I
"Andre!"
"Yes, monsieur."
The little waiter, with anxiety in his smooth, blond face, hurried to
the table.
"Bring me the _Soir_."
Andre shot away, and presently returned, paper in hand.
"What is there good at the theatres, Andre?"
Andre wiped his hands in his soiled apron, and looked thoughtful.
"There's the _Folies Bergeres_, monsieur. Dumont sings to-night."
"Oh, she tires me. Her voice is cracked."
"There's Madame Judic at the _Varietes_," Andre suggested, tentatively.
"I saw her in the last piece."
Andre scratched his head, and stared at the figure at the table.
"Monsieur likes the _Cirque_, does he not?"
Monsieur did not look up from the paper. "What's at the _Cirque_ now,
Andre?"
"At the _Cirque Parisien_? There's Mademoiselle Blanche, the
acrobat. They say she's a marvel, monsieur,--and beautiful,--the
most beautiful woman in Paris. She dives from the top of the
building backwards--hundreds of feet."
"So you think it's really good, Andre?"
Andre nodded. Monsieur dropped the paper, paid his bill, left a little
fee for the _garcon_, and took himself off. At the entrance he stopped
and surveyed the surging crowd in the _Boulevard Montmartre_. He had
just finished an excellent dinner with a glass of _chartreuse verte_; so
he felt particularly complacent. As he prodded his teeth with the easy
grace of the Frenchman who knows no shame of the toothpick, he tried to
think out a plan for the evening. Nothing better occurred to him than
Andre's suggestion. He was not in the mood for the _Casino de Paris_,
nor for any of the other concert halls, nor even for the theatres. Yes,
he would go to the Circus. He hadn't been there for ten days.
For years Jules Le Baron had attended the _Cirque Parisien_ at least
once a fortnight; his friends used to chaff him for his fondness for it.
Those who had known him from a boy liked to remind him of his first
great ambition--to be a performer on the trapeze. Though this amused him
now, he had never lost his love for feats of daring and skill. Whenever
he felt particularly tired from his work at the wool-house, he would go
to the Circus; it refreshed him, and he fancied that it made him sleep
well afterwards. His first love had been a beautiful Roumanian, who
jumped through hoops of fire, landing on her velvet-caparisoned horse,
without even singeing her long, blond hair. He was fifteen then, and he
discovered that the lady was forty-five, though he could have sworn
there was not a difference of more than three years in their ages. Since
that time he had become enamoured of many of the glittering amazons of
the arena, who shot through the air, or through hoops, or out of the
mouths of cannons, or crossed dizzy heights on the tight-rope, or
juggled with long, villainous-looking knives falling in showers into
their hands.
Those episodes, however, brightened Jules Le Baron's life long before he
was twenty-five. He had since had many similar experiences in the larger
arena of the world. Indeed, he gloried in his susceptibility; he used to
give people to understand that, though fairly successful in business, he
had a very keen appreciation of the sentiments, and of all the
refinements of life. To a foreigner he would have expressed this
complication by saying that he was Parisian to his finger-tips. In
America, where, at the age of twenty-six, he passed three wretched
months, he had been appalled by the lack of sentiment among the people.
Of course, as he represented there the wool-house with which he had been
connected since his sixteenth year, he met chiefly business men; but
even these ought to have displayed an interest in something outside
their commercial routine.
It was those three months in America that gave Jules Le Baron his zest
for Paris. Of course, he had always loved it; but till he left it, his
love had not become self-conscious. America taught him what he had only
dimly known before, that for him Paris was the only city in the world
worth living in. He knew that people born away from Paris liked other
cities; secretly, however, this amused him. He believed that no one,
after living in Paris, could find any other place habitable. Indeed, any
places, any people, any customs foreign to Paris seemed to him so droll
that at the thought of some of them he often laughed aloud. America had
given him things to laugh at for the rest of his life.
Of course, Jules was proud of having visited America; it gave him a
delightful feeling of superiority to his friends and acquaintances at
home. He always felt pleased when the English and Americans that he met
in business complimented him on his English; it enabled him to say
carelessly: "Oh, I just picked it up when I was in America." He really
had learned very little English there; nearly all he knew had been
taught him by his father, a professor of chemistry in a small school in
Paris, who had spent six months in England during the siege. He had
acquired there, however, a smattering of American slang; on his lips it
sounded delicious. His friends in Paris thought he spoke English
beautifully, and frequently referred to his talent for languages. He had
given them glowing accounts of his adventures in America, and said
nothing of his desolate loneliness there; so they looked upon him as a
born traveller,--as, altogether, a man of remarkable qualities. But for
his English and his travels, they would merely have shrugged their
shoulders at the mention of his name, and dismissed him with a "_Bon
garcon!_"
Jules Le Baron knew that he was much more than a _bon garcon_. His
attitude toward the world expressed this; he always acted as if he felt
the world had been made exclusively for him. After losing his father at
fourteen, he promptly proceeded to link his mother in the closest bonds
of slavery. Yet he was kind to her, too, and, in his way, he loved her,
for she was made to obey, just as he had been born to command. When she
died and left him alone at the age of twenty with a small property, he
took a miniature apartment in the _rue de Lisbonne_, and adjusted
himself to his new life. His salary at the wool-house, where his English
helped to make him valuable, together with the property, gave him an
income of ten thousand francs a year. He considered himself rich, a
personage, one who ought to marry well.
Jules had thought so much about marriage that, at thirty, it was
surprising he should have remained unwedded. Every young woman he met he
regarded as a candidate for his hand, and he spent a large part of his
leisure in rejecting these innocent suitors. Even now, as he slowly made
his way up the _Boulevard_, he fancied that the girls he passed were
looking at him admiringly and enviously. He often smiled back at them,
for he was rarely unkind and he never gratuitously wounded any one's
feelings. With his mother, it is true, he had been occasionally severe,
but merely to discipline her, to make her see things as he saw them. At
this moment he felt particularly amiable. He was in Paris, on the
_Boulevard_ that he loved, surrounded by the people that he loved, in
the atmosphere which, as he had discovered in America, was as the very
breath to his being. The spectacle was all for him! Paris, had been
created that he might enjoy it!