He lifted his glass to her, he nodded, then he looked over his shoulder for the servant. ‘Bring me some more sauce,’ he said.
And the girl said to the man at her side: ‘Who is that old Jew guzzling at his food? He keeps staring at me.’
‘That’s Julius Lévy, one of the richest men in the world. They say he’s an insufferable bore.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘he’s got a splodge of sauce on his chin.’
Julius heard every word they said. He felt something seize at his heart, as though a hand was touching him there, twisting and turning it about. A wave of colour mounted in his face, up to his temples, at the back of his neck, in the roots of his hair. He pretended to go on smiling, to go on mashing his food into a soup. But the sauce burnt his tongue, it drew the water in his eyes. He lay down his fork, he crumbled a piece of bread with his hand.
He felt very old suddenly - very tired.
Originally Julius Lévy had intended to entertain in his palace at Neuilly. He had had visions of great dinner parties, the huge rooms filled with men and women. And he the centre of the crowd, smiling to himself, aware of their envy.
Now he decided that he did not want any of that, something had made him change his mind. A snatch of conversation overheard at a dinner, words not intended to reach his ears, they had sunk deeply into his mind. He would not forget them. He despised these people, he hated their little vacuous brains, their futile wandering train of thought. They would like to see him make himself ridiculous, they would grovel at his feet for an introduction to his house, and they would criticise, they would snigger behind his back. He was determined, therefore, that they should not have this pleasure. He would live alone in his palace, with no one but his personal servants, and the rest of the world would be shut outside, would struggle vainly for admittance.
They would picture the beauty of the place they did not know, and they would imagine him there living like some emperor, with ways and tastes superior to the common herd of men, a strange figure of secrecy, exciting wonder, awe perhaps, looked upon as someone apart from the rest of mankind - like a god. There would be a dark veil of mystery about him that no one should ever break.
Thus when his palace was ready to receive him Julius Lévy entered upon a new way of living, an existence that once he would have believed impossible and fantastic; suspicious of everyone and resentful of criticism, he shut himself up within the walls of his incredible mansion, fast keeping to his plan of solitude unnatural to him and appalling at first in its stark novelty, and then accepting it as a refuge and screen hiding him from the curious sceptical eyes of the world he had grown to hate.
This last phase was like a play to him, in which he, the leading actor, played the lone, important part.
He was Julius Lévy, the great Julius Lévy who had chosen to retire from the world, and the things he did and the way he lived should be an everlasting subject of enquiry, so he thought, a ceaseless, feverish discussion on the lips of the people without. It pleased him to picture their envy. They would tell each other stories of his wealth and lament upon the pitiful insecurity of their own luckless lives dependent on the morrow.
There would be a slackening of conduct for him now, he realised. No need to groan under the hands of his masseuse, no longer must he wear that restraining corset, nor watch his diet. He would be able to let himself go and no one would know. He was able to act as he pleased. With the wealth of the world in his hands and possessing no ties, he told himself that he held greater liberty than any man alive. He was free. Few people could boast such freedom as was his. And the world could chitter if it liked how fallen he must be, how sunk, how lost, how prematurely aged, how battered of intellect; but they would have no proof.
The laugh was on his side.
He gave himself up entirely to his imagination. Little by little the fear came to him that his wealth might depreciate in value. For all he knew secret forces were at work to rob him of his possessions. Trickery was afoot, his agents were bribed, thieves probed among his papers. He trusted no one, he knew his world too well. His very servants were false maybe, waiting their chance, covering their schemes with feigned attempt at service. Rigorously he began to cut expenses. He curtailed his staff to a minimum, he supervised accounts himself. In this way he was able to control every centime that went out of the house. He checked each item paid.The experience was of absorbing interest to him; it was like returning to the work of long ago.
He understood these things.
‘What is this?’ he would say, tapping a bill with a pencil. ‘Why the sending of all this linen to the
blanchisseuse
. Can’t we wash the necessary things here? I gave no orders for my bed linen to be changed so frequently. We must see that it lasts longer.’ And then frowning, spreading out his hands: ‘So many francs a week for kindling-wood is monstrous. Isn’t the Bois itself across the road? Why doesn’t the gardener gather faggots free? In that way there will be nothing to pay.’
He moved about his house peering through keyholes, listening on landings, bursting without warning suddenly into the kitchen quarters, expecting to find his servants discussing him. He was loathed and feared, and he knew it and he did not care. It mattered little to him if they all deserted him one by one; it would mean less to dole out in weekly wages.
It was profoundly irritating to him when the franc was stabilised. Hitherto his agents had been able to gamble effectively on the exchange. It had been his favourite old game of something for nothing.
Apart from the control of his household Julius Lévy lived mostly in a world of dreams. He had no company but his own thoughts, and he fell into the habit of talking to himself aloud. His mind ran in channels varied and intermingled, carrying him back to the past mostly, some sixty years or more. It was hard for him to realise that he was older now than Jean Blançard, that Paul Lévy when he died had been his junior by over thirty years.The fact of this left him perplexed, it muddled his pictures. He would see himself as a boy of ten dressed in a little blue cloak and clogs on his feet, stamping along the cobbled streets to the bridge across the Seine. The memory of those early days was vivid now, it was as though a curtain had risen from part of his mind, showing him these scenes painted in bright colours. The intervening time was swept away. Once more he wanted to hear music, once more he wanted the unreality of dreams.
Sometimes he would listen for a whisper in the air, the echo of a voice that was beautiful and sweet, and he would see the face of the young Rabbin who had sung to him of the enchanted city.
Once he ordered his car, long disused and idle in the garage, and he was driven to synagogue. Only this time it was not the bare temple of his boyhood, but the great oratory in the Rue de la Victoire where the wealthy Israelites of Paris worshipped, wrapped in their furs. An elderly Rabbin ministered, his voice powerful and clear, and there were violins in the choir, and there were harps, and great sonority of sound, but there was no melody of beauty that rose like a bird in the air.
Julius came away disappointed, bored. So this faith was meaningless after all; it gave him nothing. Once more he must rely on himself for supreme understanding. He would not go to the synagogue again nor to any other place. Paris as he had seen it that day depressed him, made him want to shrink back in himself, take cover behind his screen. He had lost contact with people for too long. That night he looked at his reflection and saw himself as he had grown to be. It was one single moment of lucidity that came upon him as he gazed at his reflection in the glass, a momentary escape from fatigue and a freedom from excess in food and drink. He saw the heavy face, the loose lips, the dark pouches beneath the eyes, he saw the bowed shoulders and the trembling hands. He saw his childhood, and his youth and his manhood in a single flash of penetration; his struggle, his victory, his burning progress like a meteor in the sky; he saw the face that stared at him now, ugly, degenerate and old, and he knew that his life counted therefore as nothing, that no achievement lay behind him, no battle won, no beauty possessed; that Julius Lévy was a name already vanished and lost in the sky, that had never been, that would not go on; and he wondered if there was no continuation of life, no future, no treasure beyond the stars, and if in reality there was neither God nor man, nor any world at all.
The house was like a palace built by some crazy emperor of long ago, some lonely king in Babylon, with its columns of marble, its steps of stone, its windows of vari-coloured glass. Gargoyles crouched at odd angles of the roof, and about the gardens there were statues of satyrs and little twisted fawns.
On the terrace a fountain played and was never still, the jet of water rising high in the air with a cool splash and a shiver of sound, and from the smooth hard lawns below the peacock would come to the fountain to drink, spreading his tail of glory to catch the rays of the sun. Then he would glance about him, standing on one foot and scratching his feathers, his eye cocked to the western end of the terrace, where he could see the great aviary of birds, and from here came the whistle and sweet song of their hundred voices, a mingled chorus lifted to the air. He spread his tail, and there was colour there of purple and blue and gold, and colour amongst the wide scattered rose beds, too thick and too full-blown, and colour of dazzling crimson from the richly planted shrubs.
The great white house with its turrets and its pillars stood like a mausoleum amidst the splendour, the long windows were shuttered, the shutters were barred.
There was a high wall built around the palace and its grounds, and beyond this wall were the trees of the Bois, while the road ran away to join the Porte and the Avenue de Madrid.
The house was a vast museum. The marble hall with the gallery above was surely set for such a purpose with its pedestals of sculpture, and on the walls of the lofty rooms there were tapestries and pictures beyond price, and cabinets containing china treasures of great worth.
To anyone who wandered here there would be but one thing lacking, and that the attendant on his chair by the door, coloured catalogue in hand, a war pensioner with medals on his breast leaning heavily on a stick and reciting one by one the objects by their name in rapid monotonous recitation.
And instead of this there was no one; not even a spectacled tourist from the States, nor a yawning, adolescent girl from a convent school, but only the rooms themselves with their shuttered windows, the air fuggy yet strangely cold, and the unseen chairs and furniture grouped together in stiff familiarity. They knew nothing of daylight beyond that which stole into the rooms murky and grim. Only sometimes they were visited, and this in the silence of the day or the night that were the same, and at these times their owner came, flashing suddenly the horrible yellow glare of electric light; and he would wander amongst his treasures in doubtful interest, caring for none of them, but remembering with uncanny precision the worth of that picture and the value of that chair.
It seemed that these occasional visits must afford him strange and singular satisfaction, for he would smile sometimes, with a recollection of a bargain, and he would look about him whistling under his breath, touching a canvas with his finger tip, caressing the texture of a china vase.
Then he would go once more, leaving the rooms and the treasures they contained to the old solitude, and walking down the wide marble stairs, his feet echoing hollow as they stepped, he would wander towards a shuttered window giving on the terrace, and drawing aside a bolt, turn the creaking shutters sideways, and stand for a while screened by them looking upon the terrace and the blazing shrubs.
Perhaps a gardener would pass on his way to the rose beds, watering-can in hand, looking neither to right nor left, and the owner of the palace would instinctively draw back behind his shutter for fear he should be seen, muttering to himself, passing his hand over his mouth. Then unobserved he would watch the working man, taking note of the measure of his labour, reckoning the hours of work against the wages paid. And every movement, every bending gesture of the man would be an interest to him, the way he set down his can or lifted his rake, so that he would stand there for many stretches of time, his hand against the shutter.
When the gardener moved from his rose beds and disappeared once more round the lower edge of the terrace, the owner would wake from his strange immobility and pad through the hall to a little room at the end of a long passage, a room stuffy and untidy, resonant of that peculiar pungent food smell that clings invariably to a single living-room. The windows were tightly closed, and the room was unbearably hot, although the fire in the grate burnt low. A leather chair was pulled close to the fire, and near to the chair was a table covered with a baize cloth, and upon the cloth a tray bearing a plate of sausage and half a piece of cheese, a long thin loaf of bread, and a bottle of red wine. Part of the food smell came from this tray, and part from the canary in a cage hanging against the wall; he sat on his perch pecking feebly at his seed, and the seed jar was upset, some of it spilled on the floor.
The owner sat down to the table and carved off a large piece of garlic sausage, for he was hungry, and as he loaded his mouth with the sausage and the cheese he reached with his other hand to a piece of paper and a pencil, and he jotted down figures, reckoning the wages of his gardener. Some of his food escaped from his mouth and trickled down his chin; he had a smear of sausage at the corner of his mouth.
Once he felt something warm and furry twine itself round his legs, and glancing down he saw the cat - a big, fat cat, overfed and lazy - and the cat began scratching at him, purring and humming, and then suddenly leapt into his lap and settled, closing its eyes.