The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  There was talk of the rights of people whom the universal deluge had briefly submerged and who emerged stronger than ever from that legendary bath. The intangible power of solemnly consented treaties was celebrated, and no words were found expressive enough to criticize adequately the aberration of people who did not fear being guilty of the crime of lèse-engagement.

  Step by step, with all the fertility of his crafty imagination, our representative defended the honor and interests of France, but after a final examination of the diplomatic documents that linked Haricot VII with the rest of humankind, the tribunal, while adopting considerations extremely flattering to France, remaining above the paltriness of debates, nevertheless pronounced the definitive death of Captain Sylphe.

  In the silence that followed the pronunciation of that verdict, the representative of France took out of his briefcase the declaration of Haricot VII, and read it out.

  No sign of emotion or astonishment gave a glimpse of the thoughts of those diplomats, past masters in the art of misdirection and hiding their secret sentiments. It is true that the majority did not understand a single word of the French language, and that those who might have been able to understand had no intention of being the first to speak.

  The interpreters did their best to translate the words of the orator, which arrived, after having passed through the English, Russian and Japanese languages, came back to English before being translated into Spanish, then Italian, then Latin, modern Greek and Occitan, all the way to the representative of a petty king in Tierra del Fuego.

  That individual, whose colleagues avoided him as far as possible because of the musky odor that he exhaled with a violence wounding to the least delicate olfactory faculties, extended both his arms and pronounced a phrase that appeared in French after having gone through the same series of metamorphoses. It expressed the impossibility of the son of Tierra de Fuego considering the new proposal without obtaining orders from his sovereign. He added that his religion did not permit him to receive any communication other than from the mouth of his august master. For those reasons, he asked that the matter be postponed for a year in order to give him time to make the voyage to Tierra del Fuego.

  The excellence of the pretext, admirable for prolonging for many months a mission full of advantages, could not escape men as alert as the delegates of the great nations. Unanimously, they pronounced in favor of the adjournment for a year, to the day—which is to say, until the following November the first, reserving the right to order a longer delay if it became necessary.

  Telephonic, telegraphic and postal communications being authorized by the religions and laws of the majority of countries, all the members of the tribunal envisaged the possibility of remaining in Paris for a long time—a sojourn that appeared to them, in the context of their non-official dreams, as a paradise of sensual and other delights.

  In consequence, the tribunal annulled the verdict that it had just pronounced and ordered Captain Sylphe to remain in his situation of provisional death.

  VI

  Along with all the properly regulated clocks in France, the Louis XVI pendulum clock placed on the mantelpiece of the drawing room of an apartment in the building bearing the number 27 in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, chimed four.

  A man and a woman abruptly quit the sofa on which they had been sitting side by side.

  The woman was tall rather than petite, brunette rather than blonde, pretty rather than ugly, and those who would have taken her for a young woman would have been exactly right, for the person was none other than Mademoiselle Hermine de Foiraubilles.

  The man, a captain in the cuirassiers to judge by his uniform, would have answered “Present!” without hesitation to the call of the name of Alexandre Sylphe.

  Those two individuals, one of whom surely loved the other, were waiting with an unequal impatience for the decision of the arbitration tribunal that would permit their union or render it impossible.

  The Marquise de Foiraubilles, the General’s wife, came into the drawing room, which was her own, and said, in a slightly tremulous voice: “Oh, my dear children! At this very moment your fate is being decided. And we don’t know anything yet! Oh, there are minutes in life that last thousands of seconds, seconds that are hours. Where is the General, then? He ought to be here! I want to know!”

  “Me too, Maman,” said the young woman.

  “And you, Alexandre?”

  “What? Obviously, obviously! Nothing is more painful than uncertainty,” the cuirassier sighed, falsely.

  “And yet, to fear a misfortune is nothing compared with the accomplished, irremediable fact! What if the tribunal decrees your death?” said the General’s wife, tearfully.

  “No, Maman, that’s not possible! No, it’s not possible! Alexandre is my fiancé…I love him! I don’t want him to be made into a dead man that I can no longer marry! And you love me, don’t you, Alexandre?”

  Alexandre pressed to his heart the person he called “his Hermine,” while the Marquise countered her impatience by leaning out of one of the windows, from which her gaze plunged, trying to pierce the yellow foliage of the chestnut-trees in order to interrogate the sidewalk that the General would have to go along as he came home.

  While the young woman was drinking, on the lips of her fiancé, the hope of a conjugal kiss and Madame de Foiraubilles was leaning recklessly over the window-sill, the drawing room door opened, giving passage to a man of about fifty, clad in a black frock-coat tightened at the waist and decorated on the left lapel by a large rosette of the Légion d’honneur.

  The man’s face was pale and his gray hair appeared when he removed his hat with a gesture of slow and solemn nobility.

  “Kiss, my children! Kiss one another!”

  The young people came apart; the Marquise turned round abruptly and snapped: “Well, Narcisse?”

  The General’s wife only called her husband by his forename in important circumstances: intimate effusions and capital emotions of tenderness or wrath.

  Narcisse de Foiraubilles, who was a man of decision, as much in his capacity as a general who had been a commander-in-chief in the face of the enemy as that of the head of a family conscious of his sovereign and unchallengeable authority, declared in a firm voice: “Captain, you remain dead for a further year!”

  “What a catastrophe!” moaned the Marquise.

  “What, General? That’s not possible!” the Captain exclaimed. “The tribunal was to decide whether I’m alive or dead.”

  “It hasn’t decided one or the other.” And the General related, in brief, what had happened.

  “What a catastrophe!” the Marquise continued to wail.

  “A catastrophe that will last a year, not a day longer! Civilians have been mocking military men long enough. Word of a Foiraubilles, if, in a year’s time, the judgment of that tribunal isn’t what we want it to be, I swear that things won’t stop there! In the meantime, my children, continue to embrace one another as you were doing just now.”

  “O Papa!” said the amorous Hermine, tearfully. “Why can’t we marry right away?”

  “You’re forgetting, Hermine, that I’m provisionally dead,” observed Captain Sylphe, coolly.

  “You’ll be alive next year, my Alexandre!”

  “Come on, daughter, no silliness! It’s necessary to be patient. Twelve months soon pass.”

  “You love one another; you’ll see one another every day,” the Marquise put in.

  “I want to get married right away!” declared the Captain’s fiancée, in a resolute tone.

  “Come on, my darling, that can’t be. We wouldn’t be able to find a priest to bless your union clandestinely.”

  “With money, one can get whatever one wants. I’ll take responsibility for finding a priest,” the recalcitrant lover insisted.

  General Marquis Narcisse de Foiraubilles was obliged to get on his high horse, which involved sonorous oaths, to convince his daughter to go to her room.

  Solemnly, the Marquis
e went to her future son-in-law, seized his shoulder-knots, passed one through the other, and pulled upwards sharply, saying: “Alexandre, if you’re a man of honor, you won’t undo that knot before the glorious and divine day when Hermine becomes your wife. Swear!”

  “I forbid you to swear!” the General interjected.

  “Why?” questioned the Marquise.

  “Because I don’t want the Captain to make an oath that he’ll violate, this evening, tomorrow, next week, next month…within a year, at any rate. A Captain is a man! There’s no need to blush at being a man! I pity Hermine if she marries a representative of the stronger sex capable of remaining in expectation for a year. ‘The iron that doesn’t work rusts!’ one of our present Statesmen wrote, who has made work a religion.11 In the same way, the virility that abstains becomes flaccid and devoid of energy. Deliver yourself, therefore, Captain, in accordance with your age and your temperament to the salutary simulacra of reproduction! Is not the most efficacious means of preparing for veritable combat taking part in grand maneuvers?”

  The Marquise, covering her face, went to join her daughter. The two men, left alone, looked at one another momentarily.

  “Thank you, General, thank you,” said the Captain, gripping his chief’s hands.

  “No, my boy, no, don’t thank me. It’s quite natural. Women are truly astonishing. Because nature constrains them to a fidelity that is sometimes, for them, equivalent to continence, they imagine that men…ha ha! It would be funny, if it weren’t one more proof of the inferiority of women. Come on—salute the ladies and go console yourself! But no compromising the liaison, eh?”

  “You can be tranquil, General,” declared Captain Sylphe, with the most convincing simplicity—who, after having placed both cheeks within range of the tears generously secreted by the glands of the dames de Foiraubilles, mother and daughter, left the building with a genuine satisfaction, not without having first put on the gray dust-sheet without which he was forbidden, under penalty of the worst catastrophes, to show himself in public.

  VII

  When our eyes gaze into the shadows and divine rather than distinguishing objects, the imagination often lends them forms of an infinite multiplicity. It is our dream that gives life to that which surrounds us. If light surges forth, coming to clarify contours and colors, the world that we have created vanishes, slain by reality. It is doubtless for that reason that love, which is the most fragile and most beautiful of dreams, instinctively flees the daylight and the glare of chandeliers and lamps.

  Fervent devotees of voluptuousness love to pray in the twilight hours, when the nocturnal veil half-envelops them; in the light that is drowning in darkness the gestures of tenderness turn blue with softness, and lovers belong entirely to one another, not seeking to read in one another’s eyes the secrets hidden there: egotism on the part of the man, lies on the part of the woman.

  Along the Column, whose summit could only any longer be made out confusedly, night was descending on the Place Vendôme.

  Posted behind a bay window in the small drawing room adjacent to her bedroom, the banker’s wife was gazing into that shadow, which entered slyly and which she could have thrown out with a gesture, by turning the commutator responsible for switching on the electric chandelier suspended from the ceiling. But like, and perhaps more than, the majority of women, Madame Coffre knew that semi-obscurity is propitious to the cult of amour.

  As she had put on, for the benefit of Captain Sylphe, whom she was expecting, a charming pink silk peignoir garnished with lace, she refrained from dissipating the intimacy of the rendezvous by illuminating her boudoir, as she would have done to receive her husband.

  Thought-transmission is a phenomenon so banal that there is no necessity to believe that Madame Coffre had heard the footsteps of Captain Sylphe when she ran to the door, her arms open, closing them immediately around her lover’s neck.

  “My Alexandre!”

  “My Emma!”

  “What a joy to see you again!”

  “What happiness to find myself close to you again!”

  Their tongues were occupied momentarily in translating their tenderness over all the accessible epidermal surfaces of their persons.

  “My poor Alexandre, you’re dead for another year!”

  “Let’s not talk about that! Am I not alive in your company?”

  “For myself, I’m only alive next to your heart. All the same, it’s very annoying that you’re dead!”

  “No! Why? On the contrary, that marriage, which I couldn’t avoid, has become impossible.”

  “You don’t love her, that little Foiraubilles?”

  “I only love you, my Emma.”

  “Thank you, my Alexandre, my love! Oh, everything would be perfect if you could get rid of that dust-cover!”

  “What prevents me from doing so, when we’re alone?”

  “That’s true—but in public? Remember, my love, when you accompanied me to the theater, to fêtes? Everyone looked at us, and everyone said, in low voices: ‘Monsieur Coffre, with all his millions, isn’t loved by his wife!’ I hate that man, who thought that I’d love him because he’s rich! Love can’t be bought! I bear the name of Coffre—that’s quite enough.”

  “Come on, Emma, your husband is very good to you.”

  “Naturally, you’re going to find excuses for him! Men are always in accord when it’s a matter of putting a woman in the wrong. Speak, then! I shouldn’t deceive him, should I?”

  “But yes—on the contrary!”

  “What—on the contrary? I should deceive him with everyone? Is that what you mean?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Emma? I take back what I said.”

  “Take off that frightful dust-sheet too! It seems to me that I’ll no longer love you if I only see you decked out in that ridiculous envelope...”

  “It’s not my fault, though!”

  “I don’t hold it against you! But you’re so handsome, squeezed into your dolman like a woman in her corset, with your bouffant trousers! Walk, my love, so that I can look at you. Let me admire you, my Captain!”

  Sylphe, his back stiff and his knees braced in his varnished boots, strutted back and forth, glad to recover his prestige. Madame Coffre contemplated him with a tender expression; she could not help putting her arms around his neck.

  “You see, my love, the uniform, for a man, is what beauty is for a woman.”

  “You’re beautiful! You’re a woman!”

  “You’re a soldier! You’re a man, my warrior!”

  Alexandre Sylphe drew Madame Coffre to the divan with the sure and measured gestures familiar to juvenile leads in dramas and comedies.

  Their amorous duet was striking up its preparatory chords when a bell rang.

  Madame Coffre stood up abruptly, mechanically readjusting the complex edifice of her hair. “That’s all we need! The telephone!”

  Irritated by the interruption to her amorous games, she seized the transmitter of the apparatus and interrogated abruptly: “What? What is it? Oh, it’s you Joseph?”

  Joseph was Monsieur Coffre’s valet. The apartments of the two spouses were completely separate; they communicated by means of a private telephone, and the banker never came into his wife’s apartment without warning her in advance.

  “Tell Monsieur that I can’t receive him at the moment.”

  Captain Sylph launched into a lively pantomime of protest, which Madame Coffre cut off with a significant shrug of the shoulders.

  “Well, if you insist!” She pressed the call button. “All right, Joseph—tell Monsieur that he can come right away. I’m waiting for him!”

  Joseph must have formulated a few reflections of respectful surprise regarding the contradiction between that order and the preceding one, for the irascible Emma launched an imperative: “Yes, let him come! Send him in!”

  Alexandre Sylphe had precipitately put on his dust-cover again and installed himself in an armchair in the darkest corner of the room.


  Hermann Coffre came in without noticing him and addressed his wife. “My dear, I’ve come to warn you that I won’t be dining with you this evening. I’ll be back very late.”

  “Bon appétit, and have a good time,” said his thoughtful companion.

  “Thank you,” said the banker, who was about to retire when his eye discovered Captain Sylphe. “Oh, it’s you, Captain. One can hardly see you there. Permit me to turn up the light...”

  At arm’s length, Alexandre Sylphe waited for Monsieur Coffre to offer him his hand. The two men exchanged the customary banal civilities.

  “Well, Captain, you don’t seem to have been unduly affected by the tribunal’s decision, which extends your condition for a year?”

  “What do you expect, Monsieur Coffre? War is war.”

  “And your marriage?”

  “Postponed, inevitably.”

  “Mademoiselle de Foiraubilles will wait for you indefinitely, then?”

  “She loves me,” replied the heartbreaker, simply, without any false modesty.

  “And do you love her?” asked Hermann Coffre, with an aggressive brutality.

  Sensing Emma’s eyes upon him, the Captain dared not answer “Yes,” and as he could not say “No,” he contented himself with remaining silent and lowering his head.

  “You’re quite right not to marry for love!” Hermann Coffre approved, emphasizing his words nervously. “If your wife loves you and you don’t love her, it’s her who will suffer and you who’ll have the joy of having a heart at your mercy to lacerate.”

  “You’re very poetic today, my love,” Emma mocked, sarcastically. “Is it because you’re dining out?”

  “Perhaps, my love,” Hermann Coffre relied, resuming his mask of total indifference. Sensing that he had said too much, he added: “What are you going to do during your year of waiting, Captain?”

  “Oh, my dear Monsieur Coffre, there’s no shortage of distractions in Paris. Not only your house, which is so hospitable to me...”

  “Oh, you’re exaggerating!” said the banker.

  “No, no!” protested Alexandre Sylphe. “And I assure you that it’s an amelioration of my fate—which, in any case, is not so very sad. My share of the funds granted to my brother will give me twenty thousand francs—that’s more than a general’s pay! Without this grotesque dust-cover, I’d be perfectly happy.”