Cosmopolis — Complete. Paul Bourget

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СКАЧАТЬ from 1879, to indulge in the luxurious life which can not be led by any one with an income short of five hundred thousand francs. Contrary to the custom of speculators of his genus, Hafner in time invested his earnings safely. He provided against the coming demolition of the structure so laboriously built up. The ‘Credit Austro-Dalmate’ had suffered in great measure owing to innumerable public and private disasters and scandals, such as the suicide and murder in the Schroeder family.

      Suits were begun against a number of the founders, among them Justus Hafner. He was acquitted, but with such damage to his financial integrity and in the face of such public indignation that he abandoned Austria for Italy and Vienna for Rome. There, heedless of first rebuffs, he undertook to realize the third great object of his life, the gaining of social position. To the period of avidity had succeeded, as it frequently does with those formidable handlers of money, the period of vanity. Being now a widower, he aimed at his daughter’s marriage with a strength of will and a complication of combinations equal to his former efforts, and that struggle for connection with high life was disguised beneath the cloak of the most systematically adopted politeness of deportment. How had he found the means, in the midst of struggles and hardships, to refine himself so that the primitive broker and speculator were almost unrecognizable in the baron of fifty-four, decorated with several orders, installed in a magnificent palace, the father of a charming daughter, and himself an agreeable conversationalist, a courteous gentleman, an ardent sportsman? It is the secret of those natures created for social conquest, like a Napoleon for war and a Talleyrand for diplomacy. Dorsenne asked himself the question frequently, and he could not solve it. Although he boasted of watching the Baron with an intellectual curiosity, he could not restrain a shudder of antipathy each time he met the eyes of the man.

      And on this particular morning it was especially disagreeable to him that those eyes had seen him making his unoffending notes, although there was scarcely a shade of gentle condescension—that of a great lord who patronizes a great artist—in the manner in which Hafner addressed him.

      “Do not inconvenience yourself for me, dear sir,” said he to Dorsenne. “You work from nature, and you are right. I see that your next novel will touch upon the ruin of our poor Prince d’Ardea. Do not be too hard on him, nor on us.”

      The artist could not help coloring at that benign pleasantry. It was all the more painful to him because it was at once true and untrue. How should he explain the sort of literary alchemy, thanks to which he was enabled to affirm that he never drew portraits, although not a line of his fifteen volumes was traced without a living model? He replied, therefore, with a touch of ill-humor:

      “You are mistaken, my dear Baron. I do not make notes on persons.”

      “All authors say that,” answered the Baron, shrugging his shoulders with the assumed good-nature which so rarely forsook him, “and they are right. … At any rate, it is fortunate that you had something to write, for we shall both be late in arriving at a rendezvous where there are ladies. … It is almost a quarter past eleven, and we should have been there at eleven precisely. … But I have one excuse, I waited for my daughter.”

      “And she has not come?” asked Dorsenne.

      “No,” replied Hafner, “at the last moment she could not make up her mind. She had a slight annoyance this morning—I do not know what old book she had set her heart on. Some rascal found out that she wanted it, and he obtained it first. … But that is not the true cause of her absence. The true cause is that she is too sensitive, and she finds it so sad that there should be a sale of the possessions of this ancient family. … I did not insist. What would she have experienced had she known the late Princess Nicoletta, Pepino’s mother? When I came to Rome on a visit for the first time, in ’75, what a salon that was and what a Princess! … She was a Condolmieri, of the family of Eugene IV.”

      “How absurd vanity renders the most refined man,” thought Julien, suiting his pace to the Baron’s. “He would have me believe that he was received at the house of that woman who was politically the blackest of the black, the most difficult to please in the recruiting of her salon. … Life is more complex than the Montfanons even know of! This girl feels by instinct that which the chouan of a marquis feels by doctrine, the absurdity of this striving after nobility, with a father who forgets the broker and who talks of the popes of the Middle Ages as of a trinket! … While we are alone, I must ask this old fox what he knows of Boleslas Gorka’s return. He is the confidant of Madame Steno. He should be informed of the doings and whereabouts of the Pole.”

      The friendship of Baron Hafner for the Countess, whose financial adviser he was, should have been for Dorsenne a reason for avoiding such a subject, the more so as he was convinced of the man’s dislike for him. The Baron could, by a single word perfidiously repeated, injure him very much with Alba’s mother. But the novelist, similar on that point to the majority of professional observers, had only the power of analysis of a retrospective order. Never had his keen intelligence served him to avoid one of those slight errors of conversation which are important mistakes on the pitiful checker-board of life. Happily for him, he cherished no ambition except for his pleasure and his art, without which he would have found the means of making for himself, gratuitously, enough enemies to clear all the academies.

      He, therefore, chose the moment when the Baron arrived at the landing on the first floor, pausing somewhat out of breath, and after the agent had verified their passes, to say to his companion:

      “Have you seen Gorka since his arrival?”

      “What? Is Boleslas here?” asked Justus Hafner, who manifested his astonishment in no other manner than by adding: “I thought he was still in Poland.”

      “I have not seen him myself,” said Dorsenne. He already regretted having spoken too hastily. It is always more prudent not to spread the first report. But the ignorance of that return of Countess Steno’s best friend, who saw her daily, struck the young man with such surprise that he could not resist adding: “Some one, whose veracity I can not doubt, met him this morning.” Then, brusquely: “Does not this sudden return make you fearful?”

      “Fearful?” repeated the Baron. “Why so?” As he uttered those words he glanced at the writer with his usual impassive expression, which, however, a very slight sign, significant to those who knew him, belied. In exchanging those few words the two men had passed into the first room of “objects of art,” having belonged to the apartment of “His Eminence Prince d’Ardea,” as the catalogue said, and the Baron did not raise the gold glass which he held at the end of his nose when near the smallest display of bric-a-brac, as was his custom. As he walked slowly through the collection of busts and statues of that first room, called “Marbles” on the catalogue, without glancing with the eye of a practised judge at the Gobelin tapestry upon the walls, it must have been that he considered as very grave the novelist’s revelation. The latter had said too much not to continue:

      “Well, I who have not been connected with Madame Steno for years, like you, trembled for her when that return was announced to me. She does not know what Gorka is when he is jealous, or of what he is capable.”

      “Jealous? Of whom?” interrupted Hafner. “It is not the first time I have heard the name of Boleslas uttered in connection with the Countess. I confess I have never taken those words seriously, and I should not have thought that you, a frequenter of her salon, one of her friends, would hesitate on that subject. Rest assured, Gorka is in love with his charming wife, and he could not make a better choice. Countess Caterina is an excellent person, very Italian. She is interested in him, as in you, as in Maitland, as in me; in you because you write such admirable books, in Maitland because he paints like our best masters, in Boleslas on account of the sorrow he had in the death of his first child, in me because I have so delicate a charge. She is more than an excellent person, she is a truly superior woman, very superior.” He uttered his hypocritical speech СКАЧАТЬ