By this time he was half way down the passage, and had knocked at the first door on the right before coming to the porter's lodge, which it was not necessary to pass. His knock was answered by a big fat maid of about thirty, with a short waist, square shoulders, and a great round face surmounted by a huge Auvergne cap and lit up by two brown eyes betraying animal simplicity. Instinctive distrust was expressed not only in the woman's physiognomy, but also by the manner in which she held the door instead of opening it wide, and by the way she blinked her eyes as she raised the lamp to throw the light upon the visitor's features. On recognising Claude her big face expressed a degree of satisfaction that told plainly how welcome the writer was in the Fresneau household.
'Good evening, Françoise,' said the young man; 'is your master ready?'
'Oh!—it's Monsieur Larcher,' exclaimed the maid, with a joyful smile, showing all her sharp little white teeth, of which she had lost one on each side of the top row. 'He is quite ready,' she added, 'and looks like an angel. You will find la compagnie in the dining-room. Let me take your coat for you . . . Saints preserve us! My dear gentleman, what a weight this must be on your back!'
The familiarity of this maid-of-all-work, who had come straight to the Fresneaus from the professor's native village in Auvergne, and who had made herself thoroughly at home with them for the past fifteen years, was a constant source of amusement to Claude Larcher. He was one of those deep thinkers who worship utter simplicity, no doubt because they find in it a relief from the incessant and exhaustive labour of their own brain. Françoise would sometimes speak to him of his works in most droll and grotesque terms, or with great ingenuousness express the fear with which she was always haunted—that the author was going to put her into one of his plays; or, again, she would, after the manner of her kind, give a most ludicrous turn to some literary phrase she had picked up in waiting at table. Claude remembered how he had once heard her say, in praising René's ardour for work: 'He dentifries himself with his heroes.' He could not help laughing at it even now. She would say ceuiller for cuiller, engratigner for égratigner, archeduc for aqueduc, to travel in coquelicot for incognito, and a heap of other similar slips which the writer would amuse himself by jotting down in one of his innumerable notebooks for a novel that he would never finish. He was therefore as a rule glad to provoke the woman's gossip; but that evening he was not in a mood for it, being suddenly filled with melancholy at the idea that he was playing the part of a vulgar worldly tempter. Whilst Françoise was hanging up his coat for him he looked down the corridor that he knew so well, with its doors on each side. René's bedroom was on the right at the end of the passage, facing the south; the Fresneaus were satisfied with a smaller apartment looking north, the room next to this being occupied by their son Constant, a boy six years old, of whom Emilie thought a good deal less than of René. Claude was fully acquainted with all the reasons for this tender sisterly love, as he was indeed with the whole history of this family. It was that history, so touching in its modest simplicity, which amply justified his remorse in dragging from this peaceful retreat the one in whom all was centred.
The father of Emilie and René, an attorney of Vouziers, had died a wretched death from the effects of intemperate habits. The practice having been sold and what little property there was realised, the widow, after paying all debts, found herself in possession of about fifty thousand francs. Feeling that life in Vouziers would recall too many bitter memories, Madame Vincy went to live in Paris with her two young children. She had a brother there, the Abbé Taconet, a priest of some eminence, who, though educated in the Ecole Normale, had suddenly, and without giving any reasons, entered into holy orders; the astonishment of his former comrades was, if possible, increased when they saw him, soon after leaving Saint-Sulpice, set up a school in the Rue Casette. A conscientious but very liberal Catholic, with strong leanings to Gallicanism, the Abbé Taconet had seen many families of the upper middle class hesitate between purely secular and purely religious colleges, not finding in either that combination of traditional Christianity and modern development they sought, and he had taken orders for the express purpose of carrying into effect a plan he had formed for realising that combination. The height of his ambition was reached on the day that he and two younger priests opened an ecclesiastical day school, which he christened the Ecole Saint-André, after his patron saint. The success that attended the Abbé's enterprise was so rapid that already, in the third year, two small one-horse omnibuses were required to fetch the pupils and take them back to their homes.
This opportunity of giving her son, then ten years old, an exceptional education, was one of the reasons that led Madame Vincy to choose Paris for her residence, especially since Emilie's sixteen years promised the mother valuable aid in the discharge of her household duties. By the advice of the Abbé Taconet, whom the management of the school funds had made quite a business man, she invested her fifty thousand francs in Italian stocks, which at that time could be bought at sixty-five francs, thus securing her an income of two thousand eight hundred francs per year. The secret of the idolatrous affection which Emilie lavished upon her young brother lay almost entirely in the innumerable daily sacrifices entailed by the inadequacy of this amount, for in matters of love we pursue our sufferings as at cards we pursue our losses.
Almost immediately after her arrival in Paris—she had taken rooms in this very house in the Rue Coëtlogon, but on the third floor—Madame Vincy had become an invalid, so that from 1863 to 1871, when the poor woman died, Emilie had discharged the triple duty of nursing her mother, of carefully tending a household where fifty centimes meant much, and of superintending step by step her brother's education. All this, too, she had done without allowing the fatigue that stole the colour from her cheeks to wring from her lips a single complaint. She resembled those sempstresses in the old songs of Paris who consoled themselves in their rude, incessant toil by cultivating some tender flower upon their window sill. Her flower was her brother, a timid, loving child with wistful eyes, and he had well repaid Emilie's devotion by his successes at college—a source of great joy to women whose lives were so entirely devoid of all pleasure. It was not long before René began to write poems, and Emilie had been the happy confidante of the young man's first attempts. Then, when Fresneau asked her to be his wife, not six months after the death of her mother, she consented only on condition that the professor, who had just passed his examinations, would not leave Paris, and that René was to live with them, and devote himself to writing. Fresneau joyfully acceded to these demands. He was one of those very good and very simple men who are peculiarly fitted to be lovers, granting blindly all that the object of their love desires. He had been enamoured of Emilie, without daring to declare his passion, since first making the acquaintance of the Vincys as René's master at the Ecole Saint-André in 1865. This man, who was not far from forty, felt drawn towards the girl by the strange similarity of their destinies. Had he not also renounced all selfish ambition and all personal aspirations in order to liquidate the debts which his father—a ruined schoolmaster—had left behind? From 1851 to 1872, when he married, the professor had paid twenty thousand francs to his father's creditors, and that by giving lessons at five francs each, taking one with the other! If we add to the number of working hours that produced this result the time required for preparing the lessons, correcting exercises, and going about from one place to another—Fresneau would sometimes have lessons at all points of the Parisian compass on the same day—we shall have the sketch of an existence, not uncommon in the profession of teaching, that is capable of wearing out the strongest constitutions. His love for Emilie had formed the one romance of Fresneau's life, too occupied as he had been during his youth to find time for such sentiments. The Abbé Taconet had given his blessing to their union, and an addition had been made to the slaves of René's genius.
Claude Larcher was not ignorant of any of these facts, which had all been of importance in developing the character and talent of the young poet. Whilst Françoise was hanging up his overcoat his rapid glance travelled round the dimly-lighted passage and took in all those material details which for him had a deeper and a moral signification. He knew why, in the corner near the door, side by side with the professor's stout alpaca umbrella with its clumsy handle, there stood a neat English frame with an elegant stick, chosen by Madame Fresneau for her brother. He knew, too, that it was the sister's love that had provided the dainty Malacca that adorned the hall-stand, and which had probably cost thirty times as much as the plain heavy stick carried by Fresneau when it was fine. He knew that the professor's books, after having for a long time been exposed to the dirt and dust on the blackened shelves of a bookcase in this passage, had at length been banished even from that place to a dark cupboard, and that the passage had then been given up to René's decorative fancies. The walls were adorned with engravings of his choosing—a whole row of Raffet's splendid studies of the great Napoleon, which must have been very obnoxious to the Republican tastes of the professor. But Claude knew well enough that Fresneau would be the very last to notice the constant sacrifice of the whole household to this brother, whom he, too, worshipped, out of love for Emilie, as blindly as did the servant and even the uncle—the uncle, for the Abbé Taconet had not been able to resist the influence of the young man's disposition and talent. The Abbé did not forget that his nephew possessed a modest income—the amount invested, by his advice, in Italians, and afterwards transferred to safe French stocks, now bringing in three thousand francs—and that he himself would double it at his death. Was not René's Christian education a guarantee that his literary talents would help to propagate the views of the Church? The priest had therefore done what he could to start the poet on that difficult path of letters where the fortunate youth had so far only met with happiness.
Of this happiness, consisting of pure devotion, silent affection, loving indulgence, and hearty, comforting confidence, Claude Larcher knew the value better than anyone—he who, bereft of both his parents, had, from his twentieth year, been compelled to battle alone against the hardships, the disenchantments, and the contamination of a struggling author's life in Paris. He never visited the Fresneaus without experiencing a feeling of sadness, and to-night was no exception to the rule. It was a feeling which generally made him laugh the louder and exercise his most withering sarcasm. Too enervated to bear the slightest emotion without feeling pain, he was, on such occasions, within an ace of proclaiming his agony, and in view of the hopelessness of ever conquering this excessive sensibility, ready, like a child, to be judged by his words whilst uttering the most atrocious libels on his own heart.