At the end of a year he looked for other employment. Besides, Sagnier required pioneers, regular navvies for hard work, and Roumestan was not that sort of man. The Provençal’s indolence was ineradicable, and above all things he had a loathing for office work or any hard and continuous labor. The faculty of attention, which is nothing if not deep, was absolutely wanting to this volatile Southerner. That was because his imagination was too vivid, his ideas too jumbled-up beneath his dark brows, his mind too fickle, as even his writing showed; it was never twice the same. He was all on the surface, all voice, gestures, like a tenor at the opera.
“When I am not speaking I cannot think,” he said naïvely, and it was true. Words with him never rushed forth propelled by the force of his thought; on the contrary, at the mechanical sound of his own words the thoughts formed themselves in advance. He was astonished and amused at chance meetings of words and ideas in his mind which had been lost in some corner of his memory, thoughts which speech would discover, pick up and marshal into arguments. Whilst he held forth he would suddenly discover emotions of which he had been unconscious; the vibrations of his own voice moved him to such a degree that there were certain intonations which touched his heart and affected him to tears. These were the qualities of an orator, to be sure, but he did not recognize them, as his duties at Sagnier’s had hardly been such as to give him a chance to practise them.
Nevertheless, the year spent with the great Legitimist lawyer had a decisive effect upon his after life. He acquired convictions and a political party, the taste for politics and a longing for fortune and glory.
Glory came to him first.
A few months after he left his master, that title of “Secretary to Sagnier,” which he clung to as an actor who has appeared once on the boards of the Comédie Française forever calls himself “of the Comédie Française,” was the means of getting him his first case, the defence of a little Legitimist newspaper called “The Ferret,” much patronized in the best society. His defence was cleverly and brilliantly made. Coming into court without the slightest preparation, his hands in his pockets, he talked for two hours with such an insolent “go” to him, and so much good-natured sarcasm, that the judges were forced to listen to him to the end. His dreadful southern accent, with its rolling “r’s,” which he had always been too indolent to correct, seemed to make his irony only bite the deeper. It had a power of its own, this eloquence with its very Southern swing, theatrical and yet familiar, but above all lucid and full of that broad light which is found in the works of people down South, as in their landscapes, limpid to their remotest parts.
Of course the paper was non-suited; Numa’s success was paid for by costs and imprisonment. So from the ashes of many a play that has ruined manager and author one actor may snatch a reputation. Old Sagnier, who had come to hear Numa plead, embraced his pupil before the assembled crowd. “Count yourself from this day on a great man, my dear Numa!” said he, and seemed surprised that he had hatched such a falcon’s egg. But the most surprised man was Numa himself, as with the echo of his own words still sounding in his ears he descended the broad railless staircase of the Palais de Justice, quite stunned, as if in a dream.
After this success and this ovation, after showers of eulogistic letters and the jaundiced smiles of his brethren, the coming lawyer naturally felt he was indeed launched upon a triumphal career. He sat patiently waiting in his office looking out on the courtyard, before his scanty little fire; but nothing came save a few more invitations to dinner, and a pretty bronze from the foundry of Barbédienne, a donation from the staff of Le Furet.
The new great man found himself still facing the same difficulties, the same uncertain future. Oh! these professions called liberal, which cannot decoy and entrap their clients, how hard are their beginnings, before serious and paying customers come to sit in rows in their little rooms furnished on credit with dilapidated furniture and the symbolical clock on the chimney-piece flanked by tottering candelabra! Numa was driven to giving lessons in law among his Catholic and Legitimist acquaintances; but he considered work like this beneath the dignity of the man whose name had been so covered with glory by the party newspapers.
What mortified him most of all and made him feel his wretched plight was to be obliged to go and dine at Malmus’s when he had no invitation elsewhere, and no money for a dinner at a fashionable restaurant. Nothing had changed at Malmus’s; the same cashier’s lady was enthroned among the punch-bowls as of old; the same pottery stove rumbled away near the old pipe-rack; the same shouts and accents, the same black beards from every section of the South prevailed; but his generation had passed, and he looked on the new generation with the disfavor which a man at maturity, but without a position, feels for the youths who make him seem old.
How could he have existed in so brainless a set? Surely the students of his day could not have been such fools! Even their admiration, their fawning round him like a lot of good-natured dogs, was insupportable to him.