Those three hundred francs had not been spent on Dona Xima. During the month we had already been in Paris, nobody seemed to remember her. On one occasion I had advised Dona Maria Antònia to entrust her to God. The Senyora listened to me without opening her mouth and without revealing the slightest change of expression. We will never succeed in understanding the Senyors, Miquel. They are hardhearted and perhaps cannot be otherwise. They are not interested in people so much as in the name they bear. It thus happens that an aristocrat can be more ignorant and coarse in his ways than a simple man of the middle class, and yet he will lose none of the prestige that does not belong to him, but is the legacy of a tradition exclusively connected to his name. The name is a cover for the person, and feeling to some extent invulnerable, the powerful risk forgetting even the principles of ethics and religion. I have already said that the scandalous existence the Senyor led during the first half of his life would not have been tolerated had it not been for the spell cast by the five letters in the name Bearn. That is why Jesus Christ proclaimed that if we wish to follow him we must abandon earthly honour and embrace the cross. Do you remember the time when the rector at the Seminary went so far as to call us socialists? May the Lord preserve us from falling for false theories condemned by the Church such as those of Karl Marx, a German Jew who died in London. This secular apostle, who created the materialistic conception of History, does not seem to know that about nineteen centuries ago in a stable in Bethlehem a Master was born whose doctrines included all that which Socialism proclaims as its own invention. In addition, like a good German, Karl Marx is incoherent and contradictory, striving for brotherhood by means of class struggles and wars. These are hardly the paths we are shown by our Holy Saviour! No, neither you nor I can be accused of Marxism. On the other hand, Miquel, the objections I have sometimes made to the Senyor’s morals have not meant that I did not love him, but quite the contrary. ‘If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and seeketh that which is gone astray?’ The great love I have always felt towards my benefactor rises from such a sentiment. If I have not loved Dona Maria Antònia as much it is perhaps because she was not as needful of my solicitude. Precisely because I believed the two of them were good, I found the way they proceeded with Dona Xima inhuman. It is not fair to object by saying her behaviour was a lost cause. That would be all the more reason to help her, not to forget her. When I asked the Senyor whether he knew where she was, he said he did not, and looked off into space. I was infuriated by his answer because I thought it was false. Now that I knew it was true, I found it all the more infuriating. The Senyor knew nothing about her; in other words, he wished to know nothing about her. When he had come up with the idea of visiting Paris it was, as he was to confess later on, to meet the Tissandier brothers, who claimed to have built a dirigible balloon. Such is the spirit of Faust. When he has not been able to find redemption in the sins of the flesh, the Germanic Faust seeks them in the yearning for power, in action, taking land from the sea, becoming rich…in anything but observing the Law of God.
A few days before our departure, the Senyors took me to the Opera to see Manon from a discreetly positioned box. The Grand Opera is a modern theatre next to the Boulevard des Capucines. The old theatre on the Rue Le Pelletier burned down a long time ago, as if with the disaster of Sedan God wished to destroy not only the Empire but even the stage that symbolized the scandals of that entire society. I was familiar with the famous novel by the abbé Prévost, a romantic novel that predated Romanticism, written in the middle of the eighteenth century by a man who was not the least bit frivolous and who shared the mistakes of his protagonists. The name Manon has remained a prototype of the frivolous woman who is swept away in a hurricane of passion. That is the main source of the tragedy, and I do not understand how anyone can be amused by the thoughtless mischief of an unlucky woman who would have to pay such a high price for her sins in the other life, and who even in this one was pursued by Justice and met a miserable fate in the wastelands of Louisiana.
Dona Xima was the same sort of woman as Manon, and would meet a similar fate. On one occasion I saw a funambulist who danced on a tightrope at a great height and smiled as she swayed, as if unaware of her danger, until she missed a step and broke her neck. I do not know whether the spectators who had applauded her follies realized the moral responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. I went to see the dead girl and pray a Paternoster in her memory. She was about eighteen and seemed to be smiling under her halo of golden hair.
Returning to the Senyors’ niece, I could not foresee in what manner she would be forced to atone for her conduct. In dreams she had told me that her suffering would increase until it reached the point of total despair, which would be eternal. That suffering must have referred to the gradual loss of beauty and fortune, without the counsel of religion serving as a lenitive. The mundane success for which she had lived would be increasingly denied to her as the days went by. I already found it suspicious that we had not seen her in the centre of the town in an entire month. The golden city of Paris ignored her presence. Besides this Paris of luxury and riches, which extends from the Madeleine to the Porte de Saint-Martin, there are others where silks and flowers do not smile behind the shop windows, where gaslights do not shine at night, and where there are no diamonds sparkling on lovely ladies, like morning dew. In one of those Parises unseen by visitors, near the neighbourhood of Saint Antoine, beyond the Luxembourg, in some poor room with no furniture other than a bed, a tin washbasin and a chair, Dona Xima may have possibly been hiding her defeat, her irreparable decline after having dazzled the other Paris of opera boxes, Etoile town houses and carriages waiting at the door. Her friend and benefactor, the Emperor, was dead. The newspapers no longer cared about that elegant lion by the name of the Duke of Campo Formio. Her beauty and what they would call her charm could hardly resist the double ravage of misfortune and forty years of age. When these thoughts came to my mind I looked for Dona Xima among the tattered middle-aged women from the outskirts of town. At other times I could not help but evoke her just as she had remained in my memory, and I have already mentioned that in the Champs Elysées she once appeared to me in the form of a little girl playing diabolo.
All these increasingly precise, illusory images culminated in a real and far more distressing apparition. The day before we left for Rome, after saying mass in Saint Roch, I saw her at a distance. She was still beautiful, but her figure and her grace were lost. She was walking fast and seemed worried. She wore an old pair of shoes with crooked heels; a piece of bread and a few vegetables were sticking out of her cloth bag. This time it really was Dona Xima just before the final stage of her decline. She had the same deep, sad gaze that she had in my dream. An omnibus drove between us. Meanwhile, she turned the corner of the Rue des Pyramides, and when I tried to follow her she had vanished. Years later, Dear Lord, I would again see her in Bearn, in the very room where I now write these words, on the last day of Carnival, like a tragic mask…Saint Francis of Borja, facing the dead body of the Empress, made a vow never to love anything but Eternal Beauty, but the body they were burying was no longer Dona Isabel, but some inanimate remains deprived of life; whereas on that tragic day Dona Xima was a ghost of herself. Those eyes surrounded by wrinkles and that shrunken mouth were still her eyes and her mouth. I was not facing a dead body, but a horrible woman whose features overlapped and mingled with the great beauty she had lost, already impossible to recapture intact in my memory. Yet I must not jump ahead. I must continue with my story. Overcome by a dreadful anguish, I returned to the hotel. There I came across the greatest affront I have ever been faced with in my life, an affront, Miquel, that will not be found in the archives of Bearn, which already contains others: as soon as he saw me, the concierge handed me a thick envelope with a Police stamp on it, addressed to the Senyor.
‘It’s an important matter,’ he said to me rather impolitely, ‘and I can’t give it to you unless you sign this receipt.’
After signing for it I ran and locked myself up in my room. I foresaw something serious, but never a disgrace of such magnitude. We were being expelled from Paris. Expelled as impostors, as was specified in a long protocol which my mind refused to understand. The Spaniard ‘called’ Don Toni de Bearn and the ‘lady travelling with him’ (as if they doubted her being his legitimate wife), along with the abbé Joan Mayol, ‘who professes he is performing his duties as chaplain and secretary of the above-mentioned,’ were invited to leave French soil within a period of forty-eight hours ‘given the excesses stated herein.’ Those excesses could have been the subject of a frightful novel. According to the police report, the Senyors were posing as the Prince and Princess of the House of Bearn, demanding royal treatment at the hotel and having a bellboy precede them on their outings to carry the red cushions of the Duchess of Edinburgh. In addition: the ‘so-called’ Don Toni had flown in the electrically propelled balloon of the Tissandier brothers using the false name of Bernat Villar (which turned out to be true, because he did not wish to appear in the press for fear of Dona Maria Antònia finding out). As far as the soi-disant abbé Don Joan Mayol was concerned, he was a dangerous subject who had assaulted a police officer on the Quai du Louvre because of some affair concerning a lady.
The sad and astonishing fact was that almost all they had reported was true, but we are undoubtedly as indulgent with ourselves as we are demanding with strangers. Nothing is more surprising than the discrepancy between the notion we develop about our own selves and the notion according to which we are judged by others. In 1859, a dancer with a pitiful reputation had dared to mention the name Bearn, and I have already explained that the Senyor records this in his Memoirs. In the eyes of that sinner, Don Toni was something that my pen refuses to put in writing. And nonetheless my benefactor lucidly points out that such criteria are hardly surprising at all. In Paris, the Bearns of Mallorca were unknown. Yet everyone knew the other facts, such as Dona Xima’s behaviour, the visits of the Duke and the compliance of Don Toni, followed by a timely disappearance at the very moment when the new lover began lavishing generous presents on his beloved. All of that, for those who did not know him, had a name, and La Rigolboche had uttered it. ‘I didn’t believe I deserved it,’ the Senyor had told me many times, ‘but when I saw it had been applied to me I had to admit that she had plenty of reasons. I don’t know whether La Rigolboche, who sold her favours every night, would have accepted another clear, unforgiving appellation that also appears in the dictionary…’
God was kind to us. The police had asked us to leave within forty-eight hours and we were planning to leave the following morning. I resolved not to say anything to the Senyors. I was the main culprit of that ignominy: it was only fair that I alone should suffer the consequences of not having stopped that whole princedom affair from the start. Neither could I deny the fact that I had assaulted a poor police officer. I wanted to carry the weight of the affront without sharing it with anyone else, and since I was leaving the City of Light with a heavy heart, I would at least allow the Senyors to leave with a smile on their lips, their heads high and honoured as Prince and Princess. The last time we crossed the hall, those were precisely the words pronounced for the last time—and with such irony!—by the monster at the reception desk: ‘Bonjour, messieurs les Princes.’
He said it flashing all his teeth, and God knows I felt the impulse to beat him to a pulp. Instead of doing so, I took the golden chain from my neck and begged him to accept it, telling him that it was made of old gold. When he realized how much it weighed he turned pale with greed and bowed all the way down to the floor.
‘What kind of carriage have you ordered?’ he cried out to the garcon who was carrying our luggage. ‘Couldn’t you have found an older one in all of Paris? Go get the cushions of the Duchess of Edinburgh so this lady and these gentlemen will be comfortable on their way to the station.’
The policemen who had been watching us walked over to observe the ceremony of the cushions, pushing back a few children who were in our way. One of the officers personally closed the door to the carriage and took off his hat when we departed.
‘The French are so attentive and charming,’ said Dona Maria Antònia.
The Senyor agreed. And thus we left Paris, with their majestic smiles and my heart heavy with gloom.