“You can hardly expect to dazzle T——
with the munificence and tastefulness of your presents.
Your father gives you a hundred sous a week to spend;
a great deal for a bookbinder, but very little for
a woman whose gowns cost from five hundred to three
thousand francs apiece. And, as you are neither
a Manager to sign agreements, nor a Dramatic Author
to apportion roles, nor a Journalist to write notices,
nor a young man from the draper’s to take advantage
of a moment’s caprice as opportunity offers
when delivering a new frock, I don’t see in the
least how you are to make her favour you, and I think
your tragedy queen did quite right to slam her gate
in your face.”
“Ah, well!” sighed Jean Servien, “I
told you just now I loved her. It is not true.
I hate her! I hate her for all the torments she
has made me suffer, I hate her because she is adorable
and men love her. And I hate all women, because
they all love someone, and that someone is not I!”
Garneret burst out laughing.
“Candidly,” he grinned, “they are
not so far wrong. Your love has no spark of anything
affectionate, kindly, useful in it. Since the
day you fell in love with Mademoiselle T——,
have you once thought of sparing her pain? Have
you once dreamed of making a sacrifice for her sake?
Has any touch of human kindness ever entered into
your passion? Can it show one mark of manliness
or goodness? Not it. Well, being the poor
devils we are, with our own way to push in life and
nothing to help us on, we must be brave and good.
It is half-past one, and I have to get up at five.
Good night. Cultivate a quiet mind, and come and
see me.”
Jean had only three days left to prepare for his examination
for admission to the Ministry of Finance. These
he spent at home, where the faces of father, aunt,
and apprentice seemed strange and unfamiliar, so completely
had they disappeared from his thoughts. Monsieur
Servien was displeased with his son, but was too timid
as well as too tactful to make any overt reproaches.
His aunt overwhelmed him with garrulous expressions
of doting affection; at night she would creep into
his room to see if he was sound asleep, while all
day long she wearied him with the tale of her petty
grievances and dislikes.
Once she had caught the apprentice with her spectacles,
her sacred spectacles, perched on his nose, and the
profanation had left a kind of religious horror in
her mind.
“That boy is capable of anything,” she
used to say. One of the boy’s pet diversions
was to execute behind the old lady’s back a
war-dance of the Cannibal Islanders he had seen once
at a theatre. Sticking feathers he had plucked
from a feather-broom in his hair, and holding a big
knife without a handle between his teeth, he would
creep nearer and nearer, crouching low and advancing
by little leaps and bounds, with ferocious grimaces
which gradually gave place to a look of disappointed
