Somerset maughan

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THE MAGICIAN 
BY 
SOMERSET 
MAUGHAN 
 
 
 
 

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I 
Arthur Burdon and Dr Porhoët walked in silence. They had lunched 
at a restaurant in the Boulevard Saint Michel, and were sauntering 
now in the gardens of the Luxembourg. Dr Porhoët walked with 
stooping shoulders, his hands behind him. He beheld the scene with 
the eyes of the many painters who have sought by means of the 
most charming garden in Paris to express their sense of beauty. The 
grass was scattered with the fallen leaves, but their wan decay little 
served to give a touch of nature to the artifice of all besides. The 
trees were neatly surrounded by bushes, and the bushes by trim 
beds of flowers. But the trees grew without abandonment, as though 
conscious of the decorative scheme they helped to form. It was 
autumn, and some were leafless already. Many of the flowers were 
withered. The formal garden reminded one of a light woman, no 
longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and 
paint, to make a brave show of despair. It had those false, difficult 
smiles of uneasy gaiety, and the pitiful graces which attempt a 
fascination that the hurrying years have rendered vain. 
Dr Porhoët drew more closely round his fragile body the heavy 
cloak which even in summer he could not persuade himself to 
discard. The best part of his life had been spent in Egypt, in the 
practice of medicine, and the frigid summers of Europe scarcely 
warmed his blood. His memory flashed for an instant upon those 
multi-coloured streets of Alexandria; and then, like a homing bird, it 
flew to the green woods and the storm-beaten coasts of his native 
Brittany. His brown eyes were veiled with sudden melancholy. 
'Let us wait here for a moment,' he said. 
They took two straw-bottomed chairs and sat near the octagonal 
water which completes with its fountain of Cupids the enchanting 
artificiality of the Luxembourg. The sun shone more kindly now, 
and the trees which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A 
balustrade of stone gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, 
freshly bedded, were very gay. In one corner they could see the 
squat, quaint towers of Saint Sulpice, and on the other side the 
uneven roofs of the Boulevard Saint Michel. 

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The palace was grey and solid. Nurses, some in the white caps of 
their native province, others with the satin streamers of the 
nounou
, 
marched sedately two by two, wheeling perambulators and talking. 
Brightly dressed children trundled hoops or whipped a stubborn 
top. As he watched them, Dr Porhoët's lips broke into a smile, and it 
was so tender that his thin face, sallow from long exposure to 
subtropical suns, was transfigured. He no longer struck you merely 
as an insignificant little man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey 
beard; for the weariness of expression which was habitual to him 
vanished before the charming sympathy of his smile. His sunken 
eyes glittered with a kindly but ironic good-humour. Now passed a 
guard in the romantic cloak of a brigand in comic opera and a 
peaked cap like that of an 
alguacil
. A group of telegraph boys in blue 
stood round a painter, who was making a sketch—notwithstanding 
half-frozen fingers. Here and there, in baggy corduroys, tight 
jackets, and wide-brimmed hats, strolled students who might have 
stepped from the page of Murger's immortal romance. But the 
students now are uneasy with the fear of ridicule, and more often 
they walk in bowler hats and the neat coats of the