Delphi complete works of.., p.274
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 274
If he had only had a friend, some one to take care of her, to assist her in the first paroxysm; but living underground as they were, like mountain rats in their collage, they knew no one; and the Hettémas, those abnormal egoists, shiny and swimming in fat, whose animalism became more marked with the approach of the season for hibernating, like the Esquimaux, were not people upon whom the poor creature could call for help in her despair and her abandonment.
He must break with her, however, and do it quickly. Despite his promise to himself, Jean had been to Place Vendôme two or three times, and had fallen deeper and deeper in love; and although the subject had not as yet been mentioned, the hearty welcome accorded him by old Bouchereau, and Irene’s attitude, wherein reserve was blended with affectionate indulgence and what seemed to be excited anticipation of a declaration, — everything urged him to delay no longer. And then, too, the torture of lying, the pretexts he invented to satisfy Fanny, and the species of sacrilege in going from Sappho’s kisses to lay his respectful, faltering homage at the other’s feet.
XI.
WHILE HE WAS hesitating between these alternatives, he found a card on his table at the department, the card of a gentleman who had already called twice during the morning, said the usher, with a certain respect for the following nomenclature: —
C. GAUSSIN D’ARMANDY,
President of the Submersionists of the Rhone Valley,
Member of the Central Committee of Study and Vigilance, Departmental Delegate, etc., etc.
Uncle Césaire in Paris! Le Fénat, a delegate, member of a vigilance committee! He had not recovered from his stupor when his uncle appeared, still as brown as a pineapple, with the same wondering eyes, the laugh wrinkling his temples, and the beard of the days of the League; but, instead of the everlasting fustian jacket, a new broadcloth frock-coat buttoned tightly over his stomach and endowing the little man with truly presidential majesty.
What brought him to Paris? The purchase of an elevating machine for the immersion of his new vines, — he uttered the word élévatoire with an air of conviction which magnified him in his own eyes, — and to arrange for a bust of himself which his colleagues desired as an ornament to the directors’ room.
“As you have seen by my card,” he said modestly, “they have chosen me president. My idea of submersion is making a great sensation in the South. And to think that I, Le Fénat, am actually the man to save the vineyards of France! Only the crazy fellows are good for anything, you see.”
But the principal object of his journey was the rupture with Fanny. Realizing that the affair was dragging, he had come to lend a hand. “I know all about such creatures, as you can imagine. When Courbebaisse let his go, in order to get married—” Before attacking his story, he stopped, unbuttoned his coat and produced a little wallet with well-rounded sides.
“In the first place, relieve me of this. Take it, I say! money — to grease the wheels.” He misunderstood his nephew’s gesture and thought that he refused from motives of delicacy. “Take it! take it! It makes me proud to be able to repay the son for a little of what the father has done for me. Besides, Divonne wants me to do it. She knows all about the affair, and is so glad to know that you ‘re thinking of marrying and shaking off your old crampfish!”
Jean thought that “old crampfish” was a little unjust in Césaire’s mouth after the service his mistress had done him, and he replied with a touch of bitterness, —
“Take back your wallet, uncle; you know better than any one how indifferent Fanny is to such considerations.”
“Yes, she was a good girl,” said the uncle, by way of funeral oration; and he added, winking his crow’s foot, —
“Keep the money all the same. There are so many temptations in Paris that I prefer to have it in your hands instead of mine; and then, too, you need it for ruptures just as you do for duels.”
With that he rose from his chair, declaring that he was dying of hunger and that that momentous question could be discussed more satisfactorily at the breakfast table, fork in hand. It was the typical airy, jesting tone of the Southerner in discussing questions relating to women.
“Between ourselves, my boy,” — they were seated in a restaurant on Rue de Bourgogne, and the uncle, his napkin tucked in his neck, was beaming with satisfaction, while Jean nibbled with the ends of his teeth, unable to eat, “it seems to me that you take the thing too tragically. I know very well that the first step is hard, the explanation an infernal bore; but if you feel that it’s too much for you, say nothing at all, — do as Courbebaisse did. Up to the very morning of the wedding, La Mornas knew nothing about it. At night, on leaving his intended, he would go to the place where the singer was squalling and escort her home. You will say that that wasn’t very regular, nor very honest either. But when one isn’t fond of scenes, and with such terrible creatures as Paola Mornas! For nearly ten years that tall, handsome fellow had trembled before that little hussy. When it came to cutting loose, he had to manœuvre, to resort to stratagem.” And this is how he went about it.
On the day before the wedding, one Fifteenth of August, the day of the great festival, Césaire proposed to the young woman that they should go and fish in the Yvette. Courbebaisse was to join them for dinner; and then they would all three return together on the following evening, when Paris would have evaporated its odor of dust, of exploded fire-crackers and oil-lamps. She assented. Behold them both lying at full length on the bank of that little stream, which purls and gleams between its low shores, and makes the fields so green and the willows so leafy. After the fishing, the bath. It was not the first time that he and Paola had swum together, like two boys, like comrades; but on that day that little Mornas, with her bare arms and legs, her perfectly moulded gypsy-like body, to which the wet costume clung closely everywhere — perhaps, too, the thought that Courbebaisse had given him carte blanche. Ah! the little wretch! She turned, looked him in the eyes, and said sternly, —
“You understand, Césaire; don’t try that again.”
He did not insist, for fear of spoiling his chances, but said to himself, “I will wait till after dinner.”
Very merry the dinner was, on the wooden balcony of the inn, between the two flags which the landlord had hoisted in honor of the Fifteenth of August. It was very warm, the sweet bay was very fragrant, and they could hear the drums and fireworks and the music of the hurdy-gurdy trundling through the streets.
“How stupid it is of that Courbebaisse not to come till to-morrow,” said La Mornas, stretching out her arms, with a gleam of champagne in her eyes. “I feel like having some fun to-night.”
“Gad! and so do I!”
He was leaning by her side on the balcony rail, which was still burning hot from the scorching rays of the sun, and slyly, as an experiment, slipped his arm around her waist, “Oh, Paola! Paola!” That time, instead of being angry, the singer began to laugh, but so loud and heartily that he ended by doing the same. A similar attempt was repulsed in the same way in the evening, when they returned from the fête, where they had danced and eaten sweets; and as their bedrooms adjoined, she sang to him through the partition:— “You are too small, oh! you are too small,” — with all sorts of uncomplimentary comparisons between Courbebaisse and himself. He was strongly tempted to retort, to call her the widow Mornas; but it was too soon. The next day, however, as they sat before a bountiful breakfast, and when Paola had become impatient and finally anxious at her man’s failure to appear, it was with considerable satisfaction that he drew his watch and said solemnly: “Noon! it is all over.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is married.”
“Who?”
“Courbebaisse.”
Vlan!
“Ah! my boy, what a blow! In all my lovemaking I never received such a one. And on the instant she insisted on starting off. But there was no train till four o’clock. And meanwhile the unfaithful one was scorching the rails of the P., L., and M. on his way to Italy with his wife. Thereupon she turned on me again and took it out of me with her fists and her claws, — such luck! — when I had turned the key in the door; then she went for the furniture, and finally fell on the floor in a terrible attack of hysteria. At five they put her on her bed and held her there; while I, all torn and bleeding as if I had just been through a thicket of brambles, hurried off to find Doctor d’Orsay. In such affairs it’s just the same as it is in duelling, you should always have a doctor in attendance. Fancy me rushing along the road with an empty stomach, and in such a hot sun! It was dark when I returned with him. Suddenly, as I approached the inn, I heard the sound of voices and saw a crowd under the windows. Great God? had she killed herself? had she killed some one else? With La Mornas the latter was more probable. I rushed forward, and what did I see? The balcony strung with Venetian lanterns, and the singer standing there, consoled and superb, wrapped in one of the flags and shrieking the Marseillaise as a contribution to the imperial holiday, above the applauding multitude.
“And that, my boy, is how Courbebaisse’s liaison came to an end; I won’t say that it was all ended at one stroke. After ten years of imprisonment, one must always expect a brief period of surveillance. But the worst of it fell on me, at all events; and I will stand as much from yours, if you choose.”
“Ah! uncle, she’s not the same kind of a woman.”
“Nonsense,” said Césaire, breaking the seal of a box of cigars and holding them to his ear to make sure that they were dry; “you’re not the first man who has left her.”
“That is true enough.”
And Jean joyfully grasped at that suggestion, which would have torn his heart a few months before. His uncle and his amusing story really encouraged him a little, but what he could not endure was the living a twofold lie for months, the hypocrisy, the division of his time; he could never make up his mind to that, and had waited only too long.
“What do you mean to do, then?”
While the young man was struggling with his perplexities, the member of the vigilance committee combed his beard, experimented with smiles, attitudes, different ways of carrying the head, then inquired with a careless air, —
“Does he live very far from here?”
“Who, pray?”
“Why, this artist, this Caoudal, whom you suggested to me for my bust. We might go and inquire his prices while we are together.”
Caoudal, although he had become famous, was a great spendthrift and still lived on Rue d’Assas, the scene of his early successes. Césaire, as they walked thither, inquired concerning his rank as an artist; he would ask a big price, of course, but the gentlemen of the committee insisted upon a work of the first order.
“Oh! you need have no fear, uncle, if Caoudal is willing to undertake it.” And he enumerated the sculptor’s titles, — Member of the Institute, Commander of the Legion of Honor, and a multitude of foreign orders. Le Fénat opened his eyes in amazement.
“And you are friends?”
“Very good friends.”
“What a place this Paris is? What fine acquaintances one makes here!”
Gaussin would have been somewhat ashamed to confess that Caoudal was one of Fanny’s old lovers, and that she had brought them together. But one would have said that Césaire was thinking of it.
“Is he the one who did that Sappho we have at Castelet? Then he knows your mistress and can help you, perhaps, to break with her. The Institute, the Legion of Honor, — those things always make an impression on a woman.”
Jean did not reply; perhaps he too thought that he might make use of the first lover’s influence.
The uncle continued with a hearty laugh: —
“By the way, you know the bronze is no longer in your father’s room. When Divonne learned, when I was unlucky enough to have to tell her that it represented your mistress, she wouldn’t have it there. Considering the consul’s whims, his objections to the slightest change, it wasn’t an easy matter to move it, especially without letting him suspect the reason. Oh, these women! She managed so cleverly that to-day Monsieur Thiers presides over your father’s mantel, and poor Sappho lies in the dust in the windy chamber, with the old firedogs and cast-off furniture; she suffered too in the moving, — her head-dress was smashed and her lyre broken off. Doubtless Divonne’s spite was the cause of her misfortune.”
They reached Rue d’Assas. In view of the modest, hard-working aspect of that city of artists, of studios with numbered barn-like doors, opening on both sides of a long courtyard at the end of which were the ugly buildings of a district school with a perpetual murmur of reading, the president of the Submersionists conceived fresh doubts as to the talent of a man so modestly quartered; but as soon as he entered Caoudal’s studio, he knew what to expect.
“Not for a hundred thousand francs, not for a million!” roared the sculptor at Gaussin’s first word; and slowly raising his long body from the couch on which he lay in the centre of the disorderly, neglected studio, he added: “A bust! Oh, yes! just look at that mass of plaster in a thousand pieces on the floor, — my group for the next Salon, which I have just pulverized with a mallet. That’s all I care for sculpture, and tempting as monsieur’s lineaments are—”
“Gaussin d’Armandy, president—”
The uncle collected all his titles, but there were too many of them; Caoudal interrupted him and turned to the younger man, —
“You are staring at me, Gaussin. Do you think I have grown old?”
It was quite true that he looked his full age in that light from above falling upon the scars, the furrows and wrinkles of his dissipated, fatigued face, his lion’s mane showing bald spots like old carpet, his cheeks hanging and flabby, and his moustache of the color of tarnished gilt, which he no longer took the trouble to curl or dye. What was the use? Cousinard, the little model, had gone. “Yes, my dear fellow, with my moulder, a savage, a brute, but twenty years old!”
His tone was fierce and ironical, and he strode up and down the studio, kicking aside a stool that stood in his path. Suddenly, halting in front of the mirror with a carved copper frame over the couch, he looked at himself with a ghastly grimace: “What an ugly, played-out thing! veins and dewlaps like an old cow!” He put his hand to his face, and in a piteous, comical tone, with the foresight of an old beau bewailing his charms: “To think that I shall regret even this, next year!”
The uncle was horrified. The idea of that academician talking in that tone and telling about his vile love-affairs! So there were crackbrains everywhere, even in the Institute; and his admiration for the great man lessened with the sympathy he felt for his weaknesses.
“How’s Fanny? Are you still at Chaville?” said Caoudal, suddenly subsiding and sitting down beside Gaussin, and tapping him familiarly on the shoulder.
“Oh, poor Fanny! we haven’t much longer to live together.”
“Are you going away?”
“Yes, very soon; and I am going to be married first. I have got to leave her.”
The sculptor laughed a savage laugh.
“Bravo! I am delighted to hear it. Avenge us, my boy; avenge us on those trollops. Deceive them, throw them over, and let them weep, the wretches! You will never do them as much harm as they have done to others.”
Uncle Césaire was triumphant.
“You see, monsieur doesn’t take such a tragic view of the affair as you do. Can you imagine such a zany? What keeps him from leaving her is the fear that she will kill herself!”
Jean frankly avowed the effect that Alice Doré’s suicide had made upon him.
“But this is a different matter,” said Caoudal, earnestly. “That girl was a melancholy, soft creature, with hands always falling at her sides, — a poor doll without any sawdust. Déchelette was wrong in thinking that she died for him. A suicide from fatigue and disgust with life. While Sappho — ah! yes, she’ll kill herself! She’s too fond of love for that; she’ll burn to the end, down to the bobèches. She’s of the race of jeunes premiers, who never change their line of parts and die, toothless and without eyelashes, in their jeune premier costumes. Just look at me. Do I kill myself? It’s of no use for me to grieve. I know perfectly well that now she has gone I shall take another, that I must always have one. Your mistress will do as I do, as she has done before. Only she is no longer young, and it will be a harder task.”
Still the uncle was triumphant: “You feel better now, eh?”
Jean said nothing, but his scruples were overcome and his mind made up. They were going away, when the sculptor called them back to show them a photograph which he took from the dust on his table and wiped with his sleeve. “See, there she is. Isn’t she a pretty one, the hussy, to kneel before? Those legs, that breast!” The contrast was terrible between those glowing eyes, that passionate voice, and the senile trembling of the great, spatula-shaped fingers in which quivered the smiling image of Cousinard, the little model, with her dimpled charms.
XII.
“IS IT YOU? How early you have come home!”
She came in from the garden, her skirt full of fallen apples, and ran quickly up the steps, disturbed by her lover’s manner, which was at once embarrassed and determined.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, nothing; it’s this weather, this bright sunshine. I wanted to make the most of the last fine day to take a turn in the forest, we two. What do you say?”
She gave her street urchin’s cry, which came to her lips whenever she was pleased.
“Oh, what luck! “For more than a month they had not been out, housed by the rains and winds of November. It was not always entertaining in the country; one might as well live in the Ark with Noah and his beasts. She had a few orders to give in the kitchen, because of the Hettémas, who were coming to dinner; and while he waited outside on the Pavé des Gardes, Jean gazed at the little house, warmed by that mild Indian summer light, and at the broad moss-covered pavement of the country street, with that farewell, all-embracing and endowed with memory, which we say with our eyes to places we are about to leave.
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