NUMA ROUMESTAN

BY ALPHONSE DAUDET

TRANSLATED BY CHARLES DE KAY

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1899, 1900, By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved.

University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

[1]

CHAPTER I. TO THE ARENA!

That Sunday—it was a scorching hot Sunday in July at the time of the yearly competitions for the department—there was a great open-air festival held in the ancient amphitheatre of Aps in Provence. All the town was there—the weavers from the New Road, the aristocrats of the Calade quarter, and some people even came all the way from Beaucaire.

“Fifty thousand persons at the lowest estimate,” said the Forum in its account the next day; but then we must allow for Provençal puffing.

The truth was that an enormous crowd was crushed together upon the sun-baked stone benches of the old amphitheatre, just as in the palmy days of the Antonines, and it was evident that the meet of the Society of Agriculture was far from being the main attraction to this overflow of the folk. Something more than the Landes horse-races was needed, or the prize-fights for men and “half men,” the athletic games of “strangle the cat” and “jump the swineskin,” or the contests[2] for fifers and tabor-players, as old a story to the townspeople as the ancient red stones of the Arena; something more was needed to keep this multitude standing for two hours under that blinding, murderous sun, upon those burning flags, breathing in an atmosphere of flame and dust flavored with gunpowder, risking blindness, sunstroke, fevers and all the other dangers and tortures attendant on what is called down there in Provence an open-air festival.

The grand attraction of the annual competitions was Numa Roumestan.

Ah, well; the proverb “No man is a prophet” etc. is certainly true when applied to painters and poets, whose fellow-countrymen in fact are always the last to acknowledge their claims to superiority for whatever is ideal and lacking in tangible results; but it does not apply to statesmen, to political or industrial celebrities, those mighty advertised fames whose currency consists of favors and influence, fames that reflect their glory on city and townsmen in the form of benefits of every sort and kind.

For the last ten years Numa, the great Numa, leader and Deputy representing all the professions, has been the prophet of Provence; for ten years the town of Aps has shown toward her illustrious son the tender care and effusiveness of a mother, one of those mothers of the South quick in her expressions, lively in her exclamations and gesticulatory caresses.

When he comes each summer during the vacation[3] of the Chamber of Deputies, the ovation begins as soon as he appears at the station! There are the Orpheons swelling out their embroidered banners as they intone their heroic choral songs. The railway porters are in waiting, seated on the steps until the ancient family coach which always comes for the “leader” has made a few turns of its big wheels down the alley of big plane-trees on the Avenue Berchère; then they take the horses out and put themselves into the shafts and draw the great man with their own hands, amid the shouts of the populace and the waving of hats, as far as the Portal mansion, where he gets out. This enthusiasm has so completely passed into the stage of tradition in the rites of his arrival that the horses now stop of themselves, like a team in a post-chaise, at the exact corner where they are accustomed to be taken out by the porters; no amount of beating could induce them to go a step farther.

From the first day the whole city has changed its appearance. Here is no longer that melancholy palace of the prefect where long siestas are lulled by the strident note of the locusts in the parched trees on the Cours. Even in the hottest part of the day the esplanade is alive and the streets are filled with hurrying people arrayed in solemn black suits and hats of ceremony, all sharply defined in the brilliant sunlight, the shadows of their epileptic gestures cut in black against the white walls.

The carriages of the Bishop and the President shake the highroad; then delegations arrive from[4] the aristocratic Faubourg where Roumestan is adored because of his royalist convictions; next deputations from the women warpers march in bands the width of the street, their heads held high under their Arlesian caps.

The inns overflow with the country people, farmers from the Camargue or the Crau, whose unhitched wagons crowd the small squares and streets as on a market day. In the evening the cafés crowded with people remain open well on into the night, and the windows of the club of the “Whites,” lighted up until an impossible hour, vibrate with the peals of a voice that belongs to the popular god.

Not a prophet in his own country? ’Twas only necessary to look at the Arena under the intense blue sky of that Sunday of July 1875, note the indifference of the crowd to the games going on in the circus below, and all the faces turned in the same direction, toward the municipal platform, where Roumestan was seated surrounded by braided coats and sunshades for festivals and gay dresses of many-colored silks. ’Twas only necessary to listen to the talk and cries of ecstasy and the simple words of admiration coming in loud voices from this good people of Aps, some expressed in Provençal and some in a barbarous kind of French well rubbed with garlic, but all uttered with an accent as implacable as is the sun down there, an accent which cuts out and gives its own to every syllable and will not so much as spare us the dot over an “i.”

[5]

“Diou! qu’es bèou! God! how beautiful he is!”

“He is a bit stouter than he was last year.”

“That makes him look all the more imposing.”

“Don’t push so! there is room for everybody!”

“Look at him, my son; there’s our Numa. When you are grown up you can say that you have seen him, qué!”

“His Bourbon nose is all there! and not one of his teeth missing!”

“Not a single gray hair, either!”

“Té, I should say not! he is not so very old yet. He was born in ’32—the year that Louis Philippe pulled down the mission crosses, pecaïré!”

“That scoundrel of a Philippe!”

“They scarcely show, those forty-three years of his.”

“Sure enough, they certainly don’t.... Té! here, great star—”

And with a bold gesture a big girl with burning eyes throws a kiss toward him from afar that resounds through the air like the cry of a bird.

“Take care, Zette—suppose his wife should see you.”

“The one in blue, is that his wife?”

No, the lady in blue was his sister-in-law, Mlle. Hortense, a pretty girl just out of the convent, but one, they say, who already straddled a horse just as well as a dragoon. Mme. Roumestan was more dignified, more thoroughbred in appearance, but she looked much haughtier. These Parisian ladies think so much of themselves! And so, with the picturesque impudence of their half-Latin language, the[6] women, standing and shading their eyes with their hands, proceeded in loud voices deliberately to pick the two Parisians to pieces—their simple little travelling hats, their close-fitting dresses worn without jewelry, which were so great a contrast to the local toilettes, in which gold chains and red and green skirts puffed out by enormous bustles prevailed.

The men talked of the services rendered by Numa to the good cause, of his letter to the Emperor, and his speeches for the White Flag. Oh, if we had only a dozen men in the Chamber like him, Henry V would have been on his throne long ago!

Intoxicated by this circumambient enthusiasm and wrought up by these remarks, Numa could not remain quiet in one spot. He threw himself back in his great arm-chair, his eyes shut, his expression ecstatic, and swayed himself restlessly back and forth; then, rising, he strode up and down the platform and leaned over toward the arena to breathe in as it were all the light and cries, and then returned to his seat. Jovial and unceremonious, his necktie loose, he knelt on his chair, his back and his boot-soles turned to the crowd, and conversed with his Paris ladies seated above and behind him, trying to inoculate them with his own joy and satisfaction.

Mme. Roumestan was bored—that was evident from the expression of abstracted indifference on her face, which though beautiful in lines seemed cold and a little haughty when not enlivened by the light of two gray eyes, two eyes like pearls,[7] true Parisian eyes, and by the dazzling effect of the smile on her slightly open mouth.

All this southern gayety, made up of turbulence and familiarity, and this wordy race all on the outside and the surface, whose nature was so much the opposite of her own, which was serious and self-contained, grated on her perhaps unconsciously, because she saw in them multiplied and vulgarized the same type as that of the man at whose side she had lived ten years, whom she had learned to know to her cost. The glaring hot blue sky, so excessively brilliant and vibrating with heat, was also not to her liking. How could these people breathe? Where did they find breath enough to shout so? She took it into her head to speak her thought aloud, how delightful a nice gray misty sky of Paris would be, and how a fresh spring shower would cool the pavements and make them glisten!

“Oh, Rosalie, how can you talk so!”

Her husband and sister were quite indignant, especially her sister, a tall young girl in the full bloom of youth and health, who, the better to see everything, was making herself as tall as possible. It was her first visit to Provence, and yet one might have thought that these shouts and gestures beneath the burning Italian sky had stirred within her some secret fibre, some dormant instinct, her southern origin, in fact, which was revealed in the heavy eyebrows meeting over her houri-like eyes, and her pale complexion, on which the fierce summer sun left not one red mark.

[8]

“Do, please, Rosalie!” pleaded Roumestan, who was determined to persuade his wife. “Get up and look at that. Did Paris ever show you anything like that?”

In the vast theatre widening into an ellipse that made a great jag in the blue sky, thousands of faces were packed together on the many rows of benches rising in terraces; bright eyes made luminous points, while bright colored and picturesque costumes spangled the whole mass with butterfly tints. Thence, as from a huge caldron, rose a chorus of joyous shouts, the ringing of voices and the blare of trumpets volatilized, as it were, by the intense light of the sun. Hardly audible on the lower stories, where dust, sand and human breath formed a floating cloud, this din grew louder as it rose and became more distinct and unveiled itself in the purer air. Above all rang out the cry of the milk-roll venders, who bore from tier to tier their baskets draped with white linen: “Li pan ou la, li pan ou la!” (Here’s your milk bread, here’s your milk bread!) The sellers of drinking-water, cleverly balancing their green glazed pitchers, made one thirsty just to hear them cry: “L’aigo es fresco! Quau voù beùre?” (The water’s fresh! Who will drink?)

Up on the highest brim of the amphitheatre, high up, groups of children playing and running noisily added a crown of sharp calls to the mass of noise below, much like a flock of martins soaring high above the other birds.

And over all of it, how wonderful was the play[9] of light and shadow, as with the advance of day the sun turned slowly in the hollow of the vast amphitheatre as it might on the disk of a sundial, driving the crowd along, and grouping it in the zone of shade, leaving empty those parts of the vast structure exposed to a terrible heat—broad stretches of red flags fringed with dry grass where successive conflagrations have left their mark in black.

At times a stone would detach itself in the topmost tier of the ancient monument, and, rolling down from story to story, cause cries of terror and much crowding among the people below, as if the whole edifice were about to crumble; then on the tiers there was a movement like the assault of a raging sea on the dunes, for with this exuberant race the effect of a thing never has any relation to its cause, enlarged as it is by dreams and perceptions that lack all sense of proportion.

Thus peopled and thus animated once more, the ancient ruin seemed to live again, and no longer retain its appearance of a showplace for tourists. Looking thereon, it gave one the sensation of a poem by Pindar recited by a modern Greek, which means a dead language come to life again, having lost its cold scholarly look. The clear sky, the sun like silver turned to vapor, these Latin intonations still preserved in the Provençal idiom, and here and there, particularly in the cheap seats, the poses of the people in the opening of a vaulted passage—motionless attitudes made antique and almost sculptural by the vibration of the air, local[10] types, profiles standing out like those on ancient coins, with the short aquiline nose, broad shaven cheeks and upturned chin that Numa showed; all this filled out the idea of a Roman festival—even to the lowing of the cows from the Landes which echoed through the vaults below—those vaults whence in olden days lions and elephants were wont to issue to the combat. Thus, when the great black hole of the podium, closed by a grating,

stood open to the arena all empty and yellow with sand, one almost expected to see wild beasts spring out instead of the peaceful bucolic procession of men and of the animals that had received prizes in the competitions.

At the moment it was the turn of the mules led along in harness, sumptuously arrayed in rich Provençal trappings, carrying proudly their slender little heads adorned with silver bells, rosettes, ribbons and feathers, not in the least alarmed at the fierce cracking of whips clear and sharply cut, swung serpent-like or in volleys by the muleteers, each one standing up full length upon his beast. In the crowd each village recognized its champions and named each one aloud:

“There’s Cavaillon! There’s Maussane!”

The long, richly-colored file rolled its slow length around the arena to the sound of musical bells and jingling, glittering harness, and stopped before the municipal platform and saluted Numa with a serenade of whip-crackings and bells; then passed along on its circular course under the leadership of a fine-looking horseman in white tights and[11] high top-boots, one of the gentlemen of the local club who had planned the function and quite unconsciously had struck a false note in its harmony, mixing provincialism with Provençal things and thus giving to this curious local festival a vague flavor of a procession of riders at Franconi’s circus. However, apart from a few country people, no one paid much attention to him. No one had eyes for anything but the grand stand, crowded just then with persons who wished to shake hands with Numa—friends, clients, old college chums, who were proud of their relations with the great man and wished all the world to see them conversing with him and proposed to show themselves there on the benches, well in sight.

Flood of visitors succeeded flood without a break. There were old men and young men, country gentlemen dressed all in gray from their gaiters to their little hats, managers of shops in their best clothes creased from much lying away in presses, ménagers or farmers from the district of Aps in their round jackets, a pilot from Port St. Louis twirling his big prisoner’s cap in his hands—all bearing their “South” stamped upon their faces, whether covered to the eyes with those purple-black beards which the Oriental pallor of their complexion accentuates, or closely shaven after the ancient French fashion, short-necked ruddy people sweating like terra cotta water coolers; all of them with flaming black eyes sticking well out from the face, gesticulating in a familiar way and calling each other “thee” and “thou”!

[12]

And how Roumestan did receive them, without distinction of birth or class or fortune, all with the same unquenchable effusiveness! It was: “Té, Monsieur d’Espalion! and how are you, Marquis?” “Hé bé! old Cabantous, how goes the piloting?” “Delighted to see you, President Bédarride!”

Then came shaking of hands, embraces, solid taps on the shoulder that give double value to words spoken, which are always too cold for the intense feeling of the Provençal. To be sure, the conversations were of short duration. Their “leader” gave but a divided attention, and as he chatted he waved how-d’ye-do with his hand to the new-comers. But nobody resented this unceremonious way of dismissing people with a few kind words: “Yes, yes, I won’t forget—send in your claim—I will take it with me.”

There were promises of government tobacco shops and collectors’ offices; what they did not ask for he seemed to divine; he encouraged timid ambitions and provoked them with kindly words:

“What, no medal yet, my old Cabantous, after you have saved twenty lives? Send me your papers. They adore me at the Navy Department. We must repair this injustice.”

His voice rang out warm and metallic, stamping and separating each word. One would have said that each one was a gold piece rolling out fresh from the mint. And every one went away delighted with this shining coin, leaving the platform with the beaming look of the pupil who has been awarded[13] a prize. The most wonderful thing about this devil of a man was his prodigious suppleness in assuming the air and manner of the person to whom he was speaking, and perfectly naturally, too, apparently in the most unconscious way in the world.

With President Bédarride he was unctuous, smooth in gestures, his mouth fixed affectedly and his arm stretched forth in a magisterial fashion as if he were tossing aside his lawyer’s toga before the judge’s seat. When talking to Colonel Rochemaure he assumed a soldierly bearing, his hat slapped on one side; while with Cabantous he thrust his hands into his pockets, bowed his legs and rolled his shoulders as he walked, just like an old sea-dog. From time to time, between two embraces as it were, he turned to his Parisian guests, beaming and wiping his steaming brow.

“But, my dear Numa!” cried Hortense in a low voice with her pretty laugh, “where will you find all these tobacco shops you have been promising them?”

Roumestan bent his large head with its crop of close curling hair slightly thinned at the top and whispered: “They are promised, little sister, not given.”

And, fancying a reproach in his wife’s silence, he added:

“Do not forget that we are in Provence, where we understand each other’s language. All these good fellows understand what a promise is worth. They don’t expect to get the shops any more positively than I count on giving them. But they[14] chatter about them—which amuses them—and their imaginations are at work: why deprive them of that pleasure? Besides, you must know that among us Southerners words have only a relative meaning. It is merely putting things in their proper focus.” The phrase seemed to please him, for he repeated several times the final words, “in their proper focus—in their proper focus—”

“I like these people,” said Hortense, who really seemed to be amusing herself immensely; but Rosalie was not to be convinced. “Still, words do signify something,” she murmured very seriously, as if communing with her own soul.