It was my father, whose interview with De Morny was over. He stood at the open door, and I saw the Duke, who had peeped out, and whose quick intelligence had taken in the whole affair in a flash, vanishing with a smile on his face.
"Go home!" said my father, putting me into the carriage. "I will return on foot. You have disgraced yourself; you have disgraced me. Hand yourself over to Joubert. You are to be a prisoner under lock and key until I devise some punishment to meet your case." Then, to the coachman: "Home, Lubin!" He clapped the door on me, and I was driven off, with his speech ringing in my ears, a speech which I believe was meant as much for the gallery as for me. This was my first encounter with the Comte de Coigny, and I believe I had the worst of it. But I was not thinking of De Coigny—I was thinking of little Eloise, of the Countess whose beauty haunted me, and of the Count, that noble-looking gentleman, now in prison.
Eloise had told me that their house in Paris was situated in the Faubourg St. Germain, and, as we turned out of the Rue de Lille, an inspiration came to me. I pulled the check-string, the carriage stopped, and I put my head out of the window.
"Lubin!"
"Well?"
"Drive me to the Faubourg St. Germain."
"Likely, indeed! and lose my place. Ma foi!—Faubourg St. Germain!"
"Lubin! I have a napoleon in my pocket, and I'll give it you if——"
But the carriage drove on.
I sank back on the cushions, but I was not defeated yet. There was a block of traffic in the Rue de Trône. I put my hand out, opened the door on the left side, and the next moment I was standing upon the pavement, and the heavy old carriage was driving on, with the door swinging open.
Then I ran, ran till I was out of breath, and in a broad street full of shops.
A barrel-organ was playing in the sunshine; a herd of she-asses were trotting along, followed by an Auvergnat in sabots, and a cabriolet plying for hire was approaching on the opposite side of the way.
I hailed the driver, and told him to take me to the Faubourg St. Germain.
"Where to in the Faubourg St. Germain?" asked the man.
"I want to go to the Count Feliciani's," I replied.
"The Hôtel Feliciani?"
"Yes"
"Get in." He drove off. He knew the Hôtel Feliciani, did this driver. All Paris was ringing with the disgrace of the man who, from his throne in the kingdom of finance, had fallen to the gutter, involving a thousand others in his ruin. But I knew nothing of this; and from the man's unconcerned manner I began to hope that De Coigny had told me a lie.
The cabriolet drove in through the gates of a huge hôtel in the Faubourg St. Germain. The courtyard was crowded with people—and such people! Jews, porters, female furniture dealers with heavy earrings, silken skirts, and ungloved, unwashed hands—all the sharks that ruin attracts; and in the portico, on the steps, on the very gravel of the drive, furniture, crystal chandeliers, tables, mirrors, lying like the débris left by the wave of misfortune.
It was as if one were looking at a lee shore the morning after the wreck of some palatial ship: cabin-furniture, stores, the sailor's sea-chest and the passengers' baggage, tossed up on the sands in horrible incongruity, and speaking louder than a thousand trumpets of the fury of the storm.
There was a sale in progress at the Hôtel Feliciani. I knew nothing of sales, I knew nothing of finance, speculation, or commercial ruin, but I knew that what I saw was disaster.
Getting out of the cabriolet, and telling the driver to wait for me, I went up the steps and mixed with the throng in the hall. I wanted to find the Felicianis, and some instinct told me they were not here; also, that it was useless to ask any of these people their whereabouts. I looked about me for someone in authority; and, as I looked, a voice from the large salon adjoining the hall came:
"Thirty thousand francs! Thirty thousand francs! Any advance on thirty thousand francs? Gone!" Then followed the blow of a little hammer.
They were selling the pictures. I turned to thedoorway of the great salon and squeezed my way in. The place was filled with people—all Paris was there. Men who had shaken the Count Feliciani by the hand, women who had kissed the Countess on the cheek, men and women of the highest nobility, of the greatest intelligence—très propre, to use the words of the old fool in De Morny's ante-chamber—were here, battening on the sight, and trying to snatch bargains from the ruin of their one-time friends. The Felicianis, as I afterwards learned, all but beggared, had been cast adrift, mother and daughter, by society; cast out like lepers from the pure precincts of the Court circle and the buckramed salons of the Royalist clique.
M. Hamard, the auctioneer, on his estrade, before his desk, a man in steel spectacles, the living image of the late unlamented Procurator of the Holy Synod, was clearing his throat before offering the next lot, a Gerard Dow, eighteen inches by twelve.
As the bidding leaped up by a thousand francs at a time, I edged my way through the throng closer and closer to the auctioneer, treading on dainty toes, wedging myself in between whispering acquaintances, regardless of grumbles and muttered imprecations, till I was right beside the estrade and within plucking distance of the auctioneer's coat.
"Sixty-five thousand francs!" cried M. Hamard. "This priceless Gerard Dow—sixty-five thousand francs. Any advance on sixty-five thousand francs? Gone! Well, what is it, little boy?"
"Please," said I, "can you tell me where I can find the Countess Feliciani?"
A dead silence took the room, for my nervousness had made me speak louder than I intended. People looked at one another; an awkward silence it must have been following the voice of the enfant terrible flinging the name of the woman they had cast out and deserted into the face of these worldlings who had come to examine her effects and snatch bargains from her ruin.
M. Hamard, aghast, stared down at me through his spectacles.
"You—— Who are you?" said he.
"I am her friend. My name is Patrick Mahon. My father is General Count Mahon, and I wish to see the Countess Feliciani."
M. Hamard seized a pen from the desk, scribbled some words on a piece of paper, and handed it to me.
"Go," he said. "That is the address. You are interrupting the sale."
Then, with the paper in my hand, I came back through the crush without difficulty, for the crowd made a lane for me down which I walked, paper in hand, a child of nine, the last and only friend of the once great and powerful Felicianis.
I read the address on the piece of paper to the driver of the cabriolet.
"Ma foi!" said he, "but that is a long way from here."
"Drive me there," said I.
"Yes; that is all very well, but how about my fare?"
I showed him my napoleon, got into the vehicle, and we drove off.
It was indeed a long way from there. We retook the route by which we had come, we drove through the broad streets, through the great boulevards, and then we plunged into a quarter of the city where the streets were shrunken and mean, where the people were in keeping with the streets, and the light of the bright September day seemed dull as the light of December.
At the Hôtel de Mayence in the Rue Ancelot we drew up. It was a respectable, third-rate hotel. A black cat was crouched in the doorway, watching the street with imperturbable yellow eyes, and a waiter with a stained serviette in his hand made his appearance at the sound of the vehicle drawing up.
Yes; Madame Feliciani was in: he would go up and see whether she could receive visitors. I waited, trying to make friends with the sphinx-like cat; then I was shown upstairs, and into a shabby sitting-room overlooking the street.
By the window, stitching at a child's small garment, sat an old lady with snow-white hair. It was the Countess Feliciani.
It was as if I had seen by some horrible enchantment a woman of thirty-five, happy and beautiful, surrounded by the wealth and luxury of life, suddenly withered, touched by the wand of some malevolent fairy and transformed into a woman old and poor.
It was my first lesson in the realities of life, this fairy tale, which, for hidden terror, put Vogel's story of the old woman who made the whistles completely in the shade.
Next moment I was at her knee, blubbering, withmy nose rubbing the bombazine of her black skirt—for she was in mourning—and next moment little Eloise was in her room, looking just the same as ever, and I was being comforted as if all the misfortune were mine; and Madame Feliciani, for so she chose to be styled, was smiling for the first time, I am sure, since the disaster. A late déjeûner was brought in, and I was given a place at the table. It is all misty and strange in my mind. A few things of absolute unimportance stand out—the coat of the waiter, shiny at the elbows; the hotel dog that came in for scraps; the knives and forks, worn and second-rate—but of what we said to each other I remember nothing.
"And you will come and see us?" said I as I took my departure.
"Some day," replied the Countess, with a smile, the significance of which I now understand, as I understand the horrible mockery of my innocent invitation.
Eloise ran down to see me off; and the last I saw of her was a small figure standing at the door of the hotel, and holding in its arms the black cat with the imperturbable yellow eyes.
When we arrived at the Champs Elysées I was so frightened with my doings that I gave the driver the whole napoleon without waiting for change, and then I went to meet my doom like a man, and confessed the whole business to my father.
The sentence was expulsion from Paris to the pavilion in the grounds of the Château de Saluce, whither, accordingly, I was transported next day with Joubert for a gaoler.
Since my mother's death, my father had not lived in the château. He was too grand to let it, so it was placed in the hands of a caretaker. It was a gloomy house, dating from 1572, but the pavilion was the pleasantest place in the world. It was situated in the woods of the château, woods adjoining the forest of Sénart. It had six rooms, and was surrounded by a deep moat. A drawbridge gave access to it; and by touching a lever the drawbridge would rise; and you were as completely isolated from the world as though you were surrounded by a wall of iron.
The water in the moat, fed by some unknown source, was very dark and still and deep, reflecting with photographic perfection the treetops of the wood and the fern-fronds of the bank. The water never varied in height, and, a strange thing, was rarely, even in the severest weather, covered with ice. It had a gloomy and secret look.
"Joubert," I remember saying once, as I looked over the rail of the drawbridge at the reflections on the oily surface below, "has it ever drowned a man?"
"Which?" asked Joubert.
"The water."
That was the feeling with which it inspired me, andI never lingered on the bridge when I was alone. And I was often alone now, for Joubert, having extracted my parole d'honneur to be of good behaviour and not get into mischief or bolt back to Paris, spent most of his time at the château, where the caretaker had a pretty daughter, or at the cabaret at Etiolles, Lisette, the old woman who did our cooking and made our beds, being deputed deputy-gaoler.
The weather had the feeling of early spring, though in the forest, half stricken by autumn, the leaves were falling—falling to every touch of the wind. Where the forest of Sénart began, and the woods of the château ended, the frontier was marked by a thin line of wire easy for a child to slip under. Then one felt free, free as the cock pheasant whose corkscrew-sounding voice echoed from the liquid twilight of the drives, free as the wind in the tree tops. The great pine forest of Lichtenberg had a voice. You would hear the wind rising and passing over its leagues of perfumed branches, and dying away, and rising and dying away—ever the same voice filling and deserting the same vast silence. But here, in the forest of Sénart, the tongue of the beech spoke a different language to that of the fir and the larch. There were open spaces, swathes of sunshine, forest pools like lost sapphires, where the bulrushes painted their forms on the water-surface, blue with the reflection of the autumn sky.
These woods, whose echoes had once answered to the hunting-horn of Le Roi Soleil, were haunted, but not by the ghost of Pan. Rousseau had once botanised in them, and M. de Jussien, in his coat of ribbed Indiansatin, his lilac silk vest, and white silk stockings of extraordinary fineness, had here filled his herbal with the vicris hieracioides and the cerastium aquaticum so dear to his herboristic heart. Pompadour had wandered where the rabbits played now; and the glades, shot through with sunlight and draped in the muslin of the morning mist, were the backgrounds beloved of Fragonnard for his wreaths of flying drapery, his fêtes champêtres, and his sylvan scenes.
The forest keepers all wore a state uniform. Fanchard, the one who lived nearest to us, an old soldier and a crony of Joubert's, would take me with him whilst he set his traps; and there were gypsies that haunted the clearings, real children of Egypt these, lineal descendants of Hennequin Dandèche and Clopin Trouillefou.
On the evening of our sixth day at the pavilion, a visitor arrived. It was my father. He had left his carriage in the road at the gates of the château, and had come to the pavilion on foot.
I was at supper when he arrived. He ordered another plate, and a bottle of wine; he was gay, excited, his eyes were brilliant, and he seemed quite to have forgotten my escapades in Paris, for he never referred to them. He had only come for an hour, to see how I was getting on, so he said; but he stayed three, for after supper he called Joubert, and they both went out into the night.
These two old soldiers must have had something very important to say to one another, for they were gone an hour or more. When they returned, myfather beckoned me to him and kissed me, and bade me good-night; then, as if something had suddenly occurred to him, he said to Joubert: "Patrick can come down to the road and see me off. Come, both of you, and bring a lantern."
Joubert lit a lantern. The night was black as black velvet, and the lantern only showed Joubert's legging-clad legs as he marched before us down the gravel of the drive.
The carriage was standing in the road. My father kissed me, got in, and drove away.
Just as the vehicle moved off, he looked out of the window, and the light of the lantern which Joubert was holding up struck his face. What a reckless, daring, jolly face it was, that face I was destined never to see again!
"What did father want to say to you, Joubert?" I asked as we returned to the pavilion.
"What did he want to say?" cried Joubert, whose temper seemed sharper than usual. "Why, that the price of cabbages has gone up. What else would he have to say to me at this hour of the night? Mordieu! If I could be there!"
"Where, Joubert?"
But Joubert did not reply.
Next morning the fine weather still held, and I was up at dawn. It was no trouble to get up early when one lived in the pavilion. The birds wakened one; and, then, the forest!
In the very early morning, the forest, like the sea, is full of tender lights. Shadows and trees are equallyunsubstantial, the rides are wreathed in vague mists, the last star has not quite faded from the sky, and the voice of the thrush comes from the glens as in the story of Vitigab, crying: "Deep—down deep—there somewhere in the darkness I see a ray of light." The hollow tapping of the woodpecker comes from the beech glades, whilst the rabbits shake the dew from their fur, and the rustle of the stoat comes from the ferns; a nut falls, and, looking up, you see against the sky, where the treetops are waving in the palest sapphire air, the squirrel, the sweetest of all wood things.
You observe one another and he is gone, and the wind draws up from leagues away like the rustling of a silken skirt, till, suddenly, the whole forest draws breath. You can hear it waking from its slumber just as at dusk you can hear it falling to sleep; for the forest is a living thing, a thing that breathes and speaks and has its dreams.
I was out early this morning, for I was going to breakfast with Fauchard. I passed the glades where the rabbits were sporting, chasing each other in circles smoothly and for all the world like toy rabbits on wheels and driven by clockwork. I passed the pools where the bulrushes stood up out of the mist, and nothing spoke of water save the splash of the frog, or the ripple of the water-rat swimming.
Fauchard was waiting for me. We had breakfast—a simple enough repast, consisting of coffee, biscuits, and cheese—and then we started off to visit the traps and see what they had caught.
When Fauchard had collected his harvest of stoats and moles, killed two snakes, and shot a marauding cat, it was late morning; the sun was well over the treetops, and it was time for me to return home.
"Take that path," said the ranger. "Turn neither to the right nor left, and it will lead you straight as an omnibus to the pavilion."
I bade him good morning, and, taking the path indicated, I set off. It was not a drive; in fact, it was so narrow in parts that the hawthorn bushes growing in this part of the wood nearly met; the fern in places nearly blocked the way. It was warm, and very silent.
When I paused now and then to listen, I could hear nothing except the buzzing of wasps and flies. The ground in places was boggy, the path, it seemed to me, had not been used for years. Stories of murderers and goblins occurred to my mind and made me press on all the faster.
I had turned past a clump of alders when before me I caught a glimpse of someone going in the same direction as myself—a boy of my own age, to judge from his height, but I could not see what he was dressed in, or whether he was a gypsy or a woodranger's child, for he was always just ahead of my sight at the turnings, glimpsed for a moment and then gone. I halloed to him to stop, for his company would have been very acceptable in that lonely place, but he made no reply. I ran, and pausing out of breath, I heard his footsteps running, too; then they ceased, as though he were waiting for me. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, and I laughed.
I walked softly and as quickly as I could, hoping to surprise him. Then, at the next turning, I saw him. He was amidst the bushes on the right; his head just peeped over the tops of them, and—he was a child of about my own age, and extraordinarily like little Carl.
Filled with astonishment, not thinking what I did, I ran through the bushes towards him, calling his name.
Then I remember nothing more.
I had fallen into a disused gravel-pit, treacherously hidden by the bushes, so they told me afterwards. When I recovered from my stunned condition, my cries for help had attracted the attention of Fauchard's eldest son, who, fortunately, had been passing. I do not remember calling for help; I remember nothing distinctly till I found myself on my bed, and old Dr. Perichaud of Etiolles bending over me. Then I became keenly alive to my position, for my right thigh was broken in two places, and the doctor was setting it. When the thing was over, the doctor retired with Joubert to the next room, and there they talked. When will people learn that the sick have ears to hear with, and a sense of hearing doubly acute?
This conversation came to my ears. The speakers spoke in a muted voice, it is true, but this only made the matter worse.
"You have sent for the General, you say?"
"Oui, monsieur. A man on horseback has started to fetch him. He will be here in an hour, unless——"
"Unless?"
"Monsieur does not know. The General has an affair of honour on hand. This morning, in the Bois de Boulogne, he was to meet Baron Imhoff."
"Aha!" said Perichaud, with appreciation. He was an old army surgeon, who had tasted smoke, and seen men carved with other things than scalpels. He was also a gossip, as most old army men are. "Aha! And what was the cause of the affair? Do you know?"
"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Joubert, "it was all that cursed business at the Schloss Lichtenberg, of which everyone is speaking. Baron Imhoff was cousin"—mark the "was"—"of the Baron von Lichtenberg, Baron Imhoff picked a quarrel at the Grand Club yesterday with the General. That's all. It is a bad affair."
"And the Lichtenberg affair—the cause of all this?" said Perichaud.
"Ah, that beats the Moscow campaign," said Joubert, "for blackness and treachery. Mark you: this is between ourselves. You will never breathe a word of it to anyone?"
"No, no; not a word!"
"Well, the Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was mad."
"Mad?"
"Mad. What else can you call a man who brings his little daughter up as a boy?"
"A boy?"
"It is true. He fancied she was some old dead-and-gone Lichtenberg returned, and that she was doomed to be killed by the child in there with the broken leg, whom he thought was some old dead-and-gone Saluce returned. Then— Listen to me; and I trust monsieur's honour never to let these words go further. He, or at least one of his damned jägers, tried to smother thechild. The night before, they tried to stab him—as he lay asleep in bed—with my couteau de chasse, and would have done it only the Blessed Virgin interposed."
"Great Heaven!" said the old doctor.
"Oh, yes," said Joubert; "that's the story. I saw it all with my own eyes, or I wouldn't believe my own tongue with my own ears. And now monsieur, what do you think of him?"
"Of him?" said Perichaud.
"Of the child. Is there danger?"
"Not a bit; but he'll be lame for life."
"Lame for life!"
"The femur is broken in two places, and splintered. The right leg will be two inches shorter than the left. All the surgeons in Paris could not do him any good."
"Then he will be useless for the army!" said Joubert. And I could hear the catching of his breath.
"He will never see service," replied Perichaud.
A loud smash of crockery came as a reply to the doctor's pronouncement. It was Joubert kicking a great Japanese jar on to the floor.
As for me, I had heard the death-sentence of my hopes. I would never wear a sword or lead a company into action. I would be a thing with a lame leg—a cripple. Fortunately, an opiate which the doctor had given me began to take effect. It did not make me sleepy, but it dulled my thoughts—some of them; others it made more bright. I lay listening to the doctor departing, and watching the red sunsetwhich was dyeing Etiolles, and the woods, and the walls of my bedroom.
Then Joubert's words came into my head about Lichtenberg, and the duel the General had fought that morning with Baron Imhoff. I did not feel in the least uneasy about my father, and I was picturing the duel in the woods of Lichtenberg, when a sound through the open window came to my ears.
It was a carriage rapidly driving up the distant avenue to the château.
It was my father, I felt sure. A long time passed, and then I heard steps on the drawbridge; voices sounded from below. Then came a step on the stairs; my door opened, and a gentleman stood framed in the doorway.
I shall never forget my first sight of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan, my father's cousin on the Saluces' side, and my future guardian.
I had never seen him before. He was not, indeed, a sight to come often in a child's way, this flower of the boulevards, seventy if a day, scented, exquisite, with a large impassive, evenly coloured red face, the face of a Roman consul, in which were set the blue eyes of a good-tempered child.
This great gentleman, who left the pavements of Paris only once a year for a three weeks' visit to his estates in Auvergne, had travelled express from Paris to tell a child that its father was lying dead, shot through the heart by the Baron Imhoff. And this is how he did it: He made a kindly little bow to me, and indicated Joubert to place a chair by the bedside.
"And how are we this evening?" asked he, taking my wrist as a physician might have done to feel my pulse.
I did not know who he was. I had vague suspicions that he was another doctor. Never for a moment did I dream he was the bearer of evil tidings. I said I was better—that old reply of the sick child—and he talked on various subjects: the airiness of the room, the beauty of the woods, and so forth. Then, to Joubert: "Distinctly feverish. Must not be disturbed to-night. Ah, yes, in the morning; that will be different. And no more tumbling into gravel pits," finished this astute old gentleman as he glanced back at me before leaving the room.
Then the opiate closed its lid on me, and I did not even hear the departure of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan, my future guardian, who shuffled out of the unpleasant business of grieving my heart on the same evening that he shuffled into my life, he and his grand, queer, quaint, and sometimes despicable personality, perfumed with vervain and the cigars of the Café de Paris.
The death of my father cast me into an entirely new life. Anyone less fitting than the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan to be the guardian of a child of nine it would be hard to imagine at first sight. But my father was no fool.
This gorgeous old night-moth of the Second Empire, this frequenter of Tortoni's and the Café de Paris—always hard up, with an income of two hundred thousand francs a year—was a man of rigid honour in his way.
Left sole and irresponsible guardian of me and my money, he shuffled out of his difficulties and bothers by placing the latter in the funds and the former in the Bourdaloue College—that same college of the Jesuit fathers where the Comte de Coigny was receiving his education.
Here nine years of my life were spent—nine dull but not unhappy years. Lame and unfit for the army, completely cut off from the only profession fit for a gentleman—to use the Vicomte's expression—I saw the others go off to join the Military College, and I would not have felt it so bitterly had not De Coigny been amongst them. He was my natural enemy. All the time we spent together at the Bourdaloue, wescarcely spoke a word one to the other. Speechless enmity: there can scarcely be a worse condition between boys or men.
Once a month or so the Vicomte came to see me. Joubert came often. He was installed as caretaker in the Château de Saluce, and he would bring me presents of game and plovers' eggs, huge Jaronel pears from the orchard, and cakes baked by Fauchard's wife.
During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied me. But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one knew anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after the fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose histories have for heading "Bankruptcy."
Then I forgot.
Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of ghosts, the limbo of things half remembered.
I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing. I was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament, which takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful and grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things useful. Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the literature of my heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and Esmeralda, that brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.
Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone canteach you to read. And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which statement is a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or, in other words, the twelfth of May, 1869.
I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the Place Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a dragon-fly. I was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to teach me, as the Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to be unearthed from the Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet. Blacquerie, the Viscount's tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had already called and taken the measurements for my new wardrobe. I can tell you I was elated; and no debutante ever looked forward more eagerly to the day of her debut than I to the twelfth of May.
At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the salon by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these men, and I liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little as a rock imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected Père Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice, burnt heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell.
As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose came running out, and, just as wedrove off, popped into my hand a little green-covered book on the seven deadly sins.
"What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves.
I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window.
"All that stuff you have learned," said this worthy man, "is excellent for children; but when we become men we put away childish things, as M. de Voltaire or some other scoundrel of a philosopher, I think it was, once remarked. Mark you, I say nothing against religion. Religion is a most excellent institution; but in the world, my dear Patrique, we are brought face to face with men. Religion is a fixed institution; and the nones, or complines, whatever you call it that they say to-day, were what they said two hundred years ago. But men are very shifty, and, as a matter of fact, damned rogues. It is very easy to be a saint in the College Bourdaloue; but it is very difficult to be a gentleman in the Boulevard des Italiens, especially in this bourgeois age" (he was a Royalist, with one foot in the Tuileries and the other in the Faubourg St. Germain), "when we have a what-do-you-call-it as President of the Council and a thingumbob on the throne of France."
So he went on as he sat, erect as a man of thirty, gazing at the passing streets with those blue tranquil eyes of a child, out of which youth still looked; and turning to me the pro-consular profile of which he was secretly so proud, and which was the thing, I believe, up to which this strange old gentleman lived.
To live up to your profile is not a bad rule of life, if you have a face like that possessed by the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan.
When we drew up at the Place Vendôme, I put my hand to open the door, and received my first lesson in the convenances from the Vicomte, who laid his gloved hand on my arm without a word. The footman opened the door, and the grand old gentleman descended. M. le Vicomte did not get out of a carriage—he descended. And with what a grace! He waited courteously for me on the pavement; and then, with a little wave of his clouded cane, shepherded me into the house.
At the door, Beril, the Vicomte's personal servant, a man older than his master, received us; and Joubert was in the hall with my luggage.
"And now," said the Vicomte, when I had been shown my suite of rooms, and very sumptuous they were, "déjeûner."
We got into the carriage which was waiting, the footman closed the door, and we started for the Café de Paris.
Fourteen people were invited to the repast, besides myself. It took place in the Amber Room overlooking the Boulevard; and six of the guests were ladies. Very great ladies—duchesses, in my simple eyes. Had I known more of breakfast-parties and the world, I might have wondered at the disposition of the guests; for the Duc d'Harmonville, an old gentleman with a white imperial and the exact expression of a billy-goat, sat between two of the duchesses; and the rest of the female illuminati sat, three of them altogether inone cluster, and the sixth at the right of my guardian.
There was Pélisson of the "Moniteur," the only Press man present; Carvalho of the Opéra Comique; the Duc de Cadore; Prince Metternich, with his long Dundreary whiskers now lightly streaked with grey; and, as for the rest, I did not catch their names, and I have all but forgotten their faces.
One thing especially struck me in the male guests. With the exception of Pélisson and Prince Metternich, their manner and their voices recalled something or somebody to my mind, yet what thing or person I could not remember, till Memory suddenly chalked on the vacant space before her:
De Morny.
The languid air, the half-lisp, the attentive inattention of manner, all were here, the very voice.
What a triumph! De Morny had been dead and buried nearly four years, yet his reflection still lingered on the faces of these apes; his voice had been silent since the orations and muffled drums of that dramatic funeral, which outvied in splendour the funeral of Germanicus, and which I had witnessed in company with Père Hyacinthe and the pupils of the Bourdaloue; yet his voice still was heard in the supper-rooms of Paris, discussing the length of ballet-girls' skirts and the scandals of Plon-Plon.
With the fish the conversation became more general, and with the iced champagne—served from jeroboams that took two waiters to lift—decency and the ghost of De Morny rose to take their departure.
It was strange to me, a water-drinker, and therefore an observer of the others, to see these men forgetting themselves, to see languid faces become flushed, to hear soft voices become harsh, tongues become ribald; to watch brutal lines asserting themselves in countenances unveiled by alcohol. And it was surpassingly funny to see the evanescence of the De Morny air.
At the head of the table, a tint more ruddy than usual, sat my guardian, enjoying it all.
We had all, like the lunatic guests at the dinner-party of Dr. Tar and Professor Feather, sat down to table apparently staid and respectable people, and by degrees, just as lunacy set off the Doctor's guests crowing like cocks and braying like asses, the spirit of the Second Empire in its last and rottenest stages invaded the Amber Room of the Café de Paris. Furious discussions, fumes of spilt wines, wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke, the cracked and cruel laughter of women, filled the air.
* * * * *
And in the midst of it all sat my guardian, in his element, enjoying the enjoyment of his guests, paternal, and with those childish blue eyes through which youth looked so frankly, and that voice, so courtly and well modulated, infecting the others with I know not what. I only know that from him seemed to emanate the diablerie of the party. Sober as myself, self-contained and courtly, he seemed like the negative pole of some diabolical battery, of which the others were the positive.
In the midst of the smoke and chatter he rose, andwith a glass of champagne between two fingers, as a lady holds a lily, he proposed my health and my success in the world of Paris; and I rose and said something—foolish, no doubt, but it did not matter, for Amy Féraud, of the Théâtre Montparnasse, whilst she pelted Prince Metternich with bonbons, lost her balance, fell smash on her back, pulling the tablecloth with her, and in the confusion I sat down.
Half an hour later, arm-in-arm with my guardian, I was taking a digestion walk down the Boulevard des Italiens. The old gentleman was pleased, very pleased, for it seems I had conducted myself in a modest and becoming manner, and the few words I had said had been well said; and you might have thought that he was discussing a children's party as he strolled by my side, saluting every person of distinction that he met, and being saluted in return.
I really believe that this man was as innocent at heart as any child, yet he was an old roué, a duellist, a gambler, all that a bad man could be. Yet, though always hard up, he had jealously guarded my patrimony, which he could have plundered if he had chosen with impunity. His charity was boundless if you tapped it; and though he spoke of women in a light way,I never heard him speak a bad word of any man. And he loved animals, stopping to stroke a cat in the Rue de Rivoli, and pausing, as he led me across to the Tuileries, to admire the sparrows taking their dust-baths in the Royal precincts.
"Where are we going?" I asked, with a sudden apprehension.
"It is your eighteenth birthday," replied the Vicomte. And, still with his arm in mine, he led me past the Cent-Gardes, up the steps, and into the hall of the Palace.
One might have thought that the Palace of the Tuileries belonged to the Vicomte de Chatellan, so perfectly at home did he seem. That he was a well-known and respected visitor was evident from the manner of the ushers. I was left in an anteroom, whilst the old gentleman, led by the usher, disappeared for a moment; then he came back, and, motioning me to follow him, he led the way into a room, where, at a desk-table, with a cigarette between his lips and a pen in his hand, sat Napoleon.
He threw the pen down and rose to greet us.
How wrinkled he looked! And how different, seen close and familiarly, from what he appeared in his carriage, amidst a cloud of dust, a glitter of sabres, and surrounded by his guards and gentlemen!
Quite an unfearful person; old, and rather shuffling, easy-going, and putting you at your ease, rather dreamy, and speaking with a slightly nasal voice, rolling an armchair for you to sit in with his own august hands, offering cigarettes with a little shake of the box to loosen them and make your acceptance of one more easy, searching for a matchbox amidst the papers on the desk: a true gentleman, though an unfortunate Emperor.
Though I was eighteen, I was still very much of a child, and that is perhaps why I felt an affection for the old gentleman at almost first sight. Heremembered my father perfectly well; and, with a shade of sadness and wreathed in his cigarette smoke, he fell into a little reverie. We talked—he, my guardian, and I. My lameness was explained and commiserated, and, when our audience was ended and M. Ollivier was announced as waiting, he pushed us out of his cabinet, holding our hands affectionately, patting my shoulder, and all with such a grace and goodness of heart as to make me for ever his admirer and friend.
Ah, that was a good man lost in an Emperor!
"I am due to dine at the Duc de Bassano's," said my guardian as I parted with him outside the Tuileries. "So, if we do not see one another till to-morrow morning, au revoir. You have plenty of money in your pocket, Paris is before you, you are young: amuse yourself."
Then the old gentleman marched off, and left me standing on the pavement.
I could not help recalling my father's words in the room of the Duc de Morny, years ago, when he dismissed me:
"Go and play."
I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the Place Vendôme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian, everything that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of view, I had just shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrée of the very best of society in France, yet I doubt if you could have found a more forlorn creature than myself if you had searched the whole of Paris.
I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the Place Vendôme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked at my new clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely evening, I went outagain, proposing to myself to dine somewhere and see life.
Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the evening star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night, wrapping herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself with lights. I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of the Seine, looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of the city.
Then I walked on.
Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is not by our own volition. This I was soon to prove.
I walked on—walked in the blindness of reverie—and opened my eyes to find myself in a new world.
A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafés thronged to the pavement, the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.
Such a crowd! Men with long hair, gentlemen in pegtop trousers, wearing smoking-caps with tassels, smoking long pipes; men in rags, hawkers yelling their wares, blind men tapping their way with their sticks, deaf men blowing penny whistles, grisettes, gamins, poets, painters, gnomes from the Rue du Truand, goblins from Montmartre, Thénard and Claquesons, Fleur de Marie and Mimi Pinson, Bouchardy and Bruyon; skull-like faces, ghost-like faces, faces like roses, paint, satin, squalor, beauty; and all drifting as if blown by the wind of the summer night, drifting under the stars, here in shadow, here in the blaze of the roaring cafés,drifting, drifting, in a double current from and towards the voiceless and gas-spangled Seine.
Not in the bazaars of Bagdad, or on the Bardo of Tunis, could you see so fantastic a sight as the Boulevard St. Michel in the year 1869.
It fascinated me, and, mixing with the crowd, I drifted half the length of the boulevard, till suddenly I was brought up as if by the blast of a trumpet in my face. By the pavement a man had placed a little carpet, six inches square; on this carpet, lit by the light of a bullseye lantern, two tiny dolls, manipulated by an invisible thread, were wrestling and tumbling, to the edification of a small crowd of interested onlookers. One of these—a man with a violin under his arm, a man with a round, fresh-coloured childish face—I knew at sight. He had not altered in nine years. He was the good angel, the violinist of that troupe of wandering musicians, whose music had held me in the gallery of the Schloss Lichtenberg.
I laughed to myself with pleasure as I watched him watching the dolls, all his simple soul absorbed in the sight, his violin under his arm, and a hand in the pocket of his shabby coat, feeling for a coin to pay for the entertainment.
He did not know me in the least. How could he connect the child in its nightgown, looking down from the gallery of the castle, with the young dandy who was raising his hat to him in the Boulevard St. Michel?
"Excuse me, monsieur," said I, "but I believe I have the pleasure of your acquaintance, though we have never spoken one word to each other."
He smiled dubiously and plucked nervously at a violin-string, evidently ransacking memories of beer-gardens and café-chantants to find my face.
"You will not remember me," I went on, "but I remember you. Over nine years ago, it was, in Germany, in the Schloss Lichtenberg. You remember the Hunting-Song, the horn——"
"Ach Gott!" he cried, slapping himself on the forehead. "The child in the gallery, the one in white——"
"Yes," said I; "that was me. You see, I don't forget my friends."
He was too astounded to say anything for a moment; the wretched difference our clothes made in us confused his simple mind.
Then he wiped his hand with fingers outspread across his broad face. It was just as if he had wiped away his amazement like a veil, exposing the beneficent smile that was his true expression.
"Wunderschön!" said he.
"Wunderschön indeed," replied I, laughing. "But I have much more to tell you. Come, let us walk down the Boulevard together, if you have a moment to spare. You saved my life that night—you and those friends of yours—and I must tell you about it."
I knew this man quite well, though I had never spoken to him before. A really good man is the friend of all the world; you speak to him, and you know him as though you had known him all your life, for the soul and essence of his goodness is simplicity, and instinct tells you he has no dark corners in his soul. Inhis greatness he does not dream of dark corners in yours, and so at a word you become friends.
I told him my story, and then he told me his.
He had belonged to a band of wandering musicians, long since dispersed; and on that eventful day in September, nine years ago, he and the rest of the band had been playing at Homburg. They had done badly; and, after a long day's tramp, making for Friedrichsdorff, they saw before them, just at sunset, the towers of Lichtenberg in the distance.
He, Franzius, pointed them out to the others, and proposed that they should try their luck there, but Marx, the leader of the band, demurred. A coin was tossed, and the answer of Fate was "Go," so they went.
"Ah, yes," said Franzius, as he finished. "And well it was we did so. And the child who was with you in the gallery—the little boy—how is he?"
"What child?" said I.
"He in the gallery standing beside you, dressed as a soldier, with cross-belt like the grenadiers of Pomerania."
A cold hand seemed laid on my heart, for no child had been with me in the gallery on that night; and the description given by Franzius was the description of little Carl.
"Franzius," said I, stopping and facing him, "there was no one in the gallery but myself. Of that I am positive."
There we stood facing each other in the glare of acafé, with the roar of the Boul' Miche around us, each equally astonished.
Then Franzius laughed at the absurdity of the notion that he was wrong.
"With these two eyes I saw him," said he. "And, more: once, when you made a movement as if to go, he plucked you by the sleeve of your little nightshirt—so—"—and he plucked my coat—"as if to hold you back, to keep you there listening to the music."
"He did that?"
"Mais oui."
"Ah, well," I said, with a laugh that was rather forced, "I suppose I was so taken up with the music that I did not see him. Let us walk on."
We walked on. I was perturbed. This, and the occurrence that day when I had seen little Carl in the forest of Sénart, my father's death and all that had gone before, made me feel that there was something working in my life that I but dimly understood.
For the first time, fully, Von Lichtenberg's mad attempt at my destruction rose before me, and demanded an explanation on another basis than that of madness. He had brought up his daughter as a boy, for it had been prophesied that she would be slain as a girl—slain by a Saluce; and I was the last descendant of that family. Then the picture of Margaret von Lichtenberg rose before me, and its likeness to little Carl, and the fact of my own likeness to Philippe de Saluce, who had murdered Margaret so many years ago; and it was just then, walking down the Boulevard St. Michel, amidst the crush and turmoil, jostled by studentsand grisettes, beggars and thieves, that the question came before me: "Can the dead return? Has Margaret von Lichtenberg come back to this sad old world again as little Carl? Am I Philippe de Saluce?" And then like a pang through my heart came the recollection, thefact, that I had recognised the park of Lichtenberg as a thing I had seen once before. I had not recognised the Schloss, but even that fact was an indirect confirmation of my fantastic idea, for the Schloss had been rebuilt in 1703, and the murder of Margaret had occurred many years before that.
All these questions and ideas assailing my mind at once brought terror to my heart for a moment. Only for a moment. "Well?" said I to myself, "suppose this is true, what then? What is the world around me, dull and commonplace and sordid, even under its gold and glitter? I have seen the highest pleasures that life can give men in exchange for gold to-day in the Amber Salon of the Café de Paris. I have seen an Emperor who has attained his ambition, and the futility and weariness of it all in his face. I have lost and left behind the only country where dreams are real and life worth living—childhood. I love the past; and should it come to me and surround me with its romance, should some mysterious fate call it up to me, should the end be tragedy even, then welcome, for one can only die; and what care I about death if I am given one draught from the water of romance in this arid desert of commonplace things which they call the world?"
I walked beside Franzius intoxicated: the woods ofLichtenberg were around me, the winds of some far-distant day were rocking the trees. Romance had touched me with her wand. I heard the Hunting-Song, the horn, the cries of the jägers; and now I was in the gallery of the Schloss, the sound of the violins was in my ears, the music that was holding me from death, the ghostly child was plucking at my sleeve. Ah, God! whoever has tasted the waters of romance like that will never want wine again.
And then the wand was withdrawn, and I was walking in the Boulevard St. Michel with Franzius.
He was holding out his hand timidly, as if to bid me good-bye.
"Oh, but," said I, "we must not part so soon. Can you not come and have some dinner with me? What are you doing?"
He looked at a big clock over a café on the opposite side of the way, and sighed. It pointed to a quarter to nine. He was due at La Closerie de Lilas at ten; he was a member of the band; there was a students' fancy-dress ball that night, and he evidently hated the business, though he said no word of complaint. Poor Franzius! Simple soul, poet and peasant, child of a woodcutter in Hartz, condemned to live by the gift that God had given him, just as one might imagine some child condemned to live by the sale of some lovely toy, the present of an Emperor—what a fate his was, forever surrounded by the flare of gas, the clatter of beer-mugs, and the fœtid life of music-hall and café-chantant!
"Come," I said. And, taking him by the arm, I led him into the nearest café.
You could dine here sumptuously for 1 franc 50, wine included. We found a vacant table; and as we waited for our soup the heart in me was touched at theway the world and the years had treated this friend who was part of the romance of my life; for the pitiless gaslight showed up all—the coat so old and frayed, yet still, somehow, respectable; the face showing lines that ought never to have been there. I hugged myself at the thought of my money, and what I could do for him. But in this I reckoned without Franzius.
He was hungry, and he enjoyed his dinner frankly, and like a child. He had the whole bottle of wine to himself. He had not had such a dinner for a long time, and he said so. Then I gave him the best cigar the café could supply, a black affair that smelt like burning rags, and we wandered out of the café, he, at least in outward appearance, the happiest man in Paris.
"And the Closerie de Lilas?" said I, when we were on the pavement.
"Ah, oui!" sighed Franzius, coming back from the paradise of digestion. "It is true that I should be getting there, and we must say good-bye."
"You said it was a fancy-dress ball?"
"Yes."
"I'd have gone with you only for that."
"But you will do as you are!" cried he, his face lighting up with pleasure at the thought of bringing me along with him. "Ma foi! it is not altogether fancy-dress, for Messieurs les Étudiants have not always the money to spend on dress. People go as they like."
"Very well," I replied. "Allons!" And we started.
When we reached our destination people were arriving fast, and there was a good deal of noise. A Japanese lantern was going in, and a cabinet was being put out by two grave-faced gendarmes. The cabinet was shouting, laughing, and protesting; at least, the head was that was stuck out of the top of it, and belonged presumably to the two legs that appeared below. It was very funny and fantastic, the gravity of the officers of the law contrasting so quaintly with the business they were about. Inside the big saloon all was light and colour and laughter, the band was tuning up, and Franzius rushed to the orchestra, promising to see me before I went.
I leaned against the wall and looked around me.
What a scene! Monkeys, goats, cabbages, pierrots, pierrettes, men in everyday clothes, girls in dominoes—and very little else—and then, boom, boom! the band broke into a waltz, and set the whole fantastic scene whirling. A girl, dressed as a bonbon, danced up to me, nearly kicked me in the face, and danced off again, seizing a carrot by the waist and whirling around with him. Too lame to join in the revelry, I watched, leaning against the wall and feeling horribly alone amidst all this gaiety.
I was standing like this when a fresh eruption of guests burst into the room—two men and three girls, all friends evidently, and linked together arm-in-arm.
It was well I had the wall behind me to lean against, for one of the girls, a lovely blonde, dressed as a shepherdess, was the Countess Feliciani!
The woman I had lost my heart to as a child, thewoman I had seen touched by premature old age in the little sitting-room of the Hôtel de Mayence, the same woman rejuvenated, and turned by some magic wand into a girl of eighteen, laughing and joyous.
I gazed at this prodigy; and the prodigy, who had unlinked herself from her companions, was now whirling before me in the waltz, in the arms of a grenadier with a cock's feather stuck in his hat, and totally unconscious of the commotion she had raised in my breast.
"You aren't dancing?"
"No," I said. "I'm lame."
She looked at me to see if I were serious or not; then she made a grimace, and linked her arm in mine. It was the bonbon girl. The dance was over, and the carrot had vanished to the bar, without, it seems, offering her refreshment. She had beady, black eyes, a low forehead, and rather thick lips.
"That's bad," said she, "to be lame. Let us take a stroll." And she led me towards the bar.
How many times I led that damsel, or rather was led by her towards the bar during the evening, I can't tell. After every dance she came to me and commiserated me on my lameness. She was not in great request, it seems, as a partner, dancing with anybody she could seize upon, and coming to me, as to a drinking fountain, to allay her thirst. I did not care. I scarcely heeded. All my mind was absorbed by the girl, the marvellous girl with the golden hair, who was the Countess Feliciani reborn.
"Do you know her name?" I asked the bonbon on one of our strolls in search of refreshment.
"Whose? Oh, that doll with the yellow hair? Know her name? Why, the whole quarter knows her name. Marie—what's this it is? She's a model at Cardillac's. A brandy for me, with some ice in it. Hurry up! There's the band beginning again."
The ball had now become infected by the element of riot. Scarcely had the music struck up than it ceased. Shrill screams, shouts, and sounds of scuffling came from the saloon, and, leaving the bonbon, who seemed quite unconcerned, to finish her brandy, I ran out and nearly into the arms of two gendarmes, who were making for the centre of the floor, where the carrot and the grenadier with the cock's feather were engaged in mortal combat. A ring of shouting spectators surrounded the combatants, and amidst them stood the shepherdess, weeping.
She had been dancing with the grenadier, it seems, when they had cannoned against the carrot and his partner. Hence the blows. Scarcely had the gendarmes seized upon the combatants than someone struck a chandelier. The crash and the shower of glass were like a signal. Shouts, shrieks, the crowing of cocks, the blowing of horns seized from the orchestra, the smash of glass, the crash of benches overthrown, filled the air.
The lights went out; someone hit me a blow on the head that made me see a thousand stars; and then I was in the street, with someone on my arm, someone I had seized and rescued; and the great white moonof May was lighting us, and the street, and the entry to the Closerie de Lilas, that beer-garden that the police had now seized upon and bottled. We had only just escaped in time. More and more gendarmes were hurrying up; and speechless, like deer who scent the hunters on the tracks, we ran, our shadows running before us, as if leading the way.
"We are safe here," I said, glad to pull up, for my lameness did not lend grace to my running. "We are safe here. Those gendarmes are so busy with the others, they have no time to run after us."
She had been crying when I pulled her out of the turmoil. She was laughing now.
"Oh, mon Dieu!" said she. "That Changarnier! Never will I dance with him again."
"Who is Changarnier?" I asked, looking at the lock of golden hair that had fallen loose on her shoulder, and which the moonlight was silvering, just as sorrow had silvered the hair of the once beautiful Countess Feliciani.
"He is a beast!" replied she. "Is my dress torn?" She held out her dress by a finger and thumb on either side, and rotated before me solemnly in the moonlight, so that I might examine it back and front.
"No," I said; "it is not torn, but you have lost your crook."
"Yes," replied the shepherdess; "but I have found my sheep. Oh, I saw you looking at me. You followed me with your eyes the whole evening. You made Changarnier furious; he said you were an aristocrat. Who are you, M. l'Aristocrat?"
"And you?"
"I am a shepherdess. And you?"
"I am an aristocrat."
She laughed, put her arm in mine, and we walked, the great moon casting our shadows before us.
"If we go this way," said she, "we can get something to eat. This is the Rue Petit Thouars. Are you hungry?"
"Are you?"
"Famished. Have you any money?"
"Lots."
"Good. Ah, yes; I saw you watching me. And, do you know, my friend, I have seen you before, or someone like you—and you look so friendly. Indeed, I would have spoken to you but for Changarnier. He is so jealous! You are lame?"
"Yes, I am lame."
"Then," said she, "I can never have met you before, for I have never known a lame man. But here we are."
She led the way into a small café. The place was crowded enough, but we managed to get a seat. The people at the supper were mostly the remnants of the fancy-dress ball that had escaped from the police.
I ordered everything that the place could supply, and I watched her as she ate.
She was very beautiful; quite the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, with the exception of the Countess Feliciani.
"You are not drinking. Why, you are not eating! What is the matter with you, M. l'Aristocrat?"
"I am in love," replied I.
She laughed.
A Red Indian, who was supping at the next table with a grizzly bear who had taken his head off to eat more conveniently, spoke to her occasionally over his shoulder, giving details of their escape; and I was glad enough when the bill was presented, and we wandered out again into the street.
The supper had put her in the highest spirits. She laughed at our fantastic shadows as we walked arm-in-arm down the silent Rue Petit Thouars. She chatted, not noticing my silence: told me of Cardillac's studio, and the "rapins," and the rules, and the life, and what her dress cost. "Thirty-five francs the material alone, for I made it myself. Do you admire it?"
"Yes."
"Oh, how dull you are! Yes! You ought to have said: 'Mademoiselle, your toilet is charming.' Now, repeat it after me."
"Mademoiselle, your toilet is charming."
"Good heavens! If a hearse could speak, it would speak like that. You are not gay. Never mind; you are all the nicer. Ah!" And she fell into a sentimental and despondent fit, drawing closer to me, so that our shadows made one.
Then, at a door in a side street, down which we had turned, she stopped, and drew a key from her pocket.
"I must see you again," I said. "It is absolutely necessary. When can I see you, and where?"
The door was open now. She drew me close to her,as if to whisper something, but she whispered nothing. Our lips had met in the darkness.
Then I was in the hall; the door was closed, and, following her, I was led up a steep staircase, past a landing, up another staircase to a door. She opened the door, and the moonlight struck us in the face. The great moon was framed in the lattice window, and against its face the fronds of a plant growing on the sill in a flower pot were silhouetted. The bare, poorly furnished room was filled with light, pure as driven snow.
She shut the door, with a little laugh, and I took her in my arms.
"Eloise!" I said.
She pushed me away, and stared at me with the laugh withered on her lips. Never shall I forget her face.
"Have you forgotten Toto?"
"Toto! Who—where——" Recollections were rushing upon her, but she did not yet understand. She seemed straining to catch some distant voice.
"The Castle of Lichtenberg, the pine forests, little Carl. I tried to find you, but you were gone—years ago. I was only a child, and I could not find you. But I have found you now!"
She was clinging to me, sobbing wildly; and I made her sit down on the side of the little bed. Then I sat by her, holding her whilst the sobs seemed to tear her to pieces.
"I knew you," she said at last. "I knew you, but I did not recollect—little Toto! How could I tell?"
Ah, yes, how could she tell? Through themiserable veils that lay between her and that happy time, the past seemed vague to her as a dream of earliest childhood.
Then, bit by bit, with her head on my shoulder, the miserable tale unfolded itself. The Countess Feliciani had died when Eloise was fifteen. They were in the greatest poverty, living in the Rue St. Lazare. It was the old, old, wicked, weary story that makes us doubt at times the existence of a God.