Zut, and Other Parisians

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

"And when I have won him," demanded Gabrielle, "what then? Do you think your precious brother will fare better with me than with the de Trémonceau?"

Her calm was broken for a moment by a flash of anger.

"The world is full of fools," she added. "One more or less is no great matter. I am not a Rescue Society, mademoiselle. Let your brother go his way. His best cure will be effected by the woman herself. When his money is gone, there will be no need to win him from her."

The sneer sent the blood racing to the other's cheeks. She had been counting, as she realized with a pang of mortification, upon some Quixotic quality which her reading had taught lay always dormant, even in such a woman as Gabrielle de Poirier,—some innate nobility, ready to spring into activity at the bidding of such an appeal as she had just made. And, too, beneath all her anxiety, she had believed that Thaïs loved her brother, that his peril lay not so much in her making use of him and then flinging him aside, as in the existence of actual affection between him and a woman whom, even as his wife, society would not recognize. This brutal intrusion of money into the discussion, this flippant classification of Dodo with a world full of fools who flung away honor and reputation for a passing fancy, only to be flung away themselves in turn, suddenly seemed to lay clear the whole situation, in all its sordid vulgarity, and with the revelation came a white rage against this woman who was only another of the same kind. She despised herself for having stooped to ask her aid, and a fury of wounded pride blazed in her reply.

"You know yourself well, madame!" she said. "No, surely my brother would fare no better with you, though that was not what I meant to ask. I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you, there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are, moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil you have done. I thought that, not for money's sake or vanity's, you might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him, teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send him back to decency—a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than self-interest. Your motives are the same as hers, love of admiration and love of gold,—and, perhaps, less worthy. I cannot say. Hers, at least, I can only suspect: yours I have had from your own lips. Had my brother been more than the poor weak boy he is, had he been brilliant, powerful, or a millionaire, it would never have been necessary for me to ask you to win him from her. No, madame, for you would have done so of your own accord!"

Now, there is such a thing as diplomacy, and there is such a thing as luck, and of the former Louise Chapuis had not an atom. An impulse, made apparently reasonable by pure imagination, led her to seek out Gabrielle, and had she found her, as her fancy had painted her, readily moved by the appeal of honest affection and confidence, she was competent to have won her end. Louise was one of the people who, in foreseeing a dispute, invent the replies to their own questions, and who, if the actual answers accord with those preconceived, will emerge from the ordeal triumphant, but who lack the diplomat's gift of adapting the line of argument to that of unexpected retort. Confronted with a state of affairs wholly different from that which she had supposed existent, her sole resource was in this outburst of disappointment and reproach, honest, but inutile as the clamor of a baffled baby. So much for diplomacy.

But, as we have said, there is also such a thing as luck. Gabrielle de Poirier was insufferably bored. Her Russian was in Moscow, her recent tips at Auteuil had proved disastrous, her latest feuilleton had been rejected. For six hours she had been buried among the cushions of the divan, clad materially in light pink but mentally in deepest blue, skipping from page to page of a novel that was not amusing, and confronted every ten minutes by the recurrent realization that the next event on her calendar was a dinner at the Café de Paris, which would not come for the eternity of twenty-seven hours! Despite her ungracious reception of Louise, she had been grateful for the diversion, and hardly had she sneered at Dodo's position before she lit a cigarette, and fell to studying the situation seriously. Louise, pausing, breathless, after her tirade, was surprised to find that she made no reply, looking straight before her with her great eyes half closed, and put down her silence as equivalent to admission of the charges hurled against her. The truth of the matter was, however, that Gabrielle had not heard one word of her visitor's impassioned denunciation!

There was a long silence, and then the demi-mondaine looked up.

"Where does your brother live?" she asked, touching an electric button at her side, "and what is his first name?"

"At the Hôtel du Rhin," stammered Louise, "and his name is Do—I should say Charles,—Charles Chapuis. I am at the Hôtel de Choiseuil."