Down below on the deserted platform—for people were beginning to leave and the lower tiers were empty—Numa said to his wife as he wrapped a lace shawl about her to protect her from the evening chill:
“Now, really, is it not beautiful?”
“Very beautiful,” answered the Parisian, moved this time to the depths of her artistic nature.
And the great man of Aps seemed prouder of this simple word of approbation than of all the noisy homage with which he had been surfeited for the last two hours.
CHAPTER II.
THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN.
Numa Roumestan was twenty-two years old when he came to Paris to complete the law studies which he had begun at Aix. At that time he was a good enough kind of a fellow, light-hearted, boisterous, full-blooded, with big, handsome, prominent eyes of a golden-brown color and somewhat frog-like, and a heavy mop of naturally curling hair which grew low on his forehead like a woollen cap without a visor. There was not the shadow of an idea, not the ghost of an ambition beneath that encroaching thatch of his. He was a typical Aix student, a good billiard and card player, without a rival in his capacity for drinking champagne and “going on the cat-hunt with torches” until three o’clock in the morning through the wide streets of the old aristocratic and Parliamentary town. But he was interested in absolutely nothing. He never read a book nor even a newspaper, and was deep in the mire of that provincial folly which shrugs its shoulders at everything and hides its ignorance under a pretence of plain common-sense.
Arrived in Paris, the Quartier Latin woke him up a little, although there was small reason for it. Like all his compatriots Numa installed himself as soon as he arrived at the Café Malmus, a tall and noisy barrack of a place with three stories of tall windows, as high as those in a department shop, on the corner of the Rue Four Saint Germain. It filled the street with the noise of billiard playing and the vociferations of its clients, a regular horde of savages. The entire South of France loomed and spread itself there; every shade of it! Specimens of the southern French Gascon, the Provençal, the Bordeaux man, the Toulousian and Marseilles man, samples of the Auvergnat and Perigordian Southerner, him of Ariège, of the Ardèche and the Pyrenees, all with names ending in “as,” “us” and “ac,” resounding, sonorous and barbarous, such as Etcheverry, Terminarias, Bentaboulech, Laboulbène—names that sounded as if hurled from the mouth of a blunderbuss or exploded as from a powder mine, so fierce were the ejaculations. And what shouts and wasted breath merely to call for a cup of coffee; what resounding laughter, like the noise of a load of stones shunted from a cart; what gigantic beards, too stiff, too black, with a bluish tinge, beards that defied the razor, growing up into the eyes and joining on to the eyebrows, sprouted in little tufts in the broad equine nostrils and ears, but never able utterly to conceal the youth and innocence of these good honest faces hidden beneath such tropical growths.
When not at their lectures, which they attended conscientiously, these students passed their entire time at Malmus’s, falling naturally into groups according to their provinces or even their parishes, seated around the same old tables handed down to them by tradition, which might have retained the twang of their patois in the echoes of their marble tops, just as the desks of school-rooms retain the initials carved on them by school-boys.
Women in that company were few and far between, scarcely two or three to a story, poor girls whom their lovers brought there in a shamefaced way only to pass an evening beside them behind a glass of beer, looking over the illustrated papers, silent and feeling very out of place among these Southern youths who had been brought up to despise lou fémélan—females. Mistresses? Té! By Jove, they knew where to get them whenever they wanted them for an hour or a night; but never for long. Bullier’s ball and the “howlers” did not tempt them, nor the late suppers of the rôtisseuse. They much preferred to stay at Malmus’s, talk patois, and roll leisurely from the café to the schools and then to the table d’hôte.
If they ever crossed the Seine it was to go to the Théâtre Français to a performance of one of the old plays; for the Southerner always has the classic thing in his blood. They would go in a crowd, talking and laughing loudly in the street, though in reality feeling rather timid, and then return silent and subdued, their eyes dazed by the dust of the tragic scenes they had just witnessed, and with closed blinds and gas turned low would have another game before they went to bed.