'LA JEUNE FRANCE.'
If this were not a veracious history, in the customary order of events
as they occur in the construction of fiction, the reader should have
gone straight from the quick and gracious acceptance of O'Hoolohan's
proposal of marriage to the old-fashioned formula of ringing the
wedding-bells, and leaving the united pair to the enjoyment of the
honeymoon, with the tag: 'If they don't live happy, may we!' That would
be the artistic conclusion. But we are copying from nature, and have no
pretensions to art. And O'Hoolohan's nature was one of surprises. That
phenomenally-constituted being had been very busy secretly prosecuting
researches into the manner in which the girl he had recognised in the
Morgue had come by her death, and the mode in which her body had been
disposed of.
A great city like Paris, with its never-ending rush of activities, is
like to a whirlpool. It is always in surging motion; the figures that
rise to the surface for awhile and attract a passing notice as they
circle giddily round are thought no more of, when they sink from view,
than the flotsam and jetsam sucked into the oblivion of the Maelström.
Marguerite (for it was she) had run her course, and nine days after she
had disappeared from the haunts that knew her she was forgotten. How she
had died was never ascertained; but there was narrow scope for
conjecture. It was only too evident that she had committed suicide. In
the multitude of her facile acquaintances she had met one for whom she
had conceived a real attachment. He pretended to reciprocate it, and he
did, seemingly, until his student's career was finished, and he had
received his doctor's degree, and was summoned to his home in the
provinces to begin his dull professional life. The consecrated
preliminary to that in France is to marry a neighbour's daughter with a
snug dowry, who has been provided of long date by the prudence of family
councils, tenacious of tradition. The youthful doctor duly led his
destined help-meet to the altar, and by the same act consigned her
erring sister in Paris, whose very existence she had never suspected, to
the cold Seine and the nameless burial-pit.
That is no novelty in the Latin Quarter, nor will ever be while woman,
degraded soever though she be, is not utterly heartless.
The deserted Marguerite _had_ committed suicide. She had sallied out in
the blackness of midnight, when the quays were silent and lonely, and,
watching her opportunity till the policemen and roysterers and
rag-pickers were distant, she had stealthily clambered the parapet of a
bridge and dropped into the river. That must have been the end. So it
had been settled over pipes and cards and Strasburg beer in the
_brasseries_ of the Boulevard St. Michel; and so, truly, it might--nay,
must have been.
O'Hoolohan had learned this from a knot of premature cynics in the café
of _la Jeune France_, where he had been in the habit of calling in among
other gay resorts of the district to pick up what information he could
on a matter that affected him much, for under his stone-like, soldierly
exterior there were hidden springs of tenderness.
The café which is called after young France is much affected by those
promising pillars of the future, the students of law and medicine,
especially the latter, who reside in the Latin Quarter of Paris. A
light, varied of blue and red, blazes like a pharos over its portals to
entice the customers. It lies to the right a few hundred yards up the
Boulevard St. Michel, as it is entered from the side of the quays. Here
may be seen congregated, after dinner-hour in the evening--under the
warm chandeliers in the winter, out in the fresh air of the
thoroughfare in the finer season--the future Berryers and Lamballes of
the most civilized nation in the world. Only they do not look like it
always, carelessly chatting behind their modest glasses of beer, often
from amid the clouds of incense floating from cheap cigars, or the
equally economic _caporal_ tobacco. A gay and spacious café it is; well
lit, well furnished with softly-padded cushions, and lined with rows of
mirrors reflecting the intellectual group around busily engaged wasting
the hours in everything but the study of comparative anatomy or the
subtleties of the Code Napoleon. Dominoes and picquet are more in vogue
than jurisprudence, and the only books which are read by the novices of
the learned professions who frequent the place are woman's looks, and
folly--the loss of time and money--invariably all they teach them.
The night before that on which O'Hoolohan paid his last visit to
O'Hara's chambers, the soldier of fortune had sauntered into the café
early, but it was almost deserted. It was the _mi-carême_, that oasis in
mid-Lent for the Paris student, when he avenges himself for the enforced
abstinence from his usual enjoyments by the indulgence in riot in the
interval of saturnalia allowed by custom. The habitués of the Young
France were not there. They were dancing merrily in one disguise or
other at the ball-room higher up in the same boulevard, the Closerie des
Lilas.
Why, it may be asked, did not O'Hoolohan go to the ball-room where he
had first seen her whose fate he was inquiring into? and why, knowing
that she was dead, did he seek to know more?
The one answer may serve for both questions. He looked upon himself
already as a member of Captain Chauvin's household. He would not
dishonour her he loved by showing himself in any of the notorious haunts
of loose womankind now that he was her accepted suitor. But having come
to the inevitable conclusion that Marguerite was the lost sister of
Berthe's friend, Caroline, he was anxious to obtain some memorial of
her, and, if possible, to rescue her remains from the _fosse commune_,
and put over them a simple tomb. He was emotional, was this battered
campaigner, who had buffeted about the world so much, and had an
infinite pity for human weakness--and chiefly for the weaknesses of
maidenhood beset by temptation. He hung about the café until groups
returning from the Closerie in every variety of carnivalesque costume
had filled it with a noisy company. Close to the table at which he sat,
three students, disciples of Æsculapius, from their conversation, took
up their position and ordered a frugal supper before retiring to roost
in their attics hard by. They were talkative, and talked as if they
were not very particular who listened. Our friend could not help
overhearing them, and out of their conversation had sprung the proposed
'affair of honour.'
'Ah, _ma Marguerite_,' said one pale-faced, blear-eyed stripling, as he
rolled a cigarette, 'little I thought as I whirled you in a waltz a
twelvemonth ago that I'd be having a hand in your dissection to-day. She
makes a splendid subject.'
'The proud minx, she never would take my arm,' said a sentimental
gentleman with blue spectacles. 'D'you know, Eugène, I cut enough of her
hair off when I got the chance, two hours after they brought her in, to
plait me a watch-guard. Garçon, a bock! Don't you think it a famous
idea?'
'_Ma foi!_' said Eugène, a black-bearded fellow with a Gascon accent,
robust of frame, and several years older than his companion, 'the idea
is tolerable, but mine is better. I bought a member of Marguerite and
took it home. _Tiens_, see this paper-knife,' producing one from his
pocket. 'I thought I'd like a souvenir of _la modiste_ in memory of old
times. This is made out of her tibia; I had the fibula removed. Please
to observe the beautiful polish the internal malleolus takes!'
'Is that true?' exclaimed O'Hoolohan angrily, starting forward to the
table.
'What business of yours is it?' retorted the Gascon.
'Is it true?'
'I have said it, Mr. Insolent.'
'Then you're a beast, d'you hear?'
'And you, sir, are an intermeddling hound!' shouted the Gascon, foaming
at the mouth in a spasm of fury.
O'Hoolohan shut his lips firmly a moment, and clenched his hands as if
struggling to suppress his wrath. Then, having apparently succeeded, he
said quietly and deliberately, while a smile that was near akin to a
sneer played about his lips:
'You are a braggart and a bully, like most Gascons, and it is my private
opinion at present that you are a coward into the bargain.'
There was an immediate springing to the feet of all present, and a
confused hubbub of voices, everyone speaking at once.
'Silence!' shouted the Gascon. 'This is my concern. You'll have to
answer for this, sir. Here is my friend's address.'
'I'm at your service, and the sooner the better. Your friend will not
have to wait long for a visit from a friend of mine.' And O'Hoolohan
handed his adversary his card, and took the proffered address with a
bow. Then, removing his hat with a sarcastic coolness, he saluted the
company and left.
Idiots, you will say, my dear sir or madame, to pick up this quarrel on
such foolish grounds! I admit it. But do not most quarrels rest on the
basis of folly? and are not most disputants idiots? So it has been, and
so will it be to the crack of doom.
The three students were right in one point, however. Marguerite did not
even tenant a grave in the paupers' corner of a cemetery. Her body was
not claimed; in the darkness it had been bundled in a sack, and trotted
to the Ecole Pratique in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine, there to
contribute to the enlightenment of the rising generation of surgeons.
From the slab in the Morgue to the slab in the dissecting-room! Gruesome
journey and grim destiny!