‘No, no, it’s nothing so serious,’ she replied, put out by the calmly bantering tone of the question. ‘But what I have to say is rather embarrassing for me… Forgive me for dropping in on you like this…’
‘It’s true I am dining out, but I have plenty of time to get dressed… So, what is it then?’
He waited, and now she hesitated, stammering, struck by the great luxury and hedonistic refinement that she felt all around her. Cowardice took hold of her, she didn’t have the courage now to tell the whole story. How was it possible that life, so hard for the child born of chance over there in the dunghill of the Cité de Naples, should have proved so prodigal for this one in his cultivated wealth? So much vile squalor, hunger and unavoidable dirt on one side, and on the other such a pursuit of the exquisite, such abundance, such a beautiful life. Could money then mean education, health, and intelligence? If the same human mire always existed under the surface, didn’t all civilization lie simply in this superiority of smelling nice and living well?
‘Oh dear, it’s quite a tale! I think I’m doing right in telling you about it… Anyway I have to, as I need your help.’
Maxime listened, standing at first, then sitting down facing her as his legs quite gave way in his surprise. And when she finished:
‘What! What! I’m not the only son of his—here’s a horrible little brother dropping in on me out of the blue, without any warning!’
She thought he was speaking out of self-interest, and made a reference to the matter of inheritance.
‘Oh! Papa’s inheritance!’
And he waved his hand in a gesture of ironic indifference that she didn’t understand. What on earth…? What could he mean? Didn’t he believe in his father’s great qualities, in the fortune he would certainly make?
‘No, no, my affairs are all in order, I don’t need anyone… Only, really, it’s all so funny this business, I can’t help laughing.’
He was indeed laughing, but vexed and vaguely uneasy, thinking only of himself, not having had time yet to work out what this event might bring him for good or ill. He felt quite detached from it all, and made a remark in which he fully and brutally expressed himself:
‘In fact, I don’t give a damn.’
Standing up, he went into the dressing-room and quickly returned with a tortoiseshell polisher, with which he began gently buffing his nails.
‘And what are you going to do with this monster of yours? You can’t very well send him to the Bastille, like the Man in the Iron Mask.’*
Then she told him about La Méchain’s bills, explained her idea of sending Victor to the Work Foundation, and asked him for the two thousand francs.
‘I don’t want your father to know anything about it yet, and you’re the only person I can ask; you must lend this money.’
But he flatly refused.
‘To Papa, absolutely never! Not a sou! Listen, this is a vow, if Papa just needed one sou to get over a toll-bridge I wouldn’t lend it to him. Get this clear! Some stupidities are just too stupid, and I don’t intend to be ridiculous!’
Again she looked at him, disturbed by his ugly insinuations. In this emotional moment she had neither the wish nor the time to get him to explain.
‘And to me…?’ she went on curtly. ‘Will you lend them to me, the two thousand francs?’
‘To you, to you…’
He went on polishing his nails with light and pretty motions, while still examining her with his clear eyes, eyes that could probe into the very hearts of women.
‘To you, yes, all right, I will lend to you… You’re an innocent, you’ll see I get them back.’
Then, when he had got the two notes out of a little desk and given them to her, he took her hands and held them for a moment in his own, with an air of friendly jollity, like a stepson fond of his stepmother.
‘You have illusions about Papa! Oh, don’t bother to deny it, I’m not trying to butt into your affairs… It’s strange that women sometimes seem to enjoy offering devotion; of course they have every right to take their pleasure wherever they find it… No matter, if ever you should find yourself getting little thanks for it, come and see me and we’ll have a chat.’
When Madame Caroline got back to her cab, still suffocated by the soft warmth of Maxime’s house and the scent of heliotrope that had permeated her clothes, she was shuddering as if she had just emerged from a house of ill-repute, and frightened too by the son’s odd reticences and jocular remarks about his father, which aggravated her suspicions about a shameful past. But she didn’t want to know; she had the money and she calmed down, planning what to do next day so that before nightfall the child would be rescued from his life of vice.
So in the morning she set out, having all sorts of formalities to deal with to make certain that her protégé would be admitted to the Work Foundation. Her position as secretary of the Supervisory Committee, to which the Princess d’Orviedo, the founder, had appointed ten ladies of standing, made the formalities rather easier; and by the afternoon she had only to go and collect Victor from the Cité de Naples. She took suitable garments with her; she was not free from worry that he might put up some resistance, this child who didn’t want to hear any mention of school. But La Méchain, to whom she had sent a telegram and who was waiting for her on the threshold, gave her a piece of news which she said had greatly upset her in the night: Mother Eulalie had suddenly died, from what cause exactly the doctor had not been able to say—a congestion perhaps, or some dire effect of her infected blood; and the alarming thing was that the boy, sleeping beside her, had not noticed her death in the dark until he had felt the coldness of her body. He had ended the night in the house of the owner of the Cité, stunned by this drama, and plagued by a nameless fear, so he allowed himself to be dressed, and seemed happy enough at the idea of living in a house with a beautiful garden. There was nothing to keep him at the Cité any more, since ‘the fatty’, as he called her, was going to rot in the ground.
However, La Méchain, while making out the receipt for the two thousand francs, laid down her conditions.
‘It’s agreed, isn’t it? I’ll receive the whole of the six thousand from you in one single payment, in six months’ time… otherwise, I’ll go straight to Monsieur Saccard.’
‘But’, said Madame Caroline, ‘it’s Monsieur Saccard himself who will be paying you… Today I’m just standing in for him.’
The farewells of Victor and his old cousin were not affectionate, a quick kiss on the hair, and the boy hastened to get into the cab while La Méchain, who had been reproved by Busch for accepting a mere instalment, went on dully chewing over her annoyance at losing her security.
‘Now, Madame, be straight with me, otherwise I swear I’ll make you sorry for it.’
On the way from the Cité de Naples to the Work Foundation on the Boulevard Bineau, Madame Caroline was only able to get a few monosyllables out of Victor, as his shining eyes gobbled up the road, the wide avenues, the passers-by, and the rich houses. He couldn’t write and was barely able to read, having always abandoned school in favour of jaunts on the fortifications; and his face, that of a child who has grown up too fast, showed only the frustrated appetites of his race, an eagerness, a violent urge for pleasure, aggravated by the compost of wretchedness and abominations in which he had grown up. In the Boulevard Bineau his eyes, like those of a young wild animal, sparkled even more when, getting out of the cab, he crossed the central courtyard, with the boys’ building on the right and the girls’ on the left. He had already cast a searching look over the vast playgrounds planted with beautiful trees, the tiled kitchens from whose open windows came the smell of cooking, the refectories adorned with marble, long and with high ceilings like church naves—all this royal luxury that the Princess, bent on restitution, insisted on giving to the poor. Then, at the end of the courtyard, in the central block where the administrative staff were lodged, as he was taken from one department to another to be admitted with the usual formalities, he heard
his new shoes clattering along the endless corridors, the huge staircases, and all those open areas flooded with air and light and palatially decorated. His nostrils quivered: all this would be his.
But when Madame Caroline came back to the ground floor to sign a document she took him down a new corridor and led him to a glass door, through which he could see a workshop in which boys of his age were standing at a bench, learning woodwork.
‘You see, my dear,’ she said, ‘here people work, because you have to work if you want to be healthy and happy… In the evening there are classes, and I can count on you, can’t I, to be good and do well at your studies…? You will be deciding your own future, a future such as you never dreamed of.’
A dark furrow crossed Victor’s brow. He made no reply, and his wolfish young eyes now cast only oblique and piratical looks of envy at this prodigal display of luxury: eager to possess all this but without having to do anything for it; to conquer it and feast on it by force of tooth and nail. From that moment on he was there only as a rebel, as a prisoner, dreaming of theft and escape.
‘Now everything is settled,’ Madame Caroline went on, ‘we’ll go up to the bathroom.’
It was customary for each new boarder, on entry, to take a bath; the baths were upstairs, in little rooms next to the infirmary, which consisted of two small dormitories, one for boys and one for girls, near the linen-room. The six Sisters of Charity attached to the community reigned here, in this superb linen-room of varnished maple, with its three tiers of deep linen-presses, in this model infirmary so spotlessly bright and white, cheerful and clean as health itself. The ladies of the Supervisory Committee also came there quite often and spent an hour or two in the afternoon, not so much actually to supervise as to give the work their devoted support.
And in fact the Countess de Beauvilliers was there, with her daughter Alice, in the room between the two infirmaries. The Countess often brought Alice along, to offer her some distraction and give her the pleasure of doing charitable work. That day she was helping one of the sisters to prepare slices of bread and jam for two convalescent little girls who had been allowed a teatime snack.
‘Ah,’ said the Countess on seeing Victor, who had just been sat down to wait for his bath, ‘here’s a new boy!’
She usually behaved with some formality towards Madame Caroline, greeting her only with a nod and never speaking to her, for fear, perhaps, of being drawn into neighbourly relations. But this boy Madame Caroline was bringing to the Foundation, and the air of active kindness with which she was looking after him, doubtless touched the Countess and brought her out of her normal reserve. And they began talking quietly.
‘If you only knew, Madame, from what hell I have just brought him! I recommend him to your concern, as I have recommended him to all the ladies and gentlemen.’
‘Does he have any family? Do you know any of them?’
‘No, his mother is dead… and now he only has me.’
‘Poor boy! Ah, how very sad!’
Meanwhile, Victor was gazing avidly at the bread and jam. His eyes had lit up with ferocious desire; and from the jam, being spread by the knife, he looked upward to the slender white hands of Alice, on to her too-thin neck, and then to the whole person of this puny virgin, wasting away in the long and futile wait for marriage. If only he’d been alone with her, he’d have given her such a head-butt in the stomach, how he’d have pushed her staggering against the wall and grabbed the bread and jam from her! But the girl had noticed his ravenous eyes, and after consulting the sister with a quick glance:
‘Are you hungry, my little friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t hate jam?’
‘No.’
‘So, it would suit you if I made you two slices of bread and jam that you could eat when you come out of the bath?’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot of jam on not a lot of bread is what you’d like, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
She was laughing and joking, but he remained serious and open-mouthed, his voracious eyes devouring her along with the bread and jam.
At that moment shouts of joy and quite a violent racket came up from the boys’ playground, where four o’clock playtime was just beginning. The workrooms were emptying and the children had half-an-hour for their teatime snack and to stretch their legs.
‘You see,’ Madame Caroline went on, taking Victor over to a window, ‘if there’s work there’s also play… Do you like work?’
‘No.’
‘But you like playing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, if you want to play, you have to work… That will all get sorted out, and you’ll be sensible, I’m sure.’
He did not reply. A flush of pleasure had warmed his face at the sight of his fellows let out into the yard, jumping and shouting; and his eyes went back to the bread and jam that Alice had just finished preparing and was putting on a plate. Yes! Freedom and pleasure all the time, he wanted nothing else. His bath was ready, and he was led away.
‘That’s a little fellow who won’t be all that easy to manage, I think,’ said the sister quietly. ‘I’m suspicious of them when they have an irregular face.’
‘But he’s not ugly,’ murmured Alice, ‘and you’d think he was eighteen, the way he looks at you.’
‘It’s true,’ said Madame Caroline, with a little shiver, ‘he’s very mature for his age.’
Before they left, the ladies decided to allow themselves the pleasure of seeing the little convalescent girls eat their bread and jam. One of them was especially interesting, a little blonde ten-year-old, already with knowing eyes and the look of a woman, the precocious and sickly flesh of the poorest areas of Paris. Hers was the usual story: a drunken father who brought in the mistresses he’d picked up on the street and who disappeared with one of them; a mother who had taken up with another man, then another, before herself becoming a drunkard; and the little girl in the middle of it all was beaten by all these males, when they weren’t trying to rape her. One morning her mother had had to drag her out of the arms of a mason she had herself brought home the previous day. And yet they still allowed this wretched mother to come and see her daughter, for it was she who had begged them to take her away, since even in her degradation she still kept an ardent maternal love. And indeed she was there, a thin wreck of a woman with yellowish skin and eyelids red with weeping, sitting beside the white bed on which her child, very clean and propped up with pillows, was daintily eating her bread and jam.
She recognized Madame Caroline, since she had once gone to Saccard for help.
‘Ah Madame, here’s my poor Madeleine saved once again. She’s got all our misery in her blood you see, and the doctor told me she wouldn’t live if she went on being knocked about at home with us… But here she has meat and wine, fresh air and peace… I beg you, Madame, please tell that good gentleman that not an hour of my life goes by when I don’t bless him.’
A sob choked her, as if her heart was melting with gratitude. It was of Saccard she spoke, for, like most of the parents who had children at the Foundation, it was only Saccard she knew. The Princess d’Orviedo was never on the scene, while Saccard had long been abundantly visible, populating the Foundation, gathering up all the wretchedness of the gutter in order to see this great engine of charity, partly his own creation, getting to work as fast as possible, full of eager enthusiasm as ever, and distributing five-franc notes from his own pocket to the miserable families whose little ones he was saving. And he remained, for these wretches, the one true Saviour.
‘You will tell him, won’t you, Madame, that somewhere there’s a poor woman praying for him… Oh, it’s not that I’m religious, I don’t want to lie, I’ve never been a hypocrite. No, between the churches and us it’s all over, we don’t even think of them any more, they never did us any good, going there was just a waste of time… But even so that doesn’t mean there isn’t something up above us, and it’s somehow comforting, when someone has
been kind, to call down the blessings of Heaven upon him.’
Her tears overflowed, rolling down her withered cheeks.
‘Listen to me, Madeleine, listen…’
The little girl, so pale in her snow-white nightdress, licking the jam off her bread with the tip of a greedy tongue while her eyes shone with happiness, raised her head and listened carefully, without interrupting her treat.
‘Every night, before going to sleep in your bed, you will put your hands together like this and you’ll say: “Lord, please let Monsieur Saccard be rewarded for his goodness; may he have a long and happy life.” D’you hear? You promise?’
‘Yes, Mama.’
In the weeks that followed Madame Caroline lived in a state of great moral agitation. She no longer knew what to think about Saccard. The story of Victor’s birth and abandonment, that unfortunate Rosalie, seized on the step of a staircase with such violence that she had been left disabled, the promissory notes signed and never paid, and the unfortunate fatherless child growing up in such filth—all of that deplorable past made her sick at heart. She thrust aside the images that arose from that past, just as she had not wanted to provoke any indiscretions from Maxime; there were certainly some bad things in earlier years that frightened her and would, she thought, have given her too much pain. But then there was this woman in tears, joining together the hands of her little girl, making her pray for this man, this Saccard, adored like the God of all goodness and in fact truly good, having really saved souls in that passionate businesslike activity of his, which became virtue when the work he was doing was virtuous. So she ended up unwilling to judge him and telling herself, to ease her conscience as a well-informed woman who had done too much reading and thinking, that in him, as in all men, there was both the best and the worst.
However, she had a secret pang of shame at the thought that he had possessed her. That still astounded her, but she reassured herself, vowing that it was over and done with, and that such a momentary surprise could never happen again. And three months went by, during which she went twice a week to see Victor, and one evening she found herself once more in the arms of Saccard, definitively his mistress and allowing it to become a settled relationship. What was happening to her? Was she, like so many others, just curious? Was it those shady love affairs of yesteryear that she had stirred up that had given her the desire for sensual knowledge? Or was it rather the child who had become the link, the fatal bond, between her, the mother through chance and adoption, and him, the father? Yes, it must have been just a distorted effect of sentiment. In her great sorrow at being childless, looking after the child of this man in such poignant circumstances must have touched her so deeply as to overthrow her will. Each time she saw him again she gave herself more freely to him, and her frustrated maternal longings lay at the heart of her abandon. Besides, she was a woman of clear common sense, and she could accept the facts of life without wearing herself out trying to explain their myriad complex causes. For her, that sort of untangling of mind and heart, that refined hair-splitting analysis, was only an entertainment for society ladies with nothing to do, no household to manage and no child to love, phoney intellectuals who try to find excuses for their sins and try to mask, with their science of the soul, the appetites of the flesh, common to duchesses and barmaids. She, with her overload of erudition, who had once wasted her time ardently longing to understand the whole vast world and join in the disputes of the philosophers, she had emerged from all that with a great disdain for those psychological pastimes that tend to serve as replacements for piano-playing and embroidery, and which, she would say with a laugh, had depraved more women than they cured. So, on those days when there seemed to be holes in her very self and she felt there had been a breakdown in her free will, she preferred, having once acknowledged it, to have the courage to accept the facts; and she relied on the work of life itself to remove the stain and repair the damage, just as the ever-rising sap of an oak tree renews both its wood and its bark. If she was now Saccard’s mistress, without having intended it and without being at all sure she respected him, she picked herself up again from this fall with the thought that he was not unworthy of her, charmed as she was by his qualities as a man of action, his energy for conquest, and believing him to be kind and helpful to others. Her initial shame had disappeared in that instinctive need one has to purify one’s faults, and nothing was in fact more natural and peaceful than their relationship: a liaison more of reason than passion, he happy to have her there in the evening when he was not going out, and she almost maternal with her soothing affection, her lively intelligence, and her honesty. And for this rogue of the Paris streets, scorched and toughened in every kind of financial swindle, it was really an undeserved stroke of luck, a reward stolen like everything else, to have as his own this adorable woman who at thirty-six was so young and healthy under the snowy mass of her thick white hair, a woman of such bold good sense and natural wisdom, with her faith in life just as it is, in spite of all the mud it carries in its flow.