The tall widow held the hand of a child dressed, like her, in black. Modest as the entrance price was, that sum might suffice to pay for some need of this little one or, even better, some unnecessity, some toy.

And she will return, on foot, thoughtful, dreaming, alone, always alone; for children are turbulent, egotistical, ungentle and impatient; and cannot even, like a mere animal, dog or cat, serve as confidant to a solitary sorrow.

5. Short-lived eighteenth-century author from Provence, famous for his Maxims and Reflections.

XIV
The Old Showman

The people were spread out, scattered, frolicking on holiday. It was one of those festivities which, by custom, showmen, jugglers, animal trainers, fair-booth salesmen, all count on to make up for slack seasons.

On holidays, I think, people forget discomforts, labors; they become like children. For the child, it is time off, with the horror of school looming in twenty-four hours. For the adults it’s an armistice declared with life’s malicious powers, a breathing-space in the universal struggle.

Even men of the world and those concerned with the life of the mind escape only with difficulty the influence of such popular jubilee. They absorb, willy-nilly, a share in this lackadaisical atmosphere. I myself, true Parisian, never fail to check on the flourish of booths decorating these sacred days.

They made, in fact, a redoubtable concert: squealing, bellowing, howling. A medley of cries, brassy blares, exploding rockets. Clowns and fools screwed up sunburnt faces, hardened by wind, rain, sun. They launched with aplomb actors with sure-fire acts, perfect one-liners, and gags as forceful and solid as Molière’s. Strong Men, proud of their enormous limbs, prognathous, beetle-browed, apelike, strutted their stuff in trunks laundered for the occasion. Dancers, beautiful as fairies, as princesses, capered and gamboled under bright lights that layered their skirts with glitter.

There was nothing but lights, dust, cries, joy, tumult; some giving, some getting, equally merry the one and the other. Children clung to mothers’ skirts in hope of a sugar stick, or climbed onto their fathers’ shoulder the better to see a stunning magician perform, godlike. And swirling everywhere, above all the perfumes, an odor of frying fat, incense to this feast day.

At the end of the row of booths, the very end, I caught sight of a poor showman, as if in shame self-exiled from all these splendors, bent, worn, decrepit, a human ruin, up against a post of his hovel; a hovel more miserable than that of the rudest savage, where two candle ends, runny and smoking, revealed a distress all too explicit.

Everywhere joy, profit, debauchery; everywhere certainty of tomorrow’s bread; everywhere vitality’s explosive frenzy. Here: absolute misery, misery decked out — to complete the horror — from the ragbag of comedy, a contrast introduced by necessity, not art. He, the miserable, was not laughing! He did not cry, he did not dance, he made no gestures, he did not scream; he sang no song, happy or sad; he did not beg. He remained mute and immobile. He had given up, surrendered. His fate was sealed.

But what a profound and unforgettable gaze he cast over the crowd and its lights, whose tide of movement halted several feet before his repulsive misery. I felt my throat constrict with a terrible hysteria and it seemed to me my vision was blocked by rebel tears refusing to fall.

What to do? What point in asking the wretch what curiosity, what marvel, he was prepared to show in his ill-smelling darkness, behind his torn curtain? I really didn’t dare; and in case you find my timidity risible, I admit that I feared humiliating him. Finally I had decided that in passing I would leave some money on one of his benches, hoping he might realize my intention — when the crowd in a surge, caused by some confusion or other, swept me past him.

And, turning back, obsessed by that vision, I tried to figure out my sudden sadness, saying to myself, here I have seen the image of the old man of letters who has outlived the generation he amused so brilliantly; the old poet without friends, without family, without children, brought down by misery and public ingratitude, into whose booth the forgetful world no longer wishes to enter.

XV
Cake

I had taken to traveling. The landscape in which I found myself was of irresistible grandeur and nobility. At that moment something from it must have crossed over into my soul. My thoughts fluttered up, light as air; vulgar passions, such as hate, such as profane love, now appeared to me distant as clouds drifting through the abysses under my feet. My soul seemed to me as vast and as pure as the dome of the sky encircling me; memories of earthly things came to my heart weakened, diminished, like a scarcely perceptible sound of cowbells from far away, very far away, from the slope of some other mountain. Over the little motionless lake, dark from its immense depth, passed sometimes the shadow of a cloud, like the reflection of an aerial giant sailing the sky. And I recall how this sensation, solemn and extraordinary, occasioned by grand, perfectly silent, movement, filled me with a mixture of joy and fear. In short, I felt, thanks to the rapturous beauty around me, in perfect peace with myself and with the universe; I believe, in fact, that in my perfect beatitude, totally oblivious to any earthly evil, I no longer found so ridiculous those declarations that man is born good; — at which point, unappeasable matter renewing its demands, I thought to relieve my fatigue and allay the appetite induced by my long climb. I took from my pocket a hunk of bread, a leather cup and the flask of a certain elixir pharmacists in those days sold to tourists, to mix at such moments with melted snow.

Tranquilly I broke my bread, when a light sound made me raise my eyes. Before me stood a small creature in rags, dark, dishevelled, whose hollow eyes, wild and imploring, devoured my bread.