Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (24 page)

“We have not seen him as yet, Monsieur,” while he threw his wife, who sat behind the counter, a knowing look. And the next moment, turning towards the clock:

“But he’ll be here, I hope, in ten minutes, or at most a quarter of an hour. Celestin, hurry with the newspapers! What would Monsieur like?”

Though he did not want anything, Frédéric threw down a glass of rum, then a glass of kirsch, then a glass of curaçoa, then several glasses of grog, both cold and hot. He read through that day’s
Le Siècle,
and then read it over again; he examined the caricatures in the
Charivari
down to the very tissue of the paper. When he had finished, he knew the advertisements by heart. From time to time, the sound of boots on the sidewalk outside reached his ears—it must be him! and a figure would cast its profile on the window-panes; but it invariably passed on.

In order to get rid of the sense of weariness he experienced, Frédéric kept changing his seat. He took a seat at the far end of the room; then at the right; after that at the left; and he remained in the middle of the bench with his arms stretched out. But a cat, daintily picking at the velvet on the back of the seat, startled him by suddenly leaping down, in order to lick up the spots of syrup on the tray; and the child of the house, an insufferable brat of four, played noisily with a rattle on the bar steps. His mother, a pale-faced little woman, with decayed teeth, was smiling in a stupid sort of way. What in the world could Regimbart be doing? Frédéric waited for him in an exceedingly miserable frame of mind.

The rain clattered like hail on the covering of the cab. Through the opening in the muslin curtain he could see the poor horse in the street more motionless than a horse made of wood. The stream of water, becoming enormous, trickled down between two spokes of the wheels, and the coachman was nodding drowsily with the horsecloth wrapped round him for protection, but fearing his fare might give him the slip, he opened the door every now and then, with the rain dripping from him as if falling from a mountain torrent; and, if things could get worn out by looking at them, the clock ought to have by this time been utterly dissolved, so frequently did Frédéric rivet his eyes on it. However, it kept going. Alexandre walked up and down repeating, “He’ll come! Cheer up! he’ll come!” and, in order to divert his thoughts, talked politics at some length. He even carried his hospitality so far as to propose a game of dominoes.

Finally when it was half-past four, Frédéric, who had been there since about twelve, sprang to his feet, and declared that he would not wait any longer.

“I can’t understand it at all myself,” replied the café-keeper, in a tone of straightforwardness. “This is the first time that M. Ledoux has failed to come!”

“What! Monsieur Ledoux?”

“Why, yes, Monsieur!”

“I said Regimbart,” exclaimed Frédéric, exasperated.

“Ah! a thousand pardons! You are making a mistake! Madame Alexandre, did not Monsieur say M. Ledoux?”

And, questioning the waiter: “You heard him yourself, just as I did?”

No doubt to pay his master off for old scores, the waiter just smiled.

Frédéric drove back to the boulevards, indignant at having his time wasted, raging against the Citizen, but craving his presence as if for that of a god, and firmly resolving to drag him out, if necessary, from the depths of the most remote cellars. The cab he was driving in began to irritate him, and he accordingly got rid of it. His mind was in a state of confusion. Then all the names of the cafés which he had heard pronounced by that idiot burst forth at the same time from his memory like the thousand fireworks—the Café Gascard, the Café Grimbert, the Café Halbout, the Bordelais, the Havanais, the Havrais, the Bœuf à la Mode, the Brasserie Allemande, and the Mere Morel; and he made his way to all of them in succession. But in one he was told that Regimbart had just gone out; in another, that he might perhaps call at a later hour; in a third, that they had not seen him for six months; and, in another place, that he had the day before ordered a leg of mutton for Saturday. Finally, at Vautier’s, Frédéric, on opening the door, knocked into the waiter.

“Do you know M. Regimbart?”

“What, monsieur! do I know him? ’Tis I who have the honour of waiting on him. He’s upstairs—he is just finishing his dinner!”

And, with a napkin under his arm, the proprietor of the establishment himself accosted him:

“You’re asking him for M. Regimbart, monsieur? He was here a moment ago.”

Frédéric cursed loudly, but the proprietor stated that he would find the gentleman as a matter of certainty at Bouttevilain’s.

“I assure you, on my honour, he left a little earlier than usual, for he had a business appointment with some gentlemen. But you’ll find him, I tell you again, at Bouttevilain’s, in the Rue Saint-Martin, No. 92, the second row of steps at the left, at the end of the courtyard—first floor—door to the right!”

At last, he saw Regimbart, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, by himself, at the lower end of the refreshment-room, near the billiard-table, with a glass of beer in front of him, and his chin lowered in a thoughtful attitude.

“Ah! I have been a long time searching for you!”

Without rising, Regimbart extended towards him only two fingers, and, as if he had seen Frédéric the day before, he made a few commonplace remarks about the opening of the parliamentary session.

Frédéric interrupted him, saying in the most natural tone he could assume:

“How is Arnoux?”

The reply was a long time coming, as Regimbart was gargling the liquor in his throat:

“All right.”

“Where is he living now?”

“Why, in the Rue Paradis Poissonnière,” the Citizen returned with astonishment.

“What number?”

“Thirty-seven—Good lord! what a funny fellow you are!”

Frédéric rose.

“What! are you going?”

“Yes, yes! I have to make a call—some business matter I had forgotten! Good-bye!”

Frédéric went from the tavern to the Arnoux’s residence, as if carried along by a warm wind, with the extraordinary ease one experiences in dreams.

He soon found himself on the second floor in front of a door, whose bell was ringing; a servant appeared. A second door was flung open. Madame Arnoux was seated near the fire. Arnoux jumped up, and rushed across to embrace Frédéric. She had on her lap a little boy not quite three years old. Her daughter, now as tall as herself, was standing up at the opposite side of the mantelpiece.

“Allow me to present this gentleman to you,” said Arnoux, taking his son up in his arms. And he amused himself for a few minutes in throwing the child up in the air, and then catching him as he came down.

“You’ll kill him!—ah! good heavens, stop!” exclaimed Madame Arnoux.

But Arnoux, declaring that there was not the slightest danger, still kept tossing up the child, and even addressed him in words of endearment such as nurses use in the Marseillaise dialect, which he grew up with:

“Ah! my sweet little one! my little chickadee!”

Then, he asked Frédéric why he had been so long without writing to them, what he had been doing in the country, and what brought him back.

“As for me, I am at present, my dear friend, a dealer in ceramics. But let us talk about yourself?”

Frédéric gave as reasons for his absence a protracted lawsuit and the state of his mother’s health. He laid special stress on the latter subject in order to make himself interesting. He ended by saying that this time he was going to settle in Paris for good; and he said nothing about the inheritance, lest it cast a bad light on his past.

The curtains, like the furniture upholstery, were of maroon damask wool. Two pillows lay close beside one another against the bolster. On the coal-fire a kettle was boiling; and the shade of the lamp, which stood near the edge of the chest of drawers, darkened the apartment. Madame Arnoux wore a blue merino dressing-gown. With her face turned towards the fire and one hand on the shoulder of the little boy, she unfastened the child’s vest with the other. The youngster in his shirt began to cry, while scratching his head, like the son of M. Alexandre.

Frédéric expected to feel spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have been diminished in some way that he could not comprehend—in fact, not to be the same. He was astonished at the serenity of his own heart. He made enquiries about some old friends, about Pellerin, amongst others.

“I don’t see him often,” said Arnoux. She added:

“We no longer entertain as we used to!”

Was the object of this to let him know that he would get no invitation from them? But Arnoux, continuing to exhibit the same cordiality, reproached him for not having come to dine with them uninvited; and he explained why he had changed his business.

“What are you to do in an age of decadence like ours? Great painting has gone out of fashion! Besides, we may incorporate art into everything. You know that, for my part, I am a lover of beauty. I must bring you one of these days to see my earthenware workshop.”

And he wanted to show Frédéric immediately some of his productions in the store which he had between the ground-floor and the first floor.

Dishes, soup-tureens, and washhand-basins covered the floor. Against the walls were laid out large tiles for bathrooms and dressing-rooms, with mythological subjects in the Renaissance style; whilst in the centre, a pair of whatnots, rising up to the ceiling, supported ice-buckets, flower-pots, candelabra, little plant-stands, and large statuettes of many colours, representing a negro or a shepherdess in the Pompadour fashion. Frédéric, who was cold and hungry, was bored with Arnoux’s display of his wares. He hurried off to the Café Anglais, where he ordered a sumptuous supper, and while eating, said to himself:

“How silly I was back home with my lovesickness! She scarcely knew who I was! How like an ordinary house-wife she is!”

And in a sudden burst of healthy energy, he resolved to be utterly selfish. He felt his heart as hard as the table on which his elbows rested. So then he could by this time plunge fearlessly into the vortex of society. The thought of the Dambreuses came to mind again. He would make use of them. Then he remembered Deslauriers. “Ah! well, too bad!” Nevertheless, he sent him a note by a messenger, in order to arrange to meet for lunch the next day.

Fortune had not been so kind to Deslauriers.

He had presented himself at the examination for a fellowship with a thesis on the law of wills, in which he maintained that this power of law ought to be restricted as much as possible; and, as his adversary provoked him in such a way as to make him say foolish things, he came out with many absurdities, without any reaction for his examiners. Then, as such would have it, he drew by lot, as the subject for his lecture, the statute of limitations. Thereupon, Deslauriers put forth some lamentable theories: old claims ought to be treated like new; why should a proprietor be deprived of his property because he could not furnish his deed until thirty-one years have elapsed? This was giving the security of the honest man to the inheritor of the enriched thief. Every injustice was consecrated by extending this law, which was a form of tyranny, the abuse of force! He had even exclaimed: “Abolish it; and the Franks will no longer oppress the Gauls,
¹
the English oppress the Irish, the Yankee oppress the Redskins, the Turks oppress the Arabs, the whites oppress the blacks, Poland—”

The President interrupted him: “Well! well! Monsieur, we have nothing to do with your political opinions—you can present yourself for re-examination at a later date!”

Deslauriers did not wish to try again; but this unfortunate Title XX. of the Third Book of the Civil Code had become a sort of mountain over which he stumbled. He was writing an extensive work on “Prescription considered as the Basis of the Civil Law and of the Law of Nature amongst Peoples”; and he got lost in Dunod, Rogerius, Balbus, Merlin, Vazeille, Savigny, Traplong, and other weighty authorities on the subject. In order to have more leisure time for the purpose of devoting himself to this task, he had resigned his post as head-clerk. He lived by giving private tuitions and preparing theses; and at the meetings of the debating society to rehearse legal arguments he frightened by his virulence those who held conservative views, all the young doctrinaires trained by M. Guizot—so that in a certain set he had gained a sort of celebrity, mingled, to a slight degree, with distrust.

He came to their
rendez-vous
in an overcoat, lined with red flannel, like the one Sénécal used to wear.

Out of respect for the passers-by they restrained themselves from prolonging their friendly embrace; and they made their way to Véfour’s arm-in-arm, laughing pleasantly, though with tears lingering in the depths of their eyes. Then, as soon as they were free from observation, Deslauriers exclaimed:

“By gosh! we’ll have a good time now!”

Frédéric was not quite pleased to find Deslauriers all at once associating himself in this way with his own newly-acquired inheritance. His friend exhibited too much pleasure on account of them both, and not enough on his account alone.

After this, Deslauriers gave details about his failure, and gradually told Frédéric all about his occupations and his daily existence, speaking of himself stoically, and of others with a tone of intense bitterness. He found fault with everything; there was not a man in office who was not an idiot or a rascal. He flew into a passion against the waiter for having a glass badly rinsed, and, when Frédéric uttered a reproach with a view to mitigating his wrath: “As if I were going to annoy myself with such numbskulls, who, you must know, can earn as much as six and even eight thousand francs a year, who are electors, perhaps eligible as candidates.
²
Ah! no, no!”