COUSIN BETTY

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, then

lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as _Milords_, was

driving down the Rue de l’Universite, conveying a stout man of middle

height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

Among the Paris crowd, who are supposed to be so clever, there are some

men who fancy themselves infinitely more attractive in uniform than in

their ordinary clothes, and who attribute to women so depraved a taste

that they believe they will be favorably impressed by the aspect of a

busby and of military accoutrements.

The countenance of this Captain of the Second Company beamed with a

self-satisfaction that added splendor to his ruddy and somewhat chubby

face. The halo of glory that a fortune made in business gives to a

retired tradesman sat on his brow, and stamped him as one of the elect

of Paris--at least a retired deputy-mayor of his quarter of the town.

And you may be sure that the ribbon of the Legion of Honor was not

missing from his breast, gallantly padded _a la Prussienne_. Proudly

seated in one corner of the _milord_, this splendid person let his

gaze wander over the passers-by, who, in Paris, often thus meet an

ingratiating smile meant for sweet eyes that are absent.

The vehicle stopped in the part of the street between the Rue

de Bellechasse and the Rue de Bourgogne, at the door of a large,

newly-build house, standing on part of the court-yard of an ancient

mansion that had a garden. The old house remained in its original state,

beyond the courtyard curtailed by half its extent.

Only from the way in which the officer accepted the assistance of the

coachman to help him out, it was plain that he was past fifty. There are

certain movements so undisguisedly heavy that they are as tell-tale as

a register of birth. The captain put on his lemon-colored right-hand

glove, and, without any question to the gatekeeper, went up the outer

steps to the ground of the new house with a look that proclaimed, “She

is mine!”

The _concierges_ of Paris have sharp eyes; they do not stop visitors who

wear an order, have a blue uniform, and walk ponderously; in short, they

know a rich man when they see him.

This ground floor was entirely occupied by Monsieur le Baron Hulot

d’Ervy, Commissary General under the Republic, retired army contractor,

and at the present time at the head of one of the most important

departments of the War Office, Councillor of State, officer of the

Legion of Honor, and so forth.

This Baron Hulot had taken the name of d’Ervy--the place of his

birth--to distinguish him from his brother, the famous General Hulot,

Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, created by the Emperor

Comte de Forzheim after the campaign of 1809. The Count, the elder

brother, being responsible for his junior, had, with paternal care,

placed him in the commissariat, where, thanks to the services of the two

brothers, the Baron deserved and won Napoleon’s good graces. After 1807,

Baron Hulot was Commissary General for the army in Spain.

Having rung the bell, the citizen-captain made strenuous efforts to

pull his coat into place, for it had rucked up as much at the back as in

front, pushed out of shape by the working of a piriform stomach. Being

admitted as soon as the servant in livery saw him, the important

and imposing personage followed the man, who opened the door of the

drawing-room, announcing:

“Monsieur Crevel.”

On hearing the name, singularly appropriate to the figure of the man who

bore it, a tall, fair woman, evidently young-looking for her age, rose

as if she had received an electric shock.

“Hortense, my darling, go into the garden with your Cousin Betty,” she

said hastily to her daughter, who was working at some embroidery at her

mother’s side.

After curtseying prettily to the captain, Mademoiselle Hortense went out

by a glass door, taking with her a withered-looking spinster, who looked

older than the Baroness, though she was five years younger.

“They are settling your marriage,” said Cousin Betty in the girl’s ear,

without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness had

dismissed them, counting her almost as zero.

The cousin’s dress might, at need, have explained this free-and-easy

demeanor. The old maid wore a merino gown of a dark plum color, of which

the cut and trimming dated from the year of the Restoration; a little

worked collar, worth perhaps three francs; and a common straw hat with

blue satin ribbons edged with straw plait, such as the old-clothes

buyers wear at market. On looking down at her kid shoes, made, it was

evident, by the veriest cobbler, a stranger would have hesitated to

recognize Cousin Betty as a member of the family, for she looked exactly

like a journeywoman sempstress. But she did not leave the room without

bestowing a little friendly nod on Monsieur Crevel, to which that

gentleman responded by a look of mutual understanding.

“You are coming to us to-morrow, I hope, Mademoiselle Fischer?” said he.

“You have no company?” asked Cousin Betty.

“My children and yourself, no one else,” replied the visitor.

“Very well,” replied she; “depend on me.”

“And here am I, madame, at your orders,” said the citizen-captain,

bowing again to Madame Hulot.

He gave such a look at Madame Hulot as Tartuffe casts at Elmire--when a

provincial actor plays the part and thinks it necessary to emphasize its

meaning--at Poitiers, or at Coutances.

“If you will come into this room with me, we shall be more conveniently

placed for talking business than we are in this room,” said Madame

Hulot, going to an adjoining room, which, as the apartment was arranged,

served as a cardroom.

It was divided by a slight partition from a boudoir looking out on the

garden, and Madame Hulot left her visitor to himself for a minute, for

she thought it wise to shut the window and the door of the boudoir, so

that no one should get in and listen. She even took the precaution of

shutting the glass door of the drawing-room, smiling on her daughter and

her cousin, whom she saw seated in an old summer-house at the end of the

garden. As she came back she left the cardroom door open, so as to hear

if any one should open that of the drawing-room to come in.

As she came and went, the Baroness, seen by nobody, allowed her face to

betray all her thoughts, and any one who could have seen her would have

been shocked to see her agitation. But when she finally came back from

the glass door of the drawing-room, as she entered the cardroom, her

face was hidden behind the impenetrable reserve which every woman, even

the most candid, seems to have at her command.

During all these preparations--odd, to say the least--the National

Guardsman studied the furniture of the room in which he found himself.

As he noted the silk curtains, once red, now faded to dull purple by the

sunshine, and frayed in the pleats by long wear; the carpet, from which

the hues had faded; the discolored gilding of the furniture; and the

silk seats, discolored in patches, and wearing into strips--expressions

of scorn, satisfaction, and hope dawned in succession without disguise

on his stupid tradesman’s face. He looked at himself in the glass over

an old clock of the Empire, and was contemplating the general effect,

when the rustle of her silk skirt announced the Baroness. He at once

struck at attitude.

After dropping on to a sofa, which had been a very handsome one in the

year 1809, the Baroness, pointing to an armchair with the arms ending in

bronze sphinxes’ heads, while the paint was peeling from the wood, which

showed through in many places, signed to Crevel to be seated.

“All the precautions you are taking, madame, would seem full of promise

to a----”

“To a lover,” said she, interrupting him.

“The word is too feeble,” said he, placing his right hand on his heart,

and rolling his eyes in a way which almost always makes a woman laugh

when she, in cold blood, sees such a look. “A lover! A lover? Say a man

bewitched----”

“Listen, Monsieur Crevel,” said the Baroness, too anxious to be able to

laugh, “you are fifty--ten years younger than Monsieur Hulot, I know;

but at my age a woman’s follies ought to be justified by beauty, youth,

fame, superior merit--some one of the splendid qualities which can

dazzle us to the point of making us forget all else--even at our

age. Though you may have fifty thousand francs a year, your age

counterbalances your fortune; thus you have nothing whatever of what a

woman looks for----”

“But love!” said the officer, rising and coming forward. “Such love

as----”

“No, monsieur, such obstinacy!” said the Baroness, interrupting him to

put an end to his absurdity.

“Yes, obstinacy,” said he, “and love; but something stronger still--a

claim----”

“A claim!” cried Madame Hulot, rising sublime with scorn, defiance, and

indignation. “But,” she went on, “this will bring us to no issues; I

did not ask you to come here to discuss the matter which led to your

banishment in spite of the connection between our families----”

“I had fancied so.”

“What! still?” cried she. “Do you not see, monsieur, by the entire ease

and freedom with which I can speak of lovers and love, of everything

least creditable to a woman, that I am perfectly secure in my own

virtue? I fear nothing--not even to shut myself in alone with you. Is

that the conduct of a weak woman? You know full well why I begged you to

come.”

“No, madame,” replied Crevel, with an assumption of great coldness. He

pursed up his lips, and again struck an attitude.

“Well, I will be brief, to shorten our common discomfort,” said the

Baroness, looking at Crevel.

Crevel made an ironical bow, in which a man who knew the race would have

recognized the graces of a bagman.

“Our son married your daughter----”

“And if it were to do again----” said Crevel.

“It would not be done at all, I suspect,” said the baroness hastily.

“However, you have nothing to complain of. My son is not only one of the

leading pleaders of Paris, but for the last year he has sat as Deputy,

and his maiden speech was brilliant enough to lead us to suppose that

ere long he will be in office. Victorin has twice been called upon to

report on important measures; and he might even now, if he chose, be

made Attorney-General in the Court of Appeal. So, if you mean to say

that your son-in-law has no fortune----”

“Worse than that, madame, a son-in-law whom I am obliged to maintain,”

replied Crevel. “Of the five hundred thousand francs that formed my

daughter’s marriage portion, two hundred thousand have vanished--God

knows how!--in paying the young gentleman’s debts, in furnishing his

house splendaciously--a house costing five hundred thousand francs, and

bringing in scarcely fifteen thousand, since he occupies the larger

part of it, while he owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs of the

purchase-money. The rent he gets barely pays the interest on the debt.

I have had to give my daughter twenty thousand francs this year to

help her to make both ends meet. And then my son-in-law, who was making

thirty thousand francs a year at the Assizes, I am told, is going to

throw that up for the Chamber----”

“This, again, Monsieur Crevel, is beside the mark; we are wandering from

the point. Still, to dispose of it finally, it may be said that if my

son gets into office, if he has you made an officer of the Legion of

Honor and councillor of the municipality of Paris, you, as a retired

perfumer, will not have much to complain of----”

“Ah! there we are again, madame! Yes, I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper,

a retail dealer in almond-paste, eau-de-Portugal, and hair-oil, and was

only too much honored when my only daughter was married to the son of

Monsieur le Baron Hulot d’Ervy--my daughter will be a Baroness! This is

Regency, Louis XV., (Eil-de-boeuf--quite tip-top!--very good.) I love

Celestine as a man loves his only child--so well indeed, that, to

preserve her from having either brother or sister, I resigned myself

to all the privations of a widower--in Paris, and in the prime of life,

madame. But you must understand that, in spite of this extravagant

affection for my daughter, I do not intend to reduce my fortune for the

sake of your son, whose expenses are not wholly accounted for--in my

eyes, as an old man of business.”

“Monsieur, you may at this day see in the Ministry of Commerce Monsieur

Popinot, formerly a druggist in the Rue des Lombards----”

“And a friend of mine, madame,” said the ex-perfumer. “For I, Celestin

Crevel, foreman once to old Cesar Birotteau, brought up the said Cesar

Birotteau’s stock; and he was Popinot’s father-in-law. Why, that very

Popinot was no more than a shopman in the establishment, and he is the

first to remind me of it; for he is not proud, to do him justice, to

men in a good position with an income of sixty thousand francs in the

funds.”

“Well then, monsieur, the notions you term ‘Regency’ are quite out of

date at a time when a man is taken at his personal worth; and that is

what you did when you married your daughter to my son.”

“But you do not know how the marriage was brought about!” cried Crevel.

“Oh, that cursed bachelor life! But for my misconduct, my Celestine

might at this day be Vicomtesse Popinot!”

“Once more have done with recriminations over accomplished facts,” said

the Baroness anxiously. “Let us rather discuss the complaints I have

found on your strange behavior. My daughter Hortense had a chance of

marrying; the match depended entirely on you; I believed you felt some

sentiments of generosity; I thought you would do justice to a woman who

has never had a thought in her heart for any man but her husband, that

you would have understood how necessary it is for her not to receive a

man who may compromise her, and that for the honor of the family with

which you are allied you would have been eager to promote Hortense’s

settlement with Monsieur le Conseiller Lebas.--And it is you, monsieur,

you have hindered the marriage.”

“Madame,” said the ex-perfumer, “I acted the part of an honest man.

I was asked whether the two hundred thousand francs to be settled on

Mademoiselle Hortense would be forthcoming. I replied exactly in these

words: ‘I would not answer for it. My son-in-law, to whom the Hulots had

promised the same sum, was in debt; and I believe that if Monsieur

Hulot d’Ervy were to die to-morrow, his widow would have nothing to live

on.’--There, fair lady.”

“And would you have said as much, monsieur,” asked Madame Hulot, looking

Crevel steadily in the face, “if I had been false to my duty?”

“I should not be in a position to say it, dearest Adeline,” cried this

singular adorer, interrupting the Baroness, “for you would have found

the amount in my pocket-book.”

And adding action to word, the fat guardsman knelt down on one knee and

kissed Madame Hulot’s hand, seeing that his speech had filled her with

speechless horror, which he took for hesitancy.

“What, buy my daughter’s fortune at the cost of----? Rise, monsieur--or

I ring the bell.”

Crevel rose with great difficulty. This fact made him so furious that he

again struck his favorite attitude. Most men have some habitual position

by which they fancy that they show to the best advantage the good

points bestowed on them by nature. This attitude in Crevel consisted in

crossing his arms like Napoleon, his head showing three-quarters face,

and his eyes fixed on the horizon, as the painter has shown the Emperor

in his portrait.

“To be faithful,” he began, with well-acted indignation, “so faithful to

a liber----”

“To a husband who is worthy of such fidelity,” Madame Hulot put in, to

hinder Crevel from saying a word she did not choose to hear.

“Come, madame; you wrote to bid me here, you ask the reasons for my

conduct, you drive me to extremities with your imperial airs, your

scorn, and your contempt! Any one might think I was a Negro. But I

repeat it, and you may believe me, I have a right to--to make love to

you, for---- But no; I love you well enough to hold my tongue.”

“You may speak, monsieur. In a few days I shall be eight-and-forty; I am

no prude; I can hear whatever you can say.”

“Then will you give me your word of honor as an honest woman--for you

are, alas for me! an honest woman--never to mention my name or to say

that it was I who betrayed the secret?”

“If that is the condition on which you speak, I will swear never to tell

any one from whom I heard the horrors you propose to tell me, not even

my husband.”

“I should think not indeed, for only you and he are concerned.”

Madame Hulot turned pale.

“Oh, if you still really love Hulot, it will distress you. Shall I say

no more?”

“Speak, monsieur; for by your account you wish to justify in my eyes

the extraordinary declarations you have chosen to make me, and your

persistency in tormenting a woman of my age, whose only wish is to see

her daughter married, and then--to die in peace----”

“You see; you are unhappy.”

“I, monsieur?”

“Yes, beautiful, noble creature!” cried Crevel. “You have indeed been

too wretched!”

“Monsieur, be silent and go--or speak to me as you ought.”

“Do you know, madame, how Master Hulot and I first made

acquaintance?--At our mistresses’, madame.”

“Oh, monsieur!”

“Yes, madame, at our mistresses’,” Crevel repeated in a melodramatic

tone, and leaving his position to wave his right hand.

“Well, and what then?” said the Baroness coolly, to Crevel’s great

amazement.

Such mean seducers cannot understand a great soul.

“I, a widower five years since,” Crevel began, in the tone of a man who

has a story to tell, “and not wishing to marry again for the sake of the

daughter I adore, not choosing either to cultivate any such connection

in my own establishment, though I had at the time a very pretty

lady-accountant. I set up, ‘on her own account,’ as they say, a little

sempstress of fifteen--really a miracle of beauty, with whom I fell

desperately in love. And in fact, madame, I asked an aunt of my own,

my mother’s sister, whom I sent for from the country, to live with the

sweet creature and keep an eye on her, that she might behave as well

as might be in this rather--what shall I say--shady?--no, delicate

position.

“The child, whose talent for music was striking, had masters, she was

educated--I had to give her something to do. Besides, I wished to be at

once her father, her benefactor, and--well, out with it--her lover; to

kill two birds with one stone, a good action and a sweetheart. For five

years I was very happy. The girl had one of those voices that make the

fortune of a theatre; I can only describe her by saying that she is

a Duprez in petticoats. It cost me two thousand francs a year only to

cultivate her talent as a singer. She made me music-mad; I took a box at

the opera for her and for my daughter, and went there alternate evenings

with Celestine or Josepha.”

“What, the famous singer?”

“Yes, madame,” said Crevel with pride, “the famous Josepha owes

everything to me.--At last, in 1834, when the child was twenty,

believing that I had attached her to me for ever, and being very weak

where she was concerned, I thought I would give her a little amusement,

and I introduced her to a pretty little actress, Jenny Cadine, whose

life had been somewhat like her own. This actress also owed everything

to a protector who had brought her up in leading-strings. That protector

was Baron Hulot.”

“I know that,” said the Baroness, in a calm voice without the least

agitation.

“Bless me!” cried Crevel, more and more astounded. “Well! But do you

know that your monster of a husband took Jenny Cadine in hand at the age

of thirteen?”

“What then?” said the Baroness.

“As Jenny Cadine and Josepha were both aged twenty when they first met,”

the ex-tradesman went on, “the Baron had been playing the part of Louis

XV. to Mademoiselle de Romans ever since 1826, and you were twelve years

younger then----”

“I had my reasons, monsieur, for leaving Monsieur Hulot his liberty.”

“That falsehood, madame, will surely be enough to wipe out every sin you

have ever committed, and to open to you the gates of Paradise,” replied

Crevel, with a knowing air that brought the color to the Baroness’

cheeks. “Sublime and adored woman, tell that to those who will believe

it, but not to old Crevel, who has, I may tell you, feasted too often as

one of four with your rascally husband not to know what your high

merits are! Many a time has he blamed himself when half tipsy as he has

expatiated on your perfections. Oh, I know you well!--A libertine might

hesitate between you and a girl of twenty. I do not hesitate----”

“Monsieur!”

“Well, I say no more. But you must know, saintly and noble woman, that

a husband under certain circumstances will tell things about his wife to

his mistress that will mightily amuse her.”

Tears of shame hanging to Madame Hulot’s long lashes checked the

National Guardsman. He stopped short, and forgot his attitude.

“To proceed,” said he. “We became intimate, the Baron and I, through

the two hussies. The Baron, like all bad lots, is very pleasant, a

thoroughly jolly good fellow. Yes, he took my fancy, the old rascal. He

could be so funny!--Well, enough of those reminiscences. We got to be

like brothers. The scoundrel--quite Regency in his notions--tried indeed

to deprave me altogether, preached Saint-Simonism as to women, and all

sorts of lordly ideas; but, you see, I was fond enough of my girl to

have married her, only I was afraid of having children.

“Then between two old daddies, such friends as--as we were, what

more natural than that we should think of our children marrying each

other?--Three months after his son had married my Celestine, Hulot--I

don’t know how I can utter the wretch’s name! he has cheated us both,

madame--well, the villain did me out of my little Josepha. The scoundrel

knew that he was supplanted in the heart of Jenny Cadine by a young

lawyer and by an artist--only two of them!--for the girl had more and

more of a howling success, and he stole my sweet little girl, a

perfect darling--but you must have seen her at the opera; he got her

an engagement there. Your husband is not so well behaved as I am. I am

ruled as straight as a sheet of music-paper. He had dropped a good deal

of money on Jenny Cadine, who must have cost him near on thirty thousand

francs a year. Well, I can only tell you that he is ruining himself

outright for Josepha.

“Josepha, madame, is a Jewess. Her name is Mirah, the anagram of Hiram,

an Israelite mark that stamps her, for she was a foundling picked up

in Germany, and the inquiries I have made prove that she is the

illegitimate child of a rich Jew banker. The life of the theatre, and,

above all, the teaching of Jenny Cadine, Madame Schontz, Malaga, and

Carabine, as to the way to treat an old man, have developed, in the

child whom I had kept in a respectable and not too expensive way of

life, all the native Hebrew instinct for gold and jewels--for the golden

calf.

“So this famous singer, hungering for plunder, now wants to be rich,

very rich. She tried her ‘prentice hand on Baron Hulot, and soon plucked

him bare--plucked him, ay, and singed him to the skin. The miserable

man, after trying to vie with one of the Kellers and with the Marquis

d’Esgrignon, both perfectly mad about Josepha, to say nothing of unknown

worshipers, is about to see her carried off by that very rich Duke, who

is such a patron of the arts. Oh, what is his name?--a dwarf.--Ah, the

Duc d’Herouville. This fine gentleman insists on having Josepha for his

very own, and all that set are talking about it; the Baron knows nothing

of it as yet; for it is the same in the Thirteenth Arrondissement as in

every other: the lover, like the husband, is last to get the news.

“Now, do you understand my claim? Your husband, dear lady, has robbed

me of my joy in life, the only happiness I have known since I became a

widower. Yes, if I had not been so unlucky as to come across that old

rip, Josepha would still be mine; for I, you know, should never have

placed her on the stage. She would have lived obscure, well conducted,

and mine. Oh! if you could but have seen her eight years ago, slight and

wiry, with the golden skin of an Andalusian, as they say, black hair as

shiny as satin, an eye that flashed lightning under long brown lashes,

the style of a duchess in every movement, the modesty of a dependent,

decent grace, and the pretty ways of a wild fawn. And by that Hulot’s

doing all this charm and purity has been degraded to a man-trap, a

money-box for five-franc pieces! The girl is the Queen of Trollops;

and nowadays she humbugs every one--she who knew nothing, not even that

word.”

At this stage the retired perfumer wiped his eyes, which were full of

tears. The sincerity of his grief touched Madame Hulot, and roused her

from the meditation into which she had sunk.

“Tell me, madame, is a man of fifty-two likely to find such another

jewel? At my age love costs thirty thousand francs a year. It is through

your husband’s experience that I know the price, and I love Celestine

too truly to be her ruin. When I saw you, at the first evening party

you gave in our honor, I wondered how that scoundrel Hulot could keep a

Jenny Cadine--you had the manner of an Empress. You do not look thirty,”

he went on. “To me, madame, you look young, and you are beautiful. On my

word of honor, that evening I was struck to the heart. I said to myself,

‘If I had not Josepha, since old Hulot neglects his wife, she would fit

me like a glove.’ Forgive me--it is a reminiscence of my old business.

The perfumer will crop up now and then, and that is what keeps me from

standing to be elected deputy.

“And then, when I was so abominably deceived by the Baron, for really

between old rips like us our friend’s mistress should be sacred, I swore

I would have his wife. It is but justice. The Baron could say nothing;

we are certain of impunity. You showed me the door like a mangy dog at

the first words I uttered as to the state of my feelings; you only made

my passion--my obstinacy, if you will--twice as strong, and you shall be

mine.”

“Indeed; how?”

“I do not know; but it will come to pass. You see, madame, an idiot of

a perfumer--retired from business--who has but one idea in his head, is

stronger than a clever fellow who has a thousand. I am smitten with

you, and you are the means of my revenge; it is like being in love twice

over. I am speaking to you quite frankly, as a man who knows what he

means. I speak coldly to you, just as you do to me, when you say, ‘I

never will be yours,’ In fact, as they say, I play the game with the

cards on the table. Yes, you shall be mine, sooner or later; if you were

fifty, you should still be my mistress. And it will be; for I expect

anything from your husband!”

Madame Hulot looked at this vulgar intriguer with such a fixed stare of

terror, that he thought she had gone mad, and he stopped.

“You insisted on it, you heaped me with scorn, you defied me--and I have

spoken,” said he, feeling that he must justify the ferocity of his last

words.

“Oh, my daughter, my daughter,” moaned the Baroness in a voice like a

dying woman’s.

“Oh! I have forgotten all else,” Crevel went on. “The day when I was

robbed of Josepha I was like a tigress robbed of her cubs; in short,

as you see me now.--Your daughter? Yes, I regard her as the means of

winning you. Yes, I put a spoke in her marriage--and you will not get

her married without my help! Handsome as Mademoiselle Hortense is, she

needs a fortune----”

“Alas! yes,” said the Baroness, wiping her eyes.

“Well, just ask your husband for ten thousand francs,” said Crevel,

striking his attitude once more. He waited a minute, like an actor who

has made a point.

“If he had the money, he would give it to the woman who will take

Josepha’s place,” he went on, emphasizing his tones. “Does a man ever

pull up on the road he has taken? In the first place, he is too sweet on

women. There is a happy medium in all things, as our King has told us.

And then his vanity is implicated! He is a handsome man!--He would

bring you all to ruin for his pleasure; in fact, you are already on the

highroad to the workhouse. Why, look, never since I set foot in your

house have you been able to do up your drawing-room furniture. ‘Hard up’

is the word shouted by every slit in the stuff. Where will you find a

son-in-law who would not turn his back in horror of the ill-concealed

evidence of the most cruel misery there is--that of people in decent

society? I have kept shop, and I know. There is no eye so quick as that

of the Paris tradesman to detect real wealth from its sham.--You have

no money,” he said, in a lower voice. “It is written everywhere, even on

your man-servant’s coat.

“Would you like me to disclose any more hideous mysteries that are kept

from you?”

“Monsieur,” cried Madame Hulot, whose handkerchief was wet through with

her tears, “enough, enough!”

“My son-in-law, I tell you, gives his father money, and this is what I

particularly wanted to come to when I began by speaking of your son’s

expenses. But I keep an eye on my daughter’s interests, be easy.”

“Oh, if I could but see my daughter married, and die!” cried the poor

woman, quite losing her head.

“Well, then, this is the way,” said the ex-perfumer.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a hopeful expression, which so

completely changed her countenance, that this alone ought to have

touched the man’s feelings and have led him to abandon his monstrous

schemes.

“You will still be handsome ten years hence,” Crevel went on, with his

arms folded; “be kind to me, and Mademoiselle Hulot will marry. Hulot

has given me the right, as I have explained to you, to put the matter

crudely, and he will not be angry. In three years I have saved the

interest on my capital, for my dissipations have been restricted. I have

three hundred thousand francs in the bank over and above my invested

fortune--they are yours----”

“Go,” said Madame Hulot. “Go, monsieur, and never let me see you again.

But for the necessity in which you placed me to learn the secret of

your cowardly conduct with regard to the match I had planned for

Hortense--yes, cowardly!” she repeated, in answer to a gesture from

Crevel. “How can you load a poor girl, a pretty, innocent creature,

with such a weight of enmity? But for the necessity that goaded me as a

mother, you would never have spoken to me again, never again have come

within my doors. Thirty-two years of an honorable and loyal life shall

not be swept away by a blow from Monsieur Crevel----”

“The retired perfumer, successor to Cesar Birotteau at the _Queen of

the Roses_, Rue Saint-Honore,” added Crevel, in mocking tones.

“Deputy-mayor, captain in the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion of

Honor--exactly what my predecessor was!”

“Monsieur,” said the Baroness, “if, after twenty years of constancy,

Monsieur Hulot is tired of his wife, that is nobody’s concern but mine.

As you see, he has kept his infidelity a mystery, for I did not know

that he had succeeded you in the affections of Mademoiselle Josepha----”

“Oh, it has cost him a pretty penny, madame. His singing-bird has cost

him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha! you

have not seen the end of it!”

“Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake,

forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children without

a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself respected and

loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God unspotted----”

“Amen!” exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the

face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such

an attempt. “You do not yet know the latter end of poverty--shame,

disgrace.--I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and

your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the _Prodigal

Father_ from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me deeply,” said

Crevel, seating himself, “for it is frightful to see the woman one loves

weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing against

your interests or your husband’s. Only never send to me for information.

That is all.”

“What is to be done?” cried Madame Hulot.

Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which

this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as a

mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son’s father-in-law was

insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her resistance

to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he showed,

in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a humiliated

National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the point of

snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in a state of

such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel at her feet,

kissing her hands.

“Good God! what will become of us!” she went on, wiping away her tears.

“Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her eyes?

What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in her pure

life under her mother’s care as she is by every gift of nature? There

are days when she wanders round the garden, out of spirits without

knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes----”

“She is one-and-twenty,” said Crevel.

“Must I place her in a convent?” asked the Baroness. “But in such cases

religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously trained

girls lose their head!--Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not understand

that everything is final between us? that I look upon you with horror?

that you have crushed a mother’s last hopes----”

“But if I were to restore them,” asked he.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really

touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she had

said, “I look upon you with horror.”

Virtue is always a little too rigid; it overlooks the shades and

instincts by help of which we are able to tack when in a false position.

“So handsome a girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband

nowadays if she is penniless,” Crevel remarked, resuming his starchiest

manner. “Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather alarm

intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too expensive

to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking with such

a woman on your arm, every one will turn to look at you, and follow and

covet his neighbor’s wife. Such success is a source of much uneasiness

to men who do not want to be killing lovers; for, after all, no man

kills more than one. In the position in which you find yourself there

are just three ways of getting your daughter married: Either by my

help--and you will have none of it! That is one.--Or by finding some old

man of sixty, very rich, childless, and anxious to have children; that

is difficult, still such men are to be met with. Many old men take up

with a Josepha, a Jenny Cadine, why should not one be found who is ready

to make a fool of himself under legal formalities? If it were not for

Celestine and our two grandchildren, I would marry Hortense myself. That

is two.--The last way is the easiest----”

Madame Hulot raised her head, and looked uneasily at the ex-perfumer.

“Paris is a town whither every man of energy--and they sprout like

saplings on French soil--comes to meet his kind; talent swarms here

without hearth or home, and energy equal to anything, even to making a

fortune. Well, these youngsters--your humble servant was such a one

in his time, and how many he has known! What had du Tillet or Popinot

twenty years since? They were both pottering round in Daddy Birotteau’s

shop, with not a penny of capital but their determination to get on,

which, in my opinion, is the best capital a man can have. Money may be

eaten through, but you don’t eat through your determination. Why, what

had I? The will to get on, and plenty of pluck. At this day du Tillet is

a match for the greatest folks; little Popinot, the richest druggist of

the Rue des Lombards, became a deputy, now he is in office.--Well, one

of these free lances, as we say on the stock market, of the pen, or of

the brush, is the only man in Paris who would marry a penniless beauty,

for they have courage enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married

Mademoiselle Birotteau without asking for a farthing. Those men are

madmen, to be sure! They trust in love as they trust in good luck and

brains!--Find a man of energy who will fall in love with your daughter,

and he will marry without a thought of money. You must confess that by

way of an enemy I am not ungenerous, for this advice is against my own

interests.”

“Oh, Monsieur Crevel, if you would indeed be my friend and give up your

ridiculous notions----”

“Ridiculous? Madame, do not run yourself down. Look at yourself--I love

you, and you will come to be mine. The day will come when I shall say to

Hulot, ‘You took Josepha, I have taken your wife!’

“It is the old law of tit-for-tat! And I will persevere till I have

attained my end, unless you should become extremely ugly.--I shall

succeed; and I will tell you why,” he went on, resuming his attitude,

and looking at Madame Hulot. “You will not meet with such an old man,

or such a young lover,” he said after a pause, “because you love

your daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old

libertine, and because you--the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old

Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old

Guard--will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may find

him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of to-day

was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a factory.

“And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable of

dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, ‘It will be better that I

should fall! If Monsieur Crevel will but keep my secret, I will earn

my daughter’s portion--two hundred thousand francs for ten years’

attachment to that old gloveseller--old Crevel!’--I disgust you no

doubt, and what I am saying is horribly immoral, you think? But if you

happened to have been bitten by an overwhelming passion, you would find

a thousand arguments in favor of yielding--as women do when they are in

love.--Yes, and Hortense’s interests will suggest to your feelings such

terms of surrendering your conscience----”

“Hortense has still an uncle.”

“What! Old Fischer? He is winding up his concerns, and that again is the

Baron’s fault; his rake is dragged over every till within his reach.”

“Comte Hulot----”

“Oh, madame, your husband has already made thin air of the old General’s

savings. He spent them in furnishing his singer’s rooms.--Now, come; am

I to go without a hope?”

“Good-bye, monsieur. A man easily gets over a passion for a woman of my

age, and you will fall back on Christian principles. God takes care of

the wretched----”

The Baroness rose to oblige the captain to retreat, and drove him back

into the drawing-room.

“Ought the beautiful Madame Hulot to be living amid such squalor?” said

he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its gilding,

the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the large

room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse of Imperial

festivities.

“Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome

abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a

_man-trap_ and _a money-box for five-franc pieces_!”

The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to

vilify Josepha’s avarice.

“And for whom are you so magnanimous?” said he. By this time the

baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.--“For a

libertine!” said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior wealth.

“If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is all.”

After bowing to the officer as a woman bows to dismiss an importune

visitor, she turned away too quickly to see him once more fold his arms.

She unlocked the doors she had closed, and did not see the threatening

gesture which was Crevel’s parting greeting. She walked with a proud,

defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was

exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were

ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down

summer-house, where her daughter was gossiping with Cousin Betty.

From the first days of her married life to the present time the Baroness

had loved her husband, as Josephine in the end had loved Napoleon, with

an admiring, maternal, and cowardly devotion. Though ignorant of the

details given her by Crevel, she knew that for twenty years past Baron

Hulot been anything rather than a faithful husband; but she had sealed

her eyes with lead, she had wept in silence, and no word of reproach had

ever escaped her. In return for this angelic sweetness, she had won her

husband’s veneration and something approaching to worship from all who

were about her.

A wife’s affection for her husband and the respect she pays him are

infectious in a family. Hortense believed her father to be a perfect

model of conjugal affection; as to their son, brought up to admire the

Baron, whom everybody regarded as one of the giants who so effectually

backed Napoleon, he knew that he owed his advancement to his father’s

name, position, and credit; and besides, the impressions of childhood

exert an enduring influence. He still was afraid of his father; and if

he had suspected the misdeeds revealed by Crevel, as he was too much

overawed by him to find fault, he would have found excuses in the view

every man takes of such matters.

It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary

self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words,

is her past history.

Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a

village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled

by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of the

Rhine.

In 1799 the second brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot’s father,

left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre Fischer,

disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a small

private venture in the military transport service, an opening he owed to

the favor of Hulot d’Ervy, who was high in the commissariat. By a very

obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer family.

Adeline’s father and his younger brother were at that time contractors

for forage in the province of Alsace.

Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous

Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine. She was one of those

perfect and striking beauties--a woman like Madame Tallien, finished

with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her choicest

gifts--distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance, flesh of a

superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown laboratory

where good luck presides. These beautiful creatures all have something

in common: Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of Bronzino’s

masterpieces; Jean Goujon’s Venus, painted from the famous Diane de

Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria gallery;

Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges, Madame

Recamier.--all these women who preserved their beauty in spite of years,

of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have in

figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain striking

resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the ocean of

generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is born, all

daughters of the same salt wave.

Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had the

splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman born

a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand of

God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line of

profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as she

passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once seen

her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer his wife

as quickly as the law would permit, to the great astonishment of the

Fischers, who had all been brought up in the fear of their betters.

The eldest, a soldier of 1792, severely wounded in the attack on the

lines at Wissembourg, adored the Emperor Napoleon and everything that

had to do with the _Grande Armee_. Andre and Johann spoke with respect

of Commissary Hulot, the Emperor’s protege, to whom indeed they owed

their prosperity; for Hulot d’Ervy, finding them intelligent and honest,

had taken them from the army provision wagons to place them in charge

of a government contract needing despatch. The brothers Fischer had

done further service during the campaign of 1804. At the peace Hulot had

secured for them the contract for forage from Alsace, not knowing that

he would presently be sent to Strasbourg to prepare for the campaign of

1806.

This marriage was like an Assumption to the young peasant girl. The

beautiful Adeline was translated at once from the mire of her village to

the paradise of the Imperial Court; for the contractor, one of the most

conscientious and hard-working of the Commissariat staff, was made

a Baron, obtained a place near the Emperor, and was attached to the

Imperial Guard. The handsome rustic bravely set to work to educate

herself for love of her husband, for she was simply crazy about him;

and, indeed, the Commissariat office was as a man a perfect match for

Adeline as a woman. He was one of the picked corps of fine men. Tall,

well-built, fair, with beautiful blue eyes full of irresistible fire and

life, his elegant appearance made him remarkable by the side of d’Orsay,

Forbin, Ouvrard; in short, in the battalion of fine men that surrounded

the Emperor. A conquering “buck,” and holding the ideas of the

Directoire with regard to women, his career of gallantry was interrupted

for some long time by his conjugal affection.

To Adeline the Baron was from the first a sort of god who could do no

wrong. To him she owed everything: fortune--she had a carriage, a fine

house, every luxury of the day; happiness--he was devoted to her in the

face of the world; a title, for she was a Baroness; fame, for she was

spoken of as the beautiful Madame Hulot--and in Paris! Finally, she had

the honor of refusing the Emperor’s advances, for Napoleon made her a

present of a diamond necklace, and always remembered her, asking now and

again, “And is the beautiful Madame Hulot still a model of virtue?” in

the tone of a man who might have taken his revenge on one who should

have triumphed where he had failed.

So it needs no great intuition to discern what were the motives in a

simple, guileless, and noble soul for the fanaticism of Madame Hulot’s

love. Having fully persuaded herself that her husband could do her no

wrong, she made herself in the depths of her heart the humble, abject,

and blindfold slave of the man who had made her. It must be noted, too,

that she was gifted with great good sense--the good sense of the people,

which made her education sound. In society she spoke little, and never

spoke evil of any one; she did not try to shine; she thought out

many things, listened well, and formed herself on the model of the

best-conducted women of good birth.

In 1815 Hulot followed the lead of the Prince de Wissembourg, his

intimate friend, and became one of the officers who organized the

improvised troops whose rout brought the Napoleonic cycle to a close at

Waterloo. In 1816 the Baron was one of the men best hated by the Feltre

administration, and was not reinstated in the Commissariat till 1823,

when he was needed for the Spanish war. In 1830 he took office as

the fourth wheel of the coach, at the time of the levies, a sort of

conscription made by Louis Philippe on the old Napoleonic soldiery. From

the time when the younger branch ascended the throne, having taken an

active part in bringing that about, he was regarded as an indispensable

authority at the War Office. He had already won his Marshal’s baton,

and the King could do no more for him unless by making him minister or a

peer of France.

From 1818 till 1823, having no official occupation, Baron Hulot had gone

on active service to womankind. Madame Hulot dated her Hector’s first

infidelities from the grand _finale_ of the Empire. Thus, for twelve

years the Baroness had filled the part in her household of _prima donna

assoluta_, without a rival. She still could boast of the old-fashioned,

inveterate affection which husbands feel for wives who are resigned to

be gentle and virtuous helpmates; she knew that if she had a rival,

that rival would not subsist for two hours under a word of reproof from

herself; but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears, she would know

nothing of her husband’s proceedings outside his home. In short, she

treated her Hector as a mother treats a spoilt child.

Three years before the conversation reported above, Hortense, at

the Theatre des Varietes, had recognized her father in a lower tier

stage-box with Jenny Cadine, and had exclaimed:

“There is papa!”

“You are mistaken, my darling; he is at the Marshal’s,” the Baroness

replied.

She too had seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of feeling a pang when she

saw how pretty she was, she said to herself, “That rascal Hector must

think himself very lucky.”

She suffered nevertheless; she gave herself up in secret to rages of

torment; but as soon as she saw Hector, she always remembered her twelve

years of perfect happiness, and could not find it in her to utter a word

of complaint. She would have been glad if the Baron would have taken her

into his confidence; but she never dared to let him see that she knew

of his kicking over the traces, out of respect for her husband. Such

an excess of delicacy is never met with but in those grand creatures,

daughters of the soil, whose instinct it is to take blows without ever

returning them; the blood of the early martyrs still lives in their

veins. Well-born women, their husbands’ equals, feel the impulse to

annoy them, to mark the points of their tolerance, like points at

billiards, by some stinging word, partly in the spirit of diabolical

malice, and to secure the upper hand or the right of turning the tables.

The Baroness had an ardent admirer in her brother-in-law,

Lieutenant-General Hulot, the venerable Colonel of the Grenadiers of the

Imperial Infantry Guard, who was to have a Marshal’s baton in his old

age. This veteran, after having served from 1830 to 1834 as Commandant

of the military division, including the departments of Brittany, the

scene of his exploits in 1799 and 1800, had come to settle in Paris near

his brother, for whom he had a fatherly affection.

This old soldier’s heart was in sympathy with his sister-in-law; he

admired her as the noblest and saintliest of her sex. He had never

married, because he hoped to find a second Adeline, though he had vainly

sought for her through twenty campaigns in as many lands. To

maintain her place in the esteem of this blameless and spotless old

republican--of whom Napoleon had said, “That brave old Hulot is the most

obstinate republican, but he will never be false to me”--Adeline would

have endured griefs even greater than those that had just come upon

her. But the old soldier, seventy-two years of age, battered by thirty

campaigns, and wounded for the twenty-seventh time at Waterloo, was

Adeline’s admirer, and not a “protector.” The poor old Count, among

other infirmities, could only hear through a speaking trumpet.

So long as Baron Hulot d’Ervy was a fine man, his flirtations did not

damage his fortune; but when a man is fifty, the Graces claim payment.

At that age love becomes vice; insensate vanities come into play.

Thus, at about that time, Adeline saw that her husband was incredibly

particular about his dress; he dyed his hair and whiskers, and wore a

belt and stays. He was determined to remain handsome at any cost. This

care of his person, a weakness he had once mercilessly mocked at, was

carried out in the minutest details.

At last Adeline perceived that the Pactolus poured out before the

Baron’s mistresses had its source in her pocket. In eight years he had

dissipated a considerable amount of money; and so effectually, that, on

his son’s marriage two years previously, the Baron had been compelled to

explain to his wife that his pay constituted their whole income.

“What shall we come to?” asked Adeline.

“Be quite easy,” said the official, “I will leave the whole of my salary

in your hands, and I will make a fortune for Hortense, and some savings

for the future, in business.”

The wife’s deep belief in her husband’s power and superior talents, in

his capabilities and character, had, in fact, for the moment allayed her

anxiety.

What the Baroness’ reflections and tears were after Crevel’s departure

may now be clearly imagined. The poor woman had for two years past known

that she was at the bottom of a pit, but she had fancied herself alone

in it. How her son’s marriage had been finally arranged she had not

known; she had known nothing of Hector’s connection with the grasping

Jewess; and, above all, she hoped that no one in the world knew anything

of her troubles. Now, if Crevel went about so ready to talk of the

Baron’s excesses, Hector’s reputation would suffer. She could see, under

the angry ex-perfumer’s coarse harangue, the odious gossip behind the

scenes which led to her son’s marriage. Two reprobate hussies had been

the priestesses of this union planned at some orgy amid the degrading

familiarities of two tipsy old sinners.

“And has he forgotten Hortense!” she wondered.

“But he sees her every day; will he try to find her a husband among his

good-for-nothing sluts?”

At this moment it was the mother that spoke rather than the wife, for

she saw Hortense laughing with her Cousin Betty--the reckless laughter

of heedless youth; and she knew that such hysterical laughter was quite

as distressing a symptom as the tearful reverie of solitary walks in the

garden.

Hortense was like her mother, with golden hair that waved naturally,

and was amazingly long and thick. Her skin had the lustre of

mother-of-pearl. She was visibly the offspring of a true marriage, of a

pure and noble love in its prime. There was a passionate vitality in

her countenance, a brilliancy of feature, a full fount of youth, a fresh

vigor and abundance of health, which radiated from her with electric

flashes. Hortense invited the eye.

When her eye, of deep ultramarine blue, liquid with the moisture of

innocent youth, rested on a passer-by, he was involuntarily thrilled.

Nor did a single freckle mar her skin, such as those with which many

a white and golden maid pays toll for her milky whiteness. Tall, round

without being fat, with a slender dignity as noble as her mother’s,

she really deserved the name of goddess, of which old authors were

so lavish. In fact, those who saw Hortense in the street could hardly

restrain the exclamation, “What a beautiful girl!”

She was so genuinely innocent, that she could say to her mother:

“What do they mean, mamma, by calling me a beautiful girl when I am with

you? Are not you much handsomer than I am?”

And, in point of fact, at seven-and-forty the Baroness might have been

preferred to her daughter by amateurs of sunset beauty; for she had

not yet lost any of her charms, by one of those phenomena which are

especially rare in Paris, where Ninon was regarded as scandalous, simply

because she thus seemed to enjoy such an unfair advantage over the

plainer women of the seventeenth century.

Thinking of her daughter brought her back to the father; she saw him

sinking by degrees, day after day, down to the social mire, and even

dismissed some day from his appointment. The idea of her idol’s fall,

with a vague vision of the disasters prophesied by Crevel, was such a

terror to the poor woman, that she became rapt in the contemplation like

an ecstatic.

Cousin Betty, from time to time, as she chatted with Hortense, looked

round to see when they might return to the drawing-room; but her young

cousin was pelting her with questions, and at the moment when the

Baroness opened the glass door she did not happen to be looking.

Lisbeth Fischer, though the daughter of the eldest of the three

brothers, was five years younger than Madame Hulot; she was far from

being as handsome as her cousin, and had been desperately jealous of

Adeline. Jealousy was the fundamental passion of this character, marked

by eccentricities--a word invented by the English to describe the

craziness not of the asylum, but of respectable households. A native

of the Vosges, a peasant in the fullest sense of the word, lean, brown,

with shining black hair and thick eyebrows joining in a tuft, with long,

strong arms, thick feet, and some moles on her narrow simian face--such

is a brief description of the elderly virgin.

The family, living all under one roof, had sacrificed the common-looking

girl to the beauty, the bitter fruit to the splendid flower. Lisbeth

worked in the fields, while her cousin was indulged; and one day, when

they were alone together, she had tried to destroy Adeline’s nose, a

truly Greek nose, which the old mothers admired. Though she was beaten

for this misdeed, she persisted nevertheless in tearing the favorite’s

gowns and crumpling her collars.

At the time of Adeline’s wonderful marriage, Lisbeth had bowed to fate,

as Napoleon’s brothers and sisters bowed before the splendor of the

throne and the force of authority.

Adeline, who was extremely sweet and kind, remembered Lisbeth when she

found herself in Paris, and invited her there in 1809, intending to

rescue her from poverty by finding her a husband. But seeing that it was

impossible to marry the girl out of hand, with her black eyes and sooty

brows, unable, too, to read or write, the Baron began by apprenticing

her to a business; he placed her as a learner with the embroiderers to

the Imperial Court, the well-known Pons Brothers.

Lisbeth, called Betty for short, having learned to embroider in gold

and silver, and possessing all the energy of a mountain race, had

determination enough to learn to read, write, and keep accounts; for her

cousin the Baron had pointed out the necessity for these accomplishments

if she hoped to set up in business as an embroiderer.

She was bent on making a fortune; in two years she was another creature.

In 1811 the peasant woman had become a very presentable, skilled, and

intelligent forewoman.

Her department, that of gold and silver lace-work, as it is called,

included epaulettes, sword-knots, aiguillettes; in short, the immense

mass of glittering ornaments that sparkled on the rich uniforms of the

French army and civil officials. The Emperor, a true Italian in his love

of dress, had overlaid the coats of all his servants with silver and

gold, and the Empire included a hundred and thirty-three Departments.

These ornaments, usually supplied to tailors who were solvent and

wealthy paymasters, were a very secure branch of trade.

Just when Cousin Betty, the best hand in the house of Pons Brothers,

where she was forewoman of the embroidery department, might have set up

in business on her own account, the Empire collapsed. The olive-branch

of peace held out by the Bourbons did not reassure Lisbeth; she feared

a diminution of this branch of trade, since henceforth there were to

be but eighty-six Departments to plunder, instead of a hundred and

thirty-three, to say nothing of the immense reduction of the army.

Utterly scared by the ups and downs of industry, she refused the Baron’s

offers of help, and he thought she must be mad. She confirmed this

opinion by quarreling with Monsieur Rivet, who bought the business

of Pons Brothers, and with whom the Baron wished to place her in

partnership; she would be no more than a workwoman. Thus the Fischer

family had relapsed into the precarious mediocrity from which Baron

Hulot had raised it.

The three brothers Fischer, who had been ruined by the abdication at

Fontainebleau, in despair joined the irregular troops in 1815. The

eldest, Lisbeth’s father, was killed. Adeline’s father, sentenced to

death by court-martial, fled to Germany, and died at Treves in 1820.

Johann, the youngest, came to Paris, a petitioner to the queen of the

family, who was said to dine off gold and silver plate, and never to

be seen at a party but with diamonds in her hair as big as hazel-nuts,

given to her by the Emperor.

Johann Fischer, then aged forty-three, obtained from Baron Hulot a

capital of ten thousand francs with which to start a small business

as forage-dealer at Versailles, under the patronage of the War Office,

through the influence of the friends still in office, of the late

Commissary-General.

These family catastrophes, Baron Hulot’s dismissal, and the knowledge

that he was a mere cipher in that immense stir of men and interests and

things which makes Paris at once a paradise and a hell, quite quelled

Lisbeth Fischer. She gave up all idea of rivalry and comparison with her

cousin after feeling her great superiority; but envy still lurked in

her heart, like a plague-germ that may hatch and devastate a city if the

fatal bale of wool is opened in which it is concealed.

Now and again, indeed, she said to herself:

“Adeline and I are the same flesh and blood, our fathers were

brothers--and she is in a mansion, while I am in a garret.”

But every New Year Lisbeth had presents from the Baron and Baroness; the

Baron, who was always good to her, paid for her firewood in the winter;

old General Hulot had her to dinner once a week; and there was always a

cover laid for her at her cousin’s table. They laughed at her no doubt,

but they never were ashamed to own her. In short, they had made her

independent in Paris, where she lived as she pleased.

The old maid had, in fact, a terror of any kind of tie. Her cousin had

offered her a room in her own house--Lisbeth suspected the halter of

domestic servitude; several times the Baron had found a solution of

the difficult problem of her marriage; but though tempted in the first

instance, she would presently decline, fearing lest she should be

scorned for her want of education, her general ignorance, and her

poverty; finally, when the Baroness suggested that she should live

with their uncle Johann, and keep house for him, instead of the upper

servant, who must cost him dear, Lisbeth replied that that was the very

last way she should think of marrying.

Lisbeth Fischer had the sort of strangeness in her ideas which is often

noticeable in characters that have developed late, in savages, who think

much and speak little. Her peasant’s wit had acquired a good deal of

Parisian asperity from hearing the talk of workshops and mixing with

workmen and workwomen. She, whose character had a marked resemblance to

that of the Corsicans, worked upon without fruition by the instincts of

a strong nature, would have liked to be the protectress of a weak man;

but, as a result of living in the capital, the capital had altered her

superficially. Parisian polish became rust on this coarsely tempered

soul. Gifted with a cunning which had become unfathomable, as it always

does in those whose celibacy is genuine, with the originality and

sharpness with which she clothed her ideas, in any other position she

would have been formidable. Full of spite, she was capable of bringing

discord into the most united family.

In early days, when she indulged in certain secret hopes which she

confided to none, she took to wearing stays, and dressing in the

fashion, and so shone in splendor for a short time, that the Baron

thought her marriageable. Lisbeth at that stage was the piquante

brunette of old-fashioned novels. Her piercing glance, her olive

skin, her reed-like figure, might invite a half-pay major; but she was

satisfied, she would say laughing, with her own admiration.

And, indeed, she found her life pleasant enough when she had freed it

from practical anxieties, for she dined out every evening after working

hard from sunrise. Thus she had only her rent and her midday meal to

provide for; she had most of her clothes given her, and a variety of

very acceptable stores, such as coffee, sugar, wine, and so forth.

In 1837, after living for twenty-seven years, half maintained by the

Hulots and her Uncle Fischer, Cousin Betty, resigned to being nobody,

allowed herself to be treated so. She herself refused to appear at any

grand dinners, preferring the family party, where she held her own and

was spared all slights to her pride.

Wherever she went--at General Hulot’s, at Crevel’s, at the house of the

young Hulots, or at Rivet’s (Pons’ successor, with whom she made up her

quarrel, and who made much of her), and at the Baroness’ table--she was

treated as one of the family; in fact, she managed to make friends of

the servants by making them an occasional small present, and

always gossiping with them for a few minutes before going into the

drawing-room. This familiarity, by which she uncompromisingly put

herself on their level, conciliated their servile good-nature, which

is indispensable to a parasite. “She is a good, steady woman,” was

everybody’s verdict.

Her willingness to oblige, which knew no bounds when it was not demanded

of her, was indeed, like her assumed bluntness, a necessity of her

position. She had at length understood what her life must be, seeing

that she was at everybody’s mercy; and needing to please everybody, she

would laugh with young people, who liked her for a sort of wheedling

flattery which always wins them; guessing and taking part with their

fancies, she would make herself their spokeswoman, and they thought her

a delightful _confidante_, since she had no right to find fault with

them.

Her absolute secrecy also won her the confidence of their seniors; for,

like Ninon, she had certain manly qualities. As a rule, our confidence

is given to those below rather than above us. We employ our inferiors

rather than our betters in secret transactions, and they thus become

the recipients of our inmost thoughts, and look on at our meditations;

Richelieu thought he had achieved success when he was admitted to the

Council. This penniless woman was supposed to be so dependent on every

one about her, that she seemed doomed to perfect silence. She herself

called herself the Family Confessional.

The Baroness only, remembering her ill-usage in childhood by the cousin

who, though younger, was stronger than herself, never wholly trusted

her. Besides, out of sheer modesty, she would never have told her

domestic sorrows to any one but God.

It may here be well to add that the Baron’s house preserved all its

magnificence in the eyes of Lisbeth Fischer, who was not struck, as the

parvenu perfumer had been, with the penury stamped on the shabby chairs,

the dirty hangings, and the ripped silk. The furniture we live with is

in some sort like our own person; seeing ourselves every day, we end,

like the Baron, by thinking ourselves but little altered, and still

youthful, when others see that our head is covered with chinchilla,

our forehead scarred with circumflex accents, our stomach assuming the

rotundity of a pumpkin. So these rooms, always blazing in Betty’s

eyes with the Bengal fire of Imperial victory, were to her perennially

splendid.

As time went on, Lisbeth had contracted some rather strange old-maidish

habits. For instance, instead of following the fashions, she expected

the fashion to accept her ways and yield to her always out-of-date

notions. When the Baroness gave her a pretty new bonnet, or a gown in

the fashion of the day, Betty remade it completely at home, and spoilt

it by producing a dress of the style of the Empire or of her old

Lorraine costume. A thirty-franc bonnet came out a rag, and the gown a

disgrace. On this point, Lisbeth was as obstinate as a mule; she would

please no one but herself and believed herself charming; whereas this

assimilative process--harmonious, no doubt, in so far as that it stamped

her for an old maid from head to foot--made her so ridiculous, that,

with the best will in the world, no one could admit her on any smart

occasion.

This refractory, capricious, and independent spirit, and the

inexplicable wild shyness of the woman for whom the Baron had four

times found a match--an employe in his office, a retired major, an

army contractor, and a half-pay captain--while she had refused an army

lacemaker, who had since made his fortune, had won her the name of the

Nanny Goat, which the Baron gave her in jest. But this nickname only met

the peculiarities that lay on the surface, the eccentricities which

each of us displays to his neighbors in social life. This woman, who, if

closely studied, would have shown the most savage traits of the peasant

class, was still the girl who had clawed her cousin’s nose, and who, if

she had not been trained to reason, would perhaps have killed her in a

fit of jealousy.

It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled her

to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild men,

reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the difference

between natural and civilized man. The savage has only impulse; the

civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain

retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy

of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas

sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many

feelings, where the savage has but one at a time. This is the cause of

the transient ascendency of a child over its parents, which ceases as

soon as it is satisfied; in the man who is still one with nature, this

contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a savage of Lorraine, somewhat

treacherous too, was of this class of natures, which are commoner among

the lower orders than is supposed, accounting for the conduct of the

populace during revolutions.

At the time when this _Drama_ opens, if Cousin Betty would have allowed

herself to be dressed like other people; if, like the women of Paris,

she had been accustomed to wear each fashion in its turn, she would have

been presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the stiffness of a

stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris simply does not

exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features, the Calabrian fixity

of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by Giotto, and of which a

true Parisian would have taken advantage, above all, her strange way of

dressing, gave her such an extraordinary appearance that she sometimes

looked like one of those monkeys in petticoats taken about by little

Savoyards. As she was well known in the houses connected by family which

she frequented, and restricted her social efforts to that little circle,

as she liked her own home, her singularities no longer astonished

anybody; and out of doors they were lost in the immense stir of Paris

street-life, where only pretty women are ever looked at.

Hortense’s laughter was at this moment caused by a victory won over her

Cousin Lisbeth’s perversity; she had just wrung from her an avowal she

had been hoping for these three years past. However secretive an old

maid may be, there is one sentiment which will always avail to make her

break her fast from words, and that is her vanity. For the last three

years, Hortense, having become very inquisitive on such matters, had

pestered her cousin with questions, which, however, bore the stamp of

perfect innocence. She wanted to know why her cousin had never married.

Hortense, who knew of the five offers that she had refused, had

constructed her little romance; she supposed that Lisbeth had had a

passionate attachment, and a war of banter was the result. Hortense

would talk of “We young girls!” when speaking of herself and her cousin.

Cousin Betty had on several occasions answered in the same tone--“And

who says I have not a lover?” So Cousin Betty’s lover, real or

fictitious, became a subject of mild jesting. At last, after two years

of this petty warfare, the last time Lisbeth had come to the house

Hortense’s first question had been:

“And how is your lover?”

“Pretty well, thank you,” was the answer. “He is rather ailing, poor

young man.”

“He has delicate health?” asked the Baroness, laughing.

“I should think so! He is fair. A sooty thing like me can love none but

a fair man with a color like the moon.”

“But who is he? What does he do?” asked Hortense. “Is he a prince?”

“A prince of artisans, as I am queen of the bobbin. Is a poor woman like

me likely to find a lover in a man with a fine house and money in the

funds, or in a duke of the realm, or some Prince Charming out of a fairy

tale?”

“Oh, I should so much like to see him!” cried Hortense, smiling.

“To see what a man can be like who can love the Nanny Goat?” retorted

Lisbeth.

“He must be some monster of an old clerk, with a goat’s beard!” Hortense

said to her mother.

“Well, then, you are quite mistaken, mademoiselle.”

“Then you mean that you really have a lover?” Hortense exclaimed in

triumph.

“As sure as you have not!” retorted Lisbeth, nettled.

“But if you have a lover, why don’t you marry him, Lisbeth?” said the

Baroness, shaking her head at her daughter. “We have been hearing rumors

about him these three years. You have had time to study him; and if he

has been faithful so long, you should not persist in a delay which must

be hard upon him. After all, it is a matter of conscience; and if he is

young, it is time to take a brevet of dignity.”

Cousin Betty had fixed her gaze on Adeline, and seeing that she was

jesting, she replied:

“It would be marrying hunger and thirst; he is a workman, I am a

workwoman. If we had children, they would be workmen.--No, no; we love

each other spiritually; it is less expensive.”

“Why do you keep him in hiding?” Hortense asked.

“He wears a round jacket,” replied the old maid, laughing.

“You truly love him?” the Baroness inquired.

“I believe you! I love him for his own sake, the dear cherub. For four

years his home has been in my heart.”

“Well, then, if you love him for himself,” said the Baroness gravely,

“and if he really exists, you are treating him criminally. You do not

know how to love truly.”

“We all know that from our birth,” said Lisbeth.

“No, there are women who love and yet are selfish, and that is your

case.”

Cousin Betty’s head fell, and her glance would have made any one shiver

who had seen it; but her eyes were on her reel of thread.

“If you would introduce your so-called lover to us, Hector might find

him employment, or put him in a position to make money.”

“That is out of the question,” said Cousin Betty.

“And why?”

“He is a sort of Pole--a refugee----”

“A conspirator?” cried Hortense. “What luck for you!--Has he had any

adventures?”

“He has fought for Poland. He was a professor in the school where the

students began the rebellion; and as he had been placed there by the

Grand Duke Constantine, he has no hope of mercy----”

“A professor of what?”

“Of fine arts.”

“And he came to Paris when the rebellion was quelled?”

“In 1833. He came through Germany on foot.”

“Poor young man! And how old is he?”

“He was just four-and-twenty when the insurrection broke out--he is

twenty-nine now.”

“Fifteen years your junior,” said the Baroness.

“And what does he live on?” asked Hortense.

“His talent.”

“Oh, he gives lessons?”

“No,” said Cousin Betty; “he gets them, and hard ones too!”

“And his Christian name--is it a pretty name?”

“Wenceslas.”

“What a wonderful imagination you old maids have!” exclaimed the

Baroness. “To hear you talk, Lisbeth, one might really believe you.”

“You see, mamma, he is a Pole, and so accustomed to the knout that

Lisbeth reminds him of the joys of his native land.”

They all three laughed, and Hortense sang _Wenceslas! idole de mon ame!_

instead of _O Mathilde_.

Then for a few minutes there was a truce.

“These children,” said Cousin Betty, looking at Hortense as she went up

to her, “fancy that no one but themselves can have lovers.”

“Listen,” Hortense replied, finding herself alone with her cousin, “if

you prove to me that Wenceslas is not a pure invention, I will give you

my yellow cashmere shawl.”

“He is a Count.”

“Every Pole is a Count!”

“But he is not a Pole; he comes from Liva--Litha----”

“Lithuania?”

“No.”

“Livonia?”

“Yes, that’s it!”

“But what is his name?”

“I wonder if you are capable of keeping a secret.”

“Cousin Betty, I will be as mute!----”

“As a fish?”

“As a fish.”

“By your life eternal?”

“By my life eternal!”

“No, by your happiness in this world?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, his name is Wenceslas Steinbock.”

“One of Charles XII.’s Generals was named Steinbock.”

“He was his grand-uncle. His own father settled in Livonia after the

death of the King of Sweden; but he lost all his fortune during the

campaign of 1812, and died, leaving the poor boy at the age of eight

without a penny. The Grand Duke Constantine, for the honor of the name

of Steinbock, took him under his protection and sent him to school.”

“I will not break my word,” Hortense replied; “prove his existence,

and you shall have the yellow shawl. The color is most becoming to dark

skins.”

“And you will keep my secret?”

“And tell you mine.”

“Well, then, the next time I come you shall have the proof.”

“But the proof will be the lover,” said Hortense.

Cousin Betty, who, since her first arrival in Paris, had been bitten

by a mania for shawls, was bewitched by the idea of owning the yellow

cashmere given to his wife by the Baron in 1808, and handed down from

mother to daughter after the manner of some families in 1830. The shawl

had been a good deal worn ten years ago; but the costly object, now

always kept in its sandal-wood box, seemed to the old maid ever new,

like the drawing-room furniture. So she brought in her handbag a present

for the Baroness’ birthday, by which she proposed to prove the existence

of her romantic lover.

This present was a silver seal formed of three little figures back to

back, wreathed with foliage, and supporting the Globe. They represented

Faith, Hope, and Charity; their feet rested on monsters rending each

other, among them the symbolical serpent. In 1846, now that such immense

strides have been made in the art of which Benvenuto Cellini was the

master, by Mademoiselle de Fauveau, Wagner, Jeanest, Froment-Meurice,

and wood-carvers like Lienard, this little masterpiece would amaze

nobody; but at that time a girl who understood the silversmith’s art

stood astonished as she held the seal which Lisbeth put into her hands,

saying:

“There! what do you think of that?”

In design, attitude, and drapery the figures were of the school of

Raphael; but the execution was in the style of the Florentine metal

workers--the school created by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti,

Benvenuto Cellini, John of Bologna, and others. The French masters of

the Renaissance had never invented more strangely twining monsters than

these that symbolized the evil passions. The palms, ferns, reeds, and

foliage that wreathed the Virtues showed a style, a taste, a handling

that might have driven a practised craftsman to despair; a scroll

floated above the three figures; and on its surface, between the heads,

were a W, a chamois, and the word _fecit_.

“Who carved this?” asked Hortense.

“Well, just my lover,” replied Lisbeth. “There are ten months’ work in

it; I could earn more at making sword-knots.--He told me that Steinbock

means a rock goat, a chamois, in German. And he intends to mark all his

work in that way.--Ah, ha! I shall have the shawl.”

“What for?”

“Do you suppose I could buy such a thing, or order it? Impossible!

Well, then, it must have been given to me. And who would make me such a

present? A lover!”

Hortense, with an artfulness that would have frightened Lisbeth Fischer

if she had detected it, took care not to express all her admiration,

though she was full of the delight which every soul that is open to a

sense of beauty must feel on seeing a faultless piece of work--perfect

and unexpected.

“On my word,” said she, “it is very pretty.”

“Yes, it is pretty,” said her cousin; “but I like an orange-colored

shawl better.--Well, child, my lover spends his time in doing such work

as that. Since he came to Paris he has turned out three or four little

trifles in that style, and that is the fruit of four years’ study

and toil. He has served as apprentice to founders, metal-casters, and

goldsmiths.--There he has paid away thousands and hundreds of francs.

And my gentleman tells me that in a few months now he will be famous and

rich----”

“Then you often see him?”

“Bless me, do you think it is all a fable? I told you truth in jest.”

“And he is in love with you?” asked Hortense eagerly.

“He adores me,” replied Lisbeth very seriously. “You see, child, he had

never seen any women but the washed out, pale things they all are in

the north, and a slender, brown, youthful thing like me warmed his

heart.--But, mum; you promised, you know!”

“And he will fare like the five others,” said the girl ironically, as

she looked at the seal.

“Six others, miss. I left one in Lorraine, who, to this day, would fetch

the moon down for me.”

“This one does better than that,” said Hortense; “he has brought down

the sun.”

“Where can that be turned into money?” asked her cousin. “It takes wide

lands to benefit by the sunshine.”

These witticisms, fired in quick retort, and leading to the sort of

giddy play that may be imagined, had given cause for the laughter which

had added to the Baroness’ troubles by making her compare her

daughter’s future lot with the present, when she was free to indulge the

light-heartedness of youth.

“But to give you a gem which cost him six months of work, he must be

under some great obligations to you?” said Hortense, in whom the silver

seal had suggested very serious reflections.

“Oh, you want to know too much at once!” said her cousin. “But, listen,

I will let you into a little plot.”

“Is your lover in it too?”

“Oh, ho! you want so much to see him! But, as you may suppose, an old

maid like Cousin Betty, who had managed to keep a lover for five years,

keeps him well hidden.--Now, just let me alone. You see, I have neither

cat nor canary, neither dog nor a parrot, and the old Nanny Goat wanted

something to pet and tease--so I treated myself to a Polish Count.”

“Has he a moustache?”

“As long as that,” said Lisbeth, holding up her shuttle filled with gold

thread. She always took her lace-work with her, and worked till dinner

was served.

“If you ask too many questions, you will be told nothing,” she went on.

“You are but two-and-twenty, and you chatter more than I do though I am

forty-two--not to say forty-three.”

“I am listening; I am a wooden image,” said Hortense.

“My lover has finished a bronze group ten inches high,” Lisbeth went on.

“It represents Samson slaying a lion, and he has kept it buried till it

is so rusty that you might believe it to be as old as Samson himself.

This fine piece is shown at the shop of one of the old curiosity sellers

on the Place du Carrousel, near my lodgings. Now, your father knows

Monsieur Popinot, the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, and the

Comte de Rastignac, and if he would mention the group to them as a fine

antique he had seen by chance! It seems that such things take the fancy

of your grand folks, who don’t care so much about gold lace, and that my

man’s fortune would be made if one of them would buy or even look at

the wretched piece of metal. The poor fellow is sure that it might be

mistaken for old work, and that the rubbish is worth a great deal of

money. And then, if one of the ministers should purchase the group, he

would go to pay his respects, and prove that he was the maker, and be

almost carried in triumph! Oh! he believes he has reached the pinnacle;

poor young man, and he is as proud as two newly-made Counts.”

“Michael Angelo over again; but, for a lover, he has kept his head on

his shoulders!” said Hortense. “And how much does he want for it?”

“Fifteen hundred francs. The dealer will not let it go for less, since

he must take his commission.”

“Papa is in the King’s household just now,” said Hortense. “He sees

those two ministers every day at the Chamber, and he will do the

thing--I undertake that. You will be a rich woman, Madame la Comtesse de

Steinbock.”

“No, the boy is too lazy; for whole weeks he sits twiddling with bits

of red wax, and nothing comes of it. Why, he spends all his days at the

Louvre and the Library, looking at prints and sketching things. He is an

idler!”

The cousins chatted and giggled; Hortense laughing a forced laugh, for

she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through--the

love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form, when every thought is

accreted round some form which is suggested by a chance word, as the

efflorescence of hoar-frost gathers about a straw that the wind has

blown against the window-sill.

For the past ten months she had made a reality of her cousin’s imaginary

romance, believing, like her mother, that Lisbeth would never marry;

and now, within a week, this visionary being had become Comte Wenceslas

Steinbock, the dream had a certificate of birth, the wraith had

solidified into a young man of thirty. The seal she held in her hand--a

sort of Annunciation in which genius shone like an immanent light--had

the powers of a talisman. Hortense felt such a surge of happiness, that

she almost doubted whether the tale were true; there was a ferment in

her blood, and she laughed wildly to deceive her cousin.

“But I think the drawing-room door is open,” said Lisbeth; “let us go

and see if Monsieur Crevel is gone.”

“Mamma has been very much out of spirits these two days. I suppose the

marriage under discussion has come to nothing!”

“Oh, it may come on again. He is--I may tell you so much--a Councillor

of the Supreme Court. How would you like to be Madame la Presidente? If

Monsieur Crevel has a finger in it, he will tell me about it if I ask

him. I shall know by to-morrow if there is any hope.”

“Leave the seal with me,” said Hortense; “I will not show it--mamma’s

birthday is not for a month yet; I will give it to you that morning.”

“No, no. Give it back to me; it must have a case.”

“But I will let papa see it, that he may know what he is talking about

to the ministers, for men in authority must be careful what they say,”

urged the girl.

“Well, do not show it to your mother--that is all I ask; for if she

believed I had a lover, she would make game of me.”

“I promise.”

The cousins reached the drawing-room just as the Baroness turned faint.

Her daughter’s cry of alarm recalled her to herself. Lisbeth went off to

fetch some salts. When she came back, she found the mother and daughter

in each other’s arms, the Baroness soothing her daughter’s fears, and

saying:

“It was nothing; a little nervous attack.--There is your father,” she

added, recognizing the Baron’s way of ringing the bell. “Say not a word

to him.”

Adeline rose and went to meet her husband, intending to take him

into the garden and talk to him till dinner should be served of the

difficulties about the proposed match, getting him to come to some

decision as to the future, and trying to hint at some warning advice.

Baron Hector Hulot came in, in a dress at once lawyer-like and

Napoleonic, for Imperial men--men who had been attached to the

Emperor--were easily distinguishable by their military deportment, their

blue coats with gilt buttons, buttoned to the chin, their black silk

stock, and an authoritative demeanor acquired from a habit of command in

circumstances requiring despotic rapidity. There was nothing of the old

man in the Baron, it must be admitted; his sight was still so good,

that he could read without spectacles; his handsome oval face, framed

in whiskers that were indeed too black, showed a brilliant complexion,

ruddy with the veins that characterize a sanguine temperament; and his

stomach, kept in order by a belt, had not exceeded the limits of “the

majestic,” as Brillat-Savarin says. A fine aristocratic air and great

affability served to conceal the libertine with whom Crevel had had such

high times. He was one of those men whose eyes always light up at the

sight of a pretty woman, even of such as merely pass by, never to be

seen again.

“Have you been speaking, my dear?” asked Adeline, seeing him with an

anxious brow.

“No,” replied Hector, “but I am worn out with hearing others speak for

two hours without coming to a vote. They carry on a war of words, in

which their speeches are like a cavalry charge which has no effect on

the enemy. Talk has taken the place of action, which goes very much

against the grain with men who are accustomed to marching orders, as

I said to the Marshal when I left him. However, I have enough of

being bored on the ministers’ bench; here I may play.--How do, la

Chevre!--Good morning, little kid,” and he took his daughter round the

neck, kissed her, and made her sit on his knee, resting her head on his

shoulder, that he might feel her soft golden hair against his cheek.

“He is tired and worried,” said his wife to herself. “I shall only worry

him more.--I will wait.--Are you going to be at home this evening?” she

asked him.

“No, children. After dinner I must go out. If it had not been the day

when Lisbeth and the children and my brother come to dinner, you would

not have seen me at all.”

The Baroness took up the newspaper, looked down the list of theatres,

and laid it down again when she had seen that Robert _le Diable_ was

to be given at the Opera. Josepha, who had left the Italian Opera six

months since for the French Opera, was to take the part of Alice.

This little pantomime did not escape the Baron, who looked hard at

his wife. Adeline cast down her eyes and went out into the garden; her

husband followed her.

“Come, what is it, Adeline?” said he, putting his arm round her waist

and pressing her to his side. “Do not you know that I love you more

than----”

“More than Jenny Cadine or Josepha!” said she, boldly interrupting him.

“Who put that into your head?” exclaimed the Baron, releasing his wife,

and starting back a step or two.

“I got an anonymous letter, which I burnt at once, in which I was told,

my dear, that the reason Hortense’s marriage was broken off was the

poverty of our circumstances. Your wife, my dear Hector, would never

have said a word; she knew of your connection with Jenny Cadine, and did

she ever complain?--But as the mother of Hortense, I am bound to speak

the truth.”

Hulot, after a short silence, which was terrible to his wife, whose

heart beat loud enough to be heard, opened his arms, clasped her to his

heart, kissed her forehead, and said with the vehemence of enthusiasm:

“Adeline, you are an angel, and I am a wretch----”

“No, no,” cried the Baroness, hastily laying her hand upon his lips to

hinder him from speaking evil of himself.

“Yes, for I have not at this moment a sou to give to Hortense, and I am

most unhappy. But since you open your heart to me, I may pour into it

the trouble that is crushing me.--Your Uncle Fischer is in difficulties,

and it is I who dragged him there, for he has accepted bills for me

to the amount of twenty-five thousand francs! And all for a woman who

deceives me, who laughs at me behind my back, and calls me an old

dyed Tom. It is frightful! A vice which costs me more than it would to

maintain a family!--And I cannot resist!--I would promise you here and

now never to see that abominable Jewess again; but if she wrote me two

lines, I should go to her, as we marched into fire under the Emperor.”

“Do not be so distressed,” cried the poor woman in despair, but

forgetting her daughter as she saw the tears in her husband’s eyes.

“There are my diamonds; whatever happens, save my uncle.”

“Your diamonds are worth scarcely twenty thousand francs nowadays. That

would not be enough for old Fischer, so keep them for Hortense; I will

see the Marshal to-morrow.”

“My poor dear!” said the Baroness, taking her Hector’s hands and kissing

them.

This was all the scolding he got. Adeline sacrificed her jewels, the

father made them a present to Hortense, she regarded this as a sublime

action, and she was helpless.

“He is the master; he could take everything, and he leaves me my

diamonds; he is divine!”

This was the current of her thoughts; and indeed the wife had gained

more by her sweetness than another perhaps could have achieved by a fit

of angry jealousy.

The moralist cannot deny that, as a rule, well-bred though very wicked

men are far more attractive and lovable than virtuous men; having crimes

to atone for, they crave indulgence by anticipation, by being lenient

to the shortcomings of those who judge them, and they are thought most

kind. Though there are no doubt some charming people among the virtuous,

Virtue considers itself fair enough, unadorned, to be at no pains to

please; and then all really virtuous persons, for the hypocrites do not

count, have some slight doubts as to their position; they believe that

they are cheated in the bargain of life on the whole, and they indulge

in acid comments after the fashion of those who think themselves

unappreciated.

Hence the Baron, who accused himself of ruining his family, displayed

all his charm of wit and his most seductive graces for the benefit of

his wife, for his children, and his Cousin Lisbeth.

Then, when his son arrived with Celestine, Crevel’s daughter, who was

nursing the infant Hulot, he was delightful to his daughter-in-law,

loading her with compliments--a treat to which Celestine’s vanity was

little accustomed for no moneyed bride more commonplace or more utterly

insignificant was ever seen. The grandfather took the baby from her,

kissed it, declared it was a beauty and a darling; he spoke to it in

baby language, prophesied that it would grow to be taller than himself,

insinuated compliments for his son’s benefit, and restored the child to

the Normandy nurse who had charge of it. Celestine, on her part, gave

the Baroness a look, as much as to say, “What a delightful man!” and she

naturally took her father-in-law’s part against her father.

After thus playing the charming father-in-law and the indulgent

grandpapa, the Baron took his son into the garden, and laid before him

a variety of observations full of good sense as to the attitude to be

taken up by the Chamber on a certain ticklish question which had

that morning come under discussion. The young lawyer was struck with

admiration for the depth of his father’s insight, touched by his

cordiality, and especially by the deferential tone which seemed to place

the two men on a footing of equality.

Monsieur Hulot _junior_ was in every respect the young Frenchman, as

he has been moulded by the Revolution of 1830; his mind infatuated with

politics, respectful of his own hopes, and concealing them under

an affectation of gravity, very envious of successful men, making

sententiousness do the duty of witty rejoinders--the gems of the French

language--with a high sense of importance, and mistaking arrogance for

dignity.

Such men are walking coffins, each containing a Frenchman of the past;

now and again the Frenchman wakes up and kicks against his English-made

casing; but ambition stifles him, and he submits to be smothered. The

coffin is always covered with black cloth.

“Ah, here is my brother!” said Baron Hulot, going to meet the Count at

the drawing-room door.

Having greeted the probable successor of the late Marshal Montcornet, he

led him forward by the arm with every show of affection and respect.

The older man, a member of the Chamber of Peers, but excused from

attendance on account of his deafness, had a handsome head, chilled by

age, but with enough gray hair still to be marked in a circle by the

pressure of his hat. He was short, square, and shrunken, but carried his

hale old age with a free-and-easy air; and as he was full of excessive

activity, which had now no purpose, he divided his time between reading

and taking exercise. In a drawing-room he devoted his attention to

waiting on the wishes of the ladies.

“You are very merry here,” said he, seeing that the Baron shed a spirit

of animation on the little family gathering. “And yet Hortense is

not married,” he added, noticing a trace of melancholy on his

sister-in-law’s countenance.

“That will come all in good time,” Lisbeth shouted in his ear in a

formidable voice.

“So there you are, you wretched seedling that could never blossom,” said

he, laughing.

The hero of Forzheim rather liked Cousin Betty, for there were certain

points of resemblance between them. A man of the ranks, without any

education, his courage had been the sole mainspring of his military

promotion, and sound sense had taken the place of brilliancy. Of the

highest honor and clean-handed, he was ending a noble life in full

contentment in the centre of his family, which claimed all his

affections, and without a suspicion of his brother’s still undiscovered

misconduct. No one enjoyed more than he the pleasing sight of this

family party, where there never was the smallest disagreement, for the

brothers and sisters were all equally attached, Celestine having been at

once accepted as one of the family. But the worthy little Count wondered

now and then why Monsieur Crevel never joined the party. “Papa is in

the country,” Celestine shouted, and it was explained to him that the

ex-perfumer was away from home.

This perfect union of all her family made Madame Hulot say to herself,

“This, after all, is the best kind of happiness, and who can deprive us

of it?”

The General, on seeing his favorite Adeline the object of her husband’s

attentions, laughed so much about it that the Baron, fearing to seem

ridiculous, transferred his gallantries to his daughter-in-law, who

at these family dinners was always the object of his flattery and kind

care, for he hoped to win Crevel back through her, and make him forego

his resentment.

Any one seeing this domestic scene would have found it hard to believe

that the father was at his wits’ end, the mother in despair, the son

anxious beyond words as to his father’s future fate, and the daughter on

the point of robbing her cousin of her lover.

At seven o’clock the Baron, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness,

and Hortense all engaged at whist, went off to applaud his mistress

at the Opera, taking with him Lisbeth Fischer, who lived in the Rue du

Doyenne, and who always made an excuse of the solitude of that deserted

quarter to take herself off as soon as dinner was over. Parisians will

all admit that the old maid’s prudence was but rational.

The existence of the maze of houses under the wing of the old Louvre is

one of those protests against obvious good sense which Frenchmen love,

that Europe may reassure itself as to the quantum of brains they are

known to have, and not be too much alarmed. Perhaps without knowing it,

this reveals some profound political idea.

It will surely not be a work of supererogation to describe this part of

Paris as it is even now, when we could hardly expect its survival; and

our grandsons, who will no doubt see the Louvre finished, may refuse

to believe that such a relic of barbarism should have survived for

six-and-thirty years in the heart of Paris and in the face of the palace

where three dynasties of kings have received, during those thirty-six

years, the elite of France and of Europe.

Between the little gate leading to the Bridge of the Carrousel and the

Rue du Musee, every one having come to Paris, were it but for a few

days, must have seen a dozen of houses with a decayed frontage where the

dejected owners have attempted no repairs, the remains of an old

block of buildings of which the destruction was begun at the time when

Napoleon determined to complete the Louvre. This street, and the blind

alley known as the Impasse du Doyenne, are the only passages into this

gloomy and forsaken block, inhabited perhaps by ghosts, for there never

is anybody to be seen. The pavement is much below the footway of the

Rue du Musee, on a level with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus, half

sunken by the raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped in the

perpetual shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre, darkened on

that side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy chill, and

the cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these houses a kind

of crypt, tombs of the living. As we drive in a hackney cab past this

dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue du Doyenne,

a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie there, and what

things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a

cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak

of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes appalling when we

note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the side towards the Rue

de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of tumbled paving-stones between

them and the Tuileries, by little garden-plots and suspicious-looking

hovels on the side of the great galleries, and by a desert of

building-stone and old rubbish on the side towards the old Louvre. Henri

III. and his favorites in search of their trunk-hose, and Marguerite’s

lovers in search of their heads, must dance sarabands by moonlight in

this wilderness overlooked by the roof of a chapel still standing

there as if to prove that the Catholic religion--so deeply rooted in

France--survives all else.

For forty years now has the Louvre been crying out by every gap in these

damaged walls, by every yawning window, “Rid me of these warts upon my

face!” This cutthroat lane has no doubt been regarded as useful, and has

been thought necessary as symbolizing in the heart of Paris the intimate

connection between poverty and the splendor that is characteristic

of the queen of cities. And indeed these chill ruins, among which

the Legitimist newspaper contracted the disease it is dying of--the

abominable hovels of the Rue du Musee, and the hoarding appropriated by

the shop stalls that flourish there--will perhaps live longer and more

prosperously than three successive dynasties.

In 1823 the low rents in these already condemned houses had tempted

Lisbeth Fischer to settle there, notwithstanding the necessity imposed

upon her by the state of the neighborhood to get home before nightfall.

This necessity, however, was in accordance with the country habits she

retained, of rising and going to bed with the sun, an arrangement which

saves country folk considerable sums in lights and fuel. She lived

in one of the houses which, since the demolition of the famous Hotel

Cambaceres, command a view of the square.

Just as Baron Hulot set his wife’s cousin down at the door of this

house, saying, “Good-night, Cousin,” an elegant-looking woman, young,

small, slender, pretty, beautifully dressed, and redolent of some

delicate perfume, passed between the wall and the carriage to go in.

This lady, without any premeditation, glanced up at the Baron merely

to see the lodger’s cousin, and the libertine at once felt the

swift impression which all Parisians know on meeting a pretty woman,

realizing, as entomologists have it, their _desiderata_; so he waited to

put on one of his gloves with judicious deliberation before getting into

the carriage again, to give himself an excuse for allowing his eye

to follow the young woman, whose skirts were pleasingly set out by

something else than these odious and delusive crinoline bustles.

“That,” said he to himself, “is a nice little person whose happiness I

should like to provide for, as she would certainly secure mine.”

When the unknown fair had gone into the hall at the foot of the stairs

going up to the front rooms, she glanced at the gate out of the corner

of her eye without precisely looking round, and she could see the Baron

riveted to the spot in admiration, consumed by curiosity and desire.

This is to every Parisian woman a sort of flower which she smells at

with delight, if she meets it on her way. Nay, certain women, though

faithful to their duties, pretty, and virtuous, come home much put out

if they have failed to cull such a posy in the course of their walk.

The lady ran upstairs, and in a moment a window on the second floor

was thrown open, and she appeared at it, but accompanied by a man whose

baldhead and somewhat scowling looks announced him as her husband.

“If they aren’t sharp and ingenious, the cunning jades!” thought the

Baron. “She does that to show me where she lives. But this is getting

rather warm, especially for this part of Paris. We must mind what we are

at.”

As he got into the _milord_, he looked up, and the lady and the husband

hastily vanished, as though the Baron’s face had affected them like the

mythological head of Medusa.

“It would seem that they know me,” thought the Baron. “That would

account for everything.”

As the carriage went up the Rue du Musee, he leaned forward to see the

lady again, and in fact she was again at the window. Ashamed of being

caught gazing at the hood under which her admirer was sitting, the

unknown started back at once.

“Nanny shall tell me who it is,” said the Baron to himself.

The sight of the Government official had, as will be seen, made a deep

impression on this couple.

“Why, it is Baron Hulot, the chief of the department to which my office

belongs!” exclaimed the husband as he left the window.

“Well, Marneffe, the old maid on the third floor at the back of the

courtyard, who lives with that young man, is his cousin. Is it not odd

that we should never have known that till to-day, and now find it out by

chance?”

“Mademoiselle Fischer living with a young man?” repeated the husband.

“That is porter’s gossip; do not speak so lightly of the cousin of

a Councillor of State who can blow hot and cold in the office as he

pleases. Now, come to dinner; I have been waiting for you since four

o’clock.”

Pretty--very pretty--Madame Marneffe, the natural daughter of Comte

Montcornet, one of Napoleon’s most famous officers, had, on the strength

of a marriage portion of twenty thousand francs, found a husband in an

inferior official at the War Office. Through the interest of the

famous lieutenant-general--made marshal of France six months before his

death--this quill-driver had risen to unhoped-for dignity as head-clerk

of his office; but just as he was to be promoted to be deputy-chief, the

marshal’s death had cut off Marneffe’s ambitions and his wife’s at the

root. The very small salary enjoyed by Sieur Marneffe had compelled the

couple to economize in the matter of rent; for in his hands Mademoiselle

Valerie Fortin’s fortune had already melted away--partly in paying his

debts, and partly in the purchase of necessaries for furnishing a house,

but chiefly in gratifying the requirements of a pretty young wife,

accustomed in her mother’s house to luxuries she did not choose to

dispense with. The situation of the Rue du Doyenne, within easy distance

of the War Office, and the gay part of Paris, smiled on Monsieur and

Madame Marneffe, and for the last four years they had dwelt under the

same roof as Lisbeth Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was one of the class of employes

who escape sheer brutishness by the kind of power that comes of

depravity. The small, lean creature, with thin hair and a starved beard,

an unwholesome pasty face, worn rather than wrinkled, with red-lidded

eyes harnessed with spectacles, shuffling in his gait, and yet meaner in

his appearance, realized the type of man that any one would conceive of

as likely to be placed in the dock for an offence against decency.

The rooms inhabited by this couple had the illusory appearance of sham

luxury seen in many Paris homes, and typical of a certain class of

household. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered with shabby cotton

velvet, the plaster statuettes pretending to be Florentine bronze, the

clumsy cast chandelier merely lacquered, with cheap glass saucers, the

carpet, whose small cost was accounted for in advancing life by the

quality of cotton used in the manufacture, now visible to the naked

eye,--everything, down to the curtains, which plainly showed that

worsted damask has not three years of prime, proclaimed poverty as

loudly as a beggar in rags at a church door.

The dining-room, badly kept by a single servant, had the sickening

aspect of a country inn; everything looked greasy and unclean.

Monsieur’s room, very like a schoolboy’s, furnished with the bed and

fittings remaining from his bachelor days, as shabby and worn as he was,

dusted perhaps once a week--that horrible room where everything was in

a litter, with old socks hanging over the horsehair-seated chairs, the

pattern outlined in dust, was that of a man to whom home is a matter of

indifference, who lives out of doors, gambling in cafes or elsewhere.

Madame’s room was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that

disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke

and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every

spot with his toys. Valerie’s room and dressing-room were situated in

the part of the house which, on one side of the courtyard, joined the

front half, looking out on the street, to the wing forming the inner

side of the court backing against the adjoining property. Handsomely

hung with chintz, furnished with rosewood, and thickly carpeted,

they proclaimed themselves as belonging to a pretty woman--and indeed

suggested the kept mistress. A clock in the fashionable style stood on

the velvet-covered mantelpiece. There was a nicely fitted cabinet,

and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled. The bed, the

toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the

lady’s frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice. Though everything

was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was

absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault

to find but that the taste of all this luxury was commonplace. Art,

and the distinction that comes of the choice of things that taste

assimilates, was entirely wanting. A doctor of social science would have

detected a lover in two or three specimens of costly trumpery, which

could only have come there through that demi-god--always absent, but

always present if the lady is married.

The dinner, four hours behind time, to which the husband, wife, and

child sat down, betrayed the financial straits in which the household

found itself, for the table is the surest thermometer for gauging the

income of a Parisian family. Vegetable soup made with the water haricot

beans had been boiled in, a piece of stewed veal and potatoes sodden

with water by way of gravy, a dish of haricot beans, and cheap cherries,

served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the dull-looking and

dull-sounding forks of German silver--was this a banquet worthy of this

pretty young woman? The Baron would have wept could he have seen it. The

dingy decanters could not disguise the vile hue of wine bought by the

pint at the nearest wineshop. The table-napkins had seen a week’s

use. In short, everything betrayed undignified penury, and the equal

indifference of the husband and wife to the decencies of home. The

most superficial observer on seeing them would have said that these two

beings had come to the stage when the necessity of living had prepared

them for any kind of dishonor that might bring luck to them. Valerie’s

first words to her husband will explain the delay that had postponed the

dinner by the not disinterested devotion of the cook.

“Samanon will only take your bills at fifty per cent, and insists on a

lien on your salary as security.”

So poverty, still unconfessed in the house of the superior official, and

hidden under a stipend of twenty-four thousand francs, irrespective of

presents, had reached its lowest stage in that of the clerk.

“You have caught on with the chief,” said the man, looking at his wife.

“I rather think so,” replied she, understanding the full meaning of his

slang expression.

“What is to become of us?” Marneffe went on. “The landlord will be down

on us to-morrow. And to think of your father dying without making a

will! On my honor, those men of the Empire all think themselves as

immortal as their Emperor.”

“Poor father!” said she. “I was his only child, and he was very fond of

me. The Countess probably burned the will. How could he forget me when

he used to give us as much as three or four thousand-franc notes at

once, from time to time?”

“We owe four quarters’ rent, fifteen hundred francs. Is the furniture

worth so much? _That is the question_, as Shakespeare says.”

“Now, good-bye, ducky!” said Valerie, who had only eaten a few mouthfuls

of the veal, from which the maid had extracted all the gravy for a brave

soldier just home from Algiers. “Great evils demand heroic remedies.”

“Valerie, where are you off to?” cried Marneffe, standing between his

wife and the door.

“I am going to see the landlord,” she replied, arranging her ringlets

under her smart bonnet. “You had better try to make friends with that

old maid, if she really is your chief’s cousin.”

The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the

social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as

much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is. Still, it is

easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his

office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a

woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an

old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house

they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her

bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she went

to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor chatted

with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous, entomological

existences such as are to be met with in many large tenements where,

at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that up on the fourth

floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire, Pilatre de Rozier,

Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What

Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said concerning Lisbeth Fischer

they had come to know, in consequence, partly, of the loneliness of the

neighborhood, and of the alliance, to which their necessities had led,

between them and the doorkeepers, whose goodwill was too important to

them not to have been carefully encouraged.

Now, the old maid’s pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the

porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which

betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior. Also, the porter

thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent was

no more than two hundred and fifty francs. Cousin Betty’s confidences

to Hortense were true; and it is evident that the porter’s wife might be

very likely to slander Mademoiselle Fischer in her intimate gossip with

the Marneffes, while only intending to tell tales.

When Lisbeth had taken her candle from the hands of worthy Madame

Olivier the portress, she looked up to see whether the windows of the

garret over her own rooms were lighted up. At that hour, even in July,

it was so dark within the courtyard that the old maid could not get to

bed without a light.

“Oh, you may be quite easy, Monsieur Steinbock is in his room. He has

not been out even,” said Madame Olivier, with meaning.

Lisbeth made no reply. She was still a peasant, in so far that she was

indifferent to the gossip of persons unconnected with her. Just as a

peasant sees nothing beyond his village, she cared for nobody’s opinion

outside the little circle in which she lived. So she boldly went up, not

to her own room, but to the garret; and this is why. At dessert she had

filled her bag with fruit and sweets for her lover, and she went to give

them to him, exactly as an old lady brings home a biscuit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense’s dreams working by the light of a small

lamp, of which the light was intensified by the use of a bottle of water

as a lens--a pale young man, seated at a workman’s bench covered with a

modeler’s tools, wax, chisels, rough-hewn stone, and bronze castings; he

wore a blouse, and had in his hand a little group in red wax, which he

gazed at like a poet absorbed in his labors.

“Here, Wenceslas, see what I have brought you,” said she, laying her

handkerchief on a corner of the table; then she carefully took the

sweetmeats and fruit out of her bag.

“You are very kind, mademoiselle,” replied the exile in melancholy

tones.

“It will do you good, poor boy. You get feverish by working so hard; you

were not born to such a rough life.”

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at her with a bewildered air.

“Eat--come, eat,” said she sharply, “instead of looking at me as you do

at one of your images when you are satisfied with it.”

On being thus smacked with words, the young man seemed less puzzled,

for this, indeed, was the female Mentor whose tender moods were always a

surprise to him, so much more accustomed was he to be scolded.

Though Steinbock was nine-and-twenty, like many fair men, he looked five

or six years younger; and seeing his youth, though its freshness had

faded under the fatigue and stress of life in exile, by the side of

that dry, hard face, it seemed as though Nature had blundered in the

distribution of sex. He rose and threw himself into a deep chair of

Louis XV. pattern, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, as if to rest

himself. The old maid took a greengage and offered it to him.

“Thank you,” said he, taking the plum.

“Are you tired?” said she, giving him another.

“I am not tired with work, but tired of life,” said he.

“What absurd notions you have!” she exclaimed with some annoyance. “Have

you not had a good genius to keep an eye on you?” she said, offering him

the sweetmeats, and watching him with pleasure as he ate them all. “You

see, I thought of you when dining with my cousin.”

“I know,” said he, with a look at Lisbeth that was at once affectionate

and plaintive, “but for you I should long since have ceased to live.

But, my dear lady, artists require relaxation----”

“Ah! there we come to the point!” cried she, interrupting him, her hands

on her hips, and her flashing eyes fixed on him. “You want to go wasting

your health in the vile resorts of Paris, like so many artisans, who end

by dying in the workhouse. No, no, make a fortune, and then, when you

have money in the funds, you may amuse yourself, child; then you will

have enough to pay for the doctor and for your pleasure, libertine that

you are.”

Wenceslas Steinbock, on receiving this broadside, with an accompaniment

of looks that pierced him like a magnetic flame, bent his head. The most

malignant slanderer on seeing this scene would at once have understood

that the hints thrown out by the Oliviers were false. Everything in this

couple, their tone, manner, and way of looking at each other, proved the

purity of their private live. The old maid showed the affection of

rough but very genuine maternal feeling; the young man submitted, as a

respectful son yields to the tyranny of a mother. The strange alliance

seemed to be the outcome of a strong will acting constantly on a weak

character, on the fluid nature peculiar to the Slavs, which, while it

does not hinder them from showing heroic courage in battle, gives

them an amazing incoherency of conduct, a moral softness of which

physiologists ought to try to detect the causes, since physiologists are

to political life what entomologists are to agriculture.

“But if I die before I am rich?” said Wenceslas dolefully.

“Die!” cried she. “Oh, I will not let you die. I have life enough for

both, and I would have my blood injected into your veins if necessary.”

Tears rose to Steinbock’s eyes as he heard her vehement and artless

speech.

“Do not be unhappy, my little Wenceslas,” said Lisbeth with feeling. “My

cousin Hortense thought your seal quite pretty, I am sure; and I will

manage to sell your bronze group, you will see; you will have paid me

off, you will be able to do as you please, you will soon be free. Come,

smile a little!”

“I can never repay you, mademoiselle,” said the exile.

“And why not?” asked the peasant woman, taking the Livonian’s part

against herself.

“Because you not only fed me, lodged me, cared for me in my poverty, but

you also gave me strength. You have made me what I am; you have often

been stern, you have made me very unhappy----”

“I?” said the old maid. “Are you going to pour out all your nonsense

once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and

stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all

your northern madness?--Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding--and

what am I!--You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of them? I too

have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may have in your

soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas do not get so

far as those who have none, if they don’t know which way to go.

“Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work.--Now, what have you

done while I was out?”

“What did your pretty cousin say?”

“Who told you she was pretty?” asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow

with tiger-like jealousy.

“Why, you did.”

“That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after

petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze.

Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the

ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my

good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man

with sixty thousand francs a year--and has found him!

“Why, your bed is not made!” she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining

room. “Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!”

The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and remade

the artist’s little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This mixture

of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps accounts

for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she regarded

as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based on its

alternations of good and evil?

If the Livonian had happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth

Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance must have

led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he would have been

lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the artist have been

hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid’s grasping avarice,

his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life of idleness and

peril led by many of his fellow-countrymen.

This was the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female

energy and masculine feebleness--a contrast in union said not to be

uncommon in Poland.

In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes worked into the night when

business was good, at about one o’clock one morning perceived a strong

smell of carbonic acid gas, and heard the groans of a dying man. The

fumes and the gasping came from a garret over the two rooms forming her

dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately come

to lodge in this attic--which had been vacant for three years--was

committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push with

her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed in the

convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door was open,

the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when Lisbeth had

put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, she could detect the

motives of his suicide in the destitution of the rooms, where there was

nothing whatever but a wretched table, the camp-bed, and two chairs.

On the table lay a document, which she read:

“I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia.

“No one is to be accused of my death; my reasons for killing

myself are, in the words of Kosciusko, _Finis Polonioe_!

“The grand-nephew of a valiant General under Charles XII. could

not beg. My weakly constitution forbids my taking military

service, and I yesterday saw the last of the hundred thalers which

I had brought with me from Dresden to Paris. I have left

twenty-five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent I owe

to the landlord.

“My parents being dead, my death will affect nobody. I desire that

my countrymen will not blame the French Government. I have never

registered myself as a refugee, and I have asked for nothing; I

have met none of my fellow-exiles; no one in Paris knows of my

existence.