CHAPTER III.THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN (continued).
If ever people were unsuited for life side by side it was these two. Opposites by instinct, by education and temperament, thinking alike on no one subject, they were the North and the South face to face without the slightest chance of fusion. Love feeds on contrasts like this and laughs when they are pointed out, so powerful does it feel itself. But later, when everyday life sets in, during the monotony of days and nights passed beneath the same roof, that mist which constitutes love disappears; the veil is lifted; they begin to see each other, and, what is worse, to judge each other!
It was some time before the awakening came to these young people; at least with Rosalie the illusion lasted. Clear-sighted and clever on all other subjects, for a long while she remained blind to Numa’s faults and could not see how far in many ways she was his superior. It had not taken him long to relapse into his old self again. Passion in the South is short-lived because of its very violence. And then the Southerner is so perfectly assured of the inferiority of women that, once married and sure of his happiness, he installs himselflike a bashaw in his home, receiving love as homage due and not of much importance; for, after all, it takes up a good deal of time to be loved, and Numa was much preoccupied just then arranging the new life which his marriage, his wealth and the high position in the law courts as son-in-law to M. Le Quesnoy necessitated.
The one hundred thousand francs given him by Aunt Portal sufficed to pay his debts to Malmus and the furnisher and to wipe out forever the dreary record of his straitened bachelor days. It was a delightful change from the humblefrichti(lunch) at Malmus’s on the old sofa with its worn red velvet, in company of “every one’s old girl,” to the dining-room in his new house in the Rue Scribe where, opposite his dainty little Parisian wife, he presided over the sumptuous dinners that he offered to the magnates of the law and of music.
The Provençal loved a life of eating, luxury and display, but he liked it best in his own house, without any trouble or ceremony, where a certain looseness was possible over a cigar and risky stories might be told. Rosalie resigned herself to keeping open house, the table always set, ten or fifteen guests every evening, and never anybody but men, among whose black coats her evening dress made the only point of color. There she stayed until with the serving of the coffee and the opening of cigar boxes she would slip away, leaving them to their politics and the coarse roars of laughter that accompany the close of bachelor dinners.
Only the mistress of a house knows what domestic complications arise when such constant and unusual services are required every day of the servants. Rosalie struggled uncomplainingly with this problem and tried to bring some order out of chaos, carried away as she was by the whirlwind of her terrible genius of a husband, who did not spare her the turbulence of his own nature, yet between two storms had a smile of approbation for his little wife. Her only regret was that she never had him enough to herself. Even at breakfast, that hasty morning’s meal for a busy lawyer, there was always a guest between them, namely that male comrade without whom the man of the South could not exist, that inevitable some one to answer a bright remark and call forth a flash from his own wits, the arm on which condescendingly to lean, some henchman to catch his handkerchief as he sallied forth to the Palace of Justice!
Ah, how she longed to accompany him across the Seine, how glad she would have been to call for him on rainy days, wait, and bring him home in her carriage, nestled up to him behind the windows blurred with raindrops! She did not dare to suggest such things any more, so sure was she of some excuse, an appointment in the Lawyers’ Hall with some one of three hundred intimate friends of whom the Provençal would say with deep emotion:
“He adores me! He would go through fire and water for me!”
That was his idea of friendship. But in otherrespects, no selection whatever as to his friends! His easy good-nature and lively capriciousness caused him to throw himself into the arms of each man he met, but made him as easily drop him. Every week there was a new craze for someone whose name came up incessantly, a name which Rosalie wrote down conscientiously on the little menu card, but which presently disappeared as suddenly as if the new favorite’s personality had been as flimsy and as easily burned as the little colored card itself.
Among these birds of passage one alone remained stationary, more from force of childish habit than from anything else, for Bompard and Roumestan were born in the same street at Aps. Bompard was an institution in the house, found there in a place of honor when the bride came home. He was a cadaverous creature with Don Quixote’s head and a big eagle’s nose and eyes like balls of agate set in a pitted, saffron-colored complexion that looked like Cordova leather; it was lined and seamed with the wrinkles one sees only in the faces of clowns and jesters which are forced constantly into contortions.
Bompard had never been a comedian, however. Numa had found him again in the chorus of the opera where he had sung for a short time. Beyond this, it was impossible to say what was real in the shifting sands of that career. He had been everywhere, seen everything and practised all trades. No great man or great event could be mentioned without his saying: “He is a friend ofmine,” or “I was present at the time,” and then would follow a long story to prove his assertion.
In piecing together these fragments of his history most astonishing chronological conclusions were arrived at; thus, at the same date Bompard led a company of Polish and Caucasian deserters at the siege of Sebastopol and was choir-master to the King of Holland and very close to the king’s sister, for which latter indiscretion he was imprisoned for six months in the fortress at The Hague—which did not prevent him at the same time from making a forced march from Laghouat to Gadamès through the great African desert.
He told these wonderful tales with rare gestures, in a solemn tone, using a strong Southern accent, but with a continual twitching and contortion of his features as trying to the eyes as the shifting of the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.
The present life of Bompard was as mysterious as his past. How and where did he live? And on what? He was forever talking of wonderful schemes for making money, such as a new and cheap manner of asphalting one corner of Paris, or, all of a sudden, he was deep in the discovery of an infallible remedy for the phylloxera and was only waiting for a letter from the Minister to receive the prize of one hundred thousand francs in order to be in funds to pay his bill at the little dairy where he took his meals, whose managers he had almost driven insane with his false hopes and extravagant dreams.
This crazy Southerner was Roumestan’s delight.He took him about, making a butt of him, egging him on, warming him up and exciting his folly. If Numa stopped in the street to speak to any one, Bompard stepped aside with a dignified air as if about to light a cigar. At funerals or first nights he was always turning up to ask every one in the most impressive haste: “Have you seen Roumestan anywhere?” He came to be as well known as Numa himself. This type of parasite is not uncommon in Paris; each great man has a Bompard dragging at his heels, who walks on in his shadow and comes to have a kind of personality reflected from that of his patron. It was a mere chance that Roumestan’s Bompard really had a personality of his own, not a reflection of his master. Rosalie detested this intruder on her happiness, always between her and her husband, appropriating to himself the few precious moments that might have been hers alone. The two old friends always talked a patois that seemed to set her apart and laughed uproariously at untranslatable local jokes. What she particularly disliked about him was the necessity he was under of telling lies. At first she had believed these inventions, so unsuspicious was her true and candid nature, whose greatest charm was its harmony in word and thought, a combination that was audible in the crystalline clearness and steadiness of her musical voice.
“I do not like him—he tells lies,” she said in deep disgust to Roumestan, who only laughed. To defend his friend, he said:
“No, he’s not a liar; he’s only gifted with a vivid imagination. He is a sleeper awake who talks out his dreams. My country is full of just such people. It is the effect of the sun and the accent. There is my Aunt Portal—and even I myself—if I did not have myself well in hand—”
She placed her little hand over his mouth:
“Hush, hush! I could not love you if you came from that side of Provence!”
The sad fact was that he did come from that very countryside. His assumed Paris manners and the veneer of society restrained him somewhat, but she was soon to see that terrible South appear in him after all, commonplace, brutal, illogical. The first time that she realized it was in regard to religion, about which, as about everything else, Numa was entirely in line with the traditions of his province.
Numa was the Provençal Roman Catholic who never goes to communion, never confesses himself except in cholera times, never goes to church except to bring his wife home after mass, and then stands in the vestibule near the holy-water basin with the superior air of a father who has taken his children to a show of Chinese shadows—yet a man who would let himself be drawn and quartered in defence of a faith he does not feel, which in no way controls his passions or his vices.
When he married he knew that his wife was of the same church as himself and that at the wedding in St. Paul’s the priest had eulogized them in due form as befitted all the candles and carpetsand gorgeous flowers that go with a first-class wedding. He had never worried further about it. All the women whom he knew—his mother, his cousins, his aunt, the Duchesse de San Donnino, were devout Catholics; so he was much surprised after several months of marriage to observe that his wife never went to church. He spoke of it:
“Do you never go to confession?”
“No, my dear,” she answered quietly, “nor you either, so far as I can see.”
“Oh, I—that is quite different!”
“Why so?”
She looked at him with such a sincerely puzzled expression—she seemed so far from understanding her own inferiority as a woman, that he made no reply and waited for her to explain.
No, she was not a free-thinker, nor a strong-minded woman. Educated in Paris at a good school, she had had for confessor a priest of Saint-Laurent up to seventeen; when she left school, and even for some time after, she had fulfilled all her religious duties at the side of her mother, who was a bigoted Southerner. Then, one day, something within her seemed suddenly to give way, and she declared to her parents that she felt an insuperable repulsion for the confessional. Her pious mother would have tried to overcome what she looked upon as a whim, but her father had interfered:
“Let her alone; it took hold of me just as it has seized her and at the same age.”
And since then she had consulted only her ownpure young conscience in regard to her actions. Otherwise she was a Parisian, a woman of the world to her finger-tips, and disliked the bad taste in displays of independence. If Numa wished to go to church she would go with him, as for a long while she had gone with her mother; but at the same time she would not lie or pretend to believe that in which she had lost all faith.
Numa listened to her in speechless amazement, alarmed to hear such sentiments expressed with a firmness and conviction in her own moral being that dissipated all his Southern ideas about the dependency of women.
“Then you don’t believe in God?” he asked in his best forensic manner, his raised finger pointed solemnly toward the moldings of the ceiling. She gave a cry of astonishment: “Is it possible to do so?”—so spontaneously and with such conviction that it was as good as a confession of faith. Then he fell back on what the world would say, on social conventions, on the intimate connection between religion and monarchy. All the ladies whom they knew went to church, the duchess and Mme. d’Escarbès; they had their confessors to dine and at evening parties. Her strange views would have a bad effect upon them socially, were they known. He suddenly ceased speaking, feeling that he was floundering about in commonplaces, and the discussion ended there. For several Sundays in succession he went through a grand and hollow form of taking his wife to mass, whereby Rosalie gained the boon of a pleasantwalk on her husband’s arm; but he soon wearied of the business, pleaded important engagements and let the religious question drop.
This first misunderstanding made no breach between them. As if seeking pardon, the young wife redoubled her devotion to her husband and her usual clever, smiling deference to his wishes. No longer so blind as in the earlier days, perchance she sometimes felt a vague premonition of things that she would not admit even to herself; but she was happy still, because she wished to be so, and because she lived in that dreamlike atmosphere enveloping the new life of a young married woman still surrounded by the dreams and uncertainty which are like the clouds of white tulle of the wedding dress that drape the form of a bride. The awakening was bound to come; to her it was sudden and frightful.
One summer day—they were staying at Orsay, a country seat belonging to the Le Quesnoys—her father and husband had already gone up to Paris, as they did every morning, when Rosalie discovered that the pattern for a little garment she was making was not to be found. The garment was part of the outfit for the expected heir. It is true there are beautiful things to be bought ready-made at the shops, but real mothers, the women who feel the mother-love in advance, like to plan and cut and sew; and as the pile of little clothes increases in the box, as each garment is finished, feel that they are hastening the matter and each object is bringing the advent of thelonged-for birth one step nearer. Rosalie would not for worlds have allowed any other hand to touch this tremendous work which had been begun five months before—as soon as she was sure of her coming happiness. On the bench where she sat under the big catalpa tree down there at Orsay were spread out dainty little caps that were only big enough to be tried on one’s fist, little flannel skirts and dresses, the straight sleeves suggesting the stiff gestures of the tiny form for which they were designed—and now, here she was without this most important pattern!
“Send your maid up town for it,” suggested her mother.
A maid, indeed! What should she know about it? “No, no, I shall go myself. I will have finished my shopping by noon, and then I shall go and surprise Numa and eat up half his luncheon.”
It was a beautiful idea, this bachelor luncheon with her husband, alone in the half-darkened house in the Rue Scribe, with the curtains all gone and the furniture covered up; it would be a regular spree! She laughed to herself as all alone she ran up the steps, her errands done, and put her key softly in the lock so that she might surprise him. “It is pretty late, he has probably finished.”
Indeed, she did find only the remnants of a dainty meal for two upon the table in the dining room, and the footman in his checked jacket hard at it emptying all the bottles and dishes. She thought of nothing at first but that her want of punctuality had spoiled her little plan. If only she had notloafed so long in that shop over those adorable little garments, all lace and embroideries!
“Has your master gone out?”
The slowness of the servant in answering, the sudden pallor that overspread his big impudent face framed in long whiskers, did not at first strike her. She only saw a servant embarrassed at being caught helping himself to his master’s wines and good things. Still it was absolutely necessary to say that his master was still there, but that he was very much occupied and would be occupied for quite a while. But it took him some time to stammer out this information. How the fellow’s hands trembled as he cleared off the table and began to rearrange it for his mistress’s luncheon!
“Has he been lunching alone?”
“Yes, Madame; at least, only Monsieur Bompard.”
She had suddenly caught sight of a black lace scarf lying on a chair. The foolish fellow saw it at the same moment, and as their eyes were fixed on the same object the whole thing stood before her in a flash. Quickly, without a word, she crossed the little waiting room, went straight to the door of the library, opened it wide, and fell flat on the floor. They had not even troubled themselves to lock the door!
And if you had seen the woman! Forty years old, a washed-out blonde with a pimply complexion, thin lips and eyelids wrinkled like an old glove! Under her eyes were purple scars, signs of her evil life; her shoulders were bony and hervoice harsh. But—she was high-born, the Marquise d’Escarbès! which to the Southerner means everything. The escutcheon concealed her defects as a woman. Separated from her husband through an unsavory divorce suit, disowned by her family and no longer received in the great houses of the Faubourg, Mme. d’Escarbès had gone over to the Empire and had opened a political diplomatic salon, one of those which are for the police rather than politicians, where one could find the most notorious persons of the day—without their wives. Then, after two years of intrigues, having gathered together quite a following, she determined to appeal her law case. Roumestan, who had been her lawyer in the first suit, could not very well refuse to take up the second. He hesitated, nevertheless, for public opinion was very strong against her. But the entreaties of the Marquise took such convincing steps and the lawyer’s vanity was so flattered by the steps themselves that he had yielded. Now that the case was soon to be on, they saw each other every day, either at her house or his own, pushing the affair vigorously and from two standpoints.
This terrible discovery nearly killed Rosalie; it struck her doubly in her sensibility to pain as a woman with child, bearing as she did two hearts within her, two spots for suffering. The child was killed, but the mother lived. But after three days of unconsciousness, when she regained memory and the power of suffering, her tears poured forth in a torrent, a bitter flood that nothingcould stem. When she had wept her heart out over the faithlessness of her husband, the empty cradle and the dainty little garments resting useless under the transparent blue curtains caused her anguish to break forth again in tears—but without a cry or lament!
Poor Numa was in almost as deep despair as she was. The hope of a little Roumestan, “the eldest,” who is always a great personage in Provençal families, was gone forever, destroyed by his own fault. The pale face of his wife with its resigned expression, her compressed lips and smothered sobs, nearly broke his heart—her grief was so different from his way of acting, from the coarse, superficial sensibility that he showed as he sat at the foot of his victim’s bed, saying at intervals with swimming eyes and trembling lips, “Come now, Rosalie, come now!” That was all he could find to say; but what vanity in that “Come now,” uttered with the Southern accent that so easily takes on a sympathetic tone; yet beneath it all one seemed to hear: “Don’t let it worry you, my darling little pet! Is it really worth while? Does it keep me from loving you just the same?”
It is true that he did love her just as much as his shallow nature was capable of loving constantly any one. He could not bear to think of any one else presiding over his house, caring for him, or petting him.
“I must have devotion about me,” he said naïvely, and he well knew that the devotion she had to give was the perfection of everything that a mancould desire; so the idea of losing her was horrible to him. If that is not love, what is?
Rosalie, alas, was thinking on quite another line. Her life was wrecked, her idol fallen, her confidence in him forever lost. And yet she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him, however, as a mother yields to the child that cries and begs for her pardon; also for the sake of their name, her father’s honored name that the scandal of a separation would have tarnished, and because every one believed her happy and she could not let them know the truth.
But let him beware! After this pardon so generously accorded, she warned him, a repetition of such an outrage would not find the same clemency. Let him never try it again, or their lives would be separated cruelly and forever under the eyes of the whole world. There was a firmness in her tone and look as she said this, which showed her capable of revenging her wounded woman’s pride upon a society that held her imprisoned in its bonds.
Numa understood; he swore in perfect good faith that he would sin no more. He was still upset at the risk he had run of losing his happiness and that repose which was so necessary to him, all for an intrigue which had only appealed to his vanity. It was an immense relief to be rid of his great lady, his bony marquise, who but for her noble coat-of-arms was hardly more desirable than poor “every one’s old girl” at the Café Malmus; to have no more love-letters to write and rendezvousto make and keep. The knowledge that this silly sentimental nonsense which had so tried his ease-loving nature was over and done with enchanted him as much as his wife’s forgiveness and the restored peace of his household.
He was as happy as before all this had happened. No apparent change took place in their mode of life—the table always laid, the same crowd of guests, the same round of entertainments and receptions at which Numa sang and declaimed and strutted, unconscious that at his side sat one whose beautiful eyes were evermore open and aware of facts under their veil of actual tears. She understood her great man now: all words and gestures, kind-hearted and generous at times, but kind only a little while, made up of caprice, a love of showing off and a desire to please like a coquette. She realized the shallowness of such a nature, undecided in his beliefs as in his dislikes; above all she feared for both their sakes the weakness hidden under his swelling words and resounding voice, a weakness which angered and yet endeared him to her, because, now that her wifely love had vanished, she felt the yearning towards him that a mother feels to a wayward child. Always ready to sacrifice herself and to be devoted in spite of treachery, the secret fear haunted her still: “If only he does not wear out my patience!”
Clear-sighted as she was, Rosalie quickly observed a change in her husband’s political opinions. His relations with the Faubourg St. Germain had begun to cool. The nankin waistcoat and fleur-de-lispin of old Sagnier no longer awed him. Sagnier’s mind, he said, was not what it had been. It was his shadow alone that presided at the Palace, a sleepy ghost that recalled far too well the epoch of the Legitimacy and its morbid inactivity, the next thing to death.
So it was that Numa slowly, gently developed towards the Empire, opening his doors to notable men among the Imperialists whom he had met at the house of Mme. d’Escarbès, whose influence had prepared him for this very change.
“Look out for your great man; I am afraid he is going to moult,” said the councillor to his daughter at dinner one day, when the lawyer had been letting his coarse satire loose regarding the affair of Froschdorf, which he compared to the wooden horse of Don Quixote, stationary and nailed down, while his rider with bandaged eyes believed he was careering far through heavenly space.
She did not have to ask many questions. Deceitful as he might be, his lies, which he scorned to cover with complications or with finesse, were so careless that they betrayed him at once.
Going into the library one morning she found him absorbed in writing a letter, and leaning over him with her head near his she inquired:
“To whom are you writing?”
He stammered, tried to invent something, but the clear eyes searched him through and through like a conscience; he had an impulse to be frank because he could not help it.
It was a letter to the emperor accepting the position of councillor of state, written in the dry but emphatic style, that style at the bar which he employed when addressing the Bench whilst he gesticulated with his long sleeves. It began thus: “A Vendean of the South, raised in the belief in the monarchy and a respectful reverence for the past, I feel that I shall not do violence to my honor or to my conscience—”
“You must not send that!” said she quickly.
He flew into a rage, talked loudly and brutally like a shopman at Aps laying down the law in his own household. What business was it of hers, after all was said and done? What did she mean by it? Did he interfere with her about the shape of her bonnets or the models of her gowns? He stormed and thundered as if he had a public audience, but Rosalie maintained a tranquil, almost disdainful silence at such violence as this, mere remnant of a will already broken, sure of her victory in the end. These crises which weaken and disarm them are themselves the ruin of exuberant natures.
“You must not send that letter. It would give the lie to your whole life, to all your obligations—”
“My obligations! and to whom?”
“To me. Remember how we first knew each other, how you won my heart by your protestations and disgust at the emperor’s masquerades. It was not so much the sentiments that I admired in you as the fixed purpose that you showed to upholda righteous cause once adopted—your steady manly will!”
But he defended his conduct. Ought he eat his heart out all his life long in a party frozen stiff, without springs of action, a camp deserted and abandoned under the snow? Besides, it was not he who went to the Empire, it was the Empire that came to him. The emperor was an excellent man, full of ideas, much superior to his court—in fine, he brought to bear all the good arguments for playing the traitor. But Rosalie would accept none of them, and tried to show him that his conduct would not only be treacherous but short-sighted:
“Do you not see how uneasy these people are, how they feel that the earth is mined and hollow beneath their feet? The slightest jar from a rolling stone and the whole thing will crumble! And into what a gulf!”
She talked with perfect clearness, gave details, repeated many things that she, always a silent person, had picked up after dinner from the talks when the men would leave the women, intelligent or not, to languish over toilets and worldly scandal in conversation that even such topics could not enliven.
“Odd little woman!” thought Roumestan. Where had she learned all that she was saying? He could not get over the fact that she was so clever; and, following one of those sudden changes that make these gusty natures so lovable, he took this reasoning little head, so charming with youth andyet so intelligent, between his hands and covered it with a passion of tender kisses.
“You are right, a thousand times right! I ought to write just the opposite!”
He was going to tear up the rough copy, but he noted that in the opening sentence there was a phrase that pleased him, one that might still serve his turn if it were changed a bit, somewhat in this way:
“A Vendean of the South, raised in the belief in the monarchy and a respectful reverence for the past, I feel that I should do violence to my honor and conscience, if I accepted the post which your Majesty—” etc.
This polite but firm refusal published in all the Legitimist papers raised Roumestan to a very different place in public opinion; it made his name a synonym for incorruptibility. “Cannot be rent,” wrote theCharivariunder an amusing cartoon which represented the toga of the great jurist resisting the violent tugging of the several political parties.
Shortly after this the Empire went to pieces and when the Assembly of Bordeaux met Numa had the choice between three departments which had elected him their Deputy to the House, entirely on account of his letter to the emperor. His first speeches, delivered with a somewhat forced and turgid eloquence, soon made him leader of all the parties of the Right.
He was only the small change of old Sagnier, but in these days of middle-class races, blue bloodrarely came to the front, and so the new leader triumphed on the benches of the Chamber as easily as on the old red divans at Father Malmus’s café.
Councillor-general in his own department, the idol of the entire South, and raised still higher by the position of his father-in-law, who after the fall of the Empire had become first president of the court of appeals, Numa without doubt was marked out to become sooner or later a cabinet minister. In the meantime a great man in the eyes of every one but his own wife, he carried his fresh glories about, from Paris to Versailles and down to Provence, amiable, familiar, jolly and unconventional, bringing his aureola with him, it is true, but only too willing to leave it in its band-box, like an opera hat when no ceremony calls for its presence.