Indignation seized on this incorruptible Chamber. It murmured, it fidgeted on its padded seats of red velvet, it raised a positive clamour. There were “Oh’s” of amazement, eyes lifted in astonishment, brusque movements on the benches, as if in disgust at this spectacle of human degradation. And remark that the greater part of these deputies had used the same electoral methods, that these were the heroes of those famous orgies when whole oxen were carried in triumph, ribanded and decorated as at Gargantuan feasts. Just these men cried louder than others, turned furiously towards the solitary seat where the poor leper listened, still and downcast. Yet in the midst of the general uproar, one voice was raised in his favour, but low, unpractised, less a voice than a sympathetic murmur, through which was distinguished vaguely: “Great services to the Corsican population—Considerable works—Territorial Bank.”
He who mumbled thus was a little man in white gaiters, an albino head, and thin hair in scattered locks. But the interruption of this unfortunate friend only furnished Le Merquier with a rapid and natural transition. A hideous smile parted his flabby lips. “The honourable M. Sarigue mentions the Territorial Bank. We shall be able to answer him.” He seemed in fact to be very familiar with the Paganetti den. In a few neat and lively phrases he threw the light on to the depths of the gloomy cave, showed all the traps, the gulfs, the windings, the snares, like a guide waving his torch above theoubliettesof some sinister dungeon. He spoke of the fictitious quarries, of the railways on paper, of the chimeric liners disappearing in their own steam. The frightful desert of the Taverna was not forgotten, nor the old Genoese castle, the office of the steamship agency. But what amused the Chamber most was the story of a swindling ceremony organized by the governor for the piercing of a tunnel through Monte Rotondo, a gigantic undertaking always in project, put off from year to year, demanding millions of money and thousands of workmen, and which was begun in great pomp a week before the election. His report gave the thing a comic air—the first blow of the pickaxe given by the candidate in the enormous mountain covered by ancient forests, the speech of the Prefect, the benediction of the flags with the cries of “Long live Bernard Jansoulet!” and the two hundred workmen beginning the task at once, working day and night for a week; then, when the election was over, leaving the fragments of rock heaped round the abandoned excavation for a laughing-stock—another asylum for the terrible banditti. The game was over. After having extorted the shareholders’ money for so long, the Territorial Bank this time was used as a means to swindle the electors of their votes. “Furthermore, gentlemen, another detail, with which perhaps I should have begun and spared you the recital of this electoral pasquinade. I learn that a judicial inquiry has been opened to-day into the affairs of the Corsican Bank, and that a serious examination of its books will very probably reveal one of those financial scandals—too frequent, alas! in our days—and in which, for the honour of the Chamber, we would wish that none of our members were concerned.”
With this sudden revelation, the speaker stopped a moment, like an actor making his point; and in the heavy silence weighing on the assembly, the noise of a closing door was heard. It was the Governor Paganetti leaving the tribune, his face white, the eyes wide open, his mouth half opened, like some Pierrot scenting in the air a formidable blow. Monpavon, motionless, expanded his shirtfront. The big man puffed violently into the flowers of his wife’s little white hat.
Jansoulet’s mother looked at her son.
“I have spoken of the honour of the Chamber, gentlemen. On that point I have more to say.” Now Le Merquier was reading no longer. After the chairman of the committees, the orator came on the scene, or rather the judge. His face was expressionless, his eyes hidden; nothing lived, nothing moved in all his body save the right arm—the long angular arm with short sleeves—which rose and fell automatically, like a sword of justice, making at the end of each sentence the cruel and inexorable gesture of beheading. And truly it was an execution at which they were present. The orator would leave on one side scandalous legends, the mystery which brooded over this colossal fortune acquired in distant lands, far from all control. But there were in the life of the candidate certain points difficult to clear up, certain details. He hesitated, seemed to select his words; then, before the impossibility of formulating a direct accusation: “Do not let us lower the debate, gentlemen. You have understood me. You know to what infamous stories I allude—to what calumnies, I wish I could say; but truth forces me to state that when M. Jansoulet called before your committee, was asked to deny the accusations made against him, his explanations were so vague that, though convinced of his innocence, a scrupulous regard for your honour forced us to reject a candidature so besmirched. No, this man must not sit among you. Besides, what would he do there? Living so long in the East, he has unlearned the laws, the manners, and the usages of his country. He believes in rough and ready justice, in fights in the open street; he relies on the abuses of power, and worse still, on the venality and crouching baseness of all men. He is the merchant who thinks that everything can be bought at a price—even the votes of the electors, even the conscience of his colleagues.”
One should have seen with what naive admiration these fat deputies, enervated with good fortune, listened to this ascetic, this man of another age, like some Saint-Jerome who had left his Thebaid to overwhelm with his vigorous eloquence, in a full assembly of the Roman Empire, the shameless luxury of the prevaricators and of theconcussionaires. How well they understood now this grand surname of “My conscience” which the courts had given him. In the galleries the enthusiasm rose higher still. Lovely heads leaned to see him, to drink in his words. Applause went round, bending the bouquets here and there, like the wind in a wheat-field. A woman’s voice cried with a little foreign accent, “Bravo! Bravo!”
And the mother?
Standing upright, immovable, concentrated in her desire to understand something of this legal phraseology, of these mysterious allusions, she was there like deaf-mutes who only understand what is said before them by the movement of the lips and the expression of the faces. But it was enough for her to watch her son and Le Merquier to understand what harm one was doing to the other, what perfidious and poisoned meaning fell from this long discourse on the unfortunate man whom one might have believed asleep, except for the trembling of his strong shoulders and the clinching of his hands in his hair, while hiding his face. Oh, if she could have said to him: “Don’t be afraid, my son. If they all misconstrue you, your mother loves you. Let us come away together. What need have we of them?” And for one moment she could believe that what she was saying to him thus in her heart he had understood by some mysterious intuition. He had just raised and shaken his grizzled head, where the childish curve of his lips quivered under a possibility of tears. But instead of leaving his seat, he spoke from it, his great hands pounded the wood of the desk. The other had finished, now it was his time to answer:
“Gentlemen,” said he.
He stopped at once, frightened by the sound of his voice, hoarse, frightfully low and vulgar, which he heard for the first time in public. He must find the words for his defence, tormented as he was by the twitchings of his face, the intonations which he could not express. And if the anguish of the poor man was touching, the old mother up there, leaning, gasping, moving her lips nervously as if to help him find words, reflected the picture of his torture. Though he could not see her, intentionally turned away from her gallery, as he evidently was, this maternal inspiration, the ardent magnetism of those black eyes, ended by giving him life, and suddenly his words and gestures flowed freely:
“First of all, gentlemen, I must say that I do not defend the methods of my election. If you believe that electoral morals have not been always the same in Corsica, that all the irregularities committed are due to the corrupting influence of my gold and not to the uncultivated and passionate temperament of its people, reject me—it will be justice and I will not murmur. But in this debate other matters have been dealt with, accusations have been made which involve my personal honour, and those, and those alone, I wish to answer.” His voice was growing firmer, always broken, veiled, but with some soft cadences. He spoke rapidly of his life, his first steps, his departure for the East. It sounded like an eighteenth century tale of the Barbary corsairs sailing the Latin seas, of Beys and of bold Provencals, as sunburned as crickets, who used to end by marrying some sultana and “taking the turban,” in the old expression of the Marseillais. “As for me,” said the Nabob, with his good-humoured smile. “I had no need of taking the turban to grow rich. I had only to take into this land of idleness the activity and flexibility of a southern Frenchman; and in a few years I made one of those fortunes which can only be made in those hot countries, where everything is gigantic, prodigious, disproportionate, where flowers grow in a night, and one tree produces a forest. The excuse of such fortunes is the manner in which they are used; and I make bold to say that never has any favourite of fortune tried harder to justify his wealth. I have not been successful.” No! he had not succeeded. From all the gold he had scattered he had only gathered contempt and hatred. Hatred! Who could boast more of it than he? like a great ship in the dock when its keel touches the bottom. He was too rich, and that stood for every vice, and every crime pointed him out for anonymous vengeances, cruel and incessant enmities.
“Ah, gentlemen,” cried the poor Nabob, lifting his clinched hands, “I have known poverty, I have struggled face to face with it, and it is a dreadful struggle, I swear. But to struggle against wealth, to defend one’s happiness, honour—rest—to have no shelter but piles of gold which fall and crush you, is something more hideous, more heart-breaking still. Never, in the darkest days of my distress, have I had the pains, the anguish, the sleepless nights with which fortune has loaded me—this horrible fortune which I hate and which stifles me. They call me the Nabob, in Paris. It is not the Nabob they should say, but the Pariah—a social pariah holding out wide arms to a society which will have none of him.”
Written down, the words may appear cold; but there, before the assembly, the defence of this man was stamped with an eloquent and grandiose sincerity, which at first, coming from this rustic, this upstart, without culture or education, with the voice of a boatman, first astonished and then singularly moved his hearers just on account of its wild, uncultivated style, foreign to every notion of parliamentary etiquette. Already marks of favour had agitated members, used to the flood of gray and monotonous administrative speech. But at this cry of rage and despair against wealth, uttered by the wretch whom it was enfolding, rolling, drowning in its floods of gold, while he was struggling and calling for help from the depths of his Pactolus, the whole Chamber rose with loud applause, and outstretched hands, as if to give the unfortunate Nabob more testimonies of esteem, of which he was so desirous, and at the same time to save him from shipwreck. Jansoulet felt it; and warmed by this sympathy, he went on, with head erect and confident look:
“You have just been told, gentlemen, that I was unworthy of sitting among you. And he who said it was the last from whom I should have expected it, for he alone knew the sad secret of my life, he alone could speak for me, justify me, and convince you. He has not done it. Well, I will try, whatever it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated before my country, I owe it to myself and my children this public justification, and I will make it.”
With a brusque movement he turned towards the tribune where he knew his enemy was watching him, and suddenly stopped, full of fear. There, in front of him, behind the pale, malignant head of the baroness, his mother, his mother whom he believed to be two hundred leagues away from the terrible storm, was looking at him, leaning against the wall, bending down her saintly face, flooded with tears, but proud and beaming nevertheless with her Bernard’s great success. For it was really a success of sincere human emotion, which a few more words would change into a triumph. Cries of “Go on, go on!” came from all sides of the Chamber to reassure and encourage him. But Jansoulet did not speak. He had only to say: “Calumny has wilfully confused two names. I am called Bernard Jansoulet, the other Jansoulet Louis.” Not a word more was needed.
But in the presence of his mother, still ignorant of his brother’s dishonour, he could not say it. Respect—family ties forbade it. He could hear his father’s voice: “I die of shame, my child.” Would not she die of shame too, if he spoke? He turned from the maternal smile with a sublime look of renunciation, then in a low voice, utterly discouraged, he said:
“Excuse me, gentlemen; this explanation is beyond my power. Order an investigation of my whole life, open as it is to all, alas! since any one can interpret all my actions. I swear to you that you will find nothing there which unfits me to sit among the representatives of my country.”
In the face of this defeat, which seemed to everybody the sudden crumbling of an edifice of effrontery, the astonishment and disillusionment were immense. There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the tumult of a vote taken on the spot, which the Nabob saw vaguely through the glass doors, as the condemned man looks down from the scaffold on the howling crowd. Then, after that terrible pause which precedes a supreme moment, the president made, amid deep silence, the simple pronouncement:
“The election of M. Bernard Jansoulet is annulled.”
Never had a man’s life been cut off with less solemnity or disturbance.
Up there in her gallery, Jansoulet’s mother understood nothing, except that the seats were emptying near her, that people were rising and going away. Soon there was no one else there save the fat man and the lady in the white hat, who leaned over the barrier, watching Bernard with curiosity, who seemed also to be going away, for he was putting up great bundles of papers in his portfolio quite calmly. When they were in order, he rose and left his place. Ah! the life of public men had sometimes cruel situations. Gravely, slowly, under the gaze of the whole assembly, he must descend those steps which he had mounted at the cost of so much trouble and money, to whose feet an inexorable fatality was precipitating him.
The Hemerlingues were waiting for this, following to its last stage this humiliating exit, which crushes the unseated member with some of the shame and fear of a dismissal. Then, when the Nabob had disappeared, they looked at each other with a silent laugh, and left the gallery before the old woman had dared to ask them anything, warned by her instinct of their secret hostility. Left alone, she gave all her attention to a new speech, persuaded that her son’s affairs were still in question. They spoke of an election, of a scrutiny, and the poor mother leaning forward in her red hood, wrinkling her great eyebrows, would have religiously listened to the whole of the report of the Sarigue election, if the attendant who had introduced her had not come to say that it was finished and she had better go away. She seemed very much surprised.
“Indeed! Is it over?” said she, rising almost regretfully.
And quietly, timidly:
“Has he—has he won?”
It was innocent, so touching that the attendant did not even dream of smiling.
“Unfortunately, no, madame. M. Jansoulet has not won. But why did he stop in that way? If it is true that he never came to Paris, and that another Jansoulet did everything they accuse him of, why did he not say so?”
The old mother, turning pale, leaned on the balustrade of the staircase. She had understood.
Bernard’s brusque interruption on seeing her, the sacrifice he had made to her so simply—that noble glance as of a dying animal, came to her mind, and the shame of the elder, the favourite child, mingled itself with Bernard’s disaster—a double-edged maternal sorrow, which tore her whichever way she turned. Yes, yes, it was on her account he would not speak. But she would not accept such a sacrifice. He must come back at once and explain himself before the deputies.
“My son, where is my son?”
“Below, madame, in his carriage. It was he who sent me to look for you.”
She ran before the attendant, walking quickly, talking aloud, pushing aside out of her way the little black and bearded men who were gesticulating in the passages. After the waiting-hall she crossed a great round antechamber where servants in respectful rows made a living wainscotting to the high, blank wall. From there she could see through the glass doors, the outside railing, the crowd in waiting, and among the other vehicles, the Nabob’s carriage waiting. As she passed, the peasant recognised in one of the groups her enormous neighbour of the gallery, with the pale man in spectacles who had attacked her son, who was receiving all sorts of felicitation for his discourse. At the name of Jansoulet, pronounced among mocking and satisfied sneers, she stopped.
“At any rate,” said a handsome man with a bad feminine face, “he has not proved where our accusations were false.”
The old woman, hearing that, wrenched herself through the crowd, and facing Moessard said:
“What he did not say I will. I am his mother, and it is my duty to speak.”
She stopped to seize Le Merquier by the sleeve, who was escaping:
“Wicked man, you must listen, first of all. What have you got against my child? Don’t you know who he is? Wait a little till I tell you.”
And turning to the journalist:
“I had two sons, sir.”
Moessard was no longer there. She returned to Le Merquier: “Two sons, sir.” Le Merquier had disappeared.
“Oh, listen to me, some one, I beg,” said the poor mother, throwing her hands and her voice round her to assemble and retain her hearers; but all fled, melted away, disappeared—deputies, reporters, unknown and mocking faces to whom she wished at any cost to tell her story, careless of the indifference where her sorrows and her joys fell, her pride and maternal tenderness expressed in a tornado of feeling. And while she was thus exciting herself and struggling—distracted, her bonnet awry—at once grotesque and sublime, as are all the children of nature when brought into civilization, taking to witness the honesty of her son and the injustice of men, even the liveried servants, whose disdainful impassibility was more cruel than all, Jansoulet appeared suddenly beside her.
“Take my arm, mother. You must not stop there.”
He said it in a tone so firm and calm that all the laughter ceased, and the old woman, suddenly quieted, sustained by this solid hold, still trembling a little with anger, left the palace between two respectful rows. A dignified and rustic couple, the millions of the son gilding the countrified air of the mother, like the rags of a saint enshrined in a goldenchasse—they disappeared in the bright sunlight outside, in the splendour of their glittering carriage—a ferocious irony in their deep distress, a striking symbol of the terrible misery of the rich.
They sat well back, for both feared to be seen, and hardly spoke at first. But when the vehicle was well on its way, and he had behind him the sad Calvary where his honour hung gibbeted, Jansoulet, utterly overcome, laid his head on his mother’s shoulder, hid it in the old green shawl, and there, with the burning tears flowing, all his great body shaken by sobs, he returned to the cry of his childhood: “Mother.”
Que l’heure est donc breve,Qu’on passe en aimant!C’est moins qu’un moment,Un peu plus qu’un reve.
In the semi-obscurity of a great drawing-room filled with flowers, the seats of the furniture covered with holland, the chandeliers draped with muslin, the windows open, and the venetians lowered, Mme. Jenkins is seated at the piano reading the new song of the fashionable musician; some melodic phrases accompanying exquisite verse, a melancholyLied, unequally divided, which seems written for the tender gravities of her voice and the disturbed state of her soul.
Le temps nous enleveNotre enchantement
sighs the poor woman, moved by the sound of her own voice, and while the notes float away in the court-yard of the house, where the fountain falls drop by drop among a bed of rhododendrons, the singer breaks off, her hands holding the chord, her eyes fixed on the music, but her look far away. The doctor is absent. The care of his health and business has exiled him from Paris for some days, and the thoughts of the beautiful Mme. Jenkins have taken that grave turn, as often happens in solitude, that analytical tendency which sometimes makes even momentary separations fatal in the most united households. United they had not been for sometime. They only saw each other at meal-times, before the servants, hardly speaking unless he, the man of unctuous manners, allowed himself to make some disobliging or brutal remark on her son, or on her age, which she began to show, or on some dress which did not become her. Always gentle and serene, she stifled her tears, accepted everything, feigned not to understand; not that she loved him still after so much cruelty and contempt, but it was the story, as their coachman Joe told it, “of an old clinger who was determined to make him marry her.” Up to then a terrible obstacle—the life of the legitimate wife—had prolonged a dishonourable situation. Now that the obstacle no longer existed she wished to put an end to the situation, because of Andre, who from one day to another might be forced to despise his mother, because of the world which they had deceived for ten years—a world she never entered but with a beating heart, for fear of the treatment she would receive after a discovery. To her allusions, to her prayers, Jenkins had answered at first by phrases, grand gestures: “Could you distrust me? Is not our engagement sacred?”
He pointed out the difficulty of keeping an act of this importance secret. Then he shut himself up in a malignant silence, full of cold anger and violent determinations. The death of the duke, the fall of an absurd vanity, had struck a final blow at the household; for disaster, which often brings hearts ready to understand one another nearer, finishes and completes disunions. And it was indeed a disaster. The popularity of the Jenkins pearls suddenly stopped, the situation of the foreign doctor and charlatan, ably defined by Bouchereau in the Journal of the Academy, and people of fashion looked at each other in fright, paler from terror than from the arsenic they had imbibed. Already the Irishman had felt the effect of those counter blasts which make Parisian infatuations so dangerous.
It was for that reason, no doubt, that Jenkins had judged it wise to disappear for some time, leaving madame to continue to frequent the houses still open to them, to gauge and hold public opinion in respect. It was a hard task for the poor woman, who found everywhere the cool and distant welcome which she had received at the Hemerlingues. But she did not complain; thus earning her marriage, she was putting between them as a last resource the sad tie of pity and common trials. And as she knew that she was welcomed in the world on account of her talent, of the artistic distraction she lent to their private parties, she was always ready to lay on the piano her fan and long gloves, to play some fragment of her vast repertory. She worked constantly, passing her afternoons in turning over new music, choosing by preference sad and complicated harmonies, the modern music which no longer contents itself with being an art, but becomes a science, and answers better to our nerves, to our restlessness, than to sentiment.
Daylight flooded the room as a maid brought a card to her mistress; “Heurteux, business agent.”
The gentleman was there, he insisted on seeing madame.
“You have told him the doctor is travelling?”
He had been told, but it was to madame he wished to speak.
“To me?”
Disturbed, she examined this rough, crumpled card, this unknown name: “Heurteux.” What could it be?
“Well, show him in.”
Heurteux, business agent, coming from broad daylight into the semi-obscurity of the room, was blinking with an uncertain air, trying to see. She, on the other hand, saw very distinctly a stiff figure, with iron-gray whiskers and protruding jaw, one of those hangers-on of the law whom one meets round the law courts, born fifty years old, with a bitter mouth, an envious air, and a morocco portfolio under the arm. He sat down on the edge of the chair which she pointed out to him, turned his head to make sure that the servant had gone out, then opened his portfolio methodically to search for a paper. Seeing that he did not speak, she began in a tone of impatience:
“I ought to warn you, sir, that my husband is absent, and that I am not acquainted with his business.”
Without any astonishment, his hand in his papers, the man answered: “I know thatM. Jenkinsis absent, madame”—he emphasized more particularly the two words “M. Jenkins”—“especially as I come on his behalf.”
She looked at him frightened. “On his behalf?”
“Alas! yes, madame. The doctor’s situation, as you are no doubt aware, is one, for the moment, of very great embarrassment. Unfortunate dealings on the Stock Exchange, the failure of a great financial enterprise in which his money is invested, theOEuvre de Bethleemwhich weighs heavily on him, all these reverses coming at once have forced him to a grave resolution. He is selling his mansion, his horses, everything that he possesses, and has given me a power of attorney for that purpose.”
He had at last found what he was looking for—one of those stamped folded papers, interlined and riddled with references, where the impassible law makes itself responsible for so many lies. Mme. Jenkins was going to say: “But I was here. I would have carried out all his wishes, all his orders—” when she suddenly understood by the coolness of her visitor, his easy, almost insolent attitude, that she was included in this clearing up, in the getting rid of the costly mansion and useless riches, and that her departure would be the signal for the sale.
She rose suddenly. The man, still seated, went on: “What I have still to say, madame”—oh, she knew it, she could have dictated to him, what he had still to say—“is so painful, so delicate. M. Jenkins is leaving Paris for a long time, and in the fear of exposing you to the hazards and adventures of the new life he is undertaking, of taking you away from a son you cherish, and in whose interest perhaps you had better——”
She heard no more, saw no more, and while he was spinning out his gossamer phrases, given over to despair, she heard the song over and over in her mind, as the last image seen pursues a drowning man:
Le temps nous enleveNotre enchantement.
All at once her pride returned. “Let us put a stop to this, sir. All your turns and phrases are only an additional insult. The fact is that I am driven out—turned into the street like a servant.”
“Oh, madame, madame! The situation is cruel enough, don’t let us make it worse by hard words. In the evolution of hismodus vivendiM. Jenkins has to separate from you, but he does so with the greatest pain to himself; and the proposals which I am charged to make are a proof of his sentiments for you. First, as to furniture and clothes, I am authorized to let you take—”
“That will do,” said she. She flew to the bell. “I am going out. Quick—my hat, my mantle, anything, never mind what. I am in a hurry.”
And while they went to fetch her what she wanted she said:
“Everything here belongs to M. Jenkins. Let him dispose of it as he likes. I want nothing from him. Don’t insist; it is useless.”
The man did not insist. His mission fulfilled, the rest mattered little to him.
Steadily, coldly, she arranged her hat carefully before the glass, the maid fastening her veil, and arranging on her shoulders the folds of her mantle, then she looked round her and considered for a moment whether she was forgetting anything precious to her. No, nothing—her son’s letters were in her pocket, she never allowed them to be away from her.
“Madame does not wish for the carriage?”
“No.” And she left the house.
It was about five o’clock. At that moment Bernard Jansoulet was crossing the doorway of the legislative chamber, his mother on his arm; but poignant as was the drama enacted there, this one surpassed it—more sudden, unforeseen, and without any stage effects. A drama between four walls, improvised in Paris day by day. Perhaps it is this which gives that vibration to the air of the city, that tremor which forces the nerves into activity. The weather was magnificent. The streets of the wealthy quarter, large and straight as avenues, shone in the declining light, embellished with open windows, flowery balconies, and patches of green seen on the boulevards, light and soft among the narrow, hard prospects of stone. Mme. Jenkins hurried in this direction, walking aimlessly, in a dull stupor. What a horrible crash! Five minutes ago rich, surrounded by all the respect and comfort of easy circumstances. Now—nothing. Not even a roof to sleep under, not even a name. The street!
Where was she to go? What would become of her?
At first she had thought of her son. But, to acknowledge her fault, to blush before her own child, to weep while taking from him the right to console her, was more than she could do. No, there was nothing for her but death. To die as soon as possible, to escape shame by a complete disappearance, to unravel in this way an inextricable situation. But where to die! How? There are so many ways of departure! And she called them all up mentally while she walked. Life flowed around her, its luxury at this time of the year in full flower, round the Madeleine and its market, in a space marked off by the perfume of carnations and roses. On the wide footpath were well-dressed women whose skirts mingled their rustle with the trembling of the young leaves; there was some of the pleasure here of a meeting in a drawing-room, an air of acquaintance among the passers-by, of smiles and discreet greetings in passing. And all at once Mme. Jenkins, anxious lest her features might betray her, fearing what might be thought if any one saw her rushing on so blindly, slackened her pace to the aimless gait of an afternoon walk, stopping here and there. The light materials of the dresses spoke of summer, of the country; a thin skirt for the sandy paths of the parks, gauze-trimmed hats for the seaside, fans, sunshades. Her fixed eyes fastened on these trifles without seeing them; but in a vague and pale reflection in the clear windows she saw her image, lying motionless on the bed of some hotel, the leaden sleep of a poison in her head; or, down there, beyond the walls, among the slime of some sunken boat. Which of the two was better?
She hesitated, considered, compared; then, her decision made, started off with the resolved air of a woman tearing herself regretfully from the temptations of the window. As she moved away, the Marquis de Monpavon, proud and well-dressed, a flower in his coat, saluted her at a distance with that sweep of the hat so dear to women’s vanity, the well-bred brow, with the hat lifted high above the erect head. She answered him with her pretty Parisian’s greeting, expressed in an imperceptible inclination of the body and a smile; and seeing this exchange of politeness in the midst of the spring gaiety, one would never think that the same sinister idea was guiding the two, meeting by chance on the road they were traversing in opposite directions, but to the same end.
The prediction of Mora’s valet had come true for the marquis: “We may die or lose power; then there will be a reckoning, and it will be terrible.” It was terrible. The former receiver-general had obtained with difficulty a delay of a fortnight to make up his deficiencies, taking the last chance that Jansoulet, with his election confirmed, and with full control over his millions again, would come to the rescue once more. The decision of the Assembly had just taken from him this last hope. As soon as he knew it, he returned to the club calmly, and went up to his room, where Francis was waiting impatiently for him with an important paper just arrived. It was a notification to the Sieur Louis-Marie-Agenor de Monpavon to appear the next day in the office of the Juge d’Instruction. Was it addressed to the censor of the Territorial Bank or to the former receiver-general? In any case, the bold formula of a judicial assignation in the first instance, instead of a private invitation, spoke sufficiently of the gravity of the situation and the firm resolution of Justice.
In view of such an extremity, foreseen and expected for long, he had made his plans. A Monpavon in the criminal courts!—a Monpavon, librarian in a convict prison! Never! He put all his affairs in order, tore up his papers, emptied his pockets carefully, and took something from his toilet-table, so calmly and naturally, that when he said to Francis, as he was going out, “Am going to the baths—That dirty Chamber—Filthy dust”—the servant took him at his word. And the marquis was not lying. His exciting post up there in the dust of the tribune had tired him as much as two nights in the train; and his decision to die associated itself with his desire to take a bath, the old Sybarite thought of going to sleep in the bath, like what’s his name, and other famous personages of antiquity. And in justice, it must be said that not one of these Stoics went to his death more quietly than he.
With a white camellia in his buttonhole, above his rosette of the Legion of Honour, he was going up the Boulevard des Capucines with a light step, when the sight of Mme. Jenkins troubled his serenity for a moment. She had a youthful air, a light in her eyes, something so piquant that he stopped to look at her. Tall and beautiful, with her long dress of black gauze, her shoulders wrapped in a lace mantle, her hat trimmed with a garland of autumn leaves, she disappeared in the midst of other elegant women in the balmy atmosphere; and the thought that his eyes were going to close forever on this delightful sight, whose pleasures he knew so well, saddened Monpavon a little, and took the spring from his step. But a few paces farther on, a meeting of another kind gave him back all his courage.
Some one, threadbare, shamefaced, dazzled by the light, was coming down the Boulevard. It was old Marestang, former senator, former minister, so deeply compromised in the affairs of the “Malta Biscuits,” that, in spite of his age, his services, and the great scandal of such a proceeding, he had been condemned to two years of prison, struck off the roll of the Legion of Honour, of which he had been one of the dignitaries. The affair was long ago; the poor wretch had just been let out of prison before his sentence had expired, lost, ruined, not having even the means to gild his trouble, for he had had to pay what he owed. Standing on the curb, he was waiting with bent head till the crowds of carriages should allow him to pass, embarrassed by this stoppage at the fullest spot of the boulevards between the passers-by and the sea of open carriages filled with familiar figures. Monpavon walking near him, caught his timid, uneasy look, imploring a recognition and hiding from it at the same time. The idea that one day he could humiliate himself thus, gave him a shudder of revolt. “Oh! that is not possible!” And straightening himself up and throwing out his chest, he kept on his way, firmer and more resolute than before.
M. de Monpavon walks to his death! He goes there by the long line of the boulevards, all on fire in the direction of the Madeleine, where he treads the elastic asphalt once more as a lounger, nose in the air, hands crossed behind. He has time; there is no hurry; he is master of the rendezvous. At each instant he smiles before him, waves a greeting from the ends of his fingers or makes the more formal bow we have just seen. Everything revives him, charms him, the noise of the watering-carts, the awnings of thecafes, pulled down to the middle of the foot-paths. The approach of death gives him the feelings of a convalescent accessible to all the delicacy, the hidden poesy of an exquisite hour of summer in the midst of Parisian life—of an exquisite hour—his last, and which he will prolong till night. No doubt it is for that reason that he passes the sumptuous establishment where he ordinarily takes his bath. He does not stop either at the Chinese Baths. He is too well known here. All Paris would know of it the same evening. There would be a scandal of bad taste, much coarse rumour about his death in the clubs and drawing-rooms. And the old sensualist, the well-bred man, wishes to spare himself this shame, to plunge and be swallowed up in the vague anonymity of suicide, like those soldiers who, after great battles, neither wounded, dead, or living, are simply put down as “missing.” That is why he has nothing on him which can be recognised, or furnish a hint to the inquiries of the police, why he seeks in this immense Paris the distant quarter where will open for him the terrible but oblivious confusion of the pauper’s grave. Already, since Monpavon has been walking, the aspect of the boulevard has changed. The crowd has become more compact, more active, and preoccupied, the houses smaller, marked with signs of commerce. When the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin are passed, with their overflow from the faubourgs, the provincial physiognomy of the town accentuates itself. The old beau no longer knows any one, and can congratulate himself on being unknown.
The shopkeepers looking curiously after him, with his fine linen, his well-cut coat, and good figure, take him for some famous actor strolling on the boulevard—witness of his first triumphs—before the play begins. The wind freshens, the twilight softens the distances, and while the long road behind him still glitters, it grows darker now at every step—like the past, with its retrospections to him who looks back and regrets. It seems to Monpavon that he is walking into blackness. He shivers a little, but does not falter, and continues to walk with erect head and chest thrown out.
M. de Monpavon walks to his death! Now he is entering the complicated labyrinth of noisy streets, where the clatter of the omnibus mingles with the thousand humming trades of the working city, where the heat of the factory chimneys loses itself in the fever of a whole people struggling against hunger. The air trembles, the gutters steam, the houses shake at the passing of the wagons, of the heavy drays rumbling round the narrow streets. On a sudden the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between the black shop of a charcoal-seller and the establishment of a packing-case maker, whose pine boards leaning on the walls give him a little shiver, there is a wide door, surmounted by its sign, the word BATHS on a dirty lantern. He enters, crosses a little damp garden where a jet of water weeps in a rockery. Here is the gloomy corner he was looking for. Who would ever believe that the Marquis de Monpavon had come there to cut his throat? The house is at the end, low, with green blinds and a glass door, with a sham air of a villa. He asks for a bath, and while it is being prepared he smokes his cigar at the window, with the noise of the water behind him, looks at the flower-bed of sparse lilac, and the high walls which inclose it.
At the side there is a great yard, the court-yard of a fire station, with a gymnasium, whose masts and swings, vaguely seen from below, look like gibbets. A bugle-call sounds in the yard, and its call takes the marquis thirty years back, reminds him of his campaigns in Algeria, the high ramparts of Constantine, the arrival of Mora at the regiment, and the duels, and the little parties. Ah! how well life began then! What a pity that those cursed cards—ps—ps—ps—Well, it’s something to have saved appearances.
“Your bath is ready, sir,” said the attendant.
At that moment, breathless and pale, Mme. Jenkins was entering Andre’s studio, where an instinct stronger than her will had brought her—the wish to embrace her child before she died. When she opened the door (he had given her a key) she was relieved to find that he was not there, and that she would have time to calm her excitement, increased as it was by the long walk to which she was so little accustomed. No one was there. But on the table was the little note which he always left when he went out, so that his mother, whose visits were becoming shorter and less frequent on account of the tyranny of Jenkins, could tell where he was, and wait for him or rejoin him easily. The two had not ceased to love each other deeply, tenderly, in spite of the cruelty of life which forced into the relations of mother and son the clandestine precautions of an intrigue.
“I am at my rehearsal,” said the note to-day, “I shall be back at seven.”
This attention of the son, whom she had not seen for three weeks, yet who persisted in expecting her all the same, brought to the mother’s eyes the flood of tears which was suffocating her. She felt as if she had just entered a new world. This little room was so pure, so quiet, so elevated. It kept the last rays of the setting sun on its windows, and seemed, with its bare walls, hewn from a corner of the sky. It was adorned only with one great portrait, hers, nothing but hers, smiling in the place of honour, and again, down there, on the table in a gilt frame. This humble little lodging, so light when all Paris was becoming dark, made an extraordinary impression on her, in spite of the poverty of its sparse furniture, scattered in two rooms, its common chintz, and its chimney garnished with two great bunches of hyacinths—those flowers which are hawked round the streets in barrowsful. What a good and worthy life she could have led by the side of her Andre! And in her mind’s eye she had arranged her bed in one corner, her piano in another, she saw herself giving lessons, and caring for the home to which she was adding her share of ease and courageous gaiety. How was it that she had not seen that her duty, the pride of her widowhood, was there? By what blindness, what unworthy weakness?
It was a great fault, no doubt, but one for which many excuses might be found in her easy and tender disposition, and the clever knavery of her accomplice, always talking of marriage, hiding from her that he himself was no longer free, and when at last obliged to confess it, painting such a picture of his dull life, of his despair, of his love, that the poor creature, so deeply compromised already, and incapable of one of those heroic efforts which raise the sufferer above the false situations, had given way at last, had accepted this double existence, so brilliant and so miserable, built on a lie which had lasted ten years. Ten years of intoxicating success and unspeakable unhappiness—ten years of singing, with the fear of exposure between each verse—where the least remark on irregular unions wounded her like an allusion—where the expression of her face had softened to the air of mild humility, of a guilty woman begging for pardon. Then the certainty that she would be deserted had come to spoil even these borrowed joys, had tarnished her luxury; and what misery, what sufferings borne in silence, what incessant humiliations, even to this last, the most terrible of all!
While she is thus sadly reviewing her life in the cool of the evening and the calm of the deserted house, a gust of happy laughter rose from the rooms beneath; and recalling the confidences of Andre, his last letter telling the great news, she tried to distinguish among all these fresh and limpid voices that of her daughter Elise, her son’s betrothed, whom she did not know, whom she would never know. This reflection added to the misery of her last moments, and loaded them with so much remorse and regret that, in spite of her will to be brave, she wept.
Night comes on little by little. Large shadows cover the sloping windows, where the immense depth of the sky seems to lose its colour, and to deepen into obscurity. The roofs seem to draw close together for the night, like soldiers preparing for the attack. The bells count the hours gravely, while the martins fly round their hidden nests, and the wind makes its accustomed invasion of the rubbish of the old wood-yard. To-night it sighs with the sound of the river, a shiver of the fog; it sighs of the river, to remind the unfortunate woman that it is there she must go. She shivers beforehand in her lace mantle. Why did she come here to reawaken her desire for a life impossible after the avowal she was forced to make? Hasty steps shake the staircase; the door opens precipitately; it is Andre. He is singing, happy, in a great hurry, for they are waiting dinner for him below. But, as he is striking the match, he feels that someone is in the room—a moving shadow among the shadows at rest.
“Who is there?”
Something answers him like a stifled laugh or a sob. He believes that it is one of his little neighbours, a plot of the children to amuse themselves. He draws near. Two hands, two arms, seize and surround him.
“It is I.”
And with a feverish voice, hurrying as if to assure herself, she tells him that she is setting out on a long journey, and that before going—
“A journey! And where are you going?”
“Oh, I do not know. We are going over there, a long way, on business in his own part of the world.”
“What! You will not be here for my play? It is in three days. And then, immediately after, my marriage. Come now, he cannot hinder you from coming to my marriage?”
She makes excuses, imagines reasons, but her hands burning between her son’s, and her altered voice, tell Andre that she is not speaking the truth. He is going to strike a light; she prevents him.
“No, no; it is useless. We are better without it. Besides, I have so much to get ready still. I must go away.”
They are both standing up, ready for the separation, but Andre will not let her go without telling him what is the matter, what tragic care is hollowing that fair face where the eyes—was it an effect of the dusk?—shone with a strange light.
“Nothing; no, nothing, I assure you. Only the idea of not being able to take part in your happiness, your triumph. At any rate, you know I love you; you don’t mistrust your mother, do you? I have never been a day without thinking of you: do the same—keep me in your heart. And now kiss me and let me go quickly. I have waited too long.”
Another minute and she would have the strength for what she had to do. She darts forward.
“No, you shall not go. I feel that something extraordinary is happening in your life which you do not want to tell. You are in some great trouble, I am sure. This man has done some infamous thing.”
“No, no. Let me go! Let me go!”
But he held her fast.
“Tell me, what is it? Tell me.”
Then, whispering in her ear, with a voice tender and low as a kiss:
“He has left you, hasn’t he?”
The wretched woman shivers, hesitates.
“Ask me nothing. I will say nothing. Adieu!”
He pressed her to his heart:
“What could you tell me that I do not know already, poor mother? You did not guess, then, why I left six months ago?”
“You know?”
“I know everything. And what has happened to you to-day I have foreseen for long, and hoped for.”
“Oh, wretch, wretch that I am, why did I come?”
“Because it is your home, because you owe me ten years of my mother. You see now that I must keep you.”
He said all this on his knees, before the sofa on which she had let herself fall, in a flood of tears, and the last painful sobs of her wounded pride. She wept thus for long, her child at her feet. And now the Joyeuse family, anxious because Andre did not come down, hurried up in a troop to look for him. It was an invasion of innocent faces, transparent gaiety, floating curls, modest dress, and over all the group shone the big lamp, the good old lamp with the vast shade which M. Joyeuse solemnly carried, as high, as straight as he could, with the gesture of a caryatid. Suddenly they stopped before this pale and sad lady, who looked, touched to the depths, at all this smiling grace, above all at Elise, a little behind the others, whose conscious air in this indiscreet visit points her out as thefiancee.
“Elise, embrace our mother and thank her. She has come to live with her children.”
There she is, caught in all these caressing arms, pressed against four little feminine hearts which have missed the shelter of a mother’s love for so long; there she is introduced, and so gently, into the luminous circle of the family lamp, widened to allow her to take her place there, to dry her eyes, to warm and brighten her spirit at this steady flame, even in this little studio near the roof, where just now the terrible storm blew so wildly.
He who breathes his last over there, lying in his blood-stained bath, has never known this sacred flame. Egoistical and hard, he has lived up to the last for show, throwing out his chest in a bubble of vanity. And this vanity was what was best in him. It alone had held him firm and upright so long; it alone clinched his teeth on the groans of his last agony. In the damp garden the water drips sadly. The bugle of the firemen sounds the curfew. “Go and look at No. 7,” says the mistress, “he will never have done with his bath.” The attendant goes, and utters a cry of fright, of horror: “Oh, madame, he is dead! But it is not the same man.” They go, but nobody can recognise the fine gentleman who entered a short time ago, in this death’s-head puppet, the head leaning on the edge of the bath, a face where the blood mingles with paint and powder, all the limbs lying in the supreme lassitude of a part played to the end—to the death of the actor. Two cuts of the razor across the magnificent chest, and all the factitious majesty has burst and resolved itself into this nameless horror, this heap of mud, of blood, of spoiled and dead flesh, where, unrecognisable, lies the man of appearances, the Marquis Louis-Marie-Agenor de Monpavon.