The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol. Locke William John
was there that I made her acquaintance,” he resumed, after having lit the cigarette from my pipe. “We met, we talked, we fixed it up. She is not the woman to go by four roads to a thing. She did me the honour of going straight for me. Ah, but what a wonderful woman! She rules that café like a kingdom; a Semiramis, a Queen Elizabeth, a Catherine de’ Medici. She sits enthroned behind the counter all day long and takes the money and counts the saucers and smiles on rich clients, and if a waiter in a far corner gives a bit of sugar to a dog she spots it, and the waiter has a deuce of a time. That woman is worth her weight in thousand-franc notes. She goes to bed every night at one, and gets up in the morning at five. And virtuous! Didn’t Solomon say that a virtuous woman was more precious than rubies? That’s the kind of wife the wise man chooses when he gives up the giddy ways of youth. Ah, my dear sir, over and over again these last two or three days my dear old parents – I have been on a visit to them in Aigues-Mortes – have commended my wisdom. Amélie, who is devoted to me, left her café in Carcassonne to make their acquaintance and receive their blessing before our marriage, also to show them the lace on her dessous and her new silk dress. They are too old to take the long journey to Carcassonne. ‘My son,’ they said, ‘you are making a marriage after our own hearts. We are proud of you. Now we can die perfectly content.’ I was wrong, perhaps, in saying that Amélie has no sentiment,” he continued, after a short pause. “She adores me. It is evident. She will not allow me out of her sight. Ah, my dear friend, you don’t know what a happy man I am.”
For a brilliant young man of five-and-thirty, who was about to marry a horrible Megæra ten or twelve years his senior, he looked unhealthily happy. There was no doubt that his handsome roguery had caught the woman’s fancy. She was at the dangerous age, when even the most ferro-concrete-natured of women are apt to run riot. She was comprehensible, and pardonable. But the man baffled me. He was obviously marrying her for her money; but how in the name of Diogenes and all the cynics could he manage to look so confoundedly joyful about it?
The mistral blew bitterly. I snuggled beneath the rug and hunched up my shoulders so as to get my ears protected by my coat-collar. Aristide, sufficiently protected by his goat’s hide, talked like a shepherd on a May morning. Why he took for granted my interest in his unromantic, not to say sordid, courtship I knew not; but he gave me the whole history of it from its modest beginnings to its now penultimate stage. From what I could make out – for the mistral whirled many of his words away over unheeding Provence – he had entered the Café de l’Univers one evening, a human derelict battered by buffeting waves of Fortune, and, finding a seat immediately beneath Mme. Gougasse’s comptoir, had straightway poured his grievances into a feminine ear and, figuratively speaking, rested his weary heart upon a feminine bosom. And his buffetings and grievances and wearinesses? Whence came they? I asked the question point-blank.
had straightway poured his grievances into a feminine ear
“Ah, my dear friend,” he answered, kissing his gloved finger-tips, “she was adorable!”
“Who?” I asked, taken aback. “Mme. Gougasse?”
“Mon Dieu, no!” he replied. “Not Mme. Gougasse. Amélie is solid, she is virtuous, she is jealous, she is capacious; but I should not call her adorable. No; the adorable one was twenty – delicious and English; a peach-blossom, a zephyr, a summer night’s dream, and the most provoking little witch you ever saw in your life. Her father and herself and six of her compatriots were touring through France. They had circular tickets. So had I. In fact, I was a miniature Thomas Cook and Son to the party. I provided them with the discomforts of travel and supplied erroneous information. Que voulez-vous? If people ask you for the history of a pair of Louis XV. corsets, in a museum glass case, it’s much better to stimulate their imagination by saying that they were worn by Joan of Arc at the Battle of Agincourt than to dull their minds by your ignorance. Eh bien, we go through the châteaux of the Loire, through Poitiers and Angoulême, and we come to Carcassonne. You know Carcassonne? The great grim cité, with its battlements and bastions and barbicans and fifty towers on the hill looking over the rubbishy modern town? We were there. The rest of the party were buying picture postcards of the gardien at the foot of the Tour de l’Inquisition. The man who invented picture postcards ought to have his statue on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The millions of headaches he has saved! People go to places now not to exhaust themselves by seeing them, but to buy picture postcards of them. The rest of the party, as I said, were deep in picture postcards. Mademoiselle and I promenaded outside. We often promenaded outside when the others were buying picture postcards,” he remarked, with an extra twinkle in his bright eyes. “And the result? Was it my fault? We leaned over the parapet. The wind blew a confounded mèche– what do you call it – ?”
“Strand?”
“Yes – strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed and did not move. Didn’t I say she was a little witch? If there’s a Provençal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party, including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while I betook my broken heart to the Café de l’Univers.”
“And there you found consolation?”
“I told my sad tale. Amélie listened and called the manager to take charge of the comptoir, and poured herself out a glass of Frontignan. Amélie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night – and Carcassonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human tears – and the Café de l’Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise stuck in the midst of it.”
“And so that’s how it happened?”
“That’s how it happened. Ma foi! When a lady asks a galant homme to marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Café de l’Univers was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I’m afraid you English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage. Now, we in France – Attendez, attendez!” He suddenly broke off his story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat.
“To the right, man, to the right!” he cried excitedly to McKeogh.
We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nîmes. Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left fork.
“To the right!” shouted Aristide.
McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry. I intervened with a laugh.
“You’re wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier.”
“But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier than you do!” he cried. “Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire to visit. You want to go to Nîmes, and so do I. To the right, chauffeur.”
“What shall I do, sir?” asked McKeogh.
I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad, pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan in a hard felt hat.
“You don’t want to go to Montpellier?” I asked, stupidly.
“No – ten thousand times no; not for a king’s ransom.”
“But your four thousand francs – your meeting Mme. Gougasse’s train – your getting on to Carcassonne?”
“If I could put twenty million continents between myself and Carcassonne I’d do it,” he explained, with frantic gestures. “Don’t you understand? The good Lord who is always on my side sent you especially to deliver me out of the hands of that unspeakable Xantippe. There are no four thousand francs. I’m not going to meet her train at Montpellier, and if she marries anyone