The Nabob. Alphonse Daudet
a drawing-room with gravity, to endow futile things with an air of seriousness, and to treat serious things lightly; that was the epitome of his attitude in life, a paradoxical distinction. Still handsome, despite his fifty-six years, with a comeliness compounded of elegance and proportion, wherein the grace of the dandy was fortified by something military about the figure and the haughtiness of the face; he wore with striking effect his black dress-coat, on which, to do honour to Jenkins, he had pinned a few of his decorations, which he was in the habit of never wearing except upon official occasions. The reflection from the linen, from the white cravat, the dull silver of the decorations, the smoothness of the thin hair now turning gray, enhanced the pallor of the features, more bloodless than all the bloodless faces that were to be seen that evening in the Irishman’s house.
He had led such a terrible life! Politics, play under all its forms, from the Stock Exchange to the baccarat-table, and that reputation of a man successful with women which had to be maintained at all costs. Oh, this man was a true client of Jenkins; and this princely visit, he owed it in good sooth to the inventor of those mysterious pills which gave that fire to his glance, to his whole being that energy so vibrating and extraordinary.
“My dear duke, permit me to——”
Monpavon, with solemn air and a great sense of his own importance, endeavoured to effect the presentation so long looked forward to; but his excellency, preoccupied, seemed not to hear, continued his progress towards the large drawing-room, borne along by one of those electric currents that break the social monotony. On his passage, and while he greeted the handsome Mme. Jenkins, the ladies bent forward a little with seductive airs, a soft laugh, concerned to please. But he noticed only one among them, Felicia, on her feet in the centre of a group of men, discussing some question as though she were in her studio, and watching the duke come towards her, while tranquilly taking her sherbet. She greeted him with perfect naturalness. Those near had discreetly retired to a little distance. There seemed to exist between them, however, notwithstanding what de Gery had overheard with regard to their presumed relations, nothing more than a quite intellectual intimacy, a playful familiarity.
“I called at your house, mademoiselle, on my way to the Bois.”
“I was informed of it. You even went into the studio.”
“And I saw the famous group—my group.”
“Well?”
“It is very fine. The hound runs as though he were mad. The fox scampers away admirably. Only I did not quite understand. You had told me that it was our own story, yours and mine.”
“Ah, there! Try. It is an apologue that I read in—You do not read Rabelais, M. le Duc?”
“My faith, no. He is too coarse.”
“Ah, well, his works were the text-book of my first reading lessons. Very badly brought up, you know. Oh, exceedingly badly. My apologue, then, is taken from Rabelais. Here it is: Bacchus created a wonderful fox, impossible to capture. Vulcan, on the other hand, gave a dog of his own creation the power to catch every animal that he should pursue. ‘Now,’ as my author has it, ‘it happened that the two met.’ You see what a wild and interminable chase. It seems to me, my dear duke, that destiny has in the same way brought us together, endowed with conflicting attributes; you who have received from the gods the gift of reaching all hearts, I whose heart will never be made prisoner.”
She spoke these words, looking him full in the face, almost laughing, but sheathed and erect in the white tunic which seemed to defend her person against the liberties of his thought. He, the conqueror, the irresistible, had never before met one of this audacious and headstrong breed. He brought to bear upon her, therefore, all the magnetic currents of his seductiveness, while around them the rising murmur of the fete, the soft laughter, the rustle of satins and the rattling of pearls formed the accompaniment to this duet of mundane passion and juvenile irony. He resumed after a minute’s pause:
“But how did the gods escape from that awkward situation?”
“By turning the two runners into stone.”
“Upon my word,” said he, “that is a solution which I do not at all accept. I defy the gods ever to petrify my heart.”
A fiery gleam shot for a moment from his eyes, extinguished immediately by the thought that people were observing them.
In effect, people were observing them intently, but no one with so much curiosity as Jenkins, who wandered round them a little way off, impatient and fidgety, as though he were annoyed with Felicia for taking private possession of the important personage of the assembly. The young girl laughingly called the duke’s attention to it.
“People will say that I am monopolizing you.”
She pointed out to him Monpavon waiting, standing near the Nabob who, from afar, was gazing at his excellency with the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff. The Minister of State then remembered the object which had brought him. He bowed to the young girl and returned to Monpavon, who was able at last to present to him “his honourable friend, M. Bernard Jansoulet.” His excellency bowed slightly, the parvenu humbled himself lower than the earth, then they chatted for a moment.
A group curious to observe. Jansoulet, tall, strong, with an air of the people about him, a sunburned skin, his broad back arched as though made round for ever by the low bowings of Oriental courtiery, his big, short hands splitting his light gloves, his excessive gestures, his southern exuberance chopping up his words like a puncher. The other, a high-bred gentleman, a man of the world, elegance itself, easy in his least gestures, though these, however, were extremely rare, carelessly letting fall unfinished sentences, relieving by a half smile the gravity of his face, concealing beneath an imperturbable politeness the deep contempt which he had for man and woman; and it was in that contempt that his strength lay. In an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob’s millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force, and to realize this, it was sufficient to observe the great contractor wriggling amiably before the great gentleman and casting under his feet, like the courtier’s cloak of ermine, the dense vanity of a newly rich man.
From the corner in which he had ensconced himself, de Gery was watching the scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to this introduction, when the same chance which all through the evening had so cruelly been giving the lie to the native simplicity of his inexperience, caused him to distinguish a short dialogue near him, amid that buzz of many conversations through which each hears just the word that interests him.
“It is indeed the least that Monpavon can do, to enable him to make a few good acquaintances. He has introduced him to so many bad ones. You know that he has just put Paganetti and all his gang on his shoulders.”
“Poor fellow! But they will devour him.”
“Bah! It is only fair that he should be made to disgorge a little. He has been such a thief himself away yonder among the Turks.”
“Really, do you believe that is so?”
“Do I believe it? I am in possession of very precise details on the point which I have from Baron Hemerlingue, the banker, who effected the last Tunisian loan. He knows some stories about the Nabob, he does. Just imagine.”
And the infamous gossip commenced. For fifteen years Jansoulet had exploited the former Bey in a scandalous fashion. Names of purveyors were cited and tricks wonderful in their assurance, their effrontery; for instance, the story of a musical frigate, yes, a veritable musical box, like a dining-room picture, which he had bought for two hundred thousand francs and sold again for ten millions; the cost price of a throne sold at three millions for which the account could be seen in the books of an upholsterer of the Faubourg Saint-Honore did not exceed a hundred thousand francs; and the funniest part of it was that, the Bey having changed his mind, the royal seat, fallen into disgrace before it had even been unpacked, remained still nailed in its packing-case at the custom-house in Tripoli.
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