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Pelham, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
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Volume 2 - Chapter 23 |
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_ VOLUME II CHAPTER XXIII Show me not thy painted beauties, These impostures I defy.--George Withers. The cave of Falri smelt not more delicately--on every side appeared the marks of drunkenness and gluttony. At the upper end of the cave the sorcerer lay extended, etc.--Mirglip the Persian, in the "Tales of the Genii." I woke the next morning with an aching head and feverish frame. Ah, those midnight carousals, how glorious they would be if there was no next morning! I took my sauterne and sodawater in my dressing-room; and, as indisposition always makes me meditative, I thought over all I had done since my arrival at Paris. I had become (that, God knows, I soon manage to do) rather a talked of and noted character. It is true that I was every where abused--one found fault with my neckcloth--another with my mind--the lank Mr. Aberton declared that I put my hair in papers, and the stuffed Sir Henry Millington said I was a thread-paper myself. One blamed my riding--a second my dancing--a third wondered how any woman could like me, and a fourth said that no woman ever could. On one point, however, all--friends and foes--were alike agreed; viz. that I was a consummate puppy, and excessively well satisfied with myself. A la verite, they were not much mistaken there. Why is it, by the by, that to be pleased with one's-self is the surest way of offending every body else? If any one, male or female, an evident admirer of his or her own perfections, enter a room, how perturbed, restless, and unhappy every individual of the offender's sex instantly becomes: for them not only enjoyment but tranquillity is over, and if they could annihilate the unconscious victim of their spleen, I fully believe no Christian toleration would come in the way of that last extreme of animosity. For a coxcomb there is no mercy--for a coquet no pardon. They are, as it were, the dissenters of society--no crime is too bad to be imputed to them; they do not believe the religion of others--they set up a deity of their own vanity--all the orthodox vanities of others are offended. Then comes the bigotry--the stake--the auto-da-fe of scandal. What, alas! is so implacable as the rage of vanity? What so restless as its persecution? Take from a man his fortune, his house, his reputation, but flatter his vanity in each, and he will forgive you. Heap upon him benefits, fill him with blessings: but irritate his self-love, and you have made the very best man an ingrat. He will sting you if he can: you cannot blame him; you yourself have instilled the venom. This is one reason why you must not always reckon upon gratitude in conferring an obligation. It is a very high mind to which gratitude is not a painful sensation. If you wish to please, you will find it wiser to receive--solicit even--favours, than accord them; for the vanity of the obliger is always flattered--that of the obligee rarely. Well, this is an unforeseen digression: let me return! I had mixed, of late, very little with the English. My mother's introductions had procured me the entree of the best French houses; and to them, therefore, my evenings were usually devoted. Alas! that was a happy time, when my carriage used to await me at the door of the Rocher de Cancale, and then whirl me to a succession of visits, varying in their degree and nature as the whim prompted: now to the brilliant soirees of Madame De--, or to the appartemens au troisieme of some less celebrated daughter of dissipation and ecarte;--now to the literary conversaziones of the Duchesse de D--s, or the Vicomte d'A--, and then to the feverish excitement of the gambling house. Passing from each with the appetite for amusement kept alive by variety; finding in none a disappointment, and in every one a welcome; full of the health which supports, and the youth which colours all excess or excitation, I drained, with an unsparing lip, whatever that enchanting metropolis could afford. I have hitherto said but little of the Duchesse de Perpignan; I think it necessary now to give some account of that personage. Ever since the evening I had met her at the ambassador's, I had paid her the most unceasing attentions. I soon discovered that she had a curious sort of liaison with one of the attaches--a short, ill-made gentleman, with high shoulders, and a pale face, who wore a blue coat and buff waistcoat, wrote bad verses, and thought himself handsome. All Paris said she was excessively enamoured of this youth. As for me, I had not known her four days before I discovered that she could not be excessively enamoured of any thing but an oyster pete and Lord Byron's Corsair. Her mind was the most marvellous melange of sentiment and its opposite. In her amours she was Lucretia herself; in her epicurism, Apicius would have yielded to her. She was pleased with sighs, but she adored suppers. She would leave every thing for her lover, except her dinner. The attache soon quarrelled with her, and I was installed into the platonic honours of his office. At first, I own that I was flattered by her choice, and though she was terribly exigeante of my petits soins, I managed to keep up her affection, and, what is still more wonderful, my own, for the better part of a month. What then cooled me was the following occurrence: I was in her boudoir one evening, when her femme de chambre came to tell us that the duc was in the passage. Notwithstanding the innocence of our attachment, the duchesse was in a violent fright; a small door was at the left of the ottoman, on which we were sitting. "Oh, no, no, not there," cried the lady; but I, who saw no other refuge, entered it forthwith, and before she could ferret me out, the duc was in the room. In the meanwhile, I amused myself by examining the wonders of the new world into which I had so abruptly immerged: on a small table before me, was deposited a remarkably constructed night-cap; I examined it as a curiosity: on each side was placed une petite cotelette de veau cru, sewed on with green-coloured silk (I remember even the smallest minutiae), a beautiful golden wig (the duchesse never liked me to play with her hair) was on a block close by, and on another table was a set of teeth, d'une blancheur eblouissante. In this manufactory of a beauty I remained for a quarter of an hour; at the end of that time, the abigail (the duchesse had the grace to disappear) released me, and I flew down stairs like a spirit from purgatory. From that moment the duchesse honoured me with her most deadly abhorrence. Equally silly and wicked, her schemes of revenge were as ludicrous in their execution as remorseless in their design: at one time I narrowly escaped poison in a cup of coffee--at another, she endeavoured to stab me to the heart with a paper cutter. Notwithstanding my preservation from these attacks, this new Messalina had resolved on my destruction, and another means of attempting it still remained, which the reader will yet have the pleasure of learning. Mr. Thornton had called upon me twice, and twice I had returned the visit, but neither of us had been at home to benefit by these reciprocities of politesse. His acquaintance with my mysterious hero of the gambling house and the Jardin des Plantes, and the keen interest I took, in spite of myself, in that unaccountable person, whom I was persuaded I had seen before in some very different scene, and under very different circumstances, made me desirous to increase a connoissance, which, from Vincent's detail, I should otherwise have been anxious to avoid. I therefore resolved to make another attempt to find him at home; and my headache being somewhat better, I took my way to his apartments in the Faubourg St. Germain. I love that quartier--if ever I went to Paris again I should reside there. It is quite a different world from the streets usually known to, and tenanted by the English--there, indeed, you are among the French, the fossilized remains of the old regime--the very houses have an air of desolate, yet venerable grandeur--you never pass by the white and modern mansion of a nouveau riche; all, even to the ruggedness of the pave, breathes a haughty disdain of innovation--you cross one of the numerous bridges, and you enter into another time--you are inhaling the atmosphere of a past century; no flaunting boutique, French in its trumpery, English in its prices, stares you in the face; no stiff coats and unnatural gaits are seen anglicising up the melancholy streets. Vast hotels, with their gloomy frontals, and magnificent contempt of comfort; shops, such as shops might have been in the aristocratic days of Louis Quatorze, ere British vulgarities made them insolent and dear; public edifices, still redolent of the superb charities of le grand monarque--carriages with their huge bodies and ample decorations; horses, with their Norman dimensions and undocked honours; men, on whose more high though not less courteous demeanour, the revolution seems to have wrought no democratic plebeianism--all strike on the mind with a vague and nameless impression of antiquity; a something solemn even in gaiety, and faded in pomp, appear to linger over all you behold; there are the Great French people unadulterated by change, unsullied with the commerce of the vagrant and various tribes that throng their mighty mart of enjoyments. The strangers who fill the quartiers on this side the Seine pass not there; between them and the Faubourg there is a gulf; the very skies seem different--your own feelings, thoughts--nature itself--alter, when you have passed that Styx which divides the wanderers from the habitants; your spirits are not so much damped, as tinged, refined, ennobled by a certain inexpressible awe--you are girt with the stateliness of Eld, and you tread the gloomy streets with the dignity of a man, who is recalling the splendours of an ancient court where he once did homage. I arrived at Thornton's chambers in the Rue St. Dominique. "Monsieur, est-il chez lui?" said I to the ancient porteress, who was reading one of Crebillon's novels. "Oui, Monsieur, au quatrieme," was the answer. I turned to the dark and unclean staircase, and, after incredible exertion and fatigue, arrived, at last, at the elevated abode of Mr. Thornton. "Entrez," cried a voice, in answer to my rap. I obeyed the signal, and found myself in a room of tolerable dimensions and multiplied utilities. A decayed silk curtain of a dingy blue, drawn across a recess, separated the chambre a coucher from the salon. It was at present only half drawn, and did not, therefore, conceal the mysteries of the den within; the bed was still unmade, and apparently of no very inviting cleanliness; a red handkerchief, that served as a nightcap, hung pendant from the foot of the bed; at a little distance from it, more towards the pillow, were a shawl, a parasol, and an old slipper. On a table, which stood between the two dull, filmy windows, were placed a cracked bowl, still reeking with the less of gin-punch, two bottles half full, a mouldy cheese, and a salad dish; on the ground beneath it lay two huge books, and a woman's bonnet. Thornton himself sat by a small consumptive fire, in an easy chair; another table, still spread with the appliances of breakfast, viz. a coffee-pot, a milk-jug, two cups, a broken loaf, and an empty dish, mingled with a pack of cards, one dice, and an open book de mauvais gout, stood immediately before him. Every thing around bore some testimony of the spirit of low debauchery; and the man himself, with his flushed and sensual countenance, his unwashed hands, and the slovenly rakishness of his whole appearance, made no unfitting representation of the Genius Loci. All that I have described, together with a flitting shadow of feminine appearance, escaping through another door, my quick eye discovered in the same instant that I made my salutation. Thornton rose, with an air half careless and half abashed, and expressed, in more appropriate terms than his appearance warranted, his pleasurable surprise at seeing me at last. There was, however, a singularity in his conversation, which gave it an air both of shrewdness and vulgarity. This was, as may before have been noted, a profuse intermixture of proverbs, some stale, some new, some sensible enough, and all savouring of a vocabulary carefully eschewed by every man of ordinary refinement in conversation. "I have but a small tenement," said he, smiling; "but, thank Heaven, at Paris a man is not made by his lodgings. Small house, small care. Few garcons have indeed a more sumptuous apartment than myself." "True," said I; "and if I may judge by the bottles on the opposite table, and the bonnet beneath it, you find that no abode is too humble or too exalted for the solace of the senses." "'Fore Gad, you are in the right, Mr. Pelham," replied Thornton, with a loud, coarse, chuckling laugh, which, more than a year's conversation could have done, let me into the secrets of his character. "I care not a rush for the decorations of the table, so that the cheer be good; nor for the gew-gaws of the head-dress, as long as the face is pretty--'the taste of the kitchen is better than the smell.' Do you go much to Madame B--'s ion the Rue Gretry--eh, Mr. Pelham?--ah, I'll be bound you do." "No," said I, with a loud laugh, but internal shiver; "but you know where to find le bon vin et les jolies filles. As for me, I am still a stranger in Paris, and amuse myself but very indifferently." Thornton's face brightened. "I tell you what my good fell--I beg pardon--I mean Mr. Pelham--I can shew you the best sport in the world, if you can only spare me a little of your time--this very evening, perhaps?" "I fear," said I, "I am engaged all the present week; but I long for nothing more than to cultivate an acquaintance, seemingly so exactly to my own taste." Thornton's grey eyes twinkled. "Will you breakfast with me on Sunday?" said he. "I shall be too happy," I replied There was now a short pause. I took advantage of it. "I think," said I, "I have seen you once or twice with a tall, handsome man, in a loose great coat of very singular colour. Pray, if not impertinent, who is he? I am sure I have seen him before in England." I looked full upon Thornton as I said this; he changed colour, and answered my gaze with a quick glance from his small, glittering eye, before he replied. "I scarcely know who you mean, my acquaintance is so large and miscellaneous at Paris. It might have been Johnson, or Smith, or Howard, or any body, in short." "It is a man nearly six feet high," said I, "thin, and remarkably well made, of a pale complexion, light eyes, and very black hair, mustachios and whiskers. I saw him with you once in the Bois de Boulogne, and once in a hell in the Palais Royal. Surely, now you will recollect who he is?" Thornton was evidently disconcerted. "Oh!" said he, after a short pause, and another of his peculiarly quick, sly glances--"Oh, that man; I have known him a very short time. What is his name? let me see!" and Mr. Thornton affected to look down in a complete reverie of dim remembrances. I saw, however, that, from time to time, his eye glanced up to me, with a restless, inquisitive expression, and as instantly retired. "Ah," said I, carelessly, "I think I know who he is!" "Who!" cried Thornton, eagerly, and utterly off his guard. "And yet," I pursued, without noticing the interruption, "it scarcely can be--the colour of the hair is so very different." Thornton again appeared to relapse into his recollections. "War--Warbur--ah, I have it now!" cried he, "Warburton--that's it--that's the name--is it the one you supposed, Mr. Pelham?" "No," said I, apparently perfectly satisfied. "I was quite mistaken. Good morning, I did not think it was so late. On Sunday, then, Mr. Thornton--au plaisir!" "A d--d cunning dog!" said I to myself, as I left the apartments. "However, on peut-etre trop fin. I shall have him yet." The surest way to make a dupe is to let you victim suppose you are his _ |
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