She arrived in a condition of frightful exhaustion, utterly worn out and bewildered by her long railway journey, the first of her life, for, after being taken to Tunis while still quite a child, she had never left it. From her carriage, two negroes carried her into her apartments on an easy chair which, subsequently, always remained downstairs beneath the entrance porch, in readiness for these difficult removals. Mme. Jansoulet could not mount the staircase, which made her dizzy; she would not have lifts, which creaked under her weight; besides, she never walked. Of enormous size, bloated to such a degree that it was impossible to assign to her any particular age between twenty-five and forty, with a rather pretty face but grown shapeless in its features, dull eyes beneath lids that drooped, vulgarly dressed in foreign clothes, laden with diamonds and jewels after the fashion of a Hindu idol, she was as fine a sample as could be found of those transplanted European women called Levantines—a curious race of obese creoles whom speech and costume alone attach to our world, but whom the East wraps round with its stupefying atmosphere, with the subtle poisons of its drugged air in which everything, from the tissues of the skin to the waists of garments, even to the soul, is enervated and relaxed.

This particular specimen of it was the daughter of an immensely rich Belgian who was engaged in the coral trade at Tunis, and in whose business Jansoulet, after his arrival in the country, had been employed for some months. Mlle. Afchin, in those days a delicious little doll of twelve years old, with radiant complexion, hair, and health, used often to come to fetch her father from the counting-house in the great chariot with its yoke of mules which carried them to their fine villa at La Marsu, in the vicinity of Tunis. This mischievous child with splendid bare shoulders, had dazzled the adventurer as he caught glimpses of her amid her luxurious surroundings, and, years afterward, when, having become rich and the favourite of the Bey, he began to think of settling down, it was to her that his thoughts went. The child had grown into a fat young woman, heavy and white. Her intelligence, dull in the first instance, had become still more obscured through the inertia of a dormouse's existence, the carelessness of a father given over to business, the use of opium-saturated tobacco and of preserves made from rose-leaves, the torpor of her Flemish blood, re-enforced by Oriental indolence. Furthermore, she was ill-bred, gluttonous, sensual, arrogant, a Levantine jewel in perfection.

But Jansoulet saw nothing of all this.

For him she was, and remained, up to the time of her arrival in Paris, a superior creature, a lady of the most exalted rank, a Demoiselle Afchin. He addressed her with respect, in her presence maintained an attitude which was a little constrained and timid, gave her money without counting, satisfied her most costly fantasies, her wildest caprices, all the strange desires of a Levantine's brain disordered through boredom and idleness. One word alone excused everything. She was a Demoiselle Afchin. Beyond this, no intercourse between them; he always at the Kasbah or the Bardo, courting the favour of the Bey, or else in his counting-houses; she passing her days in bed, wearing in her hair a diadem of pearls worth three hundred thousand francs which she never took off, befuddling her brain with smoking, living as in a harem, admiring herself in the glass, adorning herself, in company with a few other Levantines, whose supreme distraction consisted in measuring with their necklaces arms and legs which rivalled each other in plumpness, and bearing children about whom she never gave herself the least trouble, whom she never used to see, who had not even cost her a pang, for she gave birth to them under chloroform. A lump of white flesh perfumed with musk. And, as Jansoulet used to say with pride: "I married a Demoiselle Afchin!"

Under the sky of Paris and its cold light the disillusion began. Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange paraphernalia in her suite, he had the vague impression of a Queen Pomare in exile. The fact was that now he had seen real women of the world, and he made comparisons. After having planned a great ball to celebrate her arrival, he prudently changed his mind. Besides, Mme. Jansoulet desired to see nobody. Here her natural indolence was increased by the home-sickness which she suffered, from the first hour of her coming, by the chilliness of a yellow fog and the dripping rain. She passed several days without getting up, weeping aloud like a child, saying that it was in order to cause her death that she had been brought to Paris, and not permitting her women to do even the least thing for her. She lay there bellowing among the laces of her pillow, with her hair bristling in disorder about her diadem, the windows of the room closed, the curtains drawn close, the lamps lighted night and day, crying out that she wanted to go away-y, to go away-y; and it was pitiful to see, in that funeral gloom, the half-unpacked trunks scattered over the carpets, the frightened maids, the negresses crouched around their mistress in her nervous attack, they also groaning, with haggard eyes like those dogs of artic travellers that go mad without the sun.

The Irish doctor, called in to deal with all this trouble, had no success with his fatherly manners, the pretty phrases that issued from his compressed lips. The Levantine would have nothing to do at any price with the arsenic pearls as a tonic. The Nabob was in consternation. What was to be done? Send her back to Tunis with the children? It was scarcely possible. He was decidedly in disgrace in that quarter. The Hemerlingues were triumphant. A last affront had filled up the measure. At Jansoulet's departure, the Bey had commissioned him to have gold-pieces struck at the Paris Mint of a new design to the value of several millions; then the order, suddenly withdrawn, had been given to Hemerlingue. Publicly outraged, Jansoulet had replied by a public demonstration, offering for sale all his possessions, his palace at the Bardo given to him by the former Bey, his villas of La Marsu all of white marble, surrounded by splendid gardens, his counting-houses which were the largest and the most sumptuous in the city, and, charging, finally, the intelligent Bompain to bring over to him his wife and children in order to make a clear affirmation of a definitive departure. After such an uproar, it was no easy thing for him to return there; this was what he endeavoured to make evident to Mlle. Afchin, who only replied to him by deep groans. He tried to console her, to amuse her, but what distraction could be found to appeal to that monstrously apathetic nature? And then, could he change the sky of Paris, restore to the unhappy Levantine her patio paved with marble, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious sleepiness, listening to the water as it dripped on the great alabaster fountain with its three basins, one over the other, and her gilded barge, with its awning of crimson, which eight Tripolitan boatmen supple and vigorous rowed after sunset on the beautiful lake of El-Baheira? However luxurious the apartment of the Place Vendome might be, it could not compensate for the loss of these marvels. And then she would be more miserable than ever. At last, a man who was a frequent visitor to the house succeeded in lifting her out of her despair. This was Cabassu, the man who described himself on his cards as "professor of massage," a big, dark, thick-set man, smelling of garlic and pomade, square-shouldered, hairy to the eyes, and who knew stories of Parisian seraglios, tales within the reach of madame's intelligence. Having once come to massage her, she wished to see him again, retained him. He had to give up all his other clients, and became, at the salary of a senator, the masseur of this stout lady, her page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, delighted to see his wife contented, was unconscious of the ridicule attached to this intimacy.

Cabassu was now seen in the Bois, seated beside the favourite maid in the huge and sumptuous open carriage, also at the back of the theatre boxes taken by the Levantine, for she began to go out, since she had grown less torpid under the treatment of her masseur and was determined to amuse herself. The theatre pleased her, especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her large body found a stimulus in the false glare of the footlights. But it was to Cardailhac's theatre that she went for preference. There, the Nabob found himself in his own house. From the chief superintendent to the humblest ouvreuse, the whole staff was under his control. He had a key which enabled him to pass from the corridors on to the stage; and the small drawing-room communicating with his box was decorated in Oriental manner, with a concave ceiling like a beehive, its couches covered in camel's hair, the flame of the gas inclosed in a little Moorish lantern. Here one could enjoy a siesta during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of a Cardailhac stop at this. Remarking the taste of the Demoiselle Afchin for the drama, he had ended by persuading her that she also possessed the intuition, the knowledge of it, and by begging her when she had nothing better to do to glance over and let him know what she thought of the pieces that were submitted to him. A good way of cementing the partnership more firmly.

Poor manuscripts in your blue or yellow covers, bound by hope with fragile ribbons, that set out full of ambition and dreams, who knows what hands may touch you, turn over your pages, what indiscreet fingers deflower your charm, the charm of the unknown, that glittering dust which lies on new ideas? Who may judge you and who condemn? Sometimes, before dining out, Jansoulet, mounting to his wife's room, would find her on her lounge, smoking, her head thrown back, bundles of manuscripts by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his thick voice and with the Bourg-Saint-Andeol accent, some dramatic lucubration which he cut and scored without pity at the least criticism from the lady.

"Don't disturb yourselves," the good Nabob would signal with his hand, entering on tiptoe. He would listen, shake his head with an admiring air, as he watched his wife: "She is astonishing!" for he himself understood nothing about literature, and there, at least, he could discover once again the superiority of Mlle. Afchin.

"She had the instinct of the stage," as Cardailhac used to say; but, on the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her. Never did she take any interest in her children, abandoning them to the hands of strangers, and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting herself with offering to them the flaccid and inanimate flesh of her cheeks between two puffs of cigarette-smoke, without making any inquiries into those details of their bringing up and of their health which perpetuate the physical bond of maternity and make the hearts of true mothers bleed at the least suffering of their children.

They were three big, dull and apathetic boys of eleven, nine, and seven years, having, with the sallow complexion and the precocious bloatedness of the Levantine, the kind, black, velvety eyes of their father. They were ignorant as young lords of the middle ages. At Tunis, M. Bompain had directed their studies; but at Paris, the Nabob, anxious to give them the benefit of a Parisian education, had sent them to that smartest and most expensive of boarding-schools, the College Bourdaloue, managed by good priests who sought less to instruct their pupils than to make of them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs, disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth; they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the charge of the institution had some friend whom they visited and people who came to see them; but the Jansoulets were never summoned to the parlour, no one knew any of their relatives; from time to time they received basketfuls of sweetmeats, piles of confectionery, and that was all. The Nabob, doing some shopping in Paris, would strip for them the whole of a pastry-cook's window and send the spoils to the college, with that generous impulse of the heart mingled with negro ostentation which characterized all his actions. It was the same in the matter of playthings. They were always too pretty, tricked out too finely, useless—those toys that are for show but which the Parisian does not buy. But that which above all attracted to the little Jansoulets the respect both of pupils and masters, were their purses heavy with gold, ever ready for school subscriptions, for the professors' birthdays, and the charity visits, those famous visits organized by the College Bourdaloue, one of the tempting things in the prospectus, the marvel of sensitive souls.

Twice a month, turn and turn about, the pupils who were members of the miniature Society of St. Vincent de Paul founded in the college upon the model of the great one, went in little squads, alone, as though they had been grown-up, to bear succour and consolation into the deepest recesses of the more densely populated quarters of the town. This was designed to teach them a practical charity, the art of knowing the needs, the miseries of the lower classes, and to heal these heart-rending evils by a nostrum of kind words and ecclesiastical maxims. To console, to evangelize the masses by the help of childhood, to disarm religious incredulity by the youth and naivete of the apostles, such was the aim of this little society; an aim entirely missed, moreover. The children, healthy, well-dressed, well-fed, calling only at addresses previously selected, found poor persons of good appearance, sometimes rather unwell, but very clean, already on the parish register and in receipt of aid from the wealthy organization of the Church. Never did they chance to enter one of those nauseous dwellings wherein hunger, grief, humiliation, all physical and moral ills are written in leprous mould on the walls, in indelible lines on the brows. Their visits were prepared for, like that of the sovereign who enters a guard-room to taste the soldiers' soup: the guard-room is warmed and the soup seasoned for the royal palate. Have you seen those pictures in pious books, where a little communicant, with candle in hand, and perfectly groomed, comes to minister to a poor old man lying sick on his straw pallet and turning the whites of his eyes to heaven? These visits of charity had the same conventionality of setting and of accent. To the measured gestures of the little preachers were corresponding words learned by heart and false enough to make one squint. To the comic encouragement, to the "consolations lavished" in prize-book phrases by the voices of young urchins with colds, were the affecting benedictions, the whining and piteous mummeries of a church-porch after vespers. And the moment the young visitors departed, what an explosion of laughter and shouting in the garret, what a dance in a circle round the present brought, what an upsetting of the arm-chair in which one had pretended to be lying ill, of the medicine spilt in the fire, a fire of cinders very artistically prepared!

When the little Jansoulets went out to visit their parents at home, they were intrusted to the care of the man with the red fez, the indispensable Bompain. It was Bompain who conducted them to the Champs-Elysees, clad in English jackets, bowler hats of the latest fashion—at seven years old!—and carrying little canes in their dog-skin-gloved hands. It was Bompain who stuffed the race-wagonette with provisions. Here he mounted with the children, who, with their entrance-cards stuck in their hats round which green veils were twisted, looked very like those personages in Liliputian pantomimes whose entire funniness lies in the enormous size of their heads compared with their small legs and dwarf-like gestures. They smoked and drank; it was a painful sight. Sometimes the man in the fez, hardly able to hold himself upright, would bring them home frightfully sick. And yet Jansoulet was fond of them, the youngest especially, who, with his long hair, his doll-like manner, recalled to him the little Afchin passing in her carriage. But they were still of the age when children belong to the mother, when neither the fashionable tailor, nor the most accomplished masters, nor the smart boarding-school, nor the ponies girthed specially for the little men in the stable, nor anything else can replace the attentive and caressing hand, the warmth and the gaiety of the home-nest. The father could not give them that; and then, too, he was so busy!

A thousand irons in the fire: the Territorial Bank, the installation of the picture gallery, drives to Tattersall's with Bois l'Hery, some bibelot to inspect, here or there, at the houses of collectors indicated by Schwalbach, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers in curiosities, the encumbered and multiple existence of a bourgeois gentilhomme in modern Paris. This rubbing of shoulders with all sorts and conditions of people brought him improvement, in that each day he was becoming a little more Parisianized; he was received at Monpavon's club, in the green-room of the ballet, behind the scenes at the theatres, and presided regularly at his famous bachelor luncheons, the only receptions possible in his household. His existence was really a very busy one, and de Gery relieved him of the heaviest part of it, the complicated department of appeals and of charities.

The young man now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army, which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its Bottin by heart. He received the blonde lady, bold, young, and already faded, who only asks for a hundred napoleons, with the threat that she will throw herself into the river when she leaves if they are not given to her, and the stout matron of prepossessing and unceremonious manner, who says, as she enters: "Sir, you do not know me. Neither have I the honour of knowing you. But we shall soon make each other's acquaintance. Be kind enough to sit down and let us have a chat." The merchant at bay, on the verge of bankruptcy—sometimes it is true—who comes to entreat you to save his honour, with a pistol ready to shoot himself, bulging out the pocket of his overcoat—sometimes it is only his pipe-case. And often genuine distresses, wearisome and prolix, of people who are unable even to tell how little competent they are to earn a livelihood. Side by side with this open begging, there was that which wears various kinds of disguise: charity, philanthropy, good works, the encouragement of projects of art, the house-to-house begging for infant asylums, parish churches, rescued women, charitable societies, local libraries. Finally, those who wear a society mask, with tickets for concerts, benefit performances, entrance-cards of all colours, "platform, front seats, reserved seats." The Nabob insisted that no refusals should be given, and it was a concession that he no longer burdened his own shoulders with such matters. For quite a long time, in generous indifference, he had gone on covering with gold all that hypocritical exploitation, paying five hundred francs for a ticket for the concert of some Wurtemberg cithara-player or Languedocian flutist, which at the Tuileries or at the Duc de Mora's might have fetched ten francs. There were days when the young de Gery issued from these audiences nauseated. All the honesty of his youth revolted; he approached the Nabob with schemes of reform. But the Nabob's face, at the first word, would assume the bored expression of weak natures when they have to make a decision, or he would perhaps reply: "But that is Paris, my dear boy. Don't get frightened or interfere with my plans. I know what I am doing and what I want."

At that time he wanted two things: a deputyship and the cross of the Legion of Honour. These were for him the first two stages of the great ascent to which his ambition pushed him. Deputy he would certainly be through the influence of the Territorial Bank, at the head of which he stood. Paganetti of Porto-Vecchio was often saying it to him: "When the day arrives, the island will rise and vote for you as one man."

It is not enough, however, to control electors; it is necessary also that there be a seat vacant in the Chamber, and the representation of Corsica was complete. One of its members, however, the old Popolusca, infirm and in no condition to do his work, might perhaps, upon certain conditions, be willing to resign his seat. It was a difficult matter to negotiate, but quite feasible, the old fellow having a numerous family, estates which produced little or nothing, a palace in ruins at Bastia, where his children lived on polenta, and a furnished apartment at Paris in an eighteenth-rate lodging-house. If a hundred or two hundred thousand francs were not a consideration, one ought to be able to obtain a favourable decision from this honourable pauper who, sounded by Paganetti, would say neither yes nor no, tempted by the large sum of money, held back by the vainglory of his position. The matter had reached that point, it might be decided from one day to another.

As for the cross, things were going still better. The Bethlehem Society had assuredly made the devil of a noise at the Tuileries. They were now only waiting until after the visit of M. de la Perriere and his report, which could not be other than favorable, before inscribing on the list for the 16th March, on the date of an imperial anniversary, the glorious name of Jansoulet. The 16th March; that was to say, within a month. What would the fat Hemerlingue find to say of this signal favour, he who for so long had had to content himself with the Nisham? And the Bey, who had been misled into believing that Jansoulet was cut by Parisian society, and the old mother, down yonder at Saint-Romans, ever so happy in the successes of her son! Was that not worth a few millions cleverly squandered along the path of glory which the Nabob was treading like a child, all unconscious of the fate that lay waiting to devour him at its end? And in these external joys, these honours, this consideration so dearly bought, was there not a compensation for all the troubles of this Oriental won back to European life, who desired a home and possessed only a caravansary, looked for a wife and found only a Levantine?



THE BETHLEHEM SOCIETY

BETHLEHEM! Why did it give one such a chill to see written in letters of gold over the iron gate that historic name, sweet and warm like the straw of the miraculous stable! Perhaps it was partly to be accounted for by the melancholy of the landscape, that immense gloomy plain which stretches from Nanterre to Saint Cloud, broken only by a few clumps of trees or the smoke of factory chimneys. Possibly also by the disproportion that existed between the humble little straggling village which you expected to find and the grandiose establishment, this country mansion in the style of Louis XIII, an agglomeration of mortar looking pink through the branches of its leafless park, ornamented with wide pieces of water thick with green weeds. What is certain is that as you passed this place your heart was conscious of an oppression. When you entered it was still worse. A heavy inexplicable silence weighed on the house, and the faces you might see at the windows had a mournful air behind the little, old-fashioned greenish panes. The goats scattered along the paths nibbled languidly at the new spring grass, with "baas" at the woman who was tending them, and looked bored, as she followed the visitors with a lack-lustre eye. A mournfulness was over the place, like the terror of a contagion. Yet it had been a cheerful house, and one where even recently there had been high junketings. Replanted with timber for the famous singer who had sold it to Jenkins, it revealed clearly the kind of imagination which is characteristic of the opera-house in a bridge flung over the miniature lake, with its broken punt half filled with mouldy leaves, and in its pavilion all of rockery-work, garlanded by ivy. It had witnessed gay scenes, this pavilion, in the singer's time; now it looked on sad ones, for the infirmary was installed in it.

To tell the truth, the whole establishment was one vast infirmary. The children had hardly arrived when they fell ill, languished, and ended by dying, if their parents did not quickly take them away and put them again under the protection of home. The cure of Nanterre had to go so often to Bethlehem with his black vestments and his silver cross, the undertaker had so many orders from the house, that it became known in the district, and indignant mothers shook their fists at the model nurse; from a long way off, it is true, for they might chance to have in their arms pink-and-white babies to be preserved from all the contagions of the place. It was these things that gave to the poor place so heart-rending an aspect. A house in which children die cannot be gay; you cannot see trees break into flower there, birds building, streams flowing like rippling laughter.

The thing seemed altogether false. Excellent in itself, Jenkins's scheme was difficult, almost impracticable in its application. Yet, God knows, the affair had been started and carried out with the greatest enthusiasm to the last details, with as much money and as large a staff as were requisite. At its head, one of the most skilful of practitioners, M. Pondevez, who had studied in the Paris hospitals; and by his side, to attend to the more intimate needs of the children, a trusty matron, Mme. Polge. Then there were nursemaids, seamstresses, infirmary-nurses. And how many the arrangements and how thorough was the maintenance of the establishment, from the water distributed by a regular system from fifty taps to the omnibus trotting off with jingling of its posting bells to meet every train of the day at Rueil station! Finally, magnificent goats, Thibetan goats, silky, swollen with milk. In regard to organization, everything was admirable; but there was a point where it all failed. This artificial feeding, so greatly extolled by the advertisements, did not agree with the children. It was a singular piece of obstinacy, a word which seemed to have been passed between them by a signal, poor little things! for they couldn't yet speak, most of them indeed were never to speak at all: "Please, we will not suck the goats." And they did not suck them, they preferred to die one after another rather than suck them. Was Jesus of Bethlehem in his stable suckled by a goat? On the contrary, did he not press a woman's soft breast, on which he could go to sleep when he was satisfied? Who ever saw a goat between the ox and the ass of the story on that night when the beasts spoke to each other? Then why lie about it, why call the place Bethlehem?

The director had been moved at first by the spectacle of so many victims. This Pondevez, a waif of the life of the "Quarter," mere student still after twenty years, and well known in all the resorts of the Boulevard St. Michel under the name of Pompon, was not an unkind man. When he perceived the small success of the artificial feeding, he simply brought in four or five vigorous nurses from the district around and the children's appetites soon returned. This humane impulse went near costing him his place.

"Nurses at Bethlehem!" said Jenkins, furious, when he came to pay his weekly visit. "Are you out of your mind? Well! why then have we goats at all, and meadows to pasture them; what becomes of my idea, and the pamphlets upon my idea? What happens to all that? But you are going against my system. You are stealing the founder's money."

"All the same, mon cher maitre," the student tried to reply, passing his hands through his long red beard, "all the same, they will not take this nourishment."

"Well, then, let them go without, but let the principle of artificial lactation be respected. That is the whole point. I do not wish to have to repeat it to you again. Send off these wretched nurses. For the rearing of our children we have goats' milk, cows' milk in case of absolute necessity. I can make no further concession in the matter."

He added, with an assumption of his apostle's air: "We are here for the demonstration of a philanthropic idea. It must be made to triumph, even at the price of some sacrifices."

Pondevez insisted no further. After all the place was a good one, near enough to Paris to allow of descents upon Nanterre of a Sunday from the Quarter, or to allow the director to pay a visit to his old brasseries. Mme. Polge, to whom Jenkins always referred as "our intelligent superintendent," and whom he had placed there to superintend everything, and chiefly the director himself, was not so austere, as her prerogatives might have led one to suppose, and submitted willingly to a few liqueur-glasses of cognac or to a game of bezique. He dismissed the nurses, therefore, and endeavoured to harden himself in advance to everything that could happen. What did happen? A veritable Massacre of the Innocents. Consequently the few parents in fairly easy circumstances, workpeople or suburban tradesfolk, who, tempted by the advertisements, had severed themselves from their children, very soon took them home again, and there only remained in the establishment some little unfortunates picked up on doorsteps or in out-of-the-way places, sent from the foundling hospitals, doomed to all evil things from their birth. As the mortality continued to increase, even these came to be scarce, and the omnibus which had posted to the railway station would return bouncing and light as an empty hearse. How long would the thing last? How long would the twenty-five or thirty little ones who remained take to die? This was what Monsieur the Director, or rather, to give him the nickname which he had himself invented, Monsieur the Grantor-of-Certificates-of-death Pondevez, was asking himself one morning as he sat opposite Mme. Polge's venerable ringlets, taking a hand in this lady's favourite game.

"Yes, my good Mme. Polge, what is to become of us? Things cannot go on much longer as they are. Jenkins will not give way; the children are as obstinate as mules. There is no denying it, they will all slip through our fingers. There is the little Wallachian—I mark the king, Mme. Polge—who may die from one moment to another. Just think, the poor little chap for the last three days has had nothing in his stomach. It is useless for Jenkins to talk. You cannot improve children like snails by making them go hungry. It is disheartening all the same not to be able to save one of them. The infirmary is full. It is really a wretched outlook. Forty and bezique."

A double ring at the entrance gate interrupted his monologue. The omnibus was returning from the railway station and its wheels were grinding on the sand in an unusual manner.

"What an astonishing thing," remarked Pondevez, "the conveyance is not empty."

Indeed it did draw up at the foot of the steps with a certain pride, and the man who got out of it sprang up the staircase at a bound. He was a courier from Jenkins bearing a great piece of news. The doctor would arrive in two hours to visit the Home, accompanied by the Nabob and a gentleman from the Tuileries. He urgently enjoined that everything should be ready for their reception. The thing had been decided at such short notice that he had not had the time to write; but he counted on M. Pondevez to do all that was necessary.

"That is good!—necessary!" murmured Pondevez in complete dismay. The situation was critical. This important visit was occurring at the worst possible moment, just as the system had utterly broken down. The poor Pompon, exceedingly perplexed, tugged at his beard, thoughtfully gnawing wisps of it.

"Come," said he suddenly to Mme. Polge, whose long face had grown still longer between her ringlets, "we have only one course to take. We must remove the infirmary and carry all the sick into the dormitory. They will be neither better nor worse for passing another half-day there. As for those with the rash, we will put them out of the way in some corner. They are too ugly, they must not be seen. Come along, you up there! I want every one on the bridge."

The dinner-bell being violently rung, immediately hurried steps are heard. Seamstresses, infirmary-nurses, servants, goatherds, issue from all directions, running, jostling each other across the court-yards. Others fly about, cries, calls; but that which dominates is the noise of a mighty cleansing, a streaming of water as though Bethlehem had been suddenly attacked by fire. And those groanings of sick children snatched from the warmth of their beds, all those little screaming bundles carried across the damp park, their coverings fluttering through the branches, powerfully complete the impression of a fire. At the end of two hours, thanks to a prodigious activity, the house is ready from top to bottom for the visit which it is about to receive, all the staff at their posts, the stove lighted, the goats picturesquely sprinkled over the park. Mme. Polge has donned her green silk dress, the director a costume somewhat less neglige than usual, but of which the simplicity excluded all idea of premeditation. The Departmental Secretary may come.

And here he is.

He alights with Jenkins and Jansoulet from a splendid coach with the red and gold livery of the Nabob. Feigning the deepest astonishment, Pondevez rushes forward to meet his visitors.

"Ah, M. Jenkins, what an honour! What a surprise!"

Greetings are exchanged on the flight of steps, bows, shakings of hands, introductions. Jenkins with his flowing overcoat wide open over his loyal breast, beams his best and most cordial smile; there is a significant wrinkle on his brow, however. He is uneasy about the surprises which may be held in store for them by the establishment, of the distressful condition of which he is better aware than any one. If only Pondevez had taken proper precautions. Things begin well, at any rate. The rather theatrical view from the entrance, of those white fleeces frisking about among the bushes, have enchanted M. de la Perriere, who himself, with his honest eyes, his little white beard, and the continual nodding of his head, resembles a goat escaped from its tether.

"In the first place, gentlemen, the apartment of principal importance in the house, the nursery," said the director, opening a massive door at the end of the entrance-hall. His guests follow him, go down a few steps and find themselves in an immense, low room, with a tiled floor, formerly the kitchen of the mansion. The most striking object on entering is a lofty and vast fireplace built on the antique model, of red brick, with two stone benches opposite one another beneath the chimney, and the singer's coat of arms—an enormous lyre barred with a roll of music—carved on the monumental pediment. The effect is startling; but a frightful draught comes from it, which joined to the coldness of the tile floor and the dull light admitted by the little windows on a level with the ground, may well terrify one for the health of the children. But what was do be done? The nursery had to be installed in this insalubrious spot on account of the sylvan and capricious nurses, accustomed to the unconstraint of the stable. You only need to notice the pools of milk, the great reddish puddles drying up on the tiles, to breathe in the strong odour that meets you as you enter, a mingling of whey, of wet hair, and of many other things besides, in order to be convinced of the absolute necessity of this arrangement.

The gloomy-walled apartment is so large that to the visitors at first the nursery seems to be deserted. However, at the farther end, a group of creatures, bleating, moaning, moving about, is soon distinguished. Two peasant women, hard and brutalized in appearance, with dirty faces, two "dry-nurses," who well deserve the name, are seated on mats, each with an infant in her arms and a big nanny-goat in front of her, offering its udder with legs parted. The director seems pleasantly surprised.

"Truly, gentlemen, this is lucky. Two of our children are having their little luncheon. We shall see how well the nurses and infants understand each other."

"What can he be doing? He is mad," said Jenkins to himself in consternation.

But the director on the contrary knows very well what he is doing and has himself skilfully arranged the scene, selecting two patient and gentle beasts and two exceptional subjects, two little desperate mortals who want to live at any price and open their mouths to swallow, no matter what food, like young birds still in the nest.

"Come nearer, gentlemen, and observe."

Yes, they are indeed sucking, these little cherubs! One of them, lying close to the ground, squeezed up under the belly of the goat, is going at it so heartily that you can hear the gurglings of the warm milk descending, it would seem, even into the little limbs that kick with satisfaction at the meal. The other, calmer, lying down indolently, requires some little encouragement from his Auvergnoise attendant.

"Suck, will you suck then, you little rogue!" And at length, as though he had suddenly come to a decision, he begins to drink with such avidity that the woman leans over to him, surprised by this extraordinary appetite, and exclaims laughing:

"Ah, the rascal, is he not cunning?—it is his thumb that he is sucking instead of the goat."

The angel has hit on that expedient so that he may be left in peace. The incident does not create a bad impression. M. de la Perriere is much amused by this notion of the nurse that the child was trying to take them all in. He leaves the nursery, delighted. "Positively de-e-elighted," he repeats, nodding his head as they ascend the great staircase with its echoing walls decorated with the horns of stags, leading to the dormitory.

Very bright, very airy, is this vast room, running the whole length of one side of the house, with numerous windows and cots, separated one from another by a little distance, hung with fleecy white curtains like clouds. Women go and come through the large arch in the centre, with piles of linen on their arms, or keys in their hands, nurses with the special duty of washing the babies.

Here too much has been attempted and the first impression of the visitors is a bad one. All this whiteness of muslin, this polished parquet, the brightness of the window-panes reflecting the sky sad at beholding these things, seem to throw into bold relief the thinness, the unhealthy pallor of these dying little ones, already the colour of their shrouds. Alas! the oldest are only aged some six months, the youngest barely a fortnight, and already there is in all these faces, these faces in embryo, a disappointed expression, a scowling, worn look, a suffering precocity visible in the numerous lines on those little bald foreheads, cramped by linen caps edged with poor, narrow hospital lace. What are they suffering? What diseases can they have? They have everything, everything that one can have: diseases of children and diseases of men. The fruit of vice and poverty, they bring into the world hideous phenomena of heredity at their very birth. This one has a perforated palate, and this great copper-coloured patches on the forehead, all of them rickety. Then they are dying of hunger. Notwithstanding the spoonfuls of milk, of sweetened water, which are forced down their throats, notwithstanding the feeding-bottle employed now and then, though against orders, they perish of inanition. These little creatures, worn out before birth, require the most tender and the most strengthening food; the goats might perhaps be able to give it, but apparently they have sworn not to suck the goats. And this is what makes the dormitory mournful and silent, not one of those little clinched-fisted tempers, one of those cries showing the pink and firm gums in which the child makes trial of his lungs and strength; only a plaintive moaning, as it were the disquiet of a soul that turns over and over in a little sick body, without being able to find a comfortable place to rest there.

Jenkins and the director, who have seen the bad impression produced on their guests by this inspection of the dormitory, try to put a little life into the situation, talk very loudly in a good-natured, complacent, satisfied way. Jenkins shakes hands warmly with the superintendent.

"Well, Mme. Polge, and how are our little nurslings getting on?"

"As you see, M. le Docteur," she replies, pointing to the beds.

This tall Mme. Polge is funereal in her green dress, the ideal of dry-nurses. She completes the picture.

But where has Monsieur the Departmental Secretary gone? He has stopped before a cot which he examines sadly, as he stands nodding his head.

"Bigre de bigre!" says Pompon in a low voice to Mme. Polge. "It is the Wallachian."

The little blue placard hung over the cot, as in the foundling hospitals, states the child's nationality: "Moldo, Wallachian." What a piece of ill-luck that Monsieur the Secretary's attention should have been attracted to that particular child! Oh, that poor little head lying on the pillow, its linen cap askew, with pinched nostrils, and mouth half opened by a quick, panting respiration, the breathing of the newly born, of those also who are about to die.

"Is he ill?" asked Monsieur the Secretary softly of the director, who has come up to him.

"Not the least in the world," the shameless Pompon replies, and, advancing to the side of the cot, he tries to make the little one laugh by tickling him with his finger, straightens the pillow, and says in a hearty voice, somewhat overcharged with tenderness: "Well, old fellow?" Shaken out of his torpor, escaping for a moment from the shades which already are closing on him, the child opens his eyes on those faces leaning over him, glances at them with a gloomy indifference, then, returning to his dream which he finds more interesting, clinches his little wrinkled hands and heaves an elusive sigh. Mystery! Who shall say for what end that baby had been born into life? To suffer for two months and to depart without having seen anything, understood anything, without any one even knowing the sound of his voice.

"How pale he is!" murmurs M. de la Perriere, very pale himself. The Nabob is livid also. A cold breath seems to have passed over the place. The director assumes an air of unconcern.

"It is the reflection. We are all of us green here."

"Yes, yes, that is so," remarks Jenkins, "it is the reflection of the lake. Come and look, Monsieur the Secretary." And he draws him to the window to point out to him the large sheet of water with its dipping willows, while Mme. Polge makes haste to draw over the eternal dream of the little Wallachian the parted curtains of his cradle.

The inspection of the establishment must be continued very quickly in order to destroy this unfortunate impression.

To begin with, M. de la Perriere is shown a splendid laundry, with stoves, drying-rooms, thermometers, immense presses of polished walnut, full of babies' caps and frocks, labelled and tied up in dozens. When the linen has been warmed, the linen-room maid passes it out through a little door in exchange for the number left by the nurse. A perfect order reigns, one can see, and everything, down to its healthy smell of soap-suds, gives to this apartment a wholesome and rural aspect. There is clothing here for five hundred children. That is the number which Bethlehem can accommodate, and everything has been arranged upon a corresponding scale; the vast pharmacy, glittering with bottles and Latin inscriptions, pestles and mortars of marble in every corner, the hydropathic installation, its large rooms built of stone, with gleaming baths possessing a huge apparatus including pipes of all dimensions for douches, upward and downward, spray, jet, or whip-lash, and the kitchens adorned with superb kettles of copper, and with economical coal and gas ovens. Jenkins wished to institute a model establishment; and he found the thing easy, for the work was done on a large scale, as it can be when funds are not lacking. You feel also over it all the experience and the iron hand of "our intelligent superintendent," to whom the director cannot refrain from paying a public tribute. This is the signal for general congratulations. M. de la Perriere, delighted with the manner in which the establishment is equipped, congratulates Dr. Jenkins upon his fine creations, Jenkins compliments his friend Pondevez, who, in his turn, thanks the Departmental secretary for having consented to honour Bethlehem with a visit. The good Nabob makes his voice heard in this chorus of eulogy, finds a kind word for each one, but is a little surprised all the same that he has not been congratulated himself, since they were about it. It is true that the best of congratulations awaits him on the 16th March on the front page of the Official Journal in a decree which flames in advance before his eyes and makes him glance every now and then at his buttonhole.

These pleasant words are exchanged as the party passes along a big corridor in which the voices ring out in all their honest accents; but suddenly a frightful noise interrupts the conversation and the advance of the visitors. It seems to be made up of the mewing of cats in delirium, of bellowings, of the howlings of savages performing a war-dance, an appalling tempest of human cries, reverberated, swelled, and prolonged by the echoing vaults. It rises and falls, ceases suddenly, then goes on again with an extraordinary effect of unanimity.

Monsieur the Director begins to be uneasy, makes an inquiry. Jenkins rolls furious eyes.

"Let us go on," says the director, rather anxious this time. "I know what it is."

He knows what it is; but M. de la Perriere wishes to know also what it is, and, before Pondevez has had the time to unfasten it, he pushes open the massive door whence this horrible concert proceeds.

In a sordid kennel which the great cleansing has passed over, for, in fact, it was not intended to be exhibited, on mattresses ranged on the floor, a dozen little wretches are laid, watched over by an empty chair on which the beginning of a knitted vest lies with an air of dignity, and by a little broken saucepan, full of hot wine, boiling on a smoky wood fire. These are the children with ringworm, with rashes, the disfavoured of Bethlehem, who had been hidden in this retired corner with recommendation to their dry-nurse to rock them, to soothe them, to sit on them, if need were, in order to keep them from crying; but whom this country-woman, stupid and inquisitive, had left alone there in order to see the fine carriage standing in the court-yard. Her back turned, the infants had very quickly grown weary of their horizontal position; and then all these little scrofulous patients raised their lusty concert, for they, by a miracle, are strong, their malady saves and nourishes them. Bewildered and kicking like beetles when they are turned on their backs, helping themselves with their hips and their elbows, some fallen on one side and unable to regain their balance, others raising in the air their little benumbed, swaddled legs, spontaneously they cease their gesticulations and cries as they see the door open; but M. de la Perrier's nodding goatee beard reassures them, encourages them anew, and in the renewed tumult the explanation given by the director is only heard with difficulty: "Children kept separate—Contagion—Skin-diseases." This is quite enough for Monsieur the Departmental Secretary; less heroic than Bonaparte on his visit to the plague-stricken of Jaffa, he hastens towards the door, and in his timid anxiety, wishing to say something and yet not finding words, murmurs with an ineffable smile: "They are char-ar-ming."

Next, the inspection at an end, see them all gathered in the salon on the ground floor, where Mme. Polge has prepared a little luncheon. The cellar of Bethlehem is well stocked. The keen air of the table-land, these climbs up and downstairs have given the old gentleman from the Tuileries an appetite such as he has not known for a long time, so that he chats and laughs as if he were at a picnic, and at the moment of departure, as they are all standing, raises his glass, nodding his head, to drink, "To Be-Be-Bethlehem!" Those present are moved, glasses are touched, then, at a quick trot, the carriage bears the party away down the long avenue of limes, over which a red and cold sun is just setting. Behind them the park resumes its dismal silence. Great dark masses gather in the depths of the copses, surround the house, gain little by little the paths and open spaces. Soon all is lost in gloom save the ironical letters embossed above the entrance-gate, and, away over yonder, at a first-floor window, one red and wavering spot, the light of a candle burning by the pillow of the dead child.

"By a decree dated the 12th March, 1865, issued upon the proposal of the Minister of the Interior, Monsieur the Doctor Jenkins, President and Founder of the Bethlehem Society is named a Chevalier of the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour. Great devotion to the cause of humanity."

As he read these words on the front page of the Official Journal, on the morning of the 16th, the poor Nabob felt dazed.

Was it possible?

Jenkins decorated, and not he!

He read the paragraph twice over, distrusting his own eyes. His ears buzzed. The letters danced double before his eyes with those great red rings round them which they have in strong sunlight. He had been so confident of seeing his name in this place; Jenkins, only the evening before, had repeated to him with so much assurance, "It is already done!" that he still thought his eyes must have deceived him. But no, it was indeed Jenkins. The blow was heavy, deep, prophetic, as it were a first warning from destiny, and one that was felt all the more intensely because for years this man had been unaccustomed to failure. Everything good in him learned mistrust at the same time.

"Well," said he to de Gery as he came as usual every morning into his room, and found him visibly affected, holding the newspaper in his hand, "have you seen? I am not in the Official."

He tried to smile, his features puckered like those of a child restraining his tears. Then, suddenly, with that frankness which was such a pleasing quality in him: "It is a great disappointment to me. I was looking forward to it too confidently."

The door opened upon these words, and Jenkins rushed in, out of breath, stammering, extraordinarily agitated.

"It is an infamy, a frightful infamy! The thing cannot be, it shall not be!"

The words stumbled over each other in disorder on his lips, all trying to get out at once; then he seemed to despair of finding expression for his thoughts and in disgust threw on the table a small box and a large envelope, both bearing the stamp of the chancellor's office.

"There are my cross and my brevet. They are yours, friend. I could not keep them."

At bottom the words did not signify much. Jansoulet adorning himself with Jenkins's ribbon might very well have been guilty of illegality. But a piece of theatrical business is not necessarily logical; this one brought about between the two men an effusion of feeling, embraces, a generous battle, at the end of which Jenkins replaced the objects in his pocket, speaking of protests, letters to the newspapers. The Nabob was again obliged to check him.

"Be very careful you do no such thing. To begin with, it would be to injure my chances for another time—who knows, perhaps on the 15th of August, which will soon be here."

"Oh, as to that," said Jenkins, jumping at this idea, and stretching out his arm as in the Oath of David, "I solemnly swear it."

The matter was dropped at this point. At luncheon the Nabob was as gay as usual. This good humour was maintained all day, and de Gery, for whom the scene had been a revelation of the true Jenkins, the explanation of the ironies and the restrained wrath of Felicia Ruys whenever she spoke of the doctor, asked himself in vain how he could enlighten his dear patron about such hypocrisy. He should have been aware, however, that in southerners, with all their superficiality and effusion, there is no blindness, no enthusiasm, so complete as to remain insensible before the wisdom of reflection. In the evening the Nabob had opened a shabby little letter-case, worn at the corners, in which for ten years he had been accustomed to work out the calculations of his millions, writing down in hieroglyphics understood only by himself his receipts and expenditures. He buried himself in his accounts for a moment, then turning to de Gery:

"Do you know what I am doing, my dear Paul?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"I am just calculating"—and his mocking glance thoroughly characteristic of his race, rallied the good nature of his smile—"I am just calculating that I have spend four hundred and thirty thousand francs to get a decoration for Jenkins."

Four hundred and thirty thousand francs! And that was not the end.



BONNE MAMAN

Paul de Gery went three times a week in the evening to take his lesson in bookkeeping in the Joyeuses' dining-room, not far from that little parlour in which he had seen the family the first day, and while with his eyes fixed on his teacher he was being initiated into all the mysteries of "debtor and creditor," he used to listen, in spite of himself, for the light sounds coming from the industrious group behind the door, with thoughts dwelling regretfully on the vision of all those pretty brows bent in the lamplight. M. Joyeuse never said a word of his daughters; jealous of their charms as a dragon watching over beautiful princesses in a tower, and excited by the fantastic imaginings of his excessive affection for them, he would answer with marked brevity the inquiries of his pupil regarding the health of "the young ladies," so that at last the young man ceased to mention them.

He was surprised, however, at not once seeing that Bonne Maman whose name was constantly recurring in the conversation of M. Joyeuse, entering into the least details of his existence, hovering over the household like the emblem of its perfect ordering and of its peace.

So great a reserve on the part of a venerable lady who must assuredly have passed the age at which the interest of young men is to be feared, seemed to him exaggerated. The lessons, however, were good ones, given with great clearness, the teacher having an excellent system of demonstration, and only one fault, that of becoming absorbed in silences, broken by sudden starts and exclamations let off like rockets. Apart from this, he was the best of masters, intelligent, patient, and conscientious, and Paul learned to know his way through the complex labyrinth of commercial books and resigned himself to ask nothing beyond.

One evening, towards nine o'clock, as the young man had risen to go, M. Joyeuse asked him if he would do him the honour of taking a cup of tea with his family, a custom dating from the time when Mme. Joyeuse, nee de Saint-Amand, was alive, she having been used to receive her friends on Thursdays. Since her death and the change in the financial position, the friends had become dispersed; but his little weekly function had been kept up.

Paul having accepted, the good old fellow opened the door and called:

"Bonne Maman!"

An alert footstep in the passage, and immediately the face of a girl of twenty, in a halo of abundant brown hair, made its appearance.

De Gery, stupefied, looked at M. Joyeuse.

"Bonne Maman?"

"Yes, it is a name that we gave her when she was a little girl. With her frilled cap, her authority as the eldest child, she had a quaint little air. We thought her like her grandmother. The name has clung to her."

From the honest fellow's tone as he spoke thus, one felt that to him this grandparent's title applied to such an embodiment of attractive youth seemed the most natural thing in the world. Every one else thought as he did on the point; both her sisters, who had hastened to their father's side, grouping themselves round him somewhat as in the portrait exhibited in the window on the ground floor, and the old servant who placed on the table in the little drawing-room a magnificent tea-service, a relic of the former splendours of the household. Every one called the girl "Bonne Maman" without her ever once having grown tired of it, the influence of that sacred title touching the affection of each one with a deference which flattered her and gave to her ideal authority a singular gentleness of protection.

Whether or not it were by reason of this appellation of grandmother which as a child he had learned to reverence, de Gery felt an inexpressible attraction towards this young girl. It was not like the sudden shock which he had received from that other, that emotional agitation in which were mingled the desire to flee, to escape from a possession and the persistent melancholy of the morrow of a festivity, extinguished candles, the lost refrains of songs, perfumes vanished into the night. In the presence of this young girl as she stood superintending the family table, seeing if anything were wanting, enveloping her children, her grandchildren, with the active tenderness of her eyes, there came to him a longing to know her, to be counted among her old friends, to confide to her things which he confessed only to himself; and when she offered him his cup of tea without any of the mincings of society or drawing-room affectations, he would have liked to say with the rest a "Thank you, Bonne Maman," in which he would have put all his heart.

Suddenly, a cheerful knock at the door made everybody start.

"Ah, here comes M. Andre. Elise, a cup quickly. Jaia, the little cakes." At the same time, Mlle. Henriette, the third of M. Joyeuse's daughters, who had inherited from her mother, nee de Saint-Amand, a certain instinct for society, observing the number of visitors who seemed likely to crowd their rooms that evening, rushed to light the two candles on the piano.

"My fifth act is finished," cried the newcomer as he entered, then he stopped short. "Ah, pardon," and his face assumed a rather discomfited expression in the presence of the stranger. M. Joyeuse introduced them to each other: "M. Paul de Gery—M. Andre Maranne," not without a certain solemnity. He remembered the receptions held formerly by his wife, and the vases on the chimneypiece, the two large lamps, the what-not; the easy chairs grouped in a circle had an air of joining in this illusion, and seemed more brilliant by reason of this unaccustomed throng.

"So your play is finished?"

"Finished, M. Joyeuse, and I hope to read it to you one of these evenings."

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

Their neighbour was in the habit of writing for the stage, and no one here doubted of his success. Photography, in any case, promised fewer profits. Clients were very rare, passers-by little disposed to business. To keep his hand in and to save his new apparatus from rusting, M. Andre was accustomed to practise anew on the family of his friends on each succeeding Sunday. They lent themselves to his experiments with unequalled long-suffering; the prosperity of this suburban photographer's business was for them all an affair of amour propre, and awakened, even in the girls, that touching confraternity of feeling which draws together the destinies of people as insignificant in importance as sparrows on a roof. Andre Maranne, with the inexhaustible resources of his great brow full of illusion, used to explain without bitterness the indifference of the public. Sometimes the season was unfavourable, or, again, people were complaining of the bad state of business generally, and he would always end with the same consoling reflection, "When Revolt is produced!" That was the title of his play.

"It is surprising all the same," said the fourth of M. Joyeuse's daughters, twelve years old, with her hair in a pigtail, "it is surprising that with such a good balcony so little business should result."

"And, if he were established on the Boulevard des Italiens," remarks M. Joyeuse thoughtfully, and he is launched forth!—riding his chimera till it is brought to the ground suddenly with a gesture and these words uttered sadly: "Closed on account of bankruptcy." In the space of a moment the terrible visionary has just installed his friend in splendid quarters on the Boulevard, where he gains enormous sums of money, at the same time, however, increasing his expenditure to so disproportionate an extent that a fearful failure in a few months engulfs both photographer and his photography. They laugh heartily when he gives this explanation; but all agree that the Rue Saint-Ferdinand, although less brilliant, is much more to be depended upon than the Boulevard des Italiens. Besides, it happens to be quite near the Bois de Boulogne, and if once the fashionable world got into the way of passing through it—That exalted society which was so much sought by her mother, is Mlle. Henriette's fixed idea, and she is astonished that the thought of receiving "le high-life" in his little apartment on the fifth floor makes their neighbour laugh. The other week, however, a carriage with livery had called on him. Only just now, too, he had a very "swell" visit.

"Oh, quite a great lady!" interrupts Bonne Maman. "We were at the window on the lookout for father. We saw her alight from her carriage and look at the show-frame; we made sure that her visit was for you."

"It was for me," said Andre, a little embarrassed.

"For a moment we were afraid that she was going to pass on like so many others, on account of your five flights of stairs. So all four of us tried to attract her without her knowing it, by the magnetism of our four staring pairs of eyes. We drew her gently by the feathers of her hat and the laces of her cape. 'Come up then, madame, come up,' and finally she entered. There is so much magnetism in eyes that are kindly disposed."

Magnetism she certainly had, the dear creature, not only in her glances, indeterminate of colour, veiled or gay like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the draping of her dress, in everything about her, even to the long curl, falling over the neck erect and delicate as a statue's.

Tea having been served, while the gentlemen finished their cups and talked—old Joyeuse was always very long over everything he did, by reason of his sudden expeditions to the moon—the girls brought out their work, the table became covered with wicker baskets, embroideries, pretty wools that rejuvenated with their bright tints the faded flowers of the old carpet, and the group of the other evening gathered once more within the bright circle defined by the lamp-shade, to the great satisfaction of Paul de Gery. It was the first evening of the kind that he had spent in Paris; it recalled to him others of a like sort very far away, lulled by the same innocent laughter, the peaceful sound produced by scissors as they are put down on the table, by a needle as it pierces through linen, or the rustle of a page turned over, and dear faces, disappeared for ever, gathered also around the family lamp, alas! so abruptly extinguished.

Having been admitted to this charming intimacy, he remained in it, took his lessons in the presence of the girls and was encouraged to chat with them when the good old man closed his big book. Here everything rested him after the whirl of that life into which he was thrown by the luxurious social existence of the Nabob; he come to renew his strength in this atmosphere of honesty, of simplicity, tried, too, to find healing there for the wounds with which a hand more indifferent than cruel stabbed his heart mercilessly.

"Some women have hated me, other women have loved me. She who has hurt me most never either loved or hated me." Paul had met that woman of whom Henri Heine speaks. Felicia was full of welcome and cordiality for him. There was no one whom she treated with more favour. She used to reserve for him a special smile wherein one felt the kindliness of an artist's eye arrested by and dwelling on a pleasing type, and the satisfaction of a jaded mind amused by anything new, however simple in appearance it may be. She liked that reserve, suggestive in a southerner, the honesty of that judgment, independent of every artistic or social formula and enlivened by a touch of provincial accent. These things were a change for her from the zigzag stroke of the thumb illustrating a eulogy with its gesture of the studio, from the compliments of comrades on the way in which she would snub some old fellow, or again from those affected admirations, from the "char-ar-ming, very nice indeed's" with which young men about town, sucking the knobs of their canes, were accustomed to regale her. This young man at any rate did not say such things as that to her. She had nicknamed him Minerva, on account of his apparent tranquility and the regularity of his profile; and the moment she saw him, however far-off, she would call:

"Ah, here comes Minerva. Hail, beautiful Minerva! Put down your helmet and let us have a chat."

But this familiar, almost fraternal, tone convinced the young man that he would make no further advance into that feminine comradeship in which tenderness was wanting, and that he lost each day something of his charm—the charm of the unforeseen—in the eyes of that woman born weary, who seemed to have already lived her life and found in all that she heard or saw the insipidity of a repetition. Felicia was bored. Her art alone could distract her, carry her away, transport her into a dazzling fairyland, whence she would fall back worn out, surprised each time by this awakening like a physical fall. She used to draw a comparison between herself and those jelly-fish whose transparent brilliancy, so much alive in the cool movements of the waves, drift to their death on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those times devoid of inspiration, when the artist's hand was heavy on his instrument, Felicia, deprived of the one moral support of her intellectual being, became unsociable, unapproachable, a tormenting mocker—the revenge taken of human weakness on the tired brains of genius. After having brought tears to the eyes of every one who cared for her, raking up painful recollections or enervating anxieties, she reached the lowest depths of her fatigue, and as there was always some fun in her, even in her ennui in a kind of caged wild-beast's howl, which she called "the cry of the jackal in the desert," and which used to make the good Crenmitz turn pale.

Poor Felicia! That life of hers was indeed a frightful desert when art did not beguile it with its illusions; a desert mournful and flat, where everything was lost, reduced to one level, beneath the same monotonous immensity, the naive love of a child of twenty, a passionate duke's caprice, in which all was overwhelmed by an arid sand driven by blasting fates. Paul was conscious of that void, desired to escape it; but something held him back, like a weight which unrolls a chain, and in spite of the calumnies he heard, and notwithstanding the odd whims of the strange creature, he dallied deliciously after her, at the price of bearing away with him from this long lover's contemplation only the despair of a believer reduced to the adoring of images alone.

The refuge lay down there, in that remote quarter of the town where the wind blew so hard, yet without preventing the flame from mounting white and straight—it was the family circle presided over by Bonne Maman. Oh! she at least was not bored, she never uttered the cry of the "jackal in the desert." Her life was far too full; the father to encourage, to sustain, the children to teach, all the material cares of a home where the mother's hand is wanting, those preoccupations that awake with the dawn and are put to sleep by the evening, unless indeed it bring them back in dream, one of those devotions, tireless but without apparent effort, very pleasant for poor human egotism, because they dispense from all gratitude and hardly make themselves felt, so light is their hand. She was not the courageous daughter who works to support her parents, gives private lessons from morning to night, forgets in the excitement of a profession all the troubles of the household. No, she had understood her task in a different sense, a sedentary bee restricting her cares to the hive, without once humming out of doors in the open air among the flowers. A thousand functions: tailoress, milliner, mender of clothes, bookkeeper also for M. Joyeuse, who, incapable of all responsibility, left to her the free disposal of their means, to be pianoforte-teacher, governess.

As it happens in families that have been in a good position, Aline, as the eldest daughter, had been educated at one of the best boarding-schools in Paris. Elise had been with her there for two years; but the last two, born too late, and sent to small day-schools in the locality, had all their studies yet to complete, and this was no easy matter, the youngest laughing upon every occasion from sheer good health, warbling like a lark intoxicated with the delight of green corn, and flying away far out of sight of desk and exercises, while Mlle. Henriette, ever haunted by her ideas of grandeur, her love of luxurious things, took to work hardly less unwillingly. This young person of fifteen, to whom her father had transmitted something of his imaginative faculties, was already arranging her life in advance and declared formally that she should marry one of the nobility, and would never have more than three children: "A boy to inherit the name and two little girls—so as to be able to dress them alike."

"Yes, that's right," Bonne Maman would say, "you shall dress them alike. In the meantime, let us attend to our participles a little."

But the one who caused the most concern was Elise, with her examination taken thrice without success, always failing in history and preparing herself anew, seized by a deep fear and a mistrust of herself which made her carry about with her everywhere and open every moment that unfortunate history of France, in the omnibus, in the street, even at the luncheon-table; she was already a grown girl and very pretty, and she no longer possessed that little mechanical memory of childhood wherein dates and events lodge themselves for the whole of one's life. Beset by other preoccupations, the lesson was forgotten in an instant, despite the apparent application of the pupil, with her long lashes fringing her eyes, her curls sweeping over the pages, and her rosy mouth animated by a little quiver of attention, repeating ten times in succession: "Louis, surnamed le Hutin, 1314-1316; Philip V, surnamed the Long, 1316-1322. Ah, Bonne Maman, it's no good; I shall never know them." Whereupon Bonne Maman would come to her assistance, help her to concentrate her attention, to store up a few of those dates of the Middle Ages, barbarous and sharp as the helmets of the warriors of the period. And in the intervals of these occupations, of this general and constant superintendence, she yet found time to do some pretty needlework, to extract from her work-basket some delicate crochet lace or a piece of tapestry on which she was engaged and to which she clung as closely as the young Elise to her history of France. Even when she talked, her fingers never remained unoccupied for a moment.

"Do you never take any rest?" said de Gery to her, as she counted under her breath the stitches of her tapestry, "three, four, five," to secure the right variation in the shading of the colours.

"But this is a rest from work," she answered. "You men cannot understand how good needlework is for a woman's mind. It gives order to the thoughts, fixes by a stitch the moment that passes what would otherwise pass with it. And how many griefs are calmed, anxieties forgotten, thanks to this wholly physical act of attention, to this repetition of an even movement, in which one finds—of necessity and very quickly—the equilibrium of one's whole being. It does not hinder me from following the conversation around me, from listening to you still better than I should if I were doing something. Three, four, five."

Oh, yes, she listened. That was apparent in the animation of her face, in the way in which she would suddenly straighten herself as she sat, needle in air, the thread taut over her raised little finger. Then she would quickly resume her work, sometimes after putting in a thoughtful word, which agreed generally with the opinions of friend Paul.

An affinity of nature, responsibilities and duties similar in character, drew these two young people together, interested each of them in the other's occupations. She knew the names of his two brothers Pierre and Louis, his plans for their future when they should have left school. Pierre wanted to be a sailor. "Oh, no, not a sailor," Bonne Maman would say, "it will 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 provincial, full of affection for the city in which she had been born, in which she had grown to chaste young womanhood, and that gave her in return those vivacities, those natural refinements, that jesting good-humour which incline one to believe that Paris, with its rain, its fogs, its sky which is no sky, is the veritable fatherland of woman, whose nerves it heals gently and whose qualities of intelligence and patience it develops.

Each day Paul de Gery came to appreciate Mlle. Aline better—he was the only person in the house who so called her—and, strange circumstance, it was Felicia who completed the cementing of their intimacy. What relations could there exist between the artist's daughter, moving in the highest spheres, and this little middle-class girl buried in the depths of a suburb? Relations of childhood and of friendship, common recollections, the great court-yard of the Institution Belin, where they had played together for three years. Paris is full of these juxtapositions. A name uttered by chance in the course of a conversation brought out suddenly the bewildered question:

"You know her then?"

"Do I know Felicia? Why, our desks were next each other in the first form. We had the same garden. Such a nice girl, and so handsome and clever!"

And, observing the pleasure with which she was listened to, Aline used to recall the times which already formed a past for her, seductive and melancholy like all pasts. She was very much alone in life, the little Felicia. On Thursdays, when the visitors' names were called out in the parlour, there was no one for her; except from time to time a good but rather absurd lady, formerly a dancer, it was said, whom Felicia called the Fairy. In the same way she used to have pet names for all the people she cared for and whom she transformed in her imaginations. In the holidays they used to see each other. Mme. Joyeuse, while she refused to allow Aline to visit the studio of M. Ruys, used to invite Felicia over for whole days, very short days they seemed, minglings of study, music, dual dreams, young intimate conversations. "Oh, when she used to talk to me of her art, with that enthusiasm which she put into everything, how delighted I was to listen to her! How many things I have understood through her, of which I should never have had any idea. Even now when we go to the Louvre with papa, or to the exhibition of the 1st of May, that special feeling I have about a beautiful piece of sculpture, a good picture, carries me back immediately to Felicia. In my early girlhood she represented art to me, and it corresponded with her beauty. Her nature was a little vague, but so kind, I always felt she was something superior to myself, that bore me to great heights without frightening me. Suddenly she stopped coming to see me. I wrote to her; no reply. Later on, fame came to her; to me great sorrows, absorbing duties. And of all that friendship, which was very deep, however, since I cannot speak of it without—'three, four, five'—nothing now remains except old memories like dead ashes."

Bending over her work, the brave girl made haste to count her stitches, to imprison her regret in the capricious designs of her tapestry, while de Gery, moved as he heard the testimony of those pure lips against the calumnies of rejected young dandies or of jealous comrades, felt himself raised, restored to the proud dignity of his love. This sensation was so sweet to him that he returned in search of it very often, not only on the evenings of the lessons, but on other evenings, too, and almost forgot to go to see Felicia for the pleasure of hearing Aline talk about her.

One evening, as he was leaving the Joyeuses' home, Paul met the neighbour, M. Andre, on the landing, who was waiting for him and took his arm feverishly.

"Monsieur de Gery," he said in a trembling voice, with eyes that glittered behind their spectacles, the one feature of his face that was visible in the darkness. "I have an explanation to ask from you. Will you come up to my rooms for a moment?"

There had only been between this young man and himself the banal relations of two persons accustomed to frequent the same house, whom no tie unites, who seem ever separated by a certain antipathy of nature, of manner of life. What explanation could there be called for between them? He followed him with much perplexed curiosity.

The aspect of the little studio, chilly under its top-light, the empty fireplace, the wind blowing as though they were out of doors and making the candle flicker, the solitary light on the scene of the night's labour of a poor and lonely man, reflected on sheets of paper scribbled over and scattered about, in short, this atmosphere of habitations wherein the soul of the inhabitants lives on its own aspirations, caused de Gery to understand the visionary air of Andre Maranne, his long hair thrown back and streaming loose, that somewhat excessive appearance, very excusable when it is paid for by a life of sufferings and privations, and his sympathy immediately went out to this courageous fellow whose intrepidity of spirit he guessed at a glance. But the other was too deeply moved by emotion to notice the progress of these reflections. As soon as the door was closed upon them, he said, with the accent of a stage hero addressing the perfidious seducer, "M. de Gery, I am not yet a Cassandra."

And seeing the stupefaction of de Gery:

"Yes, yes," he went on, "we understand each other. I have known perfectly well what it is that draws you to M. Joyeuse's house, and the eager welcome with which you are received there has not escaped my notice either. You are rich, you are of noble birth, there can be no hesitation between you and the poor poet who follows a ridiculous trade in order to give himself full time to reach a success which perhaps will never come. But I shall not allow my happiness to be stolen from me. We must fight, monsieur, we must fight," he repeated, excited by the peaceful calm of his rival. "For long I have loved Mlle. Joyeuse. That love is the end, the joy, and the strength of an existence which is very hard, in many respects painful. I have only it in the world, and I would rather die than give it up."

Strangeness of the human soul! Paul did not love the charming Aline. His whole heart belonged to the other. He thought of her simply as a friend, the most adorable of friends. But the idea that Maranne was interested in her, that she no doubt returned this regard, gave him the jealous shiver of an annoyance, and it was with some considerable sharpness that he inquired whether Mlle. Joyeuse was aware of this sentiment of Andre's and had in any way authorized him thus to proclaim his rights.

"Yes, monsieur, Mlle. Elise knows that I love her, and before your frequent visits—"

"Elise? It is of Elise you are speaking?"

"And of whom, then, should I be speaking? The two others are too young."

He fully entered into the traditions of the family, this Andre. For him, Bonne Maman's age of twenty years, her triumphant grace, were obscured by a surname full of respect and the attributes of a Providence which seemed to cling to her.

A very brief explanation having calmed Andre Maranne's mind, he offered his apologies to de Gery, begged him to sit down in the arm-chair of carved wood which was used by his sitters, and their conversation quickly assumed an intimate and sympathetic character, brought about by the so abrupt avowal at its opening. Paul confessed that he, too, was in love, and that he came so often to M. Joyeuse's only in order to speak of her whom he loved with Bonne Maman, who had known her formerly.

"That is my case, too," said Andre. "Bonne Maman knows all my secrets; but we have not yet ventured to say anything to the father. My position is too unsatisfactory. Ah, when I shall have got Revolt produced!"

Then they talked of that famous drama, Revolt, upon which he had been at work for six months, day and night, which had kept him warm all the winter, a very severe winter, but whose rigours the magic of composition had tempered in the little studio, which it transformed. It was there, within that narrow space, that all the heroes of his piece had appeared to his poet's vision like familiar gnomes dropped from the roof or riding moon-beams, and with them the gorgeous tapestries, the glittering chandeliers, the park scenes with their gleaming flights of steps, all the luxurious circumstance expected in stage effects, as well as the glorious tumult of his first night, the applause of which was represented for him by the rain beating on the glass roof and the boards rattling in the door, while the wind, driving below over the murky timber-yard with a noise as of far-off voices, borne near and anew carried off into the distance, resembled the murmurs from the boxes opened on the corridor to let the news of his success circulate among the gossip and wonderment of the crowd. It was not only fame and money that it was destined to procure him, this thrice-blessed play, but something also more precious still. With what care accordingly did he not turn over the leaves of the manuscript in five thick books, all bound in blue, books like those that the Levantine was accustomed to strew about on the divan where she took her siestas, and that she marked with her managerial pencil.

Paul, having in his turn approached the table in order to examine the masterpiece had his glance attracted by a richly framed portrait of a woman, which, placed so near to the artist's work, seemed to be there to preside over it. Elise, doubtless? Oh, no, Andre had not yet the right to bring out from its protecting case the portrait of his little friend. This was a woman of about forty, gentle of aspect, fair, and extremely elegant. As he perceived her, de Gery could not suppress an exclamation.

"You know her?" asked Andre Maranne.

"Why, yes. Mme. Jenkins, the wife of the Irish doctor. I have had supper at their house this winter."

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

"Mme. Maranne made a second marriage with Dr. Jenkins. You are surprised, are you not, to see me in these poor surroundings, while my relatives are living in the midst of luxury? But, you know, the chances of family life sometimes group together natures that differ very widely. My stepfather and I have never been able to understand each other. He wished to make me a doctor, whereas my only taste was for writing. So at last, in order to avoid the continual discussions which were painful to my mother, I preferred to leave the house and plough my furrow alone, without the help of anybody. A rough business. Funds were wanting. The whole fortune has gone to that—to M. Jenkins. The question was to earn a livelihood, and you are aware what a difficult thing that is for people like ourselves, supposed to be well brought-up. To think that among all the accomplishments gained from what we are accustomed to call a complete education, this child's play was the only thing I could find by which I could hope to earn my bread. A few savings, my own purse, slender like that of most young men, served to buy my first outfit and I installed myself here far away, in the remotest region of Paris, in order not to embarrass my relatives. Between ourselves, I don't expect to make a fortune out of photography. The first days especially were very difficult. Nobody came, or if by chance some unfortunate wight did mount, I made a failure of him, got on my plate only an image blurred and vague as a phantom. One day, at the very beginning, a wedding-party came up to me, the bride all in white, the bridegroom with a waistcoat—like that! And all the guests in white gloves, which they insisted on keeping on for the portrait on account of the rarity of such an event with them. No, I thought I should go mad. Those black faces, the great white patches made by the dresses, the gloves, the orange-blossoms, the unlucky bride, looking like a queen of Niam-niam under her wreath merging indistinguishably into her hair. And all of them so full of good-will, of encouragements to the artist. I began them over again at least twenty times, and kept them till five o'clock in the evening. And then they only left me because it was time for dinner. Can you imagine that wedding-day passed at a photographer's?"

While Andre was recounting to him with this good humour the troubles of his life, Paul recalled the tirade of Felicia that day when Bohemians had been mentioned, and all that she had said to Jenkins of their lofty courage, avid of privations and trials. He thought also of Aline's passion for her beloved Paris, of which he himself was only acquainted, for his part, with the unwholesome eccentricities, while the great city hid in its recesses so many unknown heroisms and noble illusions. This last impression, already experienced within the sheltered circle of the Joyeuse's great lamp, he received perhaps still more vividly in this atmosphere, less warm, less peaceful, wherein art also entered to add its despairing or glorious uncertainty; and it was with a moved heart that he listened to Andre Maranne as he spoke to him of Elise, of the examinations which it was taking her so long to pass, of the difficulties of photography, of all that unforeseen element in his life which would end certainly "when he could have secured the production of Revolt," a charming smile accompanying on the poet's lips this so often expressed hope, which he was wont himself to hasten to make fun of, as though to deprive others of the right to do so.



MEMOIRS OF AN OFFICE PORTER SERVANTS

Truly Fortune in Paris has bewildering turns of the wheel!

To have seen the Territorial Bank as I have seen it, the rooms without fires, never swept, the desert with its dust, protested bills piled high as that on the desks, every week a notice of sale posted at the door, my stew spreading throughout the whole place the odour of a poor man's kitchen; and then to witness now the reconstitution of our company in its newly furnished halls, in which I have orders to light fires big enough for a Government department, amid a busy crowd, blowings of whistles, electric bells, gold pieces piled up till they fall over; it savours of miracle. I need to look at myself in the glass before I can believe it, to see in the mirror my iron-gray coat, trimmed with silver, my white tie, my usher's chain like the one I used to wear at the Faculty on the days when there were sittings. And to think that to work this transformation, to bring back to our brows gaiety, the mother of concord, to restore to our scrip its value ten times over, to our dear governor the esteem and confidence of which he had been so unjustly deprived, one man has sufficed, the being of supernatural wealth whom the hundred voices of renown designate by the name of the Nabob.

Oh, the first time that he came to the office, with his fine presence, his face a little worn perhaps, but so distinguished, his manners of one accustomed to frequent courts, upon terms of the utmost familiarity with all the princes of the Orient—in a word, that indescribable quality of assurance and greatness which is bestowed by immense wealth—I felt my heart bursting beneath the double row of buttons on my waistcoat. People may mouth in vain their great words of equality and fraternity; there are men who stand so surely above the rest that one would like to bow one's self down flat in their presence, to find new phrases of admiration in order to compel them to take a practical interest in one. Let us hasten to add that I had need of nothing of the kind to attract the attention of the Nabob. As I rose at his passage—moved to some emotion, but with dignity, you may trust Passajon for that—he looked at me with a smile and said in an undertone to the young man who accompanied him: "What a fine head, like a—" Then there came a word which I did not catch very well, a word ending in art, something like leopard. No, however, it cannot have been that. Jean-Bart, perhaps, although even then I hardly see the connection. However that be, in any case he did say, "What a fine head," and this condescension made me proud. Moreover, all the directors show me a marked degree of kindness and politeness. It seems that there was a discussion with regard to me at the meeting of the board, to determine whether I should be kept or dismissed like our cashier, that ill-tempered fellow who was always talking of getting everybody sent to the galleys, and whom they have now invited to go elsewhere to manufacture his cheap shirt-fronts. Well done! That will teach him to be rude to people. So far as I am concerned, Monsieur the Governor kindly consented to overlook my somewhat hasty words, in consideration of my record of service at the Territorial and elsewhere; and at the conclusion of the board meeting, he said to me with his musical accent: "Passajon, you remain with us." It may be imagined how happy I was and how profuse in the expression of my gratitude. But just think! I should have left with my few pence without hope of ever saving any more; obliged to go and cultivate my vineyard in that little country district of Montbars, a very narrow field for a man who has lived in the midst of all the financial aristocracy of Paris, and among those great banking operations by which fortunes are made at a stroke. Instead of that, here I am established afresh in a magnificent situation, my wardrobe renewed, and my savings, which I spent a whole day in fingering over, intrusted to the kind care of the governor, who has undertaken to invest them for me advantageously. I think that is a manoeuvre which he is the very man to execute successfully. And no need for the least anxiety. Every fear vanishes before the word which is in vogue just now at all the councils of administration, in all shareholders' meetings, on the Bourse, the boulevards, and everywhere: "The Nabob is in the affair." That is to say, gold is being poured out abundantly, the worst combinazioni are excellent.

He is so rich, that man!

Rich to a degree one cannot imagine. Has he not just lent fifteen million francs as a simple loan passing from hand to hand, to the Bey of Tunis? I repeat, fifteen millions. It was a trick he played on the Hemerlingues, who wished to embroil him with that monarch and cut the grass under his feet in those fine regions of the Orient where it grows golden, high, and thick. It was an old Turk whom I know, Colonel Brahim, one of our directors at the Territorial, who arranged the affair. Naturally, the Bey, who happened to be, it appears, short of pocket-money, was very much touched by the alacrity of the Nabob to oblige him, and he has just sent him through Brahim a letter of thanks in which he announces that upon the occasion of his next visit to Vichy, he will stay a couple of days with him at that fine Chateau de Saint-Romans, which the former Bey, the brother of this one, honoured with a visit once before. You may fancy, what an honour! To receive a reigning prince as a guest! The Hemerlingues are in a rage. They who had manoeuvred so carefully—the son at Tunis, the father in Paris—to get the Nabob into disfavour. And then it is true that fifteen millions is a big sum. And do not say, "Passajon is telling us some fine tales." The person who acquainted me with the story has held in his hands the paper sent by the Bey in an envelope of green silk stamped with the royal seal. If he did not read it, it was because this paper was written in Arabic, otherwise he would have made himself familiar with its contents as in the case of all the rest of the Nabob's correspondence. This person is his valet de chambre, M. Noel, to whom I had the honour of being introduced last Friday at a small evening-party of persons in service which he gave to all his friends. I record an account of this function in my memoirs as one of the most curious things which I have seen in the course of my four years of sojourn in Paris.

I had thought at first when M. Francis, Monpavon's valet de chambre, spoke to me of the thing, that it was a question of one of those little clandestine junketings such as are held sometimes in the garrets of our boulevards with the fragments of food brought up by Mlle. Seraphine and the other cooks in the building, at which you drink stolen wine, and gorge yourself, sitting on trunks, trembling with fear, by the light of a couple of candles which are extinguished at the least noise in the corridors. These secret practices are repugnant to my character. But when I received, as for the regular servants' ball, an invitation written in a very beautiful hand upon pink paper:

"M. Noel rekwests M—— to be present at his evenin-party on the 25th instent. Super will be provided"

I saw clearly, not withstanding the defective spelling, that it was a question of something serious and authorized. I dressed myself therefore in my newest frock-coat, my finest linen, and arrived at the Place Vendome at the address indicated by the invitation.

For the giving of his party, M. Noel had taken advantage of a first-night at the opera, to which all fashionable society was thronging, thus giving the servants a free rein, and putting the entire place at our disposal until midnight. Notwithstanding this, the host had preferred to receive us upstairs in his own bed-chamber, and this I approved highly, being in that matter of the opinion of the old fellow in the rhyme:

Fie on the pleasure That fear may corrupt!

But my word, the luxury on the Place Vendome! A felt carpet on the floor, the bed hidden away in an alcove, Algerian curtains with red stripes, an ornamental clock in green marble on the chimneypiece, the whole lighted by lamps of which the flames can be regulated at will. Our oldest member, M. Chalmette, is not better lodged at Dijon. I arrived about nine o'clock with Monpavon's old Francis, and I must confess that my entry made a sensation, preceded as I was by my academical past, my reputation for politeness, and great knowledge of the world. My fine presence did the rest, for it must be said that I know how to go into a room. M. Noel, in a dress-coat, very dark skinned and with mutton-chop whiskers, came forward to meet us.

"You are welcome, M. Passajon," said he, and taking my cap with silver galloons which, according to the fashion, I had kept in my right hand while making my entry, he gave it to a gigantic negro in red and gold livery.

"Here, Lakdar, hang that up—and that," he added by way of a joke, giving him a kick in a certain region of the back.

There was much laughter at this sally, and we began to chat together in very friendly fashion. An excellent fellow, this M. Noel, with his accent of the Midi, his pronounced style of dress, the smoothness and the simplicity of his manners. He reminded me of the Nabob, without his distinction, however. I noticed, moreover, that evening, that these resemblances are frequently to be observed in valets de chambre who, living in the intimacy of their masters, by whom they are always a little dazzled, end by acquiring their manners and habits. Thus, M. Francis has a certain way of straightening his body when displaying his linen-front, a mania for raising his arms in order to pull his cuffs down—it is Monpavon to a T. Now one, for instance, who bears no resemblance to his master is Joey, the coachman of Dr. Jenkins. I call him Joey, but at the party every one called him Jenkins; for, in that world, the stable folk among themselves give to each other the names of their masters, call each other Bois l'Hery, Monpavon, and Jenkins, without ceremony. Is it in order to degrade their superiors, to raise the status of menials? Every country has its customs; it is only a fool who will be surprised by them. To return to Joey Jenkins, how can the doctor, affable as he is, so polished in every particular, keep in his service that brute, bloated with porter and gin, who will remain silent for hours at a time, then, at the first mounting of liquor to his head, begins to howl and to wish to fight everybody, as witness the scandalous scene which had just occurred when we entered?