The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait by Gabriel de Lautrec

Author:Gabriel de Lautrec [Lautrec, Gabriel de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

Monsieur Ciboire, Innkeeper

Monsieur Ciboire27 was an innkeeper in the Rue Saint-Jacques, at the sign of the Crowned Ox. He was, moreover, when he got up that morning, in a very bad temper. All night, the sleep of his legitimate spouse had been disturbed. Her husband had moaned, turned over and over like a fish on a hot stove, causing the virtuous mattress to groan in chorus with his plaints, and launched the unmade bedclothes across the room at hazard. Madame Ciboire was distressed; her husband was going mad.

The profession of innkeeper has, among other inconveniences, one more serious than the rest. It is necessary to lend an ear to clients and their sometimes-perverse theories, and it was the memory of conversations with the regulars of the Crowned Ox that was tormenting Monsieur Ciboire.

People in cafes have been known to take a malign pleasure in making an idiot of the lady enthroned at the counter in the midst of precisely-calculated and sugar cubes placed one atop another, in much the same fashion as the stones making up the pyramids were measured by the geometers of Egypt and set in place by the Hebrews. They talk to her about absurd things, which bring a smile to her lips, and her torturers track the progress of madness in her troubled brain on a daily basis. The same thing was happening to Monsieur Ciboire, and for days his dreams had been troubled by nightmares.

Among the inn’s regulars there were painters who spent their time like the majority of young painters, wearing strange clothes and emitting superannuated paradoxes. One of them, named Brancowich, who had been smoking his pipe at the second table on he left for ten years, while waiting until he could get a place at the Institut’s manger, had chosen the innkeeper as a victim. Had he not undertaken to demonstrate one evening last week, with supporting evidence and indubitable philosophical citations, that color did not exist?

To tell the truth, the existence of certain painters is an energetic and continuous protest against the reality of colors—but Monsieur Ciboire’s innocent soul had never raised the slightest doubt about the existence of colors. Monsieur Ciboire’s fine blue eyes had never regarded the various hues of everyday objects as anything but luminous verities. Monsieur Ciboire did not understand philosophical theories at all. He would never, like Descartes, have shut himself up in an earthenware stove in order to attain, ten years later, the sublime discovery that what exists, exists, and that what doesn’t exist, doesn’t. If anyone had told our innkeeper about such procedures, he would have shrugged his shoulders while looking sympathetically at the little earthenware stove on which he warmed water for shaving in the morning, and would not have hesitated to consider any man who proposed using a similar object for philosophical experiments as a madman. Monsieur Ciboire’s logic did not admit such compromises.

Thus, his mind was singularly disturbed every time he found himself in the presence of a correctly-presented paradox.

Monsieur Ciboire got out of bed slowly and regretfully.

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