My Memoirs Part 15

On the evening of the day after the funeral of President Faure, my husband came into my room, and closed the door carefully. He was trembling and pale. "You know," he began, "that we agreed, years ago, that, although living under the same roof, you and I should be entirely free to act as we pleased. We further agreed to discuss all matters of importance by letter.... But this time, I must speak to you. Something terrible has happened to-day, and we must talk about it and see how to save ourselves from disaster.... A man called on me and was with me for two hours in the studio.... Now, tell me, is it true that you possess a ma.s.s of important papers written by the late President, and is it true that you possess a most valuable pearl necklace? I know that Felix Faure presented you with a comb and a brooch, but what of those pearls? And what is the truth about the doc.u.ments?"

I remained silent. My husband went on:

"The man, who talks French with a strong German accent, states that a number of times he saw you leave the Elysee with bundles of papers in your hands. On one occasion the President accompanied you to the garden-door, and before closing it said to you: 'Be careful with the doc.u.ments.' As for the necklace, he has given me an exact description of it, he has told me the number of the pearls, their size and weight....

He says he must and will have the doc.u.ments and the necklace, but he wants the necklace first. He knows its origin and history. If you keep it, you and I and Marthe will be ruined, he says. All kinds of dangers are threatening us. He knows the scandal in which Felix Faure was unwittingly involved, and says you must know that the matter is of the greatest gravity. If you give up the necklace, no harm will befall us, and the horrible insinuations in the newspapers will at once cease.

Otherwise our position will become untenable.... He has said enough to make me realise that he speaks the truth. The man is no impostor.

Indeed, the whole affair is so dreadful that if you don't hand me the pearls, I give you my word of honour that I shall commit suicide!"

I was dumfounded. Still, I managed to say: "That German is a rogue. He has discovered some facts about the friends.h.i.+p between the late President and me, and he wants to blackmail us... and obtain the necklace, the doc.u.ments, which may be turned into money, and everything we possess."

"No," my husband replied, "he is not anxious to blackmail us, if he can obtain what he wants otherwise. As a matter of fact he is willing to buy the pearls row by row, or even pearl by pearl. But he demanded that the necklace shall never be shown or mentioned. He does not want it to be recognised, and therefore will buy at once a number of the pearls and the clasp. But the necklace must be unstrung."

"It is all very strange," I said. "The whole affair sounds like blackmail and at the same time the man seems anxious to s.h.i.+eld some one...."

"Yes, it is strange.... But if you don't yield to him to-morrow, and hand him at least some of the pearls and swear that he shall have the others, in time, he will do his worst, and I know enough to realise what the worst would be.... Now, what do you decide?"

I did not hesitate very long. I remembered the President's fear when he besought me to keep the necklace. Also I had had but little peace since those fatal pearls were in my possession....

"I will talk to the man myself, and hand him some of the pearls...."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MY HUSBAND, M. STEINHEIL, IN 1898]

"You will not see him. He came this morning only because he knew you were ill in bed; otherwise he would have made some appointment with me.... He will be here to-morrow. What shall I tell him?"

I fetched the necklace, unstrung the pearls--selected ten amongst the largest--and handed my husband the others.

"Do as you please with these," I said. "And tell that German that I shall keep these ten pearls.... Some day I may want the money that they will fetch."

The next day I heard that the man "allowed" me to keep the ten pearls, but first my husband had to swear in my name that if I ever decided to sell them, it should be to him, the German. One out of the five rows of pearls was "sold" to that mysterious individual, and the veiled libels in the newspapers ceased as if by enchantment!

Was it mere coincidence, or had the man really some power? Or had that scandalous press campaign been more or less directly his own work? Had he used it to intimidate me?

At any rate, the enigmatical German kept his promises. My husband, who had an abject fear of him, kept the pearls in his studio, and the German, who came every three or four months, insisted on seeing the pearls and then bought a few of them. He always managed to call when I was not at home, but once or twice I saw him leave the villa in the Impa.s.se just as I entered it. He was small and dark, and had a very Jewish nose. It was winter when I saw him, and the collar of his overcoat was turned up to his ears. It was quite evident that he did not wish his face to be seen.

My husband corresponded secretly with the man, and sold, through the latter's agency, a number of pictures to various persons in Germany. The whole matter was so strange that I repeatedly attempted to drag from my husband all that he knew. I had an impression that he was aware of the origin of the necklace, and that there were some clauses in his compact with the man of which he had not acquainted me. But whenever I mentioned the German he at once ran away and shut himself up in his studio.

Two or three years after the death of Felix Faure I looked into the drawer in which the pearls were kept and found they had all gone, except, of course, the ten which I had put aside.

A few days later my husband said to me: "The 'German' has been again.

His att.i.tude has changed for the worse. He now demands the ten large pearls you have kept, and also the papers of President Faure."

I refused point blank. The pearls I kept in reserve, for some unforeseen emergency. As for the doc.u.ments, I would sooner have burned them, in spite of their importance and of the memories attached to them, than hand them to that German who might have used them for Heaven knew what dangerous purpose.

"What did he say when you gave him my reply?" I asked my husband after the man had called.

"He said he could afford to wait... but he would gain his ends, 'in time.'"

A few weeks later, having finished some work I had been doing on a historical costume which my husband needed for a painting, representing a sixteenth-century n.o.bleman reading by a window--the picture was intended for the salon--I went up to the studio. An old Italian model, a man called Giganti, was there.

"Monsieur went out for a while, and told me to wait for him, Madame....

He seemed rather upset...."

"What about?"

"Oh! He said he had lost a 'political paper.'..."

It then occurred to me that during the past few days my husband had been somewhat strange and embarra.s.sed in his manner. We had a conversation about the "political paper," and he finally admitted that he "had mislaid a letter of President Faure...."

"I can guess what has happened," I said. "That man came again and demanded from you a proof that the doc.u.ments were still in our possession. You had to show them to him, and one dropped... which the man promptly seized, no doubt, and as the letters are numbered you discovered when examining them that one had disappeared. Those papers are not safe in your studio. Give them back to me."

He readily consented, and I hid it in the "secret" drawer of my writing-table, after having carefully looked through the doc.u.ments and found that none was missing, except the "mislaid" letter, which was, however, written in a cypher known only to the President and myself.

During the years that followed, the mysterious foreigner continued to call, and, as the reader will learn, did so until a few weeks before the murder of my husband and my mother in 1908. I am inclined to believe that the necklace was a crown jewel which, by a series of strange events, came into the possession of President Faure. That the "German"

should have spent so much time in exacting the pearls seems strange, but it has occurred to me that the man was playing a double game, blackmailing not only us--I doubt if M. Steinheil was ever paid for the pearls--but also the personage who was so anxious to recover them. By giving them up a few at a time, he naturally kept that personage longer in his power.

As for the way in which the necklace came into the President's possession, I take it that some foreign... Prince, with whom perhaps, for political reasons, he ought not to have been on intimate terms, had very probably lost heavily to him at a secret gambling party. Felix Faure was paid with the necklace instead of in cash, owing to the temporary financial embarra.s.sment of his ill.u.s.trious friend. The latter then, to his horror, found out the origin of the necklace and that it had been stolen--for it seemed to me that there had probably been a robbery. If the truth had leaked out, both the President and his friend would have been involved in a scandal of such far-reaching political consequences that perhaps a war might have resulted. In their consternation, they agreed to deny all knowledge of the necklace, hence the agitation of the President, who had already given me the pearls and who two days later begged me to hide them and on no account to wear them.

The "foreigner" was probably a professional blackmailer, and when he found that nothing more was to be done with the pearls and that his livelihood from that source was gone, sought to turn to his advantage the knowledge which he had gained from my husband (always too ready to give his confidence to any one who posed as his friend) of Felix Faure's doc.u.ments.

I earnestly hope that some day the mystery will be solved. My theory may then be found wanting in certain particulars, but I believe that, on the whole, it will seem, to the reader, the most plausible.

CHAPTER X

1899-1908

M. emile Loubet, President of the Senate, followed Felix Faure as President of the Republic on February 18th, 1899. As every one knows, stones were showered upon the new President as he pa.s.sed on his way from Versailles, where the "Congress" had elected him, to the station where he entrained for Paris. He was called "Panama the First"--though he had had nothing to do with the Panama frauds--insulted and besmirched as few men have been. I was only a few yards from M. Loubet at the Auteuil Steeplechase Meeting (June), when young Baron Christiani smashed the top hat of the President and almost hit with his stick the wife of the Italian Amba.s.sador, Countess Tornielli. But M. Loubet never flinched, and he weathered the storm till it abated. Some have called this cowardice; I would rather call it heroism--of a kind.

Besides the highly important and final developments in the Dreyfus affair--which have been summed up in another chapter--and its truly amazing epilogue, that is, the complete and rapid way in which France recovered from the terrible crisis and emerged serene and vigorous, there happened little worth referring to during the year 1899. There were, however, a few amazing interludes. The poet Deroulede seized the bridle of the horse of General Roget, a staunch Anti-Dreyfusard, on the day of President Faure's funeral, and ordered him to march with his troops on to the Elysee--another _coup_ that failed. Deroulede was arrested, but the Court of a.s.size acquitted him on May 31st. There were many comical conspiracies and many comical trials of conspirators; there were constant riots in Paris and elsewhere, all more noisy than alarming; there were thousands of Socialists with red b.u.t.ton-holes in search of Royalists with white b.u.t.ton-holes... and they never met. And there was the farce of the "Fort" Chabrol (a house in the Rue Chabrol, where the Anti-Semitic League had offices), which garrisoned by Jules Guerin, the secretary of the League, and a few friends, held five thousand soldiers at bay for nearly two months. Guerin and other heroes of the fort, and also Deroulede, were tried by the Senate transformed into "High Court," and were sentenced to ten years' banishment....

Afterwards things gradually quieted down. Dupuy had fallen and Waldeck-Rousseau had succeeded him as Premier. He was an able barrister and authoritive statesman who had held office in the strenuous days of Gambetta and Jules Ferry.

In May 1900, however, there was one more amusing incident. At the Paris Munic.i.p.al Elections a huge majority of Nationalists and "Anti-Semites"

were returned.... But then Paris was ever "in the opposition" and Parisians have ever been _frondeurs_.

The 1900 Exhibition brilliantly terminated the century. La Belle France, who was thoroughly tired of riots, "leagues," and agitations, had once more become quite peaceful and "respectable," as befitted a lady who was about to receive a number of sovereigns (including the Czar and his Empress, who came in 1901).

France is logical, although fond of Paradox--and practical--although, hasty, violent, quixotic, and ever in search of the truth.... And France respects Authority, although she tries to call herself socialistic, whereas she is merely democratic.

King Edward VII. came to France at the beginning of May 1908, that is, not quite a year after the end of the Boer War, and he was greeted in such a way that he might have been ent.i.tled to say: "I am the most popular man in France."