________________________________________________
_ Sophia walked alone, with tired limbs, up the damaged oak stairs
to the flat. Chirac had decided that, in the circumstances of the
victory, he would do well to go to the offices of his paper rather
earlier than usual. He had brought her back to the Rue Breda. They
had taken leave of each other in a sort of dream or general
enchantment due to their participation in the vast national
delirium which somehow dominated individual feelings. They did not
define their relations. They had been conscious only of emotion.
The stairs, which smelt of damp even in summer, disgusted Sophia.
She thought of the flat with horror and longed for green places
and luxury. On the landing were two stoutish, ill-dressed men, of
middle age, apparently waiting. Sophia found her key and opened
the door.
"Pardon, madame!" said one of the men, raising his hat, and they
both pushed into the flat after her. They stared, puzzled, at the
strips of paper pasted on the doors.
"What do you want?" she asked haughtily. She was very frightened.
The extraordinary interruption brought her down with a shock to
the scale of the individual.
"I am the concierge," said the man who had addressed her. He had
the air of a superior artisan. "It was my wife who spoke to you
this afternoon. This," pointing to his companion, "this is the
law. I regret it, but ..."
The law saluted and shut the front door. Like the concierge, the
law emitted an odour--the odour of uncleanliness on a hot August
day.
"The rent?" exclaimed Sophia.
"No, madame, not the rent: the furniture!"
Then she learnt the history of the furniture. It had belonged to
the concierge, who had acquired it from a previous tenant and sold
it on credit to Madame Foucault. Madame Foucault had signed bills
and had not met them. She had made promises and broken them. She
had done everything except discharge her liabilities. She had been
warned and warned again. That day had been fixed as the last
limit, and she had solemnly assured her creditor that on that day
she would pay. On leaving the house she had stated precisely and
clearly that she would return before lunch with all the money. She
had made no mention of a sick father.
Sophia slowly perceived the extent of Madame Foucault's duplicity
and moral cowardice. No doubt the sick father was an invention.
The woman, at the end of a tether which no ingenuity of lies could
further lengthen, had probably absented herself solely to avoid
the pain of witnessing the seizure. She would do anything, however
silly, to avoid an immediate unpleasantness. Or perhaps she had
absented herself without any particular aim, but simply in the
hope that something fortunate might occur. Perhaps she had hoped
that Sophia, taken unawares, would generously pay. Sophia smiled
grimly.
"Well," she said. "I can't do anything. I suppose you must do what
you have to do. You will let me pack up my own affairs?"
"Perfectly, madame!"
She warned them as to the danger of opening the sealed rooms. The
man of the law seemed prepared to stay in the corridor
indefinitely. No prospect of delay disturbed him.
Strange and disturbing, the triumph of the concierge! He was a
locksmith by trade. He and his wife and their children lived in
two little dark rooms by the archway--an insignificant fragment of
the house. He was away from home about fourteen hours every day,
except Sundays, when he washed the courtyard. All the other duties
of the concierge were performed by the wife. The pair always
looked poor, untidy, dirty, and rather forlorn. But they were
steadily levying toll on everybody in the big house. They amassed
money in forty ways. They lived for money, and all men have what
they live for. With what arrogant gestures Madame Foucault would
descend from a carriage at the great door! What respectful
attitudes and tones the ageing courtesan would receive from the
wife and children of the concierge! But beneath these conventional
fictions the truth was that the concierge held the whip. At last
he was using it. And he had given himself a half-holiday in order
to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious furniture
and the crimson lampshades. This was one of the dramatic crises in
his career as a man of substance. The national thrill of victory
had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the law.
The emotions of the concierge were entirely independent of the
Napoleonic foreign policy.
As Sophia, sick with a sudden disillusion, was putting her things
together, and wondering where she was to go, and whether it would
be politic to consult Chirac, she heard a fluster at the front
door: cries, protestations, implorings. Her own door was thrust
open, and Madame Foucault burst in.
"Save me!" exclaimed Madame Foucault, sinking to the ground.
The feeble theatricality of the gesture offended Sophia's taste.
She asked sternly what Madame Foucault expected her to do. Had not
Madame Foucault knowingly exposed her, without the least warning,
to the extreme annoyance of this visit of the law, a visit which
meant practically that Sophia was put into the street?
"You must not be hard!" Madame Foucault sobbed.
Sophia learnt the complete history of the woman's efforts to pay
for the furniture: a farrago of folly and deceptions. Madame
Foucault confessed too much. Sophia scorned confession for the
sake of confession. She scorned the impulse which forces a weak
creature to insist on its weakness, to revel in remorse, and to
find an excuse for its conduct in the very fact that there is no
excuse. She gathered that Madame Foucault had in fact gone away in
the hope that Sophia, trapped, would pay; and that in the end, she
had not even had the courage of her own trickery, and had run
back, driven by panic into audacity, to fall at Sophia's feet,
lest Sophia might not have yielded and the furniture have been
seized. From, beginning to end the conduct of Madame Foucault had
been fatuous and despicable and wicked. Sophia coldly condemned
Madame Foucault for having allowed herself to be brought into the
world with such a weak and maudlin character, and for having
allowed herself to grow old and ugly. As a sight the woman was
positively disgraceful.
"Save me!" she exclaimed again. "I did what I could for you!"
Sophia hated her. But the logic of the appeal was irresistible.
"But what can I do?" she asked reluctantly.
"Lend me the money. You can. If you don't, this will be the end
for me."
"And a good thing, too!" thought Sophia's hard sense.
"How much is it?" Sophia glumly asked.
"It isn't a thousand francs!" said Madame Foucault with eagerness.
"All my beautiful furniture will go for less than a thousand
francs! Save me!"
She was nauseating Sophia.
"Please rise," said Sophia, her hands fidgeting undecidedly.
"I shall repay you, surely!" Madame Foucault asseverated. "I
swear!"
"Does she take me for a fool?" thought Sophia, "with her oaths!"
"No!" said Sophia. "I won't lend you the money. But I tell you
what I will do. I will buy the furniture at that price; and I will
promise to re-sell it to you as soon as you can pay me. Like that,
you can be tranquil. But I have very little money. I must have a
guarantee. The furniture must be mine till you pay me."
"You are an angel of charity!" cried Madame Foucault, embracing
Sophia's skirts. "I will do whatever you wish. Ah! You
Englishwomen are astonishing."
Sophia was not an angel of charity. What she had promised to do
involved sacrifice and anxiety without the prospect of reward. But
it was not charity. It was part of the price Sophia paid for the
exercise of her logical faculty; she paid it unwillingly. 'I did
what I could for you!' Sophia would have died sooner than remind
any one of a benefit conferred, and Madame Foucault had committed
precisely that enormity. The appeal was inexcusable to a fine
mind; but it was effective.
The men were behind the door, listening. Sophia paid out of her
stock of notes. Needless to say, the total was more and not less
than a thousand francs. Madame Foucault grew rapidly confidential
with the man. Without consulting Sophia, she asked the bailiff to
draw up a receipt transferring the ownership of all the furniture
to Sophia; and the bailiff, struck into obligingness by glimpses
of Sophia's beauty, consented to do so. There was much conferring
upon forms of words, and flourishing of pens between thick, vile
fingers, and scattering of ink.
Before the men left Madame Foucault uncorked a bottle of wine for
them, and helped them to drink it. Throughout the evening she was
insupportably deferential to Sophia, who was driven to bed. Madame
Foucault contentedly went up to the sixth floor to occupy the
servant's bedroom. She was glad to get so far away from the
sulphur, of which a few faint fumes had penetrated into the
corridor.
The next morning, after a stifling night of bad dreams, Sophia was
too ill to get up. She looked round at the furniture in the little
room, and she imagined the furniture in the other rooms, and
dismally thought: "All this furniture is mine. She will never pay
me! I am saddled with it."
It was cheaply bought, but she probably could not sell it for even
what she had paid. Still, the sense of ownership was reassuring.
The charwoman brought her coffee, and Chirac's newspaper; from
which she learnt that the news of the victory which had sent the
city mad on the previous day was utterly false. Tears came into
her eyes as she gazed absently at all the curtained windows of the
courtyard. She had youth and loveliness; according to the rules
she ought to have been irresponsible, gay, and indulgently watched
over by the wisdom of admiring age. But she felt towards the
French nation as a mother might feel towards adorable, wilful
children suffering through their own charming foolishness. She saw
France personified in Chirac. How easily, despite his special
knowledge, he had yielded to the fever! Her heart bled for France
and Chirac on that morning of reaction and of truth. She could not
bear to recall the scene in the Place de la Concorde. Madame
Foucault had not descended. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VI - THE SIEGE: PART I
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER V - FEVER: PART IV
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