The Horses at Bordeaux

by LORNA LINDSLEY

1

QUATORZE CHEVAUX EN LIBERTÉ! There are posters of them in every department of France. They greet you on factory walls in the towns and on barn doors in the country. Sometimes the posters are newly pasted up and highly colored, sometimes they are ragged and faded. It depends on how long it was since the circus passed that way.

There were fourteen horses in the Cirque Lamar, all light bay with long tails and flowing manes. They weren’t particularly handsome, they wore no brass or leather or plumes to dress them up, but they were very intelligent because they did their act in the circus ring en liberté — that is, without rein or whip to guide them.

In May the Lamar Circus had been working its way slowly north from small town to small town. When they neared the Loire the war was at an end and they turned and fled like everyone else. A lion and a tiger in their red and gold cages, the family wagons of the circus people, and the fourteen horses in their two trucks, packed in close together so that they couldn’t hurt each other and with their chins resting on the sides of the trucks so that they could watch the landscape go by. And for some reason the circus followed the Government — it went to Bordeaux too, as if for orders.

I first heard about the circus from a friend of mine whom I met in a café on the Place du Théâtre, waiting, as all France was waiting, to know her fate. My friend was a doyenne of the Comédie Française. She had been many years on the stage and she had the large gestures and the deep voice of all the Racine tragedies in which she had played. She had found shelter on the outskirts of Bordeaux in a small château which belonged to a winegrower. The picture of the château was on the bottles of one of the lesser vintages of Bordeaux, but the owner was rich enough to have interested himself in race horses — in a modest way, of course, but he did have, in a field near his château, an enclosure with a small training course inside it.

When the circus retreated to Bordeaux it had a hard time finding adequate space on which to come to rest, for most of the land around the city was planted in grapes. Then a gendarme directed it to the racehorse owner’s château and he let them install the lion and tiger cages in an empty shed and told them they could pasture their horses in the race-track enclosure. There the fourteen horses remained and nobody bothered with them except to water them and to throw in an occasional bale of hay to supplement the grass of the track. My friend forgot about them too, after admiring them the first day and enjoying the way they kicked up their heels at their unusual freedom.

Then a week later she happened to pass by the track and she noticed an extraordinary thing. The horses weren’t grazing or galloping around the field: they were trotting in a circle, nose to tail, with that short circus trot. As she watched them they stopped as if at some unspoken order, for no one was there; and swinging their heads up and over the tails in front of them, they turned in close formation and trotted around the circle in the other direction. She went closer to look, and saw that they had already worn the June grass down to bare ground. The circle they had made was exactly the size of the circus ring.

People came to see the horses after that; it was a comforting sight, with all that was going on in France, to see such order and such discipline. The horses liked being watched too. They expected applause, and one day when they had finished their drill and heard a burst of clapping from the people who had wandered in from the vineyards, they actually took a bow before scattering over the field.

My friend was much moved by the horses. She wanted to buy sugar for them in Bordeaux, but of course could not find any; she would have to go back to the chateau emptyhanded.

She lifted her head grandly in the true Comédie Française manner and with one of her wide gestures swept the square in front of our café. The square was crammed with dusty overloaded cars. People were sitting on the running boards of their gasless cars and wondering what to do next. The sidewalk tables were filled with people drinking one café crème after another so that they could keep their seats and rest. No one had anything to do, and there were little explosions of anger and tears and hysteria in every corner.

She looked at all this confusion with a certain contempt and said: “The horses are better, they are disciplined people. Like actors, they have the tradition of the stage; for us and for them the show must go on. For myself I am happy that I learned that early in life.”

When we separated we said good-bye as if we might never meet again, which was extremely probable in those days, and she regretted that I could not come to the château to see the horses. Animals were better than men, she said.

2

In Paris five months later I ran into her again. I asked eagerly for news. What had happened to her? Had she left Bordeaux when the Germans came in, and what had happened to the circus and the Quatorze Chevaux en Liberté?

She told me that she had not been able to leave Bordeaux at that time. She had stayed on in the château, and the circus people had stayed on too. The horses had become more and more of a comfort to her, for it had not been nice to see the German Kommandatur take over the château next door and swarm over the country like the green potato bugs they were.

I said, “Did the horses perform for the Germans too?” and she replied, “Alas, yes. They performed for them too. But I tried not to take it too hard. After all, circuses are international.”

“Did the Germans behave well in Bordeaux? ” I asked. “Did they drink up all the wine?”

“Both,” she said. “They did not behave so badly, but they drank up all the wine. They were ‘correct’ with the people, but we had a little trouble with the elephants.”

“Elephants!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t tell me that there were elephants with the circus.”

“Only three,” she said. “They were called ‘Monsieur, Madame, and Bébé.’”

Then she told me the story of the elephants. One night the High Commandant was giving a dinner in the requisitioned château next door. The High Commandant was in the château because it was the finest to be found near Bordeaux — owned by one of the richest women in France, and the wines and tapestries were of the first order. The Germans sent word to the manager of the circus that they wanted the horses to come and perform for them on the lawn of the château. The circus owner excused himself — he said it couldn’t be done. But what he really wanted was not to perform for the Germans. They sent a soldier back to ask the manager to send over the tiger and lion in their cages — they would look nice at the château entrance on each side of the gate. Other officers were coming from Bordeaux; it would be a fine party. The manager again refused. He said his lion and his tiger were sick and mangy beasts and would be a credit to nobody. The Germans were angry then. They sent the soldier back to tell him to send over the three elephants or they would come and take them themselves.

So Monsieur, Madame, and Bébé were led over to the big château by their Indian elephant boys. The manager followed anxiously, but he would not go into the château; he waited in the garden outside.

The dinner was a great success, and after they had all drunk a good deal the Commandant decided he wanted the elephants brought into the dining room to parade around the table as the officers ate. The elephant boys came reluctantly. The marble floor of the entrance hall was very slippery and Bébé balked at crossing it, and the dining room when they entered it was covered with broken glass, for the guests did not wait to have the wine opened, but knocked off the heads of the bottles in true conqueror style. The elephant boys with their charges trod warily around the long table against a background of lighted candelabra and Beauvais tapestries.

Two of the officers wanted to ride the elephants, so the boys made the elephants kneel and the men climbed up on their shoulders still holding their bottles of wine. Bébé was small, so he didn’t have to kneel; a tall officer straddled him and beat him around the table with the flat of his sword. The ride didn’t last long, Bébé slipped at a corner and the officer fell off onto the dining-room table with a crash of crystal glasses and a flood of spilled wine.

When the officers had had enough of this they decided that the elephants were pretty good fellows, so they drank their healths. Then they said that the elephants might like a drink too. One of them started to pour a bottle of wine down Monsieur’s throat. This was too much for the elephant boy; he rushed outside to call the manager. The manager hurried in and remonstrated. He told the officers that it would make the elephants sick, that they were valuable elephants, nowhere in France were there such fine elephants, and he did not want them hurt. The officer brushed him off and tried again to pour the wine down Monsieur’s throat, so the manager appealed to the Commandant. He told him with tears in his eyes that besides being bad for the elephants it was a great waste of good wine. Over at the other château the circus people did not have good wine like this; they had never in their lives tasted wine like this; where they were, it was only a petit cru. Instead of giving it to the elephants, who could not appreciate it, why not give it to the poor circus people who could?

The Commandant laughed and told an orderly to bring up two dozen of the best from the cellar and to give them to the manager and the elephant boys; and after that the manager and the boys and Monsieur, Madame, and Bébé were allowed to go.

When the manager reached home and had seen his elephants safe in the barn for the night, he came up to the château to see if by chance Madame, the artiste of the Comédie Française, was still up. He wanted her to come down to the circus wagons and join his party. He was offering a petit vin d’honneur. After all, did they not belong to the same profession, the people of the circus and the people of the stage? My friend went down to the wagons with him where the troupe was collected, and he uncorked the precious wine carefully and smelled the cork and nodded satisfaction, and he poured it into tin cups and they all drank a toast to the Circus and the Comédie Française; and they drank to Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé, and to the lion and the tiger, and to the Quatorze Chevaux en Liberté. And they kept drinking to the Chevaux en Liberté all evening, for they liked the sound of the word in their mouths.