With that, and without another word, he pushed his face towards the plate and began to scoff the food.... It was pitiful to look at. He was losing his bread, and his fork, and groping for his gla.s.s all the time.... Poor soul! He just hadn't had the time to get used to it all yet.

After a short time, he spoke again:

"Do you know what's even worse? It's not being able to read the d.a.m.ned newspapers. You have to be in the trade to understand that....

Sometimes at night, when I am coming home, I buy one just for the smell of the fresh, moist paper, and newsprint.... It's so good! But there's not a soul willing to read it to me! My wife could, but she doesn't want to. She makes out that there are indecent things in the news items. Ah-ha! these old mistresses, once they marry you, there's no one more prudish. That Madame Bixiou has turned herself into a right little bigot--but only as far as it suits her!... It was she who wanted to me rub my eyes in Salette water. And then there was the blessed bread, the pilgrimages, the Holy Child, the Chinese herbal remedies, and G.o.d knows what else.... We're up to our necks in good works. And yet, it would be a real kindness to read the papers to me.... But there you are, there's no chance, she simply doesn't want to.... If my daughter was still at home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed....

"Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on earth and already she's had every imaginable illness... And miserable!

And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible ... a real monster!...

What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my responsibilities....

"Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family business. And what's it all got to do with you?... Come on, give me a bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense of humour. They're all retired teachers."

I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by something.... Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, gla.s.s in hand, and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice, as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,

"To the arts! To literature! To the press!"

And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain could devise.

"Imagine a year's-end revue ent.i.tled _Collection of Letters of 186*_; about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, h.e.l.l in miniature, where you cut your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old baron T... of la Tombola going away with a _tut-tut_ to the Tuileries with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of the delegate: the _Dearly missed! Poor dear!_ over some unlucky soul who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's improvisation was about."

The toast over, his gla.s.s empty, he asked me what the time was, and left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye.... I don't know how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning; but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life.

The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel something good, real.... Good G.o.d! The hatred, the venom, the unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That wretched man....

Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting.

Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his pocket of venom.

This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de Girardin's cartoons. Rumour has it that there are some awful things in it.... I was soon to discover the truth of it. The old over-stuffed wallet had burst open as it fell and the papers inside fell onto the carpet; I had to collect them one by one....

There was a package of letters written on decorated paper, all beginning, _My dear Daddy,_ and signed, _Celine Bixiou at the Children of Mary hospital_.

There were old prescriptions for childhood ailments: croup, convulsions, scarlet fever and measles.... (the poor little girl hadn't missed out on a single one of them!)

Finally, there was a hidden envelope from which came a two or three curly, blond hairs, which might have come from the girl's bonnet. There was some writing on it in a large, unsteady hand; the handwriting of a blind man:

_Celine's hair, cut the 13th May, the day she went to that h.e.l.l_.

That's all there was in Bixiou's wallet.

Let's face it, Parisians, you're all the same; disgust, irony, evil laughter at vicious jokes. And what does it all amount to?...

_Celine's hair, cut on the 13th May_.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN BRAIN

_To the Lady who wants pleasant stories._

I took your letter, madame, as an invitation to change my ways. I have been tempted to shade my little tales a touch too darkly, and I promised myself to give you something joyful, wildly joyful, today.

After all, what have I got to be sad about? Here I am living hundreds of kilometres from the fogs of Paris, on a radiantly beautiful hillside, in the land of the tambourine and Muscat wine. Around my windmill, everything is sunshine and music; I have wind orchestras of wheatears, bands of blue-t.i.ts, and choirs of curlews from morning to midday. And the cicadas, and the shepherds playing their fifes, and the dark haired young beauties laughing amongst the vines.... To tell the truth, this is no place for brooding; I'd rather rush rose-coloured poems and basketsful of spicy stories to you ladies.

And yet--I can't. I am still too near to Paris. Every day, even here amongst my precious pines, it finds me with its ink-stained fingers of misery.... Even as I write, I have just heard the lamentable news of the death of poor Charles Barbara, and my windmill is plunged into grief.

Farewell, curlews and cicadas! I haven't the heart for jollity right now... For that reason, madam, instead of the pretty little tale which I had promised, you will only have yet another melancholy story today.

Once, there was a man with a golden brain; yes, madame, a brain made entirely from gold. At birth, the doctors thought he wouldn't survive long, so heavy was his head and so oversized his skull. However, he did live and he thrived in the sunshine like a lovely olive tree. Except that his huge head went everywhere with him and it was pitiful to see him b.u.mping into all the furniture as he walked about the house....

All too often, he would fall down. One day, he fell from the top flight of some marble steps and just happened to catch his head on one. His head rang like an ingot. It could have killed him, but when he got up, there was nothing wrong except there was a small wound with two or three traces of congealed gold in his blond locks. That was how his parents learned that their child had a brain of pure gold.

It was kept a close secret, and the poor little thing himself suspected nothing. Sometimes he would ask why he wasn't allowed to go outside to play with the other boys in the street.

"Someone would steal from you, my treasure!" his mother told him....

Then the little lad, being terrified of being robbed, made no complaint as he went back to playing alone and dragging himself sadly from room to room....It wasn't until he was eighteen years old that his parents told him of this monstrous gift from fate. Since they had nurtured him and fed him all his life, they told him that it was about time he paid them back with some of his gold. The child didn't hesitate; he would do it that right then--but how?

The legend didn't tell him. He pulled out a nut sized piece of gold from his skull and placed it proudly onto his mother's lap.... Then, dazzled by the riches within his head, he became maddened by desire and drunk with power. So, he left the family home, and went out into the world to squander his treasure.

By the way he was living his life--royally--and spreading his gold around--lavishly--you would have thought his brain inexhaustible. And yet it did become exhausted--as could be seen by the dullness in his eyes and his pinched cheeks.

Finally, one morning, after a night of wild debauchery, the wretched boy, alone amongst the debris of the festivities and the dimming chandeliers, became terrified about the enormous hole appearing in his ingot of a brain. It was time to stop. From then on, he was like a new man. The man with the golden brain, went far away to live alone and work with his hands. He became suspicious and timid like a miser, turning his back on temptation, and trying to forget the fatal riches that he no longer wanted.... Unfortunately, a friend, who knew of his secret, had followed him. One night, the poor man was suddenly woken up by an excruciating pain in his head. He jumped up frantically and caught sight of _the friend_ running away in the moonlight with something under his coat.... Another piece of brain had been stolen!...

Some time later, the man with the golden brain fell in love, and this time, too, it came out very badly....

He fell deeply in love with a pet.i.te, blond woman, who loved him a lot, too, but who loved fripperies, white feathers, and pretty, gold-tinged, ta.s.sels bobbling along the full length of her boots, even more. In the hands of this cute little creature--half bird, half doll--the gold pieces just melted away at her pleasure. She indulged every known whim, and he could never bring himself to say no to her. He even kept back the awful truth about his fortune to the very end, for fear of upsetting her.

--Are we really rich then? she would ask.

The poor man could only answer:

--Oh, yes... very rich!

And he would smile lovingly at the little blue bird who was unknowingly eating away at his head. Yet, sometimes fear took hold of him, and he had a craving to hang on to what little he'd got, but then the little woman bounded up to him and said: