SEVERAL years ago there was no figure more conspicuous on the boulevards
of Paris at the fashionable hour than that of the dandy called le
Pompadour écossais by the journals. He had what will command attention
anywhere, but most of all in Paris—the mould of an Apollo, a tailor of
genius, the money of a Monte Cristo, and above all, Mystery. In the
speech of this tall, dark, and sober-visaged exquisite there was no hint
of a foreign nationality. His French was perfect; his idioms were
correctly chosen; only his title, Lord Balgowie, and a foible for the use
of the checkered stuff his countrymen call tartan, in his waistcoats,
proclaimed that he was a Scot. That he should elect to spend his time in
Paris seemed but natural to the boulevardiers: it is the only place for
young gentlemen of spirit and the essential cash; but why should he feed
himself like an anchorite while he surfeited his friends? why, with such
a gay exterior, should be allied a mind so sober, private character so
blameless and austere? These problems exercised the speculations of the
café tables all the summer.
In the rue Adolphe Yvon, one of the most exclusive and expensive streets
in Paris, near enough to the Bois de Boulogne to be convenient for
morning exercise, but far enough removed to be without the surge and roar
of the tides of life that beat there in the afternoons, the Pompadour
écossais had a mansion like a palace, where he entertained the
fashionable world with the aid of a cook who seemed possessed of magic
powers to startle and delight, a wine-cellar incredibly comprehensive,
and a retinue of servants such as the President of the Republic himself
could not command. If he dined at his house alone, he dined with all the
grandiose formality of Lucullus; if he patronised a restaurant, he must
have his private cabinet and a menu unbelievingly extravagant. But
strictly speaking, he never dined alone, either in the rue Adolphe Yvon,
Voisin’s, or Paillard’s: he was invariably accompanied by a
fellow-countryman, who was his secretary or companion—a fellow saturnine
and cynical, who ate and drank voraciously, while his master was content
with the simplest viands and a glass of water.
They had come in spring to the _Ville Lumière_, and stepped, as it were,
from the wagon-lit of the P.L.M. train from the South into the very
vortex of frivolity. You saw the Pompadour écossais in the morning
riding in the Bois on a snowy Irish hunter, wearing garments of a tone
and cut that promptly set the fashion to the gommeaux, with a boutonnière
of orchids; driving his coach through the avenues of Versailles in the
afternoon with a coat of gendarme blue with golden buttons; at the clubs,
the galleries, the opera, the cafés, the coulisses of the theatre—always
the very latest cry in fashion, ever splendid and inscrutable! Withal,
he never had so much as a sou in his pocket to buy a newspaper; his
secretary paid for all, and paid with nothing less than gold. Balgowie,
arbiter of elegance, envied by young men for his style, was adored by the
most fastidious and discerning women for his sensibility, which was
curiously out of keeping with his life of waste.
Quite as deeply interested in the Pompadour as any of the butterflies who
fluttered round him in the rue Adolphe Yvon was a poor old widow, wholly
unknown, in Scotland, for every Saturday she had a letter from her son,
Balgowie’s secretary. She read of childish escapades, inordinate and
unwholesome pleasures, reckless prodigality.
“What a miserable life!” she would exclaim at the news of some fresh
imbecility, as it seemed to her. “A hundred pounds for a breakfast!
Five hundred pounds for a picture to a lady! Oh, Jamie, Jamie, what a
master!”
She grieved, indeed, exceedingly about the sinful course of life in which
her son was implicated, and more than once, for his soul’s sake, asked
him to come back to Scotland, but always he temporised. With Lord
Balgowie he enjoyed a comfortable salary; he had no profession at his
hands, although he had had the best of educations, thanks to his parents’
self-denial, and he saw himself doomed for a term of years to follow the
progress of his rakish patron.
Her only comfort was in the shrewd and sober nature of his comments on
his master’s follies. “I have looked at his manner of life in all ways,
mother,” he wrote, “and it seems to me deplorable. Once I had the notion
to be wealthy for the sake of the independence and the power for good
that money can command; now I can see it has a cankering influence on the
soul. I have gone with my lord to every part of Europe, looking for
content and—in his own state—simple honesty, for friends to trust, and a
creditable occupation for the mind. Nothing in all the capitals among
the rich but idleness and riot and display, cunning intrigue,
self-seeking, and calculation. Thank God that you’re poor!”
Not so very poor, though, for he sent her thirty shillings every week, a
benefaction that enabled her to share among the really poor who were her
neighbours. For years that sum had come to her with his letters every
Saturday, often from towns whose names in their foreign spelling were
unknown to her; a sense of opulence that caused her some uneasiness had
more than once compelled her to protest. “I am sure you deprive
yourself,” she wrote, “and half that money would do me finely. You
should be saving, laddie; some day you will want to marry.”
“Marry,” he wrote her back, incontinent; “I am here in a world of
mannequins, and have yet to see the woman I could be happy to sit with in
auld age by a Scottish fire.”
But he was not always to be of that mind. One day her weekly letter held
the fabulous sum of twenty pounds, and a hint of his infatuation for a
lady he had met in Paris. His mother read his rhapsodies about the lass;
they were, she noticed, more about her wit and beauty than about her
heart. And in his letter was an unfamiliar undertone of apprehension,
secrecy, evasion, which her mother sense discerned.
* * * * *
The Pompadour écossais rose one morning from his bed, which once belonged
to Louis Quatorze, in the rue Adolphe Yvon; broke his fast on a bowl of
coffee and a roll, and having dressed himself, as he always did, without
a valet, with as much fastidiousness as if he were the Duke de Morny,
rode for an hour in the wood, and later drove his English coach, with his
English horses, English grooms, and English post-horn, out to the garden
of St Germain. He was unusually resplendent, from his hat of silk,
broad-brimmed, widely banded with bombazine, to high-heeled military
shoes which seemed moulded to his feet, and had never known an unguent,
but were polished daily to a fine dull lustre by the shin-bone of a deer.
Upon his coat lapel was a green carnation that had cost a louis; his
secretary sat behind him on the box, a man of undistinguished presence,
wearing a sardonic smile; on the seats behind him was a company of guests
for whom the lord had sieved the most exclusive salons of the
capital—Prevost and Chatran, Chelmonski the Napoleonic painter, Paul
Delourade the poet, half a dozen women of the most impeccable repute, and
among them Mathilde de Langan with her ponderous mother, who was
overjoyed to think that, after years of fruitless strategy, she was like
to find an eminently eligible son-in-law in Lord Balgowie.
The girl was altogether lovely, exquisitely moulded, in the delicious
gush of health and youthfulness, a miracle of grace with an aspect that
recalled the pictures of Italian Madonnas; a brow benign and calm, a
little tender mouth designed rather for prayer than for kissing, eyes
purple black, profound as wells and prone to an alluring pensiveness.
They reached St Germain; stabled the horses, lunched upon the terrace
that looks widely over the plain of Paris; obsequious silent servants
hung about the tables; food and banter, wine and laughter, fruit and
flowers engaged the company as it sat between the parterres, under
awnings; and apart a little, looking on with eyes that gleamed at times
with furtive and malicious entertainment, sat the secretary.
“That is a singular man of yours, milord,” remarked Mathilde, who sat
beside the Pompadour. “I have never seen him smile but in derision.”
“He is a man with a peculiar sense of humour,” said the Pompadour,
regarding her with gravely tender eyes. “I should not be surprised if
the whole interior of that apparently saturnine body is at this moment
rumbling with laughter.”
“_Vraiment_? What should he be laughing at?” asked the lady, whose
judicious mother with discreet consideration sought a wicker arm-chair,
screened herself with a quite unnecessary sunshade, and prepared to nap.
“At what he must think the folly of—of my quest for pleasure. He is, you
know, my countryman, and the happy-starred among us find content and joy
in the very cheapest, simplest entertainment. The cost of—of those
flowers alone, perhaps he calculates at this moment, would suffice to
keep his mother a fortnight.”
“_Mon Dieu_! has he got a mother?” said the lady airily. “To look at
that rugged form and the square hard countenance, I would have thought he
had been chipped from granite. But I hope the dear mother is not really
hungry. Do you know her?”
“I am privileged to read her letters once a week,” said the Pompadour.
“That must be most amusing.”
“It is at least instructive; she has her own ideas of the life of
fashion, and the character of le Pompadour.”
“Does she laugh, too, internally?”
“I fancy not,” said the Pompadour reflectively; “I think it is more
likely that she prays.”
“How droll!” said the saintly lips. “But I suppose it is the best that
one can do when one is poor. If I were so rich as you, and derived so
much edification from her epistles, I should give her money.”
“More than she has from her son, who loves her, would make her miserable.
Sixty years of strict frugality spoil the constitution for excess, and
two guineas a week would make her as uncomfortable as one of Joseph’s
dinners would.”
“You, at least, do not show appreciation of your Joseph’s dinners; you
seem content with meagre soup and dry biscuits; one might think you were
a physician, and we the subjects of experiment in indigestion.”
Madame de Langan slept assuredly; the egrets on her hat bobbed most
grotesquely; now and then she gurgled. The company had scattered, some
to see the old home of the exiled James of England, some to walk on the
forest fringes.
“Mathilde,” said the Pompadour in a whisper, taking her hand in his and
bending towards her with a look of burning concentration. “If I—if I
were poor, could you love me?”
She started, bit her lip at a certain gaucherie in the question, but did
not withdraw her hand. “I—I cannot say,” she stammered; “isn’t that a
point for the little mother?” and she glanced at the sunshade hiding the
ponderous sleeper.
“I know! I know! I know!” said the Pompadour in a fury of impatience.
“But this is our Scottish fashion; first I must know from you, and then I
shall consult your mother. Meanwhile, do you love me?”
“I have had no experience,” said the lady, not much embarrassed. “You
have not told me yet if you love me, which is, I understand, the
customary ritual.”
“_Mon Dieu_!” said he in an excess of fervour, “I’m in a flame of passion
and worship of you,” and he crushed unconsciously her fingers in his two
strong hands.
She winced. “_Oh_, _ce n’est pas gentil_,” she exclaimed, pulling away
her hand. “You hurt me horribly.” Then she smiled up in his face,
provocatively coquettish, whispering, “To-morrow,” for the other guests
came trooping back upon the terrace.
On the following evening, when the dark was falling upon Paris, and the
lamps began to bloom along the boulevards like flowers of fire, a little
woman, simple, elderly, and timid, drove to the door of the mansion in
the rue Adolph Yvon, and asked to see his lordship’s secretary.
“He is from home, madam,” said the English servant, looking with
curiosity at the homely figure.
“From home!” she exclaimed, beset with fears, and realising now more
poignantly than ever all the hazards of her scheme. “I must see him
to-night; I am his mother.”
“He is meantime with his lordship at the restaurant of Voisin,” said the
domestic kindly. “Will you come in and wait for him?”
“Thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed; “but, if it were possible, I
should like to see him now.”
He put her in a cab, and gave the name of Voisin to the driver.
Voisin’s, in the rue Cambon, is a quiet and unpretentious restaurant,
dear to aristocratic Paris, since it looks so cheap and really is
expensive. So quiet, so discreet, so restrained externally, men from the
rural parts have been known to go boldly in, misapprehending, and before
they had recovered from the blinding radiance of its tables, ask for a
brioche and a mug of beer.
To-night it had, more speciously than usual, the aspect of a simple
village inn: a hush prevailed; its waiters moved about on list, and spoke
in whispers; le Pompadour écossais dined _en prince_ upstairs with a
merry company, in a chamber upon which the whole attention of the house
was concentrated, from M. le Gerant down to the meanest kitchen scullion,
for the evening’s entertainment was upon a scale of reckless cost.
Nothing would satisfy this wonderful man to-night but curious foods
far-borne from foreign lands, strange rare beverages, golden vessels that
had only once or twice been used in the Tuileries in the last days of the
Empire. If diamonds could be crushed and turned by some miracle of
alchemy into a palatable bouillon, he, or properly his secretary, would
have cheerfully paid the cost. In an alcove screened by palms a string
quartette played the most sensuous music, so exquisitely modulated that
it seemed deliberately designed to harmonise with rallies of wit and
peals of laughter.
Mathilde, who sat to the right of the host, and by her saintly aspect
seemed at times incongruous with that company of fashion’s fools, was for
once silent, thoughtful, and demure.
“You have not told me yet if I may hope,” said the Pompadour to her in a
tender undertone, “and we disperse in less than twenty minutes.”
“Hush!” she interrupted, with an impetuous jewelled hand upon his knee;
“your friend has his eye on us! That man makes me afraid—he looks so
cold, so supercilious! I hate to have a man regard me so who is
convulsed with inside laughter, as you say; he looks—more like a
conscience than a human secretary!”
Le Pompadour cast a glance across the room to the chair from which his
secretary was at the moment summoned by a whispered message from the
manager of the restaurant.
“He is a student of life and men,” said he. “It is his humour to put the
follies of fashion underneath the microscope of a mind as searchingly
analytical as a lens.”
“I’m glad all Scots are not like that,” said the lady fervently. “Now,
you have the real French temperament, and the means to entertain it; your
secretary, were he as rich as you, I’m sure would be a skinflint.”
“There, I can swear, you misjudge him,” said the Pompadour,—“a man born
unhappy, and spoiled for any useful purpose, I am sorry for him.”
“Get rid of him—get rid of him!” said the lady, with a cleverly simulated
shudder.
“What!” said the Pompadour, regarding her with surprise, seeing for the
first time cruelty in the mild Madonna eyes. “Upon the secretary’s
stipend there depend, you know, the comforts of a poor old Scottish
lady—”
“There are so many openings for a perambulating conscience! Those
canaille! I am sure his frigid countenance spoils your appetite; it
would spoil mine—and you eat like a Trappist monk. Is that Scots too?”
“Gluttony is the one aristocratic vice to which I could never become
accustomed,” he replied. “I was—I was once, as many here to-night would
think, quite poor!”
She started slightly, looked incredulous. “How provoking it must have
been!” she said.
“No,” he reflected soberly. “Happiness—to speak platitude—has
wonderfully little to do with a bank account. You look so good and wise
I thought you had discovered that.”