A fine thing is the task of a spy, when performed for one’s own benefit
and in the interests of a passion. Is it not giving ourselves the
pleasure of a thief and a rascal while continuing honest men? But there
is another side to it; we must resign ourselves to boil with anger, to
roar with impatience, to freeze our feet in the mud, to be numbed, and
roasted, and torn by false hopes. We must go, on the faith of a mere
indication, to a vague object, miss our end, curse our luck, improvise
to ourselves elegies, dithyrambics, exclaim idiotically before
inoffensive pedestrians who observe us, knock over old apple-women and
their baskets, run hither and thither, stand on guard beneath a window,
make a thousand suppositions. But, after all, it is a chase, a hunt; a
hunt in Paris, a hunt with all its chances, minus dogs and guns and
the tally-ho! Nothing compares with it but the life of gamblers. But
it needs a heart big with love and vengeance to ambush itself in Paris,
like a tiger waiting to spring upon its prey, and to enjoy the chances
and contingencies of Paris, by adding one special interest to the many
that abound there. But for this we need a many-sided soul--for must we
not live in a thousand passions, a thousand sentiments?
Auguste de Maulincour flung himself into this ardent existence
passionately, for he felt all its pleasures and all its misery. He went
disguised about Paris, watching at the corners of the rue Pagevin and
the rue des Vieux-Augustins. He hurried like a hunter from the rue de
Menars to the rue Soly, and back from the rue Soly to the rue de Menars,
without obtaining either the vengeance or the knowledge which would
punish or reward such cares, such efforts, such wiles. But he had not
yet reached that impatience which wrings our very entrails and makes us
sweat; he roamed in hope, believing that Madame Jules would only refrain
for a few days from revisiting the place where she knew she had been
detected. He devoted the first days therefore, to a careful study of
the secrets of the street. A novice at such work, he dared not question
either the porter or the shoemaker of the house to which Madame Jules
had gone; but he managed to obtain a post of observation in a house
directly opposite to the mysterious apartment. He studied the ground,
trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of prudence, impatience,
love, and secrecy.
Early in the month of March, while busy with plans by which he expected
to strike a decisive blow, he left his post about four in the afternoon,
after one of those patient watches from which he had learned nothing.
He was on his way to his own house whither a matter relating to
his military service called him, when he was overtaken in the rue
Coquilliere by one of those heavy showers which instantly flood the
gutters, while each drop of rain rings loudly in the puddles of the
roadway. A pedestrian under these circumstances is forced to stop short
and take refuge in a shop or cafe if he is rich enough to pay for
the forced hospitality, or, if in poorer circumstances, under a
_porte-cochere_, that haven of paupers or shabbily dressed persons. Why
have none of our painters ever attempted to reproduce the physiognomies
of a swarm of Parisians, grouped, under stress of weather, in the damp
_porte-cochere_ of a building? First, there’s the musing philosophical
pedestrian, who observes with interest all he sees,--whether it be the
stripes made by the rain on the gray background of the atmosphere (a
species of chasing not unlike the capricious threads of spun glass), or
the whirl of white water which the wind is driving like a luminous
dust along the roofs, or the fitful disgorgements of the gutter-pipes,
sparkling and foaming; in short, the thousand nothings to be admired and
studied with delight by loungers, in spite of the porter’s broom which
pretends to be sweeping out the gateway. Then there’s the talkative
refugee, who complains and converses with the porter while he rests on
his broom like a grenadier on his musket; or the pauper wayfarer, curled
against the wall indifferent to the condition of his rags, long used,
alas, to contact with the streets; or the learned pedestrian who
studies, spells, and reads the posters on the walls without finishing
them; or the smiling pedestrian who makes fun of others to whom some
street fatality has happened, who laughs at the muddy women, and makes
grimaces at those of either sex who are looking from the windows; and
the silent being who gazes from floor to floor; and the working-man,
armed with a satchel or a paper bundle, who is estimating the rain as a
profit or loss; and the good-natured fugitive, who arrives like a shot
exclaiming, “Ah! what weather, messieurs, what weather!” and bows
to every one; and, finally, the true _bourgeois_ of Paris, with his
unfailing umbrella, an expert in showers, who foresaw this particular
one, but would come out in spite of his wife; this one takes a seat in
the porter’s chair. According to individual character, each member of
this fortuitous society contemplates the skies, and departs, skipping
to avoid the mud,--because he is in a hurry, or because he sees other
citizens walking along in spite of wind and slush, or because, the
archway being damp and mortally catarrhal, the bed’s edge, as the
proverb says, is better than the sheets. Each one has his motive. No one
is left but the prudent pedestrian, the man who, before he sets forth,
makes sure of a scrap of blue sky through the rifting clouds.
Monsieur de Maulincour took refuge, as we have said, with a whole family
of fugitives, under the porch of an old house, the court-yard of
which looked like the flue of a chimney. The sides of its plastered,
nitrified, and mouldy walls were so covered with pipes and conduits from
all the many floors of its four elevations, that it might have been
said to resemble at that moment the _cascatelles_ of Saint-Cloud. Water
flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black,
white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the
portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them
as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory
of which would have revealed the lives and habits of every dweller
in the house,--bits of printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial
flower-petals faded and worthless, vegetable parings, papers, scraps of
metal. At every sweep of her broom the old woman bared the soul of the
gutter, that black fissure on which a porter’s mind is ever bent. The
poor lover examined this scene, like a thousand others which our heaving
Paris presents daily; but he examined it mechanically, as a man absorbed
in thought, when, happening to look up, he found himself all but nose to
nose with a man who had just entered the gateway.
In appearance this man was a beggar, but not the Parisian beggar,--that
creation without a name in human language; no, this man formed another
type, while presenting on the outside all the ideas suggested by
the word “beggar.” He was not marked by those original Parisian
characteristics which strike us so forcibly in the paupers whom Charlet
was fond of representing, with his rare luck in observation,--coarse
faces reeking of mud, hoarse voices, reddened and bulbous noses, mouths
devoid of teeth but menacing; humble yet terrible beings, in whom a
profound intelligence shining in their eyes seems like a contradiction.
Some of these bold vagabonds have blotched, cracked, veiny skins; their
foreheads are covered with wrinkles, their hair scanty and dirty, like
a wig thrown on a dust-heap. All are gay in their degradation, and
degraded in their joys; all are marked with the stamp of debauchery,
casting their silence as a reproach; their very attitude revealing
fearful thoughts. Placed between crime and beggary they have no
compunctions, and circle prudently around the scaffold without mounting
it, innocent in the midst of crime, and vicious in their innocence. They
often cause a laugh, but they always cause reflection. One represents
to you civilization stunted, repressed; he comprehends everything, the
honor of the galleys, patriotism, virtue, the malice of a vulgar crime,
or the fine astuteness of elegant wickedness. Another is resigned, a
perfect mimer, but stupid. All have slight yearnings after order and
work, but they are pushed back into their mire by society, which makes
no inquiry as to what there may be of great men, poets, intrepid souls,
and splendid organizations among these vagrants, these gypsies of Paris;
a people eminently good and eminently evil--like all the masses who
suffer--accustomed to endure unspeakable woes, and whom a fatal power
holds ever down to the level of the mire. They all have a dream, a hope,
a happiness,--cards, lottery, or wine.
There was nothing of all this in the personage who now leaned carelessly
against the wall in front of Monsieur de Maulincour, like some fantastic
idea drawn by an artist on the back of a canvas the front of which is
turned to the wall. This tall, spare man, whose leaden visage expressed
some deep but chilling thought, dried up all pity in the hearts of those
who looked at him by the scowling look and the sarcastic attitude which
announced an intention of treating every man as an equal. His face was
of a dirty white, and his wrinkled skull, denuded of hair, bore a vague
resemblance to a block of granite. A few gray locks on either side
of his head fell straight to the collar of his greasy coat, which was
buttoned to the chin. He resembled both Voltaire and Don Quixote;
he was, apparently, scoffing but melancholy, full of disdain and
philosophy, but half-crazy. He seemed to have no shirt. His beard was
long. A rusty black cravat, much worn and ragged, exposed a protuberant
neck deeply furrowed, with veins as thick as cords. A large brown circle
like a bruise was strongly marked beneath his eyes, He seemed to be at
least sixty years old. His hands were white and clean. His boots were
trodden down at the heels, and full of holes. A pair of blue trousers,
mended in various places, were covered with a species of fluff which
made them offensive to the eye. Whether it was that his damp clothes
exhaled a fetid odor, or that he had in his normal condition the “poor
smell” which belongs to Parisian tenements, just as offices, sacristies,
and hospitals have their own peculiar and rancid fetidness, of which
no words can give the least idea, or whether some other reason affected
them, those in the vicinity of this man immediately moved away and
left him alone. He cast upon them and also upon the officer a calm,
expressionless look, the celebrated look of Monsieur de Talleyrand,
a dull, wan glance, without warmth, a species of impenetrable veil,
beneath which a strong soul hides profound emotions and close estimation
of men and things and events. Not a fold of his face quivered. His mouth
and forehead were impassible; but his eyes moved and lowered themselves
with a noble, almost tragic slowness. There was, in fact, a whole drama
in the motion of those withered eyelids.
The aspect of this stoical figure gave rise in Monsieur de Maulincour
to one of those vagabond reveries which begin with a common question and
end by comprising a world of thought. The storm was past. Monsieur de
Maulincour presently saw no more of the man than the tail of his coat
as it brushed the gate-post, but as he turned to leave his own place
he noticed at his feet a letter which must have fallen from the unknown
beggar when he took, as the baron had seen him take, a handkerchief from
his pocket. The young man picked it up, and read, involuntarily, the
address: “To Monsieur Ferragusse, Rue des Grands-Augustains, corner of
rue Soly.”
The letter bore no postmark, and the address prevented Monsieur de
Maulincour from following the beggar and returning it; for there are few
passions that will not fail in rectitude in the long run. The baron
had a presentiment of the opportunity afforded by this windfall. He
determined to keep the letter, which would give him the right to enter
the mysterious house to return it to the strange man, not doubting that
he lived there. Suspicions, vague as the first faint gleams of daylight,
made him fancy relations between this man and Madame Jules. A jealous
lover supposes everything; and it is by supposing everything and
selecting the most probable of their conjectures that judges, spies,
lovers, and observers get at the truth they are looking for.
“Is the letter for him? Is it from Madame Jules?”
His restless imagination tossed a thousand such questions to him;
but when he read the first words of the letter he smiled. Here it
is, textually, in all the simplicity of its artless phrases and its
miserable orthography,--a letter to which it would be impossible to add
anything, or to take anything away, unless it were the letter itself.
But we have yielded to the necessity of punctuating it. In the original
there were neither commas nor stops of any kind, not even notes of
exclamation,--a fact which tends to undervalue the system of notes
and dashes by which modern authors have endeavored to depict the great
disasters of all the passions:--
Henry,--Among the manny sacrifisis I imposed upon myself for your
sake was that of not giving you anny news of me; but an
iresistible voise now compells me to let you know the wrong you
have done me. I know beforehand that your soul hardened in vise
will not pitty me. Your heart is deaf to feeling. Is it deaf to
the cries of nature? But what matter? I must tell you to what a
dredful point you are gilty, and the horror of the position to
which you have brought me. Henry, you knew what I sufered from my
first wrong-doing, and yet you plunged me into the same misery,
and then abbandoned me to my dispair and sufering. Yes, I will say
it, the belif I had that you loved me and esteemed me gave me
corage to bare my fate. But now, what have I left? Have you not
made me loose all that was dear to me, all that held me to life;
parents, frends, onor, reputation,--all, I have sacrifised all to
you, and nothing is left me but shame, oprobrum, and--I say this
without blushing--poverty. Nothing was wanting to my misfortunes
but the sertainty of your contempt and hatred; and now I have them
I find the corage that my project requires. My decision is made;
the onor of my famly commands it. I must put an end to my
suferins. Make no remarks upon my conduct, Henry; it is orful, I
know, but my condition obliges me. Without help, without suport,
without one frend to comfort me, can I live? No. Fate has desided
for me. So in two days, Henry, two days, Ida will have seased to
be worthy of your regard. Oh, Henry! oh, my frend! for I can never
change to you, promise me to forgive me for what I am going to do.
Do not forget that you have driven me to it; it is your work, and
you must judge it. May heven not punish you for all your crimes. I
ask your pardon on my knees, for I feel nothing is wanting to my
misery but the sorow of knowing you unhappy. In spite of the
poverty I am in I shall refuse all help from you. If you had loved
me I would have taken all from your friendship; but a benfit given
by pitty _my soul refussis_. I would be baser to take it than he
who offered it. I have one favor to ask of you. I don’t know how
long I must stay at Madame Meynardie’s; be genrous enough not to
come there. Your last two vissits did me a harm I cannot get ofer.
I cannot enter into particlers about that conduct of yours. You
hate me,--you said so; that word is writen on my heart, and
freeses it with fear. Alas! it is now, when I need all my corage,
all my strength, that my faculties abandon me. Henry, my frend,
before I put a barrier forever between us, give me a last pruf of
your esteem. Write me, answer me, say you respect me still, though
you have seased to love me. My eyes are worthy still to look into
yours, but I do not ask an interfew; I fear my weakness and my
love. But for pitty’s sake write me a line at once; it will give
me the corage I need to meet my trubbles. Farewell, orther of all
my woes, but the only frend my heart has chosen and will never
forget.
Ida.
This life of a young girl, with its love betrayed, its fatal joys, its
pangs, its miseries, and its horrible resignation, summed up in a few
words, this humble poem, essentially Parisian, written on dirty paper,
influenced for a passing moment Monsieur de Maulincour. He asked himself
whether this Ida might not be some poor relation of Madame Jules, and
that strange rendezvous, which he had witnessed by chance, the mere
necessity of a charitable effort. But could that old pauper have seduced
this Ida? There was something impossible in the very idea. Wandering in
this labyrinth of reflections, which crossed, recrossed, and obliterated
one another, the baron reached the rue Pagevin, and saw a hackney-coach
standing at the end of the rue des Vieux-Augustins where it enters the
rue Montmartre. All waiting hackney-coaches now had an interest for him.
“Can she be there?” he thought to himself, and his heart beat fast with
a hot and feverish throbbing.
He pushed the little door with the bell, but he lowered his head as he
did so, obeying a sense of shame, for a voice said to him secretly:--
“Why are you putting your foot into this mystery?”
He went up a few steps, and found himself face to face with the old
portress.
“Monsieur Ferragus?” he said.
“Don’t know him.”
“Doesn’t Monsieur Ferragus live here?”
“Haven’t such a name in the house.”
“But, my good woman--”
“I’m not your good woman, monsieur, I’m the portress.”
“But, madame,” persisted the baron, “I have a letter for Monsieur
Ferragus.”
“Ah! if monsieur has a letter,” she said, changing her tone, “that’s
another matter. Will you let me see it--that letter?”
Auguste showed the folded letter. The old woman shook her head with a
doubtful air, hesitated, seemed to wish to leave the lodge and inform
the mysterious Ferragus of his unexpected visitor, but finally said:--
“Very good; go up, monsieur. I suppose you know the way?”
Without replying to this remark, which he thought might be a trap, the
young officer ran lightly up the stairway, and rang loudly at the door
of the second floor. His lover’s instinct told him, “She is there.”
The beggar of the porch, Ferragus, the “orther” of Ida’s woes, opened
the door himself. He appeared in a flowered dressing-gown, white flannel
trousers, his feet in embroidered slippers, and his face washed clean of
stains. Madame Jules, whose head projected beyond the casing of the door
in the next room, turned pale and dropped into a chair.
“What is the matter, madame?” cried the officer, springing toward her.
But Ferragus stretched forth an arm and flung the intruder back with so
sharp a thrust that Auguste fancied he had received a blow with an iron
bar full on his chest.
“Back! monsieur,” said the man. “What do you want there? For five or six
days you have been roaming about the neighborhood. Are you a spy?”
“Are you Monsieur Ferragus?” said the baron.
“No, monsieur.”
“Nevertheless,” continued Auguste, “it is to you that I must return this
paper which you dropped in the gateway beneath which we both took refuge
from the rain.”
While speaking and offering the letter to the man, Auguste did not
refrain from casting an eye around the room where Ferragus received him.
It was very well arranged, though simply. A fire burned on the hearth;
and near it was a table with food upon it, which was served more
sumptuously than agreed with the apparent conditions of the man and the
poorness of his lodging. On a sofa in the next room, which he could
see through the doorway, lay a heap of gold, and he heard a sound which
could be no other than that of a woman weeping.
“The paper belongs to me; I am much obliged to you,” said the mysterious
man, turning away as if to make the baron understand that he must go.
Too curious himself to take much note of the deep examination of which
he was himself the object, Auguste did not see the half-magnetic glance
with which this strange being seemed to pierce him; had he encountered
that basilisk eye he might have felt the danger that encompassed him.
Too passionately excited to think of himself, Auguste bowed, went
down the stairs, and returned home, striving to find a meaning in the
connection of these three persons,--Ida, Ferragus, and Madame Jules;
an occupation equivalent to that of trying to arrange the many-cornered
bits of a Chinese puzzle without possessing the key to the game. But
Madame Jules had seen him, Madame Jules went there, Madame Jules had
lied to him. Maulincour determined to go and see her the next day. She
could not refuse his visit, for he was now her accomplice; he was hands
and feet in the mysterious affair, and she knew it. Already he
felt himself a sultan, and thought of demanding from Madame Jules,
imperiously, all her secrets.
In those days Paris was seized with a building-fever. If Paris is
a monster, it is certainly a most mania-ridden monster. It becomes
enamored of a thousand fancies: sometimes it has a mania for building,
like a great seigneur who loves a trowel; soon it abandons the trowel
and becomes all military; it arrays itself from head to foot as a
national guard, and drills and smokes; suddenly, it abandons military
manoeuvres and flings away cigars; it is commercial, care-worn, falls
into bankruptcy, sells its furniture on the place de Chatelet, files its
schedule; but a few days later, lo! it has arranged its affairs and is
giving fetes and dances. One day it eats barley-sugar by the mouthful,
by the handful; yesterday it bought “papier Weymen”; to-day the
monster’s teeth ache, and it applies to its walls an alexipharmatic
to mitigate their dampness; to-morrow it will lay in a provision of
pectoral paste. It has its manias for the month, for the season, for the
year, like its manias of a day.
So, at the moment of which we speak, all the world was building or
pulling down something,--people hardly knew what as yet. There were very
few streets in which high scaffoldings on long poles could not be seen,
fastened from floor to floor with transverse blocks inserted into holes
in the walls on which the planks were laid,--a frail construction,
shaken by the brick-layers, but held together by ropes, white with
plaster, and insecurely protected from the wheels of carriages by the
breastwork of planks which the law requires round all such buildings.
There is something maritime in these masts, and ladders, and cordage,
even in the shouts of the masons. About a dozen yards from the hotel
Maulincour, one of these ephemeral barriers was erected before a house
which was then being built of blocks of free-stone. The day after the
event we have just related, at the moment when the Baron de Maulincour
was passing this scaffolding in his cabriolet on his way to see Madame
Jules, a stone, two feet square, which was being raised to the upper
storey of this building, got loose from the ropes and fell, crushing the
baron’s servant who was behind the cabriolet. A cry of horror shook both
the scaffold and the masons; one of them, apparently unable to keep his
grasp on a pole, was in danger of death, and seemed to have been touched
by the stone as it passed him.
A crowd collected rapidly; the masons came down the ladders swearing
and insisting that Monsieur de Maulincour’s cabriolet had been driven
against the boarding and so had shaken their crane. Two inches more and
the stone would have fallen on the baron’s head. The groom was dead,
the carriage shattered. ‘Twas an event for the whole neighborhood, the
newspapers told of it. Monsieur de Maulincour, certain that he had not
touched the boarding, complained; the case went to court. Inquiry being
made, it was shown that a small boy, armed with a lath, had mounted
guard and called to all foot-passengers to keep away. The affair ended
there. Monsieur de Maulincour obtained no redress. He had lost his
servant, and was confined to his bed for some days, for the back of the
carriage when shattered had bruised him severely, and the nervous shock
of the sudden surprise gave him a fever. He did not, therefore, go to
see Madame Jules.
Ten days after this event, he left the house for the first time, in his
repaired cabriolet, when, as he drove down the rue de Bourgogne and was
close to the sewer opposite to the Chamber of Deputies, the axle-tree
broke in two, and the baron was driving so rapidly that the breakage
would have caused the two wheels to come together with force enough to
break his head, had it not been for the resistance of the leather hood.
Nevertheless, he was badly wounded in the side. For the second time in
ten days he was carried home in a fainting condition to his terrified
grandmother. This second accident gave him a feeling of distrust; he
thought, though vaguely, of Ferragus and Madame Jules. To throw light on
these suspicions he had the broken axle brought to his room and sent
for his carriage-maker. The man examined the axle and the fracture,
and proved two things: First, the axle was not made in his workshop; he
furnished none that did not bear the initials of his name on the iron.
But he could not explain by what means this axle had been substituted
for the other. Secondly, the breakage of the suspicious axle was caused
by a hollow space having been blown in it and a straw very cleverly
inserted.
“Eh! Monsieur le baron, whoever did that was malicious!” he said; “any
one would swear, to look at it, that the axle was sound.”
Monsieur de Maulincour begged the carriage-maker to say nothing of the
affair; but he felt himself warned. These two attempts at murder were
planned with an ability which denoted the enmity of intelligent minds.
“It is war to the death,” he said to himself, as he tossed in his
bed,--“a war of savages, skulking in ambush, of trickery and treachery,
declared in the name of Madame Jules. What sort of man is this to whom
she belongs? What species of power does this Ferragus wield?”
Monsieur de Maulincour, though a soldier and brave man, could not
repress a shudder. In the midst of many thoughts that now assailed him,
there was one against which he felt he had neither defence nor courage:
might not poison be employed ere long by his secret enemies? Under the
influence of fears, which his momentary weakness and fever and low diet
increased, he sent for an old woman long attached to the service of his
grandmother, whose affection for himself was one of those semi-maternal
sentiments which are the sublime of the commonplace. Without confiding
in her wholly, he charged her to buy secretly and daily, in different
localities, the food he needed; telling her to keep it under lock and
key and bring it to him herself, not allowing any one, no matter who, to
approach her while preparing it. He took the most minute precautions to
protect himself against that form of death. He was ill in his bed
and alone, and he had therefore the leisure to think of his own
security,--the one necessity clear-sighted enough to enable human
egotism to forget nothing!
But the unfortunate man had poisoned his own life by this dread, and,
in spite of himself, suspicion dyed all his hours with its gloomy tints.
These two lessons of attempted assassination did teach him, however, the
value of one of the virtues most necessary to a public man; he saw the
wise dissimulation that must be practised in dealing with the great
interests of life. To be silent about our own secret is nothing; but to
be silent from the start, to forget a fact as Ali Pacha did for thirty
years in order to be sure of a vengeance waited for for thirty years,
is a fine study in a land where there are few men who can keep their
own counsel for thirty days. Monsieur de Maulincour literally lived only
through Madame Jules. He was perpetually absorbed in a sober examination
into the means he ought to employ to triumph in this mysterious struggle
with these mysterious persons. His secret passion for that woman grew
by reason of all these obstacles. Madame Jules was ever there, erect, in
the midst of his thoughts, in the centre of his heart, more seductive by
her presumable vices than by the positive virtues for which he had made
her his idol.
At last, anxious to reconnoitre the position of the enemy, he thought
he might without danger initiate the vidame into the secrets of his
situation. The old commander loved Auguste as a father loves his wife’s
children; he was shrewd, dexterous, and very diplomatic. He listened to
the baron, shook his head, and they both held counsel. The worthy vidame
did not share his young friend’s confidence when Auguste declared that
in the time in which they now lived, the police and the government were
able to lay bare all mysteries, and that if it were absolutely necessary
to have recourse to those powers, he should find them most powerful
auxiliaries.
The old man replied, gravely: “The police, my dear boy, is the most
incompetent thing on this earth, and government the feeblest in all
matters concerning individuals. Neither the police nor the government
can read hearts. What we might reasonably ask of them is to search
for the causes of an act. But the police and the government are both
eminently unfitted for that; they lack, essentially, the personal
interest which reveals all to him who wants to know all. No human power
can prevent an assassin or a poisoner from reaching the heart of a
prince or the stomach of an honest man. Passions are the best police.”
The vidame strongly advised the baron to go to Italy, and from Italy
to Greece, from Greece to Syria, from Syria to Asia, and not to return
until his secret enemies were convinced of his repentance, and would so
make tacit peace with him. But if he did not take that course, then the
vidame advised him to stay in the house, and even in his own room, where
he would be safe from the attempts of this man Ferragus, and not to
leave it until he could be certain of crushing him.
“We should never touch an enemy until we can be sure of taking his head
off,” he said, gravely.
The old man, however, promised his favorite to employ all the astuteness
with which Heaven had provided him (without compromising any one)
in reconnoitring the enemy’s ground, and laying his plans for future
victory. The Commander had in his service a retired Figaro, the wiliest
monkey that ever walked in human form; in earlier days as clever as a
devil, working his body like a galley-slave, alert as a thief, sly as a
woman, but now fallen into the decadence of genius for want of practice
since the new constitution of Parisian society, which has reformed even
the valets of comedy. This Scapin emeritus was attached to his master
as to a superior being; but the shrewd old vidame added a good round
sum yearly to the wages of his former provost of gallantry,
which strengthened the ties of natural affection by the bonds of
self-interest, and obtained for the old gentleman as much care as the
most loving mistress could bestow on a sick friend. It was this pearl
of the old-fashioned comedy-valets, relic of the last century, auxiliary
incorruptible from lack of passions to satisfy, on whom the old vidame
and Monsieur de Maulincour now relied.
“Monsieur le baron will spoil all,” said the great man in livery, when
called into counsel. “Monsieur should eat, drink, and sleep in peace. I
take the whole matter upon myself.”
Accordingly, eight days after the conference, when Monsieur de
Maulincour, perfectly restored to health, was breakfasting with his
grandmother and the vidame, Justin entered to make his report. As soon
as the dowager had returned to her own apartments he said, with that
mock modesty which men of talent are so apt to affect:--
“Ferragus is not the name of the enemy who is pursuing Monsieur le
baron. This man--this devil, rather--is called Gratien, Henri, Victor,
Jean-Joseph Bourignard. The Sieur Gratien Bourignard is a former
ship-builder, once very rich, and, above all, one of the handsomest
men of his day in Paris,--a Lovelace, capable of seducing Grandison.
My information stops short there. He has been a simple workman; and the
Companions of the Order of the Devorants did, at one time, elect him as
their chief, under the title of Ferragus XXIII. The police ought to know
that, if the police were instituted to know anything. The man has moved
from the rue des Vieux-Augustins, and now roosts rue Joquelet, where
Madame Jules Desmarets goes frequently to see him; sometimes her
husband, on his way to the Bourse, drives her as far as the rue
Vivienne, or she drives her husband to the Bourse. Monsieur le vidame
knows about these things too well to want me to tell him if it is the
husband who takes the wife, or the wife who takes the husband; but
Madame Jules is so pretty, I’d bet on her. All that I have told you is
positive. Bourignard often plays at number 129. Saving your presence,
monsieur, he’s a rogue who loves women, and he has his little ways
like a man of condition. As for the rest, he wins sometimes, disguises
himself like an actor, paints his face to look like anything he chooses,
and lives, I may say, the most original life in the world. I don’t doubt
he has a good many lodgings, for most of the time he manages to evade
what Monsieur le vidame calls ‘parliamentary investigations.’ If
monsieur wishes, he could be disposed of honorably, seeing what his
habits are. It is always easy to get rid of a man who loves women.
However, this capitalist talks about moving again. Have Monsieur le
vidame and Monsieur le baron any other commands to give me?”
“Justin, I am satisfied with you; don’t go any farther in the matter
without my orders, but keep a close watch here, so that Monsieur le
baron may have nothing to fear.”
“My dear boy,” continued the vidame, when they were alone, “go back to
your old life, and forget Madame Jules.”
“No, no,” said Auguste; “I will never yield to Gratien Bourignard. I
will have him bound hand and foot, and Madame Jules also.”
That evening the Baron Auguste de Maulincour, recently promoted to
higher rank in the company of the Body-Guard of the king, went to a
ball given by Madame la Duchesse de Berry at the Elysee-Bourbon. There,
certainly, no danger could lurk for him; and yet, before he left the
palace, he had an affair of honor on his hands,--an affair it was
impossible to settle except by a duel.
His adversary, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, considered that he had
strong reasons to complain of Monsieur de Maulincour, who had given some
ground for it during his former intimacy with Monsieur de Ronquerolles’
sister, the Comtesse de Serizy. That lady, the one who detested German
sentimentality, was all the more exacting in the matter of prudery. By
one of those inexplicable fatalities, Auguste now uttered a harmless
jest which Madame de Serizy took amiss, and her brother resented it. The
discussion took place in the corner of a room, in a low voice. In good
society, adversaries never raise their voices. The next day the faubourg
Saint-Germain and the Chateau talked over the affair. Madame de Serizy
was warmly defended, and all the blame was laid on Maulincour. August
personages interfered. Seconds of the highest distinction were imposed
on Messieurs de Maulincour and de Ronquerolles and every precaution was
taken on the ground that no one should be killed.
When Auguste found himself face to face with his antagonist, a man of
pleasure, to whom no one could possibly deny sentiments of the highest
honor, he felt it was impossible to believe him the instrument of
Ferragus, chief of the Devorants; and yet he was compelled, as it were,
by an inexplicable presentiment, to question the marquis.
“Messieurs,” he said to the seconds, “I certainly do not refuse to
meet the fire of Monsieur de Ronquerolles; but before doing so, I here
declare that I was to blame, and I offer him whatever excuses he may
desire, and publicly if he wishes it; because when the matter concerns a
woman, nothing, I think, can degrade a man of honor. I therefore appeal
to his generosity and good sense; is there not something rather silly in
fighting without a cause?”
Monsieur de Ronquerolles would not allow of this way of ending the
affair, and then the baron, his suspicions revived, walked up to him.
“Well, then! Monsieur le marquis,” he said, “pledge me, in presence of
these gentlemen, your word as a gentleman that you have no other reason
for vengeance than that you have chosen to put forward.”
“Monsieur, that is a question you have no right to ask.”
So saying, Monsieur de Ronquerolles took his place. It was agreed, in
advance, that the adversaries were to be satisfied with one exchange
of shots. Monsieur de Ronquerolles, in spite of the great distance
determined by the seconds, which seemed to make the death of either
party problematical, if not impossible, brought down the baron. The ball
went through the latter’s body just below the heart, but fortunately
without doing vital injury.
“You aimed too well, monsieur,” said the baron, “to be avenging only a
paltry quarrel.”
And he fainted. Monsieur de Ronquerolles, who believed him to be a dead
man, smiled sardonically as he heard those words.
After a fortnight, during which time the dowager and the vidame gave
him those cares of old age the secret of which is in the hands of long
experience only, the baron began to return to life. But one morning his
grandmother dealt him a crushing blow, by revealing anxieties to which,
in her last days, she was now subjected. She showed him a letter signed
F, in which the history of her grandson’s secret espionage was recounted
step by step. The letter accused Monsieur de Maulincour of actions that
were unworthy of a man of honor. He had, it said, placed an old woman
at the stand of hackney-coaches in the rue de Menars; an old spy, who
pretended to sell water from her cask to the coachmen, but who was
really there to watch the actions of Madame Jules Desmarets. He had
spied upon the daily life of a most inoffensive man, in order to detect
his secrets,--secrets on which depended the lives of three persons. He
had brought upon himself a relentless struggle, in which, although he
had escaped with life three times, he must inevitably succumb, because
his death had been sworn and would be compassed if all human means were
employed upon it. Monsieur de Maulincour could no longer escape his fate
by even promising to respect the mysterious life of these three persons,
because it was impossible to believe the word of a gentleman who had
fallen to the level of a police-spy; and for what reason? Merely to
trouble the respectable life of an innocent woman and a harmless old
man.
The letter itself was nothing to Auguste in comparison to the tender
reproaches of his grandmother. To lack respect to a woman! to spy upon
her actions without a right to do so! Ought a man ever to spy upon
a woman whom he loved?--in short, she poured out a torrent of those
excellent reasons which prove nothing; and they put the young baron,
for the first time in his life, into one of those great human furies in
which are born, and from which issue the most vital actions of a man’s
life.
“Since it is war to the knife,” he said in conclusion, “I shall kill my
enemy by any means that I can lay hold of.”
The vidame went immediately, at Auguste’s request, to the chief of the
private police of Paris, and without bringing Madame Jules’ name or
person into the narrative, although they were really the gist of it, he
made the official aware of the fears of the family of Maulincour about
this mysterious person who was bold enough to swear the death of an
officer of the Guards, in defiance of the law and the police. The chief
pushed up his green spectacles in amazement, blew his nose several
times, and offered snuff to the vidame, who, to save his dignity,
pretended not to use tobacco, although his own nose was discolored with
it. Then the chief took notes and promised, Vidocq and his spies aiding,
to send in a report within a few days to the Maulincour family, assuring
them meantime that there were no secrets for the police of Paris.
A few days after this the police official called to see the vidame at
the Hotel de Maulincour, where he found the young baron quite recovered
from his last wound. He gave them in bureaucratic style his thanks for
the indications they had afforded him, and told them that Bourignard was
a convict, condemned to twenty years’ hard labor, who had miraculously
escaped from a gang which was being transported from Bicetre to Toulon.
For thirteen years the police had been endeavoring to recapture him,
knowing that he had boldly returned to Paris; but so far this convict
had escaped the most active search, although he was known to be mixed up
in many nefarious deeds. However, the man, whose life was full of very
curious incidents, would certainly be captured now in one or other of
his several domiciles and delivered up to justice. The bureaucrat ended
his report by saying to Monsieur de Maulincour that if he attached
enough importance to the matter to wish to witness the capture of
Bourignard, he might come the next day at eight in the morning to a
house in the rue Sainte-Foi, of which he gave him the number. Monsieur
de Maulincour excused himself from going personally in search of
certainty,--trusting, with the sacred respect inspired by the police of
Paris, in the capability of the authorities.
Three days later, hearing nothing, and seeing nothing in the newspapers
about the projected arrest, which was certainly of enough importance to
have furnished an article, Monsieur de Maulincour was beginning to feel
anxieties which were presently allayed by the following letter:--
Monsieur le Baron,--I have the honor to announce to you that you
need have no further uneasiness touching the affair in question.
The man named Gratien Bourignard, otherwise called Ferragus, died
yesterday, at his lodgings, rue Joquelet No. 7. The suspicions we
naturally conceived as to the identity of the dead body have been
completely set at rest by the facts. The physician of the
Prefecture of police was despatched by us to assist the physician
of the arrondissement, and the chief of the detective police made
all the necessary verifications to obtain absolute certainty.
Moreover, the character of the persons who signed the certificate
of death, and the affidavits of those who took care of the said
Bourignard in his last illness, among others that of the worthy
vicar of the church of the Bonne-Nouvelle (to whom he made his
last confession, for he died a Christian), do not permit us to
entertain any sort of doubt.
Accept, Monsieur le baron, etc., etc.
Monsieur de Maulincour, the dowager, and the vidame breathed again with
joy unspeakable. The good old woman kissed her grandson leaving a tear
upon his cheek, and went away to thank God in prayer. The dear soul,
who was making a novena for Auguste’s safety, believed her prayers were
answered.
“Well,” said the vidame, “now you had better show yourself at the ball
you were speaking of. I oppose no further objections.”