The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2)

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

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"I called at your house, Mademoiselle, on my way to the Bois."

"So I understood. You even went into the studio."

"And I saw the famous group--my group."

"Well?"

"It is very fine. The greyhound runs like a mad dog. The fox is
admirably done. But I didn't quite understand. You told me that it was
the story of us two."

"And so it is! Look carefully. It's a fable that I read in--You don't
read Rabelais, Monsieur le Duc?"

"Faith, no. He is too vulgar."

"Well, I have learned to read him. Very ill-bred, you know! Oh! very.
My fable, then, is taken from Rabelais. This is it: Bacchus has made a
wonderful fox that cannot possibly be overtaken. Vulcan, for his part,
has given a dog of his making the power to overtake any animal that he
pursues. 'Now,' as my author says, 'suppose that they meet.' You see
what a wild and interminable race will result. It seems to me, my dear
duke, that destiny has brought us face to face in like manner, endowed
with contrary qualities, you, who have received from the gods the gift
of reaching all hearts, and I, whose heart will never be taken."

She said this, looking him fairly in the face, almost laughing, but
slim and erect in her white tunic, which seemed to protect her person
against the liberties of his wit. He, the conqueror, the irresistible,
had never met one of that audacious, self-willed race. So he enveloped
her in all the magnetic currents of his seductive charm, while around
them the murmur of the fete, the flute-like laughter, the rustling of
satins and strings of pearls played an accompaniment to that duet of
worldly passion and juvenile irony.

In a moment he rejoined:

"But how did the gods extricate themselves from that scrape?"

"By changing the two coursers to stone."

"By heaven," said he, "that is a result which I refuse to accept. I
defy the gods to turn my heart to stone."

A flame darted from his eyes, extinguished instantly at the thought
that people were looking at them.

In truth many people were looking at them, but no one with such deep
interest as Jenkins, who prowled around them, impatient and chafing, as
if he were angry with Felicia for monopolizing the important guest of
the evening. The girl laughingly remarked upon the fact to the duke:

"They will say that I am appropriating you."

She pointed to Monpavon standing expectantly by the Nabob, who, from
afar, bestowed upon His Excellency the submissive, imploring gaze of a
great faithful dog. Thereupon the Minister of State remembered what had
brought him there. He bowed to Felicia and returned to Monpavon, who
was able at last to present "his honorable friend, Monsieur Bernard
Jansoulet." His Excellency bowed; the parvenu humbled himself lower
than the earth; then they conversed for a moment.

It was an interesting group to watch. Jansoulet, tall and strongly
built, with his vulgar manners, his tanned skin, his broad back, bent
as if it had become rounded for good and all in the salaams of Oriental
sycophancy, his short fat hands bursting through his yellow gloves, his
abundant pantomime, his Southern exuberance causing him to cut off his
words as if with a machine. The other, of noble birth, a thorough man
of the world, elegance itself, graceful in the least of his gestures,
which were very rare by the way, negligently letting fall incomplete
sentences, lighting up his grave face with a half smile, concealing
beneath the most perfect courtesy his boundless contempt for men and
women; and that contempt was the main element of his strength. In an
American parlor the antithesis would have been less offensive. The
Nabob's millions would have established equilibrium and even turned the
scale in his favor. But Paris does not as yet place money above all the
other powers, and, to be convinced of that fact, one had only to see
that stout merchant frisking about with an amiable smile before the
great nobleman, and spreading beneath his feet, like the courtier's
ermine cloak, his dense parvenu's pride.

From the corner in which he had taken refuge, de Gery was watching the
scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to
this presentation, when chance, which had so cruelly given the lie all
the evening to his artless neophyte's ideas, brought to his ears this
brief dialogue, in that sea of private conversations in which every one
hears just the words that are of interest to him:

"The least that Monpavon can do is to introduce him to some decent
people. He has introduced him to so many bad ones. You know that he's
just tossed Paganetti and his whole crew into his arms."

"The poor devil! Why, they'll devour him."

"Pshaw! it's only fair to make him disgorge a little. He stole so much
down there among the Turks."

"Really, do you think so?"

"Do I think so! I have some very precise information on that subject
from Baron Hemerlingue, the banker who negotiated the last Tunisian
loan. He knows some fine stories about this Nabob. Just fancy--"

And the stream of calumny began to flow. For fifteen years Jansoulet
had plundered the late bey shamefully. They mentioned the names of
contractors and cited divers swindles characterized by admirable
coolness and effrontery; for instance, the story of a musical
frigate--yes, it really played tunes--intended as a dining-room
ornament, which he bought for two hundred thousand francs and sold
again for ten millions; a throne sold to the bey for three millions,
whereas the bill could be seen on the books of a house furnisher of
Faubourg Saint-Honore, and amounted to less than a hundred thousand
francs; and the most comical part of it was that the bey's fancy
changed and the royal seat, having fallen into disgrace before it had
even been unpacked, was still in its packing-case at the custom-house
in Tripoli.

Furthermore, aside from these outrageous commissions on the sale of the
most trivial playthings, there were other far more serious accusations,
but equally authentic, as they all came from the same source. In
addition to the seraglio there was a harem of European women, admirably
equipped for His Highness by the Nabob, who should be a connoisseur in
such matters, as he had been engaged in the most extraordinary
occupations in Paris before his departure for the Orient: ticket
speculator, manager of a public ball at the barrier, and of a house of
much lower reputation. And the whispering terminated in a stifled
laugh,--the coarse laugh of two men in private conversation.

The young provincial's first impulse, on hearing those infamous
slanders, was to turn and cry out:

"You lie!"

A few hours earlier he would have done it without hesitation, but since
he had been there he had learned to be suspicious, sceptical. He
restrained himself therefore and listened to the end, standing in the
same spot, having in his heart an unconfessed desire to know more of
the man in whose service he was. As for the Nabob, the perfectly
unconscious subject of that ghastly chronicle, he was quietly playing a
game of ecarte with the Due de Mora in a small salon to which the blue
hangings and two shaded lamps imparted a meditative air.

O wonderful magic of the galleon! The son of the dealer in old iron
alone at a card-table with the first personage of the Empire! Jansoulet
could hardly believe the Venetian mirror in which were reflected his
resplendent, beaming face and that august cranium, divided by a long
bald streak. So it was that, in order to show his appreciation of that
great honor, he strove to lose as many thousand-franc notes as he
decently could, feeling that he was the winner none the less, and proud
as Lucifer to see his money pass into those aristocratic hands, whose
every movement he studied while they were cutting, dealing, or holding
the cards.

A circle formed around them, but at a respectful distance, the ten
paces required for saluting a prince; that was the audience of the
triumph at which the Nabob was present as if in a dream, intoxicated by
the fairy-like strains slightly muffled in the distance, the songs that
reached his ears in detached phrases, as if they passed over a resonant
sheet of water, the perfume of the flowers that bloom so strangely
toward the close of Parisian balls, when the late hour, confusing all
notions of time, and the weariness of the sleepless night communicate
to brains which have become more buoyant in a more nervous atmosphere a
sort of youthful giddiness. The robust nature of Jansoulet, that
civilized savage, was more susceptible than another to these strange
refinements; and he had to exert all his strength to refrain from
inaugurating with a joyful hurrah an unseasonable out-pouring of words
and gestures, from giving way to the impulse of physical buoyancy which
stirred his whole being; like the great mountain dogs which are thrown
into convulsions of epileptic frenzy by inhaling a single drop of a
certain essence.

* * *

"It is a fine night and the sidewalks are dry. If you like, my dear
boy, we will send away the carriage and go home on foot," said
Jansoulet to his companion as they left Jenkins' house.

De Gery eagerly assented. He needed to walk, to shake off in the sharp
air the infamies and lies of that society comedy which left his heart
cold and oppressed, while all his life-blood had taken refuge in his
temples, of whose swollen veins he could hear the beating. He walked
unsteadily, like a poor creature who has been operated on for cataract
and in the first terror of recovered vision dares not put one foot
before the other. But with what a brutal hand the operation had been
performed! And so that great artist with the glorious name, that pure,
wild beauty, the mere sight of whom had agitated him like a
supernatural apparition, was simply a courtesan. Madame Jenkins, that
imposing creature, whose manner was at once so proud and so sweet, was
not really Madame Jenkins. That illustrious scientist, so frank of
feature and so hospitable, had the impudence to live publicly in
shameless concubinage. And Paris suspected it, yet that did not prevent
Paris from attending their parties. Last of all, this Jansoulet, so
kind-hearted and generous, for whom he felt such a burden of gratitude
in his heart, had to his knowledge fallen into the hands of a crew of
bandits, being himself a bandit, and quite worthy of the scheme devised
to make him disgorge his millions.

Was it possible; must he believe it?

A sidelong glance at the Nabob, whose huge frame filled the whole
sidewalk, suddenly revealed to him something low and common that he had
not before noticed in that gait to which the weight of the money in his
pockets gave a decided lurch. Yes, he was the typical adventurer from
the South, moulded of the slime that covers the quays of Marseille,
trodden hard by all the vagabonds who wander from seaport to seaport.
Kind-hearted, generous, forsooth! as prostitutes are, and thieves. And
the gold that flowed into that luxurious and vicious receptacle,
spattering everything, even the walls, seemed to him now to bring with
it all the dregs, all the filth of its impure and slimy source. That
being so, there was but one thing for him, de Gery, to do, and that was
to go, to leave as soon as possible the place where he ran the risk of
compromising his name, all that there was of his patrimony. Of course.
But there were the two little brothers down yonder in the
provinces,--who would pay for their schooling? Who would keep up the
modest home miraculously restored by the handsome salary of the oldest
son, the head of the family? The words "head of the family" cast him at
once into one of those inward combats in which self-interest and
conscience are the contending parties--the one strong, brutal,
attacking fiercely with straight blows, the other retreating, breaking
the measure by suddenly withdrawing its weapon--while honest Jansoulet,
the unconscious cause of the conflict, strode along beside his young
friend, inhaling the fresh air delightedly with the lighted end of his
cigar.

He had never been so happy that he was alive. And that evening at
Jenkins', his own debut in society as well as Paul's, had left upon him
an impression of arches erected as if for a triumph, of a curious
crowd, of flowers thrown in his path. So true is it that things exist
only through the eyes that see them. What a success! The duke, just as
they parted, urging him to come and see his gallery; which meant that
the doors of the hotel de Mora would be open to him within a week.
Felicia Ruys consenting to make a bust of him, so that at the next
exposition the junk-dealer's son would have his portrait in marble by
the same great artist whose name was appended to that of the Minister
of State. Was not this the gratification of all his childish vanities?

Revolving thus their thoughts, cheerful or sinister, they walked on
side by side, preoccupied, distraught, so that Place Vendome, silent
and flooded by a cold, blue light, rang beneath their feet before they
had spoken a word.

"Already!" said the Nabob. "I would have liked to walk a little
farther. What do you say?" And as they walked around the square two or
three times, he emitted in puffs the exuberant joy with which he was
full to overflowing.

"How fine it is! What pleasure to breathe! God's thunder! I wouldn't
give up my evening for a hundred thousand francs. What a fine fellow
that Jenkins is! Do you like Felicia Ruys' type of beauty? For my part,
I dote on it. And the duke, what a perfect great nobleman! so simple,
so amiable. That is fashionable Paris, eh, my son?"

"It's too complicated for me--it frightens me," said Paul de Gery in a
low voice.

"Yes, yes, I understand," rejoined the other, with adorable conceit.
"You aren't used to it yet, but one soon gets into it, you know! See
how perfectly at my ease I am after only a month."

"That's because you had been in Paris before. You used to live here."

"I? Never in my life. Who told you that?"

"Why, I thought so," replied the young man, and added, as a multitude
of thoughts came crowding into his mind:

"What have you ever done to this Baron Hemerlingue? There seems to be a
deadly hatred between you."

The Nabob was taken aback for a moment. That name Hemerlingue, suddenly
obtruded upon his joy, reminded him of the only unpleasant episode of
the evening.

"To him, as to everybody else," he said in a sad voice, "I never did
anything but good. We began life together in a miserable way. We grew
and prospered side by side. When he attempted to fly with his own wings
I always assisted him, supported him as best I could. It was through me
that he had the contract for supplying the fleet and army for ten
years; almost the whole of his fortune comes from that. And then one
fine morning that idiot of a cold-blooded Bearnese must go and fall in
love with an odalisque whom the bey's mother had turned out of the
harem! She was a handsome, ambitious hussy; she made him marry her, and
naturally, after that excellent marriage, Hemerlingue had to leave
Tunis. They had made him believe that I egged the bey on to forbid him
the country. That is not true. On the contrary, I persuaded His
Highness to allow the younger Hemerlingue--his first wife's child--to
remain at Tunis to look after their interests there, while the father
came to Paris to establish his banking-house. But I was well repaid for
my kindness. When my poor Ahmed died and the _mouchir_, his brother,
ascended the throne, the Hemerlingues, being restored to favor, never
ceased to try to injure me in the eyes of the new master. The bey was
always pleasant with me, but my influence was impaired. Ah well! in
spite of all that, in spite of all the tricks Hemerlingue has played on
me and is playing on me still, I was ready to offer him my hand
to-night. Not only did the villain refuse it, but he sent his wife to
insult me,--an uncivilized, vicious beast, who can never forgive me for
refusing to receive her at Tunis. Do you know what she called me there
to-night when she passed me? 'Robber and son of a dog.' The harlot had
the face to call me that. As if I didn't know my Hemerlingue, who's as
cowardly as he is fat. But, after all, let them say what they choose. I
snap my fingers at 'em. What can they do against me? Destroy my credit
with the bey? That makes no difference to me. I have no more business
in Tunis, and I shall get away from there altogether as soon as
possible. There's only one city, one country in the world, and that is
Paris, hospitable, open-hearted Paris, with no false modesty, where any
intelligent man finds room to do great things. And, you see, de Gery, I
propose to do great things. I've had enough of business life. I have
worked twenty years for money; now I am greedy for respect, glory,
renown. I mean to be a personage of some consequence in the history of
my country, and that will be an easy matter for me. With my great
fortune, my knowledge of men and of affairs, with what I feel here in
my head, I can aspire to anything and reach any eminence. So take my
advice, my dear boy, don't leave me,"--one would have said he was
answering his young companion's secret thought,--"stick loyally to my
ship. The spars are stanch and the hold is full of coal. I swear to you
that we will sail far and fast, damme!"

The artless Southerner thus discharged his plans into the darkness with
an abundance of expressive gestures, and from time to time, as they
paced the vast, deserted square, majestically surrounded by its
tightly-closed silent palaces, he looked up toward the bronze man on
the column, as if calling to witness that great upstart, whose presence
in the heart of Paris justifies the most extravagant ambitions and
renders all chimeras probable.

There is in youth a warmth of heart, a craving for enthusiasm which are
aroused by the slightest breath. As the Nabob spoke, de Gery felt his
suspicions vanishing and all his sympathy reviving with an infusion of
pity. No, surely that man was no vile knave, but a poor deluded mortal
whose fortune had gone to his head, like a wine too powerful for a
stomach that has long slaked its thirst with water. Alone in the midst
of Paris, surrounded by enemies and sharpers, Jansoulet reminded him of
a pedestrian laden with gold passing through a wood haunted by thieves,
in the dark and unarmed. And he thought that it would be well for the
protege to watch over the patron without seeming to do so, to be the
clear-sighted Telemachus of that blind Mentor, to point out the
pitfalls to him, to defend him against the brigands, in short to assist
him to fight in that swarm of nocturnal ambuscades which he felt to be
lurking savagely about the Nabob and his millions.

V.

THE JOYEUSE FAMILY.

Every morning in the year, at precisely eight o'clock, a new and almost
uninhabited house in an out-of-the-way quarter of Paris was filled with
shouts and cries and happy laughter that rang clear as crystal in the
desert of the hall.

"Father, don't forget my music."

"Father, my embroidery cotton."

"Father, bring us some rolls."

And the father's voice calling from below:

"Yaia, throw down my bag."

"Well, upon my word! he's forgotten his bag."

Thereupon there was joyous haste from top to bottom of the house, a
running to and fro of all those pretty faces, heavy-eyed with sleep, of
all those touzled locks which they put in order as they ran, up to the
very moment when a half-dozen of young girls, leaning over the rail,
bade an echoing farewell to a little old gentleman neatly dressed and
well brushed, whose florid face and slight figure disappeared at last
in the convolutions of the staircase. M. Joyeuse had gone to his
office. Thereupon the whole flock of fugitives from the bird-cage ran
quickly up to the fourth floor, and, after locking the door, gathered
at an open window to catch another glimpse of the father. The little
man turned, kisses were exchanged at a distance, then the windows were
closed; the new, deserted house became quiet once more except for the
signs dancing their wild saraband in the wind on the unfinished street,
as if they too were stirred to gayety by all that manoeuvring. A moment
later the photographer on the fifth floor came down to hang his
show-case at the door, always the same, with the old gentleman in the
white cravat surrounded by his daughters in varied groups; then he went
upstairs again in his turn, and the perfect calm succeeding that little
matutinal tumult suggested the thought that "the father" and his young
ladies had returned to the show-case, where they would remain
motionless and smiling, until evening.

From Rue Saint-Ferdinand to Messieurs Hemerlingue and Son's, his
employers, M. Joyeuse had a walk of three-quarters of an hour. He held
his head erect and stiff, as if he were afraid of disarranging the
lovely bow of his cravat, tied by his daughters, or his hat, put on by
them; and when the oldest, always anxious and prudent, turned up the
collar of his overcoat just as he was going out, to protect him against
the vicious gust of wind at the street corner, M. Joyeuse, even when
the temperature was that of a hothouse, never turned it down until he
reached the office, like the lover fresh from his mistress's embrace,
who dares not stir for fear of losing the intoxicating perfume.

The excellent man, a widower for some years, lived for his children
alone, thought only of them, went out into the world surrounded by
those little blond heads, which fluttered confusedly around him as in a
painting of the Assumption. All his desires, all his plans related to
"the young ladies" and constantly returned to them, sometimes after
long detours; for M. Joyeuse--doubtless because of his very short neck
and his short figure, in which his bubbling blood had but a short
circuit to make--possessed an astonishingly fertile imagination. Ideas
formed in his mind as rapidly as threshed straw collects around the
hopper. At the office the figures kept his mind fixed by their
unromantic rigidity; but once outside, it took its revenge for that
inexorable profession. The exercise of walking and familiarity with a
route of which he knew by heart the most trivial details, gave entire
liberty to his imaginative faculties, and he invented extraordinary
adventures, ample material for twenty newspaper novels.

Suppose, for example, that M. Joyeuse were walking through Faubourg
Saint-Honore, on the right hand sidewalk--he always chose that
side--and espied a heavy laundress's cart going along at a smart trot,
driven by a countrywoman whose child, perched on a bundle of linen, was
leaning over the side.

"The child!" the good man would exclaim in dismay, "look out for the
child!"

His voice would be lost in the clatter of the wheels and his warning in
the secret design of Providence. The cart would pass on. He would look
after it for a moment, then go his way; but the drama begun in his mind
would go on unfolding itself there with numberless sudden changes. The
child had fallen. The wheels were just about to pass over him. M.
Joyeuse would dart forward, save the little creature on the very brink
of death, but the shaft would strike himself full in the breast, and he
would fall, bathed in his blood. Thereupon he would see himself carried
to the druggist's amid the crowd that had collected. They would place
him on a litter and carry him home, then suddenly he would hear the
heart-rending cry of his daughters, his beloved daughters, upon seeing
him in that condition. And that cry would go so straight to his heart,
he would hear it so distinctly, so vividly: "Papa, dear papa!" that he
would repeat it himself in the street, to the great surprise of the
passers-by, in a hoarse voice which would wake him from his
manufactured nightmare.

Would you like another instance of the vagaries of that prodigious
imagination? It rains, it hails; beastly weather. M. Joyeuse has taken
the omnibus to go to his office. As he takes his seat opposite a
species of giant, with brutish face and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse,
an insignificant little creature, with his bag on his knees, draws in
his legs to make room for the enormous pillars that support his
neighbor's monumental trunk. In the jolting of the vehicle and the
pattering of the rain on the windows, M. Joyeuse begins to dream. And
suddenly the colossus opposite, who has a good-natured face enough, is
amazed to see the little man change color and glare at him with fierce,
murderous eyes, gnashing his teeth. Yes, murderous eyes in truth, for
at that moment M. Joyeuse is dreaming a terrible dream. One of his
daughters is sitting there, opposite him, beside that annoying brute,
and the villain is putting his arm around her waist under her cloak.

"Take your hand away, monsieur," M. Joyeuse has already said twice. The
other simply laughs contemptuously. Now he attempts to embrace Elise.

"Ah! villain!"

Lacking strength to defend his daughter, M. Joyeuse, foaming with rage,
feels in his pocket for his knife, stabs the insolent knave in the
breast, and goes away with head erect, strong in the consciousness of
his rights as an outraged father, to make his statement at the nearest
police-station.

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