The Martian. George du Maurier

broken twigs littered the deserted playground—for we all sat on the parapet of the terrace by the lingerie; boys and servants, le père et la mère Jaurion, Mlle. Marceline and the rest, looking towards Paris—all feeling bound to each other by a common danger, like wild beasts in a flood. Dear me! I'm out of breath from sheer pleasure in the remembrance.

      One night we had to sleep on the floor for fear of stray bullets; and that was a fearful joy never to be forgotten—it almost kept us awake! Peering out of the school‑room windows at dusk, we saw great fires, three or four at a time. Suburban retreats of the over‑wealthy, in full conflagration; and all day the rattle of distant musketry and the boom of cannon a long way off, near Montmartre and Montfaucon, kept us alive.

      Most of the boys went home, and some of them never came back—and from that day the school began to slowly decline. Père Brossard—an ancient "Brigand de la Loire," as the republicans of his youth were called—was elected a representative of his native town at the Chamber of Deputies; and possibly that did the school more harm than good—ne sutor ultra crepidam! as he was so fond of impressing on us!

      However, we went on pretty much as usual through spring and summer—with occasional alarms (which we loved), and beatings of le rappel—till the July insurrection broke out.

      My mother and sister had left Mlle. Jalabert's, and now lived with my father near the Boulevard Montmartre. And when the fighting was at its height they came to fetch me home, and invited Barty, for the Rohans were away from Paris. So home we walked, quite leisurely, on a lovely peaceful summer evening, while the muskets rattled and the cannons roared round us, but at a proper distance; women picking linen for lint and chatting genially the while at shop doors and porter's lodge‑gates; and a piquet of soldiers at the corner of every street, who felt us all over for hidden cartridges before they let us through; it was all entrancing! The subtle scent of gunpowder was in the air—the most suggestive smell there can be. Even now, here in England, the night of the fifth of November never comes round but I am pleasantly reminded of the days when I was "en pleine révolution" in the streets of Paris with my father and mother, and Barty and my little sister—and genial piou‑pious made such a conscientious examination of our garments. Nothing brings back the past like a sound or a smell—even those of a penny squib!

      Every now and then a litter borne by soldiers came by, on which lay a dead or wounded officer. And then one's laugh died suddenly out, and one felt one's self face to face with the horrors that were going on.

      Barty shared my bed, and we lay awake talking half the night; dreadful as it all was, one couldn't help being jolly! Every ten minutes the sentinel on duty in the court‑yard below would sententiously intone:

      "Sentinelles, prenez‑garde à vous!" And other sentinels would repeat the cry till it died away in the distance, like an echo.

      And all next day, or the day after—or else the day after that, when the long rattle of the musketry had left off—we heard at intervals the "feu de peloton" in a field behind the church of St.‑Vincent de Paul, and knew that at every discharge a dozen poor devils of insurgents, caught red‑handed, fell dead in a pool of blood!

      I need hardly say that before three days were over the irrepressible Barty had made a complete conquest of my small family. My sister (I hasten to say this) has loved him as a brother ever since; and as long as my parents lived, and wherever they made their home, that home has ever been his—and he has been their son—almost their eldest born, though he was younger than I by seven months.

      Things have been reversed, however, for now thirty years and more; and his has ever been the home for me, and his people have been my people, and ever will be—and the God of his worship mine!

      What children and grandchildren of my own could ever be to me as these of Barty Josselin's?

      "Ce sacré Josselin—il avait tous les talents!"

      And the happiest of these gifts, and not the least important, was the gift he had of imparting to his offspring all that was most brilliant and amiable and attractive in himself, and leaving in them unimpaired all that was strongest and best in the woman I loved as well as he did, and have loved as long—and have grown to look upon as belonging to the highest female type that can be; for doubtless the Creator, in His infinite wisdom, might have created a better and a nicer woman than Mrs. Barty Josselin that was to be, had He thought fit to do so; but doubtless also He never did.

      Alas! the worst of us is that the best of us are those that want the longest knowing to find it out.

      My kind‑hearted but cold‑mannered and undemonstrative Scotch father, evangelical, a total abstainer, with a horror of tobacco—surely the austerest dealer in French wines that ever was—a puritanical hater of bar sinisters, and profligacy, and Rome, and rank, and the army, and especially the stage—he always lumped them together more or less—a despiser of all things French, except their wines, which he never drank himself—remained devoted to Barty till the day of his death; and so with my dear genial mother, whose heart yet always yearned towards serious boys who worked hard at school and college, and passed brilliant examinations, and got scholarships and fellowships in England, and state sinecures in France, and married early, and let their mothers choose their wives for them, and train up their children in the way they should go. She had lived so long in France that she was Frencher than the French themselves.

      And they both loved good music—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—and were almost priggish in their contempt for anything of a lighter kind; especially with a lightness English or French! It was only the musical lightness of Germany they could endure at all! But whether in Paris or London, enter Barty Josselin, idle school-boy, or dandy dissipated guardsman, and fashionable man about town, or bohemian art student; and Bach, lebewohl! good‑bye, Beethoven! bonsoir le bon Mozart! all was changed: and welcome, instead, the last comic song from the Château des Fleurs, or Evans's in Covent Garden; the latest patriotic or sentimental ditty by Loïsa Puget, or Frédéric Bérat, or Eliza Cook, or Mr. Henry Russell.

      And then, what would Barty like for breakfast, dinner, supper after the play, and which of all those burgundies would do Barty good without giving him a headache next morning? and where was Barty to have his smoke?—in the library, of course. "Light the fire in the library, Mary; and Mr. Bob [that was me] can smoke there, too, instead of going outside," etc., etc., etc. It is small wonder that he grew a bit selfish at times.

      Though I was a little joyous now and then, it is quite without a shadow of bitterness or envy that I write all this. I have lived for fifty years under the charm of that genial, unconscious, irresistible tyranny; and, unlike my dear parents, I have lived to read and know Barty Josselin, nor merely to see and hear and love him for himself alone.

      Indeed, it was quite impossible to know Barty at all intimately and not do whatever he wanted you to do. Whatever he wanted, he wanted so intensely, and at once; and he had such a droll and engaging way of expressing that hurry and intensity, and especially of expressing his gratitude and delight when what he wanted was what he got—that you could not for the life of you hold your own! Tout vient à qui ne sait pas attendre!

      Besides which, every now and then, if things didn't go quite as he wished, he would fly into comic rages, and become quite violent and intractable for at least five minutes, and for quite five minutes more he would silently sulk. And then, just as suddenly, he would forget all about it, and become once more the genial, affectionate, and caressing creature he always was.

      But this is going ahead too fast! revenons. At the examinations this year Barty was almost brilliant, and I was hopeless as usual; my only consolation being that after the holidays we should at last be in the same class together, en quatrième, and all through this hopelessness of mine!

      Laferté was told by his father that he might invite two of his school‑fellows to their country‑house for the vacation, so he asked Josselin and Bussy‑Rabutin. But Bussy couldn't go—and, to my delight, I went instead.

      That ride all through the sweet August night, the three of us on the impériale of the five‑horsed diligence, just behind the conductor and the driver—and freedom, and a full moon, or nearly so—and a tremendous saucisson de