William Locke - The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol

Aristide Pujol started life on his own account as a chasseur in a Nice café – one of those luckless children tightly encased in bottle-green cloth by means of brass buttons, who earn a sketchy livelihood by enduring with cherubic smiles the continuous maledictions of the establishment. There he soothed his hours of servitude by dreams of vast ambitions. He would become the manager of a great hotel – not a contemptible hostelry where commercial travellers and seedy Germans were indifferently bedded, but one of those white palaces where milords (English) and millionaires (American) paid a thousand francs a night for a bedroom and five louis for a glass of beer. Now, in order to derive such profit from the Anglo-Saxon a knowledge of English was indispensable. He resolved to learn the language. How he did so, except by sheer effrontery, taking linguistic toll of frequenters of the café, would be a mystery to anyone unacquainted with Aristide. But to his friends his mastery of the English tongue in such circumstances is comprehensible. To Aristide the impossible was ever the one thing easy of attainment; the possible the one thing he never could achieve. That was the paradoxical nature of the man. Before his days of hunted-little-devildom were over he had acquired sufficient knowledge of English to carry him, a few years later, through various vicissitudes in England, until, fired by new social ambitions and self-educated in a haphazard way, he found himself appointed Professor of French in an academy for young ladies.

One of these days, when I can pin my dragon-fly friend down to a plain, unvarnished autobiography, I may be able to trace some chronological sequence in the kaleidoscopic changes in his career. But hitherto, in his talks with me, he flits about from any one date to any other during a couple of decades, in a manner so confusing that for the present I abandon such an attempt. All I know of the date of the episode I am about to chronicle is that it occurred immediately after the termination of his engagement at the academy just mentioned. Somehow, Aristide’s history is a category of terminations.

If the head mistress of the academy had herself played dragon at his classes, all would have gone well. He would have made his pupils conjugate irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the mysteries of the past participle and the subjunctive mood, and turned them out quite innocent of the idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But dis aliter visum . The gods always saw wrong-headedly otherwise in the case of Aristide. A weak-minded governess – and in a governess a sense of humour and of novelty is always a sign of a weak mind – played dragon during Aristide’s lessons. She appreciated his method, which was colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular. His lessons therefore were a giggling joy from beginning to end. He imparted to his pupils delicious knowledge. En avez-vous des-z-homards? Oh, les sales bêtes, elles ont du poil aux pattes , which, being translated, is: “Have you any lobsters? Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on their feet” – a catch phrase which, some years ago, added greatly to the gaiety of Paris, but in which I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit – became the historic property of the school. He recited to them, till they were word-perfect, a music-hall ditty of the early ’eighties — Sur le bi, sur le banc, sur le bi du bout du banc , and delighted them with dissertations on Mme. Yvette Guilbert’s earlier repertoire. But for him they would have gone to their lives’ end without knowing that pognon meant money; rouspétance , assaulting the police; thune , a five-franc piece; and bouffer , to take nourishment. He made (according to his own statement) French a living language. There was never a school in Great Britain, the Colonies, or America on which the Parisian accent was so electrically impressed. The retort, Eh! ta sœur , was the purest Montmartre; also Fich’-moi la paix, mon petit , and Tu as un toupet, toi ; and the delectable locution, Allons étrangler un perroquet (let us strangle a parrot), employed by Apaches when inviting each other to drink a glass of absinthe, soon became current French in the school for invitations to surreptitious cocoa-parties.

The progress that academy made in a real grip of the French language was miraculous; but the knowledge it gained in French grammar and syntax was deplorable. A certain mid-term examination – the paper being set by a neighbouring vicar – produced awful results. The phrase, “How do you do, dear?” which ought, by all the rules of Stratford-atte-Bowe, to be translated by Comment vous portez-vous, ma chère? was rendered by most of the senior scholars Eh, ma vieille, ca boulotte? One innocent and anachronistic damsel, writing on the execution of Charles I., declared that he cracha dans le panier in 1649, thereby mystifying the good vicar, who was unaware that “to spit into the basket” is to be guillotined. This wealth of vocabulary was discounted by abject poverty in other branches of the language. No one could give a list of the words in “ al ” that took “ s ” in the plural, no one knew anything at all about the defective verb échoir , and the orthography of the school would have disgraced a kindergarten. The head mistress suspected a lack of method in the teaching of M. Pujol, and one day paid his class a surprise visit.

The sight that met her eyes petrified her. The class, including the governess, bubbled and gurgled and shrieked with laughter. M. Pujol, his bright eyes agleam with merriment and his arms moving in frantic gestures, danced about the platform. He was telling them a story – and when Aristide told a story, he told it with the eloquence of his entire frame. He bent himself double and threw out his hands.

“ Il était saoûl comme un porc ,” he shouted.

And then came the hush of death. The rest of the artless tale about the man as drunk as a pig was never told. The head mistress, indignant majesty, strode up the room.

“M. Pujol, you have a strange way of giving French lessons.”

“I believe, madame,” said he, with a polite bow, “in interesting my pupils in their studies.”

“Pupils have to be taught, not interested,” said the head mistress. “Will you kindly put the class through some irregular verbs.”

So for the remainder of the lesson Aristide, under the freezing eyes of the head mistress, put his sorrowful class through irregular verbs, of which his own knowledge was singularly inexact, and at the end received his dismissal. In vain he argued. Outraged Minerva was implacable. Go he must.

We find him, then, one miserable December evening, standing on the arrival platform of Euston Station (the academy was near Manchester), an unwonted statue of dubiety. At his feet lay his meagre valise; in his hand was an enormous bouquet, a useful tribute of esteem from his disconsolate pupils; around him luggage-laden porters and passengers hurried; in front were drawn up the long line of cabs, their drivers’ waterproofs glistening with wet; and in his pocket rattled the few paltry coins that, for Heaven knew how long, were to keep him from starvation. Should he commit the extravagance of taking a cab or should he go forth, valise in hand, into the pouring rain? He hesitated.

“ Sacré mille cochons! Quel chien de climat! ” he muttered.

A smart footman standing by turned quickly and touched his hat.

“Beg pardon, sir; I’m from Mr. Smith.”

“I’m glad to hear it, my friend,” said Aristide.

“You’re the French gentleman from Manchester?”