The Immortal by Alphonse Daudet (short story to read txt) 📖

autograph letters of Charles V., sold by Madame Astier to Bos and by him transferred to Huchenard, were asserted not to be genuine--he said with a disdainful smile, that he would readily repurchase them, as he regarded them with a confidence not to be affected by any means whatsoever.
'Allow me, Mr. Secretary, allow me. I would ask you,' said Baron Huchenard, slowly unbuttoning his macintosh as he spoke, and drawing the three documents out of a large envelope, 'to observe this.' The parchments were so changed as scarcely to seem the same; their smoky brown was bleached to a perfect whiteness; and upon each, clear and legible in the middle of the page, below the signature of Charles V., was this mark,
BB.
Angouleme 1836.
'It was Delpech, the Professor of Chemistry, our learned colleague of the Academie des Sciences, who--' but of the Baron's explanation nothing but a confused murmur reached poor Leonard. There was no colour in his face, nor a drop of blood left at the tips of the big heavy fingers, in whose hold the three autographs shook.
'The 800L. shall be at your house this evening, M. Bos,' he managed to say at last with what moisture was left in his mouth.
Bos protested and appealed. The Baron had given him 900L.
'900L., then,' said Astier-Rehu, making a great effort to show them out. But in the dimly-lighted hall he kept back his colleague, and begged him humbly, as a Member of the Academie des Inscriptions, and for the honour of the whole Institute, to say nothing of this unlucky affair.
'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly, on one condition.'
'Name it, name it.'
'You will shortly receive notice that I am a candidate for Loisillon's chair.' The Secretary's answer was a firm clasp of hand in hand, which pledged the assistance of himself and his friends.
Once alone, the unhappy man sank down before the table with its load of proofs, on which lay outspread the three forged letters to Rabelais. He gazed at them blankly, and mechanically read: '_Maitre Rabelais, vous qu'avez l'esprit fin et subtil!_' The characters seemed to go round and round in a mixture of ink, dissolved into broad blots of sulphate of iron, which to his imagination went on spreading, till they reached his whole collection of originals, ten or twelve thousand, all unhappily got from the same quarter. Since these three were forged, what of his 'Galileo'?--what of his 'House of Orleans'?--the letter of Catherine II. which he had presented to the Grand Duke?--the letter of Rotrou, which he had solemnly bestowed upon the Academie? What? What? A spasm of energy brought him to his legs. Fage! He must at once see Fage!
His dealings with the bookbinder had begun some years before, when the little man had come one day to the Library of the Foreign Office to request the opinion of its learned and illustrious Keeper respecting a letter from Marie de Medicis to Pope Urban VIII. in favour of Galileo. It happened that Petit-Sequard had just announced as forthcoming, among a series of short light volumes on history, entitled 'Holiday Studies,' a 'Galileo' by Astier-Rehu of the Academie Francaise. When therefore the librarian's trained judgment had assured him that the MS. was genuine, and he was told that Fage possessed also the letter of the Pope in reply, a letter of thanks from Galileo to the Queen, and others, he conceived instantaneously the idea of writing, instead of the 'slight trifle,' a great historical work. But his probity suggesting at the same moment a doubt as to the source of these documents, he looked the dwarf steadily in the face, and after examining, as he would have examined an original, the long pallid visage and the reddened, blinking eye-lids, said, with an inquisitorial snap of the jaw, 'Are these manuscripts your own, M. Fage?'
'Oh no, sir,' said Fage. He was merely acting on behalf of a third person, an old maiden lady of good birth, who was obliged to part gradually with a very fine collection, which had belonged to the family ever since Louis XVI. Nor had he been willing to act, till he had taken the opinion of a scholar of the highest learning and character. Now, relying upon so competent a judgment, he should go to rich collectors, such as Baron Huchenard, for instance--but Astier-Rehu stopped him, saying, 'Do not trouble yourself. Bring me all you have relating to Galileo. I can dispose of it.' People were coming in and taking their places at the little tables, the sort of people who prowl and hunt in libraries, colourless and taciturn as diggers from the mines, with an air as if they had themselves been dug up out of somewhere close and damp. 'Come to my private room, upstairs, not here,' whispered the librarian in the big ear of the humpback as he moved away, displaying his gloves, oiled hair, and middle parting with the self-sufficiency often observable in his species.
The collection of Mademoiselle du Mesnil-Case, a name disclosed by Albin Fage only under solemn promise of secrecy, proved to be an inexhaustible treasure of papers relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which threw all sorts of interesting lights upon the past, and sometimes, by a word or a date, overturned completely the established opinions about facts or persons. Whatever the price, Leonard Astier took and kept every one of the documents, which almost always fitted in with his commenced or projected works. Without a shadow of doubt he accepted the little man's account of the masses of originals that were still accumulating dust in the attic of an ancient mansion at Menilmontant. If, after some venomous criticism from 'the first collector' in France, his trust was slightly disturbed the suspicion could not but vanish when the book-binder, seated at his table or watering his vegetables in the quiet grass-grown yard, met it with perfect composure, and offered in particular a quite natural explanation of certain marks of erasure and restoration, visible on some of the pages, as due to the submergence of the collection in sea-water, when it was sent to England during the emigration. After this fresh assurance Astier-Rehu would go back to the gate with a lively step, carrying off each time a purchase for which he had given, according to its historical value, a cheque for twenty, forty, or even as much as eighty pounds.
These extravagances, unsuspected as yet by those around him, were prompted, whatever he might say to quiet his conscience, not so much by the motives of the historian as by those of the collector. This, even in a place so ill-adapted for seeing and hearing as the attic in the Rue de Beaune, where the bargains were usually struck, would have been patent to any observer. The tone of pretended indifference, the 'Let me see' muttered with dry lips, the quivering of the covetous fingers, marked the progress from passion to mania, the growth of the hard and selfish cyst, which was feeding its monstrous size upon the ruin of the whole organism. Astier was becoming the intractable Harpagon of the stage, pitiless to others as to himself, bewailing his poverty and riding in the omnibus, while in two years nearly 6500L. of his savings dropped secretly into the pocket of the humpback. To account to Madame Astier, Corentine, and Teyssedre for the frequent visits of the little man, he received from the Academician pamphlets to bind, which he took away and brought back ostentatiously. They corresponded by a sort of private code. Fage would write on a post-card, 'I have some new tooling to show you, sixteenth century, in good condition and rare.' Astier would temporise: 'Not wanted, thanks. Perhaps later.' Then would come 'My dear Sir, Do not think of it. I will try elsewhere,' and to this the Academician invariably answered 'Early to-morrow morning. Bring the tooling.' Here was the torment of the collector's pleasure. He must buy and buy, or else let pass to Bos, Huchenard, or some other rival the treasures of Menilmontant. Sometimes the thought of the time when money must fail would put him into a grim rage, and infuriated by the calm, self-satisfied countenance of the dwarf, he would exclaim 'More than 6400L. in two years! And still you say, the lady is in want of money! How on earth does she get rid of it? 'At such moments he longed for the death of the old maid, the annihilation of the bookbinder, even a war, revolution, or general catastrophe, which might swallow up both the treasure and the relentless speculators who worked it.
And now the catastrophe was indeed near, not the catastrophe desired, for destiny never finds to her hand precisely the thing we asked for, but a turn of things so sudden and appalling as to threaten his work, his honour, fortune, and fame, all that he was and all that he had. As he strode away towards the Cour des Comptes, deadly pale and talking to himself, the booksellers and print-dealers along the quay scarcely recognised the Astier-Rehu who, instead of looking right into the shop for a bow, now passed them without recognition. To him neither person nor thing was visible. In imagination he was grasping the humpback by the throat, shaking him by his pin-bespangled scarf, and thrusting under his nose the autographs dishonoured by the chemistry of Delpech, with the question, 'Now then, what is your answer to that?'
When he reached the Rue de Lille, he dashed through the door of rough planks in the fence which surrounds the ruins, went up the steps, and rang the bell once and again. He was struck by the gloomy look of the building, now that no flowers or greenery covered the nakedness of the gaping, crumbling masonry and the confusion of the twisted iron-work and leafless creepers. The sound of pattens came slowly across the chilly court, and the caretaker appeared, a solid woman, who, broom in hand and without opening the gate, said, 'You want the bookbinder; but he isn't here now.' Not here! Yes, Fage had gone, and left no address. In fact, she was just cleaning up the cottage for the man who was to have the appointment to the Cour des Comptes, which Fage had resigned.
Astier-Rehu, for appearance' sake, stammered out a word or two, but his voice was lost in the harsh and mournful cries of a great flight of black birds, which made the arches echo as they descended upon the court. 'Why, here are the Duchess's rooks!' said the woman, with a respectful wave of the hand towards the bare plane-trees of the Hotel Padovani, visible over the roof opposite. 'They are come before the Duchess this year, and that means an early winter!'
He went away, with horror in his heart.


CHAPTER XII.
The day following that on which the Duchess Padovani, to show herself smiling under the blow which had fallen upon her, had appeared at the theatre, she went, as she usually did at that time of year, to Mousseaux. She made no change in her plans. She had sent out her invitations for the season, and did not cancel them. But before the arrival of the first instalment of visitors, during the few days' solitude usually spent in superintending in detail the arrangements for entertaining her guests, she passed the whole time from morning to night in the park at Mousseaux, whose slopes stretched far and wide on the banks of the Loire. She would go madly along, like a wounded and hunted animal, stop for a moment from exhaustion, and then at a throb of pain start off again. 'Coward! coward! wretch!' She hurled