Part 40

“It must be the article in the Messenger,” said he.

Everybody was talking about it, this rascally article, and before the mirror garlanded with flowers, at which each guest gave a finishing touch to his attire before entering, I surprised fragments of whispered conversation such as this:

“You have read it?”

“It is horrible!”

“Do you think the thing possible?”

“I have no idea. In any case, I preferred not to bring my wife.”

“I have done the same. A man can go everywhere without compromising himself.”

“Certainly. While a woman----”

Then they would go in, opera hat under arm, with that conquering air of married men when they are unaccompanied by their wives.

What, then, could there be in this newspaper, this terrible article, to menace to this degree the influence of so wealthy a man? Unfortunately, my duties took up the whole of my time. I could go down neither to the pantry nor to the cloak-room to obtain information, to chat with the coachmen and valets and lackeys whom I could see standing at the foot of the staircase, amusing themselves by jests upon the people who were going up. What will you? Masters give themselves great airs also. How not laugh to see go by with an insolent manner and an empty stomach the Marquis and the Marquise de Bois l’Hery, after all that we have been told about the traffickings of Monsieur and the toilettes of Madame? And the Jenkins couple, so tender, so united, the doctor carefully putting a lace shawl over his lady’s shoulders for fear she should take cold on the staircase; she herself smiling and in full dress, all in velvet, with a great long train, leaning on her husband’s arm with an air that seems to say, “How happy I am!” when I happened to know that, in fact, since the death of the Irishwoman, his real, legitimate wife, the doctor is thinking of getting rid of the old woman who clings to him, in order to be able to marry a chit of a girl, and that the old woman passes her nights in lamentation, and in spoiling with tears whatever beauty she has left.

The humorous thing is that not one of these people had the least suspicion of the rich jests and jeers that were spat over their backs as they passed, not a notion of the filth which those long trains drew after them as they crossed the carpet of the antechamber, and they all would look at you so disdainfully that it was enough to make you die of laughing.

The two ladies whom I have just named, the wife of the governor, a little Corsican, to whom her bushy eyebrows, her white teeth, and her shining cheeks, dark beneath the skin, give the appearance of a woman of Auvergne with a washed face, a good sort, for the rest, and laughing all the time except when her husband is looking at other women; in addition, a few Levantines with tiaras of gold or pearls, less perfect specimens of the type than our own, but still in a similar style, wives of upholsterers, jewellers, regular tradesmen of the establishment, with shoulders as large as shop-fronts, and expensive toilettes; finally, sundry ladies, wives of officials of the Territorial, in sorry, badly creased dresses; these constituted the sole representation of the fair sex in the assembly, some thirty ladies lost among a thousand black coats--that is to say, practically none at all. From time to time Cassagne, Laporte, Grandvarlet, who were serving the refreshments in trays, stopped to inform us of what was passing in the drawing-rooms.

“Ah, my boys, if you could see it! it has a gloom, a melancholy. The men don’t stir from the buffets. The ladies are all at the back, seated in a circle, fanning themselves and saying nothing. The fat old lady does not speak to a soul. I fancy she is sulking. You should see the look on Monsieur! Come, pere Passajon, a glass of Chateau-Larose; it will pick you up a bit.”

They were charmingly kind to me, all these young people, and took a mischievous pleasure in doing me the honours of the cellar so often and so copiously, that my tongue commenced to become heavy, uncertain, and as the young folk said to me, in their somewhat free language. “Uncle, you are babbling.” Happily the last of the effendis had just arrived, and there was nobody else to announce; for it was in vain that I sought to shake off the impression, every time I advanced between the curtains to send a name hurtling through the air at random, I saw the chandeliers of the drawing-rooms revolving with hundreds of dazzling lights, and the floors slipping away with sharp and perpendicular slopes like Russian mountains. I was bound to get my speech mixed, it is certain.

The cool night-air, sundry ablutions at the pump in the court-yard, quickly got the better of this small discomfort, and when I entered the cloak-room nothing of it was any longer apparent. I found a numerous and gay company collected round a marquise au champagne, of which all my nieces, wearing their best dresses, with their hair puffed out and cravats of pink ribbon, took their full share notwithstanding exclamations and bewitching little grimaces that deceived nobody. Naturally, the conversation turned on the famous article, an article by Moessard, it appears, full of frightful occupations which the Nabob was alleged to have followed fifteen or twenty years ago, at the time of his first sojourn in Paris.

It was the third attack of the kind which the Messenger had published in the course of the last week, and that rogue of a Moessard had the spite to send the number each time done up in a packet to the Place Vendome.

M. Jansoulet received it in the morning with his chocolate; and at the same hour his friends and his enemies--for a man like the Nabob could be regarded with indifference by none--would be reading, commenting, tracing for themselves the relation to him a line of conduct designed to save them from becoming compromised. Today’s article must be supposed to have struck hard all the same; for Jansoulet, the coachman, recounted to us a few hours ago, in the Bois, his master had not exchanged ten greetings in the course of ten drives round the lake, while ordinarily his hat is as rarely on his head as a sovereign’s when he takes the air. Then, when they got back, there was another trouble. The three boys had just arrived at the house, all in tears and dismay, brought home from the College Bourdaloue by a worthy father in the interest of the poor little fellows themselves, who had received a temporary leave of absence in order to spare them from hearing in the parlour or the playground any unkind story or painful allusion. Thereupon the Nabob flew into a terrible passion, which caused him to destroy a service of porcelain, and it appears that, had it not been for M. de Gery, he would have rushed off at once to punch Moessard’s head.

“And he would have done very well,” remarked M. Noel, entering at these last words, very much excited. “There is not a line of truth in that rascal’s article. My master had never been in Paris before last year. From Tunis to Marseilles, from Marseilles to Tunis, those were his only journeys. But this knave of a journalist is taking his revenge because we refused him twenty thousand francs.”

“There you acted very unwisely,” observed M. Francis upon this--Monpavon’s Francis, Monpavon the old beau whose solitary tooth shakes about in the centre of his mouth at every word he says, but whom the young ladies regard with a favourable eye all the same on account of his fine manners. “Yes, you were unwise. One must know how to conciliate people, so long as they are in a position to be useful to us or to injure us. Your Nabob has turned his back too quickly upon his friends after his success; and between you and me, mon cher, he is not sufficiently firmly established to be able to disregard attacks of this kind.”

I thought myself able here to put in a word in my turn:

“That is true enough, M. Noel, your governor is no longer the same since his election. He has adopted a tone and manners which I can hardly but describe as reprehensible. The day before yesterday, at the Territorial, he raised a commotion which you can hardly imagine. He was heard to exclaim before the whole board: ‘You have lied to me; you have robbed me, and made me a robber as much as yourselves. Show me your books, you set of rogues!’ If he has treated Moessard in the same sort of fashion, I am not surprised any longer that the latter should be taking his revenge in his newspaper.”

“But what does this article say?” asked M. Barreau. “Who is present that has read it?”

Nobody answered. Several had tried to buy it, but in Paris scandal sells like bread. At ten o’clock in the morning there was not a single copy of the Messenger left in the office. Then it occurred to one of my nieces--a sharp girl, if ever there was one--to look in the pocket of one of the numerous overcoats in the cloak-room, folded carefully in large pigeon-holes. At the first which she examined:

“Here it is!” exclaimed the charming child with an air of triumph, as she drew out a Messenger crumpled in the folding like a paper that has just been read.

“Here is another!” cried Tom Bois l’Hery, who was making a search on his own account. A third overcoat, a third Messenger. And in every one the same thing: pushed down to the bottom of a pocket, or with its titlepage protruding, the newspaper was everywhere, just as its article must have been in every memory; and one could imagine the Nabob up above exchanging polite phrases with his guests, while they could have reeled off by heart the atrocious things that had been printed about him. We all laughed much at this idea; but we were anxious to make acquaintance in our own turn with this curious article.

“Come, pere Passajon, read it aloud to us.”

It was the general desire, and I assented.

I don’t know if you are like me, but when I read aloud I gargle my throat with my voice; I introduce modulations and flourishes to such an extent that I understand nothing of what I am saying, like those singers to whom the sense of the words matters little, provided the notes be true. The thing was entitled “The Boat of Flowers”--a sufficiently complicated story, with Chinese names, about a very rich mandarin, who had at one time in the past kept a “boat of flowers” moored quite at the far end of the town near a barrier frequented by the soldiers. At the end of the article we were not farther on than at the beginning. We tried certainly to wink at each other, to pretend to be clever; but, frankly, we had no reason. A veritable puzzle without solution; and we should still be stuck fast at it if old Francis, a regular rascal who knows everything, had not explained to us that this meeting place of the soldiers must stand for the Military School, and that the “boat of flowers” did not bear so pretty a name as that in good French. And this name, he said it aloud notwithstanding the presence of the ladies. There was an explosion of cries, of “Ah’s!” and “Oh’s!” some saying, “I suspected it!” others, “It is impossible!”