One of the good old houses of St. Malo, built of granite, facing the Rue des Hautes Salles; a ground-floor and two storeys, each containing two rooms, and the upper one, at the back, overlooking the road round the ramparts. There you could see its walls of granite, thick enough to defy the projectiles of the olden days, the narrow windows with the iron bars, the massive gate of heart of oak, ornamented with iron fastenings, and furnished with a knocker you could hear at Saint Servan when Captain Antifer had it in hand: its slate roof pierced with dormer windows, from which the old sailor’s telescope was occasionally visible. This house—half a casemate, half a fortress—adjoining an angle of the ramparts which surround the town, has a superb view; to the right, Grand-Bé, a corner of Cézembre, the Pointe du Decollé, and Cape Frehel; to the left, the jetty and the mole, the mouth of the Rance, the beach of Prieuré, near Dinard, and the grey dome of Saint Servan.
Formerly St. Malo was an island, and perhaps Captain Antifer regretted the time when he would have been called an islander. But the ancient Aaron has become a peninsula, and he has to make the best of it. Besides, one has a right to be proud at being a child of this Breton city which has given so many great men to France—among others, Duguay-Trouin, whose statue our worthy mariner saluted every time he crossed the square, Lamennais, although this writer in no way interested him, and Chateaubriand, whose best work he did not know, and whose proud and modest tomb on the little island of Grand-Bé we cannot pass without mention.
Captain Antifer (Pierre Servan Malo) was then forty-six years old. Eighteen months before, he had retired from the sea with a certain independence which sufficed for himself and his people. A few thousand francs in the funds had resulted from his service on the two or three ships he had commanded, which had always hailed from St. Malo. These ships belonged to Le Baillif and Co., and traded in the Channel, in the North Sea, in the Baltic, and even in the Mediterranean. Before attaining this lofty position, Captain Antifer had been about the world a good deal. A good seaman, very enterprising, hard master to himself and others, never sparing himself, his courage beyond reproach, his obstinacy unyielding, the obstinacy of a true Breton. Did he regret the sea? No, for he had left it in the prime of life. Had his health anything to do with this resolve? No, for he was built of the pure granite of the Breton Coast.
It was quite enough to look at him, to hear him, to receive one of the grips of his hand, of which he was not sparing. Figure a sturdy man of medium height and thickish neck. Here is his description in detail—a woollen cap; hair bristling like the quills of a porcupine; face tanned, cooked and re-cooked by sea water, and bronzed by the sun of southern latitudes; beard like a lichen on the rocks, with the grey hairs bristling all round it; bright eyes, veritable carbuncles beneath the arched eyebrows, with the pupils black as jet and gleaming like a cat’s; nose big at the end, and long enough to carry the spectacles, and with two wrinkles at the base near the eyes; teeth complete, sound and healthy, clicking with the convulsions of the jaw, particularly as their owner always had a pebble in his mouth; ears hairy, tip erect, lobe pendent, one of them with a copper ring, on which an anchor was engraved; body rather thin, set on nervous legs firm enough on their strong supports, and straddling at the most appropriate angle for dealing with the rolling and pitching of a ship at sea. Evidently a man of unusual strength, due to the muscles massed together like the rods in a Roman lictor’s bundle; a man, drinking well and eating well, who would have a clean bill of health for many a long day. But of what irritability, nervousness and impetuosity was the individual capable who forty-six years before had been entered in the parish register under the name of Pierre Servan Malo Antifer!
And this evening, he stormed and raved, and the house shook, so that you would think that there was beating round its foundations one of those equinoctial tides which rise for fifty feet and cover half the town with spray.
Nanon, the widow of La Goât, forty-eight years of age, was the sister of this noisy sailor. Her husband, a clerk in Le Baillifs, had died young, leaving her a daughter, Enogate, who had been brought up by Uncle Antifer, who fulfilled his functions as a guardian with conscientiousness and discipline. Nanon was a worthy woman, loving her brother, trembling before him, and bending when he stormed. Enogate, charming with her golden hair, her blue eyes, her fresh carnation colour, her intelligent face, her natural grace, more resolute than her mother, and sometimes standing up to her terrible guardian, who adored her and did his best to make her the happiest of the girls of Saint Malo, as she was one of the prettiest. But perhaps his idea of happiness was not quite the same as that of his niece and ward.
The two women appeared at the door of his room, the one with her long knitting-needles, the other with the flatiron she had just taken from the front of the fire.
“What is the matter?” asked Nanon.
“Only my latitude; my confounded latitude!” answered Captain Antifer; and he gave himself a knock on the head which would have cracked any other crown than that which Nature had fortunately given him.
“Uncle,” said Enogate, “the latitude that troubles you is no reason for you putting your room into disorder.”
And she picked up the atlas, while Nanon gathered together the pieces of shell that had been scattered about as if it had gone off like a bomb.
“Did you break that?”
“Yes, I did, and if anyone else had done it, he would have had a bad quarter of an hour—”
“Why did you throw it down?”
“Because my hand itched.”
“This shell was a present from our brother,” said Nanon, “and you are to blame—”
“Well? If you were to keep on repeating until tomorrow that I am to blame, will that put it back again?”
“What will my cousin Juhel say?” asked Enogate.
“He will say nothing, and he had better say nothing!” replied Antifer, regretting that he had only got the two women before him, on whom he could not reasonably gratify his anger.
“And by-the-bye,” he added, “where is Juhel?”
“You know, uncle, that he has gone to Nantes,” replied Enogate.
“Nantes! that is something new! What is he going to do at Nantes?”
“Uncle, you yourself sent him there—you know, his examination for his certificate as long-voyage captain—”
“Long-voyage captain—long-voyage captain!” growled Antifer; “why could not he be content to be a coasting-captain like me?”
“Brother,” said Nanon, timidly, “he only took your advice—you wished—”
“Well—because I wished it—that is a fine reason! And if I had not wished it, would he not have gone all the same! Besides, he will fail.”
“No, uncle.”
“But he will! and if he does I will give him a reception—a regular whirlwind!”
You see there was no way of reasoning with this man. On the one hand he did not want Juhel to go up for the examination, and on the other, if he failed, the said pupil would catch it, as would “those asses of examiners, those pedlars in hydrography.”
But Enogate had evidently a presentiment that the young man would not be rejected, first of all because he was her cousin, then because he was an intelligent, studious young man, and then because he loved her and she loved him, and they were engaged to be married. And can you imagine three better reasons than those?
We may add that Juhel was a nephew of Captain Antifer, who had acted as guardian to him until he became of age. He had been left an orphan at an early age by the death of his mother, who had died at his birth, and by the death of his father, a naval lieutenant, whose death took place a few years afterwards. We need not be astonished that it was written above that he should be a sailor. That