and that he had quietly left the coach in the heart of the great city.
“Feeling ran very high in the district. Letters were exchanged between the Mayor and the Chief of the Paris police, but resulted in no discovery.
“Day followed day, the week ran out.
“Then, one morning, Dr. Barbesol noticed, sitting on the threshold of a door, a man clad in dirty linen, who slept with his head against the wall. He approached and recognised Isidore. He tried to waken him, and was unable to do so. The ex-May King was in a deep, disquieting sleep that nothing could break, and the Doctor, surprised, went in search of help to carry the young man to Boucheval, the chemist’s. When they lifted him up, an empty bottle appeared, hidden under him; the Doctor sniffed it and declared that it had contained brandy. It was a hint as to the remedies required. They succeeded. Isidore was drunk, drunk and besotted by eight days of debauchery, drunk and so disgusting that a ragpicker wouldn’t have touched him. His beautiful vesture of white linen was all rags and tatters, dirty, yellow, greasy, muddy, torn, beggarly; and his person smelt of all the odours of the sewer, the gutter and vice.
“He was washed, preached at, locked up, and, for four days, did not stir out of the house. He seemed ashamed and penitent. They couldn’t find on him the purse with five hundred francs, nor the little savings-book, nor even his silver watch, a sacred heirloom bequeathed to him by his father the fruiterer.
“On the fifth day, he ventured into the Rue Dauphine. Many curious glances followed him, and he went past the houses with head bent down and furtive eyes. He vanished from sight at the point where the country opens out into the valley; but two hours later he reappeared, hiccuping and reeling against the walls. He was drunk, dead drunk.
“Nothing could cure him.
“Forced to it by his mother, he became a carter and drove the coal wagons for the firm of Pougrisel, which is in existence still.
“His reputation as a drunkard was so bad and extended so far that, even at Evreux, they speak of Madame Husson’s May King, and the drunken scoundrels of the district have preserved this nickname.
“A good action is never wasted.”
Dr. Marambot rubbed his hands together at the end of his story. I asked him:
“Did you know the May King personally?”
“Oh, yes, I had the honour of closing his eyes.”
“What did he die of?”
“From an attack of delirium tremens, of course!”
We had arrived by this time at the old fortress, a pile of ruined walls surmounted by the high tower of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, and the tower called the Prisoner’s Tower.
Marambot told me the story of this prisoner who, by means of a nail, covered the walls of his cell with sculpture, following the movements of the sun through the narrow cleft of a loophole.
Then I learned that Clotaire II had given the patrimony of Gisors to his cousin Saint Romain, that Gisors ceased to be the capital of all Vexin after the Treaty of Saint-Claire-sur-Epte, that the town was the salient strategic point of the whole of this part of France, and that by reason of this natural advantage it had been captured and recaptured times without number. By order of Guillaume le Roux, the celebrated engineer Robert de Belesme constructed there a strong fortress, later attacked by Louis le Gros, then by the Norman barons, defended by Robert de Candos, yielded finally to Louis le Gros by Geoffrey Plantagenet, retaken by the English through the Templars’ treachery, quarrelled over by Philippe Auguste and Richard Coeur de Lion, burned by Edward III of England, who could not take the castle, rebuilt by the English in 1419, surrendered later to Charles VII by Richard de Marbury, taken by the Duke of Calabria, occupied by the League, lived in by Henry IV, etc., etc.
And Marambot, with deep conviction, roused almost to eloquence, repeated:
“What beggarly rascals the English are! What drunken scoundrels, my dear; May Kings, every one of them, the hypocrites!”
He was silent, then stretched his arm towards the thread of river gleaming in the meadow.
“Do you know that Henry Monnier was one of the people who fished regularly on the banks of the Epte?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“And Bouffé, my dear, Bouffé made stained glass here.”
“Well, I never!”
“He did. You can’t get away from facts like that.”
The Father
Jean de Valnoix is a friend of mine whom I visit from time to time. He lives in a little house in the woods at the edge of a river. He retired from Paris after leading a wild life for fifteen years. Suddenly he had enough of pleasures, dinners, men, women, cards, everything; and he came to live in this little place where he had been born.
There are two or three of us who go, from time to time, to spend a fortnight or three weeks with him. He is certainly delighted to see us when we arrive, and pleased to be alone again when we leave. So I went to see him last week, and he received me with open arms. We would spend the time, sometimes together, sometimes alone. Usually he reads and I work during the daytime, and every evening we talk until midnight.
Well, last Tuesday, after a scorching day, towards nine o’clock in the evening we were both of us sitting and watching the water flow at our feet; we were exchanging very vague ideas about the stars which were bathing in the current and which seemed to swim along ahead of us. Our ideas were very vague, confused, and brief, for our minds are very limited, weak, and powerless. I was growing sentimental about the sun, which dies in the Great Bear. One can only see it on very clear nights, it is so pale. When the sky is the least bit clouded it disappears. We
