Short Fiction

article, and, when they had each of them drunk three more glasses, he said, as he was going away:

“Well, you know, when it is all gone, there is more left; don’t be modest, for I shall not mind. The sooner it is finished the better pleased I shall be.”

Four days later he came again. The old woman was outside her door cutting up the bread for her soup.

He went up to her, and put his face close to hers, so that he might smell her breath; and when he smelled the alcohol he felt pleased.

“I suppose you will give me a glass of the special?” he said. And two or three times they drank each other’s health.

Soon, however, it began to be whispered abroad that Mother Magloire was in the habit of getting drunk all by herself. She was picked up, sometimes in her kitchen, sometimes in her yard, sometimes on the roads in the neighbourhood, and was often brought home dead to the world.

Chicot did not go near her any more, and, when people spoke to him about her, he used to say, putting on a distressed look:

“It is a great pity that she should have taken to drink at her age; but when people get old there is no remedy. It will be the death of her in the long run.”

And it certainly was the death of her. She died the next winter, about Christmas time, having fallen down drunk in the snow.

And when Maître Chicot inherited the farm he said:

“It was very stupid of her; if she had not taken to drink she might very well have lived for ten years longer.”

Châli

Admiral de la Valle, who seemed to be half asleep in his armchair, said in a voice which sounded like an old woman’s:

“I had a very singular little love adventure once; would you like to hear it?”

He spoke from the depths of his great armchair, with that everlasting dry, wrinkled smile on his lips, that Voltairian smile which made people take him for a terrible sceptic.

I

“I was thirty years of age and a first lieutenant in the navy, when I was entrusted with an astronomical expedition to Central India. The English Government provided me with all the necessary means for carrying out my enterprise, and I was soon busied with a few followers in that vast, strange, surprising country.

“It would take me twenty volumes to relate that journey. I went through wonderfully magnificent regions, was received by strangely handsome princes, and was entertained with incredible magnificence. For two months it seemed to me as if I were walking in a poem, that I was going about in a fairy kingdom, on the back of imaginary elephants. In the midst of wild forests I discovered extraordinary ruins, delicate and chiseled like jewels, fine as lace and enormous as mountains, those fabulous, divine monuments which are so graceful that one falls in love with their form as with a woman, feeling a physical and sensual pleasure in looking at them. As Victor Hugo says, ‘Whilst wide-awake, I was walking in a dream.’

“Toward the end of my journey I reached Ganhara, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed. It is governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine grace with pitiless ferocity.

“The city lies at the bottom of a valley, on the banks of a little lake surrounded by pagodas, which bathe their walls in the water. At a distance the city looks like a white spot, which grows larger as one approaches it, and by degrees you discover the domes and spires, the slender and graceful summits of Indian monuments.

“At about an hour’s distance from the gates, I met a superbly caparisoned elephant, surrounded by a guard of honour which the sovereign had sent me, and I was conducted to the palace with great ceremony.

“I should have liked to have taken the time to put on my gala uniform, but royal impatience would not permit me to do it. He was anxious to make my acquaintance, to know what he might expect from me.

“I was ushered into a great hall surrounded by galleries, in the midst of bronze-coloured soldiers in splendid uniforms, while all about were standing men dressed in striking robes, studded with precious stones.

“On a bench like our garden benches, without a back; I saw a shining mass, a kind of setting sun reposing; it was the rajah who was waiting for me, motionless, in a robe of the purest canary colour. He had some ten or fifteen million francs’ worth of diamonds on him, and by itself, on his forehead, glistened the famous star of Delhi, which has always belonged to the illustrious dynasty of the Pariharas of Mundore, from whom my host was descended.

“He was a man of about five-and-twenty, who seemed to have some Negro blood in his veins, although he belonged to the purest Hindu race. He had large, almost motionless, rather vague eyes, fat lips, a curly beard, low forehead, and dazzling sharp white teeth, which he frequently showed with a mechanical smile. He got up and gave me his hand in the English fashion, and then made me sit down beside him on a bench which was so high that my feet hardly touched the ground, and on which I was very uncomfortable.

“He immediately proposed a tiger hunt for the next day; war and hunting were his chief occupations, and he could hardly understand how one could care for anything else. He was evidently fully persuaded that I had only come all that distance to amuse him a little, and to be the companion of his pleasures.

“As I stood greatly in need of his assistance, I tried to flatter his tastes, and he was so pleased with me that he immediately wished