At the farther end of the long archway beneath which were the offices of Hemerlingue and Son, a dark tunnel which PÈre Joyeuse had for ten years bedecked and illumined with his dreams, a monumental staircase with wrought-iron rail, a staircase of old Paris, ascended to the left, leading to the baroness's salons, whose windows looked on the courtyard just above the counting-room, so that, during the warm season, when everything was open, the chink of the gold pieces, the noise made by piles of crowns toppling over on the counters, slightly deadened by the rich hangings at the long windows, formed a sort of commercial accompaniment to the subdued conversations carried on by worldly Catholicism.

That detail was responsible for the peculiar physiognomy of that salon, no less peculiar than the woman who presided over it, mingling a vague odor of the sacristy with the excitement of the Bourse and the most consummate worldliness, heterogeneous elements which constantly met and came in contact there, but remained separate, just as the Seine separates the noble Catholic faubourg under whose auspices the notorious conversion of the Moslem woman took place, from the financial quarters in which Hemerlingue's life and his associations were located. Levantine society, which is quite numerous in Paris, consisting principally of German Jews, bankers or commission merchants, who, after making enormous fortunes in the Orient, continue in business here in order not to lose the habit of it, was very regular in its attendance on the baroness's days. Tunisians sojourning in Paris never failed to call upon the wife of the great banker, who was in favor at home, and old Colonel Brahim, the bey's chargÉ d'affaires, with his drooping lips and his lustreless eyes, took his nap every Saturday in the corner of the same divan.

"Your salon smells of burning flesh, my goddaughter," the old Princesse de Dions said laughingly to the newly-christened Marie, whom she and MaÎtre Le Merquier had held at the baptismal font; but the presence of that crowd of heretics, Jews, Mussulmans and even renegades, those fat women with pimply faces, gaudily dressed, loaded down with gold and earrings, "veritable bales" of finery, did not prevent Faubourg Saint-Germain from calling upon, surrounding and watching over the young neophyte, the plaything of those noble dames, a very pliant, very docile doll, whom they took about and exhibited, quoting her naÏve evangelical remarks, especially interesting by way of contrast to her past. Perhaps there found its way into the hearts of those amiable patronesses the hope of encountering in that company fresh from the Orient an opportunity to make a new conversion, to fill the aristocratic mission chapel once more with the touching spectacle of one of those baptisms of adults, which carry you back to the early days of the faith, to the banks of the Jordan, and are soon followed by the first communion, the rebaptizing, the confirmation, all affording pretexts for the godmother to accompany her goddaughter, to guide that young soul, to look on at the ingenuous transports of a new-born faith, and at the same time to display costumes deftly varied and shaded to suit the brilliancy or the solemnity of the ceremony. But it does not often happen that a baron prominent in financial circles brings to Paris an Armenian slave whom he has made his lawful wife.

A slave! That was the stain in the past of that woman of the Orient, purchased long ago in the slave-mart at Adrianople for the Emperor of Morocco, then, upon the Emperor's death and the dispersion of his harem, sold to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had married her on her exit from that second seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly disguised quadroon. There is an invincible repugnance there on that subject, which the Hemerlingue family found even in Paris, where the foreign colonies form little clubs overflowing with local susceptibilities and traditions. Thus Yumina passed two or three years in utter solitude, of which she was able to turn to good account all the bitterness of heart and all the leisure hours; for she was an ambitious woman of extraordinary strength of will and obstinacy. She learned the French language thoroughly, said adieu forever to her embroidered jackets and pink silk trousers, succeeded in adapting her figure and her gait to European garb, to the embarrassment of long skirts; and one evening, at the opera, displayed to the marvelling Parisians the figure, still a little uncivilized, but elegant, refined and so original, of a female Mussulman in a dÉcolletÉ costume by LÉonard.

The sacrifice of her religion followed close upon that of her costume. Madame Hemerlingue had long since abandoned all Mohammedan practices, when MaÎtre Le Merquier, the intimate friend of the family and her cicerone in Paris, pointed out that a formal conversion of the baroness would open to her the doors of that portion of Parisian society which seems to have become more and more difficult of access, in proportion as the society all around it has become more democratic. Faubourg Saint-Germain once conquered, all the rest would follow. And so it proved that when, after the sensation occasioned by the baptism, it became known that the greatest names of France did not disdain to assemble at Baroness Hemerlingue's Saturdays, Mesdames Guggenheim, Fuernberg, CaraÏscaki, Maurice Trott, all wives of Fez millionaires and illustrious in the market-places of Tunis, renounced their prejudices and prayed to be admitted to the ex-slave's receptions. Madame Jansoulet alone, newly landed in France with a stock of Oriental ideas impeding circulation in her mind, as her nargileh, her ostrich eggs and all the rest of her Tunisian trash impeded it in her apartments, protested against what she called impropriety, cowardice, and declared that she would never step foot inside "that creature's" doors. Immediately a slight retrograde movement took place among Mesdames Guggenheim, CaraÏscaki, and other bales of finery, as always happens in Paris whenever obstinate resistance from some quarter to the regularizing of an irregular state of affairs leads to regrets and defections. They had advanced too far to withdraw, but they determined that the value of their complaisance, of the sacrifice of their prejudices should be more fully understood; and Baroness Marie realized the difference simply from the patronizing tone of the Levantines, who called her "my dear child—my good girl," with haughty condescension not unmingled with contempt. Thereafter her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds, a complicated, savage, seraglio hatred, with strangling and secret drowning at the end, an operation rather more difficult of performance in Paris than on the shores of the Lake of El-Baheira, but she was already preparing the bow-string and stout bag.

That implacable hatred being well known and understood, we can imagine the surprise and excitement in that exotic corner of society, when it was reported that not only did the stout Afchin—as those ladies called her—consent to meet the baroness, but was to call first upon her on her next Saturday. You may be sure that neither the Fuernbergs nor the Trotts proposed to miss that occasion. The baroness for her part did all that she could to give the utmost possible publicity to that solemn act of reparation, wrote notes and made calls and played her cards so well that, notwithstanding the fact that the season was very far advanced, Madame Jansoulet, if she had arrived at the mansion in Faubourg Saint-HonorÉ about four o'clock, might have seen before the lofty arched gateway, beside the Princesse de Dions' quiet livery of the color of dead leaves, and many genuine coats of arms, the showy, pretentious crests, the multi-colored wheels of a multitude of financiers' equipages and the tall powdered lackeys of the CaraÏscakis.

Above, in the reception-rooms, there was the same strange and gorgeous medley. There was a constant going and coming over the carpets of the first two rooms, which were quite deserted, a rustling of silk dresses to and from the boudoir, where the baroness received, dividing her attentions and her cajoleries between the two very distinct camps; on one side dark dresses, modest in appearance, whose richness was discernible to none but practised eyes, on the other a tumultuous springtime of bright colors, expansive waists, diamonds in profusion, floating sashes, styles for exportation, wherein one could detect a sort of regretful longing for a warmer climate and a luxurious, ostentatious life. Fans waving majestically here, discreet whispering there. Very few men, two or three youths, very thoughtful, silent and inactive, sucking the heads of their canes, several stooping figures, standing behind their wives' broad backs, talking with their heads lowered as if they were discussing smuggling expeditions; in a corner the beautiful, patriarchal beard and violet hood of an orthodox Armenian bishop.

The baroness, in her efforts to bring these discordant social elements together and to keep her salons full until the famous interview, constantly moved about, carried on ten different conversations at once, raising her soft, melodious voice to the purring pitch that distinguishes Oriental women,—a wheedling, seductive voice, and a mind as supple as her waist, opening all sorts of subjects, and, as convention requires, mingling fashions and sermons on charity, theatres and auction sales,—the scandalmonger and the confessor. She possessed a great personal charm in addition to this acquired science of entertaining, a science visible even in her very simple black dress, which brought out in relief her cloistral pallor, her houri-like eyes, her smooth, glossy hair, parted above a narrow, unwrinkled brow,—a brow whose mystery was accentuated by the too thin lips, closing to the curious the whole varied, adventurous past of that ex-odalisque, who was of no age, had no knowledge of the date of her birth, did not remember that she had ever been a child.

Clearly, if the absolute power of evil, very rarely found in women, whom their impressionable physical nature subjects to so many varying currents, could exist in a human soul, it would be found in the soul of that slave trained to concessions and fawning, rebellious but patient, and thoroughly self-controlled, like all those whom the habit of wearing a veil lowered over their eyes has accustomed to lying without danger and without scruple.

At that moment no one could have suspected the agony of suspense from which she was suffering, to see her kneeling in front of the princess, a good-humored old woman, of unceremonious manners, of whom La Fuernberg constantly said: "Well, if she's a princess!"

"Oh! godmother, don't go yet, I beg you!"

She overwhelmed her with all sorts of fascinating little tricks of action and expression, without acknowledging, of course, that she was determined to detain her until Jansoulet's arrival, in order to make her contribute to her triumph.

"You see," said the good woman, pointing to the Armenian, sitting, majestic and solemn, his tasselled hat on his knees, "I have to take poor monseigneur to the Grand-Saint-Christophe to buy medals. He could never do it without me."

"But I want you to stay. You must. Just a few minutes more."

And the baroness glanced furtively toward the gorgeous, old-fashioned clock hanging in a corner of the salon.

Five o'clock already, and the stout Afchin did not come. The Levantines began to laugh behind their fans. Luckily, tea had just been served, and Spanish wines, and a quantity of delicious Turkish cakes, which were found nowhere else, and the receipts for which, brought to Paris by the ex-slave, are preserved in harems, as certain secrets connected with the finest confectionery are preserved in our convents. That made a diversion. Hemerlingue, who came from his office from time to time on Saturdays to pay his respects to the ladies, was drinking a glass of madeira at the small table on which the refreshments were served, talking with Maurice Trott, formerly Said-Pacha's bath-master, when his wife, always mild and tranquil externally, approached him. He knew what fierce wrath must be hidden beneath that impenetrable calm, and he asked her timidly, in an undertone:

"No one?"

"No one. You see to what an outrage you have exposed me!"

She smiled, her eyes half-closed, as she removed with the ends of her fingers a crumb that had lodged in his long black whiskers; but her transparent little nostrils quivered with awe-inspiring eloquence.

"Oh! she will come," said the banker, with his mouth full. "I am sure she will come."

A rustling of silk, of a train being adjusted in the adjoining room, caused the baroness to turn her head quickly. To the great delight of the cluster of "bales" in one corner, who were watching everything, it was not she who was expected.

She bore but little resemblance to Mademoiselle Afchin, the tall, graceful blonde, with the tired features and irreproachable toilet, worthy in every respect to bear a name as illustrious as that of Dr. Jenkins. In the last two or three months the beautiful Madame Jenkins had changed greatly, had grown much older. There comes a time in the life of a woman who has long retained her youth, when the years which have passed over her head without leaving a wrinkle write themselves down pitilessly all at once in ineffaceable marks. We no longer say when we see her: "How lovely she is!" but, "She must have been very lovely." And that cruel fashion of speaking of the past, of referring to a distant period what was a visible fact but yesterday, constitutes a beginning of old age and of retirement,—a substitution of reminiscences for all past triumphs. Was it the disappointment of seeing the doctor's wife instead of Madame Jansoulet, or was the discredit which the Duc de Mora's death had brought upon the fashionable doctor destined to overflow upon her who bore his name? There was something of both those causes, and perhaps of another as well, in the cold welcome which the baroness accorded Madame Jenkins. A murmured greeting, a few hurried words, and she returned to the battalion of noble dames who were nibbling away with great zest. The salon became animated under the influence of the Spanish wines. People no longer whispered; they talked. Lamps were brought in and imparted additional brilliancy to the occasion, but announced that it was very near its end, as several persons who had no interest in the great event were already moving toward the door. And the Jansoulets did not come.

Suddenly there was a heavy, hurried step. The Nabob appeared, alone, buttoned into his black frock-coat, correctly gloved and cravatted, but with distorted features and haggard eye, still trembling from the terrible scene in which he had just taken part.

She had refused to come.

In the morning he had told Madame's women to have her dressed at three o'clock, as he was accustomed to do whenever he took the Levantine abroad with him, for he found it necessary to impart motion to that indolent creature, who, being incapable of assuming any responsibility whatsoever, allowed others to think, to decide and to act for her, although she was quite willing to go wherever he chose, when she was once started. And he relied upon that willingness to enable him to take her to Hemerlingue's house. But when, after breakfast, Jansoulet, fully dressed, magnificent, perspiring in his struggles to put on his gloves, sent to ask if Madame would soon be ready, he was told that Madame was not going out. It was a serious crisis, so serious that, discarding the mediation of valets and maids, through whom their conjugal interviews were usually conducted, he ran upstairs four stairs at a time, and entered the Levantine's luxurious apartments like a gust of the mistral.

She was still in bed, clad in the ample open-work tunic in silk of two colors, which the Moors call a djebba, and in one of their gold-embroidered caps from which her beautiful heavy black mane escaped in tangled masses around her moon-like face, flushed by the hearty meal she had just finished. The sleeves of the djebba were turned back, disclosing two enormous, shapeless arms, laden with bracelets, with long slender chains wandering amid a wilderness of little mirrors, red chaplets, boxes of perfume, microscopic pipes, cigarette cases, the trivial toy-shop display of a Moorish beauty at her hour for rising.

The bedroom, heavy with the opium-laden, suffocating odor of Turkish tobacco, presented the same disorderly aspect. Negresses went in and out, slowly removing their mistress's coffee service, her favorite gazelle was lapping a cup which he had overturned on the carpet with his slender nose, while the dark-browed Cabassu, seated at the foot of the bed with touching familiarity, was reading aloud to Madame a drama in verse soon to be produced at Cardaillac's theatre. The Levantine was amazed, absolutely stupefied by the work.

"My dear," she said to Jansoulet, in her thick Flemish accent, "I don't know what our manager is thinking about. I am just reading that play, RÉvolte, that he is so crazy over. Why, it's a frightful thing! It's never been on the stage."

"What do I care for your stage?" cried Jansoulet fiercely, despite all his respect for the daughter of the Afchins. "What! you're not dressed, yet? Weren't you told that we were going out?"

She had been told, but she had begun to read this idiotic play.

"We will go out to-morrow," she said in her sleepy tone.

"To-morrow! Impossible! We are expected to-day without fail. A very important visit."

"Where are we to go, pray?"

He hesitated a second, then answered:

"To Hemerlingue's."

She looked up at him with her great eyes, convinced that he was laughing at her. Thereupon he told her of his meeting with the baron at Mora's funeral and the agreement they had made.

"Go there if you choose," she said coldly; "but you know me very little if you think that I, an Afchin, will ever set foot inside that slave's door."

Cabassu, seeing the turn that the discussion was taking, had prudently disappeared in an adjoining room, the five books of RÉvolte in a pile under his arm.

"Stay," said the Nabob to his wife, "it is clear that you don't understand the terrible plight I am in. Listen."

Heedless of the maids and negresses, with the Oriental's sovereign indifference for the servant class, he began to draw the picture of his great embarrassment, his property in Tunis seized, his credit in Paris lost, his whole life hanging in suspense on the decision of the Chamber, Hemerlingue's influence with the man who was to make the report, and the absolute necessity of sacrificing all self-love to such momentous interests. He talked with great warmth, eager to persuade her, to take her with him. But she replied, simply: "I will not go," as if it were a matter of an expedition of no possible consequence, so long that it was likely to tire her.

"Come, come, it isn't possible that you would say such a thing," he continued, quivering with excitement. "Remember that my fortune is at stake, the future of your children, the very name you bear. Everything is staked on this one concession, which you cannot refuse to make."

He might have talked thus for hours, he would still have been met by the same determined, invincible obstinacy. A Mademoiselle Afchin could not call upon a slave.

"I tell you, madame," he exclaimed, savagely, "that slave is worth more than you. By her shrewdness she has doubled her husband's wealth, while you on the contrary—"

For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet dared to oppose his wife's will. Was he ashamed of that crime of lÈse-majestÉ or did he realize that such a declaration might dig an impassable abyss between them? At all events he changed his tone at once and knelt beside the low bed, with the affectionate, smiling tone one employs to make children listen to reason.

"My dear little Marthe, I implore you—get up and dress yourself. It's for your own interest that I ask you to do it, for your luxury, for your comfort. What will become of you if, by a mere whim, by naughty wilfulness, we are to be reduced to poverty?"

The word "poverty" conveyed absolutely no meaning to the Levantine. You could speak of it before her as you speak of death before small children. It failed to move her, as she had no idea what it was. At all events she was obstinately determined to remain in bed in her djebba, for, to emphasize her decision, she lighted a fresh cigarette from the one she had just finished, and while the Nabob enveloped his "darling little wife" in apologies and prayers and supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than hers if she would come, she watched the heady smoke float up to the painted ceiling and wrapped herself in it as in imperturbable tranquillity. Finally, in face of that persistent refusal, that silence, that forehead upon which he detected the barrier of unconquerable obstinacy, Jansoulet gave rein to his wrath and drew himself up to his full height.

"Very good," said he, "I say you shall."

He turned to the negresses:

"Dress your mistress, at once."

And the boor that he really was, the son of the Southern junk-dealer coming to the surface in that crisis, which moved him to the depths of his being, he threw back the bedclothes with a brutal, contemptuous gesture, tossing the innumerable gewgaws they held to the floor, and forcing the half-naked Levantine to jump to her feet with a promptitude most remarkable in that bulky personage. She roared under the outrage, gathered the folds of her tunic about her misshapen bust, fixed her little cap crosswise over her falling hair, and began to blackguard her husband.

"Never, you hear me, never—you shall never drag me to that—"

Filth poured from her heavy lips as from the mouth of a drain. Jansoulet might well have believed that he was in one of the frightful dens along the water front in Marseille, listening to a quarrel between a prostitute and a nervi, or looking on at some open-air fracas between Genoese, Maltese and ProvenÇal women gleaning on the quay around bags of grain in process of unloading, and reviling each other at full speed in eddies of golden dust. She was the typical seaport Levantine, the spoiled, neglected child, who from her terrace, or from her gondola, in the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming at the mouth and sputtering:

"No, I won't go—no, I won't go!"

And she was the mother of his children, an Afchin!

Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in that woman's hands, that she had only to put on a dress to save him, and that time was flying, that it would soon be too late, a gust of crime rushed to his brain, distorted all his features. He rushed at her, opening and closing his hands with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, in deadly terror, darted toward the door through which the masseur had just left the room, calling:

"Aristide!"

That cry, that voice, his wife's evident intimacy with his lieutenant—Jansoulet stopped, his frantic anger passed away, and he rushed from the room, throwing the doors open, more eager to escape the disaster and the horror whose presence he felt in his own house, than to go elsewhere to seek the help that had been promised him.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at Hemerlingue's, making a despairing gesture in the banker's direction as he entered, and approached the baroness, stammering the ready-made phrase that he had heard repeated so often on the evening of his own ball: "His wife was very ill—in despair that she could not—" She did not give him time to finish, but rose slowly, like a long, slender snake in the crosswise folds of her clinging skirt, and said, in her schoolgirl accent, without looking at him: "Oh! I knew—I knew;" then moved away and paid no further heed to him. He tried to accost Hemerlingue, but that gentleman seemed deeply absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Thereupon he went and sat down beside Madame Jenkins, whose isolation was no less marked than his. But, while he talked with the poor woman, who was as languid as he himself was preoccupied, he watched the baroness do the honors of that salon, so much more comfortable than his own great gilded halls.

The guests were taking their leave. Madame Hemerlingue escorted some of the ladies to the door, bent her head beneath the benediction of the Armenian bishop, bowed smilingly to the young dandies with canes, bestowed upon every one the proper variety of salutation, with perfect self-possession; and the poor devil could not avoid a mental comparison between that Oriental slave become such a thorough Parisian, of such marked distinction in the most refined society on earth, and that other woman, the European enervated by the Orient, brutalized by Turkish tobacco and bloated by a life of sloth. His ambition, his pride as a husband were disappointed, humiliated in that union of which he now saw the peril and the emptiness, the last cruel blow of destiny which deprived him even of the refuge of domestic happiness against all his public misfortunes.

Gradually the salons became empty. The Levantines disappeared one after another, each leaving an immense void in her place. Madame Jenkins had gone, and only two or three women, strangers to Jansoulet, remained, among whom the mistress of the house seemed to be seeking refuge from him. But Hemerlingue was at liberty, and the Nabob joined him just as he was sidling furtively away in the direction of his offices, which were on the same floor opposite the state apartments. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his confusion to salute the baroness; and when they were safely out on the landing, arranged as a reception-room, the corpulent Hemerlingue, who had been very cold and reserved so long as he felt his wife's eye upon him, assumed a somewhat more open expression.

"It's a great pity," he said in a low tone, as if he were afraid of being overheard, "that Madame Jansoulet would not come."

Jansoulet replied with a gesture of despair and savage helplessness.

"Too bad—too bad!" said the other, blowing his nose and feeling in his pocket for his key.

"Look here, old fellow," said the Nabob, taking his arm, "because our wives don't hit it off together, is no reason—That doesn't prevent our remaining friends. What a nice little chat we had the other day, eh?"

"To be sure," said the baron, withdrawing his hand to unlock the door, which opened noiselessly, disclosing the lofty private office with its one lamp burning in front of the capacious, empty armchair.

"Ya didon, Mouci,"[5] said the poor Nabob, trying to jest, and resorting to the sabir patois to remind his old chum of all the pleasant reminiscences they had overhauled the day before. "Our visit to Le Merquier still holds. The picture we were going to offer him, you know. What day shall we go?"

"Ah! yes, Le Merquier. To be sure. Well, very soon. I will write you."

"Sure? You know it's very urgent."

"Yes, yes, I'll write you. Adieu."

And the fat man closed his door hastily as if he feared that his wife might appear.

Two days later the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost undecipherable with its little fly-tracks, complicated by abbreviations more or less commercial, behind which the ex-sutler concealed his absolute lack of orthography:

"Mon ch/anc/cam/—Je ne puis dÉcid/t'accom/ chez Le Merq/. Trop d'aff/en ce mom/. D'aill/v/ ser/mieux seuls pour caus/. Vas-y carrÉm/. On t'att/. R/Cassette, tous les mat/de 8 À 10.

"A toi cor/
"Hem/."[6]