CHAPTER II.THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN.
Numa Roumestan was twenty-two years old when he came to Paris to complete the law studies which he had begun at Aix. At that time he was a good enough kind of a fellow, light-hearted, boisterous, full-blooded, with big, handsome, prominent eyes of a golden-brown color and somewhat frog-like, and a heavy mop of naturally curling hair which grew low on his forehead like a woollen cap without a visor. There was not the shadow of an idea, not the ghost of an ambition beneath that encroaching thatch of his. He was a typical Aix student, a good billiard and card player, without a rival in his capacity for drinking champagne and “going on the cat-hunt with torches” until three o’clock in the morning through the wide streets of the old aristocratic and Parliamentary town. But he was interested in absolutely nothing. He never read a book nor even a newspaper, and was deep in the mire of that provincial folly which shrugs its shoulders at everything and hides its ignorance under a pretence of plain common-sense.
Arrived in Paris, the Quartier Latin woke him up a little, although there was small reason for it. Like all his compatriots Numa installed himselfas soon as he arrived at the Café Malmus, a tall and noisy barrack of a place with three stories of tall windows, as high as those in a department shop, on the corner of the Rue Four Saint Germain. It filled the street with the noise of billiard playing and the vociferations of its clients, a regular horde of savages. The entire South of France loomed and spread itself there; every shade of it! Specimens of the southern French Gascon, the Provençal, the Bordeaux man, the Toulousian and Marseilles man, samples of the Auvergnat and Perigordian Southerner, him of Ariège, of the Ardèche and the Pyrenees, all with names ending in “as,” “us” and “ac,” resounding, sonorous and barbarous, such as Etcheverry, Terminarias, Bentaboulech, Laboulbène—names that sounded as if hurled from the mouth of a blunderbuss or exploded as from a powder mine, so fierce were the ejaculations. And what shouts and wasted breath merely to call for a cup of coffee; what resounding laughter, like the noise of a load of stones shunted from a cart; what gigantic beards, too stiff, too black, with a bluish tinge, beards that defied the razor, growing up into the eyes and joining on to the eyebrows, sprouted in little tufts in the broad equine nostrils and ears, but never able utterly to conceal the youth and innocence of these good honest faces hidden beneath such tropical growths.
When not at their lectures, which they attended conscientiously, these students passed their entire time at Malmus’s, falling naturally into groupsaccording to their provinces or even their parishes, seated around the same old tables handed down to them by tradition, which might have retained the twang of their patois in the echoes of their marble tops, just as the desks of school-rooms retain the initials carved on them by school-boys.
Women in that company were few and far between, scarcely two or three to a story, poor girls whom their lovers brought there in a shamefaced way only to pass an evening beside them behind a glass of beer, looking over the illustrated papers, silent and feeling very out of place among these Southern youths who had been brought up to despiselou fémélan—females. Mistresses?Té!By Jove, they knew where to get them whenever they wanted them for an hour or a night; but never for long. Bullier’s ball and the “howlers” did not tempt them, nor the late suppers of therôtisseuse. They much preferred to stay at Malmus’s, talk patois, and roll leisurely from the café to the schools and then to the table d’hôte.
If they ever crossed the Seine it was to go to the Théâtre Français to a performance of one of the old plays; for the Southerner always has the classic thing in his blood. They would go in a crowd, talking and laughing loudly in the street, though in reality feeling rather timid, and then return silent and subdued, their eyes dazed by the dust of the tragic scenes they had just witnessed, and with closed blinds and gas turned low would have another game before they went to bed.
Sometimes, on the occasion of the graduationof one of their number, an impromptu feed would make the whole house redolent of garlic stews and mountain cheeses smelling strong and rotting nicely in their blue paper wrappers. After his farewell dinner the new owner of a sheepskin would take down from the rack the pipe that bore his initials and sally forth to be notary or deputy in some far-away hole beyond the Loire, there to talk to his friends in the provinces about Paris—Paris which he thought he knew, but in which really he had never set his foot!
In this narrow local circle Numa readily assumed the eagle’s place. To begin with, he shouted louder than the others, and then his music was looked upon as a sign of superiority; at any rate there was some originality in his very lively taste for music. Two or three times a week he treated himself to a stall at the opera and when he came back he overflowed with recitatives and arias, which he sang quite agreeably in a pretty good throaty voice that rebelled against all cultivation. When he strode into the Café Malmus in a theatrical manner, singing some bit of Italian music as he passed the tables, peals of admiration welcomed him: “Hello, old artist!” the boys would shout from every gang. It was just like a club of ordinary citizens in this respect: owing to his reputation as a musical artist all the women gave him a warm look, but the men would use the term enviously and with a suggestion of irony. This artistic fame did him good service later when he came to power and entered public life. Even now the name ofRoumestan figures high on the list of all artistic commissions, plans for popular operas, reforms in exhibitions of paintings proposed in the Chamber of Deputies. All that was the result of evenings spent in haunting the music-halls. He learned there self-confidence, the actor’s pose, and a certain way of taking up a position three-quarters front when talking to the lady at the cashier’s desk; then his wonder-struck comrades would exclaim: “Oh! de ce Numa, pas moins!” (Oh, that Numa! what a fellow he is!)
In his studies he had the same easy victory; he was lazy and hated study and solitude, but he managed to pass his examination with no little success through sheer audacity and Southern slyness, the slyness which made him discover the weak spot in his professor’s vanity and work it for all it was worth. Then his pleasant, frank expression and his amiability were also in his favor, and it seemed as if a lucky star lighted the pathway before him.
As soon as he obtained his lawyer’s diploma his parents sent for him to return home, because the slender pocket money which he cost them meant privations they could no longer bear. But the prospect of burying himself alive in the old dead town of Aps crumbling to dust with its ancient ruins, an existence composed of a humdrum round of visits and nothing more exciting than a few lawsuits over a parcel of party-walls, held out no inducements to that undefined ambition that the southern youth vaguely felt underlying his love for the stir and intellectual life of Paris.
With great difficulty he obtained an extension of two years more, in which to complete his studies, and just as these two years had expired and the irrevocable summons home had come, at the house of the Duchesse de San Donnino he met Sagnier during a musical function to which he had been asked on account of his pretty voice—Sagnier, the great Sagnier, the Legitimist lawyer, brother of the duchess and a musical monomaniac. Numa’s youthful enthusiasm appearing in the monotonous round of society and his craze for Mozart’s music carried Sagnier off his feet. He offered him the position of fourth secretary in his office. The salary was merely nominal, but it was being admitted into the employment of the greatest law office in Paris, having close relations with the Faubourg Saint Germain and also with the Chamber of Deputies. Unluckily old Roumestan insisted on cutting off his allowance, hoping to force him to return when hunger stared him in the face. Was he not twenty-six, a notary, and fit to earn his own bread? Then it was that landlord Malmus came to the front.
A regular type was this Malmus; a large, pale-faced, asthmatic man, who from being a mere waiter had become the proprietor of one of the largest restaurants in Paris, partly by having credit, partly by usury. It had been his custom in early days to advance money to the students when they were in need of it, and then when their ships came in, allow himself to be repaid threefold. He could hardly read and could not write at all; his accountswere kept by means of notches cut in a piece of wood, as he had seen the baker boys do in his native town of Lyon; but he was so accurate that he never made a mistake in his accounts, and, more than all, he never placed his money badly. Later, when he had become rich and the proprietor of the house in which he had been a servant for fifteen years, he established his business, and placed it entirely upon a credit basis, an unlimited credit that left the money-drawer empty at the close of the day but filled his queerly kept books with endless lines of orders for food and drink jotted down with those celebrated five-nibbed pens which are held in such sovereign honor in the world of Paris trade.
And the honest fellow’s system was simplicity itself. A student kept all his pocket money, all his allowance from home. All had full credit for meals and drinks and favorites were even allowed a room in his house. He did not ask for a penny during term time, letting the interest mount up on very high sums. But he did not do this carelessly or without circumspection. Malmus passed two months every year, his vacation, in the provinces, making secret inquiry into the health and wealth of the families of his debtors. His asthma was terrible as he mounted the peaks of the Cévennes and descended the low ranges of Languedoc. He was to be seen, gouty and mysterious, prowling about among forgotten villages, with suspicious eyes lowering under the heavy lids that are peculiar to waiters in all-night restaurants. He would remain a few days in each place, interview the notary andthe sheriff, inspect secretly the farm or factory of his debtor’s father, and then nothing was heard of him more.
What he learned at Aps gave him full confidence in Numa. The latter’s father, formerly a weaver, had ruined himself with inventions and speculations and lived now in modest circumstances as an insurance agent, but his aunt, Mme. Portal, the childless widow of a rich town councillor, would doubtless leave all her property to her nephew; so, naturally, Malmus wished Numa to remain in Paris.
“Go into Sagnier’s office; I will help you.”
As a secretary of a man in Sagnier’s position he could not live in the Quartier Latin, so Malmus furnished a set of bachelor chambers for him on the Quai Voltaire, on the courts, paying the rent and giving him his allowance on credit. Thus did the future leader face his destiny, everything on the surface seemingly easy and comfortable, but in reality in the direst need; lacking pin and pocket money. The friendship of Sagnier helped him to fine acquaintances. The Faubourg welcomed him. But this social success, the invitations in Paris and to country houses in summer, where he had to arrive in perfect fashionable outfit, only added to his expense. After repeated prayers his Aunt Portal helped him a little, but with great caution and stinginess, always accompanying her gifts with long flighty stupidities and Bible denunciations against “that ruinous Paris.” The situation was untenable.
At the end of a year he looked for other employment. Besides, Sagnier required pioneers, regular navvies for hard work, and Roumestan was not that sort of man. The Provençal’s indolence was ineradicable, and above all things he had a loathing for office work or any hard and continuous labor. The faculty of attention, which is nothing if not deep, was absolutely wanting to this volatile Southerner. That was because his imagination was too vivid, his ideas too jumbled-up beneath his dark brows, his mind too fickle, as even his writing showed; it was never twice the same. He was all on the surface, all voice, gestures, like a tenor at the opera.
“When I am not speaking I cannot think,” he said naïvely, and it was true. Words with him never rushed forth propelled by the force of his thought; on the contrary, at the mechanical sound of his own words the thoughts formed themselves in advance. He was astonished and amused at chance meetings of words and ideas in his mind which had been lost in some corner of his memory, thoughts which speech would discover, pick up and marshal into arguments. Whilst he held forth he would suddenly discover emotions of which he had been unconscious; the vibrations of his own voice moved him to such a degree that there were certain intonations which touched his heart and affected him to tears. These were the qualities of an orator, to be sure, but he did not recognize them, as his duties at Sagnier’s had hardly been such as to give him a chance to practise them.
Nevertheless, the year spent with the great Legitimist lawyer had a decisive effect upon his after life. He acquired convictions and a political party, the taste for politics and a longing for fortune and glory.
Glory came to him first.
A few months after he left his master, that title of “Secretary to Sagnier,” which he clung to as an actor who has appeared once on the boards of the Comédie Française forever calls himself “of the Comédie Française,” was the means of getting him his first case, the defence of a little Legitimist newspaper called “The Ferret,” much patronized in the best society. His defence was cleverly and brilliantly made. Coming into court without the slightest preparation, his hands in his pockets, he talked for two hours with such an insolent “go” to him, and so much good-natured sarcasm, that the judges were forced to listen to him to the end. His dreadful southern accent, with its rolling “r’s,” which he had always been too indolent to correct, seemed to make his irony only bite the deeper. It had a power of its own, this eloquence with its very Southern swing, theatrical and yet familiar, but above all lucid and full of that broad light which is found in the works of people down South, as in their landscapes, limpid to their remotest parts.
Of course the paper was non-suited; Numa’s success was paid for by costs and imprisonment. So from the ashes of many a play that has ruined manager and author one actor may snatch a reputation.Old Sagnier, who had come to hear Numa plead, embraced his pupil before the assembled crowd. “Count yourself from this day on a great man, my dear Numa!” said he, and seemed surprised that he had hatched such a falcon’s egg. But the most surprised man was Numa himself, as with the echo of his own words still sounding in his ears he descended the broad railless staircase of the Palais de Justice, quite stunned, as if in a dream.
After this success and this ovation, after showers of eulogistic letters and the jaundiced smiles of his brethren, the coming lawyer naturally felt he was indeed launched upon a triumphal career. He sat patiently waiting in his office looking out on the courtyard, before his scanty little fire; but nothing came save a few more invitations to dinner, and a pretty bronze from the foundry of Barbédienne, a donation from the staff ofLe Furet.
The new great man found himself still facing the same difficulties, the same uncertain future. Oh! these professions called liberal, which cannot decoy and entrap their clients, how hard are their beginnings, before serious and paying customers come to sit in rows in their little rooms furnished on credit with dilapidated furniture and the symbolical clock on the chimney-piece flanked by tottering candelabra! Numa was driven to giving lessons in law among his Catholic and Legitimist acquaintances; but he considered work like this beneath the dignity of the man whose name had been so covered with glory by the party newspapers.
What mortified him most of all and made him feel his wretched plight was to be obliged to go and dine at Malmus’s when he had no invitation elsewhere, and no money for a dinner at a fashionable restaurant. Nothing had changed at Malmus’s; the same cashier’s lady was enthroned among the punch-bowls as of old; the same pottery stove rumbled away near the old pipe-rack; the same shouts and accents, the same black beards from every section of the South prevailed; but his generation had passed, and he looked on the new generation with the disfavor which a man at maturity, but without a position, feels for the youths who make him seem old.
How could he have existed in so brainless a set? Surely the students of his day could not have been such fools! Even their admiration, their fawning round him like a lot of good-natured dogs, was insupportable to him.
While he ate, Malmus, proud of his guest, came and sat on the little red sofa which shook under his fits of asthma, and talked to him, while at a table near by a tall, thin woman took her place, the only relic of the old days left—a bony creature destitute of age known in the quarter as “everyone’s old girl.” Some kind-hearted student now married and settled far away had opened a credit for her at Malmus’s before he went. Confined for so many years to this one pasture, the poor creature knew nothing of what was going on in the outside world; she had not even heard of Numa’s triumph, and spoke to him pityingly as to onewhom fortune had passed by, and in the same rank and category as herself.
“Well, poor old chum, how are things a-getting on? You know Pompon is married, and Laboulbène has passed his deputy at Caen.”
Roumestan hardly answered a word, hurried through his dinner and rushed away through the streets, noisy with many beershops and fruit stalls, feeling the bitterness of a life of failure and a general impression of bankruptcy.
Several years passed thus, during which his name became better known and more firmly established, but with little profit to himself, except for an occasional gift of a copy of some statuette in Barbédienne bronze. Then he was called upon to defend a manufacturer of Avignon, who had made seditious silk handkerchiefs. There was some sort of a deputation pictured on them standing about the Comte de Chambord, but very confusedly done in the printing, only with great imprudence he had allowed the initials “H. V.” (Henry Fifth) to be left, surrounded by a coat of arms.
Here was Numa’s chance for a good bit of comedy. He thundered against the stupidity that could see the slightest political allusion in that H. V.! Why, that meant Horace Vernet—there he was, presiding over a meeting of the French Institute!
This “tarasconade” had a great local success that did him more service than any advertisement won in Paris could; above all, it gained him the active approbation of his Aunt Portal. At firstthis was expressed by presents of olive oil and white melons, followed by a lot of other articles of food—figs, peppers, potted ducks from Aix, caviar from Martigues, jujubes, elderberry jam and St. John’s-bread, a lot of boyish goodies of which the old lady herself was very fond, but which her nephew threw into a cupboard to spoil.
Shortly after arrived a letter, written with a quill in a large handwriting, which displayed the brusque accents and absurd phrases customary with his aunt, and betrayed her puzzle-headed mind by its absolute freedom from punctuation and by the lively way in which she jumped from one subject to the other.
Still, Numa was able to discover the fact that the good woman desired to marry him off to the daughter of a Councillor in the Court of Appeals in Paris, one M. Le Quesnoy, whose wife, a Mlle. Soustelle from Aps, had gone to school with her at the Convent of la Calade—big fortune—the girl handsome, good morals, somewhat cool and haughty—but marriage would soon warm that up. And if the marriage took place, what would his old Aunt Portal give her Numa? One hundred thousand francs in good clinking tin—on the day of the wedding!
Under its provincialisms the letter contained a serious proposition, so serious indeed that the next day but one Numa received an invitation to dine with the Le Quesnoys. He accepted, though with some trepidation.
The Councillor, whom he had often seen at thePalais de Justice, was one of those men who had always impressed him most. Tall, slender, with a haughty face and a mortal paleness, sharp, searching eyes, a thin-lipped, tightly-closed mouth—the old magistrate, who originally came from Valenciennes, seemed like that town to be surrounded by an impregnable wall and fortified by Vauban. His cool Northern manner was most disconcerting to Numa. His high position, gained by his exhaustive study of the Penal Code, his wealth and his spotless life would have given him a yet higher position had it not been for the independence of his views and a morose withdrawal from the world and its gayeties ever since the death of his only son, a lad of twenty. All these circumstances passed before Numa’s mental vision as he mounted the broad stone steps with their carved hand-rail of the Le Quesnoy residence, one of the oldest houses on the Place Royale.
The great drawing-room into which he was shown, with its lofty ceiling reaching down to the doors to meet the delicate paintings of its piers, the straight hangings with stripes in brown and gold-colored Chinese silk framing the long windows that opened upon an antique balcony, and also on one of the rose-colored corners of brick buildings on the square—all this was not calculated to change his first impressions.
But the welcome given him by Mme. Le Quesnoy soon put him at his ease.
This fragile little woman with her sad sweet smile, wrapped in many shawls and crippled byrheumatism, from which she had suffered ever since she came to live in Paris, still preserved the accent and habits of her dear South, and she loved anything that reminded her of it. She invited Numa to sit down by her side, and looking affectionately at him in the dim light, she murmured: “The very picture of Evelina!” This pet name of his aunt, so long unheard by him, touched his quick sensibility like an echo of his childhood. It appeared that Mme. Le Quesnoy had long wished to know the nephew of her old friend, but her house had been so mournful since her son’s death, and they had been so entirely out of the world, that she had never sought him out. Now they had decided to entertain a little, not because their sorrow was less keen, but on account of their two daughters, the eldest of whom was almost twenty years old; and turning toward the balcony whence they could hear peals of girlish laughter, she called, “Rosalie, Hortense, come in—here is Monsieur Roumestan!”
Ten years after that visit Numa remembered the calm and smiling picture that appeared, framed by the long window in the tender light of the sunset, of that beautiful young girl, and the absence of all affected embarrassment as she came towards him, smoothing the bands of her hair that her little sister’s play had ruffled—her clear eyes and direct gaze.
He felt an instant confidence in and sympathy with her.
Once or twice during dinner, nevertheless, whenhe was in the full flow of animated conversation he was conscious that a ripple as of disdain passed over the clear-cut profile and pure complexion of the face beside him—without question that “cool and haughty” air which Aunt Portal had mentioned, and which Rosalie got through her striking resemblance to her father. But the little grimace of her pretty mouth and the cold blue of her look softened quickly to a kindly attention, and she was again under the charm of a surprise she did not try to conceal. Born and brought up in Paris, Rosalie had always felt a fixed aversion to the South; its accent, its manners, even the country itself as she saw it in the vacations she occasionally spent at Aps—everything was antipathetic to her. It seemed to be an instinct of race, and was the cause of many gentle disputes with her mother.
“Nothing would induce me to marry a Southerner,” Rosalie had laughingly declared, and she arranged in her own mind a type—a coarse, noisy, vacant fellow, combining an opera tenor and a drummer for Bordeaux wines, but with a fine head and well-cut features. Roumestan came pretty near to this clear-cut vision of the mocking little Parisian, but his ardent musical speech, taking on that evening an irresistible force by reason of the sympathy of those around him, inspired and aroused him, seeming even to make his face more refined. After the usual talk in low voices between neighbors at the table, thosehors-d’œuvresof conversation that circulate with caviar and anchovy,the Emperor’s hunting parties at Compiègne became the general topic of conversation; those hunts in costume at which the invited guests appeared as grandees and grand ladies of the Court of Louis XV. Knowing M. Le Quesnoy to be a Liberal, Numa launched forth into a magnificent diatribe, almost a prophetic one. He drew a picture of the Court as a set of circus riders, women performers, grooms and jockeys riding hard under a threatening sky, pursuing the stag to its death to the accompaniment of lightning-flash and distant claps of thunder, and then—in the midst of all this revelry—the deluge, the hunting horns drowned, all this monarchical harlequinade ending in a morass of blood and mire!
Perhaps this piece was not entirely impromptu; probably he had got it off before at the committee meeting; but never before had his brilliant speech and tone of candor in revolt roused anywhere such enthusiasm and sympathy as he suddenly saw reflected in one sweet, serious countenance, that he felt turning toward him, while the gentle face of Mme. Le Quesnoy lit up with a ray of fun and seemed to ask her daughter: “Well, how do you like my Southerner now?”
Rosalie was captivated. Deep in her inmost heart she bowed to the power of that voice and to generous thoughts that accorded so well with all her youthful enthusiasms, her passion for liberty and justice. As women at a play will confound the singer with his song, the actor with hisrôle, so she forgot to make allowances for the artist’simagination. Oh, if she could but have known what an abyss of nothing lay below these professional phrases, how little he troubled himself about the hunting-parties at Compiègne! She did not know that he merely needed an invitation with the imperial crest on it, and he would have joined these self-same parties, in which his vanity, his tastes as actor and pleasure-seeker, would have found complete satisfaction. But she was under the charm. As he talked, it seemed to her the table grew larger, the dull, sleepy faces of the few guests, a certain President of the Chamber and an old physician, were transfigured; and when they returned to the drawing-room, the chandelier, lighted for the first time since her brother’s death, had almost the dazzling effect upon her of the sun itself.
The sun was Roumestan.
He woke up the majestic old house, drove away mourning and the gloom that was piled in all the corners, the particles of sadness that accumulate in old dwellings; he seemed to make the facets of the mirrors glisten and give new life to the delightful panel paintings on the walls, which had been scarce visible for a hundred years.
“Are you fond of painting, Monsieur?”
“Fond of it, Mademoiselle? Oh, I should think so!”
The truth was that he knew absolutely nothing about it, but he had a stock of words and phrases ready for use on that subject as on all others, and while the servants were arranging the card tables he made the paintings on the well-preserved LouisXIII walls the pretext for a quiet talk very near to the young girl.
Of the two, Rosalie knew much the more about art. Having lived always in an atmosphere of cultivation and good taste, the sight of a fine bit of sculpture or a great painting thrilled her with a special vibratory emotion which she felt rather than expressed, because of her reserved character and because the false emotions in the world are apt to keep down the real ones. At sight of them a superficial observer, however, noting the eloquent assurance with which the lawyer talked and the wide professional gestures he used, as well as the rapt attention of Rosalie, might have taken him for some great master giving a lesson to a pupil.
“Mamma, can we go into your room? I want to show Monsieur Roumestan the hunting panel.”
At the whist table Mme. Le Quesnoy gave a quick inquiring glance at him whom she always called, with a peculiar tone of renunciation and humility in her voice, “Monsieur Le Quesnoy,” and, receiving an affirmative nod from him which meant that the thing was in order, gave the desired permission.
They crossed a passage lined with books and found themselves in the old people’s chamber, an immense room as majestic and antique as the drawing-room. The panel was above a small door beautifully carved.
“It is too dark to see it well,” said Rosalie.
As she spoke she held up a double candlestickshe had taken from a card table, and with her arm raised, her graceful figure in fine relief, she threw the light upon the picture which showed Diana, the crescent on her brow, among her huntress maidens in the landscape of a pagan Paradise. But at this gesture of a Greek torch-bearer the light from the double candles fell upon her own head with its simple coiffure and sparkled in her clear eyes with their high-bred smile and on the virginal curves of her slender yet stately bust. She seemed more of a Diana than the pictured goddess herself. Roumestan looked at her; carried away by her charm of youthful innocence and candid chastity, he forgot who she was and what his purpose had been in coming, yes, all his dreams of fortune and ambition! He felt an insane desire to clasp this supple form in his arms, to shower kisses on her fine hair, the delicate fragrance of which intoxicated him, to carry off this enchanting being to be the safeguard and joy of his whole life; and something told him that if he attempted it she would permit it, and that she was his, his entirely, conquered, vanquished at the first sight.
Fire and wind of the South, you are irresistible!