Delphi complete works of.., p.348
Delphi Complete Works of Alphonse Daudet (Illustrated), page 348
“All the same, he danced the berlin with her.”
A flood of nervous tears prevented her from continuing, and all the ivory sticks of the little fan fell on the carpet. Madame Valfon, sorely distressed by her daughter’s emotion, although thinking of something very different, took her hand with vague words of consolation.
“Oh let her finish,” grumbled the minister.
“That’s all,” murmured the girl. “And if that Claudius did not have the insolence to come afterward to get me for the cotillion which we were to dance together. I pretended not to feel well, leaving him at liberty to sit down beside me, if he chose, and try to obtain his pardon. But he returned to his telegrapher, and they cotillioned together until morning. Don’t you think that’s a dastardly thing?”
There was a moment of silence and distress. In the quivering rays of the dawn which whitened the window-panes and turned the lights pale, in the dull rumbling of Paris just coming to life again, the stealthy steps of servants, the jangling of the chandeliers as they extinguished them, and now and then the bursting of a bobèche, the flickering of a dying flame in a mirror, those four personages, so incongruous in ideas and in costumes, that shepherd and that Louis XV marchioness, that minister of the Third Republic in his black coat with the broad ribbon of the Russian order about his neck, grouped in a corner of the little card-room, gazed at one another anxiously, revealing only half of their thoughts. So many things had happened to make sport of them during that ball, which had already become a dream! The violins of the Mozart minuet carried away illusions and hopes upon their stately, almost solemn measures, but they left a few behind as well. Tears of pride, huge and glistening, filled Florence’s eyes; her mother’s shot forth gleams of a joy that she could not avow; and despite all that he lost by the failure of his stepdaughter’s marriage, Valfon reflected with delight that she would not go away, that he could still hold her on his knees, against his heart. So it was only a sort of half anger that curled his moustache as he reproached his wife with being the cause of all the trouble, on account of her infatuation for that family of beggars.
“The — the — what’s their name? Oh! yes, the Eudelines. First, you brought us the son, a fellow with the head of a hair-dresser’s apprentice, who tries to unhook a fine marriage with his curling-iron; and after the brother, the sister, this little Dina, who also seems an artful minx.”
Madame Valfon protested valiantly:
“Hush! As for the sister, I abandon her to you. I have seen her only once, and I do not know her. But as for Raymond, that admirable existence, that martyr of the family, as handsome as Jesus at twenty, and crucified all his life, he is too divine, too far above your paltry egotism. Do not speak of him, I forbid you!”
The fever of her vigil, love, indignation, the insult of a moment before, which had remained upon her forehead in the shape of a visible wrinkle; everything combined to exalt, to transfigure that once beautiful woman, who, with her superb arms and shoulders, recovered for a few moments the pure lines of her face of former days. She was so intensely excited that, except for the presence of her children, she would have shouted at her husband, at that villain, that knave from whom she had suffered so much:
“Yes, the man you speak of is handsome and I love him; and to-night, right here, I promised myself to him, do you understand, I promised myself to him. And now speak, just try to speak; I shall have something to say in reply.”
And the husband understood so well, he was so conscious that he was face to face with an impending explosion of wrath, that he did not insist.
“After all, if I do lose a newspaper, old Jacquand loses a seat in the ministry; for he can’t suppose that I’ll take him at the Marine, after this affront from his son.”
“Oh! Claude was not at all anxious to have his father a minister, for he would have to go to Lyon himself to look after their factories.”
Florence, standing in front of a mirror and already somewhat consoled, spoke tranquilly of her misadventure, as she removed the flowers from her hair. Her stepfather put his arm about her waist, with the ambiguous affection denoted by his slightest movements with respect to her.
“Go to bed, my Floflo, the last word has not been said about this business. However great a simpleton your Lyonnais may be, he will understand that there is no need of his marrying a girl with nothing at all, whom he can so easily make his mistress.” Florence shook her head:
“It is easy to see that you do not know him.”
“She is right, master,” said Wilkie, who was busy putting Florence’s fan in order. “Claudius is a gentleman who would consider that he had forfeited his honor in this world and his salvation in the other, if he should pay court to a pretty girl for any other than a good motive. So that I am convinced that if he is really in love with Dina, he will go and ask her mamma for her hand. He will take his time about it, you may be sure, for the fellow is one constant oscillation. That is because of his great height. And so I promise, my dear Florence, that if she cares ever so little about it” — he put his withered, malicious little face, which the brilliant satin of his costume made still older, close to his sister’s— “I will undertake to reconcile her to Claudius before he has taken the first step, and to patch up their marriage as easily as this fan.”
She took the fan, the pieces of which seemed to be very skilfully put together.
“How will you do it?”
“That is my secret, and I will intrust it only to our mother, who will help us when the time comes. Do you hear, mamma?”
“What is it?” asked Madame Valfon, who had gone back to her dream.
The minister, who was deciphering his wife as the conversation proceeded, sneered in his falsetto voice:
“You see that your poor mother is no longer with us. Sleep has overcome her; Jet us go to bed, my children.”
While they sought their bedrooms, those ministerial bedrooms, magnificent or coquettish, from which an intelligent upholsterer, under the direction of Wilkie, the artist of the family, had striven to remove the flavor of a former furnished lodging-house, little Dina, the perfectly innocent cause of all their agitation, was sleeping, or perhaps pretending to sleep, beside her mother, behind the screen, in the room back of the shop of the Wonderful Lamp. Madame Eudeline would have been glad to talk with her little one, to ask her for details of the ball; but the child was dropping with sleep, and the poor mother, with the difficulty that all people of middle age have in going to sleep after a certain hour, had all the trouble in the world to lie still in the half-darkness of a night light, listening to her daughter’s almost imperceptible breath beside her, and to Raymond’s nervous footsteps in his little room above.
Although he had brought his sister home nearly an hour before, the elder brother could not make up his mind to go to bed. Half undressed, he paced back and forth under the ceiling, which was so low that the powder on his hair brushed against it; then he would stop and gaze piteously at the iron bed, the pine cupboard and table, and the three dilapidated chairs. Ah! these contrasts in our Parisian lives, all brilliancy in the gas-light, whether diamonds or paste, and dying out on our return to the darkness of anxiety, of poverty at home, — to what evil thoughts they may give birth in the mind of a penniless young bachelor, who has nothing but a black coat and a few aristocratic connections, when, on leaving a society function, he returns in the early morning to his melancholy attic or the wretched home of his family! What savage dreams of the rearrangement of society by means of torch or dynamite, if the boy has an evil mind and his distress turns to envy; if he is simply a commonplace, feeble creature, how many hours wasted in dreams, in vain and barren reveries!
Before the table covered with law books, where Madame Valfon in a ball dress shone resplendent with all the glory of her eyes and her shoulders, in a showy frame of silk plush, Raymond held the lamp high in the air and snorted with pride as he reflected that this woman, the wife of a statesman, one of those of whom all Europe talks, had told him only a moment ago, as she sat at her piano, the whole story of her private life, of her moral distress, and whispered in his ear:
“Love me, comfort me.”
While she was speaking, the rhythm of a distant waltz accompanied the confessions of that low, slightly husky voice. People approached, senators, deputies, ministers, diplomats, with green or red cravats. Illustrious heads bent before her, foreign accents thanked her for her party; she did not turn her head, hardly replied, one hand on the keyboard, the other pressing the taper fingers which emerged from a marquis’s embroidered wristband, squeezing them and crushing them with all the blind force of her nerves, utterly heedless whether she was seen or not. Oh! the sly glances of that hunchback, a deputy and friend of the minister, who came to congratulate Madame Valfon on the success of her minuet; the lustful, ironical, envious glance which followed the curve of the woman’s lovely bare arm down to that caressing gesture! What would he not have given to be in Raymond’s place, to receive like him the homage of such an attachment, even at the price of poverty, at the price of that wretched garret!
From her bed behind the screen, the mother, listening to his every step, hears him descend the ladder, groping his way to fill his pitcher in the kitchen, and asks him in an undertone:
“Pray, are you not going to bed, my darling?”
“You see that you cannot sleep either, mamma. How about Dina?”
“Oh! she fell into bed like a stone. She must have danced a great deal?”
“All night. She was sure to do it, however. Her minuet was a triumph.”
Mothers never know anything, or at least never enough.
“What a close-mouthed little creature!” whispers Madame Eudeline’s voice. “She told me nothing of all this. Indeed, when she went to bed I thought that her face seemed preoccupied.”
Raymond approaches the screen and whispers: —
“Are you sure that she is asleep? Then listen: what your daughter accomplished as a shepherdess, how she stowed them all away in the pocket of her little apron, you cannot imagine. I heard on all sides: ‘Why, where does that jewel come from?’ Even Marc Javel—”
“Our Marc Javel?”
“Yes, our Marc Javel, who is inseparable from the Valfons now, because there is one department vacant in the cabinet, the Marine, which he hopes to obtain. Your daughter made a mighty impression on him too. She absolutely must come to his house and dance at a ball which he is to give for the birthday of his niece Jeannine. I promised in your name and my own, as you can imagine! Marc Javel may be very useful to us; and then he is such a cordial man, so obliging! We form wrong ideas about people. For instance, Monsieur Mauglas, the writer, you remember him? According to some people, he was a police spy employed to follow the Russian refugees in Paris. They had proofs of it. Antonin came back from London very positive on that point. Well! it’s nothing of the sort. I met Mauglas at the ball to-night, petted and surrounded all the time, everybody talking of his last study upon Corinthian dances in the Revue. The idea of that man being a spy, upon my word! He told us some wonderful things about the origin of the minuet, and for my part I was very proud to meet him again there.”
Madame Eudeline behind her screen is also very proud and very happy to think that Raymond and Dina know these fine people. What joy for the poor father if he could see his child embarked thus in Parisian society! And excited by her maternal hopes, by the gorgeous prospect of the future opening before her children, the good woman twists and turns and makes the iron bed creak, while the plaster Madonna watches overhead, with her daughter’s picture of the first communion and the great rosaries, hanging against the wall. Suddenly, lowering her voice still more, with her mouth close to the screen:
“And you, my Raymond, you tell me nothing of your own triumphs. But you had them, I am sure; you are happy?”
“Beyond everything, mother,” says Raymond in an undertone, with emphasis.
“You well deserve it, you are so good, so handsome!”
She cannot see him, but imagines him, her pretty fair-haired boy, in short breeches, buckled shoes and love-lock. His pitcher, which he holds in his hand, vulgarizes the picture a little, but the mother does not think of that.
“Ah! but she is the one who is good and handsome, mamma. If you only knew her!”
“You are right, there is an expression of goodness on her face. I look at it every day when I do your room. Her age is the only thing that I can’t explain very well, for Wilkie is twenty-two years old, like yourself. To be sure, I was an old maid when I married, and she very young, so you tell me.”
“A child, mother, a little child, whose first husband amused himself with her as with a doll, and whom the other has made suffer terribly. Ah, the villain! he had better not try it again, she will have some one to defend her now.”
Madame Eudeline feels a thrill of terror.
“Be careful, my darling; that Valfon is a man to be feared.”
“I am not afraid of him; for two years now I have been fencing an hour a day at the Association. Don’t be alarmed,” he adds, hearing the poor mother’s frightened sigh, “Valfon is as cowardly as he is mean. He is supposed to be a great fighter, and people choose him as referee in affairs of honor; but he never fights. Now good-night, dear mamma, or rather good-morning; I am going up to bed.” Luckily Raymond does not lower his lamp, and the vague gleam of the night-light, hidden by the screen, does not permit Madame Eudeline to see a faint smile hovering around the half-closed lips of little Dina, who, with closed eyes and the regular breathing of sleep, has not lost a single one of their words.
III. A BONNE FORTUNE.
AT TWENTY-TWO, RAYMOND Eudeline, a well-favored youth, and very particular about his dress, like all our young men of to-day, still had his first bonne fortune before him. For one could hardly apply that name to his relations with Geneviève, which had come to such a pitiable’ conclusion, or to his ephemeral intimacies with divers young women of the quarter. But this assignation with Madame Valfon was the beginning of his worldly life, the dawn of a career of seduction. Raymond had been for several months a favored visitor at the house of that once lovely woman, whom his twenty years and his golden curls had dazzled at once, and he might have been master of the citadel long since, but for the absurd timidity of his years.
What is the source of this timidity on the part of a young, intelligent, and comely man in presence of a woman; the invincible embarrassment of speech and gesture, which may extend even to rudeness, and which the woman invariably distrusts? Nervousness above all, nervousness with its manifold, complex causes, the most common of which is lack of money, or rather unfamiliarity with the use of money. How many times, if he had had more money at his command, if he had had in some corner of Paris a luxurious apartment in which to receive a mistress, Raymond would have displayed more presumption; how many times he would have seized the fleeting opportunity, instead of avoiding it, of closing his eyes in order not to see it.
But this time he had to surrender in face of the formal appointment made by Madame Valfon: “At three o’clock precisely, at the door of Saints Gervais and Protais. I shall be free until dinner.”
And the next moment that anxious, despairing thought: “Where am I to take her?” He thought first of Antonin’s room on Place Royale. But the tiled corridors were so old, the furniture so modest; and then the embroideress of altar-cloths — what a neighbor for a minister’s wife! Thereupon he remembered a furnished lodging-house in the same quarter, kept by a former artist of the lyric stage, who was then living with one of her tenants, a pupil at the École Centrale and a friend of Antonin. Several times this young man had invited the Eudeline brothers to dine with his mistress, and Raymond had formed a very favorable impression of the house and the service, especially as there were two entrances, on Boulevard Beaumarchais and Rue Amelot.
“And the money?” — that was the second shriek of his distress. For the evening at the Foreign Office, costume, shoes, gloves, and carriages, he had turned mamma’s cash-drawer and his brother’s purse inside out. Nothing more to hope for in that direction. He was trying to think of some expedient, tossing with insomnia on the little iron bed in his garret, on the morrow of the fête on Quai d’Orsay, when the name of Alexis, his father’s former cashier, for whom he had obtained the place of cashier of the Association of Students, suddenly flashed through his mind. The clock on the Palais Mazarin, by which all the habits of the quarter were regulated, including those of the Wonderful Lamp, struck ten. He hastily dressed himself, assured now of obtaining the few louis he needed.
At number 41, Rue des Écoles, in one of those enormous buildings with two wings, all built on the same model, to which imitation marble gives an air of magnificence, the Association of the Students of Paris occupies the five floors at the rear of the courtyard. It has taken pains to pull down the partitions of all those bourgeois suites, uniformly composed of a cream-colored salon with pink ceiling, two or three bedrooms, dressing-room and bath-room, painted in gorgeous colors and with pasteboard ornaments; replacing them with libraries of law, pharmacy and medicine, a cashier’s office, and even a shower-bath and a fencing-room. The Association has increased in size since then; but in 1887, on that sharp morning when Raymond bent his steps toward Rue des Écoles, along sidewalks slippery and mirror-like with the white frost of the night, the appearance of the A was as we have described it.
In the room on the entresol used as the cashier’s office, the attendant, who was lighting the fire, said to young Eudeline, when he expressed his surprise that M. Alexis had not yet arrived:
“Oh! he won’t be here at all to-day, nor tomorrow either, probably. His niece in Bourgogne is being married.”
Life sometimes gives to these trivial mishaps the importance of catastrophes, and the words which convey them — what they call on the stage mots de situation — fall on the ear as heavy and crushing as stones. Raymond was dazed for a moment, as he listened to the roar of the fire and the buzzing of the boy’s voice as he repeated his stupid, disastrous statement. To whom was he to apply for that money? To a “dear comrade,” perhaps, one of the thirty-three of the committee? Ah! but it was in that committee that his election as president was brewing, and he ran the risk of endangering it by adopting that attitude of starveling and borrower. However he went up to the libraries, which were cold and deserted at that hour, their windows starred with frost in the absence of heat. Only in the library of pharmacy did he find a fire of coke burning; and beside it, a codex on his knees, and a huge piece of hot bread in his hand, a poor devil of a foreign student, Roumanian or Wallachian, with hollow cheeks and protruding eyes, was reading and eating and roasting himself greedily, in a state of beatitude. Ask that fellow for three louis! Eudeline closed the door softly, and, diverted for a moment from his selfish preoccupation, reflected as he went downstairs again, that that Association, absurd and ostentatious as it was in many respects, that artificial hatchery of petty deputies and embryonic statesmen, had its sides of compassion, of generous confraternity, of which it did not boast.
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