The Nabob - Alphonse Daudet (read ebook pdf TXT) 📗

in a little Moorish lantern. Here one could enjoy a siesta during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of a Cardailhac stop at this. Remarking the taste of the Demoiselle Afchin for the drama, he had ended by persuading her that she also possessed the intuition, the knowledge of it, and by begging her when she had nothing better to do to glance over and let him know what she thought of the pieces that were submitted to him. A good way of cementing the partnership more firmly.
Poor manuscripts in your blue or yellow covers, bound by hope with fragile ribbons, that set out full of ambition and dreams, who knows what hands may touch you, turn over your pages, what indiscreet fingers deflower your charm, the charm of the unknown, that glittering dust which lies on new ideas? Who may judge you and who condemn? Sometimes, before dining out, Jansoulet, mounting to his wife's room, would find her on her lounge, smoking, her head thrown back, bundles of manuscripts by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his thick voice and with the Bourg-Saint-Andeol accent, some dramatic lucubration which he cut and scored without pity at the least criticism from the lady.
"Don't disturb yourselves," the good Nabob would signal with his hand, entering on tiptoe. He would listen, shake his head with an admiring air, as he watched his wife: "She is astonishing!" for he himself understood nothing about literature, and there, at least, he could discover once again the superiority of Mlle. Afchin.
"She had the instinct of the stage," as Cardailhac used to say; but, on the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her. Never did she take any interest in her children, abandoning them to the hands of strangers, and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting herself with offering to them the flaccid and inanimate flesh of her cheeks between two puffs of cigarette-smoke, without making any inquiries into those details of their bringing up and of their health which perpetuate the physical bond of maternity and make the hearts of true mothers bleed at the least suffering of their children.
They were three big, dull and apathetic boys of eleven, nine, and seven years, having, with the sallow complexion and the precocious bloatedness of the Levantine, the kind, black, velvety eyes of their father. They were ignorant as young lords of the middle ages. At Tunis, M. Bompain had directed their studies; but at Paris, the Nabob, anxious to give them the benefit of a Parisian education, had sent them to that smartest and most expensive of boarding-schools, the College Bourdaloue, managed by good priests who sought less to instruct their pupils than to make of them good-mannered and right-thinking men of the world, and succeeded in turning them out affectedly grave and ridiculous little prigs, disdainful of games, absolutely ignorant, without anything spontaneous or boyish about them, and of a desperate precocity. The little Jansoulets were not very happy in this forcing-house, notwithstanding the immunities which they enjoyed by reason of their immense wealth; they were, indeed, utterly left to themselves. Even the creoles in the charge of the institution had some friend whom they visited and people who came to see them; but the Jansoulets were never summoned to the parlour, no one knew any of their relatives; from time to time they received basketfuls of sweetmeats, piles of confectionery, and that was all. The Nabob, doing some shopping in Paris, would strip for them the whole of a pastry-cook's window and send the spoils to the college, with that generous impulse of the heart mingled with negro ostentation which characterized all his actions. It was the same in the matter of playthings. They were always too pretty, tricked out too finely, useless--those toys that are for show but which the Parisian does not buy. But that which above all attracted to the little Jansoulets the respect both of pupils and masters, were their purses heavy with gold, ever ready for school subscriptions, for the professors' birthdays, and the charity visits, those famous visits organized by the College Bourdaloue, one of the tempting things in the prospectus, the marvel of sensitive souls.
Twice a month, turn and turn about, the pupils who were members of the miniature Society of St. Vincent de Paul founded in the college upon the model of the great one, went in little squads, alone, as though they had been grown-up, to bear succour and consolation into the deepest recesses of the more densely populated quarters of the town. This was designed to teach them a practical charity, the art of knowing the needs, the miseries of the lower classes, and to heal these heart-rending evils by a nostrum of kind words and ecclesiastical maxims. To console, to evangelize the masses by the help of childhood, to disarm religious incredulity by the youth and _naivete_ of the apostles, such was the aim of this little society; an aim entirely missed, moreover. The children, healthy, well-dressed, well-fed, calling only at addresses previously selected, found poor persons of good appearance, sometimes rather unwell, but very clean, already on the parish register and in receipt of aid from the wealthy organization of the Church. Never did they chance to enter one of those nauseous dwellings wherein hunger, grief, humiliation, all physical and moral ills are written in leprous mould on the walls, in indelible lines on the brows. Their visits were prepared for, like that of the sovereign who enters a guard-room to taste the soldiers' soup: the guard-room is warmed and the soup seasoned for the royal palate. Have you seen those pictures in pious books, where a little communicant, with candle in hand, and perfectly groomed, comes to minister to a poor old man lying sick on his straw pallet and turning the whites of his eyes to heaven? These visits of charity had the same conventionality of setting and of accent. To the measured gestures of the little preachers were corresponding words learned by heart and false enough to make one squint. To the comic encouragement, to the "consolations lavished" in prize-book phrases by the voices of young urchins with colds, were the affecting benedictions, the whining and piteous mummeries of a church-porch after vespers. And the moment the young visitors departed, what an explosion of laughter and shouting in the garret, what a dance in a circle round the present brought, what an upsetting of the arm-chair in which one had pretended to be lying ill, of the medicine spilt in the fire, a fire of cinders very artistically prepared!
When the little Jansoulets went out to visit their parents at home, they were intrusted to the care of the man with the red fez, the indispensable Bompain. It was Bompain who conducted them to the Champs-Elysees, clad in English jackets, bowler hats of the latest fashion--at seven years old!--and carrying little canes in their dog-skin-gloved hands. It was Bompain who stuffed the race-wagonette with provisions. Here he mounted with the children, who, with their entrance-cards stuck in their hats round which green veils were twisted, looked very like those personages in Liliputian pantomimes whose entire funniness lies in the enormous size of their heads compared with their small legs and dwarf-like gestures. They smoked and drank; it was a painful sight. Sometimes the man in the fez, hardly able to hold himself upright, would bring them home frightfully sick. And yet Jansoulet was fond of them, the youngest especially, who, with his long hair, his doll-like manner, recalled to him the little Afchin passing in her carriage. But they were still of the age when children belong to the mother, when neither the fashionable tailor, nor the most accomplished masters, nor the smart boarding-school, nor the ponies girthed specially for the little men in the stable, nor anything else can replace the attentive and caressing hand, the warmth and the gaiety of the home-nest. The father could not give them that; and then, too, he was so busy!
A thousand irons in the fire: the Territorial Bank, the installation of the picture gallery, drives to Tattersall's with Bois l'Hery, some _bibelot_ to inspect, here or there, at the houses of collectors indicated by Schwalbach, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers in curiosities, the encumbered and multiple existence of a _bourgeois gentilhomme_ in modern Paris. This rubbing of shoulders with all sorts and conditions of people brought him improvement, in that each day he was becoming a little more Parisianized; he was received at Monpavon's club, in the green-room of the ballet, behind the scenes at the theatres, and presided regularly at his famous bachelor luncheons, the only receptions possible in his household. His existence was really a very busy one, and de Gery relieved him of the heaviest part of it, the complicated department of appeals and of charities.
The young man now became acquainted with all the audacious and burlesque inventions, all the serio-comic combinations of that mendicancy of great cities, organized like a department of state, innumerable as an army, which subscribes to the newspapers and knows its _Bottin_ by heart. He received the blonde lady, bold, young, and already faded, who only asks for a hundred napoleons, with the threat that she will throw herself into the river when she leaves if they are not given to her, and the stout matron of prepossessing and unceremonious manner, who says, as she enters: "Sir, you do not know me. Neither have I the honour of knowing you. But we shall soon make each other's acquaintance. Be kind enough to sit down and let us have a chat." The merchant at bay, on the verge of bankruptcy--sometimes it is true--who comes to entreat you to save his honour, with a pistol ready to shoot himself, bulging out the pocket of his overcoat--sometimes it is only his pipe-case. And often genuine distresses, wearisome and prolix, of people who are unable even to tell how little competent they are to earn a livelihood. Side by side with this open begging, there was that which wears various kinds of disguise: charity, philanthropy, good works, the encouragement of projects of art, the house-to-house begging for infant asylums, parish churches, rescued women, charitable societies, local libraries. Finally, those who wear a society mask, with tickets for concerts, benefit performances, entrance-cards of all colours, "platform, front seats, reserved seats." The Nabob insisted that no refusals should be given, and it was a concession that he no longer burdened his own shoulders with such matters. For quite a long time, in generous indifference, he had gone on covering with gold all that hypocritical exploitation, paying five hundred francs for a ticket for the concert of some Wurtemberg cithara-player or Languedocian flutist, which at the Tuileries or at the Duc de Mora's might have fetched ten francs. There were days when the young de Gery issued from these audiences nauseated. All the honesty of his youth revolted; he approached the Nabob with schemes of reform. But the Nabob's face, at the first word, would assume the bored expression of weak natures when they have to make a decision, or he would perhaps reply: "But that is Paris, my dear boy. Don't get frightened or interfere with my plans. I know what I am doing and what I want."
At that time he wanted two things: a deputyship and the cross of the Legion of Honour. These were for him the first two stages of the great ascent to which his ambition pushed him. Deputy he would certainly be through the influence of the Territorial Bank, at the head of which he stood. Paganetti of Porto-Vecchio was often saying it to him: "When the day arrives, the island will rise and vote for you