Bouvard and PĂ©cuchet by Gustave Flaubert (top ten books to read txt) đź“•
The earliest recollections of Bouvard carried him back across the banks of the Loire into a farmyard. A man who was his uncle had brought him to Paris to teach him commerce. At his majority, he got a few thousand francs. Then he took a wife, and opened a confectioner's shop. Six months later his wife disappeared, carrying off the cash-box. Friends, good cheer, and above all, idleness, had speedily accomplished his ruin. But he was inspired by the notion of utilising his beautiful chirography, and for the past twelve years he had clung to the same post in the establishment of MM. Descambos Brothers, manufacturers of tissues, 92, Rue Hautefeuille. As for his uncle, who formerly had sent him the celebrated portrait as a memento, Bouvard did not even know his residence, and expected nothing more from him. Fifteen hundred francs a year and his salary as copying-clerk enabled him every evening to take a nap at a coffee-house. Thus their meeting had the importance of a
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"Perhaps so. But what were we to think of a book in which it is pretended that the light was created before the sun? as if the sun were not the sole cause of light!"
"You forget the light which we call boreal," said the ecclesiastic.
Bouvard, without answering this point, strongly denied that light could be on one side and darkness on the other, that evening and morning could have existed when there were no stars, or that the animals made their appearance suddenly, instead of being formed by crystallisation.
As the walks were too narrow, while gesticulating, they trod on the flower-borders. Langlois took a fit of coughing.
The captain exclaimed: "You are revolutionaries!"
Girbal: "Peace! peace!"
The priest: "What materialism!"
Foureau: "Let us rather occupy ourselves with our chasuble!"
"No! let me speak!" And Bouvard, growing more heated, went on to say that man was descended from the ape!
All the vestrymen looked at each other, much amazed, and as if to assure themselves that they were not apes.
Bouvard went on: "By comparing the fœtus of a woman, of a bitch, of a bird, of a frog——"
"Enough!"
"For my part, I go farther!" cried PĂ©cuchet. "Man is descended from the fishes!"
There was a burst of laughter. But without being disturbed:
"The Telliamed—an Arab book——"
"Come, gentlemen, let us hold our meeting."
And they entered the sacristy.
The two comrades had not given the Abbé Jeufroy such a fall as they expected; therefore, Pécuchet found in him "the stamp of Jesuitism." His "boreal light," however, caused them uneasiness. They searched for it in Orbigny's manual.
"This is a hypothesis to explain why the vegetable fossils of Baffin's Bay resemble the Equatorial plants. We suppose, in place of the sun, a great luminous source of heat which has now disappeared, and of which the Aurora Borealis is but perhaps a vestige."
Then a doubt came to them as to what proceeds from man, and, in their perplexity, they thought of Vaucorbeil.
He had not followed up his threats. As of yore, he passed every morning before their grating, striking all the bars with his walking-stick one after the other.
Bouvard watched him, and, having stopped him, said he wanted to submit to him a curious point in anthropology.
"Do you believe that the human race is descended from fishes?"
"What nonsense!"
"From apes rather—isn't that so?"
"Directly, that is impossible!"
On whom could they depend? For, in fact, the doctor was not a Catholic!
They continued their studies, but without enthusiasm, being weary of eocene and miocene, of Mount Jurillo, of the Julia Island, of the mammoths of Siberia and of the fossils, invariably compared in all the authors to "medals which are authentic testimonies," so much so that one day Bouvard threw his knapsack on the ground, declaring that he would not go any farther.
"Geology is too defective. Some parts of Europe are hardly known. As for the rest, together with the foundation of the oceans, we shall always be in a state of ignorance on the subject."
Finally, PĂ©cuchet having pronounced the word "mineral kingdom":
"I don't believe in it, this mineral kingdom, since organic substances have taken part in the formation of flint, of chalk, and perhaps of gold. Hasn't the diamond been charcoal; coal a collection of vegetables? and by heating it to I know not how many degrees, we get the sawdust of wood, so that everything passes, everything goes to ruin, and everything is transformed. Creation is carried out in an undulating and fugitive fashion. Much better to occupy ourselves with something else."
He stretched himself on his back and went to sleep, while PĂ©cuchet, with his head down and one knee between his hands, gave himself up to his own reflections.
A border of moss stood on the edge of a hollow path overhung by ash trees, whose slender tops quivered; angelica, mint, and lavender exhaled warm, pungent odours. The atmosphere was drowsy, and Pécuchet, in a kind of stupor, dreamed of the innumerable existences scattered around him—of the insects that buzzed, the springs hidden beneath the grass, the sap of plants, the birds in their nests, the wind, the clouds—of all Nature, without seeking to unveil her mysteries, enchanted by her power, lost in her grandeur.
"I'm thirsty!" said Bouvard, waking up.
"So am I. I should be glad to drink something."
"That's easy," answered a man who was passing by in his shirt-sleeves with a plank on his shoulder. And they recognised that vagabond to whom, on a former occasion, Bouvard had given a glass of wine. He seemed ten years younger, wore his hair foppishly curled, his moustache well waxed, and twisted his figure about in quite a Parisian fashion. After walking about a hundred paces, he opened the gateway of a farmyard, threw down his plank against the wall, and led them into a large kitchen.
"MĂ©lie! are you there, MĂ©lie?"
A young girl appeared. At a word from him she drew some liquor and came back to the table to serve the gentlemen.
Her wheat-coloured head-bands fell over a cap of grey linen. Her worn dress of poor material fell down her entire body without a crease, and, with her straight nose and blue eyes, she had about her something dainty, rustic, and ingenuous.
"She's nice, eh?" said the joiner, while she was bringing them the glasses. "You might take her for a lady dressed up as a peasant-girl, and yet able to do rough work! Poor little heart, come! When I'm rich I'll marry you!"
"You are always talking nonsense, Monsieur Gorju," she replied, in a soft voice, with a slightly drawling accent.
A stable boy came in to get some oats out of an old chest, and let the lid fall down so awkwardly that it made splinters of wood fly upwards.
Gorju declaimed against the clumsiness of all "these country fellows," then, on his knees in front of the article of furniture, he tried to put the piece in its place. PĂ©cuchet, while offering to assist him, traced beneath the dust faces of notable characters.
It was a chest of the Renaissance period, with a twisted fringe below, vine branches in the corner, and little columns dividing its front into five portions. In the centre might be seen Venus-Anadyomene standing on a shell, then Hercules and Omphale, Samson and Delilah, Circe and her swine, the daughters of Lot making their father drunk; and all this in a state of complete decay, the chest being worm-eaten, and even its right panel wanting.
Gorju took a candle, in order to give PĂ©cuchet a better view of the left one, which exhibited Adam and Eve under a tree in Paradise in an affectionate attitude.
Bouvard equally admired the chest.
"If you keep it they'll give it to you cheap."
They hesitated, thinking of the necessary repairs.
Gorju might do them, cabinet-making being a branch of his trade.
"Let us go. Come on."
And he dragged PĂ©cuchet towards the fruit-garden, where Madame Castillon, the mistress, was spreading linen.
MĂ©lie, when she had washed her hands, took from where it lay beside the window her lace-frame, sat down in the broad daylight and worked.
The lintel of the door enclosed her like a picture-frame. The bobbins disentangled themselves under her fingers with a sound like the clicking of castanets. Her profile remained bent.
Bouvard asked her questions as to her family, the part of the country she came from, and the wages she got.
She was from Ouistreham, had no relations alive, and earned seventeen shillings a month; in short, she pleased him so much that he wished to take her into his service to assist old Germaine.
PĂ©cuchet reappeared with the mistress of the farm-house, and, while they went on with their bargaining, Bouvard asked Gorju in a very low tone whether the girl would consent to become their servant.
"Lord, yes."
"However," said Bouvard, "I must consult my friend."
The bargain had just been concluded, the price fixed for the chest being thirty-five francs. They were to come to an understanding about the repairs.
They had scarcely got out into the yard when Bouvard spoke of his intentions with regard to MĂ©lie.
PĂ©cuchet stopped (in order the better to reflect), opened his snuff-box, took a pinch, and, wiping the snuff off his nose:
"Indeed, it is a good idea. Good heavens! yes! why not? Besides, you are the master."
Ten minutes afterwards, Gorju showed himself on the top of a ditch, and questioning them: "When do you want me to bring you the chest?"
"To-morrow."
"And about the other question, have you both made up your minds?"
"It's all right," replied PĂ©cuchet.
Six months later they had become archæologists, and their house was like a museum.
In the vestibule stood an old wooden beam. The staircase was encumbered with the geological specimens, and an enormous chain was stretched on the ground all along the corridor. They had taken off its hinges the door between the two rooms in which they did not sleep, and had condemned the outer door of the second in order to convert both into a single apartment.
As soon as you crossed the threshold, you came in contact with a stone trough (a Gallo-Roman sarcophagus); the ironwork next attracted your attention. Fixed to the opposite wall, a warming-pan looked down on two andirons and a hearthplate representing a monk caressing a shepherdess. On the boards all around, you saw torches, locks, bolts, and nuts of screws. The floor was rendered invisible beneath fragments of red tiles. A table in the centre exhibited curiosities of the rarest description: the shell of a Cauchoise cap, two argil urns, medals, and a phial of opaline glass. An upholstered armchair had at its back a triangle worked with guipure. A piece of a coat of mail adorned the partition to the right, and on the other side sharp spikes sustained in a horizontal position a unique specimen of a halberd.
The second room, into which two steps led down, contained the old books which they had brought with them from Paris, and those which, on their arrival, they had found in a press. The leaves of the folding-doors had been removed hither. They called it the library.
The back of the door was entirely covered by the genealogical tree of the Croixmare family. In the panelling on the return side, a pastel of a lady in the dress of the period of Louis XV. made a companion picture to the portrait of Père Bouvard. The casing of the glass was decorated with a sombrero of black felt, and a monstrous galoche filled with leaves, the remains of a nest.
Two cocoanuts (which had belonged to PĂ©cuchet since his younger days) flanked on the chimney-piece an earthenware cask on which a peasant sat astride. Close by, in a straw basket, was a little coin brought up by a duck.
In front of the bookcase stood a shell chest of drawers trimmed with plush. The cover of it supported a cat with a mouse in its mouth—a petrifaction from St. Allyre; a work-box, also of shell work, and on this box a decanter of brandy contained a Bon Chrétien pear.
But the finest thing was a statue of St. Peter in the embrasure of the window. His right hand, covered with a glove of apple-green colour, was pressing the key of Paradise. His chasuble, ornamented with fleurs-de-luce, was azure blue, and his tiara very yellow, pointed like a pagoda. He had flabby cheeks, big round eyes, a gaping mouth, and a crooked nose shaped like a trumpet. Above him hung a canopy made of an old carpet in which you could distinguish two Cupids in a circle of roses, and at his feet, like a pillar, rose a butter-pot bearing these words in white letters on a chocolate ground: "Executed in the presence of H.R.H. the Duke of AngoulĂŞme at Noron, 3rd of October, 1847."
PĂ©cuchet, from his bed, saw all these things in a
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