Monsieur Cherami

by Paul de Kock

Thereupon, the waiter would bow to the ground before so generous a patron; and he would stalk forth proudly from the restaurant, enchanted with the effect he had produced. And the next morning he would have nothing with which to procure a dinner.

I beg you not to believe that this character is an imaginary one; that there are no men foolish enough to act in this way; there are, and many of them. For our own part, we have known more than one.

But when naught remained of the small quarterly payment, he had to live anew on loans and stratagems; he had to content himself with the very modest fare of a cheap restaurant, where the mistress was willing to supply him on credit because he flattered her and compared her with Venus, although she was blear-eyed and had a purple nose. In that place he could not order champagne and truffles, to be sure; that would have been a waste of time; but Cherami found a way, none the less, to make a sensation: shouting louder than anybody else, bewildering everybody with his chatter, and always having some marvellous adventure to relate, of which he was the hero, and in which he had performed wonderful exploits. If one of his auditors seemed to doubt the veracity of his narrative, he would insult him, threaten him, challenge him, insist on fighting him instanter, and, in order to pacify my gentleman and restore peace, the person abused must needs treat him to nothing less than a cup of coffee followed by a petit verre of liqueur. As for the waiters, as he had nothing to give them, he treated them like dogs, and threatened them with his switch when they did not serve him promptly enough.

If, instead of passing his time in smoking and loitering, Monsieur Cherami had chosen to do something, he might have increased his income, and have lived without constantly resorting to loans. He was well informed; he retained from his early education a superficial idea of many things; he knew quite a lot, in fact, and might have passed for a scholar in the eyes of those who knew nothing. His handwriting was so good that he could have obtained work as a copyist. In his youth, he had studied music, and he could play the violin a little; he might have made something of his talent in that direction and have found a place in the orchestra of a second-class theatre, or played in dance-halls for the grisette and the mechanic.

But the ci-devant Beau Arthur considered every sort of work that was suggested to him very far beneath him; he thought that he would degrade himself by becoming a copyist or a minstrel, and he was not ashamed to borrow a hundred sous when he knew that he could not repay them. What do such people understand by the word honor? Let us conclude that they fashion a kind of honor for their own use, just as some painters paint scenes from nature in which there is nothing natural, but which by common consent are called conventional nature.

One day, when he was without a sou, having been denied by all those from whom he had sought to borrow, and not daring to go to his cheap restaurant, because the mistress was absent, Cherami found himself confronted by the stern necessity of going without a mouthful of dinner, when it occurred to him to call upon his payer of interest. So he set out for the abode of the coal dealer, saying to himself on the way:

"Bernardin always refuses to make me the smallest advance; but, sacrebleu! when I tell him that I have nothing with which to pay for a dinner, it isn't possible that he will let me starve to death."

The modest tradesman was just about to sit down to dinner with his family when Cherami appeared, crying:

"The deuce! it would seem that you are about to dine! You're very lucky! For my part, I haven't the means to pay for a dinner. Lend me a crown, Bernardin, so that I can satisfy my hunger, too."

"I never have money to loan," the coal dealer replied respectfully; "but if monsieur will do us the honor to take a seat at our table, we shall be happy to offer him a share of our modest dinner."