A Drama in a Dining-Room

In the multiple brilliancies of the dining-room I found myself at the left of the Duchess Sally. Ever since her girlhood I had known her. At Narragansett Pier, in the good old nights before the Casino was dreamed of, I had sat with her on verandas that were vibrant with osculations. That was some time ago. Her subsequent transatlantic triumphs and spectacular marriage to the Duc de Malakoff are now ancient and familiar history⁠—so ancient even that I am dispensed from noting that Sally is no chicken. But though her youth had gone, her heart is young. Hence, no doubt, in disregard of every canon of precedence, my place beside her. But then, as I have intimated, she never was ceremonious.

Across the glittering service, beyond the gold branches of the lusters, sat Monsieur de Malakoff. Between him and Sally there were, including myself, fourteen other people. Over the bisque I had taken them in. Barring a nuncio and an aunt of Sally⁠—Mrs. Nicholas Manhattan⁠—I knew none of them. Barring two others, the rest of the party interested me but mediocrally. Of these two one was a vision in white, a delicious apparition that suggested the pays des songes, a face infinitely delicate and of exceeding beauty. The other was a young man who looked as the musketeer Aramis might in modern dress. His features were chiseled. On his lip was a mustache that seemingly had been drawn with a crayon. His hair was black, slightly curled; his eyes were chocolate, and their lashes long as a girl’s. I should have thought him too good-looking for a man had it not been for his chin, which was resolute, and the expression of his mouth, which was as firm and as chill as steel. Next to him was the vision. They were talking inaudibly together.

The bisque had gone. The maître d’hôtel, followed by valets de pied, was presenting sturgeon from the Volga. Turning to Sally I asked who the young man was.

“The Marquis de Parabole,” she answered. “That is his wife, next to you.” Sally would have said more, perhaps, but the nuncio was claiming her attention.

Already I had noticed my neighbor, a little, redheaded woman, who, in face and manner, suggested a bird⁠—yet, perhaps, a bird of prey. In any event, a bird that, with beak and talons, knows how to defend its own. In the word or two that I had already exchanged with her I knew by her accent that she could not be French, or, for that matter, Anglo-Saxon.

Presently our earlier conversation was resumed. At some remark of mine she smiled. I have never forgotten that smile. It disclosed a front tooth filled with a diamond.

The effect was startling and at the same time evocative. I recalled that the arrangement was affectioned in certain sections of South America, and it occurred to me that the lady might be a Brazilian⁠—a supposition which subsequent developments confirmed. Yet that which at the time intrigued me most was her relationship to the young musketeer. I could have sworn that she would never see forty again, and that he was yet to see twenty-nine. It seemed to me that I must have misunderstood Sally. But a look, which, in a pause of our talk, she shot across the table, undeceived me. It was double-barreled and aimed point-blank at the musketeer and the vision. There was hatred in it. Had I not already likened the lady to a bird I should add that there was venom in it, too. Could a look kill, there would have been murder then and there. A moment and it had gone. Her beady eyes shifted to mine.

A filet of reindeer was being served. From beyond came the rich voice of Monsieur de Malakoff. He appeared to be philosophizing on the degree of decomposition that renders game most savorous. Meanwhile, in the constant replenishment of blond wines, conversation and the tone of it heightened. The young musketeer was still talking inaudibly with that vision, but otherwise the table was united. Topics were tossed like balls. Jests flared as pinwheels do. Wit, or at least a passable imitation of it, became common property, until, in a ripple of laughter created by a suggestion only a trifle more scabreux than the last, Sally arose, and from the gayety of the room we passed into others yet gayer.

It was not for the sake of gayety that I was then in Paris. On the contrary, I was at work on a history of the young empresses of old Rome. For such labors there is nothing more serviceable than the Bibliothèque Nationale. Hence the sojourn.

The morning succeeding the dinner I went as usual to the Library. The documents that I there obtained held certain stupefactions; but my surprise at what I read was exceeded by my surprise at what I saw. At a table beyond was the young musketeer. Fancy a panther in a conservatory! Yet there he sat, fronted by a pile of MSS., and as lost in them as presently I became in the Subura. When I emerged from that Whitechapel of the past, he saw me and smiled in recognition.

A few days later at the Café Anglais, where, because of its proximity to the Library, I was in the habit of lunching, we met again, and in meeting, joined tables. For a while conversation drifted impersonally, but presently the moi popped out.

“May I, without indiscretion,” I asked, “inquire the nature of your distractions at the Bibliothèque?”

“Alchemy,” he answered. “But,” he added, with a smile in which there was amusement at my manifest surprise, “let me ask what are your distractions there.”

“Nothing half so fascinating,” I replied. “I am merely a writer.”

“In that case,” he retorted, “you are an alchemist, too. A wad of paper and an ounce of ink you transform into bank notes. The transmutation of metals is a process only a trifle more elaborate. Others have practiced it successfully, and what has been done may be repeated.”

“No doubt,” I answered; “but the age of miracles has gone.”

“Has it?” he asked, with an air of great innocence. “That, really, I did not know. I fancied that it had come. I believe that could the people who lived in what you call the age of miracles return they would be far more astonished at contemporary wonders than we are at those of the past. Tenez, monsieur. Just across the river is the Église de Ste. Chose. Its construction must have cost a lot, yet it was built by a poor devil of a bookseller who emerged from grinding poverty into abnormal wealth⁠—relatively speaking, that is, for in his time even the richest were none too well off. For that matter, they are none too well off now. It is in wealth alone that the world has not progressed. Kings today have to count the pennies. Budgets are out at elbows. France, the most opulent country in Europe, is obliged to consider penuriously the cost of an ironclad. In early times there was nothing of this. The kings that were built at will cities of enchanted dwellings, shimmering avenues, and walls so wide that they were race courses. The treasures that Alexander looted provided him with coin to the value of fifteen billion francs, a sum tolerably large, and yet paltry beside the four hundred and twenty-five billion that is estimated to have been the value of the treasure heaped on the pile of Assurbanipal.

“Whence did wealth in such proportions come? Through what wizardry were the fairylands that existed then created? Obviously, there was a secret, and that secret has been lost. At the beginning of the present era the total amount of money in circulation was a hundred times inferior to that which in earlier days a single satrap possessed. Thereafter the world grew steadily poorer. It was not until after the discovery of the Americas that wealth began to look up. But what are the world’s riches now in comparison to what they were? There was not only a secret, and a secret that has been lost, but that secret was the transmutation of metals. Its fading memories used to haunt the minds of men. The attempts of Caligula to regain them are historic. They hallucinated the Middle Ages. Geber’s theory, that metals are compound bodies made up of mercury and sulphur in different proportions, fascinated every alchemist, even to Roger Bacon, for he, too, had crucibles, alembics, and aludels at work. In Paracelsus the effort culminated. He demonstrated that there is an unknown element, a quintessence, which he called the alcahest, and which when recovered would do the trick. That quintessence, Flamel, the bookseller whom I mentioned, found. I was going over one of his manuscripts today. There, monsieur⁠—”

For a moment he fumbled in his pocket. Then he drew out an envelope, which he handed me. On it were signs quite cabalistic and figures equally abstruse. Yet from it there emanated an odor of orris, and I could not but notice that it was addressed to the marquis at a club. It naturally occurred to me that in addition to the distractions that he admitted he probably had others that he concealed. I am not censorious, and in view of the lady with the diamond tooth, I did not blame him in the least.

“There,” he resumed, “are the component parts. I jotted them on that envelope,” he interrupted himself to explain, “because it was the only bit of paper I had. But that is the formula.”

With that he ran on into technical terms, which conveyed no meaning to me, and my attention wandered until arrested by an entirely intelligible mention of flesh and blood.

“Human?” I asked, with pardonable surprise.

“Yes,” he answered, “that is best. But nowadays people have such prejudices. Yet there is the alcahest.”

He paused, glanced at the envelope, from it to me, and then, with that grace of manner which only Latins have, apologized for the dissertation. “Anything theoretical is so tiresome,” he added, in his winning way. “Yet if by chance the subject has the merit of interesting you, I should be glad if you would accompany me to my shop. My home,” he continued, “is in the Avenue Marceau, but for this work I have a maisonnette in the Rue de la Pompe, which I fitted up expressly. There I could have the pleasure of showing you an experiment or two.”

The stupefactions of the Subura claimed me still, I had counted on a long afternoon at the Library. I was stupid enough to prefer the society of a dead empress to a living alchemist, and I thanked him. Whereupon, after paying our scores⁠—scores that included strawberries at a franc apiece, which, I mind me now, were fully worth it⁠—we got out into the sunshine and absinthe of the street, where, little dreaming in what dramatic circumstances I was to see him again, we parted.

The dead empress detained me in Paris until, ejected by the heat, I ran down to Étretat. There, at the Casino one noon when looking over the Figaro, I jumped as though a dog had bitten me. I think anyone else might have done so, too. I had happened on the account⁠—with which all the world has since been familiar⁠—of the arrest of the Marquis de Parabole for murder.

On the esplanade without was the usual throng of people that gathers there during the hour that precedes the déjeuner and succeeds the dip. Among them was my old friend, Mrs. Manhattan. Thinking that I might furnish a fillip for her breakfast, I approached her.

I have sometimes thought that horrors appeal to women more than they do to men. I am often in error; I may have been then, yet, as I greeted this lady, it seemed to me that she was reveling in the revelations. It is true that she knew De Parabole, and acquaintance with people lends an admitted charm to anything that you may read about them. The worse it is the better you like it. Mrs. Manhattan was radiant. From the manner in which she spoke it seemed to me that nothing had pleased her more since the day the news reached her of Sally’s engagement. I presumed to say as much, but she turned on me quite viciously.

“When a man kills his wife⁠—” she began.

“His wife!” I exclaimed. “The Figaro did not say that.”

“Bother the Figaro! It was his wife he killed. First he took her money, now he takes her life. If a man marries a Hottentot, then, Hottentot though she be, he ought to treat her decently, instead of which, after making her life a curse, he boils her up in a cauldron.”

“Nonsense!” I threw in. “Besides, she isn’t a Hottentot; she is a Brazilian.”

“It is quite the same to me,” Mrs. Manhattan, with superb indifference to ethnology, threw back. “He ought to be drawn and quartered. In my presence once he contradicted her flatly.”

“Yes, that is just it,” I managed to remark. “A woman will act on a man’s nerves day in, day out, and if, under constant fire, his nerves once give way and he calls his soul his own, he is nothing more or less than a brute.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Manhattan, with great irony, retorted; “that’s right. Justify him entirely. A man who murders his wife ought to decorated. I know all that. I have heard it before. But only in France. And since in France you feel as Frenchmen do, I can’t see why you don’t run up and congratulate him.”

Abashed and hushed, I had no recourse but to retreat. When, a few weeks later, I reached Paris, the preliminary examination had been concluded and the trial was announced. At that trial I determined to be present. Others did, too. So many, in fact, that but a fraction got in. But journalism is a sesame. As a member of the press I succeeded where members of Parliament failed. I not only succeeded in getting in, I succeeded in getting a seat⁠—a stall, rather. In the interrogatory that ensued a drama unrolled.

For setting, there were bare white walls, which a crucifix dominated. Fronting the audience was the tribunal. There, robed in red, the president and the assessors sat. Before them was a display of exhibits. To the left was the jury. In the dock, to the right, was the prisoner. As I seated myself he looked over at me and smiled, very much as he had in the Library. He seemed as out of place in the Cour d’Assises as he had in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There he had suggested a panther in a conservatory, here a prince in the galleys; and I could not but marvel at the intricacies of the mystery we call life, which had led him from one to the other.

These meditations a greffier interrupted. The indictment was being read. At its conclusion the president turned to the prisoner.

“What have you to say, De Parabole?”

“That you wish my head, monsieur,” the marquis answered, as he arose. “I regret to be unwilling to oblige you with it.”

The president pursed his lips and surveyed the court. “That is natural,” he answered, at last. “But for the moment it is beside the issue. Where were you on the night of the 12th of July?”

“That question I have already refused to answer.”

The president pursed his lips again. He reminded me of nothing so much as a salamander. His mouth had the same width and his chin the same recession.

“Yes, I am aware of it,” he continued. “You left the juge d’instruction to infer that you were occupied with some gallant adventure. For the moment we will let that go, too. Meanwhile, you may tell me the object of your separate establishment in the Rue de la Pompe.”

“Experimental researches.”

“That, I am also aware, is your defense. It is not unadroit. It explains the presence there of an arsenal of chemicals. But it does not explain the presence of other things concerning which you shall have an opportunity of enlightening the jury. You have frequently quarreled with the deceased.”

“If,” the marquis answered, “you refer to Madame De Parabole, I do not know that she is dead. Nor,” he added, with entire courtesy, “do you.”

“I at least know that she is not to be found. The prosecution has searched for her everywhere. But the search was not otherwise fruitless. It has been discovered that at the time of your marriage you had nothing but your title. Your wife, previously a widow, was the daughter of a rich Brazilian. Her property you dissipated. That accomplished, you again had nothing but your title. With a view to bartering it anew you devise an elaborate scheme. You give out that you are an alchemist. You fit up a laboratory. You stock it with chemicals. On the evening of July 12th you lure your wife there. She drives up to the door in her carriage, dismisses it, and enters the house. She has never been seen since that moment. But later that evening a passer hears a scream. At midnight another passer notices a reflection of flame. What were you doing at that hour?”

“I have forgotten.”

“Very good. I will tell you. You were destroying the remains of your wife whom you had murdered. But you did not destroy them entirely. In a cauldron in that den of yours were discovered, together with bits of bone, some thick, brown ooze in which were traces of caustic soda and caustic potash. Experts will demonstrate that by means of these chemicals a human body can be converted into just such ooze. Do you deny it?”

“On the contrary, it is quite true. Only in this instance it happens that the ooze was the residue of the body of a gorilla which I had obtained from the Jardin d’Acclimatation.”

“That defense you advanced before the juge d’instruction. Inquiries made of the management show that you did acquire a gorilla. But it was only a part of this plot of yours. It was only that, in case of misadventure, you might have a ready answer. In any event, the gorilla obtained by you did not, I suppose, have a tooth filled with a diamond. A tooth set with a diamond was found in that ooze. A tooth filled with a diamond was the peculiar characteristic of the deceased. Here it is. I invite you to be seated.”

“Silence!”

The courtroom, suddenly murmurous with indignation, hummed like a wasp’s nest. I could see men gesticulating. A woman fainted.

“Silence!” a crier repeated.

The prisoner seemed unmoved. A fat man approached and addressed him. I heard someone say that it was Maître Dupin, his advocate.

The president, who had reminded me of a salamander, looked now like a wolf; but a wolf that has fed. Turning to a huissier, he ordered him to call the first witness, and presently the coachman who, on the night of the 12th of July, had driven the marquise to the Rue de la Pompe was testifying to that effect. He was succeeded by other witnesses⁠—by agents and experts, who corroborated the president’s arraignment. When they had gone the avocat général addressed the jury, summing up the evidence, deducing from it the guilt of the accused, clearly, logically, without oratory or literature.

“Any question of mitigating circumstances,” he concluded, “is out of place in a case such as this. Yet if your conscience hesitates, it is your duty to acquit that man. But if you are absolutely convinced that he is an assassin, it is equally your duty to declare him guilty. I have no wish to say that the blood of his victim cries for vengeance. Of vengeance I know nothing. What I demand of you is justice.”

“Silence!” the crier repeated.

Again the room was humming like a wasp’s nest. But this time it was murmurous with applause. In the subsidence of that applause the fat man stood up. In his hand he held a paper, at which he glanced. Then he bowed, first to the bench, afterward to the jury.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “it had been my intention when I reached here this morning to open my address to you with a citation, not from the code, but from a novel. In the Affaire Lerouge, the most famous story of the famous Gaboriau, a man is arrested for murder. Against him are advanced proofs quite as convincing as those that have been brought against Monsieur de Parabole. But the magistrate having asked him where he was during the night of the crime, and he having refused to reply, the magistrate cried: ‘Release him; he has no alibi, he is innocent.’ Gentlemen, after reminding you of that subtle and, as it was subsequently shown, correct deduction, it had been my intention to demonstrate to you that the essence of crime is the motive, and that here none has been shown. It had also been my intention to display to you my client in his true light, a young seigneur who, through unfortunate speculations at the Bourse, had lost, not merely his wife’s fortune, but his own, and who was seeking to recover both through the transmutation of metals. Whether such transmutation be possible, whether or not⁠—as Monsieur de Parabole had confided to me⁠—he was on the point of recovering that solvent which is alleged to have existed, I am not competent to affirm. But on entering here this morning I did feel competent to use the exhibits that are piled on this table, and to show from them that whether or not the pursuits of Monsieur de Parabole were chimerical, at least they were not criminal. Among those exhibits but one object embarrassed me. That object is the diamond tooth. Even with my client’s aid and my best endeavors I felt unable to explain its presence by any theory of coincidences that would have been satisfactory, but it had been my intention to leave it to you to decide whether a man should lose his head because someone else had lost a tooth. These demonstrations that I was prepared to set before you I am now dispensed from elaborating. I let them go, vaguely outlined as they are, for, gentlemen, the Marquise de Parabole is dead indeed, only she did not die in the Rue de la Pompe, she did not die on the 12th of July. She died the day before yesterday in Rio de Janeiro!”

“Silence in this court!” It was the president who was commanding quiet now. There was no longer a murmur, there was a tumult, in which the whole vast room had joined.

“Silence!” he commanded again. Then, turning to Maître Dupin, “What evidence,” he asked, “have you in support of this statement?”

“A cablegram brought to me half an hour ago, which I shall have the honor of submitting to you. Dated Rio, it is addressed to Dr. Rosa e Silva, the Brazilian Consul here, and it states that Madame de Parabole died there, as I have represented, the day before yesterday, twenty-four hours after landing. I am aware, monsieur le président, that it will have to be verified, but meanwhile I ask that the trial be adjourned.”

Mopping his fat face, Maître Dupin bowed and sat down. I could have embraced him. I wanted to tell him so. But the avocat général was speaking now.

“The obvious good faith and high professional standing of the gentleman for the defense relieve me,” he was saying, “from opposing his suggestion. Yet I must admit⁠—”

What he was about to admit no one heeded. The salle was again in commotion. Everybody was talking at once. At the moment I could not see the prisoner. Maître Dupin was bending over him, and presently, through the tumult, circulating above and accentuating it, mounted the shrill call of the crier. Then I became conscious that I had assisted at a coup de théâtre which, for sheer poignancy, I had never seen equaled on the stage, and, precisely as from a play, I found myself drifting out with the crowd to the street.

It was months later, in the multiple brilliancies of the Malakoff dining-room, that the last act was given. Meanwhile I had gone to New York and returned. It was June again; and again, in defiance of every canon of precedence, I was seated at Sally’s left. Across the table was the young musketeer, and across the table, too, was the delicious vision. On the other side of me was Mrs. Manhattan. From beyond, through the gold branches of the lusters, came the rich voice of the duke. He was philosophizing, as a great noble may, on the superiority of white truffles over black. In appreciating the fine discrimination I could not but reflect that his ancestor, the Napoleonic hero, who had won a duchy with a sword, would have appreciated it still more. These reflections Mrs. Manhattan interrupted.

“There is a subject for you. Why not write it up?”

“Monsieur de Malakoff’s physiology of taste?” I asked.

“No; Monsieur de Parabole’s physiology of marriage. You know, do you not, that he is engaged to⁠—” and Mrs. Manhattan, with a quiver of the eyelids, indicated the delicious vision. “That is what killed the Hottentot. The poor old thing knew what was going on. A man may betray the woman who loves him, but never can he deceive her.”

“Quite so,” I answered; “and it was by way of love-token, I suppose, that she extracted that ornament from her mouth and left it where the police could make the worst of it. When I read in the papers that this lady had first planted her tooth and then vanished in order that he might be guillotined for her murder, mentally I took off my hat to the medievalism of her imagination. But though I took off my hat, were I De Parabole I would have taken her life had she not conveniently died in the interim.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Manhattan returned, with a suggestion of sarcasm, which at the moment escaped me. “You, of course, would have done wonders.”

“But I must ask him,” I continued, “whether or not he is still in search of the alcahest.”

“The what? The alcahest? What is that?”

“A synonym for happiness,” I explained. Then after glancing at some blond wine that a footman was serving I looked over at the delicious vision.

“And happiness, to my thinking,” I added, “consists, if it consists in anything, in the kiss of one girl.”

But my views were unnoticed. Sally was rising, and from the brilliancies of the dining-room we passed to other rooms yet more brilliant.