Guy Wetmore Carryl

“ If your brother has such taste” —
“Oh, madame, I know I have no right,” broke in Louise. “But you, of all women in Paris, alone have the power to win him from her.”
“And when I have won him,” demanded Gabrielle, “what then? Do you think your precious brother will fare better with me than with the de Trémonceau?”
Her calm was broken for a moment by a flash of anger.
“The world is full of fools,” she added. “One more or less is no great matter. I am not a Rescue Society, mademoiselle. Let your brother go his way. His best cure will be effected by the woman herself. ”

“ It is not every one from the provinces for whom Paris reserves her supreme surprise for the forty-third day.
It chanced to be the first evening of the de Trémonceau’s annual engagement at the Folies-Bergère, and for three days the eloquent legend “La Belle Thaïs” had been glaring at the boulevard throngs in huge block letters from the posters on the colonnes Morris. Dodo, meanwhile, had made many friends among men of tastes similar to his own — a feat which is curiously easy of accomplishment in Paris, when one has forty-odd thousand francs and a desire for company. ”

“ No, each must plunge into the radius of consuming heat and learn its peril for himself. All of which is, no doubt, a wise ruling. For if experience could be handed down from father to son, and accepted on its face value, then the child of the third or fourth generation would be a demi-god, or even a full one, and there would be no further attraction in heaven, and no further menace in hell. The which morsel of morality may be allowed to pass, if only for contrast’s sake. We were speaking of Thaïs de Trémonceau. ”

“ One cannot pretend to say what she saw in him to divert her attention from richer and maturer men. He was handsome — yes — but the Comte d’Ys was handsomer. He was rich, as such things go, and for the moment. But he had no wit, poor Dodo — and as for money, which, after all, is the only other thing which counts in the demi-monde, what were forty thousand francs to one authorized to draw, ad libitum, upon a Brazilian multi-millionaire? ”

“ I thought, in my folly, that, perhaps, in the life of such a one as you, there might come moments when you longed to be other than you are, moments when you would like to think that among all the men you have played with, ruined, and spurned, there were one or two who could speak and think of you as men speak and think of honest women, who could say that you had been an ennobling influence in their lives, and whose word would count upon the side of good when you come to answer for the evil you have done. ”

“ I thought that, not for money’s sake or vanity’s, you might wish to win my brother from this woman, and, when you had won him, teach him how sordid, how wicked, how futile such a life is, and send him back to decency — a better man! I see how mistaken I was in judging you. There is no compassion in you, no nobler instinct than self-interest. ”

“ Honors were even between the two when Dodo Chapuis first came up to pay homage to the queen capital, of which he had been dreaming for four years. He was only nineteen, the son of a great manufacturer of Arles, who had lived severely and frugally, and, dying a widower, left a cool half million of francs to be divided between Dodo and his sister Louise. There seems to have been no trace of doubt in the mind of either as to the respective uses to which their dazzling inheritances should be applied. ”

“ The Tuition of Dodo Chapuis The situation was best summed up in the epigram of little Sacha Vitzoff, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy, who said that there was room enough in Paris for two and a half millions of people and Gabrielle de Poirier, or for two and a half millions of people and Thaïs de Trémonceau, but that even the place de la Concorde was not sufficiently wide for Gabrielle and Thaïs to pass without treading on each others’ toes. ”

“ The first note was directed to Monsieur Charles Chapuis, at the Hôtel du Rhin, place Vendôme: —
“If Monsieur Chapuis is a man of honor,” it ran briefly, “he will break all engagements, however important, for this evening, and present himself chez Mademoiselle Gabrielle de Poirier at seven o’clock, on a matter intimately touching the good fame of his family. The sister of Monsieur, Mademoiselle Louise Chapuis, is chez Mademoiselle de Poirier.”
The second note was addressed to Mademoiselle Thaïs de Trémonceau, at 27 bis. rue de la Faisanderie. ”