Just at the end of the long vault, under which were the offices of
Hemerlingue and Sons, the black tunnel which Joyeuse had for ten years
adorned and illuminated with his dreams, a monumental staircase with a
wrought-iron balustrade, a staircase of mediaeval time, led towards the
left to the reception rooms of the baroness, which looked out on the
court-yard just above the cashier’s office, so that in summer, when the
windows were open, the ring of the gold, the crash of the piles of
money scattered on the counters, softened a little by the rich and lofty
hangings at the windows, made a mercantile accompaniment to the buzzing
conversation of fashionable Catholicism.
The entrance struck at once the note of this house, as of her who did
the honours of it. A mixture of a vague scent of the sacristy, with
the excitement of the Bourse, and the most refined fashion, these
heterogeneous elements, met and crossed each other’s path there, but
remained as much apart as the noble faubourg, under whose patronage
the striking conversion of the Moslem had taken place, was from the
financial quarters where Hemerlingue had his life and his friends.
The Levantine colony--pretty numerous in Paris--was composed in great
measure of German Jews, bankers or brokers who had made colossal
fortunes in the East, and still did business here, not to lose the
habit. The colony showed itself regularly on the baroness’s visiting
day. Tunisians on a visit to Paris never failed to call on the wife of
the great banker; and old Colonel Brahim, _charge d’affaires_ of
the Bey, with his flabby mouth and bloodshot eyes, had his nap every
Saturday in the corner of the same divan.
“One seems to smell scorching in your drawing-room, my child,” said the
old Princess de Dions smilingly to the newly named Marie, whom M. Le
Merquier and she had led to the font. But the presence of all these
heretics--Jews, Moslems, and even renegades--of these great over-dressed
blotched women, loaded with gold and ornaments, veritable bundles
of clothes, did not hinder the Faubourg Saint-Germain from visiting,
surrounding, and looking after the young convert, the plaything of these
noble ladies, a very obedient puppet, whom they showed, whom they took
out, and whose evangelical simplicities, so piquant by contrast with
her past, they quoted everywhere. Perhaps deep down in the heart of her
amiable patronesses a hope lay of meeting in this circle of returned
Orientals some new subject for conversion, an occasion for filling the
aristocratic Chapel of Missions again with the touching spectacle of one
of those adult baptisms which carry one back to the first days of the
Faith, far away on the banks of the Jordan; baptisms soon to be followed
by a first communion, a confirmation, when baptismal vows are renewed;
occasions when a godmother may accompany her godchild, guide the young
soul, share in the naive transports of a newly awakened belief, and
may also display a choice of toilettes, delicately graduated to the
importance of the sentiment of the ceremony. But not every day does it
happen that one of the leaders of finance brings to Paris an Armenian
slave as his wife.
A slave! That was the blot in the past of this woman from the East,
bought in the bazaar of Adrianople for the Emperor of Morocco, then
sold, when he died and his harem was dispersed, to the young Bey Ahmed.
Hemerlingue had married her when she passed from this new seraglio,
but she could not be received at Tunis, where no woman--Moor, Turk or
European--would consent to treat a former slave as an equal, on account
of a prejudice like that which separates the creoles from the best
disguised quadroons. Even in Paris the Hemerlingues found this
invincible prejudice among the small foreign colonies, constituted,
as they were, of little circles full of susceptibilities and local
traditions. Yamina thus passed two or three years in a complete solitude
whose leisure and spiteful feelings she well knew how to utilize,
for she was an ambitious woman endowed with extraordinary will and
persistence. She learned French thoroughly, said farewell to her
embroidered vests and pantaloons of red silk, accustomed her figure and
her walk to European toilettes, to the inconvenience of long dresses,
and then, one night at the opera, showed the astonished Parisians
the spectacle, a little uncivilized still, but delicate, elegant, and
original, of a Mohammedan in a costume of _Leonard’s_.
The sacrifice of her religion soon followed that of her costume. Mme.
Hemerlingue had long abandoned the practices of Mohammedan religion,
when M. le Merquier, their friend and mentor in Paris, showed them that
the baroness’s public conversion would open to her the doors of
that section of the Parisian world whose access became more and
more difficult as society became more democratic. Once the Faubourg
Saint-Germain was conquered, all the others would follow. And, in fact,
when, after the announcement of the baptism, they learned that the
greatest ladies in France could be seen at the Baroness Hemerlingue’s
Saturdays, Mmes. Gugenheim, Furenberg, Caraiscaki, Maurice Trott--all
wives of millionaires celebrated on the markets of Tunis--gave up their
prejudices and begged to be invited to the former slave’s receptions.
Mme. Jansoulet alone--newly arrived with a stock of cumbersome Oriental
ideas in her mind, like her ostrich eggs, her narghile pipe, and the
Tunisian _bric-a-brac_ in her rooms--protested against what she called
an impropriety, a cowardice, and declared that she would never set her
foot at _her_ house. Soon a little retrograde movement was felt round
the Gugenheims, the Caraiscaki, and the other people, as happens at
Paris every time when some irregular position, endeavouring to establish
itself, brings on regrets and defections. They had gone too far to draw
back, but they resolved to make the value of their good-will, of their
sacrificed prejudices, felt, and the Baroness Marie well understood the
shade of meaning in the protecting tone of the Levantines, treating her
as “My dear child,” “My dear good girl,” with an almost contemptuous
pride. Thenceforward her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds--the
complicated ferocious hatred of the seraglio, with strangling and the
sack at the end, perhaps more difficult to arrive at in Paris than
on the banks of the lake of El Bahaira, but for which she had already
prepared the stout sack and the cord.
One can imagine, knowing all this, what was the surprise and agitation
of this corner of exotic society, when the news spread, not only that
the great Afchin--as these ladies called her--had consented to see the
baroness, but that she would pay her first visit on her next Saturday.
Neither the Fuernbergs nor the Trotts would wish to miss such an
occasion. On her side, the baroness did everything in her power to give
the utmost brilliancy to this solemn reparation. She wrote, she visited,
and succeeded so well, that in spite of the lateness of the season, Mme.
Jansoulet, on arriving at four o’clock at the Faubourg Saint-Honore,
would have seen drawn up before the great arched doorway, side by side
with the discreet russet livery of the Princess de Dion, and of
many authentic _blasons_, the pretentious and fictitious arms, the
multicoloured wheels of a crowd of plutocrat equipages, and the tall
powdered lackeys of the Caraiscaki.
Above, in the reception rooms, was another strange and resplendent
crowd. In the first two rooms there was a going and coming, a continual
passage of rustling silks up to the boudoir where the baroness sat,
sharing her attentions and cajoleries between two very distinct camps.
On one side were dark toilettes, modest in appearance, whose refinement
was appreciable only to observant eyes; on the other, a wild burst of
vivid colour, opulent figures, rich diamonds, floating scarfs, exotic
fashions, in which one felt a regret for a warmer climate, and more
luxurious life. Here were sharp taps with the fan, discreet whispers
from the few men present, some of the _bien pensant_ youth, silent,
immovable, sucking the handles of their canes, two or three figures,
upright behind the broad backs of their wives, speaking with their heads
bent forward, as if they were offering contraband goods for sale; and
in a corner the fine patriarchal beard and violet cassock of an orthodox
Armenian bishop.
The baroness, in attempting to harmonize these fashionable diversities,
to keep her rooms full until the famous interview, moved about
continually, took part in ten different conversations, raising
her harmonious and velvety voice to the twittering diapason which
distinguishes Oriental women, caressing and coaxing, the mind supple
as the body, touching on all subjects, and mixing in the requisite
proportions fashion and charity sermons, theatres and bazaars, the
dressmaker and the confessor. The mistress of the house united a great
personal charm with this acquired science--a science visible even in her
black and very simple dress, which brought out her nun-like pallor, her
houri-like eyes, her shining and plaited hair drawn back from a narrow,
child-like forehead, a forehead of which the small mouth accentuated
the mystery, hiding from the inquisitive the former _favourite’s_ whole
varied past, she who had no age, who knew not herself the date of her
birth, and never remembered to have been a child.
Evidently if the absolute power of evil--rare indeed among women,
influenced as they are by their impressionable physical nature by so
many different currents--could take possession of a soul, it would be
in that of this slave, moulded by basenesses, revolted but patient, and
complete mistress of herself, like all those whom the habit of veiling
the eyes has accustomed to lie safely and unscrupulously.
At this moment no one could have suspected the anguish she suffered;
to see her kneeling before the princess, an old, good, straightforward
soul, of whom the Fuernberg was always saying, “Call that a
princess--that!”
“I beg of you, godmamma, don’t go away yet.”
She surrounded her with all sorts of cajoleries, of graces, of little
airs, without telling her, to be sure, that she wanted to keep her till
the arrival of the Jansoulets, to add to her triumph.
“But,” said the princess, pointing out to her the majestic Armenian,
silent and grave, his tasselled hat on his knees, “I must take this poor
bishop to the _Grand Saint-Christophe_, to buy some medals. He would
never get on without me.”
“No, no, I wish--you must--a few minutes more.” And the baroness threw a
furtive look on the ancient and sumptuous clock in a corner of the room.
Five o’clock already, and the great Afchin not arrived. The Levantines
began to laugh behind their fans. Happily tea was just being served,
also Spanish wines, and a crowd of delicious Turkish cakes which were
only to be had in that house, whose receipts, brought away with her by
the favourite, had been preserved in the harem, like some secrets of
confectionery on our convents. That made a diversion. Hemerlingue, who
on Saturdays came out of his office from time to time to make his bow to
the ladies, was drinking a glass of Madeira near the little table while
talking to Maurice Trott, once the dresser of Said-Pasha, when his wife
approached him, gently and quietly. He knew what anger this impenetrable
calm must cover, and asked her, in a low tone, timidly:
“No one?”
“No one. You see to what an insult you expose me.”
She smiled, her eyes half closed, taking with the end of her nail a
crumb of cake from his long black whiskers, but her little transparent
nostrils trembled with a terrible eloquence.
“Oh, she will come,” said the banker, his mouth full. “I am sure she
will come.”
The noise of dresses, of a train rustling in the next room made the
baroness turn quickly. But, to the great joy of the “bundles,” looking
on from their corners, it was not the lady they were expecting.
This tall, elegant blonde, with worn features and irreproachable
toilette, was not like Mlle. Afchin. She was worthy in every way to bear
a name as celebrated as that of Dr. Jenkins. In the last two or three
months the beautiful Mme. Jenkins had greatly changed, become much
older. In the life of a woman who has long remained young there comes a
time when the years, which have passed over her head without leaving a
wrinkle, trace their passage all at once brutally in indelible marks.
People no longer say, on seeing her, “How beautiful she is!” but “How
beautiful she must have been!” And this cruel way of speaking in the
past, of throwing back to a distant period that which was but yesterday
a visible fact, marks a beginning of old age and of retirement, a change
of all her triumphs into memories. Was it the disappointment of
seeing the doctor’s wife arrive, instead of Mme. Jansoulet, or did the
discredit which the Duke de Mora’s death had thrown on the fashionable
physician fall on her who bore his name? There was a little of each
of these reasons, and perhaps of another, in the cool greeting of the
baroness. A slight greeting on the ends of her lips, some hurried words,
and she returned to the noble battalion nibbling vigorously away. The
room had become animated under the effects of wine. People no longer
whispered; they talked. The lamps brought in added a new brilliance to
the gathering, but announced that it was near its close; some indeed,
not interested in the great event, having already taken their leave. And
still the Jansoulets did not come.
All at once a heavy, hurried step. The Nabob appeared, alone, buttoned
up in his black coat, correctly dressed, but with his face upset, his
eyes haggard, still trembling from the terrible scene which he had left.
She would not come.
In the morning he had told the maids to dress madame for three o’clock,
as he did each time he took out the Levantine with him, when it was
necessary to move this indolent person, who, not being able to accept
even any responsibility whatever, left others to think, decide, act for
her, going willingly where she was desired to go, once she was
started. And it was on this amiability that he counted to take her to
Hemerlingue’s. But when, after _dejeuner_, Jansoulet dressed, superb,
perspiring with the effort to put on gloves, asked if madame would soon
be ready, he was told that she was not going out. The matter was grave,
so grave, that putting on one side all the intermediaries of valets and
maids, which they made use of in their conjugal dialogues, he ran up the
stairs four steps at once like a gust of wind, and entered the draperied
rooms of the Levantine.
She was still in bed, dressed in that great open tunic of silk of
two colours, which the Moors call a _djebba_, and in a little cap
embroidered with gold, from which escaped her heavy long black hair, all
entangled round her moon-shaped face, flushed from her recent meal. The
sleeves of her _djebba_ pushed back showed two enormous shapeless arms,
loaded with bracelets, with long chains wandering through a heap of
little mirrors, of red beads, of scent-boxes, of microscopic pipes, of
cigarette cases--the childish toyshop collection of a Moorish woman at
her rising.
The room, filled with the heavy opium-scented smoke of Turkish tobacco,
was in similar disorder. Negresses went and came, slowly removing their
mistress’s coffee, the favourite gazelle was licking the dregs of a cup
which its delicate muzzle had overturned on the carpet, while seated at
the foot of the bed with a touching familiarity, the melancholy Cabassu
was reading aloud to madame a drama in verse which Cardailhac was
shortly going to produce. The Levantine was stupefied with this reading,
absolutely astounded.
“My dear,” said she to Jansoulet, in her thick Flemish accent, “I don’t
know what our manager is thinking of. I am just reading this _Revolt_,
which he is so mad about. But it is impossible. There is nothing
dramatic about it.”
“Don’t talk to me of the theatre,” said Jansoulet, furious, in spite of
his respect for the daughter of the Afchins. “What, you are not dressed
yet? Weren’t you told that we were going out?”
They had told her, but she had begun to read this stupid piece. And with
her sleepy air:
“We will go out to-morrow.”
“To-morrow! Impossible. We are expected to-day. A most important visit.”
“But where?”
He hesitated a second.
“To Hemerlingue’s.”
She raised her great eyes, thinking he was making game of her. Then he
told her of his meeting with the baron at the funeral of de Mora and the
understanding they had come to.
“Go there, if you like,” said she coldly. “But you little know me if you
believe that I, an Afchin, will ever set foot in that slave’s house.”
Cabassu, prudently seeing what was likely to happen, had fled into a
neighbouring room, carrying with him the five acts of _The Revolt_ under
his arm.
“Come,” said the Nabob to his wife, “I see that you do not know the
terrible position I am in. Listen.”
Without thinking of the maids or the negresses, with the sovereign
indifference of an Oriental for his household, he proceeded to picture
his great distress, his fortune sequestered over seas, his credit
destroyed over here, his whole career in suspense before the judgment
of the Chamber, the influence of the Hemerlingues on the judge-advocate,
and the necessity of the sacrifice at the moment of all personal feeling
to such important interests. He spoke hotly, tried to convince her, to
carry her away. But she merely answered him, “I shall not go,” as if it
were only a matter of some unimportant walk, a little too long for her.
He said trembling:
“See, now, it is not possible that you should say that. Think that my
fortune is at stake, the future of our children, the name you bear.
Everything is at stake in what you cannot refuse to do.”
He could have spoken thus for hours and been always met by the same
firm, unshakable obstinacy--an Afchin could not visit a slave.
“Well, madame,” said he violently, “this slave is worth more than you.
She has increased tenfold her husband’s wealth by her intelligence,
while you, on the contrary----”
For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet
dared to hold up his head before his wife. Was he ashamed of this crime
of _lese-majeste_, or did he understand that such a remark would place
an impassable gulf between them? He changed his tone, knelt down before
the bed, with that cheerful tenderness when one persuades children to be
reasonable.
“My little Martha, I beg of you--get up, dress yourself. It is for your
own sake I ask it, for your comfort, for your own welfare. What would
become of you if, for a caprice, a stupid whim, we should become poor?”
But the word--poor--represented absolutely nothing to the Levantine. One
could speak of it before her, as of death before little children.
She was not moved by it, not knowing what it was. She was perfectly
determined to keep in bed in her _djebba_; and to show her decision, she
lighted a new cigarette at her old one just finished; and while the poor
Nabob surrounded his “dear little wife” with excuses, with prayers, with
supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more
beautiful than her own, if she would come, she watched the heavy smoke
rising to the painted ceiling, wrapping herself up in it as in an
imperturbable calm. At last, in face of this refusal, this silence, this
barrier of headstrong obstinacy, Jansoulet unbridled his wrath and rose
up to his full height:
“Come,” said he, “I wish it.”
He turned to the negresses:
“Dress your mistress at once.”
And boor as he was at the bottom, the son of a southern nail-maker
asserting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back
the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the
innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to
bound to her feet with a promptitude amazing in so massive a person. She
roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust,
pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her
husband.
“Never, understand me, never! You may drag me sooner to this----”
The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout. Jansoulet could
have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Marseilles,
at some quarrel of prostitutes and bullies, or again at some open-air
dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the
quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the
whirlwinds of golden dust. She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport,
a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her
terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every
tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all. The wretched man
looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at
her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping:
“No, I will not go--no, I will not go!”
And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins!
Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman,
that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time
was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to
his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands
contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the
Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the
_masseur_ had just gone out:
“Aristide!”
This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet
stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he
flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune
and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek
elsewhere the help he had been promised.
A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues’,
making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached
the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so
often the night of his ball, “His wife, very unwell--most grieved not
to have been able to come--” She did not give him time to finish, rose
slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated
folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, “Oh, I
knew--I knew!” then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He
attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in
his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme.
Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking
to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching
the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when
compared with his own gilded halls.
It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of
the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the
benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men
with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and
the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern
slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world,
with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with
Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as
a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which
he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from
him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.
Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one
after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme.
Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet
did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to
shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob
rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices
on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him,
forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the
antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under
his wife’s eye, expanded a little.
“It is very annoying,” said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be
overheard, “that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come.”
Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.
“Annoying, annoying,” repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for
his key in his pocket.
“Come, old fellow,” said the Nabob, taking his hand, “there’s no reason,
because our wives don’t agree--That doesn’t hinder us from remaining
friends. What a good chat the other day, eh?”
“No doubt” said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door
noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily
before the enormous empty chair. “Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my
mail to despatch.”
“_Ya didon, monci_” (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to
joke, and using the _patois_ of the south to recall to his old chum all
the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening. “Our visit to Le
Merquier still holds good. The picture we were going to present to him,
you know. What day?”
“Ah, yes, Le Merquier--true--eh--well, soon. I will write to you.”
“Really? You know it is very important.”
“Yes, yes. I will write to you. Good-bye.”
And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his
wife coming.
Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost
unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more
or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of
spelling:
MY DEAR OLD COM_--I cannot accom_ you to Le Mer. _Too bus_ just now.
Besid_ y_ will be _bet_ alone to _tal_. Go _th bold_. You are _exp. A_
Cassette, _ev morn_ 8 to 10.