Название | The Nabob |
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Автор произведения | Alphonse Daudet |
Жанр | Языкознание |
Серия | |
Издательство | Языкознание |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 4064066225698 |
“Ah, my friends, my dear friends, if you could know how happy I am! What pride I feel!”
Scarce six weeks had passed since he had landed in France. Excepting two or three compatriots, those whom he thus addressed as his friends were but the acquaintances of a day, and that through his having lent them money. This sudden expansion, therefore, appeared sufficiently extraordinary; but Jansoulet, too much under the sway of emotion to notice anything, continued:
“After what I have just heard, when I behold myself here in this great Paris, surrounded by all its wealth of illustrious names, of distinguished intellects, and then call up the remembrance of my father’s booth! For I was born in a booth. My father used to sell old nails at the corner of a boundary stone in the Bourg-Saint-Andeol. If we had bread in the house every day and stew every Sunday it was the most we had to expect. Ask Cabassu whether it was not so. He knew me in those days. He can tell you whether I am not speaking the truth. Oh, yes, I have known what poverty is.” He threw back his head with an impulse of pride as he savoured the odour of truffles diffused through the suffocating atmosphere. “I have known it, and the real thing too, and for a long time. I have been cold. I have known hunger—genuine hunger, remember—the hunger that intoxicates, that wrings the stomach, sets circles dancing in your head, deprives you of sight as if the inside of your eyes was being gouged out with an oyster-knife. I have passed days in bed for want of an overcoat to go out in; fortunate at that when I had a bed, which was not always. I have sought my bread from every trade, and that bread cost me such bitter toil, it was so black, so tough, that in my mouth I keep still the flavour of its acrid and mouldy taste. And thus until I was thirty. Yes, my friends, at thirty years of age—and I am not yet fifty—I was still a beggar, without a sou, without a future, with the remorseful thought of the poor old mother, become a widow, who was half-dying of hunger away yonder in her booth, and to whom I had nothing to give.”
Around this Amphitryon recounting the story of his evil days the faces of his hearers expressed curiosity. Some appeared shocked, Monpavon especially. For him, this exposure of rags was in execrable taste, an absolute breach of good manners. Cardailhac, sceptical and dainty, an enemy to scenes of emotion, with face set as if it were hypnotized, sliced a fruit on the end of his fork into wafers as thin as cigarette papers.
The governor exhibited, on the contrary, a flatly admiring demeanour, uttering exclamations of amazement and compassion; while, not far away, in singular contrast, Brahmin Bey, the thunderbolt of war, upon whom this reading followed by a lecture after a heavy meal had had the effect of inducing a restorative slumber, slept with his mouth open beneath his white moustache, his face congested by his collar, which had slipped up. But the most general expression was one of indifference and boredom. What could it matter to them, I ask you; what had they to do with Jansoulet’s childhood in the Bourg-Saint-Andeol, the trials he had endured, the way in which he had trudged his path? They had not come to listen to idle nonsense of that kind. Airs of interest falsely affected, glances that counted the ovals of the ceiling or the bread-crumbs on the table-cloth, mouths compressed to stifle a yawn, betrayed, accordingly, the general impatience provoked by this untimely story. Yet he himself seemed not to weary of it. He found pleasure in the recital of his sufferings past, even as the mariner safe in port, remembering his voyagings over distant seas, and the perils and the great shipwrecks. There followed the story of his good luck, the prodigious chance that had placed him suddenly upon the road to fortune. “I was wandering about the quays of Marseilles with a comrade as poverty-stricken as myself, who is become rich, he also, in the service of the Bey, and, after having been my chum, my partner, is now my most cruel enemy. I may mention his name, pardi! It is sufficiently well known—Hemerlingue. Yes, gentlemen, the head of the great banking house. ‘Hemerlingue & Co.’ had not in those days even the wherewithal to buy a pennyworth of clauvisses on the quay. Intoxicated by the atmosphere of travel that one breathes down there, the idea came into our minds of starting out, of going to seek our livelihood in some country where the sun shines, since the lands of mist were so inhospitable to us. But where to go? We did what sailors sometimes do in order to decide in what low hole they will squander their pay. You fix a scrap of paper on the brim of your hat. You make the hat spin on a walking-stick; when it stops spinning you follow the pointer. In our case the paper needle pointed towards Tunis. A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I came back to-day with twenty-five millions!”
An electric shock passed round the table; there was a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants. Cardailhac said, “Phew!” Monpavon’s nose descended to common humanity.
“Yes, my boys, twenty-five millions in liquidated cash, without speaking of all that I have left in Tunis, of my two palaces at the Bardo, of my vessels in the harbour of La Goulette, of my diamonds, of my precious stones, which are worth certainly more than the double. And you know,” he added, with his kindly smile and in his hoarse, plebeian voice, “when that is done there will still be more.”
The whole company rose to its feet, galvanized.
“Bravo! Ah, bravo!”
“Splendid!”
“Deuced clever—deuced clever!”
“Now, that is something worth talking about.”
“A man like him ought to be in the Chamber.”
“He will be, per Bacco! I answer for it,” said the governor in a piercing voice; and in the transport of admiration, not knowing how to express his enthusiasm, he seized the fat, hairy hand of the Nabob and on an unreflective impulse raised it to his lips. They are demonstrative in his country. Everybody was standing up; no one sat down again.
Jansoulet, beaming, had risen in his turn, and, throwing down his serviette: “Let us go and have some coffee,” he said.
A glad tumult immediately spread through the salons, vast apartments in which light, decoration, sumptuousness, were represented by gold alone. It seemed to fall from the ceiling in blinding rays, it oozed from the walls in mouldings, sashes, framings of every kind. A little of it remained on your hands if you moved a piece of furniture or opened a window; and the very hangings, dipped in this Pactolus, kept on their straight folds the rigidity, the sparkle of a metal. But nothing bearing