The fortunes of Fifi

by Molly Elliot Seawell

It was during the morning, and in the snuff-colored drawing-room, that the communication was made. Fifi felt a great wave of doubt and anxiety swelling up in her heart. For the first time she was brought face to face with the marriage problem, and it frightened her by its immensity. If only Cartouche were there—some one to whom she could pour out her trembling, agitated heart! But Cartouche was not there, nor would he come. And suddenly, for the first time, something of the fierceness of maidenhood overwhelmed Fifi—a feeling that Cartouche should, after all, seek her—that, if he loved her, as she knew he did above everything on earth, he should speak and not shame her by his silence.

Then, the conviction that Cartouche preferred her good to his, that he thought she would be happier married to another and a different man, and held himself honestly unworthy to marry her, brought a flood of tenderness to her heart. She had seen Cartouche turn red and pale when she kissed him, and avoid her innocent familiarities, and she knew well enough what it meant. But if he would not come, nor speak, nor write,—and everybody, even the Holy Father, was urging her to marry Louis Bourcet; and a great, strong chain of circumstances was dragging her toward the same end—oh, what a day of emotions it was to Fifi!

She knew not how it passed, nor what she said or did, nor what she ate and drank; she only waited, as if for the footfall of fate, for the hour when Louis Bourcet would arrive. He came at eight, punctual to the minute. Punctuality, like every other virtue, was his. Madame Bourcet whispered something to him, and Louis, for the first time, touched Fifi’s hand and brushed it with his lips, Fifi standing like a statue. The crisis was rapidly becoming acute.

At nine o’clock, the cribbage board was brought out; Madame Bourcet dutifully fell asleep, and Louis, with the air of doing the most important thing in the world, took from his pocket a small picture of himself, which he presented to Fifi with a formal speech, of which she afterward could not recall one word. Nor could she remember what he talked about during the succeeding half-hour before Madame Bourcet waked up. Then Louis rose to go, and something was said about happiness and economy in the management of affairs; and Louis announced that owing to the necessity of procuring certain papers from Strasburg, where his little property lay, the marriage contract could not be signed for a month yet, and inquired if Fifi would be ready to marry him at the end of the month. Fifi instantly replied yes, and then the crisis was over. From that moment nothing on earth would have induced Fifi to marry Louis Bourcet.

She did not, of course, put this in words, but sent poor Louis off with her promise to marry him in a month. Nevertheless, by one of those processes of logic which Fifi could not formulate to save her life, but which she could act up to in the teeth of fire and sword, the promise to marry Louis Bourcet settled for all time that she would not marry him.

Up to that moment all had been vague, agitating, mysterious and compelling. She felt herself driven, if not to marry Louis Bourcet, to act as if she meant to marry him. But once she had promised, once she had something tangible to go upon, her spirit burst its chains, and she was once more free. She had no more notion of marrying Louis Bourcet then than she had of trying to walk on her head. And she felt such a wild, tempestuous joy—the first flush of happiness she had known since the wretched lottery ticket had drawn the prize. She was so happy that she was glad to escape to her own room. She carried in her hand the picture of Louis Bourcet, and did not know she held it until she put it down on her mantelpiece and saw in the mirror above it her own smiling, glowing face.

“No, Louis,” she said to the picture, shaking her head solemnly, “it is not to be. I have been a fool heretofore in not saying outright that I wouldn’t marry you to save your life. But now my mind is made up. Nobody can make me marry you, and I would not do it if Cartouche, the Holy Father and the Emperor all commanded me to marry you!”

Then an impish thought came into Fifi’s head, for Fifi was in some respects a cruel young person. She would make Louis himself refuse to marry her and contrive so that all the blame would be visited upon the innocent Louis, while she, the wicked Fifi, would go free. In a flash it was revealed to her; it was to get rid of her hundred thousand francs. Then Louis would not marry her—and oh, rapture! Cartouche would.

“He can’t refuse,” thought Fifi in an ecstasy. “When I have been jilted and cruelly used, and have no money, then I can go back to the stage, and everybody will know me as Mademoiselle Chiaramonti, granddaughter of the Pope’s cousin, who won the great prize in the lottery; everybody will flock to see me, as they did the last two weeks I played; and I shall have forty francs the week, and Cartouche, and love and work and peace and Toto, and no Louis Bourcet! And how angry Julie Campionet will be!”

It was so deliciously easy to get at her money—a rip and a stitch afterward—ten thousand francs squandered before Louis Bourcet’s eyes. Fifi thought the loss of the first ten thousand would rid her of her fiancé, but she knew she could never get Cartouche as long as she had even ten thousand francs left, and she realized fully that it was Cartouche that she wanted most of anything in the world. The Holy Father would probably scold her a little, but Fifi felt sure, if she could only tell the Holy Father just how she felt and how good Cartouche was, and also how odiously good Louis Bourcet was, he would forgive her.