The Poor Plutocrats | Page 4

dishes. All these meats were cold, for the doctor forbade his patient hot
food. The old gentleman tasted each one of the dishes with the aid of
his finger-tips, and not one of them pleased him. This was too salt, that
was too sweet, a third was burnt, a fourth was tainted. He threatened to
discharge the cook, and bitterly complained that as he did not die
quickly enough for them, they were conspiring to starve him. They
might have replied that he had ordered all these things himself
yesterday; but nobody took the trouble to contradict him any longer, so
gradually the storm died away of its own accord and the old man,
turning towards Maksi, tenderly invited him to partake of the
disparaged dishes.
"Come and eat with me, Maksi, my darling."
"That I will," cried the little horror, grabbing at everything
simultaneously with both hands.
"Oh, fie, fie!" said grandpapa gently. "Take Maksi out for a ride and let
the lacquey go with him instead of his tutor!" The old gentleman then
pushed the little round table aside and signalled to the footman that he
was to put all the dishes carefully away, as he should want to see them

again on the morrow. The footman conscientiously obeyed this
command--which was given regularly every day--and locked up all the
dishes well aware that he would get a sound jacketting if he failed to
produce a single one of them when required to do so.
The old man knew well enough that there was not a servant in the
house who, for any reward on earth, would think of touching any food
that had ever lain on his table; indeed, they held it in such horror that
they used regularly to distribute it among the poor. In order therefore
that the very beggars might have nothing to thank him for, he had the
food kept till it was almost rotten before he let them have it. As for his
own family, he had not dined at the same table with them for ten years.
It was certainly not a sociable family. For example, the old gentleman's
widowed daughter, red-cheeked Madame Langai, did not exchange a
single word with her father for weeks at a time. At first he had expected
her to remain in the same room with him till nine o'clock every evening,
dealing out cards for him or boring herself to death in some other way
for his amusement. She endured it for a whole month without a word;
but at last, one evening, at seven o'clock, she appeared before him in
evening dress and said that she was going to the theatre.
Old Lapussa glared at her with all his eyes.
"To the theatre?" cried he.
"Yes, I have ordered a box."
"Really? Well, I hope you will enjoy yourself!"
The lady quitted him with a shrug. She knew that from that moment she
would inherit a million less than her elder brother; but nevertheless she
went to the theatre regularly every day, and never stirred from her box
so long as there was any one on the stage who had a word to say.
The Lapussa family was of too recent an origin for the great world to
take much notice of it, and the fame of its fabulous wealth went hand in
hand with the rumour of a sordid avarice which was not a

recommendable quality in the eyes of the true gentry. The Lapussas
were, in fact, not of gentle blood at all, but simply rich. Madame
Langai's elder brother, John, was notoriously the greatest bore in the
town, whom nobody, from the members of his own family down to his
coffee-house acquaintances, could endure for a moment. Only his
father made much of him. For all his great wealth, he was very stingy
and greedy; he even lent money at usury to his best friends. Our
amusing little friend Maksi was this man's son. The slender, fanciful
damsel, Henrietta, who appeared in that family like an errant angel
specially sent there to be tormented for the sins of her whole race, was
the orphan daughter of another son of old Lapussa, who had lost father
and mother at the same time in the most tragical manner; they had both
been drowned by the capsizing of a small boat on the Danube.
Henrietta herself had only been saved with the utmost difficulty. She
was only twelve years old at the time, and the catastrophe had had such
an effect upon her nerves that ever afterwards she collapsed at the least
sign of anger, and often fell a weeping for no appreciable cause. Since
the death of her parents, who had loved her dearly, Henrietta had been
obliged to live at her grandfather's house, where