On the day when Mabeuf said to Marius that he approved of political opinions, he expressed the real state of his mind. All political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved them all, provided they left him in peace, as the Greeks called the Furies the beautiful, the good, the charming. His political opinion consisted in a passionate love for plants, and above all for books. He possessed the termination in ist, without which no one could exist at that time, but he was neither Royalist nor Bonapartist nor Chartist: he was a bouquinist, a collector of old books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy, legitimacy, the republic, when there were mosses, grasses, shrubs, and heaps of folios they might turn over. When he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed: what the colonel did for flowers, he did for fruits. He went to mass rather from gentleness than from piety, because he loved the faces of men and hated their noise, and found them assembled and silent only in church. He had never succeeded in loving any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir. Have you never been married? I have forgotten, said he. He had composed a Flora of the Environs of Cauteretz, with coloured plates, and drew as much as two thousand francs a year from it. Although poor, he had formed a precious collection of rare copies. The sight of a sword or a gun chilled his blood. His dream was to naturalize indigo in France. His servant, an innocent spinster whose cat Sultan sufficed for the quantity of passion in her, he had nicknamed Mother Plutarque.
Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, he went to see Mabeuf, and Mabeuf talked to him of his hero from the point of view of flowers. His brother the curé died about 1830, and almost immediately the whole horizon grew dark. A notary's failure deprived him of ten thousand francs, all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own. The Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a Flora. Weeks passed without a single purchaser. Sometimes he started at the sound of the bell. It is the water-carrier, said Mother Plutarque sadly. One day he quitted the Rue Mésières, abdicated the functions of warden, sold not a part of his books but of his prints, that to which he was the least attached, and installed himself in a little house on the Rue Montparnasse. He remained but one quarter: the ground floor and garden cost three hundred francs, and he dared not spend more than two hundred; and being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots, which was intolerable to him.
He established himself near the Salpêtrière, in a thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where for fifty crowns a year he got three rooms and a garden with a well. He sold off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance he was very gay, drove the nails with his own hands, dug in his garden the rest of the day, and at night, seeing Mother Plutarque melancholy, tapped her on the shoulder: We have the indigo. Only two visitors were admitted: the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius. Austerlitz was a brawling name, extremely disagreeable to him. Brains absorbed in some bit of wisdom or folly are but slowly accessible to actual life. One declines and trickles away and is hardly conscious of it. Athwart the cloud, when all his hopes were extinguished one after the other, Mabeuf remained rather puerilely, but profoundly serene. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost. One day Mother Plutarque was reading a romance aloud. She came to a phrase about an officer of dragoons and a beauty: The beauty pouted, and the dragoon. She interrupted herself to wipe her glasses. Bouddha and the Dragon, struck in Mabeuf in a low voice. Yes, it is true that there was a dragon. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque. There is no more beautiful legend in existence. And Mabeuf fell into a delicious reverie.
