“Rien ne
nous rend si grand qu’une grande
douleur.”
Alphonse Giraud and I-between
whom had sprung up that friendship of contrasts which
Madame de Clericy had foreseen-were in constant
communication. My summons brought him to the Hotel
Clericy at once, where he found the ladies already
apprised of their bereavement. He and I set off
again for Passy, by train this time, as our need was
more urgent. I despatched instructions to the
Vicomte’s lawyer to follow by the next train-bringing
the undertaker with him. There was no heir to
my patron’s titles, but it seemed necessary to
observe every formality at this the dramatic extinction
of a long and noble line.
As we drove through the streets, the
newsboys were shrieking some tidings which we had
neither time nor inclination to inquire into at that
moment. It was a hot July day, and Paris should
have been half empty, but the pavements were crowded.
“What is the matter?”
I said to Alphonse Giraud, who was too busy with his
horse to look about. “See the faces of the
men at the cafes-they are wild with excitement
and some look scared. There is news afoot.”
“My good friend,” returned
Giraud, “I was in bed when your note reached
me. Besides, I only read the sporting columns
of the papers.”
So we took train to Passy, without
learning what it was that seemed to be stirring Paris
as a squall stirs the sea.
At Passy there was indeed grim work
awaiting us. The Prefet himself was kind enough
to busy himself in a matter which was scarcely within
his province. He had instructed the police to
conduct us to his house, where he received us most
hospitably.
“Neither of you is related to
the Vicomte?” he said, interrogatively; and
we stated our case at once.
“It is well that you did not
bring Madame with you,” he said. “You
forbade her to come?”
And he looked at me with a keenness
which, I trust, impressed the police official for
whose benefit it was assumed.
“I begged her to remain in Paris.”
“Ah!” and he gave a significant
laugh. “However-so long as she
is not here.”
He was a white-faced man, who looked
as if he had been dried up by some blanching process.
One could imagine that the heart inside him was white
also. In his own eyes it was evident that he was
a vastly clever man. I thought him rather an
ass.
“You know, gentlemen,”
he said, as he prepared his papers, “the recognition
of the body is a mere formality.”
“Then let us omit it, Monsieur
lé Prefet,” exclaimed Alphonse, with characteristic
cheerfulness; but the remark was treated with contempt.
“In July, gentlemen,”
went on the Prefet, “the Seine is warm-there
are eels-a hundred animalculae-a
score of decomposing elements. However, there
are the clothes-the contents of Monsieur
lé Vicomte’s pockets-a signet
ring. Shall we go? But first take another
glass of wine. If the nerves are sensitive-a
few drops of Benedictine?”
“If I may have it in a claret
glass,” said Alphonse, and he launched into
a voluble explanation, to which the Prefet listened
with a thin, transparent smile. I thought that
he would have been better pleased had some of the
Vicomte’s titled friends come to observe this
formality. But one’s grand friends are better
kept for fine weather only, and the official had to
content himself with the company of a private secretary
and the son of a ruined financier.
Alphonse and I had no difficulty in
recognizing the small belongings which had been extracted
from my old patron’s sodden clothing. In
the letter case was a letter from myself on some small
matter of business. I pointed this out, and signed
my name a second time on the yellow and crinkled paper
for the further satisfaction of the lawyer. Then
we passed into an inner room and stood in the presence
of the dead man. The recognition was, as the
Prefet had said, a painful formality. Alphonse
Giraud and I swore to the clothing-indeed,
the linen was marked plainly enough-and
we left the undertaker to his work.
Giraud looked at me with a dry smile
when we stood in the fresh air again.
“You and I, Howard,” he
said, “seem to have got on the seamy side of
life lately.”
And during the journey I saw him shiver
once or twice at the recollection of what we had seen.
His carriage was awaiting us at the railway station.
Alphonse had been brought up in a school where horses
and servants are treated as machines. The man
who stood at the horse’s head was, however,
anything but mechanical, for he ran up to us as soon
as we emerged from the crowded exit.
“Monseiur lé Baron!”
he cried excitedly, with a dull light in his eyes
that made a man of him, and no servant. “Has
Monsieur lé Baron heard the news-the
great tidings?”
“No-we have heard nothing. What
is your news?”
“The King of Prussia has insulted
the French Ambassador at Ems. He struck him on
the face, as it is said. And war has been declared
by the Emperor. They are going to march to Berlin,
Monsieur!”
As he spoke two groups of men swaggered
arm in arm along the street. They were singing
“Partant pour la Syrie,” very much out
of tune. Others were crying “A Berlin-a
Berlin!”
Alphonse Giraud turned and looked
at me with a sudden rush of colour in his cheeks.
“And I, who thought life a matter
of coats and neckties,” he said, with that quick
recognition of his own error that first endeared him
to me and made him the better man of the two.
We stood for a few minutes watching
the excited groups of men on the Boulevard. At
the cafes the street boys were selling newspapers at
a prodigious rate, and wherever a soldier could be
seen there were many pressing him to drink.
“In Berlin,” they shouted,
“you will get sour beer, so you must drink good
red wine when it is to be had.” And the
diminutive bulwarks of France were ready enough, we
may be sure, to swallow Dutch courage.
“In Berlin!” echoed Giraud,
at my side. “Will it end there?”
“There or in Paris,” answered
I, and lay no claim to astuteness, for the words were
carelessly uttered.
We drove through the noisy streets,
and Frenchmen never before or since showed themselves
to such small advantage-so puerile, so petty,
so vain. It was “Berlin” here and
“Berlin” there, and “Down with Prussia”
on every side. A hundred catchwords, a thousand
raised voices, and not one cool head to realize that
war is not a game. The very sellers of toys in
the gutter had already nicknamed their wares, and
offered the passer a black doll under the name of Bismarck,
or a monkey on a stick called the King of Prussia.
It was with difficulty that I brought
Alphonse Giraud to a grave discussion of the pressing
matter we had in hand, for his superficial nature
was open to every wind that blew, and now swayed to
the tempest of martial ardour that swept across the
streets of Paris.
“I think,” he said, “I
will buy myself a commission. I should like to
go to Berlin. Yes-Howard, mon brave,
I will buy myself a commission.”
“With what?”
“Ah-mon
Dieu!-that is true. I have no
money. I am ruined. I forgot that.”
And he waved a gay salutation of the
whip to a passing friend.
“And then, also,” he added,
with a face suddenly lugubrious, “we have the
terrible business of the Vicomte. Howard-listen
to me-at all costs the ladies must never
see that-must never know. Dieu!
it was horrible. I feel all twisted here-as
when I smoked my first cigar.”
He touched himself on the chest, and
with one of his inimitable gestures described in the
air a great upheaval.
“I will try to prevent it,” I answered.
“Then you will succeed, for
your way of suggesting might easily be called by another
name. And it is not only the women who obey you.
I told Lucille the other day that she was afraid of
you, and she blazed up in such a fury of denial that
I felt smaller than nature has made me. Her anger
made her more beautiful than ever, and I was stupid
enough to tell her so. She hates a compliment,
you know.”
“Indeed, I have never tried her with one.”
Alphonse looked at me with grave surprise.
“It is a good thing,”
he said, “that you do not love her. Name
of God! where should I be?”
“But it is with Madame and not
Mademoiselle Lucille that we shall have to do this
afternoon,” I said hastily.
Although he was more or less acknowledged
as an aspirant to Lucille’s hand, Giraud refused
to come within the door when we reached the Hotel
Clericy.
“No,” he answered; “they
will not want to see me at such a time. It is
only when people want to laugh that I am required.”
I found Madame quite calm, and all
her thoughts were for Lucille. The more a man
is brought into contact with maternal love, even if
it bear in no way upon his own life, the better he
will be for it-for this is surely the loftiest
of human feelings.
My own mother having died when I was
but an infant, it had never been my lot to live in
intimacy with women, until fate guided me to the Hotel
Clericy.
At no time had I felt such respect
for that quiet woman, Madame de Clericy, as on this
afternoon when widowhood first cast its sable veil
over her.
“Lucille,” she said at
once, “must not be allowed to grieve for me.
She has her own sorrow to bear, for she loved her father
dearly. Do not let her have any thought for me.”
And later, when the gods gave me five minutes alone with
Lucille herself-
“You must not,” she said,
her face drawn and white, her lips quivering, “you
must not let mother think that this is more than I
can bear. It falls heavier upon her.”
I blundered on somehow during those
two days, making, no doubt, a hundred mistakes; for
what comfort could I offer? What pretence could
I make to understand the feelings of these ladies?
My task was not so difficult as I had anticipated
in regard to the grim coffin lying at Passy.
To spare the other, both ladies agreed with me separately
that the Vicomte should be buried from Passy as quietly
as possible, and Lucille overlooked the fact that
the suggestion came from such an unwelcome source
as myself.
So, amid the wild excitement of July,
1870, we laid Charles Albert Malaunay, Vicomte de
Clericy, to rest among his ancestors in the little
church of Senneville, near Nevers. The war fever
was at its height, and all France convulsed with passionate
hatred for the Prussian.
It is not for one who has found his
truest friends-ay, and his keenest enemies-in
France to say aught against so great and gifted a
people. But it seems, as I look back now, that
the French were ripe in 1870 for one of those strokes
by which High Heaven teaches nations from time to
time through the world’s history that human greatness
is a small affair.
There are no people so tolerant of
folly as the Parisians. It walks abroad in the
streets of the great city with such unblushing self-satisfaction-such
a brazen sense of its own superiority-that
any Englishman must long to import a hundred London
street boys, with their sense of ridicule and fearless
tongue. At all times the world has possessed
an army of geniuses whose greatness consists of faith
and not of works-of faith in themselves
which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long
hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris
streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful
men could scarce fail to recognise a nation in its
decadence.
“The asses preponderate in the
streets,” said John Turner to me. “You
may hear their bray in every cafe, and France is going
to the devil.”
And indeed the voices raised in the
drinking dens were those of the fool and the knave.
I busied myself with looking into
the money affairs of my poor patron, and found them
in great disorder. All the ready cash had fallen
into the hands of Miste. Some of the estates,
as, indeed, I already knew, yielded little or nothing.
The commerce of France was naturally paralysed by
the declaration of war, and no one wanted a vast old
house in the Faubourg St. Germain-a hotbed
of Legitimism where no good Buonapartist cared to
own a friend or show his face.
I disguised nothing from Madame de
Clericy, whom indeed it was hard to deceive.
“Then,” she said, “there is no money.”
We were in my study, where I was seated
at the table, while Madame moved from table to mantelpiece
with a woman’s keen sight for the blemishes
to be found in a bachelor’s apartment.
“For the moment you are in need
of ready money-that is all. If the
war is brought to a speedy termination, all will be
set right.”
“And if the war is not brought
to a speedy termination-you are a second-rate
optimist, mon ami-what then?”
“Then I shall have to find some expedient.”
She looked at me probingly. The
windows were open, and we heard the cries of the newsboys
in the streets.
“Hear!” she said; “they are shouting
of victories.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You mean,” said the Vicomtesse
slowly, “that they will shout of victories until
the Prussians are in sight of Paris.”
“The Parisians will pay two
sous for good news, and nothing at all for evil
tidings,” I answered.
Thus we lived for some weeks, through
the heat of July-and I could neither leave
Paris nor give thought to Charles Miste. That
scoundrel was, however, singularly quiet. No
cheque had been cashed, and we knew, at all events,
that he had realised none of his stolen wealth.
On the tenth of July the Ollivier Ministry fell.
Things were going from bad to worse. At the end
of the month the Emperor quitted St. Cloud to take
command of the army. He never came to France again.