The Azure Rose: A Novel

by Reginald Wright Kauffman

On that day the annual siege of Paris ended, the city fell before her invaders, and by the time that Cartaret went into the streets, the army of occupation was in possession. The Luxembourg Gardens, the very benches along the Boul’ Miche’ were full of lovers: he could not stir from the house without encountering them.

From it, however, he had to go: the Spring called him with a sad seductiveness that he could no longer resist. He wandered aimlessly, trying the impossible: trying to keep his eyes from the couples that also wandered, but wandered hand in hand, and trying to keep his thoughts from roses and the Lady of the Rose.

He found himself before one of the riverside bookstalls, fingering an old book, leather-bound. The text, he realized, was English, or what once was so: it was a volume of Maundeville, and Cartaret was reading:

“Betwene the cytee and the chirche of Bethlehem is the felde Floridus; that is to seyne, the field florsched. For als moche as a fayre mayden was blamed with wrong ... for whiche cause sche was demed to the dethe, and to be brent in that place, to the which she was ladd. And, as the fyre began to brenne about hire, she made her preyeres to oure Lord, that als wissely as sche was not gylty ... that he would help hire, and make it to be knowen to alle men of his mercyfulle grace. And, whanne sche had thus seyd, sche entered into the fuyer; and anon was the fuyer quenched and oute, and the brondes that weren brennynge becomen white roseres, full of roses; and theise werein the first roseres and roses, both white and rede, that ever ony man saughe. And thus was this mayden saved by the grace of God.” ...

All that week—while the contents of his window-sideboard dwindled, he was sure, faster than he ate from it—he had tried to forget everything by painting heavily at pot-boilers. He had begun with the aim of earning enough to resume his studies; he had continued with the hope of getting together enough to keep alive—in Paris. And yet, fleeing from that bookstall, he was fool enough to walk all the way to Les Halles, to walk into Les Halles, and to stop, fascinated by a counter laden with boxes of strawberries, odorous and red, the smallest box of which was beyond the limits of his economy.

That was bad enough—it was absurd that his will should voluntarily play the Barmecide for the torture of his unrewarded Shacabac of a stomach—but worse, without fault of his own, was yet to follow this mere aggravation of his baser appetites. Spring and Paris are an irresistible combination on the side of folly, and that evening another sign of them presented itself: there was a burst of music; a hurdy-gurdy was playing in the rue du Val de Grâce, and Cartaret, from his window, listened eagerly. It has been intimated from the best of sources that all love lives on music, and it is the common experience that when any love cannot get the best music, it takes what it can get:

“Her brow is like the snaw-drift;
Her throat is like the swan;
Her face it is the fairest
That e’er the sun shone on—
That e’er the sun shone on—
And dark blue is her e’e——”

That French hurdy-gurdy was playing “Annie Laurie,” and, since the lonely artist’s heart ached to hear the old, familiar melody, when the bearded grinder looked aloft, Cartaret drew a coin from his pocket. Anxious to pay for his pain, as the human kind always is, he tossed his last franc to that vendor of emotions in the twilit street.

He was drunk at last with the wine that his own misery distilled. He abandoned himself to the admission that he was in love: he abandoned himself to his dream of the Lady of the Rose.

Seraphin, in a wonderful new suit of clothes, found him thus the next morning—it was a Friday—and found him accordingly resentful of intrusion. Cartaret was sitting before an empty easel, his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes looking vacantly through the posts of the easel.