The Nabob, Alphonse Daudet [new books to read .txt] 📗

were engulfed in this monster play, at the end of which the Nabob, who had started it to forget his terrors in the hazards of chance, after singular alternations and runs of luck enough to turn the hair of a beginner white, retired with winnings amounting to five hundred thousand francs. On the boulevard the next day they said five millions, and everybody cried out on the scandal, especially the _Messenger_, three-quarters filled by an article against certain adventurers tolerated in the clubs, and who cause the ruin of the most honourable families.
Alas! what Jansoulet had won hardly represented enough to meet the first Schwalbach bills.
During this wild play, of which Mora was, however, the involuntary cause, and, as it were, the soul, his name was not once uttered. Neither Cardailhac nor Jenkins put in an appearance. Monpavon had taken to his bed, stricken more deeply than he wished it to be thought. Nobody had any news.
"Is he dead?" Jansoulet said to himself as he left the club; and he felt a desire to make a call to inquire before going home. It was no longer hope that urged him, but that sort of morbid and nervous curiosity which after a great fire leads the smitten unfortunate people, ruined and homeless, back to the wreck of their dwellings.
Although it was still very early, and a pink mist of dawn hung in the sky, the whole mansion stood open as if for a solemn departure. The lamps still smoked over the fire-places, dust floated about the rooms. The Nabob advanced amid an inexplicable solitude of desertion to the first floor, where at last he heard a voice he knew, that of Cardailhac, who was dictating names, and the scratching of pens over paper. The clever stage-manager of the festivities in honour of the Bey was organizing with the same ardour the funeral pomps of the Duc de Mora. What activity! His excellency had died during the evening; when morning came already ten thousand letters were being printed, and everybody in the house who could hold a pen was busy with the writing of the addresses. Without passing through these improvised offices, Jansoulet reached the waiting-room, ordinarily so crowded, to-day with all its arm-chairs empty. In the middle, on a table, lay the hat, cane, and gloves of M. le Duc, always ready in case he should go out unexpectedly, so as to save him even the trouble of giving an order. The objects that we always wear keep about them something of ourselves. The curve of the hat suggested that of the mustache; the light-coloured gloves were ready to grasp the supple and strong Chinese cane; the total effect was one of life and energy, as if the duke were about to appear, stretch out his hand while talking, take up those things, and go out.
Oh, no. M. le Duc was not going out. Jansoulet had but to approach the half-open door of the bed-chamber to see on the bed, raised three steps--always the platform even after death--a rigid, haughty form, a motionless and aged profile, metamorphosed by the beard's growth of a night, quite gray; near the sloping pillow, kneeling and burying her head in the white drapery, was a woman, whose fair hair lay in rippled disorder, ready to fall beneath the shears of eternal widowhood; then a priest and a nun, gathered in this atmosphere of watch by the dead, in which are mingled the fatigue of sleepless nights and the murmurs of prayer.
The chamber in which so many ambitions had strengthened their wings, so many hopes and disappointments had throbbed, was wholly given over now to the peace of passing Death. Not a sound, not a sigh. Only, notwithstanding the early hour, away yonder, towards the Pont de la Concorde, a little clarinet, shrill and sharp, could be heard above the rumbling of the first vehicles; but its exasperating mockery was henceforth lost on him who lay there asleep, showing to the terrified Nabob an image of his own destiny, chilled, discoloured, ready for the tomb.
Others besides Jansoulet found that death-chamber lugubrious: the windows wide open, the night and the wind entering freely from the garden, making a strong draught; a human form on a table; the body, which had just been embalmed; the hollow skull filled with a sponge, the brain in a basin. The weight of this brain of a statesman was truly extraordinary. It weighed--it weighed--the newspapers of the period mentioned the figure. But who remembers it to-day?


THE FUNERAL
"Don't weep, my fairy, you rob me of all my courage. Come, you will be a great deal happier when you no longer have your terrible demon. You will go back to Fontainebleau and look after your chickens. The ten thousand francs from Brahim will help to get you settled down. And then, don't be afraid, once you are over there I shall send you money. Since this Bey wants to have sculpture done by me, he will have to pay for it, as you may imagine. I shall return rich, rich. Who knows? Perhaps a sultana."
"Yes, you will be a sultana, but I--I shall be dead and I shall never see you again." And the good Crenmitz in despair huddled herself into a corner of the cab so that she would not be seen weeping.
Felicia was leaving Paris. She was trying to escape the horrible sadness, the sinister disgust into which Mora's death had thrown her. What a terrible blow for the proud girl! _Ennui_, pique, had thrown her into this man's arms; she had given him pride--modesty--all; and now he had carried all away with him, leaving her tarnished for life, a tearless widow, without mourning and without dignity. Two or three visits to Saint-James Villa, a few evenings in the back of some box at some small theatre, behind the curtain that shelters forbidden and shameful pleasure, these were the only memories left to her by this liaison of a fortnight, this loveless intrigue wherein her pride had not found even the satisfaction of the commotion caused by a big scandal. The useless and indelible stain, the stupid fall of a woman who does not know how to walk and who is embarrassed in her rising by the ironical pity of the passers-by.
For a moment she thought of suicide, then the reflection that it would be set down to a broken heart arrested her. She saw in a glance the sentimental compassion of the drawing-rooms, the foolish figure that her sham passion would cut among the innumberable love affairs of the duke, and the Parma violets scattered by the pretty Moessards of journalism on her grave, dug so near the other. Travelling remained to her--one of those journeys so distant that they take even one's thoughts into a new world. Unfortunately the money was wanting. Then she remembered that on the morrow of her great success at the Exhibition, old Brahim Bey had called to see her, to make her, in behalf of his master, magnificent proposals for certain great works to be executed in Tunis. She had said No at the time, without allowing herself to be tempted by Oriental remuneration, a splendid hospitality, the finest court in the Bardo for a studio, with its surrounding facades of stone in lacework carving. But now she was quite willing. She had to make but a sign, the agreement was immediately concluded, and after an exchange of telegrams, a hasty packing and shutting up of the house, she set out for the railway station as if for a week's absence, astonished herself by her prompt decision, flattered on all the adventurous and artistic sides of her nature by the hope of a new life in an unknown country.
The Bey's pleasure yacht was to await her at Genoa; and in anticipation, closing her eyes in the cab which was taking her to the station, she could see the white stone buildings of an Italian port embracing an iridescent sea where the sunshine was already Eastern, where everything sang, to the very swelling of the sails on the blue water. Paris, as it happened, was muddy that day, uniformly gray, flooded by one of those continuous rains of which it seems to have the special property, rains that seem to have risen in clouds from its river, from its smoke, from its monster's breath, and to fall in torrents from its roofs, from its spouts, from the innumerable windows of its garrets. Felicia was impatient to get away from this gloomy Paris, and her feverish impatience found fault with the cabmen who made slow progress with the horses, two sorry creatures of the veritable cab-horse type, with an inexplicable block of carriages and omnibuses crowded together in the vicinity of the Pont de la Concorde.
"But go on, driver, go on, then."
"I cannot, madame. It is the funeral procession."
She put her head out of the window and drew it back again immediately, terrified. A line of soldiers marching with reversed arms, a confusion of caps and hats raised from the forehead at the passage of an endless cortege. It was Mora's funeral procession defiling past.
"Don't stop here. Go round," she cried to the cabman.
The vehicle turned about with difficulty, dragging itself regretfully from the superb spectacle which Paris had been awaiting for four days; it remounted the avenues, took the Rue Montaigne, and, with its slow and surly little trot, came out at the Madeleine by the Boulevard Malesherbes. Here the crowd was greater, more compact.
In the misty rain, the illuminated stained-glass windows of the church, the dull echo of the funeral chants beneath the lavishly distributed black hangings under which the very outline of the Greek temple was lost, filled the whole square with a sense of the office in course of celebration, while the greater part of the immense procession was still squeezed up in the Rue Royale, and as far even as the bridges a long black line connecting the dead man with that gate of the Legislative Assembly through which he had so often passed. Beyond the Madeleine the highway of the boulevard stretched away empty, and looking bigger between two lines of soldiers with arms reversed, confining the curious to the pavements black with people, all the shops closed, and the balconies, in spite of the rain, overflowing with human beings all leaning forward in the direction of the church, as if to see a mid-Lent festival or the home-coming of victorious troops. Paris, hungry for the spectacular, constructs it indifferently out of anything, civil war as readily as the burial of a statesman.
It was necessary for the cab to retrace its course again and to make a new circuit; and it is easy to imagine the bad temper of the driver and his beasts, all three of them Parisian in soul and passions, at having to deprive themselves of so fine a show. Then, as all the life of Paris had been drawn into the great artery of the boulevard, there began through the deserted and silent streets--a capricious and irregular drive--the snail-like progress of a cab taken by the hour. First touching the extreme points of the Faubourg Saint-Martin and the Faubourg Saint-Denis, returning again towards the centre, and at the conclusion of circuits and dodges finding always the same obstacle in ambush, the same crowd, some fragment of the black defile perceived for a moment at the branching of a street, unfolding itself in the rain to the sound of muffled drums--a dull and heavy sound, like that of earth falling on a coffin-lid.
What torture for Felicia! It was her weakness and her remorse crossing Paris in this solemn pomp, this funeral train, this public mourning reflected by the very clouds; and the proud girl revolted against this affront done her by fate, and tried to