PIPING HOT!
(_POT-BOUILLE_)
A Realistic Novel
By Émile Zola.
Translated From The 63rd French Edition.
_Illustrated With Sixteen Page Engravings_
From Designs By Georges Bellenger
London: Vizetelly & Co.
1887.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
PIPING-HOT!
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
PREFACE.
One day, in the middle of a long literary conversation, Théodore Duret
said to me: “I have known in my life two men of supreme intelligence. I
knew of both before the world knew of either. Never did I doubt, nor
was it possible to doubt, but that they would one day or other gain the
highest distinctions—those men were Léon Gambetta and Émile Zola.”
Of Zola I am able to speak, and I can thoroughly realise how
interesting it must have been to have watched him, at that time, when
he was poor and unknown, obtaining acceptance of his articles with
difficulty, and surrounded by the feeble and trivial in spirit, who,
out of inborn ignorance and acquired idiocy, look with ridicule on
those who believe that there is still a new word to say, still a new
cry to cry.
I did not know Émile Zola in those days, but he must have been then as
he is now, and I should find it difficult to understand how any man of
average discrimination could speak with him for half-an-hour without
recognising that he was one of those mighty monumental intelligences,
the statues of a century, that remain and are gazed upon through the
long pages of the world’s history. This, at least, is the impression
Émile Zola has always produced upon me. I have seen him in company, and
company of no mean order, and when pitted against his compeers, the
contrast has only made him appear grander, greater, nobler. The witty,
the clever Alphonse Daudet, ever as ready for a supper party as a
literary discussion, with all his splendid gifts, can do no more when
Zola speaks than shelter himself behind an epigram; Edmond De Goncourt,
aristocratic, dignified, seated amid his Japanese watercolours,
bronzes, and Louis XV. furniture, bitterly admits, if not that there is
a greater naturalistic god than he, at least that there is a colossus
whose strength he is unable to oppose.
This is the position Émile Zola takes amid his contemporaries.
By some strange power of assimilation, he appropriates and makes his
own of all things; ideas that before were spattered, dislocated, are
suddenly united, fitted into their places. In speaking, as in writing,
he always appears greater than his subject, and, Titan-like, grasps it
as a whole; in speaking, as in writing, the strength and beauty of his
style is an unfailing use of the right word; each phrase is a solid
piece of masonry, and as he talks an edifice of thought rises
architecturally perfect and complete in design.
And it is of this side of Émile Zola’s genius that I wish particularly
to speak—a side that has never been taken sufficiently into
consideration, but which, nevertheless, is its ever-guiding and
determinating quality. Émile Zola is to me a great epic poet, and he
may be, I think, not inappropriately termed the Homer of modern life.
For he, more than any other writer, it seems, possesses the power of
seeing a subject as a whole, can divest it at will of all side issues,
can seize with a firm, logical comprehension on the main lines of its
construction, and that without losing sight of the remotest causes or
the furthest consequences of its existence. It is here that his
strength lies, and his is the strength which has conquered the world.
Of his realism a great deal, of course, has been said, but only because
it is the most obvious, not the most dominant quality of his work. The
mistletoe invariably hides the oak from the eyes of the vulgar.
That Émile Zola has done well to characterise his creations with the
vivid sentiment of modern life rather than the pale dream which reveals
to us the past, that he was able to bend, to model, to make serviceable
to his purpose the ephemeral habits and customs of our day, few will
now deny. But this was only the off-shoot of his genius. That the
colour of the nineteenth century with which he clothes the bodies of
his heroes and heroines is not always exact, that none other has
attempted to spin these garments before, I do not dispute. They will
grow threadbare and fall to dust, even as the hide of the megatharium,
of which only the colossal bones now remain to us wherewith to
construct the fabric of the primeval world. And, in like manner, when
the dream of the socialist is realized, when the burden of pleasure and
work is proportioned out equally to all, and men live on a more
strictly regulated plan than do either the ant or the bee, I believe
that the gigantic skeleton of the Rougon-Macquart family will still
continue to resist the ravages of time, and that western scientists
will refer to it when disputing about the idiosyncrasies of a past
civilization.
In the preceding paragraph, I have said neither more nor less than my
meaning, for I am convinced that the living history of no age has been
as well written as the last half of the nineteenth century is in the
Rougon-Maequart series. I pass over the question whether, in describing
Renée’s dress, a mistake was made in the price of lace, also whether
the author was wrong in permitting himself the anachronism of
describing a fête in the opera-house a couple of years before the
building was completed. Errors of this kind do not appear to me to be
worth considering. What I maintain is, that what Émile Zola has done,
and what he alone has done—and I do not make an exception even in the
case of the mighty Balzac—is to have conceived and constructed the
frame-work of a complex civilization like ours, in all its worse
ramifications. Never, it seems to me, was the existence of the epic
faculty more amply demonstrated than by the genealogical tree of this
now celebrated family.
The grandeur, the amplitude of this scheme will be seen at once.
Adélaïde Fouque, a mad woman confined in a lunatic asylum at Plassans,
is the first ancestor; she is the transmitter of the original neurosis,
which, regulated by his or her physical constitution, assumes various
forms in each individual member of the family, and is developed
according to the surroundings in whieh he or she lives. By Rougon this
woman had two children; by Macquart, with whom she cohabited on the
death of her husband, she had three. Ursule Macquart married a man
named Mouret, and their children are therefore cousins of the
Rougon-Macquarts. This family has some forty or fifty members, who are
distributed through the different grades of our social system. Some
have attained the highest positions, as, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon,
others have sunk to the lowest depths, as Gervaise in “L’Assommoir,”
but all are tainted with the hereditary malady. By it Nana is
invincibly driven to prostitution; by it Etienne Lantier, in
“Germinal,” will be driven to crime; by it his brother, Claude, will be
made a great painter. Protean-like is this disease. Sometimes it skips
over a generation, sometimes lies almost latent, and the balance of the
intelligence is but slightly disturbed, as in the instance of Octave in
“Pot-Bouille,” and Lazare in “La Joie de Vivre.” But the mind of the
latter is more distorted than is Octave’s. Lazare lives in a perpetual
fear of death, and is prevented from realizing any of his magnificent
projects by his vacillating temperament; in him we have an example how
a splendid intelligence may be drained away like water through an
imperceptible crack in the vase, and how what might have been the fruit
of a life withers like the flowers from which the nourishing liquid has
been withdrawn.
And so in the Rougon-Macquart series we have instances of all kinds of
psychical development and decay; and with an overt and an intuitive
reading of character truly wonderful, Émile Zola makes us feel that as
the north and south poles and torrid zones are hemmed about with a
girdle of air, so an ever varying but ever recognisable kinship unites,
sometimes, indeed, by an almost imperceptible thread, the ends the most
opposed of this remarkable race, and is diffused through the different
variation each individual member successively presents. Can we not
trace a mysterious physical resemblance between Octave Mouret in “Le
Bonheur des Dames” and Maxime in “La Curée?” Is not the moral something
by which Claude Lantier in “Le Ventre de Paris” escapes the fate of
Lazare made apparent? Then, again, does not the inherited neurosis that
makes of Octave a millionaire, of Lazare a wretched hypochondriac, of
Claude Lantier a genius, of Maxime a symbol of ephemeral vice, reappear
in a new and more deadly form in Jeanne, the hysterical child, in that
most beautiful of beautiful books, “Une Page d’Amour?”
As beasts at a fair are urged on by the goads of their drivers, so
certain fate pushes this wretched family forward into irrevocable death
that is awaiting it. At each generation they grow more nervous, more
worn out, more ready to succumb beneath the ravages of the horrible
disease that in a hundred different ways is sweeping them into the
night of the grave.
Even from this imperfect outline, what majesty, what grandeur there is
in this dark design! Does not the great idea of fate receive a new and
more terrible signification? Is not the horror and gloom of the tragedy
increased by the fact that the thought was born in the study of the
scientist, and not in the cloud-palace of the dreamer? What poet ever
conceived an idea more vast! and if further proof of the epic faculty
with which I have credited Émile Zola be wanting, I have only to refer
to Pascal Rougon. Noah survived the deluge. Pascal Rougon, by some
miracle, escapes the inherited stain—he, and he alone, is completely
free from it He is a doctor, an advanced scientist, and he, in the
twentieth volume, will analyse the terrible neurosis that has
devastated his family.
In the upbuilding of this enormous edifice, Émile Zola shows the same
constructive talent as he did in its conception. The energy he displays
is marvellous. Every year a wing, courtyard, cupola, or tower is added,
and each is as varied as the most imaginative could desire. Without
looking further back than “L’Assommoir,” let us consider what has been
done. In this work, we have a study of the life of the working people
in Paris, written, for the sake of preserving the “milieu,” for the
most part in their own language. It shows how the workers of our great
social machine live, and must live, in ignorance and misery; it shows,
as never was shown before, what the accident of birth means; it shows
in a new way, and, to my mind, in as grand a way as did the laments of
the chorus in the Greek play, the irrevocability of fate. “L’Assommoir”
was followed by “Une Page d’Amour,” a beautiful Parisian idyl. Here we
see the “bourgeois” at their best. We have seven descriptions of Paris
seen from a distance of which Turner might be proud; we have a picture
of a children’s costume ball which Meissonier might fall down and
worship; we have the portrait of a beautiful and virtuous woman with
her love story told, as it were, over the dying head of Jeanne (her
little girl), the child whose nervous sensibilities are so delicate
that she trembles with jealousy when she suspects that behind her back
her mother is looking at the doctor. After “Une Page d’Amour” comes
“Nana,” and with her we are transported to a world of pleasure-seekers;
vicious men and women who have no thought but the killing of time and
the gratification of their lusts. Nana is the Messaline of modern days,
and, obeying the epic tendency of his genius, Émile Zola has instituted
a comparison between the death of the “gilded fly,” conceived in
drunkenness and debauchery, and the harlot city of the third Emperor,
which, rotten with vice, falls before the victorious arms of the
Germans.
“Nana” and “Une Page d’Amour” are psychological and philological
studies of two radically different types of women; in both works, and
likewise in “L’Assommoir,” there is much descriptive writing, and,
doubtless, Émile Zola had this fact present in his mind when he set
himself to write “Pot-Bouille,” that terrible satire on the
“bourgeoisie.” He must have said, as his plan formulated itself in his
mind, “this is a novel dealing with the home-life of the
middle-classes; if I wish to avoid repeating myself, this book must
contain a vast number of characters, and the descriptions must be
reduced to a bare sufficiency, no more than will allow my readers to
form an exact impression of the surroundings through which, the action
passes.”
“Pot-Bouille,” or “Piping Hot!” as the present translation is called,
is, therefore, an inquiry into the private lives of a number of
individuals, who, while they follow different occupations, belong to
the same class and live under the same roof. The house in the Rue de
Choiseul is one of those immense “maisons bourgeoises,” in which,
apparently, an infinite number of people live. On the first floor, we
find Monsieur Duveyrier, an “avocat de la cour,” with his musical wife,
Clotilde, and her father, Monsieur Vabre, a retired notary and
proprietor of the house, who is absorbed in the preparation of an
important statistical work; on the fourth floor are Madame Josserand,
her two daughters, whom she is always trying to marry, her crazy son
Saturnin, and her husband who spends his nights addressing advertising
circulars at three francs a thousand, in order to eke out an additional
something to help his family to ape an appearance of easy
circumstances. On the third floor is an architect, Monsieur Campardon,
with his ailing, yet blooming, wife Rose, and her cousin, “l’autre
Madame Campardon.” There is also one of Monsieur Vabre’s sons, and “a
distinguished gentleman who comes one night a week to work.”
These are the principal “locataires” but, in various odd corners, “des
petits appartements qui donnent sur la cour,” we find all sorts and
conditions of people. First on the list is the government clerk Jules
and his wife Marie. She is a weak-minded little thing who commits
adultery without affection, without desire, and the frequency of her
confinements excites the ire of her mother and father. Then come two
young men, Octave and Trublot. The former plays a part similar to that
of a tenor in an opera; he is the accepted lover of the ladies. The
latter is equally beloved by the maids. From the frequency of his
visits, he may almost be said to live in the house; he is constantly
asked to dine by one or other of the inmates, and in the morning he is
generally found hiding behind the door of one of the servants’ rooms,
waiting for an opportunity of descending the staircase unperceived by
the terrible “concierge,” the moral guardian of the house.
Other visitors who figure prominently in the story are Madame
Josserand’s brother, Uncle Bachelard, a dissipated widower, and his
nephew Gueulin; the Abbé Mouret, ever ready to throw the mantle of
religion over the back-slidings of his flock, and Madame Hédouin, the
frigid directress of “The Ladies’ Paradise,” where Octave is originally
engaged. The remaining “locataires” are Madame Juzeur, a lady who only
reads poetry, and who was deserted by her husband after a single week
of matrimonial, bliss; a workwoman who has a garret under the slates;
and last, but not least, an author who lives on the second floor. He is
rarely ever seen, he makes no one’s acquaintance, and thereby excites
the enmity of everyone.
All these, the author of course excepted, pass and repass before the
reader, and each is at once individual and representative; even the
maid-servants—who only answer “yes” and “no” to their masters and
mistresses—are adroitly characterised. We see them in their kitchens
engaged in their daily occupations: while peeling onions and gutting
rabbits and fish they call to and abuse each other from window to
window. There is Julie, the belle of the attics, of whose perfume and
pomatum Trublot makes liberal use when he honours her with a visit;
there is fat Adèle whose dirty habits and slovenly ways make of her a
butt whereat is levelled the ridicule and scorn of her fellow-servants;
there are the lovers, Hippolyte and Clémence, whose carnal intercourse
affords to Madame Duveyrier much ground for uneasiness, and in the end
necessitates the intervention of the Abbé. Never were the manners and
morals of servants so thoroughly sifted before, never was the
relationship which their lives bear to those of their masters and
mistresses so cunningly contrasted. The courtyard of the house echoes
with their quarrelling voices, and it is there, in a scene of which
Swift might be proud, that is spoken the last and terrible word of
scorn which Émile Zola flings against the “bourgeoisie.” From her
kitchen window a fellow-servant of Julie’s is congratulating her on
being about to leave, and wishing that she may find a better place. To
which Julie replies, “Toutes les baraques se ressemblent. Au jour
d’aujourd’hui, qui a fait l’une a fait l’autre. C’est cochon et
compagnie.”
I do not know to what other work to go to find so much successful
sketching of character. I had better, I think, explain the meaning I
attach to this phrase, “sketching of character,” for it is too common
an error to associate the idea of superficiality with the word
“sketch.” The true artist never allows anything to leave his studio
that he deems superficial, or even unfinished. The word unfinished is
not found in his vocabulary; to him a sketch is as complete as a
finished picture. In the former he has painted broadly and freely,
wishing to render the vividness, the vitality of a first impression; in
the latter he is anxious to render the subtlety of a more intellectual
and consequently a less sensual emotion. The portrait of Madame
Josserand is a case in point, it is certainly less minute than that of
Hélène Mouret, but is not for that less finished. In both, the artist
has achieved, and perfectly, the task he set himself. “Piping Hot!”
cannot be better defined than as a portrait album in which many of our
French neighbours may be readily recognized.
This merit will not fail to strike any intelligent reader; but the
marvellous way the almost insurmountable difficulties of binding
together the stories of the lives of the different inhabitants of the
house in the Rue de Choiseul are overcome, none but a fellow-worker
will be able to appreciate at their full value. Up and down the famous
staircase we go, from one household to another, interested equally in
each, disgusted equally with all. And this sentence leads us right up
to the enemies’ guns, brings us face to face with the two batteries
from which the critics have directed their fire. The first is the
truthfulness of the picture, the second is the coarseness with which it
is painted. I will attempt to reply to both.
M. Albert Wolff in the “Figaro” declared that in a “maison bourgeoise”
so far were “locataires” from being all on visiting terms, that it was
of constant occurrence that the people on one floor not only did not
know by sight but were ignorant of the names of those living above and
below them; that the spectacle of a “maison bourgeoise,” with the
lodgers running up and down stairs in and out of each other’s
apartments at all hours of the night and day, was absolutely false; had
never existed in Paris, and was an invention of the writer. Without a
word of parley I admit the truth of this indictment. I will admit that
no house could be found in Paris where from basement to attic the
inhabitants are on such terms of intimacy as they are in the house in
the Rue de Choiseul; but at the same time I deny that the extreme
isolation described by M. Wolff could be found or is even possible in
any house inhabited over a term of years by the same people. Émile Zola
has then done no more than to exaggerate, to draw the strings that
attach the different parts a little tighter than they would be in
nature. Art, let there be no mistake on this point, be it romantic or
naturalistic, is a perpetual concession; and the character of the
artist is determined by the selection he makes amid the mass of
conflicting issues that, all clamouring equally to be chosen, present
themselves to his mind. In the case of Émile Zola, the epic faculty
which has been already mentioned as the dominant trait of his genius
naturally impelled him to make too perfect a whole of the heterogeneous
mass of material that he had determined to construct from. The flaw is
more obvious than in his other works, but in “Piping Hot!” he has only
done what he has done since he first put pen to paper, what he will
continue to do till he ceases to write. We will admit that to make all
the people living in the house in the Rue de Choiseul on visiting terms
was a trick of composition—_et puis?_
This was the point from which the critics who pretended to be guided by
artistic considerations attacked the book; the others entrenched
themselves behind the good old earthworks of morality, and primed their
rusty popguns. Now there was a time, and a very good time it must have
been, when a book was judged on its literary merits; but of late years
a new school of criticism has come into fashion. Its manners are very
summary indeed. “Would you or would you not give that book to your
sister of sixteen to read?” If you hesitate you are lost; for then the
question is dismissed with a smile and you are voted out of court. It
would be vain to suggest that there are other people in the world
besides your sister of sixteen summers.
I do not intend putting forward any well known paradox, that art is
morals, and morals are art. That there are great and eternal moral laws
which must be acted up to in art as in life I am more than ready to
admit; but these are very different from the wretched conventionalities
which have been arbitrarily imposed upon us in England. To begin with,
it must be clear to the meanest intelligence that it would never do to
judge the dead by the same standard as the living. If that were done,
all the dramatists of the sixteenth century would have to go; those of
the Restoration would follow. To burn Swift somebody lower in the
social scale than Mr. Binns would have to be found, although he might
do to commit Sterne to the flames. Byron, Shelley, yes, even Landor
would have to go the same way. What would happen then, it is hard
to-say; but it is not unfair to hint that if the burning were argued to
its logical conclusion, some of the extra good people would find it
difficult to show reason, if the intention of the author were not taken
into account, why their most favourite reading should be saved from the
general destruction.
Many writers have lately been trying to put their readers in the
possession of infallible recipes for the production of good fiction;
they would, to my mind, have employed their time and talents to far
more purpose had they come boldly to the point and stated that the
overflow of bad fiction with which we are inundated is owing to the
influence of the circulating library, which, on one side, sustains a
quantity of worthless writers who on their own merits would not sell a
dozen copies of their books; and, on the other, deprives those who have
something to say and are eager to say it of the liberty of doing so. It
may be a sad fact, but it is nevertheless a fact, that literature and
young girls are irreconcilable elements, and the sooner we leave off
trying to reconcile them the better. At this vain endeavour the
circulating library has been at work for the last twenty years, and
what has been the result? A literature of bandboxes. Were Pope,
Addison, Johnson, Fielding, Smollet, suddenly raised from their graves
and started on reviewing “three vols.,” think you that they would not
all cry together, “This is a literature of bandboxes?”
We judge a pudding by the eating, and I judge Messrs. Mudie and Smith
by what they have produced; for they, not the ladies and gentlemen who
place their names on the title pages, are the authors of our fiction.
And what a terrible brood to admit the parentage of! Let those who
doubt put aside pre-conceived opinions, and forgetting the bolstered up
reputation of the authors, read the volumes by the light of a little
common sense. Cast a glance at those that lie in Miss Rhoda Broughton’s
lap. What a wheezing, drivelling lot of bairns they are! They have not
a virtue amongst them, and their pinafore pages are sticky with
childish sensualities.
And here we touch the keynote of the whole system. For, mark you, you
can say what you like provided you speak according to rule. Everything
is agreed according to precedent. I could give a hundred instances, but
one will suffice. On the publication of “Adam Bede” a howl was raised,
but the book was alive; it finished by being accepted, and the
libraries were obliged to give way. The employment of seduction in the
fabulation of a story was therefore established. This would have been a
great point gained, if Mr. Mudie had not succeeded in forcing on all
succeeding writers George Eliot’s manner of conducting her story. In
“Adam Bede” we have Hetty described as an extremely fascinating
dairymaid and Arthur as a noble-minded young man. After a good deal of
flirtation they are shown to us walking through a wood together, and
three months after we hear that Hetty is _enceinte_. Now, ever since
the success of this book was assured, we have had numberless novels
dealing with seductions, but invariably an interval of three months is
allowed wherein the reader’s fancy may disport until the truth be told.
Not being a select librarian I will not undertake to say that the cause
of morality is advanced by leaving the occurrence of the offence
unmarked by a no more precise date than that of three months, but being
a writer who loves and believes in his art, I fearlessly declare that
such quibblery is not worthy of the consideration of serious men; and
it was to break through this puerile conventionality that I was daring
enough in my “Mummer’s Wife” to write that Dick dragged Kate into the
room and that the door was slammed behind her. And it is on this
passage that the select circulating libraries base a refusal to take
the book. And it is such illiterate censorship that has thrown English
fiction into the abyss of nonsense in which it lies; it is for this
reason and no other that the writers of the present day have ceased
even to try to produce good work, and have resigned themselves to the
task of turning out their humdrum stories of sentimental
misunderstanding. Yet, strange to say, in every other department of
art, an unceasing intellectual activity prevails. Our poetry, our
histories, our biographies, our newspapers are strong and vigorous,
pregnant with thought, trenchant in style; it is not until we turn to
the novel that we find a wearisome absence of everything but drivel.
Though much that I would like to have said is still unsaid, the
exigencies of space compel me to bring this notice to a close. However,
this one thing I hope I have made clear: that it is my firm opinion
that if fiction is to exist at all, the right to speak as he pleases on
politics, morals, and religion must be granted to the writer, and that
he on his side must take cognizance of other readers than sentimental
young girls, who require to be provided with harmless occupation until
something fresh turns up in the matrimonial market. Therefore the great
literary battle of our day is not to be fought for either realism or
romanticism, but for freedom of speech; and until that battle be gained
I, for one, will continue fearlessly to hold out a hand of welcome to
all comers who dare to attack the sovereignty of the circulating
library.
The first of these is “Piping Hot!” and, I think, the pungent odour of
life it exhales, as well as its scorching satire on the middle-classes,
will be relished by all who prefer the fortifying brutalities of truth
to the soft platitudes of lies. As a satire “Piping Hot!” must be read;
and as a satire it will rank with Juvenal, Voltaire, Pope, and Swift.
George Moore.
PIPING-HOT!
(_POT-BOUILLE_)
CHAPTER I.
In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, a block of vehicles arrested the cab
which was bringing Octave Mouret and his three trunks from the Lyons
railway station. The young man lowered one of the windows, in spite of
the already intense cold of that dull November afternoon. He was
surprised at the abrupt approach of twilight in this neighbourhood of
narrow streets, all swarming with a busy crowd. The oaths of the
drivers as they lashed their snorting horses, the endless jostlings on
the foot-pavements, the serried line of shops swarming with attendants
and customers, bewildered him; for, though he had dreamed of a cleaner
Paris than the one he beheld, he had never hoped to find it so eager
for trade, and he felt that it was publicly open to the appetites of
energetic young fellows.
The driver leant towards him.
“It’s the Passage Choiseul you want, isn’t it?”
“No, the Rue de Choiseul. A new house, I think.”
And the cab only had to turn the corner. The house was the second one
in the street: a big house four storeys high, the stonework of which
was scarcely discoloured, in the midst of the dirty stucco of the
adjoining old frontages. Octave, who had alighted on to the pavement,
measured it and studied it with a mechanical glance, from the silk
warehouse on the ground floor to the projecting windows on the fourth
floor opening on to a narrow terrace. On the first floor, carved female
heads supported a highly elaborate cast-iron balcony. The windows were
surrounded with complicated frames, roughly chiselled in the soft
stone; and, lower down, above the tall doorway, two cupids were
unrolling a scroll bearing the number, which at night-time was lighted
up by a jet of gas from the inside.
A stout fair gentleman, who was coming out of the vestibule, stopped
short on catching sight of Octave.
“What! you here!” exclaimed he. “Why, I was not expecting you till
to-morrow!”
“The truth is,” replied the young man, “I left Hassans a day earlier
than I originally intended. Isn’t the room ready?”
“Oh, yes. I took it a fortnight ago, and I furnished it at once in the
way you desired. Wait a bit, I will take you to it.”
He re-entered the house, though Octave begged he would not give himself
the trouble. The driver had got the three trunks off the cab. Inside
the doorkeeper’s room, a dignified-looking man with a long face,
clean-shaven like a diplomatist, was standing up gravely reading the
“Moniteur.” He deigned, however, to interest himself about these trunks
which were being deposited in his doorway; and, taking a few steps
forward, he asked his tenant, the architect of the third floor as he
called him:
“Is this the person, Monsieur Campardon?”
“Yes, Monsieur Gourd, this is Monsieur Octave Mouret, for whom I have
taken the room on the fourth floor. He will sleep there and take his
meals with us. Monsieur Mouret is a friend of my wife’s relations, and
I beg you will show him every attention.”
Octave was examining the entrance with its panels of imitation marble
and its vaulted ceiling decorated with rosettes. The courtyard at the
end was paved and cemented, and had a grand air of cold cleanliness;
the only occupant was a coachman engaged in polishing a bit with a
chamois leather at the entrance to the stables. There were no signs of
the sun ever shining there.
Meanwhile, Monsieur Gourd was inspecting the trunks. He pushed them
with his foot, and, their weight filling him with respect, he talked of
fetching a porter to carry them up the servants’ staircase.
“Madame Gourd, I’m going out,” cried he, just putting his head inside
his room.
It was like a drawing-room, with bright looking-glasses, a red flowered
Wilton carpet and violet ebony furniture; and, through a partly opened
door, one caught a glimpse of the bed-chamber with a bedstead hung with
garnet rep. Madame Gourd, a very fat woman with yellow ribbons in her
hair, was stretehed out in an easy-chair with her hands clasped, and
doing nothing.
“Well! let’s go up,” said the architect.
And seeing how impressed the young man seemed to be by Monsieur Gourd’s
black velvet cap and sky blue slippers, he added, as he pushed open the
mahogany door of the vestibule:
“You know he was formerly the Duke de Vaugelade’s valet.”
“Ah!” simply ejaculated Octave.
“It’s as I tell you, and he married the widow of a little bailiff of
Mort-la-Ville. They even own a house there. But they are waiting until
they have three thousand francs a year before going there to live. Oh!
they are most respectable doorkeepers!”
The decorations of the vestibule and the staircase were gaudily
luxurious. At the foot of the stairs was the figure of a woman, a kind
of gilded Neapolitan, supporting on her head an amphora from which
issued three gas-jets protected by ground glass globes. The panels of
imitation white marble with pink borders succeeded each other at
regular intervals up the wall of the staircase, whilst the cast-iron
balustrade with its mahogany hand-rail was in imitation of old silver
with clusters of golden leaves. A red carpet, secured with brass rods,
covered the stairs. But what especially struck Octave on entering was a
green-house temperature, a warm breath which seemed to be puffed from
some mouth into his face.
“Hallo!” said he, “the staircase is warmed.”
“Of course,” replied Campardon. “All landlords who have the least
self-respect go to that expense now. The house is a very fine one, very
fine.”
He looked about him as though he were sounding the walls with his
architect’s eyes.
“My dear fellow, you will see, it is a most comfortable place, and
inhabited solely by highly respectable people!”
Then, slowly ascending, he mentioned the names of the different
tenants. On each floor were two separate suites of apartments, one
looking on to the street, the other on to the courtyard, and the
polished mahogany doors of which faeed eaeh other. He began by saying a
few words respecting Monsieur Auguste Vabre; he was the landlord’s
eldest son; since the spring he had rented the silk warehouse on the
ground floor, and he also occupied the whole of the “entresol” above.
Then, on the first floor the landlord’s other son, Monsieur Théophile
Vabre and his wife, resided in the apartment overlooking the courtyard;
and in the one overlooking the street lived the landlord himself,
formerly a notary at Versailles, but who was now lodging with his
son-in-law, Monsieur Duveyrier, a judge at the Court of Appeal.
“A fellow who is not yet forty-five,” said Campardon, stopping short.
“That’s something remarkable, is it not?”
He ascended two steps, and then suddenly turning round, he added:
“Water and gas on every floor.”
Beneath the tall window on each landing, the panes of which, bordered
with fretwork, lit up the staircase with a white light, was placed a
narrow velvet covered bench. The architect observed that elderly
persons could sit down and rest. Then, as he passed the second floor
without naming the tenants.
“And there?” asked Octave, pointing to the door of the principal suite.
“Oh! there,” said he, “persons whom one never sees, whom no one knows.
The house could well do without them. Blemishes, you know, are to be
found everywhere.”
He gave a little snort of contempt.
“The gentleman writes books, I believe.”
But on the third floor his smile of satisfaction reappeared. The
apartments looking on to the courtyard were divided into two suites;
they were occupied by Madame Juzeur, a little woman who was most
unhappy, and a very distinguished gentleman who had taken a room to
which he came once a week on business matters. Whilst giving these
particulars, Campardon opened the door on the other side of the
landing.
“And this is where I live,” resumed he. “Wait a moment, I must get your
key. We will first go up to your room; you can see my wife afterwards.”
During the two minutes he was left alone, Octave felt penetrated by the
grave silence of the staircase. He leant over the balustrade, in the
warm air which ascended from the vestibule; he raised his head,
listening if any noise came from above. It was the death-like
peacefulness of a middle-class drawing-room, carefully shut in and not
admitting a breath from outside. Behind the beautiful shining mahogany
doors there seemed to be unfathomable depths of respectability.
“You will have some excellent neighbours,” said Campardon, reappearing
with the key; “on the street side there are the Josserands, quite a
family, the father who is cashier at the Saint-Joseph glass works, and
also two marriageable daughters; and next to you the Pichons, the
husband is a clerk; they are not rolling in wealth, but they are
educated people. Everything has to be let, has it not? even in a house
like this.”
From the third landing, the red carpet ceased and was replaced by a
simple grey holland. Octave’s vanity was slightly ruffled. The
staircase had, little by little, filled him with respect; he was deeply
moved at inhabiting such a fine house as the architect termed it. As,
following the latter, he turned into the passage leading to his room,
he caught sight through a partly open door of a young woman standing up
before a cradle. She raised her head at the noise. She was fair, with
clear and vacant eyes; and all he carried away was this very distinct
look, for the young woman, suddenly blushing, pushed the door to in the
shame-faced way of a person taken by surprise.
Campardon turned round to repeat:
“Water and gas on every floor, my dear fellow.”
Then he pointed out a door which opened on to the servants’ staircase.
Their rooms were up above. And stopping at the end of the passage, he
added:
“Here we are at last.”
The room, which was square, pretty large, and hung with a grey
wall-paper with blue flowers, was furnished very simply. Close to the
alcove was a little dressing-closet with just room enough to wash one’s
hands. Octave went straight to the window, which admitted a greenish
light. Below was the courtyard looking sad and clean, with its regular
pavement, and the shining brass tap of its cistern. And still not a
human being, nor even a noise; nothing but the uniform windows, without
a bird-cage, without a flower-pot, displaying the monotony of their
white curtains. To hide the big bare wall of the house on the left hand
side, which shut in the square of the courtyard, the windows had been
repeated, imitation windows in paint, with shutters eternally closed,
behind which the walled-in life of the neighbouring apartments appeared
to continue.
“But I shall be very comfortable here!” cried Octave delighted.
“I thought so,” said Campardon. “Well! I did everything as though it
had been for myself; and, moreover, I carried out the instructions
contained in your letters. So the furniture pleases you? It is all that
is necessary for a young man. Later on, you can make any changes you
like.”
And, as Octave shook his hand, thanking him, and apologising for having
given him so much trouble, he resumed in a serious tone of voice:
“Only, my boy, no rows here, and above all no women! On my word of
honour, if you were to bring a woman here it would revolutionize the
whole house!”
“Be easy!” murmured the young man, feeling rather anxious.
“No, let me tell you, for it is I who would be compromised. You have
seen the house. All middle-class people, and of extreme morality!
between ourselves, they affect it rather too much. Never a word, never
more noise than you have heard just now. Ah, well! Monsieur Gourd would
at once fetch Monsieur Vabre, and we should both be in a nice pickle!
My dear fellow, I ask it of you for my own peace of mind: respect the
house.”
Octave, overpowered by so much virtue and respectability, swore to do
so. Then, Campardon, casting a mistrustful glance around, and lowering
his voice as though some one might have heard him, added with sparkling
eyes:
“Outside it concerns nobody. Paris is big enough, is it not? there is
plenty of room. As for myself, I am at heart an artist, therefore I
think nothing of it!”
A porter carried up the trunks. When everything was straight, the
architect assisted paternally at Octave’s toilet. Then, rising to his
feet he said:
“Now we will go and see my wife.”
Down on the third floor the maid, a slim, dark, and coquettish looking
girl, said that madame was busy. Campardon, with a view of putting his
young friend at ease, showed him over the rooms: first of all, there
was the huge white and gold drawingroom, highly decorated with
artificial mouldings, and situated between a green parlour which the
architect had turned into a workroom and the bedroom, into which they
could not enter, but the narrow shape of which, and the mauve
wall-paper, he described. As he next ushered him into the dining-room,
all in imitation wood, with an extraordinary complication of baguettes
and coffers, Octave, enchanted, exclaimed:
“It is very handsome!”
On the ceiling, two big cracks cut right through the coffers, and, in a
corner, the paint had peeled off and displayed the plaster.
“Yes, it creates an effect,” slowly observed the architect, his eyes
fixed on the ceiling. “You see, these kind of houses are built to
create effect. Only, the walls will not bear much looking into. It is
not twelve years old yet, and it is already cracking. One builds the
frontage of handsome stone, with a lot of sculpture about it; one gives
three coats of varnish to the walls of the staircase; one paints and
gilds the rooms; and all that flatters people, and inspires respect.
Oh! it is still solid, it will certainly last as long as we shall!”
He led him again across the ante-room, which was lighted by a window of
ground glass. To the left, looking on to the courtyard, there was a
second bed-chamber where his daughter Angèle slept, and which, all in
white, looked on this November afternoon as sad as a tomb. Then at the
end of the passage, came the kitchen, into which he insisted on
conducting Octave, saying that it was necessary to see everything.
“Walk in,” repeated he, pushing open the door.
A terrible uproar issued from it. In spite of the cold, the window was
wide open. With their elbows on the rail, the dark maid and a fat cook,
a dissolute looking old party, were leaning out into the narrow well of
an inner courtyard, which lighted the kitchens of each floor, placed
opposite to each other. They were both yelling with their backs bent,
whilst, from the depths of this hole, arose the sounds of vulgar
voices, mingled with oaths and bursts of laughter. It was like the
overflow of some sewer: all the domestics of the house were there,
easing their minds. Octave’s thoughts reverted to the peaceful majesty
of the grand staircase.
Just then the two women, warned by some instinct, turned round. They
remained thunderstruck on beholding their master with a gentleman.
There was a gentle whistle, windows were shut, and all was once more as
silent as death.
“What is the matter, Lisa?” asked Campardon.
“Sir,” replied the maid, greatly excited, “it’s that filthy Adèle
again. She has thrown a rabbit’s guts out of the window. You should
speak to Monsieur Josserand, sir.”
Campardon became very grave, anxious not to make any promise. He
returned to his workroom, saying to Octave:
“You have seen all. On each floor, the rooms are arranged the same. I
pay a rent of two thousand five hundred francs, and on a third floor,
too! Rents are rising every day. Monsieur Vabre must make about
twenty-two thousand francs a year from his house. And it will increase
still more, for there is a question of opening a wide thoroughfare from
the Place de la Bourse to the new Opera-house. And he had the ground
this is built upon almost for nothing, twelve years ago, after that
great fire caused by a druggist’s servant!”
As they entered, Octave observed, hanging above a drawing-table, and in
the full light from the window, a richly framed picture of a Virgin,
displaying in her opened breast an enormous flaming heart. He could not
repress a movement of surprise; he looked at Campardon, whom he had
known to be a rather wild fellow at Plassans.
“Ah! I forgot to tell you,” resumed the latter slightly colouring, “I
have been appointed diocesan architect, yes, at Evreux. Oh! a mere
bagatelle as regards money, in all barely two thousand francs a year.
But there is scarcely anything to do, a journey now and again; for the
rest I have an inspector there. And, you see, it is a great deal, when
one can print on one’s cards: ‘government architect.’ You can have no
idea what an amount of work that procures me in the highest society.”
Whilst speaking, he looked at the Virgin with the flaming heart.
“After all,” continued he in a sudden fit of frankness, “I do not care
a button for their paraphernalia!”
But, on Octave bursting out laughing, the architect was seized with
fear. Why confide in that young man? He gave a side glance, and,
putting on an air of compunction, he tried to smooth over what he had
said.
“I do not care and yet I do care. Well! yes, I am becoming like that.
You will see, you will see, my friend: when you have lived a little
longer, you will do as every one else.”
And he spoke of his forty-two years, of the emptiness of life, posing
for being very melancholy, which his robust health belied. In the
artist’s head which he had fashioned for himself, with flowing hair and
beard trimmed in the Henri IV. style, one found the flat skull and
square jaw of a middle-class man of limited intelligence and voracious
appetites. When younger, he had a fatiguing gaiety.
Octave’s eyes became fixed on a number of the “Gazette de France,”
which was lying amongst some plans. Then, Campardon, more and more ill
at ease, rang for the maid to know if madame was at length disengaged.
Yes, the doctor was just leaving, madame would be there directly.
“Is Madame Campardon unwell?” asked the young man.
“No, she is the same as usual,” said the architect in a bored tone of
voice.
“Ah! and what is the matter with her?”
Again embarrassed, he did not give a straightforward answer.
“You know, there is always something going wrong with women. She has
been in this state for the last thirteen years, ever since her
confinement. Otherwise, she is as well as can be. You will even find
her stouter.”
Octave asked no further questions. Just then, Lisa returned, bringing a
card; and the architect, begging to be excused, hastened to the
drawing-room, telling the young man as he disappeared to talk to his
wife and have patience. Octave had caught sight, on the door being
quickly opened and closed, of the black mass of a cassock in the centre
of the large white and gold apartment.
At the same moment, Madame Campardon entered from the ante-room. He
scarcely knew her again. In other days, when a youngster, he had known
her at Plassans, at her father’s, Monsieur Domergue, government clerk
of the works, she was thin and ugly, as puny-looking as a young girl
suffering from the crisis of her puberty; and now he beheld her plump,
with the clear and placid complexion of a nun, soft eyes, dimples, and
a general appearance of an overfed she-cat. If she had not been able to
grow pretty, she had ripened towards thirty, gaining a sweet savour and
a nice fresh odour of autumn fruit. He remarked, however, that she
walked with difficulty, her whole body wrapped, in a mignonette
coloured silk dressing-gown, moving; which gave her a languid air.
“But you are a man, now!” said she gaily, holding out her hands. “How
you have grown, since our last journey to the country!”
And she gazed at him: tall, dark, handsome, with his well kept
moustache and beard. When he told her his age, twenty-two, she scarcely
believed it: he looked twenty-five at least. He, whom the presence of a
woman, even though she were the lowest of servants, filled with
rapture, laughed melodiously, enveloping her with his eyes of the
colour of old gold, and of the softness of velvet.
“Ah! yes,” repeated he gently, “I have grown, I have grown. Do you
recollect, when your cousin Gasparine used to buy me marbles?”
Then, he gave her news of her parents. Monsieur and Madame Domergue
were living happily, in the house to which they had retired; they
merely complained of being very lonely, bearing Campardon a grudge for
having taken their little Rose from them, during a stay he had made at
Plassans on business. Then, the young man tried to bring the
conversation round to cousin Gasparine, having a precocious youngster’s
old curiosity to satisfy, in the matter of an hitherto unexplained
adventure: the architect’s mad passion for Gasparine, a tall lovely
girl, but poor, and his sudden marriage with skinny Rose who had a
dowry of thirty thousand francs, and quite a tearful scene, and a
quarrel, and the flight of the abandoned one to Paris, to an aunt who
was a dressmaker. But Madame Campardon, whose placid complexion
preserved a rosy paleness, did not appear to understand. He was unable
to draw a single particular from her.
“And your parents?” inquired she in her turn. “How are Monsienr and
Madame Mouret?”
“Very well, thank you,” replied he. “My mother scarcely leaves her
garden. You would find the house in the Rue de la Banne, just as you
left it.”
Madame Campardon, who seemed unable to remain standing for long without
feeling tired, had seated herself on a high drawing-chair, her legs
stretched out in her dressing-gown; and he, taking a low chair beside
her, raised his head when speaking, with his air of habitual adoration.
With his large shoulders, he was like a woman, he had a woman’s feeling
which at once admitted him to their hearts. So that, at the end of ten
minutes, they were both talking like two lady friends of long standing.
“Now I am your boarder,” said he, passing a handsome hand with neatly
trimmed nails over his beard. “We shall get on well together, you will
see. How charming it was of you to remember the Plassans youngster and
to busy yourself about everything, at the first word!”
But she protested.
“No, do not thank me. I am a great deal too lazy, I never move. It was
Achille who arranged everything. And, besides, was it not sufficient
that my mother mentioned to us your desire to board in some family, for
us to think at once of opening our doors to you? You will not be with
strangers, and will be company for us.”
Then, he told her of his own affairs. After having obtained a
bachelor’s diploma, to please his family, he had just passed three
years at Marseilles, in a big calico print warehouse, which had a
factory in the neighbourhood of Plassans. He had a passion for trade,
the trade in women’s luxuries, into which enters a seduction, a slow
possession by gilded words and adulatory glances. And he related,
laughing victoriously, how he had made the five thousand francs,
without which he would never have ventured on coming to Paris, for he
had the prudence of a Jew beneath the exterior of an amiable
giddy-headed fellow.
“Just fancy, they had a Pompadour calico, an old design, something
marvellous. No one would bite at it; it had been stowed away in the
cellars for two years past. Then, as I was about to travel through the
departments of the Var and the Basses-Alpes, it occurred to me to
purchase the whole of the stock and to sell it on my own account. Oh!
such a success! an amazing success! The women quarrelled for the
remnants; and to-day, there is not one there who is not wearing some of
my calico. I must say that I talked them over so nicely! They were all
with me, I might have done as I pleased with them.”
And he laughed, whilst Madame Campardon, charmed, and troubled by
thought of that Pompadour calico, questioned him: “Little bouquets on
an unbleached ground, was it not?” She had been trying to obtain the
same thing everywhere for a summer dressing-gown.
“I have travelled for two years, which is enough,” resumed he.
“Besides, there is Paris to conquer. I must immediately look out for
something.”
“What!” exclaimed she, “has not Achille told you? But he has a berth
for you, and close by, too!”
He uttered his thanks, as surprised as though he were in fairy land,
asking, by way of a joke, whether he would not find a wife and a
hundred thousand francs a-year in his room that evening, when a young
girl of fourteen, tall and ugly, with fair insipid-looking hair, pushed
open the door, and gave a slight cry of fright.
“Come in and don’t be afraid,” said Madame Campardon. “It is Monsieur
Octave Mouret, whom you have heard us speak of.”
Then, turning towards the latter, she added:
“My daughter, Angèle. We did not bring her with us at our last journey.
She was so delicate! But she is getting stouter now.”
Angèle, with the awkwardness of girls in the ungrateful age, went and
placed herself behind her mother, and cast glances at the smiling young
man. Almost immediately, Campardon reappeared, looking excited; and he
could not contain himself, but told his wife in a few words of his good
fortune: the Abbé Mauduit, Vicar of Saint-Roch, had called about some
work, merely some repairs, but which might lead to many other things.
Then, annoyed at having spoken before Octave, and still quivering, he
rapped one hand in the other, saying:
“Well! well! what are we going to do?”
“Why, you were going out,” said Octave. “Do not let me disturb you.”
“Achille,” murmured Madame Campardon, “that berth, at the Hédouins’—”
“Why, of course! I was forgetting,” exclaimed the architect. “My dear
fellow, a place of first clerk at a large linen-draper’s. I know some
one there who has said a word for you. You are expected. It is not yet
four o’clock; shall I introduce you now?”
Octave hesitated, anxious about the bow of his necktie, flurried by his
mania for being neatly dressed. However, he decided to go, when Madame
Campardon assured him that he looked very well. With a languid
movement, she offered her forehead to her husband, who kissed her with
a great show of tenderness, repeating:
“Good-bye, my darling—good-bye, my pet.”
“Do not forget that we dine at seven,” said she, accompanying them
across the drawing-room, where they had left their hats.
Angèle followed them without the slightest grace. But her music-master
was waiting for her, and she at once commenced to strum on the
instrument with her bony fingers. Octave, who was lingering in the
ante-room, repeating his thanks, was unable to make himself heard. And,
as he went downstairs, the sound of the piano seemed to follow him: in
the midst of the warm silence other pianos—from Madame Juzeur’s, the
Vabres’, and Duveyriers’—were answering, playing on eaeh floor other
airs, whieh issued, distantly and religiously, from the calm solemnity
of the doors.
On reaching the street, Campardon turned into the Rue
Neuve-Saint-Augustin. He remained silent, with the absorbed air of a
man seeking for an opportunity to broach a subject.
“Do you remember Mademoiselle Gasparine?” asked he, at length. “She is
first lady assistant at the Hédouins’. You will see her.”
Octave thought this a good time for satisfying his curiosity.
“Ah!” said he. “Does she live with you?”
“No! no!” exelaimed the architect, hastily, and as though feeling hurt
at the bare idea.
Then, as the young man appeared surprised at his vehemence, he gently
continued, speaking in an embarrassed way:
“No; she and my wife no longer see each other. You know, in families—
Well, I met her, and I could not refuse to shake hands, could I? more
especially as she is not very well off, poor girl. So that, now, they
have news of each other through me. In these old quarrels, one must
leave the task of healing the wounds to time.”
Octave was about to question him plainly on the subject of his
marriage, when the architect suddenly put an end to the conversation by
saying:
“Here we are!”
It was a large linen-drapers, opening on to the narrow triangle of the
Place Gaillon, at the corner of the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin and the
Rue de la Michodière. Across two windows immediately above the shop was
a signboard, with the words, “The Ladies’ Paradise, founded in 1822,”
in faded gilt letters, whilst on the shop windows was inscribed, in
red, the name of the firm, “Deleuze, Hédouin, & Co.”
“It has not the modern style, but it is honest and solid,” rapidly
explained Campardon. “Monsieur Hédouin, formerly a clerk, married the
daughter of the elder Deleuze, who died a couple of years ago; so that
the business is now managed by the young couple—the old Deleuze and
another partner, I think, both keep out of it. You will see Madame
Hédouin. Oh! a woman with brains! Let us go in.”
It so happened that Monsieur Hédouin was at Lille buying some linen;
therefore Madame Hédouin received them. She was standing up, a
penholder behind her ear, giving orders to two shopmen who were putting
away some pieces of stuff on the shelves; and she appeared to him so
tall, so admirably lovely, with her regular features and her tidy hair,
so gravely smiling, in her black dress, with a turn-down collar and a
man’s tie, that Octave, not usually timid, could only stammer out a few
observations. Everything was settled without any waste of words.
“Well!” said she, in her quiet way, and with her tradeswoman’s
accustomed gracefulness, “you may as well look over the place, as you
are not engaged.”
She called one of her clerks, and put Octave under his guidance; then,
after having politely replied to a question of Campardon’s that
Mademoiselle Gasparine was out on an errand, she turned her back and
resumed her work, continuing to give her orders in her gentle and
concise voice.
“Not there, Alexandre. Put the silks up at the top. Be careful, those
are not the same make!”
Campardon, after hesitating, at length said to Octave that he would
call again for him to take him back to dinner. Then, during two hours,
the young man went over the warehouse. He found it badly lighted,
small, encumbered with stock, which, overflowing from the basement,
became heaped up in the corners, leaving only narrow passages between
high walls of bales. On several different occasions he ran against
Madame Hédouin, busy, and scuttling along the narrowest passages
without ever catching her dress in anything. She seemed the very life
and soul of the establishment, all the assistants belonging to which
obeyed the slightest sign of her white hands. Octave felt hurt that she
did not take more notice of him. Towards a quarter to seven, as he was
coming up a last time from the basement, he was told that Campardon was
on the first floor with Mademoiselle Gasparine. Up there was the
hosiery department, which that young lady looked after. But, at the top
of the winding staircase, the young man stopped abruptly behind a
pyramid of pieces of calico systematically arranged, on hearing the
architect talking most familiarly to Gasparine.
“I swear to you it is not so!” cried he, forgetting himself so far as
to raise his voice.
A slight pause ensued.
“How is she now?” at length inquired the young woman.
“Well! always the same. It comes and goes. She feels that it is all
over now. She will never get right again.”
Gasparine resumed, in compassionate tones:
“My poor friend, it is you who are to be pitied. However, as you have
been able to manage in another way, tell her how sorry I am to hear
that she is still unwell—”
Campardon, without letting her finish, seized hold of her by the
shoulders and kissed her roughly on the lips, in the gas-heated air
already becoming heavy beneath the low ceiling. She returned his kiss,
murmuring:
“To-morrow morning, if you can, at six o’clock; I will remain in bed.
Knock three times.”
Octave, bewildered, and beginning to understand, coughed, and showed
himself. Another surprise awaited him. Cousin Gasparine had become
dried up, thin and angular, with her jaw projecting, and her hair
coarse; and all she had preserved of her former self were her large
superb eyes, in a face that had now become cadaverous. With her jealous
forehead, her ardent and obstinate mouth, she troubled him as much as
Rose had charmed him by her tardy expansion of an indolent blonde.
Gasparine was polite, without effusiveness. She remembered Plassans—she
talked to the young man of the old times. When they went off, Campardon
and he, she shook their hands. Downstairs, Madame Hédouin simply said
to Octave:
“To-morrow, then, sir.”
Out in the street the young man, deafened by the cabs, jostled by the
passers-by, eould not help remarking that this lady was very beautiful,
but that she did not seem particularly amiable. On the black and muddy
pavement, the bright windows of freshly-painted shops, flaring with
gas, east broad rays of vivid light; whilst the old shops, with their
sombre displays, lit up in the interior only by smoking lamps, which
burnt like distant stars, saddened the streets with masses of shadow.
In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, just before turning into the Rue do
Choiseul, the architect bowed on passing before one of these
establishments.
A young woman, slim and elegant, dressed in a silk mantlet, was
standing in the doorway, drawing a little boy of three towards her, so
that he might not get run over. She was talking to an old bareheaded
lady, the shopkeeper, no doubt, whom she addressed in a familiar
manner. Octave eould not distinguish her features in that dim light,
beneath the dancing reflections of the neighbouring gas-jets; she
seemed to him to be pretty, he only saw two bright eyes, whieh were
fixed a moment upon him like two flames. Behind her yawned the shop,
damp like a cellar, and emitting an odour of saltpetre.
“That is Madame Vabre, the wife of Monsieur Théophile Vabre, the
landlord’s younger son. You know the people who live on the first
floor,” resumed Campardon, when he had gone a few steps. “Oh! a most
charming lady! She was born in that shop, one of the best paying
haberdashers of the neighbourhood, which her parents, Monsieur and
Madame Louhette, still manage, for the sake of having something to
occupy them. They have made some money there, I will warrant!”
But Octave did not understand trade of that sort, in those holes of old
Paris, where at one time a piece of stuff was sufficient sign. He swore
that nothing in the world would ever make him consent to live in such a
den. One surely caught some rare aches and pains there!
Whilst talking, they had reached the top of the stairs. They were being
waited for. Madame Campardon had put on a grey silk dress, had arranged
her hair coquettishly, and looked very neat and prim. Campardon kissed
her on the neck, with the emotion of a good husband.
“Good evening, my darling; good evening, my pet.”
And they passed into the dining-room. The dinner was delightful. Madame
Campardon at first talked of the Deleuzes and the Hédouins—families
respected throughout the neighbourhood, and whose member’s were well
known; a cousin who was a stationer in the Rue Gaillon, an uncle who
had an umbrella shop in the Passage Choiseul, and nephews and nieces in
business all round about. Then the conversation turned, and they talked
of Angèle, who was sitting stiffly on her chair, and eating with inert
gestures. Her mother was bringing her up at home, it was preferable;
and, not wishing to say more, she blinked her eyes, to convey that
young girls learnt very naughty things at boarding-schools. The child
had slyly balanced her plate on her knife. Lisa, who was clearing the
cloth, missed breaking it, and exclaimed:
“It was your fault, mademoiselle!”
A mad laugh, violently restrained, passed over Angèle’s face. ‘Madame
Campardon contented herself with shaking her head; and, when Lisa had
left the room to fetch the dessert, she sang her praises—very
intelligent, very active, a regular Paris girl, always knowing which
way to turn. They might very well do without Victoire, the cook, who
was no longer very clean, on account of her great age; but she had seen
her master born at his father’s—she was a family ruin which they
respected. Then as the maid returned with some baked apples:
“Conduct irreproachable,” continued Madame Campardon in Octave’s ear.
“I have discovered nothing against her as yet. One holiday a month to
go and embrace her old aunt, who lives some distance off.”
Octave observed Lisa. Seeing her nervous, flat-chested, blear-eyed, the
thought came to him that she must go in for a precious fling, when at
her old aunt’s. However, he greatly approved what the mother said, as
she continued to give him her views on education—a young girl is such a
heavy responsibility, it is necessary to keep her clear even of the
breaths of the street And, during this, Angèle, each time Lisa leant
over near her chair to remove a plate, pinched her in a friendly way,
whilst they both maintained their composite, without even moving an
eyelid.
[Illustration]
“One should be virtuous for one’s own sake,” said the architect
learnedly, as though by way of conclusion to thoughts he had not
expressed. “I do not care a button for public opinion; I am an artist!”
After dinner, they remained in the drawing-room until midnight. It was
a little jollification to celebrate Octave’s arrival. Madame Campardon
appeared to be very tired; little by little she abandoned herself,
leaning back on the sofa.
“Are you suffering, my darling?” asked her husband.
“No,” replied she in a low voice. “It is always the same thing.”
She looked at him, and then gently asked:
“Did you see her at the Hédouins’?”
“Yes. She asked after you.”
Tears came to Rose’s eyes.
“She is in good health, she is!”
“Come, come,” said the architect, showering little kisses on her hair,
forgetting they were not alone. “You will make yourself worse again.
You know very well that I love you all the same, my poor pet!”
Octave, who had discreetly retired to the window, under the pretence of
looking into the street, returned to study Madame Campardon’s
countenance, his curiosity again awakened, and wondering if she knew.
But she had resumed her amiable and doleful expression, and was curled
up in the depths of the sofa, like a woman who has to find her pleasure
in herself, and who is forcibly resigned to receiving the caresses that
fall to her share.
At length Octave wished them good-night. With his candlestick in his
hand, he was still on the landing, when he heard the sound of silk
dresses rustling over the stairs. He politely stood on one side. It was
evidently the ladies of the fourth floor, Madame Josserand and her two
daughters, returning from some party. As they passed, the mother, a
superb and corpulent woman, stared in his face; whilst the elder of the
young ladies kept at a distance with a sour air, and the younger,
giddily looked at him and laughed, in the full light of the candle. She
was charming, this one, with her irregular but agreeable features, her
clear complexion, and her auburn hair gilded with light reflections;
and she had a bold grace, the free gait of a young bride returning from
a ball in a complicated costume of ribbons and lace, like unmarried
girls do not wear. The trains disappeared along the balustrade: a door
closed. Octave lingered a moment, greatly amused by the gaiety of her
eyes.
He slowly ascended in his turn. A single gas-jet was burning, the
staircase was slumbering in a heavy warmth. It seemed to him more
wrapped up in itself than ever, with its chaste doors, its doors of
rich mahogany, closing the entrances to virtuous alcoves. Not a sigh
passed along, it was the silence of well-mannered people who hold their
breath. Presently a slight noise was heard; Octave leant over and
beheld Monsieur Gourd, in his cap and slippers, turning out the last
gas-jet. Then all subsided, the house became enveloped by the solemnity
of darkness, as though annihilated in the distinction and decency of
its slumbers.
Octave, nevertheless, had great difficulty in getting to sleep. He kept
feverishly turning over, his brain occupied with the new faces he had
seen. Why the devil were the Campardons so amiable? Were they dreaming
of marrying their daughter to him later on? Perhaps, too, the husband
took him to board with them so that he might amuse and enliven the
wife? And that poor lady, what peculiar complaint could she be
suffering from? Then his ideas got more mixed; he saw shadows pass—?
little Madame Pichon, his neighbour, with her clear empty glances;
beautiful Madame Hédouin, correct and grave in her black dress; and
Madame Vabre’s ardent eyes, and Mademoiselle Josserand’s gay laugh. How
they swarmed in a few hours in the streets of Paris! It had always been
his dream, ladies who would take him by the hand and help him in his
affairs. But these kept returning and mingling with fatiguing
obstinacy. He knew not which to choose; he tried to keep his voice
soft, his gestures cajoling. And suddenly, worn-out, exasperated, he
yielded to his brutal inner nature, to the ferocious disdain in which
he held woman, beneath his air of amorous adoration.
“Are they going to let me sleep at all?” said he out loud, turning
violently on to his back. “The first who likes, it is the same to me,
and all together if it pleases them! To sleep now, it will be daylight
to-morrow.”