Chapter XIV

 

 

The effort he had just made, the energy he had expended, seemed, like a flash of lightning, to tear through the darkness that enveloped him momentarily: he had an exact consciousness of the situation.

Is it possible, he thought, as he paced back and forth outside the copyist’s door, that a man of my worth and my intelligence, by the sole fact of being unexpectedly deprived of money and a domicile, can be reduced at a stroke to dying of hunger? Is it possible that a being, until then of exemplary morality, by virtue of a logical and fatal series of adventures, has consented to play the role that I have played?

Is it possible, again, that after so much misery and emotion, I’m not ill or mad?

The half-hour chimed on the clock of Saint-Eustache. He climbed up four floors and stopped in front of a door on which he read, in impeccable longhand: Aristide Lampe, copies in all genres. Enter without knocking.

He opened the door and found himself in a large room where tables of blackened wood, with piles of Bottins and papers, porcelain inkwells and various accessories, were lined up methodically in two rows. A voice emerged from a large desk situated in a well-illuminated corner.

“Who’s there?”

“The person sent by Monsieur Raphael.”

“Ah! Good, come in.” A little old man, thin and hyperbolically bearded, his head ornamented by a Greek bonnet and his sleeves covered in lustrine, considered him from head to toe in a cavalier fashion.

“What can you do?” he asked, in a bantering tone.

“Anything you wish to confide to me in the manner of handwriting.”

“Anything I wish! That might be saying a lot.”

“Would you care to try me, Monsieur?”

“I should think so. Many who pretend to know everything know nothing. You have some suspicion of what an address is? I don’t demand perfection, but have you even the slightest idea, the slightest suspicion?”

“I think so,”

“You think so! We’ll see. Most people who have sent letters to their parents or girls of their acquaintance imagine that they know how to write a subscription, the cretins! If you put them to the test they present you with something formless, devoid of order, clarity, elegance and style. Well, me, purely by the organization of an envelope I can appreciate and judge the true value of a man. I’m not a graphologist, mind—graphology is a fraud, since it’s sufficient to have the vaguest notions to make a mockery all the experts, and I, Lampe, a mere entrepreneur of copies, guarantee that I can imitate any handwriting and cover all their assertions with ridicule.”

He writhed in his armchair with shrill laughter, as if he had just carried out his threat and was enjoying his triumph.

“Certainly, I’m no graphologist,” he suddenly went on, with a kind of anger, as if to reject an imaginary accusation, and added sententiously: “but show me how you write a address and I’ll tell you who you are, what you’ve been worth, what you’re worth now and what you’ll be worth in future.”

He changed his tone. “Take an envelope and prepare to write.” The patient did as he was ordered. “Here you are: Monsieur Aristide Lampe, entrepreneur of copies in all genres, 122 Rue des Petits-Carreaux, Paris, Seine, France.” The pretentious gnome added: “Everyone knows that Paris is in the département of the Seine and that the Seine is a département of France. If I’m dictating superfluous things, unnecessary in practice, it’s because I need it in order to judge you on a complete address. You’ve finished?”

Charles Balin passed him the envelope.

“Has ha! Ha ha!” coughed the exclamatory minuscule individual. “Not bad: there’s order, firmness, correction; no general conception, of course, no flight, no artistic sense; the good little writing of a modest man, with no energy, down to earth, incapable of a brilliant or audacious action; the downstrokes of a heavy, materialistic mind, a sybarite; a hint of eccentricity but no imagination; apart from that, qualities, usage, above all, enormous usage. You’ve written a great deal in your lifetime. Wait, don’t enlighten me, I’m not asking you anything—I want to have the merit of the discovery.”

Père Lampe picked p the envelope again, looked several times at his future employee, absorbed himself in a profound meditation, and then suddenly slapped is forehead.

“Eureka!” he cried, like Archimedes. “You’re either a former clerk in the customs service, or a former employee of the State. Ha!”

Charles Balin in a state of legitimate defense against human stupidity, simulated a comical astonishment. “How the devil did you divine that?” he murmured.

“I’m never mistaken,” declared Monsieur Lampe, radiantly. “So you are?”

“A former customs clerk.”

“So you have a retirement pension that permits you to live.”

“Oh, very little, Monsieur.”

“Yes, I understand that you need little supplementary resources, to found a few pleasures. You’re a bachelor, are you not?” He winked and hummed a popular tune: Que c’est gentil les p’tites femmes.

“Don’t contradict him in anything,” the young man had advised. The petitioner sketched a smile of approval.

“So you want to work for me. Well, these are my conditions: you’ll write addresses for prospectuses at a rate of seventy-five centimes a thousand for Paris, a franc for the provinces, one franc twenty-five for other countries. I pay on Saturday.”

“I will, however, need a small advance at the end of the day, if only a few sous.”

“We’ll see about that. But come a little closer, and bend down.”

The entrepreneur of copies raised himself up in his armchair, sniffed him like a dog and uttered an exclamation of disgust. “You reek of alcohol, you know. Take this as read: I don’t tolerate drunkenness in the studio; at the first sign of intoxicated handwriting, I’ll sack you.”

“You can see, Monsieur, you who have just proven your astonishing perspicacity, that I don’t have the appearance of a drunkard. In any case, look: no sign of an alcoholic tremor.” He held out his two hands.

“Why are you doing that?” asked the old ape.

“Because if I had the habit of drinking, my hands would start to tremble.”

“You think so? Let’s see.” He tried to do the same; his hands were agitated characteristically. He withdrew them rapidly. “All that’s nonsense that physicians say,” he growled. “Let’s pass on to serious matters. If you accept my conditions, here’s your place.”

He sat down. Eight o’clock chimed. Three other employees, including the young man from the previous evening, came into the studio and came to occupy their desks after a silent salutation. Père Lampe distributed the work, gave a few instructions, and soon, nothing could any longer be heard but the scratching of pens and the rustle of paper.

No one said a word. Maître Lampe walked back and forth, looking over the shoulders of his scribes like a schoolmaster.

“Above all, Messieurs,” he suddenly exclaimed, “I recommend you to silence.” He went on, in a slow and monotonous voice, as if dictating an imposition: “A copyist, if one speaks to him aside, is likely to commit errors, to mistake one word for another, to neglect his work. It’s time and paper that one wastes, it’s a loss that he inflicts on his employer and himself.”

The newcomer, momentarily distracted by the attention he ought to pay to those words, swiftly resumed work.

The door slowly opened, and a frightfully pale man, a lamentable apparition of an emaciated Christ, appeared on the threshold, timidly.

“Ah, there you are, Monsieur Benoit!” cried the employer. “Very sorry, my dear Monsieur; you haven’t come for five days, and as you can see, your place is taken!”

The poor devil, with tears in his eyes, considered the occupied place sadly.

“I sent word that I was ill, Monsieur,” he sighed.

“It’s precisely for that reason that I’ve replaced you. Is it my fault if you’re ill? Ought my work to suffer? You’re ill, my friend, go take care of yourself. When you’re completely cured, come back. I’ll give you work...if I have any to give you.”

The unfortunate bowed and disappeared, closing the door discreetly. Charles Balin felt his heart gripped. So he had taken the place of that poor fellow! The struggle for existence, pitilessly cruel, required that the bread he was going to eat should be snatched from some other mouth!

Behind that man who had just appeared to him there might perhaps be a wife and children who no longer had anything to eat.

Raphael, his neighbor facing, passed him a piece of paper with a few words written in haste: If it hadn’t been you, he read, it would have been someone else. Charles Balin thanked him with a nod of the head.

“Above all, Messieurs, I recommend you to silence,” Maître Lampe repeated.

A smile from the young man seemed to say to him: Pay no attention; it’s a mania.

“Silence,” the entrepreneur of copies continued, “is indispensable in a place where one is writing. The slightest distraction might have the most unfortunate consequences. One has seen wills broken, lawsuits engaged, fortunes lost for a misplaced comma.”

He had stopped behind one of his pen-pushers, a middle-aged man who looked like an old soldier.

“Ah!” Explain to me, I beg you, why the devil you persist in underlining the word Paris in your addresses?”

“But yesterday, Monsieur, you instructed me to do it.”

“Yesterday, yes, because the prospectuses you were doing were to be distributed by post and it was, in consequence, necessary to call the attention of that administration’s employees to the proper name and the city. But today, haven’t I told you that these addresses are to be distributed to domiciles by a porter?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

“And you have not divined that it is, in consequence, unnecessary to waste your time and my ink underlining the word Paris. Have you not understood that it would be much simpler and quicker to put the initials E.V., which signify En Ville? You therefore never show a little initiative? It’s necessary to tell you everything, explain everything?”

The bewildered employee kept quiet.

“Above all, Messieurs, I recommend you to silence,” the maniac added, by way of conclusion.

After several hours of work in which the accomplice of Guilleri¹⁸ never ceased chattering, knocking over piles of books, thumping chairs and shifting tables in order to make sure that they were stable, a curt tap on the desk announced the lunch break.

“Have you the habit of frequenting a restaurant?” Raphael asked him, as they went downstairs. On his negative response, the young man proposed an advantageous creamery in the vicinity.

“I only have eight sous,” he confessed.”

“For that you can have a set meal. Anyway, don’t worry about that—I’ll be able to get you credit.”

“That’s all the more obliging as you scarcely know me.”

“I know you well enough to know that I’m not risking anything by doing it.”

He thanked him cordially.

“Do you think,” he added, “that the little man will give me something on account this evening?”

“Yes, if you ask him for it in order to buy lustrine sleeves. I’ll lend you a pair tomorrow.”

“You’re my good angel.”

“Père Lampe,” Raphael continued, “only allows himself to be softened by one pretext—lustrine sleeves—and only tolerates one weakness, “little women.” When I say little, it’s a manner of speaking, for the women he decorates with that dainty qualification are always veritable monuments.”

“The law of contrasts.”

“He only understands lust in a massive form; it’s not rare to encounter him, around midnight, in the process of gravitating in the orbit of some Callipygian Venus. If you ever happen to arrive at the studio late, for whatever reason, allow him to believe that you were delayed in some alcove in a furnished house.”

While they took their meager repast, the amiable your man brought him up to date with the eccentricities and caprices to which he would be obliged to submit.

“You passed the examination?” he asked, laughing. “You didn’t deny the divination, at least?”

“Thanks to your recommendation, I carefully refrained.”

“And you did well; he would have held it against you. Anyway, you must have pleased him—he hasn’t covered you with the sarcasms that he hardly ever spares newcomers. Now, if you’re armed with patience and you intend to stay with him for a few months while waiting for something better, don’t forget what I’m about to tell you: he only admits that one earns two or three francs a day, so never do more than three thousand addresses. He always dismisses those that surpass that number on some pretext or other; his standard reason is that work too rapidly done is always poorly done. It’s thanks to that observation that I’ve been able to keep the job.”

“I note, and have already noted several times, that you have a veritable gift for observation.”

“Since my earliest childhood, Monsieur, I’ve been obliged to earn my living—one quickly acquires experience in that game.”

“You’re an orphan?”

“Worse than that, alas—I’m a poor bastard.”

“Many people who were the honor of their nation have been in the same situation. Anyway, we no longer have the same prejudices today as of old.”

“Do you think there were as many prejudices as that, in olden days? Then, as now, poverty was much more culpable than vice; the bastards of great houses never had any cause for complaint.”

“You’re educated, I can see.”

“Not as much as I’d like; I have so little time. By day I copy addresses; by night I perform minor roles at the Théâtre du Châtelet.”

“You act at the Châtelet? How much do you get for that?”

“Two francs a night. Would you like to follow my example?”

“It’s an anonymous situation I’d accept without reluctance.”

“With a small lie it should be easy. You have one of those faces before which one remains indecisive as to whether it’s the face of a physician, a priest or an actor. Be a former actor—you’ve come back from abroad, you’re in difficulty; I’ll answer for the rest.”

“You’re a veritable providence for me!”

“Something great and mysterious that envelops you draws me to you: you must be good, you must be indulgent.”

“Raphael,” proclaimed Charles Balin, greatly impressed by that divination, “you ought to have been born in an epoch and a land where seers were honored.”

“That’s true,” murmured Raphael. “I sometimes have the fatal gift of reading the thoughts of others; I must be near death.”

“I know that you’re ill!” exclaimed Charles Balin, forcefully. “I was once a renowned healer; I shall care for you, and save you!”

“No, let me die. It’s necessary that I die. Only death can wash away the stain.”

He did not reflect then upon the infinite sadness with which his young companion pronounce those words, or perhaps put them down to his disreputable origin.

 

The very next day, thanks to his new friend, the apprentice copyist made his debut in a non-speaking part in La Princesse au coeur de verre, a spectacular fantasy play, which, defying the dog days, attracted the provinces to the Châtelet. He was thus, by turns, a guard, a genie, a statue, a big head, a eunuch in a seraglio, a melon in the realm of the vegetables, a great lord of the court, a village peasant, a scullion in a hostelry, a vase in the realm of porcelain, a ferocious beast in the depths of a wood, a dragon at the entrance of a cavern, an ophicleide in the Temple of Harmony, a demon in Hell and a marine monster in Neptune’s court. The lie that Raphael had told also brought him an unexpected windfall; in his capacity as a former actor a few lines were confided to him, which he delivered marvelously.

He found himself singularly at ease in that new situation; he had the bizarre impression that it was really his place and that he had never done anything else throughout his life.

After a few days he had earned three francs and the theater and two francs fifty at the copyist’s. Half of that sum allowed him to live, the other was religiously set aside. His first priority was to recover his trunk.

A month later, he found himself in possession of a fortune: ninety francs! He rapidly consecrated them to ridding himself of the odious check suit, buying a suit in black cheviot, a hat etc. He was just in time! The Châtelet, preparing its winter spectacle, had dismissed the supplementary personnel and Maître Lampe, perhaps confused by that transformation, which gave his subordinate an aristocratic allure, or vaguely aware of his superiority, had taken a dislike to him and was giving evidence of an angry humor. Raphael, familiar with the Lilliputian’s habits, warned his friend to employ his hours of liberty seeking other employment.

As they were going past a music publisher’s shop one evening, Charles Balin stopped to look at the new publications.

“Are you by chance a musician?” Raphael asked him.

“Well, I was once an appreciated pianist.”

“What!” exclaimed the young man, delightedly. “And you didn’t say anything? What were you thinking? You play the piano! But in your situation, that’s a veritable lifebelt! Quickly, follow me.”

The young man immediately took him to a Montmartre dive whose accompanist he knew. The musician, an obliging fellow, sat Monsieur Charles down at the keyboard, made him decipher and then accompany two or three songs, asked him whether he had any notions of harmony, and seemed delighted with the trial.

“My dear colleague,” he affirmed, “with the talent that you have, you can present yourself without dread anywhere. Here’s my card. Go to ***, the well-known lyrical agent; he’ll have you fixed up in no time.

Charles Balin left, penetrated with gratitude for his young friend, whose fertile and resourceful mind had come so powerfully to his aid. He expressed his affectionate sentiments, but Raphael brushed his gratitude aside.

“You’re not reasonable,” he proclaimed, laughing. “You could occupy a position a hundred times preferable to the one that renders us slaves of that malevolent dwarf, and you hide your talent. Why haven’t you thought of taking advantage of it?”

“To tell you the truth, my lack of initiative is a subject of perpetual surprise to myself. Perhaps I’ve been stunned by the unexpected event that plunged me into poverty. But now, thanks to you, it seems to me that the veil will soon be torn.”

The two friends had finally found a relatively well-paid position in the administration of a daily newspaper in the process of foundation. They still had a week before them, in which they set about doing four or five thousand addresses per day. The dwarf, outraged by that sudden augmentation, could not master his wrath.

One could not do such a great number of addresses without carelessness; the handwriting was no longer legible; his porters had returned some of them, which they could not decipher; his clients had made him reproaches; quantity was only obtained at the expense of quality; who embraces too much grips poorly; everything comes to him who waits; the pitcher that goes oftenest to the well…the entire book of proverbs passed his lips. The two copyists, attained by an incurable deafness, continued to achieve a fabulous production.

On the last Saturday in September, while Maître Lampe, who had just paid them, grumbling, indulged himself in hand-rubbings and lip-pursings preliminary to some insolent formula of dismissal, Charles Balin interrupted him just as he was about to open his mouth.

“Permit me, Monsieur,” he said, “to recognize the welcome that you have been kind enough to give us, but having, along with Raphael, found a much more advantageous situation, we are in the fortunate necessity of quitting this studio—of which, believe me, we shall retain a tenacious memory.”

“Good, good,” grunted the dwarf, full of rage. “Don’t play the clown with your priestly humbug and get out.” He had second thoughts. “Tell me, child,” he insinuated, addressing Raphael, “is it in the land of the Hebrews that you’ve found a place?”

“The Jews are less hard than you are on the unfortunate,” replied the young man, sharply.

“Especially those of Sodom,” sniggered the entrepreneur of copies.

“Wretch!” exclaimed Charles Balin, beside himself at the enormity of the insult. He pounced on the copyist, took him by the collar and shook him like a rag. The other employees, utterly enchanted by the adventure, intervened for form’s sake.

“Go fetch the police!” howled the little old man.

Raphael dragged his defender away. “In the name of Heaven, let’s get out of here,” he murmured. “The man’s malevolent; he’ll make a complaint and have us arrested.”

They walked for some time without saying anything. When they arrived on the quais they slowed down.

“Could I support such an insult to you and to me?” exclaimed Charles Balin. “The wretch! I regret not having slapped him; his calumny is the greatest insult one can throw in a man’s face.”

Raphael bowed his head. He was weeping.

A dolorous suspicion crossed his companion’s mind. Nothing, however, in the bearing, the gaze or the appearance of the young man could authorize such a supposition. His slightly effeminate mannerisms could legitimately be attributed to his delicate health. He was a good judge; his medical functions and expertise had put him in the presence of vile degenerates who parodied amour. However, allusions and sniggers that he had overheard while they were appearing at the Châtelet, vague insinuations made one day when they were soliciting employment at one of the great Parisian hotels, Raphael’s profound sadness, and his inexplicable refusal to go to certain places suddenly came back to his mind. He took the young man by the arm and looked at him fixedly.

“Well, yes, it’s true, or at least, it was true,” the unfortunate confessed. “At ten years old, left to myself, forced by poverty to suffer corrupt companionship and promiscuities, a wretched procurer drew me into the vice. I went into a shady establishment as an errand-boy, where I was skillfully delivered as pasture to ignoble lubricities. As soon as I was really capable of judging and understanding, I wanted to get out, to become an honest man, but in the ten years I’ve been struggling to erase the stain, all my efforts have been vain. Just as I think it’s disappeared, some passer-by, a stranger, perhaps a companion of hazard or debauchery darts a comment or a glance at me that kills me. You understand, now, why life becomes more odious to me every day, and why I want so much to die!”

After a pause, he went on: “I sense, I know that it’s necessary for us to part forever. Don’t hold it against me too much for having hidden the odious, infamous truth from you; I had so much need for a little amity and esteem; I divined in you a mind so indulgent, so just, and so elevated that I put off the painful moment of confession for as long as I could—but if hazard and malevolence had not put you on the track, I swear to you that, considering it a duty, I would not have taken long to tell you my dire and lamentable story. You bear on your forehead the mark of some unusual adventure that separates you forever from other men; you’re the only one from whom I would dare demand aid and pardon.”

“Wretch! Wretch!” murmured Charles Balin. “Raphael” he exclaimed, suddenly, “would you really like to become a man?”

“Can you doubt it? Have I given you the slightest reason for suspicion in my conduct, my words or my actions?”

“Then this is what you must do. You’ve told me that you have some savings and that you speak a little English. Flee these places where the past weighs so heavily upon your existence, where the streets know your shame and the roofs have sheltered your infamy; change your name and face. If someone seeks to recognize you, boldly spit in his face and tell him that he’s a liar. You’re not solely responsible for your corruption; society owes you a reparation, and your intelligence will be able to attain it. Go to England, or America, or the end of the world, wherever you wish, but please don’t stay here for another moment. You deserve to live. Give me your hand; I hold your efforts in esteem, and it’s purely in your interests that I speak.”

Raphael had wiped away his tears; his eyes where shining with resolution.

“Thank you for your kind words,” he said. “It seems to me that they have suddenly cured the disease that was eating me away. Thanks you too for the lessons and advice that you’ve given me, the cares you’ve lavished on me, the friendship with which you’ve honored me. Thank you above all for that pardon, which rehabilitates and redeems me. I owe you everything: life, honor, perhaps glory. Tomorrow, I swear to you, I shall no longer be in Paris.”

He watched him flee in the direction of his dwelling.

Poor child! he thought. Placed in normal conditions, with his intelligence, his natural distinction and his extreme sensibility, he might have aspired to anything.

Then he glimpsed the dubious situation that that acquaintance had created for him. He had had a keen amity for the young man; they had lived side by side; that promiscuity might be interpreted in a malevolent fashion.

Were all the events of his new existence, even the simplest and most innocent, to serve to accentuate his fall? It was thanks to Mariette, and thanks to Raphael, that he had begun to emerge from oblivion; was it fated that all aid, all assistance, would come to him from an impure source? Could the man who had put himself outside society no longer be accepted, except by those whom society had cast out? Why was it necessary for his projects to be thwarted by the repugnances of old? Struck by the marvelous aptitudes of his young friend, penetrated with gratitude for the services he had never ceased to render him, he had resolved to educate him, to arm him for the struggle, to make a precious auxiliary of him who would have aided him in his task, and now an imperious necessity had separated them!

A storm that was building extended its heavy shroud of cloud over Paris. A long rumble of thunder resounded in the air. He lifted a menacing fist toward the sky; it seemed to him that Destiny was laughing at his vain efforts.

 

Chapter XV

 

 

Charles Balin had not forgotten Mariette, or the debt of honor contracted in her regard. If he had been slow in acquitting it, it was because he wanted to do it in a good and generous fashion; he estimated that an initial settlement of a hundred and fifty or two hundred francs, at least, was necessary. On the other hand, putting all sentimentality aside and sure of his intentions, he had told himself that before thinking about that largesse, he ought to be in a reasonable situation to make it.

His new position was infinitely preferable to the miserable employment he had recently occupied. He earned a hundred and fifty francs a month, the work was easy—he sent the paper to subscribers after having wrapped it—the conditions were agreeable and his relationship with his employer imprinted with urbanity. In addition, the lyrical agent to whom the Montmartre musician had recommended him had found him a few odd jobs and, finally, had sent him as an accompanist to a modest café concert in the Montparnasse quarter. That was another four francs a day to augment his budget.

After the martyrdom of the Béguinard school and the annoying eccentricities of the entrepreneur of copies, and above all after the apprehensions of his black distress, he experienced the joy of navigators who, having been tossed by interminable tempests, deprived of food and fresh water, end up landing on an enchanted island. A month of calm and repose, a more abundant and healthier nourishment, concerns of toilette whose privation had been very painful for him, soon rendered him a measure of composure. Numerous resources, of which that situation was the larva, of which the kind of torpor into which he had suddenly been suddenly plunged had prevented him from thinking, presented themselves to his mind. His bibliographical knowledge would permit him to earn a few sous dealing in books; he could undertake scientific or literary research for authors, orchestrate songs for the artistes he accompanied, etc., etc...

Did he not have the decent attire and the few advances indispensable to attempt approaches successfully? He hastened to rent a mansard in the Rue Vavin, buy a few items of furniture on easy terms, and on the eighth on November 18**, a little more than six months after Dr. Albin’s funeral, Charles Balin lay down for the first time in a bed that was really his own.

It was a great and veritable joy, rapidly shadowed by bitter reflections. The fine success had arrived, after many privations, of sleeping in a narrow iron-framed bed for which he had not yet finished paying. How far away he was from his goal! He had scarcely had time to think about it vaguely; would he ever contrive to attain it?

He turned his attention backwards. A letter that had arrived a few days before from London had informed him that Raphael, employed by a major commercial company, was about to depart for India.

And Mariette? It was time to think about her. He could see her again with his head held high. But was he not going to find her still in the company of the accursed waiter? What did it matter? He had to fulfill the obligations that the pity of the prostitutes had created, and it was all the more urgent because his job as an accompanist in a low-level café concert might put him in the presence of one of them any day. He therefore put aside savings with that objective, and, soon finding himself in a position to do things honorably, set out in search of the poor registered prostitute.

At the Hôtel de la Dordogne et du Calvados he was told that Mariette had left the house four months before.

“She must still be in the country,” the clerk told him in a mocking tone. He was not sufficiently acquainted with argot to understand the precise significance of the words.

Apart from the furnished lodging-house there were two places where he might find her: the Brasserie de l’Avenir or the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre. He went back down toward the grand boulevards. It was Saturday; his Sunday morning was free, he could be up late without being inconvenienced.

He wandered the sidewalks that had witnessed his rude ordeal with the sensation of wellbeing that a convalescent experiences who has just escaped death. The street was more animated than usual; the cafes, wine merchants, patisseries and charcuteries were overflowing with clients. Bands of partygoers were coming back noisily from Montmartre, while artistes and journalists, their tasks accomplished, were returning to the heights at a rapid pace. Newsvendors were deafening the passers-by, trying to get rid of their last few copies, while the street-vendors, having become hoarse, had run out of patter.

A hubbub suddenly rose up. Idlers and curious passers-by ran toward a brawl, where two women thrown out of an establishment were tearing at one another’s hair, to the great joy of the coachmen stationed outside the doors. Other whores were coming and going, running after belated pedestrians and grabbing the arms of night-prowlers. He recognized one of them and went over to her.

Lucie Pognon, enticed by the sight of the well-dressed man with the distinguished air and gray beard, who was coming toward her of his own accord, whispered the most seductive promises.

“You don’t recognize me, then?” said the unknown man.

“Wait a minute—yes, I think so! You’ve been with me before! Oh, the old rogue, it’s you who...”

He interrupted her swiftly. “”That’s not it. I’m the man to whom you were obliging enough to lend assistance over there on the bench, about three and a half months ago.”

“Impossible!” cried the stupefied prostitute. “In fact, I recognize you now. There’s a surprise! How well-dressed you are, and how good you look! You’ve made a fortune, then?”

“Not yet, but I’m in a less precarious situation, and if you’ll permit me, Mademoiselle, to offer you a little present in memory of the service you rendered me, I’d be very obliged to you.” He slipped a louis into her hand.

“Twenty francs,” observed the whore, overjoyed. “Twenty bullets for the ten sours I put in the kitty—one can say that that was money well-invested. That’s marvelous. Well, Mariette was right, you’re a worthy, honest man.

“You weren’t alone that evening in coming to my aid.”

“No, there was also Nini Nichon.”

“Is she here?”

“Hey Nini! Where’s Nichon?”

Without exactly being a sylphide, the enormous blonde had rapidity.

“Here I am. What is it? Does Monsieur want two women all to himself? Judge and you’ll know—with me there’s no robbery. No tricks, you can see that, I bought them at Bon-Marché. ‘We have them for all tastes, in metal wire, in rubber.’”

“You’re drunk again,” Lucie interrupted, dryly. “You obviously don’t recognize Monsieur.”

“Yes, I recognize him,” said the stout Nichon, without even looking. “He’s the Monsieur from the other night who...”

The tall Lucie put her hand over her mouth. “No blather, you stupid lummox, and look hard—he’s a mate. I’ll bet you a glass you don’t recognize him. Ah, you see, you’re flummoxed.” She whispered a few words in her ear.

“My God, it’s true!” exclaimed Nini Nichon. “Who’d have thought it? But he’s up and running now, damn it!”

Charles Balin, in a hurry to cut the conversation short, slipped another louis into the hand of the buxom chatterbox with the same politeness. She squealed in delighted surprise, hid in the corner of a coaching entrance, lifted up her skirt and hastily stuffed the gold coin into her stocking.

“Now,” he said, “I’d like to see Mariette.”

“Mariette!” interjected the two women. “You don’t know, then?”

He had a sentiment of anxiety whose violence surprised him.

“I don’t know anything,” he murmured. “Has something happened to her?”

“She’s in Saint-Lazare.”

“Ill?”

“In prison.”

“Because of you,” added Nini Nichon.

“Because of me?”

“A little, my lad. She bashed Émile, the waiter, the redhead’s lover.”

“She killed him?”

“No, but she smashed a tankard in his face. We were all witnesses, big Lucie, Valentine and me.”

Charles Balin uttered a sigh of satisfaction. It was evidently just a matter of a tavern brawl, but he was interested to know all the details. His name might have been pronounced in court; he had to know what the situation was.

He offered to buy the two women a drink, provided that it was not at the Avenir.

Lucie Pognon refused; Git-le-Coeur was intractable on Saturday; it was pay day and, as in the administration of the cab company, he demanded higher fees at certain times and in certain circumstances, and she wanted to buy a dress with the twenty francs that had fallen from heaven, it was necessary for her to work.

Nini Nichon, to whom the offer of a drink was never indifferent, hastened to accept. She took him to the Clair de Lune, a dive that she called a night restaurant, but where it was nevertheless necessary to have the password to be admitted.

The hovel was worse than the Avenir, but it was too late to retreat and his companion, on familiar ground, hastened to order two well-garnished sauerkrauts.

“I’m not eating,” he objected, timidly. “Only order one.”

“Bah! I’ll eat them both,” affirmed his guest, with a coarse laugh.

He was in haste to be brought up to date.

“You remember,” she told him, addressing him as tu like a comrade, “the morning when you were unloading cabbages at Les Halles—so Mariette said, because I didn’t see anything. Well, the evening of that day, she came back to the Avenir and she wasn’t in a good mood, I can tell you, because she hadn’t made anything all evening and someone had taken, or she’d lost, all her money.

“Valentine—you know, Émile’s redhead, who’d vexed her the night before—started teasing her again because of you. She said—and how she said it!—that you were an old good-for-nothing, that you were out of prison, that you wanted to have yourself kept by the girls, that she’d been stupid to pay you a louis, etc. etc. She gave her a clout, and what a clout!

“We separated them, and nothing would have come of it if Émile hadn’t arrived. When Valentine, who’s a coward, had her lover beside her, she started coming out with horrors again on your account, and Émile pitched in even harder. Well, if you’d seen Mariette! She was whiter than that napkin! Me, who knows her and heard her grinding her teeth, I thought to myself: something bad’s going to happen here. ‘Hey,’ she finished up saying to Émile, ‘leave me in peace—you’re a liar, a dirty nark, and the thief is you!’ The other tried to raise his hand, but he hadn’t made the move when he got the beer-glass in his face and was bleeding like an ox.

“You can imagine that that caused a stink! The police came, they took them to the station. Perhaps nothing would still have come of it, but Mariette started calling Émile a nark again—for her, who isn’t stupid, that wasn’t very clever. In a police station, calling someone an informer burns the ears.

“The brigadier, offended, said she was insulting the police. She replied to that, because she doesn’t like the agents, because her father was put in front of a firing squad during the Commune. Then they arrested her; she was brought up in the police court: assault and battery, insults to the authority, the whole shebang; and she was sent down for four months.”

“Poor Mariette! It’s me who caused her that misfortune,” sighed Charles Balin.

“You can believe it! I don’t know why, perhaps you have hidden talents, but she really thought a lot of you. Look, the evening when she threw the glass of brandy in your face, you’d scarcely gone out when she regretted it and started to cry. Then we went to get a bite in Les Halles—well, it was because of you. You’ll understand that I couldn’t let her drink alone!” Laughing loudly, she added: “Me, I never miss an opportunity. Waiter! Another half.”

“You were a witness in the affair you said. Was my name mentioned in court?”

“Had to be! Émile said you were a crook, Mariette replied that it wasn’t true, that’s all.”

“Was my name pronounced?”

“I don’t remember. All I know is that Mariette hasn’t spilled the beans—you can be sure of that.”

“What! You still believe the waiter’s accusations?”

“Me? What does it have to do with me? I don’t care. It seems to me, though, that if you really were a thief, you wouldn’t have given me twenty francs, unless...” She lowered her voice and winked. “Unless you’d pulled off a big coup.”

Charles Balin shuddered with shame.

“Oh, you know, with me, nothing to fear. Look, motus,” she said, clicking her teeth with her thumbnail.

He tried to protest his innocence.

“Motus, motus,” repeated the stout whore. “After all,” she added, cynically, “perhaps you’re an honest man, but for me, you see, the most honest man is the one who pays me the most.”

A surge of disgust nauseated him—and yet that vile prostitute had given her obol to save his life!

He remained plunged in humiliating reflections, and quickly reverted to the less filthy memory or Mariette. Why had he not made enquiries earlier? He would have been able to soften the rigors of prison, return to her then, in a more opportune fashion, the service that he owed her. Why had he thought of himself first? Why had he waited to accumulate a relatively large sum? Egotism and vanity, no doubt.

The few sous brought at an opportune moment are worth a hundred times more than futile largesse! But perhaps he still had time to come to her aid.

“She was arrested the day when you came to Les Halles?”

“That same evening.”

“That was the end of July; it’s now the end of November,” he calculated. “So it’s exactly four months that Mariette has been in prison. Perhaps she’s even been released?”

“Certainly not. She’d have come to the Avenir.”

“Then she’ll be released before long?”

“Probably.”

“No one has gone to her aid during that long sojourn?”

Nini Nichon put on a tearful expression, raised her eyes to the heavens, made a gesture of desolation and swallowed the rest of her half-liter in a single draught in order to forget her chagrin.

“Not that I know,” she sighed. “Poor Mariette! We haven’t thought about her once, but the times are so hard! Lucie has her fat leech, Git-le-Coeur, and I can’t make ends meet.”

“Well, Mademoiselle, as soon as you see Mariette, tell her, please, that I’m presently a pianist at the café concert whose address I’ll give you, and that she mustn’t fail to come to find me there.

“In the meantime, be kind enough to get these twenty francs to her, so that when she comes out of prison she can eat, get a room, and come to the establishment where I’m employed. Tell her, though, not to come to join me in the orchestra, but to wait by the door until it’s time for me to leave.”

“I won’t fail,” promised Nini Nichon, putting the address in her corsage. “But the twenty francs...”

“Well?”

“I’d rather not take charge of them. I’m afraid of eating them—or, rather, drinking them.”

Charles Balin could not help smiling.

“You’re slandering yourself, Mademoiselle. You’ll remember that you might find yourself in a situation similar to your comrade’s; you’ll remember, since you were taught when you were little, that it’s necessary not to do unto others what you wouldn’t want anyone to do to you, and you’ll give Mariette the deposit I’m confiding to you.”

“You’re right,” said the prostitute, who had instinctively stopped addressing him as tu. “I’ll do as you say.”

He paid, got up and left, without having been excessively solicited by the truculent individual, who nevertheless did not fail to expend herself in further compliments on the exceptional abundance of her charms, the comfortable breadth of her bed, the prefect tranquility of her furnished hotel, the near-virginity that a long widowhood had remade for her, the benevolent dispositions to which an abundant and well-watered nourishment had given birth, the obliging attention that she would have for a friend, etc. He replied, smiling, that he did not want to be unfaithful to Mariette.

It was three o’clock in the morning. He was in haste to get back to his domicile. The sight of the place where the drama of his misery had almost reached its denouement in such a banal fashion, the conversation he had had with the prostitutes and the news that he had just learned had revived the memory of Mariette in a disturbing fashion. After the four months in prison that she had received for coming to his defense, would he have the courage to see her again coldly? Would his determination not weaken?

What’s the point? he replied to himself, immediately. Wasn’t it necessary to bring the adventure to a prompt and definitive end? Why retie bonds that he would break the day after? It would be absurd, and perhaps cruel. He no longer had the right to treat that unfortunate woman as flesh for pleasure that one takes or leaves at will, especially if, a floret of amour grown on the worst of dung-heaps, she experienced the slightest feeling of tenderness for him.

It was pretentious, at his age, to imagine such a thing, but had not her comrade in debauchery just made that claim? Had he not believed it momentarily? Great misfortunes, especially when they are enveloped in mystery, have the attraction of the gulf, and fascinate the rebellious.

Certainly, Mariette could not have the nobility of soul that gives rise to blind devotions, but the instinctive curiosity that had pushed her toward him might perhaps have engendered a rudimentary sentiment of that sort.

On the other hand, he could not think of hampering his life with such a liaison. It would have been necessary for that for him to have money for her to live on and time to devote to her.

It was infinitely probably, anyway, that even in that event, the vagabond, irremediably degraded by a long past of vices, would not accept the calm and worthy life that he would want to impose on her.

He decided, therefore, and it was the wisest course, that Mariette would remain his friend, and that he would only see her again in that light.

He had almost arrived at the Rue Vavin while philosophizing thus, along the railings of the Luxembourg, when, just as he was telling himself that he had committed an honest action and that no harm would come to him, a man surged abruptly from the shadows and seized him bodily, another gagged him with two hands, while a third robbed him. In the blink of an eye his pockets were cleaned out, and the thieves had vanished.

Surprised by the rapidity of the operation, he had not had time to utter a cry or to put up a fight. He quickly wiped his soiled lips, bruised by the brutal hands of the aggressor, and then perceived, sadly, the loss of his wallet. Fortunately, he still had a little money at home. Mariette would not be utterly disappointed when she came to the rendezvous.

Gradually, thinking that he had received neither blows nor wounds, and that the skillful professionals had been content, like conjurors, to rob him with a magisterial dexterity, he accepted his fate stoically. Who, then, could have carried out the coup? Had he been seen giving money to the two prostitutes? Had they talked too loudly about his generosity? Had they confided it to eager ears? Or had the prowlers attacked him at random?

The last supposition might have been true, but a voice sniggered in his ear that his subjection to pillage was the logical consequence of his scrupulous restitution. “Clean him out properly,” Nini Nichon must have said to the skillful pickpockets of the Clair de Lune, “but don’t do him too much harm; he might be a high-class criminal, and in any case, he’s Mariette’s friend.”

Bah! He wouldn’t die of it. Half a million francs had been stolen from him and he hadn’t been able to say anything.

Two uniformed policemen came down the street, making their regular footfalls ring on the pavement. They were arriving too late, like carabiniers in an operetta. He thought about confiding his misadventure to them, but did not take long to change his mind.

“With my luck,” he murmured, “I’m capable of getting myself arrested. As the poet says, let’s imitate the prudent silence of Conrart.”¹⁹

 

Chapter XVI

 

 

The Café Concert de l’Étoile, a former interior courtyard transformed into a glass-roofed hall, where “Monsieur Charles” exercised his talents as an accompanist, did not shine either in the renown of its artistes or in the luxury of its decoration. It was one of those improvised establishments in which the singing serves as an excuse for the poor quality of the fare and its slightly elevated prices. The habitual troupe consisted of three chanteuses, a baritone and two comedians, to whom occasional amateur performances sometimes lent their collaboration. The pianist, reinforced on important occasional by a cornet, a clarinet and a trombone, represented the entire orchestra. As for the public, except for Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, when workers’ families took possession of the hall, it was composed almost entirely of regular clients: local employees and shopkeepers, art-students in search of the Gioconda, Pygmalions in quest of statues, impecunious students and litterateurs as yet devoid of glory, whom the proximity of schools and the low rents attracted to the quarter in large numbers and whose hearts came to search for pasture.

It was, in fact, notorious in a certain milieu that the habituées of the Étoile, vaguely married women, sentimental local seamstresses and kept mistresses with time on their hands, did not come there in search of fortune, but were content with a little gaiety and amour. A few of them even made a specialty of allowing themselves to be subjugated by the pseudo-actors who hung out there

The men being almost their equals, they considered before anything else the matter of their employment. It was thus that the baritone and the pianists enjoyed an incontestable primacy; whether they were young or old, elegant or dilapidated, handsome or ugly, whether their hair was blond, brown, red or white, they immediately became the prey of some amiable habituée.

Monsieur Charles, initially surprised and even flattered by the languorous stares of which he was the object, had quickly suspected the truth. Seeing the same women devouring indistinctly all the ephemeral singers of the establishment, he mistrusted the advances they made to him and, without affecting puritanical manners or a prudish virtue discordant with the rather unrestrained milieu in which the need to live had placed him, he maintained a polite reserve, not avoiding provocative conversations but opposing the most profound deafness to insinuations of a certain kind. His situation was too precarious, and he had too much pride, to chase after such adventures.

A pretty blonde, a somewhat rough-hewn former chambermaid from the Franche-Comté, who had nurtured for years an insatiable caprice for all the virtuosos who succeeded one another in Père Antoine’s establishment, had inevitably set her cap at the new arrival. Although he was not in the prime of youth, he had a distinguished air and polite manners made to flatter self-esteem. With the flair of a perverted soubrette, the lovely Annette divined in the pianist, whom her neurosis still lacked, a man of the world plunged into poverty by an unexpected catastrophe, and that supposition stimulated her monomania.

She had regular features, an advantageous and lithe figure, large gray eyes, a luxuriant bosom, ash-blonde hair, a suggestive neck and appetizing lips. She wore elegant clothes, expensive jewelry, paid ostentatiously for drinks and proclaimed, when she wanted to be heard, that she was a good and disinterested girl for whomever had the gift of pleasing her. The painters were mad about her, the sculptors licked her feet, and the poets brought out her beauty in the most impeccable sonnets, but—excluding commercial transactions, of course—a man only had the gift of pleasing her on condition of making his agile fingers fly over ivory keys. The most convulsive comedians, the most eccentric clowns, the most muscular gymnasts, the most charming baritones, the most disconcerting tightrope-walkers and the most dexterous jugglers had sought the way to her heart in vain; and yet, on simply hearing a pianist, that unassailable heart, not content with opening all its doors, resonated like a statue of Memnon.

The species of indifference with which Monsieur Charles had received her first advances plunged the beautiful Annette into the deepest amazement. Although she had judged him, instinctively, superior in education and delicacy to the bashers of chords she had known thus far, she had not expected to find the slightest resistance in a man who, in view of his age and situation, was scarcely spoiled by fortune. Perhaps she had approached the matter too abruptly.

Changing tactics, therefore, instead of the frontal assaults she was accustomed to making, and which ordinary settled the matter with an immediate victory, she stood down her batteries and laid siege methodically to the heart rebellious to her initial summons.

A long week passed in insignificant skirmishes; the enemy avoided combat and remained holed up. Never had the conquest of a performer demanded so much effort. She began to get impatient; doubtless he was married or had a mistress—but, having always considered inconstancy as second nature, and infidelity as the most sacred of duties, that reason could not have any value in her eyes. Did she not have a lover who maintained her? That did not prevent her from deceiving him—on the contrary!

Perhaps the artiste, who, in spite of his gray hair, seemed to her to be as timid and desirable as a novice, dared not take advantage of the windfall? Perhaps his reserve, as a well-brought-up man, prevented him from declaring himself too rapidly? She took the baritone Fernand into her confidence, and charged him with adroitly discovering the trouble in his heart.

The baritone, a Pandarus of the Barrière, was coarsely eager to transmit the gallant message.

“You’ve had a real stroke of luck, Monsieur Charles. The most beautiful girl in the quarter, a true bourgeois morsel, is smitten with you!”

“Who’s that?” the accompanist had asked, feigning astonishment.

“You don’t suspect, then? The great Annette, of course! A fine sprig of a girl, that one, not a hooker, not a painter’s purée nor a gigolette at the Bullier: the kept woman of a rich wood-merchant, nice tits, neat, well-dressed, who has real jewels, fine furniture and doesn’t run after a loaf of bread!”

The baritone, a former village blacksmith, who, after having dreamed of making a hundred thousand francs a year at the Opéra, had great difficulty getting hundred-sou gigs, and subsidized his needs by breeding racing greyhounds, was licking his lips as he enumerated all the advantages that such an acquaintance involved.

“Don’t play the joker, Monsieur Fernand, I beg you,” the pianist replied. “I’m only too well aware that at my age, one is no longer made for conquests; it’s fine for you with your superb lungs and your curly moustache, which drive them all mad.”

“The fact is,” admitted the baritone, “that one doesn’t do badly. But what do you expect—I don’t like to make the darlings suffer, me, and when they’re pretty, in truth, if they want a little bit of Fernand, I don’t raise any obstacles!”

He made a self-satisfied gesture, tweaked his moustache, winked and hummed the scale, all the way down to the lowest register of his voice.

“But to get back to you, Monsieur Charles,” the victorious baritone went on, “I assure you that Annette, without having one of those terrible crushes that women have for me, wouldn’t be averse to receiving a few little piano lessons at home. Move quickly, or I’ll steal her away!”

In a fit of mad enthusiasm, the irresistible singer was about to tap him on the belly; he stepped back rapidly.

“You’ll die in the skin of a joker, Monsieur Fernand—stop it now, it’s your turn.”

Annette was watching them chat, curiously. The baritone came on stage and she addressed an interrogative gesture to him. Fernand replied with a doubtful grimace.

Excited by the difficulty, the tenacious blonde, increasingly seduced by the imposing air, the distinction, and the youthful and singularly keen gaze of the pianist, decided to make more precise advances. Fernand had doubtless acquitted the commission poorly. Perhaps—hadn’t he courted her himself?—a sentiment of jealousy had even pushed him to put a spoke in the wheel. She could not admit for a moment that a man might disdain her, and in this milieu, where all the habituées were on the lookout, she sensed that she was becoming an object of humorous remarks for the host of rejected adorers. It was necessary for her to reckon with the recalcitrant accompanist.

That same evening, therefore, offering the pretext of being afraid to go home alone, she begged Monsieur Charles to escort her to her door—which the musician consented to do with the most amiable courtesy. When they arrived, she invited him insistently to come in for a small glass of liqueur, but the pianist did his best to escape.

“Are you afraid then, that I’m imperiling your virtue?” she exclaimed, laughing.

“My virtue, Mademoiselle, would be only too glad to succumb if you were to do it the honor of provoking it, but alas, I’m too old to hope for such favors,” the cavalier replied, gallantly. “It’s absolutely necessary that I go home immediately to do some very urgent work; don’t see any other reason for my refusal.”

He’s afraid of being late, she thought. His legitimate must be expecting him!

The next day, driven to extremes, she employed the ultimate means, the one that never failed.

She knew how to play the piano, a little, and had, she had been assured, great dispositions for singing; she wanted to perfect them in his school, and begged him to come and give her a few lessons at home. She would pay him the fees that he habitually demanded of his pupils.

Monsieur Charles assumed his most desolate expression. “Impossible, Mademoiselle; I work all day, I don’t have a single moment of liberty. As you can suppose, I can’t live on the four francs I earn here!”

“All the more reason why you mustn’t be alone,” added the lovely Annette, a trifle vexed.

“What do you mean?”

“You have a wife, a mistress?”

The musician assumed a melancholy expression. “Yes,” he ended up sighing, as if a painful confession were being extracted from him.

Annette he knew, as an old habitué of the concert, spending money without counting it, always trailing friends and suitors after her, had considerable influence with Père Antoine. Some even claimed that the cut-price impresario had not always been indifferent to the charms of “my child,” as he always called her. At any rate, the old entrepreneur, an intelligent and rapacious man, who had become a wine-merchant after being a coal-merchant, the proprietor of a dance-hall after being a wine-merchant, and then the proprietor of a drinking-den that he had transformed into a flourishing café concert, placed a high value on such a generous client. He was already looking with a jaundiced eye upon his employee’s obstinate refusal of the drinks he was offered.

“You could at least take a glass of milk or syrup from time to time,” he complained. “It’s refreshing.”

“It’s injurious to my health.”

“Have a rum, then—that’s fortifying. You’re losing me three francs a night; with the four I give you that makes seven; for that price, I could have a Paganini.” Any celebrated performer was a Paganini for Père Antoine.

The musician sought to calm the interested businessman’s irritation with all kinds of soothing words, but he sensed that he had not been forgiven for his refusals of drinks, and that a few words from the lovely Annette would suffice to get him fired.

Monsieur Charles thus had a capital interest in not offending the title-holder of the pianist, and if it was necessary to end up passing under her Caudine Forks—which, after all, might be a very agreeable punishment, given the tales told left right and center about previous adventures—the near-certainty that once her caprice was satisfied, the beautiful woman’s only priority would be getting rid of him, caused him to postpone as long as he could a denouement for which so many others, who did not possess a golden key, sighed in vain.

From that unexpected refusal, the blonde Annette had concluded that Monsieur Charles must be afflicted by some bad-tempered leech, and that that was the sole reason that prevented him from accepting her reiterated advances.

Bah! It would not be said that a single one of the Étoile’s virtuosos had escaped her. She would end up triumphing over those conjugal dreads! Hysterically perverse and obstinate, she invested her self-esteem in it, donned dresses that were very elegant but more discreet, assumed the modest and amiable airs of a perfect lady, and every evening, from her habitual place behind the piano, uttered sighs, indulged in long conversations with Monsieur Charles, and acted in such a fashion that she soon passed in all eyes for the accompanist’s accredited mistress.

The handsome Fernand had groused, her little comrades had gossiped. The hairy bohemians, furious at not being appreciated at their true value, were laughing at her disappointment; it was necessary at all costs to save appearances. Once the thing was well-established, if he continued stupidly to insist on ignoring her caprice, she would take it upon herself to get him fired. Sober for the practical drinks-merchant, virtuous for her! That really was too many good qualities for a dive of that sort.

Monsieur Charles divined the machinations of the persistent blonde, and redoubled his diplomacy. In any other circumstances, he would have made her an agreeable plaything; she was worth the trouble, and if the case was not very interesting in itself, the obstinacy that she put into pursuing the goal ended up flattering his vanity. He searched through all the chatter for the cause of that musical erotomania.

Annette’s “pianistomania” had distant and profound roots. Since childhood, in the village, the piano, the privilege of the demoiselle of the château, had appeared to her to be the supreme mark of distinction and wealth. As a chambermaid, “playing the piano like Madame” was the culminating point of her dreams of the future.

Having progressed from lewd bourgeois to lyceans, from valets and coachmen and the Salle Wagram of the boulevards, the clients who possessed a piano had enjoyed all her consideration. Later, when luck, in the form of a wood-merchant from the Nord had ended up smiling on her, her first luxury as a kept woman had been to buy an Érard piano, and her first perversity as a faithless mistress had been to sleep with the professor charged with unveiling the secrets of the sonorous keyboard to her, and the blind tuner who maintained it in good condition.

As usually happens, her enthusiasm for the instrument had been of short duration; she had changed pianists and offered herself in holocaust to all the masters of the keyboard, but her numerous sacrifices had not developed dispositions in which she was completely lacking. When, after eight months of intense labor, she perceived that Mon rocher de St-Malo still remained inaccessible and that the Sultan Polka continued to be an undecipherable rebus, she had relegated her dreams of performing to the background, had no longer considered the instrument as anything but an item of furniture of indispensable ostentation, which her blind tuner, whom she continued to madden amorously, came to visit from time to time, and had transferred all her admiring affection to the privileged beings for whom arpeggios and demisemiquavers were mere child’s play.

She judged the beauty of music by the quantity of ink that blackened the paper. The blacker a piece was, the more value it took on in her eyes. The cascades of notes and the racket of base-lines caused delicate shivers to run down her back Variations on the Carnaval de Venise and Au clair de la lune were an inexhaustible source of emotional astonishments. The notes repeated in tremolo of the Crépuscule caused her to swoon. The amour she felt for the player was in direct proportion to his velocity.

Unfortunately, if the beautiful Annette adored the pianist in general, she very rapidly lost her appetite for the pianist in particular; she corrected the vivacity of her imperious caprices by an incurable inconstancy. As soon as she had realized her desire, as soon as she had observed, once again, that the lover could open all the treasures of his heart to her without giving her the slightest particle of his talent, the insatiable seeker of the rapid fingerer sighed after the unknown that he agency would not take long to procure for Père Antoine—and the latter, considering an accompanist as a kind of machine with which all the agencies were abundantly provided and Annette as an opulent client difficult to replace, played with regard to “my child” the role of a veritable accomplice. At the moment when the unfortunate pianist, infatuated with his personal advantages, was curling his moustache victoriously or caressing his beard with the utmost satisfaction, he was abruptly dismissed under some pretext or other; usually, Père Antoine reproached him for not playing quickly enough.

The adventure lasted for varying lengths of time, but the termination was fatal and regular. One of them, doubtless to retain the flighty Annette in his net for longer, had had the ironic and ingenious idea of persuading her that, although her dispositions for the piano were disputable—that was doubtless because she had started too late—she had a voice of incontestable beauty and it was necessary to reveal that treasure swiftly to the public. That new hobby-horse, mounted with enthusiasm and a deplorable credulity, had caused her to fall into another mania: that of the concert.

The prestige of the pianist had increased even further. In each new accompanist she saw the man who might bring out the scale that nature was hiding jealously in the depths of her pretty throat, the liberator of the nightingale imprisoned in her opulent thoracic cage. If the blonde Annette had heard the innumerable jokes to which her bland voice, limited in its range, gave rise on a daily basis, she would have had a few doubts regarding her vocation as a future Star, but she had beautiful eyes in order not to see, and adorable ears in order not to hear.

That new mania was rendered all the more powerful because Père Antoine found it to his advantage. From time to time she attempted debuts that brought in serious benefits. It required so much money to make a good audience, and the claque was always composed of thirsty individuals. The pretty maniac confronted the footlights, the weekday audience applauded as a joke, but Sunday’s whistled pitilessly. Père Antoine made “my child” understand that she still needed work, the professor who had been unable to make anything of his pupil’s brilliant dispositions was sacked, and the story recommenced.

Monsieur Charles had learned or divined all that. He knew that, one way or another, his place would not take long to get away from him. His role as Joseph was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and Père Antoine was even reproaching Annette for no longer cultivating her voice.

Would it not be better to resign himself to being devoured by the pretty monster? He did not, after all, experience any repugnance for the neurotic. She was soulless, devoid of perfume, like an orchid born in ingrate terrain, but he found her worthy to excite his passing curiosity. Furthermore, the exploration he had just made at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, and the memory of Mariette, had stirred up lubricities that his long continence as a scholar had only ever put to sleep He wondered whether he might not find in the elegant Annette a powerful distraction that would made him forget that of the ordure, that of the sidewalk.

He rapidly became ashamed of those sentiments of ingratitude. The unfortunate woman was worth at least as much, if not more, than the fortunate one. He was quite wrong to lose his memory so rapidly; had he not been a man of the street himself, a vagabond, a beggar, a starveling! Was he going to scorn the woman who had helped him?

No, he would not have the soul of a turncoat.

He regretted, nevertheless, not having chosen another place of rendezvous for Mariette, Her appearance of a brazen streetwalker, the poverty of her attire, and the vulgarity of her language, might attract the mockery of the regulars and the malevolent disdain of Annette.

Bah! She would wait for him at the back of the hall, he would collect her at the exit and steal her away rapidly from the curiosity of the artistes and the mockers.

 

Chapter XVII

 

 

For several days he had been watching the comings and goings in the hall anxiously, and that evening again—it was Thursday—nothing had revealed the presence of Mariette. She had, however, come in while he was playing deafening variations in the guise of an intermezzo, and, as she was wretchedly dressed, she had retreated into the darkest corner. Her friends had warned her about the change that had taken place in the attire and the bearing of the man she had helped; she had no difficulty in recognizing him.

The pianist had just played his final chords. Annette, authorized for some time by an affability, almost tenderness, that augured well, pressed Monsieur Charles closely, and the latter, making a three-quarter turn on his stool, responded with smiles to the provocations of his beautiful neighbor. Mariette had a frightful contraction of the heart.

A local prostitute had just at down beside her. “Do you know the blonde who’s talking to the pianist?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s the great Annette, a well-to-do kept woman—a real show-off! She has an air of looking down at you, because she’s covered in silk and thinks that makes her better than the rest of us. Well, what can I tell you—some bitches have all the luck. Oh, if I had a lover who gave me the necessary, it’d be me who’d amuse myself deceiving him.”

“She pulls strokes?”

“That’s obvious—you can see by the moves she’s putting on the pianist.”

Mariette felt faint.

“Then the pianist…?” she said, effortfully.

“Is her lover of the heart, of course. It’s not with the three or four francs he earns here that he can keep her and pay for the diamonds she has in her ears.”

“Are you sure of what you’re saying?” Mariette asked, clinging on to a last hope.

“Well, I haven’t held the candle, but everyone here’s joking about it. It’s a young one who’s wearing the horns and old one who’s getting fed—the world upside down, eh!”

The poor girl lapsed into a mutism that the chatter of her neighbor could no longer interrupt.

For a moment, she had a desire to flee, but why should she go? He wasn’t her lover; she had no rights over him. He had told her to come and wait; she had come. Doubtless, he wanted to give her some money, perhaps the other’s money. She’d be stupid to refuse it. She wouldn’t amuse herself playing the prude; she’d take her money and go, and never see him again.

Tears rose too her eyes. She had had such a pleasant dream in coming to this rendezvous!

Why had he brought her here, rather than somewhere else? To make her witness his scene, to brag, to avenge himself for the way she’d treated him in the Avenir? Oh, if she were sure of that, he’s make him repent of it! She wasn’t a girl to let herself be mocked. But in what way was he mocking her? Hadn’t she insulted him, hadn’t she chased him away?

He had taken another mistress; that was quite natural. He wanted to see her again to recognize the service she had rendered him, that was certain, the money he’d given to the others proved it. How many men in his place wouldn’t even have thought of it? The only guilty one was her!

She gazed at her rival, radiant with pleasure; she compared the other’s costume with the poor garments in which she was clad, and again, envy and jealousy fermented in her heart. With her beautiful dress and her jewels, she wasn’t as pretty as all that, the slut. She hadn’t done four months in prison for him. Ha! All it needed was for her to amuse herself looking down on her, damn it!

Then Mariette contemplated her lover of one night avidly, and observed with a stupor mingled with admiration the transformation that had been announced to her. Instead of the enigmatic individual clad in an eccentric check suit with the dirty hat and the distraught and morbid face, she saw an elegant man, with a dazzlingly white shirt, a neatly-trimmed beard, carefully-combed hair and a becoming smile. She considered fearfully the abysm that separated them now: her, the registered prostitute just out of prison; him, the distinguished man that a rich and beautiful woman seemed happy to possess.

All the projects that she had formed since Nini Nichon had told her the good news collapsed. All the hopes to which her naivety, mingled with perversity and tenderness, had given birth, fled. Why was he no longer the starveling, the old lost dog, the defrocked priest, the wretch, the thief, that his fall had brought down to her level and would have permitted her to associate her life with his?

Such was the true significance of the confused reflections that were passing through her soul.

Now, utterly resigned, having lost all illusion, she waited patiently for the spectacle to end. She did not have a sou. Nini Nichon, under some pretext, had not yet given her the twenty francs she had for her; she had scarcely been able to advance her twenty sous to get into the café concert. She too had not yet eaten that day.

The concert was over, the pianist played the retreat, the audience flowed toward the exit door. She waited in her corner. Soon, the last habitués would have emptied the hall.

The artistes, Annette, and two or three other women headed for the door in their turn.

Monsieur Charles suddenly found himself face to face with Mariette. Before the poverty of her appearance he had a moment of irritation and repulsion that made him hesitate. Would he have the cowardice not to recognize her?

A rapid vision of the past surged before his eyes, and he ran to her.

“My dear Mariette!” he cried, affectionately. “Here you are at last!”

He took her hands, drew her toward him and kissed her.

Sniggers and jokes burst out behind him. He turned round menacingly.

“This poor girl is worth more than all the women here,” he declared, in an irritated voice. “I won’t tolerate anyone mocking her.”

The spell of sorts with which the great Annette had succeeded in enveloping him was broken; he was ready to scourge her mania.

“What do this heap of cowards and whores have against me!” howled Mariette. “Come here, then, bitch, and say it to my face, if you dare!”

She was about to hurl herself at her rival, but he grabbed her violently by the arm and drew her outside. He had suddenly calmed down; Mariette was still grumbling. She suddenly burst into sobs.

“Sorry, sorry,” she stammered. “I heard someone call me a filthy whore and I couldn’t hold back. Perhaps I’ve done you harm.”

He was quick to console her. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, my dear. When were you released?”

“This morning.”

“Have you seen Nini Nochon? Has she given you the money?”

“Someone stole it all while she was asleep. She could only give me twenty sous to get into the concert.”

“You haven’t eaten, then?”

“Oh, I’m not very hungry yet.”

“Poor Mariette! Come quickly, we’ll go to a brasserie; it’s not midnight yet, we still have time.”

They sat down at table. Mariette continually interrupted her eating in order to talk.

“Eat first,” he told her. “We’ll chat later.”

He thought, while he watched her devour the food with such a good appetite, of that long day without bread, on which the charity of the prostitutes had rescued him. He was ashamed of the vile hesitation he had just experienced and cursed the stupid vanity that had caused it. She had not been concerned about whether he was a pianist before coming to his aid.

He set about contemplating her. The four months of forced rest she had just taken had changed her visibly. Although her face had the characteristic pallor produced by the privation of air and light her cheeks were full, her wrinkles effaced, her complexion uniform, her large eyes less ringed, and her coiffure more modest. Her attire was almost sordid, it was true, but in her dirty black woolen dress she looked more like a poor seamstress just out of the hospital than a whore ready to resume her vile work. She resembled the pauperess he had seen kneel down before Dr. Albin’s tomb. He was astonished by a change so advantageous for her, and expressed his satisfaction with it.

“Do you know that you’re pretty like this, and have a respectable air about you?”

“Really?” she exclaimed, a gleam of joy in her eyes. “People won’t take me for what I am, then,” she added, quickly, and sadly.

“Embarrassed, he did not know what to say.

“Why don’t you try to work?” he ventured, finally.

“Work?” she said, sardonically. “Go back to the sweatshop, wear myself out to die of hunger? Oh la la! If I weren’t a slut, perhaps I could try to try again to get out that way, but what’s the point now? I could never become an honest woman again, could I? So why put myself through the hard grind of honest women? What would give me the courage to do it? I’d need someone I loved to tell me that I had to do that and nothing else, or it’d be over.”

He sank into dolorous reflections. The terrible logic of acquired vice, accepted corruption, caused him painful impressions. So, tomorrow, perhaps tonight, the unfortunate was about to descend into the gutter again. In a few days, that physiognomy, which had become almost chaste, would have resumed the bold allure, the brutal cynicism that would doubtless stigmatize it forever. Oh, if he could extend a hand efficaciously, take advantage of the calm that had broken her depraved habits, make her understand the debasement of her condition, give her the desire to get out of it…

He opened his mouth...

But what right had he to speak thus, to trouble her crapulous quietude, insert remorse and regret into her soul? Was she not unhappy enough already? It was actions, not words, that was required. Was he ready to become her lover? Did he even have the means to support her? He knew that he did not. Besides which, another task, much greater and more noble, solicited him. Charles Balin kept silent.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, seemingly having divined his disquiet.

“About you,” he admitted. “But why are you no longer addressing me as tu?”

“I don’t know. I don’t dare.”

“Have you forgotten, then, that we are and always will be old friends?” He added: “Nothing else alas, since destiny obliges us each to live in our own way.”

“Ah,” said the prostitute, with a gaze imprinted with resignation and reproach.

“Well, you see, Mariette, one day, perhaps soon, I shall be rich. Then, no matter where you are, I’ll come to find you and I’ll say: here’s money, become free again, act as you wish; have a lover if you want, but no longer be at the mercy of passers-by.”

“May the good God hear you,” she replied, simply. Then the enigmatic young woman had an instant of ironic and bitter revolt. “And in the meantime,” she observed, “it’ll be necessary to go back to the game.”

There was a long moment of silence. What could he say?

“So, my poor Mariette,” he resumed. “You hadn’t eaten yet today?”

“Bah! It’s not the first time that’s happened to me, and it surely won’t be the last.”

“It’s always in moments of distress,” he remarked, with thoughtless indelicacy, “that luck abandons you, for you might have been able to encounter a friend to come to your aid.”

Mariette blushed to her ear-lobes. “I met a fellow coming to the concert,” she murmured, “but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t thinking about that.”

He gazed at her, astonished by her sudden blush and her sadness.

Had she by chance, been thinking about seeing him again as soon as she emerged from prison, of renewing the relationship that ought to have been irrevocably broken, of keeping the first fruits for him? He resolved to take away all hope.

“Where will you go now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll walk straight ahead, and arrive somewhere eventually,” she replied, with a forced smile.

“Do you think I’d let you leave without money?” he hastened to add. “Why would I have asked you to come, then?”

“How do I know?”

“Certainly not, my dear. We’re going to go to the Rue Vavin. I no longer dare carry money on me; I was robbed the other day going home. I’ll go up and look for what I’ve put in reserve, and give it to you.”

He paid the bill and left.

Mariette had taken the arm that he had offered and wanted to tell him about her quarrel with the waiter. He begged her not to rake up bad memories. Then she told him about her sojourn in prison, the books she had been lent to read. She had earned a few sous working, but she had been indebted when she was put away and had had to give them to her mates.

They had arrived at the door.

“Is this where you live?” she asked. “In a furnished room? You’re all alone?”

“Yes. Why ask that?”

“Well, what would be extraordinary about you having a mistress?”

“Nothing, but I assure you that I’m alone. To have a mistress, it’s necessary to be able to maintain her.”

“Is that true, what you’re saying?”

“I swear to you, Mariette.”

She looked at him with a suppliant expression. “Well, since I’m alone,” she implored, slowly, “take me. I won’t be inconvenient.”

He made a moment of irritation, which the prostitute saw.

“You must have a sofa, a chair,” she said, in a low voice. “I’m not difficult, I’ll sleep on that.”

He remembered the night when Mariette had taken him in. A violent combat began in his heart. But the situation was not the same. Wasn’t he going to give her money, permit her to sleep in a good bed?

“No, my dear Mariette, I’m sorry. I can’t explain why, but it’s necessary that we don’t see one another in that fashion again.”

“Tomorrow,” she replied, dully, “It’ll be finished. I’ll go away, we won’t see one anther again. I have no pretention to be your wife. You’ll always hold it against me what I did to you in the Avenir, but you can see that I regretted it, because I fought for you.”

“Mariette, I swear to you again that all these reasons you’re imagining don’t exist, but I can’t, I mustn’t have any other liaison.”

“Since I’ll go away tomorrow, as I told you, why are you afraid of my staying?”

His impatience increased. “Wait here; I’ll come back,” he replied, in a tone that was almost curt and harsh.

She straightened up, bold once again. “Well, go—but now I know what I was told at the café concert is true.”

“And what were you told?”

“That you have a mistress. She’s waiting for you up there, for sure.”

“For the third time I swear to you that I haven’t.”

“Why won’t you take me with you, then? I didn’t disgust you the night I took you to my room!”

Visibly disconcerted, he maintained an awkward silence.

The strange young woman’s expression suddenly softened. “I’m wrong to reproach you,” she added, discouraged. “You’re right not to want me anymore, I’m nothing much. Go get me the money and I’ll go.”

He ran up the stairs, took the sum he had put aside and came down again in haste.

Mariette was no longer there. He saw a shadow fleeing in the distance.

“Oh my God!” he murmured. “Where is she going?”

He ran as fast as he could and caught up with her along the railings of the Luxembourg.

“Mariette! You’re crazy! You know full well that I have to give you, pay you back, the money!”

The young woman turned on him like a wild beast. “Money! That’s not what I came for!” she howled. “Keep your money, or I’ll throw it in your face! Money! I have what I need to make it too!” She accompanied those words with a lewd gesture. “Go back to your jewel-box, your great blowsy blonde. Get away!”

Was he weak, perverse, afraid of letting her believe that another woman was keeping him, or was he vanquished by the young woman’s disinterest? What the suppliant and meek Mariette had not been able to obtain, the unleashed whore, beautiful in anger and transfigured by that inconceivable amour, had no difficulty in getting. Was it not just that he should also render her the alms of pleasure that she had given him, since she put more value on that than all the rest?

“Come on, then,” he murmured.

It was his turn to beg. One might have thought that she was trying to read the reason for his change of mind in his gaze.

“Swear to me that you’re speaking with an honest heart?” she ended up by demanding.

He held out his arms; she threw herself into them recklessly, sobbing, avid for tenderness, famished for a little veritable love.

They went back to the mansard without saying a word, almost running, gripped by a previously-unknown intoxication.

 

The next day, Charles Balin went back to his office, emerging as if dazzled by a dream, wondering in what fashion he was about to pay the legitimate reparation that he owed Mariette. He was very late, the administration of the newspaper was capable of sacking him—but nothing came of it.

That evening, however, the concierge handed him a note.

Monsieur Charles, wrote the amiable person who was serving Père Antoine as a scribe for the circumstance, after last night’s scandal, and informed of the bad company that you keep, I am obliged to dismiss you.

My action must be partly just and honest, he thought, since destiny is inflicting such a light punishment on me.

 

Chapter XVIII

 

 

Now, without veritably loving Mariette, he sensed that the bond that had been formed would be difficult to undo, entangling him with her.

The indefinable something that attracted him to her, the mixture of naïve perversity and delicate sentiments that caused him new surprises every day, had ignited his covetousness, and unchained his lustful instincts. The carnal sensuality that he had scorned for so long, belated by imperious, claimed its due, and the person who poured out the troubling liqueur, expert in enchantments, made him drink it to the dregs. He had found Calypso’s island.

Already, many a time, he had tried to take back his liberty, but the revolt, soon repressed, had only served to make him aware of his weakness, to tighten the chain, to convince him of his cowardice. Mariette had only to look at him, and he fell submissively into her arms. The young woman who had wanted to leave the mansard the day after that night of amour no longer left it, and he was the one who had retained her.

Thus is was that his noble project, for the accomplishment of which he had given up everything, was relegated to the background, just at the moment when he had decided to set to work, and he was no longer thinking about anything but redeeming Mariette from her ignoble slavery.

To lift her out of it completely? It was necessary not to think of that; he did not have the resources and could not consecrate his entire life to her. But there are degrees of vice, castes in prostitution, a kind of hierarchy in corruption. It was that ladder that it was first necessary for his friend to climb. The further away she was from poverty, the better able she would be to follow the good instincts dormant in the depths of her heart.

It was necessary, before anything else, to find a little money. Since he had to live with Mariette for some time, he did not want her, at all costs, to have the slightest acquaintance with the degrading milieu from which he hoped to remove her. Once she was launched into another mode of existence, they would be able to part as good friends, he to resume his task, she and she to live more happily and even to raise herself up if she was truly worthy of it. But until they were able to recover their respective liberty, he demanded a common life exempt from any compromise; it was therefore necessary for him to provide for all her needs.

He racked his brains for a long time; a project of indisputable rectitude came to mind.

Dr. Albin, he thought, has left his widow nearly a million, which he acquired legitimately by his knowledge. Could I not recover a tiny part of that sum? It no longer belongs to me, it’s true, since Dr. Albin is dead, of my own will, and has given her all his wealth, but have I not some right to it all the same? Oh, I don’t want to be demanding, all the more so as there would surely be danger in that. Two thousand francs ought to suffice.

He took an ordinary piece of paper and drafted the following note:

 

I, the undersigned, recognize that I owe Monsieur Charles Balin, for a painting by Van Ostade, L’Opérateur de village, which he has sold me, the sum of two thousand francs.

Paris, 16 June 18**

Dr. L. Albin.

 

He had, in fact, bought the said painting at the time indicated and had placed it in his consulting room.

He put the note in an envelope and, modifying his handwriting, he added to it the following letter:

 

Madame,

The late Professor Albin, your husband, gave me more than a year and a half ago this recognition of a debt of two thousand francs, a sum of which I now have the most urgent need.

I was far away from France at the time of his death and unable to bring my entitlement to your attention earlier. I know, Madame, that you are one of those elite individuals for whom moral obligations have as much value as written proofs, so I have not hesitated for a moment in sending you the justification of the debt. Dr. Albin, having no money on him at the time he bought the painting from me, gave me the acknowledgement you will find enclosed.

I have the honor, Madame, of being your humble and very respectful servant.

Charles Balin,

42 Rue Vavin.

 

Certainly, he was playing a dangerous game. Madame Albin, left to herself, he was sure, would pay immediately, but she had advisors. Dr. Larmezan must have taken charge of her affairs; there might be an investigation; he might be accused of having imitated the illustrious scientist’s handwriting; his former employment as a copyist even rendered him susceptible of that suspicion. Fortunately, his concierge only knew him in his capacity as a pianist, obliged as he was to draw the bolt for him at late hours.

He awaited the result of his attempt impatiently. After ten days, a letter from Maître ***, a notary, invited him to call at his study. The cashier apologized for the delay; he had been obliged to have the note verified by experts and to seek information. That quest had not been absolutely satisfactory, but Dr. Albin’s handwriting had been recognized indisputably, the sum he had demanded was therefore paid.

The facility with which that sort of fraud had succeeded occasioned him regrets. Why had he not thought of that means earlier? It is true that he had not had any presentable domicile then, and that a room in a sleazy hotel would have given rise to the most violent suspicions.

He silenced the scruples that murmured in his conscience. Was he not coming to Mariette’s aid, and had he not once earned that money?

A thousand francs served to complete his furnishings and to provide his mistress with clothing and underwear. Mariette had never seen such a windfall. Her modest but elegant attire transfigured her; she never ceased looking at herself in the mirror, admiring herself ingenuously.

She tried with all her might to go out with him that evening. He had no difficulty proving to her that it was necessary not to show herself thus to her former friends, that bravado of that kind might excite their jealousy and covetousness needlessly, and that she would also expose herself to temptations that would separate them forever. That threat was sufficient to make her abandon the project, but she then demanded that he take her to the Café Concert de l’Étoile. She promised him that she would not say anything to the insolent Annette, who had looked down on her, but she wanted her to see her well-dressed.

That was a petty satisfaction of self-esteem of which he did not want to deprive her; in any case, he would not be sorry himself to destroy the poor impression that the people at the concert hall must have formed.

They went out, arm in arm, like two young lovers, to Père Antoine’ establishment. Mariette, in her new outfit, had comical alternatives of silent gravity and exuberant gaiety, which amused him greatly. In the spontaneous reflections that joy inspired in him, he perceived, marveling, that she thought soundly and had wit.

They went into the hall. The great Annette was in her usual place and the pianist, a very young man, incessantly turned toward her, without paying overmuch heed to the singers. The entrance of Monsieur Charles and Mariette disquieted the pretty maniac and caused her a violent surge of resentment. She was, so to speak, caught in the act; the only pianist who had not fallen victim to her affectations had been able to see with his own eyes the scant regard she had for the individual and her infatuation with the employment. The thing was all the more sensible because the skillful resistance of the graying musician had disconcerted her flighty heart; his fine manners and fluency has fascinated her, and she had found herself on the brink of falling for him.

The baritone Fernand, perceiving his former accompanist in his turn, made signs of intelligence to him, and, few moments later, went to confer with Père Antoine, whom he notified of his presence.

The impresario drink-merchant immediately approached the lovely Annette.

“When you’ve finished distracting my employees, my girl,” he exclaimed, in a fashion to make himself heard, “you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

The tall young woman, humiliated, rose to her feet furiously

“Oh, it’s like that is it?” she declared. “That’s all right, I’m going, and I’ll never set foot in this dirty dive again.”

“And you’ll give me pleasure,” Père Antoine approved. “You’re really too demanding, and you turn the establishment upside-down.”

“Come on then,” she shouted to the young man. “Can’t you see that you’re about to be sacked. It’s been fixed—the replacement’s already here.”

The young virtuoso, only subjugated the day before and hypnotized by the beautiful blonde, thought himself obliged to follow her. The director, who seemed to have been counting on that, hastened to approach Monsieur Charles. He was fed up with gigolos, he wanted a serious man like him; the artistes were right, one couldn’t change accompanists every month without disrupting the service. He therefore begged him to take his place again; if Annette took it into her head to come back, he would throw her out.

Delighted with the proposition, the musician sat down at the piano and the triumphant Mariette took possession of Annette’s chair.

Monsieur Charles was intrigued by the change of attitude on the part of the rapacious proprietor of the Étoile. The reasons he had given, although plausible, could not be the only ones. There had surely been a quarrel between them; the appellation “my girl,” which had replaced “my child” was characteristic; it was almost a term of scorn, which Père Antoine only applied to lower class clients. At the exit, the baritone Fernand gave him the key to the enigma.

Annette’s financial supporter, the wood merchant, had suddenly rendered his generous soul to God; the lovely woman, thus finding herself reduced to seeking her fortune anew, had had the unfortunate idea of wanting to exploit the gold mine lurking in her lungs, and not only had she not offered any money to prepare the room but had actually had the audacity to ask for a fee.

Confronted by that enormity, Père Antoine had almost fallen over; his nose, formed like an eagle’s beak, had turned up in a menacing fashion; his indignation had taken on epic proportions, and he had not yet calmed down. “My child,” denuded of all prestige, was no longer anything but an insupportable whore who debauched all his pianists and whom he would throw out at the first opportunity. The personnel had agreed, and the arrival of the former accompanist had precipitated events.

As for the irresistible baritone, he had not thought for an instant of avenging himself for the lack of success of his own advances; he could not care less about Annette; he could not satisfy all the women infatuated with him—but he was, all the same, not sorry to have rubbed it in.

While they walked back to the Rue Vavin, Mariette sang the songs she had just heard.

“You know,” her friend remarked, “you’re hitting the right notes—you have a musical memory; one might even think that you have a voice.”

“Yes, I have a voice,” Mariette affirmed. “I think told you I that have a voice. When I was young and better off, if you’d heard me sing in the studio, you’d have been amazed. Here, listen to whether I have a voice!”

She intoned a popular song.

The joyful Charles Balin had found the solution to the problem, for which he had been searching since the commencement of the liaison. He would make his friend a singer at the café concert! It was the best and only relatively honorable fashion that was in his power to pull her out of the gutter and give her a means of existence, in order to be able to leave her to her own devices when he had the courage to abandon her.

The troubling dream in which he was living could not, in fact, last long. Remorse was beginning to assail him with increasing frequency; outside of his work, Mariette absorbed all his hours, all his thoughts, and deflected him from his goal.

The night of amour that crowned the fortunate day quickly stifled the first protests of his conscience.

The following day, he made his mistress party to the project he had conceived. At the mere idea that she might one day enter the café concert, she began to jump for joy.

He bought an old upright piano that was not completely worn out, books of elementary instruction and scores, and commenced the education of the near-illiterate slum girl.

The newspaper that employed him had just failed; he had a thousand francs in hand. His job as an accompanist and a few piano and singing lessons permitted him to live without taking up all his time; he was able to devote himself seriously to the ingrate task he had imposed to himself.

The success was surprising; after a mere five months the little Parisienne, willing, courageous, intelligent and extraordinarily malleable in his hands, had attained unexpected results. She expressed herself almost correctly, no longer remembered, except in rare moments of anger, the dirty argot of old, and had relearned everything she had known on leaving elementary school. In music, her progress had been even more rapid; she had almost mastered the scale, she had learned to read music a little, and endowed with a good memory, possessed a veritable repertoire. Her natural qualities, her desire to achieve something, and the verve she put into the slightest actions, had facilitated the task singularly.

He had, in addition, taken advantage of certain affinities, her ardent and enthusiastic character and her accentuated traits to steer her in the most favorable direction. It was thus that she had learned the majority of the popular songs of Italy and Spain, and, whether by assimilation or atavism, Mariette launched an Olé like a veritable Castilian.

He judged that she would soon be ready to make her debut, and envisaged, not without sadness, the moment of separation. The months they had spent together would have been even happier if he had been able to free himself from his remorse.

He earned between eight a ten francs a day; Mariette cooked a simple meal; they set to work, and then went to the concert, before swiftly returning home.

The humble lodgings in which they lived were situated under the eaves of an old building. Two windows, drawn back from the roof, which formed a terrace above them inundated them with light and pure air. Without equaling the splendor of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the convolvulus, clematis, roses and wallflowers that Mariette grew in boxes already framed the windows and promised imminent flowers. Day by day, they followed the progress of their cherished plants, and Mariette, who measured their height, announced the growth with a charming pride. In the distance, the verdure of the Luxembourg ornamented the horizon of their regal landscape.

Their furniture bordered on indigence: a big iron-framed bed, two tables, a few chairs, the old upright piano, a bulbous eighteenth-century chest of drawers unearthed in a local second-hand dealer’s shop, a kitchen table, household utensils, a cast-iron stove, and a few pleasant prints on the wall formed the whole of it; but everything was neat and orderly, because Mariette applied herself to proving that she was no stranger to domestic chores.

It was there that a little happiness had come to console their poverty. Their communal life, it is true, had not always been exempt from storms. Mariette sometimes had disquieting reversions to a savage state.

Not that she had ever sought to deceive him; the advances that had inevitably been made to her by the habitués of the café concert had always been greeted with a singular coldness; but she sometimes suffered from sudden hungers for liberty, sudden revolts that troubled their union.

The slightest intemperance unleashed her impetuous character, when she vomited insults at the smallest irritation, regretted the time when no one could demand anything of her, cursed her slavery, declared that she had had enough of it, hastily packed her clothes and went out, slamming the door. She had had two or three fits of that sort, which had been very hard for him to bear.

But as she had quickly returned, ashamed, to the fold; as she had humbly begged his pardon and had returned, more courageously and submissively, to her study; as the pity he felt for her was infinite; and as he was determined to leave her some day, he had contented himself with making sensible reproaches, demonstrating to her the facility with which she could fall back into the mire if she allowed herself to be carried away by her indomitable nature—and it had all ended in tears and kisses.

 

Chapter XIX

 

 

It was in the month of June 18** that Mariette made her debut at the Café Concert de l’Étoile. Monsieur Charles, knowing the suspicion and avarice of the former coal merchant, had carefully refrained from making him the slightest proposition. Père Antoine gladly accepted amateurs in quest of a debut, but he obstinately refused, even if they had the voice of Faure or Patti, to grant them the slightest fee. His resolution in that regard was as unshakable as the granite of his natal region. For him, there were no veritable artistes except for those the agencies procured for him; all the others were Goguette singers.²⁰ Pay them—get away! It was, on the contrary, him who had the might to demand money; apprenticeships were served in all métiers. The great Annette knew what the obstinate attempts she had once made every few months had cost her! As if he were going to amuse himself paying debutants! All his artistes and waiters would bring him their good friends! He wanted veritable chanteuses, the professional chanteuses that the agency sent him.

The pianist, informed, went directly to the agency, introduced Mariette, had her audition, and left with a formal assurance that at the first request, she would be sent to Père Antoine at a salary of five francs a night, the maximum fee that the parsimonious montagnard granted to ladies.

“Your protégée has a voice and talent,” he was told by the lyrical agent, an active young man on the lookout for artistes of the future, “her physiognomy has character, she has a good figure and her voice will carry in big halls; if her debut is favorable, which I don’t doubt, and she becomes habituated rapidly to the boards—that’s the main thing—we shan’t leave her dragging her heels in a low-class café concert.” Addressing the radiant and confused Mariette, he added: “And you won’t forget later, Mademoiselle, that the agency helped you to find a brilliant situation. In brief, when you’re offered serious engagements, come to find me: I’ll obtain you more advantageous conditions, and get a commission.”

A short time afterwards, Mariette received the summons so ardently desired. The day before, Père Antoine, alerted by a special letter from his supplier, which only happened in exceptional circumstances, announced to all his personnel an artiste of the first rank, from the top drawer, an Italian named Rose Gontran.

“What makes you think she’s Italian?” asked the surprised accompanist.

“Look, read it for yourself!”

Monsieur Charles could not help smiling. The agent advertised a chanteuse del primo cartetto, Mademoiselle Rose Gontran.

“Well, Monsieur Antoine,” he declared, “Mademoiselle Rose isn’t Italian.”

“Oh,” said the disappointed director.

“She’s Spanish,” aid the pianist, to console the impresario. “A Spaniard from Paris,” he added, laughing, “which is to say, Parisian, born of Spanish parents.”

“You know her, then?”

“I’ve accompanied her often.”

“Does she have the talent the agency says?”

“You’re a man of taste, you have experience and flair, you’ll judge her for yourself.”

“Certainly,” Père Antoine had replied, swelling up with pride, “but even so, what’s your opinion?”

“I don’t want to spoil your surprise. I’ll bring her to you myself, tomorrow.”

“You know her intimately, then? Admit it—your legitimate isn’t here.”

“Perhaps.”

The next day, the former coal merchant, at the sight of Mariette, who presented herself with the letter of convocation, started comically in surprise.

“Rose Gontran, the Spaniard, is you?”

“Yes, Monsieur Antoine.”

“Impossible! You name is Mariette.”

“Rose is my stage name.”

“You’re a professional singer, then?”

“Your agency wouldn’t have sent me otherwise.”

“You’ve been here every evening.”

“I was resting, on doctor’s orders.”

“Where have you sung, then?”

Mariette brazenly listen ten Parisian café concerts and twenty in the provinces. Père Antoine, too wily not to understand that his hand was being forced, scratched his head indecisively, but he left it there. There was hardly anyone in the place, and besides, she was an artiste that the agency had sent him, the sole consideration that could reckon with his mistrust.

Mariette, therefore, made her debut that same evening. The thing had been kept secret; her friend knew full well that if Annette had caught wind of it she would not have failed to organize a cabal; only the sympathetic clan of painters and rhymers had been alerted.

The result was all that could be hoped. The chanteuse had a few moments of weakness—no matter how small a stage is, one does not tread the boards for the first time without a dangerous emotion—but the help that the accompanist gave her, forgotten words whispered, tightness in the voice masked by energetic chords, and the powerful encouragement of friendly smiles, came to her aid at the critical moments. The debutante, recalled several times like a star, obtained a dazzling success. Even Père Antoine shelled out the hundred-sou coin without complaint. Rose Gontran had conquered all votes.

Charles Balin had demanded that is mistress change her name. The registered prostitute who had emerged from prison had to erase all traces of her past, to the extent that it was possible.

At first, Mariette wanted a sonorous name with a Spanish termination, but he had persuaded her of the futility of pretentious pseudonyms of that sort. Nevertheless, as her real name was Marie-Rose Gantron and his weakness for anagrams was able to satisfy the debutante, she received the name with the Castilian termination of Rose Gontran.

The success of the chanteuse was accentuated in the following days; bands of students came to acclaim her. For the first time, Père Antoine had an artiste who brought in receipts. Then he learned that Annette had hired whistlers. He talked about calling the police. Monsieur Charles begged him not to do that, and presented himself unexpectedly at the home of his former admirer.

“Let’s put our cards on the table,” he said to her. “I know what you’re planning. If you have the audacity to carry it through, I’ll send a signed circular letter to all the agencies asking them to communicate it to the pianists; I’ll denounce your infatuation, of which some of them are already aware, and you’ll become the laughing-stock or the prey of all the key-tappers in the capital. Believe me, don’t waste your money satisfying imaginary grievances, the adventure will turn against you. Instead, make a friend of Rose, whose talent will open doors, and who might be useful to you later. Come this evening; I’ll introduce you to her.”

The beautiful Annette returned to the Concert de l’Étoile, and was the first to applaud her rival.

Two months later, aided by a fortunate hazard and the interested protection of the agency, Rose Gontran went to the Ambassadors at four hundred francs a month. There, her debut became something far more serious. Although she had acquired the necessary aplomb and the habitude of the audience, it was necessary to cope with the jealousy of rivals and the appreciation of the petty press. Aided by her friend’s advice, modest, becoming and affable, she was able to maintain herself in a situation that was initially effaced, but became more brilliant by the day. When the dormant rivalries awoke, it was too late. Rose, applauded by the public, judged favorably by the theatrical press, was able to defy the envy of her comrades, the gossip of the wings and the gibes that her poverty attracted to her.

The intoxication of the stage had taken possession of her ardent nature. She put so much passion and consciousness into singing fashionable platitudes that the most banal lucubrations were entirely transfigured. Soon, authors were bringing her their songs. On that occasion again her friend made observations and suggested retouches, and only allowed her to accept works in conformity with her qualities. Success did not fail to confirm the choices.

An ambition that he had never imagined devoured her; she felt that it was necessary to take advantage of the favor that the public and the press seemed eager to lavish upon the previous day’s unknown. She wanted to reach the first rank.

Unfortunately, their resources were blatantly insufficient, and poverty risked being an insurmountable obstacle.

In that milieu, of such a dubious artistic value, talent, although welcome, is often only an accessory; the beauty of the singers, the luxury of their costumes, and sometimes, the eccentricity of their genre, occupies the place of honor. How many stars of the first magnitude, without their charms and outfits, would become mere embers!

Charles Balin knew all that; he took account of the sufferings that poor Rose must be enduring. The ordeal must be hard, the offenses to self-esteem incessant and cruel; her rivals had sumptuous dresses and expensive jewels, of which they made the most. She, with the same two or three costumes that they had been only able to procure at the price of the greatest sacrifices, cut a rather paltry figure! Although she dared not complain too loudly, fits of rage followed by long period of sadness, bitter comparisons, eyes reddened by tears, sullen silences, became increasingly frequent and significant.

The situation would therefore, not take long to unravel of its own accord. He would suffer, perhaps more than he thought, but his task with regard to Mariette seemed to him to be complete. He awaited the painful moment with resignation. He wanted the separation to come from her, or that she would furnish him with a genuinely serious reason. Rose Gontran was still too close to Mariette for the event to be long delayed!

One day, without the slightest warning, Rose did not come back in the evening.

In spite of being prepared for it, the method affected him painfully. Why was she doing it is such a brutal fashion? A simple word would have sufficed.

He did not see her until three days later. Disdaining recourse to lies, she threw herself into his arms, weeping.

She needed clothes, she was weary of being humiliated by her comrades, the directors were looking askance at her penury. Yesterday, they had made the implication; tomorrow, they might give her the sack. So she had taken advantage of an opportunity, but an opportunity so exceptional that he wouldn’t hold it against her. Who was she? A wretch that he’d taken out of the gutter. A few stains more or less were no big deal, especially if they were made in an intelligent and discreet fashion. Her new estate had terrible demands; he shouldn’t object, then, to the rare blots that she might make in their communal life. He was the only one that she would always love, and it was to him alone that she’d retain an eternal gratitude.

He stopped her.

“I don’t hold it against you, Mariette, and I’ve been expecting this dolorous moment, almost with impatience. Fatality has obliged me to leave you; it was necessary, as you know, that it would happen sooner or later, and as soon as possible. You’ve taken the initiative—so much the better! You’ve spared me the great chagrin that the fear of seeing you weep would have given me.

“You helped me on a day of terrible misery, and in spite of the primordial interest I had in living alone, I thought that I ought to devote a few months of my life to help you to escape from shame. It would be necessary, to redeem you completely, to give you all my soul and all my heart; I can’t do that; that would be to abandon my plans; it would be to commit a cowardice, to transform a meritorious action of my past life into a futile sacrilege.

“It’s necessary that I return to the mysterious task that is imposed on me, and I render your liberty to you. Let’s separate, Mariette, without bitterness and without regrets, and let’s remain friends, in spite of everything.”

“The division that you’d like me to accept, I would have been able to forgive you when you were still wretched and you needed my indulgence and my pity; today, when you’re capable of earning a living, I could no longer submit to it without dishonor and without scorn for myself. Now, I have need of all my strength and all my esteem to accomplish the miracle that I have to realize.

“I don’t know what the future reserves for us, and how we might meet again one day; doubtless it will be in another milieu and under another name; don’t recognize me then unless I recognize you, and don’t seek to retie bonds that so many reasons oblige us to break. But if any danger threatens you, if any despair takes possession of your heart, don’t forget that you’ll always have a sure and disinterested friend in me, who will always make every effort to get you out of difficulty.

“Let’s embrace one last time, Rose, and not for long, for you’ll make me suffer needlessly.”

She threw herself into his arms again. He pushed her gently toward the door.

Leaning on the banister he watched her go down the stairs sadly. A frightful pain gripped his heart; he wanted to call her back, but the cry would not emerge from his throat.

Oh, if Rose Gontran had only looked up and seen the anguish that had taken his breath away!

He left the door ajar.

Mariette might perhaps have come back. Rose Gontran did not.

Soon, other sentiments came to agitate him. The memory of the work that it was necessary to complete comforted him. Since that absorbing liaison, born of the obligation created by misery and also, he was obliged to recognize, by an impulse of his heart, could only ever be temporary; it was a hundred times better that it end completely. Certainly, he was heartbroken to have lost Mariette, but he ought to deem himself fortunate to have recovered his liberty so easily.

The clock chimed midday; he resolved to go eat lunch at a restaurant. As he went past the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, his curiosity was solicited by a crowd of idlers who were forming a hedge to either side of the porch.

A wedding, no doubt, he thought. A long file of carriages, their coachmen and horses decorated with flowers, were waiting at the exit. He drew nearer. The head of the cortege came down the steps of the perron.

On the arm of Dr. Larmezan, majestically clad in a robe of blue silk, a woman, the bride, looked directly at him.

He hastened to flee like a guilty man, ashamed, humiliated, his heart bleeding, gripped again by an inexplicable regret at finding himself alone forever.

 

Chapter XX

 

 

Convinced that Rose, after having acquired the dresses and jewels indispensable to her success, would not take long to come back to beg his forgiveness; certain that he would be weak enough to allow himself to be recaptured, he resolved, in order to avoid the danger, to leave the sunlit mansard in the Rue Vavin.

In any case, the narrow abode, which she had filled with her presence, now seemed singularly sad and empty. Before the old piano, still open, on the stand of which the last song that he had had that her still remained, he had even felt tears rising to his eyes. It was necessary, therefore, since it was still haunted by troubling memories, to abandon that place, where dreams bore him, involuntarily, toward the absentee.

The Café Concert de l’Étoile had changed management and personnel; Rose would lose track of him and find a lover more in conformity with the demands of her new situation. The aid and advice of the old friend had incontestably been indispensable to Mariette; his presence and his love could only be injurious to the future of Rose Gontran.

He therefore rented the specious loft of a of town house in the Rue de Ile-Saint-Louis, installed his books and his furniture there, and then, thinking, full of remorse, that since the death of Dr. Albin, the search for quotidian bread and the education of Mariette had prevented him from taking a single step toward the sacred goal, he wanted to redeem his long inaction by means of intense labor, and finally begin the brilliant synthesis of chemistry that had reduced the totality of his past work to nothing.

The task was much more arduous than he had supposed. He could not repeat, for lack of money, certain fundamental experiments; the official laboratories were closed to him and the miserly libraries only opened their doors to the privileged. In spite of that, he worked day and night for more than two months, sustained by a feverish excitement, scarcely according a few moments to his meals, stealing hours from his sleep, forbidding himself the slightest rest. Carried away by a kind of frenzy, he succeeded thus in laying down the first foundations of the envisioned work—but at the price of what sacrifices!

The intermittent work he found: music lessons, translations of foreign works, sessions as a pianist, etc., was no longer sufficient to enable him to live in an adequate fashion; the few savings he had had the prudence to put by had been absorbed by Rose’s dresses; his furniture, sold piece by piece, had been reduced to the strictly necessary. It would have been necessary to run hither and yon, interrupting his favored labor, and rather than waste time, which fled so quickly, he preferred to nourish himself wretchedly with meager portions purchased in a vague local creamery and shiver with cold in his large fireless room. Robust as he was, his health could not support so much effort and so many privations with impunity.

One day in November, on returning from the Bibliothèque Nationale, he went along the glacial Rue de l’Ile-Saint-Louis, exposed to all the winds, inundated with sweat, and felt ill when he got home. He immediately went to bed; violent shivers agitated him all night, and then the symptoms of pneumonia became manifest. He had his old concierge cover him with vesicants and cared for himself as best he could. Scarcely was he convalescent from that first attack, however, than a grave complication set in. A diffuse anthrax of the neck developed rapidly, in disquieting fashion.²¹

This time, the malady necessitated the intervention of another; it was necessary to quit the loft where no one had come to sit at his bedside. He covered himself up as best he could, informed the concierge, and, hanging on to the walls, his head hammered by the fever, dragged himself to the somber edifice that might perhaps shelter his death-throes.

“The central hospitals are full up,” he was told. “We have no more rom. Go to Lariboisière or Beaujon.”

He demonstrated the impossibility of his taking a single step further, insisted on speaking to the intern on duty, explained his situation to him, protested against the humanity of a refusal whose result would be a certain aggravation of a condition already very grave, and ended up being admitted urgently.

By an ironic and mysterious will, number twenty of the St-Jean ward entered as a patient in the service that Dr. Albin had directed so magisterially for such a long time. He took refuge, devoured by disease, in the supreme asylum where, full of strength and health, he had so often leaned over the suffering of others. He sheltered, conscious of his own peril, behind the white curtains where he had seen so many poor devils die, with the vague and general pity that results from professional indifference. In the fashion in which an orderly helped him to undress, he already judged their value, the care of mercenaries for whom he no longer had the eye of the mater.

He spent a night of torment and hauntings. Policemen tracked him from bench to bench and his legs gave way beneath him; abject beings dragged him into an endless whirlwind and his heavy head was suddenly tipped back more forcibly by the gyratory movement. An immense jeering crowd chased him. He was buried alive in a tomb.

The next day, he was beginning to sleep, taking advantage of the brief morning calm, when the sound of footsteps and voices woke him up with a start. The chief of service, his successor, had just arrived and was making his daily round. A compact group of students was following him, stopping at all the beds, listening religiously to the lessons in anima vili that the master was lavishing upon them, trying to recognize maladies, examining wounds, fractures and tumors by turns.

“An entrant yesterday evening,” announced the intern, indicating number twenty.

“What have you observed?” asked the eminent surgeon. “Reply in a low voice in order that these Messieurs don’t hear; we’re each going to judge the case. The intern obeyed. The chief of service advanced toward the patient, ordered him to sit up, hanging on to the rope that hung down before him, and examined him carefully.

“Look,” he said. “He’s been covered in vesicants.”

“So, my worthy friend,” said the chief surgeon, “you’ve been ill before coming here?”

“I’ve just had pneumonia,” the patient replied.

“And who was the donkey who put those vesicants on you.”

“It was me.”

“My compliments—your remedy has put you in the state you’re in now.” He turned toward his audience. “That treatment for pneumonia is a little behind the times, but it still has ferocious partisans, it must he said. My illustrious predecessor Dr. Albin was one of them.” He perceived one of his pupils.

“Diagnose this illness!”

The apprentice succeeded the master and palpated the tissues for some time.

“It’s an anthrax,” he finally replied.

“Very good; and you, Monsieur Boulon, do you observe the fluctuation?”

The inexperienced hands of the provincial of that name fell heavily upon Charles Balin’s dolorous neck and attempted to resolve the question by repeated palpations. A third student advanced in his turn to observe the fact. The patient had allowed himself to fall back on his bed, moaning.

“I can’t take any more,” he murmured. “I’m cold; leave me, I beg you; you can examine me tomorrow.”

“Let’s leave him,” the chief of service approved. “The poor devil’s tired, and with reason. The case is typical and serious, Messieurs; we’re in the presence of a diffuse anthrax.” He gave a long and brilliant discourse to the audience, who took notes, without thinking that the patient could understand the meaning of the medical terms he employed.

“I can’t yet pronounce on the outcome,” he added. “How old is the patient? He looked at the placard. “Forty-seven.²² If he’s not an alcoholic, the prognosis might be good, Hey, my man, do you have the habit of taking a few little glasses with friends?”

The patient shook his head.

“They always say no,” he observed. “This one doesn’t look like a drunkard. “What métier do you follow?”

“Writing. You can open up broadly. I’ve never had syphilis and don’t have diabetes,” the patient added, as if to get ahead of the questions he was bound to be asked.

“Lucky you!” muttered the chief of service. He took his lancet and made broad cuts. The skin split under the steel. The poor devil, clinging to the bed-frame, horribly pale, supported the pain without flinching, but cold sweat beaded his livid face.

“Come on, my friend, don’t worry; it’s nothing,” he concluded, after having informed his pupils of the contrary.

“You haven’t noticed,” he said to the intern, as he went on to the next bed, “that if that pen-pusher wore his hair long and shaved off his beard, he’d bear a strong resemblance to Dr. Albin?”

“Indeed,” replied the student. “I wondered yesterday why I thought I recognized him.

Ill as he was, Charles Balin, subject of study, typical case, raw material for observation, no longer had the same way of seeing as Dr. Albin. While still admitting that the hospital ward ought to be a school for aspirants to the doctorate, he judged nevertheless that the situation of the indigent patient demanded a reserve, a delicacy and a respect that he now regretted not always having had.

The patient spent several days between life and death; perhaps he did not take all the potions that his former colleague ordered for him, and did not always follow his prescriptions, but in spite of that, he found himself out of danger after a week.

Liberated from the instinctive and egotistical concern that had only made him think at first about his own existence, he examined what was happening around him. He watched, with his patient’s eye, the long agonies that he had only glimpsed with his physician’s eye. The gasps and coughing fits of the dying filled his nights with anxious pity. The hallucinated ramblings of the delirious evoked phantoms that had never appeared to him; the racking coughs and stifled plaints began to augment his own suffering; the insipid and penetrating odor of death gave him nausea.

He saw a cadaver carried away, enveloped in its shroud, still warm, without any pious hand closing its eyes. Whose turn is it next? the orderlies seemed to be asking as they looked to the right and left.

There were so many things that he would have sworn he knew thoroughly, of which he had had scarcely glimpsed the appearances. His dolor and misery had taught him to feel pity, and his compassion led to understanding.

The idea that I was working for the profit of humankind, he confessed, too often made me forget humanity. There’s something other than an anatomical specimen in a cadaver, and something other than a subject of study in sickness!

His convalescence lasted a fortnight. Soon, he knew, he would be given his ticket of leave. What if he could stay for a while in the hospital, in the capacity of an orderly? That would permit him not to fall back without resources into the street. He needed once again to sell a few poor items of furniture, but it would be better to keep them. He imparted his desire to the chief of service, presenting himself as a former medical student whom reverses of fortune had deflected, and asked for his support.

A few days later, a place having been found in another surgical ward, the recommended convalescent was dressed in his smock and circled by the regulation apron.

The head of service, one of his old rivals, to whom the new subordinate was introduced, inspected him with a rapid glance.

“Why, it’s Père Albin!!” he exclaimed, observing the resemblance. He started laughing; his pupils joined in chorus, and the soubriquet remained to him among his colleagues.

Soon, the new orderly gave evidence of singularly astonishing surgical aptitudes. He begged the interns and pupils to let him undertake a few dressings, a favor that the idle hastened to accord to him. He put a passion, a contentment and a skill into it that surprised everyone.

“Where did you learn all that?” asked the chief of service, brought up to date. He repeated his story of interrupted studies

“Aren’t you, rather, some provincial bone-setter? There are, it’s said, some who are very skillful.”

The orderly tried to protest.

“Don’t defend yourself,” added the chief of service. “Some pork-butchers, not to mention amphitheater assistants, carry out disarticulations I wouldn’t disavow.”

The skill that the newcomer showed earned him some consideration at first; the pupils established laudatory comparisons between his dressings and those of the interns, and the latter, often in haste to leave, confided their work to him on more than one occasion. But the services that the orderly strove to render did not take long to become a source of trouble. One thing earned him a disgrace from which he ought to have taken a lesson. Several times without be instructed, he remade dressings that he thought badly executed. There was in that action a usurpation of function complicated by a kind of criticism that could not be tolerated. The offended interns forbade him to touch their dressings thereafter, and never missed an opportunity to treat him as a servant.

Charles Balin tried for some time to hold himself in check, but involuntarily, surges of impatience, authoritarian observations and occasional rude comments escaped him in confrontation with a lack of skill or a hesitation. It was not admissible than an orderly should dare to correct or criticize those to whom he owed submission and respect; everyone ganged up against him, and even his colleagues, initially full of admiration for is incontestable superiority, but rapidly becoming jealous, treated him as a black sheep.

He requested a transfer; the director, after having reprimanded him and warned him that in case of recidivism he would be obliged to dismiss him, consented to it.

The orderly kept quiet for another month, telling himself that he was, after all, in the wrong, that Dr. Albin himself would not have suffered such anarchy in his staff, and that, socially speaking, the intrinsic value of an individual ought not to be above the position he occupied.

Soon, however, an event that caused a certain noise in the hospital world was imputed to the surprising orderly: several errors of diagnosis had been corrected on the placards!

Taken to task, he strenuously denied any responsibility for that bold action, which damaged the reputation of a renowned surgeon. The latter, unable to admit that an orderly was capable of giving him lessons, insisted that he be sacked, but there was no proof and he was spared again.

A final incident, however, completed the measure.

A worker employed in roughcasting fell from the scaffolding, sustaining grievous wounds in the thigh, and was immediately taken to the hospital. A considerable hemorrhage endangered his life; a few more minutes and the man would be dead.

It was about two o’clock; no surgeon was there. The intern on duty, as was required, attempted a ligature of the femoral artery, but he had lost his composure groping and could not find the artery. Yielding to an irresistible surge of impatience, the audacious orderly, who was serving as his aide, suddenly took the scalpel from his hand, shoved him away without saying a word, discovered the artery in the blink of an eye and tied it off.

At a stroke, the situation was no longer tolerable; the astounded young surgeon had not breathed a word, but rumor of the incident spread rapidly. The following day, the director summoned him again.

“Monsieur,” he said to him, with an involuntary respect, “you did something yesterday that in itself in perhaps worthy of praise, but which nevertheless obliges me to criticize you and dismiss you. You took on a very heavy responsibility that you were not entitled to bear. You did, in truth, succeed in that delicate enterprise, but admit that if the injured man had died in your hands, what might have followed. Can you imagine the scandal? All the newspapers in Paris would report that the Hospital allows patients to be butchered by orderlies in the face of the most distinguished surgeons! You can see the raising of shields from here. If someone dies in the hands of a physician, no one can raise any protest; his scientific qualifications are a guarantee for society, but in the hands of a ward attendant! I would, with every right, throw him out immediately. Go then, if you please; exercise your talents elsewhere. Yesterday, chance favored you; tomorrow, your vanity, give an appetite, might cause you to commit the worst blunders. Here’s the account I’ve prepared; present it to the cahier.”

Charles Balin, having argued the urgency of the case and force majeure, made the observation that a human life was at stake and that he was sure of himself, since he had succeeded.

The honorable director was intractable. A surgeon, denying all evidence, putting concern for human life below his whim, could obstinately refuse to apply antiseptic in his service; he found that quite natural, or, at least, not his concern. But an orderly, even if he saved a man’s life, had to be severely punished for daring to take on the role of a qualified individual. The exceptional success did not justify the monstrosity of the action. The reasons that the subaltern tried to put forward could only have value among people with no social organization, in a land where rules were made to be broken and diplomas were issued without conferring any prerogative.

Chapter XXI

 

 

Desolate, but obliged to recognize himself the social logic of the outcome. Charles Balin quit the smock and apron that he had worn with joy and honor for more than three months. He had not spent a sou of his meager wages, had received meager New Year’s gifts, and relatives of patients grateful for his attentions had sometimes slipped the modest offerings of poor folk into his hand; he could therefore take his time and search for an employment. He would continue his scientific work as soon as fortune had smiled on him a little. It was necessary before anything else to be sure of being able to live and not fall back into the tenebrous in pace in which he had almost left his intelligence and his skin.

He went back to his domicile on the Ile St-Louis, passed his cherished manuscripts in review, tidied himself up somewhat, and headed with no precise goal toward the grand boulevards. The first thing that struck his eyes was a large poster with a portrait of a woman:

FOLIES NOUVELLES every evening ROSE GONTRAN.

Damn! he thought, Mariette’s making rapid progress; already a star of the first magnitude.

A real pleasure inundated his soul. He had read in the newspapers, from time to time, laudatory appreciations of his pupil, but he had not imagined such a rapid and brilliant vogue. The registered prostitute who had been walking the streets scarcely a year ago was today bringing all Paris to her feet! She was, therefore, out of all poverty, in a position to live luxuriously, to follow her tastes and satisfy her caprices—and all that was his work; he was the good genie of that unexpected metamorphosis!

Put in a good mood, he treated himself to a succulent dinner washed down by a generous wine. Then, enlivened by that small intemperance, he headed for the Folies Nouvelles. He wanted to hear Rose, observe her progress for himself. Lost in the crowd of spectators, she would not see him or would not recognize him. Perhaps she was no longer even thinking about him?

He bought a ticket and hid himself in the discreet penumbra of the gallery.

Young women in opulent but garish dresses—export items—old much-decorated gentlemen, party-goers in suits with flowers in their buttonholes, Englishmen in check jackets that reminded him of the accursed rags of old and provincials in violation of conjugal fidelity were heaped up in groups or walking around at a slow pace.

The spectacle was encumbered with acrobatic exercises and clownish pantomimes, which bored him. A kind of almost-silent expectation and the accumulation of auditors in the most favorable spots announced to him the appearance of the Star. Soon, in fact, the orchestra launched into a seguidilla, thunderous applause brought the house down, and Rose Gontran came on stage.

With her mantilla, her short skirt, latticed with black silk on a yellow background heightened with jonquil ribbons, her half-naked breasts florid with blood-colored carnations, her features accentuated, her large eyes circled with bistre, her almost masculine forehead, her elegant slender legs, and beneath the floods of oxyacetylene light that enveloped her, causing the silk to gleam and her diamonds to sparkle, bringing out the pallor of her uniformly mat complexion, she was still not pretty in the dainty sense of the word, but beautiful, with a beauty full of enticement.

His heart beat forcefully, and a frisson ran through him to the marrow of his bones.

She sang, to the Spanish tunes that he had once taught her, filthy words emphasized by feline movements of the hips and vulgar but graceful gestures.

The success immediately took on triumphant proportions: acclamations, enthusiastic encores, and a rain of flowers; nothing was lacking. By the end, the delirium was at its height. Radiant with joy, she apologized for having run out of strength and made her exit, blowing mischievous kisses.

Charles Balin found himself leaning against an open box in which the two cavaliers serving a golden-haired demi-mondaine were making themselves noticeable by the warmth of their bravos.

“Wonderful, superb, stunning, amazing!” cried one of the young men, who never ran out of eulogies.

“What enthusiasm!” his neighbor ended up saying, with a hint of jealousy. “Are you infatuated with that Montmartrean Spaniard?”

“Why not? She’s worth the trouble, I think.”

“In that case, my lad, you can dig deep, if you have pockets,” the golden-haired beauty assured him. “Rose Gontran doesn’t want a lover. She doesn’t like men.”

“Really?”

“Try—you’ll see.”

“What does she love, then?” asked the other, feigning naivety.

“You’re indiscreet, Alfred. Go ask her.”

“All the same, these good little comrades, insinuations don’t cost them anything.”

“Damn! Listen, it isn’t me, it’s her who says it. Look, yesterday evening we were eating at the next table at Peters, and just between us, drinking champagne and eavesdropping. She was with Baron de Ramel, who was pressing her hard.”

“The handsome, irresistible de Ramel?”

“The same. Doubtless he’d just made her some firm proposition, for Rose started laughing in his face. ‘No, no, my lad!’ she cried. ‘Comrade, as much as you like, anything else, never! Men! I don’t need them anymore; I’ve known too many in my life and they disgust me too much. I’ve only ever loved one; he was old, not handsome and poor; me, I was young and beginning to have talent, money, success, and he didn’t want me anymore!’”

“Pooh! It’s an affectation, like any other, to excite desire and raise the price. Look, if you want my opinion, it’s fashionable in a certain milieu, to go to Lesbos, but fundamentally, it’s a pose.”

“A pose! A pose!” repeated the beautiful young woman, writhing. “What reason would she have, then, for always having that filthy old seal trailing after her?”

“A seal?”

“You can see, in the front row of the stalls, that fat common whore, decked out like an inmate of the Darcy.”

Charles Balin looked in the direction indicated. Still fat, ignoble, but richly rigged out in a garish fashion, Nini Nichon was lounging in one of the orchestra stalls.

So it was for that that he’d wasted ten months of his new life, so short and so precious! Sickened, he was about to leave, the obligatory final ballet having no interest for him, when he thought he recognized the tall Annette marching toward him.

He was not mistaken; the svelte blonde, still beautiful and desirable, was nonchalalantly following the stream of strollers. What was she doing in this place, denuded of pianists?

He overtook her, turned round and looked at her, smiling.

“Monsieur Charles!” she exclaimed, recognizing him in her turn. “That’s funny! I was just thinking about you a moment ago!”

“Good or bad?”

“Both. But perhaps you’re waiting for Rose Gontran and...”

“I haven’t been waiting for Rose for a long time.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she said, with a knowing air. “It appears that she’s conjugating the verb amour in the feminine.”

He cut her off swiftly. “I left Rose of my own accord.”

“Then I can ask you without indiscretion to offer me a glass of beer.”

“With pleasure, Mademoiselle.” They went into the winter garden and sat to one side.

“Ah!” sighed the great Annette, “that Rose Gontran truly has all the luck. She’s a star, the newspapers talk about her, her picture plasters the walls, the directors cover her with gold—and all that’s your work, because without you, without your lessons, what would she be? Nothing, less than nothing. It’s you who launched her; she still be walking the streets if she hadn’t been your mistress.”

“There is, in fact, some truth in what you say.”

The beautiful Annette uttered a profound sigh. “And to think that if you’d wanted, it could have been the same for me!”

“Perhaps, but not in the same fashion, though.”

“What do you mean?” said Annette leaning very close to him.

“Are you willing to hear the truth, the whole truth? You might perhaps be able to take advantage of it.”

“Explain yourself—you’re making me impatient.”

“Well, until now you’ve been following a false path. Once again, excuse my frankness but you’ve always interested me.”

“Speak with an open heart.”

“It’s not sufficient to love music and singing to become a musician and singer; it also needs natural gifts, which determination can develop but can’t give us. Now those indispensable qualities, without wishing to offend you, you don’t possess in a high enough degree.”

“Oh!” said the pretty woman, disappointed.

“But,” he said, “you’re tall, well made, and, according to rumor, a good girl, although a trifle inconstant; you have a whim that pushes you toward the stage. Set your sights on dancing. I’m a good prophet and a good judge—Rose Gontran is the proof of that. You’ll succeed.”

“What an idea!” exclaimed the great Annette delighted. “I sense that what you’re saying is true—it’s like a revelation. And I never thought of it! I fact, I adore dancing.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“It’s not too late; a few months of serious study and you can debut as chorus girl at the Folies. Your fine figure, your beauty and your grace will do the rest.” Laughing, he added: “You’ll never get to the Opéra, it’s true, but you’ll acquire the notoriety for which you have such a great desire.”

In her enthusiasm, Annette would willingly have thrown her arms around him; she could see herself already, acclaimed, recalled by a delirious audience. She looked at him tenderly; he felt a quivering of the flesh run through him. A languor full of softness invaded him; the lust that the sight of the other had just stirred up rose rapidly to the surface. Nevertheless, he dared not make an advance, fearing a refusal that, after all, would only be a legitimate revenge.

Annette, for her part, had had too many previous disappointments to issue a categorical invitation.

He had just paid for the drinks.

“Are you free this evening?” he sighed.

“Yes!” she hastened to respond. “Why?”

“Because if, by chance, you’re afraid to walk home alone,” he replied, smiling, “I’d be glad to accompany you.”

“As far as the door?”

“And even further.”

“You’re not afraid that Rose Gontran might see us?” she said, mockingly, as she took his arm.

“I no longer love her,” he murmured, gripped by a dull ager. “I never loved her. Come on.”

This time, the great Annette could affirm, without fear of contradiction, that not one of Père Antoine’s pianists had resisted her enchantments. Already, in the fiacre that carried them toward the Boulevard Montparnasse, the pretty vampire was devouring her prey with kisses.

Monsieur Charles had lost nothing by waiting.

 

Chapter XXII

 

 

That amorous adventure, born of resentment as much as hazard, had the ephemeral duration of the longest of Annette’s caprices. He had imagined that the beautiful woman would make him forget the other, but he perceived, as soon as the next day, that nothing could tear Mariette out of his heart.

The malevolent insinuations he had heard at the Folies Nouvelles represented to him Rose Gontran in the grip once again of her vicious past, returned to the crapulous milieu from which he thought he had liberated her; ought he, however, to trust the gossip of some rival? Alas, the presence of Nini Nichon, whose appearance denounced that she was sponging on Mariette corroborated the accusation.

After all, what was astonishing about it? Had he not left her in a situation that was, it is true, less repulsive, but just as degrading as that of old? The price of the act did not wash away the stain. There would not have been a great difference between the high-cost Rose Gontran and Mariette whoring at a discount on the sidewalk. From the moral viewpoint, in fact, the state of the rich prostitute was perhaps even more despicable, since it did not have imminent destitution as an excuse.

Had not Rose Gontran instinctively felt that?

Reclaimed by the shameful past, she was escaping the repulsive merchandising of prostitution by means of a perverse caprice that he knew full well to be only a temporary phase in her disordered existence. He had been too hasty in quitting Mariette; he should only have abandoned her at the moment when, provided with the accoutrements and engagements necessary to earn a lavish living, she was able to become the disinterested mistress of some devoted friend; she would then have been on the road that led to moral redemption. Instead of that, he had seized the first opportunity to leave her; he had taken Mariette off the street merely to return her to the alcove.

He had feared finding himself in a dubious situation—a paltry excuse born of egotistical self-regard. He was outside of all social conventions, free in his actions, the sole judge of their intrinsic value; it had been necessary to stay with her, to channel her excesses, so to speak. He would have continued to earn his living honestly, no compromise being able to draw in into enjoying a life of dishonorably sourced luxury. Rose Gontran, thanks to his aid, would have continued to deny Mariette’s crapulous camaraderie, and Nini Nichon, attracted by the fortune, would doubtless never have exploited debasing memories.

He had, in truth, a great and veritable excuse: that he was obliged to pursue a goal a thousand times more elevated, and could not attach himself any longer to Mariette’s fate; but he ought not to be astonished, given that, if he found her in a moral situation almost as despicable as that of old.

Did he not have a partial responsibility for that almost immediate return to her vomit? If she really had loved him, had she not demanded of intoxication, a poor counselor, the forgetfulness of his abandonment? Of all the vices of the past, drunkenness had remained the most tenacious; he had only been able to master it to a degree by dint of patience, supplications and cunning. The deadly habit had surely profited from his departure to recover all of its empire.

An item published a few days later in a morning newspaper confirmed him in that opinion:

 

One of our most talented café concert stars, Mademoiselle Rose Gontran, to be precise, came on stage last night in a state of unstable equilibrium, which the audience almost failed to find to its taste, but with a presence of mind as rare as it is precious in such a situation, the witty artiste immediately began singing to the tune from La Périchole;²³ ‘”I’m a little drunk, a little drunk, but shh! You mustn’t tell. Shh!, etc.” Needless to say, the incident was concluded by laughter and applause.

 

Now he was sure of it; Rose Gontran was as much to be pitied as criticized. But what could he do about it? Had he not already devoted too much time and vital energy to her, stolen from the sole enterprise that was worthy of him? Had he not returned, in the measure of the possible, the fortuitous aid that she had once brought him? If he had not been able to redeem her, she was sheltered henceforth from hunger and official stigma, and if ever disgust for vice took hold in her, poverty would no longer rivet her to infamy.

It was thus, with the sophisms of his intellect, that he tried to dissimulate the anxieties of his heart, which, independently of his will, sought a thousand reasons to exculpate, or at least to excuse, Mariette. Certainly, he had never loved her, any more than he loved her today, in the true sense of the word; otherwise, he would not have hesitated for a single instant to sacrifice his dream to her, to consecrate all his life to her; and yet, a sheaf of sentiments, in which gratitude, perversity, pity and even curiosity flourished, still attracted him to her by a thousand memories.

He sensed, more vaguely, that another motive had played an important role in that kind of fascination, but that cause he could neither define nor divine.

It was in that situation of mind and heart that he approached Nini Nichon, encountered one day in the environs of the Trinité. The whore, initially surprised and annoyed, obstinately refused to recognize him, calling him a peasant and threatening to call the police.

Rose must still love me, he thought, since the wicked angel was afraid of me; she doubtless imagined that I wanted to take her back.

Not wanting either to see her or write to her, he found an indirect means of reminding her of him. Remembering that he had once written verses—what had he not done?—he sent her the words and music of a love song, “Chanson pour aimer,” the last quatrain of which was:

 

Since it is necessary that everything ends

Let us separate loving one another;

Our love will be the dream

That endures eternally.

 

involuntarily betraying the secrets of his heart.

That scarcely resembled the singer’s vulgar genre, but she sang it with all her heart and veritable tears and, as the influence of her friend had always been beneficial, the success it obtained proved to Rose Gontran that she had no need of coarse words and provocative gestures to conquer the applause of the public.

In the following days, the theatrical press carried numerous advertisements saying that Mademoiselle Rose Gontran keenly desired to reach an agreement with the author of Chanson pour aimer, Monsieur Charles Balin, for new creations of the same kind.

He knew what that meant, and did not respond.

A few weeks later he learned that the Star, departed on tour, was reaping profits and laurels on the great stages of Austria and Russia. He was simultaneously pained and satisfied; the slightest encounter might have reunited them, and the mere presence of Rose in Paris was sufficient to trouble his repose.

Several months went by; on emerging from the hospital he had found a modest employment with a large manufacturer of chemical and pharmaceutical products with which anterior purchases had created a connection for him.

That position presented considerable advantages. Not only did he earn a living, but he had a well-equipped laboratory at his disposal, and although his employer did not always see without displeasure one of his minor employees devoting himself to scientific research, the reliability of his analyses, the simplification of procedures and a few other exceptional services that he rendered caused it to be overlooked.

He repeated the conclusive experiments that overturned Dr. Albin’s theory and found new ones to support then, bringing a definitive precision to the mysterious formulae.

Intoxicated by those results—which, after months of discouragement and forced inactivity had affirmed his convictions—he thought, unfortunately, that he was ready to commence the struggle. A preliminary article published by the Revue des Sciences, in which the fashionable theory was seriously criticized, burst like a bomb.

The article was signed Charles Balin. An investigation of sorts was mounted. The druggist, told by numerous official acquaintances that he was suspected of having encouraged the attack, hastened to dismiss the audacious employee. He had nothing for which to reproach him, but by keeping him he would have risked losing the greater part of his clientele.

Similar companies not want to inherit such a dangerous auxiliary at any price, he found himself out on the street again, and fell back into tenebrous despair. Although he no longer had, as before, the immediate anxiety of lacking a loaf of bread, the rudeness and rapidity of the riposte, and the ostracism with which he felt himself immediately subjected, taught him brutally that he was not yet strong enough or sufficiently well-armed to go into the arena.

He set out once again in quest of employment. A veterinarian, the director of an animal boarding establishment, was in search of an aide accustomed to the manipulation of pharmaceutical products. On the advice of his former employer he applied for the post and was accepted.

There, things seemed at first to present themselves in a favorable light. His employer, a great gambler against fate, exceedingly fond of racecourses and beautiful women, spending his days in the weighing-room and his nights in fashionable cabarets, gladly delegated professional cares to his auxiliaries. As long as the employee was subordinate and only had to prepare drugs, all went well; unfortunately, he could not help displaying his surgical and veterinary aptitudes, and the veterinarian, all the more delighted because he wanted to go to the races in Nice, immediately confided the administration of the hospital to him. That was the part of the establishment where sick inmates were placed, where poor tomcats were neutered, the ears of ratting dogs were cropped and bulldogs were deprived of their tails.

In spite of the irony of the situation and his repugnance for such work, the Chief of Service mastered his pride and set to work conscientiously. It was, after all, an excellent opportunity to experiment with the potency of certain antiseptics that he had recently discovered.

The most recalcitrant quinsies, coughs, galls and swine-fevers, and the most tenacious tapeworms could not rest his treatments. After a fortnight, the dogs had returned to their kennels, the cats, returned to old ladies’ laps, were purring by the fireside, and parrots reinstalled on their perches were once again delighting children great and small.

On his return, the veterinarian, amazed by that unexpected evacuation, could not master his ill humor.

“I had sixty boarders when I left!” he cried, with comical chagrin, “and now I have no more than ten. You’ve either sent them away without being cured or you haven’t followed my prescriptions.”

“I have, in fact, applied treatments that I thought better.”

“That, I can’t support in my establishment! By what right did you take that initiative? What qualifications guarantee you? You haven’t come from Alfort,²⁴ I assume! In any case, I expect you to respect my instructions, and I’m dismissing you.” He muttered, inaudibly: “Go get hanged elsewhere. The health of an animal isn’t as precious as that of a man; we have the right to exploit the manias of people, almost all rich, who often threat their animals with more regard than their fellows. I’m a partisan of cures, since they ought to serve the good reputation of my establishment, but there’s no need to obtain them with such urgency!”

“Monsieur,” Charles Balin said to him, divining his thoughts, “I hold animals in no higher esteem than one ought to, but apart from the fact that any weak and suffering creature has a right to our pity, the most rudimentary honesty commanded me to act in that fashion. Your clients, via your intermediary, paid me to reestablish the health of their pets; I cured them as rapidly as I could, that’s all.”

“And you did well,” replied the businessman, coldly, “but your reasoning runs into the brutal logic of a fact: so long as I had animals to care for, I needed someone to carry out that task. No longer having any, I no longer need the special employee. That’s all, and goodnight.”

The director, freed from paying wages, went out laughing quietly.

Had he not avenged himself in his fashion for the repugnant role of clipper of canine ears and castrator of cats that necessity had forced upon him?

 

In the meantime, Rose Gontran, returned from Russia, had resumed performing at the Folies Nouvelles, and her success was increasing by the day when the newspapers announced a sudden indisposition on the singer’s part.

Observing that her name was still absent from the posters, he did not take long to become anxious, and ran to the Folies, where he was informed of the imminent return of the chanteuse. Nevertheless, he went to her domicile in the Rue de la Pépinière, where the Cerberus obstinately refused to unclench his teeth, and prevented him from going up. He had strict instructions not to give out and information and not to let anyone in.

Two or three days later, he learned from a theatrical newspaper that Rose Gontran, afflicted by a serious smallpox, would not be returned to the stage for a time as yet undetermined.

Smallpox! That was ugliness, despair, ruin for her, but he might perhaps be able to prevent her being disfigured. Determined to force all doors, he ran to the Rue de la Pépinière, where the concierge no longer tried to stop him and indicated the floor. He went up the stairs like a madman. The key was in the door; he went in without even thinking about knocking.

Everything seemed deserted; the cupboard doors were open, the drawers agape; clothing and lingerie was trailing everywhere; one might have thought that the apartment had been burgled.

He called out. A thin old woman appeared on the threshold of a doorway and, without letting go of the bottle of warm wine she was holding in her hand, half drunk, told him that the poor lady was very ill; the doctor had said that she would not recover.

He entered the bedroom that the megaera indicated to him with a finger, distraught. He had arrived too late! Rose Gontran, covered with horrible pustules, her face torn, her body lacerated, was writhing on the bearskin that served as a bedside rug. He picked her up and quickly replaced her in the bed.

Poor Rose, prey to delirium, had not recognized him.

“Is this how you look after the invalids confided to your care!” he shouted, seized by a violent anger.

The mercenary started stammering excuses; she had only left for a minute; the lady must have fallen while she was preparing the warm wine that she had been advised to take to preserve her from the infection; for sure she would not have taken long to perceive the accident and put her back in bed.

Mad with dolor, he sat down momentarily on the bed and took Rose’s pulse; the unfortunate woman continued to ramble. He prescribed a potion and, not trusting the unsteady drunkard, ran to fetch it himself, returning a few minutes later.

“Why are you here on your own?” he demanded of the nurse.

“Well, Monsieur,” the old woman replied, “there are maladies that scare people, not everyone wants to care for them. Me, although they say you can’t catch it twice, I only agreed to do it to please the concierge, a friend of my poor late husband, and because he promised me a good fee. With that, I’m afraid of being robbed. Who’ll pay me if she dies?”

“Shut up, you old fool—she can hear you. Has Mademoiselle Rose no servants, or friends, then?”

“Oh, friends—they’re fine ones, her friends. In the early days, there was a fat blonde and a maid, sluts who didn’t dare go into the room once and gave orders to the concierge not to let anyone in. The good-for-nothings spent their time plying bezique, as if nothing were happening, while the sick woman was moaning to break your heart! Yesterday evening the doctor said that she might well not recover, and might not even last the night; then they quickly parceled up linen and all kinds of things that were theirs—so they told me—because they lived together; they left in a cab, telling me they’d come back this morning, and I can see that they’ve done a flit. They’re a dirty lot, all the same.”

Charles Balin spent the night with the invalid and strove, as much as he could, to attenuate the ravages of the disease.

In the morning, Rose had a long sleep, after which she seemed to be emerging from a bad dream. Her eyelids were swollen; her closed eyes could not see anything.

“Nini,” she murmured.

“Rose…Mariette,” he replied, in a sift voice.

She shuddered and uttered a cry. “Charles! Charles! I recognize you, I know it’s you! I no longer want to die! Save me!”

He could not help shedding tears, and took the hands that was groping, searching for him—but she snatched it away swiftly.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “You’ll catch my disease. It’s catching—the doctor said so…”

From that moment on, the poor young woman gradually improved. She asked where Nini and the maid were; the old nurse told her about their departure.

“It’s all over for me,” she repeated, with resignation.

Two days later she was out of danger, but Charles Balin wondered fearfully whether she would survive her despair, when she saw the hideous traces that the disease had left on her face.

As if she divined his concern, she sighed: “I’m going to be very ugly now, aren’t I?”

He tried to attenuate the truth and console her,

“Oh, I know, I sense that I’ll be disfigured. The doctor who cared for me took precautions, but one night, I woke up with a start; I was afraid; I called out but no one came. I tried to get up, but I fell on the floor, and I can’t remember anything more.” Sadly, she added: “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

He bowed his head and said nothing.

“Oh, I don’t hold it against you. If I only had the hope of seeing you in future,” she implored, “perhaps I’d still be happy. I’d resent this illness less, which has brought you to close to me again. I could even console myself for being hideous; you taught me resignation. I wasn’t pretty before, now I’ll be frightful!”

He promised to do everything for her that he could.

The convalescence made good progress. Soon, Rose was able to get up. The first time she looked in a mirror she uttered a scream of horror and nearly fainted.

He had, however prepared her with all kinds of circumspection for that despairing contemplation; it was necessary, besides, that she should not trust that first impression; the wounds, still poorly scarred, made her a thousand times uglier than she would be; the skin would resume its natural color in time; the inequalities would disappear.

“It’s over, completely over,” she replied, sobbing. “Adieu, beautiful dreams; I’ll never set foot on a stage again.”

That day, which he had put off as long as he could be keeping Rose in bed under countless pretexts, was for her a source of profound dolor. Rendered suspicious by the inhuman abandonment of Nini and her maid, she wanted to insect her cupboards. Her money, her jewels, all the objects of any value and a part of her clothing and lingerie had disappeared.

“The wretch!” she murmured, desolate. “The punishment is greater than I expected. Ugly and ruined—it’s too much, all at once.”

Again she dissolved in tears.

He tried to make her accept her disappointments philosophically.

“You didn’t want me when I was pretty,” she observed, “and now I’m a scarecrow, now I no longer have anything, and perhaps can’t even earn a living any longer, how can you expect me not to weep, thinking that it will soon be necessary for us to separate again.”

“I left you,” he replied, gravely, “because you were rich and pretty and I thought you were able to do without my help. Now that you’re appealing to me for help; now, above all, that your misfortune, more than anything else, might enable you to become an honest woman by obliging you to work, although I can’t engage my entire future, if you swear to me never to get in the way of my projects, whatever they may be, if you promise to do as I ask blindly, I’m ready to extend my hand to you again. We’ll earn our living as best we can.”

An immense joy transfigured her. “I swear to you,” she cried, throwing herself into his arms.

“You know,” she added, in a curt, dull and resolute voice that that penetrated his heart like a sharp spike, “if you hadn’t said that to me, I would have thrown myself in the river tonight.”

A few hours later, Rose Gontran, completely reestablished, asked for the annulment of her engagement. The director of the Folies Nouvelles refrained from raising the slightest obstacle. Fortunately for her, he owed her a considerable sum, which permitted her to pay her rent and acquit all her debts.

The first thing to do was to abandon the costly apartment, sell the expensive furniture, now unnecessary and collect the debris that the thieves had left. She assembled thus about four thousand francs.

What were they going to do?

Mariette—for she demanded that from now on, he would no longer call her Rose Gontran—wanted to buy a small stationer’s shop.

He saw nothing inconvenient in that. She would tend the shop, he would go to work or would do such work as he found at home; they would thus resume the communal life of old, the obscure life of calm and wellbeing that she had always regretted. Why hadn’t he proposed that before? What could have prevented him? Could he not act as he wished, pursuing all his projects without her raising the slightest obstacle, without her even seeking to penetrate the mystery with which he enveloped himself?

They toured various quarters in quest of premises. A good opportunity having come up in the Rue de Belleville, they concluded the bargain. The foundation was already laid, and he completed it in an intelligent fashion by adding the sale of newspapers, and put a notice in the window:

Scientific and literary works, chemical analyses, translations of foreign works, redactions of pamphlets and prospectuses. Apply within.

After a few weeks, the encyclopedic stationer had enough work no longer to have to seek any outside. A former pork-butcher, his neighbor, aiming for academic palms, having had him write a pamphlet on The Role of Tinned Goods in Military Alimentation, the success of which had surpassed all expectations, immediately ordered a host of opuscules. It was thus that he published successively, under the name of the ambitious sausage-merchant: A Rational Manner of Salting and Smoking Meat, Hygiene in the Breeding of Pigs, Let’s Make Lard French, Italian Swine and Gallic Butchery and Long Live Bayonne and Down With York.

Two or three maniacs of that sort, and the future was assured.

Mariette became cheerful again and set to work courageously; her friend had demonstrated to her from the start that veritable commercial skill consisted of never cheating the clients, having merchandise of all qualities and always selling items at their true value. She had taken advantage of this advice, and customers did not take long to flock into the small shop.

The perpetual comings and goings, the conversations she willingly exchanged with the regulars, the respect that her past reputation earned her—for she had ended up being recognized—and the sympathies that her affable manners attracted to her lent powerful assistance to the vanquishing of her chagrin; one would have sworn that she had been in commerce all her life.

Her friend, shut away in a first floor room, drafted his commissions or ripened his projects.

Soon, there was enough money to buy chemical products and a few accessories necessary to his experiments. Mariette never asked him the reason for those relatively expensive purchases or worried about what he was doing.

In reality, she did not hinder him at all; he had, therefore, taken the best course.

 

Chapter XXIII

 

 

Since Charles Balin had been able to analyze coldly the unforeseen situation created by the loss of his fortune, he had traced a program whose broad lines would first assure his material existence, which never losing sight of his scientific projects, and then to earn the sum of money necessary to the completion and the publication of his work. In order for him to be able to do that in advantageous conditions, however, it was indispensable that he should be in possession of official qualifications. The miserable failure and unfortunate consequences of his first attempt would have demonstrated that necessity, if he had not already been convinced of the fact.

His plan, prior to the theft at the Crédit International, had been to purchase an American, Belgian or Italian doctoral diploma, and, furnished with that parchment, to obtain the favor, easily done, of taking the examinations for the French doctorate. Thus placed, he would have sufficient qualifications to act fruitfully.

Events having disrupted those plans, instead of the few months that he would have needed, he might well have to spend years becoming an official doctor again. His situation, nevertheless, was beginning to improve. Mariette’s commerce, increasingly prosperous, brought in a good income; his personal endeavors had already permitted him to make savings; another few thousand francs, and the University of Liège or Pisa would sing the dignus est intrare in his honor.

Hazard gave him the chance to earn them more rapidly. Passing one day in front of the shop of the foul-mouthed second hand clothes dealer from which he had once bought his hat, the curiosity of an old practitioner pushed him to discover whether the diabetic was still alive. He went into the wretched shop.

The obese man was still there; his condition even seemed to have improved.

“What do you desire?” he asked, on seeing him enter.

“To enquire after your health, Monsieur.”

“Bah!” grunted the shopkeeper, still as peevish. “But I’m not ill.”

“You have been, at least, and gravely, if I remember correctly.”

“Perhaps,” muttered the amiable broker. “What does it have to do with you?”

“I can see that you don’t recognize me.”

“Wait a minute,” said the merchant.

“Have you forgotten the man in the check suit who gave you a consultation two and a half years ago?”

“The bone-setter!” cried the second-hand dealer, seized with a veritable joy. “I recognize you. Sit down, I beg you, and let me express my gratitude. I owe you a big debt—you put me back on my feet.” He rummaged in the drawer of a dresser and pulled out a dirty piece of paper. “Look—do you recognize it? It’s your prescription—I’ve been careful not to lose it. As soon as I feel ill I run to the pharmacist, and a few days later, I’m better.”

“I’m glad to have been of service to you.”

“It won’t be said that you’ve come to see me without our clinking glasses.”

The broker was so persistent that the visitor could not refuse the invitation. They went into a small neighborhood café. As they went past his shop, the stationer pointed it out.

“That’s where I live now, Monsieur; we’re practically neighbors. When you need newspapers or stationery, you know where to come.”

“What! It’s you that bought the stationer’s!” exclaimed the second-hand dealer, increasingly delighted. “I can ask you for a consultation, then, if necessary?”

“I’ll be happy to give you one.”

“Do you know that, without suspecting it, you sank the doctor who was treating me. The imprudent fellow had told overly curious cousins that I only had two or three months to live. The others no longer left the house, they thought they’d already inherited. Perhaps you’d have thrown them out? I’m not so stupid. I let them give me a heap of presents and lavish me with care. After a while, when they saw that, instead of taking the train for the turnip field, I was continuing, thanks to your regime, to devour the oysters they bought me, they departed, furious. You should have heard them slandering the doctor—and the friend I told the story to made fun of him. As for me, I couldn’t met him in the street without laughing in his face; he started making long detours in order not to go past the shop, and he ended up leaving the quarter.”

The scrap merchant introduced his savior to the regulars of the little café, recommended the stationer’s shop loudly, and whispered a few words in their ears.

After a few days, everyone in the neighborhood knew that the bone-setter who had cured Père Ravin was a stationer in the Rue de Belleville. Consultations began to arrive.

Mariette, knowing her friend’s value, found it quite natural, and strove with all her might to persuade him to accept retribution. Why should his services not be recognized? The local doctors got paid for their cures, in spite of their blunders!

After all, Charles Balin said to himself, am I not fundamentally an illustrious healer, and can I not accept two or three francs for advice for which Dr. Albin was paid twenty times as much?

To the question “How much do I owe you?” he therefore replied: “Whatever you want to give me; you don’t have any obligation; the law doesn’t give me the right to receive a fee.” A few consultants profited from the liberty, but the majority did not depart without leaving their obol.

Soon, his reputation grew and was propagated.

A former orderly at the hospital recognized him, told the story of the operation, and claimed that he had made a mockery of all the celebrated surgeons of the hospitals. The stationer, having become a famous bone-setter by public rumor, received visits from all the corners of the quarter, and even the heart of Paris.

In the beginning, the pharmacists filled his prescriptions, to which they found no grounds for objection, but, on receiving threats from physicians, they were soon obliged to refuse them. The bone-setter then had to advise his patients to go to establishments where he had not been blacklisted—which is to say, those that were outside the quarter. The physicians and pharmacists immediately fell upon him; he was denounced and threatened. It was necessary to surround himself with mystery and, with the aid of the persecution, his renown took on colossal proportions. The qualified doctors, afflicted in their interests, searched everywhere for evidence and witnesses, but the healer, with a remarkable flair, sent suspect patients away or treated them gratuitously, as was his right.

Unfortunately, a public event arrived, which gave redoubtable weapons to his adversaries.

A private carriage had tipped over in the Rue de Belleville. The passenger, violently projected on to the sidewalk, was gravely wounded; his left tibia, broken in two, had torn through the skin and was sticking out of the wound. Transported to a pharmacist’s shop, prey to the most intense pain, he called loudly for help that did not come. No local physician was at home! The proposal was made to fetch the bone-setter.

“Whoever you like,” he begged, “as long as I’m not left in this state any longer and can be taken home.”

The stationer hastened to come, staunched the blood-flow, reduced the fracture, washed the wound and had the injured man placed in the least painful position.

Then he waited for one of the physicians who had been summoned to arrive.

Seeing that no one was coming, and judging that he had to apply a special dressing urgently, he said: “Would you like me to apply a dressing that will allow you to be taken home without danger, Monsieur? Once at home, you can call your usual doctor, and he will do what is necessary.”

The injured man, already sensibly relieved, urged him to do so. He obtained bandages, wadding, cardboard and plaster and rapidly constructed a plastered apparatus, with the opening indispensable to the future care that the wound required. When the apparatus was complete he dressed the wound meticulously.

He had scarcely fastened the last pin when one of the physicians who had been summoned arrived.

“Who reduced the fracture and put on this apparatus?”

“It was me, Monsieur.”

“Ah! The bone-setter. That’s a surgical operation: what gave you the audacity and the right to do it?”

“The urgency there was to do it immediately, and the doubtless involuntary delay in your arrival.”

“All right,” growled the physician. “We’ll see about that later.” He prepared to take off the dressing.”

“You mustn’t touch that,” declared the bone-setter.

“Who’ll stop me?”

“The injured man, whose precious time you’ll waste performing unnecessary maneuvers.”

“You’re afraid that I’ll see your stupidities.”

“The treating surgeon, Dr. P***, whose value you know, I think, will establish them.”

The impatient victim paid the physician for the unnecessary disturbance, thanked the man who had just alleviated his suffering and asked him to accompany him to his domicile to supervise the care of the transportation.

Professor P***, alerted in advance by telegram, was waiting for him there. The invalid as put to bed with the greatest precaution, and then Charles Balin briefly put the illustrious surgeon in the picture. The case was very serious; he had thought it necessary to make a plastered apparatus that would permit the injured man to return home without suffering too much. Dr. P*** approved, removed the bandages that were covering the wound and examined it carefully.

“That’s perfect,” he declared. “You made this dressing yourself, you tell me?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

“All my compliments, my dear colleague; I couldn’t have done better if I’d done it myself. In what quarter do you practice?”

The bone-setter did not know what to say. “I’m not a physician in the official sense,” he ended up confessing.

“That’s impossible. Where did you lean to do that?”

“I’ve been a medical student, and then a hospital orderly.”

“Are you by any chance the famous orderly of whom I’ve heard talk—the one who did the ligature?”

“The same.”

“Well, my friend, I’ll tell you frankly that it’s regrettable that you don’t have a diploma in your pocket. Once again, I couldn’t have done better myself, and my intervention is presently unnecessary” He addressed his rich client: “Monsieur will remake the dressing; I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Doctor,” asked the injured man, “do you see any inconvenience in me asking him to be my nurse?”

“Not only don’t I see any,” replied the eminent operator, “but I urge you enthusiastically to do it.”

The bone-setter accepted the offer, and cared for the gentleman for more than a month.

The man, who bore one of the most illustrious names in the French nobility, endowed with a high intelligence, an extensive instruction and a perfect education, had a somewhat timorous nature. Delighted, to begin with, to have as a nurse a companion who could understand and reply to him, he quickly became intrigued, and then alarmed, by the surprising erudition of the Bellevillois stationer.

“Doctor,” he confided to Professor P*** , one day when his guardian was not present, “I don’t like mystery, and the man who is caring for me is truly too surrounded by it. He’s no more a stationer or an orderly than you or I are chestnut-sellers or street-sweepers.”

“Why do you think that?” interrogated Dr. P***.

“Because Monsieur Balin, or, rather, the so-called Monsieur Balin, possesses knowledge and an education such as I’ve rarely encountered, and you know the kind and the worth of my acquaintances.”

“Is that possible?”

“He knows Descartes, Kant and Hegel in depth. No question of science, art or literature is foreign to him; he plays chess better than I do and is polite to the point of letting me win. He knows three or four living languages. He plays Bach and Beethoven like a professional. Finally, you’ve told me yourself that he makes a dressing as well as you do, which is not saying a little! Until now, you’ve been able to respond to me that he was once a medical student, that he has perhaps received a very careful education, and that an incredible series of misfortunes has reduced him to the humble situation he now occupies, but wait—that isn’t all. You know that, having long been a secretary to the ambassador, I know all the chancelleries inside out. Well, a few words escaped here and there have proved to me that that unknown man is aware of certain very serious diplomatic secrets. He knows things that a minister only confides to his night-cap.”

“Damn!” aid the illustrious professor. “Who can he be?”

“That’s the catch! At any rate, be certain that he’s only a sham stationer. He’s a man in hiding, a noted nihilist or a disgraced foreign diplomat, unless he’s some defrocked papal nuncio. Anyway, I’m at a loss, and I confess to you that the mysterious fellow frightens me. In spite of the service he’s rendered me, I’ll be glad to see the back of him.”

“That’s simple enough. You’re out of danger, well on your way to being fully healed—thanks to him, in fact. Give him a generous recompense and send him on his way.”

“I’ll give him a thousand-franc bill and…”

“Make it two thousand,” put in the prince of surgery. “He hasn’t stolen them, and wealth has its obligations. With the other two thousand that I’ll demand for my visits, you’ll be getting away lightly.”

“That’s all right; would you be kind enough to carry out the commission?”

“With pleasure. He took the two banknotes that the convalescent held out to him. As the stationer had just returned, he said: “Say goodbye to Monsieur de S***, and come downstairs with me; I need to talk to you.”

Charles Balin and his patient made their reciprocal adieux, and he immediately rejoined Dr. P***, who was waiting for him in the antechamber.

“Here’s two thousand francs that I’ve been instructed to give you,” the latter said.

“Two thousand francs!” stammered the delighted stationer. “Oh, dear and illustrious master, you can’t imagine the importance of the service you’ve just rendered me, and I thank you with all my heart—for that sum, I divine, it was you who requested, and perhaps demanded.”

“Now, permit me to ask you a question,” said the famous operator. “Who are you? Where have I seen you before? I know you, I’m absolutely sure of it, but I can only put the name of a dead man to the physiognomy of which you remind me.”

“Master, you’re never mistaken in making a diagnosis?”

“Sometimes I am,” the practitioner assured him, laughing. “All the same, joking aside, who are you?”

“A simple Belleville stationer, and something of a bone-setter.”

“That’s not true,” interjected Dr. P***, a trifle dryly. “You’re in hiding, and it’s showing little gratitude for the service that I have, indeed, rendered you to manifest such a great suspicion in my regard. Come on, confess!”

“If I were in hiding,” the unknown replied, in a grave tone, “and I could tell someone my name, you would be the only person to whom I would wish to confide it.”

“I understand what you mean to say,” replied his illustrious interlocutor, softening. “Excuse my indiscretion; it’s born of a sentiment of sympathy, and it’s the same sympathy that leads me to give you some good advice before we separate. Since you have some reason for dissimulating your identity, and have chosen the profession of stationer for that, don’t any longer display an instruction and an education out of all proportion to the mask you’ve put on. You’ve awakened Monsieur de S***’s suspicions—let that serve as a lesson for the future. Give me your hand—and I’m certain that it’s not that of an unknown that I’m shaking.”

They separated.

“That’s post mortem sympathy,” murmured Charles Balin. “That damned Dr. P*** has true flair—the scientist, a rare thing, is also an artist.”

While the bone-setter had been serving as a nurse, his enemies had created a stir. The Faculty had taken the matter in hand; it was known that the healer had been an orderly; it was absolutely necessary that an example be made of him, else all the orderlies would set up as bone-setters. An urgent complaint had therefore been lodged and the Prefecture of Police had begun an investigation.

When the joyful stationer, brandishing his two thousand-franc bills, burst into the modest shop, he found Mariette in tears.

“Oh, my God! What’s happened? What’s the matter?” he demanded, fearfully. Mariette told him that an agent of the secret police, charged with carrying out an investigation, had come in search of information.

“Bah!” he declared. “I’m not saying that I don’t care—I’d be lying—but that news is less disagreeable to me, since I have the money that will permit me to take a giant step forward in the realization of my projects.”

“Yes but I haven’t told you everything,” Mariette replied, her tears not drying up.

“Explain—you’re torturing me.”

“The agent of the Sûreté charged with the investigation is Émile, the waiter from the café. He recognized me.”

“That wretch again,” he growled, carried away by a surge of anger. “Let him go to the devil!” He reflected for a few moments. “After all, the misfortune isn’t as great as you imagine. They’re going to know that Charles Balin and Jacques Liban are one and the same. Well, so what? What can they do to me? Give me a heavier sentence as a recidivist, that’s all. The vagabond Liban has, however, paid society by three months in prison for the crime of having been robbed. It’s true, though, that they’re going to ask me once again who I am and try to hurt me by raking over the mud of your past...”

“My past?” said Mariette, surprised. “My past has nothing to do with the illegal practice of medicine.”

“Ha! The court and the prosecution, to establish what they call moral proofs, won’t see it like that. Whatever can cast a slur on an accused won’t be passed over in silence.”

“That’s infamous! They’d better watch out. I’m not a woman to take things lying down.”

“Don’t worry; I’ll try to ward off the blow, from which, as regards myself, I don’t have very much to dread. There’s no law to punish anonymity. If the law is intent on discovering my identity, let them try. I defy them to do it.”

“What if we were to leave, quit the quarter, Paris, France?” Mariette proposed.

He hesitated momentarily.

“If I were alone, my dear,” he ended up replying, “that would indeed by the surest and most logical means of avoiding further trouble. I could change my name, take another mask, and that would be the end of it. The bone-setter Balin, convicted in his absence, would escape their indiscreet curiosity. But we’d be obliged to sell the shop, which is your entire fortune, for a derisory price, and I don’t have the right to put you in difficulties. The few savings I possess are absolutely necessary to the imminent realization of my projects. Besides which, that police agent won’t lose sight of us again. I could easily give him the slip, but it wouldn’t be the same for you.”

He stopped, and set about reflecting profoundly.

So, whether he liked it or not, Mariette was, and perhaps always would be, an embarrassment, and obstacle!

The poor young woman sensed it. “What if you left on your own?” she said effortfully.

He reflected again. “No, Mariette, that would be to leave you the objective of that blackguard’s persecutions; he’d set some trap for you and you’d be caught in it. You still need my help, and I won’t abandon you for the moment. Later—I see, in fact, that I’ll be forced to change my name and identity again—I’ll probably ask you, as an indispensable sacrifice, to accept a temporary separation; but first I want to make certain of your material fate. Let’s await events.”

They spent a lamentable evening full of evil presentiments.

 

Chapter XXIV

 

 

Mariette, disfigured by the smallpox, perpetually absorbed by work, revived by the affection and advice of her friend, seemed to have forgotten the intoxicating triumphs of the stage, but Rose Gontran was not dead within her. Although she avoided going to spectacles, and had forcefully refused the piano that Charles Balin had offered to buy for her, she was still anxious about former rivals and friends, devoured all the theatrical papers and often fell into long periods of sadness that brought tears to her eyes.

“Rose, Rose,” said her friend—at such times he affected to call her by her pseudonym—“poor Rose! You’re missing the ovations of the public again, weeping for your vanished dream.” She quickly wiped her eyes and tried to laugh.

“With a chestnut stove like this,” she said, pointing at her face, “no café concert director would consent to give me three francs a night! Père Antoine wouldn’t even want me for nothing.”

“To be sure,” he replied, “you could no longer, it seems to me, succeed as well in the genre that won you stunning success. It’s necessary, to make the most of the filth that you sang, to have a great self-assurance, a certain charm, grace, beauty, and a crapulous boldness—in brief, an ensemble that it would be difficult for you to have today.

“If the concert bug has bitten you again, you’d risk vegetating in local cabarets or going to make the delight of sub-prefectures in barns hastily transformed into concert-halls. As for tackling the serious singing stages, that requires long and difficult studies, and there too, the physical plays an important role with regard to the directors and the audience. Perhaps, though, you could go into the real theater and play comedy or drama.”

“You think so?” she said, falling into the trap.

“Ah—I see you’re a liar,” he observed immediately. “You can’t get over your regrets; our humble existence weighs upon you.”

With the most solemn oaths, Mariette swore that she would never set foot on the boards again—but not a day passed when he did not catch her in the process of asking her mirror whether it was necessary to renounce all hope.

Another blemish came to afflict her friend and cause him more real chagrin. Although Mariette’s attitude from the viewpoint of fidelity had become irreproachable again, she adored and respected the only man to whom she owed a modicum of honor and joy, had even succeeded in restraining her indomitable love of liberty, and stuck to her daily task without proffering the slightest complaint, she still allowed herself to be drawn to drink, sometimes more than was reasonable. She gladly offered a little glass to the neighbor who came to gossip in her shop, and always had a bottle of rum or cognac hidden behind her bundles of old newspapers.

Charles Balin perceived the artificial excitement that delivered Mariette to unaccustomed fits of gaiety, anger or loquacity, but, knowing full well that habits of that kind are difficult to uproot, full of indulgence, rightly supposing that she was seeking to forget her disillusionments in drunkenness, he limited himself to amicable remonstrations to which his mistress could not take exception. In any case, ashamed and deploying an uncommon energy, she was genuinely trying to efface that last vestige of her debauchery.

Every time she had made a reference to the shameful past, he had told her to be quiet; now the reappearance of the baneful waiter, transformed into an agent of the Sûreté, had returned the conversation to the miry epoch in which they had met. That fop, scarred by Mariette, had suffered cruelly in his vanity; he would surely try to avenge himself. Already, when she was at the concert, he had planned a conspiracy that had turned against him; the whistlers had been abused by the audience.

What would he contrive now that he was in a position to do them harm and a favorable opportunity had unexpectedly presented itself to him? That question always left them sad and perplexed.

He knew approximately what he was facing: the story of the Café Mansard would be brought up again in court, his unconsciousness on a bench on the boulevard might be related; the matter of simulation would be held against him; but was not she, who had nothing to do with the case, also about to be covered in mud, the whole dung-heap raked over?

The methods of the law, he repeated to himself, to habituate himself to those execrable maneuvers of chicanery, were not always imprinted with great delicacy. The public prosecutor and the advocate of the physicians’ syndicate would not let the slightest detail escape that might sully him and present him to the judges as an individual denuded of all moral sensibility. Mariette was snarling in a disquieting fashion.

To put an end to the affair of the Café Mansard, which his enemies would not fail to exploit, he went to that establishment, perceived the manager on the threshold and told him that he had come to settle a bill. The man, unused to events of that sort—he very rarely gave credit—considered him in surprise, without recognizing him.

He took a louis out of his pocket. “Take the seventeen francs that I consumed in your establishment on the fifth of May 18**, and for which you had me arrested.”

Increasingly amazed, the manager stammered obsequious apologies. “Come in, Monsieur, please. I’m not the owner and I don’t have the liberty to act as I please; otherwise, believe me, I wouldn’t have had recourse to that extremity. Seventeen and three equals twenty; here, Monsieur, are the three francs, and come again.”

“You’re forgetting the receipt.”

“That’s true. Here you are.”

He hastened to transmit the document to his advocate.

The investigation was singularly protracted; the examining magistrate summoned him numerous times. His entire past since the fifth of May 18** had been gradually reconstituted; they had even found the traces of his passage through the copyist’s studio, and the latter had not failed to give his liaison with his former employee Raphael a less than honorable significance. He was frightened in spite of himself by the obstinacy with which they were trying to tear the veil that envelope him. Undoubtedly they thought they were on some important trail.

As he had the first time, he remained stubbornly mute; he could only be convicted of one misdemeanor: the legal practice of medicine. On that subject, he would have been able to invoke the testimony of Dr. P***, and have himself defended by the invalids he had cured, but he did not want, for reasons of scrupulousness, to have recourse to those means. He had dictated the arguments of his defense to his advocate himself.

Medicine is not only a science, but also, and perhaps primarily, an art. Now, artistry is a gift that diplomas do not deliver. If there are, therefore, outside official science, individuals endowed with the prescience that constitutes a healer, the society that benefits from their services has no right to condemn them, especially when their intervention is signaled by their success.

That the law, rightly excusing the errors of qualified physicians, should be pitiless toward those who, without any other title, render themselves guilty of negligence or awkwardness, all well and good! But for that law to punish a man who has nothing to his account but indisputable cures—his delicate situation having obliged him to refuse categorically to treat incurable maladies—is inhumane and tyrannical; it is to give an exorbitant and unjust value to a piece of parchment, which, all too often, alas, does not confer knowledge on its possessor. Furthermore, the accused could not be convicted of having demanded real fees; he had always left his clients free in their actions. His prescriptions, even in the opinion of the pharmacists, had been drawn up in a therapeutically impeccable fashion.

As for the bone-setter’s incognito, he would make use of a perfectly rational hypothesis. Assume, the defender would say to the jurors, that a man has been assumed to be dead, that his wife has remarried, that his children have shared his patrimony; suppose that that voluntary exile, devoured by spleen and gnawed by homesickness, returns to the city of his birth, but does not want to sow trouble and annoyance among his relatives by an official return based on an admission of his identity. Assume that the unknown man had been a skillful qualified physician with multiple diplomas, and ask yourselves whether the accused, whose skill, cures and operations had surprised everyone, might not be that man.

Such were the broad lines of his defense.

Fearful that Mariette might be dragged into the case, he judged it appropriate to write to the public prosecutor and his adversaries’ advocate.

The agent of the Sûreté changed with the investigation, he told them, had a personal grudge against them. Mariette Gantron, it is true, had an unfortunate past, but she had tried to rise above it by all possible means; she was none other than the charming Rose Gontran adored by the public and distanced from the theater by a cruel malady; she now lived with him maritally in the most correct fashion; she had nothing to do with the misdemeanor for which the bone-setter was reproached; it would be profoundly inhumane to recall corruption for which society bore a large part of the responsibility; he appealed to their indulgence, to the broadness of their ideas. Let them be pitiless toward him, if they judged it appropriate, but at least let them have pity on her.

 

The day of judgment, so long awaited, finally arrived. Mistrusting the irascible nervousness of his mistress, he ordered her categorically to stay at home, certain that at the slightest offensive word she was capable of resorting to insults.

In spite of the eloquence of his defender, and the relatively anodyne speech of the public prosecutor, the tribunal, based on a prior conviction , the proven fact of illegal practice and on the incognito that the accused obstinately maintained, sentenced the bone-setter Balin to three months in prison and a hundred franc fine,

That denouement was relatively satisfactory to him; there had been mention of a registered prostitute whose help had saved his life, but Mariette’s name had not been pronounced. The duration of the reclusion was, it is true, longer than he had expected, but the steps taken by his advocate, combined with the protection that Dr. P*** did not refuse him, obtained him permission to devote himself to his cherished studies.

He had been put under immediate arrest; one of the Gardes de Paris who escorted him scratched his head with embarrassment had seemed to want to ask him something; he smiled at him to put him at his ease.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” the representative of the public force ended up admitting to him, overcoming his timidity and showing him his ribs. “For a long time I’ve had a pain that sometimes stops me sleeping; the horse remedies that the major gives me are no more use than a plaster on a wooden leg.”

He could not help laughing. “So you want to submit me to a further conviction, wretch?”

The worthy soldier was nonplussed.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go into a corner. What do you feel?”

He gave him a consultation, and took out a pocket notebook to write him a prescription.

 

Chapter XXV

 

 

Those three months at Saint-Pélagie, consecrated to the most regular and most assiduous work, passed with a rapidity that surprised him. Isolated and temporarily delivered from all care, receiving Mariette’s visit every week, he scarcely thought about cursing his judges. Fundamentally, the law was playing its role, safeguarding the legal exercise of a difficult, delicate and sacred profession; it guaranteed the worthy public against the brazen and dangerous charlatanism of unscrupulous adventurers. Was it not sufficiently exploited by official charlatans? It had just struck him harshly, but what was he? An exception of which blind justice could not take account because his identity was hidden under a cloak of mystery. To what did he owe his worth and his success as a bone-setter? To real medical studies once sanctioned by the demanded qualifications. The law is only a means, it can only be just in the generality and en bloc. Why had he put himself outside the law, outside society? No more than the orderly, the bone-setter could not remain unpunished.

Now he was about to be able to re-enter into legality; he would go to Liège or Pisa, acquire a diploma there, return to Paris and pas his examinations. For that, a civil estate, documents—papers, as the gendarmes put it—would be absolutely necessary; he would find them in London. He had assured himself once that shady agencies in that city delivered veritable civil estates in return for a few. He would have recourse to that expedient, in general dishonorable, but legitimate and indispensable in this particular case.

It was necessary at all costs that Jacques Liban and Charles Balin disappear. Such individuals, possessors of a criminal record, watched by the police, stained by a wretched past, would have a very slender authority to combat the doctrines of the famous Dr. Albin. It was, moreover, probable that if the bone-setter Balin dared to present himself to the Faculty in order to take his examination there, he would not be welcomed with the greatest indulgence. It would be very dangerous to procure identity papers in the name of Charles Balin; he might be charged with forgery of official documents, and then it would be forced labor. He therefore required a new name for a new identity. Once in London and advised to the demands of the agency, he would make a decision.

So, under another mask, which he would strive to render as dissimilar as possible to the preceding ones, he would return to Paris and would not be recognized.

A mortal chagrin and a profound distress invaded him. It would be necessary, for that, to leave Mariette! Would she consent to it? Could she? It was, however, certain that if he stayed with Mariette, it would not be long before he was recognized, suspected, and paralyzed in all his enterprises. The agent dogging their heels would not lose sight of her again.

Mariette was, therefore, a dangerous obstacle, and he had to choose between two alternatives: either to stay with her and try to realize his projects in deplorable conditions; or to leave her temporarily, reappear after a further metamorphosis and put to work all the advantages that absolute liberty, a stainless identity and official titles would procure him.

Did he have any right to hesitate? Was Mariette not incidental to his existence? Ought he to forget his noble goal any longer?

Evidently, no, yes, and no.

He would therefore demonstrate to his mistress the absolute necessity of that temporary separation; but before leaving her, before even informing her of that cruel resolution, he would devote a few more months to her existence.

She was still, he felt sure, fundamentally haunted by regret for her past successes. He had surprised her reading the scripts of fashionable plays and attempting to declaim; it was in giving her that new position in conformity with her secret desires that he would console her and enable her to accept an inevitable departure.

The ideas that he had already resifted many times received a definitive sanction during his sojourn in prison.

 

The first person he saw on emerging from Saint-Pélagie was Mariette, who was waiting for him in a fiacre, impatient and overexcited. She fell into his arms and kissed him with a violence and an agitation that surprised him.

“How you’re trembling!” he observed.

“It’s nothing—a little anger, that’s all.”

“Caused by what—or whom?”

“That agent of the Sûreté, whom I perceived again as I came here. During your absence he’s never ceased to prowl around the shop and spy on my every move. I wonder what he’s trying to do?”

“Doubtless push you to extremes, to exasperate you, to profit from some insult to cause trouble for you.”

“It’s possible, unless he wants to assure himself personally that I’m no longer on the game.”

“It’s scarcely probable. He wouldn’t dare to indulge in such maneuvers. I’m no longer a vagabond and you’re not the Bohemian of old. We’re legitimate, Mariette, and you have no idea of the social value of that word. Legitimacy is a file on which the reptilian individual would be advised not to damage his teeth.”

“He’s capable of anything,” said Mariette, whose eyes filled with tears. “Hasn’t he spread it around the quarter that I’ve had a registration number?”

“The cowardly wretch.”

“He’d better not show himself again now that you’re back,” she snarled, menacingly.

“What would you do? You’re being silly—that would be to fall into his trap.” He seized the opportunity. “Look, we ought to sell the stationer’s, if we can get a reasonable price, and shake him off our track.”

“Perhaps you’re right, but what will I do then?”

“We’ll think about it; there’s no urgency.”

They hastened back to the shop. Several invalids notified of his release were waiting to consult him, which annoyed him; he did not want to start again. He would care for them later, since he would have the right.”

“Let’s close the shop for today,” he said, toward evening. “I need some air; we’ll go for a walk and celebrate.”

“With pleasure,” said Mariette. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say those words.”

He had not said them without intention.

They confided the sale of newspapers to an obliging neighbor and went down the Faubourg du Temple. It was time for the return from work; like a rising tide, floods of human heads were emerging in the distance with vague undulations. Workers curbed under the burden of tool-boxes, their hands and faces blackened by manual labor of factory smoke, and women laden with needlework that they were delivering or taking away, were climbing the slope with sad smiles on their faces: the smiles of tasks accomplished; the resigned smiles of wage-earners cowed by poverty. Modest clerks and sprightly shop-girls marched at a faster pace. Housewives, purses in hand, in the summary clothing of women going to market, were besieging handcarts loaded with no-longer-fresh victuals or allowing themselves to be convinced by the seductive offers of rubicund apprentice butchers who hailed them as they passed. A reek of vitriolated absinthe emerged from all the drinking dens. At the street-corners, and the entrances to passages, compact groups surrounded ambulant artistes and young seamstresses, their songs in their hands, awkwardly trying to follow the singer’s voice.

Mariette stopped in front of a rotisserie and was admiring the chaplet of gilded birds rotating over the blazing wood fire. He looked from side to side at wrinkled brows, shining gazes, lips retaining saliva. The anguish and hunger of old return to mind. He had an imperceptible surge of ill-humor.

“Better to eat them than look at them,” he said. “You’re wasting precious time; let’s go to a restaurant so we can come out early, if the desire takes us to go somewhere.”

The delivered themselves to the glorious sin of gluttony, drank select wines and branded liqueurs, and then, without a precise goal, followed the crowd that was taking advantage of the last five days.

It was the first time, for a long time, that they had walked along the grand boulevards together in the evening. Mariette’s attire was simple but in perfect taste; nothing about her evoked the brazen streetwalker or the excessively elegant Rose Gontran of the Folies Nouvelles, whose city costumes were a little too similar to those of the stage. The astonishing facility she had for adapting to the environment in which circumstances placed her had made her a petty bourgeois Parisienne in the process of celebrating some family anniversary. She was able to go past the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre with impunity, with no fear of being recognized.

Old Lucie, always solid at her post, was already on duty. Mariette shuddered on seeing her, and a tear escaped her eye.

“Poor woman,” she sighed. “Poor woman! That’s how I was, not three years ago. Let’s go, quickly, I beg you.”

They increased their pace and remained silent for a few moments. The nervous movements that Mariette’s arms were making indicated a salutary terror of the past. She was painting, seemingly fleeing some imaginary danger.

“Why are you running like that?” he asked. “There’s no hurry.”

“This sidewalk would burn my feet,” she replied, in a muffled and resolute voice that he was not hearing for the first time, “if it ever tried to take me back!”

He hastened to interrupt her. “Are you crazy to think of such impossibilities? Isn’t there already a profound abyss between the present and the past? Haven’t you redeemed your shame, first by talent and then by work?”

“Talent,” murmured Mariette, sadly. “A paltry talent, which couldn’t resist a few marks on the face. As for work,” she added, in a low voice “who knows what the future has in store for us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will I have the strength to work, if you’re no longer there?”

“I’ve got an idea!” he exclaimed, to change the subject. “Today’s a feast day: Holy Deliverance. It’s necessary to talk like prisoners, because I’m out of prison. What if we were to go to the theater?”

The impressionable Mariette immediately cheered up.

“I’d never have dared to ask you,” she confessed, “but that would give me the greatest pleasure.” She added almost immediately: “Unless it would give me the greatest chagrin. Never mind—let’s go. Perhaps it will stop me getting gloomy.”

They deliberated for a moment in order to consult their taste. La Périchole was advertised on the poster for the Variétés. She knew the score, had read the eulogistic appreciations of the singer who was playing the title role; it was there that she wanted to go.

They went in. Poor Rose Gontran, happy at first and then gripped by an extraordinary excitement, murmured in her lover’s ear that, without boasting, she guaranteed that she could sing as well and better than that, and soon fell into a profound melancholy.

The hubbub of the entr’acte led to a diversion. They had gone to the lobby; a theater gossip columnist recognized the ex-star of the Folies Nouvelles and approached her.

“Mademoiselle Rose Gontran! What a pleasant surprise!”

“What?” she replied, radiantly. “I’m still recognizable?”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you otherwise,” the journalist replied, laughing. “Come on, when’s the comeback?”

“Alas, Monsieur, just look at me.” She lifted her veil with a swift gesture. “How do you think I’d dare to set foot on stage with this pock-marked face?”

“You’re exaggerating, Mademoiselle. I don’t think you’ve changed as much as all that. Besides which, beauty is only indispensable to mediocre artistes; with the talent you have, you could get by, if necessary.”

“Thank you for you gallant words,” Rose stammered, blushing with pleasure, “but I take them at their worth—which is to say, for the delicate politeness of a charming man.”

They returned to their seats. The pensive Mariette was only listening to the play with a distracted ear.

“Fundamentally, you were wrong to bring me here,” she sighed as they left. “It’s revived my dolors and caused my regrets to be reborn. When one’s intoxicated by this milieu, when you’ve seen all gazes devouring you and all hands applauding you, it’s hard to think that it’s finished, all over.”

“Who knows, Mariette?”

“What do you mean? Am I not disfigured? Do you think I took the flattering words of that well-brought up man for sincerity?”

“The journalist isn’t so far from the truth as you think.”

Surprised, she stopped and stared at him. “Are you speaking seriously or trying to drive me mad? Shut up. I’m ugly—fearfully ugly.”

“Much less than I feared,” he replied, without appearing to perceive her emotion. “Time has already greatly attenuated the ravages of the accursed malady; your mirror is there to tell you that; the lines of your face have regained almost all their purity. With the distance of the stage, intelligently made up, you could produce an excellent effect, and if, as I’ve explained before, you can no longer operate in the same genre, nevertheless...”

She closed his mouth with her hands, and then started kissing him madly, as if to belie what his lips were saying.

“Naughty,” she said. “Don’t blow on a fire that ought to go out, don’t release hopes that I’ve locked away irrevocably in the depths of my heart.”

The weather was good; they went home on foot. At the corner of the Rue de la Lune she had a hunger for a galette that she hastened to satisfy. She started devouring it first with her beautiful teeth, with a child-like joy; then she suddenly became somber and stopped eating, as if she hated the past, even in her most innocent memories.

“Poor girl!” she sighed, taking his arm again.

“Who are talking about?”

“The unfortunate who once, in this same place, soothed her hunger with two or three sous’ worth of galette.”

“Why always evoke the past, Mariette? Let’s expel it from our minds, let’s think about the future.”

But the past, that evening, was obstinate in surging forth. Near the Château d’Eau, a monumental woman whose stride had the imposing gait of a Dutch cutter with the wind in its sails, went past them going in the opposite direction. A victim of the law of contrasts, the minuscule Père Lampe was navigating in Nini Nichon’s wake.

He had once frequented too many intern’s wards to resist the desire to commit a mischief.

“Above all, Messieurs,” he shouted, “I recommend silence.”

The dwarf, furious at being recognized, veered away and disappeared into the shadows, while the fat whore, sensing that she was no longer being followed, slowed her pace and then stopped, to scrutinize the boulevard in all directions.

“The stolen money has scarcely profited her,” remarked Mariette, with an indifference that augured well.

They resumed walking, both plunged in their reflections. The encounter with Père Lampe had reminded him of Raphael. What had become of him?

“What are you thinking about?” Mariette ended up asking, troubled by the long silence.

“Things already distant and heart-rending, miseries and corruptions that have explained to me why, on a given day, the paving stones rise up of their own accord into barricades, and why energetic unknowns struggle ferociously until the last breath, solely for the pleasure of killing.”

 

Chapter XXVI

 

 

The seed that he had sown in such favorable ground did not take long to germinate and grow. Mariette, hooked by the hope of a new debut, immediately wanted to return to study.

They sold the stationer’s shop in Belleville and rented a small apartment in the Rue Lepic. They had about twelve thousand francs in hand, and it was agreed that that sum would remain intact. If circumstances obliged them to separate temporarily, they would each take half.

“Why are you talking about circumstances that might separate us?” Mariette had interrogated him, anxiously.

“Because I have a mission to fulfill,” he replied, “and it will be necessary for me to reclaim my liberty when the time comes.”

Mariette, nonplussed, became somber and taciturn.

“Oh, our separation won’t be definitive,” he hastened to affirm, “We’ll surely find one another later, and we can then, if you still love me—for you’ll still be young and I’m marching rapidly toward decrepitude—resume our communal life without cares and without remorse. But let’s not talk about that, since the time hasn’t come.”

On the contrary, Mariette, as if to deflect him from his mysterious and incomprehensible projects, caused the dream of a happy existence to shine: she would make her debut in the theater, earn tidy sums. She knew, of course, that she would not have the same successes as before, but she would be living the life of which she dreamed, and he would devote himself to his favorite research; nothing would any longer come to trouble their happiness. She looked up at him then. He contented himself with shaking his head.

“Let’s begin by working relentlessly. You’ll make your debut, and then we’ll see.” He thus prepared her, little by little, to accept without too much surprise and chagrin the separation that he judged to be necessarily imminent.

At that moment he was carrying out research on the fermentation of wine on behalf of a notable merchant. Mariette was taking a course in declamation and spent the rest of the day learning roles. In the evenings, he made her rehearse, lavishing her with advice and accompanying her on the piano. He would have preferred that his mistress set her sights on an entirely serious genre; he found powerful dramatic qualities in her; in his opinion, she would have succeeded in passionate roles. But Mariette, wanting to utilize her voice, had a weakness for operetta; perhaps she would rediscover her formed success there? She had not graduated from the Conservatoire, had not passed through any of the usual channels, how could she make the most of her dramatic qualities? What theater would consent to put her forward? It was necessary to begin by accepting minor parts, and then…whereas the past successes of Rose Gontran might serve as a trampoline for a neighboring genre.

If he had had the design of associating his entire life with Mariette’s, he would have imposed his will on her, but since he had to leave her, he did not think that he had the right to oppose her desire.

His chemical work was reasonably well-paid; he was putting some money aside and was relatively happy, when an accident, banal for anyone else, took on a menacing gravity for him.

The scientific and technical journals were making a great fuss about the new explosives that the European powers, armed to the teeth, were putting to trial. That gave him the idea of studying certain combinations of nitric acid with organic compounds, and he was able to fabricate a powder whose power surpassed that of all the detonating mixtures.

The wine merchant, already glimpsing the gleam of millions, became enthused with the idea and furnished him with the means to develop it.

The laboratory experiments having been satisfactory, it only remained to carry out a conclusive trial. They close a large garden in the suburb where the merchant had his warehouse, and only employed a small quantity of the substance. Even so, the explosion was so conclusive that all the windows in the neighborhood were shattered. There was talk of a bomb, successive attacks in London having awakened the suspicion of the police.

The prefecture made a minute investigation, which established the real cause of the accident. The delinquent manufacturer got away with a large fine and the payment of serious damages. His notoriety as a merchant put him above all suspicion—but his employee had all the difficulty in the world is extracting himself from the claws of the law, and the businessman, hearing about his two prior convictions, did not want to have any more to do with him.

That event having caused him to lose his job and put the former waiter on their tracks, they thought about changing domicile again. Mariette had made great progress; her dialogue was vivacious, compelling and astonishingly natural, and she knew a dozen fashionable scores; she could now grasp the first favorable moment to make her debut. The recent threats of arrest pushed him to encourage his mistress’ impatience. Rose Gontran—she had resumed the name known to and loved by the public—made a tour of all the generic theaters.

In the most outwardly amiable fashion, the directors sent her away one after another; although the pretexts were polite and enlivened by the warmest eulogies, the refusals were nevertheless categorical.

Poor Rose came back in the evening desperate and dejected, putting her disappointments down to her ugliness. He did his best to console her. Was it not necessary to expect such hitches? When she had proved her talent, all the obstacles would disappear; it would no longer be her who was petitioning, it was the directors who would come to put themselves at her feet.

“How am I going to prove to them that I have talent?” exclaimed the poor young woman. “They don’t even want to give me an audition!”

For his part, luck was not showing itself any more clement; all his attempts failed miserably. Hidden machinations and detestable allegations, whose source it was easy to divine, had him rejected everywhere. He had to dip into the money put in reserve.

In the meantime, a new and violent blow struck him in a sensitive place. The Revue des Sciences published a translation of an article signed by a young German scientist, Ludwig Keller, which also attacked Dr. Albin’s theories and announced in veiled terms that he would soon be able to publish decisive experiments.

Thus, while he was wasting time preparing operetta debuts, someone else—a foreigner—was about to rob him of his future glory, and he had in hand the money that would permit him to act...

He spent several days in a state of overexcitement that skirted madness.

“My God!” said the frightened Rose, repeatedly. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I need to leave,” he murmured. “A great misfortune, the greatest one that could befall me, is threatening me, and it’s my fault because...”

“Because it’s mine, perhaps,” she replied, weeping.

He consoled her rapidly, but in a fashion nevertheless to make her comprehend that she was, indeed, a real obstacle.

“No, Rose, darling, but it’s absolutely necessary that you make your debut, that you can earn your living, that you can do without my help, and that I’m free.”

“Debut!” cried the actress, in despair. “You know full well that it’s my most ardent desire, but no one wants me. What can I do? Great God, what can I do?”

 

A few days later, Rose Gontran, overexcited in her turn, seemed completely changed. An influential journalist that she had met in the offices of a theater had taken an interest in her and had formally promised to arrange a debut for her in the imminent future. She never ceased chattering, building castles in Spain. He was a serious young man, a talented playwright, he was going to introduce her to several directors; if necessary, he would impose himself upon them. Her slightest desires would be taken into account. Her new friend had heard her, judged her and had seemed enthusiastic.

He feared that he understood, and frowned, but she did not notice, or did not want to notice anything.

Seen she was absent for long periods, came back well after nightfall on various pretexts, excited by drink and troubled by remorse. He no longer had any doubt that Rose Gontran, in order to arrive more rapidly at her goal, was deceiving him.

After all, it was an excellent opportunity, an opportune denouement. He resolved to bring the situation to a head. He did not go to bed that night and waited up fir her until three o’clock in the morning.

Anticipating the storm and following her habit when she wanted to avoid any explanation, she threw himself into his arms when she came in. She finally had an opportunity to make her debut!

“Where?” he asked, coldly.

“At the Théâtre de la Gaité-Belleville.” He pulled a face. “Oh, I know that it isn’t famous,” she hastened to add, “but what do you expect? My protector hasn’t been able to find anything else for the moment. It’s a means to have me judged. Didn’t I make my debut at Père Antoine’s when you got me into the concerts?”

“The circumstances aren’t the same. In that epoch, you hadn’t yet been on stage; you didn’t have a reputation to sustain; you made your debut before my eyes; I was sure of the audience; I accompanied you, and your success was absolutely dependent on you. Here you’re going to be hindered by ridiculous nonentities, comrades devoid of talent, an insufficient setting, an improvised orchestra, an audience prejudiced by your previous successes or ill-disposed to your attempt, and many other things.”

“My God! What can I do? I’ve accepted, I’ve given my word.”

“Debut, then, but instruct your new lover to make sure that you can show yourself in favorable conditions.”

There was a long and painful moment of silence.

“My lover,” she finally stammered, in a low voice, bowing her head. “My only, my true lover, is you.”

“I have been, Rose, and always will be, but the time for our temporary separation has come. I’ll leave France tomorrow.”

She looked at him with an imploring expression, as if, knowing that she had been divined, she were humbly begging his pardon. He read her thoughts.

“I have nothing to forgive you for, my dear. On the contrary; it’s me who’s demanding your indulgence. The implacable logic of things has once again created the incidents that have happened to us. If I had not been resolved for a long time to leave you, for pitiless reasons, I wouldn’t have pushed you into the path you’re taking. I’m therefore the only one responsible for your actions; I know the reasons for which you’ve committed them, and I have no right to reproach you for them.”

She threw herself into his arms, weeping.

He told her that his resolution was irrevocable, that he had already put off his duty for too long, that he did not feel any resentment toward her, that they would meet again in time, and that then, without reticence, they could swear an eternal fidelity to one another. Their liaison was a mutual obstacle that it was necessary to break through; he was even glad to know that, when he was gone, she would not be without support. He had learned from hearsay that her protector was a man of intelligence and heart; without egotism, he hoped that their liaison would be serious.

He spent the night giving her advice, begging her not to have the slightest acquaintance, under any pretext, with her old milieu. He implored her not to allow herself to be discouraged by the difficulty of her first forays, to work courageously, always to aim at higher goals.

He recommended her, above all, to avoid the slightest intemperance.

Rose never ceased to weep, trailing at his knees, swearing to him that she still lived him, that she was ready to give up everything to go with him. He was inexorable.

“Since I have to leave,” he declared, “since it’s necessary that I leave and that an action, although already pardoned, gives me the strength to do it, it’s today that I shall leave.”

He took six thousand francs, as agreed, gave her the other six thousand, promised her one last time that he would see her again, tore himself from her arms and fled in haste.

This time, it was Rose who leaned all her anguish on the banister. It was him who did not look up. It was him who did not come back.

 

Rose Gontran remained plunged in her dolorous stupor for a long time.

“Gone! Gone!” she murmured, her heart torn. “He doesn’t want to understand, then. He doesn’t want to know that since the moment that I met him, if my body has failed—what does a little more or less soiling signify to Mariette?—my soul and my heart have never ceased for a single instant to belong to him.”

Then she clutched stubbornly at one last hope. He wanted to teach her a lesson; he knew that she had deceived him, he wanted to punish her—but he was good; he would come back; he was going to come back.

She waited for several days without going out, shivering at every sound of footsteps, waking up with a start in the middle of the night. The absentee still did not come back.

Gradually, her despair changed face; anger invaded her, muted at first and then explosive. She was very stupid, after all, to take the thing so much to heart! He had wanted to leave her; any pretext would do. A motive that she hated profoundly without knowing what it was, tore him away from her; she was not loved as she loved. Why, then, abandon herself to her chagrin?

She went out, returned to her new lover, ran around all the brasseries and cabarets in Montmartre, got abominably drunk and did not go home for several days.

Then regrets came to assail her again, she returned in haste to the communal abode, as if she were going to find him there.

“No letters, no visitors,” the concierge told her. “Has Monsieur gone traveling, then?

“Yes,” she replied, confused. “He might not be back for some time.”

The apartment was in the name of Charles Balin. She paid a quarter’s rent in advance, took her money and effects, ordered a fiacre and confided the keys to the concierge.

“Give them to Monsieur Balin when he comes back,” she instructed.

“You’re going too, Madame? But you’ll come back.”

“It’s only the dead who don’t come back,” she murmured.

She gave the coachman the address of her protector and fled, swallowing her tears.

 

A few weeks later, on the eve of her debut as an operetta performer, Rose Gontran had returned to work ardently.

The intelligent and handsome young man, attracted to her by a keen sympathy, and whom she had abandoned, partly on impulse but mostly by calculation, made her a thousand protestations of love. She looked at him, astonished, smiling and sad. She surrendered herself mechanically to the slightest of his desires, strove to please him, even tried to love him, but it was the other, always the other, the mysterious individual she had helped, the first man that had not treated her as a whore, who still took up all the room in her heart.

The theatrical papers had already announced that Rose Gontran, the much-applauded star of the Folies Nouvelles, was about to return to the generic stage. Perhaps her friend had not put enough discretion into the publicity that his situation as a critic and author permitted him to make. Perhaps the newspapers made a little too much of the exceptional talent that the actress was about to demonstrate and the admiring astonishment that the public was about to experience. At any rate, Rose Gontran’s debut was considered as a Parisian event, and the public, blasé about great premières, although grumbling, deigned to climb the hill.

In memory of the evening when her lover had taken her to the Variétés, the actress had chosen the role of La Périchole.

That evening, the Théatre de la Gaité-Belleville presented an unexpected aspect. Men in suits, former admirers of Rose Gontran of the Folies Nouvelles, journalists, critics, gossip columnists, socialites on the lookout for novelties, theater directors come to judge the debutant, and former comrades of the concert hall who did not consider that ascension toward a genre in vogue without jealousy, had taken possession of all the best sets and chased the small local theater’s regulars from the boxes and the stalls. The hall was literally packed with spectators; the worthy public, relegated to the highest galleries, betrayed their ill humor by demanding with deafening cries and obstinate foot-stamping the raising of the curtain, which was late.

In the wings, Rose Gontran, emotional and immeasurably nervous, was running around madly, jostling belated employees and the bit-part players that it was necessary to drag away from the seductions of the bar, criticizing at the last moment the poverty of the costumes and the dilapidation of the set. Furthermore, in order to hide the traces of the smallpox, she was outrageously made up. Her first appearance on the stage cast a chill that augured badly. The gentlemen in suits, disappointed, interrogated one another with their eyes, with characteristic grimaces, the little comrades of old stifled laughter and whispered among themselves. The bulk of the audience remained indifference.

The first couplets were sung with vigor; she received a little timid applause; the entire first act passed without any notable incident.

She had vaguely perceived that several individuals among the spectators had cards suspended from their buttonholes or affecting to keep them in view in their hands, but she had not attached any importance to the observation.

“I hope you placed the advertisement,” the actor playing the Viceroy said to her during the entr’acte.

“What advertisement are you talking about?” she asked, astonished.

“Well, the cards that are being distributed gratuitously at the door; all the spectators have a card,” he added, with a coarse laugh. She snatched the piece of cardboard that he held out to her from his hand. It was, in form and color, exactly similar to her old prostitute’s registration card. On one side she read in large letters: Mariette Gantron, and in parentheses, Rose Gontran; on the other was the program of the play.

The blow struck home! A mortal anguish gripped her throat; a stifled cry escaped her, and she fainted. People gathered around her. She gradually recovered consciousness, collected her ideas, and wanted to leave. The director, who put the indisposition to the account of emotion, begged her not to do anything, assuring her that everything would go well. Inertly, she allowed herself to be persuaded, but only consented that the manager would announce to the audience that she had fainted and ask for its indulgence.

When her lover wanted to comfort her in his turn, suddenly gripped by an inexplicable surge of anger, thinking that he might perhaps have anticipated the blow or warded it off, she ordered him dryly to leave her alone.

The gallery, impatient with the length of the delay, recommenced its infernal racket. The curtain finally went up, and she made a superhuman effort. She knew now where the odious conspiracy originated. Émile, the former waiter, surrounded by shady accomplices, applauded madly without rhyme or reason.

“Shh! Down with the claque!” shouted the regulars, furiously.

The performance was interrupted in that fashion continually, and the disconcerted actors were obliged to await the reestablishment of silence before resuming the dialogue.

Soon, laughter and cries of every sort accentuated the disorder; poor Périchole, at her wit’s end, lost her head and her memory, stopped dead. The prompter raised his voice clumsily; the curious heads of carpenters and scene-shifters emerged from the wings. The actors on stage could scarcely dissimulate their laughter, and the cabal profited from the opportunity to go full tilt.

Then the actress, her eyes haggard and her lips trembling, showed her fist to her implacable enemy, shouted: “Coward!” with all the force of her anger and her voice. The public, thinking that it had been insulted, demanded apologies.

“She’s drunk!” cried some.

“It’s her habit!” replied others.

“To the carnival!”

“Apologies!”

“We want our money back!”

The fashionable people smiled; the journalists and directors watched the debacle, almost indifferently; the little friends gave free rein to their laughter. Rose Gontran, half mad, leaned against an upright on the stage, breathlessly.

Suddenly, she summoned up all her strength, came resolutely to the front of the stage and made a sign that she wanted to speak. A silence full of curiosity immediately fell in the hall.

“My insult,” she roared, “was not addressed to the public, whom I have always respected, and whom I respect more than ever, but to the agent of the secret police who has mounted an infamous conspiracy against me.” She indicated Émile with a gesture.

All gazes turned in that direction; the agent, of course, was indistinguishable from everyone else, and no one could tell whom she intended to indicate. Cries of “Down with the cop!” and “Throw the nark out!” burst out on all sides.

If Rose had had a modicum of self-composure; if the slightest authorized advice had come to support her; if anyone, in fact, had even been able to identify the author of the disorder, the game might have turned around and the fall changed into a triumph; but Rose Gontran was alone; her lover, discouraged by the first rebuff and ashamed of the defeat, was hiding in the depths of the dressing-rooms or had perhaps already left; the dreamer who loved her had been unable to understand her and had removed himself from the action.

She left the stage and refused to go back on.

“I’ll be obliged to return the money,” begged the director again, who had followed her to her dressing-room. “You’ve caused me considerable damage; at least go on to the end; I’ve gone to considerable expense.”

“How much have you spent?” she demanded, curtly.

“About two thousand.”

“Here it is,” she said, extracting two bills from her handbag. “Return the money; I’m going.”

She undressed in haste, put on her ordinary clothes and left without saying another word. In the hall, the racket was at its height; people mistaken for policemen had been challenged and jostled; there was fighting.

It had begun to rain. She went down the Rue du Faubourg du Temple on foot, almost running, without knowing exactly where she was going. A fiacre, coming up behind her at the gallop, nearly crushed her; she threw herself instinctively to one side, and the movement dislodged her poorly-pinned hat. She did not even think of picking it up.

In the Place du Château-d’Eau she sat down, in spite of the bad weather, on the terrace of a café, and demanded several glasses of brandy, which she drank one after another. She paid the bill and resumed her course.

The air was damp, the sky heavy and low; drizzle was falling gently, the noise of fiacres and the din of the last omnibuses was muffled by the soft ground. Under the street-lights, surrounded by luminous haloes, the passers-by appeared as if behind a yellow net-curtain. Mariette, her hair almost undone, her make-up soaking, her shirts splashed with mud, looking like a drunken refugee from a brothel, marched straight ahead, her eyes haggard.

A burly lout who, coming out of a pimps’ café in quest of good fortune, had seen her stop and drink the brandy, barred her passage with his arm, as if in jest, then offered her his arm and made gallant propositions.

She looked at him, bewildered, her arms dangling, her mouth open.

Fearing that he had not been understood, the man reiterated his suggestion, entering into precise details, alerted her to his habits and demands, and concluded by offering her money.

“Ah! Yes, yes, I know what you mean,” she murmured. “It’s all the same to me. As you wish; it’s necessary.”

“Come on then,” said the man. “We’ll get a hotel room.”

She followed him momentarily; then, suddenly changing her mind, as if she were emerging from a frightful dream, she uttered a cry of anguish and fled at top speed.

The stupefied lecher watched her disappear.

Now, she knew where she was.

She took the Rue Turbigo, followed the Boulevard Sebastopol, traversed the Place du Châtelet, found herself on the bridge, climbed the parapet with a rapid movement, and threw herself into the Seine.

 

Chapter XXVII

 

 

Resolved to head straight for the goal, Charles Balin, as soon as he arrived in London, set out in search of the shady establishment that had already been identified to him.

The Monks Agency is not easy to find; no directory mentions it and some of the best-informed people have never heard of it.

“I don’t know the Monks Agency,” the aged cab-driver told him, “but I know a bookseller of that name who does business.” He took the cab anyway, and it stopped in front of a shabby shop on Holborn Hill.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to the individual who emerged from behind a barricade of old books. “I’m looking for a Monks Agency, and the similarity of the name caused me to suppose that you might be able to inform me.”

“Perhaps,” replied the sales clerk. “I can tell by your accent that you’re French; what sort of agency are you talking about?”

“One of those specializing in litigations and question of interest, which carry out research and procure certain documents.”

“The boss does indeed do all that,” the employee interjected, “and we sometimes receive people who come in search of the Monks Agency.” He stressed the final word in a significant fashion.

“In that case, I’d like to speak to Mr. Monks.”

“He’s not here, Monsieur.”

“When can I see him?”

“I don’t know. If, however, you care to confide the subject of your visit, I can inform him of it tonight or tomorrow and ask him for an appointment.”

Damn! thought the foreigner. That’s a lot of precautions; Monks the bookseller is evidently the man I want. Even so, he hesitated.

“You can confide in me in complete security, Monsieur. I’ll admit that if you want to see Mr. Monks, that’s the only way that you can enter into communication with him.”

“The Mr. Monks for whom I’m searching might, I’m told, be able to procure me certain papers I need.”

“Who gave you that information?”

“A solicitor passing through Paris: Mr. Clifford, if I remember rightly.”

“Speak frankly: what do you want?”

“Identity papers.”

“That’s clear; come this way.”

He was introduced into a back room, where Mr. Monks, a sort of leather bag surmounted by a small neckless head and furnished with arachnid limbs gestured to him to sit down.

“You desire identity papers, I understand. What nationality? Real or false?”

“French nationality and real; otherwise my papers won’t have any value.”

“I can get you serious ones for five hundred pounds.”

“Five hundred pounds!” murmured the client, with a grimace of disappointment. “My means don’t permit me, then, to carry my project forward.”

“The least French, English and German papers,” said the fake bookseller, “sell for that price; if they include aristocratic titles or scientific diplomas I charge extra, but I have cheaper ones. The Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish are four hundred pounds, Russian, Austrian, Swiss and Belgian three hundred. For a hundred I can furnish Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, as many as you wish. All the rest—American, Asiatic, African, Oceanian—vary between thirty and fifty pounds. I’m talking, of course, about authentic documents; if you wish to equip yourself with false papers, they’re cheaper—much cheaper—and between the two of us, Monsieur, the false ones are often better than the real ones. It depends on the usage you want to make of them.”

“I’m very sorry to have disturbed you needlessly,” the visor stammered. “I hadn’t expected such high prices.”

“Well, Monsieur, people who want to change their identity always have serious reasons for doing so; they’re usually notaries or bankers on the run, former keepers of public houses, relatives of people condemned to death, executioners…in brief, people who want to escape dishonor and who, for some reason, have broken with the past. Those people don’t care about the price, especially when they’re certain of not being cheated. Now, the Monks Agency never leads its clients into error.” With a little pointed laugh, he added: “It devotes itself to its dishonest operations with scrupulous honesty.”

“The reasons I have...”

“Don’t concern me,” the businessman interrupted. “The identity papers I sell cost me dear. Even though I’ve taken my precautions—I’m not a merchant of old papers for nothing—I risk, in making that traffic, having disagreeable encounters with the law, so it’s reasonable that I obtain some profit.”

Charles Balin apologized again and left. The six or seven thousand francs he possessed, which had not only to serve him to obtain documents but also to support him and take his examinations, were scarcely in rapport with the demands of the Monks Agency.

He dismissed the cab and was going back to his hotel on foot when the bookseller’s clerk caught up with him in the street.

“I know that you didn’t make a deal with the boss,” the individual said. “Would you find some good advice worth two or three pounds?”

“If the advice you have to give me is worth the fee, I’m good judge and an honest man; I’ll recognize your service.”

“I’ll trust in your honesty. My idea is practical, excellent and realizable in a short time. You want authentic identity papers: go to New York and have yourself naturalized as a Yankee. With the directions I give you, and a few papers I’ll provide, which will cost you another two or three pounds—let’s say five in all—it can be very easily done.”

Time was pressing; he was afraid of being anticipated by another; above all, he could not see how he was going to get the 12,500 francs Mr. Monks was demanding. What did nationality matter, after all? Science and Art have no fatherland. He accepted the plan. Instead of going to Liège or Pisa, he would obtain his diploma from a university in the New World.

A fortnight later, Pierre Iblan, a chemist of Cuban origin, arrived in New York, went on to Philadelphia, registered at the university and requested naturalization. Antedated letters from Dr. Albin recommending him warmly to former correspondents immediately won him the eager support of several professors.

A few months later, the Cuban chemist, having become a Yankee citizen and received a doctorate, took the steamer, disembarked at Le Havre and returned to Paris.

The new individual who, under that further anagram of Albin, was about to go in pursuit of glory, no longer had more than a distant resemblance to his previous incarnations. The slightly darkened complexion, the narrow beard running beneath the chin, the long near-white hair, the simultaneously grave and bold manner and the exotic air he had about him allowed Dr. Iblan to go anywhere without running any risk of being unmasked.

A sufficient knowledge of the English and Spanish languages completed the illusion. He astonished himself with a transformation so complete, and began to wonder whether his aptitudes as an actor might have been one of the principal results of his past success.

A method for the fabrication of artificial ivory sold in the United States had brought him a few thousand francs. He rented a small apartment in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, decorated the main room artistically with furniture and ornaments bought at the Hôtel Drouot,²⁵ and rapidly entered into communication with the American Legation. Then he solicited and obtained the favor of sitting the examinations for a French doctorate. He had no more to do than present himself before the Faculty.

Until then, the constant preoccupations, daily obligations and overwork, without causing him to forget Rose Gontran, had prevented him from making any serious search for her. He had heard vaguely about the failure of her attempted comeback, knew that her former domicile as uninhabited, and that was all. Now that he was completely reinstalled her and had no more to do than wait for the moment to subject himself to his proofs he was in haste to relocate his lover, determined to watch over her covertly and come to her aid if necessary.

People in the theatrical profession and the press were unable to give him any information about the present situation of the actress; even the man who had been her lover was completely ignorant as to what had become of her—but they told him all the details of the fatal evening and the abominable machination of which the unfortunate artiste had been the victim.

Then he had funereal presentiments; involuntarily, the statement that Rose had pronounce so resolutely on the day when he had promise not to abandon her—“If you hadn’t said that, I’d have thrown myself in the river”—returned incessantly to his mind. He knew her violent character, her nervousness, so easy to excite, and her energetic will. He trembled to acquire some sad certainty. Failure combined with abandonment might have driven her to any extreme.

If, however, one way or another, Rose Gontran were dead, the fact would be surely known—but the Seine does not surrender all of its cadavers, and how many people who had had their moment of celebrity die abandoned and forgotten in obscure mansards? Enquiry agencies could not furnish him with any information.

He went to the Gaité-Belleville.

“Since the night when Rose Gontran left us flat,” the director replied, “I haven’t heard any mention of her. She must surely have regretted that impulsive action. A vile cabal had, it’s true, been mounted against her, but the performance might have ended turning to her honor. She lacked composure authorized advice. I did what I could; unfortunately, I could speak any louder than my rights as director, and she closed my mouth by compensating me generously for the expenses I’d made.”

“She had no one to look out for her? A husband, a lover?”

“There was the young playwright, but the fellow was the first to lose his head. In any case, he appeared to have no influence over her, and Mademoiselle Gontran, so far as I could judge, wasn’t easy to manage.”

He had already been assured that Rose had left their former domicile shortly after his departure. Supposing, nevertheless, that she might have left some indication there, and have reason in any case to recover the furniture and books he had abandoned in the Rue Lepic, he furnished himself with an authorization from his relative Charles Balin, and presented himself to the concierge. She, embarrassed by the apartment and glad to be paid, did not raise the slightest objection.

He took the keys, ran up the stairs and opened the door. Nothing had changed, but on the table, very visible, a letter addressed to Monsieur Charles Balin immediately struck his gaze. He tore open the envelope, trembling with emotion, and read the words, effaced her and there by tears:

Wicked man who makes me weep so much, I’ll wait for you forever; don’t forget your promise. Poor Mariette.

Poor Mariette, indeed! What could have become of her?

He wiped his eyes, because he was weeping too, and went back downstairs.

“So you’ve never heard any further mention of Madame Balin?” he asked the concierge again.

“Neither Monsieur nor Madame.” She had second thoughts. “Yes, a man came several times to ask whether they still lived here and where they’d gone. Without being a witch, I’m sure that he was a cop.”

He gave her a coin, told her that he would send removal men the next day, and left.

The concierge called him back.

“Oh, Monsieur, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you. When the lady left, I asked her whether she was coming back. She said: ‘It’s only the dead who don’t come back.’”

A sudden chill traversed his heart.

Bah! It was a manner of speaking; he could not draw any conclusion from a popular saying.

Perhaps Mariette had obtained some engagement elsewhere? It was not admissible that she had been reclaimed by her past.

He went so far as to wander in the vicinity of the Faubourg Montmartre and was accosted by old Lucie, whose offers he declined, but to whom he gave some money, under the pretext that he had known her a long time ago and had already encountered hr on his first voyage to Paris with someone named…wait a moment...

The American made a semblance of searching his memory.

“Nini Nichon, a big aggressive blonde, I’ll wager.”

“No.”

“Valentine, then…a pullet from Le Mans? Jeanne Gambier? Fanny Béquille?”

“No,” the foreigner replied, to each name on the list. “It’s true that it was four or five years ago,” he added, to put her on the track. “You probably don’t remember.”

“Four or five years…Mariette, perhaps?”

“Mariette—that was her name, Mariette! I’d like to see her again.”

“Well, old chap, if you’re waiting for Mariette to lose your innocence, you’ll wait a long time. You’d do better to come with me.”

“She’s dead, then?”

“No one knows! She was in the theater; no one has seen her since the night when she had a fiasco. A chap named Émile said later that she must have gone to the provinces or abroad with her old mec.”

“Oh…she had, what did you say?”

“An old mec, a mysterious old fellow, a lost dog, a former curé, a fellow who had ups and downs, a thief, perhaps a murderer—so Émile says, for I have nothing to reproach him for myself; he even gave me twenty bullets one day for nothing.”

He did not want to know any more, and, ashamed of the investigation, which he had thought necessary, he resolved not to take his research any further.

Poor Mariette! He was almost certain now that, yielding to some crazy excitation, she had found repose and oblivion in death.

A long and dolorous sadness invaded him. An instinctive hallucination nailed him to the sidewalk, haggard. He saw Rose, maddened, coming out of the theater at a run, going down the streets and boulevards without drawing breath; he saw her nervous clenched hands hanging on to the hard stone parapet; he heard the muffled splash of the body that the Seine, the consoler of the desperate, had hastened to swallow.

He shook himself to chase away the nightmare; he had the painful impression that he had suddenly grown several years older.

Had he loved her, then? Did he love her still, to experience such cruel suffering?

It was impossible for him to reply.

He walked straight ahead, and found himself in the Place de l’Opéra.

It was the night of a première; municipal guardsmen enveloped in their dark mantles, their helmets dazzling in the glare of the electric lights, astride their large horses, were stationed hieratically on the edges of the large square. The spectacle had just finished; the steps of the monumental peristyle were packed with people, gentlemen in suits covered fur-lined overcoats; officers in dress uniform; warmly wrapped ladies their shoulders wrapped in marten or ermine, their faces hidden beneath silk capelines or lace mantillas.

Carriages were arriving slowly in single file, turning away and disappearing rapidly in all directions. Once, he too had been among that elite; his love of music had caused him to follow these artistic events passionately.

He was at the corner of the boulevard, outside the Café de la Paix; suddenly, he recognized his old coachman, traveling rapidly and extracting his vehicle from the curious crowd. In the coupé, which had almost brushed him, an involuntary glance showed him the woman who had long been his neglected wife, with whom he had spent an almost indifferent life, amorously enlaced by Dr. Larmezan’s left arm.

A stupid and incomprehensible surge of indignation gripped him; the familiar attitude of Dr. Larmezan seemed to him to be grossly revolting. Tremulously, he watched the vehicle race away at the gallop. One might have thought that he had suffered an outrage.

The impression, it is true, was as brief as the apparition. “Am I going mad?” he murmured, almost immediately. “Only a moment ago, the memory of Mariette, the near-certainty of having lost her gave me a profoundly cruel pain, and now, the rapid vision of the woman who was legally and honestly my wife, with whom I lived for such a long time almost without waiting to love her, almost without wanting to know her, disturbs me and seems to engender a ridiculous sentiment of jealousy. It’s absurd! I must be losing my mind. Why has that wall of glass reflected, so to speak, the regret of the other?”

The cold made him shiver, and he resumed walking. Now he was thinking, as he went through the same places, of that calvary of begging when his hunger, as heavy as a cross, had weighed so heavily upon his shoulders. He told himself that alongside him, perhaps, there were human beings whom his relative prosperity was already preventing him from recognizing, submissive to the same anguish. He examined the passers-by with eyes in which pity was mingled with fear. The providential memory of Mariette came back to haunt him, and now he saw her, hooked on to some laundry-boat jetty, icy, decomposed, her orbits empty: a human rag doing a danse macabre in the eddies of the rapid current.

He retraced his steps, shivering, and, in order to warm himself up, went into the first establishment he encountered on his route.

It was the Café Américain. Women enticed by his exotic allure immediately came to prowl around him, addressing suggestive twitches of the lips and languorous blinks to him. He gazed at them without seeing them, blinking his own eyes at the display of garish colors, sniffing with an unconscious sensuality the heady odors emanating from skirts and corsages, and drank a hot toddy, which did him good.

He gradually returned to a sentiment of reality. What the devil as he doing in this milieu, so out of tune with his sinister and grave thoughts. He now saw the maneuvers of which he as the object, and was in haste to get away from them—but as he summoned the waiter, a gross Rubenesque blonde draped in mauve velvet, who saw prey ready to escape, came brazenly to ask him whether he was not going to buy her a drink. He shivered involuntarily on recognizing Nini Nichon.

He grasped one last hope. Perhaps he might learn something.

“With pleasure, Mademoiselle,” he said, adopting his circumstantial accent. “And entirely in your honor, I assure you.”

“I can always drink another glass,” sat the fat woman, whose sumptuous costume did not lend her the slightest distinction. “A grog, waiter. It’s so cold tonight that I’d need twenty to warm me up,” she added, laughing heavily. She sat down facing him and waited to be served. He seemed to be studying her intently.

“It seems to me that I know you,” he ended up saying. “Where the devil have I seen you before?”

“Who doesn’t know Nini Nichon? Not four in all Paris,” she proclaimed, tapping her enormous bosom, which began quivering gelatinously. “There aren’t two like me.”

“Oh, I have it,” he said. “I saw you once at the Folies Nouvelles.”

“It’s possible; I once went there every evening. Oh, those were the good times.”

“Weren’t you the friend of a singer—Rose Gontran?”

“The intimate friend,” replied the mass of greasy flesh. “Poor Rose!” she added, drinking her toddy slowly. “She’s dead.” He stared at her; she seemed to be holding back a tear. “She died of smallpox. I closed her eyes myself.”

 

Chapter XXVIII

 

 

In front of the modest table covered with a simple cloth, behind which three examiners were seated without ostentation, the foreign chemist prepared himself to submit to the terrible proofs of the French doctorate.

His companions in the line, timid and trembling, replied with discretion to the questions addressed to them; he had the clear voice and assured tone of a man of worth. A venerable professor interrogated him about the theories of Dr. Albin; carried away by the subject, the American emitted grave doubts about the merit of their point of departure. The examiner stopped him.

“You certainly don’t lack knowledge, Monsieur,” he remarked, severely, “but you’re bringing us theories now for which we haven’t asked, and which are only hypotheses devoid of authority, since no one has demonstrated them. Your affirmations might, perhaps, be affirmed by the scientists of the New World, or find grace among German professors, but they prove to us that you have not understood the beautiful discoveries of our illustrious and regretted master; you will therefore be kind enough to go and study them more deeply, your artistry in throwing dust in the eyes is insufficient for us; we shall hear you again on another occasion.”

He was deferred!

If he had had time to waste the adventure would have amused him: he did not understand what he had invented!

After all, it was his own fault. Why forget that he was presenting himself as a pupil, why perorate like a master? He had not been asked to refute Dr. Albin’s doctrines; he had been asked to explain then, and that is what he should have done.

The lesson was excellent. He easily passed all his other examinations, refraining from emitting the slightest personal notion, repeating all the theories dear to the professors who questioned him, submitted a thesis that was a collection of bibliographical researches and was received with the warmest eulogies.

On the twelfth of March 18**, Doctor Pierre Iblan of the University of Philadelphia donned the French doctoral toga and received the diploma that permitted him henceforth to speak on his own behalf, care for the sick and obtain glory, honor and profit therefrom.

He had thought it would take him five or six months to attain that objective; it had taken him nearly five years! Five years of poverty, persecution and groping, five years of thick darkness that only a single ray of light had traversed.

Fortunately, all of that was about to end…and the devoted friend of those dismal hours was no longer there! That thought alone mitigated the delirious joy that he felt as he emerged from the thesis hall. In the courtyard of the École de Médecine, a gleam of pride illuminated his eyes.

“It’s the two of us, now, Professor Albin!” he exclaimed, raising a menacing fist against the Sacred Arch, while, pensive in his bronze envelope, Bichat seemed to be smiling at him and encouraging him.²⁶

 

Dr. Iblan, doctor of the University of Philadelphia, doctor and laureate of the Faculté de Paris, comfortably installed in his apartment in the Rue du Faubourg-Honoré, waits for patients, but the patients do not arrive. A few consultants sent by the American Legation who come from time to time to ask his advice, relying on their quality as compatriots, let him know that they are not rich, and end up obtaining treatment for free.

However, the doctor has considerable expenses: a costly rent, a small household. The money he had melts away like snow; the local suppliers, not reassured by the information they do not fail to seek, began to refuse him credit. The rich American and Spanish colonies do not bring the contribution he expected; their patriotism vanishes before the slightest distress, and they prefers to address themselves to the leading lights of French Science. Who has heard of Dr. Iblan, anyway? Where does he come from? Where are his proofs?

I obviously lack connections, he says to himself. It’s necessary to launch myself into society. He therefore sets out in search of invitations, runs around soirées easy of access, perorates in a brilliant fashion in cosmopolitans salons, makes music, attacks all subjects with authority—and achieves unexpected results. All the qualities that once aided in him his upward progress now work against him.

“He’s too good a musician to be a good physician,” snigger some.

“Too much of a physician to be an artiste,” claim the others.

“These people who dabble in everything don’t get to the bottom of anything,” observe the specialists.

“These foreigners can try as they might,” whisper the Parisiennes, “young or old, they never succeed in escaping the flashy category.”

“Haven’t you noticed,” the foreigners confide to one another, “that Dr. Iblan has no character or mark of nationality?”

“He belongs to the neuter gender.”

“A character out of Sardou, then.”

“All dentists, these Americans,” insinuate colleagues aggravated by his brilliant conversation.

“I have a horror of old doctors,” confess the neurotics, ingenuously, “only young and cheerful faces inspire me with confidence.”

These ephemeral connections, he soon thinks, in his consulting room, too often barren, can’t be of any great utility to me; I spend my time in too many places where I only pas through; people don’t have time to appreciate me, or even to get to know me. I need to frequent a salon of repute, and in a sustained fashion. The circle will be more restricted, but I’ll be better able to have myself judged and to create real sympathies.

Here the difficulty becomes greater; one does not penetrate overnight into the intimacy of a house; the more amiable his smiles become and the more engaging his manners, the more the reserve is accentuated.

He finally succeeds in capturing the good graces of the Baronne d’A***, an Austrian lady of note—so it is said—who invites him to her intimate Thursday gatherings.

The Baronne’s Thursdays are not as intimate as he had imagined. At the very first soirée he has the disagreeable impression of wandering through a carnival masquerade even more grotesque than those through which he has already passed. The drawing rooms are overly luxurious, the furniture excessively gilded; there are too many master paintings, heraldic jewels, family relics and regal snuff-boxes. Old gentlemen whose faces are worryingly pale or excessively acned, like vicious ostlers or debauched sacristans, wear too many sashes, decorations and necklaces of all sorts of orders. Dethroned princes play cards with too much luck. The ladies display too many diamonds and too much bosom, but seem nevertheless too reserved. Demoiselles who are too young and dowagers who are too old have smiles that are too enigmatic and gazes that are too bold. The buffet is too notorious in its insufficiency, and the servants contemplate the appetite of the guests with too much mockery. There are too many foreign generals, plenipotentiary ministers of unknown principalities, ambassadors of distant nations, Italian tenors, Germen harpists, Polish pianists, celebrated cantatrices, famous tragediennes and writers of genius. All those people have too much renown in their own lands for it not to be astonishing that one has never heard of them. The few Parisians astray in that milieu are considering it with too much curiosity. Finally, the Baronne d’A***, a buxom blonde of about forty, whose husband is often away, darts too many significant glances at Dr. Iblan. He is too fearful of the tariff list, and quickly escapes from the excessive intimacy of the place.

It was there, perhaps, that he might have circulated with the greatest ease and perhaps profit, but his scruples are still too keen and his delicacy too sensitive.

A few other attempts at intimate relationships succeed no better. Sometimes it is a milieu of extraordinarily dubious financiers who move millions in words and go home on foot on the pretext of getting a little air. Sometimes it is a cut-throat’s den where the naïve are stripped gaming, sometimes the boudoir of a procuress where the heavy draperies seem to be designed to stifle screams; a mysterious lair where the reek of laxity, treason and crime seem to corrupt the air and creep in the corners. The doors of honest houses remain obstinately closed. It seems that people sense, divine or know that he has no name, no fatherland, no family and no personality.

He then resumes his peregrinations, banal but more honorable, around the fêtes where one merely passes through and receptions remain open, where the people who shake your hand one evening no longer recognize you the next.

Meanwhile, time is flying; his social connections, he observes fearfully, only lead to the subjugation of a few old hysterics that his self-respect sends away, and who then became redoubtable enemies.

His frequentations oblige him to futile expenses, the devil continues to lodge in his purse, and the goal is retreating instead of getting closer.

A victim of his mask, he then surpasses the measure, unconsciously taking on charlatanesque appearances, has recourse to newspaper advertisements affirming with aplomb and arrogance that he has as much and more merit than no matter which of his fashionable colleagues.

Serious people smile, a few desperate individuals rejected by other physicians and reputedly incurable finally come to him and permit him to live in a meager fashion, but the incurables die on his hands and the naïve, enticed by excessive promises, end up proclaiming his impotence; nothing remains of Dr. Iblan but a reputation for employing means of undeniable correctness.

He knows that by raising the tenor of his publicity and employing more money in his advertisement, he would better exploit the credulity of his contemporaries, but the sentiment of his real value inhibits him; the horror of lying, the professional honesty of old, still ties his hands. He only does things that succeeded partially, or not at all.

The need to put himself in evidence then leads to mistakes that awaken all suspicions.

One evening, he finds himself in a salon with well-known politicians, some of whom are former colleagues of député Albin. The majority profess so-called advanced ideas but are only, in reality, narrow minds nourished on bombastic words and imbued with prudhommesque doctrines, shamelessly ambitious, democrats or socialists by order, egotists whose convictions are expended in promises.

They have been taking about the occult sciences, and some are fulminating against mystical tendencies with all the more insistence because a talented young physician, brought into the limelight by recent occultist publications, is affecting to exempt himself from the conversation.

“So-called telepaths, theosophists, mages, diviners, magnetizers and tutti quanti,” declares a rival of Maître Homais, pompously, “are merely skillful charlatans; coincidences and fortune hazards alone establish their reputation; the supernatural doesn’t exist.”

“That’s precisely what the most authorized occultists assert,” declares the young physician, finally picking up the gauntlet. “There is no supernatural; nothing exists outside nature and contrary to it; but it’s nevertheless true that an infinity of redoubtable or beneficial natural forces of which so-called exact science is profoundly ignorant are revealed to initiates. There are properties as strange as magnetism, for example, in many other minerals; the physicists of the Institute have no doubt of it, and Asiatic herdsmen make use of them.

“Without going so far, for thousands of years, the fishermen of our Mediterranean coasts have known, profoundly mysterious as it still is, that a few drops of oil are sufficient to calm an irritated sea; science has scarcely begun to learn that; and how many uneducated peasants of our French provinces know secrets of herbs, enchantments and dreams, while the therapists of the Académie have forgotten that Hippocrates and Galen used them every day. The majority of our remedies—belladonna, digitalis, opium, etc.—come to us from sorcerers who maintained the tradition. What do we not owe to the Medieval alchemists, who were neither madmen nor ignorant?

“Believe me, don’t judge too lightly doctrines that we haven’t studied sufficiently, and let us look at important facts without prejudice! The day isn’t far off when official medicine will perceive once again that, alongside the single force that we recognize today, vitality, there’s another equally important, vitalism. That’s a fact about which there’s nothing supernatural, a fact known throughout the ages, as occultist physicians have proclaimed.”

“There are occultist physicians then?”

“Why not. I know one who has just accomplished a miraculous cure in a desperate case of typhoid fever.”

“The recipe! The recipe!” cry ironic voices.

“It’s quite simple. He transmitted vital fluid to his patient, expelled all thought of death and rendered her the will to live.”

“That physician is a criminal, since, having those powers, he still lets people die every day from that disease.”

“Would you be ready to give your blood every time a patient could be saved by a transfusion? Can’t you understand that, as the transmission of vital fluid is made at the expense of the operator, such a means can only be employed exceptionally.”

“He ought at least to teach it to his colleagues.”

“Some don’t want to, other are unable to receive the words of truth; that’s why there have always been, and always will be, phenomena known to some and unknown to the majority—which is to say, occult sciences.”

“The only sciences that I admit,” announces a humanitarian philosopher, “are those that are displayed in broad daylight, and profit humankind with their discoveries.”

“Humankind,” ripostes the occultist, with a bitter laugh, “a few centuries ago, hastened to burn, without rhyme or reason, anyone who lifted a corner of the veil. We cannot, we who are judges and parties, appreciate the conduct that the humankind of today adopts in their regard; posterity will inform our descendants when it judges our actions and our works, but it is logical to think that if people hide their discoveries, it is because they believe them to be baneful to their contemporaries or harmful, perhaps mortal, for themselves.

“Do you imagine that the age of persecutions has passed forever? Alas, the hydra that devours the pioneers of ideas has only changed its face and form; an immense myriapod, it enlaces the contemporary world in its viscous rings; there is nothing astonishing in the fact that the initiates are fearful.

“On the other hand, are you certain that all discoveries are profitable to humanity in the way that you mean? So long as alcohol, employed in the form of a cordial, was the secret of a few Alchemists, it was not belied by the name of eau-de-vie invented by Arnaud de Villeneuve.²⁷ Does it not merit the name of eau-de-mort now that science has put it within the range of everyone? And, as a great statesman has said, is it not more harmful to the human race that the three greatest plagues—war, disease and famine—put together?

“Certain discoveries can only be usefully unveiled to beings worthy to receive them. Not all races are equipped to the same degree to digest what you call progress. Entire peoples have died, and are dying, of the civilization that conquest brings them, for under the fallacious name of civilization you almost always conceal vile commercial interests.”

“That’s the theory of the candle-snuffer,” proclaims a radical député. “By what right do you hide from some what you teach to others?”

“Because not everyone merits knowing everything. Because superiority, intelligence and moral value are only acquired by successive efforts, which the law does not decree.”

“If the law doesn’t decree them, it prepares them.”

“It ought to prepare them, but religious hypocrisy and materialistic egotism put a stop to it, and it’s because the occult sciences proclaim the superiority of the spirit and its liberation, that they are persecuted or, which is worse, turned to ridicule.”

“That wouldn’t happen if people didn’t make a métier out of astonishing their fellows and chasing after money with pretended secrets: exploiters on one side, imbeciles on the other. The love of the marvelous that simple minds have is fundamentally nothing but an aspiration toward the better, toward the best; it’s inadmissible that they’re cheated.”

“Is it any more admissible that they’re exploited, deceived and harmed by scientific hypotheses, yesterday’s verities, tomorrow’s errors? Your science is impotent and wretched, the means of which it disposes are so limited, its views so narrow and its pretentions so great, that its intervention is more often harmful than helpful. Wasn’t it in the name of science, only to cite one example, that for centuries, physicians extorted and killed their patient by bleeding them left, right and center? Diaforus isn’t dead yet. So combat cupidity and charlatanism wherever it seeks to insinuate itself, but don’t declare a priori that all the honest people, all the scholars are on one side and all the rogues and ignoramuses on the other.”

“You’re not going to go so far as to admit the deceptions of spiritism, mythological fables and popular superstition?”

“Words—all that’s just words. I’m not saying that; I’m simply affirming that alongside known phenomena, there are occult phenomena that a few privileged individuals know and the revelation of which would astonish you prodigiously.”

“I’d certainly like to be astonished,” voices proclaim from various directions.

The young defender of occultism falls silent—but Dr. Iblan cannot resist the need to intervene

“That’s very easy,” he affirms. “I don’t approve of all my young friend’s theories and I’m not a mage or a diviner, but if it’s merely a matter of astonishing you, I’ll take responsibility for that.”

The challenge is accepted.

He leans close to the ear of one and reveals a family secret; he reminds another of a parliamentary intrigue to which only a few individuals had the key; a third is amazed to find that confidential steps taken in a distant epoch are known to the American doctor; a député is astonished to learn the cause that had motivated his vote in a important circumstance; a former minister hears a state secret recalled.

Everyone looks sat one another, astounded. A glacial silence succeeds the animated conversations. The pseudo-sorcerer is almost made to understand that his presence is a cause of embarrassment and annoyance.

He leaves a few minutes later, under some pretext, perceiving too late that he has just committed an absurd blunder. Anxious people interrogate him with their gaze; no one can understand. He is a spy, a secret policeman, a dangerous individual, perhaps a master blackmailer.

No one dares say so aloud but everyone is thinking it.