CHAPTER XII.
Gustave recovered, but slowly. The physician pronounced him out of all
immediate danger, but said frankly to him, and somewhat more guardedly to
his parents, "There is ample cause to beware." "Look you, my young
friend," he added to Rameau, "mere brain-work seldom kills a man once
accustomed to it like you; but heart-work, and stomach-work, and nerve-
work, added to brain-work, may soon consign to the coffin a frame ten
times more robust than yours. Write as much as you will--that is your
vocation; but it is not your vocation to drink absinthe--to preside at
orgies in the _Maison Doree_. Regulate yourself, and not after the
fashion of the fabulous Don Juan. Marry--live soberly and quietly--and
you may survive the grandchildren of _viveurs_. Go on as you have done,
and before the year is out you are in _Pere la Chaise_."
Rameau listened languidly, but with a profound conviction that the
physician thoroughly understood his case.
Lying helpless on his bed, he had no desire for orgies at the _Maison
Doree_; with parched lips thirsty for innocent tisane of lime-blossoms,
the thought of absinthe was as odious to him as the liquid fire of
Phlegethon. If ever sinner became suddenly convinced that there was a
good deal to be said in favour of a moral life, that sinner at the moment
I speak of was Gustave Rameau: Certainly a moral life--'Domus et placens
uxor',--was essential to the poet who, aspiring to immortal glory, was
condemned to the ailments of a very perishable frame.
"Ah," he murmured plaintively to himself, "that girl Isaura can have no
true sympathy with genius! It is no ordinary man that she will kill in
me!"
And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head
pillowed on his mother's breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate man
may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant,
mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he
confided to his mother the secret of his heart.
Isaura had refused him--that refusal had made him desperate.
"Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how
healthful!" His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him
and cheer his drooping spirits.
She told him of Isaura's messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau,
who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his
mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. "She could not do less,"
he said. "Has no one offered to do more?"--he thought of Julie when he
asked that--Madame Rameau hesitated.
The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before my
book closes, I shall have to preach--no, not to preach, but to imply--
plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best to take
them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people, for what
they are.
I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian _bourgeoisie_ are
as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not an
uncommon type of her class. She had been when she first married
singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty;
and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper--very
plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly
attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue.
Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more
faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau
hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more
than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.
After that hesitating pause she said, "Yes--a young lady calling herself
Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your nurse.
When I said, 'But I am his mother--he needs no other nurses,' she would
have retreated, and looked ashamed--poor thing! I don't blame her if she
loved my son. But, my son, I say this,--if you love her, don't talk to
me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle Cicogna,
why, then your father will take care that the poor girl who loved you not
knowing that you loved another is not left to the temptation of penury."
Rameau's pale lips withered into a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the
resplendent Julie!--true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in the
Bois had once been the envy of duchesses--Julie! who had sacrificed
fortune for his sake--who, freed from him, could have millionaires again
at her feet!--Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save
an erring nursemaid--Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written to
him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in
blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:
"Traitor!--I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to
love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it--woe
to her! _Ingrat_! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when
betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick--quick.
JULIE."
Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother
was right--he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see how
Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly,
"Don't trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want
of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura--but, alas! I dare not
hope. Give me my _tisane_."
When the doctor called next day, he looked grave, and, drawing Madame
Rameau into the next room, he said, "We are not getting on so well as I
had hoped; the fever is gone, but there is much to apprehend from the
debility left behind. His spirits are sadly depressed." Then added the
doctor, pleasantly, and with that wonderful insight into our complex
humanity in which physicians excel poets, and in which Parisian
physicians are not excelled by any physicians in the world: "Can't you
think of any bit of good news--that 'M. Thiers raves about your son's
last poem! that 'it is a question among the Academicians between him and
Jules Janin'--or that 'the beautiful Duchesse de ------- has been placed
in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young
Red Republican whose name begins with R.'--can't you think of any bit of
similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state
of your dear boy's _amour propre_, compared to which all the drugs in the
Pharmacopoeia are moonshine and water; and meanwhile be sure to remove
him to your own house, and out of the reach of his giddy young friends,
as soon as you possibly can."
When that great authority thus left his patient's case in the hands of
the mother, she said, "The boy shall be saved."
