SUPPER AT THE BELLE ÉTOILE
The French army were in a rather savage temper just then. The English,
especially, had but scant courtesy to expect at their hands. It was
plain, however, that the cadaverous gentleman who had just apostrophized
the heraldry of the Count's carriage, with such mysterious acrimony, had
not intended any of his malevolence for me. He was stung by some old
recollection, and had marched off, seething with fury.
I had received one of those unacknowledged shocks which startle us,
when, fancying ourselves perfectly alone, we discover on a sudden that
our antics have been watched by a spectator, almost at our elbow. In
this case the effect was enhanced by the extreme repulsiveness of the
face, and, I may add, its proximity, for, as I think, it almost touched
mine. The enigmatical harangue of this person, so full of hatred and
implied denunciation, was still in my ears. Here at all events was new
matter for the industrious fancy of a lover to work upon.
It was time now to go to the table-d'hôte. Who could tell what lights
the gossip of the supper-table might throw upon the subject that
interested me so powerfully!
I stepped into the room, my eyes searching the little assembly, about
thirty people, for the persons who specially interested me. It was not
easy to induce people, so hurried and overworked as those of the Belle
Étoile just now, to send meals up to one's private apartments, in the
midst of this unparalleled confusion; and, therefore, many people who
did not like it might find themselves reduced to the alternative of
supping at the table-d'hôte or starving.
The Count was not there, nor his beautiful companion; but the Marquis
d'Harmonville, whom I hardly expected to see in so public a place,
signed, with a significant smile, to a vacant chair beside himself. I
secured it, and he seemed pleased, and almost immediately entered into
conversation with me.
"This is, probably, your first visit to France?" he said.
I told him it was, and he said:
"You must not think me very curious and impertinent; but Paris is about
the most dangerous capital a high-spirited and generous young gentleman
could visit without a Mentor. If you have not an experienced friend as a
companion during your visit--." He paused.
I told him I was not so provided, but that I had my wits about me; that
I had seen a good deal of life in England, and that I fancied human
nature was pretty much the same in all parts of the world. The Marquis
shook his head, smiling.
"You will find very marked differences, notwithstanding," he said.
"Peculiarities of intellect and peculiarities of character, undoubtedly,
do pervade different nations; and this results, among the criminal
classes, in a style of villainy no less peculiar. In Paris the class who
live by their wits is three or four times as great as in London; and
they live much better; some of them even splendidly. They are more
ingenious than the London rogues; they have more animation and
invention, and the dramatic faculty, in which your countrymen are
deficient, is everywhere. These invaluable attributes place them upon a
totally different level. They can affect the manners and enjoy the
luxuries of people of distinction. They live, many of them, by play."
"So do many of our London rogues."
"Yes, but in a totally different way. They are the _habitués_ of
certain gaming-tables, billiard-rooms, and other places, including your
races, where high play goes on; and by superior knowledge of chances, by
masking their play, by means of confederates, by means of bribery, and
other artifices, varying with the subject of their imposture, they rob
the unwary. But here it is more elaborately done, and with a really
exquisite _finesse_. There are people whose manners, style,
conversation, are unexceptionable, living in handsome houses in the best
situations, with everything about them in the most refined taste, and
exquisitely luxurious, who impose even upon the Parisian bourgeois, who
believe them to be, in good faith, people of rank and fashion, because
their habits are expensive and refined, and their houses are frequented
by foreigners of distinction, and, to a degree, by foolish young
Frenchmen of rank. At all these houses play goes on. The ostensible host
and hostess seldom join in it; they provide it simply to plunder their
guests, by means of their accomplices, and thus wealthy strangers are
inveigled and robbed."
"But I have heard of a young Englishman, a son of Lord Rooksbury, who
broke two Parisian gaming tables only last year."
"I see," he said, laughing, "you are come here to do likewise. I,
myself, at about your age, undertook the same spirited enterprise. I
raised no less a sum than five hundred thousand francs to begin with; I
expected to carry all before me by the simple expedient of going on
doubling my stakes. I had heard of it, and I fancied that the sharpers,
who kept the table, knew nothing of the matter. I found, however, that
they not only knew all about it, but had provided against the
possibility of any such experiments; and I was pulled up before I had
well begun by a rule which forbids the doubling of an original stake
more than four times consecutively."
"And is that rule in force still?" I inquired, chapfallen.
He laughed and shrugged, "Of course it is, my young friend. People who
live by an art always understand it better than an amateur. I see you
had formed the same plan, and no doubt came provided."
I confessed I had prepared for conquest upon a still grander scale.
I had arrived with a purse of thirty thousand pounds sterling.
"Any acquaintance of my very dear friend, Lord R----, interests me; and,
besides my regard for him, I am charmed with you; so you will pardon
all my, perhaps, too officious questions and advice."
I thanked him most earnestly for his valuable counsel, and begged that
he would have the goodness to give me all the advice in his power.
"Then if you take my advice," said he, "you will leave your money in the
bank where it lies. Never risk a Napoleon in a gaming house. The night I
went to break the bank I lost between seven and eight thousand pounds
sterling of your English money; and my next adventure, I had obtained an
introduction to one of those elegant gaming-houses which affect to be
the private mansions of persons of distinction, and was saved from ruin
by a gentleman whom, ever since, I have regarded with increasing respect
and friendship. It oddly happens he is in this house at this moment. I
recognized his servant, and made him a visit in his apartments here, and
found him the same brave, kind, honorable man I always knew him. But
that he is living so entirely out of the world, now, I should have made
a point of introducing you. Fifteen years ago he would have been the man
of all others to consult. The gentleman I speak of is the Comte de St.
Alyre. He represents a very old family. He is the very soul of honor,
and the most sensible man in the world, except in one particular."
"And that particular?" I hesitated. I was now deeply interested.
"Is that he has married a charming creature, at least five-and-forty
years younger than himself, and is, of course, although I believe
absolutely without cause, horribly jealous."
"And the lady?"
"The Countess is, I believe, in every way worthy of so good a man," he
answered, a little dryly. "I think I heard her sing this evening."
"Yes, I daresay; she is very accomplished." After a few moments' silence
he continued.
"I must not lose sight of you, for I should be sorry, when next you meet
my friend Lord R----, that you had to tell him you had been pigeoned in
Paris. A rich Englishman as you are, with so large a sum at his Paris
bankers, young, gay, generous, a thousand ghouls and harpies will be
contending who shall be the first to seize and devour you."
At this moment I received something like a jerk from the elbow of the
gentleman at my right. It was an accidental jog, as he turned in his
seat.
"On the honor of a soldier, there is no man's flesh in this company
heals so fast as mine."
The tone in which this was spoken was harsh and stentorian, and almost
made me bounce. I looked round and recognized the officer whose large
white face had half scared me in the inn-yard, wiping his mouth
furiously, and then with a gulp of Magon, he went on:
"No one! It's not blood; it is ichor! it's miracle! Set aside stature,
thew, bone, and muscle--set aside courage, and by all the angels of
death, I'd fight a lion naked, and dash his teeth down his jaws with my
fist, and flog him to death with his own tail! Set aside, I say, all
those attributes, which I am allowed to possess, and I am worth six men
in any campaign, for that one quality of healing as I do--rip me up,
punch me through, tear me to tatters with bomb-shells, and nature has me
whole again, while your tailor would fine--draw an old coat.
_Parbleu_! gentlemen, if you saw me naked, you would laugh! Look at
my hand, a saber-cut across the palm, to the bone, to save my head,
taken up with three stitches, and five days afterwards I was playing
ball with an English general, a prisoner in Madrid, against the wall of
the convent of the Santa Maria de la Castita! At Arcola, by the great
devil himself! that was an action. Every man there, gentlemen, swallowed
as much smoke in five minutes as would smother you all in this room! I
received, at the same moment, two musket balls in the thighs, a grape
shot through the calf of my leg, a lance through my left shoulder, a
piece of a shrapnel in the left deltoid, a bayonet through the cartilage
of my right ribs, a cut-cut that carried away a pound of flesh from my
chest, and the better part of a congreve rocket on my forehead. Pretty
well, ha, ha! and all while you'd say bah! and in eight days and a half
I was making a forced march, without shoes, and only one gaiter, the
life and soul of my company, and as sound as a roach!"
"Bravo! Bravissimo! Per Bacco! un gallant' uomo!" exclaimed, in a
martial ecstasy, a fat little Italian, who manufactured toothpicks and
wicker cradles on the island of Notre Dame; "your exploits shall resound
through Europe! and the history of those wars should be written in your
blood!"
"Never mind! a trifle!" exclaimed the soldier. "At Ligny, the other day,
where we smashed the Prussians into ten hundred thousand milliards of
atoms, a bit of a shell cut me across the leg and opened an artery. It
was spouting as high as the chimney, and in half a minute I had lost
enough to fill a pitcher. I must have expired in another minute, if I
had not whipped off my sash like a flash of lightning, tied it round my
leg above the wound, whipt a bayonet out of the back of a dead Prussian,
and passing it under, made a tourniquet of it with a couple of twists,
and so stayed the haemorrhage and saved my life. But, _sacrebleu_!
gentlemen, I lost so much blood, I have been as pale as the bottom of a
plate ever since. No matter. A trifle. Blood well spent, gentlemen." He
applied himself now to his bottle of _vin ordinaire_.
The Marquis had closed his eyes, and looked resigned and disgusted,
while all this was going on.
"_Garçon_," said the officer, for the first time speaking in a low
tone over the back of his chair to the waiter; "who came in that
traveling carriage, dark yellow and black, that stands in the middle of
the yard, with arms and supporters emblazoned on the door, and a red
stork, as red as my facings?"
The waiter could not say.
The eye of the eccentric officer, who had suddenly grown grim and
serious, and seemed to have abandoned the general conversation to other
people, lighted, as it were accidentally, on me.
"Pardon me, Monsieur," he said. "Did I not see you examining the panel
of that carriage at the same time that I did so, this evening? Can you
tell me who arrived in it?"
"I rather think the Count and Countess de St. Alyre."
"And are they here, in the Belle Étoile?" he asked.
"They have got apartments upstairs," I answered.
He started up, and half pushed his chair from the table. He quickly sat
down again, and I could hear him _sacré_-ing and muttering to
himself, and grinning and scowling. I could not tell whether he was
alarmed or furious.
I turned to say a word or two to the Marquis, but he was gone. Several
other people had dropped out also, and the supper party soon broke up.
Two or three substantial pieces of wood smoldered on the hearth, for the
night had turned out chilly. I sat down by the fire in a great armchair
of carved oak, with a marvelously high back that looked as old as the
days of Henry IV.
"_Garçon_," said I, "do you happen to know who that officer is?"
"That is Colonel Gaillarde, Monsieur."
"Has he been often here?"
"Once before, Monsieur, for a week; it is a year since."
"He is the palest man I ever saw."
"That is true, Monsieur; he has been often taken for a _revenant_."
"Can you give me a bottle of really good Burgundy?"
"The best in France, Monsieur."
"Place it, and a glass by my side, on this table, if you please. I may
sit here for half-an-hour."
"Certainly, Monsieur."
I was very comfortable, the wine excellent, and my thoughts glowing and
serene. "Beautiful Countess! Beautiful Countess! shall we ever be better
acquainted?"