“THE MOON.”
The narrative of Jeanne Auvache, which continues yet through three
volumes, may here be dropped, and what else took place may be gleaned
from the “Memoirs” of Monsieur Goncourt Leflô (Prefect of the Seine),
and from the “Notes” of Saïd Pasha (Chargé d’Affaires), together with
jottings and gossips of other witnesses.
In that place which used, I think, to be called “La Plage,” but is
now the Club des Décavés, a crowd one afternoon sat surveying the
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. (The Décavés is far up at the top of
the Avenue by the Arc de Triomphe, from which point the throngs of
bicyclists who have toiled up the incline of the Champs Elysées put
their legs up, give themselves to God, and by Him are taken gaily down
the long-drawn-out incline to the Bois, like boats in the river of
carriages which rolls droning down.) It was an afternoon in June, and
everyone who knows his “capital of the universe” at all knows that
sight, whose mood, in its large-minded worldliness, is rather to be
recalled than to be described.
The Décavés itself, with people coming, going, sitting, sipping,
gossiping, was a scene of no little vivacity; and to a new-comer, as
he stepped up, one of a group of three said eagerly, “You have heard,
Leflô?”
“Well, naturally, one has heard,” answered Monsieur Leflô, the Prefect,
as he sat, “inasmuch as one cannot dodge the omnipresent, and all
Paris is talking of it.”
“But what an indiscretion!” cried Monsieur Isabeau Thiéry.
“A public embrace at the Foreign Office, my friends!” added the Abbé
Sauriau, his plump palms spread a little.
“But, then, everything is possible at the Foreign Office,” remarked the
Prefect of the Seine: “above all, dizziness of the head.”
“This, however, my friends,” now said the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet,
“is an incident, not of the Third Republic, but of the Second Empire!
Transfer the scene to the Bal Morel, and the lady might have been
Païva, as the male Plon-Plon,” whereat Isabeau Thiéry shook backward
his lion’s mane of hair with, “It may be an incident of the Third
Empire, which we see beginning—unless by chance a patriot or two
still exists in France.” (“He was”—to quote from the “Notes” of Saïd
Pasha—“one of the tribe of poet-politicians—the Hugos, Lamartines,
Châteaubriands—and though neither his poetry, nor even his politics,
was at all equal to theirs, Thiéry, as we know, took himself awfully
seriously, excelling them all, since not in head, at any rate in hair,
in his spread of hatrim and La Vallière cravat, whose crimson hue
proved him “of the Left.”)
“But was it Lepsius who did this?” now said the Abbé Sauriau, his
tumbler of byrrh brought half-way up to his broad mouth: “Lepsius,
the Nazarene, reeling beneath the mead of Venus! This Puritan, whose
existence is presumed to be made up of a race with the sun, to whom
a speck of dust appears a heap of leprosy, and the loss of a minute
the loss of a province?... This Lepsius, indeed, is a myth he has
contrived by chance to create in men’s minds a Lepsius-Phantasm, as
there is a ‘Napoleonic Legend’; but oh, if he had but a real existence!
Who in that case, my friends, could fail to revere this furious reaper
of the tickings of the clock, who lives with one eye on a second-hand,
and with the other, I am told, on a pyramid of thrones? Do you know
the story that is told of what he replied to Proudhon _ainé_, who at
that time was one of the Quæstors of the Chamber, when Proudhon _ainé_
said to him, ‘To-morrow, monsieur, it shall be done’? The answer of
Lepsius—as they say—was, ‘Monsieur, believe me, to-day is each man’s
last, last chance, for it will be doubly impossible for him to effect
to-morrow just that which he may effect to-day, since to-morrow it will
be all an altered world, he an altered man in it.’... Is it _he_, my
friends, whom we find engaging in an amour so touched with giddiness
that it may not wait for privacy?”
“A propos of ‘the clock,’” remarked the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, his
little hand all aflash with diamonds in the sunshine, “Freycinet _fils_
is said to have remarked this afternoon at Tortoni’s that then at
least, during the kiss, Monsieur Lepsius lost reckoning of the clock,
seeing that his eyes were tight closed! And it is now being said round
about the Palais-Bourbon of Cardinal Pontmartin, who has declared that
the kiss lasted a minute and eight seconds by the clock, ‘How could the
Prelate have seen the clock, when those holy eyes of his must have been
poring upon Paradise revealed before them!’—a _mot_ at which the titter
and grin of the beau set his (!) teeth atremble with a rather ghastly
glitter on his gums.
“But as to the lady——” Isabeau Thiéry began to say at the same moment
that the old gossip exclaimed, “Here comes Saïd Pasha, one of the
keenest listeners and best observers in Paris”—and a brown man with
a firm lip, perfectly turned out, came up to the table, the duke
observing to him, “Monsieur, one is conscious from the very blush of
your boots that you bring with you much that is new.”
“But, Monsieur le Duc, they were not polished by myself,” replied Saïd
Pasha innocently—a reply which raised a smile! since everybody knew
that the duke, in the course of a very varied career, had had need to
be his own menial.
“In any case, you can enlighten us as to the identity of the lady who
is on the tapis in connection with a certain individual,” said Isabeau
Thiéry to Saïd Pasha, who at that time was generally supposed to be
in quite the inner _côterie_ of the Palais-Lepsius; but in the same
instant that the staid and cautious _chargé d’affaires_ was asking what
lady was meant, the duc was saying, “Here, too, comes Monsieur the
Englishman,” and one Mr. E. Reader Meade, an attaché at the Faubourg
St. Honoré, walked up—a man who, because of his bulk, and of that mass
of face on which was written “phlegm” and “judgment,” was often in the
Paris of that day nicknamed “the Englishman.” As he approached, the
aged gossip, holding up his eye-glass before a dilapidated eye, made
the observation, “But do I read aright in Monsieur Meade’s air that he
is unaware of anything having happened?”
“Very possibly, Monsieur le Duc,” replied the Englishman, sitting down,
“since I only arrived from London an hour ago”—at which confession
of benightedness, in a moment the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet was at
Meade’s ear, leaning over, tittering forth the story with no little
vivacity—Soirée last night at the Quai d’Orsay—all the Faubourg
St. Honoré there, much of the Faubourg St. Germain itself, not to
mention a Chausée d’Antin mob—in the grand _salon_ the _quadrille
d’honneur_ had already begun, the Prince of Wales the partner of
Madame la Ministre—out in the vestibule, moving in, a crowd—in its
midst the young Lepsius and his usual retinue—also a lady, supposed to
be English, who at any rate was under the chaperonage of the English
Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; this lady and a certain individual
gradually work together through the throng, by accident, say some, by
design or blind desire, say others—do not, however, seem to see each
other—move on with the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, without speech
or look—till for some reason two of the electric jets chance to go
dark, leaving the vestibule in partial gloom, whereupon that pale
dark face of a certain individual turns toward the lady’s pale fair
face—the lady’s pale face turns somewhat toward his—and, according
to Cardinal Pontmartin, who was quite near the pair, their wide and
wild eyes stare awhile at each other with a stare of scare, of even
the extreme of terror, as in apprehension of some impending crash and
catastrophe—until now the lips of Lepsius pounce upon the lady’s—nor
does the good girl turn hers away, gives herself gallantly up to the
vertigo and whirl of it, smiling though white, her eyes closed, his
eyes closed—the crowd looking on in an amazement so profound, that
Cardinal Pontmartin had since declared that his hair could not but have
stood on end, if he had had any, as beyond all question would the hair
of the good Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, if it had been real.”
“And we who imagined that Society under the Third Empire was destined
to be as earnest and _bourgeoise_ as was that under the Citizen
Monarchy,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry with sarcasm when the old duke had
concluded the story, to which Mr. E. Reader Meade replied with a smile,
“But what can be more ‘_bourgeois_’ than kissing, monsieur, or more
‘earnest’ than such a kiss?”
“Such a kiss,” the Abbé Sauriau said, “is a proof, my friends, of
nothing save of Lepsius’ disdain of mankind, since he certainly weighed
the thirty or so pairs of eyes which observed that kiss as lightly as
lovers on a stile weigh the eyes of kine which watch them. Do you know
the story that is told of his answer to Marshal Macintosh, à propos
of the Marshal’s remark that a foreigner, even after a hundred years,
is never regarded and behugged by the French as a Frenchman? Lepsius
replied, ‘It may be nice to be loved, monsieur, but what is nicer far
is to be disliked, to behold yourself surrounded by people thirsting
like Tantalus to hurt you, and to behold them powerless, because of
your towering superiority.’ So you see, my friends: Napoleon regarded
men mainly as pawns in his game; Monsieur Lepsius, in his more _savant_
mood, regards them as gorillas in his garden of zoology”—and now the
abbé’s eyes shot out beneath his bush of eyebrow a beam of bile, bush
that burned, yet was not consumed, while Isabeau Thiéry’s eyes, quick
as tinder, caught fire also, for company.
Saïd Pasha, however, with a frown, was saying, “Oh, pardon, Monsieur
l’Abbé!... This anecdote of the reply of Monsieur Lepsius to Marshal
Macintosh is, indeed, known; but I need hardly remark that to repeat
is not quite to prove, and, in fact, the words are so unlike the
individual to whom they are attributed, that I have even ventured to
assert that they were never uttered by Monsieur Lepsius, the mood of
whose converse is usually much more taciturn. As to Monsieur l’Abbé’s
mention of gorillas, I think I have the honour to know that Monsieur
Lepsius is far too exact an intellect to regard mankind precisely in
that light, but rather, let us say, as sons of Hannaman, the ape-god of
the Brahmins; and as to the alleged kiss at the Quai d’Orsay, of which,
by the way, everyone in Paris is spreading about a different account,
I am able to state that its occurrence, if it occurred, was the result
of no world-disdain, but simply of one of those magnetic gales that
deflect even the needle of the compass. After all, as was said in a
certain Orléaniste _salon_ not thirty minutes since, ‘it takes two to
make a kiss,’ and since the lady is not accused of world-disdain, I do
not see why the male.”
At this Monsieur Leflô—a little quick personality, whose hairs grew
like a wig of bristles—ogled Isabeau Thiéry with, “We are all aware
that the utiliser of the moon has a champion wherever Saïd Pasha is
present!”
“But, Monsieur le Prefect,” said Saïd Pasha, sudden and quick in
quarrel, “am I charged with partisanship for aught but the simple
truth?”
“No, monsieur,” replied the Prefect dryly, “even though it is a matter
of common talk that Saïd Pasha once shed tears of admiration at the
sight of a certain individual racing with camels from a sand-storm
near Khartoum, and from that moment became a hero-worshipper. So it
is said—I was not there. In any case, I beg leave to question the
‘magnetic gale’ by which you explain this embrace, since I believe that
the reason of it is quite a different one than people conceive.”
At this Saïd Pasha’s brow bowed low, with the reply, “We know that
Monsieur Leflô is a prefect who is a Fouché and a Réal in one.”
“Oh, as for that,” Leflô answered in his off-hand way, “it requires no
spy of the Rue de Jerusalem to recognise the truth that this kiss was
no result of vertigo, but of a political purpose.”
“That is only the truth,” added the old Due de Rey-Drouilhet, “since it
is certain that a certain individual ‘knows his Paris’—more perfectly
knows it than Napoleon the First, as perfectly perhaps as Napoleon the
Third; and knowing that your Parisian, as Victor Hugo has observed,
must for ever be grinning the teeth, either in a laugh or in a snarl,
the arch-gamester never permits himself to forget that there must be no
flagging in the game, since in Paris to be out of sight is to be out of
mind, and so seeks continually to _épater les gens_, keeping himself
alive in the public eye by breaking ever anew upon it in a new attitude
and costume, and invariably with an _éclat_ whose radiance blinds. No,
this gentleman is hardly one of those who like to shine in the dark!
If for once in his life he tears his lips from the telephone to apply
them to those of a lady, he takes care that there shall be as many
eye-witnesses to the event as when some months ago he used to assume
the rôle of Haroun al Raschid by appearing in an incognito of rags in
the thieves’ kitchens of the Quartier Mouffetard, where he engaged in a
knife-fight with a Spaniard, and in a cangiar-fight with two Moors who
had attacked him. For here, my friends, we meet with the scenic skill
of a Bonaparte in combination with the ambitious mania of a Thiers,
Bismarck’s steel, that art-genius for _Welt-politik_ of a Cæsar Borgia,
and——”
“All possibly true,” interrupted the Abbé Sauriau, “but the thing
that this very young man lacks is a certain humanity and nativeness
to the world: for a man above the world he may be, since they say so,
but one discerns that, with all his worldliness, he is hardly a man of
the world. How perfect, how Parisian even, his manners when he likes;
but one gleans that they have been but recently acquired, and girt on
externally for a purpose, as Cato learned Greek at eighty. He lacks a
_je ne sais quoi_ which no one lacks. If he laughs, one feels that he
has said to himself, ‘Just here I will do a laugh, in order to produce
such or such an impression upon this brute-mind.’ All men, indeed,
are actors: but Lepsius is an actor who acts acting, like the players
in _Hamlet_, and I am not certain whether he is to be considered the
best of the world’s actors, or the worst: for ‘the brute-mind’ is
frequently not so brute as not to perceive that his art lacks the art
to conceal its art, owing to the fact that he shares in the mistake
made by each superior mind in deeming the difference between himself
and other beings deeper than it really is. Hence, for all his brains,
a certain _gaucherie_ in his being, a grimace, a guffaw, in relation
to the world, to which he is innately a stranger. How very alien to
our humanity, for example, the commercial use which he has proposed
of the bodies of the dead, a use which he pretends would solve the
world-problem of poverty. On that afternoon, too, when the Moon Company
Bill was being introduced, and he in the Centre began to scratch his
head with one finger in the manner of Cæsar—a signal to his creature
Huguenin on the extreme left to scream, ‘Cæsar! Cæsar!’ in a bogus tone
of indignation—the intention, as everybody knows, was that the whole
Chamber should take up the roar and reverberate it through France; but
not one soul took it up! The trick was immediately seen through by each
French child...!”
“Yes, last August,” said Mr. E. Reader Meade, gazing away at all the
throng and flutter of the scene, “last August, when the individual in
question had not yet been two months a factor in politics; but nine
biggish months of world-knowledge, of archive-searching, of worming in
the Big Book,[B] have since gone by——”
[B] National Debt Ledger.
“My friends,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, still with his Jesuit
blandness, though his bush burned, “I have quite recently been in
personal contact with the individual in question, and still I say that
I receive from him, as previously, the impression of a being destitute
of humour.... He does not please; he cannot speak to you: for though
his memory which, I admit, is no bad one, should render him the best of
_causeurs_, his uneasy feeling that idle speaking is a crime renders
him the worst.... Oh, I am not demolishing any idol! Why, my friends,
should I? You have lately listened to that charge brought against me
in the Chamber by Maître Tombarel, the charge of intellectual egoism
and envy. I cannot, it appears, be envious of a Rockefeller or a Mogul,
but I go green with envy, it appears, on hearing a great epigram that
I did not myself think of making. Well, I deny it.... If to my little
books my contemporaries have too amiably granted the name of ‘great,’
does that impede my conceiving the possibility of some brain brighter,
greater, being made by Nature? Or, can _no_ mind really conceive,
and frankly admit to itself, a mind of better fibre than itself?
I—don’t know; or rather! _my_ mind could and would, I am most sure,
if—the occasion arose. Thus I can speak, I hope, of the individual
in question without spleen; indeed, I have even been touched with a
feeling of compassion for this poor boy, so joylessly toiling, all
lone and lorn, fatherless, a stone thrown from Utopia—for who could
picture him in the rôle of a son? And did he not once say to Freycinet
_père_, ‘Monsieur the Président of the Senate,’ said he, ‘I never had
a parent.’ Never, at any rate, a brother being, a friend probably,
climbing his mountain-way without quite knowing why or whither, but
willy-nilly climbing.... Oh, my friends, it is not through jealousy,
but for pity, that men should be busying themselves in bottling up the
buzzing of this bee.”
To words so bold no one answered anything, till Isabeau Thiéry
observed, “From the bee honey, though, as aroma from the rose, though
the former _has_ its sting, as the latter its thorn.”
“Ah, monsieur,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, knowing on which nerve to
work upon Thiéry, “Brutuses, I fear, are even rarer than Cæsars!”
whereat, instantly, Isabeau Thiéry, with a new enthusiasm, was crying,
“Still, Monsieur l’Abbé, Brutuses—exist!”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Reader Meade, with a twinkling eye on Thiéry,
“but could a patriot be the Brutus of a Cæsar, whose first work would
be a frontier reconstructed ‘as in 1814’?”—words which had the effect
of making Thiéry glance gladly at the Englishman with the exclamation,
“That, too, is a truth, monsieur!” (“His, Thiéry’s, soul,” says Saïd
Pasha, in his _Paris Notes_, “was like meadows over which sweep shadows
that fleetly succeed each other. He had no self, this man, but only a
set of stock concepts, borrowed emotions—provided only that they were
pure, enthusiastic, and high-souled. Hence he was _the very serf_ of
certain catchwords! If one breathed ‘Brutus’ nothing could keep the
poet-politician from leaping to his feet to butcher Lepsius, if one but
breathed ‘as in 1814,’ Thiéry was secretly ready to press Lepsius to
his breast.”)
“But,” demands the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet now, smuggling a cachou
into his mouth, “where is the guarantee of the promise ‘as in 1814’?
Certainly, fancy pictures to us in that workshop of the Palais-Lepsius
the models of many a mechanism which will whiff into wind the
barricades of the next 18th Brumaire or 2nd of December, to say nothing
of the _corps d’armée_ of the Fatherland and the navies of Albion.
And, indeed, they exist, these legions of ingenious steels! For it
was but yesterday that Colonel Doumic, whom Barras, of Public Works,
and I met at Bignon’s, was dropping hints of another wonderful thing,
a ‘steerable bullet,’ he said, which, it appears, is to be both a
bullet and a boat, being made with a hole somewhere in its steel to
hold a man, who will steer it.... It appears, my friends, that the
keel of this contrivance will merely skim along the sea’s surface,
being upheld by the rebound of a gun or something exploding downward,
I forget how many times a minute; and the boat so upheld will be
swept forward rocketwise by another succession of explosions, like a
motor-car; so that this thing will safely visit vessel after vessel at
bullet’s rate, with fatal results to all a navy within some minutes.
Doumic should know, being one of the elect with the individual in
question: for is it not Doumic who already is choosing the regiments to
be quartered upon Paris, in order to send them back to the provinces
imbued, one after the other, with this new-imperial dream? But as for
me, who am hardly still a youth, I little believe in dreams that are
unrealised; I have witnessed many, many things, and heard many words:
I have heard Cora Pearl hum the _Kyrie_, and I have beheld Alfred
de Musset sober. Hence to me the individual in question is mainly a
_directeur de spectacle forain_—a famous one, it is true. His palaces
that are like the blasphemous gardens built to reproduce Paradise by
that king of Irim whom the gods struck blind for arrogance—then the
revels—his Moon-proposal—then his riding of his _Chérie_ to victory at
Longchamp—his Exhibition-proposal—then this kiss—each seems to belong
to a series of scenic——”
“_Was_ the kiss scenic?” asked Mr. E. Reader Meade semi-privately
of Saïd Pasha, upon which Saïd Pasha undid his cross-looking lip to
answer, “No, monsieur. I state only a fact when I declare that for over
four months I have foreknown some such collapse of the intellectual
tension of the individual in question—a collapse owing, I say again, to
a magnetic gale and to nothing else. Nor was this thing at all sought
by Monsieur Lepsius. He is not, we are aware, by nature a Petrarch or
Ortis; he is by nature an athlete, an engineer, a financier, a juggler,
a sage—what you will, save a gallant; and as others flee the pest, so
he has fled this infirmity of his. All which, by the way, I can state
on the authority of a man already known, I think, to Monsieur Meade,
to Monsieur l’Abbé Sauriau, and to Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet,
one Shan Healy, who is known to have followed Monsieur Lepsius from
England to Ceylon, to Japan, and other regions, some couple of years
ago: and from this man’s statement one is afraid that the blame for
what has taken place must be laid upon the lady. In fact, although
Monsieur Lepsius certainly knew the young girl before his departure
from Europe, and knew on his return that she was then in France with
her aunt, the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, he appears to have given
himself no sort of pains to greet her again; nor was it until some
four months after his star had well risen over the horizon, that the
eyes of the two individuals in question encountered one another on
the Palais-Lepsius roof, during the morning hours of that ball that
followed upon the passing of the Moon Bill. We remember the sight,
messieurs: a morning all stars, the Champs Elysées all one swarm of
carriage-lights from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde,
the Palais-Lepsius looking like one of the buildings of Chilminar or
Balbec which the genii are believed to have wished into being, and
everyone to be met there, save Monsieur Lepsius himself. Monsieur
Lepsius, it appears, had gone to sleep during the rout at his usual
hour, but at the hour of three had roused himself to go up to his
observatory, no one but his servant being with him; and up there he
was, his gaze glued to his tube, a busy-body in the concerns of other
worlds, when the lady, as ladies seem to conceive it their duty to do,
smartly recalled him to this one. ‘Oh! pardon,’ says she, and with
what object, or by what right, she had got herself up thither is not
known, though she was not the only one of the guests who, beguiled by
the desire of the eye, were roaming _ad lib._ through the rooms of the
building that night. At all events, as her lips part to pronounce her
‘pardon,’ the other individual in question darts his glance round from
the glass to her, crouches there aghast some eight seconds, gazing,
dumb-struck, and—vanishes. Monsieur Healy declares that his heart
all but ceased to beat, believing as he did that his master, who had
darted out of a casement, had cast his body headlong down! Well, three
several times since then have the two individuals——”
But now, before the anecdotist could further go, a sound arose and
grew, not loud, but universal over the grounds of the Club, the
Avenue, l’Etoile—a rumour in whose droning the word “Lepsius” was
to be heard, as a troop of Zouaves and Turcos, riding all in their
bright robes, broke into the ocean-current of carriages that rolled
through the Avenue. Up from the Elysées they came, making down for
the Bois de Boulogne; and up soon after them trotted another crowd
of troopers—Moors, Hindoos—voluminous in their vestments of various
hues, carrying javelins (jereeds), with streamers, on large chargers
which caracoled; and, close behind these, three carriages with
gentlemen-ushers, household gentlemen; and up behind these outriders;
grooms costumed in green and gold; pigmies in jockey-caps, from which
hung fringes of gold; and up behind all a phaeton hauled by Orloff
horses that haughtily pawed the air, to fling far their front-hoofs,
trotting. In this sat Lepsius. He was in mufti, but clearly no “mere
_pékin_,” the insignia of the Grand Cordon of the Legion showing
his connection with the Army; and by his side sat a girl who looked
American, on her lap a scribbling-book, and flying in her fingers a
pencil. He, as he drove up, bowed repeatedly a little to the buzz that
droned about his ear, but without ever once glancing upward, his lips
never ceasing to move and murmur to the girl whose fingers flew. And
away to the wood swept the wind of it.
Everyone then turned anew to sip his _aperitif_, and the old Duc de
Rey-Drouilhet was anew observing that turn-outs so perfect had not
conquered the eye since “the early sixties,” when a man with white
hair that curled upward at his nape came up to the table of our
anecdotists to inquire whether the Comte de Courcy had been with them,
or had been noticed about the club. “I had to meet the count here,” he
explained; and something humble, bowed down and sad in his air touched
their compunction. During the moving-by of the cavalry troop he had
been semi-secretly eyeing the sight through trees some distance from
the street; then had come out to seek the count, and now was about
to fare farther, when all at once the count himself was there with
a raised hat, and at once, grasping the old man’s hand, he began to
present “Dr. Lepsius” to the rest.
“‘Lepsius’?” Isabeau Thiéry breathed the word.
“_Need_ I explain,” said Monsieur le Comte, taking a chair, all
business, all smiles, with dimples in the chart of his large face,
“that there may be many men of that name?—_not_ necessarily related by
ties of family? which ties, in any case, can never possess much weight
in the matter of politics. So that if by chance we here are all a
harmony, politically speaking——”
The count’s eye ran prying with an underlook about the table from face
to face, whereat Mr. E. Reader Meade glanced at Saïd Pasha, Saïd Pasha
glanced at Mr. Meade, and they two got up to bow themselves out of
the business, while the others, with glances at one another, silently
smiled.
Then Monsieur le Comte de Courcy, fingering a crucifix of gold that
from of old lay smooth from his fingering under his shirt-frills,
said to the others, “Gentlemen, it is not without a purpose that I
present to you now (rather than more formally at our meeting this
evening in Monseigneur Piscari’s house) our actuated by precisely the
same motives as ourselves, nay, if possible, by motives still nobler,
concerned not with France alone, but of world-wide anxiety. He brings
with him something which, as I believe that it will prove of even
extreme interest to you, I wished to lay before the Abbé Sauriau, our
excellent secretary, previous to our meeting at Monseigneur Piscari’s
this evening, in order——”
“Gentlemen,” suddenly rising, said Dr. Lepsius in a low tone, “I think
that perhaps if I took a stroll while you talk the matter over, that
might be more in order. I will be back to answer any question that may
occur to you,” whereat hats were anew raised, the doctor went away,
Monsieur de Courcy’s underlook peered about to see that nobody was too
near, and now he drew with care from out a pocket-book a bit of paper,
rather brown and brittle, that had passed through flame. He laid it
on the table: and quickly, like a congress of eagles, the intriguers’
heads were together over it, the old duke skipping like a youth closer
round to it, and that lax skin of the Abbé Sauriau’s brow, which above
was narrow, broad below, twitching short-sightedly over the browned
words, while his bush burned. Only the Count de Courcy leaned back,
fingering his secret crucifix, musing through his cigarette fumes upon
the clouds, humorously dimpled. (“He was ever healthy and happy-hearted
when in office-harness,” says Saïd Pasha of him, “with a no small
degree of rush and magnetism when revelling in the thick of affairs;
one of your true _gens de bureau_; an intellect essentially narrow,
bigot, bourgeois, as ‘devout’ as he was profoundly irreligious; but
iron; and the busier the blither.”)
And presently when Isabeau Thiéry, demanded whence the paper came,
“This script,” replied the Comte de Courcy, “is a portion of a
private letter written from Paris some seven months ago to a certain
English nobleman who is a Directeur Publique—say a ‘Permanent
Under-Secretary’—of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. By what
succession of good chances the fragment has got itself into the hands
of our friend, Dr. Lepsius, will no doubt be described by him to-night
at Monseigneur Piscari’s.”
“But can we be sure who wrote it?” Isabeau Thiéry said, “when it lacks
a signature?” to which the count stopped his humming to reply, “Would
a signature add to our certainty, monsieur, when the individual whom
you have in your mind is said to write a hundred hands a day, as it
suits his purpose? But surely the internal evidence furnishes us with a
certainty which is ample.”
“Oh, ample,” said Monsieur Leflô, glancing up.
“Well, he is a showman,” sighed the old gossip, rising with satisfied
old eyes from the script, while his eye-glass dropped.
“But he is mad,” added the Abbé Sauriau.
“That is the definition of God,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry: “a showman
who is mad”—a remark which caused the Comte de Courcy to laugh, though
with one hand he was at the crucifix, while with the other he was
taking up to replace in its nook the bit of paper, which had on it,
still to be read through the burn, the typewritten words, “World ...
redistribution which I shall choose ... two worlds ... nevertheless,
England ... world’s total capital ... Bank of Dresd ... S. America
_plus_ Africa the first, Asia _plus_ Russia the second, the rest of
Europe _plus_ North America the ... Russia, too, to be included in
Manchuria ... the Caspian ... from the Caspian to the Bosphorus ...
France first, then, by means of France, the world.... The ocean of
blood which will flow, but that, of course ... Quebec to be the capital
of the world, and the seat of my ... Moon ... has been too stupid ...
shape of the ape’s brain ... nevertheless, moonlight will ... like
the eggs of the ostrich, which she hatches, not by sitting on them,
but by just gazing at them, so I may.... If the moon had been of some
beautiful hue, and of a brighter light, and a reliable light, men ...
would naturally have used the day-time for slumber.... Even birds and
brutes, I assume, will soon learn to prefer the mood of the beautiful
night-time of my ... it is for _you_, therefore ... when the Exhibition
... come to Paris at ... discreet fash ... afterwards ... my friend
and....”
“Well, it is a great and a gallant brain, after all,” cried Isabeau
Thiéry with a flush, when Monsieur le Comte had put away his
pocket-book with the script in it.
“A great and a gallant brain,” mused the Minister of the Interior,
who, fingering his imperial, was smiling at the sky; “though not a
Christian, not a Catholic, not a French brain.”
“Tush! the brain of a precocious, pert youth,” observed the Abbé
Sauriau, with a burning bush, “whom it is the duty of us all to remove
out of harm’s way without more delay.”
“Though that will not be done without difficulty, mind you!” Monsieur
Leflô remarked with a little grimace, planting his fore finger-tip
against his hard nut: “but in the event of a citation of the individual
before the Sixth Correctional Tribunal, with a view to obtaining a
decree of banishment against him for instigating civil strife, I should
say that this document would be of use.”
“The Sixth Correctional Tribunal,” mused the count, smiling; “I
thought, however, that that idea had by this time been abandoned by
us all, if only for the reason that the trial could not possibly be
completed before the Exhibition, during which, as we assume, the _coup
d’état_ that we dread is to take place? Personally I cannot help
thinking that a court-trial of uncertain termination is no longer
pertinent to the situation, especially as we have been so happy as to
win the sanction of the Church (in the persons of Monsieur l’Abbé and
of Monseigneur) to move urgent and more certain ways of averting this
danger to the world.”
The Abbé Sauriau, who had a habit of ever eyeing his right shoe and
red sock, which shook up continually (the leg being crossed), struck
smartly with his gloves, remarking, “A stronghold close to the coast,
with grim bastions and the gloomiest of oubliettes! twelve or fifteen
years of that is what the youth wants——” and he struck back his spread
of hair that broadened lankly out down over the ears, the Count de
Courcy repeating with approval in his musing manner, “Twelve to fifteen
years of that, twelve to fifteen years——” and going suddenly grim-red,
he giggled gleefully to himself.
“Monsieur l’Abbé is right,” the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet said: “fifteen
years of a bastille’s oubliette is known to induce in a youth a
definite diffidence as to using his lips in public, either in speaking
or in kissing,” at which speech Monsieur de Courcy, who was drinking
menthe, grew crimson, gripping his glass so grimly that it cracked, the
green fluid streaming from the table to the abbé’s sock.
“If it can be done ...” muttered Monsieur Leflô; “_if_ it can be
done....”
“Why, Monsieur le Prefect,” said the abbé, “was it not a Frenchman who
said that ‘cannot’ is a _bête de mot_?”
“That is a truth, too, monsieur!” cried Isabeau Thiéry, “and provided
it prove necessary....”
But now a trooper, as troopers do everywhere pursue every Ministre de
l’Intérieur, came to the table with a document for the Count de Courcy,
who, making his excuses, raised himself to hasten away; but some
yards off stopped to beckon to the Abbé Sauriau, who rolled after him
with his big stick and soft hat, and together they two walked toward
the minister’s carriage, the abbé’s top-heavy bulk, all thickness of
shoulder without any throat, shambling short below the minister’s mass;
and the minister said to him, “Twelve to fifteen years of a bastille
by the coast, you say: and, certainly, such things have often enough
been effected by private effort for public purposes. But I do not blind
myself to the fact that it would be beyond the Law, and—in fact—I
have to consult you now on a matter of—conduct. I am now about to go
through a singular interview, and I—address myself, Monsieur l’Abbé,
to the ecclesiastic in you. You understand me, I think. We are all
first of all Catholics and good Christians, are we not? and afterwards
men-of-state. A singular interview—with a woman, who, on the strength
of having been in the same yacht, the same house, as myself some three
years since, has lately—thrice—addressed herself to me by letter. A
lady’s maid she—_was_; and as such knew the individual whom we have
been discussing: for this individual whom we habitually associate only
with the future has also, it appears, a past—aye, and a shameful past,
too—I say a baleful and abominable past—which merits to be punished,
which it is righteous to punish. Think of it, Monsieur l’Abbé! as a
mere boy—oh, really, my blood boils to speak of these turpitudes!—he
not only betrayed this poor soul, but afterwards robbed her of all,
all, her paltry savings; was chased through the thoroughfares of London
for petty theft....”
“The young Lepsius?”
“Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé—your hero.”
“Whose hero?”
“Is it not being stated on the boulevards by Léon Bergerac in
particular, who is always the best informed man in Paris, that you are
bitten by an infatuation which is half an idolatry of admiration, and
half a hatred, and wholly a hankering, that hardly permits you to talk
of aught but of one being?”
“_I?_” breathed the Abbé Sauriau, standing still to stare, revealed a
moment to himself; then with rage, “oh, he lies, he lies: Léon Bergerac
is known to be my enemy!”
“Well, well, no doubt,” muttered the minister “... but as to this
woman, whose name is Auvache——”
“Not the Jeanne Auvache who threw vitriol at the individual in question
at Dover on the 11th of November, threw it wide, and was imprisoned for
five months?” queried Monsieur l’Abbé.
“It _may_,” said the minister, “be the same; in fact—it is a
possibility; though the name is not an uncommon one, Monsieur
l’Abbé—Auvache—men, women enough of that name, you will say. But I
may tell you one thing: this woman has been spied by a clerk in her
lodgings throwing vials of water at a nail’s head .... It is her hobby,
it seems, having arranged rows of vials on the floor, to eject water at
a run from them upon a nail in the wall; a drill of the eye, wrist,
fingers, that goes on regularly in the loneliness of that garret every
day; she will also practise herself in rushing with a knife to stab a
bull’s-eye on the wall—_why_, no one can say.”
The Abbé Sauriau pondered it for some moments, and presently observed,
“She must be an imbecile.”
“That is what I have said to myself, Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied the
minister; “why else should the woman, in wishing to obtain an _entrée_
into the _valetaille_ Lepsius, address herself to _me_? unless by some
chance she is aware that I know one Nundcumar, a functionary in the
Palais-Lepsius.... This Nundcumar has risen, Monsieur l’Abbé. Eight
years ago he was a lean scarecrow down on his luck about Paris and
London, pretending to be a doctor of medicine, but possessing even less
knowledge of medicine than the present Prefect of Police possesses
of the police. Then he became a cook, and it was thus that I again
came across him at Egmond, the Brittany château of the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard. Then he remigrated to his native Agra, and was there
met and admired by the individual whom we now have in our minds—so
Nundcumar avers, though this person, who never ceases to speak,
certainly never yet produced a word which by chance was an accuracy. At
all events, I am still in touch with the man, and could easily induce
him—to-day even—to introduce that ill-used and lunatic woman into the
_valetaille_ Lepsius, provided I do not definitely find in my interview
with her presently that she has any purpose in view other than the
search for work.”
Monsieur l’Abbé pondered it a little. Then, “Let it be so, then,” he
suddenly replied, as they now arrived at the count’s brougham; “but
though your interview will no doubt prove over-brief to permit of any
deep probing into the woman’s motives and so on, you will very likely
find the time to impress upon her that the practice, or drill, with the
_knife_, at least, is quite offensive, while——”
“You have known how to say what I was only able to think, Monsieur
l’Abbé.... Au revoir, then.” And the Count de Courcy drove away.
The abbé then turned to go back to the table of the gossips; but now a
little girl who was gambolling among the trees, tumbling down before
his feet and beginning to scream, immediately he had her garnered
in his arms, hugging her to his bosom, his lips on her head, with
whimperings of love (“for,” says a Note of Saïd Pasha, “he had a most
fond father’s heart, if especially for children, hardly less for all
the world, whenever he was not merciless with envy of some other
mind”); and he toyed before the child’s eyes one of his few coins,
saying, “But look, then, all this is for thee—all, all,” and he pointed
at the receding brougham, leering, breathing, “Look! that is the
brougham of Monsieur the Minister of the Interior—but look! a man whose
‘blood boils to speak of these turpitudes’ since he has need to condone
his deeds to his own shabby-genteel conscience”—and he clasped the
little girl’s fingers upon the franc, placed her on the ground, and now
hurried back to the table where by now Dr. Lepsius was again sitting
with the gossips.