VIII
Marianne Kayser was superstitious. She believed that in the case of compromised affairs, salvation appeared at the supreme moment of playing the very last stake. She had always rebounded, for her part,—like a rubber-ball, she said—at the moment that she found herself overthrown, and more than half conquered. Fate had given some cause for her superstitious ideas. She thought herself lost, and was weary of searching, of living, in fact, when suddenly Monsieur de Rosas reached Paris from the other end of the world. That was salvation.
The duke did not prove very difficult to ensnare. He had yielded like a child in Sabine's boudoir. Marianne left that soirée with unbounded delight. She had recovered all her hopes and regained her luck. The next day she would again see Rosas. She passed the night in dreams. Light and gold reigned upon her life. She was radiant on awaking.
Her uncle, on seeing her, found her looking younger and superb.
"You are as beautiful as a Correggio, who though a voluptuous painter, must have been talented. You ought to pose to me for a Saint Cecilia. It would be magnificent, with a nimbus—"
"Oh! let your saint come later," said Marianne, "I haven't time."
Simon Kayser did not ask the young woman, moreover, why "she had not time." Marianne was perfectly free. Each managed his affairs in his own way. Such, in fact, was one of the favorite axioms of this painter, a man of principle.
Marianne breakfasted quickly and early, and after dressing herself, during which she studied coquettish effects while standing before her mirror, she left the house, jumped into a cab and drove to the Hôtel Continental. With proud mien and tossing her head, she asked for the duke as if he belonged to her. She was almost inclined to exclaim before all the people: "I am his mistress!"
But she suddenly turned pale upon hearing that Monsieur de Rosas had left.
"What! gone?"
Gone thus, suddenly, unceremoniously, without notice, without a word? It was not possible.
They were obliged to confirm this news to her several times at the hotel office. Monsieur le duc had that very morning ordered a coupé to take him to catch a train for Calais. It was true that he had left some baggage behind, but at the same time he notified them that they would perhaps have to forward it to him in England later.
Marianne listened in stupid astonishment. She became livid under her little veil.
"Monsieur de Rosas did not receive a telegram?"
"Yes, madame."
"Ah!"
Something serious had, perhaps, suddenly intervened in the duke's life. Nevertheless, this abrupt departure without notification, following the exciting soirée of the previous day, greatly astonished this woman who but now believed herself securely possessed of José.
"Nonsense!" she thought. "He was afraid of me—Yes, that's it!—Of course, he was afraid of me. He loves me much, too much, and distrusts himself. He has gone away."
She commenced to laugh uneasily as she got into her carriage again.
"Assuredly, that is part of my fate. That stupid Guy leaves for Italy. Rosas leaves for England. Steam was invented to admit of escape from dangerous women. I did not follow Lissac. What if I followed the duke?"
She shrugged her shoulders, and gnawed her cambric handkerchief under her veil, her head resting on the back of the coach, while the driver waited, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, ignorant of the direction in which the young woman wished to go.
Marianne felt herself beaten. She was like a gambler who loses a decisive game. Evidently, Rosas only showed more clearly by the action he had taken, how much he was smitten; she measured his love by her own dismay; but what was the good of that love, if the duke escaped in a cowardly fashion?—But where could she find him? Where follow him? Where write to him?—A man who runs about as he does! A madman! Perhaps on arriving at Dover he had already re-embarked for Japan or Australia.
"Ah! the unexpected happens, it seems," thought Marianne, laughing maliciously, as she considered the ludicrousness of her failure.
"Madame, we are going—?" indifferently asked the coachman, who was tired of waiting.
"Where you please—to the Bois!"
"Very good, madame."
He looked at his huge aluminum watch, coolly remarking:
"It was a quarter of twelve when I took Madame—"
"Good! good!—to the Bois!"
The movement of the carriage, the sight of the passers-by, the sunlight playing on the fountains and the paving-stones of the Place de la Concorde fully occupied Marianne's mind, although irritating her at the same time. All the cheerfulness attending the awakening spring, delightful as it is in Paris, seemed irony to her. She felt again, but with increased bitterness, all the sentiments she experienced a few mornings previously when she called on Guy and told him of her burdensome weariness and distaste of life. Of what use was she now? She had just built so many fond dreams on hope! And all her edifices had crumbled.
"All has to be recommenced. To lead the stupid life of a needy, lost, harassed woman; no, that is too ridiculous, too sad! What then—" she said to herself, as with fixed eyes she gazed into the infinite and discovered no solution.
She was savagely annoyed at Rosas. She would have liked to tear him in pieces like the handkerchief that she shredded. Ah! if he should ever return to her after this flight!
But perhaps it was not a flight—who knows? The duke would write, would perhaps reappear.
"No," a secret voice whispered to Marianne. "The truth is that he is afraid of you! It is you, you, whom he flees from."
To renounce everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last! However, if she only had courage!
It was while looking at the great blue lake, the snowy swans, the gleaming barks, that she dreamed, as she had just told Vaudrey, of making an end of all. Madness, worse than that, stupidity! One does not kill one's self at her age; one does not make of beauty a valueless draft. In order to occupy herself, she had bought some brown bread, which she mechanically threw to the ducks, in order to draw her out of herself. It was then that Sulpice saw her.
"Assuredly," she thought, as she left the minister, "those who despair are idiots!"
In fact, it seemed that chance, as her fingers had cast mouthfuls of bread to the hungry bills, had thrown Vaudrey to her in place of Rosas.
A minister! that young man who smiled on her just now in the alleys of the Bois and drew near her with trembling breath was a minister. A minister as popular as Vaudrey was a power, and since Marianne, weary of seeking love, was pursuing an actuality quite as difficult to obtain—riches, Sulpice unquestionably was not to be despised.
"As a last resource, one might find worse," thought Marianne, as she entered her home.
She had not, moreover, hesitated long. She was not in the mood for prolonged anger. She was at an age when prompt decisions must be made on every occasion that life, with its harsh spurs, proposed a problem or furnished an opportunity. On the way between the Lake and Rue de Navarin, Marianne had formed her plan. Since she had to reply to Vaudrey, she would write him. She felt an ardent desire to avenge herself for Rosas's treatment, as if he ought to suffer therefor, as if he were about to know that Sulpice loved her.
Had she found the duke awaiting her, as she entered the house, she would have been quite capable of lashing his face with a whip, while making the lying confession:
"Ah! you here? It is too late! I love Monsieur Vaudrey."
She would, moreover, never know any but gloomy feelings arising from her poverty in that house. The thought suggested itself to her of at once inviting Vaudrey to call on her. But surrounded by the vulgar appointments of that poor, almost bare, studio, concealing her poverty under worn-out hangings, indifferent studies, old, yellowed casts covered with dust—to receive Vaudrey there would be to confess her terribly straitened condition, her necessities, her eagerness, all that repels and freezes love. In glancing around her uncle's studio, she scrutinized everything with an expression of hatred.
It smacked of dirty poverty, bourgeois ugliness. She would never dare to ask Vaudrey to sit upon that divan, which was littered with old, torn books and tobacco grains, and which, when one sat upon it, discharged a cloud of dust whose atoms danced in the sunlight.
"What are you looking at?" asked Kayser, as he followed his niece's glances about the room. "You seem to be making an inspection."
"Precisely. And I am thinking that your studio would not fetch a very high figure at Drouot's auction mart."
"Lofty and moral creations don't sell in times like these," gravely replied the old dauber. "For myself, I am not a painter of obscene subjects and lewd photography."
Marianne shrugged her shoulders and went out, coughing involuntarily. Old Kayser passed his time steeped in the odors of nicotine.
"I am lost, if Vaudrey comes here," she said to herself.
She knew well enough that caprice, the love of those who do not love, lives on luxury, intoxicating perfumes, shimmering silk, and all the mysterious surroundings of draperies which are the accompaniment of the adventure. Vaudrey would recoil before this Bohemian studio. The famous "nimbus," of which Kayser spoke, was the creature of his tobacco smoke. What was to be done, then? Receive the minister yonder in that remote apartment where, all alone,—it was true—she went to dream, dream with all the strange joys attending isolation? Draw this man to a distant corner of Paris, in the midst of the ruins of former luxury, as mean as the wretch's studio?—Eh! that was to acknowledge to Vaudrey that she was intriguing for a liaison with the single object of quitting the prison-walls of want. She realized that this man, full of illusions, believing that he had to do with perhaps a virtuous girl, or, at least, one who was not moving in her own circle, who was giving herself, but not selling herself, would shrink at the reality on finding himself face to face with an adventuress.
"Illusion is everything! He must be deceived! They are all stupid!" she mused.
But how was she to deceive this man as to her condition, how cloak her want, how cause herself to pass for what she was not? With Rosas it would have been a simple matter. Poor, she presented herself to him in her poverty. He loved her so. She could the better mislead him. But with Vaudrey, on the contrary, she must dazzle.
"Two innocents," Marianne said to herself, "the one thirsts for virtue, the other for vice."
Should she confess everything to Sulpice as she had done to Rosas? Yes, perhaps, if she discovered no better way, but a better plan had to be found, sought, or invented. Find what? Borrow? Ask? Whom? Guy? She would not dare to do so, even supposing that Lissac was sufficiently well off. Then she wished to keep up appearances, even in Guy's eyes. Further, she had never forgiven him for running off to Italy. She never would forget it. No, no, she would ask nothing from Guy.
To whom, then, should she apply? She again found herself in the frightful extremity of those who, in that almost limitless Paris, involved in the terrible intricacies of that madly-directed machine, seek money, a loan, some help, an outstretched hand, but who find nothing, not an effort to help them in all its crowd. She was overcome with rage and hatred. Nothing! she had nothing! She would have sold herself to any person whatsoever, to have speedily obtained a few of the luxuries she required. Yes; sold herself now, to sell herself more dearly to-morrow.
Sold! Suddenly from the depths of her memory she recalled a form, confused at first, but quickly remembered vividly, of an old woman against whom she had formerly jostled, in the chance life she had led, and who, once beautiful, and still clever and rich, it was said, had been seized with a friendly desire to protect Marianne. It was a long time since the young woman had thought of Claire Dujarrier. She met her occasionally, her white locks hidden under a copious layer of golden powder, looking as yellow as sawdust. The old woman had said to her:
"Whenever you need advice or assistance, do not forget my address: Rue La Fontaine, Auteuil."
Marianne had thanked her at the time, and had forgotten all about it till now, when in the anguish of her pursuit she recalled the name and features of Claire Dujarrier as from the memories of yesterday. Claire Dujarrier, a former danseuse, whose black eyes, diamonds, wild extravagance, and love adventures were notorious formerly, had for the last two or three years buried herself in a little house, fearing that she would be assassinated; she kept her diamonds in iron-lined safes built in the wall, and had a young lover, a clerk in a novelty store, who was stronger than a market-house porter, and who from time to time assumed a high tone and before whom she stood in awe.
"Claire Dujarrier! The very thing!—Why not?" thought Marianne.
She had been introduced to the ex-danseuse by Guy de Lissac. He was considered as one of Claire's old lovers. They quarrelled when the old dame had heard one of Guy's bons mots that had become familiar at the Club:
"When I see her, I always feel a slight emotion: she recalls my youth to me!—But alas! not hers!"
Claire was well-off and perhaps miserly. Marianne instinctively felt, however, that she would get help at her hands.
Money!
"I will return her all! It is usury. Her pledge is here!"
With brazen front, Kayser's niece struck her bosom, looking at the same time at the reflection of her fine bust and pale face in the mirror.
The next day she went straight to the former danseuse's.
Claire Dujarrier lived in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds, boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other as in some village passage, the butcher's store, the pharmacy, the wine-dealer's shop, the baker's establishment,—a kind of little summer resort with a forlorn look in February, the kiosks and cottages half decayed, the gardens full of faded, dreary-looking leaves. Marianne looked about, seeking the little Claire house. She had visited it formerly. A policeman wandered along sadly,—as if to remind one of the town,—and on one side, a gardener passed scuffling his wooden shoes, as if to recall the village.
However, here it was that the formerly celebrated girl, who awoke storms of applause when she danced beside Cerrito at the Opéra, now lived buried in silence,—a cab going to the Villa Montmorency seemed an event in her eyes,—forgotten, her windows shut, and as a diversion looking through the shutters at the high chimneys of some factory in the neighboring Rue Gras that belched forth their ruddy or bluish fumes, or yellow like sulphuric acid, or again red like the reflection of fire.
Marianne rang several times when she arrived at the garden railing of the little house. The bells sounded as if they were coated with rust. An ancient maid-servant, astonished and morose, came to open the door.
She conducted the young woman into the salon where Claire Dujarrier sat alone, eating cakes, with her terrier on her lap.
The dog almost leaped at Marianne's throat while Claire, rising, threw herself on her neck.
"Ah! dear little one!—How pleased I am! What chance brings you?"
Marianne looked at the Dujarrier. She might still be called almost lovely, although she was a little painted and her eyes were swollen, and her cheeks withered; but she knew so perfectly well all the secrets for rejuvenating, the eyebrow preparation, the labial wash, that she was a walking pharmaceutical painting done on finely sculptured features. The statue, although burdened with fat, was still superb.
She listened to Marianne, smiled, frowned and, love-broker and advisory courtesan that she was, ended by saying to the "little one" that she had a devilish good chance and that she had arrived like March in Lent.
"It is true, it has purposely happened. Vanda, you know her well?"
"What! Vanda, whom that big viper Guy called the Walking Rain?"
"I do not remember—"
"Well! Vanda has gone to Russia, she left a month ago. She will be there all the winter and summer, and part of next winter. Her general requires her. He is appointed to keep an eye on the Nihilists. So she wishes to rent her house in Rue Prony. That is very natural. A charming house. Very chic. In admirable taste. You have the chance. And not dear."
"Too dear for me, who have nothing!"
"Little silly! You have yourself," said Claire Dujarrier. "Then you have me, I have always liked you. I will lend you the ready cash to set yourself up, you can give me bills of exchange, little documents that your minister—pest! you are going on well, you are, ministers!—that His Excellency will endorse. Vanda will not expect anything after the first quarter. Provided that her house is well-rented to someone who does not spoil it, she will be satisfied. If she should claim all, why, at a pinch I can make up the amount. But, my dear,"—and the old woman lowered her voice,—"on no account say anything to Adolphe."
"Adolphe?"
"Yes, my husband. You do not know him?"
She took from the table a photograph enclosed in a photograph-case of sky-blue plush, in which Marianne recognized a swaggering fellow with flat face, large hands, fierce, bushy moustache, who leaned on a cane, swelling out his huge chest in outline against a mean, gray-tinted garden ornamented with Medicis vases.
"A handsome fellow, isn't he? Quite young!—and he loves me—I adore him, too!"
The tumid eyes of Claire Dujarrier resembled lighted coals. She pressed kiss after kiss of her painted lips on the photograph and reverently laid it on the table.
Marianne almost pitied this half-senile love, the courtesan's terrifying, last love.
She was, however, too content either to trouble herself, or even to reflect upon it. She was wild with joy. It seemed to her that a sudden rift had opened before her and a gloriously sunny future pictured itself to her mind. What an inspiration it was to think of Claire Dujarrier!
She would sign everything she wished, acknowledge the sums lent, with any interest that might be demanded. Much she cared about that, indeed!—She was sure now to free herself and to succeed.
"You are jolly right," said the ancient danseuse. "The nest is entirely at the birds' disposal. Your minister—I don't ask his name, but I shall learn it by the bills of exchange—would treat you as a grisette if he found you at your uncle's. Whereas at Vanda's—ah! at Vanda's! you will have news to tell me. So, see this is all that is necessary. I will write to Vanda that her house is rented, and well rented. Kiss me and skip! I hear Adolphe coming. He does not care to see new faces. And then, yours is too pretty!" she added, with a peculiar significance.
She got the old servant to show Marianne out promptly, as if she felt fearful lest her husband should see the pretty creature. Claire Dujarrier was certainly jealous.
"It is not I that would rob her of her porter!" Marianne thought, as she walked away from Rue La Fontaine.
Evening was now darkening the gray streets. A faint bluish mist was rising over the river and spreading like breath over the quays. Marianne saw Paris in the distance, and her visit seemed like a dream to her; she closed her eyes, and a voice within her whispered confusedly the names of Rosas, Vaudrey, Vanda, Rue Prony; she pictured herself stretched at length on a reclining chair in the luxurious house of a courtesan, and she saw at her feet that man—a minister—who supplicatingly besought her favor, while in the distance a man who resembled Rosas was travelling, moving away, disappearing—
"Nonsense!" the superstitious creature said to herself, "it was one or the other! The duke or the minister! I have not made the choice."
Then looking at the confused image of herself thrown on the window of the cab, she threw a kiss at her own pale reflection, happy with the unbounded joy of a child, and cried aloud while laughing heartily:
"Bonjour, Vanda! I greet you, Mademoiselle Vanda."