position,--if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. But
already has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive,
and from which an author is judged by the next generation that will
have time to criticise only the most famous of the works this
generation leaves behind it. We can see also that much of Daudet's
later writing is slight and not up to his own high standard, although
even his briefest trifle had always something of his charm, of his
magic, of his seductive grace. We can see how rare an endowment he has
when we note that he is an acute observer of mankind, and yet without
any taint of misanthropy, and that he combines fidelity of reproduction
with poetic elevation.
He is--to say once more what has already been said in these pages more
than once--he is a lover of romance with an unfaltering respect for
reality. We all meet with strange experiences once in our lives, with
"things you could put in a story," as the phrase is; but we none of us
have hairbreadth escapes every morning before breakfast. The romantic
is as natural as anything else; it is the excess of the romantic which
is in bad taste. It is the piling up of the agony which is disgusting.
It is the accumulation upon one impossible hero of many exceptional
adventures which is untrue and therefore immoral. Daudet's most
individual peculiarity was his skill in seizing the romantic aspects of
the commonplace. In one of his talks with his son he said that a
novelist must beware of an excess of lyric enthusiasm; he himself
sought for emotion, and emotion escaped when human proportions were
exceeded. Balance, order, reserve, symmetry, sobriety,--these are the
qualities he was ever praising. The real, the truthful, the
sincere,--this is what he sought always to attain.
Daudet may lack the poignant intensity of Balzac, the lyric sweep of
Hugo, the immense architectural strength of M. Zola, the implacable
disinterestedness of Flaubert, the marvellous concentration of
Maupassant, but he has more humor than any of them and more
charm,--more sympathy than any but Hugo, and more sincerity than
any but Flaubert. His is perhaps a rarer combination than any of
theirs,--the gift of story-telling, the power of character-drawing,
the grasp of emotional situation, the faculty of analysis, the feeling
for form, the sense of style, an unfailing and humane interest in his
fellow-men, and an irresistible desire to tell the truth about life as
he saw it with his own eyes.
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
Columbia University,
in the City of New York.
CONTENTS
Page
I. DR. JENKINS' PATIENTS 7
II. A BREAKFAST ON PLACE VENDÔME 37
III. MEMOIRS OF A CLERK.--A CASUAL GLANCE AT
THE "CAISSE TERRITORIALE" 63
IV. A DÉBUT IN SOCIETY 77
V. THE JOYEUSE FAMILY 103
VI. FELICIA RUYS 128
VII. JANSOULET AT HOME 156
VIII. THE WORK OF BETHLEHEM 172
IX. GRANDMAMMA 193
X. MEMOIRS OF A CLERK.--THE SERVANTS 216
XI. THE FÊTES IN HONOR OF THE BEY 238
XII. A CORSICAN ELECTION 272
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'Take away your flowers, my dear'" _Frontispiece_
In Felicia's Studio _Page_ 26
"'His Excellency, the Duc de Mora!'" " 88
From drawings by Lucius Rossi.
THE NABOB.
A hundred years ago Le Sage wrote these words at the head of _Gil
Blas_:
"As there are persons who cannot read a book without making
personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they
find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded
readers that they will err in making such application of the
portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim
has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."
Without attempting to draw any comparison between Le Sage's novel and
my own, I may say that I should have liked to place a declaration of
the same nature on the first page of _The Nabob_, at the time of its
publication. Several reasons prevented my doing so. In the first place,
the fear that such an advertisement might seem too much like a bait
thrown out to the public, an attempt to compel its attention. Secondly,
I was far from suspecting that a book written with a purely literary
purpose could acquire at a bound such anecdotal importance, and bring
down upon me such a buzzing swarm of complaints. Indeed, such a thing
was never seen before. Not a line of my work, not one of its heroes,
not even a character of secondary importance, but has become a pretext
for allusions and protestations. To no purpose does the author deny the
imputation, swear by all the gods that there is no key to his
novel--every one forges at least one, with whose assistance he claims
to open that combination lock. It must be that all these types have
lived, bless my soul! that they live to-day, exactly identical from
head to foot. Monpavon is So-and-So, is he not? Jenkins' resemblance is
striking. One man is angry because he is in it, another one because he
is not in it; and, beginning with this eagerness for scandal, there is
nothing, not even chance similarities of name, fatal in the modern
novel, descriptions of streets, numbers of houses selected at random,
that has not served to give identity to beings built of a thousand
pieces and, moreover, absolutely imaginary.
The author is too modest to take all this outcry to himself. He knows
how great a part the friendly or treacherous indiscretions of the
newspapers have had therein; and without thanking the former more than
is seemly, without too great ill-will to the latter, he resigns himself
to the stormy prospect as something inevitable, and simply deems
himself in duty bound to affirm that he has never, in twenty years of
upright, literary toil, resorted to that element of success, neither on
this occasion nor on any other. As he turned the leaves of his memory,
which it is every novelist's right and duty to do, he recalled a
strange episode that occurred in cosmopolitan Paris some fifteen years
ago. The romance of a dazzling career that shot swiftly across the
Parisian sky like a meteor evidently served as the frame-work of _The
Nabob_, a picture of manners and morals at the close of the Second
Empire. But around that central situation and certain well-known
incidents, which it was every one's right to study and revive, what a
world of fancy, what inventions, what elaboration, and, above all, what
an outlay of that incessant, universal, almost unconscious observation,
without which there could be no imaginative writers. Furthermore, to
obtain an idea of the "crystallizing" labor involved in transporting
the simplest circumstances from reality to fiction, from life to
romance, one need only open the _Moniteur Officiel_ of February, 1864,
and compare a certain session of the Corps Législatif with the picture
that I give of it in my book. Who could have supposed that, after the
lapse of so many years, this Paris, famous for its short memory, would
recognize the original model in the idealized picture the novelist has
drawn of him, and that voices would be raised to charge with
ingratitude one who most assuredly was not his hero's "assiduous
guest," but simply, in their infrequent meetings, an inquisitive
acquaintance on whose mind the truth is quickly photographed, and who
can never efface from his memory the images that are once imprinted
thereon?
I knew the "real Nabob" in 1864. I occupied at that time a
semi-official position which forced me to exhibit great reserve in my
visits to that luxurious and hospitable Levantine. Later I was
intimately associated with one of his brothers; but at that time the
poor Nabob was far away, struggling through thickets of cruel brambles,
and he was seen at Paris only occasionally. Moreover, it is very
unpleasant for a courteous man to reckon thus with the dead, and to
say: "You are mistaken. Although he was an agreeable host, I was not
often seen at his table." Let it suffice therefore, for me to declare
that, in speaking of Mère Françoise's son as I have done, it has been
my purpose to represent him in a favorable light, and that the charge
of ingratitude seems to me an absurdity from every standpoint. That
this is true is proved by the fact that many people consider the
portrait too flattering, more interesting than nature. To such people
my reply is very simple: "Jansoulet strikes me as an excellent fellow;
but at all events, if I am wrong, you can blame the newspapers for
telling you his real name. I gave you my novel as a novel, good or bad,
without any guaranty of resemblances."
As to Mora, that is another matter. Something has been said of
indiscretion, of political defection. Great Heaven! I have never made a
secret of it. At the age of twenty, I was connected with the office of
the high functionary who has served as my model; and my friends of
those days know what a serious political personage I made. The
Department also must have strange recollections of that eccentric clerk
with the Merovingian beard, who was always the last to arrive and the
first to depart, and who never went up to the duke's private office
except to ask leave of absence; of a naturally independent character,
too, with hands unstained by anything like sycophancy, and so little
reconciled to the Empire that, on the day when the duke proposed to him
to enter his service, the future attaché deemed it his duty to declare
with touching juvenile solemnity that "he was a Legitimist."
"So is the Empress," was His Excellency's reply, and he smiled with
calm and impertinent condescension. I always saw him with that smile on
his face, nor had I any need to look through keyholes; and I have drawn
him so, as he loved to appear, in his Richelieu-Brummel attitude.
History will attend to the statesman. I have exhibited him, introducing
him at long range in my fictitious drama, as the worldly creature that
he was and wished to be, being well assured that in his lifetime it
would not have offended him to be so presented.
This is what I had to say. And now, having made these declarations in
all frankness, let us return to work with all speed. My preface will
seem a little short, and the curious reader will seek in vain therein
the anticipated piquancy. So much the worse for him. Brief as this page
may be, it is three times too long for me. Prefaces have this
disadvantage, that they prevent one from writing books.
ALPHONSE DAUDET.
I.
DOCTOR JENKINS' PATIENTS.
Standing on the stoop of his little house on Rue de Lisbonne, freshly
shaved, with sparkling eye, lips slightly parted, long hair tinged with
gray falling over a broad coat-collar, square-shouldered, robust, and
sound as an oak, the illustrious Irish doctor, Robert Jenkins,
chevalier of the Medjidie and of the distinguished order of Charles
III. of Spain, member of several learned and benevolent societies,
founder and president of the Work of Bethlehem,--in a word, Jenkins,
the Jenkins of the Jenkins Arsenical Pills, that is to say, the
fashionable physician of the year 1864, and the busiest man in Paris,
was on the point of entering his carriage, one morning toward the end
of November, when a window on the first floor looking on the inner
courtyard was thrown open, and a woman's voice timidly inquired:
"Shall you return to breakfast, Robert?"
Oh! what a bright, affectionate smile it was that suddenly illumined
that handsome, apostle-like face, and how readily one could divine, in
the loving good-morning that his eyes sent up to the warm white
peignoir visible behind the parted hangings, one of those tranquil,
undoubting conjugal passions, which custom binds with its most flexible
and strongest bonds.
"No, Madame Jenkins"--he loved to give her thus publicly her title of
legitimate wife, as if he felt a secret satisfaction therein, a sort of
salve to his conscience with respect to the woman who made life so
attractive to him--"No, do not expect me this morning. I am to
breakfast on Place Vendôme."
"Ah! yes, the Nabob," said the lovely Madame Jenkins, with a very
marked inflection of respect for that personage out of the _Thousand
and One Nights_, of whom all Paris had been talking for a month; then,
after a moment's hesitation, she whispered between the heavy hangings,
very softly, very lovingly, for the doctor's ear alone: "Be sure and
not forget what you promised me."
It was probably a promise very difficult to keep, for, at the reminder,
the apostle's brows contracted, his smile froze upon his lips, his
whole face assumed an incredibly harsh expression; but it was a matter
of a moment. The faces of these fashionable physicians become very
expert in lying, by the bedsides of their wealthy patients. With his
most affectionate, most cordial manner, and showing a row of dazzling
teeth, he replied:
"What I promised shall be done, Madame Jenkins. Now, go in at once and
close your window. The mist is cold this morning."
Yes, the mist was cold, but white as snow; and, hovering outside the
windows of the comfortable coupé, it lighted up with soft reflections
the newspaper in the doctor's hands. Over yonder in the dark, crowded,
populous quarters, in the Paris of tradesmen and workmen, they know
nothing of the pretty morning mist that loiters on the broad avenues;
the bustle of the waking hours, the passing and repassing of
market-gardeners' wagons, omnibuses, drays loaded with old iron, soon
chop it and rend it and scatter it. Each passer-by carries away a
little of it on a threadbare coat, a worn muffler, or coarse gloves
rubbing against each other. It drenches the shivering blouses, the
waterproofs thrown over working dresses; it blends with all the
breaths, hot with insomnia or alcohol, buries itself in the depths of
empty stomachs, penetrates the shops which are just opening their
doors, dark courtyards, staircases, where it stands on the balusters
and walls, and fireless garrets. That is why so little of it remains
out-of-doors. But in that open, stately portion of Paris where Dr.
Jenkins' patients lived, on those broad tree-lined boulevards, those
deserted quays, the mist soared immaculate, in innumerable waves, as
light and fleecy as down. It was compact, discreet, almost luxurious,
because the sun, slothful in his rising, was beginning to diffuse soft,
purplish tints, which gave to the mist that enveloped everything, even
the roofs of the rows of mansions, the aspect of a sheet of white
muslin spread over scarlet cloth. One would have said that it was a
great curtain sheltering the long, untroubled sleep of wealth, a thick
curtain behind which nothing could be heard save the soft closing of a
porte-cochère, the rattling of the milkmen's tin cans, the bells of a
herd of asses trotting by, followed by the short, panting breath of
their conductor, and the rumbling of Jenkins' coupé beginning its daily
round.
First of all, to the hôtel de Mora. On the Quai d'Orléans, beside the
Spanish embassy, stood a superb palace with its principal entrance on
Rue de Lille, and a door on the riverside, and long terraces which
formed a continuation of those of the embassy. Between two high,
ivy-covered walls, connected by imposing stone arches, the coupé flew
like an arrow, announced by two strokes of a clanging bell, which
aroused Jenkins from the trance in which the perusal of his newspaper
seemed to have plunged him. Then the wheels rolled less noisily over
the gravel of a vast courtyard and stopped, after a graceful sweep, at
the front steps, above which was spread a circular awning. One could
see indistinctly through the mist half a score of carriages in a line,
and the silhouettes of English grooms leading the duke's saddle-horse
up and down an avenue of acacias, all leafless at that season and
standing naked in their bark. Everything revealed well-ordered,
pompous, assured luxury.
"It makes no difference how early I come, others are always here before
me," said Jenkins, glancing at the line in which his coupé took its
place; but, certain of not being compelled to wait, with head erect and
a tranquil air of authority, he went up the official steps, over which
so many trembling ambitions, so many stumbling anxieties passed every
day.
Even in the reception-room, high-studded, and resonant as a church,
which two huge fires filled with gleaming life, notwithstanding the
great stoves burning day and night, the magnificence of the
establishment burst upon one in warm and heady puffs. There was a
suggestion of the hot-house and the drying-room as well. Great heat and
abundant light; white wainscoting, white marble statues, immense
windows, nothing confined or close, and yet an equable atmosphere well
fitted to encompass the existence of some delicate, over-refined,
nervous mortal. Jenkins expanded in that factitious sunlight of wealth;
he saluted with a "good-morning, boys," the powdered Swiss with the
broad gilt baldric and the footmen in short clothes and blue and gold
livery, all of whom had risen in his honor, touched lightly with his
finger the great cage of monkeys capering about with shrill cries, and
darted whistling up the white marble stairs covered with a carpet soft
and dense as a lawn, to the duke's apartments. Although he had been
coming to the hôtel de Mora for six months, the good doctor had not yet
become hardened to the purely physical impression of cheerfulness and
lightness of heart caused by the atmosphere of that house.
Although it was the abode of the highest functionary of the Empire,
there was nothing to suggest the departments or their boxes of dusty
documents. The duke had consented to accept the exalted post of
Minister of State and President of the Council only on condition that
he need not leave his house; that he should go to the department only
an hour or two a day, long enough to affix his signatures to documents
that required it, and that he should hold his audiences in his bedroom.
At that moment, although it was so early, the salon was full. There
were serious, anxious faces, provincial prefects with shaven lips and
administrative whiskers, something less arrogant in that reception-room
than in their prefectures; magistrates, stern of manner, dignified of
gesture; deputies full of importance, shining lights of finance,
substantial manufacturers from the country; and among them could be
distinguished, here and there, the thin ambitious face of a deputy
councillor to some prefecture, in the garb of a solicitor, black coat
and white cravat; and one and all, standing or seated, alone or in
groups, silently forced with a glance the lock of that lofty door,
closed upon their destinies, from which they would come forth in a
moment, triumphant or crestfallen. Jenkins walked rapidly through the
crowd, and every one followed with an envious eye this new arrival,
whom the usher, in his chain of office, frigid and correct in his
bearing, seated at a table beside the door, greeted with a smile that
was both respectful and familiar.
"Who is with him?" the doctor inquired, pointing to the duke's room.
With the end of his lips, and not without a slightly ironical twinkle
of the eye, the usher murmured a name, which, if they had heard it,
would have angered all those exalted personages who had been waiting an
hour for the _costumier_ of the opera to finish his audience.
A murmur of voices, a flash of light--Jenkins had entered the duke's
presence; _he_ never waited.
Standing with his back to the fire, dressed in a blue fur-trimmed
jacket, which heightened by its soft reflection the strength and
haughtiness of his face, the President of the Council was
superintending the drawing of a Pierrette's costume for the duchess to
wear at her next ball, and giving directions with as much gravity as if
he were dictating the draft of a law.
"Have very fine pleats on the ruff and none at all on the
sleeves.--Good-morning, Jenkins. At your service."
Jenkins bowed and stepped forward into the enormous room, whose
windows, opening on a garden that extended to the Seine, commanded one
of the loveliest views in all Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the
Louvre, interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India
ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a
platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer
screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the
double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to
excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at
random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous shapes, composed the
furniture of that famous room, where the most momentous and the most
trivial questions were discussed with the same gravity of tone and
manner. There was a beautiful portrait of the duchess on the wall; and
on the mantel a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which had
received the honor of a medal of the first class at the recent Salon.
"Well, Jenkins, how goes it this morning?" said His Excellency, walking
to meet the doctor, while the costumer was collecting his fashion
plates, which were strewn about over all the chairs.
"And you, my dear duke? I fancied that you were a little pale last
night at the Variétés."
"Nonsense! I was never so well. Your pills have a most amazing effect
on me. I feel so lively, so vigorous. When I think how completely
foundered I was six months ago!"
Jenkins, without speaking, had put his great head against the
minister's jacket, at the spot where the heart beats in the majority of
mankind. He listened a moment while His Excellency continued to talk in
the indolent, listless tone which was one of his chief claims to
distinction.
"Whom were you with last night, doctor? That great bronzed Tartar who
laughed so loud at the front of your box?"
"That was the Nabob, Monsieur le Duc. The famous Jansoulet, who is so
much talked about just now."
"I might have suspected it. The whole audience was looking at him. The
actresses played at him all the time. Do you know him? What sort of a
man is he?"
"I know him. That is, I am treating him. Thanks, my dear duke, that's
all. Everything is all right there. When he arrived in Paris a month
ago, the change of climate disturbed him a little. He sent for me, and
since then has taken a great fancy to me. All that I know of him is
that he has a colossal fortune, made in Tunis, in the Bey's service,
that he has a loyal heart, a generous mind in which ideas of
humanity--"
"At Tunis?" the duke interposed, being naturally far from sentimental
and humanitarian. "Then, why the name of Nabob?"
"Bah! Parisians don't look so deep as that. In their eyes every rich
stranger is a nabob, no matter where he comes from. This one, however,
has just the physique for the part, coppery complexion, eyes like coals
of fire, and in addition a gigantic fortune, of which he makes, I have
no hesitation in saying, a most noble and most intelligent use. I owe
it to him"--here the doctor assumed an air of modesty--"I owe it to him
that I have succeeded at last in inaugurating the Work of Bethlehem for
nursing infants, which a morning newspaper that I was looking over just
now--the _Messager_, I think,--calls 'the great philanthropic idea of
the century.'"
The duke glanced in an absent-minded way at the sheet the doctor handed
him. He was not the man to be taken in by paid puffs.
"This Monsieur Jansoulet must be very wealthy," he said coldly. "He is
a partner in Cardailhac's theatre. Monpavon persuades him to pay his
debts, Bois-l'Héry stocks his stable for him and old Schwalbach
furnishes a picture gallery. All that costs money."
Jenkins began to laugh.
"What can you expect, my dear duke; you are an object of great interest
to the poor Nabob. Coming to Paris with a firm purpose to become a
Parisian, a man of the world, he has taken you for his model in
everything, and I do not conceal from you that he would be very glad to
study his model at closer quarters."
"I know, I know, Monpavon has already asked leave to bring him here.
But I prefer to wait and see. One must be on one's guard with these
great fortunes that come from such a distance. _Mon Dieu_, I don't
say, you know, that if I should meet him elsewhere than in my own
house, at the theatre, or in somebody's salon--"
"It happens that Madame Jenkins intends to give a little party next
month. If you would do us the honor--"
"I shall be very glad to go to your house, my dear doctor, and if the
Nabob should be there, I should not object to his being presented to
me."
At that moment the usher opened the door.