Delphi complete works of.., p.262
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 262
“You do very wrong to make sport of him. That letter is horribly pathetic and heartrending.” And he added in a low voice, holding her hands: “Tell me, why do you turn him away?”
“I don’t want him any more. I don’t love him.”
“But he was your lover. He provided this luxury in which you live, in which you have always lived, which is necessary to your happiness.”
“My dear,” she said in her frank way, “when I didn’t know you, I thought this was all very nice. Now it is a bore, a disgrace; my heart rises against it. Oh! I know you will tell me that you ‘re not in earnest about it, that you don’t love me. But I make that my business. I will force you to love me, whether you will or no.”
He made no reply, agreed to meet her the next day, and made his escape, leaving a few louis for Machaume, the drainings of his student’s purse, to pay for the terrine. So far as he was concerned it was all over. What right had he to bring confusion into that woman’s existence, and what could he offer her in exchange for what she would lose through him?
He wrote her to that effect the same day, as gently, as sincerely as he could, but without telling her that he had felt that their liaison, that pleasant, attractive caprice, had suffered a violent and fatal blow when he heard, after his night of love, that betrayed lover’s sobs alternating with her own sneering laughter and her laundress’s oaths.
In that tall youth, whose heart was far away from Paris, in the midst of the Provençal moors, there was a touch of the paternal roughness and all the delicacy of feeling, all the nervous temperament of his mother, whom he resembled as closely as a portrait. And to defend him against the allurements of pleasure he had in addition the example of a brother of his father, whose dissipation and wild career had half ruined the family and endangered the honor of the name.
Uncle Césaire! With just those two words and the domestic drama they recalled, one might demand from Jean sacrifices much more painful than that of this amourette, to which he had never attached great importance. However, it was harder to break than he had imagined.
Although formally dismissed, she returned again and again, undiscouraged by his refusals to see her, by the closed door, by his inexorable orders. “I have no self-esteem,” she wrote him. She watched for him to go to the restaurant for his meals, waited for him in front of the café where he read the newspapers. And no tears, no scenes. If he were with other men she contented herself with following him, with watching for the moment when he should be alone.
“Do you want to see me to-night? No? Some other time then.” And she would go her way with the gentle resignation of the peddler strapping up his pack, leaving him remorseful for his cruelty and humiliated by the lie he stammered at every meeting. “The examination was close at hand — he had no time. After that, later, if she still cared.” As a matter of fact, he intended, as soon as he had passed, to take a month’s vacation in the South, expecting that she would forget him in that time.
Unfortunately, when the examination was over, Jean fell sick, — a severe inflammation of the throat, caught in a corridor at the department, which assumed serious proportions as the result of neglect. He knew no one in Paris save a few students from his province, whom his engrossing liaison had estranged and scattered. Moreover, under the circumstances, something more than ordinary devotion was required, and the very first night Fanny Legrand established herself beside his bed and did not leave him for ten days, nursing him tirelessly, without fear or disgust, as deft as a professional nurse, with affectionate, coaxing ways, and sometimes, in his hours of fever, carrying him back to a serious illness of his childhood, so that he called her his aunt Divonne and said, “Thank you, Divonne,” when he felt Fanny’s hands on his burning forehead.
“It isn’t Divonne, it’s I — I am taking care of you.”
She saved him from mercenary nursing, from fires stupidly allowed to go out, from draughts brewed in a concierge’s lodge; and Jean was constantly surprised at the activity, the ingenuity, the nimbleness of those indolent, pleasure-loving hands.
At night she slept two hours on the couch, — a boarding house couch, as soft as the plank bed of a police-station.
“Pray do you never go home, my poor Fanny?” he asked her one day. “I am better now. You must go and set Machaume’s mind at rest.”
She began to laugh. A fine time she was having, was Machaume, and all the house with her. They had sold everything, furniture, clothes, even the bedding. All she had left was the dress on her back, and a little fine linen saved by her maid. Now, if he turned her away, she would be in the gutter.
III.
“THIS TIME I think I have found what we want. Rue d’Amsterdam, opposite the station. Three rooms and a great balcony. If you choose, we will go and look at it when you leave the office. It’s high up, fifth floor — but you can carry me. That was so nice, do you remember?”
Highly amused by the memory, she clung to him, nestled against his neck, seeking the old place, her place.
Their life had become intolerable in their furnished lodgings, with all that the term implies, the chattering of girls in nets and old shoes on the stairways, the paper partitions behind which other households swarmed, the promiscuous mixing up of keys, candlesticks, and boots. Not to her, certainly; with Jean, the roof, the cellar, even the sewer would have made a satisfactory nesting-place for her. But the lover’s refinement took offence at certain associations, to which, as a bachelor, he had given no thought. Those one-night households annoyed him, seemed to cast dishonor upon his own establishment, caused him something of the same sadness and disgust caused by the cage of monkeys at the Jardin des Plantes, mimicking all the gestures and expressions of human love. He was tired of the restaurant too, of having to go twice a day for his meals to Boulevard Saint-Michel, a great room crowded with students, pupils at the Beaux-Arts, painters and architects, who, although they did not know him, had become familiar with his face during the year he had dined there.
He blushed, as he opened the door, to see all those eyes turned upon Fanny, and entered with the aggressive, embarrassed air characteristic of very young men accompanied by a woman; and he also was afraid of meeting one of the chiefs of his department, or some one from his province. Then there was the question of economy. —
“How expensive this is!” she would say every time, running over the bill for the dinner, which she carried away with her. “If we were housekeeping, I could run the house three days for that money.”
“Well, what’s to hinder us?” And they set about finding a suitable place.
That is the pitfall. Everybody falls into it, the best, the most honorable of men, by virtue of the instinct of neatness, the longing for a “home,” instilled in them by early education and the genial warmth of the fireside.
The apartment on Rue d’Amsterdam was rented at once and voted delightful, despite its rooms en enfilade, of which the kitchen and living-room looked out on a damp backyard where odors of dishwater and chlorine arose from an English tavern, and the bedroom on the sloping, noisy street, shaken day and night by jolting vans and drays, cabs and omnibuses, by the shrill whistles of arriving and departing locomotives, all the uproar of the terminus of the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest, which displayed its glass roof of the color of muddy water directly opposite. The great advantage of the location was the knowledge that the train was close at hand, and Saint-Cloud, Ville d’Avray, Saint-Germain, and all the verdure-clad stations on the banks of the Seine almost under their balcony. For they had a balcony, broad and commodious, which retained from the munificence of the former tenants a zinc tent painted to imitate striped canvas, dripping wet and melancholy enough under the pattering of the winter rains, but a very pleasant place to dine in summer, in the fresh air, as in a mountain chalet.
They turned their attention to the matter of furniture. Jean having informed Aunt Divonne, who was the family steward as it were, of his project of keeping house, she sent him the necessary money; and her letter announced at the same time the speedy arrival of a wardrobe, a commode, and a large cane-seated easy-chair taken from the Chambre du Vent for the behoof of the Parisian.
That chamber, which he saw in his mind’s eye at the end of a corridor at Castelet, always unoccupied, the shutters closed and barred, the door secured with a bolt, was exposed by its position to the full fury of the mistral, which made its walls creak like a room in a lighthouse. It was used as a storeroom for old cast-off articles, for what each generation relegated to the past to make room for new purchases.
Ah! if Divonne had known what strange siestas would be taken in the cane-seated chair, what India silk skirts and flounced pantalettes would fill the drawers of the Empire commode! But Gaussin’s remorse on that account was swallowed up in the numberless little delights of the beginning of housekeeping. It was such fun, after the office, between daylight and dark, to set off arm-in-arm on a voyage of discovery, and to visit some street in the faubourg to select a dining-room outfit — the sideboard, the table, and six chairs — or cretonne curtains for the windows and the bed. He would accept anything with his eyes closed; but Fanny scrutinized for two, tried the chairs, experimented with the leaves of the table, showed herself an experienced shopper.
She knew the shops where they could buy at the cost of manufacture a complete kitchen equipment for a small family, the four iron saucepans, the fifth glazed for the morning chocolate; no copper, because it takes too long to clean. Six metal covers with soup spoons, and two dozen plates of English ware, strong and bright-colored, all counted and packed and ready for shipment, like a doll’s teaset. For sheets, napkins, toilet and table linen, she knew a dealer, the agent of a great factory at Roubaix, to whom they could pay so much a month; and as she was always watching the shop-windows, on the lookout for bankrupt sales, for the wreckage which Paris constantly washes ashore in its scum, she discovered on Boulevard Clichy, at second hand, a magnificent bed, almost new, and large enough for the ogre’s seven young women to sleep in a row.
He too tried his hand at making purchases as he returned from the office; but he knew nothing about it, could not bear to say no or to leave a shop empty-handed. Going into a second-hand place to buy an old-fashioned oil-cruet which she had described to him, he brought away as a substitute for the article, which was already sold, a salon chandelier with glass pendants, which was quite useless to them, as they had no salon.
“We will put it in the veranda,” said Fanny, to console him.
And the pleasure of taking measurements, the discussions as to placing a piece of furniture; and the shouts, the wild laughter, the arms thrown up in despair, when they discovered that, despite all their precautions, despite the very complete list of indispensable purchases, something had been forgotten.
For instance, the sugar-grater. Fancy their starting to keep house without a sugar-grater!
Then, when everything was bought and put in place, the curtains hung, a wick in the new lamp, what a delightful evening was that first one in the new home, the careful scrutiny of the three rooms before going to bed, and how she laughed as she held the light while he locked the door: “Another turn; one more — lock it tight. Let us be sure that we ‘re at home.”
Thereupon began a new, delightful life. On leaving his work, he returned home at once, longing to be sitting by the fire in his slippers. And as he splashed through the dark streets, he imagined their warm, brightly lighted room, enlivened by its old provincial furniture, at which Fanny turned up her nose at first as rubbish, but which had turned out to be very pretty antique pieces; especially the wardrobe, a Louis XVI. gem, with its painted panels, representing Provençal fêtes, shepherds in jackets of flowered stuff dancing to the flute and the tambourine. The presence of those antiquated articles, familiar to his eyes in his childhood, reminded him of his father’s house and sanctified his new home, whose comforts he was still to enjoy.
In answer to his ring, Fanny appeared, neatly and coquettishly dressed, “on deck,” as she said. Her dress of black woollen stuff, without ornament, but cut by a fashionable dressmaker’s pattern, — the simplicity of a woman who has worn fine raiment, — her sleeves rolled up, and a great white apron; for she herself did their cooking, and simply had a charwoman for the heavy work which chaps the hands or injures their shape.
She was very clever at it, knew a multitude of receipts, dishes of the North and South, as varied as her repertory of popular ballads, which, when the dinner was at an end and the white apron hung behind the closed door of the kitchen, she sang to him in her worn but passionate contralto.
Below, the street roared, a rushing torrent. The cold rain pattered on the zinc of the veranda; and Gaussin, in his easy-chair, with his feet stretched out to the fire, watched the windows in the railway station opposite and the clerks stooping to write by the white light of great reflectors.
He was very comfortable; he allowed himself to be coddled. In love? no; but grateful for the love with which she enveloped him, for that never-varying affection. How could he have deprived himself so long of that happiness, in the fear — at which he laughed now — of being bewitched, of assuming a yoke? Was not his life more respectable than when he used to go about recklessly from girl to girl?
There was no danger for the future. Three years hence, when he went away, the separation would come about naturally, without any shock. Fanny was forewarned; they talked about it together, as about death, — a distant but inevitable fatality. There remained the great grief of his people at home when they learned that he did not live alone; the wrath of his father, that man of rigid principles and so quick to act.
But how could they find out? Jean saw no one in Paris. His father, “the consul,” as he was called at home, was detained in Provence the whole year by the superintendence of his very considerable estates, which he cultivated himself, and by his hard battles with the vines. His mother was helpless, could not step or move without assistance, and left to Divonne the management of the house and the care of the two little twin sisters, Marthe and Marie, whose unexpected double birth had taken away her strength and activity forever. As for Uncle Césaire, Divonne’s husband, he was a great child who was not allowed to travel alone, And now Fanny knew the whole family. When he received a letter from Castalet, at the foot of which the little girls had written a few lines in their big handwriting with their little fingers, she read it over his shoulder, shared his emotion. Of her own previous existence he knew nothing, asked no questions. He had the attractive, unconscious egotism of his years, no jealousy, no anxiety. Full of his own life, he allowed it to overflow, thought aloud, laid bare his heart, while the other remained mute.
Thus the days and weeks passed in a happy tranquillity disturbed for a moment by a circumstance which moved them deeply, but in different ways. She thought that she was enceinte, and told him of it with such delight that he could not fail to share it. But at heart he was afraid. A child, at his age! What would he do with it? Should he acknowledge it? And what a pledge between himself and that woman, what a complication in future!
Suddenly the chain became visible to him, heavy, cold, and riveted about his neck. He did not sleep at night, nor did she; and, lying side by side in their great bed, they dreamed, open-eyed, a thousand leagues apart.
Luckily that false alarm was not repeated, and they resumed their peaceful, delightfully secluded life. Then, when the winter had passed and the real sun had returned once more, their little abode became still more charming, enlarged by the balcony and the tent. At night they dined there beneath the sky tinged with green and streaked by the whistling flight of swallows.
The street sent up its hot puffs and all the sounds of the neighboring houses; but the slightest breath of fresh air was theirs, and they forgot themselves for hours, hand in hand, conscious of nothing. Jean remembered similar nights on the bank of the Rhone, and dreamed of distant consulates in very warm countries, of a ship’s deck, leaving the harbor, where the breeze would have that same long breath which fluttered the curtain of the tent. And when an invisible caress upon his lips murmured, “Do you love me?” he always returned from very far away to answer, “Oh! yes, I love you.” — That is what comes of taking them so young; they have too many things in their heads.
On the same balcony, separated from them by an iron railing garlanded with climbing flowers, another couple billed and cooed, M. and Madame Hettéma, husband and wife, very vulgar persons, whose kisses resounded like slaps on the face. They were wonderfully well-mated in age, in tastes, in heavy build, and it was touching to hear those two mature lovers singing in low tones, as they leaned on the balustrade, old-fashioned sentimental ditties.
“Mais je l’entends qui soupire dans l’ombre;
C’est un beau rêve, ah! laissez-moi dormir.”
They appealed to Fanny; she would have liked to know them. Sometimes indeed she and her neighbor exchanged a loving, happy woman’s smile over the blackened railing; but the men, as always, were more distant, and they never spoke.
Jean was returning home from Quai d’Orsay one afternoon when he heard some one call him by name at the corner of Rue Royale. It was a lovely day, bright and warm, and Paris was sunning itself at that corner of the boulevard, which has not its equal in the world at sunset on a fine day, about the hour for returning from the Bois.
“Sit down here, my handsome youngster, and have something to drink; it rejoices my eyes to look at you.”
Two long arms had seized him and seated him under the awning of a café which encroached upon the sidewalk with its three rows of tables. He made no resistance, flattered to hear the throng of provincials, foreigners, striped jackets and round hats, whispering curiously the name of Caoudal.
The sculptor, sitting at a table in front of a glass of absinthe, which went well with his military figure and the rosette of an officer of the Legion of Honor, had beside him the engineer Déchelette, who had arrived the day before, always the same, sunburned and yellow, his prominent cheekbones crowding his good-natured little eyes, his nostrils greedily sniffing Paris. As soon as the young man was seated, Caoudal pointed to him with comic rage, —
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