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

have told me nothing, I have heard nothing."
The Nabob, still heated with his burst of confidence, which demanded, it seemed to him, a cordial response, a pressure of the hand, was seized with a strange uneasiness. This coolness, this absent look, so unnerved him that he was at the door with the awkward bow of one who feels himself importunate, when the other stopped him.
"Wait, then, my dear colleague. What a hurry you are in to leave me! A few moments, I beg of you. I am too happy to have a chat with a man like you. Besides, we have more than one common bond. Our friend Hemerlingue has told me that you, too, are much interested in pictures."
Jansoulet trembled. The two words--"Hemerlingue," "pictures"--meeting in the same phrase so unexpectedly, restored all his doubts, all his perplexities. He did not give himself away yet, however, and let Le Merquier advance, word by word, testing the ground for his stumbling advances. People had told him often of the collection of his honourable colleague. "Would it be indiscreet to ask the favour of being admitted, to--"
"On the contrary, I should feel much honoured," said the Nabob, tickled in the most sensible--since the most costly--point of his vanity; and looking round him at the walls of the room, he added with the tone of a connoisseur, "You have some fine things, too."
"Oh," said the other modestly, "just a few canvases. Painting is so dear now, it is a taste so difficult to satisfy, a true passion _de luxe_--a passion for a Nabob," said he, smiling, with a furtive look over his glasses.
They were two prudent players, face to face; but Jansoulet was a little astray in this new situation, where he who only knew how to be bold, had to be on his guard.
"When I think," murmured the lawyer, "that I have been ten years covering these walls, and that I have still this panel to fill."
In fact, at the most conspicuous place on the wall there was an empty place, emptied rather, for a great gold-headed nail near the ceiling showed the visible, almost clumsy, trace of a snare laid for the poor simpleton, who let himself be taken in it so foolishly.
"My dear M. Le Merquier," said he with his engaging, good-natured voice, "I have a Virgin of Tintoretto's just the size of your panel."
Impossible to read anything in the eyes of the lawyer, this time hidden under their overhanging brows.
"Permit me to hang it there, opposite your table. That will help you to think sometimes of me."
"And to soften the severities of my report, too, sir?" cried Le Merquier, formidable and upright, his hand on the bell. "I have seen many shameless things in my life, but never anything like this. Such offers to me, in my own house!"
"But, my dear colleague, I swear to you----"
"Show him out," said the lawyer to the hang-dog servant who had just entered; and from the middle of his office, whose door remained open, before all the waiting-room, where the paternosters were silent, he pursued Jansoulet--who slunk off murmuring excuses to the door--with these terrible words:
"You have outraged the honour of the Chamber in my person, sir. Our colleagues shall be informed of it this very day; and, this crime coming after your others, you will learn to your cost that Paris is not the East, and that here we do not make shameless traffic of the human conscience."
Then, after having chased the seller from the temple, the just man closed his door, and approaching the mysterious green curtain, said in a tone that sounded soft amidst his pretended anger:
"Is that what you wanted, Baroness Marie?"


THE SITTING
That morning there were no guests to lunch at 32 Place Vendome, so that towards one o'clock might have been seen the majestic form of M. Barreau, gleaming white at the gate, among four or five of his scullions in their cook's caps, and as many stable-boys in Scotch caps--an imposing group, which gave to the house the aspect of an hotel where the staff was taking the air between the arrivals of the trains. To complete the resemblance, a cab drew up before the door and the driver took down an old leather trunk, while a tall old woman, her upright figure wrapped in a little green shawl, jumped lightly to the footpath, a basket on her arm, looked at the number with great attention, then approached the servants to ask if it was there that M. Bernard Jansoulet lived.
"It is here," was the answer; "but he is not in."
"That does not matter," said the old lady simply.
She returned to the driver, who put her trunk in the porch, and paid him, returning her purse to her pocket at once with a gesture that said much for the caution of the provincial.
Since Jansoulet had been deputy for Corsica, the domestics had seen so many strange and exotic figures at his house, that they were not surprised at this sunburnt woman, with eyes glowing like coals, a true Corsican under her severe coif, but different from the ordinary provincial in the ease and tranquility of her manners.
"What, the master is not here?" said she, with an intonation which seemed better fitted for farm people in her part of the country, than for the insolent servants of a great Parisian mansion.
"No, the master is not here."
"And the children?"
"They are at lessons. You cannot see them."
"And madame?"
"She is asleep. No one sees her before three o'clock."
It seemed to astonish the good woman a little that any one could stay in bed so late; but the tact which guides a refined nature, even without education, prevented her from saying anything before the servants, and she asked for Paul de Gery.
"He is abroad."
"Bompain Jean-Baptiste, then."
"He is with monsieur at the sitting."
Her great gray eyebrows wrinkled.
"It does not matter; take up my trunk just the same."
And with a little malicious twinkle of her eye, a proud revenge for their insolent looks, she added: "I am his mother."
The scullions and stable-boys drew back respectfully. M. Barreau raised his cap:
"I thought I had seen madame somewhere."
"And I too, my lad," answered Mme. Jansoulet, who shivered still at the remembrance of the Bey's _fete_.
"My lad," to M. Barreau, to a man of his importance! It raised her at once to a very high place in the esteem of the others.
Well! grandeur and splendour hardly dazzled this courageous old lady. She did not go into ecstasies over gilding and petty baubles, and as she walked up the grand staircase behind her trunk, the baskets of flowers on the landings, the lamps held by bronze statues, did not prevent her from noticing that there was an inch of dust on the balustrade, and holes in the carpet. She was taken to the rooms on the second floor belonging to the Levantine and her children; and there, in an apartment used as a linen-room, which seemed to be near the school-room (to judge by the murmur of children's voices), she waited alone, her basket on her knees, for the return of her Bernard, perhaps the waking of her daughter-in-law, or the great joy of embracing her grandchildren. What she saw around her gave her an idea of the disorder of this house left to the care of the servants, without the oversight and foreseeing activity of a mistress. The linen was heaped in disorder, piles on piles in great wide-open cupboards, fine linen sheets and table-cloths crumpled up, the locks prevented from shutting by pieces of torn lace, which no one took the trouble to mend. And yet there were many servants about--negresses in yellow Madras muslin, who came to snatch here a towel, there a table-cloth, walking among the scattered domestic treasures, dragging with their great flat feet frills of fine lace from a petticoat which some lady's-maid had thrown down--thimble here, scissors there--ready to pick up again in a few minutes.
Jansoulet's mother was doubly wounded. The half-rustic artisan in her was outraged in the tenderness, the respect, the sweet unreasonableness the woman of the provinces feels towards a full linen cupboard--a cupboard filled piece by piece, full of relics of past struggles, whose contents grow finer little by little, the first token of comfort, of wealth, in the house. Besides, she had held the distaff from morning till night, and if the housewife in her was angry, the spinner could have wept at the profanation. At last, unable to contain herself longer, she rose, and actively, her little shawl displaced at each movement, she set herself to pick up, straighten, and carefully fold this magnificent linen, as she used to do in the fields of Saint-Romans, when she gave herself the treat of a grand washing-day, with twenty washerwomen, the clothes-baskets flowing over with floating whiteness, and the sheets flapping in the morning wind on the clothes-lines. She was in the midst of this occupation, forgetting her journey, forgetting Paris, even the place where she was, when a stout, thick-set, bearded man, with varnished boots and a velvet jacket, over the torso of a bull, came into the linen-room.
"What! Cabassu!"
"You here, Mme. Francoise! What a surprise!" said the _masseur_, staring like a bronze figure.
"Yes, my brave Cabassu, it is I. I have just arrived; and as you see, I am at work already. It made my heart bleed to see all this muddle."
"You came up for the sitting, then?"
"What sitting?"
"Why, the grand sitting of the legislative body. It's do-day."
"Dear me, no. What has that got to do with me? I should understand nothing at all about it. No, I came because I wanted to know my little Jansoulets, and then, I was beginning to feel uneasy. I have written several times without getting an answer. I was afraid that there was a child sick, that Bernard's business was going wrong--all sorts of ideas. At last I got seriously worried, and came away at once. They are well here, they tell me."
"Yes, Mme. Francoise. Thank God, every one is quite well."
"And Bernard. His business--is that going on as he wants it to?"
"Well, you know one has always one's little worries in life--still, I don't think he should complain. But, now I think of it, you must be hungry. I will go and make them bring you something."
He was going to ring, more at home and at ease than the old mother herself. She stopped him.
"No, no, I don't want anything. I have still something left in my basket." And she put two figs and a crust of bread on the edge of the table. Then, while she was eating: "And you, lad, your business? You look very much sprucer than you did the last time you were at Bourg. How smart you are! What do you do in the house?"
"Professor of massage," said Aristide gravely.
"Professor--you?" said she with respectful astonishment; but she did not dare ask him what he taught, and Cabassu, who felt such questions a little embarrassing, hastened to change the subject.
"Shall I go and find the children? Haven't they told them that their grandmother is here?"
"I didn't want to disturb them at their work. But I believe it must be over now--listen!"
Behind the door they could hear the shuffling impatience of the children anxious to be out in the open air, and the old woman enjoyed this state of things, doubling her maternal desire, and hindering her from doing anything to hasten its pleasure. At last the door opened. The tutor came out first--a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great _dejeuners_. On bad