Fortunately for the latter it was Mademoiselle Marie who made up the bills and had charge of the cash-box; the Laveurs occupied themselves exclusively with the kitchen and the household arrangements. Inevitably, the student boarders lost their hearts to the “Greek Statue”; but she laughed at their gallantry, and gaily wanted to know how on earth they could keep a wife when they couldn’t pay their own way. Bill of M. Paul a month and thirteen days overdue. Laundry account of M. Pierre five weeks in arrears, and the washerwoman making persistent “inquiries.” The washing-basin of M. Jacques, broken an eternity ago, still standing against him in the boarding-house ledger. And yet they wanted to marry her, all of them—the foolish sentimentalists, the dear, simple imbeciles! No, no; she would try to keep the Laveurs in ignorance of the unpaid bills; she would sew buttons on to M. Paul’s shabby coat, and blot out the stains from M. Pierre’s; she would say no more of the washing-basin; she would reassure the angry blanchisseuse; she would, in a word, do everything for the student boarders except marry them. “Tant pis,” cried the latter dramatically, “you have broken my heart. I shall never do anything in this world. You have ruined me!” Replied the radiant Savoyarde: “Nonsense! Work hard, and make a name for yourself. And when you are famous come and see me, and I promise not to remind you of the washerwoman, or the basin, or your faded old coat.”
Their studies finished, away from the narrow little Rue des Poitevins went the “heartbroken” boarders to make a “name for themselves.” Not so heartbroken but that they became either heroic or distinguished “citizens” of France. At the end of the plain, bourgeois dinner Mademoiselle Marie came to Gambetta’s table for dessert, and, amidst a cracking of nuts and the drinking of sour wine, the future great and noble Gambetta tempestuously held forth. A Republic for France was his cry. How the glasses danced as he thumped with his fist on the table! What cheers from the boarders; what a blush and a flush on the face of the “Greek Statue”! Gambetta stirred that sombre, musty boarding-house as later he roused the whole of France with his eloquence, enthusiasm, his glorious patriotism. His Republican programme was first conceived, his famous social battle-cry—“Le Cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi”—was first sounded in that pension of the narrow, obscure Rue des Poitevins. Emotion, we may be sure, of the “Greek Statue” whilst her hero was away with the Army of the Loire. Gloom and hunger in the Pension Laveur during the Siege of Paris; never a sniff of the strong onion soup. Years later—1881—Gambetta Prime Minister, accession of “le Grand Ministère,”—and joy and pride of the “Greek Statue.” But downfall of the “Grand Ministère” after only two months’ power, and death of Gambetta in the following year—and then, yes, then, so, at least, I surmise, grief and tears of the Savoyarde, the “Greek Statue,” now become grey-headed, now a sexagenarian, now known to her boarders as “Tante Marie.”
So have we arrived at the twilight of the once radiant Savoyarde’s career. She is sixty, and the golden hair has gone grey, and familiarly and affectionately she is known amongst her boarders as “Auntie.” Still, however, does she sew on the missing buttons of the jeunesse of the Latin Quarter, and allow the pension bills to stand over, and overlook the matter of broken washing-basins, and pacify the angry blanchisseuse, and encourage her struggling boarders with the old words of long ago: “Work hard, and make a name for yourself, and come and tell me of your fame....” Years roll on—and “Tante Marie” becomes deaf and frail, and holds a hand to her ear when the pensionnaires of the past return to the Rue des Poitevins—elderly, many of them wealthy and distinguished—and pay her homage, and thank her emotionally for her kindnesses, and leave behind them autographed photographs bearing, amongst many other signatures, the names of Alphonse Daudet, François Coppée, Waldeck-Rousseau (Gambetta’s disciple), Reclus, the great physician, Millerand (ex-Minister of War), Pichon, the actual French Foreign Secretary, and a former President of the Republic, Émile Loubet.... More years roll by and “Tante Marie” becomes bent, shaky and wizened—a nonagenarian. Against her will, she is removed from the sombre, musty old Balzacian pension to a small, modern, electric-lighted apartment—where she dies. Dies, in spite of her beauty, brilliancy, irresistibility, a spinster. Dies with the admission: “It was Gambetta I loved. Impossible, of course. But he called me a Greek Statue!”
3. Pension de Famille. French and Piano Lessons. Les Saintes Filles, Mesdemoiselles Périvier
Three years have elapsed since Henri Rochette, the dashing young French financier with the handsome black beard, fell with a crash.
“Le Krach de Rochette. Arrest of the Financier. Millions of Losses. Ruin of Small Investors,” yelled the camelots on the boulevards. It was another affaire, a gigantic swindle reminiscent of Panama, in that the greater part of the victims were small, thrifty people, who now stood in thousands outside Rochette’s closed, darkened offices, weeping, raging, pathetically or passionately demanding the return of their savings.
“That Rochette, he came from nowhere—how did he manage it?” asked the prudent bourgeois, who had steeled himself against Rochette’s alluring, rattling circulars.
Yes, Rochette had come from nowhere—or rather, he had come from the country town of Melun, where he was a waiter in a greasy hotel; then he passed as clerk into a financial establishment; next he opened spacious offices of his own and successfully floated a dozen different companies. I believe the chief factor in Rochette’s success was the black beard he began to grow and to cultivate assiduously, elaborately, after his departure from Melun. With ambition, audacity and, above all, an ornamental black beard, no Frenchman should fail to make his fortune. Lemoine, the alchemist, Duez, the liquidator of the Religious Congregations, both of them had splendid black beards; and the first lived in great style, at the expense of even so astute a financier as Sir Julius Wernher, and the second kept up costly establishments on money belonging to the State. True, MM. Duez and Lemoine were shorn of their beards and sent to prison. But for a long while, at all events, a really fine black beard in France can excite admiration, inspire confidence, command capital and make millions.
Well, Rochette fell with a crash—and so a panic, so ruin in Paris. Cases of suicide. Other cases of death from the shock. Bailiffs in possession of small homes and dim shops, and the small people expelled. Up with the shutters in Rochette’s splendid offices; away to prison with the swindling financier, and off with his beard. Victims and victims—dazed, broken, distracted. Amongst the forlornest victims, the two Mesdemoiselles Périvier.
“Saintly creatures,” the stout, red-faced Curé of the church of St Sulpice used to say of the Mesdemoiselles Périvier. For years and years they had resided in his parish, attending a Low Mass and High Mass every morning, and Vespers every evening; for years and years they had subscribed to M. le Curé’s “good works,” and provided his favourite dishes of vol-au-vent and poulet-au-riz upon those monthly occasions when he dined with them in their dreary, six-roomed flat. It was the most sunless, the most joyless of homes; and the Mesdemoiselles Périvier were the frailest, the simplest, the most frugal of old spinsters, with scarcely a friend and not a relative in the world, and with no experience of the shocks and hardships of life until their small income was lost in the Rochette crash.