unambiguous noises coming through that door, there behind my armoire; a
strident laugh, and a few hardy exclamations, that could leave me in
no doubt as to the sex and quality of my fellow-lodger. An hour or two
later I encountered Zizi on the landing; and the concierge informed me
that she was the tenant of the next room to my own. Such a neighbourship
would horrify you in London or New York: but we think nothing of
accidents much worse than that, here in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Afterwards, night and morning, and more especially in those small hours
that are properly both or neither, I would hear Zizi’s laughter beyond
our dividing door; her laughter, or her thin little voice raised in a
stupid song, or the murmur of light talk, that would sometimes leap to
the pitch of anger, for I suspect that Zizi’s temper was uncertain;
and then, rare at first, but recurring more and more frequently, till it
became quite the dominant note, her hard, dry, racking little cough.
Elinor was in Paris about this time. To my great joy, she had come to
pass the autumn, and perhaps the winter too; and she was very anxious
that I should show her something of the seamy side of life here. She had
taken lodgings on the other—the right and wrong—bank of the river;
and every afternoon, my day’s work done, I would join her there, and
we would go off together for little excursions into Bohemia. I happened
to be extraordinarily flush for the moment; I had nearly two hundred
pounds of ready money; and this was a help. Of course I took her to the
Moulin Rouge, which disgusted her, as I had warned her that it would;
and to the Chat Noir, which amused her; and I was fortunate enough
to get two seats for a performance at the Théâtre Libre, which
both amused and disgusted her at once; and I introduced her to the
jerry-built splendours of Bullier; and we took long delightful walks
together in the Luxembourg, where she would feed the sparrows with
crumbs of unnutritious bread; and we lunched, dined, and supped together
in an infinite number of droll restaurants; and now and then we went
slumming in the far north, or east, or south; and Pousset’s knew us,
and Vachette’s; and sometimes,’ for the fun or the convenience of
the thing, we would drop in among the demi-gomme of the Café de la
Paix: and she would have been altogether happy and contented save for
a single unfulfilled desire. She wanted to make acquaintance with some
member of the sisterhood of Sainte Grisette; she wanted, as a literary
woman, to see what such an one would be like; to convince herself
whether or not they were as black as I had painted them, for I had
painted them very black indeed.
“Well,” I said at last, “you’ll be sorry for it, but since you
won’t take no for an answer, I’ll see what can be done.”
Then one afternoon I was waiting for her by appointment, in that very
Café de la Paix, when whom should I see enter, and ensconce themselves
in a back room, but my neighbour Zizi, and her friend of the ribbons,
Madame Germaine. “When Elinor arrives,” I thought, “and if her
heart is still set on that sort of thing, I will introduce Zizi to her:
for Zizi is as nearly innocuous as a microbe of her variety very well
can be.” Elinor arrived a moment later: beautiful, strong, gracious,
and pure as a May morning: and I proposed the measure to her; and
her instant decision was, “Oh, yes, by all means.” So she and I
penetrated into the backroom, and took the table next to Zizi’s;
and presently Zizi gave me a sly little covert glance and smile; and
therewith I invited her and her companion to come and sit with us.
“Madame permits?” demanded Zizi, raising her eyebrows, astonished
at such magnanimity on the part of a fellow-woman. Elinor smiled assent;
and the two étudiantes rose and placed themselves before our own slab
of marble. I asked them what they would take; of course they commanded
each a menthe à l’eau. But though I tried to suit the conversation to
their taste and level, they were not perfectly at ease. The presence of
Elinor, whom, for all that she was alone with a man in the Café de la
Paix, they could perceive with half an eye to be a bird of a totally
different feather to their own, embarrassed them a good deal. Their
desire to appear well before her, their determined best behaviour, tied
their tongues, and made them surpassingly dull; for when they are not
flavoured lavishly with Gallic salt, they are unimaginably insipid,
these little soubrettes in the comedy of evil. However, before we broke
up, I had engaged them to breakfast with us on the Sunday to follow. We
were all to meet at Fousset’s in the Boulevard at noon, and thence
we would proceed to the Abbaye de Thélème, where I would bespeak a
cabinet particulier.
The Abbaye de Thélème is the riskiest of restaurants in a most risky
quarter: but Elinor wanted to see the seamy side of Parisian life, and I
was resolved to satisfy her once for all with a drastic measure of it.
“Voyez-vous,” I heard Zizi boasting to her, in a whisper, “it
is forbidden for women to come alone to this café. But I am an honest
girl. The gérant knows me. They make no objection to me or to my
friends. Adieu, madame. Au revoir, proche,”—this last to me. Proche,
indeed! But in the Latin Quarter the word is often used as a substitute
for voisin. Then Zizi took her small self off, followed by Germaine.
“Well,” I queried, as soon as Elinor and I were alone, “is your
thirst for experience satisfied? Are you happy at last?”
“I am overcome with bewilderment. Who would have known that they
weren’t simply two ordinary bourgeoises? There wasn’t anything rowdy
or shocking about them.”
“What! The rouge? The ribbons? The bulging eyes?”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that one. I didn’t care much for her.
Still, even she looked no worse than—well, a shop-girl. But the
other, the little one. I shouldn’t have been surprised to meet her
anywhere,—at Madame X———’s, at Madame de Z———-’.. She
was dressed so quietly, in such good taste. Her manners were so subdued,
almost English. And her face,—it’s a face that would strike you
anywhere. So delicate, refined, so quaint and interesting. She
doesn’t rouge. And such lovely hair! Oh, I am sure she is full of good
qualities. What a shame and horror it is that... that... It makes one
feel inclined to loathe your whole sex.”
Elinor’s commentary at this point became a lamentation, which it would
be irrelevant to repeat. “I must get her to tell me her story,” was
its conclusion.
“Oh, she’ll tell you her story fast enough, only, I warn you, it
will be a pack of lies. The truth isn’t in them, those little puppets.
Don’t cherish any illusions about her. The most one can say for her is
that she’s a fairly harmless example of a desperately bad class. The
grisette of Musset, of Henry Murger, exists no longer, even if she ever
did exist. To-day Zizi was on her good behaviour. Sunday, I hope for
the sake of science, she’ll get off it, and be her wicked little self.
Yes, her face is remarkable, but it’s an absurd accident, a slip of
nature: not one of the qualities it would seem to indicate is anywhere
in her—neither wit nor humour nor emotion. She’s just a little
undersized cat; not a kitten: she has none of the innocent gentleness of
a kitten: an undergrown, hard, sprightly little cat. However, she can be
amusing enough when she’s roused; and on Sunday we are likely to have
a merry breakfast.” But herein I proved myself a false prophet.
We were still at the hors d’ouvres when Zizi began to cry. She had
coughed; and Elinor had asked her if she had a cold; and that question
precipitated a flood of tears. This was dispiriting. It is always
dispiriting to see one of these creatures anything but gay and flippant:
serious feeling is so crudely, so garishly, at variance with your
preconception of them, with the mood in which you approach them. And yet
they cry a good deal,—mostly, however, tears of mere spite or vexed
vanity; or, it may be, of hysteria, for they are frightfully subject
to what they call crises de nerfs. But Zizi’s tears now were of a
different water. Had she a cold? Oh, no, it was worse than that. The
doctor said her lungs were affected; and if she didn’t speedily change
her mode of life, she must go into a decline. And this, if you please,
was the dish laid on our table, there in the vulgar cabinet particulier
of that shady restaurant, under the crystal gasalier, and between the
four diamond-scratched looking-glasses that covered the walls,—this
was the dish served to us even before the oysters; and you may imagine,
therefore, with what appetite we attacked the good things that came
after. The doctor had told her that she must absolutely suspend her
dissipations for at least a six-month, and rest, and soigner herself,
and “feed up,” or she would surely become poitrinaire. “And do
nothing? How can I? Faut vivre, parbleu!” Her present friend-in-chief,
she explained, was at the School of Mines; his pension from his family
only amounted to two hundred and fifty francs a month; he was all that
is good, he would do his utmost for her; but she couldn’t live on what
he could spare her out of two hundred and fifty francs a month.
With this she went off in a regular fit of hysterics; and Elinor had
her hands full, trying to bring her round. Hysterics are infectious;
and Madame Germaine sat in her place, and sobbed helplessly,—not in
sympathy, but by infection,—whilst her tears fell into her plate.
I saw that Elinor was tremendously distressed, and I cursed the
misinspired moment when I had arranged this feast. “Terrible,
terrible!” she murmured, shaking her head and looking at me with
pained eyes. When at length Zizi was calm again, Elinor asked, “You
won’t mind if I speak with Monsieur in English?” and then said to
me, “This is quite too dreadful. We must do something for her. We must
save her from consumption; and perhaps at the same time we can redeem
her, make a good woman of her. She has it in her.”
I respected Elinor’s sincerity too much to laugh at the utopian
quality of her optimism: so I waived the latter of her remarks, and
replied only to the former. “I should be glad to do anything possible
for her, but I don’t exactly see what is possible. Besides, I don’t
believe she’s threatened with consumption, any more than I am. This
is a pose, to make herself interestingly pathetic in your eyes, and get
some money. You’ll see—she’s going to strike me for fifty francs.
It’s the sum they usually ask for. And she wants to win your sanction
to the gift beforehand.”
Surely enough, Zizi lifted up her tearful face, its features all puffed
out and empurpled, and said at this very moment, in a whimper that
ought to have hardened the softest heart, “If Monsieur could give me
a little money—a couple of louis—a fifty-franc note? I could buy
medicines and things.”
“Nonsense,” said I, brutally; “you’d buy chiffons and things.”
She laughed without offence, and gave me a knowing glance, but
protested, “Non, sérieusement, je veux me soigner.” Then she turned
to Elinor, and pleaded coaxingly, “Madame, tell him to give me fifty
francs—pour me soigner.”
“No,” Elinor replied; “he won’t give you fifty francs, but this
is what he will do, what we will do. If you will obey the doctor’s
orders, send your friends about their business, and lead a perfectly
regular life for the time being, we will undertake to see that you want
for nothing during the next six months. After that, nous verrons! For
the present, that is what we offer you: six months in which to give
yourself every chance for a cure. Only, during those six months—faut
etre sage.”
Of course, Zizi began to cry again; and, of course, she could do nothing
less than accept Madame’s proposition with some show of effusion:
though I mistrusted the whole-heartedness of her acceptance; she would
much rather have pocketed the fifty francs, and had done with us.
Elinor and she fell to discussing sundry practical details. Good and
abundant food, warm clothing, healthful lodgings: these were the three
desiderata that Elinor prescribed. As for the last, Zizi assured us that
she already had them—“since I live in the same house as Monsieur,”
she explained, convincingly.
But Elinor was not convinced. “Do your rooms face south?” was the
question she insisted on.
Now Zizi, about the points of the compass, and such abstruse matters
generally, had no more idea than I have of Sanskrit; yet, “Oh, yes, my
room gives to the noon,” she answered, without turning a hair.
“And, anyhow, it is a very nice room.—Come and see,” she added,
impulsively. “I should be charmed to show you.”
“I suppose it will be all right?” Elinor asked of me.
“Oh, no worse than the rest,” I acquiesced.
And so we took a cab, and were driven to the Rue St. Jacques. Madame
Germaine parted from us at the threshold of the eating-house. “I have
an engagement in the Parc Monceau,” she informed us, in the candour of
her heart. Zizi jeered at her a good deal as we drove across the town.
“Her ribbons—hein? Her goggle-eyes! Not at all comme il faut. But
a brave girl. She loves me like a sister. Monsieur smiles. No, word of
honour, it is not as you think.” If I had thought as Zizi thought I
thought, I shouldn’t have smiled; but she, of course, couldn’t be
expected to understand that. “Poor Germaine! Her real name is Gobbeau,
Marthe Gobbeau. She is stupid and ugly, but she is good-natured,”
which was more, perhaps, than one could say with truth of her little
critic. “Her mother is an ouvreuse in the Théâtre de Belleville.”
“And her father?” queried Elinor.
“Her father!” cried Zizi, and she was about to continue, when it
occurred to her to respect Elinor’s unsophistication. She gave me
a furtive wink, and said, gravely, “Oh, her father lives in
the twenty-first arrondissement.” Elinor was not aware that the
arrondissements of Paris number only twenty, and so she could not
realise either the double meaning or the antiquity of this evasion.
Zizi’s room was precisely like a thousand other rooms in the Latin
Quarter, though rather more luxurious than most: much more so than mine,
for example. To begin with, she had a carpet, her private property, a
sober-hued Brussels carpet, that covered almost the entire floor; then
she had four chairs, each practicable and reasonably fresh-looking; her
bed was enriched by a counterpane of crimson silk, and crimson too were
the hangings over it. The walls were decorated in the prevailing style
of her class and epoch, with tambourines, toy trumpets, empty bonbon
boxes, and so forth, hung from tin-tacks. But the chief impression that
you got of the room was one of cleanliness and order: Zizi, still for
all slips of hers, was French.
“How very neat it is, how exquisitely neat,” Elinor murmured, in
evident surprise.
Zizi smiled complacently,—with what they call proper pride. “Pas
mal, hein? Asses chic, eh?” she questioned, whilst her eyes snapped
triumphantly.
“Yes,” Elinor admitted, “it is very nice, but—it looks due
north.”
And she proceeded to develop her favourite hygienic thesis, to the
effect that no one could keep well who lived in a room that had no sun,
the application being that Zizi must change her quarters. To-morrow,
Monday, she must find a room that really did “give to the noon;” and
at three o’clock we would meet her at the Vachette, and go with her to
inspect it. Of course we were to pay the rent.
“My dear Elinor,” I said, when we had taken leave of Zizi, “I
am sorry to discourage you, but your benevolent schemes will come to
nothing. She won’t change her lodgings, and she won’t change her
mode of life. We would much better have given her a little ready cash,
and got rid of her. An endeavour to be respectable, if only ad interim
as it were, would weary her too much. You rashly promised to see
that she wanted for nothing. Can you see that she has plenty of
excitement?—which is the breath of her nostrils. To-morrow she will
draw back; she will tell you that on the whole she finds she can’t
accept your bigger offer, and will renew her request for fifty
francs.”
“If I didn’t know you weren’t, I should think you were a perfectly
soulless cynic,” was Elinor’s rejoinder.
But, cynic or no cynic, I was right. Elinor, in agreeing to meet Zizi at
Vachettes on the morrow, had forgotten a previous engagement, which
she remembered afterwards; so I went to the rendezvous alone, charged,
however, with full powers to act as I might deem best. Zizi was a
quarter-hour late, but she didn’t mind that, apparently; at any rate
she vouchsafed no apology for having kept me waiting. She made haste
to let me know that she couldn’t possibly change her lodgings; she
hadn’t even looked for others: her mother wouldn’t hear of it, for
one thing; and then—her friends? They all have mothers, somehow or
other, though the notion seems incongruous: yet I suppose it’s only
natural. Zizi’s was a purple-faced old sage femme from the purlieus of
‘Montmartre. She had taken counsel with her mother, she said, and
her mother wouldn’t hear of her changing her abode. And then—her
friends? When they came to see her, and found that she had moved,
they would be displeased; they wouldn’t follow her up. Business is
business, after all, but in our youth we were taught that friendship
isn’t. Anyhow, Zizi foresaw herself quite friendless if she moved.
“But my room is very well. If you and Madame want to support me, why
not support me there?”
I echoed, rather feebly perhaps, Elinor’s lecture on the advantages of
sunlight; and in any case, I told her, desirous as Madame and I were
to “support her,” we positively declined to permit ourselves that
indulgence, unless she took a sunny room: what we really wished was to
help her to get well; we were persuaded that she couldn’t get well in
a northern aspect; and we had no sort of eagerness to throw our money
from the windows. It was pretty clear to me that she had begun to
distrust our motives: such unaccustomed kindness, such reckless
extravagance, bore on their face a suspicious look.
“Et cette dame?” she queried. “Cette anglaise? Qu est-ce qu’elle
me veut? Elle est ta maîtresse, hein? Femme mariée, eh? Et toi, avec
ton petit air Sainte-Nitouche, va! I’ll tell you what: give me some
money, fifty francs, to buy medicines, to pay a doctor. Come on! Fifty
francs—it isn’t much.”
“Yes, it is, my dear,” I retorted. “It’s a jolly lot, as you
know very well. But still, if you prefer the part, when you might have
the whole, that is your affair; and so I’m going to give it to you.
Only, mind, this will begin and end the whole transaction. We give
you fifty francs, but we will never give you another penny.” Then I
smuggled a fifty-franc note into her pretty little hand,—smuggled it,
so that the waiters and the other consommateurs shouldn’t see.
But Zizi was troubled by no such false shame. She smoothed the note
out, and held it up to the light, scrutinising it rigorously. Having
satisfied herself that it wasn’t a counterfeit, she crammed it into
a small silver purse, closed the purse with a snap, and buried it in
an occult female pocket. At last she turned her face towards mine,
and said, “T’es bon, toi. That will bring you luck. Kiss me.” I
suggested that the café was rather too public a place for kissing. The
fifty-franc note radiated its genial warmth throughout her small frame,
and she quite “chippered up,” and laughed and chatted with me very
pleasantly. “Why do you never come to see me,—since we live in the
same house?” she was good enough to ask. And she tried to pump me, in
a naughty insinuating way, about Elinor, her benefactress.
But Zizi was launched upon her descent into Avernus. Her cough got worse
and worse; her cheeks grew hollow, her whole face dragged-looking; her
figure lost its elasticity. She took to rouge and powder, and introduced
falsetto notes into her toilet. With her failing health, her friends
began to fail her too: coughs and fevers and eyes unnaturally bright are
disturbing elements, and put a strain on friendship. She had to seek for
new ones, and was to be met with a good deal in the Boulevards. Whenever
she spied Elinor and me on her horizon, she bore down upon us, and
begged for money: and she was always spying us, always turning up; it
seemed as if she must have dogged our footsteps. Thus you cast your
bread upon the waters, and it comes back to you in the fulness of time.
She was French, as I have remarked before: but she showed no discretion,
and no respect for places or occasions. Not infrequently, therefore,
her familiar hailings of us were embarrassing. By and by she acquired a
light-hearted habit of entering the Vachette, ordering what she would,
and leaving it to be scored to my account; and I had to remonstrate. At
last she found out Elinor’s address, and called upon her. But Elinor
was going to London the next day; so nothing came of that. This was in
December; and early in the same month Zizi began to keep her room. She
was probably very ill; she coughed perpetually. She coughed a good deal
when it wasn’t necessary, and only racked without relieving her poor
chest, to say nothing of her neighbours’ nerves. I used to urge her to
control her cough, not to cough when she could help it; but self-control
of any sort was beyond her tradition; and she would always cough at the
slightest impulse. Once in a great while, if she was a little better,
and the weather favoured, she would put on her rouge and her finery, and
go out,—to “pécher à la ligne,” as she expressed it. Then, on
her re-entrance, I would hear forlorn attempts at song and laughter,
which would inevitably end in long, pitiful fits of coughing.
And now it is all over; Zizi is dead; and I am as much shocked as if the
event were inconsequent and unexpected, as if she hadn’t been coughing
her life out steadily these three months past. Ah, well, the difficulty
is to reconcile one’s idea of Zizi with anything not vain and hollow
and make-believe, with anything natural and sincere; and death is so
hideously natural, so horribly sincere. For the first time since her
birth, I dare say, she has done a sincere thing, a real thing,—she has
died!
THE PRODIGAL FATHER.
His wife had died some five and twenty years before, leaving him with
an infant son upon his hands; and she had made him promise that the boy
should be brought up as a “good American.”
He, poor man, was a desperately bad one. The very word, for instance,
as he pronounced it, forgot to rhyme with hurricane; and, lest anybody
should be disposed to look indulgently upon the said offence, I hasten
to add that he persistently sounded the e in clerk unlike the i in
dirk. Besides (the homeliness of the detail may be forgiven to
its significance), he suffered his nose, as an instrument for the
communication of ideas, to sink into disuse and atrophy.
And he lived in London, and brazenly acknowledged that he liked it
better than New York.
A serious old friend, writing from oversea to remonstrate with him,
spoke of duty and patriotism, and got this pert reply:—
“Duty, my dear, is the last weakness of great minds; and patriotism,
as manifested at any rate by such travelling fellow-countrymen of ours
as I have met on British soil, patriotism corrupts good manners. Of the
patriots themselves I may say, as of divers birds, orators, operas, and
women, that they should be seen perhaps, but certainly not heard; and if
I could not talk, I should not wish to live.”
As a matter of principle all this rather shocked his young American wife
(a Massachusetts girl, who had been bred in the straitest sect of the
national religion), though in practice she was nearly as shameless as
himself. Anyhow, she submitted cheerfully to a residence in England, and
forbore to draw comparisons;—indeed, if she had drawn them, it is not
inconceivable that they might have redounded less to the disparagement
of the elder country than one could have desired.. But then she fell
ill, and came to die, and was smitten with home-sickness; and fond
memories of the land of her girlhood begot a sort of dim remorse for the
small place she had lately let it hold in her affections; and groping
blindly for something in the nature of atonement, she made her husband
promise that the boy should be educated as a good American, in an
American school, and at Harvard College.
Afterwards, he transported the baby and its nurse to Beacon Street in
Boston, and deposited them with the dead lady’s parents. And as soon
as he decently could be returned to England; and twenty-five years
passed during which neither father nor son crossed the Atlantic.
This I am afraid must be confessed, that he was a very, very frivolous
young person;—he carried his age as jauntily as his gloves and his
walking-stick, and would have been genuinely surprised if anybody had
spoken of him as otherwise than young, though he was fifty-seven.