Books: Cosmopolis, v2

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file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

COSMOPOLIS

By PAUL BOURGET

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER IV

APPROACHING DANGER

"I could not act differently," repeated Dorsenne on the evening of that
eventful day. He had given his entire afternoon to caring for Gorka. He
made him lunch. He made him lie down. He watched him. He took him in a
closed carriage to Portonaccio, the first stopping-place on the Florence
line. Indeed, he made every effort not to leave alone for a moment the
man whose frenzy he had rather suspended than appeased, at the price,
alas, of his own peace of mind! For, once left alone, in solitude and in
the apartments on the Place de la Trinite, where twenty details testified
to the visit of Gorka, the weight of the perjured word of honor became a
heavy load to the novelist, so much the more heavy when he discovered the
calculating plan followed by Boleslas. His tardy penetration permitted
him to review the general outline of their conversation. He perceived
that not one of his interlocutor's sentences, not even the most agitated,
had been uttered at random. From reply to reply, from confidence to
confidence, he, Dorsenne, had become involved in the dilemma without
being able to foresee or to avoid it; he would either have had to accuse
a woman or to lie with one of those lies which a manly conscience does
not easily pardon. He did not forgive himself for it.

"It is so much worse," said he to himself, "as it will prevent nothing.
A person vile enough to pen anonymous letters will not stop there. She
will find the means of again unchaining the madman.... But who wrote
those letters? Gorka may have forged them in order to have an
opportunity to ask me the question he did.... And yet, no.... There are
two indisputable facts--his state of jealousy and his extraordinary
return. Both would lead one to suppose a third, a warning. But given by
whom?.... He told me of twelve anonymous letters.... Let us assume that
he received one or two.... But who is the author of those?"

The immediate development of the drama in which Julien found himself
involved was embodied in the answer to the question. It was not easy to
formulate. The Italians have a proverb of singular depth which the
novelist recalled at that moment. He had laughed a great deal when he
heard sententious Egiste Brancadori repeat it. He repeated it to
himself, and he understood its meaning. 'Chi non sa fingersi amico, non
sa essere nemico. "He who does not know how to disguise himself as a
friend, does not know how to be an enemy." In the little corner of
society in which Countess Steno, the Gorkas and Lincoln Maitland moved,
who was hypocritical and spiteful enough to practise that counsel?

"It is not Madame Steno," thought Julien; "she has related all herself to
her lover. I knew a similar case. But it involved degraded Parisians,
not a Dogesse of the sixteenth century found intact in the Venice of
today, like a flower of that period preserved. Let us strike her off.
Let us strike off, too, Madame Gorka, the truthful creature who could not
even condescend to the smallest lie for a trinket which she desires. It
is that which renders her so easily deceived. What irony!.... Let us
strike off Florent. He would allow himself to be killed, if necessary,
like a Mameluke at the door of the room where his genial brother-in-law
was dallying with the Countess.... Let us strike off the American
himself. I have met such a case, a lover weary of a mistress, denouncing
himself to her in order to be freed from his love-affair. But he was a
roue, and had nothing in common with this booby, who has a talent for
painting as an elephant has a trunk--what irony! He married this
octoroon to have money. But it was a base act which freed him from
commerce, and permitted him to paint all he wanted, as he wanted.
He allows Steno to love him because she is diabolically pretty,
notwithstanding her forty years, and then she is, in spite of all, a real
noblewoman, which flattered him. He has not one dollar's-worth of moral
delicacy in his heart. But he has an abundance of knavery.... Let us,
too, strike out his wife. She is such a veritable slave whom the mere
presence of a white person annihilates to such a degree that she dares
not look her husband in the face.... It is not Hafner. The sly fox is
capable of doing anything by cunning, but is he capable of undertaking a
useless and dangerous piece of rascality? Never.... Fanny is a saint
escaped from the Golden Legend, no matter what Montfanon thinks! I have
now reviewed the entire coterie.... I was about to forget Alba.... It
is too absurd even to think of her.... Too absurd? Why?"

Dorsenne was, on formulating that fantastic thought, upon the point of
retiring. He took up, as was his habit, one of the books on his table,
in order to read a few pages, when once in bed. He had thus within his
reach the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive
intellectuality; they were Goethe's Memoirs; a volume of George Sand's
correspondence, in which were the letters to Flaubert; the 'Discours de
la Methode' by Descartes, and the essay by Burckhart on the Renaissance.

But, after turning over the leaves of one of those volumes, he closed it
without having read twenty lines. He extinguished his lamp, but he could
not sleep. The strange suspicion which crossed his mind had something
monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl. What a suspicion and
what a young girl! The preferred friend of his entire winter, she on
whose account he had prolonged his stay in Rome, for she was the most
graceful vision of delicacy and of melancholy in the framework of a
tragical and solemn past. Any other than Dorsenne would not have
admitted such an idea without being inspired with horror. But Dorsenne,
on the contrary, suddenly began to dive into that sinister hypothesis, to
help it forward, to justify it. No one more than he suffered from a
moral deformity which the abuse of a certain literary work inflicts on
some writers. They are so much accustomed to combining artificial
characters with creations of their imaginations that they constantly
fulfil an analogous need with regard to the individuals they know best.
They have some friend who is dear to them, whom they see almost daily,
who hides nothing from them and from whom they hide nothing. But if they
speak to you of him you are surprised to find that, while continuing to
love that friend, they trace to you in him two contradictory portraits
with the same sincerity and the same probability.

They have a mistress, and that woman, even in the space sometimes of one
day, sees them, with fear, change toward her, who has remained the same.
It is that they have developed in them to a very intense degree the
imagination of the human soul, and that to observe is to them only a
pretext to construe. That infirmity had governed Julien from early
maturity. It was rarely manifested in a manner more unexpected than in
the case of charming Alba Steno, who was possibly dreaming of him at the
very moment when, in the silence of the night, he was forcing himself to
prove that she was capable of that species of epistolary parricide.

"After all," he said to himself, for there is iconoclasm in the
excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest
moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength, "after
all, have I really understood her relations toward her mother? When I
came to Rome in November, when I was to be presented to the Countess,
what did not only one, but nine or ten persons tell me? That Madame
Steno had a liaison with the husband of her daughter's best friend, and
that the little one was grieving about it. I went to the house. I saw
the child. She was sad that evening. I had the curiosity to wish to
read her heart.... It is six months since then. We have met almost
daily, often twice a day. She is so hermetically sealed that I am no
farther advanced than I was on the first day. I have seen her glance at
her mother as she did this morning, with loving, admiring eyes. I have
seen her turn pale at a word, a gesture, on her part. I have seen her
embrace Maud Gorka, and play tennis with that same friend so gayly, so
innocently. I have seen that she could not bear the presence of Maitland
in a room, and yet she asked the American to take her portrait....
Is she guileless?.... Is she a hypocrite? Or is she tormented by doubt-
divining, not divining-believing, not believing in-her mother? Is she
underhand in any case, with her eyes the color of the sea? Has she the
ambiguous mind at once of a Russian and an Italian?.... This would be a
solution of the problem, that she was a girl of extraordinary inward
energy, who, both aware of her mother's intrigues and detesting them with
an equal hatred, had planned to precipitate the two men upon each other.
For a young girl the undertaking is great. I will go to the Countess's
to-morrow night, and I will amuse myself by watching Alba, to see. . .
If she is innocent, my deed will be inoffensive. If perchance she is
not?"

It is vain to profess to one's own heart a complaisant dandyism of
misanthropy. Such reflections leave behind them a tinge of a remorse,
above all when they are, as these, absolutely whimsical and founded on a
simple paradox of dilettantism. Dorsenne experienced a feeling of shame
when he awoke the following morning, and, thinking of the mystery of the
letters received by Gorka, he recalled the criminal romance he had
constructed around the charming and tender form of his little friend;
happily for his nerves, which were strained by the consideration of the
formidable problem. If it is not some one in the Countess's circle, who
has written those letters? He received, on rising, a voluminous package
of proofs with the inscription: "Urgent." He was preparing to give to
the public a collection of his first articles, under the title of
'Poussiere d'Idees.'

Dorsenne was a faithful literary worker. Usually, involved titles serve
to hide in a book-stall shop--made goods, and romance writers or dramatic
authors who pride themselves on living to write, and who seek inspiration
elsewhere than in regularity of habits and the work-table, have their
efforts marked from the first by sterility. Obscure or famous, rich or
poor, an artist must be an artisan and practise these fruitful virtues--
patient application, conscientious technicality, absorption in work.
When he seated himself at his table Dorsenne was heart and soul in his
business. He closed his door, he opened no letters nor telegrams, and he
spent ten hours without taking anything but two eggs and some black
coffee, as he did on this particular day, when looking over the essays of
his twenty-fifth year with the talent of his thirty-fifth, retouching
here a word, rewriting an entire page, dissatisfied here, smiling there
at his thought. The pen flew, carrying with it all the sensibility of
the intellectual man who had completely forgotten Madame Steno, Gorka,
Maitland, and the calumniated Contessina, until he should awake from his
lucid intoxication at nightfall. As he counted, in arranging the slips,
the number of articles prepared, he found there were twelve.

"Like Gorka's letters," said he aloud, with a laugh. He now felt
coursing through his veins the lightness which all writers of his kind
feel when they have labored on a work they believe good. "I have earned
my evening," he added, still in a loud voice. "I must now dress and go
to Madame Steno's. A good dinner at the doctor's. A half-hour's walk.
The night promises to be divine. I shall find out if they have news of
the Palatine,"--the name he gave Gorka in his moments of gayety.
"I shall talk in a loud voice of anonymous letters. If the author of
those received by Boleslas is there, I shall be in the best position to
discover him; provided that it is not Alba.... Decidedly--that would be
sad!"

It was ten o'clock in the evening, when the young man, faithful to his
programme, arrived at the door of the large house on the Rue du Vingt
Septembre occupied by Madame Steno. It was an immense modern structure,
divided into two distinct parts; to the left a revenue building and to
the right a house on the order of those which are to be seen on the
borders of Park Monceau. The Villa Steno, as the inscription in gold
upon the black marble door indicated, told the entire story of the
Countess's fortune--that fortune appraised by rumor, with its habitual
exaggeration, now at twenty, now at thirty, millions. She had in reality
two hundred and fifty thousand francs' income. But as, in 1873, Count
Michel Steno, her husband, died, leaving only debts, a partly ruined
palace at Venice and much property heavily mortgaged, the amount of that
income proved the truth of the title, "superior woman," applied by her
friends to Alba's mother. Her friends likewise added: "She has been the
mistress of Hafner, who has aided her with his financial advice," an
atrocious slander which was so much the more false as it was before ever
knowing the Baron that she had begun to amass her wealth. This is how
she managed it:

At the close of 1873, when, as a young widow, living in retirement in the
sumptuous and ruined dwelling on the Grand Canal, she was struggling with
her creditors, one of the largest bankers in Rome came to propose to her
a very advantageous scheme. It dealt with a large piece of land which
belonged to the Steno estate, a piece of land in Rome, in one of the
suburbs, between the Porta Salara and the Porta Pia, a sort of village
which the deceased Cardinal Steno, Count Michel's uncle, had begun to lay
out. After his demise, the land had been rented in lots to kitchen-
gardeners, and it was estimated that it was worth about forty centimes a
square metre. The financier offered four francs for it, under the
pretext of establishing a factory on the site. It was a large sum of
money. The Countess required twenty-four hours in which to consider,
and, at the end of that time, she refused the offer, which won for her
the admiration of the men of business who knew of the refusal. In 1882,
less than ten years later, she sold the same land for ninety francs a
metre. She saw, on glancing at a plan of Rome, and in recalling the
history of modern Italy, first, that the new masters of the Eternal City
would centre all their ambition in rebuilding it, then that the portion
comprised between the Quirinal and the two gates of Salara and Pia would
be one of the principal points of development; finally, that if she
waited she would obtain a much greater sum than the first offer. And she
had waited, applying herself to watching the administration of her
possessions like the severest of intendants, depriving herself, stopping
up gaps with unhoped-for profits. In 1875, she sold to the National
Gallery a suite of four panels by Carpaccio, found in one of her country
houses, for one hundred and twenty thousand francs. She had been as
active and practical in her material life as she had been light and
audacious in her sentimental experiences. The story circulated of her
infidelity to Steno with Werekiew at St. Petersburg, where the
diplomatist was stationed, after one year of marriage, was confirmed by
the wantonness of her conduct, of which she gave evidence as soon as
free.

At Rome, where she lived a portion of the year after the sale of her
land, out of which she retained enough to build the double house, she
continued to increase her fortune with the same intelligence. A very
advantageous investment in Acqua Marcia enabled her to double in five
years the enormous profits of her first operation. And what proved still
more the exceptional good sense with which the woman was endowed, when
love was not in the balance, she stopped on those two gains, just at the
time when the Roman aristocracy, possessed by the delirium of
speculation, had begun to buy stocks which had reached their highest
value.

To spend the evening at the Villa Steno, after spending all the morning
of the day before at the Palais Castagna, was to realize one of those
paradoxes of contradictory sensations such as Dorsenne loved, for poor
Ardea had been ruined in having attempted to do a few years later that
which Countess Catherine had done at the proper moment. He, too, had
hoped for an increase in the value of property. Only he had bought the
land at seventy francs a metre, and in '90 it was not worth more than
twenty-five. He, too, had calculated that Rome would improve, and on the
high-priced land he had begun to build entire streets, imagining he could
become like the Dukes of Bedford and of Westminster in London, the owner
of whole districts. His houses finished, they did not rent, however.
To complete the rest he had to borrow. He speculated in order to pay his
debts, lost, and contracted more debts in order to pay the difference.
His signature, as the proprietor of the Marzocco had said, was put to
innumerable bills of exchange. The result was that on all the walls of
Rome, including that of the Rue Vingt Septembre on which was the Villa
Steno, were posted multi-colored placards announcing the sale, under the
management of Cavalier Fossati, of the collection of art and of furniture
of the Palais Castagna.

"To foresee is to possess power," said Dorsenne to himself, ringing at
Madame Steno's door and summing up thus the invincible association of
ideas which recalled to him the palace of the ruined Roman Prince at the
door of the villa of the triumphant Venetian: "It is the real Alpha and
Omega."

The comparison between the lot of Madame Steno and that of the heir of
the Castagnas had almost caused the writer to forget his plan of inquiry
as to the author of the anonymous letters. It was to be impressed upon
him, however, when he entered the hall where the Countess received every
evening. Ardea himself was there, the centre of a group composed of Alba
Steno, Madame Maitland, Fanny Hafner and the wealthy Baron, who, standing
aloof and erect, leaning against a console, seemed like a beneficent and
venerable man in the act of blessing youth. Julien was not surprised on
finding so few persons in the vast salon, any more than he was surprised
at the aspect of the room filled with old tapestry, bric-a-brac,
furniture, flowers, and divans with innumerable cushions.

He had had the entire winter in which to observe the interior of that
house, similar to hundreds of others in Vienna, Madrid, Florence, Berlin,
anywhere, indeed, where the mistress of the house applies herself to
realizing an ideal of Parisian luxury. He had amused himself many an
evening in separating from the almost international framework local
features, those which distinguished the room from others of the same
kind. No human being succeeds in being absolutely factitious in his home
or in his writings. The author had thus noted that the salon bore a
date, that of the Countess's last journey to Paris in 1880. It was to be
seen in the plush and silk of the curtains. The general coloring, in
which green predominated, a liberty egotistical in so brilliant a blonde,
had too warm a tone and betrayed the Italian. Italy was also to be found
in the painted ceiling and in the frieze which ran all around, as well as
in several paintings scattered about. There were two panels by Moretti
de Brescia in the second style of the master, called his silvery manner,
on account of the delicate and transparent fluidity of the coloring;
a 'Souper chez le Pharisien' and a 'Jesus ressuscite sur le rivage',
which could only have come from one of the very old palaces of a very
ancient family. Dorsenne knew all that, and he knew, too, for what
reasons he found almost empty at that time of the year the hall so
animated during the entire winter, the hall through which he had seen
pass a veritable carnival of visitors: great lords, artists, political
men, Russians and Austrians, English and French--pellmell. The Countess
was far from occupying in Rome the social position which her
intelligence, her fortune and her name should have assured her. For,
having been born a Navagero, she combined on her escutcheon the cross of
gold of the Sebastien Navagero who was the first to mount the walls of
Lepante, with the star of the grand Doge Michel.

But one particular trait of character had always prevented her from
succeeding on that point. She could not bear ennui nor constraint, nor
had she any vanity. She was positive and impassioned, in the manner of
the men of wealth to whom their meditated--upon combinations serve to
assure the conditions of their pleasures. Never had Madame Steno
displayed diplomacy in the changes of her passions, and they had been
numerous before the arrival of Gorka, to whom she had remained faithful
two years, an almost incomprehensible thing! Never had she, save in her
own home, observed the slightest bounds when there was a question of
reaching the object of her desire. Moreover, she had not in Rome to
support her any member of the family to which she belonged, and she had
not joined either of the two sets into which, since 1870, the society of
the city was divided. Of too modern a mind and of a manner too bold, she
had not been received by the admirable woman who reigns at the Quirinal,
and who had managed to gather around her an atmosphere of such noble
elevation.

These causes would have brought about a sort of semi-ostracism, had the
Countess not applied herself to forming a salon of her own, the recruits
for which were almost altogether foreigners. The sight of new faces, the
variety of conversation, the freedom of manner, all in that moving world,
pleased the thirst for diversion which, in that puissant, spontaneous,
and almost manly immoral nature, was joined with very just clear-
sightedness. If Julien paused for a moment surprised at the door of the
hall, it was not, therefore, on finding it empty at the end of the
season; it was on beholding there, among the inmates, Peppino Ardea, whom
he had not met all winter. Truly, it was a strange time to appear in new
scenes when the hammer of the appraiser was already raised above all
which had been the pride and the splendor of his name. But the grand-
nephew of Urban VII, seated between sublime Fanny Hafner, in pale blue,
and pretty Alba Steno, in bright red, opposite Madame Maitland, so
graceful in her mauve toilette, had in no manner the air of a man crushed
by adversity.

The subdued light revealed his proud manly face, which had lost none of
its gay hauteur. His eyes, very black, very brilliant, and very
unsteady, seemed almost in the same glance to scorn and to smile, while
his mouth, beneath its brown moustache, wore an expression of disdain,
disgust, and sensuality. The shaven chin displayed a bluish shade, which
gave to the whole face a look of strength, belied by the slender and
nervous form. The heir of the Castagnas was dressed with an affectation
of the English style, peculiar to certain Italians. He wore too many
rings on his fingers, too large a bouquet in his buttonhole, and above
all he made too many gestures to allow for a moment, with his dark
complexion, of any doubt as to his nationality. It was he who, of all
the group, first perceived Julien, and he said to him, or rather called
out familiarly:

"Ah, Dorsenne! I thought you had gone away. We have not seen you at the
club for fifteen days."

"He has been working," replied Hafner, "at some new masterpiece, at a
romance which is laid in Roman society, I am sure. Mistrust him, Prince,
and you, ladies, disarm the portrayer."

"I," resumed Ardea, laughing pleasantly, "will give him notes upon
myself, if he wants them, as long as this, and I will illustrate his
romance into the bargain with photographs which I once had a rage for
taking.... See, Mademoiselle," he added, turning to Fanny, "that is how
one ruins one's self. I had a mania for the instantaneous ones. It was
very innocent, was it not? It cost me thirty thousand francs a year, for
four years."

Dorsenne had heard that it was a watchword between Peppino Ardea and his
friends to take lightly the disaster which came upon the Castagna family
in its last and only scion. He was not expecting such a greeting. He
was so disconcerted by it that he neglected to reply to the Baron's
remark, as he would have done at any other time. Never did the founder
of the 'Credit Austyr-Dalmate' fail to manifest in some such way his
profound aversion for the novelist. Men of his species, profoundly
cynical and calculating, fear and scorn at the same time a certain
literature. Moreover, he had too much tact not to be aware of the
instinctive repulsion with which he inspired Julien. But to Hafner, all
social strength was tariffed, and literary success as much as any other.
As he was afraid, as on the staircase of the Palais Castagna, that he had
gone too far, he added, laying his hand with its long, supple fingers
familiarly upon the author's shoulder:

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