Part 13

“My faith, no. He is too coarse.”

“Ah, well, his works were the text-book of my first reading lessons. Very badly brought up, you know. Oh, exceedingly badly. My apologue, then, is taken from Rabelais. Here it is: Bacchus created a wonderful fox, impossible to capture. Vulcan, on the other hand, gave a dog of his own creation the power to catch every animal that he should pursue. ‘Now,’ as my author has it, ‘it happened that the two met.’ You see what a wild and interminable chase. It seems to me, my dear duke, that destiny has in the same way brought us together, endowed with conflicting attributes; you who have received from the gods the gift of reaching all hearts, I whose heart will never be made prisoner.”

She spoke these words, looking him full in the face, almost laughing, but sheathed and erect in the white tunic which seemed to defend her person against the liberties of his thought. He, the conqueror, the irresistible, had never before met one of this audacious and headstrong breed. He brought to bear upon her, therefore, all the magnetic currents of his seductiveness, while around them the rising murmur of the fete, the soft laughter, the rustle of satins and the rattling of pearls formed the accompaniment to this duet of mundane passion and juvenile irony. He resumed after a minute’s pause:

“But how did the gods escape from that awkward situation?”

“By turning the two runners into stone.”

“Upon my word,” said he, “that is a solution which I do not at all accept. I defy the gods ever to petrify my heart.”

A fiery gleam shot for a moment from his eyes, extinguished immediately by the thought that people were observing them.

In effect, people were observing them intently, but no one with so much curiosity as Jenkins, who wandered round them a little way off, impatient and fidgety, as though he were annoyed with Felicia for taking private possession of the important personage of the assembly. The young girl laughingly called the duke’s attention to it.

“People will say that I am monopolizing you.”

She pointed out to him Monpavon waiting, standing near the Nabob who, from afar, was gazing at his excellency with the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff. The Minister of State then remembered the object which had brought him. He bowed to the young girl and returned to Monpavon, who was able at last to present to him “his honourable friend, M. Bernard Jansoulet.” His excellency bowed slightly, the parvenu humbled himself lower than the earth, then they chatted for a moment.

A group curious to observe. Jansoulet, tall, strong, with an air of the people about him, a sunburned skin, his broad back arched as though made round for ever by the low bowings of Oriental courtiery, his big, short hands splitting his light gloves, his excessive gestures, his southern exuberance chopping up his words like a puncher. The other, a high-bred gentleman, a man of the world, elegance itself, easy in his least gestures, though these, however, were extremely rare, carelessly letting fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his strength lay. In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob’s millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient to observe the great contractor wriggling amiably before the great gentleman and casting under his feet, like the courtier’s cloak of ermine, the dense vanity of a newly rich man.

From the corner in which he had ensconced himself, de Gery was watching the scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to this introduction, when the same chance which all through the evening had so cruelly been giving the lie to the native simplicity of his inexperience, caused him to distinguish a short dialogue near him, amid that buzz of many conversations through which each hears just the word that interests him.

“It is indeed the least that Monpavon can do, to enable him to make a few good acquaintances. He has introduced him to so many bad ones. You know that he has just put Paganetti and all his gang on his shoulders.”

“Poor fellow! But they will devour him.”

“Bah! It is only fair that he should be made to disgorge a little. He has been such a thief himself away yonder among the Turks.”

“Really, do you believe that is so?”

“Do I believe it? I am in possession of very precise details on the point which I have from Baron Hemerlingue, the banker, who effected the last Tunisian loan. He knows some stories about the Nabob, he does. Just imagine.”

And the infamous gossip commenced. For fifteen years Jansoulet had exploited the former Bey in a scandalous fashion. Names of purveyors were cited and tricks wonderful in their assurance, their effrontery; for instance, the story of a musical frigate, yes, a veritable musical box, like a dining-room picture, which he had bought for two hundred thousand francs and sold again for ten millions; the cost price of a throne sold at three millions for which the account could be seen in the books of an upholsterer of the Faubourg Saint-Honore did not exceed a hundred thousand francs; and the funniest part of it was that, the Bey having changed his mind, the royal seat, fallen into disgrace before it had even been unpacked, remained still nailed in its packing-case at the custom-house in Tripoli.

Next, beyond these wildly extravagant commissions on the provision of the least toy, they laid stress upon accusations more grave but no less certain, since they also sprang from the same source. It seemed there was, adjoining the seraglio, a harem of European women admirably equipped for his Highness by the Nabob, who must have been a good judge in such matters, having practised formerly, in Paris--before his departure for the East--the most singular trades: vendor of theatre-tickets, manager of a low dancing-hall, and of an establishment more ill-famed still. And the whispering ended in a smothered laugh, the coarse laugh of men chatting among themselves.

The first impulse of the young man from the country, as he heard these infamous calumnies, was to turn round and exclaim:

“You lie!”

A few hours earlier he would have done it without hesitating; but, since he had been there, he had learned distrust, scepticism. He contained himself, therefore, and listened to the end, motionless in the same place, having deep down within himself an unavowed desire to become further acquainted with the man whose service he had entered. As for the Nabob, the completely unconscious subject of this hideous recital, tranquilly installed in a small room to which its blue hangings and two shaded lamps gave a reposeful air, he was playing his game of ecarte with the Duc de Mora.

O magic of Fortune’s argosy! The son of the dealer in old iron seated alone at a card-table opposite the first personage of the Empire! Jansoulet could scarcely believe the Venetian mirror in which were reflected his own bright countenance and the august head with its parting down the middle. Accordingly, in order to show his appreciation of this great honour, he sought to lose decently as many thousand-franc notes as possible, feeling himself even so the winner of the game, and quite proud to see his money pass into those aristocratic hands, whose least gesture he studied as they dealt, cut, or held the cards.

A circle had formed around them, always keeping a distance, however, the ten paces exacted for the salutation of a prince; it was the public there to witness this triumph in which the Nabob was bearing his part as in a dream, intoxicated by those fairy harmonies rather faint in the distance, whose songs that reached him in snatches as over the resonant obstacle of a pool, the perfume of flowers that seem to become full blown in so singular fashion towards the end of Parisian balls, when the late hour that confuses all notions of time and the weariness of the sleepless nights communicate to brains soothed in a more nervous atmosphere, as it were, a dizzy sense of enjoyment. The robust nature of Jansoulet, civilized savage that he was, was more sensitive than another to these unknown subtleties, and he had need of all his strength to refrain from manifesting by some glad hurrah, by some untimely effusion of gestures and speech, the impulse of physical gaiety which pervaded his whole being, as happens to those great mountain dogs that are thrown into epileptic fits of madness by the inhaling of a drop of some essence.

“The sky is clear, the pavement dry. If you like, my dear boy, we will send the carriage away and return on foot,” said Jansoulet to his companion as they left Jenkins’s house.

De Gery accepted with eagerness. He felt that he required to walk, to shake off in the open air the infamies and the lies of that comedy of society which had left his heart cold and oppressed, with all his life-blood driven to his temples where he could hear the swollen veins beating. He staggered as he walked, like those unfortunate persons who, having been operated upon for cataract, in the terror of sight regained, do not dare put one foot before the other. But with what a brutal hand the operation had been performed! So that great artist with the glorious name, that pure and untamed beauty the sight alone of whom had troubled him like an apparition, was only a courtesan. Mme. Jenkins, that stately woman, of bearing at once so proud and so gentle, had no real title to the name. That illustrious man of science with the open countenance, and a manner so pleasant in his welcome, had the impudence thus to parade a disgraceful concubinage. And Paris suspected it, but that did not prevent it from running to their parties. And, finally, Jansoulet, so kind, so generous, for whom he felt in his heart so much gratitude, he knew him to be fallen into the hands of a gang of brigands, a brigand himself and well worthy of the conspiracy organized to cause him to disgorge his millions.

Was it possible, and how much of it was he to be obliged to believe?

A glance which he threw sideways at the Nabob, whose immense person almost blocked the pavement, revealed to him suddenly in that walk oppressed by the weight of his wealth, a something low and vulgar which he had not previously remarked. Yes, he was indeed the adventurer from the south, moulded of the slimy clay that covers the quays of Marseilles, trodden down by all the nomads and wanderers of a seaport. Kind, generous, forsooth! as harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source. There remained, then, for him, de Gery, but one thing to do, to go away, to quit with all possible speed this situation in which he risked the compromising of his good name, the one heritage from his father. Doubtless. But the two little brothers down yonder in the country. Who would pay for their board and lodging? Who would keep up the modest home miraculously brought into being once more by the handsome salary of the eldest son, the head of the family? Those words, “head of the family,” plunged him immediately into one of those internal combats in which interest and conscience struggled for the mastery--the one brutal, substantial, attacking vigorously with straight thrusts, the other elusive, breaking away by subtle disengagements--while the worthy Jansoulet, unconscious cause of the conflict, walked with long strides close by his young friend, inhaling the fresh air with delight at the end of his lighted cigar.