“Mlle. Hortense is very ill. Madame will receive nobody.”
For the tenth time during the ten days that had passed Audiberte had received the same answer, motionless before that heavy-timbered door with its knocker, the like of which can scarcely be found except beneath the arcades of the Place Royale, a door which once shut seemed to her to refuse forever an entrance to the old house of the Le Quesnoys.
“Very well,” said she, “I am not coming back; it must be they now who shall call me back.”
In great agitation she set out again through the lively turmoil of that commercial quarter, where drays laden with cases and barrels and iron bars, noisy and flexible, were forever passing the pushcarts that rolled under the porches and back into the courtyards where the coopers were nailing up the cases for export. But the peasant girl was not aware of this infernal row and of the rumbling of labor which shook the high houses to their very topmost floors; in her venomous head a very different kind of row was going on, a clashing of brutal thoughts and a terrible clangor[302] of foiled wishes. So she set forth, feeling no fatigue, and in order to economize the ’bus fare crossed on foot the entire distance from the Marais to Abbaye-Montmartre Street.
After a fierce and lively peregrination from one lodging to the other, hotels and furnished apartments of all kinds, from which they were expelled each time on account of the tabor-playing, they had just recently made shipwreck in that quarter. It was a new house which had allured, at the cheap prices for housewarmers, a temporary horde of girls, Bohemians and business agents, and those families of adventurers such as one sees at the seaports, a floating population which shows its lack of work on the balconies, watching arrivals and departures in hopes that there may be something to be gained for them in the flood. Fortune is here the flood on which they cast their watchful eyes.
The rent was very high for them to pay, especially now that the skating-rink had failed and it was necessary to sue upon government stamped paper for the price of Valmajour’s few appearances. But the tabor did not bother anybody in that freshly-painted barrack whose door was open at every hour of the night for the different crooked businesses of the tenants—not to speak of all the quarrels and rows that were going on. On the contrary, it was the tabor-player who was bothered. The advertising on placards, the many-colored tights and his fine moustaches had aroused perilous interest among the ladies of the skating-rink[303] less coy than that prude of a girl down there in the Marais. He was acquainted with actors at the Batignolles, all that sweet-scented crowd which met in a pot-house on the Boulevard Rochechouart called the Straw-Lair. This same Straw-Lair, where people passed their time in loafing fatly, playing cards, drinking lager beer and passing from one to the other the scandal of the little theatres and the lowest class of gallantry, was the enemy and the horror of Audiberte. It was the cause of savage rages, under the stormy blows of which the two Southerners bent their backs as under a tempest in the tropics, merely revenging themselves by cursing their tyrant in a green skirt and talking about her in that mysterious and hateful tone which schoolboys and servants use: “What did she say? how much did she give you?” and playing into each other’s hands in order to slip away behind her back. Audiberte knew this well and watched them; she did her business outside quickly, impatient to get home; and particularly was it so that day, because she had left them early in the morning. As she ascended the stairs she stopped a moment, hearing neither tabor nor shepherd’s pipe.
“Oh, the beggarly wretch, he’s off again to his Straw-Lair!”
But as she came in at the door her father ran up to her and headed the explosion off.
“Now don’t squeal, somebody’s come to visit you; a gentleman from the Munistry!”
The gentleman was waiting in the drawing-room;[304] for, as it always happens in these buildings, cheaply built and made by machinery, with every room on each floor exactly the same, one above the other, they too had a drawing-room hung with a cheap paper, creamy and waffled into patterns till it looked like a dish of beaten eggs, a drawing-room which made the peasant girl a very proud woman. Méjean was passing in review most compassionately the Provençal furniture scattered about this dentist’s waiting-room, full of the crude light from two windows guiltless of curtains—the coco and the moco (tumbler-holder and lamp-holder), the kneading-trough, the bread-basket much banged about by house-movings and by travel—these showed their rural rustiness alongside of the cheap gilding and wall paintings. The haughty profile of Audiberte, very pure in its lines, surmounted by her Sunday head-dress, which seemed just as out-of-place in the fifth story of a Parisian apartment house, completed the feeling of pity which he had concerning these victims of Roumestan; and so he introduced very gently the cause of his visit.
The Minister, wishing to spare the Valmajours new misfortunes, for which up to a certain point he felt himself responsible, sent them five thousand francs to pay for their losses in having changed their home and to carry them back again to their own place. He took the bills from his purse and laid them on the old dark kneading-trough of nutwood.
“So, then, we’ll have to leave?” asked the[305] peasant girl without budging an inch and pondering a while.
“The Minister desires that you should go as soon as possible; he is anxious to know that you have returned to your home as happy as you were before.”
Old Valmajour cast his eye around at the bank-notes:
“As for me, that seems reasonable enough—de qué n’en disés?”
But she would not say anything and waited for the sequel, which Méjean introduced by twisting and turning his purse:
“And to those five thousand francs we will add five thousand more which are here, in order to get back again—to get back again—”
His emotion choked him. Cruel was the commission which Rosalie had given him. Ah, how often it costs a lot to be considered a quiet-loving, strong man; much more is demanded of such a one than of other people! Then he added very rapidly—“the photograph of Mlle. Le Quesnoy.”
“At last! now we have got to it. The photograph—didn’t I know it, by heavens?” At every word she bounded up like a goat. “And so you really believe that you can make us come from the other end of France, that you can promise everything to us—to us who never asked for anything—and then that you can put us out of doors like so many dogs who have done their worst and left their dirt everywhere? Take[306] back your money, gentleman! You can be dead sure that we sha’n’t leave, and you can say so there, and also that the photograph won’t be returned to them! That’s a paper and a proof, that is. I keep it safe in my little bag; it never leaves me and I shall show it about through Paris and what is written upon it, so that all the world may know that all those Roumestans are no better than a family of liars—of liars—”
She was foaming with rage.
“Mlle. Le Quesnoy is very, very ill,” said Méjean, with great solemnity.
“Avaï!”
“She is leaving Paris, and in all probability will never return—alive!”
Audiberte said not a word, but the silent laugh of her eyes, the implacable no which was written upon her classic brow, on which the hair grew low beneath the little lace head-dress, were sufficient to warrant the firmness of her refusal. Then a temptation seized Méjean to throw himself upon her, tear the little Indian bag from her girdle and fly with it; still, he restrained himself, attempted a few useless expostulations, and then, quivering with rage likewise, he said, “You will repent of this,” and to the great regret of Father Valmajour, left the house.
“Look out, little girl, you are going to bring us into some misfortune!”
“Not much! It’s them that we’ll give trouble to; I am going to ask the advice of Guilloche.”
[307]
Guilloche, contentieux.Behind the yellow card bearing those two words, fastened on the door which was opposite their own, was one of those terrible business men whose entire instalment consists of an enormous leather portfolio containing the minutes and notes of rancid lawsuits, sheets of white paper for secret denunciations and begging letters, bits of pie-crust, a false beard and sometimes even a hammer with which to strike milkwomen dead, as was seen recently in a famous lawsuit. This type of man, of whom many exist in Paris, would not be worthy of a single line if said Guilloche, a name which was as good as a signboard when one considered his countenance divided up into a thousand little symmetrical wrinkles, had not added to his profession an entirely new and characteristic department.
Guilloche did the business of penalties for schoolboys and collegians. A poor devil of an usher, when the classes came out from recitation, went about collecting the penalties in the way of copies to be turned in. He stayed awake far into the night copying lines of the Æneid or the various forms of the Greek verb luo. When there was lack of regular business Guilloche, who was a graduate of college, harnessed himself up for this original work, which he found fairly profitable.
Audiberte’s matter having been explained to him, he declared that it was excellent. The Minister might be legally held up and the newspapers[308] might be made to come down; the photograph alone was worth a mine of gold; only it was necessary to use time to go hither and thither and he must have advances of money which must be paid down in good coin; as for the Puyfourcat inheritance, that seemed to him a pure Fata Morgana, a dictum which mortified terribly the peasant girl’s love of lucre already so terribly tried, all the more because Valmajour, who had been much asked to swell drawing-rooms during the first winter, no longer set foot in a single house of the Faubourg St. Germoyne.
“So much the worse! I will work the harder, I will economize—zou!”
That energetic little Arlesian head-dress flew about in the great new building, ran up and down stairs, carrying from story to story her tale of adventure wid the Menister. She excited herself, squealed, pounced about, and then in a mysterious voice would say: “And thin there’s the photograph,” and with a furtive and sidelong glance, such as the sellers of photographs in the arcades employ when old libertines call for tights, she would show the picture:
“A pretty girl, at any rate! And you have read what is written there underneath?”
This kind of thing happened in the bosom of the temporary families and with the roller-skating ladies of the rink or at the Straw-Lair—ladies whom she pompously called Mme. Malvina or Mme. Éloïse, being deeply impressed by their velvet skirts, their chemises edged with holes for[309] ribbons and all the implements of their business, without bothering herself otherwise as to what that business might be. And thus the picture of this lovely creature, so distinguished and delicate, passed through these critical and curious defilements; they picked her to pieces; they read laughing the silly avowal of love, until the Provençal girl took her treasure back again and thrust it into the mouth of her money-bag with a furious gesture and in a strangled voice exclaimed:
“Well, I guess we have got them with that!”
Zou! off she flew to the bailiff—the bailiff for the affair of the skating-rink, the bailiff used to hunt Cadaillac, the bailiff for Roumestan. And as if that were not sufficient for her quarrelsome disposition, she had a host of troubles with janitors, the unending fight about the tabor-playing, which ended this time in the exile of Valmajour to one of those basements leased by a wine merchant where the sounding of hunting-horns alternate with lessons in kicking and boxing. From that time forth it was in this cellar, by the light of a gas jet which cost them so much per hour, and while looking about at the vests and fencing-gloves and copper horns hung on the wall, that the tabor-player passed his hours of exercise, pale and lonely like a captive, sending forth from below the pavement all kinds of variations on the shepherd’s pipe, not at all unlike the mournful and piercing notes of a baker’s cricket.
One day Audiberte received an invitation to[310] call upon the Commissary of Police in her quarter. She ran thither quickly, quite certain that it referred to her cousin Puyfourcat, and entered smiling with her head-dress tossing; but after a quarter of an hour she crept out, overwhelmed by a very peasant-like horror of the policeman, who, at his very first word, had forced her to deliver up the photograph and sign a receipt for ten thousand francs in which she absolutely renounced all and any suits at law. All the same she obstinately refused to leave, insisted upon believing in the genius of her brother and kept always alive in the depths of her memory the delicious astonishment caused one winter evening by that long file of carriages passing through the courtyard of the Ministry, where all the windows were alight.
When she came back she notified her two men, who were much more frightened than she was, that not another word was to be spoken about that business; but she never piped a word about the money. Guilloche, who suspected that there was some money, employed every means in his power to get a portion of it, and having obtained only the slenderest commission, felt a frightful rancor in regard to the Valmajours.
“Well,” said he one morning to Audiberte while she was brushing on the staircase the finest clothes belonging to the musician, who was still in bed, “well, I hope you are satisfied at last. He is dead!”
“Who is dead?”
[311]
“Why, Puyfourcat, your cousin; it is in the paper.”
She gave a screech, rushed into the apartment, calling aloud and almost in tears:
“Father! Brother! Hurry quick, the inheritance!”
As all of them clustered terribly moved and panting in a circle about that infernal fellow Guilloche, the latter slowly unfolded the Journal Officiel and in a very leisurely manner read to them as follows:
“‘On this first day of October 1876, the Court at Mostaganem has ordered the publication and advertisement of the following inheritances at the order of the Ministry of the Interior.—Popelino (Louis), day-laborer—’ No, it isn’t that one—‘Puyfourcat (Dosithée)—’”
“Yes, that’s him,” said Audiberte.
The old bird thought it was necessary to wipe his eyes a bit.
“Pécaïré! Poor Dosithée—!”
“——died at Mostaganem the 14th of January, 1874, born at Valmajour in the commune of Aps—”
In her eagerness and impatience the peasant girl asked:
“How much is it?”
“Three francs, thirty-five cintimes!” cried Guilloche in the voice of a fruit-peddler; and leaving in their hands the paper, in order that they might thoroughly verify the disappointment which had come to them, he flew off with a roar of[312] laughter which seemed infectious, for it rang from story to story down into the street and delighted all that great big village called Montmartre, where the legend of the Valmajours’ inheritance had been widely circulated.
The inheritance from Puyfourcat, only three francs thirty-five! Audiberte pretended to laugh at it harder than the others, but the frightful desire for vengeance upon the Roumestans, who were in her eyes responsible for all their troubles, burned within her and now only increased in fury and looked about for some pretext or means, for the first weapon that lay to hand.
Most singular was the countenance of papa during this disaster. The while his daughter pined away with weariness and fury, and the captive musician became paler with every day passed in his cellar, papa, expanding like a rose, careless of what happened, did not even show his old professional envy and jealousy; he seemed to have arranged some quiet existence for himself outside and away from his family. Hardly had he stowed away the last mouthful of breakfast than off he went; and sometimes in the morning, when she was brushing his clothes, she noticed that a dried fig or a prune or some preserve or other would fall out of his pockets, and when she asked how they came there, the old fellow had one story or another for an explanation.
He had met a peasant woman from their country in the street, or he had run across a man from down there who was coming to see them.
[313]
Audiberte tossed her head: “Avaï! Wait till I follow you once!”
The truth was that while strolling about Paris the old man had discovered in the St. Denis quarter a big shop of food-stuffs, where he had entered, lured by the sign and by the temptations of the exotic shop-front, which was full of colored fruits and of silver and painted papers; it made a brilliant bit of color in the foggy, populous street. This shop, where he had ended by becoming a crony and friend of the family, was well known to Southerners quartered in Paris and had for its sign:
Aux Produits du Midi.“At the products of the South”—never was a sign more truthful. Everything in that shop was the product of the South, from the shopkeepers, M. and Mme. Mèfre, who were two products of the Fat South, having the prominent nose of Roumestan, the flaring eyes, the accent, the phrases and demonstrative welcome of Provence, down to their shop-boys, who were familiar and called people by their first names and did not hesitate in their guttural voices to call out to the desk: “I say, Mèfre, where did youse put the sausages?”—yes, down to the little Mèfre children, whining and dirty, who passed their lives amid a constant menace of being disembowelled or scalped or made into soup, but who nevertheless kept right on sticking their little dirty fingers into all the open barrels; nay, even to the buyers,[314] gesticulating and gossiping by the hour together in order at last to buy a barquette (boat shaped cake) for two cents, or taking their seats on chairs in a circle in order to discuss the merits of garlic sausage or of pepper sausage. Here one might listen to the “none the less, at least, come now, other ways”—the whole vocabulary, in fact, belonging to Aunt Portal, exchanged in the most noisy voices, whilst the “dear brother” in a dyed-over black coat, a friend of the family, haggled over some salt fish, and the flies, the vast horde of flies, drawn hither by all the sugar of these fruits and the candies and the almost Oriental pastries, buzzed and boomed right in the middle of the winter, kept alive by that steady heat. And when some busy Parisian grew impatient at the attendants all down at heel and the sublime indifference these shop people showed, continuing their gossip from one counter to the other whilst weighing and doing up things all wrong, it was a sight to see how that Parisian was put in his place by some remark uttered in the strongest country accent:
“Té! vé! if you are in a hurry the door is always open, you know, and the tram-cars are passing in front of the shop.”
Father Valmajour was received with open arms by this gang of compatriots. M. and Mme. Mèfre remembered that they had seen him in the old time at the Fair of Beaucaire in a competition of tabor-players.
Between old people from the South that Fair at[315] Beaucaire, now no more and existing merely as a name, has remained like a Masonic bond of brotherhood. In our Southern provinces it was the fairy-tale for the whole year, the one distraction for all those narrow lives; people got ready for it a long time in advance, and for a long time after they talked about it. It formed a reward which could be promised to wife and children, and if it was not possible to take them along, one might bring them a bit of Spanish lace or a toy, which took little place in one’s bag. The Beaucaire Fair, moreover, under pretext of business, meant a whole month or a fortnight at least of the free, exuberant and unexpected life of a camp of gypsies. One got a bed here or there from the citizens or in the shops or on top of desks, or else in the open street under the canvas hood of wagons or even below the warm light of the July stars.
O, for the business without the boredom of the shop, matters treated while one dines, or at the door in shirt sleeves, or at the booths ranged along the Pré, on the banks of the Rhône! The river itself was nothing but a moving fair-ground, supporting its boats of all shapes, its lahuts, lute shaped boats with lateen sails which came from Arles, Marseilles, Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, filled with wines, anchovies, oranges and cork, decorated with banners and standards and streamers which sounded in the fresh wind and reflected their colors in the swiftly flowing water. And what a clamor there was in that variegated crowd[316] of Spaniards, Sardinians, Greeks in long tunics and embroidered slippers, Armenians with their furred hats and Turks with their befrogged jackets, their fans and wide trousers of gray linen! All these were jammed together in the open-air restaurants, the booths for children’s toys and canes and umbrellas, for jewelry and Oriental pastils and caps. And then to think of what was called the “fine Sunday,” that is to say, the first Sunday after the opening of the fair—the orgies on the quays and the boats and in the famous restaurants, such as La Vignasse or the Grand Jardin or the Café Thibaut! Those who have once seen that fair have always felt a home-sickness for it to the end of their days.
One felt free and easy at the shop of the Mèfre couple, somewhat as at the Beaucaire Fair. And as a matter of fact, in its picturesque disorder the shop did resemble an improvised grand fair for the sale of foreign and southern products. Here all full and bending were sacks of meal in a golden powder, dried peas as big and hard as buck-shot and big chestnuts all wrinkled and dusty looking, like little faces of old female charcoal-burners; there stood jars of black and green olives preserved in the Picholini manner, tin cans of red oil with the taste of fruit, barrels of preserves from Apt made of melon rinds, of figs, of quinces and of apricots—all the remains of fruit from a fair dropped into molasses. Up there on the shelves among the salted goods and preserves, in a thousand bottles and a thousand[317] tin boxes, were the special relishes belonging to each city—the shells and little ships of Nîmes, the nougat of Montélimar, the ducklings and biscuits of Aix—all in gilded envelopes ticketed and signed.
Then there were the early vegetables, an outpouring of Southern gardens without shadows, in which the fruits hanging in slender green foliage have a factitious look of jewels—firm looking jujubes with a fine sheen of newly lacquered walnut side by side with pale azeroles, figs of every sort, sweet lemons, green or scarlet peppers, great big swelling melons, enormous onions with flowerlike hearts, muscat grapes with long berries so transparent that the flesh of them trembles like wine in a flask, rows of bananas striped black and yellow, regular landslides of oranges and pomegranates with their red gold tones, like little bombs made of red copper with their fuses issuing from a small crenelated crown. And finally, everywhere, on the walls and ceilings, on both sides of the door, in the tangle of burnt palms, chaplets of leeks and onions and dried carobs, packages of sausages, bunches of corn on the cob, there was a constant stream of warm hues, there was the entire summer, there was the Southern sunshine fastened up in boxes, sacks and jars radiating color out to the very sidewalk through the muddiness of the windows.
Old Valmajour would enter this shop with his nostrils dilated, quivering and most excited. This man, who refused the slightest work in the presence[318] of his children and would wipe his brow for hours over a single button that he had to sew on his waistcoat, boasting of having accomplished a labor like one of “Caesar’s,” in this shop was always ready to lend a helping hand, throw off his coat to nail up or open cases, picking up here and there an olive or a bit of berlingot candy and lightening the labor with his monkey tricks and stories. On one day in the week, indeed, the day of the arrival of codfish à la brandade, he stayed very late at the store in order to aid them in sending out the orders.
Among them all this particular Southern dish, codfish à la brandade, could hardly be found elsewhere in Paris except at the Produits du Midi; but it was the true article, white, carded fine, creamy, with just a touch of garlic, the way it is done at Nîmes, from which city indeed the Mèfres had it forwarded. On Thursday evening it reaches Paris at seven o’clock by the lightning express and Friday morning it is distributed throughout the city to all the good customers whose names are on the big book of the store. Nay, it is on that very commercial ledger with its tumbled leaves, smelling of spices and soiled with oil, that is inscribed the history of the conquest of Paris by the Southerners; there appear one after the other all the big fortunes, political and industrial posts, names of celebrated lawyers, deputies, ministers, and among them all especially that of Numa Roumestan, the Vendean of the South, the pillar of the altar and the throne.
[319]
For the sake of that single line on which Roumestan’s name is written the Mèfres would toss the whole book into the fire. He it is who represents best their ideas in religion, politics and everything. It is just as Mme. Mèfre says, and she is more enthusiastic than her husband:
“For that man, I tell you, anybody would imperil their eternal soul.”
They are very fond of recalling the period when Numa, already on the road to fame, did not disdain to come there himself to buy his stores. And how he did understand the way of choosing by the touch a pasty! or a sausage that sweats nicely under the knife! Then such kind-heartedness! and that imposing, handsome face! and always a compliment for Madame, a pleasant word for his “dear brother,” a caressing touch for the little Mèfres who accompanied him as far as the carriage bearing his parcels. Since his elevation to the Ministry, since those scoundrels of Reds had given him so much bother in the two Chambers, they did not see anything more of him, pécaïré! but he always remained faithful to the Produits, and it was always he who got the first distribution.
One Thursday evening about ten o’clock, when all the pots of codfish à la brandade had been wrapped and tied and placed in fine alignment on the counter, the whole Mèfre family, the shop boys, old Valmajour and all the products of the South were in full number on hand, perspiring and blowing. They were taking a rest with the peculiar air of people who have accomplished a[320] difficult task and were “dipping a bit” with ladyfingers and biscuits steeped in thick wine or orgeat syrup—“Come now, just something mild”—for as to anything strong, Southerners do not care for that at all. Among the townspeople as in the country parts drunkenness from alcohol is almost unknown. Instinctively this race has a fear and horror of it; it feels itself intoxicated from its birth—drunk without drinking.
For it is most certainly true that the wind and the sun distil for them a terrible kind of natural alcohol whose effect is felt more or less by all those born down there. Some of them have only that little drop too much which loosens the tongue and gestures and causes one to see life rosy in color and discover sympathetic souls everywhere, which brightens the eye, widens the streets, sweeps away obstacles, doubles audacity and strengthens the timid; others who are violently affected, like the little Valmajour girl or Aunt Portal, reach at any minute the limits of a stuttering, stammering and blind delirium. To understand it one must have seen our festivals in Provence with the peasants standing up on the tables yelling and pounding with their big yellow shoes, screaming: “Waiter, dé gazeuse!” (lemon soda)—an entire village raving drunk over a few bottles of lemonade. And where is the Southerner who has not experienced those sudden prostrations of the intoxicated, those breakings-down of the whole being, right on the heels of wrath or of enthusiasm—changes as sudden as a sunburst or a shadow across a March sky?
[321]
Without possessing the delirious Southern quality of his daughter, Father Valmajour was born with a pretty lively case of it. And that evening his ladyfingers dipped in orgeat affected him with a crazy jollity which made him reel off, standing with his glass in his hand and his mouth all twisted in the middle of the shop, all the farcical performances of an old sponge who pays his scot without money. The Mèfres and their shopmen were rolling around on the flour sacks with delight:
“Oh! de ce Valmajour, pas moins!” (O! that Valmajour, what a fellow he is!)
Suddenly the liveliness of the old fellow stopped short and his gesture, like that of a jumping-jack, was brought to a dead pause by the apparition before him of a Provençal head-dress trembling with rage.
“What are you doing here, father?”
Madame Mèfre raised her arms toward the sausages suspended from the ceiling:
“What! this is your young lady? And you have never told us about her! Well, how teeny-weeny she is! but a good girl, I’ll be bound. Take a seat Miss, do!”
Owing as much to his habit of lying as to a desire to keep himself free, the old man had never spoken about his children, but had given himself out as an old bachelor who lived on his income; but among Southern people nobody is at a loss for one invention or another; if an entire caravan of little Valmajours had marched in on the heels of Audiberte the welcome would have[322] been just the same, just as warm and demonstrative; they rushed forward and made a place for her.
“Différemment, you must eat some dipped ladyfingers with us, too.”
The Provençal girl stood embarrassed. She had just come from outside, from the cold and blackness of the night, a hard night of December, where the feverish life of Paris continued to pulsate in spite of the late hour and could be felt through the heavy fog torn in every direction by swiftly moving shadows, the colored lanterns of the omnibuses and the hoarse horns of the street cars; she arrived from the North, she arrived from winter, and then all of a sudden, without transition, she found herself in the midst of Italian Provence, in this shop of the Mèfres glowing just previous to Christmas with all kinds of toothsome and sun-filled articles, in the midst of the well-known accents and fragrances of home! It was her own country suddenly found again, a return to the motherland after a year of exile, of struggles and trials far away among the barbarians. A warmth gradually invaded her and slackened her nerves, the while she broke her barquette cake in a thimbleful of Carthagène and answered the questions of all this kindly set of people, as much at ease and familiar with her as if everybody had known each other for twenty years or more. She felt a return to her life and usual habits; tears rose to her eyes—those hard eyes with veins of fire which never wept.
[323]
The name “Roumestan” uttered at her side dried up this emotion suddenly. It came from Mme. Mèfre, who was looking over the addresses of her clients and was warning her shop-boys not to make any mistake and especially not to take the codfish à la brandade for Numa to Grenelle Street, but to the Rue de Londres.
“Seems as if codfish is not in the odor of sanctity in the Rue de Grenelle,” remarked one of the cronies at the Products.
“Yes, indeed,” said M. Mèfre. “The lady belongs up North—just as northerly as possible—uses nothing but butter in her kitchen, eh?—while in the Rue de Londres there’s the nicest kind of South, jollity, singing and everything cooked in oil—I understand why Numa enjoys himself most there.”
So they were talking in the lightest of tones of this second household established by the Minister in a very convenient little house quite close to the railway station where he could repose after the fatigues of the Chamber, free from visitors and the greater botherations. You may be sure that the excitable Mme. Mèfre would have uttered fine screeches if just the same sort of thing had occurred in her family; but for Numa there was something very attractive and natural in it.
He loved the tender passion; but didn’t all our kings, Charles X and Henry IV, play the gay Lothario? Té! pardi! He got that from his Bourbon nose.
And mixed in with this light tone, this air of[324] delight in spicy talk with which the South treats all affairs of the heart, there was a race hatred, the antipathy they felt against the woman of the North, the strange woman and her food cooked with butter. They grew excited, they went into a variety of anédotes, the charms of little Alice and her successes in grand opera.
“Why, I knew Mother Bachellery in the old time of the Fair at Beaucaire,” said old Valmajour. “She used to sing ballads at the Café Thibaut.”
Audiberte listened without breathing, never losing a single word and engraving in her mind names and addresses; her little eyes glittered with a diabolical intoxication in which the Carthagène wine had no part.
[325]