The fortunes of Fifi

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“No need to do that, Fifi,” said Cartouche, in a strange voice. “After to-morrow you need not wear thirty-franc cloaks any more.”

“Oh, you cruel Cartouche!” cried Fifi, and burst into the anticipated fit of crying. She insisted on weeping on Cartouche’s shoulder, and even kicked Toto when that sympathetic dog would have joined his grief to hers, for Toto knew well enough that something was to pay, whether it was the devil or not, he could not tell, but rather suspected it was the devil.

Cartouche tried to comfort Fifi—usually not a difficult problem when one has to be reconciled to a fortune—but there is always something staggering in contemplating another state of existence. Neither Cartouche nor Fifi could at once become calm, and Fifi, too, felt in some singular, but acute manner, that the hundred thousand francs stood between her and Cartouche.

“Now, mind, Fifi,” Cartouche said, “not a word of this to the people in the theater. Wait until the money is actually in your hands.”

“In my hands,” cried Fifi, tearfully and indignantly, “in your hands, you mean, you cruel Cartouche!”

Fifi had called Cartouche cruel a dozen times since she had drawn the prize, but Cartouche did not mind it. He would have liked to stay with her but there were a dozen things awaiting him at the theater, and Cartouche was not the man to neglect his work. He went off, therefore, and had not a minute to himself, until just before it was time to dress for the play. Then he went to his room, and taking his tin box from the chink in the chimney, he counted over his twenty-two francs—saved by doing without food and fire.

Clothes and shoes he must have to keep his place in the theater. Duvernet had been a good friend to him, and he could not go in rags, so that people would say: “There goes one of Duvernet’s actors. That man does not pay his people enough to give them decent clothes to their backs.”

But food and fire were a man’s own affairs, and, by keeping on the near side of both, Cartouche had been able to save twenty-two francs in three weeks of the coldest weather he had ever felt. And how little it was! How contemptible alongside of a hundred thousand francs! Cartouche, sighing, put the box back. It was all in vain: those days when he battled with his hunger, those bitter nights when the snow lay deep on the roofs below his garret, and his old, cracked stove was as cold as the snow. And yet, there had been a tender, piercing sweetness in the very endurance of those privations—it was for Fifi. And Fifi would never more need his savings, which thought should have made him happy, but did not.

The next day, the whole story was out, the newspapers published the numbers and names of the winners, and it was as if Fifi had been transported to another planet.

Duvernet came first to congratulate her. She was in a cold spasm of terror for fear he had come to tell her that her services were no longer needed at the theater. It seemed to her as if she were about to be thrown headlong into an unknown abyss, and she thought that if she could but remain at the Imperial Theater for a short while longer, long enough to get accustomed to that stupendous change which awaited her, it would become a little more tolerable. And Duvernet himself was so strange, it frightened Fifi. He was so respectful; he did not strut as usual, and he called her Mademoiselle Chiaramonti, instead of Fifi. And Toto, who usually barked furiously at the manager, did not bark at all, but sat on his hind legs, his fore legs dropping dejectedly, and looked ruefully in Duvernet’s face, as much as to say: