Zut, and Other Parisians

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

He paused, and pausing, smiled.

"Thou didst most nearly understand me, Jean," he continued, "in buying Le Pochard. For in truth, he was my brother—my twin—my soul, in the semblance of a toy! How we have laughed at him! Yet all along I have seen myself in that senseless little man of tin. Is it fanciful? Peut-être bien! But, now that he is gone, I see that I must go, too,—and in the same way, my Jean, in the same way,—with my absinthe in my hand and the key of inspiration turning uselessly in the broken spring of my heart!"

He rose suddenly, with a shiver, and looked down at Jean le Gai. For an instant he touched him on the hair, and then he was gone into the night, leaving the little architect gazing, wide-eyed and mute, at the crinkling ashes of the last, unworthiest moth of all.

During the days that followed, Le Pochard stood upon the mantel-corner. They no longer touched him, but left him, as it were, a monument to his own folly.

There was no further trace in Grégoire's manner of the mood which had loosed his tongue on the night of his last reading. To Jean, who, in his simplicity stood ready with comfort and encouragement, he seemed to be in need of neither. Plainly, what he had said was but a phase of that strange imagination which had dictated the exquisite pathos of his "Danaé" and his "Tristan;" and this one thing little Jean had learned,—that his friend lived the moods he wrote, and that oftentimes, when what he said was seemingly most personal, he was posing for his own pen—a painter in speech, drawing from his reflection in a mirror opposite. So the vague alarm aroused by Grégoire's words died down, and Jean plunged once more into his work.

In those last days of the competition his projet, laboriously builded, detail by detail, leaped into completion with a suddenness startling even to himself. He knew that it was good,—knew so without the surprising enthusiasm of his comrades at the atelier, and the still more surprising commendation of his patron, the great Laloux himself, whose policy was nil admirari, whose frown a habit, and whose "Bon!" a miracle. But even Jean le Gai, with all his buoyant optimism, was unprepared in conviction for those words which reverberated, to his ears like thunder, beneath the dome of the Institut.

"Prix de Rome—Jean Fraissigne—Atelier Laloux!"

Would Grégoire never come? He asked himself the question a hundred times as he paced the floor of their living-room an hour before dinner, exulting in the cold roast chicken and the champagne, and the huge Maréchale Niel rose which he had purchased for the occasion. For he was determined, was Jean le Gai, that Grégoire should be the first to know. Was it not Grégoire who had encouraged him all along, who had prophesied success when as yet the projet was no more than an exquisse exquisse, who had laughed down Jean's forebodings, and magnified Jean's hopes a hundred-fold? Yes, evidently Grégoire must be the first to know, before even a bleu should be sent to Avignon to gladden the heart of Fraissigne père!

But when Grégoire came, there was no need to tell him after all. For it was the chicken that shouted Jean's news—the chicken, and the champagne, and the great yellow rose, and, most of all, the face of Jean himself. So it was that Grégoire held out his long, thin arms, wide-spread, and that into them rushed Jean, to be hugged and patted, as he gabbled some things that there was such a thing as understanding and many more that there was not.

"Rome—Rome, think of it! And the paternel—but he will die of joy! Ah, mon vieux,—Rome! The dreams—the hopes—all I have wished for—and now—and now—Ah, mon vieux, mon vieux!"