“But why, then? If it isn’t that, what is it?”
“Oh, bah!”
“I insist upon your telling me. Tell me.”
“Very good, then. I don’t care to know a girl who lives
’collée’ with a gaga,” I said, brutally.
P’tit-Bleu flushed suddenly, and faced me with blazing eyes.
“Comment done! You believe that?” she cried.
“Pooh!” said I.
“Oh, mais non, mais non, mais non, alors! You don’t believe that?”
“You pay me a poor compliment. Why should you expect me to be ignorant
of a thing the whole Quarter knows?”
“Oh, the whole Quarter! What does that matter to me, your Quarter?
Those nasty little students! C’est de la crasse, quoi! They may
believe—they may say—what they like. Oh, ça m’est bien égal!”
with a shake of the head and a skyward gesture. “But you—but my
friends! Am I that sort of girl? Answer.”
“There’s only one sort of girl in the precincts ot this
University,” declared her disenchanted interlocutor. “You’re all
of one pattern. The man’s an ass who expects any good from any of
you. Don’t pose as better than the others. You’re all a—un tas de
saletés. I’m sick and tired of the whole sordid, squalid lot of you.
I should be greatly obliged, now, if you would have the kindness to
leave me. Go back to your gaga. He’ll be impatient waiting.”
That speech, I fancied, would rid me of her. But no.
“You are trying to make me angry, aren’t you? But I refuse to
leave you till you have admitted that you are wrong,” she persisted.
“It’s an outrageous slander. Monsieur Long (that is his name,
Monsieur Long), he lives in the same house with me, on the same landing;
et voilà tout. Dame! Can I prevent him? Am I the landlord? And, for
that, they say I’m ’collée’ with him. I don’t care what they
say. But you! I swear to you it is an infamous lie. Will you come home
with me now, and see?”
“Oh, that’s mere quibbling. You go with him everywhere, you dine
with him, you are never seen without him.”
“Dieu de Dieu!” wailed P’tit-Bleu. “How shall I convince you? He
is my neighbour. Is it forbidden to know one’s neighbours? I swear to
you, I give you my word of honour, it is nothing else. How to make you
believe me?”
“Well, my dear,” said I, “if you wish me to believe you, break
with him. Chuck him up. Drop his acquaintance. Nobody in his senses will
believe you so long as you go trapesing about the Quarter with him.”
“Oh, but no,” she cried, “I can’t drop his acquaintance.”
“Ah, there it is,” cried I.
“There are reasons. There are reasons why I can’t, why I
mustn’t.”
“I thought so.”
“Ah, voyons!” she broke out, losing patience.
“Will you not believe my word of honour? Will you force me to tell you
things that don’t concern you—that I have no right to tell? Well,
then, listen. I cannot drop his acquaintance, because—this is a
secret—he would die of shame if he thought I had betrayed it—you
will never breathe it to a soul—because I have discovered that he has
a—a vice, a weakness. No—but listen. He is an Englishman, a
painter. Oh, a painter of great talent; a painter who has exposed at the
Salon—quoi! A painter who is known in his country. On a même parlé
de lui dans les journaux; voilà! But look. He has a vice. He has half
ruined, half killed himself with a drug. Yes—opium. Oh, but wait,
wait. I will tell you. He came to live in our house last July, in the
room opposite mine. When we met, on the landing, in the staircase, he
took off his hat, and we passed the bonjour. Oh, he is a gentleman; he
has been well brought up. From that we arrived at speaking together a
little, and then at visiting. It was the dead season, I had no affairs.
I would sit in his room in the afternoon, and we would chat. Oh, he is
a fine talker. But, though he had canvases, colours, all that is needed
for painting, he never painted. He would only talk, talk. I said, ’But
you ought to paint.’ He said always, ’Yes, I must begin something
to-morrow.’ Always to-morrow. And then I discovered what it was. He
took opium. He spent all his money for opium. And when he had taken his
opium he would not work, he would only talk, talk, talk, and then sleep,
sleep. You think that is well—hein? That a painter of talent should do
no work, but spend all his money for a drug, for a poison, and then say,
’To-morrow’. You think I could sit still and see him commit these
follies under my eyes and say nothing, do nothing? Ruin his brain, his
health, his career, and waste all his money, for that drug? Oh, mais
non. I made him the sermon. I said, ’You know it is very bad, that
which you are doing there.’ I scolded him. I said, ’But I forbid
you to do that—do you understand? I forbid it.’ I went with him
everywhere, I gave him all my time; and when he would take his drug I
would annoy him, I would make a scene, I would shame him. Well, in the
end, I have acquired an influence over him. He has submitted himself to
me. He is really trying to break the habit. I keep all his money. I give
him his doses. I regulate them, I diminish them. The consequence is, I
make him work. I give him one very small dose in the morning to begin
the day. Then I will give him no more till he has done so much work.
You see? Tu te figures que je suis sa maîtresse? Je suis plutôt
sa nounou—va! Je suis sa caissière. And he is painting a great
picture—you will see. Eh bien, how can I give up his acquaintance?
Can I let him relapse, as he would do to-morrow without me, into his bad
habit?”
I was walking with long strides, P’tit-Bleu tripping at my elbow; and
before her story was finished we had left the Boulevard behind us, and
reached the middle of the Pont St. Michel. There, I don’t know why, we
halted, and stood looking off towards Notre-Dame. The grim grey front
of the Cathedral glowed softly amethystine in the afternoon sun, and
the sky was infinitely deep and blue above it. One could be intensely
conscious of the splendid penetrating beauty of this picture, without,
somehow, giving the less attention to what P’tit-Bleu was saying.
She talked swiftly, eagerly, with constantly changing, persuasive
intonations, with little brief pauses, hesitations, with many gestures,
with much play of eyes and face. When she had done, I waited a moment.
Then, grudgingly, “Well,” I began, “if what you tell me is
true——”
“If it is true!” P’tit-Bleu cried, with sudden fierceness. “Do
you dare to say you doubt it?”
And she gazed intently, fiercely, into my eyes, challenging me, as it
were, to give her the lie.
Before that gaze my eyes dropped, abashed.
“No—I don’t doubt it,” I faltered, “I believe you. And—and
allow me to say that you are a—a damned decent little girl.”
Poor P’tit-Bleu! How shall I tell you the rest of her story—the
story of those long years of love and sacrifice and devotion, and of
continual discouragement, disappointment, with his death at the end of
them, and her disappearance?
In the beginning she herself was very far from realising what she
had undertaken, what had befallen her. To exercise a little friendly
supervision over her neighbour’s addiction to opium, to husband his
money for him, and spur him on to work—it seemed a mere incident in
her life, an affair by the way. But it became her exclusive occupation,
her whole life’s chief concern. Little by little, one after the other,
she put aside all her former interests, thoughts, associations, dropped
all her former engagements, to give herself as completely to caring for,
guarding, guiding poor old Edward Long, as if she had been a mother, and
he her helpless child.
Throughout that first winter, indeed, she continued to dance at
Bullier, continued to instruct her corps of pupils, and continued even
occasionally, though much less frequently than of old time, to be seen
at the Vachette, or to sup with a friend at the Gambrinus. But from day
to day Monsieur Edouard (he had soon ceased to be Monsieur Long,
and become Monsieur Edouard) absorbed more and more of her time and
attention; and when the spring came she suddenly burned her ships.
You must understand that she had one pertinacious adversary in her
efforts to wean him of his vice. Not an avowed adversary, for he
professed the most earnest wish that she might be successful; but an
adversary who was eternally putting spokes in her wheel, all the same.
Yes, Monsieur Edouard himself. Never content with the short rations
to which she had condemned him, he was perpetually on the watch for a
chance to elude her vigilance; she was perpetually discovering that
he had somehow contrived to lay in secret supplies. And every now
and again, openly defying her authority, he would go off for a grand
debauch. Then her task of reducing his daily portion to a minimum must
needs be begun anew. Well, when the spring came, and the Salon opened,
where his picture (her picture?) had been received and very fairly hung,
they went together to the Vernissage. And there he met a whole flock
of English folk—artists and critics, who had “just run over for the
show, you know”—with whom he was acquainted; and they insisted on
carrying him away with them to lunch at the Ambassadeurs.
I, too, had assisted at the Vernissage; and when I left it, I found
P’tit-Bleu seated alone under the trees in the Champs-Elysées. She
had on a brilliant spring toilette, with a hat and a sunshade.... Oh,
my dear! It is not to be denied that P’tit-Bleu had the courage of
her tastes. But her face was pale, and her lips were drawn down, and her
eyes looked strained and anxious.
“What’s the row?” I asked.
And she told me how she had been abandoned—“plantée là” was
her expression—and of course I invited her to lunch with me. But
she scarcely relished the repast. “Pourvu qu’il ne fasse pas de
bêtises!” was her refrain.
She returned rather early to the Rue Monsieur le Prince, to see if he
had come home; but he hadn’t. Nor did he come home that night, nor
the next day, nor the next. At the week’s end, though, he came: dirty,
haggard, tremulous, with red eyes, and nude—yes, nude—of everything
save his shirt and trousers! He had borrowed a sovereign from one of
his London friends, and when that was gone, he had pledged or sold
everything but his shirt and trousers—hat, boots, coat, everything.
It was an equally haggard and red-eyed P’tit-Bleu who faced him on
his reappearance. And I’ve no doubt she gave him a specimen of her
eloquence. “You figure to yourself that this sort of thing amuses me,
hein? Here are six good days and nights that I haven’t been able to
sleep or rest.”
Explaining the case to me, she said, “Ah, what I suffered! I could
never have believed that I cared so much for him. But—what would
you?—one attaches oneself, you know. Ah, what I suffered! The anxiety,
the terrors! I expected to hear of him run over in the streets. Well,
now, I must make an end of this business. I’m going to take him away.
So long as he remains in Paris, where there are chemists who will sell
him that filthiness (cette crasse) it is hopeless. No sooner do I get
my house of cards nicely built up, than—piff!—something happens to
knock it over. I am going to take him down into the country, far from
any town, far from the railway, where I can guard him better. I know a
place, a farmhouse, near Villiers-St.-Jacques, where we can get board.
He has a little income, which reaches him every three months from
England. Oh, very little, but if I am careful of it, it will pay our
way. And then—I will make him work.”
“Oh, no,” I protested. “You’re not going to leave the
Quarter.” And I’m ashamed to acknowledge, I laboured hard to
dissuade her. “Think how we’ll miss you. Think how you’ll bore
yourself. And anyhow, he’s not worth it. And besides, you won’t
succeed. A man who has an appetite for opium will get it, coûte que
coûte. He’d walk twenty miles in bare feet to get it.” This was the
argument that I repeated in a dozen different paraphrases. You see,
I hadn’t realised yet that it didn’t matter an atom whether she
succeeded, or whether he was worth it. He was a mere instrument in the
hands of Providence. Let her succeed or let her fail in keeping him from
opium: the important thing... how shall I put it? This little Undine had
risen out of the black waters of the Latin Quarter, and attached herself
to a mortal. What is it that love gains for Undines?
“Que veux-tu?” cried P’tit-Bleu. “I am fond of him. I can’t
bear to see him ruining himself. I must do what I can.”
And the Quarter said, “Ho-ho! You chaps who didn’t believe it was
a ’collage’. He-he! What do you say now? She’s chucked up
everything, to go and live in the country with him.”
In August or September I ran down to the farmhouse near
Villiers-St.-Jacques, and passed a week with them. I found a mightily
changed Monsieur Edouard, and a curiously changed P’tit-Bleu, as well.
He was fat and rosy, he who had been so thin and white. And she—she
was grave. Yes, P’tit-Bleu was grave: sober, staid, serious. And her
impish, mocking black eyes shone with a strange, serious, calm light.
Monsieur Edouard (with whom my relations had long before this become
confidential) drew me apart, and told me he was having an exceedingly
bad time of it.
“She’s really too absurd, you know. She’s a martinet, a tyrant.
Opium is to me what tobacco is to you, and does me no more harm. I need
it for my work. Oh, in moderation; of course one can be excessive. Yet
she refuses to let me have a tenth of my proper quantity. And besides,
how utterly senseless it is, keeping me down here in the country.
I’m dying of ennui. There’s not a person I can have any sort of
intellectual sympathy with, for miles in every direction. An artist
needs the stimulus of contact with his fellows. It’s indispensable. If
she’d only let me run up to Paris for a day or two at a time, once
a month say. Couldn’t you persuade her to let me go back with
you? She’s the most awful screw, you know. It’s the French
lower-middle-class parsimony. I’m never allowed to have twopence in my
pocket. Yet whose money is it? Where does it come from? I really can’t
think why I submit, why I don’t break away from her, and follow my own
wishes. But the poor little thing is fond of me; she attached herself
to me. I don’t know what would become of her if I cast her off.
Oh, don’t fancy that I don’t appreciate her. Her intentions are
excellent. But she lacks wisdom, and she enjoys the exercise of power. I
wish you’d speak with her.”
P’tit-Bleu also drew me apart.
“Please don’t call me P’tit-Bleu any more. Call me Jeanne. I have
put all that behind me—all that P’tit-Bleu signifies. I hate to
think of it, to be reminded of it. I should like to forget it.”
When I had promised not to call her P’tit-Bleu any more, she went on,
replying to my questions, to tell me of their life.
“Of course, everybody thinks I am his mistress. You can’t convince
them I’m not. But that’s got to be endured. For the rest, all is
going well. You see how he is improved. I give him fifteen drops of
laudanum, morning, noon, and night. Fifteen drops—it is nothing, I
could take it myself, and never know it. And he used to drink off an
ounce—an ounce, mon cher—at a time, and then want more at the end of
an hour. Yes! Oh, he complains, he complains of everything, he frets,
he is not contented. But he has not walked twenty miles in bare feet, as
you said he would. And he is working. You will see his pictures.”
“And you—how do you pass your time? What do you do?”
“I pose for him a good deal. And then I have much sewing to do. I take
in sewing for Madame Deschamps, the Deputy’s wife, to help make the
ends meet. And then I read. Madame Deschamps lends me books.”
“And I suppose you’re bored to death?”
“Oh, no, I am not bored. I am happy. I never was really happy—dans
le temps.”
They were living in a very plain way indeed. You know what French
farmhouses are apt to be. His whole income was under a hundred pounds
a year; and out of that (and the trifle she earned by needlework) his
canvases, colours, brushes, frames, had to be paid for, as well as
his opium, and their food, clothing, everything. But
P’tit-Bleu—Jeanne—with that “lower-middle-class parsimony” of
hers, managed somehow. Jeanne! In putting off the name, she had put off
also, in great measure, the attributes of P’tit-Bleu; she had become
Jeanne in nature. She was grave, she was quiet. She wore the severest
black frocks—she made them herself. And I never once noticed the
odour of peau-d’.spagne, from the beginning to the end of my visit.
But—shall I own it? Jeanne was certainly the more estimable of the two
women, but shall I own that I found her far less exciting as a comrade
than P’tit-Bleu had been? She was good, but she wasn’t very lively
or very amusing.
P’tit-Bleu, the heroine of Bullier, that lover of noisy pleasure, of
daring toilettes, of risky perfumes, of écrevisses and chablis, of
all the rush and dissipation of the Boul’ Miche and the Luxembourg,
quietly settling down into Jeanne of the home-made frocks, in a rough
French farmhouse, to a diet of veal and lentils, lentils and veal, seven
times a week, and no other pastime in life than the devoted, untiring
nursing of an ungrateful old English opium-eater—here was variation
under domestication with a vengeance.
And on Sunday... P’tit-Bleu went twice to church!
About ten days after my return to Paris, there came a rat-ta-ta-tat at
my door, and P’tit-BIeu walked in—pale, with wide eyes. “I don’t
know how he has contrived it, but he must have got some money somewhere,
and walked to the railway, and come to town. Anyhow, here are three
days that he has disappeared. What to do? What to do?” She was in a
deplorable state of mind, poor thing, and I scarcely knew how to help
her. I proposed that we should take counsel with a Commissary of Police.
But when that functionary discovered that she was neither the wife nor
daughter of the missing man, he smiled, and remarked, “It is not
our business to recover ladies’ protectors for them.” P’tit-BIeu
walked the streets in quest of him, all day long and very nearly all
night long too, for close upon a fortnight. In the end, she met him on
the quays—dazed, half-imbecile, and again nude of everything save
his shirt and trousers. So, again, having nicely built up her house of
cards—piff!—something had happened to topple it over.
“Let him go to the devil his own way,” said I. “Really, he’s
unworthy of your pains.”
“No, I can’t leave him. You see, I’m fond of him,” said she.
He, however, positively refused to return to the country. “The fact
is,” he explained, “I ought to go to London. Yes, it will be well
for me to pass the winter in London. I should like to have a show there,
a one-man show, you know. I dare say I could sell a good many pictures,
and get orders for portraits.” So they went to London. In the spring
I received a letter from P’tit-Bleu—a letter full of orthographic
faults, if you like—but a letter that I treasure. Here’s a
translation of it:
“My dear Friend,—I have hesitated much before taking my pen in
hand to write to you. But I have no one else to turn to. We have had
a dreadful winter. Owing to my ignorance of the language one speaks in
this dirty town, I have not been able to exercise over Monsieur Edouard
that supervision of which he has need. In consequence, he has given
himself up to the evil habit which you know, as never before. Every
penny, every last sou, which he could command, has been spent for that
detestable filth. Many times we have passed whole days without eating,
no, not the end of a crust. He has no desire to eat when he has had his
dose. We are living in a slum of the most disgusting, in the quarter of
London they call Soho. Everything we have, save the bare necessary of
covering, has been put with the lender-on-pledges. Yesterday I found a
piece of one shilling in the street. That, however, I have been forced
to dispense for opium, because, when he has had such large quantities,
he would die or go mad if suddenly deprived.
“I have addressed myself to his family, but without effect. They
refuse to recognise me. Everybody here, of course, figures to himself
that I am his mistress. He has two brothers, one of the army, one an
advocate. I have besieged them in vain. They say, ’We have done
for him all that is possible. We can do no more. He has exhausted
our patience. Now that he has gone a step farther, and, in his age,
disgraced himself by living with a mistress, as well as besotting
himself with opium, we wash our hands of him for good.’ And yet, I
cannot leave him, because I know, without me, he would kill himself
within the month, by his excesses. To his sisters, both of whom are
married and ladies of the world, I have appealed with equal results.
They refuse to regard me otherwise than as his mistress. But I cannot
bear to see that great man, with that mind, that talent, doing himself
to death. And when he is not under the influence of his drug, who is so
great? Who has the wit, the wisdom, the heart, the charm, of Monsieur
Edouard? Who can paint like him?
“My dear, as a last resource, I take up my pen to ask you for
assistance. If you could see him your heart would be moved. He is so
thin, so thin, and his face has become blue, yes, blue, like the face of
a dead man. Help me to save him from himself. If you can send me a note
of five hundred francs, I can pay off our indebtedness here, and bring
him back to France, where, in a sane country, far from a town, again I
can reduce him to a few drops of laudanum a day, and again see him in
health and at work. That which it costs me to make this request of you,
I have not the words to tell you. But, at the end ot my forces, having
no other means, no other support, I confide myself to your well-tried
amity.
“I give you a good kiss. Jeanne.”
If the reading of this letter brought a lump into my throat and
something like tears into my eyes—if I hastened to a banker’s,
and sent P’tit-Bleu the money she asked for, by telegraph—if I
reproached her bitterly and sincerely for not having applied to me
long before,—I hope you will believe that it wasn’t for the sake of
Monsieur Edouard.
They established themselves at St. Etienne, a hamlet on the coast of
Normandy, to be farther from Paris. Dieppe was their nearest town. They
lived at St.-Etienne for nearly three years. But, periodically, when she
had got her house of cards nicely built up—piff!—he would walk into
Dieppe.
He walked into Dieppe one day in the autumn of 1885, and it took her a
week to find him. He was always ill, after one of his grand debauches.
This time he was worse than he had ever been before. I can imagine the
care with which she nursed him, her anxious watching by his bedside, her
prayers, her hopes, the blankness when he died.
She came back to Paris, and called three times at my lodgings. But I
was in England, and didn’t receive the notes she left till nearly six
months afterwards. I have never seen her since, never heard from her.
What has become of her? It is not pleasant to conjecture. Of course,
after his death, she ought to have died too. But the Angel of this Life,
“Whose care is lest men see too much at once,”
couldn’t permit any such satisfying termination. So she has simply
disappeared, and, in the flesh, may have come to... one would rather not
conjecture. All the same, I can’t believe that in the spirit she will
have made utter shipwreck. I can’t believe that nothing permanent was
won by those long years of love and pain. Her house of cards was toppled
over, as often as she built it up; but perhaps she was all the while
building another house, a house not made with hands, a house, a temple,
indestructible.
Poor P’tit-Bleu!