The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  “Who’s that?” the accompanist had asked, feigning astonishment.

  “You don’t suspect, then? The great Annette, of course! A fine sprig of a girl, that one, not a hooker, not a painter’s purée nor a gigolette at the Bullier: the kept woman of a rich wood-merchant, nice tits, neat, well-dressed, who has real jewels, fine furniture and doesn’t run after a loaf of bread!”

  The baritone, a former village blacksmith, who, after having dreamed of making a hundred thousand francs a year at the Opéra, had great difficulty getting hundred-sou gigs, and subsidized his needs by breeding racing greyhounds, was licking his lips as he enumerated all the advantages that such an acquaintance involved.

  “Don’t play the joker, Monsieur Fernand, I beg you,” the pianist replied. “I’m only too well aware that at my age, one is no longer made for conquests; it’s fine for you with your superb lungs and your curly moustache, which drive them all mad.”

  “The fact is,” admitted the baritone, “that one doesn’t do badly. But what do you expect—I don’t like to make the darlings suffer, me, and when they’re pretty, in truth, if they want a little bit of Fernand, I don’t raise any obstacles!”

  He made a self-satisfied gesture, tweaked his moustache, winked and hummed the scale, all the way down to the lowest register of his voice.

  “But to get back to you, Monsieur Charles,” the victorious baritone went on, “I assure you that Annette, without having one of those terrible crushes that women have for me, wouldn’t be averse to receiving a few little piano lessons at home. Move quickly, or I’ll steal her away!”

  In a fit of mad enthusiasm, the irresistible singer was about to tap him on the belly; he stepped back rapidly.

  “You’ll die in the skin of a joker, Monsieur Fernand—stop it now, it’s your turn.”

  Annette was watching them chat, curiously. The baritone came on stage and she addressed an interrogative gesture to him. Fernand replied with a doubtful grimace.

  Excited by the difficulty, the tenacious blonde, increasingly seduced by the imposing air, the distinction, and the youthful and singularly keen gaze of the pianist, decided to make more precise advances. Fernand had doubtless acquitted the commission poorly. Perhaps—hadn’t he courted her himself?—a sentiment of jealousy had even pushed him to put a spoke in the wheel. She could not admit for a moment that a man might disdain her, and in this milieu, where all the habituées were on the lookout, she sensed that she was becoming an object of humorous remarks for the host of rejected adorers. It was necessary for her to reckon with the recalcitrant accompanist.

  That same evening, therefore, offering the pretext of being afraid to go home alone, she begged Monsieur Charles to escort her to her door—which the musician consented to do with the most amiable courtesy. When they arrived, she invited him insistently to come in for a small glass of liqueur, but the pianist did his best to escape.

  “Are you afraid then, that I’m imperiling your virtue?” she exclaimed, laughing.

  “My virtue, Mademoiselle, would be only too glad to succumb if you were to do it the honor of provoking it, but alas, I’m too old to hope for such favors,” the cavalier replied, gallantly. “It’s absolutely necessary that I go home immediately to do some very urgent work; don’t see any other reason for my refusal.”

  He’s afraid of being late, she thought. His legitimate must be expecting him!

  The next day, driven to extremes, she employed the ultimate means, the one that never failed.

  She knew how to play the piano, a little, and had, she had been assured, great dispositions for singing; she wanted to perfect them in his school, and begged him to come and give her a few lessons at home. She would pay him the fees that he habitually demanded of his pupils.

  Monsieur Charles assumed his most desolate expression. “Impossible, Mademoiselle; I work all day, I don’t have a single moment of liberty. As you can suppose, I can’t live on the four francs I earn here!”

  “All the more reason why you mustn’t be alone,” added the lovely Annette, a trifle vexed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a wife, a mistress?”

  The musician assumed a melancholy expression. “Yes,” he ended up sighing, as if a painful confession were being extracted from him.

  Annette he knew, as an old habitué of the concert, spending money without counting it, always trailing friends and suitors after her, had considerable influence with Père Antoine. Some even claimed that the cut-price impresario had not always been indifferent to the charms of “my child,” as he always called her. At any rate, the old entrepreneur, an intelligent and rapacious man, who had become a wine-merchant after being a coal-merchant, the proprietor of a dance-hall after being a wine-merchant, and then the proprietor of a drinking-den that he had transformed into a flourishing café concert, placed a high value on such a generous client. He was already looking with a jaundiced eye upon his employee’s obstinate refusal of the drinks he was offered.

  “You could at least take a glass of milk or syrup from time to time,” he complained. “It’s refreshing.”

  “It’s injurious to my health.”

  “Have a rum, then—that’s fortifying. You’re losing me three francs a night; with the four I give you that makes seven; for that price, I could have a Paganini.” Any celebrated performer was a Paganini for Père Antoine.

  The musician sought to calm the interested businessman’s irritation with all kinds of soothing words, but he sensed that he had not been forgiven for his refusals of drinks, and that a few words from the lovely Annette would suffice to get him fired.

  Monsieur Charles thus had a capital interest in not offending the title-holder of the pianist, and if it was necessary to end up passing under her Caudine Forks—which, after all, might be a very agreeable punishment, given the tales told left right and center about previous adventures—the near-certainty that once her caprice was satisfied, the beautiful woman’s only priority would be getting rid of him, caused him to postpone as long as he could a denouement for which so many others, who did not possess a golden key, sighed in vain.

  From that unexpected refusal, the blonde Annette had concluded that Monsieur Charles must be afflicted by some bad-tempered leech, and that that was the sole reason that prevented him from accepting her reiterated advances.

  Bah! It would not be said that a single one of the Étoile’s virtuosos had escaped her. She would end up triumphing over those conjugal dreads! Hysterically perverse and obstinate, she invested her self-esteem in it, donned dresses that were very elegant but more discreet, assumed the modest and amiable airs of a perfect lady, and every evening, from her habitual place behind the piano, uttered sighs, indulged in long conversations with Monsieur Charles, and acted in such a fashion that she soon passed in all eyes for the accompanist’s accredited mistress.

  The handsome Fernand had groused, her little comrades had gossiped. The hairy bohemians, furious at not being appreciated at their true value, were laughing at her disappointment; it was necessary at all costs to save appearances. Once the thing was well-established, if he continued stupidly to insist on ignoring her caprice, she would take it upon herself to get him fired. Sober for the practical drinks-merchant, virtuous for her! That really was too many good qualities for a dive of that sort.

  Monsieur Charles divined the machinations of the persistent blonde, and redoubled his diplomacy. In any other circumstances, he would have made her an agreeable plaything; she was worth the trouble, and if the case was not very interesting in itself, the obstinacy that she put into pursuing the goal ended up flattering his vanity. He searched through all the chatter for the cause of that musical erotomania.

  Annette’s “pianistomania” had distant and profound roots. Since childhood, in the village, the piano, the privilege of the demoiselle of the château, had appeared to her to be the supreme mark of distinction and wealth. As a chambermaid, “playing the piano like Madame” was the culminating point of her
dreams of the future.

  Having progressed from lewd bourgeois to lyceans, from valets and coachmen and the Salle Wagram of the boulevards, the clients who possessed a piano had enjoyed all her consideration. Later, when luck, in the form of a wood-merchant from the Nord had ended up smiling on her, her first luxury as a kept woman had been to buy an Érard piano, and her first perversity as a faithless mistress had been to sleep with the professor charged with unveiling the secrets of the sonorous keyboard to her, and the blind tuner who maintained it in good condition.

  As usually happens, her enthusiasm for the instrument had been of short duration; she had changed pianists and offered herself in holocaust to all the masters of the keyboard, but her numerous sacrifices had not developed dispositions in which she was completely lacking. When, after eight months of intense labor, she perceived that Mon rocher de St-Malo still remained inaccessible and that the Sultan Polka continued to be an undecipherable rebus, she had relegated her dreams of performing to the background, had no longer considered the instrument as anything but an item of furniture of indispensable ostentation, which her blind tuner, whom she continued to madden amorously, came to visit from time to time, and had transferred all her admiring affection to the privileged beings for whom arpeggios and demisemiquavers were mere child’s play.

  She judged the beauty of music by the quantity of ink that blackened the paper. The blacker a piece was, the more value it took on in her eyes. The cascades of notes and the racket of base-lines caused delicate shivers to run down her back Variations on the Carnaval de Venise and Au clair de la lune were an inexhaustible source of emotional astonishments. The notes repeated in tremolo of the Crépuscule caused her to swoon. The amour she felt for the player was in direct proportion to his velocity.

  Unfortunately, if the beautiful Annette adored the pianist in general, she very rapidly lost her appetite for the pianist in particular; she corrected the vivacity of her imperious caprices by an incurable inconstancy. As soon as she had realized her desire, as soon as she had observed, once again, that the lover could open all the treasures of his heart to her without giving her the slightest particle of his talent, the insatiable seeker of the rapid fingerer sighed after the unknown that he agency would not take long to procure for Père Antoine—and the latter, considering an accompanist as a kind of machine with which all the agencies were abundantly provided and Annette as an opulent client difficult to replace, played with regard to “my child” the role of a veritable accomplice. At the moment when the unfortunate pianist, infatuated with his personal advantages, was curling his moustache victoriously or caressing his beard with the utmost satisfaction, he was abruptly dismissed under some pretext or other; usually, Père Antoine reproached him for not playing quickly enough.

  The adventure lasted for varying lengths of time, but the termination was fatal and regular. One of them, doubtless to retain the flighty Annette in his net for longer, had had the ironic and ingenious idea of persuading her that, although her dispositions for the piano were disputable—that was doubtless because she had started too late—she had a voice of incontestable beauty and it was necessary to reveal that treasure swiftly to the public. That new hobby-horse, mounted with enthusiasm and a deplorable credulity, had caused her to fall into another mania: that of the concert.

  The prestige of the pianist had increased even further. In each new accompanist she saw the man who might bring out the scale that nature was hiding jealously in the depths of her pretty throat, the liberator of the nightingale imprisoned in her opulent thoracic cage. If the blonde Annette had heard the innumerable jokes to which her bland voice, limited in its range, gave rise on a daily basis, she would have had a few doubts regarding her vocation as a future Star, but she had beautiful eyes in order not to see, and adorable ears in order not to hear.

  That new mania was rendered all the more powerful because Père Antoine found it to his advantage. From time to time she attempted debuts that brought in serious benefits. It required so much money to make a good audience, and the claque was always composed of thirsty individuals. The pretty maniac confronted the footlights, the weekday audience applauded as a joke, but Sunday’s whistled pitilessly. Père Antoine made “my child” understand that she still needed work, the professor who had been unable to make anything of his pupil’s brilliant dispositions was sacked, and the story recommenced.

  Monsieur Charles had learned or divined all that. He knew that, one way or another, his place would not take long to get away from him. His role as Joseph was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and Père Antoine was even reproaching Annette for no longer cultivating her voice.

  Would it not be better to resign himself to being devoured by the pretty monster? He did not, after all, experience any repugnance for the neurotic. She was soulless, devoid of perfume, like an orchid born in ingrate terrain, but he found her worthy to excite his passing curiosity. Furthermore, the exploration he had just made at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, and the memory of Mariette, had stirred up lubricities that his long continence as a scholar had only ever put to sleep He wondered whether he might not find in the elegant Annette a powerful distraction that would made him forget that of the ordure, that of the sidewalk.

  He rapidly became ashamed of those sentiments of ingratitude. The unfortunate woman was worth at least as much, if not more, than the fortunate one. He was quite wrong to lose his memory so rapidly; had he not been a man of the street himself, a vagabond, a beggar, a starveling! Was he going to scorn the woman who had helped him?

  No, he would not have the soul of a turncoat.

  He regretted, nevertheless, not having chosen another place of rendezvous for Mariette, Her appearance of a brazen streetwalker, the poverty of her attire, and the vulgarity of her language, might attract the mockery of the regulars and the malevolent disdain of Annette.

  Bah! She would wait for him at the back of the hall, he would collect her at the exit and steal her away rapidly from the curiosity of the artistes and the mockers.

  Chapter XVII

  For several days he had been watching the comings and goings in the hall anxiously, and that evening again—it was Thursday—nothing had revealed the presence of Mariette. She had, however, come in while he was playing deafening variations in the guise of an intermezzo, and, as she was wretchedly dressed, she had retreated into the darkest corner. Her friends had warned her about the change that had taken place in the attire and the bearing of the man she had helped; she had no difficulty in recognizing him.

  The pianist had just played his final chords. Annette, authorized for some time by an affability, almost tenderness, that augured well, pressed Monsieur Charles closely, and the latter, making a three-quarter turn on his stool, responded with smiles to the provocations of his beautiful neighbor. Mariette had a frightful contraction of the heart.

  A local prostitute had just at down beside her. “Do you know the blonde who’s talking to the pianist?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s the great Annette, a well-to-do kept woman—a real show-off! She has an air of looking down at you, because she’s covered in silk and thinks that makes her better than the rest of us. Well, what can I tell you—some bitches have all the luck. Oh, if I had a lover who gave me the necessary, it’d be me who’d amuse myself deceiving him.”

  “She pulls strokes?”

  “That’s obvious—you can see by the moves she’s putting on the pianist.”

  Mariette felt faint.

  “Then the pianist…?” she said, effortfully.

  “Is her lover of the heart, of course. It’s not with the three or four francs he earns here that he can keep her and pay for the diamonds she has in her ears.”

  “Are you sure of what you’re saying?” Mariette asked, clinging on to a last hope.

  “Well, I haven’t held the candle, but everyone here’s joking about it. It’s a young one who’s wearing the horns and old one who’s getting fed—the world upside down, eh!”r />
  The poor girl lapsed into a mutism that the chatter of her neighbor could no longer interrupt.

  For a moment, she had a desire to flee, but why should she go? He wasn’t her lover; she had no rights over him. He had told her to come and wait; she had come. Doubtless, he wanted to give her some money, perhaps the other’s money. She’d be stupid to refuse it. She wouldn’t amuse herself playing the prude; she’d take her money and go, and never see him again.

  Tears rose too her eyes. She had had such a pleasant dream in coming to this rendezvous!

  Why had he brought her here, rather than somewhere else? To make her witness his scene, to brag, to avenge himself for the way she’d treated him in the Avenir? Oh, if she were sure of that, he’s make him repent of it! She wasn’t a girl to let herself be mocked. But in what way was he mocking her? Hadn’t she insulted him, hadn’t she chased him away?

  He had taken another mistress; that was quite natural. He wanted to see her again to recognize the service she had rendered him, that was certain, the money he’d given to the others proved it. How many men in his place wouldn’t even have thought of it? The only guilty one was her!

  She gazed at her rival, radiant with pleasure; she compared the other’s costume with the poor garments in which she was clad, and again, envy and jealousy fermented in her heart. With her beautiful dress and her jewels, she wasn’t as pretty as all that, the slut. She hadn’t done four months in prison for him. Ha! All it needed was for her to amuse herself looking down on her, damn it!

  Then Mariette contemplated her lover of one night avidly, and observed with a stupor mingled with admiration the transformation that had been announced to her. Instead of the enigmatic individual clad in an eccentric check suit with the dirty hat and the distraught and morbid face, she saw an elegant man, with a dazzlingly white shirt, a neatly-trimmed beard, carefully-combed hair and a becoming smile. She considered fearfully the abysm that separated them now: her, the registered prostitute just out of prison; him, the distinguished man that a rich and beautiful woman seemed happy to possess.