From drawings by Lucius Rossi.
A hundred years ago Le Sage wrote these words at the head ofGil Blas:
"As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."
"As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."
Without attempting to draw any comparison between Le Sage's novel and my own, I may say that I should have liked to place a declaration of the same nature on the first page ofThe Nabob, at the time of its publication. Several reasons prevented my doing so. In the first place, the fear that such an advertisement might seem too much like a bait thrown out to the public, an attempt to compel its attention. Secondly, I was far from suspecting that a book written with a purely literary purpose could acquire at a bound such anecdotal importance, and bring down upon me such a buzzing swarm of complaints. Indeed, such a thing was never seen before. Not a line of my work, not one of its heroes, not even a character of secondary importance, but has become a pretext for allusions and protestations. To no purpose does the author deny the imputation, swear by all the gods that there is no key to his novel—every one forges at least one, with whose assistance he claims to open that combination lock. It must be that all these types have lived, bless my soul! that they live to-day, exactly identical from head to foot. Monpavon is So-and-So, is he not? Jenkins' resemblance is striking. One man is angry because he is in it, another one because he is not in it; and, beginning with this eagerness for scandal, there is nothing, not even chance similarities of name, fatal in the modern novel, descriptions of streets, numbers of houses selected at random, that has not served to give identity to beings built of a thousand pieces and, moreover, absolutely imaginary.
The author is too modest to take all this outcry to himself. He knows how great a part the friendly or treacherous indiscretions of the newspapers have had therein; and without thanking the former more than is seemly, without too great ill-will to the latter, he resigns himself to the stormy prospect as something inevitable, and simply deems himself in duty bound to affirm that he has never, in twenty years of upright, literary toil, resorted to that element of success, neither on this occasion nor on any other. As he turned the leaves of his memory, which it is every novelist's right and duty to do, he recalled a strange episode that occurred in cosmopolitan Paris some fifteen years ago. The romance of a dazzling career that shot swiftly across the Parisian sky like a meteor evidently served as the frame-work ofThe Nabob, a picture of manners and morals at the close of the Second Empire. But around that central situation and certain well-known incidents, which it was every one's right to study and revive, what a world of fancy, what inventions, what elaboration, and, above all, what an outlay of that incessant, universal, almost unconscious observation, without which there could be no imaginative writers. Furthermore, to obtain an idea of the "crystallizing" labor involved in transporting the simplest circumstances from reality to fiction, from life to romance, one need only open theMoniteur Officielof February, 1864, and compare a certain session of the Corps Législatif with the picture that I give of it in my book. Who could have supposed that, after the lapse of so many years, this Paris, famous for its short memory, would recognize the original model in the idealized picture the novelist has drawn of him, and that voices would be raised to charge with ingratitude one who most assuredly was not his hero's "assiduous guest," but simply, in their infrequent meetings, an inquisitive acquaintance on whose mind the truth is quickly photographed, and who can never efface from his memory the images that are once imprinted thereon?
I knew the "real Nabob" in 1864. I occupied at that time a semi-official position which forced me to exhibit great reserve in my visits to that luxurious and hospitable Levantine. Later I was intimately associated with one of his brothers; but at that time the poor Nabob was far away, struggling through thickets of cruel brambles, and he was seen at Paris only occasionally. Moreover, it is very unpleasant for a courteous man to reckon thus with the dead, and to say: "You are mistaken. Although he was an agreeable host, I was not often seen at his table." Let it suffice therefore, for me to declare that, in speaking of Mère Françoise's son as I have done, it has been my purpose to represent him in a favorable light, and that the charge of ingratitude seems to me an absurdity from every standpoint. That this is true is proved by the fact that many people consider the portrait too flattering, more interesting than nature. To such people my reply is very simple: "Jansoulet strikes me as an excellent fellow; but at all events, if I am wrong, you can blame the newspapers for telling you his real name. I gave you my novel as a novel, good or bad, without any guaranty of resemblances."
As to Mora, that is another matter. Something has been said of indiscretion, of political defection. Great Heaven! I have never made a secret of it. At the age of twenty, I was connected with the office of the high functionary who has served as my model; and my friends of those days know what a serious political personage I made. The Department also must have strange recollections of that eccentric clerk with the Merovingian beard, who was always the last to arrive and the first to depart, and who never went up to the duke's private office except to ask leave of absence; of a naturally independent character, too, with hands unstained by anything like sycophancy, and so little reconciled to the Empire that, on the day when the duke proposed to him to enter his service, the future attaché deemed it his duty to declare with touching juvenile solemnity that "he was a Legitimist."
"So is the Empress," was His Excellency's reply, and he smiled with calm and impertinent condescension. I always saw him with that smile on his face, nor had I any need to look through keyholes; and I have drawn him so, as he loved to appear, in his Richelieu-Brummel attitude. History will attend to the statesman. I have exhibited him, introducing him at long range in my fictitious drama, as the worldly creature that he was and wished to be, being well assured that in his lifetime it would not have offended him to be so presented.
This is what I had to say. And now, having made these declarations in all frankness, let us return to work with all speed. My preface will seem a little short, and the curious reader will seek in vain therein the anticipated piquancy. So much the worse for him. Brief as this page may be, it is three times too long for me. Prefaces have this disadvantage, that they prevent one from writing books.
Alphonse Daudet.
I.
DOCTOR JENKINS' PATIENTS.
Standing on the stoop of his little house on Rue de Lisbonne, freshly shaved, with sparkling eye, lips slightly parted, long hair tinged with gray falling over a broad coat-collar, square-shouldered, robust, and sound as an oak, the illustrious Irish doctor, Robert Jenkins, chevalier of the Medjidie and of the distinguished order of Charles III. of Spain, member of several learned and benevolent societies, founder and president of the Work of Bethlehem,—in a word, Jenkins, the Jenkins of the Jenkins Arsenical Pills, that is to say, the fashionable physician of the year 1864, and the busiest man in Paris, was on the point of entering his carriage, one morning toward the end of November, when a window on the first floor looking on the inner courtyard was thrown open, and a woman's voice timidly inquired:
"Shall you return to breakfast, Robert?"
Oh! what a bright, affectionate smile it was that suddenly illumined that handsome, apostle-like face, and how readily one could divine, in the loving good-morning that his eyes sent up to the warm white peignoir visible behind the parted hangings, one of those tranquil, undoubting conjugal passions, which custom binds with its most flexible and strongest bonds.
"No, Madame Jenkins"—he loved to give her thus publicly her title of legitimate wife, as if he felt a secret satisfaction therein, a sort of salve to his conscience with respect to the woman who made life so attractive to him—"No, do not expect me this morning. I am to breakfast on Place Vendôme."
"Ah! yes, the Nabob," said the lovely Madame Jenkins, with a very marked inflection of respect for that personage out of theThousand and One Nights, of whom all Paris had been talking for a month; then, after a moment's hesitation, she whispered between the heavy hangings, very softly, very lovingly, for the doctor's ear alone: "Be sure and not forget what you promised me."
It was probably a promise very difficult to keep, for, at the reminder, the apostle's brows contracted, his smile froze upon his lips, his whole face assumed an incredibly harsh expression; but it was a matter of a moment. The faces of these fashionable physicians become very expert in lying, by the bedsides of their wealthy patients. With his most affectionate, most cordial manner, and showing a row of dazzling teeth, he replied:
"What I promised shall be done, Madame Jenkins. Now, go in at once and close your window. The mist is cold this morning."
Yes, the mist was cold, but white as snow; and, hovering outside the windows of the comfortable coupé, it lighted up with soft reflections the newspaper in the doctor's hands. Over yonder in the dark, crowded, populous quarters, in the Paris of tradesmen and workmen, they know nothing of the pretty morning mist that loiters on the broad avenues; the bustle of the waking hours, the passing and repassing of market-gardeners' wagons, omnibuses, drays loaded with old iron, soon chop it and rend it and scatter it. Each passer-by carries away a little of it on a threadbare coat, a worn muffler, or coarse gloves rubbing against each other. It drenches the shivering blouses, the waterproofs thrown over working dresses; it blends with all the breaths, hot with insomnia or alcohol, buries itself in the depths of empty stomachs, penetrates the shops which are just opening their doors, dark courtyards, staircases, where it stands on the balusters and walls, and fireless garrets. That is why so little of it remains out-of-doors. But in that open, stately portion of Paris where Dr. Jenkins' patients lived, on those broad tree-lined boulevards, those deserted quays, the mist soared immaculate, in innumerable waves, as light and fleecy as down. It was compact, discreet, almost luxurious, because the sun, slothful in his rising, was beginning to diffuse soft, purplish tints, which gave to the mist that enveloped everything, even the roofs of the rows of mansions, the aspect of a sheet of white muslin spread over scarlet cloth. One would have said that it was a great curtain sheltering the long, untroubled sleep of wealth, a thick curtain behind which nothing could be heard save the soft closing of a porte-cochère, the rattling of the milkmen's tin cans, the bells of a herd of asses trotting by, followed by the short, panting breath of their conductor, and the rumbling of Jenkins' coupé beginning its daily round.
First of all, to the hôtel de Mora. On the Quai d'Orléans, beside the Spanish embassy, stood a superb palace with its principal entrance on Rue de Lille, and a door on the riverside, and long terraces which formed a continuation of those of the embassy. Between two high, ivy-covered walls, connected by imposing stone arches, the coupé flew like an arrow, announced by two strokes of a clanging bell, which aroused Jenkins from the trance in which the perusal of his newspaper seemed to have plunged him. Then the wheels rolled less noisily over the gravel of a vast courtyard and stopped, after a graceful sweep, at the front steps, above which was spread a circular awning. One could see indistinctly through the mist half a score of carriages in a line, and the silhouettes of English grooms leading the duke's saddle-horse up and down an avenue of acacias, all leafless at that season and standing naked in their bark. Everything revealed well-ordered, pompous, assured luxury.
"It makes no difference how early I come, others are always here before me," said Jenkins, glancing at the line in which his coupé took its place; but, certain of not being compelled to wait, with head erect and a tranquil air of authority, he went up the official steps, over which so many trembling ambitions, so many stumbling anxieties passed every day.
Even in the reception-room, high-studded, and resonant as a church, which two huge fires filled with gleaming life, notwithstanding the great stoves burning day and night, the magnificence of the establishment burst upon one in warm and heady puffs. There was a suggestion of the hot-house and the drying-room as well. Great heat and abundant light; white wainscoting, white marble statues, immense windows, nothing confined or close, and yet an equable atmosphere well fitted to encompass the existence of some delicate, over-refined, nervous mortal. Jenkins expanded in that factitious sunlight of wealth; he saluted with a "good-morning, boys," the powdered Swiss with the broad gilt baldric and the footmen in short clothes and blue and gold livery, all of whom had risen in his honor, touched lightly with his finger the great cage of monkeys capering about with shrill cries, and darted whistling up the white marble stairs covered with a carpet soft and dense as a lawn, to the duke's apartments. Although he had been coming to the hôtel de Mora for six months, the good doctor had not yet become hardened to the purely physical impression of cheerfulness and lightness of heart caused by the atmosphere of that house.
Although it was the abode of the highest functionary of the Empire, there was nothing to suggest the departments or their boxes of dusty documents. The duke had consented to accept the exalted post of Minister of State and President of the Council only on condition that he need not leave his house; that he should go to the department only an hour or two a day, long enough to affix his signatures to documents that required it, and that he should hold his audiences in his bedroom. At that moment, although it was so early, the salon was full. There were serious, anxious faces, provincial prefects with shaven lips and administrative whiskers, something less arrogant in that reception-room than in their prefectures; magistrates, stern of manner, dignified of gesture; deputies full of importance, shining lights of finance, substantial manufacturers from the country; and among them could be distinguished, here and there, the thin ambitious face of a deputy councillor to some prefecture, in the garb of a solicitor, black coat and white cravat; and one and all, standing or seated, alone or in groups, silently forced with a glance the lock of that lofty door, closed upon their destinies, from which they would come forth in a moment, triumphant or crestfallen. Jenkins walked rapidly through the crowd, and every one followed with an envious eye this new arrival, whom the usher, in his chain of office, frigid and correct in his bearing, seated at a table beside the door, greeted with a smile that was both respectful and familiar.
"Who is with him?" the doctor inquired, pointing to the duke's room.
With the end of his lips, and not without a slightly ironical twinkle of the eye, the usher murmured a name, which, if they had heard it, would have angered all those exalted personages who had been waiting an hour for thecostumierof the opera to finish his audience.
A murmur of voices, a flash of light—Jenkins had entered the duke's presence;henever waited.
Standing with his back to the fire, dressed in a blue fur-trimmed jacket, which heightened by its soft reflection the strength and haughtiness of his face, the President of the Council was superintending the drawing of a Pierrette's costume for the duchess to wear at her next ball, and giving directions with as much gravity as if he were dictating the draft of a law.
"Have very fine pleats on the ruff and none at all on the sleeves.—Good-morning, Jenkins. At your service."
Jenkins bowed and stepped forward into the enormous room, whose windows, opening on a garden that extended to the Seine, commanded one of the loveliest views in all Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the Louvre, interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous shapes, composed the furniture of that famous room, where the most momentous and the most trivial questions were discussed with the same gravity of tone and manner. There was a beautiful portrait of the duchess on the wall; and on the mantel a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which had received the honor of a medal of the first class at the recent Salon.
"Well, Jenkins, how goes it this morning?" said His Excellency, walking to meet the doctor, while the costumer was collecting his fashion plates, which were strewn about over all the chairs.
"And you, my dear duke? I fancied that you were a little pale last night at the Variétés."
"Nonsense! I was never so well. Your pills have a most amazing effect on me. I feel so lively, so vigorous. When I think how completely foundered I was six months ago!"
Jenkins, without speaking, had put his great head against the minister's jacket, at the spot where the heart beats in the majority of mankind. He listened a moment while His Excellency continued to talk in the indolent, listless tone which was one of his chief claims to distinction.
"Whom were you with last night, doctor? That great bronzed Tartar who laughed so loud at the front of your box?"
"That was the Nabob, Monsieur le Duc. The famous Jansoulet, who is so much talked about just now."
"I might have suspected it. The whole audience was looking at him. The actresses played at him all the time. Do you know him? What sort of a man is he?"
"I know him. That is, I am treating him. Thanks, my dear duke, that's all. Everything is all right there. When he arrived in Paris a month ago, the change of climate disturbed him a little. He sent for me, and since then has taken a great fancy to me. All that I know of him is that he has a colossal fortune, made in Tunis, in the Bey's service, that he has a loyal heart, a generous mind in which ideas of humanity—"
"At Tunis?" the duke interposed, being naturally far from sentimental and humanitarian. "Then, why the name of Nabob?"
"Bah! Parisians don't look so deep as that. In their eyes every rich stranger is a nabob, no matter where he comes from. This one, however, has just the physique for the part, coppery complexion, eyes like coals of fire, and in addition a gigantic fortune, of which he makes, I have no hesitation in saying, a most noble and most intelligent use. I owe it to him"—here the doctor assumed an air of modesty—"I owe it to him that I have succeeded at last in inaugurating the Work of Bethlehem for nursing infants, which a morning newspaper that I was looking over just now—theMessager, I think,—calls 'the great philanthropic idea of the century.'"
The duke glanced in an absent-minded way at the sheet the doctor handed him. He was not the man to be taken in by paid puffs.
"This Monsieur Jansoulet must be very wealthy," he said coldly. "He is a partner in Cardailhac's theatre. Monpavon persuades him to pay his debts, Bois-l'Héry stocks his stable for him and old Schwalbach furnishes a picture gallery. All that costs money."
Jenkins began to laugh.
"What can you expect, my dear duke; you are an object of great interest to the poor Nabob. Coming to Paris with a firm purpose to become a Parisian, a man of the world, he has taken you for his model in everything, and I do not conceal from you that he would be very glad to study his model at closer quarters."
"I know, I know, Monpavon has already asked leave to bring him here. But I prefer to wait and see. One must be on one's guard with these great fortunes that come from such a distance.Mon Dieu, I don't say, you know, that if I should meet him elsewhere than in my own house, at the theatre, or in somebody's salon—"
"It happens that Madame Jenkins intends to give a little party next month. If you would do us the honor—"
"I shall be very glad to go to your house, my dear doctor, and if the Nabob should be there, I should not object to his being presented to me."
At that moment the usher opened the door.
"Monsieur le Ministre de l'Intérieur is in the blue salon. He has but a word to say to Your Excellency. Monsieur le Préfet de Police is still waiting below, in the gallery."
"Very good," said the duke, "I will go to him. But I should like to make a definite arrangement about this costume first. Let us see, friend What's-your-name, what do we decide about those ruffs?Au revoir, doctor. Nothing to do but keep on with the pearls, is there?"
"Keep on with the pearls," said Jenkins, bowing; and he took his leave, radiant over the two bits of good fortune that fell to his lot at the same time—the honor of entertaining the duke, and the pleasure of gratifying his dear Nabob. The crowd of petitioners through whom he passed in the ante-chamber was even greater than when he entered; new arrivals had joined the patient waiters of the first hour, others were hurrying upstairs, pale-faced and full of business, and in the courtyard carriages continued to arrive, to range themselves gravely and solemnly in a double circle, while the question of ruffed sleeves was discussed upstairs with no less solemnity.
"To the club," said Jenkins to his coachman.
The coupé rolled along the quays, recrossed the bridges, and turned into Place de la Concorde, which already wore a different aspect from that it had worn a short time before. The mist had lifted in the direction of the Garde-Meuble and the Greek temple of the Madeleine, revealing here and there the white spray of a fountain, the arcade of a palace, the top of a statue, the shrubbery of the Tuileries, shivering by the gates. The veil, not raised but rent in spots, discovered patches of blue sky: and, on the avenue leading to the Arc de Triomphe, one could see breaks driving swiftly along, filled with coachmen and jockeys, dragoons of the Empress's corps, body-guards in gorgeous fur-lined coats riding two by two in long lines, with a great clanking of bits and spurs and neighing of fresh horses, all in the light of a still invisible sun, emerging from the vague depths of the mist, plunging into it again in masses, like a swiftly-vanishing vision of the morning splendor of that quarter.
Jenkins alighted at the corner of Rue Royale. From roof to cellar of the great gambling-house servants were bustling about, shaking rugs, airing the salons where the odor of cigar-smoke still lingered, where heaps of fine ashes were blowing about in the fireplaces, while on the green tables, still quivering with the games of the night, the candles were still burning in silver candelabra, the flame ascending straight into the pallid light of day. The uproar and the going and coming ceased on the third floor, where several members of the club had their apartments. Of the number was the Marquis de Monpavon, to whose door Jenkins bent his steps.
"Ah! is it you, doctor? Deuce take it! What time is it, pray? I'm not at home."
"Not even to the doctor?"
"Oh! not to anybody. A question of costume, my dear fellow. Never mind, come in all the same. Toast your feet a moment while François finishes my hair."
Jenkins entered the bedroom, which was as prosaic a place as all furnished apartments are, and approached the fire, where curling-tongs of all dimensions were heating, while from the adjoining laboratory, separated from the bedroom by an Algerian curtain, the Marquis de Monpavon submitted to the manipulations of his valet. Odors of patchouli, cold cream, burned horn and burned hair escaped from the restricted quarters; and from time to time, when François came out to take a fresh pair of tongs, Jenkins caught a glimpse of an enormous dressing-table laden with innumerable little instruments of ivory, steel, and mother-of-pearl, files, scissors, powder-puffs and brushes, phials, cups, cosmetics, labelled, arranged in lines, and amid all that rubbish, petty ironmongery and dolls' playthings, a hand, the hand of an old man, awkward and trembling, dry and long, with nails as carefully kept as a Japanese painter's.
While making up his face, the longest and most complicated of his matutinal occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told him of his aches and pains and of the good effect of the pearls, which were making him younger, he said. And listening to him thus, at a little distance, without seeing him, one would have believed he was the Duc de Mora, he had so faithfully copied his way of speaking. There were the same unfinished sentences, ending in aps—ps—ps—uttered between the teeth. "What's-his-names" and "What-d'ye-call-'ems" at every turn, a sort of lazy, bored, aristocratic stammer, in which one divined profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the duke's circle everybody strove to copy that accent, those disdainful intonations, in which there was an affectation of simplicity.
Jenkins, finding the session a little tedious, rose to go.
"Adieu, I am going. Shall I see you at the Nabob's?"
"Yes, I expect to breakfast there—promised to take What's-his-name, Thingumbob, you know, about our great affair—ps—ps—ps. Weren't for that, I'd stay away—downright menagerie, that house."
The Irishman, despite his kindly feeling, agreed that the society at his friend's house was a little mixed. But what of that! they must not blame him for that. He didn't know any better, poor man.
"Doesn't know and won't learn," said Monpavon sourly. "Instead of consulting men of experience—ps—ps—ps—takes the first sycophant that comes. Did you see the horses Bois-l'Héry bought for him? Downright swindle, those beasts. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. I'll wager Bois-l'Héry got 'em for six thousand."
"Oh! fie, fie—a gentleman!" said Jenkins, with the indignation of a noble soul refusing to believe in evil.
Monpavon went on, as if he did not hear:
"And all because the horses came from Mora's stable!"
"To be sure, the dear Nabob's heart is set on the duke. So that I shall make him very happy when I tell him—"
The doctor stopped, in some embarrassment.
"When you tell him what, Jenkins?"
Jenkins, looking decidedly sheepish, was forced to admit that he had obtained permission from His Excellency to present his friend Jansoulet. He had hardly finished his sentence when a tall spectre with flabby cheeks and multicolored hair and whiskers darted from the dressing-room into the chamber, holding together with both hands at his skinny but very straight neck, a dressing-gown of light silk with violet dots, in which he had enveloped himself like a bonbon in its paper wrapper. The most salient feature in that heroi-comic countenance was a great arched nose shining with cold cream, and a keen, piercing eye, too youthful, too clear for the heavy, wrinkled lid that covered it. All of Jenkins' patients had that same eye.
Verily Monpavon must have been deeply moved to show himself thus shorn of all prestige. In fact it was with white lips and in a changed voice that he now addressed the doctor, without the affected stammer, speaking rapidly and without stopping to breathe:—
"Come, come, my dear fellow, there's no nonsense between us, is there? We have met in front of the same porringer; but I let you have your share and I propose that you shall let me have mine." Jenkins' air of amazement did not check him. "Let it be understood once for all. I promised the Nabob that I'd present him to the duke as I presented you long ago. Don't you interfere in what concerns me and me alone."
Jenkins, with his hand upon his heart, protested his innocence. He had never had any such intention. Of course Monpavon was too close a friend of the duke for any one else to—How could he have imagined such a thing?
"I imagine nothing," said the old nobleman, more subdued, but still very cold. "I simply wanted to have a perfectly frank explanation with you on this subject."
The Irishman held out his broad open palm.
"My dear marquis, explanations are always frank between men of honor."
"Honor is a great word, Jenkins. Let us say men of good-breeding. That is sufficient."
And as that same good-breeding, which he put forward as a supreme guide of conduct, suddenly reminded him of his absurd plight, the marquis offered a finger for his friend's demonstrative grasp and passed hastily behind his curtain, while the other took his leave, in haste to continue his round of visits.
What a magnificent practice this Jenkins had, to be sure! Nothing but princely mansions, halls comfortably heated and filled with flowers on every floor, downy, silk-lined alcoves, wherein disease became quiet and refined, where nothing suggested the brutal hand that tosses upon a bed of misery those who cease to work only to die. To tell the truth, these clients of Dr. Jenkins were not patients at all. They would not have been received at a hospital. As their organs had not even strength enough to feel a shock, it was impossible to find the seat of their trouble, and the physician leaning over them would have listened in vain for the palpitation of suffering in those bodies which were already inhabited by the inertia and silence of death. They were weakened, exhausted, anæmic, consumed by their absurd mode of life, and yet so attached to it that they strove desperately to prolong it. And the Jenkins Pearls became famous just because of the lashing they administered to jaded constitutions.
"Doctor, I implore you, let me go to the ball this evening!" a young woman would say, as she lay, utterly prostrated, in her invalid's chair, her voice hardly more than a breath.
"You shall go, my dear child."
And go she would, and look lovelier than ever before.
"Doctor, at any price, even if it's the death of me, I must be at the council of ministers to-morrow morning."
He would be there and would win new triumphs by his eloquence and ambitious diplomacy. And afterward—oh! afterward, indeed. But no matter! to their last day Jenkins' patients went about, showed themselves, deceived the consuming selfishness of the multitude. They died on their feet, like men and women of the world.
After innumerable turns on the Chaussée d'Antin and Champs-Élysées, after visiting all the millionaires and titled personages in Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the doctor drew up at the corner of Cours-la-Reine and Rue Françoise I., before a house with a swell front which stood at the corner of the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which in no wise resembled those he had visited since the morning. Immediately upon entering, the tapestries that covered the walls, the old stained glass windows intersecting with their lead sashes the soft, many-hued light, a gigantic saint in carved wood facing a Japanese monster with bulging eyes and back covered with highly polished scales, indicated the imaginative and eccentric taste of an artist. The small servant who opened the door held in leash an Arabian greyhound larger than himself.
"Madame Constance is at mass," he said, "and mademoiselle is in the studio, alone. We have been working since six o'clock this morning," the child added, with a terrible yawn, which the dog caught on the wing, and which caused him to open wide his red mouth with its rows of sharp teeth.
Jenkins, whom we have seen enter the private apartments of the Minister of State with such perfect tranquillity, trembled slightly as he raised the portière that hid the open doorway of the studio. It was a magnificent sculptor's workroom, the rounded front being entirely of glass, with columns at either side: a large bay-window flooded with light and at that moment tinged with opal by the mist. More ornate than the majority of these workrooms, to which the daubs of plaster, the modelling tools, the clay scattered about and the splashes of water give something of the appearance of a mason's yard, this one blended a little coquetry with its artistic equipment. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures hanging on the bare wall, and here and there—on oak pedestals—two or three of the works of Sébastien Ruys, whose very last work, not exhibited until after his death, was covered with black gauze.
The mistress of the establishment, Felicia Ruys, daughter of the famous sculptor, and already known to fame herself by two masterpieces, the bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, stood in the centre of the studio, at work modelling a figure. Dressed in a blue cloth riding-habit with long folds, a scarf of China silk twisted around her neck like a boy's cravat, her fine, black hair, gathered carelessly on top of her little Grecian head, Felicia was working with extreme zeal, which added to her beauty by the condensation, so to speak, the concentration of all her features in a scrutinizing and satisfied expression. But it changed abruptly on the doctor's arrival.
"Ah! it's you, is it?" she said brusquely, as if waking from a dream. "Did you ring? I did not hear."
And in the ennui, the weariness that suddenly overspread that lovely face, only the eyes retained their expression and brilliancy, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins Pearls was heightened by a natural fierceness.
Oh! how humble and condescending the doctor's voice became, as he replied:
"Your work absorbs you completely, does it not, my dear Felicia? Is it something new that you're doing? I should say that it is very pretty."
He drew near to the still formless sketch in which a group of two animals could be vaguely distinguished, one of them, a greyhound, flying over the ground at a truly extraordinary pace.
"The idea came to me last night. I began to work by lamplight. My poor Kadour doesn't find it amusing," said the girl, looking with a caressing expression of affection at the greyhound, whose paws the small servant was trying to separate in order to force him into the proper pose.
Jenkins observed with a fatherly air that she did wrong to tire herself so, and added, taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:
"Let us see, I am sure that you are feverish."
At the touch of that hand Felicia had a feeling of something very like repulsion.
"Let me alone—let me alone—your pearls can do nothing for me. When I am not working, I am bored, bored to death, so bored that I could kill myself; my ideas are of the color of that thick, brackish water flowing yonder. To be just at the beginning of life and to be disgusted with it! It's hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, never opening her mouth, but smiling all by herself at her memories of the past. I have not even that, not even any pleasant memories to recall. I have nothing but work—work!"
In Felicia's Studio
In Felicia's Studio
As she spoke, she worked fiercely, sometimes with the tool, sometimes with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge kept on the wooden frame on which the group stood; so that her complaints, her lamentations, inexplicable in a mouth of twenty years which had in repose the purity of a Grecian smile, seemed to be uttered at random, and addressed to no one in particular. And yet Jenkins seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have predestined her to the study of the plastic arts.
Annoyed by that admiring glance, which she felt like a weight, Felicia resumed:
"By the way, do you know that I saw your Nabob? He was pointed out to me at the Opera, Friday."
"Were you at the Opera, Friday?"
"Yes. The duke sent me his box."
Jenkins changed color.
"I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time in twenty years, since her farewell performance, that she had entered the Opera. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her former triumphs sparkled in her eyes. How fortunate one is to have such emotions. A perfect type of his class, that Nabob. You must bring him to see me. It would amuse me to do his head."
"What! why he is frightful! You can't have had a good look at him."
"Indeed I did, on the contrary. He was opposite us. That white Ethiopian visage would be superb in marble. And not commonplace, at all events. Moreover, if he's so ugly as all that, you won't be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora's bust. What a wicked face you had at that time, Jenkins!"
"Not for ten years of life," muttered Jenkins in a threatening voice, "would I go through those hours again. But it amuses you to see people suffer."
"You know very well that nothing amuses me," she said, shrugging her shoulders with supreme impertinence.
Then, without looking at him, without another word, she plunged into one of those periods of intense activity by means of which true artists escape from themselves and all their surroundings.
Jenkins took a few hurried steps, deeply moved, his lip swollen with avowals that dared not come forth, and began two or three sentences that met with no reply; at last, feeling that he was dismissed, he took his hat and walked toward the door.
"It's understood then, is it? I am to bring him here?"
"Who, pray?"
"Why, the Nabob. Only a moment ago you said yourself—"
"Oh! yes," said the strange creature, whose caprices were not of long duration, "bring him if you choose; I don't care particularly about it."
And her musical, listless voice, in which something seemed to have broken, the utter indifference of her whole bearing showed that it was true, that she cared for nothing on earth.
Jenkins went away in sore perplexity, with clouded brow. But as soon as he had passed the door he resumed his smiling, cordial manner, being one of those men who wear a mask on the street. The mist, still visible in the neighborhood of the Seine, was reduced to a few floating shreds, which gave an air of vapory unsubstantiality to the houses on the quay, to the steam-boats of which only the paddle-wheels could be seen, and to the distant horizon, where the dome of the Invalides hovered like a gilded balloon, whose netting shed rays of light. The increasing warmth, the activity in the quarter indicated that noon was not far away and that it would soon be announced by the ringing of all the bells.
Before calling upon the Nabob, however, Jenkins had another call to make. But it seemed to be a great nuisance to him. However, as he had promised! So he said, with sudden decision, as he jumped into the carriage:
"68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, aux Ternes."
Joe, the coachman, was scandalized and made his master repeat the address; even the horse showed some little hesitation, as if the valuable beast and the spotless new livery were disgusted at having to visit a faubourg so far away, outside the restricted but brilliant circle in which their master's patients were grouped together. They arrived, however, without hindrance, at the end of an unfinished provincial street, and at the last of its houses, a five-story building, which the street seemed to have sent out to reconnoitre and ascertain if it could safely continue in that direction, isolated as it was between desolate tracts of land awaiting prospective buildings or filled with the materials of demolished structures, with blocks of stone, old blinds with no rooms to shelter, boards with hanging hinges, a vast boneyard of a whole demolished quarter.
Innumerable signs swayed in the wind over the door, which was adorned with a large case of photographs, white with dust, before which Jenkins paused for a moment. Had the illustrious physician come so far to have his picture taken? One might have thought so from the interest which detained him in front of that case, containing fifteen or twenty photographs representing the same family in different groups and attitudes and with different expressions: an old gentleman with his chin supported by a high white stock, and a leather satchel under his arm, surrounded by a bevy of maidens with their hair arranged in braids or in curls. Sometimes the old gentleman had sat with only two of his daughters; or perhaps one of those pretty, graceful figures appeared alone, her elbow resting on a truncated column, her head bending over a book, in a natural and unstudied pose. But it was always the same motive with variations, and there was no other male figure in the case but the old gentleman in the white cravat, and no other female figures than those of his numerous daughters.
"Studios on the fifth floor," said a sign over the case. Jenkins sighed, measured with his eye the distance from the ground to the little balcony up among the clouds; then he made up his mind to enter. In the hall he passed a white cravat and a majestic leather satchel, evidently the old gentleman of the showcase. Upon being questioned, he replied that M. Maranne did in fact live on the fifth floor. "But," he added with an engaging smile, "the floors are not high." With that encouragement the Irishman started up an entirely new and narrow staircase, with landings no larger than a stair, a single door on each floor and windows which afforded glimpses of a melancholy paved courtyard and other stairways, all empty: one of those horrible modern houses, built by the dozen by contractors without a son, their greatest disadvantage consisting in the thinness of the partitions, which forces all the lodgers to live together as in a Fourierite community. For the moment that disadvantage was not of serious consequence, only the fourth and fifth floors being occupied, as if the tenants had fallen from the sky.
On the fourth, behind a door bearing a copper plate with the words:M. Joyeuse,Expert in Handwriting, the doctor heard the sound of fresh, young laughter and conversation and active footsteps, which accompanied him to the door of the photographic establishment above.
These little industries, perching in out-of-the-way corners, and seeming to have no communication with the outer world, are one of the surprises of Paris. We wonder how people live who take to them for a living. What scrupulous providence, for instance, could send customers to a photographer on a fifth floor among waste lands, at the far end of Rue Ferdinand, or documents for examination to the expert on the floor below. Jenkins, as he made that reflection, smiled a pitying smile, then entered without ceremony as he was invited to do by this inscription: "Walk in without knocking." Alas! the permission was not abused.—A tall youth in spectacles, who was writing at a small table, his legs wrapped in a traveling shawl, rose hurriedly to greet the visitor, whom his short-sightedness prevented him from recognizing.
"Good-morning, André," said the doctor, extending his hand cordially.
"Monsieur Jenkins!"
"I am a good fellow as always, you see. Your conduct to us, your persistence in living apart from your relatives, commended to my dignity the utmost reserve in dealing with you; but your mother wept. And here I am."
As he was speaking, he glanced about the poor little studio, where the bare walls, the scanty furniture the brand-new photographic apparatus, the little fireplaceà la prussienne, also new, which had never seen a fire, were disastrously apparent in the bright light that fell from the glass roof. The drawn features and straggling beard of the young man, whose very light eyes, high, narrow forehead, and long fair hair thrown back in disorder gave him the appearance of a visionary, all were accentuated in the uncompromising light; and so was the dogged will expressed in that limpid glance which met Jenkins' eye coldly, and offered in anticipation an unconquerable opposition to all his arguments, all his protestations.
But the excellent Jenkins pretended not to notice it.
"You know how it is, my dear André. From the day that I married your mother, I have looked upon you as my son. I expected to leave you my office, my practice, to place your foot in a golden stirrup, and I was overjoyed to see you follow a career devoted to the welfare of mankind. Suddenly, without a word of explanation, without a thought for the effect such a rupture might produce in the eyes of the world, you cut loose from us, you dropped your studies and renounced your future prospects, to embark in some degrading mode of life, to adopt an absurd trade, the refuge and the pretext of all those who are shut out from the society to which they belong."
"I am working at this trade for a living. It's a means of earning my bread while I wait."
"Wait for what?—literary renown?"
He glanced contemptuously at the papers scattered over the table.
"But all this does not touch the question; this is what I came here to say to you: an opportunity is offered you, a door thrown wide open to the future. The Work of Bethlehem is founded. The noblest of my humanitarian dreams has taken shape. We have bought a magnificent villa at Nanterre in which to install our first branch. The superintendence, the management of that establishment is what it has occurred to me to offer to you, as to another myself. A princely house to live in, the salary of a major-general, and the satisfaction of rendering a service to the great human family. Say the word and I will take you to see the Nabob, the noble-hearted man who pays the expenses of our undertaking. Do you accept?"
"No," said the author, so abruptly that Jenkins was disconcerted.
"That's it. I expected a refusal when I came here, but I came none the less. I took for my motto, 'Do what is right, without hope.' And I am faithful to my motto. So, it's understood, is it—that you prefer a life dependent on chance, without prospects and without dignity, to the honorable, dignified, useful life that I offer you?"
André made no reply; but his silence spoke for him.
"Beware—you know to what this decision of yours will lead, a final estrangement; but you have always desired it. I need not tell you," continued Jenkins, "that to break with me is to break with your mother also. She and I are one."
The young man turned pale, hesitated a second, then said with an effort:
"If my mother cares to come and see me here, I shall certainly be very happy—but my determination to remain apart from you, to have nothing in common with you, is irrevocable."
"At least, you will tell me why?"
He made a gesture signifying, "no," that he would not tell him.
For the moment the Irishman was really angry. His whole face assumed a savage, cunning expression which would have greatly surprised those who knew only the good-humored, open-hearted Jenkins; but he was careful to go no farther in the direction of an explanation, which he dreaded perhaps no less than he desired it.
"Adieu," he said from the doorway, half turning his head. "Never apply to us."
"Never," replied his stepson in a firm voice.
This time, when the doctor said to Joe: "Place Vendôme," the horse, as if he understood that they were going to call on the Nabob, proudly shook his shining curb, and the coupé drove away at full speed, transforming the hub of each of its wheels into a gleaming sun. "To come such a distance to meet with such a reception! One of the celebrities of the day treated so by that Bohemian! This comes of trying to do good!" Jenkins vented his wrath in a long monologue in that vein; then suddenly exclaimed with a shrug: "Oh! pshaw!" And such traces of care as remained on his brow soon vanished on the pavement of Place Vendôme. On all sides the clocks were striking twelve in the sunshine. Emerging from her curtain of mist, fashionable Paris, awake and on her feet, was beginning her day of giddy pleasure. The shop-windows on Rue de la Paix shone resplendent. The mansions on the square seemed to be drawn up proudly in line for the afternoon receptions; and, at the end of Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries, in the glorious sunlight of winter, marshalled its shivering statues, pink with cold, among the leafless quincunxes.
II.
A BREAKFAST ON PLACE VENDÔME.
There were hardly more than a score of persons that morning in the Nabob's dining-room, a dining-room finished in carved oak, supplied only the day before from the establishment of some great house-furnisher, who furnished at the same time the four salons which could be seen, one beyond the other, through an open door: the hangings, the objects of art, the chandeliers, even the plate displayed on the sideboards, even the servants who served the breakfast. It was the perfect type of the establishment improvised, immediately upon alighting from the railway train, by a parvenu of colossal wealth, in great haste to enjoy himself. Although there was no sign of a woman's dress about the table, no bit of light and airy material to enliven the scene, it was by no means monotonous, thanks to the incongruity, the nondescript character of the guests, gathered together from all ranks of society, specimens of mankind culled from every race in France, in Europe, in the whole world, from top to bottom of the social scale. First of all, the master of the house, a sort of giant—sunburned, swarthy, with his head between his shoulders—to whom his short nose, lost in the puffiness of the face, his woolly hair massed like an Astrakhan cap over a low, headstrong forehead, his bristling eyebrows with eyes like a wild cat's in ambush, gave the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuk, of a savage on the frontiers of civilization, who lived by war and marauding. Luckily the lower part of the face, the thick, double lips which parted readily in a fascinating, good-humored smile, tempered with a sort of Saint Vincent de Paul expression that uncouth ugliness, that original countenance, so original that it forgot to be commonplace. But his inferior extraction betrayed itself in another direction by his voice, the voice of a Rhone boatman, hoarse and indistinct, in which the southern accent became rather coarse than harsh, and by two broad, short hands, with hairy fingers, square at the ends and with almost no nails, which, as they rested on the white table cloth, spoke of their past with embarrassing eloquence. Opposite the host, on the other side of the table, at which he was a regular guest, was the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon who in no wise resembled the mottled spectre whom we saw in the last chapter; a man of superb physique, in the prime of life, with a long, majestic nose, the haughty bearing of a great nobleman, displaying a vast breastplate of spotless linen, which cracked under the continuous efforts of the chest to bend forward, and swelled out every time with a noise like that made by a turkey gobbling, or a peacock spreading his tail. His name Monpavon was well suited to him.[1]
Belonging to a great family, with wealthy kindred, the Duc de Mora's friendship had procured for him a receiver-generalship of the first class. Unfortunately his health had not permitted him to retain that fine berth—well-informed persons said that his health had nothing to do with it—and he had been living in Paris for a year past, waiting until he should be cured, he said, to return to his post. The same persons asserted that he would never find it again, and that, were it not for the patronage of certain exalted personages—Be that as it may, he was the important guest at the breakfast; one could see that by the way in which the servants waited upon him, by the way in which the Nabob consulted him, calling him "Monsieur le Marquis," as they do at the Comédie Française, less from humility than from pride because of the honor that was reflected on himself. Filled with disdain for his fellow-guests, Monsieur le Marquis talked little, but with a very lofty manner, as if he were obliged to stoop to those persons whom he honored with his conversation. From time to time he tossed at the Nabob, across the table, sentences that were enigmatical to everybody.
"I saw the duke yesterday. He talked a good deal about you in connection with that matter of—you know, What's-his-name, Thingumbob—Who is the man?"
"Really! He talked about me?" And the honest Nabob, swelling with pride, would look about him, nodding his head in a most laughable way, or would assume the meditative air of a pious woman when she hears the name of Our Lord.
"His Excellency would be pleased to have you go into the—ps—ps—ps—the thing."
"Did he tell you so?"
"Ask the governor—he heard it as well as I."
The person referred to as the governor, Paganetti by name, was an energetic, gesticulatory little man, tiresome to watch, his face assumed so many different expressions in a minute. He was manager of theCaisse Territorialeof Corsica, a vast financial enterprise, and was present in that house for the first time, brought by Monpavon; he also occupied a place of honor. On the Nabob's other side was an old man, buttoned to the chin in a frock-coat without lapels and with a standing collar, like an oriental tunic, with a face marred by innumerable little gashes, and a white moustache trimmed in military fashion. It was Brahim Bey, the most gallant officer of the regency of Tunis,aide-de-campto the former bey, who made Jansoulet's fortune. This warrior's glorious exploits were written in wrinkles, in the scars of debauchery, on his lower lip which hung down helplessly as if the spring were broken, and in his inflamed, red eyes, devoid of lashes. His was one of the faces we see in the felon's dock in cases that are tried behind closed doors. The other guests had seated themselves pell-mell, as they arrived, or beside such acquaintances as they chanced to meet, for the house was open to everybody, and covers were laid for thirty every morning.
There was the manager of the theatre in which the Nabob was a sleeping partner,—Cardailhac, almost as renowned for his wit as for his failures, that wonderful carver, who would prepare one of hisbons motsas he detached the limbs of a partridge, and deposit it with a wing in the plate that was handed him. He was a sculptor rather than animprovisateur, and the new way of serving meats, having them carved beforehand in the Russian fashion, had been fatal to him by depriving him of all excuse for a preparatory silence. So it was generally said that he was failing. He was a thorough Parisian, a dandy to his fingers' ends, and as he himself boasted, "not full to bursting with superstition," which fact enabled him to give some very piquant details concerning the women in his theatrical company to Brahim Bey, who listened to him as one turns the pages of an obscene book, and to talk theology to his nearest neighbor, a young priest, curé of some little Southern village, a thin, gaunt fellow, with a complexion as dark as his cassock, with glowing cheek-bones, pointed nose, all the characteristics of an ambitious man, who said to Cardailhac, in a very loud voice, in a tone of condescension, of priestly authority:
"We are very well satisfied with Monsieur Guizot. He is doing well, very well—it's a victory for the Church."
Beside that pontiff with the starched band, old Schwalbach, the famous dealer in pictures, displayed his prophet's beard, yellow in spots like a dirty fleece, his three mouldy-looking waistcoats and all the slovenly, careless attire which people forgave him in the name of art, and because he had the good taste to have in his employ, at a time when the mania for galleries kept millions of money in circulation, the one man who was most expert in negotiating those vainglorious transactions. Schwalbach did not talk, contenting himself with staring about through his enormous lens-shaped monocle, and smiling in his beard at the extraordinary juxtapositions to be observed at that table, which stood alone in all the world. For instance Monpavon had very near him—and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction—Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sangFigaroin the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country fair, amasseur, pedicurist, manicurist and something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the assurance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all classified with reference to some one specialty. Bompain, the secretary, the steward, the man of confidence, through whose hands all the business of the establishment passed; and a single glance at that stupidly solemn face, that vague expression, that Turkish fez poised awkwardly on that village schoolmaster's head, sufficed to convince one what manner of man he was to whom interests like the Nabob's had been entrusted.
Lastly, to fill the gaps between the figures we have sketched, Turks of every variety! Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled with that exotic element, a whole multicolored Parisian Bohemia of decayed gentlemen, squinting tradesmen, penniless journalists, inventors of strange objects, men from the South landed in Paris without a sou—all the tempest-tossed vessels to be revictualled, all the flocks of birds whirling about in the darkness, that were attracted by that great fortune as by the light of a lighthouse. The Nabob received that motley crew at his table through kindness of heart, generosity, weakness, and entire lack of dignity, combined with absolute ignorance, and partly as a result of the same exile's melancholy, the same need of expansion that led him to receive, in his magnificent palace on the Bardo in Tunis, everybody who landed from France, from the petty tradesman and exporter of small wares, to the famous pianist on a tour and the consul-general.
Listening to those different voices, those foreign accents, incisive or stammering, glancing at those varying types of countenance, some uncivilized, passionate, unrefined, others over-civilized, faded, of the type that haunts the boulevards, over-ripe as it were, and observing the same varieties in the corps of servants, where "flunkeys," taken the day before from some office, insolent fellows, with the heads of dentists or bath-attendants, bustled about among the motionless Ethiopians, who shone like black marble torch-holders,—it was impossible to say exactly where you were; at all events, you would never have believed that you were on Place Vendôme, at the very heart and centre of the life of our modern Paris. On the table there was a similar outlandish collection of foreign dishes, sauces with saffron or anchovies, elaborately spiced Turkish delicacies, chickens with fried almonds; all this, taken in conjunction with the commonplace decorations of the room, the gilded wainscotings and the shrill jangle of the new bells, gave one the impression of a table-d'hôte in some great hotel in Smyrna or Calcutta, or of the gorgeous saloon of a trans-Atlantic liner, thePéreireor theSinai.
It would seem that such a variety of guests—I had almost said of passengers—would make the repast animated and noisy. Far from it. They all ate nervously, in silence, watching one another out of the corner of the eye; and even the most worldly, those who seemed most at ease, had in their eyes the wandering, distressed expression indicating a persistent thought, a feverish anxiety which caused them to speak without answering, to listen without understanding a word of what was said.
Suddenly the door of the dining-room was thrown open.
"Ah! there's Jenkins," exclaimed the Nabob, joyfully. "Hail, doctor, hail! How are you, my boy?"
A circular smile, a vigorous handshake for the host, and Jenkins took his seat opposite him, beside Monpavon and in front of a plate which a servant brought in hot haste, exactly as at a table-d'hôte. Amid those preoccupied, feverish faces, that one presented a striking contrast with its good-humor, its expansive smile, and the loquacious, flattering affability which makes the Irish to a certain extent the Gascons of Great Britain. And what a robust appetite! with what energy, what liberty of conscience, he managed his double row of white teeth, talking all the while.
"Well, Jansoulet, did you read it?"
"Read what, pray?"
"What! don't you know? Haven't you read what theMessagersaid about you this morning?"
Beneath the thick tan on his cheeks the Nabob blushed like a child, and his eyes sparkled with delight as he replied:
"Do you mean it? TheMessagersaid something about me?"
"Two whole columns. How is it that Moëssard didn't show it to you?"
"Oh!" said Moëssard modestly, "it wasn't worth the trouble."
He was a journalist in a small way, fair-haired and spruce, a pretty fellow enough, but with a face marked by the faded look peculiar to waiters at all-night restaurants, actors and prostitutes, made up of conventional grimaces and the sallow reflection of the gas. He was reputed to be the plighted lover of an exiled queen of very easy virtue. That rumor was whispered about wherever he went, and gave him an envied and most contemptible prominence in his circle.
Jansoulet insisted upon reading the article, being impatient to hear what was said of him. Unfortunately Jenkins had left his copy at the duke's.
"Let some one go at once and get me aMessager," said the Nabob to the servant behind his chair.
Moëssard interposed:
"That isn't necessary; I must have the thing about me."
And with the free and easy manner of the tap-room habitué, of the reporter who scrawls his notes as he sits in front of his mug of beer, the journalist produced a pocketbook stuffed with memoranda, stamped papers, newspaper clippings, notes on glossy paper with crests—which he scattered over the table, pushing his plate away, to look for the proof of his article.
"Here it is." He passed it to Jansoulet; but Jenkins cried out:
"No, no, read it aloud."
As the whole party echoed the demand, Moëssard took back his proof and began to read aloud theWork of Bethlehem and M. Bernard Jansoulet, a long deliverance in favor of artificial nursing, written from Jenkins' notes, which were recognizable by certain grandiloquent phrases of the sort that the Irishman affected: "the long martyrology of infancy—the venality of the breast—the goat, the beneficent nurse,"—and concluding, after a turgid description of the magnificent establishment at Nanterre, with a eulogy of Jenkins and the glorification of Jansoulet: "O Bernard Jansoulet, benefactor of infancy!"
You should have seen the annoyed, scandalized faces of the guests. What a schemer that Moëssard was! What impudent sycophancy! And the same envious, disdainful smile distorted every mouth. The devil of it was that they were forced to applaud, to appear enchanted, as their host's sense of smell was not surfeited by the odor of incense, and as he took everything very seriously, both the article and the applause that it called forth. His broad face beamed during the reading. Many and many a time, far away in Africa, he had dreamed of being thus belauded in the Parisian papers, of becoming a person of some consequence in that society, the first of all societies, upon which the whole world has its eyes fixed as upon a beacon-light. Now that dream was fulfilled. He gazed at all those men around his table, at that sumptuous dessert, at that wainscoted dining-room, certainly as high as the church in his native village; he listened to the dull roar of Paris, rumbling and tramping beneath his windows, with the unspoken thought that he was about to become a great wheel in that ever-active, complicated mechanism. And thereupon, while he sat, enjoying the sense of well-being that follows a substantial meal, between the lines of that triumphant apology he evoked, by way of contrast, the panorama of his own life, his wretched childhood, his haphazard youth, no less distressing to recall, the days without food, the nights without a place to lay his head. And suddenly, when the reading was at an end, in the midst of a veritable overflow of joy, of one of those outbursts of Southern effusiveness which compel one to think aloud, he cried, protruding his thick lips toward the guests in his genial smile:
"Ah! my friends, my dear friends, if you knew how happy I am, how proud I feel!"
It was barely six weeks since he landed in France. With the exception of two or three compatriots, he had known these men whom he called his friends hardly more than a day, and only from having loaned them money. Wherefore that sudden expansiveness seemed decidedly strange; but Jansoulet, too deeply moved to notice anything, continued:
"After what I have just heard, when I see myself here in this great city of Paris, surrounded by all the illustrious names and distinguished minds within its limits, and then recall my father's peddler's stall! For I was born in a peddler's stall. My father sold old iron at a street corner in Bourg-Saint-Andéol! It was as much as ever if we had bread to eat every day, and stew every Sunday. Ask Cabassu. He knew me in those days. He can tell you if I am lying. Oh! yes, I have known what poverty is." He raised his head in an outburst of pride, breathing in the odor of truffles with which the heavy atmosphere was impregnated. "I have known poverty, genuine poverty too, and for a long time. I have been cold, I have been hungry, and horribly hungry, you know, the kind of hunger that makes you stupid, that twists your stomach, makes your head go round, and prevents you from seeing, just as if some one had dug out the inside of your eyes with an oyster-knife. I have passed whole days in bed for lack of a coat to wear; lucky when I had a bed, which I sometimes hadn't. I have tried to earn my bread at every trade; and the bread cost me so much suffering, it was so hard and tough that I still have the bitter, mouldy taste of it in my mouth. And that's the way it was till I was thirty years old. Yes, my friends, at thirty—and I'm not fifty yet—I was still a beggar, without a sou, with no future, with my heart full of remorse for my poor mother who was dying of hunger in her hovel down in the provinces, and to whom I could give nothing."
The faces of the people who surrounded that strange host as he told the story of his evil days were a curious spectacle. Some seemed disgusted, especially Monpavon. That display of old rags seemed to him in execrable taste, and to denote utter lack of breeding. Cardailhac, that sceptic and man of refined taste, a foe to all emotional scenes, sat with staring eyes and as if hypnotized, cutting a piece of fruit with the end of his fork into strips as thin as cigarette papers. The Governor, on the contrary, went through a pantomime expressive of perfunctory admiration, with exclamations of horror and compassion; while, in striking contrast to him, and not far away, Brahim Bey, the thunderbolt of war, in whom the reading of the article, followed by discussion after a substantial repast, had induced a refreshing nap, was sleeping soundly, with his mouth like a round O in his white moustache, and with the blood congested in his face as a result of the creeping up of his gorget. But the general expression was indifference and ennui. What interest had they, I ask you, in Jansoulet's childhood at Bourg-Saint-Andéol, in what he had suffered, and how he had been driven from pillar to post? They had not come there for such stuff as that. So it was that expressions of feigned interest, eyes that counted the eggs in the ceiling or the crumbs of bread on the table-cloth, lips tightly compressed to restrain a yawn, betrayed the general impatience caused by that untimely narrative. But he did not grow weary. He took pleasure in the recital of his past suffering, as the sailor in a safe haven delights in recalling his voyages in distant seas, and the dangers, and the terrible shipwrecks. Next came the tale of his good luck, the extraordinary accident that suddenly started him on the road to fortune. "I was wandering about the harbor of Marseille, with a comrade as out-at-elbows as myself, who also made his fortune in the Bey's service, and, after being my chum, my partner, became my bitterest enemy. I can safely tell you his name,pardi! He is well enough known, Hemerlingue. Yes, messieurs, the head of the great banking-house of Hemerlingue and Son hadn't at that time the money to buy two sous' worth of crabs on the quay. Intoxicated by the air of travel that you breathe in those parts, it occurred to us to go and seek a living in some sunny country, as the foggy countries were so cruel to us. But where should we go? We did what sailors sometimes do to decide what den they shall squander their wages in. They stick a bit of paper on the rim of a hat. Then they twirl the hat on a cane, and when it stops, they go in the direction in which the paper points. For us the paper needle pointed to Tunis. A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I return to-day with twenty-five millions."
There was a sort of electric shock around the table, a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants. Cardailhac exclaimed: "Mazette!" Monpavon's nose subsided.
"Yes, my children, twenty-five millions in available funds, to say nothing of all that I've left in Tunis, my two palaces on the Bardo, my vessels in the harbor of La Goulette, my diamonds and my jewels, which are certainly worth more than twice that. And you know," he added, with his genial smile, in his hoarse, unmusical voice, "when it's all gone, there will still be some left."
The whole table rose, electrified.
"Bravo! Ah! bravo!"
"Superb."
"Verychic—verychic."