The Crime of the Impasse de l'Enfant Jésus

1

Huysbroeck the painter sat in his studio. It was a disgusting world: Red Thérèse had demanded her week's money, the little savage! Ah, but her curling ashen blonde hair; her dead white face, and its thin splash of red; her animal lips, and the strong white teeth of her! Her supple muscular body, that he so loved to paint! Yet because she demanded her week's money, he had turned her out of the studio.

He had—yes, he had struck her. Only with a paintbrush (for look you! reader, this Huysbroeck was a weak man), but yet a blow. The paint—terre verte—had stained her bare shoulder; she would not let him cleanse it. "I know something to wipe that well away," she had snarled, caught up her shawl, and run down the stairs. Bah! She would come back.

But—would he be there? The outlook was not promising for the painter.

To look at the studio on would not have guessed his embarrassment. True, the quarter is not fashionable; the impasse is the haunt of characters dubious and worse; but the house stood alone, lofty and commodious, well-appointed in every respect. The studio was a model of luxury; money could do no more. That money, having supplied the studio, could not supply the painter, was not the fault of money's quantity, but of its quality. Money cannot buy genius or intelligence.

Arsène Huysbroeck was really a bad painter. Years of copying the most horrible chromolithographs could not have taught any ordinary painter the famous smoothness of his canvasses. It was a very genius of badness that informed his work. So too the shoddy sentimentality of his subjects, his habit of making his pictures speak—either to tell a complete Bow Bells novelette to preach a prig's sermon or to ask an absurd question as to its own meaning—all these things endeared him to the highest authorities on art. Almost alone among French painters, his works were extremely popular in England. The bob-a-nob exhibition in Bond Street had put the seal on his fame by some discreet epigram about combining the noble enthusiasms of Sir Noel Paton and the artistic restraint of the Honourable John Collier.

"How true!" thought the suburbs. "How choicely expressed!" said Bayswater. Park Lane had him in to paint the already too much painted.

He was known, too, as the perpetrator of the portrait of ex-President Sisse, whose term at the Elysée had so tragically and mysteriously closed. Huysbroeck had been a genuine mourner at the great funeral; for in Sisse he had lost an intimate friend and generous patron. In certain obscure ways he had repaid his benefactor; the President had found him a useful tool in various affairs—hostile rumour said, affairs that the great man himself could not appear in them.

After the President's death commissions had not been quite so frequent. Expenses had increased. Madame Huysbroeck had presented him with two more children; and the painter cursed the name of Zola. A book like Fécondité ought to be suppressed. Pornography! Filth! and they would take this dog's bones to the Panthéon! Freemason! Jew! Canaille!

An Italian gentleman living in Rome drew a regular income from our painter, thanks to the very vagueness of the threat, for Huysbroeck maintained in his own soul a skilful torturer. Zélie's milliner was really too outrageous, and Madame Huysbroeck's name was Aline.

I must think, he said aloud, throwing down the papers he had been morosely studying, I must think of a jolly good lie!

(I believe I mentioned that Huysbroeck was a weak man.)

2

As he sat moodily revolving the possibilities of the situation the door opened and his family appeared. Madame Dupont, his mother-in-law, was a cunning ole peasant woman from Rouen, her blank eyes beady and bright, her face a mass of wrinkles; all the art of the beauty doctor and the milliner—who had worked with set teeth at it!—had failed to persuade those features to resemble the ideal combination of a young coquette at the Bal Tabarin with a duchess of the ancienne régime.

Madame Huysbroeck followed her into the studio. In great contrast to her mother, she was a plump, fluffy blonde, considerable above the average height. She was dressed gorgeously in a broidered walking costume of dove-coloured cloth with a hem of black and scarlet braid, echoed by similar devices at her wrists and breast. She wore an immense hat of white straw with a scarlet chiffon trimming and an ample tuft of black eagle's feathers.

Her daughter Félise followed her, a clear throwback to old Madame Dupont. Her small black eyes, her petite figure, her straight black hair, all echoed the old harridan. She was sixteen years old, but as undeveloped as a child of twelve, which was just as well for her. She would not be allowed to look sixteen for another ten years yet.

"I thought I would come and show you my new hat, Arsène; we are going to the races."

Madame curtsied.

"Very nice, Hélène, but not very patriotic!"

"Eh, why?"

"The colours, my dearest!"

"Ah, maman," broke in the child, clapping her hands, "maman is a German!"

"What nonsense!" said Madame Huysbroeck angrily. "And you, child, be quiet!"

She was furious: she wanted compliments, for she was herself a little doubtful about the perfect taste of her costume; and she was getting raillery.

Arsène, a man of peace, hastened to soothe her.

"The hat is beautiful, astonishing, soul-shaking," said he. Her mother joined him. "And for the colours, that is an omen. Back all the German horses, my daughter."

Arsène jumped up, slapping his fat thigh. "Good little maman," said he, running to the old woman and kissing her. "It is an omen! Eureka!" and he went dancing about the studio; a great idea ha struck him.

Hélène was annoyed again; she was "not there." "Come," she said, "we are late, let us be off." Out she swept, and the two little women after her.

"Good bye, black eagle!" laughed Arsène, "if you cost a hundred francs you shall earn a hundred thousand."

"Come, let us investigate the affair in detail!" He took down from a shelf a portfolio, and studied it intently for a few minutes. Satisfied, he went off to the post office and sent a telegram to a certain Socialist newspaper in Berlin: "Can you tell me anything about von Hühne?" and got he extremely mysterious reply: "The same. Proof enough to sink a warship."

But Arsène was very satisfied. The same evening he wrote a charming little note to an aristocratic friend, by name of Comte de la Souricière, inviting him next day to a little al fresco lunch at the Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne.

Arsène was early at the restaurant, and as he sat sipping an apéritif he patted cheerfully the pocket-book which held the telegrams. "My friend," he said, referring to the pocket-book, "you are going to put on flesh: you will be very, very fat!"

3

The Comte de la Souricière had fallen into a copper and got starched. The imperial, black as night; the black silk hat, the black frock-coat, unrelieved by the expectable red botton, the black cravat, fastened by a black pearl—there was not one touch of colour in the whole figure. Even his cheeks were of that colourless white which somehow suggests black, as it were an underlying force.

One would have said that the Count was in mourning. Indeed, it was so; but it was an Empire that he mourned.

Beneath his passionless exterior was a flame of devotion to the house of Napoleon—a monomania, one almost might say.

He was perhaps the only man in Paris who did not spit when the news came that the prince for whom all was prepared—a new coup d'état which had every chance of success—did not propose to risk his worthless neck in what he called his capital.

No! The Comte de la Souricière had not spat; a rare devotion, that!

He greeted Huysbroeck with a certain formal frigidity. He was a gentleman, with all a gentleman's fastidiousness; and he could not conceal from himself that he was lunching with a reptile. Clearly he had some very important object in view; when one sees a man of this sort out of his element, in a crank food-dive, or at tea with an Anarchist Communist, it is safe to assume that he is not doing it for fun, or even out of curiosity.

During lunch they discussed the politics of France; Huysbroeck with a cunning, and knowledge of rascality, that served him better than intelligence; the Count with a cold contempt only tempered by an indifference which seemed to imply that the matter concerned him just as much and as little as the affairs of sewer-rats.

When, however, the coffee and cognac were going and the cigars lighted, the Count shifted abruptly to the business of the assignation.

"You wrote me," he said shortly, "that you had your hand on D. at last."

He watched the painter carefully; he had his suspicions that he was being played with beyond the conventional limits of political intrigue.

"Indirectly, yes. We can disgrace L. —von Hühne, you remember?" answered the painter. "Do me the favour to cast your eye over these telegrams."

The Count disdainfully complied. His scorn turned to active disgust: the black shape of him seemed to quiver from its eternal rigidity. A second, no longer.

"What do you advise?" he asked.

"Offer L. the old terms; this time he will comply, if we threaten him with this exposure. A telegram to good Editor Soften in Berlin, the storm roars in the distance just as he gets our offer—what choice has he?"

"And you need?"

"Only your letter and eight hundred thousand francs."

"Sir," replied the other, with great dignity, his black eyes seeking to read the soul of the wretched spy, "let me speak to you quite frankly. In the course of the last six years, since the death of President Sisse, His Imperial Majesty's humble servants have been paying you very large sums for certain correspondence to which your intimacy with the President entitled you. We do not think—I tell you simply and clearly—that that correspondence has been worth what we have paid for it. Besides this, you have negotiated with the German Secret Service agent L. who you say—I admit a good deal of corroboration—possesses all the documents necessary to prove the treachery of D. and thereby destroy the Republic—"

He raised his hat for a moment; his lips moved in prayer. For twenty years he had not heard the name of the Republic without an earnest appeal to the Powers celestial to bring back the Empire.

"L.," he continued, "has always refused our really magnificent offers on the ground that his career in Germany would be broken. The treachery of D. was of no common sort; the Kaiser would appear in a very undignified aspect. The whole policy of the Empire is compromised.

"Now, as I understand, you propose that we should break his career by the help of this hostile Socialist fellow, so that our offer is his one opportunity. Have I understood?"

"Perfectly, Monsieur le Comte!" replied the painter. "But I cannot conceive why you should have thought it necessary to recapitulate."

"Simply that you may understand our present position. You have been bound to our party by ties of extraordinary strength; for this reason you have been trusted with the disposal of immense sums of money; trusted—I say it without offence—more then, in my opinion, any man ought to be trusted. We continue to trust you; but it is only fair to yourself that you should be warned that certain gentlemen of our party dislike you and distrust you. They are incredulous about the possibilities of L.; one or two doubt—I am sorry to say—whether D. was a traitor after all."

Huysbroeck displayed weak irritation, which, so far as it was intentional, was meant to represent the indignation of a patriot who had suffered all things for his country and was now wounded by the mouth that his hand had fed.

"I still do not see," he said rudely, "why the devil this long rigmarole. I have served His Majesty well these long years, without reward—well, quite inadequate when you think of all I have suffered—and—and—," He did not know what to say, stammered, and broke down, confused.

"I merely wish you to understand that this transaction must be entirely satisfactory. Innuendo and the opinions of third parties, however eminent, are useless to us. We are paying this large sum for official correspondence, and for nothing else. And I am rather afraid that if—"

"You need not go on," said Huysbroeck, a red flush in his face. Was it anger or fear? "If I play you false, you will have me murdered. Air connu!"

"Let us sing it no more, then!" smiled the Count. "You have been unfortunate, hitherto; you are going to retrieve all that by a brilliant success on the present occasion."

"Sir, I will do my best," answered the painter, affecting a dogged honesty combined with a pathetic assumption of the younger - man - placed - for - the - first - time - in - a - position - of - danger - and - responsibility - saying - good - bye - for - ever - to - his - chief - manner.

"Well," replied the Count, "we trust you. I need say no more." He excused himself politely, and drove off.

The painter sat down again and ordered an absinthe. I wonder," he mused. "how little I can call half when I see L.?"

4

But for the astuteness of old Madame Dupont, Arsène would have made shipwreck many a time ere now. In the present instance he was wise enough to consult her.

"Fine affair," she cried, as he entered the 'drawing room. "That little slut of a model was here asking for money. I slapped her face fiercely for her, I can tell you. I really wish, Arsène," she said more soberly, "that you would employ a little more discretion in the conduct of affairs!"

"Dear mother," he began.

"I know, I know," she snapped. "But the girl shouted out the story down the impasse. Fine, if we had neighbours!"

"Little mother," he said, "we will leave that for the moment. I am in terrible trouble."

"What is it?"

"I have," he said sombrely, "in this coat-pocket, the sum of eight hundred thousand francs."

"Poor boy!" chirped the little old woman, "there is a trouble indeed. Let me share it with you!"

"They will cost me honour, perhaps life," he replied. "You know my old dealings with the agent whom we call L."

"The Prussian spy-king?"

"Right, maman! Well, that hat of Aline's suggested a new scheme to me"—and he went on to unfold the story which our readers know.

"Well," said the old woman, "go and buy them! You will always have a large profit on the business!"

"The trouble is, little mother, that for all I know—Listed: L. has not got any papers. Perhaps there are no such papers. Perhaps D. is really a much-abused man. I have got the money, but I can't keep it. I must return it. Or could we fly to ——"

"Don't talk like a fool!" snapped the old woman. "Return money you have your fist on! Fly? To some savage country with no boulevards, no Bois, no Longchamps, no Faubourg? Say nothing; let me think!"

The old woman shrank into herself for [a] full five minutes. Then she straightened herself out again.

You will go to Berlin," she said. "You will change the money into gold there. You will go to this Herr Soften, and give him a thousand francs. You will promise him nine thousand more on the day that L. leaves Germany. Of course you must hide your visit from L. What name does he know you by? A false one? Good; use your own.

"You will telegraph from Berlin to this foolish Count that the papers are entirely satisfactory, that he is to call here for them on Sunday morning. You are then to telegraph that you fear you are watched by Republican spies, and will be a day late. In the train, when everyone is asleep, you will go into the corridor, fire a revolver through the window at your bed, throw away the revolver through the outer window, rush into your compartment, and pretend that the ball whistled past your head, and woke you. Telegraph to the Count that you have been shot at, but escaped, and that the papers are safe.

"In the meanwhile, I will do what is necessary in Paris; for, understand my son, that the papers will be stolen from this house."

"But, little mother, it would be easier to pretend to lose them on the journey."

"Exactly; you are not very bright today, Arsène! It is necessary that people should say: Had he been a rogue, how much more easily—"

"But this is dangerous, very dangerous. The police of Paris are not foolish!"

Mme Dupont gave a sniff; she did not believe in official acumen. "Leave it to me!" she said; "I will throw dust in the eyes of a dozen as smart as M. Homard."

Arsène Huysbroeck knew his mother-in-law from of old; he could trust her.

Abandoning all objections, they threw themselves heart and soul into the details of the pretended burglary.

Madame Huysbroeck must be told of the scheme; the girl Félise must be sent into the country where he two little brothers already were. With her could go the watch-dog Jack, of whom she was extremely fond.

Raymond, the valet, must be told to sleep soundly. He was a fool; almost a 'natural.' Madame Dupont would get Antorino, Arsène's favourite model, to come with a friend and do the 'burglary.' There must be evidence that the safe yielded to no bungler. Antorino would be sure to know somebody expert.

Nothing of great value must be in the house; it would never do for the sham burglary to become a real one.

Very good then; all Arsène need do was to pack a toothbrush.

If all that Huysbroeck desired was the vindication of his honour, he had it. No breath of suspicion touched him. The Imperialists mourned, but blamed him not.

For when the frightened valet brought in the police, and the police telephoned for the great M. Homard himself, that gentleman was confronted by an impenetrable mystery of quite another sort than that proposed by the ingenuity of Madame Dupont.

In his bed lay the painter, bound, gagged, strangled and mutilated.

Upon the floor not far off see Madame Dupont in a similar condition.

In her child's room lay the painter's wife, bound and gagged. The house had been ransacked for papers, which lay in confusion on the floor.

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