Letters From My Windmill by Alphonse Daudet, Frederick Davies Page A

fresh, moist paper, and newsprint…. It's so good! But there's
not a soul willing to read it to me! My wife could, but she doesn't
want to. She makes out that there are indecent things in the news
items. Ah-ha! these old mistresses, once they marry you, there's no one
more prudish. That Madame Bixiou has turned herself into a right little
bigot—but only as far as it suits her!… It was she who wanted to me
rub my eyes in Salette water. And then there was the blessed bread, the
pilgrimages, the Holy Child, the Chinese herbal remedies, and God knows
what else…. We're up to our necks in good works. And yet, it would be
a real kindness to read the papers to me…. But there you are, there's
no chance, she simply doesn't want to…. If my daughter was still at
home, she would; but since I became blind, I've sent her to the
Notre-Dame-des-Arts, so there'd be one less mouth to feed….
    "Now there's another one sent to test me! She's only had nine years on
earth and already she's had every imaginable illness… And miserable!
And ugly! Uglier than I am, if that's possible … a real monster!…
What do you expect? I have never known how to face up to my
responsibilities….
    "Well, what good company I turned out to be, boring you with my family
business. And what's it all got to do with you?… Come on, give me a
bit more brandy. I'd better be off. When I leave here, I am off to the
public information service and the ushers are not famed for their sense
of humour. They're all retired teachers."
    I poured him some brandy. He sipped it and then seemed moved by
something…. Suddenly, on a whim, I think, he got up, glass in hand,
and briefly moved his blind, viper-like head around, with the amiable
smile of someone about to speak, and then speaking in a strident voice,
as if holding forth to a banquet for two hundred,
    "To the arts! To literature! To the press!"
    And there he stood, spouting a toast for fully ten minutes. It was the
most wild, the most marvellous improvisation which his clown's brain
could devise.
    "Imagine a year's-end revue entitled Collection of Letters of 186* ;
about our literati, our gossip, our quarrels, all the idiocies of an
eccentric world, a cesspool of ink, hell in miniature, where you cut
your own throat, disembowel yourself, rob yourself, and outtalk the
bourgeoisie about interest rates and money. Where they let you starve
to death better than anywhere else; all our cowardice and woes; old
baron T… of la Tombola going away with a tut-tut to the Tuileries
with his begging bowl and his flowery clothes. Then there's the year's
deaths, the burial announcements, the never changing funeral oration of
the delegate: the Dearly missed! Poor dear! over some unlucky soul
who was refused the means to bury himself; the suicides; and those gone
insane. Imagine all that, told, itemised, and gesticulated by an orator
of genius, and you will then have some idea of what Bixiou's
improvisation was about."
    * * * * *
    The toast over, his glass empty, he asked me what the time was, and
left in a wild mood, without so much as saying goodbye…. I don't know
how Monsieur Duruy's ushers were affected by his visit that morning;
but I do know that after that awful blind man had left, I have never
felt so sad, so bad, in the whole of my life.
    The very sight of ink sickened me, my pen horrified me, I wanted to
distance myself from it all, to run away, to see trees, to feel
something good, real…. Good God! The hatred, the venom, the
unquenchable need to belittle it all, to befoul everything! Oh! That
wretched man….
    Then I furiously paced up and down in my room still hearing the
giggling disgust he had shown for his daughter. Right then, I felt
something under my feet, near where the blind man had been sitting.
Bending down, I recognised his wallet, a thick, worn wallet, with split
corners, which he always carried with him and laughingly called his
pocket of venom.
    This wallet, in our world, was as famous as Monsieur de