The Azure Rose: A Novel

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

You would have said that it behooved a man in Charlie Cartaret’s situation to devote his evenings to a consideration of its difficulties and his days to hard work; but Cartaret, though he did, as you will see, try to work, devoted the first evening of his new régime to thoughts that, if they affected his situation at all, tended only to complicate it. He thought, as he had so much of late, and as he was to think so much more in the future, of the Lady of the Rose.

Who was she? Whence did she come? What was this native land of hers that she professed to love so well? And, if she did love it so well, why had she left it and come to Paris with a companion that appeared to be some strange compromise between guardian and servant?

He wondered if she were some revolutionary exile: Paris was always full of revolutionary exiles. He wondered if she were a rightful heiress, dispossessed of a foreign title. Perhaps she was the lovely pretender to a throne. In that mysterious home of hers, she must have possessed some exalted position, or the right to it, for Chitta had kneeled to her on the dusty floor of this studio, and the Lady’s manner, he now recalled, was the manner of one accustomed to command. Her beauty was of a type that he had read of as Irish—the beauty of fair skin, hair black and eyes of deepest blue; but the speech was the English of a woman born to another tongue.

What was her native speech? Both her French and her English were innocent of alien accent—he had heard at least a phrase or two of the former—yet both had a precision that betrayed them as not her own and both had a foreign-born construction. Her frequent use of the word “sir” in addressing him was sufficiently peculiar. She employed the word not as one that speaks frequently to a superior, but rather as if she were used to it in a formal language, or a grade of life, in which it was a common courtesy. It was something more usual than the French “monsieur,” even more usual than the Spanish “señor.”

Cartaret leaned from a window. The air was still keen, but the night was clear. The rue du Val de Grâce was deserted, its houses dark and silent. Overhead, in the narrow ribbon of indigo sky, hung a pallid moon: a disk of yellow glass.

What indeed was she, this Lady of the Rose? He pictured as hers a distant country of deep valleys full of clamoring streams and high mountains where white roses grew. He pictured her as that country’s sovereign. Yet the rose which she treasured had not yet faded on the day of her arrival: she could not come from anywhere so far away.

He was cold. He closed the window, shivering. He was ridiculous: why, he had been in danger of falling in love with a woman of whom he knew nothing! He did not even know her name....

The passage of slow-footed time helped him, however, not at all. He would sit for hours, idle before his easel, listening for her light step on the stair and afraid to go to meet her when at last he heard it, for he was desperately poor now, and poverty was making him the coward that it will sooner or later make any man.

He had antagonized the concierge by preparing his own coffee in the morning instead of continuing to pay Mme. Refrogné for it. When he had something to cook, he cooked badly; but there were days when he had nothing, and lived on pastry and bricks of chocolate, and others when it seemed to him that such supplies as he could buy and store on that shelf outside the window were oddly short-lived.

For a while he called daily at the shop of M. Lepoittevin, but that absurd picture of a boy tearing a rose would not sell, and Cartaret soon grew ashamed of calling there; Fourget he would not face. He managed at first to dispose of one or two sketches and so kept barely alive, yet, as the days went by, his luck dwindled and his greatest energy was expended in keeping up a proud pretense of comfort to his friends of the Quarter.