In the rue Adolphe Yvon, one of the most exclusive and expensive streets in Paris, near enough to the Bois de Boulogne to be convenient for morning exercise, but far enough removed to be without the surge and roar of the tides of life that beat there in the afternoons, the Pompadour écossais had a mansion like a palace, where he entertained the fashionable world with the aid of a cook who seemed possessed of magic powers to startle and delight, a wine-cellar incredibly comprehensive, and a retinue of servants such as the President of the Republic himself could not command. If he dined at his house alone, he dined with all the grandiose formality of Lucullus; if he patronised a restaurant, he must have his private cabinet and a menu unbelievingly extravagant. But strictly speaking, he never dined alone, either in the rue Adolphe Yvon, Voisin’s, or Paillard’s: he was invariably accompanied by a fellow-countryman, who was his secretary or companion—a fellow saturnine and cynical, who ate and drank voraciously, while his master was content with the simplest viands and a glass of water.
They had come in spring to the Ville Lumière, and stepped, as it were, from the wagon-lit of the P.L.M. train from the South into the very vortex of frivolity. You saw the Pompadour écossais in the morning riding in the Bois on a snowy Irish hunter, wearing garments of a tone and cut that promptly set the fashion to the gommeaux, with a boutonnière of orchids; driving his coach through the avenues of Versailles in the afternoon with a coat of gendarme blue with golden buttons; at the clubs, the galleries, the opera, the cafés, the coulisses of the theatre—always the very latest cry in fashion, ever splendid and inscrutable! Withal, he never had so much as a sou in his pocket to buy a newspaper; his secretary paid for all, and paid with nothing less than gold. Balgowie, arbiter of elegance, envied by young men for his style, was adored by the most fastidious and discerning women for his sensibility, which was curiously out of keeping with his life of waste.
Quite as deeply interested in the Pompadour as any of the butterflies who fluttered round him in the rue Adolphe Yvon was a poor old widow, wholly unknown, in Scotland, for every Saturday she had a letter from her son, Balgowie’s secretary. She read of childish escapades, inordinate and unwholesome pleasures, reckless prodigality.
“What a miserable life!” she would exclaim at the news of some fresh imbecility, as it seemed to her. “A hundred pounds for a breakfast! Five hundred pounds for a picture to a lady! Oh, Jamie, Jamie, what a master!”
She grieved, indeed, exceedingly about the sinful course of life in which her son was implicated, and more than once, for his soul’s sake, asked him to come back to Scotland, but always he temporised. With Lord Balgowie he enjoyed a comfortable salary; he had no profession at his hands, although he had had the best of educations, thanks to his parents’ self-denial, and he saw himself doomed for a term of years to follow the progress of his rakish patron.
Her only comfort was in the shrewd and sober nature of his comments on his master’s follies. “I have looked at his manner of life in all ways, mother,” he wrote, “and it seems to me deplorable. Once I had the notion to be wealthy for the sake of the independence and the power for good that money can command; now I can see it has a cankering influence on the soul. I have gone with my lord to every part of Europe, looking for content and—in his own state—simple honesty, for friends to trust, and a creditable occupation for the mind. Nothing in all the capitals among the rich but idleness and riot and display, cunning intrigue, self-seeking, and calculation. Thank God that you’re poor!”
Not so very poor, though, for he sent her thirty shillings every week, a benefaction that enabled her to share among the really poor who were her neighbours. For years that sum had come to her with his letters every Saturday, often from towns whose names in their foreign spelling were unknown to her; a sense of opulence that caused her some uneasiness had more than once compelled her to protest. “I am sure you deprive yourself,” she wrote, “and half that money would do me finely. You should be saving, laddie; some day you will want to marry.”
“Marry,” he wrote her back, incontinent; “I am here in a world of mannequins, and have yet to see the woman I could be happy to sit with in auld age by a Scottish fire.”
But he was not always to be of that mind. One day her weekly letter held the fabulous sum of twenty pounds, and a hint of his infatuation for a lady he had met in Paris. His mother read his rhapsodies about the lass; they were, she noticed, more about her wit and beauty than about her heart. And in his letter was an unfamiliar undertone of apprehension, secrecy, evasion, which her mother sense discerned.
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