Books: Cosmopolis, v1
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Paul Bourget >> Cosmopolis, v1
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Montfanon had listened to the discourse with an inpenetrable air. In the
religious solitude in which he was awaiting the end, as he said, nothing
afforded him greater pleasure than the discussion of ideas. But he was
inspired by the enthusiasm of a man who feels with extreme ardor, and
when he was met by the partly ironical dilettanteism of Dorsenne he was
almost pained by it, so much the more so as the author and he had some
common theories, notably an extreme fancy for heredity and race. A sort
of discontented grimace distorted his expressive face. He clicked his
tongue in ill-humor, and said:
"One more question!.... And the result of all that, the object? To what
end does all this observation lead you?"
"To what should it lead me? To comprehend, as I have told you," replied
Dorsenne.
"And then?"
"There is no then," answered the young man, "one debauchery is like
another."
"But among the people whom you see living thus," said Montfanon, after a
pause, "there are some surely whom you like and whom you dislike, for
whom you entertain esteem and for whom you feel contempt? Have you not
thought that you have some duties toward them, that you can aid them in
leading better lives?"
"That," said Dorsenne, "is another subject which we will treat of some
other day, for I am afraid now of being late.... Adieu."
"Adieu," said the Marquis, with evident regret at parting. Then,
brusquely: "I do not know why I like you so much, for in the main you
incarnate one of those vices of mind which inspire me with the most
horror, that dilettanteism set in vogue by the disciples of Monsieur
Renan, and which is the very foundation of the decline. You will recover
from it, I hope. You are so young!" Then becoming again jovial and
mocking: "May you enjoy yourself in your descent of Courtille; I almost
forgot that I had a message to give to you for one of the supernumeraries
of your troop. Will you tell Gorka that I have dislodged the book for
which he asked me before his departure?"
"Gorka," replied Julien, "has been in Poland three months on family
business. I just told you how that trip cost him his mistress."
"What," said Montfanon, "in Poland? I saw him this morning as plainly as
I see you. He passed the Fountain du Triton in a cab. If I had not been
in such haste to reach Ribalta's in time to save the Montluc, I could
have stopped him, but we were both in too great a hurry."
"You are sure that Gorka is in Rome--Boleslas Gorka?" insisted Dorsenne.
"What is there surprising in that?" said Montfanon. "It is quite
natural that he should not wish to remain away long from a city where he
has left a wife and a mistress. I suppose your Slav and your Anglo-Saxon
have no prejudices, and that they share their Venetian with a
dilettanteism quite modern. It is cosmopolitan, indeed.... Well, once
more, adieu.... Deliver my message to him if you see him, and," his face
again expressed a childish malice, "do not fail to tell Mademoiselle
Hafner that her father's daughter will never, never have this volume.
It is not for intriguers!" And, laughing like a mischievous schoolboy,
he pressed the book more tightly under his arm, repeating: "She shall not
have it. Listen.... And tell her plainly. She shall not have it!"
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF A DRAMA
"There is an intelligent man, who never questions his ideas, " said
Dorsenne to himself, when the Marquis had left him. "He is like the
Socialists. What vigor of mind in that old wornout machine!" And for a
brief moment he watched, with a glance in which there was at least as
much admiration as pity, the Marquis, who was disappearing down the Rue
de la Propagande, and who walked at the rapid pace characteristic of
monomaniacs. They follow their thoughts instead of heeding objects.
However, the care he exercised in avoiding the sun's line for the shade
attested the instincts of an old Roman, who knew the danger of the first
rays of spring beneath that blue sky. For a moment Montfanon paused to
give alms to one of the numerous mendicants who abound in the
neighborhood of the Place d'Espagne, meritorious in him, for with his one
arm and burdened with the prayer-book it required a veritable effort to
search in his pocket. Dorsenne was well enough acquainted with that
original personage to know that he had never been able to say "no" to any
one who asked charity, great or small, of him. Thanks to that system,
the enemy of beautiful Fanny Hafner was always short of cash with forty
thousand francs' income and leading a simple existence. The costly
purchase of the relic of Montluc proved that the antipathy conceived for
Baron Justus's charming daughter had become a species of passion. Under
any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted in such cases, would
not have failed to meditate ironically on that feeling, easy enough of
explanation. There was much more irrational instinct in it than
Montfanon himself suspected. The old leaguer would not have been logical
if he had not had in point of race an inquisition partiality, and the
mere suspicion of Jewish origin should have prejudiced him against Fanny.
But he was just, as Dorsenne had told him, and if the young girl had been
an avowed Jewess, living up zealously to her religion, he would have
respected but have avoided her, and he never would have spoken of her
with such bitterness.
The true motive of his antipathy was that he loved Cardinal Guerillot,
as was his habit in all things, with passion and with jealousy, and he
could not forgive Mademoiselle Hafner for having formed an intimacy with
the holy prelate in spite of him, Montfanon, who had vainly warned the
old Bishop de Clermont against her whom he considered the most wily of
intriguers. For months vainly did she furnish proofs of her sincerity of
heart, the Cardinal reporting them in due season to the Marquis, who
persisted in discrediting them, and each fresh good deed of his enemy
augmented his hatred by aggravating the uneasiness which was caused him,
notwithstanding all, by a vague sense of his iniquity.
But Dorsenne no sooner turned toward the direction of the Palais Castagna
than he quickly forgot both Mademoiselle Hafner's and Montfanon's
prejudices, in thinking only of one sentence uttered by the latter that
which related to the return of Boleslas Gorka. The news was unexpected,
and it awakened in the writer such grave fears that he did not even
glance at the shop-window of the French bookseller at the corner of the
Corso to see if the label of the "Fortieth thousand" flamed upon the
yellow cover of his last book, the Eclogue Mondaine, brought out in the
autumn, with a success which his absence of six months from Paris, had,
however, detracted from. He did not even think of ascertaining if the
regimen he practised, in imitation of Lord Byron, against embonpoint,
would preserve his elegant form, of which he was so proud, and yet
mirrors were numerous on the way from the Place d'Espagne to the Palais
Castagna, which rears its sombre mass on the margin of the Tiber, at the
extremity of the Via Giulia, like a pendant of the Palais Sacchetti, the
masterwork of Sangallo. Dorsenne did not indulge in his usual pastime of
examining the souvenirs along the streets which met his eye, and yet he
passed in the twenty minutes which it took him to reach his rendezvous
a number of buildings teeming with centuries of historical reminiscences.
There was first of all the vast Palais Borghese--the piano of the
Borghese, as it has been called, from the form of a clavecin adopted by
the architect--a monument of splendor, which was, less than two years
later, to serve as the scene of a situation more melancholy than that of
the Palais Castagna.
Dorsenne had not an absent glance for the sumptuous building--he passed
unheeding the facade of St.-Louis, the object of Montfanon's admiration.
If the writer did not profess for that relic of ancient France the piety
of the Marquis, he never failed to enter there to pay his literary
respects to the tomb of Madame de Beaumont, to that 'quia non sunt' of
an epitaph which Chateaubriand inscribed upon her tombstone, with more
vanity, alas, than tenderness. For the first time Dorsenne forgot it;
he forgot also to gaze with delight upon the rococo fountain on the Place
Navonne, that square upon which Domitian had his circus, and which
recalls the cruel pageantries of imperial Rome. He forgot, too, the
mutilated statue which forms the angle of the Palais Braschi, two paces
farther--two paces still farther, the grand artery of the Corso Victor-
Emmanuel demonstrated the effort at regeneration of present Rome; two
paces farther yet, the Palais Farnese recalls the grandeur of modern art,
and the tragedy of contemporary monarchies. Does not the thought of
Michelangelo seem to be still imprinted on the sombre cross-beam of that
immense sarcophagus, which was the refuge of the last King of Naples?
But it requires a mind entirely free to give one's self up to the charm
of historical dilettanteism which cities built upon the past conjure up,
and although Julien prided himself, not without reason, on being above
emotion, he was not possessed of his usual independence of mind during
the walk which took him to his "human mosaic," as he picturesquely
expressed it, and he pondered and repondered the following questions:
"Boleslas Gorka returned? And two days ago I saw his wife, who did not
expect him until next month. Montfanon is not, however, imaginative.
Boleslas Gorka returned? At the moment when Madame Steno is mad over
Maitland--for she is mad! The night before last, at her house at dinner,
she looked at him--it was scandalous. Gorka had a presentiment of it
this winter. When the American attempted to take Alba's portrait the
first time, the Pole put a stop to it. It was fine for Montfanon to talk
of division between these two men. When Boleslas left here, Maitland and
the Countess were barely acquainted and now---- If he has returned it is
because he has discovered that he has a rival. Some one has warned him--
an enemy of the Countess, a confrere of Maitland. Such pieces of infamy
occur among good friends. If Gorka, who is a shot like Casal, kills
Maitland in a duel, it will make one deceiver less. If he avenges
himself upon his mistress for that treason, it would be a matter of
indifference to me, for Catherine Steno is a great rogue.... But my
little friend, my poor, charming Alba, what would become of her if there
should be a scandal, bloodshed, perhaps, on account of her mother's
folly? Gorka returned? And he did not write it to me, to me who have
received several letters from him since he went away; to me, whom he
selected last autumn as the confidant of his jealousies, under the
pretext that I knew women, and, with the vain hope of inspiring me....
His silence and return no longer seem like a romance; they savor rather
of a drama, and with a Slav, as much a Slav as he is, one may expect
anything. I know not what to think of it, for he will be at the Palais
Castagna. Poor, charming Alba!"
The monologue did not differ much from a monologue uttered under similar
circumstances by any young man interested in a young girl whose mother
does not conduct herself becomingly. It was a touching situation, but a
very common one, and there was no necessity for the author to come to
Rome to study it, one entire winter and spring. If that interest went
beyond a study, Dorsenne possessed a very simple means of preventing his
little friend, as he said, from being rendered unhappy by the conduct of
that mother whom age did not conquer. Why not propose for her hand?
He had inherited a fortune, and his success as an author had augmented
it. For, since the first book which had established his reputation, the
'Etudes de Femmes,' published in 1879, not a single one of the fifteen
novels or selections from novels had remained unnoticed. His personal
celebrity could, strictly speaking, combine with it family celebrity,
for he boasted that his grandfather was a cousin of that brave General
Dorsenne whom Napoleon could only replace at the head of his guard by
Friant. All can be told in a word. Although the heirs of the hero of
the Empire had never recognized the relationship, Julien believed in it,
and when he said, in reply to compliments on his books, "At my age my
grand-uncle, the Colonel of the Guard, did greater things," he was
sincere in his belief. But it was unnecessary to mention it, for,
situated as he was, Countess Steno would gladly have accepted him as a
son-in-law. As for gaining the love of the young girl, with his handsome
face, intelligent and refined, and his elegant form, which he had
retained intact in spite of his thirty-seven years, he might have done
so. Nothing, however, was farther from his thoughts than such a project,
for, as he ascended the steps of the staircase of the palace formerly
occupied by Urban VII, he continued, in very different terms, his
monologue, a species of involuntary "copy" which is written instinctively
in the brain of the man of letters when he is particularly fond of
literature.
At times it assumes a written form, and it is the most marked of
professional distortions, the most unintelligible to the illiterate,
who think waveringly and who do not, happily for them, suffer the
continual servitude to precision of word and to too conscientious
thought.
"Yes; poor, charming Alba!" he repeated to himself. "How unfortunate
that the marriage with Countess Gorka's brother could not have been
arranged four months ago. Connection with the family of her mother's
lover would be tolerably immoral! But she would at least have had less
chance of ever knowing it; and the convenient combination by which the
mother has caused her to form a friendship with that wife in order the
better to blind the two, would have bordered a little more on propriety.
To-day Alba would be Lady Ardrahan, leading a prosaic English life,
instead of being united to some imbecile whom they will find for her here
or elsewhere. She will then deceive him as her mother deceived the late
Steno--with me, perhaps, in remembrance of our pure intimacy of to-day.
That would be too sad! Do not let us think of it! It is the future,
of the existence of which we are ignorant, while we do know that the
present exists and that it has all rights. I owe to the Contessina my
best impressions of Rome, to the vision of her loveliness in this scene
of so grand a past. And this is a sensation which is enjoyable; to visit
the Palais Castagna with the adorable creature upon whom rests the menace
of a drama. To enjoy the Countess Steno's kindness, otherwise the house
would not have that tone and I would never have obtained the little one's
friendship. To rejoice that Ardea is a fool, that he has lost his
fortune on the Bourse, and that the syndicate of his creditors, presided
over by Monsieur Ancona, has laid hands upon his palace. For, otherwise,
I should not have ascended the steps of this papal staircase, nor have
seen this debris of Grecian sarcophagi fitted into the walls, and this
garden of so intense a green. As for Gorka, he may have returned for
thirty-six other reasons than jealousy, and Montfanon is right: Caterina
is cunning enough to inveigle both the painter and him. She will make
Maitland believe that she received Gorka for the sake of Madame Gorka,
and to prevent him from ruining that excellent woman at gaming. She will
tell Boleslas that there was nothing more between her and Maitland than
Platonic discussions on the merits of Raphael and Perugino.... And I
should be more of a dupe than the other two for missing the visit.
It is not every day that one has a chance to see auctioned, like a simple
Bohemian, the grand-nephew of a pope."
The second suite of reflections resembled more than the first the real
Dorsenne, who was often incomprehensible even to his best friends. The
young man with the large, black eyes, the face with delicate features,
the olive complexion of a Spanish monk, had never had but one passion,
too exceptional not to baffle the ordinary observer, and developed in a
sense so singular that to the most charitable it assumed either an
attitude almost outrageous or else that of an abominable egotism and
profound corruption.
Dorsenne had spoken truly, he loved to comprehend--to comprehend as the
gamester loves to game, the miser to accumulate money, the ambitious to
obtain position--there was within him that appetite, that taste, that
mania for ideas which makes the scholar and the philosopher. But a
philosopher united by a caprice of nature to an artist, and by that of
fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller. The abstract
speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor
would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates to
amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the man-of-
pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice. He invented for
himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a compromise between
his contradictory tendencies, which he formulated in a fashion slightly
pedantic, when he said that his sole aim was to "intellectualize the
forcible sensations;" in clearer terms, he dreamed of meeting with, in
human life, the greatest number of impressions it could give and to think
of them after having met them.
He thought, with or without reason, to discover in his two favorite
writers, Goethe and Stendhal, a constant application of a similar
principle. His studies had, for the past fourteen years when he had
begun to live and to write, passed through the most varied spheres
possible to him. But he had passed through them, lending his presence
without giving himself to them, with this idea always present in his
mind: that he existed to become familiar with other customs, to watch
other characters, to clothe other personages and the sensations which
vibrated within them. The period of his revival was marked by the
achievement of each one of his books which he composed then, persuaded
that, once written and construed, a sentimental or social experience was
not worth the trouble of being dwelt upon. Thus is explained the
incoherence of custom and the atmospheric contact, if one may so express
it, which are the characteristics of his work. Take, for example, his
first collection of novels, the 'Etudes de Femmes,' which made him
famous. They are about a sentimental woman who loved unwisely, and who
spent hours from excess of the romantic studying the avowed or disguised
demi-monde. By the side of that, 'Sans Dieu,' the story of a drama of
scientific consciousness, attests a continuous frequenting of the Museum,
the Sorbonne and the College of France, while 'Monsieur de Premier'
presents one of the most striking pictures of the contemporary political
world, which could only have been traced by a familiar of the Palais
Bourbon.
On the other hand, the three books of travel pretentiously named
'Tourisime,' 'Les Profils d'Etrangeres' and the 'Eclogue Mondaine,' which
fluctuated between Florence and London, St.-Moritz and Bayreuth, revealed
long sojourns out of France; a clever analysis of the Italian, English,
and German worlds; a superficial but true knowledge of the languages, the
history and literature, which in no way accords with 'l'odor di femina',
exhale from every page. These contrasts are brought out by a mind
endowed with strangely complex qualities, dominated by a firm will and,
it must be said, a very mediocre sensibility. The last point will appear
irreconcilable with the extreme and almost morbid delicacy of certain of
Dorsenne's works. It is thus however. He had very little heart. But,
on the other hand, he had an abundance of nerves and nerves, and their
irritability suffice for him who desires to paint human passions, above
all, love, with its joys and its sorrows, of which one does not speak to
a certain extent when one experiences them. Success had come to Julien
too early not to have afforded him occasion for several adventures.
In each of the centres traversed in the course of his sentimental
vagabondage he tried to find a woman in whom was embodied all the
scattered charms of the district. He had formed innumerable intimacies.
Some had been frankly affectionate. The majority were Platonic. Others
had consisted of the simple coquetry of friendship, as was the case with
Mademoiselle Steno. The young man had never employed more vanity than
enthusiasm. Every woman, mistress or friend, had been to him, nine times
out of ten, a curiosity, then a model. But, as he held that the model
could not be recognized by any exterior sign, he did not think that he
was wrong in making use of his prestige as a writer, for what he called
his "culture." He was capable of justice, the defense which he made of
Fanny Hafner to Montfanon proved it; of admiration, his respect for the
noble qualities of that same Montfanon testify to it; of compassion, for
without it he would not have apprehended at once with so much sympathy
the result which the return of Count Gorka would have on the destiny of
innocent Alba Steno.
On reaching the staircase of the Palais Castagna, instead of hastening,
as was natural, to find out at least what meant the return to Rome of the
lover whom Madame Steno deceived, he collected his startled sensibilities
before meeting Alba, and, pausing, he scribbled in a note-book which he
drew from his pocket, with a pencil always within reach of his fingers,
in a firm hand, precise and clear, this note savoring somewhat of
sentimentalism:
"25 April, '90. Palais Castagna.--Marvellous staircase constructed by
Balthazar Peruzzi; so broad and long, with double rows of stairs, like
those of Santa Colomba, near Siena. Enjoyed above all the sight of an
interior garden so arranged, so designed that the red flowers, the
regularity of the green shrubs, the neat lines of the graveled walks
resemble the features of a face. The idea of the Latin garden, opposed
to the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon, the latter respecting the irregularity of
nature, the other all in order, humanizing and administering even to the
flower-garden."
"Subject the complexity of life to a thought harmonious and clear, a
constant mark of the Latin genus, for a group of trees as well as an
entire nation, an entire religion--Catholicism. It is the contrary in
the races of the North. Significance of the word: the forests have
taught man liberty."
He had hardly finished writing that oddly interpreted memorandum, and was
closing his note-book, when the sound of a familiar voice caused him to
turn suddenly. He had not heard ascend the stairs a personage who waited
until he finished writing, and who was no other than one of the actors in
his "troupe" to use his expression, one of the persons of the party of
that morning organized the day before at Madame Steno's, and just the one
whom the intolerable marquis had defamed with so much ardor, the father
of beautiful Fanny Hafner, Baron Justus himself. The renowned founder of
the 'Credit Austro-Dalmate' was a small, thin man, with blue eyes of an
acuteness almost insupportable, in a face of neutral color. His ever-
courteous manner, his attire, simple and neat, his speech serious and
discreet, gave to him that species of distinction so common to old
diplomatists. But the dangerous adventurer was betrayed by the glance
which Hafner could not succeed in veiling with indifferent amiability.
The man-of-the-world, which he prided himself upon having become, was
visible through all by certain indefinable trifles, and above all by
those eyes, of a restlessness so singular in so wealthy a man, indicating
an enigmatical and obscure past of dark and contrasting struggles,
of covetous sharpness, of cold calculation and indomitable energy.
Fanatical Montfanon, who abused the daughter with such unjustness, judged
the father justly. The son of a Jew of Berlin and of a Dutch Protestant,
Justus Hafner was inscribed on the civil state registers as belonging to
his mother's faith. But the latter died when Justus was very young,
and he was not reared in any other liturgy than that of money. From his
father, a persevering and skilful jeweller, but too prudent to risk or
gain much, he learned the business of precious stones, to which he added
that of laces, paintings, old materials, tapestries, rare furniture.
An infallible eye, the patience of a German united with his Israelitish
and Dutch extraction, soon amassed for him a small capital, which his
father's bequest augmented. At twenty-seven Justus had not less than
five hundred thousand marks. Two imprudent operations on the Bourse,
enterprises to force fortune and to obtain the first million, ruined the
too-audacious courtier, who began again the building up of his fortune by
becoming a diamond broker.
He went to Paris, and there, in a wretched little room on the Rue
Montmartre, in three years, he made his second capital. He then managed
it so well that in 1870, at the time of the war, he had made good his
losses. The armistice found him in England, where he had married the
daughter of a Viennese agent, in London, for the purpose of starting a
vast enterprise of revictualing the belligerent armies. The enormous
profits made by the father-in-law and the son-in-law during that year
determined them to found a banking-house which should have its principal
seat in Vienna and a branch in Berlin. Justus Hafner, a passionate
admirer of Herr von Bismarck, controlled, besides, a newspaper. He tried
to gain the favor of the great statesman, who refused to aid the former
diamond merchant in gratifying political ambitions cherished from an
early age.
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