Chapter II: By Toby Allspy (1)

THE FIVE FLOORS.

To the best of our belief, Paris is the only city in Europe where a prize is annually distributed for the encouragement of VIRTUE. In England--that Joseph Surface of the civilized globe--we give premiums for the growth of fat sheep and piccotees, we boast of prize-oxen and prize-heartsease; but at present we have no prize-virtue. The celebrated benefaction founded by Monsieur de Monthyon (confided to the administration of the French Academy) consists in annual premiums for the production of the finest trait of moral excellence, and the literary work best calculated to promote its recurrence.

Now, Monsieur Boncœur, of the first-floor of the corner of the Rue Montmartre, might have monopolised the whole Monthyon endowment for the last fifteen years. The whole man was an incarnate virtue; his works, literary or literal, were based upon the strictest morality. From his top-knot to his shoe-tie, propriety predominated. Methodical in his hours and diet, regular as a chronometer in despatch of business, he insured his own ease of mind and body by scrupulous exactitude in the discharge of their duties and pleasures. His apartment was a model of commodiousness,--doors and windows shutting to a hair; not a draught of air, not a creaking hinge, not an unsteady table, not a hard-shutting drawer, not an easy-opening lock in the whole suite. The floors in summer were as polished as their master's demeanour, the carpets in winter as soft as his address. No grand displays of fragile luxury, of Japan porcelain or Bohemian glass, alarmed the anxieties of Monsieur Boncœur's constituency. It was the "comfortable" in perfection,--but nothing more.

What wonder that a man thus basking in the sunshine of prudent prosperity should bask in the favour of the world?--that such an ornament to society should be incorporated in all the learned and charitable societies of the city?--that so worthy a fellow should be a fellow of every academy and literary association? A string of conventional distinctions was attached to Boncœur's name, vying in length with the catalogue of chivalric honours appended in German almanacks to that of Prince Metternich; but, what was more to the purpose, the patronymic thus honoured was inscribed in every public stock or fund, domestic or foreign. His house was a house of universal bondage. Not a railroad could be started by government till Boncœur had been closeted in the stuffy, fussy, great-talking-little-doing cabinet of the Home Department; nor a minister accredited, till he had hinted his hints and inferred his inferences in the sphinxical blue-chamber of the Foreign. The worsted epaulettes of that all-conciliating monarch, the citizen king, were observed to bow lower to their excellent and much-esteemed friend Monsieur Boncœur than to any other of the golden calves invited to feed and ruminate at the royal rack and manger of the Tuileries.

Of all the inhabitants of the house whose _cordon_ was pulled by Madame Grégoire, Boncœur may be considered as at once the least and the most domestic. His business lay elsewhere,--his pleasures lay elsewhere; it was only his respectability that lodged in ostentatious comfort in the first-floor of that memorable dwelling. He knew and cared nothing concerning the neighbours. On his progress from his apartment to his carriage, from his carriage back to his apartment, the banker's countenance expressed only a mild, imperturbable magnanimity, looking neither to the right nor left, but enwrapt in reminiscences of the panacean speech he had been delivering to the Chamber, in proof to the kingdom that it paid no taxes, but lay stretched upon a bed of roses. One day, however, when his ascent happened to be more mercurial than usual, he came suddenly in contact with Claire de Courson, whose slight figure was bending under the weight of a piece of furniture which she was carrying up to her mother's room; and her pure complexion became suffused with the deepest blushes as she acknowledged and declined his polite offers of assistance in her task. Next day, Robert the footman, who had been deputed to relieve her from the burthen of the elbow-chair, was commissioned to convey the "Follet" and apricot marmalade in the same direction. Till that memorable epoch, the virtuous Monsieur Boncœur had remained ignorant that the house contained so powerful an incentive to the fulfilment of the Christian commandment to love his neighbour as himself. But it was not too late. The banker was fond of apricot marmalade, and partial to the prettinesses of a fashionable magazine,--his fair neighbour of an age to share his predilections; and, in presenting these saccharine offerings, he did as he would be done by. The virtuous Monsieur Boncœur was too painfully aware, however, of the scandal-mongering propensities of a sinful world to entrust to the remarks of a common staircase and porter's lodge the visits of a bachelor first-floor to a single third-floor, with large grey eyes, long black eyelashes, and the shape of a nymph. His respectable Robert, a corpulent middle-aged footman, might in the first instance represent his high-principled principal, without provoking the espionage of Ma'mselle Berthe, or the commentations of Madame Grégoire. In the intimacy he hoped to establish, all the advances must come down stairs. The man after the king's own heart was too prudent to stir a single step upward.

Beyond the door of the antechamber, however, which was opened by Mademoiselle de Courson in person, the corpulent footman did not penetrate. The young lady returned, in her mother's name, a civil answer of acknowledgment to their wealthy neighbour, stating that the infirmities of her mother's health rendered it impossible for them to receive visitors. The corpulent footman (despising these wretched people,--as wretched people who keep no establishment of servants ought to be despised by a corpulent footman,) immediately settled it in his own mind that the apartment was too shabby and littered to admit of receiving a gentleman of such far-famed respectability as the eminent banker of the Rue Bergère; that the Coursons' furniture was probably mean,--their fare meagre. The utmost stretch of his pampered imagination did not conjecture that their fare consisted of their furniture,--that ever since Madame's arrival with the truck, she had been dining on chairs and breakfasting on feather-beds. Not a soul in the house (except Guguste) had at present noticed that the _meubles_ carried down and conveyed away "to be mended" never found their way back again.

Small as were the appetites of the third-floor, it is extremely difficult to feed and lodge two full-grown human beings upon a pension of forty pounds a-year; and, by the recent failure of the notary in whose hands the small funds of Madame de Courson were deposited, this was all that remained to support her and her daughter. On the discovery of their misfortune, indeed, Claire had undertaken to increase her own and her mother's daily bread by assiduous needle-work; but the constant attendance required by the poor and sorrowful invalid rendered it difficult for her daughter to fulfil her good intentions. Till the loss of their property, they had resided, in tolerable comfort, in cheerful rooms on the Quai Voltaire, assisted by an effective servant; but all this had been perforce resigned,--the best part of their goods was sold off, their wardrobe stript of its luxuries, and Claire was fully justified in undertaking, as she did, the service of the kitchen and pantry; for it was clear that their diet must henceforward consist of bread and water. Like most poor people, they were proud; and pride served to increase their privations. Madame de Courson, the widow of an officer, one of the victims of the Russian campaign, had never yet solicited a pecuniary favour from living mortal. She preferred working for her livelihood, or starving; that is, she preferred that her daughter should work for their livelihood, and consequently that they should starve together. It must be owned (_par parenthèse_) that the only favours tendered to her acceptance since she took up her domicile in the corner house, were Monsieur Boncœur's gift of apricot marmalade and loan of a journal, and poor Guguste's earnest entreaty to Mademoiselle, into whose acquaintance he had intruded by carrying up Madame de Courson's first and last batch of wood, to be permitted to black her shoes, and perform other little neighbourly offices of similar delicacy. When, however, the shoes grew thinner and thinner, without being replaced, his aid was more rarely accepted, and at length positively declined; and little Guguste, who was more a man of the world than the corpulent footman, justly concluded that Mademoiselle Claire did not like to expose her attempts at repairing the inevitable fissures to the comments of Monsieur Georges's lad of all work. Still, though tacitly dismissed from her service, the grey-eyed beauty never passed him on the stairs without a word or smile of recognition, even when her heart was sorest and countenance saddest; for Guguste had installed himself her friend. It remained to be seen whether the donor of the apricot marmalade would prove as true a one as the young shoeblack.

Be it not inferred, however, that the amiable attentions of the ragamuffin page were paid solely as a tribute to beauty; they were a tribute to beauty in distress. There were two other particles of the fair sex resident under the same roof, whom most lads of his age would have preferred to the grey-eyed nymph of the third-floor, viz. Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque, a pretty widow, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty years of age, (for in a well-dressed widow it is extremely difficult to determine a woman's age within ten years or so,--none but a lady's husband being admitted to investigate the case before she

"adores,
With head uncover'd, the cosmetic powers;")

and Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque's coquettish waiting-maid, Mademoiselle Aglaé. But for neither of these divinities of the _entresol_ had Guguste ever felt inspired with an inclination to wield the blacking-brush! Not that either the widow or the maid was at any moment guilty of a _chaussure_ susceptible of such plebeian _enchainement_:--Madame la Baronne walked not only in silk attire, but silken shoes; while Ma'mselle Aglaé, like Lear's soldiers, was shod with felt, shuffling in slippers all the morning, and reserving prunella or satin for her visits, play-goings, and _bals masqués_.

Madame la Baronne, with a fortune of thirty thousand francs, or twelve hundred pounds, per annum, would have passed in London for a widow of moderate means, and might perhaps have speculated on improving them by marriage. In Paris she passed for a rich one, and occupied herself with her own amusement. It is amazing how much pleasure may be purchased in that circumscript capital at the rate of one hundred pounds per month, particularly in the state of blessedness which is called single. Conscious of her advantage, Madame de Gimbecque was far from anxious to inscribe herself in the register of lodgers in the Rue Montmartre by double entry. France is peculiar in its views of wedded happiness. In England, what is called a well-assorted marriage implies parity of condition, and compatibility of temper; in Paris, it implies equality of fortune. Five thousand a-year proposes to five thousand a-year,--three hundred per annum to three hundred; not Lord Thomas to Miss Sophia, or plain Tom to pretty Sophy. Beauty, harp-playing, quadrilling, have nothing to do with it,--all is matter of arithmetic! If the match turn out ill, it is no fault of the matchmakers; all has been done according to Cocker.

Now Madame la Baronne, like most Frenchwomen, was a capital calculatress. She knew that, though Sophy and Tom are richer with six hundred a-year between them than Sophy with three and Tom with the same pittance, a pretty Madame de Gimbecque, between twenty-five and fifty years of age, is richer as a widow with thirty thousand francs per annum, than as the wife of a man of fashion with sixty. To espouse any man, _un_fashionable, was out of the question,--that is, any man unfashionable with an income only equal to her own. A Crœsus of any age or calling would have brought his own apology; and she would have added herself and her establishment to that of the respectable banker of the Rue Bergère at a moment's notice. But that consummation was past praying for. A Crœsus would require a Crœsa as his partner for life, as surely as the primitive lion trotted side by side with a lioness into Noah's ark; and Monsieur Boncœur, if matrimonially inclined, would demand hundreds of thousands per annum to amalgamate with his hundreds of thousands. The charming Adolphes and exquisite Amédées, meanwhile, frequenting Madame de Gimbecque's opera-box, or ambling by her side in the Bois de Boulogne, had either not an unmortgaged estate wherewith to pretend to her hand, or, if successful pretendants, would appropriate after marriage to their own gratification, not only their own thirty thousand, but three-fourths of hers. Very early in her widowhood Madame de Gimbecque came to this conclusion; and, on giving utterance at her toilet, as she threw off her widow's weeds, to her anti-matrimonial intention, they were confirmed by Mademoiselle Aglaé with so loud an "amen," that a by-stander might have supposed them two lay-nuns pronouncing vows of eternal celibacy.

Madame de Gimbecque, though thus egoistical in her calculations, was nevertheless a light-hearted, good-humoured little woman, who, if she did not go out of her way to do good, did all the good that lay in it. She had been born, bred, married, and widowed according to that matter-of-fact social system of the French which leaves no space for the expansion of the feelings. Nothing like affection had graced her parents' household,--nothing like affection had warmed her own. Her fifteen thousand francs per annum had been married to those of an ex-colonel of cuirassiers, thirty years her senior, who had pretty nearly scolded, sworn, smoked, and expectorated his pretty wife out of patience, when the sour little cherub who sits up aloft keeping watch over matrimonial destinies, took pity on the lady, and took the colonel to itself.

Marianne de Gimbecque, (then _not_ between fifty and five-and-twenty, but between five-and-twenty and fifteen,) though an orphan as well as a widow, consoled herself as thoroughly as propriety would admit for this sudden bereavement. She had neither a tie nor a relative in the world; but what pretty Parisian with _trente mille francs de rente_ can feel lonely, while there is an opera, a carnival, and a milliner's shop in existence!

The baroness speedily set about improving her solitary hours. She devoted herself to the cultivation of her charms, as an Englishwoman might have done to the cultivation of her mind. Her accomplishments as a cosmetician were really surprising; she studied the art as a branch of natural history; not a perfumer in Paris could have deceived her as to the ingredients of a wash, or chemical compounds of a pommade. She knew what acids would injure the enamel of her teeth, what astringents wither the smooth surface of her cheek, what spirituous infusions turn her sable locks to iron-grey or silver, as well as Berthollet or "Sromfridevé." She could tell what atmospheric changes enabled her to exchange blue ribbons for pink, without compromise of the becoming; and regulated by the phases of the moon her ebbs and flows between cap, hat, and turban.

Nothing could be more artistically managed than the apartment of the little coquette. Nothing, by the way, is so _easy_ to render coquettish as an _entresol_, which is, in fact, a series of boudoirs: saloons like those of Devonshire House, or a hall like that of Stafford, must be stately and ostentatious; the trickery of prettiness would be as much out of place in such places as rouge and pearl powder on the marble cheek of Michael Angelo's Moses. But a light airy _entresol_, or _mezzonino_ story, whose windows, fronting the south, are shaded by Genoese awnings, overhanging balconies, filled with geraniums, heliotropes, and mignonette,--whose anteroom is painted blue stripewise, to represent a tent, and whose dining-room is varnished scagliola fashion,--whose drawing-room is of white and gold, the _fauteuils_ and divans of yellow satin, the _cabarets_ of pale Saxon blue porcelain, adorned with shepherds, shepherdesses, and garlands of carnations,--the _consoles_ of varnished maple, white as snow, or as the single marble table, _taillé en bloc_, which sustains a scentless exotic in a vase of pale-green Sèvres,--whose boudoir is a tent of white muslin, drawn over dove-coloured _gros de Naples_,--whose bed-room is hung with cachemere spotted with palm-leaves, leading to a bath-room altogether spotless, and lined with mirrors;--such an _entresol_ is a paradise for a Peri, (whose age is between twenty-five and fifty!) and such was the one inhabited in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre by Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque!

The household was concomitant. A page in a neat livery, a powdered-headed middle-aged sobriety of a _maître d'hôtel_, a _chef_ of sufficient merit for a lady neither a dinner-giver nor dinner-devotee; and, to complete the measure, the _soubrette_, the waiting-maid, the spruce, cunning, _pimpante_, _fringante_, Mademoiselle Aglaé, with her embroidered cambric aprons and pink ribbons;--one pennyworth of waiting-maid to all this monstrous quantity of male-faction! The _maître d'hôtel_ dusted the china, the page rubbed the floors,--everything but the lady's toilet being performed in France by slaves of the masculine gender. Monsieur Simon, the sober _maître d'hôtel_, and Lindor, the pert page, sometimes suggested to their mistress's mistress that an additional petticoat would be far more advantageous to the establishment than entertaining a workwoman fifteen days in the month for the care of the household linen; but the _femme de chambre_ would not hear of it. She chose to be the sole Helen in Troy; and, though devoid of personal views on either page or butler,--the cook in his white paper _casquette_, or the coachman in his flaxen wig,--resolved to admit no rival near the throne of her soubrettish autocracy. It was quite plague enough to have the house frequented by Eugène de Marsan, (the handsome cousin-german of the ugly defunct ex-colonel of cuirassiers, Monsieur le Baron Nicodême de Gimbecque,) and Claude de Bercy, (the popular author of seventy-five successful vaudevilles,) without encumbering the little _entresol_ (or its double entrance, double staircase, and corridor, appropriately named in Paris "of escape,") with such lumber as a chambermaid.

"Has Madame Oudot sent home my _foulard peignoir_?" demanded Madame la Baronne of her waiting-maid, as she lay reclining in her marble-bath, whose tepid warmth served to diffuse through the little room the aroma of the eau de Ninon which Mademoiselle Aglaé was sprinkling on the surface.

"_Non, madame!_ Yet I was particular in making her promise it for yesterday, knowing that Madame expected a visit from Monsieur Eugène before she dressed to take her ride."

"Tiresome woman!" cried the lady in the bath,--an apostrophe which Aglaé of course applied to the unpunctual _couturière_. "Give me the new number of 'Le Bon Ton,' and in five minutes ring for my chocolate, and bring in my warm linen,--not sooner, or it will be cold before I am ready."

The waiting-maid obeyed; but finding on the marble slab in the corridor the _Constitutionnel_, damp from the press, she held it for a moment over the drying-basket of the bath-linen, and returned to her lady, taking the liberty, as she slowly paced the room, to cast an eye upon the news of the morning.

"_Sacristie! ce cher Monsieur Boncœur!_ another audience of the king!" exclaimed Mademoiselle Aglaé, presenting the paper to her lady, who extended to receive it, a languid hand, humid with the perfumed exhalations of the bath.

"Doubtless about his title," she replied.

"_Title!_" inquired the waiting-maid, fearing she might be about to forfeit the envied distinction of belonging to the only household of quality in the hotel.

"Didn't I tell you that our neighbour overhead had purchased the estate of D'Offémont, and was trying to obtain the royal sanction to assume the name? Ay, exactly: the King, I perceive, has created him a baron; not D'Offémont, however,--he is to be Baron de Boncœur. What people this government _does_ ennoble!"

"Monsieur Boncœur has one of the greatest names in the monied world," remonstrated the waiting-woman: "he is mayor of his _arrondissement_, and _marguiller_ of the parish."

"He may be beadle or drum-major, for anything I know or care," said Madame de Gimbecque with sublime contempt; "but I am convinced that in the time of the elder branch he would never have shaken the dust from his feet in the palace of the Tuileries. Ha!--a critique on Claude's new play. Pray remind me, by and by, to send to Monsieur de Bercy the note-case wadded with vitiver I have been embroidering for him. _Voyons! 'Sophie de Melcour_, a drama in three acts. We regret--a-hem!--feeble--diffuse--flat--a-hem!--dialogue full of platitudes--characters full of exaggeration--style stilted--catastrophe contemptible--false taste--corrupt morality.' (This must have been written by some particular friend!) 'We cannot take our leave of Monsieur de Bercy without counselling him to turn his mind to some other branch of literary occupation than the stage, for which the bent of his genius evidently disqualifies this pains-taking but ill-judging young man.' Bah!--Eugène de Marsan's doing, I am convinced! He knows I dote upon theatrical entertainments; he knows that I bespoke half-a-dozen boxes to give _éclat_ to Monsieur de Bercy's piece, and thinks to disgust me by this disparagement. Eugène does not know me; he does not appreciate the generosity of woman's nature! His abuse of poor Claude's play has put me more in conceit with it than ever. Certainly the style of 'Sophie de Melcour' is rather stilted, and nobody can deny the exaggeration of the characters. _I_ expected that the catastrophe would cause the damnation of the piece; and as to the dialogue, I could scarcely sit it out without a yawn. Aglaé! on second thoughts, Monsieur de Marsan is going out of town, and has been plaguing me for the last six months for some little trifle of my own work. I will give _him_ the _vitiver_ pocket-book: there will be plenty of time hereafter to get up another for Monsieur de Bercy. People so devoted to letters have no time to think of embroidered pocket-books. I dare say Bercy would like one bought at the Petit Dunquerque twice as well. There is no more sentiment in him than in one of his own farces."

Mademoiselle Aglaé was of the same opinion. The _Constitutionnel_ having decided that Claude's seventy-sixth vaudeville was not to run, she decided that the author of the vaudeville was also at a stand-still. The loss of his _droits d'auteur_, which would probably deprive her of the gold chain and cross promised by her lady's love, determined _his_ forfeiture of the embroidered note-case!

While the sacred mysteries of the toilet are proceeding in the bath-room, let us take a peep at the equivocal gentleman of the third-floor; no longer arrayed in velvet or sparkling with solitaires, but engirt in a scanty, washed-out printed calico dressing-gown, torn in the button-holes, and short enough to display at the open wristbands the sleeves of a dirty checked shirt, covering a yellow shrivelled skin, apparently washed out, like the calico. A pair of flannel drawers, yellow as arnotto, covered his shrunk shanks; a pair of old shoes, cut down into agonizing slippers, his stockingless feet; while, enfranchised from the spruce, lustrous _toupet_ adorning his brows when exposed to day's or gas-light's garish eye, his mean, narrow, Emperor-of-Austrian forehead recedes into a bare crown, whose denuded ugliness adds thirty years to the age of the full-dressed sallier-forth of the night before. Even his mouth--that critical verifier of age--is strangely oldened; for his set of _Desirabodes_ is still freshening in a glass of water on the chimney-piece, while the mumbling, toothless gums, fallen on each other, allow the lanky sallow cheeks to collapse, like the sides of a half-empty balloon.

Such was the unsophisticated man of the individual whose "getting-up" (as Claude de Bercy would have called it) for public representation was one of the miracles of the Palais Royal; a bazaar which, like the pedlar from the fair Lavinian shore, hath "complexions in its pack," and youth and beauty per yard, per ell, or per ounce, exposed in all its plate-glass windows. It was, as we have already stated, usually half-past seven of an evening when the full-dressed effort of art started forth along the Boulevards; it was as invariably three o'clock in the morning, minus a quarter, when it returned again to lay aside its adornments, and subside into the lean and slippered pantaloon. Ma'mselle Berthe had been three hours snoring when, with a patent key, he nightly let himself in, to deposit his _Desirabodes_, false fronts, whiskers, and calves on his dressing-table; and in the secretaire beside it realities of a more solid nature: bags of silver pieces, rouleaux of golden ones, and now and then a flimsy I O U from some English flat, or an I O U addressed by the Bank of England to millions of English flats, which he rarely ensnugged within the secret-paper-drawer of his _bonheur du jour_ without pronouncing a benediction over its senseless form, varying in intensity of expression, indeed, according as the document happened to be accompanied by bags of silver or rouleaux of gold. When wholly unaccompanied,--sole trophy of his midnight gains,--the fiendish expression of the little mummy's puckered visage deepened into downright demonism.

Meanwhile it was the morning duty of the sour _femme de confiance_ to summon the shattered remains of humanity, which she called master, to breakfast. But let it not be inferred from the squalid nature of his personal costume that the board of Monsieur Georges was spread penuriously: his outward man regarded the gratification of others; his inward regarded his own. The colour of his dressing-gown tended not a jot to his selfish enjoyment; but the amber coffee and smoking cream, the spongy bread and _présalé_ butter, the slices of hard _saucisson d'Arles_ and tender _côtelettes à la minute_ in their silver _réchaud_, regarded exclusively his own five senses. It was to ensure to his daily use these sweeteners of human existence that the _chevalier d'industrie_ toiled in his loathsome calling from eight o'clock to two per night; it was to ensure them hot and hot, and upon the most moderate terms, that he bore with the angular and acid female who presided over his domestic arrangements the remaining eighteen hours of the twenty-four. A younger and fairer _femme de ménage_ would have exacted a nicer toilet, and the daintiest half of the dainties wherewith it was her duty to provide his table. But the _chissie_ not only calculated the weight of provisions to be consumed to the thirty-second fraction of an ounce, but was content to eat the drumsticks of the chickens, the wings of the woodcocks, as well as to support the unsightly spectacle of his bald head and nauseous costume.

"Of what were you disputing last night with the old witch, Madame Grégoire, when I passed the porter's lodge?" demanded Monsieur Georges of the perpendicular shrew seated opposite to him, as he swallowed to his own share the twentieth of the two dozen oysters of Murênes provided for their breakfast.

"I only stepped in to pay her the twenty francs for Guguste's monthly board."

"But what was there in _that_ to beget a squabble?" demanded the toothless man, in the mumbling chuckle which nothing but long custom enabled his housekeeper to understand. "Had she a complaint to make against the lad?"

"No one has complaints to make of him but _you_," said Ma'mselle Berthe, (forgetting her own venomous impeachment concerning the coffee and cream.) "We disputed because Madame Grégoire, like an ill-conditioned woman as she is, presumed to insult me."

"And what then?--you can make her _étrennes_ pay for it."

"_You_ can: but what compensation will it be to _me_ that you diminish her New-year's gift from twenty francs to ten? She had the impudence to ask me to have an eye to the people on the third-floor! As if I was paid to do the spy-work of the _propriétaire_!"

"And who _are_ the people on the third-floor?" demanded Monsieur Georges, who knew and cared very little for the proceedings of any house save the one under government licence in the Rue de Richelieu, amid the blaze of whose Corcel lamps, and glare of whose gilded cornices, he had the honour nightly to assist in fleecing the disloyal subjects of Louis Philippe and the greenhorn foreign visitors to his realms.

"How should I know?"

"Because Madame Grégoire, doubtless, informed you."

"She told me it was a lady and her daughter, about whom she had her doubts."

"_What_ doubts?--that they were disreputable people?"

"Bah!--that they were _beggars_!"

"Then why don't the landlord get rid of them?"

"How can he?--they pay their rent."

"Then what did she want you to find out?"

"How the young lady employs herself of a morning, and why the mamma did not choose to receive the visits of that excellent man Monsieur le Baron de Boncœur."

"Is the first-floor made a baron?"

"To be sure he is!--everybody is made something now-a-days. If you had the spirit of a mouse, you would call yourself the Chevalier de Georges."

"I _have_ the spirit of a mouse, which is to 'ware trap!" chuckled the dilapidated croupier. "I had a little adventure one season at Bagnères de Bigorre, under the name of the Chevalier St. Georges, which the police may not happen to have forgotten. But to return to the banker: what can he have in view by visiting a couple of beggarly women on a third-floor above the _entresol_?"

"You are as bad as Ma'me Grégoire! That is just what she inquired of _me_."

"But though you mightn't choose to acquaint _her_ with what had come to your knowledge--Hark! a ring at the bell," cried Monsieur Georges, interrupting himself as he shuffled out of his seat, and prepared to retreat into his adjoining chamber. "If 'tis any one for me, say I'm gone out, and shan't be at home till evening."

"Don't flurry yourself," replied the housekeeper, moving towards the ante-room; "'tis only Guguste, come up to varnish your boots and bring your _toupet_ from the barber's. Don't you hear him scratching the panel? That is the signal by which I know his ring from any other person's."

And no sooner had she charily opened the door, and prepared to lock it again after admitting him, than the quick-witted _gamin_, in his fustian blouse, and barret-cap, though thread-bare, set jauntily on one side, insinuated himself into the hated apartment.

"What makes you so late, sirrah?" demanded the mummy in the washed-out calico dressing-gown, grudging the foundling even the savoury steam of the viands that still circled in the eating-room.

"'Tis only half-after eleven, sir," replied the drudge. "You desired there might be no noise in the apartment till half-after eleven."

"'Tis three minutes after the half-hour."

"Mademoiselle does not choose me to come in, till breakfast is cleared away, and the things ready to be washed up," said Guguste, not caring to hear.

"In that case you have no right to be here now. But you know my orders, that you are to enter this room with my dressing things every day at half-past eleven. Where have you been idling for the last three minutes?"

"I have not been idling."

"Where have you been working, then?"

"Helping to put up a truckle-bed in Madame Grégoire's back-room. Her son Jules returned at five o'clock this morning from India."

"From India, child?" demanded the gouvernante, peeling the only slice of saucisson left in the dish, and insinuating it between lips as thin as itself.

"From Algiers in the Indies. Monsieur Jules serves in the twenty-third regiment of the line; and, having suffered considerably from the climate, has obtained his furlough."

"Another lazy useless hanger-on in the house! God help us!" ejaculated the housekeeper. "There, go and arrange your master's things in his dressing-room, while I put away breakfast. I will leave the china for you to wash up, outside the kitchen-door. Go!"

And he went,--neither whistling, however, nor with any want of thought. Between his discoveries concerning the Courson family, and the wonderful events he had just heard recited in the metaphorical military prose of Monsieur Jules, (_alias_ the slang of the twenty-third regiment of the line,) Guguste had a forty-horse power of cogitation at that moment labouring in his brain!

(_To be continued._)

THE LAST OF THE BANDITS.

I much admired, and have often thought of, two pictures of Horace Verney's, which I saw in the _Exposition des Tableaux_, of I forget what year, at Paris; in truth to nature, in conception and character, they leave nothing to desire. They were painted at Rome; and represent, one, the attack of brigands,--and the other, the death and confession of the captain of the gang after their falling into the hands of the dragoons.

Much has been written, too, on the subject of these outcasts of society; but no description of their manner of life and habits can compare with Washington Irving's "Painter's Story," or rather Charles de Chatillon's own adventures, when carried off from Lucien Bonaparte's villa at Frescati, in mistake for that prince.

The times are grown degenerate; brigandage is no longer a profession; bandits, like the Mohicans, are become extinct, and from Terracina to Forli, travellers have now-a-days no chance of meeting with a Paolo Ucelli, a Fiesole Ogagna, a De Cesaris, or a Barbone. I remember traversing that tract at a period when I expected every moment to see some of these freebooters in their picturesque costume peep from behind every projecting rock. Civilization and morality have stifled all sentiment;--the Neapolitan frontier is become a Salvator Rosa without its figures.

When I landed at Cività Vecchia from the steamer, I inquired of the landlord of the inn whether the redoubtable Barbone was still an inmate of the fortress; and, on his answering in the affirmative, obtained an order to visit the place. Under the escort of one of the Pope's carabiniers, behold me then in the shadow of that colossal edifice!

It was built by Michael Angelo, and, like all his works, whether in architecture, statuary, or painting, is stamped with the grandeur of his genius. Its stupendous bastions, its ponderous gateway, seem built for eternity. Every stone is a rock such as Briareus and his earth-born brothers might have hurled against Jupiter, in that Titanic war described with such sublime obscurity by Hesiod.

The gendarme was, as is common to all the tribe of cicerones, talkative--not respecting the building, for he had never heard of the great architect, but concerning its then inhabitants. He would, if I had listened to him, have recounted the particulars of Signor Barbone's exploits during the seventeen years that he ravaged like a pestilence the Pontifical states. But I expected to obtain information from the fountain-head, and checked his loquacity.

Our hero had, twice before his present captivity, made terms with the Papal government. Once he was placed with Marocco and Garbarone, two worthy confreres, in the seminary of Terracina; and, just as the priests began to consider him an example of contrition and penitence, bore off the youths into the mountains, where this wolf of the fold barbarously murdered all those whose fathers would not, or could not, pay the exorbitant ransom demanded.

One only of the prisoners escaped the proscription, and the circumstance is a curious one. They were bound two and two, and after great privations and fatigues,--for they were dragged into fastnesses almost inaccessible,--an order was given for their execution. One had already fallen by the stiletto, when his companion invoked Sant' Antonio, the patron saint of brigands, and that name saved him. It is a hint worth knowing. Should any future Barbone arise, remember to call upon Saint Anthony!

Barbone afterwards became keeper of the château of St. Angelo, the great prison at Rome; but quickly relapsed into his old practices, the last of which exceeded in ferocity the rest.

Not far from Forli, an Englishman of distinction, whose name I will not mention, was stopped on his way to Rome. They plundered the father, and carried off the daughter. On reaching his destination he put a price on Barbone's head; but one morning a box arrived, which, instead of his, contained that of the daughter!

The revolting recollection of this ruffian's cruelty made me pause as I stood in the portal and thought of that of the Inferno, for which it would have been no bad model; and thought, too, of the giants who guarded it, whose arms, as they wildly brandished them, looked in the distance like the vans of windmills (the original, by the by, of Cervantes'). They would have been in excellent keeping with the place. For a moment, I say, I hesitated about entering; but curiosity got the better of terror, and I resolved to visit the Bagno, a name which in the month of August it well merited.

In the court-yard were walking several of the brigands who belonged to their monarch's train,--his satellites; but I did not stop to address them. I desired my conductor to show me to the head-quarters of the general, in the interior of the prison.

I found there a great many cells or holes, not unresembling dog-kennels, arched and formed in the massive walls; and, among the rest, the den of the Cacus. He was lying at full length on the floor, which might be eight or ten feet in length; and behind him, almost hid in shade, was crouching another brigand, leaning on his elbows, and stooping low. He was taking his siesta. This bandit was, I afterwards found, Barbone's prime-minister. They were inseparable--the tiger and his jackal, or rather, perhaps, wolf.

Barbone raised himself on one arm at my approach, and eyed me with all the hauteur of a prince. He was dressed like the rest, in the usual uniform,--cap, jacket, and coarse trowsers. He by no means corresponded in appearance with one of Horace Verney's brigands. He was a man of a middle height, corpulent in his person, with a countenance that showed no trace of crime: his features were handsome and regular; and his hair, long, black, and curly, hung over his shoulders. He certainly set all Lavater's theories at defiance. As to his head, I leave that to the phrenologists.

He seemed little inclined to enter into conversation; and, fettered as he was, I should have felt as little disposed to trust myself in his den as in that of a bloodhound. However, perceiving that I did not go away, and stood at the entrance, he at last had the courtesy to come forth. I, too, was inclined to address him civilly, with the hope of knowing something of his history and character; so I said to him,

"You are the famous Barbone, of whom I have heard so much, and long wished to see?"

"_Gasparoni, a servirlo_," said he.

The reply made me smile, for I doubted not he would have served me, if set at liberty, in his own peculiar way.

"You smile," said he; "perhaps you are come to mock me?" He folded his arms, and looked at me sternly.

"I had no such intention," I replied. "You call yourself Gasparoni. I thought your name had been Barbone?"

"So they styled me," he answered, "from the long beard which I formerly wore."

"Pray may I ask you how you happened to be taken?" I observed inquiringly.

"_Preso!_" said he contemptuously; "I was never taken. Not all the troops in the Pontifical states could have taken me. None but eagles could have reached our resorts. There we wanted for nothing, besiege us as they might. The peasants were our friends, and brought us plenty of provisions. We annihilated party after party that they sent against us, till the soldiers would fight no longer. Many of them entered our band, which at one time consisted of nearly one hundred. But I got tired of that savage life. In the summer months it was well enough; but to brave the winter among the mountains,--to sleep on the snows with nothing but our mantles to shelter us,--to be deprived of our wives and children,--not to be able to dispose of our booty without great risk, so that even money was often of no use to us! I could point out where many a napoleon and doppia d'oro is buried. And yet," said he after a pause, "that life, with all its privations and miseries, is preferable to confinement in a prison. Oh! you cannot fancy what the want of liberty is to us mountaineers!--to rot in a dungeon,--not to have the free use of our limbs!" Here he clanked his chains.

After this harangue, which he delivered with great volubility, he folded his arms again, _à la Napoleon_, and a gloom came over him. He seemed to be lost in thought.

"You have said," I observed, "that you were never taken. How then came you here?"

"Here!" he said with emphasis; "I was trepanned--betrayed! The Pope broke his faith; my confessor, his sacred word. I was promised pardon,--full pardon for myself and my brave brothers. We were betrayed--sold; and yet we live in hopes that the holy father will redeem his promise."

"Yes," thought I; "if he _had_ done you justice, you would not be here."

"Your name," I said flatteringly, "is well known in Europe. You are the Napoleon of bandits, and worthy of being classed with De Cesaris."

"De Cesaris," said he contemptuously, "_era un miserabile!_ He took a poor painter for a prince. Ha! ha! Gasparoni would not have made such a blunder." Here he laughed again with a consciousness of superiority. "The fool, too," said he, "to allow the artist to paint his portrait!--it was like a man's putting his name on a stiletto, and leaving it as evidence against himself."

"Perhaps," said I, "like him, you have no objection to the world's knowing something of your story. Charles de Chatillon has immortalized him; he is become an historical character."

"I have no such ambition," said he. "It matters little what the world thinks of me; but you shall have my history, if you have any curiosity to know it."

"The greatest," I replied.

"It is a short one," observed the bandit.

"I am the son of Rinalda, better known in the Roman annals than I am. She was cruelly injured. Deprived of her lover, Peronti, whom they made a priest, she took a hatred to all mankind--a just one, and taught me to revenge her wrongs on the whole human species; brought me up to brigandage as a profession,--and as good a one as any other, and as honourable! I went very early into the mountains, and joined a band of brave fellows, which, on the death of their captain, I was unanimously chosen to command. Chosen from my merit, I governed them by opinion. They knew that I was brave and prudent. I had many times an opportunity of showing that I had all the qualities that constitute a good general: had I commanded an army, like Napoleon, I should have been as invincible. Once we were besieged in the upper ranges of the Abruzzi by a company of Austrians, at the time those _maledetti tyranni d'Italia_ had possession of Naples. We were enclosed on three sides by the troops, and on the other was a precipice of many hundred feet, that plunged, without a shelf or ledge of rock, into the plain. I was at that time detached with nine of my companions; but such was the nature of the crag on which we bivouacked,--so narrow the access to it, that only one person could mount the pass at a time. This our enemies knew, for they lost several men in making a reconnaissance. But our provisions failed us, and we were on the point of giving ourselves up, for fear of starvation, when I discovered an eagle's eyrie, and, to the wonder of our foes, contrived, by plundering it of hares and kids, to support nature for many days. At last the eaglets flew; and then our distress returned, and with it the thought of surrender.

"I recollected, however, that opposite to where a single sentinel had been posted there was a chasm--a fissure--a deep ravine, the top of which was covered with wood; and one dark night, leading my little band, I crawled on hands and knees without being perceived, and poniarded the vidette:--he fell without a groan! We then, after overcoming incredible dangers, reached the brink of the abyss. My troop eyed the gulph with terror. It was narrow; but at the bottom roared a mountain torrent, that from its immeasurable depth looked like a silver thread. I came provided with a rope, to which, when we dare not go down into the plain, we are in the habit of attaching a basket, which we lower to the peasants for provisions; to this rope I adjusted a heavy dagger, and hurled it across the chasm. By good fortune, it got entangled at the first throw among the brushwood, and stuck fast between two of the branches. Having drawn it tight, I fastened it to a tree on our side of the ravine. My companions watched me with anxiety, wondering what next I was about to do. I spoke not a word, but suspended myself over the abyss; and, hand over hand, reached the opposite bank in safety. All followed me, and with like success, save one, whose strength or courage failed him: he unhappily sunk into the boiling gulph, but he was dead long before he reached it; so that his sufferings were less than had he been taken by the Tedeschi. What a supper we made that night! and how soundly we slept! That night--that sleep repaid all our toils!

"Great was the astonishment of our foes when they found we had escaped their snares; and you may by that escape form some notion of the pleasures of a brigand's life.

"But this was not the only time we were near falling into the power of the soldiery. In all my seventeen years of service we were never betrayed but once. You know that one of the great trades in our mountains is that of Carbonari. The wood is of no value but to make charcoal, which principally goes into the markets of Rome and Naples. We always kept on good terms with these gentry. One night we were incautiously--contrary to our usual practice--drinking with them, without having placed a single sentinel, when we found ourselves attacked by an armed party,--not, however, before I heard their arms rattling in the branches; so that we had time to seize our muskets. They were much more numerous than ourselves, but they paid dear for their attack: I killed four with my own hand. I was wounded; but that is nothing--I am full of wounds: look here, and here, and here! The Carbonari fled; but we surprised them afterwards. Who can escape from those intent on revenge!--a time always comes, or soon or late. So with them. We retaliated--terribly retaliated; not a man escaped! Not that I lifted a hand against them,--none ever fell by Gasparoni but in action."

As he said this, his stature seemed to grow; and it was clear that he thought himself a hero. He waited, expecting, no doubt, that I should express my admiration of his exploits; but I remembered the last, and said to him,

"You forget the daughter of the Englishman--her head----"

"_Questo Inglese era un impertinente_," replied he. "Why did he not send the ransom? He knew, or ought to have known, the laws of brigands; we could not have spared her life had we wished it. No; it would have been an act of injustice--of gross partiality."

Here some of the brigands, who had heard his words, came up, and by their gestures gave confirmation of their general's words.

"And who among the band," I inquired, "was the executioner; for, like Louis XI, I suppose you had your Tristan?"

He pointed to the back of the cave, and called Geronymo, the figure whom I had first observed. He came forward.

"_Son quì!_" said the man with a hoarse guttural voice, that might have been mistaken for the howl of a wolf.

I looked at him attentively, and not without a sense of horror and disgust. His long and bony, yet athletic form, might have served as a model for a gladiator, for the muscles protruded like one of Michael Angelo's anatomical figures: his cadaverous sallow countenance pale with crime,--his eyes deep sunk, and overhung by thick bushy eyebrows, and emitting a gloomy light as within caverns,--his thin and straight upper lip, with the lower underhung like that of a dog-fish, fitted him well for the bourreau of Signor Gasparoni.

"So you were the executioner of the Englishman's daughter, Geronymo, eh?" I inquired.

"_Si, signor_," said he, with a grin of satisfaction, that betrayed a pride of office, and a superiority over his fellows.

"_Era molto bella!_" observed one of the bandits behind me.

I looked over my shoulder. The wretch who spoke was a little corpulent man, and reminded me of one of Rubens' satyrs. There was a most revolting leer on his countenance, which suggested to my mind not her death,--which was a mercy,--but the miserable fate that preceded it. I remembered the story of the peasant girl in the Tales of a Traveller, and shuddered.

Turning round again to that iron-visaged wretch, Geronymo, I said to him,

"Have you no remorse, Geronymo, for all the murders you have committed?"

"Remorse!" he replied, as though he did not understand the meaning of the word: "ought not a good soldier to obey the word of command? Whenever the captain said '_Amazza!_' _amazzava_."

"_Avete amazzato molte?_" I asked.

"_Si, signor, moltissime_," he replied, with the greatest nonchalance. His eye lighted up, as he spoke, with a gloomy joy.

I turned from him as from a basilisk, and almost thought I heard the death-rattle of one of his victims.

As I was about to leave the Bagno, I met a capuchin, their confessor. It was the same who had persuaded Gasparoni to deliver himself up to the Roman authorities. I took him aside, and entered into conversation with him. He was a man advanced in age, and of a physiognomy such as I have observed to be common to almost all ecclesiastics in Italy,--heavy, dull, and unmeaning. He told me that Gasparoni and most of his band were very religious, and went regularly to mass and confession. He added, that he had petitioned the holy father for their liberation, and that he had no doubt, if released, that they would now make good subjects.

"The Pope," I observed, "knows them too well by past experience to trust such wretches at large again."

What tales might not this man reveal! but I found he was disinclined to be communicative, and in a hurry to commence his duties. I wished him therefore a _buon giorno_.

When we have voluntarily shut ourselves up in a Bagno with its unhappy inmates, it seems as though the return to liberty was interdicted to us,--that we are the victims to some snare, and that the iron gates of the prison are actually closed on us for ever. But a moment's reflection dissipates the fearful illusion, and we abandon ourselves, as Lucretius describes those who behold a storm at a distance, to the pleasure derived from our own security; or as we do when leaning over the parapet of a precipice. But, at the same time, I rushed through the open doors like a captive on being delivered from his chains, and, having emerged from the gloomy gateway, breathed more freely, inhaled with a new delight the sea-breeze, and stood watching the sun sink slowly through the vaporous atmosphere till it had totally disappeared below the waters. Then I returned to my inn, reflecting that I had perhaps just seen the last of the bandits. And yet the scene I had witnessed left no impression behind it such as I had expected; it furnished no stores to feed the imagination or to awaken the enthusiasm of art. The poetry of banditism has perished in the citadel of Cività Vecchia.

THE GLORIES OF GOOD HUMOUR.

BY GODFREY GOODFELLOW.

"Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit æquus."--HOR.

What a charming thing good humour is! How superexcellent and inestimable a quality, or character, or attribute of the mind! Yes, I unhesitatingly declare there is nothing like it. It is the only true key to the casket of happiness, the real source of all this world's enjoyments, the potent mithridate of misery, the balm of life, the care-dispelling Nepenthe, the rich restoring heavenly elixir drawn by wisdom from the alembic of content.