The Nabob. Alphonse Daudet
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nowhere, and the doctor, as he bent over them, might have sought in vain the throb of any suffering in those bodies which the inertia, the silence of death already inhabited. They were worn-out, debilitated people, anaemics, exhausted by an absurd life, but who found it so good still that they fought to have it prolonged. And the Jenkins pills became famous precisely by reason of that lash of the whip which they gave to jaded existences.
“Doctor, I beseech you, let me be fit to go to the ball this evening!” the young woman would say, prostrate on her lounge, and whose voice was reduced to a breath.
“You shall go, my dear child.”
And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.
“Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I must be at the Cabinet Council.”
He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy.
Afterward—oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their last day Jenkins’s clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world.
After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d’Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.
“Mme. Constance is at mass,” he said, “and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone. We have been at work since six o’clock this morning,” added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.
Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was a splendid sculptor’s studio, the front of which, on the street corner, semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms, which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason’s shed, this one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall and, here and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was covered with a piece of black gauze.
The mistress of the house, Felicia Ruys, the daughter of the famous sculptor and herself already known by two masterpieces, the bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, was standing in the middle of the studio, occupied in the modelling of a figure. Wearing a tightly fitting riding-habit of blue cloth with long folds, a fichu of China silk twisted about her neck like a man’s tie, her black, fine hair caught up carelessly above the antique modelling of her small head, Felicia was at work with an extreme earnestness which added to her beauty the concentration, the intensity which are given to the features by an attentive and satisfied expression. But that changed immediately upon the arrival of the doctor.
“Ah, it is you,” said she brusquely, as though awaked from a dream. “The bell was rung, then? I did not hear it.”
And in the ennui, the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was heightened by the constitutional wildness.
Oh, how the doctor’s voice became humble and condescending as he answered her:
“So you are quite absorbed in your work, my dear Felicia. Is it something new that you are at work on there? It seems to me very pretty.”
He moved towards the rough and still formless model out of which there was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound which was scampering at full speed with a rush that was truly extraordinary.
“The idea of it came to me last night. I began to work it out by lamplight. My poor Kadour, he sees no fun in it,” said the girl, glancing with a look of caressing kindness at the greyhound whose paws the little page was endeavouring to place apart in order to get the pose again.
Jenkins remarked in a fatherly way that she did wrong to tire herself thus, and taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:
“Come, I am sure you are feverish.”
At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost of repulsion.
“No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. To be commencing life, and to be disgusted with it! It is hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who passes her days in her chair, without opening her mouth, but smiling to herself over her memories of the past. I have not even that, I, happy remembrances to muse upon. I have only work—work!”
As she talked she went on modelling furiously, now with the boasting-tool, now with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge placed on the wooden platform which supported the group; so that her complaints, her melancholies, inexplicable in the mouth of a girl of twenty which, in repose, had the purity of a Greek smile, seemed uttered at random and addressed to no one in particular.
Jenkins, however, appeared disturbed by them, troubled, despite the evident attention which he gave to the work of the artist, or rather to the artist herself, to the triumphant grace of this girl whom her beauty seemed to have predestined to the study of the plastic arts.
Embarrassed by the admiring gaze which she felt fixed upon her, Felicia resumed:
“Apropos, I have seen him, you know, your Nabob. Some one pointed him out to me last Friday at the opera.”
“You were at the opera on Friday?”
“Yes. The duke had sent me his box.”
Jenkins changed colour.
“I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time for twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been inside the Opera-House. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs sparkled in her eyes. Happy who has emotions like that. A real type, that Nabob. You will have to bring him to see me. He has a head that it would amuse me to do.”
“He! Why, he is hideous! You cannot have looked at him carefully.”
“On the contrary, I had a perfect view. He was opposite us. That mask, as of a white Ethiopian, would be superb in marble. And not vulgar, in any case. Besides, since he is so ugly as that, you will not be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora’s bust. What a disagreeable face you had, Jenkins, in those days!”
“For ten years of life,” muttered Jenkins in a gloomy voice, “I would not have that time over again. But you it amuses to behold suffering.”
“You know quite well that nothing amuses me,” said she, shrugging her shoulders with a supreme impertinence.
Then, without looking at him, without adding another word, she plunged into one of those dumb activities by which true artists escape from themselves and from everything that surrounds them.
Jenkins paced a few steps in the studio, much moved, with avowals on the tip of his tongue