The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)

A >> Alphonse Daudet >> The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)

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"So your play is finished?"

"Finished, Monsieur Joyeuse, and I mean to read it to you one of these
days."

"Oh! yes, Monsieur Andre. Oh! yes," said all the girls in chorus.

Their neighbor wrote for the stage and no one of them entertained a
doubt of his success. Photography held out less promise of profit, you
know. Customers were very rare, the passers-by disinclined to patronize
him. To keep his hand in and get his new apparatus into working order,
Monsieur Andre was taking his friends again every Sunday, the family
lending themselves for his experiments with unequalled good-humor, for
the prosperity of that inchoate, suburban industry was a matter of
pride to them all, arousing, even in the girls, that touching sentiment
of fraternity which presses the humblest destinies together as closely
as sparrows on the edge of a roof. But Andre Maranne, with the
inexhaustible resources of his high forehead, stored with illusions,
explained without bitterness the indifference of the public. Either the
weather was unfavorable or else every one complained of the wretched
condition of business, and he ended always with the same consoling
refrain: "Wait until _Revolte_ has been acted!" _Revolte_ was the title
of his play.

"It's a surprising thing," said the fourth of the Joyeuse girls, a
child of twelve with her hair in a pigtail, "it's a surprising thing
that you do so little business with such a splendid balcony!"

"And then there's a great deal of passing through the quarter," added
Elise confidently. Grandmamma smilingly reminded her that there was
even more on Boulevard des Italiens.

"Ah! if it were Boulevard des Italiens--" said M. Joyeuse dreamily,
and away he went on his chimera, which was suddenly brought to a
stand-still by a gesture and these words, uttered in a piteous tone:
"closed because of failure." In an instant the terrible _Imaginaire_
had installed his friend in a splendid apartment on the boulevard,
where he earned an enormous amount of money, increasing his expenses
at the same time so disproportionately, that a loud "_pouf_" swallowed
up photographer and photography in a few months. They laughed heartily
when he gave that explanation; but they all agreed that Rue
Saint-Ferdinand, although less showy, was much more reliable than
Boulevard des Italiens. Moreover, it was very near the Bois de
Boulogne, and if the fashionable world should once begin to pass that
way--That fashionable society which her mother so affected was
Mademoiselle Henriette's fixed idea; and she was amazed that the
thought of receiving _high-life_ in his little fifth-floor studio,
about as large as a diving-bell, should make their neighbor laugh. Why,
only a week or two before, a carriage came there with servants in
livery. Sometimes, too, he had had a "very swell" visitor.

"Oh! a real great lady," Grandmamma chimed in. "We were at the window
waiting for father. We saw her leave the carriage and look at the
frame; we thought surely she came to see you."

"She did come to see me," said Andre, a little embarrassed.

"For a moment we were afraid she would go on as so many others do, on
account of your five flights. So we all four did our best to stop her,
to magnetize her with our four pairs of wide-open eyes. We pulled her
very gently by the feathers in her hat and the lace on her cape. 'Come
upstairs, pray, madame, pray come upstairs,' and finally she came.
There is so much magnetism in eyes that want a thing very much!"

Surely she had magnetism enough, the dear creature, not only in her
eyes, which were of uncertain hue, veiled or laughing like the sky of
her Paris, but in her voice, in the folds of her dress, in everything,
even to the long curl that shaded her straight, graceful statue-like
neck and attracted you by its tapering shaded point, deftly curled over
a supple finger.

The tea being duly served, while the gentlemen continued their talking
and drinking--Pere Joyeuse was always very slow in everything that he
did, because of his abrupt excursions into the moon--the girls resumed
their work, the table was covered with wicker baskets, embroidery,
pretty wools whose brilliant coloring brightened the faded flowers in
the old carpet, and the group of the other evening was formed anew in
the luminous circle of the lamp shade, to the great satisfaction of
Paul de Gery. It was the first evening of that sort he had passed in
Paris; it reminded him of other far-away evenings, cradled by the same
innocent mirth, the pleasant sound of scissors laid upon the table, of
the needle piercing the cotton, or the rustling of the leaves of a book
as they are turned, and dear faces, vanished forever, clustered in the
same way around the family lamp, alas! so suddenly extinguished.

Once admitted into that charming domestic circle, he was not excluded
from it again, but took his lessons among the girls, and made bold to
talk with them when the good man closed his ledger. There everything
tended to give him grateful repose from the seething life in which the
Nabob's luxurious worldliness involved him; he bathed in that
atmosphere of honesty and simplicity, and strove to cure there the
wounds with which a hand more indifferent than cruel was mercilessly
riddling his heart.

* * *

"Women have hated me, other women have loved me. She who did me the
most harm never had either love or hate for me." Paul had fallen in,
with the woman of whom Heinrich Heine speaks. Felicia was very
hospitable and cordial to him. There was no one whom she welcomed more
graciously. She reserved for him a special smile, in which there was
the pleased expression of an artist's eye resting upon a type which
attracts it, and the satisfaction of a _blase_ mind which is amused by
anything new, however simple it may seem to be. She liked that reserve,
most alluring in a Southerner, the straightforwardness of that
judgment, entirely free from artistic or worldly formulas and enlivened
by a touch of local accent. It was a change for her from the zigzag
movement of the thumb, drawing flattery in outline with the gestures of
a studio fag, from the congratulations of comrades on the way in which
she silenced some poor fellow, and from the affected admiration, the
"chawming--veay pretty," with which the young dandies honored her as
they sucked the handles of their canes. He, at all events, said nothing
of that sort to her. She had nicknamed him Minerva, because of his
apparent tranquillity and the regularity of his profile; and as soon as
he appeared, she would say: "Ah! there's Minerva. Hail, lovely Minerva.
Take off your helmet and let us have a talk."

But that familiar, almost fraternal, tone convinced the young man of
the hopelessness of his love. He realized that he could not hope to
make any further progress in that feminine good-fellowship in which
affection was lacking, and that he should lose something every day of
his charm as an unfamiliar type in the eyes of that creature who was
born bored, and who seemed to have lived her life already and to find
the insipidity of repetition in everything that she heard or saw.
Felicia was suffering from ennui. Only her art had the power to divert
her, to take her out of herself, to transport her to a fairyland of
dazzling beauty from which she returned all bruised and sore, always
surprised at the awakening, which resembled a fall. She compared
herself to the jelly-fish, whose transparent brilliancy in the coolness
and constant movement of the waves, vanishes on the shore in little
gelatinous pools. During those intervals of idleness, when the absence
of thought leaves the hand inert upon the modelling tool, Felicia,
deprived of the sole moral nerve of her intellect, became savage,
unapproachable, sullen beyond endurance,--the revenge of paltry human
qualities upon great tired brains. After she had brought tears to the
eyes of all those whom she loved, had striven to evoke painful memories
or paralyzing anxieties, and had reached the brutal, murderous climax
of her fatigue,--as it was always necessary, where she was concerned,
that something ridiculous should be mingled even with the saddest
things, she would blow away the remains of her ennui with a cry like
that of a dazed wild beast, a sort of yawning roar which she called
"the cry of the jackal in the desert," and which would drive the blood
from the excellent Crenmitz's cheeks, taking her by surprise in her
torpid placidity.

Poor Felicia! Her life was in very truth a ghastly desert when her art
did not enliven it with its visions, a dismal, unrelieved desert, where
everything was crushed and flattened beneath the same monotonous
immensity, the ingenuous love of a boy of twenty and the caprice of an
amorous duke, where everything was covered with dry sand blown about by
the scorching winds of destiny. Paul was conscious of that void, he
tried to escape from it; but something detained him, like a weight
which unwinds a chain, and, notwithstanding the evil things he heard,
notwithstanding the strange creature's peculiarities, he hovered about
her with a delicious sense of enjoyment, under pain of carrying naught
away from that long amorous contemplation save the despair of a
believer reduced to the adoration of images.

The place of refuge was in yonder out-of-the-way quarter, where the
wind blew so hard without preventing the flame from burning white and
straight,--it was in the domestic circle presided over by Grandmamma.
Oh! she did not suffer from ennui, she never uttered "the cry of the
jackal in the desert." Her life was too well filled: the father to
comfort and encourage, the children to teach, all the material cares of
a household in which the mother was lacking, the engrossing thoughts
which wake with the dawn and which the night puts to sleep, unless it
renews them in dreams--one of those instances of indefatigable but
apparently effortless devotion, very convenient for poor human
selfishness, because it dispenses with all gratitude and hardly makes
itself felt, its touch is so light. She was not one of the courageous
girls who work to support their parents, give lessons from morning to
night and forget the annoyances of the household in the excitement of
an engrossing occupation. No, she had formed a different conception of
her duty, she was a sedentary bee confining her labors to the hive,
with no buzzing around outside in the fresh air and among the flowers.
A thousand and one functions to perform: tailor, milliner, mender,
keeper of accounts as well,--for M. Joyeuse, being incapable of any
sort of responsibility, left the disposition of the family funds
absolutely in her hands,--teacher and music mistress.

As is often the case in families which were originally in comfortable
circumstances, Aline, being the eldest, had been educated in one of the
best boarding-schools in Paris, Elise had remained there two years with
her; but the two younger ones, having come too late, had been sent to
little day-schools in the quarter and had all their studies to
complete; and it was no easy matter, for the youngest laughed on every
pretext, an exuberant, healthy, youthful laugh, like the warbling of a
lark drunken on green wheat, and flew away out of sight of desk and
symbols, while Mademoiselle Henriette, always haunted by her ideas of
grandeur, her love of "the substantial," was none too eager for study.
That young person of fifteen, to whom her father had bequeathed
something of his imaginative faculty, was already arranging her life in
anticipation, and declared formally that she should marry some one of
birth and should never have more than three children: "A boy for the
name, and two little girls--so that I can dress them alike."

"Yes, that's right," Grandmamma would say, "you shall dress them alike.
Meanwhile, let us see about our participles."

But the most troublesome of all was Elise with her thrice unsuccessful
examination in history, always rejected and preparing herself anew,
subject to attacks of profound terror and self-distrust which led her
to carry that unfortunate handbook of French history with her wherever
she went, and to open it at every instant, in the omnibus, in the
street, even at the breakfast table; but, being already a young woman
and very pretty, she no longer had the mechanical memory of childhood
in which dates and events are incrusted forever. Amid her other
preoccupations the lesson would fly away in a moment, despite the
pupil's apparent application, her long lashes concealing her eyes, her
curls sweeping the page, and her rosy mouth twitching slightly at the
corners as she repeated again and again: "Louis le Hutin, 1314-1316.
Philippe V, le Long, 1316-1322--1322.--Oh! Grandmamma, I am lost. I
shall never learn them." Thereupon Grandmamma would take a hand, help
her to fix her attention, to store away some of those barbarous dates
in the Middle Ages, as sharp-pointed as the helmets of the warriors of
those days. And in the intervals of those manifold tasks, of that
general and constant superintendence, she found time to make pretty
things, to take from her work-basket some piece of knitting or
embroidery, which clung to her as steadfastly as young Elise to her
history of France. Even when she was talking, her fingers were never
unemployed for one moment.

"Do you never rest?" de Gery asked her while she counted in a whisper
the stitches of her embroidery, "three, four, five," in order to vary
the shades.

"Why, this work is rest," she replied. "You men have no idea how useful
needlework is to a woman's mind. It regularizes the thought, fixes with
a stitch the passing moment and what it carries with it. And think of
the sorrows that are soothed, the anxieties forgotten by the help of
this purely physical attention, this constant repetition of the same
movement, in which you find--and find very quickly, whether you will or
no--that your equilibrium is entirely restored. It does not prevent me
from hearing all that is said in my neighborhood, from listening to you
even more attentively than I should if I were idle--three, four, five."

Oh! yes, she listened. That was plain from the animation of her face,
from the way in which she would suddenly straighten herself up, with
her needle in the air and the thread stretched over her raised little
finger. Then she would suddenly resume her work, sometimes interjecting
a shrewd, thoughtful word, which as a general rule agreed with what
friend Paul thought. A similarity in their natures and in their
responsibilities and duties brought those two young people together,
made them mutually interested each in those things that the other had
most at heart. She knew the names of his two brothers, Pierre and
Louis, and his plans for their future when they should leave school.
Pierre wanted to be a sailor. "Oh! no, not a sailor," said Grandmamma,
"it would be much better for him to come to Paris with you." And when
he admitted that he was afraid of Paris for them, she laughed at his
fears, called him a provincial, for she was full of affection for the
city where she was born, where she had grown chastely to womanhood, and
which gave her in return the vivacity, the natural refinement, the
sprightly good-humor which make one think that Paris, with its rains,
its fogs, its sky which is no sky, is the true fatherland of woman,
whose nerves it spares and whose patient and intelligent qualities it
develops.

Each day Paul de Gery appreciated Mademoiselle Aline more
thoroughly--he was the only one in the house who called her by that
name--and, strangely enough, it was Felicia who finally cemented their
intimacy. What connection could there be between that artist's
daughter, fairly launched in the most exalted spheres, and that
bourgeois maiden lost to sight in the depths of a suburb? Connections
of childhood and friendship, common memories, the great courtyard of
the Belin establishment, where they had played together for three
years. Such meetings are very common in Paris. A name mentioned at
random in conversation suddenly calls forth the amazed question:

"What! do you know her?"

"Do I know Felicia? Why we sat at adjoining desks in the first class.
We had the same garden. Such a dear, lovely, clever girl!"

And, noticing how pleased he was to listen to her, Aline recalled the
days, still so near, which already formed part of the past to her,
fascinating and melancholy like all pasts. She was quite alone in life,
was little Felicia. On Thursday, when they called out the names in the
parlor, there was never any one for her; except now and then an old
woman, a nice old woman, if she was a little ridiculous, a former
ballet-dancer it was said, whom Felicia called the Fairy. She had pet
names like that for everybody of whom she was fond, and she transformed
them all in her imagination. They used to see each other during the
vacations. Madame Joyeuse, although she refused to send Aline to M.
Ruys's studio, invited Felicia for whole days,--very short days, made
up of work and music, of joint dreams and unrestrained youthful
chatter. "Oh! when she talked to me about her art, with the ardor which
she put into everything, how delighted I was to hear her! How many
things she enabled me to understand of which I never should have had
the slightest idea! Even now, when we go to the Louvre with papa, or to
the Exhibition of the first of May, the peculiar emotion that one feels
at the sight of a beautiful bit of sculpture or a fine painting, makes
me think instantly of Felicia. In my young days she represented art,
and it went well with her beauty, her somewhat reckless but so kindly
nature, in which I was conscious of something superior to myself, which
carried me away to a great height without frightening me. Suddenly we
ceased to see each other. I wrote to her--no reply. Then fame came to
her, great sorrow and engrossing duties to me. And of all that
friendship, and very deep-rooted it must have been, for I cannot speak
of it without--three, four, five--nothing is left but old memories to
be poked over like dead ashes."

Leaning over her work, the brave girl hastily counted her stitches,
concealing her grief in the fanciful designs of her embroidery, while
de Gery, deeply moved to hear the testimony of those pure lips in
contradiction of the calumnies of a few disappointed dandies or jealous
rivals, felt relieved of a weight and once more proud of his love. The
sensation was so sweet to him that he came very often to seek to renew
it, not only on lesson evenings, but on other evenings as well, and
almost forgot to go and see Felicia for the pleasure of hearing Aline
speak of her.

One evening, when he left the Joyeuse apartment, he found waiting for
him on the landing M. Andre, the neighbor, who took his arm feverishly.

"Monsieur de Gery," he said, in a trembling voice, his eyes flashing
fire behind their spectacles, the only part of his face one could see
at night, "I have an explanation to demand at your hands. Will you come
up to my room a moment?"

Between that young man and himself there had been only the usual
relations of two frequent visitors at the same house, who are attached
by no bond, who seem indeed to be separated by a certain antipathy
between their natures and their modes of life. What could there be for
them to explain? Sorely puzzled, he followed Andre.

The sight of the little studio, cold and cheerless under its glass
ceiling, the empty fireplace, the wind blowing as it blows outside, and
making the candle flicker, the only light that shone upon that vigil of
a penniless recluse, reflected upon scattered sheets all covered with
writing,--in a word, that atmosphere of inhabited cells wherein the
very soul of the inhabitants exhales,--enabled de Gery to comprehend at
once the impassioned Andre Maranne, his long hair thrown back and
flying in the wind, his somewhat eccentric appearance, very excusable
when one pays for it with a life of suffering and privations; and his
sympathy instantly went out to the courageous youth, whose militant
pride he fully divined at a single glance. But the other was too
excited to notice this transition. As soon as the door was closed, he
said, with the accent of a stage hero addressing the perjured seducer:

"Monsieur de Gery, I am not a Cassandra yet." And, as he observed his
interlocutor's unbounded amazement, he added: "Yes, yes, we understand
each other. I see perfectly clearly what attracts you to M. Joyeuse's,
nor has the warm welcome you receive there escaped me. You are rich,
you are of noble birth, no one can hesitate between you and the poor
poet who carries on an absurd trade in order to gain time to attain
success, which will never come perhaps. But I won't allow my happiness
to be stolen from me. We will fight, monsieur, we will fight," he
repeated, excited by his rival's unruffled tranquillity. "I have loved
Mademoiselle Joyeuse a long while. That love is the aim, the joy, and
the strength of a very hard life, painful in many respects. I have
nothing but that in the world, and I should prefer to die rather than
to renounce it."

What a strange combination is the human heart! Paul was not in love
with the charming Aline. His whole heart belonged to another. He
thought of her simply as a friend, the most adorable of friends. And
yet the idea that Maranne was thinking of her, that she undoubtedly
responded to his lover-like attentions, caused him a thrill of jealous
anger, and his tone was very sharp when he asked if Mademoiselle
Joyeuse were aware of this feeling of Andre's and had in any way
authorized him to proclaim his rights.

"Yes, monsieur, Mademoiselle Elise knows that I love her, and before
your frequent visits--"

"Elise--is it Elise you're talking about?"

"Why, who should it be, pray? The other two are too young."

He entered thoroughly into the traditions of the family. In his eyes
Grandmamma's twenty years, her triumphant charm, were concealed by a
respectful _sobriquet_ and by her providential qualities.

A very brief explanation having allayed Andre Maranne's excitement, he
offered his apologies to de Gery, invited him to take a seat in the
carved wooden armchair in which his customers posed, and their
conversation speedily assumed an intimate and confidential character,
attributable to the earnest avowal with which it began. Paul confessed
that he too was in love, and that his only purpose in coming so often
to M. Joyeuse's was to talk about his beloved with Grandmamma, who had
known her long before.

"It's the same with me," said Andre. "Grandmamma knows all my secrets;
but we have not dared say anything to her father yet. My position is
too uncertain. Ah! when _Revolte_ has been brought out!"

Thereupon they talked about _Revolte_! the famous drama on which he had
been at work day and night for six months, which had kept him warm all
through the winter, a very hard winter, whose rigor was tempered,
however, by the magic power of composition in the little garret, which
it completely transformed. There, in that confined space, all the
heroes of his play had appeared to the poet, like familiar sprites
falling through the roof or riding on the moonbeams, and with them the
high-warp tapestries, the gleaming chandeliers, the vast parks with
gateways flooded with light, all the usual magnificence of stage-setting,
as well as the glorious uproar of the first performance, the applause
being represented by the rain beating on the windows and the signs
flapping against the door, while the wind, whistling through the
melancholy lumber-yard below with a vague murmur of voices brought from
afar and carried far, resembled the murmur from the boxes opening into
the lobby, allowing his triumph to circulate amid the chattering and
confusion of the audience. It was not simply the renown and the money
that that blessed play were to bring to him, but something far more
precious. How carefully, therefore, did he turn the pages of the
manuscript contained in five great books in blue covers, such books as
the Levantine spread out upon the divan on which she took her siestas,
and marked with her managerial pencil.

Paul having drawn near the table in his turn, in order to examine the
masterpiece, his eyes were attracted by a portrait of a woman in a
handsome frame, which seemed, being so near the artist's work, to have
been stationed there to stand guard over it. Elise, of course? Oh! no,
Andre had no right as yet to take his young friend's photograph away
from its protecting environment. It was a woman of about forty, fair,
with a sweet expression, and dressed in the height of fashion. When he
saw the face, de Gery could not restrain an exclamation.

"Do you know her?" said Andre Maranne.

"Why, yes--Madame Jenkins, the Irish doctor's wife. I took supper with
them last winter."

"She is my mother." And the young man added in a lower tone:

"Madame Maranne married Dr. Jenkins for her second husband. You are
surprised, are you not, to find me in such destitution when my parents
are living in luxury? But, as you know, chance sometimes brings very
antipathetic natures together in the same family. My father-in-law and
I could not agree. He wanted to make a doctor of me, whereas I had no
taste for anything but writing. At last, in order to avoid the constant
disputes, which were a source of pain to my mother, I preferred to
leave the house and dig my furrow all alone, without assistance from
any one. It was a hard task! money was lacking. All the property is in
the hands of that--of M. Jenkins. It was a question of earning my
living, and you know what a difficult matter that is for persons like
ourselves, well brought up as it is termed. To think that, with all the
knowledge included in what it is fashionable to call a thorough
education, I could find nothing but this child's play which gave me any
hope of being able to earn my bread! Some little savings from my
allowance as a young man sufficed to buy my first outfit, and I opened
a studio far away, at the very end of Paris, in order not to annoy my
parents. Between ourselves, I fancy that I shall never make my fortune
in photography. The first weeks especially were very hard. No one came,
or if by any chance some poor devil did toil up the stairs, I missed
him, I spread him out on my plate in a faint, blurred mixture like a
ghost. One day, very early in my experience, there came a wedding
party, the bride all in white, the husband with a waistcoat--oh! such a
waistcoat! And all the guests in white gloves which they insisted upon
having included in the photograph, because of the rarity of the
sensation. Really, I thought I should go mad. Those black faces, the
great white daubs for the dress, the gloves and the orange flowers, the
unfortunate bride in the guise of a Zulu queen, under her wreath which
melted into her hair! And all so overflowing with good-nature, with
encouragement for the artist. I tried them at least twenty times, kept
them until five o'clock at night. They left me only when it was dark,
to go and dine! Fancy that wedding-day passed in a photograph gallery!"

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