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THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE

  IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
  EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN

  THE WHITE STONE




THE WHITE STONE

  BY ANATOLE FRANCE

  A TRANSLATION BY
  CHARLES E. ROCHE

  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
  NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMX

  Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO, LIMITED
  Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London




CONTENTS


 CHAP.                       PAGE
    I.                          9
   II. GALLIO                  29
  III.                        107
   IV.                        147
    V. THROUGH THE HORN
       OR THE IVORY GATE      183
   VI.                        237




  Καὶ ἔμοιγε δοκεῖτε ἐπὶ λευκάδα πέτρην καὶ δῆμον ὀνείρων
  καταδαρθέντες τοσαῦτα ὀνειροπολεῖν ἐν ἀκαρεῖ τῆς νυκτὸς
  οὔσης.
                      (Philopatris, xxi.)

  And to me it seems that you have fallen asleep
  upon a white rock, and in a parish of dreams, and
  have dreamt all this in a moment while it was
  night.




THE WHITE STONE

I


A few Frenchmen, united in friendship, who were spending the spring in
Rome, were wont to meet amid the ruins of the disinterred Forum. They
were Joséphin Leclerc, an Embassy Attaché on leave; M. Goubin, licencié
ès lettres, an annotator; Nicole Langelier, of the old Parisian family
of the Langeliers, printers and classical scholars; Jean Boilly, a
civil engineer, and Hippolyte Dufresne, a man of leisure, and a lover
of the fine arts.

Towards five o’clock of the afternoon of the first day of May, they
wended their way, as was their custom, through the northern door,
closed to the public, where Commendatore Boni, who superintended the
excavations, welcomed them with quiet amenity, and led them to the
threshold of his house of wood nestling in the shadow of laurel bushes,
privet hedges and cytisus, and rising above the vast trench, dug down
to the depth of the ancient Forum, in the cattle market of pontifical
Rome.

Here, they pause awhile, and look about them.

Facing them rise the truncated shafts of the Columnæ Honorariæ, and
where stood the Basilica of Julia, the eye rested on what bore the
semblance of a huge draughts-board and its draughts. Further south, the
three columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri cleave the azure of the
skies with their blue-tinted volutes. On their right, surmounting the
dilapidated Arch of Septimus Severus, the tall columns of the Temple
of Saturn, the dwellings of Christian Rome, and the Women’s Hospital
display in tiers, their facings yellower and muddier than the waters of
the Tiber. To their left stands the Palatine flanked by huge red arches
and crowned with evergreen oaks. At their feet, from hill to hill,
among the flagstones of the Via Sacra, narrow as a village street,
spring from the earth an agglomeration of brick walls and marble
foundations, the remains of buildings which dotted the Forum in the
days of Rome’s strength. Trefoil, oats, and the grasses of the field
which the wind has sown on their lowered tops, have covered them with
a rustic roof illumined by the crimson poppies. A mass of _débris_,
of crumbling entablatures, a multitude of pillars and altars, an
entanglement of steps and enclosing walls: all this indeed not stunted
but of a serried vastness and within limits.

Nicole Langelier was doubtless reviewing in his mind the host of
monuments confined in this famed space:

“These edifices of wise proportions and moderate dimensions,” he
remarked, “were separated from one another by narrow streets full of
shade. Here ran the _vicoli_ beloved in countries where the sun shines,
while the generous descendants of Remus, on their return from hearing
public speakers, found, along the walls of the temples, cool yet
foul-smelling corners, whence the rinds of water-melons and castaway
shells were never swept away, and where they could eat and enjoy their
siesta. The shops skirting the square must certainly have emitted the
pungent odour of onions, wine, fried meats, and cheese. The butchers’
stalls were laden with meats, to the delectation of the hardy citizens,
and it was from one of those butchers that Virginius snatched the knife
with which he killed his daughter. There also were doubtless jewellers
and vendors of little domestic tutelary deities, protectors of the
hearth, the ox-stall, and the garden. The citizens’ necessaries of life
were all centred in this spot. The market and the shops, the basilicas,
_i.e._, the commercial Exchanges and the civil tribunals; the Curia,
that municipal council which became the administrative power of the
universe; the prisons, whose vaults emitted their much dreaded and
fetid effluvia, and the temples, the altars, of the highest necessity
to the Italians who have ever some thing to beg of the celestial powers.

“Here it was, lastly, that during a long roll of centuries were
accomplished the vulgar or strange deeds, almost ever flat and dull,
oftentimes odious and ridiculous, at times generous, the agglomeration
of which constitutes the august life of a people.”

“What is it that one sees, in the centre of the square, fronting the
commemorative pedestals?” inquired M. Goubin, who, primed with an
eye-glass, had noticed a new feature in the ancient Forum, and was
thirsting for information concerning it.

Joséphin Leclerc obligingly answered him that they were the foundations
of the recently unearthed colossal statue of Domitian.

Thereupon he pointed out, one after the other, the monuments laid bare
by Giacomo Boni in the course of his five years’ fruitful excavations:
the fountain and the well of Juturna, under the Palatine Hill; the
altar erected on the site of Cæsar’s funeral pile, the base of which
spread itself at their feet, opposite the Rostra; the archaic stele and
the legendary tomb of Romulus over which lies the black marble slab of
the Comitium; and again, the Lacus Curtius.

The sun, which had set behind the Capitol, was striking with its
last shafts the triumphal arch of Titus on the towering Velia. The
heavens, where to the West the pearl-white moon floated, remained as
blue as at midday. An even, peaceful, and clear shadow spread itself
over the silent Forum. The bronzed navvies were delving this field of
stones, while, pursuing the work of the ancient Kings, their comrades
turned the crank of a well, for the purpose of drawing the water which
still forms the bed where slumbered, in the days of pious Numa, the
reed-fringed Velabrum.

They were performing their task methodically and with vigilance.
Hippolyte Dufresne, who had for several months been a witness of their
assiduous labour, of their intelligence and of their prompt obedience
to orders, inquired of the director of the excavations how it was that
he obtained such yeoman’s work from