The Nabob by Alphonse Daudet
page 35 of 516 (06%)
page 35 of 516 (06%)
|
must be at the Cabinet Council."
He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of ambitious diplomacy. Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their last day Jenkins's clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men and women of the world. After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d'Antin and the Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold, tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself. "Mme. Constance is at mass," he said, "and Mademoiselle is in the studio quite alone. We have been at work since six o'clock this morning," added the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth. Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the |
|