Part 4

The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was rather mixed at his friend’s. But then! One could hardly blame him for it. The poor fellow, he knew no better.

“Neither knows nor is willing to learn,” remarked Monpavon with bitterness. “Instead of consulting people of experience--ps, ps, ps--first sponger that comes along. Have you seen the horses that Bois l’Hery has persuaded him to buy? Absolute rubbish those animals. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. We may wager that Bois l’Hery got them for six thousand.”

“Oh, for shame--a nobleman!” said Jenkins, with the indignation of a lofty soul refusing to believe in baseness.

Monpavon continued, without seeming to hear:

“All that because the horses came from Mora’s stable.”

“It is true that the dear Nabob’s heart is very full of the duke. I am about to make him very happy, therefore, when I inform him----”

The doctor paused, embarrassed.

“When you inform him of what, Jenkins?”

Somewhat abashed, Jenkins had to confess that he had obtained permission from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the heavy and wrinkled eyelid which covered it. Jenkins’s patients all had that eye.

Monpavon must indeed have been deeply moved to show himself thus devoid of all prestige. In point of fact, with white lips and a changed voice he addressed the doctor quickly, without the lisp this time, and in a single outburst:

“Come now, mon cher, no tomfoolery between us, eh? We are both met before the same dish, but I leave you your share. I intend that you shall leave me mine.”

And Jenkins’s air of astonishment did not make him pause. “Let this be said once for all. I have promised the Nabob to present him to the duke, just as, formerly, I presented you. Do not mix yourself up, therefore, with what concerns me alone.”

Jenkins laid his hand on his heart, protested his innocence. He had never had any intention. Certainly Monpavon was too intimate a friend of the duke, for any other--How could he have supposed?

“I suppose nothing,” said the old nobleman, calmer but still cold. “I merely desired to have a very clear explanation with you on this subject.”

The Irishman extended a widely opened hand.

“My dear marquis, explanations are always clear between men of honour.”

“Honour is a big word, Jenkins. Let us say people of deportment--that suffices.”

And that deportment, which he invoked as the supreme guide of conduct, recalling him suddenly to the sense of his ludicrous situation, the marquis offered one finger to his friend’s demonstrative shake of the hand, and passed back with dignity behind his curtain, while the other left, in haste to resume his round.

What a magnificent clientele he had, this Jenkins! Nothing but princely mansions, heated staircases, laden with flowers at every landing, upholstered and silky alcoves, where disease was transformed into something discreet, elegant, where nothing suggested that brutal hand which throws on a bed of pain those who only cease to work in order to die. They were not in any true speech, sick people, these clients of the Irish doctor. They would have been refused admission to a hospital. Their organs not possessing even strength to give them a shock, the seat of their malady was to be discovered nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited. They were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it prolonged. And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.

“Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!” the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was reduced to a breath.

“You shall go, my dear child.”

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

“Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I must be at the Cabinet Council.”

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their last day Jenkins’s clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d’Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

“Mme. Constance is at mass,” he said, “and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone. We have been at work since six o’clock this morning,” added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was a splendid sculptor’s studio, the front of which, on the street corner, semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms, which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason’s shed, this one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall and, here and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was covered with a piece of black gauze.