CHAPTER XVII A DÉJEÛNER AT THE CAFÉ DE PARIS
The death of my father cast me into an entirely new life. Anyone less fitting than the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan to be the guardian of a child of nine it would be hard to imagine at first sight. But my father was no fool.
This gorgeous old night-moth of the Second Empire, this frequenter of Tortoni's and the Café de Paris—always hard up, with an income of two hundred thousand francs a year—was a man of rigid honour in his way.
Left sole and irresponsible guardian of me and my money, he shuffled out of his difficulties and bothers by placing the latter in the funds and the former in the Bourdaloue College—that same college of the Jesuit fathers where the Comte de Coigny was receiving his education.
Here nine years of my life were spent—nine dull but not unhappy years. Lame and unfit for the army, completely cut off from the only profession fit for a gentleman—to use the Vicomte's expression—I saw the others go off to join the Military College, and I would not have felt it so bitterly had not De Coigny been amongst them. He was my natural enemy. All the time we spent together at the Bourdaloue, we scarcely spoke a word one to the other. Speechless enmity: there can scarcely be a worse condition between boys or men.
Once a month or so the Vicomte came to see me. Joubert came often. He was installed as caretaker in the Château de Saluce, and he would bring me presents of game and plovers' eggs, huge Jaronel pears from the orchard, and cakes baked by Fauchard's wife.
During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied me. But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one knew anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after the fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose histories have for heading "Bankruptcy."
Then I forgot.
Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of ghosts, the limbo of things half remembered.
I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing. I was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament, which takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful and grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things useful. Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the literature of my heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and Esmeralda, that brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.
Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone can teach you to read. And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which statement is a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or, in other words, the twelfth of May, 1869.
I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the Place Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a dragon-fly. I was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to teach me, as the Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to be unearthed from the Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet. Blacquerie, the Viscount's tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had already called and taken the measurements for my new wardrobe. I can tell you I was elated; and no debutante ever looked forward more eagerly to the day of her debut than I to the twelfth of May.
At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the salon by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these men, and I liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little as a rock imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected Père Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice, burnt heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell.
As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose came running out, and, just as we drove off, popped into my hand a little green-covered book on the seven deadly sins.
"What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves.
I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window.
"All that stuff you have learned," said this worthy man, "is excellent for children; but when we become men we put away childish things, as M. de Voltaire or some other scoundrel of a philosopher, I think it was, once remarked. Mark you, I say nothing against religion. Religion is a most excellent institution; but in the world, my dear Patrique, we are brought face to face with men. Religion is a fixed institution; and the nones, or complines, whatever you call it that they say to-day, were what they said two hundred years ago. But men are very shifty, and, as a matter of fact, damned rogues. It is very easy to be a saint in the College Bourdaloue; but it is very difficult to be a gentleman in the Boulevard des Italiens, especially in this bourgeois age" (he was a Royalist, with one foot in the Tuileries and the other in the Faubourg St. Germain), "when we have a what-do-you-call-it as President of the Council and a thingumbob on the throne of France."
So he went on as he sat, erect as a man of thirty, gazing at the passing streets with those blue tranquil eyes of a child, out of which youth still looked; and turning to me the pro-consular profile of which he was secretly so proud, and which was the thing, I believe, up to which this strange old gentleman lived.
To live up to your profile is not a bad rule of life, if you have a face like that possessed by the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan.
When we drew up at the Place Vendôme, I put my hand to open the door, and received my first lesson in the convenances from the Vicomte, who laid his gloved hand on my arm without a word. The footman opened the door, and the grand old gentleman descended. M. le Vicomte did not get out of a carriage—he descended. And with what a grace! He waited courteously for me on the pavement; and then, with a little wave of his clouded cane, shepherded me into the house.
At the door, Beril, the Vicomte's personal servant, a man older than his master, received us; and Joubert was in the hall with my luggage.
"And now," said the Vicomte, when I had been shown my suite of rooms, and very sumptuous they were, "déjeûner."
We got into the carriage which was waiting, the footman closed the door, and we started for the Café de Paris.
Fourteen people were invited to the repast, besides myself. It took place in the Amber Room overlooking the Boulevard; and six of the guests were ladies. Very great ladies—duchesses, in my simple eyes. Had I known more of breakfast-parties and the world, I might have wondered at the disposition of the guests; for the Duc d'Harmonville, an old gentleman with a white imperial and the exact expression of a billy-goat, sat between two of the duchesses; and the rest of the female illuminati sat, three of them altogether in one cluster, and the sixth at the right of my guardian.
There was Pélisson of the "Moniteur," the only Press man present; Carvalho of the Opéra Comique; the Duc de Cadore; Prince Metternich, with his long Dundreary whiskers now lightly streaked with grey; and, as for the rest, I did not catch their names, and I have all but forgotten their faces.
One thing especially struck me in the male guests. With the exception of Pélisson and Prince Metternich, their manner and their voices recalled something or somebody to my mind, yet what thing or person I could not remember, till Memory suddenly chalked on the vacant space before her:
De Morny.
The languid air, the half-lisp, the attentive inattention of manner, all were here, the very voice.
What a triumph! De Morny had been dead and buried nearly four years, yet his reflection still lingered on the faces of these apes; his voice had been silent since the orations and muffled drums of that dramatic funeral, which outvied in splendour the funeral of Germanicus, and which I had witnessed in company with Père Hyacinthe and the pupils of the Bourdaloue; yet his voice still was heard in the supper-rooms of Paris, discussing the length of ballet-girls' skirts and the scandals of Plon-Plon.
With the fish the conversation became more general, and with the iced champagne—served from jeroboams that took two waiters to lift—decency and the ghost of De Morny rose to take their departure.
It was strange to me, a water-drinker, and therefore an observer of the others, to see these men forgetting themselves, to see languid faces become flushed, to hear soft voices become harsh, tongues become ribald; to watch brutal lines asserting themselves in countenances unveiled by alcohol. And it was surpassingly funny to see the evanescence of the De Morny air.
At the head of the table, a tint more ruddy than usual, sat my guardian, enjoying it all.
We had all, like the lunatic guests at the dinner-party of Dr. Tar and Professor Feather, sat down to table apparently staid and respectable people, and by degrees, just as lunacy set off the Doctor's guests crowing like cocks and braying like asses, the spirit of the Second Empire in its last and rottenest stages invaded the Amber Room of the Café de Paris. Furious discussions, fumes of spilt wines, wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke, the cracked and cruel laughter of women, filled the air.
* * * * *
And in the midst of it all sat my guardian, in his element, enjoying the enjoyment of his guests, paternal, and with those childish blue eyes through which youth looked so frankly, and that voice, so courtly and well modulated, infecting the others with I know not what. I only know that from him seemed to emanate the diablerie of the party. Sober as myself, self-contained and courtly, he seemed like the negative pole of some diabolical battery, of which the others were the positive.
In the midst of the smoke and chatter he rose, and with a glass of champagne between two fingers, as a lady holds a lily, he proposed my health and my success in the world of Paris; and I rose and said something—foolish, no doubt, but it did not matter, for Amy Féraud, of the Théâtre Montparnasse, whilst she pelted Prince Metternich with bonbons, lost her balance, fell smash on her back, pulling the tablecloth with her, and in the confusion I sat down.
Half an hour later, arm-in-arm with my guardian, I was taking a digestion walk down the Boulevard des Italiens. The old gentleman was pleased, very pleased, for it seems I had conducted myself in a modest and becoming manner, and the few words I had said had been well said; and you might have thought that he was discussing a children's party as he strolled by my side, saluting every person of distinction that he met, and being saluted in return.
I really believe that this man was as innocent at heart as any child, yet he was an old roué, a duellist, a gambler, all that a bad man could be. Yet, though always hard up, he had jealously guarded my patrimony, which he could have plundered if he had chosen with impunity. His charity was boundless if you tapped it; and though he spoke of women in a light way, I never heard him speak a bad word of any man. And he loved animals, stopping to stroke a cat in the Rue de Rivoli, and pausing, as he led me across to the Tuileries, to admire the sparrows taking their dust-baths in the Royal precincts.
"Where are we going?" I asked, with a sudden apprehension.
"It is your eighteenth birthday," replied the Vicomte. And, still with his arm in mine, he led me past the Cent-Gardes, up the steps, and into the hall of the Palace.
One might have thought that the Palace of the Tuileries belonged to the Vicomte de Chatellan, so perfectly at home did he seem. That he was a well-known and respected visitor was evident from the manner of the ushers. I was left in an anteroom, whilst the old gentleman, led by the usher, disappeared for a moment; then he came back, and, motioning me to follow him, he led the way into a room, where, at a desk-table, with a cigarette between his lips and a pen in his hand, sat Napoleon.
He threw the pen down and rose to greet us.
How wrinkled he looked! And how different, seen close and familiarly, from what he appeared in his carriage, amidst a cloud of dust, a glitter of sabres, and surrounded by his guards and gentlemen!
Quite an unfearful person; old, and rather shuffling, easy-going, and putting you at your ease, rather dreamy, and speaking with a slightly nasal voice, rolling an armchair for you to sit in with his own august hands, offering cigarettes with a little shake of the box to loosen them and make your acceptance of one more easy, searching for a matchbox amidst the papers on the desk: a true gentleman, though an unfortunate Emperor.
Though I was eighteen, I was still very much of a child, and that is perhaps why I felt an affection for the old gentleman at almost first sight. He remembered my father perfectly well; and, with a shade of sadness and wreathed in his cigarette smoke, he fell into a little reverie. We talked—he, my guardian, and I. My lameness was explained and commiserated, and, when our audience was ended and M. Ollivier was announced as waiting, he pushed us out of his cabinet, holding our hands affectionately, patting my shoulder, and all with such a grace and goodness of heart as to make me for ever his admirer and friend.
Ah, that was a good man lost in an Emperor!