As knives in our country are not generally endowed with that physical
possession, I could only stare my astonishment.
"Eh, I see! It is an _English_ word, and you do not understand it. It
means _lame_."
By which I discovered that had she spoken our transatlantic _patois_ she
would have said "_blades_."
Every one of our Relicts had her private sitting-room attached to her
bed-room, the house having been built expressly to suit the demands of
_bourgeois_ widows with fortunes. Thus our _salon_ was of very little
account until after dinner, when our widows, instead of returning to
their own rooms, the garden, or the boulevard, where they spent the day,
herded together around card-tables almost as closely as sheep in a pen.
The _salon_ was not intended for daytime use; in the bitterest weather
it had no fire until evening, and it had but a single window, which
looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three
stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air
ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale
and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour
there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one
door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as
much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon
success when half a score of antique roses flaunted and flared, and the
death-knell of sly hopes sounded with echoed and re-echoed cry: "_Mon
Dieu!_ I smell air!" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell you not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell
we not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smells she not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell they
not air?"
Almost all our _veuves_ had children and grandchildren in Paris, and we
were continually surprised to see the mundane elegance of these younger
branches of our withered old trees. It showed the usual history,
however, of _bourgeois_ parents who had worked steadily, lived humbly
and economically, to gather _dots_ for their daughters and open careers
for their sons, to see them thus rise to positions in life far above
their parents. Every day some of these younger branches came to our
house in handsome carriages and toilets; and indeed on some days the
number of elegant visitors who rang at our door gave the impression of a
gay reception _a la mode_ rather than of the ordinary visitors of a
_pension bourgeoise_ at Saint-Maude.
One of our Relicts was decidedly less _bourgeoise_ and more _paysanne_
than any of the rest. She was round as a ball, seventy years of age, and
dressed always in short gray petticoats, black short-gown, and close
white cap. Madame Boulanger kept close watch upon her, and tried to
confine her to the sunny, high-walled garden set with a number of round
little iron tables, where our Relicts took their after-_dejeuner cafe_
on sunny days. But Madame Boulanger was not Argus-eyed, and thus we
often saw Madame Leroy escape through the front door and roll like a
huge balloon along the boulevard, bent on what she called "collecting
her rents." The way she did it was to enter every open door and accost
every grown person she saw with the stern reproach that he was
behind-hand with his rent, and if he did not pay up by to-morrow she
would send the _huissier_ to sell him out. The poor creature was so well
known in the neighborhood that she never received rough treatment, and
was generally so thoroughly tired out by her rent-collecting as to be
quite ready to return without resistance whenever one of our servants
sought her. When she did not escape, and mingled with the conglomerate
widowhood of the garden (she was never permitted in the _salon_, and
went to bed with the chickens), her time was spent, hour after hour, day
after day, month after month, going from Relict to Relict, telling
always the same story,--always the same, and always a true one:
"Are you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris from Normandy
fifty years ago, on foot, with one hundred francs. We kept a
green-grocery on Rue des Saints-Peres. When my husband died he left me
one hundred thousand francs. I go to collect my rents: will you go? Are
you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris on foot," etc., etc.,
etc.
One of the most elegant of all our visitors was to this poor old Madame
Leroy. She always came in an elegant landau, with liveried coachman and
footman. Her toilets were of incomparable luxury, but likewise of
restrained and cultured taste, being usually of black velvet,
duchess-like laces, and queenly furs. She always went directly to this
old peasant-woman's handsomely-furnished rooms, and we never saw her
except as she descended from her carriage before the windows at which we
sat. She was a tall, finely-formed, aristocratic-looking brunette of
thirty-five or forty, artistically gotten up as to complexion and hair,
and always smiling affectionately at the tea-kettle old figure waiting
at the door to greet her. This aristocratic lady was known in the house
as Madame la Princesse, and was the daughter of our ancient _paysanne_
and green-grocer, whom a Slav noble had taken from a _cafe chantant_ in
Constantinople to endow with his name and fortune.
Another of our _veuves_ filled her private _salon_ with cats. There were
seven of them, and the odor of her premises was ancient and cat-like.
Three of these cats were sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything, and had
lived with their mistress in these very rooms years before, when booming
shells sped hot over the house, and fell sometimes close beside it,
during the siege of Paris.
"How did you manage to feed them?" we asked.
"I bought slices of cat in the market and stewed them in wine," answered
Madame Pognon. "Wine and rice were the only things we were not stinted
in. Thus I could always make a ragout for Pierre, Jean, and Jacques, and
they throve on it. But I had to keep them shut up, or they would have
made ragouts instead of eaten them."
A characteristic of our Relicthood _en bloc_ was its idleness. I never
saw one of them with a piece of knitting or any other work in her hands
during all the weeks we were there. In fine weather they loitered and
basked in the garden, gossiping or amusing themselves with novelettes
cut from the penny papers and passed from one to the other in turn. The
front door stood almost always open, and the suburban neighborhood
about it was during pleasant days largely flecked by the grave gowns and
white caps belonging to our _pension_. Nearly all were Bonapartists (for
was not trade good during the Empire?) and found the present times sadly
out of joint. Nearly all had stood behind counters or at cashiers'
desks, and had thus never learned more strictly feminine employments,
and now, retired upon their _rentes_, they found time heavy upon their
hands. None were conspicuously _devote_: they had never been so in their
younger days, and they were not of natures to be spiritualized by long
familiarity with life. Death could not be far off from most of them, but
they never spoke of it, never seemed to think of it; and, although life
was dull, they clung to it as by monotonous habit that _is_ but knows
not why.
* * * * *
Still another of our well-remembered _pensions_ was on the bright
Vesuvian Bay. The flaming mountain overlooked us, Naples floated beyond
us like a dream-city, before us the Mediterranean shimmered and shone
like a sultana's satin tunic. We could drop a stone from our windows
into the sea; we ran dripping from our sea-baths up long stairs, across
tiled balconies, into our vast rooms; all day and all night the swish
and lisp of the soft tides mingled with our voices and dreams.
As somebody said of us that summer, we were a "cosmopolitan mess," a
hotch-potch of nationalities, such as is always found in so general a
rendezvous as Italy. We were rather less of a hotch-potch, however, than
in London, but somehow it seemed to us that our peculiarities were more
salient than they could ever appear in proper and conventional
Bloomsbury. We were largely German, as the travelling population of
Italy is. In Bloomsbury our medium of expression was the English
language, and English was the language at table, no matter how foreign
our company. But in this Italian _pensione_, where the faces were
continually changing, the languages changed as often. One day only
English was the rule, and those who could not unite with the majority
remained mute. Another day, with a tremendous incursion of Teutons, who
always seem to travel in hordes, only German gutturals held the table,
and we who had no facility with them muttered meek French or sullen
English to our neighbors. The next day French would be the rule, and
Teuton must mumble in it and Anglo-Saxon stammer or hold its peace.
Curiously enough, although we were in Italy, Italian was rarely, almost
never, spoken among us, our only use of it being in orders to the
servants. Our landlady was English, with an Italian husband, but they
both held only upper menial places in the establishment, and never
dreamed of sitting at table with us or of meeting us upon any terms of
equality. This want of familiarity with Italian proves how little mere
travellers and haunters of _pensioni_ ever know of the middle-class
inhabitants of the country. The Italians themselves stir from home very
seldom; they almost never admit foreigners into their own houses, and
when forced abroad seek cheap Italian inns rather than the innumerable
boarding-houses infested by the outer barbarian. Italian peasant life is
open to all foreigners, but not that of the middle classes.
Our landlord had a daughter whose cheek was pale and whose garments hung
loosely upon her. When first we remarked this and her heavy eye,
everybody laughed.
"The usual story,--loves and rides away," was remarked in various
languages.
It was heartless to laugh, but we could not help it. For wan and
drooping landlords' daughters had become so familiar to us in Italian
_pensioni_ that we needed only to glance at the set of each one's gown
and the tint of her cheek to know if HE were still present and wooing or
had faithlessly ridden away. The race, however, was not always to the
rider.
One evening under our window, when the air swooned with languid scent of
lemon- and orange-blossoms, we heard a sobbing and a sighing that
reminded us of the Mock Turtle in "Alice in Wonderland." Glancing out,
by the soft light of the summer moon, enhanced by the shimmering water,
we saw two persons who seemed to be weeping in each other's arms under a
shuddering ilex. The stouter one--he was not the taller--we recognized
as a young Teuton for whose sake we had seen a gown very loose and a
cheek very wan afar off among the Alban Hills only a month before.
"I love you, Tita, I love you. I have thought I loved a dozen times
before, but I was mistaken. I never loved any girl before," he boohooed.
"_Dio mio!_" laughed the girl. "All the _Tedeschi_ say that who come
here. I wonder they are not tired of the old tune. I--I am _fiance_ to a
_bel Espagnol_ who rode away a month ago, and who ought to have been
back before now."
We found our Teuton fellow-_pensionnaires_ to have tastes more unnatural
than for landlords' daughters. One of them we had remarked for his
extreme beauty, not entirely of feature and rich olive hue, but of
pathetic, dreamy expression,--as we said, like an ideal St. John. At
first we never spoke of him except as "St. John." We gradually ceased to
call him so, however, when we had seen him several times at table, and
we grew finally so coarsely irreverent as to call him "_Mange-tout_."
Our meat was brought from distant Naples, making the journey without
ice, under a broiling Italian sun. Often it came to table so shorn of
its pristine freshness that not the hungriest of us could condone its
odor. One sultry night everybody's plate went away untouched, save two
or three. Flesh and fowl were "high,"--yea, "twice high," as the British
gourmet prefers his game. St. John's plate was _not_ sent away. That
ideal being was served three times, after which he rose and helped
himself from the side-table, remarking half apologetically as he did so,
"The cook has really surpassed himself to-day!"
"Ja! ja!" echoed our Teutons.
We saw our St. John next morning sucking raw eggs before his coffee.
"Because the _nourriture_ is poor. I do it to strengthen me," he
explained.
"When I am well I eat all I can hold," he confidentially imparted to the
_table-d'hote_. "When I am ill I eat more than I do when I am well."
One of our _pensionnaires_ was a swarthy Brazilian, living upon a
colossal and mysteriously-begotten fortune and spending what remained to
him of life upon the Mediterranean shores. He knew every _pensione_ of
the whole wide region, and in strident, barbaric tones--continually
reminding us of the savage aboriginal blood betrayed by narrow eyes and
high cheek-bones--flooded our _table-d'hote_ with the gossip of
_pensioni_ at Capri, Castellamare, Pompeii, Sorrento, and Salerno,--the
giddiness of all the widows, the cunning of the young girls, the
wickedness of the wives, and the barefaced or clever intriguing of
husband-hunting mammas. All that year, as we quietly slipped from one
Mediterranean _pensione_ to another, we met and recognized the heroes
and heroines of our Brazilian's _chroniques scandaleuses_, and we
breathed many a thanksgiving that we were slipping east while he slipped
west and thus were not known of name and evil fame in advance of our
coming.
Our Brazilian was a devout Catholic, which led to his giving great
offence at our table. Nobody could endure to pass him anything or to
take anything from him, and the hideous bird-of-prey-like rattling of
his right hand at any service turned many a delicate appetite away and
made our Brazilian of almost Gorgon-like effect upon all new-comers. The
finger-nails of his right hand were vowed to the Virgin: for two years
they had been uncut, and now, like fiendish claws, extended two inches
beyond the withered and dusky fingers.
"Why am I not liked by _ces belles dames_?" he asked one day. "They
never ask me to their excursions; they seem to shrink from taking my
hand."
"Because of your talons," somebody ventured to explain.
"Oh, no! the Blessed Virgin would never allow _that_," he asserted
confidently.
Before the end of the summer, however, he seemed to lose confidence in
the Virgin's tampering with natural law for his sake. One day we saw
that the talons were sacrificed, and were told that the Mother of God
had announced to our Brazilian in a dream that she would accept a vow
never to cut his hair in place of the devoted nails.
A few days later our _divoto_ came upon the loggia, where sat a bevy of
ladies of many nations, in a screeching aboriginal rage.
"I sacrificed my vow to you _belles dames_, although I refused it to
Madame la Duchesse de B----," he screamed, "and yet you avoid me. Am I
not an _homme fait_" (certainly our sixty-year-old Brazilian had never
read "Pendennis"), "and better than any of these boys you admire? Do you
imagine the Blessed Virgin will not pay you off for this? Do you think
she will go back on a man like me,--of whom Victor Emanuel himself was
jealous when I rode on the Pincian with Madame la Princesse della
Gr----?"
* * * * *
We thus found many peculiar people in the varied experiences of _nos
pensions_. We found often learning and often culture, but more vulgarity
than we did refinement, more splendor than delicacy of habit, more
blatant ignorance than culture, more _sans gene_ than dignity of manners
and character. It is always thus in any mere "cosmopolitan mess," any
"hotch-potch of nationalities." For the eccentric and obnoxious types
are always and everywhere those most largely _en evidence_, while the
gentle and refined nestles closest to the cool, still, mossy ground,
leaving sunny flaunting to wider blooms and stronger perfumes.