In the Days of My Youth Part 53

"Get along with you, M'sieur Muller," she said. "You're always playing the _farceur_! The parcel was brought by a man who looked like a stonemason."

"And n.o.body has called?"

"n.o.body, except M'sieur Richard."

"Monsieur Richard's visits are always gratifying and delightful--may the _diable_ fly away with him!" said Muller. "What did dear Monsieur Richard want to-day, Madame Duphot?"

"He wanted to see you, and the third-floor gentleman also--about the rent."

"Dear Richard! What an admirable memory he has for dates! Did he leave any message, Madame Duphot?"

The old woman looked at me, and hesitated.

"He says, M'sieur Muller--he says ..."

"Nay, this gentleman is a friend--you may speak out. What does our beloved and respected _proprietaire_ say, Madame Duphot?"

"He says, if you don't both of you pay up the arrears by midday on Sunday next, he'll seize your goods, and turn you into the street."

"Ah, I always said he was the nicest man I knew!" observed Muller, gravely. "Anything else, Madame Duphot?"

"Only this, Monsieur Muller--that if you didn't go quietly, he'd take your windows out of the frames and your doors off the hinges."

"_Comment_! He bade you give me that message, the miserable old son of a spider! _Quatre-vingt mille plats de diables aux truffes_! Take my windows out of the frames, indeed! Let him try, Madame Duphot--that's all--let him try!"

And with this, Muller, in a towering rage, led the way upstairs, muttering volleys of the most extraordinary and eccentric oaths of his own invention, and leaving the little old _portiere_ grinning maliciously in the hall.

"But can't you pay him?" said I.

"Whether I can, or can't, it seems I must," he replied, kicking open the door of his studio as viciously as if it were the corporeal frame of Monsieur Richard. "The only question is--how? At the present moment, I haven't five francs in the till."

"Nor have I more than twenty. How much is it?"

"A hundred and sixty--worse luck!"

"Haven't the Tapottes paid for any of their ancestors yet?"

"Confound it!--yes; they've paid for a Marshal of France and a Farmer General, which are all I've yet finished and sent home. But there was the washerwoman, and the _traiteur_, and the artist's colorman, and, _enfin_, the devil to pay--and the money's gone, somehow!"

"I've only just cleared myself from a lot of debts," I said, ruefully, "and I daren't ask either my father or Dr. Cheron for an advance just at present. What is to be done?"

"Oh, I don't know. I must raise the money somehow. I must sell something--there's my copy of t.i.tian's 'Pietro Aretino.' It's worth eighty francs, if only for a sign. And there's a Madonna and Child after Andrea del Sarto, worth a fortune to any enterprising sage-femme with artistic proclivities. I'll try what Nebuchadnezzar will do for me."

"And who, in the name of all that's Israelitish, is Nebuchadnezzar?"

"Nebuchadnezzar, my dear Arbuthnot, is a worthy Shylock of my acquaintance--a gentleman well known to Bohemia--one who buys and sells whatever is purchasable and saleable on the face of the globe, from a s.h.i.+p of war to a comic paragraph in the _Charivari_. He deals in bric-a-brac, sermons, government sinecures, pugs, false hair, light literature, patent medicines, and the fine arts. He lives in the Place des Victoires. Would you like to be introduced to him?"

"Immensely."

"Well, then, be here by eight to-morrow morning, and I'll take you with me. After nine he goes out, or is only visible to buyers. Here's my bottle of Rhenish--genuine a.s.smanshauser. Are you hungry?"

I admitted that I was not unconscious of a sensation akin to appet.i.te.

He gazed steadfastly into the cupboard, and shook his head.

"A box of sardines," he said, gloomily, "nearly empty. Half a loaf, evidently disinterred from Pompeii. An inch of Lyons sausage, saved from the ark; the remains of a bottle of fish sauce, and a pot of currant jelly. What will you have?"

I decided for the relics of Pompeii and the deluge, and we sat down to discuss those curious delicacies. Having no corkscrew, we knocked off the neck of the bottle, and being short of gla.s.ses, drank our wine out of teacups.

"But you have never opened your parcel all this time," I said presently.

"It may be full of _billets de banque_--who can tell?"

"That's true," said Muller; and broke the seals.

"By all the G.o.ds of Olympus!" he shouted, holding up a small oblong volume bound in dark green cloth. "My sketch-book!"

He opened it, and a slip of paper fell out. On this slip of paper were written, in a very neat, small hand, the words, "_Returned with thanks_;" but the page that contained the sketch made in the Cafe Procope was missing.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

AN EVENING PARTY AMONG THE PEt.i.t-BOURGEOISIE.

Madame Marotte, as I have already mentioned more than once, lived in the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis; which, as all the world knows, is a prolongation of the Rue St. Denis--just as the Rue St. Denis was, in my time, a transpontine continuation of the old Rue de la Harpe. Beginning at the Place du Chatelet as the Rue St. Denis, opening at its farther end on the Boulevart St. Denis and pa.s.sing under the triumphal arch of Louis le Grand (called the Porte St. Denis), it there becomes first the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, and then the interminable Grande Route du St.

Denis which drags its slow length along all the way to the famous Abbey outside Paris.

The Rue du Faubourg St. Denis is a changed street now, and widens out, prim, white, and glittering, towards the new barrier and the new Rond Point. But in the dear old days of which I tell, it was the sloppiest, worst-paved, worst-lighted, noisiest, narrowest, and most crowded of all the great Paris thoroughfares north of the Seine. All the country traffic from Chantilly and Compiegne came lumbering this way into the city; diligences, omnibuses, wagons, fiacres, water-carts, and all kinds of vehicles thronged and blocked the street perpetually; and the sound of wheels ceased neither by night nor by day. The foot-pavements of the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, too, were always muddy, be the weather what it might; and the gutters were always full of stagnant pools. An ever-changing, never-failing stream of rustics from the country, workpeople from the factories of the _banlieu,_ grisettes, commercial travellers, porters, commissionaires, and _gamins_ of all ages here flowed to and fro. Itinerant venders of cakes, lemonade, cocoa, chickweed, _allumettes_, pincus.h.i.+ons, six-bladed penknives, and never-pointed pencils filled the air with their cries, and made both day and night hideous. You could not walk a dozen yards at any time without falling down a yawning cellar-trap, or being run over by a porter with a huge load upon his head, or getting splashed from head to foot by the sudden pulling-up of some cart in the gutter beside you.

It was among the peculiarities of the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis that everybody was always in a hurry, and that n.o.body was ever seen to look in at the shop-windows. The shops, indeed, might as well have had no windows, since there were no loungers to profit by them. Every house, nevertheless, was a shop, and every shop had its window. These windows, however, were for the most part of that kind before which the pa.s.ser-by rarely cares to linger; for the commerce of the Rue du Faubourg St.

Denis was of that steady, unpretending, money-making sort that despises mere shop-front attractions. Grocers, stationers, corn-chandlers, printers, cutlers, leather-sellers, and such other inelegant trades, here most did congregate; and to the wearied wayfarer toiling along the dead level of this dreary pave, it was quite a relief to come upon even an artistically-arranged _Magasin de Charcuterie_, with its rows of glazed tongues, mighty Lyons sausages, yellow _terrines_ of Strasbourg pies, fantastically shaped pickle-jars, and pyramids of silvery sardine boxes.

It was at number One Hundred and Two in this agreeable thoroughfare that my friend's innamorata resided with her maternal aunt, the worthy relict of Monsieur Jacques Marotte, umbrella-maker, deceased. Thither, accordingly, we wended our miry way, Muller and I, after dining together at one of our accustomed haunts on the evening following the events related in my last chapter. The day had been dull and drizzly, and the evening had turned out duller and more drizzly still. We had not had rain for some time, and the weather had been (as it often is in Paris in October) oppressively hot; and now that the rain had come, it did not seem to cool the air at all, but rather to load it with vapors, and make the heat less endurable than before.

Having toiled all the way up from the Rue de la Harpe on the farther bank of the Seine, and having forded the pa.s.sage of the Arch of Louis le Grand, we were very wet and muddy indeed, very much out of breath, and very melancholy objects to behold.

"It's dreadful to think of going into any house in this condition, Muller," said I, glancing down ruefully at the state of my boots, and having just received a copious spattering of mud all down the left side of my person. "What is to be done?"

"We've only to go to a boot-cleaning and brus.h.i.+ng-up shop," replied Muller. "There's sure to be one close by somewhere."

"A boot-cleaning and brus.h.i.+ng-up shop!" I echoed.

"What--didn't you know there were lots of them, all over Paris? Have you never noticed places that look like shops, with ground gla.s.s windows instead of shop-fronts, on which are painted up the words, '_cirage des bottes?_'"

"Never, that I can remember."

"Then be grateful to me for a piece of very useful information! Suppose we turn down this by-street--it's mostly to the seclusion of by-streets and pa.s.sages that our bashful s.e.x retires to renovate its boots and its broadcloth."