“And I suppose you’re bored to death?”
“Oh, no, I am not bored. I am happy. I never was really happy—dans le temps.”
They were living in a very plain way indeed. You know what French farmhouses are apt to be. His whole income was under a hundred pounds a year; and out of that (and the trifle she earned by needlework) his canvases, colours, brushes, frames, had to be paid for, as well as his opium, and their food, clothing, everything. But P’tit-Bleu—Jeanne—with that “lower-middle-class parsimony” of hers, managed somehow. Jeanne! In putting off the name, she had put off also, in great measure, the attributes of P’tit-Bleu; she had become Jeanne in nature. She was grave, she was quiet. She wore the severest black frocks—she made them herself. And I never once noticed the odour of peau-d’.spagne, from the beginning to the end of my visit. But—shall I own it? Jeanne was certainly the more estimable of the two women, but shall I own that I found her far less exciting as a comrade than P’tit-Bleu had been? She was good, but she wasn’t very lively or very amusing.
P’tit-Bleu, the heroine of Bullier, that lover of noisy pleasure, of daring toilettes, of risky perfumes, of écrevisses and chablis, of all the rush and dissipation of the Boul’ Miche and the Luxembourg, quietly settling down into Jeanne of the home-made frocks, in a rough French farmhouse, to a diet of veal and lentils, lentils and veal, seven times a week, and no other pastime in life than the devoted, untiring nursing of an ungrateful old English opium-eater—here was variation under domestication with a vengeance.
And on Sunday... P’tit-Bleu went twice to church!
About ten days after my return to Paris, there came a rat-ta-ta-tat at my door, and P’tit-BIeu walked in—pale, with wide eyes. “I don’t know how he has contrived it, but he must have got some money somewhere, and walked to the railway, and come to town. Anyhow, here are three days that he has disappeared. What to do? What to do?” She was in a deplorable state of mind, poor thing, and I scarcely knew how to help her. I proposed that we should take counsel with a Commissary of Police. But when that functionary discovered that she was neither the wife nor daughter of the missing man, he smiled, and remarked, “It is not our business to recover ladies’ protectors for them.” P’tit-BIeu walked the streets in quest of him, all day long and very nearly all night long too, for close upon a fortnight. In the end, she met him on the quays—dazed, half-imbecile, and again nude of everything save his shirt and trousers. So, again, having nicely built up her house of cards—piff!—something had happened to topple it over.
“Let him go to the devil his own way,” said I. “Really, he’s unworthy of your pains.”
“No, I can’t leave him. You see, I’m fond of him,” said she.
He, however, positively refused to return to the country. “The fact is,” he explained, “I ought to go to London. Yes, it will be well for me to pass the winter in London. I should like to have a show there, a one-man show, you know. I dare say I could sell a good many pictures, and get orders for portraits.” So they went to London. In the spring I received a letter from P’tit-Bleu—a letter full of orthographic faults, if you like—but a letter that I treasure. Here’s a translation of it:
“My dear Friend,—I have hesitated much before taking my pen in hand to write to you. But I have no one else to turn to. We have had a dreadful winter. Owing to my ignorance of the language one speaks in this dirty town, I have not been able to exercise over Monsieur Edouard that supervision of which he has need. In consequence, he has given himself up to the evil habit which you know, as never before. Every penny, every last sou, which he could command, has been spent for that detestable filth. Many times we have passed whole days without eating, no, not the end of a crust. He has no desire to eat when he has had his dose. We are living in a slum of the most disgusting, in the quarter of London they call Soho. Everything we have, save the bare necessary of covering, has been put with the lender-on-pledges. Yesterday I found a piece of one shilling in the street. That, however, I have been forced to dispense for opium, because, when he has had such large quantities, he would die or go mad if suddenly deprived.