Colas Breugnon

Thanks be to St. Martin, business is bad, so there is no use in breaking one's back; and Lord knows I have worked hard enough in my time to take a little rest and comfort here at my table, with a bottle of wine on my right hand, the ink-well on the left, and a new quire of paper before me. "Your good health, old boy!" I say to myself, "I am to have a talk with you now." Downstairs I can hear my wife raging while the wind roars outside and I am told there are threatenings of war. Well, let them be!How jolly it is to be alone face to face with the best fellow in the world (I am talking of course of my other self, of you, Colas, with your old red phiz, and queer grin, with your long Burgundian nose all askew like a hat on one ear). Tell me if you can why it is so good to see you like this, just our two selves; to look closely at your elderly countenance, touching lightly, as it were, on the wrinkles, and to drink a bumper of old remembrance from the bottom of my heart which is like a deep well, worse luck! It is pleasant enough to dream, but still better to pin one's dreams down to paper! However, I am no visionary, but wide-awake, full of fun and clear-sighted, with no idle fancies in my head. I only tell what I have seen, done, and said; and for whom do I write? Certainly not for fame; for I am no fool, and know what I amount to, the Lord be praised! I write for my grandchildren? Little will be left of all my scribblings in ten years, as the old woman is jealous of them, and burns whatever she can lay hands on. For whom, then? Why, for my other self, of course, for our good pleasure.I am sure I should burst if I did not write! Truly I am not for nothing the child of my grandfather, who could not sleep unless he had put down on the edge of his pillow the number of flagons he had emptied. I feel I must talk, and here in Clamecy I have had my fill of word contests. I must break loose, like the fellow who shaved King Midas. I know my tongue runs away with me; and it would be at the risk of my neck if I were heard; but what's the odds! without its dangers life would be flat enough. I am like our big white oxen, and love to chew the cud of the day's food. How good it is to taste, feel, and handle all one has thought, observed, or picked up; to smack one's lips, to relish, as one tells it over to one's self, something one snapped up hastilyit seems to melt in one's mouth, and slip down softly; and how good it is to glance around one's little world and say, "All this is mine, here I am lord and master, no frost or cold can nip me; here reigns no king, no pope! Not even my old shrew!" But now I must take an account of this world of mine. The first and best of my possessions is myself. Colas Breugnon, a good Burgundian, plain and straightforward, with a well-rounded waistcoat. I am not exactly in my first youthfifty last birthday,but well set-up, my teeth still good, and my sight as clear as a fish's. My beard still sprouts vigorously, but is undoubtedly grayish, and I can't help regretting the fair hair of my youth, and would not say no, if you offered to set my clock back twenty or thirty years. But after all ten lusters are a fine thing. The youngsters may laugh, but how many of them could have paraded up and down France as I have done, for all these years? Lord! how much sun and rain have hit this old back! I have been roasted, soaked, and warmed over dozens of times and my body, like a cracked leather sack, is full of joy and sorrow, spite and good-humor, wisdom and folly, hay and straw, figs and grapes, fruit ripe and unripe, roses and hawswhat I have seen, felt and known, owned and lived, all jumbled together in the game-bag, and what fun to dive into it;but hold on, Colas! We will go into that tomorrow, we shall never be done if we take it up today, so just now we will draw up the inventory of all property belonging to me.

Dettagli