The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron

Thirty

339 Thirty the January day had been dark and overcast. at noon a few flakes of snow had straggled downward from the heavy clouds and been trodden into the muddy slush which filled the streets of london. on the day of Queen Mary’s funeral other such desultory and random flakes had fallen upon the gold and purple of her bier, as it made its journey to westminster , and her people had stood with their feet in the freezing slush to watch it pass. nicolas larcher had stood with them. he had observed that many of them wept, and since it had not seemed to him the habit of the english to display emotion openly, he was the more impressed by these unforced and unconcealed tears. he had not wept, but he had felt the weight of public grief. She had died during Christmas week, and the festivities of the season had been extinguished, not by royal decree, but by a spontaneous and universal sorrow. william , they said, had been dealt a blow by her loss from which he would never recover. he was still in retirement. Business went on in the houses of Parliament and in the City, but the sense of gloom still overhung all activities, and weather continued clouded. it was the year 1695. this day called for candles at high noon in the shop where nicolas was employed. it was a fairly large establishment . there were, besides himself, two other journeymen, 340 Janet Lewis and half a dozen apprentices of varying ages, and the master, an englishman, who had received the young Frenchman on the word of a friend. Since he had left rouen, he had progressed along a well-established way, maintained by members of the reformed religion, accepted as if he had been one of them, all because of that first introduction at rouen. there were no other Frenchmen in the shop, although there were in the city of london, by common estimate, some sixty thousand refugees from France. he had not lacked acquaintances among his compatriots. he had found lodging with an old émigré from nantes, a Monsieur Bouquet, who gave him lessons in the english language and advised him on english ways. Monsieur Bouquet was a clockmaker employed in Charing Cross road, and when his day’s work was over, before returning home, he sometimes met nicolas at a coffeehouse near St. Paul’s. nicolas had arranged to meet him that evening. he had not learned much that was new to him about his craft since coming to london. on the contrary, he had found himself more skilled than most of his english companions. his english master had been glad to have him, recognizing promptly the well-trained artisan. Most of the repair work on old volumes was given to the young Frenchman, and while the apprentices briskly folded sheets of new publications, nicolas in his corner dismembered and rebuilt old books such as his father had repaired. as far as the craft was concerned , he sometimes thought, he might as well have been at home, but there was a difference elsewhere. he had been handed that afternoon quite casually a book to be rebound, and before he left for his rendezvous with Monsieur Bouquet he opened the book and read once more the title page. it was for him an experience to be savored. 341 T H E G H O S T O F M O N S I E U R S C A R R O N “the history of the Sabbath, by Pet. heylan, london, Printed by henry Seile, and are to bee solde at the Sign of the tyger’s-head in Saint-Paul’s churchyard, 1636.” nicolas smiled, and the smile was not for the fact that the tyger’s-head still flourished, after nearly sixty years, and that he would pass the sign that evening on his way to meet his friend. it was because this History of the Sabbath expounded the altogether heretical idea of a small religious group which rejected the first day of the week as a day of Christian worship, and returned to the Judaic custom and the command of Moses, in remembering the seventh day to keep it holy. he had leafed through the book and found the arguments reasonable except that they ignored the instructions of Saint Paul. But the mere fact that he held such...