The world was widening out. Father brought from Paris a marvellous
game, called Fortuna, with bells over pockets in the wood, and balls
which were pushed with cues. Father had travelled from Paris with it
five days and six nights. It was inexpressibly fascinating; no one else
in Copenhagen had a game like it. And next year, when Father came home
from Paris again, he brought a large, flat, polished box, in which
there were a dozen different games, French games with balls, and
battledores and shuttlecocks, games which grown-up people liked
playing, too; and there were carriages which went round and round by
clockwork, and a tumbler who turned somersaults backwards down a flight
of steps as soon as he was placed on the top step. Those were things
that the people in France could do.
The world was widening out more and more. Relations often came over
from Göteborg. They spoke Swedish, but if you paid great attention you
could understand quite well what they said. They spoke the language of
_Frithiof's Saga_, but pronounced it differently from Mr. Voltelen. And
there came a young French count whose relations my father's brother had
known; he had come as a sailor on a French man-o'-war, and he came and
stayed to dinner and sang the Marseillaise. It was from him that I
heard the song for the first time. He was only fifteen, and very
good-looking, and dressed like an ordinary sailor, although he was a
count.
And then there were my two uncles, Uncle Jacob and Uncle Julius--my
mother's brother Jacob and my father's brother Julius, who had both
become Frenchmen long ago and lived in Paris. Uncle Jacob often came
for a few weeks or more at a time. He was small and broad-shouldered
and good-looking. Everybody was fond of Uncle Jacob; all the ladies
wanted to be asked to the house when Uncle Jacob came. He had a wife
and four children in Paris. But I had pieced together from the
conversation of the grown-up people that Aunt Victorine was his wife
and yet not his wife. Grandmother would have nothing to do with her.
And Uncle Jacob had gone all the way to the Pope in Rome and asked for
her to remain his wife. But the Pope had said No. Why? Because Aunt
Victorine had had another husband before, who had been cruel to her and
beaten her, and the man came sometimes, when Uncle was away, and took
her furniture away from her. It was incomprehensible that he should be
allowed to, and that the Pope would do nothing to prevent it, for after
all she was a Catholic.
Uncle Jacob had a peculiar expression about his mouth when he smiled.
There was a certain charm about everything he said and did, but his
smile was sad. He had acted thoughtlessly, they said, and was not
happy. One morning, while he was visiting Father and Mother and was
lying asleep in the big room, there was a great commotion in the house;
a messenger was sent for the doctor and the word _morphia_ was spoken.
He was ill, but was very soon well again. When he asked his sister next
day: "What has become of my case of pistols?" she replied with a grave
face: "I have taken it and I shall keep it."
I had not thought as a boy that I should ever see Uncle Jacob's wife
and children. And yet it so happened that I did. Many years afterwards,
when I was a young man and went to Paris, after my uncle's death, I
sought out Victorine and her children. I wished to bring her personally
the monthly allowance that her relatives used to send her from Denmark.
I found her prematurely old, humbled by poverty, worn out by privation.
How was it possible that she should be so badly off? Did she not
receive the help that was sent from Copenhagen every month to uncle's
best friend, M. Fontane, in the Rue Vivienne? Alas, no! M. Fontane gave
her a little assistance once in a while, and at other times sent her
and her children away with hard words.
It turned out that M. Fontane had swindled her, and had himself kept
the money that had been sent for years to the widow of his best friend.
He was a tall, handsome man, with a large business. No one would have
believed that a scoundrel could have looked as he did. He was
eventually compelled to make the money good. And when the cousin from
Denmark rang after that at his French relatives' door, he was
immediately hung round, like a Christmas tree, with little boys and one
small girl, who jumped up and wound their arms round his neck, and
would not let him go.