Samual Brohl & Company(赛穆王·布洛公司)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 736.05KB 191 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

SAMUEL BROHL &

COMPANY

VICTOR CHERBULIEZ

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

CHAPTER I

Were the events of this nether sphere governed by the calculus of

probabilities, Count Abel Larinski and Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz would

almost unquestionably have arrived at the end of their respective careers

without ever having met. Count Larinski lived in Vienna, Austria; Mlle.

Moriaz never had been farther from Paris than Cormeilles, where she went

every spring to remain throughout the fine weather. Neither at Cormeilles

nor at Paris had she ever heard of Count Larinski; and he, on his part, was

wholly unaware of the existence of Mlle. Moriaz. His mind was occupied

with a gun of his own invention, which should have made his fortune, and

which had not made it. He had hoped that this warlike weapon, a true

/chef-d'oeuvre/, in his opinion superior in precision and range to any other

known, would be appreciated, according to its merits, by competent judges,

and would one day be adopted for the equipment of the entire Austro-

Hungarian infantry. By means of unremitting perseverance, he had

succeeded in obtaining the appointment of an official commission to

examine it. The commission decided that the Larinski musket possessed

certain advantages, but that it had three defects: it was too heavy, the

breech became choked too rapidly with oil from the lubricator, and the

cost of manufacture was too high. Count Abel did not lose courage. He

gave himself up to study, devoted nearly two years to perfecting his

invention, and applied all his increased skill to rendering his gun lighter

and less costly. When put under test, the new firearm burst, and this

vexatious incident ruined forever the reputation of the Larinski gun. Far

from becoming enriched, the inventor had sunk his expenses, his advances

of every kind; he had recklessly squandered both revenue and capital,

which, to be sure, was not very considerable.

Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz had a more fortunate destiny than Count

Larinski. She did not plume herself on having invented a new gun, nor did

she depend upon her ingenuity for a livelihood; she had inherited from her

mother a yearly income of about a hundred thousand livres, which enabled

her to enjoy life and make others happy, for she was very charitable. She

loved the world without loving it too much; she knew how to do without it,

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

having abundant resources within herself, and being of a very independent

disposition. During the winter she went out a great deal into society, and

received freely at home. Her father, member of the Institute and Professor

of Chemistry at the College of France, was one of those /savants/ who

enjoy dining out; he had a taste also for music and for the theatre.

Antoinette accompanied him everywhere; they scarcely ever remained at

home except upon their reception evenings; but with the return of the

swallows it was a pleasure to Mlle. Moriaz to fly to Cormeilles and there

pass seven months, reduced to the society of Mlle. Moiseney, who, after

having been her instructress, had become her /demoiselle de compagnie/.

She lived pretty much in the open air, walking about in the woods, reading,

or painting; and the woods, her books, and her paint-brushes, to say

nothing of her poor people, so agreeably occupied her time that she never

experienced a quarter of an hour's /ennui/. She was too content with her lot

to have the slightest inclination to change it; therefore she was in no hurry

to marry. She had completed twenty-four years of her existence, had

refused several desirable offers, and wished nothing better than to retain

her maidenhood. It was the sole article concerning which this heiress had

discussions with those around her. When her father took it into his head to

grow angry and cry, "You must!" she would burst out laughing;

whereupon he would laugh also, and say: "I'm not the master here; in fact,

I am placed in the position of a ploughman arguing with a priest."

It is very dangerous to tax one's brains too much when one dines out

frequently. During the winter of 1875, M. Moriaz had undertaken an

excess of work; he was overdriven, and his health suffered. He was

attacked by one of those anemic disorders of which we hear so much

nowadays, and which may be called /la maladie a la mode/. He was

obliged to break in upon his daily routine, employ an assistant, and early

in July his physician ordered him to set out for Engadine, and try the

chalybeate water-cure at Saint Moritz. The trip from Paris to Saint Moritz

cannot be made without passing through Chur. It was at Chur that Mlle.

Antoinette Moriaz, who accompanied her father, met for the first time

Count Abel Larinski. When the decree of Destiny goes forth, the spider

and the fly must inevitably meet.

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

Abel Larinski had arrived at Chur from Vienna, having taken the route

through Milan and across the Splugen Pass. Although he was very short of

funds, upon reaching the capital of the canton of Grisons he had put up at

the Hotel Steinbock, the best and most expensive in the place. It was his

opinion that he owed this mark of respect to Count Larinski; such duties

he held to be very sacred, and he fulfilled them religiously. He was in a

very melancholy mood, and set out for a promenade in order to divert his

mind. In crossing the Plessur Bridge, he fixed his troubled eyes on the

muddy waters of the stream, and he felt almost tempted to take the fatal

leap; but in such a project there is considerable distance between the

dream and its fulfilment, and Count Larinski experienced at this juncture

that the most melancholy man in the world may find it difficult to conquer

his passion for living.

He had no reason to feel very cheerful. He had quitted Vienna in order

to betake himself to the Saxon Casino, where /roulette/ and /trente- et-

quarante/ are played. His ill-luck would have it that he stopped on the way

at Milan, and fell in with a circle of ill repute, where this most imprudent

of men played and lost. There remained to him just enough cash to carry

him to Saxon; but what can be accomplished in a casino when one has

empty pockets? Before crossing the Splugen he had written to a petty Jew

banker of his acquaintance for money. He counted but little on the

compliance of this Hebrew, and this was why he paused five minutes to

contemplate the Plessur, after which he retraced his steps. Twenty minutes

later he was crossing a public square, ornamented with a pretty Gothic

fountain, and seeing before him a cathedral, he hastened to enter it.

The cathedral of Chur possesses, among other curiosities, a painting

by Albert Durer, a St. Lawrence on the gridiron, attributed to Holbein, a

piece of the true cross, and some relics of St. Lucius and his sister Ernesta.

Count Abel only accorded a wandering attention to either St. Lucius or St.

Lawrence. Scarcely had he made his way into the nave of the building,

when he beheld something that appeared to him far more interesting than

paintings or relics. An English poet has said that at times there is revealed

to us a glimpse of paradise in a woman's face, and it was such a rare

blessing that was at this moment vouchsafed unto Count Larinski. He was

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

not a romantic man, and yet he remained for some moments motionless,

rooted to the spot in admiration. Was it a premonition of his destiny? The

fact is that, in beholding for the first time Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz, for it

was none other than she who thus riveted his attention, he experienced an

inexplicable surprise, a thrilling of the heart, such as he never before had

experienced. In his first impression of this charming girl he made one

slight mistake. He divined at once that the man by whom she was

accompanied, who had gray hair, a broad, open brow, vivacious eyes,

shaded by beautiful, heavy eye-brows, belonged to some learned fraternity;

but he imagined that this individual with a white cravat, who had evidently

preserved his freshness of heart, although past sixty years of age, was the

fortunate suitor of the beautiful girl by his side.

There are some women whom it is impossible not to gaze upon.

Wherever Mlle. Antoinette Moriaz appeared she was the object of

universal observation: first, because she was charming; and, then, because

she had a way of her own of dressing and of arranging her hair, a peculiar

movement of the head, a grace of carriage, which inevitably must attract

notice. There were those who made so bold as to assert that she assumed

certain little peculiarities solely for the purpose of attracting the chance

observer. Do not believe a word of it. She was altogether indifferent to

public opinion and consulted her own taste alone, which was certainly

impregnated with a touch of audacity; but she did not seek to appear

audacious--she merely acted according to her natural bent. Observing her

from a distance, people were apt to fancy her affected, and somewhat

inclined to be fantastic; but on approaching her, their minds were speedily

disabused of this fancy. The purity of her countenance, her air of

refinement and thorough modesty, speedily dispelled any suspicious

thoughts, and those who had for a moment harboured them would say

mentally, "Pardon me, mademoiselle, I mistook." Such, at least, was the

mental comment of Count Abel, as she passed close by him on leaving the

church. Her father was telling her something that made her smile; this

smile was that of a young girl just budding into womanhood, who has

nothing yet to conceal from her guardian angel. Count Larinski left the

church after her, and followed her with his eyes as she crossed the square.

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

On returning to the hotel he had a curiosity to satisfy. He questioned one

of the /garcons/, who pointed out to him in the hotel register for travellers

the following entry: "M. Moriaz, member of the Institute of France, and

his daughter, from Paris, /en route/ for Saint Moritz." "And where then?"

he asked himself; then dismissed the subject from his mind.

When he had dined, he repaired to the post-office to inquire for a letter

he was expecting from Vienna. He found it, and returned to shut himself

up in his chamber, where he tore open the envelope with a feverish hand.

This letter, written in a more peculiar than felicitous French, was the reply

of the Jew banker. It read as follows:

"M. LE COMTE:

"Although you both write and understand German very well, you do

not like to read it, and therefore I write to you in French. It grieves me

deeply not to have it in my power to satisfy your honoured demand.

Business is very dull. It is impossible for me to advance you another florin,

or even to renew your note, which falls due shortly. I am the father of a

family; it pains me to be compelled to remind you of this.

"I wish to tell you quite freely what I think. I did believe in your gun,

but I believe in it no longer, no one believes in it any more. When strong,

it was too heavy; when you made it lighter, it was no longer strong. What

came next? You know it burst. Beware how you further perfect it, or it will

explode whenever it becomes aware that any one is looking at it. This

accursed gun has eaten up the little you had, and some of my savings

besides, although I have confidence that you will, at least, pay me the

interest due on that. It grieves me to tell you so, M. de Comte, but all

inventors are more or less crack-brained, and end in the hospital. For the

love of God, leave guns as they are, and invent nothing more, or you will

go overboard, and there will be no one to fish you out."

Abel Larinski paused at this place. He put his letter down on the table,

and, turning round in his arm-chair, with a savage air, his eye fixed on a

distant corner of the room, he fell to thus soliloquizing in a sepulchral

voice:

"Do you hear, idiot? This old knave is right. Accursed be the day when

the genius of invention thrilled your sublime brain! A grand discovery you

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

have made, forsooth! What have I gained from it? Grand illusions, grand

discomfitures! What hath it availed me that I passed whole nights

discussing with you breech-loaders, screw-plates, tumbrels, sockets,

bridges, ovoid balls, and spring-locks? What fruits have I gained from

these refreshing conversations? You foresaw everything, my great man,

except that one little thing which great men so often fail to see, that

mysterious something, I know not what, which makes success. When you

spoke to me, in your slow, monotonous tones, when you fixed upon me

your melancholy gaze, I should have been able to read in your eyes that

you were only a fool. The devil take thee and thy gun, thy gun and thee;

hollow head, head full of chimeras, true Pole, true Larinski!"

To whom was Count Abel speaking? To a phantom? To his double? He

alone knew. When he had uttered the last words, he resumed the perusal of

his letter, which ended thus:

"Will you permit me to give you a piece of advice, M. le Comte, a

good little piece of advice? I have known you for three years, and have

taken much interest in your welfare. You invent guns, which, when they

are strong, lack lightness. I beg your pardon, but I do not comprehend you,

M. le Comte. The name you bear is excellent; the head you carry on your

shoulders is superb, and it is the general opinion that you resemble /Faust/;

but neither name nor head does you any good. Leave the guns as they are,

and bestow your attention upon women; they, and they alone, can draw

you out of the deep waters where you are now floundering. There is no

time to lose. I beg your pardon, but you must be thirty years old, and

perhaps a little more. This /diable/ of a gun has made you lose three

valuable years.

"It pains me, M. le Comte, to be compelled to remind you that the

little note falls due shortly. I have had the value of the bracelet you left

with me as a pledge estimated; it is not worth a thousand florins, as you

believed; it is a piece of antiquity that has a value to only those who can

indulge in a caprice for fancy articles, and such caprices are rare nowadays,

the time for such is past.

"I am, M. le Comte, with much respect, your humble and obedient

servant,

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

"MOSES GULDENTHAL."

Abel Larinski turned once more in his chair. He crumpled up between

his fingers the letter of M. Moses Guldenthal, saying to himself as he did

so, that the Guldenthals are often very clear-sighted folks. "Ay, to be sure,"

thought he, "this Hebrew is right, I have lost three valuable years. I have

had fever, and my eyes have been clouded; but, Heaven be praised! The

charm is broken, the illusion fled, I am cured --saved! Farewell, my

chimera, I am no longer thy dupe! Many thanks, my dear friend: I return to

you your gun; do with it as it seemeth best to you."

His eyes suddenly fell on his own reflection in the mirror above the

chimney-piece, and he regarded it fixedly for a few moments.

"The semblance truly of an inventor," he resumed, mournfully smiling.

"This pale, emaciated face; these deep-set eyes, with dark circles about

them; these hollow, cadaverous cheeks! The three years have indeed left

their traces. Bah! a little rest in the Alpine pastures, and /Faust/ will

become rejuvenated."

He seized a pen, and wrote the following reply:

"You are truly kind, my dear Guldenthal: you refuse me the miserable

florins, but you give me in their stead a little piece of advice that is worth

a fortune. Unluckily, I am not capable of following it. Noble souls like

ours comprehend each other with half a word, and you are a poet

whenever it suits you. When in the course of the day you have transacted a

neat little piece of business, after having rubbed your hands until you have

almost deprived them of skin, you tune your violin, which you play like an

angel, and you draw from it such delightful strains that your ledger and

your cash-box fall to weeping with emotion. I, too, am a musician, and my

music is the fair sex. But, alas! women never can be for me other than an

adorable inutility, a part of the dream of my life. Your dreams yield you a

handsome percentage, as I have sorrowfully experienced; my dreams yield

me nothing, and therefore it is that they are dear to me.

"I must prohibit--understand me clearly--your disposing of the trinket

I left with you; we have the weakness, we Poles, of clinging to our family

relics. Set your mind at rest; before the end of the month I shall have

returned to Vienna, and will honour the dear little note. One day you will

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

go down on your knees to beg of me to loan you a thousand florins, and I

will astonish you with my ingratitude. May the God of Abraham, of Isaac,

and of Jacob, have you in his holy keeping, my dear Guldenthal!"

As he finished his letter, he heard the sound of harps and violins. Some

itinerant musicians were giving a concert in the hotel-garden, which was

lit up as bright as day. Abel opened his window, and leaned on his elbows,

looking out. The first object that presented itself to his eyes was Mlle.

Moriaz, promenading one of the long garden-walks, leaning on her father's

arm. Many eyes were fixed on her--we have already said it was difficult

not to gaze upon her--but no one contemplated her with such close

attention as Count Larinski. He never once lost sight of her.

"Is she beautiful? Is she even pretty?" he queried within himself. "I

cannot quite make up my mind, but I am very sure that she is charming.

Like my bracelet, this is a fancy article. She is a little thin, and her

shoulders are too vigorously fashioned for her waist, which is slender and

supple as a reed; but, such as she is, she has not her equal. Her walk, her

carriage, resemble nothing I ever have seen before. I can well imagine that

when she appears in the streets of Paris people turn to look after her, but

no one would have the audacity to follow her. How old is she? Twenty-

four or twenty-five years, I should say. Why is she not married? Who is

this withered, pinched-looking fright of a personage who trots at her side

like a poodle-dog? Probably some /demoiselle de compagnie/. And there

comes her /femme de chambre/, a very spruce little lass, bringing her a

shawl, which the /demoiselle de compagnie/ hastens to put over her

shoulders. She allows it to be done with the air of one who is accustomed

to being waited upon. Mlle. Moriaz is an heiress. Why, then, is she not

married?"

Count Larinski pursued his soliloquy as long as Mlle. Moriaz

promenaded in the garden. As soon as she re-entered the hotel, it appeared

to him that the garden had become empty, and that the musicians were

playing out of tune. He closed his window. He gave up his plan of starting

the next day for Saxon. He had decided that he would set out for Saint

Moritz, to pass there at least two or three days. He said to himself, "It

seems absurd; but who can tell?"

SAMUEL BROHL & COMPANY

Thereupon he proceeded to investigate the state of his finances, and he

weighed and re-weighed his purse, which was very light. Formerly Count

Larinski had possessed a very pretty collection of jewellery. He had

looked upon this as a reserve fund, to which he would have recourse only

in cases of extreme distress. Alas! there remained to him now only two

articles of his once considerable store--the bracelet that was in the hands

of M. Guldenthal, and a diamond ring that he wore on his finger. He

decided that, before quitting Chur, he would borrow money on this ring, or

that he would try to sell it.

He remained some time seated at the foot of his bed, dangling his legs

to and fro, his eyes closed. He had closed them, in order to better call up a

vision of Mlle. Moriaz, and he repeated the words: "It seems absurd; but

who can tell? The fact is, we can know nothing of a surety, and anything

may happen." Then he recalled one of Goethe's poems, entitled "Vanitas!

vanitatum vanitas!" and he recited several time in German these two lines:

"Nun hab' ich mein' Sach' auf nichts gestellt, Und mein gehort die

ganze Welt!"

This literally signifies, "Now that I no longer count on anything, the

whole world is mine." Abel Larinski recited these lines with a purity of

accent that would have astonished M. Moses Guldenthal.

M. Moriaz, after wishing his daughter good-night, and imprinting a

kiss upon her brow, as was his custom, had retired to his chamber. He was

preparing for bed, when there came a knock at his door. Opening this, he

saw before him a fair-haired youth, who rushed eagerly towards him,

seized both his hands, and pressed them with effusion. M. Moriaz

disengaged his hands, and regarded the intruder with a bewildered air.

"How?" cried the latter. "You do not know me? So sure as you are one

of the most illustrious chemists of the day, I am Camille Langis, son of

your best friend, a young man of great expectations, who admires you

truly, who has followed you here, and who is now ready to begin all over

again. There, my dear master, do you recognise me?"

"Ay, to be sure I recognise you, my boy," replied M. Moriaz, "although,

to tell the truth, you have greatly changed. When you left us you were a

mere youth."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SAMUELBROHL&COMPANY1SAMUELBROHL&COMPANYVICTORCHERBULIEZSAMUELBROHL&COMPANY2CHAPTERIWeretheeventsofthisnetherspheregovernedbythecalculusofprobabilities,CountAbelLarinskiandMlle.AntoinetteMoriazwouldalmostunquestionablyhavearrivedattheendoftheirrespectivecareerswithouteverhavingmet.CountLarinskilivedi...

展开>> 收起<<

Samual Brohl & Company(赛穆王·布洛公司).pdf

共191页,预览39页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Samual Brohl & Company(赛穆王·布洛公司)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: