Books: Cosmopolis, v1
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Paul Bourget >> Cosmopolis, v1
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It was a bitter disappointment to the persevering man, who, having tried
his luck in Prussia, emigrated definitively to Vienna. The establishment
of the 'Credit Austro-Dalmate,' launched with extraordinary claims,
permitted him at length to realize at least one of his chimeras. His
wealth, while not equaling that of the mighty financiers of the epoch,
increased with a rapidity almost magical to a cipher high enough to
permit him, from 1879, to indulge in the luxurious life which can not be
led by any one with an income short of five hundred thousand francs.
Contrary to the custom of speculators of his genus, Hafner in time
invested his earnings safely. He provided against the coming demolition
of the structure so laboriously built up. The 'Credit Austro-Dalmate'
had suffered in great measure owing to innumerable public and private
disasters and scandals, such as the suicide and murder in the Schroeder
family.
Suits were begun against a number of the founders, among them Justus
Hafner. He was acquitted, but with such damage to his financial
integrity and in the face of such public indignation that he abandoned
Austria for Italy and Vienna for Rome. There, heedless of first rebuffs,
he undertook to realize the third great object of his life, the gaining
of social position. To the period of avidity had succeeded, as it
frequently does with those formidable handlers of money, the period of
vanity. Being now a widower, he aimed at his daughter's marriage with a
strength of will and a complication of combinations equal to his former
efforts, and that struggle for connection with high life was disguised
beneath the cloak of the most systematically adopted politeness of
deportment. How had he found the means, in the midst of struggles and
hardships, to refine himself so that the primitive broker and speculator
were almost unrecognizable in the baron of fifty-four, decorated with
several orders, installed in a magnificent palace, the father of a
charming daughter, and himself an agreeable conversationalist,
a courteous gentleman, an ardent sportsman? It is the secret of those
natures created for social conquest, like a Napoleon for war and a
Talleyrand for diplomacy. Dorsenne asked himself the question
frequently, and he could not solve it. Although he boasted of watching
the Baron with an intellectual curiosity, he could not restrain a shudder
of antipathy each time he met the eyes of the man.
And on this particular morning it was especially disagreeable to him that
those eyes had seen him making his unoffending notes, although there was
scarcely a shade of gentle condescension--that of a great lord who
patronizes a great artist--in the manner in which Hafner addressed him.
"Do not inconvenience yourself for me, dear sir," said he to Dorsenne.
"You work from nature, and you are right. I see that your next novel
will touch upon the ruin of our poor Prince d'Ardea. Do not be too hard
on him, nor on us."
The artist could not help coloring at that benign pleasantry. It was all
the more painful to him because it was at once true and untrue. How
should he explain the sort of literary alchemy, thanks to which he was
enabled to affirm that he never drew portraits, although not a line of
his fifteen volumes was traced without a living model? He replied,
therefore, with a touch of ill-humor:
"You are mistaken, my dear Baron. I do not make notes on persons."
"All authors say that," answered the Baron, shrugging his shoulders with
the assumed good-nature which so rarely forsook him, "and they are
right.... At any rate, it is fortunate that you had something to write,
for we shall both be late in arriving at a rendezvous where there are
ladies.... It is almost a quarter past eleven, and we should have been
there at eleven precisely.... But I have one excuse, I waited for my
daughter."
"And she has not come?" asked Dorsenne.
"No," replied Hafner, "at the last moment she could not make up her mind.
She had a slight annoyance this morning--I do not know what old book she
had set her heart on. Some rascal found out that she wanted it, and he
obtained it first.... But that is not the true cause of her absence.
The true cause is that she is too sensitive, and she finds it so sad that
there should be a sale of the possessions of this ancient family....
I did not insist. What would she have experienced had she known the late
Princess Nicoletta, Pepino's mother? When I came to Rome on a visit for
the first time, in '75, what a salon that was and what a Princess!....
She was a Condolmieri, of the family of Eugene IV."
"How absurd vanity renders the most refined man," thought Julien, suiting
his pace to the Baron's. "He would have me believe that he was received
at the house of that woman who was politically the blackest of the black,
the most difficult to please in the recruiting of her salon.... Life is
more complex than the Montfanons even know of! This girl feels by
instinct that which the chouan of a marquis feels by doctrine, the
absurdity of this striving after nobility, with a father who forgets the
broker and who talks of the popes of the Middle Ages as of a trinket!....
While we are alone, I must ask this old fox what he knows of Boleslas
Gorka's return. He is the confidant of Madame Steno. He should be
informed of the doings and whereabouts of the Pole."
The friendship of Baron Hafner for the Countess, whose financial adviser
he was, should have been for Dorsenne a reason for avoiding such a
subject, the more so as he was convinced of the man's dislike for him.
The Baron could, by a single word perfidiously repeated, injure him very
much with Alba's mother. But the novelist, similar on that point to the
majority of professional observers, had only the power of analysis of a
retrospective order. Never had his keen intelligence served him to avoid
one of those slight errors of conversation which are important mistakes
on the pitiful checker-board of life. Happily for him, he cherished no
ambition except for his pleasure and his art, without which he would have
found the means of making for himself, gratuitously, enough enemies to
clear all the academies.
He, therefore, chose the moment when the Baron arrived at the landing on
the first floor, pausing somewhat out of breath, and after the agent had
verified their passes, to say to his companion:
"Have you seen Gorka since his arrival?"
"What? Is Boleslas here?" asked Justus Hafner, who manifested his
astonishment in no other manner than by adding: "I thought he was still
in Poland."
"I have not seen him myself," said Dorsenne. He already regretted having
spoken too hastily. It is always more prudent not to spread the first
report. But the ignorance of that return of Countess Steno's best
friend, who saw her daily, struck the young man with such surprise that
he could not resist adding: "Some one, whose veracity I can not doubt,
met him this morning." Then, brusquely: "Does not this sudden return
make you fearful?"
"Fearful?" repeated the Baron. "Why so?" As he uttered those words he
glanced at the writer with his usual impassive expression, which,
however, a very slight sign, significant to those who knew him, belied.
In exchanging those few words the two men had passed into the first room
of "objects of art," having belonged to the apartment of "His Eminence
Prince d'Ardea," as the catalogue said, and the Baron did not raise the
gold glass which he held at the end of his nose when near the smallest
display of bric-a-brac, as was his custom. As he walked slowly through
the collection of busts and statues of that first room, called "Marbles"
on the catalogue, without glancing with the eye of a practised judge at
the Gobelin tapestry upon the walls, it must have been that he considered
as very grave the novelist's revelation. The latter had said too much
not to continue:
"Well, I who have not been connected with Madame Steno for years, like
you, trembled for her when that return was announced to me. She does not
know what Gorka is when he is jealous, or of what he is capable."
"Jealous? Of whom?" interrupted Hafner. "It is not the first time I
have heard the name of Boleslas uttered in connection with the Countess.
I confess I have never taken those words seriously, and I should not have
thought that you, a frequenter of her salon, one of her friends, would
hesitate on that subject. Rest assured, Gorka is in love with his
charming wife, and he could not make a better choice. Countess Caterina
is an excellent person, very Italian. She is interested in him, as in
you, as in Maitland, as in me; in you because you write such admirable
books, in Maitland because he paints like our best masters, in Boleslas
on account of the sorrow he had in the death of his first child, in me
because I have so delicate a charge. She is more than an excellent
person, she is a truly superior woman, very superior." He uttered his
hypocritical speech with such perfect ease that Dorsenne was surprised
and irritated. That Hafner did not believe one treacherous word of what
he said the novelist was sure, he who, from the indiscreet confidences of
Gorka, knew what to think of the Venetian's manner, and he; too,
understood the Baron's glance! At any other time he would have admired
the policy of the old stager. At that moment the novelist was vexed by
it, for it caused him to play a role, very common but not very elevating,
that of a calumniator, who has spoken ill of a woman with whom he dined
the day before. He, therefore, quickened his pace as much as politeness
would permit, in order not to remain tete-a-tete with the Baron, and also
to rejoin the persons of their party already arrived.
They emerged from the first room to enter a second, marked "Porcelain;"
then a third, "Frescoes of Perino del Vaga," on account of the ceiling
upon which the master painted a companion to his vigorous piece at Genoa-
-"Jupiter crushing the Giants"--and, lastly, into a fourth, called "The
Arazzi," from the wonderful panels with which it was decorated.
A few visitors were lounging there, for the season was somewhat advanced,
and the date which M. Ancona had chosen for the execution proved either
the calculation of profound hatred or else the adroit ruse of a syndicate
of retailers. All the magnificent objects in the palace were adjudged at
half the value they would have brought a few months sooner or later. The
small group of curios stood out in contrast to the profusion of
furniture, materials, objects of art of all kinds, which filled the vast
rooms. It was the residence of five hundred years of power and of
luxury, where masterpieces, worthy of the great Medicis, and executed in
their time, alternated with the gewgaws of the eighteenth century and
bronzes of the First Empire, with silver trinkets ordered but yesterday
in London. Baron Justus could not resist these. He raised his glass and
called Dorsenne to show him a curious armchair, the carving of a cartel,
the embroidery on some material. One glance sufficed for him to
judge.... If the novelist had been capable of observing, he would have
perceived in the detailed knowledge the banker had of the catalogue the
trace of a study too deep not to accord with some mysterious project.
"There are treasures here," said he. "See these two Chinese vases with
convex lids, with the orange ground decorated with gilding. Those are
pieces no longer made in China. It is a lost art. And this tete-a-tete
decorated with flowers; and this pluvial cope in this case. What a
marvel! It is as good as the one of Pius Second, which was at Pienza and
which has been stolen. I could have bought it at one time for fifteen
hundred francs. It is worth fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, all of
that. Here is some faience. It was brought from Spain when Cardinal
Castagna came from Madrid, when he took the place of Pius Fifth as
sponsor of Infanta Isabella. Ah, what treasures! But you go like the
wind," he added, "and perhaps it is better, for I would stop, and
Cavalier Fossati, the auctioneer, to whom those terrible creditors of
Peppino have given charge of the sale, has spies everywhere. You notice
an object, you are marked as a solid man, as they say in Germany. You
are noted. I shall be down on his list. I have been caught by him
enough. Ha! He is a very shrewd man! But come, I see the ladies. We
should have remembered that they were here," and smiling--but at whom?--
at Fossati, at himself or his companion?--he made the latter read the
notice hung on the door of a transversal room, which bore this
inscription: "Salon of marriage-chests."
There were, indeed, ranged along the walls about fifteen of those wooden
cases painted and carved, of those 'cassoni' in which it was the fashion,
in grand Italian families, to keep the trousseaux destined for the
brides. Those of the Castagnas proved, by their escutcheons, what
alliances the last of the grand-nephews of Urban VII, the actual Prince
d'Ardea, entered into. Three very elegant ladies were examining the
chests; in them Dorsenne recognized at once fair and delicate Alba Steno,
Madame Gorka, with her tall form, her fair hair, too, and her strong
English profile, and pretty Madame Maitland, with her olive complexion,
who did not seem to have inherited any more negro blood than just enough
to tint her delicate face. Florent Chapron, the painter's brother-in-
law, was the only man with those three ladies. Countess Steno and
Lincoln Maitland were not there, and one could hear the musical voice of
Alba spelling the heraldry carved on the coffers, formerly opened with
tender curiosity by young girls, laughing and dreaming by turns like her.
"Look, Maud," said she to Madame Gorka, "there is the oak of the Della
Rovere, and there the stars of the Altieri."
"And I have found the column of the Colonna," replied Maud Gorka.
"And you, Lydia?" said Mademoiselle Steno to Madame Maitland.
"And I, the bees of the Barberini."
"And I, the lilies of the Farnese, " said in his turn Florent Chapron,
who, having raised his head first, perceived the newcomers. He greeted
them with a pleasant smile, which was reflected in his eyes and which
showed his white teeth. "We no longer expected you, sirs. Every one has
disappointed us. Lincoln did not wish to leave his atelier. It seems
that Mademoiselle Hafner excused herself yesterday to these ladies.
Countess Steno has a headache. We did not even count on the Baron, who
is usually promptness personified."
"I was sure Dorsenne would not fail us," said Alba, gazing at the young
man with her large eyes, of a blue as clear as those of Madame Gorka were
dark. "Only that I expected we should meet him on the staircase as we
were leaving, and that he would say to us, in surprise: 'What, I am not
on time?' Ah," she continued, "do not excuse yourself, but reply to the
examination in Roman history we are about to put you through. We have to
follow here a veritable course studying all these old chests. What are
the arms of this family?" she asked, leaning with Dorsenne over one of
the cassoni. "You do not know? The Carafa, famous man! And what Pope
did they have? You do not know that either? Paul Fourth, sir novelist.
If ever you visit us in Venice, you will be surprised at the Doges."
She employed so affectionate a grace in that speech, and she was so
apparently in one of her moods--so rare, alas! of childish joyousness,
that Dorsenne, preoccupied as he was, felt his heart contract on her
account. The simultaneous absence of Madame Steno and Lincoln Maitland
could only be fortuitous. But persuaded that the Countess loved
Maitland, and not doubting that she was his mistress, the absence of both
appeared singularly suspicious to him. Such a thought sufficed to render
the young girl's innocent gayety painful to him. That gayety would
become tragical if it were true that the Countess's other lover had
returned unexpectedly, warned by some one. Dorsenne experienced genuine
agitation on asking Madame Gorka:
"How is Boleslas?"
"Very well, I suppose," said his wife. "I have not had a letter to-day.
Does not one of your proverbs say, 'No news is good news?'"
Baron Hafner was beside Maud Gorka when she uttered that sentence.
Involuntarily Dorsenne looked at him, and involuntarily, master as he was
of himself, he looked at Dorsenne. It was no longer a question of a
simple hypothesis. That Boleslas Gorka had returned to Rome unknown to
his wife constituted, for any one who knew of his relations with Madame
Steno, and of the infidelity of the latter, an event full of formidable
consequences. Both men were possessed by the same thought. Was there
still time to prevent a catastrophe? But each of them in this
circumstance, as is so often the case in important matters of life, was
to show the deepness of his character. Not a muscle of Hafner's face
quivered. It was a question, perhaps, of rendering a service to a woman
in danger, whom he loved with all the feeling of which he was capable.
That woman was the mainspring of his social position in Rome. She was
still more. A plan for Fanny's marriage, as yet secret, but on the point
of being consummated, depended upon Madame Steno. But he felt it
impossible to attempt to render her any service before having spent half
an hour in the rooms of the Palais Castagna, and he began to employ that
half hour in a manner which would be most profitable to his possible
purchases, for he turned to Madame Gorka and said to her, with the rather
exaggerated politeness habitual to him:
"Countess, if you will permit me to advise you, do not pause so long
before these coffers, interesting as they may be. First, as I have just
told Dorsenne, Cavalier Fossati, the agent, has his spies everywhere
here. Your position has already been remarked, you may be sure, so that
if you take a fancy for one, he will know it in advance, and he will
manage to make you pay double, triple, and more for it. And then we have
to see so much, notably a cartoon of twelve designs by old masters, which
Ardea did not even suspect he had, and which Fossati discovered--would
you believe?--worm-eaten, in a cupboard in one of the granaries."
"There is some one whom your collection would interest," said Florent,
"my brother-in-law."
"Well," replied Madame Gorka to Hafner with her habitual good-nature,
"there are at least two of these coffers that I like and wish to have.
I said it in so loud a tone that it is not worth the trouble of hoping
that your Cavalier Fossati does not know it, if he really has that mode
of espionage in practice. But forty or fifty pounds more make no
difference--nor forty thousand even."
"Baron Hafner will warn you that your tone is not low enough," laughed
Alba Steno, "and he will add his great phrase: 'You will never be
diplomatic.' But," added the girl, turning toward Dorsenne, having drawn
back from silent Lydia Maitland, and arranging to fall behind with the
young man, "I am about to employ a little diplomacy in order to find out
whether you have any trouble." And here her mobile face changed its
expression, looking into Julien's with genuine anxiety. "Yes," said she,
"I have never seen you so preoccupied as you seem to be this morning.
Do you not feel well? Have you received ill news from Paris? What ails
you?"
"I preoccupied?" replied Dorsenne. "You are mistaken. There is
absolutely nothing, I assure you." It was impossible to lie with more
apparent awkwardness, and if any one merited the scorn of Baron Hafner,
it was he. Hardly had Madame Gorka spoken, when he had, with the
rapidity of men of vivid imagination, seen Countess Steno and Maitland
surprised by Gorka, at that very moment, in some place of rendezvous,
and that surprise followed by a challenge, perhaps an immediate murder.
And, as Alba continued to laugh merrily, his presentiment of her sad fate
became so vivid that his face actually clouded over. He felt impelled to
ascertain, when she questioned him, how great a friendship she bore him.
But his effort to hide his emotion rendered his voice so harsh that the
young girl resumed:
"I have vexed you by my questioning?"
"Not the least in the world," he replied, without being able to find a
word of friendship. He felt at that moment incapable of talking, as they
usually did, in that tone of familiarity, partly mocking, partly
sentimental, and he added: "I simply think this exposition somewhat
melancholy, that is all." And, with a smile, "But we shall lose the
opportunity of having it shown us by our incomparable cicerone," and he
obliged her, by quickening her pace, to rejoin the group piloted by
Hafner through the magnificence of the almost deserted apartment.
"See," said the former broker of Berlin and of Paris, now an enlightened
amateur--" see, how that charlatan of a Fossati has taken care not to
increase the number of trinkets now that we are in the reception-rooms.
These armchairs seem to await invited guests. They are known. They have
been illustrated in a magazine of decorative art in Paris. And that
dining-room through that door, with all the silver on the table, would
you not think a fete had been prepared?"
"Baron," said Madame Gorka, "look at this material; it is of the
eighteenth century, is it not?"
"Baron," asked Madame Maitland, "is this cup with the lid old Vienna or
Capadimonte?"
"Baron," said Florent Chapron, "is this armor of Florentine or Milanese
workmanship?"
The eyeglass was raised to the Baron's thin nose, his small eyes
glittered, his lips were pursed up, and he replied, in words as exact as
if he had studied all the details of the catalogue verbatim. Their
thanks were soon followed by many other questions, in which two voices
alone did not join, that of Alba Steno and that of Dorsenne. Under any
other circumstances, the latter would have tried to dissipate the
increasing sadness of the young girl, who said no more to him after he
repulsed her amicable anxiety. In reality, he attached no great
importance to it. Those transitions from excessive gayety to sudden
depression were so habitual with the Contessina, above all when with him.
Although they were the sign of a vivid sentiment, the young man saw in
them only nervous unrest, for his mind was absorbed with other thoughts.
He asked himself if, at any hazard, after the manner in which Madame
Gorka had spoken, it would not be more prudent to acquaint Lincoln
Maitland with the secret return of his rival. Perhaps the drama had not
yet taken place, and if only the two persons threatened were warned, no
doubt Hafner would put Countess Steno upon her guard. But when would he
see her? What if he, Dorsenne, should at once tell Maitland's brother-
in-law of Gorka's return, to that Florent Chapron whom he saw at the
moment glancing at all the objects of the princely exposition? The step
was an enormous undertaking, and would have appeared so to any one but
Julien, who knew that the relations between Florent Chapron and Lincoln
Maitland were of a very exceptional nature. Julien knew that Florent--
sent when very young to the Jesuits of Beaumont, in England, by a father
anxious to spare him the humiliation which his blood would call down upon
him in America--had formed a friendship with Lincoln, a pupil in the same
school. He knew that the friendship for the schoolmate had turned to
enthusiasm for the artist, when the talent of his old comrade had begun
to reveal itself. He knew that the marriage, which had placed the
fortune of Lydia at the service of the development of the painter,
had been the work of that enthusiasm at an epoch when Maitland, spoiled
by the unwise government of his mother, and unappreciated by the public,
was wrung by despair. The exceptional character of the marriage would
have surprised a man less heeding of moral peculiarities than was
Dorsenne, who had observed, all too frequently, the silence and reserve
of that sister not to look upon her as a sacrifice. He fancied that
admiration for his brother-in-law's genius had blinded Florent to such a
degree that he was the first cause of the sacrifice.
"Drama for drama," said he to himself, as the visit drew near its close,
and after a long debate with himself. "I should prefer to have it one
rather than the other in that family. I should reproach myself all my
life for not having tried every means." They were in the last room,
and Baron Hafner was just fastening the strings of an album of drawings,
when the conviction took possession of the young man in a definite
manner. Alba Steno, who still maintained silence, looked at him again
with eyes which revealed the struggle of her interest for him and of her
wounded pride. She longed, without doubt, at the moment they were about
to separate, to ask him, according to their intimate and charming custom,
when they should meet again. He did not heed her--any more than he did
the other pair of eyes which told him to be more prudent, and which were
those of the Baron; any more than he did the observation of Madame Gorka,
who, having remarked the ill-humor of Alba, was seeking the cause, which
she had long since divined was the heart of the young girl; any more than
the attitude of Madame Maitland, whose eyes at times shot fire equal to
her brother's gentleness. He took the latter by the arm, and said to him
aloud:
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