The Fortunes of Fifi. 1903 Book Reviews

The Fortunes of Fifi. 1903 by M. Elliot Seawell Book Summary

CHAPTER I
THE IMPERIAL THEATER
Although it was not yet six o’clock, the November night had descended upon Paris—especially in those meaner quarters on the left bank of the Seine, where, in 1804, lights were still scarce. However, three yellow flickering lamps hung upon a rope stretched across the narrow Rue du Chat Noir. In this street of the Black Cat the tall old rickety houses loomed darkly in the brown mist that wrapped the town and shut out the light of the stars.
Short as well as narrow, the Rue du Chat Noir was yet a thoroughfare connecting two poor, but populous quarters. The ground floor of the chief building in the street was ornamented with a row of gaudy red lamps, not yet lighted, and above 
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them, inscribed among some decaying plaster ornaments, ran the legend:
THE IMPERIAL THEATER.
DUVERNET, MANAGER.
Imperial was a great word in Paris in the month of November, 1804.
Across the way from the theater, at the corner where the tide of travel turns into the little street, stood Cartouche, general utility man in the largest sense of the Imperial Theater, and Mademoiselle Fifi, just promoted to be leading lady. The three glaring, swinging lamps enabled Cartouche to see Fifi’s laughing face and soft shining eyes as he harangued her.
“Now, Fifi,” Cartouche was saying sternly, “don’t get it into your head, because you have become Duvernet’s leading lady, with a salary of twenty-five francs the week, that you are Mademoiselle Mars at the House of Molière, with the Emperor waiting to see you as soon as the curtain goes down.”
“No, I won’t,” promptly replied Fifi.
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“And remember—no flirtations.”
“Ah, Cartouche!”
“No flirtations, I say. Do you know why Duvernet made you his leading lady instead of Julie Campionet?”
“Because Julie Campionet can no more act than a broomstick, and—”
“You are mistaken. It is because Duvernet saw that Julie was going the way of his three former leading ladies. They have each, in turn, succeeded in marrying him, and there are three divorce cases at present against Duvernet, and he does not know which one of these leading ex-ladies he is married to, or if he is married at all; and here is Julie Campionet out for him with a net and a lantern. So Duvernet told me he must have a leading lady who didn’t want to marry him, and I said: ‘Promote Fifi. She doesn’t know much yet, but she can learn.’”
“Is it thus you speak of my art?” cried Fifi, who, since her elevation, sometimes assumed a very grand diction, as well as an air she considered highly imposing.
“It is thus I speak of your art,” replied Cartouche grimly—which caused Fifi’s pale, pretty 
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cheeks to color, and made her shift her ground as she said, crossly:
“Everybody knows you lead Duvernet around by the nose.”
“Who is ‘everybody’?”
“Why, that hateful Julie Campionet, and myself, and—and—”
“It is the first thing I ever knew you and Julie Campionet to agree on yet—that the two of you are ‘everybody’. But mind what I say—no flirtations. Duvernet beats his wives, you know; and you come of people who don’t beat their wives, although you are only a little third-rate actress at a fourth-rate theater.”
Fifi’s eyes blazed up angrily at this, but it did not disturb Cartouche in the least.
“And you couldn’t stand blows from a husband,” Cartouche continued, “and that’s what the women in Duvernet’s class expect. Look you. My father was an honest man, and a good shoemaker, and kind to my mother, God bless her. But sometimes he got in drink and then he gave my mother a whack occasionally. Did she mind it? Not a bit, but gave him back as good as he sent; and when my father got sober, it was all comfortably made 
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up between them. But that is not the way with people of your sort—because you are not named Chiaramonti for nothing.”
“It seems as if I were named Chiaramonti for nothing, if I am, as you say, only a little third-rate actress at a fourth-rate theater,” replied Fifi, sulkily.
To this Cartouche answered only:
“At all events, there’s no question of marrying for you, Fifi, unless you marry a gentleman, and there is about as much chance of that, as that pigs will learn to fly.”
“So, I am to have neither lover nor husband, no flirtations, no attachments—” Fifi turned an angry, charming face on Cartouche.
“Exactly.”
“Cartouche,” said Fifi, after a pause, and examining Cartouche’s brawny figure, “I wish you were not so big—nor so overbearing.”
“I dare say you wish it was my arm instead of my leg that is stiff,” said Cartouche.
He moved his right leg as he spoke, so as to show the stiffness of the knee-joint. Otherwise he was a well-made man. He continued, with a grin:
“You know very well I would warm the jackets 
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of any of these scoundrels who hang about the Imperial Theater if they dared to be impudent to you, because I regard you as a—as a niece, Fifi, and I must take care of you.”
Cartouche had a wide mouth, a nose that was obstinacy itself, and he was, altogether, remarkably ugly and attractive. Dogs, children and old women found Cartouche a fascinating fellow, but young and pretty women generally said he was a bear. It was a very young and beautiful woman, the wife of the scene painter at the Imperial Theater, who had called attention to the unlucky similarity between Cartouche’s grotesque name and that of the celebrated highwayman.
Cartouche had caught the scene painter’s wife at some of her tricks and had taken the liberty of giving a good beating to the gentleman in the case, while the scene painter had administered a dose out of the same bottle to the lady; so the promising little affair was nipped in the bud, and the scene painter’s wife frightened into behaving herself. But she never wearied of gibing at Cartouche—his person, his acting, everything he did.
In truth, Cartouche was not much of an actor, and was further disqualified by his stiff leg. But 
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the Imperial Theater could scarcely have got on without him. He could turn his hand to anything, from acting to carpentering. He was a terror to evil-doers, and stood well with the police. Duvernet, the manager, would rather have parted with his whole company than with Cartouche, who received for his services as actor, stage manager, and Jack of all trades the sum of twenty-two francs weekly, for which he worked eighteen hours a day.
The worst of Cartouche was that he always meant what he said; and Fifi, who was naturally inclined to flirtations, felt sure that it would not be a safe pastime for her, if Cartouche said not. And as for marrying—Cartouche had spoken the truth—what chance had she for marrying a gentleman? So Fifi’s dancing eyes grew rueful, as she studied Cartouche’s burly figure and weather-beaten face.
The night was penetratingly damp and chill, and Fifi shivered in her thin mantle. The winter had come early that year, and Fifi had taken the money which should have gone in a warm cloak and put it into the black feathers which nodded in her hat. Pity Fifi; she was not yet twenty.
Cartouche noted her little shiver.
“Ah, Fifi,” he said. “If only I had enough 
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money to give you a cloak! But my appetite is so large! I am always thinking that I will save up something, and then comes a dish of beans and cabbage, or something like it, and my money is all eaten up!”
“Never mind, Cartouche,” cried Fifi, laughing, while her teeth chattered; “I have twenty-five francs the week now, and in a fortnight I can buy a cloak. Monsieur Duvernet asked me yesterday why I did not pawn my brooch of brilliants and buy some warm clothes. I posed for indignation—asked him how he dared to suggest that I should pawn the last remnant of splendor in my family—and he looked really abashed. Of course I couldn’t admit to him that the brooch was only paste; that brooch is my trump card with Duvernet. It always overawes him. I don’t think he ever had an actress before who had a diamond brooch, or what passes for one.”
“No,” replied Cartouche, who realized that the alleged diamond brooch gave much prestige to Fifi, with both the manager and the company. “However, better days are coming, Fifi, and if I could but live on a little less!”
The streets had been almost deserted up to that 
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time, but suddenly and quietly, three figures showed darkly out of the mist. They kept well beyond the circle of light made by the swinging lamp, which made a great, yellow patch on the mud of the street.
All three of them wore long military cloaks with high collars, and their cocked hats were placed so as to conceal as much as possible of their features. Nevertheless, at the first sight of one of these figures, Cartouche started and his keen eyes wandered from Fifi’s face. But Fifi herself was looking toward the other end of the street, from which came the sound of horses’ hoofs and the rattle of a coach in the mud. It came into sight—a huge dark unwieldy thing, with four horses, followed by a couple of traveling chaises. As the coach lurched slowly along, it passed from the half-darkness into the circle of light of the swinging lamps. Within it sat a frail old man, wrapped up in a great white woolen cloak. He wore on his silvery hair a white beretta. His skin was of the delicate pallor seen in old persons who have lived clean and gentle lives, and he had a pair of light and piercing eyes, which saw everything, and had a mild, but compelling power in them.
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Fifi, quite beside herself with curiosity, leaned forward, nearly putting her head in the coach window. At that very moment, the coach, almost wedged in the narrow street, came to a halt for a whole minute. The bright, fantastic light of the lamps overhead streamed full upon Fifi’s sparkling face, vivid with youth and hope and confidence, and a curiosity at once gay and tender, and she met the direct gaze of the gentle yet commanding eyes of the old man.
Instantly an electric current seemed established between the young eyes and the old. The old man, wrapped in his white mantle, raised himself from his corner in the coach, and leaned forward, so close to Fifi that they were not a foot apart. One delicate, withered hand rested on the coach window, while with an expression eager and disturbing, he studied Fifi’s face. Fifi, for her part, was bewitched with that mild and fatherly glance. She stood, one hand holding up her skirts, while involuntarily she laid the other on the coach window, beside the old man’s hand.
While Fifi gazed thus, attracted and subdued, the three figures in the black shadow were likewise 
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studying the face of the old man, around which the lamps made a kind of halo in the darkness. Especially was this true of the shortest of the three, who with his head advanced and his arms folded, stood, fixed as a statue, eying the white figure in the coach. Suddenly the wheels revolved, and Fifi felt herself seized unceremoniously by Cartouche, to keep her from falling to the ground.
“Do you know whom you were staring at so rudely?” he asked, as he stood Fifi on her feet, and the coach moved down the street, followed by the traveling chaises. “It was the Pope—Pius the Seventh, who has come to Paris to crown the Emperor; and proud enough the Pope ought to be at the Emperor’s asking him. But that’s no reason you should stare the old man out of countenance, and peer into his carriage as if you were an impudent grisette.”
Cartouche had an ugly temper when he was roused, and he seemed bent on making himself disagreeable that night. The fact is, Cartouche had nerves in his strong, rough body, and the idea just broached to him, that Fifi would have to go two weeks or probably a month without a warm 
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cloak, made him irritable. If it would have done any good, he would cheerfully have given his own skin to make Fifi a cloak.
Fifi, however, was used to Cartouche’s roughness, and, besides, she was under the spell of the venerable and benignant presence of the old man. So she gave Cartouche a soft answer.
“I did not mean to be rude, but something in that old man’s face touched me, and overcame me; and Cartouche, he felt it, too; he looked at me with a kind of—a kind of—surprised affection—”
“Whoosh!” cried Cartouche, “the Holy Father, brought to Paris by his Imperial Majesty the Emperor Napoleon, is surprised at first sight into so much affection for Mademoiselle Fifi, leading lady at the Imperial Theater, that he means to adopt her, give her a title, make her a countess or I don’t know what, and leave her a million of francs.”
Fifi, at this, turned her shapely, girlish back on the presumptuous Cartouche, while there was a little movement of silent laughter on the part of the three persons who had remained in the little dark street, after the passing of the Pope’s traveling equipage.
Cartouche had not for a moment forgotten the 
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face of the one he recognized so instantly, but seeing them keeping in the shadow, and having, himself, the soul of a gentleman, forbore to look toward them, and proceeded to get Fifi out of the way.
“Come now,” said he. “It is time for me to go to the theater, and you promised me you would sew up the holes in Duvernet’s toga before the performance begins. It split last night in the middle of his death scene, and I thought the whole act was gone, and I have not had time to-day to get him a new toga; so run along.”
Fifi, for once angry with Cartouche, struck an attitude she had seen in a picture of Mademoiselle Mars as Medea.
“I go,” she cried, in Medea’s tragic tone on leaving Jason, “but I shall tell Monsieur Duvernet how you treat his leading lady.”
And with that she stalked majestically across the street and disappeared in the darkness.
One of the group of persons came up to Cartouche and touched him on the shoulder. It was the one, at sight of whom Cartouche had started. In spite of his enveloping cloak, and a hat that concealed much of his face, Cartouche knew him.
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“Who is that pretty young lady with whom you have been quarreling?” he asked.
“That, your Majesty,” replied Cartouche, “is Mademoiselle Fifi, a very good, respectable little girl who has just been made leading lady at Monsieur Duvernet’s theater across the way.”
Cartouche, although thrilled with happiness, did not feel the least oppressed or embarrassed at talking with the Emperor. No private soldier did—for was not the Emperor theirs? Had they not known him when he was a slim, sallow young general, who knew exactly what every man ought to have in his knapsack, and promised to have the company cooks shot if they did not give the soldiers good soup? Did he not walk post for the sleeping sentry that the man’s life might be saved? And although the lightning bolts of his wrath might fall upon a general officer, was he not as soft and sweet as a woman to the rugged moustaches who trudged along with muskets in their hands? And Cartouche answered quite easily and promptly—the Emperor meanwhile studying him with that penetrating glance which could see through a two-inch plank.
“So you know me,” said the Emperor. “Well, I 
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know you, too. It is not likely that I can forget the hour in which I saw your honest, ugly face. You were the first man across at the terrible passage of the bridge of Lodi.”
“Yes, Sire. And your Majesty was the second man across at the terrible passage of the bridge of Lodi.”
“Ah, was it not frightful! We were shoulder to shoulder on the bridge that day, you and I. Your legs were longer than mine, else I should have been across first,” the Emperor continued, smiling. “Berthier, here, was on the bridge, too. We had a devil of a time, eh, Berthier?”
Marshal Berthier, short of stature and plain of face, and the greatest chief of staff in Europe, smiled grimly at the recollection of that rush across the bridge. The Emperor again turned to Cartouche; he loved to talk to honest, simple fellows like Cartouche, and encouraged them to talk to him; so Cartouche replied, with a broad grin:
“Your Majesty was on foot, struggling with us tall fellows of the Thirty-second Grenadiers. At first we thought your Majesty was some little boy-officer who had got lost in the mêlée from his command; and then we saw that it was our general, and 
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a hundred thousand Austrians could not have held us back then. We ate the Austrians up, Sire.”
“Yes, you ate the Austrians up. Afterward, I never could recall without laughing the expression on the faces of my old moustaches when they saw me on the bridge.”
“Ah, Sire, when the soldiers came to themselves and began to think about things, they were in transports of rage at your Majesty for exposing your life so.”
The Emperor smiled—that magic and seductive smile which began with his eyes and ended with his mouth, and which no man or woman could resist. He began to pull Cartouche’s ear meditatively.
“You old rascals of moustaches have no business to think at all. Besides, you made me a corporal for it. One has to distinguish himself to receive promotion.”
“All the same,” replied Cartouche obstinately, “we were enraged against your Majesty; and if your Majesty continues so reckless of your life, it will be followed by a terrible catastrophe. The soldiers will lose the battle rather than lose their Emperor.”
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The Emperor had continued to pull Cartouche’s ear during all this.
“And where are your moustaches?” he asked. “And do you still belong to the Thirty-second Grenadiers? For they were the fellows who got across first.”
Cartouche shook his head.
“I did not get a scratch at Lodi, your Majesty; nor at Arcola, nor Castiglione, nor Rivoli, nor at Mantua; but one day, I was ordered to catch a goat which was browsing about my captain’s quarters; and I, Cartouche, first sergeant in the Thirty-second Grenadiers, who had served for nine years, who had been in seven pitched battles, twenty-four minor engagements and more skirmishes than I can count, was knocked down by that goat, and my leg broken—and ever since I have been good for nothing to your Majesty. See.”

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