The Measure

Old Tregre read it on the Tuesday, and for the first time in forty years he read the English half first and then did not read the French half at all.

He read the English half out loud, on the wharf, at noon, slowly, the whole paragraph, with his finger under the words. A bill had been introduced in the House of Commons in New Westminster by a member from Ohio, on behalf of a committee, and had been given its first reading. It was called the War Security (Enemy Language) Bill. It would provide, for the duration of the present war and for six months after it, that no school receiving public money in any polity of the Realm should give instruction in the language of a state with which the Realm was at war, and that no newspaper, periodical or pamphlet should be published in that language without the approval of the War Ministry. It was argued for on grounds of security. The member from Ohio had said that the Realm could not be expected to fight a war against France while educating its children in French.

Then old Tregre stopped. He looked at the French page, which had the same paragraph on it, translated, under a headline in the largest type the paper had used since the declaration. He looked at it for a long time. And he folded the paper without reading it, and put it under his arm, and said, in French, to the men on the wharf:

“Si ça passe, c’est la dernière fois que je vous lis L’Abeille.”

If that passes, this is the last time I read you L’Abeille.

And went home.

---

His grandmother had learned her letters from the Ursulines in 1844.

She told him that on the Tuesday evening, on the gallery, which she had never told him before. He had read the paragraph to her from the window, the English and then the French, and she had listened with her hands in her lap the way she listened to Achille’s letters, and when he had finished she was quiet for a long time, and then she said it.

“En 1844. Chez les Ursulines. J’avais huit ans.”

In 1844. With the Ursulines. I was eight.

She told him about it. The convent by the river, and the nuns in black, and a room with forty little girls in it at long benches with slates, and an old nun at the front, very fierce, from France, from Normandy, who had come out in 1820 and had never once been back and had never once stopped saying that the French of Louisiane was a disgrace and that she would make them speak it properly if it killed her; and she had taught them their letters, in French, on the slates, in the convent by the river, and said every day that their French was a disgrace, and loved them, his grandmother said, more than anybody had loved them in their lives.

“Elle nous a appris à écrire,” said his grandmother. “En français. Le français de France. Elle disait que le nôtre c’était pour la cuisine.”

She taught us to write. In French. The French of France. She said ours was for the kitchen.

She was quiet again.

“Et c’était vrai,” she said. “Le nôtre, c’est pour la cuisine. Et pour le lac. Et pour les enfants. Et pour les morts.”

And it was true. Ours is for the kitchen. And for the lake. And for the children. And for the dead.

---

His father asked about the boat.

He asked on the Wednesday, at the end of the wharf, at five in the morning, in the dark, with the lantern on the post. He was bent over the gunwale of the Marie-Ange with his hands on the painter, the way he always was, and he was talking to the boat, low, the way he always did, allons, ma belle, and then he stopped, with his hands on the painter, and said, not to the boat:

“Ils vont vouloir le nom?”

Will they want the name?

Lucien looked at him. His father was looking at the stern of the boat. At the white letters on the black, repainted every Lent. MARIE-ANGE.

“Non, Papa. C’est pour les écoles. Et les journaux.”

No, Papa. It’s for the schools. And the newspapers.

His father looked at the name for a moment longer.

“Mais c’est écrit,” he said. Then he stepped down into the boat, the way he always did, onto the thwart and then the floorboards, without looking, and put his hand up for the lantern.

But it’s written.

---

It was the only thing on the lake shore anybody talked about for twelve days. Not the war; the war was the lists, and the lists came on Mondays, and in between them you went out on the lake. The bill was every day.

The school on Esplanade, which the parish ran and the Grand Duchy paid for and where every child on the lake shore learned its catechism and its letters in French and its arithmetic in English, would close its French classes. The Ursulines would close theirs. L’Abeille would print its English half and nothing else, or would need a letter from the War Ministry for its French half, and the editor said in the paper on the Thursday, in both halves, that he would close the paper before he asked the War Ministry for a letter, and that he had been publishing it since 1827 and his father before him and his grandfather before that, and that the Realm had never in ninety years asked him to, and that if the Realm wanted to read L’Abeille before the people of La Nouvelle-Orléans did it could buy a copy for a penny like everybody else.

The men in collars on the streetcar read that one in English and did not say anything.

The member from Ohio was quoted on the Friday. He had said, in the Commons, that he meant no insult to the loyal people of Louisiane, whose sons were even now in the line in Flanders, but that the Realm must look at its security without sentiment, and that a population which spoke the enemy’s language might be loyal in its heart and still be a channel for the enemy’s agents, and that the children of Louisiane would thank the Realm in twenty years for having taught them to think in English.

Old Tregre read that one too. He read it in English, on the wharf, and when he got to channel for the enemy’s agents he stopped, and looked at the men round him, the fishermen of the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, in their canvas coats with their hats in their hands, Robichaux and Landry and Tregre and Bazile and Prudhomme, and four of the five from the lake shore in the First Louisiane’s column were their sons and nephews, and old Tregre looked at them, and then he went on reading, and when he had finished he folded the paper very small and put it in his pocket instead of under his arm, as if it were something that needed to be kept out of the rain.

---

There was a meeting at the French Opera House on the Sunday.

Lucien went. He went on his own; his father had gone out on the lake at two in the afternoon, which he did now on Sundays, every Sunday since the prince, and sat in the boat a quarter of a mile out for two hours without a sail and without the trawl and came back, and nobody asked him about it, and he did not say. Lucien took the streetcar in and walked from Canal Street to Bourbon Street, and the street outside the Opera House was full, and the Opera House was fuller.

He had never been inside it. It was the grandest building in the city, white and tall, with columns and tiers of boxes going up in gold and red to a painted ceiling, and a stage with a curtain, and seats for two thousand, and every seat was full, and the boxes were full, and the aisles, and the back of the stalls, where the people who could not get a seat stood, and where Lucien stood, against the wall, with the fishermen.

They were all there. Every man from the lake shore who was not on the water. Old Tregre, at the front of them, in his good coat. Sostène Arceneaux. The motorman Robichaux, off duty, in a collar. Ti-Jean Robichaux, the nephew, on his wooden leg, whom the First Louisiane had sent home six mornings running from the steps of the Cabildo. They stood at the back in their good coats against the wall under the gallery and looked at the gold and the red and the painted ceiling, and at the stage.

There were chairs on the stage. A table, with a cloth on it. And men at the table, in black coats: a priest, a lawyer, an old man with a white beard who was the editor of L’Abeille, the member of the Commons for the city, and a thin dark woman in black whom Lucien did not know.

---

The lawyer spoke first.

He was a small man with spectacles and a voice that went to the back of the Opera House without trying, and he spoke in French, and he did not make a speech. He read. He had a book in his hand, an old one, bound in brown, and he opened it on the table in front of him and read from it, slowly, in French and then in English, the way old Tregre read on the wharf.

The Acts of Admission of the Grand Duchy of Louisiane, eighteen hundred and four.

He read a paragraph about the Code. He read a paragraph about the courts. And then he read a paragraph about the language, slowly, twice, in French and then in English, and when he had finished it he closed the book and looked up at the Opera House, at the stalls and the boxes and the gallery and the people standing at the back, and said, in French, in a perfectly ordinary voice:

“That is the guarantee. It was given to us in eighteen hundred and four, when we were sold and not asked. It was given to us by the same Parliament that is now being asked to take it away. It is not a law of the Grand Duchy. It is not a law of the Realm. It is the condition on which the Grand Duchy is in the Realm at all, and Parliament cannot repeal it, any more than it can repeal the Grand Duchy. A bill that reaches it is not a bad law. It is not a law.”

He sat down.

The Opera House did not cheer. That was the thing Lucien remembered. Two thousand people in a gold and red theatre, and the lawyer sat down, and nobody cheered; they sat very still, all of them, as though they had been told something they had known all their lives and had not known was written down.

---

The editor of L’Abeille spoke, and the priest, and the member for the city, who said he had spoken against the bill in the Commons on Wednesday and would speak against it again and that the member from Ohio was a good man who had never met a Louisianais in his life and did not know what he was saying. And then the thin dark woman in black stood up.

She did not go to the front of the stage. She stood up at her chair beside the table, and the Opera House went quiet, because nobody knew who she was.

“Je m’appelle Madame Arsène Fontenot,” she said. “De la Paroisse d’Orléans. De l’embouchure du Bayou Saint-Jean.”

My name is Madame Arsène Fontenot. Of Orleans parish. Of the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean.

At the back, against the wall, the fishermen did not move.

“Mon fils Hippolyte était dans le Premier Louisiane,” said the widow Fontenot. “Il a été tué le neuf janvier. En Flandre. Il avait dix-neuf ans. Je lui ai appris à lire.”

My son Hippolyte was in the First Louisiane. He was killed on the ninth of January. In Flanders. He was nineteen. I taught him to read.

She did not say anything else for a moment. The Opera House waited.

“En français,” she said.

And sat down.

---

Afterwards, going out, in the crush in the foyer under the chandeliers, Lucien saw the man in the grey suit.

He would not have noticed him, except that he was the only man in the foyer who was not talking. Everybody else was talking, in French, all at once, two thousand people pouring out of the Opera House into the foyer and the street, the way people talk when they have been made to sit still for two hours and have been told something; and the man in the grey suit was standing by the door, against the wall, with his hat on, not talking, with a small black notebook in his hand, and a pencil, and he was writing in it.

He was not from the city. You could see that. His suit was not a city suit and his hat was not a city hat, and he was standing the way men stand who are not from where they are standing. He looked at the faces going past him out of the door, one after another, and wrote in the notebook.

He looked at Lucien. For a second. The way the men in collars on the streetcar had looked at him on the wharf in June: once, and away. And wrote something.

Lucien went out past him into the street.

Old Tregre was on the pavement outside, with the fishermen. He had seen the man too. He looked back through the doors of the Opera House at the grey suit by the wall with the notebook, and then at Lucien, and he did not say anything about it. He took the paper out of his pocket, the one he had folded very small on Friday, and unfolded it, and looked at it, and folded it again.

“Ils nous regardent,” said old Tregre.

They’re watching us.

He put the paper back in his pocket. Then he put his hat on, and said, to the fishermen, in a voice that was not the voice he read the lists in and not the voice he read the price of cotton in, but a third voice, which Lucien had never heard from him:

“Qu’ils regardent. Ils verront des Louisianais.”

Let them watch. They’ll see Louisianais.

And they walked back up Bourbon Street to Canal, the fishermen of the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, in their good coats, talking French, all the way to the streetcar, louder than they needed to.