If you want simple and sincere feeling, if you would see overflowing affection, tenderness, laughter—the laughter born of great happiness which, at a tiny movement of the lips, is brought to the verge of tears—and the beautiful wild joy of youth illumined by bright eyes transparent to the very depths of the souls behind them—all these things you may find this Sunday morning in a house that you know of, a new house, down yonder, right at the end of the old faubourg. The glass door on the ground floor shines more brightly than usual. More gaily than ever dance the letters over the door, and from the open windows comes the sound of glad cries, flowing from a stream of happiness.
“Accepted! it is accepted! Oh, what good luck! Henriette, Elise, do come here! M. Maranne’s play is accepted!”
Andre heard the news yesterday. Cardailhac, the manager of theNouveautes, sent for him to inform him that his play was to be produced immediately—that it would be put on next month. They passed the evening discussing scenic arrangements and the distribution of parts; and, as it was too late to knock at his neighbour’s door when he got home from the theatre, the happy author waited for the morning in feverish impatience, and then, as soon as he heard people stirring below and the shutters open with a click against the house-front, he made haste to go down to announce the good news to his friends. Just now they are all assembled together, the young ladies in prettydeshabille, their hair hastily twisted up, and M. Joyeuse, whom the announcement had surprised in the midst of shaving, presenting under his embroidered night-cap a strange face divided into two parts, one side shaved, the other not. But Andre Maranne is the most excited, for you know what the acceptance ofRevoltmeans for him; what was agreed between them and Bonne Maman. The poor fellow looks at her as if to find an encouragement in her eyes; and the rather mischievous, kind eyes seem to say, “Make the experiment, in any case. What is the risk?” To give himself courage he looks also at Mlle. Elise, pretty as a flower, with her long eyelashes drooped. At last, making up his mind:
“M. Joyeuse,” said he thickly, “I have a very serious communication to make to you.”
M. Joyeuse expresses astonishment.
“A communication? Ah,mon Dieu, you alarm me!”
And lowering his voice:
“Are the girls in the way?”
“No. Bonne Maman knows what I mean. Mlle. Elise also must have some suspicion of it. It is only the children.”
Mlle. Henriette and her sister are asked to retire, which they immediately do, the one with a dignified and annoyed air, like a true daughter of the Saint-Amands, the other, the young Chinese Yaia, hardly hiding a wild desire to laugh.
Thereupon a great silence; after which, the lover begins his little story.
I quite believe that Mlle. Elise has some suspicion in her mind, for as soon as their young neighbour spoke of a communication, she drew herAnsart et Rendufrom her pocket and plunged precipitately into the adventures of somebody surnamed the Hutin, thrilling reading which makes the book tremble in her hands. There is reason for trembling, certainly, before the bewilderment, the indignant stupefaction into which M. Joyeuse receives this request for his daughter’s hand.
“Is it possible? How has it happened? What an extraordinary event! Who could ever have suspected such a thing?”
And suddenly the good old man burst into a great roar of laughter. Well, no, it is not true. He had heard of the affair; knew about it, a long time ago.
Her father knew all about it! Bonne Maman had betrayed them then! And before the reproachful glances cast in her direction, the culprit comes forward smiling:
“Yes, my dears, it is I. The secret was too much for me. I found I could not keep it to myself alone. And then, father is so kind—one cannot hide anything from him.”
As she says this she throws her arms round the little man’s neck; but there is room enough for two, and when Mlle. Elise in her turn takes refuge there, there is still an affectionate, fatherly hand stretched out towards him whom M. Joyeuse considers thenceforward as his son. Silent embraces, long looks meeting each other full of emotion, blessed moments that one would like to hold forever by the fragile tips of their wings. There is chat, and gentle laughter when certain details are recalled. M. Joyeuse tells how the secret was revealed to him in the first instance by tapping spirits, one day when he was alone in Andre’s apartment. “How is business going, M. Maranne?” the spirits had inquired, and he himself had replied in Maranne’s absence: “Fairly well, for the season, Sir Spirit.” The little man repeats, “Fairly well for the season,” in a mischievous way, while Mlle. Elise, quite confused at the thought that it was with her father that she talked that day, disappears under her fair curls.
After the first stress of emotion they talk more seriously. It is certain that Mme. Joyeuse,neede Saint-Amand, would never have consented to this marriage. Andre Maranne is not rich, still less noble; but the old accountant, luckily, has not the same ideas of grandeur that his wife possessed. They love each other; they are young, healthy, and good-looking—qualities that in themselves constitute fine dowries, without involving any heavy registration fees at the notary’s. The new household will be installed on the floor above. The photography will be continued, unlessRevoltshould produce enormous receipts. (The Visionary may be trusted to see to that.) In any case, the father will still remain near them; he has a good place at his stockbroker’s office, some expert business in the courts; provided that the little ship continue to sail in deep enough water, all will go well, with the aid of wave, wind, and star.
Only one question preoccupies M. Joyeuse: “Will Andre’s parents consent to this marriage? How will Dr. Jenkins, so rich, so celebrated, take it?”
“Let us not speak of that man,” said Andre, turning pale; “he is a wretch to whom I owe nothing—who is nothing to me.”
He stops, embarrassed by this explosion of anger, which he was unable to restrain and cannot explain, and goes on more gently:
“My mother, who comes to see me sometimes in spite of the prohibition laid upon her, was the first to be told of our plans. She already loves Mlle. Elise as her daughter. You will see, mademoiselle, how good she is, and how beautiful and charming. What a misfortune that she belongs to such a wicked man, who tyrannizes over her, and tortures her even to the point of forbidding her to utter her son’s name.”
Poor Maranne heaves a sign that speaks volumes on the great grief which he hides in the depths of his heart. But what sadness would not have been vanquished in presence of that dear face lighted up with its fair curls and the radiant perspective of the future? These serious questions having been settled, they are able to open the door and recall the two exiles. In order to avoid filling their little heads with thoughts above their age, it has been agreed to say nothing about the prodigious event, to tell them nothing except that they have all to make haste and dress, breakfast still more quickly, so as to be able to spend the afternoon in the Bois, where Maranne will read his play to them, before they go on to Suresnes to have dinner at Kontzen’s: a whole programme of delights in honour of the acceptance ofRevolt, and of another piece of good news which they will hear later.
“Ah, really—what is it, then?” ask the two little girls, with an innocent air.
But if you fancy they don’t know what is in the air, if you think that when Mlle. Elise used to give three raps on the ceiling they imagined that it was for information on business, you are more ingenuous even thanle pereJoyeuse.
“That’s all right—that’s all right, children; go and dress, in any case.”
Then there begins another refrain:
“What frock must I put on, Bonne Maman—the gray?”
“Bonne Maman, there is a string off my hat.”
“Bonne Maman, my child, have I no more starched cravats left?”
For ten minutes the charming grandmother is besieged with questions and entreaties. Every one needs her help in some way; it is she who had the keys of everything, she who gives out the pretty, white, fine goffered linen, the embroidered handkerchiefs, the best gloves, all the dainty things which, taken out from drawers and wardrobes, spread over the bed, fill a house with a bright Sunday gaiety.
The workers, the people with tasks to fulfil, alone know that delight which returns each week consecrated by the customs of a nation. For these prisoners of the week, the almanac with its closed prison-like gratings opens at regular intervals into luminous spaces, with breaths of refreshing air. It is Sunday, the day that seems so long to fashionable folk, to the Parisians of the boulevard whose habits it disturbs, so gloomy to people far from their homes and relatives, that constitutes for a multitude of human beings the only recompense, the one aim of the desperate efforts of six days of toil. Neither rain nor hail, nothing makes any difference, nothing will prevent them from going out, from closing behind them the door of the deserted workshop, of the stuffy little lodging. But when the springtime is come, when the May sunshine glitters on it as this morning, and it can deck itself out in gay colours, then indeed Sunday is the holiday of holidays.
If one would know it well, it must be seen especially in the working quarters of the town, in those gloomy streets which it lights up and enlarges by closing the shops, keeping in their sheds the heavy drays and trucks, leaving the space free for wandering bands of children washed and in their Sunday clothes, and for games of battledore and shuttlecock played amid the great circlings of the swallows beneath some porch of old Paris. It must be seen in the densely populated, feverishly toiling suburbs, where, as soon as morning is come, you may feel it hovering, resposeful and sweet, in the silence of the factories, passing with the ringing of church-bells and that sharp whistle of the railways, and filling the horizon, all around the outskirts of the city, with an immense song, as it were, of departure and of deliverance. Then one understands it and loves it.
O Sunday of Paris, Sunday of the toilers and the humble, often have I cursed thee without reason, I have poured whole streams of abusive ink over thy noisy and extravagant joys, over the dust of railway stations filled by thy uproar and the maddening omnibuses that thou takest by assault, over thy tavern songs bawled everywhere from carts adorned with green and pink dresses, on thy barrel-organs grinding out their tunes beneath the balconies of deserted court-yards; but to-day, abjuring my errors, I exalt thee, and I bless thee for all the joy and relief thou givest to courageous and honest labour, for the laughter of the children who greet thee with acclamation, the pride of mothers happy to dress their little ones in their best clothes in thy honour, for the dignity thou dost preserve in the homes of the poorest, the glorious raiment set aside for thee at the bottom of the old shaky chest of drawers; I bless thee especially by reason of all the happiness thou hast brought that morning to the great new house in the old faubourg.
Toilettes having been completed, thedejeunerfinished, taken on the thumb, as they say—and you can imagine what quantity these young ladies’ thumbs would carry—they came to put on their hats before the mirror in the drawing-room. Bonne Maman threw around her supervising glance, inserted a pin here, retied a ribbon there, straightened her father’s cravat; but while all this little world was stamping with impatience, beckoned out of doors by the beauty of the day, there came a ring at the bell, echoing through the apartment and disturbing their gay proceedings.
“Suppose we don’t open the door?” propose the children.
And what a relief, with a cry of delight, they see their friend Paul come in!
“Quick! quick! Come and let us tell you the good news.”
He knew well, before any of them, that the play had been accepted. He had had a good deal of trouble to get it read by Cardailhac, who, the moment he saw its “short lines,” as he called verse, wished to send the manuscript to the Levantine and hermasseur, as he was wont to do in the case of all beginners in the writing of drama. But Paul was careful not to refer to his own intervention. As for the other event, the one of which nothing was said, on account of the children, he guessed it easily by the trembling greeting of Maranne, whose fair mane was standing straight up over his forehead by reason of the poet’s two hands having been pushed through it so many times, a thing he always did in his moments of joy, by the slightly embarrassed demeanour of Elise, by the triumphant airs of M. Joyeuse, who was standing very erect in his new summer clothes, with all the happiness of his children written on his face.
Bonne Maman alone preserved her usual peaceful air; but one noticed, in the eager alacrity with which she forestalled her sister’s wants, a certain attention still more tender than before, an anxiety to make her look pretty. And it was delicious to watch the girl of twenty as she busied herself about the adornment of others, without envy, without regret, with something of the gentle renunciation of a mother welcoming the young love of her daughter in memory of a happiness gone by. Paul saw this; he was the only one who did see it; but while admiring Aline, he asked himself sadly if in that maternal heart there would ever be place for other affections, for preoccupations outside the tranquil and bright circle wherein Bonne Maman presided so prettily over the evening work.
Love is, as one knows, a poor blind creature, deprived of hearing and speech, and only led by presentiments, divinations, the nervous faculties of a sick man. It is pitiable indeed to see him wandering, feeling his way, constantly making false steps, passing his hands over the supports by which he guides himself with the distrustful awkwardness of the infirm. At the very moment when Paul was doubting Aline’s sensibility, in announcing to his friends that he was about to start on a journey which would occupy several days, perhaps several weeks, did not remark the girl’s sudden paleness, did not hear the distressed cry that escaped her lips:
“You are going away?”
He was going away, going to Tunis, very much troubled at leaving his poor Nabob in the midst of the pack of furious wolves that surrounded him. Mora’s protection, however, gave him some reassurance; and then, the journey in question was absolutely necessary.
“And the Territorial?” asked the old accountant, ever returning to the subject in his mind. “How are things standing there? I see Jansoulet’s name still at the head of the board. You cannot get him out, then, from that Ali-Baba’s cave? Take care—take care!”
“Ah, I know all about that, M. Joyeuse. But, to leave it with honour, money is needed, much money, a fresh sacrifice of two or three millions, and we have not got them. That is exactly the reason why I am going to Tunis to try to wrest from the rapacity of the Bey a slice of that great fortune which he is retaining in his possession so unjustly. At present I have still some chance of succeeding, while later on, perhaps—”
“Go, then, and make haste, my dear lad, and if you return, as I wish you may, with a heavy bag, see that you deal first of all with the Paganetti gang. Remember that one shareholder less patient than the rest has the power to smash the whole thing up, to demand an inquiry; and you know what the inquiry would reveal. Now I come to think of it,” added M. Joyeuse, whose brow had contracted a frown, “I am even surprised that Hemerlingue, in his hatred for you, has not secretly brought up a few shares.”
He was interrupted by the chorus of imprecations which the name of Hemerlingue raised from all the young people, who detested the fat banker for the injury he had done their father, and for the ill-will he bore that good Nabob, who was adored in the house through Paul de Gery.
“Hemerlingue, the heartless monster! Wretch! That wicked man!”
But amid all these exclamations, the Visionary was following up his idea of the fat baron becoming a shareholder in the Territorial for the purpose of dragging his enemy into the courts. And you may imagine the stupefaction of Andre Maranne, a complete stranger to the whole affair, when he saw M. Joyeuse turn to him, and, with face purple and swollen with rage, point his finger at him, with these terrible words:
“The greatest rascal, after all, in this affair, is you, sir!”
“Oh, papa, papa! what are you saying?”
“Eh, what? Ah, forgive me, my dear Andre. I was fancying myself in the examining magistrate’s private room, face to face with that rogue. It is my confounded brain that is always running away with me.”
All broke into uproarious laughter, which escaped into the outer air through the open windows, and went to mingle with the thousand noises of moving vehicles and people in their Sunday clothes going up the Avenue des Ternes. The author ofRevolttook advantage of the diversion to ask whether they were not soon going to start. It was late—the good places would be taken in the Bois.
“To the Bois de Boulogne, on Sunday!” exclaimed Paul de Gery.
“Oh, our Bois is not yours,” replied Aline with a smile. “Come with us, and you will see.”
Did it ever happen to you, in the course of a solitary and contemplative walk, to lie down on your face in the undergrowth of a forest, amid that vegetation which springs up, various and manifold, through the fallen autumn leaves, and allow your eyes to wander along the level of the ground before you? Little by little the sense of height is lost, the interwoven branches of the oaks above your head form an inaccessible sky, and you behold a new forest extending beneath the other, opening its deep avenues filled by a green and mysterious light, and formed of tiny shrubs or root fibres taking the appearance of the stems of sugar-canes, of severely graceful palm-trees, of delicate cups containing a drop of water, of many-branched candlesticks bearing little yellow lights which the wind blows on as it passes. And the miraculous thing is, that beneath these light shadows live minute plants and thousand of insects whose existence, observed from so near at hand, is a revelation to you of all the mysteries. An ant, bending like a wood-cutter under his burden, drags after it a splinter of bark bigger than itself; a beetle makes its way along a blade of grass thrown like a bridge from one stem to another; while beneath a lofty bracken standing isolated in the middle of a patch of velvety moss, a little blue or red insect waits, with antennae at attention, for another little insect on its way through some desert path over there to arrive at the trysting-place beneath the giant tree. It is a small forest beneath a great one, too near the soil to be noticed by its big neighbours, too humble, too hidden to be reached by its great orchestra of song and storm.
A similar revelation awaits in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind those sanded drives, watered and clean, whereon files of carriage-wheels moving slowly round the lake trace all day long a worn and mechanical furrow, behind that admirably set scene of trimmed green hedges, of captive water, of flowery rocks, the true Bois, a wild wood with perennial undergrowth, grows and flourishes, forming impenetrable recesses traversed by narrow paths and bubbling springs.
This is the Bois of the children, the Bois of the humble, the little forest beneath the great one. And Paul, who knew only the long avenues of the aristocratic Parisian promenades, the sparkling lake perceived from the depths of a carriage or from the top of a coach in a drive back from Longchamps, was astonished to see the deliciously sheltered nook to which his friends had led him. It was on the banks of a pond lying like a mirror under willow-trees, covered with water-lilies, with here and there large white shimmering spaces where sunbeams fell and lay on the bright surface.
On the sloping bank, sheltered by the boughs of trees where the leaves were already thick, they sat down to listen to the reading of the play, and the pretty, attentive faces, the skirts lying puffed out over the grass, made one think of some Decameron, more innocent and chaste, in a peaceful atmosphere. To complete this pleasant country scene, two windmill-sails seen through an opening in the branches were revolving over in the direction of Suresnes, while of the dazzling and luxurious vision to be met at every cross-roads in the Bois there reached them only a confused and perpetual murmur, which one ended by ceasing to notice. The poet’s voice alone rose in the silence, the verses fell on the air tremblingly, repeated below the breath by other moved lips, and stifled sounds of approbation greeted them, with shudders at the tragic passages. Bonne Maman was even seen to wipe away a big tear. That comes, you see, from having no embroidery in one’s hand!
His first work! That was what theRevoltwas for Andre, that first work always too exuberant and ornate, into which the author throws, to begin with, whole arrears of ideas and opinions, pent up like the waters of a river-lock; that first work which is often the richest if not the best of its writer’s productions. As for the fate that awaited it, no one could predict it; and the uncertainty that hovered over the reading of the drama added to its own emotion that of each auditor, the hopes, all arrayed in white, of Mlle. Elise, the fantastic hallucinations of M. Joyeuse, and the more positive desires of Aline as she installed in advance the modest fortune of her sister in the nest of an artist’s household, beaten by the winds but envied by the crowd.
Ah, if one of those idle people, taking a turn for the hundredth time round the lake, overwhelmed by the monotony of his habitual promenade, had come and parted the branches, how surprised he would have been at this picture! But would he ever have suspected how much passion, how many dreams, what poetry and hope there could be contained in that little green corner, hardly larger than the shadow a fern throws on the moss?
“You were right; I did not know the Bois,” said Paul in a low voice to Aline, who was leaning on his arm.
They were following a narrow path overarched by the boughs of trees, and as they talked were moving forward at a quick pace, well in advance of the others. It was not, however,pereKontzen’s terrace nor his appetizing fried dishes that drew them on. No; the beautiful lines which they had just heard had carried them away, lifting them to great heights, and they had not yet come down to earth again. They walked straight on towards the ever-retreating end of the road, which opened out at its extremity into a luminous glory, a mass of sunbeams, as if all the sunshine of that beautiful day lay waiting for them where it had fallen on the outskirts of the wood. Never had Paul felt so happy. That light arm that lay on his arm, that child’s step by which his own was guided, these alone would have made life sweet and pleasant to him, no less than this walk over the mossy turf of a green path. He would have told the girl so, simply, as he felt it, had he not feared to alarm that confidence which Aline placed in him, no doubt because of the sentiments which she knew he possessed for another woman, and which seemed to hold at a distance from them every thought of love.
Suddenly, right before them, against the bright background, a group of persons riding on horseback came in sight, at first vague and indistinct, then appearing as a man and a woman, handsomely mounted, and entered the mysterious path among the bars of gold, the leafy shadows, the thousand dots of light with which the ground was strewn, and which, displaced by their progress as they cantered along, rose and covered them with flowery patterns from the chests of the horses to the blue veil of the lady rider. They came along slowly, capriciously, and the two young people, who had drawn back into the copse, could see pass close by them, with a clinking of bits proudly shaken and white with foam as though after a furious gallop, two splendid animals carrying a pair of human beings brought very near together by the narrowing of the path; he, supporting with one arm the supple figure moulded in a dark cloth habit; she, with a hand resting on the shoulder of her cavalier and her small head seen in retreating profile beneath the half-dropped tulle of her veil, resting on it tenderly. This embrace, half disturbed by the impatience of the horses, that kiss on which their reins became confused, that passion which stalked in broad day through the Bois with so great a contempt for public opinion, would have been enough to betray the duke and Felicia, if the haughty and charming mein of the lady and the aristocratic ease of her companion, his pallor slightly tinged with colour as the result of his ride and of Jenkins’s miraculous pearls, had not already betrayed them.
It is not an extraordinary thing to meet Mora in the Bois on a Sunday. Like his master, he loved to show himself to the Parisians, to advertise his popularity with all sections of the public; and then the duchess never accompanied him on that day, and he could make a halt quite at his ease in that little villa of Saint-James, known to all Paris, whose red towers, outlined among the trees schoolboys used to point out to each other in whispers. But only a mad woman, a daring affronter of society like this Felicia, could have dreamt of advertising herself like this, with the loss of her reputation forever. A sound of hoofs dying away in the distance, of shrubs brushed in passing; a few plants that had been pressed down and were straightening themselves again; branches pushed out of the way resuming their places—that was all that remained of the apparition.
“You saw?” said Paul; speaking first.
She had seen, and she had understood, notwithstanding the candour of her innocence, for a blush spread over her features, one of those feelings of shame experienced for the faults of those we love.
“Poor Felicia!” she said in a low voice, pitying not only the unhappy woman who had just passed them, but also him whom this defection must have smitten to the very heart. The truth is that Paul de Gery had felt no surprise at this meeting, which justified previous suspicions and the instinctive aversion which he had felt for Felicia at their dinner some days before. But he found it pleasant to be pitied by Aline, to feel the compassion in that voice becoming more tender, in that arm leaning upon his. Like children who pretend to be ill for the sake of the pleasure of being fondled by their mother, he allowed his consoler to strive to appease his grief, speaking to him of his brothers, of the Nabob, and of his forthcoming trip to Tunis—a fine country, they said. “You must write to us often, and long letters about the interesting things on the journey, the place you stay in. For one can see those who are far away better when one imagines the kind of place they are inhabiting.”
So talking, they reached the end of the bowered path terminating in an immense open glade through which there moved the tumult of the Bois, carriages and riders on horseback alternating with each other, and the crowd at that distance seeming to be tramping through a flaky dust which blended it into a single confused herd. Paul slackened his pace, emboldened by this last minute of solitude.
“Do you know what I am thinking of?” he said, taking Aline’s hand. “I am thinking that it would be a pleasure to be unhappy so as to be comforted by you. But however precious your pity may be to me, I cannot allow you to waste your compassion on an imaginary pain. No, my heart is not broken, but more alive, on the contrary, and stronger. And if I were to tell you what miracle it is that has preserved it, what talisman—”
He held out before her eyes a little oval frame in which was set a simple profile, a pencil outline wherein she recognised herself, surprised to see herself so pretty, reflected, as it were, in the magic mirror of Love. Tears came into her eyes without her knowing the reason, an open spring whose stream beat within her chaste breast. He continued:
“This portrait belongs to me. It was drawn for me. And yet, at the moment of starting on this journey I have a scruple. I do not wish to have it except from yourself. Take it, then, and if you find a worthier friend, some one who loves you with a love deeper and more loyal than mine, I am willing that you should give it to him.”
She had regained her composure, and looking de Gery full in the face with a serious tenderness, she said:
“If I listened only to my heart, I should feel no hesitation about my reply: for, if you love me as you say, I am sure that I love you too. But I am not free; I am not alone in the world. Look yonder.”
She pointed to her father and her sisters, who were beckoning to them in the distance and hastening to come up with them.
“Well, and I myself?” answered Paul quickly. “Have I not similar duties, similar responsibilities? We are like two widowed heads of families. Will you not love mine as much as I love yours?”
“True? is it true? You will let me stay with them? I shall be Aline for you, and Bonne Maman for all our children? Oh! then,” exclaimed the dear creature, beaming with joy, “there is my portrait—I give it to you! And all my soul with it, too, and forever.”
About a week after his adventure with Moessard, that new complication in the terrible muddle of his affairs, Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber, one Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to Mora’s house. He had not paid a visit there since the scuffle in the Rue Royale, and the idea of finding himself in the duke’s presence gave him, through his thick skin, something of the panic that agitates a boy on his way upstairs to see the head-master after a fight in the schoolroom. However, the embarrassment of this first interview had to be gone through. They said in the committee-rooms that Le Merquier had completed his report, a masterpiece of logic and ferocity, that it meant an invalidation, and that he was bound to carry it with a high hand unless Mora, so powerful in the Assembly, should himself intervene and give him his word of command. A serious matter, and one that made the Nabob’s cheeks flush, while in the curved mirrors of his brougham he studied his appearance, his courtier’s smiles, trying to think out a way of effecting a brilliant entry, one of those strokes of good-natured effrontery which had brought him fortune with Ahmed, and which served him likewise in his relations with the French ambassador. All this accompanied by beatings of the heart and by those shudders between the shoulder-blades which precede decisive actions, even when these are settled within a gilded chariot.
When he arrived at the mansion by the river, he was much surprised to notice that the porter on the quay, as on the days of great receptions, was sending carriages up the Rue de Lille, in order to keep a door free for those leaving. Rather anxious, he wondered, “What is there going on?” Perhaps a concert given by the duchess, a charity bazaar, some festivity from which Mora might have excluded him on account of the scandal of his last adventure. And this anxiety was augmented still further when Jansoulet, after having passed across the principal court-yard amid a din of slamming doors and a dull and continuous rumble of wheels over the sand, found himself—after ascending the steps—in the immense entrance-hall filled by a crowd which did not extend beyond any of the doors leading to the rooms; centring its anxious going and coming around the porter’s table, where all the famous names of fashionable Paris were being inscribed. It seemed as though a disastrous gust of wind had gone through the house, carrying off a little of its calm, and allowing disquiet and danger to filter into its comfort.
“What a misfortune!”
“Ah! it is terrible.”
“And so suddenly!”
Such were the remarks that people were exchanging as they met.
An idea flashed into Jansoulet’s mind:
“Is the duke ill?” he inquired of a servant.
“Ah, monsieur, he is dying! He will not live through the night!”
If the roof of the palace had fallen in upon his head he would not have been more utterly stunned. Red lights flashed before his eyes, he tottered, and let himself drop into a seat on a velvet-covered bench beside the great cage of monkeys. The animals, over-excited by all this bustle, suspended by their tails, by their little long-thumbed hands, were hanging to the bars in groups, and came, inquisitive and frightened, to make the most ludicrous grimaces at this big, stupefied man as he sat staring at the marble floor, repeating aloud to himself, “I am ruined! I am ruined!”
The duke was dying. He had been seized suddenly with illness on the Sunday after his return from the Bois. He had felt intolerable burnings in his bowels, which passed through his whole body, searing as with a red-hot iron, and alternating with a cold lethargy and long periods of coma. Jenkins, summoned at once, did not say much, but ordered certain sedatives. The next day the pains came on again with greater intensity and followed by the same icy torpor, also more accentuated, as if life, torn up by the roots, were departing in violent spasms. Among those around him, none was greatly concerned. “The day after a visit to Saint-James Villa,” was muttered in the antechamber, and Jenkins’s handsome face preserved its serenity. He had spoken to two or three people, in the course of his morning rounds, of the duke’s indisposition, and that so lightly that nobody had paid much attention to the matter.
Mora himself, notwithstanding his extreme weakness, although he felt his head absolutely blank, and, as he said, “not an idea anywhere,” was far from suspecting the gravity of his condition. It was only on the third day, on waking in the morning, that the sight of a tiny stream of blood, which had trickled from his mouth over his beard and the stained pillow, had frightened this fastidious man, who had a horror of all human ills, especially sickness, and now saw it arrive stealthily with its pollutions, its weaknesses, and the loss of physical self-control, the first concession made to death. Monpavon, entering the room behind Jenkins, surprised the anxious expression of the great seigneur faced by the terrible truth, and at the same time was horrified by the ravages made in a few hours upon Mora’s emaciated face, in which all the wrinkles of age, suddenly evident, were mingled with lines of suffering, and those muscular depressions which tell of serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside, while the duke’s toilet necessaries were carried to him—a whole apparatus of crystal and silver contrasting with the yellow pallor of the invalid.
“Look here, Jenkins, the duke is very ill.”
“I am afraid so,” said the Irishman, in a low voice.
“But what is the matter with him?”
“What he wanted,parbleu!” answered the other in a fury. “One cannot be young at his age with impunity. This intrigue will cost him dear.”
Some evil passion was getting the better of him but he subdued it immediately, and, puffing out his cheeks as though his head were full of water, he sighed deeply as he pressed the old nobleman’s hands.
“Poor duke! poor duke! Ah, my friend, I am most unhappy!”
“Take care, Jenkins,” said Monpavon coldly, disengaging his hands, “you are assuming a terrible responsibility. What! is the duke as bad as that?—ps—ps—ps—Will you see nobody? You have arranged no consultation?”
The Irishman raised his hands as if to say, “What good can it do?”
The other insisted. It was absolutely necessary that Brisset, Jousseline, Bouchereau, all the great physicians should be called in.
“But you will frighten him.”
De Monpavon expanded his chest, the one pride of the old broken-down charger.
“Mon Cher, if you had seen Mora and me in the trenches of Constantine—ps—ps. Never looked away. We don’t know fear. Give notice to your colleagues. I undertake to inform him.”
The consultation took place in the evening with great privacy, the duke having insisted on this from a singular sense of shame produced by his illness, by that suffering which discrowned him, making him the equal of other men. Like those African kings who hide themselves in the recesses of their palaces to die, he would have wished that men should believe him carried off, transfigured, become a god. Then, too, he dreaded above all things the expressions of pity, the condolences, the compassion with which he knew that his sick-bed would be surrounded; the tears because he suspected them to be hypocritical, and because, if sincere, they displeased him still more by their grimacing ugliness.
He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, everything that could move him to emotion or disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life. Every one knew this, and the order was to keep away from him the distress, the misery, which from one end of France to the other flowed towards Mora as to one of those forest refuges lighted during the night at which all wanderers may knock. Not that he was hard to the unfortunate; perhaps he may have been too easily moved to the pity which he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong, and, refusing it to others, he dreaded it for himself, for the integrity of his courage. Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis thevalet de chambre, knew of the visit of those three personages introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State’s apartments. The duchess herself was ignorant of it. Separated from her husband by the barriers frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of the great world between married people, she believed him slightly indisposed, nervous more than anything else; and had so little suspicion of a catastrophe that at the very hour when the doctors were mounting the great, dimly lit staircase at the other end of the palace, her private apartments were being lit up for a girls’ dance, one of thosebals blancswhich the ingenuity of the idle world had begun to make fashionable in Paris.
This consultation was like all others: solemn and sinister. Doctors no longer wear their great periwigs of the time of Moliere, but they still assume the same gravity of the priests of Isis, of astrologers bristling with cabalistic formulae pronounced with sage noddings of the head, to which, for comical effect, there is only wanting the high pointed cap of former days. In this case the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from its setting. In the vast bed-chamber, transformed, heightened, as it were, in dignity by the immobility of the owner, these grave figures came forward round the bed on which the light was concentrated, illuminating amid the whiteness of the linen and the purple of the hangings a face worn into hollows, pale from lips to eyes, but wrapped in serenity as in a veil, as in a shroud. The consultants spoke in low tones, cast furtive glances as each other, or exchanged some barbarous word, remaining impassive, without even a frown. But this mute and reticent expression of the doctor and magistrate, this solemnity with which science and justice hedge themselves about to hide their frailty or ignorance, had no power to move the duke.
Sitting up in bed, he continued to talk quietly, with the upward glance of the eye in which it seems as if thought rises before it finally takes wing, and Monpavon coldly followed his cue, hardening himself against his own emotion, taking from his friend a last lesson in “form”; while Louis, in the background, stood leaning against the door leading to the duchess’s apartment, the spectre of a silent domestic in whom detached indifference is a duty.
The most agitated, nervous man present was Jenkins. Full of obsequious attentions for his “illustrious colleagues,” as he called them, with his lips pursed up, he hung round their consultation and attempted to take part in it; but the colleagues kept him at a distance and hardly answered him, as Fagon—the Fagon of Louis XIV—might have addressed some empiric summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially had black looks for the inventor of the Jenkins pearls. Finally, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they retired to deliberate among themselves in a little room with lacquered ceilings and walls, filled by an assortment ofbric-a-bracthe triviality of which contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.
Solemn moment! Anguish of the accused awaiting the decision of his judges—life, death, reprieve, or pardon!
With his long, white hand Mora continued to stroke his mustache with a favourite gesture, to talk with Monpavon of the club, of the foyer of theVarietes, asking news of the Chamber, how matters stood with regard to the Nabob’s election—all this coldly, without the least affectation. Then, tired, no doubt, or fearing lest his glance, constantly drawn to that curtain opposite him, from behind which the sentence was to come presently, should betray the emotion which he must have felt in the depths of his soul, he laid his head on the pillow, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the return of the doctors. Still the same cold and sinister faces, veritable physiognomies of judges having on their lips the terrible decree of human fate, the final word which the courts pronounce fearlessly, but which the doctors, whose science it mocks, elude, and express in periphrases.
“Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?” demanded the sick man.
There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart, eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation. In vain had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau had not spared him. It was not the first of the Irishman’s clients whom he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion, and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send the “dealer in cantharides” to retail his drugs on the other side of the Channel.
The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the true issue of the consultation. He abstained, therefore, from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most hopeful things they announced to him. But when Monpavon returned, he summoned him to his bedside, and, confronted by the lie visible even beneath the make-up of the decrepit old man, remarked:
“Oh, you know—no humbug! From you to me, truth. What do they say? I am in a very bad way, eh?”
Monpavon prefaced his reply with a significant silence; then brutally, cynically, for fear of breaking down as he spoke:
“Done for, my poor Augustus!”
The duke received the sentence full in the face without flinching.
“Ah!” he said simply.
He pulled his mustache with a mechanical gesture, but his features remained motionless. And immediately he made up his mind.
That the poor wretch who dies in a hospital, without home or family, without other name than the number of his bed, that he should accept death as a deliverance or bear it as his last trial; that the old peasant who passes away, bent double, worn out, in his dark and smoky cellar, that he should depart without regret, savouring in advance the taste of that fresh earth which he has so many times dug over and over—that is intelligible. And yet how many, even among such, cling to existence despite all their misery! how many there are who cry, holding on to their sordid furniture and to their rags, “I don’t want to die!” and depart with nails broken and bleeding from that supreme wrench. But here there was nothing of the kind.
To possess all, and to lose all. What a catastrophe!
In the first silence of that dreadful moment, while he heard the sound of the music coming faintly from the duchess’s ball at the other end of the palace, whatever attached this man to life, power, honour, wealth, all that splendour must have seemed to him already far away and in an irrevocable past. A courage of a quite exceptional temper must have been required to bear up under such a blow without any spur of personal vanity. No one was present save the friend, the doctor, the servant, three intimates acquainted with all his secrets; the lights moved back, left the bed in shadow, and the dying man might quite well have turned his face to the wall in lamentation of his own fate without being noticed. But not an instant of weakness, nor of useless demonstration. Without breaking a branch of the chestnut-trees in the garden, without withering a flower on the great staircase of the palace, his footsteps muffled on the thick pile of the carpets, Death had opened the door of this man of power and signed to him “Come!” And he answered simply, “I am ready.” The true exit of a man of the world, unforeseen, rapid, and discreet.
Man of the world! Mora was nothing if not that. Passing through life masked, gloved, breast-plated—breast-plate of white satin, such as the masters of fence wear on great days; preserving his fighting dress immaculate and clean; sacrificing everything to that irreproachable exterior which with him did duty for armour; he had determined on hisroleas statesman in the passage from the drawing-room to a wider scene, and made, indeed, a statesman of the first rank on the strength alone of his qualities as a man about town, the art of listening and of smiling, knowledge of men, scepticism, and coolness. That coolness did not leave him at the supreme moment.
With eyes fixed on the time, so short, which still remained to him—for the dark visitor was in a hurry, and he could feel on his face the draught from the door which he had not closed behind him—his one thought now was to occupy the time well, to satisfy all the obligations of an end like his, which must leave no devotion unrecompensed nor compromise any friend. He gave a list of certain persons whom he wished to see and who were sent for immediately, summoned the head of his cabinet, and, as Jenkins ventured the opinion that it was a great fatigue for him, said:
“Can you guarantee that I shall wake to-morrow morning? I feel strong at this moment; let me take advantage of it.”
Louis inquired whether the duchess should be informed. The duke, before replying, listened to the sounds of music that reached his room through the open windows from the little ball, sounds that seemed prolonged in the night on an invisible bow, then answered:
“Let us wait a little. I have something to finish.”
They brought to his bedside the little lacquered table that he might himself sort out the letters which were to be destroyed; but feeling his strength give way, he called Monpavon.
“Burn everything,” said he to him in a faint voice; and seeing him move towards the fireplace, where a fire was burning despite the warmth of the season.
“No,” he added, “not here. There are too many of them. Some one might come.”
Monpavon took up the writing-table, which was not heavy, and signed to thevalet de chambreto go before him with a light. But Jenkins sprang forward:
“Stay here, Louis; the duke may want you.”
He took hold of the lamp; and moving carefully down the whole length of the great corridor, exploring the waiting-rooms, the galleries, in which the fireplaces proved to be filled with artificial plants and quite emptied of ashes, they wandered like spectres in the silence and darkness of the vast house, alive only over yonder on the right, were pleasure was singing like a bird on a roof which is about to fall in ruins.
“There is no fire anywhere. What is to be done with all this?” they asked each other in great embarrassment. They might have been two thieves dragging away a chest which they did not know how to open. At last Monpavon, out of patience, walked straight to a door, the only one which they had not yet opened.
“Ma foi, so much the worse! Since we cannot burn them, we will drown them. Hold the light, Jenkins.”
And they entered.
Where were they? Saint-Simon relating the downfall of one of those sovereign existences, the disarray of ceremonies, of dignities, of grandeurs, caused by death and especially by sudden death, only Saint-Simon might have found words to tell you. With his delicate, carefully kept hands, the Marquis de Monpavon did the pumping. The other passed to him the letters after tearing them into small pieces, packets of letters, on satin paper, tinted, perfumed, adorned with crests, coats of arms, small flags with devices, covered with handwritings, fine, hurried, scrawling, entwining, persuasive; and all those flimsy pages went whirling one over the other in eddying streams of water which crumpled them, soiled them, washed out their tender links before allowing them to disappear with a gurgle down the drain.
They were love-letters and of every kind, from the note of the adventuress, “I saw you pass yesterday in the Bois, M. le Duc,” to the aristocratic reproaches of the last mistress but one, and the complaints of ladies deserted, and the page, still fresh, of recent confidences. Monpavon was in the secret of all these mysteries—put a name on each of them: “That is Mme. Moor. Hallo! Mme. d’Athis!” A confusion of coronets and initials, of caprices and old habits, sullied by the promiscuity of this moment, all engulfed in the horrid closet by the light of a lamp, with the noise of an intermittent gush of water, departing into oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two satin-gray letters trembled as he held them in his fingers.
“Who is that?” asked Monpavon, noticing the unfamiliar handwriting and the Irishman’s nervous excitement. “Ah, doctor, if you want to read them all, we shall never have finished.”
Jenkins, his cheeks flushed, the two letters in his hand, was consumed by a desire to carry them away, to pore over them at his ease, to martyrize himself with delight by reading them, perhaps also to forge out of this correspondence a weapon for himself against the imprudent woman who had signed her name. But the rigorous correctness of the marquis made him afraid. How could he distract his attention—get him away? The opportunity occurred of its own accord. Among the letters, a tiny page written in a senile and shaky hand, caught the attention of the charlatan, who said with an ingenuous air: “Oh, oh! here is something that does not look much like abillet-doux. ‘Mon Duc, to the rescue—I am sinking! The Court of Exchequer has once more stuck its nose into my affairs.‘”
“What are you reading there?” exclaimed Monpavon abruptly, snatching the letter from his hands. And immediately, thanks to Mora’s negligence in thus allowing such private letters to lie about, the terrible situation in which he would be left by the death of his protector returned to his mind. In his grief, he had not yet given it a thought. He told himself that in the midst of all his preparations for his departure, the duke might quite possibly overlook him; and, leaving Jenkins to complete the drowning of Don Juan’s casket by himself, he returned precipitately in the direction of the bed-chamber. Just as he was on the point of entering, the sound of a discussion held him back behind the lowered door-curtain. It was Louis’s voice, tearful like that of a beggar in a church-porch, trying to move the duke to pity for his distress, and asking permission to take certain bundles of bank-notes that lay in a drawer. Oh, how hoarse, utterly wearied, hardly intelligible the answer, in which there could be detected the effort of the sick man to turn over in his bed, to bring back his vision from a far-off distance already half in sight:
“Yes, yes; take them. But for God’s sake, let me sleep—let me sleep!”
Drawers opened, closed again, a short and panting breath. Monpavon heard no more of what was going on, and retraced his steps without entering. The ferocious rapacity of his servant had set his pride upon its guard. Anything rather than degradation to such a point as that.
The sleep which Mora craved for so insistently—the lethargy, to be more accurate—lasted a whole night, and through the next morning also, with uncertain wakings disturbed by terrible sufferings relieved each time by soporifics. No further attempt was made to nurse him to recovery; they tried only to soothe his last moments, to help him to slip painlessly over that terrible last step. His eyes had opened again during this time, but were already dimmed, fixed in the void on floating shadows, vague forms like those a diver sees quivering in the uncertain light under water.
In the afternoon of the Thursday, towards three o’clock, he regained complete consciousness, and recognising Monpavon, Cardailhac, and two or three other intimate friends, he smiled to them, and betrayed in a sentence his only anxiety:
“What do they say about it in Paris?”
They said many things about it, different and contradictory; but very certainly he was the only subject of conversation, and the news spread through the town since the morning, that Mora was at his last breath, agitated the streets, the drawing-rooms, the cafes, the workshops, revived the question of the political situation in newspaper offices and clubs, even in porters’ lodges and on the tops of omnibuses, in every place where the unfolded public newspapers commented on this startling rumour of the day.
Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. One sees from a distance, not the solid or insecure base of the building, but the gilded and delicate spire, embellished, carved into hollow tracery, added for the satisfaction of the age. Mora was what was seen in France and throughout Europe of the Empire. If he fell, the monument would find itself bereft of all its elegance, split as by some long and irreparable crack. And how many lives would be dragged down by that sudden fall, how many fortunes undermined by the weakened reverberations of the catastrophe! None so completely as that of the big man sitting motionless downstairs, on the bench in the monkey-house.
For the Nabob, this death was his own death, the ruin, the end of all things. He was so deeply conscious of it that, when he entered the house, on learning the hopeless condition of the duke, no expression of pity, no regrets of any sort, had escaped him, only the ferocious word of human egoism, “I am ruined!” And this word kept recurring to his lips; he repeated it mechanically each time that he awoke suddenly afresh to all the horror of his situation, as in those dangerous mountain storms, when a sudden flash of lightning illumines the abyss to its depths, showing the wounding spurs and the bushes on its sides, ready to tear and scratch the man who should fall.
The rapid clairvoyance which accompanies cataclysms spared him no detail. He saw the invalidation of his election almost certain, now that Mora would no longer be there to plead his cause; then the consequences of the defeat—bankruptcy, poverty, and still worse; for when these incalculable riches collapse they always bury a little of a man’s honour beneath their ruins. But how many briers, how many thorns, how many cruel scratches and wounds before arriving at the end! In a week there would be the Schwalbach bills—that is to say, eight hundred thousand francs—to pay; indemnity for Moessard, who wanted a hundred thousand francs, or as the alternative he would apply for the permission of the Chamber to prosecute him for a misdemeanour, a suit still more sinister instituted by the families of two little martyrs of Bethlehem against the founders of the Society; and, on top of all, the complications of the Territorial Bank. There was one solitary hope, the mission of Paul de Gery to the Bey, but so vague, so chimerical, so remote!
“Ah, I am ruined! I am ruined!”
In the immense entrance-hall no one noticed his distress. The crowd of senators, of deputies, of councillors of state, all the high officials of the administration, came and went around him without seeing him, holding mysterious consultations with uneasy importance near the two fireplaces of white marble which faced one another. So many ambitions disappointed, deceived, hurled down, met in this visitin extremis, that personal anxieties dominated every other preoccupation.
The faces, strangely enough, expressed neither pity nor grief, rather a sort of anger. All these people seemed to have a grudge against the duke for dying, as though he had deserted them. One heard remarks of this kind: “It is not surprising, with such a life as he has lived!” And looking out of the high windows, these gentlemen pointed out to each other, amid the going and coming of the equipages in the court-yard, the drawing up of some little brougham from within which a well-gloved hand, with its lace sleeve brushing the sash of the door, would hold out a card with a corner turned back to the footman.
From time to time one of thehabituesof the palace, one of those whom the dying man had summoned to his bedside, appeared in the medley, gave an order, then went away, leaving the scared expression of his face reflected on twenty others. Jenkins showed himself thus for a moment, with his cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his cuffs crumpled, in all the disorder of the battle in which he was engaged upstairs against a terrible opponent. He was instantly surrounded, besieged with questions.
Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of their cage, excited by the unaccustomed tumult, and very attentive to all that passed about them as though they were occupied in making a methodical study of human hypocrisy, had a magnificent model in the Irish physician. His grief was superb, a splendid grief, masculine and strong, which compressed his lips and made him pant.
“The agony has begun,” he said mournfully. “It is only a matter of hours.”
And as Jansoulet came towards him, he said to him emphatically:
“Ah, my friend, what a man! What courage! He has forgotten nobody. Only just now he was speaking to me of you.”
“Really?”
“‘The poor Nabob,’ said he, ‘how does the affair of his election stand?’”
And that was all. The duke had added no further word.
Jansoulet bowed his head. What had he been hoping? Was it not enough that at such a moment a man like Mora had given him a thought? He returned and sat down on his bench, falling back into the stupor which had been galvanized by one moment of mad hope, and remained until, without his noticing it, the hall had become nearly deserted. He did not remark that he was the only and last visitor left, until he heard the men-servants talking aloud in the waning light of the evening:
“For my part, I’ve had enough of it. I shall leave service.”
“I shall stay on with the duchess.”
And these projects, these arrangements some hours in advance of death, condemned the noble duke still more surely than the faculty.
The Nabob understood then that it was time for him to go, but, first, he wished to inscribe his name in the visitors’ book kept by the porter. He went up to the table, and leaned over it to see distinctly. The page was full. A blank space was pointed out to him below a signature in a very small, spidery hand, such as is frequently written by very fat fingers, and when he had signed, it proved to be the name of Hemerlingue dominating his own, crushing it, clasping it round with insidious flourish. Superstitious, like the true Latin he was, he was struck by this omen, and went away frightened by it.
Where should he dine? At the club? Place Vendome? To hear still more talk of this death that obsessed him! He preferred to go somewhere by chance, walking straight before him, like all those who are a prey to some fixed idea which they hope to conjure away by rapid movement. The evening was warm, the air full of sweet scents. He walked along the quays, and reached the trees of the Cours-la-Reine, then found himself breathing that air in which is mingled the freshness of watered roads and the odour of fine dust so characteristic of summer evenings in Paris. At that hour all was deserted. Here and there chandeliers were being lighted for the concerts, blazes of gaslight flared among the green trees. A sound of glasses and plates from a restaurant gave him the idea of going in.
The strong man was hungry despite all his troubles. He was served under a veranda with glazed walls backed by shrubs, and facing the great porch of the Palais de l’Industrie, where the duke, in the presence of a thousand people, had greeted him as a deputy. The refined, aristocratic face rose before his memory in the darkness of the sky, while he could see it also as it lay over yonder on the funereal whiteness of the pillow; and suddenly, as he ran his eye over the bill of fare presented to him by the waiter, he noticed with stupefaction that it bore the date of the 20th of May. So a month had not elapsed since the opening of the exhibition. It seemed to him like ten years ago. Gradually, however, the warmth of the meal cheered him. In the corridor he could hear waiters talking:
“Has anybody heard news of Mora? It appears he is very ill.”
“Nonsense! He will get over it, you will see. Men like him get all the luck.”
And so deeply is hope implanted in the human soul, that, despite what Jansoulet had himself seen and heard, these few words, helped by two bottles of burgundy and a few glasses of cognac, sufficed to restore his courage. After all, people had been known to recover from illnesses quite as desperate. Doctors often exaggerate the ill in order to get more credit afterward for curing it. “Suppose I called to inquire.” He made his way back towards the house, full of illusion, trusting to that chance which had served him so many times in his life. And indeed the aspect of the princely abode had something about it to fortify his hope. It presented the reassuring and tranquil appearance of ordinary evenings, from the avenue with its lights at long intervals, majestic and deserted, to the steps where stood waiting a huge carriage of old-fashioned shape.
In the antechamber, peaceful also, two enormous lamps were burning. A footman slept in a corner; the porter was reading before the fireplace. He looked at the new arrival over his spectacles, made no remark, and Jansoulet dared ask no question. Piles of newspapers lying on the table in their wrappers, addressed to the duke, seemed to have been thrown there as useless. The Nabob took up one of them, opened it, and tried to read, but quick and gliding steps, a muttered chanting, made him lift his eyes, and he saw a white-haired and bent old man, decked out in lace as though he had been an altar, who was praying aloud as he departed with a long priestly stride, his ample red cassock spreading in a train over the carpet. It was the Archbishop of Paris, accompanied by two assistants. The vision, with its murmur as of an icy north wind, passed quickly before Jansoulet, plunged into the great carriage and disappeared, carrying away with it his last hope.
“Doing the right thing,mon cher,” remarked Monpavon, appearing suddenly at his side. “Mora is an epicurean, brought up in the ideas of how do you say—you know—what is it you call it? Eighteenth century. Very bad for the masses, if a man in his position—ps—ps—ps—Ah, he is the master who sets us all an example—ps—ps—irreproachable manners!”
“Then, it is all over?” said Jansoulet, overwhelmed. “There is no longer any hope?”
Monpavon signed to him to listen. A carriage rolled heavily along the avenue on the quay. The visitors’ bell rang sharply several times in succession. The marquis counted aloud: “One, two, three, four.” At the fifth he rose:
“No more hope now. Here comes the other,” said he, alluding to the Parisian superstition that a visit from the sovereign was always fatal to dying persons. From every side the lackeys hastened up, opened the doors wide, ranged themselves in line, while the porter, his hat cocked forward and his staff resounding on the marble floor, announced the passage of two august shadows, of whom Jansoulet only caught a confused glimpse behind the liveried domestics, but whom he saw beyond a long perspective of open doors climbing the great staircase, preceded by a footman bearing a candelabrum. The woman ascended, erect and proud, enveloped in a black Spanish mantilla; the man supported himself by the baluster, slower in his movements and tired, the collar of his light overcoat turned up above a rather bent back, which was shaken by a convulsive sob.
“Let us be off, Nabob. Nothing more to be done here,” said the old beau, taking Jansoulet by the arm and drawing him outside. He paused on the threshold, with raised hand, making a little gesture of farewell in the direction of the man who lay dying upstairs. “Good-bye old fellow!” The gesture and the tone were polite, irreproachable, but the voice trembled a little.
The club in the Rue Royale, which was famous for its gambling parties, rarely saw one so desperate as the gaming of that night. It commenced at eleven o’clock and was still going on at five in the morning. Enormous sums were scattered over the green cloth, changing hands, moved now to one side, now to the other, heaped up, distributed, regained. Fortunes were engulfed in this monster play, at the end of which the Nabob, who had started it to forget his terrors in the hazards of chance, after singular alternations and runs of luck enough to turn the hair of a beginner white, retired with winnings amounting to five hundred thousand francs. On the boulevard the next day they said five millions, and everybody cried out on the scandal, especially theMessenger, three-quarters filled by an article against certain adventurers tolerated in the clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most honourable families.