The Nabob. Alphonse Daudet

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СКАЧАТЬ a dozen carriages could be seen ranged in line, and along an avenue of acacias, quite withered at that season and leafless in their bark, the profiles of English grooms leading out the saddle-horses of the duke for their exercise. Everything revealed a luxury thought-out, settled, grandiose, and assured.

      “It is quite useless for me to come early; others always arrive before me,” said Jenkins to himself as he saw the file in which his brougham took its place; but, certain of not having to wait, with head carried high, and an air of tranquil authority, he ascended that official flight of steps which is mounted every day by so many trembling ambitions, so many anxieties on hesitating feet.

      From the very antechamber, lofty and resonant like a church, which, although calorifers burned night and day, possessed two great wood-fires that filled it with a radiant life, the luxury of this interior reached you by warm and heady puffs. It suggested at once a hot-house and a Turkish bath. A great deal of heat and yet brightness; white wainscoting, white marbles, immense windows, nothing stifling or shut in, and yet a uniform atmosphere meet for the surrounding of some rare existence, refined and nervous. Jenkins always expanded in this factitious sun of wealth; he greeted with a “good-morning, my lads,” the powdered porter, with his wide golden scarf, the footmen in knee-breeches and livery of gold and blue, all standing to do him honour; lightly drew his finger across the bars of the large cages of monkeys full of sharp cries and capers, and, whistling under his breath, stepped quickly up the staircase of shining marble laid with a carpet as thick as the turf of a lawn, which led to the apartments of the duke. Although six months had passed since his first visit to Mora House, the good doctor was not yet become insensible to the quite physical impression of gaiety, of frivolity, which he received from this dwelling.

      Although you were in the abode of the first official of the Empire there was nothing here suggestive of the work of government or its boxes of dusty old papers. The duke had only consented to accept his high dignitaries as Minister of State and President of the Council upon the condition that he should not quit his private mansion; he only went to his office for an hour or two daily, the time necessary to give the indispensable signatures, and held his receptions in his bed-chamber. At this moment, notwithstanding the earliness of the hour, the hall was crowded. You saw there grave, anxious faces, provincial prefects with shaven lips, and administrative whiskers, slightly less arrogant in this antechamber than yonder in their prefectures, magistrates of austere air, sober in gesture, deputies important of manner, big-wigs of the financial world, rich and boorish manufacturers, among whom stood out here and there the slender, ambitious figure of some substitute of a prefectorial councillor, in the garb of one seeking a favour, dress-coat and white tie; and all, standing, sitting in groups or solitary, sought silently to penetrate with their gaze that high door closed upon their destiny, by which they would issue forth directly triumphant or with cast-down head. Jenkins passed through the crowd rapidly, and every one followed with an envious eye this newcomer whom the doorkeeper, with his official chain, correct and icy in his demeanour, seated at a table beside the door, greeted with a little smile at once respectful and familiar.

      “Who is with him?” asked the doctor, indicating the chamber of the duke.

      Hardly moving his lips, and not without a slightly ironical glance of the eye, the doorkeeper whispered a name which, if they had heard it, would have roused the indignation of all these high personages who had been waiting for an hour past until the costumier of the opera should have ended his audience.

      A sound of voices, a ray of light. Jenkins had just entered the duke’s presence; he never waited, he.

      Standing with his back to the fireplace, closely wrapped in a dressing-jacket of blue fur, the soft reflections from which gave an air of refinement to an energetic and haughty head, the President of the Council was causing to be designed under his eyes a Pierrette costume for the duchess to wear at her next ball, and was giving his directions with the same gravity with which he would have dictated the draft of a new law.

      “Let the frill be very fine on the ruff, and put no frills on the sleeves.—Good-morning, Jenkins. I am with you directly.”

      Jenkins bowed, and took a few steps in the immense room, of which the windows, opening on a garden that extended as far as the Seine, framed one of the finest views of Paris, the bridges, the Tuileries, the Louvre, in a network of black trees traced as it were in Indian ink upon the floating background of fog. A large and very low bed, raised by a few steps above the floor, two or three little lacquer screens with vague and capricious gilding, indicating, like the double doors and the carpets of thick wool, a fear of cold pushed even to excess, various seats, lounges, warmers, scattered about rather indiscriminately, all low, rounded, indolent, or voluptuous in shape, composed the furniture of this celebrated chamber in which the gravest questions and the most frivolous were wont to be treated alike with the same seriousness. On the wall was a handsome portrait of the duchess; on the chimneypiece a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which at the recent Salon had received the honours of a first medal.

      “Well, Jenkins, how are we this morning?” said his excellency, approaching, while the costumier was picking up his fashion-plates, scattered over all the easy chairs.

      “And you, my dear duke? I thought you a little pale last evening at the Varietes.”

      “Come, come! I have never felt so well. Your pills have a most marvellous effect upon me. I am conscious of a vivacity, a freshness, when I remember how run down I was six months ago.”

      Jenkins, without saying anything, had laid his great head against the fur-coat of the minister of state, at the place where, in common men, the heart beats. He listened a moment while his excellency continued to speak in the indolent, bored tone which was one of the characteristics of his distinction.

      “And who was your companion, doctor, last night? That huge, bronzed Tartar who was laughing so loudly in the front of your box.”

      “It was the Nabob, Monsieur le Duc. The famous Jansoulet, about whom people are talking so much just now.”

      “I ought to have guessed it. The whole house was watching him. The actresses played for him alone. You know him? What sort of man is he?”

      “I know him. That is to say, I attend him professionally.—Thank you, my dear duke, I have finished. All is right in that region.—When he arrived in Paris a month ago, he had found the change of climate somewhat trying. He sent for me, and since then has received me upon the most friendly footing. What I know of him is that he possesses a colossal fortune, made in Tunis, in the service of the Bey, that he has a loyal heart, a generous soul, in which the ideas of humanity—”

      “In Tunis?” interrupted the duke, who was by nature very little sentimental and humanitarian. “In that case, why this name of Nabob?”

      “Bah! the Parisians do not look at things so closely. For them, every rich foreigner is a nabob, no matter whence he comes. Furthermore, this nabob has all the physical qualities for the part—a copper-coloured skin, eyes like burning coals, and, what is more, gigantic wealth, of which he makes, I do not fear to say it, the most noble and the most intelligent use. It is to him that I owe”—here the doctor assumed a modest air—“that I owe it that I have at last been able to found the Bethlehem Society for the suckling of infants, which a morning paper, that I was looking over just now—the Messenger, I think—calls ‘the great philanthropic idea of the century.’ ”

      The duke threw a listless glance over the sheet which Jenkins held out to him. He was not the man to be caught by the turn of an advertisement.

      “He must be very rich, this M. Jansoulet,” said he, coldly. “He finances Cardailhac’s theatre; Monpavon gets him to pay his debts; Bois l’Hery starts a stable for him; old Schwalbach СКАЧАТЬ