“It was the Prince, who laughed joyously, and placed the little pan upon the floor, whilst he shook the interviewer warmly by the hand.”
The whole thing had a most horribly actual air. The teeming brain of Wolf had supplied little details impossible, one would say, to be false. The foolish lovers who had renounced, one her home, the other his world, for the sake of art and love in an attic, stood before one in the flesh. Wolf, inspired by champagne and the dictation of his editor, had worked with the fervor and insight of a poet; and one almost wept over the struggling pair, till one remembered that the Prince was worth half a million of money, and then one laughed till one’s sides ached.
“We are very happy,” said the Prince, at the conclusion of this weird interview. “Tell all my friends to come and see me, now that you have found me out. Tell them also that there is only one true happiness—to be young and poor, and mated to the woman one loves.”
“That last line,” had murmured De Nani to himself, “will, I have no doubt, vastly amuse Mme. la Princesse and Mlle. Powhair.”
Toto let Pantin drop, and turned his white face to the window, as if he expected to see all Paris looking in and laughing. He knew, as indeed was the fact, that men were tumbling out of bed bursting with laughter, and running into their wives’ bedrooms Pantin in hand; that starch-faced valets were shaking under their starch, as they handed Pantin to their masters on silver salvers with cups of chocolate; that young De Harnac, who was more English than his own bulldog, was crying “My Gawd!” and kicking his legs about in bed with delight as he read Pantin; that Mme. la Princesse was prostrated, and Mlle. Powhair—he could not imagine what Helen Powers was saying or thinking. The thought of her was somehow the worst part of all this trouble.
His lips were dry, and they felt as if they never could become moist again. He was quite calm, but this calmness of Toto’s would have frightened his mother to behold. He neither shrieked nor tore his hair; but, indeed, the latter feat would have been impossible, for a fortnight ago he had had it cropped to the bone in imitation of Garnier.
The hilt of this dagger was the ingratitude of Pelisson, Gaillard & Co.—the men who had been his guests, to whom he had lent money, and who had now stabbed him in this cruel manner before all Paris. Little did he know of the raving Pelisson, who, having sought vainly for Froissart, had returned by the night mail, which stops at Amiens and arrives in Paris at seven in the morning, only to find this horrible snake curled in Pantin. Pelisson at this moment was dragging the terrified Gaillard out of bed, who was protesting that he knew nothing of the matter, just as Scribe ten minutes ago had protested that eighteen thousand francs were missing from the safe, he could not tell how; and as Saxe, the German foreman, had declared that the usual big edition of Pantin was out, and could not be got back, not if God came out of Himmel, and that it was not Saxe’s fault that this schweinhund article had crawled into print—whilst Struve, whose practical joke had long ago laid the seeds of all this mischief, was the only man unconcerned by it as he lay asleep after a hard night’s work, and dreaming of stained-glass windows and saints who had strayed into art.
But Toto knew nothing of all this: he thought this cruel and spiteful trick the work of his friends. He had always liked Pelisson, and he had liked Gaillard. Gaillard had been, in fact, a kind of necessity to him—a sort of dry-nurse, who wiped his nose and said “There, there!” when he was fretful, and listened to his secrets, and told him tales, and put him up to resist his mother.
A man of the world would have seen at once that some trick had been played on Pantin. Pelisson, of all men in the world, was the last to let such an article appear in his paper; especially as it was leveled against a man who was virtually part proprietor. Gaillard, too, was entirely out of court. But Toto was not a man of the world, and the bitterest thing to him in this severe humiliation was the supposed authorship.
He took up Pantin, folded it, and hid it under one of the cushions of the couch. The act, performed on the impulse of a moment, revealed to him in a dramatic manner his position. Of what use was the hiding of one copy of Pantin under a cushion when fifty thousand Pantins were bellowing his shame all over Paris? So he snatched it out and flung it open on the table as if for everyone to read—a useless act, for everyone was reading it.