We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is
indeed _sui generis_. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in
Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Marseillais, and
who subsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The
Frenchman. I shall not mention him otherwise in this veracious
chronicle, but, looking through the city directory of Marseilles I
found an entire page devoted to his name, though all the entries may
not have been members of his family. There is no doubt that he was a
Marseillais.
Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a café of La
Cannebière and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often
crossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his
grave this many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused
by him, then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection
for him.
The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and the
Brigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he
was flush—which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a
year—he was as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere
between the little principality of Monaco and the headwaters of the
Nile; transparent as a child; idiosyncratic to a degree. I understand
Marseilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me since he was
born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was driven
away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feel sure,
for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A
gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my
life.
I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis.
His attire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he
carried a delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm.
She was his wife. It was a circumstance connected with this lady which
led to the after intimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill.
I had casually met her husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by
this token, seeking sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to
me with his sorrow.
I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees
and with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give
her back to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was
his passion, and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the
softest of soft things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and
he proceeded to fulfill his vow.
But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned,
to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running a
restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about
cooking than about anything else—we had had a contest or two over the
mysteries of a pair of chafing dishes—and as there was not a really
good eating place in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was
said rather in jest than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the
money. The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had
opened The Brunswick.
In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into
day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o’clock supper there. It
was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between
us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of
the reserves behind The Major’s buoyant optimism and occasional
gasconnade.
He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction
of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to
Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd
Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard—very
nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders—myself the
humble witness and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of
course we lived exceedingly well.
The Major’s most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and
had been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once
into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall
Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck
story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had
not been an inhabitant.
Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major
gave us a most graphic account of how “the old house”—for thus he
designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence
or which he had some reason for not more particularly indicating—had
sent him in charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after
many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant
away; and Rudolph Fink, who was of the party, immediately said, “I can
attest the truth of The Major’s story, because my brother Albert and I
were in charge of some fishing camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the
exact date of the floods, and we caught many of those rosewood logs in
our nets as they floated out to sea.”
Augustine’s Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia,
and even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The
Major declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look
“like a monkey.” He proposed to give a dinner.
There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at
luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The
Brunswick. I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to
say that they were Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major
appeared, a train of servants following with a silver tureen. The lid
was lifted.
“_Voilà!_” says he.
The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like
bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!
The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am
sorry to say, leading the rebellion.
“I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!” exclaimed The Frenchman, quite
losing his usual good English in his excitement.
We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But
he bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time
Sam Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.
Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into
the kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: “Is there any of that
terrapin left over from last night?”
All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and
triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the
Philadelphia express tags!
On another occasion a friend of The Major’s, passing The Brunswick and
observing some diamond-back shells in the window said, “Major, have you
any real live terrapins?”
[Illustration: Henry Woodfire Grady—One of Mr. Watterson’s “Boys”]
“Live!” cried The Frenchman. “Only this morning I open the ice box and
they were all dancing the cancan.”
“Major,” persisted the friend, “I’ll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot,
you cannot show me an actual living terrapin.”
“What do you take me for—confidence man?” The Major retorted. “How you
expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?”
“Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we
shall have the wine.”
“Oh, well,” says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, “if
you insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me.”
He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box.
It was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he
was gone for sure.
“Là!” says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells
with his cane as he held the candle aloft.
“But,” says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance,
“you told me they were dancing the cancan!”
The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite
numb and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the
shells about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a
sudden he stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.
“Ah,” he murmured. “I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It
is ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o’clock
by the watch every night.” And without another word he reached for the
Veuve Cliquot!
For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major
was exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs.
His legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain
dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he
rarely mentioned his business—though he worked like a slave, and could
not have been making much or any profit—so that there rose the query
how he contrived to make both ends meet. Little by little I came into
the knowledge that there was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it
matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty thousand francs, paid
in quarterly installments of ten thousand francs each.
Occasionally he mentioned “the Old House,” and in relating the famous
Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of
the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of
“l’Oncle Célestin,” with the deepest feeling.
“Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?”
Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we
were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. “Well, sir, the other
night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was
drunk, and I cried too!”
I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came from
Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the
Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been
well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money
dealings scrupulously honest—was all I could be sure of. What had he
done to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black
sheep, for that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful
woman, his wife—a tireless church and charity worker, who lived the
life of a recluse and a saint—had she reclaimed him from his former
self? I knew that she had been the immediate occasion of his turning
over a new leaf. But before her time what had he been, what had he
done?
Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I
entered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of the
little dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon
the table in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my
entrance and I seated myself on the opposite side of the table.
Presently he looked up, and seeing me, without a word passed me a
letter which, all blistered with tears, had brought him to this
distressful state. It was a formal French burial summons, with its long
list of family names—his among the rest—the envelope, addressed in a
lady’s hand—his sister’s, the wife of a nobleman in high military
command—the postmark “Lyon.” Uncle Celestin was dead.
Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must
not repeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best
names in France, Uncle Célestin himself not the least of them.
At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was taken
away, nobody knew when, nobody where, and with it went the beautiful
woman, his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a
word.