It was stifling in the Eighth Chamber, where the Fage case was just coming on after interminable preliminaries and great efforts on the part of influential persons to stop the proceedings. Never had this court-room, whose walls of a mouldy blue and diamond pattern in faded gilding reeked with the effluvium of rags and misery, never had this court seen squeezed on its dirty seats and packed in its passages such a press and such a crowd of fashionable and distinguished persons, so many flower-trimmed bonnets and spring costumes by the masters of millinery art, to throw into relief the dead black of the gowns and caps. People were still coming in through the entrance lobby, where the double doors were perpetually swinging as the tide flowed on, a wavy sea of thronging faces upturned beneath the whitish light of the landing. Everyone was there, all the well-known, well-worn, depressingly familiar personages that figure at every Parisian festivity, fashionable funeral, or famous ‘first night.’ There was Marguerite Oger well to the fore, and the little Countess Foder, and beautiful Mrs. Henry of the American Embassy. There were the ladies belonging to the Academic confraternity, Madame Ancein in mauve on the arm of Raverand, the leader of the bar; Madame Eviza, a bush of little roses surrounded by a busy humming swarm of would-be barristers. Behind the President’s bench was Danjou, standing with folded arms, and showing above the audience and the judges the hard angles of his regular stage-weathered countenance, everywhere to be seen during the last forty years as the type of social commonplace in all its manifold manifestations. With the exception of Astier-Réhu and Baron Huchenard, who were summoned as witnesses, he was the only Academician bold enough to face the irreverent remarks that might be expected in the speech of Fage’s counsel, Margery, the dreaded wit, who convulses the whole assembly and the bench with the mere sound of his nasal ‘Well.’ Some fun was to be expected; the whole atmosphere of the place announced it, the erratic tilt of the barristers’ caps, the gleam in the eyes and curl in the corners of the mouths of people giving one another little anticipatory smiles. There were endless anecdotes current about the achievements in gallantry of the little humpback who had just been brought to the prisoner’s box and, lifting his long well-greased head, cast into the court over the bar the conquering glance of a manifest ladies’ man. Stories were told of compromising letters, of an account drawn up by the prisoner mentioning right out the names of two or three well-known ladies of fashion, the regular names dragged again and again into every unsavoury case. There was a copy of the production going the rounds of the seats reserved for the press, a simple conceited autobiography containing none of the revelations imputed to it by public rumour. Fage had beguiled the tedium of confinement by writing for the court the story of his life. He was born, he said, near Vassy (Haute Marne), as straight as anybody—so they all say—but a fall from a horse at fifteen had bent and inflected his spine. His taste for gallantry had developed somewhat late in life when he was working at a bookseller’s in the Passage des Panoramas. As his deformity interfered with his success, he tried to find some way of getting plenty of money. The story of his love affairs alternating with that of his forgeries and the means employed, with descriptions of ink and of parchment, resulted in such headings to his chapters as ‘My first victim—For a red ribbon—The gingerbread fair—I make the acquaintance of Astier-Réhu—The mysterious ink—I defy the chemists of the Institute.’ This brief epitome is enough to show the combination, the humpback’s self-satisfaction plus the arrogance of the self-taught artisan. The general result of reading the production was utter amazement that the Permanent Secretary of the Académie Française and the official representatives of science and literature could have been taken in for two or three years by an ignorant dwarf with a brain crammed full of the refuse of libraries and the ill-digested parings of books. This constituted the extraordinary joke of the whole business, and was the explanation of the crowded court. People came to see the Académie pilloried in the person of Astier-Réhu, who sat among the witnesses, the mark of every eye. There he sat without moving, absorbed in his thoughts, not turning his head, and hardly answering the fulsome compliments of Freydet who was standing behind, with black gloves and a deep crape hat-band, having quite recently lost his sister. He had been summoned for the defence, and the Academic candidate was afraid that the fact might damage him in the eyes of his old master. He was apologising and explaining how he had come across the wretched Fage in Védrine’s studio, and that was the reason of this unexpected call. But his whispers were lost in the noise of the court and the monotonous hum from the bench, as cases were called on and disposed of, the invariable ‘This day week, this day week’ descending like the stroke of the guillotine and cutting short the barrister’s protest, and the entreaties of poor red-faced fellows mopping their brows before the seat of justice. ‘But, Monsieur le Président...’ ‘This day week.’ Sometimes from the back of the court would come a cry and a despairing movement of a pair of arms, ‘I am here, M. le Président, but I can’t get through, there’s such a crowd...’ ‘This day week.’ When a man has beheld such clearances as these, and seen the symbolic scales operate with such dexterity, he gets a vivid impression of French justice; it is not unlike the sensation of hearing the funeral service raced through in a hurry by a strange priest over a pauper’s grave.
The voice of the President called for the Fage case. Complete silence followed in the court, and even on the staircase landing where people had climbed on to benches to see. Then after a short consultation on the bench the witnesses filed out through a dense crowd of gowns on their way to the little room reserved for them, a dreary empty place, badly lighted by glass windows that had once been red, and looking out on a narrow alley. Astier-Réhu, who was to be called first, did not go in, but walked up and down in the gloomy passage between the witness-room and the court. Freydet wished to stay with him, but he said in a colourless voice, ‘No, no, let me alone, I want to be alone.’ So the candidate joined the other witnesses who were standing in little knots—Baron Huchenard, Bos the palaeographer, Delpech the chemist, of the Académie des Sciences, some experts in handwriting, and two or three pretty girls, the originals of some of the photographs that adorned the walls of Fage’s room, delighted at the notoriety that the proceedings would bring them, laughing loudly and displaying startling little spring hats strangely different from the linen cap and woollen mittens of the caretaker at the Cour des Comptes. Védrine also had been summoned, and Freydet came and sat by him on the wide ledge of the open window. The two friends, whirled apart in the opposing currents that divide men’s lives in Paris, had not met since the summer before until the recent funeral of poor Germaine de Freydet Védrine pressed his friend’s hand and asked how he was, how he felt after so terrible a blow. Freydet shrugged his shoulders, ‘It’s hard, very hard, but after all I’m used to it.’ Then, as Védrine stared in wonder at his selfish stoicism, he added, ‘Just think, that’s twice in one year that I have been fooled.’ The blow, the only blow, that he remembered, was his failure to get Ripault-Babin’s seat, which he had lately missed, as he had missed Loisillon’s before. Presently he understood, sighed deeply, and said, ‘Ah, yes, poor Germaine!’ She had taken so much trouble all the winter about his unlucky candidature. Two dinners a week! Up to twelve or one o’clock she would be wheeling her chair all over the drawing-room. She had sacrificed her remaining strength to it, and was even more excited and keen than her brother. And at the last, the very last, when she was past speaking, her poor twisted fingers went on counting upon the hem of the sheet ‘Yes, Védrine, she died, ticking and calculating my chances of Ripault-Babin’s seat. Oh, if only for her sake, I will get into their Académie, in defiance of them all, and in honour of her dear memory!’ He stopped short, then in an altered and lower voice went on: ‘Really I don’t know why I talk like that. The truth is that, since they put the idea into my head, I can think of nothing else. My sister is dead and I have hardly given her a tear. I had to pay my calls and “beg for the Académie,” as that fellow says. The thing takes the very life out of me. It’s perfectly maddening.’
In the savage plainness of these words and the excited ring of the angry voice, the sculptor could scarcely recognise his gentle courteous friend, to whom mere living used to be a joy. The absent expression in his eye, the anxious wrinkle on his brow, and the heat of the hand which grasped Védrine’s, all betrayed his subjection to one absorbing passion, one fixed idea. But the meeting with Védrine seemed to have relieved his nerves, and he asked affectionately, ‘Well, what are you doing, and how are you getting on? How is your wife? And the children?’ His friend answered with his quiet smile. All were doing well, thank God. The little girl was just going to be weaned. The boy continued to fulfil his function of looking lovely, and was waiting impatiently for old Réhu’s centenary. As for himself, he was hard at work. He had two pictures in the Salon this year, not badly hung, and not badly sold. On the other hand a creditor, not less unwise than hard, had taken possession of the Knight, and he had passed from stage to stage, first lying much in the way in a fine suite of rooms on the ground floor in the Rue St. Pétersbourg, then packed off to a stable at Batignolles, and now shivering under a cowkeeper’s shed at Levallois, where from time to time the sculptor and his family went to pay him a visit.
‘So much for glory!’ added Védrine with a laugh, as the voice of the usher called for the witness Astier-Réhu. The head of the Permanent Secretary showed for a moment, outlined against the dusty light of the court-room, upright and steady; but his back he had forgotten to control, and the shiver of his broad shoulders betrayed intense feeling. ‘Poor man,’ muttered the sculptor, ‘he’s got heavy trials to go through. This autograph business, and his son’s marriage.’
‘Is Paul Astier married?’
‘Yes, three days ago, to the Duchess Padovani. It was a sort of morganatic marriage, with no guests but the young man’s mamma and the four witnesses. I was one of them, as you may suppose, for a freak of fate seems to associate me with all the acts and deeds of the Astier family.’
And Védrine described the sorrowful surprise with which in the Mayor’s room he had seen the Duchess Padovani appear, deathly pale, as haughty as ever, but withered and heart-broken, with a mass of grey hair, the poor beautiful hair that she no longer took the trouble to dye. By her side was Paul Astier, the Count, smiling, cold, and charming as before. They all looked at one another, and nobody had a word to say except the official who, after a good stare at the two old ladies, felt it incumbent upon him to remark with a gracious bow:
‘We are only waiting for the bride.’
‘The bride is here,’ replied the Duchess, stepping forward with head erect and a bitter smile which spoilt and twisted her beautiful mouth.