all, why enter upon such a crusade against a word so often and so happily employed on the stage? Who does not know that the immortal Molière called one of his plays The Imaginary Cuckold? I have seen that play acted, and consequently advertised in the streets of Paris, less than three years ago—at a time, however, when we permitted ourselves many fewer liberties than at present; and yet I saw no one draw back with horror or disgust, or indulge in any of these indignant, nervous outbursts on reading the poster of the Théâtre-Français on which the announcement of The Imaginary Cuckold was printed. I think, however, that we should be more strict with respect to what is said on the stage, than with respect to what is put in a novel; for, if I take my daughter to the play, and if the characters make unseemly remarks, I cannot prevent my daughter from hearing them; whereas it is a very easy matter for me to prevent her reading a novel in which such things are expressed.

But I repeat, the word cuckold should raise a laugh, and that is all. Is not that the effect which it produces at the theatre?

I know that someone will say: “What was all right long ago may not be right now; other times, other morals.”

I will answer: Other times, other customs, other styles of clothes, other hours for meals,—that is all very true; but as to other morals, I refuse to believe it. We have the same passions, the same failings, the same absurdities as our fathers. I am fully convinced that we are no better than they; those passions and vices may be concealed under more polished forms, but the substance is always the same. Civilization makes men more amiable, more clever in concealing their faults; the progress of knowledge makes them better informed and less credulous. But whereby will you prove to me that it makes them less selfish, less ambitious, less envious, less dissipated? No; the men of to-day are no better than those of an earlier day, or than those who will live a thousand years hence, if men still exist at that time, which I will not assert, but which may be presumed. Let us not be scandalized to-day by what made our ancestors laugh; let us not make a show of being so strict, so fastidious—for that proves nothing in favor of our virtue. At the

theatre respectable mothers of families laugh heartily at a somewhat broad jest, but kept women make wry faces, or hold their fans before their eyes.

Secondly, when authors go so far in what is called the romantic style, why should people be any more rigorous with respect to the jovial style, in regard to pictures of society? Because I describe a contemporaneous scene, must I be on my guard against allowing my pen too free a swing? Is that privilege reserved exclusively for those who carry us back to past ages, and who array their characters in vast top boots and short cloaks?

While I am addressing my readers, especially those of the fair sex, I cannot resist the temptation to reply to the criticism that has sometimes been made to the effect that I write immoral books.

Books that are merry, that tend to arouse laughter only, may be a little free, without being licentious for that reason. Although sensuality is dangerous, jests never arouse it. A work which makes the reader sigh, which excites the imagination, is far more dangerous than one which causes laughter. Those persons who have failed to see the moral purpose of my novels have not chosen to see it. I do not consider it necessary to be morose, in order to offer a lesson or two to one’s readers. Molière did not chastise the faults and follies of men, and turn their vices into ridicule, with a scowl on his face.

In Georgette, I have sketched the life of a kept woman; she ends in a way not likely to attract imitators. In Brother Jacques, I have depicted a gambler, and shown to what lengths that horrible passion may carry us. In the Barber of Paris two men yield to their respective passions, avarice and libertinage. Both are punished wherein they have sinned. Jean proves that a worthily placed passion may make us blush for our manners, for our ignorance, and may arouse our disgust of bad company and low resorts. In the Milkmaid of Montfermeil, I have tried to prove that money expended in benefactions reaps a better harvest than that squandered in follies. André the Savoyard is the story of a poor child of the mountains; by behaving becomingly, by assisting his mother and brother, by giving all that he owns to his benefactress, he succeeds in being happy and in conquering a hopeless love. Sister Anne is a girl seduced and abandoned. Her seducer, confronted by his mistress and his wife at once, is given a rough lesson. The Wife, the Husband and

the Lover presents only too true a picture of the conduct of many married people. The Natural Man and the Civilized Man must demonstrate the advantages of education. If these works have not a moral, it is probably because I was unable to write them with sufficient skill to bring it home to my readers.

But I have said enough, yes, too much, of my novels; and all apropos of this poor Cocu! In heaven’s name, mesdames, do not let the title alarm you. The epigraph of the book must have reassured you to some slight extent: read on therefore without fear, do not condemn without a hearing. Perhaps you will find this novel less hilarious than you imagine; perhaps indeed you will think that I might have, that I should have presented my hero in quite a different guise. But if this novel, such as it is, does not please you, forgive me, mesdames; I will try to do better in another work; for Le Cocu, which I offer you to-day, will not, I trust, be the last that I shall write.

CH. PAUL DE KOCK.

I A READING ROOM

“Madame, give me the Constitutionnel.”

“They are all in use at the moment, monsieur.”

“Well, then give me the Courrier Français.”

“Here’s the first sheet of it, monsieur. You shall have the rest in a moment.”

“When I read a newspaper, madame, I like to have it whole; with this new fashion of yours, of cutting the paper in two, you sometimes make us wait at the most interesting places, and that is very unpleasant.”

“But, monsieur, we can’t take ten copies of the same paper! The expenses are big enough already! By cutting the paper, it is easier to accommodate a number of people, and the second sheet of the Courrier Français will certainly be returned before you have read the first.”

“That is not certain. I am not one of those people who spend an hour reading a column. I want a whole paper.”

“Will you have the Débats?”

“Very well, give me the Débats.”

The gentleman who insisted upon having a whole newspaper, like the children who insist upon having a dish to themselves at a restaurant, although they often cannot eat half of it, had entered the reading room grumbling; he took his seat upon a bench between two readers, one of whom, a young and courteous man, moved along to make room for him, while the other, who was old and wrinkled, with his hair brushed à la pigeon’s wing, glanced crossly at the newcomer and turned his back on him after muttering in a sour tone:

“Be careful, monsieur, you are sitting on my coat.”

I was standing at the door of the room, where I rarely remain long; I easily obtained a whole newspaper, because I selected a humble literary sheet; and in these days when politics engrosses everybody, mere literature is cruelly neglected. I can readily understand that people are interested in and absorbed by the interests of our country. There are times when I myself read the great newspapers eagerly; but even then I could not pass hours poring over them. What would you have? One cannot make oneself over, and politics has never been in my line. Indeed, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that that would be a most blessed country where the people were never called upon to busy themselves with politics.

I wanted to know what the papers said about the play that was produced the day before at the Variétés. One paper declared that is was detestable, another pronounced it delightful; is it possible to form an opinion upon such judgments?

“Madame, give me the Quotidienne, please, and the Gazette de France, if nobody has them.”

“No, monsieur, nobody has them; here they are.”

I turned to look. One often turns to look when one is not reading anything serious; I wanted to see the gentleman who had taken the Gazette and the Quotidienne. I saw a very tall, straight individual, with smooth, plastered hair, curly behind the ears; with a furtive eye and a honeyed voice; I was on the point of saying, with red ears and a flushed complexion; in truth, he had both these, and if I had looked at him before he spoke, I could have guessed what papers he would have asked for. Some people claim that the face is deceitful; but no, it is not so deceitful as it is said to be, especially to those who take the trouble to examine it carefully.

I still held my paper in my hand but I was no longer reading it. I amused myself by scrutinizing all those faces leaning over the printed pages. It would have made a pretty picture for a genre painter. That stout man, with his elbows resting on the table covered with the conventional green cloth, had the air of a potentate called upon to arbitrate between neighboring kings. Sometimes he protruded his lower lip, dissatisfied doubtless with what was being done; but soon his expression softened, his mouth resumed its usual expression, and a slight nod of the head indicated that he was better pleased with what he was reading.

At his right, a short, gray-haired man was reading with an avidity which was depicted upon every feature. It mattered little to him that people came in and went out, coughed, blew their noses, or sat down beside him; his eyes did not leave for one second the sheet that he held before them, and they gleamed like a young man’s. There was patriotism, glory, liberty in that expression.

Beyond him, a man of uncertain age, a man with a mania; that could be seen at a glance. The lamp must be exactly in front of him, his feet must have a chair to rest upon, and his snuff-box must be placed beside his paper. If all these conditions were not exactly fulfilled, then he was perfectly wretched and had no idea what he was reading. I soon had a proof of it: his neighbor moved his snuff-box with his elbow, whereupon he raised his eyes angrily and glared at the offender, muttering:

“It seems to me that you have room enough, and that it isn’t in your way!”

It was several minutes before he could resume his reading in peace, and he did not do so until he had replaced his box at the same distance from his hand as before. But soon a more serious accident happened: as there were many people in the room, a newcomer ventured to take the chair upon which his feet were resting. Thereupon the man with the mania was completely upset; after glancing askance at the person who had presumed to take such a liberty, he rose, walked to the desk, angrily threw down the newspaper and a sou, and left the room, saying:

“It’s outrageous! it is impossible to read the news when one is interrupted and disturbed every moment.”

The man with the smooth hair had taken a seat in the corner at the end of the room. From time to time he cast a furtive glance about him; then he resumed his reading, but very quietly, without moving, without the slightest change of expression.

Just beyond him, a stupid faced man had been leaning over the same sheet for an interminable time; but he was not asleep, as I thought at first. That man was, so I was told, the terror of all reading rooms. He regularly took four hours to read an ordinary newspaper, and six to read the Moniteur. If those who let newspapers had many customers like him, they would have to charge by the hour, as at billiards.

I was about to return to my literary review, but my attention was distracted by a female voice which rang in my ears; anything of the feminine gender always distracts my attention. I instantly abandoned the regular customers of the reading room, and looked into the next room at the right, which was filled with tables covered with books; for at that establishment books as well as papers were let; and in truth it was wisely done, for in these days, in order to earn one’s living, it is none too much, in fact sometimes it is not enough, to do two things at once.

As I was standing between the two rooms, it was easy for me to look into the one devoted to books: I saw a woman of some twenty years, with a bright, wide-awake face. Her dress indicated that she lived near by; her head was uncovered; a black silk apron à corsage fitted her snugly; but her feet were in list slippers which were much too large for her, and she also had a thimble on one of her hands, which were covered with old gloves of which the fingers were cut off. She tripped in, smiling, and placed a package of books on the desk, saying:

“Here! we have devoured all these already!”

“What! why, you only got them yesterday!”

“Oh! we read fast at our house; my aunt doesn’t do anything else, and my sister has a sore thumb and couldn’t work; she often has a sore thumb, my sister has; and my brother much prefers reading novels to practising on the violin. I confess that I like it much better too, when he is not practising; it’s so tiresome to have a violin forever scraping in your ears; oh! it sets my teeth on edge just to think of it. I have a horror of a violin—What are you going to give me? We want something nice.”

“I don’t just know, you read so fast; before long you will have read all the books I have got.”

“We want something new.”

“New! that’s what all the subscribers say; they think that nothing is good except what is new; and yet we have some old novels which are far ahead of the modern ones. ”

“Bah! you say that to get me to take your Cleveland, your Tom Jones and your old Doyen de Killerine again.”

“The Doyen de Killerine is a very good book, mademoiselle, and——”

“Madame, I don’t take any interest in a hunchback hero with crooked legs and patches over his eyes. No! no! what I like is a handsome young man, very dark and well-built, with a noble carriage; he is all right,—you can imagine him and fancy that you are looking at him. When he makes love, you say to yourself: ‘I’d like to have a lover like him;’ and there’s some pleasure in that.”

The proprietress smiled; I did the same, while pretending to be engrossed in my paper. The young woman fluttered from one table to another; she would take up a book, open it, then put it back on its shelf, saying:

“We have read this; we have read this. Bless my soul! have we read everything?”

“Here, mademoiselle,” said the woman who kept the room, “here’s something interesting and well written.”

“What is it?”

“La Femme de Bon Sens, ou La Prisonnière de Bohême.”

“Let’s see whom it is by: translated from the English by Ducos. Why, this was published in 1798! Are you making fun of me, to give me such an old novel as this?”

“What difference does it make how old it is, when I tell you that it is good?”

“I tell you that its age makes a great deal of difference; we like pictures of contemporary manners. A novel more than twenty years old cannot depict the manners of to-day.”

“But it may depict the passions and absurdities of society; those things are of all times, mademoiselle. That is why people still enjoy seeing Tartufe, the Misanthrope, the Etourdi, although those works are certainly not new.”

“Oh! it all depends on the taste. But I don’t want the Femme de Bon Sens. Besides, I don’t like the title; it seems to be an epigram.”

“Well, here is something new—the Bourreau de——”

“Enough! enough! thank the Lord we have never cared for executioners—bourreaux—! we don’t like the literature of the burying ground, the manners of the Morgue. It is possible that such pictures may be true to life, but we have no desire to go to those places to find out; we would shun with horror a street or square where preparations were being made to execute a criminal; and you expect us to enjoy reading books where the author persists in describing such horrors in detail, in presenting ghastly pictures! Oh! it seems to me, madame, that a man must have a very bad opinion of women to think that they will enjoy such reading, that such tableaux can possibly have any attraction for them. It is equivalent to coupling us with the wretches who rush in crowds to look on at an execution; and I did not suppose that there could be any glory in writing for those women!”

I could not resist the desire to look up from my paper; we like to meet people who think as we do, and as I agreed absolutely with that young woman in her views regarding literature, I looked at her with satisfaction. Chance willed that she should look at me at the same moment. I smiled, no doubt, for she made a funny little face and skipped away to another part of the room.

She soon returned with four volumes, and said:

“At last, I believe I have found one that we haven’t read: Eugène et Guillaume. I will take this. It’s by Picard; it ought to be good.”

“You should not always trust to the author’s name, mademoiselle; however, when it is by a writer who knows how to write, one is sure at all events to have something which will not offend in style, even if the plot or the incidents are not well done. You say that you will take Eugène et Guillaume?”

“Yes, but I must have something else with it. Four volumes! why, they will hardly last one evening. By the way, have you anything new by the author of Sœur Anne? He is my favorite, you know.”

I could not help looking at the young woman with still greater satisfaction, for I am very intimate with the author whom she named.