It was true that the armoury was so heated. Amidst the grotesque encaustic tiles of M. Quatrebarbe, designed after the manner of the old paving he had torn up, the hot-air gratings opened their bright brazen mouths.
Madame de Bonmont was careful to invite the Abbé Guitrel to a seat near one of the radiators, and to ask him if his feet were damp, and whether he would not have a glass of something hot.
Under the ribbed vault of its roof, the huge room glittered with a display of iron and steel such as not even the Armeria in Madrid could boast. One or two of the financier’s brilliant business coups had resulted in a collection of armour not to be equalled by that of Spitzer himself.
Examples of the three centuries of plate armour were there in every form known to Europe. On the gigantic chimney-piece, guarded by two Brabançons in magnificent cuisses, a condottiere’s Suit of mail bestrode that of a horse, with open chamfron, horse muzzle, mane-guard, tail-guard, and poitrel. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with dazzling suits of armour, casques, basinets, helmets, salades, morions, skull caps, iron hats, hauberks, coats of armour, brigantines, greaves, solerets, and spurs.
From the shields, bucklers, and targes, of all descriptions, radiated flambergs, Konigsmark swords, partisans, gisarmes, war-scythes, two-edged swords, Toledo rapiers, poniards, stylets, and daggers.
All around the room stood phantom figures clothed in polished and unpolished steel; in steel, engraved, inlaid, chased, and damascened. Maximiliennes with fluted and bowed cuirasses, puffed and bell-shaped suits of armour, the “polichinelle” of Henri III, and the “écrevisse” of Louis XIII. Panoplies of war that had adorned French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English princes; coats of mail worn by knights, captains, sergeants, crossbowmen, reiters, veterans, by soldiers of fortune from every country in Europe, by mercenaries and Switzers.
Here was steel armour that had figured at the Field of the Cloth of Gold; at the jousts and tourneys of England, France, and Germany; armour from Poitiers, Verneuil, Granson, Fomovo, Ceresole, Pavia, Ravenna, Pultava, and Culloden; worn by nobles or mercenaries, by knights or caitiffs, by victor or vanquished, by friend or foe — all collected by the Baron and displayed in this room.
After dinner, while pouring out the coffee, Madame de Bonmont offered no sugar to the Abbé, who always took it, and gave it to Baron Wallstein, who suffered from diabetes and had to be very careful in his diet. She did not do this with any malice aforethought, but her mind was full of other matters that engaged her undivided attention. Her depression, which, simple soul that she was, she was incapable of hiding, was caused by a telegram from Paris, worded with a twofold meaning; one literal and commonplace, obvious to all, referring to a delay in forwarding some plants; the other, the real and ingenious one, understood, to her unhappiness, by herself alone, indicated that her lover could not come to Montil but was in dire straits and forced to remain in Paris.
It was nothing new for Raoul Marcien to be in need of money. Since he attained his majority, fifteen years previously, he had just managed to keep himself going by a series of bold and clever coups. But this year, his difficulties, which had continued to increase and multiply, were positively appalling.
Madame de Bonmont was nearly always worried and depressed about him and his affairs, for she loved him truly and tenderly with all her soul and with all her body.
“Two lumps for you, M. de Terremondre?”
Yes, she adored her Raoul, her Rara, with all the strength of her placid soul. She would have liked him to be loving and faithful, pure-minded and studious. He was not what she wished him to be, and in her grief and fear of losing him, she regularly burned candles for his benefit in the church of Saint-Antoine.
M. de Terremondre, who was by way of being a connoisseur, examined the pictures. They were all modern works of art, paintings by Daubigny, Theodore Rousseau, Jules Dupré, Chintreuil, Diaz, and Corot, and consisted of mournful-looking pools bordered by deep woods, dew-brushed meadows, village streets, forest glades bathed in the golden light of the setting sun, and willows emerging from the silver mists of morning. The prevailing tones were white, fawn, green, blue, and grey. In massive gilt frames they stood out against the crimson damask hangings that accorded ill with the gigantic Renaissance chimney-piece, with the loves of the nymphs and the metamorphoses of the gods sculptured in the stone. The pictures undoubtedly marred the effect of the wonderful old ceiling, the painted compartments of which reproduced in infinite variety the peacock of Bernard de Paves tied by the foot to the lute of Nicolette de Vaucelles.
“That’s a fine Millet,” said M. de Terremondre, coming to a standstill before a goosegirl, whose ‘figure stood out, terrible in its rustic solemnity, against a background of pale gold.
“It’s a pretty picture,” answered Baron Wallstein. “I have the same thing at my house in Vienna, but mine is a shepherd, not a goosegirl. I don’t know what my brother gave for this one.” Cup in hand, he began to stroll round the gallery. “This Jules Dupré cost my brother-in-law 50,000 francs; this Theodore Rousseau 60,000 and this Corot 100,000.”
“I am acquainted with the views of the late Baron in regard to pictures,” replied M. de Terremondre, following the Baron round the room. “One day he met me going down the staircase of the Hôtel des Ventes, with a little picture under my arm. He caught hold of my sleeve, as he was fond of doing, and said, ‘What are you carrying off there?’ With the satisfied pride of the complacent dabbler in art I replied, ‘A Ruisdael, M. de Bonmont, a genuine Ruisdael. It has been engraved and I happen to have a print in my portfolio. “What did you give for your Ruisdael?’ ‘The sale was in a dark room on the ground floor and the dealer did not know what he was selling. Thirty francs!’”
“‘What a pity! What a pity!’ he ejaculated, and, seeing my surprise, gave another tug at my sleeve. ‘My dear M. de Terremondre, you ought to have given 10,000 francs for it; if you had paid as much as that it would have been worth 30,000 francs to you. The little picture only cost you thirty francs and will never fetch a high price, say twenty-five louis at the most. The value of a thing cannot rise at a jump from thirty francs to 30,000!’ ‘Ah!” concluded M. de Terremondre, “the Baron was a clever man!”
“He was indeed,” replied Wallstein, “and he also liked taking a rise out of people.”
The two cronies looked up, and saw, right before their eyes, the very Baron they had been discussing, the man who had been so clever all his life. There he was, painted by Delaunay, amongst a lot of costly pictures, his cunning animal-like face leering out of a glittering frame.
Madame de Bonmont and the Abbé, seated together in the huge chimney corner before the fire, were chatting about the weather and day-dreaming. Madame de Bonmont was thinking how sweet life might be, if only Rara willed it so. She loved him so simply and so ingenuously. All the ancient and modern moralists, all the fathers of the Church, the doctors and theologians, the Abbé Guitrel and Monseigneur Chariot, the Pope and the whole of the Church Council, the archangel Michael with his great trumpet, and Christ come again in His glory to judge both the quick and the dead — all of them put together would never have succeeded in making her believe that it was a sin for her to love Rara. She was thinking that she would not see him at Montil, and that perhaps, at that very moment, he was unfaithful to her. She knew he was almost as familiar with women as he was with the bailiffs; she had seen him at the races with ladies of easy virtue and uncertain age, at whom he had cast leering glances as he handed them the field-glasses or helped them on with their cloaks. The poor dear could not get rid of a whole host of tiresome people, to whom he was bound for reasons she found it impossible to understand, even when he explained them at length. She felt very unhappy and heaved a deep sigh.
The Abbé was thinking of the bishopric of Tourcoing. His rival, the Abbé Lantaigne, was done for. He was going under in the ruin of his seminary, smothered beneath bills of the butcher Lafolie. But there were many rivals in the field. A senior curate from Par
is and a curé from Lyons seemed to be the Government favourites; the Nunciature as usual lay low. The Abbé Guitrel heaved a sigh.
Hearing the sigh, Madame de Bonmont, who was very kind-hearted, reproached herself for selfishly thinking of her own affairs. She made an effort to appear interested in the Abbé Guitrel’s concerns, and affectionately inquired whether he would not soon be made a bishop.
“You are a candidate for Tourcoing,” she said. “Would you not dislike living in so small a town?”
The Abbé declared that the care of his flock would be sufficient to occupy him, and that, moreover, the diocese of Tourcoing was one of the oldest and most important in Northern France. “It is the see,” he added, “of the blessed St. Loup, the apostle of Flanders.”
“Indeed?” remarked Madame de Bonmont.
“We must be careful,” went on the Abbé, “not to confound St. Loup, the apostle of Flanders, with St. Loup, Bishop of Lyons, St. Leu or Loup, Bishop of Sens, and St. Loup, Bishop of Troyes. The latter had been married seven years to Pimentola, a sister of the Bishop of Arles, when he left her, to retire in solitude to Lerins and devote himself entirely to works of ascetic piety.”
And Madame de Bonmont was thinking:
“He’s been losing heavily again. In one way it is good for him, because he has been winning too frequently at the club lately, and people were getting suspicious. On the other hand it’s a great nuisance. I shall have to pay up.”
And Madame de Bonmont was much annoyed at having to pay Rara’s debts. In the first place she never liked paying and, in the second, she disliked lending money to Rara as much as a matter of principle as from fear of not being loved for herself alone. At the same time she knew that when she saw her Rara, gloomy and terrible, tying a wet towel round his fevered cranium — which was beginning to be discernible through the fast-thinning hair — and when she heard the poor darling crying amidst a torrent of blasphemies that the only thing for him to do was to blow out his brains, she knew she would have to pay. You see Rara was a man of honour; in fact, he lived on honour; since he had left the Army his profession had been that of witness or umpire, and, in the smartest circles, no duel ever took place without his presence.
And to think that she would have to part with more money. If only he belonged entirely to her and was loving and attentive. As it was, he was in a perpetual state of agitation, desperation, and fury, and always seemed like a man laying about him in the thick of a fight.
“The saint of whom I am speaking, Madame la Baronne,” went on the Abbé, “the blessed St. Loup, or Lupus, preached the gospel in Flanders, and his apostolic labours were often fraught with many trials. In his biography we find an instance which will touch you by its naïve beauty. One frosty day in winter he was traversing the frozen countryside, and stopped at the house of a senator to warm himself. The latter, who was entertaining some of his boon companions, continued to hold unseemly conversation with them in the presence of the apostle. St. Loup made an attempt to stop the conversation. ‘My sons,’ said he to the senator and his guests, ‘are you not aware that on the day of judgment you will have to answer for every vain speech you have uttered? Treating the exhortations of the holy man with contempt, however, they returned with redoubled zest to their indecent and impious talk. Shaking the dust from off his feet, the blessed saint said to them, ‘I desired to warm my tired body against the bitter cold, but your sinful talk forces me, though still numb with cold, to quit your company.’”
Madame de Bonmont was sadly reflecting that lately, with teeth set and eyes flashing, Rara had been threatening the destruction of the Jews. He had always been against the Jews, and so had she for that matter. However, she preferred not to discuss the subject, and in her opinion Rara, being the lover of a Catholic lady of Jewish origin, was wanting in tact when he swore, as he invariably did, that he would like to rip open every “sheeny” in Christendom. She would have preferred more gentleness and sympathy, calmer views and more amiable desires. As for herself, her thoughts of love were mingled with innocent dreams of sweetmeats and poetry.
“The mission of the blessed St. Loup,” continued the Abbé Guitrel, “bore fruit. The inhabitants of Tourcoing were baptised by him, and chose him by acclamation for their bishop. His end was accompanied by circumstances which I feel sure will impress you, Madame. One December day, in the year of our Lord 397, St. Loup, then full of years and good deeds, made his way to a tree surrounded by briars, where it was his habit to pray. Fixing two stakes into the ground, he marked out a space as long as his body, and said to the disciples he had asked to accompany him, ‘When, by God’s will, I end my exile in this world, it is there I desire to be laid.’
“St. Loup died on the Sunday following the day on which he had marked out his last resting-place, and it was done as he had commanded. Blandus came to inter the body of the blessed saint, whom he was afterwards to succeed as Bishop of Tourcoing.”
She felt sad and full of compassion. She understood the reason for Rara’s anti-Jewish frenzies, and excused them. The fact was that latterly, to re-establish his reputation among his fellows as a man of honour, Rara had warmly espoused the cause of the Army, in which he had formerly served as a cavalry officer. He had greatly tightened the bonds that united him with one great family — the Army, and had even struck a Jew whom he had overheard in a café asking for the Army list.
Madame de Bonmont loved and admired him, but she was far from happy.
Raising her head and opening her flower-like eyes she said:
“The see of the blessed St. Loup, apostle to — Please go on, M. l’Abbé. I am very interested.”
It was Madame de Bonmont’s fate to seek; in hearts little fitted to give it her, the sweetness of peaceful love. The sentimental Elizabeth had always bestowed her heart upon arrant adventurers. During her husband’s lifetime she had fondly loved the son of an obscure senator, young X — , famous for having appropriated to his own use a whole year’s secret funds of a certain government department. Close upon this she had given her confidence to an extremely fascinating man who was one of the bright particular stars of the government press, and who suddenly disappeared from view in a tremendous financial catastrophe. These two, at any rate, had been introduced to her by the Baron himself. You cannot blame a woman if she has lovers belonging to her own set. But her newest, dearest, her one and only love, Raoul Marcien, had not been one of the Baron’s friends. He did not belong to the world of sale and barter. She had met him in a most select circle of Catholic Royalist society somewhere in the provinces. He was himself as good as a nobleman. This time she had firmly believed she was going to satisfy her desire for love, and delicate, refined intimacy, that at last she had found the chivalrous lover with noble and beautiful feelings of whom she had so long dreamed.
And now she found that he was like all the others, alternately frozen with fear and burning with rage, torn with anguish of mind and agitated by the extraordinary adventures of a life devoted to fraud and blackmail. But he was so much more picturesque and amusing than any one else! He would, for instance, be summoned as witness in some serious and delicate affair, and at the same time be served with a judgment-summons at his club; or again, he might one day be made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and the same morning be haled before the court on a charge of embezzlement. Moreover, with erect carriage, and well-waxed moustache, he defended his honour at the point of his sword. But for some months past he had seemed to be losing his sang-froid; he spoke too loudly, and gesticulated too much, in fact he compromised his case by his desire for vengeance, for he was always complaining of betrayal.
It was with real anxiety that Elizabeth saw Rara’s temper grow daily more unmanageable. When she went to see him of a morning she would find him in his shirt-sleeves, bending over his old military trunk crammed full of writs, swearing and blaspheming with crimson face. “Rogues! scoundrels! scum! wretches!” he would shout, vociferating that they should hear from him to their cost. She would snatch a ki
ss in the middle of the curses, and be sent away with the usual remark that he would blow out his brains.
No, it was not the love of which Elizabeth had dreamed.
“You were saying, M. l’Abbé, that the blessed St. Loup — ?”
But the Abbé, with his head inclined at a gentle angle and hands clasped upon his portly frame, was fast asleep in his chair.
So Madame de Bonmont, who was as kind to herself as she was to others, also fell asleep in her easy chair; fell asleep, thinking that perhaps after all Rara would come to an end of his worries soon, that she might only have to give him quite a little money, and that after all she was beloved by the handsomest of men.
“My dear, my dear,” cried the much-travelled Madame Hortha, in her trumpet-like voice, calculated to strike terror into the heart of a Turk, “are we not to see M. Ernest to-night?”
Standing there, with her big limbs and heavy features, she looked like a warrior virgin left behind and forgotten for twenty years in the wings of the theatre at Bayreuth; she was terrible to look upon, clothed and girdled with jet and steel that flashed, gleamed, and clanked as she moved, but, in spite of it all, quite a good sort of woman, and the mother of numerous children.
Awakened with a start by the magic blast that blared from the bosom of the excellent Madame Hortha, the Baronne replied that her son, who had obtained sick leave, was to arrive that evening at Montil, and the carriage had gone to the station to meet him.
The Abbé Guitrel, whose slumbers, too, had been pierced by this nocturnal flourish of trumpets, adjusted his spectacles, and, moistening his lips, that they might have the necessary unction, murmured with heavenly sweetness:
“Yes, Loup — Loup.”
“And so,” said Madame de Bonmont, “you will wear the mitre, you will hold the crosier, and have a big ring on your finger.”
“I do not know yet, Madame,” replied M. Guitrel.
“Yes, yes! You will be appointed!” She leaned forward slightly, and, in a low voice, asked: “Monsieur l’Abbé, must the Bishop’s ring be of any particular design?”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 150