The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol (American Magazine series)/The Adventure of Fleurette
The Adventure of Fleurette
One day when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of woman I pulled him up.
“My good friend,” said I, “you seem to have fallen in love with every woman you have ever met; but for how many of them have you really cared?”
“Mon Dieu! For all of them!” he cried, springing from his chair and making a windmill of himself.
“Come, come,” said I, “all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance. Have you ever been really in love in your life?”
“How should I know?” said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away and looked out of window.
There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his cigarette into the fire and thrust his hands into his pockets. He sighed.
“Perhaps there was Fleurette,” said he, not looking at me. “Est-ce qu'on sait jamais? That wasn't her real name—it was Marie-Joséphine; but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know.”
I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French tongue.
“The most delicate little flower you can conceive,” he continued. “Tiens, she was a tired lily—so white, and her hair the flash of gold on it—and she had eyes—des yeux de pervenche, as we say in French. What is pervenche in English—that little pale blue flower?”
“Periwinkle,” said I.
“Periwinkle eyes! Was there ever such a language! Ah, no! She had des yeux de pervenche.... She was diaphane, diaphanous ... impalpable as cigarette smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils like infinitesimal seashells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of her.... Ah! Cré nom d'un chien! life is droll. It has no common sense. It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette? It was this way—'”
And the story he narrated I will do my best now to set down.
The good Monsieur Bocardon of the Hôtel de la Curatterie at Nimes, whose grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded in these chronicles, had a brother in Paris who managed the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange conjuncture, a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighborhood of the Halles Centrales). Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers, stockings and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch transportation), and American schoolmarms realizing at last the dream of their modest and laborious lives. Accommodation was cheap, manners were easy and knowledge of the gay city less than rudimentary.
To Monsieur Bocardon of Paris Aristide, one August morning, brought glowing letters of introduction from Monsieur and Madame Bocardon of Nimes. Monsieur Bocardon of Paris welcomed Aristide as a Provençal and a brother. He brought out from a cupboard in his private bureau an hospitable bottle of old Armagnac and discoursed with Aristide on the seductions of the South. It was there that he longed to retire—to a dainty little hotel of his own with a smart clientèle. The clientèle of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse was not to his taste. He spoke slightingly of his guests.
“There are people who know how to travel,” said he, “and people who don't. These lost muttons here don't, and they make hotel-keeping a nightmare instead of a joy. A hundred times a day have I to tell them the way to Notre Dame. Pouch!” said he, gulping down his disgust and the rest of his Armagnac, “it is back-breaking.”
“Tu sais mon vieux,” cried Aristide—he had the most lightning way of establishing an intimacy—“I have an idea. These lost sheep need a shepherd.”
“Eh bien?” said Monsieur Bocardon.
“Eh, bien,” said Aristide. “Why should not I be the shepherd, the official shepherd attached to the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse?”
“Explain yourself,” said Monsieur Bocardon.
Aristide, letting loose his swift imagination, explained copiously and hypnotized Mon- sieur Bocardon with his glittering eye until he had assured to himself a means of liveli- hood. From that moment he became the familiar genius of the hotel. Scorning the title of “guide,” lest he should be associated in the minds of the guests with the squalid scoundrels who infest the Boulevard, he constituted himself “Directeur de l'Agence Pujol.” An obfuscated Bocardon formed the rest of the agency and pocketed a percentage of Aristide's earnings, and Aristide, addressed as “Director” by the Anglo-Saxons, “Monsieur le Directeur” by the Latins and “Herr Direktor” by the Teutons, walked about like a peacock in a barnyard.
At that period, and until he had learned Baedeker by heart, a process which nearly gave him brain fever, and still, he declares, brings terror into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography and art treasures of Paris than the flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not to heed; but now and then the American schoolmarms unmasked the charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had been erected by the Pilgrim Fathers, would have accepted the statement meekly.
“My friend,” said Aristide, with Provençal flourish and braggadocio, “I never met a woman that would not sooner be misled by me than be taught by the whole Faculty of the Sorbonne.”
He had been practising this honorable profession for about a month, lodging with the good Madame Bidoux at 214 bis rue St. Honoré, when, one morning, in the vestibule of the hotel, he ran into his old friend Batterby, whom he had known during the days of his professorship of French at the Academy for Young Ladies in Manchester. The pair had been fellow lodgers in the same house in the Rusholme Road; but whereas Aristide lived in one sunless bed-sitting-room looking on a forest of chimney pots, Batterby, man of luxury and ease, had a suite of apartments on the first floor and kept an inexhaustible supply of whisky, cigars, and such like etceteras of the opulent, and the very ugliest prize bull-pup you can imagine. Batterby, in gaudy raiment, went to an office in Manchester; in gaudier raiment he often attended race meetings. He had rings and scarf-pins and rattled gold in his trousers' pockets. He might have been an insufferable young man for a poverty-stricken teacher of French to have as a fellow lodger; but he was not. Like all those born to high estate he made no vulgar parade of his wealth and to Aristide he showed the most affable hospitality. A friendship had arisen between them which the years had idealized rather than impaired. So when they met that morning in the vestibule of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse, their greetings were fervent and prolonged.
In person Batterby tended toward burliness. He had a red, jolly face, divided unequally by a great black mustache, and his manner. was hearty. He slapped Aristide on the back many times and shook him by the shoulders.
“We must have a drink on this straight away, old man,” said he.
“You're: so strange, you English,” said Aristide. “The moment you have an emotion you must celebrate it by a drink. 'My dear fellow, I've just come into a fortune. Let us have a drink.' Or, 'My friend, my poor old father has just been run over by an omnibus. Let us have a drink.' My good Reginald, look at the clock. It is only nine in the morning.”
“Rot,” said Reginald. “Drink is good at any time.”
They went into the dark and deserted smoking room, where Batterby ordered Scotch and soda and Aristide, an abstemious man, a vermouth sec.
“What's that muck?” asked Batterby, when the waiter brought the drinks. Aristide explained. “Whisky's good enough for me,” laughed the other. Aristide laughed too, out of politeness and out of joy at meeting his old friend. i
“With you playing at guide here,” said Batterby, when he had learned Aristide's position in the hotel, “it seems I have come to the right shop. There are no flies on me, you know, but when a man comes to Paris for the first time he likes to be put up to the ropes.”
“Your first visit to Paris?” cried Aristide. “Mon vieux, what wonders are going to ravish your eyes! What a time you are going to have!”
Batterby bit off the end of a great black cigar.
“If the missus will let me,” said he.
“Missus? Your wife? You are married, my dear Reginald?” Aristide leaped, in his unexpected fashion, from his chair and almost embraced him. “Ah! but you are happy! You are lucky! It was always like that. You open your mouth and the larks fall ready roasted into it! My congratulations. And she is here, in this hotel, your wife? Tell me about her.”
Batterby lit his cigar. “She's nothing to write home about,” he said modestly. “She's French”
“French? No—you don't say so!” exclaimed Aristide in ecstasy.
“Well, she was brought up in France from her childhood, but her parents were Finns. Mighty funny place for people to come from—Finland—isn't it? You could never expect it—might just as well think of 'em coming from Lapland. She's an orphan. I met her in London.”
“But that's romantic! And she is young, pretty?”
“Oh, yes; in a way,” said the proprietary Briton.
“And her name?”
“Oh, she has a fool name—Fleurette. I wanted to call her Flossie, but she didn't like it.”
“I should think not,” said Aristide. “Fleurette is an adorable name.”
“I suppose it's right enough,” said Batterby. “But if I want to call her good old Flossie, why should she object? You married, old man? No? Well, wait till you are. You think women are angels all wrapped up in feathers and wings beneath their toggery, don't you? Well, they're just blooming porcupines all bristling with objections.”
“Mais, allons, donc!” cried Aristide. “You love her, your beautiful Finnish orphan brought up in France and romantically met in London, with the adorable name?”
“Oh, that's all right,” said the easy Batterby, lifting his half-emptied glass. “Here's luck!'
“Ah, no!” said Aristide leaning forward, and clinking his wine glass against the other's tumbler. “Here is to Madame.”
When they returned to the vestibule, they found Mrs. Batterby patiently awaiting her lord. She arose from her seat at the approach of the two men, a fragile flower of a girl, about three and twenty, pale as a lily, with exquisite though rather large features, and with eyes of the blue of the pervenche (in deference to Aristide, I use the French name) which seemed to smile trustfully through perpetual tears. She was dressed in pale shadowy blue—graceful, impalpable, just like the smoke, said Aristide, curling upward from a cigarette.
“Reggie has spoken of you many times, Monsieur,” said Fleurette, after the introduction had been effected.
Aristide was touched. “Fancy him remembering me! Ce bon vieux Reginald. Madame,” said he, “your husband is the best fellow in the world.”
“Feed him with sugar and he won't bite,” said Batterby; whereat they all laughed, as if it had been a very good joke.
“Well, what about this Paris of yours?” he said, after a while. “The missus knows as little of it as I do.”
“Really?” asked Aristide.
“I lived all my life in Brest, before I went to England,” she said modestly.
“She wants to see all the sights, the Louvre, the Morgue, the Cathedral of What's-its-name that you've got here. I've got to go round, too. Pleases her and don't hurt me. You must tote us about. We'll have a cab, old girl, as you can't do much walking, and good old Pujol will come with us.”
“But that is ideal!” cried Aristide, flying to the door to order the cab; but before he could reach it he was stopped by three or four waiting tourists, who pointed some to the clock, some to the wagonette standing outside, and asked the Director when the personally conducted party was to start. Aristide, who had totally forgotten the responsibilities attached to the directorship of the Agence Pujol and, but for this reminder, would have blissfully left his sheep to err and stray over Paris by themselves, returned, crestfallen, to his friends and explained the situation.
“But we'll join the party,” said the cheery Batterby. “The more the merrier—good old bean-feast. Will there be room?”
“Plenty,” replied Aristide, brightening. “But would it meet the wishes of Madame?”
Her pale face flushed ever so slightly and the soft eyes fluttered at him a half-astonished, half-grateful glance.
“With my husband and you, Monsieur, I should love it,” she said.
So Mr. and Mrs. Batterby joined the personally conducted party, as they did the next morning and the next and several mornings after, and received esoteric information concerning the monuments of Paris that is hidden even from the erudite. The evenings, however, Aristide, being off duty, devoted to their especial entertainment. He took them to riotous and perspiring restaurants where they dined gorgeously—for three francs fifty, wine included; to open-air cafés-concerts in. the Champs Elysées which Fleurette found infinitely diverting, but which bored Batterby, who knew not French, to stertorous slumber; to crowded brasseries on the Boulevard, where Batterby awakened, under a steady flow of whisky, to appreciative contemplation of Paris life. As in the old days of the Rusholme Road, Batterby flung his money about with unostentatious generosity. He was out for a beano, he declared, and hang the expense! Aristide, whose purse, scantily filled (truth to say) by the profits of the Agence Pujol, could contribute but modestly to this reckless expenditure, found himself forced to accept his friend's lavish hos- pitality. Once or twice, delicately, he suggested withdrawal from the evening's dissipation.
“But, my good Monsieur Pujol,” said Fleurette, with childish tragicality in her pervenche eyes, “without you we shall be lost. We shall not enjoy ourselves at all, at all.”
So Aristide, out of love for his friend and out of he knew not what for his friend's wife, continued to show them the sights of Paris. They went to the cabarets of Montmartre, the Ciel where one is served by angels, the Enfer where one is served by red devils in a Tattarean lighting, the Néant where one has coffins for tables—than all of which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which caused Fleurette to grip Aristide's hand tight in scared wonderment and Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier, and various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by the wind, and Batterby absorbed a startling assortment of alcohols. In a word, Aristide procured for his friends prodigious diversion.
“How do you like this, old girl?” Batterby asked one night, at the Moulin de la Galette, a dizzying, not very decorous, and to the unsophisticated visitor a dangerous place of entertainment. “Better than Great Coram Street, isn't it?”
She smiled and laid her hand on his. She was a woman of few words but of infinite caressing actions.
“I ought to let you into a secret, Aristide. This is our honeymoon.”
“Who would have thought it?” said Aristide.
“A fortnight ago she was being killed in a Bloomsbury boarding house. There were two of 'em—she and a girl called Carrie. I used to call 'em Fetch and Carrie. This one was Fetch. Well, she fetched me, didn't you, old girl? And now you're Mrs. Reginald Batterby, living at your ease, eh?”
“Madame would grace any sphere,” said Aristide.
“I wish I had more education,” said Fleurette, humbly. “Monsieur Pujol and yourself are so clever that you must laugh at me.”
“We do sometimes, but you mustn't mind us. Remember—at the what-you-call-it—the little shanty at Versailles?”
“The Grand Trianon,” said Aristide.
“That's it. When you were showing us the rooms—'What is the Empress Josephine doing now?'” He mimicked her accent. “Ha! ha! And the poor soul gone to glory a couple of hundred years ago.”
The little mouth puckered at the corners, and moisture gathered in the blue eyes.
“Mais, mon Dieu, it was natural, the mistake,” cried Aristide gallantly. “The Empress Eugénie, the wife of another Napoleon, is still living.”
“Bien sûr,” said Fleurette. “How was I to know?”
“Never mind, old girl,” said Batterby. “You're living, all right, and out of that beastly boarding house, and that's the chief thing. Another month of it would have killed her. She had a cough that shook her to bits. She's looking better already, isn't she, Pujol?”
{dhr} One night, about three weeks after the Batterbys' arrival in Paris, Batterby sent his wife to bed, and invited Aristide to accompany him for half an hour to a neighboring café. He looked grave and troubled.
“I've been upset by a telegram,” said he, when drinks had been ordered. “I'm called away to New York on business. I must catch the boat from Cherbourg to-morrow evening. Now, I can't take Fleurette with me. Women and business don't mix. She has jolly well got to stay here. I shan't be away more than a month. TIl leave her plenty of money to go on with. But what's worrying me is—how is she going to stick it? So, look here, old man, you're my pal, aren't you?”
He stretched out his hand. Aristide grasped it impulsively.
“Why of course, mon vieux!”
“If I felt that I could leave her in your charge, all on the square, as a real straight pal—I should go away happy.”
“She shall be my sister,” cried Aristide, “and I shall give her all the devotion of a brother.... I swear it—tiens—what can I swear it on?” He flung out his arms and looked round the café as if in search of an object. “I swear it on the head of my mother. Have no fear. I, Aristide Pujol, have never betrayed the sacred obligations of friendship. I accept her as a consecrated trust.”
“You only need to have said 'Right-o,' and I would have believed you,” said Batterby. “I haven't told her yet. There'll be blubbering all night. Let us have another drink.”
When Aristide arrived at the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse at nine o'clock the next morning, he found that Batterby had left Paris by the early train. Fleurette he did not meet until he brought back the sight-seers to the fold in the evening. She had wept much during the day; but she smiled bravely on Aristide. A woman could not stand in the way of her husband's business.
“By the way, what is Reginald's business?” Aristide asked.
She did not know. Reginald never spoke to her of such things; perhaps she was too ignorant to understand.
“But he will make a lot of money by going to America,” she said. Then she was silent for a few moments. “Mon Dieu!” she sighed, at last. “How long the day has been!”
It was the beginning of many long days for Fleurette. Reginald did not write from Cherbourg or cable from New York, as he had promised, and the return American mail brought no letter. The days passed drearily. Sometimes, for the sake of human society, she accompanied the tourist parties of the Agence Pujol; but the thrill had passed from the Morgue and the glory had departed from Versailles. Sometimes she wandered out by herself into the streets and public gardens; but pretty, unprotected and fragile, she attracted the attention of evil or careless men, which struck cold terror into her heart. Most often she sat alone and listless in the hotel, reading the feuilleton of the Petit Journal, and waiting for the post to bring her news.
“Mon Dieu, Monsieur Pujol, what can have happened?”
“Nothing at all, chére petite Madame,”—question and answer came many times a day. “Only some foolish mischance which will soon be explained. The good Reginald has written and his letter has been lost in the post. He has been obliged to go on business to San Francisco or Buenos Aires—eh, que veux-tu, one cannot have letters from those places in twenty-four hours!”
“If only he had taken me with him!”
“But, dear Madame Fleurette, he could not expose you to the hardships of travel. You, who are as fragile as cobweb, how could you go to Patagonia or Senegal or Baltimore, those wild places where there are no comforts for women? You must be reasonable. I am sure you will get a letter soon—or else in a day or two, he will come, with his good honest face as if nothing had occurred—these English are like that—and call for whisky and soda. Be comforted, chère petite Madame.”
Aristide did his best to comfort her, threw her in the companionship of decent women staying at the hotel and devoted his evenings to her entertainment. But the days passed, and Reginald Batterby, with the good honest face, neither wrote nor ordered whisky and soda. Fleurette began to pine and fade.
One day she came to Aristide.
“Monsieur Pujol, I have no more money left.”
“Bigre!” said Pujol. 'The good Bocardon will have to give you credit. I'll arrange it.”
“But I already owe for three weeks,” said Fleurette.
Aristide sought Bocardon. One week more was all the latter dared allow.
“But her husband will return and pay you. He is my old and intimate friend. I make myself hoarse in telling it to you, wooden-head that you are!”
But Bocardon, who had to account to higher powers, the proprietors of the hotel, was helpless. At the end of the week, Fleurette was called upon to give up her room. She wept with despair; Aristide wept with fury; Bocardon wept out of sympathy. Already, said Bocardon, the proprietors would blame him for not using the legal right to detain Madame's luggage.
“Mon Dieu, Mon Dieu, what is to become of me?” wailed Fleurette.
“You forget, Madame,” said Aristide, with one of his fine flourishes, “that you are the sacred trust of Aristide Pujol.”
“But I can't accept your money,” objected Fleurette.
“Tron de l'air!” he cried. “Did your husband put you in my charge or did he not? Am I your legal guardian or am I not? If I am your legal guardian what right have you to question the arrangements made by your husband? Answer me that?”
Fleurette, too gentle and too miserable for intricate argument, sighed.
“But it is your money all the same.”
Aristide turned to Bocardon. “Try,” said he, “to convince a woman! Do you want proofs? Wait there a minute while I get them from the safe of the Agence Pujol.”
He disappeared into the bureau, where, secure from observation, he tore an oblong strip from a sheet of stiff paper and, using an indelible pencil, wrote out something fantastic, halfway between a check and a bill of exchange, forged as well as he could from memory the signature of Reginald Batterby—the imitation of handwriting was one of Aristide's many odd accomplishments—and made the document look legal by means of a receipt stamp which he took from Bocardon's drawer. He returned to the vestibule with the strip, folded and somewhat crumpled, in his hand.
“Voilà,” said he, handing it boldly to Fleurette. “Here is your husband's guarantee to me, your guardian, for four thousand francs.”
Fleurette examined the forgery. The stamp impressed her. For the simple souls of France there is magic in papier timbré.
“It was my husband who wrote this?” she asked curiously.
“Mais, oui,” said Aristide, with an offended air of challenge.
Fleurette's eyes filled again with tears. “I only inquired,” she said, “because this is the first time I have seen his handwriting.”
“Ma pauvre petite,” said Aristide.
“I will do whatever you tell me, Monsieur Pujol,” said Fleurette, humbly.
“Good! That is talking like une bonne petite dame raisonnable. Now I know a woman made up of holy bread whom Saint Paul and Saint Peter are fighting to have next them when she goes to Paradise. Her name is Madame Bidoux, and she sells cabbages and asparagus and charcoal at No. 213 bis rue Saint Honoré. She will arrange our little affair. Bocardon, will you have Madame's trunks sent to that address?”
He gave his arm to Fleurette, and walked out of the hotel, with serene confidence in the powers of the sainted Madame Bidoux. Fleurette accompanied him unquestioningly. Of course, she might have said: “If you hold negotiable security from my husband to the amount of four thousand francs, why should I exchange the comforts of the hotel for the doubtful accommodation of the sainted Madame Bidoux who sells cabbages?” But I repeat that Fleurette was a simple soul who took for granted the wisdom of so flamboyant and virile a creature as Aristide Pujol.
Away up at the top of No. 213 bis rue St. Honoré was a little furnished room to let, and there Aristide installed his sacred charge. Madame Bidoux, who, as she herself maintained, would have cut herself into four pieces for Aristide—did he not save her dog's life? Did he not marry her daughter to the brigadier of gendarmes (sale voyou!) who would otherwise have left her lamenting? Was he not the most mirific of God's creatures?—Madame Bidoux, although not quite appreciating Aristide's quixotic delicacy, took the forlorn and fragile wisp of misery to her capacious bosom. She made her free of the cabbages and charcoal. She provided her, at a risible charge, with succulent meals. She told her tales of her father and mother, of her neighbors, of the domestic differences between the concierge and his wife (soothing idyl for an Ariadne!), of the dirty thief of a brigadier of gendarmes, of her bodily ailments—her body was so large that they were many—of the picturesque death, through apoplexy, of the late Monsieur Bidoux—the brave woman, in short, gave her of her heart's best. As far as human hearts could provide a bed for Fleurette, that bed was of roses. Asa matter of brutal fact it was narrow and nubbly, and the little uncarpeted room was ten feet by seven; but, to provide it, Aristide went to his own bed hungry. And if the bed of a man's hunger is not to be accounted as one of roses, there ought to be a vote for the reduction of the Recording Angel's salary.
It must not be imagined that Fleurette thought the bed hard. Her bed of life from childhood had been nubbly. She never dreamed of complaining of her little room under the stars, and she sat among the cabbages, like a tired lily, quite contented with her material lot. But she drooped and drooped, and the cough returned and shook her, and Aristide, realizing the sacredness of his charge, became a prey to anxious terrors.
“Mère Bidoux,” said he, “she must have lots of good, nourishing, tender, underdone beef, good fillets and entrecôtes saignantes.”
Madame Bidoux sighed. She had a heart, but she also had a pocket which, like Aristide's, was not overfilled.
“That costs dear, my poor friend,” she said.
“What does it matter what it costs? It is I who provide,” said Aristide grandly.
And Aristide gave up tobacco and coffee and the mild refreshments at cafés essential to the existence of every Frenchman, and degraded his soul by taking half-franc tips from tourists—a source of income which as Direcrector, Monsieur le Directeur, Herr Direktor of the Agence Pujol, he had hitherto scorned haughtily—in order to provide Fleurette with underdone beefsteaks.
All his leisure he devoted to her. She represented something that hitherto had not come into his life—something delicate, tender, ethereal, something of woman that was exquisitely adorable, apart from the flesh. Once, as he was sitting in the little shop, she touched his temple lightly with her fingers.
“Ah, you are good to me, Aristide.”
He felt a thrill, such as no woman's touch had ever caused to pass through him—far, far sweeter, cleaner, purer. If the bon Dieu could have given her to him then and there to be his wife, what bond could have been holier? But he had bound himself by a sacred obligation. His friend on his return should find him loyal.
“Who could help being good to you, little Fleurette?” said he. “Even an Apache would not tread on a lily of the valley!”
“But you put me in water and tend me so carefully.”
“So that you can be fresh whenever dear Reginald comes back.”
She sighed. “Tell me what I can do for you, my good Aristide.”
“Keep well and happy and be a valiant little woman,” said he.
Fleurette tried hard to be valiant; but the effort exhausted her strength. As the days went on, even Aristide's inexhaustible conversation failed to distract her from brooding. She lost the trick of laughter. In the evenings, when he was most with her, she would sit, either in the shop or in the little room at the back, her blue childish eyes fixed on him wistfully. At first he tried to lure her into the gay street; but walking tired her. He encouraged her to sit outside on the pavement of the rue Saint Honoré and join with Madame Bidoux in the gossip of neighbors; but she listened to them with uncomprehending ears. In despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards; he juggled with oranges; he had a mountebank's trick of putting one leg round his neck; he imitated the voices of cats and pigs and ducks till Madame Bidoux held her sides with mirth. He spent time and thought in elaborating what he called bonnes farces, such as dressing himself up in Madame Bidoux's raiment and personifying a crabbed customer. Fleurette smiled but listlessly at all these comicalities.
One day she was taken ill. A doctor, summoned, said many learned words which Aristide and Madame Bidoux tried hard to understand.
“But, after all, what is the matter with her?”
“She has no strength to struggle. She wants happiness.”
“Can you tell me the druggist's where that can be procured?” asked Aristide.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “I tell you the truth. It is one of those pulmonary cases. Happy, she will live; unhappy, she will die.”
“My poor Madame Bidoux, what is to be done?” asked Aristide, after the doctor had gone off with his modest fee. “How are we to make her happy?”
“If only she could have news of her husband!” replied Madame Bidoux.
Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby
Aristide's anxieties grew heavier. It was November, when knickerbockered and culture-seeking tourists no longer fill the cheap hotels of Paris. The profits of the Agence Pujol dwindled. Aristide lived on bread and cheese, and foresaw the time when cheese would be a sinful luxury. Meanwhile Fleurette had her nourishing food, and grew more like the ghost of a lily every day. But her eyes followed Aristide, wherever he went in her presence, as if he were the god of her salvation.
One day, Aristide, with an unexpected franc or two in his pocket, stopped in front of a bureau de tabac. A brown packet of caporal and a book of cigarette papers—a cigarette roller—how good it would be! He hesitated, and his glance fell on a collection of foreign stamps exposed in the window. Among them were twelve Honduras stamps, all postmarked. He stared at them, fascinated.
“Mon brave Aristide!” he cried, “if the bon Dieu does not send you these vibrating inspirations it is because you yourself have already conceived them!”
He entered the shop and emerged, not with caporal and cigarette papers, but with the twelve Honduras stamps.
That night he sat up in his little bedroom at No. 213 bis rue St. Honoré until his candle failed, inditing a letter in English to Fleurette. At the head of his paper he wrote “Hotel Rosario, Honduras.” And at the end of the letter he signed the name of Reginald Batterby. Where Honduras was, he had but a vague idea. For Fleurette, at any rate, it would be somewhere at the other end of the world, and she would not question any want of accuracy in local detail. Just before the light went out he read the letter through with great pride. Batterby alluded to the many letters he had posted from remote parts of the globe, gave glowing forecasts of the fortune that Honduras had in store for him, reminded her that he had placed sufficient funds for her maintenance in the hands of Aristide Pujol, and assured her that the time was not far off when she would be summoned to join her devoted husband.
“Madame Bidoux was right,” said he, before going to sleep. “This is the only way to make her happy.”
The next day Fleurette received the letter. The envelope bore the postmarked Honduras stamp. It had been rubbed on the dusty pavement to take off the newness. It was in her husband's handwriting. There was no mistake about it—it was a letter from Honduras.
“Are you happier now, little doubting female St. Thomas that you are?” cried Aristide when she had told him the news.
She smiled at him out of grateful eyes, and touched his hand.
“Much happier, mon bon ami,” she said gently.
Later in the day she handed him a letter addressed to Batterby. It had no stamp. “Will you post this for me, Aristide?”
Aristide put the letter in his pocket and turned sharply away, lest she should see a sudden rush of tears. He had not counted on this innocent trustfulness. He went to his room. The poor little letter! He had not the heart to destroy it. No; he would keep it till Batterby came; it was not his to destroy. So he threw it into a drawer.
Having once begun the deception, however, he thought it necessary to continue. Every week, therefore, he invented a letter from Batterby. To interest her he drew upon his Provençal imagination. He described combats with crocodiles, lion hunts, feasts with terrific savages from the interior who brought their lady wives chastely clad in petticoats made out of human teeth; he drew pictures of the town, a kind of palm-shaded Paris by the sea, where one ate ortolans and oysters as big as soup plates, and where Chinamen with pigtails rode about the streets on camels. It was not a correct description of Honduras, but, all the same, an exotic atmosphere, stimulating and captivating, rose from the pages. With this it was necessary to combine expressions of affection. At first it was difficult. Essential delicacy restrained him. He had also to keep in mind Batterby's vernacular. To address Fleurette, impalpable creation of fairyland, as “old girl” was particularly distasteful. Ry degrees, however, the artist prevailed. And then at last the man himself took to forgetting the imaginary writer and poured out words of love, warm, true and passionate.
And every week Fleurette would smile and tell him the wondrous news, and would put into his own hands an unstamped letter to post, which he, with a wrench of the heart, would add to the collection in the drawer.
Once she said diffidently, with an unwonted blush, and her pale blue eyes swimming: “I write English so badly. Won't you read the letter and correct any mistakes?”
But Aristide laughed and licked the flap of the envelope and closed it. “What has love to do with spelling and grammar? The good Reginald would prefer your bad English to all the turned phrases of the Académie Francaise.”
In despair Aristide, to coax a smile from her lips, practised his many queer accomplishments. He conjured with cards
“It is as you like, Aristide,” said Fleurette, with wistful eyes.
Yet, in spite of the weekly letters, Fleurette continued to droop. The winter came, and Fleurette was no longer able to stay among the cabbages of Madame Bidoux. She lay on her bed in the little room, ten foot by seven, away, away at the top of the house in the rue Saint Honoré. The doctor, informed of her comparative happiness, again shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing more to be done.
“She is dying, Monsieur, for want of strength to live.”
Then Aristide went about with a great heartache. Fleurette would die. She would never see the man she loved again. What would he say when he returned and learned the tragic story? He would not even know that Aristide, loving her, had been loyal to him. When the Director of the Agence Pujol personally conducted the clients of the Hôtel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse to the Grand Trianon and pointed out the bed of the Empress Josephine, he nearly broke down.
“What is the Empress doing now?”
What was Fleurette doing now? Going to join the Empress in the world of shadows....
The tourists talked after the manner of their kind.
“She must have found the bed very hard, poor dear.”
“Give me an iron bedstead and a good old spring mattress.”
“Ah, but my dear sir, you forget. The Empress's bed was slung on the back of tame panthers which Napoleon brought from Egypt.”
It was hard to jest convincingly to the knickerbockered with death in one's soul.
“Most beloved little Flower,” ran the last letter that Fleurette received. “I have just had a cable from Aristide saying that you are very ill. I will come to you as soon as I can. Ces petits yeux de pervenche—I am learning your language here, you see—haunt me day and night....” et cetera, et cetera.
Aristide went up to her room with a great bunch of chrysanthemums. The letter peeped from under the pillow. Fleurette was very weak. Madame Bidoux, who, during Fleurette's illness, had allowed her green-grocery business to be personally conducted to the deuce by a youth of sixteen very much in love with the lady who sold sausages and other charculerie next door, had spread out the fortune-telling cards on the bed and was prophesying mendaciously. Fleurette took the flowers and clasped them to her bosom.
“No letter for ce cher Reginald?”
She shook her head. “I can write no more,” she whispered.
She.closed her eyes. Presently she said, in a low voice,
“Aristide—if you kiss me, I think I can go to sleep.”
He bent down to kiss her forehead. A fragile arm twined itself about his neck, and he kissed her on the lips.
“She is sleeping,” said Madame Bidoux, after a while.
Aristide tiptoed out of the room.
And so died Fleurette. Aristide borrowed money from the kind-hearted Bocardon for a beautiful funeral and Madame Bidoux and Bocardon and a few neighbors and himself saw her laid to rest. When they got back to the rue Saint Honoré he told Madame Bidoux about the letters. She wept and clasped him, weeping, too, in her kind, fat old arms.
The next evening Aristide, coming back from his day's work at the Hôtel de Soleil et de l'Ecosse, was confronted in the shop by Madame Bidoux, hands on broad hips.
“Tiens, mon petit,” she said, without preliminary greeting. “You are an angel. I knew it..But that a man's an angel is no reason for his not being an imbecile. Read this.”
She plucked a paper from her apron pocket and thrust it into his hand. He read it and blinked in amazement.
“Where did you get this. Mère Bidoux?”
“Where I got many more. In your drawer. The letters you were saving for that infamous scoundrel. I wanted to know what she had written to him.”
“Mére Bidoux,” cried Aristide. “Those letters were sacred!”
“Bah!” said Madame Bidoux unabashed. “There is nothing sacred to a sapper or an old grandmother who loves an imbecile. I have read the letters, et voilà, et voilà, et voilà!” and she emptied her pockets of all the letters, minus the envelopes, that Fleurette had written.
And, after the first glance at the first letter, Aristide had no compunction in reading. They were all addressed to himself.
They were very short, ill written in a poor little uncultivated hand. But they all contained one message, that of her love for Aristide. Whatever illusions she may have had concerning Batterby had soon vanished. She knew, with the unerring instinct of woman, that he had betrayed and deserted her. Aristide's pious fraud had never deceived her for a second. Too gentle, too timid to let him know what was in her heart, she had written the secret patiently week after week, hoping every time that curiosity or pity or something she knew not what would induce him to open the idle letter and wondering in her simple peasant's soul at the delicacy that caused him to refrain. Once she had boldly given him the envelope unclosed....
“If only I had known,” said Aristide.
“What would you have done?” I asked.
“She died for want of love, parbleu,” said Aristide, *and there was mine quivering in my heart and trembling on my lips all the time.... She had des yeux de pervenche. Ah! nom d'un chien! It is only with me that Providence plays such tricks.”
He walked to the window and looked out into the gray street. Presently I heard him murmuring the words of the old French song:
“Elle est morte en fèvrier;
Pauvre Colinette!”
She knew, with the unerring instinct of woman, that he had betrayed and deserted her