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_ But in three days' Chirac, with amazing luck, fell into another
situation, and on the Journal des Debats. It was the Prussians who
had found him a place. The celebrated Payenneville, second
greatest chroniqueur of his time, had caught a cold while doing
his duty as a national guard, and had died of pneumonia. The
weather was severe again; soldiers were being frozen to death at
Aubervilliers. Payenneville's position was taken by another man,
whose post was offered to Chirac. He told Sophia of his good
fortune with unconcealed vanity.
"You with your smile!" she said impatiently. "One can refuse you
nothing!"
She behaved just as though Chirac had disgusted her. She humbled
him. But with his fellow-lodgers his airs of importance as a
member of the editorial staff of the Debats were comical in their
ingenuousness. On the very same day Carlier gave notice to leave
Sophia. He was comparatively rich; but the habits which had
enabled him to arrive at independence in the uncertain vocation of
a journalist would not allow him, while he was earning nothing, to
spend a sou more than was absolutely necessary. He had decided to
join forces with a widowed sister, who was accustomed to parsimony
as parsimony is understood in France, and who was living on
hoarded potatoes and wine.
"There!" said Sophia, "you have lost me a tenant!"
And she insisted, half jocularly and half seriously, that Carlier
was leaving because he could not stand Chirac's infantile conceit.
The flat was full of acrimonious words.
On Christmas morning Chirac lay in bed rather late; the newspapers
did not appear that day. Paris seemed to be in a sort of stupor.
About eleven o'clock he came to the kitchen door.
"I must speak with you," he said. His tone impressed Sophia.
"Enter," said she.
He went in, and closed the door like a conspirator. "We must have
a little fete," he said. "You and I."
"Fete!" she repeated. "What an idea! How can I leave?"
If the idea had not appealed to the secrecies of her heart,
stirring desires and souvenirs upon which the dust of time lay
thick, she would not have begun by suggesting difficulties; she
would have begun by a flat refusal.
"That is nothing," he said vigorously. "It is Christmas, and I
must have a chat with you. We cannot chat here. I have not had a
true little chat with you since you were ill. You will come with
me to a restaurant for lunch."
She laughed. "And the lunch of my lodgers?"
"You will serve it a little earlier. We will go out immediately
afterwards, and we will return in time for you to prepare dinner.
It is quite simple."
She shook her head. "You are mad," she said crossly.
"It is necessary that I should offer you something," he went on
scowling. "You comprehend me? I wish you to lunch with me to-day.
I demand it, and you are not going to refuse me."
He was very close to her in the little kitchen, and he spoke
fiercely, bullyingly, exactly as she had spoken to him when
insisting that he should live on credit with her for a while.
"You are very rude," she parried.
"If I am rude, it is all the same to me," he held out
uncompromisingly. "You will lunch with me; I hold to it."
"How can I be dressed?" she protested.
"That does not concern me. Arrange that as you can."
It was the most curious invitation to a Christmas dinner
imaginable.
At a quarter past twelve they issued forth side by side, heavily
clad, into the mournful streets. The sky, slate-coloured, presaged
snow. The air was bitterly cold, and yet damp. There were no
fiacres in the little three-cornered place which forms the mouth
of the Rue Clausel. In the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, a single
empty omnibus was toiling up the steep glassy slope, the horses
slipping and recovering themselves in response to the whip-
cracking, which sounded in the streets as in an empty vault.
Higher up, in the Rue Fontaine, one of the few shops that were
open displayed this announcement: "A large selection of cheeses
for New Year's gifts." They laughed.
"Last year at this moment," said Chirac, "I was thinking of only
one thing--the masked ball at the opera. I could not sleep after
it. This year even the churches, are not open. And you?"
She put her lips together. "Do not ask me," she said.
They proceeded in silence.
"We are triste, we others," he said. "But the Prussians, in their
trenches, they cannot be so gay, either! Their families and their
Christmas trees must be lacking to them. Let us laugh!"
The Place Blanche and the Boulevard de Clichy were no more lively
than the lesser streets and squares. There was no life anywhere,
scarcely a sound; not even the sound of cannon. Nobody knew
anything; Christmas had put the city into a lugubrious trance of
hopelessness. Chirac took Sophia's arm across the Place Blanche,
and a few yards up the Rue Lepic he stopped at a small restaurant,
famous among the initiated, and known as "The Little Louis." They
entered, descending by two steps into a confined and sombrely
picturesque interior.
Sophia saw that they were expected. Chirac must have paid a
previous visit to the restaurant that morning. Several disordered
tables showed that people had already lunched, and left; but in
the corner was a table for two, freshly laid in the best manner of
such restaurants; that is to say, with a red-and-white checked
cloth, and two other red-and-white cloths, almost as large as the
table-cloth, folded as serviettes and arranged flat on two thick
plates between solid steel cutlery; a salt-cellar, out of which
one ground rock-salt by turning a handle, a pepper-castor, two
knife-rests, and two common tumblers. The phenomena which
differentiated this table from the ordinary table were a champagne
bottle and a couple of champagne glasses. Champagne was one of the
few items which had not increased in price during the siege.
The landlord and his wife were eating in another corner, a fat,
slatternly pair, whom no privations of a siege could have
emaciated. The landlord rose. He was dressed as a chef, all in
white, with the sacred cap; but a soiled white. Everything in the
place was untidy, unkempt and more or less unclean, except just
the table upon which champagne was waiting. And yet the restaurant
was agreeable, reassuring. The landlord greeted his customers as
honest friends. His greasy face was honest, and so was the pale,
weary, humorous face of his wife. Chirac saluted her.
"You see," said she, across from the other corner, indicating a
bone on her plate. "This is Diane!"
"Ah! the poor animal!" exclaimed Chirac, sympathetically.
"What would you?" said the landlady. "It cost too dear to feed
her. And she was so mignonne! One could not watch her grow thin!"
"I was saying to my wife," the landlord put in, "how she would
have enjoyed that bone--Diane!" He roared with laughter.
Sophia and the landlady exchanged a curious sad smile at this
pleasantry, which had been re-discovered by the landlord for
perhaps the thousandth time during the siege, but which he
evidently regarded as quite new and original.
"Eh, well!" he continued confidentially to Chirac. "I have found
for you something very good--half a duck." And in a still lower
tone: "And it will not cost you too dear."
No attempt to realize more than a modest profit was ever made in
that restaurant. It possessed a regular clientele who knew the
value of the little money they had, and who knew also how to
appreciate sincere and accomplished cookery. The landlord was the
chef, and he was always referred to as the chef, even by his wife.
"How did you get that?" Chirac asked.
"Ah!" said the landlord, mysteriously. "I have one of my friends,
who comes from Villeneuve St. Georges--refugee, you know. In
fine ..." A wave of the fat hands, suggesting that Chirac should not
inquire too closely.
"In effect!" Chirac commented. "But it is very chic, that!"
"I believe you that it is chic!" said the landlady, sturdily.
"It is charming," Sophia murmured politely.
"And then a quite little salad!" said the landlord.
"But that--that is still more striking!" said Chirac.
The landlord winked. The fact was that the commerce which resulted
in fresh green vegetables in the heart of a beleagured town was
notorious.
"And then also a quite little cheese!" said Sophia, slightly
imitating the tone of the landlord, as she drew from the
inwardness of her cloak a small round parcel. It contained a Brie
cheese, in fairly good condition. It was worth at least fifty
francs, and it had cost Sophia less than two francs. The landlady
joined the landlord in inspecting this wondrous jewel. Sophia
seized a knife and cut a slice for the landlady's table.
"Madame is too good!" said the landlady, confused by this noble
generosity, and bearing the gift off to her table as a fox-terrier
will hurriedly seek solitude with a sumptuous morsel. The landlord
beamed. Chirac was enchanted. In the intimate and unaffected
cosiness of that interior the vast, stupefied melancholy of the
city seemed to be forgotten, to have lost its sway.
Then the landlord brought a hot brick for the feet of madame. It
was more an acknowledgment of the slice of cheese than a
necessity, for the restaurant was very warm; the tiny kitchen
opened directly into it, and the door between the two was open;
there was no ventilation whatever.
"It is a friend of mine," said the landlord, proudly, in the way
of gossip as he served an undescribed soup, "a butcher in the
Faubourg St. Honore, who has bought the three elephants of the
Jardin des Plantes for twenty-seven thousand francs."
Eyebrows were lifted. He uncorked the champagne.
As she drank the first mouthful (she had long lost her youthful
aversion for wine), Sophia had a glimpse of herself in a tilted
mirror hung rather high on the opposite wall. It was several
months since she had attired herself with ceremoniousness. The
sudden unexpected vision of elegance and pallid beauty pleased
her. And the instant effect of the champagne was to crenew in her
mind a forgotten conception of the goodness of life and of the
joys which she had so long missed. _
Read next: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VI - THE SIEGE: PART V
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VI - THE SIEGE: PART III
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