Numa Roumestan

“Gentlemen of the Central Administration!”

“Directors of the Academy of the Fine Arts!”

“Gentlemen of the Academy of Medicine!”

In grand gala dress, with his short hose and sword by his side, the chamberlain was announcing the arrivals in a mournful voice that resounded through the solemn drawing-rooms. As he called out, lines of black coats crossed the immense hall all red and gold and ranged themselves in a half-circle before the Minister, who stood with his back to the chimneypiece, having near him his Under-Secretary of State, M. de la Calmette, and his chief of cabinet, his foppish attachés and a few directors belonging to the Ministry such as Dansaert and Béchut. His Excellency addressed compliments and congratulations for the decorations and academic palms granted to some of those present, according as each organization arrived and was presented by its dean or president; then the organization turned right about and gave way to another set, some bodies retiring whilst others arrived, causing no little confusion at the doors of the hall.

For it was late; it was past one o’clock and each man was thinking of the breakfast which was waiting for him at home. In the concert hall which had been turned into a vestiary, impatient groups were looking at their watches, buttoning their gloves, adjusting their white cravats below their drawn faces; gaping and weariness, bad temper and hunger were on every side. Roumestan himself felt the weariness of this important day. He had lost his fine warmth of spirit shown at the same time last year, his faith in the future and in reform, and he let his little speeches off slowly, pierced through to his very marrow by the cold, despite the radiators and the enormous flaming wood fire; indeed, that little flaky snow which whirled about the panes of the windows seemed to fall upon his light heart and congeal it even as it fell upon the greensward of the garden.

“Gentlemen of the Comédie-Française!”

Closely shaved and solemn, distributing bows just as the fashion was in the grand epoch, they posed themselves in majestic attitudes about their dean, who in a cavernous voice presented the company, talked about the endeavors and vows the company had made—“the” company, without any epithet or qualifying word, just as we say “God” or as we say “the” Bible—exactly as if no other company existed in the world except that alone! And it must be said that poor Roumestan needs be very much enfeebled if this same company could not excite his eloquence and grand theatrical phrases, this company to which he himself seemed to belong with his bluish chin, his jowls and his distinguished but most conventional poses!

The fact was that for the last eight days, since the departure of Rosalie, he was like a gambler who has lost his mascot; he was frightened and suddenly felt himself inferior to his fortune and thus ready to be crushed. Mediocrities who have been favored by chance have such panics and nervous crises and they were increased in him by the terrible scandal which was about to break out, the scandal of a lawsuit for separation which the young wife insisted upon absolutely, notwithstanding all his letters and visits, his grovelling prayers and oaths. To keep up appearances it was said at the Ministry that Mme. Roumestan had gone to live with her father because of the near departure of Mme. Le Quesnoy and Hortense. But nobody was taken in by that, and the luckless man saw his adventure reflected in pity or curiosity or sarcasm from all these faces which were defiling before him, as well as from certain broadly marked smiles and from various shakes of the hand, a little more energetic than usual. There was not a single one of the lowest employees who had come to the reception in jacket and overcoat who was not thoroughly posted in this matter. Among the offices couplets were circulating from mouth to mouth in which Chambéry rhymed with Bachellery; more than one porter discontented with his pay was humming one of these couplets within himself whilst making a deep bow to his supreme chief.

Two o’clock! Still the organized bodies kept presenting themselves and the snow kept deepening whilst the man with the chains over his uniform introduced pell-mell and without any kind of order:

“Gentlemen of the School of Laws!”

“Gentlemen of the Conservatory of Music!”

“Directors of the Subsidized Theatres!”

By favor of seniority and his three failures Cadaillac arrived at the head of this delegation. Roumestan longed far more to fall with fist and foot upon the cynical impresario whose nomination had occasioned such serious embarrassment to him than to listen to the fine speech to which the ferocious insolence of his look gave the lie and to answer him with a forced compliment, half of which stuck in the big folds of his cravat:

“Greatly touched, gentlemen ... mn mn mn ... progress of art ... mn mn mn ... still better in the future....”

And the impresario as he moved off:

“Poor old Numa—he’s got a charge of lead in his wing this time!”

When these had left, the Minister and his comrades did honor to the usual breakfast; but this meal which had been so gay and full of effusion the year before was weighted down by the gloom of the chief and bad temper on the part of his intimates, who were all of them enraged with him on account of their own situations which he had already begun to compromise. This scandalous lawsuit coming just in the midst of the debate over Cadaillac would be sure to make Roumestan impossible as a member of the cabinet. That very morning at the reception in the Palace of the Élysées the Marshal had said two words about it with the laconic and brutal eloquence natural to an old cavalryman: “A dirty business!”

Without precisely having heard this speech from an august mouth, which was murmured in Numa’s ear in an alcove, the gentlemen round him saw very clearly their own fall coming behind that of their chief.

“Oh, women, women!” grunted the learned Béchut over his plate. M. de la Calmette with his thirty years of official life grew melancholy as he pondered over a retiring from office like unto Tircis, and below his breath the long-legged Lappara amused himself by frightening Rochemaure out of his wits:

“Viscount, we must look out for ourselves; we shall be decapitated before eight days are over!”

After a toast had been given by the Minister to the New Year and his dear collaborators, uttered with a shaky voice in which one heard the tears, they separated. Méjean, who stayed to the last, walked two or three times up and down beside his friend without having the courage to say a single word; then he too left. Notwithstanding his wish to keep by his side during that day a man like Méjean whose straightforward nature forced his respect like a reproach uttered by his own conscience, but at the same time sustained and reassured him, Numa could not stand in the way of Méjean’s duty, which was to run his round of visits and distribute good wishes and presents for the New Year, any more than he could prevent his chamberlain from going back to his family and unburdening himself of his sword and short-clothes.

What a howling solitude was that Ministry! It was like Sunday in a factory with the boiler cold and silent. In all the departments upstairs and downstairs, in his own cabinet, where he vainly attempted to write, in his bed-chamber, which he began once more to fill with his sobs, everywhere that little January snow was whirling about the big windows, veiling the horizon and increasing the silence which was like that of the Eastern steppes.

Oh, the misery of men in lofty positions!

A clock struck four and then another answered and then still others replied through the vast desert of the palace until it seemed as if there was nothing alive there except the hour. The idea of remaining there till evening face to face with his wretchedness frightened him. He felt that he must thaw himself a little with a bit of friendship and tenderness. Steam radiators and warm-air registers and half trees flaming in the chimneypiece did not constitute a hearth; for a moment he thought of the Rue de Londres. But he had sworn to his lawyer—for the lawyers were already at work—to keep quiet until the suit was decided. All of a sudden a name flashed across his mind: “Bompard! Why had he not come?” Generally he was observed to arrive the first on mornings of feast-days, his arms full of bouquets and paper sacks with candies for Rosalie, Hortense and Mme. Le Quesnoy, wearing on his lips a smile which expressed his character of grandpapa or of Santa Claus. Of course Roumestan paid the bill of these surprises, but friend Bompard was possessed of imagination enough to forget that fact, and, notwithstanding her antipathy, Rosalie could not help being touched when she thought of the privations which the poor devil must have undergone in order to be so generous.

“Suppose I go and get him and we dine together.”

He was reduced to that. He rang, took off his evening dress, all his medals and orders and went out on foot by the Rue Bellechasse.

The quays and bridges were all white; but when he had crossed the courtyard of the Carrousel neither ground nor air betrayed a trace of snow. It disappeared under the wheels that crowded the street, in the swarming myriads of the mob covering the sidewalks at the shop-fronts and pushing round the offices of the omnibus lines. This tumult of a feast-day evening, the calls of the coachmen, the shrill cries of peddlers in the luminous confusion of the shop-fronts, where the lilac-colored jets from the Jablochkoff burners extinguished the twinkling yellow of the gas and the last reflections from the pale afternoon, lulled the despair of Roumestan and dissolved it, as it were, by means of the agitation of the street. Meantime he directed his steps toward the Boulevard Poissonnière where the old Circassian, very sedentary like all men of imagination, had lived for the last twenty years, in fact since his arrival in Paris.

Nobody had ever seen the interior of Bompard’s home, of which nevertheless he talked a good deal, as well as of his garden and his artistic furniture, to complete which he haunted all the auctions at the Hôtel Drouot.

“Do come to breakfast one of these days and eat a chop with me!”

That was the regular form of invitation which he scattered right and left, but any one who took him at his word never found anybody at home; he came up standing against signs left by the janitor, against bells wrapped in paper or deprived of their wire. During an entire year Lappara and Rochemaure obstinately continued to try to reach Bompard’s rooms and overcome the extraordinary stratagems of the Provençal who was guarding the mystery of his apartment—but all in vain. One day he even took out some of the bricks near the front door in order to be able to say across this species of barricade to the friends he had invited:

“Awfully sorry, dear boys—we have had an escape of gas—everything blown up last night!”

After having mounted numberless stories and wandered through long corridors, tumbled over invisible steps and intruded upon veritable assemblies of witches among the servants’ bedrooms, Roumestan, quite blown from that arduous ascent, to which his legs of an illustrious man were no longer equal, tumbled against a great big washbowl fastened to the wall.

“Who’s there?” spoke out a well-known voice coming from far down the throat.

The door opened slowly, weighed down by a clothes-rack upon which hung the entire wardrobe of the lodger for winter and summer; the room was small and Bompard did not lose the benefit of an eighth of an inch and was compelled to keep his toilet table in the corridor. His friend found him lying on a little iron bed, his brow decorated with a scarlet head-dress, a sort of Dantesque cap which rose up in astonishment at sight of the distinguished visitor.

“It can’t be you!”

“Are you ill?” said Roumestan.

“Ill? not much!”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You see I am taking stock of things,” and then he added, to explain his thought: “I have so many plans in my head, so many inventions! Now and then I get dispersed and lose myself; it is only when I lie abed that I can gather myself together a little.”

Roumestan looked about for a chair, but none was there except the single one in use as a night table; it was covered with books and newspapers and had a candlestick wobbling on top of them all. He sat down on the foot of the bed.

“Why do we never see anything more of you?”

“Pshaw! you must be joking. After what happened I could not meet your wife face to face. Just think a little! There I was right before her, the codfish à la brandade in my hand. It took a mighty lot of coolness, I can tell you, not to let everything drop.”

“Rosalie is no longer at the Ministry,” said Numa quite overwhelmed.

“You astonish me; do you mean to say that it has not been arranged?”

And indeed it did not seem possible to him that Madame Numa, a person of so much good sense ... for after all, what was all this business anyhow? “Come now, just a mere fancy!”

The other interrupted him:

“You don’t understand her—she is an implacable woman—the perfect image of her father—Northern race, my dear fellow—with them it is not as it is with us, where the greatest anger evaporates in gesticulations and threats and then there is nothing left and we face about. But they keep everything in mind; it is terrible.”

He did not say that she had already forgiven him once before; and then, in order to escape from his sorrowful thoughts:

“Get your clothes on; you must come and dine with me.”

While Bompard was making his toilet out in the corridor the Minister looked about the mansard room lit by a little window like a tobacco-box, over which the melting snow was running. Pity seized him face to face with this penury, these damp rags, the whitewashed paper and little stove worn with rust and fireless notwithstanding the cold. And he asked himself, used as he was to the sumptuousness of his palace, how people could live in such a place?

“Have you seen the gardeen?” cried Bompard joyfully from his basin.

His garden was the leafless tops of three plane-trees which could not be seen unless one stood upon the solitary chair in the room.

“And my little museum?”

His museum he called a few ticketed knick-knacks upon a board, a brick, a short pipe in brierwood, a rusty knife-blade and an ostrich egg—but the brick came from the Alhambra, the sword had been used in the vendettas of a famous Corsican bandit, the short pipe bore an inscription, “Pipe of a Morocco criminal,” and finally the ostrich egg represented the vanishing of a beautiful dream, all that remained—along with a few laths and bits of plaster heaped in a corner—of the famous Bompard Incubator and the scheme for artificial hatching. But now, my dear boy, there is something much better on hand—a marvellous scheme—millions in it—which he was not at liberty to explain at present.

“What is it you are looking at? That?—That is my brevet of membership—bé, yes, membership in the Aïoli.”

This club of the Aïoli had for its purpose the bringing together once a month of all the Southerners living in Paris, in order to eat a dinner cooked with garlic, a way of never losing either the fragrance or the accent of home. It was a tremendous organization—a President of Honor, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Seniors, Questors, Treasurers, all furnished with their diplomas as members brave with silver streamers, and the flower of the leek as decoration upon rose-colored paper. This precious document was displayed on the wall alongside of advertisements of every sort of color, sales of houses, railway placards and so forth, which Bompard liked to have always under his nose, in order, as he ingenuously remarked, “to do his liver good.” There might one read: “Château to sell, one hundred and fifty hectares, meadows, hunting, river, pond full of fish.... Lovely little property in Touraine, vineyards, luzernes, mill-on-the-Cize.... Round trip through Switzerland, through Italy, to Lago Maggiore, to the Borromean Islands....” These things excited him just as much as if he had had fine landscapes in oil hanging on the wall. He believed he was in these places—and he was there!

“By Jove!” said Roumestan with a shade of envy of this wretched believer in chimeras, so happy in his rags—“You have a tremendous imagination. Come, are you ready? Let’s get down. It is frightfully cold up here.”

After a few turns through the brilliant streets across the jolly mob of the boulevards the two friends settled themselves down in the heady, radiating warmth of a little room in a big restaurant, in front of oysters and a bottle of Château-Yquem very carefully uncorked.

“To your health, my comrade—I pray that it may be good and happy forever.”

“Té! why it’s a fact,” said Bompard; “we haven’t kissed each other yet.”

Across the table they gave each other a hug with moistened eyes and Roumestan felt himself quite gay again, despite the wrinkled and swarthy hide of the Circassian. Ever since morning he had wanted to kiss somebody. Besides, think of all the years they had known each other—thirty years of their life in front of them on that tablecloth—and through the vapor rising from delicate dishes and over the straw wrappers of delicious wines they recalled their days of youth, their fraternal recollections, races and picnics, saw once more their own boyish faces and interlarded their effusions with words in dialect which brought them still closer together.

“T’en souvénès, digo?” (I say, do you remember?)

In a room near by could be heard a noise of high laughter and little screams.

“To the devil with females,” said Roumestan; “there is nothing worth while but friendship!”

And then they drank to each other once more; nevertheless their talk turned in another direction: “And how about the little girl?” asked Bompard, winking his eye. “How is she getting on?”

“O, of course, I have not seen her again, you know.”

“Of course not, of course not,” said the other turning suddenly very serious and putting on a solemn face.

Presently a piano behind the partition began to play scraps of waltzes, fashionable quadrilles and bars of music from operettas, now crazy and now languid. They stopped talking in order to listen, pulling off the withered grapes, and Numa, all of whose sensations appeared to have two faces and to be swung upon a pivot, began to think about his wife and his child and his lost happiness. So he must needs unbosom himself at the top of his voice with his elbows on the table.

“Eleven years of intimacy, trust and tenderness—all that flashed away and vanished in a minute! how can it be possible? ah, Rosalie, Rosalie—”

No one could ever know what she had been to him, and he himself had not thoroughly understood it until after her departure. Such an upright spirit, such a straightforward heart! And what shoulders and what arms! No little gingerbread doll like little Bachellery; something full and amber-tinted and delicate—

“Besides, don’t you see, my dear comrade, there’s no denying that when we are young we need surprises and adventures—meetings in a hurry, sharpened by the fear of being caught, staircases one comes down on all fours with one’s boots in one’s arms—all that is part of love. But at our age what we desire above everything else is peace and what the philosophers call security in pleasure. It is only marriage which can give you that.”

He jumped up all of a sudden, threw down his napkin: “Off with us, té!”

“And we are going—?” asked the impassible Bompard.

“To walk by under her window just as I did twelve years ago—to this, my dear boy, is he reduced, the grand Master of the University—”

Under the arcaded way of the Place Royale, whose square garden covered with snow formed a white quadrilateral within its iron fence, these two friends walked up and down for a long while, spying out in the broken sky-line formed by the Louis XIII roofs, chimneys and balconies the lofty windows of the Hôtel Le Quesnoy.

“To think that she is over there,” sighed Roumestan, “so near to me, and yet I may not see her!”

Bompard was shivering with his feet in the mud and did not appreciate very greatly this sentimental excursion; in order to bring it to a close he used strategy, and knowing well that Numa was a soft one, in deadly fear of the slightest illness:

“I’m afraid you’ll catch cold, Numa,” insinuated he like the traitor he was.

The Southerner was struck with fear, and they quickly returned to the carriage.

She was there indeed, in that same drawing-room where he had seen her for the first time. The furniture was just the same and held the same place, having reached that age when furniture, like temperaments, cannot be renewed. Scarcely were there a few more faded folds in the fawn-colored hangings and a film over the dull reflections from the mirrors like that one sees on deserted ponds which nothing ever touches. The faces of the two old people under the two-branched candlesticks at the card-table in company with their usual partners showed likewise a little of the wear and tear of life. Madame Le Quesnoy’s features were puffy and drooping as if the fibre had been taken out of them, and the President’s pallor was still more pallid and still prouder was the revolt that he preserved in the bitter blue of his eyes. Seated near a big arm-chair, the cushions of which were still crushed down by a light weight, her sister having gone to bed, Rosalie continued in a low voice that reading aloud which she had been giving a moment before for the benefit of her sister, reading on in a low voice through the silence of whist broken by the half-words and interjections of the players.

It was a book belonging to her youth, one of those poets of nature whom her father had taught her to love. And she perceived the whole past of her life as a young girl rising up from the pure white of the stanzas as well as the fresh and penetrating impression of the books one has read first in life.

The book slipped from her hands upon her knees, the last two lines re-echoing their mournful song to the very depths of her being, recalling to her the wretchedness which for one moment she had forgot. There lies the cruelty that poets exercise; they lull and appease you, but then with one word they envenom again the wound which they were by way of healing.

She saw herself as she was in that same place twelve years before when Numa paid his addresses to her with great big bouquets of roses; when, clothed with her twenty years and the wish to be beautiful for his sake, from that very window she watched him coming, just as one watches one’s own destiny. In every corner of the house there remained echoes of his warm and tender voice, so ready to lie. If one looked a moment among the music scattered about the piano one would find the duos which they sang together; everything which surrounded her seemed accomplices of the disaster in her failure of a life. She thought of what that life might have been by the side of an honest man and loyal comrade, not brilliant and ambitious, but enjoying a simple and hidden existence in which they would have courageously borne all bitternesses and all sorrow to the very end of their days.

“Elle aurait eu bien moins de peine.” (Ah, far less woe would she have known.)

She had plunged so deep into her dream that when the whist party ended and her parents’ old friends had left, almost without her remarking it, answering mechanically the friendly and pitying farewells that each one gave her, she failed to perceive that the President, instead of conducting his friends to the front door as had been his habit every evening, no matter what the time or season, was marching up and down the drawing-room. At last he stopped before her and put a question to her in a voice which caused her all of a sudden to tremble:

“Well, my child, where are you in this matter? have you made up your mind?”

“Why, dear father, I am exactly where I was before.”

He seated himself beside her, took her hand and attempted to do the persuasive:

“I have been to see your husband ... he consents to everything ... you can live here with me the entire time that your mother and sister shall be away, and even afterwards if your anger against him still continues. But I tell you again, this suit for separation is impossible! I do hope that you will not insist upon it.”

Rosalie tossed her head.

“My dear father, you do not understand that man. He will employ all his cunning to surround me and get me back again, make me his dupe, a voluntary dupe, who has accepted an undignified and degraded existence. Your daughter is not a woman of that sort. I demand a complete and irreparable rupture, openly announced to all the world.”

From the card-table where she sat ranging the cards and markers Mme. Le Quesnoy, without turning round, gently interposed:

“Forgive, my child, forgive.”

“O yes, that is easy to say when one has a husband as upright and loyal as yours, when one never has known the suffocating effect of lies and treason, drawing their plots about one. He is a hypocrite, I tell you. He has his Chambéry morality and his morality of the Rue de Londres. His words and his acts are never in accord—two ways of speech, two faces—all the seductive and catlike nature of his race—in a word, the man of the South!”

And then, losing her head as her anger exploded, she said:

“Besides, I had already forgiven him once. Yes, two years after my marriage. I never told you about it, I have never spoken to a single person. I was very unhappy; and then we only remained together because of an oath he made me.—But he only lives on perjuries! And now it is completely at an end, completely at an end!”

The President did not insist further, but slowly rose and went over to his wife. There was a whispering together and something like a debate, surprising enough between that authoritative man and this humble, annihilated creature: “You must tell her.... Yes, yes, I want you to tell her....” Without adding another word M. Le Quesnoy left the room and his sonorous regular step, his step of every evening, could be heard mounting the solitary vaulted stairs, through all the solemn spaces of the grand drawing-room.

“Come here,” said her mother to the daughter with a tender gesture, “nearer to me, still nearer.”

She would never dare to tell her aloud; and even when they were so close and heart was beating against heart, she still hesitated:

“Listen, dear; it is he who demands it—he wants me to tell you that your destiny is the destiny of all women, and that even your mother has not escaped it.”

Rosalie was overwhelmed with that secret confided to her which she had divined in a flash at the first words of her mother, whilst her old and very dear voice broken with tears could hardly articulate the very sorrowful, very sorrowful story, similar in every way to her own—the crime of her husband from the earliest years of their housekeeping, just as if the motto of these wretched coupled beings must be “Deceive me or else I deceive thee!”—the man hastening to begin the evil in order to maintain his superior rank.

“Enough, enough, Mamma. Oh, how you are hurting me!”

This father whom she so admired, whom she placed far above any other man, this sterlingly honest and firm magistrate! But what kind of creatures were men, anyhow? At the North and down South, all were alike, traitors and perjurers. She who had not wept a tear because of the treason of her husband now felt herself invaded by a flood of hot tears because of this humiliation of her father.... And so they were counting upon this, were they? to make her yield! No, a hundred times no; she would never forgive. Ha, ha! so that was marriage, was it? Very well; dishonor and disdain upon marriage then! What cared she for fear of scandal and the proprieties of the world, since it was a rivalry as to who should treat them with the most contempt?

Her mother, taking her in her arms and pressing her against her heart, endeavored to soften the revolt of this young conscience wounded in all its beliefs, in its dearest superstitions; she caressed her gently as if she were rocking a child:

“Yes, yes, you will forgive. You will do as I did—you see it is our destiny. Ah, I also had a terrible bitterness in me during the first moments and a great longing to throw myself out of the window. But I thought of my child, my poor little Andrew who was just coming to life, who since then grew up and died, loving and respecting all his family. So you too will pardon in order that your child shall have the same happy tranquillity which my own courage secured to you, so that he shall not be one of those half-orphans whom parents share between them, whom they bring up in hatred and disdain to one and the other. You will also remember that your father and mother have already suffered tremendously and that other bitter sorrows are menacing them now—”

She stopped short, suffocated by feeling, and then in a solemn accent:

“My daughter, all sorrows become softened and all wounds are capable of being cured. There is only one sorrow which is irreparable and that is the death of the person we love.”

In the failure of her agitated forces that followed these last words Rosalie felt the figure of her mother grow in grandeur by as much as her father had lost greatness in her eyes. She even reproached herself for having so long misunderstood the sublime and resigned self-abnegation concealed beneath that apparent feebleness which was the result of bitter blows. Thus it came about that for her mother’s sake, for her mother’s sake alone, she renounced the lawsuit in revenge of her outraged rights, and renounced it in gentle words, almost as if asking pardon: “Only do not insist that I go back to him—I should be too ashamed. I will accompany my sister to the South. Afterwards, later, we shall see.”

The President came back again, and when he saw the enthusiasm with which the old mother was throwing her arms about the neck of her child he understood that their cause was won.

“Thank you, my daughter,” he murmured, very much touched. Then after a little hesitation he approached Rosalie for the usual kiss of good-night. But the brow which ordinarily was so tenderly offered moved aside and his kiss lost itself in her hair.

“Good-night, father.”

He said nothing in return, but went away hanging his head with a convulsive shudder in his high shoulders. He who during his life had accused so many people, had condemned so many—he, the First Magistrate of France, had found a judge in his turn.