The Nabob

A >> Alphonse Daudet >> The Nabob


"Not even for the doctor?"

"Oh, for nobody. Question of etiquette, _mon cher_. No matter, come in
all the same. You'll warm your feet for a moment while Francis finishes
doing my hair."

Jenkins entered the bed-chamber, a banal place like all furnished
apartments, and moved towards the fire on which there were set to
heat curling-tongs of all sizes, while in the contiguous laboratory,
separated from the room by a curtain of Algerian tapestry, the Marquis
de Monpavon gave himself up to the manipulations of his valet. Odours of
patchouli, of cold-cream, of hartshorn, and of singed hair escaped from
the part of the room which was shut off, and from time to time, when
Francis came to fetch a curling-iron, Jenkins caught sight of a huge
dressing-table laden with a thousand little instruments of ivory, and
mother-of-pearl, with steel files, scissors, puffs, and brushes, with
bottles, with little trays, with cosmetics, labelled and arranged
methodically in groups and lines; and amid all this display, awkward and
already shaky, an old man's hand, shrunken and long, delicately trimmed
and polished about the nails like that of a Japanese painter, which
faltered about among this fine hardware and doll's china.

While continuing the process of making up his face, the longest, the
most complicated of his morning occupations, Monpavon chatted with the
doctor, told of his little ailments, and the good effect of the _pills_.
They made him young again, he said. And at a distance, thus, without
seeing him, one would have taken him for the Duc de Mora, to such
a degree had he usurped his manner of speech. There were the same
unfinished phrases, ended by "ps, ps, ps," muttered between the teeth,
expressions like "What's its name?" "Who was it?" constantly thrown into
what he was saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless,
wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of
speech. In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one
sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an
affectation of simplicity.

Jenkins, finding the sitting rather long, had risen to take his
departure.

"Adieu, I must be off. We shall see you at the Nabob's?"

"Yes, I intend to be there for luncheon. Promised to bring him--what's
his name. Who was it? What? You know, for our big affair--ps, ps, ps.
Were it not for that, should gladly stay away. Real menagerie, that
house."

The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was
rather mixed at his friend's. But then! One could hardly blame him for
it. The poor fellow, he knew no better.

"Neither knows nor is willing to learn," remarked Monpavon with
bitterness. "Instead of consulting people of experience--ps, ps,
ps--first sponger that comes along. Have you seen the horses that Bois
l'Hery has persuaded him to buy? Absolute rubbish those animals. And he
paid twenty thousand francs for them. We may wager that Bois l'Hery got
them for six thousand."

"Oh, for shame--a nobleman!" said Jenkins, with the indignation of a
lofty soul refusing to believe in baseness.

Monpavon continued, without seeming to hear:

"All that because the horses came from Mora's stable."

"It is true that the dear Nabob's heart is very full of the duke. I am
about to make him very happy, therefore, when I inform him----"

The doctor paused, embarrassed.

"When you inform him of what, Jenkins?"

Somewhat abashed, Jenkins had to confess that he had obtained permission
from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely
had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face
and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room
into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very
erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he
was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about
this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold
cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the heavy and
wrinkled eyelid which covered it. Jenkins's patients all had that eye.

Monpavon must indeed have been deeply moved to show himself thus devoid
of all prestige. In point of fact, with white lips and a changed voice
he addressed the doctor quickly, without the lisp this time, and in a
single outburst:

"Come now, _mon cher_, no tomfoolery between us, eh? We are both met
before the same dish, but I leave you your share. I intend that you
shall leave me mine."

And Jenkins's air of astonishment did not make him pause. "Let this be
said once for all. I have promised the Nabob to present him to the duke,
just as, formerly, I presented you. Do not mix yourself up, therefore,
with what concerns me alone."

Jenkins laid his hand on his heart, protested his innocence. He had
never had any intention. Certainly Monpavon was too intimate a friend of
the duke, for any other--How could he have supposed?

"I suppose nothing," said the old nobleman, calmer but still cold.
"I merely desired to have a very clear explanation with you on this
subject."

The Irishman extended a widely opened hand.

"My dear marquis, explanations are always clear between men of honour."

"Honour is a big word, Jenkins. Let us say people of deportment--that
suffices."

And that deportment, which he invoked as the supreme guide of conduct,
recalling him suddenly to the sense of his ludicrous situation, the
marquis offered one finger to his friend's demonstrative shake of the
hand, and passed back with dignity behind his curtain, while the other
left, in haste to resume his round.

What a magnificent clientele he had, this Jenkins! Nothing but princely
mansions, heated staircases, laden with flowers at every landing,
upholstered and silky alcoves, where disease was transformed into
something discreet, elegant, where nothing suggested that brutal hand
which throws on a bed of pain those who only cease to work in order to
die. They were not in any true speech, sick people, these clients of
the Irish doctor. They would have been refused admission to a hospital.
Their organs not possessing even strength to give them a shock, the seat
of their malady was to be discovered nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent
over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those
bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited. They
were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd
life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it
prolonged. And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of
that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.

"Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!"
the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was
reduced to a breath.

"You shall go, my dear child."

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

"Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I
must be at the Cabinet Council."

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of
ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their
last day Jenkins's clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the
devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men
and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d'Antin and the
Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled
personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived
at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a
house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and
entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those
through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold,
tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips
of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint
in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes
and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the
imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered
the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

"Mme. Constance is at mass," he said, "and Mademoiselle is in the studio
quite alone. We have been at work since six o'clock this morning," added
the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making
him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the
chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the
curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was
a splendid sculptor's studio, the front of which, on the street corner,
semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with
pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just
then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms,
which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the
puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason's shed, this
one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in
every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall
and, here and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works
of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was
covered with a piece of black gauze.

The mistress of the house, Felicia Ruys, the daughter of the famous
sculptor and herself already known by two masterpieces, the bust of her
father and that of the Duc de Mora, was standing in the middle of the
studio, occupied in the modelling of a figure. Wearing a tightly fitting
riding-habit of blue cloth with long folds, a fichu of China silk
twisted about her neck like a man's tie, her black, fine hair caught up
carelessly above the antique modelling of her small head, Felicia was
at work with an extreme earnestness which added to her beauty the
concentration, the intensity which are given to the features by an
attentive and satisfied expression. But that changed immediately upon
the arrival of the doctor.

"Ah, it is you," said she brusquely, as though awaked from a dream. "The
bell was rung, then? I did not hear it."

And in the ennui, the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that
adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was
the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was
heightened by the constitutional wildness.

Oh, how the doctor's voice became humble and condescending as he
answered her:

"So you are quite absorbed in your work, my dear Felicia. Is it
something new that you are at work on there? It seems to me very
pretty."

He moved towards the rough and still formless model out of which there
was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound
which was scampering at full speed with a rush that was truly
extraordinary.

"The idea of it came to me last night. I began to work it out by
lamplight. My poor Kadour, he sees no fun in it," said the girl,
glancing with a look of caressing kindness at the greyhound whose paws
the little page was endeavouring to place apart in order to get the pose
again.

Jenkins remarked in a fatherly way that she did wrong to tire herself
thus, and taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

"Come, I am sure you are feverish."

At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost
of repulsion.

"No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not
work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the
colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. To be
commencing life, and to be disgusted with it! It is hard. I am reduced
to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in
her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her
memories of the past. I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to
muse upon. I have only work--work!"

As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the
boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time
on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the
group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the
mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek
smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.

Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the
evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to
the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty
seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.

Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia
resumed:

"Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob. Some one pointed him
out to me last Friday at the opera."

"You were at the opera on Friday?"

"Yes. The duke had sent me his box."

Jenkins changed colour.

"I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time for
twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been
inside the Opera-House. It made a great impression on her. During the
ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs
sparkled in her eyes. Happy who has emotions like that. A real type,
that Nabob. You will have to bring him to see me. He has a head that it
would amuse me to do."

"He! Why, he is hideous! You cannot have looked at him carefully."

"On the contrary, I had a perfect view. He was opposite us. That mask,
as of a white Ethiopian, would be superb in marble. And not vulgar,
in any case. Besides, since he is so ugly as that, you will not be
so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora's bust. What a
disagreeable face you had, Jenkins, in those days!"

"For ten years of life," muttered Jenkins in a gloomy voice, "I would
not have that time over again. But you it amuses to behold suffering."

"You know quite well that nothing amuses me," said she, shrugging her
shoulders with a supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without adding another word, she plunged
into one of those dumb activities by which true artists escape from
themselves and from everything that surrounds them.

Jenkins paced a few steps in the studio, much moved, with avowals on
the tip of his tongue which yet dared not put themselves into words. At
length, feeling himself dismissed, he took his hat and walked towards
the door.

"So it is understood. I must bring him to see you."

"Who?"

"Why, the Nabob. It was you who this very moment----"

"Ah, yes," remarked the strange person whose caprices were short-lived.
"Bring him if you like. I don't care, otherwise."

And her beautiful dejected voice, in which something seemed broken, the
listlessness of her whole personality, said distinctly enough that it
was true, that she cared really for nothing in the world.

Jenkins left the room, extremely troubled, and with a gloomy brow. But,
the moment he was outside, he assumed once more his laughing and cordial
expression, being of those who, in the streets, go masked. The morning
was advancing. The mist, still perceptible in the vicinity of the Seine,
floated now only in shreds and gave a vaporous unsubstantiality to
the houses on the quay, to the river steamers whose paddles remained
invisible, to the distant horizon in which the dome of the Invalides
hung poised like a gilded balloon with a rope that darted sunbeams. A
diffused warmth, the movement in the streets, told that noon was not far
distant, that it would be there directly with the striking of all the
bells.

Before going on to the Nabob's, Jenkins had, however, one other visit to
make. But he appeared to find it a great nuisance. However, since he had
made the promise! And, resolutely:

"68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, at the Ternes," he said, as he sprang into his
carriage.

The address required to be repeated twice to the coachman, Joey, who
was scandalized; the very horse showed a momentary hesitation, as if the
valuable beast and the impeccably clad servant had felt revolt at the
idea of driving out to such a distant suburb, beyond the limited but
so brilliant circle wherein their master's clients were scattered.
The carriage arrived, all the same, without accident, at the end of a
provincial-looking, unfinished street, and at the last of its buildings,
a house of unfurnished apartments with five stories, which the street
seemed to have despatched forward as a reconnoitring party to discover
whether it might continue on that side isolated as it stood between
vaguely marked-out sites waiting to be built upon or heaped with the
debris of houses broken down, with blocks of freestone, old shutters
lying amid the desolation, mouldy butchers' blocks with broken hinges
hanging, an immense ossuary of a whole demolished region of the town.

Innumerable placards were stuck above the door, the latter being
decorated by a great frame of photographs white with dust before which
Jenkins paused for a moment as he passed. Had the famous doctor come so
far, then, simply for the purpose of having a photograph taken? It might
have been thought so, judging by the attention with which he stayed
to examine this display, the fifteen or twenty photographs which
represented the same family in different poses and actions and with
varying expressions; an old gentleman, with chin supported by a high
white neckcloth, and a leathern portfolio under his arm, surrounded by
a bevy of young girls with their hair in plait or in curls, and with
modest ornaments on their black frocks. Sometimes the old gentleman had
posed with but two of his daughters; or perhaps one of those young and
pretty profile figures stood out alone, the elbow resting upon a broken
column, the head bowed over a book in a natural and easy pose. But, in
short, it was always the same air with variations, and within the glass
frame there was no gentleman save the old gentleman with the white
neckcloth, nor other feminine figures that those of his numerous
daughters.

"Studios upstairs, on the fifth floor," said a line above the frame.
Jenkins sighed, measured with his eye the distance that separated the
ground from the little balcony up there in the clouds, then he decided
to enter. In the corridor he passed a white neckcloth and a majestic
leathern portfolio, evidently the old gentleman of the photographic
exhibition. Questioned, this individual replied that M. Maranne did
indeed live on the fifth floor. "But," he added, with an engaging smile,
"the stories are not lofty." Upon this encouragement the Irishman began
to ascend a narrow and quite new staircase with landings no larger than
a step, only one door on each floor, and badly lighted windows through
which could be seen a gloomy, ill-paved court-yard and other cage-like
staircases, all empty; one of those frightful modern houses, built
by the dozen by penniless speculators, and having as their worst
disadvantage thin partition walls which oblige all the inhabitants to
live in a phalansterian community.

At this particular time the inconvenience was not great, the fourth and
fifth floors alone happening to be occupied, as though the tenants had
dropped into them from the sky.

On the fourth floor, behind a door with a copper plate bearing the
announcement "M. Joyeuse, Expert in Bookkeeping," the doctor heard
a sound of fresh laughter, of young people's chatter, and of romping
steps, which accompanied him to the floor above, to the photographic
establishment.

These little businesses perched away in corners with the air of having
no communication with any outside world are one of the surprises of
Paris. One asks one's self how the people live who go into these
trades, what fastidious Providence can, for example, send clients to
a photographer lodged on a fifth floor in a nondescript region, well
beyond the Rue Saint-Ferdinand, or books to keep to the accountant
below. Jenkins, as he made this reflection, smiled in pity, then went
straight in as he was invited by the following inscription, "Enter
without knocking." Alas! the permission was scarcely abused. A tall
young man wearing spectacles, and writing at a small table, with his
legs wrapped in a travelling-rug, rose precipitately to greet the
visitor whom his short sight had prevented him from recognising.

"Good-morning, Andre," said the doctor, stretching out his loyal hand.

"M. Jenkins!"

"You see, I am good-natured as I have always been. Your conduct towards
us, your obstinacy in persisting in living far away from your parents,
imposed a great reserve on me, for my own dignity's sake; but your
mother has wept. And here I am."

While he spoke, he examined the poor little studio, with its bare walls,
its scanty furniture, the brand-new photographic apparatus, the little
Prussian fireplace, new also and never yet used for a fire, all forced
into painfully clear evidence beneath the direct light falling from the
glass roof. The drawn face, the scanty beard of the young man, to whom
the bright colour of his eyes, the narrow height of his forehead,
his long and fair hair thrown backward gave the air of a visionary,
everything was accentuated in the crude light; and also the resolute
will in that clear glance which settled upon Jenkins coldly, and in
advance to all his reasonings, to all his protestations, opposed an
invincible resistance.

But the good Jenkins feigned not to perceive anything of this.

"You know, my dear Andre, since the day when I married your mother I
have regarded you as my son. I looked forward to leaving you my practice
and my patients, to putting your foot in a golden stirrup, happy to see
you following a career consecrated to the welfare of humanity. All at
once, without giving any reason, without taking into any consideration
the effect which such a rupture might well have in the eyes of the
world, you have separated yourself from us, you have abandoned your
studies, renounced your future, in order to launch out into I know not
what eccentric life, engaging in a ridiculous trade, the refuge and the
excuse of all unclassed people."

"I follow this occupation in order to earn a living. It is bread and
butter in the meantime."

"In what meantime? While you are waiting for literary glory?"

He glanced disdainfully at the scribbling scattered over the table.

"All that is not serious, you know, and here is what I am come to tell
you. An opportunity presents itself to you, a double-swing door opening
into the future. The Bethlehem Society is founded. The most splendid of
my philanthropic dreams has taken body. We have just purchased a superb
villa at Nanterre for the housing of our first establishment. It is the
care, the management of this house that I have thought of intrusting
to you as to an _alter ego_. A princely dwelling, the salary of the
commander of a division, and the satisfaction of a service rendered to
the great human family. Say one word, and I take you to see the Nabob,
the great-hearted man who defrays the expense of our undertaking. Do you
accept?"

"No," said the other so curtly that Jenkins was somewhat put out of
countenance.

"Just so. I was prepared for this refusal when I came here. But I am
come nevertheless. I have taken for motto, 'To do good without hope,'
and I remain faithful to my motto. So then, it is understood you prefer
to the honourable, worthy, and profitable existence which I have just
proposed to you, a life of hazard without aim and without dignity?"

Andre answered nothing, but his silence spoke for him.

"Take care. You know what that decision will involve, a definitive
estrangement, but you have always wanted that. I need not tell you,"
continued Jenkins, "that to break with me is to break off relations also
with your mother. She and I are one."

The young man turned pale, hesitated a moment, then said with effort:

"If it please my mother to come to see me here, I shall be delighted,
certainly. But my determination to quit your house, to have no longer
anything in common with you, is irrevocable."

"And will you at least say why?"

He made a negative sign; he would not say.

For once the Irishman felt a genuine impulse of anger. His whole
face assumed a cunning, savage expression which would have very much
astonished those that only knew the good and loyal Jenkins; but he took
good care not to push further an explanation which he feared perhaps as
much as he desired it.

"Adieu," said he, half turning his head on the threshold. "And never
apply to us."

"Never," replied his stepson in a firm voice.

This time, when the doctor had said to Joey, "Place Vendome," the horse,
as though he had understood that they were going to the Nabob's, gave a
proud shake to his glittering curb-chains, and the brougham set off at
full speed, transforming each axle of its wheels into sunshine. "To
come so far to get a reception like that! A celebrity of the time to be
treated thus by that Bohemian! One may try indeed to do good!" Jenkins
gave vent to his anger in a long monologue of this character, then
suddenly rousing himself, exclaimed, "Ah, bah!" and what anxiety there
was remaining on his brow quickly vanished on the pavement of the Place
Vendome. Noon was striking everywhere in the sunshine. Issued forth from
behind its curtain of mist, luxurious Paris, awake and on its feet,
was commencing its whirling day. The shop-windows of the Rue de la
Paix shone brightly. The mansions of the square seemed to be ranging
themselves haughtily for the receptions of the afternoon; and, right at
the end of the Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries,
beneath a fine burst of winter sunshine, raised shivering statues, pink
with cold, amid the stripped trees.