Paz was leading so subterranean a life that the fashionable world of
Paris asked who he was when the Comtesse Laginska was seen in the Bois
de Boulogne riding between her husband and a stranger. During the ride
Clementine insisted that Thaddeus should dine with them. This caprice of
the sovereign lady compelled Paz to make an evening toilet. Clementine
dressed for the occasion with a certain coquetry, in a style that
impressed even Adam himself when she entered the salon where the two
friends awaited her.
“Comte Paz,” she said, “you must go with us to the Opera.”
This was said in the tone which, coming from a woman means: “If you
refuse we shall quarrel.”
“Willingly, madame,” replied the captain. “But as I have not the fortune
of a count, have the kindness to call me captain.”
“Very good, captain; give me your arm,” she said,--taking it and
leading the way to the dining-room with the flattering familiarity which
enchants all lovers.
The countess placed the captain beside her; his behavior was that of
a poor sub-lieutenant dining at his general’s table. He let Clementine
talk, listened deferentially as to a superior, did not differ with her
in anything, and waited to be questioned before he spoke at all. He
seemed actually stupid to the countess, whose coquettish little ways
missed their mark in presence of such frigid gravity and conventional
respect. In vain Adam kept saying: “Do be lively, Thaddeus; one would
really suppose you were not at home. You must have made a wager to
disconcert Clementine.” Thaddeus continued heavy and half asleep.
When the servants left the room at the end of the dessert the captain
explained that his habits were diametrically opposite to those of
society,--he went to bed at eight o’clock and got up very early in the
morning; and he excused his dulness on the ground of being sleepy.
“My intention in taking you to the Opera was to amuse you, captain; but
do as you prefer,” said Clementine, rather piqued.
“I will go,” said Paz.
“Duprez sings ‘Guillaume Tell,’” remarked Adam. “But perhaps you would
rather go to the ‘Varietes’?”
The captain smiled and rang the bell. “Tell Constantin,” he said to the
footman, “to put the horses to the carriage instead of the coupe. We
should be rather squeezed otherwise,” he said to the count.
“A Frenchman would have forgotten that,” remarked Clementine, smiling.
“Ah! but we are Florentines transplanted to the North,” answered
Thaddeus with a refinement of accent and a look in his eyes which
made his conduct at table seem assumed for the occasion. There was
too evident a contrast between his involuntary self-revelation in this
speech and his behavior during dinner. Clementine examined the captain
with a few of those covert glances which show a woman’s surprise and
also her capacity for observation.
It resulted from this little incident that silence reigned in the salon
while the three took their coffee, a silence rather annoying to Adam,
who was incapable of imagining the cause of it. Clementine no longer
tried to draw out Thaddeus. The captain, on the other hand, retreated
within his military stiffness and came out of it no more, neither on the
way to the Opera nor in the box, where he seemed to be asleep.
“You see, madame, that I am a very stupid man,” he said during the dance
in the last act of “Guillaume Tell.” “Am I not right to keep, as the
saying is, to my own specialty?”
“In truth, my dear captain, you are neither a talker nor a man of the
world, but you are perhaps Polish.”
“Therefore leave me to look after your pleasures, your property, your
household--it is all I am good for.”
“Tartufe! pooh!” cried Adam, laughing. “My dear, he is full of ardor;
he is thoroughly educated; he can, if he chooses, hold his own in any
salon. Clementine, don’t believe his modesty.”
“Adieu, comtesse; I have obeyed your wishes so far; and now I will take
the carriage and go home to bed and send it back for you.”
Clementine bowed her head and let him go without replying.
“What a bear!” she said to the count. “You are a great deal nicer.”
Adam pressed her hand when no one was looking.
“Poor, dear Thaddeus,” he said, “he is trying to make himself
disagreeable where most men would try to seem more amiable than I.”
“Oh!” she said, “I am not sure but what there is some _calculation_ in
his behavior; he would have taken in an ordinary woman.”
Half an hour later, when the chasseur, Boleslas, called out “Gate!” and
the carriage was waiting for it to swing back, Clementine said to her
husband, “Where does the captain perch?”
“Why, there!” replied Adam, pointing to a floor above the porte-cochere
which had one window looking on the street. “His apartments are over the
coachhouse.”
“Who lives on the other side?” asked the countess.
“No one as yet,” said Adam; “I mean that apartment for our children and
their instructors.”
“He didn’t go to bed,” said the countess, observing lights in Thaddeus’s
rooms when the carriage had passed under the portico supported by
columns copied from those of the Tuileries, which replaced a vulgar zinc
awning painted in stripes like cloth.
The captain, in his dressing-gown with a pipe in his mouth, was watching
Clementine as she entered the vestibule. The day had been a hard one for
him. And here is the reason why: A great and terrible emotion had taken
possession of his heart on the day when Adam made him go to the Opera
to see and give his opinion on Mademoiselle du Rouvre; and again when he
saw her on the occasion of her marriage, and recognized in her the woman
whom a man is forced to love exclusively. For this reason Paz strongly
advised and promoted the long journey to Italy and elsewhere after the
marriage. At peace so long as Clementine was away, his trial was renewed
on the return of the happy household. As he sat at his window on this
memorable night, smoking his latakia in a pipe of wild-cherry wood
six feet long, given to him by Adam, these are the thoughts that were
passing through his mind:--
“I, and God, who will reward me for suffering in silence, alone know
how I love her! But how shall I manage to have neither her love nor her
dislike?”
And his thoughts travelled far on this strange theme.
It must not be supposed that Thaddeus was living without pleasure, in
the midst of his sufferings. The deceptions of this day, for instance,
were a source of inward joy to him. Since the return of the count and
countess he had daily felt ineffable satisfactions in knowing himself
necessary to a household which, without his devotion to its interests,
would infallibly have gone to ruin. What fortune can bear the strain of
reckless prodigality? Clementine, brought up by a spendthrift father,
knew nothing of the management of a household which the women of the
present day, however rich or noble they are, are often compelled to
undertake themselves. How few, in these days, keep a steward. Adam, on
the other hand, son of one of the great Polish lords who let themselves
be preyed on by the Jews, and are wholly incapable of managing even the
wreck of their vast fortunes (for fortunes are vast in Poland), was
not of a nature to check his own fancies or those of his wife. Left to
himself he would probably have been ruined before his marriage. Paz had
prevented him from gambling at the Bourse, and that says all.
Under these circumstances, Thaddeus, feeling that he loved Clementine
in spite of himself, had not the resource of leaving the house and
travelling in other lands to forget his passion. Gratitude, the key-note
of his life, held him bound to that household where he alone could look
after the affairs of the heedless owners. The long absence of Adam
and Clementine had given him peace. But the countess had returned
more lovely than ever, enjoying the freedom which marriage brings to a
Parisian woman, displaying the graces of a young wife and the nameless
attraction she gains from the happiness, or the independence, bestowed
upon her by a young man as trustful, as chivalric, and as much in
love as Adam. To know that he was the pivot on which the splendor the
household depended, to see Clementine when she got out of her carriage
on returning from some fete, or got into it in the morning when she took
her drive, to meet her on the boulevards in her pretty equipage,
looking like a flower in a whorl of leaves, inspired poor Thaddeus with
mysterious delights, which glowed in the depths of his heart but gave no
signs upon his face.
How happened it that for five whole months the countess had never
perceived the captain? Because he hid himself from her knowledge, and
carefully concealed the pains he took to avoid her. Nothing so resembles
the Divine love as hopeless human love. A man must have great depth of
heart to devote himself in silence and obscurity to a woman. In such
a heart is the worship of love for love’s sake only--sublime avarice,
sublime because ever generous and founded on the mysterious existence
of the principles of creation. _Effect_ is nature, and nature is
enchanting; it belongs to man, to the poet, the painter, the lover. But
_Cause_, to a few privileged souls and to certain mighty thinkers,
is superior to nature. Cause is God. In the sphere of causes live
the Newtons and all such thinkers as Laplace, Kepler, Descartes,
Malebranche, Spinoza, Buffon; also the true poets and solitarys of
the second Christian century, and the Saint Teresas of Spain, and such
sublime ecstatics. All human sentiments bear analogy to these conditions
whenever the mind abandons Effect for Cause. Thaddeus had reached this
height, at which all things change their relative aspect. Filled with
the joys unutterable of a creator he had attained in his love to all
that genius has revealed to us of grandeur.
“No,” he was thinking to himself as he watched the curling smoke of his
pipe, “she was not entirely deceived. She might break up my friendship
with Adam if she took a dislike to me; but if she coquetted with me to
amuse herself, what would become of me?”
The conceit of this last supposition was so foreign to the modest
nature and Teutonic timidity of the captain that he scolded himself for
admitting it, and went to bed, resolved to await events before deciding
on a course.
The next day Clementine breakfasted very contentedly without Paz, and
without even noticing his disobedience to her orders. It happened to be
her reception day, when the house was thrown open with a splendor that
was semi-royal. She paid no attention to the absence of Comte Paz, on
whom all the burden of these parade days fell.
“Good!” thought he, as he heard the last carriages driving away at two
in the morning; “it was only the caprice or the curiosity of a Parisian
woman that made her want to see me.”
After that the captain went back to his ordinary habits and ways, which
had been somewhat upset by this incident. Diverted by her Parisian
occupations, Clementine appeared to have forgotten Paz. It must not be
thought an easy matter to reign a queen over fickle Paris. Does any one
suppose that fortunes alone are risked in the great game? The winters
are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the
Empire. What works of art and genius are expended on a gown or a garland
in which to make a sensation! A fragile, delicate creature will wear
her stiff and brilliant harness of flowers and diamonds, silk and steel,
from nine at night till two and often three o’clock in the morning. She
eats little, to attract remark to her slender waist; she satisfied her
hunger with debilitating tea, sugared cakes, ices which heat her, or
slices of heavy pastry. The stomach is made to yield to the orders of
coquetry. The awakening comes too late. A fashionable woman’s whole life
is in contradiction to the laws of nature, and nature is pitiless. She
has no sooner risen than she makes an elaborate morning toilet, and
thinks of the one which she means to wear in the afternoon. The moment
she is dressed she has to receive and make visits, and go to the Bois
either on horseback or in a carriage. She must practise the art of
smiling, and must keep her mind on the stretch to invent new compliments
which shall seem neither common nor far-fetched. All women do not
succeed in this. It is no surprise, therefore, to find a young woman who
entered fashionable society fresh and healthy, faded and worn out at the
end of three years. Six months spent in the country will hardly heal the
wounds of the winter. We hear continually, in these days, of mysterious
ailments,--gastritis, and so forth,--ills unknown to women when they
busied themselves about their households. In the olden time women only
appeared in the world at intervals; now they are always on the scene.
Clementine found she had to struggle for her supremacy. She was cited,
and that alone brought jealousies; and the care and watchfulness exacted
by this contest with her rivals left little time even to love her
husband. Paz might well be forgotten. Nevertheless, in the month of
May, as she drove home from the Bois, just before she left Paris for
Ronquerolles, her uncle’s estate in Burgundy, she noticed Thaddeus,
elegantly dressed, sauntering on one of the side-paths of the
Champs-Elysees, in the seventh heaven of delight at seeing his beautiful
countess in her elegant carriage with its spirited horses and sparkling
liveries,--in short, his beloved family the admired of all.
“There’s the captain,” she said to her husband.
“He’s happy!” said Adam. “This is his delight. He knows there’s no
equipage more elegant than ours, and he is rejoicing to think that some
people envy it. Have you only just noticed him? I see him there nearly
every day.”
“I wonder what he is thinking about now,” said Clementine.
“He is thinking that this winter has cost a good deal, and that it is
time we went to economize with your old uncle Ronquerolles,” replied
Adam.
The countess stopped the carriage near Paz, and bade him take the seat
beside her. Thaddeus grew as red as a cherry.
“I shall poison you,” he said; “I have been smoking.”
“Doesn’t Adam poison me?” she said.
“Yes, but he is Adam,” returned the captain.
“And why can’t Thaddeus have the same privileges?” asked the countess,
smiling.
That divine smile had a power which triumphed over the heroic
resolutions of poor Paz; he looked at Clementine with all the fire of
his soul in his eyes, though, even so, its flame was tempered by the
angelic gratitude of the man whose life was based upon that virtue.
The countess folded her arms in her shawl, lay back pensively on her
cushions, ruffling the feathers of her pretty bonnet, and looked at the
people who passed her. That flash of a great and hitherto resigned soul
reached her sensibilities. What was Adam’s merit in her eyes? It was
natural enough to have courage and generosity. But Thaddeus--surely
Thaddeus possessed, or seemed to possess, some great superiority
over Adam. They were dangerous thoughts which took possession of the
countess’s mind as she again noticed the contrast of the fine presence
that distinguished Thaddeus, and the puny frame in which Adam showed
the degenerating effects of intermarriage among the Polish aristocratic
families. The devil alone knew the thoughts that were in Clementine’s
head, for she sat still, with thoughtful, dreamy eyes, and without
saying a word until they reached home.
“You will dine with us; I shall be angry if you disobey me,” she said as
the carriage turned in. “You are Thaddeus to me, as you are to Adam. I
know your obligations to him, but I also know those we are under to you.
Both generosities are natural--but you are generous every day and all
day. My father dines here to-day, also my uncle Ronquerolles and my aunt
Madame de Serizy. Dress yourself therefore,” she said, taking the hand
he offered to assist her from the carriage.
Thaddeus went to his own room to dress with a joyful heart, though
shaken by an inward dread. He went down at the last moment and behaved
through dinner as he had done on the first occasion, that is, like a
soldier fit only for his duties as a steward. But this time Clementine
was not his dupe; his glance had enlightened her. The Marquis de
Ronquerolles, one of the ablest diplomates after Talleyrand, who had
served with de Marsay during his short ministry, had been informed by
his niece of the real worth and character of Comte Paz, and knew how
modestly he made himself the steward of his friend Laginski.
“And why is this the first time I have the pleasure of seeing Comte
Paz?” asked the marquis.
“Because he is so shy and retiring,” replied Clementine with a look at
Paz telling him to change his behavior.
Alas! that we should have to avow it, at the risk of rendering the
captain less interesting, but Paz, though superior to his friend
Adam, was not a man of parts. His apparent superiority was due to his
misfortunes. In his lonely and poverty-stricken life in Warsaw he had
read and taught himself a good deal; he had compared and meditated. But
the gift of original thought which makes a great man he did not possess,
and it can never be acquired. Paz, great in heart only, approached in
heart to the sublime; but in the sphere of sentiments, being more a man
of action than of thought, he kept his thoughts to himself; and they
only served therefore to eat his heart out. What, after all, is a
thought unexpressed?
After Clementine’s little speech, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and his
sister exchanged a singular glance, embracing their niece, Comte Adam,
and Paz. It was one of those rapid scenes which take place only in
France and Italy,--the two regions of the world (all courts excepted)
where eyes can say everything. To communicate to the eye the full power
of the soul, to give it the value of speech, needs either the pressure
of extreme servitude, or complete liberty. Adam, the Marquis du Rouvre,
and Clementine did not observe this luminous by-play of the old coquette
and the old diplomatist, but Paz, the faithful watchdog, understood
its meaning. It was, we must remark, an affair of two seconds; but to
describe the tempest it roused in the captain’s soul would take far too
much space in this brief history.
“What!” he said to himself, “do the aunt and uncle think I might be
loved? Then my happiness only depends on my own audacity! But Adam--”
Ideal love and desire clashed with gratitude and friendship, all equally
powerful, and, for a moment, love prevailed. The lover would have his
day. Paz became brilliant, he tried to please, he told the story of the
Polish insurrection in noble words, being questioned about it by the
diplomatist. By the end of dinner Paz saw Clementine hanging upon
his lips and regarding him as a hero, forgetting that Adam too, after
sacrificing a third of his vast fortune, had been an exile. At nine
o’clock, after coffee had been served, Madame de Serizy kissed her niece
on the forehead, pressed her hand, and went away, taking Adam with her
and leaving the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Marquis du Rouvre, who
soon followed. Paz and Clementine were alone together.
“I will leave you now, madame,” said Thaddeus. “You will of course
rejoin them at the Opera?”
“No,” she answered, “I don’t like dancing, and they give an odious
ballet to-night ‘La Revolte au Serail.’”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Two years ago Adam would not have gone to the Opera without me,” said
Clementine, not looking at Paz.
“He loves you madly,” replied Thaddeus.
“Yes, and because he loves me madly he is all the more likely not to
love me to-morrow,” said the countess.
“How inexplicable Parisian women are!” exclaimed Thaddeus. “When they
are loved to madness they want to be loved reasonably: and when they are
loved reasonably they reproach a man for not loving them at all.”
“And they are quite right. Thaddeus,” she went on, smiling, “I know
Adam well; I am not angry with him; he is volatile and above all grand
seigneur. He will always be content to have me as his wife and he will
never oppose any of my tastes, but--”
“Where is the marriage in which there are no ‘buts’?” said Thaddeus,
gently, trying to give another direction to Clementine’s mind.
The least presuming of men might well have had the thought which came
near rendering this poor lover beside himself; it was this: “If I do not
tell her now that I love her I am a fool,” he kept saying to himself.
Neither spoke; and there came between the pair one of those deep
silences that are crowded with thoughts. The countess examined Paz
covertly, and Paz observed her in a mirror. Buried in an armchair like
a man digesting his dinner, the image of a husband or an indifferent
old man, Paz crossed his hands upon his stomach and twirled his thumbs
mechanically, looking stupidly at them.
“Why don’t you tell me something good of Adam?” cried Clementine
suddenly. “Tell me that he is not volatile, you who know him so well.”
The cry was fine.
“Now is the time,” thought poor Paz, “to put an insurmountable barrier
between us. Tell you good of Adam?” he said aloud. “I love him; you
would not believe me; and I am incapable of telling you harm. My
position is very difficult between you.”
Clementine lowered her head and looked down at the tips of his varnished
boots.
“You Northern men have nothing but physical courage,” she said
complainingly; “you have no constancy in your opinions.”
“How will you amuse yourself alone, madame?” said Paz, assuming a
careless air.
“Are not you going to keep me company?”
“Excuse me for leaving you.”
“What do you mean? Where are you going?”
The thought of a heroic falsehood had come into his head.
“I--I am going to the Circus in the Champs Elysees; it opens to-night,
and I can’t miss it.”
“Why not?” said Clementine, questioning him by a look that was
half-anger.
“Must I tell you why?” he said, coloring; “must I confide to you what I
hide from Adam, who thinks my only love is Poland.”
“Ah! a secret in our noble captain?”
“A disgraceful one--which you will perhaps understand, and pity.”
“You, disgraced?”
“Yes, I, Comte Paz; I am madly in love with a girl who travels all over
France with the Bouthor family,--people who have the rival circus to
Franconi; but they play only at fairs. I have made the director at the
Cirque-Olympique engage her.”
“Is she handsome?”
“To my thinking,” said Paz, in a melancholy tone. “Malaga (that’s her
stage name) is strong, active, and supple. Why do I prefer her to all
other women in the world?--well, I can’t tell you. When I look at her,
with her black hair tied with a blue satin ribbon, floating on her bare
and olive-colored shoulders, and when she is dressed in a white tunic
with a gold edge, and a knitted silk bodice that makes her look like a
living Greek statue, and when I see her carrying those flags in her hand
to the sound of martial music, and jumping through the paper hoops which
tear as she goes through, and lighting so gracefully on the galloping
horse to such applause,--no hired clapping,--well, all that moves me.”
“More than a handsome woman in a ballroom?” asked Clementine, with
amazement and curiosity.
“Yes,” answered Paz, in a choking voice. “Such agility, such grace under
constant danger seems to me the height of triumph for a woman. Yes,
madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Ellsler, all
who reign or have reigned on the stage, can’t be compared, to my mind,
with Malaga, who can jump on or off a horse at full gallop, or stand
on the point of one foot and fall easily into the saddle, and knit
stockings, break eggs, and make an omelette with the horse at full
speed, to the admiration of the people,--the real people, peasants and
soldiers. Malaga, madame, is dexterity personified; her little wrist or
her little foot can rid her of three or four men. She is the goddess of
gymnastics.”
“She must be stupid--”
“Oh, no,” said Paz, “I find her as amusing as the heroine of ‘Peveril
of the Peak.’ Thoughtless as a Bohemian, she says everything that comes
into her head; she thinks no more about the future than you do of
the sous you fling to the poor. She says grand things sometimes. You
couldn’t make her believe that an old diplomatist was a handsome young
man, not if you offered her a million of francs. Such love as hers is
perpetual flattery to a man. Her health is positively insolent, and she
has thirty-two oriental pearls in lips of coral. Her muzzle--that’s what
she calls the lower part of her face--has, as Shakespeare expresses
it, the savor of a heifer’s nose. She can make a man unhappy. She likes
handsome men, strong men, Alexanders, gymnasts, clowns. Her trainer, a
horrible brute, used to beat her to make her supple, and graceful, and
intrepid--”
“You are positively intoxicated with Malaga.”
“Oh, she is called Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with a piqued
air. “She lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, in a pretty apartment on the
third story, all velvet and silk, like a princess. She has two lives,
her circus life and the life of a pretty woman.”
“Does she love you?”
“She loves me--now you will laugh--solely because I’m a Pole. She saw
an engraving of Poles rushing with Poniatowski into the Elster,--for all
France persists in thinking that the Elster, where it is impossible
to get drowned, is an impetuous flood, in which Poniatowski and his
followers were engulfed. But in the midst of all this I am very unhappy,
madame.”
A tear of rage fell from his eyes and affected the countess.
“You men have such a passion for singularity.”
“And you?” said Thaddeus.
“I know Adam so well that I am certain he could forget me for some
mountebank like your Malaga. Where did you first see her?”
“At Saint-Cloud, last September, on the fete-day. She was at a corner of
a booth covered with flags, where the shows are given. Her comrades,
all in Polish costumes, were making a horrible racket. I watched her
standing there, silent and dumb, and I thought I saw a melancholy
expression in her face; in truth there was enough about her to sadden a
girl of twenty. That touched me.”
The countess was sitting in a delicious attitude, pensive and rather
melancholy.
“Poor, poor Thaddeus!” she exclaimed. Then, with the kindliness of a
true great lady she added, not without a malicious smile, “Well go, go
to your Circus.”
Thaddeus took her hand, kissed it, leaving a hot tear upon it, and went
out.
Having invented this passion for a circus-rider, he bethought him
that he must give it some reality. The only truth in his tale was the
momentary attention he had given to Malaga at Saint-Cloud; and he had
since seen her name on the posters of the Circus, where the clown, for
a tip of five francs, had told him that the girl was a foundling, stolen
perhaps. Thaddeus now went to the Circus and saw her again. For ten
francs one of the grooms (who take the place in circuses of the dressers
at a theatre) informed him that Malaga was named Marguerite Turquet, and
lived on the fifth story of a house in the rue des Fosses-du-Temple.
The following day Paz went to the faubourg du Temple, found the house,
and asked to see Mademoiselle Turquet, who during the summer was
substituting for the leading horsewoman at the Cirque-Olympique, and a
supernumerary at a boulevard theatre in winter.
“Malaga!” cried the portress, rushing into the attic, “there’s a fine
gentleman wanting you. He is getting information from Chapuzot, who is
playing him off to give me time to tell you.”
“Thank you, M’ame Chapuzot; but what will he think of me if he finds me
ironing my gown?”
“Pooh! when a man’s in love he loves everything about us.”
“Is he an Englishman? they are fond of horses.”
“No, he looks to me Spanish.”
“That’s a pity; they say Spaniards are always poor. Stay here with me,
M’ame Chapuzot; I don’t want him to think I’m deserted.”
“Who is it you are looking for, monsieur?” asked Madame Chapuzot,
opening the door for Thaddeus, who had now come upstairs.
“Mademoiselle Turquet.”
“My dear,” said the portress, with an air of importance, “here is some
one to see you.”
A line on which the clothes were drying caught the captain’s hat and
knocked it off.
“What is it you wish, monsieur?” said Malaga, picking up the hat and
giving it to him.
“I saw you at the Circus,” said Thaddeus, “and you reminded me of a
daughter whom I have lost, mademoiselle; and out of affection for my
Heloise, whom you resemble in a most striking manner, I should like to
be of some service to you, if you will permit me.”
“Why, certainly; pray sit down, general,” said Madame Chapuzot; “nothing
could be more straightforward, more gallant.”
“But I am not gallant, my good lady,” exclaimed Paz. “I am an
unfortunate father who tries to deceive himself by a resemblance.”
“Then am I to pass for your daughter?” said Malaga, slyly, and not in
the least suspecting the perfect sincerity of his proposal.
“Yes,” said Paz, “and I’ll come and see you sometimes. But you shall be
lodged in better rooms, comfortably furnished.”
“I shall have furniture!” cried Malaga, looking at Madame Chapuzot.
“And servants,” said Paz, “and all you want.”
Malaga looked at the stranger suspiciously.
“What countryman is monsieur?”
“I am a Pole.”
“Oh! then I accept,” she said.
Paz departed, promising to return.
“Well, that’s a stiff one!” said Marguerite Turquet, looking at Madame
Chapuzot; “I’m half afraid he is wheedling me, to carry out some fancy
of his own--Pooh! I’ll risk it.”
A month after this eccentric interview the circus-rider was living in
a comfortable apartment furnished by Comte Adam’s own upholsterer, Paz
having judged it desirable to have his folly talked about at the hotel
Laginski. Malaga, to whom this adventure was like a leaf out of the
Arabian Nights, was served by Monsieur and Madame Chapuzot in the double
capacity of friends and servants. The Chapuzots and Marguerite were
constantly expecting some result of all this; but at the end of three
months none of them were able to make out the meaning of the Polish
count’s caprice. Paz arrived duly and passed about an hour there once
a week, during which time he sat in the salon, and never went
into Malaga’s boudoir nor into her bedroom, in spite of the clever
manoeuvring of the Chapuzots and Malaga to get him there. The count
would ask questions as to the small events of Marguerite’s life, and
each time that he came he left two gold pieces of forty francs each on
the mantel-piece.
“He looks as if he didn’t care to be here,” said Madame Chapuzot.
“Yes,” said Malaga, “the man’s as cold as an icicle.”
“But he’s a good fellow all the same,” cried Chapuzot, who was happy in
a new suit of clothes made of blue cloth, in which he looked like the
servant of some minister.
The sum which Paz deposited weekly on the mantel-piece, joined to
Malaga’s meagre salary, gave her the means of sumptuous living compared
with her former poverty. Wonderful stories went the rounds of the Circus
about Malaga’s good-luck. Her vanity increased the six thousand francs
which Paz had spent on her furniture to sixty thousand. According to
the clowns and the supers, Malaga was squandering money; and she now
appeared at the Circus wearing burnous and shawls and elegant scarfs.
The Pole, it was agreed on all sides, was the best sort of man a
circus-rider had ever encountered, not fault-finding nor jealous, and
willing to let Malaga do just what she liked.
“Some women have the luck of it,” said Malaga’s rival, “and I’m not one
of them,--though I do draw a third of the receipts.”
Malaga wore pretty things, and occasionally “showed her head” (a term in
the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young
men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was
very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who
presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was
a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to
discover the philosopher’s stone. Some even more envenomed scandals
drove her to a curiosity that was greater than Psyche’s. She reported
them in tears to Paz.
“When I want to injure a woman,” she said in conclusion, “I don’t
calumniate her; I don’t declare that some one magnetizes her to get
stones out of her, but I say plainly that she is humpbacked, and I prove
it. Why do you compromise me in this way?”
Paz maintained a cruel silence. Madame Chapuzot was not long in
discovering the name and title of Comte Paz; then she heard certain
positive facts at the hotel Laginski: for instance, that Paz was a
bachelor, and had never been known to have a daughter, alive or dead,
in Poland or in France. After that Malaga could not control a feeling of
terror.
“My dear child,” Madame Chapuzot would say, “that monster--” (a man who
contented himself with only looking, in a sly way,--not daring to come
out and say things,--and such a beautiful creature too, as Malaga,--of
course such a man was a monster, according to Madame Chapuzot’s ideas)
“--that monster is trying to get a hold upon you, and make you do
something illegal and criminal. Holy Father, if you should get into
the police-courts! it makes me tremble from head to foot; suppose they
should put you in the newspapers! I’ll tell you what I should do in your
place; I’d warn the police.”
One particular day, after many foolish notions had fermented for
some time in Malaga’s mind, Paz having laid his money as usual on the
mantel-piece, she seized the bits of gold and flung them in his face,
crying out, “I don’t want stolen money!”
The captain gave the gold to Chapuzot, went away without a word, and did
not return.
Clementine was at this time at her uncle’s place in Burgundy.
When the Circus troop discovered that Malaga had lost her Polish count,
much excitement was produced among them. Malaga’s display of honor was
considered folly by some, and shrewdness by others. The conduct of the
Pole, however, even when discussed by the cleverest of women, seemed
inexplicable. Thaddeus received in the course of the next week
thirty-seven letters from women of their kind. Happily for him, his
astonishing reserve did not excite the curiosity of the fashionable
world, and was only discussed in the demi-mondaine regions.
Two weeks later the handsome circus-rider, crippled by debt, wrote the
following letter to Comte Paz, which, having fallen into the hands
of Comte Adam, was read by several of the dandies of the day, who
pronounced it a masterpiece:--
“You, whom I still dare to call my friend, will you not pity me
after all that has passed,--which you have so ill understood? My
heart disavows whatever may have wounded your feelings. If I was
fortunate enough to charm you and keep you beside me in the past,
return to me; otherwise, I shall fall into despair. Poverty has
overtaken me, and you do not know what _horrid things_ it brings
with it. Yesterday I lived on a herring at two sous, and one sou
of bread. Is that a breakfast for the woman you loved? The
Chapuzots have left me, though they seemed so devoted. Your
desertion has caused me to see to the bottom of all human
attachments. The dog we feed does not leave us, but the Chapuzots
have gone. A sheriff has seized everything on behalf of the
landlord, who has no heart, and the jeweller, who refused to wait
even ten days,--for when we lose the confidence of such as you,
credit goes too. What a position for women who have nothing to
reproach themselves with but the happiness they have given! My
friend, I have taken all I have of any value to _my uncle’s_; I have
nothing but the memory of you left, and here is the winter coming
on. I shall be fireless when it turns cold; for the boulevards are
to play only melodramas, in which I have nothing but little bits
of parts which don’t _pose_ a woman. How could you misunderstand the
nobleness of my feelings for you?--for there are two ways of
expressing gratitude. You who seemed so happy in seeing me
well-off, how can you leave me in poverty? Oh, my sole friend on
earth, before I go back to the country fairs with Bouthor’s circus,
where I can at least make a living, forgive me if I wish to know
whether I have lost you forever. If I were to let myself think of
you when I jump through the hoops, I should be sure to break my legs
by losing _a time_. Whatever may be the result, I am yours for life.
“Marguerite Turquet.”
“That letter,” thought Thaddeus, shouting with laughter, “is worth the
ten thousand francs I have spent upon her.”