The Immortal. Alphonse Daudet
Academician in his deep and resonant bass.
‘No, Meuchieu Achtier. It is the young gentleman.’
On Wednesday mornings the polisher opened the door, because Corentine was dressing her mistress.
‘How’s The Master?’ cried Paul Astier, hurrying by to his mother’s room. The Academician did not answer. His son’s habit of using ironically a title generally bestowed upon him as a compliment was always offensive to him.
‘M. Fage is to be shown up as soon as he comes,’ he said, not addressing himself directly to the polisher.
‘Yes, Meuchieu Achtier.’ And the bang-bang-bang began again.
‘Good morning, mamma.’
‘Why, it’s Paul! Come in. Mind the folds, Corentine.’
Madame Astier was putting on a skirt before the looking-glass. She was tall, slender, and still good-looking in spite of her worn features and her too delicate skin. She did not move, but held out to him a cheek with a velvet surface of powder. He touched it with his fair pointed beard. The son was as little demonstrative as the mother.
‘Will M. Paul stay to breakfast?’ asked Corentine. She was a stout countrywoman of an oily complexion, pitted with smallpox. She was sitting on the carpet like a shepherdess in the fields, and was about to repair, at the hem of the skirt, her mistress’s old black dress. Her tone and her attitude showed the objectionable familiarity of the under-paid maid-of-all-work.
No, Paul would not stay to breakfast. He was expected elsewhere. He had his buggy below; he had only come to say a word to his mother.
‘Your new English cart? Let me look,’ said Madame Astier. She went to the open window, and parted the Venetian blinds, on which the bright May sunlight lay in stripes, just far enough to see the neat little vehicle, shining with new leather and polished pinewood, and the servant in spotless livery standing at the horse’s head.
‘Oh, ma’am, how beautiful!’ murmured Coren-tine, who was also at the window. ‘How nice M. Paul must look in it!’
The mother’s face shone. But windows were opening opposite, and people were stopping before the equipage, which was creating quite a sensation at this end of the Rue de Beaune. Madame Astier sent away the servant, seated herself on the edge of a folding-chair, and finished mending her skirt for herself, while she waited for what her son had to say to her, not without a suspicion what it would be, though her attention seemed to be absorbed in her sewing. Paul Astier was equally silent. He leaned back in an arm-chair and played with an ivory fan, an old thing which he had known for his mother’s ever since he was born. Seen thus, the likeness between them was striking; the same Creole skin, pink over a delicate duskiness, the same supple figure, the same impenetrable grey eye, and in both faces a slight defect hardly to be noticed; the finely-cut nose was a little out of line, giving an expression of slyness, of something not to be trusted. While each watched and waited for the other, the pause was filled by the distant brushing of Teyssèdre.
‘Rather good, that,’ said Paul.
His mother looked up. ‘What is rather good?’
He raised the fan and pointed, like an artist, at the bare arms and the line of the falling shoulders under the fine cambric bodice. She began to laugh.
‘Yes, but look here.’ She pointed to her long neck, where the fine wrinkles marked her age. ‘But after all,’ … you have the good looks, so what does it matter? Such was her thought, but she did not express it. A brilliant talker, perfectly trained in the fibs and commonplaces of society, a perfect adept in expression and suggestion, she was left without words for the only real feeling which she had ever experienced. And indeed she really was not one of those women who cannot make up their minds to grow old. Long before the hour of curfew—though indeed there had perhaps never been much fire in her to put out—all her coquetry, all her feminine eagerness to captivate and charm, all her aspirations towards fame or fashion or social success had been transferred to the account of her son, this tall, good-looking young fellow in the correct attire of the modern artist, with his slight beard and close-cut hair, who showed in mien and bearing that soldierly grace which our young men of the day get from their service as volunteers.
‘Is your first floor let?’ asked the mother at last.
‘Let! let! Not a sign of it! All the bills and advertisements no go! “I don’t know what is the matter with them; but they don’t come,” as Védrine said at his private exhibition.’
He laughed quietly, at an inward vision of Védrine among his enamels and his sculptures, calm, proud, and self-assured, wondering without anger at the non-appearance of the public. But Madame Astier did not laugh. That splendid first floor empty for the last two years! In the Rue Fortuny! A magnificent situation—a house in the style of Louis XII.—a house built by her son! Why, what did people want? The same people, doubtless, who did not go to Védrine. Biting off the thread with which she had been sewing, she said:
‘And it is worth taking, too!’
‘Quite; but it would want money to keep it up.’
The people at the Crédit Foncier would not be satisfied. And the contractors were upon him—four hundred pounds for carpenter’s work due at the end of the month, and he hadn’t a penny of it.
The mother, who was putting on the bodice of her dress before the looking-glass, grew pale and saw that she did so. It was the shiver that you feel in a duel, when your adversary raises his pistol to take aim.
‘You have had the money for the restorations at Mousseaux?’
‘Mousseaux! Long ago.’
‘And the Rosen tomb?’
‘Can’t get on. Védrine still at his statue.’
‘Yes, and why must you have Védrine? Your father warned you against him.’
‘Oh, I know. They can’t bear him at the Institute.’
He rose and walked about the room.
‘You know me, come. I am a practical man. If I took him and not some one else to do my statue, you may suppose that I had a reason.’ Then suddenly, turning to his mother:
‘You could not let me have four hundred pounds, I suppose?’ She had been waiting for this ever since he came in; he never came to see her for anything else.
‘Four hundred pounds? How can you think——’ She said no more; but the pained expression of her mouth and eyes said clearly enough:
‘You know that I have given you everything—that I am dressed in clothes fit for the rag-bag—that I have not bought a bonnet for three years—that Corentine washes my linen in the kitchen because I should blush to give such rubbish to the laundress; and you know also that my worst misery is to refuse what you ask. Then why do you ask?’ And this mute address of his mother’s was so eloquent that Paul Astier answered it aloud:
‘Of course I was not thinking of your having it yourself. By Jove, if you had, it would be the better for me. But,’ he continued, in his cool, off hand way, ‘there is The Master up there. Could you get it from him? You might. You know how to get hold of him.’
‘That is over. There is an end of that.’
‘Well, but, you know, he works; his books sell; you spend nothing.’
He looked round in the subdued light at the reduced state of the old furniture, the worn curtains, the threadbare carpet, nothing of later date than their marriage thirty years ago. Where was it then that all the money went?
‘I say,’ he began again, ‘I wonder whether my venerable sire is in the habit of taking his fling?’
It was an idea so monstrous, so inconceivable, that of Léonard Astier-Réhu ‘taking his fling,’ that his wife could not help smiling in spite of herself. No,