THE GOOD ADVICE OF M. DE NANI.
“Tell me, my dear boy,” bleated old De Nani, who wanted to get the
affair over and done with before dinner, “could you till the end
of next month, when my rents from Normandy will be due—could you
accommodate me with a little loan?”
“Yes, rather,” said Toto. “How much?”
“Seven hundred and fifty francs would save me the necessity of
approaching a money-lender,” said the old fellow, trembling in his
shoes at the amount for which he was asking. “But——”
Toto stopped under the lamp at the corner of the Rue de Courcelles
where it cuts the Boulevard Haussmann. He took a note-case from his
pocket.
“Here’s a note for a thousand. You can let me have it some time. I
haven’t anything smaller.”
“A million million thanks!” cried De Nani, grabbing the note and
gritting his false teeth to think that he might have asked for two
thousand and obtained it just as easily—“a million thanks! Why, my dear
boy, what a doleful yawn! One might fancy you bored.”
“I am, to death.”
“May I make you a little prescription?” inquired the old man, in whom
the prospect of the coming dinner operated like an elixir of youth.
“A prescription for ennui? Yes.”
“Get married.”
“I have been thinking that myself.”
“She is a very charming girl.”
“Who?”
“Mlle.—what do you call her?—Powhair?”
“Bah!” said Toto. “I’d as soon think of marrying the Bank of France.”
“_Parbleu!_” murmured De Nani. “What an extraordinary remark! But
everything that comes from Prince Toto is extraordinary, even his
pictures.”
He had the bank-note safe in his pocket, and could allow himself the
luxury of a little irony in the guise of praise.
“Firstly,” said Toto, “she’s too rich; and secondly, my mother wants me
to marry her.”
“True,” said De Nani. “She is also _gauche_, and speaks through her
beautiful nose like a trumpet.”
“She is good enough as a girl,” said the Prince with a frightful yawn
as they turned down the Rue Tronchet.
“Well, then,” said De Nani, “try a mistress.”
“I have four,” replied Toto dolorously.
“Dismiss them.”
“I have, but they cling on.”
“Get drunk.”
“Can’t. I was born drunk, and am beginning to get sober. That is what’s
the matter with me, I think.”
“Try opium.”
“Makes me sick.”
“Ether capsules.”
“Worse.”
“Go into the country and make love to a milkmaid.”
“Never done that,” said Toto reflectively.
“I did once when I was young. _Mon Dieu!_ she followed me to Paris. No,
I would advise you to leave that alone; nothing clings like a milkmaid.
Try, try, try a glass of absinthe.”
They stopped at a café and had a glass of absinthe, for which Toto paid.
“I would like to get drunk on absinthe and die in my cups,” said De
Nani, who was a man of original sins, frost-bound by poverty, but
blossoming now under the warm influence of Toto.
“Let’s,” said the Prince, beginning to laugh.
“Now I have made you laugh!” cried the old fellow triumphantly. “And
here we are at the Grand Café. No, my Toto, we will not die just
yet, while there are Grand Cafés, and good dinners, and pretty girls
adorning the world. Tu, tu, tu! how the lights flare!”
They entered, the old man following Toto and pursing out his hideous
old lips. One could see his stomach working through his face as they
passed first to the lavatory with the frescoed ceilings, where Toto
washed himself vehemently with his coat off, and De Nani looked on.
Then, led by the assistant head-waiter, they ascended to the private
room where the Prince’s friends were waiting.
Three men only—Pelisson, of the _Journal des Débats_; Gaillard, a
mystical poet, pantheistic, melancholic, with no very fixed belief in
anything, save, perhaps, the works of Gaillard; and Otto Struve, the
art critic.
Pelisson, a powerfully built fellow, singularly like De Blowitz, even
to the pointed whiskers, was of the type of man who pushes the world
aside with his shoulders, whilst he pushes it forward with his head.
Gaillard, who was remarkable for his high collars, pointed beard, and
the childish interest he took in little things unconnected with his
profound art, sat astride a chair watching Pierre Pelisson juggling
with a wine-glass, a fish-knife, and a serviette. By the fireplace
stood Otto Struve, a man with a hatchet-shaped face, who seemed in the
last stages of consumption, and weighed down by the cares of the whole
world, which he bore with suppressed irritation.
Toto’s entrance was the entrance of money. Everyone forgot everyone
else for a moment; the electric lamps seemed to blaze more brightly;
waiters suddenly appeared, mutes shod with velvet and bearing the _hors
d’œuvre_.
“M. le Marquis de Nani,” said Toto, introducing his friend; and they
took their seats.
Old De Nani ate his oysters, glancing sideways, this way and that
way, at the triumvirate of talent, as if to say, “Who the devil are
you?” and “Who the devil are you?” Pelisson groaned and grunted; he
was writing the beginning of a leading article in that wonderful head
of his, where a clerk always sat taking notes in indelible ink, an
artist beside him taking sketch-portraits of everyone and pictures
of everything. Toto looked bored and the dinner unpromising, till
suddenly Struve broke the ice by choking over his soup. With the
laughter, conversation broke out and babbled. The fish was served, and
one might have fancied twenty people were talking, Toto’s voice raised
shrill against Gaillard’s periods, and the trumpet tones of Pelisson
dominating all like the notes of a sax-horn.
“I don’t believe in God, you say?” said Gaillard, savagely attacking a
fillet of sole. “Well, perhaps not, according to your ideas; according
to mine, I have the pleasure of worshiping a god. He has fifty-three
names. The Chinese call him Fot; benighted Asiatic tribes, Buddha;
Kempfer, by the way, wrote it——”
“No, no, no!” cried Toto. “No theology, or I’ll turn M. le Marquis de
Nani upon you, and he’ll eat you up, for he’s an atheist.”
“An atheist!” cried Pelisson, turning his broad face on De Nani. “I
thought they were all dead. M. de Nani, beware! They’ll kill you and
stuff you for the Musée Carnavalet.”
“I’ll stuff him,” shouted Toto, imagining himself a wit. “What shall it
be, Marquis—bran, sawdust?”
“Ortolans,” answered De Nani, too busily engaged in stuffing himself to
find passage for more than one word.
“By my soul, the Marquis is right!” cried the great newspaper man.
“An atheist stuffed with ortolans is all they want to complete
their collection now they have crowned their idiocy by buying ——’s
collection of bronzes.”
“Talking of crowns,” came the insidious lisp of Struve, “have you heard
the news? Willy Hohenzollern has—guess what.”
“Written a farce?”
“Painted his face?”
“Become a telegraph clerk?”
“Gone mad,” replied Struve.
“What’s his madness?” roared Pelisson, glaring at this opposition
newsman.
“They say he fancies himself an Emperor.”
“Throw flowers over him to cool him,” cried Toto, snatching a rose out
of a dish and flinging it in Struve’s face as the _entrée_ was brought
in.
De Nani listened to the random conversation as he ate, or at least
seemed to; a dull flush was apparent under the paint on his face.
Each guest had his own attendant, and the service was conducted with
the precision of mechanism. The glass of the Marquis was always full,
yet he was continually emptying it; like the old gentleman at M. de
Richelieu’s feast, he felt his teeth growing again, and for a little
while, under the influence of the powerful Rhone wines, his youth
seemed to return.
“Talking of art,” said Gaillard, fingering the stem of his wineglass
delicately and turning to Toto, “a rumor reached me to-day through De
Brie, the editor of the _Boulevard_—you know De Brie? It was to the
effect that our host——”
“Yes.”
“That our host,” continued Gaillard, turning to the others, “wearied by
the incapacity of the two salons to appreciate genius——”
“To appreciate genius,” echoed Struve.
“Is about to found an art school.”
De Nani leaned back in his chair and slipped a button of his waistcoat,
as if to give room for the sycophant to ramp.
“And who,” said he, “would be fitter to found an art school than our
host—ahu!—who, may I ask, M. Veillard?”
“Gaillard.”
“Maillard—than our illustrious host, ahu! I have seen his works,
_ventre St. Gris_! Ahu! I am not a man of yesterday, M. Baillard; my
memory carries me back to the time before women wore hoops.”
“Indeed,” murmured Struve, who had placed the rose flung at him by Toto
with its stalk in his glass of champagne, and was staring at it with
the rapt air of a poet.
“Indeed yes, monsieur, I was born on the edge of the First Empire. I
saw the new Napoleon rise—you, sir, have only seen him vanish.”
“I have seen many a napoleon vanish,” mourned Struve; “but go on—your
tale charms me. Pelisson, listen.”
“Go to the devil!” said Pelisson, who was now writing with the speed of
fire and a stylographic pen on a long strip of paper, using the table
for a desk.
“I have seen the art galleries of Europe,” continued De Nani, now three
parts drunk, and unconscious that he was making a fool of himself
before the first art critic in Europe, “and I unhesitatingly proclaim
M. le Prince’s work to be on a level—allowing of course for youth—on a
level with the best I have seen.”
“Oh, rot! oh, rubbish!” cried Toto, blushing furiously and flinging
flowers at the great bent head of Pelisson, whilst that journalist,
wallowing in his journalese, only grunted and growled in a far-away
manner and wrote the more quickly. “_I_ can’t paint, _I_ can’t
draw—might if I took to it really. Pelisson, you pig! wake up and eat
your pudding.”
“I have said what I have said,” concluded De Nani, attacking his
ice-pudding with all the youthful nonchalance of your man who wears
false teeth.
“And my rose is drunk,” said Struve, as the rose tumbled out of the
glass.
“_I_ can’t paint,” murmured Toto again with the air of a spoilt child.
“Toto!” demanded Struve, placing the rose languidly in his coat, “how
much wine have you drunk?”
“Why?”
“Because a lot of truth is escaping from you.”
Toto laughed; he always believed Struve to be jesting when in earnest,
and in earnest when jesting. Then he sat watching De Nani, and
wondering at his capacity for champagne.
“Cigars, cigars!” cried Pelisson, finishing his article with a dash,
flinging down his pen and bursting out like a sun. “What’s this?
pudding!” He devoured it like a pig, and then roared again for cigars.
Three boxes were swiftly passed in from the outside.
He placed one before him, sent his article off to the _Journal des
Débats_ office, which lies near by, and, leaning back in his chair with
thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, blew clouds of smoke at the
gilded ceiling, and cried: “Let’s make a noise.”
“What’s up now?” inquired Toto.
“The Ministry will be down to-morrow!” cried Pelisson, flapping the
sides of his chest with his turtle-fin hands. “You’ll hear the tumble
of portfolios—flip, flap, flop; and I’ve helped to pull them, ehu! Let
us make a noise; it’s the only thing worth living for. I’d die in a
world where I couldn’t make a noise; you couldn’t make me a worse hell
than a padded room. You, Toto—how do you live without making a noise?
Gaillard squeaks in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, Struve grumbles in the
_Temps_, I roar in the _Débats_; you, wretched child! are silent: take
up a pen or a paint-brush and make a noise.”
“I would if I could,” mourned Toto.
“You mean you could if you would!” retorted Pelisson. “Write a little
book of poems, and I’ll abuse them; I’ll make your name rattle
like a pea in a bottle. Write an ode to the Pope or paint a modest
picture—there’s two ideas for you gratis, each a fortune. Give me some
coffee.”
“I wouldn’t give a pin for fame unless I earned it,” said Toto, handing
the coffee. “I’d just as soon swing a rattle as have a work of art of
mine”—Struve groaned—“made famous by my friends or my position.”
“Why,” cried Pelisson, “he’s talking sense, this boy is!”
“He’s talking nonsense,” said Struve.
“He’s talking divinity—I mean (hic) divinely,” said Gaillard, who
was finishing his second bottle of champagne, and writing poetry on
his cuffs with the stylographic pen that had just helped in the
destruction of a Ministry.
De Nani was dumbly digesting; he had filled his pockets with cigars,
and was wishing he had brought a sack. He was also drunk—in fact, to
put it plainly, very drunk.
“I’m talking _sense_,” cried Toto with flashing eyes.
“_He_ can’t paint,” suddenly broke out De Nani, the drunkenness lifting
like a veil and disclosing his true thoughts. “He’s only pretending.
Doesn’t want to paint—’sgot four mistresses.”
He slipped away from his chair as if sucked down by a whirlpool. A roar
of laughter went up that shook the ceiling, and then, to everyone’s
horror, Toto the debonair, the hero of cock-fights and what not, broke
into tears.
At this extraordinary sight Gaillard first gazed with a grin, and then
burst out like a firework touched off, wringing his hands and calling
upon God.
“Devil take that old scoundrel!” cried Pelisson, kicking at the body of
De Nani, which seemed quite flaccid now that the truth had got out of
it. “Where did you pick him up?—he’s a scamp, he’s a scamp!”
“Toto, my dear Toto,” lisped Struve, “paint a picture to-morrow, and
I’ll make it famouth for you. So help me God! I will, or my name’s not
Struve.”
“Alas!” cried Gaillard, drinking off a glass of brandy, “I am touched
at the soul. Toto, my Toto, our Toto, _do_ not grieve. I, too, will
write a little poem, and it will make your picture famous. Where is
that wretch? Kick him, Pelisson!”
“Don’t let the waiters in,” choked Toto. “It’s only stupidity”—sniff,
sniff—“the old fellow is drunk; don’t kick him, P-P-Pelisson, he’s an
old man. I p-picked him up at my mother’s; he’s only stupid. There, I’m
all right.”
“Oh, dear me!” sighed Struve; “we are all right now, let us play
baccarat.”
“I am desolated,” mourned Gaillard, who had now to be comforted. “And
my little poem is spoiled.” He looked at his shirt cuffs and broke into
tears.