"Monsieur le Marquis," said Duplessis, when the salon was cleared of all
but himself and the two friends, "Lemercier has confided to me the state
of your affairs in connection with M. Louvier, and flatters me by
thinking my advice may be of some service; if so, command me."
"I shall most gratefully accept your advice," answered Alain, "but I fear
my condition defies even your ability and skill."
"Permit me to hope not, and to ask a few necessary questions. M. Louvier
has constituted himself your sole mortgagee; to what amount, at what
interest, and from what annual proceeds is the interest paid?"
Herewith Alain gave details already furnished to the reader. Duplessis
listened, and noted down the replies.
"I see it all," he said, when Alain had finished. "M. Louvier had
predetermined to possess himself of your estate: he makes himself
mortgagee at a rate of interest so low, that I tell you fairly, at the
present value of money, I doubt if you could find any capitalist who
would accept the transfer of the mortgage at the same rate. This is not
like Louvier, unless he had an object to gain, and that object is your
land. The revenue from your estate is derived chiefly from wood, out of
which the interest due to Louvier is to be paid. M. Gandrin, in a
skilfully-guarded letter, encourages you to sell the wood from your
forests to a man who offers you several thousand francs more than it
could command from customary buyers. I say nothing against M. Gandrin,
but every man who knows Paris as I do, knows that M. Louvier can put, and
has put, a great deal of money into M. Gandrin's pocket. The purchaser
of your wood does not pay more than his deposit, and has just left the
country insolvent. Your purchaser, M. Collot, was an adventurous
speculator; he would have bought anything at any price, provided he
had time to pay; if his speculations had been lucky he would have paid.
M. Louvier knew, as I knew, that M. Collot was a gambler, and the chances
were that he would not pay. M. Louvier allows a year's interest on his
hypotheque to become due-notice thereof duly given to you by his agent--
now you come under the operation of the law. Of course, you know what
the law is?"
"Not exactly," answered Alain, feeling frostbitten by the congealing
words of his counsellor; "but I take it for granted that if I cannot pay
the interest of a sum borrowed on my property, that property itself is
forfeited."
"No, not quite that--the law is mild. If the interest which should be
paid half-yearly remains unpaid at the end of a year, the mortgagee has a
right to be impatient, has he not?"
"Certainly he has."
"Well, then, _on fait un commandement tendant de saisie immobiliere_,
viz: The mortgagee gives a notice that the property shall be put up for
sale. Then it is put up for sale, and in most cases the mortgagee buys
it in. Here, certainly, no competitors in the mere business way would
vie with Louvier; the mortgage at three and a half per cent. covers more
than the estate is apparently worth. Ah! but stop, M. le Marquis; the
notice is not yet served: the whole process would take six months from
the day it is served to the taking possession after the sale; in the
meanwhile, if you pay the interest due, the action drops. Courage, M. le
Marquis! Hope yet, if you condescend to call me friend."
"And me," cried Lemercier; "I will sell out of my railway shares to-
morrow-see to it, Duplessis--enough to pay off the damnable interest.
See to it, _mon ami_."
"Agree to that, M. le Marquis, and you are safe for another year," said
Duplessis, folding up the paper on which he had made his notes, but
fixing on Alain quiet eyes half concealed under drooping lids.
"Agree to that!" cried Rochebriant, rising--"agree to allow even my worst
enemy to pay for me moneys I could never hope to repay--agree to allow
the oldest and most confiding friends to do so--M. Duplessis, never!
If I carried the porter's knot of an Auverguat, I should still remain
gentilhomme and Breton."
Duplessis, habitually the driest of men, rose with a moistened eye and
flushing cheek--"Monsieur le Marquis, vouchsafe me the honour to shake
hands with you. I, too, am by descent gentilhomme, by profession a
speculator on the Bourse. In both capacities I approve the sentiment you
have uttered. Certainly, if our friend Frederic lent you 7000 Louis or
so this year, it would be impossible for you even to foresee the year in
which you could repay it; but,"--here Duplessis paused a minute, and then
lowering the tone of his voice, which had been somewhat vehement and
enthusiastic, into that of a colloquial good-fellowship, equally rare to
the measured reserve of the financier, he asked, with a lively twinkle of
his grey eye, "Did you never hear, Marquis, of a little encounter between
me and M. Louvier?"
"Encounter at arms--does Louvier fight?" asked Alain, innocently.
"In his own way he is always fighting; but I speak metaphorically. You
see this small house of mine--so pinched in by the houses next to it that
I can neither get space for a ball-room for Valerie, nor a dining-room
for more than a friendly party like that which has honoured me to-day.
_Eh bien_! I bought this house a few years ago, meaning to buy the one
next to it and throw the two into one. I went to the proprietor of the
next house, who, as I knew, wished to sell. 'Aha,' he thought, 'this is
the rich Monsieur Duplessis;' and he asked me 2000 louis more than the
house was worth. We men of business cannot bear to be too much cheated;
a little cheating we submit to--much cheating raises our gall. _Bref_--
this was on Monday. I offered the man 1000 louis above the fair price,
and gave him till Thursday to decide. Somehow or other Louvier hears of
this. 'Hillo!' says Louvier, 'here is a financier who desires a hotel to
vie with mine!' He goes on Wednesday to my next-door neighbour.
'Friend, you want to sell your house. I want to buy--the price?' The
proprietor, who does not know him by sight, says: 'It is as good as sold.
M. Duplessis and I shall agree.' 'Bah! What sum did you ask M.
Duplessis?' He names the sum; 2000 louis more than he can get elsewhere.
'But M. Duplessis will give me the sum.' 'You ask too little. I will
give 3000. A fig for M. Duplessis. I am Monsieur Louvier.' So when I
call on Thursday the house is sold. I reconcile myself easily enough to
the loss of space for a larger dining-room; but though Valerie was then a
child at a convent, I was sadly disconcerted by the thought that I could
have no _salle de bal_ ready for her when she came to reside with me.
Well, I say to myself, patience; I owe M. Louvier a good turn; my time to
pay him off will come. It does come, and very soon. M. Louvier buys an
estate near Paris--builds a superb villa. Close to his property is a
rising forest ground for sale. He goes to the proprietor: says the
proprietor to himself, 'The great Louvier wants this,' and adds 5000
louis to its market price. Louvier, like myself, can't bear to be
cheated egregiously. Louvier offers 2000 louis more than the man could
fairly get, and leaves him till Saturday to consider. I hear of this--
speculators hear of everything. On Friday night I go to the man and I
give him 6000 louis, where he had asked 5000. Fancy Louvier's face the
next day! But there my revenge only begins," continued Duplessis,
chuckling inwardly. "My forest looks down on the villa he is building.
I only wait till his villa is built, in order to send to my architect and
say, Build me a villa at least twice as grand as M. Louvier's, then clear
away the forest trees, so that every morning he may see my palace
dwarfing into insignificance his own."
"Bravo!" cried Lemercier, clapping his hands. Lemercier had the spirit
of party, and felt for Duplessis against Louvier much as in England Whig
feels against Tory, or vice versa.
"Perhaps now," resumed Duplessis, more soberly,--"perhaps now, M. le
Marquis, you may understand why I humiliate you by no sense of obligation
if I say that M. Louvier shall not be the Seigneur de Rochebriant if I
can help it. Give me a line of introduction to your Breton lawyer and to
Mademoiselle your aunt--let me have your letters early to-morrow. I will
take the afternoon train. I know not how many days I may be absent, but
I shall not return till I have carefully examined the nature and
conditions of your property. If I see my way to save your estate, and
give a _mauvais quart d'heure_ to Louvier, so much the better for you, M.
le Marquis; if I cannot, I will say frankly, 'Make the best terms you can
with your creditor.'" "Nothing can be more delicately generous than the
way you put it," said Alain; "but pardon me, if I say that the pleasantry
with which you narrate your grudge against M. Louvier does not answer its
purpose in diminishing my sense of obligation." So, linking his arm in
Lemercier's, Alain made his bow and withdrew.
When his guests had gone, Duplessis remained seated in meditation--
apparently pleasant meditation, for he smiled while indulging it; he then
passed through the reception-rooms to one at the far end appropriated to
Valerie as a boudoir or morning-room, adjoining her bed-chamber; he
knocked gently at the door, and, all remaining silent within, he opened
it noiselessly and entered. Valerie was reclining on the sofa near the
window-her head drooping, her hands clasped on her knees. Duplessis
neared her with tender stealthy steps, passed his arm round her, and drew
her head towards his bosom. "Child!" he murmured; "my child, my only
one!"
At that soft loving voice, Valerie flung her arms round him, and wept
aloud like an infant in trouble. He seated himself beside her, and
wisely suffered her to weep on, till her passion had exhausted itself;
he then said, half fondly, half chillingly: "Have you forgotten our
conversation only three days ago? Have you forgotten that I then drew
forth the secret of your heart? Have you forgotten what I promised you
in return for your confidence? and a promise to you have I ever yet
broken?"
"Father! father! I am so wretched and so ashamed of myself for being
wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can
promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be
mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover."
"Valerie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I
spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a
child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also
from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have
willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the
year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry
your tears and smile on me, Valerie. If you will not see in me mother
and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her who
shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth
which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me."
As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognized in him the old
saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the one soft
feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had left
unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the love of
parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so strong as it
is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the avaricious, even
among the profligate, it forces itself into flower. Other loves fade
away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent love blooms to the
last. Valerie felt the presence of that love as a divine protecting
guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his hand with grateful
kisses.
"Do not torture yourself, my child, with jealous fears of the fair
Italian. Her lot and Alain de Rochebriant's can never unite; and
whatever you may think of their whispered converse, Alain's heart at this
moment is too filled with anxious troubles to leave one spot in it
accessible even to a frivolous gallantry. It is for us to remove these
troubles; and then, when he turns his eyes towards you, it will be with
the gaze of one who beholds his happiness. You do not weep now,
Valerie!"
PREFATORY NOTE. (BY THE AUTHOR'S SON.)
The Parisians and Kenelm Chillingly were begun about the same time, and
had their common origin in the same central idea. That idea first found
fantastic expression in The Coming Race; and the three books, taken
together, constitute a special group distinctly apart from all the other
works of their author.
The satire of his earlier novels is a protest against false social
respectabilities; the humour of his later ones is a protest against the
disrespect of social realities. By the first he sought to promote social
sincerity, and the free play of personal character; by the last, to
encourage mutual charity and sympathy amongst all classes on whose
interrelation depends the character of society itself. But in these
three books, his latest fictions, the moral purpose is more definite and
exclusive. Each of them is an expostulation against what seemed to him
the perilous popularity of certain social and political theories, or a
warning against the influence of certain intellectual tendencies upon
individual character and national life. This purpose, however, though
common to the three fictions, is worked out in each of them by a
different method. The Coming Race is a work of pure fancy, and the
satire of it is vague and sportive. The outlines of a definite purpose
are more distinctly drawn in Chillingly-a romance which has the source of
its effect in a highly-wrought imagination. The humour and pathos of
Chillingly are of a kind incompatible with the design of The Parisians,
which is a work of dramatised observation. Chillingly is a romance; The
Parisians is a Novel. The subject of Chillingly is psychological; that
of The Parisians is social. The author's object in Chillingly being to
illustrate the effects of "modern ideas" upon an individual character,
he has confined his narrative to the biography of that one character.
Hence the simplicity of plot and small number of dramatis personae;
whereby the work gains in height and depth what it loses in breadth of
surface. The Parisians, on the contrary, is designed to illustrate the
effect of "modern ideas" upon a whole community. This novel is
therefore panoramic in the profusion and variety of figures presented by
it to the reader's imagination. No exclusive prominence is vouchsafed to
any of these figures. All of them are drawn and coloured with an equal
care, but by means of the bold broad touches necessary for their
effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures
are, indeed, but the component features of one great Form, and their
actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character-that of
the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France;-a character
everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real
hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic
illustration as being the most advanced in the progress of "modern
ideas." Thus, for a complete perception of its writer's fundamental
purpose, The Parisians should be read in connection with Chillingly, and
these two books in connection with The Coming Race. It will then be
perceived that, through the medium of alternate fancy, sentiment, and
observation assisted by humour and passion, these three books (in all
other respects so different from each other) complete the presentation of
the same purpose under different aspects; and thereby constitute a group
of fictions which claims a separate place of its own in any thoughtful
classification of their author's works.
One last word to those who will miss from these pages the connecting and
completing touches of the master's hand. It may be hoped that such a
disadvantage, though irreparable, is somewhat mitigated by the essential
character of the work itself. The aesthetic merit of this kind of novel
is in the vivacity of a general effect produced by large swift strokes of
character; and in such strokes, if they be by a great artist, force and
freedom of style must still be apparent, even when they are left rough
and unfinished. Nor can any lack of final verbal correction much
diminish the intellectual value which many of the more thoughtful
passages of the present work derive from a long, keen, and practical
study of political phenomena, guided by personal experience of public
life, and enlightened by a large, instinctive knowledge of the human
heart.
Such a belief is, at least, encouraged by the private communications
spontaneously made, to him who expresses it, by persons of political
experience and social position in France; who have acknowledged the
general accuracy of the author's descriptions, and noticed the suggestive
sagacity and penetration of his occasional comments on the circumstances
and sentiments he describes.