XX.
BARONESS HEMERLINGUE.
At the farther end of the long archway beneath which were the offices of Hemerlingue and Son, a dark tunnel which Père Joyeuse had for ten years bedecked and illumined with his dreams, a monumental staircase with wrought-iron rail, a staircase of old Paris, ascended to the left, leading to the baroness's salons, whose windows looked on the courtyard just above the counting-room, so that, during the warm season, when everything was open, the chink of the gold pieces, the noise made by piles of crowns toppling over on the counters, slightly deadened by the rich hangings at the long windows, formed a sort of commercial accompaniment to the subdued conversations carried on by worldly Catholicism.
That detail was responsible for the peculiar physiognomy of that salon, no less peculiar than the woman who presided over it, mingling a vague odor of the sacristy with the excitement of the Bourse and the most consummate worldliness, heterogeneous elements which constantly met and came in contact there, but remained separate, just as the Seine separates the noble Catholic faubourg under whose auspices the notorious conversion of the Moslem woman took place, from the financial quarters in which Hemerlingue's life and his associations were located. Levantine society, which is quite numerous in Paris, consisting principally of German Jews, bankers or commission merchants, who, after making enormous fortunes in the Orient, continue in business here in order not to lose the habit of it, was very regular in its attendance on the baroness's days. Tunisians sojourning in Paris never failed to call upon the wife of the great banker, who was in favor at home, and old Colonel Brahim, the bey's chargé d'affaires, with his drooping lips and his lustreless eyes, took his nap every Saturday in the corner of the same divan.
"Your salon smells of burning flesh, my goddaughter," the old Princesse de Dions said laughingly to the newly-christened Marie, whom she and Maître Le Merquier had held at the baptismal font; but the presence of that crowd of heretics, Jews, Mussulmans and even renegades, those fat women with pimply faces, gaudily dressed, loaded down with gold and earrings, "veritable bales" of finery, did not prevent Faubourg Saint-Germain from calling upon, surrounding and watching over the young neophyte, the plaything of those noble dames, a very pliant, very docile doll, whom they took about and exhibited, quoting her naïve evangelical remarks, especially interesting by way of contrast to her past. Perhaps there found its way into the hearts of those amiable patronesses the hope of encountering in that company fresh from the Orient an opportunity to make a new conversion, to fill the aristocratic mission chapel once more with the touching spectacle of one of those baptisms of adults, which carry you back to the early days of the faith, to the banks of the Jordan, and are soon followed by the first communion, the rebaptizing, the confirmation, all affording pretexts for the godmother to accompany her goddaughter, to guide that young soul, to look on at the ingenuous transports of a new-born faith, and at the same time to display costumes deftly varied and shaded to suit the brilliancy or the solemnity of the ceremony. But it does not often happen that a baron prominent in financial circles brings to Paris an Armenian slave whom he has made his lawful wife.
A slave! That was the stain in the past of that woman of the Orient, purchased long ago in the slave-mart at Adrianople for the Emperor of Morocco, then, upon the Emperor's death and the dispersion of his harem, sold to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had married her on her exit from that second seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly disguised quadroon. There is an invincible repugnance there on that subject, which the Hemerlingue family found even in Paris, where the foreign colonies form little clubs overflowing with local susceptibilities and traditions. Thus Yumina passed two or three years in utter solitude, of which she was able to turn to good account all the bitterness of heart and all the leisure hours; for she was an ambitious woman of extraordinary strength of will and obstinacy. She learned the French language thoroughly, said adieu forever to her embroidered jackets and pink silk trousers, succeeded in adapting her figure and her gait to European garb, to the embarrassment of long skirts; and one evening, at the opera, displayed to the marvelling Parisians the figure, still a little uncivilized, but elegant, refined and so original, of a female Mussulman in a décolleté costume by Léonard.
The sacrifice of her religion followed close upon that of her costume. Madame Hemerlingue had long since abandoned all Mohammedan practices, when Maître Le Merquier, the intimate friend of the family and her cicerone in Paris, pointed out that a formal conversion of the baroness would open to her the doors of that portion of Parisian society which seems to have become more and more difficult of access, in proportion as the society all around it has become more democratic. Faubourg Saint-Germain once conquered, all the rest would follow. And so it proved that when, after the sensation occasioned by the baptism, it became known that the greatest names of France did not disdain to assemble at Baroness Hemerlingue's Saturdays, Mesdames Guggenheim, Fuernberg, Caraïscaki, Maurice Trott, all wives of Fez millionaires and illustrious in the market-places of Tunis, renounced their prejudices and prayed to be admitted to the ex-slave's receptions. Madame Jansoulet alone, newly landed in France with a stock of Oriental ideas impeding circulation in her mind, as her nargileh, her ostrich eggs and all the rest of her Tunisian trash impeded it in her apartments, protested against what she called impropriety, cowardice, and declared that she would never step foot inside "that creature's" doors. Immediately a slight retrograde movement took place among Mesdames Guggenheim, Caraïscaki, and other bales of finery, as always happens in Paris whenever obstinate resistance from some quarter to the regularizing of an irregular state of affairs leads to regrets and defections. They had advanced too far to withdraw, but they determined that the value of their complaisance, of the sacrifice of their prejudices should be more fully understood; and Baroness Marie realized the difference simply from the patronizing tone of the Levantines, who called her "my dear child—my good girl," with haughty condescension not unmingled with contempt. Thereafter her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds, a complicated, savage, seraglio hatred, with strangling and secret drowning at the end, an operation rather more difficult of performance in Paris than on the shores of the Lake of El-Baheira, but she was already preparing the bow-string and stout bag.
That implacable hatred being well known and understood, we can imagine the surprise and excitement in that exotic corner of society, when it was reported that not only did the stout Afchin—as those ladies called her—consent to meet the baroness, but was to call first upon her on her next Saturday. You may be sure that neither the Fuernbergs nor the Trotts proposed to miss that occasion. The baroness for her part did all that she could to give the utmost possible publicity to that solemn act of reparation, wrote notes and made calls and played her cards so well that, notwithstanding the fact that the season was very far advanced, Madame Jansoulet, if she had arrived at the mansion in Faubourg Saint-Honoré about four o'clock, might have seen before the lofty arched gateway, beside the Princesse de Dions' quiet livery of the color of dead leaves, and many genuine coats of arms, the showy, pretentious crests, the multi-colored wheels of a multitude of financiers' equipages and the tall powdered lackeys of the Caraïscakis.