Paz (La Fausse Maitresse)

“Good morning, Adam,” he said familiarly. Then he bowed courteously as he asked Clementine what he could do for her.

“You are Laginski’s friend!” exclaimed the countess.

“For life and death,” answered Paz, to whom the count threw a smile of affection as he drew a last puff from his perfumed pipe.

“Then why don’t you take your meals with us? why did you not accompany us to Italy and Switzerland? why do you hide yourself in such a way that I am unable to thank you for the constant services that you do for us?” said the countess, with much vivacity of manner but no feeling.

In fact, she thought she perceived in Paz a sort of voluntary servitude. Such an idea carried with it in her mind a certain contempt for a social amphibian, a being half-secretary, half-bailiff, and yet neither the one nor the other, a poor relation, an embarrassing friend.

“Because, countess,” he answered with perfect ease of manner, “there are no thanks due. I am Adam’s friend, and it gives me pleasure to take care of his interests.”

“And you remain standing for your pleasure, too,” remarked Comte Adam.

Paz sat down on a chair near the door.

“I remember seeing you about the time I was married, and afterwards in the courtyard,” said Clementine. “But why do you put yourself in a position of inferiority, – you, Adam’s friend?”

“I am perfectly indifferent to the opinion of the Parisians,” he replied. “I live for myself, or, if you like, for you two.”

“But the opinion of the world as to a friend of my husband is not indifferent to me – ”

“Ah, madame, the world will be satisfied if you tell them I am ‘an original.’”

After a moment’s silence he added, “Are you going out to-day?”

“Will you come with us to the Bois?”

“Certainly.”

So saying, Paz bowed and withdrew.

“What a good soul he is!” said Adam. “He has all the simplicity of a child.”

“Now tell me all about your relations with him,” said Clementine.

“Paz, my dear,” said Laginski, “belongs to a noble family as old and illustrious as our own. One of the Pazzi of Florence, at the time of their disasters, fled to Poland, where he settled with some of his property and founded the Paz family, to which the title of count was granted. This family, which distinguished itself greatly in the glorious days of our royal republic, became rich. The graft from the tree that was felled in Italy flourished so vigorously in Poland that there are several branches of the family still there. I need not tell you that some are rich and some are poor. Our Paz is the scion of a poor branch. He was an orphan, without other fortune than his sword, when he served in the regiment of the Grand Duke Constantine at the time of our revolution. Joining the Polish cause, he fought like a Pole, like a patriot, like a man who has nothing, – three good reasons for fighting well. In his last affair, thinking he was followed by his men, he dashed upon a Russian battery and was taken prisoner. I was there. His brave act roused me. ‘Let us go and get him!’ I said to my troop, and we charged the battery like a lot of foragers. I got Paz – I was the seventh man; we started twenty and came back eight, counting Paz. After Warsaw was sold we were forced to escape those Russians. By a curious chance, Paz and I happened to come together again, at the same hour and the same place, on the other side of the Vistula. I saw the poor captain arrested by some Prussians, who made themselves the blood-hounds of the Russians. When we have fished a man out of the Styx we cling to him. This new danger for poor Paz made me so unhappy that I let myself be taken too, thinking I could help him. Two men can get away where one will perish. Thanks to my name and some family connections in Prussia, the authorities shut their eyes to my escape. I got my dear captain through as a man of no consequence, a family servant, and we reached Dantzic. There we got on board a Dutch vessel and went to London. It took us two months to get there. My mother was ill in England, and expecting me. Paz and I took care of her till her death, which the Polish troubles hastened. Then we left London and came to France. Men who go through such adversities become like brothers. When I reached Paris, at twenty-two years of age, and found I had an income of over sixty thousand francs a year, without counting the proceeds of the diamonds and the pictures sold by my mother, I wanted to secure the future of my dear Paz before I launched into dissipation. I had often noticed the sadness in his eyes – sometimes tears were in them. I had had good reason to understand his soul, which is noble, grand, and generous to the core. I thought he might not like to be bound by benefits to a friend who was six years younger than himself, unless he could repay them. I was careless and frivolous, just as a young fellow is, and I knew I was certain to ruin myself at play, or get inveigled by some woman, and Paz and I might then be parted; and though I had every intention of always looking out for him, I knew I might sometime or other forget to provide for him. In short, my dear angel, I wanted to spare him the pain and mortification of having to ask me for money, or of having to hunt me up if he got into distress. SO, one morning, after breakfast, when we were sitting with our feet on the andirons smoking pipes, I produced, – with the utmost precaution, for I saw him look at me uneasily, – a certificate of the Funds payable to bearer for a certain sum of money a year.”

Clementine jumped up and went and seated herself on Adam’s knee, put her arms round his neck, and kissed him. “Dear treasure!” she said, “how handsome he is! Well, what did Paz do?”

“Thaddeus turned pale,” said the count, “but he didn’t say a word.”

“Oh! his name is Thaddeus, is it?”

“Yes; Thaddeus folded the paper and gave it back to me, and then he said: ‘I thought, Adam, that we were one for life or death, and that we should never part. Do you want to be rid of me?’ ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘if you take it that way, Thaddeus, don’t let us say another word about it. If I ruin myself you shall be ruined too.’ ‘You haven’t fortune enough to live as a Laginski should,’ he said, ‘and you need a friend who will take care of your affairs, and be a father and a brother and a trusty confidant.’ My dear child, as Paz said that he had in his look and voice, calm as they were, a maternal emotion, and also the gratitude of an Arab, the fidelity of a dog, the friendship of a savage, – not displayed, but ever ready. Faith! I seized him, as we Poles do, with a hand on each shoulder, and I kissed him on the lips. ‘For life and death, then! all that I have is yours – do what you will with it.’ It was he who found me this house and bought it for next to nothing. He sold my Funds high and bought in low, and we have paid for this barrack with the profits. He knows horses, and he manages to buy and sell at such advantage that my stable really costs very little; and yet I have the finest horses and the most elegant equipages in all Paris. Our servants, brave Polish soldiers chosen by him, would go through fire and water for us. I seem, as you say, to be ruining myself; and yet Paz keeps the house with such method and economy that he has even repaired some of my foolish losses at play, – the thoughtless folly of a young man. My dear, Thaddeus is as shrewd as two Genoese, as eager for gain as a Polish Jew, and provident as a good housekeeper. I never could force him to live as I did when I was a bachelor. Sometimes I had to use a sort of friendly coercion to make him go to the theatre with me when I was alone, or to the jovial little dinners I used to give at a tavern. He doesn’t like social life.”

“What does he like, then?” asked Clementine.

“Poland; he loves Poland and pines for it. His only spendings are sums he gives, more in my name than in his own, to some of our poor brother-exiles.”

“Well, I shall love him, the fine fellow!” said the countess, “he looks to me as simple-hearted as he is grand.”

“All these pretty things you have about you,” continued Adam, who praised his friend in the noblest sincerity, “he picked up; he bought them at auction, or as bargains from the dealers. Oh! he’s keener than they are themselves. If you see him rubbing his hands in the courtyard, you may be sure he has traded away one good horse for a better. He lives for me; his happiness is to see me elegant, in a perfectly appointed equipage. The duties he takes upon himself are all accomplished without fuss or emphasis. One evening I lost twenty thousand francs at whist. ‘What will Paz say?’ thought I as I walked home. Paz paid them to me, not without a sigh; but he never reproached me, even by a look. But that sigh of his restrained me more than the remonstrances of uncles, mothers, or wives could have done. ‘Do you regret the money?’ I said to him. ‘Not for you or me, no,’ he replied; ‘but I was thinking that twenty poor Poles could have lived a year on that sum.’ You must understand that the Pazzi are fully the equal of the Laginski, so I couldn’t regard my dear Paz as an inferior. I never went out or came in without going first to Paz, as I would to my father. My fortune is his; and Thaddeus knows that if danger threatened him I would fling myself into it and drag him out, as I have done before.”

“And that is saying a good deal, my dear friend,” said the countess. “Devotion is like a flash of lightning. Men devote themselves in battle, but they no longer have the heart for it in Paris.”

“Well,” replied Adam, “I am always ready, as in battle, to devote myself to Paz. Our two characters have kept their natural asperities and defects, but the mutual comprehension of our souls has tightened the bond already close between us. It is quite possible to save a man’s life and kill him afterwards if we find him a bad fellow; but Paz and I know THAT of each other which makes our friendship indissoluble. There’s a constant exchange of happy thoughts and impressions between us; and really, perhaps, such a friendship as ours is richer than love.”

A pretty hand closed the count’s mouth so promptly that the action was somewhat like a blow.

“Yes,” he said, “friendship, my dear angel, knows nothing of bankrupt sentiments and collapsed joys. Love, after giving more than it has, ends by giving less than it receives.”

“One side as well as the other,” remarked Clementine laughing.

“Yes,” continued Adam, “whereas friendship only increases. You need not pucker up your lips at that, for we are, you and I, as much friends as lovers; we have, at least I hope so, combined the two sentiments in our happy marriage.”

“I’ll explain to you what it is that has made you and Thaddeus such good friends,” said Clementine. “The difference in the lives you lead comes from your tastes and from necessity; from your likings, not your positions. As far as one can judge from merely seeing a man once, and also from what you tell me, there are times when the subaltern might become the superior.”

“Oh, Paz is truly my superior,” said Adam, naively; “I have no advantage over him except mere luck.”

His wife kissed him for the generosity of those words.

“The extreme care with which he hides the grandeur of his feelings is one form of his superiority,” continued the count. “I said to him once: ‘You are a sly one; you have in your heart a vast domain within which you live and think.’ He has a right to the title of count; but in Paris he won’t be called anything but captain.”

“The fact is that the Florentine of the middle-ages has reappeared in our century,” said the countess. “Dante and Michael Angelo are in him.”

“That’s the very truth,” cried Adam. “He is a poet in soul.”

“So here I am, married to two Poles,” said the young countess, with a gesture worthy of some genius of the stage.

“Dear child!” said Adam, pressing her to him, “it would have made me very unhappy if my friend did not please you. We were both rather afraid of it, he and I, though he was delighted at my marriage. You will make him very happy if you tell him that you love him, – yes, as an old friend.”

“I’ll go and dress, the day is so fine; and we will all three ride together,” said Clementine, ringing for her maid.

II

Paz was leading so subterranean a life that the fashionable world of Paris asked who he was when the Comtesse Laginska was seen in the Bois de Boulogne riding between her husband and a stranger. During the ride Clementine insisted that Thaddeus should dine with them. This caprice of the sovereign lady compelled Paz to make an evening toilet. Clementine dressed for the occasion with a certain coquetry, in a style that impressed even Adam himself when she entered the salon where the two friends awaited her.

“Comte Paz,” she said, “you must go with us to the Opera.”

This was said in the tone which, coming from a woman means: “If you refuse we shall quarrel.”

“Willingly, madame,” replied the captain. “But as I have not the fortune of a count, have the kindness to call me captain.”

“Very good, captain; give me your arm,” she said, – taking it and leading the way to the dining-room with the flattering familiarity which enchants all lovers.

The countess placed the captain beside her; his behavior was that of a poor sub-lieutenant dining at his general’s table. He let Clementine talk, listened deferentially as to a superior, did not differ with her in anything, and waited to be questioned before he spoke at all. He seemed actually stupid to the countess, whose coquettish little ways missed their mark in presence of such frigid gravity and conventional respect. In vain Adam kept saying: “Do be lively, Thaddeus; one would really suppose you were not at home. You must have made a wager to disconcert Clementine.” Thaddeus continued heavy and half asleep. When the servants left the room at the end of the dessert the captain explained that his habits were diametrically opposite to those of society, – he went to bed at eight o’clock and got up very early in the morning; and he excused his dulness on the ground of being sleepy.

“My intention in taking you to the Opera was to amuse you, captain; but do as you prefer,” said Clementine, rather piqued.

“I will go,” said Paz.

“Duprez sings ‘Guillaume Tell,’” remarked Adam. “But perhaps you would rather go to the ‘Varietes’?”

The captain smiled and rang the bell. “Tell Constantin,” he said to the footman, “to put the horses to the carriage instead of the coupe. We should be rather squeezed otherwise,” he said to the count.

“A Frenchman would have forgotten that,” remarked Clementine, smiling.

“Ah! but we are Florentines transplanted to the North,” answered Thaddeus with a refinement of accent and a look in his eyes which made his conduct at table seem assumed for the occasion. There was too evident a contrast between his involuntary self-revelation in this speech and his behavior during dinner. Clementine examined the captain with a few of those covert glances which show a woman’s surprise and also her capacity for observation.

It resulted from this little incident that silence reigned in the salon while the three took their coffee, a silence rather annoying to Adam, who was incapable of imagining the cause of it. Clementine no longer tried to draw out Thaddeus. The captain, on the other hand, retreated within his military stiffness and came out of it no more, neither on the way to the Opera nor in the box, where he seemed to be asleep.

“You see, madame, that I am a very stupid man,” he said during the dance in the last act of “Guillaume Tell.” “Am I not right to keep, as the saying is, to my own specialty?”

“In truth, my dear captain, you are neither a talker nor a man of the world, but you are perhaps Polish.”

“Therefore leave me to look after your pleasures, your property, your household – it is all I am good for.”

“Tartufe! pooh!” cried Adam, laughing. “My dear, he is full of ardor; he is thoroughly educated; he can, if he chooses, hold his own in any salon. Clementine, don’t believe his modesty.”

“Adieu, comtesse; I have obeyed your wishes so far; and now I will take the carriage and go home to bed and send it back for you.”

Clementine bowed her head and let him go without replying.

“What a bear!” she said to the count. “You are a great deal nicer.”

Adam pressed her hand when no one was looking.

“Poor, dear Thaddeus,” he said, “he is trying to make himself disagreeable where most men would try to seem more amiable than I.”

“Oh!” she said, “I am not sure but what there is some calculation in his behavior; he would have taken in an ordinary woman.”

Half an hour later, when the chasseur, Boleslas, called out “Gate!” and the carriage was waiting for it to swing back, Clementine said to her husband, “Where does the captain perch?”

“Why, there!” replied Adam, pointing to a floor above the porte-cochere which had one window looking on the street. “His apartments are over the coachhouse.”

“Who lives on the other side?” asked the countess.

“No one as yet,” said Adam; “I mean that apartment for our children and their instructors.”

“He didn’t go to bed,” said the countess, observing lights in Thaddeus’s rooms when the carriage had passed under the portico supported by columns copied from those of the Tuileries, which replaced a vulgar zinc awning painted in stripes like cloth.

The captain, in his dressing-gown with a pipe in his mouth, was watching Clementine as she entered the vestibule. The day had been a hard one for him. And here is the reason why: A great and terrible emotion had taken possession of his heart on the day when Adam made him go to the Opera to see and give his opinion on Mademoiselle du Rouvre; and again when he saw her on the occasion of her marriage, and recognized in her the woman whom a man is forced to love exclusively. For this reason Paz strongly advised and promoted the long journey to Italy and elsewhere after the marriage. At peace so long as Clementine was away, his trial was renewed on the return of the happy household. As he sat at his window on this memorable night, smoking his latakia in a pipe of wild-cherry wood six feet long, given to him by Adam, these are the thoughts that were passing through his mind: —

“I, and God, who will reward me for suffering in silence, alone know how I love her! But how shall I manage to have neither her love nor her dislike?”

And his thoughts travelled far on this strange theme.

It must not be supposed that Thaddeus was living without pleasure, in the midst of his sufferings. The deceptions of this day, for instance, were a source of inward joy to him. Since the return of the count and countess he had daily felt ineffable satisfactions in knowing himself necessary to a household which, without his devotion to its interests, would infallibly have gone to ruin. What fortune can bear the strain of reckless prodigality? Clementine, brought up by a spendthrift father, knew nothing of the management of a household which the women of the present day, however rich or noble they are, are often compelled to undertake themselves. How few, in these days, keep a steward. Adam, on the other hand, son of one of the great Polish lords who let themselves be preyed on by the Jews, and are wholly incapable of managing even the wreck of their vast fortunes (for fortunes are vast in Poland), was not of a nature to check his own fancies or those of his wife. Left to himself he would probably have been ruined before his marriage. Paz had prevented him from gambling at the Bourse, and that says all.

Under these circumstances, Thaddeus, feeling that he loved Clementine in spite of himself, had not the resource of leaving the house and travelling in other lands to forget his passion. Gratitude, the key-note of his life, held him bound to that household where he alone could look after the affairs of the heedless owners. The long absence of Adam and Clementine had given him peace. But the countess had returned more lovely than ever, enjoying the freedom which marriage brings to a Parisian woman, displaying the graces of a young wife and the nameless attraction she gains from the happiness, or the independence, bestowed upon her by a young man as trustful, as chivalric, and as much in love as Adam. To know that he was the pivot on which the splendor the household depended, to see Clementine when she got out of her carriage on returning from some fete, or got into it in the morning when she took her drive, to meet her on the boulevards in her pretty equipage, looking like a flower in a whorl of leaves, inspired poor Thaddeus with mysterious delights, which glowed in the depths of his heart but gave no signs upon his face.

How happened it that for five whole months the countess had never perceived the captain? Because he hid himself from her knowledge, and carefully concealed the pains he took to avoid her. Nothing so resembles the Divine love as hopeless human love. A man must have great depth of heart to devote himself in silence and obscurity to a woman. In such a heart is the worship of love for love’s sake only – sublime avarice, sublime because ever generous and founded on the mysterious existence of the principles of creation. Effect is nature, and nature is enchanting; it belongs to man, to the poet, the painter, the lover. But Cause, to a few privileged souls and to certain mighty thinkers, is superior to nature. Cause is God. In the sphere of causes live the Newtons and all such thinkers as Laplace, Kepler, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Buffon; also the true poets and solitarys of the second Christian century, and the Saint Teresas of Spain, and such sublime ecstatics. All human sentiments bear analogy to these conditions whenever the mind abandons Effect for Cause. Thaddeus had reached this height, at which all things change their relative aspect. Filled with the joys unutterable of a creator he had attained in his love to all that genius has revealed to us of grandeur.

“No,” he was thinking to himself as he watched the curling smoke of his pipe, “she was not entirely deceived. She might break up my friendship with Adam if she took a dislike to me; but if she coquetted with me to amuse herself, what would become of me?”

The conceit of this last supposition was so foreign to the modest nature and Teutonic timidity of the captain that he scolded himself for admitting it, and went to bed, resolved to await events before deciding on a course.

The next day Clementine breakfasted very contentedly without Paz, and without even noticing his disobedience to her orders. It happened to be her reception day, when the house was thrown open with a splendor that was semi-royal. She paid no attention to the absence of Comte Paz, on whom all the burden of these parade days fell.

“Good!” thought he, as he heard the last carriages driving away at two in the morning; “it was only the caprice or the curiosity of a Parisian woman that made her want to see me.”

After that the captain went back to his ordinary habits and ways, which had been somewhat upset by this incident. Diverted by her Parisian occupations, Clementine appeared to have forgotten Paz. It must not be thought an easy matter to reign a queen over fickle Paris. Does any one suppose that fortunes alone are risked in the great game? The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire. What works of art and genius are expended on a gown or a garland in which to make a sensation! A fragile, delicate creature will wear her stiff and brilliant harness of flowers and diamonds, silk and steel, from nine at night till two and often three o’clock in the morning. She eats little, to attract remark to her slender waist; she satisfied her hunger with debilitating tea, sugared cakes, ices which heat her, or slices of heavy pastry. The stomach is made to yield to the orders of coquetry. The awakening comes too late. A fashionable woman’s whole life is in contradiction to the laws of nature, and nature is pitiless. She has no sooner risen than she makes an elaborate morning toilet, and thinks of the one which she means to wear in the afternoon. The moment she is dressed she has to receive and make visits, and go to the Bois either on horseback or in a carriage. She must practise the art of smiling, and must keep her mind on the stretch to invent new compliments which shall seem neither common nor far-fetched. All women do not succeed in this. It is no surprise, therefore, to find a young woman who entered fashionable society fresh and healthy, faded and worn out at the end of three years. Six months spent in the country will hardly heal the wounds of the winter. We hear continually, in these days, of mysterious ailments, – gastritis, and so forth, – ills unknown to women when they busied themselves about their households. In the olden time women only appeared in the world at intervals; now they are always on the scene. Clementine found she had to struggle for her supremacy. She was cited, and that alone brought jealousies; and the care and watchfulness exacted by this contest with her rivals left little time even to love her husband. Paz might well be forgotten. Nevertheless, in the month of May, as she drove home from the Bois, just before she left Paris for Ronquerolles, her uncle’s estate in Burgundy, she noticed Thaddeus, elegantly dressed, sauntering on one of the side-paths of the Champs-Elysees, in the seventh heaven of delight at seeing his beautiful countess in her elegant carriage with its spirited horses and sparkling liveries, – in short, his beloved family the admired of all.