Part 22

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.