Part 29

“It is true,” remarked the personage, speaking with the slightest possible movement of his mouth and continuing to take his wine in little sips, “it is true that we received the Nabob at Grandbois the other week. There even happened something very funny on the occasion. We have a quantity of mushrooms in the second park, and his excellency amuses himself sometimes by gathering them. Now at dinner was served a large dish of fungi. There were present, what’s his name--I forget, what is it?--Marigny, the Minister of the Interior, Monpavon, and your master, my dear Noel. The mushrooms went the round of the table, they looked nice, the gentlemen helped themselves freely, except M. le Duc, who cannot digest them and out of politeness feels it his duty to remark to his guests: ‘Oh, you know, it is not that I am suspicious of them. They are perfectly safe. It was I myself who gathered them.’

“‘Sapristi!’ said Monpavon, laughing, ‘then, my dear Auguste, allow me to be excused from tasting them.’ Marigny, less familiar, glanced at his plate out of the corner of his eye.

“‘But, yes, Monpavon, I assure you. They look extremely good, these mushrooms. I am truly sorry that I have no appetite left.’

“The duke remained very serious.

“‘Come, M. Jansoulet, I sincerely hope that you are not going to offer me this affront, you also. Mushrooms selected by myself.’

“‘Oh, Excellency, the very idea of such a thing! Why, I would eat them with my eyes closed.’

“So you see what sort of luck he had, the poor Nabob, the first time that he dined with us. Duperron, who was serving opposite him, told us all about it in the pantry. It seems there could have been nothing more comic than to see the Jansoulet stuffing himself with mushrooms, and rolling terrified eyes, while the others sat watching him curiously without touching their plates. He sweated under the effort, poor wretch. And the best of it was that he took a second portion, he actually found the courage to take a second portion. He kept drinking off glasses of wine, however, like a mason, between each mouthful. Ah, well, do you wish to hear my opinion? What he did there was very clever, and I am no longer surprised that this fat cow-herd should have become the favourite of sovereigns. He knows where to flatter them in those little pretensions which no man avows. In brief, the duke has been crazy over him since that day.”

This little story caused much laughter and scattered the clouds which had been raised by a few imprudent words. So then, since the wine had untied people’s tongues, and they knew each other better, elbows were leaned on the table and the conversation fell on masters, on the places in which each of them had served, on the amusing things he had seen in them. Ah! of how many such adventures did I not hear, how much of the interior life of those establishments did I not see pass before me. Naturally I also made my own little effect with the story of my larder at the Territorial, the times when I used to keep my stew in the empty safe, which circumstance, however, did not prevent our old cashier, a great stickler for forms, from changing the key-word of the lock every two days, as though all the treasures of the Bank of France had been inside. M. Louis appeared to find my anecdote entertaining. But the most astonishing was what the little Bois l’Hery, with his Parisian street-boy’s accent, related to us concerning the household of his employers.

Marquis and Marquise de Bois l’Hery, second floor, Boulevard Haussmann. Furniture rich as at the Tuileries, blue satin on all the walls, Chinese ornaments, pictures, curiosities, a veritable museum, indeed, overflowing even on to the stairway. The service very smart: six men-servants, chestnut livery in winter, nankeen livery in summer. These people are seen everywhere at the small Mondays, at the races, at first-nights, at embassy balls, and their name always in the newspapers with a remark upon the handsome toilettes of Madame, and Monsieur’s remarkable chic. Well! all that is nothing at all but pretence, plated goods, show, and when the marquis wants five francs nobody would lend them to him upon his possessions. The furniture is hired by the fortnight from Fitily, the upholsterer of the demi-monde. The curiosities, the pictures, belong to old Schwalbach, who sends his clients round there and makes them pay doubly dear, since people don’t bargain when they think they are dealing with a marquis, an amateur. As for the toilettes of the marquise, the milliner and the dressmaker provide her with them each season gratis, get her to wear the new fashions, a little ridiculous sometimes but which society subsequently adopts because Madame is still a very handsome woman and reputed for her elegance; she is what is called a launcher. Finally, the servants! Makeshifts like the rest, changed each week at the pleasure of the registry office which sends them there to do a period of probation by way of preliminary to a serious engagement. If you have neither sureties nor certificates, if you have just come out of prison or anything of that kind, Glanand, the famous agent of the Rue de la Paix, sends you off to the Boulevard Haussmann. You remain in service there for a week or two, just the time necessary to buy a good reference from the marquis, who, of course, it is understood, pays you nothing and barely boards you; for in that house the kitchen-ranges are cold most of the time, Monsieur and Madame dining out nearly every evening or going to balls, where a supper is included in the entertainment. It is positive fact that there are people in Paris who take the sideboard seriously and make the first meal of their day after midnight. The Bois l’Herys, in consequence, are well-informed with regard to the houses that provide refreshments. They will tell you that you get a very good supper at the Austrian Embassy, that the Spanish Embassy rather neglects the wines, and that it is at the Foreign Office again that you find the best chaud-froid de volailles. And that is the life of this curious household. Nothing that they possess is really theirs; everything is tacked on, loosely fastened with pins. A gust of wind and the whole thing blows away. But at least they are certain of losing nothing. It is this assurance which gives to the marquis that air of raillery worthy of a Father Tranquille which he has when he looks at you with both hands in his pockets, as much as to say: “Ah, well, and what then? What can they do to me?”

And the little groom, in the attitude which I have just mentioned, with his head like that of a prematurely old and vicious child, imitated his master so well that I could fancy I saw himself as he looks at our board meetings, standing in front of the governor and overwhelming him with his cynical pleasantries. All the same, one must admit that Paris is a tremendously great city, for a man to be able to live thus, through fifteen, twenty years of tricks, artifice, dust thrown in people’s eyes, without everybody finding him out, and for him still to be able to make a triumphal entry into a drawing-room in the rear of his name announced loudly and repeatedly, “Monsieur le Marquis de Bois l’Hery.”

No, look you, the things that are to be learned at a servants’ party, what a curious spectacle is presented by the fashionable world of Paris, seen thus from below, from the basements, you need to go to one before you can realize. Here, for instance, is a little fragment of conversation which, happening to find myself between M. Francis and M. Louis, I overheard about the worthy sire de Monpavon.

“You are making a mistake, Francis. You are in funds just now. You ought to take advantage of the occasion to restore that money to the Treasury.”

“What will you have?” replied M. Francis with a despondent air. “Play is devouring us.”

“Yes, I know it well. But take care. We shall not always be there. We may die, fall from power. Then you will be asked for accounts by the people down yonder. And it will be a terrible business.”

I had often heard whispered the story of a forced loan of two hundred thousand francs which the marquis was reputed to have secured from the State at the time when he was Receiver-General; but the testimony of his valet de chambre was worse than all. Ah! if masters had any suspicion of how much servants know, of all the stories that are told in the servants’ hall, if they could see their names dragged among the sweepings of the house and the refuse of the kitchen, they would never again dare to say even “shut the door” or “harness the horses.” Why, for instance, take Dr. Jenkins, with the most valuable practice in Paris, ten years of life in common with a magnificent woman, who is sought after everywhere; it is in vain that he has done everything to dissimulate his position, announced his marriage in the newspapers after the English fashion, admitted to his house only foreign servants knowing hardly three words of French. In those three words, seasoned with vulgar oaths and blows of his fist on the table, his coachman Joey, who hates him, told us his whole history during supper.

“She is going to kick the bucket, his Irish wife, the real one. Remains to be seen now whether he will marry the other. Forty-five, she is, Mrs. Maranne, and not a shilling. You should see how afraid she is of being left in the lurch. Whether he marries her or whether he does not marry her--kss, kss--we shall have a good laugh.”

And the more drink he was given, the more he told us about her, speaking of his unfortunate mistress as though she were the lowest of the low. For my own part, I confess that she interested me, this false Mme. Jenkins, who goes about weeping in every corner, implores her lover as though he were the executioner, and runs the chance of being thrown overboard altogether, when all society believes her to be married, respectable, and established in life. The others only laughed over the story, the women especially. Dame! it is amusing when one is in service to see that the ladies of the upper ten have their troubles also and torments that keep them awake at night.

Our festal board at this stage presented the most lively aspect, a circle of gay faces stretched towards this Irishman whose story was adjudged to have won the prize. The fact excited envy; the rest sought and hunted through their memories for whatever they might hold in the way of old scandals, adventures of deceived husbands, of those intimate privacies which are emptied on the kitchen-table along with the scraps from the plates and the dregs from the bottles. The champagne was beginning to claim its own among the guests. Joey wanted to dance a jig on the table-cloth. The ladies, at the least word that was a little gay, threw themselves back with the piercing laughter of people who are being tickled, allowing their embroidered skirts to trail beneath the table, loaded with the remains of the food and covered with spilt grease. M. Louis had discreetly retired. Glasses were filled up before they had been emptied; one of the housekeepers dipped a handkerchief in hers, filled with water, and bathed her forehead with it, because her head was swimming, she said. It was time that the festivity should end; and, in fact, an electric bell ringing in the corridor warned us that the footman, on duty at the theatre, had come to summon the coachmen. Thereupon Monpavon proposed the health of the master of the house, thanking him for his little party. M. Noel announced that he proposed to give another at Saint-Romans, in honour of the visit of the Bey, to which most of those present would probably be invited. And I was about to rise in my turn, being sufficiently accustomed to social banquets to know that on such an occasion the oldest man present is expected to propose the health of the ladies, when the door opened abruptly, and a tall footman, bespattered with mud, a dripping umbrella in his hand, perspiring, out of breath, cried to us, without respect for the company:

“But come on then, you set of idiots! What are you sticking here for? Don’t you know it is over?”

THE FESTIVITIES IN HONOUR OF THE BEY

In the regions of the Midi, of bygone civilization, historical castles still standing are rare. Only at long intervals on the hillsides some old abbey lifts its tottering and dismembered front, perforated by holes that once were windows, whose empty spaces look now only to the sky. A monument of dust, burnt up by the sun, dating from the time of the Crusades or of the Courts of Love, without a trace of man among its stones, where even the ivy no longer clings nor the acanthus, but which the dried lavenders and the ferns embalm. In the midst of all those ruins the castle of Saint-Romans is an illustrious exception. If you have travelled in the Midi you have seen it, and you are to see it again now. It is between Valence and Montelimart, on a site just where the railway runs alongside the Rhone, at the foot of the rich slopes of Baume, Raucoule, and Mercurol, where the far-famed vineyards of l’Ermitage, spreading out for five miles in close-planted rows of vines, which seem to grow as one looks, roll down almost into the river, which is there as green and full of islands as the Rhine at Basle, but under a sun the Rhine has never known. Saint-Romans is opposite on the other side of the river; and, in spite of the brevity of the vision, the headlong rush of the train, which seems trying to throw itself madly into the Rhone at each turning, the castle is so large, so well situated on the neighbouring hill, that it seems to follow the crazy race of the train, and stamps on your mind forever the memory of its terraces, its balustrades, its Italian architecture; two low stories surmounted by a colonnaded gallery and flanked by two slate-roofed pavilions dominating the great slopes where the water of the cascades rebounds, the network of gravel walks, the perspective of long hedges, terminated by some white statue which stands out against the blue sky as on the luminous ground of a stained-glass window. Quite at the top, in the middle of the vast lawns whose green turf shines ironically under the scorching sun, a gigantic cedar uplifts its crested foliage, enveloped in black and floating shadows--an exotic silhouette, upright before this former dwelling of some Louis XIV farmer of revenue, which makes one think of a great negro carrying the sunshade of a gentleman of the court.

From Valence to Marseilles, throughout all the Valley of the Rhone, Saint-Romans of Bellaignes is famous as an enchanted palace; and, indeed, in that country burnt up by the fiery wind, this oasis of greenness and beautiful rushing water is a true fairy-land.

“When I am rich, mamma,” Jansoulet used to say, as quite a small boy, to his mother whom he adored, “I shall give you Saint-Romans of Bellaignes.” And as the life of the man seemed the fulfilment of a story from the Arabian Nights, as all his wishes came true, even the most disproportionate, as his maddest chimeras came to lie down before him, to lick his hands like familiar and obedient spaniels, he had bought Saint-Romans to offer it, newly furnished and grandiosely restored, to his mother. Although it was ten years since then, the dear old woman was not yet used to her splendid establishment. “It is the palace of Queen Jeanne that you have given me, my dear Bernard,” she wrote to her son. “I shall never live there.” She never did live there, as a matter of fact, having stayed at the steward’s house, an isolated building of modern construction, situated quite at the other end of the grounds, so as to overlook the outbuildings and the farm, the sheepfolds and the oil-mills, with their rural horizon of stacks, olive-trees and vines, extending over the plain as far as one could see. In the great castle she would have imagined herself a prisoner in one of those enchanted dwellings where sleep seizes you in the midst of your happiness and does not let you go for a hundred years. Here, at least, the peasant-woman--who had never been able to accustom herself to this colossal fortune, come too late, from too far, and like a thunder-clap--felt herself linked to reality by the coming and going of the work-people, the letting-out and taking-in of the cattle, their slow movement to the drinking pond, all that pastoral life which woke her by the familiar call of the cocks and the sharp cries of the peacocks, and brought her down the corkscrew staircase of the pavilion before dawn. She looked upon herself only as the trustee of this magnificent estate, which she was taking care of for her son, and wished to give back to him in perfect condition on the day when, rich enough and tired of living with the Turks, he would come, according to his promise, to live with her beneath the shade of Saint-Romans.

Then, too, what universal and indefatigable supervision! Through the mists of early morning the farm-servants heard her rough and husky voice: “Olivier, Peyrol, Audibert. Come on! It is four o’clock.” Then she would hasten to the immense kitchen, where the maids, heavy with sleep, were heating the porridge over the crackling, new-lit fire. They gave her a little dish of red Marseilles-ware full of boiled chestnuts--frugal breakfast of bygone times, which nothing would have induced her to change. At once she was off, hurrying with great strides, her large silver keyring at her belt, whence jingled all her keys, her plate in her hand, balanced by the distaff which she held, in working order, under her arm, for she spun all day long, and did not stop even to eat her chestnuts. On the way, a glance at the stables, still dark, where the animals were moving duly, at the stifling pens with their rows of impatient and outstretched muzzles; and the first glimmers of light creeping over the layers of stones that supported the embankment of the park, lit up the figure of the old woman, running in the dew, with the lightness of a girl, despite her seventy years--verifying exactly each morning all the wealth of the domain, anxious to make sure that the night had not taken away the statues and the vases, uprooted the hundred-year-old quincunx, dried up the springs which filtered into their resounding basins. Then the full sunlight of midday, humming and vibrating, showed still, on the sand of an alley, against the white wall of a terrace, the long figure of the old woman, elegant and straight as her spindle, picking up bits of dead wood, breaking off some uneven branch of a shrub, careless of the shock it caused her and the sweat which broke out over her skin. Towards this hour another figure was to be seen in the park also--less active, less noisy, dragging rather than walking, leaning against the walls and railings--a poor round-shouldered being, shaky and stiff, a figure from which life seemed to have gone out, never speaking, when he was tired giving a little plaintive cry towards the servant, who was always near, who helped him to sit down, to crouch upon some step, where he would stay for hours, motionless, mute, his mouth hanging, his eyes blinking, hushed by the strident monotony of the grasshopper’s cry--a blotch of humanity in the splendid horizon.

This, this was the first-born, Bernard’s brother, the darling child of his father and mother, the glorious hope of the nail-maker’s family. Slaves, like so many others in the Midi, to the superstition of the rights of primogeniture, they had made every possible sacrifice to send to Paris their fine, ambitious lad, who set out assured of success, the admiration of all the young women of the town; and Paris, after having for six years, beaten, twisted, and squeezed in its great vat the brilliant southern stripling, after having burnt him with all its vitriol, rolled him in all its mud, finished by sending him back in this state of wreckage, stupefied and paralyzed--killing his father with sorrow, and forcing his mother to sell her all, and live as a sort of char-woman in the better-class houses of her own country-side. Lucky it was that just then, when this broken piece of humanity, discharged from all the hospitals of Paris, was sent back by public charity to Bourg-Saint-Andeol, Bernard--he whom they called Cadet, as in these southern families, half Arab as they are, the eldest always takes the family name, and the last-comer that of Cadet--Bernard was at Tunis making his fortune, and sending home money regularly. But what pain it was for the poor mother to owe everything, even the life, the comfort of the sad invalid, to the robust and courageous boy whom his father and she had loved without any tenderness; who, since he was five years old, they had treated as a “hand,” because he was very strong, woolly-headed, and ugly, and even then knew better than any one in the house how to deal in old nails. Ah! how she longed to have him near her, her Cadet, to make some return to him for all the good he did, to pay at last the debt of love and motherly tenderness that she owed him!

But, you see, these princely fortunes have the burdens, the wearinesses of royal lives. This poor mother, in her dazzling surroundings, was very like a real queen: familiar with long exiles, cruel separations, and the trials which detract from greatness; one of her sons forever stupefied, the other far away, seldom writing, absorbed in his business, saying, “I will come,” and never coming. She had only seen him once in twelve years, and then in the whirl of a visit of the Bey to Saint-Romans--a rush of horses and carriages, of fireworks, and of banquets. He had gone in the suite of his monarch, having scarcely time to say good-bye to his old mother, to whom there remained of this great joy only a few pictures in the illustrated papers, showing Bernard Jansoulet arriving at the castle with Ahmed, and presenting his mother. Is it not thus that kings and queens have their family feelings exploited in the journals? There was also a cedar of Lebanon, brought from the other end of the world, a regular mountain of a tree, whose transport had been as difficult and as costly as that of Cleopatra’s needle, and whose erection as a souvenir of the royal visit by dint of men, money, and teams had shaken the very foundations. But this time, at least, knowing him to be in France for several months--perhaps for good--she hoped to have her Bernard to herself. And now he returned to her, one fine evening, enveloped in the same triumphant glory, in the same official display, surrounded by a crowd of counts, of marquises, of fine gentlemen from Paris, filling, they and their servants, the two large wagonettes she had sent to meet them at the little station of Giffas on the other side of the Rhone.

“Come, give me a kiss, my dear mother. There is nothing to be ashamed of in giving a good hug to the boy you haven’t seen all these years. Besides, all these gentlemen are our friends. This is the Marquis de Monpavon, the Marquis de Bois d’Hery. Ah! the time is past when I brought you to eat vegetable soup with us, little Cabassu and Jean-Batiste Bompain. You know M. de Gery? With my old friend Cardailhac, whom I now present, that makes the first batch. There are others to come. Prepare yourself for a fine upsetting. We entertain the Bey in four days.”

“The Bey again!” said the old woman, astounded. “I thought he was dead.”