Chapter XIV: Part 14

All the speeches are over; three long speeches as icy as the vault into which the dead man has just descended, three official declamations which, above all, have provided the orators with an opportunity of giving loud voice to their own devotion to the interests of the dynasty. Fifteen times the guns have roused the many echoes of the cemetery, shaken the wreaths of jet and everlasting flowers--the light _ex-voto_ offerings suspended at the corners of the monuments--and while a reddish mist floats and rolls with a smell of gunpowder across the city of the dead, ascends and mingles slowly with the smoke of factories in the plebeian district, the innumerable assembly disperses also, scattered through the steep streets, down the lofty steps all white among the foliage, with a confused murmur, a rippling as of waves over rocks. Purple robes, black robes, blue and green coats, shoulder-knots of gold, slender swords, of whose safety the wearers assure themselves with their hands as they walk, all hasten to regain their carriages. People exchange low bows, discreet smiles, while the mourning-coaches tear down the carriage-ways at a gallop, revealing long lines of black coachmen, with backs bent, hats tilted forward, the box-coats flying in the wind made by their rapid motion.

The general impression is one of thankfulness to have reached the end of a long and fatiguing performance, a legitimate eagerness to quit the administrative harness and ceremonial costumes, to unbuckle sashes, to loosen stand-up collars and neckbands, to slacken the tension of facial muscles, which had been subject to long restraint.

Heavy and short, dragging along his swollen legs with difficulty, Hemerlingue was hastening towards the exit, declining the offers which were made to him of a seat in this or that carriage, since he knew well that his own alone was of size adequate to cope with his proportions.

“Baron, Baron, this way. There is room for you.”

“No, thank you. I want to walk to straighten my legs.”

And to avoid these invitations, which were beginning to embarrass him, he took an almost deserted pathway, one that proved too deserted indeed, for hardly had he taken a step along it before he regretted it. Ever since entering the cemetery he had had but one preoccupation--the fear of finding himself face to face with Jansoulet, whose violence of temper he knew, and who might well forget the sacredness of the place, and even in Pere Lachaise renew the scandal of the Rue Royale. Two or three times during the ceremony he had seen the great head of his old chum emerge from among the crowd of insignificant types which largely composed the company and move in his direction, as though seeking him and desiring a meeting. Down there, in the main road, there would, at any rate, have been people about in case of trouble, while here--Brr--It was this anxiety that made him quicken his short step, his panting breaths, but in vain. As he looked round, in his fear of being followed, the strong, erect shoulders of the Nabob appeared at the entrance to the path. Impossible for the big man to slip away through one of the narrow passages left between the tombs, which are placed so close together that there is not even space to kneel. The damp, rich soil slipped and gave way beneath his feet. He decided to walk on with an air of indifference, hoping that perhaps the other might not recognise him. But a hoarse and powerful voice cried behind him:

“Lazarus!”

His name--the name of this rich man--was Lazarus. He made no reply, but tried to catch up a group of officers who were moving on, very far in front of him.

“Lazarus! Oh, Lazarus!”

Just as in old times on the quay of Marseilles. Under the influence of old habit he was tempted to stop; then the remembrance of his infamies, of all the ill he had done the Nabob, that he was still occupied in doing him, came back to him suddenly with a horrible fear so strong that it amounted to a paroxysm, when an iron hand laid hold of him unceremoniously. A sweat of terror broke out over all his flabby limbs, his face became still more yellow, his eyes blinked in anticipation of the formidable blow which he expected to come, while his fat arms were instinctively raised to ward it off.

“Oh, don’t be afraid. I wish you no harm,” said Jansoulet sadly. “Only I have come to beg you to do no more to me.”

He stooped to breathe. The banker, bewildered and frightened, opened wide his round owl’s eyes in presence of this suffocating emotion.

“Listen, Lazarus; it is you who are the stronger in this war we have been waging on each other for so long. I am down; yes, down. My shoulders have touched the ground. Now, be generous; spare your old chum. Give me quarter; come, give me quarter.”

This southerner was trembling, defeated and softened by the emotional display of the funeral ceremony. Hemerlingue, as he stood facing him, was hardly more courageous. The gloomy music, the open grave, the speeches, the cannonade of that lofty philosophy of inevitable death, all these things had worked on the feelings of this fat baron. The voice of his old comrade completed the awakening of whatever there remained of human in that packet of gelatine.

His old chum! It was the first time for ten years--since their quarrel--that he had seen him so near. How many things were recalled to him by those sun-tanned features, those broad shoulders, so ill adapted for the wearing of embroidered coats! The thin woollen rug full of holes, in which they used to wrap themselves both to sleep on the bridge of the _Sinai_, the food shared in brotherly fashion, the wanderings through the burned-up country round Marseilles, where they used to steal big onions and eat them raw by the side of some ditch, the dreams, the schemings, the pence put into a common fund, and, when fortune had begun to smile on them, the fun they had had together, those excellent quiet little suppers over which they would tell each other everything, with their elbows on the table.

How can one ever reach the point of seriously quarrelling when one knows the other so well, when they have lived together like two twins at the breast of the lean and strong nurse, Poverty, sharing her sour milk and her rough caresses! These thoughts passed through Hemerlingue’s mind like a flash of lightning. Almost instinctively he let his heavy hand fall into the one which the Nabob was holding out to him. Something of the primitive animal was roused in them, something stronger than their enmity, and these two men, each of whom for ten years had been trying to bring the other to ruin and disgrace, fell to talking without any reserve.

Generally, between friends newly met, after the first effusions are over, a silence comes as if they had no more to tell each other, while it is in reality the abundance of things, their precipitate rush, that prevents them from finding utterance. The two chums had touched that condition; but Jansoulet kept a tight grasp on the banker’s arm, fearing to see him escape and resist the kindly impulse he had just roused.

“You are not in a hurry, are you? We can take a little walk, if you like. It has stopped raining, the air is pleasant; one feels twenty years younger.”

“Yes, it is pleasant,” said Hemerlingue; “only I cannot walk for long; my legs are heavy.”

“True, your poor legs. See, there is a bench over there. Let us go and sit down. Lean on me, old friend.”

And the Nabob, with brotherly aid, led him to one of those benches dotted here and there among the tombs, on which those inconsolable mourners rest who make the cemetery their usual walk and abode. He settled him in his seat, gazed upon him tenderly, pitied him for his infirmity, and, following what was quite a natural channel in such a spot, they came to talking of their health, of the old age that was approaching. This one was dropsical, the other subject to apoplectic fits. Both were in the habit of dosing themselves with the Jenkins pearls, a dangerous remedy--witness Mora, so quickly carried off.

“My poor duke!” said Jansoulet.

“A great loss to the country,” remarked the banker with an air of conviction.

And the Nabob added naively:

“For me above all, for me; for, if he had lived--Ah! what luck you have, what luck you have!”

Fearing to have wounded him, he went on quickly:

“And then, too, you are clever, so very clever.”

The baron looked at him with a wink so droll, that his little black eyelashes disappeared amid his yellow fat.

“No,” said he, “it is not I who am clever. It is Marie.”

“Marie?”

“Yes, the baroness. Since her baptism she has given up her name of Yamina for that of Marie. She is a real sort of woman. She knows more than I do myself about banking and Paris and business. It is she who manages everything at home.”

“You are very fortunate,” sighed Jansoulet. His air of gloom told a long story of qualities missing in Mlle. Afchin. Then, after a silence, the baron resumed:

“She has a great grudge against you, Marie, you know. She will not be pleased when she hears that we have been talking together.”

A frown passed over his heavy brow, as though he were regretting their reconciliation, at the thought of the scene which he would have with his wife. Jansoulet stammered:

“I have done her no harm, however.”

“Come, come, neither of you has been very nice to her. Think of the affront put upon her when we called after our marriage. Your wife sending word to us that she was not in the habit of receiving quondam slaves. As though our friendship ought not to have been stronger than a prejudice. Women don’t forget things of that kind.”

“But no responsibility lay with me for that, old friend. You know how proud those Afchins are.”

He was not proud himself, poor man. His mien was so woebegone, so supplicating under his friend’s frown, that he moved him to pity. Decidedly, the cemetery had softened the baron.

“Listen, Bernard; there is only one thing that counts. If you want us to be friends, as formerly, and this reconciliation not to be wasted, you will have to get my wife to consent. Without her nothing can be done. When Mlle. Afchin shut her door in our faces you let her have her way, did you not? In the same way, on my side, if Marie said to me when I go home, ‘I will not let you be friends,’ all my protestations now would not prevent me from throwing you overboard. For there is no such thing as friendship in face of such difficulties. Peace at one’s fireside is better than everything else.”

“But in that case, what is to be done?” asked the Nabob, frightened.

“I am going to tell you. The baroness is at home every Saturday. Come with your wife and pay her a visit the day after to-morrow. You will find the best society in Paris at the house. The past shall not be mentioned. The ladies will gossip together of chiffons and frocks, talk of the things women do talk about. And then the whole matter will be settled. We shall become friends as we used to be; and since you are in difficulties, well, we will find some way of getting you out of them.”

“Do you think so? The fact is I am in terrible straits,” said the other, shaking his head.

Hemerlingue’s cunning eyes disappeared again beneath the folds of his cheeks like two flies in butter.

“Well, yes; I have played a strong game. But you don’t lack shrewdness, all the same. The loan of the fifteen millions to the Bey--it was a good stroke, that. Ah! you are bold enough; only you hold your cards badly. One can see your game.”

Till now they had been talking in low tones, impressed by the silence of the great necropolis; but little by little human interests asserted themselves in a louder key even there where their nothingness lay exposed on all those flat stones covered with dates and figures, as if death was only an affair of time and calculation--the desired solution of a problem.

Hemerlingue enjoyed the sight of his friend reduced to such humility, and gave him advice on his affairs, with which he seemed to be fully acquainted. According to him the Nabob could still get out of his difficulties very well. Everything depended on the validation, on the turning up of a card. The question was to make sure that it should be a good one. But Jansoulet had no more confidence. In losing Mora, he had lost everything.

“You lose Mora, but you regain me; so things are equalized,” said the banker tranquilly.

“No, do you see it is impossible. It is too late. Le Merquier has completed the report. It is a dreadful one, I believe.”

“Well, if he has completed his report, he will have to prepare another.”

“How is that to be done?”

The baron looked at him with surprise.

“Ah, you are losing your senses. Why, by paying him a hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand francs, if necessary.

“How can you think of such a thing? Le Merquier, that man of integrity! ‘My conscience,’ as they call him.”

This time Hemerlingue’s laugh burst forth with an extraordinary heartiness, and must have reached the inmost recesses of the neighbouring mausoleums, little accustomed to such disrespect.

“‘My conscience’ a man of integrity! Ah! you amuse me. You don’t know, then, that he is in my pay, conscience and all, and that--” He paused, and looked behind him, somewhat startled by a sound which he had heard. “Listen.”

It was the echo of his laughter sent back to them from the depths of a vault, as if the idea of Le Merquier having a conscience moved even the dead to mirth.

“Suppose we walk a little,” said he, “it begins to be chilly on this bench.”

Then, as they walked among the tombs, he went on to explain to him with a certain pedantic fatuity, that in France bribes played as important a part as in the East. Only one had to be a little more delicate about it here. You veiled your bribes. “Thus, take this Le Merquier, for instance. Instead of offering him your money openly, in a big purse, as you would to a local pasha, you go about it indirectly. The man is fond of pictures. He is constantly having dealings with Schwalbach, who employs him as a decoy for his Catholic clients. Well, you offer him some picture--a souvenir to hang on a panel in his study. The whole point is to make the price quite clear. But you will see. I will take you round to call on him myself. I will show you how the thing is worked.”

And delighted at the amazement of the Nabob, who, to flatter him, exaggerated his surprise still further, and opened his eyes wide with an air of admiration, the banker enlarged the scope of his lesson--made of it a veritable course of Parisian and worldly philosophy.

“See, old comrade, what one has to look after in Paris, above everything else, is the keeping up of appearances. They are the only things that count--appearances! Now you have not sufficient care for them. You go about town, your waistcoat unbuttoned, a good-humoured fellow, talking of your affairs, just what you are by nature. You stroll around just as you would in the bazaars of Tunis. That is how you have come to get bowled over, my good Bernard.”

He paused to take breath, feeling quite exhausted. In an hour he had walked farther and spoken more than he was accustomed to do in the course of a whole year. They noticed, as they stopped, that their walk and conversation had led them back in the direction of Mora’s grave, which was situated just above a little exposed plateau, whence looking over a thousand closely packed roofs, they could see Montmartre, the Buttes Chaumont, their rounded outline in the distance looking like high waves. In the hollows lights were already beginning to twinkle, like ships’ lanterns, through the violet mists that were rising; chimneys seemed to leap upward like masts, or steamer funnels discharging their smoke. Those three undulations, with the tide of Pere Lachaise, were clearly suggestive of waves of the sea, following each other at equal intervals. The sky was bright, as often happens in the evening of a rainy day, an immense sky, shaded with tints of dawn, against which the family tomb of Mora exhibited in relief four allegorical figures, imploring, meditative, thoughtful, whose attitudes were made more imposing by the dying light. Of the speeches, of the official condolences, nothing remained. The soil trodden down all around, masons at work washing the dirt from the plaster threshold, were all that was left to recall the recent burial.

Suddenly the door of the ducal tomb shut with a clash of all its metallic weight. Thenceforth the late Minister of State was to remain alone, utterly alone, in the shadow of its night, deeper than that which then was creeping up from the bottom of the garden, invading the winding paths, the stone stairways, the bases of the columns, pyramids and tombs of every kind, whose summits were reached more slowly by the shroud. Navvies, all white with that chalky whiteness of dried bones, were passing by, carrying their tools and wallets. Furtive mourners, dragging themselves away regretfully from tears and prayer, glided along the margins of the clumps of trees, seeming to skirt them as with the silent flight of night-birds, while from the extremities of Pere Lachaise voices rose--melancholy calls announcing the closing time. The day of the cemetery was at its end. The city of the dead, handed over once more to Nature, was becoming an immense wood with open spaces marked by crosses. Down in a valley, the window-panes of a custodian’s house were lighted up. A shudder seemed to run through the air, losing itself in murmurings along the dim paths.

“Let us go,” the two old comrades said to each other, gradually coming to feel the impression of that twilight, which seemed colder than elsewhere; but before moving off, Hemerlingue, pursuing his train of thought, pointed to the monument winged at the four corners by the draperies and the outstretched hands of its sculptured figures.

“Look here,” said he. “That was the man who understood the art of keeping up appearances.”

Jansoulet took his arm to aid him in the descent.

“Ah, yes, he was clever. But you are the most clever of all,” he answered with his terrible Gascon intonation.

Hemerlingue made no protest.

“It is to my wife that I owe it. So I strongly recommend you to make your peace with her, because unless you do----”

“Oh, don’t be afraid. We shall come on Saturday. But you will take me to see Le Merquier.”

And while the two silhouettes, the one tall and square, the other massive and short, were passing out of sight among the twinings of the great labyrinth, while the voice of Jansoulet guiding his friend, “This way, old fellow--lean hard on my arm,” died away by insensible degrees, a stray beam of the setting sun fell upon and illuminated behind them in the little plateau, an expressive and colossal bust, with great brow beneath long swept-back hair, and powerful and ironic lip--the bust of Balzac watching them.

LA BARONNE HEMERLINGUE

Just at the end of the long vault, under which were the offices of Hemerlingue and Sons, the black tunnel which Joyeuse had for ten years adorned and illuminated with his dreams, a monumental staircase with a wrought-iron balustrade, a staircase of mediaeval time, led towards the left to the reception rooms of the baroness, which looked out on the court-yard just above the cashier’s office, so that in summer, when the windows were open, the ring of the gold, the crash of the piles of money scattered on the counters, softened a little by the rich and lofty hangings at the windows, made a mercantile accompaniment to the buzzing conversation of fashionable Catholicism.

The entrance struck at once the note of this house, as of her who did the honours of it. A mixture of a vague scent of the sacristy, with the excitement of the Bourse, and the most refined fashion, these heterogeneous elements, met and crossed each other’s path there, but remained as much apart as the noble faubourg, under whose patronage the striking conversion of the Moslem had taken place, was from the financial quarters where Hemerlingue had his life and his friends. The Levantine colony--pretty numerous in Paris--was composed in great measure of German Jews, bankers or brokers who had made colossal fortunes in the East, and still did business here, not to lose the habit. The colony showed itself regularly on the baroness’s visiting day. Tunisians on a visit to Paris never failed to call on the wife of the great banker; and old Colonel Brahim, _charge d’affaires_ of the Bey, with his flabby mouth and bloodshot eyes, had his nap every Saturday in the corner of the same divan.

“One seems to smell scorching in your drawing-room, my child,” said the old Princess de Dions smilingly to the newly named Marie, whom M. Le Merquier and she had led to the font. But the presence of all these heretics--Jews, Moslems, and even renegades--of these great over-dressed blotched women, loaded with gold and ornaments, veritable bundles of clothes, did not hinder the Faubourg Saint-Germain from visiting, surrounding, and looking after the young convert, the plaything of these noble ladies, a very obedient puppet, whom they showed, whom they took out, and whose evangelical simplicities, so piquant by contrast with her past, they quoted everywhere. Perhaps deep down in the heart of her amiable patronesses a hope lay of meeting in this circle of returned Orientals some new subject for conversion, an occasion for filling the aristocratic Chapel of Missions again with the touching spectacle of one of those adult baptisms which carry one back to the first days of the Faith, far away on the banks of the Jordan; baptisms soon to be followed by a first communion, a confirmation, when baptismal vows are renewed; occasions when a godmother may accompany her godchild, guide the young soul, share in the naive transports of a newly awakened belief, and may also display a choice of toilettes, delicately graduated to the importance of the sentiment of the ceremony. But not every day does it happen that one of the leaders of finance brings to Paris an Armenian slave as his wife.

A slave! That was the blot in the past of this woman from the East, bought in the bazaar of Adrianople for the Emperor of Morocco, then sold, when he died and his harem was dispersed, to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had married her when she passed from this new seraglio, but she could not be received at Tunis, where no woman--Moor, Turk or European--would consent to treat a former slave as an equal, on account of a prejudice like that which separates the creoles from the best disguised quadroons. Even in Paris the Hemerlingues found this invincible prejudice among the small foreign colonies, constituted, as they were, of little circles full of susceptibilities and local traditions. Yamina thus passed two or three years in a complete solitude whose leisure and spiteful feelings she well knew how to utilize, for she was an ambitious woman endowed with extraordinary will and persistence. She learned French thoroughly, said farewell to her embroidered vests and pantaloons of red silk, accustomed her figure and her walk to European toilettes, to the inconvenience of long dresses, and then, one night at the opera, showed the astonished Parisians the spectacle, a little uncivilized still, but delicate, elegant, and original, of a Mohammedan in a costume of _Leonard’s_.

The sacrifice of her religion soon followed that of her costume. Mme. Hemerlingue had long abandoned the practices of Mohammedan religion, when M. le Merquier, their friend and mentor in Paris, showed them that the baroness’s public conversion would open to her the doors of that section of the Parisian world whose access became more and more difficult as society became more democratic. Once the Faubourg Saint-Germain was conquered, all the others would follow. And, in fact, when, after the announcement of the baptism, they learned that the greatest ladies in France could be seen at the Baroness Hemerlingue’s Saturdays, Mmes. Gugenheim, Furenberg, Caraiscaki, Maurice Trott--all wives of millionaires celebrated on the markets of Tunis--gave up their prejudices and begged to be invited to the former slave’s receptions. Mme. Jansoulet alone--newly arrived with a stock of cumbersome Oriental ideas in her mind, like her ostrich eggs, her narghile pipe, and the Tunisian _bric-a-brac_ in her rooms--protested against what she called an impropriety, a cowardice, and declared that she would never set her foot at _her_ house. Soon a little retrograde movement was felt round the Gugenheims, the Caraiscaki, and the other people, as happens at Paris every time when some irregular position, endeavouring to establish itself, brings on regrets and defections. They had gone too far to draw back, but they resolved to make the value of their good-will, of their sacrificed prejudices, felt, and the Baroness Marie well understood the shade of meaning in the protecting tone of the Levantines, treating her as “My dear child,” “My dear good girl,” with an almost contemptuous pride. Thenceforward her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds--the complicated ferocious hatred of the seraglio, with strangling and the sack at the end, perhaps more difficult to arrive at in Paris than on the banks of the lake of El Bahaira, but for which she had already prepared the stout sack and the cord.

One can imagine, knowing all this, what was the surprise and agitation of this corner of exotic society, when the news spread, not only that the great Afchin--as these ladies called her--had consented to see the baroness, but that she would pay her first visit on her next Saturday. Neither the Fuernbergs nor the Trotts would wish to miss such an occasion. On her side, the baroness did everything in her power to give the utmost brilliancy to this solemn reparation. She wrote, she visited, and succeeded so well, that in spite of the lateness of the season, Mme. Jansoulet, on arriving at four o’clock at the Faubourg Saint-Honore, would have seen drawn up before the great arched doorway, side by side with the discreet russet livery of the Princess de Dion, and of many authentic _blasons_, the pretentious and fictitious arms, the multicoloured wheels of a crowd of plutocrat equipages, and the tall powdered lackeys of the Caraiscaki.

Above, in the reception rooms, was another strange and resplendent crowd. In the first two rooms there was a going and coming, a continual passage of rustling silks up to the boudoir where the baroness sat, sharing her attentions and cajoleries between two very distinct camps. On one side were dark toilettes, modest in appearance, whose refinement was appreciable only to observant eyes; on the other, a wild burst of vivid colour, opulent figures, rich diamonds, floating scarfs, exotic fashions, in which one felt a regret for a warmer climate, and more luxurious life. Here were sharp taps with the fan, discreet whispers from the few men present, some of the _bien pensant_ youth, silent, immovable, sucking the handles of their canes, two or three figures, upright behind the broad backs of their wives, speaking with their heads bent forward, as if they were offering contraband goods for sale; and in a corner the fine patriarchal beard and violet cassock of an orthodox Armenian bishop.

The baroness, in attempting to harmonize these fashionable diversities, to keep her rooms full until the famous interview, moved about continually, took part in ten different conversations, raising her harmonious and velvety voice to the twittering diapason which distinguishes Oriental women, caressing and coaxing, the mind supple as the body, touching on all subjects, and mixing in the requisite proportions fashion and charity sermons, theatres and bazaars, the dressmaker and the confessor. The mistress of the house united a great personal charm with this acquired science--a science visible even in her black and very simple dress, which brought out her nun-like pallor, her houri-like eyes, her shining and plaited hair drawn back from a narrow, child-like forehead, a forehead of which the small mouth accentuated the mystery, hiding from the inquisitive the former _favourite’s_ whole varied past, she who had no age, who knew not herself the date of her birth, and never remembered to have been a child.

Evidently if the absolute power of evil--rare indeed among women, influenced as they are by their impressionable physical nature by so many different currents--could take possession of a soul, it would be in that of this slave, moulded by basenesses, revolted but patient, and complete mistress of herself, like all those whom the habit of veiling the eyes has accustomed to lie safely and unscrupulously.

At this moment no one could have suspected the anguish she suffered; to see her kneeling before the princess, an old, good, straightforward soul, of whom the Fuernberg was always saying, “Call that a princess--that!”

“I beg of you, godmamma, don’t go away yet.”

She surrounded her with all sorts of cajoleries, of graces, of little airs, without telling her, to be sure, that she wanted to keep her till the arrival of the Jansoulets, to add to her triumph.

“But,” said the princess, pointing out to her the majestic Armenian, silent and grave, his tasselled hat on his knees, “I must take this poor bishop to the _Grand Saint-Christophe_, to buy some medals. He would never get on without me.”

“No, no, I wish--you must--a few minutes more.” And the baroness threw a furtive look on the ancient and sumptuous clock in a corner of the room.

Five o’clock already, and the great Afchin not arrived. The Levantines began to laugh behind their fans. Happily tea was just being served, also Spanish wines, and a crowd of delicious Turkish cakes which were only to be had in that house, whose receipts, brought away with her by the favourite, had been preserved in the harem, like some secrets of confectionery on our convents. That made a diversion. Hemerlingue, who on Saturdays came out of his office from time to time to make his bow to the ladies, was drinking a glass of Madeira near the little table while talking to Maurice Trott, once the dresser of Said-Pasha, when his wife approached him, gently and quietly. He knew what anger this impenetrable calm must cover, and asked her, in a low tone, timidly:

“No one?”

“No one. You see to what an insult you expose me.”

She smiled, her eyes half closed, taking with the end of her nail a crumb of cake from his long black whiskers, but her little transparent nostrils trembled with a terrible eloquence.

“Oh, she will come,” said the banker, his mouth full. “I am sure she will come.”

The noise of dresses, of a train rustling in the next room made the baroness turn quickly. But, to the great joy of the “bundles,” looking on from their corners, it was not the lady they were expecting.

This tall, elegant blonde, with worn features and irreproachable toilette, was not like Mlle. Afchin. She was worthy in every way to bear a name as celebrated as that of Dr. Jenkins. In the last two or three months the beautiful Mme. Jenkins had greatly changed, become much older. In the life of a woman who has long remained young there comes a time when the years, which have passed over her head without leaving a wrinkle, trace their passage all at once brutally in indelible marks. People no longer say, on seeing her, “How beautiful she is!” but “How beautiful she must have been!” And this cruel way of speaking in the past, of throwing back to a distant period that which was but yesterday a visible fact, marks a beginning of old age and of retirement, a change of all her triumphs into memories. Was it the disappointment of seeing the doctor’s wife arrive, instead of Mme. Jansoulet, or did the discredit which the Duke de Mora’s death had thrown on the fashionable physician fall on her who bore his name? There was a little of each of these reasons, and perhaps of another, in the cool greeting of the baroness. A slight greeting on the ends of her lips, some hurried words, and she returned to the noble battalion nibbling vigorously away. The room had become animated under the effects of wine. People no longer whispered; they talked. The lamps brought in added a new brilliance to the gathering, but announced that it was near its close; some indeed, not interested in the great event, having already taken their leave. And still the Jansoulets did not come.

All at once a heavy, hurried step. The Nabob appeared, alone, buttoned up in his black coat, correctly dressed, but with his face upset, his eyes haggard, still trembling from the terrible scene which he had left.

She would not come.

In the morning he had told the maids to dress madame for three o’clock, as he did each time he took out the Levantine with him, when it was necessary to move this indolent person, who, not being able to accept even any responsibility whatever, left others to think, decide, act for her, going willingly where she was desired to go, once she was started. And it was on this amiability that he counted to take her to Hemerlingue’s. But when, after _dejeuner_, Jansoulet dressed, superb, perspiring with the effort to put on gloves, asked if madame would soon be ready, he was told that she was not going out. The matter was grave, so grave, that putting on one side all the intermediaries of valets and maids, which they made use of in their conjugal dialogues, he ran up the stairs four steps at once like a gust of wind, and entered the draperied rooms of the Levantine.

She was still in bed, dressed in that great open tunic of silk of two colours, which the Moors call a _djebba_, and in a little cap embroidered with gold, from which escaped her heavy long black hair, all entangled round her moon-shaped face, flushed from her recent meal. The sleeves of her _djebba_ pushed back showed two enormous shapeless arms, loaded with bracelets, with long chains wandering through a heap of little mirrors, of red beads, of scent-boxes, of microscopic pipes, of cigarette cases--the childish toyshop collection of a Moorish woman at her rising.

The room, filled with the heavy opium-scented smoke of Turkish tobacco, was in similar disorder. Negresses went and came, slowly removing their mistress’s coffee, the favourite gazelle was licking the dregs of a cup which its delicate muzzle had overturned on the carpet, while seated at the foot of the bed with a touching familiarity, the melancholy Cabassu was reading aloud to madame a drama in verse which Cardailhac was shortly going to produce. The Levantine was stupefied with this reading, absolutely astounded.

“My dear,” said she to Jansoulet, in her thick Flemish accent, “I don’t know what our manager is thinking of. I am just reading this _Revolt_, which he is so mad about. But it is impossible. There is nothing dramatic about it.”

“Don’t talk to me of the theatre,” said Jansoulet, furious, in spite of his respect for the daughter of the Afchins. “What, you are not dressed yet? Weren’t you told that we were going out?”

They had told her, but she had begun to read this stupid piece. And with her sleepy air:

“We will go out to-morrow.”

“To-morrow! Impossible. We are expected to-day. A most important visit.”

“But where?”

He hesitated a second.

“To Hemerlingue’s.”

She raised her great eyes, thinking he was making game of her. Then he told her of his meeting with the baron at the funeral of de Mora and the understanding they had come to.

“Go there, if you like,” said she coldly. “But you little know me if you believe that I, an Afchin, will ever set foot in that slave’s house.”

Cabassu, prudently seeing what was likely to happen, had fled into a neighbouring room, carrying with him the five acts of _The Revolt_ under his arm.

“Come,” said the Nabob to his wife, “I see that you do not know the terrible position I am in. Listen.”

Without thinking of the maids or the negresses, with the sovereign indifference of an Oriental for his household, he proceeded to picture his great distress, his fortune sequestered over seas, his credit destroyed over here, his whole career in suspense before the judgment of the Chamber, the influence of the Hemerlingues on the judge-advocate, and the necessity of the sacrifice at the moment of all personal feeling to such important interests. He spoke hotly, tried to convince her, to carry her away. But she merely answered him, “I shall not go,” as if it were only a matter of some unimportant walk, a little too long for her.

He said trembling:

“See, now, it is not possible that you should say that. Think that my fortune is at stake, the future of our children, the name you bear. Everything is at stake in what you cannot refuse to do.”

He could have spoken thus for hours and been always met by the same firm, unshakable obstinacy--an Afchin could not visit a slave.

“Well, madame,” said he violently, “this slave is worth more than you. She has increased tenfold her husband’s wealth by her intelligence, while you, on the contrary----”

For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet dared to hold up his head before his wife. Was he ashamed of this crime of _lese-majeste_, or did he understand that such a remark would place an impassable gulf between them? He changed his tone, knelt down before the bed, with that cheerful tenderness when one persuades children to be reasonable.

“My little Martha, I beg of you--get up, dress yourself. It is for your own sake I ask it, for your comfort, for your own welfare. What would become of you if, for a caprice, a stupid whim, we should become poor?”

But the word--poor--represented absolutely nothing to the Levantine. One could speak of it before her, as of death before little children. She was not moved by it, not knowing what it was. She was perfectly determined to keep in bed in her _djebba_; and to show her decision, she lighted a new cigarette at her old one just finished; and while the poor Nabob surrounded his “dear little wife” with excuses, with prayers, with supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than her own, if she would come, she watched the heavy smoke rising to the painted ceiling, wrapping herself up in it as in an imperturbable calm. At last, in face of this refusal, this silence, this barrier of headstrong obstinacy, Jansoulet unbridled his wrath and rose up to his full height:

“Come,” said he, “I wish it.”

He turned to the negresses:

“Dress your mistress at once.”

And boor as he was at the bottom, the son of a southern nail-maker asserting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to bound to her feet with a promptitude amazing in so massive a person. She roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust, pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her husband.

“Never, understand me, never! You may drag me sooner to this----”

The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout. Jansoulet could have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Marseilles, at some quarrel of prostitutes and bullies, or again at some open-air dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the whirlwinds of golden dust. She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport, a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all. The wretched man looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping:

“No, I will not go--no, I will not go!”

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins! Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman, that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the _masseur_ had just gone out:

“Aristide!”

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues’, making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, “His wife, very unwell--most grieved not to have been able to come--” She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, “Oh, I knew--I knew!” then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme. Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when compared with his own gilded halls.

It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme. Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under his wife’s eye, expanded a little.

“It is very annoying,” said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard, “that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come.”

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

“Annoying, annoying,” repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for his key in his pocket.

“Come, old fellow,” said the Nabob, taking his hand, “there’s no reason, because our wives don’t agree--That doesn’t hinder us from remaining friends. What a good chat the other day, eh?”

“No doubt” said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily before the enormous empty chair. “Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my mail to despatch.”

“_Ya didon, monci_” (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to joke, and using the _patois_ of the south to recall to his old chum all the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening. “Our visit to Le Merquier still holds good. The picture we were going to present to him, you know. What day?”

“Ah, yes, Le Merquier--true--eh--well, soon. I will write to you.”

“Really? You know it is very important.”

“Yes, yes. I will write to you. Good-bye.”

And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his wife coming.

Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of spelling:

MY DEAR OLD COM_--I cannot accom_ you to Le Mer. _Too bus_ just now. Besid_ y_ will be _bet_ alone to _tal_. Go _th bold_. You are _exp. A_ Cassette, _ev morn_ 8 to 10.

Yours _faith_

HEM.

Below as a postscript, a very small hand had written very legibly:

“A religious picture, as good as possible.”

What was he to think of this letter? Was there real good-will in it, or polite evasion? In any case hesitation was no longer possible. Time pressed. Jansoulet made a bold effort, then--for he was very frightened of Le Merquier--and called on him one morning.

Our strange Paris, alike in its population and its aspects, seems a specimen map of the whole world. In the Marais there are narrow streets, with old sculptured worm-eaten doors, with overhanging gables and balconies, which remind you of old Heidelberg. The Faubourg Saint-Honore, lying round the Russian church with its white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers. Little, low, clean houses, each with its brass plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Cassette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, their doors each with its knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town--Tours or Orleans, for example--in the district of the cathedral or the palace, where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the sound of the bells and the choir.

It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club--of which he had just been made honorary president--that M. Le Merquier lived. He was _avocat_, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm.

He arrived before nine o’clock at an old mansion of which the ground floor was occupied by a religious bookshop, asleep in the odour of the sacristy, and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles are printed for hawkers, and mounted the great whitewashed convent stairway. Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic atmosphere, in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south, impressions of infancy still intact, thanks to his long absence from home; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the occasion to call them in question. Fashionable hypocrisy had presented itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity, and he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings. Introduced into the _avocat’s_ waiting-room--a vast parlour with fine white muslin curtains, having for its sole ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto’s Dead Christ--his doubt and trouble changed into indignant conviction. It was not possible! He had been deceived as to Le Merquier. There was surely some bold slander in it, such as so easily spreads in Paris--or perhaps it was one of those ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months. No, this stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal the bags of gold. He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal, to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth of cassocks. In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting there with him. A Dominican, ascetic and serene, walking up and down with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the _Echo of Purgatory_, the _Rose-bush of Mary_, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical indulgences and remissions of future sins. Some muttered words, a stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer’s principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an “I was expecting you” in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.

The moment was decisive, the situation embarrassing. Jansoulet did not hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob’s pretensions to know men as well as Mora. And this instinct, which, said he, had never deceived him, warned him that he was at that moment dealing with a rigid and unshakable honesty, a conscience in hard stone, untouchable by pick-axe or powder. “My conscience!” Suddenly he changed his programme, threw to the winds the tricks and equivocations which embarrassed his open and courageous disposition, and, head high and heart open, held to this honest man a language he was born to understand.

“Do not be astonished, my dear colleague,”--his voice trembled, but soon became firm in the conviction of his defence--“do not be astonished if I am come to find you here instead of asking simply to be heard by the third committee. The explanation which I have to make to you is so delicate and confidential that it would have been impossible to make it publicly before my colleagues.”

Maitre Le Merquier, above his spectacles, looked at the curtain with a disturbed air. Evidently the conversation was taking an unexpected turn.