Guilloche, contentieux.
Behind the yellow card bearing those two words, fastened on the door which was opposite their own, was one of those terrible business men whose entire instalment consists of an enormous leather portfolio containing the minutes and notes of rancid lawsuits, sheets of white paper for secret denunciations and begging letters, bits of pie-crust, a false beard and sometimes even a hammer with which to strike milkwomen dead, as was seen recently in a famous lawsuit. This type of man, of whom many exist in Paris, would not be worthy of a single line if said Guilloche, a name which was as good as a signboard when one considered his countenance divided up into a thousand little symmetrical wrinkles, had not added to his profession an entirely new and characteristic department.
Guilloche did the business of penalties for schoolboys and collegians. A poor devil of an usher, when the classes came out from recitation, went about collecting the penalties in the way of copies to be turned in. He stayed awake far into the night copying lines of the Æneid or the various forms of the Greek verb luo. When there was lack of regular business Guilloche, who was a graduate of college, harnessed himself up for this original work, which he found fairly profitable.
Audiberte’s matter having been explained to him, he declared that it was excellent. The Minister might be legally held up and the newspapers might be made to come down; the photograph alone was worth a mine of gold; only it was necessary to use time to go hither and thither and he must have advances of money which must be paid down in good coin; as for the Puyfourcat inheritance, that seemed to him a pure Fata Morgana, a dictum which mortified terribly the peasant girl’s love of lucre already so terribly tried, all the more because Valmajour, who had been much asked to swell drawing-rooms during the first winter, no longer set foot in a single house of the Faubourg St. Germoyne.
“So much the worse! I will work the harder, I will economize—zou!”
That energetic little Arlesian head-dress flew about in the great new building, ran up and down stairs, carrying from story to story her tale of adventure wid the Menister. She excited herself, squealed, pounced about, and then in a mysterious voice would say: “And thin there’s the photograph,” and with a furtive and sidelong glance, such as the sellers of photographs in the arcades employ when old libertines call for tights, she would show the picture:
“A pretty girl, at any rate! And you have read what is written there underneath?”
This kind of thing happened in the bosom of the temporary families and with the roller-skating ladies of the rink or at the Straw-Lair—ladies whom she pompously called Mme. Malvina or Mme. Éloïse, being deeply impressed by their velvet skirts, their chemises edged with holes for ribbons and all the implements of their business, without bothering herself otherwise as to what that business might be. And thus the picture of this lovely creature, so distinguished and delicate, passed through these critical and curious defilements; they picked her to pieces; they read laughing the silly avowal of love, until the Provençal girl took her treasure back again and thrust it into the mouth of her money-bag with a furious gesture and in a strangled voice exclaimed:
“Well, I guess we have got them with that!”
Zou! off she flew to the bailiff—the bailiff for the affair of the skating-rink, the bailiff used to hunt Cadaillac, the bailiff for Roumestan. And as if that were not sufficient for her quarrelsome disposition, she had a host of troubles with janitors, the unending fight about the tabor-playing, which ended this time in the exile of Valmajour to one of those basements leased by a wine merchant where the sounding of hunting-horns alternate with lessons in kicking and boxing. From that time forth it was in this cellar, by the light of a gas jet which cost them so much per hour, and while looking about at the vests and fencing-gloves and copper horns hung on the wall, that the tabor-player passed his hours of exercise, pale and lonely like a captive, sending forth from below the pavement all kinds of variations on the shepherd’s pipe, not at all unlike the mournful and piercing notes of a baker’s cricket.