The Parisians — Complete, Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton [christmas read aloud .TXT] 📗

Unprescient of the perils that awaited him, absorbed in the sense of existing discomfort, cold, and hunger, Fox lifted his mournful visage from his master’s dressing-gown, in which he had encoiled his shivering frame, on the entrance of De Breze and the concierge of the house in which Lemercier had his apartment. Recognising the Vicomte as one of his master’s acquaintances, he checked the first impulse that prompted him to essay a feeble bark, and permitted himself, with a petulant whine, to be extracted from his covering, and held in the arms of the murderous visitor.

“Dieu des dieux!” ejaculated De Breze, “how light the poor beast has become!” Here he pinched the sides and thighs of the victim. “Still,” he said, “there is some flesh yet on these bones. You may grill the paws, fricassee the shoulders, and roast the rest. The rognons and the head accept for yourself as a perquisite.” Here he transferred Fox to the arms of the concierge, adding, “Vite au besogne, mon ami.”

“Yes, Monsieur. I must be quick about it while my wife is absent. She has a faiblesse for the brute. He must be on the spit before she returns.”

“Be it so; and on the table in an hour—five o’clock precisely—I am famished.”

The concierge disappeared with Fox. De Breze then amused himself by searching into Frederic’s cupboards and buffets, from which he produced a cloth and utensils necessary for the repast. These he arranged with great neatness, and awaited in patience the moment of participation in the feast.

The hour of five had struck before Savarin and Frederio entered the salon; and at their sight De Breze dashed to the staircase and called out to the concierge to serve the dinner.

Frederic, though unconscious of the Thyestean nature of the banquet, still looked round for the dog; and, not perceiving him, began to call out, “Fox! Fox! where hast thou hidden thyself?”

“Tranquillise yourself,” said De Breze. “Do not suppose that I have not....”

NOTE BY THE AUTHOR’S SON.—[See also Prefatory Note]—The hand that wrote thus far has left unwritten the last scene of the tragedy of poor Fox. In the deep where Prospero has dropped his wand are now irrevocably buried the humour and the pathos of this cynophagous banquet. One detail of it, however, which the author imparted to his son, may here be faintly indicated. Let the sympathising reader recognise all that is dramatic in the conflict between hunger and affection; let him recall to mind the lachrymose loving-kindness of his own post-prandial emotions after blissfully breaking some fast, less mercilessly prolonged, we will hope, than that of these besieged banqueters, and then, though unaided by the fancy which conceived so quaint a situation, he may perhaps imagine what tearful tenderness would fill the eyes of the kind-hearted Frederic, as they contemplate the well-picked bones of his sacrificed favourite on the plate before him; which he pushes away, sighing, “Ah, poor Fox! how he would have enjoyed those bones!”

The chapter immediately following this one also remains unfinished. It was not intended to close the narrative thus left uncompleted; but of those many and so various works which have not unworthily associated with almost every department of literature the name of a single English writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST. Had the author lived to finish it, he would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the redoubtable Louvier. Amongst the few other pages of the book which have been left unwritten, we must also reckon with regret some pages descriptive of the reconciliation between Graham Vane and Isaura Cicogna; but, fortunately for the satisfaction of every reader who may have followed thus far the fortunes of Die Parisians, all that our curiosity is chiefly interested to learn has been recorded in the Envoi, which was written before the completion of the novel.

We know not, indeed, what has become of these two Parisian types of a Beauty not of Holiness, the poor vain Poet of the Pave, and the good-hearted Ondine of the Gutter. It is obvious, from the absence of all allusion to them in Lemercier’s letter to Vane, that they had passed out of the narrative before that letter was written. We must suppose the catastrophe of their fates to have been described, in some preceding chapter, by the author himself; who would assuredly not have left 141. Gustave Rameau in permanent pos session of his ill-merited and ill-ministered fortune. That French representative of the appropriately popular poetry of modern ideas, which prefers “the roses and raptures of vice” to “the lilies and languors of virtue,” cannot have been irredeemably reconciled by the sweet savours of the domestic pot-au jeu, even when spiced with pungent whiffs of repudiated disreputability, to any selfish betrayal of the cause of universal social emancipation from the personal proprieties. If poor Julie Caumartin has perished in the siege of Paris, with all the grace of a self-wrought redemption still upon her, we shall doubtless deem her fate a happier one than any she could have found in prolonged existence as Madame Rameau; and a certain modicum of this world’s good things will, in that case, have been rescued for worthier employment by Graham Vane. To that assurance nothing but Lemercier’s description of the fate of Victor de Mauleon (which will be found in the Envoi) need be added for the satisfaction of our sense of poetic justice and if on the mimic stage, from which they now disappear, all these puppets have rightly played their parts in the drama of an empire’s fall, each will have helped to “point a moral” as well as to “adorn a tale.” Valete et plaudite!