Married he was and had been so for twelve years, but he had mentioned
the fact to no one among his Parisian acquaintances, through Eastern
habit, that silence which the people of those countries preserve upon
affairs of the harem. Suddenly it was reported that madame was coming,
that apartments were to be prepared for herself, her children, and her
female attendants. The Nabob took the whole second floor of the house
on the Place Vendome, the tenant of which was turned out at an expense
worthy of a Nabob. The stables also were extended, the staff doubled;
then, one day, coachmen and carriages went to the Gare de Lyon to meet
madame, who arrived by train heated expressly for her during the journey
from Marseilles and filled by a suite of negresses, serving-maids, and
little negro boys.
She arrived in a condition of frightful exhaustion, utterly worn out
and bewildered by her long railway journey, the first of her life, for,
after being taken to Tunis while still quite a child, she had never left
it. From her carriage, two negroes carried her into her apartments on an
easy chair which, subsequently, always remained downstairs beneath
the entrance porch, in readiness for these difficult removals. Mme.
Jansoulet could not mount the staircase, which made her dizzy; she
would not have lifts, which creaked under her weight; besides, she
never walked. Of enormous size, bloated to such a degree that it was
impossible to assign to her any particular age between twenty-five and
forty, with a rather pretty face but grown shapeless in its features,
dull eyes beneath lids that drooped, vulgarly dressed in foreign
clothes, laden with diamonds and jewels after the fashion of a Hindu
idol, she was as fine a sample as could be found of those transplanted
European women called Levantines--a curious race of obese creoles whom
speech and costume alone attach to our world, but whom the East wraps
round with its stupefying atmosphere, with the subtle poisons of its
drugged air in which everything, from the tissues of the skin to the
waists of garments, even to the soul, is enervated and relaxed.
This particular specimen of it was the daughter of an immensely rich
Belgian who was engaged in the coral trade at Tunis, and in whose
business Jansoulet, after his arrival in the country, had been employed
for some months. Mlle. Afchin, in those days a delicious little doll of
twelve years old, with radiant complexion, hair, and health, used often
to come to fetch her father from the counting-house in the great chariot
with its yoke of mules which carried them to their fine villa at La
Marsu, in the vicinity of Tunis. This mischievous child with splendid
bare shoulders, had dazzled the adventurer as he caught glimpses of
her amid her luxurious surroundings, and, years afterward, when, having
become rich and the favourite of the Bey, he began to think of settling
down, it was to her that his thoughts went. The child had grown into a
fat young woman, heavy and white. Her intelligence, dull in the first
instance, had become still more obscured through the inertia of a
dormouse’s existence, the carelessness of a father given over to
business, the use of opium-saturated tobacco and of preserves made from
rose-leaves, the torpor of her Flemish blood, re-enforced by Oriental
indolence. Furthermore, she was ill-bred, gluttonous, sensual, arrogant,
a Levantine jewel in perfection.
But Jansoulet saw nothing of all this.
For him she was, and remained, up to the time of her arrival in Paris, a
superior creature, a lady of the most exalted rank, a Demoiselle Afchin.
He addressed her with respect, in her presence maintained an attitude
which was a little constrained and timid, gave her money without
counting, satisfied her most costly fantasies, her wildest caprices, all
the strange desires of a Levantine’s brain disordered through boredom
and idleness. One word alone excused everything. She was a Demoiselle
Afchin. Beyond this, no intercourse between them; he always at the
Kasbah or the Bardo, courting the favour of the Bey, or else in his
counting-houses; she passing her days in bed, wearing in her hair a
diadem of pearls worth three hundred thousand francs which she never
took off, befuddling her brain with smoking, living as in a harem,
admiring herself in the glass, adorning herself, in company with a few
other Levantines, whose supreme distraction consisted in measuring with
their necklaces arms and legs which rivalled each other in plumpness,
and bearing children about whom she never gave herself the least
trouble, whom she never used to see, who had not even cost her a pang,
for she gave birth to them under chloroform. A lump of white flesh
perfumed with musk. And, as Jansoulet used to say with pride: “I married
a Demoiselle Afchin!”
Under the sky of Paris and its cold light the disillusion began.
Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob
had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of
the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy
draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange paraphernalia in
her suite, he had the vague impression of a Queen Pomare in exile.
The fact was that now he had seen real women of the world, and he made
comparisons. After having planned a great ball to celebrate her arrival,
he prudently changed his mind. Besides, Mme. Jansoulet desired to see
nobody. Here her natural indolence was increased by the home-sickness
which she suffered, from the first hour of her coming, by the chilliness
of a yellow fog and the dripping rain. She passed several days without
getting up, weeping aloud like a child, saying that it was in order to
cause her death that she had been brought to Paris, and not permitting
her women to do even the least thing for her. She lay there bellowing
among the laces of her pillow, with her hair bristling in disorder about
her diadem, the windows of the room closed, the curtains drawn close,
the lamps lighted night and day, crying out that she wanted to go
away-y, to go away-y; and it was pitiful to see, in that funeral gloom,
the half-unpacked trunks scattered over the carpets, the frightened
maids, the negresses crouched around their mistress in her nervous
attack, they also groaning, with haggard eyes like those dogs of artic
travellers that go mad without the sun.
The Irish doctor, called in to deal with all this trouble, had no
success with his fatherly manners, the pretty phrases that issued from
his compressed lips. The Levantine would have nothing to do at any price
with the arsenic pearls as a tonic. The Nabob was in consternation.
What was to be done? Send her back to Tunis with the children? It was
scarcely possible. He was decidedly in disgrace in that quarter. The
Hemerlingues were triumphant. A last affront had filled up the
measure. At Jansoulet’s departure, the Bey had commissioned him to have
gold-pieces struck at the Paris Mint of a new design to the value of
several millions; then the order, suddenly withdrawn, had been given
to Hemerlingue. Publicly outraged, Jansoulet had replied by a public
demonstration, offering for sale all his possessions, his palace at
the Bardo given to him by the former Bey, his villas of La Marsu all of
white marble, surrounded by splendid gardens, his counting-houses which
were the largest and the most sumptuous in the city, and, charging,
finally, the intelligent Bompain to bring over to him his wife and
children in order to make a clear affirmation of a definitive departure.
After such an uproar, it was no easy thing for him to return there;
this was what he endeavoured to make evident to Mlle. Afchin, who only
replied to him by deep groans. He tried to console her, to amuse her,
but what distraction could be found to appeal to that monstrously
apathetic nature? And then, could he change the sky of Paris, restore to
the unhappy Levantine her _patio_ paved with marble, where she used to
pass long hours in a cool, delicious sleepiness, listening to the water
as it dripped on the great alabaster fountain with its three basins, one
over the other, and her gilded barge, with its awning of crimson, which
eight Tripolitan boatmen supple and vigorous rowed after sunset on the
beautiful lake of El-Baheira? However luxurious the apartment of the
Place Vendome might be, it could not compensate for the loss of these
marvels. And then she would be more miserable than ever. At last, a man
who was a frequent visitor to the house succeeded in lifting her out
of her despair. This was Cabassu, the man who described himself on his
cards as “professor of massage,” a big, dark, thick-set man, smelling
of garlic and pomade, square-shouldered, hairy to the eyes, and who
knew stories of Parisian seraglios, tales within the reach of madame’s
intelligence. Having once come to massage her, she wished to see him
again, retained him. He had to give up all his other clients, and
became, at the salary of a senator, the masseur of this stout lady, her
page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, delighted to see his wife
contented, was unconscious of the ridicule attached to this intimacy.
Cabassu was now seen in the Bois, seated beside the favourite maid in
the huge and sumptuous open carriage, also at the back of the theatre
boxes taken by the Levantine, for she began to go out, since she had
grown less torpid under the treatment of her masseur and was determined
to amuse herself. The theatre pleased her, especially farces or
melodramas. The apathy of her large body found a stimulus in the false
glare of the footlights. But it was to Cardailhac’s theatre that she
went for preference. There, the Nabob found himself in his own house.
From the chief superintendent to the humblest _ouvreuse_, the whole
staff was under his control. He had a key which enabled him to pass from
the corridors on to the stage; and the small drawing-room communicating
with his box was decorated in Oriental manner, with a concave ceiling
like a beehive, its couches covered in camel’s hair, the flame of the
gas inclosed in a little Moorish lantern. Here one could enjoy a siesta
during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on
the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of
a Cardailhac stop at this. Remarking the taste of the Demoiselle Afchin
for the drama, he had ended by persuading her that she also possessed
the intuition, the knowledge of it, and by begging her when she had
nothing better to do to glance over and let him know what she thought
of the pieces that were submitted to him. A good way of cementing the
partnership more firmly.
Poor manuscripts in your blue or yellow covers, bound by hope with
fragile ribbons, that set out full of ambition and dreams, who knows
what hands may touch you, turn over your pages, what indiscreet fingers
deflower your charm, the charm of the unknown, that glittering dust
which lies on new ideas? Who may judge you and who condemn? Sometimes,
before dining out, Jansoulet, mounting to his wife’s room, would find
her on her lounge, smoking, her head thrown back, bundles of manuscripts
by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his thick
voice and with the Bourg-Saint-Andeol accent, some dramatic lucubration
which he cut and scored without pity at the least criticism from the
lady.
“Don’t disturb yourselves,” the good Nabob would signal with his hand,
entering on tiptoe. He would listen, shake his head with an admiring
air, as he watched his wife: “She is astonishing!” for he himself
understood nothing about literature, and there, at least, he could
discover once again the superiority of Mlle. Afchin.
“She had the instinct of the stage,” as Cardailhac used to say; but, on
the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her. Never did
she take any interest in her children, abandoning them to the hands of
strangers, and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting
herself with offering to them the flaccid and inanimate flesh of
her cheeks between two puffs of cigarette-smoke, without making any
inquiries into those details of their bringing up and of their health
which perpetuate the physical bond of maternity and make the hearts of
true mothers bleed at the least suffering of their children.
They were three big, dull and apathetic boys of eleven, nine, and seven
years, having, with the sallow complexion and the precocious bloatedness
of the Levantine, the kind, black, velvety eyes of their father. They
were ignorant as young lords of the middle ages. At Tunis, M. Bompain
had directed their studies; but at Paris, the Nabob, anxious to give
them the benefit of a Parisian education, had sent them to that smartest
and most expensive of boarding-schools, the College Bourdaloue, managed
by good priests who sought less to instruct their pupils than to make of
them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded
in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs,
disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous
or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little
Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding
the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth;
they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the
charge of the institution had some friend whom they visited and people
who came to see them; but the Jansoulets were never summoned to the
parlour, no one knew any of their relatives; from time to time they
received basketfuls of sweetmeats, piles of confectionery, and that was
all. The Nabob, doing some shopping in Paris, would strip for them the
whole of a pastry-cook’s window and send the spoils to the college, with
that generous impulse of the heart mingled with negro ostentation
which characterized all his actions. It was the same in the matter
of playthings. They were always too pretty, tricked out too finely,
useless--those toys that are for show but which the Parisian does not
buy. But that which above all attracted to the little Jansoulets the
respect both of pupils and masters, were their purses heavy with gold,
ever ready for school subscriptions, for the professors’ birthdays,
and the charity visits, those famous visits organized by the College
Bourdaloue, one of the tempting things in the prospectus, the marvel of
sensitive souls.
Twice a month, turn and turn about, the pupils who were members of the
miniature Society of St. Vincent de Paul founded in the college upon the
model of the great one, went in little squads, alone, as though they had
been grown-up, to bear succour and consolation into the deepest recesses
of the more densely populated quarters of the town. This was designed
to teach them a practical charity, the art of knowing the needs, the
miseries of the lower classes, and to heal these heart-rending evils
by a nostrum of kind words and ecclesiastical maxims. To console, to
evangelize the masses by the help of childhood, to disarm religious
incredulity by the youth and _naivete_ of the apostles, such was the aim
of this little society; an aim entirely missed, moreover. The children,
healthy, well-dressed, well-fed, calling only at addresses previously
selected, found poor persons of good appearance, sometimes rather
unwell, but very clean, already on the parish register and in receipt of
aid from the wealthy organization of the Church. Never did they
chance to enter one of those nauseous dwellings wherein hunger, grief,
humiliation, all physical and moral ills are written in leprous mould on
the walls, in indelible lines on the brows. Their visits were prepared
for, like that of the sovereign who enters a guard-room to taste the
soldiers’ soup: the guard-room is warmed and the soup seasoned for
the royal palate. Have you seen those pictures in pious books, where a
little communicant, with candle in hand, and perfectly groomed, comes
to minister to a poor old man lying sick on his straw pallet and turning
the whites of his eyes to heaven? These visits of charity had the same
conventionality of setting and of accent. To the measured gestures of
the little preachers were corresponding words learned by heart and
false enough to make one squint. To the comic encouragement, to the
“consolations lavished” in prize-book phrases by the voices of young
urchins with colds, were the affecting benedictions, the whining and
piteous mummeries of a church-porch after vespers. And the moment the
young visitors departed, what an explosion of laughter and shouting in
the garret, what a dance in a circle round the present brought, what an
upsetting of the arm-chair in which one had pretended to be lying ill,
of the medicine spilt in the fire, a fire of cinders very artistically
prepared!
When the little Jansoulets went out to visit their parents at home,
they were intrusted to the care of the man with the red fez, the
indispensable Bompain. It was Bompain who conducted them to the
Champs-Elysees, clad in English jackets, bowler hats of the latest
fashion--at seven years old!--and carrying little canes in their
dog-skin-gloved hands. It was Bompain who stuffed the race-wagonette
with provisions. Here he mounted with the children, who, with their
entrance-cards stuck in their hats round which green veils were twisted,
looked very like those personages in Liliputian pantomimes whose entire
funniness lies in the enormous size of their heads compared with their
small legs and dwarf-like gestures. They smoked and drank; it was a
painful sight. Sometimes the man in the fez, hardly able to hold himself
upright, would bring them home frightfully sick. And yet Jansoulet was
fond of them, the youngest especially, who, with his long hair, his
doll-like manner, recalled to him the little Afchin passing in her
carriage. But they were still of the age when children belong to the
mother, when neither the fashionable tailor, nor the most accomplished
masters, nor the smart boarding-school, nor the ponies girthed specially
for the little men in the stable, nor anything else can replace
the attentive and caressing hand, the warmth and the gaiety of the
home-nest. The father could not give them that; and then, too, he was so
busy!
A thousand irons in the fire: the Territorial Bank, the installation
of the picture gallery, drives to Tattersall’s with Bois l’Hery,
some _bibelot_ to inspect, here or there, at the houses of collectors
indicated by Schwalbach, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers
in curiosities, the encumbered and multiple existence of a _bourgeois
gentilhomme_ in modern Paris. This rubbing of shoulders with all sorts
and conditions of people brought him improvement, in that each day he
was becoming a little more Parisianized; he was received at Monpavon’s
club, in the green-room of the ballet, behind the scenes at the
theatres, and presided regularly at his famous bachelor luncheons, the
only receptions possible in his household. His existence was really a
very busy one, and de Gery relieved him of the heaviest part of it, the
complicated department of appeals and of charities.
The young man now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque
inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great
cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army,
which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its _Bottin_ by heart. He
received the blonde lady, bold, young, and already faded, who only asks
for a hundred napoleons, with the threat that she will throw herself
into the river when she leaves if they are not given to her, and the
stout matron of prepossessing and unceremonious manner, who says, as she
enters: “Sir, you do not know me. Neither have I the honour of knowing
you. But we shall soon make each other’s acquaintance. Be kind enough to
sit down and let us have a chat.” The merchant at bay, on the verge of
bankruptcy--sometimes it is true--who comes to entreat you to save his
honour, with a pistol ready to shoot himself, bulging out the pocket
of his overcoat--sometimes it is only his pipe-case. And often genuine
distresses, wearisome and prolix, of people who are unable even to tell
how little competent they are to earn a livelihood. Side by side with
this open begging, there was that which wears various kinds of disguise:
charity, philanthropy, good works, the encouragement of projects of art,
the house-to-house begging for infant asylums, parish churches, rescued
women, charitable societies, local libraries. Finally, those who wear
a society mask, with tickets for concerts, benefit performances,
entrance-cards of all colours, “platform, front seats, reserved seats.”
The Nabob insisted that no refusals should be given, and it was a
concession that he no longer burdened his own shoulders with such
matters. For quite a long time, in generous indifference, he had gone
on covering with gold all that hypocritical exploitation, paying
five hundred francs for a ticket for the concert of some Wurtemberg
cithara-player or Languedocian flutist, which at the Tuileries or at the
Duc de Mora’s might have fetched ten francs. There were days when the
young de Gery issued from these audiences nauseated. All the honesty of
his youth revolted; he approached the Nabob with schemes of reform. But
the Nabob’s face, at the first word, would assume the bored expression
of weak natures when they have to make a decision, or he would perhaps
reply: “But that is Paris, my dear boy. Don’t get frightened or
interfere with my plans. I know what I am doing and what I want.”
At that time he wanted two things: a deputyship and the cross of the
Legion of Honour. These were for him the first two stages of the great
ascent to which his ambition pushed him. Deputy he would certainly be
through the influence of the Territorial Bank, at the head of which he
stood. Paganetti of Porto-Vecchio was often saying it to him: “When the
day arrives, the island will rise and vote for you as one man.”
It is not enough, however, to control electors; it is necessary also
that there be a seat vacant in the Chamber, and the representation of
Corsica was complete. One of its members, however, the old Popolusca,
infirm and in no condition to do his work, might perhaps, upon certain
conditions, be willing to resign his seat. It was a difficult matter to
negotiate, but quite feasible, the old fellow having a numerous family,
estates which produced little or nothing, a palace in ruins at Bastia,
where his children lived on _polenta_, and a furnished apartment at
Paris in an eighteenth-rate lodging-house. If a hundred or two hundred
thousand francs were not a consideration, one ought to be able to
obtain a favourable decision from this honourable pauper who, sounded
by Paganetti, would say neither yes nor no, tempted by the large sum
of money, held back by the vainglory of his position. The matter had
reached that point, it might be decided from one day to another.
As for the cross, things were going still better. The Bethlehem Society
had assuredly made the devil of a noise at the Tuileries. They were now
only waiting until after the visit of M. de la Perriere and his report,
which could not be other than favorable, before inscribing on the list
for the 16th March, on the date of an imperial anniversary, the glorious
name of Jansoulet. The 16th March; that was to say, within a month. What
would the fat Hemerlingue find to say of this signal favour, he who for
so long had had to content himself with the Nisham? And the Bey, who had
been misled into believing that Jansoulet was cut by Parisian society,
and the old mother, down yonder at Saint-Romans, ever so happy in
the successes of her son! Was that not worth a few millions cleverly
squandered along the path of glory which the Nabob was treading like a
child, all unconscious of the fate that lay waiting to devour him at its
end? And in these external joys, these honours, this consideration so
dearly bought, was there not a compensation for all the troubles of this
Oriental won back to European life, who desired a home and possessed
only a caravansary, looked for a wife and found only a Levantine?