The Boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, with the
variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of shops and cafés seen
through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant
porches of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the
far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure
and prosperity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening
in June. Hyacinth had been walking about all day—he had walked from
rising till bedtime every day of the week spent since his arrival—and
now an extraordinary fatigue, a tremendous lassitude had fallen upon
him, which, however, was not without its delight of sweet satiety,
and he settled himself in a chair beside a little table in front of
Tortoni’s not so much to rest from it as to enjoy it. He had seen so
much, felt so much, learnt so much, thrilled and throbbed and laughed
and sighed so much during the past several days that he was conscious
at last of the danger of becoming incoherent to himself and of the need
of balancing his accounts.
To-night he came to a full stop; he simply sat at the door of the
most dandified café in Paris and felt his pulse and took stock of
his impressions. He had been intending to visit the Variétés Theatre,
which blazed through intermediate lights and through the thin foliage
of trees not favoured by the asphalt, on the other side of the great
avenue. But the impression of Chaumont—he relinquished that for the
present; it added to the luxury of his situation to reflect that he
should still have plenty of time to see the _succès du jour_. The same
effect proceeded from his determination to order a _marquise_ when
the waiter, whose superior shirt-front and whisker emerged from the
long white cylinder of an apron, came to take his commands. He knew
the decoction was expensive—he had learnt as much at the moment he
happened to overhear for the first time a mention of it; which had
been the night before as he sat in his stall during an _entr’acte_
of the Comédie Française. A gentleman beside him, a young man in
evening-dress, conversing with an acquaintance in the row behind,
recommended the latter to refresh himself with the luxury in question
after the play: there was nothing like it, the speaker remarked, of a
hot evening in the open air when one was thirsty. The waiter brought
Hyacinth a tall glass of champagne in which a pineapple ice was in
solution, and our hero felt he had hoped for a sensation no less
intense in looking for an empty table on Tortoni’s terrace. Very few
tables were empty, and it was his belief that the others were occupied
by high celebrities; at any rate they were just the types he had had
a prevision of and had wanted most to meet when the extraordinary
opportunity to come abroad with his pockets full of money (it was
more extraordinary even than his original meeting with the Princess)
turned real to him in Lomax Place. He knew about Tortoni’s from his
study of the French novel, and as he sat there he had a vague sense
of fraternising with Balzac and Alfred de Musset: there were echoes
and reminiscences of their works in the air, all confounded with the
indefinable exhalations, the strange composite odour, half agreeable,
half impure, of the Boulevard. “Splendid Paris, charming Paris”—that
refrain, the fragment of an invocation, a beginning without an end,
hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth’s ears; the only articulate words
that got themselves uttered in the hymn of praise his imagination had
been addressing to the French capital from the first hour of his stay.
He recognised, he greeted with a thousand palpitations, the seat of
his maternal ancestors—was proud to be associated with so much of the
superb, so many proofs of a civilisation that had no visible rough
spots. He had his perplexities and even now and then a revulsion for
which he had made no allowance, as when it came over him that the most
brilliant city in the world was also the most blood-stained; but the
great sense that he understood and sympathised was preponderant, and
his comprehension gave him wings—appeared to transport him to still
wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations.
In other days, in London, he had thought again and again of his
mother’s father, the revolutionary watchmaker who had known the ecstasy
of the barricade and had paid for it with his life, and his reveries
had not been sensibly chilled by the fact that he knew next to nothing
about him. He figured him in his mind, this mystic ancestor, had a
conviction that he was very short like himself and had curly hair, an
immense talent for his work and an extraordinary natural eloquence,
together with many of the most attractive qualities of the French
character. But he was reckless and a little cracked, also probably
immoral; he had difficulties and debts and irrepressible passions;
his life had been an incurable fever and its tragic termination was a
matter of course. None the less it would have been a charm to hear him
talk, to feel the influence of a gaiety which even political madness
could never quench; for his grandson had a theory that he spoke the
French tongue of an earlier time, delightful and sociable in accent
and phrase, exempt from the baseness of modern slang. This vague yet
vivid personage became our young friend’s constant companion from
the day of his arrival; he roamed about with Florentine’s boy hand in
hand, sat opposite him at dinner, by the small table in the restaurant,
finished the bottle with him, made the bill a little longer—treating
him furthermore to innumerable revelations and counsels. He knew the
lad’s secret without being told and looked at him across the diminutive
tablecloth where the great cube of bread, pushed aside a little, left
room for his elbows—it puzzled Hyacinth that the people of Paris should
ever have had the fierceness of hunger when the loaves were so big;
gazed at him with eyes of deep, kind, glowing comprehension and with
lips which seemed to murmur that when one was to die to-morrow one must
eat and drink, one must gratify all one’s poor senses all one could
to-day. There was nothing venerable, no constraint of importance or
disapproval, in this edifying and impalpable presence; the young man
considered that Hyacinth Vivier was of his own time of life and could
enter into his pleasures as well as his pains. Wondering repeatedly
where the barricade on which his grandfather must have fallen had
been erected he at last satisfied himself—though I am unable to
trace the course of the induction—that it had bristled across the
Rue Saint-Honoré very near to the Church of Saint-Roch. The pair
had now roamed together through all the museums and gardens, through
the principal churches—the republican martyr was very good-natured
about this; through the passages and arcades, up and down the great
avenues, across all the bridges and above all again and again along
the river, where the quays were an endless entertainment to Hyacinth,
who lingered by the half-hour beside the boxes of old books on the
parapets, stuffing his pockets with fivepenny volumes while the bright
industries of the Seine flashed and glittered beneath him and on the
other bank the glorious Louvre stretched either way for a league. Our
young man took the same satisfaction in the Louvre as if he had been
invited there, as he had been to poor obliterated Medley; he haunted
the museum during all the first days, couldn’t look enough at certain
pictures nor sufficiently admire the high polish of the great floors
in which the golden frescoed ceilings repeated themselves. All Paris
struck him as tremendously artistic and decorative; he felt as if
hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy, Philistine world, a world
in which the taste was the taste of Little Peddlington and the idea
of beautiful arrangement had never had an influence. In his ancestral
city it had been active from the first, and that was why his quick
sensibility responded and why he murmured his constant refrain whenever
the fairness of the great monuments arrested him in the pearly silvery
light or he saw them take grey-blue, delicate tones at the end of
stately vistas. It seemed to him the place expressed herself, and
did it in the grand style, while London remained vague and blurred,
inarticulate, blunt and dim. Splendid Paris, charming Paris indeed!
Eustache Poupin had given him letters to three or four democratic
friends, ardent votaries of the social question, who had by a miracle
either escaped the cruelty of exile or suffered the outrage of pardon
and, in spite of republican _mouchards_ no less infamous than the
imperial and the periodical swoops of a despotism which had only
changed its buttons and postage-stamps, kept alive the sacred spark
which would some day become a consuming flame. Hyacinth, however, had
not had the thought of delivering these introductions; he had accepted
them because Poupin had had such a solemn glee in writing them, and
also because he had not the courage to let the couple in Lisson Grove
know how since that terrible night at Hoffendahl’s a change had come
over the spirit of his dream. He had not grown more concentrated,
he had grown more relaxed, and it was inconsistent with relaxation
that he should rummage out Poupin’s friends—one of whom lived in the
Batignolles and the others in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine—and make
believe he cared for what they cared for in the same way as they cared
for it. What was supreme in his mind to-day was not the idea of how
the society that surrounded him should be destroyed; it was much more
the sense of the wonderful, precious things it had produced, of the
fabric of beauty and power it had raised. That destruction was waiting
for it there was forcible evidence, known to himself and others, to
show; but since this truth had risen before him in its magnitude he
had become conscious of a transfer, partial if not complete, of his
sympathies; the same revulsion of which he had given a sign to the
Princess in saying that now he pitied the rich, those who were regarded
as happy. While the evening passed therefore, as he kept his place at
Tortoni’s, the emotion that was last to visit him was compunction for
not having put himself in relation with poor Poupin’s friends, for
having neglected to make the acquaintances of earnest people.
Who in the world, if one should come to that, was as earnest as he
himself or had given such signal even though secret proofs of it?
He could lay that unction to his soul in spite of his having amused
himself cynically, spent all his time in theatres, galleries, walks of
pleasure. The feeling had not failed him with which he accepted Mr.
Vetch’s furtherance—the sense that since he was destined to perish
in his flower he was right to make a dash at the beautiful, horrible
world. That reflexion had been natural enough, but what was strange was
the fiddler’s own impulse, his desire to do something pleasant for him,
to beguile him and ship him off. What had been most odd in this was
the way Mr. Vetch appeared to overlook the fact that his young friend
had already had that year such a turn of dissipation as was surely rare
in the experience of London artisans. This was one of the many things
Hyacinth thought of; he thought of the others in turn and out of turn;
it was almost the first time he had sat still long enough to collect
himself. A hundred confused reverberations of the recent past crowded
on him and he saw that he had lived more intensely in the previous
six months than in all the rest of his time. The succession of events
finally straightened itself and he tasted over some of those rarest,
strangest moments. His last week at Medley in especial had already
become a far-off fable, the echo of a song; he could read it over as
a romance bound in vellum and gold, gaze at it as he would have gazed
at some exquisite picture. His visit there had been perfect to the
end, and even the three days compromised by Sholto’s sojourn had not
broken the spell, for the three more that had elapsed before his own
departure—when the Princess herself had given him the signal—were the
most important of all. It was then she had made it clear to him that
she was in earnest, was prepared for the last sacrifice. He felt her
his standard of comparison, his authority, his measure, his perpetual
reference; and in taking possession of his mind to this extent she had
completely renewed it. She was altogether a new term, and now that he
was in a foreign country he observed how much her conversation, itself
so foreign, had prepared him to understand it. In Paris he saw of
course a great many women and noticed almost all of them, especially
the actresses; inwardly confronting their movement, their speech, their
manner of dressing, with that of his extraordinary friend. He judged
her to be beyond them in every respect, though there were one or two
actresses who had the air of trying to copy her.
The recollection of the last days he had spent with her affected
him now like the touch of a tear-washed cheek. She had in the last
intimacy, strangest and richest of revelations, shed tears for him,
and it was his suspicion that her secret idea was to frustrate the
redemption of his vow to Hoffendahl, to the immeasurable body that
Hoffendahl represented. She pretended to have accepted it, and what
she said was simply that when he should have played his part she would
engage to save him—to fling a cloud about him as the goddess-mother of
the Trojan hero used in Virgil’s poem to _escamoter_ Æneas. What she
meant was in his view to prevent him from playing his part at all. She
was in earnest for herself, not for him. The main result of his closest
commerce with her, in which somehow, all without herself stooping,
she had only raised him higher and higher and absolutely highest,
had been to make him feel that he was good enough for anything. When
he had asked her the last day if he might write to her she said Yes,
after two or three weeks. He had written about Pinnie’s death, and
again just before coming abroad, and in doing so had taken account of
something else she had said in regard to their correspondence—that
she didn’t wish vague phrases, protestations or compliments; she
wanted the realities of his life, the smallest, the “dearest,” the
most personal details. Therefore he had treated her to the whole
business of the break-up in Lomax Place, including the sale of the
rickety furniture and similar sordid items. He had told her what that
transaction brought—a beggarly sum, but sufficient to help a little to
pay debts, and had informed her further that one of the ways Mr. Vetch
had taken to hurry him off to Paris was to press upon him thirty pounds
out of his quaint little hoard, crowning the sum already inherited
from Pinnie—which, in a manner that none of Hyacinth’s friends of
course could possibly regard as frugal or even as respectable, was now
consecrated to a mere excursion. He even mentioned that he had ended
by accepting the thirty pounds, adding that he feared his peculiar
situation—she would know what he meant by that—made for a failure of
proper dignity: it disposed one to grab all one could get, kept one at
least very tolerant of whims that took the form of offered comforts.
What he didn’t mention to his shining friend was the manner in which
he had been received by Paul Muniment and by Millicent Henning on his
return from Medley. Millicent’s reception had been of the queerest;
it had been quite unexpectedly mild. She had made him no scene of
violence and appeared to have given up the line of throwing a blur of
recrimination over her own equivocal doings. She treated him as if she
liked him for having got in with the swells; she had an appreciation
of success which would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that
he was really successful. She tried to make him describe the style
of life that was led in a house where people were invited to stay
like that without having to pay, and she surprised almost as much as
she gratified him by not indulging in any of her former digs at the
Princess. She was lavish of ejaculations when he answered certain of
her questions—ejaculations that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh I say!” and
“Oh my stars!”—and he was more than ever struck with her detestable
habit of saying “Aye, that’s where it is” when he had made some remark
to which she wished to give an intelligent and sympathetic assent.
But she didn’t jeer at the Princess’s private character; she stayed
her satire in a case where there was such an opening for it. Hyacinth
reflected that this was lucky for her: he couldn’t have stood it
(nervous and anxious as he was about Pinnie) if she had had at such a
time the bad taste to be low and abusive. Under that stress he would
have broken with her completely—would have been too disgusted. She
displeased him enough as it was by her vulgar tricks of speech. There
were two or three little, recurrent thumb-marks of the common that
smutched her more blackly for him than their size warranted—as when she
said “full up” for full, “sold out” for sold, or remarked to him that
she supposed he was now going to “chuck up” his work at old Crook’s.
It was as if he were fairly requiring of her to speak _better_ than
women of fashion. These phrases at any rate had fallen upon his ear
many a time before, but now they seemed almost unpardonable enough to
quarrel about. Not that he had any wish to quarrel, for if the question
had been pushed he would have admitted that to-day his intimacy with
the Princess had caused any claims he might have had upon Millicent to
lapse. Millicent was all discretion, however; she only, it was evident,
wished to convey to him that it was better for both parties they should
respect each other’s liberty. A genial understanding on this subject
was what Miss Henning desired, and Hyacinth forbade himself to inquire
what use she proposed to make of her freedom. During the month that
elapsed between Pinnie’s death and his visit to Paris he had seen her
several times, since the respect for each other’s freedom had somehow
not implied cessation of intercourse and it was only natural she should
have been soft to him in his bereaved condition. Hyacinth’s sentiment
about Pinnie was deep, and Millicent was clever enough to guess it;
the consequence of which was that on these occasions she was very soft
indeed. She talked to him almost as if she had been his mother and he
a convalescent child; called him her dearest dear and a precious young
rascal and her own old boy; moralised a good deal, abstained from beer
(till she learnt he had inherited a fortune), and when he remarked
once (moralising a little too) that after the death of a person we
have loved we are haunted by the memory of our failures of kindness,
of generosity, rejoined with a dignity that made the words almost a
contribution to the philosophic view, “Yes, that’s where it is!”
Something in her behaviour at this period had even made Hyacinth wonder
if there were not some mystical sign in his appearance, some fine
betrayal in the very expression of his face, of the predicament in
which he had been placed by Diedrich Hoffendahl; he began to suspect
anew the operation of that “beastly _attendrissement_” he had detected
of old in people who had the benefit of Miss Pynsent’s innuendoes. The
compassion Millicent felt for him had never been one of the reasons why
he liked her; it had fortunately been corrected, moreover, by his power
to make her furious. This evening, on the Boulevard, as he watched the
endless facial successions, one of the ideas that came to him was that
it was odd he should like her even yet; for heaven knew he liked the
Princess better, and he had hitherto supposed that when a sentiment of
this kind had the energy of a possession it made a clean sweep of all
minor predilections. But it was clear to him that she still existed for
him as a loud-breathing feminine fact, that he couldn’t feel he had
quite done with her or she with him, and that in spite of his having
now so many other things to admire there was still a comfort in the
recollection of her robust beauty and her primitive passions. Hyacinth
thought of her as some clever young barbarian who in ancient days
should have made a pilgrimage to Rome might have thought of a Dacian or
Iberian mistress awaiting his return on the rough provincial shore. If
Millicent judged his visit at a “hall” a proof of the sort of success
that was to attend him—how he reconciled this with the supposition
that she perceived as a ghostly crown intermingled with his curly hair
the lurid light of destiny, the aureola of martyrdom, he would have
had some difficulty in explaining—if Miss Henning considered, on his
return from Medley, that he had taken his place on the winning side
it was only consistent of her to borrow a grandeur from the fact of
his course of travel; and indeed by the time he was ready to start
she spoke of his participation in this privilege of the upper classes
as if she had invented it herself and had even contributed materially
to the funds required. It had been her theory from the first that she
only liked people of spirit; and Hyacinth certainly had never had so
much spirit as when he went “abroad,” after the fashion of Mr. Vetch of
old, with a hat-box. He could say to himself quite without bitterness
that of course she would profit by his absence to put her relations
with Sholto on a comfortable footing; yet somehow, after all, at this
moment, as her distant English face out-blossomed the nearer, the livid
Parisian, it had not that gentleman’s romantic shadow across it. It
was the general brightness of Paris perhaps that made him see things
sharp; at any rate he remembered with kindness something she had said
to him the last time he saw her and that it touched him exceedingly at
the moment. He had happened to observe to her in a friendly way that
now Miss Pynsent had gone she was, with the exception of Mr. Vetch, the
person in his whole circle who had known him longest. To this Millicent
had replied that Mr. Vetch wouldn’t live for ever and that she should
then have the satisfaction of being his very oldest friend. “Oh well,
I shan’t live for ever either,” said Hyacinth; which led her to ask if
by chance he had a weakness of the chest. “Not that I know of, but I
might get smashed in a row”; and when she broke out into scorn of his
silly notion of turning everything up—as if any one wanted to know what
a costermonger would like, or any of that low sort at the East End!—he
amused himself with inquiring if she were satisfied with the condition
of society and thought nothing ought to be done for people who at
the end of a lifetime of starvation wages had only the reward of the
hideous workhouse and a pauper’s grave.
“I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything if ever _you_ was to slip up,”
she had answered simply, looking at him with her beautiful boldness.
Then she had added: “There’s one thing I can tell you, Mr. Robinson:
that if ever any one was to do you a turn——!” And she had paused again,
tossing back the head she carried as if it were surmounted by the
plumes of a chieftainess, while Hyacinth asked what would occur in that
contingency. “Well, there’d be _one_ left behind who would take it up!”
she had announced; and in the tone of the declaration there had been
something clear and brave. It struck Hyacinth as a strange fate—though
not stranger after all than his native circumstances—that one’s memory
should come to be represented by a shop-girl overladen with bracelets
of imitation silver; but he was reminded that Millicent was a fine
specimen of a woman of a type opposed to the whining, and that in her
large, free temperament many disparities were reconciled.