“Never mind, worthy Jasmin,” rejoined the tutor, “all those things will serve as well later; my pupil will have to go home eventually. As for myself, I am Mentor, and I must not abandon Telemachus, even when he goes to dinner at the Rocher de Cancale.”
XI
MONFRÉVILLE.—DARÉNA.—POTERNE
A handsome salon had been engaged and a sumptuous banquet ordered at the Rocher de Cancale, by Comte Daréna, who had said to himself before he started for Gagny:
“Whatever happens, we shall surely come back to dinner; to be sure, if I happen to be one of those who are to pay, it will be rather hard for me just at this time; but that doesn’t worry me much; I’ll order the dinner none the less.”
To give no thought to anything but pleasure, to pay no heed to the future, to be, in truth, often indifferent concerning affairs of the present, such was Daréna’s nature. Born of a noble family, he had received an excellent education and had studied diligently. His father, a man of a proud and stern character, having observed in his son early in life a decided taste for independence and dissipation, had thought that he could correct him by depriving him of those amusements and that liberty which are the ordinary means of relaxation after toil and study. Thus, when Daréna was nineteen years of age, he had never had a franc that he could call his own, or a half hour of freedom. At that time his father died; his mother had died long before, and he suddenly found himself his own master and possessed of a very pretty little fortune. He plunged recklessly into pleasure and dissipation, trying to make up all the time that his father’s severity had caused him to lose, and bade adieu forever to study and to serious things.
Cards, women, horses, the table, became his idols. At first he frequented the best society, to which his name and his wealth gave him access; from the very beginning he had a multitude of love intrigues; but Daréna was not sentimental, he looked for nothing but pleasure in such affairs, and broke them off as soon as he foreshadowed the slightest exaction or annoyance.
As ladies in good society are not always disposed to form a liaison of a few days only, and as Comte Daréna’s behavior was no secret, since he plumed himself on not becoming attached to any woman, his amatory triumphs gradually became less numerous in the fashionable world, and he was compelled to pay his addresses to petites bourgeoises, then to ladies of the theatre, then to grisettes, then to courtesans; and finally he had grown to be so unexacting on that point that he had been known to take his mistresses from the most humble ranks of society.
Daréna’s fortune, like his love-affairs, had sunk constantly lower and lower. At last, at the age of twenty-eight, the count had squandered his whole patrimony and had nothing left save the house in Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which he desired to sell, and upon which he had already borrowed more than it was worth.
But, far from worrying concerning his present plight and his future, so long as he was able to dine well, to drink champagne with a ballet dancer, a figurante, a lace-maker, or even a lady’s maid, Daréna snapped his fingers at all the rest. To obtain those enjoyments, he was often obliged to resort to doubtful expedients; but the man who is not particular in choosing his acquaintances is not always particular as to his means of existence.
A person named Poterne had seconded Daréna’s dissipation and ruin to the utmost of his power. This Poterne was a man whose age it was impossible to guess, he was so ugly and unshapely. A gaunt, bony, angular body, supported by thin, knock-kneed legs, was surmounted by an oblong head of excessive length, a nose broken in the centre and hooked at the end, a mouth without lips, a protruding chin, and small eyes of a dull green hue, shaded by bushy eyebrows, and turning incessantly in every direction. Add to these an enormous quantity of thick, dirty brown hair, always cut like the quills of a hedgehog, and you have a faithful image of Monsieur Poterne.