"Yes, I know Trottier," answered Heathcote, far from pleased at finding that the painter and the paragraphist were intimate.
It was not unlikely that Trottier had warned his friend against answering any inquiries about Georges.
"Then I think you must have heard a good deal about me," said Eugène Tillet, with a satisfied smile. "Trottier knew me when I was in the zenith of my power—glorious days—glorious nights those. The days of Gautier and Gustave Planche, Villemessant, Roqueplan—the days when there were wits in Paris, Monsieur. Ah! you should have seen our after-midnight cénacle at the Café Riche. How the pale dawn used to creep in upon our talk! and how we defied the waiters, when, between two and three o'clock, they tried to put out the gas and get rid of us! I remember how, one night, we all came with candle-ends in our pockets, and when the waiters began to lower the gas, lit up our candles—a veritable illumination. They never tried to put out our lamps after that. Yes, those were glorious nights, and art was honoured in those days. There was a man called Georges, a French Canadian, I believe; a man of large fortune and splendid brains—he came to a bad end afterwards, I am sorry to say"—this with airiest indifference. "He used to give little suppers at the Café de Paris or the Maison d'Or, suppers of half a dozen at most—banquets for the gods. I was generally one of that select circle."
"You painted this friend of yours, no doubt," suggested Heathcote, "this Monsieur Georges."
"No; he had a curious antipathy to sitting for his portrait. I wanted to paint him. He had a fine head, highly paintable. A fine picturesque head, which was all the more picturesque on account of a particularly artistic wig."
"Do you mean to say that he wore a wig?"
"Habitually. He had lost his hair in South America after a severe attack of fever, and it had never grown again. He wore a light auburn wig, with hair that fell loosely and carelessly over his forehead, almost touching his eyebrows. The style suited him to perfection, and the wig was so perfect in its simulation of nature, that I doubt if any one but a painter or a woman would have detected that it was a wig. He dressed in a careless semi-picturesque style—turn-down collar, loose necktie, velvet coat—and with that long hair of his, he had altogether the air of a painter or a poet."
"And you never painted him?"
"Never. I have sketched his head many a time from memory, for my own amusement, both before and after his disappearance; but he never sat to me. I might have made money by giving the police one of my sketches, when they were trying to hunt Georges down as a suspected murderer: but I am not a Judas, to betray the friend at whose table I have eaten," said the painter, whose Scriptural knowledge was derived solely from the Old Masters, and who regarded the disciple's crime from a purely social point of view.
Heathcote was careful to show the least possible curiosity about the vanished Georges. He listened with the air of a man who is charmed by a delightful conversationalist, who admires the raconteur, but who has no personal interest in the subject of the discourse. And Eugène Tillet was accustomed so to talk and so to be heard. He was an egotist of the first water, and was not a close observer of other people.