The pretender: A story of the Latin Quarter

It was nearly a week before I recovered from the surprise of my sudden marriage.

As far as the actual ceremony went it seemed as if I were the person least concerned. One, James Horace Madden, was tying himself in the most awkward manner to a member of the opposite sex, a slight, pale, neatly-dressed girl whose lucent blue eyes were already beginning to regard him with positive adoration. The said James Horace Madden, a tall, absent-minded young man, stared about him continually. He was, indeed, more like a curious and amused spectator than a principal in the affair, and it was nearly over before he decided to become interested in it.

Well, I was married, so they told me, as they shook my hand; and I had a wife, so she assured me as she clung lightly to my arm. She seemed extravagantly happy. When I saw she was so happy I was glad I had married her. To tell the truth, I had almost backed out. The inconsiderateness of Captain Fitzbarrington in not dying had hurt my feelings and aroused in me a resentment against Fate. In the end, however, good nature prevailed. I believe I am good-natured enough to marry a dozen women should occasion demand.

We had not been wed five minutes before Anastasia developed an extraordinary capacity, for unreserved affection. I have never been capable of unreserved affection, not even for myself; but I can appreciate it in others, particularly if I am the object of it. She also developed such a morbid fear of the infuriate O’Flather that on my suggesting we spend our honeymoon in Paris her enthusiasm was almost grotesque. When we arrived at the Gare du Nord I believe she could have knelt down and kissed the very stones.

And to tell the truth my own delight was hardly less restrained. There’s only one mood in which to approach Paris—Rhapsody. So for ten marvellous days I rhapsodised. The fact that I was on a honeymoon seemed trivial compared with my presence in the most adorable of cities. Truly my bride had reason to be jealous of this Paris, and, as she was given that way, doubtless she would have been had not she herself loved so well.

But there was another matter to distract me: had I not a new part to play? As a young married man it behooved me, in the first place, to acquire a certain seriousness and weight. After due reflexion I decided to give up the flippant cigarette and take to the more dignified pipe. So I made myself a present of a splendid meerschaum, and getting Anastasia to encase the bowl in a flannel jacket I began to colour it.

Imagine me, then, on a certain snappy morning of late December, nursing my flannel-clad meerschaum as I swing jauntily along the Quai des Tournelles. Seasonable weather! the brilliant sunshine playing on the Seine with all the glitter of cutlery: beyond the splendid stride of steel between the two Iles, the Hôtel de Ville: to the left the hideous Morgue; beyond that, again, the grey glory of Notre Dame, its bone-blanched buttresses like the ribs of some uncouth monster, its two blunt towers like timeworn horns, its gargoyles etched in ebon black against the sky.

“After all,” I am reflecting, “the advantages of marrying a person one does not know are sufficiently obvious. Then there is no bitterness of disillusionment, no chagrin of being found out. What woman can continue to idealise an unshaven man in pyjamas? What man can persist in adoring a female in a peignoir with her hair concentrated into knots? In good truth we never marry the person with whom we go through the wedding ceremony: it’s always some one else.”

Here I pause to stare appreciatively at the Fontaine St. Michel, amid whose icicles the sunbeams play at hide-and-seek. Then I watch the steam of a tug which the sunshine tangles in fleeces of gold amid the bare branches of a marronnier; after which in the same zestful way I regard a hearty man on a sand-barge toasting some beef on a sharpened stick over a fire. Suddenly these humble things seem to become alive with interest for me.

“Yes,” I continue, “love is an intoxicant, marriage the most effective of soberers. It is a part of life’s discipline, a bachelor’s punishment for his sins, a life-long argument in which one is wise to choose an opponent one can out-voice. How the fictitious values of courtship are discounted in the mart of matrimony! It makes philosophers of us all. Having been a benedict three weeks, of course I know everything about it.”

The long slate-grey façade of the Louvre is sun-radiant, and like a point of admiration rears the Tower St. Jacques. Looking down the shining river the arches of the many bridges interlock like lacework, and like needles the little steamers dart gleaming through. The graceful river and the gleaming quays laugh in the sunshine, and as I look at them my heart laughs too.

“But,” I go on musingly, “to marry some one you don’t know, some one who has never inspired you with mad dreams, never lived for you in the glamour of romance: surely that is ideal. You have no illusions; her virtues as well as her faults are all to discover. Take my own case. So far, I haven’t discovered a single fault. My wife adores me. She can scarcely bear me out of her sight. Even now I know she’s anxiously awaiting my return; imagines I may have been run over by a taxi, and then arrested by a policeman for getting in its way. Or else I have a maîtresse. Frequently she shows signs of jealousy, and I’ve been away over an hour. Really I must hurry home to reassure her.”

With that I pass under the arch of the Institute, and turn up the rue de Seine. I glance with eager interest at the gorgelike rue Visconti; I itch to turn over the folios before the doors of the art dealers, but on I go stubbornly till I come to a doorway bearing the sign:

HÔTEL DU MONDE ET DU MOZAMBIQUE.

A certain tenebrous suggestion in the vestibule seems to account for the latter part of the title. It is a tall, decrepit building that at some time had been sandwiched between two others of more stalwart bearing who now support it. It consists chiefly of a winding stairway lit by lamps of oil. At every stage two rooms seem to happen; but they are so small as to appear accidental.

So up this precipitous stairway lightly I leap till I come to the third storey. There before a yellow door I knock three times.

“Come in!” cries a joyful voice, and I enter to find two soft arms around my neck, and two soft lips upheld expectantly.

“Hullo, Little Thing,” I shout cheerily.

“Oh, darleen, why you not come before? You affright me. I sink you have haxident, and I am anxieuse.”

“No, no, I’ve only been gone an hour. I’ve had several narrow escapes, though. Nearly got blown into the Seine, was attacked by an Apache in the Avenue de l’Opera, and, stepping off the pavement to avoid going under a ladder, was knocked down by a taxi. But no bones broken; got home at last.”

“Ah! you laugh; but me, I wait here and I sink all the time you was keel. Oh, darleen! if you was keel I die too.”

“Nonsense! You’d make rather a jolly little widow. Well, what else have you been doing, besides worrying about me?”

“Oh, I make blouse. I sink it will be very pretty. You will see.”

“All right, we’ll put it on and go to the opera to-night.”

The “opera” is a cinema house near the Place St. Michel, where we go on rainy evenings, usually in our oldest clothes, and joking merrily about opera cloaks and evening dress.

“See! Isn’t it nice?”

She holds up a shimmering sketch in silk and pins. “It’s the chiffon you geeve me. But you must not spend your money like that. You spoil me.”

“Not at all. But talking about money reminds me: I got my English gold changed to-day. Now, let’s form a committee of ways and means. Here is all that lies between you and me and the wolf.”

I throw a wad of flimsy French bills on the table.

“A thousand francs! Now that’s got to last us till some Editor realises that certain gems of literature signed ‘Silenus Starset’ are worth real money.”

“Oh, they are loovely, darleen, your writings. No one will refuse articles so beautiful.”

“My dear, you can’t conceive the intensity of editorial obfustication. I fear we’ve got to retrench. You must make the ‘economies.’”

“Yes, yes, that is easy for me. I know nussing but make the economies. You see it is the chance often if I have anysing to make the economies on.”

“Good! Well, the first thing is to get out of this hotel. We can’t afford palatial luxury at five francs a day.”

And here I look with some distaste at the best bedroom the Hôtel du Monde et du Mozambique affords. I see a fat, high bed of varnished pine, on which reposes a bloated crimson quilt. On the mantelpiece a glass bell enshrines a clock of gilt and chocolate-coloured marble. There is a paunchy, inhospitable chair of green plush, and two of apologetic cane. An oval table is covered by a fringed cloth of crimson velour, and there is a mirror in two sections, which, by an ingenious system of distortion immediately makes one hate oneself—one either looks mentally abnormal, or about as intelligent as a caveman.

“In truth,” I observe, “the decorative scheme of our apartment puzzles me. Whether it is Empire or Louis Quinze I cannot decide. Really, we must seek something less complex.”

She looks at the money thoughtfully. “We might take a logement. Already have I think of it. To-day I have ask Madame who keep the hotel, and she tell me zere is one very near—rue Mazarin. The rent is five hundred by year. Perhaps it is too much,” she adds timidly.

“No, I think we might allow that. We pay three months in advance, I suppose. Allow other three hundred francs for furnishing—do you think we could manage on that?”

She looks doubtful. “Not very nice; but we will do for the best. I will be so careful.”

“Oh, we’ll arrange somehow. We’ll then have five hundred francs for food and other things. We must make that last for three months. By that time I’m sure to be making something out of my writings. Five hundred francs for two people for three months isn’t much, is it?”

“No, but we will take very much care, darleen. I do not care for myself; it is only for you.”

“Don’t lose any sleep over me. I’ll be all right if you will. It will be real fun scheming and dreaming, and making the best of everything. We’ll see how much happiness we can squeeze out of every little sou; we’ll get to know the joys and sorrows of the poor. They say that Bohemia is vanished; but we’ll prove that wherever there is striving and the happy heart in spite of need, wherever there is devotion to art in the face of poverty, there eternally is Bohemia. Hurrah! how splendid to be young and poor and to have our dreams!”

I laugh exultantly, and the girl enters into my joyous mood.

“Yes,” she says, “we shall be gay. As for me, I will buy a métier. I will work at my hem-broderie. I will make leetle money like that. Oh, not much, but it will assist. So we will be all right.”

“Yes,” I cry, enamoured of the vision. “And when success does come, how we will glory in it! How good will seem the feast after the fast! Ah! but sometimes, when we have our house near the Bois, will we not look back with regret to the days when we struggled and rejoiced there in our tiny Mansard of Dreams?”

I pause for a moment, while my kinematographic imagination begins to work. I go on dramatically:

“Then some day of December twilight, when the snow is falling, I will steal away from the flunkies and the marble halls, and go down to look at the old windows now so blind and dead. And as I stand wrapped in mournful reverie and a five hundred franc overcoat, suddenly I hear a soft step. There in the dusk I am aware of a shadowy form also gazing up at the poor old windows. Lo! it is you, and there are tears in your eyes. You too have slipped away from the marble halls to sentimentalise over the old home. Then we embrace, and, calling the limousine, whirl off to dinner at the Café de la Paix.... But that reminds me—let’s go to déjeûner. Where shall it be—chez Voisin, Foyet, or Laperouse?”

It turns out to be at the sign of the Golden Snail in the neighbourhood of the Markets, where for one franc seventy-five we have an elaborate choice of hors-de-œuvres, some meat that we strongly suspect to be horse, big white beans, a bludgeon of highly-glazed bread, a wedge of mould-sheathed Camembert (which she eats with joy, but which I cannot be induced to touch), and some purple wine that puts my teeth on edge. Yet, as I sit there with a large damp napkin on my knee and my feet in the saw-dust of the floor, I am superlatively happy.

“It is very extravagant,” I say, as I recklessly order coffee. “You know there are places where we can have déjeûner for one franc fifty, or even for one franc twenty-five. Just think of it! We might have saved a whole franc on this meal.”

“We save much more than that, when we have ménage. It will cost so little then. You will see.”

“Will it really? Come on, then, and let’s have a look at your apartment. It may be taken just ten minutes before we get there. They always are.”

Off we go as eager as children, and with rising excitement we reach the mouldering rue Mazarin. We reconnoitre a gloomy-looking building entered by a massive, iron-studded door. Through a tunnel-like porch-way we see a tiny court in the centre of which is a railed space about six feet square. Within it stand a few pots of dead geraniums and a weather-stained plaster-cast of Bellona, thus achieving an atmosphere of both nature and art.

The corpulent concierge emerges from her cubby-hole.— Yes, she will show us the apartment. There has been a Monsieur to see it that very morning. He has been undecided whether to take it or not, but will let her know in the morning.

This makes us keen to secure it, and it is almost with a determination to be pleased that we mount five flights of dingy stairs. A faded carpet accompanies us as far as the fourth flight, then deserts us in disgust.

Nothing damps our ardour, however. We decide that the smallness of the two rooms is a decided advantage, the view into the mildewed court quaint and charming, the fact that water is obtained from a common tap on the landing no particular detriment. The girl, pleased that I am pleased, becomes enthusiastic. It will be her first home. Her heart warms to it. Scant as it is, no other will ever be quite so dear. With the eye of fancy she sees its bareness clad and comforted. Poor lonely house! Seeing the light ashine in the wistful blue eyes, I too become enthusiastic, and thus we inspire each other.

“It’s a dear little apartment,” I say. “How lucky we are to have stumbled on it. I’m going to take it at once. We’ll pay the first quarter’s rent right now.”

“You must geeve somesing to the concierge,” she whispers as I pay.

“Ah, I see! a sop to Cerebus. All right.”

“How much you geeve?”

“Twenty francs.”

“Mon Dieu! Twenty francs! Ten was enough. She sink now we are made of money.”

Anastasia is always ready to remind me that we have entered on a régime of economy. She seems to have made up her mind that, like all Americans, I have no idea of the value of money, and that as a thrifty and prudent woman of the most thrifty and prudent race in the world, it behooves her to keep a close hand on the purse strings. I am just like a child, she decides, and she must look after me like a mother.

What a busy week it is! She takes into her own hands the furnishing of our home, calculating every sou, pondering every detail. Time after time we prowl past the furnishing shops on the Avenue du Maine, trying to decide what we had best take. There is a novel pleasure in this. Thus I am absurdly pleased when, on our deciding to take a table at twenty-two francs, I find a place where I can buy exactly the same for twenty-one.

We save money on the cleaning of the house by doing it ourselves. There is the floor to wax and polish. For the latter operation I sit down on a pad of several thicknesses of flannel, then she, catching my feet, pulls me around on the slippery surface till it shines like a mirror. We are very proud of that glossy floor, and regard our work almost with reverence, stepping on it as one might the sacred carpet of Mecca.

Then comes the furnishing. First, there is the bedroom. We buy two little beds of the fold-up variety, and set them side by side. Our bedding, though only of cotton, is, we decide, softer and nicer than linen and wool; and the pink quilt that covers both beds, could, we declare, scarce be told from silk. Our wardrobe—what is easier than to make a broad shelf about six feet high, and hang from it chintz curtains behind which a dozen hooks are screwed into the wall.

Equally simple are our other arrangements. A cosy corner can be deftly made of boards and cushions. She insists on me buying a superannuated armchair, and she re-covers it, so that it looks like new. She selects cheap but dainty curtains, a pretty table-cloth to hide the rough table, so that you’d never know; a little buffet, a mirror for the bedroom, pictures for the walls, kitchen things, table things—really, it’s awful how much you require for a ménage, and how quickly in spite of yourself your precious money melts.

These are the merry days, but at last all is finished—the first home. What if we have exceeded the margin a little? Everything is really cosy and comforting.

“This is an occasion,” I say. “Let us celebrate it.”

In our little stove, heated to a cherry glow, we roast our maiden chicken. The first time we put it on the table it is not quite enough done. We peer at it anxiously, we probe at it cautiously, finally we decide to put it back for another quarter of an hour. But then—ye gods! What a bird! How plump and brown and savoury! How it sizzles in the amber gravy! Never, think we, have we tasted fowl so delicious. We eat it with reverence.

After that she makes one of the seven-and-thirty salads of that land of salads; then we have a dish of petits pois, and we finish off with a great golden brioche and red currant jam.

“Now,” I say, “we’ll drink to ourselves, and to our ’appy ’ome; and, by the gods, we’ll drink in champagne!”

With that I triumphantly produce a half-bottle of Mousseux that I have been hiding, a graceful bottle with a cap of gold. Appalling extravagance! Veuve Amiot! Who could tell it from Veuve Clicquot?—and it costs only a franc and a half.

Cut the wire! Watch the cork start up, slowly, slowly ... then— Pop! away it springs, and smacks the ceiling. Quickly I fill her a foaming glass, and we drink to “La France.” After that, sitting over the fire, we plunge long spongy biscuits into the bubbling wine that seems to seethe in fierce protest at being thus tormented. And if you do not think we are as happy as the joyous liquor we sip, you do not know Youth and Paris. To conclude the evening, we scurry off to the Cinema theatre as merry as children.

Most of the films are American, and what is my amazement to find that one of them, all cowboys, breeze, and virtue rewarded, is a cinematisation of my own book, Rattlesnake Ranch. Yes, there are my characters—the sheriff’s daughter, Mike the Mule-skinner, and the rest. A thrill runs down my back, almost a shiver.

“How do you like it?” I ask the girl.

“I love it. I love all sings Americaine now.”

“Really, it’s awful rubbish. You mustn’t judge America by things like that.”

“I love it,” she protests stoutly.

We get home quite tired; but after she has gone to bed, I get out my pen and plunge into a new article. It is called, How to be a Successful Wife.