The weight of the name

by Paul Bourget

Maxwell Altona—although born in Germany he bore that English baptismal name—seemed in no wise embarrassed to find himself in the presence of a son of the debtor he had plotted to rob, and when Métivier had named them to each other, he said calmly, with his shrewdest glance and his most engaging smile:—

"I am the more pleased to have the honor of being presented to you, Monsieur le Comte, because I followed your trial with the deepest interest and greatly admired your action at Hugueville. You have taken your leave."—Here the foreigner betrayed himself, by that little Germanism; no one is perfect.—"You are proposing, no doubt, to devote yourself to your fine château. I am well acquainted with its marvels."—At this point, one of the indescribably ironical expressions that play over the mysterious features of these international tradesmen.—"Allow me to suggest to you an opportunity that is perhaps unique. You have but one of the two Gobelins of the Turkish Embassy. It is the entry of Mehemet Effendi into Paris, in 1721, with the mission of congratulating the King on his accession," he added, addressing Métivier. Then, turning again to the possible purchaser, "I know where the other is."

"Isn't he amazing?" the notary asked Landri as he showed him out. "One affair has failed. He goes about another at once. He was going to strip you. He sells to you. Faith, I advise you to look at the tapestry. I am sure it's genuine. That's his probity, the pirate! He doesn't cheat about his wares. And Cauvet won't have a commission, I promise you."

A commission? Was it possible that Chaffin had in very truth not hesitated to commit the most shocking of private crimes, the betrayal of a dead wife to her husband, of an illegitimate son to the head of a family, after all the benefactions he had received, and all for fear of losing his percentage, as Métivier had said, of the four millions? Was it possible? At all events the objection urged at first by M. de Claviers was removed: the fact that the anonymous letter was sent before Chaffin's dismissal did not prove that he was not guilty. And yet how many things still made it improbable that he was! And in the first place, that he had had Madame de Claviers' letters in his possession! Improbability? Yes. Impossibility? No. Here the son's complicity once more appeared as the essential and sufficient condition.

All these ideas were whirling about in Landri's mind as he returned from Place de la Madeleine toward Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. They suddenly crystallized in a resolution which caused him to turn his back on his home and walk toward Place de la Concorde, then through the Tuileries toward the Seine, Notre-Dame, and Ile Saint-Louis. How many times he had followed that route, a mere child, on his way from the paternal abode to Quai de Béthune, where Chaffin's family then lived. Having agreed, it will be remembered, to live with his pupil, he often took him on Sunday to pass a few hours with Madame Chaffin, their daughter Louise, and their son Pierre, in the fourth floor apartment, from the balcony of which one commanded such a beautiful view of the Seine, with the chevet of Notre-Dame at the right, the dome of the Panthéon and of the Val-de-Grâce in front, and at the left the thickets of the Jardin des Plantes and the Salpêtrière. In course of time the Chaffins had gone down to the third floor, then to the first, without leaving the house, which was convenient to the young medical student because of the proximity of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Latin Quarter. Louise had never married, and Madame Chaffin was still living.

These recollections of an existence apparently so upright protested in the former pupil's heart against the insulting step he was preparing to take. He was going to question Pierre Chaffin. But great heaven! That virtuous occupant of an old house on a patriarchal quay had actually put his fingers in his master's fortune. Were there but one chance in a thousand, in ten thousand, that he had likewise stolen Madame de Claviers' letters, with the connivance of his son Pierre, that one chance was enough to cause Landri to try, at whatever cost, to find out.

"What do I risk?" he said to himself on the way. "I ask him whether, to his knowledge, any one except himself and the servants entered the sick man's bedroom. If no one went in, he will say no, simply. If some one did go in, and that some one was his father, he will be confused. If it is only for a second, I shall see it. That will be a certain indication, and then I shall act."

How? By what steps? He did not know. But on the other hand he did know that he was on his way to another trying scene in which all the suffering of the last weeks would be revived, on seeing the physician for the first time since that fatal Tuesday. He recalled Pierre's preoccupied expression as he came from his delirious patient's bedside, and the persistence with which he repeated: "It's downright madness." But what then? They were likely to meet at any time, and if Landri really proposed to keep to the compact he had made with M. de Claviers and to defend his mother's memory, guilty though she was, against this witness of Jaubourg's death-agony, it was much better to see him at once and to bear himself in their interview as if the dying man had in truth talked mere nonsense, which was of no consequence.

There was, to be sure, a difficulty of another sort. Pierre was the son of a man dismissed by the marquis for dishonesty. True. But Landri was not making a personal call upon him. He was going to seek information at the hands of a doctor who had been paid by M. de Claviers; for Jaubourg's residuary legatee must have paid all the debts of the deceased, including the expenses of the last sickness. Moreover, if Pierre was not Chaffin's confederate, he certainly did not know the true reason of his father's discharge. His father would never have told him. In that case there was nothing in Landri's procedure to surprise the doctor. In the contrary case, why spare a couple of brigands?

All varieties of grief have their egoism. There was another hypothesis which Madame de Claviers' son did not consider: perhaps, since his father's dismissal, Pierre Chaffin had been passing through a crisis similar to that of which his playmate in childhood was undergoing the terrors. Between ignorance and actual complicity, there is room for suspicion. Let us say at once that such was the plight of the physician, worried to the point of dismay by the visible change that he had observed in his father during the past month.