Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris (48 page)

‘ Thank you for coming,’ said a voice that startled me.

I was already near the bed cradling Denise’s head in my arms. It was my friend from reformatory. The first woman, perhaps the only one, who ever had a real affection for me. She led me into a life of sin without realizing what she was doing.

Adèle put a cup of herbal tea on the night stand. Denise left her hands in mine for a long time. Gradually I could feel them getting warmer.

I went to see the hotel manager, and I asked him to heat up a little bit of sweetened Bordeaux wine. I had Denise drink a few spoonfuls of this wine. It revived her strength and her memory.

‘ I am all right,’ she said, rising a little. ‘ I feel better, but I have so many things to tell you that I do not know where to begin. Eight years ago, in Rouen, I met a young man named Edouard who worked in a shop. His mother lived in the country, and I lived with him and took his name, even though we both knew where we stood. He wanted to marry me as soon as his mother could be convinced that I loved him enough to make him happy. Several times he suggested we do it in spite of her, but I refused. A year ago Edouard changed suddenly; he became pensive and preoccupied. His boss was leaving the business and was thinking of putting him at the head of his establishment, but there was one obstacle: me.

‘ One day I could not contain my joy, and I announced to him that I was going to be a mother. Instead of smiling at me when he heard the news, Edouard turned pale.

‘ ‘My mother has obtained some information about your past,’ he told me, ‘and she learned. . . . A marriage between us is now impossible.’

‘‘He began picking fights with me, and I endured them for the sake of my child, but one day he faulted me for a past I had admitted to him.

‘‘I ran away, taking with me what I had on. I went to a hotel, and he sent me my things and fifty francs for the move.

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A Dead Woman and a Ghost

‘‘When I learned that he was going to marry the daughter of a merchant from Elbeuf, I realized it was hopeless, and I came back to Paris, determined to work to feed my child. I wrote letter after letter to Rouen, not asking anything for myself, but for my child. There were no replies.’

She motioned for me to give her something to drink, then she continued. ‘‘I do not want you or any woman to take care of my daughter.

Oh! I know that you would not entice her into a life of sin, but we do not always do what we want. Among the lost women I have met, I have never known one who was raised at the Orphan Home. Being there is better than knowing one’s mother when one must despise her.’

    

The Orphan Home seemed like the saddest and most dismal place to live, but I had to respect the dying mother’s last wishes.

Yet, I decided to try one more time with the father. I wrote a long letter to one of my friends who lived in Rouen. I attached to it a few lines for M. Edouard.

At daybreak I sent for a doctor. He declared that the sick woman could not be transported to my house, that her condition was hopeless.

I had the little girl brought to me. She was sweet and sparkling clean.

Adèle had bought her a pretty baby outfit.

I returned to see Denise the same day. She was worse. That night it looked like it was all over and I was sent for at midnight. Adèle was rubbing her temples with vinegar.

‘ Her daughter has not been baptized yet,’ Adèle told me softly.

I asked the hotel servant to go to Sainte-Elisabeth for a priest and to send me the child’s nursemaid. To avoid frightening Denise, I told her that I was going to have her daughter baptized until the regular christening ceremony could be arranged.

At seven o’clock the priest arrived. We left him alone with them.

The child received the first sacrament in the room where her mother had just received the last sacrament.

      

At nine o’clock my maid brought me a letter from Rouen; it was from my friend and here is approximately what it said: My dear Céleste, I went to see M. Edouard. His mother was the one who received me after making me wait for almost an hour. She told me her son is gravely ill, and that complications from a serious illness would sent him to his grave.

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A Dead Woman and a Ghost

The poor woman burst into tears, and I had to wait for her to compose herself so I could read her your letter. Her tears redoubled. I was not surprised because I, myself, had cried reading it.

‘ Oh! Monsieur,’ she exclaimed joining her hands together, ‘‘you will drive me insane. My poor Edouard is not mean; he has not even seen the latest letters from this woman because I am the one who received them, and recognizing the handwriting, I burned them without reading them.

If I had known that she was so miserable, I would have gone to Paris myself. Where does she live? I want to write to her and beg her to give me his child. But she must not come herself; my Edouard is married. I just wish that she would entrust her child to you.’

I read this letter to Denise several times.

She pressed my hand with the little bit of strength she had left, then she whispered, ‘‘He is ailing. . . . I feel better knowing that he did not receive my letters. My daughter must leave right away.’

I had the nursemaid come. Denise gave her daughter a last long kiss; her lips remained parted, her gaze transfixed, and she died!

The nursemaid left at noon. As she saw the child leave, Adèle cried; she was already thinking of her as her own.

The day after next I received a letter from Rouen that totally reassured me on the child’s fate. Her arrival had been celebrated by Edouard’s mother, but the joy did not last long. Edouard had been seized by fever and delirium; he could not recognize his mother or his wife, and he died in their arms twenty-four hours after Denise.

  

It is about this time that I received the first letters that Lionel had written me at sea.

I had a terrible reaction. I became ill, so ill that, after the eighteenth performance, I had to interrupt my work on the stage for a while.

In fact the dramatic road I was on was so arid that I had often felt like putting an end to it. If it had not been for Page, I would have abandoned the theater. Unfortunately, she also fell ill and left the Variétés.

I was looking for distractions from my own worries. Disparaging attacks against Lionel gave me back all my energy. It was being said that, foreseeing his own ruin, he had made me his proxy.

The trials started again; for three months newspapers were preoccupied with nothing but this affair and thus publicly linked an honorable name to mine.

A few letters written by me to Lionel and seized at my house were

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A Dead Woman and a Ghost

brought up at the trials. They were printed in Le Droit and contested.

Supposedly they had been dictated to me, written for me, who knows?

I did not sleep anymore, ate very little, but I had one goal: to prove that what I had in my possession was mine, that Lionel might have been flighty, but that he was incapable of even thinking of the odious calculations he was accused of.

A friend had talked me into making a confession that could enlighten the judges. So I wrote down my whole life hoping to make my defense easier.

Studying during the day and writing at night, nothing daunted me. I got to work, and I was delighted and surprised to discover a new interest. I had written several letters to Richard, and these letters remained unanswered.

One day my maid announced that there was military man in the living room who wanted to speak to me.

I was surprised to see Deligny! Deligny in the uniform of an officer!

‘‘Well,’ he said, ‘ do you not recognize me? Must I give you my card?’’

‘‘Yes, of course I recognize you, but I had been told you were dead.’

‘‘Me!’’ he said laughing. ‘‘I would have sent you a notice, but thank God I am in good health. I have been in Paris for two days barracked at the Ecole Militaire. I am wearing my plain uniform today,’ he added twirling around. ‘ The dress uniform is quite beautiful. I shall wear it the next time I come see you, if you will allow me.’

‘Are you still quarrelsome?’’

‘‘Nothing has changed,’ he said taking my hands, ‘ and my affection for you less than the rest. And you, are you happy, Céleste?’’

‘‘Yes, my friend, very happy to see you.’

‘‘Really,’ he said, kissing my hands, ‘‘well, good! By the way, I would really like to see you act. Oh, and you know that this poor Médème is dead; he was killed in a duel. Everyone thought it was me.’

‘ Poor boy, he was so sweet!’’

‘ Oh, well! We must not think about it. Good-by, my dear Céleste, we shall dine together one of these days. I shall introduce you to my friends.’

As Deligny was leaving I was handed a pack of letters from Australia.



38

o

A Miner’s Diary

A Party of Gold Diggers—Céleste, What Have You Driven Me To?—

The Most Honest Are the Aborigines, Who Disdain Property—

He Sends His Four Crumbs of Gold to the One for Whom He Ruined Himself

   at eight in the morning with a Frenchman, M. Malfilâtre, who, like me, is going to the mines.

The road to Paramatta is charming.

Lunch in Paramatta at an inn full of drunken natives.

We start off again and after ten miles of road we arrive at the Peu-rith ferry.

The road climbs and goes along extremely deep canyons. We enter a forest of gigantic trees unlike any I have ever seen in Europe.

Each time my imagination soars, my heart and my thoughts return to Céleste.

I picked a little twig of sweet heather along the way and promised myself I would send it to her with my first letter.

At six in the evening rain and nightfall took us by surprise.

Over the four and a half hours we met a landau pulled by four horses on its way back from Bathurst.

It was escorted; it is the one containing the gold.

We also met some miners returning on horseback, and we ran across a large number of them camping out with huge fires all around their carriages and their horses.

    

In a secluded canyon, by a little creek, five miners were gathered.

They had just had tea.

The appearance and the clothes of these individuals were most extraor-

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A Miner’s Diary

dinary. Never did Schiller dream up more tawny faces, more hairy beards, and more unkempt hair for his bandits.

Each one wore a complete arsenal—pistols, revolvers, knives, daggers

—all there on their belts. If they had appeared on the stage of a theater on the boulevards decked out in this way, they would have looked utterly grotesque. In an Australian forest, they were terrifying.

Their conversation was loud and their gestures rapid and jerky. A bottle of brandy made the rounds from one hand to the next, from one mouth to the next. Each time a bottle was empty it was refilled from a keg located on a small knoll fifty feet away.

Once their drunkenness reached its peak, they continued chanting, yelling, and gesturing until, exhausted, they all fell down.

The miners’ laughter was still echoing when suddenly a shrill and nasal voice was heard, and a tall, skinny, and lanky man of about fifty years of age appeared and stood near the fire.

‘‘Per Bacco! We are having fun here; buona sera, signori, do not let me disturb you.’

A kind of grunt was the only reply he got. The newcomer scanned his surroundings with the look of an investigator.

‘ Hum!’ he said. ‘A party, and there is gold.’

This man’s features were angular. From a sack he was carrying he pulled out a worn violin whose lacquer was peeling off and whose strings had been restrung and were full of knots.

‘ Oh, what a wreck! Hey, there, old man, your squeaky fiddle has seen a few wars!’’

‘ No, can you not see that it is yawning because it is bored in his company!’’

‘‘Pazienza! ’ said the stranger as he was applying rosin to his frayed bow. ‘ Pazienza, figli miei,’ and he began to tune it.

Without replying to the questions, the stranger started to play a sort of rondo; he was terrific. It was almost impossible to follow the movement of his bow; under his steel fingers the instrument laughed, cried, squeaked, whistled.

The energetic rondo sounded clear and precise amid all these modula-tions.

The miners were shrieking, shouting obscene songs, and the frenzied violin speeded up.

All of a sudden their shrieks stopped, their legs gave way, and our three companions fell into a motionless heap.1 The stranger put his violin back in his green broadcloth sack, looked around, took a swallow of brandy, and quietly examined the sleeping men.

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A Miner’s Diary

We left, thinking there was nothing more to see, but we had barely taken a few steps when he started to pile pine branches on the fire to revive it.

The next day, just when we were about to depart, we learned that some miners had burned to death by accident.

They had fallen asleep near a fire that ignited a brandy keg. The burning alcohol had them surrounded before they could wake up.

I wanted to see for myself, and I became convinced that a crime had been committed.

The Italian had disappeared, the miners’ gold had been stolen, and the metal rings clearly indicated that the keg had purposely been rolled among the sleeping men.

,      ?

We are now on paths that defy reason.

On the way we did encounter three or four houses or bark huts, but, hoping to find at least a decent inn, we pressed our horses on a little farther.

At nightfall we reached a rather rapid river. M. Malfilâtre waded in the waters up to his knees to gauge the depth, and I spurred my horse and went into the river, which was only three or four feet deep. Soon we found the road on the other side.

Finally at nine o’clock we saw a light and ran up on an inn.

We were told it was full and were turned away. After some dickering we were let in.