"Patrie Francaise."
He strutted on the platform, behind the great patriot, and held his overcoat all the evening.
For that matter, he can say that he has held all the overcoats of all the great patriots of this time.
That will count for something in his life.
Another evening, at the exit of a Dreyfusard meeting, to which the countess had sent him to "smash the jaws of the cosmopolitans," he was arrested and taken to the station-house for having spat upon these people without a country, and shouted at the top of his voice:
"Death to the Jews!
Long Live the King!
Long Live the Army!"
The countess threatened the government with an interpellation in the chamber, and Monsieur Jean was at once released.
His mistress even added twenty francs a month to his wages, in compensation for this lofty feat of arms.
M. Arthur Meyer printed his name in the "Gaulois."
His name figures also opposite the sum of a hundred francs in the "Libre Parole," among the subscribers to the fund for a monument for Colonel Henry.
Coppee inscribed it there officially.
Coppee also made him an honorary member of the
"Patrie Francaise,"—an astonishing society.
All the servants in the great houses belong to it.
There are also counts, marquises, and dukes.
On coming to breakfast yesterday, General Mercier said to Jean:
"Well, my brave Jean?"
My brave Jean!
Jules Guerin, in the
"Anti-Juif," has written, under the heading,
"Another Victim of the Sheenies!" an article beginning:
"Our valiant anti-Semitic comrade, M. Jean," etc. And finally, M. Forain, who now is always at the house, has had Jean pose for a design, which is to symbolize the soul of the country.
M. Forain thinks that Jean has "just the mug for that."
He receives at this moment an astonishing number of illustrious decorations, of serious tips, and of honorary and extremely flattering distinctions.
And if, as there is every reason to believe, General Mercier decides to summon Jean for the coming Zola trial, to give false testimony,—the nature of which the staff will decide upon soon,—nothing will be lacking to complete his glory.
This year, in high society, there is nothing so fashionable and effective as false testimony.
To be selected for a perjurer, besides bringing certain and swift glory, is as good as winning the capital prize in a lottery.
M. Jean clearly perceives that he is making a greater and greater sensation in the neighborhood of the Champs-Elysees.
When, in the evening, he goes to the cafe in the Rue Francois I. to play pool for a turkey, or when he takes the countess's dogs out for an airing, he is the object of universal curiosity and respect; so are the dogs, for that matter.
That is why, in view of a celebrity which cannot fail to spread from the neighborhood over Paris, and from Paris over France, he has become a subscriber to a clipping-bureau, just as the countess has done.
He will send me the smartest things that are written about him.
This is all that he can do for me, for I must understand that he has no time to attend to my affairs.
He will see, later,—"when we shall be in power," he writes me, carelessly.
Everything that happens to me is my fault; I have never known how to conduct myself; there has never been any sequence in my ideas; I have wasted the best places, without profit.
If I had not been such a hot-head, I, too, perhaps, would be on the best terms with General Mercier, Coppee, Deroulede; and perhaps, although I am only a woman, I should see my name sparkling in the columns of the
"Gaulois," which is so encouraging for all sorts of domesticity. Etc., etc.
To read this letter almost made me cry, for I felt that Monsieur Jean is quite gone from me, and that I can no longer count on him,—on him or on anybody!
He does not tell me a word of my successor.
Ah! I see her from here, I see them from here, both of them, in the chamber that I know so well, kissing and caressing each other, and making the round of the public balls and the theatres together, as we used to do so prettily.
I see him, in his putty-colored overcoat, returning from the races, after having lost his money, and saying to her, as so many times he has said to me: "Lend me your jewels and your watch, that I may hang them up."
Unless his new role of participant in political manifestations and of royalist conspirator has filled him with new ambitions, and he has abandoned the loves of the servants' hall for the loves of the salon.
He will come back to them.
Is all that happens to me really my fault?
Perhaps.
And yet it seems to me that a fatality of which I have never been the mistress has weighed upon my entire existence, and has prevented me from ever staying more than six months in the same place.
When they did not discharge me, I left, disgusted beyond endurance.
It is funny, and it is sad,—I have always been in a hurry to be "elsewhere," I have always entertained a mad hope of "those chimerical elsewheres," which I invest with the vain poesy, the illusory mirage of far-away distances, especially since my stay at Houlgate with poor M. Georges.
That stay has left me with a certain anxiety, a certain torturing necessity of reaching fruitlessly after unattainable ideas and forms.