Chapter 5 Test Item File Waybright/Chen/Pyper, Financial Accounting, Ce

Financial Accounting First Canadian Edition

Canadian 1st Edition Waybright
Full download at link: https://testbankpack.com/p/test-bank-for-financial-
accounting-first-canadian-edition-canadian-1st-edition-by-waybright-isbn-
0132889714-9780132889711/

Financial Accounting (Waybright)

Chapter 5 Accounting for a Merchandising Business

5.1 Describe the relationship among wholesalers, retailers, and customers

1) Wholesalers purchase large quantities of product from manufacturers and then sell the product to retailers.
Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

2) Retailers may buy goods from the manufacturer and then sell the goods to consumers.
Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

3) Goods that a retailer sells to consumers are classified as inventory.

Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

4) The predominant types of businesses in Canada are:

A) merchandising businesses.
B) manufacturing businesses.
C) service businesses.
1
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Canada Inc.
Chapter 5 Test Item File Waybright/Chen/Pyper, Financial Accounting, Ce

D) wholesale businesses.
E) retail businesses.
Answer: C
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

2
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Canada Inc.
Chapter 5 Test Item File Waybright/Chen/Pyper, Financial Accounting, Ce

5) Inventory for a merchandising business is classified as a(n):

A) liability.
B) revenue.
C) part of shareholder's equity.
D) asset.
E) expense.
Answer: D
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Application
Blooms: Comprehension
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

6) Which of the following would NOT be classified as a retailer?

A) Canadian Tire
B) H & R Block
C) Walmart
D) Giant Tiger
E) Sears
Answer: B
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Application
Blooms: Comprehension
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

7) Which of the following would NOT be classified as a service business?

A) Karl's Lawn Mowing
B) Ty's Tax Preparation
C) Paula's Pet Walking
D) Sheila's Fashion Boutique
E) Lilly's Hair Salon
Answer: D
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Application
Blooms: Comprehension
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

3
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Canada Inc.
Chapter 5 Test Item File Waybright/Chen/Pyper, Financial Accounting, Ce

8) What type of internet company are Amazon.ca and Walmart.ca?

A) service businesses
B) manufacturing businesses
C) retail businesses
D) wholesalers
E) financial businesses
Answer: C
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Application
Blooms: Comprehension
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

9) Who buys goods from retailers?

Answer: customers
Diff: 1 Type: SA
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

10) What is the general public also referred to as?

A) final consumers
B) service customers
C) retail customers
D) manufacturing customers
E) merchandise customers
Answer: A
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 7-1 Identify the different types of sales and receivables and discuss related internal controls for accounts
receivable
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

5.2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems

1) Most businesses today use the periodic inventory method.

Answer: FALSE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

4
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Canada Inc.
Chapter 5 Test Item File Waybright/Chen/Pyper, Financial Accounting, Ce

2) Because of innovative and computerized methods of tracking inventory, most businesses today use the
perpetual inventory method.
Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

3) The perpetual inventory system keeps a running record of inventory as it is bought and sold.
Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

4) When the perpetual records do not equal the physical count of the inventory, the general ledger is updated
with the differences.
Answer: TRUE
Diff: 1 Type: TF
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

5) A useful tool that updates inventory is the:

A) cash register.
B) bar code scanner.
C) price tag on the merchandise.
D) UPC number.
E) bar code.
Answer: B
Diff: 1 Type: MC
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

6) Which financial statement does the Cost of Goods Sold account appear on?
Answer: the income statement
Diff: 1 Type: SA
LO: 5-2 Define periodic and perpetual inventory systems
Skills: Recall
Blooms: Knowledge
CFALO: A-9 Explain and apply inventory costing methods

5
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Canada Inc.
Another document from Scribd.com that is
random and unrelated content:
 CHAPTER XIV.
THE VICTIMS.
A morning at ten o’clock. The antechamber at the Ministry of Public
Instruction; a long corridor badly lighted, with dark hangings and an
oaken wainscot. The gallery is full of a crowd of office-seekers, seated or
sauntering about, who from minute to minute become more numerous;
each new arrival gives his card to the solemn clerk wearing his chain of
office, who receives it, examines and without a word deposits it by his
side on the slab of the little table where he is writing; all this in the
haggard light from a window dripping from a gentle October rain.
One of the last arrivals, however, has the honor of stirring the
august impassiveness of this clerk. He is a great big man, weather-
beaten, sunburned and of a tarry aspect, with two little silver anchors in
his ears for rings and with the voice of a seal that has caught a cold—just
such a voice as one hears in the transparent early morning mists in the
seaports of Provence.
“Let him know that it is Cabantous, the pilot—he knows what is up;
he expects me.”
“You are not the only one,” answers the clerk, who smiles discreetly
at his own joke.
Cabantous does not appreciate the delicacy of the joke; but he
laughs in good humor, his mouth opening back as far as the silver
anchors; and, making use of his shoulders, he pushes through the crowd,
which falls aside before his wet umbrella, and installs himself on a bench
alongside a sufferer who is almost as weather-beaten as himself.
“Té! vé!—why, it is Cabantous. Hello, how are you?”
The pilot begs his pardon—cannot recall who it is.
“Valmajour, you remember; we used to know each other down there
in the arena.”
“That is true, by gad.—Bé, my good fellow, you at least can say that
Paris has changed you—”
 The tabor-player has now become a gentleman with very long black
hair pushed behind his ears in the manner of the musical person, and
that, along with his swarthy complexion and his blue-black moustache, at
which he is constantly pulling, makes him look like one of the gypsies at
the Ginger-bread Fair. On top of all this a constant look of the village
cock with its crest up, a conceit like that of village beau and musician
combined, in which the exaggeration of his Southern origin betrays itself
and slops over, notwithstanding his tranquil and ungarrulous appearance.
His lack of success at the opera has not frightened him off; like all
actors in such cases he attributes his failure to a cabal, and for his sister
and himself that word “cabal” has taken on barbaric and extraordinary
proportions, and moreover a Sanscrit spelling—the khabbala—a
mysterious monster which combines the traits of the rattlesnake and the
pale horse of the Apocalypse.
And so he relates to Cabantous that he is about to appear in a few
days at a great variety show in a café on the boulevard—“An eskating-
rink I would have you understand!” where he is to figure in some living
pictures, at two hundred francs the evening.
“Two hundred francs an evening!” The eyes of the pilot roll in his
head.
“And besides that, they will cry my bography in the street and my
portrait in life size will be on all the walls of Paris, wid my costume of a
troubadour of the old times, which I shall put on every evening when I
do my music.”
What flatters him most in all of this is the costume. What a bore that
he is not able to put on his crenelated cap and his long-pointed shoes in
order that he might show the Minister what a splendid engagement he
has, and this time on good government stamped paper which was signed
without Roumestan’s aid! Cabantous looks at the stamped paper,
smudged on both its faces, and sighs.
“You are mighty lucky; why, look at me—it’s more than a year that
I am ’oping for my medal. Numa told me to send my papers on here and
I did send my papers here—after that I never heard anything more about
the medal, nor about the papers, nor about anything else. I wrote to the
Ministry of Marine; they don’t know me at the Marine. I wrote to the
Minister himself; the Minister did not answer. And what beats me is this,
that now, when I haven’t my papers with me and a discussion arises
among the mercantile captains as to pilotage, the port councilmen won’t
listen to my arguments. So, finding that was the way of it, I put my ship
in dry dock and says I to myself: Come, let’s go and see Numa.”
He was almost in tears about it, was this wretched pilot. Valmajour
consoles and reassures him and promises to speak for him with the
Minister; he does this in an assured tone, his finger on his moustache,
like a man to whom people can refuse nothing. But after all the haughty
attitude is not peculiar to him; all these people who are waiting for an
audience—old priests of pious manners in their visiting cloaks;
methodical and authoritative professors; dudish painters with their hair
cut Russian fashion; thick-set sculptors with broad ends to their fingers
—they all have this same triumphant air—special friends of the Minister
and sure of their business. All of them, as they came in, have said to the
clerk: “He expects me.”
Each one is filled with a conviction that if only Roumestan knew
that he was there!—This it is that gives a very particular physiognomy to
the antechamber of the Ministry of Public Instruction, without a trace of
those feverish pallors, of those trembling anxieties, which one perceives
in the waiting-rooms at other Ministries.
“Who is he engaged with?” asks Valmajour in a loud voice, going
up to the little table.
“The Director of the Opera.”
“Cadaillac—all right, I know—it is about my business!”
After the failure made by the tabor-player in his theatre Cadaillac
had refused to let him appear again. Valmajour wished to bring suit, but
the Minister, who was afraid of the lawyers and the little newspapers,
had begged the musician to withdraw his plea, guaranteeing him a round
sum as damages. There is no doubt whatever with Valmajour that they
are at this moment discussing these damages and not without a certain
animation, too, for every few moments the clarion voice of Numa
penetrates the double door of his sitting room, which at last is rudely torn
open.
“She is not my protegée, she is yours!”
Big fat Cadaillac leaves the room, hurling this taunt, crosses the
antechamber with an angry gait and passes the clerk who is coming up
between two lines of solicitors.
 “You have only to give my name.”
“Let him only know that I am here.”
“Tell ’im it’s Cabantous.”
The clerk listens to nobody, but marches very solemnly on with a
few visiting cards in his hand and the door which he leaves partly open
behind him shows the Minister’s sitting-room filled with light from its
three windows overlooking the garden, all of one panel of the wall
covered by the cloak turned up with ermine of M. de Fontanes, painted
standing at full length.
A trace of astonishment showing on his cadaverous face, the clerk
comes back and calls:
“Monsieur Valmajour.”
The musician is not at all astonished at passing in this way over the
heads of the others.
Since early morning his portrait has appeared placarded on all the
walls of Paris. Now he is a personage and hereafter the Minister will no
longer cause him to languish among the draughts in a railway station.
Conceited and smiling, there he stands in the centre of the luxurious
bureau where secretaries are occupied in pulling out drawers and
cardboard pigeon-holes in a frantic search for something. Roumestan in a
terrible rage scolds, thunders and curses, both hands in his pockets:
“Come now, be done with it! those papers, what the devil!—So they
have been lost, have they, that pilot’s papers?... Really, gentlemen, there
is an absence of order here!...”
He catches sight of Valmajour: “Ha, it’s you, is it?” and he springs
upon him with one leap, the while the backs of the secretaries are
disappearing by the side doors in a state of terror, each carrying off an
armful of boxes.
“Now look here, are you never going to stop persecuting me with
your dog-at-the-fair music? Haven’t you had enough with one chance at
it? How many do you require? Now they tell me that there you are on all
the walls in your hybrid costume. And what is all this bosh that they
have brought me here?—that your biography? A mass of blunders and
lies. You know perfectly well that you are no more a Prince than I am
and that those parchments which are talked about here have never
existed save in your own imagination!”
 With the brutal gesture of the man who loves argument he grabbed
the wretched fellow by the flap of his jacket with both hands and as he
talked kept shaking him. In the first place this “eskating-rink” didn’t
have a penny—perfect fakirs! They would never pay him and all he
would get would be the shame of this dirty advertisement on the strength
of his name, the name of his protector. Now the newspapers could begin
their jokes again—Roumestan and Valmajour the fifer for the Ministry;
and, growing excited at the memory of these attacks, his big cheeks
quivering with the anger hereditary in his family, with a fit of rage like
those of Aunt Portal, more scaring in the solemn surroundings of an
office where the personality of a man should disappear before the public
situation, he screamed at the top of his voice:
“But for God’s sake get out of here, you wretched creature, get out
of here! We have had enough of your shepherd’s fife!”
Stunned and silly, Valmajour let the flood go on, stuttering, “All
right, all right,” and appealed to the pitying face of Méjean, the only man
whom the Master’s rage had not sent into headlong flight, and then
gazed piteously on the big portrait of Fontanes, who looked scandalized
at excesses of this sort and seemed to accentuate his grand Ministerial air
the more, in proportion as Roumestan lost his own dignity. At last,
escaping from the powerful fist which clutched him, the musician was
able to reach the door and fly half-crazed with his tickets for the
“eskating.”
“Cabantous, pilot!” said Numa, reading the name which the
impassive clerk presented to him, “There’s another Valmajour! But no, I
won’t have it; I have had enough of being their tool—enough for to-day
—I am no longer in....”
He continued to march up and down his office, trying to get rid of
what remained of that furious rage, the shock of which Valmajour had
very unfairly received. That Cadaillac, what impudence! daring to come
and reproach him about the little girl, in his own office, in the Ministry
itself, and before Méjean, before Rochemaure! “Well, certainly, I am too
weak; the nomination of that man to the directorship of the opera was a
terrible blunder!”
His chief clerk was entirely of that opinion but he would have taken
good care not to say so; for Numa was no longer the good fellow he used
to be, who was the first to laugh at his own embarrassments and took
railleries and remonstrances in good part. Having become the practical
chief of the cabinet in consequence of his speech at Chambéry and a few
other oratorical triumphs, the intoxication that comes with heights
gained, that royal atmosphere where the strongest heads are turned, had
changed him quite, had made him nervous, splenetic and irritable.
A door beneath a curtain opened and Mme. Roumestan appeared,
ready to go out, her hair fashionably dressed and a long cloak concealing
her figure. With that serene air which for five months back lit up her
pretty face: “Have you your council to-day, my dear? Good-morning,
Monsieur Méjean.”
“Why, yes, council—a meeting—everything!”
“I wanted to ask you to come as far as Mamma’s house; I am
breakfasting there; Hortense would have been so glad!”
“But you see it is impossible.” He looked at his watch: “I ought to
be at Versailles at noon.”
“Then I will wait for you and take you to the station.”
He hesitated a second, not more than a second:
“All right, I will put my signature here and then we will go.”
While he was writing Rosalie was giving Méjean news of her sister
in a low tone. The coming of winter affected her spirits; she was
forbidden to go out. Why did he not call upon her? She had need of all
her friends. Méjean gave a gesture of discouragement and woe: “Oh, so
far as I am concerned....”
“But I tell you yes, there is a good deal more chance for you. It is
only caprice on her part; I am sure that it cannot last.”
She saw everything in a rosy light and wanted to have all the world
about her as happy as she was—O, how happy! and glad with so perfect
a joy that she indulged in a certain superstition never to acknowledge the
fulness of her joy to herself. As for Roumestan, he talked about his affair
everywhere with a comical sort of pride, to indifferent people as well as
to his intimates:
“We are going to call it the child of the Ministry!” and then he
would laugh at his joke till the tears came.
And of a truth those who knew about his existence outside, the
household in the city impudently established with receptions and an open
table, this husband who was so sensitive and tender and who talked of
his coming fatherhood with tears in his eyes, appeared a character not to
be defined, perfectly at peace in his lies, sincere in his expansiveness,
putting to the rout the conclusions of those who did not understand the
dangerous complications of Southern natures.
“Certainly, I will take you there,” said he to his wife as they got into
the carriage.
“But if they are waiting for you?”
“Well, so much the worse for them; let them wait for me—we shall
be together all the longer.”
He took Rosalie’s arm under his own and pressing against her as if
he were a child:
“Té! do you know that I am happy only in this place? Your
gentleness rests me, your coolness comforts me. That Cadaillac put me
into such a state of rage! He’s a fellow without any conscience, he’s a
fellow without any morality—”
“You didn’t know his character, then?”
“The way he is carrying on that theatre is a burning shame!”
“It is true that the engagement of that Mlle. Bachellery ... why did
you let him do it? A girl who is false in everything, her youth, her voice,
even her eyelashes.”
Numa felt his cheeks reddening; it was he himself who fastened
them on, now, with his own great big fingers, those eyelashes! The little
girl’s mamma had taught him how to do it.
“Whom does this little good-for-nothing belong to, anyhow? The
Messenger was talking the other day of influences in high circles, of
some mysterious protection—”
“I don’t know; to Cadaillac, undoubtedly.”
He turned away in order to conceal his embarrassment and suddenly
threw himself back horrified.
“What is it?” asked Rosalie, looking out of the window too.
There was the placard of the skating-rink, enormous, printed in
crying colors which showed out under the rainy and gray sky, repeating
itself at every street corner, on every vacant space of a naked wall and on
the planks of temporary fences. It showed a gigantic troubadour
encircled with living pictures as a border—all blotches in yellow, green
and blue, with the ochre color of the tabor placed across the figure. The
long hoarding which surrounded the new building of the city hall, past
which their carriage was going at the moment, was covered with this
coarse and noisy advertisement, which was stupefying even to Parisian
idiocy.
“My executioner!” said Roumestan with an expression of comic
dismay. Rosalie found fault with him gently.
“No—your victim! and would that he were the only one! But
somebody else has caught fire from your enthusiasm—”
“Who can that be?”
“Hortense.”
Then she told him what she had finally proved to be a certainty,
notwithstanding the mysteries made by the young girl—namely, her
affection for this peasant, a thing which at first she had believed a mere
fancy, but which worried her now like a moral aberration in her sister.
The Minister was in a state of indignation.
“How can it be possible? That hobnail, that bog-trotter!”
“She sees him with her imagination, and especially in the light of
your legends and inventions which she has not been able to put in the
right focus. That is why this advertisement and grotesque coloring which
enrage you fill me on the contrary with joy. I believe that her hero will
appear so ridiculous to her that she will no longer dare to love him. If it
were not for that, I hardly know what would become of us. Can you
imagine the despair of my father; can you imagine yourself the brother-
in-law of Valmajour?—oh, Numa, Numa! poor involuntary maker of
dupes.”
He did not put up any defence, but indulged in anger against
himself, against his “cussed Southernism” which he was not able to
overcome.
“Look here, you ought to stay always just as you are, right up
against my side as my beloved councillor and my holy protection. You
alone are good and indulgent, you alone understand and love me.”
He held her little gloved hand to his lips and said this with such a
firm conviction that tears, real tears, reddened his eyelids: then, warmed
up and refreshed by this effusion, he felt better; and so, when they
reached the Place Royale and with a thousand tender precautions he had
helped his wife out of the carriage, it was with a joyous tone and one free
of all remorse that he threw the address to his coachman: “London
Street, hurry, quick!”
Moving slowly, Rosalie vaguely caught this address and it gave her
pain. Not that she had the slightest suspicion; but he had just said that he
was going to the Saint-Lazare station. Why was it that his acts were
never in accordance with his words?
In her sister’s bedroom another cause for anxiety met her: she felt
on entering that there had been a sudden stoppage of a discussion
between Hortense and Audiberte, who still kept the traces of fury on her
face while her peasant’s head-dress still quivered on her hair bristling
with rage. Rosalie’s presence kept her in bounds, that was clear enough
from her lips and eyebrows viciously drawn together. Still, as the young
wife asked her how she did, she was forced to answer and so began to
talk feverishly of the eskating, of the advantageous terms which were
offered them, and then, surprised at Rosalie’s calm, demanded in an
almost insolent tone:
“Aren’t you coming to hear my brother? It is something that is at
least worth while, if for nothing more than to see him in his costume!”
This ridiculous costume as it was described by her in her peasant
dialect, from the dents in the cap down to the high curving points of the
shoes, put poor Hortense in a state of agony; she did not dare raise her
eyes to her sister’s face. Rosalie asked to be excused from going; the
state of her health did not permit her to visit the theatre. Besides, in Paris
there were certain places of entertainment where all women could not go.
The peasant woman stopped her short at the first suggestion.
“Beg your pardon, I go perfectly well and I hope I am as good as
anybody else—I have never done any wrong, I have not; I have always
fulfilled my religious duties.”
She raised her voice without a trace of her old bashfulness, just as if
she had acquired rights in the house. But Rosalie was much too kind and
far too superior to this poor ignorant thing to cause her humiliation,
particularly as she was thinking about the responsibility that rested on
Numa. So, with the entire intelligence of her heart and revealing as usual
the uncommon delicacy of her mind, in those truthful words that heal
although they may sting a little, she endeavored to make Audiberte
understand that her brother had not succeeded and never would succeed
in Paris, the implacable city, and that rather than obstinately continue a
humiliating struggle, falling into the mire and mud of artistic existence, it
would be far better for them to return to their Provence and buy their
farm back again, the means to accomplish which would be furnished
them, and so, in their laborious life surrounded by nature, forget the
unhappy results of their trip to Paris.
The peasant girl let her talk to the very end without interrupting her
a single moment, merely darting at Hortense a look of irony from her
wicked eyes as though to challenge her to make some reply. At last,
seeing that the young girl did not wish to say anything more, she coldly
declared that they would not go, because her brother had all kinds of
engagements in Paris—all kinds which it was impossible for him to
break. Upon that she threw over her arm the heavy wet cloak which had
been lying on the back of a chair, made a hypocritical curtsy to Rosalie,
“Wishing you a very good day, Madame, and thanking you very much, I
am sure,” and left the room, followed by Hortense.
In the antechamber, lowering her voice on account of the servants:
“Sunday evening, qué? half past ten without fail!” And in a
pressing, authoritative voice: “Come now, you certainly owe that to your
pore friend! Just to give him a little heart ... and to start with, what do
you risk, anyhow? I am coming to get you and I am going to bring you
back!”
Seeing that Hortense still hesitated, she added almost aloud in a
tone of menace: “Come now, I would like to know: are you his betrothed
or not?”
“I’ll come, I’ll come,” said the young girl greatly alarmed.
When she returned to the room, seeing that she looked worried and
sad, Rosalie asked her:
“What are you thinking about, my dear girl? are you still dreaming
the continuation of your novel? It ought to be getting pretty well forward
in all these months,” added she, taking her gayly around the waist.
“Oh, yes, pretty well forward—”
After a silence Hortense continued in an obscure tone of
melancholy: “But the trouble is, I can’t see my way to the close of the
novel.”

She didn’t care for him any more: it may be that she never had
loved him. Under the transforming power of absence and that “tender
glory” which misfortune gave to the Moor Abencerage he had appeared
to her from a distance as her man of destiny. It seemed a proud act on her
part to knit her own existence with that of one who was abandoned by
everything, success and protectors together. But when she got back to
Paris, what a pitiless clearness of things! What a terror to perceive how
absolutely she had made a mistake!
To start with, Audiberte’s first visit had shocked her because of the
new manners of the girl, too familiar and free and easy, and because of
the look of an accomplice which she gave when telling her in whispers:
“Hush, don’t say anything! he’s coming to get me....”
That kind of action seemed to her rather hasty and rather bold, more
especially the idea of presenting this young man to her parents. But the
peasant girl wanted to hurry things. And then, all at once, Hortense
perceived her error when she looked upon this artist of the variety stage
with his long hair behind his ears, full of stage movements, denting in
and shifting his sombrero of Provence on his characteristic head—
always handsome, of course, but full of a plain preoccupation to appear
so.
Instead of taking a lowly manner in order to make her forgive him
for that generous spirit of interest which she had felt for him, he
preserved his air of a conqueror, his silly look of the victor, and without
saying a word—for he would hardly have known what to say—he treated
this finely organized Parisian girl just as he would in similar conditions
have treated her, the Des Combette girl—took her by the waist with the
motion of a soldier and troubadour and wanted to press her to his breast.
She disengaged herself with a sudden repulsion and a letting go of all her
nerves, leaving him there looking foolish and astonished, while
Audiberte quickly intervened and scolded her brother violently. What
kind of manners had he, anyhow? It must have been in Paris that he
learned such manners, in the Faubourg Saint Germoyne, without a doubt,
among his duchesses?
“Come now, wait at least until she is your wife!”
 And turning to Hortense:
“O, he is so in love with you; his blood is parching with his love,
pécaïré!”
From that time on, when Valmajour came to get his sister he
considered it necessary to assume the sombre and desperate air of an
illustration to a ballad: “‘The ocean waits for me,’ the Knight hadjured.”
In other conditions the young girl might have been touched, but really
the poor fellow seemed too much of a nullity. All he knew how to do was
to smooth the nap of his soft hat while reciting the list of his successes in
the faubourg of the nobles, or else the rivalries of the stage. One day he
talked to her for a whole hour about the vulgarity of handsome Mayol,
who had refrained from congratulating him at the end of a concert; and
all the while he kept repeating:
“There you are with your Mayol!... Bé! he is not very polite, your
Mayol isn’t!”
And all this was accompanied by Audiberte’s attitudes of
watchfulness, her severity of a policeman of morals, and this in the face
of these very cold lovers! O, if she had been able to divine what a terror
possessed the soul of Hortense, what a loathing for her frightful mistake!
“Ho! what a capon—what a capon of a girl—” she would
sometimes say to her, trying to laugh, with her eyes brimming with rage,
because she considered that this love-affair was dragging too much and
believed that the young girl was hesitating for fear of meeting the
reproaches and anger of her parents. Just as if that would have weighed a
straw in the balance for such a free and proud nature, had there been a
real love in her heart; but how can one say: “I love him,” and buckle on
one’s armor, rouse one’s spirits and fight, when one does not love at all?
However, she had promised, and every day she was harassed by
new demands. For instance there was that first night at the skating-rink,
to which the peasant girl insisted upon taking her, whether or no,
counting upon the singer’s success and the sympathy of the applause to
break down the last objections. After a long resistance the poor little girl
ended by consenting to skip out secretly for that one night behind the
back of her mother, making use of lies and humiliating complications.
She had given way through fear and weakness, perhaps also with the
hope of getting her first impression back again at the theatre—that
mirage which had vanished; of lighting up again, in fact, that flame of
love which was so desperately quenched.
 CHAPTER XV.
THE SKATING-RINK.
Where was it? Whither was she being taken? The cab had been going for
a long, long time; seated at her side, Audiberte had been holding her
hands, reassuring her and talking to her with a feverish violence. She did
not look at anything, she did not hear anything; the noise of the wheels,
the sharp tones of that shrill little voice had no sense for her mind
whatever; nor did the streets and boulevards and house-fronts seem to
her to wear their usual aspect, but were discolored by the lively emotion
within, as if she were looking at them out of the carriage in a funeral or
marriage procession.
Finally they brought up with a jerk and stopped before a wide
pavement inundated by white light which carved the crowd of people
swarming here into black sharp-cut shadows. At the entrance of the large
corridor was a wicket for the tickets, then a double door of red velvet,
and right upon that a hall, an enormous hall, which with its nave and its
side aisles and the stucco on its high walls, recalled to her an Anglican
church which she had once visited on the occasion of a marriage. Only in
this case the walls were covered with placards and advertisements in
every color, setting forth the virtues of pith helmets, shirts made to
measure for four francs and a half and announcements of clothing-shops,
alternating with the portrait of the tabor-player, whose biography one
could hear cried in that voice of a steam-valve used by programme-
sellers. They were in the midst of a stunning noise in which the murmur
of the circulating mob, the humming of the tops on the cloth of the
English billiard tables, calls for drinks, snatches of music broken by
patriotic gunshots coming from the back of the hall, were dominated by a
constant noise of roller skates going and coming across a broad asphalted
space surrounded by balustrades, the centre of a perfect storm of crush
hats and bonnets of the time of the Directory.
Hortense walked behind the Provençal girl, anxious and frightened,
now turning pale and now turning red beneath her veil, following her
with difficulty through a perfect labyrinth of little round tables at which
women were seated two and two drinking, their elbows on the table,
cigarettes in their mouths and their knees up, overwhelmed with a look
of boredom. Against the wall from point to point stood crowded counters
and behind each was a girl standing erect, her eyes blackened with kohl,
her mouth red as blood and little flashes of steel coming from a bang of
black or russet hair plastered over her brow. And this white and black of
painted skin, this smile with its painted vermilion-point, were to be
found on all the women, as if it were a livery belonging to nocturnal and
pallid apparitions which all were forced to wear.
Sinister also was the slow strolling of the men who elbowed their
way in an insolent and brutal manner between the tables, puffing the
smoke of their thick cigars right and left with the insult of their
marketing as they pushed about to look as closely as possible at the
wares. And what gave it still more the impression of a market was the
cosmopolite public talking all kinds of French, a hotel public which had
just arrived and run into the place in their travelling clothes—Scotch
bonnets, striped jackets, tweeds still full of the fog of the Channel and
Muscovite furs thawing fast in the Paris air. And there were the long
black beards and insolent airs of people from the banks of the Spree
covering satyr grins and Tartar mugs; there too were Turkish fezzes
surmounting coats without any collars, negroes in full evening dress
gleaming like the silk of their tall hats and little Japanese men dressed
like Europeans, dapper and correct, like tailors’ advertisements fallen
into the fire.
“Bou Diou! How ugly he is,” said Audiberte suddenly, as they
passed a very solemn Chinaman with his long pigtail hanging down the
back of his blue gown; or else she would stop and, nudging her
companion with her elbow, cry “Vé! vé! see the bride!” and show her
some woman dressed entirely in white lounging on two chairs—one of
which supported her white satin shoes with silver heels—the waist of her
dress wide open, the train of her gown all which-way, and orange flowers
fastening the lace of a short mantilla in her hair. Then, suddenly
scandalized by certain words which gave her the clue to these very
chance bridal flowers, the Provençal girl would add in a mysterious
manner: “A regular snake, you know!” Then suddenly, in order to drag
Hortense away from a bad example, she would hurry her toward the
central part of the building where a theatre rose far in the back,
occupying the same place as the choir in a church. The stage was there
under electric flames which came and went in two big glass spheres
away up in the ceiling, like two gleaming, starry eyes of an Eternal
Father in a book of holy images.
Here they could compose themselves after the tumultuous
wickedness of the lobbies. Families of little citizens, the shopkeepers of
the quarter, filled the orchestra stalls. There were few women. It might
have been possible to believe oneself in some kind of an auditorium,
were it not for the horrible noise all about, which was always being
overborne by the regular rolling of the skaters on the asphalt floor,
drowning even the brass instruments and the drums of the orchestra, so
that really on the boards all that was possible was the dumb-show of
living pictures.
As they seated themselves the curtain went down on a patriotic
scene: an enormous Belfort lion made of cardboard, surrounded by
soldiers in triumphant poses on crumbling ramparts, their military caps
stuck on the ends of their guns, gesticulating to the measure of the
Marseillaise, which nobody could hear. This performance and this wild
excitement stimulated the Provençal girl; her eyes were bulging in her
head; as she found a place for Hortense she exclaimed:
“Qué! we are nice here, qué! But do haul up your veil—don’t
tremble so, there is no danger wid me!”
The young girl did not answer, still overwhelmed by the impression
of that slow, insulting crowd of strollers where she had been confounded
with the rest, among all those livid masks of women. And behold, right
in front of her, she found those horrible masks once more, with their
blood-stained lips—found them in the grimacing faces of two clowns in
tights who were dislocating all their joints, a bell in each hand with
which they were sounding out, whilst they frolicked about, an air from
“Martha”—a veritable music of the gnomes, formless and stuttering,
very much in its place in the musical babel of the skating-rink. Then the
curtain fell again, and for the tenth time the peasant girl stood up and sat
down again, fussed about, fixed her head-dress anew and suddenly
exclaimed, as she looked down the programme: “There, the Cordova
Mount—the summer locusts, the farandole—there, there, it is beginning,
vé, vé!”
Rising once more, the curtain displayed upon the background of the
scenery a lilac mountain, up which mounted buildings of stone most
weird in construction, partly castle, partly mosque, here a minaret and
there a terrace; they rose in ogival arches, crenelations and Moorish
work, with aloes and palm-trees of zinc rising at the foot of towers
sharply cut against the indigo blue of a very crude sky. One may see just
such absurd architecture in the suburbs of Paris among villas inhabited
by newly enriched merchants. In spite of all, in spite of the crying tones
of the slopes blossoming with thyme and exotic plants placed there by
mistake because of the word “Cordova,” Hortense was rather
embarrassed at sight of that landscape which held for her the most
delightful recollections. And that palace of the Turk perched upon the
mountain all rose-colored porphyry, and that reconstructed castle, really
did seem to her the realization of her dreams, but quite grotesque and
overdone, as it happens when one’s dream is about to slip into the
oppression of a nightmare.
At a signal from the orchestra and from an electric jet, long devil’s-
darning-needles, personated by girls in an undress of tightly-fitting silks,
a sort of emerald-green tights, rushed upon the stage waving their long
membranous wings and whirling their wooden rattles.
“What! those are locusts? Not much!” said the Provençal girl
indignantly.
Already they had arranged themselves in a half circle, like a
crescent-shaped mass of seaweed, all the time whirling their rattles,
which sounded very distinctly now, because the row made by the parlor
skates was softened and for a moment the noise of the lobby was hushed
in a close wall of heads leaning toward the stage, their eyes glaring under
every kind of head-dress in the world. The wretchedness which tore
Hortense’s heart grew deeper when she heard coming, at first from afar
and gradually increasing, the low sound of the tabor.
She would have liked to flee in order not to have seen what was
coming. In its turn the shepherd’s pipe sounded out its high notes and the
farandole, raising under the cadence of its regular steps a thick dust the
color of the earth, unrolled itself with all the fantastic costumes
imaginable, short skirts meant to lure the eye, red stockings with gold
borders, spangled waists, head-dresses of Arab coins, of Indian scarfs, of
Italian kerchiefs or those from Brittany or Caux, all worn with a fine
Parisian disdain of truth to locality.
Behind them, pushing forward on his knee a tabor covered with
gold paper, came the great troubadour of the placards—his legs incased
in tights, one leg yellow with a blue shoe on and one leg blue shod in
yellow, with his satin waistcoat covered with puffs and his crenelated
velvet cap overshadowing a countenance which remained quite brown
despite cosmetics, and of which nothing could be seen well except a big
moustache stiffened with Hungarian pomade.
“Ah!” said Audiberte in perfect ecstasy.
When the farandole had taken up its place on the two sides of the
stage in front of the locusts with their big wings, the troubadour, standing
alone in the centre, saluted with an air of assurance and victory under the
glaring eyes of the Eternal Father whose rays poured a luminous
hoarfrost upon his coat.
The aubade began, rustic and shrill, yet it went forward into the
halls hardly farther than the footlights; there it lived a very short life,
fighting for a moment with the flamboyant banners on the ceiling and the
columns of the enormous interior, and then fell flat into a great and bored
silence. The public looked on without the slightest comprehension.
Valmajour began another piece, which at the first sounds was received
with laughter, murmurs and cat-calls. Audiberte took Hortense’s hand:
“Listen! that’s the cabal!”
At this point the cabal consisted merely of a few “Heh! louder!” and
of jokes of this sort, which were called out by a husky voice belonging to
some low woman on seeing the complicated dumb-show that Valmajour
employed: “Oh, give us a rest, you chump!”
Then the rink took up again its sound of parlor skates and of
English billiards and its ambulatory marketing, overwhelming the
shepherd’s pipe and the tabor which the musician insisted upon using
until the very end of the aubade. After this he saluted again, marched
forward toward the footlights, always accompanied by that mysterious
grand air which never quitted him. His lips could be seen moving and a
few words came here and there into ear-shot: “It came to me all of a
sudden ... one hole ... three holes ... the good God’s birrd....”
His despairing gesture was understood by the orchestra and gave the
signal for a ballet in which the locusts twined themselves about the
odalisques from Caux and formed plastic poses, undulatory and
lascivious dances beneath Bengal flames which threw their rainbow light
as far as the pointed shoes of the troubadour, who continued his dumb-
show with the tabor in front of the castle of his ancestors in a great glory
and apotheosis.
 There lay the romance of poor little Hortense! That is what Paris
had made of it.

The clear bell of the old clock hanging on the wall of her chamber
sounded one as Hortense roused herself from the arm-chair into which
she had fallen utterly crushed when she entered. She looked around her
gentle maiden’s nest, warm with the reassuring gleams of a dying fire
and of an expiring night-lamp.
“What am I doing here? Why did I not go to bed?”
She could not remember at first what had happened, only feeling a
complete sickness through her entire being and in her head a noise which
made it ache. She stood up and walked a step or two before she
perceived that she still wore her hat and mantle; then all came back to
her. She remembered then their departure after the curtain fell, their
return through the hideous market, more brilliantly illumined than
before, among drunken book-makers fighting with each other in front of
a counter, through cynical voices whispering a sum of money as she
passed—and then the scene at the exit, with Audiberte who wished her to
come and felicitate her brother; then Audiberte’s wrath in the coach, the
abuse which the creature heaped upon her, only ended by Audiberte
humiliating herself before her, and kissing her hands for pardon; all that
and still other things danced through her memory along with the horrible
faces of the clowns, harsh noises of bells, cymbals and rattles, and the
rising up of many-colored flames about that ridiculous troubadour to
whom she had given her heart! A terror that was physical roused her at
that idea:
“No, no; never! I’d far rather die!”
All of a sudden, in the looking-glass in front of her, she caught sight
of a ghost with hollow cheeks and narrow shoulders drawn together in
front with the gesture of a person shuddering with cold. The spectre
looked a little like her, but much more like that poor Princess of Anhalt
who had so roused her curiosity and pity at Arvillard that she had
described her sad symptoms in a letter. The princess had just died at the
opening of winter.
 “Why, look—look!” She bent forward, came nearer to the glass and
recalled the inexplicable kindness that everybody down there had shown
her, the fright her mother evinced, the tenderness of old Bouchereau at
her departure—and understood! Now at last she knew what it was, she
knew the end of the game! It was here without any one to aid it. Surely it
was long enough she had been looking for its coming.
 CHAPTER XVI.
“AT THE PRODUCTS OF THE SOUTH.”
“Mlle. Hortense is very ill. Madame will receive nobody.”
For the tenth time during the ten days that had passed Audiberte had
received the same answer, motionless before that heavy-timbered door
with its knocker, the like of which can scarcely be found except beneath
the arcades of the Place Royale, a door which once shut seemed to her to
refuse forever an entrance to the old house of the Le Quesnoys.
“Very well,” said she, “I am not coming back; it must be they now
who shall call me back.”
In great agitation she set out again through the lively turmoil of that
commercial quarter, where drays laden with cases and barrels and iron
bars, noisy and flexible, were forever passing the pushcarts that rolled
under the porches and back into the courtyards where the coopers were
nailing up the cases for export. But the peasant girl was not aware of this
infernal row and of the rumbling of labor which shook the high houses to
their very topmost floors; in her venomous head a very different kind of
row was going on, a clashing of brutal thoughts and a terrible clangor of
foiled wishes. So she set forth, feeling no fatigue, and in order to
economize the ’bus fare crossed on foot the entire distance from the
Marais to Abbaye-Montmartre Street.
After a fierce and lively peregrination from one lodging to the other,
hotels and furnished apartments of all kinds, from which they were
expelled each time on account of the tabor-playing, they had just recently
made shipwreck in that quarter. It was a new house which had allured, at
the cheap prices for housewarmers, a temporary horde of girls,
Bohemians and business agents, and those families of adventurers such
as one sees at the seaports, a floating population which shows its lack of
work on the balconies, watching arrivals and departures in hopes that
there may be something to be gained for them in the flood. Fortune is
here the flood on which they cast their watchful eyes.
 The rent was very high for them to pay, especially now that the
skating-rink had failed and it was necessary to sue upon government
stamped paper for the price of Valmajour’s few appearances. But the
tabor did not bother anybody in that freshly-painted barrack whose door
was open at every hour of the night for the different crooked businesses
of the tenants—not to speak of all the quarrels and rows that were going
on. On the contrary, it was the tabor-player who was bothered. The
advertising on placards, the many-colored tights and his fine moustaches
had aroused perilous interest among the ladies of the skating-rink less
coy than that prude of a girl down there in the Marais. He was
acquainted with actors at the Batignolles, all that sweet-scented crowd
which met in a pot-house on the Boulevard Rochechouart called the
Straw-Lair. This same Straw-Lair, where people passed their time in
loafing fatly, playing cards, drinking lager beer and passing from one to
the other the scandal of the little theatres and the lowest class of
gallantry, was the enemy and the horror of Audiberte. It was the cause of
savage rages, under the stormy blows of which the two Southerners bent
their backs as under a tempest in the tropics, merely revenging
themselves by cursing their tyrant in a green skirt and talking about her
in that mysterious and hateful tone which schoolboys and servants use:
“What did she say? how much did she give you?” and playing into each
other’s hands in order to slip away behind her back. Audiberte knew this
well and watched them; she did her business outside quickly, impatient
to get home; and particularly was it so that day, because she had left
them early in the morning. As she ascended the stairs she stopped a
moment, hearing neither tabor nor shepherd’s pipe.
“Oh, the beggarly wretch, he’s off again to his Straw-Lair!”
But as she came in at the door her father ran up to her and headed
the explosion off.
“Now don’t squeal, somebody’s come to visit you; a gentleman
from the Munistry!”
The gentleman was waiting in the drawing-room; for, as it always
happens in these buildings, cheaply built and made by machinery, with
every room on each floor exactly the same, one above the other, they too
had a drawing-room hung with a cheap paper, creamy and waffled into
patterns till it looked like a dish of beaten eggs, a drawing-room which
made the peasant girl a very proud woman. Méjean was passing in
review most compassionately the Provençal furniture scattered about this
dentist’s waiting-room, full of the crude light from two windows
guiltless of curtains—the coco and the moco (tumbler-holder and lamp-
holder), the kneading-trough, the bread-basket much banged about by
house-movings and by travel—these showed their rural rustiness
alongside of the cheap gilding and wall paintings. The haughty profile of
Audiberte, very pure in its lines, surmounted by her Sunday head-dress,
which seemed just as out-of-place in the fifth story of a Parisian
apartment house, completed the feeling of pity which he had concerning
these victims of Roumestan; and so he introduced very gently the cause
of his visit.
The Minister, wishing to spare the Valmajours new misfortunes, for
which up to a certain point he felt himself responsible, sent them five
thousand francs to pay for their losses in having changed their home and
to carry them back again to their own place. He took the bills from his
purse and laid them on the old dark kneading-trough of nutwood.
“So, then, we’ll have to leave?” asked the peasant girl without
budging an inch and pondering a while.
“The Minister desires that you should go as soon as possible; he is
anxious to know that you have returned to your home as happy as you
were before.”
Old Valmajour cast his eye around at the bank-notes:
“As for me, that seems reasonable enough—de qué n’en disés?”
But she would not say anything and waited for the sequel, which
Méjean introduced by twisting and turning his purse:
“And to those five thousand francs we will add five thousand more
which are here, in order to get back again—to get back again—”
His emotion choked him. Cruel was the commission which Rosalie
had given him. Ah, how often it costs a lot to be considered a quiet-
loving, strong man; much more is demanded of such a one than of other
people! Then he added very rapidly—“the photograph of Mlle. Le
Quesnoy.”
“At last! now we have got to it. The photograph—didn’t I know it,
by heavens?” At every word she bounded up like a goat. “And so you
really believe that you can make us come from the other end of France,
that you can promise everything to us—to us who never asked for
anything—and then that you can put us out of doors like so many dogs
who have done their worst and left their dirt everywhere? Take back your
money, gentleman! You can be dead sure that we sha’n’t leave, and you
can say so there, and also that the photograph won’t be returned to them!
That’s a paper and a proof, that is. I keep it safe in my little bag; it never
leaves me and I shall show it about through Paris and what is written
upon it, so that all the world may know that all those Roumestans are no
better than a family of liars—of liars—”
She was foaming with rage.
“Mlle. Le Quesnoy is very, very ill,” said Méjean, with great
solemnity.
“Avaï!”
“She is leaving Paris, and in all probability will never return—
alive!”
Audiberte said not a word, but the silent laugh of her eyes, the
implacable no which was written upon her classic brow, on which the
hair grew low beneath the little lace head-dress, were sufficient to
warrant the firmness of her refusal. Then a temptation seized Méjean to
throw himself upon her, tear the little Indian bag from her girdle and fly
with it; still, he restrained himself, attempted a few useless
expostulations, and then, quivering with rage likewise, he said, “You will
repent of this,” and to the great regret of Father Valmajour, left the
house.
“Look out, little girl, you are going to bring us into some
misfortune!”
“Not much! It’s them that we’ll give trouble to; I am going to ask
the advice of Guilloche.”
G , .
Behind the yellow card bearing those two words, fastened on the
door which was opposite their own, was one of those terrible business
men whose entire instalment consists of an enormous leather portfolio
containing the minutes and notes of rancid lawsuits, sheets of white
paper for secret denunciations and begging letters, bits of pie-crust, a
false beard and sometimes even a hammer with which to strike
milkwomen dead, as was seen recently in a famous lawsuit. This type of
man, of whom many exist in Paris, would not be worthy of a single line
if said Guilloche, a name which was as good as a signboard when one
considered his countenance divided up into a thousand little symmetrical
wrinkles, had not added to his profession an entirely new and
characteristic department.
Guilloche did the business of penalties for schoolboys and
collegians. A poor devil of an usher, when the classes came out from
recitation, went about collecting the penalties in the way of copies to be
turned in. He stayed awake far into the night copying lines of the Æneid
or the various forms of the Greek verb luo. When there was lack of
regular business Guilloche, who was a graduate of college, harnessed
himself up for this original work, which he found fairly profitable.
Audiberte’s matter having been explained to him, he declared that it
was excellent. The Minister might be legally held up and the newspapers
might be made to come down; the photograph alone was worth a mine of
gold; only it was necessary to use time to go hither and thither and he
must have advances of money which must be paid down in good coin; as
for the Puyfourcat inheritance, that seemed to him a pure Fata Morgana,
a dictum which mortified terribly the peasant girl’s love of lucre already
so terribly tried, all the more because Valmajour, who had been much
asked to swell drawing-rooms during the first winter, no longer set foot
in a single house of the Faubourg St. Germoyne.
“So much the worse! I will work the harder, I will economize—
zou!”
That energetic little Arlesian head-dress flew about in the great new
building, ran up and down stairs, carrying from story to story her tale of
adventure wid the Menister. She excited herself, squealed, pounced
about, and then in a mysterious voice would say: “And thin there’s the
photograph,” and with a furtive and sidelong glance, such as the sellers
of photographs in the arcades employ when old libertines call for tights,
she would show the picture:
“A pretty girl, at any rate! And you have read what is written there
underneath?”
This kind of thing happened in the bosom of the temporary families
and with the roller-skating ladies of the rink or at the Straw-Lair—ladies
whom she pompously called Mme. Malvina or Mme. Éloïse, being
deeply impressed by their velvet skirts, their chemises edged with holes
for ribbons and all the implements of their business, without bothering
herself otherwise as to what that business might be. And thus the picture
of this lovely creature, so distinguished and delicate, passed through
these critical and curious defilements; they picked her to pieces; they
read laughing the silly avowal of love, until the Provençal girl took her
treasure back again and thrust it into the mouth of her money-bag with a
furious gesture and in a strangled voice exclaimed:
“Well, I guess we have got them with that!”
Zou! off she flew to the bailiff—the bailiff for the affair of the
skating-rink, the bailiff used to hunt Cadaillac, the bailiff for Roumestan.
And as if that were not sufficient for her quarrelsome disposition, she
had a host of troubles with janitors, the unending fight about the tabor-
playing, which ended this time in the exile of Valmajour to one of those
basements leased by a wine merchant where the sounding of hunting-
horns alternate with lessons in kicking and boxing. From that time forth
it was in this cellar, by the light of a gas jet which cost them so much per
hour, and while looking about at the vests and fencing-gloves and copper
horns hung on the wall, that the tabor-player passed his hours of
exercise, pale and lonely like a captive, sending forth from below the
pavement all kinds of variations on the shepherd’s pipe, not at all unlike
the mournful and piercing notes of a baker’s cricket.
One day Audiberte received an invitation to call upon the
Commissary of Police in her quarter. She ran thither quickly, quite
certain that it referred to her cousin Puyfourcat, and entered smiling with
her head-dress tossing; but after a quarter of an hour she crept out,
overwhelmed by a very peasant-like horror of the policeman, who, at his
very first word, had forced her to deliver up the photograph and sign a
receipt for ten thousand francs in which she absolutely renounced all and
any suits at law. All the same she obstinately refused to leave, insisted
upon believing in the genius of her brother and kept always alive in the
depths of her memory the delicious astonishment caused one winter
evening by that long file of carriages passing through the courtyard of
the Ministry, where all the windows were alight.
When she came back she notified her two men, who were much
more frightened than she was, that not another word was to be spoken
about that business; but she never piped a word about the money.
Guilloche, who suspected that there was some money, employed every
means in his power to get a portion of it, and having obtained only the
slenderest commission, felt a frightful rancor in regard to the Valmajours.
 “Well,” said he one morning to Audiberte while she was brushing
on the staircase the finest clothes belonging to the musician, who was
still in bed, “well, I hope you are satisfied at last. He is dead!”
“Who is dead?”
“Why, Puyfourcat, your cousin; it is in the paper.”
She gave a screech, rushed into the apartment, calling aloud and
almost in tears:
“Father! Brother! Hurry quick, the inheritance!”
As all of them clustered terribly moved and panting in a circle about
that infernal fellow Guilloche, the latter slowly unfolded the Journal
Officiel and in a very leisurely manner read to them as follows:
“‘On this first day of October 1876, the Court at Mostaganem has
ordered the publication and advertisement of the following inheritances
at the order of the Ministry of the Interior.—Popelino (Louis), day-
laborer—’ No, it isn’t that one—‘Puyfourcat (Dosithée)—’”
“Yes, that’s him,” said Audiberte.
The old bird thought it was necessary to wipe his eyes a bit.
“Pécaïré! Poor Dosithée—!”
“——died at Mostaganem the 14th of January, 1874, born at
Valmajour in the commune of Aps—”
In her eagerness and impatience the peasant girl asked:
“How much is it?”
“Three francs, thirty-five cintimes!” cried Guilloche in the voice of
a fruit-peddler; and leaving in their hands the paper, in order that they
might thoroughly verify the disappointment which had come to them, he
flew off with a roar of laughter which seemed infectious, for it rang from
story to story down into the street and delighted all that great big village
called Montmartre, where the legend of the Valmajours’ inheritance had
been widely circulated.
The inheritance from Puyfourcat, only three francs thirty-five!
Audiberte pretended to laugh at it harder than the others, but the frightful
desire for vengeance upon the Roumestans, who were in her eyes
responsible for all their troubles, burned within her and now only
increased in fury and looked about for some pretext or means, for the
first weapon that lay to hand.
Most singular was the countenance of papa during this disaster. The
while his daughter pined away with weariness and fury, and the captive
musician became paler with every day passed in his cellar, papa,
expanding like a rose, careless of what happened, did not even show his
old professional envy and jealousy; he seemed to have arranged some
quiet existence for himself outside and away from his family. Hardly had
he stowed away the last mouthful of breakfast than off he went; and
sometimes in the morning, when she was brushing his clothes, she
noticed that a dried fig or a prune or some preserve or other would fall
out of his pockets, and when she asked how they came there, the old
fellow had one story or another for an explanation.
He had met a peasant woman from their country in the street, or he
had run across a man from down there who was coming to see them.
Audiberte tossed her head: “Avaï! Wait till I follow you once!”
The truth was that while strolling about Paris the old man had
discovered in the St. Denis quarter a big shop of food-stuffs, where he
had entered, lured by the sign and by the temptations of the exotic shop-
front, which was full of colored fruits and of silver and painted papers; it
made a brilliant bit of color in the foggy, populous street. This shop,
where he had ended by becoming a crony and friend of the family, was
well known to Southerners quartered in Paris and had for its sign:
A P M .
“At the products of the South”—never was a sign more truthful.
Everything in that shop was the product of the South, from the
shopkeepers, M. and Mme. Mèfre, who were two products of the Fat
South, having the prominent nose of Roumestan, the flaring eyes, the
accent, the phrases and demonstrative welcome of Provence, down to
their shop-boys, who were familiar and called people by their first names
and did not hesitate in their guttural voices to call out to the desk: “I say,
Mèfre, where did youse put the sausages?”—yes, down to the little
Mèfre children, whining and dirty, who passed their lives amid a
constant menace of being disembowelled or scalped or made into soup,
but who nevertheless kept right on sticking their little dirty fingers into
all the open barrels; nay, even to the buyers, gesticulating and gossiping
by the hour together in order at last to buy a barquette (boat shaped cake)
for two cents, or taking their seats on chairs in a circle in order to discuss
the merits of garlic sausage or of pepper sausage. Here one might listen
to the “none the less, at least, come now, other ways”—the whole
vocabulary, in fact, belonging to Aunt Portal, exchanged in the most
noisy voices, whilst the “dear brother” in a dyed-over black coat, a friend
of the family, haggled over some salt fish, and the flies, the vast horde of
flies, drawn hither by all the sugar of these fruits and the candies and the
almost Oriental pastries, buzzed and boomed right in the middle of the
winter, kept alive by that steady heat. And when some busy Parisian
grew impatient at the attendants all down at heel and the sublime
indifference these shop people showed, continuing their gossip from one
counter to the other whilst weighing and doing up things all wrong, it
was a sight to see how that Parisian was put in his place by some remark
uttered in the strongest country accent:
“Té! vé! if you are in a hurry the door is always open, you know,
and the tram-cars are passing in front of the shop.”
Father Valmajour was received with open arms by this gang of
compatriots. M. and Mme. Mèfre remembered that they had seen him in
the old time at the Fair of Beaucaire in a competition of tabor-players.
Between old people from the South that Fair at Beaucaire, now no
more and existing merely as a name, has remained like a Masonic bond
of brotherhood. In our Southern provinces it was the fairy-tale for the
whole year, the one distraction for all those narrow lives; people got
ready for it a long time in advance, and for a long time after they talked
about it. It formed a reward which could be promised to wife and
children, and if it was not possible to take them along, one might bring
them a bit of Spanish lace or a toy, which took little place in one’s bag.
The Beaucaire Fair, moreover, under pretext of business, meant a whole
month or a fortnight at least of the free, exuberant and unexpected life of
a camp of gypsies. One got a bed here or there from the citizens or in the
shops or on top of desks, or else in the open street under the canvas hood
of wagons or even below the warm light of the July stars.
O, for the business without the boredom of the shop, matters treated
while one dines, or at the door in shirt sleeves, or at the booths ranged
along the Pré, on the banks of the Rhône! The river itself was nothing
but a moving fair-ground, supporting its boats of all shapes, its lahuts,
lute shaped boats with lateen sails which came from Arles, Marseilles,
Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, filled with wines, anchovies, oranges
and cork, decorated with banners and standards and streamers which
sounded in the fresh wind and reflected their colors in the swiftly
flowing water. And what a clamor there was in that variegated crowd of
Spaniards, Sardinians, Greeks in long tunics and embroidered slippers,
Armenians with their furred hats and Turks with their befrogged jackets,
their fans and wide trousers of gray linen! All these were jammed
together in the open-air restaurants, the booths for children’s toys and
canes and umbrellas, for jewelry and Oriental pastils and caps. And then
to think of what was called the “fine Sunday,” that is to say, the first
Sunday after the opening of the fair—the orgies on the quays and the
boats and in the famous restaurants, such as La Vignasse or the Grand
Jardin or the Café Thibaut! Those who have once seen that fair have
always felt a home-sickness for it to the end of their days.
One felt free and easy at the shop of the Mèfre couple, somewhat as
at the Beaucaire Fair. And as a matter of fact, in its picturesque disorder
the shop did resemble an improvised grand fair for the sale of foreign
and southern products. Here all full and bending were sacks of meal in a
golden powder, dried peas as big and hard as buck-shot and big chestnuts
all wrinkled and dusty looking, like little faces of old female charcoal-
burners; there stood jars of black and green olives preserved in the
Picholini manner, tin cans of red oil with the taste of fruit, barrels of
preserves from Apt made of melon rinds, of figs, of quinces and of
apricots—all the remains of fruit from a fair dropped into molasses. Up
there on the shelves among the salted goods and preserves, in a thousand
bottles and a thousand tin boxes, were the special relishes belonging to
each city—the shells and little ships of Nîmes, the nougat of Montélimar,
the ducklings and biscuits of Aix—all in gilded envelopes ticketed and
signed.
Then there were the early vegetables, an outpouring of Southern
gardens without shadows, in which the fruits hanging in slender green
foliage have a factitious look of jewels—firm looking jujubes with a fine
sheen of newly lacquered walnut side by side with pale azeroles, figs of
every sort, sweet lemons, green or scarlet peppers, great big swelling
melons, enormous onions with flowerlike hearts, muscat grapes with
long berries so transparent that the flesh of them trembles like wine in a
flask, rows of bananas striped black and yellow, regular landslides of
oranges and pomegranates with their red gold tones, like little bombs
made of red copper with their fuses issuing from a small crenelated
crown. And finally, everywhere, on the walls and ceilings, on both sides