woman’s bread, her bed of leaves, and her house.
He never left her. He had finished his travels.
Father Joseph added:
“It was our Lady the Virgin who permitted that, sir, seeing that a woman had opened her door to Judas.”
For this old vagabond was the Wandering Jew.
The countryside did not know this at once, but soon suspected it from the fact that he was always walking, the habit was so strong in him.
Another thing had roused their suspicions. The woman who sheltered the unknown man in her house passed for a Jewess, since she had never been seen at church.
For ten leagues around no one called her anything but “the Jewess.”
When the little children of the district saw her coming to beg, they cried out:
“Mother, mother, it’s the Jewess!”
She and the old man began to wander round the neighbourhood, holding their hands out at every door, babbling entreaties after every passerby. They were seen at all hours of the day, on lonely paths, in village streets, or eating a piece of bread in the shade of a solitary tree, in the fierce heat of noon.
And they began to call the beggar “Father Judas.”
One day he brought back in his sack two little live pigs which had been given him at a farm because he had cured the farmer of a sickness.
And soon he stopped begging, wholly occupied in leading his pigs about in search of food, guiding them along the tarn, under the solitary oak-trees, and in the little valleys near by. The woman, on the contrary, wandered ceaselessly in quest of alms, but joined him again every evening.
No more than she he went to church, and had never been seen to make the sign of the cross at the wayside shrines. All this caused a deal of gossip.
One night his companion was taken ill with a fever, and began to shake like a rag in the wind. He went to the town to get medicine, then shut himself up with her, and for six days no one saw him.
But the curé, having heard that “the Jewess” was about to pass away, came to bring the dying woman the consolations of his religion, and to offer her the last sacrament. Was she a Jewess? He did not know. In any event, he wished to try and save her soul.
He had scarcely knocked at the door when Father Judas appeared on the threshold, panting, his eyes blazing, all his long white beard quivering like running water: he screamed words of blasphemy in an unknown tongue, stretching out his thin arms to hinder the priest’s entry.
The curé tried to speak, offered him money and assistance, but the old man continued to revile him, making the gesture of stoning him.
And the priest retreated, pursued by the beggar’s curses.
Next day, Father Judas’s companion died. He buried her himself in front of the doorway. They were so poor that no one interfered with them.
Once more the man was seen leading his pigs along the tarn and on the hillsides. And several times he began begging for food again. But now he got next to nothing, so many stories were going round about him. And everyone knew in what a fashion he had welcomed the curé.
He disappeared. It was during Holy Week. No uneasiness was felt.
But on Easter Monday some boys and girls who had gone for a walk up to the tarn, heard a great noise in the hut. The door was shut; the boys broke it open and the two pigs escaped, leaping like deer. They were never seen again.
They all entered, and saw on the ground a few old rags, the beggar’s hat, some bones, some dried blood and remains of flesh in the hollow of a skull.
His pigs had eaten him.
And Father Joseph added:
“It had happened on Good Friday, at three in the afternoon.”
I asked him: “How do you know?”
He replied: “It cannot be doubted.”
I did not try to make him understand how natural it was for the famished beasts to eat their suffering master if he had died suddenly in his hut.
As for the cross on the wall, it appeared one morning, and no one knew what hand had painted it that strange colour.
After that, none doubted that the Wandering Jew had died in that place.
I believed it myself for an hour.
Feminine Men
How often we hear people say, “That man is charming, but he is a woman, a regular girl.” They are alluding to the feminine men, the bane of our country.
For all we men in France are feminine, that is, fickle, fanciful, innocently treacherous, without consistency in our convictions or our will, violent and weak, as women are.
But the most irritating of the species is assuredly the Parisian and the boulevardier, in whom the appearance of intelligence is more marked, and who combines in himself all the attractions and all the faults of charming harlots to an exaggerated degree in virtue of his masculine temperament.
Our Chamber of Deputies is full of feminine men. They form the greater number of the amiable opportunists whom one might call “The Charmers.” It is they who control by soft words and deceitful promises, who know how to shake hands in such a manner as to win hearts, how to say “My dear friend” in a certain tactful way to the people they know the least, to change their minds without suspecting it, to be carried away by each new idea, to be sincere in their weathercock convictions, to let themselves be deceived as they deceive others, to forget the next morning what they affirmed the day before.
The newspapers are full of male prostitutes. That is probably where one finds them most, but it is also where they are most needed. Certain papers, like the Journal des Débats and the Gazette de France, are exceptions.
Assuredly, every good journalist must be something of a prostitute—that is, at the command of the public, supple in following unconsciously the
