I spoke his name and introduced myself. His surprise and pleasure were pronounced, for he had thought (as he said) that by this time I would be dead. There was an instant’s flash of his eye, as if a suspicion of my loyalty had crossed his mind; but it was gone on the instant, and immediately Doltaire, who also had interpreted the look, smiled, and said he had carried me off to breakfast while the furniture of my former prison was being shifted to my new one. After a word or two more, with Stevens’s assurance that the British had recovered from Braddock’s defeat and would soon be knocking at the portals of the Chateau St. Louis, we parted, and soon Doltaire and I got out at the high stone steps of the palace.
Standing there a moment, I looked round. In this space surrounding the Intendance was gathered the history of New France. This palace, large enough for the king of a European country with a population of a million, was the official residence of the commercial ruler of a province. It was the house of the miller, and across the way was the King’s storehouse, La Friponne, where poor folk were ground between the stones. The great square was already filling with people who had come to trade. Here were barrels of malt being unloaded; there, great sacks of grain, bags of dried fruits, bales of home-made cloth, and loads of fine-sawn boards and timber. Moving about among the peasants were the regular soldiers in their white uniforms faced with blue, red, yellow, or violet, with black three-cornered hats, and black gaiters from foot to knee, and the militia in coats of white with black facings. Behind a great collar of dogskin a pair of jet-black eyes flashed out from under a pretty forehead; and presently one saw these same eyes grown sorrowful or dull under heavy knotted brows, which told of a life too vexed by care and labour to keep alive a spark of youth’s romance. Now the bell in the tower above us rang a short peal, the signal for the opening of La Friponne, and the bustling crowd moved towards its doors. As I stood there on the great steps, I chanced to look along the plain, bare front of the palace to an annex at the end, and standing in a doorway opening on a pair of steps was Voban. I was amazed that he should be there—the man whose life had been spoiled by Bigot. At the same moment Doltaire motioned to him to return inside; which he did.
Doltaire laughed at my surprise, and as he showed me inside the palace said: “There is no barber in the world like Voban. Interesting interesting! I love to watch his eye when he draws the razor down my throat. It would be so easy to fetch it across; but Voban, as you see, is not a man of absolute conviction. It will be sport, some day, to put Bigot’s valet to bed with a broken leg or a fit of spleen, and send Voban to shave him.”
“Where is Mathilde?” I asked, as though I knew naught of her whereabouts.
“Mathilde is where none may touch her, monsieur; under the protection of the daintiest lady of New France. It is her whim; and when a lady is charming, an Intendant, even, must not trouble her caprice.”
He did not need to speak more plainly. It was he who had prevented Bigot from taking Mathilde away from Alixe, and locking her up, or worse. I said nothing, however, and soon we were in a large room, sumptuously furnished, looking out on the great square. The morning sun stared in, some snowbirds twittered on the window-sill, and inside, a canary, in an alcove hung with plants and flowers, sang as if it were the heart of summer. All was warm and comfortable, and it was like a dream that I had just come from the dismal chance of a miserable death. My cloak and cap and leggings had been taken from me when I entered, as courteously as though I had been King Louis himself, and a great chair was drawn solicitously to the fire. All this was done by the servant, after one quick look from Doltaire. The man seemed to understand his master perfectly, to read one look as though it were a volume—
“The constant service of the antique world.”
Such was Doltaire’s influence. The closer you came to him, the more compelling was he—a devilish attraction, notably selfish, yet capable of benevolence. Two years before this time I saw him lift a load from the back of a peasant woman and carry it home for her, putting into her hand a gold piece on leaving. At another time, an old man had died of a foul disease in a miserable upper room of a warehouse. Doltaire was passing at the moment when the body should be carried to burial. The stricken widow of the dead man stood below, waiting, but no one would fetch the body down. Doltaire stopped and questioned her kindly, and in another minute he was driving the carter and another upstairs at the point of his sword. Together they brought the body down, and Doltaire followed it to the burying-ground; keeping the gravedigger at his task when he would have run away, and saying the responses to the priest in the short service read above the grave.
I said to him then, “You rail at the world and scoff at men and many decencies, and yet you do these things!”
To this he replied—he was in my own lodgings at the time—“The brain may call all men liars and fools, but the senses feel the shock of misery which we do not ourselves inflict. Inflicting, we are prone to cruelty, as you have seen a schoolmaster begin punishment with tears, grow angry at the shrinking back under his cane, and give way to a sudden lust of torture. I have little pity for those who can help themselves—let them fight or eat the leek; but the child and the helpless and the sick it is a pleasure to aid. I love the poor as much as I love anything. I could live their life, if I were put to it. As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the puddles of wretchedness but I could have worked at the plough or the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf. I have no ethics, and yet I am on the side of the just when they do not put thorns in my bed to keep me awake at night!”