The Tuition of Dodo Chapuis
THE situation was best summed up in the epigram of little Sacha Vitzoff, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy, who said that there was room enough in Paris for two and a half millions of people and Gabrielle de Poirier, or for two and a half millions of people and Thaïs de Trémonceau, but that even the place de la Concorde was not sufficiently wide for Gabrielle and Thaïs to pass without treading on each others' toes.
It was a rivalry of long standing, nourished by innumerable petty jealousies and carefully treasured affronts. Gabrielle was tall and very slender, with a clear, pale complexion, and hair of a curious dark bronze that in certain lights showed a hint of olive green. So Thaïs called her the Asparagus Woman—la Femme Asperge. Thaïs was short and anything but slim, and brown of hair, eyes, and skin. So Gabrielle called her the Mud-Ball—la Boule de Boue. And neither appellation was pleasing to the object thereof.
These two great luminaries of the Parisian demi-monde, blazing crimson with mutual jealousy, followed, for six months of the year, a kind of right-triangular orbit, comprising the restaurant of Armenonville, the race-course of Auteuil, and the Café de Paris, and embracing divers other points of common interest,—the Palais de Glace, of a Sunday afternoon, the tea-room of the Elysée Palace Hotel, the Folies-Marigny, the Salon, and the Horse-Show; and, individually, Gabrielle's apartment on the avenue Kléber, and Thaïs's little hôtel on the rue de la Faisanderie. Between the last two, as regards situation, cost, and general equipment, there was not a straw's weight of difference, save in the estimation of their respective occupants. The apartment had been rented for a term of years, and furnished and decorated, and supplied with four servants, by a Russian millionaire, and the same was true of the hotel in every, save one, detail,—the de Trémonceau's millionaire was a Brazilian. For the rest, Gabrielle was of a literary bent, and wrote occasional feuilletons for the Journal, and short stories, staggering with emotion, for the Gil Blas Illustré: something which, in the opinion of Thaïs, was stupid and all there was of the most ignoble. Thaïs herself was a sporadic feature at the Folies-Bergère, where she sang songs of a melody and a propriety equally doubtful, bunching up her silk skirts at the end of the refrain, with her side toward the audience, and winking, with brazen effrontery, at a spot midway between the heads of the bald gentleman in the third row and the wide-eyed little St. Cyrien across the aisle. The which Gabrielle found to be the trade of a camel.
Each had her horses, and her carriage, in which she was whirled three times up and three times down the allée des Acacias each noon of the season, and again at five o'clock, and each spent hours daily in the rue de la Paix, trailing long skirts of tulle and satin before the mirrors of the men-milliners, and pricing strings of pearls in the private offices of servile jewelers. Each was deftly veneered, as it were, with the bearing of the grande dame, except at the moment when she chanced to pass the other, or refer to her in the course of conversation. Then the irrepressible past came suddenly to the fore in a word or a gesture, which babbled of Gabrielle's early experience in the workroom of the very Paquin she was now patronizing, and of Thaïs's salad days as assistant to a florist on the grand boulevards.
Honors were even between the two when Dodo Chapuis first came up to pay homage to the queen capital, of which he had been dreaming for four years. He was only nineteen, the son of a great manufacturer of Arles, who had lived severely and frugally, and, dying a widower, left a cool half million of francs to be divided between Dodo and his sister Louise. There seems to have been no trace of doubt in the mind of either as to the respective uses to which their dazzling inheritances should be applied. Louise promptly accepted a young playwright with a record of fourteen rejected revues, to whose suit her father had been most violently opposed; and Dodo, as promptly, took out a letter of credit for fifty thousand francs and departed for Paris on the morning following the funeral.
The story of Dodo's first six weeks in the capital is the story of full a million of his kind. A pocket filled with gold and a mind emptied of responsibility; youth, health, and craving for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,—these foundations given, the aspect of the structure erected thereupon is inevitable.
Dodo made his début at the Moulin Rouge at eight o'clock on the evening of his first day in Paris. Despite appearances, this did not mean that he was wholly a fool. One must remember that it was the evening of the first day. He walked leagues, it seemed to him, around the crowded promenade, half stifled by an atmosphere composed of equal parts of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and cheap perfumery. He watched a quadrille made up of shrill shrieks, rouge, and an abundance of white lace. He tossed balls into numbered holes in a long board, and won a variety of prizes of pseudo-Japanese make, which he immediately presented to the exponents of the aforesaid quadrille. He squandered a louis in firing a rifle at paper rabbits passing in monotonous succession over three feet of sickly green hillside. He bought a citronade for a girl with blue eyes, and a menthe glaciale for another with brown; and, at the end, rebuffing the proffered services of a guide, who, by reason of his new tan overcoat, and to his intense disgust, addressed him in English, he returned to the Hôtel du Rhin in a state of profound despondency.
But that, as we have said, was on his first evening. On the third, he had engaged a table in advance at Maxim's, and supped in state on caviar, langouste à l'Américaine, and Ruinart. And with Antoinette Féria. It was not much of an achievement, but it showed progress.
On the following day Dodo went to Auteuil, won twelve francs fifty on a ten-franc bet, and dined at Armenonville. It was here that Suzanne Derval looked cross-eyed at him, fingered her pearls, and remarked that he had beaux yeux. Dodo might be said to be fairly launched.