Monsieur de Bougrelon and Other Stories by Lorrain Jean

Author:Lorrain, Jean [Lorrain, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Snuggly Books
Published: 2021-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Epilogue to Monsieur de Bougrelon

He has appeared to me. Yes, him—the man who was the enchantment, and, slightly, the regret, of my brief sojourn in the land of canals and windmills. The man whose phantasmal silhouette, prestigious verbiage and epic bombast animated and populated the fogs of Amsterdam for me, and the North Sea; the man of castles in Spain, evoked by a word and a gesture—but what a word of genius and what a superb gesture, in the mist and rain of the Netherlands!

The man who gave speech to the portraits in the museum, the gallant costumes of vanished centuries, and even the soul of bottles of conserves; yes, the magician of the Seadeck, of old frames and display-cases, Monsieur de Bougrelon came, at a distance of exactly a year, to reveal himself to me in the heart of Provence—but a rainswept and dismal Provence, a Provence spoiled by downpours, thus having become even sadder, without the sun, than the sandy dunes of the sad Netherlands—and in rather singular circumstances.

There were three manifestations.

The first occurred in Marseille, a Marseille still streaming with the inundation of that first of January 1898, but already warmed again by two mornings of lovely sunshine.

It was on the Monday, the third of that month, in truth, toward noon, at the hour when the Cannebière wriggles and swarms with the incessant comings and goings of its cosmopolitan crowd, going up and down the celebrated lanes to the masts of the Old Harbor. On the Quai de la Fraternité, there were the usual troops of street-porters sampling scallops and sea-urchins from the stalls of shellfish-merchants, pell-mell with the fat merchants of the city—because that is also the hour when the Bourse is going full tilt. The sun-trap of the Cheminée du Roi René, between the Place Victor-Gelu and the church of Saint-Augutin, was enlivened by the chatter and gaiety of dock-workers and stevedores returning from La Joliette.

Oh, the odors of garlic and bouillabaisse!

Intoxicated by the crowd, whose anonymity delighted me, I allowed myself to be drawn by it to a booth where idlers had formed a circle.

A group of shoeshine boys and fishwives was gesticulating there, with whores from La Tourette, flirting with tobacco-chewers, all roguish, with shiny dark eyes and thick lips drawn back over white teeth, all curiously leaning over two lamentable burnooses fallen on the sidewalk: two old Arabs in hoods, heaps of verminous rags and extenuated flesh, fallen there exhausted, under the feet of the pedestrians.

Long waxy faces with long white beards and extinct gazes, the faces of millenarian prophets, the two Arabs remained motionless under the inquisitive, indifferent gazes, as if they were on the parvis of their mosque, and their mummified hands continued, mechanically, to knead the yellow and wrinkled soles of their bare feet. Both had disembarked that morning, no doubt—Monday is one of the days when ferries arrive from Tunis and Algiers. In front of them, there were the masts of the Old Harbor and the blue of the deceptive sea.

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