L'homme qui rit. English Read online

  PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

  URSUS.

  I.

  Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Theirdispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf:probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found _Ursus_ fit forhimself, he had found _Homo_ fit for the beast. Man and wolf turnedtheir partnership to account at fairs, at village fetes, at the cornersof streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which peopleseem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip and to buy quackmedicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted thecrowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Ourgreatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication paradebefore us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royalprocessions.

  Ursus and Homo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the HighStreet of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-sideto country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One marketexhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van uponwheels, which Homo was civilized enough to draw by day and guard bynight. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, orthere was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck andpulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown oldtogether. They encamped at haphazard on a common, in the glade of awood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at theoutskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, inpublic walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches.When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran upopen-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursusharangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politelymade a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. Thewolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by theman, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, whichswelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man,"his friend would say to him.

  Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite wasthe intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize hismisanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for thestomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whetherto add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. Tobe a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speakwithout his moving his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, anyone's accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that youbelieved you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated themurmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title ofEngastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries ofbirds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called thegray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself: so thatat times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a publicthoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with thevoices of beasts--at one time stormy as a multitude, at another freshand serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the lastcentury a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of menand animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, wasattached to the person of Buffon--to serve as a menagerie.

  Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singularexpositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing inthem, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people'shands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes,taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, asyou start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows notwhither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions.He used to say: "There is one difference between me and the Archbishopof Canterbury: I avow what I am." Hence it was that the archbishop,justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverlydisarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon ChristmasDay, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered fromthe pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardonedUrsus.

  As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use ofaromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immensepower which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, thecatkin, the white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, thetraveller's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; atopportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which pluckedat the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. Hecured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew'sear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures thehorse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herbmandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had manyrecipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according toPliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; heeffected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that hehad once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honourto take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that hewas only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submitto some such legend about us.

  The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an oldLatin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and hePindarized. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He couldhave composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than thatof Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerablerhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures ofspeech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of amother followed by her two daughters, _There is a dactyl_; of a fatherpreceded by his two sons, _There is an anapaest_; and of a little childwalking between its grandmother and grandfather, _There is anamphimacer_. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The schoolof Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom,thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this wasthe fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who didnot often buy.

  Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. Thewolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by itsfinch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursusat a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; thishelped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroicpastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river toLondon. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty milesfrom London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought abrigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set tobreaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it inanother--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made woodenaqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundredbridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river enteredLondon, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgardetails into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, inwhich the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her hisbed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to paythem"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir HughMiddleton had completed the work at his own expense.

  Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable andtalkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with someone, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who haslived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one'snature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is anoutlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialoguewith the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom ofSocrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took afterthose great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his ownaudience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himselfat times; but the
re were times also when he rendered himself justice.One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heardto cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in thestalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in theovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I havethoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, theformation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was somethingfatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; butlet those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosycast the first stone at him.

  Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there theywould certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of thenormal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland thisweight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious.It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence wasconclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; toolight, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers wereweighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighingcheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had acrow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away fromHolland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leavethe United Kingdom.

  However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having madethe acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life hadcome over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him hadgone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life ofchance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skillin everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick tohealth, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered aclever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for awizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesomein those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himselfopen to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in roughthickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved bythe Counsellor De l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the eveningmist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye,barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for thematter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, wastoo good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, tokill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fairor foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with fourwings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certainabominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek,without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness,or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursusspoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowedhimself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is assertedthat Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at whichuncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galento Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm toGalen.

  To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of thepolice. His van was long enough and wide enough to allow of his lyingdown in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owneda lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, amongwhich were musical instruments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin withwhich he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He calledthis putting on full dress. He used to say, "I have two skins; this isthe real one," pointing to the bearskin.

  The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besideshis house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello onwhich he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yieldedhim enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole,through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his boxas to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one ofthem Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At nightthe wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hairwas black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he wassixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have justseen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs andconvicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he waslong. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is thesettlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him forsadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able toweep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as ofthe palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruinwas Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of aprophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In hisyouth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.

  This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they arenow.

  Not so very much though.