Numa Roumestan

CHAPTER IV. A SOUTHERN AUNT—REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD.

The Portal mansion in which the great man dwells when he is in Provence is one of the show-places of Aps. It is mentioned by the Joanne guide-book in the same category as the temple of Juno, the amphitheatre, the old theatre and the tower of the Antonines, relics of the old Roman days of which the town is very proud and always keeps well furbished up. But it is not the heavy ancient arched gate of the old provincial residence itself, embossed with immense nails, nor the high windows, bristling with iron bars, spikes and pike-heads of a threatening sort, that they point out to the stranger who comes to see the town. It is only a little balcony with its black iron props on the first floor, corbelled out above the porch. For it is here that Numa shows himself to the crowd when he arrives and it is from here that he speaks. The whole town is witness that the iron balcony, which was once as straight as a rule, has been hammered into such an original shape, into such capricious curves, by the blows showered upon it by the powerful fist of the orator.

“Té, vé! our Numa has molded the iron!”

This they will say with bulging eyes and so much earnestness as to leave no room for doubt—say it with that imposing rolling of the “r” thus: pétrrri le ferrr!

They are a proud race, these good people of Aps, and kindly withal, but vivid in their impressions and most exaggerated in their language, of which Aunt Portal, a true type of the local citizenry, gave a very fair idea.

Immensely fat, apoplectic, her blood rushing to her pendulous cheeks purple like the lees of wine in fine contrast with her pale complexion, the skin of a former blonde. So far as one saw it the throat was very white, and her neat handsome iron-gray curls showed from beneath a cap decorated with lilac ribbon. Her bodice was hooked awry, but she was imposing nevertheless, having a majestic air and a pleasant smile and manner. It was thus that she appeared in the half-light of her drawing-room, always kept hermetically sealed after the Southern custom. You would say she looked like an old family portrait, or one of Mirabeau’s old marquises, and very appropriate to her old house, built a hundred years ago by Gonzague Portal, chief councillor of the Parliament of Aix.

It is not uncommon to find people and houses in Provence that seem as if they belong to olden times, as if the last century, while passing out through those high panelled doors, had let a bit of her gown full of furbelows stick in the crack of the door.

But if in conversing with Aunt Portal you should be so unlucky as to hint that Protestants are as good as Catholics, or that Henry V may not ascend the throne at any moment, the old portrait will spring headlong out of its frame, and with the veins on its neck swelling and the hands tearing at the neatly hanging curls, will fly into an ungovernable passion, swear, threaten and curse! These outbursts have passed into tradition in the town and many wonderful tales are told upon the subject. At an evening party in her house a servant let fall a tray of wineglasses; Aunt Portal fell into one of her fits of rage, shouting and exciting herself with cries, reproaches and lamentations; finally her voice failed, and almost choking in her frenzy, unable to beat the unlucky servant, who had promptly fled, she raised the skirt of her dress and wrapped it about her head and face to conceal her groans and her visage disfigured by rage, quite regardless of the voluminous display of a portly, white-fleshed lady to which she was treating her guests.

In any other part of the country she would have been considered mad, but in Aps, the land of hot brains and explosive natures, they were satisfied to say that she “rode a high horse.” It is true that passers-by on the quiet square before her doors on restful afternoons, when the cloistral stillness of the town is only broken by the chirping of the locusts or a few notes on a piano, are wont to hear such words as “monster,” “thief,” “assassin,” “stealers of priests’ property,” “I’ll cut your arm off,” “I’ll rip the skin off your stomach!” Then doors would slam and stairways tremble beneath the vaults of whitewashed stone; windows would open noisily, as though the mutilated bodies of the unhappy servants were to be thrown from them! But nothing happens; the servants placidly continue their work, accustomed to these tempests, knowing perfectly that they are mere habits of speech.

An excellent person, all things considered, ardent, generous, with a great desire to please and to sacrifice herself—a noble trait in these impulsive people, and one by which Numa had profited. Since he had been chosen deputy the house on the Place Cavalerie belonged to him, his aunt only reserving the right to remain there the rest of her life. And then, what a delight it was to her when the party from Paris arrived, with the receptions, the visits, the morning music and the serenades which the presence of the great man brought into that lonely life of hers, eager for excitement! Besides, she adored her niece Rosalie, partly because they were so entirely the opposite of each other and also because of the respect she felt for the daughter of the chief magistrate of France.

It really needed a world of patience on Rosalie’s part and all the love of family inculcated in her by her parents to endure for two whole months the whims and tiresome caprices of this disordered imagination, always over-excited and as restless in mind as she was indolent in her big body. Seated in the large vestibule, as cool as a Moorish court, but yet close and musty from the exclusion of air and sunshine, Rosalie, holding a bit of embroidery in her hands—for like a true Parisian she never could be idle—was obliged to listen for hours at a time to her surprising confidences. The enormous lady sat before her in an arm-chair, with her hands free in order to gesticulate, and recapitulated breathlessly the chronicles of the whole town. She sometimes depicted her maid-servants and coachman as monsters, sometimes as angels, according to the caprice of the moment. She would select some one against whom she apparently had some grudge, and cover the detested one with the foulest, bloodiest, most venomous abuse, relating stories like those in the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith. Rosalie, who had lived with Numa, had luckily become accustomed to these frantic objurgations. She listened abstractedly; for the most part they passed in at one ear and out at the other; hardly did she stop to wonder how it came about that she, so reserved and discreet, could ever have entered such a family of theatrical persons who draped themselves with phrases and overflowed with gestures. It had to be a very strong bit of gossip to make her hold up Aunt Portal with an “Oh, my dear aunt!” thrown out with a far-away air.

“Perhaps you are right, my dear, perhaps I do exaggerate a little.”

But Aunt Portal’s tumultuous imagination was soon off again, recounting some comic or tragic tale with so much mimicry and dramatic effect that she gave one the impression of wearing alternately the two masks borne by ancient actors of tragedy and of comedy. She only calmed down when she described her one visit to Paris and related the wonders of the arrival in the “Passage Somon,” where she had stopped at a small hotel patronized by all the travelling salesmen of her native province, where they “took the air” in a glass-covered passage as stuffy and hot as a melon-frame. Of all her remarkable stories of Paris this place was the central point from which everything else evolved—it was the elegant, fashionable spot beyond all others.

These tiresome, empty tirades had at least the spice of being uttered in the strangest and most amusing kind of language, in which an old-school stilted French, the French of books of rhetoric, was mixed with the oddest provincialisms. Aunt Portal detested the Provençal tongue, that dialect so admirable in color and sonorousness, which only the peasants and people talk, which contains an echo of Latin vibrating across the deep blue sea. She belonged to the burgher class of Provence who translate pécaïré by péchère (sinner) and fancy they talk correctly.

When her coachman Ménicle (Dominick) in his frank way said to her in Provençal:

“Voù baia de civado au chivaou” (I am going to give the horses oats)—she would assume an austere air and say:

“I do not understand you—speak French, my good fellow!”

Then Ménicle, like a docile schoolboy, would say:

“Je vais bayer dé civade au chivau.”

“That is right, now I understand you!”—and he would go away thinking that he had been speaking the language. It is a fact that most of the people in the South below Valence only know this hybrid kind of French.

But besides all this Aunt Portal played upon her words by no means according to her fancy but in accordance with the rules of some local grammar. Thus she said déligence for diligence, achéter for acheter, anédote for anecdote, régitre for régistre. She called a pillow-slip (taie d’oreiller) a coussinière, an umbrella was an ombrette, the foot-warmer which she used at all seasons of the year was a banquette. She did not cry, she “fell to tears;” and though very “overweighted” she never took more than “half hour” for her round of the city. All this twaddle was larded with those little words and expressions without precise meaning which Provençals scatter through their speech, those verbal snips which they stuff between sentences to lessen their stress or increase their strength, or keep up the multifold character of the accent, such as

“Aie, ouie, avai, açavai, au moins, pas moins, différemment, allons!”

This contempt of Mme. Portal for the language of her province extended to its usages and its traditions and even to its costume. Just as she did not permit her coachman to lapse into Provençal, in the same way she never would have allowed a servant to enter her house wearing the head-dress and neck-kerchief of Arles.

“My house is neither a mas (farm) nor a weaver’s loft,” said she. Nor would she let them wear a chapo either. To wear a bonnet is the distinctive hieratic sign of the ascendancy of the citizen in the provinces. The title of “madame” is one of its attributes, a title refused to any of the baser sort. It is amusing to see the condescension of the wife of a retired officer or municipal employee who earns eight hundred francs a year, doing her own marketing in an enormous bonnet, when she speaks to the wife of an immensely rich farmer from the Crau, in her picturesque headgear trimmed with real old thread lace. In the Portal mansion the ladies had worn bonnets for over a century. This made Mme. Portal very arrogant toward poor people and was the cause of a terrible scene between her and Roumestan a few days after the festival in the amphitheatre.

It was a Friday morning at breakfast, a regular Provençal breakfast, pretty and attractive to the eye although strictly a fast-day meal, for Aunt Portal was very keen about her orders. On the white cloth in picturesque array were big green peppers, alternating with blood-red figs, almonds and carved water-melons, that looked like big rose-colored magnolias, anchovy patties and little white rolls such as are to be found nowhere else—all very light dishes set among decanters of fresh water and bottles of light home-made wine. Outside in the sun the locusts and rays were chirping and glittering, and a broad band of golden light slid through a crevice into the great dining-room, vaulted and resounding like the refectory of a convent.

In the middle of the table on a chafing dish were two large cutlets designed for Numa. Notwithstanding that his name was uttered in all the prayers, perhaps because of it, the great man of Aps, alone of all the family, had obtained a dispensation from fasting from the cardinal. So there he sat feasting and carving his juicy cutlets, while his aunt and his wife and sister-in-law breakfasted on figs and watermelon.

Rosalie was used to it. The two days’ fast every week was but a part of her yearly burden, as much a matter of course as the sunshine, the dust, the hot mistral wind, the mosquitoes, her aunt’s gossip and the Sunday services at the church of St. Perpétue. But the youthful appetite of Hortense revolted against this continual fasting and it took all the gentle authority of the elder sister to prevent an outburst from the spoiled child, which would have shocked all Aunt Portal’s ideas of the conduct becoming to a young person of refinement and education. So Hortense had to content herself with her husks, revenging herself by making the most awful grimaces, rolling up her eyes, snuffing up the smell of the cutlets and murmuring under her breath for Rosalie’s benefit alone:

“It always happens so. I took a long ride this morning. I am as hungry as a tramp!”

She still wore her habit, which was as becoming to her tall, slim figure as was the straight, high collar to her irregular saucy little face, still flushed by her exercise in the open air. Her ride had given her an idea.

“Oh Numa, how about Valmajour? When are we going to see him?”

“Who is Valmajour?” answered Numa, whose fickle brain had already discarded all memory of the taborist. “Té, that’s a fact, Valmajour! I had forgotten all about him. What a genius he is!”

It all came back to him—the arches of the amphitheatre echoing to the farandole with the dull vibration of the tabor; it fired his memory and so excited him that he called out decisively:

“Aunt Portal, do lend us the landau; we will set off directly after breakfast.”

His aunt’s brow darkened above her big eyes, flaming like those of a Japanese idol.

“The landau? Avai! What for? At least you’re not going to take your wife and sister to see that player of the tutu-panpan!”

This word “tutu-panpan” so perfectly mimicked the sound of the fife and tabor that Roumestan burst out laughing, but Hortense took up the defence of the old Provençal tabor with much earnestness. Nothing that she had seen in the South had impressed her so much. Besides, it would not be honest to break one’s word to the nice boy.

“He is a great artist! Numa, you said so yourself.”

“Yes, yes, little sister, you are right; we must certainly go.”

Aunt Portal in a towering rage said that she could not understand how a man like her nephew, a deputy, could put himself out for peasants, farmers, whose people from father to son had made music for the villages. Then, in her usual spirit of mimicry, she stuck out a disdainful lip and played with the fingers of one hand on an imaginary fife, while with the other she beat upon the table to represent the tabor, taking off the tabor-player’s gestures.

“Nice people to take ladies to see! No one but Numa would dream of doing such a thing. Calling on the Valmajours! Holy mother of angels!” And becoming more and more excited, she accused them of crimes enough to make them out a brood of monsters as bloody and dreadful as the Trestaillon family, when suddenly across the table she caught the eye of her butler Ménicle, who came from the same village as the Valmajours and was listening to her lies, every feature strained in astonishment. At once she shouted to him in a terrible voice to “go and change himself quickly” and have the landau at the door at “two o’clock a quarter off.” All the rages of Aunt Portal ended in this fashion.

Hortense threw down her napkin and ran and kissed the old lady rapturously on her fat cheeks. She was in a tumult of gayety and bounded for joy:

“Come, Rosalie, let us hurry!”

Aunt Portal looked at her niece:

“Well, I hope, Rosalie, that you are not going to vagabondize with these feather-heads!”

“No, no, aunt, I will stay with you” answered Rosalie, amused at the character of elderly relative that her unvarying amiability and resignation had created for her in that house.

At the right moment the carriage came promptly to the door, but they sent it on ahead, telling Ménicle to wait for them at the amphitheatre square, and Roumestan set out on foot with his little sister on his arm, full of curiosity and pride at seeing Aps in his company, to visit the house in which he was born and to retrace with him the streets through which he had so often walked when a child.

It was the hour of the midday rest. The whole town slept, silent and deserted, rocked by the south wind blowing in great fanlike gusts, cooling and freshening the fierce Provençal summer heat, but making walking difficult, especially along the Corso, which offered no resistance to it, where it roared round the little city with the bellowings of a loosened bull. Hortense, with her head down, her hands tightly clasped about her brother’s arm, out of breath and bewildered, enjoyed the sensation of being raised and borne along by the gusts which were like resistless waves, noisy and complaining, white with foamlike dust. Sometimes they had to stop and cling to the ropes stretched along the ramparts for use on windy days. Owing to the whirlwinds in which bits of bark and plane-tree seeds spun round, and owing to its solitude the Corso had an air of distress in its wide desolation, still soiled as it was with the remains of the recent market, strewn with melon-rinds, straw litters, empty casks, as if the mistral alone had charge of the street cleaning.

Roumestan was anxious to reach the carriage as soon as possible, but Hortense enjoyed this battle with the hurricane and insisted on walking farther, panting and overborne by the gust that curled her blue veil three times around her hat and molded her short walking skirt against her figure as she walked. She was saying:

“It is queer how different people are! Rosalie, now, hates the wind. She says it blows away all her ideas, keeps her from thinking. Now me the wind excites, intoxicates!”

“So it does me!” said Numa, clinging on to his hat, his eyes full of water, and then suddenly, as they turned a corner:

“Ah, here is my street—I was born here.”

The wind was going down, at least they felt it less; it was blowing farther away with a sound as of billows breaking on a beach, as one hears them from the quiet inner bay. The street was a largish one, paved with pointed stones, without sidewalks, and the house an insignificant little gray structure standing between an Ursuline convent shaded with big plane-trees and a fine old seignorial mansion on which was carved a coat of arms and the inscription “Hôtel de Rochemaure.” Opposite stood a very old and characterless building with broken columns, defaced statues and grave-stones with Roman inscriptions carved on them; it had the word “Academy” in faded gilt letters over a green door.

In that little gray house the great orator first saw the light on the 15th of July, 1832; it was easy to draw more than one parallel between his narrow, classical talent and his education as a Catholic and a Legitimist, and that little house of needy citizens with a convent on one side and a seignorial residence on the other, and a provincial academy in front of it.

Roumestan was filled with emotion, as he always was over anything concerning himself. He had not visited this spot for perhaps thirty years; it needed the whim of this young girl to bring him here. He was much struck with the immutability of things. He recognized in the wall a shutter-catch that his childish hand had turned and played with every morning as he passed on his way up the street. The columns and precious torsos of the academy threw their shadows on the same spot as of old. The rose-laurel bushes had the same spicy odor and he showed Hortense the narrow window where his mother had sat and signed to him to hurry when he came from the friars’ school:

“Come up quickly, father has come in!” His father did not like to be kept waiting.

“Tell me, Numa, is it really true? were you really educated by the friars?”

“Yes, little sister, until I was twelve years old, and then Aunt Portal sent me to the Assumption, the most fashionable boarding-school in the town; but it was the Ignorantins over there in that big barrack with yellow shutters who taught me to read.”

As he called to mind the pail of brine under the Brother’s chair in which were soaked the straps with which they beat the boys, to make the pain greater, he shuddered; he remembered the large paved class-room where they were made to say their lessons on their knees and had to crawl up holding out their hands to be punished on the slightest pretext; he recalled how the Brother in his shabby black gown stood stiff and rigid, with his habit rolled up beneath his arm, the better to strike his pitiless blows—Brother Crust-to-cook, as he was called, because he was the cook. He remembered how the dear Brother cried “ha!” and how his little inky fingers tingled with the pain as if ants were biting them. As Hortense cried aloud in dismay at the brutality of such punishments, he related others still more dreadful; for example, they were obliged to clean the freshly watered pavements with their tongues, the dust and water making a muddy substance that injured the tender palates of the naughty children.

“It is shameful! and you defend such people and speak in their favor in the Chamber?”

“Ah, my dear, that is politics!” said Roumestan calmly.

As they talked they were threading a labyrinth of small, dingy streets, almost oriental in their character, where old women lay asleep on their doorsteps, and other streets, though not so sombre, where long pieces of printed calicoes fluttered in explanation of signboards on which were painted: “Haberdashery,” “Shoes,” “Silks.”

Thence they came out on what was called in Aps the “Little Square,” with its asphalt melting in the hot sun and surrounded by shops, at this hour closed and silent, in the narrow shadow of whose walls boot-blacks slept peacefully, their heads resting on their boxes, their limbs stretched out like those of drowned people, wrecks of the tempest that has just swept over the town. An unfinished monument occupied the centre of the little square. Hortense wished to know what was ultimately to be the statue placed upon it and Roumestan smiled in an embarrassed way.

“It is a long story!” he answered, hurrying on.

The town of Aps had voted a statue to Numa, but the Liberals of the “Vanguard” had strongly disapproved of this apotheosis of a living man and so his friends had not dared to go on with it. The statue was all ready, but now probably they would wait for his death before raising it. Surely it’s a glorious thought that after your funeral you will have civic recognition and that you die only to rise again in bronze or marble; but this empty pedestal shining in the sun seemed to Roumestan, whenever he passed it, as gloomy as a majestic family vault; it was not until they had reached the amphitheatre that he could dispel his funereal thoughts.

The old structure, divested of its Sunday cheerfulness and returned to its solemnity of a great and useless ruin, seemed damp and cheerless as it loomed darkly against the rays of the setting sun, with its dark corridors and floors caved in here and there and stones crumbling beneath the footsteps of the centuries.

“How dreadfully sad it is!” said Hortense, regretting the music of Valmajour’s fife; but to Numa it did not seem sad. His happiest days had been passed there—his childish days with all their pleasures and longings. Oh, the Sundays at the bull-fights, prowling around the gates with other poor children who lacked ten sous to pay for their tickets! In the hot afternoon sun they crawled into some corner where a glimpse of the arena could be obtained. What pleasures of forbidden fruits!—the red-stockinged legs of the bull-fighters, the wrathful hoofs of the bull, the dust of the combat rising from the arena amid the cries of “Bravo!” and the bellowings and the roar of the multitude! The yearning to get inside was not to be resisted. While the sentinel’s back was turned the bravest of them would wriggle through the iron bars with a little effort.

“I always got through!” said Roumestan in ecstasy. The history of his whole life was expressed in those few words. By chance or by cleverness—no matter how close were the bars—the Southerner always wriggled through.

“I was thinner in those days, all the same,” he said with a sigh and he looked with comic regret at the narrow bars of the grille and then at his big white waistcoat, within which lay the solid sign of his forty years.

Behind the enormous amphitheatre they found the carriage, safely harbored from wind and sun. They had to wake up Ménicle, who was sleeping peacefully on the box between two large baskets of provisions, wrapped in his heavy cloak of royal blue. But before getting in Numa pointed out to Hortense an old inn at a distance whose sign read: “To the Little St. John, coach and express office,” the whitewashed front and large open sheds of which took up one whole corner of the square. In these sheds were ancient stage-coaches and rural chaises long unused, covered with dust, their shafts raised high in air from beneath their gray covers.

“Look there, little sister,” he cried with emotion. “It was from this spot that I set out for Paris one-and-twenty years ago. There was no railway then; we went by coach as far as Montélimar, then up the Rhône. Heavens, how happy I was! and how your big Paris frightened me! It was evening—I remember it so well....”

He spoke quickly, reminiscences crowding each other in his mind.

“The evening, ten o’clock, in November, beautiful moonlight. The guard’s name was Fouque, a great person! While he was harnessing we walked about with Bompard—yes, Bompard—you know we were already great friends. He was, or thought he was, studying for a druggist and meant to join me in Paris. We made many plans for living together and helping each other along in the world to get ahead quicker—in the meantime he encouraged me, gave me good advice—he was older than I. My great bugbear was the fear of being ridiculous—Aunt Portal had ordered for me a travelling wrap called a Raglan; I was a little dubious about that Raglan, so Bompard made me put it on and walk before him in it. Té! I can see yet my shadow beside me as I walked, and gravely, with that knowing air he has, he said: ‘That is all right, old boy; you don’t look ridiculous.’—Ah, youth, youth!”

Hortense, who was beginning to fear that they should never get away from this town where every stone was eloquent of reminiscences for the great man, led the way gently towards the carriage.

“Let us get in, Numa. We can talk just as well as we drive along.”

CHAPTER V. VALMAJOUR.

It takes hardly more than two hours to drive from Aps to Cordova Mountain provided the wind is astern. Drawn by the two old horses from the Camargue, the carriage went almost by itself, propelled by the mistral which shook and rattled it, beating on its leather hood and curtains or blowing them out like sails.

Out here it did not bellow any more as it did round the ramparts and through the vaulted passages of the town; but, free of all obstacles, driving before it the great plain itself, where a solitary farm and some peasant manses here and there, forming gray spots in the green landscape, seemed the scattering of a village by the storm, the wind passed in the form of smoke before the sky, and like sudden dashes of surf over the tall wheat and olive orchards, whose silvery leaves it made to flutter like a swarm of butterflies. Then with sudden rebounds that raised in blond masses the dust that crackled under the wheels it fell upon the files of closely pressed cypresses and the Spanish reeds with their long rustling leaves, which made one feel that there was a river flowing beside the road. When for one moment it stopped, as if short of breath, one felt all the weight of summer; then a truly African heat rose from the earth, which was soon driven off by the wholesome, revivifying hurricane, extending its jovial dance to the very farthest point on the horizon, to those little dull, grayish mounds which are seen on the horizon in all Provençal landscapes, but which the sunset turns to iridescent tints of fairyland.

They did not meet many people. An occasional huge wagon from the quarries filled with hewn stones, blinding in the sunlight; an old peasant woman from Ville-des-Baux bending under a great couffin or basket of sweet-smelling herbs; the robe of a mendicant friar with a sack on his back and a rosary round his waist, his hard, tonsured head sweating and shining like a Durance pebble; or else a group of people returning from a pilgrimage, a wagon-load of women and girls in holiday attire, with fine black eyes, big chignons and bright-colored ribbons, coming from Sainte Baume or Notre-Dame-de-Lumière. Well, the mistral gave to all these people, to hard labor, to wretchedness and to superstition the same flow of health and good spirits, gathering up and scattering again during its rushes the hymn of the monk, the shrill canticles of the pilgrims, the bells and jingling blue glass beads of the horses and the “Dia! hue!” of the carters, as well as the popular refrain that Numa, intoxicated by the breeze of his native land, poured forth with all the power of his lungs and with wide gesticulations that were waved from both the carriage doors at once:

Suddenly he cried to the coachman: “Here! Ménicle, Ménicle!”

“Monsieur Numa?”

“What is that stone building on the other side of the Rhône?”

“That, Monsieur Numa, is the jonjon of Queen Jeanne.”

“Oh, yes, that’s so—I remember; poor jonjon! Its name is as much of a ruin as the tower itself!”

And then he told Hortense the story of the royal dungeon, for he was thoroughly grounded in his native legends.

That ruined and rusty tower up there dated from the time of the Saracen invasion, although more modern than the ruin of the abbey near it, a bit of whose half crumbled wall still remained standing near at hand, with its row of narrow windows showing against the sky and its big ogival doorway. He showed her, against the rocky slope, a worn pathway leading to a pond that shone like a cup of crystal, where the monks used to go to fish for eels and carp for the table of the abbot. As they looked at the lovely spot Numa remarked that the men of God had always known how to select the choicest spots in which to pass their comfortable, restful lives, generally choosing the summits where they might soar and dream, but whence they descended upon the quiet valleys and levied their toll on all the good things from the surrounding villages.

Oh, Provence in the Middle Ages! land of the troubadours and courts of beauty!

Now briers dislocate the stones of the terraces erstwhile swept by the trains of courtly beauties—Stephenettes or Azalaïses—while ospreys and owls scream at night in the place where the dead and gone troubadours used to sing! But was there not still a perfume of delicate beauty, a charming Italian coquetry pervading this landscape of the Alpilles, like the quiver of a lute or viol floating through the pure, still air?

Numa grew excited, forgetting that he had only his sister-in-law and old Ménicle’s blue cloak for audience, and, after a few commonplaces fit for local banquets and meetings of the Academy, broke forth into one of those ingenious and brilliant impromptus that proved him to be indeed the descendant of the light Provençal troubadours.

“There is Valmajour!” said Ménicle all at once, pointing upwards with his whip as he leaned round on the box.

They had left the highroad and were climbing a zigzag path up the side of Cordova Mountain, narrow and slippery with the lavender whose fragrance filled the air with a smell of burnt incense as the carriage wheels passed. On a plateau half way up, at the foot of a black, dilapidated tower, the roofs of the farmstead could be seen. Here it was that for years and years the Valmajours had lived, from father to son, on the site of the old château whose name abided with them. And who knows? perhaps these peasants really were the descendants of the princes of Valmajour, related to the counts of Provence and to the house of Baux. This idea, imprudently expressed by Roumestan, was eagerly taken up by Hortense, who thus accounted to herself for the really high-bred manners of the taborist.

As they conversed in the carriage on the subject Ménicle listened to their talk in amazement from his box. The name of Valmajour was common enough in the province; there were mountain Valmajours and Valmajours of the valley, according as they dwelt on upland or on plain. “So they are all noblemen!” he wondered. But the astute Provençal kept his thoughts on the subject to himself.

As they advanced further into this desolate but beautiful landscape the imagination of the young girl, excited by Numa’s animated conversation, gave free vent to its romantic impressions, stimulated by the brightly-colored fantasies of the past; and looking upward and seeing a peasant woman sitting on a buttress of the ruined tower, watching the approach of the strangers, her face in profile, her hand shading her eyes from the sun, she imagined she saw some princess wearing the mediæval wimple gazing down upon them from her feudal tower—like an illustration in an old book.

The illusion was hardly dispelled when, on leaving the carriage, they saw before them the sister of the taborist, who was making willow screens for silk worms. She did not rise, although Ménicle had shouted to her from a distance: “Vé! Audiberte, here are visitors for your brother!” Her face with its delicate, regular features, long and green as an unripe olive, expressed neither pleasure nor surprise, but kept the concentrated look that brought the heavy black eyebrows together in front and seemed to tie a knot below her obstinate brows, as if with a hard, fixed line. Numa, somewhat taken aback by this frigid reception, said hastily: “I am Numa Roumestan, the deputy—”

“Oh, I know who you are well enough,” she answered gravely, and throwing down her work in a heap by her side: “Come in a moment, my brother will be here presently.”

When she stood up their hostess lost her imposing appearance; short of stature, with a large bust, she walked with an ungraceful waddle that spoiled the effect of her pretty head charmingly set off by the little Arles head-dress and the picturesque fichu of white muslin with its bluish shadow in every fold which she wore over her shoulders. She led her guests into the house. This peasant’s cottage, leaning up against its ruined tower, seemed to have imbibed a distinguished air, with its coat-of-arms in stone over a door shaded by an awning of reeds cracked by the heat of the sun and its big curtain of checked muslin stretched across the door to keep out the mosquitoes. The old guard-room, with its ceiling riddled by cracks, its tall, ancient chimneypiece and its white walls, was lighted only by small green-glass windows and the curtain stretched across the door.

In the dim light could be seen the black wooden kneading-trough, shaped like a sarcophagus, carved with designs of wheat and flowers; over it hung the open-work wicker bread-basket, ornamented with little Moorish bells, in which the bread is kept fresh in Provençal farm-houses. Two or three sacred images, the Virgin, Saint Martha and the tarasque, a small red copper lamp of antique form hanging from the beak of a mocking-bird carved in white wood by one of the shepherds, and on each side of the fireplace the salt and the flour boxes, completed the furniture of the big room, not forgetting a large sea-shell, with which they called the cattle home, glittering on the mantelpiece above the hearth.

A long table ran lengthwise through the hall, on each side of which were benches and stools. From the ceiling hung strings of onions black with flies, that buzzed loudly whenever the door curtain was raised.

“Take a seat, sir—a seat, madame; you must share the grand boire with us.”

The grand boire or “big drink” is the lunch partaken of wherever the peasants are working—out in the fields, under the trees, in the shade of a mill, or in a roadside ditch. But the Valmajours took theirs in the house, as they were at work near by. The table was already laid with little yellow earthen dishes in which were pickled olives and romaine salad shining with oil. In the willow stand where the bottles and glasses are kept Numa thought he saw some wine.

“So you still have vineyards up here?” he asked smilingly, trying to ingratiate himself with this queer little savage. But at the word “vineyards” she sprang to her feet like a goat bitten by an asp, and in a moment her voice struck the full note of indignation. Vines! oh, yes! nice luck they had had with their vineyards! Out of five only one was left to them—the smallest one, too, and that they had to keep under water half the year,—water from the roubine at that, costing them their last sou! And all that—who was to blame for it? the Reds, those swine, those monsters, the Reds and their godless republic, that had let loose all the devils of hell upon the country!

As she spoke in this passionate manner her eyes grew blacker with the murky look of an assassin; her pretty face was all convulsed and disfigured, her mouth was distorted and her black eyebrows made with their knot a big lump in the middle of her brow. The strangest of all was that in spite of her fury she continued her peaceful avocations, making the coffee, blowing the fire, coming and going, gesticulating with whatever was in her hand, the bellows or the coffee-pot, or a blazing brand of vine-wood from the fire, which she brandished like the torch of a Fury. Suddenly she calmed down.

“Here is my brother,” she said.

The rustic curtain, brushed aside, let in a flood of white sunlight against which appeared the tall form of Valmajour, followed by a little old man with a smooth face, sunburned until it was as black and gnarled as the root of a diseased vine. Neither father nor son showed any more excitement at the sight of the visitors than Audiberte.

The first greeting over, they seated themselves at the table, on which had been spread the contents of the two baskets that Roumestan had brought in the carriage, at sight of which the eyes of old Valmajour shone with little joyous sparkles. Roumestan, who could not recover from the want of enthusiasm about himself shown by these peasants, began at once to speak of the great success on the Sunday at the amphitheatre. That must have made him proud of his son!

“Yes, yes,” mumbled the old man, spearing his olives with his knife. “But I too in my time used to get prizes myself for my tabor-playing”—and he smiled the same wicked smile that had played on his daughter’s lips in her recent gust of temper. Very peaceful just now, Audiberte sat upon the hearthstone with her plate upon her knees; for, although she was the mistress of the house and a very tyrannical one at that, she still obeyed the ancient Provençal custom that did not allow the women to sit at the table and eat with their men. But from that humble spot she listened attentively all the while to what they were saying and shook her head when they spoke of the festival at the amphitheatre. She did not care for the tabor, herself—nani! no indeed! Her mother had been killed by the bad blood her father’s love for it had occasioned. It was a profession, look you, fit for drunkards; it kept people from profitable work and cost more money than it made.

“Well then, let him come to Paris,” said Roumestan. “Take my word for it, his tabor will coin money for him there....”

Spurred on by the utter incredulity of the country girl, he tried to make her understand how capricious Paris was and how the city would pay almost anything to gratify its whims. He told her of the success of old Mathurin, who used to play the bagpipes at the “Closerie des Genets,” and how inferior were the Breton bagpipes, coarse and shrieking, fit only for Esquimaux in the Polar Circle to dance to, when compared with the tabor of Provence, so pretty, so delicate and high-bred! He could tell them that all the Parisian women would go wild over it and all wish to dance the farandole. Hortense also grew excited and put in her oar, while the taborist smiled vaguely and twirled his brown moustache with the fatuous air of a lady-killer.

“Well now, come! Give me an idea what he would earn by his music!” cried the peasant girl. Roumestan thought a moment. He could not say precisely. One hundred and fifty to two hundred francs—

“A month?” quoth the old man excitedly.

“Heavens! no—a day!”

The three peasants started and then looked at each other. From any one else but M. Numa the deputy, member of the General Council, they would have suspected a joke, a galéjade! But with him of course the matter was serious. Two hundred francs a day—foutré! The musician himself wished to go at once, but his more prudent sister would have liked to draw up a paper for Roumestan to sign; and then quietly, with lowered eyelids, that the money greed in her eyes might not be seen, she began to canvass the matter in her hypocritical voice.

Valmajour was so much needed at home, pécaïré! He took care of the property, ploughed, dressed the vines, his father being too old now for such work. What should they do if her brother went away? And he—he would be sure to be homesick alone in Paris, and his money, his two hundred francs a day, who would take care of it in that awful great city? And her voice hardened as she spoke of money that she could not take care of and stow carefully away in her most secret drawer.

“Well,” said Roumestan, “come to Paris with him.”

“And the house?”

“Leave it or sell it. You can buy a much better one when you come back.”

He hesitated as Hortense glanced warningly at him, and, as if remorseful for disturbing the quiet life of these simple people, he said:

“After all, there is a great deal besides money in this life. You are lucky enough as you are.”

Audiberte interrupted him sharply: “Lucky? Existence is a struggle; things are not as they used to be!”—and she began again to whine about the vineyards, the silk-worms, the madder, the vermilion and all the other vanished riches of the country. Nowadays one had to work in the sun like cart-horses. It is true that they expected to inherit the fortune of Cousin Puyfourcat, the colonist in Algiers, but Algeria is so far away; and then the astute little peasant, in order to warm Numa up, whom she reproached herself for causing to lose some of his enthusiasm on the subject, turned in a catty way to her brother and said in her coaxing, singsong voice:

“Qué, Valmajour! suppose you play something for the pleasure of the pretty young lady.”

Ah, clever girl! she was not mistaken. At the first blow of the stick, at the first pearly notes of the fife Roumestan was trapped once more and went into raptures.

The musician leaned against the curb of an old well in front of the farmhouse door. Over the well was an iron frame, round which a wild fig-tree had wound itself and made a marvellously picturesque background for his handsome figure and swarthy face. With his bare arms, his dusty, toil-worn garments, his uncovered sun-browned breast, he looked nobler and prouder than he had appeared when in the arena, where his natural grace had a somewhat tawdry touch through a certain striving after theatrical effect. The old airs that he played on his rustic instrument, made poetic by the solitude and silence of the mountains and waking the ancient golden ruins from their slumbers in stone, floated like skylarks round the slopes all gray with lavender or checkered with wheat and dead vines and mulberry-trees with their broad leaves casting longer but lighter shadows on the grass at their feet. The wind had gone down. The setting sun played upon the violet line of the Alpilles and poured into the hollows of the rocks a very mirage of lakes, of liquid porphyry and of molten gold.

All along the horizon there seemed as it were a luminous vibration, like the stretched cords of a lyre, to which the song of the crickets and the hum of the tabor furnished the sonorous base. Silent and delighted, Hortense, seated on the parapet of the old tower, leaning her elbow on the fragment of a broken column near which a pomegranate grew, listened and admired while she let her romantic little mind wander, filled with the legends and stories that Roumestan had told her on the way to the farm.

She pictured to herself the old château rising from its ruins, its towers rebuilt, its gates renewed, its cloister-like arches peopled with lovely women in long-bodiced gowns, with those pale, clear complexions that the sun cannot injure. She herself was a princess of the house of Baux with a pretty name of some saint in a missal and the musician who was giving her a morning greeting was also a prince, the last of the Valmajours, dressed in the costume of a peasant.

“Of a certes, ywis, the song once finished,” as the chroniclers of the courts of love of old used to say, she broke from the tree above her a bunch of pomegranate blossoms and held it out to the musician as the prize won by his playing. He received it with gallantry and wound it round the strings of his tabor.

CHAPTER VI. CABINET MINISTER!

Three months have passed since that expedition to Mount Cordova.

Parliament had met at Versailles in a deluge of November rain, which brought the low cloudy sky down to the lakes in the parks, enveloped everything in mist and wrapped the two Chambers in a dreary dampness and darkness; but it had done nothing to cool the heat of political hatreds. The opening was stormy and threatening. Train after train filled with deputies and senators followed and crossed each other, hissing, whistling, spluttering, blowing defiant smoke at each other as if animated by the same passions and intrigues they were carrying through the torrents of rain. During this hour in the train, discussion and loud-voiced conversation prevail above all the tumult of rushing wheels in the different carriages, as violently and furiously as if they were in the Chamber.

The noisiest, the most excited of all is Roumestan. He has already delivered himself of two speeches since Parliament met. He addresses committees, talks in the corridors, in the railway station, in the café, and makes the windows tremble in the photographer’s shop where all the Rights assemble. Little else is seen but that restless outline and heavy form, his big head always in motion, the roll of his broad shoulders, so formidable in the eyes of the Ministry, which he is about to “down” according to all the rules, like one of the stoutest and most supple of his native Southern wrestlers.

Ah! the blue sky, the tabors, the cicadas, all the bright pleasures of his vacation days—how far away they seem, how utterly dislocated and vanished! Numa never gives them a moment’s thought nowadays, entirely carried away as he is by the whirl of his double life as politician and man of the law. Like his old master Sagnier, when he went into politics he did not renounce the law, and every evening from six o’clock to eight his office in the Rue Scribe is thronged with clients.

It looked like a legation, this office managed by Roumestan. The first secretary, his right-hand man, his counsellor and friend, was a very good legal man of business named Méjean, a Southerner, as were all Numa’s following; but from the Cévennes, the rocky region of the South, which is more like Spain than Italy, where the inhabitants have retained in their manners and speech the prudent reserve and level-headed common-sense of the renowned Sancho.

Vigorous, robust, already a little bald, with the sallow complexion of sedentary workers, Méjean alone did all the work of the office, clearing away papers, preparing speeches, trying to reconcile facts with his friend’s sonorous phrases—some say his future brother-in-law’s. The other secretaries, Messieurs de Rochemaure and de Lappara, two young graduates related to the noblest families in the province, are only there for show, in training for political life under Roumestan’s guidance.

Lappara, a handsome tall fellow with a neat leg, a ruddy complexion and a blond beard, son of the old Marquis de Lappara, chief of the Right in the Bordeaux district, is a fair type of that Creole South; he is a gabbler and adventurer, with a love for duels and prodigalities (escampatives). Five years of life in Paris, one hundred thousand francs gone in “bucking the tiger” at the clubs, paid for with his mother’s diamonds, had sufficed to give him a good boulevard accent and a fine crusty tone of gold on his manners.

Viscount Charlexis de Rochemaure, a compatriot of Numa, is of a very different kind. Educated by the Fathers of the Assumption, he had made his law studies at home under the superintendence of his mother and an abbé; he still retained from that early education a candid look and the timid manners of a theological student that contrasted vividly with his goatee in the style of Louis XIII, the combination making him seem at one and the same time foxy and a muff.

Big Lappara tries hard to initiate this young Tony Lumpkin into the mysteries of Parisian life. He teaches him how to dress himself, what is chic and what is not chic, to walk with his neck forward and his mouth drawn down and to seat himself all of a piece, as it were, with his legs extended in order not to wrinkle his trousers at the knees. He would like to shake his simple faith in men and things, to cure him of that love of superstitions which simply classes him among the quill-drivers.

Not a bit of it! the viscount likes his work and when he is not at the Palace or the Chamber with Roumestan, as to-day for instance, he sits for hours at the secretaries’ table in the office next to the chief’s and practises engrossing. The Bordeaux man, on the contrary, has drawn an arm-chair up to the window, and in the twilight, with a cigar in his mouth and his legs stretched out, lazily watches through the falling rain and the steaming asphalt the long procession of carriages driving up to the doors with every whip in the air; for to-day is Mme. Roumestan’s Thursday.

What a lot of people! and still they come; more and more carriages! Lappara, who boasts of knowing thoroughly the liveries of the great people in Paris, calls out the names as he recognizes them: “Duchesse de San Donnino, Marquis de Bellegarde—hello! the Mauconseils, too! Now I’d like to know what that means?” and turning towards a tall, thin person who stands by the mantelpiece drying his worsted gloves and his light-colored trousers, too thin for the season, carefully turned up over his cloth shoes: “Have you heard anything, Bompard?”

“Heard anythink? Sartainly I have,” was the answer in a broad accent.

Bompard, Roumestan’s mameluke, has the honorary position of a fourth secretary who does outside business, goes to look for news and sings his patron’s praises about the streets. This occupation does not seem to be a lucrative one, judging from his appearance, but that is really not Numa’s fault. Aside from the midday meal and an occasional half-louis, this singular kind of parasite could never be induced to accept anything; and how he supported existence remained as great a mystery as ever to his best friends. To ask him if he knows anything, to doubt the imagination of Bompard, is to show a fine simplicity of soul!

“Yes, gentlemen, and somethink vary serious.”

“What is it?”

“The Marshal has just been shot at.” For one moment consternation reigns; the young men look at each other. Then Lappara stretches himself in his chair and asks languidly:

“How about your asphalt affair, old man—how is it getting on?”

“Vai! the asphalt—I have something much better than that.”

Not at all surprised that his news of the attempted assassination of the Marshal had produced so little effect, he now proceeded to unfold to them his new scheme. A wonderful thing, and so simple! It was to scoop the prizes of one hundred and twenty thousand francs that the Swiss governments offers yearly at the Federal shooting-matches. He had been a crack shot at larks in his day; with a little practice he could easily get his hand in again and secure a hundred and twenty thousand francs annually to the end of his life. Such an easy way to do it, au moins! Traversing Switzerland by short marches, going slowly, from canton to canton, rifle on showlder.

The man of schemes grew warm with his subject, climbed mountains, crossed glaciers, descended vales and torrents and shook down avalanches before his astonished young listeners. Of all the imaginings of that disordered brain this was certainly the most astonishing, delivered with an air of perfect conviction, with a fire and flame that, burning inwardly, covered his brow with corrugated wrinkles.

His ravings were only hushed by the breathless arrival of Méjean, who came rushing in much excited:

“Great news!” he said throwing his bag upon the table. “The Ministry is fallen!”

“It can’t be possible!”

“Roumestan takes the Ministry of Public Instruction....”

“I knew that,” said Bompard; and as they smiled, he added: “Par-fait-emain, gentlemen! I was there; I have just come from there.”

“And you didn’t mention it before!”

“Why should I? No one ever believes me. I think it is my agsent,” he added resignedly and with a candid air, the fun of which was lost in the prevailing excitement.

Roumestan a Cabinet Minister!

“Ah, my boys, what a shifty, smart fellow the chief is!” Lappara kept saying, throwing himself back in his chair with his legs near the ceiling. “Hasn’t he played his cards well!”

Rochemaure looked up indignant:

“Don’t talk of smartness and shiftiness, my friend; Roumestan is conscientiousness itself. He goes straight ahead like a bullet—”

“In the first place, there are no bullets nowadays, my child—only shells; and shells do this—” and with the tip of his boot he indicated the curving course of a trajectory:

“Scandal-monger!”

“Idiot!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Méjean wondered to himself over this extraordinary man Roumestan, this complicated nature whom even those who knew him most intimately could judge so differently.

“A shifty fellow!—conscientiousness itself!”

The public judged of him in the same double way. He who knew him thoroughly was conscious of the shallowness and indolence that modified his tireless ambition and made him at the same time better and worse than his reputation. But was it really true, this news of his Ministerial portfolio? Anxious to know the truth, Méjean glanced in the glass to see if he was in proper shape, and, stepping across the hall, entered the apartments of Mme. Roumestan.

From the antechamber where the footmen waited with their ladies’ wraps could be heard the hum of many voices deadened by the heavy, luxurious hangings and high ceilings. Rosalie generally received in her little drawing-room, furnished as a winter garden with cane seats and pretty little tables, the light just filtering in between the green leaves of the plants that filled the windows. That had always sufficed her in her lowly position as a simple lady overshadowed by her husband’s greatness, perfectly without social ambition and passing among those who did not know her superiority for a good-enough person of no great importance. But to-day the two large drawing-rooms were humming and crowded to overflowing; new people were constantly arriving, friends to the remotest degree, even to the slightest acquaintanceship, people to whose faces it would have puzzled Rosalie to attach a name.

Dressed very simply in a gown of violet, most becoming to her slender figure and the whole harmonious personality of her being, she received every one alike with her gentle little smile, her manner somewhat haughty—her réfréjon, or “uppish” air, as Aunt Portal had once expressed it. Not the slightest elation at her new position—rather a little surprise and uneasiness, but her feelings kept well concealed!

She went from group to group as the daylight faded rapidly in the lower story of the city house and the servants brought lamps and lighted the candles. The rooms assumed their festal air as at their evening receptions, the rich shining hangings and oriental rugs and tapestries glittering like colored stones in the light.

“Ah, Monsieur Méjean!” and Rosalie came up to him, glad to feel an intimate friend near her in this crowd of strangers. They understood each other perfectly. This Southerner who had learned to be cool and the emotional Parisian had similar ways of seeing and judging things, and together they acted as counterweights to the weaknesses and extravagances of Numa.

“I came in to see if the news were true. But there is no doubt about it,” said he, glancing at the crowded rooms. She handed him the telegram she had received from her husband and said in a low voice:

“What do you think of it?”

“It is a great responsibility, but you will be there.”

“And you too,” she answered, pressing his hand, and then turned away to meet other new-comers.

The fact was that more people kept arriving but no one went away. They were waiting for Roumestan; they wished to hear all the particulars of the affair from his own lips—how with one lift of his shoulder he had managed to upset them all. Some of the new arrivals who had just come from the Chamber were already bringing with them bits of news and scraps of conversations. Every one crowded about them in pleasurable excitement. The women especially were wildly interested. Under the big hats which came into fashion that winter their pretty cheeks flushed with that fine rosy tint, that fever one sees in the players round the tables at the gambling house at Monte Carlo. The fashion of hats this year was a revival of the days of the Fronde, soft felt hats with long feathers; perhaps it was this that made their wearers so interested in politics. But all these ladies appeared well up in such matters; they talked in purest parliamentary language, emphasizing their remarks with blows from their little muffs; all of them sang the praises of the leader. In fact this exclamation could be heard on every side: “What a man! what a man!”

In a corner sat old Béchut, a professor at the Collège de France, a very ugly man all nose—an immense scientist’s nose that seemed to have elongated itself from poking into books. He was taking the success of Roumestan as the text for one of his favorite theories—that all the weakness in the modern world comes from the too prominent place in it given to women and children. Ignorance and toilets, caprice and brainlessness! “You see, sir, that is where Roumestan is so strong! He has no children and he has known how to escape the influence of woman. So he has followed one straight, firm path; no turning aside, no deviation!” The solemn personage whom he was addressing, councillor at the Court of Cassation, a simple-looking, round-headed little man whose ideas rattled about in his empty skull like corn in a gourd, drew himself up approvingly in a magisterial way, as who should say: “I also am a superior man, sir! I also have escaped from the influences to which you refer.”

Seeing that people were listening, the professor spoke louder and cited the great names of history, Cæsar, Richelieu, Frederick, Napoleon, scientifically proving at the same time that in the scale of thinking creatures woman was on a much lower grade than man. “And, as a matter of fact, if we examine the cellular tissues....”

But what was much more amusing to examine was the expression on the faces of the wives of these two gentlemen, who were sitting side by side, all attention, taking a cup of tea—which genial meal, with its goodies hot from the oven, its steaming samovar and rattle of spoons on costly china, was just being served to the guests. The younger lady, Mme. de Boë, had made of her gourd-headed husband, a used-up nobleman with nothing but debts, a magistrate in the Court of Cassation through the influence of her family; people shuddered to think of this spendthrift, who had quickly wasted all his wife’s fortune and his own, having the public moneys in his control. Mme. Béchut, a former beauty and still beautiful, with long-lidded, intelligent eyes and delicate features, showed only by a contraction of her mouth that she had been at war with the world for years and was consumed with a tireless and unscrupulous ambition. Her sole effort had been to push into the front rank her very commonplace professor. By means that unfortunately were only too well known she had compelled the doors of the Institute and the Collège de France to open to him. There was a whole world of meaning in the grim smile that these two women exchanged over their teacups—and perhaps, if one were to search carefully among the gentlemen, there were a good many other men in the throng who had not been exactly injured by feminine influence.

Suddenly Roumestan appeared. Disregarding the shouts of welcome and congratulations of the guests, he crossed the room quickly, went straight to his wife and kissed her on both cheeks before she could prevent this rather trying demonstration before the public. But what could have better disproved the assertion of the professor? All the ladies cried “bravo!” Much hand-shaking and embracing ensued and then an attentive silence as Numa, leaning against the chimney-piece, began to relate briefly the results of the day.

The great blow arranged a week ago to be struck to-day, the plots and counter-plots, the wild rage of the Left at its defeat, his own overwhelming triumph, his rush to the tribune, even to the very intonation he had used to the Marshal when he replied: “That depends on you, Mr. President”—he told everything, forgot nothing, with a gayety and warmth that were contagious.

Then, becoming grave, he enumerated the great responsibilities of his position; the reform of the University with its crowd of youths to be brought up hoping for the realization of better things—this allusion was understood and greeted with loud applause; but he meant to surround himself with enlightened men, to beg for the good will and devotion of all. With moist eyes he mustered the groups about him. “I call on you, friend Béchut, and you, my dear De Boë—”

They were all so in earnest that no one stopped to ask in what manner the dull wits of the councillor at the Court of Cassation could aid in the reform of the University. But then the number of persons of that sort whom Roumestan had urged that afternoon to aid him in his tremendous duties of the Public Instruction was really incalculable. As regards the fine arts, however, he felt more at ease, so he said; there they would not refuse help! A flattering murmur of laughter and exclamations stopped his further words.

As to that department there was but one voice in all Paris, even among his worst enemies—Numa was the man for the work. Now at last there would be a jury for art, a lyric theatre, an official art! But the Minister cut these dithyrambics off and remarked in a gay and familiar tone that the new Cabinet was composed almost exclusively of Southerners. Out of eight members Provence, Bordeaux, Périgord and Languedoc had supplied six; and then, growing excited: “Aha, the South is climbing, the South is climbing! Paris is ours. We have everything. It rests with you, gentlemen, to profit by it. For the second time the Latins have conquered Gaul!”

He looked indeed like a Latin of the conquest, his head like a medallion with broad flat surfaces on the cheeks, with his dark complexion and unceremonious ways, his carelessness, so out of place in this Parisian drawing-room. In the midst of the cheers and laughter greeting his last speech Numa, always a good actor, knowing well how to leave as soon as he had shot his bolt, suddenly quitted the fireplace and signing to Méjean to follow him passed from the room by one of the smaller doors, leaving Rosalie to make his excuses for him. He was to dine at Versailles with the Marshal; he had hardly the time to dress and sign a few papers.

“Come and help me dress,” said he to a servant who was laying the table with three plates, for Roumestan, Madame and Bompard, around that basket of flowers which Rosalie had fresh at every meal. He felt a thrill of delight that he was not to dine there; the tumult of enthusiasm that he had left behind him in the drawing-room excited in him the desire for more gayety and more brilliant company. Besides, a Southerner is never a domestic man. The Northern nations alone have invented to meet their wretched climate the word “home,” that intimate family circle to which the Provençal and the Italian prefer the gardens of cafés and the noise and excitement of the streets.

Between the dining-room and the office was a small reception room, usually full of people at this hour, anxiously watching the clock and looking abstractedly at the illustrated papers, but quite preoccupied by their legal woes. Méjean had sent them all away to-day, for he did not think Numa could attend to them. One, however, had refused to go: a big fellow in ready-made garments and awkward as a corporal in citizen’s dress.

“Ah, God be with ye, Monsieur Roumestan; how are things? I have been hoping so long that you would come!”

The accent, the swarthy face, that jaunty air—Numa had seen them somewhere before, but where?

“You have forgotten me?” said the stranger. “Valmajour, the taborist.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course.”

He was about to pass on, but Valmajour planted himself before him and informed him that he had arrived the day before yesterday. “I couldn’t get here before, because when one moves a whole family, it takes a little time to get installed.”

“A whole family?” said Numa with bulging eyes.

“Bé! yes; my father and my sister. We have done as you advised.”

Roumestan looked distressed and embarrassed, as he always did when called upon to redeem notes like this or fulfil a promise, lightly given in order to make himself agreeable, but with little idea of future acceptance. Dear me, he was only too glad to be of use to Valmajour! He would consider it and see what he could do. But this evening he was very much hurried—exceptional circumstances—the invitation of the President. But as the peasant made no sign of going: “Come in here,” said he, and they went into the study.

As Numa sat at his desk reading over and signing several papers Valmajour glanced about the handsome room, richly furnished and carpeted, with book-shelves covering all the walls, surmounted by bronzes, busts and works of art, reminiscences each one of glorious causes—a portrait of the king signed by his own royal hand. And he was much impressed by the solemnity of it all—the stiffness of the carved chairs, the rows of books, above all the presence of the servant, correct in his severe black costume, coming and going and arranging quickly on chairs his master’s evening clothes and immaculate linen. But over there in the light of the lamps the big kind face and familiar profile of Roumestan that he knew so well reassured him. His letters finished, Roumestan began to dress, and while the servant drew off his master’s trousers and shoes he asked Valmajour questions and learned to his dismay that before leaving home they had sold everything that they owned in the world—mulberry-trees, vineyards, farm, everything!

“You sold your farm, foolish fellow?”

“Well, my sister was somewhat afraid, but my father and I insisted upon it. I said to them, ‘What risk is it when we are going to Numa and when he is getting us to come?’”

It needed all the taborist’s naïveté to dare talk in that free and easy way before a Minister. It was not Valmajour’s simplicity that struck Numa most; it was the thought of the great crowd of enemies that he had made for himself by this incorrigible mania for promises. Now I ask you—what need was there to go and disturb the quiet life of these poor people? and he went over in his memory all the details of his visit to Mount Cordova, the scruples of the peasant girl and the pains that he took to overcome them. What for? what devil tempted him? He, this peasant, was dreadful. And as to his talent, he did not remember much about it, concerned as he was at having this whole family on his shoulders. He knew beforehand how his wife would reproach him—remembered her cold look as she said: “Still, words must mean something!” And now, in his new position at the source and spring of favors, what a lot of trouble he was going to create for himself as a result of his own fatal benevolence!

But the gladsome thought that he was a Minister and the consciousness of his power restored his spirits almost at once. On such pinnacles as his, why should such small things worry him? Master of all the fine arts, with all the theatres and places of amusement under his thumb, it would be a trifle to make the fortune of these luckless people. Restored to his own self-complacency, he changed his tone and in order to keep the peasant in his place told him solemnly and from a lofty place to what important distinction he had been that day appointed. Unhappily he was at that moment only half dressed, his feet in silk stockings rested on the floor and his portly form was arrayed in white flannel underclothes trimmed with pink ribbons. Valmajour could not connect the word “Minister” in his mind with a fat man in his shirt-sleeves, so he continued to call him Moussu Numa, to talk to him about his own “music” and the new songs that he had learned. Ah, he feared no tabor-player in all Paris now!

“Listen, I will show you.”

He flew toward the next room to get his tabor but Roumestan stopped him.

“I tell you I am in a great hurry, deuce take you!”

“All right, all right, another time then,” said the peasant good-naturedly.

And seeing Méjean approaching he thought it necessary to begin to tell him the story of the fife with three stops.

“It come to me right in the middle of the night, listening to the singing of the nightingoyle; thought I to meself: ‘How is it, Valmajour—’”

It was the same little story that he had told them in the amphitheatre: having found it successful, he cleverly clung to it, repeating it word for word. But this time his manner became less assured, a certain embarrassment gaining from moment to moment as Roumestan finished his toilet and stood before him in all the severity of his black evening clothes and enormous shirt-front of fine linen with its studs of Oriental pearls, which the valet handed him piece by piece.

Moussu Numa seemed to him to have grown taller, his head, held stiffly, solemnly, for fear of disarranging his immaculate white muslin tie, seemed lighted up by the pale beams radiating from the cross of Saint Anne around his neck and the big order of Isabella the Catholic, like a sun, pinned upon his breast. And suddenly the peasant, seized by a wave of respect and fright, realized that he stood in the presence of one of those privileged beings of the earth, that strange, almost superhuman creature, the powerful god to whom the prayers and desires and supplications of his worshippers are sent only on large stamped paper, so high up, indeed, that humbler devotees are never privileged to see him, so haughty that they only whisper his name with fear and trembling, in a sort of restrained fear and ignorant emphasis—the Minister!

Poor Valmajour! He was so upset by this idea that he hardly heard Roumestan’s kind words of farewell, asking him to come again in a fortnight when he would be installed in his new quarters at the Ministry.

“All right, all right, your Excellency.”

He backed towards the door, still dazzled by the orders and extraordinary expression of his transfigured compatriot. Numa was delighted at this sudden timidity, which was a tribute to what he henceforward called his “ministerial air,” his curling lip, his frowning brow and his severe, reserved manner.

A few moments later his Excellency was rolling towards the railway station, forgetting this tiresome episode and lulled by the gentle motion of the coupé with its bright lamps as he flew to meet his new and exalted engagements. He was already preparing the telling points in his first speech, composing his plan of campaign, his famous letter to the rectors and thinking of the excitement caused all over Europe when they should read his nomination in to-morrow’s papers, when, at the turn of the boulevard, in the light of a gas-lamp reflected in the wet asphalt, he caught sight of the taborist, his tabor hanging from his arm, deafened and frightened, waiting for an opportunity to cross the street which was at that hour, as all Paris hastened to re-enter its gates, a moving mass of carriages and wagons, while crowded omnibuses jolted swaying along and the horns of the tramway conductors sounded at intervals. In the falling shades of night and the steam of dampness which the rain threw up from the hurrying crowd, in this great jostling crowd the poor boy seemed so lost, exiled and overwhelmed by the tall, unfriendly buildings around him—he seemed so pitifully unlike the handsome Valmajour at the door of his mas, giving the rhythm to the locusts with his tabor, that Roumestan turned away his head and, for a few moments, a feeling of remorse threw a cloud over the radiant pathway of his triumph.

CHAPTER VII. THE PASSAGE DU SAUMON.

While awaiting a more complete settling than was possible before the arrival of their furniture, which was coming by slow freight, the Valmajours had taken rooms temporarily at the famous Passage du Saumon, where from time immemorial teachers from Aps and its district have stopped, and of which Aunt Portal still retained such astonishing recollections. There, up under the roof, they had two small rooms, one of which was without light or air, a kind of wood-closet which was occupied by the men; the other was not much larger but seemed to them fine in comparison, with its worm-pierced black walnut furniture, its moth-eaten ragged carpet on the worn wooden floor and the dormer windows that let in only a bit of a sky as lowering and yellow as the long donkey-backed skylight over the Passage.

In these poor quarters they kept up the memory of home with a strong smell of garlic and fried onions, which foreign food they cooked for themselves on a little stove. Old Valmajour, who loved good eating and was also fond of company, would have liked to dine at the hotel table, where the white linen and plated salt-cellars and service seemed very handsome to him, and also to have joined in the noisy conversations and mingled with shouts of laughter of the commercial gentlemen who at meal times filled the house to the very top floor with their noise and jollity. But Audiberte opposed this flatly.

Amazed not to find at once on their arrival the promises of Numa fulfilled and the two hundred francs an evening which had filled her little head with piles of money ever since the visit of the Parisians; horrified at the high price of everything, from the first day she had been seized with the craze that the Parisians call “fear of wanting.” For herself she could get along with anchovies and olives as in Lent—té, pardi! but her men were perfect wolves, worse than in their own country because it is colder in Paris, and she was obliged to be constantly opening her saquette, a large calico pocket made by her own hands, in which she carried the three thousand francs that they had received for their farm and chattels.

Each coin that she spent was a struggle, a pang, as if she were handing over the stones of her farmhouse or the last vines of her vineyard. Her peasant greed and her suspiciousness, that fear of being cheated by a tenant which caused her to sell her farm instead of letting it, were redoubled in this gloomy, unknown Paris, this city which from her garret she heard roaring with a sound that did not cease day or night at this noisy corner of the city market, causing the glasses near the hotel water-bottle on the table to rattle at every hour.

No traveller lost in a wood of sinister repute ever clung more convulsively to his baggage than did Audiberte to her saquette as she walked through the streets in her green skirt and her Arles head-dress, which the passers-by turned to stare at. When she entered a shop with her countrywoman’s gait, the way she had of calling things by a lot of outlandish names, saying api for celery, mérinjanes for aubergines, made her, a woman from the south of France, as much a stranger in her country’s capital as if she had been a Russian from Nijni Novgorod or a Swede from Stockholm.

Sweet and humble of manner at first, if she detected a smile on the face of a clerk or received a rough answer on account of her mania for bargaining, she would suddenly fly into a gust of rage; her pretty virginal brown face twitching with frantic gesticulations she would pour forth a torrent of noisy, vainglorious words. Then she would tell about the expected legacy from Cousin Puyfourcat, the two hundred francs a night to be earned by her brother, the friendship that Roumestan had for them—sometimes calling him Numa, sometimes the Menister—all this with an emphasis more grotesque than her familiarity. Everything was jumbled together in a flood of gibberish composed of the langue d’oil tinged with French.

Then her habitual caution would return to her; she would fear that she had talked imprudently, and, seized by a superstitious terror at her own gossip, she would stop, suddenly mute, and close her lips as tightly as the strings of her saquette.

At the end of a week she had become a legendary character in the quarter of the Rue Montmartre, a street of shops where, at their ever-open doors, the vendors of meats, green-groceries and colonial wares discussed the affairs and secrets of all the inhabitants of the neighborhood. The constant teasing of these people, the saucy questions with which they plied her as she made her frugal purchases each morning—as to why her brother’s appearance was delayed and when the legacy was coming from the Arab—all these insults to her self-respect, more than the fear of poverty staring them in the face, exasperated Audiberte against Numa, against those promises which at first she had suspected, true child of the South that she was, knowing well that the promises of her country-people down South vanish easier than those of other folks—all because of the lightness of the air.

“Oh, if we had only made him sign a paper!”

This idea became a fixture in her mind and she felt daily in her brother’s pockets for the stamped document when Valmajour set out for the Ministry, in order to be sure it was there.

But Roumestan was engaged in signing another kind of paper and had many things to think of more important than the taborist. He was settling down in his new office with the generous ardor and enthusiasm, with the fever of a man who comes to his own. Everything was a novelty to him—the enormous rooms of the Ministry as well as the large ideas necessitated by his position. To arrive at the top, to “reconquer Gaul,” as he had said, that was not so difficult; but to sustain himself satisfactorily, to justify his elevation by intelligent reforms and attempts at progress! Full of zeal, he studied, questioned, consulted, literally surrounded himself with shining lights. With Béchut, that great professor, he studied the evils of the college system and the means to extirpate the spirit of free-thinking in the schools. He employed the experience of his chief in the fine arts, M. de la Calmette, who had behind him twenty-nine years of office, and of Cadaillac, the manager of the grand opera, who was still erect after three failures, in order to remodel the Conservatory, the Salon and the Academy of Music in accordance with brand-new plans.

The trouble was that he never listened to these counsellors, but talked himself for hours at a time and then, suddenly glancing at his watch, would rise and hastily dismiss them: “Bad luck to it—I had forgotten the council meeting! What a life, not a moment to oneself! I understand—just send me your memorial right off!”

Memorials were piling up on Méjean’s desk, who, notwithstanding his good intentions and intelligence, had none too much time for current work and so permitted these grand reforms to slumber in their dust. Like all Ministers when they arrive at a portfolio, Roumestan had brought with him all his clerks from the Rue Scribe—Baron de Lappara and Viscount de Rochemaure, who gave a flavor of aristocracy to the new Ministry, but who were otherwise perfectly incompetent and ignorant of their duties.

The first time that Valmajour came there he was received by Lappara, who occupied himself by preference with the fine arts and whose duties consisted principally in sending invitations in large official envelopes at all hours by staff officers, dragoons or cuirassiers to the young ladies of the minor theatres, asking them to supper. Sometimes the envelope was empty, being merely a pretext to display in front of the lady’s door that reassuring orderly from the Ministry the day before some debt came due.

Lappara received him with a kindly, easy air, a bit top-loftical, like that of a feudal lord receiving one of his vassals. His legs outstretched, so as not to crease his gray-blue trousers, he talked mincingly without stopping a moment the polishing of his nails.

“Not easy just now—the Minister is busy—perhaps in a few days. We’ll let you know, my good fellow!”

And when in his simplicity the musician ventured to say that his matter was somewhat urgent, that they only had enough for a short time left, the baron, carefully placing his file upon the edge of the desk with his most serious air, suggested to him to have a crank attached to his tabor.

“A crank attached to my tabor?—for what purpose?”

“Why, my dear fellow, so as to use it as a box for plaisirs (cakes) while you are out of work.”

The next time Valmajour came to see Roumestan he was received by Rochemaure. The viscount raised his head of hair frizzed with hot irons from the dusty ledger over which he was bending and in his conscientious manner asked to have the mechanism of the fife explained to him, took notes, tried to understand and said finally that he was not there for art matters, but more especially for religious questions.

After that the unhappy peasant never could find any one—they had all betaken themselves to that inaccessible retreat where His Excellency had hidden himself. Still he did not lose calmness or heart and always responded to the evasive answers and shrugging shoulders of the attendants with the surprised but steady look and shrewd half-smile peculiar to the Provençal.

“All right, I will come again.”

And he did come again. But for his high gaiters and the tabor hanging on his arm, he might have been taken for an employee of the house, he came so regularly. But each time he came it was harder than the last.

Now the mere sight of the great arched door made his heart beat. Beyond the arch was the old Hôtel Augereau with its large courtyard where they were already stacking wood for the winter and the double staircase so hard to ascend under the mocking gaze of the servants. Everything combined to harass him—the silver chains of the porters, the gold-laced caps, the endless gorgeous things that made him feel the distance that separated him from his patron. But he dreaded more than all this the dreadful scenes that he went through at home, the terrible frowning brows of Audiberte; that is why he still desperately insisted on coming. At last the hall porter took pity upon him and gave him the advice to waylay the Minister at the Saint-Lazare station when he was going down to Versailles.

He took his advice and did sentry work in the big lively waiting room on the first story at the hour of the Parliament train when it took on a very special look of its own. Deputies, senators, journalists, members of the Left, of the Right and all the parties jostled each other there, forming as variegated a throng as the blue, red and green placards that covered the walls. They watched each other, talked, screamed, whispered, some sitting apart rehearsing their next speech, others, the orators of the lobbies, making the windows rattle with loud voices that the Chamber was never destined to hear. Northern accents and Southern accents, divers opinions and sentiments, swarming ambitions and intrigues, the noisy tramp of the restless crowd—this waiting-room with its delays and uncertainties was an appropriate theatre for politics, this tumult of a journey at a fixed hour which would soon, at bid of the whistle, be speeding over the rails down a perspective of tracks, disks and locomotives, over a country full of accidents and surprises.

Five minutes later he saw Numa enter, leaning on the arm of one of his secretaries who carried his portfolio. His coat was flung open, his face beaming just as he had looked that day on the platform in the amphitheatre and at a distance he recognized the facile voice, the warm words, his protestations of friendship: “Count on me,—put yourself in my hands,—it is as good as granted....”

The Minister just then was in the honey-moon of prosperity. Except for political enmities—not always as bitter as they are supposed to be, simply the result of rivalry between public speakers or quarrels of lawyers on opposite sides of a case—Numa had no enemies, not having been in power long enough to discourage those who sought his services. His credit was still good. Only a few had begun to be impatient and dog his footsteps. To these he threw a loud, hasty “How are you, friend?” that anticipated their reproaches and in a way denied their arguments, while his familiar manner flattered the baffled office-seekers and yet kept their demands at a distance. It was a great idea, was this “How are you?” It sprang from instinctive duplicity.

At sight of Valmajour, who came swinging towards him, his smile showing his white teeth, Numa felt inclined to throw him his fatal, careless “How are you, friend?”—but how could he treat this peasant lad in a little felt hat as a friend as he stood there in his gray jacket, from the sleeves of which his brown hands protruded like those in a cheap village photograph? He preferred to pass him by without a word, with his “Ministerial air,” leaving the poor boy amazed, crushed and knocked about by the crowd that was following the great man. Still Valmajour returned to his station the next day and several days thereafter, but he did not dare approach the Minister; he sat on the edge of a bench with that touching air of sorrowful resignation that one so often sees in a railway station on the faces of soldiers and emigrants, who are going to a strange country, prepared to meet all the chances of their evil destiny.

Roumestan could not evade that silent figure on his path with its dumb appeal. He might pretend not to see it, turn aside his glance, talk louder as he passed; the smile on his victim’s face was there and remained there until the train had gone. Of a certainty he would have preferred a noisy demand and a row, when he could have called a policeman and given the disturber of his complacency in charge and so got rid of him. He, the Minister, went so far as to take a different station on the left bank of the Seine to avoid this trouble of his conscience. Thus in many instances is the greatest man’s life made wretched by some little thing of no account, like a pebble in the seven-league boots.

But Valmajour would not despair.

“He must be ill,” he said to himself and stuck obstinately to his post. At home his sister watched for his coming in a fever of impatience.

“Well, bé! have you seen the Menister? Has he signed that paper?”

His eternal “No, not yet!” exasperated her, but more his calmness as he threw into a corner his tabor whose strap left a dent on his shoulder—it was the calmness of indolence and shiftlessness, as common as vivacity among Southern nations. Then the queer little creature would fall into one of her furious fits. What had he in his veins in place of blood?—was there to be no end to this?—“Look out, or I will attend to it myself!” Very calm, he made no answer, but let the storm blow over, took his instruments from their cases, his fife and mouth-piece with its ivory tip, and rubbed them well with a bit of cloth for fear of dampness and promised to try at the Ministry again to-morrow, and, if he could not see Numa, ask to see Mme. Roumestan.

“O, vaï! Mme. Roumestan! You know she does not like your music—but the young lady, though—she will be sure to help you; yes indeed!” And she tossed her head.

“Madame or Mademoiselle, they don’t either of them care anything about you,” said the old man, who was cowering over a turf fire that his daughter had economically covered with ashes, a fire about which they were eternally quarrelling.

In the bottom of his heart the old man was not displeased at his son’s want of success, from professional jealousy. All these complications and the uprooting of their lives had been most welcome to the Bohemian tastes of the old wandering minstrel; he was delighted at first with the journey and the idea of seeing Paris, that “Paradise of females and purgatory of hosses,” as the carters of his country put it, imagining that in Paris one would see women like houris arrayed in transparent garments and horses distorted, leaping about in the midst of flames.

Instead he had found cold, privations and rain. From fear of Audiberte and respect for Roumestan he had contented himself with grumbling and shivering in a corner, only an occasional word or wink hinting at his dissatisfaction. But Numa’s treachery and his daughter’s fits of wrath gave him also an excuse for opening hostilities. He revenged himself for all the blows to his vanity that his son’s musical proficiency had inflicted on him for ten years and shrugged his shoulders as he heard him trying his fife.

“Music, music, oh, yes—much good your music is going to do you!”

And then in a loud voice he asked if it wasn’t a sin to bring an old man like him so far—into this Sibelia, this wilderness, to let him perish of cold and hunger. He called on the memory of his sainted wife, whom, by the way, he had killed with unhappiness—“made a goat of her,” as Audiberte put it. He would whine for hours at a time, his head in the fire, red-faced and sullen, until his daughter, wearied with his lamentations, gave him a few pennies and sent him out to get a glass of country wine for himself. In the wine-shop his sorrows fled away. It was comfortable by the roaring stove; in the warmth the old wretch soon recovered his low vein of an actor in Italian comedy, which his grotesque figure, big nose and thin lips made more apparent, taken in connection with his little wiry body, like Punch in the show.

He was soon the delight of the customers in the wine-shop with his buffooneries and his boasting. He jeered his son’s tabor and told them how much trouble it gave them at the hotel; for in order to be ready for his coming out Valmajour, kept at tension by the delay of hopes, persisted in practising up to midnight; but the other tenants objected to the continual thunder of the tabor and the ear-piercing cry of the fife—the very stairs shook with the sound, as if an engine were in motion on the fifth floor.

“Go ahead,” Audiberte would say to her brother when the proprietor came to them with complaints. It was pretty queer if one hadn’t the right to make music in this Paris that makes so much noise one cannot sleep at night! So he continued to practise. Then the proprietor demanded their rooms. But when they left the Passage du Saumon, the hostelry so well known in their native province, one that recalled their native land, they felt as if their exile were heavier to bear and that they had journeyed still a bit farther North.

The night before they left, after another long, unfruitful journey taken by Valmajour, Audiberte hurried her men through dinner without speaking a word, but with the light of firm resolution shining in her eyes. When it was over she threw her long brown cloak over her shoulders and went out, leaving the washing of the dishes to the men.

“Two months, almost two months since we came to Paris,” she muttered through her clenched teeth. “I’ve had enough, I am going to speak to this Menister myself—”

She arranged the ribbon of her head-dress, that, perched over her wavy hair in high bows, stood up like a helmet, and rushed violently from the room, her well-blacked boot-heels kicking at every step the heavy material of her gown. Father and son stared at each other alarmed, but did not dare to restrain her; they knew that any interference would but exasperate her anger. They passed the afternoon alone together, hardly speaking as the rain battered against the windows, the one polishing his bag and fife, the other cooking the stew for supper over a good, big fire that he took advantage of Audiberte’s absence to kindle, and over which he was for once getting thoroughly warm.

Finally her quick steps, the short steps of a dwarf, were heard in the corridor. She entered beaming.

“Too bad our windows do not look out upon the street,” she said, removing her cloak, which was perfectly dry. “You might have seen the beautiful carriage in which I came home.”

“A carriage! you are joking!”

“And two servants, and liveries—it is making a great stir in the hotel!”

Then in a wondering silence she described and acted out her adventure. In the first place and to start with—instead of going to the Minister, who would not have received her, she found out the address—one can get anything if one talks politely—of the sister of Mme. Roumestan, the tall young lady who came to see them at Valmajour. She did not live at the Ministry but with her parents in a quarter full of little, badly-paved streets that smelt of drugs and reminded Audiberte of her own province. It was ever so far away and she was obliged to walk. She found the place at last in a little square surrounded with arcades like the placette at Aps.

The dear young lady—how well she had received her, without any haughtiness, although everything looked very rich and handsome in the house, much gilding, and many silken curtains hung round on this side and that, in every direction:

“Ah, God be with you! So you have come to Paris? Where from? Since when?”

Then, when she heard how Numa had disappointed them, she rang for her governess, she too a lady in a bonnet, and all three set off for the Ministry. It was something to see the bows and reverences made to them by all those old beadles who ran ahead of them to open the doors.

“So you have seen him, then, the Minister?” timidly ventured Valmajour as his sister stopped to breathe.

“Seen him! I certainly have; what did I tell you, you poor bédigas (calf), that you must get the young lady on your side! She arranged the whole thing in no time. There is to be a great musical function next week at the Minister’s and you are to play before the directors of the Conservatory of Music. And after that, cra-cra! the contract drawn up and signed!”

But the best of all was that the young lady had driven her home in the carriage of the Minister.

“And she was very anxious to come upstairs with me,” added the peasant girl, winking at her father and distorting her pretty face with a meaning grimace. The father’s old face, with its complexion like a dried fig, wrinkled up in a look of slyness which meant: “I understand; not a word!” He no longer taunted the taborist. Valmajour himself, very quiet, did not understand his sister’s perfidious meaning; he could think only of his coming appearance, and, taking down his instruments, he passed all his pieces in review, sending the notes as a farewell all over the house and down the glass-covered passage in floods of trills on rolling cadences.

CHAPTER VIII. RENEWAL OF YOUTH.

The Minister and his wife had finished breakfast in their dining-room on the first floor, a room much too big and showy, that never could be thoroughly thawed out, even with heavy curtains and the heat of a furnace that warmed the whole house, and the steam from the hot dishes of a copious repast. By some chance that morning they were alone together. On the table amidst the dessert, always a great feature in the Southerner’s meal, lay a box of cigars and a cup of vervain, which is the tea of the Provençal, and large boxes filled with cards of invitation to a series of concerts to be given by the Minister. They were addressed to senators, deputies, clergymen, professors, academicians, people of society—all the motley crowd that is generally bidden to public receptions; and some larger boxes for the cards to the privileged guests asked to the first series of “little concerts.”

Mme. Roumestan was running them over, occasionally pausing at some name, watched by her husband out of the corner of his eye as he pretended to be absorbed in selecting a cigar, while really his furtive glance was noting the disapprobation and reserve on her quiet face at the promiscuous way this first batch of invitations had been selected.

But Rosalie asked no questions; all these preparations did not interest her. Since their installation at the Ministry she had felt herself farther off than ever from her husband, separated by his many engagements, too many guests and a public way of living that had destroyed all intimacy. To this was added the ever-bitter sorrow of childlessness; never to hear about her the pattering of tireless little feet, nor any of those peals of baby laughter that would have banished from their dining-room that icy look as if a hotel where they were stopping for a day or two, with its impersonal air on tablecloth, furniture, silver and all the sumptuous things to be found in any public place.

In the embarrassing silence could be heard the distant sound of hammers interspersed with music and singing. The musicians were rehearsing, while carpenters were busy putting up and hanging the stage on which the concert was to take place. The door opened; Méjean entered, his hands full of papers.

“Still more petitions!”

Roumestan flew into a rage: No, it was really too bad!—if it were the Pope himself there would be no place to give him. Méjean calmly placed before him the heap of letters, cards and scented notes:

“It is very difficult to refuse—you promised them, you know—”

“I promised? I haven’t spoken to one of them!”

“Listen a moment: ‘My dear Minister—I beg to remind you of your kind speech,’ and this one, ‘The General informs me that you were so kind as to offer him,’ and this, ‘Reminding the Minister of his promise.’”

“I must be a somnambulist, then!” said Roumestan in astonishment.

The fact was that as soon as the day for the concert was decided upon Numa had said to every one whom he met in the Senate or Chamber: “I count on you for the 10th, you know,” and as he added “Quite a private affair,” no one had failed to accept the flattering invitation.

Embarrassed at being caught in the act by his wife, he vented his irritability upon her as usual.

“It’s the fault of your sister with her taborist. What need have I of all this fuss? I did not intend to give our concerts until much later—but that girl, such an impatient little person! ‘No, no, right away;’ and you were in as much of a hurry as she was! L’azé me fiche if I don’t believe this taborist has turned your heads.”

“O no, not mine,” answered Rosalie gayly. “Indeed I am dreadfully afraid that this foreign music may not be understood by the Parisians. We ought to have brought the atmosphere of Provence, the costumes, the farandole—but first of all,” she added seriously, “it is necessary that you must keep your promise.”

“Promise, promise? It will be impossible to talk at all very soon!”

Turning towards his secretary, who was smiling, he added:

“By Jove, all Southerners are not like you, Méjean, cold and calculating and taciturn. You are a false one, a renegade Southerner, a Franciot, as they say with us. A Southerner?—you? A man who has never lied and who does not like vervain tea!” he added with a comically indignant tone.

“I am not so franciot as I seem, sir,” answered Méjean calmly. “When I first came to Paris twenty years ago I was a terrible Southerner—impudence, gesticulations, assurance—as talkative and inventive as—”

“As Bompard,” prompted Roumestan, who never liked other people to ridicule his dearest friend, but did not deny himself the privilege.

“Yes, really, almost as bad as Bompard. A kind of instinct urged me never to tell the truth. One day I began to feel ashamed of this and resolved to correct it. Outward exaggeration could be mastered at least by speaking in a low voice and keeping my arms pressed tightly against my sides; but the inward—the boiling, bubbling torrent—that was more difficult. Then I made an heroic resolution. Every time I caught myself in an untruth I punished myself by not speaking for the rest of the day; that is how I was able to reform my nature. Nevertheless the instinct is there under all my coolness. Sometimes I have broken off short in the middle of a sentence—it isn’t the words I lack, quite the contrary—I hold myself in check because I feel that I am going to lie.”

“The terrible South—there is no way of escaping from it!” said the genial Numa, philosophically, blowing a cloud of smoke from his cigar up to the ceiling. “The South holds me through the mania I have to make promises, that craziness of throwing myself at people’s heads and insisting on their happiness whether they want it or not—”

A footman interrupted him, opened the door and announced with a knowing and confidential air:

“M. Béchut is here.”

The Minister was furious at once. “Tell him I am at breakfast! I wish people would let me alone.”

The footman asked pardon, but said M. Béchut claimed that he had an appointment with his Excellency. Roumestan softened visibly:

“Well, well, I will come. Let him wait in the library.”

“Not in the library,” said Méjean, “it is occupied; there’s the Superior Council! You appointed this hour to see them.”

“Well, in M. de Lappara’s room, then—”

“I have put the Bishop of Tulle in there,” said the footman timidly; “your Excellency said—”

Every place was occupied with office-seekers whom he had confidentially told that the breakfast hour was the time when they would be sure to find him—and most of them were personages that could not be made to “do antechamber” like the ordinary herd.

“Go into my morning room,” said Rosalie as she rose. “I am going out.”

And while the secretary and the footman went to reassure and quiet the waiting petitioners Numa hastily swallowed his cup of vervain, scalding himself badly, exclaiming: “I am at my wits’ end, overwhelmed.”

“What can that sorry fellow Béchut be after now?” asked Rosalie, instinctively lowering her voice in that crowded house where a stranger was lurking behind every door.

“What is he after? After the manager’s position of course. Té! he is Dansaert’s shark—he expects him to be thrown overboard for him to devour.”

She approached him hastily:

“Is M. Dansaert to be dropped from the Cabinet?”

“Do you know him?”

“My father often spoke of him—he was a compatriot and old friend of his. He considers him an upright man and very clever.”

Roumestan stammered out his reasons: “Bad tendencies—free-thinker—it was necessary to make reforms, and then, he was a very old man.”

“And you will put Béchut in his place?”

“O, I know the poor man lacks the gift of pleasing the ladies.”

She smiled a fine scornful smile.

“His impertinences are as indifferent to me as his compliments would be. What I cannot forgive in him is his assumption of clerical learning and piety. I respect all forms of religion—but if there is one thing more detestable in this world than another, it is hypocrisy and deceit.”

Unconsciously her voice rose warm and vibrating; her rather cold features beamed with a glow of honesty and rectitude and flushed with righteous indignation.

“Hush, hush,” said Numa pointing towards the door. Perhaps it was not perfectly just; he allowed that old Dansaert had rendered good service to his country; but what was to be done? He had given his word.

“Take it back,” said Rosalie. “Come, Numa, for my sake—I implore you!”

The tender request was emphasized by the gentle pressure of her little hand upon his shoulder. He was much touched. His wife had not seemed interested in his affairs of late; she had given only an indulgent but silent attention to his plans, which were ever changing their direction. This urgent request was flattering to him.

“Can any one resist you, my darling?”

He pressed upon her finger tips a kiss so fervid that she felt it all up her narrow sleeve. She had such beautiful arms! It was most painful, however, to say anything disagreeable to a man’s face and he rose reluctantly:

“I will be here, listening!” she said with a pretty threatening gesture.

He went into the next room, leaving the door ajar to give himself courage and so that she might hear all that was said. Oh, the beginning was firm and to the point!

“I am in despair, my dear Béchut—but it is utterly impossible for me to do for you as I promised—”

The answer of the professor was inaudible, but rendered in a tearful, supplicating voice through his huge tapir-like nose. To her surprise Roumestan did not waver, but began to sound the praises of Dansaert with a surprising accent of conviction for a man to whom all his arguments had only just been suggested. True, it was very hard for him to take back a promise once given, but was it not better than to do an act of injustice? It was his wife’s thought modulated and put to music and uttered with wide, heartfelt gestures that made the hangings vibrate.

“Of course I will make up to you in some way this little misunderstanding,” he added, changing his tone hastily.

“Oh, good Lord!” cried Rosalie under her breath. Then came a shower of new promises—the cross of commander in the Legion of Honor on the first of January next, the next vacancy in the Superior Council, the—the—Béchut tried to protest, just for decency’s sake, but said Numa: “Permit me, permit me, it’s only an act of justice—such men as you are too uncommon—”

Intoxicated with his own benevolence, stammering from sheer affectionateness—if Béchut had not gone Numa would have offered him his own portfolio next. But suddenly remembering the concert, he called to him from the door:

“I count on seeing you next Sunday, my dear professor; we are starting a series of little concerts, very unceremonious you know—the very ‘top of the basket’—”

Then returning to Rosalie, he said:

“Well, what do you think of it? I hope I have been firm enough!”

It was really so amusing that she burst into a peal of laughter. When he understood her amusement and that he had made a number of new promises, he seemed alarmed.

“Well, well, people are grateful to one all the same.”

She left him, smiling one of her old smiles, quite gay from her kind deed and perhaps above all delighted to find a feeling for him reviving in her heart that she had long thought dead.

“Angel that you are!” said Numa to himself as he watched her go, tears of tenderness in his eyes; and when Méjean came in to remind him of the waiting council:

“My friend, listen: when one has the luck to possess a wife like mine—marriage is an earthly Paradise. Hurry up and marry!”

Méjean shook his head without answering.

“How now? Isn’t your affair prospering?”

“I fear not. Mme. Roumestan promised to sound her sister for me, but as she has never said anything more—”

“Don’t you want me to manage it for you? I get on splendidly with my little sister-in-law.... I bet you I can make her decide....”

There was still a little vervain left in the teapot, and as he poured out a fresh cup Roumestan overflowed with protestations to his first secretary. “Ah! no, success had not altered him; as always, Méjean was his best, his chosen friend! Between him and Rosalie he indeed felt himself stronger and more complete....

“O, my friend, that woman, that woman—if you only knew what her goodness is! how noble and forgiving! When I think that I was capable of—”

Positively it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from launching the confidence that rose to his lips along with a heavy sigh. “If I did not love her, I should be guilty indeed.”

Baron de Lappara came in quickly and whispered with a mysterious air:

“Mlle. Bachellery is here.”

Numa turned scarlet and a flash dried the tenderness from his eyes in a moment.

“Where is she? In your room?”

“Monsignor Lipmann was there already,” said Lappara, smiling a little at the idea of the possible meeting. “I put her downstairs in the large drawing-room. The rehearsal is over.”

“Very well; I will go.”

“Don’t forget the Council,” Méjean tried to say, but Roumestan did not hear and sprang down the steep stairway leading to the Minister’s private apartments on the reception floor.

He had steered clear of serious entanglements since the trouble over Mme. d’Escarbès, avoiding adventures of the heart or of vanity, because he feared an open rupture that might ruin his household forever. He was not a model husband, certainly, but the marriage contract, though soiled and full of holes, was still intact. Though once well warned, Rosalie was much too honest and high-minded to spy jealously upon her husband, and although she was always anxious, never sought for proofs. Even at that moment, if Numa had had any idea of the influence this new fancy of his was to have upon his life, he would have hastened to ascend the stairs much more quickly than he had come down them; but our destiny delights to come to us in mask and domino, doubling the pleasure of the first meeting with the touch of mystery. How could Numa divine that any danger threatened from the pretty little girl whom he had seen from his carriage window crossing the courtyard several days before, jumping over the puddles, holding her umbrella in one hand and her coquettish skirts gathered up in the other, with all the smartness of a true Parisian woman, her long lashes curving above a saucy, turned-up nose, her blond hair, twisted in an American knot behind, which the moist air had turned to curls at the ends, and her shapely, finely-curved leg quite at ease above her high-heeled boot—that was all he had seen of her. So during the evening he had said to De Lappara as if it were a matter of very little importance:

“I will wager, that little charmer I met in the courtyard this morning was on her way to see you.”

“Yes, your Excellency, she came to see me, but it was on your account she came.”

And then he had named little Bachellery.

“What! the débutante at the Bouffes? How old is she? Why, she’s hardly more than a child!”

The papers were talking a great deal that winter about this Alice Bachellery, whom a fashionable impresario had discovered in a small theatre in the provinces, whom all the world was crowding to hear when she sang the “Little Baker’s Boy,” the chorus to which—

she gave with an irresistible drollery. She was one of those divas half a dozen of whom the boulevard devours each season, paper reputations inflated by gas and puffery, which make one think of the little rose-colored balloons that live their single day of sunshine and dust in the public gardens. And what think you she had come to ask for at the Minister’s? Permission to appear on the programme at his first concert! Little Bachellery and the Department of Public Instruction! It was so amusing and so crazy that Numa wanted to hear her ask it himself; so by a Ministerial letter that smelt of the leather and gloves of the orderly who took it he gave her to understand that he would receive her next day. But the next day Mlle. Bachellery did not appear.

“She must have changed her mind,” said Lappara, “she is such a child!”

But Roumestan felt piqued, did not mention the subject for two days and on the third sent for her.

And now she was awaiting him in the great drawing-room for official functions, all in gold and red, so imposing with its long windows opening into the garden now bereft of flowers, its Gobelin tapestries and its marble statue of Molière sitting in a dreamy posture in the background. A grand piano, a few music-stands used at the rehearsal, scarcely filled one corner of the big room whose dreary air, like an empty museum, would have disconcerted any one but little Bachellery; but then she was such a child!

Tempted by the broad floor, all waxed and shiny, here she was, amusing herself by taking slides from one end of the room to the other, wrapped in her furs, her hands in a muff too small for them, her little nose upraised under her jaunty pork-pie hat, looking like one of the dancers of the “ice ballet” in The Prophet. Roumestan caught her at the game.

“Oh! Your Excellency!”

She was dreadfully embarrassed, her eyelashes quivering, all out of breath. He had come in with his head up and a solemn step in order to give some point to a somewhat irregular interview and put this impertinent huzzy, who had kept Ministers waiting, in her proper place. But the sight of her quite disarmed him. What could you expect?

She laid her simple ambition so cleverly before him as an idea that had come to her suddenly, to appear at the concerts which every one was talking about so much—it would be of so much advantage to her to be heard otherwise than in comic opera and music hall extravaganzas, which bored her to death! But then, on reflection, a panic had seized her: “Oh, I tell you, a regular panic! Wasn’t it, Mamma?”

Then for the first time Roumestan perceived a stout woman in a velvet cloak and a much beplumed bonnet advancing toward him with regular reverences every three steps. Mme. Bachellery, the mother, had been a singer in a concert-garden. She had the Bordeaux accent, a little nose like her daughter’s sunk in a large face like a dish—one of those terrible mothers, who, in the company of their daughters, seem the hideous prophecy of what their beauty will come to! But Numa was not engaged in a philosophical study. He was too much engrossed by the grace of this hoyden that shone from a finished body, a body adorably finished, as well as by her theatrical slang mingled with her childlike laugh, “her sixteen-year-old laugh,” as the ladies of her acquaintance called it.

“Sixteen! then how old could she have been when she went on the stage?”

“She was born there, your Excellency. Her father, now retired, was the manager of the Folies Bordelaises.”

“A daughter of the regiment,” said Alice, showing thirty-two sparkling teeth, as close and evenly ranked as soldiers on parade.

“Alice, Alice, you forget yourself in the presence of his Excellency.”

“Let her alone—she is only a child!”

He made her sit down by him on the sofa in a kindly, almost paternal manner, complimented her on her ambition and her sentiment for real art, her desire to escape from the easy and demoralizing successes of comic opera; but then she would have to work hard and study seriously.

“O, as for that,” she answered, brandishing a roll of music, “I study two hours every day with Mme. Vauters.”

“Mme. Vauters? Yes, hers is an excellent method,” and he opened the roll of music and examined its contents with a knowing air.

“What are we singing now? Aha! The waltz of Mireille, the song of Magali. Why, they are the songs of my part of the country!”

He half closed his eyes and keeping time with his head he began softly to hum:

And she took it up:

And Roumestan sang out loud:

“Do wait a moment,” she cried, “Mamma will play us the accompaniment.”

Pushing aside the music-stands and opening the piano, she led her reluctant mother to the piano-stool. Ah, she was such a determined little person! The Minister hesitated a moment with his finger on the page of the duet—what if any one should hear them? Never mind; there had been rehearsals going on every day in the big salon.... They began.

They were singing together from the same sheet of music as they stood, while Mme. Bachellery played from memory. Their heads were almost touching, their breaths mingled together with caressing modulations of the music. Numa got excited and dramatic, raising his arms to bring out the high notes. For many years now, ever since his political life had absorbed him, he had done more talking than singing. His voice had become heavy like his figure, but he still loved to sing, especially with this child.

He had completely forgotten the Bishop of Tulle and the Superior Council which was wearily awaiting him round the big green table. Several times the pallid face of the chamberlain on duty, his official silver chain clanking, peered into the room but quickly disappeared again, terrified lest he should be caught gazing at the Minister of Public Instruction and Religions singing a duet with an actress from one of the minor theatres. But a Minister Numa was no longer, only Vincent the basket-maker pursuing the unapproachable Magali through all her coquettish transformations. And how well she fled! how well, with childish malice, she did make her escape, her ringing laughter clear as pearls rippling over her sharp little teeth, until at last, overcome, she yields and her mad little head, made dizzy by her rapid course, sinks on her lover’s shoulder!...

Mme. Bachellery broke the charm and recalled them to their senses as soon as the song was finished. Turning round, she cried:

“What a voice, Excellency! What a noble voice!”

“Yes, I used to sing when I was young” he said, somewhat fatuously.

“But you still sing maganifisuntly! Say, Baby, what a contrast to M. de Lappara!”

Baby, who was rolling up her music, shrugged her shoulders as much as to say, that was too much of a truism to be discussed or to need further answer. A little anxious, Roumestan asked:

“Indeed? M. de Lappara?”

“O, he sometimes comes to eat bouillabaise with us; then after dinner Baby and he sing duets together.”

Hearing the music no longer, the chamberlain ventured at last into the room, as cautiously as a lion-tamer going into a cage of lions.

“Yes, yes, I am coming,” said Roumestan, and addressing the little actress with his best “Excellency air” in order to make her feel the difference in position between him and his secretary:

“I am very much pleased with your singing, Mademoiselle; you have a great deal of talent, a great deal! And if you care to sing for us on Sunday next, I gladly grant you that favor.”

She gave a joyful, childlike cry: “Really? O, how lovely of you!”—and in an instant flung her arms about his neck.

“Alice! Alice! Well, I declare!” cried her mother.

But she was gone; she had taken flight through the great rooms where she looked so tiny in the long perspective—a child! O, such a perfect child!

Much agitated by her caress, Roumestan paused a few moments before he went upstairs. Outside in the wintry garden one pale sun-ray shone on the withered lawn and seemed to warm and revive the winter. He felt penetrated to the heart by a similar warmth as if the contact with this supple youthful form communicated some of its spring-like vitality to him. “Ah! how charming is youth!”

Instinctively he glanced at himself in the mirror; a mournfulness came over him that he had not felt for years. How changed things were, boun Diou! He had grown very stout from want of exercise, much sitting at his desk and the too constant use of his carriage; his complexion was injured by staying up late at night, his hair thin and grizzled at the temples; he was even more horrified at the fatness of his cheeks and the vast flat expanse between his nose and his ears. “I have a mind to grow a beard to cover that.” But then the beard would be white—and yet he was only forty-five. Alas, politics age one so!

He was suffering there, in those few moments, the frightful anguish a woman feels when she realizes that all is over—her power of inspiring love is gone, while her own power to love still remains. His reddened lids swelled with tears; there in the midst of his masterful place this sorrow profoundly human, in which ambition had no part, seemed to him bitter almost beyond endurance. But with his usual versatility of feeling he consoled himself quickly by thinking of his talents, his fame and his high position. Were they not just as strong as beauty or as youth in order to make him loved?

“Come, come!”

He quite despised himself for his folly, and, driving off his troubles with the customary jerk of his shoulder, went upstairs to dismiss the Council, for he had no time left to preside to-day.

“What has happened to you, my dear Excellency, you seem to have renewed your youth?”

This question was asked him a dozen times in the lobby of the Chambers, where his good humor was remarked upon and where he caught himself humming, “O Magali, my well-beloved.” Sitting on the Bench he listened with an attention most flattering to the speaker during a long-winded discourse about the tariff, smiling beatifically beneath his lowered eyelids.

So the Left, whom his character for astuteness held in awe, said timidly one to the other: “Let us hold fast, Roumestan is preparing a coup!” In reality he was engaged in bringing before his mental vision, through the empty hum of the wearying discourse, the outlines of little Bachellery, trotting her out, as it were, before the Ministerial Bench, passing her attractions in review, her hair waving like a golden net across her brow, her wild-rose complexion, her bewitching air of a girl who was already a woman!

Nevertheless, that evening he had another attack of moodiness on the train returning from Versailles with some of his colleagues of the Cabinet. In the heated carriage where every one was smoking they were discussing, in the free and easy manner that Numa always carried about with him, a certain orange-colored velvet bonnet in the diplomats’ gallery that framed a pale Creole face; it had proved an agreeable diversion from the tariff question and caused all the honorable noses to rise, just as the sudden appearance of a butterfly in a school-room will fix the attention of the class in the middle of a Greek lesson. Who was she? No one knew.

“You must ask the General,” said Numa gayly, turning to the Marquis d’Espaillon d’Aubord, Minister of War, an old rake, tireless in love. “That’s all right—do not try to get out of it—she never looked at any one but you.”

The General cut a sinister grimace that caused his old yellow goat’s moustache to fly up under his nose as if it were moved by springs.

“It is a good while since women have bothered themselves about me—they only care for bucks like that!”

In this extremely choice language peculiar to noblemen and soldiers he indicated young De Lappara, sitting modestly in a corner of the carriage with Numa’s portfolio on his lap, respectfully silent in the company of the big-wigs.

Roumestan felt piqued, he did not know exactly why, and replied hotly. In his opinion there were many other things that women preferred to youth in a man.

“They tell you that, of course.”

“I ask the opinion of these gentlemen.”

These gentlemen were all elderly, some so fat that their coats would hardly meet across their stomachs, some thin and dried up, bald or quite white, with defective teeth and ugly mouths, many of them in failing health—these Ministers and Under-secretaries of State all agreed with Numa. The discussion became very animated as the Parliamentary train rushed along with its noise of wheels and loud talk.

“Our Ministers are having a great row,” said the people in the neighboring compartments.

Several newspaper reporters tried to hear through the partitions what they were saying.

“The well-known man, the man in power!” thundered Numa, “that is what they like. To know that the man who is kneeling before them with his head on their knees is a great man, a powerful man, one who moves the world—that works them up!”

“Yes, indeed!”

“You are right, quite right.”

“I am of your opinion, my dear colleague.”

“Well, as for me, I tell you that when I was only a poor little lieutenant on the staff and went out on my Sunday leave, dressed in my best, with my five and twenty years and my new shoulder-straps, I used to get many long, fond glances from the women whom I met, those glances like a whip that make your whole body tingle from head to foot, looks that cannot be got by a big epaulette of my age. And so, now, when I want to feel the warmth and sincerity in looks of that sort from lovely eyes, silent declarations in the open street, do you know what I do? I take one of my aides-de-camp, young, cocky, with a fine figure and—get them by promenading by his side, S—d—m—s—!”

Roumestan did not speak again until they reached Paris. As in the morning, he was again plunged in gloom, but furious also against those fools of women who could be so blind as to go crazy over boobies and fops.

What was there particularly fascinating about De Lappara he would like to know? Throughout the discussion he had sat fingering his beard with a fatuous air, looking conceited in his perfect clothes and low-cut shirt collar, and not saying a word. He would have liked to slap him. Probably it was that air he took when he sang Mireille with little Bachellery—who was probably his mistress. The idea was horrible to him—but still he would have liked to know the truth about it and convince himself.

As soon as they were alone and driving to the Ministry in the coupé he said to Lappara suddenly, brutally, without looking at him:

“Have you known these women long?”

“Which women, your Excellency?”

“The Bachellerys, of course; O, come!”

He had been thinking of them so constantly himself that he felt as if every one else must be doing the same thing. Lappara laughed.

O, yes—he had known them a long time; they were countrywomen of his. The Bachellery family and the Folies Bordelaises were part of the jolliest souvenirs of his youth. He had been desperately enough in love with the mother when he was a lad to make all his school-boy buttons split.

“And to-day in love with the daughter?” asked Roumestan playfully, rubbing the misty window with his glove to look out into the dark rainy street.

“Ah!—the daughter is a horse of another color. Although she seems to be so light and frisky, she is really a very serious and cool young person. I don’t know what she is aiming at, but I feel that it is something that I can never have the chance to offer her.”

Numa felt comforted: “Really—and yet you continue to go there!”

“O, yes, they are so amusing, the Bachellery family. The father, the retired manager, writes comic songs for the concert-gardens. The mother sings and acts them while frying eels in oil and making a bouillabaise that Roubion’s own isn’t a patch on. Noise, disorder, bits of music, rows—there you have the Folies Bordelaises at home. Alice rules the roost, rushes about like mad, runs the supper, sings; but never loses her head for one moment.”

“Well, gay boy, you expect her to lose it some day, do you not? and in your favor!” Suddenly becoming very serious the Minister added: “It is not a good place for you to go to, young man. The devil! You must learn to take life more seriously than you do. The Bordelaise folly cannot last all your life.”

He took his hand: “Do you never think of marrying?”

“No, indeed, Excellency. I am perfectly content as I am—unless, indeed, I should find some uncommon bonanza.”

“We could find you the bonanza—with your name, your connections ... what would you say to Mlle. Le Quesnoy?”

“O, Excellency—I never should have dared....”

Notwithstanding all his boldness, the Bordeaux man grew pale with joy and astonishment.

“Why not? You must, you must—you know how highly I esteem you, my dear boy; I should like to have you as a member of my family—I should feel stronger, more rounded out—”

He stopped suddenly, remembering that he had used these same words to Méjean that same morning.

“Well, I can’t help it—it’s done now.”

He jerked his shoulder and sank into a corner of the coupé.

“After all, Hortense is free to choose for herself; she can decide. I shall have saved this boy anyhow from spending his time in bad company.” And in fact Roumestan really thought that this motive alone had made him act as he did.

CHAPTER IX. AN EVENING PARTY AT THE MINISTRY.

There was an unusual look to the Faubourg St. Germain that evening. Quiet little streets that were sleeping peacefully at an early hour were awakened by the jolting of omnibuses turned from their usual course; while other streets, where usually the uninterrupted stream and roar of great Parisian arteries prevail, were like a river-bed from which the water has been drained. Silent, empty, apparently enlarged, the entrance was guarded by the outline of a mounted policeman or by the sombre shadows across the asphalt of a line of civic guards, with hoods drawn up over their caps and hands muffled in their long sleeves, saying by a gesture to carriages as they approached: “No one can pass.”

“Is it a fire?” asked a frightened man, putting his head out of the carriage window.

“No, sir; it is the evening party of the Public Instruction.”

The sentry passed on and the coachman drove off, swearing at being obliged to go so far out of his way on that left bank of the Seine, where the little streets planned without system are still somewhat confusing, after the fashion of old Paris.

At a distance, sure enough, the brilliant lights from the two fronts of the Ministry, the bonfires lighted in the middle of the streets because of the cold, the gleam from lines of lanterns on the carriages converging to one spot, threw a halo round the whole quarter like the reflection of a great conflagration, made more brilliant by the limpid blueness of the sky and the frosty dryness of the air. On approaching the house, however, one was reassured by the perfect arrangements of the party; for the conflagration was but the glare of the even white light rising to the eaves of the nearer houses, that rendered visible, as distinctly as by day, the names in gold upon the different public buildings—“Mayory of the Seventh District,” “Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs,” fading off in Bengal flames and fairylike illumination among the branches of some big and leafless trees.

Among those who lingered notwithstanding the chill wind and formed a hedge of curious gazers near the hotel gates was a little pale shadow with awkward, ducklike gait, wrapped from head to foot in a long peasant’s cloak, which allowed nothing of her but two piercing eyes to be visible. She walked up and down, bent with the cold, her teeth chattering, but insensible to the biting frost in the fever and intoxication of her excitement. Occasionally she would rush at some carriage in the row advancing slowly up the Rue de Grenelle with a luxurious noise of jingling harness and champing bits of impatient horses, where dainty forms clad in white were dimly seen behind the misty carriage windows. Then she would return to the entrance where the privilege of a special ticket allowed the carriage of some dignitary to break the line and enter. She pushed the people aside: “Excuse me—just let me look a moment.” Under the blaze from the lamp-stands built in the form of yew trees, under the striped awning of the marquees, the carriage doors, opening with a bang, discharged upon the carpets their freight of rustling satin, billowy tulle and glowing flowers.

The little figure leaned eagerly forward and hardly withdrew herself quickly enough to avoid being crushed by the next carriage to come on.

Audiberte was determined to see for herself how such an entertainment was managed. How proudly she gazed on this crowd and these lights, the soldiers ahorse and afoot, the police and these brilliant goings-on, all this part of Paris turned topsy-turvy in honor of Valmajour’s tabor! For it was being given in his honor and she was sure that his name was on the lips of all these fine and beautiful gentlemen and ladies. From the front entrance on Grenelle Street she rushed to that on Bellechasse Street, through which the empty carriages drove out; there she mingled with the civic guards and the coachmen in immense coats with capes round a brasero flaming in the middle of the street, and was astonished to hear these people talking of every-day matters, the sharp cold of that winter, potatoes freezing in the cellars, of things absolutely foreign to the function and her brother. The slowness of the crawling line of carriages particularly irritated her; she longed to see the last one drive up and be able to say: “Ready at last! Now it will begin. This time it is really commencing.”

But with the deepening of the night the cold became more penetrating; she could have cried with the pain of her nearly frozen feet; but it is pretty rough to cry when one’s heart is so happy!

At last she made up her mind to go home, after taking in all this gorgeousness in one last look and carrying it off in her poor, savage little head as she passed along the dismal streets through the icy night. Her temples throbbed with the fever of ambition and almost burst with dreams and hopes, whilst her eyes were forever dazzled and, as it were, blinded by that illumination to the honor and glory of the Valmajours.

But what would she have said, had she gone in, had she seen all those drawing-rooms in white and gold unfolding themselves in perspective beneath their arcaded doorways, enlarged by mirrors on which fell the flames of the chandeliers, the wall decorations, the dazzling glitter of diamonds and military trappings, the orders of all kinds—palm-shaped, in tufted form, broochlike, or big as Catherine wheels, or small as watch-charms, or else fastened about the neck with those broad red ribbons which make one think of bloody decapitations!

Pell-mell among great names belonging to the Faubourg St. Germain there were present ministers, generals, ambassadors, members of the Institute and the Superior Council of the University. Never in the arena at Aps, no, not even at the tabor matches in Marseilles, had Valmajour had such an audience. To tell the truth, his name did not occupy much space at this festival which was given in his honor. The programme was decorated with marvellous borders from the pen of Dalys, and certainly mentioned “Various Airs on the Tabor” with the name of Valmajour in combination with that of several lyrical pieces; but people did not look at the programme. Only the intimate friends, only those people who are acquainted with everything that is going on, said to the Minister as he stood to receive at the entrance to the first drawing-room:

“So you have a tabor-player?” And he answered, with his thoughts elsewhere:

“Yes, a whim of the ladies.”

He was not thinking much of poor Valmajour that evening, but of another appearance much more important to him. What would people say? Would she be a success? Had not the interest he had taken in the child made him exaggerate her talent? And, very much in love, although he would not have owned it yet to himself, bitten to the bone by the absorbing passion of an elderly man, he felt all the anxiety of the father, husband, lover or milliner of a débutante, one of those sorrowful anxieties such as one often sees in somebody restlessly wandering behind the scenes on the night of a first representation. That did not prevent him from being amiable, warm and meeting his guests with both hands outstretched; and what guests, boun Diou! nor from simpering, smiling, neighing, prancing, throwing back his body, twisting and bending with unfailing if somewhat monotonous effusion—but with shades of difference, nevertheless.

Suddenly quitting, almost pushing aside, the guest to whom he was speaking in a low voice and promising endless favors, he flew to meet a stately lady with crimson cheeks and authoritative manner: “Ah, Madame la Maréchale,” and placing in his own the august arm encased in a twenty-button glove, he led his noble guest through the rooms between a double row of obsequious black coats to the concert room, where Mme. Roumestan presided, assisted by her sister.

As he passed through the rooms on his return he scattered kind words and hand-shakes right and left. “Count on me! It’s a settled thing!”—or else he threw rapidly his “How are you, friend?”—or again, in order to warm up the reception and put a sympathetic current flowing through all this solemn society crowd, he would present people to each other, throwing them without warning into each other’s arms: “What! you do not know each other? The Prince of Anhalt!—M. Bos, Senator!” and never noticed that the two men, their names hardly uttered, after a hasty duck of the head and a “Sir”—“Sir,” merely waited till he was gone to turn their backs on each other with a ferocious look.

Like the greater number of political antagonists, our good Numa had relaxed and let himself out when he had won the fight and come to power. Without ceasing to belong to the party of moral order, this Vendean from the South had lost his fine ardor for the Cause, permitted his grand hopes to slumber, and began to find that things were not so bad after all. Why should these savage hatreds exist between nice people? He yearned for peace and a general indulgence. He counted on music to operate a fusion among the parties, his little fortnightly concerts becoming a neutral ground for artistic and sociable enjoyment, where the most bitterly hostile people might meet each other and learn to esteem one another in a spot apart from the passions and torments of politics.

That was why there was such a queer mixture in the invitations; thence also the embarrassment and lack of ease among the guests; therefore also colloquies in low tones suddenly interrupted and that curious going and coming of black coats, the assumed interest seen in looks raised to the ceiling, examining the gilded fluting of the panels, the decorations of the time of the Directory, half Louis XVI, half Empire, with bronze heads on the upright lines of the marble chimneypieces. People were hot and at the same time cold, as if, one might believe, the terrible frost outside, changed by the thick walls and the wadding of the hangings, had been converted into moral cold. From time to time the rushing about of De Lappara and De Rochemaure to find seats for the ladies broke in upon the monotonous strolling about of bored men, or else a stir was made by the sensational entrance of the beautiful Mme. Hubler, her hair dressed with feathers, her profile dry like that of an indestructible doll, with a smile like a stamped coin drawn up to her very eyebrows—a wax doll in a hair-dresser’s window. But the cold soon returned again.

“It is the very devil to thaw out these rooms of the Public Instruction. I am sure the ghost of Frayssinous walks here at night.”

This remark in a loud tone was made by one of a group of young musicians gathered obsequiously round Cadaillac, the manager of the opera, who was sitting philosophically on a velvet couch with his back against the statue of Molière. Very fat, half deaf, with a bristling white moustache, his face puffy and impenetrable, it was hard to find in him the natty and politic young impresario under whose care the “Nabob” had given his entertainments; his eyes alone told of the Parisian joker, his ferocious science of life, his spirit, hard as a blackthorn with an iron ferule, toughened in the fire of the footlights. But full and sated and content with his place and fearful of losing it at the end of his contract, he sheathed his claws and talked little and especially little here; his only criticism on this official and social comedy being a laugh as silent and inscrutable as that of Leather-Stocking.

“Boissaric, my good fellow,” he asked in a low voice of an ambitious young Toulousian who had just had a ballet accepted at the opera after only ten years of waiting—a thing nobody could believe—“you who know everything, tell me who that solemn-looking man with a big moustache is who talks familiarly to every one and walks behind his nose with as thoughtful an air as if he were going to the funeral of that feature: he must belong to the shop, for he talked theatre to me as one having authority.”

“I don’t think he is an actor, master, I think he is a diplomat. I just heard him say to the Belgian Minister that he had been his colleague a long time.”

“You are mistaken, Boissaric. He must be a foreign general; only a moment ago I heard him perorating in a crowd of big epaulettes and he was saying: ‘Unless one has commanded a large body of men—’”

“Strange!”

They asked Lappara, who happened to pass; he laughed.

“Why, it’s Bompard!”

“Quès aco Bompard?” (Who is this Bompard?)

“A friend of Roumestan’s. How is it you have never met him?”

“Is he from the South?”

“Té! I should say so!”

In truth, Bompard, buttoned tightly into a grand new suit with a velvet collar, his gloves thrust into his waistcoat, was really trying to help his friend in the entertainment of his guests by a varied but continuous conversation. Quite unknown in the official world, where he appeared to-day for the first time, he may be said to have made a sensation as he carried his faculty for invention from group to group, telling his marvellous visions, his stories of royal love affairs, adventures and combats, triumphs at the Federal shooting-matches in Switzerland, all of which produced the same effects upon his audience—astonishment, embarrassment and disquiet. Here at least there was an element of gayety, but it was only for a few intimates who knew him. Nothing could dispel the cloud of ennui that penetrated even into the concert room, a large and very picturesque apartment with its two tiers of galleries and its glass ceiling that gave the impression of being under the open sky.

A decoration of green palms and banana-trees, whose long leaves hung motionless in the light of the chandeliers, made a fresh background to the toilettes of the women sitting on numberless rows of chairs placed close together. It was a wave of white moving necks, arms and shoulders rising from their bodices like half-opened flowers, heads dressed with jewelled stars, diamonds flashing against the blue depths of black tresses or waves of gold from the locks of blondes; a mass of lovely figures in profile, full of health, with lines of beauty from waist to throat, or fine slender forms, from a narrow waist clasped by a little jewelled buckle up to a long neck circled with velvet. Fans of all colors, bright with spangles, shot with hues, danced in butterfly lightness over all and mingled the perfumes of “white rose” or opoponax with the feeble breath of white lilacs and natural fresh violets.

The bored expression on the faces of the guests was deeper here as they reflected that for two mortal hours they must sit thus before the platform on which was spread out in a semicircular row the chorus, the men in black coats, the women in white muslin, impassive as if sitting in front of a camera, while the orchestra was concealed behind copses of green leaves and roses, out of which the arms of the bass-viols reared themselves like instruments of torture. Oh, the torment of the “music stocks”! All of them knew it, for it was one of the cruelest fatigues of the season and of their worldly burden. That is why, looking everywhere, the only happy, smiling face to be found in the immense room was that of Mme. Roumestan—not that ballet-dancer’s smile, common to professional hostesses, which so easily changes to a look of angry fatigue when no one is watching. Hers was the face of a happy woman, a woman loved, just starting on a new life.

O, the endless tenderness of an honest soul which has never throbbed but for one person! She had begun to believe again in her Numa; he had been so kind and tender for some time back. It was like a return; it seemed as if their two hearts were closely knit again after a long parting. Without asking whence came this renewal of affection in her husband, she found him loverlike and young once more, as he was the night that she showed him the panel of the hunt; and she herself was still the same fair young Diana, supple and charming in her frock of white brocade, her fair hair simply banded on her brow, so pure and without an evil thought, looking five years younger than her thirty summers!

Hortense was very pretty to-night also; all in blue—blue tulle that enveloped her slender figure like a cloud and lent a soft shade to her brunette face. She was much preoccupied with the début of her musician. She wondered how the spoiled Parisians would like this music from the provinces and whether, as Rosalie had said, the tabor-player ought not to be framed in a landscape of gray olive-trees and hills that look like lace. Silently, though very anxious in the rustle of fans, conversations in low voice and the tuning of the instruments, she counted the pieces that must come before Valmajour appeared.

A blow from the leader with his bow on his desk, a rustling of paper on the platform as the chorus rises, music in hand, a long look of the victims toward the high doorway clogged with black coats, as if yearning to flee, and the first notes of a choral by Glück ring through the room and soar upward to the glassy ceiling where the winter’s night lays its blue sheets of cold.

“Ah, dans ce bois funeste et sombre....”

The concert has begun.

The taste for music has increased greatly in France within the last few years. Particularly in Paris, the Sunday concerts and those given during Holy Week, and the numberless musical clubs, have aroused the public taste and made the works of the great masters known to all, making a musical education the fashion. But at bottom Paris is too full of life, too given over to intellect, really to love music, that absorbing goddess who holds you motionless without voice or thought in a floating web of harmony, and hypnotizes you like the ocean; in Paris the follies that are done in her name are like those committed by a fop for a mistress who is the fashion; it is a passion of chic, played to the gallery, commonplace and hollow to the point of ennui!

Ennui!

Yes, boredom was the prevailing note of this concert at the Ministry of Public Instruction. Beneath that forced admiration, that expression of simulated ecstasy which belongs to the worldly side of the sincerest woman, the look of boredom rose higher and higher; there soon appeared unmistakable signs that dimmed the brilliant smile and shining eyes and changed completely their charming, languishing poses, like the motion of birds upon the branches or when sipping water drop by drop. On the long rows of endless chairs these fine ladies, one woman after the other, would make their fight, trying to reanimate themselves with cries of “Bravo! Divine! Delicious!” and then, one after another, would succumb to the rising torpor which ascended like the mists above a sounding sea, driving far away into the distance of indifference all the artists who defiled before them one by one.

And yet the most famous and illustrious artists of Paris were there, interpreting classical music with all the scientific exactness it demands, which, alas, cannot be acquired save at the expense of years. Why, it is thirty years now that Mme. Vauters has been singing that beautiful romanza of Beethoven “L’Apaisement,” and yet never has she done it with more passion than this evening. But it seems as if strings were lacking to the instrument; one can hear the bow scraping on the violin. And behold! of the great singer of former days and of that famous classical beauty there remains nothing else but well studied attitudes, an irreproachable method and that long white hand which at the last stanza brushes aside a tear from the corner of her eye, made deep with charcoal—a tear that translates a sob which her voice can no longer render.

What singer save Mayol, handsome Mayol, has ever sighed forth the serenade from “Don Juan” with such ethereal delicacy—that passion which is like the love of a dragon-fly? Unfortunately people don’t hear it any longer. There is no use for him to rise atiptoe with outstretched neck and draw out the note to its very end, while accompanying it with the easy gesture of a yarn-spinner seizing her wool with two fingers—nothing comes out, nothing! Paris is grateful for pleasures which are past and applauds all the same; but these used-up voices, these withered and too well-known faces, medals whose design has been gradually eaten away by passing from hand to hand, can never dissipate the heavy fog which infests the Minister’s party. No, notwithstanding every effort which Roumestan makes to enliven it, notwithstanding the enthusiastic bravos which he hurls in his loudest voice into the phalanx of black coats, nor the “Hush!” with which he frightens people who attempt to converse two apartments away, and who thereafter prowl about silent as spectres in that strong illumination and change their places with every precaution in the hopes of finding some distraction, their backs rounded and their arms swinging—or fall completely crushed upon the low arm-chairs, their opera hats suspended between their legs—idiotic and with faces empty of expression!

At one time, it is true, the appearance of Alice Bachellery on the stage wakes up and enlivens the audience; a struggling bunch of curious people assails each of the two doors of the hall in order to see the little diva in her short skirt on the platform, her mouth half open and her long lashes quivering as if with surprise at seeing all this multitude.

“Chaud! chaud! les p’tits pains d’ gruau!” hum the young club-men as they imitate the low-lived gesture that accompanies the end of her refrain. Old gentlemen belonging to the University approach, trembling all over, and turning their good ear toward her, in order not to lose a bit of the fashionable vulgarity. So there is a disappointment when, in her somewhat shrill and limited voice, the little pastry-cook’s boy begins to produce one of the grand airs from “Alceste,” prompted by Mme. Vauters, who is encouraging her from the flies. Then the faces fall and the black coats disperse and begin once more their wandering with all the more freedom, now that the Minister is not watching them; for he has slipped off to the end of the last drawing-room on the arm of M. de Boë, who is quite stunned by the honor accorded him.

Eternal infancy of Love! What though you may have twenty years of law at the Palace of Justice behind you and fifteen years on the Bench; what though you may be sufficiently master of yourself to preserve in the midst of the most agitated assemblies and most ferocious interruptions the fixed idea and the cold-bloodedness of a gull that is fishing in the heart of a storm—nevertheless, if passion shall once enter into your life, you will find yourself the feeblest among the feeble, trembling and cowardly to the point of hanging desperately to the arm of some fool, rather than listen bravely to the slightest criticism of your idol.

“Excuse me—I must leave you—here is the entr’acte—” and the Minister hurries away, casting the young maître des requêtes back into that original obscurity of his from which he shall never emerge again. The crowd struggles toward the sideboards; the relieved expression on the faces of all these unfortunate listeners, who have at last regained the right to move and speak, is sufficient to make Numa believe that his little protégée has just won a tremendous success. People press about him and felicitate him—“Divine! Delicious!” But there is nobody to talk positively to him about the thing that interests him, so that at last he grabs hold of Cadaillac, who is passing near him, walking sidewise and splitting the human stream with his enormous shoulder as a lever.

“Well? well? How did you like her?”

“Why, whom do you mean?”

“The little girl,” said Numa in a tone which he tries to make perfectly indifferent. The other man, who is good enough at fencing, comprehends at once and says without blenching:

“A revelation!”

The lover flushes up as if he were twenty years old—as when, at the Café Malmus, “everybody’s old girl” pressed his foot under the table.

“Then—you think that at the opera—?”

“No sort of question!—but she would have to have a good one to put her on the stage,” said Cadaillac with his silent laugh. And while the Minister rushes off to congratulate Mlle. Alice, the “good one to put her on the stage” continues his march in the direction of the buffet which can be seen, framed by an enormous mirror without a border, at the end of a drawing-room which is all brown and gilded woodwork. Notwithstanding the severity of the hangings and the impudent and pompous air of the butlers, who are certainly chosen from University men who have missed their examination, at this spot the nasty tempers and boredom have disappeared in front of the enormous counter crammed with delicate glasses, fruits and pyramids of sandwiches; humanity has regained its rights and these evil looks give way to attitudes of desire and voracity. Through the narrowest space that remains open between two busts or between two heads bending over toward the bit of salmon or chicken wing on their little plate, an arm intrudes, attempting to seize a tumbler or fork or roll of bread, scraping off rice powder on shoulders or on a black sleeve or a brilliant, crude uniform. People chatter and grow animated, eyes glitter, laughter rises under the influence of the foaming wines. A thousand bits of speech cross each other—interrupted remarks, answers to questions already forgotten. In one corner one hears little screams of indignation: “What a brute! How disgusting!” about the scientist Béchut, that enemy of women, who is going on reviling the weaker sex. Then a quarrel among musicians. “But, my dear fellow, beware—you are denying altogether the increase of the quinte.”

“Is it really true she is only sixteen?”

“Sixteen years of the cask and some few extra years of the bottle.”

“Mayol!—O, come now! Mayol!—finished, empty! and to think that the opera gives two thousand francs every night to that thing!”

“Yes, but he has to spend a thousand francs of seats to get his auditorium warm, and then, on the sly, Cadaillac gets all the rest of it away from him playing écarté.”

“Bordeaux!—chocolate!—champagne!—”

“—will have to come and explain himself before the commission.”

“—by raising the ruche a little with bows of white satin.”

In another part of the house Mlle. Le Quesnoy, closely surrounded by friends, recommends her tabor player to a foreign correspondent with an impudent head as flat as that of a choumacre and begs him not to leave before the end of the play; she scolds Méjean, who is not supporting her properly, and calls him a false Southerner, a franciot and a renegade. In the group near by a political discussion has started. One mouth opens in a hateful way with foam about the teeth and says, chewing on the words as if they were musket balls and he would like to poison them:

“Whatever exists in the most destructive of demagogies—”

“—Marat the conservative!” said a voice—but the rest of the sentence was lost in a confused noise of conversations mixed with clattering of plates and glasses, which the coppery tones of Roumestan’s voice all of a sudden dominated: “Ladies! hurry, ladies!—or you will miss the sonata in fa!”

There is a silence as of the dead. Then the long procession of trailing trains begins to cross the drawing-room and settle itself once more into the rows of chairs. The women have that despairing face one sees on captives who are returned to prison after an hour’s walk in the open fields. And so the concertos and symphonies follow each other, note after note. Handsome Mayol begins again to draw out that intangible note of his and Mme. Vauters to touch again the loosened cords of her voice. All of a sudden a sign of life appears, a movement of curiosity, just as it was a little while ago when the small Mlle. Bachellery made her entrance. It is the tabor-player Valmajour, the apparition of that proud peasant, his soft felt hat over one ear, his red belt around his waist and his plainsman’s jacket on one shoulder. It was an idea of Audiberte’s, an instinct in her natural feminine taste, to dress him in this way in order to give him greater effect in the midst of all the black coats. Well, well, at last, this at least is new and unexpected—this long tabor which hangs to the arm of the musician, the little fife on which his fingers move hither and yon, and the charming airs to the double music whose movement, rousing and lively, gives a moire-like shiver of awakening to the satin of those lovely shoulders! That worn-out public is delighted with these songs of morning, so fresh and embalmed with country fragrances—these ballads of Old France.

“Bravo! Bravo! Encore!”

And when, with a large and victorious rhythm which the orchestra accompanies in a low note, he attacks the “March of Turenne,” deepening and supporting his somewhat shrill instrument, the success is wild. He has to come back twice, ten times, being applauded first of all by Numa, whom this solitary success has warmed completely and who now takes credit to himself for this “fancy of the ladies.” He tells them how he discovered this genius, explains the great mystery of the fife with three holes and gives various details concerning the ancient castle of the Valmajours.

“Then he really is called Valmajour?”

“Certainly—belongs to the Princes des Baux—he is the last of the line.”

And so this legend starts, scatters, expands, enlarges and becomes at last a regular novel by George Sand.

“I have the parshemints at my house,” corroborates Bompard in a tone which permits of no question.

But in the midst of all this worldly enthusiasm more or less fabricated there is one little heart which is moved, one young head which is completely intoxicated and takes all these bravos and fables seriously. Without speaking a word, without even applauding, her eyes fixed and lost, her long, supple figure following in the balancing motion of a dream the bars of the heroic march, Hortense finds herself once more down there in Provence on the high terrace overlooking the sun-baked plain, whilst her musician plays for her a morning greeting, as if to one of those ladies in the Courts of Love, and then sticks her pomegranate flower on his tabor with a savage grace. This recollection moves her delightfully, and leaning her head on her sister’s shoulder she murmurs very low: “O, how happy I am!” uttering it with a deep and true accent which Rosalie does not notice at once, but which later on shall become more definite in her memory and shall haunt her like the stammered news of some misfortune.

“Eh! bé! My good Valmajour, didn’t I tell you? What a success!—eh?” cried Roumestan in the little drawing-room where a stand-up supper was being served for the performers. As to this success, the other stars of the concert considered it a bit exaggerated. Mme. Vauters, who was seated in readiness to leave while she waited for her carriage, concealed her spite in a great big cape of lace filled with violent perfumes, while handsome Mayol, standing in front of the buffet, showing in his back his slack nerves and weariness by a peculiar gesture, tore to pieces with the greatest ferocity a poor little plover and imagined that he had the tabor-player under his knife. But little Bachellery did not stoop to any such bad temper. In the midst of a group of young fops, laughing, fluttering and digging her little white teeth into a ham sandwich, like a schoolboy assailed by the hunger of a growing child, she played her game of infancy. She tried to make music on Valmajour’s fife.

“Just see, M’sieur le ministre!”

Then, noticing Cadaillac behind his Excellency, with a sharp twirl of her feet she advanced her forehead like that of a little girl for him to kiss.

“Howdy, uncle!—”

It was a relationship purely fantastic such as they adopt behind the scenes.

“What a make-believe madcap!” grunted the “right man to put one on the stage” behind his white moustache, but not in too loud a voice, because in all probability she was going to become one of his pensioners and a most influential pensioner.

Valmajour stood erect before the chimneypiece with a fatuous air, surrounded by a crowd of women and journalists. The foreign correspondent put his questions to him brutally, not at all in that hypocritical tone he used when interrogating ministers in special audiences; but, without being troubled in the least thereby, the peasant answered him with the stereotyped account his lips were used to: “It all come to me in the night while I listened me to the nightingawles singin’—”

He was interrupted by Mlle. Le Quesnoy, who offered him a glass of wine and a plate heaped up with good things especially for him.

“How do you do? You see this time I myself am bringing you the grand-boire.” She had made her speech for a purpose, but he answered her with a slight nod of the head, and, pointing to the chimneypiece, said “All right, all right, put it down there,” and went on with his story.

“So, what the birrud of the Lord could do with one hole....” Without being discouraged, Hortense waited to the end and then spoke to him about his father and his sister.

“She will be very much delighted, will she not?”

“O, yes; it has gone pretty well.”

With a silly smile he stroked his moustache while looking about him with restless eyes. He had been told that the director of the opera desired to make him an offer and he was on the watch for him afar, feeling even at this early moment the jealousy of an actor and astonished that anybody could spend so much time with that good-for-nothing little singing-girl. Filled with his own thoughts, he took no trouble to answer the beautiful young girl standing before him, her fan in her hand, in that pretty, half-audacious attitude which the habit of society gives. But she loved him better as he was, disdainful and cold toward everything which was not his art; she admired him for accepting loftily the compliments which Cadaillac poured upon him with his off-hand roundness:

“Yes, I tell you ... yes, indeed!... I tell you exactly what I mean ... great deal of talent ... very original, very new; I hope no other theatre save the Opera shall have your first appearance.... I must find some occasion to bring you forward. From to-day on, consider yourself as one of the House!”

Valmajour thought of the paper with the government stamp on it which he had in the pocket of his jacket; but the other man, just as if he divined the thought that possessed him, stretched out his supple hand: “There, that engages us both, my dear fellow;” and pointing out Mayol and Mme. Vauters—who were luckily occupied elsewhere, for they would have laughed too loud—he continued:

“Ask your comrades what the given word of Cadaillac means!” At this he turned on his heel and went back into the ball.

Now it had become a party which had spread into less crowded but more animated rooms, and the fine orchestra was taking its revenge for three hours of classical music by giving waltzes of the purest Viennese variety. The lofty personages and solemn people having left, the floors now belonged to the young people, those maniacs of pleasure who dance for the love of dancing and for the intoxication of flying hair and swimming eyes and trains whipped round about their feet. But even then politics could not lose its rights and the fusion dreamt of by Roumestan did not take place. Even of the two rooms where they danced one of them belonged to the Left Centre and the other to the White, a flower de luce White without a stain, in spite of the efforts Hortense made to bind the two camps together! Much sought out as the sister-in-law of the Minister and daughter of the Chief Judge, she saw about her big marriage portion and her influential connections a perfect flock of waistcoats with their hearts outside.

While dancing with her, Lappara, greatly excited, declared that His Excellency had permitted him—but just there the waltz ended and she left him without listening to the rest and came toward Méjean, who did not dance and yet could not make up his mind to leave.

“What a face you make, most solemn man, man most reasonable!”

He took her by the hand: “Sit down here; I have something to say to you—by the authority of my Minister—”

Very much overcome, he smiled, and while noting the trembling of his lips Hortense understood and rose very quickly.

“No, no, not this evening—I can listen to nothing—I am dancing—”

She flew away on the arm of Rochemaure, who had just come to fetch her for the cotillion. He too was very much taken; just in order to imitate Lappara, the good young fellow ventured to pronounce a word which caused her to break out in a gale of gayety that went whirling with her round the entire room, and when the shawl figure was finished she went over toward her sister and whispered in her ear:

“Here we are in a nice mess! Here is Numa, who has promised me to each of his three secretaries!”

“Which one are you going to take?”

Her answer was cut short by the rolling of the tabor.

“The farandole! The farandole!”

It was a surprise for his guests from the Minister—the farandole to close the cotillion—the South to the last go! and so—zou! But how do people dance it? Hands meet each other and join and the two dancing-rooms come together this time. Bompard gravely explains: “This is the way, young ladies,” and he cuts a caper.

And then, with Hortense at its head, the farandole unrolls itself across the long rows of rooms, followed by Valmajour playing with a superb solemnity, proud of his success and of the looks which his masculine and robust figure in that original costume earn for him.

“Isn’t he beautiful!” cried Roumestan, “isn’t he handsome! a regular Greek shepherd!”

From room to room the rustic dance, more and more crowded and lively, follows and chases the spectre of Frayssinous. Reawakened to life by these airs from the ancient time, the figures on the great tapestries, copied from the pictures of Boucher and Lancret, agitate themselves and the little naked backs of the cupids who are rolling about along the frieze take on a movement in the eyes of the dancers as of a rushing hunt as wild and crazy as their own.

Away down there at the end of the vista Cadaillac has edged up to the buffet with a plate and a glass of wine in his hand; he listens, eats and drinks, penetrated to the very centre of his scepticism by that sudden heat of joy:

“Just remember this, my boy,” said he to Boissaric, “you must always remain to the end at a ball. The women are prettier in their moist pallor, which does not reach the point of fatigue any more than that little white line there at the windows has reached the point of being daylight. There is a little music in the air, some dust that smells nicely, a semi-intoxication which refines a sensation and which one ought to savor as one eats a hot chicken wing washed down with champagne frappé.—There! just look at that, will you.”

Behind the big mirror without a frame the farandole was lengthening out, with all arms stretched, into a chain alternate of black and light notes softened by the disorder of the toilets and hair and the mussiness that comes from two hours’ dancing.

“Isn’t that pretty, eh?—And the bully boy at the end there, isn’t he smart!” Then he added coldly, as he put down his glass:

“All the same, he will never make a cent.”

CHAPTER X. THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH.

There never had been any great sympathy between President Le Quesnoy and his son-in-law. The lapse of time, frequent intercourse and the bonds of relationship had not been able to narrow the gap between these two natures, or to vanquish the intimidating coolness which the Provençal felt in the presence of this big, silent man, with his pale and haughty face, from whose height a steely-gray look, which was the look of Rosalie without her tenderness and indulgence, fell upon his lively nature with freezing effect. Numa, with his mobile and floating nature, always overwhelmed by his own conversation, at one and the same time a fiery and a complicated nature, was in a state of constant revolt against the logic, the uprightness, the rigidity of his father-in-law. And while he envied him these qualities, he placed them to the credit of the coldness of nature in this man of the North, that extreme North which the President represented to him.

“Beyond him, there’s the wild polar bear—beyond that, nothing at all—the north pole and death.”

All the same he flattered the President, endeavored to cajole him with adroit, feline tricks, which were his baits to catch the Gaul. But the Gaul, subtler than he was himself, would not permit himself to be taken in, and on Sunday, in the dining-room at the Place Royale, at the moment when politics were discussed, whenever Numa, softened by the good dinner, attempted to make old Le Quesnoy believe that in reality the two were very close to an understanding, because both wanted the same thing, namely, liberty—it was a sight to see the indignant toss of the head with which the President penetrated his armor.

“Oh! Not at all, not the same by any means!”

In half-a-dozen clear-cut, hard arguments, he established the distances between them, unmasked fine phrases and showed that he was not the man to be taken in by their humbuggery. Then the lawyer got out of the affair by joking, though extremely angry at bottom and particularly on account of his wife, who looked on and listened without ever mixing herself up with political talk. But then in the evening, while going home in the carriage, he took great pains to prove to her that her father was lacking in common-sense. Ah! if it had not been for her presence, how finely he would have put the President to his trumps! In order not to irritate him, Rosalie avoided taking part with either.

“Yes, it is unfortunate—you don’t understand each other....” But in her own heart she agreed with the President.

When Roumestan arrived at a Minister’s portfolio the coolness between the two men only became greater. M. Le Quesnoy refused to show himself at his son-in-law’s receptions in the Rue de Grenelle and he explained the matter very precisely to his daughter.

“Now, please tell your husband this—let him continue to visit me here, and as often as possible; I shall be most delighted. But you must not expect ever to see me at the Ministry. I know well enough what those people are preparing for us: I don’t want to have the appearance of being an accomplice.”

After all, the situation between them was saved in the eyes of society by that heartfelt sorrow, that mourning of the heart, which had imprisoned the Le Quesnoys in their own home for so many years. Probably the Minister of Public Instruction would have been very much embarrassed to feel the presence in his drawing-room of that sturdy old contradictor, in whose presence he always remained a little boy. Still, he made believe to appear wounded by that decision; he struck an attitude on account of it, a thing which is very precious to an actor, and he found a pretext for not coming to the Sunday dinners except very irregularly, making as a plea one of those thousand excuses, engagements, meetings, political banquets, which offer so wide a liberty to husbands in politics.

Rosalie, on the contrary, never missed a Sunday, arriving early in the afternoon, delighted to find again in the home circle of her parents that taste of the family which her official life hardly permitted her the leisure to satisfy. Mme. Le Quesnoy being still at vespers and Hortense at church with her mother, or carried off to some musical matinée by friends, she was always certain to find her father in his library, a long room crammed from top to bottom with books. There he was, shut in with his silent friends, his intellectual intimates, the only ones with whom his sorrow had never found fault. The President did not seat himself to read; he passed the shelves in review, stopping in front of some finely bound books; standing there, unconscious what he did, he would read for an hour at a time without recognizing the passage of time or that he was weary. When he saw his eldest daughter enter, he would give a pale smile. After a few words were exchanged, because neither one nor the other was exactly garrulous, she also passed in review her beloved authors, choosing and turning over the leaves of some book in his immediate neighborhood in that somewhat dusky light of the big courtyard in the Marais, where the bells, sounding vespers near by, fell in heavy notes amidst the stillness that Sunday brings to the commercial quarters of a city. Sometimes he gave her an open book:

“Read that!” and put his finger under a passage; and when she had read it:

“That’s fine, is it not?”

There was no greater pleasure for that young woman, to whom life was offering whatever there was of brilliant and luxuriant things, than the hour passed beside that mournful and aged father in whom her daughterly adoration was raised to a double power by other and intimate bonds altogether intellectual.

It was to him she owed the uprightness of her thought and that feeling for justice which made her so courageous; to him also her taste for the fine arts, her love of painting and of fine poetry—because with Le Quesnoy the continuous pettifoggery of the law had not succeeded in ossifying the man in him.

Rosalie loved her mother and venerated her, not without some little revolt against a nature which was too simple, too gentle, annihilated as it were in her own home; a nature which sorrow, that elevates certain souls, had crushed to the earth and forced into the most ordinary feminine occupations—into practical piety, into housekeeping in its smallest details. Although she was younger than her husband, she appeared to be the elder of the two, judged by her old woman’s talk; she was like one rendered old and sorrowful, who searched all the warm corners of her memory and all the souvenirs of her infancy in a land hot with the sun of Provence. But above all things the church had taken possession of her; since the death of her son she was in the habit of going to church in order to put her sorrow to slumber in the silent freshness and half-light and half-noise of the lofty naves, as though it were in the peace of a cloister barred by heavy double gates against the roar of the outer life. This she did with that devout and cowardly egotism of sorrows which kneel upon a prie-Dieu and are released from all anxieties and duties.

Rosalie, who was a young girl already at the moment of their mishap, had been struck by the very different way in which her parents suffered. Mme. Le Quesnoy, renouncing everything, was steeped in a tearful religion, but Le Quesnoy set out to obtain strength from daily work accomplished. Her tender preference for her father arose in her through the exercise of her reason. Marriage, life in common with all the exaggerations, lies and lunacies of her Southerner, caused her to feel the shelter of the silent library all the more pleasantly because it was a change from the grandiose, cold and official interior of the Ministry. In the midst of their quiet chat, the noise of a door was heard, a rustling of silk, and Hortense would enter.

“Ah, ha! I knew I should find you here!”

She did not love to read, Hortense did not. Even novels bored her; they were never romantic enough to suit her exalted frame of mind. After running up and down for about five minutes with her bonnet on, she would cry:

“How these old books and papers do smell stuffy! Don’t you find it so, Rosalie? Come on, come a little with me! Papa has had you long enough. Now it’s my turn.”

And so she would carry her off to her bedroom, their bedroom; for Rosalie also had used it until she was twenty years old.

There, during an hour of delightful chat, she saw about her all those things which had been a part of herself—her bed with cretonne curtains, her desk, her étagère, her library, where a bit of her childhood still lingered about the titles of the volumes and about the thousand childish things preserved with all due devotion. Here she found again her old thoughts lying about the corners of that young girl’s bedroom, more coquettish and ornamented, it is true, than it was in her time. There was a rug on the floor; a night lamp in the shape of a flower hung from the ceiling and fragile little tables stood about for sewing or writing, against which one knocked at every step; there was more elegance and less order. Two or three pieces of work begun were hanging over the backs of the chairs and the open desk showed a windy scattering of note-paper with monograms. When you entered there was always a minute or two of trouble.

“O, it’s the wind,” said Hortense with a peal of laughter. “The wind knows I adore him; he must have come to see if I was at home.”

“They must have left the window open,” answered Rosalie quietly. “How can you live in such an interior? For my part I am not able to think if anything is out of place.”

She rose to straighten the frame of a picture fastened to the wall; it irritated her eyes, which were as exact as her nature.

“O, well! it’s just the contrary with me. It puts me in form. It seems to me that I am travelling.”

This difference in their natures was reflected on the faces of the two sisters. Rosalie had regular features with great purity in their lines, calm eyes of a color changing constantly like that of a deep lake; the other’s features were very irregular, her expression clever, her complexion the pale tint of a Creole woman. There were the North and the South in the father and the mother, two very different temperaments which had united without merging together; each was perpetuating its own race in one of the children, and all this, notwithstanding the life in common, the similar education in a great boarding-school for young girls, where, under the same masters, and only a few years later, Hortense was taking up the scholastic tradition which had made of her sister an attentive, serious woman, always ready to the minute, absorbed in her smallest acts. That same education had left her tumultuous, fantastic, unsteady of soul and always in a hurry. Sometimes, when she saw her so agitated, Rosalie cried out:

“I must say I am very lucky; I have no imagination.”

“As for me, I haven’t anything else,” said Hortense; and she reminded her how at boarding school, when M. Baudouy was given the task of teaching them style and the development of thought, during that course which he pompously termed his imagination class, Rosalie had never had any success, because she expressed everything in a few concise words, whereas she, on the other hand, given an idea as big as your nail, was able to blacken whole volumes with print.

“That’s the only prize I ever got—the imagination prize!”

Despite it all they were a tenderly united couple, bound to each other by one of those affections between an elder and a younger sister into which an element of the filial and maternal enters. Rosalie took her about with her everywhere, to balls, to her friends’ houses, on her shopping trips in which the taste of Parisian women is exercised; even after leaving the boarding-school she remained her younger sister’s little mother. And now she is occupying herself with getting her married, with finding for her some quiet and trustworthy companion, indispensable for such a madcap as she is, the powerful arm which is needed to offset her enthusiasms.

It was plain that the man she meant was Méjean; but Hortense, who at first did not say no, suddenly showed an evident antipathy. They had a long talk about it the day following the ministerial reception, when Rosalie had detected the emotion and trouble of her sister.

“O, he is kind and I like him well enough,” said Hortense, “he is one of those loyal friends such as one would like to have about one all one’s life; but that is not the sort of husband that will do for me.”

“Why?”

“You will laugh at me. He does not appeal to my imagination enough; there it is! A marriage with him—why it makes me think of the house of a burgher, right-angled and stiff, at the end of an alley of trees which stand as straight as the letter I; and you know well enough that I love something else—the unexpected, surprises—”

“Well, who then? M. de Lappara?”

“Thank you! In order that I should be just a wee bit preferred to his tailor?”

“M. de Rochemaure?”

“What, that model red-tapist?—and I who have a perfect horror of red tape!”

And when the disquiet which Rosalie showed pushed her to the wall, for she wished to know everything and interrogated her closely:

“What I should like to do,” said the young girl, while a faint flame like a fire in straw rose into the pallor of her complexion, “what I should like to do—” Then in a changed voice and with an expression of fun:

“I should like to marry Bompard! Yes, Bompard; he is the husband of my dreams—at any rate he has imagination, that fellow, and some resources against deadly dulness!”

She rose to her feet and passed up and down the room with that gait, a little inclined over, which made her seem even taller than her figure warranted. People did not recognize Bompard’s worth; but what pride and what dignity of existence were his, and, with all his craziness, what logic!

“Numa wanted to give him a place in the office close to him; but he would not take it, he preferred to live in honor of his chimera. And people actually accuse the South of France of being practical and industrious!—but there is the man to give that legend the lie. Why, look here—he was telling me this the other night at the ball—he is going to brood out ostrich eggs—an artificial brood machine—he is positive that he will make millions,—and he is far more happy than if he had those millions! Why, it is a perpetual life in fairy-land with a man of that sort. Let them give me Bompard; I want nobody but Bompard!”

“Well, well, I see I shall learn nothing more to-day either,” said the big sister to herself, who divined underneath these lively sallies something deep down below.

One Sunday when she reached her old home Rosalie found Mme. Le Quesnoy awaiting her in the vestibule, who told her with an air of mystery:

“There’s somebody in the drawing-room—a lady from the South.”

“Aunt Portal?”

“You shall see—”

It was not Mme. Portal, but a saucy Provençal girl whose deep curtsy in the rustic way came to an end in a peal of laughter.

“Hortense!”

Her skirt reaching to the tops of her black shoes, her waist increased by the folds of tulle belonging to the big scarf, her face framed among the falling waves of hair kept in place by a little bonnet made of cut velvet and embroidered with butterflies in jet, Hortense looked very like the chatos whom one sees on Sunday practising their coquetries on the Tilting Field at Arles, or else walking, two and two, with lowered lashes, through the pretty columns of St. Trophyme cloisters, whose denticulated architecture goes very well with those ruddy Saracen reds and with the ivory color of the church in which a flame of a consecrated candle trembles in the full daylight.

“Just see how pretty she is!” said her mother, standing in ecstasy before that lively personification of the land of her youthful days. Rosalie, on the other hand, shuddered with an inexplicable sadness, as if that costume had taken her sister far, far away from her.

“Well, that is a fantastic idea! It is very becoming to you, but I like you far better as a Parisian girl. And who dressed you so well?”

“Audiberte Valmajour. She has just gone out.”

“How often she comes here!” said Rosalie, going into their room to take off her bonnet. “What a friendship it is! I shall begin to get jealous.”

Hortense excused herself, a little bit embarrassed; this head-dress from Provence gave so much pleasure to their mother in the sober house.

“Is it not true, mother?” cried she, going from one room into the other. “Besides, that poor girl feels so outlandish in Paris and is so interesting with her blind devotion to the genius of her brother.”

“Oh! Genius, is it?” said the big sister, tossing her head a bit.

“What! You saw it yourself the other night at your house, the effect it produced—everywhere just the same thing!”

And when Rosalie answered that one must estimate at their real value these successes won in the world of society and due to politeness, a caprice of an evening, the last fad:

“Well, I don’t care, he is in the opera!”

The velvet band on the little head-dress bristled up in sign of revolt, as if it were really covering one of those enthusiastic heads above whose profile it floats, down there in Provence. Besides, the Valmajours were not peasants like others, but the last remnants of a reduced family of nobles.

Rosalie, standing in front of the tall mirror, turned about laughing:

“What! You believe in that legend?”

“Why, of course I do. They descend in direct line from the Princes des Baux. There are the parchments and there are the coats of arms at their rustic doorway. Any day that they should wish—”

Rosalie shuddered. Behind the peasant who played the flute there was the prince besides. Given a strong imagination—and that might become dangerous.

“None of that story is true,” and this time she did not laugh any more. “In the district of Aps there are ten families bearing that so-called princely name. Anybody who told you otherwise told a falsehood through vanity or through—”

“But it was Numa—it was your husband. The other night at the Ministry he gave us all sorts of details.”

“O! You know how it is with him—you have got to consider the focus, as he says himself.”

Hortense was not listening. She had gone back into the drawing-room, and, seated at the piano, she began in a loud voice:

It was an old popular ballad of Provence, sung to an air as grave as a church recitative, that Numa had taught his sister-in-law; one that he enjoyed hearing her sing with her Parisian accent, which, sliding over the Southern articulations, made one think of Italian spoken by an Englishwoman.

She interrupted herself in order to fling out his words with the gesture and intonation that Numa used when he got excited. “There, look you, me children! ’tis as foine as Shakespeare.”

“Yes, a picture of manners and customs,” said Rosalie, coming up to her, “the husband gross and brutal, the wife catlike and mendacious—a true household in Provence!”

“Oh, my dear child,” said Mme. Le Quesnoy, in a tone of gentle reproof, the tone that is used when ancient quarrels have become the habit. The piano-stool whisked quickly around and brought face to face with Rosalie the cap of the furious little Provence girl.

“’Tis really too much! what harm has it ever done to you, our South? as for me, I adore it! I did not know it at the time, but that voyage you made me take revealed to me my real country. It is no use to have been baptized at St. Paul’s; I belong down there, I do—I am a child of the ‘little square.’ Do you know, Mamma, some one of these days we will just leave these cold Northerners planted right here, and we two will go down to live in our beautiful South, where people sing and dance—the South of the winds, of the sun, of the mirage, of everything that makes one poetic and widens one’s life—

Her two agile hands fell back upon the piano, scattering the end of her dream in a tumult of resounding notes.

“And not one word about the tabor-player!” thought Rosalie. “That’s a serious thing!”

It was a good deal more serious than she imagined.

From the day when Audiberte had seen Mlle. Le Quesnoy fasten a flower on the tabor of her brother, from that very moment there arose in her ambitious soul a splendid vision of the future, which had not been without its effect on their transplantation to Paris. The reception which Hortense gave her, when she came to complain about her brother’s obstination in running after Numa, defined and strengthened her in her still vague hope. And since then, gradually, without opening her mind to her men-folks otherwise than through half words, she prepared the path with the duplicity of the peasant woman who is nearly an Italian, gliding and crawling forward. From her seat in the kitchen in the Place Royale, where she began by waiting timidly in a corner on the edge of a chair, she crept into the drawing-room and installed herself, always neat and trig, in the position of a poor relation.

Hortense was crazy about her, showed her to her friends as if she were a pretty piece of bric-à-brac brought from that land of Provence which she always spoke of with enthusiasm. And the other girl played herself off as more simple than nature allows, exaggerated her savage rages, her tirades of wrath with clenched fist against the muddy sky of Paris, and would often use a charming little exclamation, Boudiou, the effect of which she arranged and watched like a kittenish girl on the stage. The President himself had smiled at this Boudiou, and just to think of having made the President smile!

But it was in the young girl’s bedroom, when they were alone, that she put all her tricks in play. All of a sudden she would kneel at her feet, would seize her hand, go into ecstasies over the smallest points of her toilet, her way of making a bow in a ribbon, her manner of dressing her hair, letting slip those heavy compliments directly in her face, which give great pleasure all the same, so spontaneous and naïve do they appear.

Oh, when the young lady stepped out of the carriage in front of the mas [the farm-house], she thought she saw the queen of the angels in person! and she was for a time speechless at the sight, and her brother, pécaïré, when he heard on the stones of the descending road the noise of the carriage which took back the little Parisian, he said it was as if those stones, one by one, were falling on his heart. She played a great rôle with regard to this brother, his pride and his anxieties—his anxieties, now why? I just ask you why—since that reception at the “Menistry” he was being talked about in all the papers and his portrait was seen everywhere and such invitations as he got in the Faubourg Saint-Germoine—why he couldn’t meet them all! Duchesses, countesses, wrote him notes on splendid paper—they had coronets on their letters just like those on the carriages which they sent to bring him in; and still—well, no, he wasn’t happy, the “pore” man! All these things whispered in Hortense’s ear gave her some share of the fever and magnetic will-power of the peasant girl. Then, without looking at Audiberte, she asked if perhaps Valmajour did not have down there in Provence a betrothed who was waiting for him.

“He a betrothed?—avaï! you do not know him—he has much too much belief in himself to desire a peasant girl. The richest girls have been on his track, the Des Combette girl, and then still another, and a lot of gay ladies—you know what I mean! He did not even look at them. Who knows what it is he is revolving in his head? Oh, these artists—”

And that word, a new one for her, assumed on her ignorant lips an expression hard to define, somewhat like the Latin spoken at mass, or some cabalistic formula picked up in a book of magic. The heritage which would come from Cousin Puyfourcat returned again and again during the course of this adroit gossip.

There are very few families in the South of France, whether artisans or burghers, who do not possess a Cousin Puyfourcat, an adventurer who has departed in early youth in search of fortune and has never written since, whom they love to imagine enormously rich. He is like a lottery ticket running for an indefinite time, a chimerical vista opening up fortune and hope in the distance, which at last they end by taking for a fact. Audiberte believed firmly in the fortune of that cousin and she talked about it to the young girl, less for the purpose of dazzling her than in order to diminish the social gap which separated them. When Puyfourcat should die, her brother was to buy Valmajour back again, cause the castle to be rebuilt and his patent of nobility acknowledged, because everybody said that the necessary papers were extant.

At the close of such chats as these, which were sometimes prolonged deep into the twilight, Hortense remained for a long time silent, her forehead pressed against the pane, and saw the high towers of that reconstructed castle as they lifted themselves in the rose-colored winter sunset, the terrace shining with torches and resounding with concerts in honor of the chatelaine.

“Boudiou, how late it is,” cried the peasant girl, seeing that she had brought her to the point where she desired, “and the dinner for my men is not ready yet! I must fly!”

Very often Valmajour came and waited for her downstairs; but she never allowed him to come upstairs. She felt that he was so awkward and coarse, and cold, besides, toward any idea of flattering. She had no use for him yet.

Somebody who was very much in her way, too, but difficult to escape, was Rosalie, with whom her feline ways and her false innocency did not take at all. In her presence Audiberte, her terrible black brows knit across her forehead, did not say a single word; and in that Southern silence there rose up along with the racial hatred that anger of the weak person, underhand and vindictive, which turns against the obstacle most dangerous to its projects. Her real grievance was Rosalie, but she talked about quite other ones to her little sister. For example, Rosalie did not like tabor-playing; then “she did not do her religious duties—and a woman who does not do her religion, you know....” Audiberte did her religion and in the most tremendous way; she never missed a single mass and she went to communion on the proper days. But all that did not hinder in any way her actions; intriguer, liar and hypocrite as she was, violent to the verge of crime, she drew from the Bible texts nothing but excuses for vengeance and hatred. Only she kept her honor in the feminine sense of the word. With her twenty-eight years and her pretty face, in those low quarters where the Valmajours were moving nowadays, she preserved the severe chastity of her thick peasant’s scarf, bound about a heart which had never beat with any emotion beside ambition for her brother.

“Hortense makes me anxious—look at her there.”

Rosalie, to whom her mother whispered this confidentially in a corner of the drawing-room at the Ministry, thought that Mme. Le Quesnoy shared her own anxiety, but the observation made by the mother referred merely to the physical condition of Hortense, who had not been able to cure herself of a bad cold. Rosalie looked at her sister; always the same dazzling complexion, liveliness and gayety; she coughed a little, but what of that? only as all Parisian girls do after the ball season! The summer would certainly put her back again in good shape very quickly.

“And have you spoken to Jarras about her?”

Jarras was a friend of Roumestan, one of the old boys of the Café Malmus. He assured her that it was nothing and suggested a course at the waters of Arvillard.

“All right, then; you must get off quickly,” said Rosalie with vivacity, delighted with this pretext of getting Hortense away.

“Yes, but there is your father, who would be alone—”

“I will go and see him every day—”

Then, sobbing, the poor mother acknowledged the horror which such a trip with her daughter caused her. During an entire year it had been necessary for her to run from one watering place to another for the sake of the child they had already lost. Was it possible that she would have to begin again the same pilgrimage, with the same frightful results in prospect? And the other, too,—the disease had seized him at the age of twenty, in his full health, in his full powers—

“Oh Mamma, do be quiet!”

And Rosalie scolded her gently: Come, now; Hortense was not ill; the doctor said that the trip would only be a pleasure party; Arvillard, in the Alps of Dauphiny, was a marvellous country; she herself would like nothing better than to accompany Hortense in her mother’s place; unfortunately, she could not do it. Reasons most serious—

“Yes, yes. I understand—your husband, the Ministry—”

“O, no. It isn’t that at all!”

And to her mother, in that nearness of heart which they so seldom found affecting them: “Listen, then, but for you alone—nobody knows it, not even Numa ...” she acknowledged a still very fragile hope of a great happiness which she had quite despaired of, the happiness which made her wild with joy and fear, the entirely new hope of a baby who might perhaps be born to them.

CHAPTER XI. A WATERING-PLACE.

“Well, it is queer enough, this place from which I am writing to you. Imagine a square hall, very lofty, paved with stones, done in stucco work—a sonorous hall, where the daylight falling through two enormous windows is veiled down to the lowest pane with blue curtains and further obscured by a sort of floating vapor, having a taste of sulphur in it, which clings to one’s clothes and tarnishes one’s gold ornaments. In this hall are people seated near the walls, on benches, chairs and stools round little tables—people who look at their watches every minute, get up and go out, leaving their seats to others, letting one see each time through the half-open door a mob of bathers moving about in the brightly lit vestibule and the flowing white aprons of the serving women who dash here and there. In spite of all this movement, no noise, but a continual murmur of conversation in low voices, newspapers being unfolded, badly oxidized pens scratching on paper, a solemnity as in a church—the whole place bathed and refreshed by the big stream of mineral water arranged in the middle of the hall, the rush of which breaks itself against a disk of metal, is crushed to pieces, separates in jets and turns to powder above the great basins placed one upon the other and all dripping with moisture. This is the inhalation hall.

“I must let you know, my dear girl, that everybody does not inhale in the same way. For instance, the old gentleman who sits in front of me at this moment follows the prescriptions of the doctor to the letter, for I recognize them all. Our feet placed upon a stool and our chest pushed forward, let us pull in our elbows and keep our mouth open all the time to make the inspiration easy. Poor, dear man! How he does inhale, with what a confidence in the result! What little round eyes he has, credulous and devout, which seem to be saying to the spring:

“‘O spring of Arvillard, cure me well; see how I inhale you, see what faith I have in you—’

“Then we have the skeptic, who inhales without inhaling, his back bent, shrugging his shoulders and rolling up his eyes. Then there are the discouraged ones, the people who are really sick and feel the uselessness and nothingness of all this. One poor lady, my neighbor, I see putting her finger quickly to her mouth every little while to see if her glove is not stained at the tip with a red blot. But, all the same, people find some means to be gay. Ladies who belong in the same hotel push their chairs near to each other, form groups, do their embroidery, gossip in a low voice, discuss the newspaper of the baths and the list of strangers just arrived. Young persons bring out their English novels in red covers, priests read their breviaries—there are a great many priests at Arvillard, particularly missionaries with big beards, yellow faces, voices hoarse from having preached so long the word of God. As to me, you know I don’t care about novels, particularly those novels of to-day in which everything happens just like things in everyday life. So for my part I take up my correspondence with two or three designated victims—Marie Tournier, Aurélie Dansaert and you, great big sister whom I adore! Look out for regular journals! Just think, two hours of inhalation in four times, and that every day! Nobody here inhales as much as I do, which is as much as saying that I am a real phenomenon. People look at me a good deal for this reason and I have no little pride in it.

“As to the rest of the treatment—nothing else except the glass of mineral water which I go and drink at the spring in the morning and evening, and which ought to triumph over the obstinate veil which this horrid cold has thrown over my voice. There is the special point of the Arvillard waters and for that reason the singers and songstresses make this place their rendezvous. Handsome Mayol has just left us, with his vocal cords entirely renewed. Mlle. Bachellery, whom you remember—the little diva at your reception—has found herself so well in consequence of the treatment that after having finished three regular weeks she has begun three more, wherefore doth the newspaper of the baths bestow upon her great praise. We have the honor of dwelling in the same hotel with that young and illustrious person, adorned with a tender Bordeaux mother, who at the table d’hôte advertises ‘good appetites’ in the salad and talks of the one-hundred-and-forty-franc bonnet which her young lady wore at the last Longchamps races—a delicious couple, and greatly admired among us all! We go into ecstasies over the childish graces of Bébé, as her mother calls her, over her laughter, her trills, the tossings of her short skirt. We crowd together in front of the sanded courtyard of the hotel in order to see her do her game of croquet with the little girls and little boys—she will play with none but the little ones—to see her run and jump and send her ball like a real street boy.

“‘Look out, I’m going to roquet you, Master Paul!’

“Everybody says of her, ‘What a child she is!’ As for me, I believe that those false childish ways are a part of a rôle which she is playing, just like her skirts with big bows on them and her hair looped up postillon-style. Then she has such an extraordinary way of kissing that great big Bordeaux woman, of suspending herself to her neck, of allowing herself to be cradled and held in her lap before all the world! You know well enough how caressing I am—well, honor bright! it makes me feel embarrassed when I kiss mamma.

“A very singular family, too, but less amusing, consists of the Prince and Princess of Anhalt, of Mademoiselle their daughter, and the governess, chamber-women and suite, who occupy the entire first floor of the hotel and are the grand personages thereof. I often meet the princess on the stair going up step by step on the arm of her husband—a handsome gallant, bursting with health under his military hat turned up with blue. She never goes to the bathing-hall except in a sedan chair and it is heartrending to see that wrinkled and pale face behind the little pane of the chair; father and child walk at the side, the child very wretched-looking, with all the features of her mother and very likely also all of her malady. This little creature, eight years old, who is not allowed to play with the other children and who looks down sadly from the balcony on the games of croquet and the riding-parties at the hotel, bores herself to death. They think that her blood is too blue for such common joys and prefer to keep her in the gloomy atmosphere of that dying mother, by the side of that father who shows his sick wife to the public with an impudent and worn-out face, or give the child over to the servants.

“But heavens, it’s a kind of pest, it’s an infectious disease, this nobility business! These people take their meals by themselves in a little dining-room; they inhale by themselves—because there are separate halls for families—and you can imagine the mournfulness of that companionship—that woman and the little girl together in a great silent vault!

“The other evening we were together in considerable number in the big room on the ground floor where the guests unite to play little games, sing and even occasionally to dance. Mamma Bachellery had just accompanied Bébé in a cavatina from an opera—you know ‘we’ want to enter the opera; in fact, we have come to Arvillard to ‘cure up our voice for that’ according to the elegant expression of the mother. All of a sudden the door opened and the princess made her appearance, with that grand air which is her own—near her end but elegant, wrapped in the lace mantle which hides the terrible and significant narrowness of her shoulders. The little girl and the father followed.

“‘Go on, I beg of you—’ coughed the poor woman.

“And would you believe it? that idiot of a little singer must choose out of all her repertory the most harrowing, the most sentimental ballad ‘Vorrei morir,’ something like our ‘Dying Leaves’ in Italian, a ballad of a sick woman who fixes the date of her death in autumn, in order to give herself the illusion that all nature will die along with her, enveloped in the first autumnal fog as in a winding sheet!

“It is a graceful air, but with a sadness in it which is increased by the caressing sound of the Italian words; and there in the middle of that big drawing-room, into which penetrated all sorts of perfumes through the open window, the little breezes, too, and the freshness of a fine summer night, this longing to live on until autumn, this truce and surcease asked of the malady took on something too poignant to bear. Without saying a word, the princess stood up and quickly left the room. In the shadows of the garden I heard a sob, one long sob, then the voice of a man scolding, and then those tearful complaints which a child makes when it sees its mother sorrowing.

“That is the mournfulness of such watering-places: these miseries concerning health which meet one everywhere, these persistent coughs scarcely deadened by the hotel partitions, these precautions taken with handkerchiefs pressed upon the mouth in order to keep off the air, these chats and confidences, the miserable meaning of which one divines from the hand moving toward the chest or toward the back near the shoulder-blade, from the sleepy manner, the dragging gait and the fixed idea of misfortune.

“Mamma, poor mamma, who knows the stages in sickness of the lungs, says that at Eaux-Bonnes or at Mont Dore it is a very different thing from what it is here. To Arvillard people send only convalescents like myself or else desperate cases for which nothing can do any more good. Luckily at our hotel Alpes Dauphinoises we have only three sick persons of that sort, the princess and two young Lyon people, brother and sister, orphans and very rich, they say, who appear to be on their last legs; especially the sister, with that pallid complexion of the Lyon women, as if seen under water; she’s wound up in morning gowns and knit shawls, without one jewel or ribbon—not a single glimpse of coquetry about her!

“She looks poverty-stricken, that rich girl; she is certainly lost and she knows it; she is in despair and abandons herself to despair. On the other hand, in the bent figure of the young man, tightly squeezed into a fashionable jacket, there is a certain terrible determination to live, an incredible force of resistance to the malady.

“‘My sister has no spring in her—but I have plenty!’ said he the other day at the table d’hôte, in a voice quite eaten away, which is as difficult to hear as the ut note of Vauters the diva when she sings. And the fact is, he does have springs in the most surprising way; he is the make-fun of the hotel, the organizer of games, card-parties and excursions; he goes out riding and driving in sleds, that kind of little sled laden with fagots on which the mountaineers of this country toboggan you down the steepest slopes; he waltzes and fences, shaken with the terrible spasms of coughing which never stop him for a moment.

“We have, beside, a medical luminary here—you remember him—Dr. Bouchereau, the man whom mamma went to consult about our poor Andrew. I do not know whether he has recognized us, but he never bowed—a regular old bear!

“I have just come from drinking my half-glass of water at the spring. This precious spring is ten minutes away, as one ascends in the direction of the high peak, in a gorge where a torrent all feathery with foam rolls and thunders, having come from the glacier which closes the view, a glacier shining and clear between the blue Alps that seems to be forever crumbling and dissolving its invisible and snowy base into that white mass of beaten water. Great black rocks dripping constantly among the ferns and lichens, the groves of pine and a dark green foliage, a soil in which spicules of mica glitter in the coal dust—that is the place; but something that I cannot express to you is the tremendous noise of the torrent tearing among the stones and of the steam-hammer of a lumber mill, which the water sets in action; and then, besides, in this narrow gorge, on its single road, which is always crowded, there are coal-carts, long files of mules, riding parties of excursionists and the water drinkers going and coming. I forgot to mention the apparition at the doors of wretched dwellings of some horrible male or female cretin, displaying a hideous goitre, a great big idiotic face with an open and grumbling mouth! Cretinism is one of the products of the country; it seems that Nature here is too strong for human beings and that the minerals and the rest—copper, iron and sulphur—seize, strangle and suffocate them; that that water flowing from the peaks chills them as it does those wretched trees which one sees growing all dwarfed between two crags. There’s another of those impressions made upon a new arrival, the mournfulness and horror of which disappear in the course of a few days.

“For now, instead of flying from them, I have my special pet sufferers from goitre, one in particular, a frightful little monster, perched on the border of the road in a chair fit for a child of three years old; but he is sixteen, exactly the age of Mlle. Bachellery. When I near him, he dodders about his head, as heavy as a stone, and gives forth a hoarse cry, a crushed cry without understanding and without style; and as soon as he has received his piece of silver, he raises it in triumph toward a charcoal-woman, who is watching him from the corner of a window. He is a piece of good fortune envied by a great many mothers, for this hideous creature takes in, by himself alone, more than his three brothers do, who are at work at the furnaces of La Debout. His father does nothing at all; afflicted with consumption, he passes the winter by his poor man’s hearth and in summer installs himself on a bench with other unhappy ones in the warm mist which the hot springs create as they pour forth.

“The young lady of the springs, in her white apron and with dripping hands, fills the glasses which are held out to her, as they come along, while in the courtyard near by, separated from the road by a low wall, heads are seen, the bodies of which one cannot perceive, heads thrown backward, contorted with their efforts, grinning in the sunshine, their mouths wide open; ’tis an illustration for the Inferno of Dante: the sinners damned to gargling!

“Sometimes, when we leave, we go the big round while returning to the establishment and descend by the country way. Mamma, whom the noise of the hotel fatigues and who particularly fears lest I should dance too much in the drawing-room, had indulged the dream of hiring a little house in Arvillard, where there is plenty of choice at every door; on every story there are bills, which flutter among the potted plants between the fresh and tempting curtains. One asks oneself what on earth becomes of the inhabitants during the season; do they camp in bands on the surrounding mountains, or do they go and live in the hotel at fifty francs a day? It would surprise me if it were so, for that magnet which they carry in their eye when they look at the bather seems to me terribly rapacious—there is something in it which glitters and catches hold.

“Yes, that same shining something, that sudden gleam on the forehead of my little boy with the goitre, reflected from his piece of silver—I find it everywhere; on the spectacles of the little nervous doctor who auscults me every morning, in the eyes of the good sugarly-sweet ladies who ask you in to examine their houses, their most convenient little gardens, crammed with holes full of water and kitchens on the ground floor to serve the apartments in the third story; in the eyes of carmen with their short blouses and lacquered hats decked with big ribbons, who make signs to you from the boxes of their carryalls; in the look cast by the donkey-boy standing in front of the wide-open barn in which long ears switch to and fro; yes, even in the glances of these donkeys, in their long look of obstinacy and gentleness, I have seen that metallic hardness which the love of money gives; I have seen it, it exists.

“After all, their houses are frightful, huddled together and mournful, having no outlook, full of disagreeable points of all kinds which are impossible to ignore, because your attention has been drawn to them in the house next door. Decidedly we shall stick to our caravansary, the Alpes Dauphinoises, which lies hot in the sun on its height and steeps its red bricks and uncountable green shutters in the middle of an English park not yet of age, a park with hedges, labyrinth and sanded roads, the enjoyment of which it shares with five or six other overgrown hotels of the country—La Chevrette, La Laita, Le Bréda, La Planta.

“All these hotels with Savoy names are in a state of ferocious rivalry; they spy upon each other, watch each other across the copses, and there is a merry war as to which shall put on the most style with its bells, its pianos, the whip-cracking of its postilions, its expenditure of fireworks; or which one shall throw its windows widest open in order that the animation there, the laughter, songs and dances shall appeal to the visitors lodged in the opposite hotel and make them say:

“‘How they do amuse themselves down there! What a lot of people they must have!’

“But the place where the hottest battle goes on between the rival taverns is in the columns of the Bathers’ Gazette, where those lists of new arrivals are printed, which the little sheet gives with minute exactness, twice a week.

“What envious rage at the Laita or the Planta when, for example, they read:

“‘Prince and Princess of Anhalt and their suite, ... Alpes Dauphinoises.’

“Everything becomes colorless in the light of that crushing line. What response can there be? They rack their brains; they try their wits; if you are possessed of a de or some title, they drag it out and flaunt it. Why, here’s La Chevrette has been serving us up the very same Inspector of Forests three times under as many different species, as Inspector, as Marquis, and as Chevalier of Saints Maurice and Lazarus; but the Alpes Dauphinoises is still wearing the cockade, though you may be sure it is not on our account. Great heavens! You know how retiring mamma always is, and afraid of her shadow; well, she took good care to forbid Fanny saying who we were, because the position of papa and that of your husband might have drawn about us too much idle curiosity and social riffraff. The newspaper said merely Mesdames Le Quesnoy de Paris, ... Alpes Dauphinoises; and as Parisians are few and far between our incognito has not been unveiled.

“We are very simply arranged, but comfortably enough—two rooms on the second floor, the whole valley lying before us, an amphitheatre of mountains black with pine woods far below—mountains which show various shades and get lighter and lighter as they rise with their streaks of eternal snow; barren steeps close upon little farms which look like squares in green and yellow and rose, among which the haycocks look no larger than bee-hives.

“But this beautiful landscape does little to keep us in our rooms. In the evening there is the drawing-room, in the day time we wander through the park to carry out the treatment. In connection with an existence so full and yet so empty, the treatment takes hold of and absorbs you. The amusing hour is the one after breakfast, when groups are formed about the little tables for coffee under the big lime-tree at the entrance of the garden; this is the hour for arrivals and departures. People exchange good-byes and shake hands about the carriage which is taking off the bathers; the hotel people press forward, their eyes brilliant with that shiny look, that famous sheen of the Savoyard; we kiss people whom we hardly know; handkerchiefs are waved; the horse-bells jangle, and then the heavy and crowded wagon disappears, swaying along the narrow road on the side of the hill, carrying off with it those names and faces which for a moment have made a part of our life in common, those faces unknown yesterday and to-morrow forgot.

“Others come and install themselves after their own fashion. I imagine that this is like the monotony of packet-ships, with the change of faces at every port. All this going and coming amuses me, but poor dear mamma continues to be very sorrowful, very much absorbed, in spite of the smile which she tries to give when I look at her. I can guess that every detail of our lives brings with it for her a heartrending souvenir, a memory of the gloomiest images. Poor thing, she saw so many of those caravansaries of sick people during that year when she followed her poor dying boy from stage to stage, in the lowlands or on the mountains, beneath the pines or at the edge of the sea, with hope always deceived and that eternal resignation which she was ever obliged to show during her martyrdom.

“I do think that Jarras might have arranged to save her from the memory of this sorrow; for as for me, I am not sick, I cough hardly at all, and with the exception of my disgusting huskiness, which leaves me with a voice fit for crying vegetables in the street, I have never been so well in my life. A real devilish appetite, would you believe it? fits of hunger so terrible that I can hardly wait for a meal! Yesterday, after a breakfast with thirty dishes, with a menu more involved than the Chinese alphabet, I saw a woman stemming raspberries before our door. All of a sudden a desire seized me; two bowls full, my dear girl, two bowls full of the great big fresh raspberries, ‘the fruit of the country,’ as our waiter calls them, and there you have my appetite!

“All the same, my dear, how lucky it is that neither you nor I have taken the malady of that poor brother of ours, whom I hardly knew and whose discouraged expression, which is shown on his portrait in our parents’ chamber, comes back to me here, when I see other faces with their drawn features! And what an odd fish is this doctor who formerly took care of him, this famous Bouchereau! The other day mamma wanted to present me to him; in order to obtain a consultation with him we prowled around the park in the neighborhood of the old, long-legged fellow with his brutal and harsh face. But he was very much surrounded by the Arvillard doctors, who were listening to him with all the humbleness of pupils. Then we waited for him at the close of the inhalation; all our labor in vain! The fellow set off walking at such a pace that it seemed as if he wished to avoid us. You know with mamma one does not get over ground fast; so we missed him again this time. Finally, yesterday morning, Fanny went on our part to ask of his housekeeper if he could receive us; he sent back word that he was at the baths to care for his own health and not to give medical advice! There’s a boor for you! It is quite true that I have never seen such a pallor as he presents; it is like wax; papa is a highly-colored gentleman by the side of him. He lives only upon milk, never comes down to the dining-room and still less to the drawing-room. Our little nervous doctor, the one whom I call M. That’s-what-you-need, will have it that he is the victim of a very dangerous heart malady and it is only the waters of Arvillard which have for the past three years permitted him to stay alive.

“‘That’s what you need! That’s what you need!’

“That is all that one can make out in the babble of this funny little man, as vain as he is garrulous, who whirls round our apartments every morning.

“‘Doctor, I don’t sleep—I believe this treatment agitates me’.... ‘That’s what you need!’ ‘Doctor, I am always so sleepy—I think it must be that mineral water.’... ‘That’s what you need!’

“What he seems to need more than anything else is that his tour of visits should be made quickly, in order that he may be at his consultation office before ten o’clock, in that little fly-box where the patients are crammed together as far out as the stairs and down the steps as far as the curb-stone. And I can tell you he doesn’t loaf much, but whips you off a prescription without stopping for one moment his jumping and prancing, like a bather who is trying to get his ‘reaction.’

“O, yes, that reaction! That’s another story, too. As for me, I shall take neither baths nor douches, so I don’t make my reaction, but I remain sometimes a quarter of an hour under the lindens of the park, looking at the march up and down of all these people who walk with long, regular steps and a deeply absorbed look, passing each other without saying one word. My old gentleman of the inhalation hall, the man who tries to propitiate the springs, carries on this exercise with the same punctuality and conscientiousness. At the entrance to the shaded walk he comes to a full stop, shuts his white umbrella, turns down the collar of his coat, looks at his watch, and—forward, march! Each leg stiff, elbows to his side, one, two! one, two! as far as the long pencil of white light which the absence of a tree, forming there an opening, throws across the alley at that point. He never goes farther than that, raises his arms three times as if he had dumb-bells in his hands, then returns in the same fashion, brandishes dumb-bells once more, and does this for fifteen turns, one after the other. I have an idea that the department for the crazy people at Charenton must have somewhat the same features that my alley presents about eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“So it is true, after all, Numa is coming to see us? O, how delighted I am! how delighted I am! Your letter has just come by the one o’clock mail which is distributed at the office of the hotel. It is a solemn moment which is decisive of the hue and color of the entire day. The office is crammed and people arrange themselves in a semicircle around fat Mme. Laugeron, who is very imposing in her morning gown of blue flannel, whilst in her authoritative voice with a bit of manner in it, the voice of a former lady’s companion, she reads off the many-colored addresses of the mail. At the call each one advances, and it is my duty to tell you that we put a certain amount of personal pride in having a big mail. In what does one not show some personal pride, for the matter of that, during this perpetual rubbing shoulders of vanities and of follies? Just to think that I should reach the point of being proud of my two hours of inhalation!

“‘The Prince of Anhalt—M. Vasseur—Mlle. Le Quesnoy—’ Deceived again! it is only my fashion journal. ‘Mlle. Le Quesnoy—’ I give a glance to see if there is nothing more for me and skip with your dear letter away down to the end of the garden, where there is a bench surrounded by big walnuts.

“Here it is—this is my own bench, the corner where I go to be alone in order to dream and build my Spanish castles; for it is a singular thing that in order to invent well and to develop oneself intellectually according to the precepts laid down by M. Baudouy, I do not need very wide horizons. If my landscape is too big, I lose myself in it, I scatter myself, ’tis all up with me. The only bore about my bench is the neighborhood of the swing, where that little Bachellery girl passes half her day in letting herself be swung into space by the young man who believes in having springs. I should think he must have plenty of spring in order to push her that way by the hour together; at every moment come babyish cries and musical roulades: ‘Higher, higher yet, a little more—’

“Heavens! How that girl does get on my nerves! I wish that swing would pass her off and up into a cloud and that she would never come back again!

“Things are so nice upon my bench, so far away, when she is not there! I have thoroughly enjoyed your letter, the postscript of which made me utter a cry of delight.

“O, blessed be Chambéry and its new college and that corner-stone to be laid, which brings the Minister of Public Instruction into our district. He will be very comfortable here for the preparation of his speech, either walking about our shady alley, the ‘reaction alley,’ (come, that wasn’t bad for a pun!) or else beneath my walnuts, when Miss Bachellery is not scaring them with her cries. My dear Numa! I get on so well with him; he is so lively, so gay! How we shall chat together about our Rosalie and the serious motive which prevents her from travelling at this time—O great Heavens, that was a secret!—and poor mamma, who has made me swear so often about it! she is the one who will be glad enough to see dear Numa again. On this occasion she quite lost every sort of timidity or modesty; you ought to have seen the majesty with which she entered the office of the hotel in order to take an apartment for her son-in-law, the Minister! O, what fun, the face of our landlady hearing this news!

“‘Why—what—my ladies, you are—you were—?’

“‘Yes, we were—yes, we are—’

“Her broad face turned lilac and poppy-colored—a very palette for an impressionist painter. And so with M. Laugeron and the entire hotel service. Since our arrival we have been demanding an extra candlestick in vain; now there are five on the chimneypiece. I can promise you that Numa will be well served and installed; they will give him the first story, occupied by the Prince of Anhalt, which will be vacant in three days. It appears that the waters of Arvillard are bad for the princess; and even the little doctor himself believes it is better that she should leave as quickly as possible. That is what is best—because if a tragedy should occur the Alpes Dauphinoises would never recover from the blow.

“It is really pitiable, the hurry there is about the departure of these wretched people, the way they edge them off, the way they shove them along in consequence of that magnetic hostility which places seem to exhale where a person is no longer wanted. Poor Princess of Anhalt, whose arrival here was made such a festival! a little more and they would have her conducted to the borders of the department between two policemen—that is the hospitality of watering places!

“And by the way, how about Bompard? You haven’t told me whether he is coming too or not. Dangerous Bompard! If he should come I am quite capable of eloping with him on some glacier. What intellectual development might we not discover between us, as we approached the snowy peaks! I laugh, I am so delighted—and I go on inhaling, a little embarrassed, it is true, by the neighborhood of that terrible Bouchereau, who has just come in and seated himself two seats away from me.

“What an obdurate air he has, that man, to be sure! His hands crossed on the knob of his cane and chin resting on his hands, he talks away in a high voice, looking straight ahead, without really speaking to anybody. Do you suppose that I must take it as a lesson for me, what he says of the lack of prudence among the ladies who bathe, about their gowns of thin linen, about the folly of going out of doors after dinner in a country where the evenings are mortally cold? Horrid man, one would believe he is aware that I propose this evening to beg for charities at the Arvillard church in aid of the work of the propaganda! Father Olivieri is to describe from the pulpit his missionary trips into Thibet, his captivity and martyrdom, while Mlle. Bachellery will sing the ‘Ave Maria’ of Gounod, and I am going to have the greatest fun on our return to the hotel, marching through all the little dark streets by lantern-light, just like a regular ‘retreat’ with torches.

“If that is a consultation on my health which M. Bouchereau was giving me, I don’t want it; it is too late. In the first place, my very dear sir! I have full permission from my little doctor, who is far more amiable than you are and has even allowed me to take a turn at a waltz in the drawing-room at the close. Oh, only a little one, of course; besides, if I dance a little too much, everybody goes for me! They do not understand that I am robust, notwithstanding a figure like a long lead-pencil and that a Parisian girl never gets ill from dancing too much. ‘Look out now—don’t tire yourself too much.’ This woman will bring me up my shawl, that man will close the window at my back for fear that I should catch cold; but the most interested of all is the youth with springs, because he has discovered that I have a devilish deal more springs than his sister.

“Poor girl, that would not be difficult! Between you and me, I believe that, rendered desperate by the frigidity of Alice Bachellery, this young gentleman has retired upon me and proposes to make love to me—but alas, how he loses his labor; for my heart is taken, it is all Bompard’s!—O, well, after all, no, it is not Bompard’s, and you know that too. The personage in my romance is not Bompard, it is—it is—ha, ha! so much the worse for you! my hour is up; I will tell you some other day, Miss Haughtiness!”

CHAPTER XII. A WATERING-PLACE ( continued ).

The morning on which the Bathers’ Gazette announced that his Excellency, the Minister of Public Instruction, with his secretary Bompard and staff, had taken quarters in the Alpes Dauphinoises, great was the demoralization in the surrounding hotels. It just happened that La Laita had been keeping dark for two days a Catholic bishop from Geneva in order to produce him at the proper moment, as well as a Councillor-General from the Department of the Isère, a Lieutenant-Judge from Tahiti, an architect from Boston—in fact, a whole cargo; La Chevrette was on the point of receiving also a “Deputy from the Rhône and family.” But the Deputy, the Lieutenant-Judge and all disappeared, lost in the illustrious mass of flame, the flame of glory, which followed Numa Roumestan everywhere!

People talked only of him, occupied themselves about him only. Any pretext was good enough to introduce oneself into the Alpes Dauphinoises in order to pass before the little drawing-room on the ground floor looking into the garden where the Minister took his meals with his ladies and his secretary; to see him taking a hand in a game of bowls, dear to Southern Frenchmen, with Father Olivieri of the Missions, a holy man and terribly hairy, who, along of having lived among savages, had taken unto himself their manners and customs, uttering terrible cries when taking aim and brandishing the balls above his head when letting fly as if they were tomahawks.

The Minister’s handsome features, the oiliness of his manners, won him all hearts, but more especially his sympathy for the poor. The day after his arrival the two waiters who served on the first floor announced at the hotel office that the Minister was going to take them to Paris for his personal servants. Now, as they were good workmen, Mme. Laugeron pulled a very wry face, but allowed nothing to be seen by his Excellency, whose presence was of such great importance and honor to her hotel. The prefect and the rector made their appearance from Grenoble in full fig to present their respects to Roumestan. The Abbot of La Grande Chartreuse—for Roumestan made a pleading on their side against the Prémontrés and their liqueur—sent him with the greatest pomp a case of extra-fine chartreuse; and finally the Prefect of Chambéry came to get his orders for the laying of the corner-stone for the new college, a good occasion for a manifesto in a speech and for a revolution in the methods at the universities.

But the Minister asked for a little rest. The labors of the session had wearied him; he wanted to have a chance to get a breath, to live quietly in the midst of his family and prepare at leisure this Chambéry speech, which had such a considerable importance. And the prefect understood that perfectly well; he only asked to be notified forty-eight hours before in order that he might give the necessary brilliancy to the ceremony. The corner-stone had been waiting for two months and would naturally wait longer for the good-will of the illustrious orator.

As a matter of fact, what kept Roumestan at Arvillard was neither the necessity for rest nor the leisure needed by that marvellous improvisator—upon whom time and reflection had the same effect as humidity upon phosphorus—but the presence of Alice Bachellery. After five months of an impassioned flirtation, Numa had got no further with his little one than he was on the day of their first meeting. He haunted the house, enjoyed the savory bouillabaisse cooked by Mme. Bachellery, listened to the songs of the former director of the Folies Bordelaises, and repaid these slight favors with a flood of presents, bouquets, Ministerial theatre boxes, tickets to meetings of the Institute and the Chamber of Deputies, and even with the diploma of Officer of Academy for the song-writer—all this without getting his love affair one bit ahead.

Nevertheless, he was not one of those fresh hands who are ready to go fishing at every hour without having tried the water beforehand and thoroughly baited it; only he was engaged in an affair with the cleverest kind of trout, who amused herself with his precautions, now and then nibbled at the bait and sometimes gave him the impression that she was caught; but then, all of a sudden, with one of her bounds she would skip away, leaving him with his mouth dry with longing and his heart shaken by the motions of her undulating, subtle and tempting spine.

Nothing was more enervating than this little game. Numa could have caused it to stop at any minute by giving the little girl what she demanded, namely, a nomination as prima donna at the opera, a contract for five years, large extras, allowance for fire, the right to have her name displayed—all that stipulated on paper bearing the government stamp, and not merely by a simple clasp of the hand, or by Cadaillac’s “Here’s my hand on it!” She believed no more in that than she did in the expressions, “You may depend upon me for it”—“It’s just the same as if you had it”—phrases with which for the past five months Roumestan had been trying to dupe her.

Roumestan found himself between two pressing demands. “Yes,” said Cadaillac, “all right—if you will renew my own lease.” Now Cadaillac was used up and done with; his presence at the head of the first musical theatre was a scandal, a blot, a rotten heritage from the Imperial administration. The press would certainly raise an outcry against a gambler who had failed three times and was not allowed to wear his officer’s cross, against a cynical poseur who dissipated the public money without any shame.

Finally, wearied out with not being able to allow herself to be captured, Alice broke the fish-line and skipped away, carrying the fish-hook with her.

One day the Minister arrived at the Bachellery house and found it empty, except for the father, who, in order to console him, sang his last popular refrain for his benefit:

He forced himself to be patient for a month, and then went to see the fertile song-writer again, who was good enough to sing him his new song beginning—

and let him know that the ladies, finding themselves delightfully situated at the baths, had announced their intention to double the term of their sojourn.

Then it was that Roumestan remembered that he was expected for the laying of the corner-stone of the college at Chambéry, a promise he had made off-hand and which probably would have remained off-hand if Chambéry had not been in the neighborhood of Arvillard, whither, by a providential piece of chance, Jarras, the doctor and friend of the Minister, had just sent Mlle. Le Quesnoy.

Immediately upon his arrival they met each other in the garden of the hotel. She was tremendously surprised to see him, just as if that very morning she had not read the pompous announcement of his coming in the daily gazette, just as if for eight days past, through the thousand voices of its forests, its fountains, its innumerable echoes, the whole valley had not been announcing the arrival of his Excellency.

“What! you here?”

Roumestan, with his Ministerial air, imposing and stiff:

“I am here to see my sister-in-law.”

Moreover he was surprised to find that Miss Bachellery was still at Arvillard; he had thought her gone this long while.

“Well, come now, I have got to take care of myself, haven’t I? since Cadaillac pretends that my voice is so sick!”

Then she gave him a little Parisian nod with the ends of her eyelashes and waltzed off, uttering a clear roulade, a delicious undersong like the note of a blackbird, which one hears long after one loses the bird from sight.

Only from that day on she changed her manner. It was no longer the precocious child forever bouncing about the hotel, roqueting Master Paul, playing with the swing and other innocent games; it was no longer the girl who was only happy with the children, disarmed the most severe mammas and most morose ecclesiastics by the ingenuousness of her laugh and her promptness at the sacred services. In place of that appeared Alice Bachellery, the diva of the Bouffes, the pretty tomboy, lively in manners and setting the pace, who surrounded herself with young whipper-snappers, got up impromptu festivities, picnics and suppers, whose doubtful reputation her mother, who was always present, only partly succeeded in making respectable.

Every morning a basket-wagon with a white canopy bordered with fringed curtains drew up to the front door an hour before these fine ladies came downstairs in their light-toned gowns. Meanwhile about them pranced and caracoled a jolly cavalcade consisting of everybody in the way of a free and unmarried person in the Alpes Dauphinoises and the neighboring hotels—the Assistant Justice, the American architect and more especially the young man on springs, whom the young diva seemed no longer to be driving to despair by her innocent infantilities. The carriage well-crammed with cloaks against their return, a big basket of provisions on the box, they swept through the country at a sharp rate on the road for the Chartreuse of St. Hugon. Three hours were spent on the mountain along zigzag, precipitous roads on a level with the black tops of pines that scramble down precipices toward torrents all white with foam; or else in the direction of Brame-farine, where one breakfasts on mountain cheese washed down by a little claret very lively in its nature, which makes the Alps dance before one’s eyes—Mont Blanc and all that marvellous horizon of glaciers and blue peaks which one discovers up there, together with little lakes, fragments shining at the foot of the crags like so many broken pieces of sky.

Then they came down “à la ramasse,” seated upon sledges of branches without any backs to lean against, which made it necessary to grasp the branches frantically, launched headlong as they were down the declivities, steered by a mountaineer who goes straight ahead over the velvet of the upland pastures and the pebbly bed of dry torrents, and passing with the same swiftness a section of rock or the big gap of a river. At last it lands you down below overwhelmed, bruised and suffocated, your whole body in a quiver and your eyes rolling with the sensation of having survived a most horrible earthquake.

And the day’s trip was not complete unless the entire cavalcade had been drenched on the way by one of those mountain storms, bright with lightning flashes and streaks of hail, which frighten the horses, make the landscape dramatic and prepare a sensational return. Little Bachellery would be seated on the box in some man’s overcoat, the tassel of her cap decorated with a feather of the Pyrennean partridge. She would hold the reins, whip the horses hard in order to warm herself and, when once landed from the coach, recount all the dangers of the excursion with the greatest vivacity, a high sharp voice and brilliant eyes, showing the lively reaction of her youthful body against the cold downpour—all with a little shudder of fear.

It would have been well if then at least she had felt the need of a good sleep, one of those leaden slumbers which trips in the mountains produce. Not at all; till early morning, in the rooms of these women, there were goings on without end—laughter, songs, popping bottles, meals brought up at improper hours, card-tables pushed around for baccarat—and all this over the head of the Minister, whose room happened to be just underneath.

Several times he complained of it to Mme. Laugeron, who was very much torn between her desire to be agreeable to his Excellency and fear of causing clients with such good paying qualities discontent. And besides, has any one the right to be very exacting in these hotels at the baths which are always being turned upside down by departures and arrivals in the midst of the night, by trunks that are dragged about, by big boots and iron-bound Alpine sticks of mountain climbers, who are engaged in making ready for the ascent long before daybreak? And then, besides, the fits of coughing of the sick people, those horrible, incessant coughs which seem to tear people in spasms, appearing to combine the elements of a sob, a death rattle and the crowing of a husky cock.

These giddy nights, heavy July nights, which Roumestan passed turning and twisting on his bed, filled with pressing thoughts, while upstairs sounded clear in the night the laughter of his neighbors, broken by single notes and snatches of song—these nights he might have employed writing his speech for Chambéry; but he was too much agitated and too angry. He had to control himself not to run upstairs to the next floor and drive off at the tips of his boots the young man on springs, the American and that shameless Assistant Justice, that dishonor to French jurisprudence in the colonies, so as to be able to seize that naughty little scoundrel by the neck, by her turtle-dove’s neck puffed out with roulades, and at the same time say to her just once for all:

“Isn’t it about time that you ceased making me suffer in this way?”

In order to quiet himself and drive off these dreams and other visions even more vivid and painful he lit his candle again, called to Bompard, asleep in the adjoining room—his comrade, his echo, always ready at command—and then the two would talk about the girl. It was for that very purpose he had brought him along, having torn him away with no little trouble from the business of establishing his artificial hatcher. Bompard consoled himself by talking of his venture to Father Olivieri, who was thoroughly acquainted with the raising of ostriches, having lived at Cape Town a long while. The tales told by the priest interested the imaginative Bompard very much more than Numa’s affair with little Bachellery—the Father’s voyages, his martyrdom, the different ways in which the robust body of the man had been tortured in different countries—that buccaneer’s body burnt and sawed and stretched on the wheel, a sort of sample card of refinements in human cruelty—and all that along with the cool fan of silky and tickly ostrich plumes dreamt of by the promoter. But Bompard was so well trained to his business of shadow that even at that time of night Numa found him ready to warm up and be indignant in sympathy with him and to express, with his magnificent head under the silken ends of a night scarf, the emotions of anger, irony or sorrow, according as the talk fell upon the false eyelashes of the artificial little girl, on her sixteen years, which certainly were equal to twenty-four, or on the immorality of a mother who could take part in such scandalous orgies. Finally, when Roumestan, having declaimed and gesticulated well and laid bare the weakness of his amorous heart, put out his candle, saying “Let’s try to sleep, come on,” then Bompard would use the advantage of the darkness to say to him before going to bed:

“Well, in your place, I know well enough what I would do.”

“What?”

“I would renew the contract with Cadaillac.”

“Never!”

And then he would plunge violently under the bed-clothes in order to protect himself from the rowdy-dow overhead.

One afternoon at the time for music, that hour during life at the baths which is given over to coquetry and gossip, whilst all the bathers, crowded in front of the establishment as if on the poop of a ship, came and went, slowly circled about, or took their seats on the camp-chairs arranged in three rows, the Minister had darted into an empty alley in order to avoid Mlle. Bachellery, whom he saw coming clad in a stunning toilet of blue and red, escorted by her staff. There, all alone, seated in the corner of a bench and with his pre-occupation strong upon him, infected by the melancholy of the hour and that distant music, he was mechanically stirring about with his umbrella the spots of fire with which the alley was strewn by the setting sun, when a slow shade passing across his sunlight made him raise his eyes. It was Bouchereau, the celebrated doctor, very pale and puffy, dragging his feet after him. They knew each other in the way that all Parisians at a certain height of society know each other. It chanced that Bouchereau, who had not been out for several days, felt in a sociable frame of mind; he took a seat; they fell to talking: “Is it true that you are ill, Doctor?”

“Very ill,” said the other with his manner of a wild boar, “a hereditary disease—a hypertrophy of the heart. My mother died of it and my sisters also. Only, I shall last less long than they, because of my horrible business; I have about a year to live—or two years at the most.”

There was nothing except useless phrases with which to answer this great scientist, this infallible diagnoser who was talking of his death with such quiet assurance. Roumestan understood it, as in silence he pondered that there indeed were sorrows a good deal more serious than his own. Bouchereau went on without looking at him, having that vague eye and that relentless sequence of ideas which the habit of the professorial chair and his lectures give to a professor:

“We physicians, you see, are supposed not to feel anything because we have such an air with us. They think that in the sick person we are taking care of the sickness only, never the being, the human creature suffering pain. What an error! I have seen my master Dupuytren, who was supposed to be a pretty tough chicken, weeping hot tears before a poor little sufferer from diphtheria who told him very quietly that it was an awful bore to die ... and then those heart-breaking appeals from anguished mothers, those passionate hands which clasp your arm: ‘My child, save my child!’ ... and then the fathers who stiffen themselves up and say to you in a very masculine voice, but with great big tears running down their cheeks: ‘You will pull him through, won’t you, Doctor?’ It is all very well to harden oneself, but such despairs break your heart, and that is a nice thing, isn’t it, when one’s own heart is already attacked? Forty years of practice and every day becoming more nervous and sensitive—it is my patients who have killed me! I am dying from the sufferings of other people!”

“But I thought you did not accept patients any more, Doctor,” said the Minister, who was deeply moved.

“Oh, no; never any more, for nobody’s sake! I might see a man fall dead to the ground there in front of me and I wouldn’t even bend down. You understand? It is enough to turn one’s blood at last, this sickness of mine, which I have increased by all the sicknesses of others! Why, I want to live; there is nothing else but life!”

With all his pallor he excited himself and his nostrils, pinched with a look of morbidness, drank in the light air filled with lukewarm aromas, vibrating musical instruments and cries of birds. He continued with a heart-broken sigh:

“I do not practise any more, but I always remain the doctor. I preserve that fatal gift of diagnosis, that horrible second sight for the latent symptom, for suffering which the sufferer hopes to conceal, and which at a mere glance at the passer-by I perceive in the person who walks and talks and acts in the full force of his being, showing me the man about to die to-morrow, the motionless corpse. And all that just as clearly as I see it advancing towards me, the fit which is going to do for me, that last fainting-fit from which nothing can ever bring me back.”

“It is frightful!” murmured Numa, who felt himself turning pale. A poltroon in the face of sickness and death, like all Provençal people, those people so crazy to live, he turned his face away from the redoubtable scientist and did not dare look him in the face for fear he might read on his own rubicund features the warning signs of his, Numa’s, approaching end.

“Oh! this terrible skill at diagnosis, which they all envy me, how sad it makes me, how it ruins the little remnant of life which remains to me! Why, look here: I know a luckless woman here whose son died of laryngeal consumption ten or twelve years ago. I had seen him twice and I alone among all the physicians gave warning of the seriousness of the malady. Well, to-day I come across that same mother with her young daughter; and I may say that the presence of those unfortunate ones destroys the good of my sojourn at the baths and does me more harm than my treatment will ever do me good. They pursue me, they wish to consult me, and as for me I absolutely refuse to do it. No good of auscultating that child in order to read her condemnation! It was enough the other day to have seen her voracity while seizing a bowl of raspberries, and during the inhalation to have seen her hand lying on her knees, a thin hand, the nails of which are puffed up and rise above the fingers as if they were ready to detach themselves. That girl has the consumption her brother had; she will die before the year is out. But let other people tell them that; I have given enough of those dagger-stabs which have turned again to stab me. I want no more.”

Roumestan had got up, very much frightened.

“Do you know the name of those ladies, Doctor?”

“No; they sent me their card and I would not even see them. I only know that they are at our hotel.”

And all of a sudden, looking down the alley, he cried:

“By George, there they are!—I am off—”

Away down there at the end of the alley, on the little gravelled circle whence the band was sending its last note, there was a movement of umbrellas and light-colored gowns among the foliage, just as the first strokes of the dinner bells were heard from the hotels. The ladies Le Quesnoy detached themselves from a group of lively, chatting people, Hortense tall and slender in the sunlight, in a toilet of muslin and valenciennes, a hat trimmed with roses and in her hand a bouquet of the same kind of rose bought in the park.

“With whom were you talking just now, Numa? We thought it was Dr. Bouchereau.”

There she was before him, dazzling in her youth and so brilliant, on that happy day, that her mother herself began to lose her fears and allowed a little of that infectious gayety to be reflected on her ancient face.

“Yes, it was Bouchereau, who was recounting to me his miseries; he’s pretty low, poor fellow!”

And Numa, looking at her, reassured himself.

“The man is crazy; it is not possible; it’s his own death he is dragging about with him and prognosticates everywhere.”

At that moment Bompard appeared, walking very quickly and brandishing a newspaper.

“What is up?” asked the Minister.

“Great news! The tabor-player has made his début—”

They heard Hortense murmur: “At last!” and Numa was radiant.

“Success, was it not?”

“Do you think so? I have not read the article; but here are three columns on the front sheet of the Messenger!”

“There’s one more whom I discovered!” said the Minister, who had seated himself again with his thumbs in the armholes of his waist-coat. “Come on, read it to us.”

Mme. Le Quesnoy having called attention to the fact that the dinner-bell had sounded, Hortense hastily answered that it was only the first bell, and, her cheek resting on her hand, she listened in a pretty attitude of smiling expectancy. Bompard read:

“Is it due to the Minister of the Fine Arts or to the Director of the Opera that the Parisian public suffered such a grotesque mystification as that with which it was victimized last night?—”

They all started, with the exception of Bompard, who, under the impetus of his gait as a fine reader, lulled by the sonorous sound of his own voice and without taking in what he was reading, looked from one to the other, surprised at their astonishment.

“Well,” said Numa, “go on, go on!”

“In any case, it is the Honorable Roumestan who must shoulder the responsibility. He it is who has lugged up from his province this savage and odd-looking piper, this goat-whistler—”

“Well, there certainly are some people who are very mean,” interrupted the young girl, who had turned quite pale under her roses. The reader continued, with eyes staring in horror at the dreadful things he saw coming:

“—this goat whistler; to him is due that our Academy of Music appeared for the space of an evening like the return from the fair at Saint Cloud. In truth it would take a very crack fifer indeed to believe that Paris—”

The Minister rudely dragged the newspaper from his hand.

“I hope you don’t intend to read us that idiocy to the bitter end, do you? it is quite enough to have brought it to us at all.”

He ran down the article with his eye, with one of those quick glances of the public man who is used to reading the invectives of the daily press. “A provincial Minister—a pretty clog-dancer—Valmajour’s own Roumestan—hissed the Ministry and smashed his tabor—”

He had enough of it, thrust the virulent paper down into the bottom of his pocket, then rose, puffing with the rage that swelled his face, and taking Mme. Le Quesnoy by the arm:

“Come, let’s go to dinner, Mamma—this should teach me not to fret myself for the sake of a parcel of nobodies.”

All four marched along together, Hortense with her eyes upon the ground in a state of consternation.

“This is a matter concerning an artist of great talent,” said she, trying to strengthen her voice, a little veiled in its tone. “One ought not to hold him responsible for the injustice done him by the public nor for the irony of the newspapers.”

Roumestan came to a dead stop.

“Talent—talent!—bé, yes—I don’t deny that—but much too exotic—” and, raising his umbrella:

“Let us beware of the South, little sister, let’s beware of the South—don’t work it too hard—Paris will grow weary.”

And he resumed his walk with measured steps, quiet and cool as if he were a citizen of Copenhagen. The silence was unbroken save for the crackling of the gravel under his feet, which in certain circumstances seems to indicate the crushing or crumbling effect of a fit of rage or of a dream.

When they reached the front of the hotel, from the ten windows of whose enormous dining-room there came the noise of hungry spoons clattering on bottoms of plates, Hortense stopped, and, raising her head:

“So then, this poor boy—you’re going to abandon him?”

“What is to be done?—there is no use fighting against it—since Paris doesn’t care for him.”

She gave him an indignant glance which was almost one of disdain.

“Oh, it is horrible, what you are saying; well, as for me, I am prouder than you are; I am true to my enthusiasms!”

She crossed the porch of the hotel with two skips.

“Hortense, the second bell has sounded!”

“Yes, yes, I know—I am coming down.”

She ran up to her room and locked the door in order not to be interfered with. Opening her desk, one of those natty trifles by the aid of which a Parisian woman can make personal to herself even the chamber of an inn, she pulled out one of the photographs of herself which she had had taken in the head-dress and scarf of an Arles woman, wrote a line underneath it and affixed her name. Whilst she was putting on the address the bell in the tower of Arvillard sounded the hour across the sombre violet that filled the valley, as if to give solemnity to what she had dared to do.

“Six o’clock.”

From the torrent the mist was rising in wandering and flaky masses of white. In the amphitheatre of forests and mountains and the silver plume of the glacier, in the rose-colored evening, she took note of the smallest details of that silent and reposeful moment, just as on the calendar one marks some single date among all others; just as in a book one underscores a passage which has caused one emotion; dreaming aloud she said:

“It is my life, my entire life I am risking at this moment.”

She took as witness the solemnity of the evening, the majesty of nature, the tremendous repose of everything about her.

Her entire life that she was engaging? Poor little girl! if she had only known how little that was!

A few days after this the Le Quesnoy ladies left the hotel, Hortense’s treatment having ended. Although reassured by the healthy look of her child and by what the little doctor said concerning the miracle performed by the nymph of the waters, her mother was only too glad to have done with that life, which in its smallest details recalled to her a past martyrdom.

“And how about you, Numa?”

O, as for him, he intended to stay a week or two longer, finish a bit of medical treatment and take advantage of the quiet which their departure would afford him in order to write that famous speech. It would make a tremendous row, the news of which they would get at Paris. By George! Le Quesnoy would not like it much!

Then all of a sudden, Hortense, though ready to leave, and notwithstanding she was happy at returning home to see the beloved absent ones whom distance made even more dear to her—for her imagination reached even to her heart—Hortense suddenly felt sorrow at leaving this beautiful country and all the hotel society and her friends of three weeks, to whom she had no idea she had become so much attached. Ah, ye loving natures! how you give yourselves out! how everything grasps you and then what pain ensues when breaking these invisible yet sensitive threads!

People had been so kind to her, so full of attention; and at the last hour so many outstretched hands pressed about the carriage, so many tender expressions! Young girls would kiss her: “We shall have no more fun without you.” Then they promised to write to each other and exchanged mementos, sweet-smelling boxes and paper-cutters made of mother-of-pearl with this inscription in a shimmering blue like the lakes: “Arvillard, 1876.” And while M. Laugeron slipped a bottle of superfine Chartreuse into her travelling-sack, she saw, up there behind the pane of her chamber window, the mountaineer’s wife who had been her servant dabbing her eyes with an enormous handkerchief of the color of wine-lees and heard a husky voice murmur in her ear: “Plenty of spring, my dear young lady, always plenty of spring!” It was her friend the consumptive, who, having jumped up on the wheel, poured out upon her a look of good-bye from two haggard and feverish eyes, but eyes sparkling with energy, will and a bit of emotion besides. O, what kind people! what kind people!...

Hortense could not speak for fear of crying.

“Good-bye, good-bye, all!”

The Minister accompanied the ladies as far as the distant railway station and took his seat in front of them. Crack goes the whip, jingle go the bells! All of a sudden Hortense cries out:

“Oh, my umbrella!” She had had it in her hand not a moment before. Twenty people rush off to find it: “The umbrella, the umbrella”—not in the bedroom, not in the drawing-room; doors slam; the hotel is searched from top to bottom.

“Don’t look for it; I know where it is.”

Always lively, the young girl jumps out of the carriage and runs to the garden, toward the grove of walnuts, where even that morning she had been adding several chapters to the romance that was being written in her crazy little head. There lay the umbrella, thrown across the bench, a bit of herself left in that favorite spot, something which was very like her. What delicious hours had been passed in this nook of rich verdure! what confidences had gone off on the wings of the bees and butterflies! Without a doubt she would never return thither again. This thought caused her heart to contract and kept her there. At that moment she found everything charming, even the long grinding sound of the swing.

“Get out! you make me weary—”

It was the voice of Mlle. Bachellery who was furious at being left because of this departure and, believing herself alone with her mother, was talking to her in her habitual tongue. Hortense thought of the filial flatteries which had so often jarred upon her nerves and laughed to herself while returning to the carriage. Then, at the turn of an alley, she found herself face to face with Bouchereau. She stepped aside, but he laid hold of her arm.

“So you are going to leave us, my child?”

“Why, yes, sir.”

She hardly knew what to answer, startled by this meeting and surprised because it was the first time that he had ever spoken to her. Then he took her two hands in his own and held her that way in front of him, his arms wide apart, and gazed upon her fixedly from his piercing eyes under their brushy white brows. Then his lips and hands, his whole body trembled, while a rush of blood colored deeply his pallid face.

“Well, then, good-bye, happy journey!” And without another word he drew her to him and pressed her to his breast with the tenderness of a grandfather and then hastened away with both hands pressed against his heart, which seemed about to break.

CHAPTER XIII. THE SPEECH AT CHAMBÉRY.

The little Bachellery girl, clad in a fantastic cloak with a blue silk capuchon, to go with a little toque wound round with a great big veil, sang before her glass while finishing the buttoning of her gloves; her clear, sharp voice had risen that morning in full limpidity and in the best of humors. Spick and span for the excursion, the gay little body of her had a pleasant fragrance of fresh toilet and new gown, very neat and trig in contrast with the sloppy state of the hotel bedroom, where the remainder of a late supper was to be seen on the table, higgledy-piggledy with poker chips, cards and candles—all this close to the tumbled bed and a big bath-tub full of that gleaming “little milk” of Arvillard, so fine for calming the nerves and making the skin of the ladies bathing there as smooth as satin. Downstairs the basket-wagon was waiting, the horses shaking their bells and a full escort of youths caracoling in front of the porch.

Just as the toilet was finished a knock came at the door.

“Come in!”

Roumestan came in, much excited, and held out to her a large envelope:

“There, Mlle—O! read—read—”

It was her engagement at the opera for five years, with all the appointments she had wished, with the right of having her name printed big, and everything. When she had read it, article by article, coldly and with perfect poise, down to the great coarse signature of Cadaillac, then and only then she took one step towards the Minister, and, raising her veil, which was drawn closely about her face to keep out the dust on the trip, standing very close to him, her rosy beak in the air:

“You are very good—I love you—”

Nothing more than that was needed to make the man of the public forget all the embarrassments which this engagement was going to cause him. He restrained himself, however, and remained stiff, cold and frowning like a crag.

“Now, I have kept my promise and I withdraw—I do not care to disarrange your picnic party—”

“My picnic? Oh, yes, that’s so—we’re going to Château Bayard.”

And then, casting both her arms around his neck, she said in a wheedling voice:

“You’ve got to come with us; yes—O, yes, I tell you.”

She brushed her long pencilled eyelashes across his cheek and even nibbled a little at his statuesque chin, but not very hard, with the ends of her little teeth.

“What! with those young people? Why, it is impossible. You cannot dream of it?”

“Those young people? Much do I care for those young people! I will just let them rip—Mamma will let them know—oh, they are used to it!—You hear, Mamma?”

“I’m going,” said Mme. Bachellery, whom one could see in the next chamber with her foot on a chair, trying to force over her red stockings a pair of cloth gaiters much too small for her. She made the Minister one of her famous courtesies from the Folies Bordelaises and hurried downstairs to send the young gentlemen flying.

“Keep a horse for Bompard; he will come with us,” cried the little girl after her; and Numa, touched by this attention, enjoyed the delicious pleasure of holding this pretty girl in his arms and hearing all that impertinent gang of young people walk off at a funeral pace with their ears drooping. Many a time had their jumpings and skippings caused his heart a lively time. One kiss applied for a long moment on a smile which promised everything—then she disengaged herself.

“Hurry up and dress yourself; I’m in haste to be on the way.”

What a buzz of curiosity through the hotel, what a movement behind the green blinds, when it was known that the Minister had joined the picnic at Château Bayard and that his big white waistcoat and the Panama hat shading his Roman face were seen displayed in the basket-wagon in front of the little singer! After all, just as Father Olivieri who had learned a lot during his voyages remarked, what harm was there in it, anyhow? Didn’t her mother accompany them, and Château Bayard, a historical monument, did it or did it not belong to the public buildings under Ministerial control? So let us not be so intolerant, great Heavens! especially in regard to men who give up their entire life to the defence of the right doctrines and our holy religion!

“Bompard is not coming—what’s the matter with him?” murmured Roumestan, impatient at having to wait there before the hotel exposed to all those plunging glances which volleyed upon him notwithstanding the canopy of the carriage. At a window in the first story an extraordinary something appeared, a something white and round and exotic, which spake in the voice of the former chieftain of Circassians, “Go on ahead, I’ll rejine you!”

Just as if they had only been waiting for the word, the two mules, low in shoulder but solid in hoof, got away shaking their travelling-bells, crossed the park in three jumps and whirled past the bathing establishment.

“Ware! ware!”

The frightened bathers and sedan-chairs hurried to one side; the bathing-maids, the big pockets of their aprons full of money and colored tickets, appeared at the entrance of the galleries; the massage men, as naked as Bedoweens under their woollen blankets, showed themselves up to the waist on the stairway of the furnaces; the blue shades of the inhalation halls were thrust aside; everybody wished to see the Minister and the diva pass.

But already they are far away, whirled at railway speed through the intersecting labyrinth of Arvillard’s little black streets, over the sharp cobblestones, close together and veined with sulphur and fire, out of which the carriage strikes sparks as it bounds along, shaking the low walls of the leprous-colored houses and causing heads to appear at the windows decked with placards. At the thresholds of the shops where they sell iron-pointed canes, parasols, climbing-irons, chalk stones, minerals, crystals and other catch-penny things for bathers appear heads which bow and brows that uncover at the sight of the Minister. The very people affected with goitre recognize him and salute with their foolish and raucous cries the grand master of the University of France, while the good ladies seated with him proudly draw themselves up stiff and most worshipful opposite, feeling well the honor which is being done them. They only lounge at their ease when they are quite clear of the village lands, on the fine turnpike toward Pontcharra, where the mules stop to blow at the foot of the tower of Le Truil, which Bompard had fixed upon as a trysting-place.

The minutes pass, but no Bompard! They know he is a good horseman because he has so often boasted of it; they are astonished and irritated—particularly Numa—who is impatient to get on down that even white road which seems absolutely without an end, and get farther into that day which seems to open up like a life full of hopes and adventures. Finally, from a cloud of dust out of which rises a frightened voice that pants out Ho! la! Ho! la! emerges the head of Bompard, covered by one of those pith helmets spread with white cloth, having a vague look of a life-boat, like those used by the British army in India, which the Provençal had brought along with the intention of dramatizing and making imposing his trip to the baths, having allowed his hatter to believe that he was off for Bombay or Calcutta.

“Come on, my dear boy!”

Bompard tosses his head with a tragical air. Evidently at his departure things had taken place; the Circassian must have been giving the people of the hotel a very queer idea of his powers of equilibrium, because his back and arms are soiled with large spots of dust.

“Wretched horse!” said he, bowing to the ladies, while the basket-wagon started once more, “wretched horse! but I have forced him to a walk!”

He had forced him so well to a walk that now the strange beast would not go ahead at all, prancing and turning about on one spot like a sick cat, notwithstanding all the efforts made by his rider. The carriage was already far away.

“Are you coming, Bompard?”

“Go on ahead, I’ll rejine you!” cried he once more in his finest Marseilles twang; then he made a despairing gesture and they saw him rushing off in the direction of Arvillard in a furious whirl of hoofs. Everybody thought: “He must have forgotten something,” and nobody thought about him further.

The turnpike curved about the hills, a broad highroad of France set with walnut-trees, having to the left forests of chestnut and pines growing on terraces and on the right tremendous slopes rolling down as far as one could see, down to the plain where villages appear crowded together in the hollows of the landscape. There were the vineyards, fields of wheat and corn, mulberries, almond-trees and dazzling carpets of Spanish broom, the seeds of which, exploding in the heat, kept up a constant popping as if the very soil were crackling and all on fire. One could readily suppose it were so, considering the heavy air and the furnace heat that did not seem to come from the sun—which was almost invisible, having retired behind a sort of haze—but appeared to emanate from burning vapors of the earth; it made the sight of Glayzin and its top, surmounted with snows which one might touch, as it seemed, with the end of one’s umbrella, look deliciously refreshing to the sight.

Roumestan could not remember ever to have seen a landscape to be compared with that one; no, not even in his dear Provence; and he could not imagine happiness more complete than his own. No anxiety, no remorse. His wife faithful and believing, the hope of a child, the prediction Bouchereau had uttered concerning Hortense, the ruinous effect which the appearance in the Journal Officiel of the decree as to Cadaillac would produce—none of these had any existence so far as he was concerned. His entire destiny was wrapt up in that beautiful girl whose eyes reflected his own, whose knees touched his, and who, beneath her blue veil turned to a rose-color by her blond flesh, sang to him while pressing his hand:

While they were rapidly whirling away in the breeze made by their motion, the turnpike, gradually becoming lonelier, widened out their horizons little by little, permitting them to see an immense plain in a semicircle with its lakes and villages and then mountains differing in shade according to their distance; it was Savoy beginning.

“O! how beautiful! O! how beautiful!” said the little singer; and he answered in a low voice: “How I do love you!”

At the last halt Bompard came up to them once more, but very piteously, on foot, dragging his horse after him by the bridle.

“This brute is most extraordinary,” said he without further explanation, and when the ladies asked him if he had fallen: “No—it’s my old wound which has opened again.”

Wounded! where and when? He had never spoken of it before. But with Bompard one had to expect any surprise. They made him get into the carriage; and with his very mild-mannered horse quietly fastened behind they set off toward Château Bayard, whose two pepper-box towers, wretchedly restored, could be seen on a high piece of ground.

A maid servant came to meet them, a quick-witted mountaineer’s woman in the service of an old priest formerly in charge of parishes in the neighborhood, who dwells in Château Bayard with the proviso that tourists may enter freely. When a visitor is announced the priest goes up to his bed-chamber in a very dignified way, unless indeed it is a question of personages of note; but the Minister, sly fellow, took good care not to give his title, so that it was in the guise of ordinary visitors that they were shown by the servant—with her phrases learned by heart and the canting tone of people of this sort—all that is left of the old manor of the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, whilst the driver laid out breakfast under an arbor in the little garden.

“Here you have the antique chapel where our good chevalier morning and evening.... Ladies and gentlemen will kindly notice the thickness of the walls.”

But they didn’t notice anything at all. It was very dark and they stumbled against the broken bits of wall which were dimly lit from a loophole, the light of which fell through a hay-loft established above the beams of the ceiling. Numa, his little girl’s arm under his own, made some fun of the Chevalier Bayard and of “his worthy mother,” dame Hélène des Allemans. The odor of ancient things bored them to death, and actually, at one time, in order to try the echo of the vaulted ceiling in the kitchen, Mme. Bachellery started to sing the last ballad composed by her husband, but really a very naughty one—

and yet nobody was scandalized; quite the contrary.

But outside, when breakfast was served on a massive stone table, and after their first hunger had been appeased, the valley of the Graisivaudan, Les Bauges, the severe buttresses of the Grande-Chartreuse and the contrast made by that landscape full of tremendous lines with the little terrace grass-plot where this solitary old man dwelt—given up entirely to prayer, to his tulip-trees and to his bees—affected little by little their spirits with something sweet and grave which was akin to reflection. At dessert the Minister, opening his guide-book to refresh his memory, spoke about Bayard “and of his poor dame mother who did tenderly weep” on that day when the child, setting out for Chambéry to be page at the Court of the Duke of Savoy, caused his little bay nag to prance in front of the north gate, on that very place where the shadow of the great tower was lengthening itself, slender but majestic, like the phantom of the old vanished castle.

And Numa, exciting himself, read to them the fine sentiments of Madame Hélène to her son at the moment of his departure:

“Pierre, my friend, I recommend to thee that before everything else thou shalt love, fear and serve God without in any wise doing Him offence, if that be possible.”

Standing there on the terrace, sweeping off a gesture which carried as far as Chambéry:

“That is what should be said to children, that is what all parents, that is what all schoolmasters—”

He stopped short and struck his brow with his hand:

“My speech!—why, that is my speech!—I have it! splendid! the Château Bayard, a local legend—for fifteen days have I been looking for it—and here it is!”

“Why, it is pure Providence,” cried Mme. Bachellery, full of admiration, but thinking all the same that the breakfast was ending rather solemnly. “What a man! What a man!”

The little girl seemed also very much excited, but of this impression Roumestan took no heed; the orator was boiling in him, behind his brow and in his breast; so, completely absorbed with his idea:

“The fine thing,” said he, casting his eyes about him, “the fine thing would be to date the speech from Château Bayard—”

“O, if Mr. Lawyer should want a little corner in which to write—”

“Why, yes, only to jot down a few notes. You’ll excuse me, ladies, just for the time that will do to drink your coffee, and I will be back. It’s merely to be able to put the date to my speech without telling a lie.”

The servant placed him in a little room on the ground floor, most ancient in appearance, whose domelike, vaulted ceiling still carries traces of gilding; an ancient room which they pretend was Bayard’s oratory, just as they present to you as his bedroom the big hall to one side in which an enormous peasant’s bed, with a canopy and dark blue curtains, is set up.

It was very nice to write between those thick walls into which the heavy atmosphere of the day could not penetrate, behind that half-open shutter which threw a pencil of light across the page and allowed the perfumes from the little garden to enter. At first the orator’s pen was not quick enough to keep pace with the flow of his ideas; he poured out his phrases headlong, in a mass—well worn but eloquent phrases of a Provençal lawyer, filled with a hidden heat and the sputtering of sparks here and there, like the outflow of molten metal. Suddenly he stopped, his head emptied of words or rendered heavy by the fatigue of the journey and the weight of the breakfast. Then he marched up and down from the oratory to the bedroom, talking in a high voice, lashing himself, listening to his footsteps under the sonorous vaults as if they were those of some illustrious revenant, and then he set himself down again without the thoughts to put down a line. Everything swam about him, the walls brilliantly white-washed and that pencil of sunlight which seemed to hypnotize him. He heard the noise of plates and laughter in the garden, far, far away, and presently, with his nose on the paper, he had fallen fast asleep.

A tremendous thunder-clap made him start to his feet. How long had he been there? His head a little confused, he stepped out into the deserted and motionless garden. The fragrance of the tulip-trees made the air heavy. Under the vacant arbor wasps were heavily flying about the heeltaps in the champagne glasses and the bits of sugar left in the cups, which the mountaineer’s woman was hurriedly clearing off, seized by the nervous fear of an animal at the approach of a thunder-storm and making the sign of the cross each time the lightning flashed. She informed Numa that the young lady had found herself with a bad headache after breakfast and so she had taken her to Bayard’s chamber to sleep a little, closing the door “vary gently” in order not to bother the gentleman at his work. The two others, the fat lady and the man with the white hat, had gone down toward the valley and without any doubt they would catch it, because there was going to be a terrible ... “just look!”

In the direction she indicated, on the choppy crest of Les Bauges and the chalky peaks of the Grande-Chartreuse, which were enveloped in lightning flashes like some mysterious Mount Sinai, the sky was darkened by an enormous blot of ink that grew larger every instant, under which the whole valley took on an extraordinary luminous value, like the light from a white and oblique reflector, according as this sombre and growling threat continued to advance. All the valley shared in the change, the reflux of wind in the tops of the green trees, the golden masses of grain, the highways indicated by feathery clouds of white dust raised by the wind and the silver surface of the river Isère. In the far distance Roumestan perceived the canvas pith helmet of Bompard, which shone like a lighthouse reflector.

He went in again but could not take hold of his work. For the moment sleep no longer paralyzed his pen; on the contrary he felt himself strangely excited by the presence of Alice Bachellery in the next chamber. By the way, was she still there? He opened the door a little and did not dare to shut it again for fear of disturbing the charming slumber of the singer, who had thrown herself with loosened clothes on the bed in a troubling disorder of tumbled hair, open corset and white, half-seen curves.

“Come, come, Numa, beware! it is the bedroom of Bayard; what the deuce!”

Positively he seized himself by the collar like a malefactor, dragged himself back and forcibly seated himself at the table. He put his head between his hands, closing his eyes and his ears in order to absorb himself completely in the last phrase, which he repeated in a low voice:

“Yes, gentlemen, the sublime advice of the mother of Bayard, which has come down to us in that mellifluous tongue of the middle ages—would that the University of France....”

The storm was so heavy and depleting, like the shade of certain trees in the tropics, it took away his nerve. His head was swimming, intoxicated by the exquisite perfumes given forth by the bitter flowers of the tulip-trees or else by that armful of blond hair scattered over the bed not far off. Wretched Minister! It was all very well to cling to his speech and to invoke the aid of the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, public instruction, religious culture, the rector of Chambéry—nothing was of any use. He had to return into Bayard’s bedchamber, and this time so close to the sleeping girl that he could hear her gentle breathing and touch with his hand the tassel stuff of the curtains which framed this provoking slumber, this mother-of-pearl flesh with the shadows and the rosy undercolor of a naughty drawing in red chalk by Fragonard.

But even there, on the brink of temptation, the Minister still fought with himself and in a mechanical murmur his lips continued to mumble that sublime advice which the University of France—when a sudden roll of thunder, whose claps came nearer and nearer, woke the singer all of a jump.

“Oh, what a fear I was in—hello! is it you?” She recognized him with a smile, with those clear eyes of a child which wakes up without the slightest embarrassment at its own disorder; and there they remained motionless and affected by the silence and growing flame of their desire. But the bedroom was suddenly plunged in a big dark shadow by the clapping-to of the tall shutters, which the wind banged shut one after the other. They heard the doors slam, a key fall, the whirling of leaves and flowers over the sand as far as the lintel of the door through which the hurricane plaintively moaned.

“What a storm!” said she in a very low voice, taking hold of his burning hand and almost dragging him beneath the curtains—

“Yes, gentlemen, this sublime advice of Bayard’s mother, which has come down to us in that mellifluous tongue of the middle ages—”

It was at Chambéry this time, in sight of the old Château of Savoy and of that marvellous amphitheatre formed of green hills and snowy mountains which Châteaubriand remembered when he saw Mount Taygetus, that the grand master of the University was speaking, thickly surrounded by embroidered coats, by palm decorations, by orders with ermine, by epaulettes decked with big tassels; there he was, dominating an enormous crowd excited by the power of his will and the gesture of his strong hand that still grasped a little ivory-handled trowel with which he had just spread the mortar for the first stone of the new Lyceum.

“Would that the University of France might speak those words to every one of its boys: ‘Pierre, my friend, I recommend to thee before everything else that....’”

And whilst he quoted those touching words emotion caused his hand, his voice and his broad cheeks to tremble at the memory of that great perfumed room in which, during the agitation caused by a most memorable thunder-storm, the Chambéry speech had been composed.

CHAPTER XIV. THE VICTIMS.

A morning at ten o’clock. The antechamber at the Ministry of Public Instruction; a long corridor badly lighted, with dark hangings and an oaken wainscot. The gallery is full of a crowd of office-seekers, seated or sauntering about, who from minute to minute become more numerous; each new arrival gives his card to the solemn clerk wearing his chain of office, who receives it, examines and without a word deposits it by his side on the slab of the little table where he is writing; all this in the haggard light from a window dripping from a gentle October rain.

One of the last arrivals, however, has the honor of stirring the august impassiveness of this clerk. He is a great big man, weather-beaten, sunburned and of a tarry aspect, with two little silver anchors in his ears for rings and with the voice of a seal that has caught a cold—just such a voice as one hears in the transparent early morning mists in the seaports of Provence.

“Let him know that it is Cabantous, the pilot—he knows what is up; he expects me.”

“You are not the only one,” answers the clerk, who smiles discreetly at his own joke.

Cabantous does not appreciate the delicacy of the joke; but he laughs in good humor, his mouth opening back as far as the silver anchors; and, making use of his shoulders, he pushes through the crowd, which falls aside before his wet umbrella, and installs himself on a bench alongside a sufferer who is almost as weather-beaten as himself.

“Té! vé!—why, it is Cabantous. Hello, how are you?”

The pilot begs his pardon—cannot recall who it is.

“Valmajour, you remember; we used to know each other down there in the arena.”

“That is true, by gad.—Bé, my good fellow, you at least can say that Paris has changed you—”

The tabor-player has now become a gentleman with very long black hair pushed behind his ears in the manner of the musical person, and that, along with his swarthy complexion and his blue-black moustache, at which he is constantly pulling, makes him look like one of the gypsies at the Ginger-bread Fair. On top of all this a constant look of the village cock with its crest up, a conceit like that of village beau and musician combined, in which the exaggeration of his Southern origin betrays itself and slops over, notwithstanding his tranquil and ungarrulous appearance.

His lack of success at the opera has not frightened him off; like all actors in such cases he attributes his failure to a cabal, and for his sister and himself that word “cabal” has taken on barbaric and extraordinary proportions, and moreover a Sanscrit spelling—the khabbala—a mysterious monster which combines the traits of the rattlesnake and the pale horse of the Apocalypse.

And so he relates to Cabantous that he is about to appear in a few days at a great variety show in a café on the boulevard—“An eskating-rink I would have you understand!” where he is to figure in some living pictures, at two hundred francs the evening.

“Two hundred francs an evening!” The eyes of the pilot roll in his head.

“And besides that, they will cry my bography in the street and my portrait in life size will be on all the walls of Paris, wid my costume of a troubadour of the old times, which I shall put on every evening when I do my music.”

What flatters him most in all of this is the costume. What a bore that he is not able to put on his crenelated cap and his long-pointed shoes in order that he might show the Minister what a splendid engagement he has, and this time on good government stamped paper which was signed without Roumestan’s aid! Cabantous looks at the stamped paper, smudged on both its faces, and sighs.

“You are mighty lucky; why, look at me—it’s more than a year that I am ’oping for my medal. Numa told me to send my papers on here and I did send my papers here—after that I never heard anything more about the medal, nor about the papers, nor about anything else. I wrote to the Ministry of Marine; they don’t know me at the Marine. I wrote to the Minister himself; the Minister did not answer. And what beats me is this, that now, when I haven’t my papers with me and a discussion arises among the mercantile captains as to pilotage, the port councilmen won’t listen to my arguments. So, finding that was the way of it, I put my ship in dry dock and says I to myself: Come, let’s go and see Numa.”

He was almost in tears about it, was this wretched pilot. Valmajour consoles and reassures him and promises to speak for him with the Minister; he does this in an assured tone, his finger on his moustache, like a man to whom people can refuse nothing. But after all the haughty attitude is not peculiar to him; all these people who are waiting for an audience—old priests of pious manners in their visiting cloaks; methodical and authoritative professors; dudish painters with their hair cut Russian fashion; thick-set sculptors with broad ends to their fingers—they all have this same triumphant air—special friends of the Minister and sure of their business. All of them, as they came in, have said to the clerk: “He expects me.”

Each one is filled with a conviction that if only Roumestan knew that he was there!—This it is that gives a very particular physiognomy to the antechamber of the Ministry of Public Instruction, without a trace of those feverish pallors, of those trembling anxieties, which one perceives in the waiting-rooms at other Ministries.

“Who is he engaged with?” asks Valmajour in a loud voice, going up to the little table.

“The Director of the Opera.”

“Cadaillac—all right, I know—it is about my business!”

After the failure made by the tabor-player in his theatre Cadaillac had refused to let him appear again. Valmajour wished to bring suit, but the Minister, who was afraid of the lawyers and the little newspapers, had begged the musician to withdraw his plea, guaranteeing him a round sum as damages. There is no doubt whatever with Valmajour that they are at this moment discussing these damages and not without a certain animation, too, for every few moments the clarion voice of Numa penetrates the double door of his sitting room, which at last is rudely torn open.

“She is not my protegée, she is yours!”

Big fat Cadaillac leaves the room, hurling this taunt, crosses the antechamber with an angry gait and passes the clerk who is coming up between two lines of solicitors.

“You have only to give my name.”

“Let him only know that I am here.”

“Tell ’im it’s Cabantous.”

The clerk listens to nobody, but marches very solemnly on with a few visiting cards in his hand and the door which he leaves partly open behind him shows the Minister’s sitting-room filled with light from its three windows overlooking the garden, all of one panel of the wall covered by the cloak turned up with ermine of M. de Fontanes, painted standing at full length.

A trace of astonishment showing on his cadaverous face, the clerk comes back and calls:

“Monsieur Valmajour.”

The musician is not at all astonished at passing in this way over the heads of the others.

Since early morning his portrait has appeared placarded on all the walls of Paris. Now he is a personage and hereafter the Minister will no longer cause him to languish among the draughts in a railway station. Conceited and smiling, there he stands in the centre of the luxurious bureau where secretaries are occupied in pulling out drawers and cardboard pigeon-holes in a frantic search for something. Roumestan in a terrible rage scolds, thunders and curses, both hands in his pockets:

“Come now, be done with it! those papers, what the devil!—So they have been lost, have they, that pilot’s papers?... Really, gentlemen, there is an absence of order here!...”

He catches sight of Valmajour: “Ha, it’s you, is it?” and he springs upon him with one leap, the while the backs of the secretaries are disappearing by the side doors in a state of terror, each carrying off an armful of boxes.

“Now look here, are you never going to stop persecuting me with your dog-at-the-fair music? Haven’t you had enough with one chance at it? How many do you require? Now they tell me that there you are on all the walls in your hybrid costume. And what is all this bosh that they have brought me here?—that your biography? A mass of blunders and lies. You know perfectly well that you are no more a Prince than I am and that those parchments which are talked about here have never existed save in your own imagination!”

With the brutal gesture of the man who loves argument he grabbed the wretched fellow by the flap of his jacket with both hands and as he talked kept shaking him. In the first place this “eskating-rink” didn’t have a penny—perfect fakirs! They would never pay him and all he would get would be the shame of this dirty advertisement on the strength of his name, the name of his protector. Now the newspapers could begin their jokes again—Roumestan and Valmajour the fifer for the Ministry; and, growing excited at the memory of these attacks, his big cheeks quivering with the anger hereditary in his family, with a fit of rage like those of Aunt Portal, more scaring in the solemn surroundings of an office where the personality of a man should disappear before the public situation, he screamed at the top of his voice:

“But for God’s sake get out of here, you wretched creature, get out of here! We have had enough of your shepherd’s fife!”

Stunned and silly, Valmajour let the flood go on, stuttering, “All right, all right,” and appealed to the pitying face of Méjean, the only man whom the Master’s rage had not sent into headlong flight, and then gazed piteously on the big portrait of Fontanes, who looked scandalized at excesses of this sort and seemed to accentuate his grand Ministerial air the more, in proportion as Roumestan lost his own dignity. At last, escaping from the powerful fist which clutched him, the musician was able to reach the door and fly half-crazed with his tickets for the “eskating.”

“Cabantous, pilot!” said Numa, reading the name which the impassive clerk presented to him, “There’s another Valmajour! But no, I won’t have it; I have had enough of being their tool—enough for to-day—I am no longer in....”

He continued to march up and down his office, trying to get rid of what remained of that furious rage, the shock of which Valmajour had very unfairly received. That Cadaillac, what impudence! daring to come and reproach him about the little girl, in his own office, in the Ministry itself, and before Méjean, before Rochemaure! “Well, certainly, I am too weak; the nomination of that man to the directorship of the opera was a terrible blunder!”

His chief clerk was entirely of that opinion but he would have taken good care not to say so; for Numa was no longer the good fellow he used to be, who was the first to laugh at his own embarrassments and took railleries and remonstrances in good part. Having become the practical chief of the cabinet in consequence of his speech at Chambéry and a few other oratorical triumphs, the intoxication that comes with heights gained, that royal atmosphere where the strongest heads are turned, had changed him quite, had made him nervous, splenetic and irritable.

A door beneath a curtain opened and Mme. Roumestan appeared, ready to go out, her hair fashionably dressed and a long cloak concealing her figure. With that serene air which for five months back lit up her pretty face: “Have you your council to-day, my dear? Good-morning, Monsieur Méjean.”

“Why, yes, council—a meeting—everything!”

“I wanted to ask you to come as far as Mamma’s house; I am breakfasting there; Hortense would have been so glad!”

“But you see it is impossible.” He looked at his watch: “I ought to be at Versailles at noon.”

“Then I will wait for you and take you to the station.”

He hesitated a second, not more than a second:

“All right, I will put my signature here and then we will go.”

While he was writing Rosalie was giving Méjean news of her sister in a low tone. The coming of winter affected her spirits; she was forbidden to go out. Why did he not call upon her? She had need of all her friends. Méjean gave a gesture of discouragement and woe: “Oh, so far as I am concerned....”

“But I tell you yes, there is a good deal more chance for you. It is only caprice on her part; I am sure that it cannot last.”

She saw everything in a rosy light and wanted to have all the world about her as happy as she was—O, how happy! and glad with so perfect a joy that she indulged in a certain superstition never to acknowledge the fulness of her joy to herself. As for Roumestan, he talked about his affair everywhere with a comical sort of pride, to indifferent people as well as to his intimates:

“We are going to call it the child of the Ministry!” and then he would laugh at his joke till the tears came.

And of a truth those who knew about his existence outside, the household in the city impudently established with receptions and an open table, this husband who was so sensitive and tender and who talked of his coming fatherhood with tears in his eyes, appeared a character not to be defined, perfectly at peace in his lies, sincere in his expansiveness, putting to the rout the conclusions of those who did not understand the dangerous complications of Southern natures.

“Certainly, I will take you there,” said he to his wife as they got into the carriage.

“But if they are waiting for you?”

“Well, so much the worse for them; let them wait for me—we shall be together all the longer.”

He took Rosalie’s arm under his own and pressing against her as if he were a child:

“Té! do you know that I am happy only in this place? Your gentleness rests me, your coolness comforts me. That Cadaillac put me into such a state of rage! He’s a fellow without any conscience, he’s a fellow without any morality—”

“You didn’t know his character, then?”

“The way he is carrying on that theatre is a burning shame!”

“It is true that the engagement of that Mlle. Bachellery ... why did you let him do it? A girl who is false in everything, her youth, her voice, even her eyelashes.”

Numa felt his cheeks reddening; it was he himself who fastened them on, now, with his own great big fingers, those eyelashes! The little girl’s mamma had taught him how to do it.

“Whom does this little good-for-nothing belong to, anyhow? The Messenger was talking the other day of influences in high circles, of some mysterious protection—”

“I don’t know; to Cadaillac, undoubtedly.”

He turned away in order to conceal his embarrassment and suddenly threw himself back horrified.

“What is it?” asked Rosalie, looking out of the window too.

There was the placard of the skating-rink, enormous, printed in crying colors which showed out under the rainy and gray sky, repeating itself at every street corner, on every vacant space of a naked wall and on the planks of temporary fences. It showed a gigantic troubadour encircled with living pictures as a border—all blotches in yellow, green and blue, with the ochre color of the tabor placed across the figure. The long hoarding which surrounded the new building of the city hall, past which their carriage was going at the moment, was covered with this coarse and noisy advertisement, which was stupefying even to Parisian idiocy.

“My executioner!” said Roumestan with an expression of comic dismay. Rosalie found fault with him gently.

“No—your victim! and would that he were the only one! But somebody else has caught fire from your enthusiasm—”

“Who can that be?”

“Hortense.”

Then she told him what she had finally proved to be a certainty, notwithstanding the mysteries made by the young girl—namely, her affection for this peasant, a thing which at first she had believed a mere fancy, but which worried her now like a moral aberration in her sister.

The Minister was in a state of indignation.

“How can it be possible? That hobnail, that bog-trotter!”

“She sees him with her imagination, and especially in the light of your legends and inventions which she has not been able to put in the right focus. That is why this advertisement and grotesque coloring which enrage you fill me on the contrary with joy. I believe that her hero will appear so ridiculous to her that she will no longer dare to love him. If it were not for that, I hardly know what would become of us. Can you imagine the despair of my father; can you imagine yourself the brother-in-law of Valmajour?—oh, Numa, Numa! poor involuntary maker of dupes.”

He did not put up any defence, but indulged in anger against himself, against his “cussed Southernism” which he was not able to overcome.

“Look here, you ought to stay always just as you are, right up against my side as my beloved councillor and my holy protection. You alone are good and indulgent, you alone understand and love me.”

He held her little gloved hand to his lips and said this with such a firm conviction that tears, real tears, reddened his eyelids: then, warmed up and refreshed by this effusion, he felt better; and so, when they reached the Place Royale and with a thousand tender precautions he had helped his wife out of the carriage, it was with a joyous tone and one free of all remorse that he threw the address to his coachman: “London Street, hurry, quick!”

Moving slowly, Rosalie vaguely caught this address and it gave her pain. Not that she had the slightest suspicion; but he had just said that he was going to the Saint-Lazare station. Why was it that his acts were never in accordance with his words?

In her sister’s bedroom another cause for anxiety met her: she felt on entering that there had been a sudden stoppage of a discussion between Hortense and Audiberte, who still kept the traces of fury on her face while her peasant’s head-dress still quivered on her hair bristling with rage. Rosalie’s presence kept her in bounds, that was clear enough from her lips and eyebrows viciously drawn together. Still, as the young wife asked her how she did, she was forced to answer and so began to talk feverishly of the eskating, of the advantageous terms which were offered them, and then, surprised at Rosalie’s calm, demanded in an almost insolent tone:

“Aren’t you coming to hear my brother? It is something that is at least worth while, if for nothing more than to see him in his costume!”

This ridiculous costume as it was described by her in her peasant dialect, from the dents in the cap down to the high curving points of the shoes, put poor Hortense in a state of agony; she did not dare raise her eyes to her sister’s face. Rosalie asked to be excused from going; the state of her health did not permit her to visit the theatre. Besides, in Paris there were certain places of entertainment where all women could not go. The peasant woman stopped her short at the first suggestion.

“Beg your pardon, I go perfectly well and I hope I am as good as anybody else—I have never done any wrong, I have not; I have always fulfilled my religious duties.”

She raised her voice without a trace of her old bashfulness, just as if she had acquired rights in the house. But Rosalie was much too kind and far too superior to this poor ignorant thing to cause her humiliation, particularly as she was thinking about the responsibility that rested on Numa. So, with the entire intelligence of her heart and revealing as usual the uncommon delicacy of her mind, in those truthful words that heal although they may sting a little, she endeavored to make Audiberte understand that her brother had not succeeded and never would succeed in Paris, the implacable city, and that rather than obstinately continue a humiliating struggle, falling into the mire and mud of artistic existence, it would be far better for them to return to their Provence and buy their farm back again, the means to accomplish which would be furnished them, and so, in their laborious life surrounded by nature, forget the unhappy results of their trip to Paris.

The peasant girl let her talk to the very end without interrupting her a single moment, merely darting at Hortense a look of irony from her wicked eyes as though to challenge her to make some reply. At last, seeing that the young girl did not wish to say anything more, she coldly declared that they would not go, because her brother had all kinds of engagements in Paris—all kinds which it was impossible for him to break. Upon that she threw over her arm the heavy wet cloak which had been lying on the back of a chair, made a hypocritical curtsy to Rosalie, “Wishing you a very good day, Madame, and thanking you very much, I am sure,” and left the room, followed by Hortense.

In the antechamber, lowering her voice on account of the servants:

“Sunday evening, qué? half past ten without fail!” And in a pressing, authoritative voice: “Come now, you certainly owe that to your pore friend! Just to give him a little heart ... and to start with, what do you risk, anyhow? I am coming to get you and I am going to bring you back!”

Seeing that Hortense still hesitated, she added almost aloud in a tone of menace: “Come now, I would like to know: are you his betrothed or not?”

“I’ll come, I’ll come,” said the young girl greatly alarmed.

When she returned to the room, seeing that she looked worried and sad, Rosalie asked her:

“What are you thinking about, my dear girl? are you still dreaming the continuation of your novel? It ought to be getting pretty well forward in all these months,” added she, taking her gayly around the waist.

“Oh, yes, pretty well forward—”

After a silence Hortense continued in an obscure tone of melancholy: “But the trouble is, I can’t see my way to the close of the novel.”

She didn’t care for him any more: it may be that she never had loved him. Under the transforming power of absence and that “tender glory” which misfortune gave to the Moor Abencerage he had appeared to her from a distance as her man of destiny. It seemed a proud act on her part to knit her own existence with that of one who was abandoned by everything, success and protectors together. But when she got back to Paris, what a pitiless clearness of things! What a terror to perceive how absolutely she had made a mistake!

To start with, Audiberte’s first visit had shocked her because of the new manners of the girl, too familiar and free and easy, and because of the look of an accomplice which she gave when telling her in whispers: “Hush, don’t say anything! he’s coming to get me....”

That kind of action seemed to her rather hasty and rather bold, more especially the idea of presenting this young man to her parents. But the peasant girl wanted to hurry things. And then, all at once, Hortense perceived her error when she looked upon this artist of the variety stage with his long hair behind his ears, full of stage movements, denting in and shifting his sombrero of Provence on his characteristic head—always handsome, of course, but full of a plain preoccupation to appear so.

Instead of taking a lowly manner in order to make her forgive him for that generous spirit of interest which she had felt for him, he preserved his air of a conqueror, his silly look of the victor, and without saying a word—for he would hardly have known what to say—he treated this finely organized Parisian girl just as he would in similar conditions have treated her, the Des Combette girl—took her by the waist with the motion of a soldier and troubadour and wanted to press her to his breast. She disengaged herself with a sudden repulsion and a letting go of all her nerves, leaving him there looking foolish and astonished, while Audiberte quickly intervened and scolded her brother violently. What kind of manners had he, anyhow? It must have been in Paris that he learned such manners, in the Faubourg Saint Germoyne, without a doubt, among his duchesses?

“Come now, wait at least until she is your wife!”

And turning to Hortense:

“O, he is so in love with you; his blood is parching with his love, pécaïré!”

From that time on, when Valmajour came to get his sister he considered it necessary to assume the sombre and desperate air of an illustration to a ballad: “‘The ocean waits for me,’ the Knight hadjured.” In other conditions the young girl might have been touched, but really the poor fellow seemed too much of a nullity. All he knew how to do was to smooth the nap of his soft hat while reciting the list of his successes in the faubourg of the nobles, or else the rivalries of the stage. One day he talked to her for a whole hour about the vulgarity of handsome Mayol, who had refrained from congratulating him at the end of a concert; and all the while he kept repeating:

“There you are with your Mayol!... Bé! he is not very polite, your Mayol isn’t!”

And all this was accompanied by Audiberte’s attitudes of watchfulness, her severity of a policeman of morals, and this in the face of these very cold lovers! O, if she had been able to divine what a terror possessed the soul of Hortense, what a loathing for her frightful mistake!

“Ho! what a capon—what a capon of a girl—” she would sometimes say to her, trying to laugh, with her eyes brimming with rage, because she considered that this love-affair was dragging too much and believed that the young girl was hesitating for fear of meeting the reproaches and anger of her parents. Just as if that would have weighed a straw in the balance for such a free and proud nature, had there been a real love in her heart; but how can one say: “I love him,” and buckle on one’s armor, rouse one’s spirits and fight, when one does not love at all?

However, she had promised, and every day she was harassed by new demands. For instance there was that first night at the skating-rink, to which the peasant girl insisted upon taking her, whether or no, counting upon the singer’s success and the sympathy of the applause to break down the last objections. After a long resistance the poor little girl ended by consenting to skip out secretly for that one night behind the back of her mother, making use of lies and humiliating complications. She had given way through fear and weakness, perhaps also with the hope of getting her first impression back again at the theatre—that mirage which had vanished; of lighting up again, in fact, that flame of love which was so desperately quenched.

CHAPTER XV. THE SKATING-RINK.

Where was it? Whither was she being taken? The cab had been going for a long, long time; seated at her side, Audiberte had been holding her hands, reassuring her and talking to her with a feverish violence. She did not look at anything, she did not hear anything; the noise of the wheels, the sharp tones of that shrill little voice had no sense for her mind whatever; nor did the streets and boulevards and house-fronts seem to her to wear their usual aspect, but were discolored by the lively emotion within, as if she were looking at them out of the carriage in a funeral or marriage procession.

Finally they brought up with a jerk and stopped before a wide pavement inundated by white light which carved the crowd of people swarming here into black sharp-cut shadows. At the entrance of the large corridor was a wicket for the tickets, then a double door of red velvet, and right upon that a hall, an enormous hall, which with its nave and its side aisles and the stucco on its high walls, recalled to her an Anglican church which she had once visited on the occasion of a marriage. Only in this case the walls were covered with placards and advertisements in every color, setting forth the virtues of pith helmets, shirts made to measure for four francs and a half and announcements of clothing-shops, alternating with the portrait of the tabor-player, whose biography one could hear cried in that voice of a steam-valve used by programme-sellers. They were in the midst of a stunning noise in which the murmur of the circulating mob, the humming of the tops on the cloth of the English billiard tables, calls for drinks, snatches of music broken by patriotic gunshots coming from the back of the hall, were dominated by a constant noise of roller skates going and coming across a broad asphalted space surrounded by balustrades, the centre of a perfect storm of crush hats and bonnets of the time of the Directory.

Hortense walked behind the Provençal girl, anxious and frightened, now turning pale and now turning red beneath her veil, following her with difficulty through a perfect labyrinth of little round tables at which women were seated two and two drinking, their elbows on the table, cigarettes in their mouths and their knees up, overwhelmed with a look of boredom. Against the wall from point to point stood crowded counters and behind each was a girl standing erect, her eyes blackened with kohl, her mouth red as blood and little flashes of steel coming from a bang of black or russet hair plastered over her brow. And this white and black of painted skin, this smile with its painted vermilion-point, were to be found on all the women, as if it were a livery belonging to nocturnal and pallid apparitions which all were forced to wear.

Sinister also was the slow strolling of the men who elbowed their way in an insolent and brutal manner between the tables, puffing the smoke of their thick cigars right and left with the insult of their marketing as they pushed about to look as closely as possible at the wares. And what gave it still more the impression of a market was the cosmopolite public talking all kinds of French, a hotel public which had just arrived and run into the place in their travelling clothes—Scotch bonnets, striped jackets, tweeds still full of the fog of the Channel and Muscovite furs thawing fast in the Paris air. And there were the long black beards and insolent airs of people from the banks of the Spree covering satyr grins and Tartar mugs; there too were Turkish fezzes surmounting coats without any collars, negroes in full evening dress gleaming like the silk of their tall hats and little Japanese men dressed like Europeans, dapper and correct, like tailors’ advertisements fallen into the fire.

“Bou Diou! How ugly he is,” said Audiberte suddenly, as they passed a very solemn Chinaman with his long pigtail hanging down the back of his blue gown; or else she would stop and, nudging her companion with her elbow, cry “Vé! vé! see the bride!” and show her some woman dressed entirely in white lounging on two chairs—one of which supported her white satin shoes with silver heels—the waist of her dress wide open, the train of her gown all which-way, and orange flowers fastening the lace of a short mantilla in her hair. Then, suddenly scandalized by certain words which gave her the clue to these very chance bridal flowers, the Provençal girl would add in a mysterious manner: “A regular snake, you know!” Then suddenly, in order to drag Hortense away from a bad example, she would hurry her toward the central part of the building where a theatre rose far in the back, occupying the same place as the choir in a church. The stage was there under electric flames which came and went in two big glass spheres away up in the ceiling, like two gleaming, starry eyes of an Eternal Father in a book of holy images.

Here they could compose themselves after the tumultuous wickedness of the lobbies. Families of little citizens, the shopkeepers of the quarter, filled the orchestra stalls. There were few women. It might have been possible to believe oneself in some kind of an auditorium, were it not for the horrible noise all about, which was always being overborne by the regular rolling of the skaters on the asphalt floor, drowning even the brass instruments and the drums of the orchestra, so that really on the boards all that was possible was the dumb-show of living pictures.

As they seated themselves the curtain went down on a patriotic scene: an enormous Belfort lion made of cardboard, surrounded by soldiers in triumphant poses on crumbling ramparts, their military caps stuck on the ends of their guns, gesticulating to the measure of the Marseillaise, which nobody could hear. This performance and this wild excitement stimulated the Provençal girl; her eyes were bulging in her head; as she found a place for Hortense she exclaimed:

“Qué! we are nice here, qué! But do haul up your veil—don’t tremble so, there is no danger wid me!”

The young girl did not answer, still overwhelmed by the impression of that slow, insulting crowd of strollers where she had been confounded with the rest, among all those livid masks of women. And behold, right in front of her, she found those horrible masks once more, with their blood-stained lips—found them in the grimacing faces of two clowns in tights who were dislocating all their joints, a bell in each hand with which they were sounding out, whilst they frolicked about, an air from “Martha”—a veritable music of the gnomes, formless and stuttering, very much in its place in the musical babel of the skating-rink. Then the curtain fell again, and for the tenth time the peasant girl stood up and sat down again, fussed about, fixed her head-dress anew and suddenly exclaimed, as she looked down the programme: “There, the Cordova Mount—the summer locusts, the farandole—there, there, it is beginning, vé, vé!”

Rising once more, the curtain displayed upon the background of the scenery a lilac mountain, up which mounted buildings of stone most weird in construction, partly castle, partly mosque, here a minaret and there a terrace; they rose in ogival arches, crenelations and Moorish work, with aloes and palm-trees of zinc rising at the foot of towers sharply cut against the indigo blue of a very crude sky. One may see just such absurd architecture in the suburbs of Paris among villas inhabited by newly enriched merchants. In spite of all, in spite of the crying tones of the slopes blossoming with thyme and exotic plants placed there by mistake because of the word “Cordova,” Hortense was rather embarrassed at sight of that landscape which held for her the most delightful recollections. And that palace of the Turk perched upon the mountain all rose-colored porphyry, and that reconstructed castle, really did seem to her the realization of her dreams, but quite grotesque and overdone, as it happens when one’s dream is about to slip into the oppression of a nightmare.

At a signal from the orchestra and from an electric jet, long devil’s-darning-needles, personated by girls in an undress of tightly-fitting silks, a sort of emerald-green tights, rushed upon the stage waving their long membranous wings and whirling their wooden rattles.

“What! those are locusts? Not much!” said the Provençal girl indignantly.

Already they had arranged themselves in a half circle, like a crescent-shaped mass of seaweed, all the time whirling their rattles, which sounded very distinctly now, because the row made by the parlor skates was softened and for a moment the noise of the lobby was hushed in a close wall of heads leaning toward the stage, their eyes glaring under every kind of head-dress in the world. The wretchedness which tore Hortense’s heart grew deeper when she heard coming, at first from afar and gradually increasing, the low sound of the tabor.

She would have liked to flee in order not to have seen what was coming. In its turn the shepherd’s pipe sounded out its high notes and the farandole, raising under the cadence of its regular steps a thick dust the color of the earth, unrolled itself with all the fantastic costumes imaginable, short skirts meant to lure the eye, red stockings with gold borders, spangled waists, head-dresses of Arab coins, of Indian scarfs, of Italian kerchiefs or those from Brittany or Caux, all worn with a fine Parisian disdain of truth to locality.

Behind them, pushing forward on his knee a tabor covered with gold paper, came the great troubadour of the placards—his legs incased in tights, one leg yellow with a blue shoe on and one leg blue shod in yellow, with his satin waistcoat covered with puffs and his crenelated velvet cap overshadowing a countenance which remained quite brown despite cosmetics, and of which nothing could be seen well except a big moustache stiffened with Hungarian pomade.

“Ah!” said Audiberte in perfect ecstasy.

When the farandole had taken up its place on the two sides of the stage in front of the locusts with their big wings, the troubadour, standing alone in the centre, saluted with an air of assurance and victory under the glaring eyes of the Eternal Father whose rays poured a luminous hoarfrost upon his coat.

The aubade began, rustic and shrill, yet it went forward into the halls hardly farther than the footlights; there it lived a very short life, fighting for a moment with the flamboyant banners on the ceiling and the columns of the enormous interior, and then fell flat into a great and bored silence. The public looked on without the slightest comprehension. Valmajour began another piece, which at the first sounds was received with laughter, murmurs and cat-calls. Audiberte took Hortense’s hand:

“Listen! that’s the cabal!”

At this point the cabal consisted merely of a few “Heh! louder!” and of jokes of this sort, which were called out by a husky voice belonging to some low woman on seeing the complicated dumb-show that Valmajour employed: “Oh, give us a rest, you chump!”

Then the rink took up again its sound of parlor skates and of English billiards and its ambulatory marketing, overwhelming the shepherd’s pipe and the tabor which the musician insisted upon using until the very end of the aubade. After this he saluted again, marched forward toward the footlights, always accompanied by that mysterious grand air which never quitted him. His lips could be seen moving and a few words came here and there into ear-shot: “It came to me all of a sudden ... one hole ... three holes ... the good God’s birrd....”

His despairing gesture was understood by the orchestra and gave the signal for a ballet in which the locusts twined themselves about the odalisques from Caux and formed plastic poses, undulatory and lascivious dances beneath Bengal flames which threw their rainbow light as far as the pointed shoes of the troubadour, who continued his dumb-show with the tabor in front of the castle of his ancestors in a great glory and apotheosis.

There lay the romance of poor little Hortense! That is what Paris had made of it.

The clear bell of the old clock hanging on the wall of her chamber sounded one as Hortense roused herself from the arm-chair into which she had fallen utterly crushed when she entered. She looked around her gentle maiden’s nest, warm with the reassuring gleams of a dying fire and of an expiring night-lamp.

“What am I doing here? Why did I not go to bed?”

She could not remember at first what had happened, only feeling a complete sickness through her entire being and in her head a noise which made it ache. She stood up and walked a step or two before she perceived that she still wore her hat and mantle; then all came back to her. She remembered then their departure after the curtain fell, their return through the hideous market, more brilliantly illumined than before, among drunken book-makers fighting with each other in front of a counter, through cynical voices whispering a sum of money as she passed—and then the scene at the exit, with Audiberte who wished her to come and felicitate her brother; then Audiberte’s wrath in the coach, the abuse which the creature heaped upon her, only ended by Audiberte humiliating herself before her, and kissing her hands for pardon; all that and still other things danced through her memory along with the horrible faces of the clowns, harsh noises of bells, cymbals and rattles, and the rising up of many-colored flames about that ridiculous troubadour to whom she had given her heart! A terror that was physical roused her at that idea:

“No, no; never! I’d far rather die!”

All of a sudden, in the looking-glass in front of her, she caught sight of a ghost with hollow cheeks and narrow shoulders drawn together in front with the gesture of a person shuddering with cold. The spectre looked a little like her, but much more like that poor Princess of Anhalt who had so roused her curiosity and pity at Arvillard that she had described her sad symptoms in a letter. The princess had just died at the opening of winter.

“Why, look—look!” She bent forward, came nearer to the glass and recalled the inexplicable kindness that everybody down there had shown her, the fright her mother evinced, the tenderness of old Bouchereau at her departure—and understood! Now at last she knew what it was, she knew the end of the game! It was here without any one to aid it. Surely it was long enough she had been looking for its coming.

CHAPTER XVI. “AT THE PRODUCTS OF THE SOUTH.”

“Mlle. Hortense is very ill. Madame will receive nobody.”

For the tenth time during the ten days that had passed Audiberte had received the same answer, motionless before that heavy-timbered door with its knocker, the like of which can scarcely be found except beneath the arcades of the Place Royale, a door which once shut seemed to her to refuse forever an entrance to the old house of the Le Quesnoys.

“Very well,” said she, “I am not coming back; it must be they now who shall call me back.”

In great agitation she set out again through the lively turmoil of that commercial quarter, where drays laden with cases and barrels and iron bars, noisy and flexible, were forever passing the pushcarts that rolled under the porches and back into the courtyards where the coopers were nailing up the cases for export. But the peasant girl was not aware of this infernal row and of the rumbling of labor which shook the high houses to their very topmost floors; in her venomous head a very different kind of row was going on, a clashing of brutal thoughts and a terrible clangor of foiled wishes. So she set forth, feeling no fatigue, and in order to economize the ’bus fare crossed on foot the entire distance from the Marais to Abbaye-Montmartre Street.

After a fierce and lively peregrination from one lodging to the other, hotels and furnished apartments of all kinds, from which they were expelled each time on account of the tabor-playing, they had just recently made shipwreck in that quarter. It was a new house which had allured, at the cheap prices for housewarmers, a temporary horde of girls, Bohemians and business agents, and those families of adventurers such as one sees at the seaports, a floating population which shows its lack of work on the balconies, watching arrivals and departures in hopes that there may be something to be gained for them in the flood. Fortune is here the flood on which they cast their watchful eyes.

The rent was very high for them to pay, especially now that the skating-rink had failed and it was necessary to sue upon government stamped paper for the price of Valmajour’s few appearances. But the tabor did not bother anybody in that freshly-painted barrack whose door was open at every hour of the night for the different crooked businesses of the tenants—not to speak of all the quarrels and rows that were going on. On the contrary, it was the tabor-player who was bothered. The advertising on placards, the many-colored tights and his fine moustaches had aroused perilous interest among the ladies of the skating-rink less coy than that prude of a girl down there in the Marais. He was acquainted with actors at the Batignolles, all that sweet-scented crowd which met in a pot-house on the Boulevard Rochechouart called the Straw-Lair. This same Straw-Lair, where people passed their time in loafing fatly, playing cards, drinking lager beer and passing from one to the other the scandal of the little theatres and the lowest class of gallantry, was the enemy and the horror of Audiberte. It was the cause of savage rages, under the stormy blows of which the two Southerners bent their backs as under a tempest in the tropics, merely revenging themselves by cursing their tyrant in a green skirt and talking about her in that mysterious and hateful tone which schoolboys and servants use: “What did she say? how much did she give you?” and playing into each other’s hands in order to slip away behind her back. Audiberte knew this well and watched them; she did her business outside quickly, impatient to get home; and particularly was it so that day, because she had left them early in the morning. As she ascended the stairs she stopped a moment, hearing neither tabor nor shepherd’s pipe.

“Oh, the beggarly wretch, he’s off again to his Straw-Lair!”

But as she came in at the door her father ran up to her and headed the explosion off.

“Now don’t squeal, somebody’s come to visit you; a gentleman from the Munistry!”

The gentleman was waiting in the drawing-room; for, as it always happens in these buildings, cheaply built and made by machinery, with every room on each floor exactly the same, one above the other, they too had a drawing-room hung with a cheap paper, creamy and waffled into patterns till it looked like a dish of beaten eggs, a drawing-room which made the peasant girl a very proud woman. Méjean was passing in review most compassionately the Provençal furniture scattered about this dentist’s waiting-room, full of the crude light from two windows guiltless of curtains—the coco and the moco (tumbler-holder and lamp-holder), the kneading-trough, the bread-basket much banged about by house-movings and by travel—these showed their rural rustiness alongside of the cheap gilding and wall paintings. The haughty profile of Audiberte, very pure in its lines, surmounted by her Sunday head-dress, which seemed just as out-of-place in the fifth story of a Parisian apartment house, completed the feeling of pity which he had concerning these victims of Roumestan; and so he introduced very gently the cause of his visit.

The Minister, wishing to spare the Valmajours new misfortunes, for which up to a certain point he felt himself responsible, sent them five thousand francs to pay for their losses in having changed their home and to carry them back again to their own place. He took the bills from his purse and laid them on the old dark kneading-trough of nutwood.

“So, then, we’ll have to leave?” asked the peasant girl without budging an inch and pondering a while.

“The Minister desires that you should go as soon as possible; he is anxious to know that you have returned to your home as happy as you were before.”

Old Valmajour cast his eye around at the bank-notes:

“As for me, that seems reasonable enough—de qué n’en disés?”

But she would not say anything and waited for the sequel, which Méjean introduced by twisting and turning his purse:

“And to those five thousand francs we will add five thousand more which are here, in order to get back again—to get back again—”

His emotion choked him. Cruel was the commission which Rosalie had given him. Ah, how often it costs a lot to be considered a quiet-loving, strong man; much more is demanded of such a one than of other people! Then he added very rapidly—“the photograph of Mlle. Le Quesnoy.”

“At last! now we have got to it. The photograph—didn’t I know it, by heavens?” At every word she bounded up like a goat. “And so you really believe that you can make us come from the other end of France, that you can promise everything to us—to us who never asked for anything—and then that you can put us out of doors like so many dogs who have done their worst and left their dirt everywhere? Take back your money, gentleman! You can be dead sure that we sha’n’t leave, and you can say so there, and also that the photograph won’t be returned to them! That’s a paper and a proof, that is. I keep it safe in my little bag; it never leaves me and I shall show it about through Paris and what is written upon it, so that all the world may know that all those Roumestans are no better than a family of liars—of liars—”

She was foaming with rage.

“Mlle. Le Quesnoy is very, very ill,” said Méjean, with great solemnity.

“Avaï!”

“She is leaving Paris, and in all probability will never return—alive!”

Audiberte said not a word, but the silent laugh of her eyes, the implacable no which was written upon her classic brow, on which the hair grew low beneath the little lace head-dress, were sufficient to warrant the firmness of her refusal. Then a temptation seized Méjean to throw himself upon her, tear the little Indian bag from her girdle and fly with it; still, he restrained himself, attempted a few useless expostulations, and then, quivering with rage likewise, he said, “You will repent of this,” and to the great regret of Father Valmajour, left the house.

“Look out, little girl, you are going to bring us into some misfortune!”

“Not much! It’s them that we’ll give trouble to; I am going to ask the advice of Guilloche.”

Behind the yellow card bearing those two words, fastened on the door which was opposite their own, was one of those terrible business men whose entire instalment consists of an enormous leather portfolio containing the minutes and notes of rancid lawsuits, sheets of white paper for secret denunciations and begging letters, bits of pie-crust, a false beard and sometimes even a hammer with which to strike milkwomen dead, as was seen recently in a famous lawsuit. This type of man, of whom many exist in Paris, would not be worthy of a single line if said Guilloche, a name which was as good as a signboard when one considered his countenance divided up into a thousand little symmetrical wrinkles, had not added to his profession an entirely new and characteristic department.

Guilloche did the business of penalties for schoolboys and collegians. A poor devil of an usher, when the classes came out from recitation, went about collecting the penalties in the way of copies to be turned in. He stayed awake far into the night copying lines of the Æneid or the various forms of the Greek verb luo. When there was lack of regular business Guilloche, who was a graduate of college, harnessed himself up for this original work, which he found fairly profitable.

Audiberte’s matter having been explained to him, he declared that it was excellent. The Minister might be legally held up and the newspapers might be made to come down; the photograph alone was worth a mine of gold; only it was necessary to use time to go hither and thither and he must have advances of money which must be paid down in good coin; as for the Puyfourcat inheritance, that seemed to him a pure Fata Morgana, a dictum which mortified terribly the peasant girl’s love of lucre already so terribly tried, all the more because Valmajour, who had been much asked to swell drawing-rooms during the first winter, no longer set foot in a single house of the Faubourg St. Germoyne.

“So much the worse! I will work the harder, I will economize—zou!”

That energetic little Arlesian head-dress flew about in the great new building, ran up and down stairs, carrying from story to story her tale of adventure wid the Menister. She excited herself, squealed, pounced about, and then in a mysterious voice would say: “And thin there’s the photograph,” and with a furtive and sidelong glance, such as the sellers of photographs in the arcades employ when old libertines call for tights, she would show the picture:

“A pretty girl, at any rate! And you have read what is written there underneath?”

This kind of thing happened in the bosom of the temporary families and with the roller-skating ladies of the rink or at the Straw-Lair—ladies whom she pompously called Mme. Malvina or Mme. Éloïse, being deeply impressed by their velvet skirts, their chemises edged with holes for ribbons and all the implements of their business, without bothering herself otherwise as to what that business might be. And thus the picture of this lovely creature, so distinguished and delicate, passed through these critical and curious defilements; they picked her to pieces; they read laughing the silly avowal of love, until the Provençal girl took her treasure back again and thrust it into the mouth of her money-bag with a furious gesture and in a strangled voice exclaimed:

“Well, I guess we have got them with that!”

Zou! off she flew to the bailiff—the bailiff for the affair of the skating-rink, the bailiff used to hunt Cadaillac, the bailiff for Roumestan. And as if that were not sufficient for her quarrelsome disposition, she had a host of troubles with janitors, the unending fight about the tabor-playing, which ended this time in the exile of Valmajour to one of those basements leased by a wine merchant where the sounding of hunting-horns alternate with lessons in kicking and boxing. From that time forth it was in this cellar, by the light of a gas jet which cost them so much per hour, and while looking about at the vests and fencing-gloves and copper horns hung on the wall, that the tabor-player passed his hours of exercise, pale and lonely like a captive, sending forth from below the pavement all kinds of variations on the shepherd’s pipe, not at all unlike the mournful and piercing notes of a baker’s cricket.

One day Audiberte received an invitation to call upon the Commissary of Police in her quarter. She ran thither quickly, quite certain that it referred to her cousin Puyfourcat, and entered smiling with her head-dress tossing; but after a quarter of an hour she crept out, overwhelmed by a very peasant-like horror of the policeman, who, at his very first word, had forced her to deliver up the photograph and sign a receipt for ten thousand francs in which she absolutely renounced all and any suits at law. All the same she obstinately refused to leave, insisted upon believing in the genius of her brother and kept always alive in the depths of her memory the delicious astonishment caused one winter evening by that long file of carriages passing through the courtyard of the Ministry, where all the windows were alight.

When she came back she notified her two men, who were much more frightened than she was, that not another word was to be spoken about that business; but she never piped a word about the money. Guilloche, who suspected that there was some money, employed every means in his power to get a portion of it, and having obtained only the slenderest commission, felt a frightful rancor in regard to the Valmajours.

“Well,” said he one morning to Audiberte while she was brushing on the staircase the finest clothes belonging to the musician, who was still in bed, “well, I hope you are satisfied at last. He is dead!”

“Who is dead?”

“Why, Puyfourcat, your cousin; it is in the paper.”

She gave a screech, rushed into the apartment, calling aloud and almost in tears:

“Father! Brother! Hurry quick, the inheritance!”

As all of them clustered terribly moved and panting in a circle about that infernal fellow Guilloche, the latter slowly unfolded the Journal Officiel and in a very leisurely manner read to them as follows:

“‘On this first day of October 1876, the Court at Mostaganem has ordered the publication and advertisement of the following inheritances at the order of the Ministry of the Interior.—Popelino (Louis), day-laborer—’ No, it isn’t that one—‘Puyfourcat (Dosithée)—’”

“Yes, that’s him,” said Audiberte.

The old bird thought it was necessary to wipe his eyes a bit.

“Pécaïré! Poor Dosithée—!”

“——died at Mostaganem the 14th of January, 1874, born at Valmajour in the commune of Aps—”

In her eagerness and impatience the peasant girl asked:

“How much is it?”

“Three francs, thirty-five cintimes!” cried Guilloche in the voice of a fruit-peddler; and leaving in their hands the paper, in order that they might thoroughly verify the disappointment which had come to them, he flew off with a roar of laughter which seemed infectious, for it rang from story to story down into the street and delighted all that great big village called Montmartre, where the legend of the Valmajours’ inheritance had been widely circulated.

The inheritance from Puyfourcat, only three francs thirty-five! Audiberte pretended to laugh at it harder than the others, but the frightful desire for vengeance upon the Roumestans, who were in her eyes responsible for all their troubles, burned within her and now only increased in fury and looked about for some pretext or means, for the first weapon that lay to hand.

Most singular was the countenance of papa during this disaster. The while his daughter pined away with weariness and fury, and the captive musician became paler with every day passed in his cellar, papa, expanding like a rose, careless of what happened, did not even show his old professional envy and jealousy; he seemed to have arranged some quiet existence for himself outside and away from his family. Hardly had he stowed away the last mouthful of breakfast than off he went; and sometimes in the morning, when she was brushing his clothes, she noticed that a dried fig or a prune or some preserve or other would fall out of his pockets, and when she asked how they came there, the old fellow had one story or another for an explanation.

He had met a peasant woman from their country in the street, or he had run across a man from down there who was coming to see them.

Audiberte tossed her head: “Avaï! Wait till I follow you once!”

The truth was that while strolling about Paris the old man had discovered in the St. Denis quarter a big shop of food-stuffs, where he had entered, lured by the sign and by the temptations of the exotic shop-front, which was full of colored fruits and of silver and painted papers; it made a brilliant bit of color in the foggy, populous street. This shop, where he had ended by becoming a crony and friend of the family, was well known to Southerners quartered in Paris and had for its sign:

“At the products of the South”—never was a sign more truthful. Everything in that shop was the product of the South, from the shopkeepers, M. and Mme. Mèfre, who were two products of the Fat South, having the prominent nose of Roumestan, the flaring eyes, the accent, the phrases and demonstrative welcome of Provence, down to their shop-boys, who were familiar and called people by their first names and did not hesitate in their guttural voices to call out to the desk: “I say, Mèfre, where did youse put the sausages?”—yes, down to the little Mèfre children, whining and dirty, who passed their lives amid a constant menace of being disembowelled or scalped or made into soup, but who nevertheless kept right on sticking their little dirty fingers into all the open barrels; nay, even to the buyers, gesticulating and gossiping by the hour together in order at last to buy a barquette (boat shaped cake) for two cents, or taking their seats on chairs in a circle in order to discuss the merits of garlic sausage or of pepper sausage. Here one might listen to the “none the less, at least, come now, other ways”—the whole vocabulary, in fact, belonging to Aunt Portal, exchanged in the most noisy voices, whilst the “dear brother” in a dyed-over black coat, a friend of the family, haggled over some salt fish, and the flies, the vast horde of flies, drawn hither by all the sugar of these fruits and the candies and the almost Oriental pastries, buzzed and boomed right in the middle of the winter, kept alive by that steady heat. And when some busy Parisian grew impatient at the attendants all down at heel and the sublime indifference these shop people showed, continuing their gossip from one counter to the other whilst weighing and doing up things all wrong, it was a sight to see how that Parisian was put in his place by some remark uttered in the strongest country accent:

“Té! vé! if you are in a hurry the door is always open, you know, and the tram-cars are passing in front of the shop.”

Father Valmajour was received with open arms by this gang of compatriots. M. and Mme. Mèfre remembered that they had seen him in the old time at the Fair of Beaucaire in a competition of tabor-players.

Between old people from the South that Fair at Beaucaire, now no more and existing merely as a name, has remained like a Masonic bond of brotherhood. In our Southern provinces it was the fairy-tale for the whole year, the one distraction for all those narrow lives; people got ready for it a long time in advance, and for a long time after they talked about it. It formed a reward which could be promised to wife and children, and if it was not possible to take them along, one might bring them a bit of Spanish lace or a toy, which took little place in one’s bag. The Beaucaire Fair, moreover, under pretext of business, meant a whole month or a fortnight at least of the free, exuberant and unexpected life of a camp of gypsies. One got a bed here or there from the citizens or in the shops or on top of desks, or else in the open street under the canvas hood of wagons or even below the warm light of the July stars.

O, for the business without the boredom of the shop, matters treated while one dines, or at the door in shirt sleeves, or at the booths ranged along the Pré, on the banks of the Rhône! The river itself was nothing but a moving fair-ground, supporting its boats of all shapes, its lahuts, lute shaped boats with lateen sails which came from Arles, Marseilles, Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, filled with wines, anchovies, oranges and cork, decorated with banners and standards and streamers which sounded in the fresh wind and reflected their colors in the swiftly flowing water. And what a clamor there was in that variegated crowd of Spaniards, Sardinians, Greeks in long tunics and embroidered slippers, Armenians with their furred hats and Turks with their befrogged jackets, their fans and wide trousers of gray linen! All these were jammed together in the open-air restaurants, the booths for children’s toys and canes and umbrellas, for jewelry and Oriental pastils and caps. And then to think of what was called the “fine Sunday,” that is to say, the first Sunday after the opening of the fair—the orgies on the quays and the boats and in the famous restaurants, such as La Vignasse or the Grand Jardin or the Café Thibaut! Those who have once seen that fair have always felt a home-sickness for it to the end of their days.

One felt free and easy at the shop of the Mèfre couple, somewhat as at the Beaucaire Fair. And as a matter of fact, in its picturesque disorder the shop did resemble an improvised grand fair for the sale of foreign and southern products. Here all full and bending were sacks of meal in a golden powder, dried peas as big and hard as buck-shot and big chestnuts all wrinkled and dusty looking, like little faces of old female charcoal-burners; there stood jars of black and green olives preserved in the Picholini manner, tin cans of red oil with the taste of fruit, barrels of preserves from Apt made of melon rinds, of figs, of quinces and of apricots—all the remains of fruit from a fair dropped into molasses. Up there on the shelves among the salted goods and preserves, in a thousand bottles and a thousand tin boxes, were the special relishes belonging to each city—the shells and little ships of Nîmes, the nougat of Montélimar, the ducklings and biscuits of Aix—all in gilded envelopes ticketed and signed.

Then there were the early vegetables, an outpouring of Southern gardens without shadows, in which the fruits hanging in slender green foliage have a factitious look of jewels—firm looking jujubes with a fine sheen of newly lacquered walnut side by side with pale azeroles, figs of every sort, sweet lemons, green or scarlet peppers, great big swelling melons, enormous onions with flowerlike hearts, muscat grapes with long berries so transparent that the flesh of them trembles like wine in a flask, rows of bananas striped black and yellow, regular landslides of oranges and pomegranates with their red gold tones, like little bombs made of red copper with their fuses issuing from a small crenelated crown. And finally, everywhere, on the walls and ceilings, on both sides of the door, in the tangle of burnt palms, chaplets of leeks and onions and dried carobs, packages of sausages, bunches of corn on the cob, there was a constant stream of warm hues, there was the entire summer, there was the Southern sunshine fastened up in boxes, sacks and jars radiating color out to the very sidewalk through the muddiness of the windows.

Old Valmajour would enter this shop with his nostrils dilated, quivering and most excited. This man, who refused the slightest work in the presence of his children and would wipe his brow for hours over a single button that he had to sew on his waistcoat, boasting of having accomplished a labor like one of “Caesar’s,” in this shop was always ready to lend a helping hand, throw off his coat to nail up or open cases, picking up here and there an olive or a bit of berlingot candy and lightening the labor with his monkey tricks and stories. On one day in the week, indeed, the day of the arrival of codfish à la brandade, he stayed very late at the store in order to aid them in sending out the orders.

Among them all this particular Southern dish, codfish à la brandade, could hardly be found elsewhere in Paris except at the Produits du Midi; but it was the true article, white, carded fine, creamy, with just a touch of garlic, the way it is done at Nîmes, from which city indeed the Mèfres had it forwarded. On Thursday evening it reaches Paris at seven o’clock by the lightning express and Friday morning it is distributed throughout the city to all the good customers whose names are on the big book of the store. Nay, it is on that very commercial ledger with its tumbled leaves, smelling of spices and soiled with oil, that is inscribed the history of the conquest of Paris by the Southerners; there appear one after the other all the big fortunes, political and industrial posts, names of celebrated lawyers, deputies, ministers, and among them all especially that of Numa Roumestan, the Vendean of the South, the pillar of the altar and the throne.

For the sake of that single line on which Roumestan’s name is written the Mèfres would toss the whole book into the fire. He it is who represents best their ideas in religion, politics and everything. It is just as Mme. Mèfre says, and she is more enthusiastic than her husband:

“For that man, I tell you, anybody would imperil their eternal soul.”

They are very fond of recalling the period when Numa, already on the road to fame, did not disdain to come there himself to buy his stores. And how he did understand the way of choosing by the touch a pasty! or a sausage that sweats nicely under the knife! Then such kind-heartedness! and that imposing, handsome face! and always a compliment for Madame, a pleasant word for his “dear brother,” a caressing touch for the little Mèfres who accompanied him as far as the carriage bearing his parcels. Since his elevation to the Ministry, since those scoundrels of Reds had given him so much bother in the two Chambers, they did not see anything more of him, pécaïré! but he always remained faithful to the Produits, and it was always he who got the first distribution.

One Thursday evening about ten o’clock, when all the pots of codfish à la brandade had been wrapped and tied and placed in fine alignment on the counter, the whole Mèfre family, the shop boys, old Valmajour and all the products of the South were in full number on hand, perspiring and blowing. They were taking a rest with the peculiar air of people who have accomplished a difficult task and were “dipping a bit” with ladyfingers and biscuits steeped in thick wine or orgeat syrup—“Come now, just something mild”—for as to anything strong, Southerners do not care for that at all. Among the townspeople as in the country parts drunkenness from alcohol is almost unknown. Instinctively this race has a fear and horror of it; it feels itself intoxicated from its birth—drunk without drinking.

For it is most certainly true that the wind and the sun distil for them a terrible kind of natural alcohol whose effect is felt more or less by all those born down there. Some of them have only that little drop too much which loosens the tongue and gestures and causes one to see life rosy in color and discover sympathetic souls everywhere, which brightens the eye, widens the streets, sweeps away obstacles, doubles audacity and strengthens the timid; others who are violently affected, like the little Valmajour girl or Aunt Portal, reach at any minute the limits of a stuttering, stammering and blind delirium. To understand it one must have seen our festivals in Provence with the peasants standing up on the tables yelling and pounding with their big yellow shoes, screaming: “Waiter, dé gazeuse!” (lemon soda)—an entire village raving drunk over a few bottles of lemonade. And where is the Southerner who has not experienced those sudden prostrations of the intoxicated, those breakings-down of the whole being, right on the heels of wrath or of enthusiasm—changes as sudden as a sunburst or a shadow across a March sky?

Without possessing the delirious Southern quality of his daughter, Father Valmajour was born with a pretty lively case of it. And that evening his ladyfingers dipped in orgeat affected him with a crazy jollity which made him reel off, standing with his glass in his hand and his mouth all twisted in the middle of the shop, all the farcical performances of an old sponge who pays his scot without money. The Mèfres and their shopmen were rolling around on the flour sacks with delight:

“Oh! de ce Valmajour, pas moins!” (O! that Valmajour, what a fellow he is!)

Suddenly the liveliness of the old fellow stopped short and his gesture, like that of a jumping-jack, was brought to a dead pause by the apparition before him of a Provençal head-dress trembling with rage.

“What are you doing here, father?”

Madame Mèfre raised her arms toward the sausages suspended from the ceiling:

“What! this is your young lady? And you have never told us about her! Well, how teeny-weeny she is! but a good girl, I’ll be bound. Take a seat Miss, do!”

Owing as much to his habit of lying as to a desire to keep himself free, the old man had never spoken about his children, but had given himself out as an old bachelor who lived on his income; but among Southern people nobody is at a loss for one invention or another; if an entire caravan of little Valmajours had marched in on the heels of Audiberte the welcome would have been just the same, just as warm and demonstrative; they rushed forward and made a place for her.

“Différemment, you must eat some dipped ladyfingers with us, too.”

The Provençal girl stood embarrassed. She had just come from outside, from the cold and blackness of the night, a hard night of December, where the feverish life of Paris continued to pulsate in spite of the late hour and could be felt through the heavy fog torn in every direction by swiftly moving shadows, the colored lanterns of the omnibuses and the hoarse horns of the street cars; she arrived from the North, she arrived from winter, and then all of a sudden, without transition, she found herself in the midst of Italian Provence, in this shop of the Mèfres glowing just previous to Christmas with all kinds of toothsome and sun-filled articles, in the midst of the well-known accents and fragrances of home! It was her own country suddenly found again, a return to the motherland after a year of exile, of struggles and trials far away among the barbarians. A warmth gradually invaded her and slackened her nerves, the while she broke her barquette cake in a thimbleful of Carthagène and answered the questions of all this kindly set of people, as much at ease and familiar with her as if everybody had known each other for twenty years or more. She felt a return to her life and usual habits; tears rose to her eyes—those hard eyes with veins of fire which never wept.

The name “Roumestan” uttered at her side dried up this emotion suddenly. It came from Mme. Mèfre, who was looking over the addresses of her clients and was warning her shop-boys not to make any mistake and especially not to take the codfish à la brandade for Numa to Grenelle Street, but to the Rue de Londres.

“Seems as if codfish is not in the odor of sanctity in the Rue de Grenelle,” remarked one of the cronies at the Products.

“Yes, indeed,” said M. Mèfre. “The lady belongs up North—just as northerly as possible—uses nothing but butter in her kitchen, eh?—while in the Rue de Londres there’s the nicest kind of South, jollity, singing and everything cooked in oil—I understand why Numa enjoys himself most there.”

So they were talking in the lightest of tones of this second household established by the Minister in a very convenient little house quite close to the railway station where he could repose after the fatigues of the Chamber, free from visitors and the greater botherations. You may be sure that the excitable Mme. Mèfre would have uttered fine screeches if just the same sort of thing had occurred in her family; but for Numa there was something very attractive and natural in it.

He loved the tender passion; but didn’t all our kings, Charles X and Henry IV, play the gay Lothario? Té! pardi! He got that from his Bourbon nose.

And mixed in with this light tone, this air of delight in spicy talk with which the South treats all affairs of the heart, there was a race hatred, the antipathy they felt against the woman of the North, the strange woman and her food cooked with butter. They grew excited, they went into a variety of anédotes, the charms of little Alice and her successes in grand opera.

“Why, I knew Mother Bachellery in the old time of the Fair at Beaucaire,” said old Valmajour. “She used to sing ballads at the Café Thibaut.”

Audiberte listened without breathing, never losing a single word and engraving in her mind names and addresses; her little eyes glittered with a diabolical intoxication in which the Carthagène wine had no part.

CHAPTER XVII. THE BABY CLOTHES.

At the light knock heard on her chamber door Mme. Roumestan trembled as if she had been caught in a crime, and pushing in again the gracefully moulded drawer of her Louis XV bureau over which she had been leaning almost on her knees, she cried:

“Who’s there? What do you want, Polly?”

“A letter for Madame; there is great haste,” answered the Englishwoman.

Rosalie took the letter and closed the door sharply. The writing was unknown and coarse, traced upon wretched paper, and there was the “urgent and personal” which accompanies begging letters. A Parisian chambermaid would never have disturbed her for such a little thing as that. She pitched it on the bureau, postponing the reading of it till later, and returned quickly to her drawer which contained the marvels of the baby’s old layette. For the last eight years, ever since the tragedy, she had not opened it, fearing to find her tears there again; nor even since her new happiness had she done so owing to a very maternal superstition, fearing lest she should come to grief once more by means of a premature caress given by way of its little layette to the child that was yet to come.

This courageous lady had all the nervous feelings of the woman, all her tremblings, all the shivery drawing-together of the mimosa. The world, which judges without understanding anything, found her cold, just as the dull and stupid suppose that flowers are not endowed with life. But now, her happiness having endured for six months, she must make up her mind to bring all these little articles out from their mourning and enclosure, shake out their pleats, go over and perhaps change them; for even in the case of baby clothes fashion changes and the ribbons are adjusted differently at different times. It was for this most intimate work that Rosalie had carefully locked herself in; throughout that big bustling Ministry, rustling with papers and humming with reports and the feverish flitting hither and thither from offices to departments, there was assuredly nothing quite so serious, nothing quite so moving as that woman on her knees before an open drawer, her heart beating and her hands trembling.

She took up the laces somewhat yellow with time which preserved along with the perfume all this white mass of innocent clothes—baby caps and undershirts arranged according to age and size, the gown for baptism, the robe full of little pleats and the doll stockings. She recalled her life down there at Orsay, gently languid and at work for hours together in the shadow of the big catalpa whose white petals dropped into her work-basket among her spools and delicate embroidery scissors, her entire thought concentrated upon some one point of tailoring which gave her the measure of her dreams and the passage of time. What illusions she had then had, what belief and trust! What a delicious murmuring throughout the foliage above her head and what a rising up of tender and novel sensations in herself! In a single day life had suddenly taken all that from her. And so despair flowed back again to her heart as little by little she pulled forth the layette—the treason of her husband, the loss of her child.

The appearance of the first little dress all ready to be pulled on, that which is laid on the cradle at the moment of birth, the sleeves pushed one within the other, the arms spread apart, the little caps blown up to a round shape, made her burst into tears. It seemed to her that her child had lived and that she had known it and held it to her heart. A son, O, certainly it was a boy, a strong and beautiful one, and from his very birth he had the mysterious and deep eyes of his grandfather! To-day he would have been eight years old and have had long curls falling round his shoulders; at that age they still belong to the mother, who takes them walking, dresses them, makes them work. Ah, cruel, cruel life!

But after a while, as she pulled out and twitched into shape these little objects tied together with microscopic bows, with their embroidered flowers and snowy laces, she began to be calm. Well, no; after all, life is not so evil, and while it lasts one must keep up one’s courage. At that terrible turn of her life she had lost all of hers, imagining that the end had come, so far as she was concerned, for believing, loving, being wife and mother; thinking in fact that there only remained for her the pleasure of looking back upon the shining past and watching it disappear in the distance like some shore which one regrets to leave. Then after gloomy years the spring had shot out its fruits slowly beneath the cold snow of her heart; lo and behold, it flowered again in this little creature who was about to live and whom she felt was already vigorous from the terrible little kicks which it gave her during the night. And then her Numa, so changed, so good, quite cured of his brutality and violence! To be sure he still showed weaknesses which she did not like, those roundabout Italian ways which he could not help having, but, even as he said—“O, that?—that is politics!” Besides that, she was no longer the victim of the illusions of her early years; she knew that in order to live happily one must be contented with coming near to what one desires in everything and that complete happiness can only be quarried from the half-happinesses which existence affords us.

A new knock at the door. It is M. Méjean who would like to speak to Madame.

“Very good, I’m coming.”

She found him in the little drawing-room which he was measuring from end to end with excited steps.

“I have a confession to make to you,” said he, using a somewhat brusque tone of familiarity which their old friendship authorized and which both of them would have liked to have turned into a relationship of brother and sister. “Some days ago I put an end to this wretched affair—and did not withhold the statement from you for the sake of keeping this longer in my possession—”

He held out to her the portrait of Hortense obtained from Audiberte.

“Well, at last! O, how happy she is going to be, poor dear!”

She softened at the sight of her sister’s pretty face, her sister sparkling with health and youth in that Provençal disguise, and read at the bottom of the picture in her fine and very firm writing: “I believe in you and I love you—Hortense Le Quesnoy.” Then, remembering that the wretched lover had also read it and that he must have been intrusted with a very sorrowful commission in procuring it, she grasped his hand affectionately:

“Thank you.”

“No, do not thank me, Madame.—Yes, it was hard—but for the last eight days I have lived with that ‘I believe in you and I love you,’ and at times I could imagine that it was meant for me.” And then very low and timidly: “How is she getting on?”

“Oh, not well at all—Mamma is taking her South. Now she is willing to do whatever anybody wishes—it is just as if a spring had broken in her.”

“Altered?”

Rosalie made a gesture: “Ah!”

“Till we meet again, Madame,” said Méjean very quickly, moving away with hurried steps; he turned back again at the door and squaring his solid shoulders beneath the half-raised curtain:

“It is the luckiest thing in the world that I have no imagination. I should be altogether too unhappy!”

Rosalie returned to her room deeply dejected. There was no use in fighting against it by recalling her sister’s youth and the encouraging words of Jarras, who persisted in looking upon it merely as a crisis which it was necessary to cross; black thoughts invaded her which would not tally with the festive white in the baby’s layette. She hastened to tie up, lay in order and turn the key upon these little scattered articles, and as she got up she perceived the letter lying on the bureau, took and read it mechanically, expecting to find the commonplace begging statement which she received every day from so many different hands, and which would have come at a lucky moment during one of those spells of superstition, when charity seems a bringer of good luck. That was why she did not understand it at first and was obliged to read again these lines, which had been written out as a copy by the ignorant pen of a schoolboy, the boy employed by Guilloche:

“If you are fond of codfish à la brandade, delicious is that which is eaten to-night at the house of Mme. Bachellery in the Rue de Londres. Your husband pays for the supper. Ring three times and enter straight ahead.”

From these foolish phrases, from this slimy and perfidious abyss, the truth arose and appeared to her, helped by coincidences and recollections—that name “Bachellery” pronounced so often during the past year, enigmatical articles in the papers concerning her engagement at the opera, that address which she had heard Numa himself give, and the long stay at Arvillard. In a second, doubt crystallized itself in her to certainty. And besides, did not the past throw a light for her upon this present and all its actual horror? Lies and grimace—he was not and could not be anything but that. Why should this eternal maker of dupes spare her? It was her fault; she had been the fool to allow herself to be caught by his lying voice and vulgar caresses. And in the same second certain details came to her mind which made her red and pale by turns.

This time it was no longer despair showing itself with heavy, pure tears as in the early deceptions, but anger against herself for having been so feeble and cowardly as to have been able to pardon him, and against him who had duped her in contempt of the promises and oaths in connection with the former crime. She would like to have convicted him of his villainy there, on the moment, but he was at Versailles in the Chamber of Deputies. It occurred to her to call Méjean, but then she felt a repugnance to force that honest fellow to lie. And being thus reduced to crushing down a swarm of contrary feelings, prevent herself from crying out and surrendering to the terrible nerve-crisis which she felt rising in her, she strode to and fro on the carpet, her hands with a familiar action resting against the loosened waist of her dressing-gown. All of a sudden she stopped and shuddered, seized by a crazy fear.

Her child!

He was suffering too and he was calling to his mother with all the power of a life which is struggling to exist. Oh, my God, if he also, if he was going to die like the other one at the same age, and under exactly similar conditions! Destiny, which people call blind, has sometimes savage combinations, and she began to reason with herself in half-broken words and tender exclamations. “Dear little fellow!—poor little fellow!—” and attempted to look upon everything coldly as it exists, in order to conduct herself in a dignified way and above all not to destroy that solitary good thing which remained to her. She even took in hand some work, that embroidery of Penelope which the Parisian woman keeps about her, being always in action; for it was necessary to wait for Numa’s return and have an explanation with him, or rather to discover in his attitude a conviction of his crime, before it came to the irremediable scandal of a separation.

O, those brilliant wools and that regular and colorless canvas—what confidences may they not receive, what regrets, joys and desires form the complicated and knotted reverse of the canvas full of broken threads in these feminine products, with their flowers peacefully interwoven!

Coming back from the Chamber of Deputies, Numa Roumestan found his wife embroidering beneath the narrow gleam of a single lighted lamp, and this quiet picture, her lovely profile softened by her chestnut-colored hair, in that luxurious shade of cushioned furniture where the lacquer screens and old bronzes, the ivories and potteries, caught the warm and shooting rays from a wood fire, overcame him by contrast with the noise of the Assembly, where the brilliantly lighted ceilings are swathed in a dust full of movement that floats above the hall of debate like the smoke from powder above a field where military are manœuvring.

“How do you do, Mamma; it’s pleasant here with you.”

The day’s meeting had been a hot one; always that wretched appropriation bill, and the Left fastened for five hours on the coat tails of that poor General d’Espaillon, who didn’t know enough to put two ideas together when he wasn’t saying g—d—, etc., etc. Well, anyhow, the Cabinet would get through this time; but after the vacation at New Year’s, when the Assembly would reach the question of the Fine Arts—then was the time to look out!

“They are counting very much on the Cadaillac business to upset me!... Rougeot is the one who will talk.... He’s no chicken, that Rougeot; he has a backbone!”

Then with his famous jerk of the shoulder: “Rougeot against Roumestan—the North against the South—all the better! It will amuse me. It will be a hand-to-hand fight.”

Excited by his political matters, he talked on in a monologue without noticing how silent Rosalie was. Then he approached her and, sitting very near her on a footstool, made her stop her work by trying to kiss her hand.

“You seem to be in a terrible hurry with what you are embroidering. Is it for my New Year’s present? I have bought yours. Just guess what it is!”

She pulled her hand gently away and looked him steadily in the face in an embarrassing manner without answering him. His features were drawn and weary from his days of work in the Assembly, showing that loosened look of the face and revealing in the corners of the eyes and the mouth a character at once weak and violent—all the passions and nothing to resist them. Faces down south are like the Southern landscape. It is better not to look at them unless the sun is shining.

“Are you dining at home?” asked Rosalie.

“No, I’m sorry to say—I’m expected at Durand’s—a tiresome dinner—té! I’m already late,” added he as he rose. “Luckily it is not necessary to dress there.”

That fixed look in his wife’s face followed him. “Dine with me, I beg of you—” and her harmonious voice hardened into insistence and sounded threatening and implacable.

But Roumestan was no observer. “And besides, business is business, is it not so? O, this life of a public man cannot be arranged as one would wish!”

“Well then, goodbye,” said she gravely, completing that farewell within her own mind with a “since it is our destiny.”

She listened to the coupé roll off beneath the vaulted passage and then, having carefully folded up her work, she rang.

“A carriage, right away—a hackney-coach—and you, Polly, give me my mantle and bonnet—I’m going out.”

Quickly ready to start, she embraced in one look the chamber she was quitting, where she neither regretted anything nor left behind her any part of herself, for it was merely the room of a furnished apartment-house despite all the pomp of its cold yellow brocades.

“See that the big cardboard box is put in the carriage.”

Of what belonged to both, the baby’s layette was all that she carried off.

Standing at the door of the coach the mystified Englishwoman asked if Madame was not going to dine at home. No, she will dine at her father’s where probably she will also pass the night.

On the way a doubt overcame her, or rather a scruple. Suppose nothing of all this were true? Suppose that Bachellery girl did not live in the Rue de Londres. She gave the coachman the address, but without much hope; still, she must have certainty on this point.

The carriage stopped before a little house two stories high, crowned by a terrace for a summer garden; it was the old home in Paris of a Cairo man who had just died a bankrupt. There was about it the look of a little house with shutters closed and curtains drawn; a strong odor of the kitchen rose from the brightly lit and noisy basement. Rosalie understood what it was just from noting how the front door obeyed three strokes of the bell and of itself seemed to turn upon its hinges. A Persian tapestry caught up by heavy cords in the centre of the antechamber allowed a glimpse of the stair with its soft carpet and its lamps in which the gas was burning at the highest point. She heard laughter, took two steps forward and saw what never more in her life she could forget.

At the turn of the stairs on the first floor Numa was leaning over the banisters red and excited, in his shirt sleeves, with his arm round the waist of that girl, who was also very much excited, her hair loosened and falling down her back upon the frills of a rose-colored silk morning-gown. And there he was, calling out in his violent way:

“Bompard, bring up the brandade!”

That was where he could be seen as he really was, the Minister of Public Instruction and Religion, the great proclaimer of religious morality, the defender of sound doctrines! It was there he showed himself without mask or hypocritical grimace—all his South turned outside for inspection!—at ease and in his shirt-sleeves as if at the Fair of Beaucaire.

“Bompard, bring up the brandade!” repeated the giddy girl, intentionally exaggerating Numa’s Provençal accent. Without a question that was Bompard, the improvised cookshop boy who came up from the kitchen, a napkin over his shoulder and his arms surrounding a great big dish. It was he who caused the sounding wing of the door to turn on its hinges.

CHAPTER XVIII. NEW YEAR’S DAY.

“Gentlemen of the Central Administration!”

“Directors of the Academy of the Fine Arts!”

“Gentlemen of the Academy of Medicine!”

In grand gala dress, with his short hose and sword by his side, the chamberlain was announcing the arrivals in a mournful voice that resounded through the solemn drawing-rooms. As he called out, lines of black coats crossed the immense hall all red and gold and ranged themselves in a half-circle before the Minister, who stood with his back to the chimneypiece, having near him his Under-Secretary of State, M. de la Calmette, and his chief of cabinet, his foppish attachés and a few directors belonging to the Ministry such as Dansaert and Béchut. His Excellency addressed compliments and congratulations for the decorations and academic palms granted to some of those present, according as each organization arrived and was presented by its dean or president; then the organization turned right about and gave way to another set, some bodies retiring whilst others arrived, causing no little confusion at the doors of the hall.

For it was late; it was past one o’clock and each man was thinking of the breakfast which was waiting for him at home. In the concert hall which had been turned into a vestiary, impatient groups were looking at their watches, buttoning their gloves, adjusting their white cravats below their drawn faces; gaping and weariness, bad temper and hunger were on every side. Roumestan himself felt the weariness of this important day. He had lost his fine warmth of spirit shown at the same time last year, his faith in the future and in reform, and he let his little speeches off slowly, pierced through to his very marrow by the cold, despite the radiators and the enormous flaming wood fire; indeed, that little flaky snow which whirled about the panes of the windows seemed to fall upon his light heart and congeal it even as it fell upon the greensward of the garden.

“Gentlemen of the Comédie-Française!”

Closely shaved and solemn, distributing bows just as the fashion was in the grand epoch, they posed themselves in majestic attitudes about their dean, who in a cavernous voice presented the company, talked about the endeavors and vows the company had made—“the” company, without any epithet or qualifying word, just as we say “God” or as we say “the” Bible—exactly as if no other company existed in the world except that alone! And it must be said that poor Roumestan needs be very much enfeebled if this same company could not excite his eloquence and grand theatrical phrases, this company to which he himself seemed to belong with his bluish chin, his jowls and his distinguished but most conventional poses!

The fact was that for the last eight days, since the departure of Rosalie, he was like a gambler who has lost his mascot; he was frightened and suddenly felt himself inferior to his fortune and thus ready to be crushed. Mediocrities who have been favored by chance have such panics and nervous crises and they were increased in him by the terrible scandal which was about to break out, the scandal of a lawsuit for separation which the young wife insisted upon absolutely, notwithstanding all his letters and visits, his grovelling prayers and oaths. To keep up appearances it was said at the Ministry that Mme. Roumestan had gone to live with her father because of the near departure of Mme. Le Quesnoy and Hortense. But nobody was taken in by that, and the luckless man saw his adventure reflected in pity or curiosity or sarcasm from all these faces which were defiling before him, as well as from certain broadly marked smiles and from various shakes of the hand, a little more energetic than usual. There was not a single one of the lowest employees who had come to the reception in jacket and overcoat who was not thoroughly posted in this matter. Among the offices couplets were circulating from mouth to mouth in which Chambéry rhymed with Bachellery; more than one porter discontented with his pay was humming one of these couplets within himself whilst making a deep bow to his supreme chief.

Two o’clock! Still the organized bodies kept presenting themselves and the snow kept deepening whilst the man with the chains over his uniform introduced pell-mell and without any kind of order:

“Gentlemen of the School of Laws!”

“Gentlemen of the Conservatory of Music!”

“Directors of the Subsidized Theatres!”

By favor of seniority and his three failures Cadaillac arrived at the head of this delegation. Roumestan longed far more to fall with fist and foot upon the cynical impresario whose nomination had occasioned such serious embarrassment to him than to listen to the fine speech to which the ferocious insolence of his look gave the lie and to answer him with a forced compliment, half of which stuck in the big folds of his cravat:

“Greatly touched, gentlemen ... mn mn mn ... progress of art ... mn mn mn ... still better in the future....”

And the impresario as he moved off:

“Poor old Numa—he’s got a charge of lead in his wing this time!”

When these had left, the Minister and his comrades did honor to the usual breakfast; but this meal which had been so gay and full of effusion the year before was weighted down by the gloom of the chief and bad temper on the part of his intimates, who were all of them enraged with him on account of their own situations which he had already begun to compromise. This scandalous lawsuit coming just in the midst of the debate over Cadaillac would be sure to make Roumestan impossible as a member of the cabinet. That very morning at the reception in the Palace of the Élysées the Marshal had said two words about it with the laconic and brutal eloquence natural to an old cavalryman: “A dirty business!”

Without precisely having heard this speech from an august mouth, which was murmured in Numa’s ear in an alcove, the gentlemen round him saw very clearly their own fall coming behind that of their chief.

“Oh, women, women!” grunted the learned Béchut over his plate. M. de la Calmette with his thirty years of official life grew melancholy as he pondered over a retiring from office like unto Tircis, and below his breath the long-legged Lappara amused himself by frightening Rochemaure out of his wits:

“Viscount, we must look out for ourselves; we shall be decapitated before eight days are over!”

After a toast had been given by the Minister to the New Year and his dear collaborators, uttered with a shaky voice in which one heard the tears, they separated. Méjean, who stayed to the last, walked two or three times up and down beside his friend without having the courage to say a single word; then he too left. Notwithstanding his wish to keep by his side during that day a man like Méjean whose straightforward nature forced his respect like a reproach uttered by his own conscience, but at the same time sustained and reassured him, Numa could not stand in the way of Méjean’s duty, which was to run his round of visits and distribute good wishes and presents for the New Year, any more than he could prevent his chamberlain from going back to his family and unburdening himself of his sword and short-clothes.

What a howling solitude was that Ministry! It was like Sunday in a factory with the boiler cold and silent. In all the departments upstairs and downstairs, in his own cabinet, where he vainly attempted to write, in his bed-chamber, which he began once more to fill with his sobs, everywhere that little January snow was whirling about the big windows, veiling the horizon and increasing the silence which was like that of the Eastern steppes.

Oh, the misery of men in lofty positions!

A clock struck four and then another answered and then still others replied through the vast desert of the palace until it seemed as if there was nothing alive there except the hour. The idea of remaining there till evening face to face with his wretchedness frightened him. He felt that he must thaw himself a little with a bit of friendship and tenderness. Steam radiators and warm-air registers and half trees flaming in the chimneypiece did not constitute a hearth; for a moment he thought of the Rue de Londres. But he had sworn to his lawyer—for the lawyers were already at work—to keep quiet until the suit was decided. All of a sudden a name flashed across his mind: “Bompard! Why had he not come?” Generally he was observed to arrive the first on mornings of feast-days, his arms full of bouquets and paper sacks with candies for Rosalie, Hortense and Mme. Le Quesnoy, wearing on his lips a smile which expressed his character of grandpapa or of Santa Claus. Of course Roumestan paid the bill of these surprises, but friend Bompard was possessed of imagination enough to forget that fact, and, notwithstanding her antipathy, Rosalie could not help being touched when she thought of the privations which the poor devil must have undergone in order to be so generous.

“Suppose I go and get him and we dine together.”

He was reduced to that. He rang, took off his evening dress, all his medals and orders and went out on foot by the Rue Bellechasse.

The quays and bridges were all white; but when he had crossed the courtyard of the Carrousel neither ground nor air betrayed a trace of snow. It disappeared under the wheels that crowded the street, in the swarming myriads of the mob covering the sidewalks at the shop-fronts and pushing round the offices of the omnibus lines. This tumult of a feast-day evening, the calls of the coachmen, the shrill cries of peddlers in the luminous confusion of the shop-fronts, where the lilac-colored jets from the Jablochkoff burners extinguished the twinkling yellow of the gas and the last reflections from the pale afternoon, lulled the despair of Roumestan and dissolved it, as it were, by means of the agitation of the street. Meantime he directed his steps toward the Boulevard Poissonnière where the old Circassian, very sedentary like all men of imagination, had lived for the last twenty years, in fact since his arrival in Paris.

Nobody had ever seen the interior of Bompard’s home, of which nevertheless he talked a good deal, as well as of his garden and his artistic furniture, to complete which he haunted all the auctions at the Hôtel Drouot.

“Do come to breakfast one of these days and eat a chop with me!”

That was the regular form of invitation which he scattered right and left, but any one who took him at his word never found anybody at home; he came up standing against signs left by the janitor, against bells wrapped in paper or deprived of their wire. During an entire year Lappara and Rochemaure obstinately continued to try to reach Bompard’s rooms and overcome the extraordinary stratagems of the Provençal who was guarding the mystery of his apartment—but all in vain. One day he even took out some of the bricks near the front door in order to be able to say across this species of barricade to the friends he had invited:

“Awfully sorry, dear boys—we have had an escape of gas—everything blown up last night!”

After having mounted numberless stories and wandered through long corridors, tumbled over invisible steps and intruded upon veritable assemblies of witches among the servants’ bedrooms, Roumestan, quite blown from that arduous ascent, to which his legs of an illustrious man were no longer equal, tumbled against a great big washbowl fastened to the wall.

“Who’s there?” spoke out a well-known voice coming from far down the throat.

The door opened slowly, weighed down by a clothes-rack upon which hung the entire wardrobe of the lodger for winter and summer; the room was small and Bompard did not lose the benefit of an eighth of an inch and was compelled to keep his toilet table in the corridor. His friend found him lying on a little iron bed, his brow decorated with a scarlet head-dress, a sort of Dantesque cap which rose up in astonishment at sight of the distinguished visitor.

“It can’t be you!”

“Are you ill?” said Roumestan.

“Ill? not much!”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You see I am taking stock of things,” and then he added, to explain his thought: “I have so many plans in my head, so many inventions! Now and then I get dispersed and lose myself; it is only when I lie abed that I can gather myself together a little.”

Roumestan looked about for a chair, but none was there except the single one in use as a night table; it was covered with books and newspapers and had a candlestick wobbling on top of them all. He sat down on the foot of the bed.

“Why do we never see anything more of you?”

“Pshaw! you must be joking. After what happened I could not meet your wife face to face. Just think a little! There I was right before her, the codfish à la brandade in my hand. It took a mighty lot of coolness, I can tell you, not to let everything drop.”

“Rosalie is no longer at the Ministry,” said Numa quite overwhelmed.

“You astonish me; do you mean to say that it has not been arranged?”

And indeed it did not seem possible to him that Madame Numa, a person of so much good sense ... for after all, what was all this business anyhow? “Come now, just a mere fancy!”

The other interrupted him:

“You don’t understand her—she is an implacable woman—the perfect image of her father—Northern race, my dear fellow—with them it is not as it is with us, where the greatest anger evaporates in gesticulations and threats and then there is nothing left and we face about. But they keep everything in mind; it is terrible.”

He did not say that she had already forgiven him once before; and then, in order to escape from his sorrowful thoughts:

“Get your clothes on; you must come and dine with me.”

While Bompard was making his toilet out in the corridor the Minister looked about the mansard room lit by a little window like a tobacco-box, over which the melting snow was running. Pity seized him face to face with this penury, these damp rags, the whitewashed paper and little stove worn with rust and fireless notwithstanding the cold. And he asked himself, used as he was to the sumptuousness of his palace, how people could live in such a place?

“Have you seen the gardeen?” cried Bompard joyfully from his basin.

His garden was the leafless tops of three plane-trees which could not be seen unless one stood upon the solitary chair in the room.

“And my little museum?”

His museum he called a few ticketed knick-knacks upon a board, a brick, a short pipe in brierwood, a rusty knife-blade and an ostrich egg—but the brick came from the Alhambra, the sword had been used in the vendettas of a famous Corsican bandit, the short pipe bore an inscription, “Pipe of a Morocco criminal,” and finally the ostrich egg represented the vanishing of a beautiful dream, all that remained—along with a few laths and bits of plaster heaped in a corner—of the famous Bompard Incubator and the scheme for artificial hatching. But now, my dear boy, there is something much better on hand—a marvellous scheme—millions in it—which he was not at liberty to explain at present.

“What is it you are looking at? That?—That is my brevet of membership—bé, yes, membership in the Aïoli.”

This club of the Aïoli had for its purpose the bringing together once a month of all the Southerners living in Paris, in order to eat a dinner cooked with garlic, a way of never losing either the fragrance or the accent of home. It was a tremendous organization—a President of Honor, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Seniors, Questors, Treasurers, all furnished with their diplomas as members brave with silver streamers, and the flower of the leek as decoration upon rose-colored paper. This precious document was displayed on the wall alongside of advertisements of every sort of color, sales of houses, railway placards and so forth, which Bompard liked to have always under his nose, in order, as he ingenuously remarked, “to do his liver good.” There might one read: “Château to sell, one hundred and fifty hectares, meadows, hunting, river, pond full of fish.... Lovely little property in Touraine, vineyards, luzernes, mill-on-the-Cize.... Round trip through Switzerland, through Italy, to Lago Maggiore, to the Borromean Islands....” These things excited him just as much as if he had had fine landscapes in oil hanging on the wall. He believed he was in these places—and he was there!

“By Jove!” said Roumestan with a shade of envy of this wretched believer in chimeras, so happy in his rags—“You have a tremendous imagination. Come, are you ready? Let’s get down. It is frightfully cold up here.”

After a few turns through the brilliant streets across the jolly mob of the boulevards the two friends settled themselves down in the heady, radiating warmth of a little room in a big restaurant, in front of oysters and a bottle of Château-Yquem very carefully uncorked.

“To your health, my comrade—I pray that it may be good and happy forever.”

“Té! why it’s a fact,” said Bompard; “we haven’t kissed each other yet.”

Across the table they gave each other a hug with moistened eyes and Roumestan felt himself quite gay again, despite the wrinkled and swarthy hide of the Circassian. Ever since morning he had wanted to kiss somebody. Besides, think of all the years they had known each other—thirty years of their life in front of them on that tablecloth—and through the vapor rising from delicate dishes and over the straw wrappers of delicious wines they recalled their days of youth, their fraternal recollections, races and picnics, saw once more their own boyish faces and interlarded their effusions with words in dialect which brought them still closer together.

“T’en souvénès, digo?” (I say, do you remember?)

In a room near by could be heard a noise of high laughter and little screams.

“To the devil with females,” said Roumestan; “there is nothing worth while but friendship!”

And then they drank to each other once more; nevertheless their talk turned in another direction: “And how about the little girl?” asked Bompard, winking his eye. “How is she getting on?”

“O, of course, I have not seen her again, you know.”

“Of course not, of course not,” said the other turning suddenly very serious and putting on a solemn face.

Presently a piano behind the partition began to play scraps of waltzes, fashionable quadrilles and bars of music from operettas, now crazy and now languid. They stopped talking in order to listen, pulling off the withered grapes, and Numa, all of whose sensations appeared to have two faces and to be swung upon a pivot, began to think about his wife and his child and his lost happiness. So he must needs unbosom himself at the top of his voice with his elbows on the table.

“Eleven years of intimacy, trust and tenderness—all that flashed away and vanished in a minute! how can it be possible? ah, Rosalie, Rosalie—”

No one could ever know what she had been to him, and he himself had not thoroughly understood it until after her departure. Such an upright spirit, such a straightforward heart! And what shoulders and what arms! No little gingerbread doll like little Bachellery; something full and amber-tinted and delicate—

“Besides, don’t you see, my dear comrade, there’s no denying that when we are young we need surprises and adventures—meetings in a hurry, sharpened by the fear of being caught, staircases one comes down on all fours with one’s boots in one’s arms—all that is part of love. But at our age what we desire above everything else is peace and what the philosophers call security in pleasure. It is only marriage which can give you that.”

He jumped up all of a sudden, threw down his napkin: “Off with us, té!”

“And we are going—?” asked the impassible Bompard.

“To walk by under her window just as I did twelve years ago—to this, my dear boy, is he reduced, the grand Master of the University—”

Under the arcaded way of the Place Royale, whose square garden covered with snow formed a white quadrilateral within its iron fence, these two friends walked up and down for a long while, spying out in the broken sky-line formed by the Louis XIII roofs, chimneys and balconies the lofty windows of the Hôtel Le Quesnoy.

“To think that she is over there,” sighed Roumestan, “so near to me, and yet I may not see her!”

Bompard was shivering with his feet in the mud and did not appreciate very greatly this sentimental excursion; in order to bring it to a close he used strategy, and knowing well that Numa was a soft one, in deadly fear of the slightest illness:

“I’m afraid you’ll catch cold, Numa,” insinuated he like the traitor he was.

The Southerner was struck with fear, and they quickly returned to the carriage.

She was there indeed, in that same drawing-room where he had seen her for the first time. The furniture was just the same and held the same place, having reached that age when furniture, like temperaments, cannot be renewed. Scarcely were there a few more faded folds in the fawn-colored hangings and a film over the dull reflections from the mirrors like that one sees on deserted ponds which nothing ever touches. The faces of the two old people under the two-branched candlesticks at the card-table in company with their usual partners showed likewise a little of the wear and tear of life. Madame Le Quesnoy’s features were puffy and drooping as if the fibre had been taken out of them, and the President’s pallor was still more pallid and still prouder was the revolt that he preserved in the bitter blue of his eyes. Seated near a big arm-chair, the cushions of which were still crushed down by a light weight, her sister having gone to bed, Rosalie continued in a low voice that reading aloud which she had been giving a moment before for the benefit of her sister, reading on in a low voice through the silence of whist broken by the half-words and interjections of the players.

It was a book belonging to her youth, one of those poets of nature whom her father had taught her to love. And she perceived the whole past of her life as a young girl rising up from the pure white of the stanzas as well as the fresh and penetrating impression of the books one has read first in life.

The book slipped from her hands upon her knees, the last two lines re-echoing their mournful song to the very depths of her being, recalling to her the wretchedness which for one moment she had forgot. There lies the cruelty that poets exercise; they lull and appease you, but then with one word they envenom again the wound which they were by way of healing.

She saw herself as she was in that same place twelve years before when Numa paid his addresses to her with great big bouquets of roses; when, clothed with her twenty years and the wish to be beautiful for his sake, from that very window she watched him coming, just as one watches one’s own destiny. In every corner of the house there remained echoes of his warm and tender voice, so ready to lie. If one looked a moment among the music scattered about the piano one would find the duos which they sang together; everything which surrounded her seemed accomplices of the disaster in her failure of a life. She thought of what that life might have been by the side of an honest man and loyal comrade, not brilliant and ambitious, but enjoying a simple and hidden existence in which they would have courageously borne all bitternesses and all sorrow to the very end of their days.

“Elle aurait eu bien moins de peine.” (Ah, far less woe would she have known.)

She had plunged so deep into her dream that when the whist party ended and her parents’ old friends had left, almost without her remarking it, answering mechanically the friendly and pitying farewells that each one gave her, she failed to perceive that the President, instead of conducting his friends to the front door as had been his habit every evening, no matter what the time or season, was marching up and down the drawing-room. At last he stopped before her and put a question to her in a voice which caused her all of a sudden to tremble:

“Well, my child, where are you in this matter? have you made up your mind?”

“Why, dear father, I am exactly where I was before.”

He seated himself beside her, took her hand and attempted to do the persuasive:

“I have been to see your husband ... he consents to everything ... you can live here with me the entire time that your mother and sister shall be away, and even afterwards if your anger against him still continues. But I tell you again, this suit for separation is impossible! I do hope that you will not insist upon it.”

Rosalie tossed her head.

“My dear father, you do not understand that man. He will employ all his cunning to surround me and get me back again, make me his dupe, a voluntary dupe, who has accepted an undignified and degraded existence. Your daughter is not a woman of that sort. I demand a complete and irreparable rupture, openly announced to all the world.”

From the card-table where she sat ranging the cards and markers Mme. Le Quesnoy, without turning round, gently interposed:

“Forgive, my child, forgive.”

“O yes, that is easy to say when one has a husband as upright and loyal as yours, when one never has known the suffocating effect of lies and treason, drawing their plots about one. He is a hypocrite, I tell you. He has his Chambéry morality and his morality of the Rue de Londres. His words and his acts are never in accord—two ways of speech, two faces—all the seductive and catlike nature of his race—in a word, the man of the South!”

And then, losing her head as her anger exploded, she said:

“Besides, I had already forgiven him once. Yes, two years after my marriage. I never told you about it, I have never spoken to a single person. I was very unhappy; and then we only remained together because of an oath he made me.—But he only lives on perjuries! And now it is completely at an end, completely at an end!”

The President did not insist further, but slowly rose and went over to his wife. There was a whispering together and something like a debate, surprising enough between that authoritative man and this humble, annihilated creature: “You must tell her.... Yes, yes, I want you to tell her....” Without adding another word M. Le Quesnoy left the room and his sonorous regular step, his step of every evening, could be heard mounting the solitary vaulted stairs, through all the solemn spaces of the grand drawing-room.

“Come here,” said her mother to the daughter with a tender gesture, “nearer to me, still nearer.”

She would never dare to tell her aloud; and even when they were so close and heart was beating against heart, she still hesitated:

“Listen, dear; it is he who demands it—he wants me to tell you that your destiny is the destiny of all women, and that even your mother has not escaped it.”

Rosalie was overwhelmed with that secret confided to her which she had divined in a flash at the first words of her mother, whilst her old and very dear voice broken with tears could hardly articulate the very sorrowful, very sorrowful story, similar in every way to her own—the crime of her husband from the earliest years of their housekeeping, just as if the motto of these wretched coupled beings must be “Deceive me or else I deceive thee!”—the man hastening to begin the evil in order to maintain his superior rank.

“Enough, enough, Mamma. Oh, how you are hurting me!”

This father whom she so admired, whom she placed far above any other man, this sterlingly honest and firm magistrate! But what kind of creatures were men, anyhow? At the North and down South, all were alike, traitors and perjurers. She who had not wept a tear because of the treason of her husband now felt herself invaded by a flood of hot tears because of this humiliation of her father.... And so they were counting upon this, were they? to make her yield! No, a hundred times no; she would never forgive. Ha, ha! so that was marriage, was it? Very well; dishonor and disdain upon marriage then! What cared she for fear of scandal and the proprieties of the world, since it was a rivalry as to who should treat them with the most contempt?

Her mother, taking her in her arms and pressing her against her heart, endeavored to soften the revolt of this young conscience wounded in all its beliefs, in its dearest superstitions; she caressed her gently as if she were rocking a child:

“Yes, yes, you will forgive. You will do as I did—you see it is our destiny. Ah, I also had a terrible bitterness in me during the first moments and a great longing to throw myself out of the window. But I thought of my child, my poor little Andrew who was just coming to life, who since then grew up and died, loving and respecting all his family. So you too will pardon in order that your child shall have the same happy tranquillity which my own courage secured to you, so that he shall not be one of those half-orphans whom parents share between them, whom they bring up in hatred and disdain to one and the other. You will also remember that your father and mother have already suffered tremendously and that other bitter sorrows are menacing them now—”

She stopped short, suffocated by feeling, and then in a solemn accent:

“My daughter, all sorrows become softened and all wounds are capable of being cured. There is only one sorrow which is irreparable and that is the death of the person we love.”

In the failure of her agitated forces that followed these last words Rosalie felt the figure of her mother grow in grandeur by as much as her father had lost greatness in her eyes. She even reproached herself for having so long misunderstood the sublime and resigned self-abnegation concealed beneath that apparent feebleness which was the result of bitter blows. Thus it came about that for her mother’s sake, for her mother’s sake alone, she renounced the lawsuit in revenge of her outraged rights, and renounced it in gentle words, almost as if asking pardon: “Only do not insist that I go back to him—I should be too ashamed. I will accompany my sister to the South. Afterwards, later, we shall see.”

The President came back again, and when he saw the enthusiasm with which the old mother was throwing her arms about the neck of her child he understood that their cause was won.

“Thank you, my daughter,” he murmured, very much touched. Then after a little hesitation he approached Rosalie for the usual kiss of good-night. But the brow which ordinarily was so tenderly offered moved aside and his kiss lost itself in her hair.

“Good-night, father.”

He said nothing in return, but went away hanging his head with a convulsive shudder in his high shoulders. He who during his life had accused so many people, had condemned so many—he, the First Magistrate of France, had found a judge in his turn.

CHAPTER XIX. HORTENSE LE QUESNOY.

Through one of those sudden shiftings of the scenery which are so frequent in the comedy of Parliamentary government, the meeting of January 8th, during which it was to be expected that the good luck of Roumestan would go all to pieces, procured for him on the contrary a striking success. When he marched up the steps of the platform in order to answer the cruel sarcasms that Rougeot had been getting off concerning the management of the opera, the mess that the department of the fine arts had got into, the emptiness of those reforms which had been trumpeted abroad by the supporters of the clerical Ministry, Numa had just learned that his wife had left Paris, having renounced her lawsuit.

This happy news, which was known to him alone, filled his answer with a confidence that radiated from his whole being. He took a haughty air, then a confidential, then a solemn one; he alluded to calumnies which are whispered in people’s ears and to some scandal that was expected:

“Gentlemen, there will be no scandal!”

The tone with which he said this threw a lively disappointment over the galleries crammed with all the sensation-loving, pretty women, mad for strong emotions, who had come there in charming costumes to see the conqueror devoured. The interpellation by Rougeot was torn to bits, the South seduced once more the North, Gaul for yet another time was conquered!—and when Roumestan ran down the steps again, worn out, perspiring and almost without voice, he had the proud satisfaction of seeing his party—but a moment ago so cold and even hostile—and his colleagues in the Cabinet, who had been accusing him of having compromised them, surround him with acclamations and enthusiastic flatteries. And in the intoxication of his success the relinquishment of her vengeance on the part of his wife kept returning to him always in the light of a supreme salvation.

He felt himself relieved and gay and expansive, so much so that on returning to the city the thought passed through his mind to run around to the Rue de Londres. O, of course, entirely as a friend! in order to reassure that poor little girl who had been as anxious as he over the results of the interpellation, who bore their common exile with so much bravery, sending him in her unformed writing, dryed with face-powder, delightful little letters in which she related her existence day by day and exhorted him to patience and prudence.

“No, no; do not come here, poor darling—write to me and think of me—I shall be brave.”

It happened that the Opera was not open that evening, and during the short passage from the station to the little house in the Rue de Londres Numa was thinking, while he clutched in his hand that little key which had been a temptation to him more than once for the last fortnight:

“How happy she is going to be!”

Having opened the door and shut it noiselessly, he suddenly found himself in deep obscurity, for the gas had not been lit. This neglect gave to the little house an appearance of mourning and widowhood which flattered him. The thick carpet on the stair softening his tread as he ran up, he reached without being in any way announced the drawing-room hung with Japanese stuffs of the most deliciously false shades just suited to the artificial gold in the tresses of the little girl.

“Who is there?” asked a pretty voice but an angry one from the divan.

“It is I, by Jove!—”

He heard a cry and a sudden springing up, and in the uncertain light of the evening by the white light of her skirts, the little singing girl stood up straight in the greatest fright, whilst handsome Lappara in a crushed but motionless position stood there looking hard at the flowers in the carpet to avoid the eyes of his master. There was no denying the situation.

“Gutter-snipes!” roared Roumestan hoarsely, seized by one of those suffocating rages during which the beast growls inside the man with a desire to tear in pieces and to bite far more than to strike.

Without knowing how it was he found himself outside the house, hurried away by fear of his own frightful wrath. In that very place and at that very hour some days before, his wife, just like himself, had received the blow of treachery, the vulgar and the outrageous wound, but a far more cruel and utterly unmerited one. But he never thought of that for a moment, filled as he was with indignation at the personal injury. No, never had such a villainy been seen beneath the sun! This Lappara whom he loved like a child! This scoundrel of a girl for whose sake he had gone the length of compromising his entire political fortune!

“Gutter-snipes!—gutter-snipes!” he repeated aloud in the empty street as he hurried through a fine, penetrating rain, which in fact calmed him far better than the finest logic.

“Té! why, I am all wet—”

He hurried to the cab-stand on the Rue d’Amsterdam, and in the crowd which collects in that place owing to the constant arrival of trains at the station he came up against the hard and tightly buttoned uniform of General the Marquis d’Espaillon.

“Bravo, my dear colleague! I was not in the Chamber; but they tell me that you charged the enemy like a —— and routed him, horse and foot.”

As he stood as straight as a lath under his umbrella, the old fellow had a devilish lively eye and moustaches gallantly twisted to the correct angle for the evening of a lucky love adventure.

“G— d— m— s—!” he went on, leaning over toward Numa’s ear with a tone of confidence in gallantry, “you at least can boast of understanding women, by Jove!”

And as the other looked at him sharply, supposing that he was speaking sarcastically:

“Why yes, don’t you remember our discussion about love? You were perfectly right. It is not only the fops and dudes that please the women—I’ve got one now on the string. Never swallowed a better than this one—G— d— m— s—, not even when I was twenty-five and had just left the Academy.”

Roumestan listened to him with his hand on the door of his cab and thought that he was smiling at the old lovesick fool, but what he produced was nothing more than a horrible grimace. His theories about women were just then so extraordinarily upset.—Glory? genius? O, come now! Those are not the things that make them care for you. He felt himself outwitted and disgusted, and had a desire to weep and then a longing to sleep in order not to think any more, especially not to recall further the frightened laugh of that little rascally girl standing straight before him with her waist in disorder and all her neck red and trembling from the interrupted kisses.

But in the agitated course of our life, hours and events link themselves together and follow each other like waves. In place of the nice rest which he hoped to obtain on returning home a new blow was awaiting him at the Ministry, a telegraphic despatch which Méjean had opened in his absence and now handed him, deeply moved:

The whole of his frightful egotism broke from him with the dismayed exclamation:

“Oh, what devoted fidelity am I losing in her!”

Then he thought of his wife who was present at that death-bed and had allowed Aunt Portal to send the despatch. Her wrath had not yielded and probably never would give way. Nevertheless, if she had been willing, how thoroughly would he not have recommenced life at her side, giving up all his imprudent follies and becoming a straightforward and almost austere family man! And then, never giving a thought to the harm that he had done, he reproached Rosalie for her hardness of heart, as if she were treating him unjustly.

He passed the night correcting the proofs of his speech and interrupting work every now and then to write bits of letters to that little scoundrel of an Alice Bachellery, letters either raging or sarcastic, scolding or abusive. Méjean was also up all night in the Secretary’s office; overwhelmed with bitter sorrow, he tried to find forgetfulness in unremitting toil, and Numa, who was pleased with his company, experienced a veritable pain because he could not pour out to him in confidence the deception he had met with. But then he would have been forced to acknowledge that he had gone back to her and stand the ridicule of the situation.

Nevertheless, he was not able to hold out, and in the morning whilst his chief of cabinet was accompanying him to the station he committed to him amongst other orders the charge of giving Lappara his walking-papers. “O, he is expecting it, you may be sure! I caught him in the very act of committing the blackest piece of ingratitude.—And when I think how kind I have been to him, to the point of intending to make him—” he stopped short; would it be believed that he was on the point of telling the man in love with Hortense that he had promised the girl’s hand to another person? Without going further into details, he declared that he did not wish to find on his return such a wretchedly immoral person at the Ministry. But on general principles he was heart-broken at the duplicity of the world—all was ingratitude and egotism. It was so bad, he would like to toss them into the street, all his honors and business matters, in order to quit Paris and become the keeper of a lighthouse on a horrible crag in the midst of the ocean.

“You have slept badly, my dear Master,” said Méjean with his tranquil air.

“No, no, it is exactly as I tell you—Paris makes me sick at my stomach....”

Standing on the platform near the cars, he turned about with a gesture of supreme disgust aimed at that great city into which the provinces pour all their ambitions and concupiscences, all their boiling and sordid overflow—and then accuse it of degeneracy and moral taint. He interrupted his tirade and then, with a bitter laugh, pointing to a wall:

“How he does dog me everywhere, that fellow over there!”

On a vast gray wall pierced with hideous little windows at the angle of the Rue de Lyon, there was the picture of a wretched troubadour. Washed out by all the moisture of the winter and the filth from a barrack of poor people, the advertisement showed on the second story a frightful mess of blue, yellow and green through which one could still see the pretentious and victorious gesture of the tabor-player. In Parisian advertisements placards succeed each other quickly, one concealing the other; but when they are of enormous dimensions, some bit or end will stick out; wherefore it happened that in every corner of Paris during the last fortnight the Minister had found before his eyes either a leg or an arm, or a bit of the Provençal cap, or an end of the laced peasant’s boots of Valmajour. These remnants threatened him even as in that Provençal legend the victim of a murder with his various limbs hacked and separated cries out against his murderer from all the separate bits of his body. But in this case he was there entire, and the horrible coloring seen through the chill morning air, forced as it was to receive unflinchingly all kinds of filth before it dropped away and disappeared under a final rush of wind, represented very well the destiny of the unfortunate troubadour, driven forever from pillar to post through the slums of that Paris which he could no longer quit, and conducting the farandole for a mob recruited from the unclassed and exiled ones and the fools, those persons thirsting for notoriety whose end is the hospital, the dissection table and the potter’s field.

Roumestan got into his coach frozen to the very bone by that morning apparition and by the cold of his sleepless night, shivering at sight through the car windows of those mournful vistas in the suburbs, those iron bridges across streets that shone with rain, those tall houses, barracks of wretchedness whose numberless windows were stuffed with rags, and then those early morning figures, hollow cheeked, sorrowful and sordid, those rounded backs and arms clutching breasts in order to conceal something or warm themselves, those taverns with signs in endless variety and the thick forest of factory chimneys vomiting smoke that falls at once to earth. After that came the first gardens of the outer suburb, black of soil, the coarse mortar in the low farm buildings, villas closely shuttered in the midst of their little gardens reduced by the winter to copses as dry as the bare wood of the kiosks and arbors, and then, farther on, the country roads broken up by puddles, where one saw files of overflowing tanks—a horizon the color of rust, and flights of crows over the deserted fields.

He closed his eyes to keep out this sorrowful Northern winter through which the whistle of the locomotive passed with long wails of distress, but his own thoughts under his lowered eyelids were in no respect happier. So near again to that fool of a girl—for the bond that held him to her still contracted his heart though it had broken!—he pondered over all the different things he had done for her and what the support of an operatic star had cost him for the last six months. In that life of the boards everything is false, but especially success, which is only worth as much as one buys. The demands of the claque, cost of tickets at the office, of dinners, receptions, presents to reporters, publicity in all its varying forms, all these have their price; then the magnificent bouquets at sight of which the singer grows red and shows emotion, gathering them up against her arms and nude neck and the shining satin of her gown; and then the ovations prepared beforehand for the provincial tour, enthusiastic processions to the hotel, serenades to the diva’s balcony and all the other things calculated to dispel the gloomy indifference of the public—ah, all these must not only be paid for but paid high!

For six months he had gone along with open pocketbook, never begrudging the triumphs arranged for the little girl. He was present at negotiations with the chief of the claque and the advertising agents of the newspapers, as well as the flower-woman whose bouquets the diva and her mother worked off on him three times without his knowledge merely by decking them out with fresh ribbons; for these Bordeaux Jewesses were possessed of a vulgar rapacity and a love of trickery and expedients which caused them at times to remain at home for entire days, clad in rags, old jackets over flowing skirts, with their feet in ancient ball slippers. In fact it was thus that Numa found them oftenest, passing their time playing cards and reviling each other as if they were in a van of acrobats at a fair. For a good many months past they had no longer put on any restraint in his presence. He knew all the tricks and grimaces of the diva and the coarseness natural to an affected and unneat woman of the South: also that she was ten years older than her age on the boards and that in order to fix upon her face that eternal smile in a Cupid’s bow she went to sleep each night with her lips pulled up at the corners and streaked with coral lip-paint.

At this point at last he himself fell asleep—but I can assure you that his mouth was not like a Cupid’s bow; on the contrary his every feature was haggard from disgust and fatigue, while his entire body was shaken by the bumps and swayings to and fro and by the shocks of the express train whirled under full steam over the metals.

“Valeïnce!—Valeïnce!”

He opened his eyes like a child called by his mother. The South had already begun to appear; between the clouds, which the wind was driving apart, deep blue abysses were dug, and there was the sky! A ray of sunlight warmed the car window and among the roadside pines one saw the grayness of a few thin olive-trees. This produced a feeling of rest throughout the sensitive nature of the Southerner and a complete polar change of ideas. He was sorry that he had been so harsh to Lappara. Think of having destroyed the future of that poor boy and plunged a whole family in grief—and for what? A “foutaise, allons!” as Bompard said. There was only one way of repairing it and correcting its look of dismissal from the Ministry, and that was the Cross of the Legion of Honor. And the Minister began to laugh at the idea of Lappara’s name appearing in the Officiel with this addition, “Exceptional services.” But after all it was an exceptional service to have delivered his chief from that degrading connection.

Orange!... Montelimar and its nougat!... Voices were already full of vibration and words reinforced by lively gestures. Waiters from the restaurant, paper sellers and station guards rushed upon the train with their eyes sticking out of their heads. Certainly this was quite a different people from that which one met thirty leagues farther North, and the Rhône, the broad Rhône, with its waves like a sea, glistened under the sunshine that turned to gold the crenelated ramparts of Avignon, whose bells—which have never stopped ringing since the days of Rabelais—saluted the big political man of Provence with their clear-cut chimes. Numa took possession of a seat at the buffet in front of a little white roll, a pasty and a bottle of the well known wine from the Nerte that had ripened between the rocks and was capable of inoculating even a Parisian with the accent of dwellers among the scrub-oak barrens.

But his natal atmosphere rejoiced his heart the most—when he was able to leave the main line at Tarascon and take a seat in a coach on the small patriarchal railway with a single track which pushes its way into the heart of Provence between the branches of mulberries and olive-trees, while tufts of wild rose scrape against the side doors. People were singing in the coaches; at every moment the train stopped in order to allow a flock of sheep to pass or to pick up a belated traveller or to ship some parcel which a boy from a mas brought up at a full run. And then what salutations and nice little bits of gossip between the train hands and the peasant women in their Arles head-dresses standing at their doors or washing clothes on the stone near the well! At the station what cries and hustlings—an entire village turning out to conduct to the cars some conscript or some girl who was off to the town for service.

“Té! vé! not good-bye, dear lass, ... but be very good, au moins!”

Then they weep and embrace each other without taking any notice of the hermit in his cowl asking alms as he leans against the station fence and mumbles his pater-noster; then, enraged at receiving nothing, turns to go as he throws his sack upon his back.

“Well, there’s another pater gone to pot!”

That phrase catches and is understood, all tears are dried and the whole company roars with laughter, the begging monk harder than the rest.

Hidden away in his coach in order to escape ovations, Roumestan enjoyed immensely all this jollity, pleased with the sight of these countenances all brown and hooked-nosed and alive with emotion and sarcasm, these big fellows with their smart air, these chatos as amber-colored as the long berries of the muscat grape, who as they grow older will turn into these crones, black and dried by the sun, who seem to scatter a dust as from the tomb every time they make one of their habitual gestures. So zou then! and allons! and all the en avants in the world! Here he found once more his own people, his changeable and nervous Provence, that race of brown crickets always at the door and always singing!

But he himself was certainly a type of them, already recovered from his terrible despair of that morning, from his disgust and his love—all swept away at the first puff of the mistral which was growling in a lively fashion through the valley of the Rhône. It met the train midway, retarding its advance and driving everything before it, the trees bent over in an attitude of flight as well as the far-away Alpilles, the sun shaken by the sudden eclipses, whilst in the distance under a rapid gleam of sunshine the town of Aps grouped its monuments about the ancient tower of the Antonines, just as a herd of cattle huddles on the wide plain of the Camargue about the oldest bull in order to break the force of the wind.

So it was that Numa made his entrance into the station to the sound of that magnificent trumpeting of the mistral.

The family had kept his arrival secret through a feeling of delicacy like his own, in order to avoid the Orpheons and banners and solemn deputations. Aunt Portal alone awaited him, majestically installed in the arm-chair belonging to the keeper of the station, with a warmer under her feet. As soon as she perceived her nephew the big rosy face of the stout lady, which had expanded in her reposeful position, took on a despairing expression and swelled up under the white lace cap, and stretching out her arms she burst into sobs and lamentations:

“Aie de nous, what a misfortune!... Such a pretty little thing, péchère!... and so good!... and so gentle!... you would take your bread from your mouth for her sake....”

“Great Heavens, is it all over?” thought Roumestan as he reverted quickly to the real purpose of his journey.

His aunt suddenly interrupted her vociferations and said coldly and in a hard tone to the servant who had forgotten the foot-warmer:

“Ménicle, the banquette!” then she took up again on the pitch of a frenzy of grief the story of the virtues of Mlle. Le Quesnoy, calling with loud cries upon heaven and its angels to know why they had not taken her in place of that child and shaking Numa’s arm with her explosions of sorrow; for she was leaning on him in order to reach her old coach at the slow gait of a funeral procession.

The horses advanced slowly under the leafless trees of the Avenue Berchère in a whirlwind of branches and dry bits of bark which the mistral was scattering as a poor sort of welcome before the illustrious traveller. At the end of the road where the porters had formed the habit of taking the horses out Ménicle was obliged to crack his whip many times, so surprised at this indifference for the great man did the horses seem to be. As for Roumestan, he was only thinking of the horrible news which he had just learned, and holding the two doll hands of his aunt, who kept constantly drying her eyes, he gently asked: “When did it happen?”

“What happen?”

“When did she die, the poor little dear?”

Aunt Portal bounced up on her thick cushions:

“Die?—Bou Diou!—who ever told you that she was dead?”

Then she added at once with a deep sigh:

“Only, péchère, she will not be here for long.”

Ah, no, not for very long, for now she no longer got up, never leaving the lace-covered pillows, on which from day to day her little thin head became less and less recognizable, painted as it was on the cheek-bones with a burning red cosmetic, whilst the eyes and nostrils were outlined in blue. With her ivory-white hands lying on the linen of the bed-clothes and a little hand-glass and comb near her to arrange from time to time her beautiful brown hair, she lay for hours without a word because of the wretched roughness that had invaded her voice, her look lost off there on the tips of the trees and in the brilliant sky over the old garden of the Portal mansion.

That evening her dreamy immobility lasted so long while the flames of the setting sun reddened all the chamber that her sister grew anxious:

“Are you asleep?”

Hortense shook her head as if she wished to drive something away:

“No, I was not asleep, and yet I was dreaming—I was dreaming that I am going to die. I was just on the borders of this world and leaning over into the other. Yes, leaning over enough to fall. I could see you still and some parts of my room, but all the same I was quite over on the other side, and what struck me most was the silence of this life in comparison with the tremendous sound that the dead were making. A sound of a beehive, of flapping wings and the low rustling of an ant-heap—the murmur which the sea leaves in the heart of its shells. It was just as if the realms of death were far more thickly peopled and encumbered than life. And all this noise was so intense that it seemed to me my ears heard for the first time and that I had discovered in me a new sense.”

She talked slowly in her rough and hissing voice. After a silence she employed whatever there was left in the way of strength in that broken and wretched instrument:

“O! my head is always on the journey.—First prize for imagination—Hortense Le Quesnoy of Paris.” A sob was heard which was drowned in the noise of a shutting door.

“You see,” said Rosalie, “Mamma had to leave the room. You hurt her feelings so.”

“On purpose—every day a little—so that she shall have less to suffer at the last,” answered the young girl in a whisper. The mistral was galloping through the big corridors of the old Provençal mansion, groaning under the doorways and shaking them with furious blows. Hortense smiled.

“Do you hear that? O, I love that, it makes me feel as if I were far away—off in the country. Poor darling,” added she, taking her sister’s hand and carrying it with a weary gesture as far as her mouth, “what a mean trick I have played you without intending to—here is your little one coming who’ll be a Southerner all through my fault—and you will never forgive me for it, Franciote!” Through the clamor of the wind the whistle of a locomotive reached her and made her shiver.

“Ah, ha, the seven o’clock train!”

Like all sick people and prisoners, she knew what the slightest sounds about her meant and mingled them with her motionless existence, just as she did the horizon before her, the grove of pines and the old weather-beaten Roman tower on the slope. From that moment on she became anxious and agitated, watching the door at which at last a servant appeared.

“That’s right,” said Hortense, in a lively way, and smiling at her big sister: “Just a minute, will you?—I will call you again.”

Rosalie thought it was a visit from the priest bringing his parochial Latin and his terrifying consolations, so she went down into the garden, which was a truly Southern enclosure without any flowers, but with alleys of box sheltered by high cypresses that withstood the wind. Ever since she had been sick-nurse she had gone thither to get a breath of air and to conceal her tears and to slacken a little all the nervous contractions of her sorrow. Oh, how well she understood that speech made by her mother:

“There is no sorrow which is irreparable but one, and that is the loss of the person we love.”

Her other sorrow, her happiness as a woman all destroyed, was quite in the background; she thought of nothing except that horrible and inevitable thing which was approaching day by day. Was it the evening hour, that red and deepening sun which left all the garden in shadow and yet lingered on the panes of the house, or that mournful wind blowing high up which she could hear without feeling it? At that moment she felt a melancholy, an anguish which could not be expressed in words. Hortense! her Hortense! more than a sister for her, almost a daughter ... she had in Hortense the first happiness of a premature mother’s love.

Sobs oppressed her, sobs without tears; she would have liked to cry aloud and call for help, but on whom? The sky, toward which the despairing raise their eyes, was so high, so far, so cold; it was as if polished off by the hurricane. Through that sky a flight of migrating birds was hurrying, but neither their cries nor their wings which made as much noise as flapping sails could be heard below. How then could a single voice from earth reach and attain those silent and indifferent abysses?

Nevertheless she made a trial and with her face turned toward the light which moved ever upward and was passing from the roof of the old house, she made her prayer to Him who has thought fit to conceal Himself and protect Himself from our sorrows and lamentations—Him whom some adore confidentially with their brows against the earth, but others forlornly search for with their arms wide apart, while others finally threaten Him with their fists and revolt against Him, denying Him in order to be able to forgive His cruelties.

And denial of this sort, blasphemy of this kind—that also is prayer.

She was called to the house and ran in trembling with fear because she had reached that nervous terror when the slightest noise re-echoes from the very depth of one’s being. The sick girl drew her near to her bed with her smile, for she had neither strength nor voice, as if she had just been talking a long time.

“I have a favor to ask of you, my darling—you know what I mean, that final favor which people grant to one who is condemned to die—forgive your husband! He has been very wicked and unworthy of you, but be indulgent and return to his side. Do this for me, dear sister, and for our parents, whom your separation grieves to death and who will soon need greatly that all should close round about them and surround them with tender care. Numa is so lively, there is no one like him for putting a little spirit into them.... It is all over, is it not? You forgive?”

Rosalie answered, “Yes, I give you my promise.”

Of what value was this sacrifice of her pride beside this irreparable disaster? Standing straight beside the bed she closed her eyes a moment, keeping back her tears—a hand which trembled rested upon hers. There he was in front of her, trembling, wretched and overwhelmed by an effusion of heart which he dared not show.

“Kiss each other,” said Hortense.

Rosalie bent her brow forward and Numa kissed it timidly. “No, no, not that way—both arms, the way one does when one really loves.”

Numa seized his wife and clasped her with one long sob, whilst the twilight fell in the great chamber as an act of pity for the girl who had thrown them one upon the other’s heart.

This was her last manifestation of life. From that moment she remained absorbed, indifferent and unaware of what passed about her, never answering those disconsolate appeals of farewell to which there is no answer, but still keeping upon her young face that expression of haughty underlying anger which those show who die too early for the ardor of the life that is in them—those to whom the disillusions of existence have not had time to speak their last word.

CHAPTER XX. THE BAPTISM.

The important day at Aps is Monday because it is market day.

Long before daylight the roads that lead to the city, the great solitary turnpikes from Arles and Avignon, where the white dust lies as quiet as a fall of snow, are enlivened by the slow grinding noise of the carts and the squawking of chickens in their osier crates and the barking of dogs running alongside; or by that rustling sound of a shower which the passage of a flock of sheep produces, accompanied by the long blouse of the shepherd which one perceives as he is carried along by the bounding wave of his beasts. Then there are cries of the cow-boys panting in the rear of their cattle and the dull sound of sticks falling upon humpy backs and outlines of horsemen armed with cowpunches in trident form. Slowly and gropingly all these phantoms are swallowed up by the dark gateways whose crenelations are seen in festoons against the starry sky; thence it spreads wide again into the corso which surrounds the sleepy city.

At that hour the town takes on itself again its character of an old Roman and Saracen city, with its irregular roofs and pointed moucharabies above the broken and dangerous stairways. This confused murmur of men and sleepy beasts penetrates with but little noise between the silvery trunks of the big plane-trees, overflows upon the avenue and even into the courtyards of the houses and stirs up warm odors of litters and fragrances of herbs and ripe fruit. When it wakes, therefore, the town discovers that it has been captured in every quarter by an enormous, lively and noisy market, just as if the entire agricultural part of Provence, men and beasts, fruits and seeds, had roused up and come together in one great nocturnal inundation.

In truth it is a magnificent sight, a pouring forth of rustic wealth that changes with the seasons. In certain places set apart by immemorial usage the oranges and pomegranates, golden colored quinces, sorbs, green and yellow melons, are piled up near the booths in rows and in heaps by the thousand; peaches, figs and grapes destroy themselves by their own weight in their baskets of transportation side by side with vegetables in sacks. Sheep and silky pigs and little cabris (kids) show airs of weariness within the palisades of their small reservations. Oxen fastened to the yoke stride along before the buyer, while bulls with smoking nostrils drag at the iron ring which holds them to the wall. And farther on, quantities of horses, the little horses from the Camargue—dwarf Arabs—prance about mingling their brown, white or russet manes; upon being called by name, “Té! Lucifer—Té! l’Esterel—” they run up to eat oats from the hands of their keepers, veritable Gauchos of the pampas with boots above the knee. Then come the poultry two by two, red and fastened by the legs, guinea fowl and chickens lying, not without much banging of the earth with their wings, at the feet of their mistresses who are drawn up in a line. Then there is the fish market, with eels alive on fennel and trout from the Sorgue and the Durance, mixing their shining scales in rainbow agonies with all the rest of the color. And last of all, at the very end, in a sort of dry winter forest are the wooden spades and hay-forks and rakes, new and very white, which rise between the plows and harrows.

On the other side of the corso against the rampart the unhitched wagons stand in line, with their canopies and linen covers and high curtains and dusty wheels, and all through the space left vacant the noisy crowd circulates with difficulty, with calls and discussions and chattering in all kinds of dialects and accents—the Provençal accent, which is refined and full of airs and graces and requires certain movements of the head and shoulder and a bold sort of mimicry, while that of Languedoc is harder and heavier and almost Spanish in its articulation. From time to time this mass of felt hats and head-dresses from Arles or the Comté, this difficult circulation of a mob of buyers and sellers, splits in two at the cries from some lagging cart which comes slowly forward with great difficulty at a snail’s pace.

The burgesses of the city hardly appear, so full of scorn are they at this invasion from the country, which nevertheless is the occasion of its originality and the source of its wealth. From morning to night the peasants are walking through the streets, stopping at the booths, at the harness-makers, shoemakers and watchmakers, staring at the metal figures of the clock on the City Hall and into the shop windows, dazzled by the gilding and mirrors of the restaurants, just as the rustics in Theocritus stood and stared at the Palace of the Ptolemies. Some issue from the drug shops laden with parcels and big bottles; others, and they form a wedding procession, enter the jeweller’s to choose, after long and cunning bargains, ear-rings with long pendent pieces and the necklace for the coming bride. And these coarse gowns, these brown and wild-looking faces and their eager, businesslike manner make one think of some town in La Vendée taken by the Chouans at the time of the great wars.

That morning, the third Monday of February, animation was very lively; the crowd was as thick as on the finest summer days, which indeed it suggested through its cloudless sky warmed by a golden sun. People were talking and gesticulating in groups, but what agitated them was less the buying and selling than a certain event which caused all traffic to cease and turned all looks and heads and even the broad eyes of the oxen and the twitching ears of the little Camargue horses toward the Church of Sainte Perpétue. The fact was that a rumor had just spread through the market, where it occasioned an emotion that ran to extraordinary height, to the effect that to-day the son of Numa would be baptized—that same little Roumestan whose birth three weeks before had been received with transports of joy in Aps and the entire Provençal South. Unfortunately this baptism, which had been delayed because of the deep mourning the family was in, had to preserve the appearance of incognito for the very same reason, and it is probable that the ceremony would have passed unperceived had it not been for certain old sorceresses belonging to the country about Les Baux who every Monday install upon the front steps of Sainte Perpétue a little market of aromatic herbs and dried and perfumed simples culled among the Alpilles. Seeing the coach of Aunt Portal stopping in front of the church, the old herb-sellers gave the alarm to the women who sell aïets (garlic), who move about pretty much everywhere from one end of the corso to the other with their arms crammed with the shining wreaths of their wares. The garlic women notified the fish dames and very soon the little street which leads to the church poured forth upon the little square all the gossip and excitement of the market-place. They pressed about Ménicle, who sat erect on the box in deep mourning with crape on his arm and hat and merely answered all questions with a silent and indifferent play of his shoulders. Spite of everything, they insisted upon waiting, and in the mercer’s street beneath the bands of calico the crowd piled itself up to suffocation while the bolder spirits mounted the well-curb—all eyes fixed on the grand portal of the church, which at last opened.

There was a murmur of “ah!” as when fireworks are let off, a triumphant and modulated sound which was cut short by the sight of a tall old man dressed in black, very much overwhelmed and very melancholy, who gave his arm to Madame Portal, who as far as she was concerned was very proud to have served as godmother along with the First President, proud of their two names side by side on the parish register; but she was saddened by the recent mourning and the sorrowful impressions which she had just renewed once more in the church. The crowd had a feeling of severe deception at sight of this austere couple, who were followed by the great man of Aps, also entirely in black and with gloves on—Numa, penetrated by the solitude and cold of this baptism performed in the midst of four candles without any other music than the wailing of the little child, upon whom the Latin of the function and the baptismal water dropping on a tender little head like that of an unfledged bird had caused the most disagreeable impression. But the appearance of a richly fed nurse, large, heavy and decked with ribbons like a prize at an agricultural meet, and the sparkling little parcel of laces and white embroidery which she carried like a sash, dissipated the melancholy of the spectators and roused a new cry that sounded like a mounting rocket, a joy scattered into a thousand enthusiastic exclamations:

“Lou vaqui!—there he is! Vé! vé!”

Surprised and dazzled, winking in the bright sunlight, Numa stopped a moment on the high porch in order to look at these Moorish faces, this closely packed herding together of a black flock from which a crazy tenderness mounted up to where he stood. And although tired of ovations, at that moment he had one of the most lively emotions in his existence as a public man, a proud intoxication which an entirely new and already very lively sentiment of paternity ennobled. He was about to speak and then remembered that this platform in front of the church was not the place for it.

“Get in, nurse,” said he to the tranquil wet-nurse from Bourgogne, whose eyes, like those of a milch cow, were staring wide open in amazement. And while she was bestowing herself with her light burden in the coach he advised Ménicle to return quickly by the cross streets. But a tremendous clamor answered him:

“No, no, the grand round—the grand round!”

They meant that he should pass the entire length of the market place.

“Well then, the grand round be it!” said Roumestan after having consulted his father-in-law with a look; for he wished to spare him this joyful procession; and so the coach, starting with many crackings of its ancient and heavy carcass, entered the little street and debouched upon the corso in the midst of vivas from the crowd, which grew excited over its own cries and culminated in a whirl of enthusiasm so as to block the way of horses and wheels at every moment. With the windows open they marched slowly on through these acclamations, raised hats, fluttering handkerchiefs and all the odors and hot breaths which the market exhaled as they passed. The women stuck their ardent bronzed heads forward right into the carriage and at seeing no more than the cap of the little baby would exclaim:

“Diou! lou bèu drôle!” (My God! what a lovely child!)

“He looks just like his father—qué?”

“Already has his Bourbon nose and his fine manners!”

“Show it to us, my darling, show us your beautiful man’s face.”

“He is as lovely as an egg!”

“You could drink him in a glass of water!”

“Té! my treasure!”

“My little quail!”

“My lambkin—my guinea-hen!”

“My lovely pearl!”

And these women wrapped and licked him with the brown flame from their eyes. But he, a child but one month old, was not scared in the least. Waked up by all this noise and leaning back on the cushion with its bows of pink ribbon, he regarded everything with his little cat eyes, the pupils dilated and fixed, with two drops of milk at the corners of his lips. And there he lay, calm and evidently pleased at these apparitions of heads at the windows and these growing noises with which soon mingled the baaing, mooing and braying of the cattle, seized as they were by a formidable nervous imitation, all their necks stretched out and mouths open and jaws yawning to the glory of Roumestan and his offspring! Even then, at a time when everybody else in the carriage was holding their stunned ears with both hands, the little man remained perfectly impassible, so that his coolness even broke up the solemn features of the old President, who said:

“Well, if that fellow was not born for the forum!”

On leaving the market they hoped to be rid of all this, but the crowd followed them, being joined as they went by the weavers on the Chemin-neuf, the yarn-makers in womanly bands and the porters from the Avenue Berchère. The shopmen ran to the threshold of their stores, the balcony of the Club of the Whites was flooded with people and presently with their banners the Orphéons debouched from all the streets singing their choral songs and giving musical bursts, just as if Numa had arrived; but along with it all there went something gayer and more unhackneyed, something beyond the habitual merry-making.

In the finest room belonging to the Portal Mansion, whose white wainscots and rich silks belonged to the last century, Rosalie was stretched upon an invalid’s chair, turning her eyes now upon the empty cradle and then upon the deserted and sunny street; she grew impatient as she waited for the return of her child. On her fine features, pale and creased with fatigue and tears, one might see nevertheless something like a happy restfulness; yet one could read there the whole history of her existence throughout the last two months, her anxieties and tortures, her rupture with Numa, the death of her dear Hortense and at last the birth of the child, which swept everything else into insignificance.

When this great happiness really came to her she did not believe it possible; broken by so many blows, she did not believe herself capable of giving life to anything. During the last days she even imagined that she no longer felt the impatient movements of the little captive, and although cradle and layette were all ready she hid them, moved by a superstitious fear, and merely notified the Englishwoman who took care of her:

“If child’s clothes are asked for, you will know where to find them.”

It is nothing to abandon oneself to a bed of torture with closed eyes and clenched teeth for many, many long hours, interrupted every five minutes by a terrible cry that tears and compels one; it is nothing to undergo one’s destiny as a victim all of whose happy moments must be dearly bought—if there is hope at the end of it all. But what horrible martyrdom in the final pain when, struck by a supreme disillusionment, the almost animal lamentations of the woman are mingled with the deeper sobs of deceived maternity! Half dead and bleeding, she kept repeating from the bottom of her annihilation: “He is dead—he is dead!”—when she heard that trial of a voice, that respiration and cry in one, that appeal for light which the newborn infant makes. Ah, with what overflowing tenderness did she not respond!

“My little one!”

He lived and they brought him to her. So this was hers after all, this little creature short of breath, dazzled and startled—almost blind! This small affair in the flesh connected her again with life, and merely by pressing it against her all the feverishness of her body was drowned by a sensation of comfortable coolness. No more mourning, no more wretchedness! Here was her son, that desire and regret which she had endured for ten years and had burnt her eyes with tears whenever she saw the children of other people, that very same baby which she had kissed so often beforehand upon so many other lovely little rosy cheeks! There he was, and he caused her a new ravishment and surprise every time that she leaned from her bed over his cradle and swept aside the covers that hid a slumber that could hardly be heard and the shivery and contracted positions of a newly born child. She wanted to have him always near her. When he went out she was anxious and counted every minute. But never had she experienced quite so much anguish as upon this morning of the baptism.

“What time is it?” asked she every minute. “How long they are! Heavens, what a time they take!”

Mme. Le Quesnoy, who had remained behind with her daughter, reassured her, although she was herself a little anxious; for this grandson, the first and only one, was very close to the heart of his grandparents and lighted up their mourning with a hope. A distant clamor which grew deeper as it approached increased the trouble of the two women. Running to the window they listened—choral songs, gunshots, clamors, bells ringing like mad! And all of a sudden the Englishwoman who is looking out on the street cries: “Madame, it is the baptism!”

And so it was the baptism, this noise like a riot and these howlings as of cannibals around the stake.

“Oh, this South, this South!” repeated the young mother, now very much frightened, for she feared that her little one would be suffocated in the press.

But not at all; here he was, very alive indeed, in splendid case, waving his short little arms with his eyes wide open, wearing the long baptismal robe whose decorations Rosalie herself had embroidered and whose laces she herself had sewed on; it was the robe meant for the other; and so it is her two sons in one, the dead and the living one, whom she owns to-day.

“He did not make a cry, or ask for milk a single time the whole journey!” Aunt Portal affirms, and then goes on to relate in her picturesque way the triumphal tour of the town, whilst in the old hotel, which has suddenly become the old house for ovations, all the doors slam and the servants rush out into the porch where the musicians are being regaled with gazeuse. The musical bursts resound and the panes tremble in every window. The old Le Quesnoys have gone out into the garden to get away from this jollity which overwhelms them with grief, and since Roumestan is about to make a speech from the balcony, Aunt Portal and Polly the Englishwoman run quickly into the drawing-room to listen.

“If Madame would be so kind as to hold the baby?” asks the wet-nurse, as consumed with curiosity as a wild woman. And Rosalie is only too happy to remain behind with her child upon her knees. From her window she can see the banners glittering in the wind and the crowd densely crushed together and spellbound by the words of her great man. Phrases from his speech reach her now and then, but more than all else she hears the tone of that captivating and moving voice, and a sorrowful shudder passes through her at thought of all the evil which has come to her by way of that eloquence, so ready to lie and to dupe others.

At last it is all over; she feels that she has reached a point where deceptions and wounds can hurt her no more; she has a child, and that sums up all her happiness, all her dreams! And holding him up like a buckler she hugs the dear little creature to her breast and questions him very low and very near by, as if she were looking for some response, or some resemblance in the sketchy features of this unformed little countenance, these dainty lineaments which seem to have been impressed by a caress in wax and already show a sensual, violent mouth, a nose curved in search of adventures and a soft and square chin.

“And will you also be a liar? Will you pass your life betraying others and yourself, breaking those innocent hearts who have never done you other evil than to believe in and love you? Will you be possessed of a light and cruel inconstancy, taking life like an amateur and a singer of cavatinas? Will you make a merchandise of words without bothering yourself as to their real value and their connection with your thought, so long as they are brilliant and resounding?”

And putting her lips in a kiss upon that little ear which the light strands of hair surround:

“Tell me, are you going to be a Roumestan?”

The orator on the balcony had lashed himself up and had reached the moment of effusiveness when nothing could be heard except the final chords, accentuated in the Southern manner—“my soul”—“my blood”—“morals”—“religion”—“our country”—punctuated by the applause of that audience which was made according to his image and which he summed up in his own self both in his qualities and his vices—an effervescing South, mobile and tumultuous like a sea with many currents, each of which spoke of him!

There was a final viva and then the crowd was heard slowly passing away. Roumestan came into the room mopping his brow; intoxicated by his triumph and warmed by this endless tenderness of the whole people, he approached his wife and kissed her with a sincere effusion of sentiment. He felt himself very kind to her and as tender as on the first day of their marriage; never a bit of remorse and never a bit of rancor!

“Bé! just see how they make much of him! How they applaud your son!” Kneeling before the sofa the grand personage of Aps played with his child and touched the little fingers that seized upon everything and the little feet that kicked out into the air.

With a wrinkle on her brow Rosalie looked at him, trying to define his contradictory and inexplicable nature. Then suddenly, as if she had found something:

“Numa, what was that proverb you people use which Aunt Portal repeated the other day? ‘Joie de rue’—how was it?”

“Oh yes, I remember: ‘Gau de carriero, doulou d’oustau.’” (Happiness of the street, sorrow of the home.)

“That is it,” said she with an expression of deep thought. And, letting the words fall one by one as you drop stones into an abyss, she slowly repeated, putting the while the sorrow of her life into it, this proverb, in which an entire race has drawn its own portrait and formulated its own being:

“Happiness of the street, sorrow of the home.”

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