The Nabob Volume I Part 2

THE NABOB.

A hundred years ago Le Sage wrote these words at the head of _Gil Blas_:

"As there are persons who cannot read a book without making personal application of the vicious or absurd characters they find therein, I hereby declare for the benefit of such evil-minded readers that they will err in making such application of the portraits in this book. I make public avowal that my only aim has been to represent the life of mankind as it is."

Without attempting to draw any comparison between Le Sage's novel and my own, I may say that I should have liked to place a declaration of the same nature on the first page of _The Nabob_, at the time of its publication. Several reasons prevented my doing so. In the first place, the fear that such an advertis.e.m.e.nt might seem too much like a bait thrown out to the public, an attempt to compel its attention. Secondly, I was far from suspecting that a book written with a purely literary purpose could acquire at a bound such anecdotal importance, and bring down upon me such a buzzing swarm of complaints. Indeed, such a thing was never seen before. Not a line of my work, not one of its heroes, not even a character of secondary importance, but has become a pretext for allusions and protestations. To no purpose does the author deny the imputation, swear by all the G.o.ds that there is no key to his novel--every one forges at least one, with whose a.s.sistance he claims to open that combination lock. It must be that all these types have lived, bless my soul! that they live to-day, exactly identical from head to foot. Monpavon is So-and-So, is he not? Jenkins' resemblance is striking. One man is angry because he is in it, another one because he is not in it; and, beginning with this eagerness for scandal, there is nothing, not even chance similarities of name, fatal in the modern novel, descriptions of streets, numbers of houses selected at random, that has not served to give ident.i.ty to beings built of a thousand pieces and, moreover, absolutely imaginary.

The author is too modest to take all this outcry to himself. He knows how great a part the friendly or treacherous indiscretions of the newspapers have had therein; and without thanking the former more than is seemly, without too great ill-will to the latter, he resigns himself to the stormy prospect as something inevitable, and simply deems himself in duty bound to affirm that he has never, in twenty years of upright, literary toil, resorted to that element of success, neither on this occasion nor on any other. As he turned the leaves of his memory, which it is every novelist's right and duty to do, he recalled a strange episode that occurred in cosmopolitan Paris some fifteen years ago. The romance of a dazzling career that shot swiftly across the Parisian sky like a meteor evidently served as the frame-work of _The Nabob_, a picture of manners and morals at the close of the Second Empire. But around that central situation and certain well-known incidents, which it was every one's right to study and revive, what a world of fancy, what inventions, what elaboration, and, above all, what an outlay of that incessant, universal, almost unconscious observation, without which there could be no imaginative writers. Furthermore, to obtain an idea of the "crystallizing" labor involved in transporting the simplest circ.u.mstances from reality to fiction, from life to romance, one need only open the _Moniteur Officiel_ of February, 1864, and compare a certain session of the Corps Legislatif with the picture that I give of it in my book. Who could have supposed that, after the lapse of so many years, this Paris, famous for its short memory, would recognize the original model in the idealized picture the novelist has drawn of him, and that voices would be raised to charge with ingrat.i.tude one who most a.s.suredly was not his hero's "a.s.siduous guest," but simply, in their infrequent meetings, an inquisitive acquaintance on whose mind the truth is quickly photographed, and who can never efface from his memory the images that are once imprinted thereon?

I knew the "real Nabob" in 1864. I occupied at that time a semi-official position which forced me to exhibit great reserve in my visits to that luxurious and hospitable Levantine. Later I was intimately a.s.sociated with one of his brothers; but at that time the poor Nabob was far away, struggling through thickets of cruel brambles, and he was seen at Paris only occasionally. Moreover, it is very unpleasant for a courteous man to reckon thus with the dead, and to say: "You are mistaken. Although he was an agreeable host, I was not often seen at his table." Let it suffice therefore, for me to declare that, in speaking of Mere Francoise's son as I have done, it has been my purpose to represent him in a favorable light, and that the charge of ingrat.i.tude seems to me an absurdity from every standpoint. That this is true is proved by the fact that many people consider the portrait too flattering, more interesting than nature. To such people my reply is very simple: "Jansoulet strikes me as an excellent fellow; but at all events, if I am wrong, you can blame the newspapers for telling you his real name. I gave you my novel as a novel, good or bad, without any guaranty of resemblances."

As to Mora, that is another matter. Something has been said of indiscretion, of political defection. Great Heaven! I have never made a secret of it. At the age of twenty, I was connected with the office of the high functionary who has served as my model; and my friends of those days know what a serious political personage I made. The Department also must have strange recollections of that eccentric clerk with the Merovingian beard, who was always the last to arrive and the first to depart, and who never went up to the duke's private office except to ask leave of absence; of a naturally independent character, too, with hands unstained by anything like sycophancy, and so little reconciled to the Empire that, on the day when the duke proposed to him to enter his service, the future attache deemed it his duty to declare with touching juvenile solemnity that "he was a Legitimist."

"So is the Empress," was His Excellency's reply, and he smiled with calm and impertinent condescension. I always saw him with that smile on his face, nor had I any need to look through keyholes; and I have drawn him so, as he loved to appear, in his Richelieu-Brummel att.i.tude.

History will attend to the statesman. I have exhibited him, introducing him at long range in my fict.i.tious drama, as the worldly creature that he was and wished to be, being well a.s.sured that in his lifetime it would not have offended him to be so presented.

This is what I had to say. And now, having made these declarations in all frankness, let us return to work with all speed. My preface will seem a little short, and the curious reader will seek in vain therein the antic.i.p.ated piquancy. So much the worse for him. Brief as this page may be, it is three times too long for me. Prefaces have this disadvantage, that they prevent one from writing books.

ALPHONSE DAUDET.

I.

DOCTOR JENKINS' PATIENTS.

Standing on the stoop of his little house on Rue de Lisbonne, freshly shaved, with sparkling eye, lips slightly parted, long hair tinged with gray falling over a broad coat-collar, square-shouldered, robust, and sound as an oak, the ill.u.s.trious Irish doctor, Robert Jenkins, chevalier of the Medjidie and of the distinguished order of Charles III. of Spain, member of several learned and benevolent societies, founder and president of the Work of Bethlehem,--in a word, Jenkins, the Jenkins of the Jenkins a.r.s.enical Pills, that is to say, the fashionable physician of the year 1864, and the busiest man in Paris, was on the point of entering his carriage, one morning toward the end of November, when a window on the first floor looking on the inner courtyard was thrown open, and a woman's voice timidly inquired:

"Shall you return to breakfast, Robert?"

Oh! what a bright, affectionate smile it was that suddenly illumined that handsome, apostle-like face, and how readily one could divine, in the loving good-morning that his eyes sent up to the warm white peignoir visible behind the parted hangings, one of those tranquil, undoubting conjugal pa.s.sions, which custom binds with its most flexible and strongest bonds.

"No, Madame Jenkins"--he loved to give her thus publicly her t.i.tle of legitimate wife, as if he felt a secret satisfaction therein, a sort of salve to his conscience with respect to the woman who made life so attractive to him--"No, do not expect me this morning. I am to breakfast on Place Vendome."

"Ah! yes, the Nabob," said the lovely Madame Jenkins, with a very marked inflection of respect for that personage out of the _Thousand and One Nights_, of whom all Paris had been talking for a month; then, after a moment's hesitation, she whispered between the heavy hangings, very softly, very lovingly, for the doctor's ear alone: "Be sure and not forget what you promised me."

It was probably a promise very difficult to keep, for, at the reminder, the apostle's brows contracted, his smile froze upon his lips, his whole face a.s.sumed an incredibly harsh expression; but it was a matter of a moment. The faces of these fashionable physicians become very expert in lying, by the bedsides of their wealthy patients. With his most affectionate, most cordial manner, and showing a row of dazzling teeth, he replied:

"What I promised shall be done, Madame Jenkins. Now, go in at once and close your window. The mist is cold this morning."

Yes, the mist was cold, but white as snow; and, hovering outside the windows of the comfortable coupe, it lighted up with soft reflections the newspaper in the doctor's hands. Over yonder in the dark, crowded, populous quarters, in the Paris of tradesmen and workmen, they know nothing of the pretty morning mist that loiters on the broad avenues; the bustle of the waking hours, the pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing of market-gardeners' wagons, omnibuses, drays loaded with old iron, soon chop it and rend it and scatter it. Each pa.s.ser-by carries away a little of it on a threadbare coat, a worn m.u.f.fler, or coa.r.s.e gloves rubbing against each other. It drenches the shivering blouses, the waterproofs thrown over working dresses; it blends with all the breaths, hot with insomnia or alcohol, buries itself in the depths of empty stomachs, penetrates the shops which are just opening their doors, dark courtyards, staircases, where it stands on the bal.u.s.ters and walls, and fireless garrets. That is why so little of it remains out-of-doors. But in that open, stately portion of Paris where Dr.

Jenkins' patients lived, on those broad tree-lined boulevards, those deserted quays, the mist soared immaculate, in innumerable waves, as light and fleecy as down. It was compact, discreet, almost luxurious, because the sun, slothful in his rising, was beginning to diffuse soft, purplish tints, which gave to the mist that enveloped everything, even the roofs of the rows of mansions, the aspect of a sheet of white muslin spread over scarlet cloth. One would have said that it was a great curtain sheltering the long, untroubled sleep of wealth, a thick curtain behind which nothing could be heard save the soft closing of a porte-cochere, the rattling of the milkmen's tin cans, the bells of a herd of a.s.ses trotting by, followed by the short, panting breath of their conductor, and the rumbling of Jenkins' coupe beginning its daily round.

First of all, to the hotel de Mora. On the Quai d'Orleans, beside the Spanish emba.s.sy, stood a superb palace with its princ.i.p.al entrance on Rue de Lille, and a door on the riverside, and long terraces which formed a continuation of those of the emba.s.sy. Between two high, ivy-covered walls, connected by imposing stone arches, the coupe flew like an arrow, announced by two strokes of a clanging bell, which aroused Jenkins from the trance in which the perusal of his newspaper seemed to have plunged him. Then the wheels rolled less noisily over the gravel of a vast courtyard and stopped, after a graceful sweep, at the front steps, above which was spread a circular awning. One could see indistinctly through the mist half a score of carriages in a line, and the silhouettes of English grooms leading the duke's saddle-horse up and down an avenue of acacias, all leafless at that season and standing naked in their bark. Everything revealed well-ordered, pompous, a.s.sured luxury.

"It makes no difference how early I come, others are always here before me," said Jenkins, glancing at the line in which his coupe took its place; but, certain of not being compelled to wait, with head erect and a tranquil air of authority, he went up the official steps, over which so many trembling ambitions, so many stumbling anxieties pa.s.sed every day.

Even in the reception-room, high-studded, and resonant as a church, which two huge fires filled with gleaming life, notwithstanding the great stoves burning day and night, the magnificence of the establishment burst upon one in warm and heady puffs. There was a suggestion of the hot-house and the drying-room as well. Great heat and abundant light; white wainscoting, white marble statues, immense windows, nothing confined or close, and yet an equable atmosphere well fitted to encompa.s.s the existence of some delicate, over-refined, nervous mortal. Jenkins expanded in that fact.i.tious sunlight of wealth; he saluted with a "good-morning, boys," the powdered Swiss with the broad gilt baldric and the footmen in short clothes and blue and gold livery, all of whom had risen in his honor, touched lightly with his finger the great cage of monkeys capering about with shrill cries, and darted whistling up the white marble stairs covered with a carpet soft and dense as a lawn, to the duke's apartments. Although he had been coming to the hotel de Mora for six months, the good doctor had not yet become hardened to the purely physical impression of cheerfulness and lightness of heart caused by the atmosphere of that house.

Although it was the abode of the highest functionary of the Empire, there was nothing to suggest the departments or their boxes of dusty doc.u.ments. The duke had consented to accept the exalted post of Minister of State and President of the Council only on condition that he need not leave his house; that he should go to the department only an hour or two a day, long enough to affix his signatures to doc.u.ments that required it, and that he should hold his audiences in his bedroom.

At that moment, although it was so early, the salon was full. There were serious, anxious faces, provincial prefects with shaven lips and administrative whiskers, something less arrogant in that reception-room than in their prefectures; magistrates, stern of manner, dignified of gesture; deputies full of importance, shining lights of finance, substantial manufacturers from the country; and among them could be distinguished, here and there, the thin ambitious face of a deputy councillor to some prefecture, in the garb of a solicitor, black coat and white cravat; and one and all, standing or seated, alone or in groups, silently forced with a glance the lock of that lofty door, closed upon their destinies, from which they would come forth in a moment, triumphant or crestfallen. Jenkins walked rapidly through the crowd, and every one followed with an envious eye this new arrival, whom the usher, in his chain of office, frigid and correct in his bearing, seated at a table beside the door, greeted with a smile that was both respectful and familiar.

"Who is with him?" the doctor inquired, pointing to the duke's room.

With the end of his lips, and not without a slightly ironical twinkle of the eye, the usher murmured a name, which, if they had heard it, would have angered all those exalted personages who had been waiting an hour for the _costumier_ of the opera to finish his audience.

A murmur of voices, a flash of light--Jenkins had entered the duke's presence; _he_ never waited.

Standing with his back to the fire, dressed in a blue fur-trimmed jacket, which heightened by its soft reflection the strength and haughtiness of his face, the President of the Council was superintending the drawing of a Pierrette's costume for the d.u.c.h.ess to wear at her next ball, and giving directions with as much gravity as if he were dictating the draft of a law.

"Have very fine pleats on the ruff and none at all on the sleeves.--Good-morning, Jenkins. At your service."

Jenkins bowed and stepped forward into the enormous room, whose windows, opening on a garden that extended to the Seine, commanded one of the loveliest views in all Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the Louvre, interlaced with trees as black as if they were drawn in India ink on the wavering background of the mist. A broad, very low bed on a platform a few steps above the floor, two or three small lacquer screens with vague fanciful decorations in gold, denoting, as did the double doors and the heavy woollen carpet, a dread of cold carried to excess, chairs of various styles, long chairs and low chairs, placed at random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous shapes, composed the furniture of that famous room, where the most momentous and the most trivial questions were discussed with the same gravity of tone and manner. There was a beautiful portrait of the d.u.c.h.ess on the wall; and on the mantel a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which had received the honor of a medal of the first cla.s.s at the recent Salon.

"Well, Jenkins, how goes it this morning?" said His Excellency, walking to meet the doctor, while the costumer was collecting his fashion plates, which were strewn about over all the chairs.

"And you, my dear duke? I fancied that you were a little pale last night at the Varietes."

"Nonsense! I was never so well. Your pills have a most amazing effect on me. I feel so lively, so vigorous. When I think how completely foundered I was six months ago!"

Jenkins, without speaking, had put his great head against the minister's jacket, at the spot where the heart beats in the majority of mankind. He listened a moment while His Excellency continued to talk in the indolent, listless tone which was one of his chief claims to distinction.

"Whom were you with last night, doctor? That great bronzed Tartar who laughed so loud at the front of your box?"

"That was the Nabob, Monsieur le Duc. The famous Jansoulet, who is so much talked about just now."

"I might have suspected it. The whole audience was looking at him. The actresses played at him all the time. Do you know him? What sort of a man is he?"

"I know him. That is, I am treating him. Thanks, my dear duke, that's all. Everything is all right there. When he arrived in Paris a month ago, the change of climate disturbed him a little. He sent for me, and since then has taken a great fancy to me. All that I know of him is that he has a colossal fortune, made in Tunis, in the Bey's service, that he has a loyal heart, a generous mind in which ideas of humanity--"

"At Tunis?" the duke interposed, being naturally far from sentimental and humanitarian. "Then, why the name of Nabob?"

"Bah! Parisians don't look so deep as that. In their eyes every rich stranger is a nabob, no matter where he comes from. This one, however, has just the physique for the part, coppery complexion, eyes like coals of fire, and in addition a gigantic fortune, of which he makes, I have no hesitation in saying, a most n.o.ble and most intelligent use. I owe it to him"--here the doctor a.s.sumed an air of modesty--"I owe it to him that I have succeeded at last in inaugurating the Work of Bethlehem for nursing infants, which a morning newspaper that I was looking over just now--the _Messager_, I think,--calls 'the great philanthropic idea of the century.'"

The duke glanced in an absent-minded way at the sheet the doctor handed him. He was not the man to be taken in by paid puffs.

"This Monsieur Jansoulet must be very wealthy," he said coldly. "He is a partner in Cardailhac's theatre. Monpavon persuades him to pay his debts, Bois-l'Hery stocks his stable for him and old Schwalbach furnishes a picture gallery. All that costs money."

Jenkins began to laugh.

"What can you expect, my dear duke; you are an object of great interest to the poor Nabob. Coming to Paris with a firm purpose to become a Parisian, a man of the world, he has taken you for his model in everything, and I do not conceal from you that he would be very glad to study his model at closer quarters."

"I know, I know, Monpavon has already asked leave to bring him here.

But I prefer to wait and see. One must be on one's guard with these great fortunes that come from such a distance. _Mon Dieu_, I don't say, you know, that if I should meet him elsewhere than in my own house, at the theatre, or in somebody's salon--"