Chapter II: Part 2

Jenkins entered the bed-chamber, a banal place like all furnished apartments, and moved towards the fire on which there were set to heat curling-tongs of all sizes, while in the contiguous laboratory, separated from the room by a curtain of Algerian tapestry, the Marquis de Monpavon gave himself up to the manipulations of his valet. Odours of patchouli, of cold-cream, of hartshorn, and of singed hair escaped from the part of the room which was shut off, and from time to time, when Francis came to fetch a curling-iron, Jenkins caught sight of a huge dressing-table laden with a thousand little instruments of ivory, and mother-of-pearl, with steel files, scissors, puffs, and brushes, with bottles, with little trays, with cosmetics, labelled and arranged methodically in groups and lines; and amid all this display, awkward and already shaky, an old man’s hand, shrunken and long, delicately trimmed and polished about the nails like that of a Japanese painter, which faltered about among this fine hardware and doll’s china.

While continuing the process of making up his face, the longest, the most complicated of his morning occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told of his little ailments, and the good effect of the _pills_. They made him young again, he said. And at a distance, thus, without seeing him, one would have taken him for the Duc de Mora, to such a degree had he usurped his manner of speech. There were the same unfinished phrases, ended by “ps, ps, ps,” muttered between the teeth, expressions like “What’s its name?” “Who was it?” constantly thrown into what he was saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless, wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an affectation of simplicity.

Jenkins, finding the sitting rather long, had risen to take his departure.

“Adieu, I must be off. We shall see you at the Nabob’s?”

“Yes, I intend to be there for luncheon. Promised to bring him--what’s his name. Who was it? What? You know, for our big affair--ps, ps, ps. Were it not for that, should gladly stay away. Real menagerie, that house.”

The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was rather mixed at his friend’s. But then! One could hardly blame him for it. The poor fellow, he knew no better.

“Neither knows nor is willing to learn,” remarked Monpavon with bitterness. “Instead of consulting people of experience--ps, ps, ps--first sponger that comes along. Have you seen the horses that Bois l’Hery has persuaded him to buy? Absolute rubbish those animals. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. We may wager that Bois l’Hery got them for six thousand.”

“Oh, for shame--a nobleman!” said Jenkins, with the indignation of a lofty soul refusing to believe in baseness.

Monpavon continued, without seeming to hear:

“All that because the horses came from Mora’s stable.”

“It is true that the dear Nabob’s heart is very full of the duke. I am about to make him very happy, therefore, when I inform him----”

The doctor paused, embarrassed.

“When you inform him of what, Jenkins?”

Somewhat abashed, Jenkins had to confess that he had obtained permission from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the heavy and wrinkled eyelid which covered it. Jenkins’s patients all had that eye.

Monpavon must indeed have been deeply moved to show himself thus devoid of all prestige. In point of fact, with white lips and a changed voice he addressed the doctor quickly, without the lisp this time, and in a single outburst:

“Come now, _mon cher_, no tomfoolery between us, eh? We are both met before the same dish, but I leave you your share. I intend that you shall leave me mine.”

And Jenkins’s air of astonishment did not make him pause. “Let this be said once for all. I have promised the Nabob to present him to the duke, just as, formerly, I presented you. Do not mix yourself up, therefore, with what concerns me alone.”

Jenkins laid his hand on his heart, protested his innocence. He had never had any intention. Certainly Monpavon was too intimate a friend of the duke, for any other--How could he have supposed?

“I suppose nothing,” said the old nobleman, calmer but still cold. “I merely desired to have a very clear explanation with you on this subject.”

The Irishman extended a widely opened hand.

“My dear marquis, explanations are always clear between men of honour.”

“Honour is a big word, Jenkins. Let us say people of deportment--that suffices.”

And that deportment, which he invoked as the supreme guide of conduct, recalling him suddenly to the sense of his ludicrous situation, the marquis offered one finger to his friend’s demonstrative shake of the hand, and passed back with dignity behind his curtain, while the other left, in haste to resume his round.

What a magnificent clientele he had, this Jenkins! Nothing but princely mansions, heated staircases, laden with flowers at every landing, upholstered and silky alcoves, where disease was transformed into something discreet, elegant, where nothing suggested that brutal hand which throws on a bed of pain those who only cease to work in order to die. They were not in any true speech, sick people, these clients of the Irish doctor. They would have been refused admission to a hospital. Their organs not possessing even strength to give them a shock, the seat of their malady was to be discovered nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited. They were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it prolonged. And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.

“Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!” the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was reduced to a breath.

“You shall go, my dear child.”

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

“Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I must be at the Cabinet Council.”

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their last day Jenkins’s clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d’Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

“Mme. Constance is at mass,” he said, “and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone. We have been at work since six o’clock this morning,” added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was a splendid sculptor’s studio, the front of which, on the street corner, semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms, which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason’s shed, this one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall and, here and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was covered with a piece of black gauze.

The mistress of the house, Felicia Ruys, the daughter of the famous sculptor and herself already known by two masterpieces, the bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, was standing in the middle of the studio, occupied in the modelling of a figure. Wearing a tightly fitting riding-habit of blue cloth with long folds, a fichu of China silk twisted about her neck like a man’s tie, her black, fine hair caught up carelessly above the antique modelling of her small head, Felicia was at work with an extreme earnestness which added to her beauty the concentration, the intensity which are given to the features by an attentive and satisfied expression. But that changed immediately upon the arrival of the doctor.

“Ah, it is you,” said she brusquely, as though awaked from a dream. “The bell was rung, then? I did not hear it.”

And in the ennui, the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was heightened by the constitutional wildness.

Oh, how the doctor’s voice became humble and condescending as he answered her:

“So you are quite absorbed in your work, my dear Felicia. Is it something new that you are at work on there? It seems to me very pretty.”

He moved towards the rough and still formless model out of which there was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound which was scampering at full speed with a rush that was truly extraordinary.

“The idea of it came to me last night. I began to work it out by lamplight. My poor Kadour, he sees no fun in it,” said the girl, glancing with a look of caressing kindness at the greyhound whose paws the little page was endeavouring to place apart in order to get the pose again.

Jenkins remarked in a fatherly way that she did wrong to tire herself thus, and taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

“Come, I am sure you are feverish.”

At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost of repulsion.

“No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. To be commencing life, and to be disgusted with it! It is hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her memories of the past. I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to muse upon. I have only work--work!”

As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.

Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.

Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia resumed:

“Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob. Some one pointed him out to me last Friday at the opera.”

“You were at the opera on Friday?”

“Yes. The duke had sent me his box.”

Jenkins changed colour.

“I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time for twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been inside the Opera-House. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs sparkled in her eyes. Happy who has emotions like that. A real type, that Nabob. You will have to bring him to see me. He has a head that it would amuse me to do.”

“He! Why, he is hideous! You cannot have looked at him carefully.”

“On the contrary, I had a perfect view. He was opposite us. That mask, as of a white Ethiopian, would be superb in marble. And not vulgar, in any case. Besides, since he is so ugly as that, you will not be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora’s bust. What a disagreeable face you had, Jenkins, in those days!”

“For ten years of life,” muttered Jenkins in a gloomy voice, “I would not have that time over again. But you it amuses to behold suffering.”

“You know quite well that nothing amuses me,” said she, shrugging her shoulders with a supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without adding another word, she plunged into one of those dumb activities by which true artists escape from themselves and from everything that surrounds them.

Jenkins paced a few steps in the studio, much moved, with avowals on the tip of his tongue which yet dared not put themselves into words. At length, feeling himself dismissed, he took his hat and walked towards the door.

“So it is understood. I must bring him to see you.”

“Who?”

“Why, the Nabob. It was you who this very moment----”

“Ah, yes,” remarked the strange person whose caprices were short-lived. “Bring him if you like. I don’t care, otherwise.”

And her beautiful dejected voice, in which something seemed broken, the listlessness of her whole personality, said distinctly enough that it was true, that she cared really for nothing in the world.

Jenkins left the room, extremely troubled, and with a gloomy brow. But, the moment he was outside, he assumed once more his laughing and cordial expression, being of those who, in the streets, go masked. The morning was advancing. The mist, still perceptible in the vicinity of the Seine, floated now only in shreds and gave a vaporous unsubstantiality to the houses on the quay, to the river steamers whose paddles remained invisible, to the distant horizon in which the dome of the Invalides hung poised like a gilded balloon with a rope that darted sunbeams. A diffused warmth, the movement in the streets, told that noon was not far distant, that it would be there directly with the striking of all the bells.

Before going on to the Nabob’s, Jenkins had, however, one other visit to make. But he appeared to find it a great nuisance. However, since he had made the promise! And, resolutely:

“68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, at the Ternes,” he said, as he sprang into his carriage.

The address required to be repeated twice to the coachman, Joey, who was scandalized; the very horse showed a momentary hesitation, as if the valuable beast and the impeccably clad servant had felt revolt at the idea of driving out to such a distant suburb, beyond the limited but so brilliant circle wherein their master’s clients were scattered. The carriage arrived, all the same, without accident, at the end of a provincial-looking, unfinished street, and at the last of its buildings, a house of unfurnished apartments with five stories, which the street seemed to have despatched forward as a reconnoitring party to discover whether it might continue on that side isolated as it stood between vaguely marked-out sites waiting to be built upon or heaped with the debris of houses broken down, with blocks of freestone, old shutters lying amid the desolation, mouldy butchers’ blocks with broken hinges hanging, an immense ossuary of a whole demolished region of the town.

Innumerable placards were stuck above the door, the latter being decorated by a great frame of photographs white with dust before which Jenkins paused for a moment as he passed. Had the famous doctor come so far, then, simply for the purpose of having a photograph taken? It might have been thought so, judging by the attention with which he stayed to examine this display, the fifteen or twenty photographs which represented the same family in different poses and actions and with varying expressions; an old gentleman, with chin supported by a high white neckcloth, and a leathern portfolio under his arm, surrounded by a bevy of young girls with their hair in plait or in curls, and with modest ornaments on their black frocks. Sometimes the old gentleman had posed with but two of his daughters; or perhaps one of those young and pretty profile figures stood out alone, the elbow resting upon a broken column, the head bowed over a book in a natural and easy pose. But, in short, it was always the same air with variations, and within the glass frame there was no gentleman save the old gentleman with the white neckcloth, nor other feminine figures that those of his numerous daughters.

“Studios upstairs, on the fifth floor,” said a line above the frame. Jenkins sighed, measured with his eye the distance that separated the ground from the little balcony up there in the clouds, then he decided to enter. In the corridor he passed a white neckcloth and a majestic leathern portfolio, evidently the old gentleman of the photographic exhibition. Questioned, this individual replied that M. Maranne did indeed live on the fifth floor. “But,” he added, with an engaging smile, “the stories are not lofty.” Upon this encouragement the Irishman began to ascend a narrow and quite new staircase with landings no larger than a step, only one door on each floor, and badly lighted windows through which could be seen a gloomy, ill-paved court-yard and other cage-like staircases, all empty; one of those frightful modern houses, built by the dozen by penniless speculators, and having as their worst disadvantage thin partition walls which oblige all the inhabitants to live in a phalansterian community.

At this particular time the inconvenience was not great, the fourth and fifth floors alone happening to be occupied, as though the tenants had dropped into them from the sky.

On the fourth floor, behind a door with a copper plate bearing the announcement “M. Joyeuse, Expert in Bookkeeping,” the doctor heard a sound of fresh laughter, of young people’s chatter, and of romping steps, which accompanied him to the floor above, to the photographic establishment.

These little businesses perched away in corners with the air of having no communication with any outside world are one of the surprises of Paris. One asks one’s self how the people live who go into these trades, what fastidious Providence can, for example, send clients to a photographer lodged on a fifth floor in a nondescript region, well beyond the Rue Saint-Ferdinand, or books to keep to the accountant below. Jenkins, as he made this reflection, smiled in pity, then went straight in as he was invited by the following inscription, “Enter without knocking.” Alas! the permission was scarcely abused. A tall young man wearing spectacles, and writing at a small table, with his legs wrapped in a travelling-rug, rose precipitately to greet the visitor whom his short sight had prevented him from recognising.

“Good-morning, Andre,” said the doctor, stretching out his loyal hand.

“M. Jenkins!”

“You see, I am good-natured as I have always been. Your conduct towards us, your obstinacy in persisting in living far away from your parents, imposed a great reserve on me, for my own dignity’s sake; but your mother has wept. And here I am.”

While he spoke, he examined the poor little studio, with its bare walls, its scanty furniture, the brand-new photographic apparatus, the little Prussian fireplace, new also and never yet used for a fire, all forced into painfully clear evidence beneath the direct light falling from the glass roof. The drawn face, the scanty beard of the young man, to whom the bright colour of his eyes, the narrow height of his forehead, his long and fair hair thrown backward gave the air of a visionary, everything was accentuated in the crude light; and also the resolute will in that clear glance which settled upon Jenkins coldly, and in advance to all his reasonings, to all his protestations, opposed an invincible resistance.

But the good Jenkins feigned not to perceive anything of this.

“You know, my dear Andre, since the day when I married your mother I have regarded you as my son. I looked forward to leaving you my practice and my patients, to putting your foot in a golden stirrup, happy to see you following a career consecrated to the welfare of humanity. All at once, without giving any reason, without taking into any consideration the effect which such a rupture might well have in the eyes of the world, you have separated yourself from us, you have abandoned your studies, renounced your future, in order to launch out into I know not what eccentric life, engaging in a ridiculous trade, the refuge and the excuse of all unclassed people.”

“I follow this occupation in order to earn a living. It is bread and butter in the meantime.”

“In what meantime? While you are waiting for literary glory?”

He glanced disdainfully at the scribbling scattered over the table.

“All that is not serious, you know, and here is what I am come to tell you. An opportunity presents itself to you, a double-swing door opening into the future. The Bethlehem Society is founded. The most splendid of my philanthropic dreams has taken body. We have just purchased a superb villa at Nanterre for the housing of our first establishment. It is the care, the management of this house that I have thought of intrusting to you as to an _alter ego_. A princely dwelling, the salary of the commander of a division, and the satisfaction of a service rendered to the great human family. Say one word, and I take you to see the Nabob, the great-hearted man who defrays the expense of our undertaking. Do you accept?”

“No,” said the other so curtly that Jenkins was somewhat put out of countenance.

“Just so. I was prepared for this refusal when I came here. But I am come nevertheless. I have taken for motto, ‘To do good without hope,’ and I remain faithful to my motto. So then, it is understood you prefer to the honourable, worthy, and profitable existence which I have just proposed to you, a life of hazard without aim and without dignity?”

Andre answered nothing, but his silence spoke for him.

“Take care. You know what that decision will involve, a definitive estrangement, but you have always wanted that. I need not tell you,” continued Jenkins, “that to break with me is to break off relations also with your mother. She and I are one.”

The young man turned pale, hesitated a moment, then said with effort:

“If it please my mother to come to see me here, I shall be delighted, certainly. But my determination to quit your house, to have no longer anything in common with you, is irrevocable.”

“And will you at least say why?”

He made a negative sign; he would not say.

For once the Irishman felt a genuine impulse of anger. His whole face assumed a cunning, savage expression which would have very much astonished those that only knew the good and loyal Jenkins; but he took good care not to push further an explanation which he feared perhaps as much as he desired it.

“Adieu,” said he, half turning his head on the threshold. “And never apply to us.”

“Never,” replied his stepson in a firm voice.

This time, when the doctor had said to Joey, “Place Vendome,” the horse, as though he had understood that they were going to the Nabob’s, gave a proud shake to his glittering curb-chains, and the brougham set off at full speed, transforming each axle of its wheels into sunshine. “To come so far to get a reception like that! A celebrity of the time to be treated thus by that Bohemian! One may try indeed to do good!” Jenkins gave vent to his anger in a long monologue of this character, then suddenly rousing himself, exclaimed, “Ah, bah!” and what anxiety there was remaining on his brow quickly vanished on the pavement of the Place Vendome. Noon was striking everywhere in the sunshine. Issued forth from behind its curtain of mist, luxurious Paris, awake and on its feet, was commencing its whirling day. The shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix shone brightly. The mansions of the square seemed to be ranging themselves haughtily for the receptions of the afternoon; and, right at the end of the Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries, beneath a fine burst of winter sunshine, raised shivering statues, pink with cold, amid the stripped trees.

A LUNCHEON IN THE PLACE VENDOME

There were scarcely more than a score of persons that morning in the Nabob’s dining-room, a dining-room in carved oak, supplied the previous evening as it were by some great upholsterer, who at the same stroke had furnished these suites of four drawing-rooms of which you caught sight through an open doorway, the hangings on the ceiling, the objects of art, the chandeliers, even the very plate on the sideboards and the servants who were in attendance. It was obviously the kind of interior improvised the moment he was out of the railway-train by a gigantic _parvenu_ in haste to enjoy. Although around the table there was no trace of any feminine presence, no bright frock to enliven it, its aspect was yet not monotonous, thanks to the dissimilarity, the oddness of the guests, people belonging to every section of society, specimens of humanity detached from all races, in France, in Europe, in the entire globe, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. To begin with, the master of the house--a kind of giant, tanned, burned by the sun, saffron-coloured, with head in his shoulders. His nose, which was short and lost in the puffiness of his face, his woolly hair massed like a cap of astrakhan above a low and obstinate forehead, and his bristly eyebrows with eyes like those of an ambushed chapard gave him the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuck, of some frontier savage living by war and rapine. Fortunately the lower part of the face, the fleshy and strong lip which was lightened now and then by a smile adorable in its kindness, quite redeemed, by an expression like that of a St. Vincent de Paul, this fierce ugliness, this physiognomy so original that it was no longer vulgar. An inferior extraction, however, betrayed itself yet again by the voice, the voice of a Rhone waterman, raucous and thick, in which the southern accent became rather uncouth than hard, and by two broad and short hands, hairy at the back, square and nailless fingers which, laid on the whiteness of the table-cloth, spoke of their past with an embarrassing eloquence. Opposite him, on the other side of the table at which he was one of the habitual guests, was seated the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon presenting no resemblance to the painted spectre of whom we had a glimpse in the last chapter. He was now a haughty man of no particular age, fine majestic nose, a lordly bearing, displaying a large shirt-front of immaculate linen crackling beneath the continual effort of the chest to throw itself forward, and bulging itself out each time with a noise like that made by a white turkey when it struts in anger, or by a peacock when he spreads his tail. His name of Monpavon suited him well.

Of great family and of a wealthy stock, but ruined by gambling and speculation, the friendship of the Duc de Mora had secured him an appointment as receiver-general in the first class. Unfortunately his health had not permitted him to retain this handsome position--well-informed people said his health had nothing to do with it--and for the last year he had been living in Paris, awaiting his restoration to health, according to his own account of the matter, before resuming his post. The same people were confident that he would never regain it, and that even were it not for certain exalted influences--However, he was the important personage of the luncheon; that was clear from the manner in which the servants waited upon him, and the Nabob consulted him, calling him “Monsieur le Marquis,” as at the Comedie-Francaise, less almost out of deference than from pride, by reason of the honour which it reflected upon himself. Full of disdain for the people around him, M. le Marquis spoke little, in a very high voice, and as though he were stooping towards those whom he was honouring with his conversation. From time to time he would throw to the Nabob across the table a few words enigmatical for all.

“I saw the duke yesterday. He was talking a great deal about you in connection with that matter. You know, that thing--that business. What was the name of it?”

“You really mean it? He spoke of me to you?” And the good Nabob, quite proud, would look around him with movements of the head that were supremely laughable, or perhaps assume the contemplative air of a devotee who should hear the name of Our Lord pronounced.

“His excellency would have pleasure in seeing you take up the--ps, ps, ps--the thing.”

“He told you so?”

“Ask the governor if he did not--heard it like myself.”

The person who was called the governor--Paganetti, to give him his real name--was a little, expressive man, constantly gesticulating and fatiguing to behold, so many were the different expressions which his face would assume in the course of a single minute. He was managing director of the Territorial Bank of Corsica, a vast financial enterprise, and had now come to the house for the first time, introduced by Monpavon; he occupied accordingly a place of honour. On the other side of the Nabob was an old gentleman, buttoned up to the chin in a frock-coat having a straight collar without lapels, like an Oriental tunic, his face slashed by a thousand little bloodshot veins and wearing a white moustache of military cut. It was Brahim Bey, the most valiant colonel of the Regency of Tunis, aide-de-camp of the former Bey who had made the fortune of Jansoulet. The glorious exploits of this warrior showed themselves written in wrinkles, in blemishes wrought by debauchery upon the nerveless under-lip that hung as it were relaxed, and upon his eyes without lashes, inflamed and red. It was a head such as one may see in the dock at certain criminal trials that are held with closed doors. The other guests were seated pell-mell, just as they had happened to arrive or to find themselves, for the house was open to everybody, and the table was laid every morning for thirty persons.

There were present the manager of the theatre financed by the Nabob, Cardailhac, renowned for his wit almost as much as for his insolvencies, a marvellous carver who, while he was engaged in severing the limbs of a partridge, would prepare one of his witticisms and deposit it with a wing upon the plate which was presented to him. He worked up his witticisms instead of improvising them, and the new fashion of serving meats, _a la Russe_ and carved beforehand, had been fatal to him by its removal of all excuse for a preparatory silence. Consequently it was the general remark that his vogue was on the decline. Parisian, moreover, a dandy to the finger tips, and, as he himself was wont to boast, “with not one particle of superstition in his whole body,” a characteristic which permitted him to give very piquant details concerning the ladies of his theatre to Brahim Bey--who listened to him as one turns over the pages of a naughty book--and to talk theology to the young priest who was his nearest neighbour, a curate of some little southern village, lean and with a complexion sunburnt till it matched the cloth of his cassock in colour, with fiery patches above the cheek-bones, and the pointed, forward-pushing nose of the ambitious man, who would remark to Cardailhac very loudly, in a tone of protection and sacerdotal authority:

“We are quite pleased with M. Guizot. He is doing very well--very well. It is a conquest for the Church.”

Seated next this pontiff, with a black neck-band, old Schwalbach, the famous picture-dealer, displayed his prophet’s beard, tawny in places like a dirty fleece, his three overcoats tinged by mildew, all that loose and negligent attire for which he was excused in the name of art, and because, in a time when the mania for picture galleries had already begun to cause millions to change hands, it was the proper thing to entertain the man who was the best placed for the conduct of these absurdly vain transactions. Schwalbach did not speak, contenting himself with gazing around him through his enormous monocle, shaped like a hand magnifying-glass, and with smiling in his beard over the singular neighbours made by this unique assembly. Thus it happened that M. de Monpavon had quite close to him--and it was a sight to watch how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at each glance in that direction--the singer Garrigou, a fellow-countryman of Jansoulet, a distinguished ventriloquist who sang Figaro in the dialect of the south, and had no equal in his imitations of animals. Just beyond, Cabassu, another compatriot, a little short and dumpy man, with the neck of a bull and the biceps of a statue by Michel Angelo, who suggested at once a Marseilles hairdresser and the strong man at a fair, a masseur, pedicure, manicure, and something of a dentist, sat with elbows on the table with the coolness of a charlatan whom one receives in the morning and knows the little infirmities, the intimate distresses of the abode in which he chances to find himself. M. Bompain completed this array of subordinates, all alike in one respect at any rate, Bompain, the secretary, the steward, the confidential agent, through whose hands the entire business of the house passed; and it sufficed to observe that solemnly stupid attitude, that indefinite manner, the Turkish fez placed awkwardly on a head suggestive of a village school-master, in order to understand to what manner of people interests like those of the Nabob had been abandoned.

Finally, to fill the gaps among these figures I have sketched, the Turkish crowd--Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled with this exotic element, a whole variegated Parisian Bohemia of ruined nobleman, doubtful traders, penniless journalists, inventors of strange products, people arrived from the south without a farthing, all the lost ships needing revictualling, or flocks of birds wandering aimlessly in the night, which were drawn by this great fortune as by the light of a beacon. The Nabob admitted this miscellaneous collection of individuals to his table out of kindness, out of generosity, out of weakness, by reason of his easy-going manners, joined to an absolute ignorance and a survival of that loneliness of the exile, of that need for expansion which, down yonder in Tunis, in his splendid palace of the Bardo, had caused him to welcome everybody who hailed from France, from the small tradesman exporting Parisian wares to the famous pianist on tour and the consul-general himself.

As one listened to those various accents, those foreign intonations, gruff or faltering, as one gazed upon those widely different physiognomies, some violent, barbarous, vulgar, others hyper-civilized, worn, suggestive only of the Boulevard and as it were flaccid, one noted that the same diversity was evident also among the servants who, some apparently lads just out of an office, insolent in manner, with heads of hair like a dentist’s or a bath-attendant’s, busied themselves among Ethiopians standing motionless and shining like candelabra of black marble, and it was impossible to say exactly where one was; in any case, you would never have imagined yourself to be in the Place Vendome, right in the beating heart and very centre of the life of our modern Paris. Upon the table there was a like importation of exotic dishes, saffron or anchovy sauces, spices mixed up with Turkish delicacies, chickens with fried almonds, and all this taken together with the banality of the interior, the gilding of the panels, the shrill ringing of the new bells, gave the impression of a _table d’hote_ in some big hotel in Smyrna or Calcutta, or of a luxurious dining-saloon on board a transatlantic liner, the “Pereire” or the “Sinai.”

It might seem that this diversity among the guests--I was about to say among the passengers--ought to have caused the meal to be animated and noisy. Far otherwise. They all ate nervously, watching each other out of eye-corners, and even those most accustomed to society, those who appeared the most at their ease, had in their glance the wandering look and the distraction of a fixed idea, a feverish anxiety which caused them to speak without relevance and to listen without understanding a word of what was being said to them.

Suddenly the door of the dining-room opened.

“Ah, here comes Jenkins!” exclaimed the Nabob delightedly. “Welcome, welcome, doctor. How are you, my friend?”

A smile to those around, a hearty shake of his host’s hand, and Jenkins sat down opposite him, next to Monpavon, before a place at the table which a servant had just prepared in all haste and without having received any order, exactly as at a _table d’hote_. Among those preoccupied and feverish faces, this one at any rate stood out in contrast by its good humour, its cheerfulness, and that loquacious and flattering benevolence which makes the Irish in a way the Gascons of England. And what a splendid appetite! With what heartiness, what ease of conscience he used his white teeth as he talked!

“Well, Jansoulet, you have read it?”

“What?”

“How, then! you do not know? You have not read what the _Messenger_ says about you this morning?”

Beneath the dark tan of his cheeks the Nabob blushed like a child, and, his eyes shining with pleasure:

“Is it possible--the _Messenger_ has spoken of me?”

“Through two columns. How is it that Moessard has not shown it to you?”

“Oh,” put in Moessard modestly, “it was not worth the trouble.”

He was a little journalist, with a fair complexion and smart in his dress, sufficiently good-looking, but with a face which presented that worn appearance noticeable as the special mark of waiters in night-restaurants, actors, and light women, and produced by conventional grimacing and the wan reflection of gaslight. He was reputed to be the paid lover of an exiled and profligate queen. The rumour was whispered around him, and, in his own world, secured him an envied and despicable position.

Jansoulet insisted on reading the article, impatient to know what had been said of him. Unfortunately Jenkins had left his copy at the duke’s.

“Let some one go fetch me a _Messenger_ quickly,” said the Nabob to the servant behind him.

Moessard intervened.

“It is needless. I must have the thing on me somewhere.”

And with the absence of ceremony of the tavern _habitue_, of the reporter who scribbles his paragraph with his glass beside him, the journalist drew out a pocket-book, crammed full of notes, stamped papers, newspaper cuttings, notes written on glazed paper with crests, which he proceeded to litter over the table, pushing away his plate in order to search for the proof of his article.

“There you are.” He passed it over to Jansoulet; but Jenkins besought him:

“No, no; read it aloud.”

The company having echoed the request in chorus, Moessard took back his proof and commenced to read in a loud voice, “The Bethlehem Society and Mr. Bernard Jansoulet,” a long dithyramb in favour of artificial lactation, written from notes made by Jenkins, which were recognisable through certain fine phrases much affected by the Irishman, such as “the long martyrology of childhood,” “the sordid traffic in the breast,” “the beneficent nanny-goat as foster-mother,” and finishing, after a pompous description of the splendid establishment at Nanterre, with a eulogy of Jenkins and a glorification of Jansoulet: “O Bernard Jansoulet, benefactor of childhood!” It was a sight to see the vexed, scandalized faces of the guests. What an intriguer was this Moessard! What an impudent piece of sycophantry! And the same envious, disdainful smile quivered on every mouth. And the deuce of it was that a man had to applaud, to appear charmed, the master of the house not being weary as yet of incense, and taking everything very seriously, both the article and the applause it provoked. His big face shone during the reading. Often, down yonder, far away, had he dreamed a dream of having his praises sung like this in the newspapers of Paris, of being somebody in that society, the first among all, on which the entire world has its eyes fixed as on the bearer of a torch. Now, that dream was becoming a reality. He gazed upon all these people seated at his board, the sumptuous dessert, this panelled dining-room as high, certainly, as the church of his native village; he listened to the dull murmur of Paris rolling along in its carriages and treading the pavements beneath his windows, with the intimate conviction that he was about to become an important piece in that active and complicated machine. And then, through the atmosphere of physical well-being produced by the meal, between the lines of that triumphant vindication, by an effect of contrast, he beheld unfold itself his own existence, his youth, adventurous as it was sad, the days without bread, the nights without shelter. Then suddenly, the reading having come to an end, his joy overflowing in one of those southern effusions which force thought into speech, he cried, beaming upon his guests with that frank and thick-lipped smile of his:

“Ah, my friends, my dear friends, if you could know how happy I am! What pride I feel!”

Scarce six weeks had passed since he had landed in France. Excepting two or three compatriots, those whom he thus addressed as his friends were but the acquaintances of a day, and that through his having lent them money. This sudden expansion, therefore, appeared sufficiently extraordinary; but Jansoulet, too much under the sway of emotion to notice anything, continued:

“After what I have just heard, when I behold myself here in this great Paris, surrounded by all its wealth of illustrious names, of distinguished intellects, and then call up the remembrance of my father’s booth! For I was born in a booth. My father used to sell old nails at the corner of a boundary stone in the Bourg-Saint-Andeol. If we had bread in the house every day and stew every Sunday it was the most we had to expect. Ask Cabassu whether it was not so. He knew me in those days. He can tell you whether I am not speaking the truth. Oh, yes, I have known what poverty is.” He threw back his head with an impulse of pride as he savoured the odour of truffles diffused through the suffocating atmosphere. “I have known it, and the real thing too, and for a long time. I have been cold. I have known hunger--genuine hunger, remember--the hunger that intoxicates, that wrings the stomach, sets circles dancing in your head, deprives you of sight as if the inside of your eyes was being gouged out with an oyster-knife. I have passed days in bed for want of an overcoat to go out in; fortunate at that when I had a bed, which was not always. I have sought my bread from every trade, and that bread cost me such bitter toil, it was so black, so tough, that in my mouth I keep still the flavour of its acrid and mouldy taste. And thus until I was thirty. Yes, my friends, at thirty years of age--and I am not yet fifty--I was still a beggar, without a sou, without a future, with the remorseful thought of the poor old mother, become a widow, who was half-dying of hunger away yonder in her booth, and to whom I had nothing to give.”

Around this Amphitryon recounting the story of his evil days the faces of his hearers expressed curiosity. Some appeared shocked, Monpavon especially. For him, this exposure of rags was in execrable taste, an absolute breach of good manners. Cardailhac, sceptical and dainty, an enemy to scenes of emotion, with face set as if it were hypnotized, sliced a fruit on the end of his fork into wafers as thin as cigarette papers.

The governor exhibited, on the contrary, a flatly admiring demeanour, uttering exclamations of amazement and compassion; while, not far away, in singular contrast, Brahmin Bey, the thunderbolt of war, upon whom this reading followed by a lecture after a heavy meal had had the effect of inducing a restorative slumber, slept with his mouth open beneath his white moustache, his face congested by his collar, which had slipped up. But the most general expression was one of indifference and boredom. What could it matter to them, I ask you; what had they to do with Jansoulet’s childhood in the Bourg-Saint-Andeol, the trials he had endured, the way in which he had trudged his path? They had not come to listen to idle nonsense of that kind. Airs of interest falsely affected, glances that counted the ovals of the ceiling or the bread-crumbs on the table-cloth, mouths compressed to stifle a yawn, betrayed, accordingly, the general impatience provoked by this untimely story. Yet he himself seemed not to weary of it. He found pleasure in the recital of his sufferings past, even as the mariner safe in port, remembering his voyagings over distant seas, and the perils and the great shipwrecks. There followed the story of his good luck, the prodigious chance that had placed him suddenly upon the road to fortune. “I was wandering about the quays of Marseilles with a comrade as poverty-stricken as myself, who is become rich, he also, in the service of the Bey, and, after having been my chum, my partner, is now my most cruel enemy. I may mention his name, _pardi_! It is sufficiently well known--Hemerlingue. Yes, gentlemen, the head of the great banking house. ‘Hemerlingue & Co.’ had not in those days even the wherewithal to buy a pennyworth of _clauvisses_ on the quay. Intoxicated by the atmosphere of travel that one breathes down there, the idea came into our minds of starting out, of going to seek our livelihood in some country where the sun shines, since the lands of mist were so inhospitable to us. But where to go? We did what sailors sometimes do in order to decide in what low hole they will squander their pay. You fix a scrap of paper on the brim of your hat. You make the hat spin on a walking-stick; when it stops spinning you follow the pointer. In our case the paper needle pointed towards Tunis. A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I came back to-day with twenty-five millions!”

An electric shock passed round the table; there was a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants. Cardailhac said, “Phew!” Monpavon’s nose descended to common humanity.

“Yes, my boys, twenty-five millions in liquidated cash, without speaking of all that I have left in Tunis, of my two palaces at the Bardo, of my vessels in the harbour of La Goulette, of my diamonds, of my precious stones, which are worth certainly more than the double. And you know,” he added, with his kindly smile and in his hoarse, plebeian voice, “when that is done there will still be more.”

The whole company rose to its feet, galvanized.

“Bravo! Ah, bravo!”

“Splendid!”

“Deuced clever--deuced clever!”

“Now, that is something worth talking about.”

“A man like him ought to be in the Chamber.”

“He will be, _per Bacco_! I answer for it,” said the governor in a piercing voice; and in the transport of admiration, not knowing how to express his enthusiasm, he seized the fat, hairy hand of the Nabob and on an unreflective impulse raised it to his lips. They are demonstrative in his country. Everybody was standing up; no one sat down again.

Jansoulet, beaming, had risen in his turn, and, throwing down his serviette: “Let us go and have some coffee,” he said.

A glad tumult immediately spread through the salons, vast apartments in which light, decoration, sumptuousness, were represented by gold alone. It seemed to fall from the ceiling in blinding rays, it oozed from the walls in mouldings, sashes, framings of every kind. A little of it remained on your hands if you moved a piece of furniture or opened a window; and the very hangings, dipped in this Pactolus, kept on their straight folds the rigidity, the sparkle of a metal. But nothing bearing the least personal stamp, nothing intimate, nothing thought out. The monotonous luxury of the furnished flat. And there was a re-enforcement of this impression of a moving camp, of a merely provisory home, in the suggestion of travel which hovered like an uncertainty or a menace over this fortune derived from far-off sources.

Coffee having been served, in the Eastern manner, with all its grounds, in little cups filigreed with silver, the guests grouped themselves round, making haste to drink, scalding themselves, keeping watchful eyes on each other and especially on the Nabob as they looked out for the favourable moment to spring upon him, draw him into some corner of those immense rooms, and at length negotiate their loan. For this it was that they had been awaiting for two hours; this was the object of their visit and the fixed idea which gave them during the meal that absent, falsely attentive manner. But here no more constraint, no more pretence. In that peculiar social world of theirs it is of common knowledge that in the Nabob’s busy life the hour of coffee remains the only time free for private audiences, and each desiring to profit by it, all having come there in order to snatch a handful of wool from the golden fleece offered them with so much good nature, people no longer talk, they no longer listen, every man is absorbed in his own errand of business.

It is the good Jenkins who begins. Having drawn his friend Jansoulet aside into a recess, he submits to him the estimates for the house at Nanterre. A big purchase, indeed! A cash price of a hundred and fifty thousand francs, then considerable expenses in connection with getting the place into proper order, the personal staff, the bedding, the nanny-goats for milking purposes, the manager’s carriage, the omnibuses going to meet the children coming by every train. A great deal of money. But how well off and comfortable they will be there, those dear little things! what a service rendered to Paris, to humanity! The Government cannot fail to reward with a bit of red ribbon so disinterested, so philanthropic a devotion. “The Cross, on the 15th of August.” With these magic words Jenkins will obtain everything he desires. In his merry, guttural voice, which seems always as though it were hailing a boat in a fog, the Nabob calls, “Bompain!”

The man in the fez, quickly leaving the liqueur-stand, walks majestically across the room, whispers, moves away, and returns with an inkstand and a counterfoil check-book from which the slips detach themselves and fly away of their own accord. A fine thing, wealth! To sign a check on his knee for two hundred thousand francs troubles Jansoulet no more than to draw a louis from his pocket.