She arrived in a condition of frightful exhaustion, utterly worn out and bewildered by her long railway journey, the first of her life, for, after being taken to Tunis while still quite a child, she had never left it. From her carriage, two negroes carried her into her apartments on an easy chair which, subsequently, always remained downstairs beneath the entrance porch, in readiness for these difficult removals. Mme. Jansoulet could not mount the staircase, which made her dizzy; she would not have lifts, which creaked under her weight; besides, she never walked. Of enormous size, bloated to such a degree that it was impossible to assign to her any particular age between twenty-five and forty, with a rather pretty face but grown shapeless in its features, dull eyes beneath lids that drooped, vulgarly dressed in foreign clothes, laden with diamonds and jewels after the fashion of a Hindu idol, she was as fine a sample as could be found of those transplanted European women called Levantines—a curious race of obese creoles whom speech and costume alone attach to our world, but whom the East wraps round with its stupefying atmosphere, with the subtle poisons of its drugged air in which everything, from the tissues of the skin to the waists of garments, even to the soul, is enervated and relaxed.
This particular specimen of it was the daughter of an immensely rich Belgian who was engaged in the coral trade at Tunis, and in whose business Jansoulet, after his arrival in the country, had been employed for some months. Mlle. Afchin, in those days a delicious little doll of twelve years old, with radiant complexion, hair, and health, used often to come to fetch her father from the counting-house in the great chariot with its yoke of mules which carried them to their fine villa at La Marsu, in the vicinity of Tunis. This mischievous child with splendid bare shoulders, had dazzled the adventurer as he caught glimpses of her amid her luxurious surroundings, and, years afterward, when, having become rich and the favourite of the Bey, he began to think of settling down, it was to her that his thoughts went. The child had grown into a fat young woman, heavy and white. Her intelligence, dull in the first instance, had become still more obscured through the inertia of a dormouse’s existence, the carelessness of a father given over to business, the use of opium-saturated tobacco and of preserves made from rose-leaves, the torpor of her Flemish blood, re-enforced by Oriental indolence. Furthermore, she was ill-bred, gluttonous, sensual, arrogant, a Levantine jewel in perfection.
But Jansoulet saw nothing of all this.
For him she was, and remained, up to the time of her arrival in Paris, a superior creature, a lady of the most exalted rank, a Demoiselle Afchin. He addressed her with respect, in her presence maintained an attitude which was a little constrained and timid, gave her money without counting, satisfied her most costly fantasies, her wildest caprices, all the strange desires of a Levantine’s brain disordered through boredom and idleness. One word alone excused everything. She was a Demoiselle Afchin. Beyond this, no intercourse between them; he always at the Kasbah or the Bardo, courting the favour of the Bey, or else in his counting-houses; she passing her days in bed, wearing in her hair a diadem of pearls worth three hundred thousand francs which she never took off, befuddling her brain with smoking, living as in a harem, admiring herself in the glass, adorning herself, in company with a few other Levantines, whose supreme distraction consisted in measuring with their necklaces arms and legs which rivalled each other in plumpness, and bearing children about whom she never gave herself the least trouble, whom she never used to see, who had not even cost her a pang, for she gave birth to them under chloroform. A lump of white flesh perfumed with musk. And, as Jansoulet used to say with pride: “I married a Demoiselle Afchin!”
Under the sky of Paris and its cold light the disillusion began. Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange paraphernalia in her suite, he had the vague impression of a Queen Pomare in exile. The fact was that now he had seen real women of the world, and he made comparisons. After having planned a great ball to celebrate her arrival, he prudently changed his mind. Besides, Mme. Jansoulet desired to see nobody. Here her natural indolence was increased by the home-sickness which she suffered, from the first hour of her coming, by the chilliness of a yellow fog and the dripping rain. She passed several days without getting up, weeping aloud like a child, saying that it was in order to cause her death that she had been brought to Paris, and not permitting her women to do even the least thing for her. She lay there bellowing among the laces of her pillow, with her hair bristling in disorder about her diadem, the windows of the room closed, the curtains drawn close, the lamps lighted night and day, crying out that she wanted to go away-y, to go away-y; and it was pitiful to see, in that funeral gloom, the half-unpacked trunks scattered over the carpets, the frightened maids, the negresses crouched around their mistress in her nervous attack, they also groaning, with haggard eyes like those dogs of artic travellers that go mad without the sun.
The Irish doctor, called in to deal with all this trouble, had no success with his fatherly manners, the pretty phrases that issued from his compressed lips. The Levantine would have nothing to do at any price with the arsenic pearls as a tonic. The Nabob was in consternation. What was to be done? Send her back to Tunis with the children? It was scarcely possible. He was decidedly in disgrace in that quarter. The Hemerlingues were triumphant. A last affront had filled up the measure. At Jansoulet’s departure, the Bey had commissioned him to have gold-pieces struck at the Paris Mint of a new design to the value of several millions; then the order, suddenly withdrawn, had been given to Hemerlingue. Publicly outraged, Jansoulet had replied by a public demonstration, offering for sale all his possessions, his palace at the Bardo given to him by the former Bey, his villas of La Marsu all of white marble, surrounded by splendid gardens, his counting-houses which were the largest and the most sumptuous in the city, and, charging, finally, the intelligent Bompain to bring over to him his wife and children in order to make a clear affirmation of a definitive departure. After such an uproar, it was no easy thing for him to return there; this was what he endeavoured to make evident to Mlle. Afchin, who only replied to him by deep groans. He tried to console her, to amuse her, but what distraction could be found to appeal to that monstrously apathetic nature? And then, could he change the sky of Paris, restore to the unhappy Levantine her patio paved with marble, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious sleepiness, listening to the water as it dripped on the great alabaster fountain with its three basins, one over the other, and her gilded barge, with its awning of crimson, which eight Tripolitan boatmen supple and vigorous rowed after sunset on the beautiful lake of El-Baheira? However luxurious the apartment of the Place Vendome might be, it could not compensate for the loss of these marvels. And then she would be more miserable than ever. At last, a man who was a frequent visitor to the house succeeded in lifting her out of her despair. This was Cabassu, the man who described himself on his cards as “professor of massage,” a big, dark, thick-set man, smelling of garlic and pomade, square-shouldered, hairy to the eyes, and who knew stories of Parisian seraglios, tales within the reach of madame’s intelligence. Having once come to massage her, she wished to see him again, retained him. He had to give up all his other clients, and became, at the salary of a senator, the masseur of this stout lady, her page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, delighted to see his wife contented, was unconscious of the ridicule attached to this intimacy.
Cabassu was now seen in the Bois, seated beside the favourite maid in the huge and sumptuous open carriage, also at the back of the theatre boxes taken by the Levantine, for she began to go out, since she had grown less torpid under the treatment of her masseur and was determined to amuse herself. The theatre pleased her, especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her large body found a stimulus in the false glare of the footlights. But it was to Cardailhac’s theatre that she went for preference. There, the Nabob found himself in his own house. From the chief superintendent to the humblest ouvreuse, the whole staff was under his control. He had a key which enabled him to pass from the corridors on to the stage; and the small drawing-room communicating with his box was decorated in Oriental manner, with a concave ceiling like a beehive, its couches covered in camel’s hair, the flame of the gas inclosed in a little Moorish lantern. Here one could enjoy a siesta during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of a Cardailhac stop at this. Remarking the taste of the Demoiselle Afchin for the drama, he had ended by persuading her that she also possessed the intuition, the knowledge of it, and by begging her when she had nothing better to do to glance over and let him know what she thought of the pieces that were submitted to him. A good way of cementing the partnership more firmly.
Poor manuscripts in your blue or yellow covers, bound by hope with fragile ribbons, that set out full of ambition and dreams, who knows what hands may touch you, turn over your pages, what indiscreet fingers deflower your charm, the charm of the unknown, that glittering dust which lies on new ideas? Who may judge you and who condemn? Sometimes, before dining out, Jansoulet, mounting to his wife’s room, would find her on her lounge, smoking, her head thrown back, bundles of manuscripts by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his thick voice and with the Bourg-Saint-Andeol accent, some dramatic lucubration which he cut and scored without pity at the least criticism from the lady.
“Don’t disturb yourselves,” the good Nabob would signal with his hand, entering on tiptoe. He would listen, shake his head with an admiring air, as he watched his wife: “She is astonishing!” for he himself understood nothing about literature, and there, at least, he could discover once again the superiority of Mlle. Afchin.
“She had the instinct of the stage,” as Cardailhac used to say; but, on the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her. Never did she take any interest in her children, abandoning them to the hands of strangers, and, when they were brought to her once a month, contenting herself with offering to them the flaccid and inanimate flesh of her cheeks between two puffs of cigarette-smoke, without making any inquiries into those details of their bringing up and of their health which perpetuate the physical bond of maternity and make the hearts of true mothers bleed at the least suffering of their children.