The American
by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #177 · 757,836 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The American
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The American
Author: Henry James
Release date: March 12, 2006 [eBook #177]
Most recently updated: February 23, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/177
Credits: Pauline J. Iacono, John Hamm and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN ***
cover
The American
by Henry James
1877
Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER I
On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining
at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied
the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre. This
commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all
weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts, but the gentleman in question had
taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown
back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful
moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed
his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an
opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he
repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead, with a somewhat
wearied gesture. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was
familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigor that
is commonly known as “toughness.” But his exertions on this particular
day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had performed great physical
feats which left him less jaded than his tranquil stroll through the
Louvre. He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was
affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Bädeker; his
attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down
with an æsthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the
pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in
the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets
who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces,
and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more
than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated
that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat
up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock
crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind
of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his
life, with a vague self-mistrust.
An observer with anything of an eye for national types would have had
no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped
connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain
humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled
out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a powerful
specimen of an American. But he was not only a fine American; he was in
the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that
kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the
most impressive—the physical capital which the owner does nothing to
“keep up.” If he was a muscular Christian, it was quite without knowing
it. If it was necessary to walk to a remote spot, he walked, but he had
never known himself to “exercise.” He had no theory with regard to cold
bathing or the use of Indian clubs; he was neither an oarsman, a
rifleman, nor a fencer—he had never had time for these amusements—and
he was quite unaware that the saddle is recommended for certain forms
of indigestion. He was by inclination a temperate man; but he had
supped the night before his visit to the Louvre at the Café
Anglais—someone had told him it was an experience not to be omitted—and
he had slept none the less the sleep of the just. His usual attitude
and carriage were of a rather relaxed and lounging kind, but when under
a special inspiration, he straightened himself, he looked like a
grenadier on parade. He never smoked. He had been assured—such things
are said—that cigars were excellent for the health, and he was quite
capable of believing it; but he knew as little about tobacco as about
homœopathy. He had a very well-formed head, with a shapely, symmetrical
balance of the frontal and the occipital development, and a good deal
of straight, rather dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his
nose had a bold well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear, cold gray,
and save for a rather abundant moustache he was clean-shaved. He had
the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type;
but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more
than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend’s
countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have
been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its
expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that
typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not
simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of
standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life,
of being very much at one’s own disposal so characteristic of many
American faces. It was our friend’s eye that chiefly told his story; an
eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was
full of contradictory suggestions, and though it was by no means the
glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything
you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet
credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely
intelligent and extremely good-humored, there was something vaguely
defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its
reserve. The cut of this gentleman’s moustache, with the two premature
wrinkles in the cheek above it, and the fashion of his garments, in
which an exposed shirt-front and a cerulean cravat played perhaps an
obtrusive part, completed the conditions of his identity. We have
approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by
no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there,
rather baffled on the æsthetic question, and guilty of the damning
fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit
of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting
Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks
the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently
promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem
to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea
in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the
imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.
As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and
then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the
fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of
by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from
side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing
and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses
for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a
restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the
gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat,
and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and
looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite
unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single
word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and
holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate
his meaning, “_Combien?_” he abruptly demanded.
The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders,
put down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands.
“How much?” said our friend, in English. “_Combien?_”
“Monsieur wishes to buy it?” asked the young lady in French.
“Very pretty, _splendide. Combien?_” repeated the American.
“It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful
subject,” said the young lady.
“The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it.
_Combien?_ Write it here.” And he took a pencil from his pocket and
showed her the fly-leaf of his guide-book. She stood looking at him and
scratching her chin with the pencil. “Is it not for sale?” he asked.
And as she still stood reflecting, and looking at him with an eye
which, in spite of her desire to treat this avidity of patronage as a
very old story, betrayed an almost touching incredulity, he was afraid
he had offended her. She was simply trying to look indifferent, and
wondering how far she might go. “I haven’t made a mistake—_pas
insulté_, no?” her interlocutor continued. “Don’t you understand a
little English?”
The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was
remarkable. She fixed him with her conscious, perceptive eye and asked
him if he spoke no French. Then, “_Donnez!_” she said briefly, and took
the open guide-book. In the upper corner of the fly-leaf she traced a
number, in a minute and extremely neat hand. Then she handed back the
book and took up her palette again.
Our friend read the number: “2,000 francs.” He said nothing for a time,
but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to
dabble with her paint. “For a copy, isn’t that a good deal?” he asked
at last. “_Pas beaucoup?_”
The young lady raised her eyes from her palette, scanned him from head
to foot, and alighted with admirable sagacity upon exactly the right
answer. “Yes, it’s a good deal. But my copy has remarkable qualities,
it is worth nothing less.”
The gentleman in whom we are interested understood no French, but I
have said he was intelligent, and here is a good chance to prove it. He
apprehended, by a natural instinct, the meaning of the young woman’s
phrase, and it gratified him to think that she was so honest. Beauty,
talent, virtue; she combined everything! “But you must finish it,” he
said. “_finish_, you know;” and he pointed to the unpainted hand of the
figure.
“Oh, it shall be finished in perfection; in the perfection of
perfections!” cried mademoiselle; and to confirm her promise, she
deposited a rosy blotch in the middle of the Madonna’s cheek.
But the American frowned. “Ah, too red, too red!” he rejoined. “Her
complexion,” pointing to the Murillo, “is—more delicate.”
“Delicate? Oh, it shall be delicate, monsieur; delicate as Sèvres
_biscuit_. I am going to tone that down; I know all the secrets of my
art. And where will you allow us to send it to you? Your address?”
“My address? Oh yes!” And the gentleman drew a card from his
pocket-book and wrote something upon it. Then hesitating a moment he
said, “If I don’t like it when it it’s finished, you know, I shall not
be obliged to take it.”
The young lady seemed as good a guesser as himself. “Oh, I am very sure
that monsieur is not capricious,” she said with a roguish smile.
“Capricious?” And at this monsieur began to laugh. “Oh no, I’m not
capricious. I am very faithful. I am very constant. _Comprenez?_”
“Monsieur is constant; I understand perfectly. It’s a rare virtue. To
recompense you, you shall have your picture on the first possible day;
next week—as soon as it is dry. I will take the card of monsieur.” And
she took it and read his name: “Christopher Newman.” Then she tried to
repeat it aloud, and laughed at her bad accent. “Your English names are
so droll!”
“Droll?” said Mr. Newman, laughing too. “Did you ever hear of
Christopher Columbus?”
“_Bien sûr!_ He invented America; a very great man. And is he your
patron?”
“My patron?”
“Your patron-saint, in the calendar.”
“Oh, exactly; my parents named me for him.”
“Monsieur is American?”
“Don’t you see it?” monsieur inquired.
“And you mean to carry my little picture away over there?” and she
explained her phrase with a gesture.
“Oh, I mean to buy a great many pictures—_beaucoup, beaucoup_,” said
Christopher Newman.
“The honor is not less for me,” the young lady answered, “for I am sure
monsieur has a great deal of taste.”
“But you must give me your card,” Newman said; “your card, you know.”
The young lady looked severe for an instant, and then said, “My father
will wait upon you.”
But this time Mr. Newman’s powers of divination were at fault. “Your
card, your address,” he simply repeated.
“My address?” said mademoiselle. Then with a little shrug, “Happily for
you, you are an American! It is the first time I ever gave my card to a
gentleman.” And, taking from her pocket a rather greasy portemonnaie,
she extracted from it a small glazed visiting card, and presented the
latter to her patron. It was neatly inscribed in pencil, with a great
many flourishes, “Mlle. Noémie Nioche.” But Mr. Newman, unlike his
companion, read the name with perfect gravity; all French names to him
were equally droll.
“And precisely, here is my father, who has come to escort me home,”
said Mademoiselle Noémie. “He speaks English. He will arrange with
you.” And she turned to welcome a little old gentleman who came
shuffling up, peering over his spectacles at Newman.
M. Nioche wore a glossy wig, of an unnatural color which overhung his
little meek, white, vacant face, and left it hardly more expressive
than the unfeatured block upon which these articles are displayed in
the barber’s window. He was an exquisite image of shabby gentility. His
scant ill-made coat, desperately brushed, his darned gloves, his highly
polished boots, his rusty, shapely hat, told the story of a person who
had “had losses” and who clung to the spirit of nice habits even though
the letter had been hopelessly effaced. Among other things M. Nioche
had lost courage. Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened
him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe,
for fear of waking up the hostile fates. If this strange gentleman was
saying anything improper to his daughter, M. Nioche would entreat him
huskily, as a particular favor, to forbear; but he would admit at the
same time that he was very presumptuous to ask for particular favors.
“Monsieur has bought my picture,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “When it’s
finished you’ll carry it to him in a cab.”
“In a cab!” cried M. Nioche; and he stared, in a bewildered way, as if
he had seen the sun rising at midnight.
“Are you the young lady’s father?” said Newman. “I think she said you
speak English.”
“Speak English—yes,” said the old man slowly rubbing his hands. “I will
bring it in a cab.”
“Say something, then,” cried his daughter. “Thank him a little—not too
much.”
“A little, my daughter, a little?” said M. Nioche perplexed. “How
much?”
“Two thousand!” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “Don’t make a fuss or he’ll
take back his word.”
“Two thousand!” cried the old man, and he began to fumble for his
snuff-box. He looked at Newman from head to foot; he looked at his
daughter and then at the picture. “Take care you don’t spoil it!” he
cried almost sublimely.
“We must go home,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “This is a good day’s
work. Take care how you carry it!” And she began to put up her
utensils.
“How can I thank you?” said M. Nioche. “My English does not suffice.”
“I wish I spoke French as well,” said Newman, good-naturedly. “Your
daughter is very clever.”
“Oh, sir!” and M. Nioche looked over his spectacles with tearful eyes
and nodded several times with a world of sadness. “She has had an
education—_très-supérieure!_ Nothing was spared. Lessons in pastel at
ten francs the lesson, lessons in oil at twelve francs. I didn’t look
at the francs then. She’s an _artiste_, eh?”
“Do I understand you to say that you have had reverses?” asked Newman.
“Reverses? Oh, sir, misfortunes—terrible.”
“Unsuccessful in business, eh?”
“Very unsuccessful, sir.”
“Oh, never fear, you’ll get on your legs again,” said Newman cheerily.
The old man drooped his head on one side and looked at him with an
expression of pain, as if this were an unfeeling jest.
“What does he say?” demanded Mademoiselle Noémie.
M. Nioche took a pinch of snuff. “He says I will make my fortune
again.”
“Perhaps he will help you. And what else?”
“He says thou art very clever.”
“It is very possible. You believe it yourself, my father?”
“Believe it, my daughter? With this evidence!” And the old man turned
afresh, with a staring, wondering homage, to the audacious daub on the
easel.
“Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French.”
“To learn French?”
“To take lessons.”
“To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?”
“From you!”
“From me, my child? How should I give lessons?”
“_Pas de raisons!_ Ask him immediately!” said Mademoiselle Noémie, with
soft brevity.
M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter’s eye he collected his
wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her
commands. “Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful
language?” he inquired, with an appealing quaver.
“To study French?” asked Newman, staring.
M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his
shoulders. “A little conversation!”
“Conversation—that’s it!” murmured Mademoiselle Noémie, who had caught
the word. “The conversation of the best society.”
“Our French conversation is famous, you know,” M. Nioche ventured to
continue. “It’s a great talent.”
“But isn’t it awfully difficult?” asked Newman, very simply.
“Not to a man of _esprit_, like monsieur, an admirer of beauty in every
form!” and M. Nioche cast a significant glance at his daughter’s
Madonna.
“I can’t fancy myself chattering French!” said Newman with a laugh.
“And yet, I suppose that the more a man knows the better.”
“Monsieur expresses that very happily. _Hélas, oui!_”
“I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about Paris, to know
the language.”
“Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult
things!”
“Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?”
Poor M. Nioche was embarrassed; he smiled more appealingly. “I am not a
regular professor,” he admitted. “I can’t nevertheless tell him that
I’m a professor,” he said to his daughter.
“Tell him it’s a very exceptional chance,” answered Mademoiselle
Noémie; “an _homme du monde_—one gentleman conversing with another!
Remember what you are—what you have been!”
“A teacher of languages in neither case! Much more formerly and much
less to-day! And if he asks the price of the lessons?”
“He won’t ask it,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.
“What he pleases, I may say?”
“Never! That’s bad style.”
“If he asks, then?”
Mademoiselle Noémie had put on her bonnet and was tying the ribbons.
She smoothed them out, with her soft little chin thrust forward. “Ten
francs,” she said quickly.
“Oh, my daughter! I shall never dare.”
“Don’t dare, then! He won’t ask till the end of the lessons, and then I
will make out the bill.”
M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing
his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not
intenser only because it was habitually so striking. It never occurred
to Newman to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in imparting
instruction; he supposed of course M. Nioche knew his own language, and
his appealing forlornness was quite the perfection of what the
American, for vague reasons, had always associated with all elderly
foreigners of the lesson-giving class. Newman had never reflected upon
philological processes. His chief impression with regard to
ascertaining those mysterious correlatives of his familiar English
vocables which were current in this extraordinary city of Paris was,
that it was simply a matter of a good deal of unwonted and rather
ridiculous muscular effort on his own part. “How did you learn
English?” he asked of the old man.
“When I was young, before my miseries. Oh, I was wide awake, then. My
father was a great _commerçant_; he placed me for a year in a
counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but much I have
forgotten!”
“How much French can I learn in a month?”
“What does he say?” asked Mademoiselle Noémie.
M. Nioche explained.
“He will speak like an angel!” said his daughter.
But the native integrity which had been vainly exerted to secure M.
Nioche’s commercial prosperity flickered up again. “_Dame_, monsieur!”
he answered. “All I can teach you!” And then, recovering himself at a
sign from his daughter, “I will wait upon you at your hotel.”
“Oh yes, I should like to learn French,” Newman went on, with
democratic confidingness. “Hang me if I should ever have thought of it!
I took for granted it was impossible. But if you learned my language,
why shouldn’t I learn yours?” and his frank, friendly laugh drew the
sting from the jest. “Only, if we are going to converse, you know, you
must think of something cheerful to converse about.”
“You are very good, sir; I am overcome!” said M. Nioche, throwing out
his hands. “But you have cheerfulness and happiness for two!”
“Oh no,” said Newman more seriously. “You must be bright and lively;
that’s part of the bargain.”
M. Nioche bowed, with his hand on his heart. “Very well, sir; you have
already made me lively.”
“Come and bring me my picture then; I will pay you for it, and we will
talk about that. That will be a cheerful subject!”
Mademoiselle Noémie had collected her accessories, and she gave the
precious Madonna in charge to her father, who retreated backwards out
of sight, holding it at arm’s-length and reiterating his obeisance. The
young lady gathered her shawl about her like a perfect Parisienne, and
it was with the smile of a Parisienne that she took leave of her
patron.
CHAPTER II
He wandered back to the divan and seated himself on the other side, in
view of the great canvas on which Paul Veronese had depicted the
marriage-feast of Cana. Wearied as he was he found the picture
entertaining; it had an illusion for him; it satisfied his conception,
which was ambitious, of what a splendid banquet should be. In the
left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman with yellow tresses
confined in a golden head-dress; she is bending forward and listening,
with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbor.
Newman detected her in the crowd, admired her, and perceived that she
too had her votive copyist—a young man with his hair standing on end.
Suddenly he became conscious of the germ of the mania of the
“collector;” he had taken the first step; why should he not go on? It
was only twenty minutes before that he had bought the first picture of
his life, and now he was already thinking of art-patronage as a
fascinating pursuit. His reflections quickened his good-humor, and he
was on the point of approaching the young man with another “_Combien?_”
Two or three facts in this relation are noticeable, although the
logical chain which connects them may seem imperfect. He knew
Mademoiselle Nioche had asked too much; he bore her no grudge for doing
so, and he was determined to pay the young man exactly the proper sum.
At this moment, however, his attention was attracted by a gentleman who
had come from another part of the room and whose manner was that of a
stranger to the gallery, although he was equipped with neither
guide-book nor opera-glass. He carried a white sun-umbrella, lined with
blue silk, and he strolled in front of the Paul Veronese, vaguely
looking at it, but much too near to see anything but the grain of the
canvas. Opposite to Christopher Newman he paused and turned, and then
our friend, who had been observing him, had a chance to verify a
suspicion aroused by an imperfect view of his face. The result of this
larger scrutiny was that he presently sprang to his feet, strode across
the room, and, with an outstretched hand, arrested the gentleman with
the blue-lined umbrella. The latter stared, but put out his hand at a
venture. He was corpulent and rosy, and though his countenance, which
was ornamented with a beautiful flaxen beard, carefully divided in the
middle and brushed outward at the sides, was not remarkable for
intensity of expression, he looked like a person who would willingly
shake hands with anyone. I know not what Newman thought of his face,
but he found a want of response in his grasp.
“Oh, come, come,” he said, laughing; “don’t say, now, you don’t know
me—if I have _not_ got a white parasol!”
The sound of his voice quickened the other’s memory, his face expanded
to its fullest capacity, and he also broke into a laugh. “Why,
Newman—I’ll be blowed! Where in the world—I declare—who would have
thought? You know you have changed.”
“You haven’t!” said Newman.
“Not for the better, no doubt. When did you get here?”
“Three days ago.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I had no idea _you_ were here.”
“I have been here these six years.”
“It must be eight or nine since we met.”
“Something of that sort. We were very young.”
“It was in St. Louis, during the war. You were in the army.”
“Oh no, not I! But you were.”
“I believe I was.”
“You came out all right?”
“I came out with my legs and arms—and with satisfaction. All that seems
very far away.”
“And how long have you been in Europe?”
“Seventeen days.”
“First time?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“Made your everlasting fortune?”
Christopher Newman was silent a moment, and then with a tranquil smile
he answered, “Yes.”
“And come to Paris to spend it, eh?”
“Well, we shall see. So they carry those parasols here—the men-folk?”
“Of course they do. They’re great things. They understand comfort out
here.”
“Where do you buy them?”
“Anywhere, everywhere.”
“Well, Tristram, I’m glad to get hold of you. You can show me the
ropes. I suppose you know Paris inside out.”
Mr. Tristram gave a mellow smile of self-gratulation. “Well, I guess
there are not many men that can show me much. I’ll take care of you.”
“It’s a pity you were not here a few minutes ago. I have just bought a
picture. You might have put the thing through for me.”
“Bought a picture?” said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round at the
walls. “Why, do they sell them?”
“I mean a copy.”
“Oh, I see. These,” said Mr. Tristram, nodding at the Titians and
Vandykes, “these, I suppose, are originals.”
“I hope so,” cried Newman. “I don’t want a copy of a copy.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Tristram, mysteriously, “you can never tell. They
imitate, you know, so deucedly well. It’s like the jewellers, with
their false stones. Go into the Palais Royal, there; you see
‘Imitation’ on half the windows. The law obliges them to stick it on,
you know; but you can’t tell the things apart. To tell the truth,” Mr.
Tristram continued, with a wry face, “I don’t do much in pictures. I
leave that to my wife.”
“Ah, you have got a wife?”
“Didn’t I mention it? She’s a very nice woman; you must know her. She’s
up there in the Avenue d’Iéna.”
“So you are regularly fixed—house and children and all.”
“Yes, a tip-top house and a couple of youngsters.”
“Well,” said Christopher Newman, stretching his arms a little, with a
sigh, “I envy you.”
“Oh no! you don’t!” answered Mr. Tristram, giving him a little poke
with his parasol.
“I beg your pardon; I do!”
“Well, you won’t, then, when—when—”
“You don’t certainly mean when I have seen your establishment?”
“When you have seen Paris, my boy. You want to be your own master
here.”
“Oh, I have been my own master all my life, and I’m tired of it.”
“Well, try Paris. How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“_C’est le bel âge_, as they say here.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that a man shouldn’t send away his plate till he has eaten
his fill.”
“All that? I have just made arrangements to take French lessons.”
“Oh, you don’t want any lessons. You’ll pick it up. I never took any.”
“I suppose you speak French as well as English?”
“Better!” said Mr. Tristram, roundly. “It’s a splendid language. You
can say all sorts of bright things in it.”
“But I suppose,” said Christopher Newman, with an earnest desire for
information, “that you must be bright to begin with.”
“Not a bit; that’s just the beauty of it.”
The two friends, as they exchanged these remarks, had remained standing
where they met, and leaning against the rail which protected the
pictures. Mr. Tristram at last declared that he was overcome with
fatigue and should be happy to sit down. Newman recommended in the
highest terms the great divan on which he had been lounging, and they
prepared to seat themselves. “This is a great place; isn’t it?” said
Newman, with ardor.
“Great place, great place. Finest thing in the world.” And then,
suddenly, Mr. Tristram hesitated and looked about him. “I suppose they
won’t let you smoke here.”
Newman stared. “Smoke? I’m sure I don’t know. You know the regulations
better than I.”
“I? I never was here before!”
“Never! in six years?”
“I believe my wife dragged me here once when we first came to Paris,
but I never found my way back.”
“But you say you know Paris so well!”
“I don’t call this Paris!” cried Mr. Tristram, with assurance. “Come;
let’s go over to the Palais Royal and have a smoke.”
“I don’t smoke,” said Newman.
“A drink, then.”
And Mr. Tristram led his companion away. They passed through the
glorious halls of the Louvre, down the staircases, along the cool, dim
galleries of sculpture, and out into the enormous court. Newman looked
about him as he went, but he made no comments, and it was only when
they at last emerged into the open air that he said to his friend, “It
seems to me that in your place I should have come here once a week.”
“Oh, no you wouldn’t!” said Mr. Tristram. “You think so, but you
wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have had time. You would always mean to go, but
you never would go. There’s better fun than that, here in Paris.
Italy’s the place to see pictures; wait till you get there. There you
have to go; you can’t do anything else. It’s an awful country; you
can’t get a decent cigar. I don’t know why I went in there, to-day; I
was strolling along, rather hard up for amusement. I sort of noticed
the Louvre as I passed, and I thought I would go in and see what was
going on. But if I hadn’t found you there I should have felt rather
sold. Hang it, I don’t care for pictures; I prefer the reality!” And
Mr. Tristram tossed off this happy formula with an assurance which the
numerous class of persons suffering from an overdose of “culture” might
have envied him.
The two gentlemen proceeded along the Rue de Rivoli and into the Palais
Royal, where they seated themselves at one of the little tables
stationed at the door of the café which projects into the great open
quadrangle. The place was filled with people, the fountains were
spouting, a band was playing, clusters of chairs were gathered beneath
all the lime-trees, and buxom, white-capped nurses, seated along the
benches, were offering to their infant charges the amplest facilities
for nutrition. There was an easy, homely gaiety in the whole scene, and
Christopher Newman felt that it was most characteristically Parisian.
“And now,” began Mr. Tristram, when they had tested the decoction which
he had caused to be served to them, “now just give an account of
yourself. What are your ideas, what are your plans, where have you come
from and where are you going? In the first place, where are you
staying?”
“At the Grand Hotel,” said Newman.
Mr. Tristram puckered his plump visage. “That won’t do! You must
change.”
“Change?” demanded Newman. “Why, it’s the finest hotel I ever was in.”
“You don’t want a ‘fine’ hotel; you want something small and quiet and
elegant, where your bell is answered and you—your person is
recognized.”
“They keep running to see if I have rung before I have touched the
bell,” said Newman “and as for my person they are always bowing and
scraping to it.”
“I suppose you are always tipping them. That’s very bad style.”
“Always? By no means. A man brought me something yesterday, and then
stood loafing in a beggarly manner. I offered him a chair and asked him
if he wouldn’t sit down. Was that bad style?”
“Very!”
“But he bolted, instantly. At any rate, the place amuses me. Hang your
elegance, if it bores me. I sat in the court of the Grand Hotel last
night until two o’clock in the morning, watching the coming and going,
and the people knocking about.”
“You’re easily pleased. But you can do as you choose—a man in your
shoes. You have made a pile of money, eh?”
“I have made enough.”
“Happy the man who can say that? Enough for what?”
“Enough to rest awhile, to forget the confounded thing, to look about
me, to see the world, to have a good time, to improve my mind, and, if
the fancy takes me, to marry a wife.” Newman spoke slowly, with a
certain dryness of accent and with frequent pauses. This was his
habitual mode of utterance, but it was especially marked in the words I
have just quoted.
“Jupiter! There’s a programme!” cried Mr. Tristram. “Certainly, all
that takes money, especially the wife; unless indeed she gives it, as
mine did. And what’s the story? How have you done it?”
Newman had pushed his hat back from his forehead, folded his arms, and
stretched his legs. He listened to the music, he looked about him at
the bustling crowd, at the plashing fountains, at the nurses and the
babies. “I have worked!” he answered at last.
Tristram looked at him for some moments, and allowed his placid eyes to
measure his friend’s generous longitude and rest upon his comfortably
contemplative face. “What have you worked at?” he asked.
“Oh, at several things.”
“I suppose you’re a smart fellow, eh?”
Newman continued to look at the nurses and babies; they imparted to the
scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. “Yes,” he said at
last, “I suppose I am.” And then, in answer to his companion’s
inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It
was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it
will be needless to introduce to the reader in detail. Newman had come
out of the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honor which in
this case—without invidious comparisons—had lighted upon shoulders
amply competent to bear it. But though he could manage a fight, when
need was, Newman heartily disliked the business; his four years in the
army had left him with an angry, bitter sense of the waste of precious
things—life and time and money and “smartness” and the early freshness
of purpose; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace with
passionate zest and energy. He was of course as penniless when he
plucked off his shoulder-straps as when he put them on, and the only
capital at his disposal was his dogged resolution and his lively
perception of ends and means. Exertion and action were as natural to
him as respiration; a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the
elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide as his
capacity; when he was fourteen years old, necessity had taken him by
his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street, to earn that
night’s supper. He had not earned it but he had earned the next
night’s, and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he
had gone without it to use the money for something else, a keener
pleasure or a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in
it, to many things; he had been enterprising, in an eminent sense of
the term; he had been adventurous and even reckless, and he had known
bitter failure as well as brilliant success; but he was a born
experimentalist, and he had always found something to enjoy in the
pressure of necessity, even when it was as irritating as the haircloth
shirt of the mediæval monk. At one time failure seemed inexorably his
portion; ill-luck became his bed-fellow, and whatever he touched he
turned, not to gold, but to ashes. His most vivid conception of a
supernatural element in the world’s affairs had come to him once when
this pertinacity of misfortune was at its climax; there seemed to him
something stronger in life than his own will. But the mysterious
something could only be the devil, and he was accordingly seized with
an intense personal enmity to this impertinent force. He had known what
it was to have utterly exhausted his credit, to be unable to raise a
dollar, and to find himself at nightfall in a strange city, without a
penny to mitigate its strangeness. It was under these circumstances
that he made his entrance into San Francisco, the scene, subsequently,
of his happiest strokes of fortune. If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in
Philadelphia, march along the street munching a penny-loaf, it was only
because he had not the penny-loaf necessary to the performance. In his
darkest days he had had but one simple, practical impulse—the desire,
as he would have phrased it, to see the thing through. He did so at
last, buffeted his way into smooth waters, and made money largely. It
must be admitted, rather nakedly, that Christopher Newman’s sole aim in
life had been to make money; what he had been placed in the world for
was, to his own perception, simply to wrest a fortune, the bigger the
better, from defiant opportunity. This idea completely filled his
horizon and satisfied his imagination. Upon the uses of money, upon
what one might do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting
the golden stream, he had up to his thirty-fifth year very scantily
reflected. Life had been for him an open game, and he had played for
high stakes. He had won at last and carried off his winnings; and now
what was he to do with them? He was a man to whom, sooner or later, the
question was sure to present itself, and the answer to it belongs to
our story. A vague sense that more answers were possible than his
philosophy had hitherto dreamt of had already taken possession of him,
and it seemed softly and agreeably to deepen as he lounged in this
brilliant corner of Paris with his friend.
“I must confess,” he presently went on, “that here I don’t feel at all
smart. My remarkable talents seem of no use. I feel as simple as a
little child, and a little child might take me by the hand and lead me
about.”
“Oh, I’ll be your little child,” said Tristram, jovially; “I’ll take
you by the hand. Trust yourself to me.”
“I am a good worker,” Newman continued, “but I rather think I am a poor
loafer. I have come abroad to amuse myself, but I doubt whether I know
how.”
“Oh, that’s easily learned.”
“Well, I may perhaps learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by
rote. I have the best will in the world about it, but my genius doesn’t
lie in that direction. As a loafer I shall never be original, as I take
it that you are.”
“Yes,” said Tristram, “I suppose I am original; like all those immoral
pictures in the Louvre.”
“Besides,” Newman continued, “I don’t want to work at pleasure, any
more than I played at work. I want to take it easily. I feel
deliciously lazy, and I should like to spend six months as I am now,
sitting under a tree and listening to a band. There’s only one thing; I
want to hear some good music.”
“Music and pictures! Lord, what refined tastes! You are what my wife
calls intellectual. I ain’t, a bit. But we can find something better
for you to do than to sit under a tree. To begin with, you must come to
the club.”
“What club?”
“The Occidental. You will see all the Americans there; all the best of
them, at least. Of course you play poker?”
“Oh, I say,” cried Newman, with energy, “you are not going to lock me
up in a club and stick me down at a card-table! I haven’t come all this
way for that.”
“What the deuce _have_ you come for! You were glad enough to play poker
in St. Louis, I recollect, when you cleaned me out.”
“I have come to see Europe, to get the best out of it I can. I want to
see all the great things, and do what the clever people do.”
“The clever people? Much obliged. You set me down as a blockhead,
then?”
Newman was sitting sidewise in his chair, with his elbow on the back
and his head leaning on his hand. Without moving he looked a while at
his companion with his dry, guarded, half-inscrutable, and yet
altogether good-natured smile. “Introduce me to your wife!” he said at
last.
Tristram bounced about in his chair. “Upon my word, I won’t. She
doesn’t want any help to turn up her nose at me, nor do you, either!”
“I don’t turn up my nose at you, my dear fellow; nor at anyone, or
anything. I’m not proud, I assure you I’m not proud. That’s why I am
willing to take example by the clever people.”
“Well, if I’m not the rose, as they say here, I have lived near it. I
can show you some clever people, too. Do you know General Packard? Do
you know C. P. Hatch? Do you know Miss Kitty Upjohn?”
“I shall be happy to make their acquaintance; I want to cultivate
society.”
Tristram seemed restless and suspicious; he eyed his friend askance,
and then, “What are you up to, anyway?” he demanded. “Are you going to
write a book?”
Christopher Newman twisted one end of his moustache a while, in
silence, and at last he made answer. “One day, a couple of months ago,
something very curious happened to me. I had come on to New York on
some important business; it was rather a long story—a question of
getting ahead of another party, in a certain particular way, in the
stock-market. This other party had once played me a very mean trick. I
owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that,
when I got a chance, I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out
of joint. There was a matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake.
If I put it out of his way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he
really deserved no quarter. I jumped into a hack and went about my
business, and it was in this hack—this immortal, historical hack—that
the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other,
only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab
cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It is
possible I took a nap; I had been traveling all night, and though I was
excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke
up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of a reverie, with the most
extraordinary feeling in the world—a mortal disgust for the thing I was
going to do. It came upon me like _that!_” and he snapped his
fingers—“as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache. I couldn’t
tell the meaning of it; I only felt that I loathed the whole business
and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea of losing that sixty
thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never
hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world. And all
this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it
as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside of
me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us
that we understand mighty little about.”
“Jupiter! you make my flesh creep!” cried Tristram. “And while you sat
in your hack, watching the play, as you call it, the other man marched
in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?”
“I have not the least idea. I hope so, poor devil! but I never found
out. We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street,
but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down
off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse.
I couldn’t have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse. What was
the matter with me? Momentary idiocy, you’ll say. What I wanted to get
out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn
ferry and to cross over. When we were over, I told him to drive me out
into the country. As I had told him originally to drive for dear life
down town, I suppose he thought me insane. Perhaps I was, but in that
case I am insane still. I spent the morning looking at the first green
leaves on Long Island. I was sick of business; I wanted to throw it all
up and break off short; I had money enough, or if I hadn’t I ought to
have. I seemed to feel a new man inside my old skin, and I longed for a
new world. When you want a thing so very badly you had better treat
yourself to it. I didn’t understand the matter, not in the least; but I
gave the old horse the bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I
could get out of the game I sailed for Europe. That is how I come to be
sitting here.”
“You ought to have bought up that hack,” said Tristram; “it isn’t a
safe vehicle to have about. And you have really sold out, then; you
have retired from business?”
“I have made over my hand to a friend; when I feel disposed, I can take
up the cards again. I dare say that a twelvemonth hence the operation
will be reversed. The pendulum will swing back again. I shall be
sitting in a gondola or on a dromedary, and all of a sudden I shall
want to clear out. But for the present I am perfectly free. I have even
bargained that I am to receive no business letters.”
“Oh, it’s a real _caprice de prince_,” said Tristram. “I back out; a
poor devil like me can’t help you to spend such very magnificent
leisure as that. You should get introduced to the crowned heads.”
Newman looked at him a moment, and then, with his easy smile, “How does
one do it?” he asked.
“Come, I like that!” cried Tristram. “It shows you are in earnest.”
“Of course I am in earnest. Didn’t I say I wanted the best? I know the
best can’t be had for mere money, but I rather think money will do a
good deal. In addition, I am willing to take a good deal of trouble.”
“You are not bashful, eh?”
“I haven’t the least idea. I want the biggest kind of entertainment a
man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything! I want to see the
tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the finest pictures and
the handsomest churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most
beautiful women.”
“Settle down in Paris, then. There are no mountains that I know of, and
the only lake is in the Bois du Boulogne, and not particularly blue.
But there is everything else: plenty of pictures and churches, no end
of celebrated men, and several beautiful women.”
“But I can’t settle down in Paris at this season, just as summer is
coming on.”
“Oh, for the summer go up to Trouville.”
“What is Trouville?”
“The French Newport. Half the Americans go.”
“Is it anywhere near the Alps?”
“About as near as Newport is to the Rocky Mountains.”
“Oh, I want to see Mont Blanc,” said Newman, “and Amsterdam, and the
Rhine, and a lot of places. Venice in particular. I have great ideas
about Venice.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Tristram, rising, “I see I shall have to introduce you
to my wife!”
CHAPTER III
He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment,
Christopher Newman went to dine with him. Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived
behind one of those chalk-colored façades which decorate with their
pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in
the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. Their apartment was rich in
the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his
visitor’s attention to their principal household treasures, the
gas-lamps and the furnace-holes. “Whenever you feel homesick,” he said,
“you must come up here. We’ll stick you down before a register, under a
good big burner, and—”
“And you will soon get over your homesickness,” said Mrs. Tristram.
Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found
inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or
in earnest. The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate
in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points
differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent
concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always
graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day
doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she
meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile,
nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by instalments.
It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that
her little scheme of independence did not definitely involve the
assistance of another person, of the opposite sex; she was not saving
up virtue to cover the expenses of a flirtation. For this there were
various reasons. To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was
entirely without illusions as to her appearance. She had taken its
measure to a hair’s breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had
accepted herself. It had not been, indeed, without a struggle. As a
young girl she had spent hours with her back to her mirror, crying her
eyes out; and later she had from desperation and bravado adopted the
habit of proclaiming herself the most ill-favored of women, in order
that she might—as in common politeness was inevitable—be contradicted
and reassured. It was since she had come to live in Europe that she had
begun to take the matter philosophically. Her observation, acutely
exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman’s first duty is not
to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women
who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had
discovered her mission. She had once heard an enthusiastic musician,
out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is
really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it
might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to
the acquisition of charming manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to
be exquisitely agreeable, and she brought to the task a really touching
devotion. How well she would have succeeded I am unable to say;
unfortunately she broke off in the middle. Her own excuse was the want
of encouragement in her immediate circle. But I am inclined to think
that she had not a real genius for the matter, or she would have
pursued the charming art for itself. The poor lady was very incomplete.
She fell back upon the harmonies of the toilet, which she thoroughly
understood, and contented herself with dressing in perfection. She
lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in
Paris that one could find things to exactly suit one’s complexion.
Besides out of Paris it was always more or less of a trouble to get
ten-button gloves. When she railed at this serviceable city and you
asked her where she would prefer to reside, she returned some very
unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or in Barcelona;
having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each
of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her
misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a
decidedly interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had been
born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy.
Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved
sometimes with her friends, and strangely expansive with strangers. She
despised her husband; despised him too much, for she had been perfectly
at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a clever man who
had slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that this
thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no
appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing
that she cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without
personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was,
as I have said before, eminently incomplete. She was full—both for good
and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had
nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.
Newman was fond, under all circumstances, of the society of women, and
now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual
interests, he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to
Mrs. Tristram; she frankly repaid it, and after their first meeting he
passed a great many hours in her drawing-room. After two or three talks
they were fast friends. Newman’s manner with women was peculiar, and it
required some ingenuity on a lady’s part to discover that he admired
her. He had no gallantry, in the usual sense of the term; no
compliments, no graces, no speeches. Very fond of what is called
chaffing, in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa
beside a member of the softer sex without feeling extremely serious. He
was not shy, and so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with
shyness, he was not awkward; grave, attentive, submissive, often
silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of rapture of respect. This
emotion was not at all theoretic, it was not even in a high degree
sentimental; he had thought very little about the “position” of women,
and he was not familiar either sympathetically or otherwise, with the
image of a President in petticoats. His attitude was simply the flower
of his general good-nature, and a part of his instinctive and genuinely
democratic assumption of everyone’s right to lead an easy life. If a
shaggy pauper had a right to bed and board and wages and a vote, women,
of course, who were weaker than paupers, and whose physical tissue was
in itself an appeal, should be maintained, sentimentally, at the public
expense. Newman was willing to be taxed for this purpose, largely, in
proportion to his means. Moreover, many of the common traditions with
regard to women were with him fresh personal impressions; he had never
read a novel! He had been struck with their acuteness, their subtlety,
their tact, their felicity of judgment. They seemed to him exquisitely
organized. If it is true that one must always have in one’s work here
below a religion, or at least an ideal, of some sort, Newman found his
metaphysical inspiration in a vague acceptance of final responsibility
to some illumined feminine brow.
He spent a great deal of time in listening to advice from Mrs.
Tristram; advice, it must be added, for which he had never asked. He
would have been incapable of asking for it, for he had no perception of
difficulties, and consequently no curiosity about remedies. The complex
Parisian world about him seemed a very simple affair; it was an
immense, amazing spectacle, but it neither inflamed his imagination nor
irritated his curiosity. He kept his hands in his pockets, looked on
good-humoredly, desired to miss nothing important, observed a great
many things narrowly, and never reverted to himself. Mrs. Tristram’s
“advice” was a part of the show, and a more entertaining element, in
her abundant gossip, than the others. He enjoyed her talking about
himself; it seemed a part of her beautiful ingenuity; but he never made
an application of anything she said, or remembered it when he was away
from her. For herself, she appropriated him; he was the most
interesting thing she had had to think about in many a month. She
wished to do something with him—she hardly knew what. There was so much
of him; he was so rich and robust, so easy, friendly, well-disposed,
that he kept her fancy constantly on the alert. For the present, the
only thing she could do was to like him. She told him that he was
“horribly Western,” but in this compliment the adverb was tinged with
insincerity. She led him about with her, introduced him to fifty
people, and took extreme satisfaction in her conquest. Newman accepted
every proposal, shook hands universally and promiscuously, and seemed
equally unfamiliar with trepidation or with elation. Tom Tristram
complained of his wife’s avidity, and declared that he could never have
a clear five minutes with his friend. If he had known how things were
going to turn out, he never would have brought him to the Avenue
d’Iéna. The two men, formerly, had not been intimate, but Newman
remembered his earlier impression of his host, and did Mrs. Tristram,
who had by no means taken him into her confidence, but whose secret he
presently discovered, the justice to admit that her husband was a
rather degenerate mortal. At twenty-five he had been a good fellow, and
in this respect he was unchanged; but of a man of his age one expected
something more. People said he was sociable, but this was as much a
matter of course as for a dipped sponge to expand; and it was not a
high order of sociability. He was a great gossip and tattler, and to
produce a laugh would hardly have spared the reputation of his aged
mother. Newman had a kindness for old memories, but he found it
impossible not to perceive that Tristram was nowadays a very light
weight. His only aspirations were to hold out at poker, at his club, to
know the names of all the _cocottes_, to shake hands all round, to ply
his rosy gullet with truffles and champagne, and to create
uncomfortable eddies and obstructions among the constituent atoms of
the American colony. He was shamefully idle, spiritless, sensual,
snobbish. He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their
native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand why the United
States were not good enough for Mr. Tristram. He had never been a very
conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see them treated as little
better than a vulgar smell in his friend’s nostrils, and he finally
broke out and swore that they were the greatest country in the world,
that they could put all Europe into their breeches’ pockets, and that
an American who spoke ill of them ought to be carried home in irons and
compelled to live in Boston. (This, for Newman was putting it very
vindictively.) Tristram was a comfortable man to snub, he bore no
malice, and he continued to insist on Newman’s finishing his evening at
the Occidental Club.
Christopher Newman dined several times in the Avenue d’Iéna, and his
host always proposed an early adjournment to this institution. Mrs.
Tristram protested, and declared that her husband exhausted his
ingenuity in trying to displease her.
“Oh no, I never try, my love,” he answered. “I know you loathe me quite
enough when I take my chance.”
Newman hated to see a husband and wife on these terms, and he was sure
one or other of them must be very unhappy. He knew it was not Tristram.
Mrs. Tristram had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the
June evenings, she was fond of sitting, and Newman used frankly to say
that he preferred the balcony to the club. It had a fringe of perfumed
plants in tubs, and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the
Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer
starlight. Sometimes Newman kept his promise of following Mr. Tristram,
in half an hour, to the Occidental, and sometimes he forgot it. His
hostess asked him a great many questions about himself, but on this
subject he was an indifferent talker. He was not what is called
subjective, though when he felt that her interest was sincere, he made
an almost heroic attempt to be. He told her a great many things he had
done, and regaled her with anecdotes of Western life; she was from
Philadelphia, and with her eight years in Paris, talked of herself as a
languid Oriental. But some other person was always the hero of the
tale, by no means always to his advantage; and Newman’s own emotions
were but scantily chronicled. She had an especial wish to know whether
he had ever been in love—seriously, passionately—and, failing to gather
any satisfaction from his allusions, she at last directly inquired. He
hesitated a while, and at last he said, “No!” She declared that she was
delighted to hear it, as it confirmed her private conviction that he
was a man of no feeling.
“Really?” he asked, very gravely. “Do you think so? How do you
recognize a man of feeling?”
“I can’t make out,” said Mrs. Tristram, “whether you are very simple or
very deep.”
“I’m very deep. That’s a fact.”
“I believe that if I were to tell you with a certain air that you have
no feeling, you would implicitly believe me.”
“A certain air?” said Newman. “Try it and see.”
“You would believe me, but you would not care,” said Mrs. Tristram.
“You have got it all wrong. I should care immensely, but I shouldn’t
believe you. The fact is I have never had time to feel things. I have
had to _do_ them, to make myself felt.”
“I can imagine that you may have done that tremendously, sometimes.”
“Yes, there’s no mistake about that.”
“When you are in a fury it can’t be pleasant.”
“I am never in a fury.”
“Angry, then, or displeased.”
“I am never angry, and it is so long since I have been displeased that
I have quite forgotten it.”
“I don’t believe,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that you are never angry. A man
ought to be angry sometimes, and you are neither good enough nor bad
enough always to keep your temper.”
“I lose it perhaps once in five years.”
“The time is coming round, then,” said his hostess. “Before I have
known you six months I shall see you in a fine fury.”
“Do you mean to put me into one?”
“I should not be sorry. You take things too coolly. It exasperates me.
And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable
thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure
beforehand and paid for it. You have not a day of reckoning staring you
in the face. Your reckonings are over.”
“Well, I suppose I am happy,” said Newman, meditatively.
“You have been odiously successful.”
“Successful in copper,” said Newman, “only so-so in railroads, and a
hopeless fizzle in oil.”
“It is very disagreeable to know how Americans have made their money.
Now you have the world before you. You have only to enjoy.”
“Oh, I suppose I am very well off,” said Newman. “Only I am tired of
having it thrown up at me. Besides, there are several drawbacks. I am
not intellectual.”
“One doesn’t expect it of you,” Mrs. Tristram answered. Then in a
moment, “Besides, you are!”
“Well, I mean to have a good time, whether or no,” said Newman. “I am
not cultivated, I am not even educated; I know nothing about history,
or art, or foreign tongues, or any other learned matters. But I am not
a fool, either, and I shall undertake to know something about Europe by
the time I have done with it. I feel something under my ribs here,” he
added in a moment, “that I can’t explain—a sort of a mighty hankering,
a desire to stretch out and haul in.”
“Bravo!” said Mrs. Tristram, “that is very fine. You are the great
Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a
while at this poor effete Old World and then swooping down on it.”
“Oh, come,” said Newman. “I am not a barbarian, by a good deal. I am
very much the reverse. I have seen barbarians; I know what they are.”
“I don’t mean that you are a Comanche chief, or that you wear a blanket
and feathers. There are different shades.”
“I am a highly civilized man,” said Newman. “I stick to that. If you
don’t believe it, I should like to prove it to you.”
Mrs. Tristram was silent a while. “I should like to make you prove it,”
she said, at last. “I should like to put you in a difficult place.”
“Pray do,” said Newman.
“That has a little conceited sound!” his companion rejoined.
“Oh,” said Newman, “I have a very good opinion of myself.”
“I wish I could put it to the test. Give me time and I will.” And Mrs.
Tristram remained silent for some time afterwards, as if she was trying
to keep her pledge. It did not appear that evening that she succeeded;
but as he was rising to take his leave she passed suddenly, as she was
very apt to do, from the tone of unsparing persiflage to that of almost
tremulous sympathy. “Speaking seriously,” she said, “I believe in you,
Mr. Newman. You flatter my patriotism.”
“Your patriotism?” Christopher demanded.
“Even so. It would take too long to explain, and you probably would not
understand. Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a
declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it’s what
you represent. Fortunately you don’t know all that, or your conceit
would increase insufferably.”
Newman stood staring and wondering what under the sun he “represented.”
“Forgive all my meddlesome chatter and forget my advice. It is very
silly in me to undertake to tell you what to do. When you are
embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you
are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.”
“I shall remember everything you have told me,” said Newman. “There are
so many forms and ceremonies over here—”
“Forms and ceremonies are what I mean, of course.”
“Ah, but I want to observe them,” said Newman. “Haven’t I as good a
right as another? They don’t scare me, and you needn’t give me leave to
violate them. I won’t take it.”
“That is not what I mean. I mean, observe them in your own way. Settle
nice questions for yourself. Cut the knot or untie it, as you choose.”
“Oh, I am sure I shall never fumble over it!” said Newman.
The next time that he dined in the Avenue d’Iéna was a Sunday, a day on
which Mr. Tristram left the cards unshuffled, so that there was a trio
in the evening on the balcony. The talk was of many things, and at last
Mrs. Tristram suddenly observed to Christopher Newman that it was high
time he should take a wife.
“Listen to her; she has the audacity!” said Tristram, who on Sunday
evenings was always rather acrimonious.
“I don’t suppose you have made up your mind not to marry?” Mrs.
Tristram continued.
“Heaven forbid!” cried Newman. “I am sternly resolved on it.”
“It’s very easy,” said Tristram; “fatally easy!”
“Well, then, I suppose you do not mean to wait till you are fifty.”
“On the contrary, I am in a great hurry.”
“One would never suppose it. Do you expect a lady to come and propose
to you?”
“No; I am willing to propose. I think a great deal about it.”
“Tell me some of your thoughts.”
“Well,” said Newman, slowly, “I want to marry very well.”
“Marry a woman of sixty, then,” said Tristram.
“‘Well’ in what sense?”
“In every sense. I shall be hard to please.”
“You must remember that, as the French proverb says, the most beautiful
girl in the world can give but what she has.”
“Since you ask me,” said Newman, “I will say frankly that I want
extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it I shall
be forty. And then I’m lonely and helpless and dull. But if I marry
now, so long as I didn’t do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must
do it with my eyes open. I want to do the thing in handsome style. I do
not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I
want to take my pick. My wife must be a magnificent woman.”
“_Voilà ce qui s’appelle parler!_” cried Mrs. Tristram.
“Oh, I have thought an immense deal about it.”
“Perhaps you think too much. The best thing is simply to fall in love.”
“When I find the woman who pleases me, I shall love her enough. My wife
shall be very comfortable.”
“You are superb! There’s a chance for the magnificent women.”
“You are not fair.” Newman rejoined. “You draw a fellow out and put him
off guard, and then you laugh at him.”
“I assure you,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that I am very serious. To prove
it, I will make you a proposal. Should you like me, as they say here,
to marry you?”
“To hunt up a wife for me?”
“She is already found. I will bring you together.”
“Oh, come,” said Tristram, “we don’t keep a matrimonial bureau. He will
think you want your commission.”
“Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions,” said Newman, “and I
will marry her tomorrow.”
“You have a strange tone about it, and I don’t quite understand you. I
didn’t suppose you would be so coldblooded and calculating.”
Newman was silent a while. “Well,” he said, at last, “I want a great
woman. I stick to that. That’s one thing I _can_ treat myself to, and
if it is to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and
struggled for, all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to
do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a
beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She
must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I
can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal
myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even
object to her being too good for me; she may be cleverer and wiser than
I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want to
possess, in a word, the best article in the market.”
“Why didn’t you tell a fellow all this at the outset?” Tristram
demanded. “I have been trying so to make you fond of _me!_”
“This is very interesting,” said Mrs. Tristram. “I like to see a man
know his own mind.”
“I have known mine for a long time,” Newman went on. “I made up my mind
tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth
having, here below. It is the greatest victory over circumstances. When
I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in mind and in manners, as well as in
person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if
he can. He doesn’t have to be born with certain faculties, on purpose;
he needs only to be a man. Then he needs only to use his will, and such
wits as he has, and to try.”
“It strikes me that your marriage is to be rather a matter of vanity.”
“Well, it is certain,” said Newman, “that if people notice my wife and
admire her, I shall be mightily tickled.”
“After this,” cried Mrs. Tristram, “call any man modest!”
“But none of them will admire her so much as I.”
“I see you have a taste for splendor.”
Newman hesitated a little; and then, “I honestly believe I have!” he
said.
“And I suppose you have already looked about you a good deal.”
“A good deal, according to opportunity.”
“And you have seen nothing that satisfied you?”
“No,” said Newman, half reluctantly, “I am bound to say in honesty that
I have seen nothing that really satisfied me.”
“You remind me of the heroes of the French romantic poets, Rolla and
Fortunio and all those other insatiable gentlemen for whom nothing in
this world was handsome enough. But I see you are in earnest, and I
should like to help you.”
“Who the deuce is it, darling, that you are going to put upon him?”
Tristram cried. “We know a good many pretty girls, thank Heaven, but
magnificent women are not so common.”
“Have you any objections to a foreigner?” his wife continued,
addressing Newman, who had tilted back his chair and, with his feet on
a bar of the balcony railing and his hands in his pockets, was looking
at the stars.
“No Irish need apply,” said Tristram.
Newman meditated a while. “As a foreigner, no,” he said at last; “I
have no prejudices.”
“My dear fellow, you have no suspicions!” cried Tristram. “You don’t
know what terrible customers these foreign women are; especially the
‘magnificent’ ones. How should you like a fair Circassian, with a
dagger in her belt?”
Newman administered a vigorous slap to his knee. “I would marry a
Japanese, if she pleased me,” he affirmed.
“We had better confine ourselves to Europe,” said Mrs. Tristram. “The
only thing is, then, that the person be in herself to your taste?”
“She is going to offer you an unappreciated governess!” Tristram
groaned.
“Assuredly. I won’t deny that, other things being equal, I should
prefer one of my own countrywomen. We should speak the same language,
and that would be a comfort. But I am not afraid of a foreigner.
Besides, I rather like the idea of taking in Europe, too. It enlarges
the field of selection. When you choose from a greater number, you can
bring your choice to a finer point!”
“You talk like Sardanapalus!” exclaimed Tristram.
“You say all this to the right person,” said Newman’s hostess. “I
happen to number among my friends the loveliest woman in the world.
Neither more nor less. I don’t say a very charming person or a very
estimable woman or a very great beauty; I say simply the loveliest
woman in the world.”
“The deuce!” cried Tristram, “you have kept very quiet about her. Were
you afraid of me?”
“You have seen her,” said his wife, “but you have no perception of such
merit as Claire’s.”
“Ah, her name is Claire? I give it up.”
“Does your friend wish to marry?” asked Newman.
“Not in the least. It is for you to make her change her mind. It will
not be easy; she has had one husband, and he gave her a low opinion of
the species.”
“Oh, she is a widow, then?” said Newman.
“Are you already afraid? She was married at eighteen, by her parents,
in the French fashion, to a disagreeable old man. But he had the good
taste to die a couple of years afterward, and she is now twenty-five.”
“So she is French?”
“French by her father, English by her mother. She is really more
English than French, and she speaks English as well as you or I—or
rather much better. She belongs to the very top of the basket, as they
say here. Her family, on each side, is of fabulous antiquity; her
mother is the daughter of an English Catholic earl. Her father is dead,
and since her widowhood she has lived with her mother and a married
brother. There is another brother, younger, who I believe is wild. They
have an old hotel in the Rue de l’Université, but their fortune is
small, and they make a common household, for economy’s sake. When I was
a girl I was put into a convent here for my education, while my father
made the tour of Europe. It was a silly thing to do with me, but it had
the advantage that it made me acquainted with Claire de Bellegarde. She
was younger than I but we became fast friends. I took a tremendous
fancy to her, and she returned my passion as far as she could. They
kept such a tight rein on her that she could do very little, and when I
left the convent she had to give me up. I was not of her _monde_; I am
not now, either, but we sometimes meet. They are terrible people—her
_monde_; all mounted upon stilts a mile high, and with pedigrees long
in proportion. It is the skim of the milk of the old _noblesse_. Do you
know what a Legitimist is, or an Ultramontane? Go into Madame de
Cintré’s drawing-room some afternoon, at five o’clock, and you will see
the best preserved specimens. I say go, but no one is admitted who
can’t show his fifty quarterings.”
“And this is the lady you propose to me to marry?” asked Newman. “A
lady I can’t even approach?”
“But you said just now that you recognized no obstacles.”
Newman looked at Mrs. Tristram a while, stroking his moustache. “Is she
a beauty?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Oh, then it’s no use—”
“She is not a beauty, but she is beautiful, two very different things.
A beauty has no faults in her face, the face of a beautiful woman may
have faults that only deepen its charm.”
“I remember Madame de Cintré, now,” said Tristram. “She is as plain as
a pike-staff. A man wouldn’t look at her twice.”
“In saying that _he_ would not look at her twice, my husband
sufficiently describes her,” Mrs. Tristram rejoined.
“Is she good; is she clever?” Newman asked.
“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a
person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into
details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I
have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”
“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.
“I will try to manage it. The only way will be to invite her to dinner.
I have never invited her before, and I don’t know that she will come.
Her old feudal countess of a mother rules the family with an iron hand,
and allows her to have no friends but of her own choosing, and to visit
only in a certain sacred circle. But I can at least ask her.”
At this moment Mrs. Tristram was interrupted; a servant stepped out
upon the balcony and announced that there were visitors in the
drawing-room. When Newman’s hostess had gone in to receive her friends,
Tom Tristram approached his guest.
“Don’t put your foot into _this_, my boy,” he said, puffing the last
whiffs of his cigar. “There’s nothing in it!”
Newman looked askance at him, inquisitive. “You tell another story,
eh?”
“I say simply that Madame de Cintré is a great white doll of a woman,
who cultivates quiet haughtiness.”
“Ah, she’s haughty, eh?”
“She looks at you as if you were so much thin air, and cares for you
about as much.”
“She is very proud, eh?”
“Proud? As proud as I’m humble.”
“And not good-looking?”
Tristram shrugged his shoulders: “It’s a kind of beauty you must be
_intellectual_ to understand. But I must go in and amuse the company.”
Some time elapsed before Newman followed his friends into the
drawing-room. When he at last made his appearance there he remained but
a short time, and during this period sat perfectly silent, listening to
a lady to whom Mrs. Tristram had straightway introduced him and who
chattered, without a pause, with the full force of an extraordinarily
high-pitched voice. Newman gazed and attended. Presently he came to bid
good-night to Mrs. Tristram.
“Who is that lady?” he asked.
“Miss Dora Finch. How do you like her?”
“She’s too noisy.”
“She is thought so bright! Certainly, you are fastidious,” said Mrs.
Tristram.
Newman stood a moment, hesitating. Then at last, “Don’t forget about
your friend,” he said, “Madame What’s-her-name? the proud beauty. Ask
her to dinner, and give me a good notice.” And with this he departed.
Some days later he came back; it was in the afternoon. He found Mrs.
Tristram in her drawing-room; with her was a visitor, a woman young and
pretty, dressed in white. The two ladies had risen and the visitor was
apparently taking her leave. As Newman approached, he received from
Mrs. Tristram a glance of the most vivid significance, which he was not
immediately able to interpret.
“This is a good friend of ours,” she said, turning to her companion,
“Mr. Christopher Newman. I have spoken of you to him and he has an
extreme desire to make your acquaintance. If you had consented to come
and dine, I should have offered him an opportunity.”
The stranger turned her face toward Newman, with a smile. He was not
embarrassed, for his unconscious _sang-froid_ was boundless; but as he
became aware that this was the proud and beautiful Madame de Cintré,
the loveliest woman in the world, the promised perfection, the proposed
ideal, he made an instinctive movement to gather his wits together.
Through the slight preoccupation that it produced he had a sense of a
long, fair face, and of two eyes that were both brilliant and mild.
“I should have been most happy,” said Madame de Cintré. “Unfortunately,
as I have been telling Mrs. Tristram, I go on Monday to the country.”
Newman had made a solemn bow. “I am very sorry,” he said.
“Paris is getting too warm,” Madame de Cintré added, taking her
friend’s hand again in farewell.
Mrs. Tristram seemed to have formed a sudden and somewhat venturesome
resolution, and she smiled more intensely, as women do when they take
such resolution. “I want Mr. Newman to know you,” she said, dropping
her head on one side and looking at Madame de Cintré’s bonnet ribbons.
Christopher Newman stood gravely silent, while his native penetration
admonished him. Mrs. Tristram was determined to force her friend to
address him a word of encouragement which should be more than one of
the common formulas of politeness; and if she was prompted by charity,
it was by the charity that begins at home. Madame de Cintré was her
dearest Claire, and her especial admiration but Madame de Cintré had
found it impossible to dine with her and Madame de Cintré should for
once be forced gently to render tribute to Mrs. Tristram.
“It would give me great pleasure,” she said, looking at Mrs. Tristram.
“That’s a great deal,” cried the latter, “for Madame de Cintré to say!”
“I am very much obliged to you,” said Newman. “Mrs. Tristram can speak
better for me than I can speak for myself.”
Madame de Cintré looked at him again, with the same soft brightness.
“Are you to be long in Paris?” she asked.
“We shall keep him,” said Mrs. Tristram.
“But you are keeping _me!_” and Madame de Cintré shook her friend’s
hand.
“A moment longer,” said Mrs. Tristram.
Madame de Cintré looked at Newman again; this time without her smile.
Her eyes lingered a moment. “Will you come and see me?” she asked.
Mrs. Tristram kissed her. Newman expressed his thanks, and she took her
leave. Her hostess went with her to the door, and left Newman alone a
moment. Presently she returned, rubbing her hands. “It was a fortunate
chance,” she said. “She had come to decline my invitation. You
triumphed on the spot, making her ask you, at the end of three minutes,
to her house.”
“It was you who triumphed,” said Newman. “You must not be too hard upon
her.”
Mrs. Tristram stared. “What do you mean?”
“She did not strike me as so proud. I should say she was shy.”
“You are very discriminating. And what do you think of her face?”
“It’s handsome!” said Newman.
“I should think it was! Of course you will go and see her.”
“To-morrow!” cried Newman.
“No, not to-morrow; the next day. That will be Sunday; she leaves Paris
on Monday. If you don’t see her; it will at least be a beginning.” And
she gave him Madame de Cintré’s address.
He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his
way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain
whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as
suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of
Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a queer way for rich people to
live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade diffusing its
brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he
had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open
in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, gravelled court,
surrounded on three sides with closed windows, and with a doorway
facing the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tin
canopy. The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman’s
conception of a convent. The portress could not tell him whether Madame
de Cintré was visible; he would please to apply at the farther door. He
crossed the court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of
the portico, playing with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman
approached, and, as he laid his hand upon the bell, said with a smile,
in English, that he was afraid Newman would be kept waiting; the
servants were scattered, he himself had been ringing, he didn’t know
what the deuce was in them. He was a young man, his English was
excellent, and his smile very frank. Newman pronounced the name of
Madame de Cintré.
“I think,” said the young man, “that my sister is visible. Come in, and
if you will give me your card I will carry it to her myself.”
Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight
sentiment, I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or
defence, as they might prove needful—but of reflection, good-humored
suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a
card upon which, under his name, he had written the words “San
Francisco,” and while he presented it he looked warily at his
interlocutor. His glance was singularly reassuring; he liked the young
man’s face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré. He was
evidently her brother. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid
inspection of Newman’s person. He had taken the card and was about to
enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the
threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, wearing evening dress. He
looked hard at Newman, and Newman looked at him. “Madame de Cintré,”
the younger man repeated, as an introduction of the visitor. The other
took the card from his hand, read it in a rapid glance, looked again at
Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment, and then said, gravely
but urbanely, “Madame de Cintré is not at home.”
The younger man made a gesture, and then, turning to Newman, “I am very
sorry, sir,” he said.
Newman gave him a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and
retraced his steps. At the porter’s lodge he stopped; the two men were
still standing on the portico.
“Who is the gentleman with the dog?” he asked of the old woman who
reappeared. He had begun to learn French.
“That is Monsieur le Comte.”
“And the other?”
“That is Monsieur le Marquis.”
“A marquis?” said Christopher in English, which the old woman
fortunately did not understand. “Oh, then he’s not the butler!”
CHAPTER IV
Early one morning, before Christopher Newman was dressed, a little old
man was ushered into his apartment, followed by a youth in a blouse,
bearing a picture in a brilliant frame. Newman, among the distractions
of Paris, had forgotten M. Nioche and his accomplished daughter; but
this was an effective reminder.
“I am afraid you had given me up, sir,” said the old man, after many
apologies and salutations. “We have made you wait so many days. You
accused us, perhaps, of inconstancy, of bad faith. But behold me at
last! And behold also the pretty Madonna. Place it on a chair, my
friend, in a good light, so that monsieur may admire it.” And M.
Nioche, addressing his companion, helped him to dispose the work of
art.
It had been endued with a layer of varnish an inch thick and its frame,
of an elaborate pattern, was at least a foot wide. It glittered and
twinkled in the morning light, and looked, to Newman’s eyes,
wonderfully splendid and precious. It seemed to him a very happy
purchase, and he felt rich in the possession of it. He stood looking at
it complacently, while he proceeded with his toilet, and M. Nioche, who
had dismissed his own attendant, hovered near, smiling and rubbing his
hands.
“It has wonderful _finesse_,” he murmured, caressingly. “And here and
there are marvelous touches, you probably perceive them, sir. It
attracted great attention on the Boulevard, as we came along. And then
a gradation of tones! That’s what it is to know how to paint. I don’t
say it because I am her father, sir; but as one man of taste addressing
another I cannot help observing that you have there an exquisite work.
It is hard to produce such things and to have to part with them. If our
means only allowed us the luxury of keeping it! I really may say, sir—”
and M. Nioche gave a little feebly insinuating laugh—“I really may say
that I envy you! You see,” he added in a moment, “we have taken the
liberty of offering you a frame. It increases by a trifle the value of
the work, and it will save you the annoyance—so great for a person of
your delicacy—of going about to bargain at the shops.”
The language spoken by M. Nioche was a singular compound, which I
shrink from the attempt to reproduce in its integrity. He had
apparently once possessed a certain knowledge of English, and his
accent was oddly tinged with the cockneyism of the British metropolis.
But his learning had grown rusty with disuse, and his vocabulary was
defective and capricious. He had repaired it with large patches of
French, with words anglicized by a process of his own, and with native
idioms literally translated. The result, in the form in which he in all
humility presented it, would be scarcely comprehensible to the reader,
so that I have ventured to trim and sift it. Newman only half
understood it, but it amused him, and the old man’s decent forlornness
appealed to his democratic instincts. The assumption of a fatality in
misery always irritated his strong good nature—it was almost the only
thing that did so; and he felt the impulse to wipe it out, as it were,
with the sponge of his own prosperity. The papa of Mademoiselle Noémie,
however, had apparently on this occasion been vigorously indoctrinated,
and he showed a certain tremulous eagerness to cultivate unexpected
opportunities.
“How much do I owe you, then, with the frame?” asked Newman.
“It will make in all three thousand francs,” said the old man, smiling
agreeably, but folding his hands in instinctive suppliance.
“Can you give me a receipt?”
“I have brought one,” said M. Nioche. “I took the liberty of drawing it
up, in case monsieur should happen to desire to discharge his debt.”
And he drew a paper from his pocket-book and presented it to his
patron. The document was written in a minute, fantastic hand, and
couched in the choicest language.
Newman laid down the money, and M. Nioche dropped the napoleons one by
one, solemnly and lovingly, into an old leathern purse.
“And how is your young lady?” asked Newman. “She made a great
impression on me.”
“An impression? Monsieur is very good. Monsieur admires her
appearance?”
“She is very pretty, certainly.”
“Alas, yes, she is very pretty!”
“And what is the harm in her being pretty?”
M. Nioche fixed his eyes upon a spot on the carpet and shook his head.
Then looking up at Newman with a gaze that seemed to brighten and
expand, “Monsieur knows what Paris is. She is dangerous to beauty, when
beauty hasn’t the sou.”
“Ah, but that is not the case with your daughter. She is rich, now.”
“Very true; we are rich for six months. But if my daughter were a plain
girl I should sleep better all the same.”
“You are afraid of the young men?”
“The young and the old!”
“She ought to get a husband.”
“Ah, monsieur, one doesn’t get a husband for nothing. Her husband must
take her as she is; I can’t give her a sou. But the young men don’t see
with that eye.”
“Oh,” said Newman, “her talent is in itself a dowry.”
“Ah, sir, it needs first to be converted into specie!” and M. Nioche
slapped his purse tenderly before he stowed it away. “The operation
doesn’t take place every day.”
“Well, your young men are very shabby,” said Newman; “that’s all I can
say. They ought to pay for your daughter, and not ask money
themselves.”
“Those are very noble ideas, monsieur; but what will you have? They are
not the ideas of this country. We want to know what we are about when
we marry.”
“How big a portion does your daughter want?”
M. Nioche stared, as if he wondered what was coming next; but he
promptly recovered himself, at a venture, and replied that he knew a
very nice young man, employed by an insurance company, who would
content himself with fifteen thousand francs.
“Let your daughter paint half a dozen pictures for me, and she shall
have her dowry.”
“Half a dozen pictures—her dowry! Monsieur is not speaking
inconsiderately?”
“If she will make me six or eight copies in the Louvre as pretty as
that Madonna, I will pay her the same price,” said Newman.
Poor M. Nioche was speechless a moment, with amazement and gratitude,
and then he seized Newman’s hand, pressed it between his own ten
fingers, and gazed at him with watery eyes. “As pretty as that? They
shall be a thousand times prettier—they shall be magnificent, sublime.
Ah, if I only knew how to paint, myself, sir, so that I might lend a
hand! What can I do to thank you? _Voyons!_” And he pressed his
forehead while he tried to think of something.
“Oh, you have thanked me enough,” said Newman.
“Ah, here it is, sir!” cried M. Nioche. “To express my gratitude, I
will charge you nothing for the lessons in French conversation.”
“The lessons? I had quite forgotten them. Listening to your English,”
added Newman, laughing, “is almost a lesson in French.”
“Ah, I don’t profess to teach English, certainly,” said M. Nioche. “But
for my own admirable tongue I am still at your service.”
“Since you are here, then,” said Newman, “we will begin. This is a very
good hour. I am going to have my coffee; come every morning at
half-past nine and have yours with me.”
“Monsieur offers me my coffee, also?” cried M. Nioche. “Truly, my
_beaux jours_ are coming back.”
“Come,” said Newman, “let us begin. The coffee is almighty hot. How do
you say that in French?”
Every day, then, for the following three weeks, the minutely
respectable figure of M. Nioche made its appearance, with a series of
little inquiring and apologetic obeisances, among the aromatic fumes of
Newman’s morning beverage. I don’t know how much French our friend
learned, but, as he himself said, if the attempt did him no good, it
could at any rate do him no harm. And it amused him; it gratified that
irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed
itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation, and which often,
even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences
in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than
fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers. He had
notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been
assured, and his judgment approved the advice, that in traveling abroad
it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country. M.
Nioche was very much of a native and, though his life might not be
particularly worth looking into, he was a palpable and smoothly-rounded
unit in that picturesque Parisian civilization which offered our hero
so much easy entertainment and propounded so many curious problems to
his inquiring and practical mind. Newman was fond of statistics; he
liked to know how things were done; it gratified him to learn what
taxes were paid, what profits were gathered, what commercial habits
prevailed, how the battle of life was fought. M. Nioche, as a reduced
capitalist, was familiar with these considerations, and he formulated
his information, which he was proud to be able to impart, in the
neatest possible terms and with a pinch of snuff between finger and
thumb. As a Frenchman—quite apart from Newman’s napoleons—M. Nioche
loved conversation, and even in his decay his urbanity had not grown
rusty. As a Frenchman, too, he could give a clear account of things,
and—still as a Frenchman—when his knowledge was at fault he could
supply its lapses with the most convenient and ingenious hypotheses.
The little shrunken financier was intensely delighted to have questions
asked him, and he scraped together information, by frugal processes,
and took notes, in his little greasy pocket-book, of incidents which
might interest his munificent friend. He read old almanacs at the
book-stalls on the quays, and he began to frequent another _café_,
where more newspapers were taken and his postprandial _demitasse_ cost
him a penny extra, and where he used to con the tattered sheets for
curious anecdotes, freaks of nature, and strange coincidences. He would
relate with solemnity the next morning that a child of five years of
age had lately died at Bordeaux, whose brain had been found to weigh
sixty ounces—the brain of a Napoleon or a Washington! or that Madame
P—, _charcutière_ in the Rue de Clichy, had found in the wadding of an
old petticoat the sum of three hundred and sixty francs, which she had
lost five years before. He pronounced his words with great distinctness
and sonority, and Newman assured him that his way of dealing with the
French tongue was very superior to the bewildering chatter that he
heard in other mouths. Upon this M. Nioche’s accent became more finely
trenchant than ever, he offered to read extracts from Lamartine, and he
protested that, although he did endeavor according to his feeble lights
to cultivate refinement of diction, monsieur, if he wanted the real
thing, should go to the Théâtre Français.
Newman took an interest in French thriftiness and conceived a lively
admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so
entirely for operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he
needed so imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that
he found an ungrudging entertainment in the spectacle of fortunes made
by the aggregation of copper coins, and in the minute subdivision of
labor and profit. He questioned M. Nioche about his own manner of life,
and felt a friendly mixture of compassion and respect over the recital
of his delicate frugalities. The worthy man told him how, at one
period, he and his daughter had supported existence comfortably upon
the sum of fifteen sous _per diem_; recently, having succeeded in
hauling ashore the last floating fragments of the wreck of his fortune,
his budget had been a trifle more ample. But they still had to count
their sous very narrowly, and M. Nioche intimated with a sigh that
Mademoiselle Noémie did not bring to this task that zealous cooperation
which might have been desired.
“But what will you have?”’ he asked, philosophically. “One is young,
one is pretty, one needs new dresses and fresh gloves; one can’t wear
shabby gowns among the splendors of the Louvre.”
“But your daughter earns enough to pay for her own clothes,” said
Newman.
M. Nioche looked at him with weak, uncertain eyes. He would have liked
to be able to say that his daughter’s talents were appreciated, and
that her crooked little daubs commanded a market; but it seemed a
scandal to abuse the credulity of this free-handed stranger, who,
without a suspicion or a question, had admitted him to equal social
rights. He compromised, and declared that while it was obvious that
Mademoiselle Noémie’s reproductions of the old masters had only to be
seen to be coveted, the prices which, in consideration of their
altogether peculiar degree of finish, she felt obliged to ask for them
had kept purchasers at a respectful distance. “Poor little one!” said
M. Nioche, with a sigh; “it is almost a pity that her work is so
perfect! It would be in her interest to paint less well.”
“But if Mademoiselle Noémie has this devotion to her art,” Newman once
observed, “why should you have those fears for her that you spoke of
the other day?”
M. Nioche meditated: there was an inconsistency in his position; it
made him chronically uncomfortable. Though he had no desire to destroy
the goose with the golden eggs—Newman’s benevolent confidence—he felt a
tremulous impulse to speak out all his trouble. “Ah, she is an artist,
my dear sir, most assuredly,” he declared. “But, to tell you the truth,
she is also a _franche coquette_. I am sorry to say,” he added in a
moment, shaking his head with a world of harmless bitterness, “that she
comes honestly by it. Her mother was one before her!”
“You were not happy with your wife?” Newman asked.
M. Nioche gave half a dozen little backward jerks of his head. “She was
my purgatory, monsieur!”
“She deceived you?”
“Under my nose, year after year. I was too stupid, and the temptation
was too great. But I found her out at last. I have only been once in my
life a man to be afraid of; I know it very well; it was in that hour!
Nevertheless I don’t like to think of it. I loved her—I can’t tell you
how much. She was a bad woman.”
“She is not living?”
“She has gone to her account.”
“Her influence on your daughter, then,” said Newman encouragingly, “is
not to be feared.”
“She cared no more for her daughter than for the sole of her shoe! But
Noémie has no need of influence. She is sufficient to herself. She is
stronger than I.”
“She doesn’t obey you, eh?”
“She can’t obey, monsieur, since I don’t command. What would be the
use? It would only irritate her and drive her to some _coup de tête_.
She is very clever, like her mother; she would waste no time about it.
As a child—when I was happy, or supposed I was—she studied drawing and
painting with first-class professors, and they assured me she had a
talent. I was delighted to believe it, and when I went into society I
used to carry her pictures with me in a portfolio and hand them round
to the company. I remember, once, a lady thought I was offering them
for sale, and I took it very ill. We don’t know what we may come to!
Then came my dark days, and my explosion with Madame Nioche. Noémie had
no more twenty-franc lessons; but in the course of time, when she grew
older, and it became highly expedient that she should do something that
would help to keep us alive, she bethought herself of her palette and
brushes. Some of our friends in the _quartier_ pronounced the idea
fantastic: they recommended her to try bonnet making, to get a
situation in a shop, or—if she was more ambitious—to advertise for a
place of _dame de compagnie_. She did advertise, and an old lady wrote
her a letter and bade her come and see her. The old lady liked her, and
offered her her living and six hundred francs a year; but Noémie
discovered that she passed her life in her armchair and had only two
visitors, her confessor and her nephew: the confessor very strict, and
the nephew a man of fifty, with a broken nose and a government
clerkship of two thousand francs. She threw her old lady over, bought a
paint-box, a canvas, and a new dress, and went and set up her easel in
the Louvre. There in one place and another, she has passed the last two
years; I can’t say it has made us millionaires. But Noémie tells me
that Rome was not built in a day, that she is making great progress,
that I must leave her to her own devices. The fact is, without
prejudice to her genius, that she has no idea of burying herself alive.
She likes to see the world, and to be seen. She says, herself, that she
can’t work in the dark. With her appearance it is very natural. Only, I
can’t help worrying and trembling and wondering what may happen to her
there all alone, day after day, amid all that coming and going of
strangers. I can’t be always at her side. I go with her in the morning,
and I come to fetch her away, but she won’t have me near her in the
interval; she says I make her nervous. As if it didn’t make me nervous
to wander about all day without her! Ah, if anything were to happen to
her!” cried M. Nioche, clenching his two fists and jerking back his
head again, portentously.
“Oh, I guess nothing will happen,” said Newman.
“I believe I should shoot her!” said the old man, solemnly.
“Oh, we’ll marry her,” said Newman, “since that’s how you manage it;
and I will go and see her tomorrow at the Louvre and pick out the
pictures she is to copy for me.”
M. Nioche had brought Newman a message from his daughter, in acceptance
of his magnificent commission, the young lady declaring herself his
most devoted servant, promising her most zealous endeavor, and
regretting that the proprieties forbade her coming to thank him in
person. The morning after the conversation just narrated, Newman
reverted to his intention of meeting Mademoiselle Noémie at the Louvre.
M. Nioche appeared preoccupied, and left his budget of anecdotes
unopened; he took a great deal of snuff, and sent certain oblique,
appealing glances toward his stalwart pupil. At last, when he was
taking his leave, he stood a moment, after he had polished his hat with
his calico pocket-handkerchief, with his small, pale eyes fixed
strangely upon Newman.
“What’s the matter?” our hero demanded.
“Excuse the solicitude of a father’s heart!” said M. Nioche. “You
inspire me with boundless confidence, but I can’t help giving you a
warning. After all, you are a man, you are young and at liberty. Let me
beseech you, then, to respect the innocence of Mademoiselle Nioche!”
Newman had wondered what was coming, and at this he broke into a laugh.
He was on the point of declaring that his own innocence struck him as
the more exposed, but he contented himself with promising to treat the
young girl with nothing less than veneration. He found her waiting for
him, seated upon the great divan in the Salon Carré. She was not in her
working-day costume, but wore her bonnet and gloves and carried her
parasol, in honor of the occasion. These articles had been selected
with unerring taste, and a fresher, prettier image of youthful
alertness and blooming discretion was not to be conceived. She made
Newman a most respectful curtsey and expressed her gratitude for his
liberality in a wonderfully graceful little speech. It annoyed him to
have a charming young girl stand there thanking him, and it made him
feel uncomfortable to think that this perfect young lady, with her
excellent manners and her finished intonation, was literally in his
pay. He assured her, in such French as he could muster, that the thing
was not worth mentioning, and that he considered her services a great
favor.
“Whenever you please, then,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, “we will pass
the review.”
They walked slowly round the room, then passed into the others and
strolled about for half an hour. Mademoiselle Noémie evidently relished
her situation, and had no desire to bring her public interview with her
striking-looking patron to a close. Newman perceived that prosperity
agreed with her. The little thin-lipped, peremptory air with which she
had addressed her father on the occasion of their former meeting had
given place to the most lingering and caressing tones.
“What sort of pictures do you desire?” she asked. “Sacred, or profane?”
“Oh, a few of each,” said Newman. “But I want something bright and
gay.”
“Something gay? There is nothing very gay in this solemn old Louvre.
But we will see what we can find. You speak French to-day like a charm.
My father has done wonders.”
“Oh, I am a bad subject,” said Newman. “I am too old to learn a
language.”
“Too old? _Quelle folie!_” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, with a clear,
shrill laugh. “You are a very young man. And how do you like my
father?”
“He is a very nice old gentleman. He never laughs at my blunders.”
“He is very _comme il faut_, my papa,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, “and
as honest as the day. Oh, an exceptional probity! You could trust him
with millions.”
“Do you always obey him?” asked Newman.
“Obey him?”
“Do you do what he bids you?”
The young girl stopped and looked at him; she had a spot of color in
either cheek, and in her expressive French eye, which projected too
much for perfect beauty, there was a slight gleam of audacity. “Why do
you ask me that?” she demanded.
“Because I want to know.”
“You think me a bad girl?” And she gave a strange smile.
Newman looked at her a moment; he saw that she was pretty, but he was
not in the least dazzled. He remembered poor M. Nioche’s solicitude for
her “innocence,” and he laughed as his eyes met hers. Her face was the
oddest mixture of youth and maturity, and beneath her candid brow her
searching little smile seemed to contain a world of ambiguous
intentions. She was pretty enough, certainly to make her father
nervous; but, as regards her innocence, Newman felt ready on the spot
to affirm that she had never parted with it. She had simply never had
any; she had been looking at the world since she was ten years old, and
he would have been a wise man who could tell her any secrets. In her
long mornings at the Louvre she had not only studied Madonnas and St.
Johns; she had kept an eye upon all the variously embodied human nature
around her, and she had formed her conclusions. In a certain sense, it
seemed to Newman, M. Nioche might be at rest; his daughter might do
something very audacious, but she would never do anything foolish.
Newman, with his long-drawn, leisurely smile, and his even, unhurried
utterance, was always, mentally, taking his time; and he asked himself,
now, what she was looking at him in that way for. He had an idea that
she would like him to confess that he did think her a bad girl.
“Oh, no,” he said at last; “it would be very bad manners in me to judge
you that way. I don’t know you.”
“But my father has complained to you,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.
“He says you are a coquette.”
“He shouldn’t go about saying such things to gentlemen! But you don’t
believe it?”
“No,” said Newman gravely, “I don’t believe it.”
She looked at him again, gave a shrug and a smile, and then pointed to
a small Italian picture, a Marriage of St. Catherine. “How should you
like that?” she asked.
“It doesn’t please me,” said Newman. “The young lady in the yellow
dress is not pretty.”
“Ah, you are a great connoisseur,” murmured Mademoiselle Noémie.
“In pictures? Oh, no; I know very little about them.”
“In pretty women, then.”
“In that I am hardly better.”
“What do you say to that, then?” the young girl asked, indicating a
superb Italian portrait of a lady. “I will do it for you on a smaller
scale.”
“On a smaller scale? Why not as large as the original?”
Mademoiselle Noémie glanced at the glowing splendor of the Venetian
masterpiece and gave a little toss of her head. “I don’t like that
woman. She looks stupid.”
“I do like her,” said Newman. “Decidedly, I must have her, as large as
life. And just as stupid as she is there.”
The young girl fixed her eyes on him again, and with her mocking smile,
“It certainly ought to be easy for me to make her look stupid!” she
said.
“What do you mean?” asked Newman, puzzled.
She gave another little shrug. “Seriously, then, you want that
portrait—the golden hair, the purple satin, the pearl necklace, the two
magnificent arms?”
“Everything—just as it is.”
“Would nothing else do, instead?”
“Oh, I want some other things, but I want that too.”
Mademoiselle Noémie turned away a moment, walked to the other side of
the hall, and stood there, looking vaguely about her. At last she came
back. “It must be charming to be able to order pictures at such a rate.
Venetian portraits, as large as life! You go at it _en prince_. And you
are going to travel about Europe that way?”
“Yes, I intend to travel,” said Newman.
“Ordering, buying, spending money?”
“Of course I shall spend some money.”
“You are very happy to have it. And you are perfectly free?”
“How do you mean, free?”
“You have nothing to bother you—no family, no wife, no _fiancée?_”
“Yes, I am tolerably free.”
“You are very happy,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, gravely.
“_Je le veux bien!_” said Newman, proving that he had learned more
French than he admitted.
“And how long shall you stay in Paris?” the young girl went on.
“Only a few days more.”
“Why do you go away?”
“It is getting hot, and I must go to Switzerland.”
“To Switzerland? That’s a fine country. I would give my new parasol to
see it! Lakes and mountains, romantic valleys and icy peaks! Oh, I
congratulate you. Meanwhile, I shall sit here through all the hot
summer, daubing at your pictures.”
“Oh, take your time about it,” said Newman. “Do them at your
convenience.”
They walked farther and looked at a dozen other things. Newman pointed
out what pleased him, and Mademoiselle Noémie generally criticised it,
and proposed something else. Then suddenly she diverged and began to
talk about some personal matter.
“What made you speak to me the other day in the Salon Carré?” she
abruptly asked.
“I admired your picture.”
“But you hesitated a long time.”
“Oh, I do nothing rashly,” said Newman.
“Yes, I saw you watching me. But I never supposed you were going to
speak to me. I never dreamed I should be walking about here with you
to-day. It’s very curious.”
“It is very natural,” observed Newman.
“Oh, I beg your pardon; not to me. Coquette as you think me, I have
never walked about in public with a gentleman before. What was my
father thinking of, when he consented to our interview?”
“He was repenting of his unjust accusations,” replied Newman.
Mademoiselle Noémie remained silent; at last she dropped into a seat.
“Well then, for those five it is fixed,” she said. “Five copies as
brilliant and beautiful as I can make them. We have one more to choose.
Shouldn’t you like one of those great Rubenses—the marriage of Marie de
Médicis? Just look at it and see how handsome it is.”
“Oh, yes; I should like that,” said Newman. “Finish off with that.”
“Finish off with that—good!” And she laughed. She sat a moment, looking
at him, and then she suddenly rose and stood before him, with her hands
hanging and clasped in front of her. “I don’t understand you,” she said
with a smile. “I don’t understand how a man can be so ignorant.”
“Oh, I am ignorant, certainly,” said Newman, putting his hands into his
pockets.
“It’s ridiculous! I don’t know how to paint.”
“You don’t know how?”
“I paint like a cat; I can’t draw a straight line. I never sold a
picture until you bought that thing the other day.” And as she offered
this surprising information she continued to smile.
Newman burst into a laugh. “Why do you tell me this?” he asked.
“Because it irritates me to see a clever man blunder so. My pictures
are grotesque.”
“And the one I possess—”
“That one is rather worse than usual.”
“Well,” said Newman, “I like it all the same!”
She looked at him askance. “That is a very pretty thing to say,” she
answered; “but it is my duty to warn you before you go farther. This
order of yours is impossible, you know. What do you take me for? It is
work for ten men. You pick out the six most difficult pictures in the
Louvre, and you expect me to go to work as if I were sitting down to
hem a dozen pocket handkerchiefs. I wanted to see how far you would
go.”
Newman looked at the young girl in some perplexity. In spite of the
ridiculous blunder of which he stood convicted, he was very far from
being a simpleton, and he had a lively suspicion that Mademoiselle
Noémie’s sudden frankness was not essentially more honest than her
leaving him in error would have been. She was playing a game; she was
not simply taking pity on his æsthetic verdancy. What was it she
expected to win? The stakes were high and the risk was great; the prize
therefore must have been commensurate. But even granting that the prize
might be great, Newman could not resist a movement of admiration for
his companion’s intrepidity. She was throwing away with one hand,
whatever she might intend to do with the other, a very handsome sum of
money.
“Are you joking,” he said, “or are you serious?”
“Oh, serious!” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, but with her extraordinary
smile.
“I know very little about pictures or how they are painted. If you
can’t do all that, of course you can’t. Do what you can, then.”
“It will be very bad,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.
“Oh,” said Newman, laughing, “if you are determined it shall be bad, of
course it will. But why do you go on painting badly?”
“I can do nothing else; I have no real talent.”
“You are deceiving your father, then.”
The young girl hesitated a moment. “He knows very well!”
“No,” Newman declared; “I am sure he believes in you.”
“He is afraid of me. I go on painting badly, as you say, because I want
to learn. I like it, at any rate. And I like being here; it is a place
to come to, every day; it is better than sitting in a little dark, damp
room, on a court, or selling buttons and whalebones over a counter.”
“Of course it is much more amusing,” said Newman. “But for a poor girl
isn’t it rather an expensive amusement?”
“Oh, I am very wrong, there is no doubt about that,” said Mademoiselle
Noémie. “But rather than earn my living as some girls do—toiling with a
needle, in little black holes, out of the world—I would throw myself
into the Seine.”
“There is no need of that,” Newman answered; “your father told you my
offer?”
“Your offer?”
“He wants you to marry, and I told him I would give you a chance to
earn your _dot_.”
“He told me all about it, and you see the account I make of it! Why
should you take such an interest in my marriage?”
“My interest was in your father. I hold to my offer; do what you can,
and I will buy what you paint.”
She stood for some time, meditating, with her eyes on the ground. At
last, looking up, “What sort of a husband can you get for twelve
thousand francs?” she asked.
“Your father tells me he knows some very good young men.”
“Grocers and butchers and little _maîtres de cafés!_ I will not marry
at all if I can’t marry well.”
“I would advise you not to be too fastidious,” said Newman. “That’s all
the advice I can give you.”
“I am very much vexed at what I have said!” cried the young girl. “It
has done me no good. But I couldn’t help it.”
“What good did you expect it to do you?”
“I couldn’t help it, simply.”
Newman looked at her a moment. “Well, your pictures may be bad,” he
said, “but you are too clever for me, nevertheless. I don’t understand
you. Good-bye!” And he put out his hand.
She made no response, and offered him no farewell. She turned away and
seated herself sidewise on a bench, leaning her head on the back of her
hand, which clasped the rail in front of the pictures. Newman stood a
moment and then turned on his heel and retreated. He had understood her
better than he confessed; this singular scene was a practical
commentary upon her father’s statement that she was a frank coquette.
CHAPTER V
When Newman related to Mrs. Tristram his fruitless visit to Madame de
Cintré, she urged him not to be discouraged, but to carry out his plan
of “seeing Europe” during the summer, and return to Paris in the autumn
and settle down comfortably for the winter. “Madame de Cintré will
keep,” she said; “she is not a woman who will marry from one day to
another.” Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back
to Paris; he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from
professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintré’s continued
widowhood. This circumstance was at variance with his habitual
frankness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the
incipient stage of that passion which is more particularly known as the
mysterious one. The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes that
were at once brilliant and mild had become very familiar to his memory,
and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospect of never
looking into them again. He communicated to Mrs. Tristram a number of
other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose; but on this
particular point he kept his own counsel. He took a kindly leave of M.
Nioche, having assured him that, so far as he was concerned, the
blue-cloaked Madonna herself might have been present at his interview
with Mademoiselle Noémie; and left the old man nursing his
breast-pocket, in an ecstasy which the acutest misfortune might have
been defied to dissipate. Newman then started on his travels, with all
his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure, and all his essential
directness and intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry, and yet
no man achieved more in brief periods. He had certain practical
instincts which served him excellently in his trade of tourist. He
found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent
when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged
from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, not
understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had
desired to ascertain. His appetite for facts was capacious, and
although many of those which he noted would have seemed woefully dry
and colorless to the ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful
inspection of the list would have shown that he had a soft spot in his
imagination. In the charming city of Brussels—his first stopping-place
after leaving Paris—he asked a great many questions about the
street-cars, and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this
familiar symbol of American civilization; but he was also greatly
struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville, and
wondered whether it would not be possible to “get up” something like it
in San Francisco. He stood for half an hour in the crowded square
before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening
to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching
history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these
gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old
letter.
At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been
intense; passive entertainment, in the Champs Élysées and at the
theatres, seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and
although, as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious,
satisfying _best_, he had not the Grand Tour in the least on his
conscience, and was not given to cross-questioning the amusement of the
hour. He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe.
He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt
a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even—a false shame,
possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the
mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high
sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man’s life
should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a
matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where
one might stroll about and purchase handsome things; but he was no more
conscious, individually, of social pressure than he admitted the
existence of such a thing as an obligatory purchase. He had not only a
dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust, of uncomfortable thoughts, and
it was both uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to
square one’s self with a standard. One’s standard was the ideal of
one’s own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to
give as well as take. To expand, without bothering about it—without
shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to
the full compass of what he would have called a “pleasant” experience,
was Newman’s most definite programme of life. He had always hated to
hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had always caught them; and
just so an undue solicitude for “culture” seemed a sort of silly
dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women,
foreigners, and other unpractical persons. All this admitted, Newman
enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as
profoundly as the most zealous _dilettante_. One’s theories, after all,
matter little; it is one’s humor that is the great thing. Our friend
was intelligent, and he could not help that. He lounged through Belgium
and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy,
planning about nothing, but seeing everything. The guides and _valets
de place_ found him an excellent subject. He was always approachable,
for he was much addicted to standing about in the vestibules and
porticos of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities
for impressive seclusion which are so liberally offered in Europe to
gentlemen who travel with long purses. When an excursion, a church, a
gallery, a ruin, was proposed to him, the first thing Newman usually
did, after surveying his postulant in silence, from head to foot, was
to sit down at a little table and order something to drink. The
cicerone, during this process, usually retreated to a respectful
distance; otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden him
sit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellow
whether his church or his gallery was really worth a man’s trouble. At
last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of
monuments, looked at his watch, and fixed his eye on his adversary.
“What is it?” he asked. “How far?” And whatever the answer was,
although he sometimes seemed to hesitate, he never declined. He stepped
into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him to answer
questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to
slow driving) and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to
the goal of his pilgrimage. If the goal was a disappointment, if the
church was meagre, or the ruin a heap of rubbish, Newman never
protested or berated his cicerone; he looked with an impartial eye upon
great monuments and small, made the guide recite his lesson, listened
to it religiously, asked if there was nothing else to be seen in the
neighborhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be
feared that his perception of the difference between good architecture
and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have been seen
gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. Ugly churches
were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful ones, and
his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like
the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and
then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely,
sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic
service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was
not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of
diversion.
He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for a
time, he formed a sort of traveler’s partnership. They were men of a
very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that,
for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share
the chances of the road. Newman’s comrade, whose name was Babcock, was
a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with a
strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a native of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in
another suburb of the New England metropolis. His digestion was weak
and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—a regimen to which he
was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be
blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these
delicacies did not flourish under the _table d’hôte_ system. In Paris
he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called
itself an American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers
were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and
shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position
of having his hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at
the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in
the course of business, at Mr. Babcock’s birthplace, and, for reasons
too recondite to unfold, his visit there always assumed in his mind a
jocular cast. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long
as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as
“Dorchester.” Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly
improbable that at home these extremely dissimilar characters would
have found any very convenient points of contact. They were, indeed, as
different as possible. Newman, who never reflected on such matters,
accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to
meditate over it privately; used often, indeed, to retire to his room
early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it
conscientiously and impartially. He was not sure that it was a good
thing for him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking life was
so little his own. Newman was an excellent, generous fellow; Mr.
Babcock sometimes said to himself that he was a _noble_ fellow, and,
certainly, it was impossible not to like him. But would it not be
desirable to try to exert an influence upon him, to try to quicken his
moral life and sharpen his sense of duty? He liked everything, he
accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not
discriminating, he had not a high tone. The young man from Dorchester
accused Newman of a fault which he considered very grave, and which he
did his best to avoid: what he would have called a want of “moral
reaction.” Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and
churches, and carried Mrs. Jameson’s works about in his trunk; he
delighted in æsthetic analysis, and received peculiar impressions from
everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested
Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman’s
gross intellectual hospitality. Mr. Babcock’s moral _malaise_, I am
afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it. He
mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European
climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him
unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty;
and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above
displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and
dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to
“culture,” he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly
bad. But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman
was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception
of the bad. Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any
quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization
of evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who
was studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman
who did not expect him to marry her. Babcock had related this incident
to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet of an unflattering sort
to the young girl. The next day his companion asked him whether he was
very sure he had used exactly the right word to characterize the young
architect’s mistress. Newman stared and laughed. “There are a great
many words to express that idea,” he said; “you can take your choice!”
“Oh, I mean,” said Babcock, “was she possibly not to be considered in a
different light? Don’t you think she _really_ expected him to marry
her?”
“I am sure I don’t know,” said Newman. “Very likely she did; I have no
doubt she is a grand woman.” And he began to laugh again.
“I didn’t mean that either,” said Babcock, “I was only afraid that I
might have seemed yesterday not to remember—not to consider; well, I
think I will write to Percival about it.”
And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a really impudent
fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow, raw and reckless in
Newman to assume in that off-hand manner that the young woman in Paris
might be “grand.” The brevity of Newman’s judgments very often shocked
and discomposed him. He had a way of damning people without farther
appeal, or of pronouncing them capital company in the face of
uncomfortable symptoms, which seemed unworthy of a man whose conscience
had been properly cultivated. And yet poor Babcock liked him, and
remembered that even if he was sometimes perplexing and painful, this
was not a reason for giving him up. Goethe recommended seeing human
nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe
perfectly splendid. He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation
to infuse into Newman a little of his own spiritual starch, but
Newman’s personal texture was too loose to admit of stiffening. His
mind could no more hold principles than a sieve can hold water. He
admired principles extremely, and thought Babcock a mighty fine little
fellow for having so many. He accepted all that his high-strung
companion offered him, and put them away in what he supposed to be a
very safe place; but poor Babcock never afterwards recognized his gifts
among the articles that Newman had in daily use.
They traveled together through Germany and into Switzerland, where for
three or four weeks they trudged over passes and lounged upon blue
lakes. At last they crossed the Simplon and made their way to Venice.
Mr. Babcock had become gloomy and even a trifle irritable; he seemed
moody, absent, preoccupied; he got his plans into a tangle, and talked
one moment of doing one thing and the next of doing another. Newman led
his usual life, made acquaintances, took his ease in the galleries and
churches, spent an unconscionable amount of time in strolling in the
Piazza San Marco, bought a great many bad pictures, and for a fortnight
enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found
Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man
walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand, and said
with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his
surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had become necessary.
“Don’t be afraid I’m tired of you,” he said.
“You are not tired of me?” demanded Babcock, fixing him with his clear
gray eye.
“Why the deuce should I be? You are a very plucky fellow. Besides, I
don’t grow tired of things.”
“We don’t understand each other,” said the young minister.
“Don’t I understand you?” cried Newman. “Why, I hoped I did. But what
if I don’t; where’s the harm?”
“I don’t understand _you_,” said Babcock. And he sat down and rested
his head on his hand, and looked up mournfully at his immeasurable
friend.
“Oh Lord, I don’t mind that!” cried Newman, with a laugh.
“But it’s very distressing to me. It keeps me in a state of unrest. It
irritates me; I can’t settle anything. I don’t think it’s good for me.”
“You worry too much; that’s what’s the matter with you,” said Newman.
“Of course it must seem so to you. You think I take things too hard,
and I think you take things too easily. We can never agree.”
“But we have agreed very well all along.”
“No, I haven’t agreed,” said Babcock, shaking his head. “I am very
uncomfortable. I ought to have separated from you a month ago.”
“Oh, horrors! I’ll agree to anything!” cried Newman.
Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last looking up, “I don’t
think you appreciate my position,” he said. “I try to arrive at the
truth about everything. And then you go too fast. For me, you are too
passionate, too extravagant. I feel as if I ought to go over all this
ground we have traversed again, by myself, alone. I am afraid I have
made a great many mistakes.”
“Oh, you needn’t give so many reasons,” said Newman. “You are simply
tired of my company. You have a good right to be.”
“No, no, I am not tired!” cried the pestered young divine. “It is very
wrong to be tired.”
“I give it up!” laughed Newman. “But of course it will never do to go
on making mistakes. Go your way, by all means. I shall miss you; but
you have seen I make friends very easily. You will be lonely yourself;
but drop me a line, when you feel like it, and I will wait for you
anywhere.”
“I think I will go back to Milan. I am afraid I didn’t do justice to
Luini.”
“Poor Luini!” said Newman.
“I mean that I am afraid I overestimated him. I don’t think that he is
a painter of the first rank.”
“Luini?” Newman exclaimed; “why, he’s enchanting—he’s magnificent!
There is something in his genius that is like a beautiful woman. It
gives one the same feeling.”
Mr. Babcock frowned and winced. And it must be added that this was, for
Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight; but in passing through Milan
he had taken a great fancy to the painter. “There you are again!” said
Mr. Babcock. “Yes, we had better separate.” And on the morrow he
retraced his steps and proceeded to tone down his impressions of the
great Lombard artist.
A few days afterwards Newman received a note from his late companion
which ran as follows:—
My Dear Mr. Newman,—I am afraid that my conduct at Venice, a week ago,
seemed to you strange and ungrateful, and I wish to explain my
position, which, as I said at the time, I do not think you appreciate.
I had long had it on my mind to propose that we should part company,
and this step was not really so abrupt as it seemed. In the first
place, you know, I am traveling in Europe on funds supplied by my
congregation, who kindly offered me a vacation and an opportunity to
enrich my mind with the treasures of nature and art in the Old World. I
feel, therefore, as if I ought to use my time to the very best
advantage. I have a high sense of responsibility. You appear to care
only for the pleasure of the hour, and you give yourself up to it with
a violence which I confess I am not able to emulate. I feel as if I
must arrive at some conclusion and fix my belief on certain points. Art
and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in our travels in
Europe we should especially remember the immense seriousness of Art.
You seem to hold that if a thing amuses you for the moment, that is all
you need ask for it, and your relish for mere amusement is also much
higher than mine. You put, however, a kind of reckless confidence into
your pleasure which at times, I confess, has seemed to me—shall I say
it?—almost cynical. Your way at any rate is not my way, and it is
unwise that we should attempt any longer to pull together. And yet, let
me add that I know there is a great deal to be said for your way; I
have felt its attraction, in your society, very strongly. But for this
I should have left you long ago. But I was so perplexed. I hope I have
not done wrong. I feel as if I had a great deal of lost time to make
up. I beg you take all this as I mean it, which, Heaven knows, is not
invidiously. I have a great personal esteem for you and hope that some
day, when I have recovered my balance, we shall meet again. I hope you
will continue to enjoy your travels, only _do_ remember that Life and
Art _are_ extremely serious. Believe me your sincere friend and
well-wisher,
BENJAMIN BABCOCK
P. S. I am greatly perplexed by Luini.
This letter produced in Newman’s mind a singular mixture of
exhilaration and awe. At first, Mr. Babcock’s tender conscience seemed
to him a capital farce, and his traveling back to Milan only to get
into a deeper muddle appeared, as the reward of his pedantry,
exquisitely and ludicrously just. Then Newman reflected that these are
mighty mysteries, that possibly he himself was indeed that baleful and
barely mentionable thing, a cynic, and that his manner of considering
the treasures of art and the privileges of life was probably very base
and immoral. Newman had a great contempt for immorality, and that
evening, for a good half hour, as he sat watching the star-sheen on the
warm Adriatic, he felt rebuked and depressed. He was at a loss how to
answer Babcock’s letter. His good nature checked his resenting the
young minister’s lofty admonitions, and his tough, inelastic sense of
humor forbade his taking them seriously. He wrote no answer at all but
a day or two afterward he found in a curiosity shop a grotesque little
statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century, which he sent off to
Babcock without a commentary. It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking
monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and
pulling a portentously long face. It was a wonderfully delicate piece
of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you
espied a fat capon hung round the monk’s waist. In Newman’s intention
what did the figure symbolize? Did it mean that he was going to try to
be as “high-toned” as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he
should succeed no better than the friar, on a closer inspection, proved
to have done? It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon
Babcock’s own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical
stroke. He made his late companion, at any rate, a very valuable little
present.
Newman, on leaving Venice, went through the Tyrol to Vienna, and then
returned westward, through Southern Germany. The autumn found him at
Baden-Baden, where he spent several weeks. The place was charming, and
he was in no hurry to depart; besides, he was looking about him and
deciding what to do for the winter. His summer had been very full, and
he sat under the great trees beside the miniature river that trickles
past the Baden flower-beds, he slowly rummaged it over. He had seen and
done a great deal, enjoyed and observed a great deal; he felt older,
and yet he felt younger too. He remembered Mr. Babcock and his desire
to form conclusions, and he remembered also that he had profited very
little by his friend’s exhortation to cultivate the same respectable
habit. Could he not scrape together a few conclusions? Baden-Baden was
the prettiest place he had seen yet, and orchestral music in the
evening, under the stars, was decidedly a great institution. This was
one of his conclusions! But he went on to reflect that he had done very
wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad; this seeing of the world was
a very interesting thing. He had learned a great deal; he couldn’t say
just what, but he had it there under his hat-band. He had done what he
wanted; he had seen the great things, and he had given his mind a
chance to “improve,” if it would. He cheerfully believed that it had
improved. Yes, this seeing of the world was very pleasant, and he would
willingly do a little more of it. Thirty-six years old as he was, he
had a handsome stretch of life before him yet, and he need not begin to
count his weeks. Where should he take the world next? I have said he
remembered the eyes of the lady whom he had found standing in Mrs.
Tristram’s drawing-room; four months had elapsed, and he had not
forgotten them yet. He had looked—he had made a point of looking—into a
great many other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thought of
now were Madame de Cintré’s. If he wanted to see more of the world,
should he find it in Madame de Cintré’s eyes? He would certainly find
something there, call it this world or the next. Throughout these
rather formless meditations he sometimes thought of his past life and
the long array of years (they had begun so early) during which he had
had nothing in his head but “enterprise.” They seemed far away now, for
his present attitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a rupture.
He had told Tristram that the pendulum was swinging back and it
appeared that the backward swing had not yet ended. Still “enterprise,”
which was over in the other quarter wore to his mind a different aspect
at different hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came
trooping back into his memory. Some of them he looked complacently
enough in the face; from some he averted his head. They were old
efforts, old exploits, antiquated examples of “smartness” and
sharpness. Some of them, as he looked at them, he felt decidedly proud
of; he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man. And,
in fact, many of the qualities that make a great deed were there: the
decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity, the clear eye, and
the strong hand. Of certain other achievements it would be going too
far to say that he was ashamed of them for Newman had never had a
stomach for dirty work. He was blessed with a natural impulse to
disfigure with a direct, unreasoning blow the comely visage of
temptation. And certainly, in no man could a want of integrity have
been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a
glance, and the former had cost him, first and last, a great many
moments of lively disgust. But none the less some of his memories
seemed to wear at present a rather graceless and sordid mien, and it
struck him that if he had never done anything very ugly, he had never,
on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful. He had spent
his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands, and,
now that he stood well outside of it, the business of money-getting
appeared tolerably dry and sterile. It is very well to sneer at
money-getting after you have filled your pockets, and Newman, it may be
said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately.
To this it may be answered that he might have made another fortune, if
he chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing. It
had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer
was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made
by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
During his stay at Baden-Baden he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram,
scolding him for the scanty tidings he had sent to his friends of the
Avenue d’Iéna, and begging to be definitely informed that he had not
concocted any horrid scheme for wintering in outlying regions, but was
coming back sanely and promptly to the most comfortable city in the
world. Newman’s answer ran as follows:—
“I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn’t expect
anything of me. I don’t think I have written twenty letters of pure
friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence
altogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship; you have
got hold of a curiosity, and I hope you will value it. You want to know
everything that has happened to me these three months. The best way to
tell you, I think, would be to send you my half dozen guide-books, with
my pencil-marks in the margin. Wherever you find a scratch or a cross,
or a ‘Beautiful!’ or a ‘So true!’ or a ‘Too thin!’ you may know that I
have had a sensation of some sort or other. That has been about my
history, ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany,
Italy—I have been through the whole list, and I don’t think I am any
the worse for it. I know more about Madonnas and church-steeples than I
supposed any man could. I have seen some very pretty things, and shall
perhaps talk them over this winter, by your fireside. You see, my face
is not altogether set against Paris. I have had all kinds of plans and
visions, but your letter has blown most of them away. ‘_L’appétit vient
en mangeant_,’ says the French proverb, and I find that the more I see
of the world the more I want to see. Now that I am in the shafts, why
shouldn’t I trot to the end of the course? Sometimes I think of the far
East, and keep rolling the names of Eastern cities under my tongue:
Damascus and Bagdad, Medina and Mecca. I spent a week last month in the
company of a returned missionary, who told me I ought to be ashamed to
be loafing about Europe when there are such big things to be seen out
there. I do want to explore, but I think I would rather explore over in
the Rue de l’Université. Do you ever hear from that pretty lady? If you
can get her to promise she will be at home the next time I call, I will
go back to Paris straight. I am more than ever in the state of mind I
told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an
eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of
them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it. I should have enjoyed
all this a thousand times more if I had had the lady just mentioned by
my side. The nearest approach to her was a Unitarian minister from
Boston, who very soon demanded a separation, for incompatibility of
temper. He told me I was low-minded, immoral, a devotee of ‘art for
art’—whatever that is: all of which greatly afflicted me, for he was
really a sweet little fellow. But shortly afterwards I met an
Englishman, with whom I struck up an acquaintance which at first seemed
to promise well—a very bright man, who writes in the London papers and
knows Paris nearly as well as Tristram. We knocked about for a week
together, but he very soon gave me up in disgust. I was too virtuous by
half; I was too stern a moralist. He told me, in a friendly way, that I
was cursed with a conscience; that I judged things like a Methodist and
talked about them like an old lady. This was rather bewildering. Which
of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very
soon made up my mind they were both idiots. But there is one thing in
which no one will ever have the impudence to pretend I am wrong, that
is, in being your faithful friend,
CHAPTER VI
Newman gave up Damascus and Bagdad and returned to Paris before the
autumn was over. He established himself in some rooms selected for him
by Tom Tristram, in accordance with the latter’s estimate of what he
called his social position. When Newman learned that his social
position was to be taken into account, he professed himself utterly
incompetent, and begged Tristram to relieve him of the care. “I didn’t
know I had a social position,” he said, “and if I have, I haven’t the
smallest idea what it is. Isn’t a social position knowing some two or
three thousand people and inviting them to dinner? I know you and your
wife and little old Mr. Nioche, who gave me French lessons last spring.
Can I invite you to dinner to meet each other? If I can, you must come
to-morrow.”
“That is not very grateful to me,” said Mrs. Tristram, “who introduced
you last year to every creature I know.”
“So you did; I had quite forgotten. But I thought you wanted me to
forget,” said Newman, with that tone of simple deliberateness which
frequently marked his utterance, and which an observer would not have
known whether to pronounce a somewhat mysteriously humorous affection
of ignorance or a modest aspiration to knowledge; “you told me you
disliked them all.”
“Ah, the way you remember what I say is at least very flattering. But
in future,” added Mrs. Tristram, “pray forget all the wicked things and
remember only the good ones. It will be easily done, and it will not
fatigue your memory. But I forewarn you that if you trust my husband to
pick out your rooms, you are in for something hideous.”
“Hideous, darling?” cried Tristram.
“To-day I must say nothing wicked; otherwise I should use stronger
language.”
“What do you think she would say, Newman?” asked Tristram. “If she
really tried, now? She can express displeasure, volubly, in two or
three languages; that’s what it is to be intellectual. It gives her the
start of me completely, for I can’t swear, for the life of me, except
in English. When I get mad I have to fall back on our dear old mother
tongue. There’s nothing like it, after all.”
Newman declared that he knew nothing about tables and chairs, and that
he would accept, in the way of a lodging, with his eyes shut, anything
that Tristram should offer him. This was partly veracity on our hero’s
part, but it was also partly charity. He knew that to pry about and
look at rooms, and make people open windows, and poke into sofas with
his cane, and gossip with landladies, and ask who lived above and who
below—he knew that this was of all pastimes the dearest to Tristram’s
heart, and he felt the more disposed to put it in his way as he was
conscious that, as regards his obliging friend, he had suffered the
warmth of ancient good-fellowship somewhat to abate. Besides, he had no
taste for upholstery; he had even no very exquisite sense of comfort or
convenience. He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was
satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair
from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs
which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort
was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be
conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical
devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The
apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said
that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the
rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person
that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an
apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was
situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted
of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped
in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors
and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily,
immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for
three months in his drawing-room.
One day Mrs. Tristram told him that her beautiful friend, Madame de
Cintré, had returned from the country; that she had met her three days
before, coming out of the Church of St. Sulpice; she herself having
journeyed to that distant quarter in quest of an obscure lace-mender,
of whose skill she had heard high praise.
“And how were those eyes?” Newman asked.
“Those eyes were red with weeping, if you please!” said Mrs. Tristram.
“She had been to confession.”
“It doesn’t tally with your account of her,” said Newman, “that she
should have sins to confess.”
“They were not sins; they were sufferings.”
“How do you know that?”
“She asked me to come and see her; I went this morning.”
“And what does she suffer from?”
“I didn’t ask her. With her, somehow, one is very discreet. But I
guessed, easily enough. She suffers from her wicked old mother and her
Grand Turk of a brother. They persecute her. But I can almost forgive
them, because, as I told you, she is a saint, and a persecution is all
that she needs to bring out her saintliness and make her perfect.”
“That’s a comfortable theory for her. I hope you will never impart it
to the old folks. Why does she let them bully her? Is she not her own
mistress?”
“Legally, yes, I suppose; but morally, no. In France you must never say
nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most
abominable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but,
after all, she is _ma mère_, and you have no right to judge her. You
have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintré
bows her head and folds her wings.”
“Can’t she at least make her brother leave off?”
“Her brother is the _chef de la famille_, as they say; he is the head
of the clan. With those people the family is everything; you must act,
not for your own pleasure, but for the advantage of the family.”
“I wonder what _my_ family would like me to do!” exclaimed Tristram.
“I wish you had one!” said his wife.
“But what do they want to get out of that poor lady?” Newman asked.
“Another marriage. They are not rich, and they want to bring more money
into the family.”
“There’s your chance, my boy!” said Tristram.
“And Madame de Cintré objects,” Newman continued.
“She has been sold once; she naturally objects to being sold again. It
appears that the first time they made rather a poor bargain; M. de
Cintré left a scanty property.”
“And to whom do they want to marry her now?”
“I thought it best not to ask; but you may be sure it is to some horrid
old nabob, or to some dissipated little duke.”
“There’s Mrs. Tristram, as large as life!” cried her husband. “Observe
the richness of her imagination. She has not a single question—it’s
vulgar to ask questions—and yet she knows everything. She has the
history of Madame de Cintré’s marriage at her fingers’ ends. She has
seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and
streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and
goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the
tipsy duke. The simple truth is that they made a fuss about her
milliner’s bill or refused her an opera-box.”
Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each
direction. “Do you really mean,” he asked of Mrs. Tristram, “that your
friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage?”
“I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that
sort of thing.”
“It is like something in a play,” said Newman; “that dark old house
over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be
done again.”
“They have a still darker old house in the country Madame de Cintré
tells me, and there, during the summer this scheme must have been
hatched.”
“_Must_ have been; mind that!” said Tristram.
“After all,” suggested Newman, after a silence, “she may be in trouble
about something else.”
“If it is something else, then it is something worse,” said Mrs.
Tristram, with rich decision.
Newman was silent a while, and seemed lost in meditation. “Is it
possible,” he asked at last, “that they do that sort of thing over
here? that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate?”
“Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it,” said Mrs.
Tristram. “There is plenty of bullying everywhere.”
“A great deal of that kind of thing goes on in New York,” said
Tristram. “Girls are bullied or coaxed or bribed, or all three
together, into marrying nasty fellows. There is no end of that always
going on in the Fifth Avenue, and other bad things besides. The
Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue! Someone ought to show them up.”
“I don’t believe it!” said Newman, very gravely. “I don’t believe that,
in America, girls are ever subjected to compulsion. I don’t believe
there have been a dozen cases of it since the country began.”
“Listen to the voice of the spread eagle!” cried Tristram.
“The spread eagle ought to use his wings,” said Mrs. Tristram. “Fly to
the rescue of Madame de Cintré!”
“To her rescue?”
“Pounce down, seize her in your talons, and carry her off. Marry her
yourself.”
Newman, for some moments, answered nothing; but presently, “I should
suppose she had heard enough of marrying,” he said. “The kindest way to
treat her would be to admire her, and yet never to speak of it. But
that sort of thing is infamous,” he added; “it makes me feel savage to
hear of it.”
He heard of it, however, more than once afterward. Mrs. Tristram again
saw Madame de Cintré, and again found her looking very sad. But on
these occasions there had been no tears; her beautiful eyes were clear
and still. “She is cold, calm, and hopeless,” Mrs. Tristram declared,
and she added that on her mentioning that her friend Mr. Newman was
again in Paris and was faithful in his desire to make Madame de
Cintré’s acquaintance, this lovely woman had found a smile in her
despair, and declared that she was sorry to have missed his visit in
the spring and that she hoped he had not lost courage. “I told her
something about you,” said Mrs. Tristram.
“That’s a comfort,” said Newman, placidly. “I like people to know about
me.”
A few days after this, one dusky autumn afternoon, he went again to the
Rue de l’Université. The early evening had closed in as he applied for
admittance at the stoutly guarded _Hôtel de Bellegarde_. He was told
that Madame de Cintré was at home; he crossed the court, entered the
farther door, and was conducted through a vestibule, vast, dim, and
cold, up a broad stone staircase with an ancient iron balustrade, to an
apartment on the second floor. Announced and ushered in, he found
himself in a sort of paneled boudoir, at one end of which a lady and
gentleman were seated before the fire. The gentleman was smoking a
cigarette; there was no light in the room save that of a couple of
candles and the glow from the hearth. Both persons rose to welcome
Newman, who, in the firelight, recognized Madame de Cintré. She gave
him her hand with a smile which seemed in itself an illumination, and,
pointing to her companion, said softly, “My brother.” The gentleman
offered Newman a frank, friendly greeting, and our hero then perceived
him to be the young man who had spoken to him in the court of the hotel
on his former visit and who had struck him as a good fellow.
“Mrs. Tristram has spoken to me a great deal of you,” said Madame de
Cintré gently, as she resumed her former place.
Newman, after he had seated himself, began to consider what, in truth,
was his errand. He had an unusual, unexpected sense of having wandered
into a strange corner of the world. He was not given, as a general
thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had had
no social tremors on this particular occasion. He was not timid and he
was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and
too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But
his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy;
with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to
perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one
does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it.
This strange, pretty woman, sitting in fire-side talk with her brother,
in the gray depths of her inhospitable-looking house—what had he to say
to her? She seemed enveloped in a sort of fantastic privacy; on what
grounds had he pulled away the curtain? For a moment he felt as if he
had plunged into some medium as deep as the ocean, and as if he must
exert himself to keep from sinking. Meanwhile he was looking at Madame
de Cintré, and she was settling herself in her chair and drawing in her
long dress and turning her face towards him. Their eyes met; a moment
afterwards she looked away and motioned to her brother to put a log on
the fire. But the moment, and the glance which traversed it, had been
sufficient to relieve Newman of the first and the last fit of personal
embarrassment he was ever to know. He performed the movement which was
so frequent with him, and which was always a sort of symbol of his
taking mental possession of a scene—he extended his legs. The
impression Madame de Cintré had made upon him on their first meeting
came back in an instant; it had been deeper than he knew. She was
pleasing, she was interesting; he had opened a book and the first lines
held his attention.
She asked him several questions: how lately he had seen Mrs. Tristram,
how long he had been in Paris, how long he expected to remain there,
how he liked it. She spoke English without an accent, or rather with
that distinctively British accent which, on his arrival in Europe, had
struck Newman as an altogether foreign tongue, but which, in women, he
had come to like extremely. Here and there Madame de Cintré’s utterance
had a faint shade of strangeness but at the end of ten minutes Newman
found himself waiting for these soft roughnesses. He enjoyed them, and
he marveled to see that gross thing, error, brought down to so fine a
point.
“You have a beautiful country,” said Madame de Cintré, presently.
“Oh, magnificent!” said Newman. “You ought to see it.”
“I shall never see it,” said Madame de Cintré with a smile.
“Why not?” asked Newman.
“I don’t travel; especially so far.”
“But you go away sometimes; you are not always here?”
“I go away in summer, a little way, to the country.”
Newman wanted to ask her something more, something personal, he hardly
knew what. “Don’t you find it rather—rather quiet here?” he said; “so
far from the street?” Rather “gloomy,” he was going to say, but he
reflected that that would be impolite.
“Yes, it is very quiet,” said Madame de Cintré; “but we like that.”
“Ah, you like that,” repeated Newman, slowly.
“Besides, I have lived here all my life.”
“Lived here all your life,” said Newman, in the same way.
“I was born here, and my father was born here before me, and my
grandfather, and my great-grandfathers. Were they not, Valentin?” and
she appealed to her brother.
“Yes, it’s a family habit to be born here!” the young man said with a
laugh, and rose and threw the remnant of his cigarette into the fire,
and then remained leaning against the chimney-piece. An observer would
have perceived that he wished to take a better look at Newman, whom he
covertly examined, while he stood stroking his moustache.
“Your house is tremendously old, then,” said Newman.
“How old is it, brother?” asked Madame de Cintré.
The young man took the two candles from the mantel-shelf, lifted one
high in each hand, and looked up toward the cornice of the room, above
the chimney-piece. This latter feature of the apartment was of white
marble, and in the familiar rococo style of the last century; but above
it was a paneling of an earlier date, quaintly carved, painted white,
and gilded here and there. The white had turned to yellow, and the
gilding was tarnished. On the top, the figures ranged themselves into a
sort of shield, on which an armorial device was cut. Above it, in
relief, was a date—1627. “There you have it,” said the young man. “That
is old or new, according to your point of view.”
“Well, over here,” said Newman, “one’s point of view gets shifted round
considerably.” And he threw back his head and looked about the room.
“Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.
“Are you interested in architecture?” asked the young man at the
chimney-piece.
“Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “to examine—as
well as I can calculate—some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you
call that interested?”
“Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.
“Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam?” And he turned to
Madame de Cintré.
“Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.
Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head
and began to look round the room again. “Had you never noticed that
number up there?” he presently asked.
She hesitated a moment, and then, “In former years,” she said.
Her brother had been watching Newman’s movement. “Perhaps you would
like to examine the house,” he said.
Newman slowly brought down his eyes and looked at him; he had a vague
impression that the young man at the chimney-piece was inclined to
irony. He was a handsome fellow, his face wore a smile, his moustaches
were curled up at the ends, and there was a little dancing gleam in his
eye. “Damn his French impudence!” Newman was on the point of saying to
himself. “What the deuce is he grinning at?” He glanced at Madame de
Cintré; she was sitting with her eyes fixed on the floor. She raised
them, they met his, and she looked at her brother. Newman turned again
to this young man and observed that he strikingly resembled his sister.
This was in his favor, and our hero’s first impression of the Count
Valentin, moreover, had been agreeable. His mistrust expired, and he
said he would be very glad to see the house.
The young man gave a frank laugh, and laid his hand on one of the
candlesticks. “Good, good!” he exclaimed. “Come, then.”
But Madame de Cintré rose quickly and grasped his arm, “Ah, Valentin!”
she said. “What do you mean to do?”
“To show Mr. Newman the house. It will be very amusing.”
She kept her hand on his arm, and turned to Newman with a smile. “Don’t
let him take you,” she said; “you will not find it amusing. It is a
musty old house, like any other.”
“It is full of curious things,” said the count, resisting. “Besides, I
want to do it; it is a rare chance.”
“You are very wicked, brother,” Madame de Cintré answered.
“Nothing venture, nothing have!” cried the young man. “Will you come?”
Madame de Cintré stepped toward Newman, gently clasping her hands and
smiling softly. “Would you not prefer my society, here, by my fire, to
stumbling about dark passages after my brother?”
“A hundred times!” said Newman. “We will see the house some other day.”
The young man put down his candlestick with mock solemnity, and,
shaking his head, “Ah, you have defeated a great scheme, sir!” he said.
“A scheme? I don’t understand,” said Newman.
“You would have played your part in it all the better. Perhaps some day
I shall have a chance to explain it.”
“Be quiet, and ring for the tea,” said Madame de Cintré.
The young man obeyed, and presently a servant brought in the tea,
placed the tray on a small table, and departed. Madame de Cintré, from
her place, busied herself with making it. She had but just begun when
the door was thrown open and a lady rushed in, making a loud rustling
sound. She stared at Newman, gave a little nod and a “Monsieur!” and
then quickly approached Madame de Cintré and presented her forehead to
be kissed. Madame de Cintré saluted her, and continued to make tea. The
new-comer was young and pretty, it seemed to Newman; she wore her
bonnet and cloak, and a train of royal proportions. She began to talk
rapidly in French. “Oh, give me some tea, my beautiful one, for the
love of God! I’m exhausted, mangled, massacred.” Newman found himself
quite unable to follow her; she spoke much less distinctly than M.
Nioche.
“That is my sister-in-law,” said the Count Valentin, leaning towards
him.
“She is very pretty,” said Newman.
“Exquisite,” answered the young man, and this time, again, Newman
suspected him of irony.
His sister-in-law came round to the other side of the fire with her cup
of tea in her hand, holding it out at arm’s-length, so that she might
not spill it on her dress, and uttering little cries of alarm. She
placed the cup on the mantel-shelf and begun to unpin her veil and pull
off her gloves, looking meanwhile at Newman.
“Is there anything I can do for you, my dear lady?” the Count Valentin
asked, in a sort of mock-caressing tone.
“Present monsieur,” said his sister-in-law.
The young man answered, “Mr. Newman!”
“I can’t courtesy to you, monsieur, or I shall spill my tea,” said the
lady. “So Claire receives strangers, like that?” she added, in a low
voice, in French, to her brother-in-law.
“Apparently!” he answered with a smile. Newman stood a moment, and then
he approached Madame de Cintré. She looked up at him as if she were
thinking of something to say. But she seemed to think of nothing; so
she simply smiled. He sat down near her and she handed him a cup of
tea. For a few moments they talked about that, and meanwhile he looked
at her. He remembered what Mrs. Tristram had told him of her
“perfection” and of her having, in combination, all the brilliant
things that he dreamed of finding. This made him observe her not only
without mistrust, but without uneasy conjectures; the presumption, from
the first moment he looked at her, had been in her favor. And yet, if
she was beautiful, it was not a dazzling beauty. She was tall and
moulded in long lines; she had thick fair hair, a wide forehead, and
features with a sort of harmonious irregularity. Her clear gray eyes
were strikingly expressive; they were both gentle and intelligent, and
Newman liked them immensely; but they had not those depths of
splendor—those many-colored rays—which illumine the brows of famous
beauties. Madame de Cintré was rather thin, and she looked younger than
probably she was. In her whole person there was something both youthful
and subdued, slender and yet ample, tranquil yet shy; a mixture of
immaturity and repose, of innocence and dignity. What had Tristram
meant, Newman wondered, by calling her proud? She was certainly not
proud now, to him; or if she was, it was of no use, it was lost upon
him; she must pile it up higher if she expected him to mind it. She was
a beautiful woman, and it was very easy to get on with her. Was she a
countess, a _marquise_, a kind of historical formation? Newman, who had
rarely heard these words used, had never been at pains to attach any
particular image to them; but they occurred to him now and seemed
charged with a sort of melodious meaning. They signified something fair
and softly bright, that had easy motions and spoke very agreeably.
“Have you many friends in Paris; do you go out?” asked Madame de
Cintré, who had at last thought of something to say.
“Do you mean do I dance, and all that?”
“Do you go _dans le monde_, as we say?”
“I have seen a good many people. Mrs. Tristram has taken me about. I do
whatever she tells me.”
“By yourself, you are not fond of amusements?”
“Oh yes, of some sorts. I am not fond of dancing, and that sort of
thing; I am too old and sober. But I want to be amused; I came to
Europe for that.”
“But you can be amused in America, too.”
“I couldn’t; I was always at work. But after all, that was my
amusement.”
At this moment Madame de Bellegarde came back for another cup of tea,
accompanied by the Count Valentin. Madame de Cintré, when she had
served her, began to talk again with Newman, and recalling what he had
last said, “In your own country you were very much occupied?” she
asked.
“I was in business. I have been in business since I was fifteen years
old.”
“And what was your business?” asked Madame de Bellegarde, who was
decidedly not so pretty as Madame de Cintré.
“I have been in everything,” said Newman. “At one time I sold leather;
at one time I manufactured wash-tubs.”
Madame de Bellegarde made a little grimace. “Leather? I don’t like
that. Wash-tubs are better. I prefer the smell of soap. I hope at least
they made your fortune.” She rattled this off with the air of a woman
who had the reputation of saying everything that came into her head,
and with a strong French accent.
Newman had spoken with cheerful seriousness, but Madame de Bellegarde’s
tone made him go on, after a meditative pause, with a certain light
grimness of jocularity. “No, I lost money on wash-tubs, but I came out
pretty square on leather.”
“I have made up my mind, after all,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “that
the great point is—how do you call it?—to come out square. I am on my
knees to money; I don’t deny it. If you have it, I ask no questions.
For that I am a real democrat—like you, monsieur. Madame de Cintré is
very proud; but I find that one gets much more pleasure in this sad
life if one doesn’t look too close.”
“Just Heaven, dear madam, how you go at it,” said the Count Valentin,
lowering his voice.
“He’s a man one can speak to, I suppose, since my sister receives him,”
the lady answered. “Besides, it’s very true; those are my ideas.”
“Ah, you call them ideas,” murmured the young man.
“But Mrs. Tristram told me you had been in the army—in your war,” said
Madame de Cintré.
“Yes, but that is not business!” said Newman.
“Very true!” said M. de Bellegarde. “Otherwise perhaps I should not be
penniless.”
“Is it true,” asked Newman in a moment, “that you are so proud? I had
already heard it.”
Madame de Cintré smiled. “Do you find me so?”
“Oh,” said Newman, “I am no judge. If you are proud with me, you will
have to tell me. Otherwise I shall not know it.”
Madame de Cintré began to laugh. “That would be pride in a sad
position!” she said.
“It would be partly,” Newman went on, “because I shouldn’t want to know
it. I want you to treat me well.”
Madame de Cintré, whose laugh had ceased, looked at him with her head
half averted, as if she feared what he was going to say.
“Mrs. Tristram told you the literal truth,” he went on; “I want very
much to know you. I didn’t come here simply to call to-day; I came in
the hope that you might ask me to come again.”
“Oh, pray come often,” said Madame de Cintré.
“But will you be at home?” Newman insisted. Even to himself he seemed a
trifle “pushing,” but he was, in truth, a trifle excited.
“I hope so!” said Madame de Cintré.
Newman got up. “Well, we shall see,” he said smoothing his hat with his
coat-cuff.
“Brother,” said Madame de Cintré, “invite Mr. Newman to come again.”
The Count Valentin looked at our hero from head to foot with his
peculiar smile, in which impudence and urbanity seemed perplexingly
commingled. “Are you a brave man?” he asked, eying him askance.
“Well, I hope so,” said Newman.
“I rather suspect so. In that case, come again.”
“Ah, what an invitation!” murmured Madame de Cintré, with something
painful in her smile.
“Oh, I want Mr. Newman to come—particularly,” said the young man. “It
will give me great pleasure. I shall be desolate if I miss one of his
visits. But I maintain he must be brave. A stout heart, sir!” And he
offered Newman his hand.
“I shall not come to see you; I shall come to see Madame de Cintré,”
said Newman.
“You will need all the more courage.”
“Ah, Valentin!” said Madame de Cintré, appealingly.
“Decidedly,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “I am the only person here
capable of saying something polite! Come to see me; you will need no
courage,” she said.
Newman gave a laugh which was not altogether an assent, and took his
leave. Madame de Cintré did not take up her sister’s challenge to be
gracious, but she looked with a certain troubled air at the retreating
guest.
CHAPTER VII
One evening very late, about a week after his visit to Madame de
Cintré, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. de
Bellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor,
he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and
eying it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed to
Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “What the devil is
he laughing at now?” our hero asked himself. But he put the question
without acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintré’s brother was a
good fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good
fellowship they were destined to understand each other. Only, if there
was anything to laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.
“To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have I
come too late?”
“Too late for what?” asked Newman.
“To smoke a cigar with you.”
“You would have to come early to do that,” said Newman. “I don’t
smoke.”
“Ah, you are a strong man!”
“But I keep cigars,” Newman added. “Sit down.”
“Surely, I may not smoke here,” said M. de Bellegarde.
“What is the matter? Is the room too small?”
“It is too large. It is like smoking in a ball-room, or a church.”
“That is what you were laughing at just now?” Newman asked; “the size
of my room?”
“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendor, and
harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”
Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “So it _is_ very ugly?” he
inquired.
“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”
“That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “Make yourself
comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship.
You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you,
it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like
to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you
explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to lose
anything, myself.”
M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid
his hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying
something, but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair,
and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking
silence,—“Certainly,” he said, “my coming to see you is an act of
friendship. Nevertheless I was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister
asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was
near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It
was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do
something that would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.”
“Well, here I am as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.
“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on “by giving me
unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is
better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that
we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought your
acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest
me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated
smoothness of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent
English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat
noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical
urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked.
M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had
met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address
him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his
physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the
impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was below the middle
height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman
afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the
agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said,
to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with
unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are
looking” he started and turned pale. In your _well_ he read a grosser
monosyllable. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair
at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the
ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast,
and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He
resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his
clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he
smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely
alive—frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a
bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a
touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound. There was
something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was
not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it
to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the
centre and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the
movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down: he
gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with
something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his
earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and
clever tricks—make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the
back of their mouths.
“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to come
and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce
upon you; the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that I
behaved very oddly the other day?”
“Rather so,” said Newman.
“So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for a
moment through his smoke-wreaths. “If that is the case, I think we had
better let it stand. I didn’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, at
all; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favorable impression. But
if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention of
Providence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for I should
seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of our
acquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic
with intervals of sanity.”
“Oh, I guess you know what you are about,” said Newman.
“When I am sane, I am very sane; that I admit,” M. de Bellegarde
answered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like
to ask you a few questions. You allow me?”
“Give me a specimen,” said Newman.
“You live here all alone?”
“Absolutely. With whom should I live?”
“For the moment,” said M. de Bellegarde with a smile “I am asking
questions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for your
pleasure?”
Newman was silent a while. Then, at last, “Everyone asks me that!” he
said with his mild slowness. “It sounds so awfully foolish.”
“But at any rate you had a reason.”
“Oh, I came for my pleasure!” said Newman. “Though it is foolish, it is
true.”
“And you are enjoying it?”
Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckle
to the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.
M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” he
said at last, “I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you
I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is there
anyone you desire to know—anything you wish to see? It is a pity you
should not enjoy Paris.”
“Oh, I do enjoy it!” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obliged to
you.”
“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “there is something
absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a
great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are a
successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to
talk as if I could lend you a hand.”
“In what way are you a failure?” asked Newman.
“Oh, I’m not a tragical failure!” cried the young man with a laugh. “I
have fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You,
evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an
edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about
the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the
consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well,
imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have done
nothing—I can do nothing!”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story. Some day I will tell you. Meanwhile, I’m right, eh?
You are a success? You have made a fortune? It’s none of my business,
but, in short, you are rich?”
“That’s another thing that it sounds foolish to say,” said Newman.
“Hang it, no man is rich!”
“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “that no
man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As a
general thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I find
clever men who have made great fortunes very offensive. They tread on
my toes; they make me uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I said
to myself. ‘Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He has the
good-nature of success and none of the _morgue_; he has not our
confoundedly irritable French vanity.’ In short, I took a fancy to you.
We are very different, I’m sure; I don’t believe there is a subject on
which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for
there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.”
“Oh, I never quarrel,” said Newman.
“Never! Sometimes it’s a duty—or at least it’s a pleasure. Oh, I have
had two or three delicious quarrels in my day!” and M. de Bellegarde’s
handsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost
voluptuous intensity.
With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment of
dialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their
heels on Newman’s glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of the
morning striking larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde
was, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on this
occasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood. It was a
tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favor
by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility
was constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his
friendship could ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an
ancient stem as he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in
his temperament nothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in
sociability and urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of
pearls. Valentin was what is called in France a _gentilhomme_, of the
purest source, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, was to
play the part of a _gentilhomme_. This, it seemed to him, was enough to
occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he
was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his
character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which
in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his
application of them an extreme geniality. In his younger years he had
been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he
would make a slip in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family
shield. He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of
schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in
mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his safe spontaneity,
and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young nobles.
He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that he had now a
mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say,
within the limits of the family, that, light-headed as he was, the
honor of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of its
other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should see.
His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyish garrulity and of the
reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and he seemed to
Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to
him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America,
Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and
young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and
very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.
“What I envy you is your liberty,” observed M. de Bellegarde, “your
wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of
people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of
you. I live,” he added with a sigh, “beneath the eyes of my admirable
mother.”
“It is your own fault; what is to hinder your ranging?” said Newman.
“There is a delightful simplicity in that remark! Everything is to
hinder me. To begin with, I have not a penny.”
“I had not a penny when I began to range.”
“Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was
impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor—do
I understand it?—it was therefore inevitable that you should become
rich. You were in a position that makes one’s mouth water; you looked
round you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to and
take hold of. When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world
with everything ticketed ‘Hands off!’ and the deuce of it was that the
ticket seemed meant only for me. I couldn’t go into business, I
couldn’t make money, because I was a Bellegarde. I couldn’t go into
politics, because I was a Bellegarde—the Bellegardes don’t recognize
the Bonapartes. I couldn’t go into literature, because I was a dunce. I
couldn’t marry a rich girl, because no Bellegarde had ever married a
_roturière_, and it was not proper that I should begin. We shall have
to come to it, yet. Marriageable heiresses, _de notre bord_, are not to
be had for nothing; it must be name for name, and fortune for fortune.
The only thing I could do was to go and fight for the Pope. That I did,
punctiliously, and received an apostolic flesh-wound at Castlefidardo.
It did neither the Holy Father nor me any good, that I could see. Rome
was doubtless a very amusing place in the days of Caligula, but it has
sadly fallen off since. I passed three years in the Castle of St.
Angelo, and then came back to secular life.”
“So you have no profession—you do nothing,” said Newman.
“I do nothing! I am supposed to amuse myself, and, to tell the truth, I
have amused myself. One can, if one knows how. But you can’t keep it up
forever. I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee that
after that I shall lose my appetite. Then what shall I do? I think I
shall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist
and go into a monastery. It was an old custom, and the old customs were
very good. People understood life quite as well as we do. They kept the
pot boiling till it cracked, and then they put it on the shelf
altogether.”
“Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the
inquiry a grotesque effect.
M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in the
question, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. “I
am a very good Catholic. I respect the Church. I adore the blessed
Virgin. I fear the Devil.”
“Well, then,” said Newman, “you are very well fixed. You have got
pleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you
complain of?”
“It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain. There is something in your
own circumstances that irritates me. You are the first man I have ever
envied. It’s singular, but so it is. I have known many men who, besides
any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into
the bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor. But
you have got something that I should have liked to have. It is not
money, it is not even brains—though no doubt yours are excellent. It is
not your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be a
couple of inches taller. It’s a sort of air you have of being
thoroughly at home in the world. When I was a boy, my father told me
that it was by such an air as that that people recognized a Bellegarde.
He called my attention to it. He didn’t advise me to cultivate it; he
said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had
come to me, because I think I have always had the feeling. My place in
life was made for me, and it seemed easy to occupy it. But you who, as
I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the
other day, have manufactured wash-tubs—you strike me, somehow, as a man
who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height. I fancy you
going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he
owns a large amount of stock. You make me feel as if I had missed
something. What is it?”
“It is the proud consciousness of honest toil—of having manufactured a
few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.
“Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not
only wash-tubs, but soap—strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars;
and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”
“Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman.
“That sets a man up.”
“Possibly,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde. “But I am forced to say that I
have seen a great many American citizens who didn’t seem at all set up
or in the least like large stock-holders. I never envied them. I rather
think the thing is an accomplishment of your own.”
“Oh, come,” said Newman, “you will make me proud!”
“No, I shall not. You have nothing to do with pride, or with
humility—that is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud
only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have
something to gain.”
“I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “but I certainly have
something to gain.”
“What is it?” asked his visitor.
Newman hesitated a while. “I will tell you when I know you better.”
“I hope that will be soon! Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall
be happy.”
“Perhaps you may,” said Newman.
“Don’t forget, then, that I am your servant,” M. de Bellegarde
answered; and shortly afterwards he took his departure.
During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and
without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established
a sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman,
the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was
concerned with these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing,
more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when
they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the
distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations;
a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally
alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the
last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat
superannuated image of _honor_; he was irresistibly entertaining and
enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of
doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he
was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human
ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in
the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen
are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that
light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two
companions could be more different, but their differences made a
capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic
was that it was extremely amusing to each.
Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue
d’Anjou St. Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court of
the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it—one of those
large, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris
from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they
find their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde’s visit, he hinted
that _his_ lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own.
But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero’s
gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky,
contracted, and crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Bellegarde, penniless
patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were
covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways
draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.
Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in
which the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific; a curtain
recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you
could see nothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows,
you could not sit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the
complete exclusion of fire. The young man’s possessions were in
picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odor of
cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman thought it a
damp, gloomy place to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and
fragmentary character of the furniture.
Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country talked very
generously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private
history with an unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say
about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental and
ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. “Oh, the
women, the women, and the things they have made me do!” he would
exclaim with a lustrous eye. “_C’est égal_, of all the follies and
stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!” On
this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate
largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous
to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even
inconsistent with a fully developed human character. But Bellegarde’s
confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the
generous young Frenchman was not a cynic. “I really think,” he had once
said, “that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They
are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries!” He said wonderfully pretty
things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had
been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm.
“But you are not to take that as advice,” he added. “As an authority I
am very untrustworthy. I’m prejudiced in their favor; I’m an
_idealist!_” Newman listened to him with his impartial smile, and was
glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally
repudiated the idea of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the
amiable sex which he himself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde,
however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical
channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own
life, and Newman told him some better stories than any that Bellegarde
carried in his budget. He narrated his career, in fact, from the
beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion’s
credulity, or his habits of gentility, appeared to protest, it amused
him to heighten the color of the episode. Newman had sat with Western
humorists in knots, round cast-iron stoves, and seen “tall” stories
grow taller without toppling over, and his own imagination had learned
the trick of piling up consistent wonders. Bellegarde’s regular
attitude at last became that of laughing self-defense; to maintain his
reputation as an all-knowing Frenchman, he doubted of everything,
wholesale. The result of this was that Newman found it impossible to
convince him of certain time-honored verities.
“But the details don’t matter,” said M. de Bellegarde. “You have
evidently had some surprising adventures; you have seen some strange
sides of life, you have revolved to and fro over a whole continent as I
walked up and down the Boulevard. You are a man of the world with a
vengeance! You have spent some deadly dull hours, and you have done
some extremely disagreeable things: you have shoveled sand, as a boy,
for supp
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/177