The Begum's Millions

11. Dinner at Dr. Sarrasin’s

 Dinner at Dr. Sarrasin’s On the th of September—only a few hours before the time designated by Herr Schultze for the destruction of France-Ville—neither the governor nor any of the residents had any notion of the frightful danger threatening them. It was seven o’clock in the evening. Nestled in thick beds of laurel roses and tamarinds, the city stretched graciously to the foot of the Cascade Mountains and presented its marble docks to the soft, caressing waves of the Pacific. Watered with care and refreshed by the breeze, the streets of France-Ville offered to the eye a cheerful and animated sight. The shade trees rustled gently. The lawns grew green. The flowers in their beds, spreading their colorful petals all at the same time, exhaled sweet fragrances. The very houses seemed to smile, quiet and coquettish in their whiteness. The air was warm, and the sky as blue as the sea that one could see glistening at the end of the long avenues. A traveler arriving in the city would have been struck by the healthy appearance of the residents, by the bustling activity in the streets. They were just closing the doors of the Academies of painting , music, sculpture and the library, which were all in the same neighborhood. There, excellent public courses were offered in small classes, which permitted each student to get the very most out of each lesson. The crowd leaving these establishments caused a certain congestion, but no exclamation of impatience, no outcry could be heard. The general aspect was of calm and satisfaction. It was not in the center of the city but on the Pacific shore that the Sarrasin family had built its home. Their house was among the first constructed in France-Ville, and the doctor had come to settle there definitively with his wife and his daughter Jeanne. 11  Octave, the impromptu millionaire, had wanted to remain in Paris, but he no longer had Marcel to serve as his mentor. The two friends had almost lost sight of each other since the days when they lived together on the rue du Roi de Sicile. When the doctor had emigrated with his wife and daughter to the Oregon coast, Octave had remained behind on his own. He was soon spending less and less time at school, where his father had wanted him to continue his studies, and he failed his last exam, whereas his friend had left at the top of his class. Until then, Marcel had been Octave’s compass; now he was incapable of leading himself. When the young Alsatian had left, his childhood friend ended up living what is often called the “high life.” In this case the word was all the more appropriate since he spent a large part of his life atop the seat of an enormous coach with four horses, constantly traveling between Avenue Marigny, where he had an apartment, and the various racetracks of the suburb. Octave Sarrasin, who three months earlier scarcely knew how to stay in the saddle in the riding school where he rented a horse by the hour, had suddenly become one of the men in France most deeply versed in the mysteries of hippology. His erudition was borrowed from an English groom whom he had attached to his service and who completely dominated him by the extent of his special knowledge. Tailors, saddle-makers, and bootmakers took up his mornings . His evenings belonged to the small theaters and the salon of a new club, which had just opened at the corner of rue Tronchet, and which Octave had chosen because the people that he found there rendered to his wealth homage that his personal merits alone had not received elsewhere. These society people seemed to him the ideal of distinction. Of particular attention was a sumptuously framed list, which stood out in the waiting room and scarcely held any but foreign names. Titles abounded, and, in counting them, one might have believed that one was in the antechamber of some heraldic university. But if you were to penetrate deeper, you would think you were in a living exposition of ethnology. All the big noses  and all the bilious complexions of the two worlds seemed to have arranged to meet each other there. Supremely well dressed, moreover , were these cosmopolitan personages, although a marked taste for whitish clothes revealed the eternal aspiration of...