by Idwal Jones
“So I was not surprised when I began to hear around me the murmur of condolences. Madama, Valmonte’s grand-aunt, had fallen lifeless on the stairway six days before. Valmonte, though he had been no favorite of hers, decorously withdrew himself from society and his pet restaurants. The dinner, however, could not be postponed. Noblesse oblige!
“We moved on the sala, heads bowed, as if in a cortege. There a table awaited us.
“It was of subdued magnificence, covered with gold-embroidered cloth, roofed with tapestry like a catafalque, and set with tapers in heavy silver holders. The salads were frosted plants, basils, and great mandrakes, their branches hung with anchovies, pickled limpets, and snails, quail eggs, olives, cockscombs, tidbits of crawfish and lobster, olives and tiny vegetables—a yield glistening after a rain of caviar dressing.
“Then came mullets, roasted larks, truffles, and artichokes. Through them all interwove the rubric of signorial wines. But I shall not weary you with the details of a banquet that went far beyond the vulgarity of mere perfection. The meat was so worthy that all that went before was but a prelude. It was fillet à la Chateaubriand.
“It baffled me. My dining partners, Duruy on one hand, and Monsieur Gilbert Emery, the actor, on the other, at first were half agreed it was Charolais beef. Then we were less sure. I thought it was beef from the Tuscan marshes, where the oxen graze on fern. ‘Zebra, perhaps?’ whispered the actor, who had dined here before.
“Zebra is, on the whole, sweet. So we kept on with our riddle, venturing this, rejecting that. No gastronome in Italy could outguess Valmonte in his whimsical moments. He had served ibis from the Nile, bear from the Urals, suckling boar from the Pyrenees, musk ox from wherever musk ox comes.
“The man on the right laid down his fork. Inspiration lighted his face.
“ ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ he whispered, ‘if it were a joint off the old Duchess.’ ”
—
Louis was asleep. He had stacked pyramids of wood all day, and been a mighty host all night. We left, and strolled to Les Halles to see the vegetables come in. Tarpaulin-covered drays were moving past like elephants. The horses at the troughs lifted their heads with a jerk under the lamps. The water dripped from their muzzles in shining arcs, like scimitars. Dawn was on the way, and we hovered about, coat collars up, until five, for a breakfast of hot soup with the draymen.
VIII
MANUEL, THE INCA
For months I had been growing aware that Freda, though always gracious, was becoming less responsive to my attentions. All this summer she had found excuses for not coming with me on a picnic to Sèvres or to Versailles, and she had even declined an invitation to the Midinettes’ Ball. Rémy had left Paris to work and learn the hotel business under his father. “I shall have to work myself up,” he wrote me, “and I’ve started at the smallest Ghismont hotel, and on the smallest Alp, which makes it the bottom of the ladder.” He had been gone since August, and it was now already November.
I knew that he was in love with Freda, but I was unwilling to retire as a rival. I wrote and wrote notes to Freda, and she agreed to come out with me, not to dance, not to see a play, but merely to talk with me for an evening. Her aunt, when I came to the apartment, was as chill as one of her Swiss glaciers. I saw by her rigidity and silence that she disapproved of my taking Freda out. But we two went, and sped on to Chez Kashbah, an old haunt of ours, both of us sitting wordless in the cab.
The old Moroccan brought us little drinks. He waited upon us with solicitude. He appeared to feel there was something wrong. Once he enquired if we had heard from Rémy, and that helped matters not at all. Then he wound up a gramophone with a lily horn, slipped in a cracked disc, as if hoping that the music of drums and flutes, wildly martial, as of some savage tribe in the desert, would impel us to dance. Then a knife fight broke out in a booth, and gendarmes dashed in to haul out two natives, locked in a deadly embrace, and heaved them into the police wagon. The “salad basket,” as it was called in our slang, was not an infrequent caller at Kashbah’s.
“A pity,” I said to Freda, “but it was only a little debate. Now that it’s quiet, you wouldn’t really like a dance?”
“Not really,” she said with calmness. “I told you before that I had no intention of dancing.”
“Of talking, then?”
She talked briefly. “I had hoped you would have seen by now that my feelings have changed, Jean-Marie. I plan soon to be married to Rémy.”
“I should have known,” I said wretchedly. “But I never dreamed that you felt so warmly to him. I am sure it was my fault.”
“No, Jean-Marie, it was no one’s fault. It was I who changed, and when Rémy asked me to marry him I agreed. That was on the very day he left. And I shall be going to Switzerland tomorrow.”
She wept a little, and tugged at the ring I had given her, but it remained on, tightly. I urged her to keep it as a little memento of old friendship. We both of us fell silent. Then I went out, whistled for a cab, and took her home. On the doorstep she gave me her cheek to kiss. I walked on to my flat, dazed. If a player happens to be under the curtain when it tumbles, he is liable to be stunned.
—
It was a melancholy autumn for me; so many of my friends were gone. Pom-Pom, the little Siamese, vowing he was in quest of the Nordic Absolute, went to live in Sweden and paint fjords. Guido went to America, to Long Island, where a cousin had bought a small estate and a mansion for him, and they were going to convert into a fashionable tavern. He begged me to come along, but I declined. If I had to be sad anywhere, I preferred to be sad in Paris. And I had just received a card announcing Freda’s marriage.
“That’s too bad, old fellow,” said Guido. “I feel sure she was in love with you. And this is an impersonal matter, I dare say. A merger of the Koepfli and Ghismont interests.”
“That’s brutal!” I protested.
“It is,” assented Guido. “So is life. Your health, Jean-Marie! And promise me you will come to Long Island and join me if life tires any further in Paris.”
It was weeks before I recovered my spirits. Paris seemed empty; the world seemed empty. Gone were Freda, Rémy, Pom-Pom, and the dream of the Bishop’s palace down the Rhone, with the signboard rocking in the breeze and bees swarming about the hives in the garden.
Then Manuel, the Colombian, came back on a brief visit. He was the only one of my old fellow students at Beynac’s in Paris this autumn.
I think he missed the old Beynac crowd as much as I did, and nightly he waited for me at the Faisan d’Or, to walk in the park, or to sit at the Café Select, and drink coffee.
Rémy used to insist that Manuel, when he first came to Paris, wore a blanket and a feather headdress—an exaggeration with a germ of truth, for he was as remote as an Inca priest, taciturn and haughty. His relatives, more than half Indian and ambitious, still kept him under their thumb.
We emancipated our Colombian. We put him through the ropes, took him along with us to the cafés, the music halls, the theaters, and urged him on the upward path. He drank pots of black coffee instead of pots of noxious sweet chocolate. With us as guests, he dined sensibly at the Dauphine-Royale or Noel-Peters.
A great change was wrought in him inwardly. He became a ballet maniac. As a flaneur he surpassed all of us. He kept a mistress—a large blonde Flemish girl hung with jewels. He was familiar at the Café Select, where he dined with La Flamande almost nightly. The waiter brought him always the same coffee filter—a silver one with “M” carved upon it.
Then he returned home to his family and his cattle. He went under duress, and with heartbreak. La Flamande wept and raged, despite the handsome gift he settled upon her; she was genuinely fond of him, poor thing. She also had virtue, and proved it by returning sensibly to her husband in Brussels.
Manuel wrote me now and then. He found he had gone home too much changed, like all the young, part-Indian bloods in the somber capital of Bogotá, atop the Andes. There were many like him on that r
oof of the world, who desperately kept up a semblance of the life they had known in Paris. They dined at some deplorable table d’hôte, wore cloaks and opera hats, and drove to the theater, where a cowboy film was unveiled to bad music in the pit.
“Some of them fly airplanes,” he told me, “to race with the condor and find a little more sun and warmth. Los pobres! They are exiles; their lives are bleak. Over the Andes the air is thin, the wind eternally howls and screams like a thief in flight. And often the planes crash on the crags. A few take wives. Some join the penitential orders, and with cowl and candle file through the dark rifts of the town, the clangor of the immense bells gnawing at their sad hearts.”
So Manuel was glad to be here tonight. He sat formal and heavy, wearing an ill-cut German suit, yellow shoes, and a violet tie, more taciturn and more Indian than ever. Our reform work on him had gone for naught. “Mon cher Manuel, how long will you stay with us this time?”
“Two weeks.”
“Absurd!”
He was not to be budged. He had to return to his cattle ranch atop the Andes, and had come only on business.
“To Bogotá?” I asked.
“I never go there.” He shrugged. “I go to no city after Paris.”
“You are married, perhaps?”
He looked at me stonily from under his hooded eyes. The ash grew longer on his cigar; it fell upon his waistcoat.
“Does one love twice?”
He puffed slowly. “I live on my estancia, alone save for a few gauchos. Often I ride away by myself, when thoughts are too much with me. I make camp in the solitude, and remain for the night before a fire. Then, in a silver filter that a waiter in a certain Paris café got for me, with an ‘M’ on it, I brew coffee. The aroma of it! The solace of it! I am elsewhere, and no longer alone. You understand, perhaps?”
—
A shift in surroundings has a healing value. I moved, with the help of the strong-armed Manuel, to a lodging house in a side street off the Bastille. Though dank, and its plaster stained with the rain in great splotches running through the chromatic scale of wines, the apartment was agreeable. It was a long chamber with spikes driven into the wall for clothes pegs, a washbasin, and a few splinters of furniture. The windows, which had looked down upon three centuries of history, gave out upon beech trees and a kiosk bright with magazines. There was no concierge, no surly warden at the entrance to spy one’s coming and going and to hold up letters until a douceur was paid out. You went straight up the stairs from an archway next to a tobacconist’s, where you paid the rental monthly.
Manuel put on old clothes and busied himself in painting the walls and ceiling with tumultuous set pieces—scenes from the Revolution; copies of Watteau and Fragonard; Andean landscapes full of volcanoes, charging bulls, condors; and no less than five portraits of Simon Bolivar at dramatic moments of his career—leading battles, signing charters, holding up the sky with his sword. Manuel hung a sheet of canvas from the ceiling, dividing the room to make it a suite, and this partition he embellished with nudes and divinities frolicking amid billowing clouds. I got in more furniture, and Manuel cut holes in the partition to receive the bureau and trunk, so that they should not bulge into the room. We had a little housewarming, and next day Manuel, refreshed by his immersion in art, left for his ancestral home in Colombia.
Beynac’s, this fall, died the death, and was torn down to make way for a cinema palace—a testimony to the falsity of progress—and with it fell the old rookery adjoining, where so many of the day students had lodged. Dismay seized us when we first heard rumors of its impending destruction. It was like pulling down the Panthéon, or the Gobelins, or even worse than that, for this was a disaster that involved our affections. The master himself was the last to depart. Defiant to the end, Beynac stayed in his office, armed with a sword cane, and he stayed there until the door was pulled off the hinges and the stairway was ripped out with a cable attached to a truck. It collapsed with a roar and an eruption of plaster and the dust of three centuries.
Then Beynac appeared at the window, lifted his hand, and made a speech. It was a very touching speech, and his thin voice, firmed by indignation, carried through the clattering of a heavy rainstorm. He deplored the savagery of modern life that was so callous to the beauty of the past. He urged us all—students, gendarmes, newsboys, and carpenters, all looking up at him—to consider what our ancestors had done, and to refresh our souls in the grace and wonder of the masterpieces of the ages long past.
“I have fought half a century to preserve this building for you. The Old Guard has not surrendered. It dies.”
A ladder was run up for him. He climbed out and descended, a roll of canvas under his arm, the rain sluicing upon his mackintosh and his thistle-white head. Manuel and I helped him down the ladder, and packed him off to a café-restaurant in the Bois. He recovered his spirits, was resigned, even gay, and over dinner and cigars told us it was Fate that had intervened, and was pushing him out to his cottage down the Seine, where he could raise hollyhocks and fish to his heart’s content for trout. I don’t suppose the thought occurred to him that of all the thousands of pupils he had taught, but two were with him at the end—an obscure sous-chef, and a stone-faced Indian from Colombia. Nor did it ever occur to him, I am sure, that these two pupils felt themselves immeasurably in debt to him.
—
Memories clustered thickly about Beynac’s for us. Rémy’s quarters were on the floor above the art school, and it was there that we once had an unexpected banquet. Improvident, but generous, Rémy often invited friends to dinner, even if his pocket and larder were empty.
On this curious night, fifteen of us had impulsively been asked in. Most of the guests, for it was the end of the month, were flat; fortunately, some of us, and the most experienced, brought along loaves of bread and some jus de parapluie, cheap claret. Rémy, after borrowing a hundred francs from me, behind the door, left to buy viands from the Italian cook shop three streets away. A caterer’s van pulled up before Beynac’s. And amidst the uproar outside—for it was the evening of election day—porters shuffled up the stairs, staggering, bent under the weight of trays. That van was a cornucopia on wheels. It sent up roasts of beef, turkeys, geese, vegetables, salads, ices, wine, and soup. Turtle soup, in huge tureens! The waiters spread the table, served turtle soup at once, and poured out Madeira.
“A banquet!” shouted Manuel, made articulate for once. He lifted his glass. “We’ll make a start. To Rémy, good old Rémy!”
If the ceiling had not been so thick, the uproarious toast would have been heard by the Conservatives and their President, the newly elected Deputy LaPlanche, who were downstairs. LaPlanche would have been deeply interested in the food, for he was one of the most particular habitués of Noel-Peters and the Faisan d’Or. Never had such a banquet been spread in this rookery, nor any devoured with such voracity. There was enough for twenty-five. The waiter sliced off only the breasts of poultry, and poured the oldest wine first. He worked dextrously, for he was a good waiter before the Lord and excelled himself for the glory of the house that had sent him.
A hundred dollars’ worth of food and champagne had been downed when the door opened. There stood Rémy with a demijohn of claret, some bread, and a paper of sausage and potato chips. He stood fascinated. His mouth opened with the fear-struck expression of one gazing upon a miracle. The waiter was bent gravely over a dish, pouring flaming sauce upon a goose-liver for Pom-Pom, who counted himself lucky if he could eat a sausage once a week. Rémy lifted an arm rigidly. He pointed to the table.
“What is this? Where did it come from?”
Manuel, his cheeks bursting with goose and baked orange, just goggled fatuously.
“Who sent this up?” insisted Rémy.
Then everybody knew something was wrong.
“Aren’t you gentlemen the Conservatives?” asked the waiter, paling.
“Conservatives!” yelled Rémy. “Not here! We are Royalists, with a jack-Communist or two,
and an Indian—but Conservatives—never! Not on this floor!”
The waiter lifted hands to his hair slowly, then pulled. He bellowed. He went lunatic. He was unable to grasp the simple explanation of the mistake. The new Deputy had ordered the dinner to be sent in after a conference at the club, downstairs, because the upstairs room was being painted. And the porters, seeing a party of gentlemen upstairs in a high state of expectancy, had made a quite natural error.
It was a painful matter to explain this to the waiter. He grew violent. For a minute or two it seemed doubtful if anybody in the room could escape alive. The waiter was one of those who prefer death to dishonor. He fled, to yell for gendarmes and Deputy LaPlanche, who would be certain to arrive outraged, and possibly go insane. As for the guests, the window offered the quickest way out. We took it.
IX
MAYOR IN THE ATTIC
I grew to like this Quarter well; it was small, provincial, as self-content as only a regional Quarter in Paris can be. The pork butcher, who locked up at seven to devote himself to his clarinet, introduced me to the other shopkeepers, the women at the news kiosk, and the café that was the haunt of my fellow tenants. This was our club. Here we met at night to consider the day’s crop of happenings. Gustav, the Samson-like barber with the fan-shaped beard, had again to the glory of our Quarter won the hair-curling contest at the Batignolles fair. The tobacconist’s kitten, treed up in the elm near the kiosk, still spurned the allurements of liver and a saucer of milk. An old mastiff, after a lifetime of neglect, had chosen to expire under the wheels of a grocery truck. Should Monsieur Justine, its owner, now loud with grief, press for monetary damages, or settle for a box of tinned meats and a little sound wine?
After the mishaps to fauna, politics was the great topic at our club. The Mayor, a rosy, large-paunched man with a thumbnail of beard and thick glasses, presided at the Wednesday night gatherings, which were an institution. M. Lambert was not rightly a mayor; the title was merely a tribute to his prestige and learning. He dwelt in the large room adjoining mine, at the end of the corridor. He lived on a tiny income that just kept him alive and sheltered. A relative, a farmer near Aurillac, sent him a fine Cantal cheese once a month, for, apart from being a philosopher, M. Lambert was a connoisseur of cheese.