THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN (_continued_).
If ever people were unsuited for life side by side it was these two.
Opposites by instinct, by education and temperament, thinking alike on
no one subject, they were the North and the South face to face without
the slightest chance of fusion. Love feeds on contrasts like this and
laughs when they are pointed out, so powerful does it feel itself. But
later, when everyday life sets in, during the monotony of days and
nights passed beneath the same roof, that mist which constitutes love
disappears; the veil is lifted; they begin to see each other, and, what
is worse, to judge each other!
It was some time before the awakening came to these young people; at
least with Rosalie the illusion lasted. Clear-sighted and clever on all
other subjects, for a long while she remained blind to Numa’s faults
and could not see how far in many ways she was his superior. It had not
taken him long to relapse into his old self again. Passion in the South
is short-lived because of its very violence. And then the Southerner is
so perfectly assured of the inferiority of women that, once married and
sure of his happiness, he installs himself like a bashaw in his home,
receiving love as homage due and not of much importance; for, after
all, it takes up a good deal of time to be loved, and Numa was much
preoccupied just then arranging the new life which his marriage, his
wealth and the high position in the law courts as son-in-law to M. Le
Quesnoy necessitated.
The one hundred thousand francs given him by Aunt Portal sufficed to
pay his debts to Malmus and the furnisher and to wipe out forever the
dreary record of his straitened bachelor days. It was a delightful
change from the humble _frichti_ (lunch) at Malmus’s on the old sofa
with its worn red velvet, in company of “every one’s old girl,” to the
dining-room in his new house in the Rue Scribe where, opposite his
dainty little Parisian wife, he presided over the sumptuous dinners
that he offered to the magnates of the law and of music.
The Provençal loved a life of eating, luxury and display, but he liked
it best in his own house, without any trouble or ceremony, where a
certain looseness was possible over a cigar and risky stories might be
told. Rosalie resigned herself to keeping open house, the table always
set, ten or fifteen guests every evening, and never anybody but men,
among whose black coats her evening dress made the only point of color.
There she stayed until with the serving of the coffee and the opening
of cigar boxes she would slip away, leaving them to their politics
and the coarse roars of laughter that accompany the close of bachelor
dinners.
Only the mistress of a house knows what domestic complications arise
when such constant and unusual services are required every day of the
servants. Rosalie struggled uncomplainingly with this problem and
tried to bring some order out of chaos, carried away as she was by the
whirlwind of her terrible genius of a husband, who did not spare her
the turbulence of his own nature, yet between two storms had a smile
of approbation for his little wife. Her only regret was that she never
had him enough to herself. Even at breakfast, that hasty morning’s
meal for a busy lawyer, there was always a guest between them, namely
that male comrade without whom the man of the South could not exist,
that inevitable some one to answer a bright remark and call forth a
flash from his own wits, the arm on which condescendingly to lean, some
henchman to catch his handkerchief as he sallied forth to the Palace of
Justice!
Ah, how she longed to accompany him across the Seine, how glad she
would have been to call for him on rainy days, wait, and bring him home
in her carriage, nestled up to him behind the windows blurred with
raindrops! She did not dare to suggest such things any more, so sure
was she of some excuse, an appointment in the Lawyers’ Hall with some
one of three hundred intimate friends of whom the Provençal would say
with deep emotion:
“He adores me! He would go through fire and water for me!”
That was his idea of friendship. But in other respects, no selection
whatever as to his friends! His easy good-nature and lively
capriciousness caused him to throw himself into the arms of each man
he met, but made him as easily drop him. Every week there was a new
craze for someone whose name came up incessantly, a name which Rosalie
wrote down conscientiously on the little menu card, but which presently
disappeared as suddenly as if the new favorite’s personality had been
as flimsy and as easily burned as the little colored card itself.
Among these birds of passage one alone remained stationary, more
from force of childish habit than from anything else, for Bompard
and Roumestan were born in the same street at Aps. Bompard was an
institution in the house, found there in a place of honor when the
bride came home. He was a cadaverous creature with Don Quixote’s head
and a big eagle’s nose and eyes like balls of agate set in a pitted,
saffron-colored complexion that looked like Cordova leather; it was
lined and seamed with the wrinkles one sees only in the faces of clowns
and jesters which are forced constantly into contortions.
Bompard had never been a comedian, however. Numa had found him again
in the chorus of the opera where he had sung for a short time. Beyond
this, it was impossible to say what was real in the shifting sands of
that career. He had been everywhere, seen everything and practised all
trades. No great man or great event could be mentioned without his
saying: “He is a friend of mine,” or “I was present at the time,” and
then would follow a long story to prove his assertion.
In piecing together these fragments of his history most astonishing
chronological conclusions were arrived at; thus, at the same date
Bompard led a company of Polish and Caucasian deserters at the siege of
Sebastopol and was choir-master to the King of Holland and very close
to the king’s sister, for which latter indiscretion he was imprisoned
for six months in the fortress at The Hague--which did not prevent him
at the same time from making a forced march from Laghouat to Gadamès
through the great African desert.
He told these wonderful tales with rare gestures, in a solemn tone,
using a strong Southern accent, but with a continual twitching and
contortion of his features as trying to the eyes as the shifting of the
bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.
The present life of Bompard was as mysterious as his past. How and
where did he live? And on what? He was forever talking of wonderful
schemes for making money, such as a new and cheap manner of asphalting
one corner of Paris, or, all of a sudden, he was deep in the discovery
of an infallible remedy for the phylloxera and was only waiting for a
letter from the Minister to receive the prize of one hundred thousand
francs in order to be in funds to pay his bill at the little dairy
where he took his meals, whose managers he had almost driven insane
with his false hopes and extravagant dreams.
This crazy Southerner was Roumestan’s delight. He took him about,
making a butt of him, egging him on, warming him up and exciting his
folly. If Numa stopped in the street to speak to any one, Bompard
stepped aside with a dignified air as if about to light a cigar. At
funerals or first nights he was always turning up to ask every one
in the most impressive haste: “Have you seen Roumestan anywhere?”
He came to be as well known as Numa himself. This type of parasite
is not uncommon in Paris; each great man has a Bompard dragging at
his heels, who walks on in his shadow and comes to have a kind of
personality reflected from that of his patron. It was a mere chance
that Roumestan’s Bompard really had a personality of his own, not
a reflection of his master. Rosalie detested this intruder on her
happiness, always between her and her husband, appropriating to himself
the few precious moments that might have been hers alone. The two old
friends always talked a patois that seemed to set her apart and laughed
uproariously at untranslatable local jokes. What she particularly
disliked about him was the necessity he was under of telling lies. At
first she had believed these inventions, so unsuspicious was her true
and candid nature, whose greatest charm was its harmony in word and
thought, a combination that was audible in the crystalline clearness
and steadiness of her musical voice.
“I do not like him--he tells lies,” she said in deep disgust to
Roumestan, who only laughed. To defend his friend, he said:
“No, he’s not a liar; he’s only gifted with a vivid imagination. He is
a sleeper awake who talks out his dreams. My country is full of just
such people. It is the effect of the sun and the accent. There is my
Aunt Portal--and even I myself--if I did not have myself well in hand--”
She placed her little hand over his mouth:
“Hush, hush! I could not love you if you came from that side of
Provence!”
The sad fact was that he did come from that very countryside. His
assumed Paris manners and the veneer of society restrained him
somewhat, but she was soon to see that terrible South appear in him
after all, commonplace, brutal, illogical. The first time that she
realized it was in regard to religion, about which, as about everything
else, Numa was entirely in line with the traditions of his province.
Numa was the Provençal Roman Catholic who never goes to communion,
never confesses himself except in cholera times, never goes to church
except to bring his wife home after mass, and then stands in the
vestibule near the holy-water basin with the superior air of a father
who has taken his children to a show of Chinese shadows--yet a man who
would let himself be drawn and quartered in defence of a faith he does
not feel, which in no way controls his passions or his vices.
When he married he knew that his wife was of the same church as himself
and that at the wedding in St. Paul’s the priest had eulogized them in
due form as befitted all the candles and carpets and gorgeous flowers
that go with a first-class wedding. He had never worried further about
it. All the women whom he knew--his mother, his cousins, his aunt,
the Duchesse de San Donnino, were devout Catholics; so he was much
surprised after several months of marriage to observe that his wife
never went to church. He spoke of it:
“Do you never go to confession?”
“No, my dear,” she answered quietly, “nor you either, so far as I can
see.”
“Oh, I--that is quite different!”
“Why so?”
She looked at him with such a sincerely puzzled expression--she seemed
so far from understanding her own inferiority as a woman, that he made
no reply and waited for her to explain.
No, she was not a free-thinker, nor a strong-minded woman. Educated
in Paris at a good school, she had had for confessor a priest of
Saint-Laurent up to seventeen; when she left school, and even for some
time after, she had fulfilled all her religious duties at the side of
her mother, who was a bigoted Southerner. Then, one day, something
within her seemed suddenly to give way, and she declared to her parents
that she felt an insuperable repulsion for the confessional. Her pious
mother would have tried to overcome what she looked upon as a whim, but
her father had interfered:
“Let her alone; it took hold of me just as it has seized her and at the
same age.”
And since then she had consulted only her own pure young conscience
in regard to her actions. Otherwise she was a Parisian, a woman of the
world to her finger-tips, and disliked the bad taste in displays of
independence. If Numa wished to go to church she would go with him, as
for a long while she had gone with her mother; but at the same time
she would not lie or pretend to believe that in which she had lost all
faith.
Numa listened to her in speechless amazement, alarmed to hear such
sentiments expressed with a firmness and conviction in her own moral
being that dissipated all his Southern ideas about the dependency of
women.
“Then you don’t believe in God?” he asked in his best forensic
manner, his raised finger pointed solemnly toward the moldings of
the ceiling. She gave a cry of astonishment: “Is it possible to do
so?”--so spontaneously and with such conviction that it was as good as
a confession of faith. Then he fell back on what the world would say,
on social conventions, on the intimate connection between religion and
monarchy. All the ladies whom they knew went to church, the duchess
and Mme. d’Escarbès; they had their confessors to dine and at evening
parties. Her strange views would have a bad effect upon them socially,
were they known. He suddenly ceased speaking, feeling that he was
floundering about in commonplaces, and the discussion ended there.
For several Sundays in succession he went through a grand and hollow
form of taking his wife to mass, whereby Rosalie gained the boon of
a pleasant walk on her husband’s arm; but he soon wearied of the
business, pleaded important engagements and let the religious question
drop.
This first misunderstanding made no breach between them. As if seeking
pardon, the young wife redoubled her devotion to her husband and her
usual clever, smiling deference to his wishes. No longer so blind as
in the earlier days, perchance she sometimes felt a vague premonition
of things that she would not admit even to herself; but she was happy
still, because she wished to be so, and because she lived in that
dreamlike atmosphere enveloping the new life of a young married woman
still surrounded by the dreams and uncertainty which are like the
clouds of white tulle of the wedding dress that drape the form of
a bride. The awakening was bound to come; to her it was sudden and
frightful.
One summer day--they were staying at Orsay, a country seat belonging
to the Le Quesnoys--her father and husband had already gone up to
Paris, as they did every morning, when Rosalie discovered that the
pattern for a little garment she was making was not to be found. The
garment was part of the outfit for the expected heir. It is true there
are beautiful things to be bought ready-made at the shops, but real
mothers, the women who feel the mother-love in advance, like to plan
and cut and sew; and as the pile of little clothes increases in the
box, as each garment is finished, feel that they are hastening the
matter and each object is bringing the advent of the longed-for birth
one step nearer. Rosalie would not for worlds have allowed any other
hand to touch this tremendous work which had been begun five months
before--as soon as she was sure of her coming happiness. On the bench
where she sat under the big catalpa tree down there at Orsay were
spread out dainty little caps that were only big enough to be tried on
one’s fist, little flannel skirts and dresses, the straight sleeves
suggesting the stiff gestures of the tiny form for which they were
designed--and now, here she was without this most important pattern!
“Send your maid up town for it,” suggested her mother.
A maid, indeed! What should she know about it? “No, no, I shall go
myself. I will have finished my shopping by noon, and then I shall go
and surprise Numa and eat up half his luncheon.”
It was a beautiful idea, this bachelor luncheon with her husband, alone
in the half-darkened house in the Rue Scribe, with the curtains all
gone and the furniture covered up; it would be a regular spree! She
laughed to herself as all alone she ran up the steps, her errands done,
and put her key softly in the lock so that she might surprise him. “It
is pretty late, he has probably finished.”
Indeed, she did find only the remnants of a dainty meal for two upon
the table in the dining room, and the footman in his checked jacket
hard at it emptying all the bottles and dishes. She thought of nothing
at first but that her want of punctuality had spoiled her little plan.
If only she had not loafed so long in that shop over those adorable
little garments, all lace and embroideries!
“Has your master gone out?”
The slowness of the servant in answering, the sudden pallor that
overspread his big impudent face framed in long whiskers, did not at
first strike her. She only saw a servant embarrassed at being caught
helping himself to his master’s wines and good things. Still it was
absolutely necessary to say that his master was still there, but that
he was very much occupied and would be occupied for quite a while. But
it took him some time to stammer out this information. How the fellow’s
hands trembled as he cleared off the table and began to rearrange it
for his mistress’s luncheon!
“Has he been lunching alone?”
“Yes, Madame; at least, only Monsieur Bompard.”
She had suddenly caught sight of a black lace scarf lying on a chair.
The foolish fellow saw it at the same moment, and as their eyes were
fixed on the same object the whole thing stood before her in a flash.
Quickly, without a word, she crossed the little waiting room, went
straight to the door of the library, opened it wide, and fell flat on
the floor. They had not even troubled themselves to lock the door!
And if you had seen the woman! Forty years old, a washed-out blonde
with a pimply complexion, thin lips and eyelids wrinkled like an old
glove! Under her eyes were purple scars, signs of her evil life; her
shoulders were bony and her voice harsh. But--she was high-born, the
Marquise d’Escarbès! which to the Southerner means everything. The
escutcheon concealed her defects as a woman. Separated from her husband
through an unsavory divorce suit, disowned by her family and no longer
received in the great houses of the Faubourg, Mme. d’Escarbès had gone
over to the Empire and had opened a political diplomatic salon, one
of those which are for the police rather than politicians, where one
could find the most notorious persons of the day--without their wives.
Then, after two years of intrigues, having gathered together quite a
following, she determined to appeal her law case. Roumestan, who had
been her lawyer in the first suit, could not very well refuse to take
up the second. He hesitated, nevertheless, for public opinion was
very strong against her. But the entreaties of the Marquise took such
convincing steps and the lawyer’s vanity was so flattered by the steps
themselves that he had yielded. Now that the case was soon to be on,
they saw each other every day, either at her house or his own, pushing
the affair vigorously and from two standpoints.
This terrible discovery nearly killed Rosalie; it struck her doubly in
her sensibility to pain as a woman with child, bearing as she did two
hearts within her, two spots for suffering. The child was killed, but
the mother lived. But after three days of unconsciousness, when she
regained memory and the power of suffering, her tears poured forth in a
torrent, a bitter flood that nothing could stem. When she had wept her
heart out over the faithlessness of her husband, the empty cradle and
the dainty little garments resting useless under the transparent blue
curtains caused her anguish to break forth again in tears--but without
a cry or lament!
Poor Numa was in almost as deep despair as she was. The hope of a
little Roumestan, “the eldest,” who is always a great personage in
Provençal families, was gone forever, destroyed by his own fault. The
pale face of his wife with its resigned expression, her compressed lips
and smothered sobs, nearly broke his heart--her grief was so different
from his way of acting, from the coarse, superficial sensibility
that he showed as he sat at the foot of his victim’s bed, saying at
intervals with swimming eyes and trembling lips, “Come now, Rosalie,
come now!” That was all he could find to say; but what vanity in that
“Come now,” uttered with the Southern accent that so easily takes on
a sympathetic tone; yet beneath it all one seemed to hear: “Don’t let
it worry you, my darling little pet! Is it really worth while? Does it
keep me from loving you just the same?”
It is true that he did love her just as much as his shallow nature was
capable of loving constantly any one. He could not bear to think of any
one else presiding over his house, caring for him, or petting him.
“I must have devotion about me,” he said naïvely, and he well knew that
the devotion she had to give was the perfection of everything that a
man could desire; so the idea of losing her was horrible to him. If
that is not love, what is?
Rosalie, alas, was thinking on quite another line. Her life was
wrecked, her idol fallen, her confidence in him forever lost. And yet
she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him, however, as a mother yields
to the child that cries and begs for her pardon; also for the sake of
their name, her father’s honored name that the scandal of a separation
would have tarnished, and because every one believed her happy and she
could not let them know the truth.
But let him beware! After this pardon so generously accorded, she
warned him, a repetition of such an outrage would not find the same
clemency. Let him never try it again, or their lives would be separated
cruelly and forever under the eyes of the whole world. There was a
firmness in her tone and look as she said this, which showed her
capable of revenging her wounded woman’s pride upon a society that held
her imprisoned in its bonds.
Numa understood; he swore in perfect good faith that he would sin no
more. He was still upset at the risk he had run of losing his happiness
and that repose which was so necessary to him, all for an intrigue
which had only appealed to his vanity. It was an immense relief to
be rid of his great lady, his bony marquise, who but for her noble
coat-of-arms was hardly more desirable than poor “every one’s old
girl” at the Café Malmus; to have no more love-letters to write and
rendezvous to make and keep. The knowledge that this silly sentimental
nonsense which had so tried his ease-loving nature was over and done
with enchanted him as much as his wife’s forgiveness and the restored
peace of his household.
He was as happy as before all this had happened. No apparent change
took place in their mode of life--the table always laid, the same crowd
of guests, the same round of entertainments and receptions at which
Numa sang and declaimed and strutted, unconscious that at his side sat
one whose beautiful eyes were evermore open and aware of facts under
their veil of actual tears. She understood her great man now: all words
and gestures, kind-hearted and generous at times, but kind only a
little while, made up of caprice, a love of showing off and a desire to
please like a coquette. She realized the shallowness of such a nature,
undecided in his beliefs as in his dislikes; above all she feared for
both their sakes the weakness hidden under his swelling words and
resounding voice, a weakness which angered and yet endeared him to her,
because, now that her wifely love had vanished, she felt the yearning
towards him that a mother feels to a wayward child. Always ready to
sacrifice herself and to be devoted in spite of treachery, the secret
fear haunted her still: “If only he does not wear out my patience!”
Clear-sighted as she was, Rosalie quickly observed a change in her
husband’s political opinions. His relations with the Faubourg St.
Germain had begun to cool. The nankin waistcoat and fleur-de-lis pin
of old Sagnier no longer awed him. Sagnier’s mind, he said, was not
what it had been. It was his shadow alone that presided at the Palace,
a sleepy ghost that recalled far too well the epoch of the Legitimacy
and its morbid inactivity, the next thing to death.
So it was that Numa slowly, gently developed towards the Empire,
opening his doors to notable men among the Imperialists whom he had met
at the house of Mme. d’Escarbès, whose influence had prepared him for
this very change.
“Look out for your great man; I am afraid he is going to moult,” said
the councillor to his daughter at dinner one day, when the lawyer
had been letting his coarse satire loose regarding the affair of
Froschdorf, which he compared to the wooden horse of Don Quixote,
stationary and nailed down, while his rider with bandaged eyes believed
he was careering far through heavenly space.
She did not have to ask many questions. Deceitful as he might be, his
lies, which he scorned to cover with complications or with finesse,
were so careless that they betrayed him at once.
Going into the library one morning she found him absorbed in writing a
letter, and leaning over him with her head near his she inquired:
“To whom are you writing?”
He stammered, tried to invent something, but the clear eyes searched
him through and through like a conscience; he had an impulse to be
frank because he could not help it.
It was a letter to the emperor accepting the position of councillor of
state, written in the dry but emphatic style, that style at the bar
which he employed when addressing the Bench whilst he gesticulated with
his long sleeves. It began thus: “A Vendean of the South, raised in the
belief in the monarchy and a respectful reverence for the past, I feel
that I shall not do violence to my honor or to my conscience--”
“You must not send that!” said she quickly.
He flew into a rage, talked loudly and brutally like a shopman at Aps
laying down the law in his own household. What business was it of hers,
after all was said and done? What did she mean by it? Did he interfere
with her about the shape of her bonnets or the models of her gowns?
He stormed and thundered as if he had a public audience, but Rosalie
maintained a tranquil, almost disdainful silence at such violence as
this, mere remnant of a will already broken, sure of her victory in the
end. These crises which weaken and disarm them are themselves the ruin
of exuberant natures.
“You must not send that letter. It would give the lie to your whole
life, to all your obligations--”
“My obligations! and to whom?”
“To me. Remember how we first knew each other, how you won my heart by
your protestations and disgust at the emperor’s masquerades. It was not
so much the sentiments that I admired in you as the fixed purpose that
you showed to uphold a righteous cause once adopted--your steady manly
will!”
But he defended his conduct. Ought he eat his heart out all his life
long in a party frozen stiff, without springs of action, a camp
deserted and abandoned under the snow? Besides, it was not he who went
to the Empire, it was the Empire that came to him. The emperor was an
excellent man, full of ideas, much superior to his court--in fine,
he brought to bear all the good arguments for playing the traitor.
But Rosalie would accept none of them, and tried to show him that his
conduct would not only be treacherous but short-sighted:
“Do you not see how uneasy these people are, how they feel that the
earth is mined and hollow beneath their feet? The slightest jar from a
rolling stone and the whole thing will crumble! And into what a gulf!”
She talked with perfect clearness, gave details, repeated many things
that she, always a silent person, had picked up after dinner from
the talks when the men would leave the women, intelligent or not, to
languish over toilets and worldly scandal in conversation that even
such topics could not enliven.
“Odd little woman!” thought Roumestan. Where had she learned all that
she was saying? He could not get over the fact that she was so clever;
and, following one of those sudden changes that make these gusty
natures so lovable, he took this reasoning little head, so charming
with youth and yet so intelligent, between his hands and covered it
with a passion of tender kisses.
“You are right, a thousand times right! I ought to write just the
opposite!”
He was going to tear up the rough copy, but he noted that in the
opening sentence there was a phrase that pleased him, one that might
still serve his turn if it were changed a bit, somewhat in this way:
“A Vendean of the South, raised in the belief in the monarchy and a
respectful reverence for the past, I feel that I should do violence to
my honor and conscience, if I accepted the post which your Majesty--”
etc.
This polite but firm refusal published in all the Legitimist papers
raised Roumestan to a very different place in public opinion; it made
his name a synonym for incorruptibility. “Cannot be rent,” wrote the
_Charivari_ under an amusing cartoon which represented the toga of the
great jurist resisting the violent tugging of the several political
parties.
Shortly after this the Empire went to pieces and when the Assembly
of Bordeaux met Numa had the choice between three departments which
had elected him their Deputy to the House, entirely on account of his
letter to the emperor. His first speeches, delivered with a somewhat
forced and turgid eloquence, soon made him leader of all the parties of
the Right.
He was only the small change of old Sagnier, but in these days of
middle-class races, blue blood rarely came to the front, and so the
new leader triumphed on the benches of the Chamber as easily as on the
old red divans at Father Malmus’s café.
Councillor-general in his own department, the idol of the entire South,
and raised still higher by the position of his father-in-law, who
after the fall of the Empire had become first president of the court
of appeals, Numa without doubt was marked out to become sooner or
later a cabinet minister. In the meantime a great man in the eyes of
every one but his own wife, he carried his fresh glories about, from
Paris to Versailles and down to Provence, amiable, familiar, jolly and
unconventional, bringing his aureola with him, it is true, but only too
willing to leave it in its band-box, like an opera hat when no ceremony
calls for its presence.