Monsieur le Marquis is Not at Home

By Achmed Abdullah

T the Cercle Richelieu, Arsène Neraton, the caustic writer of the Revue Tout-Paris, used to say that the old Marquis Alain de Chabot-Perhoet reminded him of that ancient river street which dates back to the days of Philippe-le-Bel and which is called to-day the Quai des Grands-Augustins, while the Marquis’s valet and general factotum, one Marc Lapauze, reminded him of the poster-covered police kiosque at the other end of the quai, not far from the Pont Neuf.

“Yes. A police kiosque. But, in spite of the salutary law which separates Church and State, a police kiosque topped by a celluloid crucifix and surrounded by a pinchbeck halo,” Gautran de Fairdict, the clergy-baiting young Norman, would add. And then both gentlemen would laugh boisterously and disturb the sober-minded, silk-hatted domino players, intent on “Fives” and “Matador.”

Of course the comparison was Parisian. Thus baroque, sardonic, trenchant, cruel. But true with the clear logic of France.

For the Quai des Grands-Augustins, which was once hallowed by the swinging pageant of all France and whose stony entrails once echoed to the brave clouting and clanking of Bourbon history, has changed, these latter days, into a rag-fair of things for sale: fine, dusty, brittle old things—books and pictures and bronzes and bits of wood, carved, painted, gilded, fretted. A street where he who seeks can find—perhaps a tubercular Virgin after the manner of Mignard; strange old editions, bound in hand-tooled pig’s skin, of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Baronius, Bossuet and Moses Mendelssohn; antique vases carved by Romanesque goldsmiths, twelfth century enamels from Limousin and the Auvergne, champlevés from Limoges, lacy screens from Augerolles and sunny Amiens, sculptures by Préault and Pradier.

All very beautiful, very old, very saddening. And all for sale across the counter—bits of the history, the grief, the glory of France, done up in brown paper parcels and tied with crimson twine—and sold to decorate the mantelpieces of burgess and tourist. …

The Marquis de Chabot-Perhoet, too, was for sale.

His name—like that of the Quai des Grands-Augustins—had a definite meaning in the annals of France. The story of his family was the story of France—step for step, honor for honor, glory for glory.

He was seventy years of age. His hair was snow white. His hands were thin and wrinkled like very old, very precious parchment. And he was for sale.

You could buy his endorserrent if you wished to bid Paroli and le Rouge at any of the exclusive gambling clubs to which he belonged—because of his name. If you wished to float a new perfume, a new saddle, a new liqueur, a new racetrack, a new summer resort, or a copper mine in Greenland and wanted to impress the provincial investors, you could put his noble name on the board of directors for a small block of stock or a moderate cheque. You could buy his escutcheon, his honor, the shreds and tatters of his senile passion, and every last one of his heirlooms—there was nothing left of them except a couple of old Florentine goblets from which he sipped his 1829 Meukoff cognac.

What stood between him and ruin was Marc Lapaue, his valet, a Breton like himself, as old as himself—he, whom the clergy-baiting young Norman at the Cercle Richelieu had compared to a police kiosque topped by a celluloid crucifix and surrounded by a pinchbeck halo.

He loved his master. He had never loved anybody else. Not even a woman. He knew his master’s faults, his vices, his dishonor. But he loved him.

Nor was it a dog’s love. It was the love of a man, a very good man, the sort of love which all the most expert psychologizing in the world can neither account for nor explain out of existence, and he watched over the Marquis de Chabot-Perhoet as the police kiosque near the Pont Neuf watches over the dusty shop windows of the Quai des Grands-Augustins.

Day after day it was the same tale.

A ring at the bell, angry, short, jerky, hectic—a square-shoed foot thrust in to keep the door from being slammed—and the butcher’s purple face, the butcher’s raucous voice:

“I want my money! I want to speak to the Marquis!”

“Monsieur le Marquis is not at home.”

“Ah—boug' de saligaud! I am a poor man—I want my money!”

“I shall tell Monsieur le Marquis. He will send his cheque—tomorrow.”

“No, no, no! You said that yesterday—and the day before—and for a week, a month! Always tomorrow, tomorrow! And tomorrow never comes! I want to speak to the Marquis!”

“Monsieur le Marquis is not at home,” came again the valet’s sad, drab voice, as, with surprising strength and agility, he pushed the fuming butcher out on the landing and slammed the door.

In the afternoon the same performance would be repeated, with the wine dealer this time. And again the next day and the next and the next—with glove-maker and shirt-maker and tailor, with jeweler and confiseur and baker and fruiterer.

Always the same demand for money; the same soft reply: “Monsieur le Marquis is not at home”; and always, after the unwelcome visitor had been pushed out on the landing, where he voiced his noisy and detailed opinion of the Marquis de Chabot-Perchoet to the cackling, whispering cooks of the neighboring apartments, Marc Lapauze would sigh a flat, cracked sigh.

It was not because he was ashamed of the scene. He believed in feudalism—benevolent or otherwise—and if butcher or breeches-maker should lose a few hundred francs here and there—bon sang!—why had the good God created these people except to accommodate gentlemen of quality? To his strange Breton intellect, his angular Breton limitations, which had never strayed very far from the Fleur-de-Lis and the lettres de cachet, any shop-keeper in Paris should be proud to give unlimited credit to a lord of the ancient house of Chabot-Perhoet.

He sighed because when he had said that his master was not at home he had lied. The Marquis was in his library, sipping his 1829 Meukoff cognac, looking at the lewd vignettes of a Belgian book, and smiling sardonically at the argument between creditor and valet drifting in.

And so the latter would sigh.

For he was a deeply religious man who knew that lying is a sin; who knew, too, though he did not express it to himself in these terms, that the halo about his head was pinchbeck, since he committed the same sin day after day.

It was a sin in the eyes of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—and in the eyes of Abbé Guerlin, the little wiry Jesuit around at the church of Saint Exupère, with his twinkling black eyes, his kindly, drooping mouth, his hair, thick and sleek like seal’s skin, his high-veined, eloquent hands, and his gentle manner of confessing and absolving—the abbé, who, to the Breton’s direct creed, stood for really more than any third part of the Trinity. …

“I lied again, Father,” Marc Lapauze said every Monday when he knelt in the confessional, with a lonely sun ray dancing in through the window set high in the wall and shearing a golden slice from the warm, brown gloom of carved, age-darkened oak and timeworn velvet cushions—“I lied again, my Father! Saturday I told the butcher that Monsieur le Marquis was not at home. On Friday I told the …”

“The fruiterer, my son—I know.” The abbé shook his head. “And on Thursday you told the same thing to the confiseur—”

“No—that was Wednesday. Thursday I lied to the baker.”

Abbé Guerlin hid a smile.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Friday, Thursday or Wednesday—butcher, baker or breeches-maker—it makes no difference. At all events, you committed the sin of lying, did you not, my son?”

“Yes, my Father.”

And then the abbé, still hiding his smile, would say it seemed that Marc Lapauze had sinned because of livelove [sic]—“… which is a most interesting and knotty theological point, my son,” he could continue, launching into the swing of sacred rhetoric; for he knew that the Breton would not understand a tenth of what he was saying—and knew, too, that his splendidly confusing diction, his jesuitical twists of mind and word and an occasional Latin or Hebrew quotation thrown in would so impress Marc Lapauze as to lull whatever suspicious he might have that the abbé was playing favorites with his sinning conscience.

“Last year,” he said, “when I went ad limina apostolorum, I talked about the same point at length to the most venerable Cardinal-Archbishop of Rheims—after dinner—Famen efficere ut crudae etiam fabae saccharium spiant—and so forth. He said that on the same object one can have two distinct opinions. The one theological and thus of divine origin. The other what the—ah—the scientists call rational, though perhaps it is only experimental, and therefore human. Both opinions may hold the germ of truth, though at times in apparent contradiction to each other—Vel quod materies sit omninum maxime aeterna—as said the great, if often mistaken, Erasmus. And, since everything when rightly approached can be rightly interpreted in spite of these same contradictions—Tor sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam—and since what applies to the spiritual nature of God cannot be said to apply to the merely human nature of man, thus a sin at times may not be a sin—if this sin be not sinned because of sin. A sin of love you committed. But truly,” again he smiled, “not of fleshly, thus sinful love. Shall we call it a sin of the love of loyalty—a sin of virtue—such a sin as was even committed by Agatha, the dear saint? Ah—the sin is not a bad one!”

“Go, my son, and sin no more,” he would wind up, giving him a slight penance, thoroughly convinced that promptly the same afternoon Marc Lapauze would lie to baker or butcher and that promptly the following Monday he would kneel in the confessional and tell the same tale:

“I told the wine dealer that Monsieur le Marquis was not at home. I lied, my Father!”

so the weeks grew into months; the Marquis de Chabot-Perhoet grew older and feebler and more wicked; Marc Lapauze older and feebler and more conscience-stricken; but the refrain remained the same—“Monsieur le Marquis is not at home”—and so did the confession, the slight penance, the absolution.

The only thing that changed was the attitude of the Marquis’s clubmates, also that of his creditors.

For, one by one, the Marquis’s contemporaries died. The new generation knew less and cared less about the name of Chabot-Perhoet.

Formerly, at the Cercle Richelieu, he had paid for dinners and drinks and occasional fifty-franc banknotes, for invitations to week-end parties and the use of a saddle horse, even for the fact that once in a while during a card game his wrinkled old hand would make la volte, would slip the winning ace to the bottom of the deck with nearly youthful skill—had paid for all this with his mind, which was keen as the thrust of a rapier.

“My friend,” he would say, after slipping the ace and raking in the pot, “have you ever heard the story about M. de Girardin and that little Mme. de Kock, that bourgeois dandy, and his original and bizarre turn …”; and the other would think the anecdote well worth the price.

His fund of tales was large. There was his tale of the Duc de Morny and the spicy reason why he had succeeded in lifting the censorship ban which had weighed on Dumas Fil’s La Dame aux Camélies; tales of the old Porte Saint Martin Theatre, when Marc Fournier still directed its stormy destinies—Marc Fournier, whose name was legend already at the time of the Franco-Prussian War; tales about Paul de Kock, that bourgeois dandy and his private hansom which he used to drive down the Boulevard des Crimes; tales of Ernest Blum and Léon Sari and Prince Murat—and the women appertaining therto: Cora Pearl and La Dame aux Violette's and Mme. Strauss and the Marquise de Rambouillet—

Tales that were wicked and clever, but scented with the oversweet, slightly musty perfume of other days—frangipane and peau d’Espagne, and the younger generation which filled the ornate rooms of the Cercle Richelieu, the chateaux and the racetracks, preferred the modern scents made by Coty.

The names which the Marquis used were familiar to them only from their school text-books, thus pedagogically hallowed, unfit to be wreathed with scandalous jest and anecdote. The gossip they liked to hear was gossip about Blériot and Duperdussin, Paul Claudel and Henri Bernstein, Jacques Lebaudy and the newest Brazilian multimillionaire, while the women about whom they liked to exchange talk and tips lived mostly in the stucco-faced apartment houses of the Quartier d’Europe.

They considered the old nobleman a bore and a sponger; they gave him no more dinners and no more occasional fifty-franc banknotes, and one Saturday when the ace slipped from his feeble fingers the board of governors of the Cercle Riechelieu met, with the result that M. Alain de Chabot-Perhoet was asked to send in his resignation.

The other clubs followed suit. Some members talked. The boulevards caught the ball of rumor and scandal. They gilded and tinseled and embossed it. They flung it wide and caught it again. The enterprising Alsatian and Portuguese and Levantine financiers who formerly had used the glitter of the Marquis’s name to lure the provincial investor, seeing that the glitter was tarnished and brown, ceased sending cheques and neat little blocks of stock. The tradesmen shut off all further credit, and so one day the old Marquis sat in his library, pouring out the last drop from the last bottle of 1829 Meukoff cognac—Marc Lapauze had bought it with his last twenty francs, and perhaps the Marquis knew it and perhaps he did not—

“Marc,” he turned to the valet, pointing at the two old Florentine goblets, “all my life I have refused to sell these two glasses, left me by my sainted grand-aunt, Euphrosine. I refused to sell them, mon ami, not because they were in any way sacred to the memory of that dear old grand-aunt, who died of the gout in the year when King Louis Philippe made his little coup—but because they hold exactly the right quantity of cognac. My friend, I see the necessity of drinking in the future out of thick and ungainly bathroom tumblers. You will take these two goblets to that little shop on the Quai des Grands-Augustins and sell—”

Just then there was a ring at the bell.

“The butcher, I believe,” said the Marquis, with a senile cackle that showed his toothless old gums; “tell him that I am not at home.”

“Yes, Monsieur le Marquis”—and the ring was repeated, sharp, hard, authoritative.

“It does not sound like the butcher’s,” said Marc Lapauze, going toward the door, and the next moment the voice from the outer landing told him who it was and what it portended:

“Open, in the name of the French Republic! I have a warrant for the arrest of the Marquis Alain de Chabot-Perhoet, for fraudulently obtaining goods on credit. I am the huissier. Open, in the name of the law!”

Marc Lapauze looked at his master.

“Monsieur le Marquis,” he asked, “what shall I do? What shall I say?”

“Tell him the truth—for once—” the Marquis laughed. “Tell him that I am not at home.”

“The—the truth?”

“Yes—the truth—that I have gone out for all time—” and, quite suddenly, the Marquis reached into the half-open drawer of his library-table, took out a revolver and blew out his brains; and when the huissier, outside, hearing the noise, sensing the tragedy that had occurred, burst in the door with his massive shoulder, when he rushed through the corridor toward the library he found himself stopped on the threshhold [sic] by the old valet-—who was speaking his usual formula in his usual flat, drab voice:

“Monsieur le Marquis is not at home.”

And then he cried, with queer, cracked, high-pitched sobs, as old men cry.