A Start in Life

“Mistigris! if you interfere again I’ll have you put off into the road,” said his master. “And so,” he added, turning to Georges, “monsieur has been to the East?”

“Yes, monsieur; first to Egypt, then to Greece, where I served under Ali, pacha of Janina, with whom I had a terrible quarrel. There’s no enduring those climates long; besides, the emotions of all kinds in Oriental life have disorganized my liver.”

“What, have you served as a soldier?” asked the fat farmer. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine,” replied Georges, whereupon all the passengers looked at him. “At eighteen I enlisted as a private for the famous campaign of 1813; but I was present at only one battle, that of Hanau, where I was promoted sergeant-major. In France, at Montereau, I won the rank of sub-lieutenant, and was decorated by, – there are no informers here, I’m sure, – by the Emperor.”

“What! are you decorated?” cried Oscar. “Why don’t you wear your cross?”

“The cross of ‘ceux-ci’? No, thank you! Besides, what man of any breeding would wear his decorations in travelling? There’s monsieur,” he said, motioning to the Comte de Serizy. “I’ll bet whatever you like – ”

“Betting whatever you like means, in France, betting nothing at all,” said Mistigris’s master.

“I’ll bet whatever you like,” repeated Georges, incisively, “that monsieur here is covered with stars.”

“Well,” said the count, laughing, “I have the grand cross of the Legion of honor, that of Saint Andrew of Russia, that of the Prussian Eagle, that of the Annunciation of Sardinia, and the Golden Fleece.”

“Beg pardon,” said Mistigris, “are they all in the coucou?”

“Hey! that brick-colored old fellow goes it strong!” whispered Georges to Oscar. “What was I saying? – oh! I know. I don’t deny that I adore the Emperor – ”

“I served under him,” said the count.

“What a man he was, wasn’t he?” cried Georges.

“A man to whom I owe many obligations,” replied the count, with a silly expression that was admirably assumed.

“For all those crosses?” inquired Mistigris.

“And what quantities of snuff he took!” continued Monsieur de Serizy.

“He carried it loose in his pockets,” said Georges.

“So I’ve been told,” remarked Pere Leger with an incredulous look.

“Worse than that; he chewed and smoked,” continued Georges. “I saw him smoking, in a queer way, too, at Waterloo, when Marshal Soult took him round the waist and flung him into his carriage, just as he had seized a musket and was going to charge the English – ”

“You were at Waterloo!” cried Oscar, his eyes stretching wide open.

“Yes, young man, I did the campaign of 1815. I was a captain at Mont-Saint-Jean, and I retired to the Loire, after we were all disbanded. Faith! I was disgusted with France; I couldn’t stand it. In fact, I should certainly have got myself arrested; so off I went, with two or three dashing fellows, – Selves, Besson, and others, who are now in Egypt, – and we entered the service of pacha Mohammed; a queer sort of fellow he was, too! Once a tobacco merchant in the bazaars, he is now on the high-road to be a sovereign prince. You’ve all seen him in that picture by Horace Vernet, – ‘The Massacre of the Mameluks.’ What a handsome fellow he was! But I wouldn’t give up the religion of my fathers and embrace Islamism; all the more because the abjuration required a surgical operation which I hadn’t any fancy for. Besides, nobody respects a renegade. Now if they had offered me a hundred thousand francs a year, perhaps – and yet, no! The pacha did give me a thousand talari as a present.”

“How much is that?” asked Oscar, who was listening to Georges with all his ears.

“Oh! not much. A talaro is, as you might say, a five-franc piece. But faith! I got no compensation for the vices I contracted in that God-forsaken country, if country it is. I can’t live now without smoking a narghile twice a-day, and that’s very costly.”

“How did you find Egypt?” asked the count.

“Egypt? Oh! Egypt is all sand,” replied Georges, by no means taken aback. “There’s nothing green but the valley of the Nile. Draw a green line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt. But those Egyptians – fellahs they are called – have an immense advantage over us. There are no gendarmes in that country. You may go from end to end of Egypt, and you won’t see one.”

“But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians,” said Mistigris.

“Not as many as you think for,” replied Georges. “There are many more Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands with gunpowder and munitions for Ali de Tebelen. You know, don’t you, that the British sell powder and munitions of war to all the world, – Turks, Greeks, and the devil, too, if the devil has money? From Zante we were to skirt the coasts of Greece and tack about, on and off. Now it happens that my name of Georges is famous in that country. I am, such as you see me, the grandson of the famous Czerni-Georges who made war upon the Porte, and, instead of crushing it, as he meant to do, got crushed himself. His son took refuge in the house of the French consul at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother pregnant with me, his seventh child. Our property was all stolen by friends of my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined. My mother, who lived on her diamonds, which she sold one by one, married, in 1799, my step-father, Monsieur Yung, a purveyor. But my mother is dead, and I have quarrelled with my step-father, who, between ourselves, is a blackguard; he is still alive, but I never see him. That’s why, in despair, left all to myself, I went off to the wars as a private in 1813. Well, to go back to the time I returned to Greece; you wouldn’t believe with what joy old Ali Tebelen received the grandson of Czerni-Georges. Here, of course, I call myself simply Georges. The pacha gave me a harem – ”

“You have had a harem?” said Oscar.

“Were you a pacha with many tails?” asked Mistigris.

“How is it that you don’t know,” replied Georges, “that only the Sultan makes pachas, and that my friend Tebelen (for we were as friendly as Bourbons) was in rebellion against the Padishah! You know, or you don’t know, that the true title of the Grand Seignior is Padishah, and not Sultan or Grand Turk. You needn’t think that a harem is much of a thing; you might as well have a herd of goats. The women are horribly stupid down there; I much prefer the grisettes of the Chaumieres at Mont-Parnasse.”

“They are nearer, at any rate,” said the count.

“The women of the harem couldn’t speak a word of French, and that language is indispensable for talking. Ali gave me five legitimate wives and ten slaves; that’s equivalent to having none at all at Janina. In the East, you must know, it is thought very bad style to have wives and women. They have them, just as we have Voltaire and Rousseau; but who ever opens his Voltaire or his Rousseau? Nobody. But, for all that, the highest style is to be jealous. They sew a woman up in a sack and fling her into the water on the slightest suspicion, – that’s according to their Code.”

“Did you fling any in?” asked the farmer.

“I, a Frenchman! for shame! I loved them.”

Whereupon Georges twirled and twisted his moustache with a dreamy air.

They were now entering Saint-Denis, and Pierrotin presently drew up before the door of a tavern where were sold the famous cheese-cakes of that place. All the travellers got out. Puzzled by the apparent truth mingled with Georges’ inventions, the count returned to the coucou when the others had entered the house, and looked beneath the cushion for the portfolio which Pierrotin told him that enigmatical youth had placed there. On it he read the words in gilt letters: “Maitre Crottat, notary.” The count at once opened it, and fearing, with some reason, that Pere Leger might be seized with the same curiosity, he took out the deed of sale for the farm at Moulineaux, put it into his coat pocket, and entered the inn to keep an eye on the travellers.

“This Georges is neither more nor less than Crottat’s second clerk,” thought he. “I shall pay my compliments to his master, whose business it was to send me his head-clerk.”

From the respectful glances of Pere Leger and Oscar, Georges perceived that he had made for himself two fervent admirers. Accordingly, he now posed as a great personage; paid for their cheese-cakes, and ordered for each a glass of Alicante. He offered the same to Mistigris and his master, who refused with smiles; but the friend of Ali Tebelen profited by the occasion to ask the pair their names.

“Oh! monsieur,” said Mistigris’ master, “I am not blessed, like you, with an illustrious name; and I have not returned from Asia – ”

At this moment the count, hastening into the huge inn-kitchen lest his absence should excite inquiry, entered the place in time to hear the conclusion of the young man’s speech.

“ – I am only a poor painter lately returned from Rome, where I went at the cost of the government, after winning the ‘grand prix’ five years ago. My name is Schinner.”

“Hey! bourgeois, may I offer you a glass of Alicante and some cheese-cakes?” said Georges to the count.

“Thank you,” replied the latter. “I never leave home without taking my cup of coffee and cream.”

“Don’t you eat anything between meals? How bourgeois, Marais, Place Royale, that is!” cried Georges. “When he ‘blagued’ just now about his crosses, I thought there was something in him,” whispered the Eastern hero to the painter. “However, we’ll set him going on his decorations, the old tallow-chandler! Come, my lad,” he added, calling to Oscar, “drink me down the glass poured out for the chandler; that will start your moustache.”

Oscar, anxious to play the man, swallowed the second glass of wine, and ate three more cheese-cakes.

“Good wine, that!” said Pere Leger, smacking his lips.

“It is all the better,” said Georges, “because it comes from Bercy. I’ve been to Alicante myself, and I know that this wine no more resembles what is made there than my arm is like a windmill. Our made-up wines are a great deal better than the natural ones in their own country. Come, Pierrotin, take a glass! It is a great pity your horses can’t take one, too; we might go faster.”

“Forward, march!” cried Pierrotin, amid a mighty cracking of whips, after the travellers were again boxed up.

It was now eleven o’clock. The weather, which had been cloudy, cleared; the breeze swept off the mists, and the blue of the sky appeared in spots; so that when the coucou trundled along the narrow strip of road from Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte, the sun had fairly drunk up the last floating vapors of the diaphanous veil which swathed the scenery of that famous region.

“Well, now, tell us why you left your friend the pacha,” said Pere Leger, addressing Georges.

“He was a very singular scamp,” replied Georges, with an air that hid a multitude of mysteries. “He put me in command of his cavalry, – so far, so good – ”

“Ah! that’s why he wears spurs,” thought poor Oscar.

“At that time Ali Tebelen wanted to rid himself of Chosrew pacha, another queer chap! You call him, here, Chaureff; but the name is pronounced, in Turkish, Cosserew. You must have read in the newspapers how old Ali drubbed Chosrew, and soundly, too, faith! Well, if it hadn’t been for me, Ali Tebelen himself would have bit the dust two days earlier. I was at the right wing, and I saw Chosrew, an old sly-boots, thinking to force our centre, – ranks closed, stiff, swift, fine movement a la Murat. Good! I take my time; then I charge, double-quick, and cut his line in two, – you understand? Ha! ha! after the affair was over, Ali kissed me – ”

“Do they do that in the East?” asked the count, in a joking way.

“Yes, monsieur,” said the painter, “that’s done all the world over.”

“After that,” continued Georges, “Ali gave me yataghans, and carbines, and scimetars, and what-not. But when we got back to his capital he made me propositions, wanted me to drown a wife, and make a slave of myself, – Orientals are so queer! But I thought I’d had enough of it; for, after all, you know, Ali was a rebel against the Porte. So I concluded I had better get off while I could. But I’ll do Monsieur Tebelen the justice to say that he loaded me with presents, – diamonds, ten thousand talari, one thousand gold coins, a beautiful Greek girl for groom, a little Circassian for a mistress, and an Arab horse! Yes, Ali Tebelen, pacha of Janina, is too little known; he needs an historian. It is only in the East one meets with such iron souls, who can nurse a vengeance twenty years and accomplish it some fine morning. He had the most magnificent white beard that was ever seen, and a hard, stern face – ”

“But what did you do with your treasures?” asked farmer Leger.

“Ha! that’s it! you may well ask that! Those fellows down there haven’t any Grand Livre nor any Bank of France. So I was forced to carry off my windfalls in a felucca, which was captured by the Turkish High-Admiral himself. Such as you see me here to-day, I came very near being impaled at Smyrna. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Monsieur de Riviere, our ambassador, who was there, they’d have taken me for an accomplice of Ali pacha. I saved my head, but, to tell the honest truth, all the rest, the ten thousand talari, the thousand gold pieces, and the fine weapons, were all, yes all, drunk up by the thirsty treasury of the Turkish admiral. My position was the more perilous because that very admiral happened to be Chosrew pacha. After I routed him, the fellow had managed to obtain a position which is equal to that of our Admiral of the Fleet – ”

“But I thought he was in the cavalry?” said Pere Leger, who had followed the narrative with the deepest attention.

“Dear me! how little the East is understood in the French provinces!” cried Georges. “Monsieur, I’ll explain the Turks to you. You are a farmer; the Padishah (that’s the Sultan) makes you a marshal; if you don’t fulfil your functions to his satisfaction, so much the worse for you, he cuts your head off; that’s his way of dismissing his functionaries. A gardener is made a prefect; and the prime minister comes down to be a foot-boy. The Ottomans have no system of promotion and no hierarchy. From a cavalry officer Chosrew simply became a naval officer. Sultan Mahmoud ordered him to capture Ali by sea; and he did get hold of him, assisted by those beggarly English – who put their paw on most of the treasure. This Chosrew, who had not forgotten the riding-lesson I gave him, recognized me. You understand, my goose was cooked, oh, brown! when it suddenly came into my head to claim protection as a Frenchman and a troubadour from Monsieur de Riviere. The ambassador, enchanted to find something to show him off, demanded that I should be set at liberty. The Turks have one good trait in their nature; they are as willing to let you go as they are to cut your head off; they are indifferent to everything. The French consul, charming fellow, friend of Chosrew, made him give back two thousand of the talari, and, consequently, his name is, as I may say, graven on my heart – ”

“What was his name?” asked Monsieur de Serizy; and a look of some surprise passed over his face as Georges named, correctly, one of our most distinguished consul-generals who happened at that time to be stationed at Smyrna.

“I assisted,” added Georges, “at the execution of the Governor of Smyrna, whom the Sultan had ordered Chosrew to put to death. It was one of the most curious things I ever saw, though I’ve seen many, – I’ll tell you about it when we stop for breakfast. From Smyrna I crossed to Spain, hearing there was a revolution there. I went straight to Mina, who appointed me as his aide-de-camp with the rank of colonel. I fought for the constitutional cause, which will certainly be defeated when we enter Spain – as we undoubtedly shall, some of these days – ”

“You, a French soldier!” said the count, sternly. “You show extraordinary confidence in the discretion of those who are listening to you.”

“But there are no spies here,” said Georges.

“Are you aware, Colonel Georges,” continued the count, “that the Court of Peers is at this very time inquiring into a conspiracy which has made the government extremely severe in its treatment of French soldiers who bear arms against France, and who deal in foreign intrigues for the purpose of overthrowing our legitimate sovereigns.”

On hearing this stern admonition the painter turned red to his ears and looked at Mistigris, who seemed dumfounded.

“Well,” said Pere Leger, “what next?”

“If,” continued the count, “I were a magistrate, it would be my duty to order the gendarmes at Pierrefitte to arrest the aide-de-camp of Mina, and to summon all present in this vehicle to testify to his words.”

This speech stopped Georges’ narrative all the more surely, because at this moment the coucou reached the guard-house of a brigade of gendarmerie, – the white flag floating, as the orthodox saying is, upon the breeze.

“You have too many decorations to do such a dastardly thing,” said Oscar.

“Never mind; we’ll catch up with him soon,” whispered Georges in the lad’s ear.

“Colonel,” cried Leger, who was a good deal disturbed by the count’s outburst, and wanted to change the conversation, “in all these countries where you have been, what sort of farming do they do? How do they vary the crops?”

“Well, in the first place, my good fellow, you must understand, they are too busy cropping off each others’ heads to think much of cropping the ground.”

The count couldn’t help smiling; and that smile reassured the narrator.

“They have a way of cultivating which you will think very queer. They don’t cultivate at all; that’s their style of farming. The Turks and the Greeks, they eat onions or rise. They get opium from poppies, and it gives them a fine revenue. Then they have tobacco, which grows of itself, famous latakiah! and dates! and all kinds of sweet things that don’t need cultivation. It is a country full of resources and commerce. They make fine rugs at Smyrna, and not dear.”

“But,” persisted Leger, “if the rugs are made of wool they must come from sheep; and to have sheep you must have fields, farms, culture – ”

“Well, there may be something of that sort,” replied Georges. “But their chief crop, rice, grows in the water. As for me, I have only been along the coasts and seen the parts that are devastated by war. Besides, I have the deepest aversion to statistics.”

“How about the taxes?” asked the farmer.

“Oh! the taxes are heavy; they take all a man has, and leave him the rest. The pacha of Egypt was so struck with the advantages of that system, that, when I came away he was on the point of organizing his own administration on that footing – ”

“But,” said Leger, who no longer understood a single word, “how?”

“How?” said Georges. “Why, agents go round and take all the harvests, and leave the fellahs just enough to live on. That’s a system that does away with stamped papers and bureaucracy, the curse of France, hein?”

“By virtue of what right?” said Leger.

“Right? why it is a land of despotism. They haven’t any rights. Don’t you know the fine definition Montesquieu gives of despotism. ‘Like the savage, it cuts down the tree to gather the fruits.’ They don’t tax, they take everything.”

“And that’s what our rulers are trying to bring us to. ‘Tax vobiscum,’ – no, thank you!” said Mistigris.

“But that is what we are coming to,” said the count. “Therefore, those who own land will do well to sell it. Monsieur Schinner must have seen how things are tending in Italy, where the taxes are enormous.”

“Corpo di Bacco! the Pope is laying it on heavily,” replied Schinner. “But the people are used to it. Besides, Italians are so good-natured that if you let ‘em murder a few travellers along the highways they’re contented.”

“I see, Monsieur Schinner,” said the count, “that you are not wearing the decoration you obtained in 1819; it seems the fashion nowadays not to wear orders.”

Mistigris and the pretended Schinner blushed to their ears.

“Well, with me,” said the artist, “the case is different. It isn’t on account of fashion; but I don’t want to be recognized. Have the goodness not to betray me, monsieur; I am supposed to be a little painter of no consequence, – a mere decorator. I’m on may way to a chateau where I mustn’t rouse the slightest suspicion.”

“Ah! I see,” said the count, “some intrigue, – a love affair! Youth is happy!”

Oscar, who was writhing in his skin at being a nobody and having nothing to say, gazed at Colonel Czerni-Georges and at the famous painter Schinner, and wondered how he could transform himself into somebody. But a youth of nineteen, kept at home all his life, and going for two weeks only into the country, what could he be, or do, or say? However, the Alicante had got into his head, and his vanity was boiling in his veins; so when the famous Schinner allowed a romantic adventure to be guessed at in which the danger seemed as great as the pleasure, he fastened his eyes, sparkling with wrath and envy, upon that hero.

“Yes,” said the count, with a credulous air, “a man must love a woman well to make such sacrifices.”

“What sacrifices?” demanded Mistigris.

“Don’t you know, my little friend, that a ceiling painted by so great a master as yours is worth its weight in gold?” replied the count. “If the civil list paid you, as it did, thirty thousand francs for each of those rooms in the Louvre,” he continued, addressing Schinner, “a bourgeois, – as you call us in the studios – ought certainly to pay you twenty thousand. Whereas, if you go to this chateau as a humble decorator, you will not get two thousand.”

“The money is not the greatest loss,” said Mistigris. “The work is sure to be a masterpiece, but he can’t sign it, you know, for fear of compromising her.”

“Ah! I’d return all my crosses to the sovereigns who gave them to me for the devotion that youth can win,” said the count.

“That’s just it!” said Mistigris, “when one’s young, one’s loved; plenty of love, plenty of women; but they do say: ‘Where there’s wife, there’s mope.’”

“What does Madame Schinner say to all this?” pursued the count; “for I believe you married, out of love, the beautiful Adelaide de Rouville, the protegee of old Admiral de Kergarouet; who, by the bye, obtained for you the order for the Louvre ceilings through his nephew, the Comte de Fontaine.”

“A great painter is never married when he travels,” said Mistigris.

“So that’s the morality of studios, is it?” cried the count, with an air of great simplicity.

“Is the morality of courts where you got those decorations of yours any better?” said Schinner, recovering his self-possession, upset for the moment by finding out how much the count knew of Schinner’s life as an artist.

“I never asked for any of my orders,” said the count. “I believe I have loyally earned them.”

“‘A fair yield and no flavor,’” said Mistigris.

The count was resolved not to betray himself; he assumed an air of good-humored interest in the country, and looked up the valley of Groslay as the coucou took the road to Saint-Brice, leaving that to Chantilly on the right.

“Is Rome as fine as they say it is?” said Georges, addressing the great painter.

“Rome is fine only to those who love it; a man must have a passion for it to enjoy it. As a city, I prefer Venice, – though I just missed being murdered there.”

“Faith, yes!” cried Mistigris; “if it hadn’t been for me you’d have been gobbled up. It was that mischief-making tom-fool, Lord Byron, who got you into the scrape. Oh! wasn’t he raging, that buffoon of an Englishman?”

“Hush!” said Schinner. “I don’t want my affair with Lord Byron talked about.”

“But you must own, all the same, that you were glad enough I knew how to box,” said Mistigris.

From time to time, Pierrotin exchanged sly glances with the count, which might have made less inexperienced persons than the five other travellers uneasy.

“Lords, pachas, and thirty-thousand-franc ceilings!” he cried. “I seem to be driving sovereigns. What pourboires I’ll get!”

“And all the places paid for!” said Mistigris, slyly.

“It is a lucky day for me,” continued Pierrotin; “for you know, Pere Leger, about my beautiful new coach on which I have paid an advance of two thousand francs? Well, those dogs of carriage-builders, to whom I have to pay two thousand five hundred francs more, won’t take fifteen hundred down, and my note for a thousand for two months! Those vultures want it all. Who ever heard of being so stiff with a man in business these eight years, and the father of a family? – making me run the risk of losing everything, carriage and money too, if I can’t find before to-morrow night that miserable last thousand! Hue, Bichette! They won’t play that trick on the great coach offices, I’ll warrant you.”