Papa Bouchard

ON a certain day in June, 1901, a cataclysm occurred in the quiet apartment of Mademoiselle Céleste Bouchard, in the Rue Clarisse, the quietest street in the quietest part of Paris. This cataclysm consisted of the simultaneous departure, or rather the levanting, of the entire masculine element in the excellent old lady’s household. And this masculine element had been so admirably trained! Monsieur Paul Bouchard, in particular, ten years his sister’s junior, was reckoned a model man. Mademoiselle could truly say that during Monsieur Bouchard’s fifty-four years of life he had never, until then, given her a moment’s anxiety. All the elderly ladies of the Bouchards’ acquaintance pointed with admiration to Monsieur Paul.

“Look!” they said; “such a good brother! Mademoiselle boasts that although he is fifty-four years of age he is still as obedient to her as he was at fifteen. So prosperous and respected as an advocate, too!” And all these ladies sighed because they had not succeeded in petticoating a brother or a husband as Mademoiselle Bouchard had petticoated the prosperous and respected Monsieur Paul Bouchard.

Pierre, the husband of Élise, Mademoiselle Bouchard’s maid for thirty years, was as well disciplined as his master, for he was Monsieur Paul’s valet. He had never had a will of his own since the day, thirty years before, when Élise had sworn before the altar to love, honor and obey him.

The third masculine creature in the dovecote of the Rue Clarisse was the parrot, Pierrot. Nobody knew exactly how old Pierrot was, but he was supposed to have arrived at years of discretion. Mademoiselle had spent a dozen patient years in curing Pierrot of a propensity to bad language, and she had taught him a great variety of moral maxims that made him a model bird, as Monsieur Bouchard was a model man and Pierre a model servant. It is true that Léontine de Meneval, Monsieur Paul’s ward, married to a handsome scapegrace captain of artillery, had amused herself with teaching the bird a number of phrases, such as “Bad boy Bouchard” and others reflecting on “Papa Bouchard,” as she called him. And Pierrot had picked up these naughty expressions with astonishing quickness. But Léontine had always been regarded as incorrigible by her guardian and his sister, although they really loved her, and since her marriage she had become gayer, merrier and more irresponsible than ever. This deterioration both Monsieur and Mademoiselle Bouchard laid at the door of her husband, Captain de Meneval, with his laughing eyes and devil-may-care manner; with whom, however, aside from these characteristics, not the slightest fault could be found. He was devoted to Léontine, and if the two chose to lead a life as merry and unreflecting as that of the birds in the shadowy forests, nobody could stop them. Papa Bouchard--as the artillery captain had the impudence to call him--did, it is true, keep a tight hand on Léontine’s fortune, and would allow her only half her income, at which Léontine grumbled and incited Captain de Meneval to grumble, too. But Papa Bouchard, having full power as trustee, met their complaints and protests with a proposition to cut down their allowance to one-fourth of their income, at which the two young people grew frightened, and desisted.

Now, there dwells in every masculine breast a germ of lawlessness that no discipline ever invented can wholly kill. Man or parrot, it is the same. After having been brought up in the way he should go, he longs to go it. Such was the case with Pierrot, with Pierre and with Monsieur Bouchard.

It was the bird that first made a dash for liberty. After ten years of irreproachable conduct, Pierrot, on that June morning, suddenly jumped from the balcony, where he had been walking the railing in the most sedate manner, and scuttled off in the direction of the Alcazar d’Été, the Ambassadeurs, the Moulin Rouge, and the very gayest quarter of Paris.

Monsieur Bouchard was sitting on the balcony at the time. He was rather younger looking, with his clean-shaven face and wiry figure, than most men of his age, but thanks to Mademoiselle Céleste, he patronized the same tailors that had made for his father and his grandfather. Their cut and style indicated that they had been tailors to Cardinal Richelieu and others of that time, and they dressed Monsieur Bouchard in coats and trousers and waistcoats of the pliocene age of tailoring. As for his hats, they might have been dug out of Pompeii, for any modernity they had, and the result was that Monsieur Bouchard’s back and legs looked about seventy-five, while his face looked little more than forty.

Instead of giving the alarm when Pierrot trotted gaily off, Monsieur Bouchard felt a strange thrill of sympathy with the runaway.

“Poor devil!” thought he. “No doubt he is sick of the Rue Clarisse--tired of the moral maxims--weary of the whole business. He isn’t so young as he was, but there’s a good deal of life in him still”--Pierrot was just scampering around the corner--“and he wants to see life.”

“There is a psychologic moment for everything,” so Otto von Bismarck said. The parrot’s escape made a psychologic moment for Monsieur Bouchard, and quietly putting on his hat, and telling Mademoiselle Bouchard that he was going to a meeting of the Society of French Antiquarians at St. Germains, and afterward for a stroll through the museum in the town, made straight for a street in the neighborhood of the Champs Élysées. He remembered seeing in that quarter a handsome new apartment house lately finished and thoroughly modern. He had for curiosity’s sake entered it. He had seen furnished apartments so bright, so light, so cheery, so merry that he longed to establish himself there. He had gone back once, twice, thrice, each time more infatuated with the place. To-day he walked in, selected a vacant apartment, and in ten minutes had taken a lease of it for a year.

And then he had to go back to the Rue Clarisse to tell about it.

Of course, he had not thrown off the yoke of thirty years without secret alarms, agitations and palpitations. He walked up and down the Rue Clarisse twice, his heart thumping loudly against his ribs, before he could screw up resolution to enter. He was nerved, however, by the recollection of the apartment he had just seen; it had been given up the day before by a young journalist, named Marsac, who had left various souvenirs of a very pleasant life there. The street was such a bustling, noisy street--and the Rue Clarisse was so quiet, so quiet! In the new street there were two music halls in full view and generally in full blast, gay restaurants blazing with lights, where all sorts of delicious, indigestible things to eat were to be had, and such an atmosphere of jollity and movement! Monsieur Bouchard quivered with delight like a schoolboy as he thought of it, and so he marched in to take his life in his hand while breaking the news to his sister Céleste.

Mademoiselle Bouchard, a small, prim, devoted, affectionate, obstinate creature, was sitting in the drawing-room, bemoaning with Élise the loss of Pierrot. Élise, a hard-featured, hard-working creature, had such a profound contempt for the other sex that it was a wonder she ever brought herself to marry one of them. She was saying to Mademoiselle Bouchard:

“Depend on it, Mademoiselle, that ungrateful Pierrot will never come back of his own accord. If he had been a she bird, now--but Pierrot is like the rest of his sex. It’s in them to run away--and run away they will.”

“He has had a quiet, peaceful home in the Rue Clarisse for seventeen years,” wailed poor Mademoiselle Bouchard.

“That’s reason enough for him to run away. What does he care about a quiet, peaceful home? He wants to be strutting around in some restaurant, drinking and swearing and turning night into day. They’re all like that. My Pierre, now, is just as ready to run away as was Pierrot, but I shall keep an eye on him.”

And then Monsieur Bouchard walked in, with an affectation of case and debonairness, and told about the apartment near the Champs Élysées, whereat it seemed to poor Mademoiselle Céleste as if the Louvre had moved itself over into the Bois de Boulogne and the Seine had suddenly begun to flow backward. Of course, Monsieur Bouchard had arranged a plausible tale by which his hegira was to appear the most natural and laudable thing in the world. Most men are inventive enough in the matter of personal justification. But it is one thing to make up and tell a plausible tale, and another to get that tale believed. Élise openly sniffed at the theory advanced by Monsieur Bouchard that it was absolutely necessary for him to live nearer the courts. Also, that he was really inspired by a desire to save Mademoiselle the annoyance of clients coming and going.

“You remember, my dear Céleste, you complained of Captain de Meneval the last time he was here. You said he talked and laughed so much, and chucked Élise under the chin----”

“But that was a trifle; you know there’s no real harm done,” protested Mademoiselle Bouchard.

“Why? Because I won’t let him,” said Monsieur Bouchard, with the determined air a man assumes when he wishes to impress a woman with a great notion of the power he holds over another man. “It is because he has to deal with _me_--a man born with his shirt on, as the peasants say. Otherwise, there might be harm done. De Meneval is very saucy. When I reminded him the other day of the promise I exacted from him when he married Léontine, that he wouldn’t go into debt, the fellow grinned and said he was in love with Léontine, and would have promised to eat his grandmother if I had made that a condition.”

“But in reference to this strange notion of yours about taking an apartment at your time of life----”

“That’s just it, my dear,” cried Monsieur Bouchard. “I am too old not to have a separate establishment.”

“Too old!” cried Mademoiselle, who had never ceased to regard the model Monsieur Bouchard as a wild sprig of flamboyant youth; “you mean too young!”

Monsieur Bouchard was tickled. What gentleman of fifty-four is not pleased at the assumption that he is merely a colt, after all?

Mademoiselle Bouchard anxiously scrutinized her brother. There was a lawless gleam in his eye--an indefinable something that is revealed when a man has the bit between his teeth and does not mean to let it go. Mademoiselle, good, innocent soul, was not devoid of sense, and she saw her only game was to play for time.

“Very well, Paul. If you will desert the Rue Clarisse, I will look about and get you an apartment near by, and I will let you have Pierre----”

“Oh, no, no!” cried Monsieur Bouchard, hastily. He had no mind to have a domestic Vidocq in his new quarters. “I couldn’t think of robbing you of Pierre. Thirty years you have had him. You could not get on without him.”

“Yes, I could.”

“I can’t accept the sacrifice.”

“I make it cheerfully for your sake.”

“It would be cruel to Pierre.”

“_He_ will make the sacrifice.”

“That he will,” interrupted Élise, with the freedom of an old servant. “He will caper at the notion of leaving the Rue Clarisse for some wild, dissipated place such as Monsieur Paul has selected.”