CHAPTER II.THE CASCABEL FAMILY.
CASCABEL!—A name, you might say, “pealed and
chimed on all the tongues of fame,” throughout the
five parts of the globe, and “other localities,” proudly
added the man who bore that patronymic so honorably.
Cæsar Cascabel, a native of Pontorson, right in the heart
of Normandy, was a master in all the dodges, knacks, and
trickeries of Norman folks. But, sharp and knowing as he
was, he had remained an honest man, and it were not right
to confound him with the too often suspicious members of
the juggling confraternity; in him, humbleness of birth and
professional irregularities were fully redeemed by the private
virtues of the head of the family circle.
At this period, Mr. Cascabel looked his age, forty-five, not
a day more or less. A child of the road in the full acceptation
of the word, his only cradle had been the pack that his
father shouldered as he tramped along from fairs to markets
throughout Normandy. His mother having died shortly
after his coming into the world, he had been very opportunely
adopted by a traveling troupe on the death of his
father, a few years after. With them he spent his youth in
tumbles, contortions and somersaults, his head down and
his feet in the air. Then he became in turn a clown, a
gymnast, an acrobat, a Hercules at country fairs,—until the
time when, the father of three children, he appointed himself
manager of the little family he had brought out conjointly
with Mrs. Cascabel, nee Cornelia Vadarasse, all the
way from Martigues in Provence (France).
An intelligent and ingenious man, if on the one hand his
muscle and his skill were above the common, his moral
worth was in no way inferior to his physical abilities. True, a rolling stone gathers no moss; but, at least, it rubs against the rough knobs on the road, it gets polished, its angles are smoothed off, it grows round and shiny. Even so, in the course of the twenty-five years that he had been rolling along, Cæser Cascabel had rubbed so hard, had got so thoroughly polished and rounded off, that he knew about all that can be known of life, felt surprised at nothing, wondered at nothing. By dint of roughing it through Europe from fair to fair, and acclimatizing himself quite as readily in America as in the Dutch or the Spanish Colonies, he wellnigh understood all languages, and spoke them more or less accurately, “even those he did not know,” as he used to say, for it was no trouble to him to express his meaning by gestures whenever his power of speech failed him.
Cæser Cascabel was a trifle above the middle height; his
body was muscular; his limbs were “well oiled”; his lower
jaw, somewhat protruding, indicated energy; his head
was large, and shagged over with bushy hair, his skin marbled
by the sun of every clime, tanned by the squalls of
every sea; he wore a mustache cut short at the ends, and
half-length whiskers shaded his ruddy cheeks; his nose was
rather full; he had blue eyes glowing with life and very
keen, with a look of kindness in them; his mouth would
have boasted thirty-three teeth still, had he got one put in, Before the public, he was a real Frederic Lemaitre, a tragedian with grand gestures, affected poses, and oratorical sentences, but in private, a very simple, very natural man, who doted on his wife and children.
Blessed with a constitution that could stand anything, although his advancing years now forbade him all acrobatic performances, he was still wonderful in those displays of strength that “require biceps.” He was possessed, moreover, of extraordinary talent in that branch of the showman's profession, the science of the engastrimuth or ventriloquism, a science which goes back a good many centuries if, as Bishop Eustachius asserts, the pythoness of Edon was nothing more than a ventriloquist. At his will his vocal apparatus slipped down from his throat to his stomach. You wonder if he could have sung a duet, all by himself? Well, you had better not have challenged him to!