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, a n”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.
“I do not enter on the main question,” said the Nabob. “Your report, I am assured, is impartial and loyal, such as your conscience has dictated to you. Only there are some heart-breaking calumnies spread about me to which I have not answered, and which have perhaps influenced the opinion of the committee. It is on this subject that I wish to speak to you. I know the confidence with which you are honoured by your colleagues, M. Le Merquier, and that, when I shall have convinced you, your word will be enough without forcing me to lay bare my distress to them all. You know the accusation–the most terrible, the most ignoble. There are so many people who might be deceived by it. My enemies have given names, dates, addresses. Well, I bring you the proofs of my innocence. I lay them bare before you–you only–for I have grave reasons for keeping the whole affair secret.”
Then he showed the lawyer a certificate from the Consulate of Tunis, that during twenty years he had only left the principality twice–the first time to see his dying father at Bourg-Saint Andeol; the second, to make, with the Bey, a visit of three days to his chateau of Saint- Romans.
“How comes it, then, that with a document so conclusive in my hands I have not brought my accusers before the courts to contradict and confound them? Alas, monsieur, there are cruel responsibilities in families. I have a brother, a poor fellow, weak and spoiled, who has for long wallowed in the mud of Paris, who has left there his intelligence and his honour. Has he descended to that degree of baseness which I, in his name, am accused of? I have not dared to find out. All I can say is, that my poor father, who knew more than any one in the family of it, whispered to me in dying, ‘Bernard, it is your elder brother who has killed me. I die of shame, my child.’ “
He paused, compelled by his suppressed emotion; then:
“My father is dead, Maitre Le Merquier, but my mother still lives, and it is for her sake, for her peace, that I have held back, that I hold back still, before the scandal of my justification. Up to now, in fact, the mud thrown at me has not touched her; it only comes from a certain class, in a special press, a thousand leagues away from the poor woman. But law courts, a trial–it would be proclaiming our misfortune from one end of France to the other, the articles of the official paper reproduced by all the journals, even those of the little district where my mother lives. The calumny, my defence, her two children covered with shame by the one stroke, the name–the only pride of the old peasant–forever disgraced. It would be too much for her. It would be enough to kill her. And truly, I find it enough, too. That is why I have had the courage to be silent, to weary, if I could, my enemies by silence. But I need some one to answer for me in the Chamber. It must not have the right to expel me for reasons which would dishonour me, and since it has chosen you as the chairman of the committee, I am come to tell you everything, as to a confessor, to a priest, begging you not to divulge anything of this conversation, even in the interests of my case. I only ask you, my dear colleague, absolute silence; for the rest, I rely on your justice and your loyalty.”
He rose, ready to go, and Le Merquier did not move, still asking the green curtain in front of him, as if seeking inspiration for his answer there. At last he said:
“It shall be as you desire, my dear colleague. This confidence shall remain between us. You have told me nothing, I have heard nothing.”
The Nabob, still heated with his burst of confidence, which demanded, it seemed to him, a cordial response, a pressure of the hand, was seized with a strange uneasiness. This coolness, this absent look, so unnerved him that he was at the door with the awkward bow of one who feels himself importunate, when the other stopped him.
“Wait, then, my dear colleague. What a hurry you are in to leave me! A few moments, I beg of you. I am too happy to have a chat with a man like you. Besides, we have more than one common bond. Our friend Hemerlingue has told me that you, too, are much interested in pictures.”
Jansoulet trembled. The two words–“Hemerlingue,” “pictures”–meeting in the same phrase so unexpectedly, restored all his doubts, all his perplexities. He did not give himself away yet, however, and let Le Merquier advance, word by word, testing the ground for his stumbling advances. People had told him often of the collection of his honourable colleague. “Would it be indiscreet to ask the favour of being admitted, to–“
“On the contrary, I should feel much honoured,” said the Nabob, tickled in the most sensible–since the most costly–point of his vanity; and looking round him at the walls of the room, he added with the tone of a connoisseur, “You have some fine things, too.”
“Oh,” said the other modestly, “just a few canvases. Painting is so dear now, it is a taste so difficult to satisfy, a true passion /de luxe/–a passion for a Nabob,” said he, smiling, with a furtive look over his glasses.
They were two prudent players, face to face; but Jansoulet was a little astray in this new situation, where he who only knew how to be bold, had to be on his guard.
“When I think,” murmured the lawyer, “that I have been ten years covering these walls, and that I have still this panel to fill.”
In fact, at the most conspicuous place on the wall there was an empty place, emptied rather, for a great gold-headed nail near the ceiling showed the visible, almost clumsy, trace of a snare laid for the poor simpleton, who let himself be taken in it so foolishly.
“My dear M. Le Merquier,” said he with his engaging, good-natured voice, “I have a Virgin of Tintoretto’s just the size of your panel.”
Impossible to read anything in the eyes of the lawyer, this time hidden under their overhanging brows.
“Permit me to hang it there, opposite your table. That will help you to think sometimes of me.”
“And to soften the severities of my report, too, sir?” cried Le Merquier, formidable and upright, his hand on the bell. “I have seen many shameless things in my life, but never anything like this. Such offers to me, in my own house!”
“But, my dear colleague, I swear to you—-“
“Show him out,” said the lawyer to the hang-dog servant who had just entered; and from the middle of his office, whose door remained open, before all the waiting-room, where the paternosters were silent, he pursued Jansoulet–who slunk off murmuring excuses to the door–with these terrible words:
“You have outraged the honour of the Chamber in my person, sir. Our colleagues shall be informed of it this very day; and, this crime coming after your others, you will learn to your cost that Paris is not the East, and that here we do not make shameless traffic of the human conscience.”
Then, after having chased the seller from the temple, the just man closed his door, and approaching the mysterious green curtain, said in a tone that sounded soft amidst his pretended anger:
“Is that what you wanted, Baroness Marie?”
THE SITTING
That morning there were no guests to lunch at 32 Place Vendome, so that towards one o’clock might have been seen the majestic form of M. Barreau, gleaming white at the gate, among four or five of his scullions in their cook’s caps, and as many stable-boys in Scotch caps –an imposing group, which gave to the house the aspect of an hotel where the staff was taking the air between the arrivals of the trains. To complete the resemblance, a cab drew up before the door and the driver took down an old leather trunk, while a tall old woman, her upright figure wrapped in a little green shawl, jumped lightly to the footpath, a basket on her arm, looked at the number with great attention, then approached the servants to ask if it was there that M. Bernard Jansoulet lived.
“It is here,” was the answer; “but he is not in.”
“That does not matter,” said the old lady simply.
She returned to the driver, who put her trunk in the porch, and paid him, returning her purse to her pocket at once with a gesture that said much for the caution of the provincial.
Since Jansoulet had been deputy for Corsica, the domestics had seen so many strange and exotic figures at his house, that they were not surprised at this sunburnt woman, with eyes glowing like coals, a true Corsican under her severe coif, but different from the ordinary provincial in the ease and tranquility of her manners.
“What, the master is not here?” said she, with an intonation which seemed better fitted for farm people in her part of the country, than for the insolent servants of a great Parisian mansion.
“No, the master is not here.”
“And the children?”
“They are at lessons. You cannot see them.”
“And madame?”
“She is asleep. No one sees her before three o’clock.”
It seemed to astonish the good woman a little that any one could stay in bed so late; but the tact which guides a refined nature, even without education, prevented her from saying anything before the servants, and she asked for Paul de Gery.
“He is abroad.”
“Bompain Jean-Baptiste, then.”
“He is with monsieur at the sitting.”
Her great gray eyebrows wrinkled.
“It does not matter; take up my trunk just the same.”
And with a little malicious twinkle of her eye, a proud revenge for their insolent looks, she added: “I am his mother.”
The scullions and stable-boys drew back respectfully. M. Barreau raised his cap:
“I thought I had seen madame somewhere.”
“And I too, my lad,” answered Mme. Jansoulet, who shivered still at the remembrance of the Bey’s /fete/.
“My lad,” to M. Barreau, to a man of his importance! It raised her at once to a very high place in the esteem of the others.
Well! grandeur and splendour hardly dazzled this courageous old lady. She did not go into ecstasies over gilding and petty baubles, and as she walked up the grand staircase behind her trunk, the baskets of flowers on the landings, the lamps held by bronze statues, did not prevent her from noticing that there was an inch of dust on the balustrade, and holes in the carpet. She was taken to the rooms on the second floor belonging to the Levantine and her children; and there, in an apartment used as a linen-room, which seemed to be near the school-room (to judge by the murmur of children’s voices), she waited alone, her basket on her knees, for the return of her Bernard, perhaps the waking of her daughter-in-law, or the great joy of embracing her grandchildren. What she saw around her gave her an idea of the disorder of this house left to the care of the servants, without the oversight and foreseeing activity of a mistress. The linen was heaped in disorder, piles on piles in great wide-open cupboards, fine linen sheets and table-cloths crumpled up, the locks prevented from shutting by pieces of torn lace, which no one took the trouble to mend. And yet there were many servants about–negresses in yellow Madras muslin, who came to snatch here a towel, there a table-cloth, walking among the scattered domestic treasures, dragging with their great flat feet frills of fine lace from a petticoat which some lady’s-maid had thrown down–thimble here, scissors there–ready to pick up again in a few minutes.
Jansoulet’s mother was doubly wounded. The half-rustic artisan in her was outraged in the tenderness, the respect, the sweet unreasonableness the woman of the provinces feels towards a full linen cupboard–a cupboard filled piece by piece, full of relics of past struggles, whose contents grow finer little by little, the first token of comfort, of wealth, in the house. Besides, she had held the distaff from morning till night, and if the housewife in her was angry, the spinner could have wept at the profanation. At last, unable to contain herself longer, she rose, and actively, her little shawl displaced at each movement, she set herself to pick up, straighten, and carefully fold this magnificent linen, as she used to do in the fields of Saint- Romans, when she gave herself the treat of a grand washing-day, with twenty washerwomen, the clothes-baskets flowing over with floating whiteness, and the sheets flapping in the morning wind on the clothes- lines. She was in the midst of this occupation, forgetting her journey, forgetting Paris, even the place where she was, when a stout, thick-set, bearded man, with varnished boots and a velvet jacket, over the torso of a bull, came into the linen-room.
“What! Cabassu!”
“You here, Mme. Francoise! What a surprise!” said the /masseur/, staring like a bronze figure.
“Yes, my brave Cabassu, it is I. I have just arrived; and as you see, I am at work already. It made my heart bleed to see all this muddle.”
“You came up for the sitting, then?”
“What sitting?”
“Why, the grand sitting of the legislative body. It’s do-day.”
“Dear me, no. What has that got to do with me? I should understand nothing at all about it. No, I came because I wanted to know my little Jansoulets, and then, I was beginning to feel uneasy. I have written several times without getting an answer. I was afraid that there was a child sick, that Bernard’s business was going wrong–all sorts of ideas. At last I got seriously worried, and came away at once. They are well here, they tell me.”
“Yes, Mme. Francoise. Thank God, every one is quite well.”
“And Bernard. His business–is that going on as he wants it to?”
“Well, you know one has always one’s little worries in life–still, I don’t think he should complain. But, now I think of it, you must be hungry. I will go and make them bring you something.”
He was going to ring, more at home and at ease than the old mother herself. She stopped him.
“No, no, I don’t want anything. I have still something left in my basket.” And she put two figs and a crust of bread on the edge of the table. Then, while she was eating: “And you, lad, your business? You look very much sprucer than you did the last time you were at Bourg. How smart you are! What do you do in the house?”
“Professor of massage,” said Aristide gravely.
“Professor–you?” said she with respectful astonishment; but she did not dare ask him what he taught, and Cabassu, who felt such questions a little embarrassing, hastened to change the subject.
“Shall I go and find the children? Haven’t they told them that their grandmother is here?”
“I didn’t want to disturb them at their work. But I believe it must be over now–listen!”
Behind the door they could hear the shuffling impatience of the children anxious to be out in the open air, and the old woman enjoyed this state of things, doubling her maternal desire, and hindering her from doing anything to hasten its pleasure. At last the door opened. The tutor came out first–a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great /dejeuners/. On bad terms with his bishop, he had left the diocese where he had been engaged, and in the precarious position of an unattached priest–for the clergy have their Bohemians too–he was glad to teach the little Jansoulets, recently turned out of the Bourdaloue College. With his arrogant, solemn air, overweighted with responsibilities, which would have become the prelates charged with the education of the dauphins of France, he preceded three curled and gloved little gentlemen in short jackets, with leather knapsacks, and great red stockings reaching half-way up their little thin legs, in complete suits of cyclist dress, ready to mount.
“My children,” said Cabassu, “that is Mme. Jansoulet, your grandmother, who has come to Paris expressly to see you.”
They stopped in a row, astonished, examining this old wrinkled visage between the folds of her cap, this strange dress of a simplicity unknown to them; and their grandmother’s astonishment answered theirs, complicated with a heart-breaking discomfiture and constraint in dealing with these little gentlemen, as stiff and disdainful as any of the nobles or ministers whom her son had brought to Saint-Romans. On the bidding of their tutor “to salute their venerable grandmother,” they came in turn to give her one of those little half-hearted shakes of the hand of which they had distributed so many in the garrets they had visited. The fact is that this good woman, with her agricultural appearance and clean but very simple clothes, reminded them of the charity visits of the College Bourdaloue. They felt between them the same unknown quality, the same distance, which no remembrance, no word of their parents had ever helped to bridge. The abbe felt this constraint, and tried to dispel it–speaking with the tone of voice and gestures customary to those who always think they are in the pulpit.
“Well, madame, the day has come, the great day when Jansoulet will confound his enemies–/confundantur hostes mei, quia injuste iniquitatem fecerunt in me/–because they have unjustly persecuted me.”
The old lady bent religiously before the Latin of the Church, but her face expressed a vague expression of uneasiness at this idea of enemies and of persecutions.
“These enemies are powerful and numerous, my noble lady, but let us not be alarmed beyond measure. Let us have confidence in the decrees of Heaven and in the justice of our cause. God is in the midst of it, it shall not be overthrown–/in medio ejus non commovebitur/.”
A gigantic negro, resplendent with gold braid, interrupted him by announcing that the bicycles were ready for the daily lesson on the terrace of the Tuileries. Before setting out, the children again shook solemnly their grandmother’s wrinkled and hardened hand. She was watching them go, stupefied and oppressed, when all at once, by an adorable spontaneous movement, the youngest turned back when he had got to the door and, pushing the great negro aside, came to throw himself head foremost, like a little buffalo, into Mme. Jansoulet’s skirts, squeezing her to him, while holding out his smooth forehead, covered with brown curls, with the grace of a child offering its kiss like a flower. Perhaps this one, nearer the warmth of the nest, the cradling knees of the nurses with their peasant songs, had felt the maternal influence, of which the Levantine had deprived him, reach his heart. The old woman trembled all over with the surprise of this instinctive embrace.
“Oh! little one, little one,” said she, seizing the little silky, curly head which reminded her so much of another and she kissed it wildly. Then the child unloosed himself, and ran off without saying anything, his head moist with hot tears.
Left alone with Cabassu, the mother, comforted by this embrace, asked some explanation of the priest’s words. Had her son many enemies?
“Oh!” said Cabassu, “it is not astonishing, in his position.”
“But what is this great day–this sitting of which you all speak?”
“Well, then, it is to-day that we shall know whether Bernard will be deputy or no.”
“What? He is not one now, then? And I have told them everywhere in the country. I illuminated Saint-Romans a month ago. Then they have made me tell a lie.”
The /masseur/ had a great deal of trouble in explaining to her the parliamentary formalities of the verification of elections. She only listened with one ear, walking up and down the linen-room feverishly.
“That’s where my Bernard is now, then?”
“Yes, madame.”
“And can women go to the Chamber? Then why is his wife not there? For one does not need telling that it is an important matter for him. On a day like this he needs to feel all those whom he loves at his side. See, my lad, you must take me there, to this sitting. Is it far?”
“No, quite near. Only, it must have begun already. And then,” added he, a little disconcerted, “it is the hour when madame wants me.”
“Ah! Do you teach her this thing you are professor of? What do you call it?”
“Massage. We have learned it from the ancients. Yes, there she is ringing for me, and some one will come to fetch me. Shall I tell her you are here?”
“No, no; I prefer to go there at once.”
“But you have no admission ticket.”
“Bah! I will tell them I am Jansoulet’s mother, come to hear him judged.” Poor mother, she spoke truer than she knew.
“Wait, Mme. Francoise. I will give you some one to show you the way, at least.”
“Oh, you know, I have never been able to put up with servants. I have a tongue. There are people in the streets. I shall find my way.”
He made a last attempt, without letting her see all his thought. “Take care; his enemies are going to speak against him in the Chamber. You will hear things to hurt you.”
Oh, the beautiful smile of belief and maternal pride with which she answered: “Don’t I know better than them all what my child is worth? Could anything make me mistaken in him? I should have to be very ungrateful then. Get along with you!”
And shaking her head with its flapping cap wings, she set off fiercely indignant.
With head erect and upright bearing the old woman strode along under the great arcades which they had told her to follow, a little troubled by the incessant noise of the carriages, and by the idleness of this walk, unaccompanied by the faithful distaff which had never quitted her for fifty years. All these ideas of enmities and persecutions, the mysterious words of the priest, the guarded talk of Cabassu, frightened and agitated her. She found in them the meaning of the presentiments which had so overpowered her as to snatch her from her habits, her duties, the care of the house and of her invalid. Besides, since Fortune had thrown on her and her son this golden mantle with its heavy folds, Mme. Jansoulet had never become accustomed to it, and was always waiting for the sudden disappearance of these splendours. Who knows if the break-up was not going to begin this time? And suddenly, through these sombre thoughts, the remembrance of the scene that had just passed, of the little one rubbing himself on her woollen gown, brought on her wrinkled lips a tender smile, and she murmured in her peasant tongue:
“Oh, for the little one, at any rate.”
She crossed a magnificent square, immense, dazzling, two fountains throwing up their water in a silvery spray, then a great stone bridge, and at the end was a square building with statues on its front, a railing with carriages drawn up before it, people going on, numbers of policemen. It was there. She pushed through the crowd bravely and came up to the high glass doors.
“Your card, my good woman?”
The “good woman” had no card, but she said quite simply to one of the porters in red who were keeping the door:
“I am Bernard Jansoulet’s mother. I have come for the sitting of my boy.”
It was indeed the sitting of her boy; for everywhere in this crowd besieging the doors, filling the passages, the hall, the tribune, the whole palace, the same name was repeated, accompanied with smiles and anecdotes. A great scandal was expected, terrible revelations from the chairman, which would no doubt lead to some violence from the barbarian brought to bay, and they hurried to the spot as to a first night or a celebrated trial. The old mother would hardly have been heard in the middle of this crowd, if the stream of gold left by the Nabob wherever he had passed, marking his royal progress, had not opened all the roads to her. She went behind the attendant in this tangle of passages, of folding-doors, of empty resounding halls, filled with a hum which circulated with the air of the building, as if the walls, themselves soaked with babble, were joining to the sound of all these voices the echoes of the past. While crossing a corridor she saw a little dark man gesticulating and crying to the servants:
“You will tell Moussiou Jansoulet that it is I, that I am the Mayor of Sarlazaccio, that I have been condemned to five months’ imprisonment for him. In God’s name, surely that is worth a card for the sitting.”
Five months’ imprisonment for her son! Why? Very much disturbed, she arrived at last, her ears singing, at the top of the staircase, where different inscriptions–“Tribune of the Senate, of the Diplomatic Body, of the Deputies”–stood above little doors like boxes in a theatre. She entered, and without seeing anything at first except four or five rows of seats filled with people, and opposite, very far off, separated from her by a vast clear space, other galleries similarly filled. She leaned up against the wall, astonished to be there, exhausted, almost ashamed. A current of hot air which came to her face, a chatter of rising voices, drew her towards the slope of the gallery, towards the kind of gulf open in the middle where her son must be. Oh! how she would like to see him. So squeezing herself in, and using her elbows, pointed and hard as her spindle, she glided and slipped between the wall and the seats, taking no notice of the anger she aroused or the contempt of the well-dressed women whose lace and fresh toilettes she crushed; for the assembly was elegant and fashionable. Mme. Jansoulet recognised, by his stiff shirt-front and aristocratic nose, the marquis who had visited them at Saint-Romans, who so well suited his name, but he did not look at her. She was stopped farther progress by the back of a man sitting down, an enormous back which barred everything and forbade her go farther. Happily, she could see nearly all the hall from here by leaning forward a little; and these semi-circular benches filled with deputies, the green hanging of the walls, the chair at the end, occupied by a bald man with a severe air, gave her the idea, under the studious and gray light from the roof, of a class about to begin, with all the chatter and movement of thoughtless schoolboys.
One thing struck her–the way in which all looks turned to one side, to the same point of attraction; and as she followed this current of curiosity which carried away the entire assembly, hall as well as galleries, she saw that what they were all looking at–was her son.
In the Jansoulet’s country there is still, in some old churches, at the end of the choir, half-way up the crypt, a stone cell where lepers were admitted to hear mass, showing their dark profiles to the curious and fearful crowd, like wild beasts crouched against the loopholes in the wall. Francoise well remembered having seen in the village where she had been brought up the leper, the bugbear of her infancy, hearing mass from his stone cage, lost in the shade and in isolation. Now, seeing her son seated, his head in his hands, alone, up there away from the others, this memory came to her mind. “One might think it was a leper,” murmured the peasant. And, in fact, this poor Nabob was a leper, his millions from the East weighing on him like some terrible and mysterious disease. It happened that the bench on which he had chosen to sit had several recent vacancies on account of holidays or deaths; so that while the other deputies were talking to each other, laughing, making signs, he sat silent, alone, the object of attention to all the Chamber; an attention which his mother felt to be malevolent, ironic, which burned into her heart. How was she to let him know that she was there, near him, that one faithful heart beat not far from his? He would not turn to the gallery. One would have said that he felt it hostile, that he feared to look there. Suddenly, at the sound of the bell from the presidential platform, a rustle ran through the assembly, every head leaned forward with that fixed attention which makes the features unmovable, and a thin man in spectacles, whose sudden rise among so many seated figures gave him the authority of attitude at once, said, opening the paper he held in his hand:
“Gentlemen, in the name of your third committee, I beg to move that the election of the second division of the department of Corsica be annulled.”
In the deep silence following this phrase, which Mme. Jansoulet did not understand, the giant seated before her began to puff vigorously, and all at once, in the front row of the gallery, a lovely face turned round to address him a rapid sign of intelligence and approval. Forehead pale, lips thin, eyebrows too black for the white framing of her hat, it all produced in the eyes of the good old lady, without her knowing why, the effect of the first flash of lightning in a storm and the apprehension of the thunderbolt following the lightning.
Le Merquier was reading his report. The slow, dull monotonous voice, the drawling, weak Lyonnese accent, while the long form of the lawyer balanced itself in an almost animal movement of the head and shoulders, made a singular contrast to the ferocious clearness of the brief. First, a rapid account of the electoral irregularities. Never had universal suffrage been treated with such primitive and barbarous contempt. At Sarlazaccio, where Jansoulet’s rival seemed to have a majority, the ballot-box was destroyed the night before it was counted. The same thing almost happened at Levia, at Saint-Andre, at Avabessa. And it was the mayors themselves who committed these crimes, who carried the urns home with them, broke the seals, tore up the voting papers, under cover of their municipal authority. There had been no respect for the law. Everywhere fraud, intrigue, even violence. At Calcatoggio an armed man sat during the election at the window of a tavern in front of the /mairie/, holding a blunderbuss, and whenever one of Sebastiani’s electors (Sebastiani was Jansoulet’s opponent) showed himself, the man took aim: “If you come in, I will blow out your brains.” And when one saw the inspectors of police, justices, inspectors of weights and measures, not afraid to turn into canvassing agents, to frighten or cajole a population too submissive before all these little tyrannical local influences, was that not proof of a terrible state of things? Even priests, saintly pastors, led astray by their zeal for the poor-box and the restoration of an impoverished building, had preached a mission in favour of Jansoulet’s election. But an influence still more powerful, though less respectable, had been called into play for the good cause–the influence of the banditti. “Yes, banditti, gentlemen; I am not joking.” And then came a sketch in outline of Corsican banditti in general, and of the Piedigriggio family in particular.
The Chamber listened attentively, with a certain uneasiness. For, after all, it was an official candidate whose doings were thus described, and these strange doings belonged to that privileged land, cradle of the imperial family, so closely attached to the fortunes of the dynasty, that an attack on Corsica seemed to strike at the sovereign. But when people saw the new minister, successor and enemy of Mora, glad of the blow to a /protege/ of his predecessor, smile complacently from the Government bench at Le Merquier’s cruel banter, all constraint disappeared at once, and the ministerial smile repeated on three hundred mouths, grew into a scarcely restrained laugh–the laugh of crowds under the rod which bursts out at the least approbation of the master. In the galleries, not usually treated to the picturesque, but amused by these stories of brigands, there was general joy, a radiant animation on all these faces, pleased to look pretty without insulting the solemnity of the spot. Little bright bonnets shook with all their flowers and plumes, round gold-encircled arms leaned forward the better to hear. The grave Le Merquier had imported into the sitting the distraction of a show, the little spice of humour allowed in a charity concert to bribe the uninitiated.
Impassable and cold in the midst of his success, he continued to read in his gloomy voice, penetrating like the rain of Lyons:
“Now, gentlemen, one asks how a stranger, a Provencial returned from the East, ignorant of the interests and needs of this island where he had never been seen before the election, a true type of what the Corsican disdainfully calls a ‘continental’–how has this man been able to excite such an enthusiasm, such devotion carried to crime, to profanity. His wealth will answer us, his fatal gold thrown in the face of the electors, thrust by force into their pockets with a barefaced cynicism of which we have a thousand proofs.” Then the interminable series of denunciations: “I, the undersigned, Croce (Antoine), declare in the interests of truth, that the Commissary of Police Nardi, calling on us one evening, said: ‘Listen, Croce (Antoine), I swear by the fire of this lamp that if you vote for Jansoulet you will have fifty francs to-morrow morning.’ ” And this other: “I, the undersigned, Lavezzi (Jacques-Alphonse), declare that I refused with contempt seventeen francs offered me by the Mayor of Pozzonegro to vote against my cousin Sebastiani.” It is probably that for three francs more Lavezzi (Jacques-Alphonse) would have swallowed his contempt in silence. But the Chamber did not look into things so closely.
Indignation seized on this incorruptible Chamber. It murmured, it fidgeted on its padded seats of red velvet, it raised a positive clamour. There were “Oh’s” of amazement, eyes lifted in astonishment, brusque movements on the benches, as if in disgust at this spectacle of human degradation. And remark that the greater part of these deputies had used the same electoral methods, that these were the heroes of those famous orgies when whole oxen were carried in triumph, ribanded and decorated as at Gargantuan feasts. Just these men cried louder than others, turned furiously towards the solitary seat where the poor leper listened, still and downcast. Yet in the midst of the general uproar, one voice was raised in his favour, but low, unpractised, less a voice than a sympathetic murmur, through which was distinguished vaguely: “Great services to the Corsican population– Considerable works–Territorial Bank.”
He who mumbled thus was a little man in white gaiters, an albino head, and thin hair in scattered locks. But the interruption of this unfortunate friend only furnished Le Merquier with a rapid and natural transition. A hideous smile parted his flabby lips. “The honourable M. Sarigue mentions the Territorial Bank. We shall be able to answer him.” He seemed in fact to be very familiar with the Paganetti den. In a few neat and lively phrases he threw the light on to the depths of the gloomy cave, showed all the traps, the gulfs, the windings, the snares, like a guide waving his torch above the /oubliettes/ of some sinister dungeon. He spoke of the fictitious quarries, of the railways on paper, of the chimeric liners disappearing in their own steam. The frightful desert of the Taverna was not forgotten, nor the old Genoese castle, the office of the steamship agency. But what amused the Chamber most was the story of a swindling ceremony organized by the governor for the piercing of a tunnel through Monte Rotondo, a gigantic undertaking always in project, put off from year to year, demanding millions of money and thousands of workmen, and which was begun in great pomp a week before the election. His report gave the thing a comic air–the first blow of the pickaxe given by the candidate in the enormous mountain covered by ancient forests, the speech of the Prefect, the benediction of the flags with the cries of “Long live Bernard Jansoulet!” and the two hundred workmen beginning the task at once, working day and night for a week; then, when the election was over, leaving the fragments of rock heaped round the abandoned excavation for a laughing-stock–another asylum for the terrible banditti. The game was over. After having extorted the shareholders’ money for so long, the Territorial Bank this time was used as a means to swindle the electors of their votes. “Furthermore, gentlemen, another detail, with which perhaps I should have begun and spared you the recital of this electoral pasquinade. I learn that a judicial inquiry has been opened to-day into the affairs of the Corsican Bank, and that a serious examination of its books will very probably reveal one of those financial scandals–too frequent, alas! in our days–and in which, for the honour of the Chamber, we would wish that none of our members were concerned.”
With this sudden revelation, the speaker stopped a moment, like an actor making his point; and in the heavy silence weighing on the assembly, the noise of a closing door was heard. It was the Governor Paganetti leaving the tribune, his face white, the eyes wide open, his mouth half opened, like some Pierrot scenting in the air a formidable blow. Monpavon, motionless, expanded his shirtfront. The big man puffed violently into the flowers of his wife’s little white hat.
Jansoulet’s mother looked at her son.
“I have spoken of the honour of the Chamber, gentlemen. On that point I have more to say.” Now Le Merquier was reading no longer. After the chairman of the committees, the orator came on the scene, or rather the judge. His face was expressionless, his eyes hidden; nothing lived, nothing moved in all his body save the right arm–the long angular arm with short sleeves–which rose and fell automatically, like a sword of justice, making at the end of each sentence the cruel and inexorable gesture of beheading. And truly it was an execution at which they were present. The orator would leave on one side scandalous legends, the mystery which brooded over this colossal fortune acquired in distant lands, far from all control. But there were in the life of the candidate certain points difficult to clear up, certain details. He hesitated, seemed to select his words; then, before the impossibility of formulating a direct accusation: “Do not let us lower the debate, gentlemen. You have understood me. You know to what infamous stories I allude–to what calumnies, I wish I could say; but truth forces me to state that when M. Jansoulet called before your committee, was asked to deny the accusations made against him, his explanations were so vague that, though convinced of his innocence, a scrupulous regard for your honour forced us to reject a candidature so besmirched. No, this man must not sit among you. Besides, what would he do there? Living so long in the East, he has unlearned the laws, the manners, and the usages of his country. He believes in rough and ready justice, in fights in the open street; he relies on the abuses of power, and worse still, on the venality and crouching baseness of all men. He is the merchant who thinks that everything can be bought at a price–even the votes of the electors, even the conscience of his colleagues.”
One should have seen with what naive admiration these fat deputies, enervated with good fortune, listened to this ascetic, this man of another age, like some Saint-Jerome who had left his Thebaid to overwhelm with his vigorous eloquence, in a full assembly of the Roman Empire, the shameless luxury of the prevaricators and of the /concussionaires/. How well they understood now this grand surname of “My conscience” which the courts had given him. In the galleries the enthusiasm rose higher still. Lovely heads leaned to see him, to drink in his words. Applause went round, bending the bouquets here and there, like the wind in a wheat-field. A woman’s voice cried with a little foreign accent, “Bravo! Bravo!”
And the mother?
Standing upright, immovable, concentrated in her desire to understand something of this legal phraseology, of these mysterious allusions, she was there like deaf-mutes who only understand what is said before them by the movement of the lips and the expression of the faces. But it was enough for her to watch her son and Le Merquier to understand what harm one was doing to the other, what perfidious and poisoned meaning fell from this long discourse on the unfortunate man whom one might have believed asleep, except for the trembling of his strong shoulders and the clinching of his hands in his hair, while hiding his face. Oh, if she could have said to him: “Don’t be afraid, my son. If they all misconstrue you, your mother loves you. Let us come away together. What need have we of them?” And for one moment she could believe that what she was saying to him thus in her heart he had understood by some mysterious intuition. He had just raised and shaken his grizzled head, where the childish curve of his lips quivered under a possibility of tears. But instead of leaving his seat, he spoke from it, his great hands pounded the wood of the desk. The other had finished, now it was his time to answer:
“Gentlemen,” said he.
He stopped at once, frightened by the sound of his voice, hoarse, frightfully low and vulgar, which he heard for the first time in public. He must find the words for his defence, tormented as he was by the twitchings of his face, the intonations which he could not express. And if the anguish of the poor man was touching, the old mother up there, leaning, gasping, moving her lips nervously as if to help him find words, reflected the picture of his torture. Though he could not see her, intentionally turned away from her gallery, as he evidently was, this maternal inspiration, the ardent magnetism of those black eyes, ended by giving him life, and suddenly his words and gestures flowed freely:
“First of all, gentlemen, I must say that I do not defend the methods of my election. If you believe that electoral morals have not been always the same in Corsica, that all the irregularities committed are due to the corrupting influence of my gold and not to the uncultivated and passionate temperament of its people, reject me–it will be justice and I will not murmur. But in this debate other matters have been dealt with, accusations have been made which involve my personal honour, and those, and those alone, I wish to answer.” His voice was growing firmer, always broken, veiled, but with some soft cadences. He spoke rapidly of his life, his first steps, his departure for the East. It sounded like an eighteenth century tale of the Barbary corsairs sailing the Latin seas, of Beys and of bold Provencals, as sunburned as crickets, who used to end by marrying some sultana and “taking the turban,” in the old expression of the Marseillais. “As for me,” said the Nabob, with his good-humoured smile. “I had no need of taking the turban to grow rich. I had only to take into this land of idleness the activity and flexibility of a southern Frenchman; and in a few years I made one of those fortunes which can only be made in those hot countries, where everything is gigantic, prodigious, disproportionate, where flowers grow in a night, and one tree produces a forest. The excuse of such fortunes is the manner in which they are used; and I make bold to say that never has any favourite of fortune tried harder to justify his wealth. I have not been successful.” No! he had not succeeded. From all the gold he had scattered he had only gathered contempt and hatred. Hatred! Who could boast more of it than he? like a great ship in the dock when its keel touches the bottom. He was too rich, and that stood for every vice, and every crime pointed him out for anonymous vengeances, cruel and incessant enmities.
“Ah, gentlemen,” cried the poor Nabob, lifting his clinched hands, “I have known poverty, I have struggled face to face with it, and it is a dreadful struggle, I swear. But to struggle against wealth, to defend one’s happiness, honour–rest–to have no shelter but piles of gold which fall and crush you, is something more hideous, more heart- breaking still. Never, in the darkest days of my distress, have I had the pains, the anguish, the sleepless nights with which fortune has loaded me–this horrible fortune which I hate and which stifles me. They call me the Nabob, in Paris. It is not the Nabob they should say, but the Pariah–a social pariah holding out wide arms to a society which will have none of him.”
Written down, the words may appear cold; but there, before the assembly, the defence of this man was stamped with an eloquent and grandiose sincerity, which at first, coming from this rustic, this upstart, without culture or education, with the voice of a boatman, first astonished and then singularly moved his hearers just on account of its wild, uncultivated style, foreign to every notion of parliamentary etiquette. Already marks of favour had agitated members, used to the flood of gray and monotonous administrative speech. But at this cry of rage and despair against wealth, uttered by the wretch whom it was enfolding, rolling, drowning in its floods of gold, while he was struggling and calling for help from the depths of his Pactolus, the whole Chamber rose with loud applause, and outstretched hands, as if to give the unfortunate Nabob more testimonies of esteem, of which he was so desirous, and at the same time to save him from shipwreck. Jansoulet felt it; and warmed by this sympathy, he went on, with head erect and confident look:
“You have just been told, gentlemen, that I was unworthy of sitting among you. And he who said it was the last from whom I should have expected it, for he alone knew the sad secret of my life, he alone could speak for me, justify me, and convince you. He has not done it. Well, I will try, whatever it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated before my country, I owe it to myself and my children this public justification, and I will make it.”
With a brusque movement he turned towards the tribune where he knew his enemy was watching him, and suddenly stopped, full of fear. There, in front of him, behind the pale, malignant head of the baroness, his mother, his mother whom he believed to be two hundred leagues away from the terrible storm, was looking at him, leaning against the wall, bending down her saintly face, flooded with tears, but proud and beaming nevertheless with her Bernard’s great success. For it was really a success of sincere human emotion, which a few more words would change into a triumph. Cries of “Go on, go on!” came from all sides of the Chamber to reassure and encourage him. But Jansoulet did not speak. He had only to say: “Calumny has wilfully confused two names. I am called Bernard Jansoulet, the other Jansoulet Louis.” Not a word more was needed.
But in the presence of his mother, still ignorant of his brother’s dishonour, he could not say it. Respect–family ties forbade it. He could hear his father’s voice: “I die of shame, my child.” Would not she die of shame too, if he spoke? He turned from the maternal smile with a sublime look of renunciation, then in a low voice, utterly discouraged, he said:
“Excuse me, gentlemen; this explanation is beyond my power. Order an investigation of my whole life, open as it is to all, alas! since any one can interpret all my actions. I swear to you that you will find nothing there which unfits me to sit among the representatives of my country.”
In the face of this defeat, which seemed to everybody the sudden crumbling of an edifice of effrontery, the astonishment and disillusionment were immense. There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the tumult of a vote taken on the spot, which the Nabob saw vaguely through the glass doors, as the condemned man looks down from the scaffold on the howling crowd. Then, after that terrible pause which precedes a supreme moment, the president made, amid deep silence, the simple pronouncement:
“The election of M. Bernard Jansoulet is annulled.”
Never had a man’s life been cut off with less solemnity or disturbance.
Up there in her gallery, Jansoulet’s mother understood nothing, except that the seats were emptying near her, that people were rising and going away. Soon there was no one else there save the fat man and the lady in the white hat, who leaned over the barrier, watching Bernard with curiosity, who seemed also to be going away, for he was putting up great bundles of papers in his portfolio quite calmly. When they were in order, he rose and left his place. Ah! the life of public men had sometimes cruel situations. Gravely, slowly, under the gaze of the whole assembly, he must descend those steps which he had mounted at the cost of so much trouble and money, to whose feet an inexorable fatality was precipitating him.
The Hemerlingues were waiting for this, following to its last stage this humiliating exit, which crushes the unseated member with some of the shame and fear of a dismissal. Then, when the Nabob had disappeared, they looked at each other with a silent laugh, and left the gallery before the old woman had dared to ask them anything, warned by her instinct of their secret hostility. Left alone, she gave all her attention to a new speech, persuaded that her son’s affairs were still in question. They spoke of an election, of a scrutiny, and the poor mother leaning forward in her red hood, wrinkling her great eyebrows, would have religiously listened to the whole of the report of the Sarigue election, if the attendant who had introduced her had not come to say that it was finished and she had better go away. She seemed very much surprised.
“Indeed! Is it over?” said she, rising almost regretfully.
And quietly, timidly:
“Has he–has he won?”
It was innocent, so touching that the attendant did not even dream of smiling.
“Unfortunately, no, madame. M. Jansoulet has not won. But why did he stop in that way? If it is true that he never came to Paris, and that another Jansoulet did everything they accuse him of, why did he not say so?”
The old mother, turning pale, leaned on the balustrade of the staircase. She had understood.
Bernard’s brusque interruption on seeing her, the sacrifice he had made to her so simply–that noble glance as of a dying animal, came to her mind, and the shame of the elder, the favourite child, mingled itself with Bernard’s disaster–a double-edged maternal sorrow, which tore her whichever way she turned. Yes, yes, it was on her account he would not speak. But she would not accept such a sacrifice. He must come back at once and explain himself before the deputies.
“My son, where is my son?”
“Below, madame, in his carriage. It was he who sent me to look for you.”
She ran before the attendant, walking quickly, talking aloud, pushing aside out of her way the little black and bearded men who were gesticulating in the passages. After the waiting-hall she crossed a great round antechamber where servants in respectful rows made a living wainscotting to the high, blank wall. From there she could see through the glass doors, the outside railing, the crowd in waiting, and among the other vehicles, the Nabob’s carriage waiting. As she passed, the peasant recognised in one of the groups her enormous neighbour of the gallery, with the pale man in spectacles who had attacked her son, who was receiving all sorts of felicitation for his discourse. At the name of Jansoulet, pronounced among mocking and satisfied sneers, she stopped.
“At any rate,” said a handsome man with a bad feminine face, “he has not proved where our accusations were false.”
The old woman, hearing that, wrenched herself through the crowd, and facing Moessard said:
“What he did not say I will. I am his mother, and it is my duty to speak.”
She stopped to seize Le Merquier by the sleeve, who was escaping:
“Wicked man, you must listen, first of all. What have you got against my child? Don’t you know who he is? Wait a little till I tell you.”
And turning to the journalist:
“I had two sons, sir.”
Moessard was no longer there. She returned to Le Merquier: “Two sons, sir.” Le Merquier had disappeared.
“Oh, listen to me, some one, I beg,” said the poor mother, throwing her hands and her voice round her to assemble and retain her hearers; but all fled, melted away, disappeared–deputies, reporters, unknown and mocking faces to whom she wished at any cost to tell her story, careless of the indifference where her sorrows and her joys fell, her pride and maternal tenderness expressed in a tornado of feeling. And while she was thus exciting herself and struggling–distracted, her bonnet awry–at once grotesque and sublime, as are all the children of nature when brought into civilization, taking to witness the honesty of her son and the injustice of men, even the liveried servants, whose disdainful impassibility was more cruel than all, Jansoulet appeared suddenly beside her.
“Take my arm, mother. You must not stop there.”
He said it in a tone so firm and calm that all the laughter ceased, and the old woman, suddenly quieted, sustained by this solid hold, still trembling a little with anger, left the palace between two respectful rows. A dignified and rustic couple, the millions of the son gilding the countrified air of the mother, like the rags of a saint enshrined in a golden /chasse/–they disappeared in the bright sunlight outside, in the splendour of their glittering carriage–a ferocious irony in their deep distress, a striking symbol of the terrible misery of the rich.
They sat well back, for both feared to be seen, and hardly spoke at first. But when the vehicle was well on its way, and he had behind him the sad Calvary where his honour hung gibbeted, Jansoulet, utterly overcome, laid his head on his mother’s shoulder, hid it in the old green shawl, and there, with the burning tears flowing, all his great body shaken by sobs, he returned to the cry of his childhood: “Mother.”
DRAMAS OF PARIS
Que l’heure est donc breve,
Qu’on passe en aimant!
C’est moins qu’un moment,
Un peu plus qu’un reve.