“Mon fils, as-tu du coeur?”[62] she cried, seeing me, and laughed loudly. She always laughed very gaily and sometimes even sincerely.
“Tout autre…”[63] I began, paraphrasing Corneille.{14}
“You see, vois tu,” she suddenly began chattering, “first, find my stockings, help me into my shoes, and second, si tu n’est pas trop bête, je te prends à Paris.[64] You know, I’m going right now.”
“Now?”
“In half an hour.”
Indeed, everything was packed. All her suitcases and things were standing ready. Coffee had been served long ago.
“Eh bien! If you want, tu verra Paris. Dis donc qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un outchitel? Tu étais bien bête quand tu étais outchitel.[65] But where are my stockings? So, help me on with them!”
She stuck out a really delightful little foot, swarthy, small, not misshapen, like almost all those little feet that look so cute in shoes. I laughed and began to pull a silk stocking onto it. Mlle Blanche meanwhile sat on the bed and chattered.
“Eh bien, que feras-tu, si je te prends avec? First, je veux cinquante mille francs. You’ll give them to me in Frankfurt. Nous allons à Paris; there we’ll live together et je te ferais voir des étoiles en plein jour.[66] You’ll see women such as you’ve never seen before. Listen…”
“Wait, so I give you fifty thousand francs, and what am I left with?”
“Et cent cinquante mille francs, you’ve forgotten, and, on top of that, I agree to live in your apartment for a month, two months, que sais-je! Of course, in two months we’ll go through that hundred and fifty thousand francs. You see, je suis bonne enfant and am telling you beforehand, mais tu verras des étoiles.”[67]
“What, all in two months?”
“What? So it frightens you? Ah, vil esclave! You don’t know that one month of that life is better than your whole existence? One month—et aprèsledéluge!{15} Mais tu ne peux comprendre, va! Off with you, you’re not worthy of it! Aie, que fais-tu?”[68]
At that moment I was putting a stocking on her other foot, but I couldn’t help myself and kissed it. She pulled it back and began flicking me in the face with her toe. Finally, she drove me out altogether.
“Eh bien, mon outchitel, je t’attends, si tu veux;[69] I’m leaving in a quarter of an hour!” she called after me.
Returning home, I was already as if in a whirl. What, then, was it my fault that Mlle Polina had thrown the whole wad in my face and already yesterday had preferred Mr. Astley to me? Some stray banknotes still lay on the floor; I picked them up. At that moment the door opened and the manager himself (who wouldn’t even look at me before) came with an invitation: wouldn’t I like to move downstairs to an excellent suite in which Count V. had just been staying?
I stood and thought a moment.
“The bill!” I cried. “I’m leaving right now, in ten minutes.” “If it’s Paris, let it be Paris,” I thought to myself, “it must have been written down at my birth!”
A quarter of an hour later the three of us were indeed sitting in a family compartment: myself, Mlle Blanche, and Mme la veuve Cominges. Mlle Blanche laughed loudly, looking at me, to the point of hysterics. La veuve Cominges seconded her. I wouldn’t say that I felt very gay. My life was breaking in two, but since the previous day I had become accustomed to staking all I had. Maybe it was really true that the money was too much for me and got me into a whirl. Peut-être, je ne demandais pas mieux.[70] It seemed to me that for a time—but only for a time—the stage set was being changed. “But in a month I’ll be back here, and then…then I’ll still have it out with you, Mr. Astley!” No, as I remember it now, I felt terribly sad then, though I did laugh my head off with that little fool Blanche.
“But what is it to you? How stupid you are! oh, how stupid!” cried Blanche, interrupting her laughter and beginning to scold me seriously. “Well, yes, yes, we’ll go through your two hundred thousand francs, but to make up for it, mais tu seras heureux, comme un petit roi;[71] I’ll tie your necktie myself and introduce you to Hortense. And when we’ve gone through all our money, you’ll come back here and break the bank again. What did those Jews tell you? It’s boldness above all, and you have it, and you’ll be coming to Paris bringing me money more than once. Quant à moi, je veux cinquante mille francs de rente et alors…[72]
“And the general?” I asked her.
“And the general, as you know yourself, goes to fetch me a bouquet every day at this hour. Today I purposely told him to find the rarest flowers. The poor thing will come back, and the bird will have flown. He’ll fly after us, you’ll see. Ha, ha, ha! I’ll be very glad. He’ll be useful to me in Paris; here Mr. Astley will pay for him…”
And so it was that I left for Paris then.
CHAPTER XVI
WHAT SHALL I SAY about Paris? It was all, of course, both delirium and foolery. I lived in Paris for only a little more than three weeks, and in that time my hundred thousand francs were completely finished. I’m speaking of only a hundred thousand; the remaining hundred thousand I gave to Mlle Blanche in straight cash—fifty thousand in Frankfurt, and three days later in Paris I handed her the other fifty thousand francs in a promissory note, for which, however, she took the money from me a week later, “et les cent mille francs qui nous restent, tu les mangeras avec moi, mon outchitel.”[73] She always called me outchitel. It’s hard to imagine anything in the world more calculating, mean, and stingy than the category of beings like Mlle Blanche. But that’s with regard to her own money. As for my hundred thousand francs, she later declared to me straight out that she needed it in order to establish herself initially in Paris. “So that now I’m standing on a decent footing once and for all, and it will be a long time before anybody throws me off, so at least I’ve arranged things,” she added. However, I scarcely saw that hundred thousand; she kept the money herself all the while, and my purse, which she visited every day, never held more than a hundred francs, and almost always less.
“What do you need money for?” she said occasionally with a most artless look, and I didn’t argue with her. Instead, she decorated her apartment very, very nicely on this money, and later when she moved me to the new place, she said, as she was showing me the rooms: “See what can be done, with calculation and taste, on the scantiest means.” This scantiness added up, however, to exactly fifty thousand francs. The other fifty thousand she spent on a carriage and horses, and besides that we threw two balls, that is, two evening parties, to which Hortense, and Lisette, and Cléopatre came—women remarkable in many, many respects, and even far from bad. At these two parties I was forced to play the utterly stupid role of host, to meet and entertain some rich and extremely dull merchants, impossibly ignorant and shameless army lieutenants of various sorts, and pathetic little authors and magazine midges, who arrived in fashionable tailcoats, straw-colored gloves, and with a vanity and conceit of dimensions inconceivable even in Petersburg—which is saying a lot. They even ventured to make fun of me, but I got drunk on champagne and lay about in the back room. All this was loathsome to me in the highest degree. “C’est un outchitel,” Blanche said of me, “il a gagné deux cent mille francs,[74] and without me he wouldn’t know how to spend it. And afterwards he’ll become an outchitel again—does anyone know of a post? We must do something for him.” I began resorting to champagne quite often, because I was very sad and extremely bored all the time. I lived in the most bourgeois, in the most mercantile milieu, where every sou was counted and measured out. For the first two weeks, Blanche disliked me very much, I noticed that; true, she got me smartly dressed and tied my necktie every day, but in her heart she sincerely despised me. I didn’t pay the slightest attention to that. Bored and despondent, I got into the habit of going to the Château des Fleurs,{16} where regularly, every evening, I got drunk and practiced the cancan (which they dance most vilely there) and later on even achieved some celebrity in that line. Finally, Blanche got to the bottom of me: she had somehow formed an idea for herself beforehan
d that during our cohabitation, I would walk behind her with a pencil and paper in my hand and keep an account of how much she spent, how much she stole, how much she was going to spend, and how much more she was going to steal, and, of course, she was sure that we would have battles over every ten francs. To each of my assaults, which she imagined beforehand, she had prepared timely objections; but seeing no assaults from me, at first she herself started to object. Sometimes she would begin very hotly, but seeing that I kept silent—most often lying on the sofa and staring fixedly at the ceiling—she would finally even become astonished. At first she thought I was simply stupid, an outchitel, and simply broke off her objections, probably thinking to herself: “He’s stupid; there’s no point in suggesting anything, if he doesn’t understand for himself.” She would leave, but about ten minutes later would come back again (this happened during the time of her most furious spending, spending completely beyond our means: for instance, she changed horses and bought a pair for sixteen thousand francs).
“Well, so, Bibi, you’re not angry?” she came up to me.
“No-o-o! How bo-o-oring!” I said, moving her away with my hand, but this made her so curious that she at once sat down beside me:
“You see, if I decided to pay so much, it’s because they were a good deal. They can be sold again for twenty thousand francs.”
“I believe you, I believe you; they’re splendid horses; and now you’ve got a nice turnout; it will be useful; well, and enough.”
“So you’re not angry?”
“At what? It’s smart of you to stock up on a few things you need. It will all be of use later. I see you really have to put yourself on such a footing, otherwise you’ll never make a million. Here our hundred thousand francs is only a beginning, a drop in the ocean.”
Blanche, who least of all expected such talk from me (instead of shouts and reproaches!), looked as if she’d fallen from the sky.
“So you…so that’s how you are! Mais tu as l’esprit pour comprendre! Sais-tu, mon garçon,[75] you’re an outchitel, but you should have been born a prince! So you’re not sorry our money’s going so quickly?”
“Who cares, the quicker the better!”
“Mais…sais-tu…mais dis donc, are you rich? Mais sais-tu, you really despise money too much. Qu’est-ce que tu feras après, dis donc?”[76]
“Après, I’ll go to Homburg and win another hundred thousand francs.”
“Oui, oui, c’est ça, c’est magnifique![77] And I know you’ll certainly win and bring it all here. Dis donc, you’ll make it so that I really fall in love with you! Eh bien, since that’s the way you are, I’ll love you all the while and won’t be unfaithful even once. You see, all this while, though I didn’t love you, parce que je croyais que tu n’est qu’un outchitel (quelque chose comme un laquais, n’estce pas?), but even so I was faithful to you, parce que je suis bonne fille.”[78]
“No, lies! And with Albert, that swarthy little officer—as if I didn’t see it last time?”
“Oh, oh, mais tu es…”
“No, lies, lies; and what do you think, that I’m angry? I spit on it; il faut que jeunesse se passe.[79] You can’t chase him away, if he was there before me and you love him. Only don’t give him any money, you hear?”
“So you’re not angry about that either? Mais tu es un vrai philosophe, sais tu? Un vrai philosophe! ” she cried in delight. “Eh, bien, je t’aimerai, je t’aimerai—tu verras, tu sera content! ”[80]
And, indeed, since then it was even as if she really did become attached to me, even in a friendly way, and so we spent our last ten days. The promised “stars” I didn’t see; but in some respects she really kept her word. Moreover, she got me acquainted with Hortense, who was even all too remarkable a woman in her own way and in our circle was known as Thérèse-philosophe…{17}
However, there’s no point expanding on it; all this could make up a special story, with a special coloring, which I don’t want to put into this story. The thing is that I wished with all my might that it would all be over soon. But our hundred thousand francs lasted, as I’ve already said, for almost a month—at which I was genuinely surprised: at least eighty thousand of this money Blanche spent buying things for herself, and we lived on no more than twenty thousand francs, and even so it was enough. Blanche, who towards the end was even almost candid with me (at least in certain things she didn’t lie to me), confessed that at least the debts she had had to incur wouldn’t fall on me. “I didn’t give you any bills or promissory notes to sign,” she said to me, “because I felt sorry for you; another woman would certainly have done that and packed you off to prison. You see, you see how I’ve loved you and how kind I am! This damned wedding alone is going to cost me quite a bit!”
We did indeed have a wedding. It took place at the very end of our month, and I suppose the last dregs of my hundred thousand francs went on it; with that the affair ended, that is, with that our month ended, after which I was formally dismissed.
It happened like this: a week after we installed ourselves in Paris, the general came. He came straight to Blanche and from the very first visit all but stayed with us. True, he had his own little apartment somewhere. Blanche greeted him joyfully, with shrieks and loud laughter, and even rushed to embrace him; as things turned out, she herself wouldn’t let him go, and he had to follow her everywhere: to the boulevards, and for carriage rides, and to the theater, and to see acquaintances. The general was still fit for this employment; he was rather stately and respectable—almost tall, with dyed side-whiskers and enormous mustaches (he served formerly in the cuirassiers), with a distinguished though somewhat flabby face. His manners were excellent, he wore a tailcoat very smartly. In Paris he started wearing his decorations. With such a man, to stroll down the boulevard was not only possible, but, if one may put it so, even recommandable. The kind and muddle-headed general was terribly pleased with it all; he had by no means counted on that when he appeared before us on his arrival in Paris. He appeared then all but trembling with fear; he thought Blanche would start shouting and order him thrown out; and therefore, seeing such a turn of affairs, he went into raptures and spent the whole month in some sort of senselessly rapturous state; and in such a state I left him. I was already here when I learned in detail how, after our sudden departure then from Roulettenburg, that same morning something like a fit came over him. He fell unconscious, and then for a whole week was almost like a crazy man and talked nonsense. He was treated, but he suddenly dropped everything, got on the train, and showed up in Paris. Naturally, Blanche’s reception of him proved the best medicine; but some signs of illness remained long afterwards, despite his joyful and rapturous state. He was completely unable to reason or even merely conduct any sort of slightly serious conversation; on such occasions he merely added a “Hm!” to every word spoken and nodded his head—and he got off with that. He often laughed, but it was some sort of nervous, morbid laughter, as if he was going into a fit; other times he would sit for whole hours as gloomy as night, knitting his bushy eyebrows. Many things he even didn’t remember at all; he became outrageously absentminded and adopted the habit of talking to himself. Only Blanche could revive him; and the fits of a gloomy, sullen state, when he hid in the corner, meant only that he hadn’t seen Blanche for a long time, or that Blanche had gone somewhere and hadn’t taken him with her, or hadn’t been nice to him as she was leaving. Yet he himself couldn’t say what he wanted and didn’t know he was gloomy and sad. Having sat for an hour or two (I noticed it twice when Blanche left for the whole day, probably to see Albert), he would suddenly start looking around, fussing, glancing over his shoulder, recalling, and seemed as if he wanted to find someone; but seeing no one and just not recalling what he wanted to ask, he would again lapse into oblivion, until Blanche suddenly appeared, gay, frolicsome, dressed up, with her loud, ringing laughter. She would run to him, start pulling at him, and even kiss him—a favor, however, that she rarely bestowed on him. Once the general was so glad to see her tha
t he even burst into tears—I even marveled at him.
As soon as he appeared at our place, Blanche at once began acting as his advocate before me. She even waxed eloquent. She reminded me that she had been unfaithful to the general because of me, that she had almost been his fiancée, had given him her word; that because of her he had abandoned his family, and that, finally, I worked for him and should be sensible of that, and—shame on me…I kept silent, and she rattled on terribly. Finally, I burst out laughing, and the matter ended there, that is, at first she thought I was a fool, but towards the end she arrived at the notion that I was a very good and agreeable man. In short, I had the luck, towards the end, decidedly to earn the full good favor of this worthy girl. (However, Blanche was in fact a most kind girl—only in her own way, of course; I didn’t appreciate her at first.) “You’re an intelligent and kind man,” she used to say to me towards the end, “and…and…it’s too bad you’re such a fool! You’ll never, never be rich!”
“Un vrai russe, un calmouk”[81] {18} —several times she sent me out to walk the general, just like a lackey with her greyhound. However, I also took him to the theater, and to the Bal Mabille,{19} and to restaurants. For this Blanche even supplied money, though the general had his own, and he liked very much to take out his wallet in front of people. Once I was almost obliged to use force to keep him from paying seven hundred francs for a brooch he had become enamored of in the Palais Royal{20} and wanted at all costs to give to Blanche. Well, what did she need a seven-hundred-franc brooch for? The general had no more than a thousand francs in all. I could never find out where he got it from. I suppose it was from Mr. Astley, the more so as he had paid their hotel bill. As for the way the general looked at me all the while, it seems to me that he never even suspected my relations with Blanche. Though he had heard somehow vaguely that I had won a fortune, he probably supposed I was some sort of private secretary to Blanche, or maybe even a servant. At any rate he always spoke to me condescendingly, as before, like a superior, and occasionally even began to upbraid me. Once he made Blanche and me laugh terribly, at our place, over morning coffee. He was not at all quick to take offense; but here he suddenly took offense at me—for what, I still don’t understand. But, of course, he didn’t understand himself. In short, he started talking without beginning or end, à batons rompus,[82] shouted that I was a mere boy, that he would teach me…that he would make me understand…and so on, and so forth. But no one could understand anything. Blanche rocked with laughter; finally we somehow managed to calm him down and took him for a walk. I noticed many times, however, that he felt sad, was sorry for someone or something, missed someone, even despite Blanche’s presence. In those moments, he started talking with me himself a couple of times, but never could explain anything sensibly, recalled his service, his late wife, his management, his estate. He would latch on to some word—and rejoice, and repeat it a hundred times a day, though it didn’t express his feelings or his thoughts at all. I tried to speak with him about his children; but he would get off with his former patter and quickly pass on to another subject: “Yes, yes! the children, the children, you’re right, the children!” Only once did he wax emotional—he and I were going to the theater: “They’re unfortunate children,” he suddenly began, “yes, sir, yes, they’re un-for-tunate children!” And several times later that evening he repeated the words: “Unfortunate children!” When I began talking once about Polina, he even flew into a rage. “She’s an ungrateful woman,” he exclaimed, “she’s wicked and ungrateful! She has disgraced our family! If we had laws here, I’d have tied her in knots! Yes, sir, yes, sir!” As far as des Grieux was concerned, he couldn’t even hear his name. “He has ruined me,” he said, “he has robbed me, he has killed me! He was my nightmare for two whole years! For whole months in a row I saw him in my dreams! He…he…Oh, never speak to me of him!”
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