The Eternal Adam and other stories (19 page)

‘Perhaps,’ I answered seriously.

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ retorted
Augustus Hopkins. ‘My only problem is to decide what I should put on display.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s a difficult choice.
The tenors are worn out, the dancers are past their prime, and what’s left of
their legs is priced out of reach. The Siamese twins have had their day, and
the seals, despite the best efforts of the distinguished professors who are
teaching them, still can’t talk.’

‘I won’t concern myself with spectacles
like that. No matter how worn out, exhausted, dead, or speechless the seals,
Siamese twins, dancers, and tenors may be, they are still too good for a man like
me, because I’m worth so much just for myself. I think, my dear sir, that I
will have the pleasure of seeing you in Paris.’

‘Do you expect to find some cheap object in
Paris,’ I asked him, ‘and make it famous on the strength of your reputation?’

‘Perhaps,’ he replied seriously. ‘If I come
across a doorman’s daughter who has never been accepted by the Conservatoire,
I’ll turn her into the greatest singer in the Western Hemisphere.’

On that note, we took leave of each other
and I returned to Albany. That same day, the awful news came out. It was
generally assumed that Hopkins was ruined. Large subscriptions were taken up
for his benefit. Everyone went to Exhibition Park to assess the extent of the
disaster, and this too put a goodly number of dollars in the speculator’s
pocket. He got a ridiculously high price for the pelt of the cougar that had
brought him to such a timely ruin and thereby saved his reputation as the most
enterprising man in the New World. As for me. I went back to New York and from
there to France, leaving the United States richer (without knowing it) by one
more superb humbug. And I brought back with me this conclusion: that artists
with no talent, singers with no voice, dancers without a leg, and jumpers
without a rope would have a dismal future before them if Christopher Columbus
had not discovered America.

How it is useless to seek, even on the best
maps, for the small town of Quiquendone

If you try to find, on any map of Flanders,
ancient or modern, the small town of Quiquendone, probably you will not
succeed. Is Quiquendone, then, one of those towns which have disappeared? No. A
town of the future? By no means. It exists in spite of geographies, and has
done so for some 800 or 900 years. It even numbers 2,393 souls, allowing one
soul to each inhabitant. It is situated thirteen and a half kilometres
north-west of Oudenarde, and fifteen and a quarter kilometres south-east of
Bruges, in the heart of Flanders. The Vaar, a small tributary of the Scheldt, passes
beneath its three bridges, which are still covered with a quaint mediaeval
roof, like that at Tournay. An old château is to be seen there, the first stone
of which was laid so long ago as 1197, by Count Baldwin, afterwards Emperor of
Constantinople; and there is a Town Hall, with Gothic windows, crowned by a
chaplet of battlements, and surrounded by a turreted belfry, which rises 357
feet above the soil. Every hour you may hear there a chime of five octaves, a
veritable aerial piano, the renown of which surpasses that of the famous chimes
of Bruges. Strangers – if any ever come to Quiquendone – do not quit the
curious old town until they have visited its ‘Stadtholder’s Hall’, adorned by a
full-length portrait of William of Nassau, by Brandon; the loft of the Church
of Saint Magloire, a masterpiece of sixteenth-century architecture; the
cast-iron well in the spacious Place Saint Ernuph, the admirable ornamentation
of which is attributed to the artist-blacksmith, Quentin Metsys; the tomb
formerly erected to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold, who now
reposes in the Church of Notre Dame at Bruges; and so on. The principal
industry of Quiquendone is the manufacture of whipped creams and barley-sugar
on a large scale. It has been governed by the Van Tricasses, from father to
son, for several centuries. And yet Quiquendone is not on the map of Flanders!
Have the geographers forgotten it, or is it an intentional omission? That I
cannot tell; but Quiquendone really exists, with its narrow streets, its fortified
walls, its Spanish-looking houses, its market, and its burgomaster – so much
so, that it has recently been the theatre of some surprising phenomena, as
extraordinary and incredible as they are true, which are to be recounted in the
present narration.

Surely there is nothing to be said or
thought against the Flemings of Western Flanders. They are a well-to-do folk,
wise, prudent, sociable, with even tempers, hospitable, perhaps a little heavy
in conversation as in mind; but this does not explain why one of the most
interesting towns of their district has yet to appear on modern maps.

This omission is certainly to be regretted. If only history, or in
default of history the chronicles, or in default of chronicles the traditions
of the country, made mention of Quiquendone! But no; neither atlases, guides,
nor itineraries speak of it. M. Joanne himself, that energetic hunter after
small towns, says not a word of it. It might be readily conceived that this
silence would injure the commerce, the industries, of the town. But let us
hasten to add that Quiquendone has neither industry nor commerce, and that it
does very well without them. Its barley-sugar and whipped cream are consumed on
the spot; none is exported. In short, the Quiquendonians have no need of
anybody. Their desires are limited, their existence is a modest one; they are
calm, moderate, phlegmatic – in a word, they are Flemings; such as are still to
be met with sometimes between the Scheldt and the North Sea.

In which the Burgomaster Van Tricasse and the
Counsellor Niklausse consult about the affairs of the town

‘You think so?’ asked the burgomaster.

‘I – think so,’ replied the counsellor,
after some minutes of silence.

‘You see, we must not act hastily,’ resumed the burgomaster.

‘We have been talking over this grave
matter for ten years,’ replied the Counsellor Niklausse, ‘and I confess to you,
my worthy Van Tricasse, that I cannot yet take it upon myself to come to a
decision.’

‘I quite understand your hesitation,’ said
the burgomaster, who did not speak until after a good quarter of an hour of
reflection, ‘I quite understand it, and I fully share it. We shall do wisely to
decide upon nothing without a more careful examination of the question.’

‘It is certain,’ replied Niklausse, ‘that this
post of civil commissary is useless in so peaceful a town as Quiquendone.’

‘Our predecessor,’ said Van Tricasse
gravely, ‘our predecessor never said, never would have dared to say, that
anything is certain. Every affirmation is subject to awkward qualifications.’

The counsellor nodded his head slowly in
token of assent; then he remained silent for nearly half an hour. After this
lapse of time, during which neither the counsellor nor the burgomaster moved so
much as a finger, Niklausse asked Van Tricasse whether his predecessor – of
some twenty years before – had not thought of suppressing this office of civil
commissary, which each year cost the town of Quiquendone the sum of 1,375
francs and some centimes.

‘I believe he did,’ replied the
burgomaster, carrying his hand with majestic deliberation to his ample brow;
‘but the worthy man died without having dared to make up his mind, either as to
this or any other administrative measure. He was a sage. Why should I not do as
he did?’

Counsellor Niklausse was incapable of
originating any objection to the burgomaster’s opinion.

‘The man who dies,’ added Van Tricasse
solemnly, ‘without ever having decided upon anything during his life, has very
nearly attained to perfection.’

This said, the burgomaster pressed a bell
with the end of his little finger, which gave forth a muffled sound, which
seemed less a sound than a sigh. Presently some light steps glided softly
across the tile floor. A mouse would not have made less noise, running over a
thick carpet. The door of the room opened, turning on its well-oiled hinges. A
young girl, with long blonde tresses, made her appearance. It was Suzel Van
Tricasse, the burgomaster’s only daughter. She handed her father a pipe, filled
to the brim, and a small copper brazier, spoke not a word, and disappeared at
once, making no more noise at her exit than at her entrance.

The worthy burgomaster lighted his pipe,
and was soon hidden in a cloud of bluish smoke, leaving Counsellor Niklausse
plunged in the most absorbing thought.

The room in which these two notable
personages, charged with the government of Quiquendone, were talking, was a
parlour richly adorned with carvings in dark wood. A lofty fireplace, in which
an oak might have been burned or an ox roasted, occupied the whole of one of
the sides of the room; opposite to it was a trellised window, the painted glass
of which toned down the brightness of the sunbeams. In an antique frame above
the chimney-piece appeared the portrait of some worthy man, attributed to
Memling, which no doubt represented an ancestor of the Van Tricasses, whose
authentic genealogy dates back to the fourteenth century, the period when the
Flemings and Guy de Dampierre were engaged in wars with the Emperor Rudolph of
Hapsburg.

This parlour was the principal apartment of
the burgomaster’s house, which was one of the pleasantest in Quiquendone. Built
in the Flemish style, with all the abruptness, quaintness, and picturesqueness
of Pointed architecture, it was considered one of the most curious monuments of
the town. A Carthusian convent, or a deaf and dumb asylum, was not more silent
than this mansion. Noise had no existence there; people did not walk, but
glided about in it; they did not speak, they murmured. There was not, however,
any lack of women in the house, which, in addition to the Burgomaster Van
Tricasse himself, sheltered his wife, Madame Brigitte Van Tricasse, his
daughter, Suzel Van Tricasse, and his domestic, Lotchè Janshéu. We may also
mention the burgomaster’s sister, Aunt Hermance, an elderly maiden who still
bore the nickname of Tatanémance, which her niece Suzel had given her when a
child. But in spite of all these elements of discord and noise, the
burgomaster’s house was as calm as a desert.

The burgomaster was some fifty years old,
neither fat nor lean, neither short nor tall, neither rubicund nor pale,
neither gay nor sad, neither contented nor discontented, neither energetic nor
dull, neither proud nor humble, neither good nor bad, neither generous nor
miserly, neither courageous nor cowardly, neither too much nor too little of
anything – a man notably moderate in all respects, whose invariable slowness of
motion, slightly hanging lower jaw, prominent eyebrows, massive forehead,
smooth as a copper plate and without a wrinkle, would at once have betrayed to
a physiognomist that the Burgomaster Van Tricasse was phlegm personified.
Never, either from anger or passion, had any emotion whatever hastened the
beating of this man’s heart, or flushed his face; never had his pupils
contracted under the influence of any irritation, however ephemeral. He
invariably wore good clothes, neither too large nor too small, which he never
seemed to wear out. He was shod with large square shoes with triple soles and
silver buckles, which lasted so long that his shoemaker was in despair. Upon
his head he wore a large hat which dated from the period when Flanders was
separated from Holland, so that this venerable masterpiece was at least forty
years old. But what would you have? It is the passions which wear out body as
well as soul, the clothes as well as the body; and our worthy burgomaster,
apathetic, indolent, indifferent, was passionate in nothing. He wore nothing
out, not even himself, and he considered himself the very man to administer the
affairs of Quiquendone and its tranquil population.

The town, indeed, was not less calm than
the Van Tricasse mansion. It was in this peaceful dwelling that the burgomaster
reckoned on attaining the utmost limit of human existence, after having,
however, seen the good Madame Brigitte Van Tricasse, his wife, precede him to
the tomb, where, surely, she would not find a more profound repose than that
she had enjoyed on earth for sixty years.

This demands explanation.

The Van Tricasse family might well call
itself the
‘
Jeannot
family’. This is why:

Everyone knows that the knife of this
typical personage is as celebrated as its proprietor, and not less incapable of
wearing out, thanks to the double operation, incessantly repeated, of replacing
the handle when it is worn out, and the blade when it becomes worthless. A
precisely similar operation had been going on from time immemorial in the Van
Tricasse family, to which Nature had lent herself with more than usual
complacency. From 1340 it had invariably happened that a Van Tricasse, when
left a widower, had remarried a Van Tricasse younger than himself; who,
becoming in turn a widow, had married again a Van Tricasse younger than
herself; and so on, without a break in the continuity, from generation to
generation. Each died in his or her turn with mechanical regularity. Thus the
worthy Madame Brigitte Van Tricasse had now her second husband; and, unless she
violated her every duty, would precede her spouse – he being ten years younger
than herself – to the other world, to make room for a new Madame Van Tricasse.
Upon this the burgomaster calmly counted, that the family tradition might not
be broken. Such was this mansion, peaceful and silent, of which the doors never
creaked, the windows never rattled, the floors never groaned, the chimneys
never roared, the weathercocks never grated, the furniture never squeaked, the
locks never clanked, and the occupants never made more noise than their
shadows. The god Harpocrates would certainly have chosen it for the Temple of
Silence.