In the Days of My Youth Part 62

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

GUICHET THE MODEL.

To the man who lives alone and walks about with his eyes open, the mere bricks and mortar of a great city are instinct with character. Buildings become to him like living creatures. The streets tell him tales. For him, the house-fronts are written over with hieroglyphics which, to the pa.s.sing crowd, are either unseen or without meaning. Fallen grandeur, pretentious gentility, decent poverty, the infamy that wears a brazen front, and the crime that burrows in darkness--he knows them all at a glance. The patched window, the dingy blind, the shattered doorstep, the pot of mignonette on the garret ledge, are to him as significant as the lines and wrinkles on a human face. He grows to like some houses and to dislike others, almost without knowing why--just as one grows to like or dislike certain faces in the parks and clubs. I remember now, as well as if it were yesterday, how, during the first weeks of my life in Paris, I fell in love at first sight with a wee _maisonnette_ at the corner of a certain street overlooking the Luxembourg gardens--a tiny little house, with soft-looking blue silk window-curtains, and cream-colored jalousies, and boxes of red and white geraniums at all the windows. I never knew who lived in that sunny little nest; I never saw a face at any of those windows; yet I used to go out of my way in the summer evenings to look at it, as one might go to look at a beautiful woman behind a stall in the market-place, or at a Madonna in a shop-window.

At the time about which I write, there was probably no city in Europe of which the street-scenery was so interesting as that of Paris. I have already described the Quartier Latin, joyous, fantastic, out-at-elbows; a world in itself and by itself; unlike anything else in Paris or elsewhere. But there were other districts in the great city--now swept away and forgotten--as characteristic in their way as the Quartier Latin. There was the He de Saint Louis, for instance--a _Campo Santo_ of decayed n.o.bility--lonely, silent, fallen upon evil days, and haunted here and there by ghosts of departed Marquises and Abbes of the _vieille ecole_. There was the debateable land to the rear of the Invalides and the Champ de Mars. There was the Faubourg St. Germain, fast falling into the sere and yellow leaf, and going the way of the Ile de Saint Louis.

There was the neighborhood of the Boulevart d'Aulnay, and the Rue de la Roquette, ghastly with the trades of death; a whole Quartier of monumental sculptors, makers of iron crosses, weavers of funereal chaplets, and wholesale coffin-factors. And beside and apart from all this, there were (as in all great cities) districts of evil report and obscure topography--lost islets of crime, round which flowed and circled the daily tide of Paris life; flowed and circled, yet never penetrated.

A dark arch here and there--the mouth of a foul alley--a riverside vista of gloom and squalor, marked the entrance to these Alsatias. Such an Alsatia was the Rue Pierre Lescot, the Rue Sans Nom, and many more than I can now remember--streets into which no sane man would venture after nightfall without the escort of the police.

Into the border land of such a neighborhood--a certain congeries of obscure and labyrinthine streets to the rear of the old Halles--I accompanied Franz Muller one wintry afternoon, about an hour before sunset, and perhaps some ten days after our evening in the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis. We were bound on an expedition of discovery, and the object of our journey was to find the habitat of Guichet the model.

"I am determined to get to the bottom of this Lenoir business," said Muller, doggedly; "and if the police won't help me, I must help myself."

"You have no case for the police," I replied.

"So says the _chef de bureau_; but I am of the opposite opinion.

However, I shall make my case out clearly enough before long. This Guichet can help me, if he will. He knows Lenoir, and he knows something against him; that is clear. You saw how cautious he was the other day.

The difficulty will be to make him speak."

"I doubt if you will succeed."

"I don't, _mon cher_. But we shall see. Then, again, I have another line of evidence open to me. You remember that orange-colored rosette in the fellow's b.u.t.ton-hole?"

"Certainly I do."

"Well, now, I happen, by the merest chance, to know what that rosette means. It is the ribbon of the third order of the Golden Palm of Mozambique--a Portuguese decoration. They give it to diplomatic officials, eminent civilians, distinguished foreigners, and the like. I know a fellow who has it, and who belongs to the Portuguese Legation here. _Eh bien!_ I went to him the other day, and asked him about our said friend--how he came by it, who he is, where he comes from, and so forth. My Portuguese repeats the name--elevates his eyebrows--in short, has never heard of such a person. Then he pulls down a big book from a shelf in the secretary's room--turns to a page headed 'Golden Palm of Mozambique'--runs his finger along the list of names--shakes his head, and informs me that no Lenoir is, or ever has been, received into the order. What do you say to that, now?"

"It is just what I should have expected; but still it is not a ease for the police. It concerns the Portuguese minister; and the Portuguese minister is by no means likely to take any trouble about the matter. But why waste all this time and care? If I were you, I would let the thing drop. It is not worth the cost."

Muller looked grave.

"I would drop it this moment," he said, "if--if it were not for the girl."

"Who is still less worth the cost,"

"I know it," he replied, impatiently. "She has a pretty, sentimental Madonna face; a sweet voice; a gentle manner--_et voila tout_. I'm not the least bit in love with her now. I might have been. I might have committed some great folly for her sake; but that danger is past, _Dieu merci!_ I couldn't love a girl I couldn't trust, and that girl is a flirt. A flirt of the worst sort, too--demure, serious, conventional.

No, no; my fancy for the fair Marie has evaporated; but, for all that, I don't relish the thought of what her fate might be if linked for life to an unscrupulous scoundrel like Lenoir. I must do what I can, my dear fellow--I must do what I can."

We had by this time rounded the Halles, and were threading our way through one gloomy by-street after another. The air was chill, the sky low and rainy; and already the yellow glow of an oil-lamp might be seen gleaming through the inner darkness of some of the smaller shops.

Meanwhile, the dusk seemed to gather at our heels, and to thicken at every step.

"You are sure you know your way?" I asked presently, seeing Muller look up at the name at the corner of the street.

"Why, yes; I think I do," he answered, doubtfully.

"Why not inquire of that man just ahead?" I suggested.

He was a square-built, burly, shabby-looking fellow, and was striding along so fast that we had to quicken our pace in order to come up with him. All at once Muller fell back, laid his hand on my arm, and said:--

"Stop! It is Guichet himself. Let him go on, and we'll follow."

So we dropped into the rear and followed him. He turned presently to the right, and preceded us down a long and horribly ill-favored street, full of mean cabarets and lodging-houses of the poorest cla.s.s, where, painted in red letters on broken lamps above the doors, or printed on cards wafered against the window-panes, one saw at almost every other house, the words, "_Ici on loge la nuit_." At the end of this thoroughfare our unconscious guide plunged into a still darker and fouler _impa.s.se_, hung across from side to side with rows of dingy linen, and ornamented in the centre with a mound of decaying cabbage-leaves, potato-parings, oyster-sh.e.l.ls, and the like. Here he made for a large tumble-down house that closed the alley at the farther end, and, still followed by ourselves, went in at an open doorway, and up a public staircase dimly lighted by a flickering oil-lamp at every landing. At his own door he paused, and just as he had turned the key, Muller accosted him.

"Is that you, Guichet?" he said. "Why, you are the very man I want! If I had come ten minutes sooner, I should have missed you."

"Is it M'sieur Muller?" said Guichet, bending his heavy brows and staring at us in the gloom of the landing.

"Ay, and with me the friend you saw the other day. So, this is your den?

May we come in?"

He had been standing till now with his hand on the key and the closed door at his back, evidently not intending to admit us; but thus asked, he pushed the door open, and said, somewhat ungraciously:--

"It is just that, M'sieur Muller--a den; not fit for gentlemen like you.

But you can go in, if you please."

We did not wait for a second invitation, but went in immediately. It was a long, low, dark room, with a pale gleam of fading daylight struggling in through a tiny window at the farther end. We could see nothing at first but this gleam; and it was not till Guichet had raked out the wood ashes on the hearth, and blown them into a red glow with his breath, that we could distinguish the form or position of anything in the room.

Then, by the flicker of the fire, we saw a low truckle-bed close under the window; a kind of bruised and battered seaman's chest in the middle of the room; a heap of firewood in one corner; a pile of old packing-cases; old sail-cloth, old iron, and all kinds of rubbish in another; a few pots and pans over the fire-place; and a dilapidated stool or two standing about the room. Avoiding these latter, we set ourselves down upon the edge of the chest; while Guichet, having by this time lit a piece of candle-end in a tin sconce against the wall, stood before us with folded arms, and stared at us in silence.

"I want to know, Guichet, if you can give me some sittings," said Muller, by way of opening the conversation.

"Depends on when, M'sieur Muller," growled the model.

"Well--next week, for the whole week."

Guichet shook his head. He was engaged to Monsieur Flandrin _la bas_, for the next month, from twelve to three daily, and had only his mornings and evenings to dispose of; in proof of which he pulled out a greasy note-book and showed where the agreement was formally entered.

Muller made a grimace of disappointment.

"That man's head takes a deal of cutting off, _mon ami_," he said.

"Aren't you tired of playing executioner so long?"

"Not I, M'sieur! It's all the same to me--executioner or victim, saint or devil."

Muller, laughing, offered him a cigar.

"You've posed for some queer characters in your time, Guichet," said he.

"Parbleu, M'sieur!"

"But you've not been a model all your life?"

"Perhaps not, M'sieur."

"You've been a sailor once upon a time, haven't you?"

The model looked up quickly.

"How did you know that?" he said, frowning.