Part 7

He made a negative sign; he would not say.

For once the Irishman felt a genuine impulse of anger. His whole face assumed a cunning, savage expression which would have very much astonished those that only knew the good and loyal Jenkins; but he took good care not to push further an explanation which he feared perhaps as much as he desired it.

“Adieu,” said he, half turning his head on the threshold. “And never apply to us.”

“Never,” replied his stepson in a firm voice.

This time, when the doctor had said to Joey, “Place Vendome,” the horse, as though he had understood that they were going to the Nabob’s, gave a proud shake to his glittering curb-chains, and the brougham set off at full speed, transforming each axle of its wheels into sunshine. “To come so far to get a reception like that! A celebrity of the time to be treated thus by that Bohemian! One may try indeed to do good!” Jenkins gave vent to his anger in a long monologue of this character, then suddenly rousing himself, exclaimed, “Ah, bah!” and what anxiety there was remaining on his brow quickly vanished on the pavement of the Place Vendome. Noon was striking everywhere in the sunshine. Issued forth from behind its curtain of mist, luxurious Paris, awake and on its feet, was commencing its whirling day. The shop-windows of the Rue de la Paix shone brightly. The mansions of the square seemed to be ranging themselves haughtily for the receptions of the afternoon; and, right at the end of the Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries, beneath a fine burst of winter sunshine, raised shivering statues, pink with cold, amid the stripped trees.

A LUNCHEON IN THE PLACE VENDOME

There were scarcely more than a score of persons that morning in the Nabob’s dining-room, a dining-room in carved oak, supplied the previous evening as it were by some great upholsterer, who at the same stroke had furnished these suites of four drawing-rooms of which you caught sight through an open doorway, the hangings on the ceiling, the objects of art, the chandeliers, even the very plate on the sideboards and the servants who were in attendance. It was obviously the kind of interior improvised the moment he was out of the railway-train by a gigantic parvenu in haste to enjoy. Although around the table there was no trace of any feminine presence, no bright frock to enliven it, its aspect was yet not monotonous, thanks to the dissimilarity, the oddness of the guests, people belonging to every section of society, specimens of humanity detached from all races, in France, in Europe, in the entire globe, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. To begin with, the master of the house--a kind of giant, tanned, burned by the sun, saffron-coloured, with head in his shoulders. His nose, which was short and lost in the puffiness of his face, his woolly hair massed like a cap of astrakhan above a low and obstinate forehead, and his bristly eyebrows with eyes like those of an ambushed chapard gave him the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuck, of some frontier savage living by war and rapine. Fortunately the lower part of the face, the fleshy and strong lip which was lightened now and then by a smile adorable in its kindness, quite redeemed, by an expression like that of a St. Vincent de Paul, this fierce ugliness, this physiognomy so original that it was no longer vulgar. An inferior extraction, however, betrayed itself yet again by the voice, the voice of a Rhone waterman, raucous and thick, in which the southern accent became rather uncouth than hard, and by two broad and short hands, hairy at the back, square and nailless fingers which, laid on the whiteness of the table-cloth, spoke of their past with an embarrassing eloquence. Opposite him, on the other side of the table at which he was one of the habitual guests, was seated the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon presenting no resemblance to the painted spectre of whom we had a glimpse in the last chapter. He was now a haughty man of no particular age, fine majestic nose, a lordly bearing, displaying a large shirt-front of immaculate linen crackling beneath the continual effort of the chest to throw itself forward, and bulging itself out each time with a noise like that made by a white turkey when it struts in anger, or by a peacock when he spreads his tail. His name of Monpavon suited him well.

Of great family and of a wealthy stock, but ruined by gambling and speculation, the friendship of the Duc de Mora had secured him an appointment as receiver-general in the first class. Unfortunately his health had not permitted him to retain this handsome position--well-informed people said his health had nothing to do with it--and for the last year he had been living in Paris, awaiting his restoration to health, according to his own account of the matter, before resuming his post. The same people were confident that he would never regain it, and that even were it not for certain exalted influences--However, he was the important personage of the luncheon; that was clear from the manner in which the servants waited upon him, and the Nabob consulted him, calling him “Monsieur le Marquis,” as at the Comedie-Francaise, less almost out of deference than from pride, by reason of the honour which it reflected upon himself. Full of disdain for the people around him, M. le Marquis spoke little, in a very high voice, and as though he were stooping towards those whom he was honouring with his conversation. From time to time he would throw to the Nabob across the table a few words enigmatical for all.

“I saw the duke yesterday. He was talking a great deal about you in connection with that matter. You know, that thing--that business. What was the name of it?”

“You really mean it? He spoke of me to you?” And the good Nabob, quite proud, would look around him with movements of the head that were supremely laughable, or perhaps assume the contemplative air of a devotee who should hear the name of Our Lord pronounced.

“His excellency would have pleasure in seeing you take up the--ps, ps, ps--the thing.”

“He told you so?”

“Ask the governor if he did not--heard it like myself.”

The person who was called the governor--Paganetti, to give him his real name--was a little, expressive man, constantly gesticulating and fatiguing to behold, so many were the different expressions which his face would assume in the course of a single minute. He was managing director of the Territorial Bank of Corsica, a vast financial enterprise, and had now come to the house for the first time, introduced by Monpavon; he occupied accordingly a place of honour. On the other side of the Nabob was an old gentleman, buttoned up to the chin in a frock-coat having a straight collar without lapels, like an Oriental tunic, his face slashed by a thousand little bloodshot veins and wearing a white moustache of military cut. It was Brahim Bey, the most valiant colonel of the Regency of Tunis, aide-de-camp of the former Bey who had made the fortune of Jansoulet. The glorious exploits of this warrior showed themselves written in wrinkles, in blemishes wrought by debauchery upon the nerveless under-lip that hung as it were relaxed, and upon his eyes without lashes, inflamed and red. It was a head such as one may see in the dock at certain criminal trials that are held with closed doors. The other guests were seated pell-mell, just as they had happened to arrive or to find themselves, for the house was open to everybody, and the table was laid every morning for thirty persons.

There were present the manager of the theatre financed by the Nabob, Cardailhac, renowned for his wit almost as much as for his insolvencies, a marvellous carver who, while he was engaged in severing the limbs of a partridge, would prepare one of his witticisms and deposit it with a wing upon the plate which was presented to him. He worked up his witticisms instead of improvising them, and the new fashion of serving meats, a la Russe and carved beforehand, had been fatal to him by its removal of all excuse for a preparatory silence. Consequently it was the general remark that his vogue was on the decline. Parisian, moreover, a dandy to the finger tips, and, as he himself was wont to boast, “with not one particle of superstition in his whole body,” a characteristic which permitted him to give very piquant details concerning the ladies of his theatre to Brahim Bey--who listened to him as one turns over the pages of a naughty book--and to talk theology to the young priest who was his nearest neighbour, a curate of some little southern village, lean and with a complexion sunburnt till it matched the cloth of his cassock in colour, with fiery patches above the cheek-bones, and the pointed, forward-pushing nose of the ambitious man, who would remark to Cardailhac very loudly, in a tone of protection and sacerdotal authority:

“We are quite pleased with M. Guizot. He is doing very well--very well. It is a conquest for the Church.”

Seated next this pontiff, with a black neck-band, old Schwalbach, the famous picture-dealer, displayed his prophet’s beard, tawny in places like a dirty fleece, his three overcoats tinged by mildew, all that loose and negligent attire for which he was excused in the name of art, and because, in a time when the mania for picture galleries had already begun to cause millions to change hands, it was the proper thing to entertain the man who was the best placed for the conduct of these absurdly vain transactions. Schwalbach did not speak, contenting himself with gazing around him through his enormous monocle, shaped like a hand magnifying-glass, and with smiling in his beard over the singular neighbours made by this unique assembly. Thus it happened that M. de Monpavon had quite close to him--and it was a sight to watch how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at each glance in that direction--the singer Garrigou, a fellow-countryman of Jansoulet, a distinguished ventriloquist who sang Figaro in the dialect of the south, and had no equal in his imitations of animals. Just beyond, Cabassu, another compatriot, a little short and dumpy man, with the neck of a bull and the biceps of a statue by Michel Angelo, who suggested at once a Marseilles hairdresser and the strong man at a fair, a masseur, pedicure, manicure, and something of a dentist, sat with elbows on the table with the coolness of a charlatan whom one receives in the morning and knows the little infirmities, the intimate distresses of the abode in which he chances to find himself. M. Bompain completed this array of subordinates, all alike in one respect at any rate, Bompain, the secretary, the steward, the confidential agent, through whose hands the entire business of the house passed; and it sufficed to observe that solemnly stupid attitude, that indefinite manner, the Turkish fez placed awkwardly on a head suggestive of a village school-master, in order to understand to what manner of people interests like those of the Nabob had been abandoned.

Finally, to fill the gaps among these figures I have sketched, the Turkish crowd--Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled with this exotic element, a whole variegated Parisian Bohemia of ruined nobleman, doubtful traders, penniless journalists, inventors of strange products, people arrived from the south without a farthing, all the lost ships needing revictualling, or flocks of birds wandering aimlessly in the night, which were drawn by this great fortune as by the light of a beacon. The Nabob admitted this miscellaneous collection of individuals to his table out of kindness, out of generosity, out of weakness, by reason of his easy-going manners, joined to an absolute ignorance and a survival of that loneliness of the exile, of that need for expansion which, down yonder in Tunis, in his splendid palace of the Bardo, had caused him to welcome everybody who hailed from France, from the small tradesman exporting Parisian wares to the famous pianist on tour and the consul-general himself.

As one listened to those various accents, those foreign intonations, gruff or faltering, as one gazed upon those widely different physiognomies, some violent, barbarous, vulgar, others hyper-civilized, worn, suggestive only of the Boulevard and as it were flaccid, one noted that the same diversity was evident also among the servants who, some apparently lads just out of an office, insolent in manner, with heads of hair like a dentist’s or a bath-attendant’s, busied themselves among Ethiopians standing motionless and shining like candelabra of black marble, and it was impossible to say exactly where one was; in any case, you would never have imagined yourself to be in the Place Vendome, right in the beating heart and very centre of the life of our modern Paris. Upon the table there was a like importation of exotic dishes, saffron or anchovy sauces, spices mixed up with Turkish delicacies, chickens with fried almonds, and all this taken together with the banality of the interior, the gilding of the panels, the shrill ringing of the new bells, gave the impression of a table d’hote in some big hotel in Smyrna or Calcutta, or of a luxurious dining-saloon on board a transatlantic liner, the “Pereire” or the “Sinai.”

It might seem that this diversity among the guests--I was about to say among the passengers--ought to have caused the meal to be animated and noisy. Far otherwise. They all ate nervously, watching each other out of eye-corners, and even those most accustomed to society, those who appeared the most at their ease, had in their glance the wandering look and the distraction of a fixed idea, a feverish anxiety which caused them to speak without relevance and to listen without understanding a word of what was being said to them.

Suddenly the door of the dining-room opened.

“Ah, here comes Jenkins!” exclaimed the Nabob delightedly. “Welcome, welcome, doctor. How are you, my friend?”

A smile to those around, a hearty shake of his host’s hand, and Jenkins sat down opposite him, next to Monpavon, before a place at the table which a servant had just prepared in all haste and without having received any order, exactly as at a table d’hote. Among those preoccupied and feverish faces, this one at any rate stood out in contrast by its good humour, its cheerfulness, and that loquacious and flattering benevolence which makes the Irish in a way the Gascons of England. And what a splendid appetite! With what heartiness, what ease of conscience he used his white teeth as he talked!

“Well, Jansoulet, you have read it?”

“What?”

“How, then! you do not know? You have not read what the Messenger says about you this morning?”

Beneath the dark tan of his cheeks the Nabob blushed like a child, and, his eyes shining with pleasure:

“Is it possible--the Messenger has spoken of me?”