Book: Fromont and Risler, Complete

A >> Alphonse Daudet >> Fromont and Risler, Complete




Poor little Desiree!

She recalls the country excursion which Frantz had organized for her.
That breath of nature, which she breathed that day for the first time,
falls to her lot again at the moment of her death. "Remember," it seems
to say to her; and she replies mentally, "Oh! yes, I remember."

She remembers only too well. When it arrives at the end of the quay,
which was bedecked as for a holiday, the furtive little shadow pauses at
the steps leading down to the bank.

Almost immediately there are shouts and excitement all along the quay:

"Quick--a boat--grappling-irons!" Boatmen and policemen come running from
all sides. A boat puts off from the shore with a lantern in the bow.

The flower-women awake, and, when one of them asks with a yawn what is
happening, the woman who keeps the cafe that crouches at the corner of
the bridge answers coolly:

"A woman just jumped into the river."

But no. The river has refused to take that child. It has been moved to
pity by so great gentleness and charm. In the light of the lanterns
swinging to and fro on the shore, a black group forms and moves away. She
is saved! It was a sand-hauler who fished her out. Policemen are carrying
her, surrounded by boatmen and lightermen, and in the darkness a hoarse
voice is heard saying with a sneer: "That water-hen gave me a lot of
trouble. You ought to see how she slipped through my fingers! I believe
she wanted to make me lose my reward." Gradually the tumult subsides, the
bystanders disperse, and the black group moves away toward a
police-station.

Ah! poor girl, you thought that it was an easy matter to have done with
life, to disappear abruptly. You did not know that, instead of bearing
you away swiftly to the oblivion you sought, the river would drive you
back to all the shame, to all the ignominy of unsuccessful suicide. First
of all, the station, the hideous station, with its filthy benches, its
floor where the sodden dust seems like mud from the street. There Desiree
was doomed to pass the rest of the night.

At last day broke with the shuddering glare so distressing to invalids.
Suddenly aroused from her torpor, Desiree sat up in her bed, threw off
the blanket in which they had wrapped her, and despite fatigue and fever
tried to stand, in order to regain full possession of her faculties and
her will. She had but one thought--to escape from all those eyes that
were opening on all sides, to leave that frightful place where the breath
of sleep was so heavy and its attitudes so distorted.

"I implore you, messieurs," she said, trembling from head to foot, "let
me return to mamma."

Hardened as they were to Parisian dramas, even those good people realized
that they were face to face with something more worthy of attention, more
affecting than usual. But they could not take her back to her mother as
yet. She must go before the commissioner first. That was absolutely
necessary. They called a cab from compassion for her; but she must go
from the station to the cab, and there was a crowd at the door to stare
at the little lame girl with the damp hair glued to her temples, and her
policeman's blanket which did not prevent her shivering. At headquarters
she was conducted up a dark, damp stairway where sinister figures were
passing to and fro.

When Desiree entered the room, a man rose from the shadow and came to
meet her, holding out his hand.

It was the man of the reward, her hideous rescuer at twenty-five francs.

"Well, little-mother," he said, with his cynical laugh, and in a voice
that made one think of foggy nights on the water, "how are we since our
dive?"

The unhappy girl was burning red with fever and shame; so bewildered that
it seemed to her as if the river had left a veil over her eyes, a buzzing
in her ears. At last she was ushered into a smaller room, into the
presence of a pompous individual, wearing the insignia of the Legion of
Honor, Monsieur le Commissaire in person, who was sipping his 'cafe au
lait' and reading the 'Gazette des Tribunaux.'

"Ah! it's you, is it?" he said in a surly tone and without raising his
eyes from his paper, as he dipped a piece of bread in his cup; and the
officer who had brought Desiree began at once to read his report:

"At quarter to twelve, on Quai de la Megisserie, in front of No. 17, the
woman Delobelle, twenty-four years old, flower-maker, living with her
parents on Rue de Braque, tried to commit suicide by throwing herself
into the Seine, and was taken out safe and sound by Sieur Parcheminet,
sand-hauler of Rue de la Butte-Chaumont."

Monsieur le Commissaire listened as he ate, with the listless, bored
expression of a man whom nothing can surprise; at the end he gazed
sternly and with a pompous affectation of virtue at the woman Delobelle,
and lectured her in the most approved fashion. It was very wicked, it was
cowardly, this thing that she had done. What could have driven her to
such an evil act? Why did she seek to destroy herself? Come, woman
Delobelle, answer, why was it?

But the woman Delobelle obstinately declined to answer. It seemed to her
that it would put a stigma upon her love to avow it in such a place. "I
don't know--I don't know," she whispered, shivering.

Testy and impatient, the commissioner decided that she should be taken
back to her parents, but only on one condition: she must promise never to
try it again.

"Come, do you promise?"

"Oh! yes, Monsieur."

"You will never try again?"

"Oh! no, indeed I will not, never--never!"

Notwithstanding her protestations, Monsieur le Commissaire de Police
shook his head, as if he did not trust her oath.

Now she is outside once more, on the way to her home, to a place of
refuge; but her martyrdom was not yet at an end.

In the carriage, the officer who accompanied her was too polite, too
affable. She seemed not to understand, shrank from him, withdrew her
hand. What torture! But the most terrible moment of all was the arrival
in Rue de Braque, where the whole house was in a state of commotion, and
the inquisitive curiosity of the neighbors must be endured. Early in the
morning the whole quarter had been informed of her disappearance. It was
rumored that she had gone away with Frantz Risler. The illustrious
Delobelle had gone forth very early, intensely agitated, with his hat
awry and rumpled wristbands, a sure indication of extraordinary
preoccupation; and the concierge, on taking up the provisions, had found
the poor mother half mad, running from one room to another, looking for a
note from the child, for any clew, however unimportant, that would enable
her at least to form some conjecture.

Suddenly a carriage stopped in front of the door. Voices and footsteps
echoed through the hall.

"M'ame Delobelle, here she is! Your daughter's been found."

It was really Desiree who came toiling up the stairs on the arm of a
stranger, pale and fainting, without hat or shawl, and wrapped in a great
brown cape. When she saw her mother she smiled at her with an almost
foolish expression.

"Do not be alarmed, it is nothing," she tried to say, then sank to the
floor. Mamma Delobelle would never have believed that she was so strong.
To lift her daughter, take her into the room, and put her to bed was a
matter of a moment; and she talked to her and kissed her.

"Here you are at last. Where have you come from, you bad child? Tell me,
is it true that you tried to kill yourself? Were you suffering so
terribly? Why did you conceal it from me?"

When she saw her mother in that condition, with tear-stained face, aged
in a few short hours, Desiree felt a terrible burden of remorse. She
remembered that she had gone away without saying good-by to her, and that
in the depths of her heart she had accused her of not loving her.

Not loving her!

"Why, it would kill me if you should die," said the poor mother. "Oh!
when I got up this morning and saw that your bed hadn't been slept in and
that you weren't in the workroom either!--I just turned round and fell
flat. Are you warm now? Do you feel well? You won't do it again, will
you--try to kill yourself?"

And she tucked in the bed-clothes, rubbed her feet, and rocked her upon
her breast.

As she lay in bed with her eyes closed, Desiree saw anew all the
incidents of her suicide, all the hideous scenes through which she had
passed in returning from death to life. In the fever, which rapidly
increased, in the intense drowsiness which began to overpower her, her
mad journey across Paris continued to excite and torment her. Myriads of
dark streets stretched away before her, with the Seine at the end of
each.

That ghastly river, which she could not find in the night, haunted her
now.

She felt that she was besmirched with its slime, its mud; and in the
nightmare that oppressed her, the poor child, powerless to escape the
obsession of her recollections, whispered to her mother: "Hide me--hide
me--I am ashamed!"




CHAPTER XVIII

SHE PROMISED NOT TO TRY AGAIN

Oh! no, she will not try it again. Monsieur le Commissaire need have no
fear. In the first place how could she go as far as the river, now that
she can not stir from her bed? If Monsieur le Commissaire could see her
now, he would not doubt her word. Doubtless the wish, the longing for
death, so unmistakably written on her pale face the other morning, are
still visible there; but they are softened, resigned. The woman Delobelle
knows that by waiting a little, yes, a very little time, she will have
nothing more to wish for.

The doctors declare that she is dying of pneumonia; she must have
contracted it in her wet clothes. The doctors are mistaken; it is not
pneumonia. Is it her love, then, that is killing her? No. Since that
terrible night she no longer thinks of Frantz, she no longer feels that
she is worthy to love or to be loved. Thenceforth there is a stain upon
her spotless life, and it is of the shame of that and of nothing else
that she is dying.

Mamma Delobelle sits by Desiree's bed, working by the light from the
window, and nursing her daughter. From time to time she raises her eyes
to contemplate that mute despair, that mysterious disease, then hastily
resumes her work; for it is one of the hardest trials of the poor that
they can not suffer at their ease.

Mamma Delobelle had to work alone now, and her fingers had not the
marvellous dexterity of Desiree's little hands; medicines were dear, and
she would not for anything in the world have interfered with one of "the
father's" cherished habits. And so, at whatever hour the invalid opened
her eyes, she would see her mother, in the pale light of early morning,
or under her night lamp, working, working without rest.

Between two stitches the mother would look up at her child, whose face
grew paler and paler:

"How do you feel?"

"Very well," the sick girl would reply, with a faint, heartbroken smile,
which illumined her sorrowful face and showed all the ravages that had
been wrought upon it, as a sunbeam, stealing into a poor man's lodging,
instead of brightening it, brings out more clearly its cheerlessness and
nudity.

The illustrious Delobelle was never there. He had not changed in any
respect the habits of a strolling player out of an engagement. And yet he
knew that his daughter was dying: the doctor had told him so. Moreover,
it had been a terrible blow to him, for, at heart, he loved his child
dearly; but in that singular nature the most sincere and the most genuine
feelings adopted a false and unnatural mode of expression, by the same
law which ordains that, when a shelf is placed awry, nothing that you
place upon it seems to stand straight.

Delobelle's natural tendency was, before everything, to air his grief, to
spread it abroad. He played the role of the unhappy father from one end
of the boulevard to the other. He was always to be found in the
neighborhood of the theatres or at the actors' restaurant, with red eyes
and pale cheeks. He loved to invite the question, "Well, my poor old
fellow, how are things going at home?" Thereupon he would shake his head
with a nervous gesture; his grimace held tears in check, his mouth
imprecations, and he would stab heaven with a silent glance, overflowing
with wrath, as when he played the 'Medecin des Enfants;' all of which did
not prevent him, however, from bestowing the most delicate and thoughtful
attentions upon his daughter.

He also maintained an unalterable confidence in himself, no matter what
happened. And yet his eyes came very near being opened to the truth at
last. A hot little hand laid upon that pompous, illusion-ridden head came
very near expelling the bee that had been buzzing there so long. This is
how it came to pass.

One night Desiree awoke with a start, in a very strange state. It should
be said that the doctor, when he came to see her on the preceding
evening, had been greatly surprised to find her suddenly brighter and
calmer, and entirely free from fever. Without attempting to explain this
unhoped-for resurrection, he had gone away, saying, "Let us wait and
see"; he relied upon the power of youth to throw off disease, upon the
resistless force of the life-giving sap, which often engrafts a new life
upon the very symptoms of death. If he had looked under Desiree's pillow,
he would have found there a letter postmarked Cairo, wherein lay the
secret of that happy change. Four pages signed by Frantz, his whole
conduct confessed and explained to his dear little Zizi.

It was the very letter of which the sick girl had dreamed. If she had
dictated it herself, all the phrases likely to touch her heart, all the
delicately worded excuses likely to pour balm into her wounds, would have
been less satisfactorily expressed. Frantz repented, asked forgiveness,
and without making any promises, above all without asking anything from
her, described to his faithful friend his struggles, his remorse, his
sufferings.

What a misfortune that that letter had not arrived a few days earlier.
Now, all those kind words were to Desiree like the dainty dishes that are
brought too late to a man dying of hunger.

Suddenly she awoke, and, as we said a moment since, in an extraordinary
state.

In her head, which seemed to her lighter than usual, there suddenly began
a grand procession of thoughts and memories. The most distant periods of
her past seemed to approach her. The most trivial incidents of her
childhood, scenes that she had not then understood, words heard as in a
dream, recurred to her mind.

From her bed she could see her father and mother, one by her side, the
other in the workroom, the door of which had been left open. Mamma
Delobelle was lying back in her chair in the careless attitude of
long-continued fatigue, heeded at last; and all the scars, the ugly sabre
cuts with which age and suffering brand the faces of the old, manifested
themselves, ineffaceable and pitiful to see, in the relaxation of
slumber. Desiree would have liked to be strong enough to rise and kiss
that lovely, placid brow, furrowed by wrinkles which did not mar its
beauty.

In striking contrast to that picture, the illustrious Delobelle appeared
to his daughter through the open door in one of his favorite attitudes.
Seated before the little white cloth that bore his supper, with his body
at an angle of sixty-seven and a half degrees, he was eating and at the
same time running through a pamphlet which rested against the carafe in
front of him.

For the first time in her life Desiree noticed the striking lack of
harmony between her emaciated mother, scantily clad in little black
dresses which made her look even thinner and more haggard than she really
was, and her happy, well-fed, idle, placid, thoughtless father. At a
glance she realized the difference between the two lives. What would
become of them when she was no longer there? Either her mother would work
too hard and would kill herself; or else the poor woman would be obliged
to cease working altogether, and that selfish husband, forever engrossed
by his theatrical ambition, would allow them both to drift gradually into
abject poverty, that black hole which widens and deepens as one goes down
into it.

Suppose that, before going away--something told her that she would go
very soon--before going away, she should tear away the thick bandage that
the poor man kept over his eyes wilfully and by force?

Only a hand as light and loving as hers could attempt that operation.
Only she had the right to say to her father:

"Earn your living. Give up the stage."

Thereupon, as time was flying, Desire Delobelle summoned all her courage
and called softly:

"Papa-papa"

At his daughter's first summons the great man hurried to her side. He
entered Desiree's bedroom, radiant and superb, very erect, his lamp in
his hand and a camellia in his buttonhole.

"Good evening, Zizi. Aren't you asleep?"

His voice had a joyous intonation that produced a strange effect amid the
prevailing gloom. Desiree motioned to him not to speak, pointing to her
sleeping mother.

"Put down your lamp--I have something to say to you."

Her voice, broken by emotion, impressed him; and so did her eyes, for
they seemed larger than usual, and were lighted by a piercing glance that
he had never seen in them.

He approached with something like awe.

"Why, what's the matter, Bichette? Do you feel any worse?"

Desiree replied with a movement of her little pale face that she felt
very ill and that she wanted to speak to him very close, very close. When
the great man stood by her pillow, she laid her burning hand on the great
man's arm and whispered in his ear. She was very ill, hopelessly ill. She
realized fully that she had not long to live.

"Then, father, you will be left alone with mamma. Don't tremble like
that. You knew that this thing must come, yes, that it was very near. But
I want to tell you this. When I am gone, I am terribly afraid mamma won't
be strong enough to support the family just see how pale and exhausted
she is."

The actor looked at his "sainted wife," and seemed greatly surprised to
find that she did really look so badly. Then he consoled himself with the
selfish remark:

"She never was very strong."

That remark and the tone in which it was made angered Desiree and
strengthened her determination. She continued, without pity for the
actor's illusions:

"What will become of you two when I am no longer here? Oh! I know that
you have great hopes, but it takes them a long while to come to anything.
The results you have waited for so long may not arrive for a long time to
come; and until then what will you do? Listen! my dear father, I would
not willingly hurt you; but it seems to me that at your age, as
intelligent as you are, it would be easy for you--I am sure Monsieur
Risler Aine would ask nothing better."

She spoke slowly, with an effort, carefully choosing her words, leaving
long pauses between every two sentences, hoping always that they might be
filled by a movement, an exclamation from her father. But the actor did
not understand.

"I think that you would do well," pursued Desiree, timidly, "I think that
you would do well to give up--"

"Eh?--what?--what's that?"

She paused when she saw the effect of her words. The old actor's mobile
features were suddenly contracted under the lash of violent despair; and
tears, genuine tears which he did not even think of concealing behind his
hand as they do on the stage, filled his eyes but did not flow, so
tightly did his agony clutch him by the throat. The poor devil began to
understand.

She murmured twice or thrice:

"To give up--to give up--"

Then her little head fell back upon the pillow, and she died without
having dared to tell him what he would do well to give up.




CHAPTER XIX

APPROACHING CLOUDS

One night, near the end of January, old Sigismond Planus, cashier of the
house of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, was awakened with a start in his
little house at Montrouge by the same teasing voice, the same rattling of
chains, followed by that fatal cry:

"The notes!"

"That is true," thought the worthy man, sitting up in bed; "day after
to-morrow will be the last day of the month. And I have the courage to
sleep!"

In truth, a considerable sum of money must be raised: a hundred thousand
francs to be paid on two obligations, and at a moment when, for the first
time in thirty years, the strong-box of the house of Fromont was
absolutely empty. What was to be done? Sigismond had tried several times
to speak to Fromont Jeune, but he seemed to shun the burdensome
responsibility of business, and when he walked through the offices was
always in a hurry, feverishly excited, and seemed neither to see nor hear
anything about him. He answered the old cashier's anxious questions,
gnawing his moustache:

"All right, all right, my old Planus. Don't disturb yourself; I will look
into it." And as he said it, he seemed to be thinking of something else,
to be a thousand leagues away from his surroundings. It was rumored in
the factory, where his liaison with Madame Risler was no longer a secret
to anybody, that Sidonie deceived him, made him very unhappy; and,
indeed, his mistress's whims worried him much more than his cashier's
anxiety. As for Risler, no one ever saw him; he passed his days shut up
in a room under the roof, overseeing the mysterious, interminable
manufacture of his machines.

This indifference on the part of the employers to the affairs of the
factory, this absolute lack of oversight, had led by slow degrees to
general demoralization. Some business was still done, because an
established house will go on alone for years by force of the first
impetus; but what ruin, what chaos beneath that apparent prosperity?

Sigismond knew it better than any one, and as if to see his way more
clearly amid the multitude of painful thoughts which whirled madly
through his brain, the cashier lighted his candle, sat down on his bed,
and thought, "Where were they to find that hundred thousand francs?"

"Take the notes back. I have no funds to meet them."

No, no! That was not possible. Any sort of humiliation was preferable to
that.

"Well, it's decided. I will go to-morrow," sighed the poor cashier.

And he tossed about in torture, unable to close an eye until morning.

Notwithstanding the late hour, Georges Fromont had not yet retired. He
was sitting by the fire, with his head in his hands, in the blind and
dumb concentration due to irreparable misfortune, thinking of Sidonie, of
that terrible Sidonie who was asleep at that moment on the floor above.
She was positively driving him mad. She was false to him, he was sure of
it,--she was false to him with the Toulousan tenor, that Cazabon, alias
Cazaboni, whom Madame Dobson had brought to the house. For a long time he
had implored her not to receive that man; but Sidonie would not listen to
him, and on that very day, speaking of a grand ball she was about to
give, she had declared explicitly that nothing should prevent her
inviting her tenor.

"Then he's your lover!" Georges had exclaimed angrily, his eyes gazing
into hers.

She had not denied it; she had not even turned her eyes away.

And to think that he had sacrificed everything to that woman--his
fortune, his honor, even his lovely Claire, who lay sleeping with her
child in the adjoining room--a whole lifetime of happiness within reach
of his hand, which he had spurned for that vile creature! Now she had
admitted that she did not love him, that she loved another. And he, the
coward, still longed for her. In heaven's name, what potion had she given
him?

Carried away by indignation that made the blood boil in his veins,
Georges Fromont started from his armchair and strode feverishly up and
down the room, his footsteps echoing in the silence of the sleeping house
like living insomnia. The other was asleep upstairs. She could sleep by
favor of her heedless, remorseless nature. Perhaps, too, she was thinking
of her Cazaboni.

When that thought passed through his mind, Georges had a mad longing to
go up, to wake Risler, to tell him everything and destroy himself with
her. Really that deluded husband was too idiotic! Why did he not watch
her more closely? She was pretty enough, yes, and vicious enough, too,
for every precaution to be taken with her.

And it was while he was struggling amid such cruel and unfruitful
reflections as these that the devil of anxiety whispered in his ear:

"The notes! the notes!"

The miserable wretch! In his wrath he had entirely forgotten them. And
yet he had long watched the approach of that terrible last day of
January. How many times, between two assignations, when his mind, free
for a moment from thoughts of Sidonie, recurred to his business, to the
realities of life-how many times had he said to himself, "That day will
be the end of everything!" But, as with all those who live in the
delirium of intoxication, his cowardice convinced him that it was too
late to mend matters, and he returned more quickly and more determinedly
to his evil courses, in order to forget, to divert his thoughts.

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