The weight of the name

The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but one thing,--the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a clandestine rendezvous.

It was true, but--a circumstance which would have made the officers of the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a lieutenant burst with laughter--he had this rendezvous with a woman with whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything from her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one occasion, to speak to her of his sentiments.

How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name--one of the best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great offices at court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at twenty-nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted men, emotion neutralized vanity.

He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman in question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak, languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on, uplifted by a proximate hope.

Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him the dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid, pearl-gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François soared aloft in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large private garden waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing wall, and, as far as one could see, the populous Boulevard de Montparnasse stretched away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with cabs and drays.

In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which, although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of which that street with its ancien-régime name contained some half-score or more a quarter of a century since. Alas! they are vanishing one by one. As soon as the owner of one of them dies, the crowbars of the demolishers set to work. An aristocratic plaything of stone is razed to the ground. In its place rises one of those vulgar income-producing houses, on whose threshold one finds it difficult to imagine the lingering of such a lover as this. To be sure, it is simply prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment, when he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his love.