Three weeks ago he would not have cared very much had Paris known of his mode of life and ridiculed him for it. Cocksure, and blinded by the fata Morgana of success, he would have shaken his palette in the face of Paris; but Art had changed all that.
“Art is not a wanton, to be hired for a night,” said Garnier one day in answer to a remark of Toto’s. “Mon Dieu! no; she is like that woman in the Bible whose courting took seven years, and then again seven years, and seven years again. Work, and don’t think, work and don’t think.”
Easy advice to give. Toto was now continually thinking. He was in a worse Bastille than that from which Latude made his escape, for he had devised his own bondhouse, and the prison a man makes for himself is of all prisons, perhaps, the most difficult to leave.
He dreaded now meeting anyone that he knew, and in the street going to and from the studio glanced about him with the eyes of a frightened hare. As yet no one knew of his folly but Gaillard, Helen Powers, and his mother, but, indeed, that audience, together with his self-respect, were quite enough to keep him performing a little while longer.
Then there was Célestin. The unutterable contentment and bliss of Célestin with her new life filled the heart of Toto sometimes now with a vague sort of terror. She seemed to think that this sort of thing was to go on forever. Her love for him, expressed in a thousand different ways, seemed to spring from infinity itself, and love like this is to the beloved either a blessing beyond all blessings or a curse. To Toto just now it was not a blessing.
Of course, by a cab to the Nord, or the L’Ouest, or the Orleans railway, and a ticket to anywhere, and a few months’ absence, he could have put everything to rights. Paris, like a cold gray sea, would have washed over Célestin and Dodor, washed away the furniture of the atelier, washed away his memory from the rapins at Melmenotte’s, and obliterated all traces. Paris, whose motto is “I have forgotten,” would not trouble even to repeat those funereal and final words over this small escapade.
But Toto was not the person to leave Célestin and Dodor to the mercies of Paris. In some unaccountable way Célestin had drawn the better parts of his nature to herself; to wound her would be to wound himself. If he thought Célestin were weeping alone in some attic, it would have taken the pleasure from life, and spoiled his digestion, and filled his nights with nightmares, for his better parts would have been weeping with her. In short, though capable of a foolish action, he was as yet incapable of a ruffianly, and as a result he was unhappy. A perfectly happy fool must always, I think, be a ruffian.
One day Garnier, who called frequently now as a friend of the family, found Célestin on the verge of tears. The tulip in the red-tile pot had died, and she was inconsolable. She declared that she would never keep another when Garnier offered to replace it.
“Never mind,” said the painter; “I will procure you a flower that will not die.”
A juggler who had lodged once in the same house had instructed him in the manufacture of roses that never die, immortal tulips, and decay-defying camellias. They were made from turnips cunningly carved and dyed in cochineal. Camellias were the easiest to make, roses more difficult, whilst tulips, strange to say, were the most difficult of all. The tulip had first to be blocked out roughly from the succulent root; then the exterior had to be carved, and lastly, the whole thing hollowed neatly.