The Unknown Masterpiece (6 page)

GAMBARA

To the Marquis of Belloy

It was during afternoon tea at the fireside of a mysterious retreat which no longer exists save as memory will preserve it, overlooking Paris from the hills of Bellevue to those of Belleville, from Montmartre to the Arc de Triomphe, that amid the myriad ideas which exploded and expired like rockets in your sparkling conversation, you offered my pen, with characteristic generosity, this character worthy of Hoffmann, a bearer of unknown treasures and a pilgrim at the gates of Paradise, endowed with ears to hear angelic harmonies yet no longer a tongue to repeat them, touching the keyboard with fingers deformed by the contractions of divine inspiration, under the illusion he was playing celestial music to stupefied listeners. You created Gambara, I merely costumed him. Let me render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, regretting you did not take up the pen at a period when noblemen might employ it as well as the sword in their country’s service. You may well take no thought for yourself, but your talents you owe to us.

New Year’s Day of the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-one was emptying its packet of holiday sugarplums: four o’clock had struck, restaurants were beginning to fill, and there was a crowd in the Palais Royal. Presently a carriage stopped at the entrance and out of it stepped a young man of proud bearing, doubtless a foreigner or he would not have been attended by such an aristocratically plumed footman nor displayed on his carriage doors the quarterings still coveted by heroes of the July monarchy. The stranger entered the Palais Royal and joined the crowd under the arcades, patient with the slow pace to which the press of idlers condemned his progress. He appeared accustomed to the measured gait ironically known as “an ambassador’s walk,” though his dignity seemed a trifle theatrical: handsome and severe as his countenance was, his hat, beneath which emerged a tuft of curly black hair, tilted perhaps a little too far over his right ear, belying his gravity by a slightly roguish look; his inattentive, half-closed eyes cast disdainful glances at the crowd.

“Now there’s a really good-looking man,” murmured a shopgirl, stepping aside to let him pass.

“Who’s well aware of the fact,” her homely companion replied in a loud voice.

After a turn around the arcades, the young man glanced at the sky and then at his watch, made an impatient gesture, and entered a tobacconist’s shop where he lit a cigar and lingered in front of a mirror to inspect his clothes which were a little showier than the laws of French taste prescribe. He fiddled with his collar, tugged at a black velvet vest crisscrossed by one of those heavy gold chains made in Genoa, and, casually flinging over his left shoulder a velvet-lined cloak which he then rearranged with some care, the young man resumed his promenade without permitting himself to be distracted by the appraising glances that marked his progress. When lights began to appear in the shops and the evening seemed dark enough, he headed toward the Place du Palais Royal like a man afraid to be recognized, skirting the square till he reached the fountain where, shielded by the line of fiacres, he entered the dark, dirty, and disreputable rue Froidmanteau, a sort of sewer the police tolerate near the well-swept Palais Royal, the way an Italian majordomo allows a careless footman to leave a pile of household trash in a corner of the staircase. The young man hesitated, for all the world like a suburban matron in her Sunday best anxiously peering across a rain-swollen gutter. Yet the hour was well chosen to satisfy even the most shameful fantasy: earlier one might be found out, later one might be forestalled. To have let himself be lured by one of those glances that prompt without being exactly provocative; to have followed for an hour, perhaps even a whole day, some lovely young woman idealized in his thoughts, her most trivial actions interpreted a thousand flattering ways; to have started believing in sudden, irresistible sympathies; to have imagined, in the heat of a passing exhilaration, an adventure in an age when romances are written precisely because they no longer occur; to have dreamed, wrapped in Almaviva’s cloak, of balconies and guitars, of stratagems and locks; to have written a rapturous poem and now be standing at an ill-famed door; and then—for a grand finale!—to discover his Rosina’s decorum to be no more than a precaution imposed by a police regulation—is not all this a disappointment many men have endured without admitting it? The most natural emotions are those we acknowledge with the most repugnance, and conceit is surely one of these. When the lesson stops there, a Parisian will profit by it or put it out of his mind, and no great harm is done; but this is scarcely the case for a foreigner about to discover how much his Parisian education may cost.

This stroller was a Milanese nobleman banished from his country, where several liberal escapades had rendered him persona non grata to the Austrian government. Count Andrea Marcosini had found himself welcomed to Paris with that entirely French enthusiasm invariably encountered by a lively wit and a resonant name accompanied by two hundred thousand francs a year and a charming presence. For such an individual, exile was a pleasure trip; his property was merely sequestrated, and his friends informed him that after an absence of two years at the most, he could reappear in his homeland without the slightest danger. After rhyming
crudeli affanni
with
i miei tiranni
in a dozen sonnets, after sharing his purse with a number of less fortunate Italian refugees, Count Andrea, who had the misfortune to be a poet, considered himself emancipated from his patriotic notions. Soon after his arrival, therefore, he surrendered without reservation to the various pleasures Paris offers gratis to anyone rich enough to purchase them. His talents and good looks had won him many successes among the female sex, whom he loved collectively as befitted his age, but among whom he as yet distinguished no one in particular. This taste, moreover, was subordinated in him to passions for music and poetry that he had cultivated since childhood; it struck him as more difficult and more glorious to succeed in these than in gallantry, since nature had spared him the obstacles other men are pleased to overcome. A complex man like so many others, he was easily seduced by the pleasures of luxury without which he could not have survived, just as he set great store by the social distinctions which his opinions rejected. Hence his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a poet were frequently inconsistent with his tastes, his sentiments, and his habits as a millionaire nobleman; but he consoled himself for these contradictions by discovering them in many Parisians who were similarly liberal in their interests, aristocratic by nature.

It had occasioned him no surprise, therefore, albeit a certain anxiety, on December 31, 1830, to be walking, during one of our midwinter thaws, close behind a woman whose clothes indicated a profound, radical, long-standing, indeed inveterate poverty, no prettier than so many others he saw every evening at the Théâtre des Bouffons, at the Opéra, in the salons, and certainly not so young as Madame de Manerville, from whom he had obtained the promise of a rendezvous this very day and who may still have been expecting him. Still there was something so tender yet so fierce in the intense glances the creature kept darting at him—so much suffering, so many stifled pleasures! And she had blushed so furiously when, emerging from a shop where she had remained a quarter of an hour, her eyes met those of the Milanese nobleman who had waited for her a few steps away!... There were, in fact, so many
yets
that the count, overcome by one of those furious temptations for which there is no name in any language, even in the vocabulary of orgy, had set off in pursuit of this woman in just the way an old Parisian hunts down shopgirls. As he walked along, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead of her, he scrutinized every detail of her person and attire, hoping to dislodge the absurd and insensate desire which had taken possession of his brain; he soon realized that this examination was affording him a deeper pleasure than the kind he had tasted the day before in contemplating, under the ripples of a perfumed bath, the irreproachable forms of a cherished mistress. From time to time this unknown creature would lower her head and give him the sidelong glance of a tethered goat; then, realizing she was still pursued, she walked faster as though to escape. Yet when a crush of carriages or some other incident brought Andrea close, he saw her flinch under his gaze without anything in her features betraying annoyance. These sure signs of an emotional struggle provided the ultimate spur to the unruly dreams which were exciting him, and he raced down the rue Froidmanteau which, after many false starts, the woman suddenly entered, imagining she had eluded her pursuer. He was indeed astonished by this maneuver. Night had fallen. Two heavily rouged creatures drinking cassis at a wineshop counter caught sight of the young woman and called to her. She stopped on the threshold, answered their friendly compliments by a few soft-spoken words, and continued on her way. Andrea, still walking behind her, saw her vanish into one of the darkest doorways on this street, the name of which was still unknown to him. The repellent aspect of the house the heroine of his fantasy had just entered gave him a feeling close to nausea. Stepping back to examine the premises, he found a nasty-looking fellow at his side, and asked him what kind of place this was. The man, clasping a knotty stick in his right hand and resting his left on his hip, answered with a single word: “Joker!” But as he continued staring at the Italian under the streetlamp, his countenance assumed a conciliatory expression.

“Oh, excuse me, monsieur,” he went on, suddenly changing his tone. “There’s a restaurant, too, a sort of table d’hôte, but the cooking’s terrible—they put cheese in the soup! Perhaps that’s what monsieur is looking for? It’s easy to see from his clothes that monsieur is Italian; Italians are quite fond of velvet—and of cheese. If monsieur would like me to show him a better restaurant, my aunt lives nearby, and she’s very fond of foreigners.”

Andrea pulled his cloak up to his mustache and hurried out of the street, repelled by this unpleasant individual whose garments and gestures closely matched the wretched house into which the unknown woman had just vanished. He was relieved to return to the innumerable comforts of his lodgings, and spent the rest of the evening at the Marquise d’Espard’s in an attempt to purge the contamination of this folly which had so tyrannically preoccupied him for a good part of the day. Yet after he had gone to bed, in the stillness of the night, the day’s vision returned, even more distinct and vivid than in reality. The unknown woman was still walking ahead of him: occasionally, as she stepped over a gutter, she raised her skirt and showed a shapely leg; her hips shifted nervously at every step. Once again Andrea longed to speak to her, and—he, Marcosini, a Milanese nobleman!—dared not. Then she entered the dark doorway which swallowed her up, and he chided himself for not having followed her. “For after all,” he said to himself, “if she was avoiding me and wanted to put me off the scent, that means she’s attracted to me. With women of her kind, resistance is a proof of love. If I had gone a little further with this business, I might have encountered something really disgusting, but at least I’d be able to sleep in peace.” The count was in the habit of analyzing his keenest sensations, as men involuntarily do whose brains are as active as their hearts, and he was amazed to see the unknown woman of the rue Froidmanteau again, not in the ideal majesty of visions but in all the nakedness of her distressing reality. Yet if his fantasy had stripped this woman of her livery of wretchedness, she would have been spoiled for him, for he wanted her, he desired her, he loved her with her muddy stockings, her down-at-the-heel shoes, her battered straw bonnet! He wanted her in that very house he had seen her enter! “Am I enslaved by vice?” he asked himself, with some alarm. “I haven’t come to that—not yet! I’m twenty-three years old, and I’m hardly an old roué.” The very energy of his obsession reassured him a little. This strange struggle, this reflection, and this love of the chase might with good reason surprise some persons accustomed to the ways of Paris; but it must be borne in mind that Count Andrea Marcosini was not a Frenchman.