“As well as a man is likely to be who has just got the best possible news of the election. I shall be successful,” replied Raoul, radiant.
“Delighted,” said du Tillet. “We shall want money for the paper.”
“The money will be found,” said Raoul.
“The devil is with these women!” exclaimed du Tillet, still unconvinced by the words of Raoul, whom he had nicknamed Charnathan.
“What are you talking about?” said Raoul.
“My sister-in-law is there with my wife, and they are hatching something together. You seem in high favor with the Countess; she is bowing to you right across the house.”
“Look,” said Mme. du Tillet to her sister, “they told us wrong. See how my husband fawns on M. Nathan, and it is he who they declared was trying to get him put in prison!”
“And men call us slanderers!” cried the Countess. “I will give him a warning.”
She rose, took the arm of Vandenesse, who was waiting in the passage, and returned jubilant to her box; by and by she left the Opera, ordered her carriage for the next morning before eight o’clock, and found herself at half-past eight on the Quai Conti, having called at the Rue du Mail on her way.
The carriage could not enter the narrow Rue de Nevers; but, as Schmucke’s house stood at the corner of the Quay, the Countess was not obliged to walk to it through the mud. She almost leapt from the step of the carriage on to the dirty and dilapidated entrance of the grimy old house, which was held together by iron clamps, like a poor man’s crockery, and overhung the street in quite an alarming fashion.
The old organist lived on the fourth floor, and rejoiced in a beautiful view of the Seine, from the Pont Neuf to the rising ground of Chaillot. The simple fellow was so taken aback when the footman announced his former pupil, that, before he could recover himself, she was in the room. Never could the Countess have imagined or guessed at an existence such as that suddenly laid bare to her, though she had long known Schmucke’s scorn for appearances and his indifference to worldly things. Who could have believed in so neglected a life, in carelessness carried to such a pitch? Schmucke was a musical Diogenes; he felt no shame for the hugger-mugger in which he lived; indeed, custom had made him insensible to it.
The constant use of a fat, friendly, German pipe had spread over the ceiling and the flimsy wallpaper—well rubbed by the cat—a faint yellow tint, which gave a pervading impression of the golden harvests of Ceres. The cat, whose long ruffled silky coat made a garment such as a portress might have envied, did the honors of the house, sedately whiskered, and entirely at her ease. From the top of a first-rate Vienna piano, where she lay couched in state, she cast on the Countess as she entered the gracious yet chilly glance with which any woman, astonished at her beauty, might have greeted her. She did not stir, except to wave the two silvery threads of her upright moustache and to fix upon Schmucke two golden eyes. The piano, which had known better days, and was cased in a good wood, painted black and gold, was dirty, discolored, chipped, and its keys were worn like the teeth of an old horse and mellowed by the deeper tints which fell from the pipe. Little piles of ashes on the ledge proclaimed that the night before Schmucke had bestridden the old instrument to some witches’ rendezvous. The brick floor, strewn with dried mud, torn paper, pipe ashes, and odds and ends that defy description, suggested the boards of a lodging-house floor, when they have not been swept for a week and heaps of litter, a cross between the contents of the ash-pit and the ragbag, await the servants’ brooms. A more practised eye than that of the Countess might have read indications of Schmucke’s way of living in the chestnut parings, scraps of apple peel, and shells of Easter eggs, which covered broken fragments of plates, all messed with sauerkraut. This German detritus formed a carpet of dusty filth which grated under the feet and lost itself in a mass of cinders, dropping with slow dignity from a painted stone fireplace, where a lump of coal lorded it over two half-burnt logs that seemed to waste away before it. On the mantelpiece was a pier-glass with figures dancing a saraband round it; on one side the glorious pipe hung on a nail, on the other stood a china pot in which the Professor kept his tobacco. Two armchairs, casually picked up, together with a thin, flattened couch, a worm-eaten chest of drawers with the marble top gone, and a maimed table, on which lay the remains of a frugal breakfast, made up the furniture, unpretending as that of a Mohican wigwam. A shaving-glass hanging from the catch of a curtainless window, and surmounted by a rag, striped by razor scrapings, were evidence of the sole sacrifices paid by Schmucke to the graces and to society.
The cat, petted as a feeble and dependent being, was the best off. It rejoiced in an old armchair cushion, beside which stood a white china cup and dish. But what no pen can describe is the state to which Schmucke, the cat, and the pipe—trinity of living beings—had reduced the furniture. The pipe had scorched the table in places. The cat and Schmucke’s head had greased the green Utrecht velvet of the two armchairs till it was worn quite smooth. But for the cat’s magnificent tail, which did a part of the cleaning, the dust would have lain forever undisturbed on the uncovered parts of the chest of drawers and piano. In a corner lay the army of slippers, to which only a Homeric catalogue could do justice. The tops of the chest of drawers and of the piano were blocked with broken-backed, loose-paged music-books, the boards
