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"Monsieur! I am very busy this evening, there are so many gentlemen come in."
"I will give you five francs if you will tell me all – all – succinctly about Jean Bouchon."
"Will monsieur be so good as to come here to-morrow during the morning? and then I place myself at the disposition of monsieur."
"I shall be here at eleven o'clock."
At the appointed time I was at the café. If there is an institution that looks ragged and dejected and dissipated, it is a café in the morning, when the chairs are turned upside-down, the waiters are in aprons and shirt-sleeves, and a smell of stale tobacco lurks about the air, mixed with various other unpleasant odours.
The waiter I had spoken to on the previous evening was looking out for me. I made him seat himself at a table with me. No one else was in the saloon except another garçon, who was dusting with a long feather-brush.
"Monsieur," began the waiter, "I will tell you the whole truth. The story is curious, and perhaps everyone would not believe it, but it is well documentée. Jean Bouchon was at one time in service here. We had a box. When I say we, I do not mean myself included, for I was not here at the time."
"I know about the common box. I know the story down to my visit to Orléans in 1874, when I saw the man."
"Monsieur has perhaps been informed that he was buried in the cemetery?"
"I do know that, at the cost of his fellow-waiters."
"Well, monsieur, he was poor, and his fellow-waiters, though well-disposed, were not rich. So he did not have a grave en perpétuité. Accordingly, after many years, when the term of consignment was expired, and it might well be supposed that Jean Bouchon had mouldered away, his grave was cleared out to make room for a fresh occupant. Then a very remarkable discovery was made. It was found that his corroded coffin was crammed – literally stuffed – with five and ten centimes pieces, and with them were also some German coins, no doubt received from those pigs of Prussians during the occupation of Orléans. This discovery was much talked about. Our proprietor of the café and the head waiter went to the mayor and represented to him how matters stood – that all this money had been filched during a series of years since 1869 from the waiters. And our patron represented to him that it should in all propriety and justice be restored to us. The mayor was a man of intelligence and heart, and he quite accepted this view of the matter, and ordered the surrender of the whole coffin-load of coins to us, the waiters of the café."
"So you divided it amongst you."
"Pardon, monsieur; we did not. It is true that the money might legitimately be regarded as belonging to us. But then those defrauded, or most of them, had left long ago, and there were among us some who had not been in service in the café more than a year or eighteen months. We could not trace the old waiters. Some were dead, some had married and left this part of the country. We were not a corporation. So we held a meeting to discuss what was to be done with the money. We feared, moreover, that unless the spirit of Jean Bouchon were satisfied, he might continue revisiting the café and go on sweeping away the tips. It was of paramount importance to please Jean Bouchon, to lay out the money in such a manner as would commend itself to his feelings. One suggested one thing, one another. One proposed that the sum should be expended on masses for the repose of Jean's soul. But the head waiter objected to that. He said that he thought he knew the mind of Jean Bouchon, and that this would not commend itself to it. He said, did our head waiter, that he knew Jean Bouchon from head to heels. And he proposed that all the coins should be melted up, and that out of them should be cast a statue of Jean Bouchon in bronze, to be set up here in the café, as there were not enough coins to make one large enough to be erected in a Place. If monsieur will step with me he will see the statue; it is a superb work of art."
He led the way, and I followed.
In the midst of the café stood a pedestal, and on this basis a bronze figure about four feet high. It represented a man reeling backward, with a banner in his left hand, and the right raised towards his brow, as though he had been struck there by a bullet. A sabre, apparently fallen from his grasp, lay at his feet. I studied the face, and it most assuredly was utterly unlike Jean Bouchon with his puffy cheeks, mutton-chop whiskers, and broken nose, as I recalled him.
"But," said I, "the features do not – pardon me – at all resemble those of Jean Bouchon. This might be the young Augustus, or Napoleon I. The profile is quite Greek."
"It may be so," replied the waiter. "But we had no photograph to go by. We had to allow the artist to exercise his genius, and, above all, we had to gratify the spirit of Jean Bouchon."
"I see. But the attitude is inexact. Jean Bouchon fell down the steps headlong, and this represents a man staggering backwards."
"It would have been inartistic to have shown him precipitated forwards; besides, the spirit of Jean might not have liked it."
"Quite so. I understand. But the flag?"
"That was an idea of the artist. Jean could not be made holding a coffee-cup. You will see the whole makes a superb subject. Art has its exigencies. Monsieur will see underneath is an inscription on the pedestal."
I stooped, and with some astonishment read —
"Why!" objected I, "he died from falling a cropper in the back passage, not on the field of glory."
"Monsieur! all Orléans is a field of glory. Under S. Aignan did we not repel Attila and his Huns in 451? Under Jeanne d'Arc did we not repulse the English – monsieur will excuse the allusion – in 1429. Did we not recapture Orléans from the Germans in November, 1870?"
"That is all very true," I broke in. "But Jean Bouchon neither fought against Attila nor with la Pucelle, nor against the Prussians. Then 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' is rather strong, considering the facts."
"How? Does not monsieur see that the sentiment is patriotic and magnificent?"
"I admit that, but dispute the application."
"Then why apply it? The sentiment is all right."
"But by implication it refers to Jean Bouchon, who died, not for his country, but in a sordid coffee-house brawl. Then, again, the date is wrong. Jean Bouchon died in 1869, not in 1870."
"That is only out by a year."
"Yes, but with this mistake of a year, and with the quotation from Horace, and with the attitude given to the figure, anyone would suppose that Jean Bouchon had fallen in the retaking of Orléans from the Prussians."
"Ah! monsieur, who looks on a monument and expects to find thereon the literal truth relative to the deceased?"
"This is something of a sacrifice to truth," I demurred.
"Sacrifice is superb!" said the waiter. "There is nothing more noble, more heroic than sacrifice."
"But not the sacrifice of truth."
"Sacrifice is always sacrifice."
"Well," said I, unwilling further to dispute, "this is certainly a great creation out of nothing."
"Not out of nothing; out of the coppers that Jean Bouchon had filched from us, and which choked up his coffin."
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