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27 xiv The Old Showman The people were spread out, scattered, frolicking on holiday. It was one of those festivities which, by custom, showmen, jugglers, animal trainers, fair-booth salesmen, all count on to make up for slack seasons. On holidays, I think, people forget discomforts, labors; they become like children. For the child, it is time off, with the horror of school looming in twenty-four hours. For the adults it’s an armistice declared with life’s malicious powers, a breathing-space in the universal struggle. Even men of the world and those concerned with the life of the mind escape only with difficulty the influence of such popular jubilee. They absorb, willy-nilly, a share in this lackadaisical atmosphere. I myself, true Parisian, never fail to check on the flourish of booths decorating these sacred days. They made, in fact, a redoubtable concert: squealing, bellowing, howling. A medley of cries, brassy blares, exploding rockets. Clowns and fools screwed up sunburnt faces, hardened by wind, rain, sun. They launched with aplomb actors with sure-fire acts, perfect oneliners , and gags as forceful and solid as Molière’s. Strong Men, proud of their enormous limbs, prognathous, beetle-browed, apelike, strutted their stuff in trunks laundered for the occasion. Dancers, beautiful as fairies, as princesses, capered and gamboled under bright lights that layered their skirts with glitter. There was nothing but lights, dust, cries, joy, tumult; some giving, some getting, equally merry the one and the other. Children clung to mothers’ skirts in hope of a sugar stick, or climbed onto their fathers’ shoulder the better to see a stunning magician perform, godlike. And swirling everywhere, above all the perfumes, an odor of frying fat, incense to this feast day. 28 At the end of the row of booths, the very end, I caught sight of a poor showman, as if in shame self-exiled from all these splendors, bent, worn, decrepit, a human ruin, up against a post of his hovel; a hovel more miserable than that of the rudest savage, where two candle ends, runny and smoking, revealed a distress all too explicit. Everywhere joy, profit, debauchery; everywhere certainty of tomorrow ’s bread; everywhere vitality’s explosive frenzy. Here: absolute misery, misery decked out—to complete the horror—from the ragbag of comedy, a contrast introduced by necessity, not art. He, the miserable, was not laughing! He did not cry, he did not dance, he made no gestures, he did not scream; he sang no song, happy or sad; he did not beg. He remained mute and immobile. He had given up, surrendered. His fate was sealed. But what a profound and unforgettable gaze he cast over the crowd and its lights, whose tide of movement halted several feet before his repulsive misery. I felt my throat constrict with a terrible hysteria and it seemed to me my vision was blocked by rebel tears refusing to fall. What to do? What point in asking the wretch what curiosity, what marvel, he was prepared to show in his ill-smelling darkness, behind his torn curtain? I really didn’t dare; and in case you find my timidity risible, I admit that I feared humiliating him. Finally I had decided that in passing I would leave some money on one of his benches, hoping he might realize my intention—when the crowd in a surge, caused by some confusion or other, swept me past him. And, turning back, obsessed by that vision, I tried to figure out my sudden sadness, saying to myself, here I have seen the image of the old man of letters who has outlived the generation he amused so brilliantly ; the old poet without friends, without family, without children, brought down by misery and public ingratitude, into whose booth the forgetful world no longer wishes to enter. ...

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