THE CAFE
The Cafe de Paris, kept by Melanie
Cartier, a widow, was situated on the Place du Palais,
a large irregular square planted with meager, dusty
elm trees. The place was so well known in Vauchamp
that it was customary to say, “Are you coming
to Melanie’s?” At the farther end of the
first room, which was a spacious one, there was another
called “the divan,” a narrow apartment
having sham leather benches placed against the walls,
while at each corner there stood a marble-topped table.
The widow, deserting her seat in the front room, where
she left her little servant Phrosine, spent her evenings
in the inner apartment, ministering to a few customers,
the usual frequenters of the place, those who were
currently styled “the gentlemen of the divan.”
When a man belonged to that set it was as if he had
a label on his back; he was spoken of with smiles
of mingled contempt and envy.
Mme Cartier had become a widow when
she was five and twenty. Her husband, a wheelwright,
who on the death of an uncle had amazed Vauchamp by
taking the Cafe de Paris, had one fine day brought
her back with him from Montpellier, where he was wont
to repair twice a year to purchase liqueurs.
As he was stocking his establishment he selected, together
with divers beverages, a woman of the sort he wanted of
an engaging aspect and apt to stimulate the trade
of the house. It was never known where he had
picked her up, but he married her after trying her
in the cafe during six months or so. Opinions
were divided in Vauchamp as to her merits, some folks
declaring that she was superb, while others asserted
that she looked like a drum-major. She was a tall
woman with large features and coarse hair falling
low over her forehead. However, everyone agreed
that she knew very well how to fool the sterner sex.
She had fine eyes and was wont to fix them with a bold
stare on the gentlemen of the divan, who colored and
became like wax in her hands. She also had the
reputation of possessing a wonderfully fine figure,
and southerners appreciate a statuesque style of beauty.
Cartier had died in a singular way.
Rumor hinted at a conjugal quarrel, a kick, producing
some internal tumor. Whatever may have been the
truth, Melanie found herself encumbered with the cafe,
which was far from doing a prosperous business.
Her husband had wasted his uncle’s inheritance
in drinking his own absinthe and wearing out the cloth
of his own billiard table. For a while it was
believed that the widow would have to sell out, but
she liked the life and the establishment just as it
was. If she could secure a few customers the
bigger room might remain deserted. So she limited
herself to repapering the divan in white and gold and
recovering the benches. She began by entertaining
a chemist. Then a vermicelli maker, a lawyer
and a retired magistrate put in an appearance; and
thus it was that the cafe remained open, although the
waiter did not receive twenty orders a day. No
objections were raised by the authorities, as appearances
were kept up; and, indeed, it was not deemed advisable
to interfere, for some respectable folks might have
been worried.
Of an evening five or six well-to-do
citizens would enter the front room and play at dominoes
there. Although Cartier was dead and the Cafe
de Paris had got a queer name, they saw nothing and
kept up their old habits. In course of time,
the waiter having nothing to do, Melanie dismissed
him and made Phrosine light the solitary gas burner
in the corner where the domino players congregated.
Occasionally a party of young men, attracted by the
gossip that circulated through the town, would come
in, wildly excited and laughing loudly and awkwardly.
But they were received there with icy dignity.
As a rule they did not even see the widow, and even
if she happened to be present she treated them with
withering disdain, so that they withdrew, stammering
and confused. Melanie was too astute to indulge
in any compromising whims. While the front room
remained obscure, save in the corner where the few
townsfolk rattled their dominoes, she personally waited
on the gentlemen of the divan, showing herself amiable
without being free, merely venturing in moments of
familiarity to lean on the shoulder of one or another
of them, the better to watch a skillfully played game
of écarte.
One evening the gentlemen of the divan,
who had ended by tolerating each other’s presence,
experienced a disagreeable surprise on finding Captain
Burle at home there. He had casually entered the
cafe that same morning to get a glass of vermouth,
so it seemed, and he had found Melanie there.
They had conversed, and in the evening when he returned
Phrosine immediately showed him to the inner room.
Two days later Burle reigned there
supreme; still he had not frightened the chemist,
the vermicelli maker, the lawyer or the retired magistrate
away. The captain, who was short and dumpy, worshiped
tall, plump women. In his regiment he had been
nicknamed “Petticoat Burle” on account
of his constant philandering. Whenever the officers,
and even the privates, met some monstrous-looking
creature, some giantess puffed out with fat, whether
she were in velvet or in rags, they would invariably
exclaim, “There goes one to Petticoat Burle’s
taste!” Thus Melanie, with her opulent presence,
quite conquered him. He was lost quite
wrecked. In less than a fortnight he had fallen
to vacuous imbecility. With much the expression
of a whipped hound in the tiny sunken eyes which lighted
up his bloated face, he was incessantly watching the
widow in mute adoration before her masculine features
and stubby hair. For fear that he might be dismissed,
he put up with the presence of the other gentlemen
of the divan and spent his pay in the place down to
the last copper. A sergeant reviewed the situation
in one sentence: “Petticoat Burle is done
for; he’s a buried man!”
It was nearly ten o’clock when
Major Laguitte furiously flung the door of the cafe
open. For a moment those inside could see the
deluged square transformed into a dark sea of liquid
mud, bubbling under the terrible downpour. The
major, now soaked to the skin and leaving a stream
behind him, strode up to the small counter where Phrosine
was reading a novel.
“You little wretch,” he
yelled, “you have dared to gammon an officer;
you deserve ”
And then he lifted his hand as if
to deal a blow such as would have felled an ox.
The little maid shrank back, terrified, while the amazed
domino players looked, openmouthed. However, the
major did not linger there he pushed the
divan door open and appeared before Melanie and Burle
just as the widow was playfully making the captain
sip his grog in small spoonfuls, as if she were feeding
a pet canary. Only the ex-magistrate and the
chemist had come that evening, and they had retired
early in a melancholy frame of mind. Then Melanie,
being in want of three hundred francs for the morrow,
had taken advantage of the opportunity to cajole the
captain.
“Come.” she said, “open
your mouth; ain’t it nice, you greedy piggy-wiggy?”
Burle, flushing scarlet, with glazed
eyes and sunken figure, was sucking the spoon with
an air of intense enjoyment.
“Good heavens!” roared
the major from the threshold. “You now play
tricks on me, do you? I’m sent to the roundabout
and told that you never came here, and yet all the
while here you are, addling your silly brains.”
Burle shuddered, pushing the grog
away, while Melanie stepped angrily in front of him
as if to shield him with her portly figure, but Laguitte
looked at her with that quiet, resolute expression
well known to women who are familiar with bodily chastisement.
“Leave us,” he said curtly.
She hesitated for the space of a second.
She almost felt the gust of the expected blow, and
then, white with rage, she joined Phrosine in the
outer room.
When the two men were alone Major
Laguitte walked up to Burle, looked at him and, slightly
stooping, yelled into his face these two words:
“You pig!”
The captain, quite dazed, endeavored
to retort, but he had not time to do so.
“Silence!” resumed the
major. “You have bamboozled a friend.
You palmed off on me a lot of forged receipts which
might have sent both of us to the gallows. Do
you call that proper behavior? Is that the sort
of trick to play a friend of thirty years’ standing?”
Burle, who had fallen back in his
chair, was livid; his limbs shook as if with ague.
Meanwhile the major, striding up and down and striking
the tables wildly with his fists, continued: “So
you have become a thief like the veriest scribbling
cur of a clerk, and all for the sake of that creature
here! If at least you had stolen for your mother’s
sake it would have been honorable! But, curse
it, to play tricks and bring the money into this shanty
is what I cannot understand! Tell me what
are you made of at your age to go to the dogs as you
are going all for the sake of a creature like a grenadier!”
“You gamble ” stammered
the captain.
“Yes, I do curse
it!” thundered the major, lashed into still greater
fury by this remark. “And I am a pitiful
rogue to do so, because it swallows up all my pay
and doesn’t redound to the honor of the French
army. However, I don’t steal. Kill
yourself, if it pleases you; starve your mother and
the boy, but respect the regimental cashbox and don’t
drag your friends down with you.”
He stopped. Burle was sitting
there with fixed eyes and a stupid air. Nothing
was heard for a moment save the clatter of the major’s
heels.
“And not a single copper,”
he continued aggressively. “Can you picture
yourself between two gendarmes, eh?”
He then grew a little calmer, caught
hold of Burle’s wrists and forced him to rise.
“Come!” he said gruffly.
“Something must be done at once, for I cannot
go to bed with this affair on my mind I
have an idea.”
In the front room Melanie and Phrosine
were talking eagerly in low voices. When the
widow saw the two men leaving the divan she moved
toward Burle and said coaxingly: “What,
are you going already, Captain?”
“Yes, he’s going,”
brutally answered Laguitte, “and I don’t
intend to let him set foot here again.”
The little maid felt frightened and
pulled her mistress back by the skirt of her dress;
in doing so she imprudently murmured the word “drunkard”
and thereby brought down the slap which the major’s
hand had been itching to deal for some time past.
Both women having stooped, however, the blow only
fell on Phrosine’s back hair, flattening her
cap and breaking her comb. The domino players
were indignant.
“Let’s cut it,”
shouted Laguitte, and he pushed Burle on the pavement.
“If I remained I should smash everyone in the
place.”
To cross the square they had to wade
up to their ankles in mud. The rain, driven by
the wind, poured off their faces. The captain
walked on in silence, while the major kept on reproaching
him with his cowardice and its disastrous consequences.
Wasn’t it sweet weather for tramping the streets?
If he hadn’t been such an idiot they would both
be warmly tucked in bed instead of paddling about
in the mud. Then he spoke of Gagneux a
scoundrel whose diseased meat had on three separate
occasions made the whole regiment ill. In a week,
however, the contract would come to an end, and the
fiend himself would not get it renewed.
“It rests with me,” the
major grumbled. “I can select whomsoever
I choose, and I’d rather cut off my right arm
than put that poisoner in the way of earning another
copper.”
Just then he slipped into a gutter
and, half choked by a string of oaths, he gasped:
“You understand I
am going to rout up Gagneux. You must stop outside
while I go in. I must know what the rascal is
up to and if he’ll dare to carry out his threat
of informing the colonel tomorrow. A butcher curse
him! The idea of compromising oneself with a butcher!
Ah, you aren’t over-proud, and I shall never
forgive you for all this.”
They had now reached the Place aux
Herbes. Gagneux’s house was quite
dark, but Laguitte knocked so loudly that he was eventually
admitted. Burle remained alone in the dense obscurity
and did not even attempt to seek any shelter.
He stood at a corner of the market under the pelting
rain, his head filled with a loud buzzing noise which
prevented him from thinking. He did not feel
impatient, for he was unconscious of the flight of
time. He stood there looking at the house, which,
with its closed door and windows, seemed quite lifeless.
When at the end of an hour the major came out again
it appeared to the captain as if he had only just
gone in.
Laguitte was so grimly mute that Burle
did not venture to question him. For a moment
they sought each other, groping about in the dark;
then they resumed their walk through the somber streets,
where the water rolled as in the bed of a torrent.
They moved on in silence side by side, the major being
so abstracted that he even forgot to swear. However,
as they again crossed the Place du Palais, at the sight
of the Cafe de Paris, which was still lit up, he dropped
his hand on Burle’s shoulder and said, “If
you ever re-enter that hole I ”
“No fear!” answered the
captain without letting his friend finish his sentence.
Then he stretched out his hand.
“No, no,” said Laguitte,
“I’ll see you home; I’ll at least
make sure that you’ll sleep in your bed tonight.”
They went on, and as they ascended
the Rue des Récollets they slackened
their pace. When the captain’s door was
reached and Burle had taken out his latchkey he ventured
to ask:
“Well?”
“Well,” answered the major
gruffly, “I am as dirty a rogue as you are.
Yes! I have done a scurrilous thing. The
fiend take you! Our soldiers will eat carrion
for three months longer.”
Then he explained that Gagneux, the
disgusting Gagneux, had a horribly level head and
that he had persuaded him the major to
strike a bargain. He would refrain from informing
the colonel, and he would even make a present of the
two thousand francs and replace the forged receipts
by genuine ones, on condition that the major bound
himself to renew the meat contract. It was a
settled thing.
“Ah,” continued Laguitte,
“calculate what profits the brute must make
out of the meat to part with such a sum as two thousand
francs.”
Burle, choking with emotion, grasped
his old friend’s hands, stammering confused
words of thanks. The vileness of the action committed
for his sake brought tears into his eyes.
“I never did such a thing before,”
growled Laguitte, “but I was driven to it.
Curse it, to think that I haven’t those two thousand
francs in my drawer! It is enough to make one
hate cards. It is my own fault. I am not
worth much; only, mark my words, don’t begin
again, for, curse it I shan’t.”
The captain embraced him, and when
he had entered the house the major stood a moment
before the closed door to make certain that he had
gone upstairs to bed. Then as midnight was striking
and the rain was still belaboring the dark town, he
slowly turned homeward. The thought of his men
almost broke his heart, and, stopping short, he said
aloud in a voice full of compassion:
“Poor devils! what a lot of
cow beef they’ll have to swallow for those two
thousand francs!”