Atlantida, Pierre Benoît [reading fiction .TXT] 📗
- Author: Pierre Benoît
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"I double," said the Hetman.
Cacambo and Aguida followed his example. On our side, we were more careful. The manicure especially would not risk more than twenty francs at a time.
"I demand that the cards be evened up," said Koukou imperturbably.
"This fellow is unbearable," grumbled the count. "There, are you satisfied?"
Koukou dealt and laid down a nine.
"My country and my honor!" raged Bielowsky. "I had an eight."
I had two kings, and so showed no ill temper. Rosita took the cards out of my hands.
I watched Sydya at my right. Her heavy black hair covered her shoulders. She was really very beautiful, though a bit tipsy, as were all that fantastic company. She looked at me, too, but with lowered eyelids, like a timid little wild animal.
"Oh," I thought. "She may well be afraid. I am labelled 'No trespassing.'"
I touched her foot. She drew it back in fright.
"Who wants cards?" Koukou demanded.
"Not I," said the Hetman.
"Served," said Sydya.
The cook drew a four.
"Nine," he said.
"That card was meant for me," cursed the count. "And five, I had a five. If only I had never promised his Majesty the Emperor Napoleon II never to cut fives! There are times when it is hard, very hard. And look at that beast of a Negro who plays Charlemagne."
It was true. Koukou swept in three-quarters of the chips, rose with dignity, and bowed to the company.
"Till to-morrow, gentlemen."
"Get along, the whole pack of you," howled the Hetman of Jitomir. "Stay with me, Lieutenant de Saint-Avit."
When we were alone, he poured out another huge cupfull of liqueur. The ceiling of the room was lost in the gray smoke.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"After midnight. But you are not going to leave me like this, my dear boy? I am heavy-hearted."
He wept bitterly. The tail of his coat spread out on the divan behind him like the apple-green wings of a beetle.
"Isn't Aguida a beauty?" he went on, still weeping. "She makes me think of the Countess de Teruel, though she is a little darker. You know the Countess de Teruel, Mercedes, who went in bathing nude at Biarritz, in front of the rock of the Virgin, one day when Prince Bismarck was standing on the foot-bridge. You do not remember her? Mercedes de Teruel."
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I forget; you must have been too young. Two, perhaps three years old. A child. Yes, a child. Oh, my child, to have been of that generation and to be reduced to playing cards with savages ... I must tell you...."
I stood up and pushed him off.
"Stay, stay," he implored. "I will tell you everything you want to know, how I came here, things I have never told anyone. Stay, I must unbosom myself to a true friend. I will tell you everything, I repeat. I trust you. You are a Frenchman, a gentleman. I know that you will repeat nothing to her."
"That I will repeat nothing to her?... To whom?"
His voice stuck in his throat. I thought I saw a shudder of fear pass over him.
"To her ... to Antinea," he murmured.
I sat down again.
XIII THE HETMAN OF JITOMIR'S STORY
Count Casimir had reached that stage where drunkenness takes on a kind of gravity, of regretfulness.
He thought a little, then began his story. I regret that I cannot reproduce more perfectly its archaic flavor.
"When the grapes begin to color in Antinea's garden, I shall be sixty-eight. It is very sad, my dear boy, to have sowed all your wild oats. It isn't true that life is always beginning over again. How bitter, to have known the Tuileries in 1860, and to have reached the point where I am now!
"One evening, just before the war (I remember that Victor Black was still living), some charming women whose names I need not disclose (I read the names of their sons from time to time in the society news of the Gaulois) expressed to me their desire to rub elbows with some real demi-mondaines of the artist quarter. I took them to a ball at the Grande Chaumière. There was a crowd of young painters, models, students. In the midst of the uproar, several couples danced the cancan till the chandeliers shook with it. We noticed especially a little, dark man, dressed in a miserable top-coat and checked trousers which assuredly knew the support of no suspenders. He was cross-eyed, with a wretched beard and hair as greasy as could be. He bounded and kicked extravagantly. The ladies called him Léon Gambetta.
"What an annoyance, when I realize that I need only have felled this wretched lawyer with one pistol shot to have guaranteed perfect happiness to myself and to my adopted country, for, my dear fellow, I am French at heart, if not by birth.
"I was born in 1829, at Warsaw, of a Polish father and a Russian mother. It is from her that I hold my title of Hetman of Jitomir. It was restored to me by Czar Alexander II on a request made to him on his visit to Paris, by my august master, the Emperor Napoleon III.
"For political reasons, which I cannot describe without retelling the history of unfortunate Poland, my father, Count Bielowsky, left Warsaw in 1830, and went to live in London. After the death of my mother, he began to squander his immense fortune—from sorrow, he said. When, in his time, he died at the period of the Prichard affair, he left me barely a thousand pounds sterling of income, plus two or three systems of gaming, the impracticability of which I learned later.
"I will never be able to think of my nineteenth and twentieth years without emotion, for I then completely liquidated this small inheritance. London was indeed an adorable spot in those days. I had a jolly bachelor's apartment in Piccadilly.
The whirling of wheels and the murmur of trees.'
"Fox hunting in a briska, driving a buggy in Hyde Park, the rout, not to mention the delightful little parties with the light Venuses of Drury Lane, this took all my time. All? I am unjust. There was also gaming, and a sentiment of filial piety forced me to verify the systems of the late Count, my father. It was gaming which was the cause of the event I must describe to you, by which my life was to be so strangely changed.
"My friend, Lord Malmesbury, had said to me a hundred times, 'I must take you to see an exquisite creature who lives in Oxford Street, number 277, Miss Howard.' One evening I went with him. It was the twenty-second of February, 1848. The mistress of the house was really marvelously beautiful, and the guests were charming. Besides Malmesbury, I observed several acquaintances: Lord Clebden, Lord Chesterfield, Sir Francis Mountjoye, Major in the Second Life Guards, and Count d'Orsay. They played cards and then began to talk politics. Events in France played the main part in the conversation and they discussed endlessly the consequences of the revolt that had broken out in Paris that same morning, in consequence of the interdiction of the banquet in the 12th arrondissement, of which word had just been received by telegram. Up to that time, I had never bothered myself with public affairs. So I don't know what moved me to affirm with the impetuosity of my nineteen years that the news from France meant the Republic next day and the Empire the day after....
"The company received my sally with a discreet laugh, and their looks were centered on a guest who made the fifth at a bouillotte table where they had just stopped playing.
"The guest smiled, too. He rose and came towards me. I observed that he was of middle height, perhaps even shorter, buttoned tightly into a blue frock coat, and that his eye had a far-off, dreamy look.
"All the players watched this scene with delighted amusement.
"'Whom have I the honor of addressing?' he asked in a very gentle voice.
"'Count Bielowsky,' I answered coolly to show him that the difference in our ages was not sufficient to justify the interrogation.
"Well, my dear Count, may your prediction indeed be realized; and I hope that you will not neglect the Tuileries,' said the guest in the blue coat, with a smile.
"And he added, finally consenting to present himself:
"'Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.'
"I played no active rôle in the coup d'état, and I do not regret it. It is a principle with me that a stranger should not meddle with the internal affairs of a country. The prince understood this discretion, and did not forget the young man who had been of such good omen to him.
"I was one of the first whom he called to the Elysée. My fortune was definitely established by a defamatory note on 'Napoleon the little.' The next year, when Mgr. Sibour was out of the way, I was made Gentleman of the Chamber, and the Emperor was even so kind as to have me marry the daughter of the Marshal Repeto, Duke of Mondovi.
"I have no scruple in announcing that this union was not what it should have been. The Countess, who was ten years older than I, was crabbed and not particularly pretty. Moreover, her family had insisted resolutely on a marriage portion. Now I had nothing at this time except the twenty-five thousand pounds for my appointment as Gentleman of the Chamber. A sad lot for anyone on intimate terms with the Count d'Orsay and the Duke of Gramont-Caderousse! Without the kindness of the Emperor, where would I have been?
"One morning in the spring of 1852, I was in my study opening my mail. There was a letter from His Majesty, calling me to the Tuileries at four o'clock; a letter from Clémentine, informing me that she expected me at five o'clock at her house. Clémentine was the beautiful one for whom, just then, I was ready to commit any folly. I was so proud of her that, one evening at the Maison Dorée, I flaunted her before Prince Metternich, who was tremendously taken with her. All the court envied me that conquest; and I was morally obliged to continue to assume its expenses. And then Clémentine was so pretty! The Emperor himself.... The other letters, good lord, the other letters were the bills of the dressmakers of that young person, who, in spite of my discreet remonstrances, insisted on having them sent to my conjugal dwelling.
"There were bills for something over forty thousand francs: gowns and ball dresses from Gagelin-Opigez, 23 Rue de Richelieu; hats and bonnets from Madame Alexandrine, 14 Rue d'Antin; lingerie and many petticoats from Madame Pauline, 100 Rue de Clery; dress trimmings and gloves from the Ville de Lyon, 6 Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin; foulards from the Malle des Indes; handkerchiefs from the Compagnie Irlandaise; laces from Ferguson; cosmetics from Candès.... This whitening cream of Candès, in particular, overwhelmed me with stupefaction. The bill showed fifty-one flasks. Six hundred and twenty-seven francs and fifty centimes' worth of whitening cream from Candès.... Enough to soften the skin of a squadron of a hundred guards!
"'This can't keep on,' I said, putting the bills in my pocket.
"At ten minutes to four, I crossed the wicket by the Carrousel.
"In the Salon of the aides de camp I happened on Bacciochi.
"'The Emperor has the grippe,' he said to me. 'He is keeping to his room. He has given orders to have you admitted as soon as you arrive. Come.'
"His Majesty, dressed in a braided vest and Cossack trousers, was meditating before a window. The pale green of the Tuileries showed luminously under a gentle warm shower.
"'Ah! Here he is,' said Napoleon. 'Here, have a cigarette. It seems that you had great doings, you and Gramont-Caderousse, last evening, at the Château de Fleurs.'
"I smiled with satisfaction.
"'So Your Majesty knows already....'
"'I know, I
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