A week went past. Every day I had new proof that Tom, Dick and Harry was going well. Then one morning I had a letter from my agents. They had, they said, an opportunity to place a good serial. Would I send them as much of my new book as I had finished and give a synopsis of the rest. I did so, and in three weeks’ time they wrote again to say that the American magazine Uplift had bought the serial rights for a thousand dollars.
That, too, was as satisfactory as it was unexpected. It was like finding the money. Once more I seemed to have entered on the avenue of success that seemed to open up before me in spite of myself. From now on, there would be nothing but monotonous vistas of smooth going. I was doomed to popular applause. Once more would I leap into the lists as a writer of best-sellers. So strongly had I the gift of interesting narrative that I could win half a dozen new reputations; of that I felt sure.
Yes, I had succeeded—no, I mean I had failed, failed by these later lights that Paris had kindled within me. Here, amid art that is eternal, art that means sacrifice, surrender, renunciation, I had learned to despise that work which merely serves the caprice of an hour. I had come to crave form, to strive for style. Yet what can one do? My efforts for art’s sake were artificial and stilted; it was only when I had a story to tell that I became entirely pleasing. Well, let me take my own measure. I would always be a bagman of letters. In that great division of scribes into sheep and goats I would never be other than a bleating and incorrigible goat.
CHAPTER VII
THE FATE OF FAME
Madame Séraphine had spoiled my plan of a triple marriage, but there was nothing to prevent a double one. It took place one midsummer morning in the Mairie, rue Grenelle. On the strength of my thousand dollars from the Uplift people, I offered to pay all expenses.
In the great gloomy chamber of the Mairie we occupied one of a series of benches. Frosine and Rougette were looking radiant, and Helstern and Lorrimer comported themselves as if getting married was part of their daily routine. I was the only person at all excited.
On the other benches were other bridal parties, a bridal party to a bench. On a platform facing us sat a tall man with an Assyrian beard. He wore evening dress traversed by a tricoloured sash. He took each couple in turn, looking down on them with no more interest than if they had been earwigs. Then he mumbled into his beard for about two minutes; finally he cleared his throat and for the first time we heard him distinctly: “The ceremony is terminated.”
After he had spoken this phrase about a dozen times our turn came. Joyfully I pushed forward my candidates and in a few minutes they were admitted into the matrimonial fold according to the law of France.
Then I whirled them off to Marguery’s where we had a lunch of uproarious jollity, punctuated with kisses, compliments and toasts. They would fain have lingered, but I whisked them off once more to the Place Denfort Rochereau where on every Saturday afternoon assembles the crowd of tourists that descends into the darkness of the Catacombs. I bought candles for all, showed my permit to the door-keeper, and we joined the long procession of candle-bearing cosmopolitans. The three women were delighted. It seemed so original for a Parisian to visit the Catacombs of Paris.
So for miles we followed these weird galleries hewn from the living rock and lined with the bones of their million dead. As we walked in single file the flickering candles gruesomely lit up the brown walls where the shank bones were piled with such meticulous neatness, knob dove-tailing into hollow, and the whole face of them decorated with fantastic frescoes of thousands of skulls. And behind these cordwood-like piles were vast heaps of indistinguishable débris, the bones of that mediæval myriad gutted from the graveyards when the great city had to have more room.