PUGIN
Pugin lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He had begun life quite low down in the Parisian world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, a jew book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, whose money has been dispersed, whose name has been forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth but the few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin.
Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years before he obtained recognition. The garret and starvation act had been unduly prolonged in the case of this genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in that cour des Miracles where the Bohemians camp, he had found, like a crystal vase, his exquisite style, preserved it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and carried it safely at last to the hands of Fame.
He was very rich now, very powerful, and very fortunate. Charitable, too, and ever ready to assist a fellow-worker in straitened circumstances, and to-day as he sat reading in the cool recesses of his library, and listening to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the warm June air through the open window, he felt at peace with all the world and in a mood to do justice to his bitterest enemy.
The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, letting pass only a diffused and honey-coloured twilight; a great bowl of roses filled the room with the simple and deep poetry of summer, the story of the hedges and the fields, of orchards shot through with the voices of birds, of cattle knee-deep in cool water where the dragon-flies keep up their eternal dance to the flute-like ripple of the river amidst the reeds.
Pugin, his book upon his knees, was enjoying these pictures of summer woven by perfume, when a servant entered and handed him Adams’s card and the letter of introduction written by Sabatier.
He ordered the visitor to be shown in. Adams, when he entered, found himself before a small man with a big head; an ugly little man, with a look of kindness and a very gracious and charming manner.
To Pugin Adams seemed a giant. A giant bronzed by unknown suns, talking French indifferently well, and with a foreign accent. An interesting person, indeed, but a being quite beyond his range of knowledge.
Pugin, in physical matters, was timid as a rabbit. He had never travelled farther than Trouville or Ostend, and when he indicated a chair, and when these two sat down to talk to each other, the mastiff-man felt instinctively the presence of the rabbit-man, and was at a loss how to begin.
Not for long, though. Bluffly, and with little grace enough, but with earnestness and a cunning one would never have suspected, he told of Maxine’s great admiration for the author’s work, and how she had suggested the enlistment of the said author in the crusade against crime which he, Adams, was endeavouring to raise.