Those who travel in public conveyances know that the persons thus united
by chance do not immediately have anything to say to one another; unless
under special circumstances, conversation rarely begins until they have
gone some distance. This period of silence is employed as much in mutual
examination as in settling into their places. Minds need to get their
equilibrium as much as bodies. When each person thinks he has discovered
the age, profession, and character of his companions, the most talkative
member of the company begins, and the conversation gets under way with
all the more vivacity because those present feel a need of enlivening
the journey and forgetting its tedium.
That is how things happen in French stage-coaches. In other countries
customs are very different. Englishmen pique themselves on never opening
their lips; Germans are melancholy in a vehicle; Italians too wary to
talk; Spaniards have no public conveyances; and Russians no roads.
There is no amusement except in the lumbering diligences of France, that
gabbling and indiscreet country, where every one is in a hurry to laugh
and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even
the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the
solid bourgeois. In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and
legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion. When
a young man of twenty-two, like the one named Georges, is clever and
lively, he is much tempted, especially under circumstances like the
present, to abuse those qualities.
In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior
human being of the party there assembled. He saw in the count a
manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown reason,
to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by Mistigris,
a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere Leger, the fat
farmer, an excellent subject to hoax. Having thus looked over the
ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of such companions.
“Let me see,” he thought to himself, as the coucou went down the hill
from La Chapelle to the plain of Saint-Denis, “shall I pass myself
off for Etienne or Beranger? No, these idiots don’t know who they are.
Carbonaro? the deuce! I might get myself arrested. Suppose I say I’m the
son of Marshal Ney? Pooh! what could I tell them?--about the execution
of my father? It wouldn’t be funny. Better be a disguised Russian prince
and make them swallow a lot of stuff about the Emperor Alexander. Or I
might be Cousin, and talk philosophy; oh, couldn’t I perplex ‘em! But
no, that shabby fellow with the tousled head looks to me as if he
had jogged his way through the Sorbonne. What a pity! I can mimic
an Englishman so perfectly I might have pretended to be Lord Byron,
travelling incognito. Sapristi! I’ll command the troops of Ali, pacha of
Janina!”
During this mental monologue, the coucou rolled through clouds of dust
rising on either side of it from that much travelled road.
“What dust!” cried Mistigris.
“Henry IV. is dead!” retorted his master. “If you’d say it was scented
with vanilla that would be emitting a new opinion.”
“You think you’re witty,” replied Mistigris. “Well, it _is_ like vanilla
at times.”
“In the Levant--” said Georges, with the air of beginning a story.
“‘Ex Oriente flux,’” remarked Mistigris’s master, interrupting the
speaker.
“I said in the Levant, from which I have just returned,” continued
Georges, “the dust smells very good; but here it smells of nothing,
except in some old dust-barrel like this.”
“Has monsieur lately returned from the Levant?” said Mistigris,
maliciously. “He isn’t much tanned by the sun.”
“Oh! I’ve just left my bed after an illness of three months, from the
germ, so the doctors said, of suppressed plague.”
“Have you had the plague?” cried the count, with a gesture of alarm.
“Pierrotin, stop!”
“Go on, Pierrotin,” said Mistigris. “Didn’t you hear him say it was
inward, his plague?” added the rapin, talking back to Monsieur de
Serizy. “It isn’t catching; it only comes out in conversation.”
“Mistigris! if you interfere again I’ll have you put off into the road,”
said his master. “And so,” he added, turning to Georges, “monsieur has
been to the East?”
“Yes, monsieur; first to Egypt, then to Greece, where I served under
Ali, pacha of Janina, with whom I had a terrible quarrel. There’s no
enduring those climates long; besides, the emotions of all kinds in
Oriental life have disorganized my liver.”
“What, have you served as a soldier?” asked the fat farmer. “How old are
you?”
“Twenty-nine,” replied Georges, whereupon all the passengers looked at
him. “At eighteen I enlisted as a private for the famous campaign of
1813; but I was present at only one battle, that of Hanau, where I was
promoted sergeant-major. In France, at Montereau, I won the rank of
sub-lieutenant, and was decorated by,--there are no informers here, I’m
sure,--by the Emperor.”
“What! are you decorated?” cried Oscar. “Why don’t you wear your cross?”
“The cross of ‘ceux-ci’? No, thank you! Besides, what man of any
breeding would wear his decorations in travelling? There’s monsieur,” he
said, motioning to the Comte de Serizy. “I’ll bet whatever you like--”
“Betting whatever you like means, in France, betting nothing at all,”
said Mistigris’s master.
“I’ll bet whatever you like,” repeated Georges, incisively, “that
monsieur here is covered with stars.”
“Well,” said the count, laughing, “I have the grand cross of the Legion
of honor, that of Saint Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian Eagle,
that of the Annunciation of Sardinia, and the Golden Fleece.”
“Beg pardon,” said Mistigris, “are they all in the coucou?”
“Hey! that brick-colored old fellow goes it strong!” whispered Georges
to Oscar. “What was I saying?--oh! I know. I don’t deny that I adore the
Emperor--”
“I served under him,” said the count.
“What a man he was, wasn’t he?” cried Georges.
“A man to whom I owe many obligations,” replied the count, with a silly
expression that was admirably assumed.
“For all those crosses?” inquired Mistigris.
“And what quantities of snuff he took!” continued Monsieur de Serizy.
“He carried it loose in his pockets,” said Georges.
“So I’ve been told,” remarked Pere Leger with an incredulous look.
“Worse than that; he chewed and smoked,” continued Georges. “I saw him
smoking, in a queer way, too, at Waterloo, when Marshal Soult took him
round the waist and flung him into his carriage, just as he had seized a
musket and was going to charge the English--”
“You were at Waterloo!” cried Oscar, his eyes stretching wide open.
“Yes, young man, I did the campaign of 1815. I was a captain at
Mont-Saint-Jean, and I retired to the Loire, after we were all
disbanded. Faith! I was disgusted with France; I couldn’t stand it. In
fact, I should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with
two or three dashing fellows,--Selves, Besson, and others, who are now
in Egypt,--and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of
fellow he was, too! Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now
on the high-road to be a sovereign prince. You’ve all seen him in
that picture by Horace Vernet,--‘The Massacre of the Mameluks.’ What
a handsome fellow he was! But I wouldn’t give up the religion of my
fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration
required a surgical operation which I hadn’t any fancy for. Besides,
nobody respects a renegade. Now if they had offered me a hundred
thousand francs a year, perhaps--and yet, no! The pacha did give me a
thousand talari as a present.”
“How much is that?” asked Oscar, who was listening to Georges with all
his ears.
“Oh! not much. A talaro is, as you might say, a five-franc piece.
But faith! I got no compensation for the vices I contracted in that
God-forsaken country, if country it is. I can’t live now without smoking
a narghile twice a-day, and that’s very costly.”
“How did you find Egypt?” asked the count.
“Egypt? Oh! Egypt is all sand,” replied Georges, by no means taken
aback. “There’s nothing green but the valley of the Nile. Draw a
green line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt. But those
Egyptians--fellahs they are called--have an immense advantage over us.
There are no gendarmes in that country. You may go from end to end of
Egypt, and you won’t see one.”
“But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians,” said Mistigris.
“Not as many as you think for,” replied Georges. “There are many more
Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all
that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to
embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands
with gunpowder and munitions for Ali de Tebelen. You know, don’t
you, that the British sell powder and munitions of war to all the
world,--Turks, Greeks, and the devil, too, if the devil has money? From
Zante we were to skirt the coasts of Greece and tack about, on and off.
Now it happens that my name of Georges is famous in that country. I am,
such as you see me, the grandson of the famous Czerni-Georges who made
war upon the Porte, and, instead of crushing it, as he meant to do, got
crushed himself. His son took refuge in the house of the French consul
at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother pregnant
with me, his seventh child. Our property was all stolen by friends of
my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined. My mother, who lived on her
diamonds, which she sold one by one, married, in 1799, my step-father,
Monsieur Yung, a purveyor. But my mother is dead, and I have quarrelled
with my step-father, who, between ourselves, is a blackguard; he is
still alive, but I never see him. That’s why, in despair, left all to
myself, I went off to the wars as a private in 1813. Well, to go back
to the time I returned to Greece; you wouldn’t believe with what joy old
Ali Tebelen received the grandson of Czerni-Georges. Here, of course, I
call myself simply Georges. The pacha gave me a harem--”
“You have had a harem?” said Oscar.
“Were you a pacha with _many_ tails?” asked Mistigris.
“How is it that you don’t know,” replied Georges, “that only the Sultan
makes pachas, and that my friend Tebelen (for we were as friendly as
Bourbons) was in rebellion against the Padishah! You know, or you don’t
know, that the true title of the Grand Seignior is Padishah, and not
Sultan or Grand Turk. You needn’t think that a harem is much of a thing;
you might as well have a herd of goats. The women are horribly
stupid down there; I much prefer the grisettes of the Chaumieres at
Mont-Parnasse.”
“They are nearer, at any rate,” said the count.
“The women of the harem couldn’t speak a word of French, and that
language is indispensable for talking. Ali gave me five legitimate wives
and ten slaves; that’s equivalent to having none at all at Janina. In
the East, you must know, it is thought very bad style to have wives and
women. They have them, just as we have Voltaire and Rousseau; but who
ever opens his Voltaire or his Rousseau? Nobody. But, for all that, the
highest style is to be jealous. They sew a woman up in a sack and fling
her into the water on the slightest suspicion,--that’s according to
their Code.”
“Did you fling any in?” asked the farmer.
“I, a Frenchman! for shame! I loved them.”
Whereupon Georges twirled and twisted his moustache with a dreamy air.
They were now entering Saint-Denis, and Pierrotin presently drew up
before the door of a tavern where were sold the famous cheese-cakes of
that place. All the travellers got out. Puzzled by the apparent truth
mingled with Georges’ inventions, the count returned to the coucou when
the others had entered the house, and looked beneath the cushion for
the portfolio which Pierrotin told him that enigmatical youth had
placed there. On it he read the words in gilt letters: “Maitre Crottat,
notary.” The count at once opened it, and fearing, with some reason,
that Pere Leger might be seized with the same curiosity, he took out the
deed of sale for the farm at Moulineaux, put it into his coat pocket,
and entered the inn to keep an eye on the travellers.
“This Georges is neither more nor less than Crottat’s second clerk,”
thought he. “I shall pay my compliments to his master, whose business it
was to send me his head-clerk.”
From the respectful glances of Pere Leger and Oscar, Georges perceived
that he had made for himself two fervent admirers. Accordingly, he now
posed as a great personage; paid for their cheese-cakes, and ordered
for each a glass of Alicante. He offered the same to Mistigris and his
master, who refused with smiles; but the friend of Ali Tebelen profited
by the occasion to ask the pair their names.
“Oh! monsieur,” said Mistigris’ master, “I am not blessed, like you,
with an illustrious name; and I have not returned from Asia--”
At this moment the count, hastening into the huge inn-kitchen lest his
absence should excite inquiry, entered the place in time to hear the
conclusion of the young man’s speech.
“--I am only a poor painter lately returned from Rome, where I went at
the cost of the government, after winning the ‘grand prix’ five years
ago. My name is Schinner.”
“Hey! bourgeois, may I offer you a glass of Alicante and some
cheese-cakes?” said Georges to the count.
“Thank you,” replied the latter. “I never leave home without taking my
cup of coffee and cream.”
“Don’t you eat anything between meals? How bourgeois, Marais, Place
Royale, that is!” cried Georges. “When he ‘blagued’ just now about his
crosses, I thought there was something in him,” whispered the Eastern
hero to the painter. “However, we’ll set him going on his decorations,
the old tallow-chandler! Come, my lad,” he added, calling to Oscar,
“drink me down the glass poured out for the chandler; that will start
your moustache.”
Oscar, anxious to play the man, swallowed the second glass of wine, and
ate three more cheese-cakes.
“Good wine, that!” said Pere Leger, smacking his lips.
“It is all the better,” said Georges, “because it comes from Bercy. I’ve
been to Alicante myself, and I know that this wine no more resembles
what is made there than my arm is like a windmill. Our made-up wines are
a great deal better than the natural ones in their own country. Come,
Pierrotin, take a glass! It is a great pity your horses can’t take one,
too; we might go faster.”
“Forward, march!” cried Pierrotin, amid a mighty cracking of whips,
after the travellers were again boxed up.
It was now eleven o’clock. The weather, which had been cloudy, cleared;
the breeze swept off the mists, and the blue of the sky appeared in
spots; so that when the coucou trundled along the narrow strip of road
from Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte, the sun had fairly drunk up the last
floating vapors of the diaphanous veil which swathed the scenery of that
famous region.
“Well, now, tell us why you left your friend the pacha,” said Pere
Leger, addressing Georges.
“He was a very singular scamp,” replied Georges, with an air that hid a
multitude of mysteries. “He put me in command of his cavalry,--so far,
so good--”
“Ah! that’s why he wears spurs,” thought poor Oscar.
“At that time Ali Tebelen wanted to rid himself of Chosrew pacha,
another queer chap! You call him, here, Chaureff; but the name is
pronounced, in Turkish, Cosserew. You must have read in the newspapers
how old Ali drubbed Chosrew, and soundly, too, faith! Well, if it
hadn’t been for me, Ali Tebelen himself would have bit the dust two days
earlier. I was at the right wing, and I saw Chosrew, an old sly-boots,
thinking to force our centre,--ranks closed, stiff, swift, fine movement
a la Murat. Good! I take my time; then I charge, double-quick, and cut
his line in two,--you understand? Ha! ha! after the affair was over, Ali
kissed me--”
“Do they do that in the East?” asked the count, in a joking way.
“Yes, monsieur,” said the painter, “that’s done all the world over.”
“After that,” continued Georges, “Ali gave me yataghans, and carbines,
and scimetars, and what-not. But when we got back to his capital he
made me propositions, wanted me to drown a wife, and make a slave of
myself,--Orientals are so queer! But I thought I’d had enough of it;
for, after all, you know, Ali was a rebel against the Porte. So I
concluded I had better get off while I could. But I’ll do Monsieur
Tebelen the justice to say that he loaded me with presents,--diamonds,
ten thousand talari, one thousand gold coins, a beautiful Greek girl for
groom, a little Circassian for a mistress, and an Arab horse! Yes, Ali
Tebelen, pacha of Janina, is too little known; he needs an historian.
It is only in the East one meets with such iron souls, who can nurse a
vengeance twenty years and accomplish it some fine morning. He had
the most magnificent white beard that was ever seen, and a hard, stern
face--”
“But what did you do with your treasures?” asked farmer Leger.
“Ha! that’s it! you may well ask that! Those fellows down there haven’t
any Grand Livre nor any Bank of France. So I was forced to carry off my
windfalls in a felucca, which was captured by the Turkish High-Admiral
himself. Such as you see me here to-day, I came very near being impaled
at Smyrna. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Monsieur de Riviere, our
ambassador, who was there, they’d have taken me for an accomplice of Ali
pacha. I saved my head, but, to tell the honest truth, all the rest,
the ten thousand talari, the thousand gold pieces, and the fine weapons,
were all, yes all, drunk up by the thirsty treasury of the Turkish
admiral. My position was the more perilous because that very admiral
happened to be Chosrew pacha. After I routed him, the fellow had managed
to obtain a position which is equal to that of our Admiral of the
Fleet--”
“But I thought he was in the cavalry?” said Pere Leger, who had followed
the narrative with the deepest attention.
“Dear me! how little the East is understood in the French provinces!”
cried Georges. “Monsieur, I’ll explain the Turks to you. You are a
farmer; the Padishah (that’s the Sultan) makes you a marshal; if you
don’t fulfil your functions to his satisfaction, so much the worse
for you, he cuts your head off; that’s his way of dismissing his
functionaries. A gardener is made a prefect; and the prime minister
comes down to be a foot-boy. The Ottomans have no system of promotion
and no hierarchy. From a cavalry officer Chosrew simply became a naval
officer. Sultan Mahmoud ordered him to capture Ali by sea; and he did
get hold of him, assisted by those beggarly English--who put their
paw on most of the treasure. This Chosrew, who had not forgotten the
riding-lesson I gave him, recognized me. You understand, my goose
was cooked, oh, brown! when it suddenly came into my head to claim
protection as a Frenchman and a troubadour from Monsieur de Riviere. The
ambassador, enchanted to find something to show him off, demanded that I
should be set at liberty. The Turks have one good trait in their nature;
they are as willing to let you go as they are to cut your head off;
they are indifferent to everything. The French consul, charming fellow,
friend of Chosrew, made him give back two thousand of the talari, and,
consequently, his name is, as I may say, graven on my heart--”
“What was his name?” asked Monsieur de Serizy; and a look of some
surprise passed over his face as Georges named, correctly, one of our
most distinguished consul-generals who happened at that time to be
stationed at Smyrna.
“I assisted,” added Georges, “at the execution of the Governor of
Smyrna, whom the Sultan had ordered Chosrew to put to death. It was one
of the most curious things I ever saw, though I’ve seen many,--I’ll tell
you about it when we stop for breakfast. From Smyrna I crossed to Spain,
hearing there was a revolution there. I went straight to Mina, who
appointed me as his aide-de-camp with the rank of colonel. I fought for
the constitutional cause, which will certainly be defeated when we enter
Spain--as we undoubtedly shall, some of these days--”
“You, a French soldier!” said the count, sternly. “You show
extraordinary confidence in the discretion of those who are listening to
you.”
“But there are no spies here,” said Georges.
“Are you aware, Colonel Georges,” continued the count, “that the Court
of Peers is at this very time inquiring into a conspiracy which has made
the government extremely severe in its treatment of French soldiers
who bear arms against France, and who deal in foreign intrigues for the
purpose of overthrowing our legitimate sovereigns.”
On hearing this stern admonition the painter turned red to his ears and
looked at Mistigris, who seemed dumfounded.
“Well,” said Pere Leger, “what next?”
“If,” continued the count, “I were a magistrate, it would be my duty to
order the gendarmes at Pierrefitte to arrest the aide-de-camp of Mina,
and to summon all present in this vehicle to testify to his words.”
This speech stopped Georges’ narrative all the more surely, because
at this moment the coucou reached the guard-house of a brigade of
gendarmerie,--the white flag floating, as the orthodox saying is, upon
the breeze.
“You have too many decorations to do such a dastardly thing,” said
Oscar.
“Never mind; we’ll catch up with him soon,” whispered Georges in the
lad’s ear.
“Colonel,” cried Leger, who was a good deal disturbed by the count’s
outburst, and wanted to change the conversation, “in all these countries
where you have been, what sort of farming do they do? How do they vary
the crops?”
“Well, in the first place, my good fellow, you must understand, they are
too busy cropping off each others’ heads to think much of cropping the
ground.”
The count couldn’t help smiling; and that smile reassured the narrator.
“They have a way of cultivating which you will think very queer. They
don’t cultivate at all; that’s their style of farming. The Turks and
the Greeks, they eat onions or rise. They get opium from poppies, and
it gives them a fine revenue. Then they have tobacco, which grows of
itself, famous latakiah! and dates! and all kinds of sweet things that
don’t need cultivation. It is a country full of resources and commerce.
They make fine rugs at Smyrna, and not dear.”
“But,” persisted Leger, “if the rugs are made of wool they must come
from sheep; and to have sheep you must have fields, farms, culture--”
“Well, there may be something of that sort,” replied Georges. “But their
chief crop, rice, grows in the water. As for me, I have only been along
the coasts and seen the parts that are devastated by war. Besides, I
have the deepest aversion to statistics.”
“How about the taxes?” asked the farmer.
“Oh! the taxes are heavy; they take all a man has, and leave him the
rest. The pacha of Egypt was so struck with the advantages of that
system, that, when I came away he was on the point of organizing his own
administration on that footing--”
“But,” said Leger, who no longer understood a single word, “how?”
“How?” said Georges. “Why, agents go round and take all the harvests,
and leave the fellahs just enough to live on. That’s a system that does
away with stamped papers and bureaucracy, the curse of France, hein?”
“By virtue of what right?” said Leger.
“Right? why it is a land of despotism. They haven’t any rights. Don’t
you know the fine definition Montesquieu gives of despotism. ‘Like the
savage, it cuts down the tree to gather the fruits.’ They don’t tax,
they take everything.”
“And that’s what our rulers are trying to bring us to. ‘Tax
vobiscum,’--no, thank you!” said Mistigris.
“But that is what we _are_ coming to,” said the count. “Therefore, those
who own land will do well to sell it. Monsieur Schinner must have seen
how things are tending in Italy, where the taxes are enormous.”
“Corpo di Bacco! the Pope is laying it on heavily,” replied Schinner.
“But the people are used to it. Besides, Italians are so good-natured
that if you let ‘em murder a few travellers along the highways they’re
contented.”
“I see, Monsieur Schinner,” said the count, “that you are not wearing
the decoration you obtained in 1819; it seems the fashion nowadays not
to wear orders.”
Mistigris and the pretended Schinner blushed to their ears.
“Well, with me,” said the artist, “the case is different. It isn’t on
account of fashion; but I don’t want to be recognized. Have the goodness
not to betray me, monsieur; I am supposed to be a little painter of
no consequence,--a mere decorator. I’m on may way to a chateau where I
mustn’t rouse the slightest suspicion.”
“Ah! I see,” said the count, “some intrigue,--a love affair! Youth is
happy!”
Oscar, who was writhing in his skin at being a nobody and having nothing
to say, gazed at Colonel Czerni-Georges and at the famous painter
Schinner, and wondered how he could transform himself into somebody. But
a youth of nineteen, kept at home all his life, and going for two weeks
only into the country, what could he be, or do, or say? However, the
Alicante had got into his head, and his vanity was boiling in his veins;
so when the famous Schinner allowed a romantic adventure to be guessed
at in which the danger seemed as great as the pleasure, he fastened his
eyes, sparkling with wrath and envy, upon that hero.
“Yes,” said the count, with a credulous air, “a man must love a woman
well to make such sacrifices.”
“What sacrifices?” demanded Mistigris.
“Don’t you know, my little friend, that a ceiling painted by so great a
master as yours is worth its weight in gold?” replied the count. “If the
civil list paid you, as it did, thirty thousand francs for each of
those rooms in the Louvre,” he continued, addressing Schinner, “a
bourgeois,--as you call us in the studios--ought certainly to pay
you twenty thousand. Whereas, if you go to this chateau as a humble
decorator, you will not get two thousand.”
“The money is not the greatest loss,” said Mistigris. “The work is
sure to be a masterpiece, but he can’t sign it, you know, for fear of
compromising _her_.”
“Ah! I’d return all my crosses to the sovereigns who gave them to me for
the devotion that youth can win,” said the count.
“That’s just it!” said Mistigris, “when one’s young, one’s loved; plenty
of love, plenty of women; but they do say: ‘Where there’s wife, there’s
mope.’”
“What does Madame Schinner say to all this?” pursued the count; “for I
believe you married, out of love, the beautiful Adelaide de Rouville,
the protegee of old Admiral de Kergarouet; who, by the bye, obtained for
you the order for the Louvre ceilings through his nephew, the Comte de
Fontaine.”
“A great painter is never married when he travels,” said Mistigris.
“So that’s the morality of studios, is it?” cried the count, with an air
of great simplicity.
“Is the morality of courts where you got those decorations of yours any
better?” said Schinner, recovering his self-possession, upset for the
moment by finding out how much the count knew of Schinner’s life as an
artist.
“I never asked for any of my orders,” said the count. “I believe I have
loyally earned them.”
“‘A fair yield and no flavor,’” said Mistigris.
The count was resolved not to betray himself; he assumed an air of
good-humored interest in the country, and looked up the valley of
Groslay as the coucou took the road to Saint-Brice, leaving that to
Chantilly on the right.
“Is Rome as fine as they say it is?” said Georges, addressing the great
painter.
“Rome is fine only to those who love it; a man must have a passion for
it to enjoy it. As a city, I prefer Venice,--though I just missed being
murdered there.”
“Faith, yes!” cried Mistigris; “if it hadn’t been for me you’d have been
gobbled up. It was that mischief-making tom-fool, Lord Byron, who
got you into the scrape. Oh! wasn’t he raging, that buffoon of an
Englishman?”
“Hush!” said Schinner. “I don’t want my affair with Lord Byron talked
about.”
“But you must own, all the same, that you were glad enough I knew how to
box,” said Mistigris.
From time to time, Pierrotin exchanged sly glances with the count,
which might have made less inexperienced persons than the five other
travellers uneasy.
“Lords, pachas, and thirty-thousand-franc ceilings!” he cried. “I seem
to be driving sovereigns. What pourboires I’ll get!”
“And all the places paid for!” said Mistigris, slyly.
“It is a lucky day for me,” continued Pierrotin; “for you know, Pere
Leger, about my beautiful new coach on which I have paid an advance of
two thousand francs? Well, those dogs of carriage-builders, to whom I
have to pay two thousand five hundred francs more, won’t take fifteen
hundred down, and my note for a thousand for two months! Those vultures
want it all. Who ever heard of being so stiff with a man in business
these eight years, and the father of a family?--making me run the risk
of losing everything, carriage and money too, if I can’t find before
to-morrow night that miserable last thousand! Hue, Bichette! They won’t
play that trick on the great coach offices, I’ll warrant you.”
“Yes, that’s it,” said the rapin; “‘your money or your strife.’”
“Well, you have only eight hundred now to get,” remarked the count,
who considered this moan, addressed to Pere Leger, a sort of letter of
credit drawn upon himself.
“True,” said Pierrotin. “Xi! xi! Rougeot!”
“You must have seen many fine ceilings in Venice,” resumed the count,
addressing Schinner.
“I was too much in love to take any notice of what seemed to me then
mere trifles,” replied Schinner. “But I was soon cured of that folly,
for it was in the Venetian states--in Dalmatia--that I received a cruel
lesson.”
“Can it be told?” asked Georges. “I know Dalmatia very well.”
“Well, if you have been there, you know that all the people at that end
of the Adriatic are pirates, rovers, corsairs retired from business, as
they haven’t been hanged--”
“Uscoques,” said Georges.
Hearing the right name given, the count, who had been sent by Napoleon
on one occasion to the Illyrian provinces, turned his head and looked at
Georges, so surprised was he.
“The affair happened in that town where they make maraschino,” continued
Schinner, seeming to search for a name.
“Zara,” said Georges. “I’ve been there; it is on the coast.”
“You are right,” said the painter. “I had gone there to look at the
country, for I adore scenery. I’ve longed a score of times to paint
landscape, which no one, as I think, understands but Mistigris, who
will some day reproduce Hobbema, Ruysdael, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and
others.”
“But,” exclaimed the count, “if he reproduces one of them won’t that be
enough?”
“If you persist in interrupting, monsieur,” said Oscar, “we shall never
get on.”
“And Monsieur Schinner was not addressing himself to you in particular,”
added Georges.
“‘Tisn’t polite to interrupt,” said Mistigris, sententiously, “but we
all do it, and conversation would lose a great deal if we didn’t scatter
little condiments while exchanging our reflections. Therefore, continue,
agreeable old gentleman, to lecture us, if you like. It is done in the
best society, and you know the proverb: ‘we must ‘owl with the wolves.’”
“I had heard marvellous things of Dalmatia,” resumed Schinner, “so I
went there, leaving Mistigris in Venice at an inn--”
“‘Locanda,’” interposed Mistigris; “keep to the local color.”
“Zara is what is called a country town--”
“Yes,” said Georges; “but it is fortified.”
“Parbleu!” said Schinner; “the fortifications count for much in my
adventure. At Zara there are a great many apothecaries. I lodged with
one. In foreign countries everybody makes a principal business of
letting lodgings; all other trades are accessory. In the evening, linen
changed, I sat in my balcony. In the opposite balcony I saw a woman; oh!
such a woman! Greek,--_that tells all_! The most beautiful creature in
the town; almond eyes, lids that dropped like curtains, lashes like a
paint-brush, a face with an oval to drive Raffaelle mad, a skin of the
most delicious coloring, tints well-blended, velvety! and hands, oh!--”
“They weren’t made of butter like those of the David school,” put in
Mistigris.
“You are always lugging in your painting,” cried Georges.
“La, la!” retorted Mistigris; “‘an ounce o’ paint is worth a pound of
swagger.’”
“And such a costume! pure Greek!” continued Schinner. “Conflagration of
soul! you understand? Well, I questioned my Diafoirus; and he told me
that my neighbor was named Zena. Changed my linen. The husband, an old
villain, in order to marry Zena, paid three hundred thousand francs to
her father and mother, so celebrated was the beauty of that beautiful
creature, who was truly the most beautiful girl in all Dalmatia,
Illyria, Adriatica, and other places. In those parts they buy their
wives without seeing them--”
“I shall not go _there_,” said Pere Leger.
“There are nights when my sleep is still illuminated by the eyes of
Zena,” continued Schinner. “The husband was sixty-nine years of age,
and jealous! not as a tiger, for they say of a tiger, ‘jealous as a
Dalmatian’; and my man was worse than A Dalmatian, one Dalmatian,--he
was three and a half Dalmatians at the very least; he was an Uscoque,
tricoque, archicoque in a bicoque of a paltry little place like Zara--”
“Horrid fellow, and ‘horrider bellow,’” put in Mistigris.
“Ha! good,” said Georges, laughing.
“After being a corsair, and probably a pirate, he thought no more
of spitting a Christian on his dagger than I did of spitting on the
ground,” continued Schinner. “So that was how the land lay. The old
wretch had millions, and was hideous with the loss of an ear some pacha
had cut off, and the want of an eye left I don’t know where. ‘Never,’
said the little Diafoirus, ‘never does he leave his wife, never for
a second.’ ‘Perhaps she’ll want your services, and I could go in your
clothes; that’s a trick that has great success in our theatres,’ I told
him. Well, it would take too long to tell you all the delicious moments
of that lifetime--to wit, three days--which I passed exchanging looks
with Zena, and changing linen every day. It was all the more violently
titillating because the slightest motion was significant and dangerous.
At last it must have dawned upon Zena’s mind that none but a Frenchman
and an artist was daring enough to make eyes at her in the midst of the
perils by which she was surrounded; and as she hated her hideous pirate,
she answered my glances with delightful ogles fit to raise a man to
the summit of Paradise without pulleys. I attained to the height of Don
Quixote; I rose to exaltation! and I cried: ‘The monster may kill me,
but I’ll go, I’ll go!’ I gave up landscape and studied the ignoble
dwelling of the Uscoque. That night, changed linen, and put on the most
perfumed shirt I had; then I crossed the street, and entered--”
“The house?” cried Oscar.
“The house?” echoed Georges.
“The house,” said Schinner.
“Well, you’re a bold dog,” cried farmer Leger. “I should have kept out
of it myself.”
“Especially as you could never have got through the doorway,” replied
Schinner. “So in I went,” he resumed, “and I found two hands stretched
out to meet mine. I said nothing, for those hands, soft as the peel of
an onion, enjoined me to silence. A whisper breathed into my ear, ‘He
sleeps!’ Then, as we were sure that nobody would see us, we went to
walk, Zena and I, upon the ramparts, but accompanied, if you please, by
a duenna, as hideous as an old portress, who didn’t leave us any more
than our shadow; and I couldn’t persuade Madame Pirate to send her away.
The next night we did the same thing, and again I wanted to get rid of
the old woman, but Zena resisted. As my sweet love spoke only Greek, and
I Venetian, we couldn’t understand each other, and so we quarrelled.
I said to myself, in changing linen, ‘As sure as fate, the next time
there’ll be no old woman, and we can make it all up with the language of
love.’ Instead of which, fate willed that that old woman should save
my life! You’ll hear how. The weather was fine, and, not to create
suspicion, I took a turn at landscape,--this was after our quarrel was
made up, you understand. After walking along the ramparts for some time,
I was coming tranquilly home with my hands in my pockets, when I saw the
street crowded with people. Such a crowd! like that for an execution. It
fell upon me; I was seized, garroted, gagged, and guarded by the police.
Ah! you don’t know--and I hope you never may know--what it is to be
taken for a murderer by a maddened populace which stones you and howls
after you from end to end of the principal street of a town, shouting
for your death! Ah! those eyes were so many flames, all mouths were
a single curse, while from the volume of that burning hatred rose the
fearful cry: ‘To death! to death! down with the murderer!’”
“So those Dalmatians spoke our language, did they?” said the count. “I
observe you relate the scene as if it happened yesterday.”
Schinner was nonplussed.
“Riot has but one language,” said the astute statesman Mistigris.
“Well,” continued Schinner, “when I was brought into court in presence
of the magistrates, I learned that the cursed corsair was dead, poisoned
by Zena. I’d liked to have changed linen then. Give you my word, I knew
nothing of _that_ melodrama. It seems the Greek girl put opium (a great
many poppies, as monsieur told us, grow about there) in the pirate’s
grog, just to make him sleep soundly and leave her free for a little
walk with me, and the old duenna, unfortunate creature, made a mistake
and trebled the dose. The immense fortune of that cursed pirate was
really the cause of all my Zena’s troubles. But she explained matters
so ingenuously that I, for one, was released with an injunction from the
mayor and the Austrian commissary of police to go back to Rome. Zena,
who let the heirs of the Uscoque and the judges get most of the old
villain’s wealth, was let off with two years’ seclusion in a convent,
where she still is. I am going back there some day to paint her
portrait; for in a few years, you know, all this will be forgotten. Such
are the follies one commits at eighteen!”
“And you left me without a sou in the locanda at Venice,” said
Mistigris. “And I had to get from Venice to Rome by painting portraits
for five francs apiece, which they didn’t pay me. However, that was my
halcyon time. I don’t regret it.”
“You can imagine the reflections that came to me in that Dalmatian
prison, thrown there without protection, having to answer to Austrians
and Dalmatians, and in danger of losing my head because I went twice to
walk with a woman. There’s ill-luck, with a vengeance!”
“Did all that really happen to you?” said Oscar, naively.
“Why shouldn’t it happen to him, inasmuch as it had already happened
during the French occupation of Illyria to one of our most gallant
officers of artillery?” said the count, slyly.
“And you believed that artillery officer?” said Mistigris, as slyly to
the count.
“Is that all?” asked Oscar.
“Of course he can’t tell you that they cut his head off,--how could he?”
said Mistigris. “‘Dead schinners tell no tales.’”
“Monsieur, are there farms in that country?” asked Pere Leger. “What do
they cultivate?”
“Maraschino,” replied Mistigris,--“a plant that grows to the height of
the lips, and produces a liqueur which goes by that name.”
“Ah!” said Pere Leger.
“I only stayed three days in the town and fifteen in prison,” said
Schinner, “so I saw nothing; not even the fields where they grow the
maraschino.”
“They are fooling you,” said Georges to the farmer. “Maraschino comes in
cases.”
“‘Romances alter cases,’” remarked Mistigris.