Chapter 15

To renounce everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last! However, if she only had courage!

It was while looking at the great blue lake, the snowy swans, the gleaming barks, that she dreamed, as she had just told Vaudrey, of making an end of all. Madness, worse than that, stupidity! One does not kill one's self at her age; one does not make of beauty a valueless draft. In order to occupy herself, she had bought some brown bread, which she mechanically threw to the ducks, in order to draw her out of herself. It was then that Sulpice saw her.

"Assuredly," she thought, as she left the minister, "those who despair are idiots!"

In fact, it seemed that chance, as her fingers had cast mouthfuls of bread to the hungry bills, had thrown Vaudrey to her in place of Rosas.

A minister! that young man who smiled on her just now in the alleys of the Bois and drew near her with trembling breath was a minister. A minister as popular as Vaudrey was a power, and since Marianne, weary of seeking love, was pursuing an actuality quite as difficult to obtain--riches, Sulpice unquestionably was not to be despised.

"As a last resource, one might find worse," thought Marianne, as she entered her home.

She had not, moreover, hesitated long. She was not in the mood for prolonged anger. She was at an age when prompt decisions must be made on every occasion that life, with its harsh spurs, proposed a problem or furnished an opportunity. On the way between the Lake and Rue de Navarin, Marianne had formed her plan. Since she had to reply to Vaudrey, she would write him. She felt an ardent desire to avenge herself for Rosas's treatment, as if he ought to suffer therefor, as if he were about to know that Sulpice loved her.

Had she found the duke awaiting her, as she entered the house, she would have been quite capable of lashing his face with a whip, while making the lying confession:

"Ah! you here? It is too late! I love Monsieur Vaudrey."

She would, moreover, never know any but gloomy feelings arising from her poverty in that house. The thought suggested itself to her of at once inviting Vaudrey to call on her. But surrounded by the vulgar appointments of that poor, almost bare, studio, concealing her poverty under worn-out hangings, indifferent studies, old, yellowed casts covered with dust--to receive Vaudrey there would be to confess her terribly straitened condition, her necessities, her eagerness, all that repels and freezes love. In glancing around her uncle's studio, she scrutinized everything with an expression of hatred.

It smacked of dirty poverty, bourgeois ugliness. She would never dare to ask Vaudrey to sit upon that divan, which was littered with old, torn books and tobacco grains, and which, when one sat upon it, discharged a cloud of dust whose atoms danced in the sunlight.

"What are you looking at?" asked Kayser, as he followed his niece's glances about the room. "You seem to be making an inspection."

"Precisely. And I am thinking that your studio would not fetch a very high figure at Drouot's auction mart."

"Lofty and moral creations don't sell in times like these," gravely replied the old dauber. "For myself, I am not a painter of obscene subjects and lewd photography."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and went out, coughing involuntarily. Old Kayser passed his time steeped in the odors of nicotine.

"I am lost, if Vaudrey comes here," she said to herself.

She knew well enough that caprice, the love of those who do not love, lives on luxury, intoxicating perfumes, shimmering silk, and all the mysterious surroundings of draperies which are the accompaniment of the adventure. Vaudrey would recoil before this Bohemian studio. The famous "nimbus," of which Kayser spoke, was the creature of his tobacco smoke. What was to be done, then? Receive the minister yonder in that remote apartment where, all alone,--it was true--she went to dream, dream with all the strange joys attending isolation? Draw this man to a distant corner of Paris, in the midst of the ruins of former luxury, as mean as the wretch's studio?--Eh! that was to acknowledge to Vaudrey that she was intriguing for a liaison with the single object of quitting the prison-walls of want. She realized that this man, full of illusions, believing that he had to do with perhaps a virtuous girl, or, at least, one who was not moving in her own circle, who was giving herself, but not selling herself, would shrink at the reality on finding himself face to face with an adventuress.

"Illusion is everything! He must be deceived! They are all stupid!" she mused.

But how was she to deceive this man as to her condition, how cloak her want, how cause herself to pass for what she was not? With Rosas it would have been a simple matter. Poor, she presented herself to him in her poverty. He loved her so. She could the better mislead him. But with Vaudrey, on the contrary, she must dazzle.

"Two innocents," Marianne said to herself, "the one thirsts for virtue, the other for vice."

Should she confess everything to Sulpice as she had done to Rosas? Yes, perhaps, if she discovered no better way, but a better plan had to be found, sought, or invented. Find what? Borrow? Ask? Whom? Guy? She would not dare to do so, even supposing that Lissac was sufficiently well off. Then she wished to keep up appearances, even in Guy's eyes. Further, she had never forgiven him for running off to Italy. She never would forget it. No, no, she would ask nothing from Guy.

To whom, then, should she apply? She again found herself in the frightful extremity of those who, in that almost limitless Paris, involved in the terrible intricacies of that madly-directed machine, seek money, a loan, some help, an outstretched hand, but who find nothing, not an effort to help them in all its crowd. She was overcome with rage and hatred. Nothing! she had nothing! She would have sold herself to any person whatsoever, to have speedily obtained a few of the luxuries she required. Yes; sold herself now, to sell herself more dearly to-morrow.

Sold! Suddenly from the depths of her memory she recalled a form, confused at first, but quickly remembered vividly, of an old woman against whom she had formerly jostled, in the chance life she had led, and who, once beautiful, and still clever and rich, it was said, had been seized with a friendly desire to protect Marianne. It was a long time since the young woman had thought of Claire Dujarrier. She met her occasionally, her white locks hidden under a copious layer of golden powder, looking as yellow as sawdust. The old woman had said to her:

"Whenever you need advice or assistance, do not forget my address: Rue La Fontaine, Auteuil."

Marianne had thanked her at the time, and had forgotten all about it till now, when in the anguish of her pursuit she recalled the name and features of Claire Dujarrier as from the memories of yesterday. Claire Dujarrier, a former danseuse, whose black eyes, diamonds, wild extravagance, and love adventures were notorious formerly, had for the last two or three years buried herself in a little house, fearing that she would be assassinated; she kept her diamonds in iron-lined safes built in the wall, and had a young lover, a clerk in a novelty store, who was stronger than a market-house porter, and who from time to time assumed a high tone and before whom she stood in awe.

"Claire Dujarrier! The very thing!--Why not?" thought Marianne.

She had been introduced to the ex-danseuse by Guy de Lissac. He was considered as one of Claire's old lovers. They quarrelled when the old dame had heard one of Guy's bons mots that had become familiar at the Club:

"When I see her, I always feel a slight emotion: she recalls my youth to me!--But alas! not hers!"

Claire was well-off and perhaps miserly. Marianne instinctively felt, however, that she would get help at her hands.

Money!

"I will return her all! It is usury. Her pledge is here!"

With brazen front, Kayser's niece struck her bosom, looking at the same time at the reflection of her fine bust and pale face in the mirror.

The next day she went straight to the former danseuse's.

Claire Dujarrier lived in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds, boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other as in some village passage, the butcher's store, the pharmacy, the wine-dealer's shop, the baker's establishment,--a kind of little summer resort with a forlorn look in February, the kiosks and cottages half decayed, the gardens full of faded, dreary-looking leaves. Marianne looked about, seeking the little Claire house. She had visited it formerly. A policeman wandered along sadly,--as if to remind one of the town,--and on one side, a gardener passed scuffling his wooden shoes, as if to recall the village.

However, here it was that the formerly celebrated girl, who awoke storms of applause when she danced beside Cerrito at the Opéra, now lived buried in silence,--a cab going to the Villa Montmorency seemed an event in her eyes,--forgotten, her windows shut, and as a diversion looking through the shutters at the high chimneys of some factory in the neighboring Rue Gras that belched forth their ruddy or bluish fumes, or yellow like sulphuric acid, or again red like the reflection of fire.

Marianne rang several times when she arrived at the garden railing of the little house. The bells sounded as if they were coated with rust. An ancient maid-servant, astonished and morose, came to open the door.

She conducted the young woman into the salon where Claire Dujarrier sat alone, eating cakes, with her terrier on her lap.

The dog almost leaped at Marianne's throat while Claire, rising, threw herself on her neck.

"Ah! dear little one!--How pleased I am! What chance brings you?"

Marianne looked at the Dujarrier. She might still be called almost lovely, although she was a little painted and her eyes were swollen, and her cheeks withered; but she knew so perfectly well all the secrets for rejuvenating, the eyebrow preparation, the labial wash, that she was a walking pharmaceutical painting done on finely sculptured features. The statue, although burdened with fat, was still superb.

She listened to Marianne, smiled, frowned and, love-broker and advisory courtesan that she was, ended by saying to the "little one" that she had a devilish good chance and that she had arrived like March in Lent.

"It is true, it has purposely happened. Vanda, you know her well?"

"No!" answered Marianne.

"What! Vanda, whom that big viper Guy called the Walking Rain?"

"I do not remember--"

"Well! Vanda has gone to Russia, she left a month ago. She will be there all the winter and summer, and part of next winter. Her _general_ requires her. He is appointed to keep an eye on the Nihilists. So she wishes to rent her house in Rue Prony. That is very natural. A charming house. Very _chic_. In admirable taste. You have the chance. And not dear."

"Too dear for me, who have nothing!"

"Little silly! You have yourself," said Claire Dujarrier. "Then you have me, I have always liked you. I will lend you the ready cash to set yourself up, you can give me bills of exchange, little documents that your minister--pest! you are going on well, you are, ministers!--that His Excellency will endorse. Vanda will not expect anything after the first quarter. Provided that her house is well-rented to someone who does not spoil it, she will be satisfied. If she should claim all, why, at a pinch I can make up the amount. But, my dear,"--and the old woman lowered her voice,--"on no account say anything to Adolphe."

"Adolphe?"

"Yes, my _husband_. You do not know him?"

She took from the table a photograph enclosed in a photograph-case of sky-blue plush, in which Marianne recognized a swaggering fellow with flat face, large hands, fierce, bushy moustache, who leaned on a cane, swelling out his huge chest in outline against a mean, gray-tinted garden ornamented with Medicis vases.

"A handsome fellow, isn't he? Quite young!--and he loves me--I adore him, too!"

The tumid eyes of Claire Dujarrier resembled lighted coals. She pressed kiss after kiss of her painted lips on the photograph and reverently laid it on the table.

Marianne almost pitied this half-senile love, the courtesan's terrifying, last love.

She was, however, too content either to trouble herself, or even to reflect upon it. She was wild with joy. It seemed to her that a sudden rift had opened before her and a gloriously sunny future pictured itself to her mind. What an inspiration it was to think of Claire Dujarrier!

She would sign everything she wished, acknowledge the sums lent, with any interest that might be demanded. Much she cared about that, indeed!--She was sure now to free herself and to _succeed_.

"You are jolly right," said the ancient danseuse. "The nest is entirely at the birds' disposal. Your minister--I don't ask his name, but I shall learn it by the bills of exchange--would treat you as a grisette if he found you at your uncle's. Whereas at Vanda's--ah! at Vanda's! you will have news to tell me. So, see this is all that is necessary. I will write to Vanda that her house is rented, and well rented. Kiss me and skip! I hear Adolphe coming. He does not care to see new faces. And then, yours is too pretty!" she added, with a peculiar significance.

She got the old servant to show Marianne out promptly, as if she felt fearful lest her _husband_ should see the pretty creature. Claire Dujarrier was certainly jealous.

"It is not I that would rob her of her porter!" Marianne thought, as she walked away from Rue La Fontaine.

Evening was now darkening the gray streets. A faint bluish mist was rising over the river and spreading like breath over the quays. Marianne saw Paris in the distance, and her visit seemed like a dream to her; she closed her eyes, and a voice within her whispered confusedly the names of Rosas, Vaudrey, Vanda, Rue Prony; she pictured herself stretched at length on a reclining chair in the luxurious house of a courtesan, and she saw at her feet that man--a minister--who supplicatingly besought her favor, while in the distance a man who resembled Rosas was travelling, moving away, disappearing--

"Nonsense!" the superstitious creature said to herself, "it was one or the other! The duke or the minister! I have not made the choice."

Then looking at the confused image of herself thrown on the window of the cab, she threw a kiss at her own pale reflection, happy with the unbounded joy of a child, and cried aloud while laughing heartily:

"Bonjour, Vanda! I greet you, Mademoiselle Vanda."

PART SECOND

I

The Monceau plain is the quarter of changed fortunes and dice-throwing. An entire town given over to luxury, born in a single night, suddenly sprung into existence. The unpremeditated offspring of the aggregation of millions. Instead of the cobbler's stall, the red-bedaubed shop of the dealer in wines, the nakedness of an outer boulevard, here in this spot of earth all styles flourish: the contrast of fancy, the château throwing the English cottage in the shade; the Louis XIII. dwelling hobnobbing with the Flemish house; the salamander of Francis I. hugging the bourgeois tenement; the Gothic gateway opening for the entry of the carriages of the courtesan. A town within a town. Something novel, white, extravagant, overdone: the colossal in proximity to the attractive, the vastness of a grand American hotel casting its shadow over an Italian loggia. It partook at once of the Parisian and the Yankee. The Château de Chambord sheltering a chocolate maker, and the studio of an artist now become the salon of a rich curbstone broker.

The little Hôtel de Vanda,--_one of our charming fugitives_, as those of the chroniclers who still remember Vanda, say of her in their articles sometimes--is an elegant establishment, severe in external appearance, but of entirely modern interior arrangements, with a wealth of choice knickknacks, and is regarded as one of the most attractive houses in Rue Prony. Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: _Residence to let_. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through the great gateway leading to the stables. And now, for months, a corner of Rue Prony had been silent and drowsy, and weighted with the melancholy that surrounds forsaken objects.

It was here that Marianne, in carrying out her determination, entered with a high head, resolved to cast off her sombre misery or to sink, her plans defeated. The Dujarrier had greatly assisted her in taking up her abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary, and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of a connoisseur.

"After all," Dujarrier said to herself, "it is the favorable moment for success. One does not become a _general_ except through seniority."

Marianne also experienced the same feelings as the Dujarrier. She realized that she had reached the turning-point of her life, it was like a game of baccarat that she was playing with fate. She might come out of it rich and preserved from the possibility of dying in a hospital or a hovel after having dragged her tattered skirts through the streets, or overwhelmed with debts, ruined forever, strangled by liabilities. This commercial term made her smile ironically when she thought of it. Against her she had her past, her adventurous life, almost the life of a courtesan, carried away by the current of her amorous whims; it now needed only the burden of liabilities for her to become not only completely disclassed, but ruined by Parisian life. She had given the Dujarrier receipts for all that that quasi-silent-partner had advanced her, the old lady excusing herself for the precaution she took by saying precisely:

"In that way one can hold people. Grateful acknowledgments are good; written acknowledgments are better!"

The Dujarrier considered herself witty.

Marianne had signed, moreover, all that the other had asked. She still needed, indeed, to make further outlay. And what mattered it if she plunged deeper while she was _taking a dive_, as she expressed it in her language, which was a mixture of street slang and the elegant phraseology of the salon.

"Bah! I know how to swim."

She suddenly straightened herself under this anxiety, reassured, moreover, and spurred on as she was by the Dujarrier herself, who said as she shrugged her shoulders:

"When a woman like you has a man like Vaudrey,--a minister,--she has her nest lined."

Sulpice was not the man long to resist so refined a Parisienne as Marianne. In him, the repressed ardors, the poetic ideas of a man of twenty, had become the appetites of a man of forty. This provincial, hungry for Parisianism,--very young in feelings and soul,--felt, as soon as he found himself in Marianne's company, mad with desire for a new life. The dazzling honors attending his entry into the ministry found their culmination in the burning glance of Marianne, as their eyes met.

Hardly was she installed in Rue Prony than she reminded him of his promise to call on her. He hastened to her with strange eagerness and he left her more disturbed, as if he had just taken a peep at an unknown world. The feminine elegance of the Hôtel de Vanda had suddenly intoxicated him. Marianne played her part very calmly in producing the daily ravage that passion was making on Sulpice. She studied its rapid progress with all the sang-froid of a physician. She regulated the doses of her toxicant, the poison of her glance instilled into the veins of this man. Determined to become his mistress, she desired to fall in the guise of a woman madly in love, and not as an ordinary courtesan. With any other man than Vaudrey, she would, perhaps, have yielded more quickly. But she acted with Vaudrey as formerly she had done with Rosas. Seeing that these idealists caressed their dreams, she coquetted with platonic love, besides, she preferred to remain free for a short time, without the burden of those pleasures of which she had grown tired, and which had always caused her more disgust than delight.

Moreover, she said to herself that it was necessary in Sulpice's case to have the appearance of playing frankly, of loving truly, as in the case of Rosas. But, this time, she would not let Vaudrey escape her by flight, as the duke did. She would yield at the desired moment, certain that Sulpice would not leave her the next day.

"Rosas would be here," she said to herself self-confidently, "if he had been my lover."

After a moment of regretful preoccupation, she shrugged her shoulders and said quickly:

"Bah! _what is written is written_, as he said. If I haven't him, I have the other."

The "other" grew day by day more deeply enamored. He rushed off in hot haste to visit Marianne; his hired hack, in which he sometimes left his minister's portfolio peacefully at rest, pending his return, stood before the little door in the Avenue Prony. He was happier when he thought he had made a forward step in Marianne's affections than when he had acquired new votes from the minority in the Chamber. Ambitious projects yielded to the consuming desire that he felt toward this woman. At the ministry, during the familiar conversations at table with Adrienne and even during the hurly-burly attendant on private receptions and morning interviews, he sometimes remained silent, lost in thought, his mind wandering and, in reality, with Marianne.

Adrienne, at such times, with a sweet smile which made Sulpice shudder with remorse, would beseech him to work less, to take some recreation, and not allow himself to be so absorbed in politics.

"You are extremely pale, I assure you. You look worn out. You work too hard."

"It is due to administrative changes. There are so many documents to examine."

"I know that very well, but isn't Monsieur Warcolier there? In what way does he help you?"

"In no way," replied the minister sharply, speaking with truth.

Public affairs, in fact, absorbed him, and he found it necessary to steal the precious time to make a hasty trip to Rue Prony. A vacation, it is true, was near. In less than a month, Vaudrey would have more time at his disposal. But for more than three weeks yet, the minister would have everything to modify and change,--everything to put into a healthy shape, as Warcolier said--in the Hôtel Beauvau.

What matter! He found the time to fly incognito to the Maison de Vanda, leaving his coupé at the ministry. Marianne was always there for him when he arrived. The male domestic or the femme de chambre received him with all the deference that "domestics" show when they suspect that the visitor brings any kind of subsidy to the house. To Vaudrey, there was a sort of mystery in Mademoiselle Kayser's life. Ramel, who knew her uncle Kayser, had told him of the poverty of the painter. How then, seeing that her uncle was so shabby, could the niece be so sumptuously established?