Unconscious Comedians | Page 4

the
administration, instigated by the abutters on the river banks, had
meddled. The removal of the dam threatened the existence of Gazonal's
manufactory. In 1845, Gazonal considered his cause as wholly lost; the

secretary of the Master of Petitions, charged with the duty of drawing
up the report, had confided to him that the said report would assuredly
be against him, and his own lawyer confirmed the statement. Gazonal,
though commander of the National Guard in his own town and one of
the most capable manufacturers of the department, found himself of so
little account in Paris, and he was, moreover, so frightened by the costs
of living and the dearness of even the most trifling things, that he kept
himself, all this time, secluded in his shabby lodgings. The Southerner,
deprived of his sun, execrated Paris, which he called a manufactory of
rheumatism. As he added up the costs of his suit and his living, he
vowed within himself to poison the prefect on his return, or to
minotaurize him. In his moments of deepest sadness he killed the
prefect outright; in gayer mood he contented himself with
minotaurizing him.
One morning as he ate his breakfast and cursed his fate, he picked up a
newspaper savagely. The following lines, ending an article, struck
Gazonal as if the mysterious voice which speaks to gamblers before
they win had sounded in his ear: "Our celebrated landscape painter,
Leon de Lora, lately returned from Italy, will exhibit several pictures at
the Salon; thus the exhibition promises, as we see, to be most brilliant."
With the suddenness of action that distinguishes the sons of the sunny
South, Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the street, from the street to
a street-cab, and drove to the rue de Berlin to find his cousin.
Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he
invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris, but he was
now engaged in a matter which did not allow him to receive his cousin
at the present moment. Gazonal, like a true Southerner, recounted all
his troubles to the valet.
The next day at ten o'clock, Gazonal, much too well-dressed for the
occasion (he had put on his bottle-blue coat with brass buttons, a frilled
shirt, a white waistcoat and yellow gloves), awaited his amphitryon a
full hour, stamping his feet on the boulevard, after hearing from the
master of the cafe that "these gentlemen" breakfasted habitually
between eleven and twelve o'clock.

"Between eleven and half-past," he said when he related his adventures
to his cronies in the provinces, "two Parisians dressed in simple
frock-coats, looking like NOTHING AT ALL, called out when they
saw me on the boulevard, 'There's our Gazonal!'"
The speaker was Bixiou, with whom Leon de Lora had armed himself
to "bring out" his provincial cousin, in other words, to make him pose.
"'Don't be vexed, cousin, I'm at your service!' cried out that little Leon,
taking me in his arms," related Gazonal on his return home. "The
breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the
number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must earn
their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter THIRTY
SOUS--the price of a whole day's work!"
During this monstrous breakfast--advisedly so called in view of six
dozen Osten oysters, six cutlets a la Soubise, a chicken a la Marengo,
lobster mayonnaise, green peas, a mushroom pasty, washed down with
three bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of Champagne, plus coffee and
liqueurs, to say nothing of relishes--Gazonal was magnificent in his
diatribes against Paris. The worthy manufacturer complained of the
length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the
indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold, the
rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he
bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy
to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to
end.
"My lawsuit," he said in his Southern accent and rolling his r's, "is a
very simple thing; they want my manufactory. I've employed here in
Paris a dolt of a lawyer, to whom I give twenty francs every time he
opens an eye, and he is always asleep. He's a slug, who drives in his
coach, while I go afoot and he splashes me. I see now I ought to have
had a carriage! On the other hand, that Council of State are a pack of
do-nothings, who leave their duties to little scamps every one of whom
is bought up by our prefect. That's my lawsuit! They want my
manufactory! Well, they'll get it! and they