SUPPER AT THE BELLE ETOILE.
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 Etoile 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, chap-fallen.
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, honourable 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 honour, 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 drily.
"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 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 honour 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 recognised the officer,
whose large white face had half scared me in the inn-yard, wiping
his mouth furiously, and then with a gulp of Maçon, 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
sabre-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 sabre-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 ecstacy, a fat little Italian, who manufactured
tooth-picks 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 tournequet of it with a couple of twists, and so
stayed the hemorrhage, and saved my life. But, _sacré bleu!_
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 travelling 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 Etoile?" 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 smouldered on the hearth,
for the night had turned out chilly. I sat down by the fire in a
great arm-chair, of carved oak, with a marvellously 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."