Monsieur Jonquelle (6 page)

I made the best continental bow I could.

“Madame will do me a very great honor,” I said, “if she will permit me to take her down. I
cannot pretend to a very considerable skill as an aërial pilot, but I think I can manage.” I went on, for I feared she would go away forever if I ceased to talk—and the fear was very truly founded: “There ought, of course, to be a genie with this magic box; but he is sleeping or on a journey, and in his absence may I not offer a neighbor's service?”

She declined, however, expressed her regret at having caused me this annoyance, and in some confusion returned to her apartment.

I went down in no very genial mood. Here was the golden door in the wall gone shut before I could get my foot in. I held myself now somewhat lighter in esteem. I must have bungled pretty badly. It would be my doddering, idiotic pleasantries! Whence is it that a man, ordinarily sane, has a seizure of these driveling witticisms upon the moment that the gods give him?

This woman was accustomed to a formal courtesy. And here was a big, simpering barbarian who would be genial, and would seize upon the advantage of an error to strike up a galloping acquaintance. It was no vain institution—these continental manners; and we have them not. And therefore we must be misunderstood, our best motives wrongly interpreted, and ourselves catalogued in a class of
bourgeois
.

I went down to the Promenade des Anglais and
sat there on a bench in the sun. The world went by on that great stone way paving the arc of the sea. Workmen in blue blouses were setting up standards along the streets, and cunning electrical devices, and building seats in tiers. Crowds of people moved like swarms of butterflies. An old, huge Italian came upon me with a basket of wire masks. He knew a little English and was proud to display it with his wares.

The meester would go into the carnival this night, perhaps, with friends, in a carriage? They would have a bag of—I never could get the word—but I found out later that he meant the little clay balls that are thrown like handfuls of shot, in place of confetti, and must be kept off with a mask. And he displayed his wares—pink; blue; every color. The meester would need several perhaps? He would not be alone in his carriage!

I told him with some asperity of language that I had no carriage for this night—nor any friend; and that he would oblige me by going to the devil! But he was a rogue of perennial good humor. He leered at me across his basket. The meester would not go to bed this night because his spirits were cast down! This was the gala night. Nice would be wonderland this night! The gnomes, the elfin people, and all the grotesque creatures of the fairy world would possess the city! Men traveled from the ends of the earth for this night
only. And would the meester go to sleep, then, like a lout before the fire? Let him secure a mask for two francs and forget the tables if chance were the offender—or his mistress if she had cut him. There would be fortune another day, and Nice on this night would be full of women; in fact, there was no supply of anything in France so plentiful.

I got up from the bench and left him; but he followed me to say that he would keep his eye upon me and that I should purchase from him, not one mask, but two, or he was no honest tradesman from Bordighera and the son of a poet!

I went into a shop on the Rue de Félix Fauvre and got an English book. But I could not have read the Memoirs of the Abbess of Odo. I presently gave it into the hand of a young woman who sold me a
ravissant
cigar, manufactured in Algeria—quite true, as I discovered, and from the frayed cables in the harbor there! I went then to the Crédit Lyonnais and tried to deposit a draft; but to all my tenders I received the same polite assurance in my native tongue: “Et es not sufficient.” I did not care, for I had money in my pocket; but the universe was out of joint. I took a
fiacre
to my hotel and sat once more on the terrace among the orange trees.

Evening was descending, the air was motionless, and the colors of the world were stolen out of Paradise. And yet, with it all, I sat before it
some distance down in the Inferno because a certain balcony was empty. The thing was incomparably absurd—to be thus dispossessed by a fancy! But then it is the fancies in this life that have power to dispossess us! If one goes upon an adventure in enchanted countries, shall he be unmindful of the damsel he meets there? It is not so written in the tales of Bagdad!

I was interrupted by a great buzzing. A gigantic bird circled over Nice; and far away, in the direction of Cannes, a speck was approaching; and behind it another, and still another, traveled in the dead air above the motionless sea like a projectile, until it, too, became a monster bird with black wings and a yellow body. I might have looked for these creatures in this enchanted country. Should one meet here every other wonder of Arabia and not find the roc! The whole aërial fleet of France, encamped in the flat meadows toward Cannes, was in maneuver.

In a moment the windows were full of people. I looked for Madame Nekludoff; but, instead, there came out on the balcony a squat, middle-aged woman with the aspect of a peasant. She seemed to speak to some one inside, for I could see her lips move; and she looked down once at me; then she opened the windows as wide as she could get them, in order, I thought, that some one inside could see without coming out. It occurred
to me then that my surveillance was observed by madame and that it annoyed her.

I got up and went inside, took a cold plunge, got my dinner and determined to go out and see all the carnival, like any sensible person. Monsieur Boularde said it would be time enough when I heard the cannon; but he was mistaken in that sign. There was a red glow over the city when I went out. The procession was beginning to enter the Avenue de la Gare.

The streets looking into it were packed with people. I could see above their heads. Troupes of gnomes, hunchbacked, fearfully deformed, with large, nodding heads, passed. Gigantic cabbages and carrots followed; devils mounted on horseback. Eight horses passed, dragging a red papier-mâché lion twenty feet high and long in proportion; and on the head of the creature, in a pose of sublime heroism, stood Tartarin of Tarascon. Behind came the washerwomen of the Var, with faces greater than a winebarrel, that smirked with a sort of Titanic glee, which the men under the disguise helped out by doing an absurd little step, holding their petticoats in the tips of their fingers like dancers.

I wished to get a little closer to the Avenue de la Gare, but I could not for the crowd of people and carriages immovable in the narrow street. I saw then the folly of going this night in a carriage.
It became at once imbedded in the crowd, and one had to give it up and go on foot to see. I determined to get into the Place Masséna, so I could watch the procession enter it from the Avenue de la Gare.

As I forced my way out of the crowd I saw the Italian who sold masks, with his basket on his arm and his big body on tiptoe, stretching up over the crowd. He seemed to divine my intention and followed me. The Place Masséna was also crowded, and the stand of seats in the center was black with people. I understood then how only a Latin can make a fantasy in lights.

Vast, gorgeous, fluttering butterflies caught in golden webs hung across the Avenue de la Gare, suspended above it at every cross-street, with the effect, when one looked along it, of being laced over with the innumerable webs of some monster spider, in which were entangled every variety of beautiful and delicate insect. And inclosing the whole of the Place Messéna were vast fans of many-colored lights, radiating out from some grotesque head and standing above gorgeous draperies.

On the west side of the square stood the pavilion of the King of the Carnival, hung in purple velvet, surmounted by a great circle of lights, studded with huge jewels. The King of the Carnival was himself now passing before it—
a great figure of a jolly monarch, in striped hose and a slashed doublet, grasping in his right hand the image of a jester in cap and bells, and seated in a gigantic
fiacre
. My attention was taken from His Majesty by a storm of laughter.

A mammoth float towering to the tops of the houses was entering from the Avenue de la Gare. An opera-bouffe pirate rode seated on the head of a great dolphin and preceded by a long boat of his crew, with their oars in the air. The thing was grotesque enough, for the leviathan had been caught with a thread of a fishline. But the roar of laughter was from another cause. Here was solved the immortal mystery that had baffled Paris: The jolly pirate carried the Mona Lisa under his right arm, and his left thumb to his nose, with its fingers extended—it is the oldest gesture in the world, to be found on a frieze in Pompeii, where the little boys salute with it those who come last in the chariot races of the circus.

And following at the heels of the Bandit de Pegomas came les Gardiens du Louvre, sound asleep in the big empty picture frames, the faces inconceivably stupid and covered with spider webs. They rode propped up against the side of a rough wooden box, such as pictures are packed in, and they were drawn by a donkey, also with an empty frame around his neck; while on top of the empty box, as a delicate suggestion to the authorities,
were several varieties of watchdogs in elaborate Parisian uniforms.

“
Voilà
!” some one cried out. “How excellently they sleep in Paris! Have they, perhaps, also a Madonna of the Lotus!”

They were works of genius—those two floats; a piece of subtle, piercing sarcasm that only a Latin could have manufactured. And the whole of Nice shook, as Homer says, with inextinguishable laughter. There drifted behind them a horde of specters, ghosts, wraiths—as though all the cities of the dead had emptied themselves into the Place Masséna.

Then came the great fabric of a dream—the shimmering fantastic palace of Harun-al-Rashid, raised, as by some incantation, from the baked earth of Arabia, with splendid white domes, delicate, lacy porticoes and arches, and gorgeous silk canopies, under which the houris of some divine harem danced and sang a weird, haunting, sensuous love song, with a shrill, high, passionate refrain, ending in a cry of Allah! One got the very soul of the East, languorous and soft, dreamy with desire, steeped in perfume.

Every variety of wonder followed—an endless procession of fairy extravaganza, until one believed himself come into the enchanted city of Morgana the Fay.

Midnight had arrived. The great floats were
disappearing from the Place Masséna. Crowds of shouting, singing, dancing maskers were beginning to fill the streets. The gnomes and the goblins were now abandoning the city to the nymphs and the satyrs. Fancy costumes, dainty and beautiful, supplanted the grotesque. The whole world was masked and arsenaled with confetti and bags of plaster pellets. One was seized, bombarded, whirled into a maze of dancers.

Every moment the fun became more furious and abandoned. A hamadryad, standing in a bakers' cart drawn by a donkey, declared that the donkey was a fairy prince that she would awaken into life when she could find a man to take his place. A dozen volunteered. She seized the hand of the one who arrived first, and drawing him up on to the platform of boards nailed across the bed of the cart, they began to dance
le tango Argentino
, the
danse de l'ours
, the
marche de dindon
; while the crowd hung the donkey with garlands and tramped slowly round the Place Masséna singing the songs of the carnival.

A madness as of drugs and wine was on the city, but there was no man either drugged or drunken, except now and then an English or American visitor, who staggered with champagne and, in a city full of shouting revelers, was alone brutal. One of these proved an instrument of destiny.

I was standing under the arch at the entrance to the Avenue de la Gare when I heard a woman cry out with a sharp exclamation of fear. I turned to see Madame Nekludoff struggling to free herself from the clutch of a big man in a black mask. He was dragging her by the arm, staggering, and shouting in English:

“Come on, you hussy! Come on, you hussy!”

The man was evidently inflamed with the riot of the carnival; and the woman, her hair tossed and her eyes distended, was in a very panic of terror.

I forced my way through the crowd, wrenched his hand loose and struck him in the chest. He reeled back, cursing me in English. I drew Madame Nekludoff away into the shelter of the arch. She was trembling violently.

“Oh,” she said, “it is you! I am so glad!”

She would have fallen, but I put my arm round her and held her close. Her body relaxed and her head sank on my shoulder. I stood back in the shadow of the arch while the carnival rioted round me—a man come upon the very treasure of his dream! The limp, soft body seemed to cling to me; the delicate perfume of her hair was on my face. A great possessing desire came over me to gather her up in my arms and find her mouth—and kiss her. It was my one chance, perhaps, in this world and forever more! Would I take it or
let it go? But at that very instant the seizure of weakness passed. She swung out from me and stood up, but she still trembled a little and she kept hold of my hand.

“Oh! the brute!” she said. She put her free hand up to her hair. Then she began to speak, a little gasp still in her voice:

“I came out with my maid in a carriage, but the carriage could not move and we had to get out; we became separated, and I was caught in the crowd and carried along down the Avenue de la Gare. It was awful! I could not get out—and after that this beast caught me! What a horror!” She looked up into my face and smiled though her red mouth was still quivering. “I am sorry I was rude to you this morning.”

She was like a child smiling through tears. Something in my bosom smothered me. I began to stammer:

“I am all alone. I do not know any one. I saw you there—down there on the balcony. I never saw a woman like you anywhere! You won't—you won't go away now?” And my hand tightened on her fingers.