Babette's Feast and Other Stories

by Isak Dinesen

  V. The Mission of Elishama

  Mr. Clay, however, was not ashamed. His project of the night had seized hold of him; the matter had become a trial of strength between him and the insurgents. Next midnight, as the clock struck, he took up the theme and said to Elishama: “Do you think that I can no longer do what I want to do?”

  This time Elishama did not contradict Mr. Clay with a word; he answered: “No, Mr. Clay. I think you can do whatever you want.”

  Mr. Clay said: “I want the story which I told you last night to happen in real life, to real people.”

  “I shall see to it, Mr. Clay,” said Elishama. “Where do you want it to happen?”

  “I want it to happen here,” said Mr. Clay, and proudly looked round his big, richly furnished bedroom. “In my house. I want to be present myself, and to see it all with my own eyes. I want to pick up the sailor myself, in the street by the harbor. I want to dine with him myself, in my dining room.”

  “Yes, Mr. Clay,” said Elishama. “And when do you want the story to happen, to real people?”

  “It ought to be done quickly,” said Mr. Clay after a pause. “It will have to be done quickly. But I am feeling better tonight; in a week’s time I shall be strong enough.”

  “Then,” Elishama said, “I shall have everything ready within a week.”

  After a while Mr. Clay said: “It will involve expenses. I do not mind what the expenses may come to.”

  These words gave Elishama such an impression of cold and loneliness in the old man, that it was as if they had been spoken from the grave. But since he himself did feel at home in the grave, he and his employer were at this moment brought closer together.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is going to cost us some money. For you will remember that there is a young woman in the story.”

  “Yes, a woman,” said Mr. Clay. “The world is full of women. A young woman one can always buy, and that will be the cheapest thing in the story.”

  “No, Mr. Clay,” said Elishama, “it will not be the cheapest thing in this story. For if I bring you a woman of the town, the sailor will know her for what she is. And he will lose his faith in the story.”

  Mr. Clay growled a little.

  “And a young miss I shall not be able to get you,” said Elishama.

  “I am paying you to do this work,” said Mr. Clay. “It will be part of your work to find me a woman.”

  “I shall have to think it over,” said Elishama.

  But he had already, while they talked together, been thinking it over.

  Elishama, as has been told, was well versed in bookkeeping by double entry. He saw Mr. Clay with the eyes of the world, and to the eyes of the world—had the world known of his scheme—the old man was undoubtedly mad. At the same time he saw Mr. Clay with his own eyes, and to his own eyes his employer, with his colleagues in the tea-trade and in other trades, had always been mad. And indeed he was not sure whether, to a man with one foot in the grave, the pursuit of a story was not a sounder undertaking than the pursuit of profit. Elishama at any time would side with the individual against the world, since, however mad the individual might be, the world in general was sure to be still more hopelessly and wickedly idiotic. As, once more, he walked away from Mr. Clay’s house, he realized that from this moment he was indispensable to his master, and could get out of him whatever he wanted. He did not intend to derive any advantage from the circumstance, but the idea pleased him.

  In Mr. Clay’s office there was a young accountant whose name was Charley Simpson. He was an ambitious young man and had resolved to become, in his own time, a millionaire and nabob like Mr. Clay himself. The big ruddy young gentleman considered himself to be Elishama’s only friend, treated him with patronizing joviality, and had lately honored him with his confidence.

  Charley kept a mistress in town; her name was Virginie. She was, he told his protégé, a Frenchwoman of very good family, but she had been ruined by her amorous temperament and now lived only for passion. Virginie wanted a French shawl. Her lover meant to make her a present of one, but he was afraid to go into a shop to buy it, as somebody might spot him there and report to his father in England. If Elishama would take a collection of shawls to Virginie’s house, Charley would show his gratitude by introducing him to the lady herself.

  The lovers had had a row immediately before Elishama’s arrival with the shawls. But the sight of these somewhat appeased Virginie. She draped one shawl after another round her fine figure before the looking-glass, as if the men had not been in the room, and even lifted her skirts neatly over her knee and made a couple of pas-de-basque’s. Over her shoulder she told her lover that he must now, surely, be able to see for himself that her real calling was the theatre. If she could only raise the money, the wisest thing she could do was to go back to France. There comedy, drama and tragedy still existed, and the great actresses were the idols of a nation!

  Elishama was not familiar with the words comedy, drama or tragedy, but an instinct now told him that there was a connection between these phenomena and Mr. Clay’s story. The day after his last conversation with Mr. Clay he turned his steps toward Virginie’s house.

  Within his nature Elishama had a trait which few people would have expected to find there. He felt a deep innate sympathy or compassion toward all women of this world, and particularly toward all young women.

  Although, as has already been told, he did not himself want a horse, he could fix to a penny the price of any horse shown him. And although he did not himself in the least want a woman, he could view a woman with the eyes of other young men, and accurately determine her value. Only in the latter case he considered the eyes of other young men to be short-sighted or blind, the price to be erroneous, and the article itself in some sad way underestimated and wronged.

  Mysteriously, he felt the same sympathy and compassion toward birds. The quadrupeds all left him indifferent, and horses—in spite of his knowledge and understanding of them—he disliked. But he would take a roundabout way to his office in order to pass the Chinese birdsellers’ shops, and to stand for a long time in front of their piled-up birdcages, and he knew the individual birds within them and followed their fate with concern.

  Walking along to Virginie’s house he might well feel a twofold sympathy. For she was a young woman who reminded him of a bird. As in his thoughts he compared her to other young women of Canton, she there took on the aspect of a golden pheasant or a peacock in a poultry yard. She was bigger than her sisters, nobler and more pompous of gait and feather, strutting somewhat lonely amongst the smaller domestic fowl. At their one meeting she had been a little downcast and fretful, like a golden pheasant in the moulting season. But she was always a golden pheasant.

  VI. The Heroine of the Story

  Virginie lived in a small neat Chinese house with a little garden to it and green shutters to the window. The old Chinese woman who owned the house, kept it in order and cooked for her tenant, was out today. Elishama found the door open and went straight in.

  Virginie was playing patience on her table by the window. She looked up and said: “God, is it you? What are you bringing? Shawls?”

  “No, Miss Virginie, I am bringing nothing today,” said he.

  “What is the use of you then?” she asked. “Sit down and keep me company, in God’s name, now that you are here.”

  Upon this invitation he sat down.

  Virginie, in spite of her venturesome past, was still young and fresh, with a flowerlike quality in her, as if there had been a large rose in water in the room. She was dressed in a white muslin negligee with flounces and a train to it, but had not yet done up her rich brown hair, which floated down to the pink sash round her waist. The golden afternoon sun fell between the shutters into her lap.

  She went on with her patience, but spoke the while. “Are you still with the old devil?” she asked.

  Elishama said: “He is ill and cannot go out.”

  “Good,” said Virginie, “is he going to die?”


  “No, Miss Virginie,” said Elishama. “He is even strong enough to make up new schemes. With your permission, I am now going to tell you one of them. I shall begin at the beginning.”

  “Well, so long as he is too ill to go out, I can stand hearing about him,” said Virginie.

  “Mr. Clay,” said Elishama, “has heard a story told. Fifty years ago—on a ship, one night off the Cape—he heard a story told. Now that he is ill and cannot sleep at night, he has been pondering this story. He dislikes pretense, he dislikes prophecies, he likes facts. He has made up his mind to have the story happen in real life, to real people. I have been in his service for seven years; whom would he get to carry out his wish if not me? He is the richest man in Canton, Miss Virginie, he must have what he wants. Now I shall tell you the story.

  “There was a sailor,” he began, “who went ashore from his ship in the harbor of a big town. As he was walking by himself in a street near the harbor, a carriage with two fine, well-paired bay horses drove up to him, and an old gentleman stepped out of the carriage and said to him: ‘You are a fine-looking sailor. Do you want to earn five guineas tonight?’ When the sailor said yes, the old gentleman drove him to his house and gave him food and wine. He then, Miss Virginie, said to him: ‘I am a merchant of immense wealth, as you will have seen for yourself, but I am all alone in the world. The people who, when I die, are to inherit my fortune are all silly people, continually disturbing and distressing me. I have taken to myself a young wife, but …’ ”

  Here Virginie cut short Elishama’s tale. “I know that story,” she said. “It happened in Singapore to an English merchant-captain, a friend of mine. Has he been telling it to you as well?”

  “No, Miss Virginie,” said Elishama. “He has not told it to me, but other sailors have told it. This is a story that lives on the ships; all sailors have heard it, and all sailors have told it. It might have been left at sea and never come ashore, if it had not been that Mr. Clay cannot sleep. He is now going to make it happen here in Canton, in order that one sailor in the world may be able to tell it from beginning to end, exactly as, from beginning to end, it has happened to him.”

  “He was sure to go mad in the end, with his sins,” said Virginie. “If now he wants to play a comedy with the Devil, it is a matter between the two of them.”

  “Yes, a comedy,” said Elishama. “I had forgotten the word. People play in comedies and make money by it; they become the idols of nations. Now there are three people in Mr. Clay’s comedy. The old gentleman he will play himself, and the young sailor he will himself find in a street by the harbor, where sailors come ashore from their ships. But if an English merchant-captain has told you this story, Miss Virginie, he will have told you that besides these two there is also a beautiful young lady in it. On Mr. Clay’s behalf I am now looking for this beautiful young lady. If she will come into this story, and finish it for him, Mr. Clay will pay her one hundred guineas.”

  Virginie, in her chair, turned her rich young torso all round toward Elishama, folded her arms upon her bosom and laughed to his face. “What is all this?” she inquired.

  “It is a comedy, Miss Virginie,” said he. “A drama or a tragedy. It is a story.”

  “The old man has got strange ideas of a comedy,” said Virginie. “In a comedy the actors pretend to do things, to kill one another or to die, or to go to bed with their lovers. But they do not really do any of these things. Indeed your master is like the Emperor Nero of Rome, who, to amuse himself, had people eaten up by lions. But since then it has not been done, and that is a long time ago.”

  “Was the Emperor Nero very rich?” asked Elishama.

  “Oh, he owned all the world,” said Virginie.

  “And were his comedies good?” he again asked.

  “He liked them himself, I suppose,” said Virginie. “But who would he nowadays get to play in them?”

  “If he owned all the world, he would get people to play in them,” said he.

  Virginie looked hard at Elishama, her dark eyes shining. “I suppose that nobody could insult you, even if they tried hard?”

  Elishama thought her remark over. “No,” he said, “they could not. Why should I let them?”

  “And if I told you,” she said, “to go out of my house, you would just go?”

  “Yes, I should go,” he said. “It is your house. But when I had gone you would sit and think of the things for which you had turned me out. It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted. But why should not their own thoughts be good enough for other people to tell them?”

  Virginie kept looking at him. Early that same day she had been so furious with her destiny that she had been planning to throw herself into the harbor. The patience had calmed her a little. Now she suddenly felt that she and Elishama were alone in the house, and that he had it not in him to repeat their conversation to anybody. Under the circumstances she might go on with it.

  “What does Mr. Clay pay you for coming here and proposing this thing to me?” she asked. “Trente pièces d’argent, n’est-ce pas? C’est le prix!” When Virginie’s mind moved in high spheres she thought, and expressed herself, in French.

  Elishama, who spoke French well, did not recognize her quotation, but imagined that she was mocking him for being poorly paid in Mr. Clay’s service. “No,” he said. “I am not being paid for this. I am in Mr. Clay’s employ; I cannot take on work anywhere but with him. But you, Miss Virginie, you can go wherever you like.”

  “Yes, I presume so,” said Virginie.

  “Yes, you presume so,” said Elishama, “and you have been able to go wherever you liked all your life. And you have come here, Miss Virginie, to this house.”

  Virginie blushed deeply with anger, but at the same time she once more felt, and more deeply than before, that the two were alone in the house, with the rest of the world shut out.

  VII. Virginie

  Virginie’s father had been a merchant in Canton. His motto in life, engraved in his signet ring, had been “Pourquoi pas?” All through his twenty years in China his heart had still been in France, and the great things going on there had filled and moved it.

  At the time of his death Virginie had been twelve years old. She was his eldest child and his favorite. As a little girl she was as lovely as an angel; the proud father amused himself taking her round and showing her off to his friends, and in a few years she had seen and learned much. She had a talent for mimicry; at home she gave pretty little performances, imitating the scenes she had witnessed and repeating the remarks and the gay songs she had listened to. Her mother, who came from an old seafaring family of Brittany and was well aware that a wife ought to bear with her man’s exuberant spirit, would still at times gently reprove her husband for spoiling his pretty daughter. She would get but a kiss in return, and the laughing comment: “Ah, Virginie est fine! Elle s’y comprend, en ironie!”

  In his young days the handsome and winning gentleman had traveled much. In Spain he had done business with, and been on friendly terms with, a very great lady, the Countess de Montijo. When later, out in China, he learned that this lady’s daughter had married the Emperor Napoleon III and become Empress of the French, he was as proud and pleased as if he himself had arranged the match. With him Virginie had for many years lived in the grand world of the French Court, in the vast radiant ballrooms of the Tuileries, among receptions of foreign majesties, court cabals, romantic love affairs, duels and the waltzes of Strauss.

  After her father’s death, during long years of poverty and hardship, and while she herself lost the angelic grace of her childhood and grew up too big, Virginie had secretly turned to this glorious world for consolation. She still walked up marble stairs lighted by a thousand candles, herself all sparkling with diamonds, to dance with princes and dukes; and her companions of a lonely, monotonous existence in dreary rooms wondered at the girl’s pluck. In the end, however, the Tuileries themselves had faded and vanished round her. />
  Even when the father had endeavored to engraft moral principles in the daughter’s young mind he had illustrated them with little anecdotes from the Imperial Court. One of them had impressed itself deeply in the little girl’s heart. The lovely Mademoiselle de Montijo had informed the Emperor Napoleon that the only way to her bedroom ran through the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Virginie was familiar with the Cathedral of Notre Dame; a big engraving of it hung in her parents’ drawing room. She had pictured to herself a bedroom of corresponding dimensions, and in the middle of it the lovely Mademoiselle Virginie, all in lace. The vision many times had warmed and cheered her heart.

  Alas, the way to her bedroom had not run through the Cathedral of Notre Dame! It had not even run through the little gray French Church of Canton. Lately it had run, without much of a detour, from the offices and counting-houses of the town. For this reason Virginie despised the men that had come by it.

  One triumph she had had in her career of disappointments, but nobody but herself knew of it.

  Her first lover had been an English merchant-captain, who had made her run away with him to Japan, just then opened to foreign trade. On the couple’s very first night in Japan there was an earthquake. All round their little hotel houses cracked and tumbled down and more than a hundred people were killed. Virginie that night had experienced something besides terror; she had lived through the great moment of her life. The thundering roar from heaven was directed against her personally; the earth shook and trembled at the loss of her innocence; the mighty breakers of the sea bewailed Virginie’s fall! Frivolous human beings only—her lover with them—within this hour ignored the law of cause and effect and failed to realize the extent of her ruin.

  Virginie had a good deal of kindness in her nature. In her present sad situation, after she had definitely come down from the Tuileries, she would have liked her lovers better had they left her free to love them in her own way, as poor pitiful people in need of sympathy. She might have put up with her present lover, Elishama’s friend, if she could have made him see their liaison such as she herself saw it—as two lonely people’s attempt to make, in an unpretentious bourgeois way and by means of a little mutual gentleness, the best of a sorry world. But Charley was an ambitious young man who liked to see himself as a man of fashion and his mistress as a great demimondaine. His mistress, who knew the real meaning of the word, in their daily life together was tried hard by this vanity of his, and it lay at the root of most of their quarrels.