Pot Luck Read online

  ‘Because, I can tell you, I’d be the one who’d be compromised. You can see what the house is like. They’re all bourgeois people, and so terribly moral. Between ourselves, I think they overdo it. Ah, well! Monsieur Gourd would go straight to Monsieur Vabre and we’d both be in a fine mess. My dear chap, for my own peace of mind, I ask you: respect the house.’

  Octave, overcome by so much virtue, swore that he would do so. Then Campardon, looking round warily and lowering his voice as if fearful of being overheard, added, with shining eyes:

  ‘Outside it’s nobody’s business, eh? Paris is big enough, there’s plenty of room. As for me, I’m an artist at heart, and I don’t care a damn about such things.’

  A porter brought up the trunks. When everything had been sorted out, the architect took a paternal interest in Octave’s toilet. Then, standing up, he said:

  ‘Now let’s go down and see my wife.’

  On the third floor the maidservant, a slim, dark, coquettish-looking girl, said that madame was busy. To put his friend at ease, Campardon showed him round the apartment. First of all, there was the big white-and-gold drawing-room, elaborately decorated with imitation mouldings. This was situated between a little green parlour which had been turned into a study, and the bedroom, which they could not enter but whose narrow shape and mauve wallpaper the architect described. When he took him into the dining-room, all in imitation wood, with its strange mixture of beading and panels, Octave, enchanted, exclaimed: ‘It’s very handsome!’

  There were two great cracks running right through the panelling on the ceiling, and in one corner the paint had peeled off and was showing the plaster.

  ‘Yes, it certainly creates an effect,’ said the architect slowly, with his eyes riveted to the ceiling. ‘You see, these kinds of houses are built for effect. The walls, though, aren’t very solid. The house was only built twelve years ago, and they’re already cracking. They build the frontage of very fine stone, with all sorts of sculpture, give the staircase three coats of varnish, and touch up the rooms with gilt and paint; that’s what impresses people and inspires respect. But it’s still solid enough! It’ll last as long as we will.’

  He led Octave through the anteroom again, with its ground-glass windows. To the left, overlooking the courtyard, there was a second bedroom where his daughter Angèle slept; it was all in white, which, on this November afternoon, made it seem as sad as a tomb. Then, at the end of the passage, there was the kitchen, which he insisted on showing Octave, saying that he must see everything.

  ‘Come in,’ he repeated, as he pushed the door open.

  A hideous noise greeted them as they entered. Despite the cold, the window was wide open. Leaning over the rail, the dark maidservant and a fat old cook were looking down into the narrow well of the inner courtyard, which let some light into the kitchens that faced each other on every floor. Bending forward, they were both yelling, while from the bowels of the courtyard rose the sound of crude laughter, mingled with curses. It was as if a sewer had brimmed over. All the domestics in the house were there, letting off steam. Octave thought of the bourgeois majesty of the grand staircase.

  As if by instinct, the two women turned round. At the sight of their master with a gentleman they were struck dumb. There was a slight hissing noise, the windows were shut, and all became once more as silent as the grave.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lisa?’ asked Campardon.

  ‘If you please, sir,’ said the maid, greatly excited, ‘it’s that dirty Adèle again. She’s thrown some rabbit’s guts out of the window. You should speak to Monsieur Josserand, sir.’

  Campardon looked very serious, anxious not to make any promises. He withdrew to the study, saying to Octave:

  ‘You’ve seen everything now. The rooms are the same on every floor. Mine cost me two thousand five hundred francs; on the third floor, too! Rents are going up every day.* Monsieur Vabre must make about twenty-two thousand francs a year out of his house. And it’ll go on increasing, because there’s talk of a big thoroughfare from the Place de la Bourse to the new opera house.* And the land the house is built on he got for virtually nothing, about twelve years ago, when there was that big fire started by some chemist’s servant.’

  As they entered Octave noticed, above a drawing-table, and with the light from the window shining directly upon it, a handsomely framed picture of the Holy Virgin displaying on her breast an enormous flaming heart. He could not conceal his surprise, and looked at Campardon, whom he remembered as being rather a wild fellow in Plassans.

  ‘Oh!’ said the latter, blushing a little, ‘I forgot to tell you I’ve been appointed architect to the diocese—at Evreux. It doesn’t pay much, barely two thousand francs a year. But there’s nothing to do—the occasional trip; in any case, I’ve got a surveyor down there. And, you see, it’s quite an advantage if you can put on your card, “Government Architect”. You can’t imagine how much work it brings me from society people.’

  As he spoke, he gazed at the Virgin with her flaming heart.

  ‘After all,’ he added in a sudden fit of candour, ‘I don’t believe in any of their claptrap.’

  But when Octave burst out laughing, the architect became worried. Why confide in this young man? He gave him a sideways glance, assumed an air of contrition, and tried to smooth over what he had said.

  ‘Well, I don’t care, and yet I do. That’s about it. You’ll see, you’ll see: when you’re a bit older you’ll do like everybody else.’

  He spoke of his age—forty-two—of the emptiness of existence, and hinted at a melancholy which in no way matched his robust health. Beneath his flowing hair and neatly trimmed beard there was the flat skull and square jaw of a bourgeois man of limited intelligence and animal appetites. When younger, he had been fun-loving to the point of tedium.

  Octave’s eyes fell on a copy of the Gazette de France,* which was lying among some plans. Then Campardon, becoming more and more embarrassed, rang for the maid, to know if madame was now free. Yes, the doctor was just leaving and madame would be there directly.

  ‘Is Madame Campardon not well?’ asked the young man.

  ‘No, she’s the same as usual,’ said the architect, with a touch of annoyance in his voice.

  ‘Oh, what’s the matter with her?’

  More embarrassed than ever, he answered evasively: ‘You know, women have always got something wrong with them. She’s been like that for the last thirteen years, ever since her confinement. Otherwise she’s very well. You’ll even find that she’s put on a little weight.’

  Octave desisted from further questions. Just then Lisa came back, bringing a card, and the architect, apologizing, hurried into the drawing-room, begging the young man to talk to his wife in the meantime. As the door quickly opened and closed, in the middle of the spacious white-and-gold drawing-room Octave caught sight of the black spot of a cassock.

  At the same moment Madame Campardon came in from the anteroom. He did not recognize her. Years before, when as a youngster he knew her in Plassans, at the house of her father Monsieur Domergue, who worked for the local board of works, she had been thin and plain and, for all her twenty years, as puny as a girl who has just reached puberty. Now he found her plump, with a clear complexion, and as placid as a nun; soft-eyed, dimpled, with the air of a fat tabby cat. Though she had not become pretty, she had ripened at about thirty, gaining a sweet savour, a pleasant, fresh odour as of autumn fruit. He noticed, however, that she walked with difficulty, her hips swaying in a long loose dressing-gown of mignonette-coloured silk, which gave her a languid air.

  ‘You’re quite a man now,’ she said jovially, holding out her hands. ‘You’ve grown since we last saw you!’

  She looked him up and down—tall, dark, handsome young man that he was, with his carefully trimmed beard and moustache. When he told her his age, twenty-two, she could hardly believe it, declaring that he looked at least twenty-five. He—whom the very presence of a woman, even of the lowest maidservant, enraptur
ed—laughed a silvery laugh as he returned her gaze with eyes the colour of old gold and soft as velvet.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated gently. ‘I’ve grown, I’ve grown. Do you remember when your cousin Gasparine used to buy me marbles?’

  Then he gave her news of her parents. Monsieur and Madame Domergue were living happily in the house to which they had retired; all they complained of was that they were very lonely, and they bore Campardon a grudge for having taken their little Rose from them when he had come down to Plassans on business. Octave then tried to turn the conversation round to his cousin Gasparine, hoping to satisfy his curiosity about a mystery that for him had never been solved—the architect’s sudden passion for Gasparine, a tall, handsome girl who didn’t have a penny, and his hasty marriage with skinny Rose, who had a dowry of thirty thousand francs, the tearful scene and the recriminations, followed by the flight of the forsaken one to her dressmaker aunt in Paris. But Madame Campardon, though she blushed slightly, appeared not to understand. He could get no details from her.

  ‘And your parents, how are they?’ she enquired in her turn.

  ‘They’re very well, thank you,’ he replied. ‘My mother never leaves her garden now. You’d find the house in the Rue de la Banne just the same as when you left it.’*

  Madame Campardon, who seemed unable to stand for any length of time without feeling tired, had sat down in a high easy-chair, her legs stretched out under her dressing-gown; and taking a low chair beside her, he looked up at her when speaking, with his usual air of adoration. Though broad-shouldered, there was nevertheless something feminine about him, something that appealed to women and made them instantly take him to their hearts. Thus, after ten minutes they were both chatting away like two old friends.

  ‘So now I’m your boarder,’ he said, stroking his beard with a shapely hand, the nails of which were neatly trimmed. ‘We’ll get on very well together, you’ll see. It was extremely nice of you to think of the little boy from Plassans, and to take all this trouble for me.’

  ‘No, no, don’t thank me,’ she protested. ‘I’m far too lazy, I never do anything. It was Achille who arranged everything. Besides, when my mother told us you wanted to board with a family, that was enough for us to make you welcome. You won’t be among strangers, and it’ll be company for us.’

  Then he told her about himself. After passing his baccalaureate, to please his family, he had spent the last three years in Marseilles, in a big calico print shop which had a factory near Plassans. He had a passion for business, for the new trade in women’s luxury goods, in which there was something of the pleasure of seduction, of slow possession by gilded phrases and flattering looks. Laughing victoriously, he told her how he had made the five thousand francs without which he would never have risked coming to Paris, for he had the prudence of a Jew beneath his appearance of carefree good-nature.

  ‘Just think, they had some Pompadour calico, an old design, quite marvellous. Nobody wanted it, it had been gathering dust in the warehouse for two years. So, as I was going on a trip through the Var and the Basses-Alpes, I suddenly thought of buying up the whole stock and selling it on my own account. It was a huge success. The women almost came to blows over the remnants, and today every one of them is wearing some of my calico. I must say, I talked them over quite beautifully! I had them all at my feet, I could have done what I liked with them.’

  He laughed, while Madame Campardon, charmed and somewhat troubled by the thought of that Pompadour calico, kept asking him questions. Little bunches of flowers on a light-brown ground, wasn’t that the pattern? She had been looking everywhere for something similar, for her summer dressing-gown.

  ‘I was travelling around for two years,’ he went on, ‘and that’s enough. Now there’s Paris to conquer. I must look out for something at once.’

  ‘But didn’t Achille tell you?’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s found a position for you, and close by, too.’

  He thanked her, as astonished as if he were in fairyland, and was asking jokingly if he would find a wife with a hundred thousand francs a year in his room that evening when the door was pushed open by a plain, lanky girl of fourteen with straw-coloured hair, who uttered a slight cry of surprise.

  ‘Come in, don’t be shy,’ said Madame Campardon. ‘This is Monsieur Octave Mouret, whom you’ve heard us mention.’

  Then, turning to Octave, she said:

  ‘My daughter, Angèle. We didn’t take her with us on our last trip. She was so delicate. But she’s putting on weight now.’

  Angèle, with the awkwardness of girls of her age, had planted herself behind her mother and was staring at the smiling young man. Almost immediately Campardon came back, looking excited, and could not resist telling his wife immediately of the good luck he had had. Father Mauduit, vicar of Saint-Roch, had called about some work—just a few repairs, but it might lead to something much bigger. Then, annoyed at having talked like this in front of Octave, but still trembling with excitement, he clapped his hands and said:

  ‘Well, well, what are we going to do?’

  ‘You were going out,’ said Octave. ‘Don’t let me hold you up.’

  ‘Achille,’ murmured Madame Campardon, ‘that situation, at the Hédouins’ …’

  ‘Of course,’ exclaimed the architect, ‘I’d forgotten. My dear fellow, it’s the job of head assistant at a large draper’s shop. I know somebody there who put in a word for you. They’re expecting you. Since it’s not yet four o’clock, would you like me to take you there?’

  Octave hesitated, and, in his mania for being well-dressed, felt nervous about the bow of his necktie. However, when Madame Campardon assured him that he looked very smart he decided to go. She languidly offered her forehead to her husband, who kissed her with effusive tenderness, repeating:

  ‘Goodbye, my darling; goodbye, my pet.’

  ‘Remember, dinner’s at seven,’ she said, as she accompanied them across the drawing-room to get their hats.

  Angèle awkwardly followed them. Her music-master was waiting for her, and she immediately attacked the instrument with her skinny fingers. Octave, who lingered in the anteroom repeating his thanks, could hardly hear himself speak. As he went down the stairs the sound of the piano seemed to pursue him. In the warm silence other pianos, from Madame Juzeur’s, the Vabres’, and the Duveyriers’, were answering, different tunes sounding from every floor, distant and mystical, behind the chaste solemnity of the mahogany doors.

  Outside, Campardon turned into the Rue Neuve-Sante-Augustin. He was silent and preoccupied, like a man waiting to broach something.

  ‘Do you remember Mademoiselle Gasparine?’ he asked eventually. ‘She’s forewoman at the Hédouins’. You’ll be seeing her.’

  Octave thought this a good opportunity to satisfy his curiosity.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘does she live with you?’

  ‘No, no!’ exclaimed the architect, as if hurt by the suggestion.

  Then, as Octave seemed surprised by the sharpness of his reaction, he added, in a gentler tone, and somewhat embarrassed:

  ‘No, she and my wife never see each other now. You know what families are like … Well, I bumped into her, and I could hardly refuse to shake hands, could I? Especially as the poor girl’s not well off. So now they get news of each other through me. In old quarrels like this only time can heal the wounds.’

  Octave was about to ask him about his marriage, when the architect suddenly cut him short by saying:

  ‘Here we are!’

  At the corner of the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin and the Rue de la Michodière, facing the narrow, three-cornered Place Gaillon, was a linen-draper’s shop. Across two windows just above the shop was a signboard, with the words, ‘The Ladies’ Paradise: Established 1822,’ in faded gilt lettering, while the shop-windows bore the name of the firm, in red: ‘Deleuze, Hédouin & Co.’

  ‘It’s not quite in the modern style, but it’s a good, solid business,’ explained Campardon rapidly. ‘Monsieur Hédouin, who start
ed off as a clerk, married the daughter of the elder Deleuze, who died two years ago, so that the business is now managed by the young couple—old Deleuze and another partner, I think, both keep out of it. You’ll meet Madame Hédouin. She’s got a good head on her shoulders! Let’s go in.’

  Monsieur Hédouin happened to be away in Lille, buying linen, so Madame Hédouin received them. She was standing with a pen behind her ear, giving orders to two shopmen who were arranging pieces of stuff on the shelves. Octave thought her so tall and attractive, with her regular features and neatly plaited hair, black dress, turn-down collar, and man’s tie, that when she smiled gravely at him he could hardly stammer out a reply, though he was not usually bashful. Everything was settled without any waste of words.

  ‘Well,’ she said, in her quiet way and easy professional manner, ‘as you’re free, perhaps you’d like to look over the shop.’

  She called one of the clerks, entrusted Octave to his care, and then, after politely replying to Campardon that Mademoiselle Gasparine was out on an errand, turned her back and went on with her work, giving orders in the same gentle, firm voice.

  ‘Not there, Alexandre. Put the silks up at the top. Be careful! Those aren’t the same sort.’

  After some hesitation, Campardon said he would come back and fetch Octave for dinner. So for two hours the young man explored the shop. He found it badly lit, small, and cluttered with stock, which, as there was no room for it in the basement, was piled up in corners, leaving only narrow passages between high walls of bales. Several times he ran into Madame Hédouin gliding along the narrowest passages without ever snagging her dress. She seemed to be the life and soul of the place; the assistants responded to the slightest gesture of her white hands. Octave was hurt that she did not take more notice of him. At about a quarter to seven, just as he was coming up from the basement for the last time, he was told that Campardon was on the first floor with Mademoiselle Gasparine. That was the hosiery department, which the young lady looked after. But, at the top of the winding staircase, Octave stopped short behind a pyramid of calico-bales, symmetrically arranged, on hearing the architect talking in the most familiar way to Gasparine.