CHAPTER I.

GARNIER.

The _rapin_ of Paris is the sparrow of the artistic temple, but he is much more besides. For one thing, he is sometimes an eagle in disguise. He laughs as he paints, and plays dominoes with fantastic gravity. He is generally ugly, but he loves Beauty, and draws her in all postures, even immodest ones. Sometimes he becomes literary, and publishes a journal the size of a prayer-book, in which he has written nonsense and which lives for three months. In this way, I suppose, he takes a vague sort of revenge for all the nonsense that has been written about him.

I do not think you will find in Europe a more foul-minded person than the _rapin_, or a more joyous, or a more lovable, or a more pitiable. And though he is certainly the most consequential creature in the world, he is the greatest knocker-down of pedestals. Delacroix declared he could smell corruption in the air of Paris. I think he must have smelt the _rapin_. Yet out of this dung spring the fairest flowers of art.

Toto, forsaking his world for a space, had cast in his lot with this creation, and Célestin, like an angel made blind by love, followed him. Dodor had no voice in the matter, yet he endeavored to put it in as he swung in his cage from the nail in the wall.

“Oh!” sighed Célestin next morning as she sat beside Toto on the couch opposite the stove. “Am I on earth still, or can it be that we are in heaven?”

In one day she had become a woman without ceasing to be an angel, and Dodor sang as if to assure her of the fact, whilst Toto kissed her, and a beam of sun through the top light touched the tulip.

That was their morning, spent amidst the great flowers of the chintz-covered couch, whilst time passed over them like a butterfly with blue wings, and Paris grumbled through the top light like a jealous monster.

In the afternoon Toto, in his blouse, settled his painting things and rearranged drapery, whilst his companion, whose fingers could not be still, turned the morning, gone now forever, into a hat. She murmured to the hat as she made it, telling it of her happiness—a most adorable soliloquy lost to the world forever, for Toto was too busy to note it down. Then, when the structure was finished, she held it out on her finger-tip for admiration. It blushed there as if ashamed of its beauty and happiness. And Toto said “It is beautiful,” in an abstracted voice, for he was hunting for a palette-knife.

They dined at a little restaurant near the Palais Bourbon, and spent their evening at the Porte St. Martin Theater, where a bloody drama was enacted, which caused Célestin to weep deliciously and shiver.

This was their honeymoon, for next day work began in earnest, and Toto started for Melmenotte’s studio, a large bleak room filled with canvases and diligent students, a naked woman, large and solid and sitting on a throne, in their midst.

They hazed him at first, but he did not lose his temper, so they left him alone; besides, he showed no talent, therefore created no envy, hatred, or malice.

But Garnier, the man who worked on his right, took an interest in him just, perhaps, because the others voted him uninteresting and his work hopeless. It was Garnier’s way; he was a friend of failures, and took an interest in the forlorn. Sparrows, stray cats, or people like Toto appealed to him strangely.

He was an immense fellow, with Southern blood in his veins and hopes of humanity, and his secret ambition in life was to be a politician and set the world to rights. Nature, however, the sworn foe of secret ambitions, had placed all his talents in his eyes and fingers, insisting that this wayward child should be no politician, but a divine artist.

He had a great reputation as a scamp. He swore terrifically, and could out-talk a washerwoman. He was always borrowing, and spending, and lending, and giving, and he boasted that he kept a mistress. No one ever saw her; he kept her jealously hid, for she was eighty. He had, in fact, met her one day on one of the bridges crossing the Seine, and pensioned her forthwith because she reminded him of his mother, whom he had never beheld.

He was a love-child, it seems, and certainly a most terrible mixture as far as mind and morals were concerned, for his ideals were always very high, and his ideas often very low, and his language very often pornographic. To complete himself, he always stank of garlic, and his pockets were generally stuffed with cheap cigarettes and sweets, which he dispensed open-handed to his friends.

“Thanks,” said Toto, taking a cigarette from a dozen held out by Garnier.

It was the third morning of his attendance at the studio, and he was feeling depressed; he was also putting away his things, for it was Saturday, and work stopped at twelve.

“I,” said Garnier, “am going to enjoy myself, but the question is, How? Shall I go home and go to bed and read Eugène Sue, or shall I go to the Tobacco-Pot and play dominoes? Jolly, have you any money?”

“None,” answered a lank-haired and evil-faced youth, darting out of the room, and clattering away down the stairs after the others.

“I have,” said Toto.

“How much?” inquired Garnier, with the air of a judge.

“Ten francs.”

“That settles it. We will go to the Tobacco-Pot. Ten francs, and this is Saturday! _Mon Dieu_, what a Rothschild you must be! Where did you get your money from?”

“My father.”

“What is he?”

“He keeps a shop.”

“Happy for you. You can paint away, and the old bird feeds you. Oh, I should like a shop—a little shop, where I would sell sweets and cigarettes, and live in my shirt-sleeves, and read the _Ami du Peuple_ and kick my heels.”

“What do you think of my work?” asked Toto, glancing at the mediocre drawing upon his canvas.

“It’s capital,” said Garnier, his mind running on his little shop, where children would toddle in with their sou for sugar-sticks, and old women totter in for hap’orths of snuff: for, though Garnier loved all humanity, he perhaps loved the two extremes, childhood and old age, most.

“What made Melmenotte turn up his nose at it the way he did this morning when he came round?”

“He never praises anyone—he’s a fossil. Come, let us be off to the Tobacco-Pot. Annette will be here in a moment to clear up.”

“Come home with me and have some _déjeuner_; that will be better than the Tobacco Pot,” said Toto, as they went down the stairs.

“To your father’s place?”

“Oh, no; my atelier—Rue de Perpignan. I will introduce you to my—wife.”

“_You_ married!” cried Garnier, stopping in astonishment, and clutching Toto’s arm. “Why, you are scarcely out of the egg!”

“I am twenty-two.”

“_Mon Dieu!_ well, why not? it is the happiest life. Oh, I should like to have a wife and twelve little children all three years old. That is the age of all others; they talk like birds, and sentences from heaven slip into their conversation; and tumble on their noses, and pull one’s beard. I have always seen myself as I ought to be some day, with a big stomach, sitting in an armchair, the children pulling my watch-chain, and mamma plying her needle, whilst the cat purred on the hearth: and here are you, three years younger than I am, and you have it all. What an eye the Germans have for children! how they draw them! _Mon Dieu!_ I can almost forgive them Sédan for the sake of those adorable little Fritzes and Gretchens one sees in their funny little books.”

They reached the Rue de Perpignan at last, and found _déjeuner_ waiting. There was a little salad, some stewed beef, and a bottle of white wine, also some fruit on a plate.

As Toto and Célestin embraced, Garnier looked around him with a sigh. His room was an attic, yet I doubt if he would have exchanged his attic, where he lay abed on Sunday reading the “Mysteries of Paris” and imagining himself Prince Rudolph, and of a week-day night reading the _Intransigèant_ by the light of a tallow candle and imagining himself Henri Rochefort, for this atelier, even were Célestin thrown in—at least, at present.

Not that he undervalued Célestin, even at the first glance; far from it. The great, noisy Garnier was silent and quelled for quite ten minutes. He had never met Célestin before amidst all the women he had met, and he seemed undecided for a while as to whether an angel or a child was dispensing the cold stewed beef and the salad. Then he made up his mind, evidently, that it was a child, and began to play with her. He told stories, really droll little stories, that a child or a man might laugh over, and stainless as the white roads of Provence. And he mimicked old men and women without malice, and in such a way that Célestin wept from laughing.

After _déjeuner_ he taught his hostess how to make cat’s cradles, and Dodor’s history was told to him whilst he sat on the couch and nursed his knee and smoked his villainous cigarettes of Caporal.

The guitar was taken down from the wall, and he played _café-chantant_ songs, things with the ghost of an air moving in a whirl of sound, and sang the “Girls of Avignon” with tears in his eyes, that seemed to behold the whirl of the farandole, the white road to Arles, the moonlight, the fireflies, and the orange trees shivering in the mistral.

Altogether it was a most enjoyable afternoon, and the excitement and laughter left Célestin quite spent. A fit of coughing seized her when the time came for them to go out to dinner, and she declared that she must lie down. So she lay down on her bed, and Toto covered her up with a shawl, and gave her one of the lozenges Mme. Liard had placed in her trunk to suck.

Then he went out with Garnier, and they dined at a little café for two francs each, wine included.

“I found this little café only three months ago,” said Garnier. “It is a wizard café. I dine here as often as I can, for some day I expect to find it vanished. Those whom the gods love die young, and I am sure the gods must love this little café. I cannot tell how they give one such a dinner for two francs, including a bottle of Maconolais. That hare soup was a miracle. I suspect the miracle to be cats. But no matter; the taste was right. I save up on week-days, and dine here on Sundays.”

“How long have you been working at art?”

“Five years.”

Toto felt rather aghast.

“Have you been working at Melmenotte’s atelier all that time?”

“Oh, no; for the last two years I have been in his private studio; it is being altered just now, so I just come to herd with the rest to keep my hand in. I must be doing something.”

“Have you exhibited yet?”

“No; Melmenotte will not let me. I am to next year; I shall have a picture in the Salon next year.”

“How sure he is of himself!” thought Toto. “And how dull he must be to have worked five years without exhibiting!” Then to Garnier: “One of the fellows told me one could live by selling pot-boilers.”

“Yes; one could live by house-painting, for the matter of that. Who was it told you?”

“That young fellow with the long hair—Jolly you called him, I think.”

“He is an awful wretch, that man, but a fine artist. Beware of him; do not ask him to your home. I never speak bad of people; but Jolly is not a person: he is a genius who will die in a jail or a lunatic asylum. I’ve told him so often. It would not do for him to make the acquaintance of Mlle. Célestin.”

Garnier gave a little sigh as he ate a lark on toast, which he declared he suspected of being a rat. He seemed thinking a great deal of Célestin. The talk wandered over a number of topics, but somehow always back to or near Célestin.

Then Toto paid the score, and produced so much money that Garnier borrowed a napoleon in as natural a manner as that of a bee taking a suck at a flower. He then, as they walked away smoking Trabucos, bought a copy of the _Intransigèant_, and wandered home to read it, reminding Toto as they parted to give his regards to Célestin.