Project Gutenberg's The Aspirations of Jean Servien, by Anatole France

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Aspirations of Jean Servien

Author: Anatole France

Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11060]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN ***

Produced by Robert J. Hall

THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN

BY ANATOLE FRANCE

A TRANSLATION BY ALFRED ALLINSON

I

Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the _Rue Notre-Dame
des Champs_. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the
Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother
nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet,
with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing
the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression
for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her
foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste.

Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held
clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a
severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no
very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed,
which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened
that confined her to her bed.

There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little
one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish
whisper bits of her favourite ditty:

The fisherman, when dawn is nigh,
Peers forth to greet the kindling sky....

Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of
each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little
Jean's lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn
and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar
in her fond hopes.

A woman of the people, knowing nothing of the circumstances of
fashionable life, save from a few peeps at their outward pomp
and the vague tales of _concierges_, footmen, and cooks, she
pictured her boy at twenty more beautiful than an archangel,
his breast glittering with decorations, in a drawing-room full
of flowers, amid a bevy of fashionable ladies with manners every