During the war of 1870 Haudouin went through a difficult time. The Prussians entered Claquebue, and since he was mayor he suffered greatly. More than once, so it was said, enemy soldiers came within an ace of cooking and eating him, and on one occasion they even inserted a skewer into his body. Fortunately a higher officer arrived in the nick of time and declared that this did not count. But they robbed him of fodder, horses, potatoes and a mattress that was almost new. Ferdinand, who by then was set up as a vet in Saint-Margelon, lost all his customers and was at one moment even in danger of being mobilised. Haudouin and his wife went in constant fear for their son Honore, who had joined the sharpshooters in the woods. And finally Sergeant Alphonse, in one of the early advance-guard skirmishes, received a wound in the knee which caused him to limp for the rest of his life. When he returned to Claquebue he was treated at first with distinction, but gradually people fell into the habit of calling him “the cripple,” with an undertone of disdain.
Haudouin took down the portraits of the Emperor and Canrobert without waiting for the war to end; soon afterwards he replaced them with those of Thiers and Mac-Mahon; then with those of Jules Grevy and Gambetta, and so on. But the picture of the Green Mare remained in its accustomed place. Sometimes on a Sunday, when the family was seated over the stew or grilled pork in the diningroom, Haudouin would raise his eyes to look at it, and contemplating it with his head a little on one side would murmur with a sigh:
“You’d almost think it could talk!”
The others round the table would gulp their wine to conceal their emotion.
The artist who painted me was none other than the celebrated Murdoire. In addition to his genius as a painter he was the possessor of a stupendous secret which I shall refrain from making known to the painters of the present day. It is not that I fear to diminish Murdoire’s reputation by doing so: the portraits he left behind, so disturbingly endowed with life, the very landscapes of which it has been been said that the shadow of the god Pan may be seen to stir amid their foliage — all these bear witness to the fact that without the genius of the painter mere technical acquirements are as nothing. But artistic snobbishness in these days has in some cases gone so far that I am reluctant to run the risk of starting a vogue for a process than can only be carried out at considerable personal expense.
Suffice it to say, then, that the humours of the spring, the warmth of the earth, the sap of youth, the favours of the servant-girl, all these magical distillations were in a fashion which must remain for ever unrevealed blended in the paint with which Murdoire’s inspired brush depicted the speaking curve of my neck, the eloquence of my lips, the sensitive awareness of my nostrils and above all the halfhuman light in my eyes, that mysterious glow of life which lovers, misers and neurotics have sought ever since to interpret as they peer into the troubled waters of my gaze. He was driven from the farm, poor Murdoire, leaving behind him a masterpiece, and exhausted by his manifold labours he died soon afterwards.
As the Haudouins hung me in the dining-room the artist’s spirit trembled in my milky eyes and ran quivering the length of my green flanks. I was born to the consciousness of a harsh and desiring world in which my animal nature was enriched by the generous and lofty eroticism of Alurdoire. This simulacrum of my flesh was endowed with all the painful yearnings of humanity: the call of pleasure stirred my imagination with heavy and burning dreams, with priapic turmoil. Alas, I was not slow to discover the wretchedness of existing merely as a two-dimensional appearance, or to perceive the vanity of desires lacking all means of fulfilment.
In order to find an outlet for these impulses I obliged myself to divert them along other paths, where they might do service to the contemplative tendency favoured by my immobile state. I concerned myself with the study of my hosts and with reflections upon the spectacle afforded me by the observation of their intimate life. The liveliness of my imagination, the regrets which I could not prevent myself from feeling, and the dual nature, half man and half horse, with which the artist had endowed me — all this made it almost inevitable that my particular interest should dwell upon the love-life of the Haudouins. Whereas the mobile observer is obliged in his contemplation of the world to discover the harmonies of numbers and the secrets of series and permutations, the stationary witness may discern the very habits of life itself. I was, moreover, assisted in my purpose by the subtle powers of intuition which I owe to the brush of Murdoire: however, I shall offer no conclusions that are not based upon what I have seen or heard or deduced at first hand.
I have known four generations of Haudouins, the first at a ripe age, the last in its infancy. For seventy years I have watched the Haudouins engaged upon the commerce of love, each bringing to it the resources of an individual temperament, but the greater number (I might well say all, to some extent) remaining constant, both in the quest and the fulfilment, to a sort of family catechism which seemed to impose on them, not merely a certain ritual, but misgivings, scruples and predilections. If I had seen in this no more than a manifestation of heredity I should not refer to it, since that is a matter beyond my mare’s under-
standing. But I have observed that well-knit families have erotic traditions which are handed on from one generation to the next like the rules of daily behaviour or cooking recipes. These traditions are not restricted to habits of prudence and hygiene, but concern themselves also with the ways of making love, of speaking of it and of not speaking of it. To say this is to say little that everyone does not already know. The erotic side of life is so closely bound up with domestic habits, with shared beliefs and common interests, that it is always conditioned, even when it leads to rivalry between individuals, by the mode of existence of which it is a part, and which may be peculiarly that of a family. It is for this reason impossible to portray in any detail the mechanism by which it is transmitted. In one way or another the parents teach their children how to make love, for the most part inadvertently, in talking about the weather or politics or the price of eggs. There are also more direct means of transmission, since children have an astonishing faculty for catching words spoken in an undertone, for noting furtive gestures which later they will imitate, and for correctly interpreting conversations having a double meaning.