Marse Henry Part 24

He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before him. When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was nigh. I did not see him--he was too ill to see any one--but Frank Mason kept me advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having reached home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise surprised, and almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at last.

Frank Mason and his wife--"the Masons," they were commonly called, for Mrs. Mason made a wondrous second to her husband--were from Cleveland, Ohio, she a daughter of Judge Birchard--Jennie Birchard--he a rising young journalist caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a foreign appointment. They ran the gamut of the consular service, beginning with Basel and Ma.r.s.eilles and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. Wherever they were their house was a very home--a kind of Yankee shrine--of visiting Americans and militant Americanism.

Years before he was made consul general--in point of fact when he was plain consul at Ma.r.s.eilles--he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said to me, "A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has money to burn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him at the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner--carte blanche." The rich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the appearance of a hayseed. On the contrary he was a most distinguished-looking old gentleman. The dinner we ordered was "stunning"--especially the wines. When the bill was presented our host scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item and making his own addition, altogether "like a thoroughbred." Frank and I watched him not without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had paid the score he said with a smile: "That was rather a steep bill, but we have had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dance hall we'll go there and I'll buy the outfit."

II

First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of France.

It was gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse.

He was reputed the Emperor's natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexican adventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the final Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob."

De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built. Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place Vendome; but later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable spirit of the irrepressible French.

Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, when wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one of the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary stranger being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about his business.

"This is my business," he impudently answered.

"Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a Parisian myself!"

He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and with a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well, you don't look it," and scampered off.

Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Rome struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nimes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors. They are all hard by Ma.r.s.eilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with legend

_"...tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance and Provencal song and sun-burnt mirth."_

Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on the way.

The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finis.h.i.+ng of dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of fortune! Where will it end?

The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest."

Ten thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make room for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that in some ways the conditions were improved.

Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent men struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond!

What is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided per capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, little to the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in the Grand Army of the Wretched!

III

We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is indeed _sui generis_. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Ma.r.s.eillais, and who subsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The Frenchman. I shall not mention him otherwise in this veracious chronicle, but, looking through the city directory of Ma.r.s.eilles I found an entire page devoted to his name, though all the entries may not have been members of his family. There is no doubt that he was a Ma.r.s.eillais.

Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a cafe of La Cannebiere and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often crossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his grave this many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused by him, then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection for him.

The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and the Brigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he was flush--which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a year--he was as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere between the little princ.i.p.ality of Monaco and the headwaters of the Nile; transparent as a child; idiosyncratic to a degree.

I understand Ma.r.s.eilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me since he was born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was driven away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feel sure, for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my life.

I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis.

His attire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carried a delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm.

She was his wife. It was a circ.u.mstance connected with this lady which led to the after intimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill.

I had casually met her husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seeking sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me with his sorrow.

I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if G.o.d would give her back to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was his pa.s.sion, and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the softest of soft things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he proceeded to fulfill his vow.

But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned, to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running a restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about cooking than about anything else--we had had a contest or two over the mysteries of a pair of chafing dishes--and as there was not a really good eating place in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was said rather in jest than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick.

In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there. It was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves behind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.

He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witness and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly well.

The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an inhabitant.

Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave us a most graphic account of how "the old house"--for thus he designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he had some reason for not more particularly indicating--had sent him in charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who was of the party, immediately said, "I can attest the truth of The Major's story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fis.h.i.+ng camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea."

Augustine's Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and even got as far as New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, and straightway, The Major declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look "like a monkey." He proposed to give a dinner.

There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we a.s.sembled at The Brunswick.

I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.

"_Voila!_" says he.

The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like bean soup flecked by a few strands of black c.r.a.pe!

The explosion duly arrived from the a.s.sembled gourmets, I, myself, I am sorry to say, leading the rebellion.

"I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!" exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing his usual good English in his excitement.

We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But he bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time Sam Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.

Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into the kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: "Is there any of that terrapin left over from last night?"

All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the Philadelphia express tags!

On another occasion a friend of The Major's, pa.s.sing The Brunswick and observing some diamond-back sh.e.l.ls in the window said, "Major, have you any real live terrapins?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry Woodfin Grady One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys".]

"Live!" cried The Frenchman. "Only this morning I open the ice box and they were all dancing the cancan."

"Major," persisted the friend, "I'll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you cannot show me an actual living terrapin."

"What do you take me for--confidence man?" The Major retorted. "How you expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?"

"Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we shall have the wine."