Zut, and Other Parisians

Dodo's Elysium lasted longer than such mirages are wont to do. For a full month he basked in the sultry sunshine of the de Trémonceau's smiles, dined almost nightly in the rue de la Faisanderie, occupied a fauteuil at the Folies while she whisked her spangled skirts and sang "Holà! Holà!" to Sarasate's music, supped with her afterwards at the Café de Paris or Paillard's, and paid the addition, and tipped the garçon, and the maître d'hôtel and the chef d'orchestre, as liberally as if he had had a million francs instead of a dwindling twenty thousand. And the delirium might have lasted even longer had it not been for Louise Chapuis.

No one ever knew who told. There is a wireless telegraphy in such cases which defies detection. Suffice it to say that, one morning, the Hôtel de Choiseuil numbered Mademoiselle Chapuis among its guests, and that, as this name was inscribed upon the register, the Fates rang up the curtain on the final act of the brief comedy of the tuition of Dodo Chapuis.

Where, when, and how Louise contrived, in three days of Paris, to strike, full and firm-fingered, the keynote of the situation remained a mystery which none of those concerned was capable of solving. In all the capital there was but one person competent to deal conclusively with the situation. That person was Gabrielle de Poirier, and to Gabrielle de Poirier Louise Chapuis applied.

There could have been no stranger meeting than this between the young Arlésienne, with her blue eyes, and her embarrassed hands, and her gown that all the plage turned to look at, because it was in the fashion of more than yester-year, and the cold, stately leader of the demi-monde, with her air of languid ease, her shimmer of diamonds, and her slow, tired voice, roused to interest for the moment by this singularly sudden and imperative demand upon her good-will and ingenuity.

Louise found Gabrielle half buried among the cushions of a great divan, with a yellow-backed novel perched, tent-like, upon her knee. For once, the demi-mondaine was alone, bored to extinction by the blatant ribaldry of Octave Mirbeau. She had fingered the simply-lettered card of her unknown visitor for a full minute, before bidding her valet-de-pied admit her. A whim, a craving for novelty – who knows what? The Open Sesame had been spoken, and now, in the half-light of late afternoon, her caller stood before her.

"Be seated," said Gabrielle courteously. "Be seated, Ma – ?"

" – Demoiselle," replied Louise, complying with the invitation.

There was a brief pause. Each woman studied the other curiously. Then Louise began to speak, at first timidly.

"You think it strange, no doubt, madame, this visit of mine. Let me be quite candid. I come to ask a favor of you – I, who have no right, save the right of one woman to crave assistance from another. I have a brother" —

"Faith of God!" said Gabrielle, lightly, "so have I. A poor sample, if you will!"

Her flippancy seemed suddenly to lend the other fresh courage. She leaned forward eagerly, clasping her gray-gloved hands upon her knee.

"But mine," she said, "is but a boy. He has come to Paris, seeking to know the world, and, lately, he has become the friend of Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau."

"Zut!" put in Gabrielle. "You say well that it is but a boy!"

"Is there need to tell you," continued Louise, without heeding the sneer, "what this means to me? Is there need to tell you what it means to him?"

"My faith, no!" said Mademoiselle de Poirier. "It is acquainted with me, that story. The end is not beautiful!"

"Tout simplement," said her visitor, "I have come to Paris to bring him back, to show him the folly of his way. But I alone am powerless. You – you who are more admired, more beautiful, more clever than this Mademoiselle de Trémonceau" – (Oh, Louise!) – "you alone can aid me to rescue him."

Gabrielle raised her eyebrows slightly, and let her lids droop with an air of unutterable boredom.

"Truly, mademoiselle," she drawled, "I neither see in what fashion I can assist you, nor why, in any event, I should concern myself with this affair. If your brother has such taste" —

"Oh, madame, I know I have no right," broke in Louise. "But you, of all women in Paris, alone have the power to win him from her."

"And when I have won him," demanded Gabrielle, "what then? Do you think your precious brother will fare better with me than with the de Trémonceau?"

Her calm was broken for a moment by a flash of anger.

"The world is full of fools," she added. "One more or less is no great matter. I am not a Rescue Society, mademoiselle. Let your brother go his way. His best cure will be effected by the woman herself. When his money is gone, there will be no need to win him from her."

The sneer sent the blood racing to the other's cheeks. She had been counting, as she realized with a pang of mortification, upon some Quixotic quality which her reading had taught lay always dormant, even in such a woman as Gabrielle de Poirier, – some innate nobility, ready to spring into activity at the bidding of such an appeal as she had just made. And, too, beneath all her anxiety, she had believed that Thaïs loved her brother, that his peril lay not so much in her making use of him and then flinging him aside, as in the existence of actual affection between him and a woman whom, even as his wife, society would not recognize. This brutal intrusion of money into the discussion, this flippant classification of Dodo with a world full of fools who flung away honor and reputation for a passing fancy, only to be flung away themselves in turn, suddenly seemed to lay clear the whole situation, in all its sordid vulgarity, and with the revelation came a white rage against this woman who was only another of the same kind. She despised herself for having stooped to ask her aid, and a fury of wounded pride blazed in her reply.

"You know yourself well, madame!" she said. "No, surely my brother would fare no better with you, though that was not what I meant to ask. I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you, there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are, moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil you have done. I thought that, not for money's sake or vanity's, you might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him, teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send him back to decency – a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than self-interest. Your motives are the same as hers, love of admiration and love of gold, – and, perhaps, less worthy. I cannot say. Hers, at least, I can only suspect: yours I have had from your own lips. Had my brother been more than the poor weak boy he is, had he been brilliant, powerful, or a millionaire, it would never have been necessary for me to ask you to win him from her. No, madame, for you would have done so of your own accord!"

Now, there is such a thing as diplomacy, and there is such a thing as luck, and of the former Louise Chapuis had not an atom. An impulse, made apparently reasonable by pure imagination, led her to seek out Gabrielle, and had she found her, as her fancy had painted her, readily moved by the appeal of honest affection and confidence, she was competent to have won her end. Louise was one of the people who, in foreseeing a dispute, invent the replies to their own questions, and who, if the actual answers accord with those preconceived, will emerge from the ordeal triumphant, but who lack the diplomat's gift of adapting the line of argument to that of unexpected retort. Confronted with a state of affairs wholly different from that which she had supposed existent, her sole resource was in this outburst of disappointment and reproach, honest, but inutile as the clamor of a baffled baby. So much for diplomacy.

But, as we have said, there is also such a thing as luck. Gabrielle de Poirier was insufferably bored. Her Russian was in Moscow, her recent tips at Auteuil had proved disastrous, her latest feuilleton had been rejected. For six hours she had been buried among the cushions of the divan, clad materially in light pink but mentally in deepest blue, skipping from page to page of a novel that was not amusing, and confronted every ten minutes by the recurrent realization that the next event on her calendar was a dinner at the Café de Paris, which would not come for the eternity of twenty-seven hours! Despite her ungracious reception of Louise, she had been grateful for the diversion, and hardly had she sneered at Dodo's position before she lit a cigarette, and fell to studying the situation seriously. Louise, pausing, breathless, after her tirade, was surprised to find that she made no reply, looking straight before her with her great eyes half closed, and put down her silence as equivalent to admission of the charges hurled against her. The truth of the matter was, however, that Gabrielle had not heard one word of her visitor's impassioned denunciation!

There was a long silence, and then the demi-mondaine looked up.

"Where does your brother live?" she asked, touching an electric button at her side, "and what is his first name?"

"At the Hôtel du Rhin," stammered Louise, "and his name is Do – I should say Charles, – Charles Chapuis. I am at the Hôtel de Choiseuil."

"Bon!" said the other. "If you will go home, mademoiselle, and keep your own counsel, I think I can promise you that you will shortly have your brother back."

Louise stepped forward impulsively.

"Oh, madame!" – she began.

But just then the valet-de-pied appeared at the door, and Gabrielle, taking up her novel, flounced back among the cushions.

"Bon jour, mademoiselle," she said, without looking at Louise. "Achille, la porte! And send Mathilde to me."

The conference between mistress and maid was brief but eloquent.

"Who," demanded Gabrielle, "is Dodo Chapuis?"

"The young monsieur of Boule-de-Boue," responded Mathilde promptly.

"Parfaitement. I needed to refresh my memory. And how long is it since we cabled the last tuyau?"

"Eight weeks, at least, madame – before the coming of Monsieur Chapuis."

"Bon!" said Gabrielle. "We cable another tip at once."

(For it may be noted, in passing, that she had one source of income which La Belle Thaïs little suspected!)

"What does Boule-de-Boue do to-night?" she demanded again.

"Dines at home with Monsieur Chapuis," replied the omniscient Mathilde, "dances at the Fol' Berg' at eleven, sups at Paillard's with Monsieur Chapuis."

(For it may also be noted, in passing, that the maid of La Belle Thaïs had one source of income which her mistress totally ignored!)

"Très bien!" said Gabrielle. "Now a pen and paper, the inkstand, envelopes, sealing wax, and a telegraph form, and write as I tell thee."

For ten minutes Mathilde wrote rapidly, and then spread the results of her exertions out before her, in the shape of two notes and a cablegram, and read them aloud triumphantly. The first note was directed to Monsieur Charles Chapuis, at the Hôtel du Rhin, place Vendôme: —

"If Monsieur Chapuis is a man of honor," it ran briefly, "he will break all engagements, however important, for this evening, and present himself chez Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier at seven o'clock, on a matter intimately touching the good fame of his family. The sister of Monsieur, Mademoiselle Louise Chapuis, is chez Mademoiselle de Poirier."

The second note was addressed to Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau, at 27 bis, rue de la Faisanderie.

"A friend advises Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau that Monsieur Charles Chapuis dines with Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier this evening at half past seven."

And the cablegram was to Señor Miguel Cevasco, Reconquista 21, Buenos-Ayres, République Argentine.

"19 rides in the carriage of 52. 26."

The point of which observation lay in the fact that Dodo confessed to nineteen, and Señor Miguel to fifty-two, and Gabrielle to twenty-six.

It was a bold play, and one foredoomed to failure unless each link in the chain held true. But Mademoiselle de Poirier was no novice, and experience had long since taught her that success is the child of audacity; so, ten minutes later, Achille was speeding, in one cab, toward the place Vendôme, pausing only at the bureau de télégraphe on the corner of the rue Pierre Charron and the avenue Marceau, and Mathilde was speeding in another toward the rue de la Faisanderie: and Gabrielle herself was making life not worth living for Louis, her long-suffering maître-d'hôtel.

The upshot of this triple commotion was that, as the clock on her mantel struck seven, Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier was posing on a chaise-longue in correct imitation of David's "Madame Récamier," except for a wonderful black gown, when Achille announced Monsieur Charles Chapuis.

Dodo entered the room in immaculate evening dress, but with a touch of embarrassment in his manner which betrayed his years. He was good to look upon, was Dodo, tall, straight, and slight, with the ruddy olive skin, the firm, square fling of chest and shoulder, the narrowness of waist, and the confident swing of long, slender, but sinewy legs with which one is blessed at nineteen in Bouches-du-Rhône. Gabrielle, taking note of him from under her covert, languid lids, was compelled, for once, to mental candor.

"I comprehend Thaïs," she said to herself, but to Dodo, "Monsieur, I felicitate you. You have the true spirit of chivalry."

"My sister" – began Dodo.

"Is, no doubt, at the Hôtel de Choiseuil," answered Gabrielle, coolly, fanning herself. "In any event she is not here. Oh, she was here – yes; but she had gone – gone before I sent you the note. Be seated, monsieur."

Dodo selected a chair, dropped into it, and awaited developments in silence. Six weeks before, he would have demanded in a passion the meaning of this subterfuge. But whatever might be said of La Belle Thaïs, one learned diplomacy in her company.

"You are surprised, monsieur!"

"I am infinitely surprised, madame," he agreed, with charming candor.

"Shall we be frank with each other?" asked Gabrielle, pleasantly.

"I think it is the only way," said Dodo. "Eh bien, I am infinitely surprised, madame; first, to see my sister's name in connection with yours at all, and, second, to find that you have been lying to me."

"She came to ask me to rescue you from the toils of Thaïs de Trémonceau."

Despite his elaborate self-control, Dodo flushed crimson.

"I think we had best drop the discussion here," he said, rising. "There can be no possible profit in continuing it. If my sister was here at all" —

"Her card is there on the table," put in Gabrielle, pointing with her fan.

"Pardon. I should not have permitted myself the insinuation. I accept your statement, and simply say that it was an unwarrantable intrusion on her part. For you, madame, I have only admiration. Your compliance" —

"It was not that," said Gabrielle, shortly. "I can conceive of nothing less important to me than your sister's wishes. But I dislike Mademoiselle de Trémonceau."

"That," said Dodo, with exaggerated courtesy, "can only be a matter of opinion. I admire Mademoiselle de Trémonceau enormously."

"The force of admiration is undoubtedly strong," snapped Gabrielle, "to reconcile you to riding in another man's carriage, drinking another man's wine, dawdling with another man's" —

"Assez!" said Dodo.

Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders.

"Quite right," she said. "You are old enough to see for yourself. I presume you will not return to her."

"On the contrary, I shall be with her in fifteen minutes."

In the distance an electric bell whirred.

"Sooner than that, I think," smiled Gabrielle, and then La Belle Thaïs was standing at the salon door. She was gowned in scarlet, with a poppy flaring in her hair, and, if she had but lent to her dance at the Folies but half the fury of that entrance, the manager would, no doubt, have tripled her already ample salary. And, at the instant of her appearance, as if by signal, – which indeed it was, – Louis flung wide the opposite door, with a stately "Monsieur et madame sont servis," and there, gleaming with spotless napery, silver shaded candlesticks, and shimmering cut glass, was the daintiest of tables, set for two!

What Thaïs did and what she said, this is not the time or place to detail. She was not wanting in vocabulary, the de Trémonceau, nor sparing thereof in an emergency. A decade of careful training fell from her like a discarded mantle, and she became in an instant the vulgar-tongued fleuriste of the boulevards. From her chaise-longue Gabrielle smiled calmly, the picture of a new Circe, rejoicing in the success of her spells. And, between the two, Dodo, his hands clenched until the knuckles shone white, turned sick with contempt and loathing. At the end Thaïs flung him an unspeakable taunt, and there was a pause. Then, —

"Do you play the black or the red, monsieur?" asked Gabrielle, sweetly, with a glance at her own gown and another at the de Trémonceau's.

Dodo let his eyes run slowly, contemptuously, from the topmost ripple of her bronze hair to the point of her satin slipper, with the felicitous inspiration of seeming to take stock of her charms and to be not over-pleased therewith. Then, —

"I continue my game, madame!" he said. "I play the red."

It was the last, faint cry of youthful chivalry, disillusioned, blotted out, and it was wasted on Thaïs de Trémonceau.

"Tu penses, salaud!" she broke in, with a laugh. "Well, then, thou art well mistaken. Rien ne va plus!"

"He will come back to me!" she cried to her rival, as the door closed behind him.

"Perhaps," agreed Gabrielle, "but only to leave you again, in a fashion more mortifying for him and more calamitous for you. I sent a cable to Buenos Ayres this afternoon."

She was deliberately flinging away the aforementioned source of income, for the sake of seeing a certain expression on the face of La Belle Thaïs. But when she saw it, she was well content. For the honors were no longer even.

On the avenue Kléber, Dodo hailed the first cab that passed, and flinging a curt "Hôtel de Choiseuil – au galop!" to the cocher, blotted himself into one corner, and covered his face with his hands.

"It was my first, but it shall be my last confidence in woman," he said. It was neither strictly original nor strictly true, this, but it showed progress.

For there is such a thing as diplomacy and there is such a thing as luck, and the fact that his sister had not an atom of the former made no difference whatever in the tuition of Dodo Chapuis.

Le Pochard

HIS applicability was evident to the mind of Jean Fraissigne from the moment when the camelot placed Le Pochard on a table in front of the Taverne, and he proceeded to go through his ridiculous pretense of drinking from the cup in his left hand which he filled from the bottle in his right. Jean, who was dawdling over a demi, and watching the familiar ebb and flow of life on the Boul' Miche', was at first passively pleased at the distraction provided by the appearance of the toy, and then, of a sudden, consumedly absorbed in the progress of his operations. For what was plain to any but a blind man was the fact that Le Pochard was the precise counterfeit of Jean's friend and comrade, Grégoire – Grégoire, with his flat-brimmed hat, and his loose working blouse, and his loud checked trousers – Grégoire, hélas! with his flushed face, and his tremulous hands, and his unsteady walk, as Jean had seen him a hundred times!

Le Pochard staggered to and fro upon the marble-topped table, nodding maudlinly, and alternately filling his cup and raising it uncertainly to his expressionless face. At last, weakened by his exertions, he passed one arm through the handle of Jean's demi, hesitated, and then leaned heavily against the glass and stood motionless, with his topheavy head bent forward, and his eyes fixed on the price-mark upon the saucer below. This eloquent manœuvre, so unspeakably appealing, determined the future ownership of Le Pochard. Jean purchased him upon the spot, and bore him off in triumph to the rue de Seine, as an object lesson for Grégoire Caubert.

The two students shared a little sous-toit within a stone's throw of the Beaux-Arts, neither luxuriously nor yet insufficiently furnished. It was Jean's good fortune to have a father who believed in him – not a usual condition of mind in a provincial merchant whose son displays an unaccountable partiality for architecture – and, what was more to the point, who could afford to demonstrate his confidence by remittances, which were inspiring, if not on the score of magnitude, at least on that of regularity. And, since freedom from pecuniary solicitude is the surest guarantee of a cheerful spirit, there was no more diligent pupil at the Boîte, no blither comrade in idle hours, – above all, no more loyal friend, in sun or shadow, throughout the length and breadth of the Quartier, than little Jean le Gai, as he was called by those who loved him, and whom he loved.

That was why the comrades were at a loss to understand his friendship for Grégoire Caubert. Had the latter been one of themselves, a type of the schools, in that fact alone, whatever his peculiarities, would have lain a reason for the association. But, to all intents and purposes, he was of another world. His similarity to Jean and to themselves began and ended with his costume. For the rest he was silent and reserved, courting no confidence and giving none, unknowing and unknown to the haunts they frequented, – the Deux Magots, the Escholiers, the Taverne, the Bullier, and Madame Roupiquet's in the rue de Beaune, and the Rouge on Thursday nights. Jean le Gai, when questioned as to the doings of Grégoire, seemed to reflect something of his friend's reserve. He admitted that the other wrote: he even went so far as to prophesy that some day Grégoire would be famous. Further, he made no admissions.

"Diable!" he said. "What does it matter? He goes his way – I go mine. And if we choose to live together, whose concern is it then, I ask you? Fichez-moi la paix, vous autres!"

So popular curiosity went unsatisfied, so far as Grégoire was concerned, and the apparently uncongenial ménage came, in time, to be looked upon as one of the unexplained mysteries of the Quartier, – one, for the rest, which made no particular difference to any one save the two immediately concerned.

But if Jean made no admissions as to Grégoire, it was not for lack of sufficient knowledge. They had met, as men meet in the Quartier, – as bubbles meet in a stream, and, for reasons not apparent, are drawn together by an irresistible attraction, and fuse into one larger, brighter bubble than either has been before. For little Jean Fraissigne, whose exquisses were the wonder of the School, and whose projets had already come to be photographed and sold in the shops of the rue Bonaparte and the quai Conti, believed in his heart that architecture was as nothing compared to literature, and Grégoire, whose long, uphill struggle had been unaccompanied by comradely admiration or even encouragement, found indescribable comfort, in the hour of his success, in the faith and approbation of the friend who alone, of all men, knew his secret, – knew that the Réné de Lys of the "Chansons de Danaé" and the "Voyage de Tristan" of which all Paris was talking, was none other than himself – Grégoire Caubert, on whose wrist the siren of absinthe had laid a hand that was not to be shaken off, and whom she was leading, if by the paths of subtlest fancy and almost miraculous creative faculty, yet toward an end inevitable on which he did not dare to dwell.

To Jean, healthy, rational, and cheerful as a young terrier, much that Grégoire said and did was totally incomprehensible, but what he did not understand he set down, with conviction, to the eccentricity of genius. The long nights which he spent alone, sleeping sanely in their bedroom in the rue de Seine, while Grégoire's cot stood empty beside him, and Grégoire himself was tramping the streets of Paris; the return of his friend in the first faint light of dawn, pale-faced and swaying; the succeeding hours which, despite his exhaustion, he spent at his desk, feverishly writing, and tossing the pages from him, one by one, until the floor was strewn with them on all sides; finally, his heavy slumber far into the afternoon, – all this, to Jean, was but part and parcel of that marvelous thing called literature. He returned at seven to find that Grégoire had prepared a wonderful little meal, and was walking up and down the floor, unevenly, absinthe in hand, awaiting his arrival.