Part 3

“Bah! the Parisians do not look at things so closely. For them, every rich foreigner is a nabob, no matter whence he comes. Furthermore, this nabob has all the physical qualities for the part--a copper-coloured skin, eyes like burning coals, and, what is more, gigantic wealth, of which he makes, I do not fear to say it, the most noble and the most intelligent use. It is to him that I owe”--here the doctor assumed a modest air--“that I owe it that I have at last been able to found the Bethlehem Society for the suckling of infants, which a morning paper, that I was looking over just now--the _Messenger_, I think--calls ‘the great philanthropic idea of the century.’”

The duke threw a listless glance over the sheet which Jenkins held out to him. He was not the man to be caught by the turn of an advertisement.

“He must be very rich, this M. Jansoulet,” said he, coldly. “He finances Cardailhac’s theatre; Monpavon gets him to pay his debts; Bois l’Hery starts a stable for him; old Schwalbach a picture gallery. It means money, all that.”

Jenkins laughed.

“What will you have, my dear duke, this poor Nabob, you are his great occupation. Arriving here with the firm resolution to become a Parisian, a man of the world, he has taken you for his model in everything, and I do not conceal from you that he would very much like to study his model from a nearer standpoint.”

“I know, I know. Monpavon has already asked my permission to bring him to see me. But I prefer to wait; I wish to see. With these great fortunes that come from so far away one has to be careful. _Mon Dieu_! I do not say that if I should meet him elsewhere than in my own house, at the theatre, in a drawing-room----”

“As it just happens, Mrs. Jenkins is proposing to give a small party next month. If you would do us the honour----”

“I shall be glad to come, my dear doctor, and if your Nabob should chance to be there I should make no objection to his being presented to me.”

At this moment the usher on duty opened the door.

“Monsieur the Minister of the Interior is in the blue salon. He has only one word to say to his excellency. Monsieur the Prefect of Police is still waiting downstairs, in the gallery.”

“Very well,” said the duke, “I am coming. But I should like first to finish the matter of this costume. Let us see--friend, what’s your name--what are we deciding upon for these ruffs? Au revoir, doctor. There is nothing to be done, is there, except to continue the pills?”

“Continue the pills,” said Jenkins, bowing; and he left the room beaming with delight at the two pieces of good fortune which were befalling him at the same time--the honour of entertaining the duke and the pleasure of obliging his dear Nabob. In the antechamber, the crowd of petitioners through which he passed was still more numerous than at his entry; newcomers had joined those who had been patiently waiting from the first, others were mounting the staircase, with busy look and very pale, and in the courtyard the carriages continued to arrive, and to range themselves on ranks in a circle, gravely, solemnly, while the question of the sleeve ruffs was being discussed upstairs with not less solemnity.

“To the club,” said Jenkins to his coachman.

The brougham bowled along the quays, recrossed the bridges, reached the Place de la Concorde, which already no longer wore the same aspect as an hour earlier. The fog was lifting in the direction of the Garde-Meuble and the Greek temple of the Madeleine, allowing to be dimly distinguished here and there the white plume of a jet of water, the arcade of a palace, the upper portion of a statue, the tree-clumps of the Tuileries, grouped in chilly fashion near the gates. The veil, not raised, but broken in places, disclosed fragments of horizon; and on the avenue which leads to the Arc de Triomphe could be seen brakes passing at full trot laden with coachmen and jobmasters, dragoons of the Empress, fuglemen bedizened with lace and covered with furs, going two by two in long files with a jangling of bits and spurs, and the snorting of fresh horses, the whole lighted by a sun still invisible, the light issuing from the misty atmosphere, and here and there withdrawing into it again as if offering a fleeting vision of the morning luxury of that quarter of the town.

Jenkins alighted at the corner of the Rue Royale. From top to bottom of the great gambling house the servants were passing to and fro, shaking the carpets, airing the rooms where the fume of cigars still hung about and heaps of fine glowing ashes were crumbling away at the back of the hearths, while on the green tables, still vibrant with the night’s play, there stood burning a few silver candlesticks whose flames rose straight in the wan light of day. The noise, the coming and going, ceased at the third floor, where sundry members of the club had their apartments. Among them was the Marquis de Monpavon, whose abode Jenkins was now on his way to visit.

“What! It is you, doctor? The devil take it! What is the time then? I’m not visible.”

“Not even for the doctor?”

“Oh, for nobody. Question of etiquette, _mon cher_. No matter, come in all the same. You’ll warm your feet for a moment while Francis finishes doing my hair.”

Jenkins entered the bed-chamber, a banal place like all furnished apartments, and moved towards the fire on which there were set to heat curling-tongs of all sizes, while in the contiguous laboratory, separated from the room by a curtain of Algerian tapestry, the Marquis de Monpavon gave himself up to the manipulations of his valet. Odours of patchouli, of cold-cream, of hartshorn, and of singed hair escaped from the part of the room which was shut off, and from time to time, when Francis came to fetch a curling-iron, Jenkins caught sight of a huge dressing-table laden with a thousand little instruments of ivory, and mother-of-pearl, with steel files, scissors, puffs, and brushes, with bottles, with little trays, with cosmetics, labelled and arranged methodically in groups and lines; and amid all this display, awkward and already shaky, an old man’s hand, shrunken and long, delicately trimmed and polished about the nails like that of a Japanese painter, which faltered about among this fine hardware and doll’s china.

While continuing the process of making up his face, the longest, the most complicated of his morning occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told of his little ailments, and the good effect of the _pills_. They made him young again, he said. And at a distance, thus, without seeing him, one would have taken him for the Duc de Mora, to such a degree had he usurped his manner of speech. There were the same unfinished phrases, ended by “ps, ps, ps,” muttered between the teeth, expressions like “What’s its name?” “Who was it?” constantly thrown into what he was saying, a kind of aristocratic stutter, fatigued, listless, wherein you might perceive a profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the society of which the duke was the centre, every one sought to imitate that accent, those disdainful intonations with an affectation of simplicity.

Jenkins, finding the sitting rather long, had risen to take his departure.

“Adieu, I must be off. We shall see you at the Nabob’s?”

“Yes, I intend to be there for luncheon. Promised to bring him--what’s his name. Who was it? What? You know, for our big affair--ps, ps, ps. Were it not for that, should gladly stay away. Real menagerie, that house.”

The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was rather mixed at his friend’s. But then! One could hardly blame him for it. The poor fellow, he knew no better.

“Neither knows nor is willing to learn,” remarked Monpavon with bitterness. “Instead of consulting people of experience--ps, ps, ps--first sponger that comes along. Have you seen the horses that Bois l’Hery has persuaded him to buy? Absolute rubbish those animals. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. We may wager that Bois l’Hery got them for six thousand.”

“Oh, for shame--a nobleman!” said Jenkins, with the indignation of a lofty soul refusing to believe in baseness.

Monpavon continued, without seeming to hear:

“All that because the horses came from Mora’s stable.”

“It is true that the dear Nabob’s heart is very full of the duke. I am about to make him very happy, therefore, when I inform him----”

The doctor paused, embarrassed.

“When you inform him of what, Jenkins?”

Somewhat abashed, Jenkins had to confess that he had obtained permission from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the heavy and wrinkled eyelid which covered it. Jenkins’s patients all had that eye.

Monpavon must indeed have been deeply moved to show himself thus devoid of all prestige. In point of fact, with white lips and a changed voice he addressed the doctor quickly, without the lisp this time, and in a single outburst:

“Come now, _mon cher_, no tomfoolery between us, eh? We are both met before the same dish, but I leave you your share. I intend that you shall leave me mine.”

And Jenkins’s air of astonishment did not make him pause. “Let this be said once for all. I have promised the Nabob to present him to the duke, just as, formerly, I presented you. Do not mix yourself up, therefore, with what concerns me alone.”

Jenkins laid his hand on his heart, protested his innocence. He had never had any intention. Certainly Monpavon was too intimate a friend of the duke, for any other--How could he have supposed?

“I suppose nothing,” said the old nobleman, calmer but still cold. “I merely desired to have a very clear explanation with you on this subject.”

The Irishman extended a widely opened hand.

“My dear marquis, explanations are always clear between men of honour.”

“Honour is a big word, Jenkins. Let us say people of deportment--that suffices.”

And that deportment, which he invoked as the supreme guide of conduct, recalling him suddenly to the sense of his ludicrous situation, the marquis offered one finger to his friend’s demonstrative shake of the hand, and passed back with dignity behind his curtain, while the other left, in haste to resume his round.

What a magnificent clientele he had, this Jenkins! Nothing but princely mansions, heated staircases, laden with flowers at every landing, upholstered and silky alcoves, where disease was transformed into something discreet, elegant, where nothing suggested that brutal hand which throws on a bed of pain those who only cease to work in order to die. They were not in any true speech, sick people, these clients of the Irish doctor. They would have been refused admission to a hospital. Their organs not possessing even strength to give them a shock, the seat of their malady was to be discovered nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited. They were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it prolonged. And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.

“Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!” the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was reduced to a breath.

“You shall go, my dear child.”

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

“Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I must be at the Cabinet Council.”

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their last day Jenkins’s clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d’Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

“Mme. Constance is at mass,” he said, “and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone. We have been at work since six o’clock this morning,” added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was a splendid sculptor’s studio, the front of which, on the street corner, semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms, which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason’s shed, this one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall and, here and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was covered with a piece of black gauze.

The mistress of the house, Felicia Ruys, the daughter of the famous sculptor and herself already known by two masterpieces, the bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, was standing in the middle of the studio, occupied in the modelling of a figure. Wearing a tightly fitting riding-habit of blue cloth with long folds, a fichu of China silk twisted about her neck like a man’s tie, her black, fine hair caught up carelessly above the antique modelling of her small head, Felicia was at work with an extreme earnestness which added to her beauty the concentration, the intensity which are given to the features by an attentive and satisfied expression. But that changed immediately upon the arrival of the doctor.

“Ah, it is you,” said she brusquely, as though awaked from a dream. “The bell was rung, then? I did not hear it.”

And in the ennui, the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was heightened by the constitutional wildness.

Oh, how the doctor’s voice became humble and condescending as he answered her:

“So you are quite absorbed in your work, my dear Felicia. Is it something new that you are at work on there? It seems to me very pretty.”

He moved towards the rough and still formless model out of which there was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound which was scampering at full speed with a rush that was truly extraordinary.

“The idea of it came to me last night. I began to work it out by lamplight. My poor Kadour, he sees no fun in it,” said the girl, glancing with a look of caressing kindness at the greyhound whose paws the little page was endeavouring to place apart in order to get the pose again.

Jenkins remarked in a fatherly way that she did wrong to tire herself thus, and taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

“Come, I am sure you are feverish.”

At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost of repulsion.

“No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. To be commencing life, and to be disgusted with it! It is hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her memories of the past. I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to muse upon. I have only work--work!”

As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.

Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.

Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia resumed:

“Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob. Some one pointed him out to me last Friday at the opera.”

“You were at the opera on Friday?”

“Yes. The duke had sent me his box.”

Jenkins changed colour.

“I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time for twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been inside the Opera-House. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs sparkled in her eyes. Happy who has emotions like that. A real type, that Nabob. You will have to bring him to see me. He has a head that it would amuse me to do.”

“He! Why, he is hideous! You cannot have looked at him carefully.”

“On the contrary, I had a perfect view. He was opposite us. That mask, as of a white Ethiopian, would be superb in marble. And not vulgar, in any case. Besides, since he is so ugly as that, you will not be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora’s bust. What a disagreeable face you had, Jenkins, in those days!”

“For ten years of life,” muttered Jenkins in a gloomy voice, “I would not have that time over again. But you it amuses to behold suffering.”

“You know quite well that nothing amuses me,” said she, shrugging her shoulders with a supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without adding another word, she plunged into one of those dumb activities by which true artists escape from themselves and from everything that surrounds them.

Jenkins paced a few steps in the studio, much moved, with avowals on the tip of his tongue which yet dared not put themselves into words. At length, feeling himself dismissed, he took his hat and walked towards the door.

“So it is understood. I must bring him to see you.”

“Who?”

“Why, the Nabob. It was you who this very moment----”

“Ah, yes,” remarked the strange person whose caprices were short-lived. “Bring him if you like. I don’t care, otherwise.”

And her beautiful dejected voice, in which something seemed broken, the listlessness of her whole personality, said distinctly enough that it was true, that she cared really for nothing in the world.

Jenkins left the room, extremely troubled, and with a gloomy brow. But, the moment he was outside, he assumed once more his laughing and cordial expression, being of those who, in the streets, go masked. The morning was advancing. The mist, still perceptible in the vicinity of the Seine, floated now only in shreds and gave a vaporous unsubstantiality to the houses on the quay, to the river steamers whose paddles remained invisible, to the distant horizon in which the dome of the Invalides hung poised like a gilded balloon with a rope that darted sunbeams. A diffused warmth, the movement in the streets, told that noon was not far distant, that it would be there directly with the striking of all the bells.

Before going on to the Nabob’s, Jenkins had, however, one other visit to make. But he appeared to find it a great nuisance. However, since he had made the promise! And, resolutely:

“68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, at the Ternes,” he said, as he sprang into his carriage.

The address required to be repeated twice to the coachman, Joey, who was scandalized; the very horse showed a momentary hesitation, as if the valuable beast and the impeccably clad servant had felt revolt at the idea of driving out to such a distant suburb, beyond the limited but so brilliant circle wherein their master’s clients were scattered. The carriage arrived, all the same, without accident, at the end of a provincial-looking, unfinished street, and at the last of its buildings, a house of unfurnished apartments with five stories, which the street seemed to have despatched forward as a reconnoitring party to discover whether it might continue on that side isolated as it stood between vaguely marked-out sites waiting to be built upon or heaped with the debris of houses broken down, with blocks of freestone, old shutters lying amid the desolation, mouldy butchers’ blocks with broken hinges hanging, an immense ossuary of a whole demolished region of the town.