Le Proverbe By Michel Aymé French to English Translation
In the light of the suspended light that lit up the kitchen, Mr. Jacotin saw in a general glance the family curved around the food and witnessing, by stealthy looks, that they feared the mood of the master of the house. The profound conscience that he had of his devotion, a narrow worry of domestic justice, actually rendered him unfair and tyrannical, and his explosions of a quick-tempered man, always unpredictable, kept in his home an atmosphere of constraint that didn't miss irritating him.
Having learned in the afternoon that he had been designated for the P.A. [educator's award], he refrained from telling the family until the end of dinner. After having drinken a glass of wine with his last mouthful of cheese, he was about to speak, but it seemed to him that the atmosphere was not such that he had wished for welcoming the happy news. His look slowly did the tour of the table, stopping first at his spouse, of whom the sickly look, the sad and scared face gave him so little honor with his colleages. It passed next to the aunt Julie who had settled in the home by playing up her old age and several deathly sicknesses and who, in seven years, had cost surely greater than money that the family couldn't wait for her inheritance. Next came the tour of his two daughters, seventeen and sixteen years old, employed at a store at 500 Francs per month, yet dressed like princesses, watch-bracelets, gold pins at the V-line of their dresses, the airs of being above their condition, and the family asked themselves where the money went, and they were amazed. Mr. Jacotin suddenly had the atrocious feeling that they were stealing their goods, that they drank the sweat of their pains and that he was ridiculously indulgent. The wine suddenly went to his head and enflamed his already remarkable large face to rest by his natural ruddiness.
It was in this spirited disposition when his look fell on his son Lucien, a boy of thirteen who, since the start of the meal, strove to pass unnoticed. The father glimpsed something suspicious in the paleness of his small face. The kid hadn't raised his eyes, but feeling watched, he twisted a crease in his black school smock with his two hands.
"Would you really like to tear it?" said the father in a voice that promised it. "You do all that you can for tearing it?"
Letting go of his smock, Lucien set his hands on the table. He leaned his head on his plate without daring to look for the comfort of a look from his sisters and abandoned everything to his menacing misfortune.
"I'm speaking to you, you know. Il seems to me that you could answer me. But I suspect you of not having the good, calm conscience."
Lucien protested with a scared look. He by no means hoped to divert suspicion, but he knew that his father would have been disappointed to not find fear in the eyes of his son.
"No, you surely don't have a calm conscience. Do you want to tell me what you did this afternoon?"
"This afternoon, I was with Pichon. He had told me that he would look for me at 2:00. In leaving here, we met up with Chapusot who was going on errands. First, we were at the doctor for his uncle who is sick. Since the day before yesterday, he has been feeling pain in his liver..."
But the father understood that he wanted to lose him in the story and cut off: "Don't mix yourself like that in the liver of otheres. None of you worry so much when it's me who suffers. Rather tell me where you were this morning."
"I was to see with Fourmont the house that burned down last night on Poincaré Avenue."
"So, you were outside all day? From morning until evening? Good to hear, since you spent your Thursday having fun, I imagine that you did you homework?"
Le father pronounced these last words with a softer tone that made them all hold their breath.
"My homework?" murmurmed Lucien.
"Yes, your homework."
"I worked yesterday evening upon returning from class."
"I'm not asking you if you worked yesterday evening. I'm asking you if you did your homework for tomorrow."
Each one felt things heading for a climax and would have wanted to move away, but the experience taught them that all interference in similar cicumstances could only spoil things and furiously change the aggressiveness of this violent man. As a matter of strategy, Lucien's two sisters feigned following the affair absentmindedly, while the mother, prefering to not assist much next to an annoying scene, escaped to a closet. Mr. Jacotin himself, bordering on anger, hesitated again to bury the news of the P.A. But the aunt Julie, moved by the generous feelings, couldn't hold her tongue.
"Poor child, you are always after him. Since he tells you that he worked yesterday evening. It's really necessary that he also has fun."
Offended, Mr. Jacotin replied with arrogance: "I will beg you to not impede my efforts in the upbringing of my son. Being his father, I act as such and I understand to direct him according to my beliefs. Free to you, when you will have kids, to indulge their every whim."
The aunt Julie, who was 73 years old, judged that he possibly had irony in talking about his kids to come. Frazzled at his trick, she left the kitchen. Lucien followed her with a touched look and saw a moment, in the half-light of the shiny and clean kitchen, to grope for the switch. When she reclosed the door, Mr. Jacotin took all the family to witness that he had nothing to say that justified such a departure and he complained of the treachery that he had to put him in the situation of passing for someone rude. Neither his daughters, who put themselves to clearing the table, nor his wife, could decide to approve, which brought an agreement. Their silence caused him a new outrage. Bursting with anger, he returned to Lucien: "I'm still waiting for your response. Yes or no, did you do your homework?"
Lucien understood that he wouldn't win anything by dragging the things and he took the plunge.
"I didn't do my French homework."
A glimmer of gratitude passed in the eyes of his father. He had pleasure in dealing with a youngster like that.
"Why, please?"
Lucien raised his shoulders as a sign of ignorance and even amazement, as if the question was absurd.
"I could smash that brat," murmured the father in devouring his look.
One moment, he stayed silent, considering the degree of meanness to which descended his ingrateful son who, without any avowable reason and apparently without remorse, neglected to do his French homework.
"It's therefore good what I thought," he said, "and his voice starts to show with the tone of the speech. Not only do you continue, but you make a habit of it. Here is a French assignment that the teacher gave you last Friday for tomorrow. You therefore had eight days to do it and you didn't find the way. And if I hadn't talked to you, you went to class without having done it. But worst of all, it's that you will have spent all your Thursday lounging and lazing about. And with whom? With a Pichon, a Fourmont, a Chapusot, all these, all these dunces in the class. The dunces are your kind. Who is alike gets together. Of course you wouldn't think to play with Béruchard. You would believe yourself dishonorable to go play with a good student. And first, Béruchard wouldn't accept, him, Béruchard, I am sure that il doesn't have fun. And that he never has fun. It's good for you. He works, Béruchard. The consequence, it's that he is always at the top of the class. Not later than last week, he was three places in front of you. You can be sure that it's a pleasant thing for me who follows at the desk with his father all day. Yet a man less well-noticed than me. What is it about Béruchard? I talk to his father. He's a working man, if you will, but who lacks ability. And on political ideas, it's quite equal on the job. He never had ideas. And Béruchard, he knows it well. When we discuss some things or other, in front of me, he doesn't get far. Despite that, if he comes to talk to me about his kid who is always the first in his class, it's him who takes the upper hand. I find myself for this reason in a faulty position. I'm not lucky to have a son like Béruchard. A son at the top of the class in French and maths. A son who sweeps all the prizes. Lucien, will you leave that napkin ring alone! I will not tolerate you listening to me with those intolerable airs of yours. Yes or no, did you hear me? Or if you want a couple of smacks to learn that I am your father? Lazy, hooligan, incapable! A French assignment given eight days ago! You won't tell me that if you had stamina or that if you thought that I give you difficulty, a similar thing would produce itself. No, Lucien, you don't know to show gratitude. Otherwise that, your French homework, you would have done it. The difficulty that I give myself in my work. And the worries and the anxiety. For the present and for the future. What I get too old, anyone to support me. It's better to be sure of yourself than of others. A cent, I never asked for it. Me, to start off, I was never to look out for a neighbor. And I was never helped by mine. My father didn't let me study. When I was twelve, in apprenticeship. To pull the cart and by all the time. Winter, the swellings, and summer, the shirt that stuck to my back. But you lounge. You are lucky to have a father who is very good. But that won't last. When I think. A French assignment. Lazy-bones, dirty fellow! Be good, you will always be weak. And me all the time who thought you managed everything, next Wednesday, you will play The Burgraves. I don't doubt what waited for me upon returning to my house. When I'm not there, one can be sure that it's anarchy. It's the homework not being done and all that follows throughout the house. And, listen well, you had to pick the very day..."
The father made a significant pause. A delicate sentiment, of decency and modesty, made him lower his eyelids.
"The day where I learn that I am proposed for the P.A. Yes, this is the day that you choose."
He waited a few seconds for the effect of his last words. But, hardly detached from his long interuption, they seemed to not have been understood. Each one had heard them, like the rest of the speech, without penetrating the sense. Alone, Mr. Jacotin, knowing that he waited for the reward of returned services for two years, in his quality of voluntary treasurer, to the U.N.S.P. [local choral society], had the impression that something of importance came escaped from him. The word of the P.A. returned a strange but familiar sound to his ears, and came up for her the vision of her husband dressed in his honorary musician's cap and astride on the higher branch of a palm tree. The fear of having been inattentive finally made him see the sense of this poetic fiction and she opened her mouth and prepared herself to express a different joy. It was too late. Mr. Jacotin, who bitterly delighted himself in the indifference of his own, feared that a word from his wife saw to soothe the injury of this heavy silence and hastened to prevent her.
"Continue," he said with a painful sneer. "I said that you had eight days to do this French homework. Yes, eight days. Hold on, I would like to know since when Béruchard did it. I am sure that he didn't wait eight days, nor six, nor five. Nor three, nor two. Béruchard, he did it the next day. And do you want to tell me which assignment this is?"
Lucien, who wasn't listening, let time pass before answering. His father summoned him in a voice that passed through three doors and went to touch the aunt Julie in her bedroom. In a bedshirt and a defeated look, she came to inquire.
"What is this? See, what do you do to him, to this child? I want to know."
As bad luck would have it in this instant Mr. Jacotin let himself dominate by the thought of his P.A. This is why patience failed him. Even at the peak of his anger, he usually expressed himself in a decent way of speaking. But the tone of this old woman taken into his house by a charitable account and talking with this lack of consideration to a man in happening to be decorated, appeared to him an attack calling for disrespect.
"You," he answered, "you four-letter word, you!"
The aunt Julie stood openmouthed, her eyes round, yet incredulous, and as he specified what he meant by four letters, she fainted. There were cries of fright in the kitchen, a long rumor of drama with moving of hot-water bottles, of saucers and flasks. Lucien's sisters and their mother bustled about close to the sick with words of compassion and comfort, of which each one cruelly affected Mr. Jacotin. They avoided his look, but when by chance their faces turned towards him, their eyes were hard. They felt guilty and, pitying the old woman, sincerely regretted the excess of speech to which he had let himself go. He would have wished to excuse himself, but the disapproval that surrounded him so visibly hardened his pride. While the family took the aunt Julie away to her bedroom, he pronounced in a loud and clear voice: "For the third time, I am asking you what your French homework consists of."
"It's a development of a given theme," said Lucien. "We had to explain the proverbe: "Slow and steady wins the race.""
"And so? I don't see what stops you."
Lucien nodded his assent, but his face was reluctant.
"In any case, hurry to look for your notebooks for me, and work. I want to see your homework finished."
Lucien went to take his school-bag that was lying in a corner of the kitchen, in taking out a draft notebook and written high on a blank page: "Slow and steady wins the race." Even as slowly as he wrote, that wouldn't have taken five minutes. He then started to suck on his penholder and considered the proverbe with a hostile and stubborn attitude.
"I see that you take that with a bad will," said the father. "Take your time. Me, I'm not in a hurry. I will wait all night if it's necessary."
In fact, he had started in the position of conveniently waiting. Lucien, in raising his eyes, saw to him an air of worry that despaired him. He tried to think about the proverb: "Slow and steady wins the race." For him, there was in it evidence requiring no demonstration, and he thought with disgust of La Fontaine's fable: The Hare and the Toirtoise. Meanwhile, his sisters, after having layed the aunt Julie down, began to arrange the dishes in the cupboard and, even as attentive as they were to not make noise, it happened that the bumps that irritated Mr. Jacotin, seemed to him that the family wanted to offer to the student a good excuse to do nothing. Suddenly, there was an awful din. The mother dropped an iron pan in the sink that bounced on the tiled floor.
"Careful," scolded the father. "It's all the same irritating. How would like that he works, also, in a similar carnival? Leave him calm and go besides. The table is cleared off. Go lie down."
At once, the women left the kitchen. Lucien felt betrayed by his father, at night, and thinking to the death at dawn lifeless over his proverb, he started to cry.
"A lot of good that does you," his father said to him. "You big ninny, you!"
The voice stayed rough, but with a touch of compassion, because Mr. Jacotin, yet ashamed of the drama that he had caused this hour, wished to redeem his leadership by a certain leniency towards his son. Lucien perceived the shade, he expected and cried more strongly. A tear fell on the notebook, near the proverb. Moved, the father made a tour of the table in dragging a chair and came to sit next to the kid.
"Let's go, get me your handkercheif and this will be finished. At your age, you should think that if I am hard on you, it's for your own good. Later, you will say: "He was right." A father who knows to be severe, there is nothing better for the child. Béruchard, justly, told me that yesterday. It's a habit, to him, to fight his own. Sometimes it's the slaps or his foot where I think, sometimes the strap or beef nerve. He gets good results. Surely his way works right and he goes far. But to fight a child, me, I couldn't, except of course perhaps from time to time. Each one has his own ideas. It's what I said to Béruchard. I consider that it's better to appeal to the reason of the child.
Appeased by these good words, Lucien had stopped crying and his father understood that as worry.
"Because I am speaking to you as to a man, you aren't going to at least imagine that this would be weakness?"
"Oh no," answered Lucien with a tone of profound conviction.
Reassured, Mr. Jacotin had a look of kindness. Next, considering on the other hand the proverb, moreover the difficulty of his son, he believed to be able to generously show himself a bit of cost and said with good-naturedness: "I see well that if I don't put my hand to to it, we'll still be here at four in the morning. Let's go, to work. We therefore say: "Slow and steady wins the race." Let's see. Slow and steady..."
Soon, the subject of this French homework had appeared nearly ridiculous using something to be easy. Now that he had assumed responsibility, he saw it from another eye. His look worried, he reread the proverb several times and murmured: "It's a proverb."
"Yes," agreed Lucien who waited for what was to come next with a new assurance.
Much calm trust troubled Mr. Jacotin's heart. The idea that his father's prestige was at stake made him nervous.
"In giving you this assignment," he asked, "the teacher didn't say anything to you?"
"He told us, 'Especially, avoid summarizing The Hare and the Tortoise. It's up to you to find an example.' That is what he said."
"Hold on, this is true," said the father. "The Hare and the Tortoise, that's a good example. I hadn't thought of it."
"Yes, but it's forbidden."
"Forbidden, of course, forbidden. But anyways, if everything is forbidden..."
His face a bit flushed, Mr. Jacotin looked for an idea or at least a sentence to make a start. His imagination was restive. He started to consider the proverb with a feeling of fear and resentment. Little by little, his look took the same expression of annoyance that had been a little while ago that of Lucien.
Finally, he had an idea that was to develop a subtitle for the newspaper, "The Arms Race", that he had read the same morning. The development came well: a nation preparing itself for the war for a long time, making cannons, tanks, machine guns, and planes. The neighboring nation sluggishly prepares itself, of the sort that it isn't ready at all when the war happened and it vainly strives to make up for its delay. There is all the matter an excellent assignment."
Mr. Jacotin's face, which had become clear one moment, darkened all of a sudden. He came to think that his political views didn't permit him to choose an example as one-sided. He had too much honesty to humble his convictions, but it was all the same loss. Despite the firmness of his opinions, he let himself lightly touch on the regret of not being a part of the reactionary party, which would have allowed him to exploit his idea with his conscience's approval. He pulled himself together in thinking about his P.A., but with a lot of sadness.
Lucien waited without worrying about the result of this deep thinking. He judged himself as free from care of explaining the proverb and didn't think about it anymore. But the silence that dragged on made the time appear long to him. His eyelids heavy, he made to hear several prolonged yawns. His father, his face tensed by the effort of his research, perceived them as much as reproach and his nervousness increased it. No matter how much he put spirit to his torture, he found nothing. The arms race bothered him. It seemed that it made itself bound to the proverb and the efforts that he made to forget it imposed it justly on his thought. From time to time, he looked at his son furtively and anxiously.
When he didn't hope anymore and prepared himself to confess his lack of power, there occured to him another idea. It presented itself as a reversal of the arms race which it succeeded to separate his obsession. It was yet a question of a competition, but sportive, to which they would prepare themselves two teams of rowers, one methodically, the other with negligence.
"Let's go," commanded Mr. Jacotin, "write."
Half-asleep, Lucien started and took his penholder.
"My word, were you sleeping?"
"Oh! No. I was thinking. I was thinking about the proverb. But I haven't found anything."
The father had a small indulgent laugh, next his look became fixed and, slowly, he began to dictate: "On this splendid Sunday summer afternoon, comma, what are then these pretty green objects with long form, comma, who smite our looks? We would say from afar that they are provided with long arms, but these arms are another thing that the oars and the green objects are in reality two course boats that swing softly with the will of the waves of the Marne."
Lucien, taken by a vague anxiety, dared to raise his head and had a bit of a scared look. But his father didn't see it, too busy with polishing a transition sentence that was going to allow him to introduce the rival teams. His mouth half-opened, his eyes half-closed, he watched his rowers and assembled them in the field of his thoughts. Groping along, he put his hands forward towards his son's penholder.
"Deal. I am going to write myself. It's more convenient than dictating."
Feverish, he began to write from an abundant pen. The ideas and the words came to him easily, in a convenient yet joyful order, that tended it to lyricism. He felt rich, teacher of a magnificent and flowery domain. Lucien looked one moment, not without a bit of apprehension, running on his rough notebook the inspired pen finished by being set down on the table. At 11:00, his father woke him up and handed the notebook to him.
"And now, you are going to calmly recopy that for me. I'm waiting that you have finished by rereading. Try to put the punctuation, especially."
"It is late," observed Lucien. "Will I possibly do better by waking up early tomorrow morning?"
"No, no. Strike while the iron is hot. Yet another proverb, notice."
Mr. Jacotin had a smug smile and added: "This proverb there, I wouldn't be troubled to explain it either. If I had the time, it wouldn't be necessary to push me a lot. It's a first-rate subject. A subject on which makes me strong to write my twelve pages. At least, do you understand it well?"
"What?"
"I'm asking you if you understand the proverb 'Stirke while the iron is hot.'"
Lucien, overburdened, failed to give up to the discouragement. He pulled himself together and answered with a large sweetness: "Yes, Papa. I understand well. But it's necessary that I recopy my homework."
"That's right, recopy," said Mr. Jacotin with a tone that translated his scorn for certain activities of a subordinate order.
A week later, the teacher gave back the corrected copy.
"On the whole," he said, "I am far from satisfied. If I exclude Béruchard to whom I gave a 13, and five or six others all rightfully passing, you didn't understand the assignment."
He explained what it would have been necessary to do, next, in the pile of copies marked up with red ink, he chose three from it that he started to comment on. The first was Béruchard's, which he spoke of in flattering terms. The third was Lucien's.
"In reading yours, Jacotin, I was surprised by a style of writing to which you haven't accustomed me to and which appeared to me so unpleasant that I didn't hesitate to fail you with a three. If it often happened to me to blame the dryness of your developments, I have to tell you that you fell this time in the contrary fault. You have found the way to fill up six pages in staying constantly on the outside of the subject. But the more insupportable is your floweryness that you felt you had to adopt.
The teacher still talked for a long time about Lucien's assignmen, that he proposed to other students as the model of bad writing. He read some passages in a loud voice that seemed to him particularly bad examples. In the class, there were some smiles, some clucks, and even some sustained laughter. Lucien was very pale. His self-esteem hurt, he also was feeling affiliated devotion.
Yet, he blamed his father for putting him in the situation of getting himself laughed at by his peers. Mediocre student, never his negligence nor his ignorance had exposed him like that to ridicule. Whether it was a question of a French assignment, of Latin or algebra, he remained even with all his shortcomings a just feeling of decency and schoolboy elegance. The evening where, his eyes red from sleep, he had recopied Mr. Jacotin's draft, he had hardly made a mistake of the welcome that would be made to his assignment. The next day, more awake, he had even hesitated to hand it back to the teacher, feeling more strongly what it contained of falsities and discord, considering the habits of the class. But at the last moment, an instinctive faith in the infallibility of his father had him decided.
On returning to school, Lucien thought with grief about this burst of so to speak religious trust that had spoken more loudly than the evidence. Of what had mixed the father in explaining this proverb? For certain, the father had well deserved the humiliation of seeing himself get three out of twenty on his French assignment. There was in that enough to cure him of any desire to explain the proverbs. And Béruchard who had 13. The father would have difficulty recovering. That would teach him.
At the table, Mr. Jacotin showed himself as playful and almost gracious. An elation a bit feverish animated his look and his words. He had the mannerism of not posing at first the question that burned his lips and that his son waited for. The atmosphere at lunch wasn't very different that what it usually was. The gaiety of the father, in place of putting the guests at ease, was rather a supplementary trouble. Mrs. Jacotin and her daughters tried in vain to adopt an allowed tone to the good humor of the man of the house. For the aunt Julie, she got used to an duty of stress by a sulky attitude and an air of offended surprise how suspiciously unusual this cheery manner seemed to look to the family. Mr. Jacotin felt it himself, because he didn't delay to darken.
"Let's get to the point," he said with bruskness. "And the proverb?"
His voice betrayed an emotion that resembled more worry than impatience. Lucien felt that in this instant he could cause the misfortune of his father. He now looked at him with a freedom that suddenly revealed to him the real character of his father. He understood that, through the long years, the poor man lived on the feeling of his infallibility as the master of the house and that in explaining the proverb, he had engaged the principle of his infallibility in a dangerous adventure. Not only was the domestic tyrant going to lose his face before his own, but he would lose at the same time the consideration that he had for his own self. This would be a disaster. And in the kitchen, at the table, across from the aunt Julie who always watched for revenge, this drama that a simple word could unleash already had an upsetting reality. Lucien was made frightened by the weakness of his father and his heart expected a feeling of generous pity.
"Are you daydreaming? I'm asking you if the teacher returned my assignment?" said Mr. Jacotin.
"Your assignment? Yes, he returned it."
"And what grade did we get?"
"Thirteen."
"Not bad. And Béruchard?"
"Thirteen."
"And the best grade was?"
"Thirteen."
His father's face lit up. He turned himself towards the aunt Julie with an insistant look, as if the grade of thirteen had been given despite her. Lucien lowered his eyes and kept his thoughts to himself with a moved pleasure. Mr. Jacotin touched his shouler and said with kindness: "You see, my dear child, when you undertake work, all is firstly of good thinking. Understand work, it's to have made more than three quarters. That is justly what I would like to show you in the head once and for all. And I will arrive there. I will put all the necessary times there. Rest, to leave now, and from now on, all your French homework, we will do it together."
