Jilted: My Uncle's Scheme (Complete‪)‬

My father was a major in the army who, at the time this story begins, had lived in Longueville-sur-mer for fifteen years, to which place he had come, after my mother’s death, bringing me with him. I was then seven years old. He put me to a good school in the neighbourhood, at which I remained until I was sixteen; and was then let free. Considering myself a man, I worked hard to grow a mustache, in which I very ignominiously failed; for it was not until I was one-and-twenty that nature condescended to favour me with that very elegant and martial decoration. I also took to colouring meerschaum pipes, in which art, before I was nineteen, I was considered by my companions to excel, though I did not succeed in establishing my reputation in that line until I had dealt such an injury to my nervous system as I fear I shall never recover. I also became, before long, an expert hand at billiards, though up to the last Bob Le Marchmont could always give me twenty points and beat me comfortably. But I was his better at whist, and was indeed a match for several grave old gentlemen who were members of our English Club in the Rue des Chiens.

My father was a remarkably handsome man, with a nose like Lord Chatham’s and with whiskers which I would liken to two solid bastions of hair, richly dyed and inexorably curled. A whiter hand than his never embellished a cuff. He stood six feet in his stockings, and well do I remember Sub-lieutenant Delplanque saying to me “Mon cher, one may stitch pokers instead of whalebone into one’s stays, and still fail to achieve the air magnificent and Cæsaresque that distinguishes le major Argrrrarve.” I was once walking on the port, as they call the quay, with my father, when Louis Napoleon drove past us; His Majesty was in mufti, and my father would not have known him had not the Emperor deigned to raise his hat. The compliment was an imperial one, and my father would relate the incident with exquisite satisfaction. Jack Sturt said “it was foreign majesty paying homage to British arms—and legs.” To which I added, “God save the Queen.”

There can be no doubt that after I left school my father ought to have put me to one of the professions, or entered me in a house of business. He had two brothers, one of whom owned a private bank, the other was a retired stock-broker; and either of them, as they afterwards told me, would have been very glad to take me by the hand, had my father applied to them. But he was by nature a reckless man: by reckless I mean that he never troubled himself about the future (though he lived strictly within his half-pay). He hated trouble of any kind or description. If ever he reflected upon the future, he could scarcely, I am sure, understand that it should mean more than a perpetual succession of morning strolls, and afternoon siestas, and evening whist parties. He pursued day after day, with automatic regularity, a small round of trifling and monotonous distractions, which by degrees girdled his existence with the narrowest possible horizon, and prevented him from sympathising with any needs which, like mine, lay outside the sphere of his daily routine.

I do not say I was not as much or more to blame. Had I teazed him, he would no doubt have made an effort to get me out of Longueville into some calling in England. To speak the truth, I liked my life so well that I had no wish to change. Monotony has its fascination. We cling to dulness after many years of habitude. Don’t you know people who have, to your certain knowledge, made up their minds for the last ten years to leave the place they live in? Year after year the same story is told—how they hate the society; how inhospitable the neighbours are; how low the town has become since their day: how every stone in every street is as familiar to them as their faces; how unspeakably nauseating the people who live opposite, and who overlook all their internal doings, make life by the sickening regularity of their habits. But your grumbling friends still go on living in the same place; and all they do, and all they probably ever will do, is to amuse their resolution to quit with fictitious inspections of houses they don’t mean to take, and occasional applications for lists to distant house-agents, with whom they have not the slightest intention of transacting any business. Over and over again I would say, “I’d give anything to get out of this hole;” and no man’s voice more loudly swelled the residential chorus of abuse against Longueville than mine. But I never meant what I said. In the depths of my soul dwelt a very pathetic love for our apartments, with the faded velvet furniture and ghastly skeleton clock and antique mirrors, over Auguste Soulier’s the bootmaker’s shop in the Rue d’Enghien; for the pastry-cook’s opposite, where, when a boy, I would spend my pocket-money in pistaches and tarts, and where, when grown too nice for raw sweetmeats and jam, I would dawdle over Vanilla ices; for the billiard table in the Café Grenouille over whose worn cloth I have stooped with an enthusiasm that, directed into a money-making channel, would have earned me a good income; for the whist tables in the club-room, where, amid volumes of smoke from cigars, at fifty centimes apiece, I would make or lose during a long evening as much as ten sous. And shall I ever forget—oh, fond and foolish heart, be still!—shall I ever forget thee, sweet Pauline Gautier—remind me, was thy father a dancing-master, or did he keep a school? Thee, I say, whom on summer evenings I would row in a boat on the amber-coloured river, filling the intervals of the measured music of my oars with tender breathings, surely not the less delightful for thee to hear because I whispered them in French, not always strictly grammatical?